This turns into a great speech. It dispels the death by association much of the media preach – associating the tea parties with the Republican Party.
My favorite part comes at 4:30 – “The Republican Party does not represent you anymore. . . . President Obama is spending our children’s future. He’s selling us into slavery and serfdom. But don’t forget that before Obama’s stimulus was George W. Bush’s banker bailout that both McCain and Obama supported. They want you to think that you have a choice in this country between Republican and Democrat, between right and left, but when the governments boot is stamping upon your face – and I can speak from experience – it doesn’t matter whether it’s the left boot or the right boot. Big government is the enemy.”
Such are the miracles of government-run education.
“Hundreds of New York City public school teachers accused of offenses ranging from insubordination to sexual misconduct are being paid their full salaries to sit around all day playing Scrabble, surfing the Internet or just staring at the wall, if that’s what they want to do.
Because their union contract makes it extremely difficult to fire them, the teachers have been banished by the school system to its ‘rubber rooms’ — off-campus office space where they wait months, even years, for their disciplinary hearings.
The 700 or so teachers can practice yoga, work on their novels, paint portraits of their colleagues — pretty much anything but school work. They have summer vacation just like their classroom colleagues and enjoy weekends and holidays through the school year.
‘You just basically sit there for eight hours,’ said Orlando Ramos, who spent seven months in a rubber room, officially known as a temporary reassignment center, in 2004-05.” (Read more from news.yahoo.com)
Happy 4th or July. Today is a good day to recognize some heroes – the Institute for Justice. These guys are like super heroes to me.
From their website: “We challenge the government when it stands in the way of people trying to earn an honest living, when it unconstitutionally takes away individuals’ property, when bureaucrats instead of parents dictate the education of children, and when government stifles speech. We seek a rule of law under which individuals can control their destinies as free and responsible members of society.”
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Minnesota’s eminent domain abuses
“Following stiff opposition from the nearly 50-year-old company, its employees, unions and the Institute for Justice – a public interest law firm that battles eminent domain abuse nationwide – the Port Authority decided not to use eminent domain to take the company’s property. . . .
For the past 50 years, Advance has built its equipment-leasing business without government subsidies. Its 43 employees, 20 of whom are members of Local 120 of the Teamsters and Local 49 of the Operating Engineers, provide cranes, scaffolding and shoring equipment to construction projects. Advance has played an instrumental role in constructing and restoring of landmarks in the Twin Cities, including the Xcel Energy Center, the Cathedral of St. Paul and Regions Hospital. ‘You cannot look at St. Paul’s skyline without seeing the contribution that our family business has made,’ Haug added.
Last September, the Port Authority stated its intention to acquire by eminent domain 10 acres of Advance’s property near Interstate 35E and Maryland Avenue in the Arlington-Jackson section of St. Paul. In October and November, Advance’s owners and allies asked the City Council not to authorize the Port Authority’s plan to destroy this successful business for a yet-to-be-identified business and an unspecific use requiring more than $10 million in government subsidies.” (Read more at ij.org)
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Banned in Boston: Erroll Tyler’s Fight for Economic Liberty as Boston protects tourism cartel
Developer colludes with state for eminent domain abuses. Anyone who fights back is guilty of defamation:
“Dallas, Texas – The author and publisher of Bulldozed: ‘Kelo,’ Eminent Domain, and the American Lust for Land today asked a Dallas state court to dismiss the defamation lawsuit filed against them by Dallas developer H. Walker Royall. Published in 2007, Bulldozed chronicles events in Freeport, Texas, where Royall signed a development agreement to have the city take land owned by Western Seafood – a generations-old shrimping business – and give that land to Royall’s development company for a luxury yacht marina. Royall sued the book’s author, Carla Main, and its publisher, Encounter Books, in October 2008, seeking monetary damages and a permanent prohibition on further printing or distribution of the book.
Royall’s lawsuit is part of a national trend. Similar suits have been filed in Tennessee, Missouri, Washington and elsewhere by developers and government officials looking to silence critics of eminent domain for private gain. Earlier, when the Gore family – owners of Western Seafood and the original victims of Royall’s eminent domain abuse effort in Freeport – complained against Royall’s actions, he sued them for defamation.” (Read more at ij.org)
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Free to Design: Florida Entrepreneurs Take On the Interior Design Cartel
“In the case of cocaine there is an even more striking precedent for evidence being ignored: the World Health Organisation (WHO) conducted what is probably the largest ever study of global use. In March 1995 they released a briefing kit which summarised their conclusions, with some tantalising bullet points.
‘Health problems from the use of legal substances, particularly alcohol and tobacco, are greater than health problems from cocaine use,’ they said. ‘Cocaine-related problems are widely perceived to be more common and more severe for intensive, high-dosage users and very rare and much less severe for occasional, low-dosage users.’
I will never drink Captain Morgan Rum. I will never drive a GM car.
“In June 2008, U.S. Virgin Islands Governor John deJongh Jr. agreed to give London-based Diageo Plc billions of dollars in tax incentives to move its production of Captain Morgan rum from one U.S. island — Puerto Rico — to another, namely St. Croix.
DeJongh says he had no idea his deal would help make the world’s largest liquor distiller the most unlikely beneficiary of the emergency Troubled Asset Relief Program approved by Congress just four months later.” (Read more from crooksandliars.com)
This post is dedicated to all my Obama-supporting friends who told me we needed to prevent our financial system from collapsing, too big to fail, what about the children, etc . . .
“Recall the number of times that government officials told taxpayers that we would make money on investments in AIG and the like. Well, so far we’ve lost $159 billion dollars across all our TARP investments. The loss is calculated as the difference in funds committed and allocated to securities and the market value of those securities. That loss represents 36% of the funds committed and actually allocated.
Not that anybody in the media or the financial industry would want you to know that.”
Robert Schmidt writes that “the memos provide a glimpse, in often candid language, into how Wall Street is grappling with its pariah status.”
“It is imperative that in this historic period of reform, the industry be recognized as playing a positive role in seeking change and providing solutions to the problems we face,” one of the documents said. “There is currently widespread skepticism about the industry’s commitment to this needed change.”
The great thing about that quote is not how it makes me want to find my pitchfork, but how it perfectly encapsulates exactly why there is “widespread skepticism” raging across the land. Everyone knows exactly what “playing a positive role in seeking change and providing solutions to the problems we face” really means: doing everything we can to weaken proposed regulation of the securities industry and ensure that we can get can back to business as usual as soon as possible.
Populist overreaction? $14 trillion of American wealth has vanished in the last 18 months, and we’re being accused of overreacting? We have not yet even begun to overreact!
“Two weeks after his election as president, Barack Obama said, ‘Few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change. The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear.’ Shortly thereafter, more than 100 scientists signed a newspaper advertisement responding, ‘With all due respect Mr. President, that is not true.’ The scientists, from places as varied and esteemed as Los Alamos National Laboratory, the American Physical Society, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and the University of Pennsylvania, said the ‘case for alarm regarding climate change is grossly overstated.’
But even many who are not skeptical about global warming found things to dislike in ACES. Rep. Dennis Kucinich, who voted against it, said, ‘It won’t address the problem. In fact, it might make the problem worse.’ Kucinich faulted the bill’s ‘Enron-style accounting methods’ and allocation of $60 billion for Carbon Capture and Sequestration, ‘a single technology which may or may not work.’ Kucinich faulted the corporate welfare embedded in the bill, saying that the “trillion dollar carbon derivatives market will help Wall Street investors,’ with any benefits ‘passed through coal companies and other large corporations, on whom we will rely to pass on the savings.’
‘I take climate change seriously,’ libertarian economist Megan McArdle wrote last week. But she said the projections for ACES’s ‘effect on global warming are entirely negligible,’ and any hope that U.S. passage of the bill will ‘persuade China and India to get on board’ is ‘entirely wishful thinking on the part of American environmentalists. China is not going to let its citizens languish in subsistence farming because 30 years from now, some computer models say there will be some not-well-specified bad effects from high temperatures. Nor is India.'” (Read more from campaignforliberty.com)
Ron Paul’s Statement before the US House of Representatives, June 4, 2009:
“Madam Speaker, before voting on the ‘cap-and-trade’ legislation, my colleagues should consider the views expressed in the following petition that has been signed by 31,478 American scientists:
‘We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind.
There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.’
Circulated through the mail by a distinguished group of American physical scientists and supported by a definitive review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, this may be the strongest and most widely supported statement on this subject that has been made by the scientific community.” (Read more from lewrockwell.com)
Al Gore: There’s a consensus, I tell you! A fucking consensus! Now buy some solar panels from the companies I invested in!!!