Dane Cook and Atheists

Vox Day asks atheists a question:

Let's assume, for the sake of argument, that you, the atheist, are completely correct and there is no God. Let us postulate that religion is merely an evolutionary spandrel and religious faith is merely a crutch for the intellectually weak, crippled, and cowardly.

Now, what is the normal human being's opinion of the sort of individual who would purposefully kick out the crutch from a cripple who is leaning upon it? Indeed, what is your opinion of such an individual?

Here's Dane Cook (I know, but I actually chuckled) talking about his encounter with an atheist. Also pilfered from Vox Day:

Taki's Top Drawer

Taki Theodoracopolus has revamped his website Taki's Top Drawer check it out and you will find some of the best conservative writing around. Never heard of Taki Theodoracopolus before?:

Taki writes a column, the “High Life,” which has appeared in London’s The Spectator for the past twenty-five years. He writes also for National Review, the Sunday Times (London), Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Quest, among others. In 2002, Taki founded The American Conservative magazine with Pat Buchanan and Scott McConnell.

Here is a piece about McCain, the GOP, and Abortion from Dan McCartney:

The GOP has had opportunities to overturn Roe before—at any point when Republicans controlled the House, Senate, and White House, Congress could have restricted the Supreme Court’s jurisdiction over abortion using the powers invested in the legislative branch by Article III of the Constitution, overturning Roe at a stroke. Perhaps they were right not to do so: the powers of Article III, Section 2 have rarely been used in such a manner, and the precedent could easily have boomeranged against conservatives once the Democrats took Congress. Nevertheless, if the GOP were as adamantly pro-life as pro-lifers are encouraged to believe it is, the Republican Congress could have voided Roe any time between 2003 and 2007.

Read the rest here and browse around, you will see a conservatism that is almost unrecognizable for what passes for "mainstream" these days.

The Bills Keep Piling Up

Unnoticed in the media last week among the all important stories like what Barack Obama's preacher said on the pulpit (why are people still talking about that?), John McCain's teeth, and nipple rings, the Social Security Board of Trustees released its 2008 annual report on the finances of the Social Security Trust Fund.

It's not pretty and hasn't been for years:

The Report released Tuesday pointed out that when benefits payouts exceed revenue, Social Security will have to dig into its assets the fund has accumulated over the years to fund the over-extended benefits. The Report also noted that once Social Security goes upside down, it can only continue to fund the benefits until 2041. ... if the Government does not somehow begin to pay back the money it owes to the Social Security Funds, then current benefits will HAVE to be reduced by 2017 because there will be no assets for them to fall back on. With nearly 80 million baby boomers planning to begin drawing benefits in the coming years, there is no way possible to reduce benefit spending.

All candidates agree that a massive Social Security Reform is inevitable. The major difference is, the Democrats think the Government can fix it, while the Republicans feel it is better off partly privatized and less reliant on the Government. Where all the front-running candidates falter is the fact that they have all been in Senate for at least the last 2 years, with McCain and Hillary being in the Senate for a minimum of 6 years, and neither of them have yet to do anything about the Social Security problem.

Read the rest at Political Lore

Crossing the Rubicon

I'm truly speechless:

In the past two weeks, the Federal Reserve, long the guardian of the nation's banks, has redefined its role to also become protector and overseer of Wall Street.

With its March 14 decision to make a special loan to Bear Stearns and a decision two days later to become an emergency lender to all of the major investment firms, the central bank abandoned 75 years of precedent under which it offered direct backing only to traditional banks.

Inside the Fed and out, there is a realization that those moves amounted to crossing the Rubicon, setting the stage for deeper involvement in the little-regulated markets for capital that have come to dominate the financial world.

Leaders of the central bank had no master plan when they took those actions, no long-term strategy for taking on a more assertive role regulating Wall Street. They were focused on the immediate crisis in world financial markets. But they now recognize that a broader role may be the result of the unprecedented intervention and are being forced to consider whether it makes sense to expand the scope of their formal powers over the investment industry.

"This will redefine the Fed's role," said Charles Geisst, a Manhattan College finance professor who wrote a history of Wall Street. "We have to realize that central banking now takes into its orbit everything in the financial system in one way or another. Whether we like it or not, they've recreated the financial universe."

The Fed has made a special lending facility -- essentially a bottomless pit of cash -- available to large investment banks for at least the next six months. Even if that program is allowed to expire this fall, the Fed's actions will have lasting impact, economists and Wall Street veterans said.

The story is more floating of an idea than anything else. But the mere fact that our leaders are considering expanding the role of the Fed should raise alarms and red flags to everyone. The response from everyone to this idea SHOULD be a resounding Ari Gold "Fuck You!" along with calls for Bernanke resign and the Fed to be abolished. That is, unless everyone likes inflation at 20 percent, and government intruding into every aspect of your life, and us living in a banana republic like Zimbabwe.

Looking at the situation, I'm reminded of this quote by one of our founding fathers:

"If the American people ever allow private banks to control issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."

Thomas Jefferson

Anyone wonder where we are at?

The Dead Letter Office

There is actually an internet version:

When businesses want to communicate with their customers via e-mail, many send messages with a bogus return address, e.g. "somethinghere@donotreply.com." The practice is meant to communicate to recipients that any replies will go unread.

But when those messages are sent to an inactive e-mail address or the recipient ignores the instruction and replies anyway, the missives don't just disappear into the digital ether.

Instead, they land in Chet Faliszek's e-mail box.

As owner of www.donotreply.com, the Seattle-based programmer receives millions of wayward e-mails each week, including a great many missives destined for executives at Fortune 500 companies or bank customers, even sensitive messages sent by government personnel and contractors.

Read the rest here.

Pilfered from Consumerist

Come on

The Swindle has the story of the Patriot Act being used in a drug case:

The lawyer for a man accused of being a major cocaine supplier for the Wichita Crips gang contends that a secret search of the man's house under the Patriot Act was illegal.

In a recent motion to suppress any evidence from the search, defense lawyer Charles O'Hara argued that the Patriot Act was meant for "serious matters involving national security," not drug cases like the one involving his client, Tyrone Andrews.

"I thought that this Patriot Act was something passed to protect us all from these terrorist acts, and it would be used very judiciously," O'Hara said Monday. "This doesn't seem to be one where these secret searches would be used."

Should we really be surprised by this? I'm mean it's not like the pros and cons of the Patriot Act weren't debated thoroughly and every aspect of it was vetted for its constitutionality in the 30 minutes that Congress had to read its 300 plus pages before having to vote on it. I think I spent more time deciding which pair of flip flops I was going to put on this morning than Congress spent scrutinizing the Patriot Act (I went with the brown ones). But, once again, we shouldn't be surprised by the overreach of law enforcement. They are using the tools given to them.

I'm at the point where I think that the only legislation we should be seeing from Congress should just be acts that start repealing everything that the feds have done for the past 100 years. They can start with abolishing the Federal Reserve, eliminating the income tax, stopping the drug war, pulling the troops from Europe, Japan, Korea, and yes Iraq, repealing the Patriot Act and a bunch of other stuff. I have pretty much nothing but contempt for the parade of government bailouts, government entitlements, and undermining of the Constitution. It's a horrible feeling knowing that the GOP has presided over 8 years of it and the party that once preached civil liberties, fiscal restraint and limited government now must be put down like Old Yeller. (metaphorically of course! Sorry DHS, FBI, CIA, NSA, TSA, DEA, BATF, IRS, OSHA, FEMA)

The Spitzer Scandal by a 3 year old

Pilfered from Gorillamask

The Revolution Lives! Part 2

Liberty Maven gives the rundown on the 40+ candidates who are running for Federal office on the Ron Paul platform.

One guy who I'm endorsing is Murray Sabrin, he's a professor at Ramapo College and is running for the Senate seat in New Jersey. Click here for his site.

Here is Dr. Sabrin getting the Ron Paul endorsement:

Katrina Revisited: Walmart Wins! Part 2

Lew Rockwell and Walter Block on Hurricane Katrina, it's aftermath, and getting people to realize that central planning (whether it's for the economy or for disaster relief) sucks balls:

Watching the Capitol Hill hearings on what went wrong after Hurricane Katrina provided a glimpse of what it must have been like in the Politburo in the 1950s. The Soviet bureaucrats would gather with the party officials and factory and farm managers to figure out why grain production was down or why shop shelves were empty or why the bread lines were ever longer and the quality ever worse.

They gathered under the conviction that they had a workable system that was being rendered unworkable because of the incompetence, shirking, or wrecking of certain key players in the chain of command. No one was permitted to say that the command system itself was the problem. Instead, they had to place blame on someone, as if all problems could be reduced to issues of obedience. It was always a scramble. Whoever was finally said to be at fault faced certain ruin.

Let's be clear, we are much closer to a socialist society than we are to a free state. Every aspect of our lives can be monitored, scrutinized, criminalized, or taxed by our government. But when the opportunity came for our government to make good on the marshmellowy promise of safety and protection during the hurricane, let's face it, the government swung and missed.

I don't fault Bush for the governments weak, inefficient, and incompetent response because Katrina could have happened on Clinton's watch and I'm pretty confident we would have gotten the same bureaucratic abortion that W presided over.

What we should be questioning is the fundamental assumption that our strong central government should be handling disaster relief (among many other things) at all. That's one question that no one in the MSM is asking.

I like the way Rockwell and Block end their paper:

It took decades for the rot to give way underneath the Soviet apparatus of central planning. But eventually the implausibility of the entire project was no longer possible to deny. It gave way under an intellectual reaction against the whole of socialism. We are seeing something like that take place today, as government fails in Iraq and New Orleans, and in every place around the country and the world where it causes problems and creates no solutions. The age of confident central planning is behind us. Right now, the state is just trying to keep its head above water. If freedom is to have a future, the time will come when it will sink to an ignoble end, and we will wonder how we ever believed in this myth called government crisis management.

Read the whole position paper here.

Too little too late

A surprisingly positive article on Ron Paul from Fox News:

Time to listen to Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the lone voice of reason in Congress today who’s got to feel like he’s shouting into a field of cotton with his repeated warnings about the dangers of a collapsing dollar, while the administration goes AWOL on the problem.

The dollar just hit a record intraday low against the euro on reports that consumer confidence levels have dropped to levels not seen since the post-Watergate era. It is down 7% year to date against the Chinese renminbi, it’s weaker than the Japanese yen and the Canadian loonie.

The joke is the greenback is now only stronger than the Mexican pesos and the Zimbabwe dollar, an overstatement for dramatic effect, to be sure.But since hitting a peak in 2002, the dollar has lost about a quarter of its value against a trade weighted basket of currencies.

Read the rest here.

I think I'm in love

The only type of car I've ever owned has been 2 door coupes. From the Chevy I had in high school, to the bulletproof Toyota I kept for 10 years, to the Volvo coupe I have now, I've never had anything with more than 2 doors.

Now, the Aston Martin DBS is way out of my price range, and will be for all time (unless I win the lottery) but the new Audi A5 is not. It's brand new, and is more Grand Tourer than race car but I look at pics of it and can't wait to see what one looks like in real life:

DC vs Heller Pundit Roundup

Update:

I dare you to watch this video of this woman testifying before Congress and not get a lump in your throat, she speaks the truth. Thanks to Eric at Red State Eclectic:



I meant to put this up last week:

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard a case dealing with the 2nd Amendment. It could prove to be a landmark decision that SCOTUS hands down and may finally put to rest whether owning a firearm is an "individual" or "collective" right. As such, there are plenty of opinions going around before the ACTUAL opinion from the Supreme Court gets handed down. Here's a smattering of them:

Reason Mag- Jonathan Raech - Gun rights protect civil rights even if you are gay.

ABC News - Jan Greenberg - Justice Kennedy may be the "swing" vote in this case, and based on his questioning, it sounds like he's in the "individual" rights camp.

But Dakota Ranger brings up a good point in his post about the Heller case:

We don't licence our other rights, nor do we do background checks for the privilege of driving. When there are politicians that want to give drivers licences to illegal aliens it is disgusting to us law abiding gun owners that we have to go through a background check at every purchase.

The whole idea of having the 2nd Amendment was so that the people would be able to protect themselves from criminals and others who wish to do them harm. But what if the trespasser is the government itself? What if government was so tyrannical, so oppressive that IT was what people were protecting themselves from?

My point is that the idea of having a license program for guns seems antithetical to what the 2nd Amendment is about. Because if the government was the enemy of the people, then a firearm registration program is nothing more than a roadmap to tell the government exactly where the guns are.

Katrina Revisited: Walmart wins!

As if we don't already know that private enterprise almost always does things better than the government, it turns out that even in disaster FEMA (whose sole reason for existence is handling disasters) sucks balls and should be eliminated. From Federal Times:

Private organizations such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot and other so-called “big box” stores provided more supplies and relief than the Federal Emergency Management Agency in the days immediately after Hurricane Katrina, George Mason University’s Mercatus Center said in a report released March 20. Local store managers took advantage of their autonomy and moved quickly to reopen after the storm and distribute supplies — sometimes for free, and often without the permission of superiors. One Wal-Mart employee in Kenner, La., broke through a warehouse door with a forklift to get water for a nearby retirement home, the report said.

But at the bureaucratically stymied FEMA, supply purchases and shipments were tied up in red tape, and offers of help from other parties were turned down for fear of liability issues.

The main difference, said report author Steven Horwitz, is that private companies have to make sure there are still people in the community to shop at their stores after a disaster and who think well enough of stores like Wal-Mart and Home Depot to give them their business. That prompts companies to act quickly and keeps them from gouging prices, which, they believe, hurt them in the long run.

Wow, look people are able to make decisions for themselves without taking orders from central planning! Who woulda thunk it?

Hmmm, Intriguing.

There's talk that former Congressman Bob Barr could run for President as the Libertarian Party nominee. From the Washington Times:

"There is great deal [of] dissatisfaction with the candidates for the two major parties, particularly among conservatives, but also a great deal of Internet and other support for a candidate like Ron Paul who advocates libertarian and true conservative principles," said Mr. Barr, who is now a Libertarian.

If he were to get the nomination, his presence could really hurt John McCain. McCain already has enough problems with the hard core base as it is. The presence of Bob Barr (whose conservative cred is well documented) would only highlight McCain's weakness with that base. I think I'd vote for him instead of McCain.

Deja vu, All Over Again

William Anderson gives an overview of what we can expect over the next decade in our economy by comparing it to what happened in the 70's. Read the whole thing here.

Nice Job! Part 2

Big government incompetence fever!:

"During his nearly four years as a translator for U.S. forces in Iraq, Saman Kareem Ahmad was known for his bravery and hard work. "Sam put his life on the line with, and for, Coalition Forces on a daily basis," wrote Marine Capt. Trent A. Gibson.

Gibson's letter was part of a thick file of support -- including commendations from the secretary of the Navy and from then-Maj. Gen. David H. Petraeus -- that helped Ahmad migrate to the United States in 2006, among an initial group of 50 Iraqi and Afghan translators admitted under a special visa program.

Last month, however, the U.S. government turned down Ahmad's application for permanent residence, known as a green card. His offense: Ahmad had once been part of the Kurdish Democratic Party, which U.S. immigration officials deemed an "undesignated terrorist organization" for having sought to overthrow former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.

Ahmad, a Kurd, once served in the KDP's military force, which is part of the new Iraqi army. A U.S. ally, the KDP is now part of the elected government of the Kurdish region and holds seats in the Iraqi parliament. After consulting public Web sites, however, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services determined that KDP forces "conducted full-scale armed attacks and helped incite rebellions against Hussein's regime, most notably during the Iran-Iraq war, Operation Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom."

Ahmad's association with a group that had attempted to overthrow a government -- even as an ally in U.S.-led wars against Hussein -- rendered him "inadmissible," the agency concluded in a three-page letter dated Feb. 26."

With friends like that...

Pilfered from Obsidian Wings

Nice Job!

Conservative Belle has news about progress being made on the border fence. In fact, the Army Corp of Engineers have been dispatched to the border to facilitate the building. Unfortunately, the engineers and the $23 million that goes with them is being sent to the border in Egypt.

Click here to see the details.

Big government incompetence fever, catch it!

Chertoff on Real ID: We're not Kidding

Of course DHS isn't kidding about the Real ID. Because you can't kid when the jokes on you.

Homeland Security Chief Michael Chertoff has come out today saying that all states must comply with the mandate from the Feds, otherwise travelers won't be able to board planes at airports. Reaction from states like South Carolina, Maine, and Montana? I would describe it as making a loose fist, putting it in the general vicinity of ones nether regions, and shaking vigorously. Oh, and don't forget to throw in a rolling of the eyes.

Montana's Governor REALLY doesn't like the REAL ID, listen to an interview he gave recently to NPR here. I've never heard of a governor actually saying "blah blah blah" on the radio in an official interview. It's friggin hilarious. Here's what DHS's reaction to Montana:

On Friday, the federal agency granted Montana an extension, even though state officials didn't ask for one and insist they will not adhere to the Real ID law.

Go Montana.

Ron Paul Schools Some Douchebag about the Gold Standard

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that the guy who they brought on to counter Doctor Paul was talking out of his ass especially when he started talking about the Great Depression. But don't take my word for it. This is what Milton Friedman had to say about what caused it. From a recent article in Worldnetdaily:

Friedman: Well, we have to distinguish between the recession of 1929, the early stages, and the conversion of that recession into a major catastrophe.

The recession was an ordinary business cycle. We had repeated recessions over hundreds of years, but what converted [this one] into a major depression was bad monetary policy.

The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve System, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States. There's no other example I can think of, of a government measure which produced so clearly the opposite of the results that were intended.

And what happened is that [the Federal Reserve] followed policies which led to a decline in the quantity of money by a third. For every $100 in paper money, in deposits, in cash, in currency, in existence in 1929, by the time you got to 1933 there was only about $65, $66 left. And that extraordinary collapse in the banking system, with about a third of the banks failing from beginning to end, with millions of people having their savings essentially washed out, that decline was utterly unnecessary.

At all times, the Federal Reserve had the power and the knowledge to have stopped that. And there were people at the time who were all the time urging them to do that. So it was, in my opinion, clearly a mistake of policy that led to the Great Depression.

Click here to see what current Fed Chair Ben Bernanke has to say about Friedman's assessment. I'm sure you'll find it enlightening.

The Revolution Lives

In Missouri from St.Louis Post Dispatch:

The first hints were the phone calls.

Never before had St. Charles County Republican Party Chairman Jon Bennett received so many queries about where this year's party caucus was to be held. And Bennett didn't recognize most of the callers.

On Saturday, Bennett learned why. Dozens of avid supporters of Ron Paul, a Texas congressman who is running a renegade quest for the presidential nomination, staged a political guerrilla attack. At that caucus at St. Peters City Hall — as well as others across the state — party regulars like Bennett were overwhelmed.

Party crashers! How rude.

The LA Times has additional coverage of what happened in Missouri:

Usually attended only by party apparatchiks, the caucuses help set the official party platform and deal with internal rules issues. The kind of stuff most folks ignore. Not the Paulistas, who swarmed meetings in St. Louis, Kansas City, Springfield and some rural counties and, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch put it, "snagged roughly a third of the 2,137 state Republican delegates."

This reminds me of that scene in Old School where the character played by Jeremy Piven finds out that Luke Wilson and crew were able to get their fraternity set up. "They're really good at paperwork!"

Of course, this really didn't go over too well with some of the Republican blogosphere. Take for example Dee over at Chatterbox Chronicles.

Now, I've always maintained that the way that most of the Pajamas Media Right react to Ron Paul is not really any different than what you would find with the Daily Kos crowd about George W. Bush. Mostly rantings and name calling, but never really anything that challenges the basic questions that he asks and that makes them squirm.

Anyway, one question that will be asked is now that the GOP is the party of big government and we are now paying for the sins of our largesse, why should anyone vote for the party hack McCain if it's just more of the same thing we've had for 8 years? Look at where all this spending has gotten us. Up until yesterday, the silence from the PJM right on the collapse of the dollar and government bailouts for financial institutions had been deafening. My opinion is because this disaster can be laid squarely at the feet of GWB and 6 years of GOP rule and to all the neocon enablers who cheered every step of the way. Well, people are waking up, and all of the "Old Right" are pissed. Because you ruined it all for me, my kids, and my grandkids.

God Bless Ron Paul for standing up there and speaking the truth.