Honduras For Dummies

By Tom Palmer at CATO:

Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?

And BO continues to support the ousted leader... Go figure.

Definition of Bankruptcy

Debt equaling 200% of GDP?

Will on Healthcare Reform

Genius:

Most Americans do want different health care: They want 2009 medicine at 1960 prices. Americans spent much less on health care in 1960 (5 percent of gross domestic product as opposed to 18 percent now). They also spent much less -- nothing, in fact -- on computers, cellphones, and cable and satellite television.

Your next car can cost less if you forgo GPS, satellite radio, antilock brakes, power steering, power windows and air conditioning. You can shop for such a car at your local Studebaker, Hudson, Nash, Packard and DeSoto dealers.

Whole thing here.

Obamacare Cronyism

Guess who's exempt from the Obamacare tax? Answer here. Oh yea, and Congress is exempt from all of the mandates as well. The sheer audacity of these people is nothing less than amazing.

I think this quote sums it all up for me:

Obama (June 15): "If you like your doctor, you will be able to keep your doctor. Period." Huh? Gee. Thanks, Pres. So nice of you to give me permission to keep my doctor. Un-freaking-believable. This is how they really think.

Blind Faith

A Spanish university professor, Gabriel Calzada, claims each new "green" job in Spain costs approximately $752,000 to $800,000, and entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs. And this is the very model that BO is using for his domestic "greening" agenda. Pesky statistics and facts. Always getting in the way of self-righteousness.

George Will hits it out of the park:

Still, one can be agnostic about [such] reports while being dismayed by the frequency with which such findings are ignored simply because they question policies that are so invested with righteousness that methodical economic reasoning about their costs and benefits seems unimportant. When the president speaks of "new green energy economies" creating "countless well-paying jobs," perhaps they really are countless, meaning incapable of being counted.

For fervent believers in governments' abilities to control the climate and in the urgent need for them to do so, believing is seeing: They see, through their ideological lenses, governments' green spending as always paying for itself. This is a free-lunch faith comparable to that of those few conservatives who believe that tax cuts always completely pay for themselves by stimulating compensating revenue from economic growth.

Whole Will article here.

Why We Have the 4th Amendment

From the Guardian:

Under the Terrorism Act 2000, the "section 44 stops" allow the police to search anyone in a designated area without suspicion that an offence has occurred.

The Founders didn't like the British government's penchance for searches in 18th century either. 10,000 stops per month. Yikes.

51 Things You Cannot See Via Google Earth

Interesting.

Our President the Liar

Ear Mark for Illinois.

Transparancy Watch

Still waiting:

The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.

Despite President Barack Obama's pledge to introduce a new era of transparency to Washington, and despite two rulings by a federal judge that the records are public, the Secret Service has denied msnbc.com's request for the names of all White Housevisitors from Jan. 20 to the present. It also denied a narrower request by thenonpartisan watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, which sought logs of visits by executives of coal companies.

Via MSNBC. And the beat goes on...

The Andy Griffith Show: Anarcho-Capitalist Propaganda

So says Darrin Knode:

Andy Griffith acted like a man. He behaved time and again like a compassionate human being and not as an officer of the state, not as an embodiment of the government, dogma incarnate. No, he was more of a negotiator than a guard or a civil violence figure, a policeman. He tried to settle matters through arbitration and restitution, which often ended in both parties being satisfied or even one admitting his wrongdoing after being reasoned with. He rarely ever arrested anyone who was truly non-violent, and even the violent were treated with a base respect for life.

And for his civil and peaceful behavior, it was he who held the respect of the whole of the community, and as the superior man to the state figure Barney. Andy constantly corrects the mistakes of Barney, who fouls up the absolute simplest of tasks. His incompetence is caused by applying almost childlike bullheadedness and forceful behavior to all scenarios and his need to be everyone's boss.

I like it. Arleen was a dream, was a dream...

Following the Constitution is NOT Activism

Finally, a major news periodical (Forbes) publishes something that is correct (from Professor Epstein):

...it doesn't follow from these points that it's a cardinal judicial sin to upset federal or state legislation. Nor does some implicit, overarching judicial norm of "strict construction" condemn most forms of judicial intervention.

That narrow conception of the judicial role may be congenial to conservatives who think democratic outcomes almost always have greater legitimacy than judicial ones. As a libertarian, however, I do not share that judgment. The Founders well understood the risk of faction, which could allow simple majorities to restrict the liberties or confiscate the property of their political opponents.

Exactly. Whole Forbes article here. And here is Damon Root with a spectacular piece on the subject. I am often confounded by the conservative longing for judicial deference to democratic majorities. As Root explains:

There is no inconsistency between principled judicial activism and limited government... For the better part of six decades, in fact, judicial activism was associated almost exclusively with the protection of economic rights, while its counterpart, judicial restraint, was the rallying cry of liberal reformers.