We trust the experts less and less, but they keep coming to us for money.
In this atmosphere, the fight for a massive global treaty to fight climate change that involves annual payments of $100 billion and more to (mostly) corrupt and incompetent governments in developing countries that make Greece look as tidy as Sweden has no chance.
The Founding Fathers well described "swarms of officers sent hither to harass the people." It is worth pondering how bureaucracy may have inside it a tyranny trying to get out.
THEY TOLD ME THAT IF I VOTED FOR MCCAIN, we'd get an Attorney General who'd want to curtail Miranda rights. And they were right!
Attorney General Eric Holder said that Congress should "give serious consideration" to updating the Miranda warning which requires law enforcement officials to inform suspects of their rights – including the right to remain silent.In an interview on "This Week," Holder said that the U.S. needs to exam whether the current rules regarding Miranda warnings give law enforcement agents the "necessary flexibility" when dealing with terrorism cases.
Ah, remember all that talk about the "lawless Bush Administration" trampling civil rights, and the fierce moral urgency of change? Well, if you believed that stuff when they were peddling it. . . hey, rube!
a 1999 study by psychologist Robert Feldman at the University of Massachusetts showed that the most popular kids were also the most effective liars.
Here's what the TP itself really fears, in an inchoate way that for most of its members doesn't rise to the level of clear understanding, but is still intuitively very powerful: the US is embracing central planning as a governing theory, as fast as our legislative processes will allow. . . . Central planning has two primary flaws, when compared with economic freedom: it misallocates resources, and it magnifies the impact of corruption. I could write a decent-sized book explaining both of those mechanisms, but because I've never been busier in my life than I have been these past few weeks, I'll cut to the conclusion.
The endpoint of central planning, if not outright failure, is a much deeper and more intractable division of society into haves and have-nots. After promising a better world for everyone, the progressives will end up creating a society that is more polarized than ever. . . . And we're already seeing everywhere, from David Brooks to Noam Chomsky, the signs of how the elites will have to deal with the polarization: by loudly proclaiming in their captive media that the have-nots are stupid and, eventually, evil.
Great Moments in Socialized Medicine
"Doctors repeatedly mistook a teenage girl's cancer for migraines--spotting three tumours only after her father refused to leave the hospital until she had a CT scan," London's Daily Mail reports:
Danica Maxwell, 14, said she felt like 'a nuisance' and 'just another kid with a migraine who was making a fuss' when she was seen at the West Cumberland Hospital, in Whitehaven, Cumbria.
When she was eventually operated on she was told she would have died had the cancer gone unnoticed any longer.
The tumours removed from her body were deemed so unusual they were sent to America for analysis.
Danica's tumors ended up at Princeton University, where former Enron adviser Paul Krugman produced the following analysis: "In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We've all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false."
from here.
Libertarian sentiment has finally gone mainstream.
A movement that said that people should do whatever they wanted as long as it didn't hurt anyone else couldn't compete during the culture wars that began in the 1960s.
But after two wars, a $12 trillion debt, a financial crisis and the most politically tone-deaf president in modern history, Americans may have finally given up on big government.
It appears that when government sets out to solve a problem, not only does it violate our freedom, it also accomplishes the opposite of what it set out to do.
How is it that Obama can fail to see that changes of the magnitude he is seeking would compel those who believe that those changes are dangerous—who honestly believe that they are bad for the country and whose belief is grounded in powerful ideas about how society should be ordered—to marshal their forces to do whatever is in their power to prevent them from taking place? And that it would be wise not to dismiss or belittle the energy and resolve of the opposition, but rather to take their full measure and plan accordingly?
