Publius

I don't normally do photos on here. But I had to.

To do big things, you need big money and a lot of people. There are fundamentally only two ways to accumulate big money and a lot of people: voluntarily, or involuntarily. In the voluntary column, you have say Apple. It has accumulated some $80 Billion now through the efforts of its tens of thousands of employees, investors, and executives. It uses that money to invest in great new technology. Big innovations often require big money. Apple spends tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars, and the efforts of thousands of people to bring new products to market. It has earned all the money to do that, through voluntary, mutually beneficial relationships. In the involuntary column, when the pharoahs built the pyramids, it was done by slaves, under the whip, worked to death with no choice in the matter. Both "big" projects (the iPad, and the Pyramid) required lots of money and lots of people. But one was voluntary, the other involuntary. One was created throu...

With all of the little neo-hippies on Wall Street (and the President) bashing "greedy corporations", holding signs that say "A corporation is not a person", perhaps we should take a little detour from our political path to discuss what, precisely, is a corporation? Indeed, a corporation is not "a person". That is obvious to even dullards such as the Occupy Wall Street crowd. A corporation is a nexus of a number of people organized around a common goal. It is a type of social organization that provides incredible benefits to civilization. Corporations align the interests of: owners/shareholders/investors workers customers Of course, the purpose of a corporation is to produce a profit for its owners. There, I said it. PROFIT. Profit is not evil, profit is not "exploitation". Profit is a goal of all rational, productive activity. Without profit, you are toiling in order to live hand to mouth, on a day to day basis. To profit is to pr...

The purpose of government is to protect our rights, our individual liberty. Yet Barack Obama has turned our government into a tool to destroy the very concepts of individuals, rights, and morality. Wall Street Bailout - companies that recklessly gambled with financial instruments they didn't understand, were rewarded with hundreds of billions of dollars of bailouts. Banks that were responsible and did not have problems, were forced to take government money and be subjected to government control anyway, and paid a price for bailout money that they didn't need. States bailout - left-wing states such as California and Illinois which boast large welfare apparatus and progressive taxation, are the hardest-hit by the recession because their tax structures are set up to punish the wealthy, and in a recession the wealthiest are the ones who get hit the hardest. In California, the powerful public employees unions have engineered outrageous pensions and salary increases, while around the...

The illustrious John Kerry, loser in the 2004 Presidential election, is one of the leftists who constantly proclaim bromides such as "the rich are getting richer", "the rich should pay their fair share", etc. Kerry is among the most liberal of Senators, and any time a question of tax cuts versus tax increases comes up, Kerry has always voted for tax increases. Yet, he is harboring his new $7M yacht (guardian of the proletariat that he is) in Rhode Island - in order to dodge massive taxes on such property in Taxachusetts, er, Massachusetts. Kerry's dodge will save him nearly $500,000 plus $70,000 a year in taxes on the yacht. http://wbztv.com/local/john.kerry.yacht.2.1825558.html Kerry's comment: "I have nothing more to say." It's a good thing that Kerry is fighting for the common man - by raising taxes on the most evil segment of our society, diabetics and disabled people, against whom he voted to sock an excise tax on medi...

If you have been following the JournoList scandal, you know that emails leaked from the list show that leftist journalists such as Ezra Klein of the Washington Post among others, collaborated among other things on how to tackle certain issues in articles and best attack their Republican opponents. The response of these leftist wonks to these revelations have been more revelatory, perhaps, than the actual emails. They are saying "Well what's more natural than a bunch of us 'progressives' hanging out on an internet forum?" And from my side, of COURSE these people are all hardcore leftists. That's what we've been saying for 30 years, that the press is almost completely leftist. The point is that journalism schools, and these people, have been defending themselves for decades by claiming that they are following all these standards for objective reporting. And now we learn that in fact, they are working together to damage real debate by throwing around unfounde...

Since Socialist ideology is in direct contradiction to many laws of reality, such as laws of human behavior, of economics, and of just plain common sense, you would expect that leftists must on a daily basis evade and actively disbelieve plain facts that are placed in front of them. This is why they will simply call you a racist or a liar if you challenge them on the facts - their beliefs are already arbitrary and not based on a chain of induction or deduction from observation. Everything they believe is based on a floating abstraction. So when, occasionally, these types see a fact that seems to support their view of reality, they go positively hog wild over it. Note then the responses in the blogosphere to the Daily Kos / Research 2000 polling over the past two years. The fact that the Kos polling consistently showed 10 to 15 points higher support for Democrats than all other polls caused no concern to these people - it only "proved" that polling firms such as Rasmu...

In an act of appeasement worthy of Chamberlain, Comedy Central has recently and repeatedly bowed to Islamic totalitarianism, by censoring themselves. http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2010/04/20/comedy-central-censors-south-park-episode-muslim-threats/ Comedy Central bleeped out all references to the Prophet Muhammad in Wednesday night's episode of the animated show "South Park." ... In addition to bleeping the words "Prophet Muhammad," the show also covered the character with a large block labeled "Censored." In response to this, Comedy Central keystone Jon Stewart, had this to say: " The censorship was a decision Comedy Central made I think as a way to protect their employees from what they believe was any possible harmful repercussions to them, " Stewart stated, adding, comically, that "after forcing many of these same employees to work on [Comedy Central shows] "Mind of Mencia" and "Crod Mandoon" … damage done....

At a campaign rally, I mean a health-care stump speech, in Ohio today, Obama trod out a poor victim of evil insurance companies. "Obama planned to visit Strongsville, Ohio, home of cancer patient Natoma Canfield, who wrote the president she gave up her health insurance after it rose to $8,500 a year. Obama repeatedly has cited that letter from a self-employed cleaning worker who lives in the Cleveland suburb to illustrate the urgency of the massive overhaul." And what would happen to this woman under Obamacare? $8,500 is where the 40% excise tax on "cadillac insurance plans" kicks in. So Democrats in Congress are demonizing this woman for spending "too much". While the excise tax supposedly is to be levied against insurance companies, given their slim profits the only way insurance companies could afford the tax is to pass it on to their customers. So this poor woman's insurance would not have been $8,500, but instead $11,900. That would sure help her ...

Over the past several months, the same independent voters who swept Barack Obama into office have been increasingly turning away from him. The tide of opposition has risen to the point that Massachusetts elected Republican Scott Brown to fill a seat held by liberal Kennedy's for over 50 years -- based on Brown's platform of stopping the Obama agenda. Obama was elected because he told voters that he was a new kind of politician; that he would reach across the aisle and work with both Democrats and Republicans; that he would negotiate a health care bill in public on CSPAN; that he wouldn't raise taxes on the middle class "by one dime"; that lobbyists for special interests would be exposed and have no say in his administration. And, that he wasn't George Bush. But Obama is exactly the same kind of politician; he has helped lock Republicans out of every step of the process in every one of his major initiatives, his lip service about a "health care summit...

In 2005, MoveOn.org and many other leftists vigorously opposed the use of a procedural gimmick by Republicans then in control of the Senate, to approve one of Bush's judicial nominations. As reported here in 2005: MoveOn.org says of the "nuclear option": Their plan is to throw out 200 years of checks and balances in the Senate, by silencing the minority party for the first time in American history. It's a maneuver so outrageous that even Republicans call it the "nuclear option." It will take 51 senators to defeat them, and the vote is probably less than a month away. If Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist can twist enough arms to get 51 votes in support of Cheney's ruling, the minority party will be completely silenced for the first time ever. Note the key claim: "the minority party will be completely silenced for the first time ever." In 2005, when they opposed what the Senate was acting on, MoveOn.org cherished the time-honored filibuster, as g...

You may have noticed Socialist Democrats, so-called "Progressives", using the term "tea-baggers" to refer to the grass-roots protests against the massive government intervention in our economy led by Obama, Pelosi and Reid. The actual name these protesters have taken on is "Tea Party" - as in, the Boston Tea Party. "Tea-bagger" is quite a different thing. According to WikiPedia, "Teabagging is a slang term for the act of a man placing his scrotum in the mouth[1] or on or around the face (including the top of the head) of another person, often in a repeated in-and-out motion as in irrumatio. The practice resembles dipping a tea bag into a cup of tea." This kind of base insult is unprecedented in our nation's political discourse. This is the hateful disdain progressives feel for people exercising their rights to petition, to assemble, and to speak. This is the bile that Democrats are spewing against anyone who opposes their Glorious L...

The out-of-control Congress on a runaway mission to implement so-called "health-care reform" at any cost has over the past few weeks demonstrated a complete disregard for the Constitution. In particular, the concepts of equal protection under the law and federalism are being completely run over by the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cabal. First, everyone knows about the Cornhusker Kickback - special deals whereby Nebraska gets a free ride on Medicaid increased which will be paid by the Federal Government. Every other state in the nation, however, gets no such deal. The Cornhusker Kickback was a cynical payoff to get Ben Nelson's vote for the Senate bill. Yet many state Attorneys General have stood up to say this provision is unconstitutional. Second, just announced today: A senior Democratic official speaking on background told Fox News that the threshold for exemption would be raised from $23,000 to $24,000 per family but would remain the same at $8,500 for singles with high-value pl...

Whenever socialists want to attack a business enterprise they don't like, all they have to do is Go Large. Make it Big. Big Oil. Big Coal. Big Insurance. Big Pharma. To a Democrat socialist, putting "Big" in front of anything is tantamount to declaring that object an evil of such magnitude that nobody would dare to disagree with them on it. (A variation of the argument from intimidation). This is a Big Pile of ****, because they certainly don't seem to object to Big Government. Only Big business is evil, Big Government is ... well, something else. This tells you everything you need to know about the Democrat/socialist philosophy: Big companies get big and stay big by providing - through mutually beneficial, voluntary trade - what their customers want. To a socialist, this is evil. Big Government gets big and stays big by mercilessly taxing its citizens, generally against their will, for the benefit of special interests, in order to buy votes. To a socialist, this is g...

It's happening already - politicians such as Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi are taking the credit for your hard work. The past two years have been a very hard time for many. We are now seeing some economic growth and growth of perhaps 4-5% is projected for next year (let's hope it's true). And guess who is taking credit for it? Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. Yet the government cannot create wealth. If the government taxes you to spend money to build a bridge and employ some people, it does so at the expense of the job creation that would have resulted had you been free to spend your own money. The difference is whether you get to act in freedom, or whether the central planner's in Washington's Politburo acts on your behalf - in a distinct lack of freedom. Barry and Nancy are saying "Look at this bridge we built!" while encouraging you not to look at the hundreds of thousands of homes that were NOT built because of radically increased taxes and debt. For eac...

From FoxNews : The Obama administration is pushing back against calls to halt or delay closing the Guantanamo Bay prison in light of the failed Christmas Day terror attack, suggesting that shutting down the prison will undermine terrorist recruitment in the very network that claimed responsibility for last week's plot. Obama is absolutely right about this. If we do exactly what the terrorists want us to do , they will all go home and we will be safe!

In a year when the Federal Government has already spent $1.4T more than it has - adding $20,000 in federal debt obligations to each American family -- Obama and his insane Congress want to double-down on the spending. Except it's not doubling, it's increasing far more than that. Hillary Clinton promised to pay $100B to "developing countries to offset the costs of adapting to climate change": http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=2351880 This is nothing less than a transfer payment to the 3rd-world, at a time when we can least afford it. When Federal deficits of $1T per year or more are projected through the next ten years , Obama and his cronies are throwing more and more fuel on the fire. So the Democrats have now taken their philosophy of nakedly buying votes with taxpayer money, and are exporting it overseas. $100B is $1,500 per family. Since this wasn't included in any of Obama's budgets, this is on top of the $300,000 national debt per family we ...

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/03/obamas-olympic-failure-highlights-limits-international-appeal/ Aside from the question of why the President of the most powerful nation on earth, who should be focusing on winning two wars, removing obstacles to renewed economic growth, and a myriad of foreign policy problems spent time to go to Copenhagen to give a sales pitch for the Olympics, the result -- which has surprised leftist cheerleaders of Obama -- was that he failed. The Fox article above says "perhaps his international star power has limits", but misses the point. Well of course his star power has limits. And the limit is that many in the world hate America because of her ideas, because of what she represents. Hatred for America preceded George Bush and as Obama is perhaps now starting to realize, it exists after George Bush too. The rest of the world cheers Obama when he denigrates and insults America, when he supplicates himself to the likes of Abbas, Ghadafi, Chavez...

Many Democrats, and now Jimmy Carter, have claimed that opposition to Obama's government takeover of the US health care system are "racist" or "motivated by racism": http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/09/16/carter-racism-claim-draws-widespread-criticism/ This is complete and utter nonsense, Carter, and you know it. Yes there are some racists out there. Who cares? When hundreds of thousands of people descend on Washington DC to protest Obama's socialized medicine proposals, it's about socialism, stupid! The real story here should be, why does anyone still pay attention to anything Jimmy Carter says, when he is widely held as the worst modern president? Why does the media continue to feature Carter prominently? Why do they seek his input and advice on economic issues when under Carter we had double-digit inflation, double-digit interest rates, and shrinkage of real income across the nation? Because he's a socialist and the media is biased, maybe? The...

The socialist left has set up a massive straw man in the health care debate. It is, in short: "Opponents of Obama's health-care (wait, no, health-insurance) plan want to maintain the status-quo." This of course is a straw man and a great lie. There are clearly problems with the health care system, or more precisely, with the way that costs are growing out of whack. Nobody says the current setup is ideal. There is legitimate disagreement, however, about whether Yet Another Government Welfare Program is the way to go. Obama says "we need a government insurance plan to keep the private insurers honest". Even assuming that insurance companies were being dishonest (which is clearly the intention of Obama's phrasing), why not open the insurance field to MORE competition by allowing insurers to operate across state lines? That is one solution to the issue of limited competition in insurance and one which does not require a massive new federal bureaucracy and entit...