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POPSWill GOP Call to Repeal Health Care Bill? Repealing the health care bill, however, would take more than winning back a few congressional seats. Just as the Republican minority in the Senate has stalled the current health care debate, a Democratic minority could do the same to any repeal measure unless Republicans were able to pull together at least a 60-vote majority. The GOP would also have to overcome the strong majority Democrats now have in the House. Even if they were to win both chambers back, President Obama could veto any repeal measure at least through 2012. "Anyone who thinks they'll be able to repeal ObamaCare is kidding themselves," Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, told the Washington Independent. "If they want to stop it, they need to stop it now."
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POPSHYPOCRITICAL SCAM ARTISTS Approximately 140 aircraft carrying world leaders, heads of state and VIPs will land in Copenhagen, the U.N. estimates — although 95 percent of departures from Copenhagen Airport will be “green departures,” which allow airplanes to climb continuously to their optimal operating level, enabling them to reach planned routes sooner than usual. The result, according to the U.N., is saved time, fuel and carbon emissions. But Michaels wonders why attendees, particularly those in Europe, can't ride the rails into Copenhagen. “That’s the way I get to New York,” Michaels said. “There’s nothing new here. There’s always been a lot of hypocrisy amongst the climate change political community. "Prince Charles goes around the world in a private jet, telling everyone else they need to ration their carbon dioxide. Please.”
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POPS20 Texas Democrats Desert Party, Go Republican Scores of Democrats across Texas like the five who have switched parties today are not so much leaving their party. Their party, its leadership in Washington and its leadership here in Texas, has left them. We’re pleased to continue growing the Texas GOP by attracting those who share our conservative values of limited government, strong national defense and robust economic growth via the free market to join us. 15 THIS YEAR, 5 MORE YESTERDAY DESERT PARTY WHICH HAS DESERTED AMERICA http://bit.ly/6hGbZV by John Charlton at The Post and Mail
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POPSLibertarian Group To Sue Administration for Failing to Disclose Global Warming Docs Moreover, Treasury redacted portions of the documents. One internal memo on cap-and-trade said that "given the administration's proposal to auction all emission allowances, a cap-and-trade program could generate federal receipts on the order of $100 to $200 billion annually," but the Department blacked out the $100 billion-$200 billion figure. Horner said Treasury redacted the figure because it was "highly embarrassing" for the administration. Days later, Treasury re-released the same documents without any portions redacted. Treasury said they are currently considering the appeal.
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POPSGlenn Beck: Harmful to the Conservative Movement Video at first clip link. Second clip link is to a commentary from Peter Wehner, former Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the White House Office of Strategic Initiatives. Mr. Wehner served in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush Administrations prior to becoming deputy director of speechwriting for President George W. Bush in 2001. In 2002, he was asked to head the Office of Strategic Initiatives, where he generated policy ideas, reached out to public intellectuals, published op-eds and essays, and provided counsel on a range of domestic and international issues. Prior to joining the Bush Administration, Wehner was executive director for policy for Empower America, a conservative public-policy organization. Mr. Wehner also served as a special assistant to the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy and, before that, as a speechwriter for then-Secretary of Education Bill Bennett.
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POPSUnderstanding Government Subsidies There are many people who will rally behind "socialized" oil, but read on: Hidden Oil Subsidies The real price of gasoline is what people actually pay for it, not just what they pay for it at the pump. That might seem subtle, but there's a big difference. The Cato Institute, a libertarian think-thank, did a study on the subject. What they found is simply mind-boggling. They calculated that the US spent between $30 to $60 billion (with a 'b') a year safeguarding oil supplies in the Middle East during the 1990s, even though its imports from that region totaled only about $10 billion a year during that period. A more comprehensive study that includes the Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other oil protection services (the coast guard is clearing shipping lanes and doing navigational support to oil tankers, etc) shows that actual subsidies to Big Oil are between $78 to $158 billion (again, with a 'b') per year.
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POPS"Democrat-Media Complex" “The unorthodox roll-out was orchestrated to protect James and Hannah,” said Breitbart. “The moment that their peril ended, was when Jon Stewart reported on this, making fun of the media for missing the story. At that moment I called James and Hannah and said, “You’re mostly in the clear, and the only people left who’ll attack you will be some liberal bloggers.’” Breitbart knows something about liberal bloggers. His pre-BigGovernment career included many months working to launch The Huffington Post. (He had been a researcher for Arianna Huffington in the early 1990s, before he joined Drudge, when both of them were still conservatives.) “I wanted the world to see what the Left and the Los Angeles/Manhattan salons had to think about national politics,” Breitbart told TWI. “Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I thought it would be great for Arianna and I thought it would be great for the right, because it gave them source material.”
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POPSWho Would the Teabaggers Hate More Than Obama - Reagan
From the article: The graph looks at total federal debt (blue line) and debt as a percentage of GDP (red line). Obviously World War II represented a significant period of the spending with the government taking on debt (much of it in the form of war bonds) to finance the war (see the redline which represents debt as percentage of GDP). This high debt load was unwound over the following decades. In 1981 this downward trend reverses and begins to rocket back upward. That upward trend is not arrested until 1994 when it flattens and starts a downward trend until 2001 when it starts to climb up again. During the 1980s the debt blossomed from $700 billion to nearly $3 trillion establishing a credit card bill so high (in comparison to near-term past decades) as to engender America with a "fuck it" attitude. The teabag argument that high deficit spending leads to inevitable tax hikes has credibility. George H. W. Bush who was the president immediately after this period was forced to
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POPSWho are the wealth creators? Having declared that the very idea of representing capital as well as labor in government is undemocratic, Lincoln goes on to demolish the assumption made by those today who talk about investors as "wealth creators": It is assumed that labor is available only in connection with capital; that nobody labors unless somebody else, owning capital, somehow by the use of it induces him to labor. Lincoln goes on to point out that many Americans were self-employed, and that many others were laborers at one point in their lives and capitalists at others. With the war against the slave-owning South in the background, he concludes: Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not existed.
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POPSGlenn Beck, anti-communist art critic? More: Fair enough. That’s cable television for you. On to a bigger question: Does Beck know what he’s talking about? Absolutely not, says Christopher Knight, an art critic (a real one) for the Los Angeles Times. Beck was as “nutty as usual,” Knight wrote: He pointed to a portrait of Lenin in Mexican master Diego Rivera’s destroyed Rockefeller lobby mural, “Man at the Crossroads,” but forgot to mention that old John D. had the mural removed because of it. (Facts are stubborn things — even more stubborn than demagoguery.) With comedy stylings like that, Beck is turning out to be the Harold Harby of our day. Who was Harold Harby? A Los Angeles city councilman in the early 1950s, Harby took up propaganda-arms with a paranoid group of right-wing loonies called the Society for Sanity in Art. They made it their patriotic duty to search out Communist symbols they just knew were hidden in that weird, postwar abstract art.
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POPSActual Tea Party Quotes So one of them is blaming Obama for two wars that started under Bush and a law that was both passed and renewed under Bush. Then we have a couple who claims that Democrats everywhere are "demonizing" the troops. Now, there may well be fringe activists within the Democratic Party who do such things, but Democratic politicians? Especially when a Democratic president wants to commit more troops to one of the wars? The fact that a piece like this, which seems to be trying hard to be favorable to the Tea Party goers, couldn't find more coherent people to quote gives me real pause.
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POPSIdaho GOP Leader, Tea Party Organizer Arrested For Assault With A Deadly Weapon (a gun) McAffee, a backer of libertarian-leaning former GOP presidential candidate Ron Paul and an activist in this year's anti-big-government "Tea Party" protests, helped organize Paul backers who aligned at last June's Idaho State Republican Convention in Sandpoint with other foes of then-state GOP Chairman Kirk Sullivan. Sullivan was voted from office in favor of Norm Semanko. "I'm unarmed, I'm an old man," Lutes, 51, told The Associated Press on Thursday. "I'm trying to find out why he's taking pictures of my house. I said, 'Knock on my door, let me know what you want.' Then, I think he's reaching for his business card and he pulls out a concealed weapon and I think he's going to blow my head off."
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POPSPlease tell me who you are Democrat, Republican, independent, libertarian. Understand this. We don't care. Political parties are meaningless to us. Patriotic Americans are willing to do right by us and our Constitution and that is all that matters to us now. We are going to fire all of you who abuse power and seek more. It is not your power. It is ours and we want it back. We entrusted you with it and you abused it. You are dishonorable. You are dishonest. As Americans we are ashamed of you. You have brought shame to us.
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POPSMore Red-Baiting of Obama: The "Socialist" Joker Here we have yet another demonstration of lablelling substituting itself for critical thought. Obama gets red-baited once more. It's a pity that Tyler Nixon at Delaware Libertarian isn't an artist because if he were he could do an image of Obama as a fascist, something he labeled the President in a recent post: http://tinyurl.com/nq7bjn Thoughtful criticism must be difficult for these people.
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POPSGone Are the Days of Wine and Roses Politicians are happy to blame the recession for depriving citizens of programs they have come to expect. The recession didn't create the gap between state government commitments and state government resources. It only exposed it.
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POPSI, Toaster The basic theme of Thwaites' Toaster Project, however, was first conceived back in 1958 in the brilliant essay "I, Pencil," written by Leonard Read, founder of the libertarian think tank Foundation for Economic Education. In other words, the division of labor is what makes pencils—and, for that matter, all of the conveniences of modern life—possible. Millions of people are involved in the manufacture of a single pencil, or in Thwaites' case, a single toaster. No single human being could possibly possess the know-how to make one on his own. Pan back until you've framed the entire world economy, and it's hard not to marvel at the wonder and miracle of capitalism's invisible hand.
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POPSA Libertarian Revival "You and I are told we must choose between a left or right, but I suggest there is no such thing as a left or right. There is only an up or down. Up to man's age-old dream -- the maximum of individual freedom consistent with order -- or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism. Regardless of their sincerity, their humanitarian motives, those who would sacrifice freedom for security have embarked on this downward path. Plutarch warned, " 'The real destroyer of the liberties of the people is he who spreads among them bounties, donations and benefits.' " Ronald Reagan - Address to the nation, October 27, 1964
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POPSJesus was a libertarian I was asked today by a Progressive Statists, "Interested to know how you believe Libertarianism is in any way compatible with the Gospel and greatest commandments." Im my research, I came across this interesting perspective regarding LIBERTARIANS and the Commandments of the Gospel
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POPSAnnuit Coeptis American political news and opinion with a Republican or Libertarian twist.
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POPSSo Painfully True And one of the best: Government is the great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else. -Frederic Bastiat, French Economist (1801-1850)
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