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Thursday, October 30, 2014

Miscellany: 10/30/14

Quote of the Day
I am in earnest; 
I will not equivocate; 
I will not excuse; 
I will not retreat a single inch; 
and I will be heard.
William Lloyd Garrison

Image of the Day

Via Brendan Riley Bachman on FB

Tweet of the Day
Phony Democrats in "Independent" Clothing

Via NTU

Democrat Dirty Tricks in Delaware



First Nominations for Economic Illiterate of the Year

Yes, I've invented a new annual mock award. Hillary Clinton's recent "You Didn't Hire Them" stump speech instantly qualifies (see my two latest tweets above). But it's difficult to imagine this Female-President-in-Waiting can top Argentina's Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner's megalomaniac delusions. Let me quote Simon Black:
Argentina’s new ‘supply law’, or Ley de Abastecimiento, due to take effect in December next year.
Under this new law, the government will have the honorable burden of defending consumers from greedy producers.
Companies are now prohibited from setting their prices too high, generating too much profit, or producing too little.
And unlike the country’s astronomically high taxes (which at least have defined numbers and penalties), the new supply law doesn’t even say what is meant by too high, too many, or too little.
It simply reinforces the government’s unchecked power to arbitrarily audit, fine, shut down, and expropriate production of private companies.
More Reunions











Facebook Corner

(Judge Andrew Napolitano). If the government wants to confine you, you do NOT have to prove you are worthy of freedom.
The government has to prove you are worthy of confinement!
More -- http://goo.gl/0l53vF
It's utterly immoral and shameful how many anti-scientific right-wing authoritarians are willing to sell out our Constitutional rights. The real Ebola crisis is all of you fascists, politically exploiting the situation to attack a woman who is not ill, merely smeared by association because of a media-induced public hysteria, without a modicum of common sense by political whores trying to capitalize on mass stupidity.

This excerpt is from a financial newsletter that wants to remind you idiots of a few inconvenient truths:

" News stories focus on the people infected with Ebola. Let's think about the people who weren't infected.

--The four people who stayed in a small Dallas apartment with Thomas Eric Duncan while he was sick with Ebola were not infected.
--None of the people who flew on Frontier Airlines with nurse Amber Vinson on Oct. 13 has shown up as infected. Their 21-day incubation period will end Nov. 3.
--None of the people who rode a New York subway or visited the same bowling alley and restaurants as Dr. Craig Spencer has shown signs of infection so far.
--Other than the two Dallas nurses, no worker in the other U.S. hospitals treating Ebola patients has caught the disease yet.

Furthermore, the survival rate for non-African Ebola patients is very high, at least so far. I believe the two Spanish priests are the only Western fatalities to date."

This is from the New England Journal of Medicine:

"The governors of a number of states, including New York and New Jersey, recently imposed 21-day quarantines on health care workers returning to the United States from regions of the world where they may have cared for patients with Ebola virus disease. We understand their motivation for this policy — to protect the citizens of their states from contracting this often-fatal illness. This approach, however, is not scientifically based, is unfair and unwise, and will impede essential efforts to stop these awful outbreaks of Ebola disease at their source, which is the only satisfactory goal. The governors' action is like driving a carpet tack with a sledgehammer: it gets the job done but overall is more destructive than beneficial... 

"Therefore, an asymptomatic health care worker returning from treating patients with Ebola, even if he or she were infected, would not be contagious. Furthermore, we now know that fever precedes the contagious stage, allowing workers who are unknowingly infected to identify themselves before they become a threat to their community....Notably, Duncan's family members who were living in the same household for days as he was at the start of his illness did not become infected.

"Hundreds of years of experience show that to stop an epidemic of this type requires controlling it at its source. Médecins sans Frontières, the World Health Organization, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and many other organizations say we need tens of thousands of additional volunteers to control the epidemic. We are far short of that goal, so the need for workers on the ground is great. These responsible, skilled health care workers who are risking their lives to help others are also helping by stemming the epidemic at its source. If we add barriers making it harder for volunteers to return to their community, we are hurting ourselves."

Instead of listening to know-nothing buffoons like Bill O'Reilly and acting like jerks, get yourself educated on the topic, and keep in mind FEAR-MONGERING NEVER LEADS TO GOOD PUBLIC POLICY AND IS A THREAT TO OUR CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS.
Dude, that incessant and mindless bunch of "Liberal" garbage you just upchucked there is precisely the reason that QUARANTINE is necessary. You quote this and that, claim things to be factual and almost all of it comes from "Liberal" owned media. This is a tactic the "Left" has used for years. Blah blah blah until people forget the real problem, then sweep it under the rug. First of all, 80% of the crap you posted is not founded in truth (I tried fact checking it). It is speculation and most of it is outdated. Secondly, the "Left Wing" liberal retards in this country are the exact reason why the world hates and disrespects us so wholeheartedly right now. No spine, no truth and no regard for the very constitution this country was founded on. It just pisses me off when some Liberal P.O.S. with a vocabulary decides to spew his rhetoric about something he really has no clue about. Lets just put you into quarantine with Kaci and hope (for your sake) she isn't contagious. What do you think about that scenario? Wise up you lying liberal retard. The Left Leaning Mainstream Media are the FEAR Mongers and this post you just put forth feeds the fire. The public needs to know our government will do ANYTHING to keep us ALL safe. I don't care which way you lean, we all deserve to be safe from a potential epidemic of which there is NO CURE !!!
Listen, fear-mongering right-wing authoritarian fascist (no, [I'm referencing an interim commenter] he's not a real conservative--I am. I'm a Constitutional conservative.) It's an absolute FACT that you can count all those who have been diagnosed with Ebola from all West African flights into the US on one hand, the only people who have caught the disease here were medical professionals after Duncan checked himself into a hospital, and at least one of those 2 have been declared now free of the infection. Inconvenient truth to your crackpot conspiracy.

I stand behind my sources and the New England Journal of Medicine. Just because you believe in crackpot sources who feed on your scientific illiteracy and tell you what you want to hear or are in a state of denial doesn't "disprove" the facts I've stated. Your "fact check" sources and $5 will buy me a cup of joe at Starbucks. The facts are on my side. FYI: I'm not a social liberal. I am a fusion libertarian-conservative like Ron and Rand Paul and Justin Amash. I've also published peer-reviewed empirical research.

(Reason). Congressman Jared Polis thinks libertarians should vote for Democratic candidates, because Democratic nominees are increasingly more supportive of individual liberty and freedom than Republicans. Do you agree?
What a load of crap... This President had a supermajority in 2009-2010 and what did he do? Scrap the Patriot Act? Expedite our exit from Iraq before Bush's schedule or get us out of Afghanistan? Reform all but bankrupt entitlements? Tackle drug law reform? No--they created two reforms, ObamaCare and Dodd N. Frankenstein that imposed a crippling blow to an already struggling economy. This President has more than doubled the publicly held federal debt and we have had one of the slowest job recoveries in American history--on top of Bush's pitiful record of a net gain of 1M, mostly local/state government. Even if we've had a modest pickup lately, we have the lowest labor force participation rates in decades--while the Dems push for more business mandates on labor and push for a minimum wage increase with sky-high unemployment among the low-skilled/inexperience workers in urban areas. One of the few bright spots has been in oil/gas production where federally-controlled areas have largely not participated because of environmental restrictions/policies.

Tech innovation actually thrives because of lighter regulation by government; in fact, it's the Democrats trying to impose regulations on the Internet. It's the Democrats who are trying to regulate political speech by a Constitutional amendment. It's the Democrats largely responsible for our convoluted tax system (built up over decades since the 1930's) and the $1.8T regulatory empire. And it was under Democrat Administrations that we fought the 4 bloodiest wars in the last century, and our casualties in Afghanistan have more than doubled under Obama, and drone attacks, along with Obama-approved kill lists, including American citizens without due process, have grown on steroids.

(Reason). Should libertarians vote Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, or none of the above? Share your thoughts in the comments!
I would advise libertarians for the most viable candidate that reflects their views in a substantive manner. In most cases, that's going to be a Republican in a tight race, because for the most part Democrats are the government of the Regulatory Empire, Excess Taxation, and Unsustainable Spending and Liabilities. There is no longer such a thing as a classical liberal Democrat like Thomas Jefferson or Grover Cleveland. Let us remember not a single vote for ObamaCare was cast by a Republican, almost none for Dodd N. Frankenstein, and it was the GOP that stopped the Senate Democrats' attempts to pass a constitutional amendment to let the Congress regulate political speech.

Bottom line: Democrats, not Republicans, run on expanding the State. The fact is only one political party that nominates and elects people like Ron and Rand Paul and Justin Amash. Now if it's not a close contest, vote for one of the perennial losers that the Libertarian Party nominates. But if you let a "Progressive" Democrat into office who will tax and spend your child/grandchild's inheritance, stop looking for others to blame.

Proposals

I think I'm running low on fresh videos; I try to avoid repeats of embedded videos, but keep seeing ones I remember from past weeks. So don't be surprised if I skip this segment on an occasional or an extended basis. As I've mentioned before, I think of myself as very creative, I own a number of books on the topic, and I love to see the innovative ways guys (or the occasional lady) choose to pop the question; I don't think my own relatives have done their own videos, but even if they did, I wouldn't identify them. No, I will not cover gay commitment proposals; as a Christian libertarian, I accept the right of association, even if I do not personally agree with the gay lifestyle--that's different than promoting it.









Political Cartoon

Courtesy of Michael Ramirez via Townhall
Musical Interlude: My Favorite Vocalists

Linda Ronstadt, "I Can't Let Go".