Fear is the mind killer.
Paul Muad'Ib
Tweet of the Day
Obama made a long-overdue step towards normalizing relations, trade and travel between the US and Cuba. Don't micromanage it:open the door.
— Ronald Guillemette (@raguillem) December 18, 2014
Image of the Day
Religious Liberties for Corporations? Hobby Lobby, the Affordable Care Act, and the Constitution: Thumbs UP!
I'm not going to embed a 90-minute podcast here (see the above link); this is a unique hybrid debate/book review. It won't surprise any familiar reader to know I think Shapiro dominated the progressive Gans; you do have to give Gans credit for showing up at a place not sympathetic to his world view.
Gans basically argues a slippery slope for corporate person rights and then bashes corporate control over women's drugs; he disingenuously argues that birth control and other "preventive" care are otherwise "unaffordable". Shapiro points out some of the conceptual problems with Gans case, e.g., comparing auto with health insurance. But let me reinforce certain points: first, no employer has control over what its employees do with their paychecks, including paying for birth control. Second, all things being equal, health policies not covering certain birth control should be cheaper, which generally translates to a bigger paycheck. Third, this is an artifact of bad public policy tying healthcare to work; there are other approaches to healthcare, including a universal deduction one could use to purchase individual policies. And preventive care and birth control are ordinary expenses, not shared risk like cancer. Why, for instance, should I have to subsidize a woman's voluntary sexually active lifestyle?
Election 2014 Over: McSally (R-AZ) Wins: GOP at 247 in House, Most Since 1928
Facebook Corner
(Reason). An Indiana cop is selling "Breathe Easy--Don't Break the Law" t-shirts in response to Eric Garner protesters. But his response to critics of the slogan is more offensive than the t-shirts, themselves.
This Indiana cop goes beyond being illiterate about unalienable rights. Let's be clear: you work at the expense of and for the sake of the people. Unnecessary force, as in the case of the Garner homicide, is NEVER legally or morally justifiable. Garner had been arrested before without some fascist cop jumping on him and obstructing his breathing. Garner was outnumbered at least 4-1 and was neither a flight risk nor posed a physical threat to the cops. Even if you are retarded enough to justify using force over a victimless crime of selling individual cigarettes, it is not the function of a police officer to serve as judge, jury and executioner. A true professional cop uses violence only as a last resort. Trying to blame the victim for a cop's unprofessional behavior and selling a t-shirt implying a person's natural right to breathe is at the discretion of a rogue cop are purely offensive.
(responding to a troll: I had embedded a video in yesterday's daily post separate from my FB feature; I had added this comment on the FB thread: Sen. Coburn, thank you for your patriotic service as Senator, for speaking truth instead of your political whore colleagues, thinking they can buy their way to politically cover their lack of oversight. You will be missed. Somehow the troll confuses a bill's hype with its reality and then accuses me of hypocritically blasting Coburn in a recent comment, which is a departure from reality.)
First, I never criticized Coburn in any Facebook thread; you are confusing me with someone else. Second, Coburn is not new to the politicization of the VA; I happen to be more of a conservative-libertarian who believes most of the things done by government could be done better, faster, safer in the free markets. All government does is mismanage things inefficiently beyond its scope of competence. Vets should be serviced by quality health providers in a location convenient to them, not by a self-serving bureaucracy.
(Reason). Elizabeth Warren is right. That doesn’t happen very often.
I normally like Barton Hinkle, but he is wrong about Cherokee Lizzie. The issue as I've seen written up elsewhere is the issue of using swaps in the sense of hedging risks against one's loan portfolio. For example, consider this year's price collapse in the oil market. If you had made a loan to, say, a shale oil operator, you might want to shield against a catastrophe crippling the ability of the customer to pay off the loan. This is hardly "speculative". Without the ability to hedge, the bank may simply decide not to make the loan. I would argue being able to hedge would make the risks of a loan portfolio easier to manage and less susceptible to catastrophic losses--and any taxpayer bailout.
But a couple of other notes: Cherokee Lizzie has hardly been a voice of consistency, say over the poster boy of cronyism, the Ex-Im Bank, which she supports. And when has she called for ending the Fed? Second, Dodd N Frankenstein hardly involves true solutions to "too big to fail"; in fact, it anticipates them. If you really want to get rid to bank corruption, you remove the crutch of federal deposit insurance and other free market reforms--none of which appear in the economically illiterate leftist populist Cherokee Lizzie's policy book.
(Ron Paul). Elizabeth Warren is known for her socialist views, but she may not be a true liberal.
What’s your definition of “liberal”? http://bit.ly/1Aitk5w
Ron Paul is spot on. The term "liberal" has been co-opted by Cherokee Lizzie and her fellow economically illiterate leftist authoritarians, each of them trying to blame capitalism for the perverse vicious circle of paternalistic government failure, corruption and incompetence. Liberty is the antithesis of the economic fascism of FDR, LBJ, and the modern "progressives"; it means being free of the incompetent ruling class of "progressive" political whores; the free markets are the true democracy of voluntary transactions and transparency. Ron Paul, Rand, Amash, myself and others are "classical liberals"; we are conservative in the sense of the liberal tradition, like the Old Right in the New Deal era; we reject the tyranny of the majority, those who support intervening in the economy or foreign affairs. Faux liberals like Cherokee Lizzie decide what liberties you'll be able to exercise in the legal-plundering, redistributive State.
(Cato Institute). "The 114th Congress should pick where the president left off and move to fully end the trade embargo and lift the travel ban on Cuba."
Unfortunately, Obama waited until his lame-duck status before initiating it. I concur with Cato Institute: it's long overdue normalizing relations, lifting the embargo and travel bans. The latter are easier said than done.
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Steve Kelley via Townhall |
David Foster featuring Andrea Bocelli, "Angels We Have Heard on High". Oh my God, when he trips the scales during the chorus before the choir cut-in, and his subsequent English close is pure vocal artistic magic....
