One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief
that one's work is terribly important.
Bertrand Russell
Presidential Fact of the Day
It's no surprise why the American people gave President Coolidge 54% of their votes on November 4, 1924! By the end of his presidency Coolidge shrank the Federal Budget from $5.1 billion in 1921 to $3.3 billion in 1929. He lowered the national debt from $22.3 billion in 1923 to $16.9 billion in 1929, and, because of his tax policies, by 1927 98 percent of the population paid no income tax. That's a record to be proud of! - Calvin Coolidge Foundation.Chart of the Day: Oil Prices vs. US Shale, Exporter Breakeven
As most consumers know, oil prices have slumped to around $80/barrel, in part to a glut due to a sluggish global economy, increased non-OPEC (e.g., US/Canada) output, and recent OPEC increased production, particularly from Saudi Arabia. In part, Saudi Arabia is sending OPEC members a message, it's not happy with Russia, which is another major producer, and it's pressuring higher-cost North American unconventional shale oil/tar sands production.
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| Via Benzinga |
Choose Life
Facebook Corner
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| Via National Review |
There are some "progressive" trolls raising a false issue about majoritarians deciding minority rights. "Gay marriage" is not a right; as a never-married straight bachelor, I don't have the "right" to marry anyone who does not freely consent. What's truly anti-libertarian is for someone to argue that gay relationships should be regulated by the State. Most pro-liberty people acknowledge the right of association; that's different from the State.conferring a special recognition of that relationship. If individual states want to confer that status, let states compete to attract gay couples.
Another pet peeve disingenuous comparison to anti-miscegenation laws: racial characteristics are incidental to the core procreative function of marriage.
(Reason). "When will Democrats—who so vociferously opposed a Republican president’s extraconstitutional war-making powers—stand up and oppose President Obama’s unconstitutional usurpation of war-making powers?" -Rand Paul
I scanned to see if any other commenters made a salient distinction; I didn't see anyone make it. Rand Paul is disintinguishing between illegal vs. ill-considered war on ISIS. In fact, Rand Paul in a recent foreign policy speech reinforced his support for engaging in military action against ISIS, which Ron Paul, myself and other non-interventionists oppose. Rand is simply referencing Obama's lawless opinion that his position fully enables the actions he's taken on ISIS and drone activity; it would be "nice" if Congress rubber-stamped what he's doing, but he doesn't need it. Rand is rightly indignant that this former lecturer on Constitutional law is ignoring the salient role Congress serves in declaring war.
The bigger issue for Rand is whether he favors meddling in other global hotspots that are none of our business or wants to stop wasting American blood and treasure in a morally hazardous fashion.
Further evidence that there's no difference between republicans and democrats.
He's a simple-minded LP troll repeating the same old bullshit. Never mind Ron Paul, Barr, and Gary Johnson were Republicans. When's the last time you heard a Democrat over the past century espouse free markets and free trade?
What the hell is a "Libertarian Republican"? He is a Republican and will always cave in the end to the Republican Party. PLEASE STOP CALLING HIM A LIBERTARIAN!
Think Amash, Massey, both Pauls, myself and others; some of us are fusion libertarian-conservatives. Libertarians also differ on liberty issues, like abortion and open borders.
(Reason). President Barack Obama has announced that the Internet should be regulated as a public utility.
The cable companies wanted to create tiers -- say the more money Fox News paid them, the faster, the better and greater download speed they would get.. And NPR not having the money would mean their speed, their service would be at the bottom-- You the customer would want to go to sites that worked faster--- thus creating a disadvantage for providing something so simple as news... News that is vastly corporate in nature doesn't need that type of boost.
"The airline companies created first-class/business class tiers to make money." Yeah, of course, you pay more to get premium service. Express Mail costs more than first class. It costs more to attend Harvard than your local community college. It's a key concept of capitalism. The point is, where are you going to get the funding to justify expanding bandwidth? Should low-resource users or carriers have to subsidize resource hogs? Netflix dwarfs other Web traffic; why do you think they're pushing "net neutrality"? The fact is the reason that the Internet has provided a vast supply of content and services is because we haven't had pushing-on-a-string Statist regulators/censors. We can access the Internet by cable, wireless, satellite, wires, etc. The free market works; if an ISP doesn't deliver desired content, there are other ISP's or potential competitors. What we know doesn't work: government regulation. They've been regulating banks for over two centuries and look how well that's worked out.
Preventing "pay for play", anti-competitive collusion and monopolistic practices? Sounds good to me. Not all regulation is bad regulation, Reason Magazine.
Economically illiterate trolls buying into the Statist bullshit concept of "net neutrality" are beyond naive useful idiots for crony content providers. The goddamn Statists had nothing to do with the commercial success of the Internet, and they're looking to easily duped morons to buy into their cover story in a power grab. I would rather trust Comcast than the partisan FCC bastards.
More Proposals
Political Cartoon
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| Courtesy of Gary Varvel via Townhall |
Linda Ronstadt & Aaron Neville, "When Something Is Wrong With My Baby". This marks the end of my Ronstadt series. With my next post, we'll transition to Glen Campbell.
