I just put myself through the torture of watching J. Edgar and I now hate that man even more than I did before, if that’s humanly possible.

Another thing that caught my attention is a liberty they took at the beginning of the film.  They referred to the attacks as “Bolshevik Communist” bombings, which is a half truth and almost an outright lie, as they were Anarchist bombings carried out by Galleanist Anarchists…which was an Anarcho-Communism group operating in America beginning circa 1914.  Today, would be mostly likely be categorized as a Libertarian Socialism group.

evilteabagger:

I don’t get it. I can walk into CVS right now and buy a pack of condoms or plan B no questions asked. When did contraception become an issue in the first place?

The stated purpose of health care reform was to address the problem of uninsured patients who either face bankruptcy due to exorbitant bills, or rely on the free emergency care hospitals must provide. But the Affordable Health Care Act (ACA) does far more than require Americans to be insured for catastrophic illness and other major medical expenses. To be approved under the ACA, an insurance policy must include extensive coverage for routine care.

In a sense, medical insurance is meant to mitigate life’s unfair and arbitrary tragedies: Some people are plagued by chronic illness or struck by a devastating health crisis, and need costly care to prevent death or disability. Fertility, however, is a normal part of life and a healthy function of the human body. Contraception is arguably an essential personal need for many, especially women; to call it an essential medical need is a stretch, except where pregnancy would pose a grave health risk.

I think it’s really greedy to say that everyone else owes you contraception. Where the heck did this idea come from?

“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.” — Mark Twain

If you want to get at the real reason for the financial meltdown of 2008, you need look no further than Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (you can also thank Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton for the Community Reinvestment Act).  I hope he burns the place down before he leaves.

The Declaration of Independence

Our country’s leaders would do well to read and remember this document…

By CALVIN WOODWARD and TOM RAUM 

Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama’s promise Thursday that everything in his jobs plan will be paid for rests on highly iffy propositions.

It will only be paid for if a committee he can’t control does his bidding, if Congress puts that into law and if leaders in the future - the ones who will feel the fiscal pinch of his proposals - don’t roll it back.

A look at some of Obama’s claims and how they compare with the facts:

Click for further reading.

“In fact, this larger notion that the only thing we can do to restore prosperity is just dismantle government, refund everyone’s money, let everyone write their own rules, and tell everyone they’re on their own — that’s not who we are,”

-Barack Obama

This quote offends my Libertarian ideals in so many different ways.  I was brought up to be self reliant and I was taught that if there’s something you want, you have to go out there and get it…nobody’s going to give it to you.  This though, is the statement of a typical Statist; what he’s really saying here is don’t depend on yourselves, depend on the government.  ”Just put your faith in us and everything will be okay.”  Sounds a bit like a snake oil salesman to me.  What he fails to mention is that entitlements, big government and their abuses of power have landed us in this mess, the best thing they can do to get us out of it is to just get out of the way.

Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.  So on and so forth.

simonf:alltheflowersshonelikeflames:

An Italian radio program’s story about Iceland’s on-going revolution is a stunning example of how little our media tells us about the rest of the world. Americans may remember that at the start of the 2008 financial crisis, Iceland literally went bankrupt.  The reasons were mentioned only in passing, and since then, this little-known member of the European Union fell back into oblivion.

As one European country after another fails or risks failing, imperiling the Euro, with repercussions for the entire world, the last thing the powers that be want is for Iceland to become an example. Here’s why:

Five years of a pure neo-liberal regime had made Iceland, (population 320 thousand, no army), one of the richest countries in the world. In 2003 all the country’s banks were privatized, and in an effort to attract foreign investors, they offered on-line banking whose minimal costs allowed them to offer relatively high rates of return. The accounts, called IceSave, attracted many English and Dutch small investors.  But as investments grew, so did the banks’ foreign debt.  In 2003 Iceland’s debt was equal to 200 times its GNP, but in 2007, it was 900 percent.  The 2008 world financial crisis was the coup de grace. The three main Icelandic banks, Landbanki, Kapthing and Glitnir, went belly up and were nationalized, while the Kroner lost 85% of its value with respect to the Euro.  At the end of the year Iceland declared bankruptcy…

What happened next was extraordinary. The belief that citizens had to pay for the mistakes of a financial monopoly, that an entire nation must be taxed to pay off private debts was shattered, transforming the relationship between citizens and their political institutions and eventually driving Iceland’s leaders to the side of their constituents. The Head of State, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, refused to ratify the law that would have made Iceland’s citizens responsible for its bankers’ debts, and accepted calls for a referendum.

Of course the international community only increased the pressure on Iceland. Great Britain and Holland threatened dire reprisals that would isolate the country…

In the March 2010 referendum, 93% voted against repayment of the debt.  The IMF immediately froze its loan.  But the revolution (though not televised in the United States), would not be intimidated. With the support of a furious citizenry, the government launched civil and penal investigations into those responsible for the financial crisis. Interpol put out an international arrest warrant for the ex-president of Kaupthing, Sigurdur Einarsson, as the other bankers implicated in the crash fled the country.

But Icelanders didn’t stop there: they decided to draft a new constitution that would free the country from the exaggerated power of international finance and virtual money.

To write the new constitution, the people of Iceland elected twenty-five citizens from among 522 adults not belonging to any political party but recommended by at least thirty citizens. This document was not the work of a handful of politicians, but was written on the internet.

Refusing to bow to foreign interests, that small country stated loud and clear that the people are sovereign.

That’s why it is not in the news anymore.

Read Whole

(via isay)

What is this country’s main problem? Too many politicians…our elected government needs less lawyers and more business men, scientists, and engineers.

Is this guy serious??

And one more thing, if you think there are actually differences between Democrats and Republicans, then you’ve been fooled. They’re all Statists; they both just want power and control, over you and your life.  The system and government that we have in place today is at odds with everything I believe in.  Just take a look below at the definition of statism and you’ll find there’s no denying it.

Statism (or etatism) is a scholarly term in political philosophy either emphasising the role of the state in analysing political change; or, in describing political movements which support the use of the state to achieve goals.

When used to describe analyses, statism refers to analyses that use a dichotomy between state and society, with the state viewed as a homogeneous institution capable of using political power to enact policy on a passive or resisting society composed of the body of people. Such an analysis, dependent on the elitist theory of power, is contested by those who prefer the pluralist theory of power which contends that power is exercised by individuals and competing organisations within society.

Economic statism (dirigisme), for instance, promotes the view that the state has a major and legitimate role in directing the economy, either directly through state-owned enterprises and other types of machinery of government, or indirectly through economic planning. It may refer to the ideology of statism that holds that:

Sovereignty is vested not in the people but in the national state, and that all individuals and associations exist only to enhance the power, the prestige, and the well-being of the state. The concept of statism, which is seen as synonymous with the concept of nation, and corporatism repudiates individualism and exalts the nation as an organic body headed by the Supreme Leader and nurtured by unity, force, and discipline.

The term statism is sometimes used to refer to state capitalism or highly-regulated market economies with large amounts of government intervention. It is also used to refer to state socialism or co-operative economic systems that use the state, through nationalization, as a means of running industry.