Paul M. Jones

Best thing I've seen yet regarding #Occupy* and the Tea Party.

Occupy Wall Street, at its core, is a reaction to the increasing power and influence of large corporations. The Tea Party, at its core, is a reaction to the government's constant interference with private enterprise. But wait a minute--aren't those things connected?

Bailouts, subsidies, tax breaks, special rights and privileges, regulations designed to restrict competition--to name a few of the many ways the government protects and stimulates corporate interests, and those things are every bit as anti-free market as, not to mention directly related to, the high taxes and excessive bureaucracy that gets Tea Partiers riled up.[3] In other words, aren't these two groups--Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party--raging against different halves of the same machine? Do I have to draw a Venn diagram here?

... [venn diagram here] ...

Yeah, I'm oversimplifying, but only a little. The greatest threat to our economy is neither corporations nor the government. The greatest threat to our economy is both of them working together. There are currently two sizable coalitions of angry citizens that are almost on the same page about that, and they're too busy insulting each other to notice.

My take? If the government doesn't have the power to grant favors, corporations can't use government for favors. Via How Conservatives Drove Me Away: Occupy Wall Street vs. The Tea Party.

President Obama authorized the deployment to Uganda of approximately 100 combat-equipped U.S. forces to help regional forces “remove from the battlefield” – meaning capture or kill – Lord’s Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony and senior leaders of the LRA.

The forces will ultimately go to Uganda, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with the permission of those countries.

World War 4, folks. If Bush did this, would we be happy? Via JammieWearingFool: Great News: Obama Deploys Troops to Uganda.

The [Occupy Wall Street] protesters are right about one thing: Washington has been coddling Wall Street. But they have missed the most important way that Wall Street lives off the rest of us. ...

There is a much more important, albeit quieter, favor Washington has been performing for Wall Street over the last 25 years: When large financial institutions get into trouble, policymakers make sure that their creditors receive 100 cents on the dollar [6].

The economist Milton Friedman liked to point out that capitalism is a profit-and-loss system. Profits encourage risk-taking. Losses encourage prudence, which is just as important. Over the last 25 years, however, government policy has been laissez-faire when it comes to profits, and socialist when it comes to creditor losses.

If the protesters want to fix the symbiosis between Wall Street and Washington, the first thing they need to do is recognize the disease. The disease is not too much capitalism but too little. If firms that fund bad investments by other firms lost all their money, they would either disappear or learn to be more prudent. Washington needs to be less involved with Wall Street, not more. We need less crony capitalism and more of the real thing. We need to demand of our politicians that they stop bailing out losers 100 cents on the dollar. If we keep subsidizing recklessness, we will keep getting more of it, and the rest of us will pay the price.

Emphasis mine. Read the whole thing. Via Occupy Wall Street and Washington's History of Financial Bailouts.

The Great Loon wrecked his country in the service of his twisted ambitions and an incoherent philosophy; he believed the flatterers and toadies who told him that he was wise.  His relations and his allies pillaged the country. He persecuted the innocent, oppressed the poor, slandered the just.

Sadly, he deserved the death he received -- just as Saddam Hussein deserved the humiliation and mockery of his last moments on earth.  Forty years of comfortable prison in the Hague would not have been just recompense for his crimes; for a man whose vanity and ambition turned a country into a concentration camp, death is a just sentence, however served.

I am glad he is gone, and I am glad that the United States shares in the honor of his fall.

World War 4, folks. Via Farewell To The Great Loon | Via Meadia.

President Obama says government will have to build the nation out of the economic trough.

"We're the country that built the intercontinental railroad," Obama says. "So how can we now sit back and let China build the best railroads?"

Ironic that he mentions the Chinese. Progressives used to complain that to build the railroad, bosses abused Chinese workers -- called them "coolies" and treated them badly. Now this is big success?

I guess Obama doesn't know that the Transcontinental Railroad was a Solyndra-like Big Government scandal. The railroad didn't make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent.

As we should expect, without market discipline -- profit and loss -- contractors ripped off the taxpayers. After all, if you get paid by the amount of track you lay, you'll lay more track than necessary.

Credit Mobilier, the first rail construction company, made enormous profits by overcharging for its work. To keep the subsidies flowing, it made big contributions to congressmen.

Where have we heard that recently?

The transcontinental railroad lost tons of money. The government never covered its costs, and most rail lines that used the tracks went bankrupt or continued to be subsidized by taxpayers.

The Union Pacific and Northern Pacific -- all those rail lines we learned about in history class -- milked the taxpayer and then went broke.

One line worked. The Great Northern never went bankrupt. It was the railroad that got no subsidies.

via Government is the biggest job killer | John Stossel | Columnists | Washington Examiner.

This morning the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued its opinion in Abdual Latif v. Obama. I can’t tell you what the court decided, or why, because the opinion is classified.

Secret law. Police state. Via The Volokh Conspiracy » You Can’t Read This Opinion.

I'm getting tired of people talking about the Fair Tax as if it was a value-added tax (e.g. here). It's not. It is a classic sales tax, just like your State sales tax. It is not levied at each part of the production process; it is levied once, at the point of sale, on the end consumer.

Did I mention that it's World War 4?

The United States accused Iran on Tuesday of backing a plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington, escalating tensions with Tehran and stirring up a hornet's nest in the Gulf, where Saudi Arabia and Iran have long jostled for power.

...

The assassination plot began to unfold in May 2011 when Arbabsiar approached an individual in Mexico to help, but that individual turned out to be an informant for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

The confidential source, who was a paid informant but not identified, immediately tipped law enforcement agents, according to the criminal complaint. Arbabsiar paid $100,000 to the informant in July and August for the plot, a down payment on the $1.5 million requested.

LIKE A "HOLLYWOOD MOVIE"

Shakuri approved the plan to kill the ambassador during telephone conversations with Arbabsiar, the complaint said.

As part of the plot, the informant talked to Arbabsiar about trying to kill the ambassador at a Washington, D.C. restaurant he frequented, but warned him that could lead to dozens of others being killed, including U.S. lawmakers.

The criminal complaint said that Arbabsiar responded "no problem" and "no big deal".

After Arbabsiar was arrested in New York, he allegedly confessed and provided U.S. authorities with more details about the Iranian government's alleged involvement, Holder said.

Court papers say in a monitored phone call Shakuri allegedly confirmed to Arbabsiar the plot should move forward as quickly as possible, stating "just do it quickly, it's late."

Mueller said in this case "individuals from one country sought to conspire with a drug trafficking cartel in another country to assassinate a foreign official on United States soil."

He added: "Though it reads like the pages of a Hollywood script, the impact would have been very real and many lives would have been lost," he said.

It defies excerpting; read the whole thing at Iranians charged in U.S. over assassination plot | Reuters.

Update: Is this a turning point for US "relations" with Iran?

When the revolution that eventually overthrew Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak began, I warned that the end result could easily be a government as bad or worse than Mubarak’s was. In a revolutionary situation, liberal democratic forces often get outmaneuvered by more ruthless and better-organized opponents -- even if majority public opinion would prefer a liberal regime. In Egypt, I pointed out, the establishment of a repressive regime is made more likely by the fact that public opinion is in may ways extremely illiberal. Unfortunately, this fear has so far been justified by events. As Thanassis Cambanis explains in the Atlantic, the new Egyptian government is well on its way to becoming a military dictatorship in some ways more repressive than Mubarak’s regime ...

via The Volokh Conspiracy » Egypt Sliding into Military Dictatorship.

Cleaned up from a comment at Heartiste. (The rest of the site is might not be safe for work, or your sunny outlook.)

1. Deconstruct the great books on university campuses

2. Tell men they need to man up

3. Dumb down the entire school system

4. Tell men they need to man up

5. [Screw over] men in divorce court

6. Tell men they need to man up

7. Send men to die on foreign shores in foreign neocon wars

8. Tell men they need to man up

9. Drug boys with ritalin/adderall for being boys

10. Tell men they need to man up

11. Encourage women to [have sex] early and often with douchebags

12. Tell men they need to man up

13. Destroy the classical, heroic character in their neocon movies, replacing them with […] gay cowboys

14. Tell men they need to man up

15. Print money from thin air and inflate and deflate bubbes to seize a man’s home and property

16. Tell men they need to man up

17. Encourage women to become fat, whiny bitches

18. Tell men they need to man up

19. Transofrm the church from an instititution where a man could once go to
    meet a virginal, exalted wife, into a front for the divorce industry, where
    single mothers with three children from three [different fathers] go to rope in a
    beta male to pay for [the other mens'] spawn

20. Tell men they need to man up

21. Castigate, attack, and impugn men for acting like men

22. Tell men they need to man up

23. Transform the noble, exalted university into a nursery, ruled by neocon
    women […] exiling and deconstructing the great books and men, and rewading
    the servile future nannies of the nanny state with fiat dollars delivered
    fresh from Ben Bernanke’s helicopter

24. Tell men they need to man up

25. Remove all men from the publishing industry, so that Priscilla Painton of
    Simon and Schuster […] can publish Tucker Max […] stories on how he
    [slept with] somone’s future wife who will [screw over] her future huspband in
    divorce court as revenge for having [had sex with] a neocon) and taped it
    secretly without her consent. Remove all men from the publishing
    industry and repalce deep, profound really great books for men with Twilight
    vampire […] female rape fantasy “romance” novels.

26. Tell men they need to man up

27. Conceive of a hundred government programs to criminalize men and force
    them to hand over their assets to women

28. Tell men they need to man up

29. Financially incentivize womem to file for divorce, promising them that
    their former husdband will have to pay for all their future [lovemaking]
    sessions, and that they get the kids/house/car/assets

30. Tell men they need to man up

31. Fill the law schools with fat, embittered, burned-out, nasty (in looks and
    spirit) […] lawyeresses, and replace Moses’ and Zeus’s law with Bernanke’s
    banker laws which exalts theft via the inflation tax.

32. Tell men they need to man up.