Skip

Here in the land of “Live Free or Die”, we still have this Liberty that others have been denied:

The federal seat-belt-law mandate was the result of a 1980s deal between Reagan-era Transportation secretary Elizabeth Dole (proof, long before Mayor Bloomberg, that nanny-state tendencies transcend partisan labels) and Detroit automakers, who calculated that regulating their customers would help stave off regulating their own design decisions. And now?

Yep, a Big Govt politician turned bureaucrat conspired with Big Biz cronies to get a result THEY wanted – via regulation.  Not by our elected leaders.  So far, NH has said “screw you” and resisted the siren call to make it mandatory for adults to click in when car traveling.  That’s even after the Feds offered the State “free money” to help out with the budget with the strings attached that it had to force its residents to wear seatbelts – if I remember right, the bribe to do it the Feds’ way was about $3.65 / person.  Cheap, eh, the offer to strip that decision from adults to protect themselves or not?

Read more

A former CIA officer serving jail time for leaking documents to the New York Times accused federal officials of setting a double standard by apparently refusing to aggressively prosecute Hillary Clinton.

Clinton was “a high ranking official who should know better, but completely given a pass, and almost an apologetic pass,” Jeffrey Sterling, who was found guilty of leaking classified information to Times reporter James Risen last year, said in an interview with the Washington Post published on Monday.

“So how should us regular citizens feel, especially with heightened concerns about national security?”

The operative questions is if we have moved from equal under the law, to what have we moved to?  Are we now well within the “Animal Farm” age, where some are more equal than others, and that “additional equality” has everything to do with to whom you are connected than a connectedness to a statute?

Read more

…Looking around the country, we find huge gaps in major metropolitan areas’ economic fortunes — for every booming Dallas-Fort Worth, there’s a sclerotic Detroit.

Adam Smith’s principles, put forth more than two centuries ago, go a long way toward explaining why some areas do so much better than others. In “The Wealth of Nations,” the Scottish economist linked prosperity to a political economy of freedom, built upon private property, market incentives, free trade, specialization and a culture of commerce.

Sor of like how the US was founded – freedom, respect for private property, marketplace over government, and for that time, commerce was seen as a public good to be elevated.  Sadly, we see these virtues being cast negatives (re: the rise of two Socialists in running for President).  I’ve posted before the listing of countries and the direct correlation of their economic freedom and the resulting heightened living standards of their citizens.  Here we see that it doesn’t just hold at the country level (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Read more

From Cafe Hayek:  Is Administrative Law Unlawful?:

“Evidently, the lust for power outside the law is a recurring danger, and it is confined neither to monarchies nor to the past. Understanding this, Americans in their constitutions carefully repudiated power outside or above the law.  Their constitutions, however, could no longer hold off the danger when an increasingly dominant knowledge class abandoned its attachment to the straight and narrow paths of law in pursuit of broader avenues of extra- and supralegal power.

The result, as in the past, is an alternate, parallel system of law, which is not law, but mere command, and which increasingly crowds out real law.  Americans thus must live under a dual system of government, one part established by the Constitution, and another circumventing it.

….[E]xtralegal power again threatens the liberty demarcated by law.  Of course, administrative law is said to have statutory authority.  This, however, does not alter the fact that administrative law confines Americans, not through law, but outside it, thus displacing the liberty under law with a subjugation to administrative command.

The liberty established by the Constitution is a liberty under law, not a liberty under administrative fiat.  It is a complete freedom to do whatever is not forbidden by law, and any attempt to impose extralegal constraints is unconstitutional.

Read more

“America’s new elites, fancying themselves superior to the rural, the old, the religiously inclined and the rest, have increasingly turned politics into something that is done to people, for their own good, rather than by people according to their moral outlook. And then they wonder why people go looking for something else, something less sneering.”

As I keep saying, you have brought us upon yourselves.  If you had done your jobs right and without fancy pants airs, keeping a sense of servant leaders, you wouldn’t have the Trump or Bernie phenomena biting you in the butt.  We are a people slow to anger but once ticked off, uncontrollable.  After all, we are descended from brigands, outcasts, fortune seekers, those seeking liberty, and outsiders.  Summary?

Read more

I knew it wouldn’t last long before some squish Republican US Senator would start the wimping out – it is who they are.  They were elected to do ONE thing: stop Obama and the Progressive agenda for which he stands.  Any.Way.Necessary.and.Possible.  Full Stop.  You only have one job to do to keep this country moving closer to full socialism.  I say that for I doubt they can actually move that Overton Window back to the right – they could have they wanted to but they lack the political will.  Doubt me?

Breaking from his fellow Republicans, Illinois Sen. Mark Kirk on Monday urged his colleagues to approve the next nominee for Supreme Court justice.

Allowing an ideologically sympatico judge to be seated on the Supreme Court bench is part and parcel of that Full Stop.  Yes, the President has the Constitutional power and

Read more

Ayup, we’re seeing all KINDS of Democrats who, back in the day (like 2006, 2007), were against the President nominating someone for the Supreme Court.  Of course, it was a Republican President doing the nominating – like then US Senator Joe Biden:

Ayup, the message is clear: a sitting President should not nominate in the last year because: NEXT PRESIDENT! But boy, are the Democrats showing their hypocrisy big time.  And this is the problem – Consistency. And in this case, the lack there of.  Which proves one thing:

No Principles

Yes, in politics there is always going to be some amount of wiggle,

Read more

Obama is looting the Treasury to pay off insurers

The Obama administration will tell any lie and break any law to prevent the president’s signature health-care program from collapsing.  Insurance companies such as UnitedHealthcare and Aetna are losing billions trying to sell ObamaCare plans, and the risk is they’ll drop out at the end of 2016. No insurance companies means no ObamaCare.

In 2014, the White House tried to avert that disaster by promising insurers a taxpayer-funded bailout, but public outrage and quick action by Sen. Marco Rubio put a stop to it. Now the administration is at it again.  Desperate to keep insurers on board, the administration scrambled to find another pot of money. Unfortunately, once again, a big part of that money pot belongs to the public. [see Crony Capitalism  -Skip]

President Obama doesn’t seem to care. On Feb. 12, the administration announced that the money will be handed out to insurers — a whopping $7.7 billion this year alone. But it’s not just expensive: That huge handout to the insurance industry is also illegal.

Read more

“The late Justice Antonin Scalia will be remembered for his colorful comments from the bench, but court watchers say his true and lasting legacy will be the way he transformed the Supreme Court.  Scalia, 79, died while on a hunting trip in Texas and will be buried on Saturday after a funeral in Washington. His sudden passing has set off a flurry of remembrances, with friends and foes alike hailing his intellect and rigorous approach.

“Justice Scalia changed the terms of the debate, if you will,” said M. Miller Baker, a partner at international law firm McDermott Will & Emery in Washington.  “He made the Supreme Court a more rigorous place — more precisely, he required the court and litigants to focus on the actual meaning of the Constitution and the meaning of the statutes before the court.”

Read more

I’ll just say it loud: some people just don’t deserve free stuff.  After all, it’s worth every penny they paid for it seems to be their outlook.  How many of us know people that once having received something free, trash it?  Not everyone and some people are REALLY appreciative of what they have been given.  Those aren’t the people I’m talking about.

I watched a ton of kids in college just waste everything that was given to them for “free” – their parents paid and paid and they simply partied and partied and partied.  They left school haven blown 10s of thousands with nothing to show for it – betcha not even any memories given how wasted they were.  I know – I was the one that picked them up (or dragged – some of the guys were really big guoff the dorm floor and got them back into their rooms.

Free stuff given out by politicians is a seriously bad idea – no skin

Read more

Silly Season Phase One is now over. Just a few things off the top of my head from last night’s S. Carolina Republican primary and Nevada’s Democrat one:

• South Carolina: Dead Men Walking – Jeb Bush knew it and was both bright enough and Old School enough to know when the game is over.  John Kasich and Ben Carson are just Vanity Candidates now.  Politicians love the limelight and will do anything do stay in it – even if they know they are going to be made sport of.  Look, they can keep on going, even get media time but they aren’t going anywhere.  People to continue to donate to them might as well put the bills on the grill, shut the cover, and light it.

Read more