“Transparency and the rule of law will be the touchstones of this Presidency”

— Barack Obama

11:48 pm  •  15 May 2013  •  49 notes

“In a few short weeks, [the Obama administration has] managed to show that when [government] wants to do “good” things, [its] managerial competence falls somewhere between David Brent and a cat chasing a laser pointer. But when government wants to flex its more malevolent muscles, [it’s] fucking Iron Man!”

— Jon Stewart (via laliberty)

(via anarchovelocirachel)

10:48 am  •  15 May 2013  •  194 notes

“But until this week and word of the Justice Department’s move against the AP, journalists lived under a false sense of security and entitlement. In their fantasy land, journalists were specially protected by the First Amendment. And no wonder: The Justice Department actually has a form to fill out when a government lawyer intends to subpoena a journalist’s records. The Attorney General has to sign off on it, as if that signals some sort of special protection for media. The directive requires a multi-part test before any such subpoena will be granted…
But two months and 20 phone lines is hardly narrow and minimally invasive. The AP says it wasn’t notified of the Justice Department’s intrusion, and so couldn’t have sought judicial intervention.
The fact that the Justice Department is governed by such guidelines and secretly collected the AP’s phone records anyway reminds me of the fact that North Korea’s government has a statute on the books promising a free press. (See Article 53.) But guidelines aren’t laws — the Justice Department’s guidelines, like North Korea’s free-press law, proved worthless as soon as they proved untidy.
Attorney General Holder is citing national security as an excuse for this intrusion — the catch-all concern that governments, including the U.S. government, have used to restrain press freedom for centuries.”

— Al Tompkins, “Why the Justice Department ‘better have a damned good explanation’ for seizing AP phone records’,” Poynter. (via asuperfluousman)

10:06 am  •  15 May 2013  •  19 notes

“For example, one big reason that our rates are skyrocketing is that it is becoming illegal for CareFirst and all other health insurance companies to deny someone with a preexisting condition. What insurance provider in their right mind would cover someone new who say, just contracted flesh eating bacteria, for example? It’s the equivalent of a home insurance provider accepting a new customer whose house was already burning down. People can now pay a small fine/tax, and not get insurance until they get a major health problem and then the insurance provider has to accept them at the same rate that everyone else is paying. This is just plain stupid; it violates the entire point of insurance and will result in people gaming the system.”

—

A Small Business Owner Explains the Hard Facts of Obamacare to Employees

It’s long but worth the read.

9:35 am  •  15 May 2013  •  19 notes

“Whatever happened to “Hey, I have some apples, would you like to buy them?” “Yes, thank you!” That’s as complicated as it should be to open a business in this country.”

— Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation (via nbcparksandrec)

(Source: whymanwhy, via hipsterlibertarian)

5:48 pm  •  11 May 2013  •  588 notes

“Wilson feels that government harassment is a sign he is doing something good for society by challenging outdated regulatory practices. ‘The blueprints have already moved beyond the DefCad.com database, seeded several times on the file-sharing site Pirate Bay. It’s in the fabric of the Internet.’ Wilson predicted that they would come after his creation, but that they could not stop its proliferation. Now, only time will tell if he is correct.”

— U.S. Government shuts down 3D gun manufacturer

9:50 pm  •  9 May 2013  •  16 notes

“

Falsely assessing partial blame for the violence on a piece of artistic expression inflicted damage not just on the California resident who made it—Nakoula Basseley Nakoula is currently serving out a one-year sentence for parole violations committed in the process of producing Innocence—but also on the entire American culture of free speech. In the days and weeks after the attacks, academics and foreign policy thinkers fell over themselves dreaming up new ways to either disproportionately punish Nakoula or scale back the very notion of constitutionally protected expression.

Fourteen days after Ambassador Chris Stevens was murdered by Islamists, President Barack Obama stood up in front of the United Nations and declared that the “message” of a movie virtually no one will ever see “must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity,” that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” and that we all should “condemn incitement against Sufi Muslims, and Shiite pilgrims.”

It should give even Obama’s strongest supporters pause that the same administration so wary about characterizing Benghazi as a “terrorist attack” was simultaneously so eager to characterize an artistic provocation as a (potentially criminal) incitement.

”

—

Matt Welch - Benghazi Hall of Shame

I think it’s absolutely amazing how the Left lets Obama slide on so many things. He literally stood in front of the U.N. and lied his ass off to the whole world.

11:57 am  •  9 May 2013  •  15 notes

“No doubt the raising of a very exorbitant tax, as the raising as much in peace as in war, or the half or even the fifth of the wealth of the nation, would, as well as any other gross abuse of power, justify resistance in the people.”

— Adam Smith

2:50 pm  •  28 April 2013  •  5 notes

“The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.”

— Henry Hazlitt - Economics in One Lesson

12:18 pm  •  7 April 2013  •  34 notes

“Now, over the next couple of months, we’ve got a couple of issues: gun control. (Applause.) I just came from Denver, where the issue of gun violence is something that has haunted families for way too long, and it is possible for us to create common-sense gun safety measures that respect the traditions of gun ownership in this country and hunters and sportsmen, but also make sure that we don’t have another 20 children in a classroom gunned down by a semiautomatic weapon — by a fully automatic weapon in that case, sadly.”

—

President Obama blatantly lying about the facts of the Sandy Hook elementary shooting to a crowd at a DCCC fundraiser.

For those of you who are still unclear as to the difference between full-auto and semi-auto firearms, watch this video.

8:32 am  •  5 April 2013  •  12 notes

“When you print money, the money does not flow evenly into the economic system. It stays essentially in the financial service industry and among people that have access to these funds, mostly well-to-do people. It does not go to the worker. I just mentioned that it doesn’t flow evenly into the system.

Now from time to time it will lift the NASDAQ like between 1997 and March 2000. Then it lifted home prices in the U.S. until 2007. Then it lifted the commodity prices in 2008 until July 2008 when the global economy was already in recession. More recently it has lifted selected emerging economies, stock markets in Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, up four times from 2009 lows and now the U.S.

So we are creating bubbles and bubbles and bubbles. This bubble will come to an end. My concern is that we are going to have a systemic crisis where it is going to be very difficult to hide. Even in gold, it will be difficult to hide.”

— Marc Faber AKA Dr. Doom

9:30 am  •  28 March 2013  •  32 notes

“At this point, we’re not seeing a major risk to the U.S. financial system or the U.S. economy.”

— Ben Bernanke

7:08 pm  •  20 March 2013  •  20 notes

“If Mr. Paul wants to be taken seriously he needs to do more than pull political stunts that fire up impressionable libertarian kids…I don’t think what happened yesterday is helpful to the American people.”

— Senator John McCain on the floor of the Senate just now.

12:19 pm  •  7 March 2013  •  12 notes

“I’d like to break Strom’s record, but I have discovered there are limits to filibustering, and I have to go take care of one of those”

— Senator Rand Paul who officially yielded the floor at 12:39 AM est

12:43 am  •  7 March 2013  •  118 notes

11:21 pm  •  6 March 2013  •  120 notes