Thoughts, essays, and writings on Liberty. Written by the heirs of Patrick Henry.

July 13, 2010

This Is Your Government

As our readers can no doubt see, things have moved to a snail’s pace here. I’m not sure I expect that to change soon [at least for me]. However, I came across this post at TJIC, referencing a post at Coyote Blog, that is an absolute must read. This is a government that is arbitrary, [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 1:09 pm || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Government Ethics,Government Incompetence,Government Transparency,Government Waste,Look About
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May 13, 2010

Prosecutors Ask If Congress Duped CBO To Obtain Favorable Score

Okay, that’s not true. But it’s no different than this: Prosecutors Ask if 8 Banks Duped Rating Agencies Wall Street played a crucial role in the mortgage market’s path to collapse. Investment banks bundled mortgage loans into securities and then often rebundled those securities one or two more times. Those securities were given high ratings [...]

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March 25, 2010

Bureaucratic Environmental Protection Agency

The proprietor of Coyote Blog is an entrepreneur specializing in operating camping & recreation facilities. Recently he’s been moving from big pick-up trucks to much smaller, more fuel-efficient, cheaper used Japanese trucks. That is, until the EPA barred their import: These are trucks that are from an emissions regime (in Japan) harsher than ours and [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 12:21 pm || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Environment,Government Incompetence,Government Regulation,Government Transparency
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March 19, 2010

Quote Of The Day

From the LA Times, a story about the LA City Council. Electronic auto-voting allows council members to avoid actually attending council meetings, much to the chagrin of voters: Still, their physical absence frequently infuriates members of the public who show up to testify only to find themselves addressing one or more empty chairs. Advertisement “We [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 6:22 am || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Government Ethics,Government Transparency,Quote of the Day
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March 5, 2010

Quote Of The Day

The state of Washington is currently in process on a bill that will impound any car for 12 hours where the driver is arrested on suspicion of DUI. This will be automatic — whether the car is owned by an innocent third party, or whether someone else in the vehicle can legally drive does not [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 9:02 am || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Crime and Punishment,Government Regulation,Government Transparency,Legal,Police Watch,Politics
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February 17, 2010

Innocence Commission Exonerates Greg Taylor After Serving 16 Years of Life Sentence

North Carolina has at least one criminal justice reform that all states ought to adopt: an innocence commission (particularly for states which currently have a death penalty). So far, North Carolina is the only state which has such a commission. Greg Taylor, convicted of 1st degree murder of prostitute Jacquetta Thomas in 1993, was the [...]

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January 13, 2010

Reporting On Stimulus Jobs Becomes Even Less Useful

I suspect we’ll see a corresponding shift in the rhetoric. Instead of Obama saying the stimulus “created or saved X million jobs”, he’ll say the stimulus “put X million Americans to work.” Either way, it’s still a joke: When the White House unveiled its nearly $800 billion stimulus package last year, it promised not only [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 1:21 pm || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Fiscal Policy,Government Incompetence,Government Transparency,Government Waste
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January 7, 2010

Would C-SPAN Make The Healthcare Bill “Worse”? Define Worse.

I’ll blockquote Peter Suderman over at Reason blockquoting the CAP’s “wonk room” blog on this one: The short version of the argument is that C-SPAN’s coverage would put pressure on legislators to perform for the cameras and thus make the bill worse: C-SPAN is grounded in the belief that transparency produces superior legislation. And maybe [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 12:11 pm || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Government Ethics,Government Incompetence,Government Transparency,Healthcare,Politics,The Welfare State
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December 12, 2009

Earmark And Healthcare Wars: Ron Paul vs Jeff Flake

A recent article in the Washington Examiner by John Labeaume details the differing approaches to earmarks that two of most libertarian members of Congress have. This difference came out in a vote on an amendment that Flake wrote to H.R. 3791 which was the Fire Grants Reauthorization Act of 2009. The Flake amendment would ban [...]

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December 9, 2009

Automakers Steal $30B From Obama’s Jobs Program

Now it’s the automakers. Too bad nobody predicted that throwing money into these fine well-run American corporations could have been a bad deal! The Obama administration will tell Congress Wednesday that it expects to lose about $30 billion of the $82 billion government bailout of the auto industry. Gene Sperling, senior counsel to Treasury Secretary [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 8:49 am || Permalink || Comments Off || TrackBack URI || Categories: Government Incompetence,Government Transparency,Government Waste
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October 6, 2009

Babs Boxer Will Do Anything For Re-Election: Even Cosponsor S.604!

Back in July, I sent letters to Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein urging them to support or even cosponsor S.604, the Audit-The-Fed bill. I received the typical mealy-mouthed responses (posted below after the fold), and like a bad blogger I never actually mentioned the responses here. How mealy-mouthed was Boxer’s response? Well, THIS was the [...]

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Transparency No Longer* In Vogue in Democrat Controlled Congress

Gosh, it doesn’t seem like all that long ago the American public was promised hope, change, and a more open, transparent, ethical federal government if we only elected Obama the next President of the United States. Before that, in 2006 Pelosi and Co. made many of the same promises. Now the Democrats have the House, [...]

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Results Not Typical

The Federal Trade Commission has taken a solid step towards regulation of bloggers, first by declaring that any “in-kind” contribution for a product review must be considered an official endorsement and requires disclosure. Despite the fact that I — of my own volition — did so on the one occasion I was actually given something [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 10:02 am || Permalink || Comments (4) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Government Regulation,Government Transparency,Taxation
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September 29, 2009

PATRIOT Act – Much Ado About Drugs, Not About Terrorism

The PATRIOT Act was sold to the country as the line in the sand protecting us from the murderous hordes of Islamist terrorists. Passed in a hurry following 9/11, they told us that these powers were needed for terrorism only, and not for general law-enforcement. Civil libertarians didn’t believe this assertion, of course, and as [...]

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September 28, 2009

Why You Should Support Auditing The Fed

The Fed is tasked with the dual goals of price stability and restraining inflation. Folks like myself would suggest it hasn’t done a very good job of either, but that’s not crucial to the question of whether we should be able to determine how they’re attempting to fulfill their mission. Particularly irksome when we’re talking [...]

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September 24, 2009

HHS Blocks Misleading Insurance Company Propoganda! [It Just Happens To Be True]

The Department of Health and Human Services isn’t pleased. You see, Humana has sent out a mailer (PDF) claiming that under the proposed health care legislation, Medicare Advantage benefits might be cut. HHS thinks this might be misleading, partly because Max Baucus (D-MT) says it won’t cut benefits and because they suggest it can be [...]

Posted By: Brad Warbiany @ 3:17 am || Permalink || Comments (1) || TrackBack URI || Categories: Free Speech,Government Regulation,Government Transparency,Healthcare
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September 23, 2009

The NEA Con-Call; There’s Not Much “There” There

On August 10th, a conference call occurred, including folks from the White House, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the arts community. The purpose of the call was to “rally the troops” of artists who had spent time working for the Obama campaign, enlisting their help to push national service initiatives. The revelation of [...]

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September 12, 2009

Obama Raises Taxes Without Vote of Congress

“I can make a firm pledge….no family making less than $250,000 will see any form of tax increase…..not any of your taxes”-Barack Obama, September 12, 2008 Once again, President Obama has lied to the country. After raising cigarette taxes earlier this year, Obama just ordered another tax increase. This time, he raised every American’s taxes [...]

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August 31, 2009

UAW = Unions Accepting Welfare

Hmm, I guess we can see once again that our Congress is not in any way trying to manage our car companies (and their unions) for political gain: The latest example is the $10 billion taxpayers will be asked to shell out to prop up the United Auto Workers’ retiree health insurance program. That provision [...]

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August 17, 2009

The Nuance Of Medical Marijuana Raids In California

One of Obama’s campaign promises was to stop federal raids on medical marijuana dispensaries which were allowed by state law. Many pundits (myself included) have been lambasting him for not living up to that promise based upon stories like these: Police raids on medical marijuana dispensaries continue–and continue with federal help, despite an Obama promise [...]

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