Gary Galles at the Ludwig von Mises institute posts these select quotes from the 1949 book Power in the People by Brookings Institution scholar Felix Morley.

And all I can say is amen to all of this--I really should save them all and make them Thoughts for the Day for the next month or so.

Maybe I will. But if you have ADD or are really bored, here they are, all in one bunch. (After the "read more" but well worth your time.)

Well, actually, he wants to go after Glenn Beck, Beck's producer/wingman Stu Burguiere, and of course Roger Ailes.

And no, this time I don't care to link to Daily Kos.

But something comes to my mind about stones and people living in glass houses . . .

A broken clock is right twice a day, I suppose. I'm sure the actual proposal will do just the opposite, but this Reuters story reports that President Obama might just have stumbled into a good idea:

Obama, in his weekly radio and Internet address, said the government would enact rules making it easier for small businesses to let workers automatically enroll in Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) and 401(k) retirement plans.

Of course, if individual accounts and investment plans are a good idea for retirement, why aren't they good ideas for the foundation of the long-term funding of individuals people's health care?

The Heritage Foundation:

Government expenditures are not free. Economists know this and most others recognize it when they take the time to think about it. Unfortunately, it seems not everybody takes that time.

In a story fit for satire in The Onion, a renewable energy research group, bankrolled by a $1.1 billion subsidy from the Department of Energy, concludes that huge government subsidies for renewable energy don’t reduce employment after all. However, their reasoning works only so long as the subsidies don’t come out of anybody’s pocket—a practical and theoretical impossibility.

Two environmentalists at the Alliance for Sustainable Energy, LLC (see ASE brag about the billion it gets from Uncle Sam, here ) on contract to the National Renewable Energy Labs authored a research paper that tries to undermine the widely circulated research from a Spanish think tank.

The Spanish research, directed by economist Gabriel Calzada, at King Juan Carlos University, analyzed the subsidized expenditure necessary to create the green jobs in Spain. It compared those funds to the private expenditure needed to support the average conventional job. Supported by other data as well, they conclude that each subsidized green job in Spain eliminated over two conventional jobs.

Emphasis mine. Hey, a two for one deal! Oh, wait, it's a one for two deal? Hmm. That's not quite gonna "save or create" a jillion jobs now, is it?

"Opportunity cost" is a really, really simple concept. It's what you can't buy when you spend money on something else. Spending wisely generally means minimizing the opportunity cost--meaning what you are spending money on is the "best and highest use" of the money you can find. Spending stupidly generally means that you are getting less for your money than the money would otherwise be worth.

Destroying two jobs to create one is a perfect example of spending money stupidly. We should not do this.

Unless your goal all along is to destroy Western industrial civilization. At some point, you have to wonder . . .

Van Jones resigns from his White House post.

In the middle of the night.

On a weekend.

On a holiday weekend.

What do we call this?

A good start.

Oh, and make no mistake. I am not being the slightest bit hyperbolic here. I am not exaggerating. Van Jones is a self-admitted communist. That he was in the White House at all should make any rational person wonder what the hell Barack Obama is doing up there.

THIS is precisely why all of the tea partiers and town hall attendees are so angry.

If you voted for Barack Obama, you voted to put a communist in the White House. How do you feel about that? How do you feel about someone who openly adopts and advocates the very same philosophy that bankrupted Russia--and killed millions of Russians in the state farms and gulags--being that close to the most powerful political position in the world?

Are you OK with it? Really?

New York Times:

In the very long term, the ability to artificially warm the climate, particularly the Arctic, could be seen as a boon as the planet’s shifting orientation to the Sun enters a phase that could initiate the next ice age.

Hmm. Do I detect a shift in the narrative? If the New York Times, generator of many of the memes of the left side of society, is starting to maybe kinda sorta say "well heck, maybe that global warming thing isn't so bad after all" then what the heck are we trying to do with "Cap and Trade?"

Save The Planet. Burn Coal.

Snookums and I went to the FreedomFest 2009 that had been advertised on KCMO 710 here in Kansas City. I went because, you know, I'm apparently a right-wing wacko. Snookums went because she's married to a right-wing wacko and it was a chance to sit outside in the sun for a few hours and read her book.

The Pig Guys

The pigs say: "That's All Folks," "American Capitalist Pig" (standing up) and "No Socialist Pigs" (belly-up). More follows--click "read more."

The "war on drugs."

The drug war has been a debacle both domestically and internationally. In the United States, it has overwhelmed our prisons (indeed, the entire criminal justice system) caused many urban neighborhoods to become combat zones, and eviscerated the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. In the drug-source countries of South America, it has created a bonanza of corruption and helped bring to power such populist demagogues as Bolivia’s Evo Morales. In Afghanistan, the counter-narcotics mission has alienated tens of thousands of Afghan opium farmers and, even worse, tribal leaders and other important political players — key U.S. allies who rely on the drug trade to fund their power bases. The war on drugs there, in short, has undermined our far more crucial mission to defeat al Qaeda.

And I say that as a person with no interest in any drug stronger than Jack Daniel's.

Reuters:

Researchers at Imperial College London have found evidence a chemical in broccoli and other green leafy vegetables could boost a natural defense mechanism that protects arteries from the clogging that can cause heart attacks.

I like broccoli. I'm weird that way.

That somebody has written this sentence in a long, detailed analysis of the U.S. government's financial mess:

But my guess is that, faced with the alternatives of seeing both the dollar and the debt become worthless or defaulting on the debt while saving the dollar, the U.S. government will choose the latter.

It can happen here. It will happen, if the Democrats don't sober up in a damn hurry and stop spending money like drunken Congresscritters. The Republicans aren't in this game--the voters quite effectively saw to that in the 2008 elections. It's the Democrats who are driving us all right off the financial cliff--quite frankly, the completion of a suicide trip that Hoover and FDR put us on after the Crash of 1929--including and especially FDR's New Deal. We're in the endgame now of the New Deal policies, and all the Democrats have to offer is more of the same disastrous policies that got us here in the first place.

It's the Democrats, and only the Democrats, who can stop it. If they don't, then not a single Democrat deserves to be re-elected in 2010.

The Republicans might have been bad fiscally towards the end of the Bush Administration. The Democrats have been worse, by a couple of orders of magnitude.