Dennis Kucinich Urges Conversation about Impeachment

Watch this and reflect on the actions of the current POTUS and his demagoguery about Iran.

While this video is meant to tear down Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama would do well to reflect on what "V" said:

"And where once you had the freedom to object, to think and speak as you saw fit, you now have censors and systems of surveillance coercing your conformity and soliciting your submission. How did this happen? Who's to blame? Well certainly there are those more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror."

A timeless commentary on the nature of government and the collective.

If you can't afford a $44 ticket to go to the stage version of 1984, there are plenty of very affordable book and DVD versions available at amazon.com.

Whether you consider yourself a Republican, Libertarian or Democrat (or something else) the amazing influence of George Orwell on society cannot be denied. A stage performance of his story "1984" will be appearing in Scottsdale on Friday and Saturday (March 24th and 25th) at 8:00 PM. $44.00 per ticket.

I am all in favor of a pinch of salt. That is why I follow with interest the skeptic crowd which from my vantage point is headed by Penn Jillette. Mr. Jillette endorses James Randi and has had him on the Penn Radio show several times.

It is a sad day however when BoingBoing.net reports that James Randi claims that 36 homeopathic sleeping pills is a fatal dose. I would be hard pressed to find a reference *anywhere* that alleges that there is any dose of homeopathic medicine that will cause a negative side effect such as that claimed by Mr. Randi.

I would have no complaint if James Randi claimed that homeopathic medicine is ineffective (he is welcome to his considered opinion, one I happen to disagree with) but his current claim about homeopathic medicine is preposterous. If one takes webmd.com as a reasonably orthodox baseline, its article at most quotes medical figures and journals stating that homeopathic medicine is ineffective, not deadly.

Fix or scrap. In politics that is a question often posed and government will nearly always choose fix, euphimistically called "reform". Such is the case when it comes the the Arizona Clean Election system which the Arizona House of Representatives just voted to reform. 57 yes'es, 0 no's, 3 not voting. Sad-sad-sad.

A note to freshen up the references to Senator Jon Kyl - at least I haven't seen anyone claim that Mr. Kyl is "most likely to blow up the world" (that award goes to Arizona Senator John McCain). How old will John McCain be come election day 2008? Answer: 72 years old. Older than Ronald "I cannot recall" Reagan who was 69 years old upon becoming president.

There is something indescribable to be learned from Sarah Silverman.

Iraq:The hidden story. From UK station Channel 4 dated May 12th, 2006, 48 minutes.

Over at aznetroots.com the simmering hate of current day liberals boils over even as government regulation rachets up one more notch. Luckily you can demonstate the reason why government minimum wage laws hurt people in just one picture.

At least one person at Hot AZ It Gets thinks we should be sympathetic to the continued efforts of the Arizona legislature to get a pay increase. As if getting paid $24,000 a year plus $35 dollars a day they are in session isn't fair. For a job where they are only required to work 120 days of the year (compared to a working man's 260 days) I think that is fine and plenty fair. If they really addressed all the issues they wouldn't be called for special sessions and the populace could breathe easier knowing that the legislature and executive departments weren't concocting some new way to regulate Arizonans in a new and different way.

From Gabriel Gifford's Cactus Roots Connection, Vol. 22 we learn that the Democrats still haven't learned that government minumum wage laws have negative effects:

Raising the Minimum Wage
Giffords also backed legislation boosting the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, the latest in a series of sweeping measures enacted by the 110th Congress. Giffords is a co-sponsor of the bipartisan minimum wage bill, the first pay raise for working Americans in a decade. Now $5.15 an hour, the minimum wage will go up $2.10 over two years and directly benefit an estimated 13 million workers and their families.

In Arizona, an estimated 148,000 workers will benefit from the hourly wage hike. Nearly 70 percent of those workers are at least 20 years old and almost 60 percent are women. "This pay raise is long overdue," said Giffords, the former president and chief executive officer of Tucson's El Campo Tire Inc. "Over the past ten years the minimum wage was stuck at $5.15 an hour, while members of Congress benefited from nearly $32,000 in pay increases. That is unacceptable."

And how many wokers won't benefit from this hike and will be fired or never hired in the first place? Shoot folks, if the minimum wage is so good why not immediately raise it to $9.00 a hour? The reason is that the negative effects would be too evident and the voting public would learn that Democrats can't be trusted (the Republicans can't either but that's an item for another day).

For some background:

According to a claim by the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, the passage of the first Federal mandated minimum wage in the United States in 1933 led to an estimated 500,000 blacks losing their jobs via replacement by higher skilled and more educated white laborers. Milton Friedman, 1976 Nobel Prize winner in Economics, called the minimum wage one of the most "anti-negro laws" for what he saw as its adverse affects on employers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage#_note-mack

I do not agree with liberal socialists and I do not agree with conservative socialists but I imagine everybody agrees that the vermin who create badware are to be despised and shunned. Visit www.stopbadware.org to learn more about this scourge and find out what Google, Lenovo, Sun Microsystems and a couple of non-profit groups are doing to turn back the tide.

Ron Paul Speech on the Patriot Act

Ron Paul talks about the Patriot Act and how the government eventually catches up to what the people want. Recorded August 31st, 2006.

It is good to see that there is at least one Democrat pointing out those electected democrats who aren't smart enough to figure out that some people who voted for Democrats wanted less war and not more.

The Libertarian Alternative - Bureaucrash on making capitalism cool

I enjoyed watching Heather Talley of Bureaucrash.com and host Mark Selzer talk about making capitalism cool.

Catastrophic events notwithstanding, it looks like Arizona will have to cope with Republican Senator Jon Kyl for six more years. I still can't believe the majority of voters swallowed his "Time magazine says I am one of the 10 best Senators". That probably is true, unfortunately for the average citizen the 10 best US Senators are drunk on power and indifferent to the suffering of others. Add that to the existing Republican predeliction to assume that there is no real rush to get out of Iraq and it will likely at least a year before President Bush will feel like declaring victory so that GI Joe and GI Jane can be stationed where they can protect americans and not the corporate welfare queens, Halliburton and a dozen other companies.

Deadpan satire is such a sharp knife.

It has been a very long time since I read The Lord of The Rings but I remember being captivated by the story Mr. Tolkien told. Reading articles about it are a continuing source of intellectual enjoyment. William Lopascio's recounting of his thoughts on TLOTR is a inspiring story.

Being a libertarian and not being desirous of regulating more jobs out of existence in the US I oppose (Arizona) proposition 202. In case you think that people earning minimum wage are looking forward to increased government regulation of private enterprise, take a look at comment #1 on this post.