Muppets and Mittens: Is Romney Trying to Prove that He's Brain Dead?

In an interview with Fortune Magazine, Romney claims he's going to solve our budget problems by cutting funding for PBS, the National Endowment of the Arts and and Amtrak.

Mitt Romney: Slash Amtrak, PBS Funding, But Defense Cuts And Middle Class Tax Cuts Off The Table

The federal government is spending about $3.7 TRILLION a year on tax revenues of about $2.2 trillion. If you are going to be a serious budget cutter, you start with the big ticket items first because that's where you achieve the biggest payback.

Mitt's cuts:

PBS $444 million
National Endowment of the Arts $146 million
Amtrak subsidies $1.56 billion

Now I totally agree that subsidies to PBS and the National Endowment of the Arts should be abolished and I further believe that Amtrak should just be put on the auction block for sale.  But these items are small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

Romney the Big Governrment Statist, just can't bring himself to even suggest cutting big ticket items that are the real problem.  Ron Paul boldly outlined his plan to cut $1 trillion year one as president.

RON PAUL “PLAN TO RESTORE AMERICA”

SPENDING: Cuts $1 trillion in spending during the first year of Ron Paul’s presidency, eliminating five cabinet departments (Energy, HUD, Commerce, Interior, and Education), abolishing the Transportation Security Administration and returning responsibility for security to private property owners, abolishing corporate subsidies, stopping foreign aid, ending foreign wars, and returning most other spending to 2006 levels.

Ron Paul has an plan to dig us out of our fiscal nightmares. All Romney had to do was just partially or wholly steal Ron Paul's plan. But weasel wimp Mittens opted instead to expose his lack of testicular fortitude.

Not only is Romney pathetically weak when it comes to slashing spending, he turns mega big spender when it comes to massively increasing defense spending by trillions.

Mitt Romney Proposes $8 Trillion Welfare Program for Defense Contractors; Prepare for Two Wars if Romney Wins

Yo Mitt, if you've got a pair, time is running out to show them.  Wimp talk just won't cut in an election where Republicans are already behind in critical swing states.  

The Unaffordable Affordable Care Act

When the Democrats passed Obamacare, officially known as the Affordable Care Act, they were sufficiently astute to NOT implement most of this horror until after the 2012 election and for darn good reasons. Nobody can afford Obama's 'affordable' heath care.

Even the New York Times has chirped in on this issue.

Ambiguity in Health Law Could Make Family Coverage Too Costly for Many

The new health care law is known as the Affordable Care Act. But Democrats in Congress and advocates for low-income people say coverage may be unaffordable for millions of Americans because of a cramped reading of the law by the administration and by the Internal Revenue Service in particular....

Under the law, most Americans will be required to have health insurance starting in 2014. Low- and middle-income people can get tax credits and other subsidies to help pay their premiums, unless they have access to affordable coverage from an employer.

The law specifies that employer-sponsored insurance is not affordable if a worker’s share of the premium is more than 9.5 percent of the worker’s household income. The I.R.S. says this calculation should be based solely on the cost of individual coverage for the employee, what the worker would pay for “self-only coverage.”

Critics say the administration should also take account of the costs of covering a spouse and children because family coverage typically costs much more.

In 2011, according to an annual survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation, premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance averaged $5,430 a year for single coverage and $15,070 for family coverage. The employee’s share of the premium averaged $920 for individual coverage and more than four times as much, $4,130, for family coverage.

Under the I.R.S. proposal, such costs would be deemed affordable for a family making $35,000 a year, even though the family would have to spend 12 percent of its income for full coverage under the employer’s plan.

The debate over the meaning of affordable pits the Obama administration against its usual allies. Many people who support the new law said the proposed rules could leave millions of people in the lower middle class uninsured and frustrate the intent of Congress, which was to expand coverage.

The Democrats understand full well that they will take a hit and incur the wrath of its base when the reality surfaces that a low income working class family is forced to shell out 12% of its income  for government mandated 'affordable' health insurance.

Of course, the Democratic solution to the the world's most expensive healthcare system is to raise taxes and provide 'free' but very expensive healthcare.  However, the big problem with the US healthcare system is that it's unaffordable at any price.

America spends more on heathcare than any nation on the planet and by a wide margin.

U.S. healthcare costs the most but isn't the best: Report

Health Care Costs To Reach Nearly One-Fifth Of GDP By 2021

Clearly, the US healthcare system isn't working for us. It's hugely expensive, grossly inefficient, bureaucrat heavy and doesn't even deliver basic quality healthcare.

Such is the legacy of a nation that once proudly boasted of the world's finest healthcare system but that was long before the government got involved.

For more on the healthcare issue, see:

The Absurdity of US Healthcare and OMG, the Hysteria over SCOTUS upholding the Obamacare Tax! Under What Circumstances Would This Government Hating Libertarian Reluctantly Support a Single Payer Healthcare System?

The CIA is the Biggest Drug Dealer on the Planet

For most Americans, this may sound crazy but it's absolutely true and has been true for decades.

The U.S. Government Is the Biggest Drug Dealer in the World!

While the U.S. federal government has been waging a phony and hypocritical "war on drugs" as an easy way to increase repression in inner cities and confiscate millions of dollars in private assets through unconstitutional forfeiture laws in order to fund its burgeoning police state, it has also been an active participant in the illegal drug trade, using public resources to bring heroin and cocaine into American inner cities at least since the 1960's.

Sound like paranoia? In fact, this information has been confirmed by scholars and researchers throughout the past three decades. Any honest scholar that has researched the issue will tell you that this is the truth, but you will find very little information about it in the mainstream mass media. The most recent scandal involved the Central Intelligence Agency selling crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles in order to fund the U.S. covert war against the people of Nicaragua.

While the CIA's heavy involvement in the drug trade, and especially the crack cocaine trade, has been well documented by scholars such as Dr. Peter Dale Scott at least since the Iran-Contra hearings in the 1980s, the mass media are only now beginning to take notice. And even when they do take notice, most of the sheep-like journalists and anchorpeople continue to parrot the absurd government line in contradiction to the blatant facts, which are available to anyone who reads beyond the corporate summaries of government press releases. On NPR, for example, a reporter commented that since the story wasn't picked up by the New York Times, it must be false. Another reporter on FOX News said "there has been no direct evidence, repeat, no direct evidence, linking the CIA to the crack trade in South Central."

These people are either complete idiots or just flat out liars. The evidence is overwhelming and will convince anyone other than an utter fool.

Fast forward to Fast and Furious.  Not only was the US government caught red handed giving military grade weapons to a  Mexican drug cartel(s), the Justice Department and Eric Holder attempted to cover it up, thereby compounding the scandal.

Fast and Furious Bombshell Explode

According to a high-ranking Mexican drug cartel operative, who is currently in U.S. custody, there are some things that the American people are not being told about Fast and Furious. We obviously knew something was not being told behind the scenes because of Barack Obama issuing executive privilege and Holder being in contempt of Congress for failing to comply. But this makes even the sleepiest of people perk up their ears and pay attention.

Jesus Vicente Zambada-Niebla, known as the Sinaloa Cartel’s “logistics coordinator,” has brought allegations that the gunwalking operation had nothing to do with tracking guns and everything to do with supplying them.

Although it is believed that the CIA has been involved with the drug trade at least since the days of Jimmy Carter who funded and armed the Afghan Mujuhadeen in poppy field rich Afghanistan, many other US presidents and officials have been implicated in supporting the CIA and its drug business.

ARKANSAS GOVERNOR BILL CLINTON, PRESIDENT GEORGE BUSH, CIA DRUGS FOR GUNS CONNECTION

An independent group of researchers in Arkansas are charging that Governor Bill Clinton is covering up an airport used by the CIA and major cocaine smugglers in a remote corner of the Ozark mountains. According to Deborah Robinson of In These Times, the Inter mountain Regional Airport in Mena,Arkansas continues to be the hub of operations for people like assassinated cocaine kingpin Barry Seal as well as government intelligence operations linked to arms and drug smuggling.

In the 1980's, the Mena airport became one of the world's largest aircraft refurbishing centers, providing services to planes from many countries.Researchers claim that the largest consumers of aircraft refurbishing services are drug smugglers and intelligence agencies involved in covert activities.In fact, residents of Mena, Arkansas, have told reporters that former marine Lt. Colonel Oliver North was a frequent visitor during the 1980's. Eugene Hasenfus, a pilot who was shot down in a Contra supply plane over Nicaragua in 1986, was also seen in town renting cargo vehicles.

A federal Grand Jury looking into activities at the Mena airport refused to hand down any indictments after drug running charges were made public.

Of course, it's no surprise that George Herbert Walker Bush was involved in the CIA's drug trade because Bush is a former CIA chief with long and deep ties to the agency and its clandestine operations.  Much has been written about the CIA, Bush and drugs which includes several books and investigative journalist pieces.

The GOP's Death Wish

A lot of Republican liberty activists and Libertarians saw the handwriting on the wall in 2006 when the GOP lose the House of Representatives. The GOP operates under the delusion that it has a solidly committed base and it only needs to get out the vote to win elections. This is not only a boneheaded assumption, it's dead wrong. It's wrong because the GOP never understood it's own volatile base and automatically presumed that the Republican base was nothing but a bunch of religious right whackos who just need to hear candidates unleash venomous attacks on the social issues and 'Bingo', they would win an election.

The truth is that the GOP base has always been a complex and mixed bag of diverse constituencies including libertarians, independents, fiscal conservatives, Buchananites, paleo-conservatives, constitutionalists and other disgruntled factions who once aligned with the Republican Party, mostly out of desperation and the fact that the Republican Party was once deemed the lesser of the two evils.

What happened in 2006 and again in 2008 is that all those ticked off and angry disgruntled conservatives and libertarians could no longer even hold their noses and vote Republican like they once did. They revolted.  In fact, these voters finally decided that the lesser of the 2 evils is still evil.

Cato made an astute observation on the impact of the libertarian vote on the GOP in 2006.

Losing Libertarians

President Bush and his colleagues are telling voters that no matter how unhappy they are with Republicans, they'll like Democrats even less.

But evidence from around the country suggests that even if the conservatives come home to the Republican Party, the GOP could still lose Congress by losing libertarian voters.

Take a look at independent voters. There are more of them than before, especially in the West. More than 25 percent of Arizona voters now register as independent or third-party voters. And according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, they've shifted sharply toward the Democrats in this fall's elections.

But independents haven't fallen in love with the Democrats. They seem to be motivated more by dissatisfaction with Republicans than enthusiasm for Democrats.

If the situation was bad for the Republican Party in 2006 and 2008, it's going to be even worse in 2012 given the rise of the Ron Paul movement that has captivated the young.  A platform of peace, liberty and prosperity is a campaign theme that rings loud and clear.  Americans are fed up with the wars, crony capitalism, assaults on civil liberties, bankster bailouts and massive corruption.

But it's 2012 and the GOP once again thinks that all it needs to do is get its base fired up and to the ballot box.

What base?  The GOP base is permanently splintered and fractured.

The GOP has lost the independent vote, the female vote, the fiscal conservative vote, the anti-war vote, the constitutionalist vote and a whole lot of other voters who really did once hold their noses and dutifully vote Republican.

Those days are long gone.  Yet, the RNC/GOP machines have the blazing audacity to go out of their way and overtly employ fraud and treachery to disenfranchise the Ron Paul supporters and libertarians.

Chasing away the remnants of a dwindling base is not a strategy for winning elections.  But that is precisely what the Republican Party had done.

Ultimately, I believe that liberty activists will succeed in taking over the GOP machines, county by county and state by state.  The Paulites already took over the GOP machines in IA, MN, ME and NV, even though establishment Republicans are still working damn hard to kick the Ron Paul delegates out of Tampa.

What's left of the GOP is not a pretty sight.  The general perception is that the heart and soul of the GOP, as it is presently constituted,  is the socially intolerant Warvangelicals who lust for endless wars, theocracy and big bad government.  It's not a stretch to assert that the American people are indeed thoroughly disgusted with these folks and consider them vile.  Voters may not be pleased with Obama and Gang but they also fear the the Republican nutjobs who booed when Ron Paul suggesting invoking the Golden Rule on foreign policy.

In a nutshell, the Republican Party is just too damn scary for most Americans.

America: A Prison Nation Where Just About Every Human Activity is Criminalized

The state represents violence in a concentrated and organized form. The individual has a soul, but as the state is a soulless machine, it can never be weaned from violence to which it owes its very existence." - Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi

In theory, the only reason a criminal justice system should even exist is to facilitate justice for victims of crimes.  In reality, the criminal justice system is nothing more a hugely expensive statist enterprise that generates revenues for the government and the increasingly privatized prison industry while providing a guarantee of job security for police and prison guard unions.

A truly just criminal justice system works like this: No victim, No crime

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies, America, with a population of 310 million, has over 2.2 million folks in prison and China, a nation with a population of 1.3 billion, has far less folks in prison. 

1. United States of America 2,266,832
2. China 1,640,000
3. Russian Federation 738,400
4. Brazil 514,582
5. India 368,998

Why do we have so many folks locked up? Is America just a more crime ridden and violent place than other nations?  Is crime actually escalating?   According to the New York Times, "The number of violent crimes in the United States dropped significantly last year, to what appeared to be the lowest rate in nearly 40 years..."

If violent crime has been significantly dropping in the US for 40 years, then why are so many folks in prison and why is the US prison population exploding?  It makes no sense.  But our jails and prison systems are overflowing with folks who shouldn't even be in prison.  Many folks are definitely rotting in prison for possession of marijuana and other victimless or minor crimes.

The cost of a nation of incarceration

A report by the organization, "The Price of Prisons," states that the cost of incarcerating one inmate in Fiscal 2010 was $31,307 per year. "In states like Connecticut, Washington state, New York, it's anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000," he said.

Yes - $60,000 a year. That's a teacher's salary, or a firefighter's. Our epidemic of incarceration costs us taxpayers $63.4 billion a year.

The explosion in incarceration began in the early 1970s...

Americans are a people obsessed with 'there ought to be a law' and they routinely rant and rave to outlaw everything they don't personally approve of. The cost of the criminalization of human behavioral choices like smoking pot or prostitution is far greater than the cost of maintaining the prison industrial complex.  The social costs are devastating.  Families are broken up, separated and they suffer greatly when a breadwinner is imprisoned for a victimless crime. When folks are finally sprung from prison, they can't get a job because of their criminal record and this typically drives them into desperation that includes committing real crimes.

Prison Math

Housing nonviolent, victimless offenders with violent criminals for years on end can’t possibly help them reintegrate into society, which helps explain why four out of 10 released prisoners end up back in jail within three years of their release.

As the Harvard sociologist Bruce Western and the University of Washington sociologist Becky Pettit showed in a 2010 study published by the Pew Center on the States, incarceration has a lasting impact on men’s earnings. Taking age, education, school enrollment, and geography into account, they found that past incarceration reduced subsequent wages by 11 percent, cut annual employment by nine weeks, and reduced yearly earnings by 40 percent. Only 2 percent of previously incarcerated men who started in the bottom fifth of the earnings distribution made it to the top fifth 20 years later, compared to 15 percent of never-incarcerated men who started at the bottom.

It isn’t just offenders whose lives are damaged. Western and Pettit note that 54 percent of inmates are parents with minor children, including more than 120,000 mothers and 1.1 million fathers. One in every 28 children has a parent incarcerated, up from 1 in 125 just 25 years ago. Two-thirds of these children’s parents were incarcerated for nonviolent offenses.

Over a period of 40 years, we've spend over $1 trillion dollars on the idiotic War on Drugs, here and CNN reported that Marijuana laws just creates criminals.

It's time for America to rethinks its criminal justice system and restore it to what it's supposed to be - prosecuting and locking up dangerous criminals who are truly harmful to society while decriminalizing victimless crimes and personal behavioral choices that do not create victims.

The Many Benefits of a Merchant Loan

Most businesses have been faced with the issue of a cash crunch. Though often it happens to businesses that are new, it is often seen as happening to several established organizations as well. An earlier avenue of funding used to business loans from banks. Today, however with a tough economic scenario, most financial institutions make it extremely difficult for a business to get a loan.

That is where merchant loans have come into being. These are quick loans that can be availed of online and have a low qualification level. More importantly, unlike banks they do not have any restrictions on the way you can use the money. When you borrow from a bank, you are specifically asked whether you need the money for refurbishing your office, for inventory, for salaries or for any other purpose. How much of the loan amount is sanctioned depends on what it will be used for and your credit history as well. Banks look into not only the credit history of your establishment but your personal credit score as well.

With a merchant loan, all you need to qualify is to be in business for a short while, with three months being the minimum. You also need to accept credit cards as a means of payment. If you have an assured sum of around $5000 coming in each month, the lender will be rest assured that you can pay your instalments. With a merchant loan this is based on a percentage of business that you bring in each month. Should you have had a bad month, then you can hold off making a payment.

The good thing about merchant loans is that they are payable over a period of a year. Should you not be able to make a payment in one month, you could also do so in the next. Since you do not put up collateral, you are not going to lose anything should you default. Though if you do, you will find it difficult to get another loan. What you can do instead is talk to your lender before the lapse of your payment and ask for an extension. This often works to your advantage. It also will not reflect on your credit score and you may soon be eligible for more loans.

Finding the right kind of lender can easily be done via testimonials online or from people you already know. Once you get the paperwork done, you should have your money in a short while.

Since 2005, Merchant Cash and Capital, LLC has been one of the nation's small business cash advance funding leaders. MCC has helped business owners who need funding and can't wait for a business loan. Business Loans Bad Credit options with uses of merchant cash advance made simple.

Article Source: EzineArticles.com

The Government Subsidizes Junk Food and the Costly Lifestyle Diseases Resulting from Poor Nutrition

If there ever was a defining characteristic of insanity, it's got to be the US government. Only in America are taxpayers forced to subsidized unhealthy bad food that results in expensive to maintain lifestyle diseases that are also publicly funded. The Big Food and Big Pharm lobbies are determined to perpetually guarantee big profits through mandates and subsidies. The marriage of big government and big business has churned Americans into fat pharmaceutical dependent blimps.

Cato has a fascinating piece on this issue.

How Uncle Sam's Making Us Fat

The US Department of Agriculture is Exhibit A for foolish, wasteful federal policymaking: It spends billions subsidizing the same unhealthy foods it tells us to avoid.

This year, the USDA will spend more than $1 billion subsidizing the growth of four common food additives: corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, corn starch and soy oils (hydrogenated vegetable oil).

These additives "provide a cheap dose of sweetness and fat to a wide variety of junk food products," warns the US Public Interest Research Group. PIRG found that the USDA spent $18.2 billion from 1995 to 2011 to subsidize junk-food additives.

Yet, while some of your tax dollars pay for these junk-food additives, more pay for public-health education campaigns that strive to convince us to eat less and to eat better.

The USDA lectures and hectors us to avoid anything that's fatty, salty, sugary or filled with processed ingredients — like the ones our tax dollars subsidize.

Clearly, the Agriculture Department puts the D in double standard: The bureacuracy's left hand is at war with its right.

The government doesn't just subsidize nasty things like the manufacture of HFCS and hydrogenated oils, it also subsidizes the retail sale of these nasty products with food stamp subsidies.  Food stamps have been renamed SNAP, Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program, although there's nothing nutritious about the program.  Even liberal organizations are waking up to the stone cold reality that the government subsidizes junk food that makes folks sick and unhealthy. The farm bill passed by Congress is loaded with all kinds of subsidy horrors

Farm Bill Jackpot – How Much do Corporations Benefit from SNAP?

* Powerful food industry lobbying groups such as the American Beverage Association and the Snack Food Association teamed up to oppose health-oriented improvements to SNAP, at times working with anti-hunger groups

* At least nine states have proposed bills to make health-oriented improvements to SNAP, but none have passed, in part due to opposition from the food industry In one year, nine Walmart Supercenters in Massachusetts together received more than $33 million in SNAP dollars—over four times the SNAP money spent at farmers markets nationwide

*In two years, Walmart received about half of the one billion dollars in SNAP expenditures in Oklahoma

* J.P. Morgan Chase holds contracts in 24 states to administer SNAP benefits, indicating concentrated power and a lack of competition

*In New York, a seven-year deal originally paid J.P. Morgan Chase $112 million for EBT services, and was recently amended to add $14.3 million—an increase of 13 percent States are seeing unexpected increases in administrative costs, while banks and other private contractors are reaping significant windfalls from the economic downturn and increasing SNAP participation.

While food stamps supporting liberals are not exactly recognizing that the government freebies that they so cherish are unhealthy, they are beginning to wake up to the reality and some of them are lobbying for nutritional improvement in the junk food laden food stamp program.

As a Libertarian, I oppose the food stamp program.  That said, I don't believe it will ever vanish.  However, it can be vastly improved by restricting food stamp use to fruits, vegetable, meats and dairy. Food stamp users are notorious for loading up with junk food, sugary cereals for their kids and soda.  They don't have the common sense to eat sensibly which is precisely why junk food needs to be banned from the food stamp program.

But there's a hugely expensive companion problem to the food stamp insanity and junk food subsidies.  Bad food results in lifestyle diseases that are very expensive to treat.  Not only are American taxpayers forced to pay for the junk food that makes folks sick with lifestyle diseases, they are also forced to pay for their healthcare.  In fact, Medicare and Medicaid are costing American taxpayers near $1 trillion a year, here.

With 60% of the American people already on some form of taxpayer subsidized healthcare, America is already a socialist nation and most Americans absolutely do demand government provided healthcare and other entitlements.  Support for Medicare, Medicaid and other government programs remains quite strong. Americans are just like everybody else – they want something for free (translation: at the expense of somebody else) but there is no such thing as a free anything and anything the government does is very costly, inefficient and life threatening.

America spends more on healthcare than any industrialized nation and by a very wide margin.

Also, there is no corresponding increase in American longevity considering the huge amount of money we pour into health care. In fact, we keep going backwards, 3rd world nations are surpassing us and we ranked 42nd in longevity.

U.S. ranks just 42nd in life expectancy

Americans are living longer than ever, but not as long as people in 41 other countries. For decades, the United States has been slipping in international rankings of life expectancy, as other countries improve health care, nutrition and lifestyles...

Among the other factors:

•Adults in the United States have one of the highest obesity rates in the world. Nearly a third of U.S. adults 20 years and older are obese, while about two-thirds are overweight, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

•“The U.S. has the resources that allow people to get fat and lazy,” said Paul Terry, an assistant professor of epidemiology at Emory University in Atlanta. “We have the luxury of choosing a bad lifestyle as opposed to having one imposed on us by hard times.”

Tragically, American is a nation swimming with fat entitlement dependent pigs. Of course, the government itself is responsible for this nightmare by doling out freebies, free junk food and free healthcare to those who simply refuse to eat or live responsibly.

Kids are eating high calorie, low nutrition diets that primarily consist of simple carbohydrates, sugar, corn syrup, fats and sodium. Much of what kids eat in the schools is taxpayer funded garbage. Even more horrifying is that Migration Information reported that schools actually sell advertising to junk food purveyors by signing “"pouring rights" contracts that permit snack and soft drink companies to advertise to children on school vending machines, scoreboards, book covers, t-shirts, and news programs shown on televisions in the classroom., here.

Only in America do we kill our kids for profit and do it with our tax dollars!!

A group called Healthyamericans.org reported in June 2009 that "Today, we spend nearly $800 billion on health problems that are directly linked to lifestyle and poor health habits each year-about one third of our total health care spending…” and that article was quoting a congress critter, here.

America can't begin to solve its immense economic and fiscal problems because we remain a nation of spoiled rotten morons, from the political class and all the way down to the people who vote to hire the police powers of the state to forcibly steal from somebody else to give them what they think they want or deserve.  So long as folks are allowed to vote for politicians who will keep them fat, lazy, sick and entitlement dependent, the soul of a once proud, independent, prosperous and responsible people will continue to die and morph into something so vile that neither America nor Americans will ever be restored to our glorious legacy of being the the strongest, most prosperous and freest people in human history.