This is getting to be old news, but I think it’s important. Inconsistencies often appear in the big sensational stories, especially the scary ones which justify our loss of liberty in the name of security.

[Kurt Haskell:] Today is the second worst day of my life after 12-25-09. Today is the day that I realized that my own country is lying to me and all of my fellow Americans. Let me explain.

Ever since I got off of Flight 253 I have been repeating what I saw in US Customs. Specifically, 1 hour after we left the plane, bomb sniffing dogs arrived. Up to this point, all of the passengers on Flight 253 stood in a small area in an evacuated luggage claim area of an airport terminal. During this time period, all of the passengers had their carry on bags with them. When the bomb sniffing dogs arrived, 1 dog found something in a carry on bag of a 30 ish Indian man. This is not the so called “Sharp Dressed” man. I will refer to this man as “The man in orange”. The man in orange, who stood some 20ft away from me the entire time until he was taken away, was immediately taken away to be searched and interrogated in a nearby room. At this time he was not handcuffed. When he emerged from the room, he was then handcuffed and taken away. At this time an FBI agent came up to the rest of the passengers and said the following (approximate quote) “You all are being moved to another area because this area is not safe. I am sure many of you saw what just happened (Referring to the man in orange) and are smart enough to read between the lines and figure it out.” We were then marched out of the baggage claim area and into a long hallway. This entire time period and until we left customs, no person that wasn’t a law enforcement personnel or a passenger on our flight was allowed anywhere on our floor of the terminal (or possibly the entire terminal) The FBI was so concerned during this time, that we were not allowed to use the bathroom unless we went alone with an FBI agent, we were not allowed to eat or drink, or text or call anyone. I have been repeating this same story over the last 5 days. The FBI has, since we landed, insisted that only one man was arrested for the airliner attack (contradicting my account). However, several of my fellow passengers have come over the past few days, backed up my claim, and put pressure on FBI/Customs to tell the truth. Early today, I heard from two different reporters that a federal agency (FBI or Customs) was now admitting that another man has been held (and will be held indefinitely) since our flight landed for “immigration reasons.” Notice that this man was “being held” and not “arrested”, which was a cute semantic ploy by the FBI to stretch the truth and not lie.

Just a question, could that mean that the man in orange had no passport?

However, a few hours later, Customs changed its story again. This time, Mr. Ron Smith of Customs, says the man that was detained “had been taken into custody, but today tells the news the person was a passenger on a different flight.”

. . . .

For the last five days I have been reporting my story of the so
called “sharp dressed man.” For those of you who haven’t read my
account, it involves a sharp dressed “Indian man” attempting to talk a ticket agent into letting a supposed “Sudanese refugee” (The terrorist) onto flight 253 without a passport. I have never had any idea how it played out except to note that the so called “Sudanese reefugee” later boarded my flight and attempted to blow it up and kill me. At no time did my story involve, or even find important whether the terrorist actually had a passport. The importance of my story was and always will be, the attempt with an accomplice (apparently succesful) of a terrorist with all sorts of prior terrorist warning signs to skirt the normal passport boarding procedures in Amsterdam. By the way, Amsterdam security did come out the other day and admit that the terrorist did not have to “Go through normal passport checking procedures”. (Read more from mlive.com)

Don’t tell Fox “News” about this. To them, the important thing about this story is the possibility of Iran’s involvement, and us remaining afraid.

“[I will] smash the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter them to the wind.” ~John F. Kennedy

Despite the construction freeze, dozens of settlements in the West Bank are experiencing a building boom, even on the eve of another visit to the region by U.S. envoy George Mitchell to try to restart talks for a final settlement between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Construction is being carried out mostly to the east of the separation fence; it began shortly after warrants were issued on November 26 freezing construction.

Haaretz toured the area on Wednesday and witnessed work being carried out in the Barkan and Ariel industrial zones, as well as the construction of housing at Ariel, Elkana North, Peduel and Kfar Tapuah. A sign at Kfar Tapuah announced plans for the construction of 65 new housing units. Israel patrols were evident, but not inspectors of the Civil Administration enforcing the construction ban.
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In all the sites mentioned there is evidence of heavy equipment preparing the ground for construction or for the creation of suitable infrastructure. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Remember, they hate us because they are evil fanatics. </sarcasm>

What’s most interesting to me about this interaction is the way Maddow resolutely pushes the left vs. right narrative. I don’t presume to know if it’s witting or unwitting, but I do thing that sometimes the American people are sold the illusion of opposites where there is no difference. BOTH parties supported expanding our wars. BOTH parties supported transferring massive amounts of wealth to our politically elite banks.

Kudos to Ron Paul for refusing to accept the illusion.

This video points to the same bit of government hypocrisy as the important broken window fallacy When money is taken away from people and spent on either unproductive jobs or the repair of a broken window, it is not a net gain for society. This principle comes up often.

Hard to believe this bullshit is in bloomberg, but here it is:

The 2010 census couldn’t have come at a better time for the U.S. economy.

The government will hire about 1.2 million temporary workers in the first half of the year to administer the decennial population count, possibly providing a bridge to gains in private employment later in the year.

The surge will probably dwarf any hiring by private employers early in 2010 as companies delay adding staff until they are convinced the economic recovery will be sustained. Money earned by the clipboard-toting workers going door-to-door to verify the government population survey is likely to be spent, giving the economy an extra lift.

The request by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the United Nations Human Rights Council last year to postpone the vote on the Goldstone report followed a particularly tense meeting with the head of the Shin Bet security service, Haaretz has learned. At the October meeting in Ramallah, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a “second Gaza.”

Diskin, who reports directly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatened to revoke the easing of restrictions on movement within the West Bank that had been implemented earlier last year. He also said Israel would withdraw permission for mobile phone company Wataniya to operate in the Palestinian Authority. (Read more from haaretz.com)

Over, and over. Regulation doesn’t protect us. It eliminates competition for big businesses.

From a mailing:

Seven candidates have filed to run against me. These candidates include three Republicans in my own primary on March 2, and they will stop at nothing to tear down and destroy all we have worked for.

Please read some of the quotes my opponents have been throwing at me:

“(Ron Paul) wants to cut spending on our military industrial complex because he believes in a weaker foreign policy.”

“Ron Paul has become a complete nutcase conspiratorialist quasi-Anti-Semitic leftwing American-hating nutball.”

“Ron Paul is out of touch with this district and it is time for him to move on…Dr. No Must Go!”

These quotes come directly from my opponents’ campaign literature and websites. We cannot let these attacks stand.

I plan to fight back and will mount an aggressive campaign. Carol, my family and my staff are already working very hard, but I need your immediate support.

This is several months old, but it is fantastic. How can anyone possibly oppose college tuition subsidies? Please listen and learn. Like most government programs, government tuition subsidies punish exactly the people they presume to help.

Yale University

1810-1852 tuition = $33/year or 1.65 ounces of gold
1918 tuition = $160/year (dollars were inflated during WWI) = 8.4 ounces of gold = 32 days of manual labor
2009 tuition = $36,500/year or about 33 ounces of gold = 550 days of manual labor

This was caused not by freedom or greed. It was caused by reckless government subsidies.

Leave it to the WSJ to report the truth – and then try to paper over it:

Sales taxes declined 9% to $70 billion in the third quarter compared with the year-ago period, the Census Bureau said. Income taxes plunged 12% to about $58 billion. Together, sales and income taxes make up roughly half of state and local tax revenue.

The WSJ then goes on to opine:

State and local tax revenues tend to lag behind the downturns as well as the upturns in the economy because of the time it takes for collections to catch up with depressed store sales and diminished incomes.

This is true for income taxes.

It is absolutely false when it comes to sales taxes.

As someone who ran a registered establishment for more than a decade that was responsible for filing and paying sales taxes (I signed more returns “under penalty of perjury” than I can count during those years!) I can state that it is an absolute fact that sales tax returns are filed and monies are remitted MONTHLY – if there is an upturn in business – an actual upturn – it shows up NOT MORE THAN ONE MONTH LATER in sales tax receipts. Period. (Read more from market-ticker.denninger.net)

Another great interview from Radio Free Market:

All the goods and services of modern life are the result of the division of labor carried to immense proportions. Self-sufficiency in anything, whether it be energy or toilet paper, means that we should restrict the division of labor to some extent. Think of our economic world as a bulls-eye. The small dot in the middle would be the goods and services represented by a subsistence economy, such as that of the North American Indian tribes. Small bands of people provided everything they consumed themselves. As capital and the division of labor expand, we move further out on the rings and the size of the economy grows exponentially larger. Instead of hunting our own food and weaving our own clothes, we rely upon the specialized skills of others, who perform only small pieces of the entire process but who perform their process unbelievably efficiently and productively. The division of labor expands to such a degree that we no longer understand how most goods that we consume are produced. We take all this for granted, yet it is a miracle of the free market. The more people engaged in the division of labor, the greater will be the total amount of goods and services available. Of course, the largest possible extension of the division of labor, until we trade with alien worlds, is the entire population of planet earth. (You can be assured that shortly after encountering our first alien civilization, entrepreneurs will be looking for trading opportunities!)

It is clear from this explanation that reverting backward from a more extensive division of labor society to a less extensive one means that society must accept a lower standard of living. There are two main causes for such an unfortunate occurrence—war and misguided economic policy. (Read more from patrickbarron.blogspot.com)