The Obama regime has been up to some heavy justice-trampling entirely aside from planting the seeds for takeovers of both the health care and financial trading industries. Glenn Greenwald details Obama’s authorization of the assassination of U.S. citizens. While it’s true that this has become old news and I have even written a few blag posts since this Greenwald post, the quotes are no less juicy:

Obama’s Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, acknowledged in Congressional testimony that the administration reserves the “right” to carry out such assassinations.
[...]
Today, both The New York Times and The Washington Post confirm that the Obama White House has now expressly authorized the CIA to kill al-Alwaki no matter where he is found, no matter his distance from a battlefield.
[...]
No due process is accorded. No charges or trials are necessary. No evidence is offered, nor any opportunity for him to deny these accusations (which he has done vehemently through his family). None of that.

Instead, in Barack Obama’s America, the way guilt is determined for American citizens — and a death penalty imposed — is that the President, like the King he thinks he is, secretly decrees someone’s guilt as a Terrorist.

In more Orwellian news, the Supreme Court ruled that some convicted sex offenders can be kept in prison indefinitely by federal officials (presumably the Department of “Justice”), after they have completed their prison sentences. It is terrifying how broadly sex crimes are defined, how aggressively they are pursued, and how remorselessly people who have only been accused, much less convicted, of sexual crimes are treated. There are people whose lives are ruined because they had oral sex as teenagers or because they walk around naked in their kitchens and their wannabe-tyrant neighbors have some twisted appetite for punishing others for anything they can. This ruling will soon extend to terrorism and all other crimes that some lawyer or judge can construe as being related to “national security”, if it doesn’t already.

The RIAA and MPAA want the government to force all computers to contain software that automatically deletes alleged copyright-infringing material. The best arguments against the RIAA and MPAA anymore are quoting them verbatim and reporting their behavior. As Voltaire quipped, “I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.’ And God granted it.” The RIAA and MPAA could not exist in their present form or commit any of the violations they have become infamous for without a monopolistic state and, particularly, a powerful central government backing them up. By the way, did you know there is an “Office of Intellectual Property Enforcement”? My god, they might as well rename it MiniIntelProp.

We are coming up on Presidential Candidate Obama’s original proposed date (summer 2010) for withdrawing (or at least beginning to withdraw) most American soldiers from Iraq. While I don’t believe he ever actually had any intention of scaling down the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan or reducing the U.S.’s military presence in the Middle East to any considerable degree, my skepticism and his duplicity are not even necessarily the most important issues about his promises/plans to withdraw troops. Most important is any well-intentioned president’s inability to divert our military’s path from one of aggression and expansion to one of defense and contraction. There are too many people and too many industrial interests opposing such a sea change for it to ever happen, except that I think America’s impending financial collapse will force the military to contract and withdraw, which side effect will be nothing but good.

You don’t have to be remotely libertarian-ish to be outraged at this: Novartis sales rep who alleges she was raped by a client was subjected to “disciplinary action” by HR, and the managers showed no interest in pursuing the case or bringing the alleged rapist to justice. I don’t have anything to add; the heinousness of it all is self-evident.

I think it’s sad how many people want more nationalization/centralization of all kinds of laws and regulations. An alarming percentage of people think national or even worldwide standards for businesses, behaviors, and just about everything else would make our lives better, but this is exactly the wrong attitude. More diversity of options, as a general rule, makes just about everything better in the long run, mainly because freedom is good for people and more innovation occurs when we can try different things and succeed or fail based on merit. The latest example that prompted me to write this is a comment I read in a discussion thread about stupid alcohol sales laws, commonly called blue laws. The comment read, “i hate the variation in alcohol laws from State to State. this shit needs to be modernized and made uniform across the Nation. i think it’s absurd that in my state, PA, i can’t buy liquor/wine from ANYWHERE but a State store.” Yes, since it is obvious that government and only government has created your problem, then the best solution is MORE government and MORE concentrated power in the hands of people who are EVEN FARTHER removed from your home and your life and who care about you individually EVEN LESS than the people who passed the current laws, if that’s possible. I’m sorry to end on an arrogant or haughty note, but Statists are stupid.

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom suddenly skipped town for two days, so SF had no mayor. This is a problem? Let people run their own lives for a while without getting in their way, and see how well it works!

I think it is incredibly unfair to fire teachers or other public employees because of some supposedly scandalous but completely legal pictures of them on Facebook or mySpace or somewhere else on the internet. Sometimes, the victims were fired for things that weren’t even pornographic or illicit in any way. Ashley Payne, a 24-year-old teacher in Barrow County, Georgia, was fired because of non-pornographic pictures and supposedly profane comments posted to her Facebook page. “I wasn’t doing anything illegal, I wasn’t doing anything provocative,” she says. She had set everything in her profile to “private” and was not friends with any students or parents. She has no idea how the parent who brought the complaint gained access to her photos. Oh, and also, the parent complained of Payne’s holding an alcoholic drink in one of the pictures. The completely infuriating, despicable, wretched, reviled, pathetic, sanctimonious destructiveness of idiotic teetotaling motherfuckers aside, by what right does a school board fire a teacher for doing nothing illegal, pornographic, harmful, or even unadvisable by any standards? I wish I had the link to a story about another teacher who was fired over some photographs of her in provocative poses, taken either by her boyfriend or husband before she ever became a teacher. So if you have ever done anything that someone in the school system or related to someone in the school system wouldn’t have done herself, that is grounds for firing. This is so typical of the the overly intrusive nanny state and the fascist busybodies that run our stupid society.

It strikes me as a sign of technological impairment or old-fogey-cluelessness when people refer to blog posts as “blogs.” To me, the LRC contributors are the most prominent perpetrators of this transgression. They’ll write, “In reference to your blog from yesterday…” or “…which I wrote about in a previous blog.” Hey, guys, “blog” is short for “web log,” as in, a journal. You wouldn’t refer to an entry in a child’s diary or a starship catpain’s log as a “log.” You would call it an entry. The proper term is blog post or blog entry. You can shorten it to “post” without using any more keystrokes than you now use. Calling a blog post a “blog” is like Senator Ted Stevens calling an email “an internet.” (In case you were wondering, yes, this is the only type of situation in which I would use the conventional “blog” instead of the uber-|337 and irreverent “blag.”)

Ha! Some person at “Progressive Nation” writes of the “growing rift between Libertarians and Republicans. No, this is not a repeat from the 1970′s, the 1980′s, the 1990′s, or every year of the Bush regime.

The first-class moran who occupies Michigan’s lieutenant governor post wants to tax bottled water companies to rescue the flagging revenues of a college scholarship program. In the state with the worst economy in the nation. The one that’s been in a depression for a year longer than the rest of the nation. The one losing businesses in hordes. It is simply depressing that after all these years, liberals refuse to understand that taxes hurt businesses and employment, and that taking more and more money from the taxpayers to put into government programs only destroys wealth. If you want education to be more affordable, or you want to save the environment (as the rest of this idiotic tax would fund), get the government out of both, and let people, companies, and communities solve their problems for themselves.

Juice is as unhealthy as soda and contributes just as much to obesity and diabetes, say some scientists. Yeah, you know who else blamed juice for the world’s problems? HITLER.

Apparently hosting a Harry Potter–themed dinner party for charity around Halloween is an infringement of Warner Bros.’s copyrights.

An “up-or-down vote on health care”?! You want the Congress and the President to make a single, sweeping, incontestable, one-size-fits-all decision on a multi-trillion-dollar endeavor that will affect the financial and medical well-being of nearly every single living American and future Americans for generations to come? You think an entire industry that each and every one of us must make decisions about and interact with on a monthly or yearly basis should be reduced to an “up-or-down vote” by a few hundred politicians? You fought and argued and marched and pleaded against the unilateral, power-grabbing, hegemonic abuses of the previous corrupt Republican regime, and now you are urging the Democrats in power to make a similar, unilateral and incontestable decision that every single American must live under and deal with regardless of whether they wanted it? It is unilateral because it entails a single government issuing edicts and a single president signing bills that govern everyone else’s life. THAT IS THE PROBLEM! YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM! TAKING POWER FROM THE PUBLIC AND GIVING IT TO A FEW POLITICIANS IS THE PROBLEM WITH OUR WORLD! Why don’t you stupid liberal Democrats get a clue about something for once?

They are forever oblivious to the harm the State does to any child’s education, so they think simply requiring children to receive more of it will make them better-educated. This is similar to the imposition of new taxes to pay for things the people don’t want and the enforcement of new regulations to fix economic problems that the government caused in the first place. More rules, more requirements, more bureaucracy, more taxation, more coercion.

Children are subjected to an alarming amount of Statolatrist propaganda from the very earliest stages of schooling, which is proudly lauded by Obama maniacs but which detracts from the quality of their education. Statolatry itself doesn’t make people worse at math, reading, or writing, but it has obviously facilitated the continuing, government-mandated decline in those basic areas of education. The more people who are brainwashed into the peculiar belief that the State should educate people, the more people who will support its idiotic, bureaucratic impediments to good education. And it doesn’t matter how well Americans can do calculus, critique literature, or write eloquent presidential speeches; if they support the absurd socialist agenda that Obama is trying to force upon his subjects, they are doing more harm than good—more harm than they could ever do if they were ignorant, stupid, and not a cheerleader for the Almighty State.

I imagine most Obama maniacs will support these proposals because they are coming from our Savior himself but also because they love the State and anything that expands it. But the most important issue here is not the content of the proposals themselves; it’s the fact that they will be coming from a very few people who will force their ideas on the entire nation. The fact that any apparatus or infrastructure exists that would allow for a single edict to govern that many people’s lives is of primary importance—obviously the content of its edicts will serve only to enhance and enlarge it, so the existence of the Department of Education and the power given to a single president over so many people’s schooling should alarm everyone, with condemnation of the specific proposals following as a corollary. It will not alarm most leftists. They vehemently opposed No Child Left Behind because George W. Bush signed it into law, and then later they found rationales (all valid ones, I surmise) to support their knee-jerk reaction; they will undoubtedly support Obama and his Education Department’s proposals because they come from Obama, and then later they will find rationales to justify their continued support despite clear evidence that they are biased tools.

Notice my use of the term “school year” in the first paragraph. Does it bother you that we gloss over the singular, all-encompassing term “school year” as commonplace and obvious in meaning? There should be no “school year”! There should be no bureaucracy or secretary or president who decides what the school year is! That’s the problem: the unilateral power of the State to define the “school year” and do all the other things it does under the pretense of educating children!

If people want some solutions to the deficiencies in schooling, particularly class time, that children are given, they should look to the absence of family, community, and individual responsibility in children’s education. These are direct and predictable consequences of the State’s involvement in anything. I am not surprised that Obama’s proposals will put even more of the children’s time under the purview of governments and necessarily less in the company of family members—people who should (and would, in a free society) be more influential in their education. Children should be playing and exercising more, spending more time learning from their parents, more time with their siblings, more time in extracurricular music or sports lessons, more time learning how to make their own decisions, and less time in the vicinity of bureaucrats with education degrees.

The idea that more government schooling will educate children better smacks of the dim-witted Statism that also led people to advocate throwing more and more money at failing schools. Here are four easy solutions to America’s educational shortcomings: 1. Eliminate the monopolistic Department of Education (and the ability of any criminal, elected or unelected, in the federal government to make any decisions about any child’s education but his own). 2. Abolish all taxes everywhere that in any way fund any public school or public-education-related endeavor. 3. Abolish all laws that are in any way related to home-schooling. 4. Remove all restrictions, regulations, and barriers to entry for private schools.

In response to this line of reasoning, I have come across a counter-argument from Statists that goes, “Yeah, government medical insurance will crowd out private insurance just like Social Security did away with private retirement funds and Fannie Mae made private mortgage lenders obsolete.”

Ha! If you want to compare the future of your beloved government health insurance to the other governmental failures of Social Security and Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, go right ahead! What does their impracticality, their inefficiency, and indeed their criminality, together with the fact that they continue to exist in our society, tell you about the nature of private vs. “public” ventures? If you think the taxpayer-funded health insurance will do just as well for its subscribers and for the rest of the country at large, you can assert that all you want!

File this under the “Statists are hopelessly stupid and so is their worldview” category.

As if electing complete idiots with no economic knowledge and no regard for individual rights to the presidency every four years for the last several decades weren’t proof enough: A jury ruled in favor of the RIAA, against the Minnesota woman it sued, requiring her to pay the RIAA $1.92 million, or $80,000 per song she downloaded “illegally.” Those jurors will never suffer karma as bad as they deserve. Neither will anyone who works for the RIAA (mainly, their executives and attorneys). They are going to burn in a very special level of hell, a level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theater.

Well short of Obama’s first hundred days, the dominant characteristic of his Presidency is clear: activist government, on every front. It’s harder to make out the contours of the philosophy at the core of this dazzling blur of action. Given the early and ample track record, there’s surprisingly little agreement over the nature of Obamaism.

There is among libertarians. He is a Statolatrist in the extreme, dominated by envious class warfare on the one hand and unadulterated Keynes-Krugmanism on the other.

Obama’s signature projects defy grouping under a single heading, and, as a result, he has been criticized for inconsistency.

Corporate-State socialism. Or economic fascism. Okay, that’s two headings, but they mean about the same thing. (If only "inconsistent" socliasm were his problem! That was the problem we had with the Bushies, and that was bad enough!)

What underlies so many of Obama’s decisions is an attachment to the institutions that hold up American society, a desire to make them function better rather than remake them altogether.

No critique of the notion that Obama or any other president should feel the need or have the power to either make "American institutions" function better or remake them altogether—oh, no, don’t question the very basis of the awesome power of the unitary executive.

Allowing the auto industry to die would create social havoc in communities around the country, and anything less than de-facto government control seems inadequate.

I don’t understand the American public’s inability to understand this. First of all, allowing unprofitable companies to lose money and be bought out, change their niche in the world, or make room for competitors would not result in the death of the auto industry. The increased profit motive, heightened susceptibility to competition, and necessary re-focusing on foreign over domestic sales would make the American auto industry stronger, as anyone who thought about it longer than was required for a knee-jerk patriotic-socialist reaction knows. Second, not allowing those things to happen to the automotive and other industries is precisely what has created the economic havoc we witness in the world slowly deteriorating around us. Companies must make profit to survive, hire workers, and improve their products over time, and for an economy to be healthy it must slough off the unprofitable endeavors to allow for those resources to be allocated in more desired (more profitable) ways. Just because something exists (is an "American institution") doesn’t mean it must continue to, and the longer the re-allocation of money, labor, and equipment is delayed, the more resources will have been wasted and the more difficult it will be for workers, managers, and entrepreneurs to find the most profitable enterprises.

As we can see and as pro-auto-bailout (or pro-de-facto-government-control) commentators are so quick to point out, failure of the automotive industry would create a domino effect of failure throughout the economy, so this "havoc" from unprofitability would not be confined to one or a few industries. On this they are right. But the auto industry is already failing. The unprofitability of thousands of companies is already wreaking economic havoc around the world. Unprofitability is our biggest enemy outside of the State, so to restore order and sustainability to our economy, we must allow unprofitable allocations of resources to fade away and profitable ones to take their place. Prevention of this punishment of unprofitability, to say nothing of a substantial level of direct control by the government, retards or outright prevents this economic calculation from taking place. But I wouldn’t expect that level of thought and analysis to appear in a rinky-dink magazine like The New Yorker. After all, Obama is the Savior of America, so let’s get back to praising Him and demonizing the conservatives who are virtually indistinguishable from Him and His cronies:

Obama may not see a similar need to put the government in charge of the big banks, but he has also shown that he has no taste for such a disruption of the system—even if it were politically possible, and perhaps even if it were the most direct route back to financial health.

Obviously you are not paying attention. This is exactly what "the system" is! Protect the rich and powerful and screw the little guy. This "egalitarian" Obama is debasing the dollar for the benefit of Wall Street millionaires and continuing the corporate-State socialist swindle of privatizing profits and socializing losses. He and his subordinates do not hide this. I don’t know what purpose the clause "even if it [nationalizing the banks] were the most direct route back to financial health" serves if not to suggest the possibility that it is. To type that into a sentence is to display its utter absurdity. No further refutation is (should be) necessary.

Obama seems to recognize that nothing has shredded the civic fabric in recent years more than the harsh inequalities of finance capitalism and the market ideology of a generation of American politics.

The American Heritage Dictionary defines capitalism (among other, similar definitions) as, "An economic and political system characterized by a free market for goods and services and private control of production and consumption." The Treasury Department and its central bank control the money supply and have outlawed freely competing currencies. The SEC and FTC (purport to) govern and regulate trading on financial markets and the conduction of business under their jurisdiction. The central bank’s manipulation of interest rates below where the free market obviously would have placed them led directly to sub-prime mortgage stupidity and hyper-leveraging of mortgage-backed securities. The Community Reinvestment Act played no small role in widespread mortgage defaults. The Imperial Federal Government’s explicit guarantee of mortgage loans purchased by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (government-created and -sponsored enterprises) also permitted undue risks to be taken. The Internal Revenue Service takes a goddamned quarter or more of most people’s earnings and tells them it’s for their own good! Did I mention the currency is totally and completely controlled by the State, with literally no input of any kind from the free market? What free ownership and exchange of goods and services are you talking about? What "market ideology" are you confusing with our thoroughly socialist boobocracy? Do you even know what interest rates are for or what inflation means?

But modern conservatism has grown into exactly the opposite of its origins, in Burke’s respect for tradition and Madison’s promotion of countervailing checks on concentrations of power. Instead, like any revolutionary creed, it is abstract, hard-edged, and indifferent to experience and existing conditions.

That sounds exactly like left-liberalism. They both became Statism, as Mises, Rand, and Rothbard predicted. It became increasingly clear at this point that George Packer never had a point or had lost the ability to make one, so he resorted to bashing the Republicans, which any idiot with a keyboard can do by random accident, they’re such an easy target.

Most of the remaining congressional Republicans seem content to adhere to this creed, and to allow banks, car companies, and homeowners to be crushed under the invisible foot of the market—all that matters is the consistent application of principle.

Congratulations: you’re the first person ever to accuse neocons of being principled or consistent.

Last week, the House Republicans released a shadow budget that would repeal much of the stimulus package and impose a domestic-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are beginning to call a depression. While claiming to be fiscally responsible, it would also create new optional tax brackets and cut or eliminate taxes of every kind, from capital gains to the estate and alternative minimum taxes, tilting the benefits sharply toward—you guessed it—the wealthy.

Maybe the wealthy would get the tax cuts because they’re the ones who pay the most taxes! A government-spending freeze in the middle of what some economists are calling (and what libertarians have been calling) a depression would be a godsend. To even insinuate that curtailing government spending would be harmful is the epitome of Statolatrist ignorance and destructive barbarism, bordering on Krugman-like stupidity.

After quoting some doom-and-gloom selections from conservatives about fascism and tyranny and 1984 coming to our lives, Packer concludes:

This is what the historian Richard Hofstadter has called “the paranoid style in American politics.” In the world of intelligence, it’s known as mirror-imaging: in this case, seeing in an enemy’s mental structure a reflection of one’s own feverish simplifications. Conservatives will not be able to understand the elusive nature of Obamaism and counter its formidable appeal until they remove the impediment of their own insular, rigid ideology.

Again, I am simply constitutionally incapable of understanding the complete and utter self-blinding exhibited by liberal Democrats: you are championing in Obama exactly what you would have demonized—and did, in fact, demonize for eight years!—in his Republican counterparts. If John McCain were president and had replicated Obama in every single, last policy proposal and official position and bill signed, liberal Democrats would vilify him as a fascist and a corporatist with every self-righteous breath and every furious keystroke.

The ideology of the Republicans is identical to that of the Democrats: gain and maintain political power. The only relevant group with a “rigid ideology” is the libertarians, whose radical ideas of peace, private property rights, individual sovereignty, sound money, and free exchange put us in the unique position of being able to understand and criticize Obama’s actions that directly clash with every one of those ideals. We understand the (not so) “elusive nature of Obamaism” just fine—a hell of a lot better than his apologetic idolaters: Enrich the powerful and well-connected at the expense of everyone else, and grow the State at every possible turn. This is Obamaism and unbiased observers with an interest in liberty saw it four years ago. It’s no different from Statism of any other stripe from any other time in our history.

When I saw his list of questions that he would supposedly refute, I was very interested in number 3: “Isn’t having to work for a boss in capitalism the same as having to work for a living in nature?” This question was often my initial reaction to people who tried to drag out the wage-slave nonsense. After all, it only seemed obvious to me that in order to consume, you must produce. Thus, if you don’t work for a wage, it’s only necessary that in order to eat, you must farm your own land. In order to have shelter, you must build you own house. In other words, if you’re not a “wage-slave”, then your only alternative is to be a “labor-slave”. However, mr1001nights here simply refutes that Capitalist Myth with his simple answer, transcribed by me:

“No. The unavoidable subjection of man to nature, that is having to work to gain one’s substinance, is not the same as the subjection of man to man. That is, having to work for a boss.”

That’s it. That’s his whole refutation. I’m glad he cleared that up for me so easily.

Maybe he goes into further detail, but I stopped watching shortly after that point. You can make all the bold claims you want, but I prefer a little more thought in my arguments than just statements presented as fact. If anyone else would like to explain why working the land to eat and be sheltered is so different from working for another man, I’m all ears.