An EXCELLENT resource for Comparitive Obama Progress.

Discovered this wonderfully convenient flash by the good people at Gallup that enables you to compare each president's historical data in job approval, on a day by day basis. Very useful in allowing you to compare Obama to other presidents. Or any president to any other president, all the way back to Truman.

~David Morris~

Just how more corrupt can this congress get?

So, not only is Rangel on the ropes for his tax evasion, Maxine Waters also finds her feet to the fire on charges of swindling bailout funds in a manner that was biased towards assisting her husband.

Is it only just these two that are in trouble however? I would like to get further into the potential ethics problems of the democrats right now, if not short for time. Needless to say, I cannot imagine a more corrupt time for congress.

~David Morris~

Unpresidential President Indeed

The view huh? Mr. Obama, you're going on the View as president of the United States to discuss what exactly?

...

I fear that "..." is sadly all that was truly discussed. There was nothing of substance. Why this medium, no one can answer.

It is very belittling of himself. That's all anyone seems to know.

~David Morris~

Great Myths of the Great Depression

Great Myths on the Great Depression.

Sigh. 90% taxes. Just to name a few as a preview.

~David Morris~

GOP Youth Convention - A personal case study for proper framing.

Along with some of my other libertarian co-workers, I attended a GOP Youth Convention. The mission was to design an official party agenda on a variety of issues from the perspective of young people. The process involved splitting us into subcommittees (such as economics, foreign policy, etc) where we'd draft an proposed stance on a specific topic. We would then vote on the wordings of our drafts before making such stances official. Participates could make calls to reword the stance if found disagreeable, and we would hence vote on the alternative proposal.

While much of the economic and health care issues were agreeable, nominally, libertarians and conservatives are capable of disagreement when it comes to immigration, defense spending, and certain other social issues. With three libertarians in the crowd (including one who was particularly eager), most of the deadlock took place here.

Specifically, on immigration and gay marriage. It appeared that one of my co-workers was unintentionally stirring a hornet nest in the manner she made her proposals on such issues, leading her be be labeled as a "democrat spy" by certain individuals who found her disagreeable.

I recall the deadlock on the definition of marriage in particular. Singularly it appeared, my co-worker was advocating against the original proposal of the societal subcommittee of simply pre-defining marriage as between a man and a woman. However, her framing had more of an appeal tailored to civil liberals and proved agitating to many. As temperaments flared, I quietly thought of means to reword the manner in a way that everyone could be satisfied with.

It is here that I was thankful for heeding some of the lessons learned at Cato in regards to relating to one's audience. I've always believed libertarians can create more common ground with conservatives than not, if they are mindful of proper framing. Recalling the Ransberger Pivot, I employed it in a manner that was able to end the deadlock by making an appeal to the constitution, a document that everyone in the room could appreciate. In the end, rather than stand for federal involvement on marriage, I subtly took things in a direction of allowing the 10th Amendment to settle the issue.

It was nice to play peacemaker.

~David Morris~

Mosque across Ground Zero. Oh well. Can I have a cross then?

Response to this article at Washington Examiner.

I'm a Christian libertarian with traditional values. Sure, I can claim mixed feelings on the controversy of a mega-mosque on Ground Zero.

However, unless there's some hidden form of legal foul play, I can't really care enough to be up in arms about it. I understand after all, that Islam is composed of different denominations just as Christianity is. Its not as if al Qaeda is funding this. Again, I don't necessarily endorse the mosque. I would still appreciate it were they not to build the mosque.

I would also appreciate it if someone gave me a quarter right about now. Oh well, its no big deal if I don't get what I want on this one. This is a red herring to more important things.

Besides, I perceive no true threat to my religious freedom on account of this Islamic building anyway. Nay, that remains the purview of ignorantly intolerant anti-Christian activists, who oft speak of "separation of church and state" as though the term "state" was synonymous with "public display."

So how about the following compromise?

Muslims get their mosque across the street of ground zero, and Christians get to put a cross or religious plaque somewhere ON ground zero. That is, whenever they decide to put something there.

Nah, that's probably attract the ACLU.

~David Morris~

Debt Metaphors To the Moon.

I decided to go hunting for some debt metaphors today. Imagine the engineering achievements would could obtain!
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Big numbers: As a point of reference, if 11.4 trillion $1 bills were stacked on top of each other, they would stretch all the way to the moon. And back. And over halfway to the moon again. Put another way, if you brought $1-trillion in crisp one-dollar bills to the bank and you handed the teller a dollar every second, it would take 32,000 years to completely transfer the money. [source]

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23.5 Trillion Dollars Is 23.5 Football Fields Stacked 2 Stories Deep With Packed $100 Bills: That’s the Size of USA Federal Debt. [source]

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If you had a nice neat stack of $100 bills 40 inches high, you would have a million dollars.

A billion dollars is a thousand million. If you could keep it from falling over, a billion dollars in $100 bills all in one stack or on one helluva spindle would be more than 300 stories high. More than three Sears Towers stacked one on top of the other. It would be 3,333 feet high, a hazard to air traffic requiring beacons flashing day and night.

The amount that the Bush administration borrowed from investors last month, October 2002, was ironically 33.3 times as much as the above and if stacked all together in $100 bills would reach 21 miles into space. That's not feet or inches, but 21 statute miles of 5,280 feet to the mile.

And that's not all. The Bush administration ran up the entitlement side of the national debt another $20.9 billion which means that the total national debt went up $54.3 billion last month, October 2002. Now, our monthly stack of $100 bills would reach 34.2 miles into space. And that's only what your government added to the tab in one month.

If you took the entire national debt and it was possible to stack it neatly in $100 bills, that stack would extend 3,966 miles into space. "One of these days Alice, to the moon."

If our hypothetical spindle was based in New York City and it fell to the east, we could have a narrow bridge across the Atlantic to Berlin. If it fell to the west, the top would land more than 900 miles offshore from San Francisco in the Pacific.

From another direction.

If you set aside $7 million a day from the birth of Christ, from the beginning of the Gregorian calendar 2,002 years ago, you would be able to pay off the national debt by November of the year 2458. That's only 456 years from now. Of course, right now the national debt would have to stop going up.

There are nitwits who tell us that the United States can easily afford a debt of this size because our Gross Domestic Product is more than $10 trillion a year. At $6.3 trillion, the national debt is only about 60 percent of the GDP.

The implication here is that all we have to do is stop spending money for six or seven months of the year, send everything we make to the government, and everything will be hunky dory. It really means we would all be dead in a matter of weeks.

Don't buy medicine. Don't buy gasoline or groceries. Don't go to Starbucks or McDonald's. Of course, there wouldn't be anybody there anyway because they would all be doing the same thing. How long do you think you could last that way, even if we didn't start killing each other over what's left on the shelves?

We all know what the sensible solution is. Set up a payment plan within our means.

Unfortunately, the most we've ever paid against the national debt was $230 billion in fiscal 2000 and that wasn't enough to keep the debt from going up another $18 billion that year due to interest and the theft of entitlement surpluses.

If you go to any mortgage lender or any of the plug-in mortgage models on the Internet, you will find that paying off the national debt in anything less than 50 years requires annual payments of at least $350 billion a year. And that's with interest as low as 5 percent.

However.

There is one thing we could do that would be of benefit to all of us. We could get rid of the bogus bonds that our crooked government has awarded us while they played a con game called "borrowing" entitlement money—actually stealing our surplus Social Security, Medicare, gas taxes, and other excessive overpayments.

We don't need these phony securities. The entire "Intragovernmental Holdings" side of the national debt, currently standing at $2.7 trillion, is fraudulent. Worse than anything Enron, WorldCom, Global Crossings, Arthur Andersen, or any of the corporations under investigation by the Justice Department and SEC have done.

Wipe that fraudulent $2.7 trillion from the crooked books and we've only got $3.6 trillion in honest debt to investors to pay off.

We would all be better off if the crooks had the integrity to simply take the money and run in the first place instead of tricking us with their double taxation scam.
[source]

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~David Morris~