Last month’s nannies pulled a modern-day Footloose by banning singing, dancing and rapping at new bars and restaurants—in Snoop Dog’s home, no less!

But what about this month?

Check out who’s pulling the plug on electric bingo machines (sorry charity fundraisers) and who won’t let pet stores sell dogs and cats (seriously?).

But the Nanny of the Month goes to the heartland pol who’s waging a very real war on fake pot (A.K.A. spice, K2, genie, black mamba, bliss, dragon, Bombay Blue …)

Ladies and gentlemen, we present Reason.tv’s Nanny of the Month for February 2010: Kansas State Rep. Robert Olson!

(more…)

When going into any kind of competition, I was taught to respect the abilities of an opponent. To not do so results in things we commonly refer to as “upsets”.

Seeing how a lot of liberals aren’t into sports and have disdain for organized competition, the comments by the website “biasedliberalmedia.com” about the comic book’s mocking of Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann (and conservatives in general) by “award-winning Minneapolis artist and political activist Ken Avidor” make perfect sense.

The little guy with the hat with the teabags hanging from it is a “tea-bagger,” a conservative anti-tax activist — representing hundreds of the same who use tea bags as a symbol of one of the first American anti-tax rebellions, the Boston Tea Party. (These people clearly have no idea what “tea bagging” refers to in sexual slang, or they would be even angrier than they are.) Michele is on record as saying that she “hates” taxes. These days she’s not talking about cutting taxes so much; she tends to talk more about the debt that is caused by the failure to tax. But conservatives still have her down as an anti-tax politician even though she has never successfully lowered anyone’s taxes.

‘These people clearly have no idea what “tea bagging” refers to in sexual slang, or they would be even angrier than they are.’

A clear example of the narcissistic underestimation of their ideological opponents.

(more…)

A former reporter for the New York Times, Fox Butterfield, became a bit of a laughingstock in the 1990s for publishing a series of articles addressing the supposed quandary of how crime rates could be falling during periods when prison populations were expanding. A number of critics sarcastically explained that crimes rates were falling because bad guys were behind bars and invented the term “Butterfield Effect” to describe the failure of leftists to put 2 + 2 together.

We now have a version of the Butterfield Effect in tax policy. Recent IRS data show that rich people earned a record amount of income in 2007 and also faced their lowest effective tax rate in almost two decades. Proponents of soak-the-rich tax policy complain about these developments, but they seem oblivious to the Laffer Curve insight that rich people earned more income in part because tax rates were lower. This video explains how the Laffer Curve works.

Liberals don’t understand that if they penalize the rich with higher tax rates, as President Obama is proposing, they will be disappointed to discover that they collect considerably less revenue than predicted for the simple reason that wealthy taxpayers will respond by earning less taxable income. This Bloomberg excerpt is a good example. The leftist quoted in the article assumes that income is a fixed variable and successful taxpayers will passively endure higher taxes.

(more…)

We will never control our government until we control the federal tax system.

It is corrupted and unfair and feeds unchecked government growth. It has made the federal government far more powerful than what was supposed to be its equal—our state governments. The income tax hides the cost of the government from plain sight and provides endless amounts of our money for the advancement of politician’s personal ambitions. It is very good for those in Washington and very destructive for the rest of us.

We’re being treated as if our only value as citizens is how much more money we can be made to give up from our paychecks. When it comes to more and more spending and more and more taxes, it is a one-way conversation. I’m ready to talk back and I don’t think I’m alone. That’s why I’m calling on every patriot to join me in a tax revolt march on Washington , D.C.

I’m leading a Tea Party Patriot team in a growing on-line tax revolt which arrives in Washington , D.C. on April 15^th to merge with the huge physical rallies that are already planned for that day. It’s a new technology that allows people to choose a graphic “avatar” to digitally march on-line to Washington with hundreds of thousands of other Americans. Even the homebound, recovering veterans and the elderly can add their voice to this new American chorus.

I’m seeing a lot of people remembering that politicians are supposed to follow the will of the people—not trample it. Like Boston Harbor , this is where we again make our stand.

(more…)

The District of Columbia’s murder rate plummeted by an astounding 25 percent last year, much faster than for the US as a whole or for similarly sized cities. If you had asked Chicago’s Mayor Daley, that wasn’t supposed to happen. The Supreme Court’s 2008 decision to strike down DC’s handgun ban and gunlock requirements should have lead to a surge in murders, with Wild West shootouts. The Supreme Court might keep Daley’s predictions in mind today as they hear the oral arguments on Tuesday in the Chicago handgun ban case.

Everyone in DC now knows that murder rates rose after the handgun ban and fell after they were removed. Unfortunately, Chicago never learned that lesson. The forthcoming third edition of More Guns, Less Crime shows that in the 17 years after its ban on new handguns went into effect, there are only two years where Chicago’s murder rate was as low as it was in 1982. Chicago’s murder rate fell relative to other largest 50 largest cities prior to the ban and rose relative to them afterwards. For example, Chicago’s murder rate went from equalling the average for those other cities in 1982, to exceeding their average murder rate by 32 percent in 1992 and by 68 percent in 2002. There is no year after the ban that Chicago’s murder rate fared as well relative to other cities as it did in 1982.

Similar comparisons exist for the top ten largest cities, the US as a whole, or the counties that boarder Chicago. The accompanying figure shows how Chicago’s murder rates changed relative to the rates in the adjacent counties. In the five years before the ban, Chicago’s murder rate fell by 28 percent relative to those counties. (County level crime data only goes back to 1977.) in the five years after the ban, Chicago’s murder rate doubled relative to those other counties.

(more…)

Thomas Paine said that “It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government.”  He did so amidst the long shadow of a centralized government which regarded individual rights as secondary to its own.  Today, “56% of people questioned in a CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey  . . . say they think the federal government’s become so large and powerful that it poses an immediate threat to the rights and freedoms of ordinary citizens.”  They do so in the shadow of a government seeking to take control of nearly 17% of the US economy, if not that portion of our lives, in the name of caring for our health.

For any that have cared to listen to the debates over multi-trillion dollar spending programs, tax hikes, cap and trade or health care, at issue is not simply whether those huge government programs would provide lasting solutions – they will not – at issue is our basic right to Liberty.  Quite frankly, it was never the assumption of the Founding Fathers that it was the role of government to provide a moving target standard of living for Americans.  It was their sincere hope that the government of limited powers they set up would allow people to pursue their lives, Liberty and happiness.  To do so they, wanted to hamstring government’s ability to act – not ours.

Since then, of course, the scale has tipped in favor of government power over our pursuits.  Each step along the way, those concerned with our Liberty have heard the echoes of Senator Daniel Webster when he said:

“Good intentions will always be pleaded for every assumption of authority. It is hardly too strong to say that the Constitution was made to guard the people against the dangers of good intentions. There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.”

As you consider his words, it may worthy to also consider the lives of Americans, at the dawn of these United States, and the lives of Americans today.

(more…)

What would Saul Alinksy do?

In the wake of defeats for the Obama administration last month both with Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory in the bluest of blue states and the Supreme Court Citizens United decision that will let thousands of groups speak more freely about candidates positions’ in the 2010 elections and beyond, that’s the question President Obama and his allies are probably asking. It’s also the question that proponents of limited, constitutional government and free enterprise must be asking in order to anticipate the organized Left’s next moves.

Alinksy was the father of left-wing community organizing. He wrote the book Rules for Radicals and other primers, which explained to would-be leftist organizers how to “search out controversy” and “fan the latent hostilities.” Seeing the world as a never-ending conflict between the “haves and have-nots,” Alinsky wrote In Rules for Radicals that “in war, the end justifies almost any means.”  One community organizer who took Alinsky’s words to heart was a young Barack Obama, who worked for an offshoot of Alinsky’s network of organizations in Chicago in the 1980s. Throughout his career, according to the Washington Post, Obama has “embraced many of Alinsky’s tactics.”

And one tactic in Alinsky’s arsenal dovetails almost perfectly with Obama’s new focus on so-called “financial reform” and his bashing of Wall Street to score political points. One of Alinsky’s most important rules for radicals was that “you do what you can with what you have and clothe it with moral garments.” In this case, the “moral garment” is the supposed interest of shareholders.

Obama and Democrats are pushing legislation they claim would empower average investors against powerful corporate executives. They propose requiring a shareholder vote on everything from CEO pay to – in a move to limit the freedoms in the Citizens United decision — companies’ weighing in on political candidates.

(more…)

The prospect of CNBC analyst Larry Kudlow seeking the Republican and Conservative Party nominations to oppose Sen. Chuck Schumer has become a cause among Tea Party folks, Conservatives, Republicans and many on Wall Street. Not since James L. Buckley won a US Senate seat in 1970 have New York Conservatives been so excited about a statewide political race.

Pick Up the Mantle

I don’t know Kudlow well. We met several times during the Reagan years but it was at Buffalo Congressman Jack Kemp’s 2009 memorial service that I got reacquainted with the pro-growth enthusiast. Kudlow has been on on my STONEzone TEN BESTED DRESSED LISTtm since 2008. I admire him as an unabashed apostle of hope and optimism and opportunity on television and radio. His are the politics of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, who Kudlow calls his mentor.

It goes without saying that Chuck Schumer needs a vigorous challenger; he is perhaps the most odious, pushy, abrasive and self-absorbed jerk in Congress today. His pork-fests are legendary, and he narrowly escaped indictment for corruption as an Assemblyman before becoming the master of the “pay to play” game in Washington.

But Kudlow’s potential candidacy is about something even more important than sending Schumer packing.

(more…)

California Attorney General Jerry Brown seems to be getting a lot of reminders from his gubernatorial challengers Steve Poizner and Meg Whitman about his failed governorship of the state from 1975-1983 when Californian’s endured high unemployment, home foreclosures, large scale labor strikes and fuel shortages at the gas station. Recognizing the failed policies of then Governor Brown, California voters revolted and passed Proposition 13 which is a landmark initiative that limited politician’s ability to arbitrarily raise taxes on California residents.

Over a week ago, Attorney General Jerry Brown got yet another reminder, this time coming from the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. The report “Follow the Money: ACORN, SEIU and their Political Allies” focuses public attention on AG Brown’s failed investigation of ACORN. While some of Brown’s gubernatorial challengers talk of the need for a California Governor to have a spine of steel, AG Brown has instead crumpled like an aluminum can cowardly hiding behind state bureaucrats and a wall of state agencies.

On October 1, 2009, Jerry Brown publicly announced that an investigation had been opened concerning undercover videos that were obtained by citizen journalists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles who videotaped ACORN employees at two California offices. ACORN employees were filmed providing advice regarding tax evasion, prostitution and human smuggling of underage girls. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger was informed by AG Brown in a letter that he had “opened an investigation of both ACORN and the circumstances under which ACORN employees were videotaped.” Since that announcement, AG Brown has found himself at the center of a controversy surrounding the mismanagement of the investigation as well as a potential scandal due to a double standard involving one of his own state employees secretly recording conversations with reporters.

Shortly after ACORN had been alerted to the immanent investigation as a result of AG Brown’s public announcement, ACORN employees at the San Diego, CA office were caught engaging in a massive document dump on October 9, 2009. Those records were retrieved from an unsecured shared public dumpster where they had been thrown revealing sensitive personal, financial and banking information for both clients and employees in addition to revelations about the political inner workings of ACORN’s relationship with major U.S. banks and labor unions.

(more…)

The 2010 Winter Olympics are over. Although the U.S. Men’s hockey team lost the final to Canada, the US closed the games with a total of 37 medals, more than any other country.