Today marks the 48^th anniversary of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and with it, 48 years of conspiracy theories.

The Left has promulgated nearly all of these theories since the day of the assassination in 1963. Kennedy was killed by a communist — someone to the left of him — but yet we’re still told this was some grand conspiracy, involving what would necessarily be dozens or even hundreds of people who orchestrated and executed it (and then kept the secret!) with right wing forces at the center.

Various suspects have included military industrialists, the CIA, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, pro-Israeli groups, oil magnates aligned with Lyndon Johnson, right-wing racists, E. Howard Hunt, and J. Edgar Hoover.

Even at the time, the Kennedys and the mediacouldn’t accept that a lone deranged leftist was responsible. Kennedy, after all, was in Dallas, a hotbed of rightwing extremism as they saw it. Even as the shooting was taking place, Connally yelled out “They’re going to kill us all!” Jacqueline Kennedy didn’t change her clothes until she got back to Washington, stating to Lady Bird Johnson she wanted “them to see what they did to Jack.” (Emphasis mine.) This was the liberal mindset, from the people in the car on out.

Gerald Posner’s 1993 book “Case Closed” makes a strong and convincing argument that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, and for it he’s been demonized as a right wing stooge, a Kennedy-hater, or enforcer of the establishment line, obviously on the payroll of some nefarious right wing phantom.

But Posner did what most of the conspiracy theorists don’t do: look at the actual evidence that exists, and at the life of Lee Harvey Oswald. Why do all these conspiracy theorists typically ignore all that’s known about Oswald? Because there’s a clear trajectory in his activities that led to the assassination.

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Peter Schiff, the president of EuroPacific Capital and sometimes-pundit/author/political-candidate, testified before the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Government Reform and Stimulus Oversight on September 13^th. The video of his testimony has become a minor YouTube hit and was featured prominently this week by Breitbart TV.

Schiff’s rat-a-tat-tat criticisms of government intervention and promotion of common sense economics, right out of the Austrian School, is music to the ears of conservative-libertarian types. He was a one-man laissez faire quote machine, with lines like:

“One of the riskiest things you can do in America is hire someone.”

“Demand doesn’t come from things that aren’t produced.”

“Regulations substantially increase the cost of employing people.”

“Infrastructure spending drains the economy of resources.”

“You can always see . . . the jobs government creates. What you can’t see are the jobs they destroy.”

“All the government can do is rearrange the resources, it doesn’t create any wealth.”

“An economy has to be based in savings, investing, and production.”

Schiff centered his testimony around explaining, through one statistic and common sense pronouncement after another, why fiscal and monetary policy — specifically government stimulus and low interest rates — are dragging down the overall economy, destroying jobs, devaluing the currency, causing businesses to flee the country, and resulting in all sorts of unintended consequences.

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I happened to be in a hair salon when the news first hit. The shock was palpable as word spread from the employees to their clients. There was surprise, then sadness. It was one of those moments some people will always remember exactly where they were and what they were doing at the time.

Upon returning home, sketchy details emerged on internet-news sites, and the Facebook and Twitter-sphere were abuzz as people came to terms with the sad reality.

Amy Winehouse was dead.

This particular singer, who’s only semi-legitimate claim to fame was an appropriate ditty about her refusal to go to rehab, should have surprised no one who bothered to care when she reportedly topped her own previous attempts at excess with a mix of cocaine, heroine and horse tranquilizers; or if you’re to believe her parents, a lack of alcohol.

This singer-turned-public-spectacle became the latest martyr of the Me Generations who elevate practitioners of extreme-hedonism-to-the-point-of-death to romantic notions of victimhood. You know, troubled creative geniuses struggling with enormous and unexpected success. Pushing a 27-year-old body to the point of death through partying takes actual work, and an absolute inability to control one’s cravings.

The next weekend, news hit that a Chinook helicopter had been shot down during a raid in Afghanistan, killing all 30 on board, including 22 Navy SEALs, many reportedly from the elite Team 6. Loss of life during a time of war is tragic, but military casualties are an expected and necessary evil and cost of wars fought for an ostensibly greater good.

But there’s something especially devastating – both psychologically and militarily – about losing so many of the very best. To the extent the internet blogosphere and Facebook are any indications of public sentiment, at least among certain demographics, the public expressions of sadness and grief at this event was mostly confined to those few pro-military individuals. The public expressions of shock and sadness were far less than the number reserved for the drug-addicted dead singer/public spectacle, and only one brave person in my sphere of online friends dared to call out the general population on their sad priorities.

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Let’s talk about fairness. As President Obama himself explained in a debate back in 2008, the tax code isn’t and shouldn’t be structured for maximizing either revenue or economic growth.

It’s about fairness. And by fairness, he means a highly progressive system where a small percentage of the population known as “the rich” (a group continually being defined down) pays more and more of their income to the Treasury, ostensibly to be redistributed to those who “need it”, with need being defined by Obama and his gangs of central planners.

In the current “unfair” system Obama ostensibly disdains, the wealthiest 1% of households pay 38% of all income taxes, the top 5% (those earning more than $160,000) account for 59% of all federal income taxes, while a Tax Policy Center study showed the bottom 45% paid no income taxes in 2010.

Looking at these numbers, anyone truly concerned with fairness — not vengeance — must conclude the wealthy are shouldering an unfair burden in a system in which they stand to benefit the least.

Obviously we all pay taxes of one sort or another. There are payroll taxes, Social Security taxes, property taxes, sales taxes. At the local and state levels, the wealthiest pay a higher percentage of the tax burden, because they’re buying more expensive properties and purchasing a greater number of goods and services with their disposable income.

But they benefit equally from laws protecting their property, police and fire departments, roads, public schools, and public parks and institutions. (Those who send their kids to private schools pay the cost of those schools plus the cost of the public school, for which they receive nothing in return.) Those who pay less or nothing have equal access to these protections and services.

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Back in the 80s, Wendy’s, the fast-food giant, ran a very successful ad campaign known as “Where’s the beef?”…

Perhaps the Republicans should revise the famous line for an ad campaign and call it “Where’s the plan?”.

Obama has spent his entire presidency talking about “his plan” while denigrating and disparaging plans of other serious legislators or endorsing plans crafted by busy tax-and-spend congressional Democrats. He famously referred to “his plan” during the health care debate, promising all sorts of goodies to everyone with an interest with statements like “if you like your like plan, you can keep it,” while assuring us all that his plan would lower costs and insure more individuals, regardless of the economic illogic of this argument.

In the end, the law forever stamped as “Obamacare” was a 2,000+ page hodgepodge thrown together by years of busybody work from the desk drawers of congressional staffers, professional theorists and lawyers, all with an interest in increasing the regulatory and taxation State. We never actually saw Obama’s Plan, because there wasn’t one. None of his comments or predictions had to be true, because, well, at the time the plan wasn’t his. Now he owns it.

When Paul Ryan presented his Road Map — a serious long-term budget proposal that seeks to incrementally decrease the burden of runaway entitlements with as little pain as possible — Obama dismissed it as “anti-American”. Reasonable people can disagree with aspects of Ryan’s plan, but to simply dismiss it as anything less than a serious attempt to get us on the road to fiscal recovery is not serious leadership.

At best, it’s agitation from a community organizer.

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On the morning of April 12, 1981, I had the privilege of doing something few other 6-year-olds got to do: I watched the very first Space Shuttle launch from the air near Cape Canaveral.

My father, at the time, owned a helicopter charter company and was flying press runs and national news anchors from hotels to the Cape (Dan Rather was nice enough to let me get some sleep in his hotel room the night before the launch). At the time, the launch of Columbia marked the end of a six-year American-less era in space, as the Shuttle program succeeded the Apollo program that by the year 1975 had become a service vehicle for the joint Russian Skylab program.

The optimism that spring morning was palatable, as thousands of people camped out all night and filled the causeway over the Banana River and lined the streets and beaches of Titusville and beyond. They had reason to be optimistic about this new age of space exploration. This “Space Shuttle” — designed in the 1960s, built and tested in the 1970s — would usher in a new era of cheap and frequent manned space flight. In fact, it would become so commonplace people would probably cease to notice. With space flight being affordable and accessible, it was only a matter of time before the idea of growing up to become an astronaut wouldn’t require all those years of studying and hard work; why, anyone could go!

As we know now, it was not to be. NASA’s first attempt to put a civilian in space ended in spectacular tragedy when the Shuttle Challenger broke up during liftoff on a frigid day in January, 1986.

This disaster, later attributed technically to an O-ring failure in the shuttle’s solid rocket booster, but more broadly attributed to a rushed and overambitious schedule and bureaucratic negligence, grounded the program for 2 1/2 years.

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Polling data, as well as anecdotal evidence suggests two things: Liberals especially and even some who are loosely conservative and/or those who are economically near-illiterate, assume A) money grows on trees; and B) anything the government does can only be done by the government.

I often think for a group of people (the Left) who pride themselves on their intelligence, their solutions are always predictably simplistic and uncreative. How difficult is it, really, to identify a problem, and then always resort to the exact same “solution”: more spending of money; or rather, more transferring of money from one place to another?

Social Security is a prime example. If the federal government did not administer Social Security, would we suddenly see American streets filled with starving, destitute elderly people? Would they simply wither away and die without this precious life-saving entitlement from the federal government? This assumes there would be a need within the economy no one would think to fill.

If the federal government stopped providing this service, would it no longer exist, or would enterprising financial institutions fill the void? It’s not far-fetched to imagine you could set up a very similar insurance system with a banking institution, taking money paid into it to use as savings, loaning it back out and investing it, much like the way annuities work. Call it a mandatory annuity.

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