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This is all about the control of information. It’s not about piracy, or terrorism or the children.

But what if people think it’s about the children. It’s not like anybody is going to read these bills anyway. Call it something that everyone has to vote for, just because of the name. Call it something like “Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act”. Oh wait, that one already exists.

In another video, Peter Schiff goes to Occupy Wall Street to debate some of the people out in the street. With his “I am the 1%, let’s talk”, the arguments begin. My favorite is the watching the woman’s face at 2:50.

View the full version of this video.

I want to highlight a few pieces that a found particularly entertaining.

The Federal Reserve is accountable to the Congress for two objectives–maximum employment and price stability, on an equal footing.

While those stated objectives are accurate, accountability is questionable. With unemployment reaching 10% and a 100-year record of depreciating the dollar by over 95%. If they are accountable, Congress isn’t holding them to it.

From the Associated Press:

During a speech Tuesday in Boston, Bernanke said the steps the Fed took during the crisis proved to be successful.

Really? Successful? By what measure? Didn’t you just say that the economy was  “close to faltering”?

A Reuters article from 4 October states that:

Earlier this month, Bernanke told members of Congress that the economy “is close to faltering.” He assured lawmakers that the central bank was prepared to take further steps to try to bolster economic growth.

Also from the Associated Press:

Minutes of the Sept. 20-21 meeting reflected the policymakers’ uncertainty over why the economy is struggling to grow and create jobs more than two years after the recession has ended.

So which one is it? Did your steps prove to be successful? Is the economy close to faltering? Do you just not know what’s going on? Does it even matter if you aren’t accountable for the things you do?

Here’s an excerpt:

“Mr. Speaker–I have as much respect for the memory of the deceased, and as much sympathy for the sufferings of the living, if suffering there be, as any man in this House, but we must not permit our respect for the dead or our sympathy for a part of the living to lead us into an act of injustice to the balance of the living. I will not go into an argument to prove that Congress has no power to appropriate this money as an act of charity. Every member upon this floor knows it. We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money. Some eloquent appeals have been made to us upon the ground that it is a debt due the deceased. Mr. Speaker, the deceased lived long after the close of the war; he was in office to the day of his death, and I have never heard that the government was in arrears to him. Every man in this House knows it is not a debt. We cannot, without the grossest corruption, appropriate this money as the payment of a debt. We have not the semblance of authority to appropriate it as a charity. Mr. Speaker, I have said we have the right to give as much money of our own as we please. I am the poorest man on this floor. I cannot vote for this bill, but I will give one week’s pay to the object, and if every member of Congress will do the same, it will amount to more than the bill asks.” He took his seat. Nobody replied. The bill was put upon its passage, and, instead of passing unanimously, as was generally supposed, and as, no doubt, it would, but for that speech, it received but few votes, and, of course, was lost.

The rest of the article explains what drove Crockett to give that speech. It’s worth the time to listen to it.

Which is which? Answer after the jump.

Answers:

Obama: top
Boehner: bottom

There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and  concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.

- John Adams in a letter to Jonathan Jackson, Oct. 2, 1789

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right… The United States has never developed an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent. Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds.

- H.L. Mencken in Minority Report: H.L. Mencken’s Notebooks (1956)

(One of the “Snowflake” memos written by Donald Rumsfeld during his tenure as U.S. Secretary of defense, from Harper’s Magazine, May 2011).

Via TYWKIWDBI.

Philip takes those huge numbers, divides by 100 million, then compares the government to a family.  I’ve posted before about how numbers without context can be confusing.

We have a family that is spending $38,200 per year. The family’s income is $21,700 per year. The family adds $16,500 in credit card debt every year in order to pay its bills. After a long and difficult debate among family members, keeping in mind that it was not going to be possible to borrow $16,500 every year forever, the parents and children agreed that a $380/year premium cable subscription could be terminated. So now the family will have to borrow only $16,120 per year.

Read the rest of his post.