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Here's this year's Obama State of the Union 2012 News and Commentary roundup. If you missed Obama's 2012 State of the Union Address Tuesday night, don't worry. Looks like you didn't miss anything new: Familiar Rhetoric, Failed Record The "dumbing down" of America-- Obama's 2012 State of the Union Address was written at an 8th grade reading level for the third straight year : Obama's SOTU addresses have the lowest average Flesch-Kincaid score of any modern president; Obama owns three of the six lowest-scoring addresses since FDR. For the third consecutive State of the Union Address, Barack Obama spoke in clear, plain terms. And for the third straight Address, the President's speech was written at an eighth-grade level. In Obama's own words: "My message is simple." But was it too simplistic ? A Smart Politics study of the 70 orally delivered State of the Union Addresses since 1934 finds the text of Obama...

Lew Rockwell, chairman at the Ludwig Von Mises Institute , says that Greece isn't getting bailed out, but the actual banks that own the Greek debt are. He argues that the banking establishment needs to go and shouldn't be bailed out as a risky deal goes bad. Wes Messamore , Editor in Chief, T H L Articles | Author's Page

"The Cato Institute seeks a Junior Web Designer to work with the web staff on the design and development of the Cato Institute's online content. Some of the duties of the position include: designing and updating webpages, e-newsletters, and mobile pages using the Adobe suite of products; writing and editing XHTML, CSS and JavaScript; database/ content entry; and other tasks that may arise during the day-to-day management of multiple websites and online channels. The position requires the candidate to have an undergraduate degree or equivalent experience in web design; a high level of proven design skill and technical proficiency; a solid understanding of the Adobe suite, web standards and usability, XHTML, HTML5 and CSS2/3; and knowledge of current and emerging digital design conventions. Qualified candidates should email their resumes in Word or PDF format with salary requirements to webmaster@cato.org ." --- More job and internship opportunities at The Cato Ins...

Writes Michael D. Tanner for The Cato Institute : The clock is slowly ticking toward Aug. 2, the date on which the U.S. faces "fiscal Armageddon" — according to the Obama administration — unless Congress agrees to raise the debt ceiling. But would we? The Obama administration, as well as much of the media and many economists, tend to equate failure to raise the debt limit with default. That's not precisely true. The Treasury Department estimates that the federal government will collect a bit more than $203 billion in taxes during August — roughly $36 billion just in the first three days. But, during August, the federal government is expected to spend $307 billion. That is why we have a problem. If the government is not able to borrow more money after Aug. 2, spending will have to be reduced to the amount of revenue that the government has. That would require roughly a 44 percent cut in federal spending. This will almost certainly hurt. But it's not the same...

Anthony Gregory: Still not worth it. "The U.S. has finally killed Osama bin Laden, the press and the administration report. Many will say this vindicates the war on terrorism, but it doesn’t." Read his entire piece at the Independent Institute . Darien Sumner: Now Libya makes more sense "Ah, now the Libyan war is beginning to make a lot more sense from a political standpoint. The government needed a new bogeyman to chase." Read the rest at LewRockwell.com . Radley Balko: Osama Won "In The Looming Tower, the Pulitzer-winning history of al-Qaeda and the road to 9/11, author Lawrence Wright lays out how Osama bin Laden’s motivation for the attacks that he planned in the 1990s, and then the September 11 attacks, was to draw the U.S. and the West into a prolonged war—an actual war in Afghanistan, and a broader global war with Islam. Osama got both. And we gave him a prolonged war in Iraq to boot. By the end of Obama’s first term, we’ll probably t...

Last month, in November the Mises Institute of Canada was unveiled. This is a historic moment for a nation so riddled with collectivism and socialism. (Not that the US is in very much better condition) To quote their About page "The Ludwig Von Mises institute of Canada was founded in November of 2010 in order to spread the teachings of the Austrian School of Economics to Canada and around the world. Please sign up to receive the Canadian Mises Daily in your in box. It has been 80 years since the beginning of what later became known as the “great depression”. Canada made many of the same mistakes that the United States made when it came to economics and state intervention in the market that Herbert Hoover and FDR did. A quote from R.B. Bennett (Conservative PM of Canada, August 7, 1930 – October 23, 1935) On his own Canadian take on the New Deal “In my mind reform means government intervention. It means government control and regulation. It means the end of Laissez-faire …. I...

'One of Israel's leading political "insiders" is insisting that there has been a dramatic transformation of President Barack Obama's strategy in the Middle East. Israel is now back "In" as the White House occupant who had called for engagement with Iran not so long ago, is now placing the threat of a nuclear Iran on the top of his diplomatic agenda at the same time that his administration is also expressing concerns over the expected leadership changes in Cairo and Riyadh...' Read the entire article at Cato . Matt Collins , Regular Columnist Articles | Author's Page

You can now pre-order historian and Mises Institute scholar, Dr. Tom Woods' new book Nullification: How To Resist Federal Tyranny In The 21st Century . Tom was recently on Lew Rockwell's show giving an interview about the upcoming book. You can listen to it here . Lew Rockwell summarizes the interview: "Thanks to the internet, Americans can learn about such forbidden ideas as the Principles of 1798, when Jefferson and Madison laid out the idea that to give the central government the sole ability to interpret the constitution was the path to tyranny, and that the states have the right and the duty to oppose tyrannical actions by the feds. Regimists try to demonize the idea of nullification, as they attempt to demonize all ideas that undermine centralized power, but that is not scaring libertarians, Tea Party people, and other dissidents. Nullification, decentralization, self-government, self-determination, even secession: the time of these un-PC ideas is here, and the Woo...

Writes Arnold Kling for the Cato Institute : Recently, the Federal Reserve has significantly altered the procedures and goals that it had followed for decades. It has more than doubled its balance sheet, paid interest to banks on reserves held as deposits with the Fed, made decisions about which institutions to prop up and which should be allowed to fail, invested in assets that expose taxpayers to large losses, and raised questions about how it will avoid inflation despite an unprecedented increase in the monetary base. We should document why the Fed took each step, what the expected results were, and whether those results were achieved. What is surprising is not that many congressional colleagues support Rep. Ron Paul's (R-TX) bill calling for an audit of the Fed. Remarkably, there is significant opposition to such oversight, and the political prospects for undertaking such an audit are relatively bleak. This paper has three main sections. The first section looks at opposition t...

In this excellent video, the executive vice president of the Cato Institute , David Boaz contends that "libertarianism is the application of science and reason to the study of politics and public policy." W. E. Messamore , Editor in Chief Articles | Author's Page

Source: Libertarian Duality Symbol By Daryl Luna, Editor at: *In Defense of the Constitution* The Cato Institute has an interesting piece on the libertarian-influenced change that may be coming to the political landscape: Libertarians Lead the Independent Shift from Obama The report's authors are quick to point out that many of the independent votes swinging away from the Obama Administration and the Democratically-controlled Congress belong to libertarians who abandoned support for Republicans, disillusioned by the GOP's big government ways, but are now standing against the Obama team for the same reasons. After pointing to evidence of an emerging libertarian force for change, the authors conclude: 'Libertarians are emerging as a force within U.S. politics. While political leaders such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee and media stars like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are icons to a "conservative base," it is not yet clear what political leaders might represe...

Every Republican should watch this excellent video by the Cato Institute . ObamaCare was modeled after RomneyCare in Massachusetts. A man who socialized medicine in his state should not be a potential front-runner for the GOP's nomination. In what kind of twisted world is that possible? Hat tip: Grant Davies

From the Cato Institute : (Un)Happy Tax Day By: Tad DeHaven "Today is that unofficial American holiday where we mourn the loss of a year’s worth of productive private resources to our bloated federal government. And it’s not just the actual dollars paid to Uncle Sam – it’s also the economic loss due to all the time and money wasted trying to comply with an increasingly complex tax code:" Click here to read the rest of the article and see some truly startling graphs and figures. The Reason Foundation Lower and Simplify Taxes! By: John Stossel "How'd we get to this point? U.S taxes were once simple! The government funded itself on tariffs and excise taxes. It didn't violate our privacy by asking us how much we made or how many dependents we have. But in 1913, the politicians decided they needed an income tax. At first, they took little money: just 1 percent on incomes between $20,000 and $50,000. Those were big incomes—adjusted for inflation, $50,000 is $1.1 mil...

This video was produced by Caleb Brown and Austin Bragg . The U.S. tax code gets more complex every year. It violates civil liberties and, left unchanged, will leave the United States at a powerful competitive disadvantage in years to come. Chris Edwards, Director of Tax Policy Studies, Senior Fellow Daniel J. Mitchell and Director of Information Policy Studies Jim Harper dissect the troubling aspects of our tax system.

The Cato Institute State of the Union Fact Check (H.T. Government Mess ) The Ludwig von Mises Institute The Address Obama Should Have Given But what if the president discovered the writings of people like Henry Hazlitt, Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand? What might such such an address have been like, and how might those in the audience have reacted? In a new piece I've written called, "The Address Obama Should Have Given - For a Change to Freedom," I imagine such a State of the Union address for a change to greater freedom, and suggest what it would have said. The Independent Institute The Audacity of Obama's State of the Union This is a decent point. Bush racked up the deficit with two off-budget wars, a bloated expansion of Medicare and tax cuts that did not correspond to any cuts in spending. And so what’s Obama propose to halt the deficit from spiraling yet more out of control? "We are prepared to freeze government spending fo...

What do some of the libertarian think tanks have to say on the recent information breach of East Anglia's Climate Research Center? Read on to find out: The Ludwig von Mises Institute Science or Nonscience? Hacked or possibly leaked emails appear to indicate that a lot of what passes for climate-change science is propaganda. Data appears to have been filtered, altered, or falsified, in order to deny the obvious: the earth is not continuing to warm up in accordance with climate change models; global temperature has been fluctuating for hundreds of thousands of years due to natural variation; and the earth is no warmer nowadays than it has been at several prior times in history. The Cato Institute Cato Fellow Patrick J. Michaels Speaks Out ClimateGate - Is Global Warming driven by science or ideology? from Atlas Global Initiative on Vimeo . Patrick J. Michaels on The Bill Handel Show Patrick J. Michaels on The Laura Ingraham Show The Independent Institute The "Scientific...

T H L 's last lineup of commentary from libertarian "think tanks" focused on America's military policy in Afghanistan. Today's Think Tank Lineup TM centers on the 20th Anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, which was yesterday. America's great libertarian think tanks had a lot of important things to say: The Reason Foundation Our Dangerous Cold War Nostalgia Communism was the greatest catastrophe of the 20th century, and one of the greatest in human history. Twenty years ago, suddenly and improbably, it fell into its death throes. It was the most dramatic, life-affirming, and miraculous event of our time. And for those of us in the West, it is one from which we have yet to recover. The Cato Institute Celebrating The Fall of the Wall On Nov. 9, 1989, the Berlin Wall, the most dramatic symbol of the most grotesque human tyranny ever to plague the globe, was opened. Free, free at last, shouted residents of half a continent and beyond. So...

Last week, Ryan Jaroncyk and I had the exciting privilege of interviewing Cato scholar and Foreign Policy Analyst, Malou Innocent . We ended up covering America's overall foreign policy and what principles should direct it, the war in Afghanistan, the war against Al-Qaeda, Obama's undeserved Nobel Peace Prize, the widely-ignored PTSD epidemic in our military, nuclear policy, and ideas for revising U.S. foreign policy to keep America safe. Below is a text transcript of the first half of this hour long interview. You are free to browse and read it at your leisure, but I highly recommend that you listen to the entire interview here . Wes Messamore : Malou? You're on the air! Malou Innocent : Thank you for having me. Wes Messamore : Ryan, you there? Ryan Jaroncyk : Yes I am! Hello, Wes. Hello, Malou. Malou Innocent : Hey Ryan. Wes Messamore : It was good corresponding with you to get this all set up. I want to start off with your fundamental underlying principles that infor...

This is the second installment of the Think Tank Lineup , a new feature here at T H L : a regular round-up consisting of short excerpts from- with links to- articles from the various liberty-oriented think tanks. In last week's lineup , we put our finger to the pulse of America's libertarian think tanks to see what they thought about health care reform. (To summarize, it should involve LESS, not more government.) This week, the libertarian think tanks are also in agreement: a more successful national defense strategy should involve less troops in Afghanistan and a more focused mission, but that if America does choose to escalate in Afghanistan, it had better send A LOT more troops than 40 or 80 thousand, and win a swift, decisive victory. The Cato Institute Afghanistan, The "Graveyard of Empires" The Ludwig von Mises Institute The Afghan Disaster In the private sector, there is always a test of success. The business must make a profit. It can sustain some losses, but ...

I am introducing a new feature here at The Humble Libertarian called the "Think Tank Lineup," which as you can imagine, will be a regular round-up consisting of short excerpts from, with links to, articles from the various liberty-oriented think tanks. Libertarian and conservative think tanks are aptly named, as they are truly the "heavy artillery" of the liberty movement, providing the intellectual and factual firepower our movement needs to combat the waves of disinformation and misunderstanding that sweep regularly over the chattering classes. As such, I want to feature their work a little more regularly and help you all tap into the great resources they have available in one easy, convenient place. Today's Think Tank Lineup will center on the debate over health insurance / health care reform: The Mises Institute Is Emergency Care a Failed Market? How, then, would truly free-market hospitals handle patients who are now free riders? There is every reason to ...