Throughout much of our nation’s history, US federalism has moved toward centralizing power within the federal government. Since the post-bailout hysteria and most recent public sector expansion, the issue of states’ rights has had a renaissance. Some Americans long for a system where states have more control to govern. You know, the system our Founders seemed to envision, where each state is an experiment adopting best practices from one another.

While I’m happy that both the PCIP bridge and the eventual change in law will allow many to obtain health coverage, I don’t feel the Affordable Care Act meaningfully addresses any of the issues in our health care system. Namely, the multitude of reasons health care is unaffordable.

Now BP was negligent as Krugman points out, but he concludes that Paul’s stance of personal responsibility is only applied to the poor and powerless. Disregarding that BP will be required to pay for this mess, which Rand Paul supports, perhaps, just perhaps, whatever cronyism is involved because 1) policies meant to help the poor often hurt them (see affordable housing, healthcare and college tuitions) and 2) those who are powerful often have closer access to government, thereby the bigger the government, the more money, power and influence they can extort.

Or perhaps rewriting the past would be a better way to put it. The Obama administration claims its saved between 2.2 and 2.8 million jobs with the stimulus. However, the folks at Biggovernment.com compared the Obama administration’s claims about jobs saved/created to what was said before the stimulus. This would seem like fuzzy math to me:

“It looks like [Goldman Sachs] wants more regulation. The question is: What’s in it for Goldman?… stricter federal liquidity and capital requirements would amount to regulators doing Goldman’s work for Goldman. They want Uncle Sam to mitigate “uncertainty about counterparties’ balance sheets.” That is, they want the government to reduce the risk that Goldman’s debtors or insurers will run into trouble.”

Back in the Middle Ages, the Catholic Church and some other unaffiliated snake oil salesmen, sold what were called indulgences. These indulgences offered penance for a variety of sins and could either commute or completely eliminate one’s arduous trip through Purgatory. Today, we have a similar situation; we have an entire market of carbon credit traders. Basically, you buy offsetting carbon credits (for someone, probably in a third world country, to plant trees or something like that) to make up for your “carbon footprint.”

Sometimes there’s just nothing to say. There is simply no way to put into words how ridiculous it is that Barack Obama, some nine months after he became president has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. This is, after all, the same guy that is escalating the war in Afghanistan! I think it would make more sense if they gave him the Nobel War Prize.

This is just dandy. One would pretty much have to be a blind, state-worshipping d-bag to not realize the Fed played a major role in the financial crisis. But as it goes, the government is spectacular at rewarding failure and punishing successs. So I guess this is, unfortunately, no surprise. Unfortunately, as Judge Andrew Napolitano asks, “who will regulate the Federal Reserve?” Apparently no one.

Two people in the United States have died from swine flu. The regular flu kills several thousand people a year. In fact, many more people have died from the regular flu than the swine flu since the whole thing blew up in the first place. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, 13,000 people have died from the regular, boring flu since January 2009.

Information is a beacon, a cudgel, an olive branch, a deterrent, depending on who wields it and how. Information is so powerful that the assumption of information, even if the information does not actually exist, can have a sobering effect.