Seems to be a popular idea – from Bloomberg:

A majority of Americans are dissatisfied with the nation’s independent central bank, saying the U.S. Federal Reserve should either be brought under tighter political control or abolished outright, a poll shows…

…Americans across the political spectrum say the Fed shouldn’t retain its current structure of independence. Asked if the central bank should be more accountable to Congress, left independent or abolished entirely, 39 percent said it should be held more accountable and 16 percent that it should be abolished. Only 37 percent favor the status quo…

Republicans and Independents are more likely than Democrats to favor abolishing the Fed – naturally, as Republicans and Independents are developing a hearty mistrust of government, while Democrats still tend to look upon government as lord and master of us all. But the big news here is that a majority, overall, favor at least some stern action to bring the Federal Reserve under control.

I am one of those in favor of abolishing – and, just to really bury the idea, I’m also in favor of a return to the gold standard for our currency. We daren’t have a bank which can manipulate the value of our money. What has happened since the Federal Reserve was created is a gigantic erosion of the value of our money – depending on how you look at it, the dollar of 1913 (the year the Fed was created) has lost 90 to 99% of its value. If your grandpa had put a dollar aside in 1910 thinking that it’d be great to give you in 2010, he’d find a dime…or maybe a penny…there to give you today. Our wealth has essentially been stolen by the central bank – and given to the various banks around the United States and the world which routinely screw the pooch in their “investments”.

Get rid of the Fed, get back to coining money and only issuing set amounts of paper currency backed by gold and silver in the US Treasury. This will allow us to really have an economy based upon hard work, savings and careful investment…people take care of real money, after all…fake money printed up at will by the Federal Reserve? Its treated like Monopoly money by the banksters and bureaucrats, and thus our collapsed economy and $13 trillion in debt.

Oh, and by the way – you know how its said that everyone has a purpose in life? Well, we’ve all kinda wondered what Ron Paul’s purpose is – turns out, he’s authored a book called End the Fed…and he’s going to be in charge of House oversight of the Federal Reserve. The stars have aligned and the man and the hour have met…

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From The Hill:

The Senate on Thursday dealt a severe blow to the repeal of the “Don’t ask, don’t tell” law, dimming the chances for the Clinton-era ban to be scrapped this year.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) failed to garner the necessary 60 votes for a procedural motion to start considering the 2011 defense authorization bill, which contains a provision to repeal the ban on openly gay people serving in the military. The final vote was 57-40…

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-CT) and Susan Collins (R-ME) are trying to revive it as a stand-alone bill to be voted on after the tax deal (the reason it failed at cloture is because the GOP has clearly stated that tax and budgetary issues must come first – no vote on anything until that is done). We’ll see what happens if they manage to bring it up again – and cloture doesn’t necessarily mean approval because a lot of “2012 Democrats” are looking over their shoulder wondering how such a vote will appear at election time.

The bottom line on this is that DADT should not be considered in this Congress – it is has been soundly rejected by the American people and thus only the most pressing of issues should be considered before adjournment. DADT, plus or minus, is not a vital issue for the United States at the moment – it can be addressed next year.

More on that great economic recovery Obama has brought us – from Bloomberg:

U.S. home values are poised to drop by more than $1.7 trillion this year amid rising foreclosures and the expiration of homebuyer tax credits, said Zillow Inc., a closely held provider of home price data.

This year’s estimated decline, more than the $1.05 trillion drop in 2009…

Of course, it all started in 2006 – but Obama said he had the fixin’ for what ails us…where is it?

Complete and utter failure – that is Obamunism.

The unforgettable voice of Nat King Cole

Once again, how’s that recovery thingy working for ya? From the Wall Street Journal:

More people tapped food stamps to pay for groceries in September as the recession and lackluster recovery have prompted more Americans to turn to government safety net programs to make ends meet.

Some 42.9 million people collected food stamps last month, up 1.2% from the prior month and 16.2% higher than the same time a year ago, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Nationwide 14% of the population relied on food stamps as of September but in some states the percentage was much higher…

One federal program I don’t have much complaint about is food stamps – regardless of what else is going on, no one in America should ever go hungry (though, of course, we must continually check to make certain we aren’t just supporting layabouts who can find work if they’d but try). But you can’t build an economy on food stamps – nor on unemployment benefits. We need work – and not just any, old work but work which creates wealth.

We’ve been entirely asinine in our economic policies since the start of the recession. We should be building and expanding farms, factories and mines but all we’ve done is bail out banks and tinker around with nearly useless things like “green jobs” and “shovel ready projects”. If we’re going to spend trillions more (and we will) over the next few years, then we should at least get something out of it – next “quantitative easing” by the Fed should result not in more money for the banksters but, instead, involve flashing some cash at people who hold down real jobs. If Bennie and the boys had wanted to do something at least modestly useful they could have sent every living American $10,000 each over the past three years…certainly would have done more for the economy than helping crooks stay rich (and we’d be no more bankrupt today for doing that than we are, anyway).

Unfortunately, I don’t think too many people in DC even realize what the problem is, let alone have any conception on how to fix it. Look for more people to be thrown on food stamps and unemployment…our economy burns down, our leaders fiddle away…

HAT TIP: Mish’s

From Life News:

A judge has issued a ruling saying a Cincinnati Planned Parenthood abortion business rushed an abortion it did on a 14-year-old girl who was a victim of sexual abuse.

The case was brought by parents whose minor daughter had an abortion at a Planned Parenthood facility without their knowledge after being sexually abused by her adult coach.

The parents allege that Planned Parenthood failed to comply with the statute requiring reports of known or suspected child abuse as well as Ohio’s parental consent statute…

The girl in question was being sexually abused from the age of 13 by her 22 year old soccer coach. The coach signed off on the abortion rather than the girl’s parents and PP went along with it. This is part of a pattern for PP – always being willing to help a child molester dispose of evidence. The creep was eventually caught and sent to jail – but that doesn’t get PP off the hook.

Congresswoman Michelle Bachman (R-MN) has proposed cutting PP’s federal funding and here is just one more reason why we should – any group which connives at the sexual abuse of children has no business obtaining taxpayer funding.

Looks like it, if Reid will give Collins (R-ME) what she wants – from NRO’s The Corner:

With Sen. Scott Brown now favoring the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, plus all 58 Democratic Senators, pro-repeal forces need only one more vote to end debate, and move forward with the broader Pentagon spending bill that would wipe the controversial law out, effecting one of Obama’s campaign promises. And many are speculating that the one vote could come from Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), as early as tonight. But she’s issued Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid an ultimatum. TPM has the scoop:

Here’s what Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) told Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that she needs to support a full Senate debate on the defense authorization bill (the vehicle for Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal): 15 guaranteed votes on amendments (10 for Republicans, and 5 for Democrats), and somewhere around four days to debate the bill…

Collins wants the amendments and wants the GOP to pick their own (I guess in normal times Reid would pick which GOP amendments would come up for a debate and vote). This could get interesting – after all, if you open up the Senate to GOP proposals you’re likely to get things which the “2012 Democrats” (ie, those red State Democrats up for election in 2012) dare not vote against…but which may prove hard to swallow for the liberal base Obama needs for 2012. Collins is a mostly pain in the neck RINO, but this is a bit clever on her part – if we’re to be stuck with Reid shoving through something which should wait until the new Congress next month, then we should at least reap some benefit for going along.

Unfortunately, this information hasn’t made it on the media’s radar.

The release by Julian Assange’s web site Wikileaks of classified documents reveals that U.S. military intelligence discovered chemical weapons labs, encountered insurgents who were specialists in the creation of toxins, and uncovered weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. However, Washington, DC officials and the news media have ignored this information.

One of the WikiLeaks document dumps reveals that as late as 2008, American troops continued to find WMD in the region.

There are numerous mentions of chemical and biological weapons in the WikiLeaks documents, however the U.S. media appear only interested in those portions of the leaked material that highlight actions that are viewed as embarrassing for the U.S. military such as the accusation that U.S. commanders were aware of abuse and “torture” of prisoners by Iraqi soldiers and police officers.

[…]

According to the latest WikiLeaks document “dump,” Saddam’s toxic arsenal, significantly reduced after the Gulf War, remained intact. Jihadists, insurgents and foreign (possibly Iranian) agitators turned to these stockpiles during the Iraq conflict and may have brewed up their own deadly agents, according to the WikiLeaks web site.

During that time, former Iraqi General Georges Sada, Saddam’s top commander, detailed the transfers of Iraq’s WMD. “There [were] weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,” Mr. Sada said. “I am confident they were taken over.”

So, it appears that our intelligence agencies were correct. So were the intelligence agencies of England, Germany, France, etc. who all concluded that Saddam had WMD. Of course, the reason why the media isn’t reporting this information is that this means that Bush was right, too.

Sorry, folks, just wasn’t feeling well and so couldn’t put together something good for the AM. Here are some stories I would have like to have written about:

Hispanics share the GOP’s conservative morality. We can work on this to eventually get a majority of Hispanic votes.

A lot more Catholics come to Congress – and now they are more likely to be genuine rather than “cafeteria” Catholics. United with our Evangelical brothers and sisters, this promises to make pro-family and pro-morality policy more possible in Congress.

Obama has granted 222 waivers to his own, signature health care law. If this doesn’t tell you that its all about political power instead of health care, then nothing else will.

Chinese kids crush Americans in education. This is because our education system is entirely wrecked – and wrecked by the Ruling Class’ unions which views education as a means of power rather than as a means of educating kids. Until we break the power of the unions – and thus take politics out of the education equation – we’ll never be able to fix this.

Arsenic-based life forms announced by NASA turn out to be bogus? This just further confirms me in my view that we are alone in the universe – no little, green men from Mars, anywhere. Unless, that is, God decided to make a host of different life forms all over the place…’cause without God doing it, the mathematical possibilities of life arising twice are nil (and even arising once are fabulously small).

The American Catholic gets a fund-raising appeal from Planned Parenthood. An excellent read.

An alternative way to deal with Assange.