Progressives seem to think that if the government provides it, it is "free". False, someone still has to pay for it. Ben Shapiro proves that Obama does not understand the real meaning of "free":

President Obama says he is a fan of the free market. Back in September, Obama spoke to Wall Street. He stated, "I have always been a strong believer in the power of the free market." He then explained that he wanted common-sense regulation of the market: "Common-sense rules of the road don't hinder the market, they make the market stronger. Indeed, they are essential to ensuring that our markets function fairly and freely."

To paraphrase Spanish dueler Inigo Montoya from "The Princess Bride": President Obama, you keep using the phrase "free markets." I do not think it means what you think it means.

Here is how the free market works: open competition among sellers, informed bidding among buyers. Sellers are responsible for competing; buyers are responsible for informing themselves. When the government pledges to increase competition or keep buyers informed, the market is no longer free. And when the government makes those pledges and then fails to enforce them, the free market is utterly perverted.

Unfortunately, President Obama's favorite "common-sense" regulations attack both sides of the free market: They restrict competition among sellers while providing false guarantees to buyers. They require that sellers charge certain prices or meet certain conditions, and they incentivize buyers not to do their research – after all, the government will ensure that no one puts bad products into the marketplace, right?

Thomas Sowell explains economics in a way that rings with clarity and truth – don't miss his book "Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy"

Wrong. Goldman Sachs is a perfect example of how the quasi-free market championed by Obama leads to chaos. On Monday, McClatchy Newspapers reported that Goldman Sachs, the nation's leading investment bank, profited handsomely from the downturn in the housing market by falsely selling mortgage-backed securities as triple-A rated investments. The securities were actually closer to junk. In 2006 and 2007, Goldman sold more than $40 billion in mortgage-backed securities, meanwhile betting against the housing market in shady ways.

The question isn't whether Goldman committed legal fraud here, although the indicators say that Goldman did. The real question is why buyers would buy these securities. The wizards of finance who bought the mortgage-backed securities while listening to Goldman's triple-A sales line must have been willfully blind – many of these securities were backed by immensely hazardous subprime mortgages. So why did the buyers fall for it?

They fell for it because they assumed that the federal government would prevent fraud. They fell for it for the same reason that Bernie Madoff's investors fell for his scam – the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is supposed to prevent these sorts of things. We pay our taxes so that a government agency will do our research for us and ensure that sales pitches are proper and accurate. We do not want to abide by the age-old aphorism "caveat emptor" – buyer beware. We do not want to be self-informed buyers. We want to be spoon-fed information by our investment advisers, no matter how ridiculous the information.

The only problem is that the federal government has proved itself utterly incapable of preventing fraud. Instead, the federal government provides the illusion of security to buyers while allowing sellers to do anything until proven guilty in a court of law.

The easy solution would be to reinvigorate a healthy sense of self-reliance in investors and buyers – tell Americans to do their own research, to do business with those they trust.

President Obama's solution is to create more regulations – regulations that will undoubtedly be ignored by bad actors and that will undoubtedly hamper honest businessmen.

Walter E. Williams presents the view of Professor Steve H. Hanke:

Hanke says that the most repeated statement about the cause of the U.S. Great Depression is that it was caused by the October 1929 stock market crash. How could that be? By April 1930, the stock market had recovered to its pre-crash level. What is not taught in history books is the Great Depression was caused by a massive government failure. The most important part of that failure were the actions by the Federal Reserve Bank that led to the contraction of the money supply by 25 percent. Then, in the name of saving jobs, Congress enacted the Smoot-Hawley Act in June 1930, which increased U.S. tariffs by more than 50 percent. Other nations retaliated and world trade collapsed. U.S. unemployment rose from 8 percent in 1930 to 25 percent in 1933. In 1932, the Herbert Hoover administration and a Democratic Congress imposed the largest tax increase in U.S. history, raising the top tax rate on income from 25 percent to 63 percent. The Roosevelt administration followed these destructive policies with New Deal legislation that massively regulated the economy and extended the Great Depression to after World War II.

Have today's politicians and their economic advisers learned anything from yesteryear's policy that turned what would have been a short, sharp downturn in the economy into a 16-year affair? The answer is very little. Professor Hanke argues that the chief enabler of both the Great Depression and our latest economic downturn is the Federal Reserve Bank, who sees itself as America's systemic risk regulator. This is the world upside down, Hanke explains: The Federal Reserve is the systemic risk.

Don't miss Ron Paul's latest best-selling book, in which he urges citizens and elected officials alike to "End the Fed"

How about a bit of history? Between 1787 and 1930, our nation has seen both mild and severe economic downturns, sometimes called panics, that have ranged from one to seven years. During that interval, there was no thought that Congress or the president should intervene in the economy to enact stimulus packages, jobs programs or massive corporate handouts. Probably, the reason that no one thought to do so was that there was no constitutional authority to do so. It took the Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt administrations to massively and unconstitutionally intervene in the economy and, with the help of a frightened, derelict U.S. Supreme Court, turn what might have been a two- or three-year sharp downturn into our longest depression.

Professor Hanke says that the lesson to be drawn from business cycle history is that, if left to run their natural course, severe downturns are followed by rapid snapbacks. The 1921 recession is a good example where wholesale prices, industrial production and manufacturing employment fell by 30 percent or more and reached their low in mid-1921. There was little government intervention, at least by today's standards, and the economy recovered naturally; and by early 1922, it had fully recovered and the nation was off to the Roaring Twenties.

The bottom line is that the idea that government bureaucrats have enough knowledge to manage an economy well is the height of conceit – what Nobel Laureate Friedrich Hayek called the "fatal conceit."

So much for Planned Parenthood's immoral sex education to lessen the need for abortion:

A  former director of a Texas Planned Parenthood branch who resigned after she watched an ultrasound-guided abortion told WND the clinic was pushing employees to strive for abortion quotas to boost profits.

"There are definitely client goals," former clinic director Abby Johnson said. "We'd have a goal every month for abortion clients and for family planning clients."

Johnson, 29, said the Bryan, Texas, Planned Parenthood clinic performed surgical abortions every other Saturday, but it began expanding access to abortion to increase earnings.

"One of the ways they were able to up the number of patients that they saw was they started doing the RU-486 chemical abortions all throughout the week," she said.

RU-486 chemical abortions kill the lining of the uterus, cutting off oxygen and nutrients, resulting in the death of an unborn baby. Johnson said the chemical abortion costs the same as an early first-trimester abortion: between $505 and $695 for each procedure.

She told WND the clinic was experiencing financial difficulties due to the economic downturn.

"Abortion is the most lucrative part of Planned Parenthood's operations," she said. "Even though they're two separate corporations, all of the money goes into one pot. With the family planning corporation really suffering, they depend on the abortion corporation to balance their budget, help get them out of the hole and help make income for the company."

She continued, "They really wanted to increase the number of abortions so that they could increase their income."

Now Planned Parenthood has retaliated against Johnson, filing a restraining order against her because the clinic fears she may leak confidential information.

Ted Baehr explains:

Years ago, one basic rule in the lawyer's toolkit was to ask the question, "By what authority?" If there were not a constitutional, legal or legislative authority, then the courts would strike down the executive action.

Recently, the price and wage czar for President Obama told the president of Bank of America that he had to return close to $2 million of his salary. The loony newspapers thought this was a good thing. The question they should have asked, however, was, "By what authority?"

Of course, the czar doesn't have such authority. The government doesn't have the authority to fix wages and prices. This is a bold, outright communist power grab by another refugee from the Dark Ages of the 1960s.

Acclaimed anti-communist author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told an audience at Harvard in 1979 that, if the Russian people had opposed the Soviet Communists, the Soviets would not have been able to devastate the country and send tens of millions of people to their untimely deaths.

It is time for us to stand up. This czar has no authority to do this. The government has no authority. We need to hold their feet to the fire of the Constitution and restore the United States to a country where the law reigns over the government rather than the government making its own laws for its avaricious, psychopathic power grab. If we sit back and do nothing, we will find ourselves in the gulag.

Of course, the ultimate law is the Law of God found in the Old Testament and New Testament documents. We need wise conservatives who will abide by that Divine Law.

The United States will have either biblical laws or anti-biblical laws – and we will either have constitutional laws or unconstitutional laws. There is no in-between.

Furthermore, the liberal, leftist, libertarian, atheist and secular activists and leaders who cry "separation of church and state" or "separation of religion and state" are actually hypocritically violating their own standard because their vocal opposition to God's Law is itself a commingling of church and state or religion and state, according to their own definitions. They are like the Muslim who wants to replace the traditional Judeo-Christian laws of the United States and Great Britain with some weird kind of Middle Eastern Islamic law, or "Shariah."

That's because you can't very well support a moral/religious law that attacks other people for supporting their own moral/religious law. That is contradictory, hypocritical and illogical.

Someone's moral/legal theology, or doctrine of God's Law, has to win in the end. Either the Christian's, the atheist's, the Muslim's, the Talmudic scholar's, the libertarian ideologue's, etc.

If we want to live in a civilized society, then the biblical doctrine of law and morality should prevail.

Be that as it may, it is clear that the wage and price czar's interference is not only anti-biblical, but also unconstitutional. Neither the Bible nor the U.S. Constitution gives government the right to determine the salaries of private citizens in private companies.

Thomas Sowell exposes another Demcorat lie:

We are incessantly being told that the cost of medical care is "too high"– either absolutely or as a growing percentage of our incomes. But nothing that is being proposed by the government is likely to lower those costs, and much that is being proposed is almost certain to increase the costs.

There is a fundamental difference between reducing costs and simply shifting costs around, like a pea in a shell game at a carnival. Costs are not reduced simply because you pay less at a doctor's office and more in taxes – or more in insurance premiums, or more in higher prices for other goods and services that you buy, because the government has put the costs on businesses that pass those costs on to you.

David Limbaugh exposes a lie trying to be made by the tax and spend Democrats:

I nearly fell out of my chair as I read this New York Times headline: "Democrats Push for Plan to Cut Deficit." From the headline alone, I couldn't tell whether this was before, during or after they supported President Barack Obama's intentional, exponential escalation of the deficit to $1.4 trillion.

That's simply immeasurable chutzpah. But just in case you're ready to be taken in yet again by these fair-weather deficit watchdogs, the first sentence of the Times article reveals their true – and true to form – motive.

"Faced with anxiety in financial markets about the huge federal deficit and the potential for it to become an electoral liability for Democrats, the White House and Congressional leaders are weighing options for narrowing the gap, including a bipartisan commission that could force tax increases and spending cuts."

Those elections have a stubborn habit of forcing even drunken sailor politicians to pretend to care about other people's money they otherwise have an unlimited appetite for squandering.

But wait; I thought concern about runaway federal spending was the concern only of those "tea party" protesters the administration has dubbed "potential domestic terrorists" who were carrying "political paraphernalia" – copies of the U.S. Constitution – and engaging in "right-wing extremist chatter" focused "on the economy."

No, we're supposed to believe the Democrats care about deficits again, the ones Obama is planning on expanding to between $9 trillion and $13 trillion over the next decade.

The left likes to use the corruption of the wealthy to attack free-market capitalism. But that is in error. For example, take a look at George Soros, a far-left Progressive anti-capitalist:

By betting against the U.S. economy and the dollar, billionaire investor George Soros has made billions from the economic downturn, Corsi wrote.

"I'm having a very good crisis," Soros told London's Daily Mail in March 2009. Soros, who came out of retirement in 2007 to manage his Quantum Investment Fund, has made $2.9 billion in doing so, including $1 billion made in 2008.

"Had Sen. McCain won the 2008 presidential campaign, George Soros would have had influence at the White House, exactly as Soros has now, after promoting and funding candidate Barack Obama since Obama first came on the national political scene with his speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention that nominated Sen. John Kerry for president," Corsi wrote. "No one should be confused that by backing both presidential candidates in 2008 that Soros is a patriot. To the contrary, Soros was concerned only that regardless of which candidate won, he wanted to be sure he won. Globalists like Soros are concerned about money, first and foremost, possibly to the exclusion of all else. Soros appears to make his political bets primarily to ensure that he preserves his ability to make and keep money."

Soros has been outspoken about his views. He began his 2008 book, subtitled "The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means," by proclaiming, "We are in the midst of the worst financial crisis since the 1930s." Soros went on to explain that the 2008 credit crisis "marks the end of an era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency." He insisted the current crisis was "the culmination of a super-boom that has lasted for more than twenty-five years."

Consistently, Soros has proclaimed the dollar is under selling pressure and "may eventually be replaced as a world reserve currency, possibly by the International Monetary Fund's Special Drawing Rights." Soros told Reuters that the U.S. economy is in for a "lasting showdown" and could face a Japan-style period of a decade or more of relatively low growth, coupled with high inflation.

Corsi noted, "Regardless of whether Sen. Obama or Sen. McCain won in 2008, Soros would still have been betting against America, selling short U.S. stocks and buying futures contracts betting the dollar would fall."

Vox Day predicts the Federal Reserve will die one way or another:

Sham and deception has become the order of the day. As congressional mandarins boldly rush to the barricades of Wall Street to defend the banks again, the administration careens wildly from one absurd public statement to the next; no sooner had it claimed to have created 640,329 jobs by spending $159 billion in stimulus money than it was asserting it had only spent $92,000 per job, not the $250,000 simple division would indicate. The federal government has reached a truly bizarre state of consciousness when it is attacking basic mathematics as "calculator abuse." And this Associated Press account of the administration's defense of nonsense serves as an amusingly apt metaphor for the way in which both the legislative and executive branches are desperately attempting to preserve the present financial system.

"[The White House] aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far."

The strategy of the political and monetary authorities is very clear. Buy time. Extend, pretend and defend. Exert the power of positive thinking, engage in happy talk and attempt to lift the public's animal spirits until the prophecy of economic recovery becomes self-fulfilling and rising asset prices return bankrupt balance sheets to solvency. It is not a good strategy. It will not be a successful strategy. But it is at least a coherent one. The problem is that they are fast running out of time. They simply refuse to understand that the real danger to the Federal Reserve system is not a political one due to the understandable fury of the American people or even an accounting one stemming from uneviscerated audit legislation, it is an economic one based on the simple fact that a fundamentally flawed system is once again approaching its inescapable reckoning.

Cory Heidelberger of Madville Times was rejected by the Madison School Board:

Tom Farrell, a retired Dakota State University professor, was selected Monday night as the newest member of the Madison School Board.

Farrell and Corey Heidelberger, both Madison residents, applied for the open position that became available when former board member Dennis Hegg moved outside of the Madison Central School District.
The school board held a special meeting on Monday to interview the two candidates and make a selection.

The state rules again:

Despite criticism that they are setting the bar too high, the South Dakota Board of Education passed a new set of high school graduation rules Monday that make upper- level math and science classes mandatory.

Unless they get waivers from their schools, all students starting high school next year will have to take geometry and algebra II and chemistry or physics. The new rules also require, for the first time, a semester each of physical education and health, although students could satisfy the health half-credit in any grade 6-12.

While health advocates praised the changes, some teachers say not all students can handle advanced math and science courses.

The Argus Leader informs us  that Big Stone II cannot get enough investors, so it is shut down:

The Big Stone II coal-fired power plant project is no more, as the remaining partners in the venture said Monday that building the $1.6 billion plant near Milbank no longer is economically possible.

Those partners include the Central Minnesota Municipal Power Agency, Heartland Consumers Power District, Missouri River Energy Services and Montana-Dakota Utilities Co.

The plant was to generate about 580 megawatts of electricity by burning low-sulfur, pulverized coal from Wyoming. In a joint statement, the partners said it was the least costly, most environmentally sound baseload power plant for the participants. But when no new partners came forward to share in the costs, it was apparent that the plant could not be built.

The report made no mention of teh impact Obama's fascist Cap & Trade agenda had on those investors. The report did cover teh celbration of Obama's political allies: