Celebrating the Life and Legacy of Frederick Douglass, Libertarian Hero

I often assigned him as a research project to students who SHOULD have learned of him in HS but instead had no contact.  What a shame that they're steeped in Jesse Jackson but ignorant of Frederick Douglass.

Higher wages lead to lower turnover, reducing the amount employers must spend recruiting and training new employees. Paying workers more can also improve motivation, morale, focus, and health, all of which can make workers more productive. In addition, by reducing absenteeism, higher wages can increase the productivity of coworkers who depend on each other or work in teams. In addition, businesses can adjust in other ways rather than reducing employment (for example, by accepting lower profit margins). 

Emphasis mine. The use of "accepting" in that last sentence constitutes felony misappropriation of a verb.

and then the some whack-job had stepped in and proposed "paper" money? Amusing parody from Ledra Capitol: what if government and media looked at paper money the way they do at Bitcoin?

Excerpts, though the whole thing is comedy gold if you are a Bitcoin maven:

Bizarre Shadowy Paper-Based Payment System Being Rolled Out Worldwide

World governments announced a plan today to allow citizens to anonymously carry parts of their wealth on their person and exchange it with others using small pieces of colorful paper printed with nationalistic and Masonic imagery along with numbers that purportedly represent the amount of wealth each piece of paper represents (if the paper is not a counterfeit). These pieces of paper are formally a "note" from each nation's central bank, but they are also called "cash" by many - this is a technical matter that is too complex to cover in our basic primer; Suffice it to say, that it is representative of the complexity and user-unfriendliness of this new system....

In what will come as a surprise to generations who have grown up with calculators and computers, ‘bills’ only come in fixed denominations, requiring users to maintain a large number of these pieces of paper that must be aggregated to execute a transaction and then re-aggregated to ‘make change,’ a complex process of returning to the payee the excess of the payment using yet other bills.  (Don’t worry if this sounds complex, we had trouble understanding it ourselves at first and it is certainly not ready for the average consumer in its current form.) ...

The launch of cash has provoked an immediate reaction from law-enforcement agencies worldwide that universally condemned the development.

“Cash is a 100% anonymous and untraceable payments technology.   It is like a weapon of mass destruction launched against law enforcement,” said Mike Smith, the recently confirmed FBI Director.  “It is the perfect payment mechanism for criminals, drug cartels, terrorists, prostitution rings and money launderers....

Banking Superintendent of New York State, Mike Smith had the following to say: “I can’t think of any reason that a law-abiding individual would want to use cash. At a bare minimum, we believe there should be a licensing procedure for individuals or businesses that plan to use cash, a ‘Cash-License’ as it were...."

Others have concerns about forgery and counterfeiting.  “Ultimately, even with all the fancy inks, cash is just a piece of paper.   We fully expect criminal groups and rogue nation states to print fake cash in order to profit or to disrupt the economies of their enemies,” said Mike Smith, an analyst at Stratfor.  “In the interim, we are certain that cash will trade a discount in the real-world, given the risk to a counterparty of accepting a forged piece of paper; no doubt cash is a huge step back from the modern cryptography in place throughout our current financial system.”.....

Though hard to imagine, cash operates with no consumer protection at all.   If your ‘bills’ are stolen or lost, they are gone forever....

February 18, 2014 1:45 pm

An unknown artist is covering the streets of Santa Monica, Calif., with posters declaring President Obama to be “subpar.”

The artwork, which features images of Obama golfing with the message, can be found on trashcans, in Porta-potties, and on street benches, according to a taco blog in Los Angeles.

that's Administration Press

A presidency ends when its catchphrase becomes a joke.

I am not a crook.

Read my lips: no new taxes.

I did not have sex with that woman.

If you like your plan you can keep your plan.

Zero Oregon Obamacare Enrollees After Four Months and $305 Million

They're really just making $#!t up now: Sebelius: 'Absolutely No Evidence' Obamacare Will Kill Jobs

But SOME of the rubes are wising up: Buyer’s Remorse: Economist Poll Finds 71% of Obama Supporters “Regret” Voting For His Re-Election. That includes 55 percent of Democrats.

JOHN DICKERSON: “Let’s all agree to not talk about Monica Lewinsky for at least two years. In fact, let’s not discuss any of the ‘events’ in the Clinton marriage.”

WES PRUDEN: Hillary Clinton’s War On Women.

Kathleen Willey, who was a prominent Democratic volunteer in the first Clinton campaign in 1992, has resurrected her accusation — never refuted — that when she accepted an invitation to call on Bubba at the White House she got no help in getting a job, but “nothing short of serious sexual harassment.”

Mrs. Willey told interviewer Aaron Klein on WABC radio in New York that she’s bringing up the story now because Hillary was Bubba’s enabler, and manipulated the response to the sexual scandals that defined the Clinton years. Hillary, she says, has never been the friend of women she pretends to be.

Nope. She smeared and intimidated ‘em whenever they got in the way.

Ex-Rep. Mel Reynolds arrested in Zimbabwe on pornography, immigration charges.

Former congressman Melvin Reynolds (D-Ill.) has been arrested by immigration officers in Zimbabwe, the Associated Press reports.

An immigration official, Ario Mabika, told AP that Reynolds was arrested for an immigration violation and possessing pornography. The state-run newspaper also reports Reynolds has failed to pay more than $24,000 in hotel bills.

Reynolds served briefly in Congress in the mid-1990s before being convicted on charges that included sexual assault and solicitation of child pornography. He was also later convicted of financial and campaign fraud.

Former president Bill Clinton commuted Reynolds’s sentence with two years remaining on it in 2001.