New Round of Fearmongering Over Texting and Driving. If you went by the breathless reporting on texting and driving, or the word of law enforcement or “traffic safety advocates” you’d think at any given moment someone is careening to their death because they or another driver had their eyes on their cellphones and not on the road. [Hit & Run]

I’ll consider believing that phones are some sort of serious threat to driver safety that must be banned once they ban things that are unquestionably more distracting in cars, like small children.

Going green: Morocco bans use of plastic bags [AL JAZEERA ENGLISH (AJE)]

I’ve written in the past about how absurd it is for Americans to worry about Muslims imposing Shariah law in the US. Now, it seems that it’s the Muslims who have to worry about American Shariah laws being imposed in their countries.

Net Neutrality: Don’t Let the FCC Control the Internet! Under the proposal currently in play, the FCC assumes an increased ability to review ISP offerings on a “case-by-case basis” and kill any plan it doesn’t believe is “commercially reasonable.” Goodbye fast-moving innovation and adjustment to changing technology on the part of companies, hello regulatory morass and long, drawn-out bureaucratic hassles. [Reason]

…as someone who grew up eating margarine, the notion that the federal government is preparing officially to ban it, as the FDA recently announced, strikes me both as truly bizarre and emblematic of the arrogance of central planning that characterizes the Obama administration.

Ira Stoll

Prepared headlines for Wednesday. It all comes down to a choice between the left-wing socialist and the right-wing socialist.

Southerners prefer a socialist who will redistribute the wealth from the taxpayers to government employees (military), agricultural interests, and corporations with “defense” contracts. They also prefer someone who bombs lots of foreigners in the name of “national greatness.”

Northerners prefer a socialist who will redistribute wealth from the taxpayers to government employees (non-military), the urban poor, and union members. They also prefer someone who will bomb lots of foreigners (albeit with less bravado) in the name of “human rights.” [LewRockwell.com Blog]

That’s what presidential elections are, today: deciding which socialist warmonger you want ruling the Evil Empire. “Change” was never one of the choices.

Financial Market Deja Vu?. “The most serious financial problem for the Nazi State is not the danger of a breakdown of the currency and banking system, but the growing illiquidity of banks, insurance companies, saving institutions, etc. . . . Germany’s financial organizations are again in a situation where their assets which should be kept liquid have become ‘frozen’. . . . But the totalitarian State can tighten its control over the whole financial system and appropriate for itself all private funds which are essential for the further existence of a private economy. Yet the institutions which still exist as private enterprises are not allowed to go bankrupt. For an artificial belief in credits and financial obligations has to be maintained in open conflict with realities.”

From Gunter Reimann, The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism (1939), p. 174, about German economic policy under Hitler.
[LewRockwell.com Blog]

Of course this applies equally to US economic policy under the Boot On Your Neck Party. And to think there are still ignorant people in this country who actually believe fascism was defeated during World War Two.