http://www.marketwatch.com/…

Central bankers and regulators are rethinking their faith in the ability of market forces alone to police the increasingly complex global financial system.

In a speech in Jackson Hole, Wyo., Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said the Fed’s toughest challenge is not restoring growth, fighting inflation, or providing fragile banks with sufficient liquidity to get through the current financial crisis. Rather, it’s finding a way to prevent the next one.

The bailout of Bear Stearns in particular represents a failure of the supervisors to monitor the system. Bear wasn’t a particularly large institution, but its assets and liabilities were so thoroughly linked with the rest of the financial world that its failure would have been devastating, Bernanke said. Read the speech.
It’s not that Bear Stearns was too big to fail, it was too interconnected.

Bernanke suggested that the Fed and other bank supervisors need to use a holistic approach, rather than look at each institution in isolation. The explosion of securitization and derivatives in the past few decades has shifted risks in ways that aren’t immediately apparent. A risk that would be manageable for one bank would be unbearable if it applied to all, because systemic risks tend to create illiquid markets.

The regulators also have to clearly explain when and under what conditions financial institutions will be allowed to fail and when they will be bailed out, Bernanke said. To limit moral hazard, bailouts should be structured so that shareholders are wiped out, similar to the way failing banks are now treated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Imposing systemwide supervision and regulation won’t be easy to design or cheap to implement. Unintended consequences are certain to appear. But the alternative of doing nothing would consign us to periodic costly boom and bust cycles that could leave us all poorer.

Just… wow. The organization that is the biggest nonfree component of the current economy and who is looking daily to increase its power doesn’t have faith in the market’s ability to handle things. What a shock. I love that last sentence too. “But the alternative of doing nothing would consign us to periodic costly boom and bust cycles that could leave us all poorer.” Is this guy serious? Has this guy ever opened an economics book or thought critically on the subject? Making us poorer? The Fed’s massive inflation has helped do that. So has the socialization of so many aspects of our lives. We have periodic costly boom and bust cycles BECAUSE they refuse to do nothing. The bust doesn’t make us poorer. It makes us wealthier in the end. The bust is the liquidation of bad investments. If you continue on with the malinvestment you’re continuing on with an inefficient system and not investing in the things with the highest priority. The boom shouldn’t be happening in the first place. Spurred on by cheap debt and other manipulations. Some debt so cheap, like today, that they in fact are paying people to take money. Price inflation being higher than interest rates. Even if you don’t believe Mises and Rothbard on that one show me where the Fed has stopped the cycle? Please. Once you’re finished show me how well government regulation and interference in healthcare, education, housing, the poor, drugs, etc. has done.

http://freedominourtime.blogspot.com/…

Unless a police officer is dutifully enforcing a legitimate warrant, or has unassailable probable cause to believe that an individual has committed a felony, he has no business attempting to arrest anybody. That was the understanding that prevailed in the Anglo-Saxon world, in one form or another, from 1215 until the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, at least here in the United States.Fifty years ago, the statutes of nearly every state recognized the right to resist unlawful arrest. Today, it is recognized only Michigan, Wyoming, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, West Virginia, and Mississippi.* The question has been examined, and upheld in remarkably candid terms by courts in Mississippi. This is ironic, given that Mississippi is the same state where Cory Maye was convicted of first degree murder for killing a police officer who invaded Maye’s home in a late-night paramilitary raid at the wrong address.

A 1963 Mississippi Supreme Court decision (King v. State) favorably cited a legal scholar’s conclusion that “the right of personal liberty is one of the fundamental rights guaranteed to every citizen, and any unlawful interference may be resisted. Every person has a right to resist an unlawful arrest; and, in preventing such illegal restraint of his liberty, he may use such force as may be necessary.”

Not quite four decades earlier, a judge presiding over the criminal trial of a police officer accused of murdering a man who resisted arrest underscored the fact that a citizen has the right to kill a police officer attempting to arrest him without probable cause or a valid warrant. The judge instructed the jury that if the officer had been attempting an illegal arrest, the defendant was permitted to employ “whatever force was necessary to avoid the arrest, even to the extent of taking the life of [the] defendant.”

In other words: A police officer who kills a civilian in the course of an unlawful arrest is a murderer; a citizen who kills a police officer when threatened with lethal violence in the course of an unlawful arrest is exercising his innate right to self-defense.

Like jury nullification the right to resist unlawful arrest is something simply not talked about by those in power and generally not know by the public. It’s something which as our nation moves closer and closer to a police state needs to be taught to others in an attempt to counteract some of the government’s abuses.

http://www.cnn.com/…

Ron Paul, as of the end of the 4th quarter 2007, is the number one Republican fundraiser still in the race in the following states:

• Montana¹
• Alaska¹
• Hawaii
• Kansas¹
• New Mexico
• North Dakota²

Is second in:

• Washington
• Oregon
• Idaho
• Iowa
• Wyoming
• Arkansas
• Wisconsin
• Kentucky
• Nebraska²
• Minnesota²
• Oklahoma²
• Indiana²
• Tennessee³
• Mississippi^2,3
• Georgia^2,3
• West Virginia^2,3

¹ Including Democrat candidates. ² Giuliani raised more before dropping. ³ Fred Thompson raised more before dropping.

Obviously money doesn’t mean votes nor will those locations where he has gained rank because of some dropping out help him much. It is however interesting with regards to how the MSM regards him as a gadfly. He’s raised more from the numerous branches of the military than all other candidates combined. He raised more than twice what any other Republican did in the 4th quarter at nearly $20m. He’s the number one Republican fundraiser in 5 states and second in 8 without removing those who have dropped out.

My ranking of donations per capita has been updated with 4th quarter numbers, top 5:

1. New Hampshire
2. Wyoming
3. Nevada
4. Alaska
5. Montana

http://www.ballot-access.org/…

Although Louisiana holds a presidential primary on February 9, the Republican Party chooses its delegates to the national convention with a two-step caucus/convention system. The first round was held on February 22, when approximately 10,000 Louisiana Republicans turned out to vote in eleven different cities for delegate to the state convention. Each U.S. House district chose 15 delegates.

It appears that Ron Paul supporters outnumbered the supporters of any of his opponents. But since this was predicted, the supporters of Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, cooperated to set up a “fusion” slate of unpledged candidates for Delegate. The “fusion” slate, labeled the “Pro-Life/Pro-Family” slate, beat the Ron Paul slate in each of the 7 U.S. House districts. Formally, the “fusion” slate billed itself as an “uncommitted” slate, and no one really knows how many supporters of each presidential candidate are on the fusion slate, except the campaigns themselves.

This is what happened in Wyoming too. Over at LewRockwell.com/blog they have a link to a handout for the Pro-Life/Pro-Family delegate slate. It’s sad they have to resort to ganging up just to keep him out. Hopefully some of those chosen are pro-Paul.

http://www.maconareaonline.com/…

For all of his wild-man antics, the politically conservative Nugent is talking about following in the footsteps of celebrities such as actor Arnold Schwarzenegger or wrestler Jesse Ventura, who won gubernatorial races.

“That would be beautiful,” Nugent said when asked if he would run for governor of Michigan in 2010. “I have threatened to do so and I was sincere.”

Some of Nugent’s antics make even Schwarzenegger’s past outspokenness appear measured by comparison.

“Michigan was once a great state. Michigan was a state that rewarded the entrepreneur and the most productive, work-ethic families of the state. Now the pimps and the whores and the welfare brats are basically the state’s babies.”

Oh my. I surely would like to see him run. We need every libertarian minded, freedom loving person we can get running for office. I don’t know how good of a chance he has in Michigan but he may take a look at Wyoming or New Hampshire.