Bob and I would like to wish you and yours a very special Merry Christmas, or Happy Holidays if you've got a stick up your butt, to everybody.

In this episode Bob and I get a little loose from the booze and spell out what our basic principles are. We ran into some interruptions and when combined with the booze, we got very tired. And yet because we love you, we still put out an episode. We hope you enjoy it.

In this episode Bob and Mark comment on the recent Delphi bankruptcy filing, the neverending push for national healthcare, and the damage wrought by the idea that higher education is the best meal ticket. With all the abuse of hippies you've come to love.

Show Notes

Paul Krugman OpEd
Screw shooters are a dime a dozen
The economy is dynamic
National Healthcare will not fix the automakers problems
Outsourcing overseas leads to increased jobs at home
Recommended reading on economics

Nationalized Healthcare has not gone away
Free healthcare is not really free
There is no healthcare crisis
Hippies just don't want to pay for medical insurance
Mark:"You're never going to get anything out of the government that you couldn't provide better yourself"
TANSTAAFL
More book recommendations
THK put forth a modest proposal to solve the healthcare crisis

Commercial Break

OpEd "Colleges can't expect K-12 to do it all"
The Ohio Board of Regents study of Ohio's incoming freshman
Most people shouldn't go to college
Our education problems are the result of pushing uneducable students through the system
Graduation or enrollment quotas can only lower standards
It's not the job of higher education to bring students up to a high school graduate level
"Student Anti-Intellectualism and the Dumbing Down of the University"
Let's lower the bar until x number of people meet the standard
There are some states that are pushing to end remedial education at Univeristies
The hippies have turned education into vocational training
A higher education is about developing higher reasoning skills
60% of Ohio's high school graduates go onto college, that's insane
Walter William's Oped
"Today's College Students and Yesteryear's High School Grads: A Comparison of General Cultural Knowledge"
Hippies have perverted what an education is supposed to be in order to further their political agenda


Links for further interest
Delphi
George Will column
John Jordan column (he's pro Union)
James P. Hoffa column

This link will take you to a site that has some details about the ongoing movement for National Healthcare

This is the text of the Oregon initiative that went down in defeat in 2002


Bibliograhy
Economics in One Easy Lesson, Henry Hazlitt
Basic Economics, Thomas Sowell
In Defense of Global Capitalism, Johan Norberg
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

Recently I had a life changing experience that I just have to share. I was listening to hour two of the November 16th, 2005 episode of Free Talk Live. Ian, one of the hosts, posited that intellectual property rights are bad for consumers because they limit consumer choice thereby inflating the price of goods. Furthermore, I learned that these government created rights are used solely to enrich the rights holder at the expense of the product consumers.

Needless to say I was floored, just as I am sure you are too, by this economic insight that I had never considered. This revelation has inspired me to create my own podcast in order to do my part in fostering consumer choice.

We call it The Hippie Killers Talk Live and here�s a link to a clip from our first show. We hope you enjoy it.

Libsyn doesn't allow you to associate more than one podcast per post. So here's part two of Episode three for your edifying enjoyment.

We're back after a brief hiatus. We decide to talk about the Iraq war and end up making such a long show that we had to break it up into two parts. Bob and I hope you find our conversation as engaging as we obviously did. The Hippie Killers fully endorse the objectives of the WoT and believe that it's important not to lose sight of our goal during the Hippies' full-court press to discredit the Bush administration for political gain during the 2006 mid-term elections.


Part One
We thank some listeners
Bob is Podcasting ignorant
How the Hippies use Vietnam as a model
Negative bias in Iraq reporting
It's not really the Iraq War anymore, it's the Occupation of Iraq
Hippies are only anti-war because they are anti-Bush
Are combat deaths really worse than the deaths at the hands of a despot?
If a government is a non-Hippie government is an illegitimate government
Hippies doesn't like America to exercise its power
Hippies are not ideological when they pick political leaders
The terrorists are not guerillas
Mark defends the Clinton administration for treating terrorism as a criminal matter
Hippies are never going to quit until America is Socialist
Bob posits a connection between Libertarian isolationism and Hippie pacifism
We finally get back on topic, successes in Iraq and how the media mis-report them
The insurgency is not a popular movement
Bob clarifies what battalion readiness, as it applies to the Iraqi forces, means
Mark has an interesting hypothesis about the biased Iraq reporting
An exit strategy operates from the assumption of surrender
Michael Goldfarb on Politics of Culture talking about the American failures in Iraq
Whenever an empire collapses, in this instance the USSR, there is a reorganization of geopolitics
Mark destroys the idea that it was a mistake to disband the Iraqi Army Regulars
Mark goes off on Hippie intellectual conceit
Appeasement is always the answer when Hippies are confronted by agressors


Part two
No conflict is like the preceding conflict
Mark thinks that the Hippies really didn't stop the Vietnam War but Bob convinces him that they did

Is an insurgency primarily composed of foreign nationals really an insurgency?
American forces had to deal with the Werewolves in defeated German, should we have declared WWII unwinnable?
Fortress America, no Battlefield America
If the Iraqis pick another leader like Saddam we'll kick him out too
There's never been a war between two free countries
Hardcore Hippies are even whackier because of their marginalization
Bob explains why the military as a whole is primarily staffed with minorities, but the combat arms are more reflective, demographically, of America
Mark is a patriot
al-Zarqawi is no Ho Chi Mihn
Did the French Resistance blow up French schools and hospitals in their fight against the NAZIS?
Final thoughts



Other links of interest

Hillary Clinton against an immediate pullout in Iraq
John Coles' post on the Murtha resolution
Oxblog's take on the Murtha resolution

For some of the successes in Iraq reconstruction click here
Bob's stats on the Iraq military status come from here