Sideshow of Hypocrisy On the Right and Left

And now for our first act, the Pulitzer Prize winning Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post.  After urging the U.S. to support the protests in Egypt for Democracy a few weeks ago, he urges the Democratic Senators opposed to Gov. Walker's union-busting in Wisoncsion that left the state to stay where they are in order stall the democratic process Wisconsins opted for at the ballot box last November.  From his column today:

Democratic state senators who fled the state to forestall Walker's coup have no choice but to remain on the lam. 

I guess Democracy is only good when it promotes what Mr. Robinson desires.

For our next act, we have Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour who, being the goody-two shoes free-market promoting conservative he is, refused to say he would get rid of farm subsidies.
Remember, Barbour needs all the Iowa primary votes he can get come next year:

When sales volumes are good, prices are reasonable, there shouldn’t be any farm subsidies. But for natural reasons, nature, or what other countries are doing in terms of how they’re handling their markets, sometimes it is appropriate to have farm subsidies.

As far as Barbour promoting free market capitalism, I will quote the great Judge Judy, "Don't Pee On My Leg and Tell Me it's Raining."

Now for Did You Know?

Did You Know that you can track the protests and riots in the Middle East live at the Al Jazeera blog? Just go to the live blog segment. I particularly like this photo:

According to Zerohedge, Time Magazine's Intelligence columnist:

reported on Tuesday that Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has ordered his security forces to sabotage the country's oil facilities, citing a source close to the government. In a column posted on Time's website, Robert Baer said the sabotage would begin by blowing up pipelines to the Mediterranean. However he added that the same source had also told him two weeks ago that unrest in neighboring countries would never spread to Libya -- an assertion that has turned out to be wrong."

I will end with some passages from two Mises Daily articles today, first is one of the best Mises quotes on the study of human action he founded, praxeology:

Choosing determines all human decisions. In making his choice man chooses not only between various material things and services. All human values are offered for option. All ends and all means, both material and ideal issues, the sublime and the base, the noble and the ignoble, are ranged in a single row and subjected to a decision which picks out one thing and sets aside another. Nothing that men aim at or want to avoid remains outside of this arrangement into a unique scale of gradation and preference. The modern theory of value widens the scientific horizon and enlarges the field of economic studies. Out of the political economy of the classical school emerges the general theory of human action, praxeology.

And Rothbard on early colonial America's currency system:

In the sparsely settled American colonies, money, as it always does, arose in the market as a useful and scarce commodity and began to serve as a general medium of exchange. Thus, beaver fur and wampum were used as money in the north for exchanges with the Indians, and fish and corn also served as money. Rice was used as money in South Carolina, and the most widespread use of commodity money was tobacco, which served as money in Virginia. The pound-of-tobacco was the currency unit in Virginia, with warehouse receipts in tobacco circulating as money backed 100 percent by the tobacco in the warehouse.

While commodity money continued to serve satisfactorily in rural areas, as the colonial economy grew, Americans imported gold and silver coins to serve as monetary media in urban centers and in foreign trade. English coins were imported, but so too were gold and silver coins from other European countries. Among the gold coins circulating in America were the French guinea, the Portuguese "joe," the Spanish doubloon, and Brazilian coins, while silver coins included French crowns and livres.

I also highly recommend Robert P. Murphy's Mises Daily which takes on Brad Delong and Steve Malanga's account on union campaign funding.  I can't wait to see Delong's response.  I have already had my run-in with Delong before, hopefully he has some more cowardly insults for Murphy.