Internet Scofflaw

The White House has announced that it will again fail to deliver a budget by the first Monday in February, as required by law. This will be the third time during the four years of the Obama administration.

The Democrat-controlled Senate, of course, has not been able to produce a budget in years.

Remember how the Department of Energy asked Solyndra to delay announcing layoffs until after the midterm elections? Newly released documents show that the White House was involved in that request:

1. 10/25/2010 — Solyndra CEO writes to the DoE that he will announce worker layoffs on 10/28.
2. 10/27/2010 — In the White House, climate change adviser Zichal sent out an e-mail to Obama adviser Browner and several other officials warning of a layoff announcement in very specific terms — “200 of their 1200 workers” — and added, “No es bueno,” which is Spanish for “not good.”
3. 10/28/2010 — No announcement comes forth from Solyndra on layoffs.
4. 10/30/2010 — Solyndra investor explains that the DoE “push[ed] very hard” for a delay on the announcement until November 3rd, the day after the election, even remarking that the DoE “oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date.”

(Previous post.)

One of the major indicators of the decline of our civilization is our failure to favor law-abiding citizens over criminals. In one of the most egregious cases you’ll see, police in Swampscott, Massachusetts (a suburb of Boston) arrested a man who stopped an armed thief who broke into his truck.

This isn’t even a gun-rights case. The hero in this case was unarmed, and disabled a criminal carrying a knife and a billy club. Nevertheless, the police charged the hero with a felony, and only after considerable media pressure was applied did the DA agree not to prosecute. Even then the DA pointedly refused to say that the police had acted incorrectly.

The message is clear: no one is to stand in the way of criminals plying their trade.

(Via Instapundit.)

A “sensitive and confidential” briefing document written by Larry Summers, head of President Obama’s economic team, in 2008 and leaked to the New Yorker recently, confirms what the president’s critics have said all along. The purpose of the Obama stimulus plan was to implement Obama’s domestic agenda, and it was known to be dangerously over-large:

The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. . .

It is important to recognize that we can only generate about $225 billion of actual spending on priority investments over next two years, and this is after making what some might argue are optimistic assumptions about the scale of investments in areas like Health IT that are feasible over this period. . .

Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run. . .

The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.

(Via Instapundit.)

Richard Griffin, one of President Obama’s illegal recess appointments to the National Labor Relations Board, where is supposed to be a neutral arbiter between labor and business (ha ha!), will be on a union’s payroll while serving on the board.

Solyndra wants to pay bonuses.

Fox News reports:

A Utah school district decided not to select a cougar as the mascot of a new high school partly because school officials and some parents believed the word is disrespectful to women. . .

In pop culture, the term “cougar” refers to a sexually aggressive middle-aged woman who attracts younger men. However, the cougar is also a large mountain cat — that also happens to be the mascot for Brigham Young University — along with three other Utah high schools.

I think this is good. Kids need to be clearly taught the idiocy of political correctness. I’m glad the Canyons School District is stepping up.

Yesterday’s online protests against the break-the-internet bills are moving Republicans into opposition, but not Democrats.

Interesting. There’s lots of things this could mean, none of them favorable to Democrats. The easiest explanation is Democrats don’t give a rat’s behind what the people think.

When the government decides who gets health care, people die:

A 23-year-old died of cervical cancer because doctors said she was too young for a smear test, her devastated family have claimed. Mercedes Curnow, from Cornwall, first went to her GP at 20 years old but her mother says her symptoms were ‘ignored’ because of her age. . .

Government legislation was changed in 2003 to mean regular smear tests are only given to women aged over 25, where previously all women over 20 were given the tests.

Whatever you do, don’t call our new health care rationing board a “death panel”, that would alarmist. . .

(Via Instapundit.)

As everyone already knows, countless web sites around the Internet are going black today to protest the break-the-internet bills, SOPA in the House and Protect IP in the Senate.

I’m not going black, because the bill is supposed to be dead in the House. But I’ve thought that before (remember when we thought we’d killed health care nationalization?), so I called my Congressman anyway. You should too.

The CBC reports:

Any decision on developments such as the proposed Northern Gateway pipeline should be left to Canadians, Prime Minister Stephen Harper says. . .

“But just because certain people in the United States would like to see Canada be one giant national park for the northern half of North America, I don’t think that’s part of what our review process is all about.”

Via Instapundit, who adds: “Funny, the usual suspects aren’t denouncing ‘Yankee imperialism’ here.”

The House is killing its break-the-Internet bill. I think this is Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) doing. Good for him.

The Senate’s bill is still alive, but I think this indicates that it has no future in the House.

Congress seems to be backing off its break-the-Internet bills.

I like this:

Here’s why the unemployment rate is falling:

(Via Instapundit.)

Utterly shameless:

The untold story of the Obama Administration’s widely reported, $335 million discrimination settlement with Countrywide Financial Corporation is that, under a secret Justice Department program, a chunk of the money won’t go to the “victims” but rather leftist groups not connected to the lawsuit.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) will determine which “qualified organizations” get leftover settlement cash and Democrat-tied groups like the scandal-plagued Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) and the open-borders National Council of La Raza (NCLR) stand to get large sums based on the hastily arranged deal which got court approval in just a few days.

(Via Instapundit.)

Victor Davis Hanson writes on how technology (developed by capitalists) has equalized society far more than the class warriors ever have.

Newark, New Jersey has instituted a program offering cash to people to inform on their neighbors who own guns.

Late in the ad (over a minute in) they drop the work “illegal” into the mix, but probably for legal cover, because it’s only after making it very clear they are trying to stop all guns:

There are a small group of people in our City that think they can walk around with guns. It is unacceptable.

(Via Instapundit.)

The FAA halted a program (Operation Migration) that used ultra-light planes to help whooping cranes migrate. Is there anything the government won’t screw up, given the chance?

(Via Instapundit.)

A Virginia school district is defending a program in which 8-year-olds sang a song supporting the Occupy Wall Street movement. They actually make the risible assertion that the professional “facilitator” had nothing to do with the song’s content, which the facilitator’s (leftist) organization eventually admitted wasn’t true.

Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, chairwoman of the DNC, took the anniversary of the Tucson shootings as an opportunity to revive the calumny that conservative rhetoric was somehow responsible for the crime. That is contemptible in its own right, but it also takes an astonishing amount of chutzpah, given this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, or this. Over the last year, the left has shown how truly un-”civil” it is.

But then Wasserman-Schultz exposed her rigged standards in a surprisingly obvious way, telling RNC chair Reince Priebus that his remark — taking her to task for her own contemptible remarks — is the sort of incivility she was talking about. So accusing people of responsibility for murder is civil, but criticizing her for it is uncivil (and, by extension, somehow contributes to murder). What a disgrace.

I’ve never been a fan of Ron Paul: His foreign policy is irresponsible and disqualifying. His domestic objectives are impractical. (“Shut them all down” is fine for a gadfly to shout from the outside, but it’s not a realistic legislative agenda. We need a real plan to downsize the government, and he doesn’t seem to have one.) I don’t share his obsession with the gold standard. And then there’s the troubling material in his newsletters.

But even as a non-fan, I still found this dismaying:

He turns out to have no plan to reform Medicare and Social Security, other than cutting defense spending to make more room for them in the budget.

He wants to slash defense spending in order to prop up entitlements (which won’t work anyway). Yikes.

Glenn Reynolds observes:

WHEN LEAKS ARE GOOD: When they harm the war on terror even though they uncover nothing illegal.

WHEN LEAKS ARE BAD: When they expose wrongdoing by Democrats.

Fox News reports:

A state-appointed panel said Tuesday that California’s plan to build a high-speed rail system in the state is not financially feasible and should be placed on hold. The report by the California High-Speed Rail Peer Review Group said the state should not authorize $2.7 billion in bonds to build the initial section of the system.

I’m sure the project will go ahead nonetheless. High-speed rail proponents are impervious to reason.

POSTSCRIPT: This seems like an appropriate time to remind everyone of the biggest problem with high-speed rail, bigger than the billions in wasted money. America has the world’s best rail system already, and high-speed rail could ruin it.

UPDATE: Sure enough:

Brown’s office signaled that the governor isn’t likely to be swayed by the panel’s findings. “It does not appear to add any arguments that are new or compelling enough to suggest a change in course,” said Gil Duran, Brown’s press secretary.

(Via Hot Air.)

One problem with technocracy is it’s so hard to distinguish from kleptocracy:

In May 2010, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi took to a podium in the Capitol to introduce a half-dozen economic experts she had convened for a meeting on how to jump-start the economy. . . What Pelosi did not mention is that one of the men in the group was her son’s boss and a partner with her husband in more than a half-dozen investments, including one that generated more than $100,000 in income for the Speaker’s family last year.

New York state’s tax department propagandizes on behalf of Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D, of course).

Yeah, this’ll help:

Argentina has temporarily blocked sales of certain electronics including Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s BlackBerry in order to stabilize the country’s ailing economy, while suggesting that companies must build plants in the country to resume sales. The decision by the Argentinian government claims that the selective consumer electronics ban is meant to slow rising inflation and correct the disparity between the pesos and U.S. dollar. . .

If someone were to look, I think they’d find a Kircher ally who benefits financially from this. At least, I hope so. It’s actually more frightening if they are actually telling the truth; if they really think that banning smartphone sales will help their economy. Who is going to invest in Argentine manufacturing under these circumstances?

POSTSCRIPT: Vodkapundit’s link is no good any more (the article’s been replaced by a full page of ads); you can find the article here.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac understated their exposure to subprime and reduced-documentation mortgages by 90%.  Freddie disclosed $140 billion of their $901 billion exposure; Fannie disclosed just $73.7 billion of their $1.1 trillion exposure.

This might have been good to know as the federal government was deciding to give Fannie and Freddie a blank check.

GM forgot to put brakes on some of its cars.

How bad is President Obama’s economic record? Very bad.

(Via Instapundit.)

Seattle’s city council has enacted a ban on plastic bags, despite such a ban having been overwhelmingly defeated by the voters. (Take that, silly voters!)

There’s a lot to hate about this: The government giving the people the finger. Infringement of our personal liberties. The fact that paper bags are no better for the environment than plastic.

But what takes the cake is this: The reusable grocery bags that they are trying to induce people to use carry health risks:

The International Association for Food Protection’s Food Protection Trends published a study in its latest issue revealing that most consumers surveyed never wash their reusable bags between uses, permitting bacteria to grow. The peer-reviewed study, completed by University of Arizona Microbiologist Dr. Charles Gerba, found that large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and that coliform bacteria were found in half of those tested. Eight percent of bags contained E. coli.

To quote from the study itself:

A wide variety of coliform bacteria were detected in the bags including Escherichia coli. E. coli
was identified in seven bags (12% of bags tested). . . Many of the bacteria isolated are capable of causing opportunistic infections in humans.

So the Seattle City Council is creating a health risk by infringing our freedom in order to address an unimportant problem in a manner already rejected by the people.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s always interesting to me to see the hierarchy of causes on the left (e.g., multi-culturalism trumps feminism). From this NPR story, downplaying the risks of grocery bags, we see that environmentalism (in its stupidest form) trumps food safety. “Don’t fret” they say, based on interviewing one person who says that having E coli in your grocery bags is probably fine. They don’t usually take that line on matters of food safety, even for threats that — unlike this one — are entirely speculative (for example).

To be fair, it’s perfectly sensible to say you’re willing to do something provided others do their part too. But then you don’t get to take the rhetorical step of saying “I want my taxes raised.” You don’t want your taxes raised; you want other people’s taxes raised.

ASIDE: On the other hand, if the point is that millionaires somehow have the moral authority to call for tax increases on millionaires, then by the same token, middle class people like the Tea Party have the moral authority to call for middle-class entitlements to be abolished. Heck, I’ll make that trade.

Moreover, I suspect most of these people are being disingenuous. Crony capitalists are all for higher taxes because higher taxes mean more government spending, which puts more money back in their pocket. And others profit from higher taxes in other ways, such as by running tax shelters or (like Warren Buffett) by selling insurance against tax bills.

If your aim is to fight Islamic stereotypes, this isn’t the way to do it:

Check out the [Islamic Diversity Center] team page, which describes the individuals on the organization’s staff. . .

That’s right: the men are identified and individually pictured, but for each female staff member there is a photo of a woman wearing a burqa, so that only her eyes are showing. Not only that, it is the same photo in each case; not a picture of the female staff member at all, but a generic image of a woman wearing a burqa.

Somehow I suspect it is going to take a little more effort to dispel those stereotypes.

If you go to the page now, the generic burka-woman has been replaced by a stark “NO PHOTO UPLOADED”.

The Washington Post reports:

Since the failure of [Solyndra], Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.

Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

(Previous post.)

(Via Power Line.)

The Obama administration says that American gun shops are responsible for the escalation of violence in Mexico. We already know that their figures are dishonest. And we already know that they trafficked thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, for reasons that have yet to be explained. But here’s another point to complete the trifecta of malfesance:

Selling weapons to Mexico – where cartel violence is out of control – is controversial because so many guns fall into the wrong hands due to incompetence and corruption. The Mexican military recently reported nearly 9,000 police weapons “missing.”

Yet the U.S. has approved the sale of more guns to Mexico in recent years than ever before through a program called “direct commercial sales.” It’s a program that some say is worse than the highly-criticized “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal, where U.S. agents allowed thousands of weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels. . .

Here’s how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves, and wouldn’t give CBS News figures for 2010 or 2011.

(Via Hot Air.)

The Obama administration says we need to give up our civil rights in order to keep guns from getting to Mexico, but they are trafficking thousands of guns illegally, and approving tens of thousands for sale legally.

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During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Obama campaign issued a full denial of stories that unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama, calling it a “myth propagated by the McCain campaign that’s been debunked”. The media (such as NPR) took their denial at face value.

Now a video has surfaced of Bill Ayers telling a group (it looks like a teacher’s union) in October 2011 that he did indeed host a fundraiser for Obama. One of them (Obama or Ayers) is lying.

Sounds like an opportunity for some enterprising journalist to ask a tough question. (Like that will ever happen.)

If you’ve been following the LightSquared scandal, you already know that LightSquared’s technology breaks GPS receivers and airplane avionics. What hasn’t been clear (to me at least) is what the technology is actually supposed to do.

Ed Morrissey explains what’s going on:

In fact, LightSquared lobbyists have been pressuring state legislators in Minnesota (where Best Buy has its corporate headquarters) to demand FCC approval through Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, in part by stressing Best Buy’s partnership with LightSquared and the notion that “retail cell phone rates for LightSquared’s partners are expected to drop by 33-50 percent!” That cost savings comes from not having to buy new frequencies, which cost carriers like AT&T and Verizon tens of billions of dollars at auction, which makes the waiver critical to their business plan.

Now it makes sense. LightSquared doesn’t have a new technology. What they have is a business plan: rather than spend a fortune to buy frequencies in the part of the spectrum where they belong, they want to use their political connections to get cheap frequencies elsewhere. They they use the cost savings to undercut their competition.

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Fox News reports:

President Obama’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee have returned more than $70,000 in contributions from former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine following the collapse of MF Global, Corzine’s financial firm, officials said Friday.

This is all about optics. The president decided it would look bad to keep campaign contributions from a man whose company stole $1.2 billion (and who personally fought against reforms that would have helped prevent the theft), and that he can afford to spare $70 thousand. However, Corzine’s personal contribution is just a drop in the bucket; Corzine’s real contribution was all the other money he could deliver:

Corzine was among Obama’s top fundraisers, raising at least $500,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign since April, according to records released by the campaign. The former Goldman Sachs chief held a fundraiser for the president last April and was considered a main Obama emissary to Wall Street.

None of that money is getting returned. He can spare $70 thousand, but half a million is another matter. He’s betting no one will pay attention to that. He isn’t even returning the other contributions from MF Global:

One of the Democratic officials said the campaign and DNC would evaluate whether to return donations from other MF Global employees on a case-by-case basis.

Three other top executives at MF Global also gave the maximum.

Victor David Hanson’s article on the decline of California’s central valley is absolutely heartbreaking.

Still more signing statements from the president who pledged not to use signing statements.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the number of the signing statements (of the we-aren’t-going-to-follow-this-provision variety, not the putting-our-interpretation-on-record variety) coming fr0m President Obama and from President Bush. I suspect that despite his posturing, Obama has put out just as many.

Walter Williams:

Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.

(Via RightWingNews.)

Still, I think that Milton Friedman’s comment is insightful. Rather than thinking about the causes of poverty, it’s more useful to think about the causes of wealth.

ProPublica looks at how the California Democratic party scammed the redistricting commission:

In previous years, the party had used its perennial control of California’s state Legislature to draw district maps that protected Democratic incumbents. But in 2010, California voters put redistricting in the hands of a citizens’ commission where decisions would be guided by public testimony and open debate. . .

In the weeks that followed, party leaders came up with a plan. Working with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — a national arm of the party that provides money and support to Democratic candidates — members were told to begin “strategizing about potential future district lines,” according to another email.

The citizens’ commission had pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves, not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests. When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party. . .

California’s Democratic representatives got much of what they wanted. . . Statewide, Democrats had been expected to gain at most a seat or two as a result of redistricting. But an internal party projection says that the Democrats will likely pick up six or seven seats in a state where the party’s voter registrations have grown only marginally.

(Via Instapundit.)

The NTSB is upset about cell phone use while driving:

And it was over just like that. It happened so quickly. And, that’s what happened at Gray Summit. Two lives lost in the blink of an eye. And, it’s what happened to more than 3,000 people last year. Lives lost. In the blink of an eye. In the typing of a text. In the push of a send button.

But it’s a lie; that figure counts all distractions, not just phone use. The actual number is less than a third of that, according to the NTSB’s own figures.

ASIDE: Another version of the piece, appearing in the Washington Post, renders the number “thousands of people”. Since the plural implies at least two thousand, that’s also a lie.

Two years ago I took a look at what the research on cell phone use while driving actually says. It was much more nuanced than the media would have us believe.

Each Chevy Volt sold has been subsidized to the tune of as much as $250k. (Via Althouse.)

In less than six weeks, 1% of Wisconsin has applied for a permit to carry a handgun. (Via Althouse.)

How absurd is the political battle over the Keystone XL pipeline? This map of pipelines in America shows how truly un-unprecedented another pipeline would be:

(Via Small Dead Animals, via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: More maps.

Victor Davis Hanson takes on the Obama mythology.

If you were a corrupt politician, and you thought that your political fortunes were tied to making certain numbers look better, wouldn’t you try to rig them? No I’m not talking about Argentina; I’m talking about the Obama administration’s effort to bring the Bureau of Labor Statistics to heel:

Over the last year, the administration has refused to fill the two top BLS positions. They have yet to nominate anyone to replace outgoing BLS Commissioner Keith Hall, whose term expires in January, and the number two post previously held by Deputy Commissioner Philip Rones has been vacant since last summer. . . BLS career professional and Associate Commissioner John Galvin has been given limited responsibilities to cover some of the deputy duties on an acting basis, but the White House has indicated it has no interest in promoting Galvin to the post of commissioner.

A retired career economist at the U.S. Department of Labor told PJ Media the administration wants to put its own political allies into the bureau, eschewing promotion from within:

Traditionally, the deputy commissioner position has been filled by promotion from within the ranks of experienced BLS career professionals, and when Rones retired from the deputy job last summer, Hall proposed promoting a highly qualified associate commissioner [John Galvin] to the position. The labor secretary and deputy secretary rebuffed that and made it clear that they wanted someone of their choosing from outside the existing career cadre.

The Senate could get involved by exercising its Senate confirmation process for a new commissioner — but the administration has circumvented the process by not nominating anyone. Nominations usually are announced as early as six months before the expiration of a term, but with a few weeks left before Hall leaves office, it is clear no commissioner will be running the bureau through much of 2012.

This has led to speculation that the White House is trying to circumvent the Senate so as to appoint a deputy whose position does not need Senate confirmation, and who would defer to the White House and to politically aggressive Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

Of course, this strategy assumes that Americans can be tricked into believing that the economy is improving, which remains to be seen.

Tests have shown that LightSquared is just as dangerous as many people feared:

Philip Falcone’s proposed LightSquared Inc. wireless service caused interference to 75 percent of global-positioning system receivers examined in a U.S. government test, according to a draft summary of results.

(Via Hot Air.)

LightSquared’s response is revealing (“How dare you reveal how dangerous our product is!”):

LightSquared is “outraged by the illegal leak of incomplete government data,” Harriman said in an e-mailed statement. “This breach attempts to draw an inaccurate conclusion to negatively influence the future of LightSquared and narrowly serve the business interests of the GPS industry.”

In fact, it’s worse than that. Not only does LightSquared disrupt GPS, it also disrupts a system that planes use to avoid running into mountains.

If LightSquared weren’t owned by a big Democratic donor, it would be dead in the water. Instead, the White House is pushing to cover all this up.

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The founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement has a history of anti-Semitic writing (more here).

As Pejman Yousefzadeh remarks:

I will only add that since it seemed to be perfectly fair to detractors of the Tea Party to judge the movement by the actions of a few dimwits at rallies, and the presence of a few offensive signs, it should also be perfectly fair to judge the Occupy movement by one of its chief gurus; and the noxious ideas he embraces.

Occupy Wall Street protesters shut down a television production because they didn’t like what they were saying:

More than 100 Occupy Wall Street demonstrators stormed the set for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” across from the Manhattan State Supreme Courthouse, shutting down production of an OWS-themed episode.

“We made it so that they could not exploit us and that’s awesome,” said Tammy Schapiro, 29, of Brooklyn.

More horrors from the British NHS, the model for national health care.