Internet Scofflaw

The FDA is considering pulling cold medicines such as Nyquil off the market. It seems that some people use them incorrectly, taking too much and/or combining them with other acetaminophen products, resulting in an overdose. This kills about 20 people per year.

Cough syrup for toddlers is already banned, due to fears it can be misused. Its misuse killed about 3 children per year. Hundreds of public pools across the country are closing because municipalities cannot afford to retrofit them with drain covers that comply with the Virginia Graeme Baker act. Circulation entrapments kill about 1 person per year. (But one of them was the granddaughter of an important politician.)

Every death is a tragedy, of course. We need to ensure safety, at whatever the cost, right?

Then what about CAFE gas mileage standards, which kill 1300 people every year? If we’re going to curtail everyone’s lives to save a few people per year (or even just one), certainly CAFE standards need to go! Right?

Not at all. We’re tightening CAFE standards. Dramatically. From 27.5 mpg to 39 mpg. We can’t know how many additional people that will kill each year, but the number is surely in the hundreds at least.

Well, I suppose the government must have its priorities. Safety isn’t everything.

UPDATE: By a vote of 24-13, Nyquil and the like will remain on the market, assuming the FDA follows its panel’s recommendation.

Oh, for crying out loud:

Q: How do you think conservative talk radio has affected the Legislature’s work?

A: The Republicans were essentially threatened and terrorized against voting for revenue. Now [some] are facing recalls. They operate under a terrorist threat: “You vote for revenue and your career is over.” I don’t know why we allow that kind of terrorism to exist. I guess it’s about free speech, but it’s extremely unfair.

Look, you legislative jackasses. Those seats aren’t yours, they’re ours. We’re allowed to turn you out of office if we don’t like what you’re doing.

David Axelrod is refusing to rule out a middle-class tax hike. Is anyone honestly surprised by this? Of course President Obama will hike taxes on the middle-class (indeed, already has); that’s what Democrats always do.

One of the more tedious parts of election campaigns and early administrations is listening to the media take seriously farcical pledges like this (or sunlight-before-signing). At least that’s over.

UPDATE: The press openly laughed at the White House press secretary’s pathetic efforts to dodge a direct question about this.

UPDATE: Transcript of Gibbs’ efforts here. (Via Instapundit.)

Here’s an interesting and revealing quote from Barack Obama during the presidential campaign last year:

After ABC’s Charlie Gibson noted that the record shows increased taxes on capital gains — which would affect 100 million Americans — would likely lead to a decrease in government revenues: “Well, Charlie, what I’ve said is that I would look at raising the capital gains tax for purposes of fairness.”

(Via Sense of Events.)

The President’s stated position is that favors higher taxes on investors, even when those taxes actually decrease revenues! The government should actually spend money just to hurt investors.

In what world is this a reasonable policy? It’s spite, pure and simple.

CNET reports:

The Environmental Protection Agency may have suppressed an internal report that was skeptical of claims about global warming, including whether carbon dioxide must be strictly regulated by the federal government, according to a series of newly disclosed e-mail messages.

Less than two weeks before the agency formally submitted its pro-regulation recommendation to the White House, an EPA center director quashed a 98-page report that warned against making hasty “decisions based on a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”

The EPA official, Al McGartland, said in an e-mail message (PDF) to a staff researcher on March 17: “The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward…and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.”

The e-mail correspondence raises questions about political interference in what was supposed to be an independent review process inside a federal agency–and echoes criticisms of the EPA under the Bush administration, which was accused of suppressing a pro-climate change document. . .

E-mail messages released this week show that [the report's author] was ordered not to “have any direct communication” with anyone outside his small group at EPA on the topic of climate change, and was informed that his report would not be shared with the agency group working on the topic.

(Via Instapundit.)

The cap-and-trade bill that the House just passed doesn’t even exist. Nowhere is the thing written down in one place. The House of Representatives voted on and passed a phantom bill.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised, as the Democrats have already shown in the past their complete disdain for parliamentary procedure.

Fox News reports:

President Obama blamed health care costs for the mounting federal deficit, saying Tuesday the country will spend $1 out of every $5 on health care within the next 10 years if the government does not mandate reform.

Describing the need to control costs as the administration’s “top priority,” the president said health costs as the “primary driver” of the federal deficit.

“The U.S. government is not going to be able to afford Medicare and Medicaid on its current trajectory,” Obama told reporters during his fourth solo news conference Tuesday.

Health care spending is sucking the life out of the federal budget, so clearly the solution is a massive expansion of government health care spending. Good thinking.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the bailouts and “stimulus” package might have contributed a wee little bit to the deficit as well, mightn’t they?

The White House has officially abandoned its “sunlight before signing” campaign promise, which it never observed anyway.

(Previous post.)

When the government runs an auto company, it decisions will be made for political reasons, not business reasons. Thus, GM’s new small car will be manufactured in Michigan, rather than its more efficient plants in Wisconsin or Tennessee. The more efficient plants will be closed. (Via Kausfiles, via Instapundit.)

In fact, the small car initiative itself is foolishness. As the Wall Street Journal pointed out, Detroit ought to be focusing on expensive cars, which could dilute their high labor costs better. But they cannot, because CAFE standards require them to manufacture lots of light (i.e., cheap) cars. Now that the government controls GM, it’s pushing GM further in the wrong direction.

I’m not back to regular blogging yet, but stupidity of this magnitude necessitates some comment. I held out hope that “cap and trade” might somehow be averted, but it seems very unlikely, now that Democrats have come to an accord.

Democrats are trumpeting a new EPA analysis that says that cap and trade will increase average household energy cost “only” about $100 a year. That seems like a lot to me. In 2005, the average household spent $1063.20 on electricity, so we’re talking about roughly a 10% increase in household electric prices.

Politicians care about household electric bills because voters see those directly, but household electricity is just the tip of the iceberg. Everything uses energy: manufacturing, transportation, services. Under cap and trade, the price of everything will increase. Dramatically.

The bottom line is that our lives require energy. We cannot maintain our current standard of living, or anything close to it, without significant carbon emissions. Plus, there are significant sources of carbon emissions outside of energy, such as food.

An MIT study shows the impossibility of what Democrats are trying to achieve. President Obama’s target is to cut per capita emissions to 2.5 tons by 2050. The United States never had a carbon footprint so small, even in colonial times. The only nations to “achieve” that level today are impoverished ones, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.

In fact, an American homeless person sleeping in shelters and eating in soup kitchens has a carbon footprint of 8.5 tons. The president wants to cut the average carbon footprint to under a third of a homeless person’s. Without multiple unforeseen technological breakthroughs, or reducing Americans to abject poverty, it simply cannot be done.

UPDATE: The EPA analysis is a rosy one too. The CBO analysis is nearly double: $175 per year. That’s a 17% increase. Other estimates are higher still.

This would sure be something.

Monica Conyers, Detroit city councilwoman and wife of the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee (!), is facing multiple bribery charges and is looking at prison time. (Via the Corner.)

Canada’s chief censor is complaining that her critics are chilling the free speech of the pro-censorship crowd.

No surprise here.

Glenn Reynolds comments:

Like Pelosi tabled the Murtha inquiry. And we’re not hearing much about Dodd, Moran, or Visclosky, either. And what about Charles Rangel? I’m beginning to think all that “draining the swamp” talk was just a bunch of campaign lies!

The Senate health care bill will cost $1.6 trillion over 10 years. For that, we can cut the proportion of insured by 6%. (Via Instapundit.)

Amazon says they will shut down their Amazon Associates program (in which people can advertise Amazon products and earn commissions) in North Carolina if its legislature goes through with a new tax on “digital click-throughs.” (Via Instapundit.)

If they don’t care about denying income to North Carolina residents during a tough time, they ought to care about hurting the state’s bottom line. Under current law, those commissions are already taxable income; under the new law, those commissions will cease to exist. Brilliant.

The “stimulus” plan is funding a program that the Democrats specifically promised to exclude:

It became a sort of poster child for fiscal responsibility — a clean-coal power plant in Illinois that was one of then-Sen. Barack Obama’s pet projects.

Democrats insisted they were so serious about keeping pork out of the stimulus bill that it was President Obama himself who blocked the FutureGen project from the massive spending package.

“It shows that we’re serious about it,” Brendan Daly, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s spokesman, said at the time. “The speaker said it, and the president said it: There will not be earmarks in this bill.”

Earmarks? Perhaps not. But funding for FutureGen? Absolutely, to the tune of $1 billion.

The Department of Energy on Friday announced that the FutureGen project is on track after all, committing federal stimulus money to advance the project to its next stage. One reason: It was the only shovel-ready project that fits the requirements of the stimulus bill.

Administration officials and the project’s other big backer, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), insist that’s not an earmark at all, as promised — because the stimulus bill doesn’t specifically name the FutureGen project as a recipient of the money.

But others say that’s a distinction without a difference — that FutureGen is merely an earmark by another name, a project that had powerful patrons, funding straight out of the stimulus bill and requirements for the money targeted so narrowly that only a few projects would fit the bill.

(Via Instapundit.)

Since the omission of FutureGen was put forward by Democrats as a demonstration that they were serious, but instead FutureGen got the most expensive earmark in history (according to Senator Tom Coburn), it seems fair to say this proves they were not serious.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, how dishonest is Dick Durban? He perfectly well knows that earmarks are often not specified by name, but by very narrow description, just as in this case.

It’s not just expensive and a horrific expansion of government, it won’t even work:

If the government did nothing new, CBO says the uninsured would be 19% of the non-elderly population in 2019. If they implemented the Democrats’ proposal, the uninsured would be 13% of the non-elderly population.

There will be more scoring documents to come, as there are a large numbers of provisions to take account of that haven’t been counted here, but this is a pretty rough start for the Democrats. They expected the CBO score to produce some painful cost numbers that would complicate their efforts, and it has. But I don’t think they expected the upside to be quite so unimpressive. It makes it difficult to argue for the value of all that spending, taxing, and growth of government.

A bankruptcy judge has aborted the government’s Delphi deal. Megan McArdle comments on the deal:

If true, this is an even more heavy-handed intervention than Chrysler, and considerably more disturbing. Debtor-in-Possession financing, or DIP, is the financing that allows companies to reorganize in bankruptcy. It’s senior to everything else because if it weren’t, no one would be willing to lend money to companies that definitionally have a high probability of failure. Stiffing those creditors in order to make GM, or even Delphi, better off, is incredibly short-sighted.

It also has some potentially scary implications for our political economy. The quasi-legitimate argument in favor of the government’s interventions in favor of the UAW was that Uncle Sam was the only available debtor-in-possession financier, and therefore had a right to call the tune. Screwing over the DIP providers would, of course, make it harder for other companies to get DIP. What new rights could the government discover in those bankruptcies?

In this case, however, the bankruptcy judge wasn’t buying. He ordered Delphi to put its assets up for auction. Now we get to test the theory that the government is acting in ways that actually make all the creditors getting cramdowns better off. If the government has indeed been acting in everyone’s best interest, the auction will be a dismal failure.

(Via Instapundit.)

Byron York has been investigating the firing of the Americorps Inspector General. It’s now clear that it was because he refused to go easy on well-connected corruption.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

I guess questioning your opponents’ patriotism is okay now?

CIA Director Leon Panetta says former Vice President Dick Cheney’s criticism of the Obama administration’s approach to terrorism almost suggests “he’s wishing that this country would be attacked again, in order to make his point.”

UPDATE: A CIA spokeman is walking back the claim now.

When they talk about Congress breeding rats, they usually don’t mean it literally:

John Bailey thought it was great when his neighbor was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 2007.

“Not everyone lives next door to a congresswoman,” he said.

But two years later, he doesn’t feel so lucky. The congresswoman’s house is abandoned and in disrepair, “a blight on the neighborhood,” Bailey said.

He said he thinks the way Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Calif., has treated her home tells far more about her than her voting record. . .

Things got so bad that in the fall of 2008 rats began breeding in Richardson’s backyard and soon moved into a house next door.

The congresswoman has gained a degree of infamy in the Sacramento neighborhood. The two-story house, gray with red trim, is badly in need of paint. The front lawn is a patchwork of grass and weeds with brown splotches of dirt. Much of the once lush ivy covering the chain-link fence has died. The red wooden gate sprawls on the lawn, unless someone props it up. A toilet sits on the back patio.

The backyard weeds, which neighbors said had grown three or four feet high, were cut a day after the Los Angeles Times wrote about them a few months ago. Dead leaves have gathered behind the hot tub. Rosebushes are struggling from lack of water, since the sprinklers are never turned on. Brown paper covers many windows. There is no furniture inside. Two beer cans are in the kitchen sink surrounded by dirt. The countertop and cabinets have been pulled out. . .

Richardson bought the house in early 2007 for $535,000. She already owned two other houses that she had defaulted on six times. . .

In April 2008, Bailey sent a letter complaining about the condition of Richardson’s house to Pelosi, then-state Democratic Party chief Art Torres and his congresswoman, Doris Matsui, a Democrat from Sacramento. Pelosi’s was the only response he received. She said she couldn’t comment.

More recently, Peter Thomsen sent Richardson an e-mail telling her that she should be responsible and fix the house for the sake of the neighborhood.  He received a response saying that he didn’t reside in her district.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Canadian “Human Rights” Commission’s latest attempt to censor Ezra Levant backfires in a big way. Watch here (nearly 15 minutes long).

(Via Instapundit.)

The indispensable Megan McArdle takes a look at the latest effort to blame President Bush for the appalling deficits that President Obama is racking up. (Via Instapundit.) The latest is a piece at the New York Times that takes a look at projected federal deficit over 2009-2012 and examines how that projection has changed from 2000 to today. Not surprisingly, the NYT piece finds the President Bush is to blame for most of the change.

McArdle makes a number of good points. An “under current law” comparison is bogus because it ignores changes that everyone knows are going to be made. For example, the annual AMT fix is going to happen, and the government is always going to spend whatever surplus it acquires. She also points out that it’s nonsensical to blame Bush (from the left anyway) for spending increases that Democrats attacked as insufficient.

But I think McArdle didn’t clearly make the central point (although her “under current law” critique gets at it). All the NYT piece does is compare fantasies. It takes a four-year period (2009-2012), three years of which have not been budgeted yet, and examines how projections of that period changed from 2000 to today.

We make a big show of making multi-year budget projections, but we budget just one year at a time. A spending plan for 2009 written in 2000 had nothing to do with reality. Likewise a spending plan for 2012 written in 2009 has nothing to do with reality.

President Obama tells us that we’re going to spend an insane amount of money this year and next, but then we’re going to start paring it back. (Diet starts tomorrow!) When you average out all four years, it doesn’t look as bad (particularly if you use OMB numbers). That’s what the NYT piece does to minimize Obama’s deficit impact.

Who actually believes that the President and the Democratic Congress, after spending trillions on ever liberal hobby horse and pork barrel, are really going to start dramatically cutting spending next year? I sure don’t.

The only reality is years that are already budgeted. Everything else is fantasy. As it happens, both Bush and Obama submitted budgets for 2009 and we can compare them. Bush’s 2009 budget was based on revenue predictions before the financial crisis, so we have to discard its bottom line, but we can still look at what would have happened under his spending plan, and compare it to Obama’s spending plan.

As I calculated here in March, Bush’s austerity budget cut spending (from the baseline) and would have ended with a $1 trillion deficit. Obama’s “stimulus” budget increased spending and would have ended with a $1.75 trillion deficit. (We’ll accept the OMB numbers for present purposes.) Something close to Obama’s budget was enacted by Congress.

President Obama has nearly doubled the deficit in one year. That’s the reality. He says that he’ll start cutting it soon. That’s fantasy.

The horrifying shooting at the Holocaust Museum earlier this week has evinced a familiar pattern. While the right responds to terror by attacking terrorists, the left often responds to terror by attacking the right. (Via Instapundit.) The news that the Museum shooter was a white supremacist indicated to the left that this incident belonged to them. They quickly settled on a narrative, suggesting that the outrageous DHS report from April, which tarred conservatives, libertarians, and veterans as potential terrorists, wasn’t so outrageous after all.

That argument is crap anyway, but it turns out that the facts in this case don’t even harmonize with their argument. As Politico put it, the shooter is “too far on the fringe to fit into conventional political classification.” He is a white supremacist, but he also hates “neocons” and believes that 9/11 was an inside job. In fact, the FBI uncovered evidence that the conservative Weekly Standard may have been on his list of targets.

This doesn’t mean that the right should now turn around and pin this atrocity on the left. Instead of turning on each other, we really should just fight the terrorists.

This sounds shady:

Some strange and potentially suspicious events tonight concerning the Obama White House and the AmeriCorps program. I’ve been told that on Wednesday night the AmeriCorps inspector general, Gerald Walpin, received a call from the White House counsel’s office telling him that he had one hour to either resign or be fired. The White House did not cite a reason. “The answer that was given was that it’s just time to move on,” one Senate source told me tonight. “The president would like to have someone else in that position.”

Inspectors General are part of every federal department. They are given the responsibility of independently investigating allegations of waste, fraud, and corruption in the government, without fear of interference by political appointees or the White House. Last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which added new protections for IGs, including a measure requiring the president to give Congress 30 days prior notice before dismissing an IG. The president must also give Congress an explanation of why the action is needed. Then-Sen. Barack Obama was one of the co-sponsors of the Act. . .

The White House is going ahead with firing Walpin. The firing apparently stems from Walpin’s investigation of a non-profit group, St. HOPE Academy, run by Kevin Johnson, the former NBA star who is now mayor of Sacramento, California (and a big Obama supporter). “[Walpin] found that Johnson, a former all-star point guard for the Phoenix Suns, had used AmeriCorps grants to pay volunteers to engage in school-board political activities, run personal errands for Johnson and even wash his car,” the AP reports. In April, the U.S. attorney declined to file any criminal charges in the matter and criticized Walpin’s investigation. But at the same time Johnson and St. HOPE agreed to repay about half of the $850,000 it had received from AmeriCorps.

Bottom line: The AmeriCorps IG accuses prominent Obama supporter of misusing AmeriCorps grant money. Prominent Obama supporter has to pay back more than $400,000 of that grant money. Obama fires AmeriCorps IG.

(Via Hot Air.)

The market is losing confidence in US Treasury debt. (Via Instapundit.) Hmm, I wonder why. Well, there’s this telling chart from Arthur Laffer:

(Via Hot Air.) And of course, there’s always this:

The bond market has good reason to begin worrying that US Treasury debt won’t be paid off, at least not in real money.

An important part of liberalism is respect for women and their right to play an equal role in business, media, and government.

Ha ha! Just kidding. An important part of liberalism is respect for liberal women and their right to play an equal role in business, media, and government. Conservative or libertarian women, on the other hand, can be attacked in the crudest possible terms, and the left will remain silent. Even the feminist left will not make a peep. Don Surber reviews several recent examples. (Via Instapundit.)

Leftist feminism isn’t about women making their own choices; it’s about women making liberal choices.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: The National Organization for Women actually did come out and condemn Letterman for his Willow/Bristol Palin joke. Good for them.

Removing that example certainly undercuts my point a bit.  That said, searching NOW’s Hall of Shame doesn’t turn up any hits for any of Surber’s other examples, even the Playboy article on raping conservative women. And, they felt the need to go back 15 years to find a somewhat (but not really) similar example to Letterman on the right. (Why they feel the need to credentialize is beyond me.) So just one cheer for NOW.