Internet Scofflaw

Interesting.

Interesting:

Americans are increasingly optimistic about the economy, but that brightening outlook hasn’t softened their outrage over the country’s direction and its political leadership, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds.

Two-thirds of those surveyed this week describe themselves as “angry” about the way things are going in the USA, the highest percentage in the decade the question has been asked. By nearly 2-1, they would rather vote for a candidate who has never served in Congress over one with experience.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama is willing to meet with the leaders of Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Cuba and North Korea, without precondition, because “the notion that somehow not talking to countries is punishment to them . . . is ridiculous”. In fact, “it is a disgrace that we have not spoken to them”.

But he won’t meet with the governor of Arizona. Some regimes are simply beyond the pale.

In Peggy Noonan’s latest Wall Street Journal column, “He Was Supposed to be Competent”, she channels public dismay at the Obama administration’s lack of competence, most recently in regard to the Deepwater Horizon spill. She makes a good point here:

His philosophy is that it is appropriate for the federal government to occupy a more burly, significant and powerful place in America—confronting its problems of need, injustice, inequality. But in a way, and inevitably, this is always boiled down to a promise: “Trust us here in Washington, we will prove worthy of your trust.” Then the oil spill came and government could not do the job, could not meet the need, in fact seemed faraway and incapable: “We pay so much for the government and it can’t cap an undersea oil well!”

She’s right that Barack Obama promised that, under him, government could do pretty much anything. Merely by nominating him for president, “the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”. He could not deliver on that promise.

But I’m with John Hinderaker in wondering why the public bought that Obama messianic nonsense in the first place. He was supposed to be competent? Why would we think that? This is a man who had no experience running anything before he was elected to the White House. His sole government experience was four years as a back-bencher in the US Senate, preceded by seven years of voting present in the Illinois Senate. His main qualification was delivering riveting speeches from the teleprompter.

The irony to this is that the discontent with President Obama’s performance is somewhat unfair. True, there are legitimate questions about why the administration exempted BP from environmental-impact analysis, how booms are being allocated, and about Obama’s strange disengagement and cluelessness. But ultimately there’s little that the federal government can do in a disaster like this.

In a different situation I would be defending the president, but in this case, Obama has made his bed. He over-promised what government can do, and he joined his party in shamelessly demagoguing Hurricane Katrina. In at least one speech he combined the two:

As we rebuild and recover, we must also learn the lessons of Katrina, so that our nation is more protected and resilient in the face of disaster. . . In Washington, that means a focus on competence and accountability – and I’m proud that my FEMA Administrator has 25 years of experience in disaster management in Florida, a state that has known its share of hurricanes. And across the country, that means improving coordination among different agencies, modernizing our emergency communications, and helping families plan for a crisis.

Now he is reaping the whirlwind.

(Previous post.)

The unauthorized biographer/stalker who rented the house next door to Sarah Palin is concerned about his privacy.

The New York Times seems to know more about how the administration is handling the Deepwater Horizon spill than the president does, despite it being his “top priority”.

(Previous post.)

When Tea Party protesters gather in a public place to protest government overreach, it’s dangerous latent terrorism. But apparently it’s fine when the SEIU buses 500 protesters literally to the front doorstep of a bank executive’s home.

But here’s the particularly sinister aspect of this protest: it was not intended for media consumption. It was purely for intimidation:

Sunday’s onslaught wasn’t designed for mainstream media consumption. There were no reporters from organizations like the Washington Post, no local camera crews who might have aired criticism of this private-home invasion. With the media covering the conservative Tea Party protesters, the behavior of individual activists has drawn withering scrutiny.

Instead, a friendly Huffington Post blogger showed up, narrowcasting coverage to the union’s leftist base. The rest of the message these protesters brought was personal-aimed at frightening Baer and his family, not influencing a broader public.

(Via Power Line.)

Interesting. This seems to indicate a lack of confidence that their health care nationalization bill will prove to be a political plus.

The problem with an official policy of ignoring criminals is some criminals are actually dangerous:

In an alarming example of how sanctuary cities can protect terrorists, a Pakistani man arrested for the Time Square bombing admitted on a city license application that he entered the U.S. illegally and authorities took no action.

That’s because he applied for the cabbie license in a state (Massachusetts) that openly protects illegal immigrants from deportation. Local law enforcement agencies throughout Massachusetts have don’t-ask-don’t-tell policies regarding illegal aliens and in this case the Boston Police Department has for years known that the terrorist, So Pir Khan, was in the country illegally.

Khan was recently arrested in an FBI terror sweep for his involvement in the Time Square bombing earlier this month. The Boston cab driver is one of three men who funneled money to the fellow Pakistani terrorist (Faisal Shahzad) who tried to blow up New York’s Time Square with a series of bombs hidden in a sports utility vehicle.

The Boston Police is lucky that Shahzad’s bomb failed. If he had succeeded in his plans, heads would be rolling in Boston over this. As it is, it’s a non-story. Until the next time.

(Via Patterico.)

If the definition of a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth, Paul Volcker committed a major gaffe in a recent speech. Volcker (one of President Obama’s chief economic advisers) cited Hauser’s law and compared it to the current rate of federal spending. He noted that the federal government always collects about 18.5% of GDP in tax revenue regardless of tax rates. When spending was around 20%, this meant a modest deficit, but spending is now around 25% or more. That means enormous deficits.

Hauser’s law observes you can’t get tax collections to 25% by tinkering with tax rates or adding a few new taxes; we need a different system to fund today’s government. And that, Volcker concludes, means a VAT. He says there is no prospect of getting government spending back to 20%. (Well, he is a Democrat.)

POSTSCRIPT: I actually understood Hauser’s law to say that government collected 19.5% of GDP, but that difference doesn’t matter to Volcker’s point.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Agriculture Department used to maintain a database of recipients of federal “farm subsidies” (payments to owners of arable land for not farming). No more. The information in the database was consistently embarrassing, so the Democratic Congress eliminated it in 2008.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Boston Globe reports:

Governor Deval Patrick, even as he decried partisanship in Washington, said today that Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda has become so obstinate that it “is almost at the level of sedition.”

I guess that we are supposed to take comfort in the “almost”. The current level of dissent is okay, barely, but any more and it will be time for a crackdown.

(Via the Corner.)

Thomas Friedman continues to fantasize about fascism. Well, at least he’s consistent.

Seriously, why do people pay attention to this guy?

UPDATE: NBC’s Andrea Mitchell agrees that we should be China for a day.

UPDATE: By the way, how on earth does Friedman think that limiting our dictator to a single day is going to protect democracy? One day is enough. The first time the Venezuelan legislature made Hugo Chavez a dictator, he issued all his decrees in one month. The second time he issued all his decrees in a single day.

Rasmussen reports that opposition to Obamacare is nearing two-thirds:

Support for repeal of the new national health care plan has jumped to its highest level ever. A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 63% of U.S. voters now favor repeal of the plan passed by congressional Democrats and signed into law by President Obama in March. Prior to today, weekly polling had shown support for repeal ranging from 54% to 58%.

Currently, just 32% oppose repeal.

Interestingly, strong support for repeal is holding steady at a near majority (46%). Weak opposition to repeal is also holding steady at hardly anyone (7%). The shift comes from a big drop in strong opposition to repeal, which fell from a third to a quarter, and a corresponding rise in weak support for repeal. Thus, it seems as though the key support for health care nationalization is eroding.

The shift could be explained by some major recent revelations that Obamacare is even worse than previously thought. On the other hand, it could be just a polling blip. If opposition falls back into the 54-58% range, you can count on the media reporting it as softening opposition.

The Consumer Product Safety Commission wants to ban manufacture and sale of drop-side cribs. But even that’s not enough for Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), who wants to get rid of the existing ones too.

Tax cuts for business tend to be pro-growth, but it’s not hard to imagine one that would be anti-growth. For example, you could offer a tax cut for refusing to hire more workers. That would be stupid, right? No one would ever do such a thing.

Well, yes, it’s stupid, but that hasn’t kept Democrats from doing exactly that:

Zach Hoffman was confident his small business would qualify for a new tax cut in President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul law. But when he ran the numbers, Hoffman discovered that his office furniture company wouldn’t get any assistance with the $79,200 it pays annually in premiums for its 24 employees. “It leaves you with this feeling of a bait-and-switch,” he said.

When the administration unveiled the small business tax credit earlier this week, officials touted its “broad eligibility” for companies with fewer than 25 workers and average annual wages under $50,000 that provide health coverage. Hoffman’s workers earn an average of $35,000 a year, which makes it all the more difficult to understand why his company didn’t qualify.

Lost in the fine print: The credit drops off sharply once a company gets above 10 workers and $25,000 average annual wages.

A tax credit you lose if you hire more than ten workers, to encourage people to keep their businesses small. Brilliant!

The real problem here is nomenclature. In truth, tax cuts and targeted tax credits are entirely different things. Tax cuts are modifications to general tax policy. Targeted tax credits are government spending concealed in the tax code. It doesn’t even matter if the targeted recipient pays no taxes; usually they make them refundable.

Democrats are putting their payoffs in the tax code more and more often because it sounds better to the public to call them “tax cuts” than “government spending”. We need to stop letting them get away with that.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: More here. (Via Instapundit.)

An example of the high principles with which financial regulation is being considered:

Dan noted yesterday that Sen. Chris Dodd snuck in a (literally) eleventh-hour amendment to the Senate’s financial-regulation bill which would have allowed a group of federal officials who oppose Sen. Blanche Lincoln’s derivatives amendment to quietly “study” it to death.

Dodd apparently thought he could safely do this without affecting Lincoln’s chances in her primary race, but Lincoln failed to win outright and must win a runoff. So now Dodd has pulled a double reverse and issued a “nevermind” via Twitter: He will not bring up his amendment to Lincoln’s derivatives bill after all.

This is all about election posturing.

Steward Baker writes:

Imagine that data from your unsecured wireless router has been mistakenly collected by a Google Street View car as it trundles down your street.  The company admits that it shouldn’t have done that.  In order to cure the privacy violation, you want Google to:

(a) Destroy your data

(b) Turn all your data over to German government officials

You can learn everything you need to know about the European privacy bureaucracy from the answer to this question.

David Ranson revisits Hauser’s Law in a new Wall Street Journal op-ed. Tax receipts as a percentage of GDP continues to remain essentially constant, regardless of tax rates:

Massachusetts’s health care law is destined to be a case study in Economics 101 textbooks:

1. Massachusetts passes a law that mandates coverage of pre-existing conditions (and also institutes other expensive mandates).
2. Adverse selection: People learn to game the system, by purchasing coverage when they need expensive treatment and dropping it immediately afterward.
3. Prices skyrocket.
4. Massachusetts imposes price controls.
5. As always, price controls create shortages. Insurers refuse to issue new policies at the mandated rates.
6. Massachusetts forces insurers to resume issuing new policies, at the mandated rates.
7. Insurers post huge losses.

That’s where Massachusetts is now. In part 8, insurers stop doing business in Massachusetts. In part 9, Massachusetts institutes a public option. Since there is no private insurance, the public option is de facto single payer. In part 10, Massachusetts’s deficit skyrockets. In part 11, health care rationing is instituted.

Massachusetts could turn back at any point. But if they don’t, each step in this progression is inevitable. It’s basic economics.

The United States is still at step one. Let’s turn back now.

Richard Blumenthal, the Democratic nominee to succeed the corrupt Christopher Dodd in the Senate, lied about serving in Vietnam. The surprising thing is the New York Times reported it.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: Blumenthal’s effort to play this off as a misunderstanding of ambiguous statements isn’t going to wash.

UPDATE: More. Blumenthal is violating the first rule of holes.

The Economist reports:

ON A recent trip to America, Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, could not resist the temptation to needle his hosts. Just before the visit his American counterpart, Barack Obama, had secured Congressional approval of a plan for a dramatic expansion of the country’s health-insurance market. Observing that America is the only wealthy country to lack universal health coverage, Mr Sarkozy sniffed: “Welcome to the club of states who don’t turn their back on the sick and the poor.”

Look here, Monsieur Grenouille Président. America does offer treatment to the sick and the poor through hospital emergency rooms. (And despite the new law, that’s where their treatment is likely to remain.)  If you want to see what it looks like to turn your back on the sick and the poor, I suggest looking a bit closer to home:

The death toll in France from August’s blistering heat wave has reached nearly 15,000, according to a government-commissioned report released Thursday, surpassing a prior tally by more than 3,000. . .

The bulk of the victims — many of them elderly — died during the height of the heat wave, which brought suffocating temperatures of up to 104 degrees in a country where air conditioning is rare. Others apparently were greatly weakened during the peak temperatures but did not die until days later.

The new estimate comes a day after the French Parliament released a harshly worded report blaming the deaths on a complex health system, widespread failure among agencies and health services to coordinate efforts, and chronically insufficient care for the elderly. . .

The heat wave swept across much of Europe, but the death toll was far higher in France than in any other country.

How did it happen? Neglect:

The immediate flush of media attention last week centered on the sexier political debate over the slow and initially dismissive reaction by the conservative government of Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin, much of which was on holiday as the death toll mounted. Raffarin has refused to accept any blame, while President Jacques Chirac was bizarrely silent — and on vacation in Canada — for the duration of the heat wave. When he finally addressed the crisis in televised remarks last Thursday, Chirac avoided finger pointing, instead emphasizing that “family solidarity [and] respect for the aged and handicapped” are necessary to avoid future tragedies. Doctors and health experts, the people no one listened to during the heat wave, are telling a larger, darker story. The heat wave only made visible, they say, a crisis that had been under way for years: a chronically under-funded and understaffed elder care system combined with a national habit of shutting senior citizens out of sight and mind. . .

The majority of this summer’s victims were found dead in homes they occupied alone — or were brought to emergency rooms too dehydrated and weak to be saved. The August vacation period had lowered the staffing levels of rescue squads and hospitals. And well before that, many elderly people had already become cut off from regular human contact.

I hope we’re not joining Mr. Sarkozy’s club. I fear we are.

Wait, this isn’t what Democrats said would happen:

The new healthcare law will pack 32 million newly insured people into emergency rooms already crammed beyond capacity, according to experts on healthcare facilities.

A chief aim of the new healthcare law was to take the pressure off emergency rooms by mandating that people either have insurance coverage. The idea was that if people have insurance, they will go to a doctor rather than putting off care until they faced an emergency.

People who build hospitals, however, say newly insured people will still go to emergency rooms for primary care because they don’t have a doctor.

“Everybody expected that one of the initial impacts of reform would be less pressure on emergency departments; it’s going to be exactly the opposite over the next four to eight years,” said Rich Dallam, a healthcare partner at the architectural firm NBBJ, which designs healthcare facilities.

“We don’t have the primary care infrastructure in place in America to cover the need. Our clients are looking at and preparing for more emergency department volume, not less,” he said.

This is not a hypothetical; it’s exactly what happened in Massachusetts:

Massachusetts in 2006 created near-universal coverage for residents, which was supposed to ease the traffic in hospital emergency rooms.

But a recent poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that nearly two-thirds of the state’s residents say emergency department wait times have either increased or remained the same.

A February 2010 report by The Council of State Governments found that wait times had not abated since the law took effect.

Obamacare is a catastrophe in waiting. Fortunately, it’s not too late for us to repeal the thing and avert the catastrophe.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Finger-Pointer-in-Chief says:

“I will not tolerate any more finger pointing.”

I suppose he means finger pointing by other people.

(Via Hot Air.)

Some more serious thoughts along these lines here.

Nancy Pelosi says the health care nationalization bill is “entrepreneurial”, because under it you can quit your job and still have health care.

Being a real entrepreneur is much, much harder under Obamacare because of the strangling web of regulations, mandates, and taxes. But to Nancy Pelosi, an “entrepreneur” is anyone without a real job.

In the Obama administration, knowing what you’re talking about is optional:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who has been critical of Arizona’s new immigration law, said Thursday he hasn’t yet read the law and is going by what he’s read in newspapers or seen on television.

Mr. Holder is conducting a review of the law, at President Obama’s request, to see if the federal government should challenge it in court. He said he expects he will read the law by the time his staff briefs him on their conclusions.

“I’ve just expressed concerns on the basis of what I’ve heard about the law. But I’m not in a position to say at this point, not having read the law, not having had the chance to interact with people are doing the review, exactly what my position is,” Mr. Holder told the House Judiciary Committee.

This weekend Mr. Holder told NBC’s “Meet the Press” program that the Arizona law “has the possibility of leading to racial profiling.” He had earlier called the law’s passage “unfortunate,” and questioned whether the law was unconstitutional because it tried to assume powers that may be reserved for the federal government.

The law that he hasn’t had time to read is all of 18 pages long.

(Via Hot Air.)

AFP reports:

The US government suffered a wider-than-expected budget deficit of 82.69 billion dollars in April, the Treasury Department said Wednesday. It was nearly four times the deficit chalked up a year earlier and the largest ever recorded in April. Most analysts had expected the April deficit, the 19th consecutive month of federal red ink, to be about 52 billion dollars. . .

“The federal government normally runs a surplus during April because of personal income-tax payments but is running a deficit now because of the recovery from the recession and the policy response,” said Augustine Faucher, director of macroeconomics research for Moody’s Economy.com.

That’s 59% higher than projected, and what’s particularly appalling is April includes tax day.