Internet Scofflaw

Here’s how our corrupt political system works: Democrats tax us (and borrow) to give sweetheart contracts and defined-benefit pensions to public employees. Public-employee unions collect dues from those employees. Then those unions spend the money to ensure the re-election of Democrats:

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees is now the biggest outside spender of the 2010 elections, thanks to an 11th-hour effort to boost Democrats that has vaulted the public-sector union ahead of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and a flock of new Republican groups in campaign spending.

The 1.6 million-member AFSCME is spending a total of $87.5 million on the elections after tapping into a $16 million emergency account to help fortify the Democrats’ hold on Congress. Last week, AFSCME dug deeper, taking out a $2 million loan to fund its push. The group is spending money on television advertisements, phone calls, campaign mailings and other political efforts, helped by a Supreme Court decision that loosened restrictions on campaign spending.

“We’re the big dog,” said Larry Scanlon, the head of AFSCME’s political operations. “But we don’t like to brag.”

This is from a year ago, but I’ve only just learned about it. In a revealing exchange at the National Press Club on May 21, 2009, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood was asked about his policies for promoting mass transit and bicycling:

Q: Some in the highway-supporters motorist groups have been concerned by your livability initiative. Is this an effort to make driving more torturous and to coerce people out of their cars?

LaHood: It is a way to coerce people out of their cars, yeah. I mean, look, people don’t like spending an hour and a half getting to work. And people don’t like spending an hour going to the grocery store. And all of you who live around here know exactly what I’m talking about. . .

Q: How do you respond?

LaHood: About everything we do around here is government intrusion into people’s lives. Have at it. [Laughter.]

NOTE: I’ve cobbled the exchange together from three sources, using the C-SPAN uncorrected transcript (at 21:48) to determine the correct order of the pieces. (Curiously, the C-SPAN video won’t play.) I also added the emphasis.

This came just days after a George Will column alleging that LaHood was trying to modify people’s behavior. I think it’s safe to call that allegation confirmed.

I’m sure the left talks this way amongst themselves all the time in private, but I am surprised to see LaHood come out and proclaim his support for coercion and intrusion into people’s lives at the National Press Club. We need these people out of office. Quite simply, they are enemies of freedom.

POSTSCRIPT: One possible explanation for LaHood’s indiscreet remarks is he may have had good reason to feel he was among friends. After his breezy defense of government intrusion, the transcript shows laughter where it ought to show gasps. Furthermore, when the National Press Club reported the event, the article made no mention of the chilling coercion/intrusion exchange, and made the meeting out to be a love-fest:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood’s penchant for off-the-cuff bantering with the press shined through at a packed NPC luncheon May 21, eliciting more laughs than customary for a Cabinet official.

Slate has developed a semi-objective measure for politicians’ vanity they call the Vanity Index, and they’ve applied it to the members of the Senate. Their methodology is based on the photos and awards that they have on their office wall, with extra credit awarded for photos with celebrities. Obviously it’s not perfect, but I think the results tell us something.

The #1 most vain senator? The famously arrogant blue-blood John Kerry (D-MA), of course. How could it be anyone else? Kerry scored significantly higher than the second-place finisher, the soon-to-be-unemployed Arlen Specter (D-PA). Rounding out the top five are Jim Bunning (R-KY) (as a Hall of Fame baseball player, this is not very surprising), the late Robert Byrd (D-WV), and Joe Lieberman (ID-CT).

Speaking of John Kerry, he is joining President Obama in blaming stupid voters for the Democrats’ woes:

“It’s absurd. We’ve lost our minds,” Kerry said. “We’re in a period of know-nothingism in the country, where truth and science and facts don’t weigh in. It’s all short-order, lowest common denominator, cheap-seat politics.”

This quote is vintage John Kerry. All of us disgusted with the Democrats, we are the lowest common denominator, the cheap seats. We know nothing.

And for some reason we didn’t elect that guy president. Imagine that.

President Obama:

If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re going to punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder and that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on November 2.

(Emphasis mine.)

Obama isn’t talking about Al Qaeda, Iran, or North Korea, he’s talking his domestic opposition. This language is unworthy of a free nation. This is Hugo Chavez territory.

One thing is for certain; Obama won’t be able to get away with this kind of crap any more:

The men and women who serve in our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America – they have served the United States of America.

So I’ve got news for you, John McCain. We all put our country first.

“Put our country first” was 2008. In 2010, it’s “punish our enemies”.

UPDATE: Charles Krauthammer has a way with words:

This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends – not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution.

UPDATE: Obama retracts the word “enemies”, saying that “opponents”  would have been better. But, significantly, he doesn’t retract the word “punish”.

A government-mandated market in imaginary goods can have pernicious effects? Who ever could have predicted such a thing?

ONE of the curiosities of carbon markets is that they do not just trade in carbon. Other greenhouse gases can be given a value, too—sometimes a very high one. Claims that these prices promote scammery are now prompting some searching questions.

The gas at the centre of the controversy is HFC-23, a greenhouse gas which, on a weight-for-weight basis, is 14,800 times better at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. HFC-23 is produced as a by-product of the manufacture of HCFC-22, an ozone-destroying refrigerant. . .

Under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the United Nations HCFC-22 producers in developing countries that destroy, rather than release, their HFC-23 can be eligible for Certified Emission Reduction (CER) credits, which can then be traded in the European Union’s emissions-trading scheme. . .

Because destroying a tonne of HFC-23 is a lot cheaper than avoiding the emission of more than 10,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, HFC-23 destruction has become the CDM’s principal source of emissions credits. . .

You cannot simply set up an HCFC-22 plant and demand cash; eligibility is limited to companies which were already producing the gases in 2000-04, and companies are capped in the amount they can receive. But there is little incentive for approved incineration schemes to reduce the amount of HFC-23 that they produce. Quite the reverse, argues CDMwatch, a group that monitors the offset market. It says it has shown the CDM executive board that some plants have reduced their HFC-23 production during periods in which they were ineligible for CERs and upped it when they became eligible again, gaming the system.

I can’t fathom how anyone can be surprised. The governments, in their wisdom, decided to create a market for trading these imaginary goods. How can they be shocked when businesses work to manufacture a “product” for which they are being paid?

ABC News (warning: annoying auto-play video) reports:

The Democratic National Committee formally has asked the Pentagon for reams of correspondence between military agencies and nine potential Republican presidential candidates, a clear indication that Democrats are building opposition-research files on specific 2012 contenders even before the midterm elections.

ABC adds that this sort of thing is typical, and the unusual thing is that the Democrats would be doing opposition research so early.

FTC Drops Investigation of Google Less Than a Week After Company Exec Hosts Obama Fundraiser.

According to Democratic pollster Doug Schoen, likely voters think that Bush was a better president than Obama by a 48-43 margin. They also think that Obama should not be re-elected, by a 56-38 margin.

No surprises for regular readers of this space, but a useful review:

(Via Pajamas Media.)

The US Commission on Civil Rights has released its draft report on the Black Panther scandal. It blasts the Department of Justice, finding that high-level political appointees were involved in the dismissal of the case (after it was already won) and that the DOJ subsequently tried to cover up their involvement. It also blasts the DOJ for failing to enforce voting rights law even-handedly, and for stonewalling the commission’s investigation.

The Washington Post’s story gives us an indication of how the mainstream media will play this story, focusing not on the damning allegations (much less the evidence), but on the partisan smokescreen that Democratic members of the commission have generated.

(Previous post.)

According to an ABC News poll, public confidence in our system of government is at the lowest level ever measured. When they first started polling the question, during the Watergate scandal, public confidence was 22 points higher.

It’s not hard to see why confidence is so low. When our government can disregard the Constitution and public opinion to nationalize the health care system, the system clearly is not working.

(Via Instapundit.)

Michelle Obama enjoys a burger and fries. But you shouldn’t.

Lisa Murkowski says:

That somehow or other these are unconstitutional because they’re not enumerated within the powers of the constitution, that somehow or other we should just be eliminating these, I think that is out of the mainstream.

Is Murkowski unfamiliar with the doctrine of enumerated powers? Or does she merely think that doctrine is out of the mainstream?

Not impeachment of President Obama. Despite the crazy warnings of some on the left, that won’t happen (barring some dramatic malfeasance that we have no reason to expect).

No, the follies are from the other side. Some Democrats are looking into impeaching Chief Justice Roberts over the Citizens United decision. They claim that Roberts committed perjury by claiming not to be a judicial activist.

POSTSCRIPT: Setting aside the preposterous effort to elevate a difference of opinion to an impeachable offense, the current Supreme Court is actually the most restrained in decades.

Joe Biden says the GOP has spent $200 billion on campaign ads.

P. J. O’Rourke doesn’t mince words.

UPDATE: I have to quote this line:

This is not an election on November 2. This is a restraining order.

Families receiving WIC (a federal food program similar to food stamps) are about to be reminded of the old adage: he who pays the piper calls the tune. If the government is paying for your food, the government is going to decide what you eat. Specifically, the Agriculture Department has decided that potatoes are bad, and WIC can no longer be used to buy them.

The millions who will soon be having the government pay for their health care may want to remember this.

The citizens’ group in Texas that uncovered a major election fraud operation is being sued by the Texas Democratic Party.

Illinois has failed to send out timely ballots to our military overseas, as required by law, but they are reportedly hand-delivering ballots to inmates.

Veronique de Rugy offers this on the extension of the Bush-era tax cuts, which are stalled because Democrats want to hike taxes on the top earners:

Setting aside the fact that the top earners are the ones who tend to drive economic growth (entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, etc.), the revenue implications of hiking their taxes are really miniscule. And that’s with a static analysis, before you consider that hiking their taxes will reduce their incentive to work.

Of course, revenue doesn’t matter to these people either. Our president is on record favoring higher taxes even if they reduce revenue. It’s not about the revenue; it’s about the spite. And in that vein, let me bump my fable.

The London Convention Centre, which is owned by the city of London, has refused to rent its facilities for a talk by Mark Steyn. The topic of Steyn’s talk: free speech.

How astonishingly iresponsible has the State of New Jersey been in regard to its pension obligations?

This gives you a sense of what Chris Christie is up against. Unfortunately, it’s not just New Jersey, nor is New Jersey even in the worst shape:

Here’s a couple more entries in the file of President Obama’s dishonest and hypocritical attack on ad campaigns funded by undisclosed and possibly foreign donors:

• David Axelrod (Obama’s campaign architect and chief political adviser) ran an astroturf campaign with undisclosed donors. The campaign was to build support for a hike in electric rates, no less.
• Democrats have raised twice as much money as Republicans from PACs of foreign companies.

(Previous post.)

Andrew Klavan’s latest is brilliant:

Why the GOP will win in November.

PBS talking head Gwen Ifill, Daily Kos blogger Markos Moulitsas, and various people I’ve never heard of are mocking Sarah Palin for telling Tea Partiers that they can’t “party like it’s 1773″ until after we win the election.

The exact thrust of their mockery isn’t clear, but I guess they were thinking that Palin was referring to the Declaration of Independence, which of course was signed in 1776. But Palin was referring to the Boston Tea Party, the namesake of the Tea Party movement, which happened in 1773.

I suppose assuming your opponents are stupid can save you time and effort, if you’re right. If you’re wrong, you look like an idiot.

In a tacit acknowledgement that Obamacare doesn’t work, the Obama administration has issued dozens of waivers exempting “mini-med” health insurers from Obamacare’s rules:

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs on Oct. 7, 2010, defended the administration’s decision to grant 30 businesses waivers from the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s minimum annual limits. Waivers were granted to several employers and insurers, including BCS Insurance, which insures workers at McDonald’s.

But the waivers are just temporary, and will no longer be available come 2014. At that point, all those people will lose their insurance.

I first noted the mini-med problem here.

More than half of the net new jobs created during the last year were in Texas. Texas is doing something right: low taxes, less regulation, and tort reform.

UPDATE: Informative charts here. (Via Instapundit.)

A week ago I noted a strikingly dishonest Democratic attack ad directed at Tim Burns, a local Congressional candidate. The Hill reports that the dishonest ad is part of a broad Democratic ad campaign, run in at least 16 different districts.

I have a low opinion of politicians. Nevertheless, sometimes a politician says something so gallingly untrue, even I can’t believe it. Today is one of those days. I feel like I am in Bizarro world just for typing the next sentence. Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) says that Republicans are responsible for the failure to reform Fannie and Freddie:

“Low-income home ownership has been a mistake, and I have been a consistent critic of it,’’ said Frank, 70. Republicans, he said, were principally responsible for failing to reform Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage giants the government seized in September 2008.

For those who don’t know Frank well enough to see how absurd this is, here’s a reminder of what Frank said when Republicans tried to reform Fannie and Freddie. (All emphasis mine.)

September 11, 2003:

”These two entities — Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” said Representative Barney Frank of Massachusetts, the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee. ”The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

Oh yeah, that really sounds like he’s fighting to reform Fannie and Freddie, and is fighting against low-income home ownership.

September 10, 2003:

The more people, in my judgment, exaggerate a threat of safety and soundness, the more people conjure up the possibility of serious financial losses to the Treasury, which I do not see. I think we see entities that are fundamentally sound financially and withstand some of the disaster scenarios.

Nope, no risk at all.

Best of all, September 25, 2003:

I do think I do not want the same kind of focus on safety and soundness that we have in OCC [Office of the Comptroller of the Currency] and OTS [Office of Thrift Supervision]. I want to roll the dice a little bit more in this situation towards subsidized housing.

Yes, let’s roll the dice. It’s only the taxpayers’ money at stake!

And let’s not forget when Frank accepted Fannie and Freddie’s own opinion on whether they needed to be reformed, on September 5, 2003:

Rep. Frank: Let me ask [George] Gould and [Franklin] Raines on behalf of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, do you feel that over the past years you have been substantially under-regulated?

Mr. Raines?

Mr. Raines: No, sir.

Mr. Frank: Mr. Gould?

Mr. Gould: No, sir. . . .

Mr. Frank: OK. Then I am not entirely sure why we are here.

(Via Greg Mankiw.)

An anti-Obama billboard has been taken down after its owner received death threats:

The controversial Colorado billboard depicting President Obama as a suicide bomber, gangster, Mexican bandit and a gay man has been taken down — just days after the sign was erected and slammed nation-wide for being racist. . .

Those who know the owner of the billboard told a local NBC News affiliate that he and his wife were receiving death threats. The person who commissioned the piece is not yet known.

Friends of the owner said he decided to take down the billboard because he was receiving harassing calls.

Once again, we see that while the Democrats would have us believe that dissent (against a Democratic administration) is tantamount to violence, the real threats of violence (and actual violence) are being directed toward the dissenters.

(Via JammieWearingFool.)

President Obama says his party isn’t doing well because the voters are irrational:

“Part of the reason that our politics seems so tough right now and facts and science and argument does not seem to be winning the day all the time is because we’re hardwired not to always think clearly when we’re scared,” Obama said Saturday evening in remarks at a small Democratic fundraiser Saturday evening. “And the country’s scared.”

Well, Mr. President, we’re not primarily scared. Mostly we’re angry. Angry that you are trying fundamentally to change the nature of our country. And angry that you are doing it despite our clear message to stop.

But I’ll admit we are scared too. Scared that you might succeed.

(Via JustOneMinute.)

POSTSCRIPT: As far as the “facts and science” go, let’s not forget his administration’s pattern of hostility toward them.

HHS has already missed between one-third and one-half of the deadlines imposed on it by Obamacare. Worse, when HHS has satisfied deadlines, it has done it by skipping the usual process of public notice and comment.