Internet Scofflaw

The LA Times reports:

Celebratory bills — honoring historical figures, or a town’s anniversary, or a major local attraction — are a big part of House business. Incoming Republican leaders say they’re a waste of time.

Waste of time? Certainly. That’s why Congress should do many more of them. The time Congress spends on this sort of thing is time Congress isn’t doing any damage.

(Via Hot Air.)

A new study finds that, since World War 2, every dollar of additional tax revenue has come with $1.17 in additional spending. It’s a “sucker play” to try to balance the budget using tax hikes, even before you consider that tax hikes depress the economy.

(Via TaxProf.)

Mark Ames (I’ve never heard of him before, but apparently he makes a living accusing the Koch brothers of astroturfing various causes, like the Tea Party and opposition to invasive TSA searches, since no one could possibly oppose runaway spending, nationalized health care, or invasive pat-downs without getting a paycheck from the vast right-wing conspiracy) has this to say about me:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Wow. Democrats call me unpatriotic all the time (most recently Paul Krugman), but this is the first time I remember being called an enemy of the state. By definition! I would be amused to see that definition.

(Via the Daily Caller.)

Paul Krugman says those who oppose the Fed’s new policy of printing money to buy long-term bonds “want the economy to stay weak”, just as China and Germany do.

It’s funny how the left always accuses the right of attacking their patriotism, when they are the ones who actually do it.

BONUS: Tom Maguire points out that Krugman was quite concerned about monetizing the debt when Republicans were in power. (And, back then, we weren’t even doing it.)

Michael Rubin notices an outright lie in Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel book. (This is old, actually, but I’m only now finding it.)

AP reports:

The cap that eventually stopped the oil from flowing was nearly pulled about a day after it was installed in mid-July because pressure readings looked so low that they indicated a leak elsewhere in the system. BP wanted the cap left in place and the well to stay shut, but government science advisers were firm and near unanimous in wanting the cap removed because of fear of a bigger, more catastrophic spill, the report said. . .

Before the cap was put in place, officials had established pressure levels that would tell them whether everything was OK, there was trouble and the cap had to be removed immediately, or whether it was a wait-and-see situation. The pressure readings were in the wait-and-see zone, but political appointees discussed it further and there was a push to remove the cap. Coast Guard Admiral Kevin Cook urged officials to give the cap more time, then Hsieh’s analysis swayed them.

To Paul Fischbeck, a professor of decision science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, this part of the report was scary.

“It became a political decision that they didn’t want to risk having this big blowout,” said Fischbeck, who wasn’t part of the commission. “You set up a logical reasonable process and in the heat of the moment all these factors creep in and it pulls you off what you had logically decided to do. And that is very dangerous when it happens.”

The disaster was averted by one scientist who took a cell-phone picture of the pressure readings and sent it to a colleague for advice.

(Previous post.)

Good grief:

Developers of the controversial Park51 Islamic community center and mosque located two blocks from ground zero earlier this month applied for roughly $5 million in federal grant money set aside for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

It’s becoming very hard to argue that the Cordoba House project is anything other than a deliberate provocation.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

Every single one of the 95 candidates who pledged to support network neutrality lost.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

The General Motors IPO is exempt from the anti-fraud laws that ordinarily apply to IPOs.

Control of the New York State Senate is not decided yet. Democrats can retain control (and thereby keep complete control of the state government) if they win the three outstanding seats. Unfortunately for them, Republicans are leading in two of the three races.

In one of the races, the Republican candidate (Mark Grisanti) leads the Democratic incumbent (Antoine Thompson) by 821 votes. Naturally it’s time for . . . a mysterious find of uncounted ballots!

Usually this means that someone “finds” a bag of uncounted ballots in a basement somewhere, but in the Empire State they think bigger. How does two uncounted voting machines sound?

GM gets a $45.4 billion tax break. For comparison, the original GM bailout was $50 billion.

Nancy Pelosi mocks Speaker-elect John Boehner for tearing up on election night.

Ramesh Ponnuru says we needn’t worry that 2011 will be a replay of 1995, with the president winning the public-relations battle against a Republican Congress.

Charles Rangel walks out of his ethics trial. Then, after the committee convicts him, he complains that the proceeding wasn’t fair: he wasn’t even in the room!

If Obamacare were working as promised, would 111 firms be getting waivers?

Of course, a lot of those waivers turn out to be payoffs for big Democratic supporters, including the SEIU.

(Previous post.)

It is said that Imperial Rome exported armies and imported grain. Plundering the provinces for the benefit of the capital is a time-honored practice for empires. With that in mind, consider this news: Seven of the ten richest counties in America (including the top three) are in the Washington, DC area.

It’s not our foreign policy that is imperialistic; it’s our domestic policy.

(Via Instapundit.)

It’s easy to mock the new Newsweek story that asks “Is the Presidency Too Big a Job?” As Glenn Reynolds puts it:

Nope. Just for the inexperienced guy with no management experience that we elected.

Or this:

The 9/11 terror attacks, in some ways, made being president easier. Struggles over education and agriculture that had mired George W. Bush’s first year in office were replaced with just one big expectation: to keep America safe.

This is Dilbert-esque! President Bush managed to do it, so it must have been easy. Oh yeah? If it’s so easy, why isn’t President Obama doing it?

But as much as Kathleen Maloney’s article tries to acquit Obama of incompetence and write off Bush’s accomplishments as trivial, her article centers around one serious point. She recognizes that our government is too big; “bloated” as she puts it. (Actually, she puts it “too bloated”. I guess a little bit of bloat is just right.)

She’s right. Indeed, the unmanageability of powerful central government is a theme that Friedrich Hayek (whoever he is) recognized over half a century ago.

But how does that acquit Obama? Even if we stipulate that the government is too big to be manageable by anyone, shouldn’t he then be trying to shrink it? Instead, he’s hell-bent on bloating it further.

POSTSCRIPT: Underscoring Maloney’s inability to see Obama’s incompetence as a unique problem, she generalizes from one data point:

Moreover, the number of speeches presidents now give—Obama delivered 57 in October alone, (including some fundraisers), written by a staff of seven speechwriters—can dilute the power of each one.

No, not “presidents”, just Obama. It has frequently been observed that Obama gives an astonishing number of speeches. I wonder if Obama might find the government more manageable if he weren’t spending his time giving two speeches a day.

More premium hikes resulting from health care nationalization.

This was The Economist’s take on the midterm elections:

What are these people on? President Obama said that, if Republicans won, there would be hand-to-hand combat on Capitol Hill. He said “[Republicans] can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” He spoke of the need for Democrats (Latinos in particular) to “punish their enemies“. Where are they seeing this bipartisan hand of cooperation?

Evidently, the Economist is still taken with this guy. They are still seeing what they want in him, rather than what is. Most of America has figured him out by now, but across the pond it seems they are still under his spell. (It’s very strange, after all of Obama’s inexcusable slights to the British, but often love isn’t rational.)

We’re told that Obamacare has solved the crisis over pre-existing conditions. Let’s take a look:

Mr. Obama declared at the time that “uninsured Americans who’ve been locked out of the insurance market because of a pre-existing condition will now be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool where they’ll finally be able to purchase quality, affordable health care—some for the very first time in their lives.”

So far that statement accurately describes a single person in North Dakota. Literally, one person has signed up out of 647,000 state residents. Four people have enrolled in West Virginia. Things are better in Minnesota, where Mr. Obama has rescued 15 out of 5.2 million, and also in Indiana—63 people there. HHS did best among the 24.7 million Texans. Thanks to ObamaCare, 393 of them are now insured.

States had the option of designing their own pre-existing condition insurance with federal dollars in lieu of the HHS plan, and 27 chose to do so. But they haven’t had much more success. Combined federal-state enrollment is merely 8,011 nationwide as of November 1, according to HHS.

Eight thousand people?! We nationalized our health care system for eight thousand people?!

For eight thousand people, we could have instituted high-risk pools and left it at that. But that wouldn’t have accomplished the left’s aspirations to put the government in charge of our health care.

I spotted this one while scanning the list of bills in Cato’s analysis of “sunlight before signing”: The XXXXXX Act of XXXX. Cnet News explains:

It was supposed to be some routine election-year largesse from Democrats: a $26 billion spending measure to aid two of the party’s core constituencies, labor unions, and government workers.

But a watchdog Web site on Sunday evening spotted an unusual feature of the legislation, which the Senate approved by a 61-to-39 vote last week.

It doesn’t actually have a name. Congress’ official Web site calls it the “______Act of____” . . . Elsewhere, it’s referred to as the “XXXXXX Act of XXXX.”

Some say that Congress doesn’t bother to read bills before voting on them. I can’t imagine where they would get such an idea.

Cato has an analysis of how well President Obama has fulfilled his “sunlight before signing” promise. After a pathetic performance during his first year in office (4.8% observance), his second year in office was a marked improvement (65% observance).

Of course, 65% only looks good by comparison to 4.8%. And in regards to major bills, it’s almost zero.

According to a new Gallup poll, fewer than half (43%) of American Muslims support the Cordoba House project (aka Ground Zero Mosque). A greater number (44%) think either that the project should be moved to another location, or that it should be turned into a different sort of project.

Michael Totten observes:

This tells us two things. Opposition to the project isn’t based on mere bigotry. And American Muslims are not a monolith.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

The Interior Department’s Inspector General confirms that the White House altered a report on drilling safety in a way that made it appear, erroneously, that White House’s drilling moratorium had been peer-reviewed:

The Interior Department’s inspector general says the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the idea of the administration’s six-month ban on new drilling.

The inspector general says the editing changes resulted “in the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed.” But it hadn’t been. The scientists were only asked to review new safety measures for offshore drilling.

The report stopped short of finding that the administration violated the law. It found that:

The Department has not definitively violated the [Information Quality Act]. For example, the recommendation for a moratorium is not contained in the safety report itself. Furthermore, the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations.

(Emphasis mine.) This is strange. Perhaps the executive summary did not explicitly indicate peer review of the recommendations, but the report found (pages 7-8) that the White House reordered the executive summary so that the reference to peer-review appeared immediately after the moratorium recommendation, where originally the two were well-separated.

Thus, after the executive summary recommended a moratorium, the very next paragraph began:

The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Those experts, who volunteered their time and expertise, are identified in Appendix 1. The Department also consulted with a wide range of experts from government, academia and industry.

Any reasonable person would conclude that the “recommendations” in question were the ones in the immediately preceding paragraph.

So how could the IG find that “the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations”? Apparently she puts a lot of weight in the difference between “peer-reviewing” the recommendations and “approving” them. That’s a pretty feeble distinction, if you ask me.

Perhaps Ms. Kendall had in mind what happened to the last inspector general to cross this White House.

(Previous post.)

POSTSCRIPT: Another interesting tidbit from the IG report: The administration has claimed privilege over all the documents relating to this incident. (Page 7.)

Nothing says “we did nothing wrong” like claiming executive privilege.