The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has been holding hearings on the ATF’s horrifying Gunwalker scandal, in which the ATF trafficked guns to Mexican gun cartels. The ranking Democrat on the committee wants to change the subject, so he is summoning a bunch of gun control advocates to testify at the committee, presumably to blame gun owners for something.
Wait a second. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), a fierce gun-control advocate, wants to divert the hearing away from the ATF’s activities trafficking guns to Mexican drug cartels? It makes you wonder what gun control really means to these people.
Anyway, I see this as likely to backfire. These people will be testifying at a hearing on Gunwalker. Democrats will be happy to solicit their usual sob stories and bogus statistics, but Republicans will make them answer questions on Gunwalker, one of the worst gun-control scandals in American history. Make them explain why we should restrict the right of law-abiding Americans while the administration trafficks guns to Mexican drug cartels.
In order to clear the title on their land, the Dupuises are spending what would have been peaceful retirement days dismantling every board and nail of their home — by hand — because they can’t afford to hire a crew.
Tough code enforcement has been ramped up in these unincorporated areas of L.A. County, leaving the iconoclasts who chose to live in distant sectors of the Antelope Valley frightened, confused and livid. They point the finger at the Board of Supervisors’ Nuisance Abatement Teams, known as NAT, instituted in 2006 by Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich in his sprawling Fifth District. The teams’ mission: “to abate the more difficult code violations and public nuisance conditions on private property.”
L.A. Weekly found in a six-week investigation that county inspectors and armed DA investigators also are pursuing victimless misdemeanors and code violations, with sometimes tragic results. The government can define land on which residents have lived for years as “vacant” if their cabins, homes and mobile homes are on parcels where the land use hasn’t been legally established. Some have been jailed for defying the officials in downtown Los Angeles, while others have lost their savings and belongings trying to meet the county’s “final zoning enforcement orders.” Los Angeles County has left some residents, who appeared to be doing no harm, homeless.
Some top county officials insist that nothing new is unfolding. Michael Noyes, deputy in charge of code enforcement for Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, says, “We’ve had a unit in the office through the ’70s and ’80s.” But key members of the county NAT team say that “definitely, yes,” a major focus on unincorporated areas was launched in 2006.
Those who suspect that the county may have plans for their land won’t be dissuaded by this:
Emeterio claims that [Deputy District Attorney David] Campbell told his public defender, “Well, he’s got ‘vacant’ land, and we want it vacant.” His voice rising, he explains the county’s view: “You’re not allowed to have anything there! Not a storage container, not a fuckin’ tire, not a nuthin’. Not a tractor. Nothing!
or this:
But Oscar Gomez, a zoning official on a county NAT team that took the Weekly on a ride-along in June, says such violations “bring the property value down. … There are actually people that own all the property around them, even if they haven’t built there yet.”
The New York Times’s ombudsman comes out against the Times’s practice of airbrushing its articles:
My preference would be that The Times do more to document and retain significant changes and corrections like those I have described. It has a policy against removing material from its archive (except in rare cases), on the principle that the record should be preserved. The Times should clarify its policy on replacing stories online, which looks like de facto removal to me, and offer the public a better-documented archive that includes all significant versions and all corrections. . .
Right now, tracking changes is not a priority at The Times. As Ms. Abramson told me, it’s unrealistic to preserve an “immutable, permanent record of everything we have done.”
There is a saying that I think is appropriate here: That which has been done, can be done. Lots of blogs and newspapers manage to keep a fairly complete record by the simple expedient of not replacing their stories. Barring that, maintaining a change history is technologically quite feasible. For instance, as an Instapundit reader points out, Wikipedia manages to do so, and in a much more difficult setting.
The chief economic culprit of President Obama’s Wednesday press conference was undoubtedly “corporate jets.” He mentioned them on at least six occasions, each time offering their owners as an example of a group that should be paying more in taxes.
“I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well,” the president stated at one point, “to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.”
But the corporate jet tax break to which Obama was referring – called “accelerated depreciation,” and a popular Democratic foil of late – was created by his own stimulus package.
Bottom line: when push comes to shove, these guys won’t even stand up for their own economic theories. They say they believe in Keynesianism, but they don’t really, at least not enough to favor it over class warfare. Their devotion to Keynes is really just an excuse to spend a lot of money.
UPDATE: According to Matthew Yglesias, Obama was not referring to the bonus depreciation provision in the stimulus bill, but to a 1987 tax provision that allowed private jets to be depreciated over five years, while commercial jets are depreciated over seven years.
I’m not necessarily going to take Yglesias’s word for it, but let’s stipulate that he is right. That means that Obama is complaining about a 24-year-old provision that allows private jets to be depreciated at a rate of 20% per year instead of 14.3%. Meanwhile, his own stimulus plan lets the same jet be depreciated by 50% in one year instead of 20%, and he has no problem with that. Does that make any sense at all?
In fact, the objection is even more nonsensical than that. The tax code is ripe with myriad rules that dictate various different depreciation periods for various things. Generally vehicles are depreciated over five years (except for railroad cars (seven), tractors (three), or ships (ten)) and that includes planes.
But wait, it’s more complicated than that. There are many, many exceptions that apply depending on how assets are used. For example, assets used to breed cows, sheep, or goats depreciate over five years, but ones used to breed pigs depreciate over three years. Ships used for commercial transportation are depreciated over 15 years instead of 10. And, on point, planes used for commercial transportation are depreciated over seven years instead of five.
I’m not going to claim that this mosaic of rules and exceptions makes sense. Obviously it was the result of legislative horse trading. But President Obama is going into the middle of this decades-old nest of rules, picking out just one, and saying that the exception should apply in place of the general rule. (And even that change would matter much less than the bonus depreciation provision in his own stimulus bill.) This makes no sense on any basis other than political demagoguery.
The strategy was supposed to lead ATF officials to drug cartel leaders, but agents admitted they never followed the weapons to see where they went.
I thought the whole point was supposedly to follow the guns. If they didn’t even follow the guns, it’s getting really hard to argue that the operation was carried out in good faith.
A few years ago, Sarah Palin caught heat for remarking that the best of America can be found in small towns, which her critics interpreted as insulting urban America. (ASIDE: I don’t think that interpretation holds up, since she said “the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.” She was complimenting — one might say pandering to — her hosts, not insulting anyone. But that’s not my point here.)
A few days ago there was an interesting exchange between Bill Maher and NYT columnist David Carr on Maher’s television show. Maher was upset about Gov. Chris Christie’s agenda in New Jersey:
MAHER: It’s okay if this [expletive] happens in Kansas and Alabama, but don’t [expletive] with the smart states.
Carr asked why Maher is so down on Christie, and Maher replied:
MAHER: I got a nice public school education there, and now there is a governor of that state there saying things that I never imagined a governor of that state would say. Maybe it’s just false pride, but I think New Jersey is more sophisticated than other states.
CARR: I think if it’s Kansas, if it’s Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right?
Now, Maher and Carr are persons of no special importance. But they are exemplars of an attitude I see every day.
So here’s my point. When Palin made her “real America” remark, liberals professed to be outraged that she would regard one part of America as better than another. But that’s not true at all. They do, many of them, see one part of America as better than another; they just see it the other way around.
In short, it wasn’t Palin’s (supposed) favoritism that bothered them. It was the fact that Palin complimented people they saw as their inferiors. Avoiding favoritism they could probably deal with, even though it would fail to recognize their greater “sophistication”. But (supposedly) placing the “middle places” over their betters, that was simply intolerable.
It’s a good thing we won the Cold War before the world found out that NATO was a paper tiger:
Not surprisingly, most of America’s next generation of military leaders has lost confidence in NATO. At a recent talk I gave at an elite U.S. military institution, just five participants out of an audience of some 60 raised their hands when asked how many believed NATO ought to continue in business.
An American colonel, recently returned from Afghanistan, told me that when he asked an officer from a European NATO member country to lead a supply convoy one evening, the officer explained that he was only paid to work for a set number of hours and his working day was done. Reminded that there was a war in progress, the officer said, “Maybe your country is at war, but not mine.”
Sensing the revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak is slipping from their grasp, activists and opposition groups are pressuring the ruling military council to postpone Egypt’s elections in September amid fears that Islamists and members of the former regime will gain too much power.
The bottom line is we have already achieved incredible strides in energy efficiency, and are continuing to do so, all without expensive and oppressive government efforts.
Some will still be unhappy, even though energy efficiency has increased dramatically, since we are still using more energy (to generate much, much more output). I think that’s telling, because it shows they don’t really want more energy efficiency; they want lower standards of living. More precisely, they want lower standards of living for the masses, not for the nomenklatura.
Another victory for free speech today as the Supreme Court struck down Arizona’s speech-limiting “clean elections” law. I continue to be amazed that so many people equate cleanliness in elections with controls on how much people can say.
I also continue to be amazed by the Ninth Circuit, the nation’s most reversed court, which somehow managed to blow this case despite a very clear precedent in Davis v. FEC.
I’m surprised at this. You would think they would wait until the scandal was off the front pages before starting to retaliate against the whistleblowers.
The AMA has come out for the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the rationing committee that was created by the health care nationalization bill. (It sounds exactly like the Independent Medicare Advisory Board, so I assume they renamed it at some point.)
Thanks guys. A year and a half ago would have been a little more useful.
CBS News has confirmed that ATF Fast and Furious “walked” guns have been linked to the terrorist torture and murder of the brother of a Mexican state attorney general last fall.
While the ATF was strong-arming gun stores into participating in its crazy scheme to traffic weapons to Mexican drug cartels, it was turning around and illegally leaking the names of those same gun stores to the media as prime sources of guns recovered in Mexico.
The ATF’s betrayal of the gun stores is a petty offense compared to the Gunwalker scandal as a whole, but it does make it that much harder to believe that the operation was conducted in good faith.
Timothy Geithner explains we need to hike taxes on small businesses so that government doesn’t shrink.
POSTSCRIPT: I was going to title this “At least he’s honest”, but, on further reflection, “honest” doesn’t seem a very good way to describe a tax cheat who is explaining why he needs to hike taxes.
The White House claims that Barack Obama never filled out a 1996 questionnaire in which he supported gay marriage, even though it has his signature on it. Does President Obama permit his staff to forge his signature? Really, I think he’s better off embracing the flip-flop.
Fannie Mae executives bungled their stewardship of the federal government’s massive foreclosure-prevention campaign, creating a bureaucratic muddle characterized by “mismanagement and gross waste of public funds,” according to a whistleblower lawsuit by a former Fannie Mae executive and consultant.
Caroline Herron, a former Fannie vice president who returned to the mortgage giant in 2009 as a high-level consultant, claims that the homeowner-relief effort was marred by delays, missteps and executives preoccupied with their institution’s short-term financial interests.
“It appeared that Fannie Mae officers were focused on maximizing incentive payments available to Fannie Mae under various federal programs – even if this meant wasting taxpayer money and delaying the implementation of high-priority Treasury programs,” she claims in the lawsuit.
Herron alleges that Fannie Mae officials terminated her $200-an-hour consulting work in January because she raised questions about how it was administering the federal government’s push to help homeowners avoid foreclosure, known as the Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP.
By the way, let’s not forget that Fannie Mae got the job through a $400 billion no-bid contract.
I’ve often remarked that the Congressional Budget Office’s scorings are of limited use because they don’t take account of how government policies change individual behavior. Thus, their scores are too kind to policies that suppress individual enterprise (that is, big government policies) and are too unkind to policies that promote it.
In a hearing before the House Budget Committee, the CBO’s director acknowledged the truth of this criticism in the context of Obamacare:
Elmendorf: The way I would put it Mr. Chairman, is we don’t model the behavior of physicians. We don’t model the access to care or quality of care.
Ryan: So you assume it stays on as is?
Elmendorf: That is the point we noted in the letter analyzing your proposal. That is a gap in our tool kit and a gap we are trying to fill.
. . . the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them?
Yet said in May 2003 in the context of Iraq:
I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.
The point is not that the Obama administration is two-faced, hypocritical, and shameless. Most administrations are; they act quite differently once they are in the White House and governance requires adult responsibility quite different from the cheap rhetoric of the campaign trail.
Rather, the significance in Obama’s case is twofold: . . .
Second, Obama has utterly embarrassed the entire liberal attack on the Bush’s administration’s efforts in Iraq and against terrorism. The venom between 2003 and 2008 was both cruel and nasty, and yet it was always presented as principled rather than partisan, not a grasp for power but the product of deeper respect for the American civic traditions.
Now we see that entire era as a complete fraud — on matters of dissent, skepticism of the War Powers Act, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, wiretaps, intercepts, Iraq, and predator targeted assassination. The hysterical commentary was never based on the merits of those acts, but simply because George Bush, a political opponent, embraced them. How do we know this? Through hypocritical couplets like those above — and the almost complete silence of the antiwar Left. Where now is Cindy Sheehan, the award-winning Michael Moore, the New York Times discounted ads to Moveon.org, the impassioned floor speeches from a Senator Reid or Kerry?
USA Today headline writers had a piece about suggestions that Delta is discriminating against Jews and Christians in their service to Saudi Arabia, and this is what they came up with:
Airline to Jewish rumor: ‘Delta does not discriminate.’
If Congressional Republicans are really intent on getting to the bottom of an ill-conceived sting operation along the border by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, they should call President Felipe Calderón of Mexico as an expert witness.
Mr. Calderón has the data showing that the tens of thousands of weapons seized from the Mexican drug cartels in the last four years mostly came from the United States.
That is simply a lie. That claim has been debunked so conclusively that it simply cannot be offered in good faith. The NYT cannot be unaware that it is false. They must just be hoping that their readers are.
How did the Gunwalker scandal happen? Did the ATF deliberately facilitate the smuggling of weapons into Mexico in order to bolster the (false) story that weapons used in Mexican crimes mostly come from the United States, in order to advance a gun-control agenda?
We don’t know. It’s hard to believe that any administration could be so corrupt. But so far, it is the only explanation that has been offered that makes any sense. Why did the ATF traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels? It defies all reason!
The agents who are talking don’t know. They warned that the scheme would be a disaster, but their pleas were ignored.
Those who do know, on the other hand, aren’t talking. And that makes me suspect the worst. If they had a good faith reason, they should tell us. Instead, the ATF and the Justice Department have been stonewalling for months.
We don’t know when Eric Holder was briefed on the scheme. It’s hard to believe that a plan to traffic weapons into a foreign country would have been approved without going to the top. (And it hardly absolves him if he is such a careless manager as to allow crazy schemes to be put into motion without his knowledge.)
But what we do know for certain is that Eric Holder has approved the cover-up. We know that because the cover-up is ongoing and he could put a stop to it. Regardless of what he knew and when he knew it, Holder should go for that reason alone.
The latest development is someone at the DOJ is trying to fight back against Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA). The Washington Post ran a story yesterday alleging, based on an anonymous source, that Issa was briefed on the scheme in April 2010 and raised no objections. Issa categorically denies the report, and adds that his office has been contacted by several publications to whom the story was shopped. The Post was the only publication to find it credible.
Even if the Issa story were true, it would not absolve the ATF, Eric Holder, or the Obama administration. But there’s no good reason to believe it, since there’s no good reason for the source to remain anonymous, unless he’s lying. He can’t be afraid of retaliation; one simply does not face negative consequences for running interference for your boss by attacking a Republican congressman.
If the Gunwalker scandal is as bad as it is starting to look — trafficking guns into a friendly country, for political purposes, leaving countless dead including a federal agent — it would be the worst scandal in American history. No one died in the Watergate burglary.
Rep. Fred Upton (R-TX), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee suggests that he is close to an agreement to repeal the light bulb ban.
Good news, I guess, but I don’t quite understand this. How is there anything to negotiate? They ought to do a straight repeal. I’m worried that they are going to load the bill up with some kind of crap.
Jon Stewart is not a nice guy, he only plays one on tv:
Comedian Steven Crowder embarrassed Stewart by publishing an email explaining that the Daily Show never books conservative pundits. (Apropos to this.) His producer then complained to Crowder’s agent, who felt he had no choice but to drop Crowder as a client.
It’s not the ban on conservative pundits I object to. As I say: that’s par for the course. But Crowder has as much right to publicize that ban as Stewart has to put it in place. After all, if Stewart is ashamed of the policy, he should stop it. If he’s not ashamed, he shouldn’t mind when it becomes public. The Daily Show’s response to Crowder’s video was simply despicable.
Once the facts in the Anthony Weiner scandal became indisputable, he still had defenders on the left. His defenders fell back on a standard argument of the left: Weiner — the defense goes — was never a proponent of morality — the defense goes — so his immorality is no big deal. At least he’s not a hypocrite.
Zombie has one response to this argument, and I don’t disagree with it. But I want to add two more.
For the time being, let’s take the liberal position seriously: Conduct doesn’t matter, only hypocritical conduct. (Obviously they don’t mean this in the limit — was Charles Manson a hypocrite? — but that’s not where I’m going with this.) Okay. Liberals don’t want to push morality, what do they want to push?
Taxes? Hypocrites. Assisting the poor? Hypocrites. Environmentalism? Hypocrites. Supremacy of the regulatory state? Hypocrites. (BONUS: That one is Anthony Weiner.) Buy American? Hypocrites. And that’s just off the top of my head.
Across the board, their agenda is to control our lives. But these hypocrites don’t want that same control over their lives. A juicy scandal is a relatively rare thing, even today, but these liberals practice their hypocrisy in the open every single day.
But that’s not the whole of it. In fact, the whole hypocrisy argument is a lie anyway.
If they really believed the argument, you wouldn’t catch liberals criticizing the immorality of a Republican caught in a scandal. They don’t care about immorality, right? They would only criticize the hypocrisy.
But that’s not what we see, is it? No, liberals pile on as quickly as anyone else. And they criticize the misconduct itself, not just the hypocrisy. They are all for moralism when it serves their purpose.
To sum up, one could say that the whole hypocrisy argument is itself hypocritical. Better yet, one could simply say it’s wrong.
The state Senate, in a 45-5 vote, gave final approval Monday to the so-called Castle Doctrine bill to expand the right of people to use deadly force against attackers in places outside their homes. A spokesman for Gov. Tom Corbett said the governor would sign the bill but was not sure when.
The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Scott Perry, R-York, eliminates a requirement that people try to retreat before using deadly force in those situations.
The gun-control nuts aren’t happy, of course:
Opponents, including a number of police chiefs and mayors, argue that existing laws provide adequate safeguards and warn the bill could foster a “Wild West” mentality.
“This is going to be dangerous for Pennsylvanians,” said Max Nacheman, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a gun-control group. “This creates more situations in which violence is an alternative.”
Any time, anywhere gun laws are liberalized, the gun-control nuts talk about how it’s going to become the “Wild West”. It never happens. No one is buying it any more.
POSTCRIPT: In fact, even the Wild West wasn’t the Wild West.
UPDATE (6/28): Governor Corbett has signed the bill. When Pennsylvania fails to become the “Wild West”, will the gun-control nuts admit they were wrong? Well, they never have before.
President Obama says the problem with our economy is that we have too many machines replacing people. He specifically mentioned ATMs.
This is a classic economic fallacy. Capital, such as machines, make labor more productive. One person can produce more using a machine than he can without it. That makes labor more valuable, not less. Any introductory economics class covers this. It’s sad that the president of the United States does not understand it.
Yes, technology can produce temporary disruptions as its ramifications work their way through the economy, but it has always been thus. It’s not a special problem now. (Besides, ATMs have been around for ages.)
Moreover, any disruption in today’s economy caused by technology is dwarfed by the disruption caused by Obama’s multiplication of the regulatory state. And that brings up the one sense in which the accumulation of capital could be seen as a negative sign: If the relative costs of labor and capital shift, so that labor becomes relatively expensive, businesses do have an incentive to substitute capital for labor. That is, capital does not cause labor to become less valuable (Obama notwithstanding, it’s quite the contrary), but capital can become more attractive if labor becomes less so.
This might actually be happening. As Tom Blumer put it, ATMs are exempt from Obamacare.
UPDATE: Another good rebuttal, along the same lines.
The Court rejected a lawsuit against several power companies, saying that job of regulating carbon dioxide belongs to the EPA, not the judicial system. (However, if I am understanding properly, the court did not address the EPA’s effort to regulate carbon dioxide in a manner contrary to law.)
The Court rejected a preposterous class action against Wal-Mart.
The Court refused to hear ACORN’s appeal of a lower court’s ruling that upheld the defunding of ACORN.
But the decision I want to highlight most is a 8-0 decision in Bond v. United States. Anthony Kennedy’s opinion on the role of federalism in the defense of individual liberty is eloquent:
The federal system rests on what might at first seem a counterintuitive insight, that “freedom is enhanced by thecreation of two governments, not one.” . . . The Framers concluded that allocation of powers between the National Government and the States enhances freedom, first by protecting the integrity of the governments themselves, and second by protecting the people, from whom all governmental powers are derived. . .
Federalism also protects the liberty of all persons within a State by ensuring that laws enacted in excess of delegated governmental power cannot direct or control their actions. . . By denying any one government complete jurisdiction over all the concerns of public life, federalism protects the liberty of the individual from arbitrary power. When government acts in excess of its lawful powers, that liberty is at stake.
The limitations that federalism entails are not therefore a matter of rights belonging only to the States. States are not the sole intended beneficiaries of federalism. . . An individual has a direct interest in objecting to laws that upset the constitutional balancebetween the National Government and the States when the enforcement of those laws causes injury that is concrete, particular, and redressable. Fidelity to principles of federalism is not for the States alone to vindicate.
This decision was easy in a sense, in that it dealt with federalism largely in the abstract, rather than in application. Still, it’s nice to see.
Escorted by four Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz solemnly called for more civility in political debate Sunday, a day after a gunman shot and critically injured her close friend Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.
Democratic Rep. [and DNC chair] Debbie Wasserman Schultz stood by her comments that Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is a “death trap for seniors” in a CNN interview Thursday.
It’s almost as though they never meant any of that civility stuff. Like they were only try to score cheap political points or something. . .
POSTSCRIPT: It’s beside the point to the whole civility swindle, but it’s also worth noting that Wasserman-Schultz was lying about the Ryan plan.
The administration of the president who pledged to pull American troops out of Iraq, hell or high water, prepares for the American presence in Iraq to continue indefinitely.
And well we should have a small presence in Iraq for the foreseeable future to safeguard our accomplishments there. I won’t criticize them for flopping to the right position. But I also won’t forget how they shamefully demagogued John McCain for saying the same.
Megan McArdle asks if it’s okay to steal. (I’m going to go with no.) And if not, why do people think it’s okay to default on their debts?
Never underestimate the power of a person to rationalize their sin.
POSTSCRIPT: This exchange is pretty good:
Peter Twieg One common variant of this argument that I’ve run into states that because lenders price default risk into the price of the loan, in the big picture defaulting is simply a fulfilment of their prior expectations and thus not a big deal – your marginal contribution to a higher price is so tiny as to not really be blameworthy at all. Concentrated benefits, diffuse costs..
odinbearded It’s funny how close that is to another argument. You know, department stores build a certain loss ratio into their prices so they’re not actually losing anything when I take that nice tie.
IPHONE users may soon be stopped from filming at concerts — as a result of new Apple technology. The leading computer company plans to build a system that will sense when people are trying to video live events — and turn off their cameras.
If this becomes a reality, I will be parting ways from Apple for good. Some things cannot be borne.
This isn’t just an issue for concerts and the like; this is an issue for any public event. Given that police in many places are already willing to break the law to keep people from recording their activities, can there be any doubt that they will be delighted to turn off cameras wherever they go. And that’s just the petty tyrants; then there are the real tyrants.
What really puzzles me is the mentality behind this. Have they forgotten who their customer is? They work for us, not for the concert promoters (and the dictators). It’s like the DVD player manufacturers who put in the “features” that prevent you from skipping to the main menu without watching ads. I paid for the player, not the studios! But this is worse than that. In that case, one could argue that the manufacturer was doing what was necessary for content to be available on DVD. That argument, implausible as it might be for DVDs, doesn’t wash at all for video recording. Are things going to stop happening in the world if Apple doesn’t prevent people from recording them?
The Mercatus Center has a ranking of the 50 states according to freedom. The worst three are New York, New Jersey, and California, so no surprises there. The best is New Hampshire (the only decent score in the northeast). Pennsylvania is in the middle of the pack.
Criticize the government, and the government will come after you:
Huntsville has stumbled into the crosshairs of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Mayor Tommy Battle said HUD’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Program Center in Atlanta recently notified the city that it will conduct an exhaustive civil rights compliance review of local affordable housing programs. . .
The mayor said Carlos Osegueda, director of HUD’s regional Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, told him Huntsville is being reviewed because of negative public comments about fair housing in The Times and local blogs.
Treasury solved this problem by issuing a series of “Notices” in which it announced that the law did not apply. . . The Treasury had no legal or economic justification for these Notices, which applied to Citigroup and AIG as well as to GM. Nonetheless, the Notices largely escaped public attention, though they had the potential to transfer significant wealth to loyal supporters (the UAW). That it could do so illustrates the risk involved in this manipulation.
President Obama’s absurd contention that the campaign in Libya does not constitute hostilities was adopted over the objections of the Office of Legal Counsel, and the Pentagon general counsel for good measure. This is almost never done:
Presidents have the legal authority to override the legal conclusions of the Office of Legal Counsel and to act in a manner that is contrary to its advice, but it is extraordinarily rare for that to happen. Under normal circumstances, the office’s interpretation of the law is legally binding on the executive branch.
For years we suffered through incessant prattle that President Bush had committed us to “illegal wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq, even though both campaigns were authorized by Congress. Now, under the Obama administration, we have a military action that actually does violate federal law. I won’t go so far as to call it an “illegal war”, since the War Powers Act is quite possibly unconstitutional, but for the first time a serious case could be made.
POSTSCRIPT: The administration contends that the Libyan campaign does not constitute “hostilities” because Qadaffi’s forces are unable to fire back. A similar argument would apply to nearly any American air campaign. But in 2007, Joe Biden pledged to impeach President Bush if he attacked Iran’s nuclear program without Congressional approval. I don’t think that circle can be squared.
UPDATE: How rare is “extraordinarily rare”? John Elwood can’t think of a case more recent than the Roosevelt administration, except this is the second time already during the Obama administration.
The Czech Republic is withdrawing from U.S. missile defense plans out of frustration at its diminished role, the Czech defense minister told The Associated Press Wednesday. . .
“I’m not surprised by the decision,” said Jan Vidim, a lawmaker in the lower house of the Czech Parliament. “The United States has been and will be our crucial strategic partner but the current administration doesn’t take the Czech Republic seriously.”
Vidim’s remarks reflected concern by many in Central and Eastern Europe that the U.S. interest in resetting ties with Moscow could come at their expense.
A series of reports by the Oakland Institute charge that several prominent American universities — including Harvard and Vanderbilt Universities and Spelman College — are investing in hedge funds and companies that are driving African farmers off their land.
They probably figure that if Columbia can get away with stealing land from Americans, no one will care about African farmers.
A group of lawmakers filed a federal lawsuit Wednesday against the Obama administration, questioning the constitutional and legal justifications for military action in Libya. The bipartisan group is being led by Reps. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, and Walter Jones, R-N.C., and includes GOP presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul.
We used to have a very useful ambiguity as regards the status of War Powers Act. Presidents would follow its processes, while maintaining they were not required to do so. Unfortunately, President Obama damaged that ambiguity by flagrantly disregarding the Act, and now this lawsuit threatens to destroy what’s left.
ASIDE: I don’t blame those guys for filing the suit. I’m against it, but people like Kucinich and Paul are going to do what they are going to do. This was predictable given Obama’s actions.
Whatever we have after this suit won’t be as good as what we had before. Either the courts will strike down the War Powers Act (which would be bad), or they will uphold it (which would be worse), or they will find some bogus justification to avoid answering the question (the best outcome from a policy perspective, but infuriating from a jurisprudential perspective).
I think the most likely outcome is the latter — a narrow ruling that dodges the central issues, but I wouldn’t bet the farm against the courts ruling on the War Powers Act. After Boumediene, nothing seems impossible. Also, if the courts were ever going to rule on the War Powers Act, the Libya campaign is the sort of case in which they would do it: a low-profile conflict with no vital national interest at stake. (Yes, I was in favor of it, but let’s be honest.)
Meanwhile, President Obama argues that the War Powers Act doesn’t apply because we are not involved in hostilities. That sounds ridiculous on the face of it, but it strikes me as just the sort of argument that courts might be inclined to seize on if they want to avoid the central issues.
Why President Obama couldn’t have just sought Congressional approval is beyond me. It’s not like he would have lost.
UPDATE: Ilya Somin takes a look at the legalities.
The private sector is limping, but regulatory agencies are doing very well indeed:
We aren’t creating many new jobs, be we’ll be sure to regulate the snot out of the ones we do have. And this doesn’t even include President Obama’s latest shackle on the economy, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Iran will use its domestically manufactured missile systems to defend itself and other Muslim nations if they are threatened, Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani has said.
And don’t forget, Iran is close to nuclear weapons and is building missile silos in Venezuela.
Posted by K. Crary 
