Internet Scofflaw

Latest Rassmussen poll.

(Via Hot Air.)

The Democrats and their allies in the legacy media may be succeeding in vilifying the Tea Party as a group, but on substance, they have the support of the majority of America. And, according to a recent poll, of the majority of economists as well.

I thought this remark, made off-hand by Glenn Reynolds in the context of vehicle confiscations being a major source of revenue to municipalities, was thought-provoking:

I don’t think law enforcement should turn a profit. When it does, it shades too easily into piracy.

Indeed. Putting down the police-as-pirate phenomenon was a great achievement of the rule of law. It would be a tragedy to lose it.

The Daily Mail reports:

The Obamas’ summer break on Martha’s Vineyard has already been branded a PR disaster after the couple arrived four hours apart on separate government jets.

But according to new reports, this is the least of their extravagances. White House sources today claimed that the First Lady has spent $10million of U.S. taxpayers’ money on vacations alone in the past year.

Branding her ‘disgusting’ and ‘a vacation junkie’, they say the 47-year-old mother-of-two has been indulging in five-star hotels, where she splashes out on expensive massages and alcohol.

POSTSCRIPT: Remember, just two months ago, when President Obama was blasting the fat cats and their private planes? Even among the fat cats, who takes two private planes to avoid a four-hour inconvenience?

POST-POSTSCRIPT: Glenn Reynolds thinks it’s interesting that the White House is starting to leak like this.

Since I can’t resist a good gotcha, this is Barack Obama in 2008:

The problem is, is that the way Bush has done it over the last eight years is to take out a credit card from the Bank of China in the name of our children, driving up the national debt from 5 trillion for the first 42 presidents — number 43 added 4 trillion dollars by his lonesome, so that we now have 9 trillion dollars of debt that we are going to have to pay back — $30,000 for every man, woman and child. That’s irresponsible. It’s unpatriotic.

President Obama has added another $4.05 trillion to the debt in just two years and seven months.

UPDATE: Oh, any by the way, please note once again which party it is that questions its opponents’ patriotism.

UPDATE: Video:

If Rick Perry’s campaign continues to do well, we are going to hear a lot about how Perry called for Texas to secede from the union. It turns out it’s not true at all.

Perry was specifically asked about secession (that is, he didn’t bring the subject up), and he said that Texas should not secede:

There’s a lot of different scenarios. Texas is a unique place. When we came in the Union in 1845, one of the issues was whether we would be able to leave if we decided to do that. My hope is that America, and Washington in particular, pays attention. We’ve got a great union. There’s absolutely no reason to dissolve it. But if Washington continues to thumb their nose at the American people, you know, who knows what might come out of that. But Texas is a very unique place, and we’re a pretty independent lot to boot.

People are trying to make hay out of the “who knows what might come” part, but coming as it did right after he specifically said there was “no reason” to secede, it’s dishonest to suggest that he was somehow insinuating that there might actually be good reason to secede.

(Via Instapundit.)

If you don’t already hate GM (why are you reading this blog?), perhaps this will get you there:

The problem is said to be the price of the Volt, which is a massive understatement, because everyone buying a Volt is understating the price. No one purchasing a Volt has the faintest clue what it really costs, because of all the taxpayer subsidies plowed into production, and hefty rebates offered at the point of sale. $400 million in federal subsidies were extracted from the taxpayer to fund Volt production, and buyers have enjoyed a $7500 federal tax credit.

That means each of the 3200 Volts sold thus far has rolled out of the lot with $132,500 in taxpayer subsidies stuffed in the glove compartment. They sticker at $41,000, so that means each Volt sold thus far actually costs $173,500, with only $33,500 paid by the actual purchaser.

That figure averages in the fixed cost assuming that not a single additional Volt will be sold. But with a realistic estimate of future Volt sales, the cost only goes down to $104k. Under GM’s assumptions, the price before subsidy would be only $47.5k.

(Via Vokdapundit.)

UPDATE APPENDED.

After his remarks a few days ago endorsing government waste to drive economic growth, I guess we shouldn’t be surprised when he takes the last step and endorses destruction to drive economic growth as well:

People on twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage.

A clearer embrace of the broken windows fallacy could hardly be made. The only question is whether that is really Paul Krugman talking.

UPDATE: No, it was not really Krugman. So we can put a cap on Krugman’s foolishness: government waste he’s for, but natural disasters he’s not.

UPDATE POSTSCRIPT: Unfortunately, Krugman couldn’t just say it wasn’t him and leave it at that. No, rather than leave this at the feet of the hoaxer that perpetrated it (a person of no importance), he had to try to turn it back against National Review:

Well, this is interesting. I hear that the not-so-good people at National Review are attacking me over something I said on my Google+ page. Except, I don’t have a Google+ page.

There was, as far as I can tell, one post at National Review about this, the one by Kevin Williamson I linked. It was titled “Somebody Please Tell Me This Is a Joke” and concluded:

I honestly cannot tell if I am being had here. I hope I am.

So Williamson did express the proper doubt over whether this was really Krugman. And he also promptly posted an update when he learned it wasn’t.  All of which people could learn by clicking through to Williamson’s post, if Krugman had linked to it. But he didn’t.

Joe Biden goes to China; attacks the Tea Party.

Andrew Klavan’s latest is great.

POSTSCRIPT: Like Klavan, I don’t know who Kim Kardashian is.

The runner-up in the Power Line Prize competition:

A European Court has ruled that having a satellite dish is a human right.

A reader at the Corner has this encouraging information about the NLRB:

If Senate Republicans just do nothing, the NRLB will lose its quorum and be unable to act beginning 1/1/12. Wilma Liebman’s term expires in a few weeks, and Craig Beckers recess appointment expires at end of the year. There was a Supreme Court ruling a few years ago that the NRLB could not act with only 2 members. And if Senate and House Republicans continue to work together forcing pro-forma sessions during recesses, the NRLB could be effectively defanged by the end of the year.

For background on why the NLRB desperately needs to be defanged, see this, and this, and this, and this.

POSTSCRIPT: In related news, Judicial Watch is filing an FOIA lawsuit to obtain the NLRB’s documents related to the Boeing travesty, and Rep. Darrell Issa has issued a subpoena for those same documents.

A lot of people are making fun of Paul Krugman for this interview, in which he says that a threat of alien invasion would be great for the economy:

I think much of the criticism misses the point. Personally, I don’t see anything wrong with the alien invasion illustration; it’s a perfectly sensible — if colorful — illustration of Krugman’s point. What I think is remarkable is the point itself: He is standing up for the principle of government waste. His point is that massive government spending to counter a non-existent threat would be a great thing!

There is one industry in which President Obama has been very successful in creating new jobs:

(Via Instapundit.)

When Virginia legalized the carrying of weapons in bars and restaurants, anti-gun activists promised it would result in a bloodbath. As always, the bloodbath failed to materialize. In fact, the opposite happened:

Virginia’s bars and restaurants did not turn into shooting galleries as some had feared during the first year of a new state law that allows patrons with permits to carry concealed guns into alcohol-serving businesses, a Richmond Times-Dispatch analysis found.

The number of major crimes involving firearms at bars and restaurants statewide declined 5.2 percent from July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011, compared with the fiscal year before the law went into effect, according to crime data compiled by Virginia State Police at the newspaper’s request.

And overall, the crimes that occurred during the law’s first year were relatively minor, and few of the incidents appeared to involve gun owners with concealed-carry permits, the analysis found.

Experience shows that liberalizing gun laws never has the negative result that anti-gun activists predict. Experience also shows that no amount of experience will stop them from continuing to make the same prediction.

(Via Instapundit.)

At a town hall in Illinois, the president was asked by a local farmer about new regulations he had heard about.

The president, on day three of his Midwest bus tour, replied: “. . . Don’t always believe what you hear.” . . .

Obama’s advice was simple: “Contact USDA.”

“Talk to them directly. Find out what it is that you’re concerned about,” Obama told the man. “My suspicion is, a lot of times, they’re going to be able to answer your questions and it will turn out that some of your fears are unfounded.”

Well, one enterprising reporter did just that. Hilarity ensues, as they say. (Well, if you think getting the run-around from government bureaucrats is hilarious, anyway.)

The point here is how astonishingly out of touch the president is. He actually believes (or perhaps he doesn’t, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt) that a citizen can simply call up the government and get a straight answer.

In the end, the USDA defended itself by saying that the regulations under discussion were not the purview of the USDA, so it really wasn’t a fair test. But that’s part of the point! We have literally hundreds of regulatory agencies. How is a citizen supposed to figure out which one is planning to ruin his life? Even the president didn’t know which was the relevant agency.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE: Yes, this too:

I love this because you can tell that Obama really believes that criticisms of the government stem from slack-jawed yokels listening to too much Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. The idea that a farmer might understand the business-end of government-agriculture relations better than Barack Obama never occurs to him. The questioner must be ignorant or misinformed because the question is inconvenient. And the solution is just as obvious. Simply call the government and you’ll get all the information you need.

(Via Power Line.)

This comment by Bill Clinton is quite revealing about how he saw the office of the presidency:

[Rick Perry is] saying ‘Oh, I’m going to Washington to make sure that the federal government stays as far away from you as possible –while I ride on Air Force One and that Marine One helicopter and go to Camp David and travel around the world and have a good time.’ I mean, this is crazy.

Big government is supposed to protect us, right? If we’re going to have food safety agencies that insist on telling us what we can and cannot eat, even to the ridiculous extreme of launching SWAT raids on raw-milk producers, you would think that — at the very least — they would take bad meat off the shelves. Nope:

Federal officials said they turned up a dangerous form of salmonella at a Cargill Inc. turkey plant last year, and then four times this year at stores selling the Cargill turkey, but didn’t move for a recall until an outbreak killed one person and sickened 77 others.

So what, exactly, are the food-safety cops for?

The problem with big government isn’t just that it is intrusive, but also that it can’t even effectively carry out its official mandate.

(Via Instapundit.)

The EPA is fining oil refiners millions for their failure to purchase a product — cellulosic ethanol — that is not available for sale.