Internet Scofflaw

While Barney Frank was protecting Fannie Mae from government scrutiny during the housing bubble, he arranged to get his partner a job there.

The Wikileaks gang styles themselves as transparency crusaders, but this story (especially when combined with Wikileaks’s recent efforts to stop leaks) shows that they are just vandals putting on airs.

President Obama has signed a bill extending the Patriot Act.

Good grief. Rarely is the hypocrisy so blatant as Democrats calling for the “nuclear option” to put an end to filibusters in light of the defeat of a judicial appointment.

Some are trying to allege that the Republicans are being hypocritical for defending the filibuster now that they are in the minority. That’s frankly dishonest. It’s one thing for the side that lost (the Republicans) to play by the rules they were unable to change. It’s quite another for the side that won (the Democrats) to change the rules they previously insisted upon, because those rules have since become inconvenient to them.

Interesting how demagoguery and hypocrisy tend to go hand-in-hand:

The new chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee was criticizing Republicans who opposed President Obama’s bailout of the American automakers union, oh, no, make that American automakers.

“If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, “we would be driving foreign cars. They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

So Michael O’Brien of The Hill newspaper went and checked what kind of automobile loyal-American-car-supporter Debbie Wasserman Schultz owns.

Yup, you guessed it — Japanese.

(Via Instapundit.)

The White House has a new rapid propaganda czar (“Director of Progressive Media & Online Response”). Jesse Lee’s job will be to respond to critical stories online, and encourage favorable stories in the “progressive media”. This sort of activity is ordinarily paid for by political parties, but now it will be paid for by our tax dollars.

Who is this guy? David Steinberg at the PJ Tatler took a look. The most interesting thing he found is that Lee’s wife was connected with (and, although we can’t be sure, was probably responsible for) MoveOn’s infamous “General Betray Us” ad.

Despite being a small and shrinking portion of the workforce, unions have received over half the Obamacare waivers. What standards the administration is using to award waivers? They don’t have a consistent answer to that question.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

Marc Thiessen writes in the Washington Post:

In a television interview last October, President Obama accidentally let slip a key element of his political philosophy: “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” . . .

This incident is worth remembering as the president prepares to issue a far-reaching executive order that would require the government to collect detailed information about the political activities of anyone applying for a federal contract. . .

Why is this a bad idea? Recall that in August 1971, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean penned a confidential memorandum in which he proposed creating a list of “our political enemies.” The purpose of the exercise, according to Dean, was to “determine what sorts of dealings these individuals have with the Federal Government and how we can best screw them (e.g., grant availability, federal contracts.. . . etc.)” Since then, enormous steps have been taken to clean up the federal contracting process and ensure that government contracts are granted solely on the basis of merit. Obama’s proposed executive order would undermine that progress, reverse years of effort to remove politics from contracting decisions and create incentives for impropriety.

Let’s not forget, this bunch is from Chicago. To them, increasing the importance of politics and graft in government contracting is a feature, not a bug.

(Via Instapundit.)

Seattle contemplates a ban on paper cups.

Don’t think it can’t happen either. This is the same town that has been known to close streets for the sole purpose of making driving less convenient.

There is a lot to like about Herman Cain, but you can’t be taken seriously as a presidential candidate without a familiarity with basic foreign policy issues. That includes the issue of right-to-return in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which Cain seems not to understand.

POSTSCRIPT: Judging by the question, Chris Wallace doesn’t entirely understand the issue either, as he spoke of Palestinians having been kicked out of Israel in 1948. A man ready to be president would be able to correct him.

(Via Michael Barone.)

Could New Hampshire become a right-to-work state? That would give them a huge competitive advantage in the northeast.

Cynthia McKinney does what Cynthia McKinney does:

A former U.S. congresswoman slammed U.S. policy on Libyan state TV late Saturday and stressed the “last thing we need to do is spend money on death, destruction and war.”

The station is fiercely loyal to Moammar Gadhafi and her interview was spliced with what appeared to be rallies in support of the embattled Libyan leader.

So she gives aid and comfort to the enemy during Democratic administrations as well as Republican ones. At least she’s consistent.

Reports the New York Post.

President Obama, at a fundraiser in Austin:

Internationally, we’ve gone through a Teutonic [sic] shift in the Middle East that could have enormous ramifications for years to come.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s amusing to picture what a Teutonic shift might look like.

Mitch Daniels is out.

AP reports:

A proposal to ban the circumcision of male children in San Francisco has been cleared to appear on the November ballot, setting the stage for the nation’s first public vote on what has long been considered a private family matter.

But even in a city with a long-held reputation for pushing boundaries, the measure is drawing heavy fire. Opponents are lining up against it, saying a ban on a religious rite considered sacred by Jews and Muslims is a blatant violation of constitutional rights. . .

If the measure passes, circumcision would be prohibited among males under the age of 18. The practice would become a misdemeanor offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or up to one year in jail. There would be no religious exemptions.

The mere fact that the measure could make the ballot tells us a lot about what “tolerance” really means in San Francisco. It will be very interesting to see if it passes.

President Obama says he is still working on gun control, “under the radar”, says Sarah Brady. Fortunately, I don’t think “under the radar” will work. The gun-rights community is paying close attention, and whatever Obama tries to sneak in by regulation will end up as a political issue.

(Via Instapundit.)

Medicare and Social Security are in even worse shape than we thought.

An AFL-CIO official boasts of intercepting their opponents’ emails.

If their opponents were foreign terrorists, this would be a scandal. Since they are not, it’s not even a story.

Of the latest batch of Obamacare waivers, 1 in 5 went to Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional district. With 435 Congressional districts (not counting DC), it seems hard to explain this by chance alone.

What do we, the public, know about the decision process for waivers? Anything at all?

Run an op-ed the White House disapproves of, and get yourself kicked out of the White House press pool.

The New York Times isn’t giving up, but their complaints are starting to become a little thin:

In downtown Baghdad, a police headquarters has been painted two shades of purple: lilac and grape. The central bank, a staid building in many countries, is coated in bright red candy cane stripes. . .

Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But the latest scourge, tastelessness, may prove the toughest to overcome.

An Instapundit reader remarks:

When all the New York Times can complain about is the color of buildings in Baghdad, can we officially say that the war was a success?

BONUS: Perhaps sensing that their thesis was a bit overwrought, the NYT has changed the final sentence of the quote to “But now it faces a new scourge: tastelessness.”

If this report is accurate, the NLRB’s horrifying decision to try to block Boeing’s decision to locate a factory in South Carolina is not some crazy outlier, but the first wave of a deliberate push by President Obama’s NLRB to give unions a veto over company decisions.

Atlas Shrugged is starting to feel a lot less alarmist than it used to feel.

If this Gallup poll is accurate, Republicans have the upper hand in the debt ceiling debate.

With the budget, Democrats can demagogue specific line items to attack budget cuts. As Milton Friedman famously pointed out, special interests are more passionate about protecting their specific perks than the general interests are about cutting them all. But with the debt ceiling there are no specific items to demagogue; the debate is on general terms, which favors fiscal conservatives.

The Economist comments on the Kahn affair:

LEAVE aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Yes, but how is this unusual? You see this whenever you look at the amenities of the ruling class. Socialism’s true purpose is to protect the privilege of the nomenklatura. Everything else is just propaganda.

(Via Instapundit.)

Mike Huckabee will not run for president. This is good news. I would vote for him over Obama, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.

It’s hard to find anything to disagree with in this Wall Street Journal editorial, criticizing Mitt Romney for his glaringly inconsistent position on health care nationalization. I really want to like Romney, but he’s weak on my number one domestic issue.

It’s not too late for him to reverse course on this. No one remembers flip-flops from the primary season, and the ever-lengthening primary season is moving them ever-further from election day. But he needs to get on with the flop. The WSJ’s advice for how to handle this is good, I think.

In what can be seen only as a reluctant acknowledgement of political reality, President Obama has reversed course and approved more oil drilling. It may be too late, though, with oil drilling rigs already leaving US waters for greener pastures.

The Democrats who control the Illinois legislature called a vote on a budget bill that no one had seen.

When the ATF isn’t facilitating sales of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, they are starting 150 acre brush fires.

(Previous post.)

There’s some very delicate phrasing in Timothy Geithner’s recent talk about “looking forward to the full repayment of our loan to [Chrysler]”. By “our loan” he doesn’t mean all of our loans to Chrysler. He means one of our loans to Chrysler — the $7.1 billion loan that we’re still hoping to see paid back. The other loans, on which we’ve lost a combined $3.5 billion, that money is gone for good.

(Via Kaus Files.)

POSTSCRIPT: I wasn’t able to locate the document that The Truth About Cars shows in the link above, but the Congressional report on the auto bailout has the same information on page 52.

In today’s America, the NLRB decides where companies build their factories, and the president can fire a CEO. But don’t worry, we’re not becoming socialist. That would be alarmist.

If you wanted to undermine freedom of religion, can you think of a better way than expanding the notion of religion to include every sort of taste or opinion? A UK tribunal has ruled that supporting public broadcasting is a form of religion.

WikiLeaks is cracking down on leaks:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now makes his associates sign a draconian nondisclosure agreement that, among other things, asserts that the organization’s huge trove of leaked material is “solely the property of WikiLeaks,” according to a report Wednesday. . .

The confidentiality agreement (.pdf), revealed by the New Statesman, imposes a penalty of 12 million British pounds– nearly $20 million — on anyone responsible for a significant leak of the organization’s unpublished material.

South Carolina is taking matters into its own hands. Who knows if this will stand up in court, but it’s great that they are trying. If nothing else, it will be good to see the federal government have to defend the light bulb ban.

Der Spiegel reports:

A Hamburg judge has filed a criminal complaint against Chancellor Angela Merkel for “endorsing a crime” after she stated she was “glad” that Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces.

I wonder if it’s time to give up on Europe.

(Via the Corner.)

It’s a pity the Brits don’t have the freedom of the press.

The particularly perverse thing about this story is that the British government is arguing that Twitter feeds from press organizations are a form of press, and that opens them up to tighter regulation. (Via Instapundit.)

Remember when Democrats’ rallying cry was “count every vote”? That was then.

Now, Joanne Kloppenberg, the defeated union candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, is working to get as many votes thrown out as she can. In one instance, she succeeded in getting 18 votes from cloistered nuns thrown out because they were missing witness signatures. (That gained her 10 of the seven thousand votes she needs.)

My opinion has always been that the election rules should be applied punctiliously. But it certainly is no good when the rules are applied strictly in only one direction.

There was a time when Paul Krugman was serious. In 1996 he wrote:

Generous benefits for the elderly are feasible as long as there are relatively few retirees compared with the number of taxpaying workers — which is the current situation, because the baby boomers swell the workforce. In 2010, however, the boomers will begin to retire. . . The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension.

. . .

In fact, the so-called ”trust funds” are making barely any provisions for the future. In another spectacular statistic, Mr. Peterson notes that if Medicare and Social Security had to obey the same rules that apply to private pensions, the reported Federal deficit this year would be not its official $150 billion, but roughly $1.5 trillion.

In short, the Federal Government, however solid its finances may currently appear, is in fact living utterly beyond its means. While the present generation of retirees is doing very nicely, the promises that are being made to those now working cannot be honored.

Today, demagoguing entitlements is the core Democratic strategy. Now Krugman toes the line, taking the trust fund very seriously and smearing anyone concerned about entitlement (such as 1996 Krugman) as dishonest:

Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come. . .

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

I don’t even understand what he is alleging that dishonest people like me and 1996 Krugman are saying. Yes, the trust fund is an accounting fiction. Social Security takes in tax money and spends it on benefits. For decades it has run a surplus doing so. (Those surpluses “don’t count”? What is that even supposed to mean?) Now it is running a deficit. Soon — long before the “trust fund” runs out of imaginary money — it will be running a massive, unaffordable deficit.

I paid $4 per gallon for gas yesterday. The Obama administration’s energy policy is working.

Yes, it’s working. Because this is exactly what they said they wanted to accomplish, according to the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu:

“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.

The Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, has also explained that it is his aim to “coerce people out of their cars.”

Neither of the aims have fully succeeded yet, but they are making excellent progress:

Note how the period of soaring gas prices coincides almost precisely with the Obama administration.

A fascinating story on one of California’s worst ideas: a scheme whereby municipalities are encouraged to steal property using imminent domain, and are rewarded by diverting state tax money into municipal slush funds. (Via Instapundit.)

Bob Zubrin has a proposal for ending gerrymandering. He proposes that a quantitative measure of the compactness (or conversely, the irregularity) of legislative districts be devised (such as the ratio of the area to the square of the circumference). Then both parties submit a districting plan and the more compact (less irregular) plan wins.

I’ve had a similar thought, but why limit it to the parties? Let’s “crowd-source” it: let anyone at all introduce a plan and take the best one.

Canada’s CBC network is in hot water for reporting election results. Canada has a law that bars the media from reporting election results in any province in which the polls are still open — a law that becomes more of a farce every year since results are easily obtainable via the internet.

No. Some day, perhaps, but today? No respectable scientist would suggest such a thing.

But Think Progress seems to think that it is. And here’s the kicker, they say so with great disdain for the anti-science bent of the “deniers”.

The Obama administration is floating a mileage tax, supported by mandatory GPS tracking.

An administration spokeperson adamantly denies that this is an administration proposal. I’m glad of that, but it’s bad enough that someone liked the idea enough to have a bill drafted.

Canadians have elected Stephen Harper to a third term, and (according to projections) his first majority government. The Liberals and the separatist Bloc Quebecois were decimated. The openly socialist NDP will become the opposition party, which should lead to clarified debates in Parliament.

All in all, today was a good day.