Internet Scofflaw

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac understated their exposure to subprime and reduced-documentation mortgages by 90%.  Freddie disclosed $140 billion of their $901 billion exposure; Fannie disclosed just $73.7 billion of their $1.1 trillion exposure.

This might have been good to know as the federal government was deciding to give Fannie and Freddie a blank check.

GM forgot to put brakes on some of its cars.

How bad is President Obama’s economic record? Very bad.

(Via Instapundit.)

Seattle’s city council has enacted a ban on plastic bags, despite such a ban having been overwhelmingly defeated by the voters. (Take that, silly voters!)

There’s a lot to hate about this: The government giving the people the finger. Infringement of our personal liberties. The fact that paper bags are no better for the environment than plastic.

But what takes the cake is this: The reusable grocery bags that they are trying to induce people to use carry health risks:

The International Association for Food Protection’s Food Protection Trends published a study in its latest issue revealing that most consumers surveyed never wash their reusable bags between uses, permitting bacteria to grow. The peer-reviewed study, completed by University of Arizona Microbiologist Dr. Charles Gerba, found that large numbers of bacteria were found in almost all bags and that coliform bacteria were found in half of those tested. Eight percent of bags contained E. coli.

To quote from the study itself:

A wide variety of coliform bacteria were detected in the bags including Escherichia coli. E. coli
was identified in seven bags (12% of bags tested). . . Many of the bacteria isolated are capable of causing opportunistic infections in humans.

So the Seattle City Council is creating a health risk by infringing our freedom in order to address an unimportant problem in a manner already rejected by the people.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s always interesting to me to see the hierarchy of causes on the left (e.g., multi-culturalism trumps feminism). From this NPR story, downplaying the risks of grocery bags, we see that environmentalism (in its stupidest form) trumps food safety. “Don’t fret” they say, based on interviewing one person who says that having E coli in your grocery bags is probably fine. They don’t usually take that line on matters of food safety, even for threats that — unlike this one — are entirely speculative (for example).

To be fair, it’s perfectly sensible to say you’re willing to do something provided others do their part too. But then you don’t get to take the rhetorical step of saying “I want my taxes raised.” You don’t want your taxes raised; you want other people’s taxes raised.

ASIDE: On the other hand, if the point is that millionaires somehow have the moral authority to call for tax increases on millionaires, then by the same token, middle class people like the Tea Party have the moral authority to call for middle-class entitlements to be abolished. Heck, I’ll make that trade.

Moreover, I suspect most of these people are being disingenuous. Crony capitalists are all for higher taxes because higher taxes mean more government spending, which puts more money back in their pocket. And others profit from higher taxes in other ways, such as by running tax shelters or (like Warren Buffett) by selling insurance against tax bills.

If your aim is to fight Islamic stereotypes, this isn’t the way to do it:

Check out the [Islamic Diversity Center] team page, which describes the individuals on the organization’s staff. . .

That’s right: the men are identified and individually pictured, but for each female staff member there is a photo of a woman wearing a burqa, so that only her eyes are showing. Not only that, it is the same photo in each case; not a picture of the female staff member at all, but a generic image of a woman wearing a burqa.

Somehow I suspect it is going to take a little more effort to dispel those stereotypes.

If you go to the page now, the generic burka-woman has been replaced by a stark “NO PHOTO UPLOADED”.

The Washington Post reports:

Since the failure of [Solyndra], Obama’s entire $80 billion clean-technology program has begun to look like a political liability for an administration about to enter a bruising reelection campaign.

Meant to create jobs and cut reliance on foreign oil, Obama’s green-technology program was infused with politics at every level, The Washington Post found in an analysis of thousands of memos, company records and internal ­e-mails. Political considerations were raised repeatedly by company investors, Energy Department bureaucrats and White House officials.

(Previous post.)

(Via Power Line.)

The Obama administration says that American gun shops are responsible for the escalation of violence in Mexico. We already know that their figures are dishonest. And we already know that they trafficked thousands of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, for reasons that have yet to be explained. But here’s another point to complete the trifecta of malfesance:

Selling weapons to Mexico – where cartel violence is out of control – is controversial because so many guns fall into the wrong hands due to incompetence and corruption. The Mexican military recently reported nearly 9,000 police weapons “missing.”

Yet the U.S. has approved the sale of more guns to Mexico in recent years than ever before through a program called “direct commercial sales.” It’s a program that some say is worse than the highly-criticized “Fast and Furious” gunrunning scandal, where U.S. agents allowed thousands of weapons to pass from the U.S. to Mexican drug cartels. . .

Here’s how it works: A foreign government fills out an application to buy weapons from private gun manufacturers in the U.S. Then the State Department decides whether to approve.

And it did approve 2,476 guns to be sold to Mexico in 2006. In 2009, that number was up nearly 10 times, to 18,709. The State Department has since stopped disclosing numbers of guns it approves, and wouldn’t give CBS News figures for 2010 or 2011.

(Via Hot Air.)

The Obama administration says we need to give up our civil rights in order to keep guns from getting to Mexico, but they are trafficking thousands of guns illegally, and approving tens of thousands for sale legally.

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During the 2008 presidential campaign, the Obama campaign issued a full denial of stories that unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers hosted a fundraiser for Barack Obama, calling it a “myth propagated by the McCain campaign that’s been debunked”. The media (such as NPR) took their denial at face value.

Now a video has surfaced of Bill Ayers telling a group (it looks like a teacher’s union) in October 2011 that he did indeed host a fundraiser for Obama. One of them (Obama or Ayers) is lying.

Sounds like an opportunity for some enterprising journalist to ask a tough question. (Like that will ever happen.)

If you’ve been following the LightSquared scandal, you already know that LightSquared’s technology breaks GPS receivers and airplane avionics. What hasn’t been clear (to me at least) is what the technology is actually supposed to do.

Ed Morrissey explains what’s going on:

In fact, LightSquared lobbyists have been pressuring state legislators in Minnesota (where Best Buy has its corporate headquarters) to demand FCC approval through Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken, in part by stressing Best Buy’s partnership with LightSquared and the notion that “retail cell phone rates for LightSquared’s partners are expected to drop by 33-50 percent!” That cost savings comes from not having to buy new frequencies, which cost carriers like AT&T and Verizon tens of billions of dollars at auction, which makes the waiver critical to their business plan.

Now it makes sense. LightSquared doesn’t have a new technology. What they have is a business plan: rather than spend a fortune to buy frequencies in the part of the spectrum where they belong, they want to use their political connections to get cheap frequencies elsewhere. They they use the cost savings to undercut their competition.

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Fox News reports:

President Obama’s re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee have returned more than $70,000 in contributions from former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine following the collapse of MF Global, Corzine’s financial firm, officials said Friday.

This is all about optics. The president decided it would look bad to keep campaign contributions from a man whose company stole $1.2 billion (and who personally fought against reforms that would have helped prevent the theft), and that he can afford to spare $70 thousand. However, Corzine’s personal contribution is just a drop in the bucket; Corzine’s real contribution was all the other money he could deliver:

Corzine was among Obama’s top fundraisers, raising at least $500,000 for Obama’s re-election campaign since April, according to records released by the campaign. The former Goldman Sachs chief held a fundraiser for the president last April and was considered a main Obama emissary to Wall Street.

None of that money is getting returned. He can spare $70 thousand, but half a million is another matter. He’s betting no one will pay attention to that. He isn’t even returning the other contributions from MF Global:

One of the Democratic officials said the campaign and DNC would evaluate whether to return donations from other MF Global employees on a case-by-case basis.

Three other top executives at MF Global also gave the maximum.

Victor David Hanson’s article on the decline of California’s central valley is absolutely heartbreaking.

Still more signing statements from the president who pledged not to use signing statements.

I would be interested to see a comparison of the number of the signing statements (of the we-aren’t-going-to-follow-this-provision variety, not the putting-our-interpretation-on-record variety) coming fr0m President Obama and from President Bush. I suspect that despite his posturing, Obama has put out just as many.

Walter Williams:

Poverty in Egypt, or anywhere else, is not very difficult to explain. There are three basic causes: People are poor because they cannot produce anything highly valued by others. They can produce things highly valued by others but are hampered or prevented from doing so. Or, they volunteer to be poor.

(Via RightWingNews.)

Still, I think that Milton Friedman’s comment is insightful. Rather than thinking about the causes of poverty, it’s more useful to think about the causes of wealth.

ProPublica looks at how the California Democratic party scammed the redistricting commission:

In previous years, the party had used its perennial control of California’s state Legislature to draw district maps that protected Democratic incumbents. But in 2010, California voters put redistricting in the hands of a citizens’ commission where decisions would be guided by public testimony and open debate. . .

In the weeks that followed, party leaders came up with a plan. Working with the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee — a national arm of the party that provides money and support to Democratic candidates — members were told to begin “strategizing about potential future district lines,” according to another email.

The citizens’ commission had pledged to create districts based on testimony from the communities themselves, not from parties or statewide political players. To get around that, Democrats surreptitiously enlisted local voters, elected officials, labor unions and community groups to testify in support of configurations that coincided with the party’s interests. When they appeared before the commission, those groups identified themselves as ordinary Californians and did not disclose their ties to the party. . .

California’s Democratic representatives got much of what they wanted. . . Statewide, Democrats had been expected to gain at most a seat or two as a result of redistricting. But an internal party projection says that the Democrats will likely pick up six or seven seats in a state where the party’s voter registrations have grown only marginally.

(Via Instapundit.)

The NTSB is upset about cell phone use while driving:

And it was over just like that. It happened so quickly. And, that’s what happened at Gray Summit. Two lives lost in the blink of an eye. And, it’s what happened to more than 3,000 people last year. Lives lost. In the blink of an eye. In the typing of a text. In the push of a send button.

But it’s a lie; that figure counts all distractions, not just phone use. The actual number is less than a third of that, according to the NTSB’s own figures.

ASIDE: Another version of the piece, appearing in the Washington Post, renders the number “thousands of people”. Since the plural implies at least two thousand, that’s also a lie.

Two years ago I took a look at what the research on cell phone use while driving actually says. It was much more nuanced than the media would have us believe.

Each Chevy Volt sold has been subsidized to the tune of as much as $250k. (Via Althouse.)

In less than six weeks, 1% of Wisconsin has applied for a permit to carry a handgun. (Via Althouse.)

How absurd is the political battle over the Keystone XL pipeline? This map of pipelines in America shows how truly un-unprecedented another pipeline would be:

(Via Small Dead Animals, via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: More maps.

Victor Davis Hanson takes on the Obama mythology.

If you were a corrupt politician, and you thought that your political fortunes were tied to making certain numbers look better, wouldn’t you try to rig them? No I’m not talking about Argentina; I’m talking about the Obama administration’s effort to bring the Bureau of Labor Statistics to heel:

Over the last year, the administration has refused to fill the two top BLS positions. They have yet to nominate anyone to replace outgoing BLS Commissioner Keith Hall, whose term expires in January, and the number two post previously held by Deputy Commissioner Philip Rones has been vacant since last summer. . . BLS career professional and Associate Commissioner John Galvin has been given limited responsibilities to cover some of the deputy duties on an acting basis, but the White House has indicated it has no interest in promoting Galvin to the post of commissioner.

A retired career economist at the U.S. Department of Labor told PJ Media the administration wants to put its own political allies into the bureau, eschewing promotion from within:

Traditionally, the deputy commissioner position has been filled by promotion from within the ranks of experienced BLS career professionals, and when Rones retired from the deputy job last summer, Hall proposed promoting a highly qualified associate commissioner [John Galvin] to the position. The labor secretary and deputy secretary rebuffed that and made it clear that they wanted someone of their choosing from outside the existing career cadre.

The Senate could get involved by exercising its Senate confirmation process for a new commissioner — but the administration has circumvented the process by not nominating anyone. Nominations usually are announced as early as six months before the expiration of a term, but with a few weeks left before Hall leaves office, it is clear no commissioner will be running the bureau through much of 2012.

This has led to speculation that the White House is trying to circumvent the Senate so as to appoint a deputy whose position does not need Senate confirmation, and who would defer to the White House and to politically aggressive Labor Secretary Hilda Solis.

Of course, this strategy assumes that Americans can be tricked into believing that the economy is improving, which remains to be seen.

Tests have shown that LightSquared is just as dangerous as many people feared:

Philip Falcone’s proposed LightSquared Inc. wireless service caused interference to 75 percent of global-positioning system receivers examined in a U.S. government test, according to a draft summary of results.

(Via Hot Air.)

LightSquared’s response is revealing (“How dare you reveal how dangerous our product is!”):

LightSquared is “outraged by the illegal leak of incomplete government data,” Harriman said in an e-mailed statement. “This breach attempts to draw an inaccurate conclusion to negatively influence the future of LightSquared and narrowly serve the business interests of the GPS industry.”

In fact, it’s worse than that. Not only does LightSquared disrupt GPS, it also disrupts a system that planes use to avoid running into mountains.

If LightSquared weren’t owned by a big Democratic donor, it would be dead in the water. Instead, the White House is pushing to cover all this up.

(Previous post.)

The founder of the Occupy Wall Street movement has a history of anti-Semitic writing (more here).

As Pejman Yousefzadeh remarks:

I will only add that since it seemed to be perfectly fair to detractors of the Tea Party to judge the movement by the actions of a few dimwits at rallies, and the presence of a few offensive signs, it should also be perfectly fair to judge the Occupy movement by one of its chief gurus; and the noxious ideas he embraces.

Occupy Wall Street protesters shut down a television production because they didn’t like what they were saying:

More than 100 Occupy Wall Street demonstrators stormed the set for “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” across from the Manhattan State Supreme Courthouse, shutting down production of an OWS-themed episode.

“We made it so that they could not exploit us and that’s awesome,” said Tammy Schapiro, 29, of Brooklyn.

More horrors from the British NHS, the model for national health care.

The Boston Herald reports:

Dispirited Occupy member Stephen Campbell, 24, said when asked why he didn’t get arrested, he said he withdrew from the camp early today as the end was clearly in sight. “The Occupy Boston movement as a whole became fascist,” he said, adding he still believes in the Occupy idea but not the organization. “At a general assembly this week we spent four hours trying to evict people rather than focusing on our political causes.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Hey bub, totalitarian parties always turn their attention inward eventually, as Robespierre, Trotsky, and countless others can attest. Fortunately, Occupy Wall Street never had enough discipline to gain any external influence, so they skipped over the reign-of-terror phase and went right to the internal purges.

(Via Transterrestrial Musings.)

A scheduled meeting between Congressional Democrats and leaders of Occupy Wall Street was called off when the press got wind of it.

The Obama campaign is compiling a list of names and email addresses of people who don’t like President Obama. (Via Instapundit.)

A case study of how the stimulus funds were spent:

I fully agree with this sentiment:

I do not love the ambience of Walmarts; by my standards they’re loud, cheerless, and tacky – and that describes a lot of their merchandise and their shoppers, too.

But my esthetic and aspirational standards are those of a comparatively wealthy person even in U.S. terms, let alone world terms. To the people who use Walmart and belong there, Walmart is a tremendous boon that stretches their purchasing power, enabling them to have things that don’t suck.

That’s why I love the idea of Walmart, and will defend it against its enemies.

We can be confident that fracking for shale gas does not contaminate the water table, because shale gas formations are far below the water table. For fracking material to leak into the water table, they would have to leak upward. (A friend of mine who is an anti-fracking activist confirms this, saying that he is more concerned with pollution at the surface.)

In light of this, the EPA’s recent finding that fracking can contaminate water is surprising. That is, it’s surprising until you learn that the EPA drilled its “well” three times as deep as an ordinary water well, all the way down into a natural gas reservoir. That’s only the most serious of several objections to the EPA’s methodology.

The question that presents itself is whether the EPA is being dishonest or simply incompetent. A popular rule of thumb suggests never to blame on malice what can be explained by incompetence, but the incompetence theory tends to break down when all of the errors point in the same direction. Has Obama’s EPA ever made a mistake that understates an environmental threat?

(Via Instapundit.)

The New York Daily News reports:

Milk Street Cafe, the restaurant whose business dried up in the face of the Occupy Wall Street barricades, is shutting down. . . Milk Street Cafe’s closure will result in the layoff of 70 workers. That’s on top of the 21 let go in October. . .

When asked whether he would ever open a restaurant in New York again, Epstein responded, “Never.”

Fighting capitalism, one employer at a time.

(Via Instapundit.)

Investor’s Business Daily writes:

In his “60 Minutes” interview this weekend, Obama claimed the economy is suffering “structural problems that have been building up for two decades.” . . .

“I’ve always believed that this was a long-term project,” Obama told CBS’s Steve Kroft, and that it “was gonna take more than a year. It was gonna take more than two years.”

The problem is that, once upon a time, Obama was saying pretty much the exact opposite. Examples:

Hilarity ensues.

(Via Instapundit.)

If global warming is a looming global catastrophe, then surely it must be the fault of the Jews :

Climate Change Means: Enough Already With What’s Good for the Jews . . .

On the Keystone XL Pipeline, the major Jewish organizations were mostly silent. Only the American Jewish Committee spoke out — in support of the pipeline as “a crucial step in strengthening U.S. energy security.”

In other words: this pipeline would be good for the Jews.

I’m so glad we have the Huffington Post to explain this sort of thing to us. Good grief.

(Via Best of the Web.)

This is interesting:

A former MF Global employee accused former president William J. Clinton of collecting $50,000 per month through his Teneo advisory firm in the months before the brokerage careened towards its Halloween filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Teneo was hired by MF Global’s former CEO Jon S. Corzine to improve his image and to enhance his connections with Clinton’s political family.

The Obama administration is cutting off funding for a program to fight sex-trafficking run by the Catholic Church, despite the independent review board’s recommendation that the program be renewed:

In the case of the trafficking contract, senior political appointees at HHS stepped in to award the new grants to the bishops’ competitors, overriding an independent review board and career staffers who had recommended that the bishops be funded again, according to federal officials and internal HHS documents. . .

The decision not to fund the bishops this time has caused controversy inside HHS. A number of career officials refused to sign documents connected to the grant, feeling that the process was unfair and politicized, individuals familiar with the matter said. Their concerns have been reported to the HHS inspector general’s office.

HHS policies spell out that career officials usually oversee grant competitions and select the winners, giving priority consideration to the review board’s judgment. The policies do not prohibit political appointees from getting involved, though current and former employees said it is unusual, especially for high-level officials.

There is little doubt about why the political staff overruled the independent review board. The politicals made it clear from the outset that Catholics would not be considered:

This spring, as the contract approached its expiration, HHS political appointees became involved in reshaping the request for proposals, adding a “strong preference” for applicants offering referrals for family planning and the “full range” of “gynecological and obstetric care.’’

That the review board selected the Catholic organization anyway, despite the “strong preference” for anyone else, indicates how superior their application must have been to the others. But the Obama administration decided that fighting sex trafficking was a lower priority than advancing its abortion agenda.

Could this administration be more brazen?

Hundreds of workers who were laid off by the bankrupt solar firm that received $528 million in taxpayer support are eligible for additional federal aid, the Labor Department has ruled.

The potential benefits for laid-off Solyndra workers would fall under a program known as “trade adjustment assistance.” The taxpayer-backed benefits are supposed to help workers who lost their jobs presumably because production was shifted overseas.

In a Nov. 18 decision, the Labor Department ruled that former Solyndra employees meet the criteria. Echoing an argument that has been made for months by Energy Secretary Steven Chu and other Obama administration officials, the department determined that Solyndra’s workers were hurt by foreign competition.

Solyndra’s workers were not hurt by foreign competition. On the contrary, they briefly had a job that should never have existed at all, if not for federal largess. They all knew it. And now they’ll get more federal largess.

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More euthanasia at the British NHS, the model for nationalized health care that Democrats would like to see established in the United States:

Tens of thousands of patients with terminal illnesses are being placed on a “death pathway”, almost double the number just two years ago, a study published today shows.

Health service guidance states that doctors should discuss with relations whether or not their loved one is placed on the scheme which allows medical staff to withdraw fluid and drugs in a patient’s final days. In many cases this is not happening, an audit has found. As many as 2,500 families were not told that their loved ones had been put on the so-called Liverpool Care Pathway, the study disclosed. In one hospital trust, doctors had conversations with fewer than half of families about the care of their loved one.

And just to be clear, these aren’t necessarily patients who will pass away without a little push:

That’s the buzz today. It sounds like suicide to me, but I’m all for it. . .

This is interesting:

For decades, Democrats have suffered continuous and increasingly severe losses among white voters. But preparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class.

All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned in favor of cementing a center-left coalition made up, on the one hand, of voters who have gotten ahead on the basis of educational attainment — professors, artists, designers, editors, human resources managers, lawyers, librarians, social workers, teachers and therapists — and a second, substantial constituency of lower-income voters who are disproportionately African-American and Hispanic.

What right-wing publication produced this story? The New York Times.

A good example of why I don’t trust Newt Gingrich. (And read to the end so you don’t miss the health care connection.)

(Via Instapundit.)

Despite mounting evidence that salt is not unhealthy, the FDA is pushing a new effort to crack down on salt consumption.

The fact is, different people need different amounts of salt. Some people would benefit from cutting back salt consumption, but others would be harmed. I happen to be in the latter category. I’ve already suffered on occasion when well-meaning nutrition busybodies have sought to limit my salt intake and I do not want to see these petty tyrants take their misguided program nationwide.

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The Richmond Tea Party paid $8,500 to use the same park that Occupy Wall Street has been using for weeks, paying nothing. So the Tea Party asked for a refund. Richmond’s response? An audit:

Tea party activists in Richmond, Va., watched as liberal Occupy Wall Street protesters paid nothing to use the same park that conservatives paid $8,500 to use for three of its “tax day” rallies. So the tea partyers pushed the issue by demanding a full refund of their fees.

Instead of a check, the Richmond Tea Party received a letter from the city saying it may have failed to pay taxes on ticket and food sales – and it should immediately prepare for an audit.

The city denies allegations that the audit warning was some kind of political retaliation or harassment.

The New Yorker has a full piece on how the Occupy Wall Street Movement was astroturfed. Of course, those who have been paying attention have known this for some time, but the fact that it’s in the pages of the New Yorker means the bubble has truly burst on this execrable movement.

(Via Big Journalism.)

POSTSCRIPT: It seems that I never linked Jon Stewart’s piece on Occupy Wall Street, which was the first sign that the left was turning on Occupy Wall Street.

(Important update appended.)

The defense bill before the Senate has a very troubling provision: it allows the president to detain indefinitely any person who supports Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or “associated forces”. The provision does not specify how the determination is made, and it provides no exemption for US citizens arrested on US soil.

According to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI) (video here, cue to 4:43:02), an earlier version of the bill specifically excluded US citizens. That provision was removed at the behest of the Obama administration.

Let’s please not have any more nonsense about this president’s great concern for civil liberties. (UPDATE: There’s still plenty of instances of this president’s disdain for civil liberties, but this isn’t an example of it.)

POSTSCRIPT: There’s plenty of blame for Republicans as well. Sen. Mark Udall (D-CO) proposed an amendment that would have striken the provision. It was voted down 60-38, with most Democrats voting yea (but not enough) and most Republicans voting no.

UPDATE: I’m confused now. Andrew McCarthy writes that the president has had the power to detain US citizens as enemy combatants at least since World War 2:

In 1942, American citizen combatant Hans Haupt was captured by the FBI inside the U.S. and ordered detained as an enemy combatant by FDR. In 2002, American citizen combatant Jose Padilla was captured by the FBI inside the U.S. and ordered detained as an enemy combatant by Bush 43. . . As the Haupt and Padilla examples demonstrate, the president already has authority (in the ongoing war, under the 2001 authorization for the use of military force (AUMF)), to detain American citizens as enemy combatants.

This isn’t consistent with what David Kopel wrote, and I’m not sure who’s right.

Further muddying the waters are two amendments (at least, I think they’re two different amendments), each of which purportedly do what Kopel says the bill does without any amendments. One is by Sessions (1274), and the other by McCain and Levin (couldn’t find a number for that one). McCarthy was talking about the latter; the former was the subject of this statement by Rand Paul. I couldn’t find text for either amendment.

UPDATE (12/9): Mea culpa. I’m now convinced to the opposite view, that the bill does not change the law, and that existing law is pretty reasonable. More here.

One of my college economics professors expounded the theory that labor unions actually improve the efficiency of unionized businesses. Despite the fact that union monopoly power leads to featherbedding, she argued that unions create such esprit de corps within the workforce that the net result is positive. Yes, she actually said that. (Later she left the university to join the Clinton administration.)

A strike at Heathrow Airport gives us the opportunity to see which effect dominates:

Heathrow has never been more efficient!
Passengers’ glee as border agency strike SPEEDS UP passport control

Passengers who had been warned of lengthy delays at Heathrow due to striking workers today said border controls were ‘better than usual’.

As Border Agency bosses were forced to take on regular airport workers to man passport control, delighted passengers said queues had been shorter than normal. The situation was echoed at Dover too as passengers faced apparently normal travel conditions with ferry services ‘running well and to time’ this morning.

Looks like the featherbedding effect not only dominates the esprit de corps effect, it also dominates any effect of the training and experience of the usual staff. It will be a pity if the strike ever ends.

POSTSCRIPT: Q: How many university workers does it take to change a light bulb? A: Three.

No punchline; that’s just how many it takes. You’re not allowed to change it yourself, either; that’s union work.

Ann Coulter explains why Republicans are so resolutely opposed to tax hikes.

One of the revelations from Peter Schweizer’s new book on Congressional insider trading is former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) cleaning up on malfeasance regards a credit card regulation bill:

Nancy Pelosi apparently bought $1 million to $5 million of Visa stock in one of the most sought-after and profitable initial public offerings (IPO) in American history, thwarted serious credit card reform for two years, and then watched her investment skyrocket 203%. . .

According to Schweizer, corporations that wish to build congressional allies will sometimes hand-pick members of Congress to receive IPOs. Pelosi received her Visa IPO almost two weeks after a potentially damaging piece of legislation for Visa, the Credit Card Fair Fee Act, had been introduced in the House. If passed, the bill would have cut into Visa’s profits substantially. . .

The Credit Card Fair Fee Act was exactly the kind of bill one would think then-Speaker Pelosi would have backed. “She had been outspoken about antitrust problems posed by insurance, oil, and pharmaceutical companies,” Schweizer notes, “and she was vocal about the need for controlling interest rates individual banks charged to use their credit cards.” . . .

Still, with at least ten percent of the Pelosi family’s entire stock portfolio invested in a single stock, Nancy Pelosi clearly had a vested interest in ensuring that Visa’s profits were protected. . . Pelosi saw to it that the bill never made it to the House floor. . .

Pelosi also blocked a second credit-card bill from reaching the house floor. Finally:

Pelosi eventually supported something called the Credit Card Reform Act. Curiously, the all-important interchange fees went untouched by that legislation. . . The bill’s other measures would not affect Visa but rather its client banks.

This is naked corruption, but, alas, it’s perfectly legal. And Pelosi is hardly alone.

Now Democrats are trying to fire back, alleging similiar by Speaker John Boehner. Now, I’m sure there are examples of similar corruption on the Republican side — Republican congressmen aren’t angels either. But for Boehner, all they have is this:

Schweizer and “60 Minutes” claim that during the 2009 debate over healthcare reform, Boehner bought health insurance stocks in the days before Congress conclusively nixed the “public option” — a government-run insurance option that could have siphoned off business from insurance companies.

If they think this is a relevant counter, they don’t even understand the scandal. There are two different reasons why Pelosi’s Visa actions are corrupt:

1. Pelosi took actions to favor her own personal interests in opposition to her usual politics. (To wit: ordinarily she certainly would have supported the credit card regulation bill.)
2. Pelosi benefited from information not available to the general public. (To wit: she knew that the credit card regulation bill would fail.)

Neither of these are the case with John Boehner. He would have opposed the public option regardless of his personal interests — it was opposed by every single Republican. And neither is there any evidence that he benefited from inside information.

Returning to the general scandal, Congress cannot be expected to police itself. If any evidence were required, the fact that a leading “reform” bill is fake would provide it. So what should be done?

Schweizer’s solution is to throw them all out and start over. Not a bad start, but even if it were accomplished, why would the next class of Congressmen be any less corrupt?

Instead, what we need to do is remove Congress’s power. Then they couldn’t use their power to serve their own interests, and they wouldn’t have insider information on which to trade.

In fact, the Founding Fathers envisioned exactly this scheme. They knew that politicians would be corrupt, and sought to set up a system in which political corruption would do the least harm. Alas, their system has been broken for years. It’s time to fix it.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama refers to the “English embassy”.