Internet Scofflaw

The Obama campaign is calling for Mitt Romney to release more tax returns. (He has already released several years.) Joel Pollak counters with a list of the top ten things that Obama has refused to release.

Pollak’s list is not really parallel, though. Some of the stuff on his list, like the Gunwalker documents, actually matters.

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney hold fundraisers in Newport Beach, California. The city bills the campaigns for the costs of security. Romney pays, Obama doesn’t.

Interestingly, the Secret Service position is that the city should provide the security for free, or if not, then someone else (such as the county or state) should provide it for free. Seriously.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: That’s not the only city Obama has stiffed. (Via Instapundit.)

What makes GM’s heavy investment in the Volt, a flawed car that no one wants, look even worse? GM makes no profit on the car:

According to multiple GM executives there is little or no profit being made on each Volt built at a present cost of around $40,000. Furthermore, the $700 million of development that went into the car has to be recouped.

GM says they have a long-term plan to make the Volt profitable. Given GM’s recent history, one has to guess that the plan is to receive a bailout. This isn’t snark: My guess is GM’s plan for the Volt is to profit from government incentives.

I’m not just talking about subsidies, which I’m sure that President Obama would dearly like to institute, but CAFE standards. With CAFE standards due to increase to an insane 54.5 mpg, every Volt sold at a loss will give GM more breathing room for regular cars.

(Via Instapundit.)

It’s no big deal, but I thought this was interesting:

The White House has reversed its previous stance of not using the official presidential seal at campaign events. The practice, which is not illegal, is a reversal from statements made by former White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs that they would not be using the official seal at campaign stops. . .

But President Obama used it last Friday at a campaign rally in Pittsburgh, and Vice President Biden used the vice presidential seal Thursday in Houston when addressing the NAACP convention.

When asked at Thursday’s White House briefing about it, current Press Secretary Jay Carney said he was not aware of that specific Gibbs comment and was quick to point out that Obama’s predecessors had used it.

Of course, the president has every right to use the presidential seal. What’s interesting about this is it exemplifies a pattern by this president. He made great promises of higher standards time and time again when it was cheap to make them, without any intention of fulfilling them.

It was easy to say that he would hold himself to a higher standard on the campaign when he wasn’t actually campaigning. Once campaigning started, the promise was forgotten.

Let’s just remember what President Obama’s fine promises are worth when not contemporaneously matched with action: nothing at all.

President Obama, after first claiming — falsely — that he was misquoted, now says his “You Didn’t Build That” remarks was taken out of context. They weren’t. Cue the video below to 32:26. That will start you with Obama suggesting that our schools are failing because students don’t want to learn, about a minute before his notorious remarks on success.

Obama talks about his “balanced way” to cut the deficit: cutting the budget by a “trillion or trillion-two” (ASIDE: Obama has added over $1.5 trillion in annual spending, before Obamacare kicks in) and asking “for the wealthy to pay a little bit more”. He then explains why they should be happy to do it: First, it worked great when Bill Clinton did it. (I suppose he would see it that way.) Second, they should “want to give something back” because:

They know they didn’t —

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own. You didn’t get there on your own!

I’m always struck by people who think: well, it must be because I was just so smart. There are a lot of smart people out there!

[And so on.]

There’s nothing in the context that is remotely exculpatory. Obama was explaining that successful people should be happy to pay higher taxes, because they didn’t succeed on their own; others were responsible for their success.

Obama can’t say specifically how he is being distorted, because he isn’t being distorted at all. He just wishes he hadn’t said it. He can’t just walk it back either, because this is a man who is temperamentally unable to admit being wrong. Instead, he has to lash out at everyone else for failing to appreciate his unspoken intent.

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Here’s the official transcript.

While searching for a good clip of President Obama’s “You Didn’t Build That” speech in Roanoke, Virginia, I found this amusing bit (cue to 1:28), in a speech Obama gave in Roanoke in 2008:

I say: “Sir, I understand you are a die-hard Republican.” He said “Yes I am.”

I said, “How’s business?”

He said: Not so good, my customers can’t afford to eat out right now.

I said: Well, I’m just curious, who’s been running the economy for the last eight years?

He said: I guess the Republicans have.

I said: If you just keep hitting your head against the wall, over and over again, and it starts to hurt, at some point do you stop hitting it against the wall?

He said: I guess that would make sense.

I said: You might want to try the Democrats for a change. We can’t do any worse!

After four years, Obama has indeed made it worse, but now Obama wants us to keep hitting our head against the wall. It will surely stop hurting eventually!

(Fun fact: banging your head against the wall does eventually stop hurting. Eventually it kills you.)

The Democrats’ DISCLOSE bill is ostensibly intended to force the disclosure of the funding sources of political speech. In fact, the law already requires disclosure of the funding of political speech (read Justice Thomas’s blistering concurrence in the Citizens United decision for why that’s a bad idea). The real effect, if not indeed the real purpose, of the bill is to create a huge chilling effect against individuals speaking out in politics.

Chuck Schumer (D-NY) admits this. In a speech supporting the DISCLOSE bill, he calls for limits on free speech:

I believe there ought to be limits because the First Amendment is not absolute. No amendment is absolute. You can’t scream ‘fire’ falsely in a crowded theater. We have libel laws. We have anti-pornography laws. All of those are limits on the First Amendment. Well, what could be more important than the wellspring of our democracy? And certain limits on First Amendment rights that if left unfettered, destroy the equality — any semblance of equality in our democracy — of course would be allowed by the Constitution. And the new theorists on the Supreme Court who don’t believe that, I am not sure where their motivation comes from, but they are just so wrong. They are just so wrong.

Notice what is absent from Schumer’s argument: anything at all to limit its application. He observes that there are some limits on the freedom of speech, and argues therefore that the government can impose other limits on the freedom of speech. He does not identify anything special about his desired anti-speech rule that would be parallel to fire-in-a-crowded-theater, libel, or pornography.

Let’s please not have any more nonsense about how the Democrats are the party of civil liberties.

California Democrats were faced with a dilemma: protecting children from pedophile teachers meant standing up against the teachers’ union. They made the wrong choice.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: And also New York Democrats. (Via Instapundit.)

. . . truly are a loathsome bunch:

The owner of several Connecticut nursing homes is calling for a criminal probe after union workers staged a mass walkout earlier this month, allegedly vandalizing and sabotaging the health care facilities in the process. Among the allegations is that the workers, supposedly disgruntled over protracted labor talks, switched around the IDs of Alzheimer’s patients.

The alleged sabotage, which also purportedly included tampering with medication records and removing patient identification bands, occurred in three of the company’s five Connecticut facilities in the overnight hours before the July 3 strike. . .

Those employees are represented by a chapter of the Service Employees International Union.

(Emphasis mine.)

An Obama campaign ad is accusing Mitt Romney of “launching a false attack” by quoting him:

NARRATOR: Mitt Romney is launching a false attack.

ROMNEY: President Obama exposes what he really thinks about free people and the American vision. . . He said this: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

NARRATOR: The only problem? That’s not what he said.

[Obama says a bunch of other stuff, interleaved with stuff from Romney, then:]

OBAMA: If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

This is truly bizarre. Not only are they lying, saying that Obama didn’t say what he said, but the ad even includes video of him saying exactly what they’re denying he said. It’s the self-refuting ad!

(Previous post.)

UPDATE: Someone prepared this shortened version of Obama’s self-refuting ad:

Dilbert’s boss’s fallacy:

I’m reminded of this by President Obama — a man who has, in his entire life, never created anything but two autobiographies (maybe) — pronouncing that entrepreneurs and inventors are not responsible for what they created:

Look, if you’ve been successful, you didn’t get there on your own.  You didn’t get there on your own.  I’m always struck by people who think, well, it must be because I was just so smart.  There are a lot of smart people out there.  It must be because I worked harder than everybody else.  Let me tell you something — there are a whole bunch of hardworking people out there.

If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.

If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.

This is a revealing statement. It’s consistent with Obama’s personal experience. He has always gotten ahead because of his ability to ingratiate himself with the machine and thereby to feed off the efforts of others. And it explains his policies: if no one is responsible for their own success, why not confiscate the fruits of their labor and “spread the wealth around”.

But it’s stunningly ignorant. He could just as well have said that a farmer who works from dawn to dusk every day to raise a patch of potatoes isn’t responsible for his crop because somebody else made his hoe. Of course no one person can prosper in isolation, this is very well understood. The economy succeeds when each person individually adds value, and is compensated for his or her effort. The guy who made the hoe is responsible for the hoe, and got paid for it, he is not responsible for the potatoes. Likewise, Obama’s teachers, road-builders and bridge-builders got paid for their efforts. This is just basic economics; it’s a pity our president doesn’t understand it.

POSTSCRIPT: But doesn’t the government pay for some of that added value? No, the taxpayer does. And the taxes are paid disproportionately by the very innovators that Obama is minimizing. Moreover, while some of our tax money does go to people who are creating value (public goods and services that would otherwise be under-provided, like roads, defense, law enforcement, and basic research) far more of it goes to transfer payments, to boondoggles, to parasites, or — worst of all — to regulators who occasionally may mitigate an externality but whose primary function is actually to hamper the creation of value.

Another must-read from Frank J Fleming.

An Obama campaign commercial blames Mitt Romney for layoffs at GST Steel. Setting aside whether Bain Capital is to blame for that, Romney wasn’t at Bain when it happened. And, the guy who was running Bain when it happened is now a top bundler for Barack Obama.

Typical:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi was emphatic. Mitt Romney’s refusal to release more than two years of his personal tax returns, she said, makes him unfit to win confirmation as a member of the president’s Cabinet, let alone to hold the high office himself.

Sen. Harry Reid went further: Romney’s refusal to make public more of his tax records makes him unfit to be a dogcatcher.

They do not, however, think that standard of transparency should apply to them. The two Democratic leaders of the Senate and the House of Representatives are among hundreds of senators and representatives from both parties who refused to release their tax records.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama doesn’t know what “outsourcing” means:

Obama responded thus: “Yesterday, his advisers tried to clear this up by telling us that there was a difference between ‘outsourcing’ and ‘offshoring.’ Seriously. You can’t make that up.”

And indeed you wouldn’t have to make it up, because it is a real thing: different words with different meanings. . . “Outsourcing” happens when a firm contracts out its non-core functions to other vendors, e.g., a hotel decides to hire a cleaning service rather than keep maids on the hotel payroll.

By the way, here’s Merriam-Webster’s definition (note the complete absence of any international connotation):

outsource : to procure (as some goods or services needed by a business or organization) under contract with an outside supplier

What’s most striking here is the aggressive nature of Obama’s ignorance. Not only is he apparently unaware that outsourcing need not be foreign, he actually mocks the notion.

One of Eric Holder’s specious defenses is that his predecessor was also aware of gunwalking too. One rebuttal is that Wide Receiver was nothing at all like Fast and Furious (as Holder himself has admitted). Another rebuttal is that it isn’t true:

During last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, Holder had alleged that former Attorney General Michael Mukasey knew of gunwalking during the George W. Bush administration.

“An attorney general who I suppose you would hold in higher regard was briefed on these kinds of tactics in an operation called Wide Receiver and did nothing to stop them — nothing,” Holder told Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn during that hearing. “Three hundred guns, at least, walked in that instance.”

After the hearing, Grassley wrote to Holder asking him to provide evidence to back up his blaming Mukasey.

Instead of being able to facilitate evidence, though, according to Iowa Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley’s office, Holder and the DOJ have now retracted that statement.

Lie in haste, retract at leisure.

(Previous post.)

What? Price caps cause shortages? Who knew?

The LA Times reports:

City officials decided not to renew a contract with American Traffic Systems Inc. for the city’s seven red-light cameras, citing a lack of enforcement from Los Angeles County courts, time wasted by Pasadena police officers and questions about the cameras’ effectiveness in improving traffic safety.

Unfortunately, Pennsylvania is going the opposite direction. James Walker of the National Motorists Association reviews many of the reasons why red-light cameras are a bad idea here, but it really comes down to this: Red-light cameras aren’t for safety, they are for revenue. In fact, they create a conflict of interest in which officials trade-off safety for revenue: the cameras only make money with short yellow lights, which make intersections more dangerous. Municipalities that keep longer yellows have found, like Pasadena, that the cameras lose money.

Remember when the Democrats were talking about the need for civility, and the danger of using violent metaphors in politics?

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

Yeah, me neither.

(Via Althouse.)

The White House, having persuaded the Supreme Court to approve their health care takeover as a tax, are shamelessly pretending that they never called it a tax:

That’s the Obama campaign press secretary saying:

Review the court transcripts, Ryan. At no point did Verrilli or any of the government lawyers say that it was a tax.

Which, of course, is an out-and-out lie. It wasn’t just Verrilli in oral arguments; it was also in the briefs, not to mention countless Democratic statements.

UPDATE: Heh.

UPDATE: More heh.

Argentina is moving on to the next step in its financial collapse: commandeering bank assets. Specifically, the government is ordering banks to make loans at rates well below the market rate, or even the interest rate.

It’s amazing to watch these socialist fools imagine that they are immune to the laws of economics.