Internet Scofflaw

The left’s second try at an ammunition ban was defeated last week.

John Hinderaker notes a troubling story:

It isn’t surprising that a Muslim extremist has offered a $10 million bounty on the heads of George Bush and Barack Obama, but it is a little shocking that the extremist in question is a member of the House of Lords . . .

Harry Reid, looking for political cover for his continued failure to adopt a budget (as required by law), asked the Senate parliamentarian to rule that last year’s Budget Control Act prohibits the Senate from voting on a budget. The parliamentarian, who Reid appointed, refused to do so, since in fact the Budget Control Act does no such thing.

James O’Keefe strikes again:

The Department of Energy wanted to make a $2.1 billion loan to Solar Trust, which is now another green bankruptcy. That would have been four times the disaster of Solyndra. Fortunately for the taxpayers, Solar Trust turned the money down as too risky.

(Previous post.)

In a new atrocity from the horror show that is the British NHS, a British man is denied medical care because he is too old:

When Kenneth Warden was diagnosed with terminal bladder cancer, his hospital consultant sent him home to die, ruling that at 78 he was too old to treat. Even the palliative surgery or chemotherapy that could have eased his distressing symptoms were declared off-limits because of his age.

The NHS sentenced this man to death, and wouldn’t even treat his suffering. Universal coverage does not mean universal access.

But don’t worry, nothing like that could ever happen here. . .

POSTSCRIPT: The story actually has a happy ending, but it’s one that makes the NHS’s judgement even worse. After the man was denied care by the socialized medicine system, she man’s daughter paid to send him to a private doctor:

Thanks to her tenacity, Kenneth got the drugs and surgery he needed — and as a result his cancer was actually cured. Four years on, he is a sprightly 82-year-old who works out at the gym, drives a sports car and competes in a rowing team.

So the NHS wanted to leave this man to die who actually could be saved. Lesson: if you want to get better, you need to be in charge of your medical care, not the government.

Unfortunately, not many people can afford to do what the man’s daughter did. When you’re already paying for “universal” medical care, most people can’t afford to pay a second time for private care. Moreover, under the Canadian system (which Democrats want to enact here), it’s not even allowed.

The White House gave the Treasury Department just one day to review the federal government’s ill-fated loan to Solyndra:

The U.S. Treasury Department was given one day to review Solyndra LLC’s $535 million U.S. loan guarantee after learning the Energy Department was ready to announce the award, according to a Treasury audit.

While Treasury staff say they had enough time to review the loan, internal e-mails cast doubt on whether staff suggestions were addressed by the Energy Department, the Treasury’s Inspector General’s Office said yesterday in the report.

Officials in the White House’s Office of Management and Budget told the Treasury Department that the announcement of a conditional commitment to Solyndra was imminent. The department had one day to review the terms of the guarantee to accommodate an Energy Department press release.

(Previous post.)

Iowahawk:

Thanks to Barack Obama, I can now fill up my truck for the price of 2 light bulbs!

At last, a law against distracted walking. Our long national nightmare is over.

Joe Biden, doing the Joe Biden thing again:

“For years, American manufacturers have faced one of the highest tax rates in the world. We want to reduce that by over 20%. We want to drop the rate, particularly, for high-tech manufacturers like you, Mr. President, even further than the 20%,” Vice President Joe Biden said at a manufacturing plant in Davenport, Iowa this week.

“We want to create a global minimum tax, because American taxpayers shouldn’t be providing a larger subsidy for investing abroad than investing at home,” Biden said at a campaign event.

(Emphasis mine.)

Biden didn’t explain who exactly would be the global taxing authority, but I don’t think we would like the answer.

An article at Forbes explains that Obamacare can be repealed using the reconciliation process, even though not all of Obamacare directly impacts the budget.

Obamacare has lost $17 trillion in the two years since it was enacted: The federal government’s unfunded liabilities for health care have grown (in current dollars, if I’m reading it right) from $65 trillion to $82 trillion.

The US GDP is about $14.6 trillion. So Obamacare has lost, in just two years, more than a full year of the entire productive capacity of the United States of America.

(Via Ricochet.)

Forbes reports:

In 2009, during the height of the debate over Obamacare, the law’s architect, MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, was all over the op-ed pages, talking about how the bill would reduce the cost of health insurance. “What we know for sure,” he told Ezra Klein, “is that [the bill] will lower the cost of buying non-group health insurance.” His words were trumpeted by the law’s advocates, and were critical to persuading skittish Democrats to vote for the bill.

(Emphasis mine.)

But “for sure” isn’t so sure as you might think:

As states began the process of considering whether or not to set up the insurance exchanges mandated by the new health law, several retained Gruber as a consultant. In at least three cases . . . Gruber reported that premiums in the individual market would increase, not decrease, as a result of Obamacare.

In Wisconsin, Gruber reported that people purchasing insurance for themselves on the individual market would see, on average, premium increases of 30 percent by 2016, relative to what would have happened in the absence of Obamacare. In Minnesota, the law would increase premiums by 29 percent over the same period. Colorado was the least worst off, with premiums under the law rising by only 19 percent.

(Emphasis mine.)

The problem (or a problem anyway) with Gruber’s original model is it didn’t account for guaranteed-issue (you can’t turn anyone away) and community rating (you can’t charge expensive customers (enough) more). Which is to say, it didn’t account for either of the central features of Obamacare!

So why did anyone take it seriously in the first place? Because they wanted to believe.

The UK has 14,000 avoidable cancer deaths each year because of age discrimination by the National Health Service. But don’t worry, nothing like that could ever happen here.

(Via Power Line.)

This picture of the Lake County (Florida) Democratic Party headquarters isn’t creepy or anything:

When Paul Krugman attacked John Hinderaker with characteristic dishonesty, but uncharacteristically including a link, Hinderaker updated the page with a best-of list of Krugman’s lies and incivility. Nicely played.

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, the lesson Krugman likely learned from this is to return to his usual practice of not including links.

The federal government wants to ban GPS navigators in cars. (Via Instapundit.)

Nice:

Conservatives on Twitter today quickly hijacked the #ILikeObamacare hashtag, which had been launched by President Barack Obama’s campaign to highlight supporters of the Democrats’ signature health care reform law.

The Twitter hashtag was the most popular in the world Friday afternoon, but not for reasons the Obama campaign wanted.

I signed up for Twitter today just so I could join in the fun. A few of my contributions:

• #ILikeObamacare because I never believed Obama’s promise that I could keep my health care anyway.
• #ILikeObamacare because 39% public support is plenty to rewrite the social contract.
• #ILikeObamacare because not enough elderly are being abused in America. bit.ly/Ag3qst
• #ILikeObamacare because politicians should decide whether people get pacemakers or painkillers. drhelen.blogspot.com/2009/07/maybe-youre-better-off-not-having.html
• #ILikeObamacare because it’s about time someone fixed Catholic theology.

UPDATE: It’s pretty much taken over by spammers now. Pity.

The UK is scrapping its new 50% tax rate that generated negative revenue.

The Daily Caller reports:

A Virginia middle school teacher recently forced his students to support President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign by conducting opposition research in class against the Republican presidential candidates.

The 8th grade students, who attend Liberty Middle School in Fairfax County, were required to seek out the vulnerabilities of Republican presidential hopefuls and forward them to the Obama campaign. . .

No similar assignment was given to research Obama’s history, identify his weaknesses or pass them along to the Republican candidates.

I think Allahpundit is right, that the Obama campaign has plenty of opposition research staff already, and doesn’t need any help from a class of middle schoolers. But as political indoctrination, this is outrageous.

President Obama thinks that oil is $1.25 a barrel:

We have subsidized oil companies for a century.  We want to encourage production of oil and gas, and make sure that wherever we’ve got American resources, we are tapping into them.  But they don’t need an additional incentive when gas is $3.75 a gallon, when oil is $1.20 a barrel, $1.25 a barrel.  They don’t need additional incentives.  They are doing fine.

(That’s the White House transcript.)

Oil (Brent Crude) is currently trading at $125.10. Obama is off by two orders of magnitude! Good thing those cowboys that understand the oil industry are out of office.

(Via Hot Air.)

DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz denies saying that the GOP is trying to bring back Jim Crow, despite having said it on television.

This is funny, but it also offers some important perspective:

The Obama administration has issued a new rule that will require public pools to install equipment costing between eight and twenty thousand dollars. This will likely force many pools to close.

Why would they do this? Don’t public pools serve poorer people, who Democrats are supposed to like?

The answer is we are seeing, once again, the Democratic party’s hierarchy of causes at work. The poor are on the very bottom rung of the ladder. They get attention only when it doesn’t conflict with any of the Democrats’ more favored constituencies. In this case, the new rule is a windfall for trial lawyers:

The Obama DOJ has said it will not be enforcing the new guidelines right away. That means no fines from the government, for now.

But the ADA also empowered citizens to sue businesses that are not in compliance with DOJ guidelines. The result will be a huge payday for enterprising trial lawyers everywhere.

“The enforcement is going to be by litigation,” said Kevin Maher, senior vice president of governmental affairs for the American Hotel & Lodging Association. “A lot of drive-by lawsuits against business by law firms that are set up file to file spurious ADA claims.”

These firms “often file lawsuits against every business in the community. A lot of times they are not even looking for businesses to comply with the ADA, they are just looking for a quick cash settlement to go away,” Maher explained.

Note that the administration admits it has no plans to enforce the regulation itself. It’s purely for the lawyers. That’s the kind of service you get when you raise $45 million for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Remember when President Obama promised that if you like your health insurance, you would get to keep it? That was a lie.

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s latest estimate (report here, p. 4), 11 million people will lose their health insurance under Obamacare. That’s 7% of all the people who receive their health insurance from their employer.

This is the CBO’s baseline estimate, meaning that the actual number could be much, much worse. The report doesn’t actually seem to give the worst-case number, but it would be over 20 million. Moreover, the worse end is more likely, since the CBO’s numbers are much rosier than the results of business surveys.

POSTSCRIPT: If you’re wondering how to reconcile these numbers with the bottom-line numbers released by the CBO, here’s the deal. The CBO says that, in their baseline, 3 to 5 million fewer people will have employment-based health care. That’s a net figure: 11 million lose it, but others would gain it, leaving 3 to 5 million fewer on net. That sort of calculation makes sense for the CBO, which is tasked with calculating the cost to the government of this monstrosity. But the net figure isn’t right for evaluating how badly Obama has broken his promise that no one who likes his or her health care will lose it.

(Via Instapundit.)

Undeterred by their failure in 2010, the left is once again trying to ban lead ammunition, which is to say, most ammunition:

A similar request was denied by the E.P.A. in August 2010. But Mr. Miller said that the new petition includes a larger consortium of groups, including some made up of hunters, and cites recent research demonstrating that the toxic levels of lead in bullets and shot cause significant poisoning of birds nationwide.

Their last effort foundered on the problem that the EPA is explicitly denied the power to regulate ammunition. Neither the size of their consortium nor their new research addresses that legal prohibition in any way.

(Via Instapundit.)

Here’s a great energy policy: Let’s subsidize the construction of wind power, and then pay the wind farms not to produce any electricity. Good thinking!

Just a couple of weeks ago, Energy Secretary Stephen Chu disavowed any interest in lowering gas prices:

“But is the overall goal to get our price —”, asked [Rep. Alan] Nunnelee, who didn’t finish the sentence.

“No, the overall goal is to decrease our dependency on oil, to build and strengthen our economy,” Chu replied.

That, of course, was wholly consistent with Chu’s long-standing position that gas prices ought to be as high here as in Europe. His policies seem to be working:

But now someone has finally reeled Chu in, pointing out that his let-them-eat-cake-alternative-fuels policy is utterly insane, politically speaking. Now Chu has renounced that position.

That’s what he says, anyway, but this is an election year. Don’t you believe a word of it. Once re-elected, that bunch will go back to doing everything they can to drive up gas prices.

In fact, other than Chu’s testimony, is there any reason to believe they have actually stopped trying to drive up prices? Has President Obama reversed his rejection of the Keystone XL pipeline, or stopped slow-walking drilling permits? Has he opened up the continental shelf to oil exploration? Has he done anything?

The North Carolina school that replaced a child’s home-packed lunch because it wasn’t nutritious enough has selected a scapegoat and suspended the teacher involved. I’ve skeptical; with all the conflicting official stories, it seems unlikely that the was one rogue teacher.

(Via Instapundit.)

Remember when President Obama said that health care nationalization would cost $900 billion over ten years? And remember how they Democrats collected enough accounting gimmicks to get the official cost to $940 billion?

The latest estimate is $1.76 trillion. And that’s with the official ten-year window still containing one free year. Next year when we have the ten-year accounting filled with ten actual years of costs, it will be still higher.

And that’s before the damn thing is even implemented. Once they starting running this monstrosity, that’s when the costs will really start to soar.

1939: “It is better to perish than to live as slaves.”

2012: “It is better to live as slaves than to pay for one’s own birth control.”

Coming soon to a school cafeteria near you:

Pink slime — that ammonia-treated meat in a bright Pepto-bismol shade — may have been rejected by fast food joints like McDonald’s, Taco Bell and Burger King, but is being brought in by the tons for the nation’s school lunch program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is purchasing 7 million pounds of the “slime” for school lunches, The Daily reports. Officially termed “Lean Beef Trimmings,” the product is a ground-up combination of beef scraps, cow connective tissues and other beef trimmings that are treated with ammonium hydroxide to kill pathogens like salmonella and E. coli. It’s then blended into traditional meat products like ground beef and hamburger patties.

“We originally called it soylent pink,” microbiologist Carl Custer, who worked at the Food Safety Inspection Service for 35 years, told The Daily. “We looked at the product and we objected to it because it used connective tissues instead of muscle. It was simply not nutritionally equivalent [to ground beef]. My main objection was that it was not meat.”

What’s interesting here is that a Democratic administration is buying this stuff to serve to kids. That’s called playing against type. (Of course, I don’t believe that Democratic politicians actually care about this stuff, except as a way to accumulate more power for themselves, but usually they put on a good show.)

When you see Democrats acting publicly against their self-proclaimed principles, like nutrition for kids, you know that someone is getting paid off. It’s like when Nancy Pelosi kills a credit card regulation bill. Eventually you’ll find out that she was given a bunch of stock in Visa.

(Via Instapundit.)

A week ago I remarked at how impressive it was that the Democrats had managed to change the topic from its frontal assault on religious freedom to Rush Limbaugh’s remarks about a contraception activist.

But I’m delighted to see now that the Democrats overplayed their hand. It seems that many Americans — and in particular many women — were not diverted from the subject of religious freedom, or were offended by the Democrats’ blatant opportunism and their willful blindness toward the much-more-common misogyny from the left.

This sort of thing encourages me that America might still be capable of governing itself wisely.

UPDATE: Another encouraging sign, compared with one month ago. (Via Hot Air.)

Taking up Andrew Breitbart’s mantle. (Via Instapundit.)

Remember when President Obama pledged that, under health care nationalization, “federal conscience laws would remain in place”?

Like nearly everything else he promised about health care reform, that was a lie, notwithstanding his pose of righteous indignation. It’s a true scoundrel who lies while accusing others of lying.

POSTSCRIPT: In fact, his lies include every single word in the clip. Yes, Obamacare does include a panel empowered to ration health care for senior citizens. And, yes, it does cover illegal immigrants. And, yes, it does fund abortions.

How bad is President Obama’s employment record? This bad:

We’ve never seen anything remotely this bad since the Great Depression.

President Obama wants to bail out real-estate speculators. If there’s anyone less worthy of a bailout, I can hardly think of who it might be.

Oh, and it turns out that if Obama decides to bail someone out, he can go right ahead and do it: the bailout starts in May. It seems that we’ve gotten that whole pesky legislative branch out of the way. (Will we hear belly-aching from the left about the “unitary executive” now? Rhetorical question.)

Another blow against freedom of religion in academia, as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro has withdrawn recognition from a Christian student club. It’s excuse: it isn’t really a religious organization.

Unlike Vanderbilt, UNC-Greensboro is obviously a state school, so this isn’t just terrible, it’s illegal.

Frank J. Fleming says it’s high time we fix the Bill of Rights:

So the Senate has voted down the effort to undo President Obama’s quite reasonable mandate that all employers have to pay for their employees’ contraception. I was shocked that there was a dispute about this — especially because of “religious objections.” Who knew that was still a thing?

Even worse, when I dug out a copy of the revered Bill of Rights to show someone how it guarantees everyone a right to contraception, I found no mention of that right!

In fact, the Bill of Rights doesn’t guarantee anything people need — not food, shelter or even broadband internet. The only things it mentions are a few nebulous rights of absolutely no market value. It’s rather pointless, really. . .

Obviously, we’re much more sophisticated now. We aren’t like the Founding Fathers, with their primitive fear of government and thunder. We need to update this silly, archaic Bill of Rights, which puts all this emphasis on “freedom” with no mention of the much more important “free stuff.” If we don’t act, other countries will make fun of us for it — and who wants to be tittered at by Belgium?

In the UK, half of all nursing home patients are being abused, according to British regulators. I’m so glad we’ve set ourselves on the path to nationalized health care.

The EpiPen is a device to administer epinephrine to a patient suffering a severe allergic reaction. The government doesn’t want them to be readily available:

It is deliberately designed to be simple enough for even a child to use unaided . . . And the dose of epinephrine – or adrenaline – dispensed by the EpiPen is so small that, while it is enough to halt allergic reactions, the only likely side effect is a raised heartbeat.

Nevertheless, when the device went on the market a few years ago, US regulators stipulated that it could only be made available on prescription and administered to a specific patient. . . Only around 7 per cent of the people who are at risk of an allergic reaction are now thought to hold EpiPens. . .

Earlier this year a seven-year-old girl in Virginia went into shock when she ate a peanut during a school break. Although the school held EpiPens for other children, it was not allowed to administer one to her, since she was not “named” on any of the prescriptions. Tragically, the child died. And this is not an isolated case: around 1,500 people are thought to die in America each year from similar allergic reactions which could have been reversed with an EpiPen.

(Via the Corner.)

Greece has defaulted.

This is actually good news. The default (a 74% “haircut”) has been a near certainty for weeks. The only question was whether the International Swaps and Derivatives Association would weasel out of paying off on credit default swaps, and they didn’t.

One can’t help but be impressed by the rhetorical jiu-jitsu with which Democrats have turned a debate over religious freedom — should the Catholic church be forced to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients — into a debate over whether Rush Limbaugh was wrong to call a woman who claims to spend $1000 per year on contraception a “slut”.

The answer to the latter question is yes, of course. No one, Limbaugh included, denies this. But the left’s show of sanctimonious indignation is awfully hard to take, given that far worse misogynistic language is routinely tolerated on the left, provided it is directed at appropriate targets. Appropriate targets evidently include Sarah Palin, Michelle Malkin, Laura Ingraham, Carrie Prejean, Michele Bachmann, etc., and even the underage daughters of prominent Republicans. Women on the right need to expect this kind of abuse, and, when it happens, today’s self-righteous enforcers of civility will just laugh it off.

Should the Catholic church be forced to conform itself to President Obama’s policy on contraceptives and abortifacients? Of course not. If you pose the question straight, almost no one will say yes. But the Democrats gambled that if they put the issue on the table, they could divert the debate into a winning cultural offensive. I wouldn’t have thought that you could get from “we will force Catholics to violate their consciences” all the way to “Republicans are attacking women”, but they seem to have pulled it off. Impressive.

(Cartoon via Powerline.)

Washington State Wire reports:

A decision by [Washington State] Senate Democratic leaders to shut minority Republicans and moderate members of their own party out of the budget-writing process ended in an epic backfire Friday night, as three moderates bolted and threw control of the chamber to the GOP.

Democrats fired back with delaying tactics that initially threatened to keep the Senate in session all night, but it appeared clear that Republicans had the upper hand and would be able to pass a GOP-written budget in the Legislature’s upper chamber. Democrats ultimately acknowledged defeat, and Senate continued to meet late Friday night to pass the bill.

The best part was when Democrats complained that by passing a budget in cooperation with moderate Democrats, the Republicans had spoiled the body’s spirit of bipartisanship. That’s got to be worth at least an honorable mention in any chutzpah competition.

(Via Instapundit.)

Health care nationalization isn’t due to be implemented until 2014, and its subsidy costs have already risen 30% (that’s $112 billion) in the last year. In other words, they haven’t the foggiest idea how much this thing is going to cost.

New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg continues his war on good food:

The New York Times looks today at what factors go into the scorecards that produce the letter grades that, for about a year, New York City restaurants have been forced to display in their front windows. Some of the rules—you’re not supposed to have rat droppings in the kitchen—are uncontroversial. But others are criticized by chefs and restaurateurs as needlessly costly or even interfering with the quality of food.

One has to do with holding and serving temperatures for foods. Certain foods, like terrines and cheese, should be served at room temperature for the best flavor. But this is either prohibited or, in the case of cheese, subject to onerous requirements . . .

Cheese isn’t the only problem area. Pork is supposed to be cooked to 165 degrees (twenty degrees higher than the USDA guideline!) unless the customer specifically requests otherwise. I’ll save you the trouble of investigating: a 165 degree pork chop is terrible. . .

Restaurants also aren’t allowed to let steaks come up to room temperature before cooking them—which leads to them cooking too heavily on the outside before reaching the desired internal temperature. . .

This is why I happily dine in restaurants that display B grades from the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Giving consumers more information is a good idea — provided it’s good information. This clearly isn’t.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Obama administration admits in a Congressional hearing that it has no interest in lowering gas prices.

The Washington Examiner reports:

The voting public apparently agrees that nothing in life is free, especially health care. A new Rasmussen poll finds that 51 percent oppose free universal health care and a whopping 63 percent reject it if required to change their current insurance coverage to a free government plan.

UPDATE: And 72% believe the individual mandate is unconstitutional.

Polls suggest that the union effort to recall Wisconsin governor Scott Walker will fail.

Hollywood has been making anti-war propaganda films for years, which (if their press statements are to be believed) weren’t even intended to make money. But one pro-military film hits theaters and message films are suddenly bad.

As far as I can tell, they are serious about this:

(Via the Corner.)

Bob Schieffer, host of CBS’s Face the Nation:

How do you go after Barack Obama, though, right now? I mean, the stock market is up. It looks like the unemployment is going down. David Axelrod in his campaign said the other day Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive. It’s going to be a tough job for you, is it now?

Oh, geez. The economy is in shambles, our debt exceeds GDP, gas prices are soaring (on purpose), Iran is going nuclear, Islamists are taking power throughout the Middle East, health care is being nationalized, the White House thinks that the government should be able to dictate ministers to churches, and Schieffer can’t see any weakness in Obama’s record?

Even Schieffer’s talking points have negatives. Bin Laden was located using human intelligence of the sort that we will never be able to get again, now that President Obama has told the enemy, in complete detail, exactly what interrogation techniques we will use. And GM was “saved” by spending nearly $100 billion of the taxpayer’s money (at least a quarter of which we will never get back), screwing GM’s creditors, and giving the new GM to Obama’s union cronies.

Europe has invented a new reason to limit free speech:

At the end of January, Viviane Reding, the European Commissioner for Justice, Fundamental Rights, and Citizenship, announced a sweeping new privacy right: the “right to be forgotten.” The proposed right would require companies like Facebook and Google to remove information that people post about themselves and later regret—even if that information has already been widely distributed. The right is designed to address a real and urgent problem in the digital age: It’s very hard to escape your past on the Internet now that every photo, status update, and tweet lives forever in the digital cloud. But the right to be forgotten takes a dangerously broad approach to solving the problem. In fact, it represents the biggest threat to Internet free speech in our time.

The article is hard to summarize, but basically the new rights takes three forms, listed in order of increasing danger to free speech:

1. The right to delete material that you posted yourself.
2. The right to demand the deletion of material that you posted yourself and others have subsequently copied elsewhere.
3. The right to demand the deletion of material that others have posted about you.

(Via Althouse.)

The bankruptcy of Solyndra, the Obama administration’s pet green-energy company, has left behind drums of improperly stored toxic waste.

(Previous post.)

Growth of our economy versus growth of our debt:

This simply cannot work.

(Via Instapundit.)

The UK’s new 50% tax rate for incomes over £150k has reduced tax revenues.

The amazing thing is that anyone is surprised by this. The existence of a Laffer curve is unarguable (one cannot contest the simple observation that the government will receive no revenue at a tax rate of 0% or 100%), the only dispute is where the curve peaks. All the evidence shows that curve peaks much lower than 50%.

Of course, there are those who support counterproductive tax rates even knowing they are counterproductive, out of sheer spite.

Heh. Good thing the smart guys are running the country now. (Via Instapundit.)

Canada is close to repealing the “hate speech” section of its Human Rights Act, which is commonly used to suppress free speech. (And I mean that in the not at all hypothetical sense.) Better late than never.

POSTSCRIPT: I’m a little puzzled though, because I thought Section 13 was found unconstitutional years ago. I guess that decision must have been overturned.

(Via Instapundit.)

At the Daily Caller: The IRS is persecuting Tea Party groups.

Via Glenn Reynolds, who adds:

Well, when the President jokes about auditing his enemies, you can expect the worker-bees to pick up on the message. I warned at the time that the President’s thuggish “joke” would cause a loss of faith in the IRS.

The Canadian long-gun registry, now abolished, never solved a single crime. What’s $2.7 billion divided by zero?

As the old joke goes, how do you know that an Obama flack is lying? His lips are moving.

Here’s White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew on the contraception mandate “compromise”:

That’s why he got the support of a range of groups, from the Catholic health association and Catholic charities, to Planned Parenthood.

White House spokesman Jack Carney:

And the organizations that will be most affected by this — Catholic Charities and the Catholic Health Association — have expressed their support for this policy, and we obviously appreciate that.

Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee:

And that’s why groups like Catholic Charities, the Catholic hospitals associations have said this is a fair compromise, that it accomplishes the goal of both women’s health as well as religious freedom.

Finally, here’s Catholic Charities:

In response to a great number of mischaracterizations in the media, Catholic Charities USA wants to make two things very clear:

1.  We have not endorsed the accommodation to the HHS mandate that was announced by the Administration last Friday.

2. We unequivocally share the goal of the US Catholic bishops to uphold religious liberty and will continue to work with the USCCB towards that goal.

Any representation to the contrary is false.

This broad attack on a single talking-point doesn’t happen by accident. Clearly, the Obama administration has decided that it serves their purposes to promulgate this lie.

(Via the Corner.)

POSTSCRIPT: Let’s not forget that the compromise itself is a lie. After announcing it, the administration went ahead and put the old, pre-compromise regulation into effect.

The New York Post reports:

On Dec. 6, nearly 300 members of the Occupy Wall Street movement flooded into East New York to begin what they considered phase two of their efforts. . . The group would take over an empty house, foreclosed on by a bank, fix it up and provide shelter to a homeless family. . .

Last week,Wise Ahadzi opened the door to the house he still owns, 702 Vermont Street in East New York. Inside is a war zone. The walls are torn down, the plumbing is ripped out and the carpeting has been plucked from the floor. It’s like walking through a ribcage.

Garbage, open food containers and Ahadzi’s possessions are tossed haphazardly around the house.
“This is where my kitchen was,” Ahadzi says. There is no sink, no refrigerator and no counter space. Instead there are dirty dishes piled high waiting for a dip in three large buckets of putrid water that serve as the dishwashing system. In a first-floor bathroom, Christmas lights dangle from a shower curtain rod. The only thing separating a toilet from the elements outside is a thin veil of paper. . .

Ahadzi thought about calling the police, until the embarrassed Occupy movement promised him that they’d repair the house and leave. Two weeks have already gone by since without any progress. Occupy hasn’t even offered to pay him for the damages.

Before and after:

The mistake here was expecting constructive action from socialist malcontents in the first place. (See also topic two here.)

(Via Instapundit.)

Mark Twain once (reportedly) said “No man’s life, liberty, or property are safe while the legislature is in session.” As true as that was in the 19th century, matters are far worse in today’s administrative state. Today’s regulators can do whatever they want, and they are always in session.

Case in point: federal regulators are looking to ban all use of electronic devices while driving. And if that’s not bad enough, some even want to ban them for passengers as well.

(Via Instapundit.)

POSTSCRIPT: A few years ago I took a look at what the research of cell phone use while driving actually says. It’ was much more nuanced than media reports would have you believe.

I also noted last December that the NTSB isn’t telling the truth about how many cell-phone-related accidents occur. It’s bad when regulators lie to support their position, for two reasons: it’s bad for them to lie, but also it suggests that they’ve decided what they are going to do, regardless of the facts.

Administration officials were warning about Solyndra as early as March 2010, but that didn’t stop the illegal bailout nearly a year later.

(Previous post.)

A group of CMU researchers have found that barely half of off-shore wind turbines will likely survive their full design life:

The US Department of Energy set a goal for the country to generate 20 per cent of its electricity from wind by 2030. One-sixth is to come from shallow offshore turbines that sit in the path of hurricanes.

Stephen Rose and colleagues from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, modelled the risk hurricanes might pose to turbines at four proposed wind farm sites. They found that nearly half of the planned turbines are likely to be destroyed over the 20-year life of the farms. Turbines shut down in high winds, but hurricane-force winds can topple them.

(Via Instapundit.)