Internet Scofflaw

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If you go to the page now, the generic burka-woman has been replaced by a stark “NO PHOTO UPLOADED”.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

(Previous post.)

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.

(Previous post.)

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.

(Previous post.)

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.

(Previous post.)

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”.

USA Today reports:

A new poll shows that most voters want the Supreme Court to overturn President Obama’s health care law, with opposition and support falling largely along party lines. Overall, voters oppose the law by 48%-40%, according to the Quinnipiac University survey.

President Obama’s Labor Department has issued new rules that require any business entering into a service contract with the federal government to hire whatever workers were employed by the last contractor for that service (or for a “similar” service). Worse, if those workers were unionized, the new contractor must recognize the old union as well.

ASIDE: The new contractor only has to hire “qualified” workers, but the rule make it very hard to show that a worker is not qualified.

In effect, this means that the employees on federal contracts are government employees. The contractor might change, but the staff will not. Contractors are left unable to make changes in the area (personnel) that is most important for improving equality and reducing cost. (ASIDE: Nevertheless, Obama actually had the temerity to suggest that “economy and efficiency are served” when contractors cannot bring in their own staff.)

I think what’s going on here is an effort to reverse privatization by executive order. It would take an act of Congress for the government to take such functions over, and such an act will not be forthcoming (nor would Democrats even want to push such legislation publicly), but this order produces most of the effect without legislation.

Over 80% of the Department of Energy’s green energy loans went to President Obama’s backers:

$16.4 billion of the $20.5 billion in loans granted as of Sept. 15 went to companies either run by or primarily owned by Obama financial backers—individuals who were bundlers, members of Obama’s National Finance Committee, or large donors to the Democratic Party.

Note that we’re not talking about minor contributors; these are bundlers, committee members, and other “large donors”. Moving on, it looks as though the process was designed for just such an outcome, by minimizing transparency and maximizing opportunities for personal influence:

The Government Accountability Office has been highly critical of the way guaranteed loans and grants were doled out by the Department of Energy, complaining that the process appears “arbitrary” and lacks transparency. In March 2011, for example, the GAO examined the first 18 loans that were approved and found that none were properly documented. It also noted that officials “did not always record the results of analysis” of these applications. A loan program for electric cars, for example, “lacks performance measures.” No notes were kept during the review process, so it is difficult to determine how loan decisions were made. The GAO further declared that the Department of Energy “had treated applicants inconsistently in the application review process, favoring some applicants and disadvantaging others.” The Department of Energy’s inspector general, Gregory Friedman, … has testified that contracts have been steered to “friends and family.”

Solyndra is not an outlier; it’s a symptom. This is corruption of the first order; the result of putting Chicago in charge of the federal government.

(Via the Foundry.) (Previous post.)

Liberals like to argue that our infrastructure is crumbling, as it gives them an excuse for spending tax money on infrastructure boondoggles. It’s not true though, at least if you look at bridges, their standard infrastructure example. The number of obsolete or structurally deficient bridges in the national highway system is declining, not rising:

(Via the Corner.)

Whatever the cause of our economic problems, it certainly isn’t President Obama’s policies:

President Obama said that the United States has gotten a “little bit lazy” when it comes to bringing in new businesses in to the states. He made the comments at a CEO summit as part of the APEC conference Saturday, when asked by Boeing CEO James McNerney about looking at the world from a Chinese perspective and what they might consider as impediments to investing. . .

He then went on to say things his administration has done like setting up Select USA that organizes government agencies in an attempt to make it easier for foreign investors to set up a plant in the U.S.

What a classic big-government solution. Rather than remove obstacles to commerce, let’s create a new government agency to help businesses manage those obstacles.

UPDATE: Select USA can’t help everyone, I’m sure. I’d be interested to learn how they decide who to help.

The Congressional Budget Office finds that the Democratic stimulus package hurt the economy.

Now I don’t put a whole lot of stock in the CBO’s models, which are far too optimistic about the effects of fiscal stimulus, but it is interesting if even those models find that the stimulus hurt.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Department of Energy asked Solyndra to delay its layoffs until after the midterm elections:

The Obama administration, which gave the solar company Solyndra a half-billion-dollar loan to help create jobs, asked the company to delay announcing it would lay off workers until after the hotly contested November 2010 midterm elections that imperiled Democratic control of Congress, newly released e-mails show.

The announcement could have been politically damaging because President Obama and others in the administration had held up Solyndra as a poster child of its clean-energy initiative. . .

A Solyndra investment adviser wrote in an Oct. 30, 2010, e-mail — without explaining the reason — that Energy Department officials were pushing “very hard” to delay making the layoffs public until the day after the elections. The announcement ultimately was made on Nov. 3, 2010 — immediately following the Nov. 2 vote.

Worse, it appears that the administration gave Solyndra $40 million in hush money:

“DOE continues to be cooperative and have indicated that they will fund the November draw on our loan (app. $40 million) but have not committed to December yet,” an unnamed Argonaut official wrote, according to the memo released by the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Republican staff. “They did push very hard for us to hold our announcement of the consolidation to employees and vendors to Nov. 3rd – oddly they didn’t give a reason for that date.”

We don’t know what the administration actually said, but it’s clear from the memo that Solyndra connected the $40 million with the delay until after the election.

(Via Hot Air.) (Previous post.)

Democrats were desperately jealous of the Tea Party movement and the energy it brought to the limited-government movement. Several attempts to astroturf a liberal counter-movement (e.g., the “Coffee Party”) failed, but they finally got theirs in Occupy Wall Street. The differences between the two movements are instructive.

The Tea Party rallies were law-abiding, obtained proper permits, and cleaned up after themselves. The Occupy Wall Street movement is the exact opposite. The very name glorifies trespassing, but their crime wave also includes assaults, rapes, theft, vandalism, attempted kidnapping, drug trafficking, and of course littering. John Nolte has compiled a list of hundreds of criminal incidents involving OWS, and those are only the ones that made the news.

OWS’s defenders would doubtless plead that the crimes are committed by a few bad apples. Well, first of all, that’s a hell of a lot of bad apples. All of these crimes came from a movement that is much smaller than the Tea Party movement.

Second, the left and their allies in the legacy media were more than happy to tar the entire Tea Party movement with antics of a few, and they still weren’t able to come up with crimes. The best they could find was some signs, and one racial incident that never happened.

Third, it’s simply not true. A scientific poll of Occupy Wall Street found that 31% support violence to advance their agenda. And the anti-law-enforcement tones is set from the top. The OWS leadership has explicitly held law enforcement at arm’s length, even to the point of discouraging rape victims from reporting rapes to the police, instead preferring to deal with rapes internally.

POSTSCRIPT: Criminality is not the only thing that sets OWS apart from the Tea Party either, there is also hygiene. New York City finally broke up the original Zuccotti Park encampment because of rapidly worsening health conditions.

The Obama administration has announced its first major anti-gun initiative:

Gun owners who have historically been able to use public lands for target practice would be barred from potentially millions of acres under new rules drafted by the Interior Department, the first major move by the Obama administration to impose limits on firearms.

Officials say the administration is concerned about the potential clash between gun owners and encroaching urban populations who like to use same land for hiking and dog walking.

“It’s not so much a safety issue. It’s a social conflict issue,” said Frank Jenks, a natural resource specialist with Interior’s Bureau of Land Management, which oversees 245 million acres. He adds that urbanites “freak out” when they hear shooting on public lands.

It’s interesting to see them admit that the move is all about placating hoplophobes and not because of any safety issue.

POSTSCRIPT: Meanwhile the House has passed a much-needed national reciprocity bill. Together with the administration’s new anti-gun initiative, this places Democrats who claim to favor gun rights in the hot seat, most notably Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

UPDATE: President Obama backs off the new policy. It’s hard for me to understand what he’s doing, even from a political point of view. He seems to be energizing his opposition while frustrating his support, unless anti-gun activists are really so pathetic as to be encouraged by incomplete gestures.

The Detroit News reports:

The Treasury Department dramatically boosted its estimate of losses from its $85 billion auto industry bailout by more than $9 billion in the face of General Motors Co.’s steep stock decline. In its monthly report to Congress, the Treasury Department now says it expects to lose $23.6 billion, up from its previous estimate of $14.33 billion. . .

The big increase is a reflection of the sharp decline in the value of GM’s share price.

POSTSCRIPT: As a matter of terminology, though, it’s not really right to call it a bailout of the auto industry. The auto industry — and even GM itself — would have survived if GM and Chrysler had done into bankruptcy. The bailout wasn’t for the auto industry’s creditors either, most of whom took a bath in the government-imposed settlement. The bailout’s beneficiary was the unions, who survived virtually unscathed.

Oops, it seems that the authors of health care nationalization blundered:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act offers “premium assistance”—tax credits and subsidies—to households purchasing coverage through new health-insurance exchanges. This assistance was designed to hide a portion of the law’s cost to individuals by reducing the premium hikes that individuals will face after ObamaCare goes into effect in 2014. (If consumers face the law’s full cost, support for repeal will grow.)

The law encourages states to create health-insurance exchanges, but it permits Washington to create them if states decline. So far, only 17 states have passed legislation to create an exchange.

This is where the glitch comes in: ObamaCare authorizes premium assistance in state-run exchanges (Section 1311) but not federal ones (Section 1321). In other words, states that refuse to create an exchange can block much of ObamaCare’s spending and practically force Congress to reopen the law for revisions.

So what does the Obama administration plan to do? Ignore their own law:

The Obama administration wants to avoid that legislative debacle, so this summer it proposed an IRS rule to offer premium assistance in all exchanges “whether established under section 1311 or 1321.” . . .

Like the rest of the nation, the Obama administration wants a different health-care law than the one we got. But that doesn’t give it the authority to rewrite the law by fiat.

After London’s Daily Mail found that most of the tents at Occupy London were left empty overnight, I was hoping that people would do the same at other Occupy encampments. Now Ezra Levant has done just that, and found that most of the tents at Occupy Toronto were left empty overnight.

(Via Instpaundit.)

Seven Wisconsin doctors who wrote bogus medical-excuse notes for protesters are being disciplined by the Medical Examining Board. The punishment is little more than a slap on the wrist, but that’s not really a surprise.

(Via Althouse.)

The deeply subsidized US solar industry is upset that China is subsidizing their solar industry.

The Washington Post reports:

A major donor to President Barack Obama discussed with White House officials a solar energy company that received a half-billion dollar federal loan and later went bankrupt, newly released emails show.

The emails released by a House committee appear to contradict repeated assurances by the Obama administration that the donor, George Kaiser, never talked about Solyndra Inc. with the White House.

The White House has now changed its story. They admit that they did discuss Solyndra with Kaiser, but now say that all their contacts with Kaiser were after the loan was granted. This may be true, as far as we know now, but it does not let them off the hook, for at least two reasons.

First, the White House did lie about whether they discussed Solyndra with Kaiser. They originally said they didn’t at all; now they say those discussions were after the key decisions were made.

Second, the key decisions were not all made. The administration may have declined Solyndra’s request for a second loan, but it did agree to restructure Solyndra’s first loan (in a manner contrary to law). That renegotiation was done in December 2010, after many contacts between Kaiser and the White House, and got final approval from the Secretary of Energy in February 2011.

(Previous post.)

Bowing to public outrage, the Obama administration reversed its proposed 15-cent tax on Christmas trees before I got a chance to comment on it. There’s still something to note about the controversy though. Even reversed, the administration doesn’t want its fingerprints on the tax:

White House spokesman Matt Lehrich told Fox News on Wednesday afternoon that the administration is putting a stop to the proposal.

“I can tell you unequivocally that the Obama administration is not taxing Christmas trees. What’s being talked about here is an industry group deciding to impose fees on itself to fund a promotional campaign, similar to how the dairy producers have created the ‘Got Milk?’ campaign,” he said. “That said, USDA is going to delay implementation and revisit this action.”

To the extent that this is true at all, it is grossly misleading. The Obama Agriculture Department has issued a rule, published in the Federal Register, requiring a 15-cent per tree fee on all major Christmas tree sellers to fund a Christmas Tree Promotion Board. This is not some voluntary contribution by the industry, it is a government program. And it’s an idiotic one — who thinks that Christmas trees need to be promoted, anyway?

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, how does the executive branch have the authority to impose new taxes without the approval of Congress anyway?

The Washington Examiner reports:

New documents obtained by Judicial Watch show acting National Labor Relations Board General Counsel Lafe Solomon joking that the NLRB’s suit against Boeing would kill jobs in South Carolina. . . Solomon writes:

The article gave me a new idea. You go to geneva and I get a job with airbus. We screwed up the us economy and now we can tackle europe.

Jokes about your own malfeasance are not as funny as some Democrats seem to think.

Occupy Oakland has reversed itself on the value of big commercial banks. They have decided that banks serve a valuable purpose after all, and they have signaled their decision in the most sincere way possible: by depositing their money with Wells Fargo.

(Via Instapundit.)

Watch this. It’s four minutes well spent.

The Washington Examiner has a piece on the White House’s deep entanglement with lobbyists, despite their pretense to the contrary. It’s not excerptable, so I’ll just quote this:

What Axelrod said about the revolving door on CNN yesterday . . . is not just demonstrably false, but it’s hard to imagine an intelligent human being in Obama’s inner circle not grasping how truly false and misleading it is.

Read the whole thing.

(Via Instapundit.)

After ACORN’s role in sponsoring the Occupy Wall Street protests was exposed last week, ACORN is scrambling to prevent further exposure:

Officials with the revamped ACORN office in New York — operating as New York Communities for Change — have fired staff, shredded reams of documents and told workers to blame disgruntled ex-employees for leaking information in an effort to explain away a FoxNews.com report last week on the group’s involvement in Occupy Wall Street protests, according to sources. . .

NYCC is also monitoring its staff’s behavior, cracking down on phone use and socialization. Officials have ordered all papers — even scraps — to be shredded every night, the source said.

“And all the supplies—everything around the office that said ‘ACORN’ — is now all in storage until this blows over,” the source said. “People literally have to cover up the cameras on the back of their cellphones in the office.”

“Now there’s no texting in the office, no phone calls in the office. They tell us to take our phone calls out into the waiting room where there’s an intercom, and then they turn on the intercom to hear our conversations. They’re installing new cameras and speakers around the building so they can hear everything.”

The fact that ACORN would go to such lengths to hide their activities strikes me a good evidence that they have something to hide. I also have to confess that, after all the damage that ACORN has done, I enjoy the spectacle of ACORN making its own staff’s lives miserable.

(Via Instapundit.)

The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks:

President Obama took four questions at a “news” conference today to talk about his plan for the economy and Europe. His only semi-interesting answer was in response to a question from the AP on how he thinks he’ll fare against a Republican next year if the economy is bad. Obama shrugged off the premise. “The least of my concerns, at the moment, is the politics of a year from now.”

Good grief. Everything he is doing right now is focused on re-election. His entire “jobs bill” is a non-starter for actual passage, and is concocted purely as campaign fodder.

What does President Obama have against charity?

There can be no doubt now that the Obama White House believes that one important way to improve the economy is for Americans to give less to charity. In the collection of proposals he calls his jobs bill, the president has—for the fourth time in his administration—proposed to limit the value of the charitable tax deduction, cutting it back for those earning more than $250,000 to just 28% of a donation, from 35%. . .

In a study released Wednesday, the University of Indiana’s Center on Philanthropy estimates that in 2013—when both higher tax rates and the decreased charitable deduction would take effect—overall philanthropy would decline by 1.4%, or $2.43 billion. . . The Indiana estimate echoes similar findings on the same subject by the Congressional Research Service in 2010.

It would be bad enough to think the government can spend money more effectively than private charities, but Obama’s plan is worse than that:

Much more worrisome are the assumptions of the latest tax proposal and a White House initiative called the Social Innovation Fund. While the former assumes that the money diverted from charity can be put to better use by government, the latter adds the notion that government funds should themselves be directed to nonprofits, some previously independent of government. The other assumption is that private philanthropy should follow along, matching government dollars. In combination, this amounts to what can be called the Solyndra-ization of philanthropy.

It’s not enough for the Democrats to divert hundreds of billions of dollars to their crony capitalists, they want to divert charitable giving to crony non-profits as well.

(Via Instapundit.)

Freddie Mac needs another $6 billion to stay afloat for another quarter. That brings the total cost to taxpayers for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to $169 billion. Thanks Barney Frank!

Solyndra’s executives awarded themselves big bonuses shortly before going bankrupt.

(Previous post.)

Megan McArdle has it right: When you plot to seize a man who has committed no crime under the law, the word is not “citizens’ arrest”; the word is “lynch mob”.

Fox News reports:

A clean-energy firm led by a member of President Obama’s jobs council has a stake in projects that have reaped nearly $2 billion in loan guarantees from Washington, a case that has raised conflict-of-interest concerns as the same jobs council pushes for more “government-backed” investment in renewable energy.

The company, NextEra Energy, secured a loan guarantee in August for a solar project in California. . . But the company also enjoys a connection to the Obama administration — company Chairman and CEO Lewis Hay sits on the president’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which last month issued a report calling, among other things, for a new federal financing program to attract private investment for clean energy projects via loan guarantees and other tools.

A new study finds that, despite the general impression promoted by teachers’ unions and liberal politicians, public school teachers are compensated better than comparable private-sector workers:

First, formal educational attainment, such as a degree acquired or years of education completed, is not a good proxy for the earnings potential of school teachers. Public-school teachers earn less in wages on average than non-teachers with the same level of education, but teacher skills generally lag behind those of other workers with similar “paper” qualifications. We show that:

• The wage gap between teachers and non-teachers disappears when both groups are matched on an objective measure of cognitive ability rather than on years of education.
• Public-school teachers earn higher wages than private-school teachers, even when the comparison is limited to secular schools with standard curriculums.
• Workers who switch from non-teaching jobs to teaching jobs receive a wage increase of roughly 9 percent. Teachers who change to non-teaching jobs, on the other hand, see their wages decrease by roughly 3 percent. This is the opposite of what one would expect if teachers were underpaid.

Second, several of the most generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers often go unrecognized. . .

We conclude that public-school-teacher salaries are comparable to those paid to similarly skilled private-sector workers, but that more generous fringe benefits for public-school teachers, including greater job security, make total compensation 52 percent greater than fair market levels.

(Via Instapundit.)

An Australian state government is in the process of passing a law that would make it a crime to insult the state’s Gaming Minister:

The amendment proposed to the Act will make it an offence to “assault, obstruct, hinder, threaten, abuse, insult or intimidate” the minister or authorised persons exercising “due diligence” in monitoring gambling systems such as pokies.

Insulting the Gaming Minister, currently one Michael O’Brien, will be punishable by a $12,000 fine.

That First Amendment is sounding pretty good right now.

Fox News reports:

An energy company that received a $43 million loan guarantee through the same federal program that backed Solyndra has followed the path of the failed solar firm and filed for bankruptcy. Beacon Power Corporation filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on Sunday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Delaware. . .

Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., ranking member of the Senate Banking Committee, called the revelation of the bankruptcy another example of “the reckless abuse of taxpayers’ dollars in the pursuit of green jobs.”

He also suggested that crony capitalism had a hand in the decision to give Beacon a loan. . . “As with Solyndra, the head of Beacon Power appears to have been a supporter of President Obama’s,” Sessions said in a statement.

Glenn Reynolds observes:

See, when you politicize health care, the suspicion is that all health care decisions are political.

Especially when the government suddenly turns 180 degrees and argues against early cancer screening.