Internet Scofflaw

President Obama has nominated Richard Cordray to head the new Consumer Financial Protection bureau. This is the same guy who, as Ohio attorney general, spent taxpayer funds to defend the state employees who illegally searched state databases for dirt on Joe the Plumber during the 2008 presidential campaign.

(Via Instapundit.)

It’s not hard to understand this stuff: (1) President Obama threatens tax hikes on companies that buy private planes. (2) Companies cut back on purchases of private planes. (3) The economy suffers:

Orders for durable goods drop 2.1 percent in June with weakness led by fall in aircraft demand

Obama’s much-vaunted manufacturing initiative will do little to promote manufacturing (although it will succeed in spending money, which is probably its real aim). He could have a much greater (and much quicker) effect simply by not attacking manufacturing.

(Via Instapundit.)

Why is the White House so frantic? President Obama trails the generic Republican by 8 points. But it’s worse than that: Obama only leads Ron Paul by 4.

Years of the left’s vilifying pharmaceutical companies are finally paying dividends: The pharmaceutical companies are starting to cut back on research.

Now Megan McArdle suggests that the fault lies more on the cost side of the companies’ cost-benefit equation. I don’t deny that the increasing difficulty in making progress plays an important role, but you have to take both sides of the ledger into account.

Drug research is paid for by the windfall from the rare success, and our government’s policy has been to make that windfall much more uncertain. Mind you, not by making the success itself less likely (although that could be happening too), but by limiting companies’ confidence that they will be able to financially exploit their successes. I’m not talking (just) about Obamacare; this has been going on for decades.

The White House lied when it claimed in 2009 that it was not deliberately targeting Fox News:

Newly released emails show the Obama administration communication team privately discussed whether to exclude Fox News from interviews in late 2009, despite claims at the time that the White House did not intend to snub the cable news channel.

The emails, obtained and released by watchdog Judicial Watch, pertain to a kerfluffle over whether the administration tried to lock Fox News out of a round of interviews with “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg, who was then responsible for reviewing compensation of Wall Street executives.

Republicans have prevailed in the Minnesota budget battle. I think Dayton (the Democratic governor) was hurt by the fact that he deliberately made the shutdown as painful as he could to the public (e.g., making it impossible to buy beer) while he deemed his own personal chef and housekeeper to be essential state employees.

Political types always like to accuse their opponents of desperation while brushing off their opponent’s attacks. It’s a time-honored (if “honored” is the right word) rhetorical device that usually has no connection to whether the opponent is really desperate or not.

But this really does smack of desperation. Talking Points Memo, a leftist web site, breathlessly reports that Paul Ryan (R-WI) was spotted drinking expensive wine at a Washington restaurant. This, apparently, is a scandal, somehow.

Ryan spent his own money, of course. This isn’t like Nancy Pelosi spending millions of taxpayer money on travel (and non-travel) in a big military plane, including a hundred thousand dollars on food and alcohol. Or any number of other magnificent wastes of taxpayer money one could mention. This is a case of people spending their own money on the product of their choice.

POSTSCRIPT: Ryan’s “accuser” (if that’s the right word), apparently surprised that her nosiness attracted critical attention, doesn’t want to be part of this story any more.

A new report from the White House’s Council of Economic Advisors found that the Democratic stimulus package created or saved (ha ha) 2.4 million jobs. A simple calculation then arrives at a figure of $278 thousand dollars spent per job. (And that’s if we take the whole “created or saved” nonsense seriously; otherwise the figure would be must less rosy.)

The White House says it disputes the report, but it doesn’t really. That is, they acknowledge the estimate, but say that dividing the money spent by the jobs created or saved (ha ha) isn’t the right calculation to make. Just looking at the number of jobs underestimates the true value of the stimulus.

This is a telling argument. The Obama administration knows that it cannot justify its signature program on the basis on employment — despite that being the sole basis on which the program was sold to us — so it is moving the goalposts.

Still, is there merit to the argument? We spent $666 billion; surely we have something to show for it? No doubt we do, but it’s hard to know how much, and the White House did not offer a figure. Moreover, we should remember that a lot of the money really was wasted (e.g., on expensive signs), or was not just wasted but actually counterproductive (e.g., cash for clunkers).

Yes, he really said that:

So, when you hear folks saying “Well, the president shouldn’t want massive job-killing tax increases when the economy is this weak.” Nobody’s looking to raise taxes right now. We’re talking about potentially 2013 and the out years.

Take a look at this chart. Then tell me whether we have a revenue problem or a spending problem.

(Via Hot Air.)

Paul Krugman now says the problem with the stimulus is we had the wrong sort of stimulus:

So what happened to the stimulus? Much of it consisted of tax cuts, not spending. Most of the rest consisted either of aid to distressed families or aid to hard-pressed state and local governments. This aid may have mitigated the slump, but it wasn’t the kind of job-creation program we could and should have had. This isn’t 20-20 hindsight: some of us warned from the beginning that tax cuts would be ineffective and that the proposed spending was woefully inadequate. And so it proved.

(Emphasis mine.)

In Krugman’s recollection, he warned us from the beginning. Fortunately, we have a better record than Krugman’s reported recollection. In February 2009 he was quite positive about the stimulus that he now says he always said was the wrong sort:

Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

Back then, aid to state governments (which he now says he warned against) was “among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan.” The only problem was that we didn’t send nearly enough of it.

It will be interesting to see how Krugman goes about squaring the circle. I anticipate endless hilarity along the lines of his efforts to justify his notorious divide-by-ten error.

(Via Kaus Files.)

The Obama administration is looking to resume the same policies that brought us the housing bubble, the housing crash, and the recession:

In what could be a repeat of the easy-lending cycle that led to the housing crisis, the Justice Department has asked several banks to relax their mortgage underwriting standards and approve loans for minorities with poor credit as part of a new crackdown on alleged discrimination, according to court documents reviewed by IBD.

Prosecutions have already generated more than $20 million in loan set-asides and other subsidies from banks that have settled out of court rather than battle the federal government and risk being branded racist. An additional 60 banks are under investigation, a DOJ spokeswoman says.

Compare this with Bill Clinton’s interventionist housing policies that caused the housing bubble in the first place, and see if you can see any difference.

The most surreal aspect of the Plame-Novak-Armitage psuedo-scandal was the spectacle of watching liberal journalists pretend to be outraged by the idea that someone would leak the identity of a covert CIA operative to the press.

Leading the outrage was The Nation, which (according to The Nation) was the first publication to argue that the leak of Valerie Plame’s name was a crime:

Four and a half years ago, after reading the Robert Novak column that outed Valerie Plame Wilson as a CIA operative specializing in counter-proliferation work, I wrote an article in this space noting that this particular leak from Bush administration officials might have been a violation of a federal law . . . and (perhaps worse) might have harmed national security by exposing anti-WMD operations. That piece was the first to identify the leak as a possible White House crime. . .

The leak came from the State Department, not the White House, but never mind that. The point is that The Nation was oh-so-concerned about damage to our national security caused by exposing a covert CIA desk-jockey.

Of course, they were full of it. They didn’t care about harming covert operations, they just wanted a bludgeon to use against the Bush administration. In fact, they like to expose covert operations, as they showed today:

Nestled in a back corner of Mogadishu’s Aden Adde International Airport is a sprawling walled compound run by the Central Intelligence Agency. Set on the coast of the Indian Ocean, the facility looks like a small gated community, with more than a dozen buildings behind large protective walls and secured by guard towers at each of its four corners. . . At the facility, the CIA runs a counterterrorism training program for Somali intelligence agents and operatives aimed at building an indigenous strike force capable of snatch operations and targeted “combat” operations against members of Al Shabab, an Islamic militant group with close ties to Al Qaeda.

The Nation published the exact location of a CIA counter-terror operation in Somalia! And that tells you all you need to know about The Nation’s vaunted concern for national security.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

William Jacobson offers President Obama’s Catch-22:

The only way for Obama to stimulate the enormous private sector job growth needed to ensure Obama’s reelection is for Obama to announce he is not running for reelection, which would unleash a wave of investment and economic activity not seen since the Great Depression.

I’ve been meaning to comment on President Obama’s decision two weeks ago to release 30 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. There is simply no way to understand it other than as a political decision. The reserve has been tapped by presidential order twice before: for 17 million barrels in 1991, on the eve of war in the Persian Gulf (ASIDE: that was in addition to a 4-million-barrel test sale in 1990, which some commentators combine with the 1991 sale), and for 21 million barrels in 2005, in response to Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of the Gulf of Mexico oil industry.

Obama tapped the reserve for 30 million, the largest release ever, and without any current emergency. He cited Libya as the motivating emergency, but the Libyan campaign had been going on for months and oil markets had already adjusted. In fact, oil prices had fallen more than 16% during the preceding two weeks. No, the only emergency is Obama’s own flagging re-election prospects.

ASIDE: Obama was so eager to see the oil released that he waived the Jones Act to allow foreign ships to carry the oil. Recall that he would not wave the Jones Act to allow foreign ships to help clean up the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, but he would allow them to carry oil for sale when his own job was on the line. Priorities.

Obama has also gotten a lesson in economics. We hold oil in the reserve to prevent disruptions in the event of a brief crisis. We don’t have nearly enough oil to affect oil prices over any extended period of time. And that is being borne out in the oil market: crude oil prices have now climbed higher than they were before the release was announced. There was no long-lasting effect on oil prices, but we’re holding 30 million fewer barrels in the event of a real emergency.

POSTSCRIPT: I’ve assumed that the release was for purely political reasons, but it’s possible that I’m insufficiently cynical. Some oil traders suspect that insider trading was involved.

The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee hit up Koch Industries for campaign contributions! The company responded:

Dear Senator Murray:

For many months now, your colleagues in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leadership have engaged in a series of disparagements and ad hominem attacks about us, apparently as part of a concerted political and fundraising strategy. Just recently, Senator Reid wrote in a DSCC fundraising letter that Republicans are trying to “force through their extreme agenda faster than you can say ‘Koch Brothers.’”

So you can imagine my chagrin when I got a letter from you on June 17 asking us to make five-figure contributions to the DSCC. You followed that up with a voicemail* indicating that, if we contributed heavily enough, we would garner an invitation to join you and other Democratic leaders at a retreat in Kiawah Island this September.

Was Murray offering to lay off Koch Industries if they contributed to the Democrats, or was she just being stupid? This is Patty Murray we’re talking about, so either explanation is possible.

UPDATE: The DSCC’s response has to be seen to be believed.

Politico reports that the House might hold a vote to repeal the light bulb ban within days. Not everyone is happy:

Environmental groups and others have mounted an opposition campaign to the Republican legislation. The Natural Resources Defense Council, the Alliance to Save Energy and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association are running advertisements in Capitol Hill newspapers touting the light bulb efficiency law.

“Phasing in energy efficient light bulbs means more choices and more savings and that’s good for families, the country and the environment,” the ads say.

“More choices”, by banning choices? Orwell would be proud.

But, in a way, I hope they do fight this. This could be a very effective wedge issue for Republicans. Once people are forced into buying CFLs, which are crappy, toxic, and expensive, and which don’t last anywhere near as long as claimed, they will be pissed. Still, I’d rather just have light bulbs.

POSTSCRIPT: Politico tries to work in their slant here:

Republicans have cast the 2007 law as a “light bulb ban,” even though the language doesn’t explicitly ban incandescent bulbs.

Those dishonest Republicans, calling it a “ban” when all the law actually does is make it impossible to get them. They’re not banned, you just can’t get them. . .

UPDATE: Well, it’s the Democratic light bulb ban now.

What happens when President Obama threatens tax hikes on companies that buy private jets? Companies pull back from their plans to buy private jets:

Much has been made of President Barack Obama’s repeated demonizing of corporate jets and the people who fly on them in his June 29th press conference.

While pundits and politicians haggle over whether alterations in the depreciation schedule of corporate jets will actually have an impact on the deficit, those in the general aviation trenches are furious.

Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association (AOPO) President Craig Fuller told The Daily Caller that Obama’s comments have cast a pall over the industry, causing many who were considering buying a plane to back away from making a purchase.

While Obama is playing politics, real people are hurt. And, of course, no tax will be paid on those planes that aren’t sold. He’s managed to hurt tax revenues slightly through his demagoguery alone, without raising a penny of additional taxes.

But that’s okay. It’s an issue of “fairness“.

(Via Instapundit.)

Stephen Hayward’s post at Power Line offering a “conservative case for higher taxes” has gotten some attention. Hayward says that the effort (if indeed there has been an effort) to control the growth of government by starving it of revenue has failed. That point, I’ll have to concede.

But he goes on to say that a more effective way to control the growth of government is to make sure people feel its cost by presenting them with the bill. That is, by raising taxes.

I agree that people should feel the cost of the government. But I really think Hayward is making an argument not for raising taxes, but for a balanced budget requirement. Currently taxes are spending are entirely uncoupled, and tax hikes in isolation will do nothing to correct that.

President Obama ordinarily has no problem inserting himself into legal disputes (even as minor as a Cambridge disorderly conduct arrest) or even launching them, but when it comes to the NLRB’s astonishing and unprecedented effort to dictate where Boeing can build a new plant, he suddenly deems it inappropriate to get involved:

Essentially, the NLRB made a finding that Boeing had not followed the law in making a decision to move a plant. And it’s an independent agency. It’s going before a judge. So I don’t want to get into the details of the case. I don’t know all the facts. That’s going to be up to a judge to decide.

If he wanted to know, he could be briefed on the facts in two minutes. And since when does he care about getting the facts first anyway? This means one thing: he is for the NLRB’s action but doesn’t want to take the political heat.

Moreover, this report seems extremely plausible in light of Obama’s response to this question. The NLRB’s Boeing action isn’t an outlier, but the leading edge of a new agenda.

California’s new anti-Amazon law is a perfect example of modern leftist legislation: it hurts individuals, costs the sate $150 million in income tax revenue, and collects $0 in additional sales taxes. It’s lose-lose-lose. But it’s an issue of “fairness”!

Teachers unions have the conceit that their interests are somehow equated to the interests of children and their education. After saying it for decades, perhaps they even believe it. In fact, the two interests are very often at odds with one another.

The purpose of teachers’ unions is primarily to advance the interests of the teachers’ unions themselves, and secondarily to advance the interests of the teachers (specifically, the teachers in the union). Education is a tertiary consideration, at best.

It’s hard to find a better example than what is going on in Wisconsin:

“This is a disaster,” said Mark Miller, the Wisconsin Senate Democratic leader, in February after Republican Gov. Scott Walker proposed a budget bill that would curtail the collective bargaining powers of some public employees. Miller predicted catastrophe if the bill were to become law — a charge repeated thousands of times by his fellow Democrats, union officials, and protesters in the streets.
Now the bill is law, and we have some very early evidence of how it is working. And for one beleaguered Wisconsin school district, it’s a godsend, not a disaster.

The Kaukauna School District, in the Fox River Valley of Wisconsin near Appleton, has about 4,200 students and about 400 employees. It has struggled in recent times and this year faced a deficit of $400,000. But after the law went into effect, at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday, school officials put in place new policies they estimate will turn that $400,000 deficit into a $1.5 million surplus. And it’s all because of the very provisions that union leaders predicted would be disastrous. . .

In the past, Kaukauna’s agreement with the teachers union required the school district to purchase health insurance coverage from something called WEA Trust — a company created by the Wisconsin teachers union. “It was in the collective bargaining agreement that we could only negotiate with them,” says Arnoldussen. “Well, you know what happens when you can only negotiate with one vendor.” This year, WEA Trust told Kaukauna that it would face a significant increase in premiums.

Now, the collective bargaining agreement is gone, and the school district is free to shop around for coverage. And all of a sudden, WEA Trust has changed its position. “With these changes, the schools could go out for bids, and lo and behold, WEA Trust said, ‘We can match the lowest bid,'” says Republican state Rep. Jim Steineke, who represents the area and supports the Walker changes. At least for the moment, Kaukauna is staying with WEA Trust, but saving substantial amounts of money.

Then there are work rules. “In the collective bargaining agreement, high school teachers only had to teach five periods a day, out of seven,” says Arnoldussen. “Now, they’re going to teach six.” In addition, the collective bargaining agreement specified that teachers had to be in the school 37 1/2 hours a week. Now, it will be 40 hours.

The changes mean Kaukauna can reduce the size of its classes — from 31 students to 26 students in high school and from 26 students to 23 students in elementary school. In addition, there will be more teacher time for one-on-one sessions with troubled students. Those changes would not have been possible without the much-maligned changes in collective bargaining.

CNBC reports:

The Federal Reserve’s massive stimulus program had little impact on the U.S. economy besides weakening the dollar and helping U.S. exports, Federal Reserve Governor Alan Greenspan told CNBC Thursday.

In a blunt critique of his successor, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, Greenspan said the $2 trillion in quantative easing over the past two years had done little to loosen credit and boost the economy.

“There is no evidence that huge inflow of money into the system basically worked,” Greenspan said in a live interview.

“It obviously had some effect on the exchange rate and the exchange rate was a critical issue in export expansion,” he said. “Aside from that, I am ill-aware of anything that really worked. Not only QE2 but QE1.”

(Via Instapundit.)

Los Angeles County is forcing people from their homes for no reason:

In order to clear the title on their land, the Dupuises are spending what would have been peaceful retirement days dismantling every board and nail of their home — by hand — because they can’t afford to hire a crew.

Tough code enforcement has been ramped up in these unincorporated areas of L.A. County, leaving the iconoclasts who chose to live in distant sectors of the Antelope Valley frightened, confused and livid. They point the finger at the Board of Supervisors’ Nuisance Abatement Teams, known as NAT, instituted in 2006 by Los Angeles County Supervisor Michael Antonovich in his sprawling Fifth District. The teams’ mission: “to abate the more difficult code violations and public nuisance conditions on private property.”

L.A. Weekly found in a six-week investigation that county inspectors and armed DA investigators also are pursuing victimless misdemeanors and code violations, with sometimes tragic results. The government can define land on which residents have lived for years as “vacant” if their cabins, homes and mobile homes are on parcels where the land use hasn’t been legally established. Some have been jailed for defying the officials in downtown Los Angeles, while others have lost their savings and belongings trying to meet the county’s “final zoning enforcement orders.” Los Angeles County has left some residents, who appeared to be doing no harm, homeless.

Some top county officials insist that nothing new is unfolding. Michael Noyes, deputy in charge of code enforcement for Los Angeles County District Attorney Steve Cooley, says, “We’ve had a unit in the office through the ’70s and ’80s.” But key members of the county NAT team say that “definitely, yes,” a major focus on unincorporated areas was launched in 2006.

Those who suspect that the county may have plans for their land won’t be dissuaded by this:

Emeterio claims that [Deputy District Attorney David] Campbell told his public defender, “Well, he’s got ‘vacant’ land, and we want it vacant.” His voice rising, he explains the county’s view: “You’re not allowed to have anything there! Not a storage container, not a fuckin’ tire, not a nuthin’. Not a tractor. Nothing!

or this:

But Oscar Gomez, a zoning official on a county NAT team that took the Weekly on a ride-along in June, says such violations “bring the property value down. … There are actually people that own all the property around them, even if they haven’t built there yet.”

Read the whole thing, or as much as you can bear.

(Via Instapundit.)

The tax break that President Obama blasted in his press conference today was created by his own stimulus bill:

The chief economic culprit of President Obama’s Wednesday press conference was undoubtedly “corporate jets.” He mentioned them on at least six occasions, each time offering their owners as an example of a group that should be paying more in taxes.

“I think it’s only fair to ask an oil company or a corporate jet owner that has done so well,” the president stated at one point, “to give up that tax break that no other business enjoys.”

But the corporate jet tax break to which Obama was referring – called “accelerated depreciation,” and a popular Democratic foil of late – was created by his own stimulus package.

Bottom line: when push comes to shove, these guys won’t even stand up for their own economic theories. They say they believe in Keynesianism, but they don’t really, at least not enough to favor it over class warfare. Their devotion to Keynes is really just an excuse to spend a lot of money.

UPDATE: According to Matthew Yglesias, Obama was not referring to the bonus depreciation provision in the stimulus bill, but to a 1987 tax provision that allowed private jets to be depreciated over five years, while commercial jets are depreciated over seven years.

I’m not necessarily going to take Yglesias’s word for it, but let’s stipulate that he is right. That means that Obama is complaining about a 24-year-old provision that allows private jets to be depreciated at a rate of 20% per year instead of 14.3%. Meanwhile, his own stimulus plan lets the same jet be depreciated by 50% in one year instead of 20%, and he has no problem with that. Does that make any sense at all?

In fact, the objection is even more nonsensical than that. The tax code is ripe with myriad rules that dictate various different depreciation periods for various things. Generally vehicles are depreciated over five years (except for railroad cars (seven), tractors (three), or ships (ten)) and that includes planes.

But wait, it’s more complicated than that. There are many, many exceptions that apply depending on how assets are used. For example, assets used to breed cows, sheep, or goats depreciate over five years, but ones used to breed pigs depreciate over three years. Ships used for commercial transportation are depreciated over 15 years instead of 10. And, on point, planes used for commercial transportation are depreciated over seven years instead of five.

I’m not going to claim that this mosaic of rules and exceptions makes sense. Obviously it was the result of legislative horse trading. But President Obama is going into the middle of this decades-old nest of rules, picking out just one, and saying that the exception should apply in place of the general rule. (And even that change would matter much less than the bonus depreciation provision in his own stimulus bill.) This makes no sense on any basis other than political demagoguery.

(Via TaxProf Blog)

A few years ago, Sarah Palin caught heat for remarking that the best of America can be found in small towns, which her critics interpreted as insulting urban America. (ASIDE: I don’t think that interpretation holds up, since she said “the best of America is not all in Washington D.C.” She was complimenting — one might say pandering to — her hosts, not insulting anyone. But that’s not my point here.)

A few days ago there was an interesting exchange between Bill Maher and NYT columnist David Carr on Maher’s television show. Maher was upset about Gov. Chris Christie’s agenda in New Jersey:

MAHER: It’s okay if this [expletive] happens in Kansas and Alabama, but don’t [expletive] with the smart states.

Carr asked why Maher is so down on Christie, and Maher replied:

MAHER: I got a nice public school education there, and now there is a governor of that state there saying things that I never imagined a governor of that state would say. Maybe it’s just false pride, but I think New Jersey is more sophisticated than other states.

CARR: I think if it’s Kansas, if it’s Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right?

Now, Maher and Carr are persons of no special importance. But they are exemplars of an attitude I see every day.

So here’s my point. When Palin made her “real America” remark, liberals professed to be outraged that she would regard one part of America as better than another. But that’s not true at all. They do, many of them, see one part of America as better than another; they just see it the other way around.

In short, it wasn’t Palin’s (supposed) favoritism that bothered them. It was the fact that Palin complimented people they saw as their inferiors. Avoiding favoritism they could probably deal with, even though it would fail to recognize their greater “sophistication”. But (supposedly) placing the “middle places” over their betters, that was simply intolerable.

Energy use versus economic production over time:

The bottom line is we have already achieved incredible strides in energy efficiency, and are continuing to do so, all without expensive and oppressive government efforts.

Some will still be unhappy, even though energy efficiency has increased dramatically, since we are still using more energy (to generate much, much more output). I think that’s telling, because it shows they don’t really want more energy efficiency; they want lower standards of living. More precisely, they want lower standards of living for the masses, not for the nomenklatura.

(Via the Corner.)

Allahpundit notes the President is having trouble keeping his story straight: Last week automation was costing us jobs. This week, robots create jobs.

The AMA has come out for the repeal of the Independent Payment Advisory Board, the rationing committee that was created by the health care nationalization bill. (It sounds exactly like the Independent Medicare Advisory Board, so I assume they renamed it at some point.)

Thanks guys. A year and a half ago would have been a little more useful.

Timothy Geithner explains we need to hike taxes on small businesses so that government doesn’t shrink.

POSTSCRIPT: I was going to title this “At least he’s honest”, but, on further reflection, “honest” doesn’t seem a very good way to describe a tax cheat who is explaining why he needs to hike taxes.

The White House claims that Barack Obama never filled out a 1996 questionnaire in which he supported gay marriage, even though it has his signature on it. Does President Obama permit his staff to forge his signature? Really, I think he’s better off embracing the flip-flop.

Now, if this sounds familiar, it’s because this isn’t the first time Obama has disavowed his own signature.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Washington Post calls President Obama on his “phony accounting” in regards to the auto bailouts.

I’ve often remarked that the Congressional Budget Office’s scorings are of limited use because they don’t take account of how government policies change individual behavior. Thus, their scores are too kind to policies that suppress individual enterprise (that is, big government policies) and are too unkind to policies that promote it.

In a hearing before the House Budget Committee, the CBO’s director acknowledged the truth of this criticism in the context of Obamacare:

Elmendorf: The way I would put it Mr. Chairman, is we don’t model the behavior of physicians. We don’t model the access to care or quality of care.

Ryan: So you assume it stays on as is?

Elmendorf: That is the point we noted in the letter analyzing your proposal. That is a gap in our tool kit and a gap we are trying to fill.

Victor Davis Hanson nails it:

Hillary Clinton . . . said this month:

. . . the bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them?

Yet said in May 2003 in the context of Iraq:

I am sick and tired of people who say that if you debate and you disagree with this administration somehow you’re not patriotic. We should stand up and say we are Americans and we have a right to debate and disagree with any administration.

The point is not that the Obama administration is two-faced, hypocritical, and shameless. Most administrations are; they act quite differently once they are in the White House and governance requires adult responsibility quite different from the cheap rhetoric of the campaign trail.

Rather, the significance in Obama’s case is twofold: . . .

Second, Obama has utterly embarrassed the entire liberal attack on the Bush’s administration’s efforts in Iraq and against terrorism. The venom between 2003 and 2008 was both cruel and nasty, and yet it was always presented as principled rather than partisan, not a grasp for power but the product of deeper respect for the American civic traditions.

Now we see that entire era as a complete fraud — on matters of dissent, skepticism of the War Powers Act, Guantanamo, renditions, tribunals, preventive detention, wiretaps, intercepts, Iraq, and predator targeted assassination. The hysterical commentary was never based on the merits of those acts, but simply because George Bush, a political opponent, embraced them. How do we know this? Through hypocritical couplets like those above — and the almost complete silence of the antiwar Left. Where now is Cindy Sheehan, the award-winning Michael Moore, the New York Times discounted ads to Moveon.org, the impassioned floor speeches from a Senator Reid or Kerry?

Rep. Fred Upton (R-TX), who chairs the House Energy and Commerce Committee suggests that he is close to an agreement to repeal the light bulb ban.

Good news, I guess, but I don’t quite understand this. How is there anything to negotiate? They ought to do a straight repeal. I’m worried that they are going to load the bill up with some kind of crap.

Once the facts in the Anthony Weiner scandal became indisputable, he still had defenders on the left. His defenders fell back on a standard argument of the left: Weiner — the defense goes — was never a proponent of morality — the defense goes — so his immorality is no big deal. At least he’s not a hypocrite.

Zombie has one response to this argument, and I don’t disagree with it. But I want to add two more.

For the time being, let’s take the liberal position seriously: Conduct doesn’t matter, only hypocritical conduct. (Obviously they don’t mean this in the limit — was Charles Manson a hypocrite? — but that’s not where I’m going with this.) Okay. Liberals don’t want to push morality, what do they want to push?

Taxes? Hypocrites. Assisting the poor? Hypocrites. Environmentalism? Hypocrites. Supremacy of the regulatory state? Hypocrites. (BONUS: That one is Anthony Weiner.) Buy American? Hypocrites. And that’s just off the top of my head.

Across the board, their agenda is to control our lives. But these hypocrites don’t want that same control over their lives. A juicy scandal is a relatively rare thing, even today, but these liberals practice their hypocrisy in the open every single day.

But that’s not the whole of it. In fact, the whole hypocrisy argument is a lie anyway.

If they really believed the argument, you wouldn’t catch liberals criticizing the immorality of a Republican caught in a scandal. They don’t care about immorality, right? They would only criticize the hypocrisy.

But that’s not what we see, is it? No, liberals pile on as quickly as anyone else. And they criticize the misconduct itself, not just the hypocrisy. They are all for moralism when it serves their purpose.

To sum up, one could say that the whole hypocrisy argument is itself hypocritical. Better yet, one could simply say it’s wrong.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports:

The state Senate, in a 45-5 vote, gave final approval Monday to the so-called Castle Doctrine bill to expand the right of people to use deadly force against attackers in places outside their homes. A spokesman for Gov. Tom Corbett said the governor would sign the bill but was not sure when.

The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Scott Perry, R-York, eliminates a requirement that people try to retreat before using deadly force in those situations.

The gun-control nuts aren’t happy, of course:

Opponents, including a number of police chiefs and mayors, argue that existing laws provide adequate safeguards and warn the bill could foster a “Wild West” mentality.

“This is going to be dangerous for Pennsylvanians,” said Max Nacheman, executive director of CeaseFirePA, a gun-control group. “This creates more situations in which violence is an alternative.”

Any time, anywhere gun laws are liberalized, the gun-control nuts talk about how it’s going to become the “Wild West”. It never happens. No one is buying it any more.

POSTCRIPT: In fact, even the Wild West wasn’t the Wild West.

UPDATE (6/28): Governor Corbett has signed the bill. When Pennsylvania fails to become the “Wild West”, will the gun-control nuts admit they were wrong? Well, they never have before.

Companies are leaving California in droves. (Via Instapundit.)

Then:

Escorted by four Broward Sheriff’s Office deputies, U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz solemnly called for more civility in political debate Sunday, a day after a gunman shot and critically injured her close friend Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona.

Now:

Democratic Rep. [and DNC chair] Debbie Wasserman Schultz stood by her comments that Republican Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget proposal is a “death trap for seniors” in a CNN interview Thursday.

It’s almost as though they never meant any of that civility stuff. Like they were only try to score cheap political points or something. . .

POSTSCRIPT: It’s beside the point to the whole civility swindle, but it’s also worth noting that Wasserman-Schultz was lying about the Ryan plan.

The Mercatus Center has a ranking of the 50 states according to freedom. The worst three are New York, New Jersey, and California, so no surprises there. The best is New Hampshire (the only decent score in the northeast). Pennsylvania is in the middle of the pack.

Criticize the government, and the government will come after you:

Huntsville has stumbled into the crosshairs of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Mayor Tommy Battle said HUD’s Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity Program Center in Atlanta recently notified the city that it will conduct an exhaustive civil rights compliance review of local affordable housing programs. . .

The mayor said Carlos Osegueda, director of HUD’s regional Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, told him Huntsville is being reviewed because of negative public comments about fair housing in The Times and local blogs.

(Via Instapundit.)

I haven’t posted this graph in a while:

For a couple of months there the unemployment rate was almost down to where President Obama said we would be if we didn’t enact his economic plan.

(Via Instapundit.)

The private sector is limping, but regulatory agencies are doing very well indeed:

We aren’t creating many new jobs, be we’ll be sure to regulate the snot out of the ones we do have. And this doesn’t even include President Obama’s latest shackle on the economy, the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

(Via Ricochet.)

A new study finds that electric cars are not very good for the environment after all:

ELECTRIC cars could produce higher emissions over their lifetimes than petrol equivalents because of the energy consumed in making their batteries, a study has found.

An electric car owner would have to drive at least 129,000km [80,000 miles] before producing a net saving in CO2. Many electric cars will not travel that far in their lifetime because they typically have a range of less than 145km on a single charge and are unsuitable for long trips. Even those driven 160,000km [100,000 miles] would save only about a tonne of CO2 over their lifetimes.

The British study, which is the first analysis of the full lifetime emissions of electric cars covering manufacturing, driving and disposal, undermines the case for tackling climate change by the rapid introduction of electric cars.

Plus there are other environmental issues beyond just greenhouse emissions.

(Via Hot Air.)

Years ago I briefly had the job of filling out forms to show compliance with the Paperwork Reduction Act. I had a flashback to that time when this morning I heard on the radio that President Obama is creating a new commission to reduce government waste.

The EPA’s new regulations have forced American Electric Power to shut down five coal-fired power plants.

For some reason, I’m reminded of an incident a few years ago in which there was a major blackout in the northeast. Democrats tried to pin blame for the blackout on President Bush, and proposed that we raise taxes on the top 1% to invest in power infrastructure. (That top 1% tax hike was their top talking point at the time. They proposed spending that hypothetical revenue on dozens of different things, depending on the topic of the day.)

No one took them seriously, and this is a big part of why. Democrats aren’t for building power infrastructure, they are for dismantling it.

(Via Instapundit.)

Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (D-FL), the new chair of the Democratic National Committee, says Republicans are so radical, they want to make illegal immigration a crime.

As I’ve said before, there’s a lot to like about Herman Cain, but today he’s just not a serious candidate. The latest reason is his puzzling position on gun rights. Either he’s weak on gun rights, or he doesn’t understand the issue enough to realize that he sounds weak on gun rights.

The American has a thoughtful article about sunk capital, and the dangers of the government sucking it dry.

It’s a classic time-consistency problem: People invested in capital because they trusted that the rule of law would protect their investment. But there’s nothing they can do to move or undo that investment, so the government sees no cost to breaking its promises. Wrong. We need people to keep investing in capital, to improve our society and economy, or even just to replace decaying capital. When investors see yesterday’s promises being broken, they are much less likely to invest today.

(Via Power Line.)

Glenn Reynolds makes an interesting point viz a viz the Weiner scandal:

I think there’s an important point in the comic value: The people who think they’re smart enough, and morally superior enough, to run everyone else’s lives are risible. They’re not smart enough to run their own lives competently, and they’re actually, overall, morally inferior — I mean, John Edwards, DSK, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Barney Frank, Tax Cheat Tim Geithner, just go down the list — and mocking them is inherently valuable. They pursue power, and they exercise power, as much for deference as anything else. Deny them that, and make it painful for them whenever possible. That’s my take.

Well, well, well:

Emergency room visits have been on the rise in Massachusetts since the passage of the 2006 health care law, much to the chagrin of supporters who projected that the opposite would happen as more people had insurance and were connected with primary care providers.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Wall Street Journal reports:

A report by McKinsey & Co. has found that 30% of employers are likely to stop offering workers health insurance after the bulk of the Obama administration’s health overhaul takes effect in 2014. . .

Previous research has suggested the number of employers who opt to drop coverage altogether in 2014 would be minimal. But the McKinsey study predicts a more dramatic shift from employer-sponsored health plans once the new marketplace takes effect. . .

In surveying 1,300 employers earlier this year, McKinsey found that 30% said they would “definitely or probably” stop offering employer coverage in the years after 2014. That figure increased to more than 50% among employers with a high awareness of the overhaul law.

Behind the expected shift is the fact that the law will give Americans new insurance options outside the workplace, and carriers will no longer be allowed to deny people coverage because they have been sick. McKinsey found that reduced the moral obligation employers may feel to provide coverage.

Environmentalists, at least in Germany, simply aren’t serious. They had a chance to prove otherwise today when the German government announced a big increase in gas- and coal-fueled power plants to make up for Germany new ban on nuclear power. Obviously, burning gas and coal generate lots of greenhouse gases, which nuclear power does not.

If they were serious about global warming, German environmentalists could have called for a resumption of nuclear power. Instead we saw that concern over global warming does not yet take precedence over anti-nuclear hysteria.

Rather than acknowledge that they faced a real choice between nuclear power or fossil fuels, Germany’s environmentalists (at least as quoted on Marketplace) instead called for greater use of imaginary and/or cost-prohibitive technologies.

If environmentalists can’t set aside their irrational fear of nuclear power to deal with global warming, a problem that they say threatens the entire world, they simply are not to be taken seriously.

President Obama has stopped receiving daily economic briefings. Does this mean that Obama has dropped his focus on the economy?

I don’t think so. The economy isn’t national security. What did they have to tell him in daily briefings? What economic indicators are there that can be measured and reported daily, and that frequently change in informative ways?

No, I think those daily briefings were strictly for public relations, to show the president’s engagement with the problem. They were probably terminated quietly almost as soon as they began.

(Via Instapundit.)

Proof that any negative characterization of President Obama, anything at all, can and will be seen as a racial slur.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

Gov. Chris Christie, saying he wasn’t elected to be “programmer in chief,” is taking New Jersey out of the broadcasting business.

NJN, a television network formed in 1968, will be broken off from the state and handed over to WNET, the New York public media station. . .

Mr. Christie, who announced the deal on Monday, said he had been uncomfortable since taking office about subsidizing a news organization whose employees were state workers charged with independently covering state government.

“In my view that should have ended with the Soviet Union,” he said. “It’s ending here in New Jersey a little bit later than the fall of the wall in Berlin, but we’re getting there.”

Optimistic take: I’m glad Christie is shutting this thing down.

My take: What?! New Jersey has a state press agency? Is it called TASS?

I haven’t commented on the Weiner scandal before. That’s partly because the whole affair is so tacky, and partly because Anthony Weiner is a congressman of no real importance. It seemed clear that he was guilty, partly because the alternative theories seemed really far-fetched, but mostly because he acted guilty. I gave no credit to his belligerent denials, since Weiner is an accomplished belligerent liar.

However, now that Weiner has admitted his guilt, I do have one remark to make. Now we can see that Andrew Breitbart had the goods, and it was his detractors who behaved irresponsibly. Go up against Breitbart at your peril.

POSTSCRIPT: I don’t see how Weiner’s career can survive, with the stuff coming out getting creepier all the time:

During one Facebook chat conversation, Broussard said she voiced uneasiness with the electronic relationship, to which she says Weiner replied, “you are not stalking me….I am stalking you.”

Perhaps she isn’t telling the truth, but at this point that’s not the smart way to bet.

The Congressional Budget Office says the ongoing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bailouts have cost $317 billion, more than twice what the White House says they cost ($130 billion). (The key calculation is on page 11 here.)

And that’s not counting the $400 billion in no-bid contracts. That’s a lot of money channeled into two organizations run almost entirely by liberals.

(Via Hot Air.)

Look to month 13 to see where the economy was when President Obama took office.

(Via Power Line.)

We’ve known for a year that the government’s attempt to prop up housing prices didn’t work, but the full extent of its complete and utter failure is still being revealed:

The ailing US housing market passed a grim milestone in the first quarter of this year, posting a further deterioration that means the fall in house prices is now greater than that suffered during the Great Depression.

The brief recovery in prices in 2009, spurred by government aid to first-time buyers, has now been entirely snuffed out, and the average American home now costs 33 per cent less than it did at the peak of the housing bubble in 2007. The peak-to-trough fall in house prices in the 1930s Depression was 31 per cent – and prices took 19 years to recover after that downturn.

If the market says prices need to fall, they are going to fall. The government can prop them up only temporarily, and even that only at huge expense. Some day we ought to learn this lesson.

POSTSCRIPT: Not only did the government spend a fortune (that it didn’t have) on the program and fail to prop up prices, even the recipients of the tax credit are worse off. There is no aspect of this program that wasn’t an utter failure. Even cash-for-clunkers wasn’t this bad.

(Via Instapundit.)

San Francisco’s proposed circumcision ban was plainly anti-Semitic in effect, if not in intent. Now we need not doubt the intent either. The ban proponents’ campaign literature includes a comic book — “Foreskin Man” — that features a Nordic hero battling evil Jewish caricatures.

I said earlier that San Francisco’s response to the proposal would be very revealing. That’s doubly true now.

(Via Instapundit.)

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac got $400 billion in no-bid contracts to administer the government’s failed loan-modification program.

The new employment report is grim, but it’s even worse than the top number suggests. Half of last month’s new jobs came from a single employer — McDonald’s.

(Via Instapundit, who also points out that McDonald’s received an Obamacare waiver.)

Documents uncovered by Judicial Watch show that the FCC coordinated its push for network neutrality with a left-wing pressure group:

Documents made public yesterday by Judicial Watch describe extensive collusion by Federal Communications Commission officials with a left-wing advocacy group in a campaign to expand government regulation of the Internet.

The documents, obtained by Judicial Watch in a December 2010 Freedom of Information Act request, were created after Democrat appointees solidified their 3-2 control of the agency in March 2009. . .

The coordination between FCC officials and Free Press, the advocacy group, supported a proposal for the agency to regulate access to the Internet as if it were a public utility, in the interest of ensuring “Net Neutrality.”

Who is Free Press?

Free Press was co-founded by Monthly Review editor Robert McChesney and the Nation contributor John Nichols. The Monthly Review is “an independent Marxist journal,” while the Nation has long described itself as “the flagship of the left.” Free Press is partially funded by George Soros’ Open Society Institute.

So it’s that bunch. This really leaves no doubt that the administration’s push for network neutrality is motivated by liberal politics.

Judicial Watch obtained the documents using a Freedom of Information Act request. It shouldn’t have been necessary; under the FCC’s rules they should have made the communications public of their own accord:

As an independent agency, the FCC is required to regulate impartially. Internal FCC rules require all employees to disclose all communication made by interested parties and “directed to the merits or outcome of a proceeding” unless they fit a narrow set of exceptions (e.g., the communication “directly relates to an emergency in which the safety of life is endangered or substantial loss of property is threatened”).

Clearly they felt it was worth hiding. And what do they say for themselves now?

An FCC spokesman failed to return multiple calls seeking comment.

(Via Instapundit.)

HHS has issued a new regulation that indicates that any health insurance premium increases greater than 10% will be “thoroughly reviewed” by government regulators. What does “thoroughly reviewed” mean in practice? Surely it will mean that all available government pressure will be leveled against the health insurance companies that try to raise their rates. (Except those that are politcally well-connected.)

Whether this will this be a de facto price cap depends on how effective that government pressure is. The one thing we know for certain is that’s how they want it to function.

If they are able to institute a de facto price cap, that will take us down the glide path to single player that much faster. That too, we know is their end goal.

(Via Power Line.)