Internet Scofflaw

. . . is found to be not-so-mythical in Oregon. That state imposed a confiscatory tax on high-income ($200k) taxpayers, and saw it fall flat on its face:

Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised “income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.”

One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. These numbers are in line with a Cascade Policy Institute study, based on interstate migration patterns, predicting that the tax surcharge would lead to 80,000 fewer wealthy tax filers in Oregon over the next decade.

The Laffer Curve is always stronger at the state and local level. People don’t want to leave America, so at the national level their only choice is between work and leisure. Not so at the state and local level; it’s easy to move to another state. And on that point, Michael Barone’s latest is relevant:

For those of us who are demographic buffs, Christmas came four days early when Census Bureau director Robert Groves announced on Tuesday the first results of the 2010 census. . .

Growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation’s total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

John Fund, at the Wall Street Journal, takes a look at the organizations that are pushing for net neutrality. Amazingly, an actual communist plot is involved:

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press joined with other leftist organizations and got funding from the usual sources (Soros, Pew, the Ford and MacArthur foundations, etc.). Their rhetorical tack is to call to protect the internet, not to impose government control on it. That strategy was the result of polling:

In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that “more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government.” The poll went on to say that since “currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly” to prevent a “centrally controlled Internet.”

And, of course, there’s always the fake research:

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture “research” on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an “independent review of existing information” for the agency in order to “lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making.”

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center’s FCC- commissioned report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC’s “National Broadband Plan,” released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

(Previous post.)

Rasmussen finds that, for the first time, a majority of voters expect the health care nationalization act to be repealed. An even larger majority think that it should be.

I wonder if Joe Biden could be any more irresponsible if he tried?

Despite uneven progress in Afghanistan, Vice President Joe Biden said next summer’s planned withdrawal would be more than a token reduction and that the U.S. would be out of the country by 2014 “come hell or high water.”

Biden’s prediction appeared to go further than statements by his boss, President Barack Obama, who just last month said there would be a reduced U.S. footprint in Afghanistan by 2014 but that the number of troops that would remain was still in question.

Obama has discussed maintaining a counterterrorism capability in Afghanistan after 2014. As recently as Dec. 16, he said the U.S. and its NATO allies would have an enduring presence there after 2014, although the details of that were unclear.

The AP also points out that the outcome of the 2012 presidential election may have some effect on troop withdrawals.

The Senate has passed the food regulation bill (that’s the one they passed before, but accidentally didn’t follow the Constitution) by unanimous consent.

I seriously thought they wouldn’t start backsliding until the next Congress convened. But this is weird. Unanimous consent? Where was DeMint?

If you google “Obamacare”, most of the top results point to web pages critical of it. That’s presumably why the federal government decided to spend taxpayers’ money to buy a sponsored link at the top of the page to direct people to a pro-Obamacare propaganda page.

(Via Instapundit.)

Megan McArdle looks at historic levels of health care spending across the world and makes a good case that Americans pay more for health care because of the tax subsidy.

Recall that John McCain proposed eliminating the tax subsidy for health care but the idea was shamelessly demagogued by the Obama campaign. (For example, they dishonestly portrayed the proposal as a tax hike, ignoring the tax credit that would compensate for taxing health benefits.)

Also note that the health care nationalization act does nothing about the problem, other than an excise tax on high-value plans that probably will never take effect.

A breathtaking photo gallery of China’s ghost towns. The classic ghost town is empty because its people moved away, but China’s ghost towns were erected by central planners and were never inhabited in the first place.

(Via Instapundit.)

The FDA is poised, for the first time, to withdraw its approval for a drug because it is too expensive.

Is communism evil or merely foolish? Glenn Reynolds discusses.

I was taught in public school that communism is a laudable idea that simply doesn’t work in practice. Certainly the latter part is true, and for a long time I never really thought about the former. I think that a lack of scrutiny is the way that notion manages to survive.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s not hard to see that communism, even in its imaginary ideal form, is about slavery. The people, all of them, are enslaved to the worker’s state. (In practice, the people are enslaved to the nomenklatura, but we’re talking about the hypothetical perfect implementation here.) The moral question then is simple: is slavery evil, or can it be good under certain circumstances?

Once you ask that question, we can readily dispense with the notion that communism would be good if only it worked.

Democrats have given up on the omnibus budget bill. This is great news; this bill was a disaster. The problem wasn’t so much the overspending and the earmarks (although those were bad), but the money appropriated to implement Obamacare.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal is dancing on the budget’s grave.

One of the fascinating things about watching Sarah Palin is how her opponents, by assuming Palin is stupid, expose themselves as ignorant fools. We’ve seen this several times recently, on topics as varied as the date of the Boston Tea Party and the doctrine of fair use. Indeed it goes back to the presidential campaign, when the AP misunderstood the Air-Defense Identification Zone.

In the latest instance, MSNBC commentator Richard Wolffe mocked Palin for saying that she draws divine inspiration from the works of CS Lewis, who he says is merely the author of a series of children’s books.

As anyone even fractionally educated in Christian apologetics knows, CS Lewis wrote many books beyond The Chronicles of Narnia. I included three of them on my list of the ten books that influenced my thinking the most. The Screwtape Letters, in particular, is probably his most famous work.

I suppose assuming your opponents are stupid can save you time and effort, if you’re right. If you’re wrong, you look like an idiot.

UPDATE (12/21): Apparently Joy Behar made the same mistake. Ignorance from Behar isn’t so surprising though.

When a state refuses “stimulus” funding, the federal government just reallocates that money to another state.

It’s disgusting to watch what’s going on in London right now: privileged kids rioting because their share of the public trough is being diminished.

It’s particularly disgusting when you consider that the enrollment caps that are the inevitable consequence of the government subsidy are preventing countless of these students’ peers from receiving the benefits of higher education at any price. These brats want to deny an education to others, to avoid paying the cost of their own education.

Here’s an interesting fact in should-we-hike-taxes-on-the-“rich” debate: 70% of American manufacturing concerns are taxed as individuals. A tax hike on the “rich” means a tax hike on manufacturing investment; less investment means lower productivity; lower productivity means fewer high-paying jobs.

House Democrats slipped a provision into their stopgap spending bill that would make it much easier for Indian tribes to operate casinos.

Britain’s NHS is reaching the “breaking point”, according to a study by the UK Royal Colleges of Physicians. (Via the Corner.)

That’s the system that Medicare and Medicaid should be modeled after, according to the man who runs Medicare and Medicaid.

Abolishing the secret ballot in union certification votes has been a bridge too far even for the Democratic Congress. But the National Labor Relations Board has gone ahead and done it by itself. A new decision from the NLRB allows unions to dispense with the secret ballot if the employer agrees.

The decision makes a mockery of the idea that certification votes protect the rights of the workers. Now an employer can allow a non-secret ballot (at the associated intimidation by union organizers) in exchange for (temporary) union concessions, and the workers — who this is supposedly all about — have no protection.

In the past, the SEIU has struck such deals to increase its own power, to the clear detriment of the workers its purported to represent, according to the liberal San Francisco Weekly:

Instead, it’s merely a re-hash of the sort of sweetheart company-union labor deals that have marred the reputation of trade unionism throughout history. It has involved trading away workers’ free-speech rights, selling out their ability to improve working conditions, and relinquishing their capability to improve pay and benefits, in order to expand the SEIU’s and Stern’s own power.

The vote was 3-1, with three Obama appointees outvoting the one remaining Bush appointee. (Craig Becker, formerly of the SEIU, whom Obama recess-appointed to the NLRB after the Senate would not confirm his appointment, did not vote — probably because his vote wasn’t needed.)

1199SEIU, a powerful health care union affiliated with SEIU, is dropping its health coverage for children, in part due to the new costs imposed by Obamacare:

“In addition, new federal health-care reform legislation requires plans with dependent coverage to expand that coverage up to age 26,” Behroozi wrote in a letter to members Oct. 22. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible, and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”

1199SEIU was a big supporter of Obamacare.

More anti-semitism from the former “dean of the White House press corps”:

[Helen] Thomas, who grew up in Detroit the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was in Dearborn today for an Arab Detroit workshop on anti-Arab bias. . . In a speech that drew a standing ovation, Thomas talked about “the whole question of money involved in politics.”

“We are owned by propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where there mouth is…We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.”

When someone refers to “the Zionists”, it’s not hard to tell whether they are using the term (1) to refer to persons who support a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel, or (2) as code for Jews. Obviously, Thomas is using the term in the second fashion, since she is spouting a standard anti-Semitic slander.

She also retracted her apology for her earlier anti-Semitic and apparently pro-Holocaust remarks:

Striking a defiant tone, journalist Helen Thomas, 90, said today she absolutely stands by her controversial comments about Israel made earlier this year that led to her resignation. . .

“I paid the price for that,” said Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent. “But it was worth it, to speak the truth.”

POSTSCRIPT: Also note that Thomas got a standing ovation from the Arab Detroit workshop on anti-Arab bias. It occurs to me that applauding anti-Semites might not be helping on the anti-Arab bias front.

(Previous post.)

The acting chairman of the FCC (a Democrat, of course) wants to regulate the news. (Via Instapundit.)

Yep, he really said that. This guy really has no idea how a president is supposed to behave, does he?

POSTSCRIPT: Last week Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) called Republicans terrorists. Could this be a deliberate meme?

UPDATE: Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) says “a ransom was paid”. I guess this really is the Democratic line.

I trust you will not be surprised to learn that Al Sharpton does not believe in free speech.

It seemed certain that the new movie Fair Game on the Valerie Plame pseudo-scandal wouldn’t be truthful. The truth would not make a very good story. The Washington Post editorial page confirms my expectation:

WE’RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film “Fair Game” – which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq – deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame’s exposure as a CIA agent. “It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”

We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. . .

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored. Mr. Wilson claimed that he had proved that Mr. Bush deliberately twisted the truth about Iraq, and he was eagerly embraced by those who insist the former president lied the country into a war. Though it was long ago established that Mr. Wilson himself was not telling the truth – not about his mission to Niger and not about his wife – the myth endures. We’ll join the former president in hoping that future historians get it right.

(Emphasis mine.) (Previous post.)

The Washington Post reports:

In reaching 392,862 deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement included more than 19,000 immigrants who had exited the previous fiscal year, according to agency statistics. ICE also ran a Mexican repatriation program five weeks longer than ever before, allowing the agency to count at least 6,500 exits that, without the program, would normally have been tallied by the U.S. Border Patrol.

When ICE officials realized in the final weeks of the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, that the agency still was in jeopardy of falling short of last year’s mark, it scrambled to reach the goal. Officials quietly directed immigration officers to bypass backlogged immigration courts and time-consuming deportation hearings whenever possible, internal e-mails and interviews show.

Instead, officials told immigration officers to encourage eligible foreign nationals to accept a quick pass to their countries without a negative mark on their immigration record, ICE employees said. . . A voluntary return doesn’t bar a foreigner from applying for legal residence or traveling to the United States in the future. . .

The surge to break the deportation record in the final weeks of the fiscal year consumed the agency, said a high-ranking immigration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

“They had everyone burning the candle at both ends to reach 390,000,” the official said. “They were basically saying anything you can do to increase the overall removal number, that’s what you should do – over everything else.”

In summary, the ICE’s record number of deportations was in part due to creative accounting, and in part due to weakened enforcement.

And then the administration lied about it:

But at a news conference Oct. 6, ICE Director John T. Morton said that no unusual practices were used to break the previous year’s mark.

“When the secretary tells you that the numbers are at an all-time high, that’s straight, on the merits, no cooking of the books,” Morton said, referring to his boss, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. “It’s what happened.”

(Via Instapundit.)

The Obama administration spent millions of taxpayer money on a (failed) propaganda campaign to shore up support for health care nationalization:

A new Judicial Watch investigation has found that President Obama spent millions of taxpayer dollars on a “misleading” propaganda campaign to help foster public support for his extremely unpopular “health care reform” law, also known as Obamacare.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, our investigators obtained documents from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding a series of three Medicare television advertisements featuring actor Andy Griffith, which were deemed misleading by a number of press outlets, including the nonpartisan (but left-of-center)FactCheck.org.

The new documents show the Obama administration spent $3,184,000 in taxpayer funds to produce and air the advertisements on national television in September and October of 2010 to educate “Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, and family members about forthcoming changes to Medicare as a result of the Affordable Care Act.”

(Emphasis mine.)

President Obama has asked for the authority to shift spending from one part of the budget to another. It’s quite obvious why the he wants such authority. Why Congress would want to grant it is quite another question.

Such authority would clearly be an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power, but who knows if that means anything any more.

Andrew Klavan:

The point is: religions are sacred. Otherwise they wouldn’t be called religions. They would be called systems of metaphysical ideas that can be discussed, criticized, and even ridiculed by free people with free minds. And we wouldn’t want that. . .

Who is regularly accused of using extremist political language? Republicans of course. Who actually does it? Democrats, such as Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) who says that negotiating with Republicans is like negotiating with terrorists.

Amtrak has lifted its ban on transporting firearms in checked luggage. (Passengers still will not be allowed to carry guns on their person.)

The ban served no conceivable legitimate purpose, it was just a way to inconvenience gun owners. The anti-gun crowd looks ridiculous trying to argue otherwise.

For the first time in as long as I recall, more Americans now identify as Republicans than as Democrats.

(Via Power Line.)

Fox News reports:

An ACORN affiliate in New Orleans was improperly awarded a fire safety and prevention grant worth nearly a half-million dollars, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. . .

In the findings, obtained by FoxNews.com, the inspector general’s office said that FEMA went against the advice of an evaluation panel to hand out the $450,484 grant to the ACORN Institute in New Orleans. From there, not all of the money could be tracked. . .

The report said that ACORN applied for the fire safety and prevention grant — meant to fund efforts to distribute and promote the use of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers – by claiming to operate programs that did not yet exist. The institute claimed to have partnerships with local fire departments through the “Urban Fire Initiative,” when in fact, that initiative “did not exist prior to the grant application.”

FEMA reduced the grant request from its original $1 million. But the report said the institute could not provide documentation to support how it spent nearly $161,000 of the money it did receive.

Lots of blame to go around here: ACORN for committing the fraud, of course, and FEMA for letting them do it after being warned.

The LA Times reports:

Celebratory bills — honoring historical figures, or a town’s anniversary, or a major local attraction — are a big part of House business. Incoming Republican leaders say they’re a waste of time.

Waste of time? Certainly. That’s why Congress should do many more of them. The time Congress spends on this sort of thing is time Congress isn’t doing any damage.

(Via Hot Air.)

A new study finds that, since World War 2, every dollar of additional tax revenue has come with $1.17 in additional spending. It’s a “sucker play” to try to balance the budget using tax hikes, even before you consider that tax hikes depress the economy.

(Via TaxProf.)

Mark Ames (I’ve never heard of him before, but apparently he makes a living accusing the Koch brothers of astroturfing various causes, like the Tea Party and opposition to invasive TSA searches, since no one could possibly oppose runaway spending, nationalized health care, or invasive pat-downs without getting a paycheck from the vast right-wing conspiracy) has this to say about me:

Anytime anyone says anything libertarian, spit on them. Libertarians are by definition enemies of the state: they are against promoting American citizens’ general welfare and against policies that create a perfect union. Like Communists before them, they are actively subverting the Constitution and the American Dream, and replacing it with a Kleptocratic Nightmare.

Wow. Democrats call me unpatriotic all the time (most recently Paul Krugman), but this is the first time I remember being called an enemy of the state. By definition! I would be amused to see that definition.

(Via the Daily Caller.)

Paul Krugman says those who oppose the Fed’s new policy of printing money to buy long-term bonds “want the economy to stay weak”, just as China and Germany do.

It’s funny how the left always accuses the right of attacking their patriotism, when they are the ones who actually do it.

BONUS: Tom Maguire points out that Krugman was quite concerned about monetizing the debt when Republicans were in power. (And, back then, we weren’t even doing it.)

Michael Rubin notices an outright lie in Jimmy Carter’s anti-Israel book. (This is old, actually, but I’m only now finding it.)

AP reports:

The cap that eventually stopped the oil from flowing was nearly pulled about a day after it was installed in mid-July because pressure readings looked so low that they indicated a leak elsewhere in the system. BP wanted the cap left in place and the well to stay shut, but government science advisers were firm and near unanimous in wanting the cap removed because of fear of a bigger, more catastrophic spill, the report said. . .

Before the cap was put in place, officials had established pressure levels that would tell them whether everything was OK, there was trouble and the cap had to be removed immediately, or whether it was a wait-and-see situation. The pressure readings were in the wait-and-see zone, but political appointees discussed it further and there was a push to remove the cap. Coast Guard Admiral Kevin Cook urged officials to give the cap more time, then Hsieh’s analysis swayed them.

To Paul Fischbeck, a professor of decision science and engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, this part of the report was scary.

“It became a political decision that they didn’t want to risk having this big blowout,” said Fischbeck, who wasn’t part of the commission. “You set up a logical reasonable process and in the heat of the moment all these factors creep in and it pulls you off what you had logically decided to do. And that is very dangerous when it happens.”

The disaster was averted by one scientist who took a cell-phone picture of the pressure readings and sent it to a colleague for advice.

(Previous post.)

Good grief:

Developers of the controversial Park51 Islamic community center and mosque located two blocks from ground zero earlier this month applied for roughly $5 million in federal grant money set aside for the redevelopment of lower Manhattan after the attacks of September 11, according to two sources with direct knowledge of the matter.

It’s becoming very hard to argue that the Cordoba House project is anything other than a deliberate provocation.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

Every single one of the 95 candidates who pledged to support network neutrality lost.

(Via the Corner.) (Previous post.)

The General Motors IPO is exempt from the anti-fraud laws that ordinarily apply to IPOs.

Control of the New York State Senate is not decided yet. Democrats can retain control (and thereby keep complete control of the state government) if they win the three outstanding seats. Unfortunately for them, Republicans are leading in two of the three races.

In one of the races, the Republican candidate (Mark Grisanti) leads the Democratic incumbent (Antoine Thompson) by 821 votes. Naturally it’s time for . . . a mysterious find of uncounted ballots!

Usually this means that someone “finds” a bag of uncounted ballots in a basement somewhere, but in the Empire State they think bigger. How does two uncounted voting machines sound?

GM gets a $45.4 billion tax break. For comparison, the original GM bailout was $50 billion.

Nancy Pelosi mocks Speaker-elect John Boehner for tearing up on election night.

Ramesh Ponnuru says we needn’t worry that 2011 will be a replay of 1995, with the president winning the public-relations battle against a Republican Congress.

Charles Rangel walks out of his ethics trial. Then, after the committee convicts him, he complains that the proceeding wasn’t fair: he wasn’t even in the room!

If Obamacare were working as promised, would 111 firms be getting waivers?

Of course, a lot of those waivers turn out to be payoffs for big Democratic supporters, including the SEIU.

(Previous post.)

It is said that Imperial Rome exported armies and imported grain. Plundering the provinces for the benefit of the capital is a time-honored practice for empires. With that in mind, consider this news: Seven of the ten richest counties in America (including the top three) are in the Washington, DC area.

It’s not our foreign policy that is imperialistic; it’s our domestic policy.

(Via Instapundit.)

It’s easy to mock the new Newsweek story that asks “Is the Presidency Too Big a Job?” As Glenn Reynolds puts it:

Nope. Just for the inexperienced guy with no management experience that we elected.

Or this:

The 9/11 terror attacks, in some ways, made being president easier. Struggles over education and agriculture that had mired George W. Bush’s first year in office were replaced with just one big expectation: to keep America safe.

This is Dilbert-esque! President Bush managed to do it, so it must have been easy. Oh yeah? If it’s so easy, why isn’t President Obama doing it?

But as much as Kathleen Maloney’s article tries to acquit Obama of incompetence and write off Bush’s accomplishments as trivial, her article centers around one serious point. She recognizes that our government is too big; “bloated” as she puts it. (Actually, she puts it “too bloated”. I guess a little bit of bloat is just right.)

She’s right. Indeed, the unmanageability of powerful central government is a theme that Friedrich Hayek (whoever he is) recognized over half a century ago.

But how does that acquit Obama? Even if we stipulate that the government is too big to be manageable by anyone, shouldn’t he then be trying to shrink it? Instead, he’s hell-bent on bloating it further.

POSTSCRIPT: Underscoring Maloney’s inability to see Obama’s incompetence as a unique problem, she generalizes from one data point:

Moreover, the number of speeches presidents now give—Obama delivered 57 in October alone, (including some fundraisers), written by a staff of seven speechwriters—can dilute the power of each one.

No, not “presidents”, just Obama. It has frequently been observed that Obama gives an astonishing number of speeches. I wonder if Obama might find the government more manageable if he weren’t spending his time giving two speeches a day.

More premium hikes resulting from health care nationalization.

This was The Economist’s take on the midterm elections:

What are these people on? President Obama said that, if Republicans won, there would be hand-to-hand combat on Capitol Hill. He said “[Republicans] can come for the ride, but they gotta sit in back.” He spoke of the need for Democrats (Latinos in particular) to “punish their enemies“. Where are they seeing this bipartisan hand of cooperation?

Evidently, the Economist is still taken with this guy. They are still seeing what they want in him, rather than what is. Most of America has figured him out by now, but across the pond it seems they are still under his spell. (It’s very strange, after all of Obama’s inexcusable slights to the British, but often love isn’t rational.)

We’re told that Obamacare has solved the crisis over pre-existing conditions. Let’s take a look:

Mr. Obama declared at the time that “uninsured Americans who’ve been locked out of the insurance market because of a pre-existing condition will now be able to enroll in a new national insurance pool where they’ll finally be able to purchase quality, affordable health care—some for the very first time in their lives.”

So far that statement accurately describes a single person in North Dakota. Literally, one person has signed up out of 647,000 state residents. Four people have enrolled in West Virginia. Things are better in Minnesota, where Mr. Obama has rescued 15 out of 5.2 million, and also in Indiana—63 people there. HHS did best among the 24.7 million Texans. Thanks to ObamaCare, 393 of them are now insured.

States had the option of designing their own pre-existing condition insurance with federal dollars in lieu of the HHS plan, and 27 chose to do so. But they haven’t had much more success. Combined federal-state enrollment is merely 8,011 nationwide as of November 1, according to HHS.

Eight thousand people?! We nationalized our health care system for eight thousand people?!

For eight thousand people, we could have instituted high-risk pools and left it at that. But that wouldn’t have accomplished the left’s aspirations to put the government in charge of our health care.

I spotted this one while scanning the list of bills in Cato’s analysis of “sunlight before signing”: The XXXXXX Act of XXXX. Cnet News explains:

It was supposed to be some routine election-year largesse from Democrats: a $26 billion spending measure to aid two of the party’s core constituencies, labor unions, and government workers.

But a watchdog Web site on Sunday evening spotted an unusual feature of the legislation, which the Senate approved by a 61-to-39 vote last week.

It doesn’t actually have a name. Congress’ official Web site calls it the “______Act of____” . . . Elsewhere, it’s referred to as the “XXXXXX Act of XXXX.”

Some say that Congress doesn’t bother to read bills before voting on them. I can’t imagine where they would get such an idea.

Cato has an analysis of how well President Obama has fulfilled his “sunlight before signing” promise. After a pathetic performance during his first year in office (4.8% observance), his second year in office was a marked improvement (65% observance).

Of course, 65% only looks good by comparison to 4.8%. And in regards to major bills, it’s almost zero.

According to a new Gallup poll, fewer than half (43%) of American Muslims support the Cordoba House project (aka Ground Zero Mosque). A greater number (44%) think either that the project should be moved to another location, or that it should be turned into a different sort of project.

Michael Totten observes:

This tells us two things. Opposition to the project isn’t based on mere bigotry. And American Muslims are not a monolith.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

The Interior Department’s Inspector General confirms that the White House altered a report on drilling safety in a way that made it appear, erroneously, that White House’s drilling moratorium had been peer-reviewed:

The Interior Department’s inspector general says the White House edited a drilling safety report in a way that made it falsely appear that scientists and experts supported the idea of the administration’s six-month ban on new drilling.

The inspector general says the editing changes resulted “in the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer reviewed.” But it hadn’t been. The scientists were only asked to review new safety measures for offshore drilling.

The report stopped short of finding that the administration violated the law. It found that:

The Department has not definitively violated the [Information Quality Act]. For example, the recommendation for a moratorium is not contained in the safety report itself. Furthermore, the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations.

(Emphasis mine.) This is strange. Perhaps the executive summary did not explicitly indicate peer review of the recommendations, but the report found (pages 7-8) that the White House reordered the executive summary so that the reference to peer-review appeared immediately after the moratorium recommendation, where originally the two were well-separated.

Thus, after the executive summary recommended a moratorium, the very next paragraph began:

The recommendations contained in this report have been peer-reviewed by seven experts identified by the National Academy of Engineering. Those experts, who volunteered their time and expertise, are identified in Appendix 1. The Department also consulted with a wide range of experts from government, academia and industry.

Any reasonable person would conclude that the “recommendations” in question were the ones in the immediately preceding paragraph.

So how could the IG find that “the Executive Summary does not indicate that the peer reviewers approved any of the Report’s recommendations”? Apparently she puts a lot of weight in the difference between “peer-reviewing” the recommendations and “approving” them. That’s a pretty feeble distinction, if you ask me.

Perhaps Ms. Kendall had in mind what happened to the last inspector general to cross this White House.

(Previous post.)

POSTSCRIPT: Another interesting tidbit from the IG report: The administration has claimed privilege over all the documents relating to this incident. (Page 7.)

Nothing says “we did nothing wrong” like claiming executive privilege.

Jonathan Adler remarks on how the environmental movement is hurting its cause, at least if stopping global warming is really its cause:

If everything calls for the same big government solution, why does it matter what the problem is?  If progressives really believe climate change is an impending catastrophe — not just a problem worth addressing but a potential apocalypse — and seek to enlist conservatives to their cause, they should pursue consensus efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including efforts to stimulate technological innovation or proposals for revenue-neutral carbon taxes (see, e.g., here, here and here).  Yet Hendricks’colleagues at CAP excoriate any and all who deviate from the progressive climate orthodoxy or espouse anything short of dramatic government intervention throughout the economy.  Environmentalists will be more successful enlisting conservatives (and many moderates) to their cause once they become more focused on solutions, and less insistent on government control.

I’ve thought much the same thing myself. The politicians and activists who tell us global warming is a crisis don’t act like it’s a crisis. If they really saw a crisis, they would be willing to make compromises to achieve action. We don’t see anything of the kind.

They don’t offer concessions in other areas, like supporting a pro-growth agenda, in order to obtain limits on greenhouse gases. They don’t accept a revenue-neutral carbon tax in place of the hugely unpopular cap and trade scheme. They oppose geoengineering research. They won’t abandon their irrational opposition to nuclear power. In fact, they won’t even compromise their ocean views to build wind farms.

In short, the environmentalist politicians and activists seem interested in fighting global warming only to the extent that doing so furthers government control over people’s lives. When the crisis becomes severe enough that they act like it’s a crisis, I’ll sit up and take notice.

Joe Biden is holding a closed meeting on government transparency.

They claim they can’t finish the paperwork until a week into the lame-duck session. Shameless. But I guess that’s the Chicago Way.

Another brilliant idea from our federal government:

For years, the federal government bought the [dairy] industry’s excess cheese and butter, an outgrowth of a Depression-era commitment to use price supports and other tools to maintain the dairy industry as a vital national resource. This stockpile, packed away in cool caves in Missouri, grew to a value of more than $4 billion by 1983, when Washington switched gears.

In 2010 dollars, that’s $8.8 billion of cheese and butter tucked away in caves!

(Via Volokh.)

Ilya Somin summarizes the state-of-play of the challenges to health care nationalization.

(Via Instapundit.)

Less government, please:

A new IBD/TIPP poll on public attitudes suggests that Tuesday’s event was less an election than an intervention: Stop what you are doing; you’re hurting us all.

A majority of the public wants Washington to stop the spending that has exploded the budget deficit. In a listing of top priorities for Congress, cutting the deficit by cutting spending came in No. 1, cited by 53%. (Fully 73%, including a majority of Democrats, said this is a “high priority.”)

#2 was to revise or repeal Obamacare.

This is an outrage: Philadelphia police arrested a man, confiscated his guns, and deleted pictures from his cell phone for “being insolent” and refusing to obey their orders. They were ordering him to stop “loitering” at a bus stop.

Note to Philly cops: You work for us. You are not our masters.

(Via Instapundit.)

A must-read for all GOP congressmen.

President Obama in January, on why Democrats didn’t need to worry about a 1994-style electoral blowout (as quoted by retiring Rep. Marion Berry (D-AR)):

Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.

Given that Bill Clinton lost “only” 54 seats in 1994, I’ve got to agree with Obama.

The outgoing 111th Congress considered every single piece of legislation under a closed (or partially closed) rule, the first ever to do so. Amazing.

Keith Olbermann has been suspended indefinitely, without pay, from MSNBC. Did NBC realize that this unhinged, vitriolic, ultra-leftist was making them look bad? Alas, no.

Olbermann was fired for violating NBC News’s policy forbidding its journalists from making political contributions. That policy is stupid and hypocritical. The reason for the policy is not to ensure fairness in the newsroom, which is clearly does not. If Olbermann hadn’t made those contributions, he would be every bit the same unhinged, vitriolic, ultra-leftist.

The reason for the policy is to give the network deniability. When a journalist gives to Democratic causes, it’s hard to deny that that journalist favors Democrats, but when the journalist’s position is shown only by the slant of his or her work, it becomes disputable. Many people will, with a perfectly straight face, deny the imbalance of the media.

So the policy is hypocritical. Moreover, applied to Keith Olbermann, it’s just stupid. No one could suggest with a straight face that Olbermann is fair. So what does it matter if he gives to Democratic causes?

It does point out that Olbermann is a complete hypocrite, since he attacked Rupert Murdoch, the founder of Fox News, for making political contributions to Republicans. But this doesn’t exonerate MSNBC, because Olbermann wasn’t fired for being a hypocrite.

I’m happy to see Keith Olbermann out of work, but he should have been fired for the right reason. This isn’t it.

UPDATE: As Bill Kristol puts it:

NBC doesn’t have real news standards for MSNBC—otherwise the channel wouldn’t exist. It’s a little strange to get all high and mighty now.

This is sheer idiocy. If payday lenders didn’t provide a valuable service, people wouldn’t use them. And if they could operate more cheaply, competition would force them to do it. (Even non-profits such as Goodwill have to charge nearly 300% interest on these sorts of loans.)

In other news, San Francisco is still crazy. The city has banned Happy Meals in the name of “food justice”.

You can’t make this stuff up. And you wouldn’t want to.

(Via the Corner.)

Suburbanites, President Obama doesn’t care much for you:

Many of the administration’s most high-profile initiatives have tended to reflect the views of urban interests – roughly 20 percent of the population – rather than suburban ones.

When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a “president from another planet.” After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: “I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.”

More recently, Obama made clear that he is more interested in containing suburbia than enhancing it. In Florida last February, the president declared, “the days of building sprawl” are “over.”

His “the suburbs bore me” line was from his law school days. Highlighting that might be a cheap shot, if there were any evidence he had changed his mind. But the quote from February shows that, if his disinterest in the suburbs has faded, it’s only because it has become hostility.

Question: why is so much of the left hostile to the suburbs? In all seriousness, I don’t understand it. It’s not environmentalism; the hostility predates the rise of environmental concern over commuting. Is it just that concentrated people are easier to control?

(Via Instapundit.)

The United States House of Representatives is not a representative body. In a representative body, the people would choose their representatives. That’s not how the House works today. In fact, it works almost the exact opposite: the representatives choose their people.

With today’s gerrymandering processes, politicians start with the desired outcome and draw districts to match. Being constrained by the census, they have to leave a few districts competitive, but in most cases the result is foreordained. It’s rather like a twisted form of proportional representation, except that a lot of people are deliberately put into districts that will never represent them, in order to obtain the desired overall outcome.

In the wake of Tuesday’s GOP wave, Republicans now control the districting process in a great many states. The Wall Street Journal predicts that Democrats, now bereft of its traditional gerrymandering advantage, will embrace reform. If so, Republicans should go along.

Yes, it’s tempting to stick it to the other side, now that the shoe is on the other foot, but we should show that we’re better than that. This isn’t a case of unilateral disarmament hurting our cause (as when term-limit advocates observe term limits on themselves and thereby disappear their own movement); there is good reason to suppose that districting reform could be permanent. (Although Nancy Pelosi did sponsor a ballot initiative to reverse California’s districting reform.)

As we (hopefully) move forward into a time of reform, I want to make a proposal. John Fund, writing positively of reform, remarks:

While there’s no way to take politics entirely out of redistricting, its influence can be limited.

Actually, I think it might be possible to take politics out entirely. Here is how I suggest redistricting should work:

1. The law should establish an objective metric for compactness. For example, the sum of the squares of the circumferences of the districts, plus a penalty every time a district boundary crosses a county line. Exactly what the metric is doesn’t matter all that much; what is important is that it admit objective calculation.
2. Anyone at all can propose a district map. All proposals in which every district contains the same number of people (within some specified tolerance) will be considered.
3. All the proposals are evaluated according to the metric, and the one with the best metric is implemented.

In this scheme, parties would be welcome to make proposals that enhance their own representation, but they would be unlikely to prevail. The winning proposal would probably come from a team of computer scientists with a supercomputer.

UPDATE: Gerrymandering 101.

Connecticut has a razor-close governor’s race undecided on election day? It must be time to starting finding bags of uncounted ballots.

Somehow, I feel like I’ve watched this show before.

I’m seeing this two years late, but it’s the perfect send-off for the Joe the Plumber incident:

(Via the DC Trawler.)

POSTSCRIPT: Ted Strickland, the Ohio governor who condoned the illegal fishing expedition through Joe Wurzelbacher’s confidential information, has been given the heave-ho by Ohio voters.

When your pitcher has hit the last six batters before finally being pulled, you’re glad to see him go, but it’s not exactly cause for celebration.