Internet Scofflaw

With all the vitriolic attacks against the NRA for its supposedly crazy proposal for armed guards in schools (the NYT called it a “mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant”), one might have gotten the impression that the proposal was out of the mainstream. In fact, the proposal is supported by 55% of Americans, and now even by the Obama administration.

If such a mainstream proposal is called “almost deranged” by the media, that tells you how far out of the mainstream the media is.

POSTSCRIPT: In fact, the 55-42 split understates how mainstream the proposal is. The 42% who are opposed includes lots of people like me who oppose the notion, not because of hoplophobia, but because we cannot afford it. Instead, we ought to revoke the gun-free zones around schools, which do not deter criminals but do prevent the school staff from stopping criminals. This would put informal armed security into the schools at no cost to the taxpayer. It’s already working in some states.

Washington, D.C. is the porn-viewing capital of America. Why doesn’t that surprise me?

Bill Clinton, professional liar and sometime president:

Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.

This isn’t even close to true. Moreover, he knows it. Glenn Kessler adds:

We ran this data past a spokesman for Clinton, but he declined to comment or offer an explanation for where the former president got his facts. That always makes us suspicious.

The fact that it was Bill Clinton talking should have made him suspicious, but I suppose we must make allowances for liberal journalists.

(Via Power Line.)

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) requires that employers offer their employees health insurance, but does not require that it be affordable. Awesome.

(Via Instapundit.)

The future of American health care is the UK’s present:

The largest and most detailed survey into hospital deaths has revealed that almost 12,000 patients are needlessly dying every year as a result of poor patient care.

The researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine based the study on 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009. The study revealed that basic errors were made in more than one in 10 cases, leading to 5.2% of deaths, which was the equivalent of nearly 12,000 preventable deaths in hospitals in England every year.

Iowahawk puts these numbers into perspective:

A Briton is 5 times more likely to die from government health care than an American is to die from a gunshot.

Timothy Geithner was hip-deep in the Libor scandal, and somehow I never heard about it:

At the hearing, Geithner stuck to a defense he expressed last week — that once he learned of the ma­nipu­la­tion, he sounded alarms to British and U.S. regulators. . .

But Republicans hammered Geithner about why he did not inform lawmakers during numerous congressional hearings or in the lengthy debate over Wall Street regulation. . . Other GOP members noted that even though Geithner knew of possible rate-fixing, the Federal Reserve still used Libor in several financial rescue programs.

Geithner defended his actions, saying that Libor was the best number available. That’s nonsense. Even if you set aside the rigging, Libor should never have been used for anything, because it doesn’t measure anything real. It never did. Libor is nothing more than the average of a set of made-up numbers.

In fact, one should have expected that Libor would be rigged. Or, put another way, what does “rigged” even mean in regard to a fictional rate? The “estimates” that make up Libor aren’t real rates that anyone can get. Their sole use is to set Libor, so of course they were chosen in such a way as to favor the estimaters own interests.

Social Security is in much more trouble than you thought. A piece in the New York Times shows the Social Security Administration’s forecast are pretty much worthless. For example, their projected death rates look like this:

First of all, the curves should not cross. But more importantly, they should certainly never go to 100%! According to the Social Security Administration, I will never collect Social Security, because there is a 100% chance that I will die by 2028.

With assumptions like this, it’s easy to see that the Administration’s estimate that it won’t run out of IOUs until 2033 is worthless.

Mike Bloomberg’s latest project is to limit supplies of painkillers to emergency rooms:

Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city officials unveiled a new initiative to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s emergency rooms as a way to combat what they described as a growing addiction problem in the region. Some critics . . ., however, felt the move would unnecessarily hurt poor and uninsured patients who use emergency rooms as their primary care doctor.

[Bloomberg said,] “Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true, so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect … There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer, and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”

If people “suffer a little bit”, Bloomberg thinks that’s a small price to pay to protect other people from themselves. That is absolutely disgusting. Quite simply, Mike Bloomberg does not believe in freedom.

And despite Bloomberg breezy dismissal of the possibility, this is exactly what is going to happen.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE: Pejman Yousefzadeh writes:

I have had loved ones go to the hospital to undergo significant surgical procedures. The aftermath of those surgeries presented said loved ones with significant rehabilitation demands which were made all the more daunting because of the post-operative pain involved. . .

It would be best to leave these kinds of decisions to the doctor and his/her patient. So when an officious, meddling busybody decides that he is in the best position to decide who gets painkillers and who doesn’t, and when said officious, meddling busybody declares that it is okay if some people “suffer” as a consequence of his decision, I tend to get more than a little upset. And you should get more than a little upset too.

I am.

Dianne Feinstein is a liar:

In fact, getting the camel’s nose under the tent, as Ifill puts it, is exactly what they are trying to accomplish. As Olson and Kopel exhaustively document in All the Way Down the Slippery Slope: Gun Prohibition in England and Some Lessons for Civil Liberties in America, the gun banners got Great Britain from complete gun freedom to a complete ban by taking slow, seemingly moderate steps:

Severe enforcement of the rifle and handgun licensing system would not have worked in 1922. Too many gun owners would have been outraged by the rapid move from a free society to one of repressive controls. By initially enforcing the 1920 legislation with moderation, and then with gradually increasing severity, the British government acclimated British gun owners to higher and higher levels of control. . .

The frog-cooking principle helps explain why America’s Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI), and the other anti-gun lobbies are so desperate to pass any kind of gun control, even controls that most observers agree will accomplish very little. By lobbying for the enactment of, for example, the Brady Bill, HCI established the principle of a national gun licensing system. Once a lenient national handgun licensing system was established in 1993, the foundation was laid so that the licensing system can gradually be tightened.

They’re trying the same thing here, but Americans are wise to them, which is why we fight everything. The courts have held that the First Amendment protection for free speech requires “breathing room”, which means that not only must the government not ban free speech, it must not come anywhere near it. The British experience shows that we need “breathing room” for the Second Amendment as well.

UPDATE: A Washington Post editorial from 1994 admitted that the the so-called assault weapon ban served no purpose other than as a stepping stone:

No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished (by the ban). Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.

We already knew that President Obama’s cash-for-clunkers program was an economic disaster. (We literally would have been better off burning $1 billion in cash.) Liberals console themselves by saying that at least it helped the environment. But it didn’t:

Whoops—’Cash for Clunkers’ Actually Hurt the Environment

According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The program’s first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that’s a pretty big mistake.

Under our monetary system, the Federal Reserve (a quasi-independent body) controls the issuing of currency and other levers that influence the money supply. This is supposed to serve as a check on the government’s ability to print money unwisely. It’s a weak check, but a check nonetheless. However, it seems that federal law contains a loophole (dealing with the minting of platinum coins) that allows the Treasury to issue currency without the approval of the Federal Reserve.

Nevertheless, even if the Treasury can do it, monetizing the debt is a crackpot idea. I thought everyone knew that, so I never paid any attention to the talk of minting trillion-dollar platinum coins.

But now, Paul Krugman is advocating it:

Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to force America into default? Yes, absolutely. . . By minting a $1 trillion coin, then depositing it at the Fed, the Treasury could acquire enough cash to sidestep the debt ceiling — while doing no economic harm at all.

Got that? No economic harm at all! We’re in LaRouche territory here, folks!

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the notion that Republicans would try to “force America into default” is pure partisan bullshit. As we learned from the last go-round with the debt ceiling, Republicans wanted to ensure that the debt was paid, and proposed legislation to ensure that by giving debt service priority. It was voted down on party lines, because Democrats wanted to keep default on the table. Quite simply, Democrats preferred to risk default than to make meaningful cuts to spending. So what Krugman really means is:

Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to cut spending? Yes, absolutely.

This kind of thinking leads to hyper-inflation.

(Via Power Line.)

If the charitable deductions are limited, charitable contributions will decrease. That’s just math. Suppose you can afford to give $1000 to charity, and suppose (to make the math easy) that you are in a 50% marginal tax bracket and the new limit is zero. Then you will give just the $1000. Before the limit went to zero, when you gave $1000 you saved $500 on taxes, so you could give another $500. That saved you $250, which you could give, which saved another $125, and so on. In the end, you were able to give $2000. So your charitable contribution is cut in half.

Of course, the realistic effect is smaller. In general, if your marginal income tax rate is r, discretionary giving in excess of the limit is reduced by r. Again, that’s just math.

But when Ari Fleischer tweeted about this effect, liberals went crazy. Here’s a typical comment, selected for its lack of profanity:

lol talk about being a complete jerk, admitting you donate for the tax deduction #NoSoul

I think #NoMath would be more appropriate. No one donates just for the tax deduction unless their marginal tax rate is over 100%. Even if you get some back on your taxes, you still don’t end up ahead!

Fleischer tried to explain it:

For those having a fit re my charity tweet, when gvt reduces ppl’s take home pay, ppl have less $ to donate/spend. It’s math

But the innumerate liberals still weren’t buying it, including innumerate fools like New Republic editor Alec MacGillis and Buzz Feed “reporter” Andrew Kaczynski.

Did I mention it’s just math? Sheesh.

A 16-year-old New Jersey boy has been sent to jail for absolutely nothing:

When a 16-year-old New Jersey boy doodled in his notebook on Tuesday, December 18, he probably didn’t expect to be arrested by the end of the day. However, when school officials saw the sketches, which they state appeared to be of weapons, and the boy “demonstrated behavior that caused them to be concerned,” the police were called.

A subsequent search of the boy’s home led to his arrest because they found several electronic parts and chemicals. He was charged with the possession of an explosive device and put in juvenile detention.

He doodled a superhero, and he owned a chemistry set and electronics set. For that, he went to jail. The authorities admit he did nothing wrong:

At no point in time did the boy threaten the school, school officials, or his classmates. He cooperated fully with authorities, and a search of the school itself found nothing dangerous . . .

and:

Police Chief Pat Moran stressed Tuesday night no threats were made by the student and there was no indication there was any danger posed to anyone or property at the school.

“There was no indication he was making a bomb, or using a bomb or detonating a bomb,” he said.

This is hysteria, plain and simple.

The Laffer Curve is inarguably real (no one will work at a 100% tax rate), the only question is where the peak is. Portugal is the latest country to be surprised to find itself on the wrong side of the peak.

An interesting column in the Wall Street Journal discusses how American ethnic groups whose members relied on individual effort to advance themselves (e.g., Germans and Asians) advanced much more quickly than those who relied on politics (e.g., Irish and Blacks). I’d like to see more data points than the author provides, but his thesis is certainly plausible.

POSTSCRIPT: For some reason, the direct link doesn’t seem to work, but this Google link does, for now anyway.

Jake Tapper, the only member of the White House press corps who occasionally asks this administration tough questions, is leaving for an anchor job at CNN. The move comes shortly after he asked President Obama a tough question on his new gun control agenda.

I’d be interested to hear the story behind his departure. It’s arguably a promotion, but the timing is curious and Tapper probably had more influence at his old job than he will at CNN.

I don’t think that professors should be fired for their political views, even for political views as disgusting as those of Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. Still, Loomis is a profoundly poor choice to make into some kind of free-speech martyr, since he was explicitly calling for sanctions against people for their speech. For example:

Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don’t want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life.

This was Loomis explaining that he didn’t want LaPierre’s “head on a stick” literally; he only wanted him imprisoned. Okay then.

Loomis has the right to call for the abolition of free speech, but don’t expect me to ride to his defense now that the would-be censor is hypocritically posturing as a free-speech martyr.

(Via Instapundit.)

Here’s something I did not know: During Prohibition, the federal government poisoned alcohol to make illicit drinking more dangerous. Over a thousand people were killed in New York City alone.

This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that drinking liquor was not even illegal. (Prohibition outlawed the production, sale, and transportation of liquor, but not its consumption.) The federal government killed thousands of people who weren’t even committing any crime.

All over Facebook, I’m told:

(Via Instapundit.)

Mike Bloomberg, one of the most odious anti-gun vultures out there, says:

I don’t think there’s anybody that’s defended the Second Amendment as much as I have.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

What’s interesting isn’t that this is a skull-poppingly enormous lie. What’s interesting is that he thinks he has to say it.

I think he’s right. We are winning.

The worst thing about the routine cruelty that so often seems to characterize the British NHS aren’t the outrages. The worst thing is how NHS outrages hardly even seem remarkable any more. In the latest set of outrages:

Alexandra Hospital in Redditch is writing to 38 families after a massive legal action that exposed years of bad practice, ranging from nurses taunting patients to leaving an elderly woman unwashed for 11 weeks. In one of the worst cases, a man had starvation recorded as the cause of his death after being treated at the hospital for two months. . .

The move will serve to intensify debate on why some nurses and doctors are treating patients without compassion, and will add weight to the warning by [Health Secretary] Mr Hunt that patients can experience “coldness, resentment, indifference” and “even contempt” in NHS hospitals. He warned that in the worst institutions, a “normalisation of cruelty” had been fostered. . .

The catalogue of failings uncovered by the mass legal action is one of the worst ever exposed at an NHS hospital. It included:
• A former nurse whose son told how she died after being left unwashed for 11 weeks, and was put on medication so powerful that she could not speak;
• A 35-year-old father-of-four whose family told how he wasted away because staff did not know how to fit a feeding tube;
• A pensioner who was left screaming in pain when his ribs were broken during a botched attempt to hoist him;
• A man who could not feed himself whose daughter described how he was taunted by nurses who took away his food uneaten;
• A great-grandmother left permanently unable to walk after doctors failed to detect a hip fracture.

Particularly worthy of note, I think, is the case where nurses put food out of the patient’s reach and then taunted him.

(Via Power Line.)

Larry Correia’s piece on gun control and gun-free zones is excellent.

The four State Department officials who were selected to take the fall for the Benghazi debacle didn’t resign after all, and will shortly be back on the job. Ambassador Chris Stevens was unavailable for comment.

(Previous post.)

New York City health inspectors have been harrassing post-Sandy relief workers:

Bobby Eustace, an 11-year veteran with the city’s fire department tells FoxNews.com that on Sunday he and his fellow firefighters from Ladder 27 in the Bronx were issued a notice of violation for not maintaining restaurant standards in a tent set up in Breezy Point, Queens, to feed victims and first responders. . .

Eustace says that the Health Department worker then checked off a list of violations at the relief tent, including not having an HVAC system and fire extinguisher. “He told us that he might come back to see if we fixed the violations. . .”

(Via Instapundit.)

When questioned, the NYC Department of Health said that its inspectors were only supposed to give advice, not issue violations. Of course, that’s exactly what they would say. (It might even be true, but government must be judged on its actions, not its reportedly good intentions.) Moreover, even if we accept that the inspectors were only supposed to give advice and the department somehow failed to communicate that simple fact to the inspectors, the fact remains that the department sent out health inspectors to interfere with relief workers, however rigid that interference was supposed to be.

The key fact I want to note is that this doesn’t somehow happen automatically. Someone thought it was a good idea to send health inspectors to interfere with relief workers and ordered that it be done.

This incident is depressingly typical. During the Gulf oil spill in 2010, the Coast Guard shut down an oil skimming operation because they did not have the required number of life jackets and fire extinguishers on board. Again, someone decided to do this. Indeed, the entire oil spill debacle was greatly exacerbated by the Obama administration’s punctilious enforcement of counter-productive rules.

This brings me to my central point. The people currently running our government will issue waivers as they see fit, mostly to advance their own political agenda (more on the pernicious effects of this in a future post), but no one can expect a waiver from their overbearing state simply because such a waiver ought to be issued!

Put another way, they issue waivers to serve their interests, not ours. You only want to serve people made homeless by a hurricane? Tough. You only want to clean oil from the Gulf of Mexico? Too bad.

So when the EPA writes milk-storage rules so broad that they cover spilled milk, and they say not to worry, they would never enforce it that way? Don’t you believe them. Someone is itching to enforce that rule.

Which brings me to Obamacare. The Obama administration has issued countless Obamacare waivers to mitigate the disastrous effects of their legislation. Why? Because they didn’t want it to be seen as (even more of) a disaster in advance of the election. But the election is now behind us. Do not expect those waivers to be renewed.

These people are itching to enforce those rules. If some people lose their jobs, what do they care? This administration made it very clear in 2009 and 2010 that nationalizing health care was more important to them than employment. If lots of people lose their health insurance, what do they care? They don’t want you to have private health insurance anyway.

These people send health inspectors to keep disaster victims from being fed; you think they care about your job, or your health insurance? Think again.

One can debate whether disaster relief (such as in the wake of Hurricane Sandy) is an appropriate use of federal money. But if we’re going to do it, it ought really to be disaster relief. For Congress to take a steaming pile of pork-barrel spending and call it hurricane relief is simply disgusting.

I demurred when White House press flack Jay Carney reportedly linked the Newtown massacre to the need for tax hikes. It may well have been his intent, but his remark was sufficiently oblique as to be deniable.

On the other hand, President Obama’s statement today was really quite explicit:

If this past week has done anything it should give us some perspective. I-I-I-If there’s one thing we should have, after this week, it should be a sense of perspective about what’s important. And I would like to think that members of that caucus would say to themselves “You know what, I disagree with the president on some things. . . But right now, what the country needs is for us to compromise, get a deficit reduction deal in place, [etc.], allow ourselves time to focus on things like preventing the tragedy in Newtown from happening again, [etc.], and if we could just pull back from the immediate political battles, if ya peel off the partisan war paint, then we should be able to get something done.”

I think, I think the Speaker would like to get that done. But an environment needs to be created not just among House Republicans but among Senate Republicans that says the campaign is over and let’s see if we can do what’s right for the country, at least for the next month!

There you have it: Because of Newtown, Republicans need to stop fighting Obama’s agenda. The man has no decency whatsoever.

(Via PJ Tatler.)

A note to gullible West Virginia voters: this is what happens when you elect a supposedly pro-gun Democrat.

UPDATE: Manchin is walking this back now. He has evidently heard from his constituents.

Here is a phrase we’re going to start seeing a lot of:

The hospital informed us that this is a fairly new operation perfected over just the last five years. However: this surgery will “cease to be available in two years for insurance patients due to ObamaCare.”

The Washington Post reports that the White House is following a plan to avoid negotiating over the “fiscal cliff”:

Two senior White House officials said that David Plouffe, Obama’s top political adviser, crafted a plan to keep the president from getting sucked into a long, public negotiation like the one that unfolded over the debt ceiling. They said that Obama’s lowest moments in his first term came in a six-month stretch of 2011 when he acted as negotiator-in-chief on the annual federal spending bills and the effort to lift the Treasury’s borrowing authority, becoming part of the image a dysfunctional Washington.

“The last thing we want is another month of images of the two of them negotiating,” one senior official said. The White House is determined that Obama “not be drawn to that level.”

This president never learned to cut deals (he never had any occasion to learn) but he knows how to campaign, so they decided to do that instead.

(Via Power Line.)

One predictable consequence of putting the government in charge of health care is everyone wants to wet their beak. And so marginal medical industries (e.g., chiropractors, acupuncturists) are lobbying to have their services included in the mandatory slate of services, and they are meeting with some success.

Remember, Obamacare was supposed to make health coverage cheaper. . .

Since exit polls suggest that Hurricane Sandy may well have given Barack Obama his narrow victory in the 2012 election, it is worth noting that the federal recovery effort — despite what was reported at the time — was a complete disaster.

One can debate the impact of the Laffer curve at the national level. A lot of entrepreneurs are reluctant to leave the country, so — at the national level — the impact of high taxes and a hostile business environment may be less than you otherwise might expect. But entrepreneurs are much more willing to change states or municipalities, so that impact is much greater at the local level.

The resulting migration statistics are very embarrassing for the progressives. Not too long ago, the Economist ran its cover story about how business is leaving California for Texas in droves.

So when the IRS announced that it will no longer report statistics on taxpayer migration, it’s not hard to guess why.

This story of how Michigan’s labor unions were hoisted by their own petard simply warms the heart. Jillian Kay Melchior tells the story at the Corner:

It seems that some Michigan Republicans — controlling the legislature and the governorship — wanted to make Michigan a right-to-work state. But Governor Rick Snyder, again a Republican, was against it. Not that he was against it in principle, but he felt that it was a divisive issue and it wasn’t the time for that debate. However, the labor unions felt differently; they introduced a ballot measure that would have prohibited right-to-work (and also given themselves various other goodies). This forced Republicans to take up the debate they had not planned to have. And the labor unions lost at the polls.

Having won the argument at the polls, Republicans has no reason not to go ahead with right-to-work legislation. Michigan’s unions now face the catastrophe (for them) of worker freedom, and it is entirely of their own making. It’s a heart-warming holiday story.

Anyway, the unions were left screaming about how right-to-work gave non-members workers the ability to freeload on the bargaining conducted by the union. In fact, just 11% of union dues go to contract bargaining (the majority goes to union administration). But numbers aside, the whole argument is a lie.

The truth is, unions are permitted to exclude non-members from the contracts they negotiate. However, the unions don’t want to do that. The unions want everyone on their contract so they can control seniority and whatnot. If they allowed workers to stay off the contract, those workers disadvantaged by the union’s rules would opt out of the union.

If the unions’ concern over freeloading were genuine, they would keep non-members out of the contract, but not a single union will do that, because they want to maintain control over everyone. Right-to-work says the union can choose to control all the workers (lamentably, Federal law gives them that power), but at least disadvantaged workers won’t be forced to sanction that control, or pay for it. (UPDATE: And if you ignore both of those points, there’s still this one.)

POSTSCRIPT: Of course, in the end, labor unions are always about brute force. Basic economics shows that (absent a monopsony situation, which are very rare today) there are always replacement workers to be had. For unions to exercise monopoly power, they need to exclude those replacement workers somehow. Scandalously, labor law helps them to do that, to a large degree, but not in the case of strikes, which are labor’s main bargaining chip. Unions then fall back on force to exclude replacement workers.

Since labor unions are ultimately all about force, we shouldn’t be surprised that their response to right-to-work has been violence, and the threat of more violence.

UPDATE: Rep. Douglas Geiss’s threat (“there will be blood”) went out over the Michigan House Democrats’ official Twitter account.

Barack Obama on December 4, 2012:

When you look at how much revenue you can actually raise by closing loopholes and deductions, it’s probably in the range of $300 billion to $400 billion. That’s not enough to come up with a balanced plan that actually reduces the deficit and puts us on the path of long-term stability.

Barack Obama on July 22, 2011:

What we said was give us $1.2 trillion in additional revenues, which could be accomplished without hiking taxes — tax rates — but could simply be accomplished by eliminating loopholes, eliminating some deductions and engaging in a tax-reform process that could have lowered rates generally while broadening the base.

For some reason, no one other than ABC’s Jake Tapper wants to call him on this.

UPDATE: Obama is being disingenuous in another way, completely apart from this. He says that we need to raise taxes, because closing loopholes won’t generate enough revenue. Whether or not that’s true, he’s not being honest about his goals:

Obama wants higher taxes in their own right, regardless of their revenue implications. He has specifically said that taxes should be higher, even if the higher taxes actually reduce revenue! And he has made clear that revenue is not the purpose for hiking taxes. Yes, that is completely insane, but that’s Barack Obama’s agenda.

According to post-election polls, Americans (and even Obama voters) want to see the Federal government address the budget deficit with spending cuts, not tax hikes. Also, Americans still hate Obamacare.

Which kind of makes you wonder what the voters were thinking. . .

Short of criminalizing hard work, could you come up with a more effective policy to suppress the work ethic among the middle class than this?

Unless you make nearly $70k per year, you’re better off (financially speaking) earning just $29k. And right around $70k is the move to the next higher tax bracket.

More horrifying stories of government-run health care from the British NHS, where sick children are being put to death to save money:

One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone.

Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken’.

The LCP – on which 130,000 elderly and terminally-ill adult patients die each year – is now the subject of an independent inquiry ordered by ministers.

Medical critics of the LCP insist it is impossible to say when a patient will die and as a result the LCP death becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. They say it is a form of euthanasia, used to clear hospital beds and save the NHS money.

We’re told, over and over again, that these are isolated incidents. With the sheer volume of these incidents, it is clear the NHS has (or, more properly, is) a systemic problem. In each “isolated incident”, the medical staff (I won’t call them doctors) are responding to the incentives they are given. Perhaps they weren’t supposed to respond by killing or abusing their patients, but that’s what keeps happening.

And that’s what’s going to happen here, too. The difference is, here, under Obamacare, the thin veneer of private control will make it easier for the advocates of nationalized health care to blame someone else.

(Via International Liberty.)

Three things that happened the day after the election:

1. FEMA shut down relief centers on Staten Island.
2. A court sentenced Nakoula Basseley Nakoula to one year in prison for probation violations no one would have cared about if he hasn’t made an anti-Mohammed video.
3. The US mission to the UN helped advance a gun-control treaty.

Barack Obama, 2004:

Maybe peace would have broken out with a different kind of White House, one less committed to waging a perpetual campaign–a White House that would see a 51-48 victory as a call to humility and compromise rather than an irrefutable mandate.

Any hope that Obama might approach his second term non-hypocritically has already been dispelled by his position on the “fiscal cliff”. And any such hope was foolishness anyway: after what he did in his first term, which would he be any less aggressive in his second, when he has “more flexibility”?

But what should be the Republican response? Many Republicans say that tax hikes will hurt the economy. On the contrary, I tend to think that overspending is more dangerous than overtaxation, in part because of Ricardian Equivalence, and in part because we are rapidly reaching insolvency. If we could strike a deal in which we can fix the spending problem at the cost of some tax hikes, we should take it. But such a deal is not likely to be on the table. Instead, what will be on the table is the usual bargain: tax hikes now in exchange for future spending cuts that will never actually happen. I’ve read that (can’t find the link now) while such deals typically promise a 3-to-1 ratio of spending cuts to tax hikes, on average they actually deliver a minus-2-to-1 ratio.

If fixing the problem isn’t on the table, should Republicans focus on holding the line on taxes? I don’t think so. On the contrary, two factors suggest that we should give President Obama the tax hikes on the (so-called) rich that he says he wants.

The first consideration is the sequester, which will bring dangerous cuts to defense spending. At the third presidential debate, Obama pledged that the sequester “will not happen”. But that was a lie: the very next day he was touting the sequester in an off-the-record interview, and now the administration proclaims openly that they are happy to go ahead with it if they don’t get the tax hikes they want.

The idea behind the sequester, as I understand it, was to include big cuts to defense and domestic spending, to give both sides an incentive to come to a different agreement. But that supposed more honesty from the Democratic side than actually exists. While they love to attack Republicans over any proposed cuts to domestic spending (killing Big Bird and whatnot), they are perfectly willing to see cuts to discretionary spending if such cuts advance their higher priorities, as this whole fight illustrates. Moreover, since the White House proposed the sequester (Obama’s lies to the contrary notwithstanding), one ought to expect that it serves their purposes. Republicans were foolish to agree to it.

The second consideration is broader. Our economy is screwed: Obamacare is kicking in. The EPA is regulating CO2. Dodd-Frank puts the government in control of the financial industry. And entitlement spending is quickly driving the Federal government to insolvency. (The EPA’s action is illegal, and most of the Dodd-Frank apparatus can’t legally operate until the Senate confirms the new bureau’s director, but I wouldn’t count on the courts to enforce the law.) If fixing the problem is off-the-table, it is imperative that we make sure that blame for the upcoming disaster is assigned correctly.

What Democrats are demanding — tax hikes for the “rich” — are reversible, and ultimately not within Republicans’ power to prevent anyway. Republicans can try to moderate them, but that won’t save the economy (as above, spending is the main problem), and doing so will give Democrats and their compliant media allies a way to blame the upcoming disaster on Republicans. What is essential is when the economy tanks, America knows who is at fault.

This is not to say that we should give Democrats anything they want. We should not allow them to nationalize any more industries or create any new entitlements, and we should vigorously fight Dodd-Frank and the EPA in the courts. Generally, we should not grant them anything irreversible. But tax rates are different; excessive taxes can be scaled back, and have been many times.

UPDATE: Were the Republicans to take this advice, here’s a way they should considering doing it.

I’m still on my post-election vacation, but I have to interrupt it to note an astonishing editorial from the Washington Post. Not so long ago I found the Post to be worth reading despite its liberalism, not so much for being a voice of reason among the left, but for making an effort at least to be fair to their opponents. Those days are now truly past.

The Post editorializes that Republicans are opposing the rumored nomination of Susan Rice, not because of the rampant dishonesty and/or incompetence exposed by Rice’s absurd public statements on the Benghazi attack, but because they are racist:

Could it be, as members of the Congressional Black Caucus are charging, that the signatories of the letter are targeting Ms. Rice because she is an African American woman? The signatories deny that, and we can’t know their hearts. What we do know is that more than 80 of the signatories are white males, and nearly half are from states of the former Confederacy.

This is really quite astonishing. Could it really be that the Washington Post has no memory of our last Secretary of State, Condoleeza Rice, another black woman who even happens to share the same last name? If they could remember Condoleeza Rice, they might recall a historical parallel: Her nomination also faced opposition, and although we can’t know her opponents’ hearts, most of them were white males, and every single one of them belonged to the party that historically supported slavery and segregration.

In fact, that’s too kind to the Democrats. Although I believe that most of Condoleeza Rice’s opposition was simple partisanship, there also was an explicitly racist campaign waged against her by prominent liberals. There is nothing remotely of that sort in the opposition to Susan Rice.

No joke:

In Staten Island, a printed paper sign taped to the front door of on the center at 6581 Hylan Blvd. at 10:30 a.m. read “FEMA Center Closed Due to Weather.”

The front doors of the disaster recovery center, which is housed inside the Mount Lorretto Catholic Youth Organization, were unlocked, but there was no staff anywhere in sight for at least a half an hour.

And a set of buses which served as a pair of warming centers at the site for the past several days were missing, according to non-FEMA volunteers who continued to hand out supplies from a nearby building despite the storm. Volunteers at a nearby donation distribution center said the buses vanished on Wednesday.

“FEMA packed up and left,” said Louis Giraldi, 47, a volunteer handing out cleaning supplies to victims. “We don’t know where they are, so there’s nothing here but us.”

Obama’s been re-elected, so I guess their work is done.

(Via Instapundit.)

I caught the end of Barack Obama’s victory speech. Incredibly, he’s doing his unity bit again. It’s as if the last six months never happened. Hell, it’s as if the last four years never happened.

In 2008, I was somewhat taken in by the pledge in his victory speech to unify the country. But an acquaintance of mine, a hard leftist, explained that Obama didn’t mean it. “Dream on” were his exact words. He was right. From his very first acts, Obama proceeded to chart the most extreme course that he could, limited only by the residual conscience of a Democratic Congress. He did it in the teeth of public opposition, proclaiming not unity, but “I won.” When people stood up in opposition, he didn’t try to find common ground. No, he vilified them as racists, and even as terrorists.

Months of slander, sarcasm, and demagoguery have done their work, and Obama convinced just enough Americans that a second term for Obama is less risky than taking a chance on Romney. Fine. But America shouldn’t be fooled by the unity bit again. I certainly won’t.

Health care nationalization and financial ruin are now probably irreversible. After tonight, America will survive in some form, but we will never again be the nation we once were.

Even as they run us into the ground, the left will never admit their policies don’t work. I wonder whose fault the next four years will be.

Jerry Pournelle:

We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It’s worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time — not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine — and it will probably never be true again.

A New York man drives to Connecticut to buy gasoline and bring it back to his neighborhood in New York City, but he wasn’t using government-approved containers, the police cited him and confiscated the gasoline. He and his neighbors are out their money, and still don’t have gas.

Because that’s the main problem New York City is facing right now: gas transported in unapproved containers.

The New York Times says that disasters call for big government; this is big government at work.

Obama’s apologists have seized on the fact that Obama’s used the word “terror” in a speech on September 12 as proof that he acknowledged the truth from the beginning. This is nonsense, and moreover, if he did acknowledge the truth on September 12, why did he spend the next month lying to us?

Now CBS has released a video that answers the question conclusively. In an interview later that day, Steve Kroft observed that in Obama’s speech that morning, he “went out of [his] way to avoid the use of the word terrorism”, and asked Obama point-blank if the attack was terrorism. Obama wouldn’t answer:

QED.

(Previous post.) (Via the Corner.)

The Sandy recovery effort in New York City’s worst-hit borough, Staten Island, is an absolute mess. This might be part of the reason why:

The [Office of Emergency Management], created by Mayor Rudy Giuliani was intended to do just that [i.e., collect reports and dispatch needed assistance], said a former Giuliani administration official, who asked not to be named criticizing the current mayor. “The real question is why OEM—which was built to manage the battle of the badges in a disaster, that’s why it exists—doesn’t have an evident lead role” in the Sandy response, the former official said. He speculated that Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, who served under Mayor David Dinkins before returning when Bloomberg took office, “never accepted the legitimacy of OEM,” which was created by the mayor who’d effectively let him go.

A senior administration official asked for comment late Sunday evening contested the Giuliani official’s categorization, but was unable to immediately explain what OEM’s role in the post-Sandy response operation was, or how exactly the chain of command between various city and outside agencies, like FEMA, was constructed.

(In any event, we had only two FEMA sightings over the day while driving over much of the island—a phone number for them written in marker on the back of an OEM trailer at Midland, and eight people wearing FEMA Corps light blue jackets huddled outside a Hess Express, seeming oblivious to or disinterested in the huge line of cars on the road beside them.)

I’m confused! Paul Krugman says FEMA is doing a great job.

Anyway, the piece tells the story of a businessman who was trying to deliver relief supplies, and spent hours driving around Staten Island trying to find a place to take them. Eventually they just went to a suffering neighborhood and handed stuff out.

POSTSCRIPT: This isn’t a conservative piece at all, either. It’s in the Daily Beast, and at one point it goes out of its way gratuitously to insult Fox News.

UPDATE: Giuliani calls the recovery effort “disgraceful”. One of his allegations is that FEMA failed to pre-position supplies of water as they said they would.

Frank J Fleming takes on the erroneous notion that the president is our country’s leader. This is my favorite part:

We have it in our heads that the president of the United States is like the CEO of our country, when in reality his job is more akin to head janitor. Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to say that politicians work as hard or are as essential to society as the average janitor. But it’s our job as private citizens to do the main work, and the government is supposed to operate in the background doing minor things that support that work — cleaning up the messes we’re too busy to handle. If the head janitor and his staff do their jobs well, we should barely even notice them.

Yet right now in America we think that this janitor is in charge of everything, and that’s how we ended up with this Obama mess. Everyone went on about how inspiring Obama was — like that matters — and how he was going to solve all our problems — like that was his job. But no one asked the essential question: Can he clean and stay out of our way? Thus we come back four years later and find that the office building we asked him to clean has been burned down, and when we ask him what happened, he gets mad at us and says, “It’s not my fault; it was messy when I started. But don’t worry, I have great plans to really get the company growing these next four years. First off, I went ahead and significantly increased the janitorial budget.”

It’s humor writing, of course, but it really struck a chord with me nevertheless. America’s government is not America, and it drives me crazy when people (like our current president) conflate the two. In the best of times the government is symbiotic with America; today it’s mostly a parasite.

Mike Bloomberg puts his anti-gun ideology ahead of disaster relief and common sense:

Mayor Bloomberg has snubbed Borough President Markowitz’s impassioned plea to bring the National Guard to Hurricane Sandy-scarred Brooklyn. . .

“We don’t need it,” Mayor Bloomberg said on Wednesday during a press update on the city’s ongoing Hurricane Sandy cleanup. “The NYPD is the only people we want on the street with guns.”

(Emphasis mine.)

This is bizarre, even from an anti-gun ideologue like Bloomberg. He doesn’t even think the National Guard can be trusted with weapons?

(Via Hot Air.)

The Democrats claim to be concerned about voter suppression, as that is their excuse for vehemently opposing any measure to fight voter fraud, but when faced with bona fide illegal voter suppression, they aren’t interested. I refer, of course, to the administration’s scandalous indifference, if not open hostility, to the voting rights of deployed servicemen.

One of the most puzzling things about the Obama’s administration’s Benghazi story is how it could have taken them so long to realize what was clear on the very first day: that it was a deliberate terrorist attack. Well, we now know that they knew it on the first day as well.

The CIA linked the 9/11/2012 attack to terrorists in the first 24 hours, and conveyed that information  to Congress on September 13. In fact, they knew that an Al Qaeda affiliate had taken responsibility for the attack after just two hours, while the battle was still ongoing.

But the administration changed its story on September 14, and spent most of the next month blaming a video. Why?

(Previous post.)

At the third presidential debate, Barack Obama said the upcoming sequester was a bad idea and he would make sure it doesn’t happen. But the very next morning, in an off-the-record interview with the Des Moines Register, he touted the sequester as central to his deficit reduction plans.

So Obama lied; the only question is to whom.

UPDATE: Obama also lied about whose idea the sequester was. He said Republicans insisted on it, when it fact it originated with the Obama administration and with Harry Reid.

The Obama administration denies that any political pressure was brought to bear in the awarding of loans by Obama’s disastrous green energy program. It would be surprising if that denial were true, and newly released emails confirm that it’s not.

How is Obamacare working? Avik Roy has been collecting the consequences from around the country:

• In Ohio, premiums will rise 55-85%, and 30% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Wisconsin, premiums will rise 30%, and 27% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Colorado, premiums will rise 19%, and 29% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Minnesota, premiums will rise 29%, and 25% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Nevada, premiums will rise 11-30%, and 44% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Florida, 30% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Virginia, 28% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In New Hampshire, 25% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Iowa, 31% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Pennsylvania, 31% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.
• In Michigan, 31% of doctors will cut service for Medicare patients.

This thing is an atrocity.

Remember that 2004 speech that launched Barack Obama as a national political figure?

It’s what allows us to pursue our individual dreams, yet still come together as a single American family: “E pluribus unum,” out of many, one. . . There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. . . There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America. . . We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.

He didn’t mean a word of it. Sure, he could talk the talk during his meteoric ascent, but now, facing the end of his political career, we see how he really is:

The Romney campaign ripped President Obama after the president suggested Friday that supporters take “revenge” by voting against the Republican nominee.

During a speech in Springfield, Ohio, . . . he mentioned Mitt Romney, drawing boos from the crowd. “No, no, no — don’t boo, vote,” Obama said. “Vote. Voting is the best revenge.”

When his own future is as stake, all that unity stuff is out the window. Now it’s time for revenge.

Of course, it’s not just this year. In 2010, when facing the first political reverses of his political career, he struck a similar tone, calling for Latinos to “punish our enemies”.

UPDATE:

UPDATE: “Obama campaign struggles to explain ‘revenge’ remark.”

On NPR yesterday morning, they reported that areas hit by Hurricane Sandy had buses running again, but it would be a while before rail service resumed. After a disaster, being able to drive around obstacles (which cars can, but trains cannot) is a significant advantage.

They also reported that on Long Island many people were staying in their homes, despite having no power or water, so they could protect them from looters. It’s a pity that New York law has made sure that most of those people protecting their homes are unarmed. Natural disasters show the folly of relying completely on the government to protect your property.

Fisker Automotive is one of the Obama’s green boondoggles, having collected half a billion dollars in Federal largess. They make overpriced, unreliable electric cars that reportedly can catch fire while being recharged.

Also, they explode when submerged by a flood.

POSTSCRIPT: Fisker’s press release is inadvertently hilarious, containing this line:

We can report that there were no injuries and none of the cars were being charged at the time.

So you don’t even have to be charging them for them to catch fire, and that’s a good thing?

This is pretty funny.

One of the remarkable things about Barack Obama is his ability to be offended by suggestions that he would do the things that he does:

The president said that he took offense “to some suggestion that, you know, in any way we haven’t tried to make sure the American people knew as information was coming in what we believed happened.”

He spent a month blaming a video for the Benghazi attack when he knew that wasn’t true, but he takes offense at the suggestion that he would do that.

(Previous post.)

Barack Obama urges people in Hurricane Sandy’s path to get information from the internet, which is just great advice for those thousands of people without power.

Mary Katharine Ham has a very interesting piece on natural disasters, the effectiveness of local aid, the ineffectiveness of FEMA, and the cluelessness of the New York Times. It’s well worth reading.

Last month’s jobs data according to the household survey was thoroughly implausible. It found that the economy created 873 thousand new jobs in a single month, driving unemployment from 8.1% to 7.8%. That number was wildly at odds with the establishment survey (114 thousand), and its like had not been seen since the height of the Reagan-era boom. (Does it feel like the Reagan boom right now?)

The Obama campaign made the most of this, but not to worry. If the number was a statistical error, which seems likely, it will be balanced out by the October report.

Or perhaps not. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is talking about delaying the October jobs report until after the election. Their excuse is Hurricane Sandy.

UPDATE: The numbers came out on schedule after all, and the unemployment rate did increase from 7.8 to 7.9. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls that “essentially unchanged”.)

This somehow got left out of the Olympics’ paean to the National Health Service:

A 29-year-old woman will die without a new drug that the NHS is refusing to provide despite the manufacturer offering it to her for free, it emerged today. Caroline Cassin, 29, who suffers from Cystic Fibrosis (CF) has been offered a new drug free of charge for a limited period by the makers but her NHS hospital is refusing.

The drug, effectively allows sufferers to lead a normal life, and has been available in America since January, and is successfully trialled and licenced in this country. However it has not yet been approved for use on the NHS and an expert specialist group is due to make recommendations to health service funding organisations by December.

Procedures take precedence over people’s lives. That’s government-run health care in a nutshell. And that’s what Obamacare is bringing to this country.

(Via Instapundit.)

In case you were wondering, yes, Obama is still collecting illegal campaign contributions. As in 2008, he has disabled the standard checks that would prevent foreigners from contributing to his campaign. And, if that weren’t enough of an indication of mens rea, foreigners are being encouraged to give the strange amount of $198. This makes sense when you learn that contributions of $200 or more must be reported to the FEC.

Barack Obama has some troubling ideas on fighting crime:

And so what can we do to intervene, to make sure that young people have opportunity; that our schools are working; that if there’s violence on the streets, that working with faith groups and law enforcement, we can catch it before it gets out of control.

And so what I want is a — is a comprehensive strategy. Part of it is seeing if we can get automatic weapons that kill folks in amazing numbers out of the hands of criminals and the mentally ill. But part of it is also going deeper and seeing if we can get into these communities and making sure we catch violent impulses before they occur.

(Emphasis mine.)

Much of this is standard pablum. I can’t help observing that Obama has been president for four years; if he has ideas for using outreach to fight crime, why isn’t he doing it already? And then there’s the ignorant/dishonest call for gun control. But what this about “catch[ing] violent impulses before they occur”?

It’s hard not to see this as sinister. Barring time travel, how is this to be accomplished? Gossip? Pervasive real-time surveillance? Psychological profiling? Is there any interpretation of this that is consistent with a free society?