Internet Scofflaw

Well, I’m glad they cleared that up. I’m sure that 72 hours was plenty of time for a thorough investigation.

Seriously, given all we’re learning about the pervasive problems in the Secret Service, is it really likely that the political side is completely innocent? Maybe the possibility merits more than a 3-day glance.

What? There’s a welfare system for right-wing bloggers? How come I never got mine?

I think these stories are related:

Department of Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said that “no one knows” if gasoline prices in the United States will reach $9 per gallon, and acknowledged that the possibility is outside his control.

and:

President Obama’s Interior Secretary Ken Salazar confirmed that the administration has gotten “more strict on denying drilling permits” since the Deepwater Horizon, though he contended Obama is also pursuing an effective all-of-the-above energy strategy.

The possibility is outside his control in the short-term, but in the long-run he certainly does have the ability to make a difference. He’s just refusing to do it.

POSTSCRIPT: Since President’s Obama strategy favors energy from the sky (wind and solar), but opposes energy from the ground (coal, oil, natural gas, nuclear), I think a more apt phrase would be all-of-the-above but none-of-the-below.

The Obama administration’s latest great idea:

The Department of Labor is poised to put the finishing touches on a rule that would apply child labor laws to children working on family farms, prohibiting them from performing a list of jobs on their own families’ land.

Under the rules, most children under 18 could no longer work “in the storing, marketing and transporting of farm product raw materials.”

“Prohibited places of employment,” a Department press release read, “would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions.”

The new regulations, first proposed August 31 by Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, would also revoke the government’s approval of safety training and certification taught by independent groups like 4-H and FFA, replacing them instead with a 90-hour federal government training course.

The Labor Department has reportedly withdrawn the proposal already in the face of public outrage. It seems America isn’t ready for a war on family farms just yet.

But why did the Obama administration want to do this in the first place? A payoff from big agro concerns? I don’t get it.

Jon Corzine, who was personally responsible for at least $200 million of the $1.2 billion stolen from the collapsing MF Global, is still fundraising for Obama.

Back when the Occupy movement was in the news, its apologists tried to explain away the movement’s anti-Semitism the same way as every other disgusting and/or criminal aspect of that movement: “Oh, those guys aren’t part of our movement; they’re just hanging around.”

It’s just amazing how many people at the Occupy encampments weren’t part of the Occupy movement. Even the Occupy’s movement’s anti-Semitic founder is somehow not representative of the movement.

But let’s hear how they explain anti-Semitic cartoons on the movement’s official Facebook page.

In honor of Earth Day:

New research from Pew finds that Republicans are better informed than Democrats:

On eight of 13 questions about politics, Republicans outscored Democrats by an average of 18 percentage points, according to a new Pew survey titled “Partisan Differences in Knowledge.”

The Pew survey adds to a wave of surveys and studies showing that GOP-sympathizers are better informed, more intellectually consistent, more open-minded, more empathetic and more receptive to criticism than their fellow Americans who support the Democratic Party.

“Republicans fare substantially better than Democrats on several questions in the survey, as is typically the case in surveys about political knowledge,” said the study, which noted that Democrats outscored Republicans on five questions by an average of 4.6 percent.

The study found that Republicans understand Democrats much better than vice versa, which is just what you would expect given the liberal slant in the legacy media. Republicans can’t help but learn what Democrats think, since it’s splattered across the media. On the other hand, Democrats can easily avoid learning anything about Republicans, and clearly many do.

But it’s not just the media, the study all found that Democrats had a greater desire to avoid learning about Republican ideas than vice versa:

A March 12 Pew study showed that Democrats are far more likely that conservatives to disconnect from people who disagree with them.

“In all, 28% of liberals have blocked, unfriended, or hidden someone on SNS [social networking sites] because of one of these reasons, compared with 16% of conservatives and 14% of moderates,” said the report, tiled “Social networking sites and politics.”

The report also noted that 11 percent of liberals, but only 4 percent of conservatives, deleted friends from their social networks after disagreeing with their politics.

The study also found that Republicans were more intellectually honest:

A March Washington Post poll showed that Democrats were more willing to change their views about a subject to make their team look good. For example, in 2006, 73 percent of Democrats said the GOP-controlled White House could lower gas prices, but that number fell by more than half to 33 percent in 2012 once a Democrat was in the White House.

In contrast, the opinions of GOP supporters were more consistent. Their collective opinion shifted by only a third, according to the data.

(Via Power Line.)

The Obama campaign has made clear that the main thrust of its attack against Mitt Romney will be to cast him as “weird”:

“Unless things change and Obama can run on accomplishments, he will have to kill Romney,” said a prominent Democratic strategist aligned with the White House.

The onslaught would have two aspects. The first is personal: Obama’s reelection campaign will portray the public Romney as inauthentic, unprincipled and, in a word used repeatedly by Obama’s advisers in about a dozen interviews, “weird.”

A major part of that strategy is to attack Romney’s Mormonism. President Obama himself would prefer to keep his hands clean, but he has surrogate aplenty. One of them is Montana’s Democratic governor Brian Schweitzer, who attacked Romney for being descended from polygamists:

The Daily Beast contacted the office of Montana Gov. Brian Schweitzer today to talk about whether his state would be in play in the 2012 presidential election. About a half hour later, the governor called back, and he had a lot to say. He didn’t think that Montana would be a swing state, but the Democrat did say that Mitt Romney could have issues nationally because his father was “born on a polygamy commune in Mexico.” . . .

Women, he said, are “not great fans of polygamy, 86 percent were not great fans of polygamy. I am not alleging by any stretch that Romney is a polygamist and approves of [the] polygamy lifestyle, but his father was born into [a] polygamy commune in Mexico.”

Romney’s father and grandfather were monogamous, but his grandfather lived in a community that accepted polygamy. What a pathetic line of attack.

And ill-advised too: Barack Obama comes from a long line of polygamists:

The line of polygamists in Obama’s family can be traced back generations in western Kenya, where it was an accepted practice within the Luo (pronounced LOO-oh) tribe. His great-grandfather, Obama Opiyo, had five wives, including two who were sisters. His grandfather, Hussein Onyango, had at least four wives, one of whom, Akumu, gave birth to the president’s father, Barack Obama, before fleeing her abusive husband. Obama Sr. was already married when he left Kenya to study at the University of Hawaii, where he married again.

Schweitzer is forgetting that Obama’s background is much weirder than Romney’s. It’s easy to forget that, when the media has buried it so effectively. But if the Obama campaign pursues the “weird” attacks on Romney, this stuff is going to come out.

(Via Gateway Pundit.)

Here’s something I didn’t know: Labor unions want their contracted wages to be the maximum permitted wages, and actually go to the NLRB to block bonuses or individual raises. Amazing.

A bill now in Congress would allow companies to pay their workers more than the union-contracted wage.

Apparently, Greenpeace feels it’s losing the debate:

Don’t the deniers have a right to free speech?
There’s a difference between free speech and a campaign to deny the climate science with the goal of undermining international action on climate change. However, there’s also responsibility that goes with freedom of speech – which is based around honesty and transparency. Freedom of speech does not apply to misinformation and propaganda.

Campaigning to undermine international action isn’t free speech? Thanks for clearing that up.

(Via the Corner.)

Federal law requires the Congress to adopt a budget every year, but for the last few years, the Democrats have ignored the law. They don’t want a budget because it would require them to go on record with their spending priorities.

Perhaps because of an attack of conscience, the Senate Budget Committee chairman Kent Conrad (D-ND) decided that the Senate would fulfill its statutory duty this year. Starting this week, the Senate Budget Committee would begin considering a budget.

But now Harry Reid has scuttled the process. The Senate will not take up a budget until after the election, if at all.

I must confess, I just don’t get this attack: In 1983, when Mitt Romney took his family on vacation, with seven people and luggage he didn’t have room in the car for the family dog. Rather than leave the dog behind, he jury-rigged a dog carrier on the roof of the car.

Somehow, this shows that Romney is cruel towards animals. How? I don’t get it. If Romney had actually “strapped the dog to the roof of the car,” as his detractors like to say, I would understand it, but he didn’t. He attached a dog carrier to the car’s roof rack, and constructed a windshield to protect him. How is that any different from a dog riding in the back of a truck?

To me, this story speaks of ingenuity and resourcefulness. It also speaks of a man who wanted to bring his dog on vacation, rather than leave it at a kennel.

I can certainly understand that the Obama campaign would rather talk about anything other than their candidate’s record in office. Nevertheless, I’m still puzzled by David Axelrod saying that loving dog owners transport their dogs in limousines, like Barack Obama. Most dog owners don’t have limousines. Isn’t it a little . . . off message to mock Mitt Romney for not having a limousine?

POSTSCRIPT: Romney brings his dog on vacation, Obama eats dog. Yes, the jokes write themselves. Even funnier than the jokes are the Obama surrogates earnestly making drawing distinctions between the Romney vacation story and the Obama dog-eating story. The truth is, both stories are nothing. What’s telling is which campaign wants to focus on the dog stories (Obama’s), and which campaign wants to talk about the economy (Romney’s).

UPDATE: Exactly right.

The White House admits that its proposed “Buffett rule” (a tax hike on millionaires, defeated — for now — in the Senate) is not intended to generate revenue or reduce the debt. In fact, the Buffett rule would actually reduce revenue and add $793 billion to the debt.

So why do it? Spite. Barack Obama has made this clear since his presidential campaign, when he said he would be willing to sacrifice revenue in order to hurt investors.

Of course, he calls it “fairness”. As if a policy that hurts someone and helps no one could possibly be fair. I’ll let Frank J give this notion the respect it deserves:

That’s not what the Buffett Rule is about; actually doing anything even slightly useful is far beyond your wildest dreams. This is just about “fairness”. Because when people don’t have a job and can’t afford basic necessities, fairness is what we’re all most worried about. “Don’t worry, honey, we’ll feed our family on fairness.” “We don’t have to worry about retirement; we have a 401k filled with fairness.”

POSTSCRIPT: Yes, I realize that the bill would also protect some people from being hit by the AMT, and that constitutes helping someone. But that’s just legislative vote-buying. Obama has specifically endorsed, as “fairness”, the notion of hurting someone to help no one.

Moreover, the AMT is a good case in point. It was designed to hit a very small number of taxpayers (about 30, if memory serves), which is probably narrower than the Buffett rule. But over time it has grown to hit millions. The Buffett rule would do the same.

He calls comedian Al Franken a “leading legal scholar.”

The Department of Labor is plastering its walls with propaganda posters.

An interesting note in the Obama administration’s battle to force Catholics to provide contraceptives and abortifacients: President Obama lied to Archbishop Dolan, telling him that the administration would ameliorate the mandates and then doing no such thing. Dolan was surprised and dismayed by this, but really shouldn’t have been.

Will this help Catholics to learn that they are supporting a party that despises them? Better late than never.

In most recessions, employment participation experiences a moderate drop and then a rebound, but not so in the Obama economy. Here’s an astonishing chart:

Something historically bad has happened. So many people either have been unable to find work, have given up on finding work, or have found that work no longer pays enough to be worth having, that employment participation has reversed three decades of progress and returned to the Carter era.

(Via The Transparency Revolution.)

The Obama administration has banned new coal-fired power plants. Is anyone surprised that his announced “all of the above” energy strategy was a lie?

A good ad from the RNC:

Oh, and this one is even more to the point:

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

John Hinderaker notes a troubling story:

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

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

James O’Keefe strikes again:

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

(Previous post.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Previous post.)

Iowahawk:

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

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

Joe Biden, doing the Joe Biden thing again:

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

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

(Emphasis mine.)

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

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

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

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

(Via Ricochet.)

Forbes reports:

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

(Emphasis mine.)

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

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

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

(Emphasis mine.)

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

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

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

(Via Power Line.)

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

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

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

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

Nice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Daily Caller reports:

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

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

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

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

President Obama thinks that oil is $1.25 a barrel:

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

(That’s the White House transcript.)

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

(Via Hot Air.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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