Internet Scofflaw

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

(Via Instpaundit.)

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

(Via Althouse.)

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

The Washington Post reports:

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

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

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

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

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

(Previous post.)

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

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

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

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

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

The Washington Examiner reports:

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

Watch this. It’s four minutes well spent.

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

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

Read the whole thing.

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

The gentleman doth protest too much, methinks:

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

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

What does President Obama have against charity?

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

(Previous post.)

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

Fox News reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

That First Amendment is sounding pretty good right now.

Fox News reports:

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

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

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

Glenn Reynolds observes:

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

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

Occupy Wall Street is packed with limousine liberals:

Many “Occupy Wall Street” protesters arrested in New York City reside in more luxurious homes than some of their rhetoric might suggest, a Daily Caller investigation has found.

For each of the 984 Occupy Wall Street protesters arrested in New York City between September 18 and October 15, police collected and filed an information sheet recording the arrestee’s name, age, sex, criminal charge, home address and — in most cases — race. The Daily Caller has obtained all of this information from a source in the New York City government.

Among addresses for which information is available, single-family homes listed on those police intake forms have a median value of $305,000 — a far higher number than the $185,400 median value of owner-occupied housing units in the United States.

Some of the homes where “Occupy” arrestees reside, viewed through Google Maps and the Multiple Listing Service real estate database, are the definition of opulence.

Using county assessors and online resources such as Zillow.com, TheDC estimated property values and rents for 87 percent of the homes and 59 percent of the apartments listed in the arrest records.

Even in the nation’s currently depressed housing market, at least 95 of the protesters’ residences are worth approximately $500,000 or more. (RELATED SLIDESHOW: Opulent homes of the ’99 percent’)The median monthly rent for those living in apartments whose information is readily available is $1,850. . .

While it would not be fair to conclude that the arrested protesters are fully representative of a movement that is not completely understood, this information forms the most complete snapshot yet of the demonstrations’ more militant participants. It also reinforces the persistent critique of protesters as entitled, upper-class agitators with few legitimate grievances.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Occupy Wall Street leaders are staying in luxury hotels. (Via Instapundit.)

Robert Heinlein:

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Barack Obama:

We had reversed the recession, avoided a depression, gotten the economy moving again. But over the last six months we’ve had a run of bad luck.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Washington Post reports:

House Democrats on Wednesday called for Congress to expand its investigation into federal loan programs to include a Bush-era loan to the bankrupt broadband Internet firm Open Range.

Open Range went bankrupt earlier this month after receiving the federal government’s biggest broadband loan totaling $267 million. Its collapse has put in jeopardy $74 million in money doled out to the firm. . .

“Your reaction to the Open Range bankruptcy could not be more different than your reaction to the Solyndra bankruptcy,” the lawmakers said in their letter to Energy and Commerce Committee chairman Fred Upton (R-Mich.).

It Democrats think this will counter the Solyndra scandal, just because the loan was made during the Bush administration, they clearly don’t understand the problem. To wit:

1. It is not alleged that Open Range exploited personal/political contacts within the Bush administration to get the loan, or that the loan was revived after being shelved under the previous administration, or that the loan was issued in violation of procedure, or that its renegotiation was contrary to law, which are just a few of the many aspects of the Solyndra affair that make it a scandal and not just a bad decision.
2. The conservative/libertarian argument that the government should not be trying to pick winners and losers (and is incapable of doing so) is not limited to Democratic administrations. We’re not happy that the Bush administration was in that business either. The Open Range bankruptcy simply underscores that point.

(Previous post.)

Earlier this month President Obama said he had no regrets about loaning half a billion dollars to Solyndra, but perhaps that was just an instance of Obama’s inability to admit a mistake. The White House now says it will review all of its green loans.

(Previous post.)

Thermal imaging shows that nearly all the tents in the Occupy London protest are left empty at night.

Perhaps Illinois should just dispense with the pretense of democratic government:

Escalating his war of words with the Legislature, Gov. Pat Quinn Thursday called for an investigation into who cast votes for as many as 18 House members who were off the House floor when utility rate-hike legislation that he opposed passed in the blink of an eye. . .

Shortly before the first part of the rate-hike package surfaced in the House, as many as 18 Democrats were called off the floor to attend a budget briefing. Some of those lawmakers told the Sun-Times they returned from the briefing to see their votes had been recorded, even though they personally hadn’t cast them and, in some cases, opposite of the way they wanted.

POSTSCRIPT: It’s not just Illinois either. We also saw the falsification of a floor vote in the US House of Representatives back when it was under Democratic management.

(Via Instapundit.)

A Gallup poll of small businesses finds that the biggest problem facing small business is complying with government regulations, not — as the pro-stimulus crowd would have us believe — lack of consumer demand. In fact, lack of consumer demand doesn’t even come in second; it barely edges lack of credit (thanks Dodd-Frank!) for third place.

The US Commission on International Religious Freedom is set to be dissolved because of one anonymous senator.

I don’t have a problem with the idea that one senator can place a hold on legislation, but they idea that he or she can do it anonymously is an affront to the entire idea of a republic.

I love Occupy Wall Street; a richer vein of irony is hard to find. These protesters, who say they want the wealth of the top 1% redistributed, turn out to have quite bourgeois sensibilities when it comes to their property. They don’t like it when people steal their stuff, squat in their tents, or freeload on their labor.

The law requires that Congress pass a budget, but Democrats haven’t done so in years. A few members of Congress are proposing a new rule whereby Congress would not be able to pass any other legislation while the budget is overdue.

I like the spirit of this, but I can see some practical problems. Fortunately I have a simpler idea: Congress should not get paid until it passes a budget.

ABC News reports:

At a million-dollar San Francisco fundraiser today, President Obama warned his recession-battered supporters that if he loses the 2012 election it could herald a new, painful era of self-reliance in America.

The Obama administration has been caught revising old press releases to replace embarrassing references to Sun Power with a different company. CNBC’s comment is rather understated:

Generally, it is not considered correct procedure to revise old press releases retroactively on the Web.

Indeed not. And an Instapundit reader notes that this isn’t even the first time. The Obama administration was also caught revising old State Department reports (from the previous administration even) to replace “Jerusalem, Israel” with “Jerusalem”.

I agree with him, it is very strange that this isn’t seen as a big deal.

Step 1: President Obama attacks companies that purchase private planes. Step 2: Aircraft demand falls. Step 3: Aircraft manufacturing employees are put out of work:

Piper Aircraft Inc. on Monday announced it will lay off 150 employees and release 55 contract personnel as a result of a decision to indefinitely suspend its Piper Altaire light business jet program.

(Via Instapundit.)

The New York office of ACORN (under its new name, New York Communities for Change) is paying people $10 an hour to participate in the Occupy Wall Street protests.

(Via Instapundit.)

Democrats on the “Super Committee” have come up with a radical new way to cut the deficit:

According to two congressional sources, the Democratic proposal would get to $1.3 trillion in federal budget savings by hiking revenues to raise half of the money. The plan would cut about $400 billion from Medicare — half through benefits cuts and half through provider savings — and proposes raising another $300 billion through stimulus spending.

(Emphasis mine.)

Raising money through stimulus spending! Brilliant! I’m a little short this month myself, so I’m going to go out and buy a flat-panel TV.

Washington DC is now the nation’s richest metropolitan area. I’m reminded of Imperial Rome, which, it is said, exported armies and imported grain.

From a poll of Occupy Wall Street protesters:

If only.

(Via Instapundit.)

Drug reimportation is back on the table, being pushed this time by David Vitter, a Louisiana Republican who ought to know better. Grace Marie-Turner attacks the scheme on the grounds of safety, which could be valid (I don’t know), but the knock-down argument against it is economic.

The short version of the argument is that we cannot realize real savings by shipping a product to Canada and back. The long version is here, the upshot of which is that reimportation would screw Canada over without accruing any discernible benefit to us.

Well said:

The social contract exists so that everyone doesn’t have to squat in the dust holding a spear to protect his woman and his meat all day every day. It does not exist so that the government can take your spear, your meat, and your woman because it knows better what to do with them.

In Chicago, a well-connected union lobbyist can earn an Illinois teachers’ pension of $108,000 per year for one day of work.

(Via Instapundit.)

Investor’s Business Daily has an important reminder of who was responsible for the subprime crash:

POSTSCRIPT: IBD also notes:

And the remaining 29% of private-label junk was mostly attributable to Countrywide Financial, which was under the heel of HUD and its “fair-lending” edicts.

Countrywide Financial should ring a bell.

(Via Instapundit.)

How not to solve the problem:

The European Commission is considering a ban on rating agencies publishing their assessments of EU countries in difficulty, the Financial Times Deutschland reports.

Sheesh.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Competitive Enterprise Institute charges that the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy has been moving discussions to UN servers in order to hide them from Freedom of Information Act requests.

This administration has withheld records on climate change from FOIA requests before.

(Via Power Line.)

A Wall Street Journal op-ed takes a look at how well stimulus plans have worked in the past. Answer: not well. But we never seem to learn.

In the United Kingdom — the exemplar of government-run health care that Democrats are working to bring to America — hospitals have been issuing do-not-resuscitate orders without consulting patients or their families.

But at least the government jumped all over them, right?

Although at least five hospitals were found by the CQC [Care Quality Commission] to be in breach of medical guidance regarding consultation with families, the watchdog declared four of the five to be “compliant” with its standards on dignity for patients, which cover broader aspects of care.

In a national report published about the checks last week, the CQC made no mention of its findings about the misuse of DNR notices.

Oh.

Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-IL) says that President Obama should ditch the Constitution:

Illinois Democratic Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. told The Daily Caller on Wednesday that congressional opposition to the American Jobs Act is akin to the Confederate “states in rebellion.” . . .

“We’ve got to go further. I support what [Obama] does. Clearly, Republicans are not going to be for it but if the administration can handle administratively what can be done, we should pursue it. And if there are extra-constitutional opportunities that allow the president administratively to put the people to work, he should pursue every single one of them,” Jackson suggested.

(Emphasis mine.)

And the grand purpose to which we should abandon our 224-year experiment with constitutional government? Jackson wants to send every unemployed person a check for $40 thousand.

(Via Instapundit.)

It’s been pretty obvious for a while that it was going to happen, but the Obama administration has officially pulled the plug on the CLASS program. For those who haven’t been following this closely, the CLASS program was a fraudulent long-term care program in Obamacare.

It could never possibly have worked, but was included in health care nationalization because, the way it was scored, it generated $70 billion in deficit reduction over 10 years. However, although a 10-year horizon can be spoofed, it’s much harder to spoof a 75-year horizon, which is what they had to do in order to bring the program into reality.

BONUS: For further amusement, look through a list of prominent Democrats singing the praise of CLASS. Every one of these people is either dishonest or incapable of basic math.

Joe Biden says crime will soar if Congress fails to pass President Obama’s stimulus jobs bill.

New York Post columnist Michael Goodwin says things are not going well for President Obama:

The reports are not good, disturbing even. I have heard basically the same story four times in the last 10 days, and the people doing the talking are in New York and Washington and are spread across the political spectrum.

The gist is this: President Obama has become a lone wolf, a stranger to his own government. He talks mostly, and sometimes only, to friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett and to David Axelrod, his political strategist.

Everybody else, including members of his Cabinet, have little face time with him except for brief meetings that serve as photo ops. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner both have complained, according to people who have talked to them, that they are shut out of important decisions.

The president’s workdays are said to end early, often at 4 p.m. He usually has dinner in the family residence with his wife and daughters, then retreats to a private office. One person said he takes a stack of briefing books. Others aren’t sure what he does.

If the reports are accurate, and I believe they are, they paint a picture of an isolated man trapped in a collapsing presidency.

Who knows if it’s true, but it’s plausible to me. This is a man whose self-regard dramatically exceeds his ability, and who is facing his first real taste of adversity. No one, himself included, really knew what he is made of, until now.

(Via Instapundit.)

Congressional investigators are scrutinizing another one of the Obama administration’s green boondoggles. Sun Power has received twice as much money from the government as Solyndra, and also appears to be in financial distress:

The Energy Department says on its website that the $1.2 billion loan to help build the California Valley Solar Ranch in San Luis Obispo County, a project that will help create 15 permanent jobs, which adds up to the equivalent of $80 million in taxpayer money for each job. But the Energy Department stands by the project. . .

SunPower posted $150 million in losses during the first half of this year and its debt is nearly 80 percent of its market value. The company is also facing class action lawsuits for misstating its earnings. . .

The company is also politically connected. Rep. George Miller’s son is SunPower’s top lobbyist. The elder Miller, a powerful California Democrat, toured the plant last October with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar.

(Via Instapundit.)

Meanwhile, the White House is refusing to turn over documents relating to Solyndra.

(Previous post.)

California Governor Jerry Brown (D) has vetoed a bill that would require law enforcement to obtain a warrant to rummage through your mobile phone. Let’s please not have any more nonsense about the left’s dedication to civil liberties.

(Via Instapundit.)

Occupy LA is just a bunch of communist revolutionaries:

So, ultimately, the bourgeoisie won’t go without violent means. Revolution! Yes, revolution that is led by the working class.

Long live revolution! Long live socialism!

Why is the media portraying these people as some kind of laudable, mainstream movement?

(Via Instapundit.)

Andrew Klavan’s latest:

(Via Instapundit.)

The Boston Herald reports.

What? You mean these are really just standard leftists, not ordinary people objecting to Wall Street? You could knock me over with a feather.

(Via Instapundit.)