Internet Scofflaw

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

(Via Power Line.)

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

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

Well, well, well:

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

(Via Instapundit.)

The Wall Street Journal reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

The Wall Street Journal reports:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Hot Air.)

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

(Via Power Line.)

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

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

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

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is Free Press?

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

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

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

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

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

An FCC spokesman failed to return multiple calls seeking comment.

(Via Instapundit.)

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

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

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

(Via Power Line.)

If the Democrats had the better argument viz a viz the budget, would they feel the need to lie about the Ryan plan?

While Barney Frank was protecting Fannie Mae from government scrutiny during the housing bubble, he arranged to get his partner a job there.

The Wikileaks gang styles themselves as transparency crusaders, but this story (especially when combined with Wikileaks’s recent efforts to stop leaks) shows that they are just vandals putting on airs.

President Obama has signed a bill extending the Patriot Act.

Good grief. Rarely is the hypocrisy so blatant as Democrats calling for the “nuclear option” to put an end to filibusters in light of the defeat of a judicial appointment.

Some are trying to allege that the Republicans are being hypocritical for defending the filibuster now that they are in the minority. That’s frankly dishonest. It’s one thing for the side that lost (the Republicans) to play by the rules they were unable to change. It’s quite another for the side that won (the Democrats) to change the rules they previously insisted upon, because those rules have since become inconvenient to them.

Interesting how demagoguery and hypocrisy tend to go hand-in-hand:

The new chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee was criticizing Republicans who opposed President Obama’s bailout of the American automakers union, oh, no, make that American automakers.

“If it were up to the candidates for president on the Republican side,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, “we would be driving foreign cars. They would have let the auto industry in America go down the tubes.”

So Michael O’Brien of The Hill newspaper went and checked what kind of automobile loyal-American-car-supporter Debbie Wasserman Schultz owns.

Yup, you guessed it — Japanese.

(Via Instapundit.)

The White House has a new rapid propaganda czar (“Director of Progressive Media & Online Response”). Jesse Lee’s job will be to respond to critical stories online, and encourage favorable stories in the “progressive media”. This sort of activity is ordinarily paid for by political parties, but now it will be paid for by our tax dollars.

Who is this guy? David Steinberg at the PJ Tatler took a look. The most interesting thing he found is that Lee’s wife was connected with (and, although we can’t be sure, was probably responsible for) MoveOn’s infamous “General Betray Us” ad.

Despite being a small and shrinking portion of the workforce, unions have received over half the Obamacare waivers. What standards the administration is using to award waivers? They don’t have a consistent answer to that question.

(Via Instapundit.) (Previous post.)

Marc Thiessen writes in the Washington Post:

In a television interview last October, President Obama accidentally let slip a key element of his political philosophy: “We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.” . . .

This incident is worth remembering as the president prepares to issue a far-reaching executive order that would require the government to collect detailed information about the political activities of anyone applying for a federal contract. . .

Why is this a bad idea? Recall that in August 1971, Richard Nixon’s White House counsel John Dean penned a confidential memorandum in which he proposed creating a list of “our political enemies.” The purpose of the exercise, according to Dean, was to “determine what sorts of dealings these individuals have with the Federal Government and how we can best screw them (e.g., grant availability, federal contracts.. . . etc.)” Since then, enormous steps have been taken to clean up the federal contracting process and ensure that government contracts are granted solely on the basis of merit. Obama’s proposed executive order would undermine that progress, reverse years of effort to remove politics from contracting decisions and create incentives for impropriety.

Let’s not forget, this bunch is from Chicago. To them, increasing the importance of politics and graft in government contracting is a feature, not a bug.

(Via Instapundit.)

Seattle contemplates a ban on paper cups.

Don’t think it can’t happen either. This is the same town that has been known to close streets for the sole purpose of making driving less convenient.

There is a lot to like about Herman Cain, but you can’t be taken seriously as a presidential candidate without a familiarity with basic foreign policy issues. That includes the issue of right-to-return in the Israel-Palestinian conflict, which Cain seems not to understand.

POSTSCRIPT: Judging by the question, Chris Wallace doesn’t entirely understand the issue either, as he spoke of Palestinians having been kicked out of Israel in 1948. A man ready to be president would be able to correct him.

(Via Michael Barone.)

Could New Hampshire become a right-to-work state? That would give them a huge competitive advantage in the northeast.

Cynthia McKinney does what Cynthia McKinney does:

A former U.S. congresswoman slammed U.S. policy on Libyan state TV late Saturday and stressed the “last thing we need to do is spend money on death, destruction and war.”

The station is fiercely loyal to Moammar Gadhafi and her interview was spliced with what appeared to be rallies in support of the embattled Libyan leader.

So she gives aid and comfort to the enemy during Democratic administrations as well as Republican ones. At least she’s consistent.

Reports the New York Post.

President Obama, at a fundraiser in Austin:

Internationally, we’ve gone through a Teutonic [sic] shift in the Middle East that could have enormous ramifications for years to come.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s amusing to picture what a Teutonic shift might look like.

Mitch Daniels is out.

AP reports:

A proposal to ban the circumcision of male children in San Francisco has been cleared to appear on the November ballot, setting the stage for the nation’s first public vote on what has long been considered a private family matter.

But even in a city with a long-held reputation for pushing boundaries, the measure is drawing heavy fire. Opponents are lining up against it, saying a ban on a religious rite considered sacred by Jews and Muslims is a blatant violation of constitutional rights. . .

If the measure passes, circumcision would be prohibited among males under the age of 18. The practice would become a misdemeanor offense punishable by a fine of up to $1,000 or up to one year in jail. There would be no religious exemptions.

The mere fact that the measure could make the ballot tells us a lot about what “tolerance” really means in San Francisco. It will be very interesting to see if it passes.

President Obama says he is still working on gun control, “under the radar”, says Sarah Brady. Fortunately, I don’t think “under the radar” will work. The gun-rights community is paying close attention, and whatever Obama tries to sneak in by regulation will end up as a political issue.

(Via Instapundit.)

Medicare and Social Security are in even worse shape than we thought.

An AFL-CIO official boasts of intercepting their opponents’ emails.

If their opponents were foreign terrorists, this would be a scandal. Since they are not, it’s not even a story.

Of the latest batch of Obamacare waivers, 1 in 5 went to Nancy Pelosi’s Congressional district. With 435 Congressional districts (not counting DC), it seems hard to explain this by chance alone.

What do we, the public, know about the decision process for waivers? Anything at all?

Run an op-ed the White House disapproves of, and get yourself kicked out of the White House press pool.

The New York Times isn’t giving up, but their complaints are starting to become a little thin:

In downtown Baghdad, a police headquarters has been painted two shades of purple: lilac and grape. The central bank, a staid building in many countries, is coated in bright red candy cane stripes. . .

Baghdad has weathered invasion, occupation, sectarian warfare and suicide bombers. But the latest scourge, tastelessness, may prove the toughest to overcome.

An Instapundit reader remarks:

When all the New York Times can complain about is the color of buildings in Baghdad, can we officially say that the war was a success?

BONUS: Perhaps sensing that their thesis was a bit overwrought, the NYT has changed the final sentence of the quote to “But now it faces a new scourge: tastelessness.”

If this report is accurate, the NLRB’s horrifying decision to try to block Boeing’s decision to locate a factory in South Carolina is not some crazy outlier, but the first wave of a deliberate push by President Obama’s NLRB to give unions a veto over company decisions.

Atlas Shrugged is starting to feel a lot less alarmist than it used to feel.

If this Gallup poll is accurate, Republicans have the upper hand in the debt ceiling debate.

With the budget, Democrats can demagogue specific line items to attack budget cuts. As Milton Friedman famously pointed out, special interests are more passionate about protecting their specific perks than the general interests are about cutting them all. But with the debt ceiling there are no specific items to demagogue; the debate is on general terms, which favors fiscal conservatives.

The Economist comments on the Kahn affair:

LEAVE aside the details of the allegations against Dominique Strauss Kahn, the head of the IMF (his lawyer indicates he will plead not guilty). Just note that the New York Times states that he was staying in a $3,000 a night suite and was taking a first class flight to Paris. This is the IMF, the body that imposes austerity on indebted countries and is funded by global taxpayers. And this was the likely leading socialist candidate for the French presidency.

Yes, but how is this unusual? You see this whenever you look at the amenities of the ruling class. Socialism’s true purpose is to protect the privilege of the nomenklatura. Everything else is just propaganda.

(Via Instapundit.)

Mike Huckabee will not run for president. This is good news. I would vote for him over Obama, but I wouldn’t be happy about it.

It’s hard to find anything to disagree with in this Wall Street Journal editorial, criticizing Mitt Romney for his glaringly inconsistent position on health care nationalization. I really want to like Romney, but he’s weak on my number one domestic issue.

It’s not too late for him to reverse course on this. No one remembers flip-flops from the primary season, and the ever-lengthening primary season is moving them ever-further from election day. But he needs to get on with the flop. The WSJ’s advice for how to handle this is good, I think.

In what can be seen only as a reluctant acknowledgement of political reality, President Obama has reversed course and approved more oil drilling. It may be too late, though, with oil drilling rigs already leaving US waters for greener pastures.

The Democrats who control the Illinois legislature called a vote on a budget bill that no one had seen.