Internet Scofflaw

When the ATF isn’t facilitating sales of weapons to Mexican drug cartels, they are starting 150 acre brush fires.

(Previous post.)

There’s some very delicate phrasing in Timothy Geithner’s recent talk about “looking forward to the full repayment of our loan to [Chrysler]”. By “our loan” he doesn’t mean all of our loans to Chrysler. He means one of our loans to Chrysler — the $7.1 billion loan that we’re still hoping to see paid back. The other loans, on which we’ve lost a combined $3.5 billion, that money is gone for good.

(Via Kaus Files.)

POSTSCRIPT: I wasn’t able to locate the document that The Truth About Cars shows in the link above, but the Congressional report on the auto bailout has the same information on page 52.

In today’s America, the NLRB decides where companies build their factories, and the president can fire a CEO. But don’t worry, we’re not becoming socialist. That would be alarmist.

If you wanted to undermine freedom of religion, can you think of a better way than expanding the notion of religion to include every sort of taste or opinion? A UK tribunal has ruled that supporting public broadcasting is a form of religion.

WikiLeaks is cracking down on leaks:

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange now makes his associates sign a draconian nondisclosure agreement that, among other things, asserts that the organization’s huge trove of leaked material is “solely the property of WikiLeaks,” according to a report Wednesday. . .

The confidentiality agreement (.pdf), revealed by the New Statesman, imposes a penalty of 12 million British pounds– nearly $20 million — on anyone responsible for a significant leak of the organization’s unpublished material.

South Carolina is taking matters into its own hands. Who knows if this will stand up in court, but it’s great that they are trying. If nothing else, it will be good to see the federal government have to defend the light bulb ban.

Der Spiegel reports:

A Hamburg judge has filed a criminal complaint against Chancellor Angela Merkel for “endorsing a crime” after she stated she was “glad” that Osama bin Laden was killed by US forces.

I wonder if it’s time to give up on Europe.

(Via the Corner.)

It’s a pity the Brits don’t have the freedom of the press.

The particularly perverse thing about this story is that the British government is arguing that Twitter feeds from press organizations are a form of press, and that opens them up to tighter regulation. (Via Instapundit.)

Remember when Democrats’ rallying cry was “count every vote”? That was then.

Now, Joanne Kloppenberg, the defeated union candidate for Wisconsin Supreme Court, is working to get as many votes thrown out as she can. In one instance, she succeeded in getting 18 votes from cloistered nuns thrown out because they were missing witness signatures. (That gained her 10 of the seven thousand votes she needs.)

My opinion has always been that the election rules should be applied punctiliously. But it certainly is no good when the rules are applied strictly in only one direction.

There was a time when Paul Krugman was serious. In 1996 he wrote:

Generous benefits for the elderly are feasible as long as there are relatively few retirees compared with the number of taxpaying workers — which is the current situation, because the baby boomers swell the workforce. In 2010, however, the boomers will begin to retire. . . The budgetary effects of this demographic tidal wave are straightforward to compute, but so huge as almost to defy comprehension.

. . .

In fact, the so-called ”trust funds” are making barely any provisions for the future. In another spectacular statistic, Mr. Peterson notes that if Medicare and Social Security had to obey the same rules that apply to private pensions, the reported Federal deficit this year would be not its official $150 billion, but roughly $1.5 trillion.

In short, the Federal Government, however solid its finances may currently appear, is in fact living utterly beyond its means. While the present generation of retirees is doing very nicely, the promises that are being made to those now working cannot be honored.

Today, demagoguing entitlements is the core Democratic strategy. Now Krugman toes the line, taking the trust fund very seriously and smearing anyone concerned about entitlement (such as 1996 Krugman) as dishonest:

Social Security has been running surpluses for the last quarter-century, banking those surpluses in a special account, the so-called trust fund. The program won’t have to turn to Congress for help or cut benefits until or unless the trust fund is exhausted, which the program’s actuaries don’t expect to happen until 2037 — and there’s a significant chance, according to their estimates, that that day will never come. . .

So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

I don’t even understand what he is alleging that dishonest people like me and 1996 Krugman are saying. Yes, the trust fund is an accounting fiction. Social Security takes in tax money and spends it on benefits. For decades it has run a surplus doing so. (Those surpluses “don’t count”? What is that even supposed to mean?) Now it is running a deficit. Soon — long before the “trust fund” runs out of imaginary money — it will be running a massive, unaffordable deficit.

I paid $4 per gallon for gas yesterday. The Obama administration’s energy policy is working.

Yes, it’s working. Because this is exactly what they said they wanted to accomplish, according to the Secretary of Energy, Steven Chu:

“Somehow we have to figure out how to boost the price of gasoline to the levels in Europe,” Mr. Chu, who directs the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, said in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in September.

The Secretary of Transportation, Ray LaHood, has also explained that it is his aim to “coerce people out of their cars.”

Neither of the aims have fully succeeded yet, but they are making excellent progress:

Note how the period of soaring gas prices coincides almost precisely with the Obama administration.

A fascinating story on one of California’s worst ideas: a scheme whereby municipalities are encouraged to steal property using imminent domain, and are rewarded by diverting state tax money into municipal slush funds. (Via Instapundit.)

Bob Zubrin has a proposal for ending gerrymandering. He proposes that a quantitative measure of the compactness (or conversely, the irregularity) of legislative districts be devised (such as the ratio of the area to the square of the circumference). Then both parties submit a districting plan and the more compact (less irregular) plan wins.

I’ve had a similar thought, but why limit it to the parties? Let’s “crowd-source” it: let anyone at all introduce a plan and take the best one.

Canada’s CBC network is in hot water for reporting election results. Canada has a law that bars the media from reporting election results in any province in which the polls are still open — a law that becomes more of a farce every year since results are easily obtainable via the internet.

No. Some day, perhaps, but today? No respectable scientist would suggest such a thing.

But Think Progress seems to think that it is. And here’s the kicker, they say so with great disdain for the anti-science bent of the “deniers”.

The Obama administration is floating a mileage tax, supported by mandatory GPS tracking.

An administration spokeperson adamantly denies that this is an administration proposal. I’m glad of that, but it’s bad enough that someone liked the idea enough to have a bill drafted.

Canadians have elected Stephen Harper to a third term, and (according to projections) his first majority government. The Liberals and the separatist Bloc Quebecois were decimated. The openly socialist NDP will become the opposition party, which should lead to clarified debates in Parliament.

All in all, today was a good day.

The United Auto Workers is in trouble: The unionized segment of the automobile industry is dying. Most (nearly all? I don’t have the numbers.) of the growth in automobile manufacturing in the United States is with foreign automakers in right-to-work states. If the UAW can’t find a way to unionize those plants, it will die.

National Review’s F. Vincent Vernuccio and Iain Murray explain (subscription required) the UAW’s strategy. The NLRB, now controlled by Obama appointees, has instituted new rules that allow a union election to be carried out by card check (i.e., without a secret ballot) if the employer agrees. Thus, if the employer chooses not to fight the union, the union is permitted to intimidate employees into agreeing to be represented.

How does the UAW plan to get them to go along? The UAW’s president was nice enough to tell us:

If a company makes the bad business decision to engage in anti-union activity, suppress the rights of speech and assembly, we will launch a global campaign to brand that company a human-rights violator.

And lest anyone miss the message, the UAW has also said that it will defend companies from attacks “from community groups that send the message that the company is not operating in a socially responsible way” if they do not fight the union.

Ominously, the UAW has already hired Jesse Jackson, who is notorious for faux human-rights extortion. In the coming months, expect to see allegations of human rights violations leveled at a major foreign automaker (probably Toyota). When it happens, you’ll know why.

The White House has banned a San Francisco Chronicle reporter from the pool for recording some protesters at an Obama fundraiser. (Then they denied having done so, but the Chronicle stood by its story.)

(Via Instapundit.)

It has come to this for the world’s most dishonest Nobel-prize-winning economist: When Paul Krugman was cited as an authority at a town meeting in Wisconsin, the room broke into laughter.

POSTSCRIPT: On a serious note, I’ll remind readers of Robert Barro’s comments on Krugman. Krugman columns are typically on macroeconomics (when he’s not writing more general libels, such as blaming shootings on Republicans), an area in which he has no special expertise.

Jimmy Carter really is one of the world’s stupidest people.

Wisconsin State Journal reports:

UW Health doctors who wrote sick notes for protesters at the Capitol in February face penalties up to a loss of pay and leadership positions, the UW School of Medicine and Public Health said Tuesday.

The medical school reviewed 22 UW Health doctors said to have been involved in writing medical excuses for protesters attending rallies over Gov. Scott Walker’s budget proposals, according to a medical school statement. . .

The Wisconsin Department of Regulation and Licensing and the Medical Examining Board are investigating eight people who allegedly wrote notes, the agencies said last week.

The Wisconsin Medical Society criticized the doctors’ actions, saying they threatened the public’s trust in the medical profession.

The Madison School District told teachers who turned in fraudulent sick notes to rescind them by last month or face discipline. The district received more than 1,000 notes from teachers during the protests.

These guys thought they could get away with anything, and seem to be surprised to find out they were wrong. Frankly, I’m a little surprised too.

(Via Instapundit.)

If you’re President Obama, you can’t run a sound fiscal policy that keeps our nation’s credit from ruin, but you can pressure Standard & Poors not to report it. (And be just about as successful.)

I suspect we’re going to see renewed political attacks against the rating agencies soon.

Massachusetts is following Wisconsin’s lead and limiting the collective bargaining privileges of public-sector unions. Does this mean we’ve won?

A British man has been arrested for singing “Kung Fu Fighting”. It’s sad to see the country that invented individual liberty abandoning it.

(Via Instapundit.)

A good example of how President Obama sees the world: Rising gasoline prices are not a substantiative problem, to be addressed by sound energy policy. They are a political problem, to be addressed by attacks on oil companies.

Paul Krugman was delighted to charge the entire right with complicity in the Loughner shooting, because we (like everyone else) used the occasional violent metaphor. But Krugman now seems to have gotten over his excruciating sensitivity to violent metaphors, as he is now writing about dealing with bad ideas with “another shot to the head”.

And save your breath if you were thinking of protesting that Krugman isn’t talking about shooting people. Not a single one of the persons (e.g., Michelle Bachmann) that Krugman smeared were talking about shooting people either. That excuse doesn’t cut it in Krugman’s new era of civility.

(Via Althouse.)

Gen. Ricardo Sanchez used to be reviled by the left as nearly a war criminal. (From particularly strident leftists you can strike the “nearly”.) But all that stuff is forgotten now that he is running for the Senate as a Democrat. As Glenn Reynolds put it: “It’s like they never cared about this stuff except insofar as they could score cheap partisan points.”

POSTSCRIPT: Democrats will doubtless turn this argument on its head and accuse Republicans of hypocrisy when their attacks on Sanchez begin. Let’s pre-but that argument now: Our opinion of Sanchez has changed, but for non-opportunistic reasons, and long before Sanchez hinted at becoming a political candidate. He has been a vociferous opponent of the surge — the strategy that won the war — even well after it was clearly working. The man has bad military judgement, and nothing else on his resume.

President Obama is taking a first step toward blackballing GOP supporters from receiving government contracts:

The White House has been circulating a draft Executive Order that would make many provisions of the failed DISCLOSE Act law by fiat. . . The order would require all companies that sign contracts with the federal government to report on the personal political activities of their officers and directors.

The Chamber of Commerce’s Blair Latoff told Politico that the order “lays the groundwork for a political litmus test for companies that wish to do business with the federal government” and is “less about disclosure than intimidation.”

There is a very simple way to prove that this Obama order is all about punishing his enemies and rewarding his friends: unions that sign collective bargaining contracts with the federal government are exempt from the “disclosure” requirements.

The TSA is targeting its critics for additional scrutiny:

CNN has obtained a list of roughly 70 “behavioral indicators” that TSA behavior detection officers use to identify potentially “high risk” passengers at the nation’s airports.

Many of the indicators, as characterized in open government reports, are behaviors and appearances that may be indicative of stress, fear or deception. None of them, as the TSA has long said, refer to or suggest race, religion or ethnicity.

But one addresses passengers’ attitudes towards security, and how they express those attitudes. It reads: “Very arrogant and expresses contempt against airport passenger procedures.”

Uh oh. I think my contempt is rising as we speak.

(Via Instapundit.)

Yet another signing statement from the president who pledged never to use signing statements.

Nice:

White House: When Obama said Paul Ryan is ‘not on the level,’ he meant Ryan is ‘absolutely sincere’

The pharmaceutical industry is upset that the Obama administration is reneging on the deal it made to buy the industry’s support for health care nationalization:

Drug industry sources tell FOX Business the Administration is backtracking on what is called the “PhRMA deal” in health reform, a deal that was struck behind closed doors in late 2009 and early 2010 in order to get the industry to support and endorse health-care reform.

In the “PhRMA” deal, drug companies would fork over $80 billion in fees as well as give drug discounts to seniors in Medicare over 10 years, among other things.

In exchange, the White House agreed, among other items, to not force the drug industry to accept rebates on drugs sold through Medicare Part D, a program launched under President George W. Bush to subsidize prescription drugs for seniors.

But President Barack Obama’s new deficit push calls for those Medicare rebates, via the Simpson-Bowles plan.

The deficit plan “has blown the deal to smithereens,” says William S. Smith, managing director of Healthcare National Strategies, a D.C.-based government affairs consulting firm. “The Obama Administration has repudiated the PhRMA deal,” says Smith, a former vice president for US public affairs and policy at Pfizer (PFE).

I know it shouldn’t, but this really makes me smile. These people sold us all out to protect their own interests, and I’m glad to see them get screwed for it. I hope this example will teach the next industry in line the folly of trying to appease the rapacious state.

President Obama explains his unpopularity in Texas, saying “Texas has always been a pretty Republican state, for, you know, historic reasons.” Good grief. Just one data point: Republicans took control of the Texas legislature for the first time since Reconstruction in 2002.

Glenn Reynolds piles on:

Apparently, when Obama taught Constitutional Law he never got around to teaching the Texas White (Democratic) Primary cases. Or talking about which side was which in the Civil War . . . .

. . . It was the Texas Democrats who excluded black voters (and Mexican-Americans) from their primaries (and then dodged further with the Jaybird Democratic Association when the courts struck down the White Primaries). This is a major set of cases under state action, and I’m surprised that Obama is unfamiliar with this history. I wonder what he covered in his Constitutional Law classes?

I would not have thought that the Obama administration could still shock me. I was wrong.

The National Labor Relations Board has ruled that Boeing cannot build its new 787 plant in South Carolina, where the labor environment is friendlier than Puget Sound. The board claims that Boeing expanding operations in a right-to-work state “discourag[es] membership in a labor organization” and thus violates the law.

This is so astonishing, it bears repeating: the NLRB is trying to dictate to a private company where it builds its plant.

The NLRB relies on the courts to enforce its rulings, and presumably this one will not stand. The NLRB certainly has no authority under the law to prevent businesses from locating in right-to-work states.

Nevertheless, this is an outrage. Ed Morrissey likens this to Ayn Rand’s fictional anti-dog-eat-dog rule. I think that’s right. If anything, I think that understates the outrage of this. Surely none can now deny that we are suffering under a socialist administration.

POSTSCRIPT: The NLRB currently has four seats (one is vacant). The chairwoman is a Clinton appointment (unwisely reappointed by President Bush in an effort to achieve comity with Democrats — how well did that work again?) who was elevated to chair by President Obama. The other three seats are Obama appointments. One of them, the radical Craig Becker, was a recess appointment. So Obama owns this board.

UPDATE: Jonathan Adler comments.

I trust no one will be shocked to learn that February’s illegal teachers’ strike in Madison, Wisconsin was coordinated by the Madison teachers’ union, MTI.

(Via Instapundit.)

Governor Walker’s budget repair plan for Wisconsin is working.

JoAnne Kloppenburg, the would-be judicial activist who lost her bid for Wisconsin Supreme Court, is demanding a recount. Good luck with that:

(Chart from Politico.) (Via Instapundit.)

Nancy Pelosi says “elections shouldn’t matter as much as they do.”

Her point, if I can render it fairly, is the two parties ought to have “shared values”, in which case the election winner wouldn’t matter as much. In particular, the Republicans ought to be more like Democrats.

She’s right, of course, that the two parties do not have shared values. The Democrats embrace statism, while the Republicans (at least officially, and often in reality) embrace personal liberty. But Pelosi never had a problem with that divide while they were winning the elections. Now that we are winning the elections, we have a serious problem.

UPDATE: Related thoughts at Power Line.

Chicago’s public schools are banning homemade lunches. In order to assure that students eat healthy lunches, students are required to eat cafeteria food or go hungry. Many are going hungry.

That’s your law of unintended consequences in a nutshell: in the interest of ensuring students eat well, students are going hungry.

But let’s not be distracted by the predictable failure of the policy. This would be a travesty even if it worked perfectly. Who do these people think they are, to usurp control of children’s diets from their parents?!

(Via Instapundit.)

The Economist (subscription required) tells the inspiring story of Vinod Khosla, who wants to save the planet using venture capitalism:

His next move was characteristically unpredictable: he temporarily moved his family to India. “I wanted to see if I could have a social impact,” he says. “I quickly realised that any non-profit activity I could do would be no more than a drop in the ocean. Most non-profit organisations are completely ineffective. That’s when I decided that I needed to look for scalable solutions, which meant self-propagating solutions, which meant capitalist solutions. Proving the capitalist tool as a solution for poverty is high on my priority list.”

That’s exactly right. Profitable solutions are scalable. Expensive solutions are not.

Khosla also has sharp words for the environmental movement:

If Mr Khosla is unapologetic about making money while helping some of the world’s poorest people, he is equally outspoken when it comes to the environmental movement in the West. “Wind projects are a waste of time. And the reality is that electric cars today are coal-powered cars, because the USA and much of Europe have mostly coal-based electricity,” he says. “Environmentalists use artificial rates of return, buried assumptions and ‘what if’ assumptions about behaviour changes. It’s useless crap.”

You knew, of course, that Paul Krugman would attack Paul Ryan’s proposed budget, but you had to wait to find out exactly what howlers Krugman would tell. The attack column is out now, and among his many absurdities (e.g., his outrage at the notion that the private sector might deliver health care more efficiently than the federal government) there is this outright lie:

In fact, the budget office finds that over the next decade the plan would lead to bigger deficits and more debt than current law.

This is untrue. It’s not close to true. It’s not even within a country mile of true.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, current law (that’s the March 2011 baseline) will result in a $6.737 trillion deficit from 2012 to 2021 (see table 1, here). President Obama’s budget will result in a $9.470 trillion deficit over that 10-year period (ibid). Under Ryan’s budget, that deficit would be $5.088 trillion (see table S-1, here).

At the risk of belaboring the point, $5.088 trillion (Ryan’s budget) is smaller than $6.737 trillion (current law). To be precise, it’s $1.649 trillion smaller. That’s nearly a quarter of the ten-year deficit.

Ryan’s budget deficit is not larger than current law; it’s much, much smaller. On the other hand, Krugman’s credibility deficit is growing all the time.

(Via the Weekly Standard.)

Some people are trying to draw an analogy between the vote-counting snafu in Waukesha County, Wisconsin and the controversy in Minnesota 2008. For example, Dave Weigel:

WANTED: A pundit who had the same reaction to missing ballots being found and changing result in Minnesota 2008, Wisconsin 2011.

The reason you don’t see many with the same reaction is there really is no parallel. In Minnesota 2008, you had Al Franken’s lawyers spending weeks mining rejected ballots until they found enough votes to win. Or worse, in Washington 2004 (a travesty that Weigel wisely doesn’t even mention), you had boxes of uncounted ballots being “discovered” on a daily basis, and ultimately many Democratic precincts actually reported more votes than registered voters.

In Waukesha County, you have votes that were counted and reported on election night, but were mistakenly not incorporated into the unofficial totals. That’s all. In fact, the city of Brookfield (whose votes were mistakenly dropped) reported its results to the media on election night, and those results were published in the local paper. (The paper recognized the significance of their story the following day.) Moreover, the correct Brookfield results are well in-line with historical norms, while the original results were not.

What we had here was simply an example of why election officials double-check the unofficial totals before they become official totals.

(Via Kaus Files.) (Previous post.)

UPDATE: Despite all that, John Fund is right. We should embrace an investigation, so long as the investigation is a broad one. It won’t hurt us to do so: the new Waukesha results seem to be solid, but Wisconsin’s election system as a whole is a mess. (Via Althouse.)

UPDATE: The day that the totaling error was announced, the vice-chair of the Waukesha Democratic Party said she stood by the corrected results. Now it seems someone has gotten to her, and she has recanted.

I think Allahpundit is right. There’s no earthly way those votes are going away, especially since they were reported contemporaneously to the Brookfield Patch, and the Democrats have to know that. This is part of an effort to delegitimize Governor Walker (no one actually cares about the supreme court seat) and energize the base.

UPDATE: Another analysis says that the corrected Waukesha results make more since than the original ones.

UPDATE: An investigation has confirmed the corrected numbers:

GAB Director Kevin Kennedy says the agency’s investigation of spring election procedures in Waukesha County remains ongoing, but that the final canvass numbers in the city of Brookfield match the initial tallies from poll workers on Election Night.

(Via Hot Air.)

From what I’ve read, the budget deal is okay given the circumstances, but Michael Ramirez puts it into perspective:

(Via Power Line.)