fundamental principle that a government and its agents are under no general duty to provide public services, such as police protection, to any particular individual citizen.
Ponder that while we consider a basic question: What drives gun-control advocates? I think there are two camps: stupid and evil.
Some controllists are clearly stupid: Anyone who actually believes that criminals obey gun-control laws is stupid. Anyone who thinks that a madman planning mass murder will be deterred by an additional weapons charge is stupid. Anyone who thinks that gun-free zones turn away criminals rather than attract them is stupid. It is self-evident to anyone with an ounce of common sense that only law-abiding persons abide by gun-control laws.
More common than that, perhaps, are those who are functionally stupid. These are the people who do have some common sense, but don’t exercise it when it comes to guns, perhaps out of a visceral distaste for them. For practical purposes, the truly stupid and functionally stupid are the same group.
That’s the first camp. The second camp knows perfectly well that gun-control laws affect only the law-abiding, and that is precisely their aim. This is the evil group. Their ultimate goal is to abolish self-defense.
That much should be clear by looking at their aims: they wish to ban weapons for precisely the people who will use them against humans only in self-defense. But we can also look at history. The United Kingdom, the country at the end of the slippery slope that the controllists see as their model, has explicitly banned, not only any device that can be effectively used for self-defense, but the very act of self-defense itself. For just one example:
The TV presenter and Marks & Spencer model Myleene Klass has been warned by police for waving a knife at teenagers who were peering into a window of her house late at night. Klass was in the kitchen with her daughter upstairs when she spotted the youths in her garden just after midnight on Friday. She grabbed a knife and banged the windows before they ran away.
Hertfordshire police warned her she should not have used a knife to scare off the youths because carrying an “offensive weapon”, even in her own home, was illegal. . .
“She is not looking to be a vigilante, and has the utmost respect for the law, but when the police explained to her that even if you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself, she was bemused.”
(Via International Liberty.) Got that? “If you’re at home alone and you have an intruder, you are not allowed to protect yourself.” Frankly, I think “bemused” is the wrong reaction.
It’s not just across the pond. In the District of Columbia, a man used a gun to save a 11-year-old boy from being mauled to death by three pit bulls, and the police are considering charging him with a crime. Message: if you save a child, you risk jail. Just let the kid die.
If you aren’t permitted to protect yourself and your family, will the government do it? Usually they can’t, of course. As the saying goes, “When seconds count, the police are just minutes away.”
But if they can, will they? Don’t count on it. (Well, probably they will, but that’s because most cops are good people, not because of institutional requirements.) In Warren v. DC, the court found that the government has “no general duty” to protect you. (In the horrifying incident behind Warren, the victims were brutalized for fourteen hours, hoping for the police who never came.) This principle has been affirmed by a whole series of rulings going all the way up to the Supreme Court.
The principle has been applied frequently, as recently as last month in New York City. In February 2011, Joseph Lozito subdued a knife-wielding maniac (who had already killed four people during his rampage) on the New York Subway, incurring seven stab wounds in the process. Lozito could not carry a gun (this being New York City), but the police were present for the whole incident. Unfortunately, the police just stood by, watching from behind a locked door until Lozito finished subduing the man. Lozito sued the city, but last month the city moved for dismissal, citing the long-standing rule that they aren’t required to lift a finger to help anyone.
But I don’t mean to give the impression that the controllists’ campaign against self-defense merely leaves us vulnerable to rare incidents of police negligence. Too often, the government’s failure to protect the people is part of a deliberate campaign of oppression:
The classic example of this is the postbellum South, in which officials felt limited in how far they could go officially to oppress freed slaves, but could easily stand by while the mob put “uppity” blacks in their place.
In the 1991 Crown Heights riot in New York City, police (under orders from the mayor, David Dinkins) allowed the pogrom to go on for three days before finally marshalling enough force to restore order.
In the District of Columbia during the mid-1990s, Mayor Marion Barry once threatened to pull the police out of the wards represented by councilmen who refused to support his budget.
After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the police looted stores, gunned down unarmed innocents, and went door-to-door illegally confiscating (i.e., stealing) firearms and assaulting their owners. The perpetrators of the Danzinger Bridge shootings were eventually punished, after a failed police cover-up, but (as far as I can tell) no police were ever punished for looting or for stealing firearms. (The police made a big show of investigating accused looters, but in the only cases I can find they “cleared” them of the charges.) New Orleans even refused to return the stolen weapons and had to be forced to do so.
What each of these incidents have in common is they took place were guns were restricted. In New York City and the District of Columbia it was (and largely still is) basically impossible for individuals to obtain guns legally. In Louisiana, citizens have the right to own guns, but New Orleans police would routinely seize any weapons they found anyway, and as soon as Katrina hit they started going door-to-door.
The experience of blacks in the postbellum South is particularly instructive. The gun-control movement in America began out of a desire to keep blacks unarmed and defenseless. Racist anti-gun laws predate the Civil War (indeed they predate the United States), but racial gun control advanced to whole new level after the emancipation of the slaves. The KKK actually began as a gun-control organization; their mission was to take guns from blacks when the government failed to do so.
This is the intellectual lineage of the non-stupid camp of the gun control movement. They want you to be defenseless, because defenseless people make less trouble. Just as they want you to depend on the government for the necessities of life (food, health care, etc.), they want you depend on them for protection from the mob. But even if you do, you still might not get that protection, because just maybe you are someone who needs to be put in his place, or be made an example of.
There’s been an interesting revelation in the case of Washington State’s proposed law that would revoke 4th amendment protection from people who own “assault weapons”. It turns out that the bill’s sponsor, who claims that the provision was somehow a mistake, has proposed legislation with the search provision twice before.
Are we to believe that the provision was inserted into a bill by mistake three different times? The notion is fanciful once, and simply preposterous three times.
Interestingly, the Washington State constitution has been found to protect the right to own an AR-15 (the canonical “assault weapon”), so the provision is explicitly attempting to revoke a constitutional right for anyone who exercises another constitutional right.
Just a few months into the Obama administration, Sheldon Richmond wrote this:
A rule we can rely on to be unfailingly applied is this: No matter how much the government controls the economic system, any problem will be blamed on whatever small zone of freedom that remains.
Finally, after a 12-year delay caused by opponents of genetically modified foods, so-called “golden rice” with vitamin A will be grown in the Philippines. Over those 12 years, about 8 million children worldwide died from vitamin A deficiency. . .
Yet, despite the cost in human lives, anti-GM campaigners—from Greenpeace to Naomi Klein—have derided efforts to use golden rice to avoid vitamin A deficiency. In India, Vandana Shiva, an environmental activist and adviser to the government, called golden rice “a hoax” that is “creating hunger and malnutrition, not solving it.”
For all the claims of “murder” thrown at the NRA over its policy arguments, the usual suspects are much quieter on this subject, where the connection between policy-advocacy and dead children is much clearer.
Indeed, for some perspective, consider this: 8 million children over 12 years works out to four Sandy Hook massacres every hour of every day for over a decade. Why isn’t the president surrounding himself with children and demanding golden rice?
The Associated Press has withdrawn its story about Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., saying he sees some in the his party favoring a 2016 presidential candidate with an immigration policy that would “round up people … and send them back to Mexico.” . . . A subsequent Associated Press review of an audio recording of the show determined that the transcript had dropped the word “don’t” from that quote, and Paul actually said, “They don’t want somebody who wants to round people up, put them in camps and send them back to Mexico.”
(Emphasis mine.) In other words, the AP story reported the exact opposite of the truth.
The correction blames Fox News for the error appearing in its rush transcript. I guess that indicates that the AP does no independent fact-checking of its own, regardless of how outlandish the report is.
As the Colorado legislature considered a bill that would ban the carrying of guns on college campuses, Representative Joe Salazar explained that women aren’t competent to judge whether they are really in danger or not:
According to the University of Colorado, here’s what women are supposed to do instead of defending themselves:
Be realistic about your ability to protect yourself.
Your instinct may be to scream, go ahead! It may startle your attacker and give you an opportunity to run away.
Kick off your shoes if you have time and can’t run in them.
Don’t take time to look back; just get away.
If your life is in danger, passive resistance may be your best defense.
Tell your attacker that you have a disease or are menstruating.
Vomiting or urinating may also convince the attacker to leave you alone.
Yelling, hitting or biting may give you a chance to escape, do it!
Understand that some actions on your part might lead to more harm.
Remember, every emergency situation is different. Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.
I particularly like the last one: “Only you can decide which action is most appropriate.” Except for using a gun to defend yourself. We’ll decide that one for you. Try vomiting instead.
POSTSCRIPT: On this topic, it’s not just Colorado rapists who want to practice their hobby safely. The pro-rape, anti-gun lobby is active in Ohio too:
Convicted rapist organizes gun control demonstration at Dayton gun show; Media fails to note his sex offender status
Don’t worry. No matter how often this happens, it’s always an isolated incident:
Richardson claimed she had submitted an absentee ballot, but was afraid her vote would not count so she also voted in person. She also said she voted in the name of her granddaughter and yet another person.
“There was absolutely no intent on my part to commit any voter fraud,” she insisted.
The culprit in this case, was a veteran poll worker. But don’t worry, I’m sure she kept her jobs as an election fraudster and as a poll worker separate.
In a revealing development, a new gun-control bill in Washington State would allow citizens who currently possess a so-called “assault weapon” to keep it, but then the police may search their home once a year without probable cause or a warrant:
In order to continue to possess an assault weapon that was legally possessed on the effective date of this section, the person possessing shall … safely and securely store the assault weapon. The sheriff of the county may, no more than once per year, conduct an inspection to ensure compliance with this subsection.
The bill’s sponsors say the provision is a mistake and they don’t know how it got there. Yeah, I’ve heard of legislative language spontaneously inserting itself into text files without any human action. That can happen.
Good grief, Media Matters will say anything. Like this:
what press cannot bring itself to report this week: Dems have NEVER EVER mounted a campaign to block cabinet pick the way GOP is w/ Hagel
“NEVER EVER” except for lots of times. I guess this hinges on a narrow and unspecified meaning of “the way GOP is w/ Hagel”, because there have been plenty of defeated cabinet picks:
Henry Dearborn (War) under Madison
James Porter (War) under Tyler
James Green (Treasury) under Tyler
Thomas Ewing (War) under Andrew Johnson
Henry Stanbery (Justice) under Andrew Johnson
Charles Warren (War) under Coolidge, twice
Lewis Strauss (Commerce) under Eisenhower
Robert Wood (HUD) under Lyndon Johnson
John Tower (Defense) under George H.W. Bush
That’s including only the nominations that were formally rejected, not those that were withdrawn in the face of opposition, or that prevailed against opposition. It’s not easy to find out who fought the long-ago nominations, but certainly Democrats mounted the efforts to defeat Warren, Strauss, and Tower. That’s three times, indeed four if you count Warren twice.
Finding the full list took some Googling, but John Tower at least is obvious. The campaign against Tower was fairly recent, and was quite memorable, because it hinged on the argument (offered with a straight face!) that womanizers were not fit to serve in the cabinet. (Yes, Ted Kennedy was among the 52 Democrats who voted against him.)
So when Media Matters bleats about the right-wing bias of the mainstream media, they are lamenting that the media is only 97% in the tank for Democrats. Sometimes a left-wing talking point is too absurd even for them.
In an piece on NPR’s weekend edition on Lance Amstrong and doping, a commentator (ESPN’s Howard Bryant) dropped in an ad hominem attack against the NRA, apropos of nothing at all. NPR edited out the attack when it re-aired the piece in later time zones, and then left it out of the archived recording and the transcript. These facts are all confirmed by NPR’s ombudsman.
In his column on the controversy, the ombudsman then goes on to explain why, with NPR’s procedures, it’s perfectly reasonable for this to go down the memory hole with no trace in the permanent record outside the memories of those who heard it. Let’s even stipulate that that makes sense.
Nevertheless, when people are alleging that you have edited a remark out of the transcript, and when you have, in fact, edited that remark out of the transcript, exactly as alleged, you don’t get to malign them as “conspiracy theorists”:
Brown contacted our office suspicious of a conspiracy.”There is no explanation for the post-broadcast edit. Is this instance a representative one, for NPR editing and posting policy(ies)?”
Well, in some ways, yes, as I myself discovered when I went to ask.
and:
I did wonder whether online transcripts and audio files could have some sort of a routine date-time stamp for when they were broadcast by NPR. Stencel told me that NPR’s systems do not have a way to do that now, but that he would look into the idea. It wouldn’t satisfy conspiracy theorists . . . But, it would create an official baseline of sorts.
You’ve just admitted that they are right, and NPR doesn’t keep accurate transcripts. They’re not “conspiracy theorists”, they are “critics”.
I’m not sure why this is news again; I first saw it months ago. But people are buzzing about the claim that President Obama’s blistering attack on Paul Ryan — with Ryan in the audience — was just a big mistake. The story goes that Ryan was invited to the speech by accident, and when they noticed that he was there it was just too late to change the tone.
Don’t you believe it. First of all, the story makes no sense. They saw Ryan there before the president appeared at the podium, but it was too late to change the speech? Nonsense. They just didn’t want to. Even if Obama was unwilling to go off teleprompter, they could have taken a few minutes to soften the speech. It might be hard, but this is a professional communication operation. Come on.
Moreover, Obama is from Chicago and he likes to do that sort of thing. This is the in-your-face president. Remember him gloating over his election victory at the 2009 stimulus meeting, and at the 2010 health care summit? And those meetings were (ostensibly) for the purpose of forging bipartisan agreement! Remember when — in a direct parallel — he used the 2010 State of the Union address to attack the Supreme Court justices to their faces?
No, Obama said what he meant to say in the manner he wanted to say it. In your face. That’s what he does. It’s the Chicago Way.
The Obama administration, through its professional liar Jay Carney, is still claiming that the sequester was the GOP’s idea:
Question: Looking at all this, do you regret that this White House suggested [the sequester] in the first place?
Jay Carney: The notion much propounded by the spin doctors on the Republican side that the sequester is somehow something that the White House and the president alone wanted and desired is a fanciful confection.
In this case, Carney is using a bit of misdirection, by answering a different question than he was asked. But the message is clear, and Barack Obama himself has been less careful, claiming at the third presidential debate:
The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed. It is something that Congress has proposed.
This is an outright lie. Here’s the photo that Republicans have been circulating, of a page from Bob Woodward’s book on the subject:
Also note the final line, below the highlighted box. “We have to get people to turn against the Republicans.” That was the entire plan. They don’t have a fiscal plan; they never did. This was all about setting the stage for attacking Republicans.
The Washington Post’s crack reporting staff delivers:
Sarah Palin tries to stay relevant
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this post and the post’s URL incorrectly reported that Sarah Palin had signed on as a contributor to the Al Jazeera America news network. The blogger cited a report on the Daily Currant Web site as the basis for that information without realizing that the piece was satirical.
Apparently sneering has replaced fact-checking at the Washington Post. Here’s the deleted material:
Late last week Al Jazeera America announced the former vice-presidential candidate would be joining their news network.
“As you all know, I’m not a big fan of newspapers, journalists, news anchors and the liberal media in general,” Palin told the Web site The Daily Currant. “But I met with the folks at Al-Jazeera and they told me they reach millions of devoutly religious people who don’t watch CBS or CNN. That tells me they don’t have a liberal bias.”
Oy. Anyone who would believe that is as stupid as they they think Sarah Palin is. That isn’t even good satire.
Anyway, the piece’s author, Suzi Parker, who apparently has not been fired for incompetence, now has her very own hashtag trending on Twitter.
POSTSCRIPT: This is actually a case of fake news imitating real news, as Iowahawk notes:
Leftwing satire headline: “Palin to work for Al Jazeera.” Rightwing satire headline: “Al Gore sells CurrentTV to Al Jazeera.” #SatireisDead
Here’s something I did not know: The Fourth Amendment’s protection against unreasonable search and seizures does not apply at the border. More precisely, arbitrary searches at the border are not considered unreasonable. Thus, customs agents and the like do not need probable cause, much less a warrant, to search people entering the country.
Okay, maybe that makes sense. But the Department of Homeland Security claims that it can use its powers of suspicionless search, not only at the border, but within 100 miles of the border! The ACLU has prepared this handy map, showing where the government says it can search you without probable cause:
The Supreme Court will probably squash this eventually, but it’s an outrage that that’s necessary.
A lot of people have written about the government’s strange decision to throw the book at Aaron Swartz, when even JSTOR (the nominal victim in the case) didn’t want to press charges.
But is it really so strange? Instead, let’s suppose that the US Attorney was faithfully carrying out government policy. What does the prosecution tell us about that policy? Swartz was a crusader for open information. (For example, before JSTOR, Swartz was making public court records available to the public.) The Obama administration — which is notoriously opposed to open information — threw the book at him.
So maybe this was a rogue US Attorney, losing sight of the big picture and of common decency. Maybe. But Occam’s razor suggests a simpler explanation: the US Attorney, taking her cue from her boss, wanted to make an example of Aaron Swartz, so she did.
UPDATE: Adding credence to my theory, an unchastened White House is cool to the idea of passing “Aaron’s Law”, which would scale back criminal penalties for harmless terms-of-use violations.
I don’t expect much from Mother Jones, an unrepentant far-left rag, but I thought that the Atlantic was supposed to be a respectable magazine. This story makes me question that. There’s a lot here that could be debunked, but I want to look at just one statement:
“Not one of 62 mass shootings in the United States over the last 30 years has been stopped this way [by an armed civilian],” reported Mother Jones’s Mark Follman, adding that the majority of mass shooters killed themselves. . .
It’s true that most mass shooters kill themselves in the end, but what about the first part? There are at least three problems with it.
The first is a logic error. Yes, mass shootings are rarely stopped by an armed civilian. Of course. Because when an armed civilian stops the incident, he stops it promptly, before it becomes a mass shooting. The civilian, you see, is already there, while the police are minutes away, at best. Those minutes are what gives the shooter the chance to become a mass shooter.
Second, armed civilians avert mass shootings not infrequently. For example, there were two instances the very same week as the Newtown shootings: one in San Antonio and one in Clackamas, Oregon. And there are plenty of others.
In short, Mother Jones’s claim — echoed by the Atlantic — might be narrowly true (although I don’t know that), but it certainly doesn’t demonstrate anything like what they suggest it does.
The story of the Alabama nutcase that abducted the 5-year old is horrifying (although it ended well), but unfortunately for the gun-control movement, it didn’t have any relevance to their efforts to ban modern sporting rifles, since the man used a shotgun. But never mind that, the Associated Press will simply transmogrify that shotgun into an “assault rifle”. This can’t be an honest mistake, since they had the story right, and then changed it.
To add insult to injury, they didn’t even issue a correction when caught in the lie. Indeed, they didn’t even change the weapon back to a shotgun. Instead, they used the less-specific phrase “firearm”. Why not be specific, unless it’s to leave open the possibility that the reader might misunderstand the weapon as a modern sporting rifle?
Remember when officials use to cover up reports in order to hide dangers? That’s old school. Today, they cover-up reports showing that industries are safe:
Thanks to a leak from an anonymous insider, we learned Thursday that a report commissioned by the State of New York has given fracking a clean bill of health. The insider “did not think it should be kept secret” and released the document, which is now nearly one year old, to the New York Times, which reported:
The state’s Health Department found in an analysis it prepared early last year that the much-debated drilling technology known as hydrofracking could be conducted safely in New York.
The eight-page analysis is a summary of previous research by the state and others…[that] delves into the potential impact of fracking on water resources, on naturally occurring radiological material found in the ground, on air emissions and on “potential socioeconomic and quality-of-life impacts.”…[It] concludes that fracking can be done safely.
The analysis and other health assessments have been closely guarded by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and his administration as the governor weighs whether to approve fracking.
Of course, covering up the report is a last resort. It’s preferable to falsify the tests, like the EPA is doing.
Why are they doing this? Possibly they believe that fracking is dangerous, despite the scientific consensus. (I believe that’s called being “anti-science”.) More likely, they’re just on the take, like Matt Damon and Al Gore.
Iowahawk explains how to do business in Obama’s America:
Perhaps instead of starting a small business, young Matt should have taken the time-honored liberal approach and started a BIG business. Those rules are simpler: (1) come up with idiotic idea, (2) give large wads of cash to a politician, (3) reap ginormormous government contract.
Good ideas — which usually involve producing a product that people want and will pay for — are for suckers now.
A federal judge has rejected an effort by the Tewksbury P0lice Department and the US Department of Justice to steal the Motel Caswell. It’s been a long road for Russ Caswell. I noted the attempted travesty in October 2011.
The Weekly Standard notes that President Obama is violating his own stimulus law, which requires quarterly progress reports. By law, he should have issued 14 such reports by now. He has only issued 8, the last one for Q2 2011.
Did Congress quietly pass a bill prohibiting smartphone unlocking and send it to President Obama’s autopen? No. What happened was the Librarian of Congress was empowered by the execrable Digital Millennium Copyright Act to decide what modifications of our own electronic devices we are permitted to perform. In short, Congress delegated the power to make law to this functionary, and last October he exercised his power to prohibit smartphone unlocking.
It is supposed to be unconstitutional for the Congress to delegate its legislative power, but the courts have been permitting it for a long time, provided Congress provides an “intelligible principle” for the delegate to use. This is a very bad thing.
It’s bad because the bar for an “intelligible principle” is now so low as to be meaningful. But more importantly, it’s bad because the limits of Congress’s time ought to be a safeguard against tyranny, but it’s not.
It used to be that Congress was a part-time job, but the workload of the average Congressional office has doubled every five years since 1935 (according to Senator James Buckley). That means more and more laws to burden the American people.
One might think that the absolute limit of 168 hours per week would cap the amount of rules that our legislature could generate, but not if they can delegate rule-making power to others. With delegated power, the government’s ability to generate new rules is literally unlimited.
With a limit, the government would be compelled to use its power selectively, and only address high priorities. Without a limit, government issues rules for absolutely the most trivial matters. (Yes, even for spilled milk.)
There ought to be no rule binding the American people that is not passed by Congress and signed by the president (or passed over his veto). This wouldn’t ensure that Congress would exercise good judgement, but at least it would require them to set priorities, and we could hold them accountable for every rule on the books.
UPDATE: Corrected the Congressional workload doubling period.
In politics, it seems there are three levels of discourse. Level one: if you have a good argument, you make it. Level two: attack the opposition with truth. Level three: attack the opposition with lies. It tells you something about the weakness of the gun-controllists case that they are settling for the bottom level.
The buzz of the day is over how gun-rights supporters heckled the father of a victim of the Sandy Hook massacre at a hearing on gun-control measures. Or, more precisely, the buzz of the day is over how that didn’t happen, but the media reported that it did.
The story seems to have started with a story in the Connecticut Post, which reported that gun-rights supporters interrupted Neil Heslin as he argued for gun control. But the video (cue to 15:00) shows that that didn’t happen. On the contrary, Heslin asked a question and was answered:
Heslin: Is there anybody in this room that can give me one reason or challenge this question, why anybody in this room needs to have one of these assault-style weapons or military weapons or high-capacity clips?
[Pause. Heslin looks around the room as if waiting for a response.]
And not one person can answer that question or give me an answer.
Audience members: [unintelligible] The Second Amendment shall not be infringed.
Heslin: Alright.
Lawmaker: Please no comments while Mr. Heslin is speaking. Or we’ll clear the room. Mr. Heslin please continue.
Not content to merely lie in their descriptions, MSNBC and CBS went further, airing videos that made it appear as though Heslin really was heckled, by editing out “Is there anybody in this room that can give me one reason . . .” to hide the fact that Heslin asked the room a question and was waiting for an answer. MSNBC’s original editing reportedly was even more dishonest. It’s gone down the memory hole now, but the appended update tacitly admits it (“the original video has been replaced with a fuller version”).
The story being completely debunked hasn’t put it to rest. Although a few have admitted their error, the claim that Heslin was “interrupted”, “heckled”, or even “shouted down” remains throughout the media, to say nothing of the leftist blogosphere.
UPDATE: Video of MSNBC’s earlier, even-more-deceptive editing, is here. It not only edits out the question (as their later video did), but also edits out the several seconds that Heslin waited for a response, and his follow-up statement that no one could answer him. It jumps in the middle of Heslin’s sentence to the audience members answering his question, making it appear he was interrupted, when he was not. Martin Bashir, you are a damned liar.
UPDATE: Some of the the people who joined in the lie: Eric Boehlert (Media Matters), David Frum, Josh Marshall (Talking Points Memo), Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs, which once was good), Piers Morgan (CNN), as well as publications and/or group blogs Gawker, Wonkette, the Daily Beast, and the Huffington Post. A few other credulous fools (Slate, and Andrew Kaczynski of Buzzfeed) joined the liars but later retracted.
It’s not just Sen. Menendez’s staff that are in trouble with the law, Menendez himself is in big trouble:
Emails show FBI investigating Sen. Bob Menendez for sleeping with underage Dominican prostitutes
If true, and they seem to have considerable evidence, his actions were not just unethical, they were criminal in both the Dominican Republic and the United States:
The age of consent in the Dominican Republic is 18. The PROTECT Act, a U.S. law passed in 2003, made it a federal crime for Americans to engage in sex for money with anyone under 18, even in countries where the age of consent is lower.
What might save Menendez is the fact that Gov. Chris Christie, a Republican, would appoint his replacement. Faced with losing a Senate seat, the Justice Department might try to make this thing go away. (Don’t tell me they wouldn’t. These people traffic guns to Mexican drug cartels.)
UPDATE (3/6): The Washington Post briefly ran a story purporting to debunk this, but the Daily Caller de-debunked their story, and the Post seems to be backpedaling (somewhat dishonestly). We’ll have to wait and see. Meanwhile, Glenn Reynolds wants everyone to remember that Menendez has two scandals going at once, and the influence-peddling scandal is unchanged.
The Constitution gives the president the power to appoint officers unilaterally during “the Recess” of the Senate:
The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.
For the first century-and-a-half, this was interpreted to mean that the president could make recess appointments during the period between Senate sessions, of which there were typically two during a two-year Congress. Since 1947, the president has assumed the additional power to make recess during intra-session breaks in the Senate’s business. This power has never been seriously challenged, until now.
For reasons of his own, President Obama decided to arrogate to himself the power to make recess appointments even when the Senate was in session, if he deemed that the Senate wasn’t doing any real work. If this were to hold up, it would give the president the power to bypass the Senate literally whenever he chose.
ASIDE: Obama justified this by an opinion from the Office of Legal Counsel. That opinion was issued just two days before the first such appointment, and overruled a standing opinion to the contrary. That opinion was issued by his own administration, and was authored by Elena Kagan, now a Supreme Court justice.
Obama’s decision to pick this fight now appears to be an unforced error of historic proportion.
The Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit has issued a unanimous, devastating ruling. It correctly brushes aside the administration’s claim to be able to decide for itself whether the Senate is in session:
The fourth and final possible interpretation of “the Recess,” advocated by the Office of Legal Counsel, is a variation of the functional interpretation in which the President has discretion to determine that the Senate is in recess. . . This will not do. Allowing the President to define the scope of his own appointments power would eviscerate the Constitution’s separation of powers.
But it goes further. The ruling finds that the recess appointment power only applies during “the Recess” which is to say the period between Senate sessions. Thus, it excludes the power to make intra-session appointments that the president has enjoyed for the last sixty-odd years.
But it goes further still. The ruling also finds that the wording “that may happen” is significant, and requires that the vacancy come into being during the recess as well! (I believe this is correct, but I had little hope that a modern court would decide thus.)
Thus, President Obama has received his comeuppance in truly historic fashion. By trying to arrogate to himself a virtually unlimited recess appointment power, he has invited a ruling that instead makes that power very limited indeed. Constitution 1, Obama 0.
This isn’t the end. The ruling can and probably will be reviewed by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court may scale back the ruling, at least in regard to “that may happen”, but I think it is unlikely to overturn the central holding.
POSTSCRIPT: Although it pales in relation to the Constitutional issues at stake, it’s also important what the ruling does, which is invalidate a full year of NLRB rulings.
UPDATE: Jennifer Rubin lists some of the NLRB rulings that will go away. A lot of bad stuff is being invalidated, like ambush elections and “micro-unions”.
New York’s new gun-control law allows New Yorkers to keep 10-round magazines (for now), but prohibits them from loading more than seven rounds in one. If you miscount, you go to jail.
I defy anyone to name any constructive purpose served by such a rule. If you were to ban 10-round magazines outright, one might imagine — following the usual pattern of gun-controllists’ wishful thinking — that it would make them a little harder for criminals to obtain. But allowing the magazines eliminates even that highly-unlikely salutary purpose.
The sole consequence of this rule will be that law-abiding persons will have seven rounds, while having no effect on criminals whatsoever.
In other words, this law is not about stopping criminals, but about disarming innocents.
Most of the New York legislature can be partly excused for this: due to the illegal haste with which the bill was rammed through, they got no chance to read it. (Of course, they should have then voted no.) But the authors of the law — particularly Andrew Cuomo — have no such excuse. These are simply bad people.
POSTSCRIPT: Of course, there’s more. The law not only bans “high-capacity” magazines, but confiscates the ones you already have. (Oh yes, they explain the provision by saying the banned magazines must be sold out-of-state, but what do you think will happen if you don’t?) They failed to put in an exception for law enforcement. And, they have accidentally banned the biathlon (which uses an unusual 8-round magazine), which Olympic athletes train for in Lake Placid, New York.
Facebook temporarily shut down The Jerusalem Post reporter Khaled Abu Toameh’s Facebook page, possibly in response to a campaign by anti-Israel activists who object to Abu Toameh’s views on corruption within the Palestinian Authority.
(I’m not sure why they say “possibly”, read on.)
On Monday, Abu Toameh posted a link to an Arabic report in a Jordanian newspaper about the corruption trial of former Jordanian intelligence chief. He also posted a link to an acerbic blog post slamming the PA that he wrote for the Gatestone Institute, where he is a contributor. . .
Hate mail and death threats poured into Abu Toameh’s inbox. While the veteran reporter has received hate mail before, he said the response to the last two posts was overwhelming.
Abu Toameh received a message from Facebook stating he had posted an item that violates the terms of use of Facebook. Then, without warning, his Facebook profile was terminated. A notice said that the account was temporarily closed “for security reasons.”
The account was reopened 24 hours later, but with the two posts deleted and no explanation.
If the timing weren’t convincing enough, the fact the two posts were deleted proves that they were the reason for the suspension.
So why is Facebook censoring criticism of the Palestinian Authority? It could be political bias, but it’s more likely simple cowardice. Allowing criticism of totalitarian regimes could result in their being banned from those regimes. Either way, this illustrates the folly of using Facebook as a medium for political dicourse.
The Bread of Life Mission, which has served the homeless community in Pioneer Square for more than 70 years, said the city has directed them to stop feeding the hungry in downtown parks.
Remember, this doesn’t just happen. Some person had to decide that stopping a church from feeding the homeless was a good idea. Which brings us back to this.
The Obama administration wants doctors to question their patients about whether they have guns in their homes. (This is part of their program to denormalize gun ownership, so that they can make the political landscape more favorable for gun bans.) Doctors should not do so:
Doctors already have a professional and legal responsibility to notify the authorities if they believe patients pose an imminent threat to others or themselves. But routine inquiry about gun ownership goes far beyond this obligation. Such inquiries will instead only offend and alienate many responsible gun owners, compromising the trust essential to the doctor-patient relationship. Doctors should not put themselves in a position where patients view them as willing (or unwitting) agents of the government working against their interests.
This illustrates, yet again, how everything in this administration takes a back seat to ideology. When quality medical practice goes up against gun control, medicine will lose.
What do you do with Egypt, a former ally that is rapidly turning into an Islamist hell-hole and is talking seriously of repudiating its peace treaty with Israel? Send them state of the art fighter jets, of course.
The Republicans seem to adopting Charles Krauthammer’s suggestion for how they should deal with the debt limit. Rather than using the debt limit to try to force big cuts in spending, which probably won’t work and will certainly result in them being (unjustly) savaged in the media, they should instead make a demand that is small, unassailable, and nevertheless important: for the Senate to produce a budget.
This is a great idea, because there is no reasonable argument that can be made against it. In fact, the Senate is required by law to produce a budget and thus has been flagrantly violating the law for the last four years. And, it’s nevertheless important because it will force Democrats to put their spending plans in the full light of day.
When Democrats attack the plan, as they will (precisely because they don’t want their spending plans debated in the full light of day), it will be an educational experience for the American people.
A new bill to be introduced into Congress would take contracts out of the sphere of criminal law, and put them back into civil law, where they belong. Lawrence Lessig explains why that’s important.
Everyone knows that the Palestinian Authority engages in terrorism against Israel, so it’s interesting but not so surprising that there exist legal documents proving that:
The document — accidentally handed over to lawyers suing the [Palestinian Authority] for $300 million on behalf of the teens’ parents — reveals a “close relationship” between the bomber and a captain in the Palestinian Authority security forces who planned the terror attack, court papers say.
The two-page memo, written in April 2012 by Maj. Ziad Abu Hamid of the authority’s General Intelligence Service, also details “at least six other critical facts” about the 2002 bombing and “clearly establishes the defendants’ material support and liability.”
But from there the story gets weird:
But Washington, DC, federal Judge Richard Leon ordered the memo returned or destroyed after the authority’s lawyers claimed it was “privileged and protected” information.
Remember, this doesn’t just happen. Some person had to decide that hassling people just trying to repair their homes was a good idea. Which brings us back to this.
Remember when the Department of Homeland Security “categorically denied” that they delayed the arrest of a member of Sen. Robert Menendez’s (D-NJ) staff until after the election? Official documents now confirm that their denial was a lie:
Federal immigration agents were prepared to arrest an illegal immigrant and registered sex offender days before the November elections but were ordered by Washington to hold off after officials warned of “significant interest” from Congress and news organizations because the suspect was a volunteer intern for Sen. Robert Menendez, according to internal agency documents provided to Congress.
The Homeland Security Department said last month, when The Associated Press first disclosed the delayed arrest of Luis Abrahan Sanchez Zavaleta, that AP’s report was “categorically false.”
Under a Republican administration, this would be a scandal of the first order. (If anything like this were ever to happen under a Republican administration.)
With all the vitriolic attacks against the NRA for its supposedly crazy proposal for armed guards in schools (the NYT called it a “mendacious, delusional, almost deranged rant”), one might have gotten the impression that the proposal was out of the mainstream. In fact, the proposal is supported by 55% of Americans, and now even by the Obama administration.
If such a mainstream proposal is called “almost deranged” by the media, that tells you how far out of the mainstream the media is.
POSTSCRIPT: In fact, the 55-42 split understates how mainstream the proposal is. The 42% who are opposed includes lots of people like me who oppose the notion, not because of hoplophobia, but because we cannot afford it. Instead, we ought to revoke the gun-free zones around schools, which do not deter criminals but do prevent the school staff from stopping criminals. This would put informal armed security into the schools at no cost to the taxpayer. It’s already working in some states.
A lawsuit recently filed in the United States Court of Claims may shed further light on the corruption of the Obama administration’s “green energy” programs. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of XP Vehicles, Inc. and Limnia, Inc., companies that competed for Department of Energy loans under a Congressionally-authorized program. The owners of XP eventually realized that there was no real competition, and that the whole Department of Energy program was a scam intended to funnel money to Obama and Democratic Party campaign contributors and political allies. They allege in addition that DOE misappropriated proprietary technology that they submitted in connection with their loan applications, and gave that technology to Obama administration cronies.
If the allegations are accurate (and I suspect they are), they are a terrific example of the wastefulness of the government’s efforts to build a green economy. In a free, competitive economy, price signals guide the allocation of resources, achieving what economists call “resource allocative efficiency”, in which the price of every commodity reflects its marginal cost of production. Thus, individual purchasing decisions reflect the actual resource costs of the product.
The government’s efforts (especially under Obama) to alter the allocation of resources to a “greener” set of choices, disrupts that efficient outcome. The entire effort is wasteful, and as this lawsuit seems likely to illustrate, sometimes egregiously so.
The irony is that all this waste is carried out under the banner of “conservation”. That’s right, waste is called conservation. George Orwell would be proud.
How does Politifact get away with such an outrageous lie? They say that they aren’t attacking the actual statement, which they concede is true:
Like many political distortions, Romney’s claim contained a grain of truth. . . Bloomberg reported on Oct. 22 that the company was planning to restart production of Jeeps in China.
and:
The Romney campaign was crafty with its word choice, so campaign aides could claim to be speaking the literal truth, but the ad left a false impression that all Jeep production was being moved to China.
Instead, they claim to be criticizing the ad’s implicit message, a completely different statement that the ad didn’t make and wasn’t true, but that Politifact claims is what the Romney campaign was really trying to say.
This of course, puts paid to Politifact’s whole pretense of running an objective operation. More than that, their ability to divine a “clear message” different from the ad’s actual content is highly dubious in light of their need to hedge about exactly what that supposedly clear message was. Moreover, even setting all that aside, it’s just not true.
With all the talk on the left of monetizing the debt with a platinum coin, apparently no one bothered to look at the law to see if it were actually legal. It’s not. It turns out that the platinum coin provision only allows for two categories of coin (bullion coins and proof coins), neither of which can be used for seigniorage. (Via Volokh.)
Neither the Treasury Department nor the Federal Reserve believes that the law can or should be used to facilitate the production of platinum coins for the purpose of avoiding an increase in the debt limit.
Bill Clinton, professional liar and sometime president:
Half of all mass killings in the United States have occurred since the assault weapons ban expired in 2005, half of all of them in the history of the country.
We ran this data past a spokesman for Clinton, but he declined to comment or offer an explanation for where the former president got his facts. That always makes us suspicious.
The fact that it was Bill Clinton talking should have made him suspicious, but I suppose we must make allowances for liberal journalists.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) requires that employers offer their employees health insurance, but does not require that it be affordable. Awesome.
In the West, including Israel, we long believed that there could be peace between Israel and the Arabs on a land-for-peace formula. We believed so because it seemed so reasonable. But the enemy is not reasonable. They want the Jews dead and will never make peace. They have said so, explicitly (even the so-called moderates).
The upcoming Israeli election will confirm that land-for-peace is dead. Even the Israeli left has figured it out, because:
The “dramatic imminent shift” is not a shift, but a realization; not imminent, but rather what happened over many years; and not dramatic, but rather the slow accumulation of many events: (1) the barbaric terror war against Israeli civilians, commenced after the first Israeli offer of a state; (2) the Palestinian rejection of the Clinton Parameters, after Israel formally accepted them; (3) the Palestinian failure to carry out even Phase I of the three-phase Roadmap; (4) the transformation of Gaza into Hamastan after Israel withdrew every settler and soldier; (5) the election of Hamas in 2006 and the Hamas coup in 2007; (6) two rocket wars from Judenrein Gaza, and the continuing prospect of more; (7) the year-long negotiation in the Annapolis Process that produced still another offer of a state, from which Abbas walked away; (8) Abbas’s announcement in 2009 that he would do nothing without a construction freeze, followed by his doing nothing after he got one; (9) the continual “reconciliation” attempts by Abbas with the terrorist group he promised to dismantle; (10) his failure to give a Bir Zeit speech to match Netanyahu’s Bar-Ilan one; (11) the inability of the Palestinians to hold an election, much less build the institutions of a peaceful democratic state; (12) the violation of their express Oslo commitments with repeated end-runs at the UN; (13) a Palestinian society, media and educational system steeped in anti-Semitism; (14) et cetera.
The Palestinians could have had an independent state at peace with Israel, but they’ve made clear they don’t want it. This underscores the foresight of the Arabs who deliberately created the Palestinian refugee problem after Israel’s war of independence by refusing to resettle the refugees, for the explicit purpose of preventing future generations from making peace with Israel.
POSTSCRIPT: Unfortunately, the American and European left has not figured it out yet, either because they are too far from the carnage, or (especially in the European case) because they are simply anti-Semitic.
The future of American health care is the UK’s present:
The largest and most detailed survey into hospital deaths has revealed that almost 12,000 patients are needlessly dying every year as a result of poor patient care.
The researchers from The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine based the study on 1,000 deaths at 10 NHS trusts during 2009. The study revealed that basic errors were made in more than one in 10 cases, leading to 5.2% of deaths, which was the equivalent of nearly 12,000 preventable deaths in hospitals in England every year.
At the hearing, Geithner stuck to a defense he expressed last week — that once he learned of the manipulation, he sounded alarms to British and U.S. regulators. . .
But Republicans hammered Geithner about why he did not inform lawmakers during numerous congressional hearings or in the lengthy debate over Wall Street regulation. . . Other GOP members noted that even though Geithner knew of possible rate-fixing, the Federal Reserve still used Libor in several financial rescue programs.
Geithner defended his actions, saying that Libor was the best number available. That’s nonsense. Even if you set aside the rigging, Libor should never have been used for anything, because it doesn’t measure anything real. It never did. Libor is nothing more than the average of a set of made-up numbers.
In fact, one should have expected that Libor would be rigged. Or, put another way, what does “rigged” even mean in regard to a fictional rate? The “estimates” that make up Libor aren’t real rates that anyone can get. Their sole use is to set Libor, so of course they were chosen in such a way as to favor the estimaters own interests.
Social Security is in much more trouble than you thought. A piece in the New York Times shows the Social Security Administration’s forecast are pretty much worthless. For example, their projected death rates look like this:
First of all, the curves should not cross. But more importantly, they should certainly never go to 100%! According to the Social Security Administration, I will never collect Social Security, because there is a 100% chance that I will die by 2028.
With assumptions like this, it’s easy to see that the Administration’s estimate that it won’t run out of IOUs until 2033 is worthless.
Yesterday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg and city officials unveiled a new initiative to limit supplies of prescription painkillers in the city’s emergency rooms as a way to combat what they described as a growing addiction problem in the region. Some critics . . ., however, felt the move would unnecessarily hurt poor and uninsured patients who use emergency rooms as their primary care doctor.
[Bloomberg said,] “Number one, there’s no evidence of that. Number two, supposing it is really true, so you didn’t get enough painkillers and you did have to suffer a little bit. The other side of the coin is people are dying and there’s nothing perfect … There’s nothing that you can possibly do where somebody isn’t going to suffer, and it’s always the same group [claiming], ‘Everybody is heartless.’ Come on, this is a very big problem.”
If people “suffer a little bit”, Bloomberg thinks that’s a small price to pay to protect other people from themselves. That is absolutely disgusting. Quite simply, Mike Bloomberg does not believe in freedom.
I have had loved ones go to the hospital to undergo significant surgical procedures. The aftermath of those surgeries presented said loved ones with significant rehabilitation demands which were made all the more daunting because of the post-operative pain involved. . .
It would be best to leave these kinds of decisions to the doctor and his/her patient. So when an officious, meddling busybody decides that he is in the best position to decide who gets painkillers and who doesn’t, and when said officious, meddling busybody declares that it is okay if some people “suffer” as a consequence of his decision, I tend to get more than a little upset. And you should get more than a little upset too.
Severe enforcement of the rifle and handgun licensing system would not have worked in 1922. Too many gun owners would have been outraged by the rapid move from a free society to one of repressive controls. By initially enforcing the 1920 legislation with moderation, and then with gradually increasing severity, the British government acclimated British gun owners to higher and higher levels of control. . .
The frog-cooking principle helps explain why America’s Handgun Control, Inc. (HCI), and the other anti-gun lobbies are so desperate to pass any kind of gun control, even controls that most observers agree will accomplish very little. By lobbying for the enactment of, for example, the Brady Bill, HCI established the principle of a national gun licensing system. Once a lenient national handgun licensing system was established in 1993, the foundation was laid so that the licensing system can gradually be tightened.
They’re trying the same thing here, but Americans are wise to them, which is why we fight everything. The courts have held that the First Amendment protection for free speech requires “breathing room”, which means that not only must the government not ban free speech, it must not come anywhere near it. The British experience shows that we need “breathing room” for the Second Amendment as well.
UPDATE: A Washington Post editorial from 1994 admitted that the the so-called assault weapon ban served no purpose other than as a stepping stone:
No one should have any illusions about what was accomplished (by the ban). Assault weapons play a part in only a small percentage of crime. The provision is mainly symbolic; its virtue will be if it turns out to be, as hoped, a stepping stone to broader gun control.
Having carefully reviewed all of the facts and circumstances of this matter, . . . OAG has determined to exercise its prosecutorial discretion to decline to bring criminal charges against Mr. Gregory . . . or any other NBC employee based on the events associated with the December 23, 2012 broadcast. OAG has made this determination, despite the clarity of the violation of this important law. . .
Amazingly, they actually come out and admit that the reason he escaped prosecution is because he was agitating for gun control:
Influencing our judgment in this case, among other things, is our recognition that the intent of the temporary possession and short display of the magazine was to promote the First Amendment purpose of informing an ongoing public debate about firearms policy in the United States, especially while this subject was foremost in the minds of the public following the previously mentioned events in Connecticut and the President’s speech to the nation about them.
ASIDE: Okay, they only actually admit that it was because he was discussing gun control — not advocating it — but can anyone suggest with a straight face that an NRA spokesman who did the same thing could have escaped prosecution?
Remember that malicious intent is not required for magazine possession to be illegal in DC. The very thing is illegal, and that’s precisely how they intend it. Even clearly legal instances are prosecuted in DC. The only known way to escape prosecution is if you’re using on television to promote gun control.
And so the rule of law in America takes another blow.
The untold story of the Obama administration is his fight against the free exercise of religion. It’s not just the contraception/abortifacients mandate. His administration has also argued that the government can dictate to churches who their ministers must be (they lost that case), and we’re starting to see a pattern of attacks on military chaplains.
Last year the Obama administration issued orders to Army chaplains forbidding them from reading a pastoral letter from the Catholic church to their congregations, and his latest attack goes directly at the chaplains themselves:
Religious liberty advocates are concerned after President Obama said a conscience clause that would allow military chaplains to opt-out of performing gay marriages is “unnecessary and ill-advised.”
The section reads, “No member of the Armed Forces may — require a chaplain to perform any rite, ritual, or ceremony that is contrary to the conscience, moral principles, or religious beliefs of the chaplain; or discriminate or take any adverse personnel action against a chaplain.
Let’s be clear what is at stake here. Obama wants to be able to force chaplains to perform rituals that are against their religions. Thus, any chaplain must either violate the precepts of his faith or leave the service. Either way, the men and women of the armed forces will be denied principled chaplains.
Obama lost this fight — as he’s lost most of them — but I wouldn’t assume this issue is over. The more radical the agenda, the more tenacious the man is in pursuing it. This issue will probably come up again with next year’s military budget.
At this point, I think we can assume that David Gregory and his staff at NBC will not be charged for illegally possessing a “high-capacity” magazine in the District of Columbia. But while the DC prosecutors exercise their discretion to let a high-profile media figure off scot-free, they prosecute the magazine-ban vigorously against ordinary people.
In fact, while Gregory faces no charges despite knowingly breaking the law, they prosecute ordinary people who didn’t even break the law at all. For example:
Mr. Brinkley was booked on two counts of “high capacity” magazine possession (these are ordinary magazines nearly everywhere else in the country) and one count of possessing an unregistered gun.
Despite the evidence Mr. Brinkley had been legally transporting the gun, his attorney Richard Gardiner said the D.C. Office of the Attorney General “wouldn’t drop it.” This is the same office now showing apparent reluctance to charge Mr. Gregory.
Mr. Brinkley refused to take a plea bargain and admit guilt, so the matter went to trial Dec. 4. The judge sided with Mr. Brinkley, saying he had met the burden of proof that he was legally transporting. Mr. Brinkley was found not guilty on all firearms-related charges, including for the “high-capacity” magazines, and he was left with a $50 traffic ticket.
When the law is applied differently to the famous and the ordinary, there is no law.
We already knew that President Obama’s cash-for-clunkers program was an economic disaster. (We literally would have been better off burning $1 billion in cash.) Liberals console themselves by saying that at least it helped the environment. But it didn’t:
Whoops—’Cash for Clunkers’ Actually Hurt the Environment
According to E Magazine, the “Clunkers” program, which is officially known as the Car Allowance Rebates System (CARS), produced tons of unnecessary waste while doing little to curb greenhouse gas emissions. The program’s first mistake seems to have been its focus on car shredding, instead of car recycling. With 690,000 vehicles traded in, that’s a pretty big mistake.
Here’s the feel-good story of the week: Hugo Chavez may have killed himself by getting his cancer treatment in Cuba, rather than at a competent hospital.
Under our monetary system, the Federal Reserve (a quasi-independent body) controls the issuing of currency and other levers that influence the money supply. This is supposed to serve as a check on the government’s ability to print money unwisely. It’s a weak check, but a check nonetheless. However, it seems that federal law contains a loophole (dealing with the minting of platinum coins) that allows the Treasury to issue currency without the approval of the Federal Reserve.
Nevertheless, even if the Treasury can do it, monetizing the debt is a crackpot idea. I thought everyone knew that, so I never paid any attention to the talk of minting trillion-dollar platinum coins.
Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to force America into default? Yes, absolutely. . . By minting a $1 trillion coin, then depositing it at the Fed, the Treasury could acquire enough cash to sidestep the debt ceiling — while doing no economic harm at all.
Got that? No economic harm at all! We’re in LaRouche territory here, folks!
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, the notion that Republicans would try to “force America into default” is pure partisan bullshit. As we learned from the last go-round with the debt ceiling, Republicans wanted to ensure that the debt was paid, and proposed legislation to ensure that by giving debt service priority. It was voted down on party lines, because Democrats wanted to keep default on the table. Quite simply, Democrats preferred to risk default than to make meaningful cuts to spending. So what Krugman really means is:
Should President Obama be willing to print a $1 trillion platinum coin if Republicans try to cut spending? Yes, absolutely.
Reformed crooks say the New York newspaper that published a map of names and addresses of gun owners did a great service – to their old cronies in the burglary trade.
The information published online by the Journal-News, a daily paper serving the New York suburbs of Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties, could be highly useful to thieves in two ways, former burglars told FoxNews.com. Crooks looking to avoid getting shot now know which targets are soft and those who need weapons know where they can steal them.
“That was the most asinine article I’ve ever seen,” said Walter T. Shaw, 65, a former burglar and jewel thief who the FBI blames for more than 3,000 break-ins that netted some $70 million in the 1960s and 1970s. “Having a list of who has a gun is like gold – why rob that house when you can hit the one next door, where there are no guns? . . . What they did was insanity.” . . .
Frank Abagnale, who was portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio in the 2002 film “Catch Me if You Can,” and is perhaps the most famous reformed thief to ever earn a legitimate living by offering the public insight into the criminal mind, called the newspaper’s actions “reprehensible.”
“It is unbelievable that a newspaper or so called journalist would publish the names and addresses of legal gun owners, including federal agents, law enforcement officers and the like,” said Abagnale, who noted that he grew up in the suburban New York area served by the Journal-News. “This would be equivalent to publishing the names of individuals who keep substantial sums of money, jewelry and valuables in their home.”
Law enforcement officials from a New York region where a local paper published a map identifying gun owners say prisoners are using the information to intimidate guards.
Rockland County Sheriff Louis Falco, who spoke at a news conference flanked by other county officials, said the Journal News’ decision to post an online map of names and addresses of handgun owners Dec. 23 has put law enforcement officers in danger.
“They have inmates coming up to them and telling them exactly where they live. That’s not acceptable to me,” Falco said. . .
Ezra Klein (of Journolist fame) is running a list of “facts” about guns in America. Most of them are nonsense, but for most of those showing so requires some analysis that I will leave to othercommentators. I want to focus on just one, this chart:
The chart shows the US with a significantly higher rate of assault deaths than all “other OECD”. Klein adds: “We are a clear outlier.”
Now, you can’t tell with them drawn atop each other, but there are 24 graphs on that chart. (They are shown separately here.) But there are 34 OECD members. If you include those (which the graph’s author did later, after being questioned on the point) you get a very different picture:
Not so much of an outlier with eight more countries put in — particularly if you look at 2010 and not the late 1970s — are we? The original graph left out all the countries with a higher or similar rate.
But wait, eight more countries? Weren’t we missing ten? If you peruse the list, it is still missing Iceland and Turkey. I wonder what’s going on in those two. The author (who does not study violence, by the way) says he couldn’t get data for Turkey. He doesn’t mention Iceland at all.
Finally, I should mention that other measures of violence paint a very different picture (see number 6, here), but that gets into the realm of analysis, so I’ll stop here.
If the charitable deductions are limited, charitable contributions will decrease. That’s just math. Suppose you can afford to give $1000 to charity, and suppose (to make the math easy) that you are in a 50% marginal tax bracket and the new limit is zero. Then you will give just the $1000. Before the limit went to zero, when you gave $1000 you saved $500 on taxes, so you could give another $500. That saved you $250, which you could give, which saved another $125, and so on. In the end, you were able to give $2000. So your charitable contribution is cut in half.
Of course, the realistic effect is smaller. In general, if your marginal income tax rate is r, discretionary giving in excess of the limit is reduced by r. Again, that’s just math.
But when Ari Fleischer tweeted about this effect, liberals went crazy. Here’s a typical comment, selected for its lack of profanity:
lol talk about being a complete jerk, admitting you donate for the tax deduction #NoSoul
I think #NoMath would be more appropriate. No one donates just for the tax deduction unless their marginal tax rate is over 100%. Even if you get some back on your taxes, you still don’t end up ahead!
Fleischer tried to explain it:
For those having a fit re my charity tweet, when gvt reduces ppl’s take home pay, ppl have less $ to donate/spend. It’s math
But the innumerate liberals still weren’t buying it, including innumerate fools like New Republic editor Alec MacGillis and Buzz Feed “reporter” Andrew Kaczynski.
When a 16-year-old New Jersey boy doodled in his notebook on Tuesday, December 18, he probably didn’t expect to be arrested by the end of the day. However, when school officials saw the sketches, which they state appeared to be of weapons, and the boy “demonstrated behavior that caused them to be concerned,” the police were called.
A subsequent search of the boy’s home led to his arrest because they found several electronic parts and chemicals. He was charged with the possession of an explosive device and put in juvenile detention.
He doodled a superhero, and he owned a chemistry set and electronics set. For that, he went to jail. The authorities admit he did nothing wrong:
At no point in time did the boy threaten the school, school officials, or his classmates. He cooperated fully with authorities, and a search of the school itself found nothing dangerous . . .
and:
Police Chief Pat Moran stressed Tuesday night no threats were made by the student and there was no indication there was any danger posed to anyone or property at the school.
“There was no indication he was making a bomb, or using a bomb or detonating a bomb,” he said.
The Laffer Curve is inarguably real (no one will work at a 100% tax rate), the only question is where the peak is. Portugal is the latest country to be surprised to find itself on the wrong side of the peak.
A proposed new handbook for Americans serving in Afghanistan warns them not to speak ill about the Taliban, advocate women’s rights or criticize pedophilia, and the general in charge is not happy with it.
The draft of the newest Army handbook seems to suggest that ignorance of Afghan culture is to blame for deadly attacks by Afghan soldiers against the coalition forces, according to The Wall Street Journal, which got a peek at the 75-page document. But its message of walking on eggshells around the locals is not going over well with U.S. Marine Gen. John Allen, the top military commander in Afghanistan.
“Gen. Allen did not author, nor does he intend to provide, a foreword,” said Col. Tom Collins, a spokesman for the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan. “He does not approve of its contents.” . . .
The draft handbook includes a summary stating that some U.S. soldiers consider Afghan forces to be “basically stupid” thieves, “gutless in combat,” “profoundly dishonest” and engaged in “treasonous collusion and alliances with enemy forces.”
The draft handbook offers a list of “taboo conversation topics” that soldiers should avoid, including “making derogatory comments about the Taliban,” “advocating women’s rights,” “any criticism of pedophilia,” “directing any criticism toward Afghans,” “mentioning homosexuality and homosexual conduct” or “anything related to Islam,” according to the Journal.
If this is the mentality of the people running the Army, it’s no wonder we’re having trouble.
AS the nation teeters at the edge of fiscal chaos, observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.
The author doesn’t quite say what should replace the Constitution, but makes it clear that the purpose is to eliminate the obstacles it poses to his liberal agenda. The rights and institutions he likes would be kept, the rest scrapped.
POSTSCRIPT: Don’t bother saying that this is just an op-ed, and doesn’t express the NYT’s position. From an important person, the NYT might run an op-ed they didn’t agree with, although rarely. (They wouldn’t even run John McCain’s op-ed in 2008.) From a little-known law professor, the NYT won’t run a piece with which they disagree.
The Des Moines Register brought a columnist out of retirement for this column. Here’s the key bits:
Here, then, is my “madder-than-hell-and-I’m-not-going-to-take-it-anymore” program for ending gun violence in America:
Repeal the Second Amendment, the part about guns anyway. It’s badly written, confusing and more trouble than it’s worth. . .
Declare the NRA a terrorist organization and make membership illegal. . .
Then I would tie Mitch McConnell and John Boehner, our esteemed Republican leaders, to the back of a Chevy pickup truck and drag them around a parking lot until they saw the light on gun control.
And if that didn’t work, I’d adopt radical measures.
The Des Moines Register thought these ideas so compelling that they brought their author out of retirement: We should the 2nd Amendment from the Bill of Rights, eliminate the free-speech rights of gun owners, torture the Republican leaders to death, and then move on to more severe measures.
Not long ago, these same people had the nerve to prattle on about the need for civility in public discourse. The same people who alleged (yes, in the pages of the Des Moines Register) that Sarah Palin’s mailer targeting various Congressmen for defeat, which was clearly not a threat of violence, was nevertheless somehow responsible for the attack on Gabrielle Giffords, those people are now talking explicitly about the torture and murder of Republicans. As a first step.
I’m sure most of my readers already know that NBC’s David Gregory is in hot water for possessing (and displaying on Meet the Press) a 30-round “high-capacity” AR-15 magazine, which is illegal in the District of Columbia. Despite the media’s incredulity over the notion that he might have to answer for this, I fail to see any reason why he and his colleagues should not be prosecuted.
They cannot claim to have made an honest mistake. They asked the DC police for permission and it was denied. The crux of the their defense, as offered by their media defenders, seems to be that it was okay for him to possess that magazine, because he didn’t plan to do anything wrong with it. For example, here’s Greta Van Susteren (via DC Caller):
I will bet my right arm David Gregory is not going to go out and commit some crime with that magazine…or that he intended to flaunt the law. . .
He certainly did flaunt the law; he displayed an illegal magazine on national television! You can’t flaunt any more than that. But never mind that, consider the other point, that David Gregory is not going to commit some crime with the magazine.
And lest we forget, this is how the gun-control advocates (like David Gregory) want it. They don’t want criminal intent to be part of the standard, because nearly everyone looking to own a gun or a magazine in DC has only benign intent. A gun ban that applies only to criminals is no gun ban at all. (Instead, they’ve settled on one that — in practice — applies only to the law-abiding.)
The only reason Gregory and company might not be prosecuted is because they are big-shot journalists. The question to be settled here is whether David Gregory and NBC are above the law.
I’m guessing we will find that the answer is yes. And when we do, Americans’ respect for the law will take yet another hit.
Yes, the 2008 financial meltdown was substantially caused by the Community Reinvestment Act, which:
Required banks to lend more to low-income communities.
Directed Fannie and Freddie to buy up mortgages and turn them into securities.
Directed Fannie and Freddie to buy up high-risk mortgages, thereby encouraging banks to make more high-risk loans.
The left is desperate to deny this, since the financial meltdown was their entire pretext, not just for staying in power despite an appalling economic record, but also for ruinous regulation of the financial sector. So far, with the help of their media allies, they have been largely successful at keeping the connection out of the public consciousness.
But that hasn’t kept economists from studying the subject, and a new paper shows a strong connection:
Did the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) Lead to Risky Lending?
Yes, it did. We use exogenous variation in banks’ incentives to conform to the standards of the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) around regulatory exam dates to trace out the effect of the CRA on lending activity. . . We find that adherence to the act led to riskier lending by banks. . . These patterns are accentuated in CRA-eligible census tracts and are concentrated among large banks. The effects are strongest during the time period when the market for private securitization was booming.
POSTSCRIPT: Because we ought to be reminded of it every few years, after the jump are some excerpts from the anti-prophetic 1999 LA Times article that covered nearly every aspect of the CRA that caused the financial crisis without seeing any problem with any of them:
An interesting column in the Wall Street Journal discusses how American ethnic groups whose members relied on individual effort to advance themselves (e.g., Germans and Asians) advanced much more quickly than those who relied on politics (e.g., Irish and Blacks). I’d like to see more data points than the author provides, but his thesis is certainly plausible.
POSTSCRIPT: For some reason, the direct link doesn’t seem to work, but this Google link does, for now anyway.
Jake Tapper, the only member of the White House press corps who occasionally asks this administration tough questions, is leaving for an anchor job at CNN. The move comes shortly after he asked President Obama a tough question on his new gun control agenda.
I’d be interested to hear the story behind his departure. It’s arguably a promotion, but the timing is curious and Tapper probably had more influence at his old job than he will at CNN.
The ATF has no explanation for how an ATF agent’s gun ended up at the scene of a mass shooting in Mexico. To be clear, this isn’t one of the thousands of guns the ATF trafficked to Mexican drug cartels, this was a gun personally purchased by ATF agent George Gillett. (The purchase also apparently was illegal, as Gillett used a false address.)
At this point I’d like to mock the ATF by suggesting they lose their authority over firearms and instead be placed in charge of some other enforcement they might be competent at, but I can’t think of what that might be. Maybe pet licensing?
The more the media talks about guns, the more you realize how completely ignorant they are on the subject.
PBS’s Mark Shields: “In the United States of America in 2012, it’s easier in many states . . . to buy an automatic weapon than it is to rent an automobile.” Since automatic weapons are illegal in all 50 states, this is not even close to true.
New York Times: A “.9-millimeter” Sig Sauer? I suppose that would sting.
Pace the New York Times, the US murder rate is not 15 times that of other rich nations. Also, the rate of violent crime rate in the UK (which the NYT apparently cherry-picked as the typical rich nation) has soared since the statistics the NYT uses were collected, and is now nearly 5 times worse than the US. Australia’s gun ban did not correlate with a drop in the murder rate. And, 300 is greater than 250.
CBS’s Bob Schieffer, weeks after he should have known better: Semi-automatic weapons “keep firing” when you pull the trigger. No they don’t.
That’s only since the Newtown shootings. Including older instances of gun ignorance like the classic “shoulder thing that goes up” (not what a barrel shroud is) would take all day.
I don’t think that professors should be fired for their political views, even for political views as disgusting as those of Erik Loomis, a history professor at the University of Rhode Island. Still, Loomis is a profoundly poor choice to make into some kind of free-speech martyr, since he was explicitly calling for sanctions against people for their speech. For example:
Dear rightwingers, to be clear, I don’t want to see Wayne LaPierre dead. I want to see him in prison for the rest of his life.
This was Loomis explaining that he didn’t want LaPierre’s “head on a stick” literally; he only wanted him imprisoned. Okay then.
Loomis has the right to call for the abolition of free speech, but don’t expect me to ride to his defense now that the would-be censor is hypocritically posturing as a free-speech martyr.
Here’s something I did not know: During Prohibition, the federal government poisoned alcohol to make illicit drinking more dangerous. Over a thousand people were killed in New York City alone.
This is particularly interesting in light of the fact that drinking liquor was not even illegal. (Prohibition outlawed the production, sale, and transportation of liquor, but not its consumption.) The federal government killed thousands of people who weren’t even committing any crime.
The worst thing about the routine cruelty that so often seems to characterize the British NHS aren’t the outrages. The worst thing is how NHS outrages hardly even seem remarkable any more. In the latest set of outrages:
Alexandra Hospital in Redditch is writing to 38 families after a massive legal action that exposed years of bad practice, ranging from nurses taunting patients to leaving an elderly woman unwashed for 11 weeks. In one of the worst cases, a man had starvation recorded as the cause of his death after being treated at the hospital for two months. . .
The move will serve to intensify debate on why some nurses and doctors are treating patients without compassion, and will add weight to the warning by [Health Secretary] Mr Hunt that patients can experience “coldness, resentment, indifference” and “even contempt” in NHS hospitals. He warned that in the worst institutions, a “normalisation of cruelty” had been fostered. . .
The catalogue of failings uncovered by the mass legal action is one of the worst ever exposed at an NHS hospital. It included:
• A former nurse whose son told how she died after being left unwashed for 11 weeks, and was put on medication so powerful that she could not speak;
• A 35-year-old father-of-four whose family told how he wasted away because staff did not know how to fit a feeding tube;
• A pensioner who was left screaming in pain when his ribs were broken during a botched attempt to hoist him;
• A man who could not feed himself whose daughter described how he was taunted by nurses who took away his food uneaten;
• A great-grandmother left permanently unable to walk after doctors failed to detect a hip fracture.
Particularly worthy of note, I think, is the case where nurses put food out of the patient’s reach and then taunted him.
The four State Department officials who were selected to take the fall for the Benghazi debacle didn’t resign after all, and will shortly be back on the job. Ambassador Chris Stevens was unavailable for comment.
Bobby Eustace, an 11-year veteran with the city’s fire department tells FoxNews.com that on Sunday he and his fellow firefighters from Ladder 27 in the Bronx were issued a notice of violation for not maintaining restaurant standards in a tent set up in Breezy Point, Queens, to feed victims and first responders. . .
Eustace says that the Health Department worker then checked off a list of violations at the relief tent, including not having an HVAC system and fire extinguisher. “He told us that he might come back to see if we fixed the violations. . .”
When questioned, the NYC Department of Health said that its inspectors were only supposed to give advice, not issue violations. Of course, that’s exactly what they would say. (It might even be true, but government must be judged on its actions, not its reportedly good intentions.) Moreover, even if we accept that the inspectors were only supposed to give advice and the department somehow failed to communicate that simple fact to the inspectors, the fact remains that the department sent out health inspectors to interfere with relief workers, however rigid that interference was supposed to be.
The key fact I want to note is that this doesn’t somehow happen automatically. Someone thought it was a good idea to send health inspectors to interfere with relief workers and ordered that it be done.
This incident is depressingly typical. During the Gulf oil spill in 2010, the Coast Guard shut down an oil skimming operation because they did not have the required number of life jackets and fire extinguishers on board. Again, someone decided to do this. Indeed, the entire oil spill debacle was greatly exacerbated by the Obama administration’s punctilious enforcement of counter-productive rules.
This brings me to my central point. The people currently running our government will issue waivers as they see fit, mostly to advance their own political agenda (more on the pernicious effects of this in a future post), but no one can expect a waiver from their overbearing state simply because such a waiver ought to be issued!
Put another way, they issue waivers to serve their interests, not ours. You only want to serve people made homeless by a hurricane? Tough. You only want to clean oil from the Gulf of Mexico? Too bad.
So when the EPA writes milk-storage rules so broad that they cover spilled milk, and they say not to worry, they would never enforce it that way? Don’t you believe them. Someone is itching to enforce that rule.
Which brings me to Obamacare. The Obama administration has issued countless Obamacare waivers to mitigate the disastrous effects of their legislation. Why? Because they didn’t want it to be seen as (even more of) a disaster in advance of the election. But the election is now behind us. Do not expect those waivers to be renewed.
These people are itching to enforce those rules. If some people lose their jobs, what do they care? This administration made it very clear in 2009 and 2010 that nationalizing health care was more important to them than employment. If lots of people lose their health insurance, what do they care? They don’t want you to have private health insurance anyway.
These people send health inspectors to keep disaster victims from being fed; you think they care about your job, or your health insurance? Think again.
Despite the fact that it never happens, this seems to keep happening:
A Massachusetts state representative has agreed to plead guilty to civil rights violations and resign from office for his role in submitting false absentee ballot applications and casting invalid ballots in 2009 and 2010, the Justice Department said in a news release Thursday. . . The news release said “one or more government officials” helped Smith intercept the ballots before they were delivered to the voters, but it did not name the officials.
A campaign of intimidation by Islamists left most Christians in this southern Egyptian province too afraid to participate in last week’s referendum on an Islamist-drafted constitution they deeply oppose, residents say. The disenfranchisement is hiking Christians’ worries over their future under empowered Muslim conservatives.
Around a week before the vote, some 50,000 Islamists marched through the provincial capital, Assiut, chanting that Egypt will be “Islamic, Islamic, despite the Christians.” At their head rode several bearded men on horseback with swords in scabbards on their hips, evoking images of early Muslims conquering Christian Egypt in the 7th Century.
They made sure to go through mainly Christian districts of the city, where residents, fearing attacks, shuttered down their stores and stayed in their homes, witnesses said.
Meanwhile, our practitioners of “smart diplomacy” are content to watch it happen, without applying even the tiniest bit of pressure.
I’ve often remarked in regard to the Plame-Novak-Armitage affair that it was awfully hard to take the outrage over the leaking of an intelligence officer’s name, coming from the very same people who like to leak (and then print) intelligence’s officers’ names.
Now that we have the Obama administration doing the exact same thing, we’ll see how much outrage we hear from those same quarters.
POSTSCRIPT: By the way, here’s another case, from the office of Sen. John Kerry (D-MA).
Posted by K. Crary 
Internet Scofflaw 
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