After raiding the public for billions of dollars, CEO Obama was still unable to salvage Chrysler, which is now heading for bankruptcy.
Despite running the company into the ground, CEO Obama has no intention of resigning his post as head of Chrysler. Not, mind you, that he actually wants to run the auto companies. So don’t go getting any funny ideas.
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But George Soros is making me!
“I don’t want to run auto companies, and I don’t want to run banks,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve got two wars I’ve got to run already–I’ve got more than enough to do.”
How stupid does this guy think we are?
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Washington D.C. tickets people for parking in their own driveways:
D.C. Councilmember Tommy Wells (D-Ward 6) says he’s been getting lots of complaints.
“For the first time in anyone’s memory,” Wells says. “People are starting to get ticketed in their own driveways. This is ridiculous and we’re going to get to the bottom of it.”
…So what does the law say?
“Any area between the property line and the building restriction line shall be considered as private property set aside and treated as public space under the care and maintenance of the property owner.”
Basically what that means is most property owners in the District don’t own the land between their front door and the sidewalk, but they are responsible for taking care of it. It’s why you can get a ticket for drinking beer on your front porch in the Nation’s Capital. You’re technically on public space. It’s also why the city can ticket you for parking in your own driveway if you don’t pull your car deep enough into the driveway beyond the façade of your house or building.
To be clear, we’re not talking about people who park in shallow driveways and let the rear of their cars block the sidewalk. The cars are off the road, off the sidewalk and in the driveway – just not far enough back for the city.
“This is ludicrous,” Anderson says, “We were three feet away from the sidewalk. People have parked here for thirty years.”
When Anderson complained to a supervisor at DPW she was told that she could lease the property from the District and avoid future tickets. Anderson, who uses the house as a place of business to see clients and regularly has several cars in her large three car driveway, scoffs at that idea. “The city is not going to extort money out of me,” she says.
What a town.
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Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic asks for an explanation:
The GOP has basically been eliminated from the Northeast by the purists so there aren’t many great examples.
Contrast that with how Democrats treat people like Mark Prior, Jon Tester, and Ben Nelson. These Senators aren’t anywhere near ideal for Democrats, as a quick glance at the Netroots sites will affirm.
But they don’t have to fear primaries by party mutilators like Pat Toomey.
Why do Dems treat their Dogs differently
Is it a function of power? Or party traditions?
The difference, such that there is, is explained by the different manner in which Republicans and Democrats secure votes. Democrats do not have a cohesive ideology; rather, they are a party existing purely to win power. They do so by launching money at key interest groups and voting blocs. Essentially, they bribe enough constituencies to vote for them until they have a majority. This tactic requires little ideological conformity from party members, beyond a simple willingness to go along to get along.
Republicans win by representing an ideology. Specifically, one of small government and fiscal restraint. They lose when they do not represent this ideology or try to be like Democrats. When they hurl money at constituency groups, they bleed ideological support while gaining little new adherents. Those receiving this largesse are thankful, no doubt, but they know they could always get even more if Democrats were in power.
Because the Republican party has to sell itself ideologically, it must, on the whole, convincingly represent that ideology. Party members such as Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins consistently undermine that image. This costs the party more seats than they provide. Cutting out enough of these miscreants, such that the party can once again be seen as representative of the small government ideology, is necessary to its regaining majority status.
But so long as the media trots out only liberals, who treat the parties as two sides of the same coin, to explain the significance of events within the Republican party, they will reach conclusions that are 180 degrees off. But that’s fine by me, as it means the liberals will, once again, be taken completely by surprise when they are booted out of office.
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I heard this morning that Arlen Specter was changing parties. Upon investigation I was sad and dismayed to learn he’s still a democrat:
Veteran Republican Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania disclosed plans Tuesday to switch parties, a move intended to boost his chances of winning re-election next year that also will push Democrats within one seat of a 60-vote filibuster-resistant majority.
“I now find my political philosophy more in line with Democrats than Republicans,” Specter said in a statement posted on a Web site devoted to Pennsylvania politics and confirmed by his office. Several Senate officials said a formal announcement was expected later in the day or Wednesday.
…Specter faced an extraordinarily difficult re-election challenge in his home state in 2010, having first to confront a challenge from his right in the Republican primary before pivoting to a general election campaign against a Democrat in a state that has trended increasingly Democratic in recent elections.
What’s amazing here is that he would just come out and admit that this is nothing more than naked opportunism. He was getting crushed in the early polls by Club for Growth President Pat Toomey, who narrowly lost the last primary battle, and that was before Specter sealed his unprincipled betrayal by supporting the porkulus bill.
Practically this makes little difference. The talk will be about how this gives democrats a 60 seat filibuster proof majority (counting the soon-to-be Senator Smalley), but that just obscures the fact there was already a 60+ seat liberal majority, thanks to the likes of Arlen Specter, Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins.
The upside is that now even the morons at the RNC will be able to figure out to stop supporting Arlen Specter at the expense of principled conservatives.
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Barney Frank, perhaps the single most reprehensible member of a reprehensible Congress, has recently been pushing for legalizing online gambling and expanded freedom in a few other ways. On this issue I support him. But in making the case for this he revealed a sadly confused, and quite dangerous, philosophy.
“I would let people gamble on the Internet,” Frank said. “I would let adults smoke marijuana; I would let adults do a lot of things, if they choose.
“But allowing them total freedom to take on economic obligations that spill over into the broader society? The individual is not the only one impacted here, when bad decisions get made in the economic sphere, it causes problems.
So the basis for government intervention, according to Barney Frank, is whether or not a decision has any impact on other people. That’s not an unreasonable criteria, but it’s entirely too simplistic by itself.
What government should be concerned with is rights. The question is not just whether someone else has been negatively impacted by a decision, but whether or not their rights have been violated. That is the criteria necessary for government action.
But there’s perhaps an even more glaring problem with Barney Frank’s assertion. He implies that bad economic decisions are less likely to be made with government involvement than when the people are “allowed” their freedom. This is entirely baseless.
Bad decisions will be made regardless of whether private individuals or governments are making them. As they cannot be eliminated, and usually not even reduced, through government involvement, the fact that bad decisions impact other people is irrelevant. The question we should be asking is: what is better at correcting those mistakes that inevitably do arise, a government bureaucracy or a dynamic economy based on freedom and choice? The evidence overwhelming points to the latter as better able to self-correct and adapt to changing circumstances.
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MSNBC is fretting that the FDA is understaffed:
The FDA is responsible for overseeing the safety of the nation’s foods, drugs, medical devices and consumer products. In each of those areas, the agency is widely regarded as having fallen down on the job.
But its biggest black eye comes from the way the agency has handled its food safety responsibilities.
This is a common refrain from nanny-staters. If only they had more money. If only they had more people. If only they had more regulations. If only they had more government! The President himself echoed this line, lamenting that, “at a bare minimum, we should be able to count on our government keeping our kids safe when they eat peanut butter.” What a sad commentary on his view of American government. Mr. President, making government responsible for protecting everyone from everything, down to their peanut butter,cannot reasonably be considered a “bare minimum.” It’s also not possible.
The President is using the recent episode of contaminated peanut butter to scare people into supporting ever more government. This is not surprising, as fear is the typical driver of government expansion. Stoking fear allows the nanny-staters to avoid explaining just why they believe government regulators can accomplish that tiny little task of “keeping [all] our kids safe when they eat peanut butter.”
If there is a government regulatory agency that has ever accomplished the goal of eliminating the danger or risk it was conjured to protect us from, I’ve yet to hear of it. Government agencies, and the bureaucrats that run them, simply do not have the incentives necessary to compel efficacy. Instead, government creations inevitably get co-opted by industry leaders, which then utilize the unique power of government force to protect not the consumer, but themselves – from market competition.
Thankfully, effective government is not necessary in situations like this. Food suppliers have ample incentive to ensure the quality of their product. Poisoning ones customers is a fast path to bankruptcy. This is not to say that mistakes will never be made, as they are inevitable. Private companies that make mistakes pay a high price, as Peanut Corp. of America learned when it filled chapter 7 bankruptcy after poor sanitary conditions at several of its plants lead to an outbreak of salmonella. This is contrasted with the bigger budgets and greater powers that usually come after government screw ups. Which incentive structure makes you feel safer?
Furthermore, the presence of government inspectors makes both consumers and producers lazy. Suppliers rely on government to prove the safety of their products, rather than having to go the extra mile to convince customers themselves, while consumers with unjustified faith in government do less research and investigation of companies and products than they otherwise would. When this combination of government and consumer apathy inevitably results in lapses, the immediate answer is always to exacerbate the situation by giving government more responsibilities, and the individual less. It’s a cycle of dependence that must be broken, and we can start by acknowledging that not only is the FDA not understaffed, but that even a single staffer is one too many.
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Not that the Democrats care. They aren’t actually interested in “investigating” anything with their “hearings.” Rather, they are just going through the motions so they can pass their cap-and-tax plan.
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Fresh from his couragous act of saving the taxpayers $100 million, Obama’s Treasury has lent GM another $2 billion, bringing their grand total of public loot to over $20 billion. Are we really to believe that America’s future depends on GM’s ability to deliver moonbat buggies?
Why is the left not taking to the streets to decry this corporatist government?
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The subject of torture is suddenly unavoidable. I suspect this is a deliberate effort to distract from poor economic news and the recent tea party backlash against big government. Be that as it may, the narrative needs to be addressed.
America, and Americans by and large, do not believe in torture. This has always been true, and it’s no more true today than it was in the Bush administration. Any government that seeks to avoid torture must, by necessity, define just what torture is. The Bush administration sought to do this. Now the Obama administration, not happy with the prior definition, seeks to adopt its own. It’s to be expected that, when a new party comes into power, issues such as this will be readdressed and new positions taken. But Obama is going one step further. Not only does he find the Bush definition wrong, he wants to label it criminal.
This is a frightening development for anyone who supports our democratic system. The United States has enjoyed a long track record of peaceful transitions that most of the world can only dream about. A large part of the reason for this is that we do not seek to criminalize political differences. When your average Latin American military junta assumes power, the first order of action is to jail everyone in power previously. The United States is better than that. It used to be, anyway.
Barack Obama is willing to leave open the possibility that Bush administration officials may be tried for drawing a line in a slightly different place than Obama draws it. Not, mind you, for wantonly and maliciously running torture dungeons where any and all practices were acceptable, but for approving a single tactic which Obama did not like, and which is routinely conducted on our own soldiers for training. Peaceful democracies are not supposed to handle complicated legal and moral issues by jailing those who take opposing positions. If Obama wants to elevate the game to that level, he should keep in mind that his entire economic agenda is flagrantly unconstitutional; whereas if he has his way on waterboarding, we might just have to start calling it criminal as well.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science and work in public policy, but please don't hold that against me.
