When you allow political channels to be used to pick economic winners and losers, it is inevitable that politicians will use political (or personal) criteria, instead of “the public good,” as naively claimed, to make those decisions.
Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.
The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm’s losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn’t meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.
Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye’s office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.
WaPo finally got around to identifying his party affiliation in paragraph 5. Sen. Inouye is a democrat, in case it wasn’t painfully obvious. Drain the swamp!
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An interesting perspective on different presidents (and congresses) and their contributions to the national debt:
Hat tip: Econosseur
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Earlier this month, a rogue New York prosecutor took it upon himself to illegally freeze $34 million in online poker winnings.
Prosecutors’ seizure of $34 million belonging to online poker players ups the ante in a long-running struggle between the Justice Department, which wants to shut down the online-gambling industry, and members of Congress who want to make it legal.
The government has used several laws to prosecute online gambling. Critics claim those laws are unclear and are sometimes contradicted by a patchwork of state laws.
Although it’s stupid no matter how you cut it, what is most pathetic about this action is that it targeted individual players whose activities were not illegal even under the ill advised stealth passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act in 2006. Over 27,000 Americans exercising their natural right to use their property as they see fit were assaulted by this policy. Although some misguided legislators think it’s their place to protect the peasants from themselves, a large part of government antagonism toward online gambling is simply a turf war. The government has skin in this game, as they sanction or even sponsor gambling all across the country. It is utterly hypocritical and immoral to use the force of government to protect chosen gambling venues while attacking others. This nanny state foolishness must stop, immediately.
It’s sad to say that what should be an issue of small government seems to be best understood by democrats, while many republicans oddly take the statist view. I don’t get it, but at least there’s one issue where some good might come with having the democrats in power.
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The New York Times, unsurprisingly, has thrown out a sob piece regarding the Ricci decision to prohibit government racism. The poor local governments simply don’t know what to do. How can they pander to leftist identity groups if they aren’t allowed to make racist, anti-white decisions? First I should dispel some falsehoods:
With the court’s ruling making it harder for cities and other employers to throw out tests they conclude are unfair, employers are expected to work harder to make sure their written tests — indeed their entire selection process — are fair.
This is a lie. The New Haven test was not demonstrated to be unfair. No specific question was determined to be racist in any way. Rather it was concluded that, merely because they did not meet some racial quota, the results could be disregarded. Any claim that the test was racist just because no black candidates scored high enough to earn promotion is based on faulty logic.
In fact, the city did work very hard to ensure “the entire selection process” was fair. What some people can’t seem to get through their thick skulls is that a fair process does not guarantee, or even make more likely, equally distributed success. Unequal distributions, then, are not evidence of unfair processes.
But on with the crying:
“We don’t see clear, bright-line guidance here,” said Lars Etzkorn, a program director with the National League of Cities. “This is going to be good for employment lawyers.”
Really? No clear guidance? For the racially obsessed, let me make it real simple. This is advice any local government idiot can follow. Are you ready? Ok, here it is:
Disregard all irrelevancies like race or sex and hire or promote the most qualified candidates!
That bright enough for you?
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Brainless hack and democratic party sock-puppet Paul Krugman weighs in on cap and trade:
So the House passed the Waxman-Markey climate-change bill. In political terms, it was a remarkable achievement.
But 212 representatives voted no. A handful of these no votes came from representatives who considered the bill too weak, but most rejected the bill because they rejected the whole notion that we have to do something about greenhouse gases.
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
Krugman’s latest screed, in addition to being filled with hateful hyperbole, is so utterly devoid of anything approaching intellectualism that one can’t help but wonder just when, exactly, the aliens took over his body and first began spewing such nonsense.
Don Boudreaux put it best:
Leave a commentIt’s more accurate to say that Mr. Krugman is committing treason against reasoned debate. One of the most compelling arguments against climate-change regulation is not that global warming isn’t occurring but, rather, that the dangers of further regulation far outweigh its likely benefits. Government regulation inevitably is a political animal; it’s never guided purely, or even largely, by disinterested science.
Is it treasonous to worry about the influence of interest-groups on regulation? Is it treasonous to fear that centralizing more power in Washington will result in unforeseen negative consequences? Is it treasonous to believe that the threat to our well-being posed by further constraints upon markets is worse than is the threat posed by higher temperatures?
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Pakistani family shot dead in ‘honour killing’ after wedding
Relatives dressed in police uniforms stormed the bridegroom’s house in the district of Charsadda, in North West Frontier Province.
“The assailants took the bridegroom out while some of the attackers climbed the wall and entered the house. They killed the bride, the mother and sister of the bridegroom,” said Saleem Jan, a police official for the Charsadda district.
…Police said the bride, who was 18 or 19 years old, came from the deeply conservative Mardan district next to Charsadda. She had run away and married her boyfriend, who was around 30, without telling her parents.”Both the girl and man married some weeks ago,” Misal Khan, the bridegroom’s uncle, told reporters at the scene.
Police said the main suspects were two uncles and a cousin.
Islam is a religion of peace.
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The media says yes. Tales of the Honduran coup are all over the major media outlets. They are cheerfully repeating the claims of leftist Latin America leaders like Hugo Chavez, that President Zelaya was ousted in a “coup.” A superficial understanding of the fact, that the military removed him from office, certainly supports this claim. A closer inspection of the events that led up to Zelaya’s ouster, however, suggests that what transpired was actually a defense of democracy against the assault of a power hungry populist leftist.
That Mr. Zelaya acted as if he were above the law, there is no doubt. While Honduran law allows for a constitutional rewrite, the power to open that door does not lie with the president. A constituent assembly can only be called through a national referendum approved by its Congress.
But Mr. Zelaya declared the vote on his own and had Mr. Chávez ship him the necessary ballots from Venezuela. The Supreme Court ruled his referendum unconstitutional, and it instructed the military not to carry out the logistics of the vote as it normally would do.
The top military commander, Gen. Romeo Vásquez Velásquez, told the president that he would have to comply. Mr. Zelaya promptly fired him. The Supreme Court ordered him reinstated. Mr. Zelaya refused.
Calculating that some critical mass of Hondurans would take his side, the president decided he would run the referendum himself. So on Thursday he led a mob that broke into the military installation where the ballots from Venezuela were being stored and then had his supporters distribute them in defiance of the Supreme Court’s order.
The attorney general had already made clear that the referendum was illegal, and he further announced that he would prosecute anyone involved in carrying it out. Yesterday, Mr. Zelaya was arrested by the military and is now in exile in Costa Rica.
After the would be dictator was ousted, the military promptly stepped aside and allowed the political branches to follow the proper protocol in replacing Zelaya. The Congress, after voting to remove Zelaya, subsequently replaced him in a manner “mandated by the constitution.” This is not the stuff of coups.
Dr. Palmer observes:
Imagine that George Bush, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or some other American president had decided to overturn the Constitution so that he could stay in power beyond the constitutionally limited time. To do that, he orders a nationwide referendum that is not constitutionally authorized and blatantly illegal. The Federal Election Commission rules that it is illegal. The Supreme Court rules that it is illegal. The Congress votes to strip the president of his powers and, as members of Congress are not that good at overcoming the president’s personally loyal and handpicked bodyguards, they send police and military to arrest the president. Now, which party is guilty of leading a coup?
Meanwhile, while Obama felt that even rhetoric would constitute “meddling” in Iran, his White House has put considerable effort into first defending and now restoring to power a would-be leftist dictator. Where are his priorities?
Update: Heritage has more.
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Rejecting the identity politics of the like of Sotomayor, the Supreme Court today overturned the decision of the Second Circuit panel, on which Judge Sotomayor sat, which upheld a lower courts decision to allow the city of New Haven to throw out the results of a hiring test for firefighters because no blacks qualified for promotion. This decision in Ricci, et al. v. DeStefano, et al. is a blow against the kind of racist identity politics pushed by Obama and Sotomayor, and a victory for the rule of law.
This ruling is the latest in a series of steps the Court has taken to strike down race-conscious actions that violate individual rights—and thus is a blow both to the Obama administration (which sided with the city in Ricci) and to the nomination of Judge Sotomayor. Those who bring cases before the courts deserve much more than empathy or even “sympathy”—the word Justice Ginsburg uses in her dissent—they deserve equal treatment under the law.
Jonathan Adler on what this means for Sotomayor:
The length of the Supreme Court’s opinions (a 34-page majority, 39-page dissent, and two concurrences) is evidence that the case raised difficult and weighty issues. It reinforces the position of Judge Sotomayor’s colleagues who criticized the panel’s initial disposition and, on their own initiative (and without the filing of a petition for rehearing en banc), sought full court review of the case. Yet even if her handling of this case reflects poorly on her judgment, I do not see it as disqualifying, and I do not believe it will prevent her from being confirmed.
And finally, Alito’s concurrence rejects the “empathy” approach (from page 13 of full decision):
Petitioners were denied promotions for which they qualified because of the race and ethnicity of the firefighters who achieved the highest scores on the City’s exam. The District Court threw out their case on summary judgment, even though that court all but conceded that a jury could find that the City’s asserted justification was pretextual. The Court of Appeals then summarily affirmed that decision.
The dissent grants that petitioners’ situation is “unfortunate” and that they “understandably attract this Court’s sympathy.” Post, at 1, 39. But “sympathy” is not what petitioners have a right to demand. What they have a right to demand is evenhanded enforcement of the law—of Title VII’s prohibition against discrimination based on race. And that is what, until today’s decision, has been denied them.
Check SCOTUSBlog for more analysis.
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See, isn’t government nice? They’re letting us keep the water that lands on our roofs! How generous.
Clearly we owe them our health care in return. Reciprocation and all that.
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I am a libertarian-conservative blogger living in the DC area. I have a Master's degree in Political Science, but please don't hold that against me.
