I came across the quote of the week. This is from Ron Kirby, the transportation planning coordinator for the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, in an article in The Washington Post about DC’s inability to evacuate people in an emergency. He said:
“You should never try to tell people what they ought to do, because all of their circumstances are different,” Kirby said, “but if you give them very good timely information, they are going to make their own decisions in ways, in general, that are going to be better for them and better for the system as a whole.”
Imagine that. Giving people information and letting them make their own decisions works better than government barking orders. Someone put this guy in charge of Obamacare!
Just a few hours after my guest appearance last week on WSAU-AM and FM radio in Wausau to talk about the Wisconsin recall elections, my phone rang.
The man calling was one of the program’s listeners, who said he tracked me down because he had a few questions. We’ll call him Sean. Sean is, it turns out, a victim of class warfare, though he wouldn’t call himself that. And, boy, was he pissed.
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Robert Fernandes, a New Jersey father, proved the “power of one” in the past month, when he dubbed Saturday, August 20, as “Lemonade Freedom Day.”
Now parents in California, Nevada, Colorado, Texas, Illinois, Indiana, Arkansas, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and Washington, D.C. are joining in. Here’s how Fernandes describes the origin of the event and what it means for him and his children: [click to continue…]
The legal immorality of the Obama administration and its Department of Justice now stands fully exposed. And even some lawyers are shocked.
To be sure, many people think lawyers are unethical. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be the joke that goes: “What’s the difference between a carp and a lawyer?” Answer: “One’s a scum-sucking bottom feeder, the other’s just a fish.”
But lawyers are officers of the court, meaning they owe the institution a duty of candor. So it’s unethical – even scandalous – for a lawyer to promise a judge he will obey a particular court order and then turn around and immediately violate it. Yet that’s exactly what President Obama’s Department of Justice did in the Florida federal district court case involving the constitutionality of Obamacare.
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The answer to the above headline is “a whole Congress” (and a senseless president “W”). As Stephen F. Heyward noted the other day, the ban of the incandescent light bulb — thanks to the federal mandate of compact fluorescent light (CFL) for all Americans starting in 2012 — will be the stupidest “energy conservation” law since Jimmy Carter Richard Nixon spearheaded the national 55 mph speed limit.
I’d rather wear a sweater. We can only hope this scheme will be much less short-lived.
Writes Heyward:
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Here is a letter to the editor I submitted to USA Today the other day and was recently published.
If Jacob Lew, director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, believes what he wrote, the nation is in even worse trouble than I thought (“Social Security isn’t the problem,” Opposing view, Retirement debate, Feb. 22).
He tells us Social Security’s so-called trust fund takes in payroll taxes and holds U.S. Treasury bonds “backed with the full faith and credit of the U.S. government — and are held in reserve for when revenue collected is not enough to pay the benefits due. We have just as much obligation to pay back those bonds with interest as we do to any other bondholders.” And that’s the problem. The federal government is both the creditor and the debtor. It’s as if the government has written IOUs to itself. To pay benefits, the government will have to cash in the bonds. To pay the interest on the bonds, it will have to raise taxes.
Moving money from the left pocket to the right pocket does not increase our wealth, nor does it increase the solvency of the federal government.
Steve Stanek
It’s tough to top the Chicago City Council’s draconian ordinances that attempts to over-regulate everything from food trucks to music venues. It appears, however, that Evanston, IL, home to Northwestern University and the city directly north of Chicago, is giving them a run for their money:
The Northwestern administration will not ask Evanston to reconsider its “brothel law,” a zoning ordinance that will cause hundreds of students to be evicted next year from off-campus housing, a University official told THE DAILY on Monday.
The law, which prevents more than three unrelated people from living together, has not been enforced for years. But on July 1, Evanston will begin enforcing it, which will force landlords to evict some of the hundreds — or thousands — of NU students who live in off-campus houses or apartments with more than two roommates, city officials confirmed to THE DAILY on Monday.
American Spectator‘s Shawn Macomber has an interview up today with Fox Business reporter Charlie Gasparino, who has written what looks like a fascinating look inside the back room interaction between the Obama administration and Wall Street. Macomber says his book, Bought and Paid For, “lays out in gobstopping detail just how well both sides have since profited from this extended dalliance, combining fiery outsider indignation with hard-won insider knowledge, narrative prowess, and a true knack for the telling anecdote…”
From the AmSpec interview:
TAS: Could there be Big Government on the scale we’ve recently seen it without the complicity of Big Finance and Wall Street?
Gasparino: They feed off each other. If there were no bailout, I guess you could say there’d be no opportunity to make money off the bailout. But what we can say is you need someone to underwrite Obamacare. Wall Street is there to do that. BlackRock managed all the toxic assets of Bear Stearns. When they do cap-and-trade, they’ll be creating a new commodity to be traded on some exchange somewhere. The Fed, urged on by the White House, went in and bought $1.3 trillion mortgage backed securities, artificially propping up the market with taxpayer money. All the Wall Street firms that bought for pennies on the dollar are benefiting from the appreciation of a market that is only appreciating because of taxpayer money. Forget financial reform. The banks have made a killing since the bailout. And the average American? They’re stuck with the wonderful stimulus package that gave us 9.6 percent unemployment.
I followed Gasparino’s reporting on the ShoreBank bailout, which had the familiar taint of Obama administration pressure applied to Wall Street firms to help out the fallen community lender. I am told that episode is included in Bought and Paid For.
Over at Heartland’s Health Care News, Ben Domenech has a great article on the increasing role government is taking in our lives, particularly in what we eat:
Unfortunately, as Schweikart details, the government-knows-best dietary program has included massive mistakes based on junk science — faulty recommendations which, paired with equally ill-conceived food subsidies, ultimately sped the rise in obesity. This total failure didn’t stop those committed bureaucrats, whose passion for government managing the lives of citizens has become a matter of sanity-killing devotion.
George W. Bush administration Surgeon General Richard Carmona, for example, once said that putting a 20-ounce bottle of sugary soda in the hands of a child is as dangerous as giving him or her car keys. I don’t suggest you test that thesis.
The “Nanny Staters” have been busy recently. Two weeks ago, the San Francisco city council vote to ban the sale of McDonald’s Happy Meals; then last week we had the FDA present the new graphic warning labels for tobacco packaging that are aimed to help educate the public about the dangers of smoking (since no one knows them already?); and now it is expected that the FDA will ban the sale of caffeinated alcohol beverages, such as Four Loko.
Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) was the first politician to comment on the FDA’s upcoming decision that it is unsafe for caffeine to be added into alcoholic beverages by stating that, “Parents should be able to rest a little easier knowing that soon their children won’t have access to this deadly brew.”
Well if by children he means high school age (18) or younger then by law they don’t have the legal right to drink as it is. Now I’m not naïve to think that underage kids don’t find illegal ways of getting their hands on alcoholic beverages, but if they can’t get Four Loko, they will just get a different alcoholic beverage or possibly a more dangerous substance.
In typical of government fashion, the upcoming ban on Four Loko and similar products is yet another case of government feeling the need to “do something” in order to counteract a few individuals who made bad decisions. This is the usual knee jerk reaction when headlines are made from citizens who are experiencing the consequences of their own actions. These tragedies are quite unfortunate, but it is hard to say that they wouldn’t have occurred even with the ban in place.
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