POLIWOOD: Remembering Ron Silver.
Archive for 2009
March 20, 2009
GREAT COMMUNICATOR: Obama apologizes for “Special Olympics” remark.
FLYING CARS: Pictures and video.
BILL ALLISON: Financial crisis doesn’t disrupt financial fundraisers. “While members may be publicly throwing AIG under the bus, in private they’re only too happy to cozy up with contributors, offering preferred access and insights in exchange for campaign cash. One of the first rules of following Washington: Watch what they do, not what they say.”
GOVERNMENT EFFICIENCY: Plan due on February 10 now put off until … April.
IS THIS THE END OF AMERICA? “U.S. law-making is riddled with slapdash, incompetence and gamesmanship.” Yes, they’re drastically underperforming even my low expectations this year.
Related thoughts from Henry Blodget. “The frantic passage of the Populist Rage Tax was a new low in the US government’s response to this crisis. It shows just how likely we are to doom ourselves to a decade or more of misery–by choking our markets, closing our borders, turning our banks into tools of social policy, and wrecking what’s left of our economy.”
Plus, bad tax policy.
YET ANOTHER TRIUMPH FOR OBAMA’S VETTERS: “Obama’s special envoy Richard Holbrooke served on A.I.G.’s board when the company a) went ‘over a cliff,’ and b) approved the now-controversial bonuses. But he’ll survive. It’s not like he also got special loan deals from Countrywide as a ‘Friend of Angelo.’ …. Oh, wait! … I don’t want to know where Holbrooke was when Enron was going down. … “
PUBLIC PENSION UPDATE: “Two top advisers to Alan G. Hevesi, the former state comptroller, were charged Thursday in a 123-count grand jury indictment that said they had turned New York’s $122 billion pension fund into a criminal enterprise. . . . Hank Morris, who was once Mr. Hevesi’s chief political adviser and a nationally known Democratic consultant, was charged with myriad counts — including bribery, grand larceny, money laundering and fraud — in a case brought by the state attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo. Mr. Morris collected more than $15 million in fees from investment companies during Mr. Hevesi’s tenure as comptroller, from 2003 to 2006, according to court papers.”
THIS WOULD BE GOOD NEWS, IF TRUE: “The New Madrid fault system does not behave as earthquake hazard models assume and may be in the process of shutting down, a new study shows.” Of course, it could just be saving its strength . . .
THEY SHOULD CALL IT “DRILLZILLA:” “This 23-pound drill bores six-inch-wide holes in brick and smashes concrete, without destroying your arms.”
NAME THAT PARTY: Chris Dodd edition!
ELECTRIC CAR NEWS: Tesla Model S will cost under $50,000 after tax breaks.
DEMANDING AN APOLOGY from Ezra Klein. Was the tweet pre-vetted on JournoList?
IN THE MAIL: From Vik Amar and Mark Tushnet, Global Perspectives on Constitutional Law.
I also note, just as an aside, that the definition of “very rich” seems increasingly to be set at “just above the level a top-notch journalist in a two-earner couple could be expected to pull down”.
Heh.
THE DEATH OF NEWSPAPERS and the Dan Rather Award.
AN ICON THAT SAYS they’re watching you.
That’s $165 million in bonus money handed out to AIG debt manipulators who may be the only ones who know how to defuse the bomb they themselves built. Now, in the scheme of things, $165 million is a rounding error. It amounts to less than 1/18,500 of the $3.1 trillion federal budget. It’s less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the bailout money given to AIG alone. If Bill Gates were to pay these AIG bonuses every year for the next 100 years, he’d still be left with more than half his personal fortune.
For this we are going to poison the well for any further financial rescues, face the prospect of letting AIG go under (which would make the Lehman Brothers collapse look trivial) and risk a run on the entire world financial system? . . . If you thought the AIG hysteria was a display of populist cynicism directed at a relative triviality, consider this: There are more than 6.5 million trucks in the United States. The program Congress terminated allowed 97 Mexican trucks to roam among them. Ninety-seven! Shutting them out not only undermines NAFTA. It caused Mexico to retaliate with tariffs on 90 goods affecting $2.4 billion in U.S. trade coming out of 40 states.
Of course we are. Because to our governing class, polls are more real than reality. And consequences, like taxes, are for the little people.
A RECIPE FOR MONGOLIAN BEEF from cool food-blog The Crepes Of Wrath.
A PROFILE of Neil Strauss, author of Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life.
But would you buy a book on survival from the author of this book? Well, they’re both about dog-eat-dog worlds. But he paid way too much for that shotgun . . . .
COMING SOON: Global warming trade wars. That’ll help cool down the economy, anyway. Brr.
ANN ALTHOUSE: “Obama skipped ‘Meet the Press’ because David Gregory is too safe and unchallenging? Sorry, I don’t believe that.”
RANDY BARNETT: Is Originalism Crossing Over?
My answer is that we stand poised on the threshold of a possible shift when the constitutionality of state restrictions of the right to keep and bear arms is confronted by the Court in the wake of DC v. Heller. The evidence is overwhelming that the Privileges or Immunities of Citizens of the United States included a personal right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, the evidence that the right protected by the original meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment was personal and individual is even stronger and less impeachable than it is with the Second Amendment. And all the historical evidence concerning a right to keep and bear arms that exists concerns the Privileges or Immunities Clause, not the Due Process Clause.
Moreover, since the path breaking work by Michael Kent Curtis appeared in the 1980s, there has formed a remarkable scholarly consensus among those familiar with the historical record, and this consensus is entirely nonideological. Indeed, on February 4, 2009, the self-described “progressive” Constitutional Accountability Center filed a brief in the consolidated case of McDonald, et al., and National Rifle Association of America, Inc., et al., v. City of Chicago, et al., and Village of Oak Park, now pending in the Seventh Circuit, arguing that the individual right to bear arms recognized in District of Columbia v. Heller, is “incorporated” against state action via the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the 14th Amendment.
Read the whole thing.