EVEN THE NEW YORK TIMES IS NOTICING: A Terrorist Horror, Then Golf: Incongruity Fuels Obama Critics.
Archive for 2014
August 22, 2014
SAD THAT ENVIRONMENTALISTS OPPOSE THIS NEW GREEN ENERGY TECHNOLOGY: Fuzzy Math Can’t Hide Shale Boom’s Green Credentials. “One day, with the right technologies, we’ll be able to power society without relying on fossil fuels, but we’re not there yet. Until then, natural gas is one of our best options, and greens would do well to recognize the fracking boom for what it is: good news.” It’s only good news if clean cheap energy is your goal.
PROF. PHILIP HAMBURGER: The SEC And The Cascade Of Evasions. “The SEC clearly hopes to use administrative proceedings to evade the constitutional right to jury. When discussing the recent trial losses suffered by the SEC, Ceresney defended its evasion by talking about the SEC as if it were a victim of unfortunate circumstances in court — circumstances that ordinarily are called juries. . . . But the juries have a point. The SEC, in reality, is acting as a prosecutor. Notwithstanding the pretense of “civil penalties” — a strange oxymoron — the SEC candidly proclaims on its website that ‘the SEC is a law enforcement agency.’ Indeed, its proceedings are government enforcement actions that seek to punish or correct, and they thus are criminal in nature. No surprise, then, that juries expect more than a civil burden of proof. Rather than a problem, this is a reminder of why juries are valuable.”
They’re only valuable if you want to protect individual freedom and government accountability. That’s not the SEC’s priority. And as Hamburger notes, it’s not just the SEC: “The ever widening evasion of constitutional rights is worrisome. Administrative agencies, such as the SEC, enforce important laws, but this is no justification for their evasion of rights — let alone the cascading evasions that threaten to make judges and juries nearly irrelevant. At one point or another, the judges will have to face up to the expanding evasions, and the longer they wait, the more difficult their task will be.”
ROLL CALL: GAO: Pentagon Broke Law in Bergdahl Case.
The Defense Department violated the law when it didn’t tell Congress before transferring five Taliban detainees from Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to Qatar in return for the Taliban’s release of captured Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the Government Accountability Office said in a legal decision made public Thursday.
Pentagon officials “did not notify the relevant congressional committees at least 30 days in advance of the transfer,” as required by law, GAO General Counsel Susan A. Poling said in a letter to nine Republican senators who had sought the analysis.
What’s more, Poling said, “because DOD used appropriated funds to carry out the transfer when no money was available for that purpose, DOD violated the Antideficiency Act,” which “prohibits federal agencies from incurring obligations exceeding an amount available in an appropriation.”
The GAO ruling provides legal backing for the position that the administration flouted the notification requirement — a view held by most Republicans and more than a few Democrats. The GAO does not address other issues that many lawmakers have raised about the merits of the exchange.
Anti-Deficiency Act violations are a serious thing. But will a False Claims Act action lie?
I BLAME RACISM: Republicans support President Obama on Iraq more than Democrats.
Most Americans support the White House’s limited airstrikes on ISIS in Iraq, with a majority of Republicans enthusiastically backing the effort, according to new Washington Post-ABC News survey.
The Aug. 13-17 survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.5 percentage points, found that 61 percent of self-identified Republican respondents support the airstrikes, while only 54 percent of Democrats say the same.
I mean, it’s already been established that there’s no other possible reason for disapproving of anything Obama does, right? So it’s got to be racism.
SHOCKER: Revolving door at regulator CFPB enables former bureaucrats to cash in at taxpayers’ expense.
Peter Carroll helped shape the mortgage regulations at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau until this spring. Now, Carroll is senior vice president of capital markets at Wells Fargo Home Mortgages, the largest private mortgage lender in the country.
Carroll’s colleague, Lisa Applegate, was the “Mortgage Implementation Lead,” at CFPB, and now she’s “strategic quality manager within Wells’ home lending capital markets group,” according to American Banker magazine.
Carroll’s replacement at CFPB, Patricia McClung, was recently at the National Association of Realtors (one of the largest lobbying groups in the country), and for years was an executive at failed mortgage giant Freddie Mac.
What’s remarkable about the revolving-door action at the CFPB this year is that it’s completely unremarkable for the agency.
The Democratic Congress and the Obama White House created the CFPB with its 2010 Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill. The top aides to Messrs. Dodd and Frank, of course, have cashed out to K Street and Wall Street.
Yet another argument for my revolving-door surtax.
MISSOURI DEMOCRAT: “Rand Paul Was Right.”
“Rand Paul was right. He talked about how we cannot militarize our cities. That what it looked like.
“I’ve never seen anything like it and I grew up in the South during the civil rights days,” he said.
He and Rep. Lacy Clay (D-Mo.) said the military-grade weapons and equipment donated by the Pentagon to local agencies were never intended to be used against citizens engaged in civil disobedience.
Well, I’m not so sure about that.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: American University’s Washington College of Law Plunges In Rankings, But Builds $130 Million New Campus.
MOST TRANSPARENT ADMINISTRATION EVER: White House Going With ‘Security By Obscurity’ As Excuse For Refusing To Release Healthcare.gov Security Details.
JUST A FEW MONTHS AGO OBAMA WAS CALLING THEM JUNIOR VARSITY: Defense secretary: ISIS threat ‘beyond anything we’ve seen.’ I predict that the press won’t make a lot of this 180-degree shift in position.
August 21, 2014
“ANYONE BUT OBAMA” SENTIMENT DOESN’T EXTEND TO HILLARY: YouGov poll: Most Americans, and most Democrats, do not wish Hillary had won in 2008.
ED DRISCOLL: Dispatches From The CNN Style Guide. “And CNN wonders why it long ago lost the trust of a nation.”
CENSORSHIP: University Blocks Student Access To “Harmful” Webpages.
Northern Illinois University is restricting students’ access to certain websites. For their own good, of course. The internet is a dangerous place, and we wouldn’t want students inadvertently coming across something controversial, now would we?
Students who attempt to visit an unauthorized site through the campus network are redirected to a creepy “Web Page Access Warning.” The “warning” is that the students are about to go somewhere that probably violates NIU internet policy. One student reported the policy to Reddit after he received a warning for trying to access the Westboro Bapist Church’s Wikipedia page. That’s right, its Wikipedia page.
NIU cites “common sense, decency, ethical use, civility, and security,” as its various rationales for the policy. Yes, a public institution of higher learning believes that it is just common sense—and ethical—to dissuade students from visiting websites deemed harmful by administrators.
Is it any wonder that higher education is losing respect?
BOB ZUBRIN: Free Kurdistan!
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: It’s Alive(ish)! Brain Cells Grow and Respond in Artificial Tissue.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Breakfast Overrated? “For years, we’ve heard that breakfast is the most important meal of the day. But scientific support for that idea has been surprisingly meager, and a spate of new research at several different universities — published in multiple articles in the August issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition — could change the way we think about early-hours eating.” Yet another place where the settled science wasn’t.
NICK GILLESPIE: The Libertarian Moment In Ferguson.
What has helped the story to go fully national, however, is that the events surrounding it exemplify the concerns that libertarians have been raising for decades about the militarization of police, which has its roots both in the drug war and the post-9/11 terror-industrial complex. As my former colleague Radley Balko, now at The Washington Post, has documented for years (first at The Cato Institute, then at Reason, and most fully in last year’s Rise of the Warrior Cop), “The buzz phrase in policing today is officer safety. You’ll also hear lots of references to preserving order, and fighting wars, be it on crime, drugs, or terrorism. Those are all concepts that emphasize confrontation. It’s a view that pits the officers as the enforcer, and the public as the entity upon which laws and policies and procedures are to be enforced.”
I remember when the catchphrase on Hill Street Blues changed from “Let’s be careful out there,” to “Let’s do it to them before they do it to us.” In retrospect, that seems like an inflection point.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: In a fun competition to design a 3-D-printed Martian habitat, three designs are finalists.
WHEN MODELS DISAGREE WITH TEMPERATURE RECORDS, well, the state of knowledge must be imperfect. I like the way the model-makers say that this means the temperature records must be wrong. . . .
THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S ALL SECURITY THEATER: Researchers Easily Slipped Weapons Past TSA’s X-Ray Body Scanners. “The glaring vulnerabilities the researchers found in the security system demonstrate how poorly the machines were tested before they were deployed at a cost of more than $1 billion to more than 160 American airports.” Security theater, and, likely, graft.
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