25 June 2009 @ 8:50AM >> The mullahs in Iran have unleashed an even more brutal wave of violence against protesters opposing the recent questionable election. CNN reports:

Security forces wielding clubs and firing weapons beat back hundreds of would-be demonstrators who had flocked to a square in the capital on Wednesday to continue protests against an election they have denounced as fraudulent, witnesses told CNN.

[...]

They were among the more than half a dozen witnesses who told CNN that security forces outnumbering protesters used overwhelming force to crush a planned demonstration in Baharestan Square, in front of the parliament building. The witnesses said police charged against the demonstrators, striking them with batons, beating women and old men and firing weapons into the air in order to disperse them.

The melee extended beyond the square, according to one woman, who told CNN that she was traveling toward Baharestan with her friends as evening approached “to express our opposition to these killings these days and demanding freedom.

[...]

According to official figures, 17 people have been killed in clashes with government forces over the past 11 days. Anti-government demonstrators have taken to the streets in at least four cities outside Tehran.

But CNN has received unconfirmed reports of as many as 150 deaths related to the popular uprising. The government’s response to it appears to have hardened in recent days. CNN has received numerous accounts of night-time roundups by government forces of opposition activists and international journalists from their homes.

Some Tehran residents said they were too afraid to talk about the political crisis over the phone to anyone in the United States or Europe. Many protesters debated whether to venture into the streets.

“I am not going outside my house at all,” a 21-year-old college student from Tehran said. “The streets are too dangerous, and just so very busy with police. Ahhhh, when will our lives get back to normal?”

Worried the government was monitoring their phone conversations, some residents said the Internet was the best way to transmit information. However, the spotty connection made it difficult to rely on the Web.

“It’s beyond fear,” said a woman who arrived at a U.S. airport from Iran, but still did not want her name used for fear for her safety. “The situation is more like terror.”

[...]

Asked why the government has made it impossible for nearly all international journalists to report from Iran, [Iranian ambassador to Mexico] Mohammad Hassan Ghadiri accused the media of not accurately reporting events. “In Tehran, there were much bigger demonstrations in favor of the government that you didn’t report about,” he said.

Asked about the shooting of 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan, whose death, captured on video, has become emblematic of the crackdown on protesters, he said, “It is not clear who killed whom.”

However, the malice of the Iranian regime is self-evident in their treatment of Neda Agha-Soltan’s surviving family, as The Guardian reports:

The Iranian authorities have ordered the family of Neda Agha Soltan out of their Tehran home after shocking images of her death were circulated around the world.

Neda Soltan

Neighbours said that her family no longer lives in the four-floor apartment building on Meshkini Street, in eastern Tehran, having been forced to move since she was killed. The police did not hand the body back to her family, her funeral was cancelled, she was buried without letting her family know and the government banned mourning ceremonies at mosques, the neighbours said.

“We just know that they [the family] were forced to leave their flat,” a neighbour said. The Guardian was unable to contact the family directly to confirm if they had been forced to leave.

The government is also accusing protesters of killing Soltan, describing her as a martyr of the Basij militia. Javan, a pro-government newspaper, has gone so far as to blame the recently expelled BBC correspondent, Jon Leyne, of hiring “thugs” to shoot her so he could make a documentary film.

Soltan was shot dead on Saturday evening near the scene of clashes between pro-government militias and demonstrators, turning her into a symbol of the Iranian protest movement. Barack Obama spoke of the “searing image” of Soltan’s dying moments at his press conference yesterday.

Amid scenes of grief in the Soltan household with her father and mother screaming, neighbours not only from their building but from others in the area streamed out to protest at her death. But the police moved in quickly to quell any public displays of grief. They arrived as soon as they found out that a friend of Soltan had come to the family flat.

In accordance with Persian tradition, the family had put up a mourning announcement and attached a black banner to the building.

But the police took them down, refusing to allow the family to show any signs of mourning. The next day they were ordered to move out. Since then, neighbours have received suspicious calls warning them not to discuss her death with anyone and not to make any protest.

A tearful middle-aged woman who was an immediate neighbour said her family had not slept for days because of the oppressive presence of the Basij militia, out in force in the area harassing people since Soltan’s death.

The area in front of Soltan’s house was empty today. There was no sign of black cloths, banners or mourning. Secret police patrolled the street.

“We are trembling,” one neighbour said. “We are still afraid. We haven’t had a peaceful time in the last days, let alone her family. Nobody was allowed to console her family, they were alone, they were under arrest and their daughter was just killed. I can’t imagine how painful it was for them. Her friends came to console her family but the police didn’t let them in and forced them to disperse and arrested some of them. Neda’s family were not even given a quiet moment to grieve.”

Another man said many would have turned up to show their sympathy had it not been for the police.

“In Iran, when someone dies, neighbours visit the family and will not let them stay alone for weeks but Neda’s family was forced to be alone, otherwise the whole of Iran would gather here,” he said. “The government is terrible, they are even accusing pro-Mousavi people of killing Neda and have just written in their websites that Neda is a Basiji (government militia) martyr. That’s ridiculous - if that’s true why don’t they let her family hold any funeral or ceremonies? Since the election, you are not able to trust one word from the government.”

Given what’s going on in Iran, the Obama Administration is finally taking a harder line:

The Obama administration is seriously considering not extending invitations to Iranian diplomats for July 4 celebrations overseas, senior administration officials tell CNN.

No, that’s not a line from a news spoof in The Onion. It’s true: the only tangible action taken by the Obama Administration in response to the violence in Iran is to disinvite Iranian diplomats to Fourth of July barbecues.

After the Soviet Union expanded the Iron Curtain by invading Afghanistan in 1979, then-President Jimmy Carter showed his steely resolve... by not allowing American athletes to attend the 1980 Olympics in Moscow.

Thirty years later, in response to the appalling oppression in Iran, President Obama shows his steely resolve by yanking some BBQ invites.

23 June 2009 @ 8:23AM >> Blogger Shannon Love argues a point about media transparency and bias disclosure that I’ve been making for years:

Obama’s Federal Trade Commission have decided to regulate blogs based on the premise that undisclosed financial relationships between bloggers and businesses could lead bloggers to deceive their readers as to the value of products they blog about. [h/t Instapundit]

If we’re going to regulate speech based on inducements to bias why stop with mere financial relationships? I think we should require all media sources to reveal all possible sources of bias starting with the political affiliations of the publishers and reporters. After all, the media sells stories they advertise as accurate and objective. Shouldn’t consumers have ready access to the information they need to decide if those claims are true?

Politics is more important than money. If you buy a toaster based on a biased recommendation, you’re only out the cost of a toaster. If you vote based on a biased political recommendation, you could lose your freedom. If the government has both the duty and the ability to protect you against bias in product recommendations on blogs, why doesn’t it have the same duty and ability to protect you against biased reporting on political matters?

Political beliefs matter. Soldiers fight and die for their political beliefs, not their paltry pay. Our political beliefs are closely tied to our moral sense of right and wrong and our sense of the just order of society. Political beliefs influence us on an unconscious level. Political beliefs do, without doubt, bias people even more strongly than money does.

This Wednesday, ABC is turning an entire day of news programing over to the Democrats’ health care plan. Wouldn’t viewers alter their judgment of the accuracy and objectivity of ABC’s reporting on the subject if they knew that the ABC employees donated to Democrats 80 times as much as they did to Republicans? Certainly, I can’t help but note that if the circumstances were reversed, most people who see nothing wrong in ABC’s actions now would suddenly see ABC’s donations as profoundly undermining the integrity of ABC’s reporting.

I’m not arguing for the government to mandate such disclosure, merely that if the government is going to be in the business of forcing disclosures of some types of information—which is what the Obama Administration is pushing—why not be consistent and thorough about it?

(Of course, I think we already know the answer, considering the “80 times” figure cited above.)

22 June 2009 @ 9:41PM >> “The federal government is spending $423,500 to find out why men don’t like to wear condoms,” reports Fox News.

I’ll give the government a hint in language they can understand: the words no, stimulus and package could be used in a valid answer.

19 June 2009 @ 8:24AM >> Remember when passing the Obama Administration’s stimulus plan was vital to saving the republic? The administration made all sorts of projections intended to demonstrate the necessity of their plan.

Well, now we’ve got a few months of data, so we can see how their plans panned out.

This chart shows Obama’s unemployment projections without the stimulus (the light blue line) and with the stimulus (dark blue line). Actual unemployment figures are shown as red dots:

(Hat Tip: Innocent Bystanders.)

3 June 2009 @ 8:49AM >> Joe Paladino of Lake Mary, Florida e-mailed in response to my piece on President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor. And, no, the reason I’m posting this is not because of the first paragraph... I keep telling myself.

Joe writes:

First off, let me say that I love your site. There have been very few times were I seem to disagree with your posts. But what I like most is that you seem fair with the issues you write about and present all facts, then state your opinion. And still have time acknowledge the letters of those who disagree with you, even though there have been instances when they don’t seem worthy of anyone’s time. That is far more than I can expect from many other sources.

But for this most recent post, I have to express opinion. To most people, this nomination seems to clearly be a case of affirmative action. Understand that I’m certainly not doubting her qualifications, which may be sufficient. Of course that is to be decided during the Senate confirmation hearing. However, what infuriates me (and should disturb her as well) is that Sotomayor was only considered on the luck that she is female, and better yet, Hispanic. I believe it is safe to say that a majority of this country has no problem working and going to school with whoever desires to be there, so long as they deserve to be there. And by that I don’t mean because a college Dean or the President of the United States wants to even things out a bit.

This inforrmation you provide about her outrage while in college concerning the lack of hispanic students on campus is ridiculous. How is it anyone’s fault that only 66 Puerto Ricans applied to Princeton that year? Perhaps her time would have be better spent encouraging the potential students to consider Princeton as the college of choice. To support my argument I’m going to quote a great man who’s influence is still seen today though the messge is often passed over.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.—Martin Luther King, Jr.

I think it is safe to say that the way our colleges, and appearently supreme courts, are run is not exactly what Dr. King had in mind. It’s common sense that we should judge all people by their character. But it is absurd that in the year 2009 people still want racial equality, unless of course you are white. We already had our run.

But I don’t suppose I can blame her. It would take a extraordinary person turn down such an incredible opportunity and immense honor.

But a black man now holds the highest office in the land. While that certainly does not undo all of the racial oppression this country has seen, it does show that Americans are ready to move forward. Unfortunately, there are some who still think that things just aren’t fair yet.

2 June 2009 @ 8:34AM >> Another example of government regulation run amok:

A local pastor and his wife claim they were interrogated by a San Diego County official, who then threatened them with escalating fines if they continued to hold Bible studies in their home, 10News reported.

Attorney Dean Broyles of The Western Center For Law & Policy was shocked with what happened to the pastor and his wife.

Broyles said, “The county asked, ‘Do you have a regular meeting in your home?’ She said, ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you say amen?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you pray?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you say praise the Lord?’ ‘Yes.’”

The county employee notified the couple that the small Bible study, with an average of 15 people attending, was in violation of County regulations, according to Broyles.

Broyles said a few days later the couple received a written warning that listed “unlawful use of land” and told them to “stop religious assembly or apply for a major use permit” — a process that could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

[...]

Broyles also said this case has broader implications.

“If the county thinks they can shut down groups of 10 or 15 Christians meeting in a home, what about people who meet regularly at home for poker night? What about people who meet for Tupperware parties? What about people who are meeting to watch baseball games on a regular basis and support the Chargers?” Broyles asked.

(Hat tip: Reason.)

1 June 2009 @ 7:41AM >> In the mid-1970s, Sonia Sotomayor—President Obama’s nominee for a seat on the Supreme Court—was a student at Princeton. Back then, when Sotomayor led a group called Acción Puertoricaño, she was an “outspoken activist” well-versed in the language of leftism and identity group grievance politics.

In a letter to the Daily Princetonian published 10 May 1974, she describes a complaint from “the Puerto Rican and Chicano students of Princeton”:

The facts of the complaint are these: 1) There is not one Puerto Rican or Chicano administrator or faculty member in the university; 2) There are two million Puerto Ricans in the United States and two and a half million more on the island itself. Yet there were only 66 Puerto Rican applicants this year, and only 31 Puerto Rican students on campus. While there are 12 million Chicanos in the United States, there were only 111 Chicano applicants and 27 students on campus this year; 3) Not one permanent course in this university now deals in any notable detail with the Puerto Rican or Chicano cultures.

Although she herself was a Puerto Rican student receiving a free ride on a full scholarship, Sotomayor concluded that a “lack of commitment on the part of the university to the Puerto Rican or Chicano heritage seems self-evident” and that it “reflect[s] the total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture.”

Hyperbole comes naturally to the college-aged, so I’m willing to believe that the Sotomayor of the Woodstock era is not the woman who sits on the court today because, as she might say, I would hope that an older Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a young Puerto Rican girl who hasn’t lived that life.

Legal blogger Tom Goldstein conducted a survey of her record on the court of appeals, where he says “Sotomayor has decided 96 race-related cases.” Sotomayor has been on the United States Court of Appeals since 1998, where she serves on panels of (typically) 3 judges that hear each case. Goldstein’s survey found:

Of the 96 cases, Judge Sotomayor and the panel rejected the claim of discrimination roughly 78 times and agreed with the claim of discrimination 10 times; the remaining 8 involved other kinds of claims or dispositions. Of the 10 cases favoring claims of discrimination, 9 were unanimous.

If that’s true and is reflective of her record being better than her rhetoric, then that’s a bit of a relief. And although there is at least one highly-controversial racial discrimination decision in the record Goldstein cites, the fact is, Republicans don’t have the political juice to oppose her anyway. So, barring Obama withdrawing her for some reason or a new fact emerging that moves enough Democrats to vote against her, Sotomayor will be confirmed.

Nevertheless, her seeming inevitability doesn’t mean that Sotomayor should get a pass for her rhetoric or her fierce support of affirmative action and racial preferences in hiring. Her philosophy on racial preferences and “social justice” should be questioned thoroughly during her Senate confirmation hearings.

Since Sotomayor endorses the idea that a judge’s ethnic background affects judicial decision-making, shouldn’t we know how her heritage has influenced her thinking in cases she’s judged? Could she point to specific cases where “being a Latina woman” lead her to a “better” decision than a “white male” would have made?

I don’t expect the Democratic majority to ask these questions, so Republicans should. That is the minimal duty of an opposition party. We’ll see if they have the stomach to do it.

31 May 2009 @ 5:18PM >> Slate’s Mickey Kaus looks at the the Obama Administration’s bailout of the United Auto Workers union and asks:

Why should the government tax unskilled workers making $18 an hour, who haven’t bankrupted their employers, in order to protect unskilled workers making $28 an hour, and who have bankrupted their employers, from having to take a pay cut?

29 May 2009 @ 6:47PM >> The recent post on the FDA’s regulation of Cheerios as a drug generated a lot of e-mail from readers. Last week, I posted a well-reasoned disagreement with my view on the matter.

Here are a couple more responses:

Maybe the cholesterol lowering qualities are not the result of the Cheerios themselves, but the fact that the person eating Cheerios for breakfast is not eating a food that might increase one’s cholesterol level, i.e. bacon. Would the FDA be justified in stepping in then? I have to imagine if you had a side of bacon (a few slices) with your Cheerios everyday, your cholesterol would not be lower by 4% in 6 weeks. To me this is common sense. Unfortunately, there are too many people out there who have given up thinking for themselves and are reliant upon others telling them what is good and what is bad. Enter the Nanny-state.

And:

I just want to encourage you concerning your take on the FDA regulating Cheerios like a drug. It seems as though we as a nation have completely lost all common sense, and I can hardly take it anymore.

Is it really a revelation that food affects health? Before we became a nation of pill popping hypochondriacs, how do you think we consumed beneficial nutrients?

Since Cheerios might be able to make health claims, and therefore should be treated like a drug, it makes sense that the FDA should also treat milk like a drug, and investigate those potentially spurrious claims that it “does a body good”. Several years ago, there was an opinion that eggs increased cholesterol. Should the FDA have classified eggs as a harmful drug? Where does it end?

Food products are already regulated to require the disclosure of ingredient lists and nutritional information. Any nutritional scientist can consume the information already required of a food manufacturer and conclude potential health benefits and risks. If a product contains 3000mg of sodium per serving, for example, does it really take a clinical study to determine that it is not heart-healthy? You could not use the same method to evaluate Ambien or Prosac.

Of course, I am making my argument based on common sense. Since common sense is rapidly going out of style, perhaps I should just concede. Let’s treat anything healthy like a drug, just to make sure everyone is “safe”. Calling my doctor now to stock up on prescriptions for citrus - need that vitamin C.

26 May 2009 @ 10:28PM >> Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s most famous congregant dishes out another heaping helping of racial healing with his Supreme Court pick:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.—Judge Sonia Sotomayor,
President Barack Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court

Apparently, however, Judge Sotomayor was not referring to herself.

21 May 2009 @ 7:26PM >> In 21^st century America, the federal government’s solution to every financial problem seems the same: people who are responsible with money are forced to foot the bill for the reckless. Video >>

21 May 2009 @ 8:44AM >> Once again, it seems that the people who follow the rules and pay on time are going to get stuck with the bill for those who don’t:

Credit cards have long been a very good deal for people who pay their bills on time and in full. Even as card companies imposed punitive fees and penalties on those late with their payments, the best customers racked up cash-back rewards, frequent-flier miles and other perks in recent years.

Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

“It will be a different business,” said Edward L. Yingling, the chief executive of the American Bankers Association, which has been lobbying Congress for more lenient legislation on behalf of the nation’s biggest banks. “Those that manage their credit well will in some degree subsidize those that have credit problems.”

20 May 2009 @ 12:43AM >> Brain Terminal reader Blake I. Markus disagrees with my take on the Food & Drug Administration’s apparent desire to regulate Cheerios:

Evan,

I have a small complaint about your article, Kids! Just Say No... to Cheerios. I normally agree with your sentiments, but this one is hard to swallow.

I am very libertarian when it comes to limiting the control of the federal government. I do not believe the government should regulate individual and ordinary decisions of regular citizens. In the game of life, the government’s role should not be deciding where to move the pieces.

However, the government must act as Milton Bradley and set the rules that make it possible to play the game fairly. Rules such as antitrust laws, banking regulations, and criminal penalties are necessary to ensure the People don’t get screwed in one form or another by other people or businesses who take too much control, engage in fraudulent behavior, or try to otherwise gouge or mislead a consumer.

With regard to your article specifically, it appears that your argument for why the FDA’s decision is a bad one, is that the government is just trying to enforce a rule for the sake of enforcing a rule and engaging in “nanny” behavior.

While I agree that the government, especially as of late, has been engaging more and more in parental decision-making, I think the actions taken by the FDA are correct. The problem isn’t that “idiots might get confused and mistake a bowl of Cheerios for a pile of Lipitor.” The real problem is that the FDA cannot set a precedent of letting products be advertised as giving specific health benefits without meeting the rigorous FDA standards established for that type of advertising.

I’m assuming here that the FDA did not approve the so-called “clinical study” that was done by General Mills, a company who does not do “clinical studies” on a regular basis. If such a precedent were to be set, herbal supplement companies could make specific claims about their products (more specific and more often than they already do) that were not correctly tested.

This decision by the FDA is a difficult one, I must say. I don’t believe there would even be an argument if this scenario were more like an herbal supplement company stating that the ingredients in the supplement will guarantee on average a 10% weight loss and 14% muscle gain, but those studies were based only on clinical trials conducted on lab rats, and the results only counted the rats who were left living after the study was over.

But the sad truth is, even though this is a children’s cereal that is practically an institution among breakfast foods (and late night desserts, as you have pointed out), the rules are in place to prevent harm to the consumer in the face of bad studies. If Cheerios conducted an FDA approved study and it was found that the decrease in cholesterol was negligible and it actually increased the likelihood of testicular cancer in young men, you would likely be changing your tone about this “nanny” decision.

Thank you for your time, and please keep writing your wonderful blog entries. While I had to say something against this entry, I am often pleased by what you have to say.

Regards,

Blake

Thanks for the e-mail, Blake. I think you have a good point with respect to herbal supplements. However, I think the Cheerios case is different in one key respect.

Herbal supplements are intended to improve someone’s health or state of mind. That’s the only reason people buy herbal supplements: to consume them like medication. So regulating them like a drug makes sense to me.

But the original and primary function of Cheerios to fill the stomach and provide the body with energy. Cheerios is tasty, and that’s a nice side-benefit, as is the apparent cholesterol-lowering power. But such benefits are secondary.

Now, if General Mills is making claims about Cheerios that are false, that’s a much more defensible case for government regulation. But in the reporting I’ve seen, nobody disputes the health claims made by General Mills. I haven’t seen anyone question the legitimacy of the studies about Cheerios cholesterol-lowering properties.

So why, then, shouldn’t the burden of proof be on the government?

Before regulating Cheerios like a drug, why doesn’t the government first commission its own independent study and see if the claims about Cheerios are false?

That seems reasonable to me, and it would certainly constitute far less government interference in private enterprise.

That’s my take on it, although I could be wrong. The media reports on this story haven’t exactly been paragons of clarity.

---

Update: In another report, it seems the FDA is questioning the claims of General Mills: “We certainly don’t have any issues with the safety of Cheerios,” Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said in an interview today. “We just believe that the labeling on this particular product has gone beyond what the science supports.”

13 May 2009 @ 11:59PM >> Cheerios. It’s a tough habit to break.

I should know. I’ve been there.

There have been many nights when my dessert consisted of a bowl of Cheerios. On certain nights, two or more.

So I understand how hard it is to extricate oneself from the clutches of such a potent addiction.

I understand why Our Benevolent Nanny, the federal government, treats Cheerios like a drug:

The FDA has sent a warning letter to General Mills, telling the company that its claims about the health benefits of eating Cheerios “would cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation and treatment of disease.”

The problem: Cheerios are a food not a drug, the FDA notes in the letter, which was sent May 5 but was posted on the agency’s website today. Thus, claims that the 68-year-old whole-grain oat cereal lowers cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease and cancer violates federal law, the agency said.

[...]

The FDA was particularly unhappy about assertions on Cheerios boxes and its website that eating the cereal can “lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks.” The FDA counters that the cereal must be approved as a drug before making such specific health claims.

General Mills spokesman Tom Forsythe said the cholesterol-lowering claim has been featured on the Cheerios box for more than two years and that the heart health claim was approved by the FDA 12 years ago. On April 20, General Mills announced results of a clinical study that showed eating two daily servings of Cheerios (1 1/2 cups each) can reduce cholesterol 10% in just a month.

“The science is not in question,” he said. “The scientific body of evidence supporting the heart health claim was the basis for FDA’s approval of the heart health claim, and the clinical study supporting Cheerios’ cholesterol-lowering benefits is very strong.”

Forsythe said the company looks forward “to discussing this with the FDA and to reaching a resolution.” General Mills faces seizure of products or an injunction against making and distributing Cheerios.

As the Los Angeles Times reports the story, it seems that the government’s complaint about the cholesterol claim isn’t that it is false. The problem, according to the FDA, is that because Cheerios is effective at lowering cholesterol, idiots might get confused and mistake a bowl of Cheerios for a pile of Lipitor.

According to government regulations, if Cheerios provides the health benefits claimed, that fact itself is all that’s needed for the government to treat it as a drug. Nevermind that it isn’t a drug. Nevermind that, for decades, schoolchildren have understood that Cheerios is food. Nevermind that. This is the government and the rules must be enforced, common sense be damned.

Anyone who looks at a box of Cheerios and sees a product “intended for use in the prevention, mitigation and treatment of disease” is the type of person whose mortgage I’ll end up paying someday. So screw him. If he can’t distinguish between cereal and medication, then let him get ripped off for that $5 a week habit, I say. Consider it stimulus by stupidity.

After all, what’s good for General Mills is good for America.

12 May 2009 @ 9:22PM >> Yeah, let’s trust our health care to the same people responsible for this:

Millions of Americans on Social Security are receiving $250 checks as part of the president’s stimulus plan — including an Anne Arundel [County, Maryland] woman who died more than 40 years ago.

The woman’s son, 83-year-old James Hagner, said he got the surprise when he checked his mailbox late last week.

“It shocked me and I laughed all at the same time,” Hagner said. “I don’t even expect to get one my own self, and I get one for my mother for 43 years ago?”

His mother, Rose, died on Memorial Day in 1967.

12 May 2009 @ 9:21PM >> Courtesy of the Associated Press:

The government will have to borrow nearly 50 cents for every dollar it spends this year, exploding the record federal deficit past $1.8 trillion under new White House estimates.

11 May 2009 @ 8:27AM >> Chrysler, the car company that will soon be owned by the federal government and the powerful union partially responsible for driving the company into the ground, is no longer honoring “lemon law” settlements to buyers of bad cars:

Chrysler’s bankruptcy is throwing a wrench into California’s lemon law, which is intended to make it easier for consumers to get refunds for defective vehicles. As the automaker’s bankruptcy grinds away, settlement checks from Chrysler to unhappy car buyers are bouncing and complaints are stymied in and out of court.

Consumer advocates say the situation could erode public confidence in buying new cars at precisely the time the automakers need customers in their showrooms. And Chrysler says it has yet to do anything to resolve the issue.

[...]

State lemon laws, such as the one passed by California in the early 1980s, make it easier for consumers to get refunds for defective vehicles that are still covered by a manufacturer’s warranty.

Under the California law, new or used vehicles that have a defect that can’t be repaired after four attempts — or two, in the case of life-threatening defects — or that have been out of service for 30 days during the warranty period may be designated “lemons.” That triggers an obligation for the manufacturer to either pay the owner a cash settlement or buy back the vehicle.

[...]

Alex Simanovsky, an Atlanta attorney whose firm handles lemon law cases in California and other states, said he had “a stack of six or seven checks in my drawer right now from Chrysler that have bounced.” The amounts range from $2,000 to $3,000 for clients who were accepting cash payments to as much as $40,000 in cases where Chrysler agreed to repurchase the vehicle.

[...]

San Diego attorney Ellen Turnage represents a client who reached a settlement with Chrysler over a 2006 Dodge Magnum with a bad suspension. The car has been returned to Chrysler, but the automaker’s check bounced.

“Now he’s got no car and no money, so he can’t go buy a new one,” Turnage said of her client. “He’s stuck. We’re hanging on to a glimmer of hope that at some point this will all be resolved.”

Apparently, the Obama administration doesn’t mind seeing Chrysler’s customers screwed, probably for the same reason that they don’t mind seeing Chrysler’s lenders get screwed. The only important thing is that the United Auto Workers union gets its big payoff for their vigorous support of Obama’s candidacy.

Unfortunately, the lesson consumers may draw from this story is, don’t buy cars from an American car company.

6 May 2009 @ 9:29AM >> History is rife with examples of mafia ties to labor unions. Now, President Obama is using mafia tactics to steal from bondholders and give the loot to one of his biggest source of campaign funds, labor unions:

The President has just harshly castigated hedge fund managers for being unwilling to take his administration’s bid for their Chrysler bonds. He called them “speculators” who were “refusing to sacrifice like everyone else” and who wanted “to hold out for the prospect of an unjustified taxpayer-funded bailout.”

[...]

The President and his team sought to avoid having Chrysler go [the normal bankruptcy] process, proposing their own plan for re-organizing the company and partially paying off Chrysler’s creditors. Some bond holders thought this plan unfair. Specifically, they thought it unfairly favored the United Auto Workers, and unfairly paid bondholders less than they would get in bankruptcy court. So, they said no to the plan and decided, as is their right, to take their chances in the bankruptcy process. But, as his quotes above show, the President thought they were being unpatriotic or worse.

[...]

The President’s attempted diktat takes money from bondholders and gives it to a labor union that delivers money and votes for him. Why is he not calling on his party to “sacrifice” some campaign contributions, and votes, for the greater good? Shaking down lenders for the benefit of political donors is recycled corruption and abuse of power.

Yesterday, I mentioned the threats made by the Obama Administration against groups that lent money to Chrysler through bond holdings. More sources are contradicting the White House, which denied they made such threats:

Creditors to Chrysler describe negotiations with the company and the Obama administration as “a farce,” saying the administration was bent on forcing their hands using hardball tactics and threats.

Conversations with administration officials left them expecting that they would be politically targeted, two participants in the negotiations said.

Although the focus has so been on allegations that the White House threatened Perella Weinberg, sources familiar with the matter say that other firms felt they were threatened as well. None of the sources would agree to speak except on the condition of anonymity, citing fear of political repercussions.

The sources, who represent creditors to Chrysler, say they were taken aback by the hardball tactics that the Obama administration employed to cajole them into acquiescing to plans to restructure Chrysler. One person described the administration as the most shocking “end justifies the means” group they have ever encountered. Another characterized Obama was “the most dangerous smooth talker on the planet- and I knew Kissinger.” Both were voters for Obama in the last election.

It’s interesting that President Obama only uses these mafia-like tactics with fellow law-abiding citizens whose only “crime” is finding themselves opposed to Obama on one issue or another.

When it comes to thugs like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez, suddenly Obama becomes Mr. Warm-and-Fuzzy, and it’s all smiles, handshakes and backslaps.

4 May 2009 @ 11:01PM >> New York Post columnist Irwin M. Stelzer notes that President Obama “said last week that he’d override the contractual and legal rights of Chrysler’s senior lenders and carve up the company between the government and the United Auto Workers.”

Stelzer continues:

Obama forced the senior lenders to take something like 30 cents for every dollar they’d lent Chrysler. Many lenders — the big banks who’d taken federal bailout money — rolled over. But some hedge-fund managers pointed out that they have a legal, fiduciary responsibility to do the best they can for their investors (which include pension funds) and decided to take their chances with a bankruptcy judge.

Never mind that this is their long-established legal right. Obama is furious with these “speculators,” and hinted that he knows where they live and will get even when the new financial-industry regulations are drafted.

This continued antagonism towards America’s business community may not be in the country’s best long-term interests, Stelzer points out:

[T]he president is counting on some of these “speculators” to partner with the Treasury and take a big stake in the toxic assets that are preventing the big banks from resuming normal lending. Unprotected by a rule of law, these investors will sit on their assets, rather than partner with a government that might some day decide, after the fact, that they made too much money, or should bear a larger portion of any losses than they had signed on to do.

Meanwhile, a prominent bankruptcy attorney, White & Case’s Tom Lauria, alleges White House threats against an opponent of the government’s Chrysler takeover plan:

One of my clients was directly threatened by the White House and in essence compelled to withdraw its opposition to the deal under threat that the full force of the White House press corps would destroy its reputation if it continued to fight.

The most interesting thing about Lauria’s claim is that the Obama official threated to sic the White House Press Corps on offending “speculators.”

In theory, the White House Press Corps is an independent body, an arm of the press and not the Obama Administration. What would give this official the idea that the press corps would blindly do the administration’s bidding?

Perhaps the press could prove its independence by digging into this story a little bit deeper. (The White House has issued a blanket denial, but the varying accounts don’t add up.)

Nevertheless, I can certainly understand why an administration official might mistakenly conclude the hard-hitting media was merely an extension of Barack Obama’s PR apparatus.

29 April 2009 @ 9:01AM >> The Washington Times on the media’s construction of Obama’s popularity myth:

President Obama’s media cheerleaders are hailing how loved he is. But at the 100-day mark of his presidency, Mr. Obama is the second-least-popular president in 40 years.

According to Gallup’s April survey, Americans have a lower approval of Mr. Obama at this point than all but one president since Gallup began tracking this in 1969. The only new president less popular was Bill Clinton, who got off to a notoriously bad start after trying to force homosexuals on the military and a federal raid in Waco, Texas, that killed 86. Mr. Obama’s current approval rating of 56 percent is only one tick higher than the 55-percent approval Mr. Clinton had during those crises.

It reminds me of a point I made in The Clinton Legacy: during the Clinton presidency, a 5.6% unemployment rate was a sign that the economy was doing well, while under Bush, the exact same unemployment rate was portrayed negatively.

The question is, how many people fall for it? Do we believe Obama is popular just because the media keeps insisting that he is?

28 April 2009 @ 7:59PM >> Today, we have dueling Quotes of the Day:

In this corner, we have Larry Kudlow:

What is going on in this country? The government is about to take over GM in a plan that completely screws private bondholders and favors the unions. Get this: The GM bondholders own $27 billion and they’re getting 10 percent of the common stock in an expected exchange. And the UAW owns $10 billion of the bonds and they’re getting 40 percent of the stock. Huh? Did I miss something here? And Uncle Sam will have a controlling share of the stock with something close to 50 percent ownership. And no bankruptcy judge. So this is a political restructuring run by the White House, not a rule-of-law bankruptcy-court reorganization.

...and in this corner, John Hinderaker:

One hallmark of organized crime loan-sharking is that, once you are in debt to the mob, you are never allowed to pay off the principal. No matter how much you pay, you always owe more. The mob squeezes you for everything you have. Until a few months ago, I never expected to see an analogy between the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Mafia. But is it unreasonable to see a parallel in the government’s refusal to allow banks that have borrowed money under TARP to repay it? Does it not appear that financial institutions that became enmeshed with the government, and are now being dictated to by the government, find it increasingly difficult to extricate themselves?

So the federal government along with the unions will have total control over not only General Motors, but Chrysler too. Meanwhile, the federal government can indefinitely extend its control of certain banks by refusing to let them repay government loans.

How is this not socialism, exactly?

26 April 2009 @ 10:59AM >> Today’s Fact of the Day:

As of Sunday, the federal government has spent all the money it will raise in taxes for the current fiscal year. From now until the end of the fiscal year in the fall, the government will be spending money that it will borrow from the Chinese and others, which will be repaid by our children and grandchildren. With interest. This is the earliest Debt Day in modern history, if not ever. From 2002 until now, it has fallen between July and September.

24 April 2009 @ 8:42AM >> Whatever happened to all that happy post-partisanship Obama promised?

The editors of the Wall Street Journal say there’s no chance of it now:

Mark down the date. Tuesday, April 21, 2009, is the moment that any chance of a new era of bipartisan respect in Washington ended. By inviting the prosecution of Bush officials for their antiterror legal advice, President Obama has injected a poison into our politics that he and the country will live to regret.

Policy disputes, often bitter, are the stuff of democratic politics. Elections settle those battles, at least for a time, and Mr. Obama’s victory in November has given him the right to change policies on interrogations, Guantanamo, or anything on which he can muster enough support. But at least until now, the U.S. political system has avoided the spectacle of a new Administration prosecuting its predecessor for policy disagreements. This is what happens in Argentina, Malaysia or Peru, countries where the law is treated merely as an extension of political power.

If this analogy seems excessive, consider how Mr. Obama has framed the issue. He has absolved CIA operatives of any legal jeopardy, no doubt because his intelligence advisers told him how damaging that would be to CIA morale when Mr. Obama needs the agency to protect the country. But he has pointedly invited investigations against Republican legal advisers who offered their best advice at the request of CIA officials.

In the Washington Post, David Ignatius writes:

Put yourself in the shoes of the people who were asked to interrogate al-Qaeda prisoners in 2002. One former officer told me he declined the job, not because he thought the program was wrong but because he knew it would blow up. “We all knew the political wind would change eventually,” he recalled. Other officers who didn’t make that cynical but correct calculation are now “broken and bewildered,” says the former operative.

[...]

One veteran counterterrorism operative says that agents in the field are already being more careful about using the legal findings that authorize covert action. An example is the so-called “risk of capture” interview that takes place in the first hour after a terrorism suspect is grabbed. This used to be the key window of opportunity, in which the subject was questioned aggressively and his cellphone contacts and “pocket litter” were exploited quickly.

Now, field officers are more careful. They want guidance from headquarters. They need legal advice. I’m told that in the case of an al-Qaeda suspect seized in Iraq several weeks ago, the CIA didn’t even try to interrogate him. The agency handed him over to the U.S. military.

So, this is where we are as a country these days? We’re really considering prosecuting people for authoring legal opinions?

Merely by raising the issue in this fashion, Obama has already undermined the future security of the country. In the environment created by President Obama and Congressional Democrats, who in their right mind would ever begin a career in intelligence or anti-terrorism? Who would stay in the intelligence services, knowing that their work could land them in court any time the presidency changes hands?

The only question is whether Obama administration officials will be prosecuted in the future for what they’re doing today. Because once politicians take the frightening step of criminalizing policy differences, they’d better plan on staying in power forever, or they may one day find themselves in the defendant’s chair. And if being too vigilant about protecting the country is a potential criminal offense, so is not doing enough.

21 April 2009 @ 7:17PM >> From Forbes:

If the government increased the top tax rate from the current rate of 35% to 100% (yes, that’s right 100%), it would only collect an extra $400 billion this year. In other words, confiscating all the income that is currently taxed at 35% would not raise enough revenue to cover any of the annual deficits projected in the next 10 years. There is no way that tax hikes on the rich alone can pay for proposed spending in the current budget.

Nevertheless, that fact alone won’t stop politicians from scapegoating “the rich,” I suspect.

20 April 2009 @ 7:40PM >> From a former police chief:

Over the past four years I’ve asked police officers throughout the U.S. (and in Canada) two questions. When’s the last time you had to fight someone under the influence of marijuana? (I’m talking marijuana only, not pot plus a six-pack or a fifth of tequila.) My colleagues pause, they reflect. Their eyes widen as they realize that in their five or fifteen or thirty years on the job they have never had to fight a marijuana user. I then ask: When’s the last time you had to fight a drunk? They look at their watches.

All of which begs the question. If one of these two drugs is implicated in dire health effects, high mortality rates, and physical violence—and the other is not—what are we to make of our nation’s marijuana laws? Or alcohol laws, for that matter.

Anybody out there want to launch a campaign for the re-prohibition of alcohol? Didn’t think so. The answer, of course, is responsible drinking. Marijuana smokers, for their part, have already shown (apart from that little matter known as the law) greater responsibility in their choice of drugs than those of us who choose alcohol.

14 April 2009 @ 9:11AM >> Smithsonian magazine reports why government intervention tends to go awry:

[H]umans have an inborn tolerance for risk-meaning that as safety features are added to vehicles and roads, drivers feel less vulnerable and tend to take more chances. The feeling of greater security tempts us to be more reckless. Behavioral scientists call it “risk compensation.”

[...]

[In 1975,] Sam Peltzman, a University of Chicago economist, published an analysis of federal auto-safety standards imposed in the late 1960s. Peltzman concluded that while the standards had saved the lives of some vehicle occupants, they had also led to the deaths of pedestrians, cyclists and other non-occupants. John Adams of University College London studied the impact of seat belts and reached a similar conclusion, which he published in 1981: there was no overall decrease in highway fatalities.

There has been a lively debate over risk compensation ever since, but today the issue is not whether it exists, but the degree to which it does. The phenomenon has been observed well beyond the highway-in the workplace, on the playing field, at home, in the air. Researchers have found that improved parachute rip cords did not reduce the number of sky-diving accidents; overconfident sky divers hit the silk too late. The number of flooding deaths in the United States has hardly changed in 100 years despite the construction of stronger levees in flood plains; people moved onto the flood plains, in part because of subsidized flood insurance and federal disaster relief. Studies suggest that workers who wear back-support belts try to lift heavier loads and that children who wear protective sports equipment engage in rougher play. Forest rangers say wilderness hikers take greater risks if they know that a trained rescue squad is on call. Public health officials cite evidence that enhanced HIV treatment can lead to riskier sexual behavior.

All of capitalism runs on risk, of course, and it may be in this arena that risk compensation has manifested itself most calamitously of late. William D. Cohan, author of House of Cards, a book about the fall of Bear Stearns, speaks for many when he observes that “Wall Street bankers took the risks they did because they got paid millions to do so and because they knew there would be few negative consequences for them personally if things failed to work out. In other words, the benefit of their risk-taking was all theirs and the consequences of their risk-taking would fall on the bank’s shareholders.” (Meanwhile investors, as James Surowiecki noted in a recent New Yorker column, tend to underestimate their chances of losing their shirts.) Late last year, 200 economists-including Sam Peltzman, who is now professor emeritus at Chicago-petitioned Congress not to pass its $700 billion plan to rescue the nation’s overextended banking system in order to preserve some balance between risk, reward and responsibility. Around the same time, columnist George Will pushed the leaders of the Big Three automakers into the same risk pool.

“Suppose that in 1979 the government had not engineered the first bailout of Chrysler,” Will wrote. “Might there have been a more sober approach to risk throughout corporate America?”

9 April 2009 @ 8:45AM >> Then, they came for the booze:

The cost of booze is going up. Whatever you’re used to paying for your favourite tipple, prepare to pay more. The days of cheap alcohol are numbered and, apparently, it is for our own good.

In wealthy nations all over the world, momentum is building for big hikes in the cost of alcohol. The rationale is to stop us all drinking to the point where we make other people’s lives hell by vandalising property, urinating and vomiting in the street, attacking people including members of our own family, and causing death and injury by driving under the influence. In other words, the goal is to stamp out what England’s Chief Medical Officer Liam Donaldson last week dubbed “passive drinking” - the damage done to innocent bystanders and society in general when people drink too much.

The passive drinking concept is borrowed from “passive smoking”. It is accepted almost everywhere that damage from passive smoking is real, and measures to curb it - taxing cigarettes heavily and banning smoking in public places, for example - have wide public support. Can a similar concept be applied to alcohol? And can the problem of passive drinking become as widely accepted as passive smoking, as hoped for by the World Health Organization, which last year began drafting a global plan to tackle alcohol abuse?

Tackling passive drinking will be an interesting experiment in social engineering. According to Donaldson, the way to do it is to raise the price of alcohol and limit its availability, however much resentment this may cause among the drinking classes. Donaldson proposed that the minimum price of a unit of alcohol (about as much as in half a pint of beer or a small glass of wine) should be raised to 50 pence.

Other countries are grasping the nettle too. The Scottish government is considering imposing a minimum price of 40 pence per unit of alcohol and banning cheap drink promotions such as two-for-one offers and “women drink free all night”. Last year, Australia slapped a hefty tax on alcopops in a bid to reduce heavy drinking among teenagers. And in North America there is much discussion about banning happy hours and similar promotions.

Look out, coffee—you’re next.

8 April 2009 @ 8:57AM >> New York City’s diminutive dictator of health habits extends his reach:

Suppose you wanted to test the effects of halving the amount of salt in people’s diets. If you were an academic researcher, you’d have to persuade your institutional review board that you had considered the risks and obtained informed consent from the participants.

You might, for instance, take note of a recent clinical trial in which heart patients put on a restricted-sodium diet fared worse than those on a normal diet. In light of new research suggesting that eating salt improves mood and combats depression, you might be alert for psychological effects of the new diet. You might worry that people would react to less-salty food by eating more of it, a trend you could monitor by comparing them with a control group.

But if you are the mayor of New York, no such constraints apply. You can simply announce, as Michael Bloomberg did, that the city is starting a “nationwide initiative” to pressure the food industry and restaurant chains to cut salt intake by half over the next decade. Why bother with consent forms when you can automatically enroll everyone in the experiment?

[...]

When Dr. Frieden and Mr. Bloomberg decided several years ago that trans fats were dangerous, they didn’t simply issue a warning or a set of voluntary guidelines. They insisted on outlawing trans fats in New York’s restaurants.

At the time, it seemed extraordinary for a city to be forbidding its diners to order a legal food product, particularly given the scientific uncertainties about trans fats and the possible harms resulting from the ban.

But that local restaurant policy now seems fairly modest by comparison with Mr. Bloomberg’s and Dr. Frieden’s plans for salt. Soon, wherever you live, wherever you eat, you could be part of their experiment.

In the America of today, there is no aspect of your life that falls outside the domain of government control.

8 April 2009 @ 8:49AM >> Fact of the Day, from the Congressional Budget Office:

The top 1% of taxpayers earned 19% of all income, and paid 28% of all federal taxes.

(In 2006, via TaxProf Blog.)

17 March 2009 @ 6:26PM >> With President Obama railing against private health insurance companies and pushing socialized medicine, this seems odd:

The Obama administration is considering making veterans use private insurance to pay for treatment of combat and service-related injuries. The plan would be an about-face on what veterans believe is a long-standing pledge to pay for health care costs that result from their military service.

But in a White House meeting Monday, veterans groups apparently failed to persuade President Obama to take the plan off the table.

“Veterans of all generations agree that this proposal is bad for the country and bad for veterans,” said Paul Rieckhoff, executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America. “If the president and the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] want to cut costs, they can start at AIG, not the VA.”

Under current policy, veterans are responsible for health care costs that are unrelated to their military service. Exceptions in some cases can be made for veterans who do not have private insurance or are 100 percent disabled.

[...]

Veterans claim that the costs of treating expensive war injuries could raise their insurance costs, as well as those for their employers. Some worried that it also could make it more difficult for disabled veterans to find work.

The leaders of several veterans groups had written Obama last month complaining about the new plan. “There is simply no logical explanation for billing a veteran’s personal insurance for care that the VA has a responsibility to provide,” they wrote.

So apparently, U.S. military veterans are the only people whose health care Obama doesn’t want the government to pay for.