How Gay Is Elena Kagan?

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | No Comments

Gayer than the annual convention of the K.D. Lang Fan Club, but the White House was so eager to slam Ben Domenech as author of a right-wing “whisper campaign” that now the Obama administration finds itself lashed to the mast of its adamant insistence on Kagan’s heterosexuality.

The weekend merriment is recounted by The Week (“A lesbian smear campaign?”) and by Lachlan Markay at Newsbusters:

Left-wing bloggers Julian Sanchez and Matt Yglesias shared Domenech’s apparently mistaken belief that Kagan was a lesbian. As Sanchez noted on Twitter, “Gay news sites treat it as common knowledge.”

Markay’s post involves a “smear” of a different sort: Sanchez isn’t “left-wing,” he’s a libertarian who works for the Cato Institute. NTTAWWT. But the point is that Elena Kagan was identified as a lesbian by people who aren’t anti-gay, including Jennifer Vanasco at the Seattle Gay News:

Suddenly, it seems possible that the next Supreme Court pick might be a lesbian. … Solicitor General Elena Kagan is not openly gay at the moment — which, of course, may mean she’s not gay at all. But persistent rumors, an absence of denial, and some assurances from people I trust make me think that, yeah, she probably is. And she’s right now on the short list of potential Supreme Court nominees to replace Justice John Paul Stevens on his retirement this summer.

However, the administration’s reaction leads Stephen H. Miller to write, “Is the ‘Charge’ of Being Gay a Slur? Ask Obama.” Miller quotes Sanchez’s boss at Cato, David Boaz:

[A] White House spokesman, Ben LaBolt, said he complained to CBS because the column “made false charges.” I would have hoped that in 2010, in a liberal White House, the statement that someone is gay would not be considered a “charge.” The American Heritage Dictionary defines “charge” as “a claim of wrongdoing; an accusation.” For many decades it was indeed a “charge,” and a career-ending one, to be identified as gay. I would hope that’s no longer true, and I’m disappointed in the White House’s language.

Of course, there are serious considerations involved here, but I’m still laughing at the overwhelming silliness of it all. The White House, in its eagerness to depict right-wingers as hateful homophobes, has staked its credibility on Elena Kagan being straight.

And she’s gayer than the audience at a Greta Garbo film festival!

Category: Gays

How Stupid Is Charlie Crist?

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | 9 Comments

Stupid enough to think he can get elected as an independent:

Top GOP officials in DC now believe it is a virtual certainty that FL Gov. Charlie Crist (R) will bolt the GOP and run instead as an independent, sources tell Hotline OnCall.
Over the weekend, Crist pulled TV advertisements that had been running in key markets, slamming ex-FL House Speaker Marco Rubio (R). Those ads, on which Crist spent close to $1.5M so far, were aimed at moving poll numbers that showed Crist losing badly.
In taking the ads down, top GOP officials have surmised both that Crist has made his decision to run as an independent, and that the attacks weren’t having an impact on the race.

Ed Morrissey:

Pulling the ads makes it look like Crist has come to some sort of decision — and we won’t have to wait much longer to see what it is. The filing deadline is eleven days away.

Charlie Crist: Making Arlen Specter Look Honorable by Comparison!

Remember who to thank for this debacle: John Cornyn and the treacherous bastards at the NRSC.

NOT ONE RED CENT!

UPDATE: Erick Erickson names names, identifying NRSC Executive Director Rob Jesmer as the “brains” behind the Crist campaign:

Remember: Rubio was already in the race and Jesmer convinced Crist to enter after Rubio was already in and raising money.

And now Crist won’t even return John Cornyn’s phone calls.

UPDATE II: Dan Riehl says “John Cornyn may be about to get something more painful from Charlie Crist than a back waxing.” Daniel Foster at NRO and John McCormack at Weekly Standard are also commenting. More at Memeorandum.

Rich Lowry lays out the case against Crist running as an independent, but my own opinion is that it would be a very good thing for Crist to run as an independent and get his ass kicked nine ways to Sunday by Marco Rubio. Time to teach these RINO crapweasels a lesson they won’t ever forget. And just as soon as Arlen Specter beats Joe Sestak in Pennsylvania’s Democratic primary, Pat Toomey will teach Arlen the same lesson.

UPDATE III: Cassy Fiano:

The smart move [for Crist], in my opinion, would be to concede defeat with grace and then spend the next few years rebuilding himself. The NRSC and the GOP establishment still like Crist. They chose him over Marco Rubio, after all. They don’t want him to leave the GOP; that tells me that even if he loses to Marco Rubio, if he does it in the right way he could still possibly have a home in the Republican Party.

No, Cassy, we don’t want Crist to make the “smart move.” He’s been stuck on stupid ever since he (literally) embraced Obama, and what we want now is for Sorry Charlie to implode like the Hindenburg at Lakehurst, a flaming gasbag of ludicrous self-pitying outrage. If Crist goes independent and gets stomped, he will become an embarrassment, a laughingstock, a spectacular example of what happens to elitist Republicans who think they’re better than the people who elect them.

PREVIOUSLY:

Category: Election, Florida, Marco Rubio, Republicans, Senate

Mark Potok and the Hijacking of ‘Hate’

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | 9 Comments

It was 1997 and I was a columnist for the Rome (Ga.) News-Tribune when the latest copy of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Intelligence Report” arrived at the office. Looking for some local angle in the report — my editor’s mantra was “local, local, local” — I flipped to the map in the back where, with several symbols, the SPLC identified the location of various “hate” groups.

My eyes popped out of my head when I saw that one of the symbols was located squarely in our community, identifying a “patriot” group that the SPLC wished to portray as a menace to the public weal: A chapter of the John Birch Society!

It so happened that I actually knew the local JBS organizer. Gretna Fuller was the wife of a judge in neighboring Gordon County. A few years earlier, as sports editor of the Calhoun (Ga.) Times, I’d covered her son when he wrestled and played baseball for Gordon Central High. In addition to her activities with Birchers, Gretna was also an all-around conservative Republican, involved with Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum among other groups and a frequent contributor to our newspaper’s letters-to-the-editor column.

And here was the Southern Poverty Law Center identifying Gretna Fuller in the same category as dangerous groups like the Hammerskins and the Aryan Nations!

Think what you will about the John Birch Society, they’ve never been associated with crime or violence, and this SPLC “hate” map included several JBS chapters, denoted in the category of “patriot” groups. In the wake of the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, the SPLC had evidently begun casting a wide net to identify “patriot” organizations, creating the impression that there were Tim McVeigh wannabes lurking in every neighborhood. And among these alleged threats to society were harmless Republican moms like Gretna Fuller.

This startling discovery was my first real insight into the modus operandi of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and especially the role of Mark Potok in the transformation of the Montgomery-based center. Originally devoted to tracking violent neo-Nazi and Klan groups, in the 1990s the SPLC began expanding its purview to include all “extremists,” which has proved to be an amazingly flexible term. In 2003, for example, an SPLC report warned its readers of the dangers posed by such respectable conservative organizations as the American Entreprise Institute and the Bradley Foundation.

This shift in the SPLC’s mission coincided with the hiring of Potok, a journalist whose biography includes this important datum:

While at USA Today, he covered the 1993 siege in Waco, the rise of militias, the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the trial of Timothy McVeigh.

Byron York has recently explained how the Clinton administration exploited the Oklahoma City bombing and, with the addition of Potok to its staff, the SPLC began doing the same thing. Longtime critics of Morris Dees and the SPLC says they have always exaggerated the “extremist” threat:

In 1994, the Montgomery Advertiser — the SPLC’s hometown newspaper — published a nine-day expose of Dees’ empire of hypocrisy, cynicism and greed. It said in an editorial that the Klan had become “a farce.” It also agreed with the criticism that the SPLC “focuses on the anti-Klan theme not because the Klan is a major threat, but because it plays well with liberal donors.” . . .
In 2009, liberal journalist Alexander Cockburn called Dees the “arch-salesman of hate-mongering.” Under a headline that labeled Dees the “King of the Hate Business,” he said Dees thrived by “selling the notion there’s a right resurgence out there in the hinterland with massed legions of haters, ready to march down Main Street draped in Klan robes, a copy of ‘Mein Kampf’ tucked under one arm and a Bible under the other.

It was with the addition of Potok to the SPLC’s staff, however, that Dees’ outfit began trying to connect this “massed legion of haters” to mainstream conservatism. This involves a deceptive technique that Laird Wilcox — a respected researcher of extremist movements — has called the “links and ties” method, using incidental associations between groups and individuals to create a false perception of shared ideology and purpose.

One of the big coups for the SPLC was smearing various Republican politicians, including Sen. Trent Lott, former Sen. George Allen, and former Rep. Bob Barr, for associating with the Council of Conservative Citizens. Once the media accepted the SPLC’s portrayal of the CCC as a dangerous “white supremacist” organization — a portrayal that CCC officials have always disputed — then the links-and-ties method meant that any association with that group could be construed as evidence of “white supremacist” sympathies.

No one has ever directly accused George Allen of being a white supremacist – which he most certainly is not — but the pretzel-logic of the links-and-ties method has the effect of making its targets guilty until proven innocent.

Few people in mainstream journalism or politics undertakes a critical examination of the SPLC’s labels because to do so would be to risk the charge of defending a “hate” group — and then, through the magic of the links-and-ties method, you will be named in the next indictment.

Since the arrival of Potok at SPLC, the links-and-ties smears have multiplied to the point of transparent absurdity. A few years ago, the SPLC began smearing immigration-control groups in such a way that Michelle Malkin would qualify as a “white supremacist.” Jim Antle recently busted that smear:

Advocates of reduced immigration levels and stronger border security are high on the SPLC’s list of targets because of the obvious racial component of the immigration issue.
Locating cranks who have made ill-tempered remarks about immigrants is not terribly difficult work for highly trained members of the thought police. But Morris Dees’s marauders have not been content to stop there. In late 2007, the SPLC labeled the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a hate group. This troubling designation by extension tarred organizations like CIS [the Center for Immigration Studies] and Roy Beck’s NumbersUSA—and quickly achieved its intended chilling effect on the immigration debate.
The SPLC’s smear became the centerpiece of the National Council of La Raza’s “Stop the Hate” campaign. “Hate” was loosely defined as any position that differed from La Raza’s advocacy of loose borders and amnesty for illegal immigrants. La Raza used the SPLC’s “findings” to try to silence its critics, and the mainstream media, always eager to portray conservatives as racists, cheerfully repeated the slur in its woefully biased coverage of the amnesty debate. Stop the Hate claimed its biggest scalp when Lou Dobbs stepped away from his microphone at CNN—by most accounts, a voluntary move, but one hastened by the network’s growing discomfort with the controversy surrounding Dobbs’s outspoken views on immigration.
FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA are far from hate groups. They are wonky, white-paper-generating organizations committed to nothing more controversial than cutting back immigration from its post-1965 high of 1 million new immigrants a year to the more traditional level of 300,000. They shy away from the more racially charged aspects of the debate, which reflects their roots in the wing of the immigration-restrictionist movement animated primarily by environmental and economic concerns rather than blood and soil.
But such facts cannot be allowed to get in the way of a good fundraising mailing—or a malicious attempt to drum certain viewpoints out of polite society. In its fevered writings about immigration reformers, the SPLC has concocted conspiracies so elaborate they would raise eyebrows within the John Birch Society.

It comes full-circle, you see? The SPLC’s fearmongering about the Right — where America is always just one Tea Party rally away from that dreaded moment when the brownshirts come goosestepping down Main Street — is at least as irresponsible as the Birchers’ fearmongering about the Left. Unlike the JBS, however, the SPLC is treated by mainstream journalists as respectable and authoritative. And among those abetting this smear operation is Geraldo Rivera:

Allahpundit summarizes this particular application of the links-and-ties method:

Militias are right-wing and angry and tea partiers are right-wing and angry, ergo tea partiers want to blow up the Murrah building. No need to directly accuse them of it, either. Just warn the public vaguely about the danger of “anti-government rhetoric” and let swing voters make the connection themselves.

Bill Clinton himself is now part of this smear, and Michelle Malkin has more on this shameless exploitation of tragedy.

One of the unintended consequences of the election of our post-racial president is that the “racist” smear has now become so ubiquitous that more and more people have begun to question the labels that liberals like Potok so blithely affix to their political adversaries. Ask the PUMAs like Hillbuzz how it felt, during the 2008 Democratic primaries, to be labeled ”racist” for supporting Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Courage is the indispensible virtue. At some point, conservatives have to stop being frightened by smear artists like Mark Potok. Remember: There are five A’s in “raaaacism.”

PREVIOUSLY:

How SPLC Hypes the Hate

Category: Racism, Tea Party, Terrorism

Another Pat Condell Outing

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

by Smitty (h/t Jihad Watch)

Pat Condell, making yet another excellent point:

Category: The Flemish Menace

Remember That ‘Culture of Corruption’?

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | 2 Comments

It’s back!

Politically connected staffers in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department twisted arms to steer a $5.4 million contract for crystal stemware to a tiny interior-design firm without putting it out for bid . . .
Two senior State Department contracting officials, Randolph Bennett and Tandra Jones, successfully pushed for the contract to go to a firm run by Denise Mathis-Gardner as a no-bid minority “8(a)” contract, the source said — an action that one shut-out competitor complained cost taxpayers an extra $1 million.
The contracted firm, Systems Design Inc., based in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood, had no experience making glassware, and its owner had only recently emerged from bankruptcy proceedings, the source said. . . .
“These two [Bennett and Jones] went down to the small-business office and insisted that we have an 8(a) company — have this company SDI do our contract,” the source said.
“They [SDI] don’t know how to make glass. The glassware is being made in Sweden.” . . .
Records show Bennett gave $1,000 to Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, $2,000 to the Obama Victory Fund and $2,300 to the Democratic National Committee for the inauguration.

The Obama administration: Transparent as Swedish crystal!

Category: Corruption

GOP Future Funny When Written By Lefty

Posted on | April 19, 2010 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Salon is quickly becoming a go-to humor site. Ed Kilgore serves up teh funny about the future of the Democratic party, which this blog will both radically paraphrase and condense:

Democratic activists ponder the November elections and wet themselves.
They are hoping that the Elders of CTHULHU will pull the economy out of the toilet in time for 2012, with no real idea of how.
Older and whiter voters dominate midterms [raaaaacism?]. It was inevitable that there be some drawback of Democratic dominance in 2010 irrespective of all the ’stuff and nonsense’ produced by the 111th Congress.
2012 will surely be a repeat of 2008: “Republicans have done a lot to brand themselves as the party of angry old white people”, which will backfire “since the radically conservative mood of the Republican base has eliminated any strategic flexibility to reach out to younger and darker (or female) voters”.
The GOP is further painted into a corner by immigration and No Child Left Behind, which the GOP must now “foreswear forever”.
The GOP has an “uninspiring cast of would-be presidents” and then lets out a burst of David Brooks flatus. Not that I have anything against intestinal gasses, mind you.
Then there is some more blah-blah about various names, as if the unwillingness to start a presidential campaign today, 2.5 years from the next POTUS election, was a bad thing. Aside: it’s actually rather smart of the left to attempt to draw people into running too early. Never, never doubt the patience and low animal cunning of the adversary.
“And history suggests that it’s already too late for someone new to emerge.” Ah ha! Hammered if you do, sickled if you don’t.
“Republicans, like or not, are probably stuck with the presidential field they now have. And it’s not a pretty sight.” Yeah, framing: yeah.
Kilgore says something coherent about Romney’s challenges with health care.
Huckabee’s commitment is unknown.
“As for Palin — well, as Brooks says, she’s a circus.” Given that the opposite of whatever Brooks says is true, she could run. Or not. And that ambiguity is a powerful tool for making lefty heads ’splode.
But she almost certainly can’t win a general election in any political environment. That, not fear, is why Democrats love to talk about her, all but openly egging her on to run.
“. . .Gingrich, whose prominence in the emerging 2012 field is the best example of how hard-up Republicans really are.”
Then he goes into some other possibilities: Pawlenty; Erik Erickson’s person favorite Mitch McConnell; “Mike Pence, a conservative favorite, could try to become the first sitting House member to win a presidential nomination since 1896″; Thune; Haley Barbour; Rick Perry and Jim DeMint, who have made a recent habit of saying things that are every oppo researcher’s dream; Rick Santorum; and Ron Paul.
We get this howler in the penultimate paragraph: “There may not even be a Bob Dole or a John McCain in this mix — the kind of candidate who can reassert adult control and at least lose gracefully in the general election.”
The concluding paragraph is a watered down Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf outing.

The rebuttal is that the American people are awakening to the devastation caused by a century of Progressivism. There are some broken tools akin to Dole and McCain that are more part of the problem than the solution, but the awareness brought on by blogs, and the energy demonstrated at Tea Parties everywhere cannot be repressed. Is BHO not already the most protested POTUS ever? Should he not hold that dubious honor, he shall by 2012.

Counter-analysis: the 2010 election buys We The People a chance, but only a chance, to set the country on a course for recovery. The Tea Parties et al. continue their pressure and whoever wins in 2012 comes in with a mandate to begin the process of unwinding a century of debt, centralization, and diminished liberty. And the efforts of the Founding Fathers shall not have been in vain.

Category: GOP

MSNBC: Media Sycophants, Not By Coincidence

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 6 Comments

Jimmie Bise observes the pecuniary motive:

General Electric . . . by some happy coincidence, managed to pay no US taxes this past year despite receiving a $140 billion gift from the administration.

Prompting Jehuda to recall the Corleones:

“And we have newspaper cable news people on the payroll, don’t we, Tom?”

Ah, but the Corleones had honor. Big difference.

Category: Uncategorized

Unnecessary and Improper

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 1 Comment

“The Congress shall have Power . . . To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers . . .”
– U.S. Constitution, Article I, Sec. 8, Clause 18

“In the last week we have gained tremendous momentum in our effort to keep carry-on bags free. We have begun to put the brakes on runaway and out-of-control airline fees.”
– Sen. Charles Schumer, New York

Category: Democrats, New York, Senate

Hey, Baby, Let’s Get Seismic

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 10 Comments

Great pickup lines in Tehran:

A senior Iranian cleric has claimed that dolled-up women incite extramarital sex, causing more earthquakes in Iran, a country that straddles several fault lines, newspapers reported today.
“Many women who dress inappropriately . . . cause youths to go astray, taint their chastity and incite extramarital sex in society, which increases earthquakes,” Ayatollah Kazem Sedighi told worshippers at overnight prayers in Tehran.

I’d be the mack daddy in an Iranian singles bar: “Sweetheart, you’re looking like the epicenter of a 7.4 on the Richter scale. How about you and me go back to my place and make the earth move?”

UPDATE: Welcome, Instpundit readers.

Category: Iran, Sex

Give Attila Money

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 7 Comments

Personally, I think she ought to at least offer to use the money to go to Vegas or New Orleans, but gasoline and eggs and cheering her up are also worthwhile projects, I suppose.

Category: Little Miss Attila

What Matthew Yglesias Doesn’t Understand About Economics

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 7 Comments

Besides everything, I mean. Christine Romer’s neo-Keynesian analysis of the economic slump – “It’s Aggregate Demand, Stupid” — inspires Yglesias to spout ignorantly about “structural” unemployment:

Every time there’s a downturn a certain swathe of the elite starts to label it unfixable and structural.

He then goes off to argue that the problem with U.S. policy is that it has been too cautious:

The fact of the matter is that key people responsible for running the global economy—people at the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve Board, and the Bank of Japan, people in the United States Senate, people in the Germany cabinet—are screwing up. In the developed world, those countries who’ve been able to respond aggressively to the crisis with aggressive expansion-via-devaluation are all doing pretty well. The bigger developed economies can’t do that exact thing, but they can mount more aggressive expansionary responses — they just aren’t.

All this is a convenient excuse for not bothering to grasp the differences between structural and cyclical unemployment. Joseph Lawler had an excellent in-depth discussion of this issue in the December-January issue of the American Spectator, which I summarized in March:

Boiling down a complex discussion to its essence, we must understand the difference between cyclical unemployment — a temporary situation caused by short-term downward trends in the business cycle — and structural unemployment, which is the result of fundamental changes in the economic structure of society.

If Yglesias is too lazy to wrap his mind around that issue, I can’t force him to do so, but I must point out that “structural” is not a synonym for ”unfixable.” The problem is that the kinds of government interventions that help ease cyclical unemployment may actually hinder recovery when there are structural changes in the economy.

Are we looking at a temporary slow period in the business cycle or are we looking at the results of structural changes in the economy? The question is not moot, nor is it a matter of political preference. If the government is shoving unemployment benefits and public assistance at people, encouraging them to wait around for the jobs to come back when, in fact, those jobs aren’t ever coming back, then your policies are doing more harm than good.

Arguments about economics have an unfortunate way of becoming arguments about politics because there is always the question of what policies the government should pursue. Yet we cannot forget there is an underlying economic reality that is immune to our political wishes.

UPDATE: A liberal who actually knows something about economics weighs in:

The important point is that while it isn’t structural now, the longer high unemployment persists the more the amount of structural unemployment will increase. There are a couple of mechanisms for this, the most obvious one being that over time, the skills of unemployed workers deteriorate as technology/practices change. This mismatch between skills of the unemployed and the needs of employers grows.

Ah, but Duncan, how can you so blithely conclude that current unemployment is not structural?

The housing boom created jobs for a lot of unskilled and semi-skilled workers who are now unemployed and who, barring a re-inflation of the “bubble,” are unlikely to find such good employment prospects in the immediate future. Furthermore, these people are in many cases the same ones who signed on for those low-doc option-ARM mortgages and are now living in houses worth less than they owe on them. So they’re doubly screwed.

All of which goes back to a point I’ve been pounding home for months: You can’t make capitalism work without capital, and the biggest problem in the U.S. economy today is a capital shortage. The housing meltdown wiped out $7 trillion in asset value, and there is simply no way to recover quickly from that kind of wipeout. So when you keep pretending that recovery is just around the corner — it’s not – you’re undermining your own credibility.

Frankly, liberals were on more solid ground with their original argument: “Blame Bush!”

Category: Economics

‘Heh’ Of The Day: ‘King Obama’

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | No Comments

by Smitty

We had a preview of this at Smittypalooza on my Inspiron Mini. Cassone allowed that they were trying to figure out a name for this less-than-serious outfit. Deadly serious topic, though. Blotto was taken, so it looks like they settled on “Lenin and the Castros”.

This blog is a brace of shameless shills for Victoria Jackson and Chris Cassone. May Fortune favor their efforts.

Category: Barack Obama, Chris Cassone

‘The Power To Tax Is The Power To Destroy’

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 3 Comments

by Smitty (via Insty)

Kansas City.com quotes Prof. Reynolds:

Everyone should pay at least some income tax. And everyone’s tax bill should go up or down whenever federal spending does.

KC.com then asks:

Is there a way to more closely align politicians’ incentives with the nation’s long-term financial interest? It’s a lot tougher than it sounds, because the incentives facing voters are perverse as well.
The problem is highlighted by a branch of economics called public choice theory, which analyzes the way people behave while making collective decisions, as opposed to how they behave in the marketplace.

I submit that the improved system, itself, isn’t all that tough. What will prove somewhere between challenging and impossible is the transition.
The title of this post is due to Daniel Webster in 1819. And what responsible person would disagree that, through taxation, the Federal government is destroying, or threatens to destroy, the country?
So take away DC’s power to tax directly.
Dan Riehl also weighed in:

I think there are at least two paths to consider, one broader and one more targeted. As McClanahan [KC.com] points out, things do happen somewhat differently within the states. Rather than only export that type of remedy up to the federal level, there needs to be a more honest discussion of state’s rights and the Tenth Amendment. Because progressives[?] are predominantly federalists, as soon as someone brings up the concept of state’s rights, it’s immediately tarred with the brush of the Civil War. That would have to abate if the country is going to be able to have a genuine discussion of state versus federal power and control, particularly as it impacts spending.
The other path includes a more informative approach to accounting for government spending. While it shouldn’t become so micro as to simply gloss over one’s eyes, we need to get away from simply discussing budgets as vast piles of money. If one is going to cut federal spending on Education for instance, it should be more clear what silo within the budget it’s targeted at. We don’t approach it that way today. As soon as one hears about cuts to education, the Left immediately paints a picture of poor children going without their school lunch, upon which more and more of them have come to depend. As an aside, that specific discussion would be better served at the state level.
It is hard to get one’s mind around, but I believe clearer cost accounting at the federal level and a more robust discussion of state versus federal government and their respective roles in our lives are at least two good paths to begin exploring.

I submit that Dan’s former approach is the horse to bet on; the latter will be as readily corrupted as the current arrangement.
The reason for the corruption is the lack of feeback. Irrespective of whom you vote into office, the Federal beast grows. What to do? Remit the sub-Federal duties that DC has piled upon itself to the States. Most importantly, that of collecting taxes.

Let the House Appropriations Committee devolve into knife fight to decide the annual billing for each state.
Let there be a simple correction, possibly a sales tax, that gets imposed upon a state to meet shortfalls.
Let the Federal interference with individuals, in terms of housing, health care, education, and all other entitlements die a very public death.
Let there be deficit spending to support a declared war, which hasn’t been seen since WWII, unless I missed something.
Let the other 49 States besides North Dakota have their own bloody banks, and the Federal Reserve oversee them, if we can’t kill that particular beast outright.

At the risk of sounding slightly cranky, if the Tea Party isn’t pushing for this sort of reform and restoration, then the Left laughs. The Left understands that the Federal death grip on the country’s future is predicated upon the power of the purse. The Contract From America will evoke a titter from the Left because it amounts to a sexy shade of lipstick upon the Federal pig. Progressivism has perverted the Constitution, at a medium pace, for about a century now. If the power to tax remains in DC, then it shall all have been a fine collective temper tantrum, but it shall not have bought much in the end.

Category: Dan Riehl, Instapundit, Progressivism, Tea Party

Rule 5 Sunday

Posted on | April 18, 2010 | 7 Comments

by Smitty

It’s been a good week for both the country and Rule 5.

Here’s My Thing leads off with Milla Jovovich, and also has Sarah Michelle Gellar
The Pirate’s Cove has another entry from the infinite pinup supply, going so far as to notice Alice on the moon.
GrEaT sAtAn”S gIrLfRiEnD had a Milblog cutie, finishing with many such, and a mournful pose for the Polish dead. Then a UN note:
United Nations hooks up to draft the world’s first comprehensive convention against terrorism. For the fourteenth time in ten years!
Just keep pluckin’ that chicken, UN.
A Conservative Shemale thinks Amber Heard in a bit full of herself.
Cassie Fiano had a Fox News video about military wives learning burlesque for their husbands.
Sports maven Fishersville Mike had Amy Mickelson, after her husband won the Masters.
Dustbury catches us up on Lileks’ Law of Lingerie. Obey the law, people. He also celebrates Emma Watson’s birthday.
Power and Control introduces Desiree Bassett, a 15 y/o guitarist with potential that can only be characterized as ridiculous. Her band is called Time Machine, which will necessitate a Joe Satriani moment:

For the ladies, Russell Crowe in the PuffHo. Also, some beach babes from India.
Smash Mouth Politics mentioned something about a Kate Gosselin Rule 5 post. Also, hotties on bikes.
Yankee Phil has some elegant Jackie O.
The Mind Numbed Robot appears to be muscling in on The Classic Liberal’s territory.
Waxing Erratic returns with an assortment of cats and Asian lovlies.
The Saint Anglibert Press recalls a scene from “Robin Hood: Men In Tights” which is well worth a “Heh”.
Proof Positive serves up the Jayne Mansfield in the Vintage category, and Mariska Hargitay in the Friday Night zone. He also has a PETA repeata. Actually, it’s a sequel, but I can’t resist a stupid pun.
Three Beers Later has Denise Milani and Juliana Moriera, and, let’s face it, altogether too much stuff atop the blog. It’s starting to look like my desk, that page.
Eye of Polyphemus notes that Hayden Panettiere introduces dolphin logic we can appreciate.
Point of a Gun noted several Rule 5 outings:
- Girls with heavy metal strings.
- Dana Loesch attempting to tell Chris Matthews something, anything, in this case about Tea Parties
- Richmond, VA Tea Party babes & signs.
- A Zooey Deschanel clip, surprisingly not a Dustbury submission.
The Classic Liberal deploys Amy Acker to explore “Central Banking as an Engine of Corruption”
Heidi Montag, suggests American Power. More Houston goodness, with Kathleen McKinley, Michelle Lancaster and Kevin Jackson. And, hot off the Twitter, Oceanside Tea Party hotties.
In My Copious Free Time suggests that the IRS individual mandate collections may not be without recompense.
Thoughts of FEI returns to the Fox News discussion with Courtney Friel and SE Cupp.
House of Eratosthenes, who has run out of alphabet and apparently awaits some federal bailout to continue his research into pulchritude, offers a brace of beer bombshells in the interim.
Belvedere returns to rock the Rule 5:
Paco Enterprises features Eleanor Powell and Buddy Rich. Primo stuff!
TrogloPundit, peering out of his Quasimodo-esque cage has spotted Paris Hilton and Christina Applegate. At the same time. Troglovision can do that.
Gateway Pundit notes some dodgy theology about kikinis and disasters, and provides an apparently Swedish example.

Bonus Joe, asking the eternal question: “Why?”

The tear line of shame.

Yankee Phil features Oksana Grigorieva, and includes Mel Gibson. How you punt on seven children is something I don’t care to know.

That’s your Rule 5 Sunday. Peace to all, and updates to Smitty.

Category: Rule 5

What New Regulation Can’t Fix: FDIC, OTS, and the WaMu SNAFU

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 4 Comments

Friday afternoon, I had to drive to Baltimore Washington International Airport to pick up my 17-year-old son Jim, who was flying in from Ohio. I could tell you a long story here about Jim’s desire to see his dog Samson, who appears to be terminally ill, and maybe dog-lovers would hit the tip-jar in sympathy, but that’s not what this post is about.

While I was driving, I turned the radio to WCSP-FM — 90.1 FM, the C-SPAN station in D.C. — and listened to a Senate subcommittee hearing on the failure of government regulators in the case of Washington Mutual, which went belly-up in 2008. Here’s the Washington Post story about the hearing:

In a testy exchange with senators Friday, the former head of the Office of Thrift Supervision denied that his agency fostered a cozy relationship with Washington Mutual that tempered oversight of the Seattle thrift and ultimately resulted in the largest bank failure in U.S. history.
A year-long Senate probe presented at a hearing Friday concluded that the OTS had identified a pattern of errors, poor risk management and even fraud at Washington Mutual. Yet it took no action to stop the bank from dumping toxic mortgages into the financial system because the bank was a huge moneymaker that paid fees amounting to 15 percent of the agency’s budget, the panel said.
In effect, the OTS was a “watchdog with no bite” that failed to keep an arm’s-length relationship with the bank it regulated, said Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Governmental Affairs subcommittee on investigations.

You can read the whole thing, but the point is that OTS regulators had identified serious problems at WaMu and warned the bank about the problems, yet took no effective action against WaMu and never publicized their concerns. Meanwhile, because of a turf-war between OTS and FDIC, at a crucial time the latter agency was prevented from gaining important information necessary to assessing the viability of WaMu.

Many people assumed that federal bank regulation ensured nothing like this could happen, but it did in part because WaMu was trying to compete against lenders like Countrywide Mortgage, which weren’t covered by the same regulations. From the FDIC’s Inspector General report:

Option ARMs represented as much as half of all loan originations from 2003 to 2007 and approximately $59 billion, or 47 percent, of the home loans on WaMu’s balance sheet at the end of 2007. WaMu’s Option ARMs provided borrowers with the choice to pay their monthly mortgages in amounts equal to monthly principal and interest, interest-only, or a minimum monthly payment. Borrowers selected the minimum monthly payment option for 56 percent of the Option ARM portfolio in 2005.
The minimum monthly payment was based on an introductory rate, also known as a teaser rate, which was significantly below the market interest rate and was usually in place for only 1 month. After the introductory rate expired, the minimum monthly payment feature introduced two significant risks to WaMu’s portfolio: payment shock and negative amortization. WaMu projected that, on average, payment shock increased monthly mortgage amounts by 60 percent.
At the end of 2007, 84 percent of the total value of Option ARMs on WaMu’s financial statements was negatively amortizing. . . .

What does “negatively amortizing” mean?

Negative amortization occurs when the minimum monthly payments made after the expiration of the teaser rate are insufficient to pay monthly interest cost. Any unpaid interest is added to the principal loan balance thereby increasing the original loan amount.

Which is to say that the home-buyer who made only the minimum payment was actually building up negative equity — his debt to the bank increasing every month. Here’s more from the IG report about WaMu’s operation:

WaMu underwriting policies and practices made what were already inherently high-risk products even riskier. For example, WaMu originated a significant number of loans as “stated income” loans. Stated income loans, sometimes referred to as “low-doc” loans, allow borrowers to simply write in their income on the loan application without providing any supporting documentation. Approximately 90 percent of all of WaMu’s home equity loans, 73 percent of Option ARMs, and 50 percent of subprime loans were “stated income” loans.
WaMu also originated loans with high loan-to-value ratios. Specifically, WaMu held a significant percentage of loans where the loan amount exceeded 80 percent of the underlying property. For example, WaMu’s 2007 financial statements showed that 44 percent of subprime loans, 35 percent of home equity loans,7 and 6 percent of Option ARMs were originated for total loan amounts in excess of 80 percent of the value of the underlying property.

You may ask yourself, “Why on earth would a bank even make loans under such terms?” Two words: Asset value.

That phrase came up several times during Friday’s hearing, but unless you’ve paid attention to what actually happened in the housing bubble, the significance of the phrase “asset value” may not be readily apparent. For many years, lenders were able to get away with making high-risk loans because of the steady upward trend in the housing market.

“Asset value” in a rising market meant that if you loaned $300,000 on a house and the borrower defaulted –hey, no problem! Foreclose on the loan and re-sell the house for $350,000. So it didn’t really matter how shady the borrower might be, as long as the value of the asset kept going up.

When the housing bubble was really cooking – 2003 through 2006 — both the borrowers and the lenders were thinking of the houses as investments. WaMu got into the game just a couple of years before the bubble burst, and engaged in practices that other lenders had been pursuing for years in markets where a seemingly insatiable demand for real estate meant that there was no such thing as a bad real-estate investment. More from the IG report:

Consistent with its initial business strategy, WaMu made most of its residential loans to borrowers in California and Florida, states that suffered above-average home value depreciation [after the bubble burst in 2007]. Additionally, within California, WaMu’s underwriting standards allowed for up to 25 percent of loans to be concentrated in one metropolitan statistical area.

Dubious lending practices had been more common in these “hot” markets, where strong demand and rising prices enabled the practice known as “flipping” — buying an undervalued home with plans for a quick resale — and where soaring values also made possible frequent home-equity refinancing.

All of this, you see, was based on “asset value” in a booming market, including WaMu’s mergers and acquisitions in 2005-2006, when they gobbled up other lenders with assets valued at more than $60 billion. And if the market had continued to boom, there never would have been a problem, as WaMu’s portfolio would have steadily increased in value. Ah, “if” — the biggest two-letter word in the English language. More from the IG report:

After the mortgage market meltdown in mid-2007, the effects of WaMu’s risky products and liberal underwriting began to materialize. In the third quarter of 2007, WaMu was still profitable, but earnings were 73 percent less than the second quarter because of loan losses. In the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008, WaMu suffered consecutive $1 billion quarterly losses because of loan charge-offs and reserves for future loan losses. . . .
On September 25, 2008, OTS closed WaMu and appointed FDIC as receiver; FDIC contemporaneously sold WaMu to JPMorgan Chase & Co for $1.89 billion.

Whoa! Just two or three years earlier, WaMu had absorbed through mergers and acquisitions four institutions with combined assets of more than $60 billion, and now WaMu was sold for less than $2 billion! And what of the role of government regulators in this disaster? From the IG report:

At over $300 billion in total assets, WaMu was OTS’s largest regulated institution and represented as much as 15 percent of OTS’s total assessment revenue from 2003 to 2008. OTS spent significant resources monitoring and examining WaMu. OTS conducted regular risk assessments and examinations that rated WaMu’s overall performance satisfactory until 2008. Those supervisory efforts also identified the core weaknesses that eventually led to WaMu’s failure – high-risk products, poor underwriting, and weak risk controls. . . .
OTS relied largely on WaMu management to track progress in correcting examiner-identified weaknesses and accepted assurances from WaMu management and its Board of Directors that problems would be resolved. OTS, however, did not adequately ensure that WaMu management corrected those weaknesses. The first time OTS took safety and soundness enforcement action against WaMu was in 2008 after the thrift started to incur significant losses.

In other words, despite OTS identifying “core weaknesses” at WaMu, no enforcement action was taken until things had already started sliding out of control. Why? Because as long as the housing market kept booming and the company was profitable — as it was until the fourth quarter of 2007 — the risk to investors and depositors was strictly hypothetical. The problems identified by OTS regulators were only dangerous in the event of a serious downturn in the real-estate market, something no one had seen in many years and which no one expected until it actually happened.

This is why liberals screaming about the need for more financial regulation are fundamentally wrong. We can generate new regulations designed to prevent a repeat of the WaMu collapse, but those new regulations — like the old regulations — will only be as good as the officials who enforce them. New regulations will inspire new evasion techniques, equally risky new ventures will attract investors with an appetite for lucrative risks, and the next “bubble” boom-and-bust will occur in some as-yet-unsuspected market sector.

Regulation cannot eliminate all risks, and unbounded faith in financial regulation creates a false sense of security — “Hey, what can go wrong? They’ve got federal regulators on the job!” — which actually makes things worse.

Ultimately, the responsibility for avoiding financial risk belongs to the investor. Like your father always warned, if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. And as the ancient Romans warned in the sign displayed at the public market: Caveat emptor.

Category: Economics, Uncategorized

What If Arnold Schwarzenegger Had Been as Conservative as Chris Christie?

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 11 Comments

The Wall Street Journal shares an anecdote about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie standing up to his state’s teachers union, earning praise from Moe Lane.

Meanwhile, we’re watching California circle the drain — the state’s unemployment rate hit 12.6% in March — and I’m thinking of what a horrible disappointment Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been. What Christie is accomplishing in New Jersey seems miraculous, but Schwarzenegger arguably could have done the same thing in California, if only he had had as much courage.

(Hat-tip: Memeorandum.)

Category: California, New Jersey, Republicans, Uncategorized

‘Build The Party, Trust The People,
Save The Country’–McCotter At SRLC

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Thaddeus McCotter is heroic. He starts off with an “simple country lawyer” reference, going back to Anatomy of a Murder, and continues through a rousing speech with punchline sufficiently arid for Steven Wright.

Thaddeus McCotter: because not all rhetoric has to be served in ALL CAPS with a shot of adrenaline.

Update: Moelanche!

Category: Fear and Loathing in the French Quarter, Republicans, Thaddeus McCotter, Video

Ben Domenech Accidentally ‘Outed’ Really-Not-So-Closeted Lesbian

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 8 Comments

This is hilarious. Potential Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan is gayer than the first three rows at an Indigo Girls concert, and yet the White House acts all outraged that conservative writer Ben Domenech incorrectly described the unmarried 49-year-old as “openly gay.”

Kagan is not officially so open about it, and this gives the White House a chance to pretend that Domenech is part of a right-wing homophobic whisper campaign. In the process, as Moe Lane notes, the White House reacted “in a manner that explicitly and authoritatively denies that Ms. Kagan is gay” – a denial that thereby makes it legitimate news if, in fact, Kagan is gayer than your average NCAA Division I varsity women’s softball team.

Allahpundit figures all the angles, but I personally doubt Obama will pick Kagan for the Stevens slot. I expect him to do the smart thing, which is to promote an appeals-court judge.

UPDATE: Omri at Mere Rhetoric:

Did the WH not get the memo that Kagan’s not only a lesbian, but that she’s not really concerned about who knows it? Two days ago it would have been totally unremarkable if she walked out of a Georgetown or Cambridge restaurant holding her girlfriend’s hand. Now it would be a national event.
Because the Obama administration decided to make Kagan’s sexual orientation a capital-t Thing, she’s now in a position where either it looks like she’s hiding her homosexuality to advance her judicial career or – if she acknowledges she’s a lesbian – it looks like she’s being chased out of the closet.

The point is, it wasn’t hateful homophobic wingnut Ben Domenech who “outed” Kagan, it was her gay-friendly liberal friends. But because the White House is in the habit of automatically attacking conservatives as hateful homophobic wingnuts, Domenech’s description of Kagan as “openly gay” pushed the red-alert button at Obama spin HQ, which then automatically denied Kagan’s lesbianism as if it weren’t already a widely known fact.

Hope and Change and Irony. Lots and lots of irony.

UPDATE II: Dan Riehl notices that Kagan slightly resembles Bob Costas. NTTAWWT.

Category: Gays

Just Another Random, Coincidental Beat-Down on Two Republicans in New Orleans

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 4 Comments

Allahpundit notes that New Orleans police have denied telling blogger Pat Dollard that they suspect a political motive in the brutal April 9 beating of Alexandra “Allee” Bautsch and her boyfriend, Joseph Brown, after they left a fundraiser for Louisiana Republican Gov. Bobby Jindal. Michelle Malkin says:

It doesn’t help to insist on making this a partisan cause celebre and reducing the victims to political pawns when the evidence remains murky — and especially when one of the victims himself heard no politically-motivated taunts.

OK, I don’t want to make it a partisan cause celebre, but I’ll be very interested in seeing who (if anyone) gets arrested for this crime. Bautsch, who works for Jindal, had her leg broken and Brown suffered a broken nose and broken jaw.

The fundraiser they had attended had drawn a crowd of anti-GOP protesters. According to the police report, the man who beat Brown was a “white male, late 20s” with a ponytail. And the crime itself was rather bizarre: The couple walked out of the French Quarter restaurant where the fundraiser was held, and were evidently pursued by a group of people shouting things like “little blonde bitch,” “f—ing faggot,” etc., before the attack occurred.

So if there was no political motive for the attack, what other possible motive could there be? There was no robbery or sexual assault. Under what imaginable circumstance would this couple have been randomly targeted for such abusive treatment?

Crazy things happen in New Orleans all the time, but when two Republicans leave a GOP fundraising event that has been targeted by protesters, when they are followed down the street and then attacked a few blocks away– well, kind of a strange coincidence, isn’t it?

Just askin’ questions . . .

Category: Crime, Fear and Loathing in the French Quarter, Republicans, Uncategorized

Fabulous Massachusetts Juggernaut Rides Again

Posted on | April 17, 2010 | 2 Comments

by Smitty

Fishersville Mike suggests we honor of Da Tech Guy, whose irrepressible enthusiasm found him making a rather unplanned conquest of the South. He hasn’t yet blogged about the response from Da Tech Wife, but the fact he’s still capable of blogging is, itself, encouraging.

The Lads Doth Not Protest Enough, Methinks

How Stacy managed to drive ~1,500 miles round trip and still have anything left for Smittypalooza and the Tax Day Tea Parties (we hit two, trying to be like Donald Douglas) I’m not really sure. Stacy did get rather testy when, at the secret headquarters, I pointed out that configuring Barbara Espinosa with TweetDeck would put Barbara ahead of Stacy on the technical competence curve. Because you can’t have being a knuckle-dragging Luddite as part of your shtick without suffering frequent, public abuse.

Da Tech Guy And The Travelling Fedora Show