Jim DeMint tells The Muppet Lobby "No"

http://demint.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?p=JimsBlog&ContentRecord_id=9f33a591-8891-4ad4-a856-e387dcade83a

Shows like Sesame Street are multi-million dollar enterprises capable of thriving in the private market. According to the 990 tax form all nonprofits are required to file, Sesame Workshop President and CEO Gary Knell received $956,513 -- nearly a million dollars -- in compensation in 2008. And, from 2003 to 2006, "Sesame Street" made more than $211 million from toy and consumer product sales.  

 When taxpayer funding for public broadcasting ends, rest assured, Cookie Monster will still be fed.

 Saving the country from crushing debt and taxes is going to require hard choices. Telling the Muppet lobby “no” should be one of the easy ones.

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U.S. Government Shuts Down 84,000 Websites, ‘By Mistake’

http://torrentfreak.com/u-s-government-shuts-down-84000-websites-by-mistake-110216/

The US Government has yet again shuttered several domain names this week. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s ICE office proudly announced that they had seized domains related to counterfeit goods and child pornography. What they failed to mention, however, is that one of the targeted domains belongs to a free DNS provider, and that 84,000 websites were wrongfully accused of links to child pornography crimes.

If it saves one child, I guess it's worth it.  Right?  I mean who needs another 84,000 web sites on the internet.  Better safe than sorry.  (Just kidding :-)

I can't wait until the Feds take over health care and start pulling the plug when it really counts.

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The President’s budget: whistling past the graveyard

http://keithhennessey.com/2011/02/14/graveyard/

With his State of the Union address and this budget, President Obama  is trying to define a new problem to be solved.  He thinks Americans are at a long-term competitive disadvantage relative to the Chinese because our government isn’t spending enough on infrastructure, innovation, and education.  Suppose you think he’s right (I don’t).  Is this problem more urgent than restoring short-term economic growth?  Is it more important than addressing unsustainable deficits and a federal government expansion that will leave fewer resources for the private sector?  The President apparently thinks it is.  I strongly disagree.

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TaxProf Blog: Rasmusen Presents The Lawlessness of the GM NOL Ruling

http://taxprof.typepad.com/taxprof_blog/2011/02/rasmussen.html

After the government joined private parties in purchasing most of General Motors’s property, the Secretary of the Treasury issued “the EESA Notices” which said that the usual tax rules would not apply and the purchasers could deduct $45 billion from their future corporate income, a tax asset worth an estimated $16 billion. The notice gave no justification for the exception, except that the TARP act gives the Secretary authority to do what is “necessary or appropriate to carry out the purposes of EESA.”

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Hayek’s Top 10 Do’s and Don’ts in a Recession

http://blog.heritage.org/2011/02/14/hayek’s-top-10-do’s-and-don’ts-in-a-recession/

In a new essay, Bruce Caldwell, the editor of The Collected Works of F.A. Hayek (19 volumes), distills the key Hayekian insights on what to do—and not do—during a recession. The short of it: “We usually don’t have the necessary knowledge to intervene effectively in the economy, and the political process is such that, even if we did, we still likely would get bad policy, coupled with an ever-growing government sector.” 

The full essay is worth reading:

http://www.heritage.org/Research/Reports/2011/02/Ten-Mostly-Hayekian-Insights-for-Trying-Economic-Times

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When States Go Bust

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/when-states-go-bust_541424.html?nopager=1

It’s a solution of apparent Alexandrian elegance and simplicity: Empower America’s cash-strapped states to slice cleanly through a strangling knot of debilitating debt and government union cronyism by letting them file for bankruptcy. Long-term liabilities could be restructured, unaffordable labor contracts rewritten, fiscal health restored. No federal bailouts necessary.

Original article from November:

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/give-states-way-go-bankrupt_518378.html

My comments: I still see constitutional issues with State bankruptcy.  However, the original article says you can avoid problems by making sure that only the State can decide to enter bankruptcy (no one can force a State into bankruptcy) and the State government must be allowed to continue to exercise their normal political control of the State (so, for example, the bankruptcy judge can't force them to raise taxes, and the Federal government could not appoint military governors as they did after the Civil War.)  So that's a weaker form of voluntary State bankruptcy, which may in fact be useful as a negotiating ploy.  In the end, I still think the State constitutions will get in the way of the State government reneging on debts and public employee pensions.  I wish it would work, but I don't think it will happen.

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If Godzilla Appeared on National Mall Gore Would Say It’s Global Warming

http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2011/02/05/charles-krauthammer-if-godzilla-appeared-national-mall-al-gore-would-#ixzz1D6pdwZsl

Charles Krauthmammer on Friday said if Godzilla appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., Al Gore would blame it on global warming.

In a religion, everything is explicable. In science, you can actually deny or falsify a proposition with evidence. You find me a single piece of evidence that Al Gore would ever admit would contradict global warming and I’ll be surprised.

Follow the link for a video clip

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Obama issues global warming rules in January, gives GE an exemption in February

Going green is good business when your political connections can get you an exemption that's not available to your competition...

http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/02/obama-issues-global-warming-rules-january-gives-ge-exemption-febr

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I Can Balance the Budget - John Stossel

John Stossel suggests that we have more government than we need.  Let's cut a few departments...

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=41540

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A Sputnik Moment? - Taylor Dinerman

Some interesting history regarding Sputnik.

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/258225/sputnik-moment-taylor-dinerman?page=1

After Sputnik was launched on Oct. 4, 1957, President Eisenhower reacted calmly; he knew that by not complaining about the overflight of U.S. territory by the Soviet spacecraft, he was setting a precedent. He understood the significance of Sputnik in large part because in 1953, almost immediately after taking office, he had ordered work to begin on America’s first spy satellite, the WS-117. As the Russians were basking in the glow of their space triumph, Deputy Secretary of Defense Donald Quarles said that the Soviets “might have done us a good turn unintentionally, in establishing the concept of international freedom of space.” Three years later, when the first U.S. spy satellites successfully delivered pictures from deep inside the USSR, no one in Moscow denounced the Americans for violations of the sacred airspace of Mother Russia. The U.S. no longer needed to fly U-2 missions in order to look inside their borders.

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Caught on Tape Planned Parenthood Aids Pimp’s Underage Sex Ring

http://www.liveaction.org/traffick

A Planned Parenthood manager in New Jersey coaches a man and a woman posing as sex traffickers how to secure secret abortions, STD testing, and contraception for their female underage sex slaves, and make their whole operation “look as legit as possible” in an undercover video released this morning.

Clinic manager Amy Woodruff, LPN, of Planned Parenthood Central New Jersey’s Perth Amboy center, warns the pimp and his prostitute to have their trafficked underage girls lie about their age to avoid mandatory reporting laws, promising, “even if they lie, just say, ‘Oh he's the same age as me, 15,’…it's just that mainly 14 and under we have to, doesn't matter if their partner's the same age, younger, whatever, 14 and under we have to report.” She says, “For the most part, we want as little information as possible.”

Video at the link.

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Round up of links on Obamacare ruling

(mostly via http://instapundit.com)

http://patterico.com/2011/01/31/analysis-of-florida-obamacare-ruling-an-enlig...

http://volokh.com/2011/01/31/todays-florida-district-court-ruling-striking-do...

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/right-turn/2011/01/left_unreasoned_and_unpre...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2011/01/028256.php

http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/florida-ruling-requires-government-to-stop-imp...

http://www.nationalreview.com/bench-memos/258509/obamacare-declared-unconstit...

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A judicial drubbing for Obamacare | Washington Examiner

http://washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/editorials/2011/01/judicial-drubbing-obamacare

In a rigorously reasoned decision that seemed to delight in turning the government's arguments on their head, U.S. District Court Judge Roger Vinson on Monday struck down as unconstitutional President Obama's signature legislative achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. In the suit brought by 26 states, Vinson found that "Congress exceeded the bounds of its authority" by including the individual mandate and held the entire act unconstitutional "because the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable" from the rest of the law. Vinson, who was appointed by President Reagan to the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of Florida in Pensacola, even tweaked Obama, pointing out in a concluding footnote that the president whose name is forever linked to the measure had backed a health care reform bill without an individual mandate when he was in the Senate. Vinson quoted then-Senator Obama as saying in 2008 that "if a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody buy a house."

Vinson said the government even conceded that its interpretation of the Commerce Clause to support the individual mandate "breaks new legal ground" and is "unprecedented." He concluded, "If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party ... it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted. It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place."

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Thomas Sowell on State Bankruptcy

Read the whole thing for other interesting bits.  I just want to address this one issue...

http://rightwingnews.com/2011/01/interviewing-thomas-sowell-on-basic-economics/

We're getting very close to the point where we could have states default on their debts for the first time. What should happen then? 

They should go bankrupt. I'm looking forward to it. 

There are three possibilities -- bankruptcy or bailouts or ruinous taxations. Of the three, bankruptcy is the one that makes the most sense because it's the one that conveys the most accurate knowledge -- which is that they've run out of money and couldn't cover all the promises they made. That fact should be revealed to all for future reference. The other thing about bankruptcy is that it's the only thing I know of that can get rid of these ruinous public sector union contracts with these extravagant pensions. Those pensions are so popular because the politicians can promise the pension now and get votes now without losing the votes of taxpayers now, because they don't set aside enough money to cover the pensions. Then they simply kick the can down the road and leave it to somebody else to figure out what to do when the money runs out.

I greatly admire Thomas Sowell, and I would never contradict him on economics, but I think he's ignoring the constitutional issues with state bankruptcies.  States are sovereign -- there's no current legal way for them to go "bankrupt".  They can simply refuse to pay theirs debts, as some did after the Civil War.  I think it would take a constitutional amendment to allow states to go bankrupt.  That's probably a good idea, but it seems unlikely to happen as long as Democrats are in power.  They'll go for a federal bailout so that they can protect their political allies.  Look for the bond holders to take a severe haircut.  Ask the Chrysler bond holders how that worked out for them.

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Greg Mankiw's Blog: Give me $1 billion to cut the budget deficit

(via instapundit)

http://gregmankiw.blogspot.com/2011/01/give-me-1-billion-to-reduce-budget.html

> I have a plan to reduce the budget deficit. The essence of the plan is the federal government writing me a check for $1 billion. The plan will be financed by $3 billion of tax increases. According to my back-of-the envelope calculations, giving me that $1 billion will reduce the budget deficit by $2 billion.
>> Now, you may be tempted to say that giving me that $1 billion will not really reduce the budget deficit. Rather, you might say, it is the tax increases, which have nothing to do with my handout, that are reducing the budget deficit. But if you are tempted by that kind of sloppy thinking, you have not been following the debate over healthcare reform.

If everybody would just accept government bail-outs, we'd all be on the road to prosperity in no time at all.

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GOP Leaders Unveil Bill To Gut $2.5 Trillion In Government Spending - HUMAN EVENTS

http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=41297

Return spending to the 2008 levels, and, after that, force discretionary spending down to 2006 levels. 

Return unspent “stimulus” money. 

Slice the civilian government workforce by 15%. 

Eliminate government subsidies to the Public Broadcasting System, the National Endowment for the Arts, Amtrak, the National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, among other agencies and programs. 

Prevent funding from going to the implementation of ObamaCare as well as restrict taxpayer money from being used by government lawyers to defend any provisions of the healthcare bill in court. 

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House repeals healthcare law

http://thehill.com/homenews/house/138897-house-votes-to-repeal-healthcare-law

The House voted on Wednesday to repeal the sweeping healthcare law enacted last year, as Republicans made good on a central campaign pledge and laid down the first major policy marker of their new majority.

The party-line vote was 245-189, as three Democrats joined all 242 Republicans in supporting repeal.

That's a bipartisan vote to repeal Obamacare.  Also, note that there were more votes for the repeal than there were in favor of the original bill.

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John Podhoretz on the civility non-sequitur

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/257283/yup-jonah-goldberg

John Podhoretz on the civility non-sequitur:

Thus, as we continue to gather more evidence of Loughner’s schizophrenia, the continuing rhetorical calls for the need for “civility” are now turning into nothing less than cover. They’re a dodge, a means by which those responsible for the slanderous accusation that somehow the Tea Party and Sarah Palin and the right were responsible for the massacre have been excused for hurling their grievously unjust charge. For, you see, they were only calling for a “new tone,” for “civility,” and who could be against those?

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George F. Will - A Congress that reasserts its power

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/14/AR2011011404663.html

The idea of American exceptionalism is obnoxious to progressives, who, evidently unaware of the idea's long pedigree (it traces to Alexis de Tocqueville) and the rich scholarship concerning the idea, assume it is a crude strain of patriotism. America, Tocqueville said, is unique because it was born free - free of a feudal past, free from an entrenched aristocracy and established religion.

The American Revolution was a political, not a social, revolution; it was about emancipating individuals for the pursuit of happiness, not about the state allocating wealth and opportunity. Hence our exceptional Constitution, which says not what government must do for Americans but what it cannot do to them.

Americans are exceptionally committed to limited government because they are exceptionally confident of social mobility through personal striving. And they are exceptionally immune to a distinctively modern pessimism: It holds that individuals are powerless to assert their autonomy against society's vast impersonal forces, so people must become wards of government, which supposedly is the locus and engine of society's creativity.

Two years into Barack Obama's presidency, we now know what he meant about "hope" and "change" - he and other progressives hope to change our national character. Three weeks into his presidency, Newsweek, unhinged by adoration of him and allowing its wishes to father its thoughts, announced that "we are all socialists now" and that America "is moving toward a modern European state." The electorate emphatically disagreed and created the 112th Congress, with its exceptionally important agenda.

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Charles Krauthammer - Massacre, followed by libel

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/11/AR2011011106068.html

Rarely in American political discourse has there been a charge so reckless, so scurrilous and so unsupported by evidence.

The origins of Loughner's delusions are clear: mental illness. What are the origins of Krugman's?

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