Internal Justice Department email communications made just days before the House of Representatives passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act show that then-Solicitor General Elena Kagan was brought into the loop as DOJ began preparing to respond to an anticipated legal complaint that Mark Levin and the Landmark Legal Foundation were planning to file against the act if the House used a procedural rule to “deem” the bill passed even if members never directly voted on it.
In another internal DOJ email communication that same week, Kagan alerted the chief of DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel to the constitutional argument that a former U.S. Appeals Court judge was making against the use of this rule.
Read the whole thing, which goes on to describe redacted emails and enough detail to really make you wonder whether that woman can tell the difference between the Constitution and a horoscope.
Via Michelle Malkin, we have Eric Holder attempting to describe the Obama Administration of lying:I guess that, in the Postmodern emotional realm in which Obama and his chums operate, it’s only lying if you felt naughty while you did it, notwithstanding sex, where naughtiness is considered erotic.
I hope that Kagan understands that ObamaCare is going to dog the rest of her professional life, and that her honorable course is to retire quietly.
Disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich was sentenced Wednesday to 14 years in prison after he made a final plea for leniency, acknowledging his guilt and saying, “I am unbelievably sorry.”
So how is Blago “disgraced,” while Obama is still wonderful? How is it that Blago was prosecuted by a federal Justice Department headed by the “disgraced” Eric Holder?
Company executives ramped up their Washington lobbying efforts, hiring a former Senate aide to work with the White House and the Energy Department. . . .
[P]ublic records show that since 2008, Solyndra has spent more than $1 million on lobbying inside the Beltway.
Lobbying expenditures of $160,000 a year in 2008 and 2009 accelerated as Solyndra’s financial and political troubles mounted. By 2010, such spending had grown to $550,000. So far this year, Solyndra has reported spending $220,000, but that number will grow as more reports filter in.
Solyndra’s other well-connected lobbyists include green-lobbyist extraordinaire and former Appropriations staffer Steve McBee and John Kerry aide Gregg Rothschild.
Carney further reports that Solyndra’s lobbyists included Andy Quinn, former chief of staff for top Democrat Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland.
So it turns out the “green jobs” meant well-paid employment for lots of well-connected D.C. lobbyists. Good thing Nancy Pelosi drained the swamp and got rid of the Culture of Corruption, huh?
UPDATE: Just in case you’ve forgotten:
“The true engine of economic growth will always be companies like Solyndra . . . The future is here. We’re poised to transform the ways we power our homes and our cars and our businesses. And we’re poised to lead our competitors in the development of new technologies and products and businesses. And we are poised to generate countless new jobs, good-paying middle-class jobs, right here in the United States of America.”
— President Barack Obama, May 26, 2010
U.S. Justice Department agencies spent too much for food at conferences, in one case serving $16 muffins and in another dishing out beef Wellington appetizers that cost $7.32 per serving, an audit found.
“Some conferences featured costly meals, refreshments, and themed breaks that we believe were indicative of wasteful or extravagant spending,” the Justice Department’s inspector general wrote in a report released today.
The inspector general reviewed a sample of 10 Justice Department conferences held between October 2007 and September 2009 at a cost of $4.4 million, a period that included the administrations of Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Barack Obama. The Justice Department spent $73.3 million on conferences in fiscal 2009, compared with $47.8 million a year earlier, according to the report.
The muffins were served at an August 2009 conference of the Executive Office for Immigration Review and the beef Wellington was offered at a February 2008 meeting hosted by the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys. A March 2009 conference of the Office on Violence Against Women served Cracker Jack, popcorn and candy bars at a single break, costing $32 per person, according to the report.
The report is a follow-up to one from 2007 that found the Justice Department had few controls to limit the costs of conference planning, food and beverages. That audit cited a reception that included Swedish meatballs costing $5 apiece.
Spending $32 per person for snacks at a conference? “Stimulus!”
If you don’t understand that, ask Paul Krugman. He won a Nobel Prize, y’know.
“Where are you going to find a nickel’s worth of business sense in an administration where there’s no private-sector experience? And caution is for lesser mortals, not The One and his chosen crew.”
— Glenn Reynolds, “SolarGate Update”
Democrats were eager to include the DOE loan guarantee programme as part of the stimulus bill in part because they believed it was, in fact, the optimal type of stimulus.
That’s the Economist arguing with the Atlantic‘s Megan McArdle about the Solyndra scandal, and the anonymous Economist writer provides this chart showing administration officials’ calculation of the “stimulus” value of these allegedly innovative policies:
Details of the Economist/McArdle dispute are irrelevant to the point I wish to make: Once you begin assigning Keynesian “output multiplier” values to federal spending proposals — and making such arbitrary speculations the basis of decision-making — you have in fact ventured into the kind of planned-economy error that sank the Soviet empire.
A free-market economy may be wasteful in some sense, and the outcomes resulting from unsupervised human action may be harmful in some sense, but when a government’s planned-economy policy tries to pick winners and losers — and gosh, Solyndra was a world-class loser, wasn’t it? — the waste and harm are inevitably more painful, simply because they are the result of a conscious decision made by responsible agents acting in the name of the nation.
The Ukrainian terror famine and the Chernobyl disaster were outcomes of Soviet policy (the first deliberate, the second accidental) undertaken on behalf of the workers’ socialist state, so that those who suffered were in effect chosen victims of “The People,” unwilling martyrs for the struggle of the worldwide proletariat. In America, by contrast, we are accustomed to muckraking journalists and liberal crusaders who chastise the nation on behalf of victims of government neglect:
Here, say the liberals, is the family bankrupted by medical expenses. If only government would provide universal health insurance, the mother of these children might not have died of cancer, their father would not have wiped out his savings, and they would not have lost their home.
Here, say the liberals, are the Gulf Coast residents who lost their jobs because of an oil spill. If only government would enact stricter regulation on off-shore drilling, commercial fishermen and other businesses and employees dependent on the fishing industry would not have lost their livelihoods.
Here, say the liberals, is the teenage transvestite murdered by hateful schoolmates. If only government would pass civil-rights protections for gays and implement “tolerence” policies in schools, such horrific tragedies could be averted.
Grant that all of these liberal arguments have some merit. Stipulate that U.S. policies vis-à-vis health care, environmental protection, and gay rights fall short of an optimum ideal. But those who are skeptical of greater government intervention see the choices involved in terms of trade-offs, so that a policy aimed toward achieving an ideal or alleviating a specific harm might — by the law of unintended consequences — create other harms. My libertarian friends are wont to think of unintended consequences strictly in terms of economic interventionism, but I could cite innumerable harms resulting from trying to pick winners and losers in the pursuit of non-economic social goals.
Years ago as a journalist in small-town Georgia, I became aware that some white teenagers were succumbing to a frighteningly merciless sort of racist mentality because school policies intended to suppress racial conflict were actually fomenting black-on-white gang violence. There is no need to relate the specifics of that situation here, but if anti-racist policies could beget racism — which is exactly what happened — I consider it entirely possible that “tolerance” policies aimed at protecting homosexuals could beget a new kind of homophobia, especially merciless because the young do not remember the bygone wrongs that these policies were intended to remedy. And, lest liberals think they can cure such a problem through politically-correct history lessons, I assure you on the basis of many years of direct observation that nothing so inspires contempt in the heart of a bully than pious lectures about the helpless victimhood of the despised Other.
Have we wandered far afield from a discussion of Solyndra? No. The relevance is quite direct: Intending to pave the way for “innovative” new sources of alternative energy, the Obama administration has almost certainly guaranteed that there will be no future “investments” of taxpayer dollars in projects like Solyndra.
In one of those predictable pendulum swings of Newtonian politics, a powerful backlash against “green energy” is now underway and gathering an irresistible momentum. The American people will not (and should not) be satisfied until some high government official is indicted on criminal charges and prosecuted to the full extent of the law in the Solyndra scandal. If Eric Holder tries to protect the guilty, Holder will be destroyed by public outrage when his complicity is discovered.
Were I in a position to advise Obama, I’d tell him to pick a scapegoat or two to throw under his bus, so as to spare himself a Watergate-sized obstruction-of-justice snowball. Better a couple of deputy undersecretaries or minor White House functionaires go to federal prison than to get yourself into one of those “what did he know and when did he know it” traps.
All the woes now descending on the Obama administration could have been averted, if any of them had been familiar with the works of Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell.
Hell, I bet Barry Manilow could tell them how and why they went wrong. But it’s too late now, and the unintended consequences are piling up into a Himalyan mountain of failure we haven’t seen since Jimmy Carter was in the White House and Barry Manilow topped the charts with that song about the hottest spot north of Havana:
Nearly $19 billion in state unemployment benefits were paid in error during the three years that ended in June, new Labor Department data show.
The amount represents more than 10% of the $180 billion in jobless benefits paid nationwide during the period. . . .
Improper payments most often occur when recipients claim benefits even though they have returned to work; employers or their administrators don’t submit timely or accurate information about worker separations; or recipients don’t correctly register with a state’s employment-service organization.
Your tax dollars at work . . . Well, not exactly “at work,” eh?
When you’re subsidizing sloth, however, it’s probably unrealistic to expect honesty, diligence and thrift on the part of the recipients.
GOP presidential candidates can help maximize the impact of exposure by making Solyndra the focus of their attacks on the incumbent’s policy agenda. We ought to hear the phrase “Solyndra scandal” in every stump speech, every press release and every Republican debate.
And that post ended with the suggestion that readers “e-mail it to your favorite local or national talk radio host, or Republican presidential candidates.” And about three hours later . . .
Joining GE in the pantheon on crony capitalism is another Obama favorite that has been in the news of late: Solyndra. The President hailed this “green energy” company in a speech last May as “the true engine of economic growth.” When he announced the $535 million guarantee to Solyndra, Vice President Biden said that investments like this are “exactly what the Recovery Act is all about.” (Dear God…If the failed Solyndra venture has been what it’s “all about,” then that explains a lot.) As I pointed out in my speech at the Reagan Ranch Center last February: “History has proven again and again, when government picks the winners and losers, we’re stuck with the losers, and we the taxpayers subsidize failure!” And that’s what we’re seeing now, as the FBI raids the solar energy company’s headquarters to glean more information after the company was handed half a billion dollars in “green energy” Stimulus funds from the American taxpayer only to later declare bankruptcy. More than one thousand Solyndra workers lost their jobs. Now as the truth comes out, we discover that the White House was heavily involved in the Department of Energy’s rushed decision to give the Stimulus funds to Solyndra, and they tried to move the money through so quickly they seem to have ignored concerns that the company was not viable. Why would they do this? Perhaps it’s because a large investor in the company (about 35%) is Obama campaign bundler George Kaiser. And with the way the deal is structured, Kaiser will get his debts paid before we the taxpayers see any relief. That is sickening. And that’s how it works: workers lose their jobs, wealthy political cronies stand a good chance of getting their money back, and the U.S. taxpayer gets the shaft. Again. . . .
You can read the whole thing. My silly suggestion that it was inspired by a blog post here was meant for laughs. Like I said, it’s common-sense stuff that seems obvious. So maybe this is just one of those “great minds think alike” situations. But remember that my advice was offered to “GOP presidential candidates,” which means . . .?
There are two ways to get money: Honestly by hard work, or dishonestly through thievery and fraud. If you vote for politicians because they promise to give you money taken from taxpayers, you are practicing the politics of thievery.
Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?
Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians. Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.
Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.
