“In 2008, the McCain for President PAC gave me half a carton of Lucky Strikes to write a post entitled John McCain is the Shizzle Dizzle.”
— Fingers Malloy, “I Took The Money And Stuff”
Category: Corruption
‘Liberal Ethics’ and Matthew Yglesias
Liberal blogger Matt Yglesias likes to call his political opponents “dishonest,” but in a revealing exchange on the website Twitter Friday he advocated lying for political purposes.
“Fighting dishonesty with dishonesty is sometimes the right thing for advocates to do, yes,” said Yglesias.
The exchange, with Washington Examiner writer Mark Hemingway, came on the heels of a debate between the two on transportation policy.
Yglesias pressed his point with another conservative writer, saying, “Do you really think deception is immoral in all circumstances?”
Read the rest. I’m recalling a chapter title in Hayek’s Road to Serfdom: “Why the Worst Get on Top.”
Socialist Opiates Are Addictive Indeed
by Smitty
The Tenth Amendment Center reprints a fine overview of the Social Security disaster:
If the words “general welfare” and “United States” are put in their proper context, then the general welfare provision grants Congress the power “[t]o lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… group well being of all the United States.” The “entire group” being referenced is not the people, as comprising a single nation, but the several States in their united capacity. Since the Constitution is a compact or contract between the several States, and the States are only united within the scope of the powers enumerated in the Constitution, this composition of the general welfare provision is in totally harmony with the intent and construction of that document.
Alexander Hamilton sustained this fact in his writings on the Constitution. In Federalist No. 83, he reduced this principle to a single sentence:
“The United States, in their united or collective capacity, are the OBJECT to which all general provisions in the Constitution must necessarily be construed to refer.” [Emphasis not added]
The general welfare clause, being but a part of a general provision of the Constitution, applies solely to the States “in their united or collective capacity.” If the Constitution had established a social compact or union between the American people, and they were the object of the general powers delegated to the federal government, then it would have been an absurdity to reference the States, in their united capacity, as the object of the general welfare phrase. In addition, if the Constitution had been established for the well being of the American people, then that same people would have been the “whole group” referenced in the general welfare phrase.
Based on the above definitions, Social Security should have been struck down because Congress used a provision of the Constitution that applied to the States, in their united capacity, and unconstitutionally applied it to the people. When Congress inserted the words “[a]n Act to Provide for the General Welfare” at the beginning of the Social Security Act, that body took a clause that granted Congress the power “[t]o lay and collect Taxes… to provide for the… group well being of all the United States” and twisted it into a power that granted Congress the power to tax and appropriate money for the general welfare generally. This was a gross usurpation of power.
RTWT for a short overview of how diabolical the notion of Social Security was and remains.
FDR’s infamous Second Bill of Rights enjoyed none of the thought and debate that went into the first round, have been implement piecemeal through Federal over-reach while blowing off Article Five, and, ultimately, cannot be supported other than by loads of pixie dust delivered by golden hover ponies.
The real question is the path to restoring the proper, Constitutional Federal role for dealing with individual citizens. Rep. Paul Ryan’s Roadmap tacitly accepts the current situation. This may be a crucial compromise in terms of Doing Something, but, let’s face it: Socialism is the opiate of the bureaucracy, and leaving a lot of dope laying around will result in it being used.
What Smith Would Do is announce a gala 100 year anniversary celebration of the 16th & 17th Amendments, plus the Federal Reserve Act, and publicly set them on fire. Whoever is President in 2012 should announce a three year preparation period, so that in 01 January 2015, the States pick up the tab for caring for such social services as they’re inclined to fund.
Congress would invoice the States for remaining Federal tasking, letting these United States tax farm their citizens to fund the Federal budget, which is not allowed to run a deficit with the exception of an actual, formal, documented, Constitutional, proper declaration of war.
States missing their funding goals have a simple VAT applied to handle the delta.
Past the vomiting from opiate withdrawal, the wisdom of such a system would be the negative feedback loop. Forced to deal with budgetary realities, Pete Stark’s head would ‘splode, and we’d quickly stop funding absurd, non-essential noise. Returning the Senators to State appointees, while probably not decreasing the net corruption in the Senate, would return a voice in Federal affairs to the States.
With the Federal opium fields not yielding so much, incumbency might not be such a big win for those Ruling Class Clowns currently mooching from the future via Federal largesse.
Of course, if I was elected and could carry off such a plan, something odd and final could likely happen. Addiction therapies which are fatal to the patient are sub-optimal. But now you sunny beaches know how I feel. Having marked out the edge of the debate, let’s see what others can do in the way of a workable compromise.
Answer: A Rick James Impersonation
by Smitty
Question: What Was Rangel Doing?
He allowed that his violations were “serious,” although not corrupt. “I have always tried to play by the rules,” he said — but also, “I have been losing a lot of sleep over these allegations.”
What does this mean?
It means that Rangel wants a deal. He’s extending an olive branch to the ethics committee. He’s probably been told that he needed to make some sort of statement to acknowledge the gravity of the situation, to not pretend that the committee would string him up over a simple paperwork error.
Via Bluegrass Pundit, an outtake:
He wasn’t keen on talking to cameras after the speech.
What was really going on [NSFW]:
It’s Time To Call The Bluff On Progressivism
by Smitty
Megan McArdle offers an outstanding play-by-play of the dust-up between Wisconsin’s Wonkish Wunderkind and Krugman.
Krugman is “that fool on television getting payed to play the fool”, and we all get that, including Krugman. The economic models are slightly better than global warming models, I can opine with as much legitimacy as anyone else.
Her follow-up post about Ryan’s Roadmap plan as such, triggers this post:
Nonetheless, I think it’s a really, really important document. Why? Because it is the most honest attempt I’ve seen by a politician to grapple with the challenges ahead of us. Strike that; it is the only attempt that I’m aware of to grapple with what lies ahead of us. Others have been willing to discuss things piecemeal, or delegate the nasty job of balancing a budget to a commission, but as far as I know only Paul Ryan has come forward and said, “Here’s how all the moving parts are going to fit together.”
And what this document shows is that it’s going to be difficult. Regardless of what you think of his tax plans, Paul Ryan has done what liberals keep asking Republicans to do: show us what he’d cut. No, he hasn’t gone through the whole budget with a fine toothed comb and given us the exact funding level for the Bureau of Indian Affairs. If he had, it would be stupid; even the most powerful legislator cannot tie the hands of those in the future completely. He’s offered cuts to domestic discretionary spending and entitlements that would hold the line under 20% of GDP. If Republicans want to shrink the size of government, they’re going to have to sign onto Ryan’s spending plan, or put forward their own, with equally dramatic trimming.
OK, so it’s time to put on the Big Person Pants and just admit that our Shiny Progressive Utopia is a mirage
Do you want to be the one to tell them that they’re going to have to pay higher taxes for the same, or lower levels of services? I’ve been trying to tell them that for years now, and believe me, on the fun scale it’s somewhere between a root canal, and seeing Neil Diamond live . . . at the kind of venue that doesn’t serve alcohol.
But if we’re going to avoid a real, ugly fiscal crisis, the sort that ends up immiserating a bunch of people, someone is going to have to tell them. Someone in Congress, I mean. The deficit commission is not going to accomplish anything if congress isn’t willing to assess its priorities and make some hard choices. You may think that Paul Ryan is too hopeful about some areas of his plan; you may think that it won’t work. All fair enough, and that’s why any starter plan like this has to go through a lot of refining before it’s ready to become legislation. But at least Paul Ryan has a plan, no matter how incomplete or unworkable you think it may be. That’s more than the rest of us can say.
Things we ‘know’:
- Krugman is a tool.
- Social Security will not exist for Gen X and later.
- Ryan’s plan, if anything, is too modest.
- Progressivism was an experiment in un-Constitutional Federal over-reach.
- Unlike fine wine, political cowardice does not improve with age.
I, for one, hope that my courageous State Attorney General picks up a head of steam from the ObamaCare suit and runs it straight up the rotten Progressive middle. Calling the Constitutional bluff on the rest of these disastrous entitlements is exactly where we need to go. Seventy years of precedent do not an Article Five amendment make. Social Security and its ugly children were false then, and the bastards are even less sustainable now.
Realistically, you’d have to partition the electorate into an older ‘sealed’ group who are untouchable, a ‘graying area’ where some options may apply, and a ‘sorry kids’ section, including me, where we just admit that the idea was untenable. The distorted mess has run open loop for too long, and anyone who is trying to pussyfoot around the economic realities is some blend of scoundrel and fool.
So let’s behave like adults, face the realities, and move the fracas to assigning the price tag for getting the Federal government out of the business of peddling utopia.
HR1586: ‘Legislate In Haste, Amend At Leisure’ Now Making Oscar Wilde
Look Serious
by Smitty
Unserious
Bluegrass Pundit has us on a merry chase, trying to find out the meaning of HR1586, which was passed :
Cato and CNET were on the case:
It was supposed to be some routine election-year largesse from Democrats: a $26 billion spending measure to aid two of the party’s core constituencies, labor unions, and government workers.
But a watchdog Web site on Sunday evening spotted an unusual feature of the legislation, which the Senate approved by a 61-to-39 vote last week.
Suggested alternate titles:
- Immoral Act of 2010
- 1586th Idiotic Act of the 111th Congress
- Can’t Get It Together Act of the Usual Suspects
- Anti-Constitutional Act of Godforsaken Commies
- Anyone Disagreeing With The Progressive Agenda Is Raaaaacist Act of 2010
- Stacy McCain Needs Vanilla Pudding
By the time you get back to the Library of Congress, the title seems to be somewhere between TARP and tarmac:
1 . To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients. (Introduced in House – IH)
2 . FAA Air Transportation Modernization and Safety Improvement Act (Engrossed Amendment Senate – EAS)
3 . To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients. (Engrossed in House [Passed House] – EH)
4 . XXXXXXAct ofXXXX (Engrossed Amendment Senate – EAS)
5 . Aviation Safety and Investment Act of 2010 (Engrossed Amendment House – EAH)
6 . To impose an additional tax on bonuses received from certain TARP recipients. (Placed on Calendar Senate – PCS)
As of this writing, it is unknown to what degree my local Congresstool’s stellar leadership record did or did not contribute to the “Legislation With No Name” debacle, but you can bet there was a fistful of dollars involved.
Serious
Instapundit posed a reader’s question:
Staggering deficits. Exploding national debt. Grossly underfunded public pensions. Aging populace. Social Security on track for insolvency. Investors running for precious metals. Higher education bubble. Stagnant economy. Massive new government healthcare program. Words like “unsustainable” in CBO reports.
I have racked my brain and debated with anyone who was willing. I can’t come up with a way out of this that doesn’t involve printing vast amounts of cash, double-digit inflation and interest rates, and the end of the dollar as a global currency because we “soft default” trillions of the national debt. What productive capacity we have left would be gutted by the tax increases needed to honestly pay what we are going to owe. And the people we owe (China, seniors, public pensioners, etc) aren’t going to just write off the debt like a bank short-selling a beach house.
So my challenge to your readers is this: “How do we get out of this WITHOUT printing money?”
In that post, another reader’s response:
There are a nearly infinite number of solutions, but the key is this: if the rate of GDP growth is greater than the rate of government spending growth, everything will come out.
Insty followed up with a realistic response:”The end of responsibility: From homeowners to government, the buck stops nowhere”
First, what is responsibility? For my purposes, responsibility is the negative feedback loop that dampens idiocy over time. More briefly, responsibility is that which our government lacks.
Why?
The Federalist model of government stands effectively scuttled for at least three reasons (he said in a Gillespie tone)
- DC has eminent domain over your wallet.
- The States as such lack a voice.
- DC has a cosmic credit card.
DC is the ultimate source of loot, punishing and rewarding by whim. Citizens have been rewarded for jacking the incumbency rate to full-on aristocratic levels.
Now someone says, ‘well, if we just curb the spending. . .’ Really? Really?
No, until you’re doing something to alter the context, to revitalize the states, to break the back of Progressivism, you’re sadly working for the other team. You’ll clean House in November, 2010, sure. You’ll maybe even up the ante in 2012. But that silent, unelected, tumorous, Orwellian staff of federal zombie-crats will, eventually, inexorably set about dining on a brain near yours, because there is no feedback loop flogging responsibility into the system.
When we’ve reached the point of honestly revisiting the last century, and set about delegating all social safety net programs to the States, over time, sensibly, to survive or die as the voters are willing to fund them sustainably (if I can use an eviro-weenie word in an economic context, knowing it’s a ‘narrative’ violation, but so is this whole blog FTW), then We The People will not seem as un-serious as a Congress that can’t get a name on legislation before voting.
It has suddenly come to me, in closing, that this could be the most honest title of any legislation in the 111th Congress. Soon, they may pass the Everything Men Know About Women Act (read the first review).
Wasn’t The Lemonade Sufficient Brew-Ha-Ha?
by Smitty
First they came for the adorable daughters selling lemonade. Via BlogProf, the word that Julie Murphy can’t have a lemonade stand made a sweet, sticky splash in the dextrosphere over the weekend. $120 for an asinine ‘temporary restaurant license’? At the posted $0.50 a glass, the unfortunate kid has to give the first 240 glasses of lemonade to the government just for the privilege of a bureaucratic probing.
Frank J. came out a thoroughgoing apologist for the fascists:
Do you know what kinds of diseases can lurk inside improperly handled lemonade? No, you don’t. And neither do I. So obviously, that threat is so severe that medical scientists won’t even tell us about it so as not to create a panic. And do you know how many people died from contaminated lemonade before stringent health regulations were enforced? I’ll give you a number: 52,143,000. Well, the number of people who died from improperly handled lemonade involves one or more digits from that number.
Scary, isn’t it? That stupid little girl could have killed half of Oregon. Luckily the government was there to protect you. But the damage isn’t just limited to people’s health; there’s also the economic impact. She goes out there with her non-union labor selling lemonade for 50 cents, and who knows how many proper businesses that paid all their licensing fees and taxes she was undercutting? She was effectively stealing money from Oregon and the federal government. Thus while President Obama is working very carefully to revive our economy, she is working directly against him. That probably also makes her a racist.
Not content with that outrage, the State of Beaver Fever decided to double down and suds up:
When the 2010 Oregon State Fair opens on Aug. 27, there won’t be an amateur beer-brewers competition for the first time in 22 years.
An overlooked, 80-year-old statute that says Oregon home-brewed beer can’t leave the home has forced fair organizers to cancel the competition, which had 335 entrants last year, says Oregon Liquor Control Commission spokeswoman Christie Scott.
Brewers were reminded of the statute after the Oregon Department of Justice clarified the law for a pub seeking to serve home brew at an event, Scott says. “As long as this is the law, we have to enforce it,” she says, adding that the commission hopes to see the statute changed in time for the 2011 fair.
Now, if the ODoJ had merely contacted “Nation of Cowards” Holder, they could have found out that, as long as the beer is transported by illegal aliens (because transporting illegal beer is a job Americans won’t do), then the grand tradition of ignoring laws like they were the 10th Amendment can be merrily continued.
WTF happened to Oregon? I was born there a couple score years back. That State grows enough marijuana to outlast WJ Clinton’s famous ability to eschew inhalation. Portland had been called the microbrew capital of the US. Now they’re as humorless as a Barack Obama speech.
Constituent Says Corruption ‘Regular Practice’ in Charlie Rangel’s District
Not like there’s any risk he could be voted out of office:
The charges against the 80-year-old Democrat include allegations he traded favors for donations to a program he founded at City College of New York, improperly obtained a rent- stabilized apartment and failed to report income from a Caribbean vacation home.
“In Harlem, he’s not going to be judged on that; that’s a regular practice here,” said Jack Broughton, 38, as he sold T- shirts from a sidewalk table on 125th Street.
Voters will remember how Rangel helped them, Broughton said. “My sister was facing eviction with three kids, and his office made one phone call and got her a place she’s been living at for 15 years,” he said.
The spirit of Tammany Hall lives on.