Dream Date: Youth Prison

Posted on Comments

From the Department of You Can’t Make This Stuff Up:

The New York State Commission of Correction says top officials and staff were irresponsible when they authorized and failed to supervise a party at a youth prison where some violent offenders had sex with dates.
The commission faults the Office of Children and Family Services for directing the Goshen Secure Center in the Hudson Valley to hold the December party for four offenders as a reward for good behavior. They ranged in age from 17 to 20, three doing time for murder and one for armed robbery.
The commission says officials knew little about the four female guests, ranging from 16 to 27, who were driven from Albany and New York City by state workers in state vehicles.

I’m having trouble trying to picture that 16-year-old’s conversation with her mother:

“Hey, Mom, can I go to a party at a prison with three convicted murderers?”
“I don’t know. There might be drinking and driving.”
“Oh, no, Mom. We’ve got state workers to drive us to the prison, so it will be perfectly safe.”
“OK, then. Have fun!”

Call me old-fashioned, but this isn’t my idea of good parenting.

Democrats Have Their Economic Excuse Ready: Blame Rahm Emanuel!

Posted on Comments

Paul Krugman is the de facto leader of those neo-Keynesians who say the problem with Obamanomics is that the stimulus package wasn’t big enough. And he links to this interview with Rep. David Obey (D-Wisc.) who points the finger at Rahm:

The problem for Obama, he wasn’t as lucky as Roosevelt, because when Obama took over we were still in the middle of a free fall. So his Treasury people came in and his other economic people came in and said “Hey, we need a package of $1.4 trillion.” We started sending suggestions down to OMB waiting for a call back. After two and a half weeks, we started getting feedback. We put together a package that by then the target had been trimmed to $1.2 trillion. And then [White House Chief of Staff] Rahm Emanuel said to me, “Geez, do you really think we can afford to come in with a package that big, isn’t it going to scare people?” I said, “Rahm, you will need that shock value so that people understand just how serious this problem is.” They wanted to hold it to less than $1 trillion. Then [Pennsylvania Senator Arlen] Specter and the two crown princesses from Maine [Sens. Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins] took it down to less than $800 billion. Spread over two and a half years, that’s a hell of a lot of money, but spread over two and a half years in an economy this large, it doesn’t have a lot of fiscal power. . . .

This is another example of how liberals distort economic history by spreading self-serving mythology: The New Deal saved America, Reagan’s tax cuts caused the deficit, Clinton was a fiscal conservative, the Bush tax cuts only helped “the rich” and, now, Obamanomics failed because of that stingy penny-pincher Rahm Emanuel.

Fail Mosque Jokers Really Annoy

Posted on Comments

by Smitty

This week’s FMJRA offers Scalia body language to New York City Minor Bloomberg, who loses the respect of the title ‘Mayor’ from this blog, due to a pattern of invertebrate cretinous behavior. To Brussels with your dhimmitude, Bloomberg.

Over in the comments on the Geller post, Kn@ppster makes a straight libertarian play on the mosque. I follow the logic of the argument right up to this point: that building is a component of an act of war, and the intended use of the structure, with all history and current events taken into consideration, is possibly a continuation of that act of war. There are times for theory, and times for pragmatism.

This inevitably leads to the Japanese Internment question, which underscores my point: requesting, for reasons of 3,000 corpses, a different venue is simply not much to ask, at all. OTOH, Bloomberg’s three card monte approach to the public hearings is despicable. Continue reading Fail Mosque Jokers Really Annoy →

Who Is Todd Gaziano?

Posted on Comments

That’s the question raised by the Ben Smith column at Politico in which Abigail Thernstrom accuses her fellow Republican members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission of exploiting the Black Panther voter-intimidation case in pursuit of “their fantasies about how they could use this issue to topple the [Obama] administration.”

Thernstrom herself is well-known as a critic of race-based quotas in education and so she caused a stir a couple weeks ago when she declared in National Review that prosecution of the Panther case was a fool’s errand. What struck me in the Politico column was this:

“Millions of people saw the clip on Fox News and YouTube,” said Todd Gaziano, a commissioner who has been the driving force behind the commission’s investigation. “Any reasonable American knows this is voter intimidation. And so the dismissal itself of an infamous case where there’s footage is more damaging to people’s perception of the rule of law than a dismissal when nobody’s paying attention.”

OK, so the question naturally occurs, Who is Todd Gaziano? He is the director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal & Judicial Studies:

Todd Gaziano focuses on legal and judicial reform and such constitutional issues as ensuring that all citizens are accorded equal treatment under the law. Before joining former Attorney General Edwin Meese at The Heritage Foundation in 1997, Mr. Gaziano served under noted conservative leaders in all three branches of the federal government. He was Chief Counsel to the House Subcommittee on National Economic Growth, Natural Resources, and Regulatory Affairs, where he worked on government-wide regulatory reform legislation for Chairman David McIntosh. He served in the Office of Legal Counsel in the U.S. Justice Department, which provides advice on constitutional and legal issues to the President, the Attorney General, and other Cabinet Secretaries. He also served as a judicial law clerk to the Honorable Edith H. Jones, United States Judge for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Mr. Gaziano received his J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School, where he was selected as a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics.

It’s not like Gaziano is a redneck hayseed who just fell off the turnip truck. Anyone wondering why so many conservatives have made a cause célèbre of the Panthers case can stop wondering: If Gaziano is a longtime associate of Ed Meese, he’s almost certainly good friends with Mark Levin, who is in turn friends with Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. So his influence is not insignificant.

Gaziano’s argument is interesting: The Panther case is important because the widely-seen video made it so “infamous” that Eric Holder’s dismissal of the case is “damaging to people’s perception of the rule of law.” If nothing else, that makes Gaziano a leading endorsee of Professor Glenn Reynolds’ ubiquitous video camera argument.

Allahpundit asks the delicious question:

At the very least, since Fox now owns this story, will Megyn Kelly have Thernstrom on next week?

Ouch! Stop twisting my arm! I know you want me to re-post that Megyn Kelly/Kirsten Powers catfight video:

UPDATE: Remember that the Panther case got renewed attention after PJM published this column by DOJ whistleblower Christian Adams.

It’s FDIC Failed-Bank Friday!

Posted on Comments

How’s that “recovery summer” workin’ out for ya?

Regulators on Friday shut down three banks in Florida, two in South Carolina and one in Michigan, bringing to 96 the number of U.S. banks to succumb this year to the recession and mounting loan defaults. . . .
With 96 closures nationwide so far this year, the pace of bank failures far outstrips that of 2009, which was already a brisk year for shutdowns. By this time last year, regulators had closed 57 banks. The pace has accelerated as banks’ losses mount on loans made for commercial property and development. . . .
As losses have mounted on loans made for commercial property and development, the growing bank failures have sapped billions of dollars out of the deposit insurance fund. It fell into the red last year, and its deficit stood at $20.7 billion as of March 31.

So, six more bank failures, the Dow drops 261 points and even Ezra Klein admits Obamanomics can’t produce a real recovery.

All in all, a great day for pessimists!

Fruit, Vegetable, Or Solid Red Meat?

Posted on Comments

by Smitty (h/t NiceDeb)

One clip is the fruit of a corrupt mind, the other is from the Onion.

They’re both creepy. Seriously: have public speakers in the United States always engaged in the kind of deliberate deceit that this Shelton fellow does, or has the merger of news, entertainment and politics taken propaganda in the US to a previously unimagined level? I’m inclined to mistrust any hearkening to a ‘golden era’, as human nature is more or less constant, in my estimation. Possibly the Inter-tubes are just increasing the visibility of the Sheltons that have always been polluting the country.

Girl Raised From Birth By Wolf Blitzer Taken Into Protective Custody

As a meaty palate cleanser, your attention is drawn to RightKlik, where Ten Buck Fridays touts Van Irion, a lawyer, NTTAWWT, a zoomie (Air Force veteran, not that there is anything wrong with that which cannot be corrected with reasonable diet and exercise–I kid), and a Volunteer. In other words, two-thirds of an Instapundit. Go, Van!

Ezra Klein Admits: ‘It Won’t Work’

Posted on Comments

“Notice that adding new jobs at a rate of 200,000 a month would take us 150 months — or 12.5 years — to get back to normalcy. So far, only April has seen more than 200,000 in non-census jobs growth — and even then, just barely.”
— Ezra Klein, July 16, 2010

Hmmm. Dow Jones Industrial Average down?  What could possibly explain this?

Stocks slumped Friday after earnings reports from two big banks disappointed investors and a survey showed that consumers are becoming more pessimistic. . . .
“It’s mostly about the poor consumer confidence numbers,” said Anthony Conroy, managing director and head trader for BNY ConvergEx Group. “The possibility of a double dip also starts to come to mind” for investors, he said, referring to a phrase that describes the economy falling back into recession.

Wow, who could have anticipated a double-dip recession? How could anyone have foreseen the failure of Obamanomics?

“The unfortunate truth, as sober economists freely admit, is that there is no easy cure for the financial mess caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. . . . Whatever policy Washington pursues, a quick and painless recovery is not going to happen, and the only real question is whether Democrats will delay recovery by implementing liberal policies that make a very bad situation even worse.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Dec. 8, 2008

“No amount of presidential persuasion, nor any conceivable quantity of federal spending, can repeal the basic economic law of supply and demand. Thus, if Congress should enact this idiotic ‘stimulus’ — a neo-Keynesian pump-priming venture absurdly overbalanced to the demand side of the equation — nothing is more predictable than its failure to spur real recovery.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, Feb. 9, 2009

“Psychobabble about the ‘mood’ of consumers can’t fix the inescapable reality of the capital shortage, a shortage that will only be worsened by the deficit-driven flood of new government debt into the bond market. . . . As if Keynesian theory had not been completely discredited by the ‘stagflation’ crisis of the 1970s, just wait and see what happens now, as unprecedented government deficits siphon already scarce capital supplies away from private-sector investment.”
— Robert Stacy McCain, May 4, 2009

The problem with waiting for vindication in this regard: If liberals were capable of admitting they’re wrong about economics, they wouldn’t be liberals, would they?

UPDATE: Even the Federal Reserve admits it won’t work:

The euro rocketed to a two-month high of $1.29 and sterling jumped two cents to almost $1.54 after the Fed confessed that the US economy may not recover for five or six years. . . .
The Fed minutes warned of “significant downside risks” and a possible slide into deflation, an admission that zero interest rates, $1.75 trillion of [quantitative easing], and a fiscal deficit above 10 [percent] of GDP have so far failed to lift the economy out of a structural slump.

In other words, all those trillions of dollars of neo-Keynesian fiscal stimulus and monetary interventions have accomplished nothing, in terms of real economic growth.

“Aggregate demand! Aggregate demand!”

Idiots.

UPDATE II: A belated welcome to Instapundit readers. You can tell I’m busy off-blog when it takes me two hours to notice a ‘Lanche.