Prediction: This is the last time you'll hear it.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's no Friday.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 12:44 PM | Comments (90)
Post contains 38 words, total size 1 kb.

Obama often told the tale of fighting for his mother's health insurance while campaigning in 2008. See, as she was dying, they ruthlessly refused to cover her. That's why ObamaCare is so important to him.

A NYT reporter wrote a biography of Obama's mother. Turns out the health insurance company did not deny her benefits, and just paid them all (minus the deductibles, I guess) until her death.

Her fight was with another insurance company she'd contracted with to pay her disability expenses (such as being out of work, etc.). But (according to that company) she signed up for insurance after she was being treated for the illness she sought to be insured for, so that was a pre-existing condition, and for those non-medical charges only she was denied coverage.

This is a big scoop. Obama's been yammering about this for years.

Michael Barrone Byron York called the reporter to see if she wanted to discuss the scoop further -- and also publicize her book, now in stores -- and she said no. Twice.

They'll decline to market their own books in order to puff up Obama and protect him from all negative coverage.

Posted by: Ace at 12:19 PM | Comments (135)
Post contains 248 words, total size 2 kb.

I can barely see or hear anything.

But this is getting yanked down all over the place, and Perez Hilton (of all people) seems to be the last guy who hasn't pulled it down yet.

I really can't tell anything from it except, as expected, the Guys are all in it. I don't think I saw the Hulk but maybe that guy taking off his glasses was Banner.

Posted by: Ace at 11:52 AM | Comments (57)
Post contains 86 words, total size 1 kb.

Have you been following this? I sure haven't. I tried to catch up last week but the recent articles all assumed that I was paying attention, and I got lost.

This article, however, explains a lot of it.

Hoare first made his claims in a New York Times investigation into the phone-hacking allegations at the News of the World.

He told the newspaper that not only did Coulson know of the phone hacking, but that he actively encouraged his staff to intercept the phone calls of celebrities in the pursuit of exclusives.

...

Sean Hoare, a one-time close friend of Coulson's, told the New York Times the two men first worked together at the Sun, where, Hoare said, he played tape recordings of hacked messages for Coulson. At the News of the World, Hoare said he continued to inform Coulson of his activities. Coulson "actively encouraged me to do it", Hoare said.

In September last year, he was interviewed under caution by police over his claims that the former Tory communications chief asked him to hack into phones when he was editor of the paper, but declined to make any comment.

Hoare returned to the spotlight last week, after he told the New York Times that reporters at the News of the World were able to use police technology to locate people using their mobile phone signals in exchange for payments to police officers.

He said journalists were able to use a technique called "pinging" which measured the distance between mobile handsets and a number of phone masts to pinpoint its location.

Hoare gave further details about the use of "pinging" to the Guardian last week. He described how reporters would ask a news desk executive to obtain the location of a target: "Within 15 to 30 minutes someone on the news desk would come back and say 'right that's where they are.'"

The NYT report mentioned is here, but it's a seven pager. It seems a lot of spying on celebrities (including the royals) was routine. I read somewhere else what really got them into trouble was when they did this to the family of a kid who was murdered.

An assistant commissioner with the Metropolitan Police just resigned. Apparently it was charged that he turned a blind eye to this. He denies wrongdoing, etc.

Murdoch's right-hand man, who is a woman, Rebekah Brooks, just resigned in connection with the scandal, and then was promptly arrested. (It's Rebekah Brooks, not Rebecca Black, as I first wrote.)

So those are the facts.

Janet Daley argues "the BBC Left" is using the scandal as a pretext for removing inconvenient actors from the public debate.

This has gone way, way beyond phone hacking. It is now about payback. Gordon Brown's surreal effusion in the House last week may have made it embarrassingly explicit, but the odour of vengeance has been detectable from the start: not just from politicians who have suffered the disfavour of Murdoch's papers, or the trade unions (and their political allies) who have never forgiven him for Wapping, but from that great edifice of self-regarding, mutually affirming soft-Left orthodoxy which determines the limits of acceptable public discourse – of which the BBC is the indispensable spiritual centre. The influence of the BBC as a monitor of what is politically admissible is almost incalculable: the entire Tory modernisation project was effectively made necessary (as its chief architects often admit) by the need to get a fair hearing on its news coverage.

Daley notes that in America, liberals are hoping to use this scandal to finally get FoxNews neutered or off the air.

Interesting bit which I didn't know (or had forgotten): There can't be a FoxNews in Britain because the law requires all news to be delivered "impartially."

And, see, the BBC is by definition "impartial." If you don't parrot the BBC, you can actually be in legal trouble with the state.

Posted by: Ace at 10:12 AM | Comments (229)
Post contains 678 words, total size 5 kb.

How your tax dollars are being used.

In this case, someone representing himself as a Russian drug dealer flush with cash -- he claims he has a McClaren with a gold-plated engine costing $800,000 -- is encouraged to claim his business is "babysitting." The Medicaid employee tells him what to hide and what to claim in order to defraud the state.

The thing is, this isn't an isolated thing. I'm sure that 90% of employees in the various bureaucracies do this, because it's the path of least resistance, not even for ideological reasons. It's just easiest to help people scam the system than to turn them away.

And that's not really a problem of any particular employee, but of the system which encourages this, and which tells them to just get the government checks out there by hook or by crook because who cares, it's free money anyway.

Over and over again this is what happens in bureaucracies. There are the paper "rules" that exist in the employee handbook and are entirely hypothetical and notional, and then there are the actual rules for conduct which everyone knows, the rules for keeping your job and not getting hassled and not making the decisions or exercising the judgment you are (supposedly) hired to make or exercise.

We saw this with Major Hassan's superiors. The paper rule was that people exhibiting psychological problems and inability to perform their jobs properly were to be demoted and/or sent for counseling and/or drummed out of the military entirely.

The real rule was "overlook Muslim weirdness because otherwise your career might be stunted or ended."

Bureaucrats respond to the real rule, not the paper rule. And it's plain what the permanent DC bureaucracy has established as the real rule.

The permanent DC bureaucracy and liberal media will claim this woman was just "poorly trained" and "one bad apple."

Nope. If only. She was trained in the paper rule and then was trained, by day to day operation, in the real rule: Just help people scam the government.

Because if you deny someone benefits, you have a person willing and eager to file a complaint against you.

But if you help someone defraud the government, there will be no complaint. Because the only person in a position to complain won't complain, as they're engaged with you in a conspiracy to defraud the government.

Everyone wins, except, of course, the taxpayer, who's paying for con artists and incompetent bureaucrats who refuse to do their jobs. But the taxpayer is never in the room, is he?

Except, once in a while, he is.

more...

Posted by: Ace at 09:41 AM | Comments (134)
Post contains 441 words, total size 3 kb.

But we have to have a deal and we can't have any arbitrary lines in the sand for political reason. And I mean 'we' as in Republicans and conservatives literally. Obama? Oh he can do as much political posturing and have as many conditions as he wants.

It's good to be the King.

"The bill would undercut the Federal Government's ability to meet its core commitments to seniors, middle-class families and the most vulnerable, while reducing our ability to invest in our future," said a just-released statement of administration policy.

Even if the Republican-run passes its "cut, cap, and balance" plan, the Senate is not expected to follow suit.

Instead, White House officials are focused on a plan being developed by Senate leaders Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell, one that allow Obama to raise the $14.3 trillion debt ceiling in exchange for about $1.5 trillion in spending cuts over 10 years. The plan would also create a new congressional panel that would look at other ways to reduce the federal debt, including possible entitlements and new tax revenue.

Meanwhile,, NRO has an interview with Paul Ryan. I think it's safe to say he's not a fan of the Exalted One.

Indeed, in almost every sense, Ryan says, Obama has been “fundamentally un-presidential” throughout the summer, “dragging his feet, failing to address the looming debt crisis — which he knows is coming — because he remains committed to his ideology.”

“This is, unfortunately, the way he operates,” Ryan says. “This is his pattern of behavior, this is his personality. For the next 18 months, it will probably be like this. It’ll be in-your-face class warfare, with bitter appeals to envy, fear, and anxiety, plus the demonization of the other side’s motives.”

Ryan, usually a happy warrior on fiscal matters, sounds resigned when asked whether he can help Republicans craft a long-term deal with the president to reduce the debt. Obama, he says, has made such a scenario near impossible. He cites Obama’s remarks to CBS News last week, when he said he could not guarantee Social Security payments, as well as the president’s “very personal” criticism of House Majority Leader Eric Cantor at the White House, as examples of the president’s inability to “discuss these issues in good faith.”

“Whenever I hear him speak now, I just shake my head and think, there he goes again,” Ryan says. “When it comes to actually governing, leading and fixing fiscal problems, he is not in the game.” He predicts that, with their votes this week, House Republicans will show that they are.

Much more of Ryan on the debt talks at the link.

Posted by: DrewM at 08:37 AM | Comments (232)
Post contains 454 words, total size 3 kb.

Key quote:

Many Democrats demand no changes to Social Security and Medicare spending. But these programs are projected to run ever-growing deficits totaling tens of trillions of dollars in coming decades, primarily from rising real benefits per beneficiary. To cover these projected deficits would require continually higher income and payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare on all taxpayers that would drive the combined marginal tax rate on labor income to more than 70% by 2035 and 80% by 2050. And that's before accounting for the Laffer effect, likely future interest costs, state deficits and the rising ratio of voters receiving government payments to those paying income taxes.

It would be a huge mistake to imagine that the cumulative, cascading burden of many tax rates on the same income will leave the middle class untouched. Take a teacher in California earning $60,000. A current federal rate of 25%, a 9.5% California rate, and 15.3% payroll tax yield a combined income tax rate of 45%. The income tax increases to cover the CBO's projected federal deficit in 2016 raises that to 52%. Covering future Social Security and Medicare deficits brings the combined marginal tax rate on that middle-income taxpayer to an astounding 71%. That teacher working a summer job would keep just 29% of her wages. At the margin, virtually everyone would be working primarily for the government, reduced to a minority partner in their own labor.

The writer goes on to note it gets worse from there, as economic output is reduced (by percentages greater than in the current Great Recession) by such a voracious tax code.

Posted by: Ace at 08:09 AM | Comments (102)
Post contains 287 words, total size 2 kb.

Sorry, am way behind.

Posted by: Ace at 08:04 AM | Comments (65)
Post contains 10 words, total size 1 kb.

Noemie Emery at The Weekly Standard posts a good piece on why privileges should not be conflated with "rights". This is an important point about the modern welfare state that people (especially liberals) fundamentally misunderstand: a "right" comes from nature (or God), not from the pen of a politician. Emery uses healthcare as an example of a privilege that the left has conflated into a "right" over the years. Well-meaning it may be, but it is a sure road to ruin.

Keith Hennessey breaks down the current state of the debt-ceiling talks. (Isn't it strange how this formerly boring procedural motion has turned into a high-stakes game of statesmanship between intractable opponents? I keep expecting President Obama to take off his shoe and start banging it on the table, chanting, "We will break you!")

Too much debt means the economy can't grow. Well...debt is one reason, but there are others. Demographics, regulation, monetary and fiscal (tax) policy also play large parts.

Get ready for a 70% marginal tax rate. I don't think voters -- especially Democrats -- really comprehend how high tax rates (on everyone, not just "the rich") would have to go up to support the current level of public spending indefinitely.

Even optimists are revising their GDP numbers down. This matters in lots of ways, but especially so for returns on investments like pension funds. I've been saying for a long time that public-sector pension funds are over-estimating their returns in order to reduce the amount of contributions required by the government and employees. Public-sector actuaries are projecting far higher return rates than the GDP numbers seem to warrant, which means that the underfunding of public-sector pensions is likely to continue.

Why employers are so slow to fill jobs. Uncertainty, government hostility to private enterprise, a poorly-educated and -trained workforce, over-regulation, over-taxation, and international competition. It's not all that hard to understand.

Alas, poor Euro! I knew him, Horatio, a currency of infinite possibility, of most excellent potential. He hath bought my lunch a thousand times, and now how abhorr'd in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it.

Who do we blame the Great Recession on today? (Shakes the Magic 8 Ball.) Let's see...Ben Bernanke and The Fed! There was no single cause for the Great Recession -- lots of people did lots of stupid things, in the public sector and in the private sector. There's plenty of blame to go around. But I think it is true that the Fed's policies have made the situation worse rather than better.

It's nothing we don't all already know, but it bears repeating: the problem isn't too little income, the problem is too much spending. More on this from the TaxProf.

The Dodd-Frank legislation isn't quite the runaway success that its Democrat authors hoped it would be.

UPDATE 1: "Fiscal child abuse." California Democrats are, naturally, horrified. Not at the situation, mind you; no, they object to the term. California, thou art boned by thine own stupidity; verily, even unto death.

UPDATE 2: Senator Tom Coburn is preparing a $9 trillion debt plan. It won't go anywhere, of course, but it's yet another stick to hit the Democrats with -- they're blocking GOP budget plans without coming up with any of their own.

UPDATE 3: The "Gimme Mine" Mentality and the American Spirit.

UPDATE 4: Angela Merkel calls for a Greek debt-default (whether she realizes it or not).

UPDATE 5: Turbo Tax Timmah has turned being a chump into a real art-form. It's not just that he's a partisan Administration shill, but that he's so bad at it. He's like some ten-year-old kid trying to imitate his dad.

UPDATE 6: Barone (a national treasure, in my opinion) lays it out -- the real debate is over the size and role of the federal government. This is the true victory of the Tea Party. It's made this central point clear. The "blue model" is failing, as it was always destined to do.

UPDATE 7: There's too much good stuff to post today; I can't keep up with it all. Walter Russell Meade (one of my favorite essayists) posts this gem: "Why Blue CanÂ’t Save The Inner Cities Part I". Do read it all.
more...

Posted by: Monty at 05:04 AM | Comments (217)
Post contains 727 words, total size 6 kb.

A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:12 AM | Comments (139)
Post contains 25 words, total size 1 kb.