On the one hand, Democrats are saying America is fighting back from the “worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.”

On the other hand, millionaire eggheads with no private sector experience—who tell everyone else to tighten their belts, while their own wives take $375,000 jaunts overseas with the kids (you know, for vacation)—are making macroeconomic decisions that are literally crippling the ability of the working poor to navigate through the nation’s fiscal woes—the same working poor who can’t afford to take on more debt right now (or ever?) to purchase a new car, in the midst of the worst housing crisis in recent memory:

If buying a used car is among your cost-cutting measures…be prepared to pay up to 30-percent more than you did last year.

It is  a simple case of supply and demand.

Trouble is…there are fewer used cars.

The cash-for-clunkers program took a bunch off the market.

Plus, Edmunds Senior Editor Bill Visnick says 5-million fewer new cars were sold last year…which pares down the used car supply even more.

The used car models jumping the most in price include mid-size SUVs and mini-vans designed to carry around families.

Used Cadillac Escalades are almost 36% more.

Chevy Suburbans jumped 34% in price.

Dodge Grand Caravans are also seeing a 34% increase.

BMW X5 is 33% higher.

An Acura MDX will run you 29% more.

Visnick says even smaller models are pulling higher prices…an average of 10% more.

Heckuva job, Barry—no wonder Minority Leader John Boehner called for your economic team to step down yesterday.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m totally behind the idea of protecting the environment—but when you forgo the ability of the working poor to get a leg up purchasing used goods, trying to lock in the votes of the well-organized and well-funded environmentalist progressive left, you have failed Mr. President—you are now everything you promised you would not be.

Of course, some of us never believed you to begin with.

(HT @radleybalko)

UPDATE:

Apparently the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president is making a mockery of human rights, too.

UPDATE 2:

Barack Obama hates college students, too.

George Scoville is a communications professional in Washington, DC.

I must say, I’m taken aback by the apparent size of the pair of stones Senator Al Franken (D-MN) must have swinging between his legs.

Do as I say, not as I do. And then thank me for it with generous donations.

The trio of Senator Franken, DNC Chairman Tim Kaine, and Illinois State Treasurer and Senate hopeful Alexi Giannoulias did a little GOP-bashing during the Democratic County Chairmen’s Association breakfast on Wednesday this week, apparently in the midst of the Illinois State Fair. Most notably, Senator Franken attacked the GOP by denouncing remarks made by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in response to President Obama’s support for the right of the Park51 group to build a Muslim cultural center approximately two blocks from the Ground Zero site where the World Trade Center stood until September 11, 2001:

Franken said conservative opposition to the mosque is “one of the most disgraceful things that I’ve heard.”

“I don’t know how many of you have been to New York, but if a building is two blocks away from anything, you can’t see it. It’s a community center. They’re going to have a gym. They’re going to have point guards. Muslim point guards,” Franken said, to laughter and applause.

“They (Republicans) do this every two years. They try to find a wedge issue, and they try to work it.”

Also see the Huffington Post’s coverage and, if you can stomach it, Franken’s Senate blog.

Now, don’t get me wrong—I still think that, in the long term, Gingrich’s remarks will damage the Republican brand. I also have my own set of feelings and opinions about the Cordoba House situation, which I previously promised not to air on the web—and I intend to keep that promise here.

But I will not stand idly by while some two-faced, power-drunk, opportunistic misogynist steps up on a soapbox to lecture the rest of America about what is tasteful or decent—and the most sickening part of the whole thing is that Franken’s PAC, Midwest Values, will probably make a ton of money from his yammering. I weep for America when I think about how unaware and uninvolved the general populace is about politics and political personalities—Alexis de Tocqueville, eat your heart out.

In 1995, among many other things, Franken was helping to write a skit for SNL and decided that a joking about rape during a staff meeting would be funny:

Franken’s problem is that he spent three decades as a professional comedian before turning to politics and has a large inventory of potential gaffe material to explain away: a 1995 magazine article describing Franken proposing rude, unfunny jokes about rape at a Saturday Night Live staff meeting; a 2000 article in Playboy in which he fantasized about three-way sex with robots (or something); an ungallant crack about women in Afghanistan (a place Franken has visited repeatedly with the USO); and so on.

Of course, the shills at Slate writing that piece went on to give the then-candidate Franken plenty of cover for his misogyny.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Translation: “My rape jokes are Norm Coleman’s fault. They’re George W. Bush’s fault.”

In fact, Franken was once quoted saying:

“I’m proud of my career as a satirist, which doesn’t mean every joke I’ve ever told was funny, or, indeed, appropriate. I understand and regret that people have been legitimately offended by some of the things I’ve written.”

Translation: “My rape jokes are your fault, America. How dare you not have a sense of humor!”

It would be laughable that the asshats at Gawker went after the GOP in 2008 for scaring Minnesota children with a mailer about Franken’s behavior—if standing up for misogyny weren’t so deplorable already.

Franken recently spoke at Netroots Nation 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada, and insisted that “net neutrality is the foremost free speech issue of our time.” Aside from not really knowing anything about technology or the Constitution, Franken could probably learn a thing or two about free speech—especially in light of his own hateful transgressions.

With all due respect, Senator – you probably ought to sit out of the debate over decency, taste, and grace. Good luck in 2014 when you can no longer ride Obama’s coattails.

UPDATE:

If you’re looking for the FOX News article on Franken’s 1995 jokes about raping CBS‘s Lesley Stahl (most of the top Google responses to “franken rape joke” link to a FOX News story), you won’t find it—believe me, I scoured the web for about an hour trying to get access to it.

So instead, I’ve taken the trouble of finding—for your viewing pleasure—the original New York Magazine article from March 13, 1995 that unearthed Franken’s impropriety. It’s about six pages in or so.

I’d tell you to enjoy it, but the whole thing is just sickening.

George Scoville is a new media professional in Washington, DC.

By George Scoville (@stackiii)

I have fought every impulse in my being to weigh in on the Cordoba House debate, and to pontificate, lecture, and moralize from atop my libertarian mountain. Now that I’m actually writing about it I find myself stricken nearly dumb by the irony of what I’m about to suggest on a blog entitled THE NEXT RIGHT. But it has become clear that The Current Right has completely forgotten about The Last Right, and this could prove to be the foil for The Next Right — at least that’s my worry. I do not intend to debate the morality or legality of the construction of Cordoba House in either this post or in the comments – so if you’re looking for an ideological fight, you’ve come to the wrong place. The Right has a new messaging problem, and if anyone intends to supplant the Democratic Party in any meaningful, long-term way, it will require pretty swift action.

The Republican Party is polling considerably well among registered voters (Gallup) on a number of factors: party identification, 2010 vote preferences among independents, and 2010 candidate preferences. The Republican Party also seems to be riding a wave of enthusiasm (RCP) that spreads quicksand all over the Democratic Party’s uphill battle as November draws near. Finally, the Republican Party has retaken the lead on the generic ballot (PPP). Whatever successes the Republican Party currently enjoys it owes in large part to both the Tea Party movement and the fact that President Obama and the Democrats over-estimated their “mandate.” This cannot be overstated, especially in light of the fact that only a handful of Republicans are engaging their Democratic counterparts substantively (The Weekly Standard).

Now, set all that aside for a moment. Step back 26 years to 1984.

Ronald Reagan wasn’t polling well, hitting a 35% approval rating in 1983 (Gallup). The economy was in recession. Unemployment was high, though it dropped from 10.8% in ’82 to 7.4% by Election Day ’84 (Salon). We were at war — each day every American faced an existential threat. Federal spending was at 22.9% of GDP (EconLib), in large part because Reagan’s defense budget crested far above projections he made on the campaign trail in ’79 and ’80. But Reagan handily won re-election in 1984 because he kept the message simple — this worked:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Why, then, is former Speaker Newt Gingrich — a sort of de facto leader of today’s Republican Party, an icon of the 1994 Republican Revolution, and potential 2012 presidential hopeful – foisting a divisive cultural narrative (WaPo) onto an election cycle already dominated by anti-Big Government and anti-spending narratives that, heretofore, have been working (Pew Research via NPR)?

Ezra Klein is pickin’ up what I’m puttin’ down:

One political question about the Ground Zero Islamic complex/mosque/theater-space/swimming pool: Why are Republicans trumpeting this? And why, a week or two ago, did they start talking about the 14th amendment? Republicans are going to win a lot of seats this year. And they’re going to do it on the backs of the economy. Getting into social issues — particularly social issues that might anger minorities — is a dangerous play. It loses them long-term votes that they just don’t need to lose. It paints their party as intolerant and opportunistic. And it’s unnecessary: It’s not like they’re hurting for things to talk about.

The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy blames the Professional Right:

All this posturing is getting tiresome. The “mosque” controversy isn’t about property rights or religious freedom. It’s a bogus issue seized by the GOP establishment to distract the rank-and-file from the party’s reluctance to shrink government.

Will Wilkinson, also of the Cato Institute, blames the amateur Right:

This idiotic foofaraw could be a distraction only if the GOP rank-and-file actually cared more about the size of government than the cultural politics of American identity. But they don’t. It’s not even close. American conservatism is a movement consumed by protecting and asserting a certain fabricated conception of the traditional American way of life against imaginary enemies. Support for small government is no more than a bullet point on the Right’s “What We Believe” cheat sheet, mouthed at opportune moments. I approve of what Gene’s trying to do here rhetorically, but the fact is that complaining about Muslims and keeping holy the memory of 9/11 and Ground Zero — the legitimizing altar of aggressive American imperialism —  is a direct manifestation of contemporary conservatism’s essence.

Personally, I don’t really care who is to blame for the propagation of this narrative — whether Gingrich is demagoguing, or the conservative, evangelical base needs some pandering. The bottom line is that playing with this narrative is like playing with fire, and could be as dangerous to the Right long-term as a Gingrich marriage proposal. In many ways the conservative base is like the fuel in a gas can, fuel that powers the political machine that winds up carrying water in elections — but for God’s sake, don’t hand the Left a big, fat box of strike-anywhere matches. 2010 and 2012 can — and should — be a slam dunk for right-of-center candidates. Let’s not botch it.

Update:

Ben Smith (POLITICO) notes that Gingrich’s caustic remarks echo those of Mussolini:

A regular correspondent wondered why Newt Gingrich’s recent declaration on the planned downtown mosque sounded so familiar, and found this:

Gingrich:

There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia.

Mussolini:

There will be a mosque in Rome, the Fascist ruler said, only when a Roman Catholic church is permitted in Mecca.

The quote is frequently attributed to Il Duce, though I’d be grateful to any Italian-speaking reader who has a primary source.

Sorry, folks – you can call me a wet blanket all you want – independent voters just won’t trade one statist polemic (Obama) for another (Gingrich).

Cross-posted at The Next Right.

Further reading:

Jacob Sullum, Reason Magazine

Doug Mataconis, Outside the Beltway blog

Doug Mataconis redux, Outside the Beltway blog

David Harsanyi, Reason Magazine

Ben Smith, POLITICO

Garrett Quinn, boston.com

Only in 44's White House does 2 - 2 = 5

This flap was so good when I discovered it earlier today that I could barely hang on to my tweet. (rimshot!)

But not everyone uses Twitter (if you are, you can find me at @stackiii), so I’m recapping the story here.

Bright and early this morning, Scott Wilson at the Washington Post‘s “44: Politics and Policy In Obama’s Washington” blog (RSS – I highly recommend this blog) reports that President Obama is now touting the solvency of Medicare (meanwhile, the debate over the expiration of Bush tax cuts has yet to come to a head):

Citing a report issued this week by the Medicare trustees, Obama said the health-care overhaul he pushed through Congress this year has added at least a dozen years to Medicare’s solvency. Obama also reminded seniors in his weekly radio and Internet address that they are now eligible for a $250 prescription drug rebate under the health-care law.

Next year, seniors who fall within the so-called doughnut hole – a gap in Medicare drug coverage – will qualify for a 50 percent discount on all prescription drugs. He said the hole will be closed entirely once the health-care measure kicks in fully over the next several years.

“Medicare is stronger and more secure,” he said in the address. “That’s important because Medicare isn’t just a program. It’s a commitment to America’s seniors – that after working your whole life, you’ve earned the security of quality health care you can afford.”

Methinks the Big Guy is grasping at straws for anything that might help Democrats in November…

I'm not frothy-mouthed this year about lots of candidates on the right, but I take solace in the fact that libertarians are currently driving Republican economic rhetoric and can - hopefully - drive the policy.

Enter Harvard economist Greg Mankiw, who notes on his blog today this Jim Angle (FOX News) report on this American Enterprise Institute (AEI) event, wherein Chief Actuary of Medicare Rick Foster poo-poo’ed the President’s health care reform initiative, on the basis of future cost projections:

The immediate physician fee reductions required under current law are clearly unworkable and are almost certain to be overridden by Congress. The productivity adjustments will affect other Medicare price levels much more gradually, but there is a strong likelihood that, without very substantial and transformational changes in health care practices, payment rates would become inadequate in the long range. As a result, the projections shown in the 2010 Trustees Report for current law should not be interpreted as our best expectation of actual Medicare financial operations in the future but rather as illustrations of the very favorable impact of permanently slower growth in health care costs, if such slower growth can be achieved.

Basically, Obama can claim credit for making Medicare more solvent if and only if an entire swath of not-altogether-realistic assumptions about the economy come to fruition. You can also have all the Hope and Change you want in the universe, but there’s a reason we call economics “the dismal science.” What rang true on the campaign trail in 2008 still rings true today: intoxicating oratory won’t fix the economy, Mr. President.

You can also see video of Rick Foster’s briefing at AEI, complete with slides, by clicking here (C-SPAN doesn’t currently allow embeds of this footage – sorry). I also recommend John Goodman’s Health Policy Blog for further reading, especially as the Obama Administration races the clock to stand up as many programs as possible before the ObamaCare lawsuit wave picks up more steam.

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right.

Remember when Michelle Obama told us we had too many fatties running around?

From a joint effort of the folks at the DNC and MyBO:

George –

Every year, our family tries to come up with a fun way to wish Barack a happy birthday.

And this August 4th, when he turns 49, I have something new in mind.

This has been a big — and hectic — year for him. After signing the Affordable Care Act and Wall Street reform into law — and completing his first year as president — I think it’s safe to say we will remember it for a long time.

And I know full well how much he credits this movement, and the work of supporters like you, for the change that we’ve accomplished.

So I’m putting together a birthday card that I would like you to sign. Together with supporters — and me, Malia, Sasha, and Bo — we’ll wish him a happy birthday and let him know that we’re ready to take on the year ahead alongside him.

Will you wish Barack a happy birthday with me?

This year also brought a lot of surprises — some good and some bad.

Supporters like you have helped him make the best of it — by contacting Congress to help push stalled legislation forward, by re-engaging supporters in the political process, by giving back with service projects across the country, and so much more.

And while we can’t know what the coming year will bring, all of us, working together, will continue pushing forward for change.

Will you help make this a memorable birthday for Barack and wish him a happy 49th?

Thanks so much,

Michelle Obama

I don’t know about you, but I think the First Lady has an awful lot of gumption asking me to sign the president’s birthday card after telling America it has had too much cake.

I hear these are actually made from vegetable pulp and corrugated boxes.

Cross-posted at Intelligence, Please…

I’m traveling today to Las Vegas, Nevada for three days and two nights for the very first time -- known to many as “Sin City,” but home to some of my very favorite people on the planet. There are six hyperlinked words there, folks, meaning six clickable links -- check them out!

I doubt very much that I’ll actually play much poker over the next few days -- not in this economy anyway (never play with what you can’t afford to lose -- seriously, if you think you have a problem, contact the Gamblers Anonymous toll-free hotline, 1-888-GA-HELPS, or 1-888-424-3577). Though I make an effort to take one big casino trip per year, I’m headed to Glitter Gulch today for RightOnline 2010, an Internet activism conference for the center-right and right, designed by Americans for Prosperity to mirror the DailyKos’ Netroots Nation, which will also take place in Vegas this weekend.

But I did used to play quite a bit of poker back in my early twenties, back around the time when fellow Tennessean Chris Moneymaker became an overnight celebrity by winning the main event at the 2003 World Series of Poker, after starting his run for poker’s most prestigious championship event at a $40 sit-and-go tournament on Poker Stars.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgdnUlIdvxE

All the memories of monster bluffs and bad beats, of laughs and friendships created (and alliances forged…) that have flooded back as I prepared for this trip have given me an opportunity to wax nostalgiac quite a bit about my early twenties (the parts I remember, anyway). But today’s post isn’t about my war stories and fisherman’s tales about gambling -- it’s about Vegas, baby -- Vegas and politics. But not Harry Reid vs. Sharron Angle -- I mean poker. And gambling. And what the Hell the government is doing to screw with people’s private lives.

The Poker Players Alliance is a non-profit, membership-based advocacy organization that sprung up in the wake of the passage of the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act of 2006 (UIGEA), and aims to help turn back the tide of state and federal government crackdowns on social and commercial games of chance. They believe (as I do) that poker doesn’t even categorically fit the description; poker is a skill game. And just in case the clip above of no-name (at the time) Chris Moneymaker leveling a tournament-altering blow against poker pro Sammy Farha didn’t convince you, here’s Mike McDermott (Matt Damon, Rounders) on sitting down to play against poker pro legend Johnny Chan:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQAI0jQTkAM

Okay, okay -- Rounders isn’t real. But poker skills are, and there’s a line in the movie that goes something to the effect of “Why do you think the same people wind up at the final table at the World Series of Poker every year? What, are they the luckiest people on the planet?” If any of you out there are poker players, and you’re on Twitter, give the Poker Players Alliance a follow (@ppapoker). From their Mission Statement:

The Poker Players Alliance (PPA) is a non-profit membership organization comprised of online and offline poker players. Our membership consists of enthusiasts from around the United States who have joined together to speak with one voice to promote the game and protect the right to play poker in all its forms.

The PPA’s mission is to establish favorable laws that provide poker players with a secure, safe and regulated place to play. Through education and awareness the PPA will keep this game of skill, one of America’s oldest recreational activities, free from egregious government intervention and misguided laws.

The PPA is committed to defending the rights of poker players. On behalf of our broad membership, we will promote and protect poker through advocacy work in Washington, D.C., and throughout the nation. The Poker Players Alliance will work with key lawmakers to ensure a thoughtful and productive dialogue that represents everyone who enjoys and wants to protect the game.

When I used PPA’s online resources to email my Congressman, Rep. Jim Cooper (D-TN 5th), a couple years ago to ask him to use time in the 110th Congress to support a repeal of UIGEA, his staff wrote back and said “Get bent.”

Okay, maybe not, but they may as well have.

Ace-King: the Texas Hold 'Em starting hand known around the felt as "Big Slick." I prefer to call it the "Anna Kournikova;" no matter how good it looks, it rarely performs.

There’s nothing more fundamental or essential to the American system of government than the protection of people’s rights to their private property, which they have acquired through labor (usually now in the form of an income, as opposed to a share of land), and their rights to dispose of that property as they see fit. This has been explored exhaustively by great philosophers and game theorists alike. There are certainly social conservative arguments against gambling (of all forms, not just online gambling) -- largely out-dated, out-moded traditionalist and absolutist moral arguments about the lasciviousness of a lawless, old West gambler’s lifestyle (booze, loose women, etc.).

Former Democratic President Bill Clinton, too -- who I’d hardly call a member of the Religious Right or moral majority -- supported a 4 percent federal income tax on all gambling wins. His thinking suggested basically that, if deadbeat dads were going to gamble their paychecks in a casino instead of paying child support, the federal government would assert its prerogative to levy a Pigouvian tax to force deadbeats to internalize the social costs of their behavior, which ostensibly resulted in externalities impacting child welfare:

[Then-candidate Hillary] Clinton’s history with gaming goes back at least to 1994, when President Bill Clinton suggested a 4 percent federal tax on all gaming receipts to help fund the administration’s health care and welfare reforms. The idea did not get very far before 30 governors convinced the administration that the states depended on gaming revenue for their own budgets, and the administration dropped the idea. But it prompted commercial casinos to organize a political action committee to permanently represent their interests in Washington, DC.

Back to my Congressman, Jim Cooper, who has helped the Obama Administration pass landmark vote-buys like health care reform. Other Lefties (mostly self-proclaimed socialists and other progressives) look at gambling as a tax on the poor -- “…a highly regressive form of taxation that thrives by inducing false hopes among the financially destitute.” But Coop is a member of the Blue Dog Coalition, representing the Protestant Vatican, and he would no doubt would reject Clinton’s idealism and levying of a tax on gambling, despite the indignation of some of the Music City’s more progressive voices, because of the effect this would have on Nashvillians who have to travel 4 hours by car to the nearest casino resort town to have a little grown-up fun.

No, Jim Cooper the Spineless Statist that everyone seems to hate (but continues to send back to Congress -- good luck to Jeff Hartline) thinks that telling me what I can and can’t do with my money -- regardless of the fact that I have no estranged children or alimony to pay, and am not financially destitute (although by no accounts wealthy) -- is the best course of action. Once again, the prohibition on gambling is another manifestation of the government presuming providence over all income in America, and what people can and can’t do with their earnings…much less hold people accountable for their decisions to wager income on games in which the odds are methodically and deliberately stacked against them, because they choose to view it as a get-rich-quick scheme. Before anyone calls me a hypocrite, I don’t gamble to make money -- I pay for entertainment, and I don’t go over the figures I budget ahead of time. I have, of course, “lost it all” before, but by and large I break even or come close to it -- that’s a win in my book.

Former Cato scholar and now Senior Editor for Reason Magazine Radley Balko (who, by the way, recently moved to Nashville) is currently participating in an interesting debate over the legalization of gambling at The Economist website -- and if anything I’ve said so far in this blog has been of interest, you’ll be riveted by what Radley is doing over there. After all -- Tennessee finally made the lottery legal after prohibiting games of chance in the state constitution over 200 years beforehand.

I’ll try to blog as often as I can from RightOnline this weekend -- and I’ll try to cross-post here and at my blog at Intelligence, Please... There may also be some good tactical/strategic discussions and panels, and I’ll try to reserve those for my blog at The Next Right. I encourage any and all of you to follow me on Twitter (@stackiii) for more instantaneous (and likely less-filtered, more hilarious) updates.

I’m about to hop on a plane, so until tomorrow…

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFw5a5Bp_Pw

Cross-posted at Intelligence, Please…

Today, le quatorze Juillet, the French celebrate their independence from the tyrannical rule of King Louis XVI who, by the time of the end of his reign, had totally destroyed the glory days of Louis XIV, the Sun King. Today, Americans should bite their tongues and express gratitude for the sacrifices the French made in the late 18th century to help turn the tide against the British in our own Revolutionary War -- sacrifices that sunk France into such a debt as to cause revolution there too.

"Aux armes!" (French for "To arms!")

On July 14, 1789, French revolutionists, identifiable by their red head coverings -- also known as the red cap of liberty -- stormed the Bastille prison, freeing all 7 of its prisoners. This seems silly, but storming the Bastille Prison would be akin to, say, toppling the IRS headquarters on Constitution Avenue in Washington, DC -- at night, when 7 janitors were emptying wastepaper baskets.

Okay, okay -- stop laughing and be serious: it was a symbolic strike against tyrannical power in Paris. The toppling of the prison paved the way for the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, a political/legal and philosophical/metaphysical document that established first principles for man’s freedom, equality, and duty to others (liberté, égalité, fraternité).

Washington correspondent for Agence France-Presse (AFP) Olivier Knox (@OKnox on Twitter, and one among 50 journalists that Craft Media/Digital recommends following) passes along this clip from the American film Casablanca -- a stirring rendition of La Marseillaise (the French national anthem), sung in Rick’s café to drown out the Nazis singing the Reich’s anthem:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KL76edqCKc

Incidentally, this is one of only two films in history that showcases La Marseillaise in its entirety -- I have blogged previously about the other film in which it appears.

Americans and Brits alike love to joke often about the French. We think they’re stuffy and snotty about their food (and ours), and unappreciative of the sacrifices we made on their behalf in World War II. And let’s face it -- a lot of that stuff is frickin’ hilarious:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6omQ5JjjLsE

But today -- Bastille Day -- we shouldn’t laugh off the causes of personal liberty and economic freedom. Culturally, the French behave to each other’s faces the way Americans behave in the political blogosphere (read: often behind a veil of anonymity or geospatial distance -- kind of makes us seem a bit cowardly in our political discourse) -- and despite their hostile disagreements, they are still, at the end of the day, proud to be French and proud to be free. Today, we should all don the red cap of liberty, and celebrate the independence of our quirky cousins, the French.

Cross-posted at Intelligence, Please…

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

This is an actual piece of mail sent to my parents' home - note the red "DO NOT FOLD" stamp on the front of the piece. (Photo originally appeared on TheHumbleLibertarian.com)

Emily Long at Government Executive has the scoop:

The U.S. Postal Service overfunded its pension accounts by $50 billion, because of the way in which its obligations have been calculated, according to a new audit.

The report submitted to Congress on Wednesday and conducted by the Segal Co. on behalf of the Postal Regulatory Commission, found the agency overpaid between $50 billion and $55 billion to its Civil Service Retirement System account. The overpayment was the result of unclear guidance on how increases in postal salaries affected pension contributions after USPS absorbed the Post Office Department in 1971.

The Office of Personnel Managementis responsible for determining the Postal Service’s contribution to its pension accounts. The report found that OPM’s calculations were appropriate based on 1974 legislation, but PRC is recommending the agency adopt more “modern methods” of allocating funds.

How or why anyone would trust the federal government to help our dismal jobs outlook when it can’t manage the jobs it already provides is absolutely beyond me.

Epic FAIL, OPM. With any luck, snail mail will be as dead as newspapers soon, and just as quickly.

UPDATE 1:

Apparently the fight over Saturday mail cancellation is heating up. Good.

UPDATE 2:

Oh, look: the Postal workers’ union also bumbled its lobbying disclosure reports. *facepalm*

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and at his personal site, Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

A couple of liberal friends pass along this little ditty from William Douglas at McHackey- er, “McClatchy”:

WASHINGTON — From former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Arizona Sen. John McCain to junior members of the House of Representatives, conservative Republicans have accused President Barack Obama of failing to do all he can to help clean up the Gulf of Mexico oil spill because he hasn’t waived a U.S. maritime law called the Jones Act.

That statute, established in 1920, requires that all goods transported between U.S. ports be carried on U.S.-flagged, U.S.-built and U.S.-owned ships crewed by U.S. citizens or permanent residents. Critics say that’s needlessly excluded foreign-flagged vessels that could have helped.

“It’s a little shocking to me that a president that has such a multinational orientation as this president didn’t immediately see the benefits of waiving the Jones Act and allowing all of these resources to come in,” former House Majority Leader Richard Armey, R-Texas, said in remarks to Newsmax.com, a conservative website.

Armey and the other Republican critics are wrong. Maritime law experts, government officials and independent researchers say that the claim is false. The Jones Act isn’t an impediment at all, they say, and it hasn’t blocked anything.

“Totally not true,” said Mark Ruge, counsel to the Maritime Cabotage Task Force, a coalition of U.S. shipbuilders, operators and labor unions. “It is simply an urban myth that the Jones Act is the problem.”

In a news briefing last week, Coast Guard Adm. Thad Allen said he’d received “no requests for Jones Act waivers” from foreign vessels or countries. “If the vessels are operating outside state waters, which is three miles and beyond, they don’t require a waiver,” he said.

So, I’d be hard pressed to believe that the GOP’s argument here is completely true, but I’m equally suspicious of Mark Ruge’s objections. Two things are worth noting:

1. Mark Ruge represents an association of entities benefiting directly from the oil spill (as they have been tasked with cleanup efforts). The decision to delegate responsibility for cleanup efforts to MCTF members is an instantiation of the Obama Administration’s consistently protectionist economic stance which is evidenced by,
2. The President’s outright refusal to accept help from foreign nations early on in the catastrophe, favoring a handout to unionized American seafarers instead of going with the most pragmatic solution available to him at the time.

This much we should come to expect from the Obama Administration – which was recently re-energized by the recall to service of Barry’s presidential campaign political team – and, as I wrote back in April, Barack Obama isn’t going to be making a whole lot of decisions going forward unless it can help him rebound and secure the White House in 2012.

President Obama surveys a Gulf Coast beach approximately one month after the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, and a well started gushing tens of thousands of barrels of crude into the sea per day. Credit: Reuters

But it’s also worth noting that Ruge’s outcry is a typical strategy among lobbying groups – and the Maritime Cabotage Task Force is just that, a lobbying group (or, if you prefer, a “special interest”), which is VERY well-funded by a number of private corporations (over 300 by my count) – to run to the press to stake out a position on an issue to try to divide or sway popular opinion…and that’s why it’s no shock to me that my friends on the Left brought this Douglas’s piece to my attention.

Now, about the “talking point”: I don’t work in maritime law at all, so I’m not offering an opinion one way or the other about any potential legal barriers to foreign assistance, and I’m certainly not going to defend the Republican Party on this messaging strategy – people say things in politics all the time that are patently untrue, and not only is nobody in Washington clear of guilt of participating in it, but the Republicans are especially bloodthirsty and are looking to take as many scalps as possible this fall.

What I do know is that a) this looks like a really desperate attempt to turn anyone and everyone against the GOP (Douglas’ heroic claim that “Armey and the Republicans are wrong”) in this seemingly new era of the Obama Administration, in which the President has begun owning issues instead of blaming his predecessor (though, of course, Democratic and progressive bloggers still carry the mantle), and b) it has got to suck to be a resident of a Gulf state, and have a first-row seat to the devastation this tragedy has unleashed upon the region’s economy, without provocation or rest, and for the President to have – Jones Act or no Jones Act – refused help early on in the catastrophe.

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and his personal site, Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZw1bLbmD2U

So instead of mapping out how we’re going to save money, and giving a name to every dollar collected like many of us do at home when we pay the mortgage, car note, and set the grocery budget, the Congress has engaged full-force in the usual kabuki, chicanery, and vapid senselessness that has become par for the course ever since TV cameras were installed in both chambers. I’m a huge proponent of open government and transparency, but giving these sociopaths a platform for grandstanding is reckless -- not to mention our own fault.

That Phil Mickleson has it soooo good…

(h/t Jim Harper)

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

In yet another nod to the protection of fledgling self-esteem, an Ottawa children’s soccer league has introduced a rule that says any team that wins a game by more than five points will lose by default.

The Gloucester Dragons Recreational Soccer league’s newly implemented edict is intended to dissuade a runaway game in favour of sportsmanship. The rule replaces its five-point mercy regulation, whereby any points scored beyond a five-point differential would not be registered.

Kevin Cappon said he first heard about the rule on May 20 — right after he had scored his team’s last allowable goal. His team then tossed the ball around for fear of losing the game.

He said if anything, the league’s new rule will coddle sore losers.

I’d be laughing if this weren’t true – and if you think about it, it’s really just a microcosm of the ideological war the progressive Left is waging against centrist Democrats, Libertarians, and Republicans alike. As an avid NHL fan, I’m supremely disappointed in Canada over this one. I can guaran-damn-tee you that Sidney Crosby didn’t become “The Next One” because some asshat in junior hockey in Nova Scotia created some bullshit mercy rule when The Kid’s team was trailing by too much.

Thanks to this person not existing in Nova Scotia, we now have Sidney Crosby

This pseudo-egalitarian horse manure has got to stop – a coddled sore loser (like someone whose skill set doesn’t merit his/her wage) eventually becomes an empowered sore loser. The problem is that they don’t suck any less at what they do, and the rest of society has to deal with that – in terms of opportunity costs, social costs, and real dollar costs (prices of goods and services).

Hat tip to Evan Coyne Maloney (@BrainTerminal on Twitter; find his blog here).

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

How would you caption this photo?

Despite Souza’s eye for capturing tense, awkward moments, it sounds like, by her own estimation, AZ Gov. Jan Brewer’s meeting with 44 went pretty well:

Emerging from a meeting with President Barack Obama Thursday, embattled Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer restated her support for the state’s controversial new immigration law.

“I feel very confident about what we have done in the past,” Brewer told reporters at the White House after a meeting she had requested with Obama. “It was the right thing to do. I believe we are protecting the people of Arizona. And beyond that I believe we are protecting the people of America.”

…

Asked if she thought Obama understands Arizona’s law, Brewer retorted, “He is a well learned man and a lawyer. If he’s read the law, I’m sure he’s understands the law.” Pressed again if she believes Obama read the law, the governor just smiled.

So it’s time to flex those snark muscles, kids – use the comments section to submit your best caption ideas! Thought and speech bubble ideas welcome too! I’m not sure what the best caption will win yet, but jump on in and get your feet wet!

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

I’ve heard and read all sorts of shoulda-woulda-coulda-mighta-musta-gonna about the tragic oil spill down in the Gulf of Mexico. It is heartbreaking that vast ecosystems are being brought to a premature end, and industries that sustain the local economies of hundreds of thousands of American citizens along the shore are also being destroyed, while they powerlessly stand by and watch.

Before I get into the meat of this post, I want to make abundantly clear my thoughts on the situation:

1. This is not any single person’s or entity’s “fault.” This is a terribly tragic accident that people of all political stripes are trying to use as their football as contentious elections heat up in the US, wherein the out-party stands to make considerable governance-altering gains. Both the MMS meth heads and profit-driven BP leadership are at fault for what happened here. Some of that fault is due to negligence, and some is just purely circumstantial.
2. I am not writing this to shout “DRILL, BABY, DRILL!” When I saw gasoline crest over $4 per gallon in the summer of 2008, it was easy to want to do something – anything – to increase the supply of oil on the surface just so that people could drive to and from work every day – something many of us take for granted. I personally tend to favor an “all of the above” energy strategy, and I am disheartened that “energy independence” has been rendered as nothing more than a political slogan for the Republican and Democratic parties over the last 40 years (this, by the way, is well-documented).

Now – on to the meat. I ran across this post today, a post by Kenneth Rogoff, Professor of Economics at Harvard University and former chief economist at the IMF (h/t to his colleague Greg Mankiw):

As the damaged BP oil well continues to spew millions of gallons of crude from the depths of the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, the immediate challenge is how to mitigate an ever-magnifying environmental catastrophe. One can only hope that the spill will be contained soon, and that the ever-darkening worst-case scenarios will not materialize.

The disaster, however, poses a much deeper challenge to how modern societies deal with regulating complex technologies. The accelerating speed of innovation seems to be outstripping government regulators’ capacity to deal with risks, much less anticipate them.

…

Now all bets are off.  In the United States, offshore drilling seems set to go the way of nuclear power, with new projects being shelved for decades. And, as is often the case, a crisis in one country may go global, with many other countries radically scaling back off-shore and out-of-bounds projects. Will Brazil really risk its spectacular coastline for oil, now that everyone has been reminded of what can happen? What about Nigeria, where other risks are amplified by civil strife?

Oil experts argue that offshore drilling never had the potential to amount to more than a small share of global supply. But there now will be greater concerns about deep drilling in any sensitive environment. And the problem is not just with oil. The big news in energy these days is the revolution in technology for tapping shale gas. With important reserves near populated areas, governments will need to temper their enthusiasm and think about the balance between risks and riches.

The basic problem of complexity, technology, and regulation extends to many other areas of modern life. Nanotechnology and innovation in developing artificial organisms offer a huge potential boon to mankind, promising development of new materials, medicines, and treatment techniques. Yet, with all of these exciting technologies, it is extremely difficult to strike a balance between managing “tail risk” – a very small risk of a very large disaster – and supporting innovation.

…

Economics teaches us that when there is huge uncertainty about catastrophic risks, it is dangerous to rely too much on the price mechanism to get incentives right. Unfortunately, economists know much less about how to adapt regulation over time to complex systems with constantly evolving risks, much less how to design regulatory resilient institutions. Until these problems are better understood, we may be doomed to a world of regulation that perpetually overshoots or undershoots its goals.

The lesson here is simple: methods of production – not just consumer products themselves – evolve quickly and rapidly. Capital investments are upgraded – sometimes making work environments safer, sometimes making plants more productive…and when society is lucky, sometimes both! Regulation – and the political process by which regulation is brought about – cannot possibly keep up with the pace of innovation. If you don’t want to take my word for it, just ask anyone working in the tech industry. Ask President Obama, who almost didn’t get to take his BlackBerry to the Oval Office after he won in 2008 (Jesus, what if he ever wants to switch to an iPhone?).

We can regulate the oil industry up to its eyeballs and beyond – but there’s always something for which even the smartest of eggheads cannot account, and technological innovation in oil production methods will continue to outpace the molasses-like movement of policy formulation. Trying to over-regulate won’t help things either; over-regulation will hamper our ability to produce other goods and services, like shale gas mining in Dr. Rogoff’s piece.

And now progressives are calling for global boycotts of BP, as if depriving them of revenues and resources will help them clean up the disaster more quickly (these are the same people who argue that the government needs more money – not less – to solve problems). The Deepwater Horizon disaster is tragic. People died. Now many more are suffering. Regulation didn’t help, and regulation won’t help because regulation can’t help. The government should worry about who’s using methamphetamines on the job, and why civil servants aren’t enforcing laws on the books. BP shareholders – and probably other oil companies in the world – could stand to (voluntarily) pool their financial resources into a disaster slush fund, if for no other reason than to give themselves some good PR.

Cross-posted at IntelligencePlease.com. Follow George on Twitter (@stackiii).

Rep. Michele Bachmann

I ran across a video of a floor speech delivered yesterday by Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN 6th), shortly after the House voted down a spending freeze on federal employee pay. The measure, offered as an amendment to H.R. 5136, the National Defense Authorization Act for FY 2011, would purportedly have saved taxpayers $2 billion in the first year, and $30 billion over the next 10:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4DizsGxX3w

Liberals argue that federal employee pay raises are justified by a) cost of living increases and b) inflation. As a DC resident, I can empathize with the cost of living argument. At the rate we’re printing soft currency, I can also understand the inflation argument (maybe we should stop using a soft currency system?). When I heard some of Bachmann’s staggering statistics, I got instant heartburn -- statistics like “the average salary and benefit package for a federal employee is almost $120,000, and the average salary and benefit package for their private sector counterpart is $60,000,” or “the percentage of federal employees earning more than $100,000 has risen from 14% to 19% during the recession.” This issue of federal government employee vs. private sector pay was thrust into the national spotlight back in January of this year by then-Candidate Scott Brown.

Sen. Scott Brown

I’m a firm believer in researching shocking claims like Bachmann’s and Brown’s (see unSpun by Kathleen Hall Jamieson of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, co-founder of FactCheck.org -- she has written lots of other greats, too), and I never put it past a politician to just cook up some statistics to try to score a few political points.

After some digging this morning, I ran across this piece from USA Today back in December 2009 -- where presumably Brown got his information, and which Bachmann cited in her floor speech yesterday. Check this out -- if you can stomach it:

The number of federal workers earning six-figure salaries has exploded during the recession, according to a USA TODAY analysis of federal salary data.

Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession’s first 18 months — and that’s before overtime pay and bonuses are counted.

Federal workers are enjoying an extraordinary boom time — in pay and hiring — during a recession that has cost 7.3 million jobs in the private sector.

The highest-paid federal employees are doing best of all on salary increases. Defense Department civilian employees earning $150,000 or more increased from 1,868 in December 2007 to 10,100 in June 2009, the most recent figure available.

When the recession started, the Transportation Department had only one person earning a salary of $170,000 or more. Eighteen months later, 1,690 employees had salaries above $170,000.

The trend to six-figure salaries is occurring throughout the federal government, in agencies big and small, high-tech and low-tech. The primary cause: substantial pay raises and new salary rules.

…

The growth in six-figure salaries has pushed the average federal worker’s pay to $71,206, compared with $40,331 in the private sector.

The analysis in USA Today comes from salary and wage data provided by the Office of Personnel Management, an independent agency (answerable to Congress, not the President). Of course, that didn’t stop the hacks at PolitiFact.com from ruling that Scott Brown’s claim was false (read their excuse reasoning if you need a good laugh today -- and shame on you for using them, ABC senior White House correspondent Jake Tapper!).

Issues of media bias aside, the power-drunk Democratic Party is driving the American economy speedily toward the edge of the cliff -- not long after the Republican Party decided to go out joyriding drunk with the public trust. Bachmann is right -- the Republican Party is definitely to blame for the skyrocketing debt and deficit. Cutting taxes while fighting a two-front war goes under former President George W. Bush’s all-time greatest policy blunders. But Bachmann is also right that the Democrats aren’t helping things by refusing to take control of what’s in their power to control -- like federal employee salaries.

Not helping things is having the most pro-union president in recent memory in the White House…Reason had a great video on the problems with unionized government employees:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFVGD3bXxuk

When does it stop? Sadly, I don’t think the Community-Organizer-in-Chief would ever have it any other way. It’s one thing to want to attract the best and the brightest to federal service and to want to make the government more competent -- and it’s quite another to throw gasoline on a fire. It’s becoming sickeningly clear that I will likely see the United States crippled by a budget crisis in my lifetime if we keep this up.

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and at his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

Who wouldn't take a man with a shotgun seriously?

Erickson’s allegations of yesterday include:

• “[H]is twittering…shows total disdain for social conservatives who make up a very large part of that group he is supposedly covering from the inside”
• “Weigel, along with a host of other reporters in DC, is going after Palin for being upset about [a stalkerish reporter/book writer moving in next door]” – so, not only is Weigel the MSM, he’s Washington
• Weigel defended the White House on Sestak-gate
• Weigel writes about “the queen of the birthers” Orly Taitz, which Erickson says is an embellishment of the fringe element on the Right – as if Taitz needed any help looking crazy (also, Erickson banned birthers at Red State)
• Writes stories “that no one on the right really cares about,” but which he is told to cover so the Left can continue to frame the Tea Party movement as innately racist, xenophobic, stupid, etc.

Clouthier lets off the gas a little:

• Weigel is like an anthropologist discovering a new culture out in the jungle
• He’s “[a] nice guy when he’s not patting you on your silly little naive head”
• Weigel is “extraordinarily dangerous”
• “[H]e’s as ideologically left as the rest, he’s just willing to lower himself to hang with the natives from time to time”

Weigel answered both criticisms late yesterday, and that’s admirable. To me, it’s a sign of the respect and appreciation Weigel clearly has for the work Clouthier and Erickson do, and for the people that they are within the modern conservative movement.

Call me a stubborn devotee to the art of philosophy – or call me crazy, or even a liberal (if you must) – but in J.S. Mill’s seminal essay On Liberty, he insisted that constraints imposed upon the freedom of thought and speech were the greatest dangers to any society – that’s not something our Founders took very lightly either. Taken with Mill’s notion that objective truth essentially did not exist – that only through combining the intersubjective experiences and perspectives of as many people as possible do we get anywhere near something like truth – this silencing (or in Weigel’s case, the public shaming) can cripple society’s ability to thrive (emphasis mine):

But it is not the minds of heretics that are deteriorated most, by the ban placed on all inquiry which does not end in the orthodox conclusions. The greatest harm done is to those who are not heretics, and whose whole mental development is cramped, and their reason cowed, by the fear of heresy. Who can compute what the world loses in the multitude of promising intellects combined with timid characters, who dare not follow out any bold, vigorous, independent train of thought, lest it should land them in something which would admit of being considered irreligious or immoral?

I don’t know Dave Weigel personally. Hell, I’ve never even met him. I follow him on Twitter and subscribe to Right Now in my RSS reader. I’ve also never met Erick Erickson or Jane Hamsher either, though I follow both on Twitter (even though Hamsher accused me of being part of a corporate ConAgra plot to convince Tea Partiers that corn subsidies weren’t corporate welfare – she really has a way with people, eh?). I also subscribe to Erickson in a reader, with whom I seem to have a collegial online relationship (and I hope this post doesn’t upset that). I’ve only once met Clouthier in person, after Jon Henke‘s panel on technology and policy at CPAC 2009, and if you’re reading this at Liberty Pundits and my relationship to Clouthier isn’t clear – well, you need more help than I can offer.

But even though I don’t know all these people, I like them all for different reasons…and I take all of them seriously – even if I don’t agree with everything every one of them says. It’s precisely because of the tenets of liberty in Mill’s philosophy – a philosophy which I try vigorously to actually live each day – that I take people seriously, especially if they’re unorthodox or take a contrary worldview to my own. I’m aware of the limits to my own knowledge and experiences (though I’m unafraid to share either at length).

If the conservative movement is looking for a champion to infiltrate the mainstream media to correct the many years of unjust and deliberately inaccurate skew and spin, and punish the MSM's most vile perpetrators, then it has imposed an unrealistic expectation on Weigel.

And I’m also aware of the limits to other people’s knowledge and experiences (and time!) too. That’s why I don’t begrudge Weigel for not brandishing the fiery sword of CONSERVATISM! against Ezra Klein, Dana Milbank, E. J. Dionne, or any other ultra-Left moonbat at the Post. Dave is a reporter, and by all estimates he does a good job of covering the Tea Parties, live from movement events, speaking to movement leaders, etc. (given, of course, that he can’t be everywhere at all times, talking to all people about all manner of things). He treats the people he does speak to fairly, and he’s transparent everywhere about his libertarian social preferences – as if his résumé should leave anyone with questions about them (Dave’s Wikipedia entry doesn’t include his stint at Reason, where he covered the presidential campaigns of Bob Barr and Ron Paul). But he’s also transparent about his purpose at WaPo:

The goal of this blog will be to explain what the right is doing, thinking, and planning as it hurtles toward the possible salvation of the 2010 midterm elections. That’s going to mean a lot of on-the-scene reporting, interviews with the people driving this movement, and close reading of the arguments making headway among the people trying to bring the Obama era to the quickest possible end.

Sometimes a “close reading of the arguments” means “not co-signing the bullshit.” Reporters ask tough questions – and Weigel is a good reporter. If the conservative movement is looking for a champion to infiltrate the mainstream media to correct the many years of unjust and deliberately inaccurate skew and spin, then it has imposed an unrealistic expectation on Weigel. If there’s anything I’ve learned from Weigel – it’s to not take oneself too seriously in this game of politics we play.

UPDATE:

Thanks for the shout-out, Dave!

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and at his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

I’m beginning to need extra digits to count the number of times the popular social networking site Facebook has changed its privacy tools and policies. Of course, site policy changes reflect the mission of its founder, twenty-something gajillionaire Mark Zuckerberg – the same Mark Zuckerberg who said earlier this year that the age of privacy is over:

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

Matt McKeon has an incredible interactive infographic on the evolution of privacy at Facebook – it’s worth a click just to visualize how much more of your personal data has become public over time on that platform. Ultimately, I’m a firm believer that the greatest privacy controls in social media and social networking rest in the behavior of the end user – if you don’t want personal information exposed in a Web 2.0 environment, don’t publish it! On Facebook, though, one can reasonably expect that private messages won’t ever be indexed and later attributed to authors in a public forum – like Google search results, where user names, photographs, interests, etc. displayed on user profiles became instantly viewable around the web by anyone earlier this year.

But diverting attention away from Facebook at the moment, who thinks that you’re probably just a privacy fundamentalist anyway, I wonder about privacy and data security in private messaging on Twitter. Anyone can join, there’s no algorithm checking to see if your name is “human enough” for you to have a profile (giving end users the veil of anonymity), and users don’t have to anchor their profile with a school or work email, which was the norm at Facebook when I joined back in 2007.

The Silicon Valley start-up and micro-blogging phenomenon ruffled users’ feathers last month when it announced on April 14 that it would be turning over access of its entire archive to the Library of Congress for “preservation and research”:

Since Twitter began, billions of tweets have been created. Today, fifty-five million tweets a day are sent to Twitter and that number is climbing sharply. A tiny percentage of accounts are protected but most of these tweets are created with the intent that they will be publicly available. Over the years, tweets have become part of significant global events around the world—from historic elections to devastating disasters.

It is our pleasure to donate access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress for preservation and research. It’s very exciting that tweets are becoming part of history. It should be noted that there are some specifics regarding this arrangement. Only after a six-month delay can the Tweets be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.

Kind of reminds me of hanging onto the Falkland Islands for strategic sheep purposes. But I digress. Geek Shui had some announcement day musings on privacy implications for the Big Government ReTweet, and at first I thought some of the concerns were kind of ridiculous – especially when you believe that you have control over how much information you publish to the web in the first place.

But then I got my hands on the HTC Incredible with Google Android from Verizon Wireless. I’ve been using third-party clients to send and read tweets for quite some time now – in fact, I didn’t really see the utility of Twitter until my first Tweetdeck experience. I’ve been a brand loyalist in my use of third-party clients (despite poking around with other apps to see how they work), sticking primarily with Tweetdeck for Desktop, and on my old BlackBerry Curve 8330, I used an application called SocialScope (which is still in private beta – this is the most impressive mobile client I have ever seen).

When I went Android, I had to find a new mobile client. I have settled on Seesmic for the moment, but have used HTC’s native client Peep, Twitter for Android, TweetCaster, twidroid, and Touiteur. Each offers a nice set of features, but I got really unsettled this morning on my way into work when I discovered that twidroid and Touiteur were able to recall direct messages – both sent and received – that I personally manually deleted on Twitter’s web interface and through commands issued through other third party clients.

There are two problems here.

First, Twitter is an open source platform. Any old application developer can access Twitter’s API once they register their client and start tweeting away. Generally, that’s a very good thing. But direct messages I have manually deleted on Twitter’s proprietary web-based platform are showing up in third-party clients. Twitter has no control (that I know of) over how developers use API – Twitter can only control how often a third-party client makes API calls (that’s why, if you’re a tweeting madman like me, Tweetdeck tells you occasionally “rate limit exceeded,” and you can’t refresh your columns).

This leads to the second problem: Twitter doesn’t have strong erase. On their blog just yesterday, Twitter reiterated one of its core principles, that users control their tweets (emphasis mine):

There has never been more opportunity for innovation on the Twitter platform than there is now. In order to continue to provide clarity, our guiding principles include:

We don’t seek to control what users tweet. And users own their own tweets.

So if I own my tweets, I should be able to make them disappear, right? Operating systems – Mac OS, Windows, whatever – in many cases don’t actually delete your files when you highlight an icon and hit “Delete.” Even when you empty your recycle bin, the file isn’t really gone, it’s just hidden from plain sight. Data can be recovered at a later time by the neighborhood geek if you accidentally delete the family Christmas album.

And apparently that’s what’s happening with Twitter in third-party mobile clients being able to use Twitter API to access, only the geeks are people we don’t know (I don’t know the developers of the Android clients I’ve tested), and then there are the geeks at the Library of Congress. Now, I’m not ready to put on my tinfoil hat just yet, but if the Federal government is going to have access to the Twitter database, then a) users need to be assured that either nobody inside the Library of Congress (or anywhere else) will be able to use API to access sent or received direct messages that users intended to delete, or b) Twitter needs to revamp its platform to include strong erase.

If I’m not able to delete content that I own – and I mean fully delete it, not just hide it from view – then do I really own it? I hope Twitter will address this issue before they suffer the bad PR that Facebook is having to withstand. I really like Twitter, and I don’t want to see it mired in another social media privacy debate.

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and at his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

Stephanopoulos: Should the Federal Government be able to set a minimum wage?

Paul: Well, it’s not a question of whether they can or cannot, I think that’s decided. I think the question you have to ask is whether or not, when you set the minimum wage, it may cause unemployment. You know, those who are at the lowest wages, if you raise the wage to a certain rate, if it’s above what the employer deems that their labor is worth, they won’t get hired. So the least-skilled people in our society have trouble getting jobs the higher you make the minimum wage. And it’s one of those things where you see on the surface, you say “OH, all these workers at McDonald’s got raised $0.50 an hour!” But what you don’t see is that there were 21 workers, and now there’s 15 workers if you raise the minimum wage too high. You know, if it were a good idea to raise the minimum wage, and it worked, why don’t we raise it to $20 an hour? Or $30 an hour? Obviously, there is a point where you get to that you cause unemployment, and I’m not really sure that the government is always the smartest in the world as far as economic decisions.

Stephanopoulos: But you wouldn’t repeal it?

Paul: Repeal the minimum wage? No, I think the vote comes up a lot of times on whether to raise it or not, and I think that what you have to ask yourself is “Do you create unemployment by raising the minimum wages too high?” But I think it’s a good example of how people with good intentions, you know, many Democrats, they say “OH, we’ll help people, we want to do this.” And they have good intentions, and I take them at their word that they want to do what’s best for people…but what happens is they don’t think through the ultimate consequences of it. It’s sort of like all of the things we’re doing by having such a massive debt in our country. They’re doing it with good intentions, but what’s happening now is that we are in danger as a country of going the way of Greece if we’re not careful…we really have to watch what’s going on and reform our spending, or we’re really in a world of hurt.

Stephanopoulos: Okay, thank you, thank you very much for giving your side of the story this morning.

Paul: Thank you, George.

As someone who has, you know, actually worked for minimum wage (actually less) for several years -- and knows how much it SUCKS - I can certainly appreciate the ethos of populist Democrats’ desires to fight for the little guy and do something -- anything! -- to help out…for the most part. There’s still a huge part of me that says that any politician (like our old friend Glaucon) will use the public trust to retain power (and therefore privilege), and that not all policy actors are benevolent and have altruistic souls (that is, if they have souls at all). But all that is to say “I get it too, Dr. Paul.”

But on the flip side of the coin, I’ve also had a hand in running a business. Not just one, or even two, but three (the demise of the third was clearly not my fault). Not that I really expect the Left to all of a sudden get it when it comes to running businesses, but firms in the marketplace a) don’t make unlimited profits, b) don’t have unlimited budgets, and c) managers have legal (and I would argue ethical) responsibilities to ownership to remain profitable, as stewards of that property, whether ownership is a sole proprietorship, limitied partnership, or thousands of invested shareholders. The arguments against minimum wage increases aren’t a matter of (lack of) care or concern for the little guy, it’s simple, elementary school mathematics. Follow me:

Let’s say I have a cake business. I have raised capital from investors, and have determined that, after overhead (including rent and utilities), acquisition of raw materials (sugar, eggs, flour, chocolate, and butter), capital investments (ovens, pans, icing guns), etc., I can afford $800 of labor per day (wow, that seems steep) -- that’s $100 per hour for each of the 8 hours I am open. So I start hiring.

At a minimum wage of $5.15/hour (what it was when I worked for Blockbuster Videos in 2000), I could hire 19 bakers, paying out $97.85 each our in labor, without running over my labor budget. In fact, I’m saving $17.20 per day (8 hours x $2.15 left over per hour in my labor budget) and I could use those savings for any number of things, from advertising, to employee bonuses, to investor dividends, etc. But everything is hunky-dory, and I’m able to meet my production target of 76 cakes per day (19 bakers = 19 cakes, each of which takes 2 hours to bake, 8 hours / 2 hours = 4 cakes per day per baker = 76 cakes), which I have determined in my business planning I will need to produce in order to keep my bakery open/profitable.

But then the government decides that $5.15 per hour isn’t enough for a person to live on (it’s doable -- trust me -- but it really sucks), so they raise the minimum wage to $7.50 per hour (which, if I’m not mistaken, they did). But my production target doesn’t change -- I still need to produce 76 cakes per day in order to remain open, so I need to keep my ingredient budget where it is. I still have to pay rent and utilities, both of which seem to increase over time at a constant rate. I don’t have any more capital investments, but will need to, from time to time, repair my ovens and replace my pans. So my outgoing expenses don’t really change. But I have to pay my employees $7.50 per hour now -- that’s only 13 employees.

But I started with 19.

Oops.

The moral of the story is that the government loves to claim credit for raising the minimum wage and helping out the little guy -- but they won’t come to my bakery and pick which 6 of my 19 employees I now have to fire or lay off. Even if I rearrange my investments, and am able to retain all of my employees, the minimum wage increase only helps the 19 - that is, it only helps the people who already have jobs. The people who are unemployed at the time the minimum wage rises are now less likely to be employed, as the price of an hour of labor (a wage) is now higher. I still need to produce 76 cakes per day, but I now have the capacity for only 52 to be produced in 8 hours -- so I have to stay open for another 4 hours every day in order to meet the quota required to remain open/profitable, and pay out an additional $390 in labor each day, which is a budget overrun of almost 50%, not to mention overtime pay, or unions organizing against me working my employees longer than 8 hours per day. I now either have to go back to my investors and beg for more money, sell off capital, move to a smaller facility, or close -- and none of these options is an easy choice for an entrepreneur to make. What’s worse for the actual operation of my business, the currently-employed are actually insulated from competition by the unemployed, and my employees have less of an incentive to do a good job:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6e8Pa6-IZU

There’s a semantic difference between remaining “open” and remaining “profitable,” and I grant that. There’s also a huge difference between accounting profit and economic profit -- you can have the latter without the former and still remain open, even though it seems like you’re losing money. My bakery thought experiment is somewhat of a simplification, and as I’ve written before, I don’t have a PhD in economics, but it demonstrates one of the fundamental principles of welfare economics: price floors (minimum wage laws) and ceilings (salary cap -- I know you sports fans hate this one) distort markets, and have (usually negative) unintended consequences (not that populist wage-mongers or labor unions will ever admit it).

All of this has been to say (again), “I get it too, Dr. Paul.” This isn’t the first time since November 2008 that we’ve seen somebody on the Right who really gets it -- take Paul Ryan for example (and don’t be surprised that Ezra Klein called him “radical”…you know, because new trillion-dollar entitlements are so mainstream) - but it’s refreshing to see someone who really understands the economics behind the political talking points. We need that kind of bold leadership on the Right -- and that’s what it is, leadership. I’m not from Kentucky, and I certainly don’t agree with everything Rand Paul has to say, but I do wish him the very best on the road to Washington. We need more people willing to wade through the horse manure to talk some sense into our economic policy.

Update:

Some people are suggesting that “no empirical study exists” that shows the correlation between wage increases and job losses, except in teenagers. Well, this isn’t scientific or anything, but it looks to me like we lost over SIX MILLION jobs after the Democrats voted to raise the minimum wage from $5.15/hr to $7.25/hr over just two years’ time in 2007 (with, of course, the blessing of former President George W. Bush -- file this one under “wrong-headed policies”):

George Scoville also blogs at The Next Right and at his personal site Intelligence, Please… He invites you to follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

The nation’s premier public health agency knowingly used flawed data to claim that high lead levels in the District’s drinking water did not pose a health risk to the public, a congressional investigation has found. But, investigators determined, the agency has not publicized its later internal research showing the problem did harm children and continues to endanger thousands of city residents.

A House investigative subcommittee concludes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made “scientifically indefensible” claims in 2004 that high lead in the water was not causing any noticeable harm to the health of city residents. The CDC hurriedly published its analysis though officials knew the research relied on incomplete and misleading blood test results that played down the health impact, the investigation found.

More like the "Center for Deficiency of Competency"

Kindly note that Leonnig’s story was written about claims made by the CDC in 2004 – during the Bush years. The CDC really screwed the pooch on this one. But for all the ways in which the Obama Administration wants to take care of us, it seems least focused on actually reforming government – you know, changing processes and best practices, “changing the way Washington works” (c’mon, we all knew he was full of shit) – unless it comes with a flashy new set of bells and whistles.

At the end of the day, the message is the same: the state just does not – indeed, cannot – do a good job. EVER. It’s an adage older than even Federalist No. 51:

If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

When you have a monopoly on the use of force within a given territory (whether de jure or de facto), the former is easy to achieve – the latter is much more difficult and, in human affairs, deserves more scrutiny and effort to reform if we are to safeguard our most hallowed, fundamental liberties.

Update:

The kind folks at the DC Water and Sewer Authority passed along their 2008 Water Quality Report and made sure to remind me via Twitter that the WaPo story talked about CDC claims in 2004. Clearly they didn’t read this story, much less comprehend it – the irony of their inability (as a government bureau) to connect the dots here is definitely not lost on me. Maybe I should also tell them that it’s 2010? Bless their hearts.

George Scoville welcomes you to read his personal blog, IntelligencePlease.com, and reminds you that the only thing that will piss off a liberal more than happy worker is a conservative who is just as smart as they are. You can also follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VzjrIk05YyU

Yesterday Melissa Clouthier had an AWESOME piece on the Muslim Miss USA, a piece which adroitly posits (contrary to this inane thumb-twiddling) that this Muslim woman -- who would be hanged, stoned, genital-mutilated, or even honor-killed in her home for even thinking of participating in a beauty pagent, is instead Westernized, bikini-clad, and shakin’ what her momma gave her. And she’s not wearing a burqa. “Let the Islamofascists put that in their pipes and smoke it,” Clouthier quips. If you don’t believe Melissa, and want to write this off as anti-brown-people Right-wing radicalism, just ask Neda what she thinks:

Warning -- Very graphic video.  Don’t watch if you’re not comfortable

www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbdEf0QRsLM

Warning -- Very graphic video.  Don’t watch if you’re not comfortable

Oh, wait -- you can’t ask Neda. Because Neda is dead. And you supported the president when he said we shouldn’t meddle in Iran’s electoral affairs. And then they gave President Barack Obama the Nobel Peace Prize while he ramped up the war in Afghanistan. Got it?

Today, filmmaker Evan Coyne Maloney follows up and passes along a piece from the Jerusalem Post about a Saudi woman who unleashes all the estrogen fury of every woman who has ever ovulated on one of the city of Al-Mubarraz’s finest “virtue cops”:

When a Saudi religious policeman sauntered about an amusement park in the eastern Saudi Arabian city of Al-Mubarraz looking for unmarried couples illegally socializing, he probably wasn’t expecting much opposition.

But when he approached a young, 20-something couple meandering through the park together, he received an unprecedented whooping.

A member of the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, the Saudi religious police known locally as the Hai’a, asked the couple to confirm their identities and relationship to one another, as it is a crime in Saudi Arabia for unmarried men and women to mix.

For unknown reasons, the young man collapsed upon being questioned by the cop.

According to the Saudi daily Okaz, the woman then allegedly laid into the religious policeman, punching him repeatedly, and leaving him to be taken to the hospital with bruises across his body and face.

This is an incredible amount of “win” for liberty in a region of the world where “freedom” usually means “freedom for me to break my foot off in yo’ ass if you don’t do what I tell you, woman,” and generally, we should support this kind of resistance to real tyranny.

George Scoville welcomes you to read his personal blog, IntelligencePlease.com, and reminds you that the only thing that will piss off a liberal more than happy worker is a conservative who is just as smart as they are. You can also follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).

So, I’m a graduate student at American University, and I’m taking a summer course in organizational analysis. Over the weekend, I had to watch segments of a documentary film by Canadian filmmaker progressive moonbat Mark Achbar, called “The Corporation.” In it, Achbar rounds up the usual suspects -- Howard Zinn, Michael Moore, Noam Chomsky, and even some Harvard business professors -- and allows them to pile on Nobel Laureate libertarian economist Milton Friedman, whom Achbar trots out as his token conservative.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pin8fbdGV9Y

I’ll save you the trouble of watching the many constituent parts of the film, all of which are available for free on YouTube -- thanks, of course, to the beneficence [sic] of the filmmaker (I really just don’t think the guy could get anyone to pay to watch his movie) -- and get right to the point. It struck me last night:

Thought: if progressives are right, and corporations aren’t people, where do they get off demanding [that] moral constraints be placed upon them?

There’s been a lot of liberal hand-wringing lately -- hand-wringing like this nonsense from former President Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich -- over the collapsed BP rig in the Gulf of Mexico and the ensuing, ongoing ecological disaster. I hate to be Master of the Obvious, but it doesn’t matter how conciliatory corporations, Republicans, or anything else the Left hates are -- the progressives will still complain, and cast baseless aspersions of vast conspiracies meant to cripple, belittle, and marginalize the little guy. Case in point: hullabaloo over the Citizens United v. FEC ruling.

Regarding the question of corporations as people, Friedman addresses this in Achbar’s film -- corporations are a legal, artificial entities that have (some of) the rights and privileges of a human being -- like the ability to acquire, own, and sell property, among others. Does a headquarters building in Washington -- the building itself -- have moral responsibility? Does a burst oil pipe in the Gulf of Mexico have a moral obligation to the marine life in the Gulf to not burst? No. Of course not…that would be silly. Do the people comprising the corporation have moral obligations to their customers or employees? I think this premise is very much up for discussion (SPOILER ALERT: my answer is “no”).

I’m no Nobel Laureate economist, but I know bullshit when I smell it…and it’s pretty stinky in this film. Take, for example, their discussion of (negative) externalities:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCGTD5Bn1m0

To believe the way Achbar frames it, an externality is far more than just an unintended consequence of commercial behavior (which it is) -- it’s a sinister plot to foist really bad things upon unsuspecting, innocent bystanders -- something only Gargamel could do to those pesky little Smurfs!

"Ooo, those goody-goody Smurfs make me sick!"

But that just isn’t the case. A (negative) externality really is just an unintended consequence of commercial behavior. Perhaps it was an organizational snafu or a critical design flaw. Mistakes happen, and BP is no more in the oil business to destroy the world’s ecosystems than it is to ride the ferris wheel at the county fair. And still, progressives demand that corporations behave morally! I’ve even seen one outcry after today’s news that BP may have found a method that turns the spill into a drill (from which we all benefit, including the mullet that make those delicious panhandle po’ boys), an outcry that says “Why do I get the feeling that BP is more concerned with getting the oil than stopping the leak?” Umm…excuse me, but siphoning the oil may not stop the leak, but it’s stopping the pollution…and they’re doing it because, oh, I don’t know, they’re in the business of bringing oil to the surface for commercial and industrial use. My question is this: if the pollution stops, why is BP’s motive any of our business?

At the end of the day, market forces (read: consumer preferences) ultimately matter most to a corporation and will shape its behavior more quickly than any progressive tirade against them. The oil market is a little bit trickier, thanks to OPEC and our “friends” in Saudi Arabia, but generally speaking, what consumers do (and don’t do) in a market matters. Apple recognized this last year when the House was considering comprehensive climate change legislation, and withdrew from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce over the Chamber’s opposition to cap-and-trade. For Apple, it was important to internalize the social cost of carbon production/pollution by depriving itself of the economic benefits of Chamber membership, so that it’s core business philosophy (and practices) more closely matched the values of its droves of consumer supporters. There’s nothing inherently moral about that decision -- it’s an economic choice made by a firm that wants to retain its customer base. Conversely, it’s not inherently immoral for corporations to do things that carry negative externalities.

So, again, as I said before -- the people comprising corporations are not obligated in the slightest to behave according to some arbitrary standard of morality (incidentally, I find it hilarious that in a post-modern world where relativistic attitudes in ethics prevail among the Left, progressive activists now presume some absolutist moral superiority over the rest of us -- don’t you?). Should we as consumers alter our preferences? Well, sure. In fact, I’m one of the only conservatives I know who supports the fundamentals of President Obama’s climate goals, if not his or the Democratic Party’s particular proposed methods for achieving reform. Corporation revenues are nothing more than a reflection of the revealed preference of income-bearing consumers in a market. But I digress.

All I’m asking for out of the Left (with no hope of actually getting it) is a little consistency: either corporations are people with moral obligations to market actors, but with full legal rights, privileges, and benefits conferred upon persons in our system of government (including but not limited to freedom of speech and due process of law), or they are not people, and therefore have no human moral obligations to society. So which is it?

George welcomes you to read his personal blog, IntelligencePlease.com, and reminds you that the only thing that will piss off a liberal more than a person who is happy working hard is a conservative who is just as smart as they are. You can also follow him on Twitter (@stackiii).