Links and Minifeatures 2009 04 27 Monday

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Carnival of Personal Finance

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The Cost of Media Bias

Andrew Breitbart has more.

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The Government Becomes a Loan Shark

When I first heard rumblings in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere that the government would not allow big banks to repay their TARP loans, I thought it was either a genuine misunderstanding or an unfair partisan canard against the Obama administration. But the stories continue in the press and Tim Geithner has not done what he needs to do to kill this story: publicly announce that almost any bank that wants to pay back the TARP can bring a "check" to him personally.

It used to be that when you borrowed money from the mob, you could almost never get free. Once the mob got its hooks into you, you found that they owned you.

Now instead of the mob, it's the federal government that won't let you free, even if you want to pay off your loan with interest.

It's about getting and keeping control. In other words, power. The Obama administration has done more in 100 days to perpetuate their own hold on power than the Bush Administration did in eight years with the War on Terror, or whatever the Obama administration is calling their attempts to control terrorists with lawyers this week.

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Obama's asking his cabinet for $100 Million in savings. Instapundit illustrates how much difference that would make.

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Green jobs: The next sub-prime mortgage?

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Where's the Backbone?

Well, not exactly. Look at the fate of various proposals in the Obama budget, and the question that arises is not Walter Mondale's famous "Where's the beef?" It's "Where's the backbone?"
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The President Ties His Own Hands on Terror

Disclosure of the techniques is likely to be met by faux outrage, and is perfectly packaged for media consumption. It will also incur the utter contempt of our enemies. Somehow, it seems unlikely that the people who beheaded Nicholas Berg and Daniel Pearl, and have tortured and slain other American captives, are likely to be shamed into giving up violence by the news that the U.S. will no longer interrupt the sleep cycle of captured terrorists even to help elicit intelligence that could save the lives of its citizens.

Which brings us to the next of the justifications for disclosing and thus abandoning these measures: that they don't work anyway, and that those who are subjected to them will simply make up information in order to end their ordeal. This ignorant view of how interrogations are conducted is belied by both experience and common sense. If coercive interrogation had been administered to obtain confessions, one might understand the argument. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), who organized the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, among others, and who has boasted of having beheaded Daniel Pearl, could eventually have felt pressed to provide a false confession. But confessions aren't the point. Intelligence is. Interrogation is conducted by using such obvious approaches as asking questions whose correct answers are already known and only when truthful information is provided proceeding to what may not be known. Moreover, intelligence can be verified, correlated and used to get information from other detainees, and has been; none of this information is used in isolation.

Obama is thinking like a lawyer; he needs to think like the leader of a country who is responsible for the welfare of its inhabitants.

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The Sting in Four Parts

For those who don't recognize the reference, it's both a confidence game conclusion and a movie about a con.

Undaunted, Obama offered his New Foundation speech as the complete, contextual, canonical text for the domestic revolution he aims to enact. It had everything we have come to expect from Obama:

The Whopper: The boast that he had "identified $2 trillion in deficit reductions over the next decade." It takes audacity to repeat this after it had been so widely exposed as transparently phony. Most of this $2 trillion is conjured up by refraining from spending $180 billion a year for 10 more years of surges in Iraq. Hell, why not make the "deficit reductions" $10 trillion -- the extra $8 trillion coming from refraining from repeating the $787 billion stimulus package annually through 2019.

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A World Of Trouble For Obama

Now comes the interesting part: when it starts to become evident that Bush did not create rogue states, terrorist movements, Middle Eastern blood feuds or Russian belligerence -- and that shake-ups in U.S. diplomacy, however enlightened, might not have much impact on them.

The Illusions of Obama's Idealism Abroad

The damage has been limited to theatrics. But as Kennedy learned, weak theatrics can induce aggression. And Obama is accumulating some weak theatrics.
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Medical care: words versus realities

The bottom line is medical care. But the rhetoric and the talking points are about insurance. Many people who could afford health insurance do not choose to have it because they know that medical care will be available at the nearest emergency room, whether they have insurance or not.

Read the whole thing.

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Tea Party Economics

Some analysts have made the case that Americans are not overtaxed (at the federal level) and that therefore the protests were not justified. But this misses the point. Government spending is exploding, with the Congressional Budget Office projecting $9.3 trillion in deficits over the next 10 years. People know that this spending represents future taxes.

Here is an interesting set of facts. If the government increased the top tax rate from the current rate of 35% to 100% (yes, that's right 100%), it would only collect an extra $400 billion this year. In other words, confiscating all the income that is currently taxed at 35% would not raise enough revenue to cover any of the annual deficits projected in the next 10 years. There is no way that tax hikes on the rich alone can pay for proposed spending in the current budget.

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Misconceptions About the Interrogation Memos

As a former federal prosecutor, I know a good case from a bad one. I know a case based on solid evidence and even-handed application of the law versus one based on scoring political points. Mr. Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, have professed their desire to take politics out of the Justice Department, to restore integrity to a department that they believe had gone astray under Mr. Bush. Their recent actions, however, speak otherwise.

Do we really want to criminalize policy differences? What happens when the next Republican Administration wants to use this precedent to charge Democratic Obama Administration officials with crimes? Perhaps to avoid that, might the Obama Administration wield all possible power (legal or not) to avoid a Republican successor? Might not all future administrations try to avoid an opposing party successor, by any means possible (Once again, legal or not)? How then, would we differ from the Mexico of 1929-2000, where the appointed PRI candidate always won the elections? Did this period do any good for the government or culture of Mexico? (I assure you, the answer is no).

Damnation of Memory

President Obama would not a want a putative President Palin to begin hearings on who ordered the targeted executions of two suspected Somali pirates, taken out in the middle of protracted negotiations. He would not wish a President Sanford one day to indict those Obama officials who approved the assassination-by-Predator-missile of suspected terrorists and their families in Pakistan -- without habeas corpus, Miranda rights, or avenues of appeal. He would not enjoy a future President Giuliani's bringing indictments of Obama officials over the NSA's exceeding its allotted e-mail intercepts, or the CIA's conducting overseas renditions of suspected terrorists without providing them the benefits of U.S. law.

Two ways to avoid that: Avoid prosecuting the Bush Administration for political differences, or avoid handing over power. There really isn't a third because the precedent Obama would establish by prosecuting them would require the continuance of complete Democratic domination of government in order to avoid future prosecution by the next Republican administration.

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Can You Believe this chutzpah? Telling us he's a deficit fighter after wasting $1.6 Trillion dollars in less than 100 days, and setting up more federal deficit in the remainder of his term than all of his predecessors combined in their full terms. And that includes the previous record holder for fiscal irresponsibility, George W. Bush.

Did I say $1.6 Trillion? More like $3 Trillion for the expansion of TARP alone. Much of that number is already known to be vulnerable to shenanigans, about which Obama and Geithner are doing basically zip.

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They said if I voted for a Republican in 2008, I'd wind up with an autocratic administration determined to wipe out civil rights -- and they were right! The Obama administration has argued for the end of the Michigan v Jackson ruling that requires police to provide an attorney for a suspect once one has been requested.

The Michigan vs Jackson ruling in 1986 established that, if a defendants have a lawyer or have asked for one to be present, police may not interview them until the lawyer is present.

Any such questioning cannot be used in court even if the suspect agrees to waive his right to a lawyer because he would have made that decision without legal counsel, said the Supreme Court.

However, in a current case that seeks to change the law, the US Justice Department argues that the existing rule is unnecessary and outdated.

The sixth amendment of the US constitution protects the right of criminal suspects to be "represented by counsel", but the Obama regime argues that this merely means to "protect the adversary process" in a criminal trial.

The Justice Department, in a brief signed by Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, said the 1986 decision "serves no real purpose" and offers only "meagre benefits".

Hot Air concludes with the right question:

Wasn't Barack Obama supposed to be a Constitutional scholar? Was that in the "How To Dismantle" school of thought?

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Hilarious! Capitalist pranks "free hugs" hippie

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About this Entry

This page contains a single entry by Dan Melson published on April 27, 2009 11:30 PM.

105% Refinancing With No PMI (Maybe) (NOW UP TO 125%) was the previous entry in this blog.

Links and Minifeatures 2009 04 29 Wednesday is the next entry in this blog.

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