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Michael Barone knows what a gangster government looks like.
Almost a year ago, in a Washington Examiner column on the Chrysler bailout, I reflected on the Obama administration’s decision to force bondholders to accept 33 cents on the dollar on secured debts while giving United Auto Worker retirees 50 cents on the dollar on unsecured debts.
This was a clear violation of the ordinary bankruptcy rule that secured creditors are fully paid off before unsecured creditors get anything. The politically connected UAW folks got preference over politically unconnected bondholders. “We have just seen an episode of Gangster Government,” I wrote. “It is likely to be a continuing series.”
Fast-forward to last Friday, when the Securities Exchange Commission filed a complaint against Goldman Sachs, alleging that the firm violated the law when it sold a collaterized debt obligation based on mortgage-backed securities without disclosing that the CDO was assembled with the help of hedge fund investor John Paulson.
On its face the complaint seems flimsy. Paulson has since become famous because his firm made billions by betting against mortgage-backed securities. But he wasn’t a big name then, and the sophisticated firm buying the CDO must have assumed the seller believed its value would go down. …
We have a few items on New Jersey’s new Guv, Chris Christie. First is by George Will.
The bridge spanning the Delaware River connects New Jersey’s capital with this town where the nation’s most interesting governor occasionally eats lunch at Cafe Antonio. It also connects New Jersey’s government with reality.
The bridge is a tutorial on a subject this government has flunked — economics, which is mostly about incentives. At the Pennsylvania end of the bridge, cigarette shops cluster: New Jersey’s per-pack tax is double Pennsylvania’s. In late afternoon, Gov. Chris Christie says, the bridge is congested with New Jersey government employees heading home to Pennsylvania, where the income tax rate is 3 percent, compared with New Jersey’s top rate of 9 percent.
There are 700,000 more Democrats than Republicans in New Jersey, but in November Christie flattened the Democratic incumbent, Jon Corzine. Christie is built like a burly baseball catcher, and since his inauguration just 13 weeks ago, he has earned the name of the local minor-league team — the Trenton Thunder. …
John Fund, noting school funding election results, says the people are with Christie for now.
Overtaxed New Jersey voters sent a clear message in yesterday’s voting on 479 public school budgets: Enough is enough. A stunning 54% of the budgets went down to defeat, the most since the recession year of 1976. The results have clear implications for a bitter power struggle between New Jersey GOP Governor Chris Christie and the state’s powerful 200,000-member New Jersey Education Association. …
Jennifer Rubin blogs on Christie.
… No wonder labor leaders are going berserk. If Christie wins, Big Labor will get its comeuppance, New Jersey will prosper, and once again liberal governance will be replaced by something better — responsible fiscal conservatism.
Daniel Foster in National Review says you haven’t made it in New Jersey until the unions want you dead.
You haven’t made it in New Jersey until organized labor wants you dead. By that measure, Chris Christie is already one of the most influential governors in the Garden State’s — shall we say, colorful history. Just a few months into his term, Christie has taken the fight to the blood-engorged leech of a public sector so quickly and so hard that one teacher-union apparatchik sent an e-mail to thousands praying for his untimely demise.
But Chris Christie lives. And nearly two-thirds of the state’s bloated school budgets are not so lucky, having perished at the polls — the local tax levy proposed by each school district in New Jersey is subject to voter approval — in greater proportion than in any year since 1976. This is undoubtedly a win for New Jersey taxpayers, who recognize the necessity, if not the palatability, of Christie’s strong fiscal medicine in a state that teeters on the brink of bankruptcy even as it pays the highest tax burden in the nation.
Faced with an $11 billion hole in a $30 billion budget, Christie used his broad constitutional discretion (New Jersey’s is arguably the most powerful governorship in the Union) to wield not a scalpel or an axe, but a scalpel the size of an axe against a Trenton machine rivaled only by Chicago and Albany in sheer size and scope. …
Governor Christie was on the Don Imus show Friday morning. Whatever you think of the iMan, he can do a good interview. Click here to see the two parts of the interview.
Stuart Taylor continues his series on the upcoming Scotus pick. This time he gushes over Merrick Garland.
I recently asserted that any of the four people on the list initially leaked by the White House would be an excellent nominee to succeed retiring Justice John Paul Stevens. (See “An Excellent Supreme Court Shortlist,” 4/10/10, p. 15.) Now I’d like to argue that the wisest choice would be Judge Merrick Garland of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
I hasten to add that the consensus that Garland would be the least controversial, most easily confirmed nominee is the least of my reasons for praising him.
Nor is my personal relationship with Garland a substantial factor, although full disclosure is in order: We became friendly in law school, working together on the law review in the mid-1970s. We had dinner at each other’s homes years ago and, more recently, have met for lunch once or twice a year. He invited my wife and me, among many others, to his chambers to watch President Obama’s inauguration. Garland has been guarded about his views, and I know nothing about them beyond the public record. But I can testify — as can many others — that he is about as fair-minded, judicious, and straight as a straight-arrow can be.
To be sure, ranking Garland and the three other shortlisters — all people of outstanding integrity and intellect — is a close call. …
Rush Limbaugh has on op-ed in WSJ following along on the Clinton/Obama slander of tea party people.
The latest liberal meme is to equate skepticism of the Obama administration with a tendency toward violence. That takes me back 15 years ago to the time President Bill Clinton accused “loud and angry voices” on the airwaves (i.e., radio talk-show hosts like me) of having incited Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh. What self-serving nonsense. Liberals are perfectly comfortable with antigovernment protest when they’re not in power.
From the halls of the Ivy League to the halls of Congress, from the antiwar protests during the Vietnam War and the war in Iraq to the anticapitalist protests during International Monetary Fund and World Bank meetings, we’re used to seeing leftist malcontents take to the streets. Sometimes they’re violent, breaking shop windows with bricks and throwing rocks at police. Sometimes there are arrests. Not all leftists are violent, of course. But most are angry. It’s in their DNA. They view the culture as corrupt and capitalism as unjust.
Now the liberals run the government and they’re using their power to implement their radical agenda. Mr. Obama and his party believe that the election of November 2008 entitled them to make permanent, “transformational” changes to our society. In just 16 months they’ve added more than $2 trillion to the national debt, essentially nationalized the health-care system, the student-loan industry, and have their sights set on draconian cap-and-trade regulations on carbon emissions and amnesty for illegal aliens.
Had President Obama campaigned on this agenda, he wouldn’t have garnered 30% of the popular vote. …
Instapundit tells us how our leaders celebrated Earth Day. They took separate jet entourages to NY.
… On a day when many Americans will be reflecting upon how they can reduce their impact on the environment, President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden boarded separate jets in Washington on Earth Day morning to fly 250 miles up the east coast to New York, where they will land at separate airports to attend separate events within a few miles of each other. …
Writing in the Journal, Richard Lindzen says when it comes to global warming, the political class doesn’t get it. Actually, they do. They’re in it for power.
In mid-November of 2009 there appeared a file on the Internet containing thousands of emails and other documents from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in Great Britain. How this file got into the public domain is still uncertain, but the emails, whose authenticity is no longer in question, provided a view into the world of climate research that was revealing and even startling.
In what has come to be known as “climategate,” one could see unambiguous evidence of the unethical suppression of information and opposing viewpoints, and even data manipulation. The Climatic Research Unit is hardly an obscure outpost; it supplies many of the authors for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Moreover, the emails showed ample collusion with other prominent researchers in the United States and elsewhere.
One might have thought the revelations would discredit the allegedly settled science underlying currently proposed global warming policy, and, indeed, the revelations may have played some role in the failure of last December’s Copenhagen climate conference to agree on new carbon emissions limits. But with the political momentum behind policy proposals and billions in research funding at stake, the impact of the emails appears to have been small. …
In the Daily Beast, Mark McKinnon compares the media’s treatment of golfing presidents.
… And here’s how ABC reported an outing after Obama had just returned from a trip to Germany visiting the horror of the Holocaust camps: “Nobody would fault Obama for taking Sunday to catch up on sleep and unwind after the breakneck travel schedule. But instead of vegging out on the couch, Obama returned to the White House for only about 90 minutes, then hopped in his motorcade and went right back to Andrews to get in nine holes of golf at one of the three courses on the base.”
And how about this headline from The Washington Post: “Just the Sport for a Leader Most Driven.” Richard Leiby reports, “To some, Obama’s frequent outings reflect a cool self-confidence.” The article then quotes a sports psychologist who said Obama seemed able to play golf despite the grim reports by the media about the wars and the economy.
That bears repeating. Here is a journalist remarking about Obama that he is “able” to play golf despite war casualties and economic disaster. For Bush, the press couldn’t believe that he would dare golf at such a time, but for Obama they marvel that he can.
Now that’s a double standard that unfortunately we’ve come to expect. When it comes to press coverage of Bush vs. Obama, it’s become par for the course.