It’s getting hard to keep up with the engulfment of every aspect of our lives by the government, and of every aspect of government by the Executive branch. Most worrisome of all is the extent to which regulatory control of the nation’s affairs, and the disbursement of the nation’s wealth, have fallen under the supremacy of a vast administrative apparatus, elected by and accountable to nobody. This leviathan, which wields almost unlimited power, is an agglomeration of departments, agencies, and federal corporations with vague and often overlapping mandates. Nobody even knows exactly how many of these agencies there are, and nobody knows even approximately how many regulations they have, in aggregate, imposed upon the ovine American masses. (Because of this no citizen can possibly be sure, as he goes about his business, that he is wholly in compliance with this great regulatory reticulum, but it is almost certain that he is not, and is therefore liable, at some functionary’s whim, to Federal prosecution.) Once created, these administrative agencies are generally immortal, and the cost of their operation tends to rise, automatically, in every budget cycle. The whole thing can best be imagined, in both form and prognosis, as a great, metastatic tumor.
Yesterday this aggressive neoplasm claimed another vital organ, as the Federal Communications Commission seized regulatory control of the Internet. As I described in an earlier post, it did so by adopting a secret 332-page White House plan on a partisan 3-2 vote. The nation, and the peoples’ representatives in Congress, pleaded with the Commission’s chairman at least to make the plan public before the vote was taken, but he would not.
Also from yesterday’s news: the President taunted the timorous GOP, daring them even to try to stop his flamboyantly lawless amnesty plan for illegal aliens — a plan that, it is increasingly obvious, is first and foremost an act of naked racial and cultural aggression against the traditional American nation, and against the supremacy of the Constitution. Today, the Republican Senate leader has compliantly abandoned his only weapon against this usurpation of power, namely a DHS-funding bill that had explicitly withheld money for the President’s amnesty program. The Senate’s new, ‘clean’ bill now goes to the House, where it will meet stiffer resistance.
There is some hope yet on this front: the whole thing may be a ploy to avoid a Senate filibuster. If the House now amends the Senate bill and sends it back to the upper chamber, my understanding is that the amended bill may only require 51 votes to pass. (I may be mistaken about this.) Meanwhile, the House is reportedly now considering a stopgap bill that would fund the DHS for three weeks.
Finally, yesterday I learned that the Treasury Department had gone ahead and handed over about three billion dollars of your money to health insurers, despite having been explicitly denied Congressional authorization to do so. Asked by the House Ways and Means Committee to explain themselves, they refused.
I know: penny-ante stuff. Chump change. But it all adds up. As someone once said, “a billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”
43 Comments
Any insight on what may have caused the Senate leader to cave? What is he, as well as the Speaker, afraid of?
The Executive branch of our government has gone rogue. Not only lawless but criminal. I hope the House stops the DHS bill dead in the water.
Long-term Incumbencephalopathy.
Malcolm? Strike the “Long term”?
I hear there’s a new strain. Kinda like cholesterol except fataler.
And while you’re at it, strike this.
I am glad to see that you are opining about net neutrality, as it has much greater interest than whether the dress is gold and white or blue and black. (It’s gold and white.)
I notice that you are unhappy that the FCC is regulating the Internet, much as it already regulates television, radio, and telephony. Let’s imagine some of the things which could happen if the Internet was not subject to federal regulation.
1) Comcast and Time Warner Cable decide that it is not economically feasible for them to provide carriage to small websites, so they send you a notice demanding $10,000 per month, or they will make your transmission speed so slow that nobody will visit your site.
2) Comcast and Time Warner Cable are run by effete pantywaist liberals who are disgusted with the bilge promulgated on NRO, Drudge, and Breitbart, so they slow those websites down to a crawl, while letting Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell have all the megabytes they want.
3) As a Comcast user, I can tell you that they are the most feckless and incompetent organization known to man (although I just learned that I can use HughesNet for Internet access, so in a few days, it will be bye, bye Comcast). I’ve heard similar things about Time Warner Cable. In their ineptitude, they characterize your site as a child pornography site, block access to it, and you have no recourse.
The rationale for putting telephony under FCC purview was that telephone service is essential for commerce, information, and communication. Hence Ma Bell was required to have a high level of service, provide indestructible phones, and do things which were not in its economic self-interest (e.g., providing telephone service in rural areas). The rationale for regulation of the Internet is much the same.
Perhaps you think that the evils of government regulation are so immense that you would willingly give Comcast and Time Warner Cable the ability to shut down your website at their whim. Cost of freedom, you know. Or perhaps you think that the benefits of the diversity of views which can be ensured only when all sites have equal access to their potential readers justifies federal oversight which guarantees this. Or perhaps you don’t care much one way or another, but the latest action of the FCC gives you an opportunity to fulminate against big, bad government.
Which is it?
I would add that Comcast and Time Warner Cable are seeking to merge (sort of like the Mets merging with the Houston Astros). If consummated, the combined entity would essentially be a monopoly exercising control over access to the Internet, save a few small players like FiOS and HughesNet. Absent regulation, it would have more concentrated media power than Hearst ever had. You’re OK with that?
The DoJ (Federal Government) passes regulations giving *guidelines for sentencing* and we get
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/27/man-gets-life-in-prison-for-se.html
Given that the GOP is timorous, my question is, “What, specifically, are they afraid of?” Does the president have something on the leaders of the GOP that gives him leeway for taunting?
Peter,
Gee, that’s funny — my website’s working fine, thanks, and I have yet to receive a notice alerting me to my new $10,000-a-month payment plan. Also, I figure if Comcast wants to charge big rich companies like Netflix extra money for all the bandwidth they hog, so they can pass along the savings to us little guys, that’s fine with me. Nothing broken here that I can see.
It’s striking how well your entirely predictable stance on this latest expansion of government power follows the standard liberal template:
1) Declare some crisis that hasn’t happened yet. (Remind you of anything else?)
2) ‘Solve’ the ‘problem’ by carving away another piece of our lives and liberties to put under the irreversible control of the Federal behemoth and the unaccountable busybodies who run it.
3) Repeat steps 1) and 2), until there is nothing outside the State.
But I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t engage in a tedious round of bickering with you about this. The arguments for and against ‘Net neutrality’ are easily found, and I have no doubt that interested readers can find ample support for whichever side of the dispute suits their temperament, as you have obviously done. And when it comes to the sickening way this thing was brought off, I’ve already said everything I need to, both above and here. (Actually, I’m a little surprised that even you are as thrilled about this new regulatory package as you seem to be, considering that the government hasn’t even allowed anybody to read it yet.)
As for fulminating against Big Government: why, yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing. (Keep checking in, and you’ll probably catch me doing it again!)
I’ll let you in on a little secret: I have a deep and many-splendored antipathy to Big Government. One reason for that is that once you’ve got beyond the essential functions of government — and the United States passed that point a very long time ago — expansion of government power always involves corresponding contractions, whether actual or potential, of liberty. (As Dennis Prager succinctly put it, “the bigger the State, the smaller the citizen.”)
The growth of government, and the consolidation of its power and oversight over every aspect of our lives, is relentless — and liberties, once lost, are seldom regained. That alone, in my view, is sufficient reason that every click of that ratchet should be resisted in principle unless there is an overwhelmingly persuasive case to be made for it. If such a case is to be made, the full text of proposed regulations should be made available to all for public debate, and the outcome determined by our elected representatives. What we got instead was a secret plan adopted on a 3-2 vote by unaccountable apparatchiks. (That rumbling sound you hear is the Founders turning over in their graves.)
But hey, that’s just my opinion. You, on the other hand, can always be counted on to fulminate in favor of Big Government with comforting, almost sidereal, regularity. Even as I was writing this post I saw your comment taking shape; I knew it was coming, and just what it would say. (I imagine that by now several of our readers did too.) I almost went ahead and posted it for you, just as a favor, because I’m that kind of a pal.
So you go right ahead on, Peter. Do what you must to advance the ‘progressive’ agenda, and to bring every last little thing in this once-great land of ours under the wise guidance, and sheltering arm, of the State. Enumerate for us at every opportunity the benevolent virtues of Ingsoc.
And we who remember what this nation was meant to be will resist you as long as we draw breath.
Henry:
Mitch McConnell is a career politician, and a long-serving incumbent. There are a great many interests that exert a pull on a man like that, and as far as I can tell he is unencumbered by any principles. In particular, Republican leadership in both House and Senate must juggle two competing claims on their attention regarding immigration: on the one hand from the enormous (and if you are the Senate Majority Leader, generous) business interests that seek to keep wages low, and on the other from the conservative base that understands very well what is being done to them, and to the traditional American nation, and wants to stop it. McConnell ran on grand promises to fight hard against Obamacare and against amnesty for illegals, but now that he’s in, he can get back to business.
It’s important to understand the way powerful members of Congress play interests against each other. People often imagine that the big corporations and other interests bribe the Congressmen to do their bidding, but it really goes, most of the time, the other way. (It’s important to understand that it is actually very difficult to distinguish, from the outside, between blackmail and bribery.) Members of Congress deliberately take up complex and controversial bills (they call them ‘milkers’) that affect competing corporate and lobbying interests in opposite ways, then go back and forth to each side, suggesting that they might be open to persuasion as regards their upcoming vote. Sometimes they can keep this up for months or even years on a single legislative proposal. It is their mode de vie.
Golly DC is busy these days.
http://boingboing.net/2015/02/27/act-now-congress-wants-to-fas.html
JK,
Gosh, I have just returned from across the pond where I read a disturbing blog entry to find your disturbing comment and link. It seems the wasted agency misnamed Homeland Security is funded for naught. It is flush with revenue and time wasters while America’s main domestic threat is located at 1600 Pa. Ave. Add to him his executive branch apparatchiks running rough shod over the FCC, Treasury, DOJ, Treasury, EPA and so on. His entire party as well as too many Rs are apparently collaborators in this treachery. If America was ever in need of a coup, the real kind, not the one underway now…the table seems to be set. Something must give.
Actually, the reason that Mitch McConnell made a grudging concession to reality is this: Republicans already have their hands full in 2016 with a weak field of candidates challenging an immensely popular Democratic candidate, who trounces each of her potential challengers in surveys. The spectacle of the Tantrum Caucus shutting down Homeland Security to object to a lawful executive order sickens pretty much everybody outside the right wing bubble.
Republicans were justifiably blamed for the other times when they shut down the government, or threatened debt default, in an effort to extract unilateral concessions from Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They may have no concern for the economic ruin which those actions caused, or the poor schlubs who have to show up for work in the mundane task of protecting us against terrorists, but the great mass of Americans do. McConnell knows this, and is keenly interested in preventing the nihilists in the House from making him Minority Leader again and boosting Hillary’s already considerable advantage still further.
It’s that simple. No reason to over-think this.
Little confused WW. This one?
http://warontherocks.com/2014/09/congress-can-fix-dhs-but-needs-to-fix-itself-first/
But reason enough to worry about the glibness with which the legitimate concerns of well-informed intelligent citizens are dismissed by monolithic political animus.
Trouble with those surveys you’re familiar with Half-Blind is, they hand out the questionnaires at the entrance to the Clinton Library in Little Rock.
I think I recall the markets setting records … and I doubt little ol’ ladies out in Salt Lake City won’t mind much should she not get a feel-up from a TSA schlub.
Pah. The GOP initially offered the Democrats a bill that gave them full funding of DHS, except for bankrolling this President’s monumentally arrogant amnesty plan — which has already been ruled lawless by a Federal judge — and the Democrats blocked it. If the DHS had been ‘shut down’ — which wouldn’t have happened anyway, as the vast majority of DHS employees are ‘essential’ and so would still work, and would be paid once the funding is resolved — it would be the Democrats’ fault, not the GOP’s.
It amazes me how a separate and equal branch of government, whose most explicitly articulated means of exerting its own sovereign authority is the power of the purse, is routinely demonized for performing this legitimate Constitutional duty — in this case, resisting an intolerable and arguably treasonous usurpation of authority by a high-handed and contemptuous President.
But the founding American principle of ‘checks and balances’ is passÁ© stuff these days, it seems. When everything is ‘the moral equivalent of war’, anything short of complete failure to march in subservient lockstep with the Executive (as long as that Executive is a Big-Government liberal) is a ‘tantrum’.
The Clinton’s…wonder how many Putin petro dollars are being laundered through the Clinton Foundation/Library/massage parlor/used cars etc etc ?
Malcolm.
An Executive branch putsch? Fits this bunch well.
With all due respect, Pete (and forgive me for my coarseness here): up yours. More people than you think are now awakening to the Constitutional crisis in this Republic. The flamboyant excesses and antagonistic arrogance of this administration are politicizing millions of formerly apathetic Americans. We — and by ‘we’ I mean not the flaccid GOP leadership, but those legions of us on the genuine Right who understand the peril this Republic faces — are going to fight you, and God willing, we will crush you.
I’ll make this prediction also: despite her polling, I don’t think Hillary Clinton will ever be the President of the United States. In fact, I don’t think she will even win the Democratic nomination in 2016.
Upon reflection, I realized how grievously wrong I was about my earlier comments about net neutrality. Of course unregulated monopolies always act in the public interest! C’mon, everybody knows that. Comcast and Time Warner would never let a silly little thing like their fiduciary responsibility to maximize shareholder value stand in the way of keeping the Internet the way it is, even when doing so is against their economic self-interest. I’m sure that the holders of CMCSA and TWC are a great bunch of guys and gals, and wouldn’t mind a bit taking a hit to earnings to support corporate altruism. What was I thinking?
Steve Wozniak, speaking of net neutrality yesterday, noted that “sometimes, the little guy wins.” I started working for Internet companies in 1994, when the leading online services were Prodigy and Compuserve. Wozniak, of course, helped start the most successful company in the history of man. Why should those of us in Silicon Valley who built this thing mind if it becomes subject to the whims of monopolists? All of the major Internet firms (except Amazon) were born here, grew up here, and continue to thrive, prosper, and innovate. What do we know about the Internet?
Regarding Hillary: I would be happy to take that bet. I will bet you a milkshake – and give you 5:1 odds – that she is nominated by the Democrats, and another milkshake with even odds that she wins the general election with at least 300 electoral votes.
I would also bet even odds that Jeb Bush is the Republican nominee.
Here’s what will happen: Christie and Jindal will flame out early. Cruz and Carson will make a lot of noise and get a lot of attention, but won’t get nearly enough delegates to get close. Walker has the backing of Charles and David, but he’s gaffe prone – witness his statement yesterday equating Wisconsin workers exercising their First Amendment rights with ISIS – and he won’t get any traction with independents. Bush will get the nomination, bloodied from his battles with the extreme right candidates – and then lose big to Hillary.
What monopoly? You just said yourself that you were leaving Comcast for another provider. There’s no crisis here. When there is, we can have this conversation again.
Anyway, if Net Neutrality is such a great idea, then we shouldn’t have had to impose it the way we did. In particular, keeping the plan secret was an astonishingly defiant and insulting slap in the face.
As for the nominations: Milkshakes are for children. I’ll bet you a bottle of whisky. (Scotch for me, sour-mash for you.)
Jeb Bush just had a very tepid response at CPAC. (He was booed.) People are starting to realize that we need to nominate a conservative candidate, rather than another Dem-Lite RINO like Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, etc. So far the best GOP bets look like Scott Walker or Ben Carson, but it’s early days yet. (Too bad Jeff Sessions isn’t running.)
I very much doubt that the Republicans will end up nominating Jeb Bush, to set up Bush v. Clinton 2016. (Boy, just imagine the fresh-faced, youthful enthusiasm.) If we nominate Bush, we deserve to lose. And my bottle of whisky says that Hillary won’t survive the primary process. (Too old, too sick, too unprincipled, too incompetent, too dishonest, too nasty, too much baggage.)
Bush v. Clinton is not going to happen.
Gatecrashing conversations, as an outsider, which concern US domestic politics is rude, so I don’t usually indulge. I just sit outside of the ring and watch the fight.
There is just something about the vehemence of your hatred of Hillary, which is a bit over the top. Is she older than Reagan was when he was elected? Is she sick? Is she incompetent? Is she nasty?
I know that she has been ridiculed for her overstatement of the danger that she once faced, and she “misspoke”, but show me an honest politician. I don’t think that people in high office are accustomed to telling the truth.
The fact is that Hillary is a clever, resilient woman and she just might win. Not for a minute do I think that she is incompetent, unlike George W, who made the world smile.
And Malcolm, when you’re making that list detailing all Hillary’s faults I can’t help but feel that you don’t like the fact that she is a woman vying for the top job. Correct me if I’m wrong.
1 human year is equal to 7 dog years. Hence, Hitlary is 469 bitch years old. That’s much older than Reagan was when he was elected.
What do you mean if looks could kill?
[img]http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Z2UO0zCPA5c/VOSquyNVhwI/AAAAAAAAfU0/SI5cg6MWX6Q/s1600/-1.jpg[/img]
*I’m temporarily (the Sundays shows are about to come on) looking for something I read yesterday the Obama team set up Facebook accounts for each of the campaigns .. quickly shutting both down after the election as it wouldn’t be helpful to have ‘loonies’ running the administrations after
I’ll get back to this later but, so I don’t have to get into me email .. and maybe this will help *explain* One-Eye’s enthusiasm.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/as-obama-nears-close-of-his-tenure-commitment-to-silicon-valley-is-clear/2015/02/27/3bee8088-bc8e-11e4-bdfa-b8e8f594e6ee_story.html
Hillary is counting on her gender to win. She has nothing else going for her. Her biggest challenge is she has no soul. A soulless female who only serves to check off another quota box on the Democrats diversity list. Ability and fitness do not factor in.
As far as a Bush/Clinton match up, maybe they could just flip a coin and then run together unopposed.
Musey, I’ll stand by every word of my characterization of Hillary Clinton. But my feeling toward her isn’t ‘hatred’; it’s more like whatever the opposite of ‘admiration’ is. (I do admit it contains a healthy admixture of revulsion.)
And no, it isn’t because she’s a woman. I am immensely fond of women, and history provides us several reassuring examples of strong and capable female leaders. My objection here is not to the idea of a woman as president; it is to the appalling idea of this woman as president.
We have had quite enough of Clintons and Bushes, thank you. There are over three hundred million people in the United States. Let’s find someone else.
Musey, when John McCain ran for office in 2008, he was 72 years old. It was impossible to go a day without hearing that he might die in office.
Hillary Clinton will be 69 when she runs. It seems the rule now is that no one is allowed to mention age.
Is she incompetent? Yes, TBH answered that.
Is she nastry? Odd question, but yes. She defended a man who raped a child. She has also defended her husband’s boorish behavior, which may include rape.
Malcolm, I tend to agree with you that the USA needs some new blood. It’s amazing how the world’s foremost democracy (and I know you don’t agree with the democratic system) appears to increasingly to run along the lines of a monarchy.
To all of you saying that Hillary’s gender is an advantage, I can only shrug. On what grounds can you make such an assertion? Women around the world are, by and large, kept in their place. Just look around any parliamentary chamber, any boardroom, anywhere that the important movers and shakers gather. The women are not there. Not at the top. With a couple of notable exceptions such as Angela Merkel, and in the rapidly fading past, Margaret Thatcher. I think Helen Clarke did a fine job in NZ but I doubt that her profile was high enough for you to have heard of her in the USA. Apart from Indira Gandhi and Benadir Bhuto (please excuse the improvised spelling because I have no idea) I’m hard pressed to think of anyone else, apart from some woman in Argentina whose name escapes me. Christina K?
What I’m saying is, Whitewall, Hillary is embracing her gender because she has no option but to do so. It’s a factor and she knows it, and it may be attractive to some to put a woman in there, but there are many more who will fight it all the way.
If there is a quota system going on here, well, it’s failing miserably.
Dom, that man McCain looked really old, he sounded old, and that extra three years on Hillary and Reagan (I looked at google Henry!) was critical. One more thing Dom, from all that I read from right wing people there is a huge reluctance to acknowledge rape. The usual line is that the woman has made it all up. There’s group think for you. So it’s ironic that you should use Hillary’s defense of her husband to put her down. Her husband may be boorish but he is also charismatic and in the absence of proof….well you know how it goes.
And Henry, your reference to bitch years is truly horrible. Probably misogynistic, certainly out of order, definitely disappointing.
Musey, Hillary rode her husband’s coattails to power. She used and abused borrowed power while he was President. Let’s see, he gave her charge over developing a nationalized “affordable” healthcare plan, which when details emerged, ended up being laughed out of existence, due to its convoluted, highly unworkable structure. The visual displays showing diagrams of her prize system became the subject of jokes for late night talk show comedians.
Her main role as “co-president”, though, was heading up the clean-up squad of what one of her closest aides termed, her husband’s “bimbo eruptions”. She launched campaigns to destroy the other women, whose names were linked to sexual contretemps with her husband. That is where she excelled – launching attacks against other women.
On her own as a Senator, she had no stunning record, preferring to participate in carefully calculated committee positions to bolster her resume for a run for President.
Then we move on to her Secretary of State stint, where US influence waned in the world and she played a starring role in creating the vast power vacuum in the Arab world, using US influence and arms to topple regimes and creating vast swaths of safe havens for terrorists. Her spokespeople couldn’t name any foreign policy successes during her tenure, so they made the number of miles she traveled, “more miles than any Secretary of State in history”, her crowning achievement…
She casts herself as the victim of some vast, right-wing conspiracy, but truly aside from being very good at political assassinations, lying (yes, she and her husband are pathological liars), and fund-raising, her achievements are thin. And her main claim to fame, that of being a champion of women and children, ranks as her most dubious. The only woman she champions is herself. Hopefully, the Clinton dirty laundry, replete with gross abuse of power and rampant corruption, will get a thorough airing this time around.
It’s a matter of opinion, Musey, and, thus far in America, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, however misguided it may be.
My own opinion is that “political correctness” is a crock of sh*t and, in the larger scheme of things, it is preferable to call a spade a “spade” rather than a “club”.
I am also of the opinion that your agressive defense against perceived slights of women in general (rather than deliberate slights of known bitches) is itself offensive. Three out of the four descriptors in the comment I quoted (namely “truly”, “certainly” and “definitely”) are of the superlative variety. You might consider ratcheting back a bit to an occasional comparative descriptor.
Henry, I do a lot of “ratcheting back” so as not to cause offense. You should have seen the unedited version of my remark and you would appreciate my restraint. You are frequently rude and seem to enjoy calling a spade a spade but you object to me using the words truly, certainly and definitely. That is inconsistent with your initially expressed view that everyone is entitled to their own opinion.
Libertybelle, thank you for that spirited defense of the prevailing view (around here).
You know, I’m not a huge fan of Hillary and I’ll take your word for it about her incompetence, but I do object to her age being referred to in “bitch years”. That is not political correctness, it is recoiling from crude, sexist, ignorant commentary. Is that spadelike enough for you Henry?
Just as I was falling asleep last night I remembered our own woman PM, the redoubtable Julia Gillard. How could I have forgotten her, how did I fail to recall the treatment that was meted out to her? I have no idea because she is a prime example of a woman who had the temerity to take the top job being mercilessly picked apart on grounds of her sex. Again, don’t get me wrong. She was a fine parliamentarian until she became PM whereupon she seemed to become wooden and unnaturally stilted, but she didn’t deserve the kind of sustained attack on her person, her figure, her fat arse, her clothes, her hairstyle, and her whiny voice that she had to endure day in and day out.
Musey,
If you had read my comment with comprehension you would have realized that I was objecting to your exaggerating my antipathy, expressly directed toward Hillary alone, into misogyny. Your repeated mindless outbursts are what we call “flying off the handle when you’re full of it”.
Henry, you may be a clever guy but you are the one who lacks comprehension. The phrase “bitch years” is disrespectful to women in general. As for “mindless flying off the handle”, I think that is what you have just done. Spectacularly.
I’m especially clever with money. But like most guys, I’ll have work on my comprehension of women …
With some women, you know, you just don’t know, you know?
Henry, can I have a loan, being poor an’all?
Speaking of women and the presidency, I and others have noticed Carly Fiorina handling herself very well in interviews and in speeches. She is actually a woman of real accomplishment.
Musey,
My cleverness with money is hereditary. But I am always willing to learn from wiser men (and, of course, women, albeit on rare occasion). According to Big Bill the Bard: “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.”
WW,
There are just as many accomplished women as men. But as Nicholson pointed out, you just have to forgo reason and accountability.