Rolling Stone’s strange, dreamy cover of terrorist
It’s interesting, and infuriating. We’ve already seen the rise of what Twitchy calls the “Jaharem” of admirers of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect, in custody since murdering a police officer and engaging in a firefight with law enforcement, then hiding and bleeding in a boat the rest of the day until he was discovered. Now Rolling Stone offers a profile of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the surviving brother of the duo who killed three and injured hundreds of others at the event, including an eight-year-old boy shredded by their bomb.Why not give Tsarnaev the soft focus treatment for that, huh?
A more minor nitpick comes from the teaser for its cover story. Rolling Stone insists on using the name “Jahar Tsarnaev.” That may be how the first name is pronounced, but his name is spelled “Dzhokhar.” It certainly sounds chummy and intimate to use the nickname version his friends used, but that’s hardly appropriate for a news story about a “monster.” Why not use his actual name? Did Rolling Stone assume its readers couldn’t figure out how to say it? As Allahpundit notes in the Green Room, the Jaharem isn’t pleased with the magazine despite the soft-focus treatment Tsarnaev gets on the cover.
http://hotair.com/archives/2013/07/17/rolling-stones-strange-dreamy-cover-of-terrorist/
McCain Orchestrates Another GOP Surrender
Sen. John McCain spent the weekend negotiating with Majority Leader Harry Reid on a deal to avert Reid's threatened use of the "nuclear option" to change Senate rules to eliminate filibusters on Presidential nominations. Through his efforts, McCain was able to secure a complete GOP capitulation on 7 pending nominations. Reid secured all the benefits of exercising the "nuclear option" without the political cost of actually using it.Under the McCain deal, the GOP will provide enough votes to secure the 60 votes needed for cloture and proceed to final consideration of the 7 nominees. In exchange, Reid agreed to replace two current union attorney nominees with two alternative union attorney nominees. McCain's swift surrender ensures that the "nuclear option" is a permanent fixture of the nomination process.
GOP objections to many of the pending nominations were not minor. The first nomination to be approved under the McCain deal was Richard Cordray to be the first Director of the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The CFPB was enacted under the Dodd-Frank legislation and holds sweeping powers over all aspects of the financial and credit sector.
When Cordray was first nominated two years ago, McCain and all but 2 GOP Senators signed a letter vowing to block any nomination unless reforms were made to the agency. A major concern was that Congress was specifically prohibited from exercising any oversight over the Agency's budget. The promise to block that nomination wasn't prompted by concerns about a specific nominee, but a fundamental political principle. McCain's deal is further confirmation that principle are cheap in Washington.
Theoretically, McCain's surrender preserves the right of Republicans to filibuster future nominations. Practically speaking, however, that right has been permanently ceded. If the GOP is willing to fold when it has serious objections to pending nominations, it will easily surrender again in the future the next time Reid threatens the "nuclear option." If the GOP isn't willing to draw a line over flawed nominees like Cordray or Thomas Perez, it never will be.
Reid believed that he could eliminate the filibuster for nominations with a simply majority vote. Democrat Sen. Carl Levin on Tuesday said he believed the change required 67 votes and stated he would vote against Reid's rule change. It would have been better for the GOP to force Reid to vote on the change. Senators would have had to go on record whether they supported Reid or Levin's interpretation of the rules. With a number of vulnerable Democrats up for reelection next year, a vote could have carried political consequences.
McCain, however, helped the Democrats avoid a risky political vote. He also ensured that he is on Harry Reid's speed-dial the next time the GOP raises objections to an Obama nomination.
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/07/17/mccain-orchestrates-another-gop-surrender
Republicans Get Filibusted
Democrats end the 60-vote Senate rule for presidential nominees.
Senate Majority Leader Rich Trumka, er, Harry Reid held a gun to the head of Republicans on the filibuster, Republicans blinked, and President Obama and the AFL-CIO will now get their nominees confirmed for the cabinet and especially a legal quorum for the National Labor Relations Board.Cut through all the procedural blather and that's the essence of the Senate's "deal" Tuesday over the 60-vote filibuster rule. While Democrats didn't formally pull the trigger of the "nuclear option" to allow a mere majority vote to confirm nominees, they have now established a de facto majority-vote rule. Any time Democrats want to do so, they can threaten to pull the majority trigger.
***
Republicans might as well acknowledge this new reality, even if it means admitting defeat in this round. GOP Senators should state clearly for the record that the next time there is a GOP President and a Democratic Senate minority wants to block an appointment with a filibuster, fuhgedaboutit. Majority rule will prevail.Otherwise Republicans will be conceding that the filibuster remains the rule—except when Democrats say it isn't. Democrats would be able to use the filibuster to block confirmation of GOP nominees the way they did John Bolton for U.N. Ambassador during the Bush Presidency, but Republicans couldn't return the favor. Bottom line: This week Democrats killed the filibuster against executive-branch appointees when the same party holds the White House and Senate.
They did so, moreover, to serve AFL-CIO chief Trumka, who all but ordered Mr. Reid to threaten the nuclear option. Big Labor desperately wants a quorum of at least three National Labor Relations Board nominees to keep issuing pro-union orders that have become the NLRB's standard operating procedure in the Obama years. Today there are only three board members and Chairman Mark Pearce is set to resign on August 27.
Under Tuesday's Senate deal, the Obama Administration will agree to withdraw the nominations of the two NLRB board members whom Mr. Obama first appointed in January 2012 as recess appointments though the Senate wasn't in recess. The President will then nominate two new pro-union board members, whom Republicans won't filibuster, as well as two GOP nominees. Mr. Trumka gets his new legal quorum.
The good news here is that this maneuver shouldn't block the legal challenge to the non-recess recess appointments. Both the D.C. and Third Circuit courts of appeal have ruled that NLRB rulings made by those non-recess board members are illegal, and the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the D.C. Circuit's Noel Canning case.
Mr. Trumka and the White House now hope the reconstituted NLRB will reissue those rulings. Then they will argue to the Supreme Court that the case is moot because there is no longer any injury.
But this is wishful thinking. The NLRB no longer has formal jurisdiction over the case now that it is in the courts, a precedent that no less than Justice Elena Kagan endorsed in 2010 in the New Process Steel v. NLRB case when she was Solicitor General.
More broadly, the President has claimed a power to declare when the Senate is in recess, and he can always do so again. Thus the injury from illegal rulings due to illegal appointments could recur, which means the issue is far from moot. This is also a significant dispute about the separation of powers. If the President can decide on his own when the Senate is in recess, then the Senate's advice and consent power is essentially gutted.
The D.C. Circuit ruling said a President can only make recess appointments if the executive-branch vacancy occurs during a Senate recess. Judge David Sentelle's majority opinion is powerful and deserves a Supreme Court hearing. But short of adopting his logic, the High Court can still rule on the legality of recess appointments made during "pro-forma" Senate sessions or in between sessions. If the High Court drops the case, it will mean such appointments are illegal in the Third and D.C. Circuits, but nowhere else.
***
Tuesday's deal also means some dreadful appointees will get to wield power, notably Labor nominee Thomas Perez. (See editorial nearby.) This would have a silver lining if it meant that Senators would put fewer holds on nominees of both parties. Michigan Democrat Carl Levin stopped nearly all Pentagon appointments during George W. Bush's second term, and it is becoming difficult for any President to fill out a government. But we suspect Democrats will still stymie GOP nominees as long as they control the Senate.It's also worth noting why Mr. Reid didn't demand a simple majority vote on judicial nominees. That may still come, but the reason for his caution is political, not a matter of Senate principle. Abortion activists want to retain the right to filibuster any future GOP nominee for the Supreme Court who is on record opposing Roe v. Wade. They fear that overruling the filibuster to get some D.C. Circuit nominees confirmed today isn't worth setting that political precedent.
Democrats also didn't challenge use of the filibuster against legislation, though this too is subject to political whim as long as this current class of liberals runs the Senate. The now dominant Al Franken generation has been elected since 2006 and doesn't know life in the minority.
If Democrats take back the House in 2014 while retaining the Senate, you can bet they will also break the legislative filibuster to give Mr. Obama some final partisan policy victories. Think carbon tax, or forcing doctors to take all Medicare and Medicaid patients. For the Obama Democrats, the rules are whatever they say they are.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887324348504578609912616658012.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_LEADTop
U.S. One of the Least Attractive Tax Climates in the World
A new study out this past week [pdf] from two European economists attempted to come up with an empirical ranking of tax attractiveness of various national tax systems around the world. Using metrics like statutory tax rates, investment taxes, withholding taxes and status of double taxation, Sara Keller and Deborah Schanz constructed an index and ranking for one hundred countries around the world.The United States comes in very, very near the bottom.
Largely due to corporate taxes, investment taxes and double taxation, the U.S. ranks 94th out of 100 in these tax attractiveness rankings, behind such attractive destinations as Venezuela, Serbia, and Greece. Countries that are known as "tax havens" like the Bahamas help to drive the Caribbean's ranking as the most attractive geographical region in the world.
As the Tax Foundation notes, the American policy of global taxation puts the U.S. in a unique class of countries:
As with corporations, the United States tax code taxes the income of individuals, no matter where in the world they earn it. The only two other counties in the world that tax individuals this way are North Korea and Eritrea. Let me repeat that: North Korea and Eritrea.Now, to throw a little bit of cold water on this: there's a lot more than tax system that makes a country "attractive" to both prospective immigrants and businesses. Very few people outside of Edward Snowden would prefer to immigrate to Venezuela over the United States. A strong civil society, justice system and rule of law obviously make the United States a very attractive place to live.
This is also a subjective and experimental study that necessarily includes value judgments, so it's far from authoritative.
But in an increasingly industrializing and interconnected world, these tax incentives will matter even at the margins. Legislators and policymakers should be taking things like this into effect when considering tax reform.
http://townhall.com/tipsheet/kevinglass/2013/07/17/us-one-of-the-least-attractive-tax-climates-in-the-world-n1642851
Stop the (Obamacare) World, I Want to Get Off
Free Trade is one of the great economic boons to which we owe a large measure of our prosperity. The fact that we can buy shirts from Malaysia, electronics from Japan, wine from France and bananas from Costa Rica makes not just us but the Malaysians, the Japanese, les Français and los Costaricenses much better off than any of us could possibly be by growing, manufacturing, or otherwise producing everything within the borders of our own country. As nations develop and advance up the economic ladder, they become capable of increasingly high-order creative design and engineering, able to outsource lower-order assembly to less advanced countries and to trade on an equal footing with the world's leaders. 'Made in China' typically means: designed in the USA, manufactured in Japan, Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Malaysia and/or the USA (still the world leader in manufacturing despite noise to the contrary), and finally assembled, at the end of the chain, in China.High-productivity workers in advanced countries are not threatened by low-wage workers in less-advanced ones, because it is productivity that counts, not the hourly wage. If the workers of Prosperia earn $100 per hour and produce 1000 widgets apiece per hour, then their labor is more cost-effective than that of workers in Destutistan who earn $10 per hour but only produce 90 widgets apiece per hour; that's 10 cents a widget from Prosperia vs 11 cents per widget from Destutistan. Under those circumstances Prosperia is said to have an absolute advantage over Destutistan.
Even if Prosperia's workers, management, capital markets, and climate are the best in the world for everything (which no country may boast), workers in Destutistan can still find work to do where they have a relative advantage, that is, where the difference in productivity between Prosperia's and Destutistan's workers is less relative to areas where Prosperia is the undisputed leader. It pays Prosperia to do what it does 'most best' and buy what it makes 'less best' from others, which provides employment for Destutistan's workers, and gives them the opportunity to advance up the economic ladder.
However, if something occurs that makes workers in one country more expensive (or more risky) to employ for any reason, then their competitive advantage may be eroded or disappear altogether, to the detriment of all except the immediate competitors. If a natural catastrophe or government-imposed tax raises the cost of employing Prosperian workers by twenty percent, then it will cost $120 to produce 1000 widgets, or 12 cents per widget, erasing the advantage. Those Prosperian workers will have to accept lower wages or lose their jobs to the foreign competition. This is obviously a loss for those workers in Prosperia and a boon to the competing workers in the particular industry. But it is not necessarily happy news even for the citizens of Destutistan in general; after all, they too now must pay 11 cents per widget when they could have gotten them cheaper by buying from Prosperia before.
Computers, the internet, and telecommunication technology have integrated world markets and intensified competition as never before in world history. Capital, entrepreneurial projects and jobs can move overnight to the places on planet Earth where they are the most welcome, most secure, and least handcuffed.
Which brings us to ObamaCare.
The Patient Protection and Accountable Care Act's employer mandate requires that employers of 50 or more full-time employees (full-time being defined by the government as those working just 30 hours or more per week) must offer health insurance coverage compliant with the requirements of the Law and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regulations or pay a $2,000 fine (sorry, tax) per employee, exempting the first 30 employees for purposes of calculating the penalty (I mean tax). This provision of the law has now been postponed by one year (in a move of questionable legality) to January 2015, but not yet repealed. The delay is a deferment, not a solution; the effects of the mandate must still be factored into any company's long-term planning.
For those companies who want to 'do the right thing' and offer a health insurance benefit, the law contains many more requirements, including:
• All compliant health insurance plans must cover dependent children to age 26.Some or all of these things may be desirable to many, but they are not necessary for all, and they must be paid for somehow. Imposing them in a one-size-fits-all mandate on all employers raises the cost and risk of employing any American without consideration of the cost-benefit trade-offs that different employers and employees might prefer and mutually agree upon (that's called Liberty of Contract). Except for very small firms, the mandate favors large, mature companies (that are not the primary source of new job growth) that employ highly-paid workers, at the expense of smaller firms employing less-skilled workers. In the latter case, the effect of the law can be to increase the cost of employing certain workers by 50% or more. The city of Wilmington, Delaware is facing the prospect of a half-million dollar spike in payroll costs (give or take $200,000) due to reclassifying part-time employees as full-time, as required by the Law. Many private employers are cutting their workers' hours to below 30 to avoid the penalty, and many '49er' companies are cancelling plans to hire their 50th employee.
• No annual or lifetime coverage limits may be imposed.
• Insurance companies may not differentiate premiums on the basis of the riskiness of an employer's industry or the age of its employees.
• ...and much more, buried in the law's 2700 pages and the derived regulations' tens of thousands of pages.
Even costs not specifically attributed to employers, but borne by taxpayers (which is to say, people who work) take their toll on the employment of Americans. The (recently doubled to $4.4 billion) cost of administering the government health insurance exchanges takes that money out of the private sector where it might have been used for entrepreneurial purposes, bidding up the wages of American workers.
Meanwhile, the foreign competition doesn't have to pay these costs, and gets a free advantage over American firms and employees, courtesy not of a volcano, a hurricane, or an earthquake, but of a man-caused disaster. Why hire 10 Americans when you can hire 12, 20 or 40 equivalently trained non-Americans for the same price?
Six million net full-time jobs have been lost in America since 2008, offset only by the 'gain' of three million part-time jobs. Relief is nowhere in sight: the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported in its Household Survey for June 2013, that the economy added 360,000 part-time jobs and lost 240,000 full-time ones.
This is not virtuous free trade; this is leading a global decline with our own self-inflicted wounds.
"There can be no prosperity or even freedom for our people if we ever abandon the competitive economic system that transformed this country into the strongest nation in the world." -- Ronald Reagan
A dozen states sue EPA over FOIA stonewalling
After months of haggling, 12 states are suing the Environmental Protection Agency to compel them to release documents related to the agency’s controversial “sue and settle” practice.The attorneys general of twelve Republican-led states, led by Oklahoma, filed a lawsuit on Tuesday after the EPA failed to respond to the attorneys general’s appeal of a Freedom of Information Act fee-waiver request.
The fee-waiver request was denied by the EPA in February.
“This appears to be a blatant strategy by the EPA to go around the process and bend the rules to create environmental regulations that have failed in Congress,” Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt said in a statement. “As part of our investigation into the pervasiveness of this tactic, we requested documents that the EPA has refused to produce. If the EPA is making backdoor deals with environmental groups to push their agenda on the American people while bypassing the states and Congress, we need to know.”
Oklahoma was joined by Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, Texas, Utah and Wyoming.
The states sought documents on communications between environmental groups and EPA officials regarding consent decrees from sue-and-settle lawsuits with environmental groups that directed the agency to implement regulations under the Clean Air Act’s Regional Haze program.
The states asked for EPA communications with environmental groups — including Greenpeace, Defenders of Wildlife, WildEarth Guardians and the Sierra Club — all of which engaged in sue-and-settle lawsuits to control the EPA’s enforcement of the Regional Haze program, critics say.
According to Pruitt’s office, “Under the Clean Air Act, the states – not the EPA – design and implement plans for compliance with the Regional Haze program.” However, states are cut out of the process when the EPA enters into a consent decree, but the states are responsible for implementing whatever new regulations the EPA proposes.
One sue-and-settle lawsuit resulted in the EPA’s costliest clean air regulations ever – the Mercury Air Toxics Standards. Other cases noted by Pruitt were settled in the same day the suit was filed, suggesting maybe some level of coordination.
Pruitt raised concerns about the EPA’s actions in a letter sent to the agency in May, after it was reported that the EPA had also been routinely denying fee waiver requests to conservative groups while granting them to environmental groups.
“Looking at FOIA fee waivers, it’s clear that EPA favors far-left environmentalist groups over conservative think tanks, but today’s lawsuit is just another example demonstrating EPA’s discrimination extends toward states as well,” said Louisiana Republican Sen. David Vitter.
The free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute obtained documents showing that since January 2012, the EPA granted fee waivers for 92 percent of FOIA requests from major environmental groups, while the agency rejected or ignored 81 percent of fee-waiver requests from conservative groups.
“Ninety-two percent of the time EPA grants fee-waiver requests from noncommercial requesters who are supportive of EPA’s policies and agendas, but denies a majority of fee-waiver requests from noncommercial requesters who are critical of EPA,” reads the state’s complaint. “States properly asked for specific records … [and] EPA violated FOIA’s mandate.”
According to Pruitt, the EPA has awarded nearly $1 million in attorneys fees in 45 settlements with environmental groups it has made public.
The EPA did not immediately respond to The Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.
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