Monthly Archives: September 2015

A Step in the Right Direction

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But it remains woefully insufficient, and further changes need to be pushed—apparently from outside—and those additional changes need to happen quickly.

The Securities and Exchange Commission said Thursday it will overhaul its in-house tribunal following months of escalating legal challenges and criticism of its increased use of its own judges.

Under the new rules, defendants will get more time to prepare: up to eight months, instead of the SEC’s “rocket docket” of pacing that suits the agency, regardless of the time actually needed to prepare. Defendants also will be able, for the first time, to get sworn testimony as part of their defense preparation.

These are crucial changes, to be sure.

However.

The SEC still will use judges that are explicitly on the SEC payroll to hear the cases the SEC brings against defendants. The SEC still will use judges that are explicitly on the SEC payroll to hear defendants’ appeals of the SEC’s house judges’ decisions.

Absent corrections to those failings, the SEC’s “courts” will remain very much kangaroo courts.

Hypocrisy of the Left

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Sanctuary City San Francisco has

proposed new city regulations, which could only be aimed at High Bridge Arms, would have required the shop to take and preserve video of all transactions and turn customers’ personal data over to police on a weekly basis.

There was only one gun shop left in San Fran at the time these new rules were proposed. That shop already had 17 cameras installed and turned video over to the police on their request. However, as the shop’s General Manager said,

it’s the idea of filming our customers taking delivery of items after they already completed waiting periods[.]

Rather than accepting that increased invasion, not just of an honest business doing business, but of the privacy of honest Americans doing honest business, the gun shop is closing.

Clearly, the Sanctuary City’s government and the residents that elect them care more about the ability of illegal immigrants with long records of violent crime to get guns than they do about honest Americans’ ability to defend themselves.

More of the Left’s War on Energy

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Regulators from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the Federal Reserve, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp went to Houston to…talk to…big banks like JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Citigroup, even a branch of the Royal Bank of Canada about those banks’ allegedly risky loans to American oil and gas producers.

The regulators’ beef? Those loans are too risky. Something bad is going to happen; the regulators don’t know what it is, and they don’t care.

Never mind that the bankers know more about energy production than do the regulators. Never mind that the bankers know more about how to assess risk than do the regulators. Never mind that those loans are secured by the proven oil and gas reserves held by the borrowing producers.

Never mind, either, that of those four banks, the one with the largest exposure, JP Morgan, has only about 5.5% of its total loan portfolio in the form of loans to those producers—and like the other three, those loans are secured by those reserves.

Never mind, then, that if all of those producers went bust all at once, the losses would sting the banks a bit, but they wouldn’t seriously hurt them. Never mind, either, then, that even if those producers went bust all at once, their secured loans—those borrowings backed by their proven reserves—would be paid to a significant degree; the losses to the banks would not approach total.

No, President Barack Obama’s Progressive Big Government Knows Better. Facts aren’t necessary.

In the end, the regulators are right, though: something bad is going to happen. The regulators are going to close off those oil and gas producers’ access to credit, and with that, our nation’s access to cheap energy. The climatistas are rejoicing.

Drugs

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Democratic Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has turned to bashing drug companies, and in doing so, she’s exposing her ignorance of economics. Last Tuesday, she proposed in all seriousness

a $250 monthly cap on out-of-pocket prescription drug costs and other measures to stop what she called “price gouging” by pharmaceutical companies.
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Under Clinton’s plan, the monthly cap would limit what insurance companies could ask patients to pay for drugs that treat patients with chronic or serious medical conditions.

Then she added this gem:

“We need to protect hard-working Americans here at home from excessive costs. Too often these drugs cost a fortune,” adding drug companies keep the profits for themselves while “shifting the cost to families.”

Well, yeah, they do keep the profits. Contra her BFF, President Barack Obama, they did build that.

Here’s a thought, Madam, for holding down costs for us “hard-working Americans here at home” about whom you claim to care so much: reduce the costs to the manufacturers by getting your Big Government’s regulations out of their way. Increase the incentives for manufacturers to reduce costs by getting your Big Government out of the way of competition.

And think about this: if your monthly cap, pulled straight out of rectal storage, plays out, what will be the cost of those drugs to us hard-working Americans here at home when the drug companies, unable to recoup their costs, stop manufacturing the drugs altogether?

Democratic Party Policy Regarding New-borns

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The House recently passed the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act which requires that babies who survive an abortion attempt are to be cared for as though they’d been born more normally. The Act opens with these two paragraphs:

Sec. 2. Findings

Congress finds as follows:

(1) If an abortion results in the live birth of an infant, the infant is a legal person for all purposes under the laws of the United States, and entitled to all the protections of such laws.

(2) Any infant born alive after an abortion or within a hospital, clinic, or other facility has the same claim to the protection of the law that would arise for any newborn, or for any person who comes to a hospital, clinic, or other facility for screening and treatment or otherwise becomes a patient within its care.

President Barack Obama has said he’ll veto this bill that protects babies newly born under a procedure that was intended to have a different outcome. His…rationale…is this:

HR 3504 [Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act] would impose new legal requirements related to the provision of abortion services in certain circumstances, which would likely have a chilling effect, reducing access to care.

If the President were presented with HR 3134 [Defund Planned Parenthood Act of 2015] or HR 3504, he would veto them.

This is nonsense. The Born-Alive bill has nothing to do with abortion, per se, only with its aftermath. The abortion ended with the removal of the baby from the mother’s womb. The task now is to care for a newly born baby. That this particular baby was born via a procedure that is not one of the more normal birthing procedures is wholly irrelevant to that.

Of course, Obama knows that. His decision—in advance of seeing the bill actually passed—to veto a bill that explicitly protects the life of a newly born infant, and the silence of his fellow Democrats on his veto threat, says volumes about the Democratic Party’s policy toward new-born babies.