Tag Archives: political parties

The Regulation Administration

Posted on by
Reply

…is in its last days, but it keeps on trying to keep in our business.  In an article for an upcoming issue of New York University Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, Secretary of the Treasury Jack Lew

made a closing argument Wednesday in defense of the financial regulatory overhaul the Obama administration engineered during the past eight years.

Among his arguments:

Mr Lew makes the case that those new entities [e.g., the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the Financial Stability Oversight Council] allow the government to react to new forms of consumer abuse or financial engineering.

That’s part of the problem, though. It’s these new entities that define “new forms of consumer abuse” without regard to statutory definitions passed by our elected representatives.  It’s these new entities that define new forms of financial engineering as unacceptable or not, without consideration of whether the new forms actually are good ideas.

Progressives like Lew actually think such government overreaches are features and not failures.

A regulatory regime that becomes frozen in time will by its very definition be outpaced by those that seek to arbitrage it….

Lew is carefully ignoring the fact that a regulatory regime as unaccountable and as agile as he wants one to be will by its very definition be in a position to, and will, block free market moves of which an overreaching government decides to disapprove.

It’s a failed argument for a failed régime.  It’s time for Lew to pack up and go home.

Democracy is a Racist Politic?

Posted on by
Reply

That’s what John Kerry, the motorboat skipper who sits in the Secretary of State’s chair, claimed Wednesday.

But here is a fundamental reality, if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic, it cannot be both.

The “choice” of one state is, as even this guy knows full well, a cynically proffered strawman.  Israel is strongly in favor of a two-state solution; the only ones who refuse the option are the terrorists polities Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.  Absent that strawman dolly, the only thing left is the racist center of Kerry’s offensive sentence.

Kerry and his mentor President Barack Obama (D), both elite-school, Ivy League educated gentlemen also know full well this bit of history, recalled by Michael Oren, Israel’s Deputy Minister for Diplomacy, for Hugh Hewitt (h/t to my Lady for reminding me of this):

In 1947, the UN declared that Palestine, as it was then known, would be partitioned into two states—an Arab state and a Jewish state. Notice, not a Palestinian state, but an Arab state. The Palestinians didn’t quite exist, yet, and at least not on the international radar. And the Arabs went to war to destroy the Jewish state when it was created on May 14, 1948. And the city of Jerusalem was divided. The eastern part of the city was occupied by the Jordanians, the West Bank was occupied by the Jordanians. In June, 1967, the Jordanians attacked Israel again. Israel repulsed the attack, reunited Jerusalem under Israeli rule, and captured the West Bank, or as we call it, Judea and Samaria. It is not occupied by international law, because the West Bank and East Jerusalem was never part of a recognized sovereign country. Nobody in the world, except for Britain and Pakistan, recognized the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. So the entire international law claim is spurious.

The next 22 days cannot pass quickly enough; there’s too much damage able to be done by guys as disingenuous as Kerry and his mentor President Barack Obama (D).

Judicial Nominations

Posted on by
Reply

In a more extensive piece about the vacancies into which President-Elect Donald Trump can nominate Federal judges, The Washington Post emphasized the nature of President Barack Obama’s (D) appointments—and by extension, the differences in judicial qualification philosophy between the two Presidents, although that wasn’t necessarily intentional.

Trump is likely to appoint judges with a view toward

[s]tate gun control laws, abortion restrictions, voter laws, anti-discrimination measures, and immigrant issues are all matters that are increasingly heard by federal judges and will be influenced by the new composition of the courts. Trump has vowed to choose ideologues in the mold of the late Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, a conservative icon….

Even though none of those are matters of ideology, much as the newspaper would like it to be, but rather are matters of adherence to the Constitution and understanding of the legal questions involved in today’s controversies.

On the other hand, Obama selected his nominees on the basis of…diversity.

Obama has used his nominations to systematically diversify the federal courts to look more like the fast-changing country. He appointed far more female and minority judges than any other president in history, and he has paid particular attention to sexual orientation. When Obama took office, there was only one openly gay or lesbian judge, and he appointed 11 more.

“The president, my predecessors and I spent a significant amount of time looking for all different kinds of diversity—racial, sexual orientation, gender, and professional background,” [White House Counsel Neil] Eggleston said.

Not at all an emphasis on Constitutional adherence, or even legal qualification: just whether a nominee was a member of an identity group within Obama’s identity politics.

Economic Advisors

Posted on by
Reply

President-Elect Donald Trump has them.

  • Larry Kudlow, the anti-Keynes, to run (maybe) the White House Council of Economic Advisers
  • Peter Navarro to Head the White House National Trade Council
  • Steve Mnuchin for Treasury Secretary
  • Wilbur Ross for Commerce Secretary
  • Linda McMahon for Administrator of the Small Business Administration
  • Gary Cohn to run the White House National Economic Council
  • Mick Mulvaney to head Office of Management and Budget
  • Rick Perry as Energy Secretary
  • Andrew Puzder for Labor secretary
  • Scott Pruitt for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency
  • Elaine Chao for Transportation Secretary
  • Betsy DeVos for of Education Secretary
  • Carl Icahn as special adviser on Federal regulations, a newly created and unpaid position

There’s much of Trump’s putative trade policy with which I disagree.

However, Progressive-Democrats don’t like these folks.  It’s hard to get a more ringing endorsement for an advisory team than that.

More Obama Fiat

Posted on by
Reply

And the failures just keep coming.

This time, it’s President Barack Obama’s (D) effort to sabotage the oil industry as thoroughly as he’s done the coal industry.  Obama’s latest bit of I Know Better And Congress Be Damned is an Executive Order that is intended to ban

federal offshore drilling and mineral leases on some 3.8 million acres from Virginia to Maine and 115 million acres off the coast of Alaska, including some of the world’s great untapped repositories of hydrocarbons.

And he’s bragging that he thinks the move is permanent.

It’s a laughable as it is delusional.