For bloggers:
Sanchez’ bill goes way beyond cyberbullying and comes close to making it a federal offense to log onto the internet or use the telephone. The methods of communication where hostile speech is banned include e-mail, instant messaging, blogs, websites, telephones and text messages.
We can’t say what we think of Sanchez’s proposal. Doing so would clearly get us two years in solitary confinement.
These people don’t care about either the first or second amendment.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Somehow, this seems related:
Left-wing bloggers have been saying that the White House’s denial of making threats should be taken at face value and that Lauria’s statement is not evidence to the contrary. But that’s ridiculous. Lauria is a reputable lawyer and a contributor to Democratic candidates. He has no motive to lie. The White House does.
Think carefully about what’s happening here. The White House, presumably car czar Steven Rattner and deputy Ron Bloom, is seeking to transfer the property of one group of people to another group that is politically favored. In the process, it is setting aside basic property rights in favor of rewarding the United Auto Workers for the support the union has given the Democratic Party. The only possible limit on the White House’s power is the bankruptcy judge, who might not go along.
Michigan politicians of both parties joined Obama in denouncing the holdout bondholders. They point to the sad plight of UAW retirees not getting full payment of the health care benefits the union negotiated with Chrysler. But the plight of the beneficiaries of the pension funds represented by the bondholders is sad too. Ordinarily you would expect these claims to be weighed and determined by the rule of law. But not apparently in this administration.
Obama’s attitude toward the rule of law is apparent in the words he used to describe what he is looking for in a nominee to replace Justice David Souter. He wants “someone who understands justice is not just about some abstract legal theory,” he said, but someone who has “empathy.” In other words, judges should decide cases so that the right people win, not according to the rule of law.
Laws are for the little people.
[Afternoon update]
Mickey Kaus says that Chrysler Plus Fiat Equals Chooch:
My objection isn’t so much to the screwing of the secure lenders (let’s agree it’s a “dangerous” precedent) or to the strong-arming of the banks that received TARP funds (another dangerous precedent!). It’s to the screwing of the secure lenders and the strongarming of the banks in order to produce a bailout plan that will not work, that will flop like Chooch. The rationale for the bailout was that a bankruptcy would kill car sales, so the government had to step in and negotiate all the bankruptcy-style concessions without actually having a bankruptcy. But Obama was unwilling to get the U.A.W. to make the bankruptcy-style concessions that would be necessary to have a viable Chrysler. And Chrysler wound up in bankruptcy anyway. Prediction: It will either fail or suck up continuing annual taxpayer subsidies in the billions. In the process it will keep flooding the market with cars and make it harder to save GM and Ford. It didn’t have to be that way…
And there is something creepy in the way many analysts simply accept that, of course, banks receiving TARP funds must now do Obama’s bidding on unrelated matters like the Chrysler bankruptcy. This is a long way from JFK using his presidential power to face down a steel price hike–a long way toward an unpleasant economic model that creates at least the potential for political thuggery, that preserves capitalism’s inequalities without its freedoms and efficiencies. Let’s not give it a name…
Oh, it has a name. It starts with “f,” and ends in “ism.”
[Update early evening]
The price of the King’s shilling:
This is troubling, because it’s now clear that the worry many of us had at the time of the bank bailouts has come true: the government is using its intervention in the banking system to pressure banks to give special deals to the government’s special friends.
Countries that use their banking systems this way don’t get good results. If you’re a fairly uncorrupt developed country, you get slower growth and bloated “critical” sectors that are usually more critical in providing campaign support, lavishly remunerated make-work jobs, and photo ops, than any products the public actually wants. Then, if something like Japan happens, you have a twenty-year “lost decade” while everyone pretends as hard as hard can be that everything is all right, in the sincere but misguided believe that wishing hard enough will make it so.
This won’t end well. Particularly if it’s like the Depression, in which the cultists managed to convince people that they were doing the best that could be done, and we just had to be patient.
[Bumped]