No Runny Eggs

The repository of one hard-boiled egg from the south suburbs of Milwaukee, Wisconsin (and the occassional guest-blogger). The ramblings within may or may not offend, shock and awe you, but they are what I (or my guest-bloggers) think.

Archive for June 17th, 2010

Open Thread Thursday – changes are coming edition

by @ 17:48. Filed under Open Thread Thursday, The Blog.

With the release of WordPress 3.0, I’ll be working on implementing some changes to this place…

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlNUrMf9yo0[/youtube]

One of the things I’m looking to do is implement The Scramble as a headline feature, with its own feed and comments system, much like Hot Air Headlines. Since that will require a rather hefty hack of the template, I can’t promise that it will be here very soon.

Since you freeload…er, loyal readers have spoken, I’ll occassionally pop out Old-School Scrambles as well, especially since Dean has said he’d help me out there, and Jo’s provided at least one.

I won’t promise too many posts the next couple days – the NASCAR Nationwide gang is over at Road America, and I’ll be there at least Saturday. Depending on schedules, I might also be there Friday, so don’t be surprised if the 2-day outburst is broken.

So, consider this a 3-day/4-night weekend open thread.

The IRS being placed in charge of PlaceboCare was no accident

by @ 16:04. Filed under Health Care Reform, Politics - National, Taxes.

Philip Klein explains over at The American Spectator the strategy the Obama adminstration is using to try to short-circuit challenges to PlaceboCare (emphasis added):

Late last night, the Obama Department of Justice filed a motion to dismiss the Florida-based lawsuit against the health care law, arguing that the court lacks jurisdiction and that the State of Florida and fellow plaintiffs haven’t presented a claim for which the court can grant relief. To bolster its case, the DOJ cited the Anti-Injunction Act, which restricts courts from interfering with the government’s ability to collect taxes.

The Act, according to a DOJ memo supporting the motion to dismiss, says that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person, whether or not such person is the person against whom such tax was assessed.” The memo goes on to say that it makes no difference whether the disputed payment it is called a “tax” or “penalty,” because either way, it’s “assessed and collected in the same manner” by the Internal Revenue Service.

Klein goes on to explain how that is a violation of both his claims that it isn’t a tax and his his campaign pledge to not raise taxes by “one dime” on those making less than $250,000 (later lowered to $200,000 if one is single, with the $250,000 supposedly still applying to those who are married).

The Godfather Presidency

by @ 9:52. Filed under Business, Politics - National.

The Heritage Foundation explains what happened at the White House yesterday:

This time it was the executives of BP who were summoned directly to the White House to have a little chat with the President and Attorney General Eric Holder (who has threatened BP with criminal prosecution). The exact conversation may never be known, and by the end of their “no-nonsense business meeting” BP emerged from the Roosevelt Room to announce that they would “voluntarily” place $20 billion into an escrow account to begin covering claims associated with the Deepwater Horizon oil disaster and contribute another $100 million to a foundation that will support oil workers made unemployed by President Barack Obama’s indefinite ban on offshore oil drilling.

Don’t buy for a second any of the mainstream media’s line about this being good for BP. The White House made clear yesterday that the $20 billion was just a down payment and in no way represented a cap on BP’s liability. In fact, the President explicitly said that the fund would not preclude individuals or states from pressing claims in court, and that it would remain separate from BP’s liability for the damages to the environment. And these damages may include the costs of cleanup for damage far beyond what BP caused. The Washington Post today reports that a gulf restoration plan of the sort promised by President Obama could cost as much as $30 billion. That’s $50 billion in damages so far. And that does not include any future money, on top of the existing $100 million donation, the White House may press BP to pay to cover the unemployment caused by President Obama’s offshore drilling ban.

They go on to discuss what would happen if BP goes into bankruptcy, noting that the Feds have put a $20 billion lien on some of BP’s American operations. While the White House assured BP that it wasn’t seeking to drive the company out of business, I seem to recall the same promises made to Chrysler and General Motors, and after a manipulation (perversion, really) of the bankrupcy process, we now own two car companies.

I guess it’s time to break out a classic People’s Cube graphic:

Expect the unexpected

by @ 9:21. Filed under Economy, Presstitute Follies.

If there’s bad economic news, in this case a sharp increase in weekly initial jobless claims to 472,000, one can count on the likes of Reuters to term it “unexpected”:

Jobless claims unexpectedly higher last week

The number of workers filing new applications for unemployment insurance unexpectedly rose last week as the manufacturing, construction and education sectors shed employees, adding to worries that the economic recovery is slowing.

(Revisions/extensions, 10:05 am 6/17/2010) – Hot Air commenter mankai found that the first version of AP’s story (thanks to Breitbart for not sending the original down the memory hole like everybody else) also used the “unexpectedly” adverb. Also, in the main post, Ed Morrissey noted that, thanks to a revision of the prior week’s claims, this week’s increase wasn’t exactly followed by 3 weeks of drops as the AP would lead one to believe.
Since Ed Morrissey decided to link here, and he has the most-exhaustive list of the press terming bad economic news “unexpected”, let’s count the number of times this year he’s caught the presstitutes using their favorite adverb:

This is hardly an exhaustive list, but that’s 22 “unexpected” bad-news items, another 2 “unexpected-by-another-phrase” bad-news items, and 2 “unexpected” good-news items. That’s an average of every other week.

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