Even if Wikipedia was censored, students would still be able to learn by reading the WSJ headlines which party controls the U.S. government administration.     Note the contrast between the headline where the cheerleading is done  (to be read by the masses) and the subheadline that provides a more sober view (and is read fewer people):

Headline:   U.S. Economy Picks Up Steam

Subheadline:  Fourth-Quarter Growth Rate of 2.8% is Fastest in 18 Months, but Doesn’t Appear Sustainable

News blurb on the front page of the WSJ (Friday, January 13):

A Justice Department opinion buttressed Obama’s contention that his recess appointments last week were constitutional.

Um, considering scandals such as Fast and Furious and the its handling of the 2008 voter intimidation case, wouldn’t that be like saying Newt Gingrich buttressed Herman Cain’s contention that there was no affair?

The White House response to the Solyndra subpoena has been referred to as “rejecting” and  “pushing back”.   In the days of the Nixon administration it would have been called stonewalling.

Stonewalling is the term I’ve used in comment sections in various places on the web.   But more recently I’ve read the subpoena and the exchange of letters.  (Links are at the web site of Fred Upton’s Energy and Commerce committee.)  I haven’t exactly changed my view of what’s happening, but I do think some of us have allowed this scuffle to distract us from the main point.

I still am amazed that the White House can have already produced 85,000 pages of documents and then complained that providing the rest could distract the President from his constitutional duties.   If there are that many documents, it  seems that the White House’s dealings with the Solyndra loan have been a distraction from the President’s constitutional duties from the beginning.

It’s also interesting that the most political of presidents, the president who uses a tax paid trip to bash Republicans while campaigning for his jobs bill, would find it in himself to complain that Upton’s committee was engaging in political partisanship.

The fact that the White House saw fit to time its rejection for the Friday night news dump suggests that it isn’t completely comfortable with its own behavior.

But why is it necessary for the Energy and Commerce committee to go through this subpoena exercise?    If it’s just to find some grounds for damaging President Obama’s re-election prospects, that’s not really behavior any better than the government’s funneling a $1 million consulting fee for evaluating the options to Lazard Ltd., one of the biggest DNC contributors.

The problem is that when the government gets in the loan business, there are vast opportunities for political corruption — opportunities for insider dealing in government funds.   The fact that it’s difficult to determine whether or not the White House was doing special deals for its friends is all the information that the committee needs.  It doesn’t need any more documents to know that it should terminate the opportunity for corruption by terminating the loan program.   Going after one particular President doesn’t do anything about the root problem.

The image (derived from Wikipedia Commons) is of a clay tablet that contains the prologue to Hammurabi’s Code.

The latest regulatory atrocity that made me go here is the Obama administration’s plan (now dropped, at least in this instance) to regulate pharmaceutical companies by forcing the resignation of executives it disapproves of.  (WSJ article:  “U.S. Drops Effort to Oust Forest Labs CEO“   The print edition headline was a less honest, less accurate one:  “Forest Chief Prevails Over U.S.”)

When I was a wee kid in elementary school (possibly as early as 4th grade) we learned that Hammurabi’s Code was an advance because people knew from it what the laws were and what the penalties were.    Now our leaders devise regulatory systems under which nobody can know what is required, and under which the best one can do is try to stay on the right political side of the authorities.    And this in an environment where the current administration has been willing to attack and threaten private businesses that make political statements that it perceives to be critical or contrary to its agenda.

People in our country used to understand about due process.  But now we have President who supposedly has an advanced degree in constitutional law, but who institutes a regulatory system that is about as far from any constitutional system as you can get.   And some headline writers for the WSJ don’t get it.

There is such a thing as good regulation and there is necessary regulation.  I’ve long wished that we could discuss good vs bad regulation rather than re-regulation vs deregulation.   But trying to regulate in the way Obama has tried to do here is likely to give all of regulation a bad name.

So to do my part to get the discussion back where it needs to be, I’ve instituted a new category of articles:   Hammurabi-Handedness.   That term is in part an allusion to related concepts, such as the invisible hand.    Hammurabi-Handedness refers to letting the invisible hand do its thing, but within a regulatory system that is as clear and well-defined as possible, and which minimizes waste and corruption.

I hereby confer on the organizers and participants in Lemonade Freedom Day the Leviathan Ankle-Biter Award, to be enjoyed by them with all the rights and privileges pertaining thereto.

The big event is on August 20.  The web site is at lemonadefreedom.com.   You can sign up on facebook

I must confess I’ve ridden past a couple of lemonade stands this summer without stopping, but I will be sure to correct that error on August 20 or any other day when there is an opportunity.

 
View larger map

Update:  Here is a Google Map provided by the Freedom Center of Missouri.  The Red markers indicate towns where kid-run concession stands have been shut down.   The Green ones are towns that allow kid-run concession stands without requiring a permit.   The Yellow ones are places that require kids to get at least one city permit.

This photo is of a hole I was digging in my back yard several years ago.  It provided some very clean fill dirt for our new garage.   I dug it deeper than this before I was done, but unlike our national economy, I never dug it so deep I couldn’t get out.  It has since been filled in.

Speaking of digging ourselves in deeper, there is an interesting side to the left’s hysterical screaming of the last several days.   If you let them rage and rant long enough and loud enough, eventually they will scream off-message and let a bit of the truth leak out.   That seems to be what happened with Rep. Mike Doyle.

For a couple of weeks it was all about how to deal with the deficit.   We knew the left was not particularly interested in reducing the deficit, of course, because Pres. Obama wouldn’t even give up his $128 billion in walking-around money for the 2012 re-election campaign.     But they tried to sell the idea that higher taxes were needed in order to reduce the deficit.  A few of their own followers may even have believed it.

But now, Rep. Mike Doyle confirmed what we knew all along.  It wasn’t about deficit reduction.  It was about Democrats feeding their spending habit.    “We have negotiated with terrorists.  This small group of terrorists have made it impossible to spend any money.”

And did Vice President Biden try to steer Rep. Doyle back on message by reminding him that deficit-reduction was the object?   No, all he could do was agree that the Democrat opponents have acted like terrorists.

And if anyone thinks it was just one rogue Congressman, President Obama couldn’t help himself, either.   Now that there was no reason to restrain himself, he came out promoting more  of his wild spending plans, aka “key investments.”

See Michelle Malkin’s column, Back to Big Government-Spending as Usual

I don’t watch television news, but I learned from the internet that a reporter named Contessa Brewer recently asked a U.S. Representative who disagreed with her if  he had a degree in economics.   (His answer:  “Yes ma’am, I do.  Highest honors.”)   URL here.

That’s a good start.  But reporters need to start asking President Obama questions like that, too.

And instead of just printing his campaign ads as news, they should ask him these questions about the debt limit debates:

• If the debt limit is not raised or is not raised enough to pay for all of the nation’s spending, which would you cut first?   a)  NPR/CPP subsidies  b) ag subsidies  c) NEA subsidies  d) Social Security  [A non-answer would be almost as good as an answer.]
• If the debt limit is not raised enough right away to pay for all the nation’s spending, will you use your $128 billion in unspent stimulus funds to help pay the bills?   Or is it more important for you to hang on to it to pay for your 2012 re-election campaign?

From CNS news, as reported by Terence Jeffrey (H/T James Taranto):

“President Barack Obama’s approval has hit an all-time low among the poorest Americans, according to the Gallup poll. Meanwhile, when compared to the other income brackets reported by Gallup, Obama’s approval is highest among the richest Americans.”

Like I’ve said, Establishment Republicans and Leftwing Democrats combine to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

Q.  So why is he going after corporate jets?

A.  That’s not his real target any more than Normandy was Eisenhower’s target.

Let Tim Geithner talk long enough, and eventually he tells you the truth.   The reason the Obama administration wants more taxes is so it can keep government large.

“If you don’t touch revenues and you leave in place the tax cuts for the top 2 percent that were put in place by President Bush, if you leave those in place and you’re trying to bring our deficits down over time, then you have to do exceptionally deep cuts in benefits for middle-class Americans and you have to shrink the overall size of government programs, things like education, to levels that we could not accept as a country,” said Geithner.

That’s the government-centric view.   The people-centric view was expressed by his questioner, Rep. Renee Elmers of North Carolina.   URL.  H/T Drudge.

[Late edit to put in the full quote instead of the partial, elided one I had posted earlier.]

A Leviathan-Anklebiter award is hereby awarded to Monique Lawless for her attempt to stop lawlessness.  (H/T James Taranto.)   As usual, the authorities prefer that people not take such dangerous actions, but we should at least give the police chief credit for admiring her courage.   Sometimes Leviathan is a lot surlier than that when people perform courageous acts on their own initiative.  The full story is here.

I hope this action doesn’t put her job as a “safety” specialist in danger.

Monique Lawless had nothing personal at stake when she saw three men leaving a Walmart store in Alvin with three cases of beer they didn’t pay for. She was a customer, not an employee, of the store.

Yet Lawless, who stands just under 5 feet tall and weighs 125 pounds, took off in pursuit of the three much larger men.

“I’m just sick of the lawlessness,” the 42-year-old Alvin woman said. “They knew their chances of getting caught were slim to none. Those kids would have gotten away with it, celebrated their theft and probably continue to do it.”

The three alleged thieves were arrested — at another Walmart store in Pearland near Texas 288 — after an hourlong chase. But Lawless’ efforts to stop them came at a price: a scratched face, broken lip and scrapes and bruises to her legs.

Lawless, an engineering safety specialist at Boeing…

Q.  And what does the photo of the Alabama State Capitol have to do with this?   A.  1) It was handy.  2)  The State of Alabama didn’t like it when Nate Shaw took the protection of his own property into his own hands, and locked him up for over a decade.

Q.  Or the two cases really analogous?   A.  Yes, they are, but how good an analogy we have here, I don’t really know.  Doesn’t matter all that much.  Ms. Lawless gets a Leviathan Anklebiter award.

Late edit:  More photos here at the UK Daily Mail Online, including some taken by CCTV security cameras.