Note: This column appeared at Pajamas Media on Wednesday under the title “Big Brother Doesn’t Want You Eating Burgers in LA.”

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In a proposal that is stunning in both its ignorance and arrogance, a South-Central Los Angeles politician wants to place a moratorium on the construction of new fast-food restaurants in her area.

What is unfortunately not nearly as surprising is how Washington Post reporter Karl Vick let some huge, uh, whoppers go by without challenge when he covered this development.

Here how Vick’s story, as carried at Boston.com, begins (HT Hot Air Headlines; bolds are mine):

Citing alarming rates of childhood obesity and a poverty of healthful eating choices, a city councilor is pushing for a moratorium on new fast-food restaurants in South-Central Los Angeles.

“Some people will say, ‘Well, people just don’t have to eat it,’ ” said Jan Perry, the Democrat who represents the city’s overwhelmingly African-American and Latino District 9. “But the fact of the matter is, what if you have no other choices?”

The proposed ordinance, which is awaiting a committee hearing, takes a page from boutique communities that turn up their noses at franchises.

It is supported by nutritionists, frustrated residents, and community activists who call restrictive zoning an appropriate response to “food apartheid.”

You would think that there are no grocery stores in South-Central offering all manner of nutritional options that often cost less per meal than fast food. Quite the contrary: Web searches on two chains I’m aware of in the area reveal that there are ten Ralph’s or Food4less stores within four miles of the address of the advocacy group whose Executive Director is quoted in the article, and at least three Vons within a reasonable distance of its zip code. When did eating store-bought food at home become a nonviable option?

Here are some relevant points to chew on:
(more…)

It’s here at Pajamas Media.

Here’s my tease (appetizer, if you will) for the column:

In a proposal that is stunning in both its ignorance and arrogance, a South-Central Los Angeles politician wants to place a moratorium on the construction of new fast-food restaurants in her area.

What is unfortunately not nearly as surprising is how Washington Post reporter Karl Vick let some huge, uh, whoppers go by without challenge when he covered this development.

It will go up at BizzyBlog on Friday morning (link won’t work until then) under the title “Oh (Big) Brother: LA Pol Wants New Fast-Food Outlet Halt; WaPo Reporter Eats It Up.”

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UPDATE: Mary Katharine Ham was on this on Monday at the Examiner. Well, so was I, except there was editing and review time from above. :–>

Not only that, the ignorance in on display is in what appears to be an official campaign video (HT Real Clear Politics):

(Excerpted comments begin at about 7:10 into the vid)

While you, most of you here have Social Security tax on every dime you’ve ever earned, you’ve got billionaires and millionaires who are paying on only a tiny ….. fraction of their income.

I’ve got a friend in Omaha, you may have heard of him, named Warren Buffett. He’s worth $56 billion. Y’know, if he’s only paying the first $100,000, that is .000001% of his income as he’s paying Social Security. I may have lost a couple of zeros in there.

The point is, it’s negligible to him, it’s not even noticeable. I think that’s why the best way forward is to first look to adjust the cap on the payroll tax, so that people like me, because I’m earning a bit more than $102,000, pay a little bit more and people in need are protected.

Folks, I cleaned up what Obama said as much as I could. Somebody ought to call Joe Biden and see if he wants to take back his comment about how articulate this guy is, instead of apologizing for having said it.

Anyway, here’s a translation of the bolded paragraph above I can (sort of) work with:

I’ve got a friend in Omaha, you may have heard of him, named Warren Buffett. He’s worth $56 billion. Y’know, if he’s only paying Social Security tax on the first $100,000, that is .000001% of his income on which he’s paying Social Security tax. I may have lost a couple of zeros in there.

You lost more than a couple of zeros, pal. You wanted your audience to mentally divide $100,000 by $56 billion (if you’re keeping score, that’s 0.00018%) — as if Warren Buffett’s income, which Obama never disclosed and probably isn’t known in total, is the same as his net worth. O,M,G.

Someone ought to tell Obama that:

• Income is what you earn.
• Net worth is what you have (after subtracting what you owe).
• Warren Buffett probably earns most of his income, which he said was more than $46 million in calendar 2006, from capital gains and dividends, against which there is no Social Security tax (yet).
• People pay Social Security tax on their income from work or self-employment, not on their net worth (yet).
• If Warren Buffett currently has earnings from work of $5.6 million (my recollection is that it’s probably lower than that), Obama was “only” off by a factor of 10,000 ($56 bil divided by $5.6 mil) in that element of his attempted “calculation.” Also, the current taxable earnings limit of $102,000 would be 1.8% of Buffett’s earnings from work, not “.000001%.”
• Under Obama’s proposal for Social Security, if Buffett’s earnings from work really is $5.6 million, he will pay over $663,000 more into the system —

  

• Warren Buffett, whose net worth is $56 billion, might indeed see this tax increase as “negligible to him …. not even noticeable.” I would suggest that someone with little previous net worth earning $5.6 million for the first time might more accurately see being forced to cough up an additional $663K as theft by government.
• Pile the 12.4% marginal tax just shown on top of the top federal income tax rate of 39.6% that would return if the current tax law isn’t extended, the 2.9% Medicare tax on all earned income, and at least 5% for state and local income taxes, and you’re at a marginal tax rate of just under 60%. That’s ridiculous.

Whether Barack Obama actually understands any of this is questionable.

This is the same guy who says that his earnings of roughly $4 million in 2007 (including book royalties, which are subject to Social Security taxation up to the current limit) is “a bit more” than $102,000. Some “bit.”

This guy is one election win away from being in charge of a $3 trillion-plus budget and responsibility for steering US economic policy.

O. M. G.

I don’t want to claim any special insight into things like this, but the claims about the product Enzyte always seemed bogus to me. The fact that so many people were clearly willing to spend money on the stuff bordered on astonishing. Now the company’s president has been found guilty “of conspiracy to commit mail fraud, bank fraud and money laundering.” It could not have happened soon enough.

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If I were from New Orleans or the Gulf Coast and had gone through the devastation of the 2005 hurricane that struck there, I’d be insulted by those characterizing the subprime lending and foreclosure problems in Northeastern Ohio as “Cleveland’s Katrina.” For cryin’ out loud, 1,836 people died in the real Katrina.

Oh, NEO’s problems are partially George Bush’s fault too. Zheesh.

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On Hillary’s sinking campaign:

• If you have to deny that your campaign is in trouble, it probably is.
• The superdelegate bleed continues. On Friday the 15th, Hillary was ahead of the candidate I often refer to as BOOHOO (Barack O-bomba Overseas Hussein “Obambi” Obama) 242-156. Tuesday the 19th (first item at link), it was 239-168. Now a February 23 AP story puts things at 241-181. Obama has picked up 25, and she has lost 1, in just eight days. At that rate, her “superdel” lead will be will be gone within about three weeks.
• Speaking of bleeding, the campaign has bled green, as in money, ever since it began. January was no exception.
• This poll, showing Obama up 57-43 in Texas, would appear to mean that the Lone Star State is lost to her. I believe that an Ohio poll with Obama on top, but by a smaller margin, will appear shortly.
• Terrier Ted Strickland, according to Robert Novak, has his doubts about whether she can win Ohio.
• The final insult — The print edition of the Sunday New York Times had the picture at the top of this story covering at least half of the territory above the fold. Ouch.

Update: Going after this, which even troubles hard-core Democrats, is — correction, WAS — Hillary’s Hail Mary pass. Problem: “Clinton’s husband pardoned more than a dozen convicted violent radicals, including a member of the same group mentioned in the Obama stories.”

Mrs. Clinton could still conceivably risk the hypocrisy charge and bring Obama’s cozy ties with 1960s radicals up at the debate in Ohio this week. I don’t think she will do it, because the spotlight might be turned back to her own radical past. Can you say “Black Panthers“?

Update 2: Her recent mocking of Obama is clever (HT Darke County GOP), but probably not enough to matter. She needed to hammer this for about three weeks for it to have significant impact, and, again, bring it up herself in a debate.

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Obama does have seem to have a certain glow about him. But its source may be nuclear in origin. Given the bogus charges thrown at Jean Schmidt in October 2006 in Ohio’s Second District, the Obama-Exelon situation needs to filed away for future reference, especially if Victoria Wells Wulsin Whatever gets too close to the Obama glow.

It has once again been too long since my last comprehensive cruise through what I believe is the largest single-state blog alliance in the nation. So let’s get started on what will only be a surface scratch at a rich treasure trove of content.

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Trakas v. Kucinich in OH-10. Trakas will announce on Saturday, noted at Big World Blog.

Related: Mark Naymik of the Cleveland Plain Dealer says, oh-so-objectively, “The Cuyahoga County Republican Party has found its sacrificial lamb in the 10th Congressional District.” Really? If Trakas plays the prolife betrayal card on Kucinich in what I believe is still a heavily Catholic district, I wouldn’t be too sure, Mark.

And somebody in Northeast Ohio has to start answering for how lousy its economy has been. It can’t be Bob Taft’s fault; Metro Columbus is getting along very well, and Metro Cincy is doing OK, if not great.

Kucinich may not be directly responsible, but what if anything has he done to stop the bleeding? It’s more likely that he’s voted against legislation — lots of it — that would have helped, and for legislation that has been or would have been harmful.

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Bearing Drift jumped on yesterday’s Sharpton-FBI-IRS story.

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Read Wizblog’s “An Accident and a Murder,” about the disparate news treatment two French crime death stories received. Don’t miss his related follow-up items.

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Maggie Thurber, on Ohio’s lack of competitiveness:

Ohio ranked 47th out of 50 states in terms of our overall ranking (1 was the best) and 49th in the Economic Performance Ranking, which was based on the state’s performance (equal-weighted average) in the three important performance variables highly influenced by state policy: personal income per capita (47th), absolute domestic migration (45th), and non-farm payroll employment (48th).

The American Legislative Exchange Council’s index to all 50 state reports (all PDFs) is here.

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Smoke If You Got ‘Em weighed in on Taxman Blog’s critique of yours truly and Nix over payday lending. Taxman responded.

My take is that there is something wrong with a business whose only reason for existing is to prey on the ignorant. At a minimum, payday lenders should be forced to treat their “fees” as interest, and be subject to Truth in Lending disclosures. The fact that they aren’t only aids and abets their predations.

Capping rates and fees, even if there is adequate disclosure, is probably necessary too. Sorry — I don’t think we can stand by and watch ignorant people get taken. And I definitely don’t want to be represented by someone who has made his career in a business whose only reason for existing, again, is to prey on the ignorant.

Taxman’s point about state lotteries is a good one, and I think that on balance we’d be better off without them. But on the mistaken public policy scale of 1-10, I think payday-lending laissez faire (which is essentially the situation in Ohio) is a 10, while the lotteries are a 3.

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Justin at Right on the Right covers yet another Hillary time warp.

A related blast from past from Snopes: “Claim (by Mrs. Clinton): I was named after Sir Edmund Hillary. False.”

A more comprehensive look at Mrs. Clinton’s history of estrangement from the truth is at Liberally Conservative.

Porkopolis wonders when Mrs. Clinton’s apology for calling General Petraeus a liar (”willing suspension of disbelief) is going to arrive.

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King’s Right Site has a story about Montel Williams that got less attention than it deserved. Mr. Williams would appear to need a halo adjustment.

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Nix is the only Guy I’m aware of noting that John and Elizabeth Edwards homeschool their two children. Given Edwards’s party’s beholdenness to the NEA, that may not be a minor matter.

Related, sort of: Return of the Conservatives notes that Heisman winner Tim Tebow, positively covered here yesterday, was homeschooled.

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Nasty, Brutish and Short has choice words on the “green shopping” movement.

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One Oar is paddling furiously against against the government education syndicate. As should we all.

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Pro Ecclesia caught Pennsylvania’s supposedly prolife, profamily senator Casey getting praise from the state’s Planned Parenthood chapter for his voting record — And thereby betraying his brave father’s legacy.

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As usual, the top three items at Central Ohioans Against Terrorism are strong doses of reality that should rattle the complacent.

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“Video: abortionist tells med students he lies to patients” — at Brain Shavings. Read it. View it.

Update: A link is also at Life News, and here’s some visual reinforcement:

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Boring Made Dull shows that Ohio Governor Strickland knows when not to cross the line (even when he’d personally like to). Barbara Sykes has no such political sense.

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And finally, Conservative UAW Guy just did something I wish I had gotten around to — chronicling the “almost too much information” debunking globaloney and those who promote it. He barely scratched the surface of what I have.

They said if George Bush was re-elected president that powerful people would dig into your past to see what you were doing in the third grade, or even kindergarten — and they were right.

And this is really dumb:

New polling shows Hillary Clinton may have dropped to second in Iowa behind Barack Obama, so now the pro-abortion New York senator has decided to go on the attack. She’s blasting her Illinois colleague on the issue of abortion and claming she’s done more to advance the pro-abortion cause.

In an Iowa stop on Monday, Clinton sought to portray Obama as someone who talks a tough game on promoting abortion but hasn’t advocated it to the same extent as her.

I realize the link is to Life News and that it’s not a quote, but it’s nonetheless clear that Mrs. Clinton has embarked on an “I’m more pro-abort than you” strategy. Even the most ardent pro-aborts have to be uncomfortable with that, as it easily conjures up a vision of who can stack bodies up the highest. What ever happened to the “safe, but rare” formulation?

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Chavez lost his grab for permanent power by a 51-49 margin. If it weren’t for fear, he would have lost by more.

The New York Times failed to note that point, even as it quoted one such fearful person near the end of its “analysis”:

For Mr. Chávez’s followers, meanwhile, the outcome of the referendum has forced some to take stock, uncomfortably, of their own loyalties.

Pedro Luis Urbina, a 33-year-old bus driver from the gritty district of El Valle who described himself as a loyal “Chavista,” said he had voted in favor of the proposals, despite disagreeing with them. The reason, Mr. Urbina said, was that he feared losing a government loan he had received to start his own small public transportation business.

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This IBD editorial is the anti-CAIR:

In 2006, a whopping 66% of religiously motivated attacks were on Jews, while just 11% targeted Muslims, even though the Jewish and Muslim populations are similar in size. Catholics and Protestants, who together account for 9% of victims, are subject to almost as much abuse as Muslims in this country.

Last year’s anti-Islamic hate crimes totaled 156. While just one hate crime is one too many, that’s a 68% drop from 2001.

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Ford broke a string of 12 consecutive months of reduced unit sales, and eked out a 0.6% increase in November vs. a year ago. The company, which was number 2 in the US just a year ago, saw ts 183,000 in unit sales trail Toyota’s by over 14,000. Still, give the folks in Dearborn a little credit, as both GM and Chrysler were down.

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Apple’s newest operating system, Leopard, is described in less-than-glowing terms by PC Magazine’s Oliver Rist. Considerably less than glowing:

Leopard is the new Vista. All the way.

Ouch.

Rist comes up with five pretty convincing reasons why. Informal conversations with several people who have upgraded give me the impression that Apple has a real problem on its hands. I for one am not upgrading for a while.

Note: This post has been moved to the top because of the importance of the topic.

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I received this e-mail from several people this morning:

I am jaw-drop stunned that an allegedly Republican governor has allowed what’s in the red box above to become law in this country’s birthplace of freedom.

And what’s this about $50 co-pays for abortions? Really?

Really (pic is from the Commonwealth Care [i.e., RomneyCare] web site; original PDF document is here):

As stated previously, I believe that Romney and his supporters, whom Gregg Jackson has taken to calling Romniacs, aren’t attempting to rebut Jackson’s detailed criticisms (here and here) of the former Massachusetts governor, because they can’t.

And now (I can’t believe I’m typing this) — Not only do the Romniacs cluelessly wonder why National Right to Life didn’t endorse their guy, they have the further gall to “speculate” that the guy NRTL did endorse paid them off (HT Life News):

Paul M. Weyrich, president of the Free Congress Foundation, said the endorsement “makes no sense,” and speculated that it had been motivated by money.

“I think in all probability the Thompson people were engaged with the National Right to Life people in financial dealing,” said Mr. Weyrich, who has endorsed former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney for the Republican nomination.

Look, if you’re a Romniac, you can disagree with NRTL’s decision and point out reasons why, especially if you believe that a Human Life Amendment (HLA), which Thompson opposes, is the way to go (Fred wants Roe v. Wade overturned, and the states to decide individually at that point; I think the HLA should be tried, but only after Roe v. Wade goes away). It may very well be that its Thompson endorsement is not the smartest move NRTL has ever made. But raising the possibility of a payoff without a shred of evidence is a breathtakingly irresponsible move by people who should and do know better. If Weyrich et al have some kind of evidence, they’d better come out with it, right freaking now.

Meanwhile, Gregg Jackson’s, and others’, solid points about Romney’s campaign positions and performance as governor, backed by real evidence, stand unrefuted. We’re still waiting for something other than character assassination in response.

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UPDATE: Sally Pipes has more in a read-the-whole thing column on what’s really happening on the ground in the Bay State –

It’s one thing to pass a law, hold a press conference, and boldly declare to have solved an intractable public policy problem, such as the lack of universal health insurance. It’s quite another to actually have the so-called solution deliver as promised.

….. It’s now crunch time in Massachusetts. The estimated 500,000 residents who still haven’t purchased health insurance must sign up by November 15th or risk being fined $219 when tax time rolls around in April. Compared to the premiums, the many may elect the fines. But they all won’t do so quietly.

….. The plan doesn’t contain any meaningful cost-control mechanisms. The bureaucrats managing the new health care agency are expressing concern about cost trends. People purchasing the insurance are older and sicker than projected, resulting in losses to the insurance carriers. Outside of the plan, Massachusetts health insurers have projected increased health premiums of 8 to 12 percent. The plans for which the taxpayers are subsidizing will likely require similar increases in cash.

At this point, it seems smart for Mitt Romney to run from his plan and distance himself from its design even as Hillary Clinton and other Democrats embrace it.

Say what? I don’t think it’s a particularly good idea to elect someone who has to run away from what he at the time considered his centerpiece accomplishment as little as a year ago. What happens if the centerpiece accomplishment of a President Romney doesn’t work out? Does he then run to Mexico?

Here’s a SmartMoney.com article on something I’ve been meaning to bring up for quite a while (bold is mine):

Buying a home is already a complex endeavor. Add in the sometimes unfathomable machinations of a homeowners association (HOA) and you enter a realm filled with the potential for misunderstandings that may have legal and financial consequences.

Often, home buyers don’t fully realize the tradeoff they’re making when they move into communities that involve becoming association members, experts say. More than 57 million people live in associations governing everything from large and small condominium developments to subdivisions of single-family homes, according to the Community Associations Institute, a trade group in Alexandria, Va.

“Many people have trouble accepting the fact that decisions will be made by others,” said Mark Pearlstein, a partner with Levenfeld Pearlstein LLC, a Chicago-based law firm that represents associations.

….. Associations provide a number of important benefits including, for instance, landscape maintenance and access to fitness facilities, and their rules often help protect property values. But it’s the horror stories that make the news: Full-blown fights over a homeowner flying a flag, stringing a clothesline or owning a large dog. And in some states associations are within their rights to foreclose on homeowners who respond to disagreements by refusing to pay their dues.

Two common homeowner complaints: Unexpected increases in dues and unwelcome rule changes.

Homeowners are often “surprised about the ability of an association to change the rules,” Pearlstein said.

For instance, recently, to forestall declines in property values, more associations are prohibiting homeowners from renting out their units. “Courts in most states have held that an association can change the rules by a vote of the ownership to restrict or eliminate leasing,” Pearlstein said.

Now, there’s the rub.

I’ll admit to not having sorted all of this out, but some freedom-advocating reactions to the arbitrary nature of HOAs, especially severe after-the-fact restrictions, would include these:

• HOAs are functioning as governments, and quite unaccountable ones at that.
• If they’re going to do that, HOA board members have to run for election — and not the internally-administered kind. I mean the normal government-administered election process at the polls.
• Major changes to HOA rules should also be subject to a formal electoral approval process.
• HOA members not on the HOA boards should have the right to bring forth ballot initiatives.
• Residents not satisfied with the resolution of a dispute need a legally-recognized right to appeal those rulings through the court system instead of being subject to binding arbitration.

I’m sure there’s a lot I’ve missed. I’m not impressed with the argument that “You agreed to it when you bought your house, now you have to live with it.” My view: You agreed to be “governed” by reasonable people, not the petty tyrants and busybodies who have all too often gravitated towards HOA positions.

Since the large majority of new homes and condos are governed (there’s that word again) by the rules (which are for all practical purposes, laws) of HOAs, their actions and somewhat extra-legal nature deserve more scrutiny than they are receiving.

I believe HOAs function as unnacountable de facto governments that need to be reined in. Though I haven’t researched it, I would be not surprised to learn that their “trade group” is into big-league lobbying at the state and federal levels to protect their arbitrary interests. I would also suspect that their power to influence any potential legislation is growing. HOAs not happy with assuming the responsibilities commensurate with their power do have a choice: They can vote to disband. Many of them wouldn’t be missed.

I don’t necessarily see this as a left-right issue, but perhaps others see it differently.

Cross-posted at Wide Open.

The Check ‘n Go situation in DC, updated today at the Enquirer, has a local angle that NixGuy has been following (here and here, with much more at his site).

John Rabenold, a lobbyist for Check ‘n Go (CNG), is running for Representative in Ohio’s 35th District as an alleged (cough, cough, blech, retch) Republican. He has raised a substantial portion of his overstuffed campaign war chest from the payday lending industry.

Mr. Rabenold works in a shady industry that (what a surprise) attracts shady people (paragraphs are in different order than in the original article). See if you can find the interesting admission in the excerpt:

In a news release, the company (Check ‘n Go) accused (the company’s former director of operations for the District of Columbia Michael) Donovan and two other former employees who also spoke at the news conference (last week) of conspiring with the Center for Responsible Lending to tarnish the company and the payday loan industry.

Check ‘n Go claims in its lawsuit that Donovan stole confidential business information about the company in violation of an agreement he signed not to disclose such information. The lawsuit also claims Donovan misled the company into hiring him by using a false Social Security number and lying about his criminal history.

The company is seeking unspecified damages from Donovan.

The news conference that Donovan spoke at was in support of legislation before the District of Columbia City Council that would cap payday-loan interest at 24 percent a year, the same rate charged by banks and credit unions. The council approved the cap Tuesday.

“The average Check ‘n Go customer in the District (of Columbia) is continuously in debt to the company for at least a year, and it’s not uncommon to see customers trapped for several years,” Donovan said last week. “The repeat borrower is vital to our business model.

The admission is that by asserting that Donovan supplied a false SSN, CNG didn’t successfully verify Mr. Donavan’s Social Security Number before hiring him. I’ll leave it to readers to come up with reasons why and related implications.

The danger that Mr. Rabenold’s primary “interest” as State Representative will be protecting his industry from meaningful regulation of its usurious practices should be evident to anyone. It’s a risk the voters of the District should not be taking — regardless of the possible appeal of his other issue positions. Even if he abstains from relevant votes, as promised in his meeting with an SOB screening committee a month ago, his years as an aide and as a lobbyist will give him insider influence on others’ votes that he doesn’t deserve.

As to Rabenold’s issue positions, I think the most telling point made by Matt about the screening interview was this:

Mr. Rabenold appears not to have given ….. a whole lot of thought in to what he’d like to accomplish if he won the election.

My take: The lack of thought is likely related to his payday lending industry-driven agenda. Apparently, little else is important.

Mr. Rabenold’s opponent, Eric Minamyer, on the other hand, has a blowaway bio. This is what what I said in June 2005 when I attended a Second Congressional District debate (Minamyer finished fifth in a field of 10, in a race ultimately won by Jean Schmidt):

(Minamyer) Read off a no-brag, just-fact resume of solid accomplishment that made you want to crawl under the chair (pew in this case) and wonder what you’ve been doing all your life: A non-professional elected politician for 16 years (now 18 — Ed.); 33 years in the Navy or Naval Reserve; served in Gulf War I, Afghanistan, OIF, with two near-death experiences; Inspector General; Hamilton County Deputy Sheriff; Lawyer.

Oh, by the way, Minamyer is solid on common-sense conservative issues, is prolife and pro-traditional marriage (but I’m being redundant). When he’s “on,” he is a very compelling speaker; I rated him second-best in the group of 11 candidates at the bipartisan June 2005 forum mentioned earlier (I gave the top rating to Tom Brinkman and third place to Jean Schmidt).

So, let’s see:
- Eric Minamyer, three-war vet — versus John Rabenold, payday lender.
- Minamyer, the longtime public servant — versus Rabenold, the lobbyist.
- Minamyer, with an agenda for improvement — versus “not a whole lot of thought” Rabenold.

Mr. Check ‘n Go needs to be Check ‘n Gone.

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UPDATE: Among the things Nix has to say today –

Oh now this makes me feel MUCH better about the payday lending industry. Not only do they rip people off, they hire convicts without so much as a background check! Nice.

With any luck, Donovan can get some decent legal representation, these guys do not want to go to the discovery stage of a lawsuit.

Interestingly enough Mr. Rabenold is not defending his company anymore. Did he lose his job as corporate spokesman?

UPDATE 2: Mr. Rabenold’s breezy assertion that he will abstain from votes relating to the business he works for has troubling implications that need to be thought through.

A representative’s conflicts of interest should be very rare, not frequent. Rabenold is in effect telling 35th District voters that they will have no say in the Statehouse on any matter relating to financial services industry regulation. After all, Mr. Rabenold, who has said that he will continue to be a CNG executive but will no longer be a lobbyist(!), should recuse himself from matters relating to his bank and credit union competitors. At the extreme, if matters relating to financial-industry regulation are folded into the state’s biennial budget, it seems that Mr. Rabenold would be compelled to abstain from that too. In fact, anyone favoring a bill subject to a close vote will put something relating to financial services into his or her bill if they think Rabenold will oppose it, to prevent him from voting.

All of this has the potential to leave a 35th District “represented” by Mr. Rabenold with little or no meaningful voting representation. So what am I missing?

UPDATE 3: Nix updates with a great riposte to a comment defending CNG.

The deadline for talks between the United Auto Workers and the Formerly Big Three automakers (General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler) theoretically looms on September 14.

No one has more at stake in a sweetheart deal than Ford, for reasons almost entirely of its own making.

Oh, the Dearborn-based company has the same daunting challenges as its other brethren at the bargaining table: a too-high cost structure, expensive retiree health-care costs, and a product line in need of serious work. That much is known.

What isn’t as well-known, and rarely understood, is that Ford has embarked on a seven-year journey of uber-Politicial Correctness that now threatens to gut its core US vehicle business.

Yesterday, Tom Borelli at Townhall explained the environmental aspect of the company’s loss of, excuse the word, focus. As the company moved from concentrating on making great cars to the misnomer known as “Corporate Social Responsibility” (CSR), it hurt itself, and the entire industry:

At the turn of the century, instead of confronting the business threat posed by global warming, William Clay Ford Jr., then chief executive of Ford Motor Company, had a better idea: embrace CSR.

The company declared war on its most profitable vehicles in its first corporate citizenship report in 2000 when it said SUVs contribute more to global warming than cars. Mr. Ford expressed concern that SUVs would harm the company’s reputation and he feared public opinion would turn against the company. According to news reports, the company wanted to be considered the “most environmentally responsible automaker.”

….. Also in 2000, Ford put dollars behind its CSR effort. In announcing the company’s $5 million sponsorship of the Carbon Mitigation Initiative (CMI) project at Princeton University, Mr. Ford said, “Corporations should be and could be a major force for resolving environmental and social concerns in the 21st century.”

….. With corporate dollars, CMI effectively whipped up global warming fears.

….. The political response to fossil fuel fears that Ford helped generate is evident in California. In 2002, the state passed a law limiting greenhouse gas emissions from new vehicles sold in California in 2009. In 2006, California sued automakers over global warming because greenhouse gases caused billions of dollars in damages.

If the harm Ford has done to itself was limited to enviro-nonsense, that would be one thing. But on top of that, the company has embraced far-left and culture-war causes that are far, far removed from anything having to do with making great cars. Two such examples have been its active opposition to affirmative action ballot initiatives and its stubborn support and sponsorship of groups supporting homosexual marriage.

Advocating causes that are at odds with the views of much of your company’s customer base may appear not have a lot to do with producing cars. But at a minimum, it distracts always time-crunched management from paying enough attention to it. If you somehow don’t agree with that, you can’t deny that getting behind causes customers don’t like often can, and often does, end up having a lot to do with selling cars — or, more accurately in this case, not selling them.

Ford has decided to make itself Exhibit A in proving that point.

The American Family Association called for a boycott of Ford over its support of homosexual groups over 18 months ago. AFA doesn’t want Ford to join the one-man, one-woman marriage bandwagon; it wants Ford to shift into neutral, as Wal-Mart did late last year, when it appeared that it too might have overinhaled on PC vapors. Wal-Mart specifically stated that it would return to putting all of its energies into what it does best, discount retailing, and threw its extraneous activities overboard.

I am not a supporter of AFA’s boycott, because I believe it is hurting too many good people. I recognize, of course, that reasonable people can disagree on this matter, and am not about to criticize anyone who finds the company’s positions and actions unsupportable, and a reason not to do business with it.

Unlike Ford, and unlike Old Media, which has thus far virtually ignored what may be the most “successful” boycott in the 21st century so far, I’m not pretending that the boycott doesn’t exist, or that it has been ineffective (I covered Old Media’s studied ignorance, while it gives inkand bandwidth to other very trivial boycotts, in April. Nothing has changed.). The boycott does exist, and it has had a significant negative impact that, if anything, continues to grow.

Since AFA’s boycott call, almost 750,000 people have signed their boycott petition. Ford’s monthly sales results during that time have come in as follows (figures were found in an AFA spreadsheet that is consistent with what I have seen reported in the months involved; August’s result was added by me from this Associated Press story at MSNBC):

The evidence that the deterioration in Ford’s US market position is accelerating is virtually beyond doubt. Ford’s monthly US sales during the AFA boycott period have almost always trailed the average result of its competitors by at least 5% to 10%. But August 2007 was even worse: Ford’s -14.4% trailed the unweighted average of its five biggest rivals by a whopping 16% (GM, +6%; Toyota, -2.8%; Chrysler, -6.1%; Nissan, +6.3%; Honda, +4.7%; average, +1.6%). Every 2007 decline during the boycott period has been worse than the corresponding decline 12 months earlier.

The sphere of influence of the AFA boycott is arguably every bit of 15-20 million people, and growing. AFA itself has over 3.1 million members who probably influence 3-5 others, while the boycott has the support of 34 other influential pro-family organizations. There’s little doubt that Ford has turned its back on at least 10% of car buyers, who also happen to be among those more likely to buy more-profitable SUV and crossover vehicles.

The fact is that anecdotes like this one are more than likely being played out hundreds of times across the country, to little or no publicity:

September 6, 2007

Pro-homosexual policies at the Ford Motor Company are being cited as the reason one ministry leader broke a longstanding tradition of purchasing vehicles from Ford.

….. ministry leader (Stephen Bennett) says Ford’s diversity policies meant his ministry could not purchase a Ford vehicle. “Ford lost out on a huge amount of money,” he points out. “….. it is just very sad that Ford continues to promote this agenda.”

It’s “sad” for more than Ford. Add to the “sad” list at least the following: its employees, whose livelihoods are in jeopardy (a good UAW deal for GM and Chrysler might not be good enough to enable Ford to survive in the US market long-term); its suppliers; its dealers; and the states and communities where its plants and facilities are located.

Short of more years of double-digit unit sales declines that the company can ill afford, what will it take for the deniers in Dearborn, and the Old Media business reporters covering the company, to acknowledge what is happening?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

Thanks to a clever new tool called Wikiscanner, we learn that some folks at the New York Times apparently have too much time on their hands. They have been whiling away spare hours as Wikipedia vandals targeting entries relating to conservatives (here, here, and here). It turns out that the Times was warned about acts of vandalism originating from its IP address range late last year (via this comment at Dan Riehl’s place.

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Shameless shilling — Although it happened two weeks ago, I just noticed that Michelle Malkin linked in an update to yours truly’s cross-posted NewsBusters entry on the Alms for Jihad book suppression.

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The BBC is caught dead to rights engaging in selective censorship — and it IS censorship in the traditional sense of the word, since the Beeb is a “public body, funded by the taxpayer” (HT LGF via Instapundit):

The BBC has been forced to remove statements from its website referring to Jesus as a ‘bastard’.

It is the latest in a string of offensive comments that BBC editors have allowed members of the public to post.

The remarks have been allowed to remain for weeks, despite complaints from religious groups.

It has led to claims that the BBC is allowing its output to be hijacked by extremists while censoring anti-Muslim sentiment.

….. One website user wanted to see if BBC editors were allowing these offensive remarks to remain while blocking others. He wrote: “No one can surpass the Muslims for denial of their role in Terrorism and Suicide bombing.” The remarks were almost immediately deleted.

Instapundit “It’s as if they reflexively side with the enemies of Western civilization.” Delete the “It’s as if,” and he’s about right.

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I can attest personally to the fact that there is a lot, lot, LOT of resistance to buying a new computer with Vista out there on the part of experienced users. Jim Louderback at PC World, who is moving on to another gig, is just one:

So why, nine months after launch, am I so frustrated? The litany of what doesn’t work and what still frustrates me stretches on endlessly.

….. I could go on and on about the lack of drivers, the bizarre wake-up rituals, the strange and nonreproducible system quirks, and more. But I won’t bore you with the details. The upshot is that even after nine months, Vista just ain’t cutting it. I definitely gave Microsoft too much of a free pass on this operating system: I expected it to get the kinks worked out more quickly. Boy, was I fooled! If Microsoft can’t get Vista working, I might just do the unthinkable: I might move to Linux.

If a lot of users hold on to their XP computers until the absolute ends of their useful lives, tech retailers and resellers could have a very unhappy Christmas season. Though I think it’s a long shot, we might even get the “Microsoft recession” I was speculating about last year (”If Mister Softee keeps diddling around with Vista and slows down the tech sector, maybe we should call the next downturn The Microsoft Recession.”)

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As to the flap over the surveillance bill (HT Moderate Voice) — Doesn’t anyone else notice the disconnect between “Bush is dumber than a box of rocks” and “Bush fooled us into giving him even more power.”?

From the “Careful What You Wish For” Department — Those who think they stopped Wal-Mart from expanding its presence in the banking business by intimidating the FDIC were, as predicted, badly mistaken:

Wal-Mart on Wednesday announced that it will expand its in-store “MoneyCenters” to about 1,000 locations by 2008.

These MoneyCenters will offer customers access to low-cost services such as check cashing, money orders and money transfers.

Wal-Mart already operates 225 MoneyCenters and expects to more than double that number to cover a quarter of its stores by the end of 2008.

Underscoring its push into financial services, Wal-Mart is broadening its menu of financial products and services, beginning with the launch of the Wal-Mart MoneyCard, a reloadable prepaid Visa rolling out nationally with GE Money and Green Dot.

Wal-Mart said it expects the low-cost money services will “help meet the needs of the millions of [its] unbanked and underserved customers.”

Surely the Moneycenters’ services will expand beyond those indicated, under what is likely a less stringent regulatory framework. Maybe the company should send a thank-you note to those who stopped it at the FDIC. If it were anyone but Wal-Mart, those same activists would be sending thank-yous to the company for lowering costs to the unbanked. Instead, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re back in a couple of years accusing it of gouging.

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Shelly Lombard thinks Ford may be facing intermediate-term bankruptcy:

The only way for Ford to get there (to profitability) is through major concessions from The United Auto Workers union, Ms. Lombard wrote in a report.

“Without such changes we believe bankruptcy or some type of out-of-court restructuring may be inevitable, though not immediate of course since Ford has enough liquidity to last until 2012 or so, even at the current cash burn rate.”

Burn rate? I haven’t seen that term since the dot-com era.

I’m going to suggest that all the UAW concessions in the world may not save Ford if the company doesn’t deal with the American Family Association boycott (713,000 and counting).

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MLB can’t really stand for Major League Baseball, it has to mean Men Loony as Bats (the flying ones):

• It’s trying to claim that watching a game you paid for on a Slingbox is illegal.
• And MLB is still harassing fantasy leagues because they think they own the facts and other common items associated with the game, such as player names, stats, team logos, and the like (covered last year here [3rd item] and here [4th item]).

Keep it up, guys, and you’ll become the new NFL (No Fan League).

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Driving trucks no one else will drive?

An author and investigative journalist believes that, in an effort to ensure Mexican trucks will begin rolling across the U.S. on schedule, the Bush administration is pressing the Senate to not take action on a bill passed overwhelmingly in the House that essentially would block the project.

The issue is safety, or lack thereof, of the Mexican big rigs. Sorry — After the shenanigans over the simple concept of building a fence, I do not trust this administration to keep unsafe rigs off the roads.

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Peggy Noonan’s column last week on the illegal immigration situation isn’t perfect, but it had a two-paragraph compassionately conservative recommendation that should not be ignored:

We should close the border, pause, absorb what we have, and set ourselves to “patriating” the newcomers who are here. The young of AmeriCorps might help teach them English. Those reaching retirement age, who happen to be the last people in America who were taught and know American history, could help them learn the story of our country. We could, as a nation, set our minds to this.

We shouldn’t be disheartened. So much good could be done once a Great Pause begins, once the alarm is abated.

I would amend that, as I’m sure Noonan would, to allow anyone legally going through the immigration process to continue to do so. In working through the backlog, new citizenships will still take place at the rate of roughly a million a year for at least a few years. But for her idea to really work, the diversity divisiveness crowd would just have to lead, follow, or get the heck out of the way. I wish I could claim to be optimistic about that.

The Institute for Policy Innovation talks about a number that comes from The Tax Foundation (link to USA Today article added by me):

$300 billion. (Note: The Tax Foundation link actually says “$275 billion and rising” — Ed.)

That’s how much the Tax Foundation estimates Americans—individuals and businesses—will spend this year on tax preparation.

That’s about 20 percent of the $1.5 trillion we’ll pay in income taxes.

So why are so many Americans willing to shell out what amounts to a 20 percent additional tax just to pay tax preparers? Complexity. Our 67,000-page tax code is impossible to understand—even for the experts.

When USA Today recently gave the same data to four tax experts, they came up with four different tax liabilities.

If the tax code were fairer, simpler and flatter, most of us wouldn’t need those preparers. It would be like a 20 percent tax cut that no one would claim hurts the poor.

IPI’s use of the word “willing” in the fourth paragraph is questionable. I’d say that in most cases the correct word is “forced.”

A private company that spent 20% of its revenue just to collect what it is owed could be described in three words: out, of, business. A firm that tried to push almost all of this cost onto its “customers,” as the IRS does, would never get past the start-up stage.

IPI didn’t really go far enough in its prescription. The incredible costly income tax system should be scrapped and replaced with the Fair Tax.

Having just gone through a couple of auctions, I’m stunned that many of the “questions” about what I was selling were, in essence, spam, sent from within Ebay, where other members were promoting their own web sites selling mostly unrelated items — 7 out of 10, at last count.

I would hope that Ebay disciplines members who are wasting sellers’ time by doing that. Though I notified the company as to what was going on (receiving only a canned response in reply), my experience would seem to indicate that they aren’t.

Walt Mossberg, as he test drove his new Sony VAIO, got, uh, hacked off (HT Techdirt) at PC makers in general:

….. I’m talking about two main problems. One is the plethora of teaser software and advertisements for products that must be cleared and uninstalled to make way for your own stuff. The second is the confusing welter of security programs you have to master and update, even on a virgin machine.

I’m also referring to how slowly a new Windows Vista machine starts and restarts, even if you haven’t yet loaded or launched any of your own software.

I am not singling out Sony here. I would have had a similar experience if I had chosen, say, a Hewlett-Packard laptop. Most major PC makers feature the security programs and trial software and offers I encountered on my new Sony. They are not part of Vista itself.

The problem is a lack of respect for the consumer. The manufacturers don’t act as if the computer belongs to you. They act as if it is a billboard for restricted trial versions of software and ads for Web sites and services that they can sell to third-party companies who want you to buy these products.

I’m distinguishing these programs, sometimes called “craplets,” from the full-featured, built-in Sony software meant to enhance the computer, or from entire, useful programs Microsoft builds into Windows, such as music and photo organizers.

On my new Sony, there were two dozen trial programs and free offers. The desktop alone contained four icons representing come-ons for various America Online services, and two for Microsoft. The start menu and program menu had more items that I neither chose nor wanted. Napster, a music service I don’t use, was lodged at the lower right of the screen.

The worst was a desktop icon called “Watch Hit Movies Now!” This turned out to be four full-length films from Sony’s movie studios, which the company had preloaded onto my computer at the cost of more than four gigabytes of precious hard-disk space. But they aren’t a gift. If you want to play them, you have to pay Sony.

Then there was the security-software mess……

I also was shocked at how long this machine took to restart and to do a cold start after being completely shut down. Restarting took over three minutes, and a cold start took more than two minutes. That suggests the computer is loading a bunch of stuff I neither know about nor want. By contrast, a brand new Apple MacBook laptop, under the same test conditions, restarted in 34 seconds and did a cold start in 29 seconds.

As they say, read the whole thing.

Mossberg didn’t note that newer Intel-based machines, in combination with Vista, enable a very deep sleep mode that, as I understand it, is withing striking distance of being a reboot, and that a PC can awaken from very deep sleep in just a few seconds. That “should” mean less frequent need to shut down or restart the machine.

But Mossberg’s point about craplets and trial-software overkill is a good one — so good that Microsoft openly worried when Vista was launched that craplets would hold back new system sales or cause system malfunctions.

It would appear that the best solution would for consumers to insist on getting craplet-free machines, but it seems that it will will take thousands of walk-aways before anyone would do something about it.

From a laughable Monday subscription-only editorial:

But if payday lending is such a consumer rip off, no one has explained why these stores have become so popular. There are some 25,000 payday stores across America, and in many small towns the payday loan store is now as commonplace as the local post office. It has become something like a $6 billion industry serving 15 million people every month.

Critics complain that the annual percentage rate (APR) on a two-week loan of $100 with a $15 fee amounts to a predatory 390%. But the equivalent APR cost to the borrower of writing a bounced check can exceed 1,300%, while a credit card late fee charge can reach 700%.

So to justify ridiculous payday lending charges, the Journal compares the interest rate on a loan to the costs of making various mistakes. That’s about as desperate as an argument can get.

Stem cell progress:

A British research team led by the world’s leading heart surgeon has grown part of a human heart from stem cells for the first time.

Since it represents real progress, the article naturally does not have the word “embryonic” in it.
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Late last week, Don Luskin talked about something that really IS settled science.
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A survey estimates that spam costs $712 per employee per year. I’d say it’s at least that. Another Information Week item says that it increased yet another 76% in the first quarter of 2007, and that small businesses are being specifically targeted.

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No one can credibly claim that Michelle Malkin is wrong about this.

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Of course, Cincinnati Mayor Mark Mallory’s Opening Day pitch was wayyyyy wide of home plate — to the left (HT RAB).

A Tuesday subscriber-only Wall Street Journal op-ed a week ago by Lawrence McQuillan and Hovannes Aramyan tablulated the damage (the Pacific Research Institute’s home page for the study is here, and has a PDF link to the full study, their press release, a number of other items):

The good news: We now have some reliable figures. The bad news: The costs are far higher than anyone imagined.

Based on our estimates, and applying the best available scholarly research, we believe America’s tort system imposes a total cost on the U.S. economy of $865 billion per year. This constitutes an annual “tort tax” of $9,827 on a family of four. It is equivalent to the total annual output of all six New England states, or the yearly sales of the entire U.S. restaurant industry.

How does the legal system extract such an astounding amount from our economy? We applied the rent-seeking theory of transfers from economic science to pick up where past studies — including the highly regarded Tillinghast-Towers Perrin study — leave off. We began by examining the static costs of litigation — including annual damage awards, plaintiff attorneys’ fees, defense costs, administrative costs and deadweight costs from torts such as product liability cases, medical malpractice litigation and class action lawsuits. The annual static costs, $328 billion per year, are well in excess of previous Tillinghast estimates.

But $328 billion is only the beginning. After all, litigation doesn’t just transfer wealth, it also changes behavior, and often in economically unproductive ways. Any true estimate of the costs of America’s tort system must also include these dynamic costs of litigation — the impact on research and development spending, the costs of defensive medicine and the related rise in health-care spending and reduced access to health care, and the loss of output from deaths due to excess liability.

Here are the beyond-static, or “dynamic,” costs identified:

• “….. medical liability concerns increase annual health care spending by $124 billion in 2006 dollars.”
• “(those liability concerns also add) 3.4 million Americans to the rolls of the uninsured ….. (causing) a total loss of output we estimate to be $39 billion per year.”
• “….. we found that foregone R&D due to excessive liability results in lost sales of new products every year of over $367 billion.”
• “….. we determined that more than 77,000 people would have been alive today and contributing to the workforce, but are not because of a failure to enact comprehensive tort reforms in the states. The cost of foregone output from these lost workers is more than $7 billion each year.”

So we’re left with the question of who ends up “paying” the tort tax. It would appear to be everyone who hasn’t collected a major judgment in the lawsuit lottery. More specifically, based on the first two bullet items above, you can state with a pretty high degree of confidence that the less well-off who end up without medical insurance thanks to litigation madness are carrying a disproportionate share of the “tort tax” burden.