Beltway Kabuki

The SOPA/PIPA Issue

sopapipa.jpgI got curious about the SOPA/PIPA copyright issue, so I did a little research and found this nice explanation on The Patriot Post:

SOPA/PIPA Draw Big Opposition

Members of the House and Senate are looking to put the brakes on new Internet anti-piracy legislation that may do more harm than good. The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) bill in the House, and its Senate companion, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), were drawn up to prevent the theft of intellectual property over the web by foreign entities. Both bills have strong backing from Hollywood and other media companies, but there is growing concern that they go too far in enforcing their mandate.

The legislation would give the government unchecked power to shut down domestic websites alleged to have committed or even enabled online piracy. The ability to illegally distribute someone else’s content over the web is a genuine problem, but this legislation would change copyright law so as to hold websites accountable for third-party content posted on their sites through comment forums and the like. Think Facebook or YouTube, and you can understand that these bills are a solution worse than the problem.

In the face of widespread Internet backlash — numerous websites “blacked out” Wednesday in protest — several senators did an about-face. So far this week, 16 Republicans and two Democrats, including seven co-sponsors, announced new opposition. Even the Obama administration expressed reservations.

Sounds like it would seriously screw-up most of us who blog or use on-line social networking. I vote NO, but you know the misrepresentatives in Washington will ignore what I say.

No Limitations

Ramirez makes a subtle comparison between the 2012 O-budget and a credit card consumer making an outrageous request of his creditors.

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The President’s 2012 budget proposal contains 43 tax hikes. All of them are utterly unnecessary. They will burden Americans with $1.5 trillion in taxes over the next ten years. He proposed to raise taxes and spending as a higher percentage of GDP in history. This will be a disaster for the economy. It will slow recovery, hurt job creation, will make American companies less competitive, and will burden all of us with higher taxes and, worse yet for seniors, it will increase consumer costs — a real problem for people on fixed incomes.

Debt Legacy

Guess who is going to pay for all the new debt? Ramirez hints at just who is going into debt . . .

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The Obama administration will formally ask Congress later this week to raise the nation’s debt ceiling by $1.2 trillion, according to Treasury Department officials.

The latest request is the third of three requests authorized by the contentious debt ceiling agreement reached last August and is expected to come on December 30 – the day the debt is projected to fall within $100 billion of the current $15.194 trillion ceiling. The new request asks the ceiling be raised to $16.39 trillion.

Navy Forced to “Go Green” – Another O-Scam

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Editorial excerpt from IBD.

Jet Fuel-Gate Is Obama’s New Solyndra

Ecofanaticism: SolyndraGate was no isolated case of corrupt government misspending. The U.S. Navy was just forced to buy 450,000 gallons of biofuels from an Obama-connected firm at an outrageous $16 per gallon.

The massive Obama stimulus was supposed to generate millions of jobs, but the $535 million loan guarantee it gave to solar panel maker Solyndra on the eve of its Chapter 11 bankruptcy illustrated the fundamental incompetence of Obama’s neo-Keynesian economic ideology.

Now we find the Navy partnering with the Agriculture Department to purchase hundreds of thousands of gallons of alternative biofuel in place of standard JP-5 fuel for Navy aircraft — the biggest federal purchase of biofuel ever.

It’s part of the White House’s “we can’t wait for Congress” strategy as the 2012 election year looms. But JP-5 typically costs less than $4 a gallon. If a family on a budget started filling up with $16-a-gallon gas, it might want to adopt the motto, “we can’t wait to go broke.”

. . .

The biofuel will be used next summer by — we’re not making this up — “the Great Green Fleet Carrier Strike Force” in exercises near Hawaii. Mabus painted the picture of America’s great naval force advancing from sails to coal to diesel to nuclear, and now finally to biofuels. But if we keep starving the Navy, it may soon not have enough loose change to repair the sails on Old Ironsides.

Read the entire editorial.

Welcome to Obamanomics

Today’s unemployment decrease is explained over at The Patriot Post (emphasis added):

November employment numbers are out today and they bring mixed news. Bloomberg reports, “The jobless rate declined to 8.6 percent, the lowest since March 2009, from 9 percent, Labor Department figures showed today in Washington. Payrolls climbed 120,000, with more than half the hiring coming from retailers and temporary help agencies, after a revised 100,000 rise in October.” Seems like good news. Unfortunately, part of the reason is that 315,000 Americans left the workforce altogether. Another part is that retailers have hired seasonal help.

Bloomberg also notes, “The so-called underemployment rate — which includes part- time workers who’d prefer a full-time position and people who want work but have given up looking — decreased to 15.6 percent from 16.2 percent.” Furthermore, “The jobless rate has exceeded 8 percent since February 2009, the longest stretch of such levels of unemployment since monthly records began in 1948.” This long after the recession supposedly ended, things should be looking much brighter than this. Welcome to Obamanomics.

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