I was ROFL, as they say or rather tweet/text, when I read the part where senators recommended replacing Google search formulas with a “panel of experts.” I mean, if that doesn’t sum up everything that is wrong with the government I don’t know what does. Has any government panel of experts ever solved anything?

(Example, the first draft of Congress’s new “Volcker Rule” is already up to about 300 pages and has propted more than 1,300 questions on exactly how regulators will enforce the newly proposed banking rules. I know! They need a “Panel Of Experts! It reminds me of the brilliant movie Idiocracy).

[WSJ] Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, gave a remarkable interview this month to the Washington Post. So remarkable that Post editors preceded the transcript with this disclosure: “He had just come from the dentist. And he had a toothache.”

Perhaps it was the Novocain talking, but Mr. Schmidt has done us a service. He said in public what most technologists will say only in private. Whatever caused him to speak forthrightly about the disconnects between Silicon Valley and Washington, his comments deserve wider attention.

Mr. Schmidt had just given his first congressional testimony. He was called before the Senate Judiciary Antitrust Subcommittee to answer allegations that Google is a monopolist, a charge the Federal Trade Commission is also investigating.

“So we get hauled in front of the Congress for developing a product that’s free, that serves a billion people. OK? I mean, I don’t know how to say it any clearer,” Mr. Schmidt told the Post. “It’s not like we raised prices. We could lower prices from free to . . . lower than free? You see what I’m saying?”

An absence of consumer harm didn’t stop senators from offering some improbable recommendations. Among them: that Google replace its algorithm with a panel of experts to ensure “fair” search results. As Google tries to improve the relevancy of its search results for consumers, some sites inevitably come up higher and some lower in the results. The losers now lobby Washington.

“Regulation prohibits real innovation, because the regulation essentially defines a path to follow,” Mr. Schmidt said. This “by definition has a bias to the current outcome, because it’s a path for the current outcome.”

WSJ:

After Congress created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as part of Dodd-Frank, President Obama said the government would prevent “hidden penalties and fees” and ensure “clear and concise information.” He promised banks that “unless your business model depends on cutting corners or bilking your customers, you’ve got nothing to fear from reform.”

Flash forward to today, and the full weight of Mr. Obama’s Washington is coming down on a bank for making perhaps the most transparent pricing change in the history of American finance. Is there any consumer who hasn’t heard that Bank of America will start charging a $5 monthly fee on debit cards? Could there be a simpler communication to allow consumers to consider other debit cards or other payment options?

For doing exactly what President Obama claimed that he wanted, the bank was rewarded by the President with an assault on national television. Mr. Obama told ABC television that the proposed fee “is exactly why we need this consumer finance protection bureau that we set up that is ready to go.”

When ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked if the fee could be stopped, Mr. Obama replied, “Well, you can stop it because it—if you—if you say to the banks, ‘You don’t have some inherent right just to, you know, get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated.’”

Mr. Durbin, incensed at the results of his plan to transfer wealth from banks to retailers, has been urging customers to close their accounts at Bank of America. Reasonable people can disagree about which politician is more economically irresponsible—the President who wants bureaucrats to dictate profit margins or the Senator who encourages a run on a bank.

Exactly. How did the Democrats expect the banking world to react to government price controls that cut their debit-card profits in half?

In any event, one should beware this new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) — because a group of un-elected, unaccountable bureaucrats are now with us forever. Their actions have already created unintended disincentives that diminish consumer purchasing power and create fewer customer choices. It starts with debit. But one day they’ll move on to credit-card, prepaid cards, and so on.

Paraphrasing President Obama, one job of the U.S. Treasury Department’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau is to determine if a business is making ‘too much profit.’ Mr. Obama is correct in his assessment that nobody is entitled to “a certain amount of profit,” but where he runs frighteningly amok is taking that assessment to mean that government should be the decider, rather than the American consumer.

Mr. Obama’s statement is quite telling, and scary too: Recall the former Soviet Union leaders used to brag that they suffered no bankruptcies in the USSR — the reason being that one can never have a bankruptcy if there is no private property, or private ownership of business. The president told us in 2008 that his wish was to “fundamentally transform America.” Judging by his words below, he wasn’t kidding. And he wonders why so many Americans fear him, and think he’s a socialist or communist?

President Obama joined fellow Democrats in blasting a new fee on debit card users announced by Bank of America, arguing that banks do not have an “inherent right” to a certain amount of profits.

The bank has come under a hail of criticism after it announced it would begin charging debit card users $5 a month, blaming the move on policymakers who curbed the amount of fees they could collect from retailers.

“You don’t have some inherent right just to get a certain amount of profit if your customers are being mistreated,” he said in an interview with ABC News. “My hope is that you’re going to see a bunch of the banks saying to themselves, ‘You know what, this is not good business practices.’”

“This is exactly why we need this [CFPB - Treasury Deparment's Consumer Financial Protection Bureau],” the president said. “We need somebody whose sole job it is to prevent stuff like this.”

Prevent stuff like what? Making a profit? Wouldn’t merchants (the banks’ customers) best determine if they’re being gouged or not rather than an unelected and unaccountable group of bureaucrats in the U.S. Treasury department? Wouldn’t consumers best decide, rather than some government bureau, if they would prefer credit cards or prepaid cards?

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out recently, here’s how government grows: It (1) either creates a real problem or invents a mythical one, then (2) proposes and enacts a “solution” to that problem. (3) Repeat steps 1 & 2.

So in this case the Democrat Congress, under the Durbin Amendment, invented the problem — that the economy was harmed by debit card fees that were too high for merchants — then enacted the solution, the Durbin Amendment, which by government fiat cut in half banks’ debit profitability, telling them that they could only charge 24 cents per debit transaction (from 44 cents).

This “solution” to an imaginary “problem” was typical liberally-activist government arrogance stemming from a belief that its “experts” could devise better economic engineering than that of 300 million consumers acting collectively.

It also smacks of hypocrisy in the form of propping up one kind of crony corporatism (bowing to the retail lobby) even as they demonize another (banking).

Here’s how the Democrat’s “solution” will affect you: less consumer choices — not just Bank of America, but the rest, like Wells Fargo, CitiGroup, Regions, and Morgan Chase, for starters, are now eliminating free checking and charging annual fees for debit-card holders, as well as eliminating many points programs.

According to CNN, “Your debit card may soon be denied for purchases greater than $100 — or even as little as $50.”

Hey, but thank heavens the government is “protecting us.”

Even worse, Mr. Obama must hate poor people. Without free checking, many poor Americans will be forced into costly high-percentage paycheck-cashers and money lenders. (Hello Amscot!)

Worst of all, the Durbin Amendment is a jobs killer: According to Portfolio.com, “the majority of startups and entrepreneurs often use their personal accounts as the initial run of funding. They count on the perks they can collect as ways to reward their staffs, especially when they can’t always afford the high-flying salaries of the past.”

Sorry, small business!

This is especially true for the smaller banks and credit unions that cannot absorb the financial loss:

The most noticeable change will likely be the closure of bank branches, reversing a decade-long growth. Branches today serve as customer-recruitment centers, as customers, once enrolled, do much of their banking electronically, by ATM or online. By making many new customers unprofitable, however, the Durbin amendment eliminates the incentive to compete by offering more branches.

Citing the negative impact of the Durbin amendment and other regulations on customer profitability, Texas-based IBC bank recently announced its decision to close 55 supermarket-based branches, eliminating 500 jobs, rather than increasing banking fees. Other banks will inevitably follow suit.

Conceived of as a narrow special-interest giveaway to large retailers, the Durbin amendment will have long-term consequences for the consumer banking system. Wealthier consumers will be able to avoid the pinch of higher banking fees by increasing their use of credit cards. Many low-income consumers will not. Banking will become less innovative and consumer-friendly.

No word yet from President Obama if large chain retailers will next be investigated by the CFPB for earning “a certain amount of profit.”

This is a great commentary from Jonah Goldberg about the fallacy-laden arguments that occur over time when the government gets its nose into something it never should have and then people attempt to disconnect that market intrusion many years later.

In his 1973 Libertarian Manifesto, the late Murray Rothbard argued that the biggest obstacle in the road out of serfdom was “status quo bias.” In society, we’re accustomed to rapid change. “New products, new life styles, new ideas are often embraced eagerly.” Not so with government. When it comes to police or firefighting or sanitation, government must do those things because that’s what government has (allegedly) always done.

“So identified has the State become in the public mind with the provision of these services,” Rothbard laments, “that an attack on State financing appears to many people as an attack on the service itself.” The libertarian who wants to get the government out of a certain business is “treated in the same way as he would be if the government had, for various reasons, been supplying shoes as a tax-financed monopoly from time immemorial.”

If everyone had always gotten their shoes from the government, writes Rothbard, the proponent of shoe privatization would be greeted as a kind of lunatic. “How could you?” defenders of the status quo would squeal. “You are opposed to the public, and to poor people, wearing shoes! And who would supply shoes . . . if the government got out of the business? Tell us that! Be constructive! It’s easy to be negative and smart-alecky about government; but tell us who would supply shoes? Which people? How many shoe stores would be available in each city and town? . . . What material would they use? . . . Suppose a poor person didn’t have the money to buy a pair?”

It’s worth keeping this fable in mind as the reaction to last week’s CNN–Tea Party Express debate hardens into popular myth. Moderator Wolf Blitzer had asked Rep. Ron Paul (R., Texas) what should happen if a man refuses to get health insurance and then has a medical crisis. Paul — a disciple of Rothbard — explained that freedom is about taking risks. “But, congressman, are you saying that society should just let him die?”

At this point, a few boneheads in the audience shouted “Yeah!” and clapped, though liberal pundits and activists imagine they saw an outpouring of support.

Paul calmly replied that he’s not in favor of letting the man die. A physician who began his career before Medicare and Medicaid were enacted, Paul noted that hospitals were never in the practice of turning away patients in need. “We’ve given up on this whole concept that we might take care of ourselves and assume responsibility for ourselves,” he observed. “Our neighbors, our friends, our churches would do it.”

Read the rest. It’s great stuff. Government doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It makes one wonder how people think we educated ourselves prior to the advent of the Department of Education.

Here’s the former CEO of American Express, Harvey Golub, expressing a less than complimentary opinion on the business savvy of the Obama Democrats:

Meanwhile, [President Obama] he’s ignored entitlement reform, retarded the development of our energy resources, and added new layers to our regulatory burden. He’s also increased the uncertainty inherent in an already dysfunctional and perverse tax code, added trillions to our national debt, spent taxpayer money ineffectively and inefficiently, tried to micromanage the economy, and acted as an incompetent venture capitalist by investing in “green jobs” and high-speed rail. This administration routinely grants and withholds favors by substituting its judgment of what is valuable and good for that of the people. What stimulus spending can do to create jobs is entirely temporary, whether in the public or private sector, and is rooted only in a political calculus.

Well said, sir.

It takes a lot of hubris to believe in the concept of central planning. The idea that a bunch of government “experts” could plan strategies and execute decisions in the free market better than the collective choices of 300 million American consumers — plus millions more globally — takes, to quote Hillary Clinton, a willing suspension of disbelief.

And yet here we are with a trifecta of failures in which the government thought it could determine winning companies.

Let’s start with General Electric, which of course began its crony capitalism relationship with government long before the Obama Democrats too power, but nonetheless continues to receive mountains of taxpayer subsidies based on its “Green” technologies. These are technologies — such as their hyperexpensive light bulbs, wind turbines that provide nothing if the wind isn’t blowing, and absolutely Orwellian carbon credit trading schemes –  which no consumer seems to really want and which wouldn’t survive in an unsubsidized environment.

It is particularly galling, given that the former GE CEO is now Obama’s job czar, and that GE is one of those favored government companies that enjoys paying $0 in taxes — this even as Obama, from the other side of his mouth, attacks “millionaires and billionaires” attempting to do the same. The reason? Because it provides American consumers with things they don’t want and produced with their tax dollars.

But as said, subsidies are as old as the apostles. The next two examples are far more sinister.

First, Soylendra: Despite repeated warnings from private auditors like PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP that the Soylendra solar-panel manufacturing company was a a lousy investment, the Obama administration nonetheless assisted it in receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. All that taxpayer money is now gone, Soylendra having declared bankruptcy in early September, and raided by the FBI a few days later.

ABCNews reported that “the White House closely monitored the Energy Department’s deliberations over a $535 million government loan to Solyndra,” and ultimately backed the loan despite warnings from White House employees. Worse, the Obama administration promised that should the company fail they would work to recoup losses of private investors — but we taxpayers are screwed. This is something that should be investigated, says former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy:

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

As if that weren’t bad enough, a key Obama supporter named George Kaiser was also involved in Soylendra, and “contributed $10,000 to the Urban Health Initiative, a notorious program created by now-First Lady Michelle Obama while she was at the University of Chicago Medical Center.” Oh, yeah, nothing to see here.

Rubbing Obama’s nose in this steaming, smelly mess, Forbes Magazine terms it a “teachable moment.” Says Forbes:

The fact that federal loan guarantees were even necessary for Solyndra tells us that few, if any, lenders thought that giving the firm money was a very good idea.  Given the fact that lenders who bet “right” on companies with strong prospects but insufficient capital are lenders who will make money, we can rest assured that hundreds if not thousands of bank loan officers took a long, hard look at Solyandra and said … no thanks.  Are we to believe that President Obama knows more than all of these profit-hungry capitalists about Solyndra’s real prospects in global solar energy markets?  That President Obama has even stronger incentives than private investors to ensure that money parked in this company or that is money well spent? To ask these questions is to answer them.

Next, Michelle Malkin has been all over a similar Obama embarrassment called LightSquared — a company that is crafting an open wireless broadband network that, regrettably to our national security, overpowers our commercial and military satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Where this becomes scandalous is because the White House attempted (but failed) to curb the damning testimony of U.S. Air Force Space Command four-star general William Shelton and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing director Anthony Russo.

General Shelton had noted earlier this year: “Within three to five miles on the ground and within 12 miles in the air, GPS is jammed by [LightSquared’s] towers. . . . If we allow that system to be fielded and it does indeed jam GPS, think about the impact. We’re hopeful we can find a solution, but physics being physics, we don’t see a solution right now.”

Despite industry-wide protests, the firm somehow received fast-track approval for a special FCC waiver that grants LightSquared the right to use wireless spectrum to build out a national 4G wireless network on the cheap. Ken Boehm, of the conservative watchdog National Legal and Policy Center in Washington, D.C., summed up the deal earlier this year: “LightSquared will get the spectrum for a song, while its competitors (e.g., AT&T and Verizon) have to spend billions.”

… LightSquared used to be known as “Skyterra.” In 2005, Obama put $50,000 into the speculative firm — raising eyebrows even among his water-carriers at the New York Times. The paper noted that Skyterra’s principal backers at the time of the investment included four Obama “friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.”

One of those pals who urged him to buy stock in Skyterra was George Haywood, a major Skyterra investor and campaign donor who chipped in nearly $50,000 to Obama’s campaigns and to his political action committee, as did his wife.

Coincidentally, Obama bought his Skyterra stock the very same day the FCC “ruled in favor of the company’s effort to create a nationwide wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications systems.” The Times reported that immediately after that morning ruling, “Tejas Securities, a regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.”

Coincidentally, Tejas and its chairman, John J. Gorman, were also major backers of Obama — flying him in a private plane for political rallies and pitching in more than $150,000 for his campaign coffers since 2004. Obama sold his stock at a loss in November 2005, but his political relationship with the company was cemented. In 2009, billionaire hedge-fund manager Philip Falcone — whose firm Harbinger Capital Partners is reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for market-manipulation abuses — acquired Skyterra.

Coincidentally, Falcone, his wife, and LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja have contributed nearly $100,000 between them to the Democratic party during critical White House meeting periods and negotiations over LightSquared’s regulatory fate.

Oh, and coincidentally, there’s $6 billion earmarked for a “public safety broadband corporation” buried in the Obama jobs proposal just as LightSquared pushes into that market, too.

It’s all just one strange quirk of timing, Team Obama shrugs. Except, as we all should know by now: There are no coincidences in Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Just an endless avalanche of quids, quos, and taxpayer woes.

I think it goes without saying that were Obama’s last name Bush or Cheney the term “LightSquared” could be well known in American households.

You know when you’re watching a football game, and the spunky, sprite running back is twisting and juking, amazing the crowd, and all of the sudden, at the worst possible moment, the running back fumbles, giving momentum to the other team, and then the coach sits the distraught player down for the rest of the game. Well, this week that running back was Michelle Bachmann and her fumble was a backfired attack on Texas Gov. Rick Perry.

While it’s legitimate or at least debatable to score points against Perry for his cronyism with Merck (et. al.) or his mandate that all schoolgirls receive the Gardasil HPV vaccine, it comes off as downright wacky McCarthyism (Jenny, not Joe) to imply a link between vaccination and “mental retardation.”

Here’s Ed Morrissey:

[Bachmann] “There’s a woman who came up crying to me tonight after the debate. She said her daughter was given that vaccine. She told me her daughter suffered mental retardation as a result of that vaccine.”

Huh? “Mental retardation” typically takes place in a pre- or neo-natal event. Autism becomes apparent in the first couple of years of life — and primarily affects boys. Gardasil vaccinations take place among girls between 9-12 years of age. Even assuming that this anecdote is arguably true, it wouldn’t be either “mental retardation” or autism, but brain damage.

The FDA has received no reports of brain damage as a result of HPV vaccines Gardasil and Cervarix.  Among the reports that correlate seriously adverse reactions to either, the FDA lists blood clots, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, and 68 deaths during the entire run of the drugs.  The FDA found no causal connection to any of these serious adverse events and found plenty of contributing factors to all — and all of the events are exceedingly rare.

The “mental retardation” argument is a rehash of the thoroughly discredited notion that vaccines containing thimerasol caused a rapid increase in diagnosed autism cases.  That started with a badly-botched report in Lancet that allowed one researcher to manipulate a ridiculously small sample of twelve cases in order to reach far-sweeping conclusions about thimerasol.  That preservative hasn’t been included in vaccines for years, at least not in the US, and the rate of autism diagnoses remain unchanged.

The most charitable analysis that can be offered in this case for Bachmann is that she got duped into repeating a vaccine-scare urban legend on national television.  It looks more like Bachmann sensed that she had won a point and wanted to go in for the kill, didn’t bother to check the facts, and didn’t care that she was stoking an anti-vaccination paranoid conspiracy theory, either.  Neither shines a particularly favorable light on Bachmann.

Rick Santorum took the correct position on the Gardasil issue.  We mandate certain vaccines in children because we mandate children be gathered for educational purposes for many years (in private or public schools), and certain diseases are easily communicable in those settings.  By mandating vaccinations against whooping cough, measles, and mumps, we are protecting children who would otherwise get exposed without any action on their part except compliance with the law.  That’s not true with HPV, and parents should decide for themselves whether to inoculate their sons and daughters with Gardasil or Cervarix.  If Perry wanted to make those inoculations more accessible, he could have crafted an opt-in system rather than forcing parents to opt out.

Other than solid backing from Tea Partyists I don’t think Bachmann had much chance for a presidential bid. However, this fumble may have eliminated her from the VP slot as well.

With a cost-benefit analysis system as obtuse and intangible as this, what’s the point of having one? Ah, but that indeed is the point, and exemplifies everything that is wrong with liberal government — all things are executed using the basis of immeasurable metrics.

Here’s the Wall Street Journal commenting on President Obama’s recent executive order for all agencies to implement a cost-benefit system prior to enacting regulation:

No sooner had Mr. Obama told the bureaucracies to subject all regulations to a cost-benefit test than the bureaucrats began telling reporters that they are already a model of modern efficiency, thank you very much. Among many others, the Environmental Protection Agency said in a statement that it was “confident” it wouldn’t need to alter a single current or pending rule. “In fact, EPA’s rules consistently yield billions in cost savings that make them among the most cost-effective in the government.”

Perhaps the EPA’s confidence owes to a little-noticed proviso in Mr. Obama’s order. When the agencies weigh costs and benefits, the order says, they should always consider “values that are difficult or impossible to quantify, including equity, human dignity, fairness, and distributive impacts.”

Talk about economic elasticities. Equity and fairness can be defined to include more or less anything as a benefit. Under this calculus, a rule might pass Mr. Obama’s cost-benefit test if it imposes $999 billion in hard costs but supposedly results in a $1 trillion increase in human dignity, whatever that means in bureaucratic practice. Another rule could pass muster even if it reduces work and investment, as long as it also lessens income inequality.

Any cost-benefit analysis depends to some extent on matters of judgment, but typically the criteria are more economically tangible, such as how to price risk or the discount rate. No business would recognize Mr. Obama’s version, since his “values” loophole boils down to a preference for bigger government. The danger is that his executive order will transform an important tool to check excessive regulation into a way to justify whatever rule the permanent bureaucracy wants.

Read the rest. It’s already happening in the EPA.

Here’s the Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon. But first, do you remember the old Star Trek (nerd alert: The Omega Glory) where Kirk, Spock, McCoy and a hapless red-shirted security guard beam down to a planet where the inhabitants, calling themselves “Yangs” and “Kohms,” short for Yankees and Communists, have been warring for centuries? A renegade Federation Capt. Ron Tracey, believing that he and his ship’s — the Exeter — remaining crew are marooned on the planet, had been helping the Kohms — right away cluing the audience that Tracey lacks Kirk’s wisdom in figuring out the puzzle of the two warring sides — against the Prime Directive. The Yangs end up capturing Kirk and crew, but Kirk saves the day by realizing that the Yangs are parallel to our culture in every way (nerd alert: Hodgkin’s Law of parallel planet development) including the flag, pledge, and constitution, and explaining at the episode’s end that the “sacred document” the Yangs claimed was only for the eyes of “chiefs, or sons of chiefs” are actually for everyone — and why the document starts “We The People.” The Yang leader, Cloud William, eventually promises Kirk that while he doesn’t fully understand, he swears to allow all his people, and even the Kohms, access to his people’s founding documents.

You have to love this simple recollection by Mr. Pilon that the U.S. Constitution was never intended to be something that only lawyers, or sons of lawyers, or Congressmen, could interpret. Somewhere our law system ran amok, and like the Yangs in Star Trek, we’ve forgotten this basic truth.

Thus the first question the new Congress should ask of any proposed law is: Does the Constitution authorize us to pursue this end? If not, that ends the matter. If yes, the second question is: Are the means we employ “necessary and proper,” as constrained by the principles of federalism and the rights retained by the people that are implied by a government of enumerated powers? In essence, the Constitution is no more complicated than that. It was written to be understood by ordinary citizens.

How, then, did modern constitutional law get so complicated and federal power so expansive? One reason is that several provisions in the Constitution were written broadly to allow for contingencies. But those provisions were never meant to open the floodgates to boundless congressional power. The presumption was that any political redress of unexpected problems would be done with due deference to the larger structure, aims and principles of the document. This brings us to the main reason Congress leapt its constitutional bounds: a fundamental shift in the climate of ideas.

Early 20th-century Progressives, inspired by European social democracies, rejected the Constitution’s plan for limited government, advocating social engineering schemes instead. Rule by government experts was the order of the day. As people and politicians succumbed to those ideas, especially in the states, courts would often block the schemes in the name of constitutional liberty. When Progressives later took their agenda to the federal level, however, and the Supreme Court continued to block it, President Franklin D. Roosevelt unveiled his infamous plan to pack the court with six new members.

The threat cowed the court, which in a pair of 1937 decisions (Helvering v. Davis and NLRB v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp) essentially gave Congress the power to redistribute and regulate at will, eviscerating the very foundation of the Constitution: the doctrine of enumerated powers. A year later, in U.S. v. Carolene Products, the court reduced property rights and economic liberty to second-class status under the Constitution. And in National Broadcasting Co. v. U.S. (1943), it allowed Congress to delegate ever more of its vastly expanded legislative powers to administrative agencies in the quickly expanding executive branch.

Now that one-party rule has ended in Washington, we’ll see President Obama use these agencies to bypass Congress and promote his progressive agenda. On Dec. 23, for example, the Environmental Protection Agency announced a schedule for setting greenhouse gas standards for power plants and oil refineries over the next two years, notwithstanding that Congress has rejected cap-and-trade legislation. The Obama administration has also quietly issued regulations providing for the end-of-life counseling that the Senate rejected when it passed ObamaCare. Expect far more of this in the next two years.

The 112th Congress will have its hands full simply monitoring what the more than 300 federal agencies are up to. But if the new members want to get to the root of the problem—if they want to start restoring limited constitutional government—they’ll have to do far more.

First, they’ll have to keep the debate focused on the Constitution, not simply on policy or practicality.

Second, they’ll have to reject without embarrassment the facile liberal objection that the courts have sanctioned what we have today, and thus all a member need do when introducing a bill is check the box that says “Commerce Clause,” “General Welfare Clause” or “Necessary and Proper Clause.”

If these clauses in the Constitution enable Congress to enact the individual health-insurance mandate, then they authorize Congress to do virtually anything. The Supreme Court was wrong in allowing Congress to exercise power not granted it by the Constitution, and courts today are wrong when they uphold those precedents—even if they’re not in a position today to reverse them until Congress takes greater responsibility.

Third, Congress has to start taking greater responsibility. Congress must acknowledge honestly that it has not kept faith with the limits the Constitution imposes. It should then stop delegating its legislative powers to executive agencies. Congress should either vote on the sea of regulations the executive branch is promulgating or, far better, rescind or defund those regulations, policies and programs that never should have been promulgated in the first place (rescission may not be possible during the next two years, but defunding is). And of course Congress should undertake no new policies not authorized by the Constitution.

This is all a tall order, and it will take years. But the alternative—our Leviathan state, which recognizes no limits on its power—is simply unconstitutional.

At most companies that have even a modicum of network security, were you to stick a thumb drive into your hard drive’s USB port you’d immediately set off network alarms and would likely be shortly thereafter locked out of that PC, and your manager would receive a call from your network operations group. But not at the US Army!

Apparently the United States government doesn’t knew about this kind of software… Worse, the leaker was a private first class, hardly some kind of high-ranking “your eyes only” official.

[UK Guardian] The United States was catapulted into a worldwide diplomatic crisis today, with the leaking to the Guardian and other international media of more than 250,000 classified cables from its embassies, many sent as recently as February this year.

At the start of a series of daily extracts from the US embassy cables – many designated “secret” – the Guardian can disclose that Arab leaders are privately urging an air strike on Iran and that US officials have been instructed to spy on the UN leadership.

These two revelations alone would be likely to reverberate around the world. But the secret dispatches, which were obtained by WikiLeaks, the whistleblowers’ website, also reveal Washington’s evaluation of many other highly sensitive international issues.

These include a shift in relations between China and North Korea, high-level concerns over Pakistan’s growing instability, and details of clandestine US efforts to combat al-Qaida in Yemen.

And these same federal jack-a$$es want to run your health care? If top secret cables can so easily be made public I don’t think HIPPA rules would mean much.

Here’s the Washington Examiner: