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.”

Here’s a great commentary by Jonah Goldberg (from his G-file e-letter) on the OWS movement:

As I mentioned in the Corner, I love this story about the fraying tensions among the Occupy Wall Street crowd.

Aside from the general schadenfreudtasticness of it all, I found this bit to contain some fascinating contradictions. Apparently some of the “facilitators” — you might call them the avant-garde of the avant-garde of the avant-garde of the lumpenproletariat — have started censoring and taxing the drummers.

To Shane Engelerdt, a 19-year-old from Jersey City and self-described former “head drummer,” this amounted to a Jacobinic betrayal. “They are becoming the government we’re trying to protest,” he said. “They didn’t even give the drummers a say. . . . Drumming is the heartbeat of this movement. Look around: This is dead, you need a pulse to keep something alive.”

The drummers claim that the finance working group even levied a percussion tax of sorts, taking up to half of the $150-300 a day that the drum circle was receiving in tips. “Now they have over $500,000 from all sorts of places,” said Engelerdt. “We’re like, what’s going on here? They’re like the banks we’re protesting.”

Wait a second. The leadership of OWS is imposing a 50 percent tax rate on the most successful and entrepreneurial protesters and they’re regulating their ability to satisfy the consumer (as it were)?

This Engelerdt guy’s grasp of political theory is a bit off, though. First he says that the organizers are becoming the sort of government they’re protesting. Except that has it exactly wrong. They’re becoming the sort of government they’re demanding!

He then goes on to say that the decision to confiscate so much of the drummers’ obscene profits makes the organizers like the banks. But the banks don’t tax anybody — that’s government’s job. In fact, if these guys had their way, the drummers should be taxed at a much higher rate, right? Why should the drummers make so much more than the guy running the seminar on how to make hemp-twine condoms or the lady teaching folks how to recycle everything from urine to toilet paper?

Beyond the Occupy Wall Street crowd playing the part of the “useful idiots” of organized socialist, national socialist (i.e., Nazi)  and communist parties, you’ve got a massive number of economically-ignorant, naive or at minimum mis-educated youths who seem unaware that they’re protesting the wrong street: Instead of occupying Wall Street they should be occupying K-street, or better yet, the Independence, First, and Constitution streets that surround the Capital building.

[Bloomberg] Federal employees whose compensation averages more than $126,000 and the nation’s greatest concentration of lawyers helped Washington edge out San Jose as the wealthiest U.S. metropolitan area, government data show.

The U.S. capital has swapped top spots with Silicon Valley, according to recent Census Bureau figures, with the typical household in the Washington metro area earning $84,523 last year. The national median income for 2010 was $50,046.

The figures demonstrate how the nation’s political and financial classes are prospering as the economy struggles with unemployment above 9 percent and thousands of Americans protest in the streets against income disparity, said Kevin Zeese, director of Prosperity Agenda, a Baltimore-based advocacy group trying to narrow the divide between rich and poor.

“There’s a gap that’s isolating Washington from the reality of the rest of the country,” Zeese said. “They just get more and more out of touch.”

Total compensation for federal workers, including health care and other benefits, last year averaged $126,369, compared with $122,697 in 2009, according to Bloomberg News calculations of Commerce Department data. There were 170,467 federal employees in the District of Columbia as of June.

That’s right. People working for the federal government make more money than those who actually produce things, be they in Silicon Valley, New York City, Atlanta or B.F. Idaho. And why is that? Well as Tina Korbe points out the Beltway “boasts one lawyer for every 12 city residents” — that’s a lot of “fat cats” to grease the palms of your slimy senator or representative in turn for tax dollars and fabricated “shovel ready” phantom jobs required to sort through phone-book sized regulatory bills.

The Bloomberg report continues:

Lobbyists play a prominent role in the Washington economy. In 2010 there were 12,964 registered lobbyists, with most working in or around the nation’s capital, according to figures compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington- based research group that tracks political spending. Spending on lobbying efforts reached a record $3.51 billion last year, up from $3.49 billion in 2009.

Ironically, while President Barack Obama and Democrats have been expressing solidarity with this confused lot of Marxists, they’re well entrenched in the Lobby enterprise.

This week the Washington Post reported that “President Obama has still managed to raise far more money this year from the financial and banking sector than Mitt Romney or any other Republican presidential candidate, according to new fundraising data. … Obama has brought in more money from employees of banks, hedge funds and other financial service companies than all of the GOP candidates combined, according to a Washington Post analysis of contribution data.”

The Democrats are against lobbying and big banking… except when they’re for it.

SARASOTA — Following an apparent shark attack in the Bay area this weekend, the animal rights organization PETA has announced plans to run an outdoor advertising campaign attacking a recent Bay area shark attack victim.

The organization plans to promote an ad that shows a human “drumstick” hanging out of a shark’s mouth, next to the words “Payback Is Hell. Go Vegan.”

The organization will put the ad on benches and billboards near Anna Maria Island, they said will promote their claim that “the deadliest killers in the water aren’t sharks — they’re humans.”

You see, if we just stopped eating fish and all became Vegans then sharks wouldn’t attack people in the wat… oh, wait… I guess we’d have to give up recreational swimming in the ocean too…

Some people are outraged when they see things like this but I think it’s great because it truly shows PETA for the half-baked, illogical, and extreme organization they are. Such PETA ideological campaigns might be great back-slapping material for their monthly meetings, but it hardly wins over more moderate and reasonably-minded people to their organization.

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.

Just yesterday I posted that the Obama cult demonstrates an increasing disconnect from and disregard of economics, but this example of disrespecting the American public takes the cake.

[Associated Press] Secretary Steven Chu came out swinging Friday against a House bill that would repeal a 2007 federal law effectively outlawing older forms of incandescent bulbs—an effort at energy conservation that has inflamed a wide swath of Americans who don’t care for the more expensive alternatives.

In a conference call with reporters, Mr. Chu said the more-efficient bulbs required would save consumers money over the life of the product, even if the up-front price is higher.

“We are taking away a choice that continues to let people waste their own money,” he said.

Talk about the nanny state run amok. Sec. Chu is going to have to point out to us which section of the U.S. Constitution empowers the government to judge what private spending is or is not “wasting” money, and what gives them the power to trump decisions by individual consumers.

Not to mention, I’ve owned my fair share of these mercury-laden “efficient” bulbs and found them lacking – many times the price of typical incandescents yet having lasted not much longer.

A common definition of hubris is when panels of unelected bureaucrats believe they can make better economic decisions than 300 million consumers in the marketplace. But worse, not only are our they not Constitutionally empowered, but their expertise is typically incorrect and filled with unintended consequences.

Finally, I think this retort by Mark Steyn on Team Obama’s hypocrisy is great.

More to the point, I wonder if Secretary Chu has any idea how stupid this argument sounds from an administration that has wasted more of other people’s money than anybody else on the planet. Secretary Chu and his colleagues took a trillion dollars of “stimulus” and, for all the stimulating it did, might as well have given it in large bills to Charlie Sheen to snort coke off his hookers’ bellies with. (In my weekend column, I touch on only the most lurid and outrageous of the government’s many smart investment decisions: its use of stimulus dollars to stimulate the Mexican coffin industry.)

Chu on that come election day.

I don’t know which group is more unconscionable, the Wisconsin state Democrats or that state’s unions.

The former group actually fled the state rather than participate in a vote on Wisconsin governor Scott Walker’s proposal to have state workers become financial participants in retirement and health care costs (something that every private sector Wisconsin citizen already does). You see, the Wisconsin Republicans have 19 of the 33 seats, but need 20 seats in order to maintain a quorum and conduct business. So the Democrats, rather than all vote against the bill in a losing effort of solidarity, simply didn’t show to work today. That’s how these “Democrats” feel about democracy and the voters of Wisconsin, that is, their constituents — there was an election, and the Wisconsin voters clearly decided that something had to be done to curb spending, growth and wasteful government.

The reply of the Wisconsin Democrats is the middle finger. So brazen are they, so unconscionable, so filled with contempt for their constituents that these Wisconsin Democrats added insult to injury by hiding in a Best Western Clock Tower Resort, which according to its website, features a hair salon, two restaurants, and “65,000 square feet of indoor water park fun at CoCo Key Water Resort and Key Quest Arcade.” All of this no doubt to be billed back to the Wisconsin taxpayer.

Next, we have the thousands of Wisconsin teachers — who called in “sick” rather than educate Wisconsin children — and other state workers who showed up in mass to protest what they call an attempt by Wisconsin Republicans to eliminate their “collective bargain rights.” This is nonsense, of course. Nobody, obviously from the mere fact that they can just up and walk away from their job for the day, is taking away their right to bargain collectively. They can bargain all they want for, say, increased salaries. No, the unions are unhappy because under the proposal they wouldn’t be able to force state workers to join a union, to pay dues. You see, they prefer anyone who happens to be in their profession — from teacher to firefighter — be forced to abide by union rules without consent or meet the wrath of union brownshirts. Who’s the fascist, again?

Instead, all that Gov. Scott Walker is proposing is that state workers of Wisconsin make financial contributions to their own retirement; that they make financial contributions to their own health care. This is somehow considered radical? That state workers should be no more exempt in contributing to the cost of their benefits than non-state workers?

President Barack Obama called the bill “an assault on unions.” Assaults are made of sterner stuff, Mr. President. The bill would nonetheless leave Wisconsin state workers in a far better financial position than that of non-state workers. I guess to Democrats “share the wealth” means have those in the private sector share their wealth with those in the public sector, but not vice versa.

Here’s Patrick McIlhernan:

The public-sector union tantrums, meant to make lawmakers wobble, have an inadvertent message for the rest of us: Voters can vote all they want. We can elect a cheapskate governor and a Legislature to match. But come the moment, unions will have the last, loudest word.

They’ll have it if takes marches. They’ll have it if it takes what amounts to an illegal strike, with so many Madison teachers calling in sick Wednesday that the district closed schools. If it takes showing up for a we-know-where-your-family-is protest on Walker’s Wauwatosa lawn while he was at work, the unions are sure they can outshout any election result.

This is exactly why Walker is right to limit the unions’ power over government spending.

Walker, remember, is not removing unions’ fundamental power to bargain for wages. He is demanding that state workers put 5.8% of their wages toward retirement and that they cover 12.6% of their health care premiums, which would still have them paying more than $100 less a month than the average schmoe. He is also proposing that elected officials determine the shape of employee benefits without having to bargain them, and this as much as the added cost has unions crying “unfair.”

They insist this is the end of unionization in government, something to which they have as much right, they say, as anyone else.

But they miss a bedrock difference. Unions in the private sector are a way of organizing private interests, those of employees, against other private interests, those of a company’s owners, for economic gain and for protection against unfairness. In government, workers are already protected against unfairness by civil service laws, and Walker has supported expanding those. Economically, government unions pit a private interest, that of employees, against the public’s interest, that of taxpayers and voters.

We see the result. Walker’s moves are prompted by the state’s vast deficit. The alternative, he says, is to lay off thousands. Nonsense, charge the marchers: Just raise taxes. Unions and allies have for years been demanding more sales taxes, new business taxes and higher taxes on other people’s incomes, all to keep the state flush and generous. We’re taxed enough already, said a voting majority in November. Not yet, insist the unions that have become the largest players in Wisconsin politics precisely to counter any such voter sentiment.

Anyway, union leaders were conceding the pension and health care premiums by this week. They said they knew they’d have to pay more eventually – so when unions in December said such payments were tantamount to slavery, it must have been just maneuvering. Bygones, say unions, as long as Walker leaves them the power to set health benefits via bargaining. Leave that, they say, and it’s peace.

Yeah? Recall how we got here. How is it that only in desperation will unions accept a deal that still leaves them better off than everyone else? How did we achieve not just next year’s $3.3 billion deficit but the decade of structural deficits before? Easy: It’s because labor costs for years have been outstripping taxpayers’ capacity. That in turn was caused by officials, elected in a union-dominated political environment, buying labor peace via benefits, where it’s harder for voters to see the costs adding up.

If the Legislature takes the 5% and 12% and doesn’t reform collective bargaining, the 5% and 12% soon will be won back by unions. Any further savings are out the window. Walker talks of moving to consumer-driven benefits, as many companies have done, to restrain medical costs. That’s anathema to unions, who will resist it contract by contract. Without bargaining reform, government costs will have taken only a pause in their ascent.

Union activists in Madison Tuesday spoke apocalyptically of “class war,” hinting wildly at general strikes and takeovers of the Capitol. They correctly see their control of the state slipping and must figure that if they bring 13,000 shouting people to Madison, they can overrule the election.

Any worried legislators should keep in mind that Walker drew about five times that many votes in Dane County alone in November.

Here’s Jay Nordlinger:

Even before Bush was elected president, the kill-Bush talk and imagery started. When Governor Bush was delivering his 2000 convention speech, Craig Kilborn, a CBS talk-show host, showed him on the screen with the words “SNIPERS WANTED.” Six years later, Bill Maher, the comedian-pundit, was having a conversation with John Kerry. He asked the senator what he had gotten his wife for her birthday. Kerry answered that he had taken her to Vermont. Maher said, “You could have went to New Hampshire and killed two birds with one stone.” (New Hampshire is an early primary state, of course.) Kerry said, “Or I could have gone to 1600 Pennsylvania and killed the real bird with one stone.” (This is the same Kerry who joked in 1988, “Somebody told me the other day that the Secret Service has orders that if George Bush is shot, they’re to shoot Quayle.”) Also in 2006, the New York comptroller, Alan Hevesi, spoke to graduating students at Queens College. He said that his fellow Democrat, Sen. Charles Schumer, would “put a bullet between the president’s eyes if he could get away with it.”

Here’s an interesting note found by Atlas Shrugs. It’s another example of the Mainstream Media (MSM) becoming so caught up in acting as paid agents for the Democrat Party that they miss the forest for trees.

We’re to believe that through some strange osmosis person A says something “inciting” that in turn causes person B to not just assassinate a political target but gun down a nine-year-old child and a dozen others. Now we have pundits and politicians actually channeling George Orwell by calling for a ban on rhetoric, on words, on symbols. Meanwhile, as Michelle Malkin demonstrates with factual evidence, the political wing intent on quieting everyone else is the group that demonstrates the likelihood of actually committing violence.

[Atlas Shrugs] We know Loughner was a political radical back in 2007, according to his high school friend, college friend, bandmate and fellow liberal Caitie Parker. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Jared Loughner targeted Giffords as far back as 2007.

There was no Tea Party in 2007, or Palin (who has officially replaced George Bush as the Left bogeyman), so what will the media spin? Nothing. Facts are irrelevant! Pump out the propaganda.

After the shooting, investigators searched a safe connected to the shooting suspect, Jared Lee Loughner, and found a letter apparently sent to him by Ms. Giffords’s office thanking him for previously attending a similar “Congress on your corner” event in 2007.

Much remains unknown about what motivated Mr. Loughner, who is in custody. But the initial evidence, including the constituent letter, has led law enforcement officials to think that the suspect had been thinking about the congresswoman for years, according to people familiar with the case.

Investigators also found paper on which the suspect apparently wrote the word “assassination” and “I planned ahead.” The meaning or significance of that writing isn’t clear.

The suspect has been uncooperative with investigators, according to law enforcement officials. Charges are expected to be filed later Sunday.

Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Robert Mueller said the charges would include the attack on Ms. Giffords and Judge Roll and other victims, with later additional charges likely. Investigators seized computers during a search of the suspect’s home, and Mr. Mueller said those were being examined.

“Never let a serious crisis go to waste. What I mean by that is it’s an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” — Former Obama White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel.

Here’s Glenn Reynolds:

Those who try to connect Sarah Palin and other political figures with whom they disagree to the shootings in Arizona use attacks on “rhetoric” and a “climate of hate” to obscure their own dishonesty in trying to imply responsibility where none exists. But the dishonesty remains.

To be clear, if you’re using this event to criticize the “rhetoric” of Mrs. Palin or others with whom you disagree, then you’re either: (a) asserting a connection between the “rhetoric” and the shooting, which based on evidence to date would be what we call a vicious lie; or (b) you’re not, in which case you’re just seizing on a tragedy to try to score unrelated political points, which is contemptible. Which is it?

I understand the desperation that Democrats must feel after taking a historic beating in the midterm elections and seeing the popularity of ObamaCare plummet while voters flee the party in droves. But those who purport to care about the health of our political community demonstrate precious little actual concern for America’s political well-being when they seize on any pretext, however flimsy, to call their political opponents accomplices to murder.

Where is the decency in that?