"The final bill took shape after a 20-hour marathon negotiation between House and Senate leaders...The cavernous Dirksen 106 conference room remained packed as dawn approached...Lawmakers had stopped trying to conceal their yawns...Weary lawmakers wrapped up their work minutes before sunrise." -- Washington Post account, "Lawmakers guide Dodd-Frank bill for Wall Street reform into homestretch," June 26, 2010
"Investigators knew from previous research that people awake for 24 hours straight display reaction times comparable to those of people who are legally drunk. Cohen's new study reveals that those who pull an all-nighter on top of two or three weeks of chronic sleep loss reach that level of severe impairment faster—after just 18 hours awake." -- Harvard Magazine article, "Lost Sleep Is Hard to Find," July-August 2010.
Libertarian law professor Richard Epstein has a new column up at Forbes.com, arguing that the Supreme Court majority got it wrong in the case of Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.
Those who have no confidence in ordinary Americans may expect a bloodbath, as the benighted masses start shooting each other, now that they can no longer be denied guns by their betters. People who think we shouldn't be allowed to make our own medical decisions, or decisions about which schools our children attend, certainly are not likely to be happy with the idea that we can make our own decisions about how to defend ourselves....If the end of gun control leads to a bloodbath of runaway shootings, then the Second Amendment can be repealed, just as other Constitutional Amendments have been repealed. Laws exist for people, not people for laws.
The chancellor of the University of California, San Francisco, which is a big medical center, Dr. Susan Desmond-Hellmann, will sell her personal stock holdings in the tobacco company Altria, the New York Times reports, and "has now ordered her investment adviser to screen for holdings in tobacco, alcohol and firearms."
The reference to firearms is particularly jarring in light of yesterday's Supreme Court decision. Which guns does Dr. Desmond-Hellman feel it is somehow unethical to profit from the manufacture and sale of? The ones the police are using to apprehend violent criminals? The ones the U.S. armed forces are using to hunt terrorists like Osama bin Laden? The ones that were used to fight the American Revolution that established our country or the Civil War that ended slavery?
So long as Dr. Desmond-Hellmann is on an ethical investment kick, why stop at divesting from firearms? Why not fast food, gambling, BP?
Federal Reserve Governor Kevin Warsh spoke yesterday at the Atlanta Rotary Club. Some highlights: "Excessive growth in government spending is not the economy's salvation, but a principal foe....Turning private-sector liabilities into public-sector obligations may effectively buy time, but it alone buys neither stability nor prosperity over the horizon." More:
The most recent round of turmoil in financial markets caused many fiscal authorities around the world to reconsider whether they can spend their way to prosperity. Some are concluding that fiscal consolidation may be the better path to economic expansion. That spending cuts are key to establishing a credible path of fiscal sustainability. That channeling government funds from higher-yielding private-sector activities to lower-yielding public-sector activities undermines economic potential. That fine-tuning aggregate demand requires a precision that is difficult for governments to execute effectively. And, that market forces are often more certain than promised fiscal spending multipliers.
The New York Times devotes a front-page news article today to attacking the Bloomberg administration for its record on racial diversity. "Top Ranks of Bloomberg Managers Are Largely White," the article's headline says. Nowhere is there any acknowledgment that someone could write the same article, just as accurately, about the leadership of the newspaper making the accusation: "Top Ranks of New York Times Managers Are Largely White."
The Associated Press reports about one of the 10 people charged by American government officials yesterday with being illegal Russian secret agents: "Pelaez is a Peruvian-born reporter and editor and worked for several years for El Diario/La Prensa, one of the country's best-known Spanish-language newspapers. She is best known for her opinion columns, which often criticize the U.S. government."
Here is an article she appears to have written for Granma, the newspaper of Cuba's communist party, complaining about corporate America's supposed exploitation of prison labor:
This video of Vice President Biden profanely rebuking a frozen-custard store manager who asked him to lower taxes is getting some traction on talk radio -- both the Hannity and the Beck e-mail newsletters today mentioned it. Once President Obama started with the three-letter words, the dam broke.
On the train back from a very brief trip to Washington Saturday, I passed through the Frank R. Lautenberg Rail Station, with a huge sign honoring the senator from New Jersey who used our tax money to pay for the station. Something about honoring a sitting member of Congress by naming something he spent money on after him struck me as vaguely off-putting, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it.
Now comes USA Today with an article that begins as follows:
At first glance, Congressmen Hal Rogers and Chaka Fattah don't have much in common. Rogers, a Republican, represents a rural district in Kentucky. Fattah, a Democrat, hails from an urban district in Philadelphia.
The House Financial Services Committee has now posted the full text — all 2315 pages of it — of the "Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act." Here is the link to the bill in PDF form. The table of contents alone is 15 pages long.
Some thoughts: Binyamin Appelbaum had it about right in the New York Times over the weekend when he wrote that the bill "is notably short on specifics, giving regulators significant power to determine its impact." Gretchen Morgenson, also writing in the New York Times over the weekend, had an interesting take when she wrote, "After President Obama signs it into law, the nation's financial industry will still be dominated by a handful of institutions that are too large, too interconnected and too politically powerful to be allowed to go bankrupt if they make unwise decisions or make huge wrong-way bets."
Today's Supreme Court decision was at least the second major piece of legislation signed into law by President Bush -- the first was the campaign finance/speech legislation struck down in Citizens United v. FEC, today's was the Sarbanes-Oxley post-Enron financial overhaul -- that the Supreme Court has ruled unconstitutional. President Bush also did not grant a pardon to Conrad Black, whose conviction in a case brought by the Bush administration's Justice Department was also cast under constitutional doubt by the Supreme Court recently. It doesn't look very good for Mr. Bush, who swore an oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.
The Supreme Court today, in a 5-4 decision with the majority opinion issued by Chief Justice Roberts, struck down as unconstitutional aspects of a Public Company Accounting Oversight Board that had been created by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. The majority ruled that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board members were too insulated from the authority of the president.
The dissent, by Justice Breyer, lists a host of other federal agencies and boards whose appointees are similar insulated from presidential control, among them, the Federal Reserve Board, of which, the dissent notes, "Each member shall hold office for a term of fourteen years from the expiration of the term of his predecessor, unless sooner removed for cause by the President."
John Stossel catches the Environmental Protection Agency proposing to treat spilled milk as if it were hazardous waste. He quotes a story from a local newspaper in an area where there are plenty of dairy farms: EPA regulations state that "milk typically contains a percentage of animal fat, which is a non-petroleum oil. Thus, containers storing milk are subject to the Oil Spill Prevention, Control and Countermeasure Program rule ..." This seems like one right out of the Onion, but sometimes truth is stranger than fiction.
The New York Times's Nobel laureate columnist, Paul Krugman, now seems to oppose tax increases, at least to judge by today's column: "the revival of the old-time religion is most evident in Europe, where officials seem to be getting their talking points from the collected speeches of Herbert Hoover, up to and including the claim that raising taxes and cutting spending will actually expand the economy, by improving business confidence."
This will be a good one for Republicans the next time President Obama and the Democrats try to raise taxes on "the rich," or on some other unpopular group (banks, private equity managers) -- even Paul Krugman says it's pulling a Herbert Hoover to raise taxes in the middle of a bad economy.
When you see a report of a "shortage," a government intervention is almost always somewhere nearby. Bloomberg News has an article about shortages of Dendreon's new prostate cancer medicine, Provenge. The article runs under the headline, "Prostate Cancer Patients Face Yearlong Rationing of Provenge." Reports Bloomberg:
The shortages stem from Dendreon's uncertainty about whether the U.S. Food and Drug Administration would approve the drug. The agency had previously denied approval, asking for more testing. Dendreon couldn't develop manufacturing facilities and seek clearance of the plants until the regulators reached a decision...Regulators must approve each new facility
The Dendreon-Provenge saga was discussed in a post on this site earlier here.
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