19 May 2010

Today’s Tabbloid
PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Kentuckians not to vote for Rand Paul.

Neocons Finish Out of the
Money in Kentucky Race [Cato
at Liberty]
MAY 18, 2010 08:24P.M.
By David Boaz
Rand Paul’s landslide victory in the Kentucky Republican primary is
being hailed as a big win for the Tea Party movement, a slap in the face
to the Republican establishment, and maybe even as a harbinger of the
rise of libertarian Republicanism. (Only 19 percent of Kentucky
Republicans say they’re libertarians, but that’s got to be more than
before the Rand Paul campaign.) It’s also a big loss for Washington
neoconservatives, who warned in dire terms about the horrors of a Paul
victory.
David Frum kept up the pressure on his website and in national
magazines, where he tossed around words like “extremist,” “conspiracy
monger,” and “his father’s more notorious positions.” (That column also
included the most amazing confession of political error I’ve ever seen:
“many of my friends fell (briefly) victim to Lyndon Larouche’s mad
ideology, which exploited those good themes to bad ends.” Say what? I
never knew anyone who fell for Lyndon Larouche; I never even heard of
any actual person who followed him; but David Frum had “many friends”
who became followers of the nuttiest guy ever to run for president?
That’s some band of friends.)
The big-government Republican establishment rallied to Grayson’s side
against the previously unknown opthalmologist from Bowling Green.
Late in the campaign, Grayson ran ads featuring endorsements from
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Cheney, Rick
Santorum, and Rudy Giuliani. That’s more raw tonnage of Republican
heavyweights than you’d see on a national convention stage.

Back in March, Jonathan Martin reported in Politico:
Recognizing the threat, a well-connected former aide to Vice
President Dick Cheney convened a conference call last week
between Grayson and a group of leading national security
conservatives to sound the alarm about Paul.
“On foreign policy, [global war on terror], Gitmo,
Afghanistan, Rand Paul is NOT one of us,” Cesar Conda wrote
in an e-mail to figures such as Liz Cheney, William Kristol,
Robert Kagan, Dan Senor and Marc Thiessen.
With an attached memo on Paul’s noninterventionist
positions, Conda concluded: “It is our hope that you can help
us get the word out about Rand Paul’s troubling and
dangerous views on foreign policy.”
And after all that Kentucky Republicans gave a 25-point victory to a first-
time candidate who opposed bailouts, deficits, Obamacare, and the war
in Iraq. That’s a sharp poke in the eye to the neocons who tried so hard
to block him. They don’t want a prominent Republican who opposes this
war and the next one, who will appeal to American weariness with war
and big government. They don’t want other elected Republicans — many
of whom, according to some members of Congress, now regret the Iraq
war — to start publicly backing away from perpetual interventionism.
There were plenty of winners tonight. But the big losers were the
neoconservatives, who failed to persuade the Republican voters of
Kentucky that wars and bailouts are essential for national progress.

In an interview, Conda noted that Paul once advocated for

closing down the detention center at Guantanamo Bay and
sending some suspected terrorists to the front lines in
Afghanistan.

“This guy could become our Republican senator from

Kentucky?” he exclaimed. “It’s very alarming.”

A week later, Dick Cheney himself issued his first endorsement of the
campaign season to Secretary of State Trey Grayson, hardly the most
promising Republican candidate of 2010. Obviously, Cheney was urging

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 19 May 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Collecting Your DNA—Not George W. Bush Is Not Missed

Controversial [Cato at [Cato at Liberty]
MAY 18, 2010 05:01P.M.
Liberty—Not Controversial]
MAY 18, 2010 05:26P.M. By Tim Lynch

By Jim Harper
That’s why the House of Representatives has put “Katie’s Law” (H.R.
4614, the Katie Sepich Enhanced DNA Collection Act of 2010) on the
“Suspension Calendar” today. That’s the procedure for considering non-
controversial bills, giving them about 20 minutes of debate.
The bill would promote collection of DNA samples from people based
simply on their arrest for certain crimes. Needless to say, being arrested
is nothing close to conviction of a crime, at which time it might be fair to
collect a person’s DNA for use as a powerful identifier in later criminal
investigations. And if DNA evidence is relevant, let it be collected and
used according to existing procedures.
An atrocious ruling from the Supreme Court yesterday in United States
v. Comstock, as has been noted. It is no real surprise that the liberals on
the Court ruled the way they did. They believe in big government and
need a way to get around a Constitution that set up a federal government
of limited and enumerated powers. Thus, we are told a “living”
Constitution “evolves” in such a way as to accomodate the administrative
state that is all around us. But the law at issue in the Comstock case did
not arise during the Clinton years. The Adam Walsh Child Protection Act
was championed by conservative legislators in the Congress and signed
by Bush.

But getting your DNA put in a database just because an investigator got
you in his or her sights? It’s the reverse of “innocent until proven
guilty.”

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Montgomery County Joins D.C.

in Pushing Cell Phone Tax
Hikes [Americans for Tax
Until the Comstock ruling was issued, court watchers were unsure of
Reform] how committed Bush’s Supreme Court picks (Roberts and Alito) were to
the constitutional doctrine of enumerated powers. The answer has now
MAY 18, 2010 05:09P.M.
arrived: Not much. As the Bush memoir makes its way to the bookstores,
I expect there will be a good deal of spin about how good the Bush
As the D.C. City Council weighs a major 51% hike in telephone taxes,
presidency was. Well, it wasn’t.
metro area residents living just north in Maryland have a battle of their
own. Facing a $1 billion overspending addiction, the M...
More here, here, and here.

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FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Dems Losing Focus on Jobs?
[The Club for Growth]
MAY 18, 2010 04:10P.M.
I Roll Call (January 28, 2010): Democrats Pleased by Renewed Focus on
Jobs
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
Without Intent [Cato at Liberty]
MAY 18, 2010 02:34P.M.
By David Rittgers
One of the major problems with the growing body of federal crimes –
over 4,500 and counting, expanding at the rate of 500 each decade – is
that many lack the traditional requirement that the defendant have acted
with a guilty mind, or mens rea. Highlighting the overcriminalization of
nearly everything is necessary to educate the citizenry and put pressure
on politicians not to pass overbroad and ill-defined criminal offenses. At
some point, however, Congress must act to address the existing flawed
statutes and put procedural barriers between bad ideas and the federal
criminal code.
Enter the Heritage Foundation and the National Association of Criminal
Defense Lawyers with their groundbreaking report, Without Intent:
How Congress is Eroding the Criminal Intent Requirement in Federal
Law.
The report studies the legislation proposed or passed by the 109th
Congress (2005-2006) and finds that a majority lacked an adequate
mens rea requirement. The report closes with a strong case for several
fundamental changes in the way that Congress creates criminal laws:
• Enact default rules of interpretation ensuring that guilty-mind
requirements are adequate to protect against unjust conviction.
• Codify the rule of lenity, which grants defendants the benefit of the
doubt when Congress fails to legislate clearly.
• Require adequate judiciary committee oversight of every bill
proposing criminal offenses or penalties.
• Provide detailed written justification for and analysis of all new
federal criminalization.
• Redouble efforts to draft every federal criminal offense clearly and
precisely.
This report is indicative of a broad effort developing across the political
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19 May 2010
spectrum to fix a federal criminal code that has become disconnected
from traditional notions of punishing blameworthy conduct.
Northwestern Law’s Searle Center on Law, Regulation and Economic
Growth held its 2009 Judicial Symposium on Criminalization of
Corporate Conduct.
The Heritage Foundation is hosting an event highlighting the findings of
Without Intent on Monday, May 24 that can also be viewed online.
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
The Good Side of Bad News in
Europe [Cato at Liberty]
MAY 18, 2010 02:33P.M.
By Alan Reynolds
What does the Greco-Euro currency/debt crisis mean for the U.S.
economy?
Nearly everyone except the uniquely wise economist John Cochrane
assumes very bad “contagion” effects –on U.S. banks, exports and
particularly U.S. manufacturing.
This echoes identical anxieties while the world went through a far more
dramatic Asian currency crisis after July 1997, and a Russian debt crisis
the following May.
The most widely ignored effect of that crisis, however, was to depress
foreign demand for oil, and thus slash oil prices to U.S. buyers from $25
a barrel in early 1997 to $11 by the end of 1998.
Oil is a major input into the manufacturing process (e.g., chemicals and
plastics), and a major cost of distribution (trucks, trains and airplanes).
It is also a major determinant of the cost of all energy sources used in
making other goods such as aluminum and paper. When marginal costs
go down, it becomes profitable to expand production.
At the height of the Asian/Russian crises, the table below shows that
U.S. manufacturing output rose by more than 10 percent. It’s an ill wind
that doesn’t blow somebody some good.
Looking at the same phenomenon from the other side, every recession
but one (1960) was preceded by a big increase in the price of oil. For oil
importers like the U.S., cheaper oil is definitely better.
During the last big foreign currency/debt crisis, the real growth of U.S.
Gross Domestic Purchases (the home-grown portion of GDP) jumped by
4.7% in 1997 and 5.5% in 1998. Yet the Fed cut interest rates three times
in October and November of 1998 because of what was happening in
other countries.
Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 19 May 2010

The table show what happened to the price of oil and to U.S. negligence, tort law, continues to operate and there is no
manufacturing from June 1997 to December 1998. The middle column is doubt that BP’s potential liability under common law alone
the price of a barrel of West Texas crude, and the column to the right is would be in the billions of dollars.
the U.S. industrial production index for the manufacturing sector.
…The point of the OPA was not to limit tort law but to
1997-06 19.17 87.80 supplement it.
1997-07 19.63 88.12
1997-08 19.93 89.69 Tort law, as traditionally understood, could only be used to
1997-09 19.79 90.45 recover damages to people and property rather than force
1997-10 21.26 90.98 firms to pay cleanup costs per se. Thus, in the OPA as I read it
1997-11 20.17 92.05 — and take the details with a grain of salt since I’m not a
1997-12 18.32 92.52 lawyer–there is no limit on cleanup costs. Moreover, the OPA
1998-01 16.71 93.36 makes the offender strictly liable for cleanup costs which
1998-02 16.06 93.31 means that if these costs are proven the offender must pay
1998-03 15.02 93.13 them regardless (there are a few defenses, such as an act of
1998-04 15.44 93.68 war, but they are unlikely to apply). The offender is also
1998-05 14.86 94.25 strictly liable for up to $75 million in economic damages
1998-06 13.66 93.53 above and beyond cleanup costs. Thus the $75 million is
1998-07 14.08 92.96 simply a cap on the strictly liable damages, the damages that
1998-08 13.36 95.40 if proven BP has to pay regardless. But there is no limit, even
1998-09 14.95 95.11 under the OPA, on economic damages in the event that BP
1998-10 14.39 95.96 failed to follow regulations or is otherwise shown to be
1998-11 12.85 96.08 negligent (same as under common law).
1998-12 11.28 96.63
The link Krugman supplies, and perhaps the source of his error, was this
In recent weeks, as the debt and currency problems in Euroland hit the Talking Points Memo item baldly describing “the maximum liability for
front page, the price of crude oil fell by about 20 percent. oil companies after a spill” as “a paltry $75 million.” Even the most
passing acquaintance with the aftermath of real-world oil spills should
Once again, as in 1997-98, everyone may be watching the wrong ball in have been enough for Krugman and TPM author Zachary Roth to realize
the wrong court. that liability for assessments to this one federal rainy-day fund is but one
component, perhaps but a minor one, of liability for overall spill damage.
And even as regards this one specialized federal fund, Krugman and
Roth got it wrong, as a glance at the May 1 edition of Krugman’s own
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS paper would have revealed:

Krugman and oil spills, cont’d When a rich and well-insured company like BP is responsible
for the spill, the government will seek reimbursement of what
[Cato at Liberty] it spends on cleanup from the company and its insurers.
MAY 18, 2010 02:13P.M.
So Krugman’s post not only strained to take a cheap shot at libertarians,
By Walter Olson but also thoroughly botched a factual background that it would have
been easy enough for him to have looked up. Other that that, it was fine.
Last week Paul Krugman seized on the Gulf oil spill as another occasion
to bash libertarians in general and the great Milton Friedman in
particular. On Friday David skewered the Times columnist over his odd
rhetorical ploy of treating politicians’ failure to follow Friedman’s
principles as a refutation of those principles. Now economist Alex
Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution reports that Krugman also completely
misunderstands the current set of laws governing oil spill liability:

The Oil Pollution Act of 1990 (OPA), which is the law that
caps liability for economic damages at $75 million, does not
override state law or common law remedies in tort (click on
the link and search for common law or see here). Thus,
Milton Friedman’s preferred remedy for corporate

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 19 May 2010

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Achieve, Inc., and the Fordham Foundation’s Michael Petrilli. It will be a
debate that must be replicated across the country before we make any
How the FCC is Destroying further move to adopt one standard for every public school in
America. You can register here to see our debate live, or catch it online at
Investment in the Internet Cato.org.

[Americans for Tax Reform] The feds are on the move in education, and the more we learn about their
MAY 18, 2010 02:07P.M. plans, the more obvious it is that they must be stopped.

Last week before a room of Net Neutrality skeptics at The Cable Show,
the FCC’s chief of policy analysis, Paul De Sa, claimed that the
Commission factored in possible market reactions to thei... FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

UK Scraps National ID [Cato at

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS Liberty]
MAY 18, 2010 01:27P.M.
Fed Ed on the Move [Cato at
By Jim Harper
Liberty]
MAY 18, 2010 01:39P.M. Reports the London Evening Standard: “The £5 billion national identity
card scheme will be consigned to the scrapheap as a result of the new
By Neal McCluskey coalition Government, the Home Office confirmed.”

There’s a lot to learn about going on in federal education policy today, I’ve written here a few times before about the uneven course of the
and none of it is good. national ID in the UK, paralleling our own: 1, 2, 3, 4.

First, Steven Brill offfers a revealing look at the Race to the Top
evaluation process in a piece that can be added to the ever-growing pile
of evidence that Race to the Top isn’t even close to the objective — or, I’d FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
add, powerful — catalyst for meaningful reform that the Obama
administration insists it is. On Tonight’s Kudlow Report
Second, it appears that congressional Democrats are preparing to pass a [Larry Kudlow’s Money
Harkin-proposed, Obama-endorsed, $23 billion bailout for teachers by
attaching it to an “emergency” appropriation for the war in Afghanistan. Politic$]
(Passing major — and highly suspect – education legislation by attaching MAY 18, 2010 01:15P.M.
it to something totally unrelated? Sound familiar?) And what’s the nice
thing about “emergency” legislation? No need to worry that the
outlay would add to our already insane federal deficit; that can’t be
allowed to interfere with saving the world (or public schooling lard).

Finally, looming on the horizon is the release of final standards from the
Common Core State Standards Initiative. The Obama administration is
trying to coerce all states to adopt the standards by linking adoption to
Race-to-the-Top competitiveness and, potentially, Elementary and
Secondary Education Act funding.

The good news is that on June 2 — potentially the very day the standards
will be released — you can catch what has sadly been a rarity so far in the Tonight at 7pm ET:
push for national standards: a real debate about whether
national standards will actually improve educational outcomes. My SUPER TUESDAY: YOUR MONEY YOUR VOTE
answer is that there is no meaningful evidence that national standards
drive superior results, but joining me to debate that right here at Cato -HAS THE GOP GOTTEN THE TEA PARTY MESSAGE?
will be the Heritage Foundation’s Lindsey Burke, Sandra Boyd of

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-WILL PUBLIC ANGER LEAD TO REGIME CHANGE IN THE FALL? FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

Club in the News [The Club for

- Kellyanne Conway, The Polling Company President & CEO
- Steve Moore, Senior Economics Writer for the Wall Street Journal Growth]
Editorial Board; “Return to Prosperity” co-author MAY 18, 2010 12:23P.M.
- Mark Walsh, “Left Jab” Host (Sirius/XM); Fmr. Sr. Vice President at
America Online; Fmr. Vertical Net CEO; Fmr. DNC Advisor There are a couple of good articles today that feature the Club for
- David Goodfriend, Fmr. Clinton W.H. Official; “Left Jab” Co-Host/Air Growth. In the Washington Times, Sean Lengell writes about the
America Co-Founder growing dissatisfaction that voters have with earmarks. s too early to
speculate. Read it all.
SEX, LIES & PRIMARIES...WILL CT AG DICK
BLUMENTHAL’S FALSE VIETNAM CLAIMS SINK HIS
POLITICAL SHIP?
FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS
- Rep. Rob Simmons, (R-CT)
- Kevin Rennie, Hartford Courant Crocodile Tears? Liberals
- Kellyanne Conway, The Polling Company President & CEO
- Mark Walsh, “Left Jab” Host (Sirius show); Fmr. Sr. Vice President at Lament Lack of Their Own on
America Online; Fmr. Vertical Net CEO; Fmr. DNC Advisor
the Court [Cato at Liberty]
MARKETS: SHORT-SELLING BAN ON TOP GERMAN BANKS; MAY 18, 2010 11:25A.M.
4-YR LOW FOR EURO; OIL/GOLD DROP; GREECE RAISING
TAXES By Ilya Shapiro

CNBC’S Bob Pisani reports. An interesting narrative has arisen among some on the left that the
nomination of Elena Kagan shows what chumps Democratic presidents
OIL HEARINGS: CAPPING THE LIABILITY? are. That is, not only could President Obama have tapped a stronger
“progressive” voice, but he – like President Clinton before him, and
CNBC’s Scott Cohn reports. unlike Republican presidents – put avoiding political fights ahead of
moving the Court left. Since LBJ, Democrats have opted for a “moderate
CONGRESS SEEKS CURBS ON FOREIGN BAILOUTS technocrat” like Stephen Breyer rather than a “lion” like William
Brennan or Thurgood Marshall. (Sonia Sotomayor was good and
- Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R/TX) (co-sponsor of bill to ban EU bailouts) necessary for identity politics, the argument continues, but, let’s face it,
- Vincent Reinhart, American Enterprise Institute resident scholar; fmr she’s no liberal Scalia.)
dir of monetary affairs at the FOMC
Take this opening quote from a New York Times article that came out
Please join us. The Kudlow Report. 7pm ET. CNBC. the day of the nominee’s announcement: “The selection of Solicitor
General Elena Kagan to be the nation’s 112th justice extends a quarter-
century pattern in which Republican presidents generally install strong
conservatives on the Supreme Court while Democratic presidents pick
candidates who often disappoint their liberal base.” Or Dahlia
Lithwick’s op-ed in Slate about how liberal law students are so many lost
sheep because their ideological heroes are deemed unconfirmable and
therefore not part of the nomination discussion.

Well. A few things on this: First, even if the argument were true, it’s
simply not statistically significant because we’re only talking four
Democratic appointments (Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg by Clinton,
Sotomayor and Kagan by Obama; poor Jimmy Carter had none, the
same number George W. Bush would have had he not been re-elected).
Second, if you line up the Republican and Democratic nominees in
recent decades, it’s conservatives who are disappointed (need I even
mention John Paul Stevens, Anthony Kennedy, and David Souter, let
alone Earl Warren and Brennan himself, all Republican nominees).

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Today’s Tabbloid PERSONAL NEWS FOR lgn@limitedgovernmentnetwork.com 19 May 2010

Third, to say that someone like Ginsburg — a push-the-envelope feminist

and ACLU lawyer — is a moderate is to center the jurisprudential
spectrum around the law faculty lounge. And fourth, as David Bernstein
details, it is people like Richard Epstein — and other Federalist Society
regulars like Dan Troy, Miguel Estrada, John Eastman, Frank
Easterbrook, Stephen Bainbridge, and Todd Zywicki (as well as Cato’s
own Roger Pilon, Randy Barnett, and Ilya Somin) — who would be
considered filibusteringly beyond the pale, much more than Lithwick’s
vaunted American Constitution Society stalwarts.

In short, if anything it is Republicans who can rightfully be disappointed

in their presidents’ nominees — though Kennedy’s seat was of course
originally to have been filled by Robert Bork. More unfortunately, it is
libertarian law students who can lament that their kind lacks
representation on the High Court — though note that the second choice
for Kennedy’s seat was Douglas Ginsburg (the last judicial martyr of the
drug war). And so, as the Court remains securely to the left of the
American people, just today ratifying radical assertions of federal
legislative and judicial power, Elena Kagan is poised to fit right into that
jurisprudential “mainstream.” Good for the left, bad for the
Constitution.

FISCALLY CONSERVATIVE BLOG FEEDS

BREAKING: Souder (IN-03) to

Resign [The Club for Growth]
MAY 18, 2010 10:56A.M.

Another day, another political scandal. From the POLITICO: Rep. Mark
Souder (R-Ind.), a former congressional staffer who was elected to the
House in the Republican revolution of 1994, has told colleagues he will
resign Tuesday because of an affair with a female aide, a House GOP
official told POLITICO. Souder has scheduled an announcement about
his future for 10 a.m. today at his congressional office in Ft. Wayne.