Because apparently math is hard. The White House has informed House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) that it will miss the legal deadline for sending a budget to Congress. Acting Budget Director Jeff Zients told Ryan (R-Wis.) late Friday that the budget will not be delivered by Feb. 4, as required by law, a House aide said.
In 2010, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank Act, which created the new “Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection (CFPB),” an all-powerful agency vested with the power to limit the choices of consumers in financial markets, making it harder and more expensive to obtain credit. This unaccountable agency operates autonomously within the Federal Reserve and will not be subjected to congressional appropriations or oversight. Yesterday, the CFPB announced | Read More »
(Via Drudge) Well, isn’t that special of them. From the Washington Post: The White House is weighing a far broader and more comprehensive approach to curbing the nation’s gun violence than simply reinstating an expired ban on assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition, according to multiple people involved in the administration’s discussions. A working group led by Vice President Biden is seriously considering measures backed by | Read More »
Wow, but that’s a lot of white guys. Please note that the picture below is from the White House’s own official Flickr account, which means that not only is calling them ‘senior advisors’ fair (I’m quoting the White House, after all); it indicates that nobody in that shop saw that picture and said Wow, but that’s a lot of white guys.
As Chad Pergram notes on twitter, Ed Henry reports the White House is calling getting the GOP to break its tax pledge, “One of the most consequential policy achievements of the last couple of decades.” See how this is already being spun. Do you really want to do this? You have a choice. Oppose this deal. It does nothing to solve our problems. It does | Read More »
In an obviously preplanned propaganda ploy, President Obama will leave his Hawaiian vacation “early” returning to Washington to engage in more fiscal cliff political theater. When Fox News first reported Obama’s travel plans, we were reminded that Obama let it slip last week that he would return this week: An administration official tells Fox it is now “likely” the President flies back to Washington late | Read More »
Ligon Duncan makes some sound points though many might not like to consider them. I actually posted this way back in 2008 when Mr. Duncan originally wrote it. But this Christmas Eve I think it is worth posting again. For those Christians who are more dismayed than overjoyed about the prospects of an Obama presidency, there should be a remembrance that as our President, Barack | Read More »
Via the Weekly Standard comes an indication that Barack Obama might as well get on the phone and tell Chuck Hagel that it’s not happening: “I’d have to study his record.” Let me explain why this is so devastating a comment coming from Senator Schumer about ex-Senator Hagel… oh, you’ve figured it out already? But let me explicit: Chuck Hagel served in the Senate from | Read More »
It’s amazing to me that at this point we’re still pretending there’s a phone monopoly. Competition exists. Yes, it’s obvious that nobody has a monopoly on phone service anymore. The assumption that there’s a monopoly is detached from the reality of the modern market. People routinely go without landlines these days, and there’s even competition for those!
FCC is at least pretending to investigate the need to deregulate and prepare for the IP Revolution in phone service. We’ll see if they rig it to get what they want out of it, though. No, I’m not very optimistic about second term Obama regulators.
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Hello again. Having been traveling from Wednesday to Friday for my employer, I did my best to get this out Friday night, but I crashed about a third of the way into my backlog of links. Then over the weekend my email server died. So, we catch up with Tech at Night on Monday!
We’ll start with the International Telecommunications Union. Reports came out that ITU anti-liberty proposals were backing off, but the effort is going in the wrong direction. A big chunk of the Anglosphere is against it, including the Obama administration.
The President is getting credit for this position from industry and House Republicans, but consider this: if the ITU’s secretary general didn’t see the Obama opposition coming then just how muted were Obama’s efforts to fix the treaty to begin with? This is a failure of the President to lead internationally.
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Democrats live by the dictum “never let a good crisis go to waste.” What better way to insert their campaign wish list into a Hurricane Sandy disaster aid bill? To that end, Obama has submitted a $60.4 billion dollar aid request for recovery of damage from Hurricane Sandy. His proposal is chock full of items from his campaign wish list, and will be considered before | Read More »
They told me that if I voted for Mitt Romney, that corporations with ties to the President would offshore billions of dollars to avoid paying taxes! Did Obama and Schmidt even feel guilty as Obama said one thing, while working with Google who was doing the opposite?
Because remember: as I’ve been saying all along, The global Internet regulations the ITU is threatening is in the spirit of the Obama- and Schmidt-backed Internet regulations we’ve seen the last four years!
And let’s be clear: the Obama administration isn’t done regulating now that the second term is coming.
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Gotta love it: I go to take a nap before Tech at Night but… oops, somebody forgot to press the Start button on that 2 hour timer. So, suddenly it’s Tech at Saturday Morning!
So yeah, we’ll start with a story that actually got me mad: the ongoing story of that now-famous RSC paper on copyright. There are conflicting reports out there, but most I’m seeing suggest there’s a real change going on at RSC, the same way there’s been a purge of a certain wing of the party elsewhere in the House.
I’m disappointed by all of this. If the RSC is going to oppose copyright reform the same way most of us oppose anarchic anti-copyright views, then the RSC is aligning itself with the most extreme perpetual-copyright views held by groups like MPAA. If there is to be no compromise, then I cannot work with them either, since my views have been declared to be in opposition to RSC.
Purges have consequences. It’s time we stopped pretending RSC is anything but an organ of the RSC establishment now. They’re clearly not speaking for the conservative reform wing of the GOP, as they once did long ago.
Read More »So I read this opening sentence from a Politico article about the White House press corps reacting to… well, read: The White House Correspondents Association is strongly urging the Obama administration to allow press access to the president’s official swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 20, following indications from inauguration committee officials that the event could potentially be closed to the press. – and I have to | Read More »
Often things get lost in the daily grind of politics. The fact that the GOP is willing to raise taxes gets lost by the media because the media wants the GOP to raise rates. This Politico story makes very clear John Boehner must not raise rates. Better to go off the cliff than raise rates. In a meeting with leadership staff, [Rob] Nabors reiterated the | Read More »
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