The STOCK Act – which is short for the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act; honestly, I wish that they’d stop coming up with cute names for these. This particular one is not really obnoxious, but some of them have really reached for the acronym – started to get really pushed through last year, once it came out that Members of Congress, including then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were profiting unduly from legal insider trading* . I call it ‘legal’ not in the sense that there was nothing wrong with said insider trading; I call it ‘legal’ because Congress exempted itself from the rules that the rest of us have to follow. The distinction is important. It’s perfectly legal for, say, Senator Dianne Feinstein to buy into a biostock company just before the company picks up a fat government subsidy check, even if she knew about it ahead of time. That’s the problem . Anyway, one of the more egregious things being done – again, involving then-Speaker Pelosi in at least one case – was the practice of offering Members of Congress a favorable position from which to buy into an IPO. Pelosi in particular used this practice to buy into a Visa IPO , right before credit card legislation that hampered Visa g ot somehow sidetracked in Congress for a year ; she ended up making a killing on the (again, ‘LEGAL’) deal. And, naturally, the amendment that would ban this practice in the future has been named the ‘Pelosi Provision’ by Republicans. By all accounts, the former Speaker is unhappy about this; I am uncertain whether or not that she is as unhappy about this as I am that the woman made several million unfortunately-legal dollars off of her former position to manipulate and delay legislation, but I somehow doubt it. The bill is largely expected to pass, by the way: the real fireworks will be in conference. If the thing gets defanged, it will be there – so keep an eye out for that particular problem. It wouldn’t be the first time that a troublesomely reformist piece of legislation got revised out of existence, while out of camera range… Moe Lane ( crosspost ) PS: Politico reports that the STOCK Act’s original sponsors Louise Slaughter and Tim Walz are unhappy that the Republican majority has taken away their bill and are now busily reshaping it. Alas for Rep. Slaughter, it’s not exactly Eric Cantor’s fault that she was incapable of getting it passed in the first place…
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Proposed ‘Pelosi Provision’ of the STOCK Act unveiled yesterday.
WARNING: The YouTube Video below is not safe either for work or Mitt Romney. There’s a part of me that hopes that the Rap-Artist known as Chapter engaged in evil satire when she wrote and performed the song portrayed in the video above. I also hope that GOP Presidential Candidate, Mitt Romney was engaging in satire when he made the following comment. “I’m in this race because I care about Americans,” Romney said. “I’m not concerned about the very poor. We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.” With only one foot in his mouth, Romney still remained hungry after his tiring victory in the Florida Primary. He rides further into his dung heap below. “I’m not concerned about the very rich,” he continued. “They’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.” Reaction from the Left was predictable. Chuck Todd tweeted his predictably nausea-inducing bilge. Many a POTUS prayer breakfast speech includes talk of caring about the poor but today when one hears it, seems to take on a diff meaning? Austin Goolsbee scored higher on the sense-of-humor metric. Headline: Romney not worried about the very poor, has nice roof cages available for any that “like fresh air. (HT: The Hill) But just how do we approach this gob-smacking gaffe from The Right? Clearly it disqualifies Mitt Romney from professional consideration as a future conservative leader. Clearly it inspires all of those in America who want to trash the Conservative Movement, and run the welfare spending odometer well into the tens of trillions. It was political equivalent of drinking strychnine, and we need to get this political cadaver named Romney embalmed and buried as rapidly as possible. But how do we critique this without opening the floodgates to dependency nation? We start by learning from one of our most intellectually-gifted political opponents; Former Democratic Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Moynihan served as one of Lyndon Johnson’s Assistant Secretaries of Labor. In this position he wrote an famous/infamous federal report entitled The Negro Family: The Case For National Action. Apparently “Safety Net” Mittens hasn’t given this work any perusal. The Moynihan Report has had long-lasting and important implications. Writing to President Lyndon Johnson, then-Assistant Secretary of Labor Patrick Moynihan argued that, without access to jobs and the means to contribute meaningful support to a family, black men would become systematically alienated from their roles as husbands and fathers. This would cause rates of divorce, abandonment and out-of-wedlock births to skyrocket in the black community (a trend that had already begun by the mid-1960s)—leading to vast increases in the numbers of female-headed households and the high rates of poverty, low educational outcomes, and inflated rates of abuse that are associated with them. (HT:Wikipedia) The obvious tragedy and failing of Moynihan’s brilliance is that it focused solely on blacks. This led critics to just write off the truth as racism. Anyone diligent enough to make it all the way to the end of Deer Hunting With Jesus by Joe Bageant will quickly realize that it’s not just African-American families that are disintegrating under the perverse incentives of the modern safety net. The lower ten percent of African-Americans are far from the only group of people in America just living for free; off the EBT. Even Ann Coulter now seems to be drinking the RomneyCare Bug Juice. (HT: Jeff Emanuel). When Mitt Romney says not to worry about the poor, they have a safety net, he’s telling us to get over our foolish and anachronistic Conservatism. We don’t empower people to improve themselves and thereby redeem their particular corner of our tragically fallen world. Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day…” is out the window in Mitt Romney’s version of the GOP. It’s more like give every ten of them a ball and hope you don’t have too many armed robberies next Saturday Night. The Poor know when they are condescended to. They know when they are being treated like cattle. They know when they are being bribed with transfer payments not to put the torch to Los Angeles. This may not always be articulated, but the poor are not human if that simmering anger and resentment isn’t there. My family comes from working-class roots. My Father worked on the farm to help his Dad make both ends meet. I know enough of what Lower Income America goes through to know good and well that our current safety net is one of the worst things that ever happened to America’s working poor. If we really intend to nominate “Safety Net” Mittens and bribe the poor with EBT Cards not to riot for the next four years, then the poor are morally right to hate The Republican Party.
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Mitt Had Better Worry About The Poor
RedState Morning Briefing For February 1, 2012 Go to www.RedStateMB.com to get the Morning Briefing every morning at no charge. 1. Susan G. Komen Listened. Have You Responded? 2. The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung, But She’s Warming Up 3. The Bad Messaging of the Newt Gingrich Super PAC 4. The Inconvenient Constitution ———————————————————————- 1. Susan G. Komen Listened. Have You Responded? Yesterday, the Susan G. Komen Foundation announced it would stop giving money to Planned Parenthood. Conservatives have been pushing on this issue for a while. As a result of the announcement, the left has gone on the attack. It is important that you who wanted Komen to do this say thank you. You can email them at news@Komen.org . More importantly, you can donate to them . If you are not willing to support an organization that takes a stand you want when they come under attack, you cannot be surprised when less organizations listen to you. So say thank you . Please click here for the rest of the post. 2. The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung, But She’s Warming Up If I were a national Republican operative, I’d be very worried about tonight. If I were a Mitt Romney fan, I’d be ecstatic. The Romney win in Florida was huge. He won the hispanic vote. He split tea party activists and evangelicals. He won where people live. Gingrich won the panhandle and largely tied in the few northern Florida population centers, but it was Romney’s night. He is on the way toward the nomination. The fat lady is warming up. But it is not a done deal yet. He still has a fractured base and lost the heart of the base. He has trouble with tea party activists and evangelicals though he roughly tied with Gingrich in capturing their support, and he has trouble with strong conservatives. Nonetheless, his get out the vote operation was a phenomenal success and the 15 to 1 advertising ratio in his favor clinched it for him. Ron Brownstein has a solid analysis on Romney’s win. It is worth nothing that in the last week of the race only 0.1% of advertising was pro-Romney and roughly 70% was anti-Gingrich. The panhandle held for Gingrich, which is more typical of a number of upcoming primaries than the rest of the state. Here’s why I’d be nervous if I were a GOP operative. Please click here for the rest of the post. 3. The Bad Messaging of the Newt Gingrich Super PAC I was surprised to land in Miami today for CNN’s coverage of the Florida Presidential Preference Primary and hear one Newt Super PAC ad over and over. I heard it on rock stations. I heard it on Rush Limbaugh. I heard it on a sports talk station. It attacked Mitt Romney for abortion. Abortion. In a state with a massive housing crisis and a state that led the way in the fight on Obamacare, the Newt Super PAC decided to run ads in Miami, FL on abortion. There is just one ad that the Newt Super PAC needs to run and that the Newt campaign itself needs to run. They need to take Rick Santorum’s attack on Romneycare from the CNN Jacksonville, FL debate and turn it into a commercial. Please click here for the rest of the post. 4. The Inconvenient Constitution As a United States Senator, I have sworn an oath to support, defend, and bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States. Complying with this Oath is not always convenient. Sometimes this requires voting against legislation that embodies policies I agree with, other times it requires taking a stand when doing so may not be popular. The Constitution itself is not a document of convenience. It specifies an onerous process – bicameralism and presentment – with which the government must comply to enact legislation. And it imposes separation of government powers and a system of checks and balances between the different branches. Please click here for the rest of the post.
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Morning Briefing for February 1, 2012
As readers will recall, we had an exchange
While reading a tale of adventure and combat on the high seas, say a novel by Patrick O’Brian or C.S. Forester, I can recall a vivid description of two ships of the line, engaged in a deadly duel, in which one of the vessels manages to inflict a particularly crushing fusillade on its opponent, described in a phrase both gripping and terrifying: “raking fire on the stern.” Since all the guns in the ships of the Napoleonic era were on the sides, the stern was particularly vulnerable and the continuous fire brought to bear on it was devastating.
