The Right Coast

It's Time To Bust Up the Big Banks | RealClearPolitics

Americans have a healthy respect for free market competition and are resistant to government interference — even when they don’t like what the market is up to. For example, 69 percent of Americans believe that large corporate executives are overpaid, but only 17 percent want the government to regulate their pay. 

In that context, it’s remarkable that 50 percent of voters nationwide favor a plan to break up our nation’s megabanks. Just 23 percent are opposed.

via www.realclearpolitics.com

The Volokh Conspiracy » United States v. Auernheimer, and Why I Am Representing Auernheimer Pro Bono on Appeal Before the Third Circuit

On Monday, Andrew Auernheimer was sentenced to serve 41 months in prison for violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Auernheimer’s case has received a lot of press attention, and I think that attention is merited: I think the case against Auernheimer is deeply flawed, and that the principles the case raises are critically important for civil liberties online. For that reason, I have agreed to represent Auernheimer pro bono in his appeal before the Third Circuit. (I will be joined by the trial counsel Tor Ekeland and his colleagues Nace Naumoski and Mark Jaffe, together with Marcia Hofmann and Hanni Fakhoury of EFF.) In this post, I want to explain some of the issues in play in this case that I think make it so important.

via www.volokh.com

Comments Tom Smith

Comments seem not to have been going up on the blog the way they would normally.  Sorry to anybody who tried to post comments and couldn't. As far as I can tell, it's fixed now. I think this was a Typepad bug as opposed to my mistake, but as I can't really tell what I was doing wrong, or why it's working now when it wasn't before, I'm not sure. Anyway, it seems to be working now. 

Rush is right on gay marriage - The Week

But then Rush pointed this out:

The second thing is, homosexual marriage. If the party makes that something official that they support, they're not gonna pull the homosexual activist voters away from the Democrat Party, but they are going to cause their base to stay home and throw their hands up in utter frustration. Now, whether they like it or not, the Republican Party's base is sufficiently large that they cannot do without them. And their problem is they don't like 'em. It really isn't any more complicated than that.

Rush is right.

via theweek.com

Like it or not, a large part of the GOP base is against gay marriage. And then there's abortion. --ts

The Real Iraq War Lesson | RealClearPolitics

But here is the most important thing the Bush administration got wrong. The Bush administration claimed that, postwar, Iraq would become a shining example of democratic capitalism, serving to transform the region and be a U.S. ally helping to check the influence of Iran.

via www.realclearpolitics.com

I was for the Iraq war because we couldn't allow a country that had WMD to cavort with terrorists. Turns out they didn't have WMD (though I suppose they might have shipped some out to Syria before we overran them). Oops. I call that a major error. I listened to Richard Perle on NPR this morning. I was aware of a generally increasing feeling of irritation and then almost rage. He is just chillin' outside of DC these days; has a gig at AEI. He basically said "oh well. Everybody thought Sadam had WMDs. I guess we were wrong. I was against the occupation, you know." Without Iraq, remember, we do not get Obama and everything that follows from that; how catastrophic that is, remains to be seen. Iraq has to go down as the biggest. Mistake. Evah.

What to do? Not much, except never listen to the neo-cons again: Most of them are liberals anyway. Don't assume the world is pining for democracy. Some bits are; mostly it's not. --ts

The Cyprus Confusion | RealClearPolitics

Cyprus' economy will get worse before it gets better, says Brookings' Elliott. It's already in recession, with 14.7 percent unemployment in January. Banks, a mainstay of the economy, will shrink. Consumers and businesses, having lost sizable deposits, will retrench. But the real question is not about Cyprus. It's whether what started in Cyprus stays in Cyprus. If it doesn't, Europe's prognosis just got a lot worse.

via www.realclearpolitics.com

Review & Outlook: Obama's Missile-Defense Reversal - WSJ.com

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel chose Friday afternoon to announce one of the biggest switcheroos of the Obama Presidency: The Pentagon now plans to fortify America's homeland defenses against missile attack, reversing a 2009 decision that was part of President Obama's fantasy of a world without nuclear weapons.

via online.wsj.com

John Cogan and John Taylor: How the House Budget Would Boost the Economy - WSJ.com

This week the House of Representatives will vote on its Budget Committee plan, which would bring federal finances into balance by 2023. The plan would do so by gradually slowing the growth in federal spending without raising taxes.

Still, the plan has been denounced by naysayers who assert that it would harm the economic recovery and that, at the least, any spending reductions should be put off until later. This thinking is just as wrong now as it was in the 1970s.

via online.wsj.com

Why the Cyprus Bail In Is a Bigger Deal Than You Think | Daily Ticker - Yahoo! Finance

You can be forgiven for thinking that you don't need to give a hoot about what's going on in Cyprus.

After all, it's just a little island somewhere in the Mediterranean.

But what's going on in Cyprus could actually matter — not just to the rest of Europe, but to the rest of the world.

via finance.yahoo.com

I hope it's not the end of the world. --ts

RNC Issues Scathing Analysis of GOP - WSJ.com

The national Republican Party released a scathing self-analysis Monday that party leaders hope will be the first step toward returning the GOP to a winning track after its election losses of November.

via online.wsj.com