In Defense of Lobbyists

In the days after the November election, Obama’s advisers announced “the strictest, and most far reaching ethics rules of any transition team in history.” These rules included a ban on lobbyists joining the new administration. Why would political ethics demand such a prohibition? According...

More on Protecting Monopolies

The New Haven Independent reports that Sen. Joe Lieberman (D – CT) is leading a coalition of “centrists” and “moderates” against a public option for healthcare—a government-run health plan that would compete with private insurers. As we recently discussed, the public option is...

Protecting Monopoly Power

It’s rare that a public-policy proposal manages to please three-quarters of the public. A government-run healthcare option has managed to do just that, according to a recent poll by CBS News and the New York Times. Seventy-two percent of respondents, including fifty percent of Republicans, said they...

IRE

Russ has been busy the past couple of days at the Investigative Reporters and Editors (IRE) conference in Baltimore. Today he will lead a panel on book writing and freelancing aimed at investigative reporters in career transition, due to the current instability in the media environment. Russ and I are both...

Russ on GRITtv

Russ was recently on Laura Flanders’s GRITtv to discuss Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination, the Tiller murder, Obama’s Middle East speech, and the upcoming Reagan centennial. Here’s Russ on the public controversies surrounding Sotomayor: I think most of these [accusations against Sotomayor]...

The Charity of Lobbyists

USA Today published a thorough investigation of the donations lobbyists pour into the favorite non-profits of Congressmen to gain influence and buy face time at charity events. Only since 2007, when congressional ethics rules were changed, has such beneficence had to be reported. The article shows that the...

Citigroup’s Bogus Profits

Remember how Citigroup’s reported $1.6 billion first-quarter profits sparked a rally in financial stocks? Martin Weiss of Weiss Research Inc. thinks Citigroup really suffered a $2.5 billion loss: Citigroup’s $1.6 billion in first-quarter profit would vanish if accounting were more stringent, says...

A Tale of Two Men-on-the-street Pieces

The Los Angeles Times reports today that the majority of people in Florence, Colorado, do not mind terrorist suspects being moved from Guantánamo to the nearby federal “supermax” prison: The Senate last week overwhelmingly rejected providing funds to close the U.S. military prison in Cuba,...

Moral Hazard, Fed Style

How exactly did the Federal Reserve gain the emergency authority to loan more than $1 trillion of taxpayer money to the banks secretly and without oversight? The Washington Post explains today in a long investigative piece by Binyamin Appelbaum and Neil Irwin. As it turns out, Sen. Chris Dodd slipped the...

$2 Trillion > $700 Billion

We’ve heard a lot rumbling from the banks in the past several weeks about how committed they are to repaying the TARP money they have received at the soonest opportunity. The motive of such talk is clear: Paying back TARP money would clearly be seen as a sign of strength,” Douglas Elliott, fellow at...