The Atlantic:

Of all these parts of Obama’s executive order, the loan forgiveness aspect will have the least impact. By moving the timeline from 25 to 20 years, it could be significant in the long run — but it won’t be felt for decades. Remember, 82% of the current student loan debt outstanding was accrued in just the past decade. So it will be at least another 10 years before any of those borrowers have hit the 20-year mark…The monthly impact of the president’s new effort for most Americans paying off college debt will be between $4 and $8

More sleight-of-hand for the innumerate and the gullible. BTW, if this is not a photoshop, this girl needs more than just financial help. (Glenn Reynolds has a simple plan to deal with the debt problem.)

A quote from February 2009:

we will pursue the housing plan I’m outlining today. And through this plan, we will help between 7 and 9 million families restructure or refinance their mortgages so they can afford — avoid foreclosure. And we’re not just helping homeowners at risk of falling over the edge; we’re preventing their neighbors from being pulled over that edge, too — as defaults and foreclosures contribute to sinking home values, and failing local businesses, and lost jobs

In the real world, we all know that government-centric tinkering doesn’t work. Even Austan Goolsbee has finally figured that out: “If you look at Cash for Clunkers or the first home buyer tax credit…I don’t think you would do that.” The only thing that works is creating an environment where businesses can thrive, and the administration would have to abandon its ideology to do so. A year ago we were saying the same thing, and it’s only gotten worse since then.

So what do we have the administration doing now? More tinkering, yet again on mortgages, and on student loans too. Result: “Just 21% favor the forgiveness of student loans…18% of the nation’s voters Strongly Approve of the way that Barack Obama is performing…That’s the lowest level of Strong Approval ever.” Hey, it’s no small achievement to both govern ineffectively and against the will of the people at the same time.

NY Magazine:

“If you don’t want to be part of this group, then you can just leave,” yelled a facilitator in a button-down shirt, “Every week we clean our house.” Seth Harper, the pro-drummer proletarian, chimed in on the side of the sitters. “We disagree on how we should clean it. A lot of us disagree with the pile.”

Zetah, tall and imposing with a fiery red beard, closed debate with a sigh. “We’re all big boys and girls. Let’s do this.” As he told me afterwards, “A lot of people are like spoiled children.” The cure? A cold snap. “Personally, I cannot wait for winter. It will clear out these people who aren’t here for the right reasons. Bring on the snow. The real revolutionaries will stay in -50 degrees.”

“The sunshine protestors will leave,” said “Zonkers,” a 20-year-old cleaner and longtime occupier from Tennessee. (He asked that his name not be used due to a felony marijuana conviction.) “The people who remain are the people who care. You get a lot of crust punks, silly kids, people who want to panhandle … It disgusts me. These people are here for a block party.”

Another argument broke out next to the pile of appropriated belongings, growing taller by the minute. A man named Sage Roberts desperately rifled through the pile, looking for a sleeping bag. “They’ve taken my stuff,” he muttered. Lauren Digion, the sanitation group leader, broke in: “This isn’t your stuff. You got all this stuff from comfort [the working group]. It belongs to comfort.”

And as I spoke to Michael Glaser, a 26-year-old Chicagoan helping lead winter preparation efforts, a physical fight broke out between a cleaner and a camper just feet from us. “When cleanups happen, people get mad,” Glaser said. “This is its own city. Within every city there are people who freeload, who make people’s lives miserable. We just deal with it. We can’t kick them out.”

As some guy said: “The most important thing we can do right now is those of us in leadership letting people know that we understand their struggles and we are on their side.” Pathetic.

They’re as knowledgeable as they are Tea-Party-like. Military spending is 17% of the budget, not largest part of the budget, as is thought by 94% of the OWS crowd. Yeah, just like the Tea Party. And of course, “we understand their struggles and we are on their side.” Pathetic. (BTW, that incident the other day — we think the teleprompter was trying to stage a getaway.)

Paul Krugman:

Listen to just about any speech by a Republican presidential hopeful, and you’ll hear assertions that the Obama administration is responsible for weak job growth. How so? The answer, repeated again and again, is that businesses are afraid to expand and create jobs because they fear costly regulations and higher taxes. Nor are politicians the only people saying this. Conservative economists repeat the claim in op-ed articles, and Federal Reserve officials repeat it to justify their opposition to even modest efforts to aid the economy. The first thing you need to know, then, is that there’s no evidence supporting this claim and a lot of evidence showing that it’s false.

Great! We must have been dreaming about that oil drilling moratorium. Good to know the NYT is on board with a drill baby drill energy policy.

George Will:

Vong, 47, left Vietnam in 1982, and after stops in Indonesia, Thailand, Taiwan and Hong Kong, settled in San Francisco and lived there for 20 years before coming here to open a nail salon with a difference. Her salon offered $30 fish therapy, wherein small fish from China nibble dead skin from people’s feet. Arizona’s Board of Cosmetology decided the fish were performing pedicures, and because all pedicure instruments must be sterilized and fish cannot be, the therapy must be discontinued. Vong lost her more-than-$50,000 investment in fish tanks and other equipment, and some customers. Three of her employees lost their jobs.

It’s not just people who are unemployed but the fish too. Maybe Arizona should team up with the National Science Foundation, which spent half a million dollars on exercise machines for shrimp.

NYT:

China has sent the price of compact fluorescent light bulbs soaring in the United States. By closing or nationalizing dozens of the producers of rare earth metals — which are used in energy-efficient bulbs and many other green-energy products — China is temporarily shutting down most of the industry and crimping the global supply of the vital resources.

China produces nearly 95 percent of the world’s rare earth materials, and it is taking the steps to improve pollution controls in a notoriously toxic mining and processing industry. But the moves also have potential international trade implications and have started yet another round of price increases for rare earths, which are vital for green-energy products including giant wind turbines, hybrid gasoline-electric cars and compact fluorescent bulbs.

General Electric, facing complaints in the United States about rising prices for its compact fluorescent bulbs, recently noted in a statement that if the rate of inflation over the last 12 months on the rare earth element europium oxide had been applied to a $2 cup of coffee, that coffee would now cost $24.55. An 11-watt G.E. compact fluorescent bulb — the lighting equivalent of a 40-watt incandescent bulb — was priced on Thursday at $15.88

Actually, that’s the price for a pack of three. You can get a regular old light bulb for a dollar or less. But that’s a bad idea. Those old bulbs are terrible — they’re cheaper and they contain less poison than the new ones!

Bloomberg:

Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were among 17 banks sued by the U.S. to recoup $196 billion spent on mortgage-backed securities bought by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The Federal Housing Finance Agency, on behalf of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, filed 17 lawsuits yesterday…

The cases are Federal Housing Finance Agency v. Bank of America Corp. (BAC), 11-CV-6195; FHFA v. Barclays Bank Plc., 11-CV- 6190; FHFA v. Citigroup, 11-CV-6196; FHFA v. Credit Suisse Holdings (USA) Inc., 11-CV-6200; FHFA v. Deutsche Bank AG, 11- CV-6192; FHFA v. First Horizon National Corp., 11-CV-6193; FHFA v. Goldman, Sachs & Co., 11-CV-6198; FHFA v. HSBC North America Holdings Inc., 11-CV-6189; FHFA v. JPMorgan Chase & Co., 11-CV- 6188; FHFA v. Merrill Lynch & Co., 11-CV-6202; FHFA v. Nomura Holding America Inc., 11-CV-6201; FHFA v. SG Americas Inc., 11- CV-6203, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York (Manhattan). Also: FHFA v. Ally Financial Inc.; FHFA v. Countrywide Financial Corp.; FHFA v. General Electric Co.; FHFA v. Morgan Stanley, New York State Supreme Court, New York County (Manhattan). And: FHFA v. Royal Bank of Scotland, 11-CV-1383, U.S. District Court, District of Connecticut (New Haven).

Comments and questions: (1) in the sub-prime debacle, everyone involved either looked the other way or had his hand in the cookie jar, so either throw them all in jail or move on; (2) as Roger Kimball noted, the government would do well to look in the mirror; (3) admittedly this is a great jobs program for lawyers, but exactly how is this going to help the housing industry and mortgage lending?

Bonus question: if the government wins the lawsuit, which part of the government will collect the $196 billion and which part of the government will bail out the banks to the tune of $196 billion?

Reuters:

The United States has a jobs problem and there’s not a lot President Barack Obama or Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke can do about it…Obama does plan a Midwestern bus tour from August 15 to August 17 to talk up jobs.

At the risk of repeating ourselves endlessly, the solutions to this problem are obvious to anyone who has recovered from his youth and the misinformation learned as an undergraduate.

From Omaha, Nebraska:

The Omaha Public Schools used more than $130,000 in federal stimulus dollars to buy each teacher, administrator and staff member a manual on how to become more culturally sensitive…The authors assert that American government and institutions create advantages that “channel wealth and power to white people,” that color-blindness will not end racism and that educators should “take action for social justice.” The book says that teachers should acknowledge historical systemic oppression in schools, including racism, sexism, homophobia and “ableism,” defined by the authors as discrimination or prejudice against people with disabilities…

The book that OPS bought, “The Cultural Proficiency Journey: Moving Beyond Ethical Barriers Toward Profound School Change,” includes a worksheet for teachers to score themselves on a continuum of cultural sensitivity. The continuum ranges from “cultural destructiveness,” as evidenced by genocide and ethnocide, to “cultural proficiency,” depicted as the highest level of awareness. Only those educators who acknowledge the existence of white privilege in America, that “white” is a culture in America and that race “is a definer for social and economic status” can reach proficiency, the authors contend. Those who score poorly on the worksheet are asked in the book what they will do “to align yourself with the values expressed.”

No wonder the teachers and administrators have to cheat on their students’ tests. With all this rubbish, there’s no time for the three R’s. HT: BOTW

HuffPo:

As part of its effort to combat the economic recession, the federal government pumped nearly $80 billion in direct investment and tax credits into the clean energy sector, catalyzing an unprecedented industry expansion. Solar energy, for example, grew 67 percent in the United States in 2010. The U.S. wind energy industry also experienced unprecedented growth as a result of the generous Section 1603 clean energy stimulus program. The industry grew by 40 percent and added 10 GW of new turbines in 2009…The global clean energy industry is set for a major crash. The reason is simple. Clean energy is still much more expensive and less reliable than coal or gas, and in an era of heightened budget austerity, the subsidies required to make clean energy artificially cheaper are becoming unsustainable…we need a comprehensive energy innovation strategy to develop, manufacture and deploy riskier but more promising clean energy technologies that may eventually compete with fossil energy

Oh, we get it. We need smarter subsidies for things that don’t work and are uneconomic. Apparently it’s true that common sense is uncommon.

The Guardian reports on another AGW government policy:

Australia’s population of wild camels, the Financial Times reveals, may soon be shot in order to earn carbon credits under the country’s forthcoming emissions trading scheme. Each one of the creatures is estimated to produce a tonne of carbon dioxide a year –- about the same as a 7,000km flight

Question: if the camel was also the pilot of the plane, what would the emissions be? And what about the methane? What a ridiculous world we have.

LA Weekly:

LAUSD is forcing teachers to cap homework at 10 percent of a student’s grade, beginning next month. “The policy is intended to account for the myriad urban problems facing the district’s mostly low-income, minority population,” writes the Los Angeles Times today. The LAUSD memo is more cryptic: “Varying degrees of access to academic support at home, for whatever reason, should not penalize a student so severely that it prevents the student from passing a class”

Forget literacy. We wouldn’t want hard work and knowledge getting in the way of a passing grade. HT: PP

Jean Weber of Florida has a problem:

her 95-year-old mother was detained and extensively searched last Saturday while trying to board a plane to fly to Michigan to be with family members during the final stages of her battle with leukemia. Her mother, who was in a wheelchair, was asked to remove an adult diaper in order to complete a pat-down search…

Wheelchairs trigger certain protocols, including pat-downs and possible swabbing for explosives, Koshetz said. “During any part of the process, if there is an alarm, then we have to resolve that alarm,” she said…Koshetz said the procedures are the same for everyone to ensure national security.

You may view the photo of the terrorist here. Note the government’s judgment: “We have reviewed the circumstances involving this screening and determined that our officers acted professionally and according to proper procedure.”

Mark Steyn has a defense of free speech and a condemnation of “hate speech” regulation. One funny bit is where two opposing groups say the same thing and are investigated for different crimes. Absurd. It’s appalling that the West has fallen so far so fast. Super fun bonus: when will they arrest the Pope?

We watched the movie Too Big to Fail. It was fast paced and exciting in its way, but it missed the main point of the crisis, just as Hank Paulson, Timothy Geithner, and Ben Bernanke did at the time. It was an act of monumental and almost criminally bad judgment to let Lehman Brothers fail, given the trillions of dollars in CDS’s and other murky counterparty risks that were in play in Spetember 2008.

A rescue was as easy as pressing Control C, Control V.

The French finance minister understood the gravity of the situation and warned Paulson that he had better bail out Lehman Brothers one way or another. If she had been listened to, much in the movie would never have happened. Her comments are included in the film; they run about five seconds of a two hour movie. Too bad.

From the minutes of the March 14, 2008 meeting of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System:

Given the unusual and exigent circumstances, the Board authorized the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (New York Reserve Bank) to extend credit to JPMorgan Chase Bank, National Association (JPMC Bank), Columbus, Ohio, on a nonrecourse basis to provide financing to Bear Stearns, and, if the Reserve Bank in consultation with Chairman Bernanke determined it was appropriate, to other primary securities dealers, when the Reserve Bank finds that adequate credit accommodations are not available to the borrower from other banking institutions. The credit should be secured to the satisfaction of the New York Reserve Bank and should not exceed a period of 28 days. The Board also approved the New York Reserve Bank’s recommendation that the credit to JPMC Bank to provide financing to Bear Stearns be extended at the rate for discounts and advances under the primary credit program (primary credit rate).

Change Bear Stearns to Lehman Brothers. Change JPMC to whomever. Presto change-o, problem solved. No need for lame excuses after the government’s actual decision turned out to be a catastrophe.

And BTW, Dodd-Frank has made future rescues of this nature far more difficult (see Section 13.3). Some reform!

Successful lawsuits against 4th of July fireworks:

Environmentalists sued the firework shows’ organizers and the city, contending the permitting process failed to follow the guidelines of the California Environmental Quality Act. They said the fireworks are shot off next to a marine sanctuary, generating debris that harms sea life. The ruling potentially means all organizers of fireworks shows in San Diego will have to file environmental impact reports before receiving city permits…”I don’t think La Jolla (Cove fireworks) should happen this year — or ever,” Gonzalez said…

Alex Roth, a spokesman for Mayor Jerry Sanders, said the city would appeal the ruling. He also lashed out against environmental lawyer Marco Gonzalez, who filed the suit at the heart of Quinn’s ruling. “Marco Gonzalez’ bizarre crusade to stop fireworks on the Fourth of July is truly shameless, especially considering he’s also seeking hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to cover his legal fees,” Roth said. “What’s next, a lawsuit against swimmers for polluting the ocean with their suntan lotion?”

California being what it is, the answer to that is probably yes. After that, we recommend a lawsuit to prohibit some other forms of pollution. We especially like the idea that the taxpayers are billed for freak shows like this.

AP:

Two leading makers of lighting products are showcasing LED bulbs that are bright enough to replace energy-guzzling 100-watt light bulbs set to disappear from stores in January….The new bulbs will also be expensive — about $50 each

The people in government who have gotten us into this poisonous mess are, shall we say, not the brightest bulbs on the circuit. Extra fun bonus: not only poison, but poison for US jobs.

Comedy gold from news anchors:

I’d like confess my sins. I drive a Chevy Tahoe. It gets 15 miles to the gallon in the city. While some people have SUVs to haul their large families around, it’s just me driving by myself to work every day. I have a number of TVs in my high house and leave them on just about all day, every day. I often turn the water on in the shower, then I walk downstairs to maybe grab breakfast, leave the water running, then I go back upstairs to take a shower. I buy 24 packs of bottled water at a time. Then I throw those bottles away without recycling. In the winter I crank the heat up to 75 or 76. All the light bulbs in my house are still the old school, less efficient incandescent bulbs. Those are my eco-sins. I’m confessing them to you

Of course, the anchor could always trade in his Tahoe for a ticket on one of those ridiculous high-speed trains the administration is hot for. Oops, in China, where the infrastructure is so swell, “the government cut bullet-train speeds 30 mph to improve safety, energy efficiency and affordability.” Ah, life in the fantasy world. It must be so pleasant.