Over at Cato@Liberty, Walter Olson criticizes CEI’s filing of an FTC complaint against General Motors regarding a recent television advertisement by the company. GM’s ad stated, “we have repaid our government loan in full with interest five years ahead of the original schedule.”
Walter and CEI agree that since GM’s alleged loan “repayment” was financed not by the company’s privately-raised (non-coercive) capital but by a separate pot of government money, the GM ad was quite disingenuous. Since the FTC has a long history of jumping on private firms for similarly misleading ads, and since exposing hypocrisy is one of the most effective methods of undermining the Leviathan, CEI decided to petition the FTC to take action against GM for its deceptive ad.
When GM was bailed out by the U.S. government a year and a half ago, the company’s reputation took a severe hit. GM sales plummeted as taxpayers reacted with fury to the bailout. Indeed, as Ed Whitacre, GM’s CEO, noted in the TV ad: “A lot of Americans disagreed with giving GM a second chance. Quite frankly, I can respect that.” GM’s ads were intended to restore the company’s tarnished reputation, presumably in hopes that GM automobile sales would increase as a result. Had GM actually repaid its government loan in full, thereby reducing its fiscal burden on American taxpayers, such an announcement would have been welcome news to us (and, presumably, to Walter as well).
NASA conducted a spectacular though brief flight test of the Orion Launch Abort System early Thursday morning at the U.S. Army’s White Sands Missile Range near Las Cruces, N.M.
The 500,000-lb. thrust abort motor rocketed the boilerplate crew module and its launch abort stack away from launch pad 32E at White Sands on time at 7 a.m. MDT, and initial indications that all systems for steering, separation, stabilization, deployment of the parachutes and landing worked perfectly.
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (AP) – A West Virginia congressional seat that’s been held by a Democrat for generations is now up for grabs after 14-term incumbent Rep. Alan Mollohan was swept out of office on a wave of voter unrest that an opponent called a referendum on President Barack Obama.
The congressman is the first U.S. House incumbent to be ousted this spring primary season amid widespread anti-incumbent sentiment. The same unrest helped end the 17-year career of Utah Republican Sen. Bob Bennett, who lost a GOP convention on Saturday.
State Sen. Michael Oliverio carried 56 percent of the vote to Mollohan’s 44 percent Tuesday night after an aggressive campaign that questioned the incumbent’s ethics and support for issues including federal health care reform.
The defeat sets up a general election battle this fall in which both Oliverio and Republican primary winner, former state GOP chairman David McKinley, will try to position themselves as fiscal conservatives and foes of big government. Both had made federal spending a key issue in the primary.
“We announced our campaign 100 days ago, and in 100 days’ time our country has fallen one-third of a trillion dollars further into debt,” Oliverio said. “We have to get the country’s financial house in order, and that’s what we’re committed to doing.”
But McKinley, also a former state legislator, said Mollohan’s ouster is about more than spending.
“People just didn’t like what was happening in Washington,” he said. The outcome is a referendum on Obama’s policies, from bailouts of banks and takeovers of car companies to health care reform.
BRUSSELS (AP) — A bold $1 trillion rescue by the European Union halted the slide of the euro on Monday and sent markets soaring worldwide in a gambit that may ultimately be seen as the moment Europe truly became a union.
The sweeping cash injection was greeted with euphoria on Wall Street, where stocks rocketed to their biggest gain in more than a year.
Still, the package did not resolve the basic dysfunction at the heart of Europe’s monetary union: Governments can still spend recklessly and saddle their partners with the bill.
The approval of a “shock and awe” level rescue package followed weeks of indecision that hammered the euro and sent world markets plunging on fears Europe’s debt contagion could spread well beyond Greece, where the crisis began several months ago.
Write or say anything about illegal immigration, and one should expect to be called all of that and more—even if a strong supporter of legal immigration. Illegal alien becomes undocumented worker. Anti-immigrant replaces anti-illegal-immigration. “Comprehensive” is a euphemism for amnesty. Triangulation abounds. A fiery op-ed grandstands and deplores the Arizona law, but offers no guidance about illegal immigration — and blames the employer for doing something that the ethnic lobby in fact welcomes.
Nevertheless, here it goes from a supporter of legal immigration: how are we to make sense of the current Arizona debate? One should show concern about some elements of the law, but only in the context of the desperation of the citizens of Arizona. And one should show some skepticism concerning mounting liberal anguish, so often expressed by those whose daily lives are completely unaffected by the revolutionary demographic, cultural, and legal transformations occurring in the American Southwest.
As I understand the opposition to the recent Arizona law, it boils down to something like the following: the federal government’s past decision not to enforce its own law should always trump the state’s right to honor it. That raises interesting questions: Does the state contravene federal authority by exercising it? If the federal government does not protect the borders of a state, does the state have a right to do it itself? The federal government has seemed in the past to be saying that if one circumvented a federal law, and was known to have circumvented federal law with recognized impunity, then there was no longer a law to be enforced.
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