Until it was publicly-exposed, the Washington Post was selling its access to the White House to lobbyists. As Politico reported, “For $25,000 to $250,000, the Washington Post is offering lobbyists and association executives off-the-record, nonconfrontational access to ‘those powerful few’ — Obama administration officials, members of Congress, and the paper’s own reporters and editors. The astonishing offer is detailed in a flier circulated Wednesday to a health care lobbyist, who provided it to a reporter because the lobbyist said he feels…

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The mortgage crisis was caused largely by the reckless government-sponsored mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and by federal affordable-housing mandates. But Obama’s proposed financial rules overhaul does absolutely nothing about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, admits Obama’s Treasury Secretary, tax cheat Timothy Geithner, even though he admits that “Fannie and Freddie were a core part of what went wrong in our system.” Worse, Obama’s plan is “largely the product of extensive conversations” with two lawmakers responsible for the corrupt status quo, Chris Dodd and Barney…

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The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is demanding to know why the “Obama Justice Department took the unusual action last month of dismissing a default judgment against the New Black Panther Party in connection with a case of voter intimidation on Election Day on November 4, 2008. Members of the NBPP were caught on film blocking access to the polls and physically and verbally intimidating voters, even going so far as to wield a nightstick in front of voters and poll…

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The President has just announced proposals for a major overhaul of the financial system. The proposals would force banks to make even MORE risky loans to low-income people. Even liberal newspapers like the Village Voice have admitted that “affordable housing” mandates are a key reason for the housing crisis and the massive number of defaulting borrowers. But Obama will not accept this reality. Instead, he wants to create a new “Consumer Financial Protection Agency” to rigorously enforce regulations pressuring banks to make loans to low-income…

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Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) appears to be working in tandem with the Obama administration on making executive pay subject to shareholder votes. That seems fair enough; shareholders deserve some say over companies in which they have a stake. However, as CNBC “Squawk on the Street” host Mark Haines noted in an interview wiht Rep. Frank this morning, the nature of such ownership complicates things.

As Haines noted, many public company shares are in the hands of large institutions — he mentioned mutual…

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By a margin of 45% to 36%, the American people want to cancel the $787 billion stimulus package, reports pollster Rasmussen Reports. Economist Lee Ohanian, a professor at UCLA, explains the failure of the stimulus package in “The $787 Billion Mistake.” Economist Kevin Hasset describes how legislation backed by Obama would wipe out more jobs in “Obama Tells American Businesses to Drop Dead.” Economist Arthur Laffer explains today how we face massive tax increases and potentially massive inflation as a result of current government policy.

Unemployment…

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The full Supreme Court just vacated the stay that Justice Ginsburg earlier entered that had temporarily blocked the government’s plan for Chrysler. Why it did so is mysterious, since it noted that it was not ruling on the merits of the legal and constitutional challenges to the government’s actions, and cautioned that “a denial of a stay is not a decision on the merits of the underlying legal issues.”

Justice Ginsburg yesterday granted a stay temporarily blocking the government’s plan for Chrysler, which…

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg yesterday granted a stay temporarily blocking the government’s plan for Chrysler, which would give effectively give most of the company to the UAW union, while paving the way for a dubious merger with Fiat. The stay was sought by pension funds that were (along with taxpayers) ripped off by the government’s plan.

The pension funds deserve to win, since the government has trampled on federal bankruptcy laws, the federal TARP bailout statute, and the Constitution in forcing its plan…

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Unemployment is now even higher than the Obama Administration said it would be if there were no stimulus package. At least 1.5 million jobs have been lost since Obama signed the $800 billion stimulus package into law.

The stimulus package is harming the economy, both by triggering trade wars that have cost at least 40,000 jobs, and by driving up interest rates for businesses that need to borrow money to expand or create jobs. (The government is keeping down interest rates on its own…

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Earlier, I wrote about the Indiana pension funds’ challenge to the Obama Administration’s plan to effectively give Chrysler to the UAW Union, while cheating the pension funds that loaned it money (and ripping off taxpayers), and how that violates federal bankruptcy laws.

The government is now arguing that the pension funds don’t have legal standing to challenge the plan, since they can’t prove they will be worse off than if the Administration had just sat back and let Chrysler go bankrupt naturally. The government…

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If deceptive labeling of bills in Congess were punishable by regulatory agencies, Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Maria Cantwell (D-WA) would be paying a hefty fine.

Their so-called “shareholder bill of rights,” recently introduced in the Senate, would impose a one-size fits all regime on public companies that would limit choices for shareholders, reduce corporate performance, and allow political agendas of pressure groups to trump the interests of ordinary investors. Most egregiously, the bill would make illegal a key feature of the corporate…

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A federal appeals court has refused to block the Administration’s illegal auto bailout, which rips off taxpayers and pension funds to enrich the UAW union. The pension funds that challenged the bailout will now appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The bailout violates the federal TARP statute by diverting financial-system bailout funds to a takeover of the auto industry. And the government’s reorganization plan for Chrysler violates federal bankruptcy laws by ripping off lenders to give the company to the UAW union.

As I noted earlier, the Indiana…

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June has arrived and so has the nation’s official hurricane season. The New York Times called attention, last week, to the political battles associated with hurricanes and the increasing cost of homeowners insurance. Daniel Sutter, professor of economics at the University of Texas Pan American, published a timely paper with CEI yesterday that examines the relationship between climate change, government regulation of homeowners insurance, and property damage caused by hurricanes. Sutter’s important findings show that the increasing cost of homeowners insurance, and increasing costs…

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The Indiana State Teachers’ Retirement Fund is rightly challenging the diversion of tens of billions of dollars of federal TARP bank bailout money to pay for auto bailouts in the Chrysler bankruptcy case. That diversion violates the law. It is part of the government’s unfair reorganization plan for Chrysler, which rips off pension funds to provide short-sighted, unsustainable preferential treatment for the UAW.

(The bailouts are doing no good. General Motors and Chrysler would actually have been better off if they had filed for bankruptcy…

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Kudos to the judges on the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals for putting a stay on the Obama administration’s nationalization scheme for the bankruptcy sale of Chrysler LLC. Kudos also to Indiana state Treasurer Richard Mourdock for standing up for the middle-income teachers and police officers in the state pension funds and making sure that contracts affecting their retirement savings are respected.

When President Obama announced the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor, who coincidentally is an appeals court judge on the Second Circuit,…

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The federal government is spending more than $50 billion to bail out General Motors, with no end in sight. But the UAW union refused to sacrifice its privileged position to save the company, demanding excessive wages and benefits that are much higher than most Americans get. The Obama Administration caved in to its demands, saddling GM with high labor costs that may doom the company in the long run.

As the Washington Post notes today, the “concessions” that Obama obtained from the UAW were…

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The federal government is giving another $30 billion in taxpayer money to General Motors to allow it to operate without having to cut excessive union wages. The Obama Administration is “gambling” on its ability to turn around the company under government control.

The Obama Administration has said it will now interfere not just with the “selection of the company’s board of directors,” but also in “fundamental corporate decisions,” and “major corporate events and transactions.” For example, Obama recently pressured GM to keep its headquarters…

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Last week, in nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, President Obama praised judicial qualities that are directly relevant to the courts that will now oversee the bankruptcy of General Motors. The president said that the qualities he most respected in judges were, ”a commitment to impartial justice, a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand,” as well as “an understanding of how the world works and how ordinary people live.”

As…

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One of Obama’s own advisers admits that the cap-and-trade energy-rationing scheme backed by the “Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats” would “have a trivially small effect on global warming while imposing substantial costs on all American households. And to get political support in key states, the legislation would abandon the auctioning of permits in favor of giving permits to selected corporations.”

Obama adviser Martin Feldstein notes that “the Congressional Budget Office recently estimated that the resulting increases in consumer prices” from capping the amount of…

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Most of the $800 billion stimulus package has yet to be spent, but it’s already harming the economy, both by triggering trade wars that have cost at least 40,000 jobs, and by driving up interest rates for businesses that need to borrow money to expand or create jobs. (The government is keeping down interest rates on its own debt by printing vast sums of money to buy its own bonds, in order to finance the exploding national debt, which will result…

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