Hans Bader

Crucial offers to help clean up BP’s oil spill “have come from Belgian, Dutch, and Norwegian firms that ... possess some of the world’s most advanced oil skimming ships.” But the Obama administration wouldn’t accept the help, because doing so would require it to do something past presidents have routinely done: waive rules imposed by the Jones Act, a law backed by unions. (more)

BP, which is responsible for the terrible oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, has a safety record infinitely worse than other oil companies, which make safety a priority in drilling for oil. ABC News reports that “BP ran up 760 ‘egregious, willful’ safety violations, while Sunoco and Conoco-Phillips each had eight, Citgo had two and Exxon had one comparable citation.” Exxon, the oil company most critical of global warming hysteria, had the best safety record. BP’s record is so bad that it has been described as a “serial environmental criminal.” (more)

The Supreme Court has just held that violent juveniles cannot be given a life sentence without the opportunity for parole, unless they succeed in killing their victim. Even torturers and rapists who attempt to commit murder cannot be denied the opportunity for release under the court’s decision Monday in Graham v. Florida. (more)

In a party-line, 56-to-43 vote Tuesday, Senate Democrats blocked any reform of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the corrupt, government-backed mortgage giants that even administration officials admit were at the “core” of “what went wrong” in the financial crisis. (more)

President Obama’s tax-cheat treasury secretary, Tim Geithner, is trumpeting the fact that General Motors has paid back a small fraction of what taxpayers gave the company, noting that “GM had repaid in full the $4.7 billion balance it owed under the government’s Trouble Asset Relief Program.” “But this so-called ‘repayment’ was just an accounting trick. GM used government bailout money to make the ‘repayment,’ as the New York Times has noted.” (more)

“Billions of more documents” will be have to be filled out by small businesses for the IRS so that a “spendthrift Congress can shake a few extra bucks out of” them to pay for ObamaCare. They will have to spend countless hours to “gather information,” such as about the person they buy a used car from, and the mom-and-pop landlords who lease space to them, even if the small business has to spend more money gathering the information than the IRS will collect in taxes as a result.  (The new health care law will raise far more revenue by taking away medical-tax deductions of “15 million very sick people” with “major medical expenses” starting in 2013.) (more)

The Obama administration and Congressional leaders are pushing a Trojan-horse financial “reform” bill that would enrich the wealthy and powerful investment bank Goldman Sachs, which was recently cited for massive fraud by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).  That’s the discovery of John Berlau, who won the National Press Club’s Sandy Hume Memorial Award for exposing the conflicts of interest of a former IRS Commissioner. (more)

The new tax on investors in the health care bill has been increased from 2.9 percent to 3.8 percent, but only a few media outlets like Bloomberg and Business Week are reporting it, since if the public knew about it, they might be more opposed to ObamaCare. (more)