Chris Smith co-sponsored HR 4, which would overturn the provision of health care reform that required all businesses to issue 1099 forms for goods and services in excess of $600. The whole point of the 1099 provision was designed to crack down on unreported business income. Given Smith’s support for overturning the provision, we have [...]

I’m reading through the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s report on what it did last Congress. Among a number of interesting details, the report describes really really bad accounting at the National Security Agency (NSA). The report describes how the Intelligence Authorization Bill of 2002 required that our big intelligence agencies produce auditable financial statements [...]

I’m busy watching this hearing today (and trying to watch one that happened last week). It’s hard to watch two hearings at once! But I didn’t want you think I was still celebrating St. Paddy’s Day, so for the moment I’ll direct you to this story, another example where DOJ is taking an unreasonable stance [...]

I almost got distracted from working my yearly post around this picture of Mr. EW and I in Moneygall, taken back in 2008 when Brian Cowen was about to become Ireland’s Taoiseach and Barack O’Bama was about to officially get enough delegates to win the Democratic nomination to be President. But this very worthwhile Adam [...]

The House Armed Services Committee is having a hearing on Law of War Detention. Much of it has focused on Jeh Johnson affirming that military commissions line up with American values. (In other words, it is fairly depressing.) But an interesting exchange happened when Hank Johnson had his turn. He set up his question by [...]

As I noted last night, the US has been violating the spirit of its agreement with the EU on access to the SWIFT database–the database tracking international financial transfers. Rather than giving Europol specific, written requests for data, it has been giving it generic requests backed by oral requests the Europol staffers are not supposed [...]

I have tracked the American negotiations with the post-Lisbon EU to get continued access to the SWIFT database, the database that tracks international money payments. Basically, after the Lisbon Treaty went into effect last year, the EU Parliament balked at giving Americans free run of the SWIFT database. The EU and US put an interim [...]

As Jim White reported this morning, Raymond Davis has been released after the families of his victims were paid blood money per Sharia law. We’ve really gotten to bizarro-land when a possible Blackwater contractor has been saved by Sharia law. But wait! Hillary says we didn’t pay the blood money ourselves. QUESTION: Okay, we’ll jump [...]

Thought I’d share some pics from the rally today in Lansing. It’s a decent sized crown–6,000 around noon; they expect to get a whole bunch of teachers out for the last set of speakers at 4:30. Here’s the crowd just outside of the Capitol in Lansing. Lots of signs about the Constitution protesting the Emergency [...]

On Friday, Dylan Ratigan and I had a podcast chat about the treatment of Bradley Manning. Among other things, we talked about the “Constitutional Law Professor” President’s rather bizarre response when DOD told him it was standard procedure to strip an Army man of his clothes because of a trumped up claim that his underwear [...]