Rex Nutting at WSJ Market Watch wrote that under President Obama, federal spending has increased at its slowest rate since, well, a long time.
Although there was a big stimulus bill under Obama, federal spending is rising at the slowest pace since Dwight Eisenhower brought the Korean War to an end in the 1950s.
Even hapless Herbert Hoover managed to increase spending more than Obama has.
See chart:
Yesterday I ran into a wingnut who could not be made to understand the chart represented rates of increase in spending, not dollars spent. Ann Coulter seems to have had problems grasping what the chart says, also. And James Pethokoukis, a hack who “in AUGUST OF 2008, was denying that we were in a recession. He then, a few months later in October 2008, was forced to admit we were in recession (since the economy had crashed and the DOW had dropped 5,000 point), decided that the reason the economy tanked and the DOW dropped was because investors were afraid that Obama was leading in the polls,” took issue with it also. Pethokoukis compared spending as rates of GNP between Bush and Obama without noting that the economy contracted in 2008. Note that many of the comments to Pethokoukis’s article are better than the article.
Yesterday Jay Carney cited the Nutting argue when he lectured newsies on Air Force One to stop repeating right-wing talking points without verifying if they are true. I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for anything to change. See also Joan Walsh.
According to Cardinal Dolan, if the Obama Administration insists that women who work for Catholic hospitals must get contraceptives paid for by health insurance, even though the Catholic Church doesn’t have to pay for the contraceptives itself, the Catholic Church will be strangled.
DOLAN: [pre-recorded] if these mandates click in, we’re going to find ourselves faced with a terribly difficult decision as to whether or not we can continue to operate. as part of our religion, it’s part of our faith that we feed the hungry, that we educate the kids, that we take care of the sick. we’d have to give it up because we’re unable to fit the description and the definition of a church given by, guess who? the federal government .
BASHIR: yes, you heard that right. they’ll have to end all charity work rather than allow women access to birth control . and the cardinal went on to say this.
DOLAN: [pre-recorded] we don’t want this fight. my lord, we just want to be left alone to do the work that we feel jesus asked us to do.
BASHIR: really? left alone ? you mean without that $2.9 billion a year from the federal government ? well, raps that could be arranged for you, sir.
Apparently the U.S. Catholic bishops see their predicament as the equivalent of St. Thomas More’s execution by King Henry VIII, which Ed Kilgore righteously calls out as artificial hysteria.
The church insists it’s an argument about religious freedom, not birth control. But, really, it’s about birth control, and women’s lower caste in the church. It’s about conservative bishops targeting Democratic candidates who support contraception and abortion rights as a matter of public policy. And it’s about a church that is obsessed with sex in ways it shouldn’t be, and not obsessed with sex in ways it should be.
Dowd also points to a recent Gallup poll that says 82 percent of U.S. Catholics think contraceptives are morally acceptable. That hasn’t stopped Ross Douthat and others from framing this skirmish has being between President Obama and Cathlics, rather than President Obama versus a bunch of isolated and clueless old men, who are all being dicks. But there it is.
See also: Scott Lemieux discusses the merits of the Cardinal’s case against the Obama Administration.
… for a growing number of strategists and operatives in both parties, the very nature of what it means to work in politics has shifted. Once wedded to the careers and aims of individual candidates, they are now driven by the agendas of the big donors who finance outside spending. …
…In the insular but fast-growing world of super PACs and other independent outfits, there are no cranky candidates, no scheduling conflicts, no bitter strategy debates with rival advisers. There are only wealthy donors and the consultants vying to oblige them.
Political consultants are stampeding to the Super PACs for jobs, because the bankrollers pay better and there’s no campaign to run. So instead of working for candidates, parties, or even advocacy groups, they work for a small number of billionaires with agendas. Some of the Super PACs do accept small donations from many donors, but some of them are “boutique” PACs “set up on behalf of a few donors — sometimes only one.”
The Super PACs are undermining the authority of parties, because it’s so much easier for a wealthy individual or interest group to dump a lot of money into a PAC that can be directed as the benefactor(s) wish. “Because they can give unlimited amounts to outside groups, they can have substantial influence without the hard work of raising money for a candidate, $2,500 check by $2,500 check, from other donors.”
The old worry was that the Super PACs would secretly be in collusion with the campaigns. The new worry is that the campaigns, and the parties, are being frozen out.
Every time I read something about What CU Hath Wrought, I think of the five Supreme Court justices who made this mess possible. These were Kennedy (who wrote the majority opinion), Roberts, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito.
It’s not unreasonable to assume that these five thought they were helping the Republican Party. But let’s assume that on some level they actually believed what they wrote in their opinions. Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion,
“The fact that speakers may have influence over or access to elected officials does not mean that these officials are corrupt. … The appearance of influence or access, furthermore, will not cause the electorate to lose faith in our democracy. By definition, an independent expenditure is political speech presented to the electorate that is not coordinated with a candidate. … The fact that a corporation, or any other speaker, is willing to spend money to try to persuade voters presupposes that the people have the ultimate influence over elected officials. This is inconsistent with any suggestion that the electorate will refuse “ ‘to take part in democratic governance’ †because of additional political speech made by a corporation or any other speaker.”
All kinds of people knew this was hooey at the time of the decision. All kinds of people knew that this decision would have a deeply corrosive influence on campaigns and on American government itself. Is Justice Kennedy really so stupid that he believed what he wrote?
You’ve probably heard that a sting operation caught three young men who allegedly planned terrorist activities to protest the NATO summit in Chicago. According to the Chicago Sun-Times, the three “allegedly plotted to firebomb President Barack Obama’s campaign headquarters and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s North Side home, as well as police stations and squad cars.”
Whether the three are guilty or not I do not know. What’s fascinating to me is the way this little issue is being portrayed by bloggers.
The NLG [National Lawyers Guild] attorneys representing the arrestees have not been shown any police records on any “month-long investigation.†The details I have been able to gather from speaking to arrestees personally make it seem like the police have, in the past 48 hours, fabricated all of these details about having some investigation in progress. Yet, the press get to see the records on arrestees so that the police can be sure people take the charges against the activists seriously and do not suspect police abuse or repression of activists. …
…It is important to recall that back in 2008, prior to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, eight activists were preemptively raided and ultimately charged with “conspiracy to riot in furtherance of terrorism.†The national security state has a script, and when it comes to “National Special Security Events,†they stick to that script pretty well.
So that’s one perspective, which I neither endorse nor dismiss. Certainly there is a long history of police-state tactics targeting demonstrators, especially around large conventions and summit meetings. There’s more than a whiff of entrapment in this story.
Of course, there’s also a long history of hot-headed young men who want to blow stuff up. I’m making no assumptions here.
Rightie bloggers have another view, which is that the three indeed are deranged terrorists working on behalf of the Occupy movement. Per the Sun-Times article, the three found each other through an Occupy Chicago housing board. In the simple world of James Hoft, that makes them “#Occupy NATO terrorists.”
Hoft doesn’t mention the three alleged terrorists were allegedly planning to bomb Obama campaign headquarters. However, commenters brilliantly deduced Chicago + terrorism = Bill Ayers (example).
The Breitbrats also forgot to mention that the alleged terrorists were going to firebomb Obama campaign headquarters and Rahm Emanuel’s home. But the commenters wasted no time in deciding that Obama himself was behind the plot:
Hold on to your butts. Ask yourself, “Why did they decide to have NATO in Chicago, anyway?” Ya all are gonna have a knee-jerk reaction to these kids. “Stupid hippies,” and i don’t disagree. They’re responsible, yes, yes, of course, but THEY ARE ALSO BEING PRODDED TO VIOLENCE AND PROTEST BY THE INVISIBLE HAND. Obama cannot have his revolution without division, chaos, and flame.
Just another way for the Obama admin to launder (our) money for his homeys in Chicago.
Here you get the best of both worlds — it’s police oppression creating false terrorists, and the Obama Administration is behind it:
So, now our federal government has given up on the muslim terrorists and are going to create fake domestic terrorists at home? And you’re right!!! Why even have this in Chicago in the first place? Have you ever heard of “FALSE FLAG?” Just wait… something crazy is going to happen and Obama is going to try to emerge as the HERO to give himself an election boost… The fix is in for this NATO Summit. I’m so sick of this crap! These people (the feds) are so predictable!
BTW, I find the video highly annoying. There’s nothing productive about yelling the “F” word at a police station.
The “get a brain, moran” award has to go to the commenters at Weasel Zippers. Here at least the blogger headlines the part about blowing up Obama headquarters, and the commenters still think Obama was behind it. Sample:
thank you barak insane obama,
mmmm, mmmm, mmmm
you and ayers are great leaders
teachers, or terrorist tactics
jackass
The Weasel Zippers crowd are not famous for eloquence. All the comments are pretty much on that level.
This is an astonishing story I’ve been struggling to wrap my head around this morning as I wait for the coffee to drip.
“TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a global set of conferences owned by the private non-profit Sapling Foundation, formed to disseminate ‘ideas worth spreading,’ says Wikipedia. In March, a venture capitalist from Seattle named Nick Hanauer gave a talk at TED on income inequality that clearly and succinctly destroyed all the BS talking points about the rich being “job creators.” Middle-class consumers are the real job creators, he said.
Most TED conference talks are published on the TED website for public viewing. But this one was embargoed for being too politically partisan. Over the past few hours several leftie bloggers and columnists such as Ezra Klein learned of this and gave TED a good smacking for being weenies. TED shot back that the charges against them are unfair; but they also admitted they embargoed the talk for being too politically partisan. So, yeah, they are weenies.
However, being weenies, they caved to pressure and released the talk. You must watch this:
And as you read or watch, remind yourself that this talk was considered too radical / controversial / partisan to be released to the public. And then email it to your wingnut uncle.
A group of high-profile Republican strategists is working with a conservative billionaire on a proposal to mount one of the most provocative campaigns of the “super PAC†era and attack President Obama in ways that Republicans have so far shied away from. …
… The plan, which is awaiting approval, calls for running commercials linking Mr. Obama to incendiary comments by his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., whose race-related sermons made him a highly charged figure in the 2008 campaign.
King of takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Followed by a hearty WTF????
Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade, is spending $10 million of his own bucks on this, um, plan, which tells us that just because you’ve got a lot of money doesn’t mean you aren’t an idiot. Like we didn’t get Rev. Wright rubbed in our faces enough times in the 2008 campaign? And you’ll notice how that turned out.
Update:Steve M suggests there could be less to this story than meets the eye. It appears (reading between lines) that the proposal was leaked to the press by the Romney campaign, which then let it be known that Mittens is against the proposal. This allows the Romney campaign to announce that Romney is above petty character assassination.
This actually makes sense to me, in a demented way. Mittens has taken some hits lately for not standing up to the fringe, such as letting go of a gay foreign policy adviser without a whimper, and standing dumb as a stump while a supporter accused the President of treason. Since Mittens cannot be spontaneously principled, they have to choreograph him being principled.
Since the country apparently has no real problems that Congress needs to be addressing, Republicans in Congress have invented a game called “let’s defeat Obama’s budget.” Here’s how it works —
Every few months, to fight the boredom, some Republican will crank out some farce legislation and submit it for a vote as “President Obama’s budget.” Be clear that the legislation is not, in fact, President Obama’s budget, but a Republican concoction inspired by those crazy copy-and-past 5,000-word emails you get from your wingnut uncle. As near as I can tell, the “budgets” are created by taking top line numbers from the President’s actual budget and leaving out about 1,944 pages worth of details, including revenue enhancements. The result is a monstrosity that the White House wouldn’t vote for, either.
For example, the here’s how the White House responded to the most recent gag budget, introduced by Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of MississippiAlabama —
Thus, a White House official said, the Sessions proposal was a “shell that could be filled with a number of things that could hurt our economy and hurt the middle class,†a White House official said. “For example, rather than ending tax breaks for millionaires his budget could hit the revenue target by raising taxes on the middle class and rather than ending wasteful programs, his budget could hit its spending target with severe cuts to important programs.â€
This vote, on a Potemkin “Obama Budget,” is not intended to be taken seriously. It’s a stunt designed to get a slag into the newscycle, and they tend to work. What happens is a Republican legislator presents a “budget proposal” that’s designed to be a satirical presentation of an “Obama budget.” Democrats don’t vote for it, because they recognize that it bears no resemblance to their budgetary preferences.
Good times! Anyway, the Republicans then put the “President’s budget” up for a vote, and because it’s such a joke no Democrat votes for it, either. Then the Republicans send out press releases saying that the President’s budget was unanimously defeated. And that Democrat-controlled liberal media cranks out amusing headlines repeating the charge about the unanimous defeat. The news stories often leave out the detail about how the defeated budget actually was a joke, which makes it all even funnier. And then wingnut bloggers write posts about it like this one:
It’s Hope and Change we can believe in as Obama proposes legislation that sweeps to unanimous votes in the House and Senate:
President Obama’s budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.
Coupled with the House’s rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama’s budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.
It’s great to see Obama uniting Washington and developing some momentum. Especially as that momentum seems to be carrying him to the exit.
Of course (wink, wink) the legislation that was voted down was not what President Obama proposed, but what a Republican imagined the President would propose if he were as demented as they are. But it’s great to see so many people keeping their sense of humor through all these trying times of not having anything else to do.
Update: Some are complaining that the Democrats haven’t introduced a budget lately. Jason Linkins writes,
But if you want to divine what another famous character of the stage termed the “method in the madness,” look at the latter half of Stephens’ statement, and the complaint that the Democrats have not put forth a budget. That’s fair, but it invites a trip into the weeds. There are reasons why the Democrats haven’t done so: 1) they know that any real “Obama budget” is a legislative nonstarter in the current climate of obstruction, and 2) the Democrats hold that the conditions created by the Budget Control Act are their de facto budget. This does not cover the lack of a budget in 2010 and 2011 — those didn’t happen because of the aforementioned obstruction, and some off-year election Democratic Party theories that failed votes would be more costly at the polls than no vote at all. (The results of the 2010 elections suggest that this was, perhaps, too clever by half.)
Let’s face it; Republicans would go ballistic and vote NO NO NO NO if Obama submitted so much as a deli menu. Even so, Dems might as well submit the real budget, which would get a majority of Dem votes. Call out the game-players.
Today’s conservative is someone who confuses freedom with feudalism. Or, put another way, he is someone who wears a “liberty or death” T-shirt while marching in support of oligarchy.
Michael Lind points out in “Why Do Conservatives Hate Freedom?” that historically conservatives have always opposed individual liberty and supported authority. Yet today’s conservatives have adopted the conceit that they are the ones who favor “freedom” while liberals — historically, the champions of individual liberty — are cast as quasi-totalitarian “statists.” The meanings of words are turned on their heads.
If you look deeper, though, you see that the iconic imagery and language of the American Revolution represents something profoundly reactionary to today’s conservatives. These icons speak to the mythic origins of American national identity, developed in 19th century textbooks and handed down in popular fiction and Disney movies. That the myths bear only superficial resemblance to what actually happened doesn’t register with them.
American mythos congeals into a kind of tribal identity in the rightie mind. It is this tribal identity that prevents them from seeing anyone who doesn’t look and think like them as “real Americans.” The protection and preservation of the tribe is the beating heart of today’s American right.
To a wingnut, “freedom” doesn’t mean “slavery,” exactly. But it does represent a kind of unquestioning allegiance to the 21st-century version of feudal lords — the Koch Brothers, Christian institutions, corporations and the wealthy generally. These are their tribal elders, after all.
The reactionary Right has not only claimed exclusive rights to patriotic icons like the flag and tri-corner hats; they also have adopted the language of the Left about rights. But “rights” to a rightie are not about standard civil liberties, but about their childish desires to deny equal rights to “others” who are different from them. So they call for the “right” to discriminate as they see fit.
Righties also favor the rights of institutions and authorities over those of individuals. For example, they champion the “rights” of pharmacists to not fill birth control prescriptions. They want employers to have the right to deny birth control coverage to employees. All in the name of liberty.
This takes us to the libertarian fallacy. Libertarians have been allied with conservatives for decades now. On the surface, this makes no sense. However, modern libertarianism began mostly as a backlash against Brown v. Board of Education and court-imposed school desegregation orders. So, again, it comes back to a “right” to not be compelled to do anything you don’t want to do, including respecting the individual liberties of others.
Libertarianism actually is anti-democratic, because government of the people, by the people, and for the people can become coercive. We, the People, can use government to make coal mine owners install expensive ventilation systems to protect the miners, for example. That’s coercive. Nine times out of ten, libertarians will take the side of ruthless mine owners over miners. After all, if a mine is unsafe, the miners can just quit, right?
So, while libertarians and liberals do converge on some issues — warrant-less surveillance, mass arrests, etc. — any liberal who assumes libertarians care about civil rights is a fool.
Michael Lind writes,
What would America look like, if conservatives had won their battles against American liberty in the last half-century? Formal racial segregation might still exist at the state and local level in the South. In some states, it would be illegal to obtain abortions or even for married couples to use contraception. In much of the United States, gays and lesbians would still be treated as criminals. Government would dictate to Americans with whom and how they can have sex. Unions would have been completely annihilated in the public as well as the private sector. Wages and hours laws would be abolished, so that employers could pay third-world wages to Americans working seven days a week, 12 hours a day, as many did before the New Deal. There would be far more executions and far fewer procedural safeguards to ensure that the lives of innocent Americans are not ended mistakenly by the state.
But to a rightie, that’s what “freedom” looks like.
With polls showing same-sex marriage not the hair-on-fire wedge issue it used to be, the GOP is cranking up the talking point that marriage is a state issue, not a federal one, and shouldn’t be an issue in the presidential campaign.
OK, geniuses, so what about the Defense of Marriage Act? Just last week, Republicans in the House voted to stop the Justice Department from using taxpayer funds to oppose DOMA.
And just last week, Romney Adviser Ed Gillespie said that Mittens supports a constitutional amendment that would strip states of the right to legalize same-sex marriage.
So which is it, righties? Hmmmmm?
Wingnuts do have a remarkable capacity for self-contradiction. See Frank Bruni:
I hesitated before picking on Bristol [Palin] because she’s an easy target. It’s like shooting moose from a helicopter flying low over the tundra.
But she so perfectly distills the double standards and audacity of so many of our country’s self-appointed moralists and supposed traditionalists: hypocrites whose own histories, along with any sense of shame, tumble out the window as soon as there’s a microphone to be seized or check to be cashed.
She proves that they’re not going away anytime soon — a new generation rises! — and that they haven’t been daunted by the ridicule justly heaped on Newt Gingrich during the Republican primaries, when he dared to cast himself as a religious conservative.
Certainly Rush thunders on. Last week he bellowed that Obama had decided to “lead a war†on traditional marriage. Seems to me Limbaugh started those hostilities long ago, if not with his first divorce then certainly with his second and third.
However, Bruni says there are people in the “uppermost ranks” of the Republican Party who don’t want the campaign to be about social issues. That nobody in the “grass roots” listens to those people has escaped Bruni’s notice. But we’ll see in the next few days if Mittens is listening to the “uppermost ranks” and backs off same sex marriage.
In the past few days whenever reporters have asked a prominent Republican about same-sex marriage, their comeback line usually is something about creating jobs. I wish someone had asked John Boehner how many jobs bills House Republicans have passed, or even sponsored, since taking over the House in 2010. I believe the answer is “zero.”
Mittens still wants to campaign on his record as a proved master of business and as a jobs creator. The Obama campaign is ready for that, too.
On top of that, Mittens had a terrible record on jobs while he was governor of Massachusetts. Mississippi may have beat the Bay State then; I’d have to look.
Weirdly, the GOP also is trying to charge the President with being too chummy with Wall Street. He’s not socialist enough for them?
Many of us would agree that Obama has been way too soft on the financial sector, and that money from the financial sector speaks way too loudly in both parties. But it’s hard to paint the financial sector as inherently evil when your nominee-presumptive is going around making excuses for the recent JP Morgan meltdown and saying that financial sector regulation would just “hamper” investment. It was just investors, not taxpayers, who lost money with JP Morgan, Mittens said.
Speaking of hampering investments, the New York Times says that investors are getting sour on investing.
Investors are shunning the stock market, and who can blame them? As serial bubbles have burst, faith in the market has been rewarded with shattered retirements. At the same time, trust has been destroyed by scandals and — as demonstrated by the reckless trading at JPMorgan Chase — the slow, uncertain pace of financial reform.
There has been less buying and selling of stock, and there have been huge outflows of investor dollars from domestic stock mutual funds, as detailed recently by The Times’s Nathaniel Popper. If the trend continues, the result could be a less robust market, with fewer companies opting to raise money by issuing shares and fewer investors willing to put their retirement savings into stocks.
Policy makers should pay attention. Evidence suggests that investors are not merely reacting to tough conditions, but rather are staying away because they do not trust the market. Restoring trust is crucial to restoring the market.
We’ll see if restoring consistency is crucial to a political party.
The recent loss of $2 billion by JP Morgan Chase is the subject of today’s column by Paul Krugman. He argues that there are some things banks should not be allowed to do, because they are dangerous to the economy as a whole.
Just to be clear, businessmen are human — although the lords of finance have a tendency to forget that — and they make money-losing mistakes all the time. That in itself is no reason for the government to get involved. But banks are special, because the risks they take are borne, in large part, by taxpayers and the economy as a whole. And what JPMorgan has just demonstrated is that even supposedly smart bankers must be sharply limited in the kinds of risk they’re allowed to take on.
Why, exactly, are banks special? Because history tells us that banking is and always has been subject to occasional destructive “panics,†which can wreak havoc with the economy as a whole. Current right-wing mythology has it that bad banking is always the result of government intervention, whether from the Federal Reserve or meddling liberals in Congress. In fact, however, Gilded Age America — a land with minimal government and no Fed — was subject to panics roughly once every six years. And some of these panics inflicted major economic losses.
Krugman goes on to say that in the 1930s we came up with a workable solution involving oversight and guarantees. “Most notably, banks with government-guaranteed deposits weren’t allowed to engage in the often risky speculation characteristic of investment banks like Lehman Brothers.” This gave us “half a century of relative financial stability.” Then banks began to engage in risky speculations again, and the results were a financial disaster in 2008 in which taxpayers had to step in to prevent total meltdown.
But, predictably, the crew at Reason say that regulation is still wrong.
… the Wall Street calamities that shook the economy a few years back weren’t a result of isolated mistakes at the individual bank level. They were the result of networked failures, in which multiple market players make the same set of mistakes at the same time, taking up all the give in the system simultaneously.
Some of us would say that Chase’s $2 billion loss was something of a canary in the coal mine, showing us that there still is danger lurking in the financial sector. The correct response is to step in now to fix the bug and not wait for another system fail. And, without looking, I’m willing to guess that the crew at Reason was opposed to regulations that might have prevented the 2008 disaster also, before it happened. The “free minds” at Reason rarely surprise me.
And, of course, next they say that there’s no reason to think that more regulation would change anything, because regulations might not be implemented properly —
… “proper” implementation is always harder than it sounds. And I’m not sure we have any more reason to trust that regulators have the wisdom and judgment to prevent such losses any more or better than the bankers themselves.
This is the argument one hears every time there’s a death in a coal mine. Some mouthpiece for the coal mining industry argues that the accident shows that regulations aren’t necessary because (blah blah blah). The truth is that safety regulations passed into law in 1977 gave us nearly two decades of death-free coal mining. Then the Bush Administration turned the Mine Safety and Health Administration over to industry insiders, who weakened regulations, resulting in the loss of 70 miners in six separate disasters.
And this is supposed to prove that regulations don’t work.
Back to the financial sector — saying that a single incident (less than four years after Lehman Brothers died) doesn’t prove a need for more regulation is like saying that because there were only 4.8 homicides per 100,000 U.S. residents in 2010, we don’t need homicide laws. And those evil government prosecutors sometimes get the wrong guy convicted, anyway.
The Whale affair shows that JPMorgan doesn’t understand how to manage risk. When you’re making multibillion-dollar bets using inherently volatile and unpredictable financial devices, nobody does — JPMorgan’s own risk models showed that its exposure had suddenly doubled in a period of weeks prior to its disclosure, which means either that the risk models were hopelessly outclassed, or that risk models can’t ever be reliably accurate under all conditions. Either way, it leads to the conclusion that Dimon desperately tried to evade on “Meet the Press”: that the only way to make this sort of risk-taking safe for the financial system is to make it illegal in the first place.
You really have to be pretty delusional to argue that the JPMorgan episode is not a warning that there are regulatory loopholes that need to be closed.
