Today’s Links: September 23, 2011

OPINION

LOS ANGELES TIMES EDITORIAL: “Dealing with Day Laborers”
“Redondo Beach has spent nearly a decade defending a misguided 1986 city ordinance that bans day laborers from soliciting work from public sidewalks, alleys, medians or highways.
Lawyers for the city say the law is designed to stop individuals from spilling out into traffic while looking for work and jeopardizing public safety. A district court tossed out the ordinance as an unconstitutional restriction of free speech. City officials persisted with a legal appeal, ignoring previous trial court decisions overturning similar laws, and instead arguing that the measure doesn’t seek to limit what people say on public sidewalks, just how they behave.”

GOPROUD: “Rick Santorum Owes Gay Soldier An Apology”
“Tonight, Rick Santorum disrespected our brave men and women in uniform, and he owes Stephen Hill, the gay soldier who asked him the question about Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell repeal, an immediate apology.  That brave gay soldier is doing something Rick Santorum has never done – put his life on the line to defend our freedoms and our way of life.”

MEGAN MCARDLE: “Is Irish Austerity Paying Dividends?”
“Last year, the failure of Irish austerity was on the lips of every left-wing wonk in America.  Paul Krugman, the leader of this school of thought, has compared austerity to bloodletting and other such primitive medical quackery (a comparison he repeated a couple of days ago).  He compared Ireland’s embrace of austerity unfavorably to Spain’s reluctance, and used Ireland as a sort of Keynesian object lesson.”

NEWS

WASTE – Gov’t Paid $600 Million in Benefits to Dead People
“The federal government has doled out more than $600 million in benefit payments to dead people over the past five years, a watchdog report says. Such payments are meant for retired or disabled federal workers, but sometimes the checks keep going out even after the former employees pass away and the deaths are not reported, according to the report this week from the Office of Personnel Management’s inspector general, Patrick McFarland.”

FANNIE MAE – Fannie Mae Cited For Failing to Stop Robo-signing
“Fannie Mae missed chances to catch law firms illegally signing foreclosure documents and its government overseer did not take the right steps to ensure Fannie was doing its job, federal regulators say.”