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In a letter sent yesterday to the University of Montana that explicitly states that it is intended as “a blueprint for colleges and universities throughout the country,” the Departments of Justice and Education have mandated a breathtakingly broad definition of sexual harassment that makes virtually every student in the United States a harasser while ignoring the First Amendment. The mandate applies to every college receiving federal funding—virtually every American institution of higher education nationwide, public or private.

The letter states that “sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as ‘any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature’” including “verbal conduct” (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an “objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation”—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.

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Federal agents and the state fire marshal have effectively barred a federal safety panel from the site of a Texas fertilizer plant blast that killed 15 people and injured about 200 others, hampering its investigation, the panel’s chairman said.

‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to … I forget what comes next.’

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The Internal Revenue Service denied the existence of any documents related to its policy of targeting Tea Party organizations in response to a 2010 Freedom of Information Act request, even though such documents were later discovered by the IRS inspector general.

The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, a conservative nonprofit group, filed a FOIA request in 2010 through investigative journalist Lynn K. Walsh seeking all IRS documents related to the agencies tax-exempt division specifically mentioning the Tea Party.

IRS headquarters responded in 2011 that it “found no documents specifically responsive to your request.”

However, the May 14 inspector general report found that the “first Sensitive Case Report [identifying Tea Party groups] was prepared by the Technical Unit” in April of 2010.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

The most recent version of the near $1 trillion farm bill is on the move again after being held up for a few months in the House at the end of last year. It has now passed out of the House and Senate agriculture committees. The Senate is supposed to take up the bill next week, and it could then be brought to the floor in June. So now is a good time to remind everyone of a few reasons why we should end all farm subsidies once and for all.

We don’t subsidize mom-and-pop machine shops, carpentry shops, or any other boutique manufacturing establishment, there’s no reason the subsidize the people who manufacture our food. And if you don’t think our food is being manufactured, go read the web sites of Archer Daniels Midland or ConAgra.

Almost half of the country’s farmland is operated by someone other than its owner. Those renters—especially young farmers who generally have higher borrowing costs to start with—face increases in both the price of renting and the cost of buying. On the other hand, farmers near retirement age, who own land through inheritance or length of tenure, reap the benefits of higher land values induced by the subsidies. In 2010 some 90,000 direct payments went to wealthy investors and absentee land owners in more than 350 American cities, according to an EWG report.

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The Romeikes fled Germany in 2008 when they were subjected to criminal prosecution for homeschooling, which is largely illegal in their country. In 2010, however, the family was granted asylum by Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman, whose decision was overturned by the Board of Immigration Appeals in 2012. A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit heard the Romeikes’ appeal on April 23rd and issued a unanimous decision against the family.

In its decision, the court said that the Romeikes had not made a sufficient case and that the United States has not opened its doors to every victim of unfair treatment.

Too bad they weren’t Muslim jihadists. Not only would they have been granted asylum, but citizenship and welfare benefits, like the Boston bombers.

Read it.

Once you accept the government’s coin, you must dance to the government’s tune.

David French blows the whistle.

Let me begin with your IRS question of the day — presented to a Tennessee conservative group:

    List each past or present board member, officer, key employee and members of their families who:

    a) Has served on the board of another organization.

    b) Was, is or plans to be a candidate for public office.  Indicate the nature of each candidacy.

    c) Has previously conducted similar activities for another entitty.

    d) Has previously submitted an application for tax exempt status.

[Emphasis added]

Got that? Of course it’s irrelevant that key members of the MSM have spouses in the Obama administration, and the MSM presumes they can remain impartial, but the Internal Revenue Service must know if a tea-party leader’s daughter has filed an application for tax exemption for a local charity, and the IRS must know if his wife might want to run for city council. Unbelievable. And unconstitutional.

Read it.

At least they’re mostly football coaches, so at least we’re paying for performance.

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Well, better that than use it to fly in some socialist politician from Washington. At least the Working Girls live in the Real World and have to spend their own money.

And the feminists say: [chirp] … [chirp] … [chirp] ….

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Instead, the Department of Education announced Thursday that income would be listed “from a dependent student’s legal parents regardless of the parents’ marital status or gender, if those parents live together.” Instead of “father,” the societally-sensitive term “Parent 1” will be used. And for “mother,” the term will be “Parent 2.”

After all, these archaic categories are just so fifteen minutes ago.

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I’ll just bet they do.

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Which will only encourage them to spend more. As Maggie Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

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Afghan security forces remain unprepared to defend Afghanistan despite U.S. expenditures of more than $54 billion on training and equipment, the Obama administration’s top oversight official in Afghanistan warned on Wednesday afternoon.

There are “multiple problems” for the United States to surmount before the Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF) are ready to assume control of the country after American forces depart in 2015, John Sopko, the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), said during a speech at the New America Foundation.

“The impending end of the U.S combat mission has led some to erroneously believe our involvement in Afghanistan is waning,” Sopko said. “I believe the United States and its allies are entering the most critical phase of the reconstruction effort in Afghanistan,” which is one of the most corrupt nations in the world.

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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

“Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.” — Qur’an 9:29

We recently saw that a jihad-martyrdom suicide bomber lived off Swedish student aid. And as British jihadist Anjem Choudary said: “The normal situation is to take money from the kuffar. You work, give us the money, Allahu akbar.” But those are just individuals. Karzai has them all beat: he is raking it in for his entire gang, a.k.a. the “Afghan government.”

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So when the owners needed a bartender last year, they sought someone who knew the territory. “Energetic and enthusiastic men and women with an appreciation of craft beer, good food, whisky and real football (a k a soccer),” the Craigslist ad read in part. “Being British definitely works in your favor.”

The résumés trickled in. One applicant, however, was not really looking for a job. She already had one: trolling the classifieds for the New York City Commission on Human Rights.

Soon, Longbow received a legal notice. The bar, it said, had violated discrimination law “by giving a preference to employment applicants based on their national origin.”

The commission offered to settle the matter for $2,500.

How generous. Nice to know that justice in New York can be bought.

 Justin Brannan, spokesman for the local city councilman, Vincent J. Gentile, had some choice words for the commission’s efforts, including “quintessential ‘letter of the law,’ versus ‘spirit of the law’ ” and “predatory ‘gotcha’ enforcement” that he said belied the city’s pro-small-business cant. “They’re not enforcing these laws to protect the public,” said Mr. Brannan, who is also president of a club, the Bay Ridge Democrats, that has held events at Longbow. “They’re enforcing them to generate revenue.”

Oh, ya think? (And to look good in front of their bosses.)

 On Thursday, Ms. Colbert said, she got a call from a commission official who warned that the fine could rise to $7,500 if she went to trial before an administrative law judge. “He also had the audacity to tell me that according to my requirements, I was not qualified to work in my own pub,” she added.

The official, Ms. Colbert said, urged her to pay the fine before the date of a coming “conciliation meeting.” The meeting is to be scheduled for next month, she said.

In other words, pay us now or pay us more later. Stand up for your rights and common sense, and the price goes up.

Read it.

The Party of Corruption keeps on truckin’.

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US job growth in April beat economist expectations as nonfarm payrolls rose 165,000, and the jobless rate fell to a four-year low of 7.5%. But the report contained worrisome signs that President Obama’s health care reform law is hurting full-time, high-wage employment.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Let’s see, more part timers and fewer hours worked. Economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin says what we’re all thinking: “This is not good news as it reflects the reliance on part-time work. … the decline in hours and rise of part-time work is troubling in light of anecdotal reports of the impact of the Affordable Care Act.”

Remember, we’re paying Congress to bite us in the ass like this — paying them very well indeed.

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This is huge, and stunning, even for critics of Medicaid: A randomized-controlled study published in the New England Journal of Medicine by a group of the nation’s top health policy scholars has found that Medicaid has no measurable effect on any of the objectively measured physical health outcomes the study examined.

In its second-year results, the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, which randomly selected 10,000 people in Oregon to get Medicaid (only about 6,300 actually got the benefit), and then compared them with a randomly selected control group, found that those who got Medicaid did not on average have healthier blood pressure, cholesterol levels, or diabetic blood pressure control than those who did not get Medicaid. Those with Medicaid did see some reduction in out of pocket health expenses. They were also less likely to be diagnosed with depression.

The Medicaid recipients also ended up utilizing a lot more health care—care that has to be paid for—than those who didn’t get coverage. But they didn’t use the emergency room any less than the control group.

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Problems bedevil the white elephant project. The High-Speed Rail Authority needs to buy land in order to build the railroad, but it has received no contractual authority to build from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe Railway Company, which owns a freight line that occupies the space for the new bullet train. Federal grants are contingent on the project having contracts that guarantee the possibility of building. At the same time, the feds are trying to assert authority over the project via the Surface Transportation Board.

Meanwhile, it now turns out that the California Senate Transportation Committee is investigating the bidding process behind the first segment of the railroad. The review process for bidding was changed to allow bidders who had not met technical specs. The winning bid came from a firm with the lowest technical score in the field. The company that won the bid, Tutor Perini Corp., has done work with the state for years. The losers, it has been suggested, will be forced to keep quiet in order to receive reimbursement for their bidding costs.

That’s not the only problem with the bidding process. The High-Speed Rail Authority, behind closed doors, authorized a process that would require bidders to consent to a massive union giveaway in order to be considered. The board did not vote on the relevant Project Labor Agreement, and the Federal Railroad Administration may not have approved it. As the Modesto Bee points out, “A cynic would suggest that the presence of the head of the State Building and Construction Trades Council of California on the HSR board might have encouraged the project labor agreement. Nevertheless, state union leaders knew how the bread was buttered. Union-affiliated organizations comprised seven of the top 10 donors, including the top five, to pass Proposition 1A in 2008.”

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

William A. Jacobson takes a look at ‘high speed’ rail.

Look at the travel time scale.  First it assumes the train will move at 220 mph — quite a feat.  If you ever have taken the Acela train in the Northeast Corridor you know that this is pie in the sky.  Plus, even at that unobtainable speed, the trip from New York to L.A. would take almost a day of actual travel time — as opposed to a few hours on a plane.  Good luck selling those tickets.

And cost?  We have covered the massive cost overruns and time delays just to build a high speed rail from L.A. to San Francisco.  Imagine that on a national scale.

It’s easy to poke fun at low information voters.  Until you realize how much they cost.

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Nothing to see here. Move along, move along….

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There has been much controversy over the government’s efforts to advertise welfare programs, particularly the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), otherwise known as the “food stamp” program.  Only they’re not “stamps” any more.  The dependent masses of Food Stamp Nation get a little credit card, called an EBT Card, which they can use in the checkout lines, just like people who pay for their own food.

In theory, this electronic processing of food stamp benefits should have provided a data-processing defense against abuse.  In practice, tales of outrageous abuse have only grown more common, as EBT cards are used to purchase everything from unhealthy groceries the Nanny State otherwise discourages – such as sugary carbonated beverages – to luxury foods, and even more creative uses like posting bail or tipping exotic dancers.  The latter incidents are among the many bizarre abuses that arise from the ability of EBT card holders to withdraw cash from ATM machines, at which point all public accountability for the money is lost.

Amazingly enough, there isn’t any serious effort currently being made to process data from EBT card transactions, although Rep. Tom Marino (R-PA) has been trying to change that with a bill called the SNAP Transparency Act.  The Washington Times describes the goal of this bill as the creation of “an online, searchable database that uses bar codes to break down how many taxpayer dollars in food stamps are spent on individual products, from Kit Kat bars to whole milk.”

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 Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s attempt to keep his state’s agencies from releasing detailed data on the use of the public-assistance system by the Tsarnaev family, whose sons, one dead and one in custody, are accused of carrying out the Boston Marathon bombings on April 15, appeared to be successful last week.

Ah, but Patrick, apparently feeling some heat, did agree “to release the information only to a House oversight committee where it will remain a secret.” Except it’s not a secret any more, at least in the aggregate, based on a report in the Boston Herald by Chris Cassidy which, based on when story comments first began appearing, went up during the middle of the afternoon today….

Read it.

Kenneth Thorpe, chairman of the health policy and management school at Emory University, estimates that 95 percent of spending in Medicare goes to patients with one or more chronic conditions — with enrollees suffering five or more chronic conditions accounting for 78 percent of its spending. “This is the Willie Sutton rule,” he says. “If 80 percent of the spending is going to patients with five or more conditions, that’s where our health-care system needs to go.”

Health Quality Partners is all about going there. The program enrolls Medicare patients with at least one chronic illness and one hospitalization in the past year. It then sends a trained nurse to see them every week, or every month, whether they’re healthy or sick. It sounds simple and, in a way, it is. But simple things can be revolutionary.

Most care-management systems rely on nurses sitting in call centers, checking up on patients over the phone. That model has mostly been a failure. And while many health systems send a nurse regularly in the weeks or months after a serious hospitalization, few send one regularly to even seemingly healthy patients. This a radical redefinition of the health-care system’s role in the lives of the elderly. It redefines being old and chronically ill as a condition requiring professional medical management.

Health Quality Partners’ results have been extraordinary. According to an independent analysis by the consulting firm Mathematica, HQP has reduced hospitalizations by 33 percent and cut Medicare costs by 22 percent.

Others in the profession have taken notice. “It’s like they’ve discovered the fountain of youth in Doylestown, Pa.,” marvels Jeffrey Brenner, founder of the Camden Coalition of Healthcare Providers.

Now Medicare is thinking of shutting it off.

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A government watchdog group has discovered that the United States government is advising Spanish-speaking residents that they need not declare their immigration status to qualify for food stamps.

A statement on the flyer—emphasized in bold and underlined—reads, “You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”

So come on down! ‘It’s free! Just swipe your EBT!’

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The Federal Helium Program – left over from the age of zeppelins and an infamous symbol of Washington’s inability to cut what it no longer needs – will be terminated.

Unless it isn’t.

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 Ever since the Clinton administration agreed in 1999 to make $50,000 payments to thousands of black farmers, the Hispanics and women had been clamoring in courtrooms and in Congress for the same deal. They argued, as the African-Americans had, that biased federal loan officers had systematically thwarted their attempts to borrow money to farm.

Translation: “We’re fashionable minorities, too, and we want our cut of the swag!” But you knew that.

 But a succession of courts — and finally the Supreme Court — had rebuffed their pleas. Instead of an army of potential claimants, the government faced just 91 plaintiffs. Those cases, the government lawyers figured, could be dispatched at limited cost.

They were wrong.

On the heels of the Supreme Court’s ruling, interviews and records show, the Obama administration’s political appointees at the Justice and Agriculture Departments engineered a stunning turnabout: they committed $1.33 billion to compensate not just the 91 plaintiffs but thousands of Hispanic and female farmers who had never claimed bias in court.

You want money? We got it! You the right color or gender? Get some here! Obama money!

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When policymakers respond to a perceived market failure (whether real or imagined) with “reforms” that instead create government failure, they tend to leave the overall economy much worse off — except for a few well-connected people and firms.

Government programs are easily gamed and very attractive to those who like gaming programs.

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Aren’t you glad the government is on your side? Imagine what life would be like if it were not.

Hm, no, you’re right, I don’t see much difference, either….

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Even in a divided Washington, everyone agrees on the importance of creating jobs in America. So why are some government agencies using taxpayer money to lobby against some food manufacturers?

At least one lawmaker, Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.) thinks it’s time government officials stopped using taxpayer money to run smear campaigns against the makers of lawfully produced goods that consumers want. On April 15, Rep. Schock introduced the Stopping Taxpayer Outlays for Propaganda Act (STOP) Act (H.R. 1572), which would prohibit the use of federal funds for advertising and media campaigns to discourage consumption of any food or beverage that is lawfully marketed under the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act. In a Politico op-ed this week, Schock explains that in this time of economic stress, using taxpayer money to harm American industry doesn’t make a lot of sense.

What a spoilsport!

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My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

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Jihad? What’s that?

As U.S. service members risk their lives to combat violent jihadists abroad, military leaders, both uniformed and civilian, capitulate to stealth jihadists at home. By bending to Islamists’ appeals for religious sensitivity, these leaders ignore the most crucial lesson of the Fort Hood massacre: Political correctness can kill.

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At least seven local health departments illegally used stimulus grant funds to lobby for greater taxes and restrictions on tobacco and unhealthy foods, according to a report released Tuesday by a nonprofit watchdog group.

The stimulus-funded Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW) program disbursed about $373 million intended to educate the public about tobacco use and obesity. Federal law prohibits grantees from using the funds for lobbying activities.

According to the group Cause of Action, local health departments from Alabama to California used the funds to devise or promote legislation designed to curb tobacco use or combat obesity.

And YOU paid for it. Aren’t  you proud?

Read  it.

What went wrong? Plenty. The stimulus was rushed to passage based on economic assumptions that remain hotly contested. Its implementation was marred by politics, logistics, and red tape. And the aid it directed toward the country’s least well off may have undermined the very recovery it was designed to hasten. This is what happens when politicians insist that something big must be done, even if they’re not sure what that something should be.

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More than 80 percent of the Defense Department’s Afghanistan reconstruction contracts are vulnerable to putting U.S. taxpayer money into enemy coffers, a government watchdog says in a new report.

According to the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), a poorly written section of the defense authorization bill means that “millions of contracting dollars could be diverted to forces seeking to harm U.S. military and civilian personnel and derail the multi-billion dollar reconstruction effort.”

“The possibility that taxpayer money could be supporting the insurgency is alarming and demands immediate action,” said John Sopko, the SIGAR. “Every effort should be made to implement stronger controls that protect our troops and ensure the success of our reconstruction efforts.”

Prediction: It ain’t gonna happen.

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When U.S. officials began collecting consumer complaints about credit cards, one goal was to identify patterns that could help them write rules protecting families with low and moderate incomes.

Note the government’s approach: Our preconceived notion is that there’s a problem; let’s go look for some data to justify sticking our noses in other people’s business.

Nearly two years later, it’s the well-to-do neighborhoods of Florida and New York that are supplying the most grievances to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an analysis of agency data shows.

Of course. The whining of the entitled is a constant theme among the Crust.

Of the top four zip codes contributing to the 18,539 complaints published as of March 18, two are on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and two in south Florida — Boca Raton and Palm Beach Gardens. Almost 60 percent of complaints originated in zip codes where the median household income is higher than the national median of $52,762, according to the analysis.

Which will not impede the government’s process of massaging the data to justify sticking their noses in other people’s business; it just motivates them to further creativity.

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“It kind of reminds me of welfare,” said disabled former truck driver James Ottesen. Ottesen told the Wall Street Journal he would “like to get re-educated to do something” because “my body is broke but my mind is not.” Still, says Ottesen, he’s reluctant to leave the disability program because it is like “a blanket covering you, and to walk out from it… at my age, it’s a little intimidating.”

Disability enrollments have exploded under President Barack Obama. Since 2009, 5.9 million people have been added to the Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) program, a 23% jump over the last five years. During that same period, just 2.5 million new jobs were created.

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President Obama has pledged to give back 5 percent of his pay to the Treasury as a symbol of solidarity with all those who have been affected by the sequester cuts. His announcement was followed by those of John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, Eric Holder, and Jacob Lew.

Vice President Biden, however, is bucking the trend among members of the president’s cabinet and holding on to the entirety of his salary — or, at least, he has yet to indicate his intention to do otherwise.

Because he’s, like, totally worth every penny.

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The Obama administration is proudly shattering welfare records with an astonishing number of people collecting public benefits long term, especially food stamps.

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IN 2010 a panel created by the White House estimated that American taxpayers spend 7.6 billion hours and some $140 billion a year keeping the IRS off their backs. According to the Washington Post over 80% of taxpayers use software or pay someone to file their taxes. The national taxpayer advocate, a sort-of in-house IRS watchdog, once said, “If tax compliance were an industry, it would be one of the largest in the United States.” But of course, it is an industry.

It is an industry made up of accountants and companies like H&R Block and Intuit, which makes the TurboTax software used by many Americans. And it is an industry that, according to ProPublica, has worked hard to keep the IRS from preparing your tax returns for you for free. Intuit, for example, has spent millions lobbying the federal government, opposing bills that would allow the IRS to send you pre-filled-in returns (the agency already has most of your relevant information) and supporting bills that would ban the practice.

Nick Gillespie lays out some inconvenient truth.

Over at Investor’s Business, the always-interesting John Merline sends word of a troubling development when it comes to Obamacare: The very people it was supposed to help the most – the uninsured – don’t seem to want the damned thing.

The ungrateful swine.

Read it.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

The USDA stated, “In 2011, program costs totaled $75.7 billion. Using the most recent data on trafficking available, USDA estimated that trafficking would be 1 percent of $75 billion, or approximately $750 million.”

But in the years 2006-2008, the USDA stated, “Trafficking diverted an estimated $330 million annually from SNAP benefits – or about one cent of each SNAP dollar – between 2006 and 2008. About 8.2 percent of all stores trafficked.”

After the free Obama Phone, I guess the free Obama Food is not a big stretch.

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In order for her Just Cupcakes LLC to remain profitable in the face of higher expected labor costs, Ms. Hesseltine believes the customer-ordering process “would have to be more automated” at the Virginia Beach, Va., chain, which has two strip-mall locations as well as a food van. Thus, she could eliminate the 10 workers who currently ask customers what they would like to eat.

Come to think of it, I have yet to see an iPad with a tattoo or a pierced eyebrow.

David French blows the whistle.

Three weeks ago we gave Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood government a $250 million economic stimulus package, and this week we decided to double-down in our national support for anti-Semites by giving the Palestinian Authority its own $500 million bonus. Never mind that this is the same Palestinian Authority that late last year directly defied the U.S. and violated the Oslo Agreements by pursuing non-member observer state status at the U.N. Never mind that this is the same Palestinian Authority that as recently as last month continued its unity talks with Hamas. Never mind that this is the same Palestinian Authority that pays millions to imprisoned terrorists and honors suicide bombers.

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Sometimes it is nice to belong to an oppressed minority.

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The report suggests that the much-touted Welfare to Work policies of the 1990s that appeared to successfully move welfare recipients off the public dole may have been a mirage. States have figured out that shifting people from welfare to disability frees up substantial funds, as states have to pay the costs of welfare, but the federal government picks up the tab for disability.

Read it.

We report — you decide.