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

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Maxford Nelson, director of labor policy at the Freedom Foundation in Olympia, Wash., told The Daily Caller News Foundation the city council’s message was “clear.”

“[The city council] does not view businesses as entities driving the job growth and prosperity in Seattle,” Nelson told TheDCNF. “The city council views businesses as entities to be punished and taxed for every employee that they hire.”

The “head tax,” as it is commonly called, was pushed principally by socialist city council member Kshama Sawant and the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) — one of the largest labor unions in the U.S.

I wonder how long before Jeff Bezos will take the hint. Socialists steal. It’s the heart of their ideology.

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The basic problem is that the tax-eaters in Seattle see ‘corporations’ as cash cows to be milked for ever-increasing welfare entitlements, and the city government uses those entitlements to buy votes. It’s the U.S. Congress in miniature. That’s why it only applies to ‘corporations’ over a certain size (the size where the number of small-business owners, i.e. voters, wouldn’t scream).

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This story begins at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, where mysterious suitcases filled with cash have become a common carry-on.

…

Fox 9 learned that these cloak-and-dagger scenarios now happen almost weekly at MSP. The money is usually headed to the Middle East, Dubai and points beyond. Sources said last year alone, more than $100 million in cash left MSP in carry-on luggage.

…

As Kerns dug deeper, he found that some of the individuals who were sending out tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of remittance payments happened to be on government assistance in this country.

How could they possibly come up with such big bucks to transfer back home?

“We had sources that told us, ‘It’s welfare fraud, it’s all about the daycare,’” said Kerns.

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As if that will ever happen. Without race to bitch about, she’s got nothin’.

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There must be a rule that one must have a below-average IQ in order to be elected to Congress as a Democrat.

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Assemblywoman Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan) has introduced a bill that would put an end to competitive rifle and archery teams in New York schools.

Rosenthal claims that allowing such programs to continue would be a tacit promotion of “gun culture.”

Note to self: Avoid New York. Whatever they’ve got might be contagious.

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She looks as if she has a serious Need for Weed.

No doubt she is looking to pick up the Stoner Vote in the 2020 Democrat primaries.

Good luck to her.

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Gee, another Person of Color. What are the odds?

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Nowadays that ought not to be too hard.

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Can’t violate a deal that was never signed. But of course the DemLegHump media won’t tell you that.

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Yeah, that will make housing more ‘affordable’. Way to go.

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You think California housing is unaffordable now, just hold their juice and watch this.

Read it.

Amazon has paused development of its 17-story building in Seattle amid a debate over a city tax hike that would cost the e-commerce giant an estimated $20 million annually.

“I can confirm that pending the outcome of the head tax vote by City Council, Amazon has paused all construction planning on our Block 18 project in downtown Seattle and is evaluating options to sub-lease all space in our recently leased Rainer Square building,” said Drew Herdener, an Amazon spokesperson.

The “head tax” would charge 26 cents per employee per hour for Seattle-based companies with $20 million or more in annual sales, affecting 585 of Seattle’s largest businesses. There are more than 45,000 Amazon employees in Seattle and its expansion in the city would have created 7,000 new jobs for the company.

Seattle’s bureaucrats needs to learn that their dicks aren’t long enough to get into a pissing contest with Jeff Bezos. He may be a liberal, but he never forgets that he’s running a business.

UPDATE: Seattle May Hit Peak Progressivism With a Literal Tax on Jobs

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Michael Caputo, a former Trump campaign adviser, unloaded on Democrats on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on Tuesday during a closed-door interview as part of the panel’s Russia investigation.

“God damn you to hell!” he said at one point in the interview, according to the Washington Examiner.

Caputo was upset over his mounting legal expenses, which he said clock in at more than $125,000.

“Today, I can’t possibly pay the attendant legal costs and live near my aging father, raising my kids where I grew up,” Caputo said during his three-hour interview. “Your investigation and others into the allegations of Trump campaign collusion with Russia are costing my family a great deal of money — more than $125,000 — and making a visceral impact on my children.”

“Forget about all the death threats against my family. I want to know who cost us so much money, who crushed our kids, who forced us out of our home, all because you lost an election,” he added. “I want to know because God damn you to hell.”

The Party of Hate claims another scalp.

UPDATE: Caputo’s complaint

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On Tuesday, the Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF), a public interest law firm, filed suit on behalf of several small-time landlords who are concerned about the financial and personal safety risks of being unable to screen tenants for past wrongdoing.

The PLF’s complaint claims that the Seattle law violates landlords’ due process rights under the 14th Amendment by imposing an “unreasonable, overbroad, and unduly burdensome” regulation. The complaint also says the law runs afoul of the First Amendment by denying landlords access to publicly available records.

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Perhaps it would have been different had it been a minority or female child. Then you wouldn’t be able to shut them up.

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Republicans are getting feisty in Trump’s America.

(How ya gonna keep ’em down in the swamp/After they’ve seen Trump win?)

The Antiplanner actually runs some numbers.

An op-ed in last Friday’s San Antonio Express-News argues that San Antonio is “one of the least-suited big cities in the world for building rapid transit.” This is because, though San Antonio is the nation’s seventh-largest city, it’s jobs are so spread out that transit just can’t work for most people.

According to Wendell Cox’s report on downtowns, in 2008 transit carried more than 10 percent of people to work in just five metropolitan areas: New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Washington. These also happen to be the only metro areas that had more than 240,000 downtown jobs. Transit in Philadelphia, which had just under 240,000 jobs, carried only 9.3 percent of metro-area jobs. San Antonio has only about 60,000 downtown jobs, so is less than a quarter of the way to needing an improved transit system.

The problem with public transit is that it takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, i.e. there are additional efforts needed to get from your home to the transit stop and then from the destination transit stop to your objective (job or shopping or whatever). Back in the days when jobs in an urban area were concentrated ‘downtown’ because information and goods moved at the speed of feet (so concentration made sense), and when people lived in a broad catchment area where they needed to go from OUT to IN and then back OUT again, mass transit made a lot of sense — and it still does in places like New York City where that logic still applies.

Otherwise, it’s just a reactionary bureaucratic wish-we-were-back-in-the-good-old-days-of-the-horse boondoggle, as one can tell from the boilerplate talk about ‘getting people out of cars and into trains’.

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Hipster life is worth millions to the right people. Hey, it’s free! Government money!

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Thank you, enviro-Nazis and ever-increasing gas mileage requirements.

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Generous pensions have always been a prime perk of government jobs. Now those pensions are causing government layoffs, reduced services, and tax increases.

Take Harvey, Illinois. The city has laid off half of its fire department and 13 police officers so it can meet its obligations to its retired police officers and firefighters—the result of decades of overpromising benefits and underfunding pension plans.

The laid-off first responders are just the first casualties of Harvey’s pension crisis. Residents and other government employees will feel the pain as Harvey cuts services, reduces salaries, or increases the workloads of its remaining employees. Harvey’s residents already face a property tax increase. Last year, a court ordered the city to impose a property tax levy specifically for its firefighters pension fund.

More info from Wikipedia:

The town is 75% black and 19% Latino, i.e. it’s run (and has been run) by Democrats.

In the 2000s and 2010s, Mayor Eric Kellogg attempted to boost Harvey’s economy with little success. Kellogg offered developers millions of dollars in incentives to revive the long vacant Dixie Square Mall. In another plan to redevelop the Chicago Park Hotel, a developer was given $10 million from the city but then abandoned the project, leaving behind a gutted building.

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The China, personally selected by First Lady Melania Trump, was originally the “Clinton China Service”, as first identified by CNN reporter Kate Bennett.

Making the selection even more appropriate, Bill and Hillary Clinton stole this China Service from the White House and were forced to return it in 2001.

Read it.

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

As a landowner of my acquaintance once said, ‘I’ve got a gun and I’ve got a shovel.’

Read it.

When the $2 billion Miami Intermodal Center (MIC) started construction in 2011, the plan was to have its central station serviced by long-distance Amtrak trains.

Construction finished in 2013 and while three different rail services currently operate at the station, Amtrak is nowhere to be found. The reason? The platform built for Amtrak is 200 feet too short for Amtrak’s long-distance trains.

This is why we don’t have government employees in charge of our health care.

Britain made that mistake after WWII and is still suffering for it.

The problem was first discovered shortly after construction began, but who exactly is to blame for the multi-million-dollar mishap, or what is to be done about it now, remain open questions.

Prediction: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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I see that the Ninth Circuit is taking steps to cement its place as most reversed Court of Appeals in the country.

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Not often you see an article like this in reliable Voice of the Crust The Guardian.

The deep state has been blamed for many things since Donald Trump became president, including by the president himself. Trump defenders have used the term promiscuously to include not just intelligence bureaucrats but a broader array of connected players in other administrative bureaucracies, in private industry, and in the media.

But even if we focus narrowly on the intelligence bureaucracies that conduct and use information collected secretly in the homeland, including the FBI, National Security Agency (NSA), and National Security Council, there is significant evidence that the deep state has used secretly collected information opportunistically and illegally to sabotage the president and his senior officials – either as part of a concerted movement or via individuals acting more or less independently.

Read it.

More than 100 suspected members of MS-13 and other gangs were released in 2017 by sanctuary jurisdictions even though federal authorities had formally requested that they be held, according to data from the Department of Homeland Security.

This will not end well.

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The ones who can be depended on to vote Democrat, of course.

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Half the results published in peer-reviewed scientific journals are probably wrong. John Ioannidis, now a professor of medicine at Stanford, made headlines with that claim in 2005. Since then, researchers have confirmed his skepticism by trying—and often failing—to reproduce many influential journal articles. Slowly, scientists are internalizing the lessons of this irreproducibility crisis. But what about government, which has been making policy for generations without confirming that the science behind it is valid?

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Some have suggested that it is parental malpractice to send your children to a public school. In many areas of the country, that proposition is hard to deny.

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According to a new report from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the states collectively carry more than $1.4 trillion in pension debt—and only four states have at least 90 percent of the assets necessary to meet their long-term obligations to retirees. The Pew paper, which is based on states’ 2016 financial reports, shows that pension debt increased by about $295 billion since the previous year, making 2016 the 15th consecutive year in which state-level pension debt increased.

How are those public-sector unions working out for you?

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At least 11 towns in Orange County have taken steps to officially oppose Senate Bill 54, the divisive law that sharply limits cooperation on immigration enforcement between California officials and the federal government.

…

The opening salvo in the battle between Orange County and Sacramento was fired on March 19 by Los Alamitos, a city of about 12,000. In a 4-1 vote, the council agreed to exempt Los Alamitos from SB54 over concerns the law was forcing local officials to undermine federal law.

State legislators in Sacramento were “bullying local elected officials into violating our oath of office,” council member Warren Kusumoto said at the time.

Though it is Orange County’s smallest city, Los Alamitos proved to be a bellwether for other jurisdictions in the county

Read it.

Obviously a white supremacist patriarchy dog whistle, but we’ll have to wait to see what sort of dog responds.

I predict: A very confused one. Or a journalist. (Sometimes it can be hard to tell those apart.)

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Because his views on gay marriage are totally relevant to being Secretary of State.

But the Witch Hunt for Heretics and Sinners knows no bounds.

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“We”, of course, meaning the government.

Half a century ago, nuclear power was on track to out-compete fossil fuels around the globe, which would have reduced the price of electricity, the amount of harmful air pollution, and greenhouse gas emissions associated with climate change. Then came a dramatic slowing of new construction and research into safer and more efficient nuclear reactors.

According to Australian National University researcher Peter Lang, the ’60s and ’70s saw a transition “from rapidly falling costs and accelerating deployment to rapidly rising costs and stalled deployment.” Had the initial trajectory continued, he writes in the journal Energies, nuclear-generated electricity would now be around 10 percent of its current cost.

…

What happened? Anti-nuclear activism and regulation.

Alan Dershowitz on the Cohen raid.

• The Fourth and Sixth Amendments prohibit government officials from in any way intruding on the privacy of lawyer/client confidential rights of citizens.
• The very fact that this material is seen or read by a government official constitutes a core violation. It would be the same if the government surreptitiously recorded a confession of a penitent to a priest, or a description of symptoms by a patient to a doctor, or a discussion of their sex life between a husband and wife.
• The recourses for intrusions on the Fourth and Sixth Amendments are multifold: the victim of the intrusion can sue for damages; he or she can exclude it from use by the government in criminal or civil cases; or the victim can demand the material back. But none of these remedies undo the harm to privacy and confidentiality done to the citizen by the government’s intrusion into his private and confidential affairs.

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How does the government screw things up? Let me count the ways….

Long before anyone was talking about the sharing economy, private pilots across the United States were already engaging in it. They used bulletin boards at general aviation airports to advertise planned trips to prospective passengers who might want to come along for the ride and share the costs of the flight.

When drivers do this, it’s called ‘carpooling’ and they get special lanes to drive in and Greenie points that cannot be traded for valuable prizes.

Pilots do that because flying is an expensive hobby. The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association warns would-be aviators to be prepared to spend more than $225 an hour when all flying costs—including fuel, insurance, and airport fees—are included. Since private pilots have to log at least three takeoffs and landings every 90 days to maintain their licenses, there aren’t many viable ways to dodge those costs. So they’ve been sharing costs with passengers since at least the 1960s. For pilots, it’s a crucial method of financing a flying habit. For passengers, it’s an alternative way to reach a destination.

In the age of Uber, it has the potential to be much more. But the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) stands in the way.

In 2014, the FAA shut down attempts to turn those analog billboards into digital ones, ruling that pilots who use online flight-sharing apps would be regulated as “common carriers” like commercial airlines. While that ruling doesn’t directly ban those apps, no private pilot making weekend trips in a single-engine Cessna is going to subject himself or herself to the additional licensing and certification requirements (or mandatory liability insurance) necessary to be a commercial pilot in the eyes of FAA.

In the wake of the agency’s ruling, one of those just-launched apps, FlyteNow, took the federal regulator to court. But last year the U.S. Supreme Court declined to take the case, seemingly grounding the apps for good.

Now Congress has an opportunity to overrule the FAA.

Read it.

Los Angeles is spending $40,000 per mile painting asphalt streets white to try to prevent global warming.

I am not making this up.

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Democratic Rep. Nydia Velazquez denounced immigration authorities for arresting an illegal immigrant inside a New York City courthouse on Friday, saying the controversial tactic “has no place” in the city.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents nabbed Panamanian national Diogenes Pinzon as he walked out of an eighth-floor courtroom in Brooklyn Criminal Court Friday morning, reported the New York Daily News, citing court officials.

Pinzon, an illegal immigrant with a long criminal history, was in court fighting domestic violence charges in connection with allegations that he robbed and threatened his girlfriend in May 2017. The 38-year-old Pinzon has been arrested 15 times since 2005, authorities say.

Velazquez joined a chorus of immigration activists who cried foul because ICE agents had quietly entered the courthouse to carry out the arrest.

Sounds like a righteous bust. I say put them both on the same bus South.

John Derbyshire points out some inconvenient truth.

The drill is, you get yourself to Mexico or Canada, go to the US border, present yourself to a border agent, and ask for asylum. The law says that your asylum application must then be formally recorded and considered. The considering of course takes for ever.

Ideally, you’d be detained in custody while it goes on. In practice, there are nothing like enough detention facilities because Congress won’t appropriate the funds. So most applicants are just given an appearance date, then released. They disappear into the U.S. interior and hook up with relatives, friends, or their gang boss from back home.

That’s a rough sketch of what happens, although a fair one, as can be seen from the number of asylum applications outstanding—300,000 currently, up from 16,000 five and a half years ago.

Read it.

Cue Leftist outrage.

Gee, when Obama did it, it was ‘Presidential’.

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Washington State University is currently offering a class on how Western science is impacted by “socially constructed” categories such as gender, sexuality, and nationality.

“Women’s Studies 220: Gender, Culture, and Science,” is a sophomore-level class taught this semester by Jenifer Barclay, an assistant professor in the school’s Department of Critical Culture, Gender, and Race Studies

Read it.

Read it.

Scott Pruitt is the greatest-ever Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. To be fair, though, the competition was never exactly stiff. The bar was set low right from the start, under the Nixon-era administrator William Ruckelshaus.

Ruckelshaus is best known for his decision to ban the use of the insecticide DDT in the US. This, in turn, led to a near-global ban which deprived the world of its most effective prophylactic against the malarial mosquito, arguably causing millions of unnecessary deaths.

But what was perhaps most shocking about Ruckelshaus’s decision was that it ran roughshod over science and due process. At the time, the EPA had just finished a seven-month hearing under Judge Edmund Sweeney concluding in a 9,000-page document that DDT was essentially harmless to humans and wildlife. Ruckelshaus decided to go with the green activists rather than the scientific evidence and banned it anyway.

This puts into perspective the liberal media’s vendetta against the EPA’s current administrator, Trump-appointed Scott Pruitt. If you believe the New York Times, for example, Pruitt is trying to “muzzle the scientific inquiry that for years has informed sound policy at an agency he seems determined to destroy.”

Perhaps there’s an element of truth in the last part. Since Nixon founded it in 1970, the EPA has grown into a mighty behemoth with more than 17,000 employees – many of them hardcore green activists opposed to the very notion of free markets and industrial civilization.

Say what you will about how much the Democrats have damaged this country, RINOs have been almost as bad.

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No wonder Hillary won the ‘popular vote’.

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A New York judge who is on probation for a drunk driving charge will receive an $11,700 raise to her salary although she has only worked one out of the past 214 days, according to a report.

Rochester City Court Judge Leticia Astacio will now be paid $187,200 instead of $175,500 due to a raise for all city judges across the state. The raise comes although Astacio has not been to work since Aug. 31, 2017, even though she was ordered by state Supreme Court Justice Craig Doran to return in February, Fox News reported.

Astacio, whose term is not up until 2024, was arrested in February 2016 after a state trooper found her car damaged. After a bench trial in August 2016, Astacio was found guilty of driving while intoxicated. Astacio was sentenced to three years of probation in July 2017 after violating her original probation.

Memo to self: Stay away from New York.

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Nothing good.

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Well, yeah, sure, everybody sues about everything these days, but it’s not clear that they have a cause of action. The Census can pretty much ask whatever it wants to, and does. I’d dearly love to see a resistance movement of people telling them ‘We’ll tell you how many people are here, and that’s all the authority you have under the Constitution’, but I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon.