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Let he without frequent flyer miles cast the first meme.

I doubt that Nancy Pelosi has ever flown coach in her life.

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These are just a taste of the freaky stuff you can find in judicial opinions.

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Seems reasonable under the plain text of the 14th Amendment. If Puerto Ricans are citizens, I don’t see how Samoans aren’t.

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Justine Damond had called police at about 11:30 p.m. to report a suspected rape in progress behind her south Minneapolis apartment. A squad car responded, but as Damond approached the car in her night clothes, Officer Mohamed Noor fired across his partner, Matthew Harrity, killing her.

Yeah, she sure looks like a rapist to me.

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Border patrol agents are refusing to hand over illegal immigrants with felony warrants to police in California because they can’t be sure local authorities will return the criminal aliens to federal custody, according to a top border security official in San Diego.

Rodney Scott, the chief patrol agent in the Border Patrol’s San Diego Sector, said earlier this month that California’s statewide sanctuary law was undermining normal cooperation between his agency and local law enforcement.

Be careful what you wish for, Social Justice Warriors, you just might get it.

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One hand washes the other. Of course, any excuse will do for milking the taxpayers.

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n 2014, the Obama administration promulgated a “guidance” to America’s public schools that threatened federal investigations and litigation against schools where black students are disciplined (e.g., by suspension) more often, on a pro rata basis, than white students, on the ground that such numerical discrepancy is evidence of discrimination.

After all, Everybody Knows that black students misbehave exactly in proportion to their percentage of the student population. In fact, that gives us a way to fix discipline problems in public schools. If black students are 60% of the student population and ipso facto commit 60% of infractions, then the obvious remedy is to increase the proportion of white students. (As we’ve known since Brown v. Board of Education, adding white students to black schools immediately makes black schools better! It’s magic. Don’t go saying the opposite, though, you racist.) But where are all these magical white students to be found? I guess we’d better bus them in from Idaho or something — long bus trip to Harlem, but it’s a small price to pay for black equality.)

Many schools responded by adopting discipline quotas, which meant in practice that after a certain number of students of a particular race had been suspended, teachers and administrators were helpless to enforce any kind of discipline in classrooms.

Saw that coming.

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The Crust takes care of their own.

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“There are all sorts of benign words in our language that sound like words unfit for polite company,” writes Jon Keller at CBS Boston, offering Uranus and clap as further examples. “And they offer us an opportunity to teach snickering kids about Civil War history or outer space—and about showing respect for others while avoiding making fools of ourselves.”

State Rep. Michelle DuBois (D-Plymouth) disagrees. She has been calling for the removal of a statehouse sign that reads “General Hooker Entrance” (so inscribed because it stands opposite a statue of General Hooker), which she described as an affront to “women’s dignity.”

“Female staffers don’t use that entrance because the sign is offensive to them,” DuBois told WBZ-TV this week.

Then they are as stupid as you are. That sends a really positive message about women in the workplace.

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Once again, Texas holds the line.

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Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin wants limits on virtual currencies, like Bitcoin, that help people keep their financial lives private from folks like him. Senator Dianne Feinstein wants government regulation of political speech by foreign agents—or maybe just by people with whom she disagrees. Gun control activists want more restrictions with which to threaten peaceful gun owners so that violent predators who break laws will have more things to ignore.

If ever there was a “there oughta be a law moment,” we’re living in it. At least, we’re living in one of all too many such moments. Because people are forever looking to the law as the solution to the ills they perceive in the world around them—often only to spackle over the failures of the previous round of laws. In the process, they’re forever forgetting that laws are usually nothing more than codified prejudices, imposed against resistant populations, by sometimes incompetent and often corrupt enforcers.

That’s one of the best definitions of modern law that I’ve ever seen.

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It’s absurd – and fitting – that a century later, opponents and supporters of daylight saving are still not sure exactly what it does. Despite its name, daylight saving has never saved anyone anything. But it has proven to be a fantastically effective retail spending plan.

Most of what you hear for and against Daylight Saving Time is junk science. The only thing we know for sure, because the relevant studies are consistent, is that changing time twice a year causes problems on the change days.

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Why proglodytes have a train fetish is beyond me, other than a general desire to turn the clock back to 1900. (Which is why they ought to be called ‘regressives’ rather than ‘progressives’.)

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

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The most reversed Appellate Circuit Court in the country strikes again.

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On January 31, Nashville Mayor Megan Barry announced that she had ended an extramarital affair with city policeman and bodyguard Rob Forrest. Since then, except for the Associated Press, the national media showed little interest in covering a whirlwind of subsequent troubling revelations. Even last week’s call by the left-leaning Nashville Tennessean for Barry’s resignation has been virtually ignored. During that time, the AP failed to tag Barry, who resigned on Tuesday, as a Democrat in 9 of 10 stories.

Media bias? What media bias?

After Barry’s January 31 announcement, Forrest immediately retired with an annual pension of $80,000. In late February, his wife filed for divorce. It’s fair to characterize Barry, the more powerful person in the relationship, as a homewrecker.

What a great advertisement for the MeToo movement.

Seems to me that if a Republican had done something that, we’d be wondering how much jail time would be involved. Since it’s a Democrat, she can look forward to some juicy consulting gigs and maybe a book deal.

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The U.S. Army is once more reforming its basic training program to deal with complaints from unit commanders that too many of the new soldiers they were receiving were unable to perform adequately. The most common complaints were new troops who were undisciplined, physically unfit, lacked basic military skills that basic is supposed to impart and generally unsuited for military service. These calls for training reforms have been a common event since peacetime conscription was introduced after World War II. During the period of peacetime conscription parents, politicians and unhappy conscripts complained that that training was too dangerous or misguided in some other way and the army made changes. Then the changes proved to be the cause of unprepared troops who could not perform well in combat or got themselves killed and the army was called on to implement more effective training. After conscription ended in the early 1970s the problem gradually got worse because fewer politicians had any personal experience with basic training or military life but were called on by special interest groups or popular movements that saw military training as something other than a program to produce effective soldiers. In the last decade, as most American combat forces in Iraq and Afghanistan came home, there were calls to make a lot of changes in recruiting and training and were, from a military sense, counterproductive. It has gotten so bad that the problems have to be addressed.

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Explicit racism is now official Democrat policy.

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And they said it couldn’t be done.

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Several months ago, Palacios was taking a stroll on his ranch and stumbled upon a small portable camera with an antenna fastened to a tree. Not long after removing the recording device, which was situated on his property near his son’s home, Palacios received phone calls from CBP officials and Texas Rangers, each one claiming they were the owners of the camera and ordering him to give it back, reports Ars Technica.

Palacios, having refused their demands and dismissed their threats of arrest, is still in possession of the camera, and hopes to use it as admissible evidence in his case.

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I’m sure he looked very sharp in his uniform and had all the Politically Correct opinions.

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The IRS first started claiming that its regulations have no economic impact in response to the 1980 Regulatory Flexibility Act (RFA), which was designed to mitigate the compliance costs of federal regulations on small businesses. The RFA states that if a proposed regulation could have a large economic impact on small businesses, the agency must consider alternatives that would leave small businesses unharmed.

The RFA also contains a Congressional amendment specifically designed to cover IRS regulations, but the IRS has shirked its duty to comply with the RFA since Congress passed the law. The IRS has broadened its self-exemption from economic impacts to all impacts, including record-keeping and other reporting burdens. That means that IRS regulations can impact small businesses while completely evading oversight from Congress or the White House.

In the Internal Revenue Manual, a document the IRS uses to guide its compliance with oversight mechanisms, the agency bizarrely claims that its rules have no economic impact. This reading allows the IRS to avoid sharing information with Congress, the executive branch, and the American people. The IRS has never offered an adequate justification for this self-exemption.

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The top public school administrator in Washington, D.C., resigned his position Tuesday, four days after it was revealed that he had conspired with another official to place his daughter in the district’s highest-performing public high school. In the process, Public Schools Chancellor Antwan Wilson bypassed the rules governing placement of district students in schools outside their own neighborhoods.

The other official, Deputy Mayor for Education Jennifer Niles, was forced to resign last week.

Both of the crooked officials are Persons of Color, of course, this being D.C.

I guess they saw Congresscritters sending their kids to tony private schools instead of the behavioral-sink D.C. public schools and thought, ‘Hey, gotta get me some of that’.

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To understand how difficult and expensive it is to build housing in San Francisco, observe the case of Robert Tillman. Tillman owns a single-story laundromat in the city’s Mission District. Since 2014, he has been attempting to develop his property into a 75-unit apartment building.

The city is in the midst of a housing affordability crisis, with an average one-bedroom apartment going for $3,400 a month. So you might think Tillman’s project would sail through the permitting process. Instead, the city’s labyrinthine process of reviews, regulations, and appeals has dragged on for four years. The project has cost the self-described “accidental developer” nearly $1 million so far, and he hasn’t even broken ground yet.

Just bureaucrats being bureacrats? No, there are residential crazies to deal with as well.

The real opposition came from some of the neighbors. A community meeting in January 2016 served as something of a flashpoint.

At the meeting, one woman fretted that the tall building would violate the privacy of a nearby public school. Another argued that the project needed to be 100 percent affordable housing. Two representatives from local Latino Cultural District Calle 24 said that even a 100 percent affordable housing project was out of the question, given the proposed height of the development.

When Tillman said he saw his project as necessary so people like his daughter could afford to come back and live in the city, one particularly motivated activist said she wished his daughter was killed in a terrorist attack.

Such local ‘activists’ are rife in California, since they’ve realized that they can hold construction projects to ransom by threatening to delay progress until it’s economically dead unless they get to wet their beaks.

Read it.

Perhaps this will start a trend.

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Nancy Pelosi was heckled by a town hall attendee in Phoenix, Arizona Tuesday.

“These are kitchen table issues for America’s families,” the House Minority Leader stated while voicing her opposition to the tax cuts signed into law by President Trump. “Most people are not in deadening poverty, but some are. Most people have to struggle to make ends meet.”

“How much are you worth, Nancy?” a woman yelled over Pelosi’s screed.

“No, we’re not talking about that,” Pelosi shot back. “I’m a mother of five, I can speak louder than anybody.”

So her first impulse is to shout down the person questioning her. Good to know. I guess her definition of town hall meeting is ‘I speak, you shut up and listen’.

It should be noted that Pelosi is one of the wealthiest members of Congress and the wealthiest female member.

She and her husband have a combined net worth in excess of $100 million.

I see no evidence that she agrees with Bill Gates that she ought to be paying higher taxes. Maybe the money is all in her husband’s name.

Alex Tubarrok, a Real Economist, looks at the Unintended Consequences of politicians meddling.

In a market economy bidding tends to move resources from low-valued uses to high-valued uses. Regulations that prevent bidding freeze resources into low-valued uses–that’s bad for the resource owners and bad for society as the total value of production is reduced but it can be good for the consumers of low-valued uses.

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I grew up in a time when Washington’s birthday was not only observed on February 22, but was celebrated with the Fannie Farmer chocolate axe honoring the mythical story told about Washington by Parson Weems. In 1968 Washington’s Birthday was moved to the third Monday in February by virtue of the Uniform Holidays Bill. It has subsequently become known as the nondescript Presidents’ Day by which we know it today.

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As the price of housing continues to rise in many cities, one popular progressive policy idea to address it is inclusionary zoning. Inclusionary zoning requires that a certain percentage of units in a building be priced at below market, targeted at people who earn some fraction of the area median income. Often this set aside is required in exchange for density bonuses or other things the developer might want.

Portland passed one of these, and according to a report in the Portland Mercury, construction fell off a cliff.

Markets work the way markets work even when you don’t want them to.

Whenever government interferes with the action of a market, participants in that market take action that seems best in their own self-interest: either working around the government restrictions (a ‘black market’) if they can do so profitably, or deserting the market if they can’t work around the constraints. (Organized crime depends on such market constraints for their profits; their business model is working around government constraints on markets, and they are pretty good at it.)

Politicians never seem to learn that they can’t just pass a law and have everyone do what the politicians want them to do in the way that politicians want them to do it.

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How, you may ask, do energy taxes ‘fight’ ‘climate chante’? Why, by discouraging the use of ‘energy’ and thus the ThoughtCrime actions that bring on ‘climate change’.

Oddly enough, it also provides parasitic government bureaucrats with extra money to waste. Purely a coincidence, of course, Win-win!

CNN’s Hossain — Republican Women Are ‘Trapped’ With ‘Abuser’ Trump  Of course, there is no evidence that Trump is an ‘abuser’ — the overwhelming majority of ‘abusers’ outed so far are Democrats.

Former Clinton Advisor Attacks Sarah Sanders — ‘She Lies Every Day’  No actual lies cited, of course, just vague allegations.

‘This Narrative Has Sunk In’: MSNBC Panel Betray The Political Agenda Behind Trump Coverage

MSNBC Analyst: Trump’s the ‘Commander-in-Chief of American Rape Culture’  Now they’re just making stuff up.

Mike Pence ‘thinks Jesus tells him to say things’, says former Trump aide Omarosa  And of course it has to be true because a black woman said it.

CNN Contributor: ‘Trump Should Be Charged With Manslaughter!’  No doubt for strangling the Proglodyte Dream.

Ed Asner Jokes About Trump’s Sons Being Mauled By Lion  Yet he would be the first to scream of somebody made a similar joke about one of Obama’s daughters.

Former Obama Campaign Aide Compares Trump to Child Murdering Haitian Dictator  Since that child-murdering Haitan dictator was black, I don’t see the resemblance.

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I wrote here about the void in the Trump/Sessions, where four nominees for Assistant Attorney General positions are being held up due to Senate inaction. The four positions are crucial ones: Assistant Attorney General, Civil Division; Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division; Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division; and Assistant Attorney General, National Security Division.

Why can’t these nominees get a vote? Apparently, it’s because of marijuana. Sen. Cory Gardner is vexed with Attorney General Sessions over enforcement of Federal marijuana laws in Colorado.

It’s offensive that these archaic privileges are standing in the way of efficient government. It’s especially offensive that a Republican Senator is impeding a Republican administration in pursuit of so trivial a subject.

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Yet another example of the culture of corruption in Democrat-run cities.

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Tell the truth — do we really NEED an Ambassador to Germany? If Trump want to talk to Merkel, he picks up the phone. If Tillerson wants to talk to Gabriel, he picks up the phone. I don’t see this as a major problem. Or even a minor problem.

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New York City public defenders protested Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers Thursday for arresting their clients at courthouses.

Note that these are illegal immigrants who have been arrested for committing crimes.

Several hundred public defenders lined up outside a courthouse in the Bronx after ICE agents arrested Dembele Lanier, an illegal immigrant who was leaving the courthouse after seeing a judge for an assault charge. His wife said the ICE agents were waiting for Lanier outside of the courthouse, WNYC News reported.

In a ‘sanctuary city’ like New York, it’s their most efficient option.

After Lanier’s arrest, Bronx public defenders and attorneys for The Legal Aid Society gathered in front of the courthouse with posters that read “immigrants are welcome here.”

Note the refusal to distinguish between legal immigrants (who are indeed welcome here) and illegal immigrants (who aren’t).

The Legal Aid Society is a communist-dominated group whose members never met a criminal that they didn’t try to get off.

The Bronx public defenders said ICE was “not an immigration enforcement zone.”

That’s a very stupid statement for lawyers to make.

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ThoughtCrime! Down the Memory Hole!

Time to home-school.

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She was expensive, but worth it.

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Good luck with that.

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I’m surprised it’s that low.

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‘Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings’

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These are the people that Democrats want in charge of our health care.

You would have thought that the Post Office was sufficient counter-example, but no ….

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Because the game was played in Minneapolis, the $112,000 bonuses paid to each player on the winning team (and the $56,000 bonuses paid to the losers), will be taxable in Minnesota, which has some of the highest personal income tax rates in the country. Each member of the Eagles will end up paying about $7,200 of their Super Bowl bonus to the state of Minnesota. That comes on top of an estimated $23,500 federal tax hit for each of the winning player’s shares.

And that’s just the start. Minnesota also imposes a so-called “jock tax” on athletes that visit the state for practices and games. Income earned during the days leading up to Sunday’s big game will be taxed at the state’s top marginal rate of 9.85 percent. Only California has a higher jock tax, and even states with no personal income taxes—like Texas and Florida, both frequent Super Bowl hosts—still hit up professional athletes, coaches, and team staff with special taxes.

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“The law that is supposed to restrict copying has instead been misused to crack down on competition, strangling a future’s worth of gadgets in their cradles,” said EFF Special Advisor Cory Doctorow. “But it’s hard to notice what isn’t there. We’re aiming to fix that with this Catalog of Missing Devices. It’s a collection of tools, services, and products that could have been, and should have been, but never were.”

The damage comes from Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA 1201), which covers digital rights management software (DRM). DRM was designed to block software counterfeiting and other illegal copying, and Section 1201 bans DRM circumvention. However, businesses quickly learned that by employing DRM they could thwart honest competitors from creating inter-operative tools.

Right now, that means you could be breaking the law just by doing something as simple as repairing your car on your own, without the vehicle-maker’s pricey tool. Other examples include rightsholders forcing you to buy additional copies of movies you want to watch on your phone—instead of allowing you to rip the DVD you already own and are entitled to watch—or manufacturers blocking your printer from using anything but their official ink cartridges.

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Attorney Michael Haddock told WZZM-TV this week that he received a notice from the Michigan Unemployment Insurance Agency in the mail that said “Michael Ryder” will receive $360 a week.

But there is nobody named “Michael Ryder” at Haddock’s address. “Ryder,” however, is the name of Haddock’s German Shepherd and Michael is his first name. So Haddock assumed the notice was for his dog.

“Not sure what he is going to do with the money, but it should be interesting,” Haddock said. “I knew he was clever, but he surprised me this time.”

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When I was a young boy, that was called The Draft and supposedly we don’t have it any more.

I guess these two ‘legislators’ (perhaps the more accurate term would be ‘commissars’) didn’t get the memo.

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Last month, Republican Assemblyman Tom Lackey introduced legislation to repeal California’s recently enacted tax on space travel. California’s space tax, the first ever created, requires businesses exploring and attempting space travel to pay taxes based on miles traveled through space and the frequency of flight launches.

I hereby christen California ‘Taxifornia’.

If we could get rid of California and Massachusetts, well, that would really make America great again.

Scott Johnson blows the whistle on the IRS, strong right arm of the Deep State.

If there was a federal agency that Barack Obama did not corrupt, it must be because it was corrupt when he took over in 2009. The corruption of the IRS is a case in point. Its criminal misconduct perfectly represents what Obama wrought in the agencies that he charged with dictating the way we live. Consider the case of Lori Lowenthal Marcus and Z Street.

Z Street is Lori’s pro-Israel group. It had its application for tax-exempt status held up at the IRS for seven years. When Lori asked why, she was told that IRS auditors had been instructed to give pro-Israel groups special attention and that Z Street’s application had been forwarded to a special IRS unit for additional review. Not to put too fine a point on the legal issues, this wasn’t kosher. It’s illegal.

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Suckin’ on lemons, every day….

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Though Maxine Waters — who boycotted President Trump’s State of the Union address — declined to give her empty SOTU seat to Ricky Taylor, the Army veteran still got to take attend Tuesday’s address.

The Daily Caller caught up with Taylor, who ended up attending as a guest of Congressman Sean Duffy, in Statuary Hall on the Hill Tuesday night, during which he poured a little more salt in Waters’ wound.

“It’s disrespectful honestly,” Taylor says, “That’s what I really believe. It’s very unpatriotic, regardless of if you like the President or not.”

That’s never stopped them before. The D in Democrat also stands for Disrespect.

Sucking on a lemon since 1991.

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Suckin’ on lemons, every one. Pelosi looks as if she’s got something caught in her teeth.