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Under the rules from the National Marine Fisheries Service, part of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, companies would have to prove where each fish or cut of meat came from, down to the ship that caught it or the farm that raised it. Fish sellers would be required to show the origin for 13 of the most popular fish species — including most types of tuna fish, crabs and cod — and when the seafood arrived at U.S. customs stations.

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The Washington Post reports that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer is under pressure over the poor record of congressional Democrats with regard to minority hiring. In response, Schumer reportedly will urge his fellow Democrats to adopt the Rooney Rule, which requires NFL teams to interview at least one minority applicant for top positions.

Thus, whereas Sessions years ago hired an African-American as his top counsel, Schumer is now trying to get Democrats to interview African-American candidates.

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A popular New York City restaurant is closing its doors after 25 years because of what the owners call a stifling regulatory environment that treats the restaurant as a “cash machine.”

China Fun, a Chinese restaurant in Manhattan, announced its Jan. 3 closure because of increases in minimum wage and a city atmosphere that treats “mom-and-pop” eateries like cash cows to pay for all the ills of society, Albert Wu, told reporters. Wu is a representative of China Fun.

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

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There’s a myth that Americans have some kind of irrational love affair with their cars, and they don’t ride transit because of that irrationality. In fact, there are very good reasons why autos provide well over 95 percent of mechanized travel in urban areas while transit provides less than two percent.

One of the most important reasons is that transit is slow. According to the American Public Transportation Association’s Public Transportation Fact Book, the average speed of rail transit is 21.5 miles per hour, while the average speed of bus transit is 14.1 mph (see page 7). So-called rapid transit, known to the Federal Transit Administration as heavy rail, averages just 21.1 mph, while light rail is 15.6 mph and streetcars are a pathetic 7.7 mph (see page 40).

Public transit takes you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be at a time inconvenient for you in the company of people whom you’d normally pay money to avoid.

And it takes between two and three times longer than driving.

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Yet another corrupt black Democrat. It’s hard to keep them all straight.

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When Eric Holder was attorney general for President Barack Obama, the Department of Justice used the federal ban on marijuana possession to arrest and imprison Californians who were legally growing under the state’s medical marijuana laws.

But never mind—that Donald Trump sure is a monster! Concerned about what Trump might do to increase enforcement of immigration laws and to loosen environmental regulations, California’s state legislature has hired Holder from his law firm, Covington & Burling, to serve as outside legal counsel. Mind you, California has a very powerful and expensive crew of state-level attorneys, but what’s an additional $25,000 a month (for now)?

Don’t think of it as selling out — think of it as cashing in.

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Do tell.

DHS Inspector General John Roth blasted TSA officials in unusually harsh language for demanding the IG inconsistently redact information about the TSA’s security practices in part because agency officials refused to maintain airport security cameras because they believe that isn’t TSA’s responsibility.

Look for … the Union label….

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The U.S. Navy’s biofuels program has “failed to demonstrate any operational or strategic advantages over petroleum and have actually increased costs” for the military, according to a new report by defense experts.

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

In 2011, President Barack Obama ordered the Navy to diversify its energy sources by using biofuels. The Obama administration based the decision on former Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis’ call to “unleash” the Corps from “the tether of fuel.” Mattis is now President-elect Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of defense.

I doubt that Mattis was calling for more cronyist ‘green’ initiatives.

Just think of what he might have done if he hadn’t gotten the Peace Prize.

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Moral: Don’t live in a city run by Democrats. Duh.

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If a lawsuit filed in state court in Jersey City, N.J. is successful, some teachers’ unions in the Garden State may no longer be able to bill taxpayers for that work. That’s because the state constitution prohibits government from giving taxpayer funds to private entities without a public purpose.

The new lawsuit is the latest example of a practice that is firmly ensconced among federal employees’ unions and is now being challenged with some success at the state and local government level. Some estimates put the cost of official time to the federal government at as much as $1 billion.

Under “release time,” teachers don’t teach, they instead perform unknown advocacy duties on a daily basis without having to dip into members’ dues.

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You know the answer. Gimme a G! Gimme an O! Gimme a V!….

Any business decision as significant as the relocation of a major production facility is the result of many factors. Still, one factor stood out when the Carrier executives met with Mike Pence, then the governor of Indiana, in March of last year. After the meeting, Pence told an Indianapolis TV station that Carrier CEO Robert McDonough said decision to relocate had nothing to do with the business climate in Indiana, but that they were frustrated with the “rising red tape” in Washington D.C.

Around the same time, Jim Schellinger, president of the Indiana Economic Development Corporation, wrote a letter to Sen. Joseph Donnelly, D-Indiana, claiming that “extensive federal regulations were the leading factor of the decision to relocate 2,100 manufacturing jobs” to Mexico, according to The Washington Post.

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Councilmember Kshama Sawant posted an open letter to her “fellow activists” on the City of Seattle’s taxpayer-funded website, urging participation in anti-Trump “Occupy Inauguration” protests organized by the Socialist Alternative Seattle. More than 3,500 people have already committed to joining the protests, according to the event’s Facebook page.

How many Victim Bingo boxes can she check? Try your luck.

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The E.P.A. is one of the reasons that Richard Nixon will burn in Hell for all eternity.

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The Antiplanner’s friend, Benita Dodd, reviews the Atlanta streetcar on the second anniversary of its inaugural run. It was supposed to cost $72 million to build. It cost $97 million. It was supposed to cost $1.7 million a year to operate. It actually costs $5.3 million.

It was projected to earn $420,000 a year in fares. During its first year, it earned nothing because it was free. In the second year, the city began charging $1 a ride, and it earned under $200,000. When it was free, it carried 2,600 riders a day. After they began charging, ridership fell to less than 1,500 a day, less than half the projected number.

It normally runs on Saturday nights until 1 am. Last Saturday, “to accommodate large crowds” for New Years Eve, the city stopped running it at 4:30 pm. (Despite the absurdity of the claim that not running the streetcar will accommodate large crowds, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reprinted the city’s press release word for word.) Naturally, after all these great successes, the city wants to build 22 more miles of streetcar lines.

Whenever you see an official estimate of cost for a government works project, double it and add 50% to get the accurate amount that it will eventually cost.

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An order closing a government lab that manipulated energy data for nearly two decades didn’t represent a “loss of confidence” in federal scientists, according to the issuing official, even though a subsequent memo by another agency executive described in gruesome detail an irretrievably mismanaged and dysfunctional operation.

The stop-work order and a subsequent review was issued after a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) chemist was caught manipulating energy-related data at an agency lab from 2008 to 2014. Another chemist manipulated data at the Colorado facility from 1996 to 2008.

“Lastly, the [program office] would like to convey to the [lab] analysts that these actions are not [emphasis theirs] a reflection of a loss of confidence in them or in their abilities,” the March 2015 stop-work order said.

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New York City celebrated the new year by opening the insanely expensive Second Avenue Subway. Just two miles and three stations long, this subway line cost nearly $4.5 billion, or more than $35,000 per inch, making it the most expensive subway in the world.

Of course, not all of that money went for digging tunnels and laying track, which cost “only” $734 million (which is still more than $5,000 per inch). The three stations cost $800 million each. But that’s not all: to complete the Second Avenue subway, the city also spend $500 million on engineering and $800 million for “management, real estate, station artwork, fare-collection systems and other sundry items.” If the entire New York City subway system cost that much, it would have cost more than $500 billion, or roughly the cost of the entire 47,856-mile Interstate Highway System in today’s dollars.

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Democratic politicians, including mayors in three major cities, are looking to use millions in taxpayer funds to protect illegal immigrants in their cities from deportation.

Mayors of Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco are looking to create funds to provide attorneys to illegal immigrants who face deportation, the Wall Street Journal reports.

Isn’t that special. Aren’t you glad you don’t live in Los Angeles, Chicago, and San Francisco?

Look it up.

I have a little list, they never would be missed….

Don’t ever say we don’t have useful stuff here.

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The state lacks effective means of enforcing the new laws, which now ban the possession of magazines that hold more than 10 rounds of ammunition.

After July 1, you will have just three legal options for disposing of these magazines: remove them from the state, sell them to a licensed dealer or turn them in to the police.

Or you will keep your mouth shut and keep your magazines stashed.

I do not advocate flouting the law. But nor do I advocate being naive. After July 1, tens of millions of illegal ammunition magazines will remain in private hands. And there is not much the state can do about it.

That’s the problem with sweeping and arbitrary bans. People have a much stronger incentive to resist than to comply. That’s what happened in Connecticut and New York after the Sandy Hook school massacre in 2012. Both states passed sweeping gun control laws requiring, among other things, registration of so-called assault weapons. Millions of guns remain unregistered.

And here we are not talking about actual weapons. Magazines are simply metal boxes with a spring inside. Even if the state had a way to collect existing magazines, new ones are not difficult to make on the cheap.

Let us all sign up to help California become a free and independent country, so that it can swiftly degenerate into a Third World hellhole, as it deserves, and leave the rest of us alone.

Read it.

Funny how that works.

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We have long lived with regulated showers, plugged up with a stopper imposed by government controls imposed in 1992. There was no public announcement. It just happened gradually. After a few years, you couldn’t buy a decent shower head. They called it a flow restrictor and said it would increase efficiency. By efficiency, the government means “doesn’t work as well as it used to.”

We’ve been acculturated to lame showers, but that’s just the start of it. Anything in your home that involves water has been made pathetic, thanks to government controls.

…

When you travel to Brazil, Australia, New Zealand, or Switzerland – and probably many places I’ve never been – you are suddenly shocked. Why does everything work so well? Why don’t things work as well in the US? The answer is one word: government. This is the only reason.

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By just about everyone’s reckoning, the so-called signature achievements of the Obama years are the enactment of Obamacare and the Iran nuclear deal. They have a lot in common. Both are ruinous and both were built on an edifice of bald-faced lies. President Obama is the lyin’king and these are the lyin’ years.

We recall the foundational lies of Obamacare: If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it. If you like your doctor, you can keep him. Obamacare will save the average family $2500 a year. Obama enunciated these lies in a manner suggesting that anyone who disputed them was an idiot. The compilation below documents Obama’s incessant reiteration of the lie about keeping your health care plan. Our familiarity with it should not dull our contempt for the liar, his partisan allies and his mainstream media adjunct.

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Hey, at least we have a plan. This is the country that elected a SWPL college frat-boy Prime Minister.

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Hey — being the Magic Negro ain’t cheap.

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In his lame-duck attempt to undermine the State of Israel with a diplomatic knifing in the front, President Obama has created fertile ground for a campaign to lead the United States out of the United Nations. Or as I call it: USexit.

…

Commenting at the time, Rep. Mike Rogers said: “Why should the American taxpayer bankroll an international organization that works against America’s interests around the world?” The time is now to restore and protect American sovereignty and get out of the United Nations.”

“I dislike paying for something that two-bit Third World countries with no freedom attack us and complain about the United States,” his Senate colleague, Rand Paul (R-KY), previously remarked. “There’s a lot of reasons why I don’t like the UN, and I think I’d be happy to dissolve it.”

Read it.

On consistent lesson from these failures is that it’s as important to make the politics work is as important as getting the particulars of the policy right. A well-designed policy that is likely to fail politically is not a well-designed policy. Often the two are at odds.

Another is that it is better to avoid entangling complex and vital systems—like, say, the health care sector—with politics in the first place. Because we are now in a situation in which we have a health care system that weighs down both the federal government and the private sector, a system which nearly everyone agrees is inefficient and unsustainable in its current form, but which, despite the efforts of reformers, also consistently and frustratingly refuses to be reformed.

A perennial problem when attempting to take money from one class of people (e.g. taxpayers) and use it to provide a benefit for another class of people (e.g. influential voting blocks) is that choices are made on political grounds rather than on economic grounds; this way leads to inefficiencies, as always happens when people try to substitute politics for economics.

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A 5-year-old in Berwick, Pennsylvania, woke his dad up on early a Saturday morning and said it was time to go to school. Daddy told him no, hon, it’s Saturday—no school!—and went back to sleep.

Now the dad, Jeffry Wagner, is facing child endangerment charges. Unbeknownst to him, his son continued to get ready for school and ventured out into the chilly day to make his way to the bus stop.

Of course, no bus arrived, so the determined little boy started to walk to school.

There’s something about working for the government that just makes people stupid.

Read it.

The Environmental Protection Agency has based its most onerous air pollution regulations on junk science meant to further political goals, says the author of a new book.

Lawyer-statistician Steve Milloy’s new book, “Scare Pollution,” shows readers how EPA has distorted the science behind air pollution regulations to hamper politically incorrect industries, from coal to logging to manufacturing.

“I have worked on EPA science controversies for 25 years,” Milloy told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “EPA doesn’t use science so much as it abuses it for its political ends.”

The EPA is one of the reasons why Richard Nixon will rot in Hell for all eternity.

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President-elect Donald Trump’s photograph won’t be on commemorative Inauguration Day train and bus passes for the Washington, D.C. Metro system, breaking with a recently established tradition.

President Barack Obama’s visage appeared on the commemorative Metro cards for both of his inaugurations, but this year Mr. Trump’s likeness won’t be on the cards because his campaign didn’t respond to a request to use his photo, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority said Thursday.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

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You might think that a lawyer and the editors of Miami’s leading newspaper would know something about the First Amendment, which protects rudeness along with crassness, indecency, racism, anti-Semitism, flag burning, tobacco billboards, violent video games, parodies involving incestuous sex, movies that make politicians look bad, and films in which women stomp on little furry animals. But neither Canton’s presentation nor the Herald’s account of it betrayed any knowledge that freedom of speech is guaranteed by the Constitution.

You wonder how some people get through law school without learning anything about the Constitution. In my first year Con Law was a required course.

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And we could have had this guy as President. There’s a bullet dodged.

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Americans believe the federal government wastes 51 cents on the dollar, and while the federal government has no concrete estimate on total waste, The Daily Caller News Foundation reported some eye-popping examples of it throughout 2016. From spending $400,000 studying gender approaches to glaciers to paying for IRS employees to live at high-end hotels, here are the most outrageous expenses of 2016.

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Of course not — it was designed to shame and embarrass.

If somebody gets offended, it’s a sign that they’re an unreconstructed racist/sexist/bigot/homophobe and need the course more than anybody.

Read it.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials refuse to explain why they let pollution fester at up to 302 highly-contaminated sites under their authority for years or even decades. They also won’t explain what they’re doing to protect people’s health.

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The worst legacy of the Obama administration may be disdain for the Constitution’s separation of powers. President Obama’s actions have created dangerous stress fractures in our constitutional architecture, making it imperative that the Trump administration and Republican Congress commence immediate repairs.

…

The media and academy enabled the administration’s unconstitutional behavior because they support its policy agenda. But the Framers expected members of Congress to jealously defend congressional power against executive encroachment—even from a president of the same political party. As Madison observed, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

This principle disappeared during the past eight years. In his 2014 State of the Union address, the president vowed to implement his agenda “wherever and whenever I can” without congressional involvement—to thunderous applause by Democrats. In November 2014, Democratic Senators urged the president to vastly expand his unilateral amnesty for illegal immigrants.

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A lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Robert Behn, writes abut this as “the law of diminishing control: the larger any organization becomes, the weaker is the control over its actions exercised by those at the top.” He says bureaucrats speak of “residents” and “tourists”— the residents are the bureaucrats; the tourists are political appointees, just passing through. Or, Behn writes, a member of the permanent government refers to himself or herself as a “We Be” — as in, “We be here before you’re here. We be here after you’re here.”

Jerry Pournelle likes to say that the purpose of a civil service is to hire and pay government workers. Let’s see whether the Trumpster can make any progress in the face of The Great Sponge.

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The U.S. Navy has spent more than $58 million on alternative fuels for its “Great Green Fleet,” according to a Senate report on Pentagon waste.

The report, by Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain’s office, found the Navy’s goal of weaning itself off petroleum products has cost taxpayers millions of dollars and did not bring U.S. fleets much closer to getting 40 percent of its energy from alternative sources.

“Unfortunately, not only has the Navy failed to meet its goal, but the alternatives it explored have been without exception far more costly to taxpayers than traditional petroleum products,” reads McCain’s report on $13 billion wasted by the Department of Defense.

Spending your money on a bogus political agenda — it’s what Democrats do best.

Read it.

The taxpayer-funded University of Kentucky has punished a journalism professor for sexual misconduct because, the professors says, he publicly sang “California Girls” by The Beach Boys.

Everybody’s a critic.

“I sent an email asking to know what exactly were the complaints against me. My message was turned into an open records request by UK’s legal office. A few days later I received a two-page letter denying my request.”

“When I inquired about my due process rights, I was told by the provost that I didn’t have any,” Ryan explains.

Welcome to Barack Obama’s America. (And yet Trump is the New Hitler.)

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Sam Johnson is – ahem – my Congressman, and does an outstanding job.

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While Anthony was setting up his exhibit with Willis at the AGU convention, in another part of the conference, Governor Jerry “Moonbeam” Brown has vowed to launch his own satellites, if Trump switches off NASA satellite climate data collection.

Well, (a) Trump isn’t going to do that — the possibility that he would (or even could) is merely another Chicken Little moment among The Usual Suspects — and (b) using what money? California is broke and going even more broke under the burden of Democrat tax-and-spend policies (of which Governor Moonbeam has been a loyal servant).

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We may see Hillary in jail yet. Wouldn’t that be entertaining.

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Voting machines in more than one-third of all Detroit precincts registered more votes than they should have during last month’s presidential election, according to Wayne County records prepared at the request of The Detroit News.

…

The problems were the worst in Detroit, where discrepancies meant officials couldn’t recount votes in 392 precincts, or nearly 60 percent. And two-thirds of those precincts had too many votes.

Voter fraud? Of course not. Purely coincidental.

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Former Rep. Chaka Fattah, D-Pa., faces up to 10 years in prison for criminal behavior that, according to The Washington Post, included money laundering and bribery. He was sentenced Monday by U.S. District Judge Harvey Bartle.

Fattah, who represented Pennsylvania’s 2nd District from 1995 to 2016, was found guilty of federal corruption charges relating to earmarks in June.

Yet Another Corrupt Black Democrat. What are the odds?

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I guess that, in Obama’s America, Congressional oversight is optional for a government agency.

You’ve got another month, guys, before the new sheriff comes after you.

Question: How is ‘climate change’ the business of the Department of Energy?

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With the near-collapse of Maryland’s co-op — called Evergreen Health — at least 989,000 individuals nationwide have lost their health insurance coverage when the nonprofit co-ops stopped selling insurance to customers, according to TheDCNF’s tally.

The losses cost taxpayers at least $2.2 billion in upfront federal loans awarded by the Obama administration to 24 nonprofit co-ops under Obamacare. The co-ops were intended to help keep health care costs down by providing non-profit competition with commercial for-profit insurers.