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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.

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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.

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Of course. You don’t keep records for a slush fund.

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Don’t see why — they can just make up new climate change data the way they made up the last set.

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Hint: It was a scam to buy more votes from the SWPL crowd.

Back in January, President Obama asked Congress to set aside $4 billion for computer science education, in what would have been the federal government’s largest targeted funding for promoting the subject in schools. The proposal seemed designed to generate more headlines than actual funding — and now, nearly a year down the road, that largely seems to be what’s happened.

Not mentioned: The threshold question of What business is it of the Federal government to spend money on computer education?

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The reason why there’s a “consensus” that climate change is happening is because it’s such a huge career detriment for a scientist to be skeptical of global warming. The E.P.A. spends billions of dollars a year on climate change research and the research money only goes to scientists who believe (or claim to believe) in climate change.

Once Trump controls the E.P.A., he can redirect the billions of dollars to research skeptical of climate change. And suddenly, overnight, we will see large numbers of skeptical scientists appear out of nowhere and there will no longer be a “consensus.”

Follow the money.

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A sensible approach would be for the federal government to take the lead in rebalancing America’s allocation of population and resources by taking a good hard look at whether so much federal activity needs to be concentrated in Washington, DC, and its suburbs. Moving agencies out of the DC area to the Midwest would obviously cause some short-term disruptions. But in the long run, relocated agencies’ employees would enjoy cheaper houses, shorter commutes, and a higher standard of living, while Midwestern communities would see their population and tax base stabilized and gain new opportunities for complementary industries to grow.

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Last week the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the federal government could not be held financially responsible for issuing erroneous warnings about the source of an outbreak of foodborne illness that caused the loss of millions of dollars of tomatoes.

The warnings, issued by the FDA in 2008, turned out to be wildly inaccurate and deeply damaging.

Government employees routinely take actions that would put private actors in jail or cost them huge fines. And yet they skate — nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

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The SWPL chickens come home to roost.

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Sure, open up the border! Let ’em all in! What could go wrong?

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And the hits just keep on comin’….

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The city of Port Angeles, Washington spent $107,516 putting up wind turbines in a new city park. The turbines will power 31 lights in the park. This will save the taxpayers of Port Angeles a whopping $41.58 per month.

That’s before subtracting operating costs, though no one yet knows how much it will cost to operate them. The city is in a dispute with the manufacturer, so it will be another month or so before they turn them on.

Washington state is the northern province of Left Coast Ecotopia, so it’s a glaring example of politically-motivated ‘environmentalism’ that underscores the Thatcher proverb ‘the problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money’.

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Texas spends $275 million a year on a vehicle inspection program and has never bothered to find out if it makes the public safer or healthier.

The Lone Star State isn’t alone. None of the other 14 states with vehicle safety inspections could provide the Government Accountability Office with any evidence justifying the existence of the programs.

Sounds like the perfect government program.

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Nobody is in charge at the U.S. Postal Service’s (USPS) Board of Governors after today when the last Senate-confirmed governor’s term expires, leaving Postmaster General Megan Brennan and Deputy Postmaster Ronald Stroman large and in charge, with no oversight.

Not that ‘oversight’ of the Post Office ever did anybody any good. There’s a reason the Post Office has entered American folklore as the poster child for bureaucracy, inefficiency, and incompetence.

The number of governors on the postal board has dwindled as nobody has been appointed to new terms since 2010. Former Democratic presidential candidate and Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has blocked multiple presidential appointments to the board, according to outgoing governor James Bilbray, a former Democratic congressman from Nevada. Meanwhile, the USPS’s deficit reached $5.6 billion this year.

This is the first I’ve ever heard of Bernie objecting to people being employed by the government. I doubt that the USPS’s deficit bothered him a microsecond.

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Jordan, who has repeatedly called for Koskinen’s impeachment, said the targeting of conservative groups by the IRS is unacceptable. He said Koskinen’s role in the scandal warrants impeachment proceedings.

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

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A wind turbine that’s part of the first U.S. offshore wind farm broke down before the site started commercially producing power.

Yeah, those ‘renewables’ are really dependable. (NOT)

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The employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act requires businesses with more than 50 full-time employees must provide health care for at least 95 percent of the employees and dependents up to age 26, or pay a fee.

Katz told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that that between his two restaurants in Fort Worth and Dallas, he has more than 50 employees. Because he doesn’t provide health care to his staff, starting Jan. 1, he will face a penalty between $200,000 and $300,000.

“I don’t have that kind of money,” Katz told the Star-Telegram. “Instead of 50 or 60 people without healthcare, we have 50 or 60 people that aren’t employed anymore. It makes no sense.”

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Where’s the enthusiasm for the President ruling by decree now? They were all for it when the Magic Negro was in power.

The problem with an Imperial Presidency is that anybody can do it.

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He must have seen a film of the Iraqis torching the oil wells in Kuwait as they were being hammerd out and said, ‘Hey, I can do that to America!’

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All of which is coming out of YOUR pockets. Aren’t you proud?

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What must it be like to be someone dumber than a journalist, or even a Congressman, who can so easily see that these are a waste of money?

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Six government appointees, including the son of a vice president, who negotiated how much public money would be spent building the Minnesota Vikings’ new football stadium get free access to luxury boxes for all events in the stadium.

Which, you know, might call into question how hard they really negotiated for the taxpayers on that one.

Bet they were Democrats.

Maybe the best part of the story is the moment when two members of the MSFA board (chairwoman Michele Kelm-Helgen and executive director Ted Mondale) try to justify their sweet, free, and secret perk by arguing that they “work long hours on game days and spent long nights negotiating on behalf of taxpayers during construction of the building, so having friends and family there is reasonable.”

Mondale, by the way, is the son of former U.S. vice president Walter Mondale and he has lived the life of a vice president’s son. After a brief stint in elected office during the 1990s, he’s settled into a rotating set of political appointments. He was appointed to the Twin Cities’ Metropolitan Council by Gov. Jesse Ventura in 1999, and he used that post to push for the approval of a pair of ridiculously expensive light rail lines. With that public boondoggle in his resume, he was probably a natural fit on the MSFA board, to which he was named CEO by Gov. Mark Dayton in 2012, just as the new stadium deal was in the works.

Looks perfectly Crustian to me. What’s the use of having power if you can’t abuse it?

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Of all the problems that dominate the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, only one ensures that the conflict will never end: the growth in the number of Arab-Palestinian refugees. Western governments have enabled this industry.

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Four black individuals have now been charged in the brutal beating of a Chicago man, all while clearly shouting “white boy” and “he voted Trump,” yet none of them will be charged with hate crimes.

There’s your racist ‘justice’ in Barack Obama’s America.

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Wisconsin school officials who are bullying a 6-year-old boy. His offense? Bringing to school the latest book in the bestselling children’s book series on American history, “Adventures of Rush Revere,” written by Rush Limbaugh (with his wife Kathryn). The book, just published, is Rush Revere and the Presidency.

As Matt, the boy’s father, explained to Vicki during her November 18 afternoon (Madison) show, school officials in Marshall, Wisconsin, regard anything written by Rush Limbaugh as “inappropriate material” — even though the series has received rave reviews, and Rush won the 2013 “Author of the Year” award at the Children’s Choice Book Awards, for his first book in the series.

This is what ‘diversity’ and ‘inclusion’ looks like in Barack Obama’s America.

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Compare with today’s bloviating.

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When Denver’s new airport rail line experienced severe glitches shortly after it opened, including malfunctioning crossing gates and a lightning strike that shut down the entire line for seven hours, among other problems, transit officials assured the public that they were just getting the bugs out of the system. But now, more than six months after it opened, the bugs are still thriving.

The crossing gate problem is so severe that the Federal Transit Administration has threatened to shut down the line until it is corrected. The contractor that built and operates the line tried to claim the lightning strike was an act of God, so the contractor shouldn’t be held responsible, but Regional Transit District officials responded that they had pointed out the company’s design was vulnerable to lightning as early as 2013, yet the company did nothing to fix the flaw. Meanwhile, the system continues to perform unreliably.

What is it with Democrats and trains? Why do they insist on living in the past?

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Looks like the whitest city in America just can’t get it right.

The Census Bureau estimates that the city of Portland is growing by more than 10,000 people a year while the Portland urban area is growing by more than 40,000 people a year, or more than 100 people a day. Despite, or more likely because of, hundreds of millions of dollars spent on growth planning, the region is doing a very poor job of producing the housing those people need to live in.

Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, brags that not only is the region following most of the advice recently offered by the White House for making housing more affordable, it actually pioneered several of the techniques. Yet according to the Federal Housing Finance Agency, Portland-area housing prices are currently growing at 13 percent per year.

Perhaps that’s because ‘most of the advice recently offered by the White House’ is just a load of crap?

That’s my guess, what’s your guess?

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At last! Somebody who gets it.

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Environmental regulators in Wyoming say water contamination previously blamed on fracking was instead “almost certainly” caused by the EPA.

Anti-fracking activists repeatedly cited the plight of Pavillion, Wyo., as proof the process should be banned. EPA investigators accidentally drilled their own monitoring wells incorrectly, introducing the contaminants which were later detected in water samples. The agency followed this up by openly theorizing that fracking was to blame for the contamination.

Read it. Before you believe the sky-is-falling headlines.

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This is a Very Bad Idea.

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A U.S. Marine Corps F-35B burst into flames mid-flight Oct. 27, causing more than $2 million in damage to the aircraft.

Further evidence that the F-35 is a flying piece of shit.

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Over the past few decades, ordinary US citizens have increasingly been denied effective access to their courts. There are many reasons for this. One is the ever greater cost of hiring a lawyer. A second factor is the increased expense, apart from legal fees, that a litigant must pay to pursue a lawsuit to conclusion. A third factor is increased unwillingness of lawyers to take a case on a contingent-fee basis when the anticipated monetary award is modest. A fourth factor is the decline of unions and other institutions that provide their members with free legal representation. A fifth factor is the imposition of mandatory arbitration. A sixth factor is judicial hostility to class action suits. A seventh factor is the increasing diversion of legal disputes to regulatory agencies. An eighth factor, in criminal cases, is the vastly increased risk of a heavy penalty in going to trial.

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A United Nations legislative body has voted to kick journalists out of its meeting Monday.

Delegates voted unanimously to ban journalists from the remaining sessions of the biennial legislative conference of World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC).

Journalists called the decision “outrageous” and “shocking,” while delegates refused to address concerns about denying press freedom.

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Barely two weeks after the US Navy commissioned its newest and most futuristic warship, armed with two huge guns that can hit targets 80 miles away, the service is moving to cancel the projectiles for the guns, citing excessive costs that run up to $800,000 per round or more.

The Long Range Land-Attack Projectile (LRLAP) is a guided precision munition that is key to the DDG 1000 Zumwalt-class’s mission as a land-attack destroyer, able to hit targets with such accuracy that, in the words of manufacturer Lockheed Martin, can “defeat targets in the urban canyons of coastal cities with minimal collateral damage.”

The LRLAP is the only munition designed to be fired from the DDG 1000’s Advanced Gun System (AGS), a 155mm/62-caliber gun with an automated magazine and handling system. Each of the three Zumwalts will carry two of the guns – the largest weapons to be designed for and fitted on a warship since World War II.

But the LRLAP’s unit price has jumped steadily as the numbers of Zumwalt-class destroyers were cut. From a total of 28 ships, to seven, and finally to three, the class shrank and costs did not.

“We were going to buy thousands of these rounds,” said a Navy official familiar with the program. “But quantities of ships killed the affordable round.”

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Cut off one head, two shall grow in its place….

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If you’re a kid in Beaverton, Oregon, you may wonder why your mom never says, “Go to the library.”

Maybe it’s because mom has something else to do today other than watch you like a hawk.