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From the moment the EmailGate scandal went public more than a year ago, it was obvious that the Federal Bureau of Investigation never had much enthusiasm for prosecuting Hillary Clinton or her friends. Under President Obama, the FBI grew so politicized that it became impossible for the Bureau to do its job – at least where high-ranking Democrats are concerned.

But you knew that.

“No wonder they couldn’t prosecute a case,” Rep. Chaffetz observed of Comey’s Bureau: “They were handing out immunity deals like candy.”

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

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The best test of any institution, large or small, is to ask whether we could get along perfectly well without it. In the case of the United Nations, the question arises not in some immediate practical sense – for all its well-advertised flaws it is here to stay – but because it is about to choose a new leader, who at least in theory could make the 71-year-old organisation rather more useful than it has been. Is it capable of reform or should we, ideally, start again?

Since it doesn’t do anything except waste our money, I would say Yes.

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Like everything touched by the Clintons, the FBI has now been compromised and slimed. We saw it in FBI Director James Comey’s absurd statement announcing Hillary Clinton’s get-out-of-jail-free pass. We saw it in the FBI’s holiday weekend document dump of 302 interviews in the case. We saw it again again late yesterday afternoon with more of the same.

These Friday afternoon document dumps come straight from the scandal management playbook perfected under the (Bill) Clinton administration. They remind us, in case any reminder was necessary, of how much we have to look forward to in the event the Clintons return to the White House. I nevertheless find it shocking that the FBI itself has now adopted the routine, acting as a party with much to be ashamed of.

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A new hangover-free synthetic alcohol which gets you tipsy but not drunk could have “seismic effects on public health”, according to a report.

The drink has been developed as an alternative to alcohol, removing the risks of hangovers, liver damage and loss of control.

But the product is being blocked by “morality police” using heavy-handed EU and government regulations, says the Adam Smith Institute.

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

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The Obama administration and some economists argue that the recovery since the Great Recession ended in 2009 has been unusually weak because of the recession’s severity and the fact that it was accompanied by a major financial crisis. Yet in a recent study of economic downturns in the U.S. and elsewhere since 1870, economist Tao Jin and I found that historically the opposite has been true. Empirically, the growth rate during a recovery relates positively to the magnitude of decline during the downturn.

…

Arguing that the recovery has been weak because the downturn was severe or coincided with a major financial crisis conflicts with the evidence, which shows that a larger decline predicts a stronger recovery. Moreover, many of the biggest downturns featured financial crises. For example, the U.S. per capita GDP growth rate from 1933-40 was 6.5% per year, the highest of any peacetime interval of several years, despite the 1937 recession. This strong recovery followed the cumulative decline in the level of per capita GDP by around 29% from 1929-33 during the Great Depression.

Looking at the vaudeville-comedy performance of John Kerry as Secretary of State, I thank God on my bended knees that Bush beat him for the Presidency.

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Much of the rationale for Obama’s candidacy mirrored the arguments frequently proffered for affirmative action programs. The inclusion of minorities in our highest positions of power, we’re often told, will produce racial progress once minorities see that they have a place in American society, and once whites are persuaded that minorities can be integrated on equal terms.

Enter Obama. After a string of failed African-American candidates for President, Obama was the first who seemed to have the right temperament and intuitions. He inspired minorities without resorting to the crude racial politics of Jesse Jackson, Carol Moseley Braun and Al Sharpton. Yet he also offered a critique of race relations that appealed to white voters without the alienating conservatism of Alan Keyes.

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Rather than lower prices, rules for Medicare help raise them. Medicare rewards doctors for prescribing costly intravenous drugs—medicines that can account for up to 30% of an oncologist’s revenue. Medicare’s rules for pills, inhalers and so on are equally nonsensical. And it is illegal for Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. Private insurers do so instead, but the government binds their hands, for example by requiring them to pay for six broad categories of drugs, without exception. This suits pharmaceutical firms. Their biggest client is required to buy their products and prohibited from negotiating the price. These high prices support innovation, they argue—not just for America, but for the world. But it is unclear if firms’ profits need be so high to sustain research.

In other words, drug prices are high because the biggest payer, the government, will pay high prices. Sounds a lot like the college tuition ‘crisis’.

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The London Evening Standard has a very interesting story today (20 September 2016) describing the first day of a professor’s fraud trial at Southwark Crown Court, London, for operating an alleged £60 million climate-related tax dodge.

The story, headed World-famous conservationist “was part of £60 million eco-projects tax scam”, says prosecutors allege that Professor Ian Swingland, a “renowned conservationist” who collected an Order of the British Empire from the Queen in 2007, together with four accomplices, had helped investors avoid tax on £170 million of income during a three-year “scam”.

Hey, let’s get us some of that there free money!

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

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Our Constitution is designed to allow citizens to both limit and empower their government. Citizens were given this power because the Founding Fathers were thoughtful scholars of history. They understood that, throughout history, concentrated power has always sought more power.

But the last seven years of the Obama administration has fundamentally changed the agreement between citizens and their government. Congress, the elected voice of citizens, was designed to share a co-equal role in governing. That is no longer true. The citizen’s role in defining our government has now been reduced to the popularity contest between candidates. The absence of any effective GOP remedy to this violation is the root cause of the fracture of the GOP.

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In 2012, when I published Spreading the Wealth: How Obama is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for the Cities, I predicted that Obama would use government funding as a lever to effectively dissolve suburban school districts, redistributing their revenues to nearby cities and forcing them to import students from outside the district. Now a “Dear Colleague” letter from three Obama cabinet secretaries makes it clear that AFFH is going to be used for precisely these purposes.

On top of that, a Gates Foundation-funded non-profit called Edbuild is working to forward the same goals, in part by advocating the “regional tax-base sharing” scheme I discussed in Spreading the Wealth. We’ve only recently been learning about the extraordinarily tight coordination between the Obama administration and the Gates Foundation on education policy. Gates is famous as the chief financial supporter of the Common Core, but few people realize that the Gates-Obama education agenda includes a death sentence for the locally-controlled suburban school district.

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I am not making this up.

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

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It cost taxpayers an estimated $43.9 billion to educate illegal alien students in the 2015-2016 school year, and $59.2 billion for programs to educate voters lacking proficient English skills, according to a Wednesday report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

FAIR estimated that it cost an average of $12,128 per illegal immigrant student in the last school year and there were an estimated 3.618 million illegal immigrant students nationwide. In addition, it takes at least $1.7 billion to educate 119,000 unaccompanied alien minors. “From January 2014 to June 2016, the federal government placed 118,929 UAMs with sponsors in the United States, typically a relative or acquaintance. This figure does not include UAMs who may have slipped past the Border Patrol,” the FAIR report stated.

Taxpayers across the country spent nearly $60 billion on non-English proficient students and the vast majority of this taxpayer cost was borne by state and local taxpayers. These students also were among the worst classroom performers.

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Skraelings are the poster children for the deplorable effects of letting the government ‘take care of you’. The prototype of the Democrat dependency state.

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Recently, the national Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association has been aggressively lobbying Congress to ignore the Obama administration’s illegal diversion of tax dollars into the pockets of—you guessed it—health insurers.

At issue is funding for the “transitional reinsurance” program in section 1341 of the Affordable Care Act. In that section, Congress instructed the Department of Health and Human Services to collect $20 billion in “contributions” over three years from private health insurance plans, apportioned by enrollment, and then use those funds to defray the cost to insurers of their most expensive enrollees with Affordable Care Act compliant individual market coverage.

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“I think the point I’ve made in the past is that these are significant vulnerabilities in the process itself, and the checks and controls,” Seto Bagdoyan, who will testify Wenesday to a joint hearing of two subcommittees of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, explained. “We were able to overcome them, using the system’s own instructions.”

One set of instructions told GAO’s investigators to contact a representative by phone to gain insurance coverage. According to Bagdoyan, “We were able to talk our way into getting coverage and subsidies by engaging in a conversation with a representative on the other end of the phone. And this was consistent, year on year on year.”

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

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Seventeen Obamacare co-ops have now failed. The Health Republic insurance of New Jersey yesterday announced it would close, leaving 35,000 members without coverage next year. The New Jersey co-op, which received almost $110 million in taxpayer loans now joins a list of 16 other Obamacare co-ops that have collapsed since Obamacare has been implemented. In all, failed co-ops have now cost taxpayers more than $1.8 billion in funds that may never be recovered.

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Moral: (1) Don’t trust Harvard. (2) Don’t trust the government.

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I would say No, but that’s me.

Saying yes might invite some critical questions, starting with, well, “why?” Why should that position, and the office it heads, be funded and maintained? There’s no critical intelligence capability — at least not in public view — that would be lost; the four operational centers (National Counterterrorism Center, National Counterproliferation Center, National Intelligence Centers, and Joint Intelligence Community Council) could easily be transferred. And that might be a good idea.

No essential function or process would disappear; planning, budgets, and operations could evolve or devolve to other offices. Eliminating the DNI might increase efficiency, removing an entire layer of bureaucratic overhead and recovering for productive activity a good portion of the innumerable hours now spent in meetings and coordination and duplicative review and oversight.

In other words, it’s just another layer of bureaucracy that allows the government to appear to be doing something while spending more money.

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These programs are set up to help people who can’t get a loan through normal means.

Well, there’s a reason they can’t get a loan through normal means: They’re bad risks. Duh.

It would appear that they only thing government employees are really good at is wasting money. (Not their money, of course….)

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Donald Trump is right. The system is rigged. Rigged against Americans at the lowest end of the economic scale. In short, individuals on various subsidies find themselves trapped in government dependence—with little hope of escape. Never before had I seen such a clear explanation of why our social welfare system ensnares—rather than protects—those on its rolls.

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A group of students and parents from Minnesota filed a lawsuit Wednesday against the federal government and their school district for allowing a transgender student who was born male but identifies as female into the girls’ locker rooms, showers, and restrooms.

The lawsuit is the latest in a series of challenges to the Obama administration’s bathroom mandate issued in May that requires public schools and universities nationwide to give transgender students full access to school facilities based on their gender identity instead of their biological sex. Schools that do not comply with the administration’s guidance could face legal action or loss of federal funding.

More: Trans Student Twerks In Girls’ Bathroom, Parents File Lawsuit

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A decade after the advent of Netflix and well into the Internet age, one lender was still betting big on video cassettes: the federal government’s Small Business Administration (SBA).

The SBA repeatedly financed people’s plans to open Blockbuster Video stores in the late 2000s, when it was obvious to nearly everyone that such businesses were a sure ticket to bankruptcy.

Unsurprisingly, taxpayers ate the cost every time–part of $18 billion taxpayers lost through defaulted SBA loans to failed businesses in the last 15 years.

The findings come from a new report by OpenTheBooks.com, a non-profit government-spending watchdog and research group, examining how often SBA loans are not repaid.

Read it.

Amazon.com Inc. teamed up with Wells Fargo & Co. in July to promote private student loans as a benefit to members of one of its services. Instead it walked into a political firestorm.

Politics ruins every good thing.

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Under a Massachusetts civil rights agency’s interpretation of new anti-discrimination law, churches can be forced to let biological males who identify as transgender women use the women’s bathroom.

Recently passed legislation amending the state’s anti-discrimination law to include protections for “gender identity” will take effect Oct. 1.

The Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination, which enforces the state’s anti-discrimination laws, recently published a “Gender identity guidance” that lays out what will be legally required of employers and “agents of places of public accommodation.”

The guidance was published Sept. 1 but has gone unreported by the media until now. The commission confirmed that the version of the guidance online is the “final edition.”

You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.

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What goes around comes around.

If black people can be persuaded to segregate themselves, maybe Mexico can be persuaded to pay for the border wall.

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Sources close to the investigations suggest that there was massive and repeated government theft of public funds, going on for over a decade. The theft of public money along with widespread Wall Street fraud associated with the islands bond issues, resulted in $39,000,000,000 in bondholder losses.

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

The Puerto Rico Power Authority (PREPA), one of the world’s largest government owned utilities has been burning No. 6, sludge oil for over a decade.  The authority has been billing its citizens for the higher grade No. 2. Oil.  The payments for this oil have been wired off shore and then kicked back to government officials family members.  The difference in cost between No.2 and No. 6 oil is approximately 58%.  In some years the overpayments exceeded $1.6 billion dollars.

Indeed — a banana republic without any bananas.

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This Labor Day, America has 83,000 fewer coal jobs and 400 coal mines than it did when Barack Obama was elected in 2008, showing that the president has followed through on his pledge to “bankrupt” the coal industry.

Happy Labor Day.

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I am not making this up.

If they’ve got a cow fart problem, then it’s no wonder people are moving to Texas.

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A huge story broke by Politico early Thursday morning exposes how Bill Clinton exploited a federal program for former president to grease the wheels of the Clinton Foundation. “Bill Clinton’s staff used a decades-old federal government program … to subsidize his family’s foundation and an associated business, and to support his wife’s private email server,” Politico reported. As shocking as the new revelation is, the “Big Three” networks gave the incendiary story a wide berth during their evening broadcasts.

Of course. It’s all about the Narrative, Larry.

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Utah Republican Rep. Rob Bishop wrote Interior Department Secretary Sally Jewell to find out why NPS officials spent taxpayer dollars on 78 projects that damaged sacred Indian sites, including boardwalks and trails over 200 sacred mounds without conducting any sort of impact analysis. Bishop, the chairman of the House Committee on Natural Resources, wants Interior officials to brief committee staff on the situation no later than Sept. 9.

NPS disclosed this information in a 2014 report on agency actions at the Effigy Mounds National Monument in Iowa. The 2014 report found NPS officials “clearly knew what they were doing was against the law” during their decade-long effort building boardwalks and trails over Indian burial grounds.

And they want to put these people in charge of our health care.

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The Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu National Blue Alert Act of 2015 established a nationwide system to give police an early warning of threats against police officers, similar to Amber Alerts for missing children. The law sped through Congress — where it passed both chambers by a voice vote — after two New York City police officers were shot and killed in an ambush attack in 2014.

…

In a separate statement to USA TODAY, the Justice Department said it took more than a year to determine which office would be responsible for implementing the law.

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“The Navy ‘blueberries’ – I don’t know what the name is, that’s what sailors call them – the great camouflage it gives is if you fall overboard,” Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told reporters in 2013.

They tried this silliness under Zumwalt, and eventually went back to the old uniforms. No telling how long it will take them to wake up from this one.

Other complaints about the NWU Type I include that it’s heavy and melts easily when exposed to heat.

This is why uniforms were traditionally of natural fibers, like cotton and wool. Sometimes the old ways are best.

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While the problem is sometimes that police barge in without a warrant, here it was kind of the opposite: the tenant had not only given them permission to go in to look for her ex-boyfriend, she had actually given them the keys. But instead of just using them, they called out the SWAT team and softened the place up for half a day before smashing in about midnight.

The dog they found in a back bedroom was arrested without incident.

Apparently some cops watch too much television.

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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) officials admitted mine waste leaked from a water treatment plant near the scene of last year’s Gold King Mine blowout.

Democrats investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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The judges released 32.9 percent of 5,530 illegal aliens charged with crimes since Oct. 1, 2015. That’s the highest percentage since at least 1998, according to Executive Office of Immigration Review data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).

“They’re not giving them a legal status, but they’re letting them stay,” Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “So it’s like a de facto amnesty.”

If an immigration judge decides not to order a person’s deportation, the illegal immigrant may stay in the U.S. after serving any prison time determined in a criminal court.

Laws that are not enforced are no longer laws, just literature.

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I believe it was one of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers who said ‘Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.’

Perhaps this is government policy now.

Read it. And watch the video.

Appearing on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” Assange was asked “how high does the corruption go in DC… is that why [Clinton] is untouchable” to which he replied, “Depending on how you defy corruption all the way to the top, obviously.”

I mean, no surprise to say that,” Assange added. “What’s happening is a form of elite immunity. Now, Hillary Clinton, her administration with Obama, has prosecuted more journalists and journalist sources including us and our alleged sources all under the Espionage Act, than all previous presidents combined.”

Looks as if Assange has committed the crime of Noticing. Bad boy!

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Enter San Francisco, where officials often don’t play by the normal economic rules. No metropolitan area is more closely identified with the burgeoning high-tech economy than the Bay Area. Yet in June, three of the city’s 11 supervisors proposed a 1.5-percent payroll tax that would be imposed specifically on technology companies that earn $1 million in gross receipts.

This “tech tax” was designed to raise money to battle the city’s homeless problem. But the economic rationale was epitomized in a statement by the bill’s author, Supervisor Eric Mar: “The rapid tech boom in our city and region threatens our city’s ability to thrive and prosper,” he said, in a Guardian report. “Five years after the boom, it’s time for San Francisco to ask the tech companies to pay their fair share.”

Just to make it fair, we’re going to make sure that everybody in the race who can run more than 10 miles per hour has to carry a crippled person on his back.

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And the shits just keep on comin’.

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Saw that comin’.

If it’s going to take the destruction of a political unit’s economy to bring these idiots back to reality, better it be D.C. than real people.

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The big enrollment drop at MU has been brewing for months, but finally became a reality this week with the start of fall term on campus. MU’s freshman class this year has some 4,799 students, a drop of over 1,400 from last year, when freshmen numbered 6,211. Overall enrollment is down by over 2,200, a drop of about 7 percent, according to preliminary numbers released by the school.

…

The decline is wreaking havoc on the school’s budget, which has a hole of about $30 million. To contain costs and reflect its shrinking population, the school has already shuttered several dormitories.

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And as a result there are fewer murderous Muslims in the world.

Would that every government expenditure brought such a return on investment.

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And it is supremely important that every child get a college degree for free at taxpayer expense because it just is.