Read it.

William F. Buckley Jr. used to speak of the “invincible ignorance” of liberalism, and there’s hardly a better example than the minimum wage. Generally the first thing you learn on the first day of Econ 101 is that if you raise the price of something, you’ll reduce the demand for that something. Including labor.

So it’s fun to notice this morning that the city of Seattle, which threw out both shoulders patting itself on the back for raising its minimum age to $11 an hour last year, is finding the results are . . . not so good.

I have a question.

Black people have been voting the straight Democrat ticket now for over 50 years.

How has that worked out? How much better is life now than before the Magic Negro sashayed into the White House?

I don’t see any improvement; quite the contrary.

So what the hell are they thinking?

Read it.

But if you’re looking for a quintessential Obamacare failure story, you might also stick that pin directly in North Carolina. For the insurance companies doing business in the state–the ones issuing policies to those 600,000 people–Obamacare has turned into a financial sinkhole. UnitedHealth Group, the nation’s largest insurance company, is pulling out of the Obamacare business in North Carolina next year. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, which dominated the individual market with more than a half-million customers, reported that losses on its Obamacare business in 2014 and 2015 topped $400 million. The insurer said that figure includes government payments designed to shield insurers from big losses during the early years of Obamacare. The only other current competitor, Aetna, wants to hike rates by nearly 25 percent next year.

‘If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor!’ Uh, no, that was a lie.

‘If you like your plan, you can keep your plan!’ Uh, no, that was a bigger lie.

‘It’s called the Affordable Care Act because it makes care more affordable!’ Uh, no, that was the biggest lie of all.

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

‘Like your doctor? You can keep your doctor!’ Uh, no, that’s a lie.

‘Like your plan? You can keep your plan!’ Uh, no, that’s a lie, too.

‘Affordable Health Care Act gives you affordable health care!’ Uh, that’s the biggest lie of all.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Key escrow — the process of keeping a set of keys for yourself “just in case” — has always been the U.S. government’s modus operandi when it comes to security. From the disastrous Clipper chip to today, the government has always wanted a back door into encryption and security. That plan backfired for the TSA.

The TSA, as you’ll remember, offers a set of screener-friendly locks. These locks use one of seven master keys that only the TSA can use — until 2014. In an article in The Washington Post, a reporter included a shot of all seven keys on a desk. It wasn’t long before nearly all the keys were made available for 3D printing and, last week, security researchers released the final key.

Don’t you feel more secure now?

And these are the people that Hillary and the Democrats want to trust with our health care … and, indeed, our whole economy.

Read it.

Mamaw encouraged me to get a job—she told me that it would be good for me and that I needed to learn the value of a dollar. When her encouragement fell on deaf ears, she then demanded that I get a job, and so I did, as a cashier at Dillman’s, a local grocery store.

Working as a cashier turned me into an amateur sociologist. A frenetic stress animated so many of our customers. One of our neighbors would walk in and yell at me for the smallest of transgressions—not smiling at her, or bagging the groceries too heavy one day or too light the next. Some came into the store in a hurry, pacing between aisles, looking frantically for a particular item. But others waded through the aisles deliberately, carefully marking each item off of their list.

Some folks purchased a lot of canned and frozen food, while others consistently arrived at the checkout counter with carts piled high with fresh produce.

The more harried a customer, the more they purchased precooked or frozen food, the more likely they were to be poor. And I knew they were poor because of the clothes they wore or because they purchased their food with food stamps. After a few months, I came home and asked Mamaw why only poor people bought baby formula. “Don’t rich people have babies, too?” Mamaw had no answers, and it would be many years before I learned that rich folks are considerably more likely to breast-feed their children.

Read it.

Very few of us have enjoyed the thrill and convenience of a supersonic flight. This is partly due to economics: Both the Concorde (1,350 mph) and the Soviet Union’s Tupolev Tu-44 (1,200 mph) faced early retirements for financial reasons.

But this does not explain why top airplane speeds have lagged behind for so many decades. Today, most airlines cruise at altitudes well below the speed of sound, with a standard Boeing 747-B clocking in at a ho-hum 570 mph cruising speed. My Mercatus Center colleagues Eli Dourado and Michael Kotrous recently dug into airspeed data compiled by Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI), an international sports aviation measurement and standard-setting body. Their finding: Innovation in air travel speeds came to a grinding halt after Joerz’s still-unbroken record-setting feat in 1976.

You can thank the FAA for this continued mediocrity in air travel. In 1973, amid ample developments in supersonic flight, the FAA bizarrely decided to prohibit supersonic travel (SST) over the US. Why? When an aircraft travels faster than the speed of sound, it generates shock waves that become compressed into one super-loud “sonic boom.” The FAA and other civilian activists were concerned about the potential damage that SST flights could do to the environment or to civil infrastructure.

Unfortunately, evidence-based policy-making did not guide the FAA’s supersonic ban. Knee-jerk techno-skepticism did.

Read it.

One reason so many people are going hungry in conflict zones is because too much of the donated food and other supplies are not reaching those who need it. The UN, Red Cross and thousands of other foreign aid organizations are having a harder time raising money mainly they are having an even harder time dealing with the growing revelations about the extent to which foreign aid is stolen after arriving in the countries where it is needed. The plundering has gone on for so long that the thieves have gotten greedy and sloppy. For example, the refugees from the 1960s-70s war in southern Morocco (West Sahara) decades ago are still sitting in Algeria supported by foreign aid. But it’s become increasingly obvious that, while the aid organizations are regularly providing aid for 120,000 refugees there are only about 40,000 real refugees in the camps. The rest of the aid goes to make a few Polisario (the rebel group that runs the camp) leaders and Algerian officials millionaires and many more underlings wealthier. For years people who lived in the camp have casually told outsiders, including reporters, details of how aid is stolen and resold and deals made with air officials to keep the loot coming. It was not long before donors were informed.

Sol Stern illustrates the New York City behavioral sink.

I can still recall the shock I experienced one morning in September 1991 after dropping my boys off at P.S. 87’s schoolyard. I lingered for a few minutes, chatting with some other parents, when I noticed a bent man in dirty, tattered clothes, wandering around the yard as if in a stupor. Wondering if a derelict had gotten into the schoolyard, I asked one of the parents if she recognized him. She responded with an ironic grin: “Don’t you know? That’s Malcolm, one of our new teachers.”

Incredulous, I headed off to Principal Jane Hand’s office. It was all true, Hand confirmed. Malcolm was now a teacher in good standing at our K–5 school. She had to hire this deeply troubled person because of the seniority-transfer clause in the labor agreement between the city and the United Federation of Teachers. The contract required principals to post half of their schools’ teacher vacancies at the end of each year and offer the positions to applicants with the greatest seniority in the system. Hand didn’t even have the right to interview Malcolm (who had transferred from a Bronx elementary school) before he showed up on the first day of school.

Read it.

One big victory Bernie Sanders supporters won when the Democratic Party wrote its platform was including his call for a $15 minimum wage.

But this week in Philadelphia, Democratic delegates and other convention-goers will get a series of stark reminders that the union organizers who have been among the loudest advocates for a $15-per-hour wage floor have also sought carve-outs to allow companies to pay their own members less if they hire union workers, giving unions a key bargaining chip.

Diane Ravitch blows the whistle.

FOR 15 years, since the passage of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind act, education reformers have promoted standardized testing, school choice, competition and accountability (meaning punishment of teachers and schools) as the primary means of improving education. For many years, I agreed with them. I was an assistant secretary of education in George H. W. Bush’s administration and a member of three conservative think tanks.

But as I watched the harmful effects of No Child Left Behind, I began to have doubts. The law required that all schools reach 100 percent proficiency as measured by state tests or face harsh punishments. This was an impossible goal. Standardized tests became the be-all and end-all of education, and states spent billions on them. Social scientists have long known that the best predictor of test scores is family income. Yet policy makers encouraged the firing of thousands of teachers and the closing of thousands of low-scoring public schools, mostly in poor black and Hispanic neighborhoods.

As the damage escalated, I renounced my support for high-stakes testing and charter schools. Nonetheless, I clung to the hope that we might agree on national standards and a national curriculum. Surely, I thought, they would promote equity since all children would study the same things and take the same tests. But now I realize that I was wrong about that, too.

Six years after the release of our first national standards, the Common Core, and the new federal tests that accompanied them, it seems clear that the pursuit of a national curriculum is yet another excuse to avoid making serious efforts to reduce the main causes of low student achievement: poverty and racial segregation.

Read it.

Are they coming after your house of worship or ministry? And who are “they?’

If you live in Iowa, up until two weeks ago “they” would have been your own state government, in the form of the Iowa Civil Rights Commission, a body empowered to interpret, apply, and enforce state civil rights laws and assess penalties for offenders.

Alarmingly, the Commission originally indicated that the state had a right to dictate how churches teach, preach, and operate regarding important doctrines such as gender and sexuality. First Liberty attorneys stepped in. For now, the Commission has admirably revised its application of the law and the Iowa problem seems to be corrected.

But the larger problem is not corrected. The larger problem is a lot of powerful “theys” across the country who are still infringing on churches or synagogues, or at least would like to do so in the right circumstances.

The aggressors are a small but powerful elite of legal activists, radical lawyers, government officials, and influential law professors. They question whether your First Amendment right to “free exercise” is even protected within the four walls of your house of worship.

Bad news for Iowa.

Read it.

The history of American close air support is a tale of learn, master and forget. Institutional focus on strategic bombardment led the U.S. Army Air Forces to enter World War II with no concept of CAS or any organization to support it. Despite the bloody growing pains of early operations in the Mediterranean theater, the lessons learned by airmen of the Ninth Tactical Air Command, under the visionary leadership of Maj. Gen. Pete Quesada, enabled the delivery of masterfully effective close support amidst the chaos of Normandy’s beaches and Patton’s relentless advance across France. Merely six years later, Quesada’s innovations were completely forgotten as the strategically-focused USAF entered the Korean War with no professional close air support community. Tragically, U.S. troops were overrun by unopposed North Korean armor, while the Air Force struggled to reinvent CAS. The cycle repeated only a decade later in the jungles of Vietnam, and the USAF relied on Special Air Warfare units flying World War II–vintage A-1 Skyraiders to effectively recreate the mission. This pattern of learn, master and forget haunted the U.S. military in three consecutive wars, because it lacked a force-in-being of dedicated CAS professionals.

Read it.

Military procurement bureaucrats are historically the source of epic misconduct and incompetence. This sort of thing goes back thousands of years and continues today even in the most technically advanced nations. An example of this, a dispute between SOCOM (Special Operations Command) and U.S. Army procurement officials, over a about computer software has become a classic example. It has gotten so bad that the publisher of the software preferred by the troops (Palantir) is suing army procurement officials who block the use of their software.

Palantir is the creator of a superior intel analysis system favored by troops allowed to use it. Unlike the troops, who have to follow orders and back off, Palantir refuses to quietly let the army spend billions on a less efficient software system that still does not work. In June 2016 Palantir Technologies told the army it was taking the dispute to court. This could get really ugly because there has already been a lot of testimony from troops who had used Palantir but were then forced to switch to the less effective (and not yet complete) DCGS (Distributed Common Ground System). Worse for the army a confidential Government Accountability Office investigation sided with Palantir.

Read it.

A Wall Street Journal reporter says Department of Homeland Security agents tried to confiscate her cell phones, even though they knew she was a journalist, after she disembarked from a flight at Los Angeles International Airport last week.

Maria Abi-Habib, a Mideast reporter for the Wall Street Journal, wrote in a Facebook post Thursday that she was going through customs and immigrations when she was approached by a DHS agent who said she wanted to “help you get through the line.” But instead, she was ushered into a room and interrogated for an hour before the DHS agents tried, unsuccesfully, to get her to turn over her cell phones.

Read it.

Housing Secretary Julian Castro violated federal law when he expressed support for Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in an interview with Yahoo News in April, an investigation has found.

Castro, who Clinton has mentioned as a possible vice presidential running mate, told reporter Katie Couric in the interview that “Clinton is the most experienced, thoughtful, and prepared candidate for president that we have this year.”

That violated the Hatch Act, according to an investigative report submitted to President Obama Monday by the Office of Special Counsel. That law, first passed in 1939, forbids anyone in the executive branch — other than the president or vice president — from using his or her official position to engage in political activity.

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

Read it.

A new report from the House Homeland Security Committee found that almost half of all Transportation Security Administration (TSA) employees allegedly committed some form of misconduct between 2013 and 2015. Additionally, misconduct rose by nearly 29 percent during this period.

Some of the complaints include failure to follow TSA procedures, abusive behavior, sexual misconduct, and bribery. On average, 58 allegations of misconduct were filed at each airport in 2015, with 35 percent of airports experiencing an increase in the number of allegations over those two years.

Read it.

We are going backwards. This would have been unthinkable just ten years ago.

And this time it’s the black people, not the nonblack people, who are demanding it. The KKK must be scratching their heads.

Read it.

Fairfax County Public Schools is learning a thing or two from the nearby Department of Education on getting stuff done.

The Virginia school board “has scrapped a public forum on the gender identity policy and scheduled a work session in which parents aren’t allowed to participate,” The Daily Signal reports.

The board chair handed out copies of the “gender identity and sexual orientation regulations” – straight from the district’s division counsel – to other members before the July 4 holiday weekend, with “no parental input—nothing from the taxpayers,” local mother Bethany Kozma told the Signal.

Read it.

Senior Obama administration officials took a series of decisions beginning in late 2013 that ranged from the reckless to the illegal in an effort to keep insurers participating in health insurance exchanges.

A report issued last week jointly by the House Ways and Means and Energy and Commerce committees explores how the administration came to unlawfully funnel $7 billion in unappropriated money to insurers through a single ObamaCare program.The program — known as cost-sharing reduction (CSR) — requires insurers to reduce deductibles and other out-of-pocket spending for certain low-income people who signed up for coverage through health insurance exchanges. In turn, the statute authorized the administration to seek an appropriation from Congress to reimburse insurers for the cost of providing these coverage enhancements.

The congressional report chronicles how the administration determined as early as 2010 that it needed an appropriation to make CSR payments to insurers. In April 2013, the president submitted a budget to Congress formally requesting the appropriation.

But in July, the Senate Appropriations Committee, then controlled by Democrats, expressly denied the president’s request. Sometime after Congress refused to fund the program, the administration contrived the theory that it could spend money without an appropriation.

‘Appropriation? We don’t need no stinkin’ appropriation!’

Read it.

So the Japanese have been using this drill-free treatment for “decades,” yet we in the United States have had to wait until last year to get it. And the only reason we can get it now to treat cavities is that it happens to be allowed as on “off-label” use for what the FDA officially approved it for.

Read it.

Robert Muise and David Yerushalmi of the American Freedom Law Center are suing the federal government, specifically the Department of Justice and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, on behalf of Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. The issue is the discriminatory behavior of Facebook, YouTube, and other major social media, which favor Islam and discriminate against other religions by suppressing material critical of Islam. Such discrimination violates state law, which should override the federal protection against lawsuits granted to Facebook, etc.

Well, probably not. But it’s worth finding out.

Read it.

And the hits just keep on comin’….

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Good. Let’s see whether they can get past RINO Ryan.

Read it.

Sounds like a typical government program to me.

Uncle Sam has tried everything — grants and loans, subsidized work-study jobs, tax credits and deductions. Result? The price of tuition, room, and board at an in-state, public college has soared from $1,405 in 1971 to $19,548 today — an increase of 1,300 percent. Unlike food, clothing, and energy, the cost of college has raced far ahead of inflation. As economic studies, including recent work at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, have repeatedly shown, the government aid meant to quell the flames has succeeded only in fanning them. If the Clinton/Sanders pledge becomes law, it is virtually certain that college will become even more costly. Perhaps that explains why 20 out of 22 economists surveyed by NPR judged Sanders’ proposal a bad idea.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … oops….

Read it.

According to the New York Post, FBI agents investigating Hillary Clinton’s use of an unsecured, private email server during her tenure as Secretary of State were required to sign unprecedented non-disclosure agreements prohibiting them from disclosing anything about their investigation of Hillary.

A former FBI chief told the New York Post that such a requirement is “very, very unusual.”

While FBI agents are typically required to sign vanilla non-disclosure agreements as part of their security clearances, law enforcement sources say they’ve never heard of a “Case Briefing Acknowledgment,” the agreement agents investigating Clinton were reportedly required to sign.

“FBI agents believe there was an inside deal put in place after the Loretta Lynch/Bill Clinton tarmac meeting,” a source told the Post.

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

Read it.

Illinois has one of the more aggressive asset forfeiture programs in the country. Ben Ruddell, criminal justice policy attorney for the ACLU of Illinois, pointed out in April that the “state’s laws in this area currently are grossly unfair. As preposterous as it seems, you can lose your property—including your car, cash, or even your home—without ever being arrested or charged with a crime.”

The ACLU records cover only two years, but they provide a wide-angle snapshot of what kind of property Illinois police seized, how much it was worth, and where the proceeds flowed. They are also rare among records on asset forfeiture because they show the disposition of seized property.

Of the $72 million seized in those two years, the state only officially arranged for the full forfeiture of $16 million. About $5 million was not ultimately kept.

When government employees are allowed to steal people’s stuff, they will do so.

Steve Sailer explains the world.

Last week, on his way to Warsaw on Air Force One, President Barack Obama was looking at social media. According to The New York Times, he alerted his press secretary that:

He had decided to make a statement himself as soon as they landed, and had told his aides to collect statistics demonstrating racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Now, you might think that’s putting the cart before the horse. Perhaps the administration should objectively evaluate the evidence first, rather than order its media flacks to dredge up some data justifying the president’s prejudices?

But that would be wrong. Everybody knows that culture or evolution can’t have anything to do with hereditary racial differences in performance. If you even consider those possibilities, you must be one of the bad white people you’ve been warned about.

Instead, we know that science has proved that statistical differences among the races are all due to a vast conspiracy to plunder blacks. Nothing makes 21st-century people who think they are white richer than having a lot of black bodies around. Just ask MacArthur genius Ta-Nehisi Coates. He’ll tell you.

Read it.

No wonder they call her Notorious RBG. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has just declared war against Donald Trump, announcing that if he is elected president, she’d consider moving to New Zealand.

It would be a good place for her. I haven’t done a double-blind study, but it’s hard to recall — or find on the web — an instance of another Supreme Court justice diving into politics quite the way Ginsburg has just done.

Ginsburg’s comment came in an interview with the New York Times’ Supreme Court scribe, Adam Liptak. He was so astounded that he warned his readers before he reported her comments that normally justices “diligently avoid political topics.”

‘Progressive’ judges, of course, feel no urge to counterfeit an appearance of impartiality.

On the other hand, we ought to encourage her to move to New Zealand in any event — it would free up a Supreme Court slot for an actual impartial judge.

Read it.

Yesterday, as normal Americans were wrapping up their work day, gearing up for baseball’s home-run derby, or playing cell-phone video games in the park, 19 senators from the Democratic Party began taking to the floor of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body to express their collective “disapproval” of the way 33 organizations speak about climate change, and to urge these allegedly “interconnected” groups to cooperate maximally with various ongoing government investigations into their uncorrect opinions. The purpose of this two-day name-and-shame exercise, the senators bragged in a press release, is “to call out Koch brothers- and fossil fuel industry-funded groups that have fashioned a web of denial to block action on climate change.”

Read it.

Jermaine Schofield was gunned down in Baltimore on Sunday, one of three murder victims in the city that day. Today, Schofield’s family held a vigil for him.

During the vigil, a gunman fired at attendees. Five were hit. Thankfully, all are expected to survive.

These events are not an aberration. Baltimore has descended into chaos since, in the aftermath of Freddy Gray’s death, the city failed to back its police force.

Murders surged a staggering 63 percent in 2015, with 344 people killed. This year hasn’t been quite as bad so far, but the murder rate remains abnormally high.

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

Read it.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

Kosher foods are disappearing from grocery stores in Vermont due to the fact many small manufacturers and suppliers do not want to bother with complying with the Green Mountain State’s new requirement that foods made using ingredients from genetically modified crops (GMOs) be labeled. Vermont’s law imposes a penalty of $1,000 per day per genetically modified product that is not labeled. Since the Vermont market is so small, it’s just easier to to stop shipping their grocery goods to that scientifically benighted state.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … oh, wait….

Last week, the U.S. Senate passed legislation would mandate federal GMO labeling and pre-empt state laws like Vermont’s. The U.S. Department of Agriculture would have two years in which to work out the implementing regulations. Activists have been pushing for mandatory federal labeling for years now and when they finally get it, they hate it. Why? Because they fear it will not be onerous enough to scare consumers away from foods made with modern biotech crops. The House is expected to pass the Senate’s version of the bill, but will President Obama veto it?

Read it.

After Thursday’s terrorist slaughter of policemen in Dallas, it’s fair to say that Barack Obama might well be the worst president in U.S. history. Here’s why.

…

Central to the nation’s Herculean effort to end the wrongs of racism was the new determination of police departments, led by New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and his police commissioner William Bratton, to restore law and order to ghetto neighborhoods, so that civil society could come back to life there, and people wouldn’t have to pay tribute to armed thugs controlling their lives. The old policing had ignored all but the most heinous ghetto crimes. Its spirit was: If they want to kill each other uptown, fine, as long as it stays up there. But for the new policing, all victims deserved police attention, regardless of race. All neighborhoods deserved police protection, regardless of the color of their residents. And since the perpetrators of crime are overwhelmingly young minority men, they properly received a very large proportion of police scrutiny. The alternative, to repeat, was to let them kill each other.

But unlike Lincoln, America’s first black president didn’t bind up the nation’s wounds but scratched them open every time police killed a black man—rightly or sometimes wrongly, because when society arms men with guns and authority, it will inevitably attract some bullies, making a police chief responsible for policing his own men vigilantly, as the NYPD especially has striven to do, and as Plato told us was statecraft’s thorniest problem. Anytime a non-black man killed an African-American, Obama cried racism and said it could have been him or his son, if he’d had one. Every time a cop, white or black, killed a black American, Obama’s reflexive instinct was to blame the cop. About the mayhem of black-on-black murder in the nation’s ghettoes, he gave only a single speech.

Read it.

“The turning ability of the MiG-17 is fantastic,” one F-4 flier recalled later. “It must be seen to be believed.”

But the Air Force had assumed that wouldn’t be a problem?—?that its then-brand-new twin-seat F-4s would never even get into a close-range dogfight. Instead, the F-4s?—?and other Air Force and Navy fighters?—?would always destroy their enemies from long range, using the Sparrow and other air-to-air missiles.

It was a flawed and dangerous assumption that got scores of American aviators shot down over Vietnam. But many years later, the Air Force is assuming the same thing … with regards to its new F-35 stealth fighter.

In January 2015, the flying branch pitted a radar-evading F-35A against a 25-year-old F-16D in mock air combat. The F-35 proved too slow and sluggish to defeat the F-16 in a turning fight, according to the official test report that War Is Boring obtained.

Read it.

Congress enacted the ethanol mandate about a decade ago because it feared the United States was too dependent on foreign oil. The lawmakers hoped ethanol, which is mostly made from corn, and other homegrown biofuels, would replace some of the imported oil. But they did not anticipate that drilling companies would solve the problem of extracting oil from shale rock, making the United States the world’s largest oil and natural gas producer.

Now the U.S. is awash in domestic oil and stuck with an ethanol mandate that forces consumers to pour ethanol into their tanks. Not only is the ethanol mandate wasting corn that should be consumed as food, but also it is wasting the money consumers use to purchase fuel.

Ethanol reduces mileage. E10, the common form of gasoline available today, contains up to 10 percent ethanol. But a gallon of ethanol contains only two-thirds of the energy in a gallon of gasoline. In fact, it takes 1.52 gallons of ethanol to replace the energy content of a gallon of gasoline. This means drivers who use E10 must fill up more often.

Read it.

The bullet that Hillary dodged may be coming back around.

The Utah Republican then asked if the FBI had investigated whether Clinton perjured herself when addressing the server while testifying to Congress.

“Not to my knowledge. I don’t think there’s been a referral from Congress,” Comey responded.

“Do you need a referral from Congress to investigate her statements under oath?” Chaffetz asked.

“We sure do,” Comey shot back.

“You’ll have one,” Chaffetz said with a laugh. “You’ll have one in the next few hours.”

…

The FBI does not take it upon itself to investigate matters before Congress, Comey told lawmakers later in the hearing. Instead, it waits for a formal offer to open an inquiry before examining whether a crime may have occurred.

…

If Clinton is found to have lied under oath while discussing the server — such as during an 11-hour hearing with the House Select Committee on Benghazi last year — she could be subject to felony charges of perjury, Comey hinted.

Comey’s situation appears to be that relying on such an old and untested statute can’t guarantee a conviction. Perhaps he’s fishing for authority to use something more fresh and potent. We shall see.

Read it.

“Last Saturday afternoon (June 4) I’m standing on the west side of Main Street directly across from the Hunt Avenue intersection chatting with friends. Of course, traffic was heavy in both directions,” Smith wrote.

“A large perfectly polished and gleaming black SUV is attempting a left turn from Hunt onto southbound Main (not easy). Suddenly blue/red lights are flashing from the windshield area of the SUV (like you would see in an official fire/police vehicle),” he continued. “I said to my friends, I’ve never seen that before on a ‘regular’ vehicle and I’d think that’s illegal and dangerous. They agreed.”

That’s when the large black SUV jolted across two lanes of traffic, lights flashing, to park in front of a fire hydrant at the high end shoe boutique Footcandy.

“A St. Helena police car happens to be going northbound and pulls into the center lane and the officer starts shaking his arm and hollering at the driver of the SUV. While this goes on a man exits the SUV assisting a woman from the vehicle. She dashes off to Footcandy while he waits by the SUV in the red zone,” Smith explained.

The police officer then drove off without confronting the driver, he wrote.

Victor Davis Hanson thinks not.

There was more of the same old, same old California news recently. Some 62 percent of state roads have been rated poor or mediocre. There were more predictions of huge cost overruns and yearly losses on high-speed rail — before the first mile of track has been laid. One-third of Bay Area residents were polled as hoping to leave the area soon.

Such pessimism is daily fare, and for good reason.

Read it.

The Obama administration has been illegally funding Obamacare “Cost Sharing Reduction” (CSR) payments for years over the objections of IRS officials, according to a report released today by the House Ways and Means Committee and the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Since Congress launched its investigation, multiple agencies have refused to provide information, selectively applied the law, and even pressured one witness not to testify.

Read it.

Countless foreign-born US veterans were deported after the federal government failed to assist in their naturalisation process, a new report by the American Civil Liberties Union said.

According to the report, many of the soldiers, whose service dated back to the Vietnam War, were deported after facing charges for minor misdemeanors – which can be deportable offences – and courts were not allowed to consider military service.

I’m curious as to why the ACLU is interested in this. Surely they don’t think that somehow ‘civil rights’ have been violated here?

If one is not a citizen, and one commits a crime, then it seems fairly obvious that deportation is a rational response for a government committed to preserving public order and the safety of its citizens.

Read it.

CIAShortly after Khaleed al Masri arrived at a CIA prison in Afghanistan, officials figured out they had the wrong man. In fact, al Masri, a German citizen who had been kidnapped for the CIA by Macedonian police, didn’t appear to have any connections to terrorism. But agents continued to hold him and continued to question him for months. A recently released report said the CIA refused to release him because it couldn’t figure out a way to do so without admitting its mistake.

Sometimes I wonder which is the greater threat: Muslims or government employees.

Government lies re food

For many years, starting in the late 1950s, a British nutritionist named John Yudkin waged a lonely war against the prevailing scientific consensus. Dietary fat was not the bogeyman it was portrayed to be, he argued. The real problem, he said, was sugar. In 1972 he published a book on the topic: Pure, White and Deadly.

And for going against the scientific grain, Yudkin was thoroughly savaged by the peers in his field. Among them was Ancel Keys, who believed fat was the culprit behind heart disease and other ailments. He made lacerating attacks on Yudkin and his research, and was joined in them by entrenched interests such as the British Sugar Bureau.

…

Eventually, however, the data suggesting problems with the fat-is-bad hypothesis—such as the fact that the French eat a lot of saturated fat but have very low rates of heart disease—piled up so high that it caused nutritionists to pause and rethink, albeit slowly and with considerable resistance. But by then, Leslie writes, “Yudkin’s scientific reputation had been all but sunk. He found himself uninvited from international conferences on nutrition. Research journals refused his papers. He was talked about by fellow scientists as an eccentric, a lone obsessive. Eventually, he became a scare story.”

Guess he was a ‘denier’, wasn’t he?

Of course, just because the nutritional consensus about fat was wrong does not mean the consensus about global warming is wrong. There’s an overwhelming scientific consensus about evolution and gravity, too. And evidence in favor of those theories continues to accumulate while evidence that could falsify them remains scarce as unicorns. Besides, prudence counsels restraint. Science might one day revise its view of gravity, but that doesn’t make it safe to jump off bridges.

Gravity and evolution have been demonstrated experimentally. Climate change — not so much.

Nevertheless, the story of John Yudkin should serve as a cautionary tale about the danger of groupthink and the folly of demonizing people who dare to ask hard questions. It’s crucially important that we get the facts about salt, climate change, and other possible hazards right. To that end, it’s also crucially important to recognize the possibility that we might be wrong.

Yea verily yea.

Read it.

Fourteen teen girls from the Bronx—all young women of color, ages 12 through 19—have gone missing since July 2014, according to New York City Councilman Andy King. He worries that their disappearances indicate the presence of a prolific youth sex-trafficking ring operating in the area. “Every other week our young girls are just vanishing off our streets,” said King at a June 29 press conference, explaining with creepy gusto that the missing Bronx teens had all been “attractive girls.”

There’s just one problem with the councilman’s lurid speculation: The vast majority of those 14 missing girls have already been reunited with their families.

Guess: Republican or Democrat?

Read it.

The chairman of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday said FBI Director James Comey plans to testify before Congress Thursday to explain his recommendation not to press criminal charges against presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton for her use of a private email server while secretary of state.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who has faced heavy scrutiny over a recent conversation with Mrs. Clinton’s husband, former President Bill Clinton, was invited by a separate committee to testify at a hearing next week.

Oversight! What a concept.

Read it.

Not every potential federal defendant gets the benefit of such distinctions. Consider the retired racecar driver on a snowmobile outing in Colorado who got lost in a blizzard and unwittingly crossed into a National Forest Wilderness Area, the Native Alaskan trapper who sold 10 sea otters to a buyer he mistakenly believed was also a Native Alaskan, and the 11-year-old Virginia girl who rescued a baby woodpecker from her cat.

The first two of these incidents resulted in misdemeanor and felony convictions, respectively, while the third led to a fine (later rescinded) and threats of prosecution. All three qualify as federal crimes, even though the perpetrators had no idea they were breaking the law—a kind of injustice that would be addressed by reforms that opponents falsely portray as a special favor to corporate polluters and other felonious fat cats.

The federal code contains something like 5,000 criminal statutes and describes an estimated 30,000 regulatory violations that can be treated as crimes. The fact that no one knows the precise numbers is itself a scandal, compounded by the fact that many of these provisions include minimal or no mens rea requirements, which specify the mental state required for conviction.

Watch it.

Interstitial video between Hillary’s lies and Comey’s evaluations.