Read it.

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

And don’t get me started on what government bureaucrats devoted to fighting poverty make a year.

Read it.

The U.S. Army is one of the most lethal fighting forces in the modern world. In 1991, it demolished the Iraqi Army in 100 hours. In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S. Army marched to Baghdad in 18 days. The ratio of enemy combat vehicles destroyed to losses suffered by U.S. and coalition forces in both Iraqi wars was stunningly lopsided.  Both in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. Army has shown a remarkable capacity to dominate across a large part of the conflict spectrum. Even the much-feared improvised explosive device (IED) threat was reduced to a manageable level through the amazing efforts of Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization (now Joint Improvised-threat Defeat Agency) and a host of government laboratories and, most important, private contractors.

Unfortunately, the Army has shown itself to be equally lethal when it comes to starting and then killing major acquisition programs.  Over the past thirty years, the U.S. Army has cancelled some 20 major acquisition programs including armored fighting vehicles, helicopters, artillery pieces, communications systems, infantry weapons and munitions. If you count designs that never got out of the research and development (R&D) process that number more than doubles.

…

According to a 2011 review of Army Acquisition, between 1998 and 2011, the Army spent more than $1 billion dollars annually on programs that were ultimately cancelled. The Army’s Big Five mistakes – the Future Combat System, Comanche Helicopter, Crusader cannon, Brilliant anti-armor munition and the Ground Combat Vehicle — cost the Army a total of $33 billion for nothing. The Army has a reputation for funding lots of R&D projects ever year. Yet, during this same period the Army spent between 22 percent and 34 percent of its annual Developmental Test and Evaluation budget on programs that were cancelled. The total loss of R&D resources on cancelled programs between 1985 and 2014 is estimated to be some $38.5 billion.

Read it.

How did a big-money Clinton donor get on an expert panel next to nuclear scientists?

Theory: Money may have changed hands. Just sayin’.

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Over the last decade the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) has found it increasingly difficult to keep its head above water financially, often posting annual losses in the billions. A steep decline of mail volume due to the rise of online communications has reduced USPS’s role in the market place. As the Postal Service’s fiscal instability has grown, so have calls for USPS reform. Potential reforms range from shifting to centralized delivery, changes in governance, and full privatization.

Read it.

I hope that all of the pro-marijuana ‘Let’s legalize it! Then we can tax it!’ people are paying attention.

I still think some Puritanism is at work—it bothers activists that smokers find vaping enjoyable, as opposed to arm patches, nasal sprays and ten-step programs. But some readers reminded me of an even bigger and more cynical reason for the state’s approach: officials are addicted to their cut of tobacco-related revenues. Smoking rates are declining. As smokers give up their bad habit, anti-smoking programs lose tax dollars.

Taking dollars from government agencies and government-addicted nonprofits makes them as grumpy as taking the last pack of cigarettes from a habitual smoker. Even though the state passed several new laws—raising the smoking age to 21 and regulating e-cigarettes like tobacco, for instance—anti-tobacco activists have qualified an initiative for the November ballot that would go even further. The “California Healthcare, Research and Prevention Tobacco Tax Act of 2016” is, as its name suggests, all about hiking tax rates.

Read it.

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

“She’s an honorable person. We know that,” Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), expected to be the next Senate Democratic leader, told reporters on Thursday. “She has said nothing was discussed related to the investigation so you have two choices: To say this didn’t matter or she’s lying. I think it didn’t matter. I don’t think she’s lying.”

I don’t consider Chuckie Schumer to be an adequate character witness.

“All I can say is Loretta Lynch is one of the most outstanding human beings I’ve ever known,” Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said.

Considering with whom Harry Reid tends to associate, that’s not even a low bar, it’s barely a line painted on the ground.

“There was no discussion on any matter pending before the Department or any matter pending with any other body, there was no discussion of Benghazi, no discussion of State Department emails,” she told reporters.

And if you believe that one, she’ll tell you another one. What’s next? Asking us to believe Bill Clinton?

Read it.

Of course they are.

Insurers helped cheerlead the creation of Obamacare, with plenty of encouragement – and pressure – from Democrats and the Obama administration. As long as the Affordable Care Act included an individual mandate that forced Americans to buy its product, insurers offered political cover for the government takeover of the individual-plan marketplaces. With the prospect of tens of millions of new customers forced into the market for comprehensive health-insurance plans, whether they needed that coverage or not, underwriters saw potential for a massive windfall of profits.

Six years later, those dreams have failed to materialize. Now some insurers want taxpayers to provide them the profits to which they feel entitled — not through superior products and services, but through lawsuits.

Read it.

“Nothing is ever as expensive as something our government provides for ‘free’ said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform.

Clinton has outlined several onerous tax increases she wants to impose on the American people. The tax increase proposals up to at least $1 trillion.

‘Tax and spend’ has worked for the Democrats so long that it’s second nature. They don’t even realize when they’re doing it.

Read it.

Yesterday, I linked to the additional views that Reps. Jim Jordan and Mike Pompeo presented in connection with the report of the House Select Committee on Benghazi. I’m told that a major reason for submitting additional views was the unwillingness of Trey Gowdy, chairman of the committee, to present any conclusions in his report.

Gowdy and the chief investigator decided just to present the facts — no conclusions. If they thought this odd decision would win approval from the mainstream media, they were mistaken. Most outlets referred to the report as a Republican report, rather than the report of the committee. I don’t recall the MSM calling Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s controversial and sulky hit piece on the CIA (the so-called torture report) a Democratic report. It was cited as the report of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

If you haven’t read the additional views of Reps. Jordan and Pompeo, I again urge you to do so. I want to comment on a portion of their statement that I don’t think has received enough attention.

Read it.

Flash back three years ago, and remember when the secretary of Homeland Security declared “the border has never been stronger.” Well, if what is going on at America’s border with Mexico is a success, Americans should shudder to think what failure looks like.

Unaccompanied children crossing the border is up over 70 percent this year. Other categories and overall numbers are on the rise as well, reflecting significant increases since 2014. And it is not just the numbers that are troubling to Americans. They are worried about national security threats on the Southern border.

Read it.

Just when you thought the Star Wars prequels couldn’t get any worse. You knew something like this was out there (“out there” in both senses of the term) in the journal Communication, Culture, and Critique:

Darth Vader Made Me Do It! Anakin Skywalker’s Avoidance of Responsibility and the Gray Areas of Hegemonic Masculinity in the Star Wars Universe

Joshua Atkinson (Bowling Green State University) and Bernadette Calafell (University of Denver)

You can’t make this shit up.

Read it.

It still took them a day to try (and fail) to find some way to blame it on Republicans, Trump, or the NRA.

Read it.

Who says police departments always move swiftly to protect their own? Sometimes it takes them almost nine years to find a fellow officer not guilty. Such is the case with Manuel Avila, a Paterson, New Jersey, cop who was accused of sexual assault in 2007. A local woman claimed that Avila had forced her to perform oral sex on him while she was in police custody.

A few days before the alleged assault, a city psychiatrist had ruled Avila unfit to carry a weapon and recommended that he retire. Instead, police officials decided to reassign him for six months to a duty that didn’t involve carrying a weapon, at which point he would reach 20 years of service—a pension milestone. Avila was assigned to monitor municipal holding cells.

Avila was acquitted of criminal charges related to the alleged assault in 2010. The city settled a civil lawsuit with his accuser in 2011, agreeing to pay her $710,000. But somehow, the police department’s internal investigation persisted through early 2016.

Throughout this time, Avila was on paid leave from the Paterson Police Department. By the end of his nine years on suspension, Avila had collected about $900,000 in income for doing nothing. With Avila’s pay, the settlement with his accuser, and legal fees, the city has spent about $1.9 million on this case.

As Jerry Pournelle likes to say, ‘The purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.’

Read it.

A super-PAC backing Hillary Clinton has accepted $200,000 in donations from a company holding multiple contracts with the federal government — despite a ban on such contributions.

According to a review of contributions by The Hill, Boston-based Suffolk Construction made two contributions of $100,000 to Priorities USA, which is backing the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.

At the time it made the contributions, Suffolk held multiple contracts worth $976,560 with the Department of Defense for maintenance and construction projects at a Naval base in Newport, R.I., and the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, N.Y., according to the government website USASpending.gov.

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Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods were heroes who gave their lives in service to our country. Their bravery and the courageous actions of so many others on the ground that night should be honored.

When the Select Committee was formed, I promised to conduct this investigation in a manner worthy of the American people’s respect, and worthy of the memory of those who died. That is exactly what my colleagues and I have done.

Now, I simply ask the American people to read this report for themselves, look at the evidence we have collected, and reach their own conclusions. You can read this report in less time than our fellow citizens were taking fire and fighting for their lives on the rooftops and in the streets of Benghazi.

Contrary to what the Drive-By Media are reporting, it shows Clinton’s malfeasance in detail.

Read it.

Yet another corrupt Democrat.

Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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Why did some Democrats skip this week’s sit-in on the chamber floor? The reasons run the gamut.

While the Democrats were overwhelmingly united in their remarkable 25-hour protest of congressional inaction on gun reform, not everyone participated. And the no-shows were absent for a range of reasons, only a handful of which were related to either the protest itself or the legislation it was designed to move. They included illness, family tragedy, travel and legal trouble.

This ability to act in unison is why Democrats keep winning and Republicans keep losing, no matter what the voting strength each might have.

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A slip-up made by a technician fitting an electronic tracking bracelet on a man with a long-standing criminal record has ended in tragedy.

The GPS device was mistakenly applied to the ankle of Washington DC man Quincy Green’s fake leg in April, while he was on house arrest for a gun charge.

Mr Green, 34, then removed his prosthetic leg with the electronic tracker attached, before allegedly shooting and killing Dana Hamilton, 44, in the American capital in the early hours of 19 May.

If there is some way to screw something up, a government employee will find it.

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

Read it.

AP has identified at least 75 meetings that Hillary Clinton had with longtime political donors, Clinton Foundation contributors, and corporate and other outside interests that were not recorded (or not properly recorded) on her State Department calendar. AP identified the meetings by comparing her calendar with separate planning schedules supplied to Clinton by aides in advance of each day’s events.

In many cases, Clinton’s State Department calendar simply excluded the meeting altogether. On other occasions, the names of those with whom she met were omitted.

Read it.

Two professors at the University of Northern Colorado were investigated after students complained that they were forced to hear opposing viewpoints.

The complaints were made to Northern Colorado’s “Bias Response Team,” an Orwellian office on campus that asks students to report their peers and professors for anything that upsets or offends them. When the news outlet Heat Street made an open records request for some of the complaints, it discovered that two students had become so upset about having to hear an opinion they disagreed with they filed reports with school administrators.

And rather than telling the students to buck up because they might hear those opinions outside of college or on the news or in the media, the schools told the professors to stop teaching that there’s an alternate viewpoint.

Read it.

For 17 years, Tom Carroll and Hermine Ricketts grew a vegetable garden in the front yard of their Miami Shores, Florida home, and no one ever complained. Then, the City Council passed a law requiring front lawns be covered with only with grass, sod or “living ground cover,” and city officials threatened them with a $50 a day fine if they planted that garden again. The couple are now in court fighting for their right to plant their garden.

What business is it of a City Council what sort of plants people grow in their own yards? This is iniquitous.

Read it.

Professors registered as Democrats outnumber those registered as Republicans by a ratio of roughly 12 to one at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill – and in 15 departments zero registered Republican professors can be found – according to educators’ registered party affiliations.

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

Asked by The College Fix to comment on the results, University of North Carolina Chapel Hill spokesman Jim Gregory said via email that the university “does not hire faculty based upon their political affiliation, but instead upon academic merit.”

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

Rich Lowry draws some parallels.

The FBI has now reversed course, but this is how its absurd redacting might have rendered enormities of the 20th century:

“The kamikaze pilot launched his attack on the U.S. aircraft carrier after proclaiming his loyalty to the Great Empire of [omitted] and its Emperor [omitted].”

“The S.S. division was utterly committed to [omitted] Germany and its leader [in German], the author of My Struggle [in German].”

“The cadres rampaged through China during the Cultural Revolution at the best of the Chairman of the [omitted], who urged them to [omitted], one of the sayings collected in his Little [omitted] Book.”

Read it.

President Obama is inflicting lingchi on the Constitution’s restraints on the executive branch. Here, however, he is acting consistent with a tradition that, while it doesn’t date back to 900, dates back to around 1900 and the onset of the Progressive Era in American politics.

He is also inflicting death by a thousand euphemisms. George Orwell wrote the book on it, so to speak, but here Obama is plowing new ground in American politics.

Read it.

And fascism creeps in on little cat feet….

California state lawmakers are poised to advance legislation they say will promote greater equity at the state’s colleges and universities, but religious freedom advocates say it’s just another attempt to advance the LGBT agenda by removing the ability of schools to determine their own criteria for selecting students and personnel and establishing codes of conduct.

The legislation is known as SB 1146, which amends the California Equity in Higher Education Act, or EHEA. As it currently stands, the statute forbids discrimination based on religion, sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. But it also contains a significant exemption for religious colleges and universities. SB 1146 would change that.

“That state of affairs is unsatisfactory to the LGBT lobby in California. They want to dramatically restrict the scope of that exemption so that a liberal arts religious institution can no longer maintain, enforce and apply faith-based conduct standards for their students and employees,” said Alliance Defending Freedom Senior Counsel Gregory Baylor, who also directs the group’s Religious Schools Team.

…

“This bill is a solution in search of a problem. There is no problem, except in the eyes of these legislators that these schools hold ‘the wrong views’ on these controversial issues. So it doesn’t really accomplish anything but it does punish these schools for having these religious views,” said Baylor.

It is not enough to conform. It is not enough to surrender. You must come to love Big Brother.

Read it.

The Pulse night club massacre was the latest in a series of Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, quite a few of which have succeeded, while others have been foiled. These attacks have used a variety of weapons: box cutters, knives, pistols, pressure cookers and rifles. There is a sharp partisan divide with respect to how such terrorist attacks should be viewed.

Republicans say that we should try harder to keep potential terrorists out of the country. Since we have no practical way to vet immigrants, and, in any event, Islamic extremists tend to be second generation Muslims like Omar Mateen, the only realistic way to do this is by reducing, or suspending altogether, immigration from Muslim-dominated countries. This is Donald Trump’s proposal.

That would be a radical departure from present practice. Senator Jeff Sessions’ Senate subcommittee has released this chart, which shows that the Obama administration will soon have issued one million green cards to immigrants from Islamic countries.

Read it.

Indeed, to make the comparison to Adam Lanza of Newtown and James Holmes of Aurora all but explicit, Obama described Mateen not as a jihadist but as a “single deranged person.”

The president did so because he doesn’t want us to view Mateen as a volunteer in a war against the United States in which he served as a combatant against a cleverly chosen soft target. He wants us to view Mateen as another psychotic American with improper access to dangerous weaponry.

It’s all about the narrative, Larry.

‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’ — Rahm Emmanuel

Read it.

The number of non-Defense Department federal officers authorized to make arrests and carry firearms (200,000) now exceeds the number of U.S. Marines (182,000). In its escalating arms and ammo stockpiling, this federal arms race is unlike anything in history. Over the last 20 years, the number of these federal officers with arrest-and-firearm authority has nearly tripled to over 200,000 today, from 74,500 in 1996.

What exactly is the Obama administration up to?

Read it.

Fearing a civil liberties backlash and “bad public relations” for the Obama administration, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson refused in early 2014 to end the secret U.S. policy that prohibited immigration officials from reviewing the social media messages of all foreign citizens applying for U.S. visas, according to a former senior department official.

“During that time period immigration officials were not allowed to use or review social media as part of the screening process,” John Cohen, a former acting under-secretary at DHS for intelligence and analysis. Cohen is now a national security consultant for ABC News.

One current and one former senior counter-terrorism official confirmed Cohen’s account about the refusal of DHS to change its policy about the public social media posts of all foreign applicants.

No wonder they aren’t catching the terrorists.

Read it.

New York City politician Adriano Espaillat has proposed that the federal government create “anti-gentrification” zones “where vulnerable tenants could form cooperatives to purchase their apartment buildings away from predatory landlords [and a] ruthless market.” As a rule of thumb, any time a politician proposes a new government program to save people from the “ruthless market,” it is worth looking to see what other government programs are really causing the problem.

First of all, gentrification is a local problem, so why should the federal government get involved? Espaillat’s answer is “the federal level . . . is really where the money is.” The real answer is that Espaillat is running for Congress, so he has to propose a federal solution to get people to vote for him. Considering that the federal government is nearly $20 trillion in debt, the Antiplanner suggests that people should be skeptical of politicians who think the federal government is made of money.

Good lick with that.

Read it.

Harvey Silverglate, a renowned civil rights attorney and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts, called investigations of global warming skeptics by state attorneys general “pure harassment.”

No shit.

Read it.

If you think that all members of Congress have to comply with all of the laws that we common citizens have to obey, think again. Over the years, Congress has passed thousands of bills and statutes that dictate how we should or shouldn’t live our lives, but its members often fail to comply with these rules. In many instances, they actually exempt themselves from those burdensome constraints.

Read it.

The young people who have moved to Portlandia like to eat out a lot, and as a result the Portland has more restaurants per capita than all but five other metropolitan areas in the country. However, the cost of eating out is rising because inexpensive restaurants are getting pushed out by more expensive ones that can afford to pay the rising rents required to stay in Portland.

Cooking for yourself is just so last century.

This is just one more symptom of Portland’s growing affordability problem. In May, median home sale prices in the Portland area exceeded $350,000 for the first time. This is 4.8 times median family incomes, the worst Portland has yet seen. While sale prices might not perfectly reflect the entire housing market, they are probably pretty close, as Zillow estimates that the median value of Portland-area homes in April was facing eviction as the owner wants to sell the land to a developer who will no doubt build dense, but much-more expensive, housing on the site. The residents are trying to raise $2 million to buy the park themselves, but this seems unlikely. At least four other mobile-home parks are also facing sale and redevelopment.

Mother Jones must be part of the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.

In 2011, the State Department cleared an enormous arms deal: Led by Boeing, a consortium of American defense contractors would deliver $29 billion worth of advanced fighter jets to Saudi Arabia, despite concerns over the kingdom’s troublesome human rights record. In the years before Hillary Clinton became secretary of state, Saudi Arabia had contributed $10 million to the Clinton Foundation, and just two months before the jet deal was finalized, Boeing donated $900,000 to the Clinton Foundation, according to an International Business Times investigation released Tuesday.

They have a pair of nice charts laying it all out.

Read it.

According to a report released by Oklahoma Watch last Tuesday, The Oklahoma Department of Public Safety purchased “Electronic Recovery and Access to Data” (ERAD) machines to assist law enforcement with seizing funds in asset forfeiture cases. Oklahoma has been struggling with frequent civil asset forfeiture abuses and it seems like state law enforcement are trying to step up the use of forfeiture rather than reforming it.

The devices allow officers to seize funds on debit cards from people that are suspected of drug trafficking but do not have cash present with them at the time.

…

If the process of civil asset forfeiture wasn’t already controversial enough, law enforcement decided to purchase these machines in order to seize a person’s funds out of his or her own private bank accounts without any additional due process. Officials claim that these devices are essential to hinder drug trafficking in the state.

Stay out of Oklahoma until this gets fixed.

Read it.

In the wake of this past weekend’s massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Sen. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) announced in a press release today that he intends to introduce new legislation which “would prohibit the purchase, possession or shipment of a firearm by anyone convicted of a misdemeanor hate crime or who received a hate crime sentence enhancement.”

This is, of course, unconstitutional. But that never stops Democrats.

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An investigation by the Electronic Frontier Foundation has shed new light on an experimental tattoo recognition program run by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and raised serious questions about the privacy safeguards in place.

I don’t see how marks on your body come under the category ‘privacy’. ‘Advertising’ perhaps.

The tattoo project has two potential uses. A simple recognition system can use individual tattoos to identify specific suspects over time, supplementing fingerprints and simple facial photos. But more sophisticated systems will also be able to identify tattoo patterns that may suggest particular criminal affiliations. Law enforcement agencies already catalog specific tattoos associated with Russian mafia and white supremacist groups, and the FBI believes an automated system might help uncover previously unrecorded associations. “Tattoos provide valuable information on an individual’s affiliations or beliefs and can support identity verification of an individual,” one researcher wrote in a NIST whitepaper.

And, indeed, having a tattoo at all reflects a degree of narcissism that constitutes, in my view, a character flaw at least as significant as anything one might post on ‘social media’.

It’s that second use case that EFF finds most concerning, potentially standing as a threat to free expression. “Tattoos are free speech that we wear on our skin,” the group writes. “Our tattoos express who we were, who we are, and who we hope to be. But when law enforcement looks at our tattoos, they see unique biometric identifiers and a shortcut to learning our personal beliefs and our social connections.”

Well, if tattoos express ‘who we are’, I don’t see any legitimacy to objecting to it being used to ‘learning our personal beliefs and our social connections’. We have a right to free speech, but it you use your free speech to shout ‘I hate Jews!’ I’m going to presume that it reflects a personal belief and feel perfectly justified in not hiring or doing business with you. You can’t have it both ways, although there’s a lot of that going around these days.

Read it.

Later this week, the U.S. House of Representatives is expected to vote on H.R. 5053, the “Preventing IRS Abuse and Protecting Free Speech Act,” introduced by Congressman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.). This important legislation prevents the IRS from targeting non-profits by prohibiting the agency from collecting the identity of donors who contribute to these organizations. Members of Congress should vote yes on H.R. 5053.

Currently, the IRS requires non-profits to submit a schedule B form, listing the names and addresses of their donors. However, this form is not used by the IRS for any purpose. Given the increasing politicization within the agency, the existence of these forms is an “accident” waiting to happen.

I would seriously love to see the Schedule B for the Clinton Foundation.

Read it.

As defined by Harvard scholars Edward L. Glaeser and Andrei Shleifer in a famous 2002 article, the Curley effect (named after its prototype, James Michael Curley, a four-time mayor of Boston in the first half of the 20^th century) is a political strategy of “increasing the relative size of one’s political base through distortionary, wealth-reducing policies.” Translation: A politician or a political party can achieve long-term dominance by tipping the balance of votes in their direction through the implementation of policies that strangle and stifle economic growth. Counterintuitively, making a city poorer leads to political success for the engineers of that impoverishment.

Here’s an example of how the Curley effect works: Let’s say a mayor advocates and adopts policies that redistribute wealth from the prosperous to the not-so-prosperous by bestowing generous tax-financed favors on unions, the public sector in general, and select corporations. These beneficiaries become economically dependent on their political patrons, so they give them their undivided electoral support—e.g., votes, campaign contributions, and get-out-the-vote drives.

This is the constant Democrat agenda: Make more and more people dependent on government handouts so they will more and more vote for the party of government handouts, i.e. Democrats.

Read it.

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

We’re not worried about the probe. We’re worried about the indictment.

Read it.

With the race for the Democratic nomination effectively concluded, Hillary Clinton now awaits the endorsement of President Obama, which they expect to come within the next few weeks. Obama is poised to play a big role in Clinton’s campaign against Donald Trump, acting as an emissary to groups and audiences that have been more reluctant to support Clinton in the past. But this creates its own set of problems: namely, that the FBI under the auspices of Obama’s administration is also actively investigating Clinton’s email server and her mishandling of classified information.

It’s hard to see any way that a conclusion reached under people like Loretta Lynch, serving at the pleasure of a president advocating vociferously for Clinton’s election, would be seen as treating the candidate fairly. Even if Clinton is cleared, a dark cloud will hang over the process. And Clinton herself should not be comfortable with the prospect of a process Trump will certainly denounce as crooked, especially considering that many Americans would likely agree with him.

Read it.

Many states are broke, even though their constituents don’t know it. The two main drivers of states’ fiscal problems are the bloated promises made by lawmakers to their public employees about health care and pension benefits and an unwillingness to acknowledge the existence of a problem. Whether the dodging of long-term obligations is done knowingly or inadvertently hardly matters. The results are still the same. Faulty accounting always comes back to hurt the people in the cities and states that have used it—for example, Puerto Rico, Detroit, and Chicago.

Jerry Pournelle is fond of saying that the function of government is to hire and pay government workers. Now those buzzards are coming home to roost.

Read it.

Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, R-Wash., the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, on Tuesday introduced a new bill in the House to completely overhaul how the nation’s soldiers receive care from the Dept. of Veterans Affairs.

The solution: Start turning the sole, and worst, example of the federal government’s single-payer system back to the private sector.

About fargin time. The VA system is the poster child proving that government-provided health care would be a disaster.

The “Caring for our Heroes in the 21st Century Act” would launch a “Veterans Accountable Care Organization” to run the VA’s health care facilities. It would help create a new voucher system whereby soldiers could use VA funding to get care from the private sector. Specifically, it would enroll all new veterans into VetsCare Choice, which covers private health care, and it would let already-enrolled veterans opt in or stay with their existing coverage.

In other words, Obamacare without the lies.

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Police in Oklahoma are deploying an electronic scanner that can drain currency from prepaid credit cards seized at the roadside using civil asset forfeiture laws.

The Electronic Recovery and Access to Data (ERAD) handheld scanner was developed at the request of the Department of Homeland Security for use by US border guards. But the gadget’s maker is now marketing it to local and state police, and Oklahoma has bought 16 of the scanners for its highway patrol.

The reader can record data from any magstripe card – even down to hotel keys – and works with Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, as well as Best Buy, Costco, Macy’s and Walmart gift cards. Any funds found can be frozen or transferred directly to a law enforcement bank account “to protect the integrity of the evidence and ensure the funds are available for trial or forfeiture,” ERAD’s advertising states.

I do not enter Oklahoma until they get this fixed.

Read it.

He is, as you might expect, not a Person of Pallor.

The former executive director of a former Head Start program in Jersey City Tuesday admitted that he diverted more than $250,000 from programs for underprivileged children and used the money for personal expenses, including a Maserati and a mink coat, prosecutors said.

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As if we need any more evidence of profligate waste in the transit industry, Chicago, Austin, and other cities are considering aerial trams, also known as gondolas. Portland’s infamous aerial tram, which opened in 2006, cost 500 percent more than the original projection, carries a mere 3,200 round trips per day, and collects fares that cover just 22 percent of its operating costs. The economic development that was promised if Portland taxpayers helped build it went to Florida instead.

The most famous aerial tram is, of course, the one from Manhattan to Roosevelt Island in New York City, an expression of the deep desire by the Crust of the Other Left Coast to live in Switzerland but still have access to Broadway and Fifth Avenue. It is perhaps not insignificant that before Roosevelt Island was ‘gentrified’ it was called Welfare Island.

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Cobb County (Ga.) Commission Chairmain Tim Lee has broken the news to his constituents that their taxes will have to be increased to complete the funding of a $40 million bond — which they voted overwhelmingly in favor of — to build public parks. To date, only about half of that bond has been funded, according to AJC.com.

But in a jaw-droppingly cynical act of crony capitalism and untransparent government, the county has found a way to come up with approximately $400 million in public funds to subsidize the new stadium being built for Major League Baseball’s Atlanta Braves, even though it denied the public a vote in the matter.

It’s shit like this that make people vote for Donald Trump.

I won’t live in a city that has a major sports stadium for precisely this reason.

Read it.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Sharon Helman, who oversaw the Phoenix office for Veterans Affairs—the one that created phony waiting lists to avoid oversight and criticism and whose exposure by CNN prompted a new law—is probably going to get rehired. Forget for the moment that “Helman plead guilty earlier this year to not reporting $50,000 in gifts she received from a lobbyist seeking business with the VA, including a car and a $5,000 check.” And hell, let’s forget what was going on in the Phoenix office that she headed up: An investigation discovered at least 3,500 vets stuck on secret waiting lists so they wouldn’t be counted on official lists that tracked how quickly former soldiers got treatment. At least a few dozen of the vets died while on such lists.

Read it.

A person can’t open the newspaper these days without encountering a reminder of the plummeting value of the dollar. Sunday’s New York Times was a perfect example. The lead editorial, about money in politics, reports, “As the money torrent rises, it’s no coincidence that for the first time in history, most members of Congress are millionaires (268 of 534 House members), according to the Center for Responsive Politics.”

This is indeed “no coincidence,” but not in the way the Times intends. The rising number of millionaires in Congress is not some indication that the legislature has been overrun by the rich, but further evidence, as if it were needed, that a million dollars isn’t what it used to be. The Center for Responsive Politics count the Times references makes no adjustment for inflation, so there’s no way to tell, as measured by any real yardstick, whether today’s Congress is richer or poorer than it used to be. In fact, the rising number of millionaires in Congress may be a sign that the chamber is more representative than it is plutocratic; CNBC reported recently that there are a “record number of millionaires living in the U.S.,” an estimated 10.4 million of them, if one counts by assets and does not include the value of one’s primary residence.

Find the government’s Consumer Price Index (thank you, Google) and figure out what your annual salary for your first job out of school is in today’s dollars. You will be shocked.

Read it.

The now famous exchange on video between FOX News reporter James Rosen with then State Department spokesman Jen Psaki was sent down the memory hole by someone at the State Department. The exchange homed in on the administration’s deceit regarding negotiations with the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Whoever dun it with the video at the State Department archives was likely acting at the behest of someone else in the Obama administration. Current State Department spokesman John Kirby has declared that the department’s less than Sherlockian investigation failed to identify a perpetrator.

Where is that super-efficient and super-effective government that we see in the Jason Bourne movies? Where are the paragons of virtue to which we are supposed to entrust our health care? Either the government is full of crooks or the government is full of incompetents. Either way, I suggest that we not give them any more money or power.

From her position at the State Department Psaki has of course failed upward. She now serves as the White House communications director. Her current position in the least transparent administration in American history can also make one wonder.

Democrats investigating Democrats: Nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.