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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Oh, they wouldn’t do that, would they?

The allegations surfaced days ago on the eve of a scheduled trial, which is now delayed. In court papers filed May 26, lawyers alleged that prosecutors had secretly gained access to discovery document files assembled by the defense team.

The lawyers wrote that an assistant U.S. attorney informed them in April that an FBI agent had received CDs containing duplicates of discovery files the defense had assembled and scanned from the more than 200 boxes of seized government evidence made available to them.

The duplicates, they wrote, were provided by a government-contracted service that makes copies of government discovery documents that defense lawyers want to inspect.

The lawyers said the owner of the service told them in an email that he has routinely provided the FBI with duplicates of the set-aside files — and not just in their case.

“It appears that this practice of surreptitiously duplicating the discovery work-product of defense counsel in the Southern District of Florida has been the norm for at least the last ten years,” lawyers representing Salo Schapiro, a Broward County doctor charged with health-care fraud, stated in court papers.

Oops.

Read it. Feel free to barf.

To unravel the great mysteries of this phenomenon, the Pentagon gave $170,000 to researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The grant was made through the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, whose mission is “to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.”

In a resultant study entitled, “Walking with coffee: Why does it spill?” the scientists found that “in the walking with coffee problem the motions of the human body, while seemingly regular, are quite complex and are coupled to a coffee cup and liquid therein, which makes it difficult to unravel the precise reasons behind coffee spilling.”

They ultimately determined differences like “common cup sizes, the coffee properties, and the biomechanics of walking [are] responsible for the spilling phenomenon.”

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The day after a San Bernardino, Calif., couple killed 14 people in a rampage, federal investigators thought they had a crucial bit of evidence.

The childhood friend and neighbor of one of the shooters was believed to be accompanying his Russian wife to a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services meeting that afternoon. Officials raced to the scene to bring the two in for questioning and to safeguard against the possibility of a second attack.

But when five agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), dressed in tactical gear, arrived shortly after noon, they were blocked from moving beyond the lobby of the building.

The agents were visibly anxious as they waited for up to 30 minutes before being able to speak to the field office director, who told them they could not make an arrest in the building. Only later was it discovered that the couple never arrived for their appointment.

…

“The contract security personnel at the facility should have immediately permitted entry to the [Homeland Security Investigations] agents once they identified themselves and explained their official purpose,” the report claimed.

And, contrary to the field office head’s claims, the report claimed that there is no policy against making arrests in Citizenship and Immigration Services buildings.

What’s more, the field office director initially refused to hand over the file on the couple, until they were given an order from Washington after the investigators had already left.

Repeat after me: Government employees are incompetent. Government employees are incompetent. Government employees are incompetent.

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Here we have Lanny Davis, a top Clinton consigliere for more than two decades, explaining how Hillary is innocent of any wrongdoing, citing five allegedly “indisputable” facts. Then follows the customary litany, cited by her defenders whenever EmailGate comes up. This was legal. Besides, everybody does it. Plus nothing was “labeled” classified at the time it appeared in Ms. Clinton’s private email. To those acquainted with Clintonspeak, the only thing missing is a discussion of the meaning of “is.”

Same Old Story.

This is deception of a special kind. In the first place, why has the Romanian hacker Guccifer pleaded guilty to hacking into Hillary’s server if he did not, in fact, do so? Moreover, the FBI has been in possession of said server for months, and they have uncovered several successful hacking efforts into it when it resided in an upstairs bathroom of the Clinton residence in Chappaqua, New York.

“We know it was hacked numerous times, it’s that simple,” explained a senior U.S. counterintelligence official who is privy some of the FBI’s findings. “If I were Vladimir Putin I’d fire the head of the SVR [Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service] if he didn’t get a good look at Hillary’s emails when they were sitting in plain sight online,” he added with a laugh.

Repeat after me: Hillary Is A Crook.

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And so it begins. Trans people will now be used as a wedge issue against colleges for people of faith.

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I’m not saying Yusuf Abdi Ali is a war criminal. But I am saying he’s an alleged war criminal, accused of murder, torture, arbitrary detention, and other crimes while a commander in the Somali National Army during the 1980s. He allegedly fled to Canada after the regime fell, claiming to be a refugee, but Canada deported him. Then he came here, but left “voluntarily” while we were getting ready to deport him. He later came back, apparently with a fake visa, but was arrested by INS agents in 1998 for lying on application forms about whether he had ever “participated in genocidal acts.” He wasn’t deported then, though it’s not clear why.  He’s being sued right now by someone who claims Ali detained, tortured, and shot him in 1987. Again, these claims haven’t yet been proven, I’m just saying that one who looked into his background to any extent might see a few red flags.

I’m also saying that neither the FBI nor the TSA apparently did that, because CNN just found him working security at Dulles International Airport.

Set a terrorist to catch a terrorist?

According to CNN, Ali and his wife have lived, under their real names, in the DC area for almost 20 years now, currently residing in Alexandria. That’s more than an hour by train and bus from Dulles, but you go where the work is, I guess. And to get this job, though he works for a private company and not the TSA, he still had to clear a “full, federally mandated vetting process” that included an FBI background check and a TSA assessment.

And Obama wants these people in charge of our health care and anything else he can get. Oy.

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The State Department on Wednesday acknowledged that an archived video of a 2013 press briefing was intentionally edited to remove a snippet of conversation about the Iran nuclear talks, an omission it had previously blamed on a “glitch.”

Earlier this year, journalists discovered that several minutes of the 2013 press briefing had been deleted from an archived video posted on YouTube. The deleted segment of tape included a discussion related to the nuclear deal with Iran, and a suggestion by spokeswoman Jen Psaki that negotiations for that deal had begun earlier than previously disclosed.

The State Department a few weeks ago blamed the missing portion of the video on a “glitch,” but did a rapid about-face on Wednesday.In reviewing the events surrounding the missing videotape, State Department officials “learned that a specific request was made to excise that portion of the briefing,” spokesman John Kirby told reporters. “We do not know who made the request to edit the video or why it was made.”

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

Q: What do you call it when your government deliberately lies to you?

A: Obamanation!

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Of the 2,099 Syrian refugees admitted so far this year, six (0.28 percent) are Christians, 2,043 (97.3 percent) are Sunni Muslims. The remaining 50 are 17 (0.8 percent) Shi’a, 30 (1.4 percent) other Muslims and 10 (0.47 percent) Yazidis.

Not a program that I’m likely to support.

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The case of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co., Inc. centered on a peat-mining business that has been prevented from using some of its property because the Army Corps of Engineers determined that the land in question contained federally protected wetlands. The Hawkes Co. disagreed with that determination and set out to challenge it in federal court. But the federal government maintained that judicial review was not an option for landowners at this stage under the Clean Water Act.

In his opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected the federal government’s position. “If respondents discharged fill material without a permit, in the mistaken belief that their property did not contain jurisdictional waters, they would expose themselves to civil penalties of up to $37,500 for each day they violated the [Clean Water] Act, to say nothing of potential criminal liability,” Roberts observed “Respondents need not assume such risks while waiting for EPA to ‘drop the hammer’ in order to have their day in court.”

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The federal government failed to conduct oversight over the $305 million taxpayer funded Cover Oregon Obamacare exchange, according to a report released by House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah). This absence of federal oversight occurred even as the state’s independent quality assurance manager, Maximus, flagged the state exchange as “high risk.”

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But they don’t care, because He Won.

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Mizzou is currently facing a $32 million dollar budget shortfall but they have the money for a diversity audit?

Sometimes, institutions deserve to fail.

‘Audit’ is an accounting term. I object to it being used by people who don’t understand the basic principles of accounting.

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The Jerry Brown administration’s obsession with becoming a global model for reducing greenhouse gases is leading to an unprecedented drive to completely reshape how Californians live. Rather than focus on more pragmatic, affordable steps to reduce greenhouse gases – more efficient cars, rooftop solar systems and promoting home-based work – the goal increasingly seems like social engineering designed to force Californians to adopt the high-density, transit-oriented future preferred by Brown’s green priesthood.

The newest outrage comes from the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research in the form of a proposed “road diet.” This would essentially halt attempts to expand or improve our roads, even when improvements have been approved by voters. This strategy can only make life worse for most Californians, since nearly 85 percent of us use a car to get to work. This in a state that already has among the worst-maintained roads in the country, with two-thirds of them in poor or mediocre condition.

The OPR move reflects the increasingly self-righteous extremism animating the former Jesuit’s underlings. Ironically, the governor’s proposals to impose this road diet rest partly on expanding the California Environmental Quality Act, which Brown, in a more insightful moment, described as a “vampire” that needs a “stake through the heart.” Now, instead, the inquisitors seize on vague legislative language and push it to what the Southern California Leadership Council has dubbed “an undesirable and unmanageable extreme.”

Never a better time to flee California and escape to Texas.

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The continuing decline of the Washington Metro Rail can be traced to two mistakes made by the people who planned it. Their first was to chose an expensive, obsolete technology that most American cities had already abandoned. Of the hundreds of cities that had rail transit in 1910, only eight were left when the Metro Rail system was planned in the late 1960s.

By sharing infrastructure with cars and trucks, buses cost far less than trains and can go anywhere there are streets. The high costs of rails means they can only reach limited destinations.

The second mistake was to fail to plan for maintenance and rehabilitation costs. Such costs start out low but rapidly grow rapidly as rail lines approach thirty years of age.

Governments exist to keep people safe and to keep people honest. Once they wander outside of their natural sphere, they screw things up.

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

Flying on an airline these days is like marching up to the front gate of Dachau and asking for a job.

Just don’t.

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Last week, the majority of Massachusetts state legislators voted in favor of a constitutional amendment to enact a “millionaire’s tax.” The organization, Raise Up, collected the necessary signatures needed in order to bring the millionaire’s tax measure to the legislature. This proposal would apply a 4.0 percent surtax on income above $1 million, which would be levied on top of the Bay State’s 5.1 percent flat income tax. The good news is, despite legislative action last week, enactment of such a tax hike is far from imminent. The Boston Globe’s Evan Horowitz explains:

“For one thing, backers need something more than a new law; they need a constitutional amendment — because at present the state constitution doesn’t allow for differential tax rates.”

An 80 percent tax surge would hit small businesses especially hard, as the majority of small businesses file under the individual income tax system. The IRS accounts that more than 3,000 small businesses in Massachusetts report incomes over $1 million. The proposed millionaire’s tax would severely burden small business and stymie future economic growth for the Bay State.

Plenty of room in Texas still.

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Sure, put the government in charge. What could go wrong?

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In most cases, investing in low-tax nations isn’t illegal; the problem for high-tax nations and those at the World Bank is that it’s getting in the way of maximum tax extractions for countries such as France. They also claim that their fight against tax competition is a fight against tax evasion. However—as we have seen after the release of the Panama Papers, which were stolen from Panama-based firms—for the most part, taxpayers are pretty honest. Politicians, not so much.

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Hey, that’s what government agencies do … for your protection, of course.

Indigenous communities have been sustained by thousands of years of food knowledge. But recent federal food safety rules could cripple those traditional systems and prevent the growth of agricultural economies in Indian Country, according to advocates and attorneys. Of the 567 tribal nations in the United States, only a handful have adopted laws that address food production and processing. Without functioning laws around food, tribes engaged in anything from farming to food handling and animal health are ceding power to state and federal authorities.

To protect tribal food systems, those advocates and attorneys are taking the law into their own hands, literally, by writing comprehensive food codes that can be adopted by tribes and used to effectively circumvent federal food safety codes. Because tribes retain sovereignty—complicated and sometimes limited though it may be—they can assert an equal right with the federal government to establish regulations for food handling.

We didn’t eat tacos in Ireland, so I refuse to eat them here.

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Just when I thought our elected representatives had reached the apex of moronic ideas. Senators Angus King (I-ME) and Joe Manchin (D-WV) want to tax opioid medicines–needed by very ill and disabled patients to treat severe pain–to pay for addiction treatment programs.

(I-ME) means ‘Idiot-Maine’.

Isn’t this just typical of our political leadership these days? Make medicine more expensive for those who need it–or for insurance companies that fund the treatment–to pay for the care of people who abuse those medicines.

Yeah, that’s a pretty fair statement. Witness the notorious ‘medical devices tax’.

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Victories against the Obama regulatory juggernaut are rare, and thus all the more worthy of note. Congratulations, then, to Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt and Republicans in Congress over the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s decision on May 10 to drop its quest to list the lesser prairie chicken as an endangered species.

Fish and Wildlife’s decision in 2014 to list was never about helping that particular range bird. It was part of an attempted federal land grab by green activists. Using a strategy called “sue and settle,” these groups propose species for protected status under the Endangered Species Act, then sue the Obama Administration to follow through. The agency then settles the suits on terms that the greens want.

Their goal in the case of the prairie chicken was to impose development restrictions on private landowners in five western states. Because the prairie chicken’s range is so wide, the greens hoped to shut down oil and gas drilling in much of the West, especially and around the fossil-fuel rich Permian Basin.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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I am not making this up.

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More than $22 billion per year in new regulatory costs were imposed on Americans last year, pushing the total burden for the Obama years to exceed $100 billion annually.

Hey, it’s what Democrats do.

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Every time the government makes a new law or regulation (nowadays, pretty much the same thing) restricting the freedom of employers and employees to set the terms of the employment, it enables more ‘black market’ off-the-books relations.

You’d think that Prohibition might have taught them some basic economics, but apparently not.

Glenn Reynolds blows the whistle.

But, of course, the CIA’s “accident” was only the latest in a long rash of “accidental” losses of incriminating information in this administration. The IRS — whose Tea Party-targeting scandal is now over 1,100 days old without anyone being charged or sent to jail — seems to have a habit of ”accidentally” destroying hard drives containing potentially incriminating evidence. It has done so in spite of court orders, in spite of Congressional inquiries and in spite of pretty much everyone’s belief that these “accidents” were actually the deliberate, illegal destruction of incriminating evidence to protect the guilty.

Then there’s Hillary’s email scandal, in which emails kept on a private unsecure server — presumably to avoid Freedom of Information Act disclosures — were deleted. Now emails from Hillary’s IT guy, who is believed to have set up the server, have gone poof.

“Destroy the evidence, and you’ve got it made,” said an old frozen dinner commercial. But now that appears to be the motto of the United States government.

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IRS Commissioner John Koskinen will not appear at a Tuesday impeachment hearing examining allegations of his misconduct despite an invitation to testify from the House Judiciary Committee.

As reported by Politico, the IRS says the Commissioner Koskinen does not have time to “fully prepare” because he just returned from China. The agency claims that he was not given enough notice of the hearing, which was scheduled more than a week ago.

Hey, what does he need to prepare? An alibi? Either he did what they say he did or he didn’t; either way, he ought to know.

The hearing is the first step in examining findings from the House Oversight Committee, which last year called for Koskinen’s impeachment.

Following the revelations that the IRS had been applying improper, politically motivated scrutiny to tea party and conservative organizations, Koskinen was appointed head of the agency promising reform and transparency.

Guess it didn’t work.

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BLUF: American taxpayers ought not to have to pay to support a Third World kleptocracy.

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But you knew that.

This summer, air travel is for people who expect to go to hell and want to know what it will be like. Security lines have reached epic lengths in many airports. Thousands of travelers have missed flights. And the Transportation Security Administration now advises passengers to arrive two hours before departure for domestic flights—and three in some places.

I’ll belabor the obvious and point out that the terrorists have won.

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Mandatory financial disclosures released this month show that, in just the two years from April 2013 to March 2015, the former first lady, senator and secretary of state collected $21,667,000 in “speaking fees,” not to mention the cool $5 mil she corralled as an advance for her 2014 flop book, “Hard Choices.”

Throw in the additional $26,630,000 her ex-president husband hoovered up in personal-appearance “honoraria,” and the nation can breathe a collective sigh of relief that the former first couple — who, according to Hillary, were “dead broke” when they left the White House in 2001 with some of the furniture in tow — can finally make ends meet.

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) is urging caution by the media as a far-reaching federal investigation into a slush fund economic redevelopment program the state set up for the Buffalo area, “Buffalo Billion.”

“Questions are normal, questions are natural,” told reporters in Rochester yesterday as the federal probe got closer to Alain Kaloyeros, the president and CEO of SUNY Poly, which administers the Buffalo Billion program. “Get the facts, don’t rush to judgement.”

Gee, that doesn’t sound like a Democrat.

The investigation has engulfed a number of former top Cuomo aides, including one who the governor has called a “brother” and another that is a friend of the Cuomo family. “If there is something wrong, I want to know about it,” Cuomo told reporters. “We will fully prosecute according to the law.”

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

Politicians like Cuomo talk a lot about money in politics but they don’t mean the money politicians spend on programs like Buffalo Billion that enrich all kinds of government hangers-on, from the donors looking for a kickback to the low-level bureaucrats those government functions depends on. The kinds of campaign finance reforms Cuomo and his ideological fellow-travelers support could stifle attempts at blowing the whistle on wasteful, corrupt spending like Buffalo Billion while keeping the routes to government money open for exploitation by the political class.

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Andrea Quenette, the University of Kansas communications professor subjected to protests and a formal investigation after offending her liberal students, was cleared of wrongdoing. But she is still ultimately out of a job.

“Andrea has been denied continuation of her tenure,” her husband, Scott Quenette, told Reason. “Despite having a recommendation from the tenure committee and her department. The new dean unilaterally denied it.”

…

Last fall, members of Quenette’s class asked to discuss the racial tensions on campus. Quenette made the mistake of confessing her own blind spots, and used imperfect language when she did so. She said, “It’s not like I see nigger spray-painted on walls,” according to her students. She also denied that racism was the sole explanation for some black KU students falling behind in their studies.

Quenette’s statements weren’t malicious, and she didn’t use the n-word as a slur. Moreover, she’s a professor of communications, and the classroom was an appropriate place to have a conversation about these issues—even if the conversation bothered some people.

But her students didn’t see it that way, and published a letter calling on KU to fire her. A lengthy investigation ensued: months later, the university determined that Quenette had broken no policies.

ThoughtCrime leads inevitably to the MemoryHold.

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“Potential safety concern.” That’s the reason school officials cited for giving a 5-year-old girl a one-day suspension after she brought a bubble gun to school.

The brightly-colored non-weapon is Frozen themed, and has pictures of Princesses Elsa and Anna on it.

Where was this when I was that age? I’d have loved to get a day off school for the mere price of a bubble gun.

These kids today are so spoiled….

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Complaints about long lines at security checkpoints in U.S. airports are crescendoing. More folks are missing their flights even though they show up at the airports hours in advance. “I don’t know what that was,” responded TSA Administrator Peter Neffenger when told about the major such snafu at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport yesterday. Let’s abolish the Transportation Security Administration.

But wouldn’t that put lots of people in danger of terrorist attacks? First, let’s agree that after the September 11, 2001 atrocities American air passengers will never again permit a commercial flight to be hijacked. So, no need for a TSA to protect against hijacking.

But what about bombs? Doesn’t the TSA protect us against terrorist bomb attacks? First, consider that last year TSA security screeners missed 95 percent of weapons and explosives in security tests. According to the TSA, its screeners found 2,653 firearms in carry-on baggage last year, and lots and lots of knives. Keep in mind that these weapons were in general not hidden by essentially innocent (if forgetful) travelers. So far, I can find no reports that the TSA has caught a single terrorist.

The perfect government program: Pisses everybody off and has no discernible impact.

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1) Environmentalists increasingly work at EPA. Want to find a former Union of Concerned Scientists employee? Look at the Obama administration.

2) EPA officials are throwing parties for environmentalists, they are using secret email servers to send them regulations in advance for commentary, they are even letting environmentalists draft them under the President’s name.

3) How many EPA officials have recused themselves from a decision because their friends at their former employer are doing the lobbying? Zero.

Look for ‘cronyism’ in the dictionary — it’s right after ‘collusion’ and ‘corruption’.

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Highmark, the insurance arm of Pittsburgh-based nonprofit Highmark Health, said in the suit that the U.S. failed to live up to obligations to pay the insurer nearly $223 million owed under an ACA program known as “risk corridors,” which aimed to limit the financial risks borne by insurers entering the new health-law markets. The suit claims “violations of the mandatory risk-corridor payment obligations prescribed” in the health law.

This is money that Congress refused to appropriate, so Obama is providing it from his ‘stash’.

The federal Department of Health and Human Services announced last fall that insurers initially would receive only 12.6% of the money they claimed under the risk-corridor program for 2014, its first year of operation. Highmark is seeking the full amount it says is due to it for that year.

Apparently Obama’s ‘stash’ is pretty bare.

The risk-corridor suits are the latest sign that six years after its passage, the ACA continues to generate intense legal controversy. Just in the past week, a federal court ruled that the Obama administration overstepped its authority in making certain payments under the law without explicit appropriations from Congress, and the Supreme Court sent back to lower courts a case regarding religious employers’ role in covering contraception.

Apparently Obama doesn’t really have a ‘stash’ after all. Perhaps he’ll dip into his book royalties. (Cue raucous laughter.)

Highmark’s suit says agency officials have reiterated that the federal government is obligated to make full risk-corridor payments.

But that acknowledgment “is an insufficient substitute for full and timely payment of the amounts owed,” the complaint says.

Obamacare – the gift that keeps on shivving.

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A new batch of emails, released late Friday afternoon, pulls back the curtain further on the level of collusion and coordination between anti-fossil fuel activists, their funders, and the attorneys general that have launched climate investigations into people, companies, and think tanks with which they disagree on the issue.

These emails, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request by brought by The Competitive Enterprise Institute and Chris Horner, show that key activists behind this campaign had hoped they could make a case for prosecuting climate “deniers” under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. But, due to multiple warnings from experts that such a case would be have no chance to actually succeed, they decided instead to shift their strategic focus to state-level attorneys general to get the job done. Interestingly, these emails date back to last summer, months before the Rockefeller-funded InsideClimate News and the Columbia School of Journalism published their #ExxonKnew investigations.

The key players that emerge from this latest batch of emails are George Mason University (GMU) professors Jagadish Shukla and Edward Maibach, who spearheaded a letter in September 2015 with several other colleagues to Attorney General Loretta Lynch and President Obama asking them to explore RICO charges against climate “deniers” and their funders.