Read it. And watch the video.

David Rutz draws attention to alleged journalist Charlie Rose and three of Barack Obama’s former speechwriters having a good laugh Monday night wjoking about the president’s infamous, oft-repeated false promise that under Obamacare, “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” (video). It must have been a helluva whopper for the leftist PolitiFact to name it the 2013 “Lie of the Year.”

As Rutz notes, Obama speechwriters Jon Lovett, Jon Favreau and David Litt appeared on Rose’s PBS program “to gush over Obama’s writing abilities and the art of speechwriting in general.” Rose asked if they had significant “impact” on Obama’s more “serious speeches.”

“The joke speech is the most fun part of this, but the things I’m the most proud of were the most serious speeches, I think,” Lovett said. “Health care. Economic speeches.”

“Lovett wrote the line about, ‘If you like your insurance, you can keep it,’” Favreau said.

“How dare you,” Lovett said, as Rose and the three wordsmiths roared with laughter.

Steve Sailer picks at the scab.

There’s been a lot of talk about Trump as the so-called “alt-right” candidate, but he’s actually been running an “alt-center” campaign, staking out positions that are controversial because they dissent in a commonsensical fashion from the increasingly bizarre mainstream globalist ideology.

One of the striking side effects of the Trump phenomenon is how he encourages more respectable sorts to attempt to articulate their establishment principles, which, when spelled out, turn out to be terrifying in their implications.

Read it.

Obamacare chief Andy Slavitt lied before a Congressional hearing investigating wasted Obamacare state exchange funds, according to a new report by the House Energy and Commerce Committee. While under oath, Slavitt claimed that “over $200 million” in funds had been returned to the federal government. In actuality, just $21.5 million has been recovered despite state exchanges receiving $4.5 billion in taxpayer funds. In addition, the $21.5 million figure represented leftover funds, not money that had been recovered as a result of federal oversight.

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

Read it.

Typically, ‘foreign aid’ merely enables enrichment on the part of 3d-world kleptocrats. If you are very very lucky a bit of it trickles down to the people who actually need it.

Nobody bothers to say ‘Thanks’ to the U.S. taxpayers who foot the bill, so I’m not sure what the point of foreign aid really is. Except perhaps to allow American (and foreign) bureaucrats feel good about themselves for ‘trying to help’.

Scott Johnson of Powerline sums it up.

Obamacare was built on an edifice of calculated lies. Some of us could see the propositions on which President Obama sold Obamacare as falsehoods at the time of the selling. Others have learned from bitter experience after the buying. President Obama and his team hold a low opinion of the intelligence of the American people. See, for example, the case of Jonathan Gruber. Having elected him president twice, we have done much to earn his contempt.

Now comes Obama deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes to reveal the lies on which Obama’s alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran was promoted. See David Samuels’s May 8 New York Times Magazine profile of Rhodes, “The aspiring novelist who became Obama’s foreign-policy guru.”

Read it.

The Federal government opened the money spigot and so colleges (naturally) raised their prices. Now you can’t afford college unless you put yourself into debt-slavery.

Now ponder the effect on medical care prices of (a) insurance and (b) Federal health care programs.

Read it.

And quite naturally respond by raising shipping prices.

The nearly $6-per-shipment surcharge, levied by ABF Freight System Inc. and Old Dominion Freight Line Inc., comes after California this year began requiring trucking companies to pay drivers for time spent refueling, on rest breaks and other periods.

Trucking companies typically pay per mile driven, and industry groups say calculating additional wages in California add to the already elevated cost of moving freight in California. The state is home to the country’s two busiest ports, as well as some of the strictest labor protections and environmental standards.

One of the reasons that the economy is bad is because politicians keep raising everyone’s costs with bullshit regulations.

Read it.

ROTC has long depended on college grades as a major factor in determining which cadets would become officers. That seemed to work. But since 2001 it has become more obvious that the quality of ROTC officers was declining while those from the service academies (West Point and the like) and OCS (Officer Candidate School, mostly for enlisted troops) was not. On closer examination it was found that the problem was grade inflation in American colleges. The old standards for acceptable grades no longer applied thus using college grades to select qualified ROTC members to become competent officers had ceased to work. The service academies were much less affected by the grade inflation craze in part because they were run by the military and their students were basically studying technical subjects. The enlisted candidates for OCS were the result of the quality control program still enforced for new recruits since the 1970s.

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DreamstimeCritics of the current intellectual climate at university campuses believe classrooms are indoctrination camps where left-wing academics brainwash students into becoming social justice activists. They are mistaken. The most pernicious and questionably legal forms of indoctrination aren’t happening in the classroom at all, and are primarily driven by administrators rather than professors.

Oregon State University provides a good example. The campus has plans to implement a new training program for incoming freshmen in the fall of 2016. Dr. Angela Batista, the campus’s interim diversity officer, sent an email to students earlier this week asking them to review the proposed training program. This training is ideological by its very nature: students will complete on-line modules in “social justice learning,” “diversity,” and “inclusivity.”

“This training initiative is intended to provide all students entering Oregon State University an orientation to concepts of diversity, inclusion and social justice and help empower all OSU students to contribute to an inclusive university community,” according to the proposal.

Presumably they will all wind up loving Big Brother.

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A new sex-trafficking law in Georgia clarifies that undercover cops totally count as minors for purposes of handing out 10-year mandatory minimum prison sentences. Georgia Gov. Nathan Deal signed the measure, which is being touted as a crackdown on the sex-trafficking of minors, into law this week. In addition to enhancing the penalties for sex trafficking someone with a developmental disability, House Bill (HB) 770 says that it shall be no defense to charges of sex trafficking of a minor that no such minor actually existed.

Making the world safe for entrapment….

Read it.

To encourage a “sustainable, resilient food system,” New York’s city council has proposed a $5 million municipal farm-subsidy program, under which the city would buy development easements in the Hudson Valley. In this way, the council plans to help feed “3 million New Yorkers liv[ing] in neighborhoods without adequate supermarkets.” It’s alarming to consider that New York could suffer food shortages so acute that the city government must establish its own agricultural supply chain. Indeed, according to the council, 1.4 million New Yorkers are “food insecure,” indicating a massive failure of markets to respond to this most basic need.

But is it true? If it’s hard to reconcile the idea that New York City has, simultaneously, starvation-level conditions and an “epidemic” of obesity in the same neighborhoods and among the same people, it is because the contemporary debate about food availability tends to ignore individual choice (and taste). Paternalism and finger-wagging masquerading as science distort the argument about how and what poor people eat. For example, the idea of “food deserts,” which is what the council means when it refers to neighborhoods without adequate supermarkets, has become a truism among liberals concerned about urban dietary habits. First Lady Michelle Obama, for example, has made their elimination one of her top priorities. And indeed, some areas around the country, especially in rural regions, lack good grocery stores.

Few of these are in New York City, however. According to the Department of Agriculture, which originated the term, two small areas on Staten Island qualify as food deserts—meaning that at least one-third of the local residents live one mile or more from a grocery store that sells fresh food. The rest of the city, the department concludes, is reasonably well served.

Read it.

Tammy Nutall-Pritchard had been braiding hair with her older sister, Debra Nutall, since she was 18 years old.

Nutall taught Nutall-Pritchard the craft when she was 15, and the sisters would stand side-by-side behind the chairs of scores of clients at Nutall’s Memphis, Tenn., salon who came in to get their hair braided while chatting and gossiping with customers.

Nutall-Pritchard did well—she charged around $300 per head and sometimes made more than $1,000 each week.

“It gave me joy,” Nutall-Pritchard, 47, told The Daily Signal of working with her sister. “She told me, ‘You learn a skill, it will bring an income for you if you do it the right way.’ She taught me to be the woman I am today, and she taught me that you can be your own boss.”

But Tennessee’s onerous licensing laws governing natural hair stylists like Nutall and Nutall-Pritchard eventually drove Nutall out of the state she and her family have called home their whole lives.

As a result, Nutall-Pritchard, who worked at the shop for more than six years, was out of a job.

Black Lives Matter, but apparently Black Jobs Don’t.

Read it.

I guess they must be doing it wrong.

Isn’t it amazing how academic institutions which have been controlled by progressives for decades are such hotbeds of racism?

The University of Missouri is already suffering greatly from the protests of last fall but they keep digging the hole deeper.

Read it.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, no longer content with just regulating securities, has accused a company called Timbervest of fraudulently taking undisclosed real-estate commissions. Timbervest was found liable by an SEC administrative law judge (“ALJ”), but even without getting into the merits of the allegations, there are several problems with this prosecution inquisition.

Robert Fernandez reveals some inconvenient truth.

However threatening the Taliban offensive becomes, the avalanche of logistics now has a momentum all of its own. The timing of the Islamic assault was probably no coincidence. The Taliban have been watching the Obama policy for years. All they had to do was wait till things passed the point of no return and then strike.

…

Perhaps the most tragic thing about Afghanistan is that the president picked a useless objective and made the decision to lose it at the greatest possible cost.

He has a gift.

Read it.

It’s a remarkable record of prediction. One hundred percent wrong. The professor president who loves to talk about teachable moments is himself unteachable. Why is that?

…

When you’ve defined your political task as “fundamentally transforming the United States of America”—as Mr. Obama did on the eve of his election in 2008—then your hands are full. Let other people sort out their own problems.

Read it.

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

Read it.

When is the last time that the entire New York subway was closed with 12 hours notice to make repairs critical to the safety of the system? Or when was the last such shutdown of the London Underground, the Paris Metro, or for that matter the Kolkata Metro or the Caracas Metro, much less the threat of closing lines for months at a time?

How many of America’s many light rail systems have shut down as a result of their having failed to sufficiently maintain their safety? There is plenty to criticize about the many new urban rail systems in the United States. They may not carry the number of passengers projected, and often have cost far more than taxpayers were told and they may not have reduced traffic congestion. But they have managed to provide safe transportation to their riders. Only one of America’s rail systems has failed so abjectly in the most fundamental of its responsibilities: America’s subway in Washington.

Read it.

After an email exchange with the principal investigator, University of Michigan psychology professor Denise Sekaquaptewa, I found out that the press reports had some inaccuracies: for one, the study does not focus solely on men’s microaggressions toward women but also tracks offenses by women, toward other women and sometimes toward men. Yet, in a more basic sense, the critics were on point.  Whatever valuable data this study may yield, it is primarily an exercise in trivial pursuit coupled with speech policing—directed at a problem that may not exist.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

Read it.

When they say ‘Go Green!’ they’re talking about how much taxpayer money can be wasted.

Read it.

America’s toothless Tiger Moth, the F?35, has copped another backhander from US government auditors: the US Government Accountability Office reckons its logistics software isn’t ready for battlefield deployment.

The GAO also warns that the US$16.7bn Autonomic Logistics Information System (ALIS) could, instead, swallow anything between $20 and $100bn.

Those warnings are contained in a report (PDF) titled DoD Needs a Plan to Address Risks Related to Its Central Logistics System.

The GAO is also concerned that the DoD’s management of ALIS is so ad-hoc that the “full scale production” due-date of 2019 might not be met.

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

Read it.

The problem is that ethanol’s benefits have been greatly exaggerated, leading to congressional regulations that required ever-increasing amounts of ethanol in our gasoline supply. The government requirement goes back to 2005, when gas prices were much higher and the U.S. was in the midst of the Iraq war. Ethanol was supposed to be a clean way to reduce our dependence on foreign oil. The growing mandate for ethanol has instead created an enormous, artificial demand that has had unintended consequences, many of them bad.

Read it.

Tennessee Legislature votes to cut all state funds for office that promotes diversity at state’s flagship university, where students walked out of class to oppose the legislation.

I suspect that rigidly controlled double-blind tests will discern that the academic achievement of those who walked out of class doesn’t not differ significantly from that of those who stayed in class.

I have always thought that any real scholar is delighted when students walk out of class, and is barely restraining himself from saying to the half dozen or so students remaining, ‘Great! The dead wood has been flushed away. You remnant are obviously here to learn so let’s get to it!’

Read it.

It’s a Blue state, so chances are pretty good.

“Racizm in the air.” “Don’t breathe, God.” “White supremacy iz a disease.” “Fuck the Police.” “The devil iz a white man.”

Those are some of the spraypainted messages that have greeted students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison over the last six months. Recently, campus police arrested the student suspected of the vandalism. The 21-year-old has yet to be formally charged.

Police said they had trouble apprehending the black, male suspect — so they had nabbed him during his black visual culture class last week. A University of Wisconsin Police Department officer entered his classroom and asked him into the hallway, according to Chancellor Rebecca Blank.

I suspect that if you automatically arrested anyone who signed up for a course called ‘black visual culture’ the crime rate in the area would drop and the average IQ on campus would rise. But that’s just a surmise on my part.

Richard Fernandez dishes out some inconvenient truth.

… the basic laws of institutional behavior remain, one of the most important is that organizations can only do what is in their repertoire. Bureaucracies are like jukeboxes.  They can’t play what’s not on the list.  One of the most striking examples of this is the scene in the 1970s movie, Five Easy Pieces. in which the character played by Jack Nicholson unsuccessfully tries to order breakfast items in a diner which are scattered in different parts of the menu.  He simply couldn’t get a “plain omelette. No potatoes. Tomatoes, instead”.

In the old days the phrase for this was “just following orders”.  Today the same constraints will apply to the EU’s response to  refugee/migrant crisis.  Even though logic dictates that the only long term policy alternative to absorbing the MENA population  is helping them make their countries “habitable” again by reforming its Human Terrain, this option is not on the menu.

The Eurocrats have looked in the handbook and there’s no entry under “crisis” for effecting the transformation the Allies did to Germany 70 years ago —  described by Dwight Eisenhower in his book Crusade in Europe. The new EU handbook says “Crusades” are strictly forbidden and are to be regarded as “cultural chauvinism” and “evil”.

That’s out so the EU will give you something else. Like the waitress in Five Easy Pieces,  it can provide items from a wide selection of welfare products, even if it’s not what anybody needs or wants.   Is ISIS blowing up Palmyra?  “We can provide you resettlement.”  Are they beheading the sheiks in Anbar?  “We can provide you with public housing.”  Is Saudi Arabia now invading Yemen and vice versa?  “We can point you to the nearest transgender bathroom.”

Read it.

Except, of course, that it isn’t government money, it’s taxpayer money, i.e. our money.

Read it.

Since 2006, the IRS has overseen an annual tax gap—the shortfall between taxes owed and collected—of about $385 billion, government analysts say. And according to an April report, the agency has not implemented 70 of 112 actions identified by the Government Accountability Office to close that loop.

In 2009, though, the IRS purchased a “cell-site simulator,” more commonly known as Stingray technology. And since November, the agency has been trying to buy another of the devices.

Like something from a spy movie, a Stingray device mimics a cellphone tower, tricking all mobile phones in an area into revealing their location and numbers. Authorities can deploy the powerful technology to tag and track an individual’s location in real time.

…

IRS Commissioner John Koskinen says the IRS uses its Stingray to hunt down fraudsters and stop money laundering. The agency’s use of the devices remained a secret until an October report in the Guardian.

Hey, if we need more money, the government can just print more. The important part is stepping on these bothersome enemies of the state.

Read it.

Liberals of a certain stripe—those who talk up “soft power” and diplomacy and disdain militarism—oppose efforts by America to impose its will by force abroad. “There are no easy or magical solutions,” as Bernie Sanders says in the “War and Peace” section of his campaign website. Yet he and those of his persuasion are ceaselessly enthusiastic about imposing their will by force at home, through the endless expansion of government power and control.

Wages too low? Force employers to pay more.

Too many uninsured? Force Americans to buy coverage.

Not enough parental leave? Force companies to provide it.

Rich people speaking too freely about politics? Rewrite the First Amendment so you can stop them.

A horrific school shooting? Take guns away from people who didn’t do it.

People drinking too much soda? Ban big servings or tax the stuff.

Fantasy sports gambling getting too popular? Shut it down.

The list could run on for pages. Except for abortion, there seems to be nothing in America for which the progressive answer is not “more government”—their own magical solution to everything.

Read it.

Over the weekend, President Obama met at the White House with some rappers to get their ideas on the pressing criminal justice issues of the day. During the meeting, one of the deep thinkers had his ankle bracelet go off. It turns out that rapper Ricky Ross is on $2,000,000 bond for kidnapping and pistol whipping his house contractor.

Imagine the outcry if Reagan or Bush had invited such a person to the White House.

Read it.

The Congressional Budget Office initially projected that Obamacare would have more than 20 million enrollees by 2016. As of the end of the 2016 calendar year enrollment period, there were “about 12.7 million” enrollees, per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This massive shortfall in expected enrollees has left insurers, both national and regional, working with fewer enrolled patients, many of which have been shown to be costlier and sicker compared to consumers who are covered by employer-based health plans.The Congressional Budget Office initially projected that Obamacare would have more than 20 million enrollees by 2016. As of the end of the 2016 calendar year enrollment period, there were “about 12.7 million” enrollees, per the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This massive shortfall in expected enrollees has left insurers, both national and regional, working with fewer enrolled patients, many of which have been shown to be costlier and sicker compared to consumers who are covered by employer-based health plans.

Making matters worse, many of the dynamics that insurers had been counting on (aside from higher enrollment totals) haven’t played out.

…

The failure of the “risk corridor” has also been a disappointment. In simple terms, the risk corridor was a fund that profitable insurers on Obamacare’s exchanges were expected to pay into. This cash would then be distributed to struggling and/or new Obamacare plan insurers to help prevent excessive losses from mispriced premiums. In 2016, the risk corridor wound up being underfunded by more than $2 billion, leading more than half of Obamacare’s approved healthcare cooperatives to shut their doors.

Read it.

One reason American politics is so polarized is that President Obama has been so cavalier about his constitutional duty to faithfully execute the laws he dislikes. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to one of his worst abuses, his 2014 order that rewrites U.S. immigration law.

In United States v. Texas, 26 states sued to block Mr. Obama’s executive diktat that awards legal status, work permits and other government benefits to some 4.3 million illegal immigrants, with no consent from Congress. A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction stopping this ukase last year, and the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals agreed. Those were narrow rulings, but the Justices enlarged the case to reach constitutional questions and will hear an unusual 90 minutes of oral argument.

Read it.

Los Angeles was once the epicenter of apparel manufacturing, attracting buyers from across the world to its clothing factories, sample rooms and design studios.

But over the years, cheap overseas labor lured many apparel makers to outsource to foreign competitors in far-flung places such as China and Vietnam.

Now, Los Angeles firms are facing another big hurdle — California’s minimum wage hitting $15 an hour by 2022 — which could spur more garment makers to exit the state.

Last week American Apparel, the biggest clothing maker in Los Angeles, said it might outsource the making of some garments to another manufacturer in the U.S., and wiped out about 500 local jobs. The company still employs about 4,000 workers in Southern California.

“The exodus has begun,” said Sung Won Sohn, an economist at Cal State Channel Islands and a former director at Forever 21. “The garment industry is gradually shrinking and that trend will likely continue.”

To quote Ross Perot: ‘Told you so.’

Read it.

Have a crying towel ready.

The decade from 1910-1920, the ‘progressive era’, was a period in which the modern semi-fascist governmental system was founded.

1913: Income Tax; Federal Reserve System (all your money are belong to us)

1914: Federal Trade Commission; Clayton AntiTrust Act (all your business are belong to us)

1916: Federal Farm Loan Act (all your groceries are belong to us)

1917: U.S. pokes it’s nose into Work War I; Conscription (all your lives are belong to us)

1919: Prohibition (start of the War on Popular Drugs)

It’s been all downhill since then.

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Solar energy company SunEdison Inc (SUNE.N) is preparing to file for bankruptcy as early as the evening of April 17, a person familiar with the matter said on Friday, nine months after its market value had reached $10 billion.

A SunEdison spokesman declined to comment.

Such a move would represent a fall from grace for the former darling of Wall Street and the renewable energy sector, whose rapid, debt-fueled expansion with solar and wind energy plants around the world proved unsustainable. The company’s market value as of Friday was $117 million.

Without heavy subsidies, ‘green power’ is unsustainable — and, quite often, even with heavy subsidies.

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At the last minute, officials at the State University of New York at New Paltz curtly canceled a planned campus debate between a notable left-wing media critic and a notable right-wing media critic because the right-wing media critic has right-wing views.

…

Emails obtained by the Oracle show that school officials aborted the debate because sociology professor Anne Roschelle complained about Kincaid’s political views. Specifically, she advised that the leftist, terrorism-inspiring Southern Poverty Law Center keeps an “Extremist File” concerning Kincaid.

Unidentified students and other professors also complained, Patterson said.

Read it.

Recently, a pair of controversial federal food issues has made the news. The unpredicted increase in USDA farm subsidies and continuing fallout from the new dietary guidelines have captured headlines. They’re worth focusing on together, as they represent some varied and truly awful federal food law and policy.

Remind me where in the Constitution the Federal government is granted power over ‘food policy’.

Earlier this week, House Agriculture Committee Chairman Michael Conaway (R-Tx.) blasted critics of farm subsidies, claiming we live in a “fantasyland” where such subsidies aren’t needed.

Conaway’s remarks come as news broke this week that Congress has woefully underestimated the cost of farm subsidies. The latest figures show taxpayers are on the hook for $13.9 billion this year, according to reports. A separate estimate shows congressional predictions fell more than a billion dollars short of actual predicted payment figures.

Are we running short of food? I don’t see any shortages, judging by the lack of lines for, say, bread at the grocery store — unlike the former Soviet Union and other places that had (and have) a government ‘food policy’.

When the most recent Farm Bill passed, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.), then-chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, touted the law as “an opportunity to cut spending.” What’s happened since? Spending has only risen. Last year, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group predicted subsidies could reach $30 billion by 2018.

Democrats: Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with crop insurance. But taxpayers shouldn’t have to pay to insure farmers against risk any more than they should be on the hook for subsidizing NASCAR drivers’ auto insurance. “If crop insurance is an important element of farming,” I wrote in 2012, “then let farmers buy such insurance on the open market—without taxpayer support—and, if need be, pass the costs on to consumers.”

No, that would be sensible, and so is necessarily excluded from government policy.

Read it.

Health insurance companies are amplifying their warnings about the financial sustainability of the ObamaCare marketplaces as they seek approval for premium increases next year.

Insurers say they are losing money on their ObamaCare plans at a rapid rate, and some have begun to talk about dropping out of the marketplaces altogether.

“Something has to give,” said Larry Levitt, an expert on the health law at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “Either insurers will drop out or insurers will raise premiums.”

While analysts expect the market to stabilize once premiums rise and more young, healthy people sign up, some observers have not ruled out the possibility of a collapse of the market, known in insurance parlance as a “death spiral.”

And, once again, reality intrudes on ‘progressive’ fantasies.

Read it.

In just the latest instance of a taxpayer-funded university singling out white students for privilege-shaming “education sessions,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison hosted a special workshop on Tuesday for the purpose of getting white students to acknowledge and confront their own white privilege.

According to the university website, “The Privilege of Whiteness” workshop was designed for white people to “reflect on and name the ways their privilege impacts their beliefs and behaviors by gaining the skills to identify the historical roots of White privilege and how it manifests today.” Prospective attendees were informed that the workshop was “designed for a White audience,” although “People of color” were still welcome.

The workshop is one of a handful of “education sessions” offered through the university’s Morgridge Center for Public Service. Students wishing to participate in the university’s Badger Volunteers program are required to attend at least one of the education sessions.

The University of Wisconsin is just the latest university to single out white students for privilege-shaming workshops.

Read it.

For anyone who, thanks to the Obama administration’s years of stonewalling, has forgotten about Fast and Furious, here’s the short version. In 2010, a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol Agent was killed while on patrol near the Mexican border. The only two firearms found at the scene were semi-automatic rifles the Obama-Holder Justice Department allowed to “walk” as part of Fast and Furious, a firearms trafficking operation. That operation allowed approximately 2,000 firearms to flow illegally into the hands of Mexican cartel associates.

When the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform tried to investigate the scandal, Team Obama stonewalled. First, it denied that law enforcement officers allowed straw purchasers to buy firearms illegally in the United States with the intent to traffic them without apprehension. Almost a year later, it finally admitted that this is precisely what had happened.

Second, when the Committee subpoenaed relevant documents, Eric Holder’s DOJ refused to produce them, citing “executive privilege.” The House voted to hold Holder in contempt and filed suit to obtain the documents. Three and half years later, Judge Jackson ordered production of the 20,000 pages mentioned above.

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

Read it.

Lindsey Gordon suffered a shattered pelvis and internal bleeding after Grand Isle, Louisiana, Assistant Police Chief Norris Esponge drove over her while she was sunbathing on the beach. Esponge, who was patrolling the beach in a Ford F-150, narrowly missed running over another woman who was sunbathing with Gordon.

Another reminder that government employees are seldom the sharpest knives in the drawer.

Read it. And watch the video.

The $15 minimum wage just went from “laughable” to “viable”—as a New York Times headline put it—to the law of the land for millions of New York and California residents.

In April 2016, the Empire and Golden states almost simultaneously passed laws that will boost the state-mandated wage floor to $15 over the next few years for all workers—a high-stakes bet that the law of supply and demand doesn’t apply to human labor.

To discuss the potential impact of the $15 minimum wage, Reason’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Don Boudreaux, an economist at George Mason University, who writes frequently about the minimum wage at his blog, Cafe Hayek.

Read it.

The Boston Globe reports that locally-based shoe company New Balance is restarting its opposition to a trade deal supported by the Obama administration, contending the government failed to honor its side of secret deal.

Democrats being Democrats: Secret deals followed by reneging. Bill Clinton had this down to an art — and probably still does, for all anyone knows.

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Exxon has just challenged attempts by Al Gore’s climate witch hunt to “investigate” them, by demanding to know what crime they are supposed to have committed.

And about fargin time, too.

To date, most companies seem to have been happy to simply pay a bit of Danegeld, and get on with business, when unfairly targeted by green campaigners, rather than engage in a costly and potentially damaging PR battle with groups of fanatics who mostly don’t matter in the long run.

But a government backed investigation, with the possible threat of future RICO charges, is far more serious than a simple PR attack on a company’s corporate image. Exxon appears to have courageously decided to stand their ground, to put an end to this nonsense once and for all – a strategy which may lead them to challenge the increasingly shaky scientific basis of the entire climate scare.

When the government starts charging people with fraud and other crimes for speaking out against the ‘progressive’ Party Line, then it’s time to head for the doors.

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By law, anyone with a severe disability is eligible to have the government discharge their federal student loans. The administration took steps four years ago to make the process easier by letting people who are totally and permanently disabled use their Social Security designation to apply for a discharge, but few took advantage. The Department of Education is now taking it upon itself to identify eligible borrowers and guide them through the steps to discharge their loans.

“Too many eligible borrowers were falling through the cracks, unaware they were eligible for relief,” said Education Under Secretary Ted Mitchell in a statement. “Americans with disabilities have a right to student loan relief. And we need to make it easier, not harder, for them to receive the benefits they are due.”

It’s hell when you’re trying to give people Taxpayer Paid Free Stuff and they won’t even take it.

Read it.

Today it is frankly unbelievable that Washington allows its Asian and European allies to continue cowering behind it. That they prefer not to do more is understandable. But that is no reason for America to do it for them.

Read it.

And even stronger is the fact that it’s a Democrat administration.

Democrats investigating Democrats — nobody gets fired, nobody goes to jail.

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In a recent letter to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (KY-R), four senators this week voiced their opposition to extending expiring renewable energy provisions as part of the FAA reauthorization bill. Senators Jeff Flake (AZ-R), Mike Lee (UT-R), James Lankford (OK-R), and Jeff Sessions (AL-R), took exception to current attempts by some in the Senate to attach tax credits for green energy to such an important and needed bill.

Good luck with that….

Read it.

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

Eric S Raymond pulls back the curtain.

Once upon a time, free-trade agreements were about just that: free trade. You abolish your tariffs and import restrictions, I’ll abolish mine. Trade increases, countries specialize in what they’re best equipped to do, efficiency increases, price levels drop, everybody wins.

Then environmentalists began honking about exporting pollution and demanded what amounted to imposing First World regulation on Third World countries who – in general – wanted the jobs and the economic stimulus from trade more than they wanted to make environmentalists happy. But the priorities of poor brown people didn’t matter to rich white environmentalists who already had theirs, and the environmentalists had political clout in the First World, so they won. Free-trade agreements started to include “environmental safeguards”.

Next, the labor unions, frightened because foreign workers might compete down domestic wages, began honking about abusive Third World labor conditions about which they didn’t really give a damn. They won, and “free trade” agreements began to include yet more impositions of First World pet causes on Third World countries. The precedent firmed up: free trade agreements were no longer to be about “free” trade, but rather about managing trade in the interests of wealthy First Worlders.

Today there’s a great deal of angst going on in the tech community about the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Its detractors charge that a “free-trade” agreement has been hijacked by big-business interests that are using it to impose draconian intellectual-property rules on the entire world, criminalize fair use, obstruct open-source software, and rent-seek at the expense of developing countries.

These charges are, of course, entirely correct. So here’s my question: What the hell else did you expect to happen? Where were you idiots when the environmentalists and the unions were corrupting the process and the entire concept of “free trade”?

Read it.

Every year at this time, we see the same kind of headlines: “U.S. biggest military spender in the world.” They’re are all based on the release of the global military spending database, an annual report compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

What the headlines usually miss is that U.S. defense spending is going down while global military spending is going up. The fact that the U.S. spends more on defense than any other individual nation dramatically misses the point.