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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Don’t fly. Problem solved, and you’ll be a lot safer.

Ask me a hard one.

Read it.

Guess they didn’t mean it when they called it a ‘Free Speech’ wall.

Read it.

California’s upcoming, poorly thought out (beyond the political gains) massive minimum wage boost to $15 per hour does not grant unions an exemption. They will not be permitted to “collectively bargain” away the price floor in exchange for other benefits, just like businesses who are not unionized.

Hey, nobody claimed that these people were the sharpest knives in the drawer.

While most folks may assume that this has always been the case, in reality, cities and municipalities that have set their own minimum wages and other employment mandates have included exemptions for unions. Many people aren’t aware of it, and it may seem odd on the surface, given that the unions themselves are pushing for the increases.

This is what happened in Los Angeles when the city mandated a special minimum wage of $15.37 that applied only to hotel workers. It included an exemption for workers represented by unions, which essentially meant this minimum wage was really a fine for not being unionized. Over the weekend, the Los Angeles Times took note that there are union workers that feel betrayed by these agreements and realize exactly what they’re for—to help unions expand their power and membership, not to actually help workers.

Read it.

“Where’s the beef?” asked a 1980s Wendy’s commercial, suggesting its burgers offered more hamburger than those of its fast-food rivals. The well-traveled phrase popped up during an April 4 hearing in the Legislature on the finances of the state’s high-speed rail project.

Read it.

Hinga Mbogo is a Kenyan immigrant who has owned Hinga’s Automotive Company in Dallas for 30 years. But because car repair shops are inconsistent with the local government’s vision for an arts district, he may be forced to close. Even worse, there is no legal obligation for Dallas to compensate Mbogo for his property.

The saga began back in 2005 with Planned Development District 298. The city rezoned Ross Avenue, home of Hinga’s, and made car repair shops illegal there. All other mechanics in the area have left as a result.

…

Because this is considered a simple zoning change rather than eminent domain—that is, the government’s “right” to expropriate private property for public use—Dallas does not even have to compensate the business owners affected.

Because Dallas is a Big City, that means (even in Texas) it is run by Democrats, who operate it to suit themselves and their rich hipster friends, which is what leads to such Liberal Fascist policies.

I’m happy to live in a nice Republican suburb.

Read it.

How much fun must it be to work for the CIA?

I have been in the wrong business all my life….

Read it.

That would suggest a degree of long-range planning that he has singularly failed to exhibit since he left Harvard Law School, so I am reluctant to believe it.

The US reminds me on one of those mafia kingpins, who force other drug dealers out of a neighborhood, so that it can monopolize the business. For years, the US has been the leader in trying to close down tax havens. We’ve strong-armed other countries into providing us with information from secret bank accounts. And now the long campaign is paying off, as the US reigns supreme as the world’s most effective and secretive tax haven.

Read it.

Does anyone read Kafka anymore? I doubt that high school and college students take him up as faithfully as we once did, but the bureaucratic tyrants running the Department of Education in the Obama administration appear to have drawn on Kafka’s Trial as a how-to manual rather than a modernist warning of a nightmarish future.

Why do we even have a Department of Education? It’s not as if they ever educate anybody. Oh, right, Jimmuh Cahtuh. ‘Nuff said.

Read it.

I think it’s fair to say that the Islamic Republic Iran is a serious enemy of the United States. The powers that be in Iran regularly proclaim their ardent desire for the death of the United States, and they take action aimed at bringing it about in one way or another.

With the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, President Obama has teamed up with the mullahs to finance their nuclear program and delay its fruition for a modest period of years if everything works out as indicated. Iran takes the money and dissolution of the sanctions regime up front. It can pull the plug on the deal at any time it sees fit.

The Constitution says ‘Treason against the United States shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.’ Connecting the dots is left as an exercise for the reader.

Read it.

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

Read it.

The rot in education affects even Texas.

The principal of an elementary school in Magnolia, Texas, has forbidden parents from picking up their kids to walk them home. No matter how close the children live to the school, they are required to take the bus or be picked up by car, Fox 26 in Houston is reporting.

If not, the local authorities are ready to enforce the rule with arrests for trespassing.

The ostensible reason for this step at Bear Branch Elementary is “safety,” but parents interviewed by local reporters think it’s really about the principal exerting ironclad control over the pick-up procedures. A video of the line of cars at pick-up time looked like a funeral cortege, solemnly inching forward.

Another petty bureaucrat who longs to be a two-bit Hitler.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

A South Carolina mom who let her 9-year-old nephew walk her 3-year-old son to the McDonald’s less than a quarter mile away has been—I’m sure you can finish this sentence in your sleep by now—arrested and charged with child neglect.

The reason? According to WSPA News 7:

The officer says the boys had to cross a street and pass several businesses and homes to get to the eatery, putting their safety at risk.

The mom, Tiesha Mesha Hillstock, 24, told the police the unthinkable: She had trusted the older boy to “take care of his cousin.”

It doesn’t get much more absurd that this. The police officer involved ought to be made to wear a diaper and suck his thumb for 24 hours in public.

Read it.

The impact of the Panama Papers is probably going to be biggest on people like Iceland’s prime minister — those who are denominated “Politically Exposed Persons” in the money laundering world. PEPs, our reader adds, are a category of individuals — foreign heads of state, their family members, and other ranking officeholders occupying significant positions in government placing them at risk for bribery or corruption.

You know where this is going….

Hillary Clinton was a PEP as Secretary of State, and so were Bill Clinton and Chelsea Clinton. When Bill Clinton set up his shell in Sweden to accept $26 million plus his speaking fee, our reader explains, a report should probably have been filed. The transaction wasn’t reported to the State Department. According to the Washington Times, the Clinton Foundation has concealed the names of the specific donors:

Mr. Clinton’s Swedish fundraising shell escaped public notice, both because its incorporation papers were filed in Stockholm — some 4,200 miles from America’s shores — and the identities of its donors were lumped by Mr. Clinton’s team into the disclosure reports of his U.S.-based charity, blurring the lines between what were two separate organizations incorporated under two different countries’ laws.

The foundation told The Times through a spokesman that the Swedish entity was set up primarily to collect donations from popular lotteries in that country, that the money went to charitable causes like fighting climate change, AIDS in Africa and cholera in Haiti, and that all of the Swedish donors were accounted for on the rolls publicly released by the U.S. charity.

The foundation, however, declined repeated requests to identify the names of the specific donors that passed through the Swedish arm.

A spokesman for Mrs. Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign declined comment.

Read it.

And AlGore is right there in the front row, looking smug as only a man who has gotten rich off of climate change hysteria can.

Treating climate change as an absolute, unassailable fact, instead of what it is—an unproven, controversial scientific theory—a group of state attorneys general have announced that they will be targeting any companies that challenge the catastrophic climate change religion.

Speaking at a press conference on March 29, New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said, “The bottom line is simple: Climate change is real.” He went on to say that if companies are committing fraud by “lying” about the dangers of climate change, they will “pursue them to the fullest extent of the law.”

Oh, that First Amendment thing? Fugeddaboudit.

Read it.

Senior administration officials say they are not walking away from the months-long Zika funding fight with the GOP, even after conceding on a key issue.

The White House said Wednesday it is now forced to dip into a funding pool reserved for the Ebola virus to fight Zika — an approach that the administration had previously dismissed as it pushed Congress to approve new funding.

This exemplifies two structural problems with modern American government: (a) Money ‘earmarked’ for one purpose that may or may not match what is needed for that purpose, and which cannot easily be repurposed when needs change, and (b) the inclination of the current administration to do whatever the fuck they want and to hell with how the government is supposed to work. Both are significant flaws, one structural, the other moral. From what I have seen, Republicans (the only other game in town) don’t seem to have a clue as to how to cope with either.

While announcing plans to move about $500 million toward Zika efforts, Obama’s top health and budget leaders lashed out at Congress for ignoring their $2 billion funding request.

“We should not play with fire here. We should not risk spreading and getting out of control before Congress acts. They need to move immediately,” Shaun Donovan, director of the Office of Management and Budget, told reporters Wednesday.

This illustrates another flaw in the way government is conducted in America, characteristic of ‘progressives’ but indulged in by non-progressives whenever they think that they can get away with it (which is too often, prompted by seeing ‘progressives’ getting away with it more often than not): The impulse to shout loudly THE SKY IS FALLING WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE in hopes of stampeding people whom they see as stupid and obstructionist into Getting With The Program promoted by their Betters. Again, Republicans are like Charlie Brown facing Lucy with the football — they know this usually ends badly, but they can’t think of that else to do.

The elephant in the room.

The “Panama Papers” are the largest leak in world history, revealing millions of documents related to the offshore accounts of politicians, former politicians, and billionaires around the world.

Despite much of the media’s focus on tax evasion as the primary theme of the Panama Papers story, which embarrassed governments are happy to adopt as the primary theme as well, the question is one of official corruption.

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

Read it.

The Austin area has, for the 5th year running, been among America’s two fastest-growing major metro areas by population. Although everybody knows about the new apartments sprouting along transportation corridors like South Lamar and Burnet, much of the growth has been in our suburbs, and in suburban-style areas of the city. Our city is growing out more than up.

How come? The desire for living in central Austin has never been higher. But Austin, like most cities, has rules that prevent new housing from getting centrally built. That makes it easier to buy and build on virgin land in the suburbs. Here are some of those rules.

Austin (heck, all of Travis County) is the blue pustule on the otherwise red butt of Texas. As a result, it suffers from typical Democrat diseases like over-regulation and stupid housing policies. This is a good list of such moronic policies.

By contrast, Houston (which doesn’t have any of these stupid ‘zoning’ policies) is doing very well indeed, and growing even faster than Austin. I wonder why….

Read it.

Apparently he thinks that the problem is that all of this tax avoidance is legal. The very idea! That people will use perfectly legal ways to lower their tax bill!

The real problem, of course, of which Obama is totally clueless (as of so much else) is oppressive levels of taxation, which makes it worthwhile for these pissant jurisdictions to provide these tax havens merely by (a) not charging as much and (b) not ratting out the beneficiaries to the Robber Barons.

Read it.

The U.S. Treasury Department yesterday released new regulations they claim will curb business inversions. In reality, this is the latest in a line of regulations that have and will fail to address the underlying problem because they are treating a symptom rather than the root cause of inversions.

America has a competitiveness problem, and inversions together with foreign acquisitions are the consequences of this problem. By choosing to treat the symptom rather than the disease, Treasury is ensuring American businesses face the tough choice of fleeing the U.S. tax system or remaining headquartered in the U.S. and facing a crushing disadvantage when competing with foreign businesses.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

Dianne Feinstein came up empty when asked by the San Francisco Chronicle what Hillary Clinton accomplished during her time in the Senate. Feinstein couldn’t recall any “bills [Clinton] authored.” However, she noted that “there are things outside of bills that you can do.”

There are, indeed. A reader directs my attention to three such things Clinton did in the Senate.

My, what a surprise.

The CIA in 2012 proposed a detailed covert action plan designed to remove Syrian President Bashar Assad from power, but President Obama declined to approve it, current and former U.S. officials tell NBC News.

It’s long been known that then-CIA Director David Petraeus recommended a program to secretly arm and train moderate Syrian rebels in 2012 to pressure Assad. But a book to be published Tuesday by a former CIA operative goes further, revealing that senior CIA officials were pushing a multi-tiered plan to engineer the dictator’s ouster. Former American officials involved in the discussions confirmed that to NBC News.

In an exclusive television interview with NBC News, the former officer, Doug Laux, describes spending a year in the Middle East meeting with Syrian rebels and intelligence officers from various partner countries. Laux, who spoke some Arabic, was the eyes and ears on the ground for the CIA’s Syria task force, he says.

Laux, an Indiana native who joined the CIA in 2005 at age 23, says he wrote an “ops plan” that included all the elements he believed were necessary to remove Assad. He was not allowed to describe the plan, but he writes that his program “had gained traction” in Washington. His boss, the head of the Syria task force, regularly briefed members of the Congressional intelligence committees on what Laux was seeing, hearing and suggesting.

Read it.

United States Army Corps of Engineers v. Hawkes Co., Inc. pits a family-owned business that harvests and processes peat for golf courses against the federal government. Hawkes Company was harvesting peat from a bog on privately owned property in Minnesota in compliance with state environmental laws when the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers put a halt to their operation, citing the Clean Water Act, which gives the federal government jurisdiction over all navigable waters in the United States. The Corps demand that the company submit to its permitting process before continuing.

The strange thing about this, and other similar cases involving the Clean Water Act, is that the Supreme Court will not rule on whether or not the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is correct in deeming the property a wetland subject to federal regulation, but whether or not the property owners even have a right to challenge the environmental agency’s decree in court.

SCOTUS adjudicated a simliar dispute between landowners and the Environmental Protection Agency back in 2012 in Sackett v. EPA. Reason TV profiled the Sackett’s case in the video above. While the agency involved is different, the principle is the same: Do landowners have the right to challenge orders from environmental agencies in court, or is such behavior illegal defiance deserving of thousands of dollars in fines a day?

Read it.

In 2010, the New York City affiliate of Habitat for Humanity received a $21 million federal grant to work on a city neighborhood hit particularly hard by the foreclosure crisis and help stabilize it.

The funds would allow Habitat-NYC to launch the most ambitious project in its 32-year history. Its neighborhood pick was Bedford-Stuyvesant, a historically poor neighborhood in central Brooklyn, where the charity would focus on buying and renovating abandoned apartment buildings.

There was just one problem. With few vacancies in the gentrifying area, longtime tenants were pushed out of their apartments — some into homelessness — clearing the way for developers to sell to Habitat at a hefty profit, a ProPublica investigation has found.

Beware the partnership of do-gooder organizations and government. That always ends badly.

My, what a surprise.

Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates says he felt President Obama “double-crossed” him during his tenure over budget cuts to the Pentagon.

…

According to the report, Gates was told to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from the defense budget after already having slashed it.

“I guess I’d have to say I felt double-crossed,” Gates said. “After all those years in Washington, I was naïve.”

Welcome to the club.

Read it.

California’s legislature on Thursday voted overwhelmingly to automate most of the Golden State’s fast-food restaurants, supermarkets, and mid-sized retail chains by 2022. No, that wasn’t the stated intent of Senate Bill 3, which sailed through the Assembly and Senate on mostly party-line votes and after little debate. But that will be the likely effect of the law, which is supposed to phase in a $15 hourly minimum wage starting in January.

Read it.

Some great news in asset forfeiture reform is coming out of Florida. S.B. 1044, approved by the legislature earlier in the month, was signed into law today by Gov. Rick Scott.

The big deal with this particular reform is that, in most cases, Florida police will actually have to arrest and charge a person with a crime before attempting to seize and keep their money and property under the state’s asset forfeiture laws. One of the major ways asset forfeiture gets abused is that it is frequently a “civil”, not criminal, process where police and prosecutors are able to take property without even charging somebody with a crime, let alone convicting them. This is how police are, for example, able to snatch cash from cars they’ve pulled over and claim they suspect the money was going to be used for drug trafficking without actually finding any drugs.

So-called ‘civil asset forfeiture’ is one of the most oppressive (and, I think, unconstitutional) tricks in the bag of police (and police agencies such as the FBI) in this country. It is inherently corrupt, placing with police every incentive to steal people’s property under color of law without respect to due process and basic Constitutional safeguards. This is a very big step in the right direction.

Read it.

This week, Connecticut lawmakers passed a bipartisan fix for this year’s $220 million deficit, but legislators in Hartford must now get to work fixing next year’s deficit—projected to be $900 million. And they have more work to do. Taken together, the state’s budgets for the next two years fall $4 billion short—even though, since 2011, Connecticut governor Dannel Malloy and the Democratic-controlled legislature have instituted two of the largest tax increases in state history.

The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.

Now Malloy and the legislators say they’re ready to try something different: Malloy is threatening to lay off at least 1,000 state workers. Up to now, the state’s public-sector unions have masterfully worked the political system for their benefit. State employees earn at least 25 percent more than private-sector workers in similar jobs. New union contracts don’t even require a vote from state legislators; if they aren’t rejected within 30 days, they automatically go into effect. And a state law says that any union contract that conflicts with or contradicts state law takes precedence. The result: state-employee benefit costs are growing at more than 5 percent a year, while revenue is growing at just 2 percent. Connecticut residents face a decline in services, even as they’ve been asked to pay higher taxes.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

BLUF: A Democrat administration in Westchester County, NY, colluded with HUD to accept 750 ‘affordable’ (i.e. full of NAMs) housing units in the county. Now, however, the current Republican is pushing back and refusing to Get With The Program. Hence, the HUD bureaucrat in charge of the scheme is trying to get a court to shut him up.

As Stanley Kurtz explains, the Federal Monitor’s attempt to silence Astorino comes in the form of a report filed on March 17 in federal court. The report claims that Astorino has spread false information about Westchester County’s housing settlement and about the efforts and intentions of HUD and the Federal Monitor himself.

As a remedy, the Federal Monitor seeks “the removal of press releases inconsistent with the declaration and findings” written by the Federal Monitor. He also calls for the hiring of “a public communications consultant that will craft a message and implement a strategy sufficiently robust to provide information broadly to the public that describes the benefits” of what HUD says it is trying to accomplish.

In effect, the Federal Monitor is asking a court to order Astorino to stop criticizing Obama’s HUD and start advertising HUD’s own views. I agree with Kurtz that “this is truly Orwellian stuff, a frightening demonstration of how the expansionist regulatory state ultimately chokes off political speech itself.”

Read it.

President Obama and his family spent nearly $3.6 million in taxpayer money on flight expenses alone for their 2015 Christmas vacation to Honolulu, Hawaii, according to a new watchdog report.

After all, why go to Camp David, which is right close by and already paid for by taxpayers?

The known travel expenses for the Obama family and Vice President Joe Biden have totaled more than $78 million.

Sometimes it is good to be the King President.

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Here’s a question that I haven’t seen discussed much. Everybody has an opinion on what the impacts of the law would be assuming it is implemented the way it says in the law it would be implemented; but I’m wondering more what sectors of the California economy will just ignore this new law the way they currently ignore many of the other laws and regulations?

Whenever governments interfere with a free market, that market re-appears ‘off the books’ — what statists call a ‘black market’ but which is an expression of the irrepressible human desire to arrange their lives to suit themselves rather than those who consider themselves the ruling class.

California is an interesting example of corruption because the government isn’t all that corrupt relative to, say, Illinois, where the government tends to shake down honest businesses. California still has 1910 Progressive government structures that are more resistant to governmental corruption than Chicago. But California now seems to have a high level of private enterprise corruption, with businesses cheating the government over taxes and Medicare and each other via insurance fraud and the like.

A natural reaction to getting your pocket picked.

So, it’s hard to say what will happen with a very high minimum wage. Big companies will have to follow the law, but a huge fraction of small businessmen in California these days are Men in Gold Chains who think laws are only for chumps.

Much as in NAM slims everywhere.

Consider that much of the labor force are ‘undocumented immigrants’ — how eager are they going to be to go to the cops about being paid less than the legal minimum wage?

Read it,

Indeed, NATO’s European wing is notorious for its freeloading on American military might, a longstanding habit of bilking U.S. taxpayers for defense while throwing good money after bad on expansive social engineering projects.

Just how much NATO Europe is mooching off the U.S. is evident with just a quick glance at the numbers. Per capita, the United States drops close to $2,000 annually on the military. NATO Europe averages less than $500—with one country, Bulgaria, as low as $89.

The contrast is so significant that it actually sees our European friends in breach of the terms of our alliance: They spent less than 1.5 percent of GDP on defense last year, despite NATO’s requirement of a 2 percent minimum. (America, by contrast, devotes an aggressive 4 to 5 percent of GDP to military spending.)

Meanwhile, as the *Wall Street Journal** *editorialized, “Europe has built elaborate domestic income-maintenance programs, with government-run health care, pensions and jobless benefits. These are hugely expensive, requiring high taxes and government spending that is a huge proportion of GDP.”

All of this is possible because, in the words of one Slovakian party leader, “we enjoy protection primarily from NATO”—which is to say, we let American taxpayers pick up the tab.

My, what a surprise.

Another subsidy-backed green energy company, this time the Spanish company Abengoa, has filed for bankruptcy within the United States.  But before doing so, squandered over $2 billion in federal funds.  The company mistakenly gambled on a government-backed artificial “green energy boom” they hoped would spurn new growth and opportunity for the company.

The Obama Administration, ever pushing their green energy ideology, tampered with the market by dolling out $2.7 billion worth of federal subsidies to Abengoa, which of course was taxpayer funded.

Read it.

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

“There are shortfalls in electronic warfare, electronic attack, shortfalls in the performance of distributed aperture system and other issues that are classified,” Mr. Gilmore said March 23. “With regard to mission assistance, stealth aircraft are not visible to achieve success against the modern stressing mobile threats. We’re relying on our $400 million investment in F-35 to provide mission systems [that] must work in some reasonable sense of that word.”

Read it.

‘Expected’ by whom? This was all predicted long since.

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Last week, a California State Court became the first in the nation to rule that a retailer violated the Americans with Disabilities Act due to a website that is not accessible to individuals with vision-related disabilities.  As we have previously reported, courts have ruled on whether the ADA applies to websites, but have always stopped short – because the cases had usually settled at early stages – of reaching the dispositive factual issue of whether a website actually violated the ADA.

The ADA is one of the reasons that George H. W. Bush will burn in Hell for all eternity.

Read it.

Today the U.S. Supreme Court issued a 4-4 decision in the case of Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association. At issue was whether public-school teachers may be forced, as a condition of government employment, to pay mandatory union fees, even when the teachers are not union members. The upshot of today’s decision is that the mandatory union fee scheme remains firmly in place.

Yet another good reason not to teach in a government school.

Yet another reason not to consider any appointments to the Supreme Court by a Democrat President.