Read it.

Despite many hours of police coaxing, he remained near the top of an 80-foot tall sequoia tree in downtown Seattle early Wednesday, refusing to come down.

CBS affiliate KIRO reports that after 17 hours of the incident, downtown Seattle streets remain closed as officials struggle for a solution to get him out of there.

Who cares? Is that against the law? Was he bothering people?

I must agree with the sign-makers. Leave him alone, for crying out loud.

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

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“The very fact that Lois Lerner isn’t in prison right now is proof of political interference at the highest levels. Lerner lied to congress, committed, contempt, and engaged in obstruction of justice on a massive scale. Yet nothing happen to her.”

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

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Urban areas might have reached “peak millennial.” As housing costs stay high and youth unemployment lags behind the general unemployment rate, older millennials have looked toward lower-cost suburbs with economic opportunity. Urban NIMBYism and government restrictions that drive up rents have pushed away millennials.

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

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Because it’s run by a government agency, of course.

Last year, the Washingtonian published a long investigative piece on the roots of Metro’s problems. The story found that the system has a toxic work environment, and employees charged with keeping the system in good repair know they’ll never be fired so they have no incentive to do their jobs well. Meanwhile, in the past, as dangerous maintenance issues were left ignored, managers stayed focused on petty issues, like making sure workers “wore their uniforms correctly and used Metro-issued microwaves to cook food instead of their own.”

And Democrats want people like these in charge of our health care. Think TSA.

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San Francisco’s colorful former mayor Willie Brown caused a stir three years ago by writing some disturbing truths about major government infrastructure projects. The city’s Transbay Terminal project—billed as a future “Grand Central Station of the West”—was running $300 million over budget. Brown argued that no one should be shocked by such overruns, and that “we always knew” the estimate was artificially low. “In the world of civic projects, the first budget is really just a down payment,” he wrote. “If people knew the real cost from the start, nothing would ever be approved. The idea is to get going. Start digging a hole and make it so big, there’s no alternative to coming up with the money to fill it in.”

And this is the Democrat approach to governance generally: We will come up with a bright idea, since we are so much smarter than you, and it’s your job to cough up the money, even if it turns out that it was a stupid bright ides. California is natural home of this sort of thinking.

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

Read it.

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

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To channel the late and much-maligned Senator Joe McCarthy, “I hold in my hand, a special mailing from Xcel Energy, the spelling-challenged Minnesota utility company formerly known as Northern States Power, informing me of what an electricity-guzzling wastrel I am.”

For it would seem that I have used 8% more energy than my neighbors! There is a colorful bar graph with Green (but, of course) representing the Good Efficient Neighbors, Grey for All Neighbors, and a long Blue Line of Shame representing ME, the Bad Grrrll, up an unconscionable 8%.

Why they should not be delighted that I am using so much of their product remains a mystery, virtually unique among purveyors of products. I await a similar letter from Ben and Jerry informing me that I have bought 8% more Cherry Garcia and Chubby Hubby Ice Cream than my most lactose-intolerant neighbors and asking me to please try to use less.

…

Finally, in a nod to the “Everyone Gets a Trophy” philosophy that defines Minnesota, the letter tells me that “In 2015 you used 13% less energy than in 2014.” Woo-hoo! Then back off, nosy eco-freaks.

Read it.

The International Institute for Sustainable Development was not so diplomatic, and estimates that the CO2 and climate benefits from replacing petroleum fuels with biofuels like ethanol are basically zero (IISD). They claim that it would be almost 100 times more effective, and much less costly, to significantly reduce vehicle emissions through more stringent standards, and to increase CAFE standards on all cars and light trucks to over 40 miles per gallon as was done in Japan just a few years ago.

But by law we still have to use it.

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And who could blame them?

The number of citizens and long-term residents cutting their official ties to Uncle Sam jumped more than 20% last year to 4,279, according to a CNNMoney analysis of the latest government data.

It’s a trend that’s been increasing in recent years. Many of those severing links are Americans living overseas who are tired of dealing with complicated tax paperwork, a headache that has worsened since new regulations came into effect.

Eighteen times as many Americans renounced their citizenship or long-term residency in 2015 compared with 2008. Last year was the third record-breaking year in a row.

Read it.

That’s a picture of the logic board of an iPhone 5C, the same model as the San Bernardino phone. The chip with the red outline is a Toshiba THGBX2G7B2JLA01 NAND Flash chip. That’s the phone’s memory chip. All the data on the phone is stored there. It’s encrypted, but here’s the thing: the encryption key is also (almost certainly) stored in the same chip. So all the FBI needs to do is de-solder the chip, mount it in its own hardware, and read out the data. Unless the FBI is completely incompetent, it should be able to do this in less than a day. And again, unless they are completely incompetent, having read out the contents of the chip they should be able to decrypt its contents in a matter of minutes if not seconds. And even if they are completely incompetent, they could use a copy of the chip to try five different PIN codes, and then replace the chip with a fresh copy of the original and try five more. Lather, rinse, repeat. At worst this would take about a week or so.

How do I know that this is possible? Because one of the highly touted features of the iPhone 6 is that it has a secure enclave where things like encryption keys can be securely stored in a way that does not make them accessible using the technique I just described.

The FBI knows this. Everyone in the security community knows this. But not everyone in the general public knows this, and the FBI is counting on that ignorance to cover up the fact that their lawsuit against Apple is a charade. They are not worried about the data on the San Bernardino iPhone, because if they were they would have had it by now.

…

What the FBI is really trying to do here is to set a legal precedent that will let them use the power of the law to do an end-run around the secure enclave, and any other security technology that any company might produce in the future.  This is not about catching some potential terrorists, this is about effectively eliminating legal access to encryption technology.  Attempts have been made in the past to regulate encryption technology through the democratic process, and they have all failed.  So now the FBI is trying to get a court to do what Congress has on multiple occasions refused to do.

Precisely so. Ye shall know the truth, and the truth is that government bureaucrats are engaged in a continual grab for power, power over you and over yours, and will lie any lie and use any bit of force at their disposal to prevail.

Resist them, steadfast in the faith.

Read it.

Currently, two billion dollars is given each year in perpetuity to an Obamacare slush fund known as the Prevention and Public Health fund. The Department of Health and Human Services is then free to spend these funds as they see fit, without any Congressional oversight.

Unsurprisingly, this has led to the slush fund being used by the Administration as a tool to push blatantly partisan, politicized policies.

Read it.

Employees at the University of Washington (UW) blew thousands of dollars in taxpayer funds intended to foster scientific research on purchases such as deluxe Snuggies and tableware, a recent audit has revealed.

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

Perish the thought.

The Los Angeles Times reports today about how two bills that would make life easier for Uber drivers are being held up in Senate committee by Sen. Ben Hueso, chair of the Senate’s Energy, Utilities and Communications Committee.

Hueso’s brothers Alfredo and Jose Hueso just happen to run a cab company, USA Cabs, in San Diego who have sued to force Uber drivers to do something that one of the bills would exempt them from doing: register for commercial license plates.

The other bill Hueso is blocking from going for a vote, after passing the Assembly with almost no opposition (a single “no” vote between the two bills), “would allow rideshare companies to carpool, picking up multiple passengers with different destinations at the same time.”

All are Democrats, of course. Being a Democrat means never having to declare a conflict of interest — just ask Hillary.

Read it.

A Pennsylvania newspaper has reported details of a $50 million alleged renewable energy scam. More shocking is how easy it was, to allegedly defraud government subsidies.

The problem will all these beguiling government programs to Improve Life And Save The Planet is that (a) as soon as ‘government money’ is available for something, a certain class of people immediately start figuring out how they can game the system, and (b) since government employees aren’t spending their own money they are less careful than a private company would be, and the result ranges from simple lack of due diligence to outright collusion in fraud.

This is exacerbated by government preferences for Fashionable Minorities, the recipients of which see the purpose of the government job as to Provide Them With A Job rather than to Get Something Accomplished. The resulting ‘work ethic’ is what you would expect.

Read it.

…is not, apparently, violating federal laws and regulations and State Department procedures in a manner that exposes thousands of classified documents to our enemies. No, that isn’t the sort of conduct that is likely to draw an indictment from Loretta Lynch’s Department of Justice. Obama’s DOJ is more interested in trying to jail scientists who point out the rather obvious flaws in the government’s desperate effort to convince Americans that global warming is our greatest threat.

Read it.

Federal prosecutors in Nashville announced this week that all charges related to an alleged Somali sex-trafficking ring had been dropped. The decision to drop the charges against 16 remaining defendants comes in the wake of a federal appeals court ruling that three men previously prosecuted as part of the case had been wrongly convicted, owing to the fact that the entire case was a sham.

…

As detailed by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, prosecutors’ case against these so-called sex traffickers was based entirely on the faulty testimony of two victims, both of whom were caught in multiple contradictions and lies, and of a Minnesota police officer who was also found to be fabricating facts. And though the case had been billed and prosecuted as one of “child sex trafficking,” one of the allegedly underage victims—intitially described as a 15-year-old—had a falsified birth certificate. It was determined likely that the “minor,” Jane Doe 2, was actually 19-years-old during the time period in question.

At every step of the case, however, red flags that should have given law enforcement pause were ignored or overlooked. Former-U.S. Attorney Todd Jones, then in Minnesota (where the bulk of the alleged activity had taken place), even declined to prosecute the case based on concerns about its quality. But because several of the alleged sex-trafficking incidents had happened in Tennessee, federal agents were able to take the case to trial in Nashville, where a jury acquitted six defendants and convicted three. A trial judge subsequently acquitted these three defendants, but federal prosecutors appealed.

This is horrible. Hopefully there is some way that these jerks wind up in jail. The Somalis are also owed some sort of compensation, as well, although I don’t know what (if any) mechanism exists for providing it.

Read it.

But you knew that.

National Public Radio collaborated with Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to survey Americans’ recent experience with health care. As to the Affordable Care Act, the survey’s findings are damning. They suggest that Obamacare has been worse than a complete waste of money.

Read it.

Yeah, right after destroying the American health care system, giving millions of illegal immigrants driver’s licenses and Social Security numbers, and maybe a golf game or six.

Nine years after Robert Levinson went missing on an Iranian island in the Persian Gulf, the White House reiterated on Wednesday that the United States has not abandoned him.

Although it might look like that to the Casual Observer (not to be confused the the Low-Information Voter, who will believe a White House pronouncement over your lyin’ eyes any day).

“Finding Mr. Levinson remains a top priority for the United States, and we continue to spare no effort to bring him home,” Earnest maintained.

Apparently no effort is all the effort they can afford to spare.

His daughter, Sarah Moriarty, claimed at the time that the family had “reached our breaking point” with the Obama administration.

“We are crushed and outraged,” she said.

Yeah, that sure sounds like the Obama administration to me.

The Obama administration, he added, is “holding Iran to its promise.”

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

Read it. And watch the video.

Detroit is a case study in the wreck of liberal governance and the politics of racial grievance. Michael Barone is from Detroit originally and has occasionally written about its decline, as in his CRB review “The unheavenly city” (on Charles LeDuff’s Detroit: An American Autopsy). The review opens: “When people ask me why I moved from liberal to conservative, I have a one-word answer: Detroit.”

Read it.

A federal judge in Washington, DC, called the Army’s plan to require a Sikh soldier to undergo special testing to make sure his long hair, beard and turban did not interfere with proper, safe wear of his helmet and gas mask “unfair and discriminatory.”

Seems like plain common sense to me. But, then, no federal judge’s decision has ever seemed like plain common sense to me, so at least one of us is consistent.

“Singling out the plaintiff [Singh] for specialized testing due only to his Sikh articles of faith is, in this context, unfair and discriminatory,” Howell wrote. “It is this singling out for special scrutiny — indeed, with the initial precaution of requiring an escort and observers for the plaintiff as he was subjected to the tests–that has a clear tendency to pressure the plaintiff, or other soldiers who may wish to seek a religious accommodation, to conform behavior and forego religious precepts.”

Except that’s not what’s happening. In reality, he’s being given special consideration to accommodate the requirements of his faith, with proper safeguards for his own safety (and those of his comrades) under modern battle conditions. US District Judge Beryl A. Howell has, of course, no military experience, and her CV of Swarthmore, Columbia, and Columbia Law is pretty thoroughly Crustian.

Read it.

But the US State Department has admitted that its round-the-clock hotline service for Syrians to report violations of the recent ceasefire needs improvement, following reports that the volunteers manning the phones were unable to understand the Arabic speakers who called in.

Hey, if they have anything important to say, they’ll say it in English. Ask Hillary.

Read it.

Hey, if you can dream it, you can do it. Ask Obama.

Like the apocryphal story of the state legislature that passed a law dictating that pi equals 3, the Oregon state legislature has passed two laws that pretend the laws of supply & demand don’t exist. The difference is that, in reality, no state legislature ever did pass a law saying that pi equals 3, but Oregon’s legislature is totally ignoring basic economic principles.

First, earlier this week, the legislature passed a new minimum wage law increasing the minimum to as high as 14.75 per hour in the Portland area by 2022 (with lower minima for other parts of the state). This will supposedly be the highest in the nation, but only in the unlikely event that no other state raises its minimum wage in the next six years. However, after adjusting for the cost of living, Oregon’s new minimum wage probably is the highest in the nation even before 2022.

…

Buoyed by its success, the legislature yesterday passed a law legalizing inclusionary zoning, that is, forcing homebuilders to sell a certain percentage of their products below cost. This will also lead them to build fewer homes and to sell the market-rate homes they do build for higher prices to offset their losses on the “affordable” homes. In other words, this law relies on the counterintuitive notion that making housing more expensive will make it more affordable.

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Saco farmer Rick Grant does not want to run afoul of any labor laws. He’s a straight up kind of guy and pays more than minimum wage to his field workers. But as the laws relate to family-owned farms his size – 125 acres under cultivation, so good-sized but far from Big Ag – some aspects of the Fair Labor and Standards Act are confusing. Or worse.

“Some of their rules seem silly, or silly to me,” he said. Like the one that means workers on Grant’s Farm shouldn’t lay hands on peppers grown by his cousin on another farm a few miles away.

All the hunderace of labor unions with none of the benefits. Thank you, Washington D.C.

Complexities in labor laws mean job descriptions that shift at surprising, some would say nonsensical, points, creating bookkeeping headaches and opening the door to potential penalties from the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. Grant keeps his books and his accountant up to date and wants to avoid a bureaucratic nightmare for doing something as deceptively simple as doing his cousin a favor.

The U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division has increased its efforts to enforce fair labor laws nationwide. “Vigorously” is the department’s term for it. They’ve added investigators and focused on traditionally low wage industries, like farm work, launching 1,400 investigations in agriculture in 2015. The department found that 80 percent of its investigations in the areas of migrant, seasonal and guest workers uncovered violations worth a total of $4.3 million in back wages to more than 10,000 workers.

Of course. Bureaucrats have to be able to demonstrate that they are doing their jobs, even if those jobs are terminally stupid.

But recently the Department of Labor also imposed penalties on Vermont farms and a vineyard in New Hampshire for violations of fair labor laws. Grant, like many in Maine’s agricultural community, has his ear to the ground and a lot of questions. Have inspectors been by? Has anyone been penalized? Does anyone really understand this stuff, besides lawyers and bureaucrats?

Nowadays, getting a visit from government employees is like being raided by the KGB. And God help you if your papers aren’t in order.

“I think the best thing to do is stay small and not hire anybody,” Lazor said. “That’s easier said than done though.”

But the only way to be safe.

Read it.

If you are tired of reading columns about Affordable Care Act failures, don’t read any further. If you’re not, please meet yet another example of how the shockingly incompetent government has wasted so much of our money in developing and administering services that are taken for granted in the private market—namely, the ACA exchanges.

The federal government spent an eye-popping $2.1 billion on 60 different contractors to build the HealthCare.gov boondoggle, and President Barack Obama’s proposed budget calls for another $535 million to operate the exchange in fiscal 2017. Billions more has been sent to the states, which also failed in a similarly spectacular fashion to construct their own portals. A Government Accountability Office report found that even by September 2015, none of the 14 states that operate their own exchange had one that was fully functioning. This was despite the fact that $5.51 billion was funneled to the states to facilitate the portals’ construction.

A number of exchanges have already failed outright, with perhaps the most notable being the implosion of Cover Oregon. The $300 million spent building Oregon’s exchange made it the third-most expensive, behind New York and California, two far more populous states. Cover Oregon also infamously spent $21 million on folksy ads that were widely mocked on the Internet and late-night talk shows.

Read it.

The University of Texas at Austin has recommended expulsion for a male student who was found responsible for sexual misconduct by the university’s Title IX bureaucrats. But the woman he supposedly raped didn’t formally accuse him—they remained friends and even flirted via text messages subsequent to the encounter.

In fact, it was the woman’s father who initiated the Title IX proceedings against the male student, “John Doe,” who is suing UT-Austin to prevent the university from expelling him.

The woman, “Jane Roe,” is not a UT-Austin student, which raises an important question: Should a university really have a responsibility to meddle in students’ private sex lives when parents of non-students file complaints?

The Title IX bureaucracy at UT-Austin evidently believes so.

Rules? We don’t need no stinkin’ rules.

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Personally, I can’t think of anyone more appropriate to name a post office after than a communist.

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A Doo radio transmitter, officially known as a T-1151 radio transmitter, is a radio transmission device camouflaged as a pile of animal droppings or, in its most common form, a large single fecal dropping from an animal indigenous to the area of intended use. Regardless, the external form of the device was designed to discourage close examination and thus, detection or disruption.

John Stossel turns over a rock.

We know government understands that new technologies are important. The military invests in robots and traffic cops use radar guns. But when the rest of us use robots or fly drones, government gets eager to put rules in place before things get “out of control.”

When it’s hard to innovate in the U.S., innovation happens elsewhere. The Japanese already offer largely automated hotels. At the Henn-na (or “Weird”) Hotel, the front desk clerk is a robot dinosaur—popular with the kids. Another robot stores your luggage, and another takes you to your room.

This may sound like an expensive stunt, but the robot hotel is cheaper than others nearby—partly because it employs fewer people.

That alarms politicians who fear change. Whenever there’s been innovation, experts predict massive unemployment.

Hence why none of the Adults believed Obama’s ‘Hope and Change’ slogan.

If we crushed every machine that did things humans used to do, we’d still be living in caves and hunting tigers with spears. Every time there’s a new invention, some people lose jobs, and there’s a period of adjustment.

But we come out ahead.

Not that any government employee will ever admit that.

Read it.

The House Ways and Means Committee held a hearing last week on the international tax competition in 2016. Various distinguished witnesses revealed severe consequences on small businesses and community structures when a corporation moves overseas. Under the present global tax laws, American businesses are not able to compete in the global economy.

The problems with double taxation and corporate inversions are not confined solely to the federal government and large corporations- the ripple effects are seen in our neighborhoods and communities.  International tax reform is being recognized as a bipartisan effort.

Read it.

When the higher ed bubble bursts, it’s going to make the last housing bubble look small.

My, what a surprise!

Of the 11 remaining health insurance co-ops created under Obamacare, eight of them could collapse in less than a year. Moreover, the 11 remaining are less than half of the original twenty-three that were established in 2012 to compete with for-profit, private insurance companies. This from Mandy Cohen, one of the top federal health officials in charge of overseeing the implementation of Obamacare. As COO of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, Cohen’s responsibilities not only cover the physical presence of Obamacare throughout the country but its disastrous virtual presence in the form of healthcare.gov.

In addition to the possible collapse of the healthcare co-ops, Cohen hinted that there was much more at stake than just the loss of insurance for consumers.

Read it.

The DOJ has persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant for a thing that does not exist, by forcing Apple to create a key that the FBI is incapable of creating..

Read it.

BLUF: The Black Panthers were a criminal gang, thugs, rapists, and murderers (listen to the tape).

The University of Minnesota and several affiliated Usual Suspects are presenting something called “The Black Panthers: A Love Story”, at which the people who tortured and murdered Alex Rackley will be honored guests.

Read it.

Taxpayers deserve a transparent, accountable government, starting with Commissioner John Koskinen’s complacency in uncovering the truth in the Lois Lerner conservative targeting scandal. The agency has continually displayed extraordinary lack of responsibility.

Koskinen has also proven to be incapable of correctly handling taxpayer dollars, protecting them from identity theft, fraud, and even lied to the American people and Congress. Clearly, the agency is in desperate need of reform and new leadership.

My, what a surprise!

A report co-sponsored by JPMorgan Chase in 2014 speaks of the problem in similarly biblical terms: “Roughly 75 percent of the world’s poor — 2.5 billion people — do not have a bank account or otherwise participate in the mainstream financial system.” The lack of access to “secure, affordable financial products and services severely limits the global poor’s financial security and opportunities.”

Yet when bankers and regulators debate the travails of the unbanked or underbanked — effectively euphemisms for poor and lower-middle-class Americans — they usually avoid two key questions: Why is this cross-section of society so marginally attached to the banking system in the first place? And who is behind the provision of “alternative” services — high-cost loan sharks, payday lenders, cash checking stores, pawnshops — the poor turn to instead of banks?

In reality, it is the banks themselves that appear to have cut off and driven away the low-income consumer, not the other way around. Wall Street won’t make loans to the poor — at least not directly. But large banks, it turns out, are behind many of the predatory nonbank, high-cost lenders that notoriously prey on poor communities. Most recently, the same JPMorgan Chase that’s working with the White House to reach the unbanked partnered with OnDeck Capital, an online lender that approves loans in a flash and charges eye-popping interest rates that averaged around 54 percent as of 2014.

Read it.

Why? Because they’ve got all this taxpayer money and if they don’t spend it before the end of the year their budget will get cut.

Did we mention that these were government employees? We probably didn’t have to.

My, what a surprise!

The federal government has failed to properly monitor enrollee eligibility for Obamacare, according to a report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). As a result, the government has made billions of dollars in Obamacare subsidy payments to individuals that may have been committing fraud.

As the report notes, the system used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) relies on data sent by three government agencies – the IRS, SSA, and DHS – to check eligibility for Obamacare. However, the system used by CMS is unable to verify many inconsistencies in the data.

This inability to properly verify enrollment has meant billions of dollars have been sent out to enrollees without verifying whether the applicants were fraudulent.

Read it.

Record numbers of refugees from Fidel Castro’s failed communist experiment are streaming into the United States — not just across the Florida Straits, but especially over the U.S.-Mexico border. During the last three months of 2015, more than 12,000 Cubans knocked on our southern door. This year’s migration is on pace to double the previous high.

In stark, resentment-sowing contrast to other migrants from Latin America, Cubans are greeted in the U.S. with cash, access to welfare and a path to citizenship. That’s all thanks to the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act. But now many politicians are asking whether, during this period of Washington-Havana thaw, it’s time to revamp this Cold War-era preference.

Read it.

A new study from the Washington Center for Equitable Growth mapped student loan delinquency rates and found that areas of cities with higher concentrations of African-Americans and Latinos had the highest delinquency rates.
Read more at http://redalertpolitics.com/2016/02/22/federal-college-loan-program-hurts-minorities/#TfG6QD4ctkm0IGLq.99

Read it.

In a recent letter addressed to Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), Obamacare chief Andy Slavitt said the federal government will “recover its fair portion” of funds in the event a failed Obamacare state exchange reaches a settlement with contractors.

Given that the federal government funded the overwhelming majority of state exchange projects with $5.5 billion in taxpayer funds, “fair portion” should be close to 100 percent.

But don’t hold your breath.

To date, recovery of the billions in wasted state exchange funds has been near non-existent, despite failed exchanges in Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico, and Nevada costing taxpayers $733 million.

In fact, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, these four states have returned ZERO dollars to the federal government, and state exchanges collectively have so far returned just $1 million.

But the waste doesn’t end there, as “working” state exchanges including Vermont, Minnesota, Maryland, and Massachusetts have each misused as much as hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds.

Further, an investigation led by House Energy and Commerce Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Tim Murphy (R-Pa.) found that federal officials were unable to provide information on the long-term sustainability of remaining exchanges, and were unable to defend the four failed state exchanges.

Read it.

In the DOJ’s defense of the FBI’s request, they said that Apple’s refusal to comply “appears to be based on its concern for its business model and public brand marketing strategy.” That may be true, but the government is playing the same game. It looks like they are using the emotions around the San Bernardino incident to garner political support for a more strategic move against companies refusing to break encryption. They know this could set the precedent they need to strong arm industry players into either installing “backdoors” on encrypted devices or bending over whenever the FBI comes knocking.

So we have competing strategies at play: the enabling of security vs. the subversion of security. Which one were you taught in high school was the government’s side?

Read it.

Earlier today, I wrote about the scheduled hearing in a case brought by several left-wing organizations to block three states from taking measures to make sure non-citizens can’t vote in the upcoming presidential elections. The states received permission from the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to proceed. The leftist outfits seek to enjoin the EAC’s order.

The Justice Department is, in effect, the lawyer for the EAC. However, it has chosen to tank the case. It “consents” to the motion to enjoin the Commission’s order.

They thought they had a sweet deal: Have a bunch of the Usual Suspect leftist anybody-can-vote groups to challenge a ruling that States can actually ask for ID, and then have the DOJ, supposedly defending the ruling, take a dive. But it didn’t work out that way.

Judge Leon also seemed taken aback that the Justice Department is not opposing the plaintiffs’ motion to enjoin the government. Leon called it “unprecedented” for DOJ to agree to a preliminary injunction blocking a federal official’s decision. “I’ve never heard of it in all my years as a lawyer,” the judge stated.

The same statement applies, I think, to any number of actions and positions taken by the Obama Justice Department under both Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch.

Stalin once said that it doesn’t matter who gets to vote so much as who counts the votes; the Obama DOJ corollary to this appears to be that it doesn’t matter what the law says so much as who gets to enforce (or not enforce) the law.

With DOJ taking the plaintiffs’ side, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach took the lead in defending the proof of citizenship requirement imposed by his state. He also raised the conflict of interest argument (discussed in my earlier post) that stems from allegations that the Justice Department ghost wrote the original ECA decision, which went in favor of the leftist civil rights plaintiffs.

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

My, what a surprise!

In a late Friday afternoon news dump before the President’s day holiday weekend, the Obama administration announced that it would pay out $7.7 billion to Obamacare insurers through the reinsurance program – including $1.7 billion in illegal payments. In all, the administration has unlawfully funneled $3.5 billion into this program.

For 2015 Obamacare reinsurance, the administration will pay out $6 billion raised from a fee on private health insurance and an additional $1.7 billion that under federal law belongs to the Treasury department. Indeed, the decision by the Obama administration directly violates section 1341 of Obamacare which explicitly states “money shall be deposited into the general fund of the Treasury of the United States and may not be used for the [reinsurance] program established under this section.”

The Obamacare reinsurance program was one of three programs (together with risk corridors and risk adjustment) created to hide the true costs of coverage on the exchange and prop up insurers by redistributing funds from different groups to Obamacare exchanges. In the case of reinsurance, this took the form of a $44 assessment on each individual with private health insurance.

Read it.

The Chinese military is able to detect U.S. F-22 stealth fighter jets, according to a Chinesemilitary expert in an interview for a CCTV program.

Several fighters from East China Sea Fleet patrolled around the Air Defense IdentificationZone (ADIZ) over the East China Sea after receiving orders that unidentified trackingoccurred near the ADIZ on the morning of Feb. 10, according to a report on PLA Daily onFeb. 11.

The report said that helicopters from a carrier-based helicopter brigade along with thecarrier patrolled around the area and missiles were set on fighters on duty at nearbymilitary airports which were prepared to take off for combat. However the report did notdisclose which country the objects belong to or other relevant information.

Some Western media guessed that the unidentified objects might be the U.S. F-22 stealthfighter jets. Chinese military expert Yin Zhuo told Asia Today that if the unidentified objects appearing near ADIZ over the East China Sea turned out to be F-22 from the U.S.,it would be a good opportunity for China’s military to practice its ability to find, identify and intercept stealth fighters.

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In order for humanity to one day colonize Mars, researchers must first find a sustainable crop to grow there. However, Mars isn’t the most hospitable place for plant life, which is why NASA scientists are currently in Lima, Peru attempting to grow potatoes in a simulated Martian environment.

The experiment, which began in January, is taking place at Lima’s International Potato Center (CIP), a nonprofit research center aimed at achieving food security, according to a press release put out by CIP in December. The researchers are growing 100 different varieties of potatoes and subjecting them to a slew of tests to see if any of them can hold up to Martian conditions.

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When public college foundations ask for donations, they tell a familiar story: state funding is tight, and donors can help support the community. Their dollars fund scholarships, buildings, academic programs. And almost always, the foundations’ money goes directly to the colleges they support.

But in Rhode Island, Governor Gina Raimondo has other ideas.

It started with a trip to Switzerland. Raimondo wanted to attend the World Economic Forum in Davos, and the University of Rhode Island Foundation offered to cover up to $10,000 of her travel costs.

During the same week of her request, when Raimondo wanted a state innovation office, another public institution’s foundation, the Rhode Island College Foundation, agreed to create it. The office’s one employee — a chief innovation officer — will make $210,000 a year and serve on the governor’s cabinet.

“It’s kind of a step out of the box in terms of the traditional ways to support a college,” said Edwin R. Pacheco, the Rhode Island College Foundation’s associate vice president for college advancement and external affairs.

To quote a famous Doonesbury cartoon: ‘That pension fund was just sitting there.’

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In Woody Allen’s Bananas (1971, written with Mickey Rose), it is the phase in which the revolutionary Esposito achieves power in the fictional Latin American backwater of San Marcos. The power promptly goes to his Esposito’s head. Esposito starts issuing proclamations such as this one: “From this day on, the official language of San Marcos will be Swedish. Silence! In addition to that, all citizens will be required to change their underwear every half-hour. Underwear will be worn on the outside so we can check. Furthermore, all children under 16 years old are now… 16 years old!”

Bananas is a comedy that plays it for laughs. Barack Obama is about as funny as cancer. We probably entered into the Esposito phase of Obama’s presidency long ago, around the time Obama started rewriting unambiguous provisions of Obamacare on his own say-so.

Now we seem to be reaching peak Esposito.

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Ethanol backers struck first, filing a lawsuit January 8, claiming that the EPA erroneously set the numbers based on demand rather than supply and that the EPA overreached in its interpretation of the RFS.

Then last week, the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers also claimed the EPA used flawed methodologies in setting the most recent numbers. “Despite the agency’s best efforts, certain aspects of the final RFS rule still run afoul of the Clean Air Act,” said Chet Thompson, president of the AFPM. “This rule further confirms that the RFS program is dysfunctional and that the only real solution is full repeal by Congress.”

The EPA is one of the reasons why Richard Nixon will burn in Hell for all eternity.