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Gov. John Bel Edwards (D-La.) is beginning his first term as governor by slamming taxpayers with a smorgasbord of tax hikes in order to close the Pelican State’s projected $700 million shortfall by June 2016. Nine of the tax increases proposed by Gov. Edwards, which are listed below, would directly hit consumers and five of them would take effect as soon as April 1st.

Well, he is a Democrat….

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The Obama administration will entirely withhold 22 emails from Hillary Clinton’s private server because they have been classified as “top secret,” the State Department said on Friday.

The existence of multiple top secret emails in the Democratic presidential front-runner’s inbox will only increase public scrutiny on the former secretary of State’s unusual email arrangement, mere days before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation nominating contest on Monday.

The 37 pages of emails are the first time the Obama administration has confirmed that messages within Clinton’s server while she was at State merit one of the highest levels of classification. Although the State Department has previously classified more than 1,300 of Clinton’s emails upon release, the vast majority of those were at lower classification levels.

Well, well, well.

Clinton’s presidential campaign quickly dismissed the news, which spokesman Brian Fallon called “overclassification run amok.”

My, what a surprise.

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In an effort to further promote their Waters of the U.S. (WOTUS) rule, the EPA may have violated the Financial Services and Government appropriations Act of 2014, according to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). How they broke the law; through their use of government funds for “unauthorized publicity and propaganda” and the use of “indirect or grassroots lobbying”. To put it simply, the EPA used government funds, designated for other purposes, to orchestrate false support for their new land grab.

In a thinly veiled attempt to spin their rule into something more presentable, they used a crowd speaking website known as Thunderclap. The EPA set up an initial page and support goal, and when that goal was reached, Thunderclap would send out a tweet previously made by the EPA that would be automatically sent out by the campaign supporters, and thus spreading the message. Thunderclap estimates the EPA’s message reached almost 2 million people. The GAO argues that since the EPA did not take responsibility for the tweets themselves, they violated the statute.

They didn’t stop there either; they continued their grassroots campaign through the use of two outside websites in favor of the rule. Through the use of hyperlinks, the EPA allowed and promoted travel to websites, for the Surfrider Foundation and National Resources Defense Council, with opinions and blogs that would attempt to trick people into being in favor of the rule. This collusion clearly is against the statute, and even though the EPA didn’t directly post, they sent traffic to these sites, once more likely violating the statute.

Read it.

At least 19 immigrant children were inadvertently handed over to human traffickers by the U.S. government last year after it failed to conduct proper background checks, a Senate report released Thursday said.

But we can surely vet all of those Syrian refugees, guaranteed!

Read it.

I suspect that it’s not so much that they’re afraid of fat as it is they’re against anything the people enjoy.

Plus they just like to tell people what to do; that’s a large part of it.

Ammo Grrrll doesn’t like what she sees.

Oh, God. Make it stop; make it stop. We are $18 bazillion quadrillion in debt (seriously, I looked it up…), half added since Dear Leader has been in charge. Obamacare accomplished absolutely none of the promised benefits (“Cover 40 Million people! Bend the Cost Curve! Keep your Insurance If You Like It! No Illegals, Except for the Illegals Who Don’t Have Insurance!”) in exchange for destroying the best health care delivery system in the world.

Millions upon millions of Federal employees are vulnerable to identity theft, blackmail, threats, at least four times as many people as the Administration admitted to at first.

Dear Leader is trying his best to lose against our beheading, gay-murdering, woman-mutilating enemies in the Middle East, but as slowly as possible so as to leave the biggest, most intractible mess for the next person in charge. The timing is tricky. If he’s not careful, Iran will have the bomb before Dear Leader is out of office. I’m sure it’s part of the backdoor deal to wait until January 21, 2017 to fire one at Israel. Was ensuring that Iran gets the bomb the ultimate pricetag for this Man-Choom-ian Candidate to pay back his consigliere, Valerie Jarrett, who was born there? She made the Obamas rich beyond any possible dreams of obscene avarice even before the post-Presidential loot rolls in like a tsunami.

Read it.

“Billions spent, but fewer people are using public transportation,” declares the Los Angeles Times. The headline might have been more accurate if it read, “Billions spent, so therefore fewer are using public transit,” as the billions were spent on the wrong things.

…

The situation is actually worse than the numbers shown in the article, which are “unlinked trips.” If you take a bus, then transfer to another bus or train, you’ve taken two unlinked trips. Before building rail, more people could get to their destinations in one bus trip; after building rail, many bus lines were rerouted to funnel people to the rail lines. According to California transit expert Tom Rubin, survey data indicate that there were an average of 1.66 unlinked trips per trip in 1985, while today the average is closer to 2.20. That means today’s unlinked trip numbers must be reduced by nearly 25 percent to fairly compare them with 1985 numbers.

Mass transit: Politicians spending billions of dollars on systems that take you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to go at times that are convenient for them, not for you.

And they wonder why people prefer to own and drive automobiles.

Read it.

As if the Obama administration could find its ass with both hands when it comes to stemming the rise of the Islamic Stat anywhere.

Read it.

City planners in Los Angeles who think (albeit very incorrectly) that they have control over how residents live are famously pushing for general plan to “get people out of their cars” in this massive city and onto bikes or into mass transit and creating communities nestled around transit hubs. It’s called their Mobility Plan 2035. It would recast the city with a heavy emphasis on pedestrian and bicycle traffic, possibly at the expense of supporting motor vehicles.

There’s a slight problem with such a plan: This does not appear to be how the citizens of Los Angeles actually want to live. Use of mass transit in Los Angeles and Orange County continues to decline even as more and more money is thrown at it. To the extent that residents rely on mass transit, they seem to prefer buses to light rail, and when the costs of riding buses goes up and the availability or quality of service goes down, riders take a hike.

Funny thing about that whole democracy business; people keep trying to make their own decisions.

Read it.

States and regions all over the country are developing plans for high-speed or conventional-speed intercity passenger trains. One of the first steps in writing such plans is the “feasibility study.” But the people writing these studies have a curious definition of “feasible.”

I think they define ‘feasible’ as ‘something we can get away with’.

Not surprisingly, that study never actually answers, or even attempts to answer, whether such a train is feasible by any standard criteria, such as whether revenues could cover capital and operating costs, or just operating costs, or whether quantifiable benefits exceed costs. Instead, the study focuses mainly on, “How can we sell this clunker of an idea to enough politicians that we can get it funded?” Instead of quantifying benefits, the study relies on slogans like “quality of life,” “attract new business,” and “provide transportation alternatives.”

Yeah, what he said.

Read it.

Legislation sponsored by Senator Mike Doherty (R-23) ensuring that kids have the right to offer snow shoveling services before storms without municipal approval was signed into law by Governor Chris Christie.

The law was prompted by a sorry story from last year, when two Bound Brook, New Jersey, high school students tried to make some money shoveling their neighbors’ driveways, only to find out this was against the law.

No doubt there is a Union somewhere that is gnashing its teeth….

Read it.

One of the “few regrets” of his presidency, President Obama said dolefully in his State of the Union speech, was “that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.” Were he endowed with “the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt,” he remarked, he could have done more to bridge the partisan divide. But he pledged to “keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office.”

Did you experience a touch of déjà vu when the president said that? Four years ago, when he was in the home stretch of his first term and running for a second, he said much the same thing.

“I’m the first one to confess that the spirit that I brought to Washington, that I wanted to see instituted, where we weren’t constantly in a political slugfest . . . I haven’t fully accomplished that,” Obama told an interviewer in 2012. “My biggest disappointment is that we haven’t changed the tone in Washington as much as I would have liked.”

Did he even try?

Hint: No.

Read it.

Somehow, highly classified information from SIPRNet, as well as even the super-secure JWICS, jumped from those closed systems to the open system and turned up in at least 1,340 of Clinton’s home e-mails — including several the CIA earlier this month flagged as containing ultra-secret Sensitive Compartmented Information and Special Access Programs, a subset of SCI.

SAP includes “dark projects,” such as drone operations, while SCI protects intelligence sources and methods.

…

“It takes a very conscious effort to move a classified e-mail or cable from the classified systems over to the unsecured open system and then send it to Hillary Clinton’s personal e-mail account,” said Raymond Fournier, a veteran Diplomatic Security Service special agent. “That’s no less than a two-conscious-step process.”

He says it’s clear from some of the classified e-mails made public that someone on Clinton’s staff essentially “cut and pasted” content from classified cables into the messages sent to her. The classified markings are gone, but the content is classified at the highest levels — and so sensitive in nature that “it would have been obvious to Clinton.” Most likely the information was, in turn, e-mailed to her via NIPRNet.

Democrats Investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

If Republicans had done any of this, their asses would already be sitting in jail.

Read it.

I vote both.

The saga of Barack Obama’s Internal Revenue Service is almost unbelievable. After “joking” years ago that he would audit his enemies, it turned out that Obama’s minions were in fact delaying or blocking routine applications for 501(c) status by conservative organizations, in order to help the Democratic Party. When Congress tried to investigate, the Obama administration stonewalled at every turn. Evidence mysteriously disappeared and the key player in the scheme, Lois Lerner, pled the Fifth rather than answer Congress’s questions.

Obama’s stonewall strategy has generally worked well. Scandals fade from the front pages when there are no new developments, and if information finally emerges, Democratic Party reporters treat it as old news. So the IRS scandal has pretty much disappeared from public awareness. Nevertheless, via InstaPundit, we learn that yet another IRS computer hard drive has been destroyed. How many is that now? I’ve lost track.

Read it.

At issue are the two civil complaints brought against Holland by school board officials over two newspaper ads she bought, which urged the members of her community to educate themselves about the candidates up for election to the town’s school board and to get out and vote. She did not advocate for or against any particular candidate. But because she had not registered as a “political committee,” two complaints were filed against her, beginning her unwanted and expensive quest to defend herself against frivolous and politically-motivated attacks on her freedom of speech and right to participate in the political process.

Read it.

In the simple morality tale that is modern mainstream liberalism, government spending leads to good things and cutting government spending leads to bad things. So when news broke that Flint, Michigan’s, water system was laced with lead and may have poisoned up to 2 percent of city residents, including 23 children, they already knew the cause: Spending cuts imposed on the city by the state emergency manager.

The Detroit Free Press lectured Governor Rick Snyder, the villain in liberal central casting who appointed the manager, thusly: “To lead the state, a balanced budget is not sufficient…He has got to see people, not sums, as the bottom line of the state balance sheet.” Meanwhile, a headline in Vox declared, “Flint, Michigan, tried to save money on water. Now its children have food lead poisoning.” And The Week’s Ryan Cooper accused Flint of poisoning its own residents to save a few bucks. “This is a stark demonstration of austerity’s false economy.”

A dissection of the events, however, suggests that it isn’t government austerity that  is responsible for the debacle but the government itself. And at every level: local, state, federal, elected officials, administrative agencies, you name it, I note in my column at The Week.

Check it out.

Funny thing about that: The top 15 high-tax states are all Blue States.

Texas, of course, is #46, which means that we have some work to do.

Read it.

Purely by coincidence, you understand. (Election? What election?) (Hillary? Who’s Hillary?)

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As if this were something pertaining to the duty a mayor, rather than managing the public services (police, fire, garbage collection) that are actually a part of his job.

f ever you were wondering why big American cities are governed so badly, take a gander at Boston University’s Menino Survey of 89 U.S. mayors, including 63 from the 275 cities with populations of at least 100,000 (key findings here; full report here).

There are many depressing results to contemplate. For instance, mayors rightly see “infrastructure” as their most pressing priority, and also rightly (at least in my experience from living the last 18 years in Los Angeles, the District of Columbia, and New York), put “roads” at the top of that infrastructure list, and yet when asked to name one project they would build with one big unrestricted grant, “mass transit” went to Number One; and when asked to name one small infrastructure item, bike/pedestrian improvements shot to the top. In fact, when asked a tradeoff question, about whether “Cities should make their roads more accessible to bicycles even if it means sacrificing driving lanes and/or parking,” a whopping 70 percent either agreed or strongly agreed.

With results as you see them: Bad traffic is made worse in favor of Crustian fads that few people use. And don’t get me started on HOV lanes….

Read it.

An “investigative summary” posted this month by the Justice Department’s inspector general criticizes the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) for hiring a federal airport security screener to help find seizable cash in passengers’ luggage. Under the arrangement, the DEA designated the screener a “confidential source” and promised him a cut of any money he found while rummaging through people’s bags.

Was that wrong? Yes, according to the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG). The OIG concluded that paying employees of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) to report evidence of criminal activity was inappropriate, since they are supposed to do that anyway. The OIG noted that DEA policy “precludes registering as a CS [confidential source] ’employees of U.S. law enforcement agencies who are working solely in their official capacity with DEA.'” It also worried that “asking the TSA Security Screener to notify the DEA of passengers carrying large sums of money in exchange for a reward based on money seized by the DEA violated the DEA’s interdiction manual” and “could have violated individuals’ protection against unreasonable searches and seizures if it led to a subsequent DEA enforcement action.”

America — well on its way to being a Third-World country.

Read it.

Between 2009 and 2011, the Department of Justice (DOJ) allowed 2,000 guns to be bought by criminals in the Phoenix area who were smuggling the weapons to Mexico in order to track the weapons in that country, because why should the DOJ limit itself to enforcing the law within America’s borders? Under the program, dubbed Operation Fast & Furious, the DOJ lost track of more than 1,400 of the weapons.

Now, one of those weapons, a .50 caliber rifle capable of taking down helicopters, has been found in the hideout of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, the purported leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. It is the third time a weapon from Fast & Furious was found at a major Mexican crime scene.

Democrats Investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

Jeff Jacoby turns over a rock.

Have you ever paid someone to punch a victim in the stomach? If you’re a Massachusetts taxpayer, you have now.

To induce GE to relocate to Boston, Governor Charlie Baker and Mayor Marty Walsh offered to cross the corporate behemoth’s palm with silver — lots and lots of silver. The package of incentives underwritten by Bay State taxpayers is expected eventually to total more than $150 million in direct subsidies, tax abatements, training funds, site improvements, and property acquisition costs. That means that General Electric — a conglomerate with roughly $150 billion in annual revenues — will siphon $188,000 out of the public treasury for each job it proposes to move to Boston.

Since this is basically one Blue State government screwing over another, one might be tempted to ignore it; neglecting the fact that all this is being done with money taxed from the people, not all of whom are brain-dead lefties. (Not even in Taxachusetts.)

Read it.

The IRS erased a hard drive belonging to a former top employee involved in the agency’s controversial, taxpayer-funded hiring of elite trial law firm Quinn Emanuel.

Although there was a court preservation order on all documents related to the IRS hiring of the outside firm, the hard drive was erased anyway. The order was borne of a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request submitted by Microsoft.

Even though the white shoe law firm has zero experience handling sensitive tax data, taxpayers have been footing bills of over $1,000 per hour for its services.

Democrats Investigating Democrats: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

Read it.

The Supreme Court decided today to review a decision adverse to the government in the legal challenge to President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules. At issue is a program that would allow as many as five million illegal immigrants who are the parents of citizens or of lawful permanent residents to apply for a program under which they would receive work permits and avoid the possibility of deportation.

Obama’s power grab was thwarted when a coalition of 26 states filed a lawsuit alleging that Obama unlawfully sidestepped Congress and ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedures Act for changing rules. A federal judge entered a preliminary injunction shutting down the program while the lawsuit proceeded, and a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit affirmed the injunction.

The district court’s injunction was based on a finding that the Obama administration didn’t follow the applicable procedures for changing rules. However, in agreeing to hear the case, the Supreme Court broadened the matter to encompass the more fundamental separation of powers concerns. It asked the parties to address whether the administration’s plan violates the constitutional command that the president “shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

Looks like King Barry has encountered a stumbling-block on his way to supreme power.

Read it.

A newly uncovered email confirms accusations that the $305 million Cover Oregon Obamacare exchange was controlled by partisan political advisors working for then-Governor John Kitzhaber’s 2014 reelection effort.

Kitzhaber is, of course, a Democrat.

Public documents previously obtained and examined by Willamette Week suggested that decisions over the fate of the now-failed exchange were given to partisan political operatives – led by a trusted aid of the governor known as “the princess of darkness.” This new email all but confirms these accusations.

Cronyism is, of course, endemic to politicians of all parties.

While Kitzhaber did win reelection, he was forced to resign months later amid a public corruption scandal involving his fiancée’s misuse of public office.

Ah, yes, the traditional Democrat way to retire from office.

Read it.

Of course. The city is run by Democrats, and Democrats don’t see why the quality of the product ought to be reflected in what they charge you for it.

“This s*** is criminal… [Michigan’s Governor Rick Snyder] deserves to go to prison for this,” local resident Kendrick Boyd was quoted as saying.

Of course. The city is run by Democrats, and Democrats always look for a Republican to blame when what they do goes wrong.

Read it.

Paul Krugman asks, “Is vast inequality necessary?” His answer is that some inequality is “inevitable,” but “the rich don’t have to be as rich as they are.”

But maybe the problem isn’t the rich are too rich. Maybe the problem is the poor aren’t rich enough. Like Bernie Sanders, who accuses Trump of being a demagogue and then spends most of his speeches lambasting the wealthy, Krugman wants to blame the wealthy for being rich. But the wealthy aren’t the ones who put policies in place that keep the poor oppressed.

The Antiplanner recently met Alan Graham, who helps homeless people in Austin. He says the homeless have too many health problems to make good employees, but they are very entrepreneurial. But the only entrepreneurial activity they are legally allowed to engage in is begging, because the courts have ruled that begging is a First Amendment right. Anything else they would like to do, even just open a lemonade stand, requires fees they can’t afford and permits from a bureaucracy they can’t understand. These rules were made by middle-class bureaucrats and progressive elected officials, not the wealthy.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

Read it.

That’s why they call it the Affordable Care Act — because they act as if it were affordable care, but it’s really just an act.

Obamacare – the gift that keeps on shivving.

Read it.

The Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) started off 2016 by removing the manatee from the Endangered Species Act (ESA) designation of “endangered” to the lesser designation of “threatened.” In a notice in the Federal Register published after the announcement, the FWS noted that manatee populations have seen gains such that there is a “very low percentage chance of this animal going extinct in the next 100 years.” However, the FWS noted one of the more pressing threats to the manatee resurgence would come from President Obama’s carbon regulations under the Clean Power Plan.

It’s no secret the President’s carbon regulations will force the premature retirement of coal-fired power plants across the U.S. In fact the President seems wholly indifferent to the thousands of jobs and livelihoods he’s destroying. However what the President and EPA did not count on is that some of the power plants that will be shuttered are integral to the survival of hundreds of Florida manatees.

The issue stems from the fact that the warm-water discharge from some Florida coal-fired power plants, such as Florida’s Big Bend Power Station, has become home to hundreds of West Indian manatees. The manatees are drawn to the warm-water discharge for a nearly six-month period in the winter.

The FWS’s notice on the manatee’s new ESA designation stated, “Within the Southeastern United States, the potential loss of warm water at power plants…used by wintering manatees is identified as a significant threat.” The FWS went on to point out that “addressing the pending loss of warm water habitat from power plant discharges remains a priority activity needed to achieve recovery.”

Read it.

Oregon has a plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by forcing electric companies to stop burning coal and to get half their energy from renewable resources. It sounds like a great plan, but like so many government plans, it has a few flaws.

First, it won’t reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Second, it will increase energy prices, thus reducing the viability of Oregon’s economy.

At least, that’s the conclusion of Oregon’s Public Utility Commission, the three-member board that is supposed to regulate electric utilities. The only problem is that the commission was never consulted about the energy plan, suggesting that the state is listening only to groups who are already true believers.

“We have some deep concerns about these negotiations because we think they will not be effective in reducing carbon emissions,” wrote commission chair Susan Ackerman in an email to the governor’s staff, “but they will be expensive to consumers.”

That never stopped them before.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine blog smells a rat, a big ugly one.

About this business of the navy patrol boats captured by Iran. As Scott and Investors Business Daily point out, there’s something off about the official story that a “navigation error” caused the boats to stray into Iranian waters. I don’t believe this story for a moment. (And the initial explanation that the boats “drifted” there after engine trouble has already been withdrawn. Why was that put out or not disavowed immediately?) One hopes that boat crews would navigate by means in addition to GPS since GPS could be taken out in a serious conflict, but unless our sailors have become incompetent or there was some extraordinary failure on these boats (unlikely I think), this “navigation error” sounds like either a deliberate mission that the Pentagon can’t acknowledge*, or the Iranians captured the boats in international waters, and we’re not willing to dispute their claim because of the Iran arms treaty agreement.

I don’t believe the government’s story for a minute, either. A number of former special forces types have explained at great length that this fable is, due to the planning and preparation for such a mission, exactly that — a fable.

This is just a fig leaf to excuse the government from having to respond to a blatant violation of international law by the Iranians, which one might call the Obama Benghazi Doctrine.

Or perhaps all of the unborn children who died on his watch. Your choice.

Read it.

Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) is planning to introduce legislation that would require sports franchises who have received public financing for their stadiums and other projects to pay back those funds if they “prematurely” relocate to another city.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports that McCaskill, channeling the rage felt by many of her constituents in the Show-Me State over the NFL’s decision to allow Rams owner Stan Kroenke to move his team from St. Louis to Los Angeles, wants to make sure the public is “treated fairly” if a team subsidized by taxpayer dollars decides to skip town before the bills are paid off, which is the case with the Rams.

Apparently the taxpayers of Missouri are still on the hook for $100 million for the stadium that the Rams are leaving behind. Just terrible, the way some people just won’t stay bought.

Read it.

The pigeons of Image Politics come home to roost.

The new year began with an underground nuclear-bomb test in North Korea, the worst first week for the Dow since 1897, and Iran forcing 10 U.S. sailors to their knees.

But the man delivering the State of the Union is “optimistic” because “unconditional love” will win.

Of course he is. His job is safe, and his pension guaranteed.

Mr. Obama said in his speech that the economy is producing jobs, which is true, and that it is “peddling fiction” to say the U.S. economy “is in decline.” Really?

The U.S. economy’s average annual growth rate since World War II has been about 3%. In Mr. Obama’s seven years it has been about 2%. Some 65% of people think the U.S. is on the wrong track. You can discover a lot about the wrong track in that missing 1% of economic growth, Mr. Obama’s “new normal.”

Everybody who is paying attention realizes that the economy is anemic at best. Of course, that category rarely includes President Obama.

The leaders of Communist China lie awake at night worrying about creating 10 million new jobs every year to prevent a revolution. The elected leader of the U.S. lies awake every night thinking about jobs making . . . windmills and solar panels.

And we’ve got a revolution.

Well, it’s pretty revolting, that’s true.

Both the Republican and, to a lesser extent, Democratic parties have elements now who want to pull down the temple. But for all the politicized agitation, both these movements, in power, would produce stasis—no change at all.

Donald Trump would preside over a divided government or, as he has promised and un-promised, a trade war with China. Hillary or Bernie will enlarge the Obama economic regime. Either outcome guarantees four more years of at best 2% economic growth. That means more of the above. That means 18-year-olds voting for the first time this year will face historically weak job opportunities through 2020 at least.

Under any of these three, an Americanized European social-welfare state will evolve because Washington—and this will include many “conservatives”—will answer still-rising popular anger with new income redistributions.

And for years afterward, Barack Obama will stroll off the 18th green, smiling. Mission, finally, accomplished.

Read it.

Climate activists on trial for blocking an oil train may be about to set a controversial legal precedent. According to Mother Jones, for the first time in American legal history, activists will be allowed to present their concerns about climate change as a legal defence for their allegedly criminal actions.

If this succeeds, the Green Shirts will soon be setting up People’s Courts to impose politically-correct environmentalism on an unsuspecting nation.

Check it out.

I rather doubt that they can do anything about ‘planetary defense’, but as a long-time SF fan I’m glad we have one.

Read it.

I suspect that both the players and the organization would much prefer to live and work in L.A. than in (yuck) St. Louis.

The St. Louis Rams will move to the Los Angeles area, where they intend to build a new, nearly $3 billion stadium in an entertainment complex in Inglewood, Calif., just over 10 miles from downtown.

Inglewood is a notorious black slum area and this will give the City/State a chance to put a lot of poor black people out on the street in favor of a (primarily publicly-funded) ego-monument to economic illiteracy.

The decision, in a 30-2 vote among the league’s 32 team owners, comes after more than a year of often acrimonious lobbying by the Chargers, the Raiders and the Rams, who each applied to move to the Los Angeles area last month because, they said, they were unable to get enough public support to build new stadiums in their markets.

In other words, they want new homes built at taxpayers’ expense. That was the original reason for moving out in the first place, the publicly-funded bribe wasn’t big enough.

Read it.

Leading House Democrats are escalating their criticisms of President Obama’s immigration policies, saying the administration’s recent arrest of scores of Central American families has “terrorized” immigrant communities nationwide.

The Democrats say they recognize the need for the Homeland Security Department (DHS) to be tough on border enforcement in order to deter the next great migrant wave.

But the agency’s recent home raids, which rounded up more than 120 immigrants denied asylum claims and now in line for deportation, backfired and sent shudders of fear through immigrant communities at home instead, the Democrats charged.

I guess they’ve lost sight of the fact that Obama isn’t a Republican.

Read it.

Readers may recall that last year, the House passed the Gosar Amendment that would have defunded President Obama’s “affirmatively furthering fair housing” (AFFH) rule. Unfortunately, Speaker Paul Ryan abandoned the Gosar Amendment during the negotiations over the Omnibus spending bill. Team Ryan loves to blame John Boehner for the disastrous Omnibus. But the Boehner-led House passed the Gosar Amendment. It was Speaker Ryan who gave it away, leaving us with a leftist power-grab of the same order of magnitude as Obamacare.

Read it.

For Disney, Mickey Mouse is not just a huge money maker, but the company’s most coveted piece of intellectual property. Mickey is Disney, and Disney is Mickey: the two are simply one and the same, and nothing is more important to Disney than his well-being. (“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known,” Walt Disney once famously said).

For this reason, Disney has done everything in its power to make sure it retains the copyright on Mickey — even if that means changing federal statutes. Every time Mickey’s copyright is about to expire, Disney spends millions lobbying Congress for extensions, and trading campaign contributions for legislative support. With crushing legal force, they’ve squelched anyone who attempts to disagree with them.

Read it. And watch the video.

Here’s a video of Portland City Commissioner Steve Novick saying the city needs to “sacrifice” its single-family neighborhoods in order to stop climate change. We’ve known that planners feel this way, but rarely do they say it in so many words.

Read it.

Except, of course, for the Disney Millennium Copyright Act.

Read it.

I predict that he will receive what we lawyers call a ‘non-responsive answer’.

Issued in 2010 and 2011 under the guise of “Dear Colleague” letters, OCR’s mandates dictate how colleges and universities that accept federal funding—virtually every institution in the country—must respond to bullying and sexual misconduct in order to comply with federal anti-discrimination statutes like Title IX. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) and other civil liberties organizations have repeatedly criticized the letters for threatening freedom of expression and due process on campus by defining First Amendment-protected expression as “harassment” and mandating the use of the lowest standard of proof in sexual misconduct cases, among other requirements.

Senator Lankford notes that OCR’s letters “fail to point to precise governing statutory or regulatory language that support their sweeping policy change.”

Legislative authority? We don’t need no legislative authority.

Read it.

Seventy million dollars is a lot of dough for a group named the Little Sisters of the Poor.

But that’s what the religious order says it will be forced to pay the government if they continue to refuse to arrange for insurance that provides lay employees coverage for contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and sterilization.

…

The brief also explains why the government does not need the Little Sisters at all: it already has many other ways to get contraceptive coverage to those who want it. “Indeed, the government has invested billions of dollars in creating exchanges for the express purpose of making it easy to obtain qualifying insurance when it is not available through an employer.  The government cannot explain why those exchanges suffice to advance its goal of getting contraceptive coverage to the tens of millions of [other] people …  yet are not good enough” for the employees of the Little Sisters.

“As Little Sisters of the Poor, we offer the neediest elderly of every race and religion a home where they are welcomed as Christ,” said Sister Loraine Marie Maguire, Mother Provincial of the Little Sisters of the Poor. “We perform this loving ministry because of our faith and cannot possibly choose between our care for the elderly poor and our faith, and we shouldn’t have to. All we ask is that our rights not be taken away.”

It is not just enough that Big Brother be loved; it is necessary that you love Big Brother.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Wonder what happened to that campaign promise to be The Most Transparent Administration in History?

Read it.

Senator McCain has released a report detailing what he calls more than “$27 billion in wasteful spending,” including “$872,164 to study how children cross the street, $25,000 for garbage art in Maine, $13,495 for Army National Guard bubble soccer, $2.2 million to text high school students to enroll in college, and $2.3 million for jazz playing robots.” The whole report is worth a careful look.

Read it.

How about this, from Inside Higher Ed today, from an interview with Sidonie A. Smith, Mary Fair Croushore Professor of the Humanities at the University of Michigan, and author of a new book entitled Manifesto for the Humanities: Transforming Doctoral Education in Good Enough Times. Sounds possibly promising? No. Take in this answer:

Q: What is the “possibly posthuman humanities scholar” and how does this idea relate to doctoral education?

A: Writing this book, I came to see the new scholar subject as a performative of passionate singularity, hybrid materiality and networked relationality. This is one sense in which the humanities scholar that is becoming is possibly posthuman, and a posthumanist scholar. The locus of thinking, for the prosthetically extendable scholar joined along the currents of networked relationality, is an ensemble affair. It involves the scholar, the device, the algorithm, the code. It involves the design architecture of platform and tool, the experiential architecture of networks, and the economy of energy. It involves the cloud, the crowd and the “rooms,” bricks and mortar and virtual, in which scholarly thinking moves forward. Ultimately, thinking is a collaborative affair of multiple actors, human and nonhuman, virtual and material, elegantly orderly and unruly.

Read it.

Education officials on Tuesday approved a plan to redraw two Brooklyn school zones, shifting a neighborhood of rising wealth from a mostly white elementary school to a mostly black and Hispanic one.

Watch that ‘neighborhood of rising wealth’ quickly turn into another ‘mostly black and Hispanic one’ as the yuppies bail.

The Department of Education proposed the rezoning to alleviate crowding at the mostly white school, Public School 8. But the debate over the move has raised thorny issues of race, class and gentrification in a quickly changing part of Brooklyn.

I’ll just bet it does.

P.S. 8’s current zone encompasses Brooklyn Heights, a prosperous neighborhood, and Dumbo, an area of former warehouses now filled with multimillion-dollar apartments. The rezoning, which will take effect in the 2016-17 school year, shifts Dumbo from P.S. 8’s zone to the zone that serves Public School 307 in Vinegar Hill. Currently, the P.S. 307 zone is small and includes part of a public-housing project, the Farragut Houses.

I guess the ‘Dumbo’ area is well named. I’m sure that’s what the purchasers fo those ‘multimillion-dollar apartments’ are feeling right now.

Though they are less than a mile apart, the schools have vastly different populations: Sixty percent of P.S. 8’s students are white, and only 16 percent are from families that receive public assistance, according to state data. Ninety percent of the students at P.S. 307 are black or Hispanic, and the same proportion are from families receiving public assistance.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to screw you.

Some parents in Dumbo said they were reluctant to send their children to P.S. 307, citing its low test scores.

I would imagine the crime statistics are of more significance than ‘low test scores’.