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’.

Read it.

In December 2015 the American military was ordered to accept women in all jobs, including infantry and special operations. This decision involves about 220,000 jobs and about 20,000 of these are for special operations personnel, commonly known as commandos. While the politicians who pushed for this policy now consider the issue settled and done with, the officers and troops in infantry and special operations units are not pleased and concerned about how to deal with it. Senior officers are bracing for more retirements or troops simply walking away when their current term of service is done. Recruiting for these strenuous and dangerous jobs is seen as even more difficult. In other words opinion surveys indicate that many experienced combat troops are ready to vote with their feet and will be impossible to replace.

…

Because the risk of injury and many other reasons, most countries found that over 90 percent of women in uniform did not want to serve in any combat unit, especially the infantry. Those women (almost all of them officers) who did apply discovered what female athletes and epidemiologists (doctors who study medical statistics) have long known; women are ten times more likely (than men) to suffer bone injuries and nearly as likely to suffer muscular injuries while engaged in stressful sports (like basketball) or infantry operations. Mental stress is another issue and most women who volunteered to try infantry training dropped out within days because of the combination of mental and physical stress. This is all a matter of sturdiness because men have more muscle and thicker bones. This makes men much less likely to suffer stress fractures or musculoskeletal injuries than women. Modern infantry combat is intensely physical, and most women remain at a disadvantage here. There are some exceptions for specialist tasks that do not involve sturdiness or strength, like sniping. Then there is the hormonal angle. Men generate a lot more testosterone, a hormone that makes men more decisive and faster to act in combat. Moreover testosterone does not, as the popular myth goes, make you more aggressive, it does make you more aware and decisive. That makes a difference in combat.

Read it.

Commenter Olorin has been using the term “dolt wrangling” to describe what appears to be one of the central methods of getting rich in the 21st Century: clever guys with spreadsheets offer attractive-seeming but implausible bets to less clever folks: subprime mortgages in the last decade, subprime car loans now, for-profit colleges financed by government loans, payday loans, casinos, and so forth. But there’s also a nonprofit side to dolt wrangling as well: refugee services and the like.

Another term for the the general approach might be the poker term “bum hunting.”

Government: ‘We have to provide these poor underprivileged people with services for free!”

Con-man: ‘We’d be happy to do that for a reasonable fee…. heh heh….’

Read it.

The U.S. Army has had to make some bold moves to comply with a 2012 order (from Congress) to cut its strength 21 percent (120,000 troops) by 2018. At that point the army will have 450,000 personnel. While the army tried to avoid cutting combat units excessively, 13 combat brigades were disbanded and some were reduced to battalion sized task forces or just headquarters (to be revived as a brigade in wartime using reservists). Some brigades were converted from Stryker units to infantry and some lost one of their three combat battalions. Other brigades gained a battalion and some additional support troops and equipment. The point of it all was to make the most of a bad situation and reorganize so that each unit was best (or better) suited to its future assignments. Most combat brigades are organized and train for eventual deployment in a certain region. They might, as often happens, be sent elsewhere. But in the meantime they have a focus for their organization and training.

This is appalling. Just as in Europe, to fund government waste and abuse in social welfare programs, the government is having to cut back on its core functions, one of which is national defense. Europe can always fall back on the United States, but whom have we to back us up?

Read it.

And rightly so, I think.

The first major action taken by Barack Obama in 2016—a set of new gun-control measures mandated via executive order—is aimed at a threat that Americans don’t spend a lot of time worrying about.

In its latest survey of Americans, Gallup finds that “dissatisfaction with government,” not guns or even terrorism, tops the list of concerns.

Funny how that works.

Obama’s new actions against guns include expanding background checks; changing definitions of mental illness in a way that limits who is able to own guns; increasing the number of federal agents charged with tracking gun sales and crimes; and more.

In other words, more power to government tools and less to individual citizens. My, what a surprise.

As Jacob Sullum noted here in December, most of the “common-sense” measures Obama is pushing would not have stopped the San Bernardino shooting or virtually any other recent mass attacks.

Don’t look at the evidence, just believe the Narrative. Guns leap from their holsters when you least expect them to and just mow people down, so therefore they Must Be Controlled.

Obama’s willingness to always pivot to issues that are not front and center, along with his willingness to expand the role of the state in virtually every aspect of our lives from health care to mass surveillance is surely a big part of the reason why people are consistently worried more about government than anything else. In this, of course, he’s had plenty of help from Republicans and his fellow Democrats, which also helps to explain another Gallup finding released this time last year: “In U.S. New Record 43% Are Independents.”

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Read it.

On New Year’s Eve, the Obama administration published a 200-page proposed rule in the Federal Register. The proposed rule is another executive order, in plain violation of the immigration laws. Obama’s executive order would illegally ignore the immigration caps that are enshrined in law. Senator Jeff Sessions denounced Obama’s usurpation, which, interestingly, was covered by hardly any “mainstream” news sources.

And if nobody does anything about it, he’ll keep doing it. Time for Congress to wake up.

Read it.

In a post about the Saudi Arabia/Iran crisis — the Saudi beheading of a Shiite cleric; the Iranian burning of the Saudi embassy — John asked, “the Middle East couldn’t possibly get worse, could it?” At NR’s Corner, David French examines the crisis and concludes “in the Middle East things can always get worse.”

Things have indeed gotten worse under President Obama. They got worse when Obama withdrew from Iraq and they are getting even worse following his nuclear deal with Iran, an abject capitulation by the U.S.

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

Read it.

The Disney Millennium Copyright Act has much to answer for.

Each year, for the past few years, the wonderful Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke University publishes a blog post highlighting key works that should have entered the public domain on January first, but did not. And each year, we write about it again. Here is the list for 2016. These are mostly works that were published in 1959. Under the law at the time they were created, the maximum copyright term was 56 years, and that apparently was more than enough of a bargain for the work to be created. That we retroactively extended those works, taking away the public domain for no actual benefit, remains a travesty. The list includes books like Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, William Burroughs’ The Naked Lunch, Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate, and Strunk and White’s famed The Elements of Style. Films that should be in the public domain today include Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, and Some Like It Hot. The original season of the seminal Rocky and Bullwinkle show would also be in the public domain.

Read it.

The package of gun controls that New York legislators hurriedly passed in January 2013, a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in neighboring Connecticut, banned the sale of magazines capable of holding more than seven rounds. Later Gov. Andrew Cuomo—who had insisted that the bill, known as the SAFE Act, be passed before legislators had a chance to read it, let alone consider its implications—realized “there is no such thing as a seven-bullet magazine” for most guns. The law was therefore changed to allow continued sale of 10-round magazines while prohibiting New Yorkers (those without badges, that is) from putting more than seven rounds in them, except at “a recognized firing range.” (No, really.) A bill recently proposed by two Democratic legislators from Brooklyn promises to repeat the mistake of imposing an ammunition limit that cannot be enforced.

Read it.

BLUF: Obama didn’t stay bought.

The Democracy Alliance is the left-wing billionaires and millionaires club that we wrote about here and elsewhere. It is interesting that Soros, along with Tom Steyer the Left’s principal money man, regretted his decision to support Obama for the presidency.

Of course, on the basis of Tanden’s email, it appears that Soros’s remorse wasn’t due to a realization that Obama is a terrible president, but rather to his own lack of access. With Hillary, on the other hand, “he can always call/meet with you on an issue of policy.” That sums up Hillary’s candidacy in a nutshell: just as far left as Barack Obama, but more corrupt! Watch for it on bumper stickers.

Read it.

The question from the congressman to the Obama administration official was straightforward enough: How many foreign visitors overstay their visas every year?

The reply was simple too, but not in a satisfying way. “We don’t know,” the official said. …

And these are the people who are going to carefully investigate all Syrian refugees and make sure there are no hidden jihadists in the group.

Right.

Read it.

For people who are supposedly against racism, Democrats seem to be working that particular seam pretty hard.

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Over the next few days we will see the homicide figures for 2015 from various cities.

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Update on this First Amendment lawsuit filed against the University of New Mexico last year: A federal judge has dismissed the case by former student Monica Pompeo, saying the Board of Regents is protected by “qualified immunity.”

The case revolved around Pompeo’s film-studies paper about the lesbian-romance movie Desert Hearts, in which she said homosexual attraction was “perverse” and referred to a childless woman in the film as “barren.” Her professor refused to grade the paper, saying it included “hate speech,” Pompeo claimed.

Yet another reason not to allow your kid to go to a government school.

Read it.

But as I’ve written before, journalists may well believe that passing laws is a good thing, and passing more laws is a better thing. But they would do well to mark that as an opinion. Many of us think that passing more laws – that is more mandates, bans, regulations, taxes, subsidies, boondoggles, transfer programs, and proclamations – is a bad thing. In fact, given that the American people pondered the “least productive Congress ever” twice, and twice kept the government divided between the two parties, it just might be that most Americans are fine with a Congress that passes fewer laws.

All I want for Christmas is a ‘Do Nothing Congress’.

Read it.

In Los Angeles, the NAACP filed a successful lawsuit against the county Metropolitan Transportation Authority for building light rail. The group argued that light rail was so expensive that the agency was forced to cut bus service to minority neighborhoods, resulting in a huge decline in transit ridership. The court ordered the agency to restore bus service, allowing ridership to recover. But in Baltimore, the NAACP seems to be arguing that cuts in bus service are worth building a billion-dollar tunnel under an African-American neighborhood.

Maybe this is a case of the NAACP’s Right Coast not knowing what its Left Coast was doing. But the heart of the complaint in Baltimore seems to be that blacks are somehow harmed because the state of Maryland chose to spend hundreds of millions of dollars on bus improvements instead of billions of dollars on one light-rail line. This suggests that the Maryland NAACP thinks dollars spent are more important than results. After all, Baltimore’s other light-rail lines are all embarrassing failures, with costs greater than projections but ridership well below projections.

Read it.

America takes its sports more seriously than its military. This is the conclusion we can draw from the December announcement by woebegone Defense Secretary Ashton Carter that women will now “be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers, and everything else that was previously open only to men.” As though the only thing that militates against women serving in the military is baseless sexism.

…

Why hasn’t the NFL or the NBA or the NHL or the MLB followed the Obama Administration’s brave lead and started fielding women? In 2013, Lauren Silberman tried out as an NFL kicker and lasted just “two pathetic and pitiful” punts before limping off the field. Her best kick made it a whopping 19 yards. There hasn’t been a whole lot of women-in-the-NFL agitation since then. The idea of women joining, say, the Patriots’ defensive lineup, remains so ridiculous that not even the most doe-eyed frappuccino feminist is badgering professional football for women’s right to be trampled underfoot. But does the Secretary of Defense imagine that what happens in war is less violent than being run over by offensive tackle Sebastian Vollmer (6’8”, 320 lbs)?

Read it.

The fuss over Trump’s comments will eventually ebb. Of more interest to me is how the episode proved, once again, that while the story of the 71,000 Japanese-Americans who were relocated, and the 35,000 Japanese aliens who were interned (in a previous piece, I explained the difference), is classified under “never forget,” the story of the approximately 14,000 German- and Italian-Americans and aliens interned during the war is officially filed under “never remind.”

The memory of the Crust supports the Narrative, and nothing is allowed to interfere with that.

Meet Arthur Jacobs. He’s the poster boy for “doesn’t fit the narrative.” Not coincidentally, he’s also the poster boy for getting your nads kicked by your own government for eighty years just because you’re of German descent. You know what he isn’t the poster boy for? “White privilege.” Jacobs’ story personifies why the ordeal of interned German-Americans and aliens during World War II was sometimes worse than what the Japanese internees went through.

Bet you didn’t know that. I certainly didn’t.

Read it.

Once again, government employees stake off scott-free from behavior that would put anyone else behind bars.

When a private citizen or company violates rules, misrepresents facts or pollutes a river, government penalties are swift and severe. It’s different when the government lies or screws up.

Two weeks ago, Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell testified before Congress on a toxic spill that federal and state agencies unleashed into western state rivers last August. Supervised by officials from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety (DRMS), an Environmental Restoration (ER) company crew excavated tons of rock and debris that had blocked the portal (entrance or adit) to the Gold King Mine above Silverton, Colorado.

The crew kept digging until the remaining blockage burst open, spilling 3,000,000 gallons of acidic water laden with iron, lead, cadmium, mercury and other heavy metals. The toxic flood contaminated the Animas and San Juan Rivers, all the way to Lake Powell in Utah. EPA then waited an entire day before notifying downstream mayors, health officials, families, kayakers, fishermen, farmers and ranchers that the water they were drinking, paddling in, or using for crops and livestock was contaminated.

Ms. Jewell told Congress she was unaware of anyone being fired, fined or even demoted. In fact, federal investigations and reports didn’t hold anyone responsible for the disaster. (Maybe they even got bonuses.) Considering the spill’s severity, the gross incompetence of government officials, their advance knowledge of the dangers, and the way they downplayed and whitewashed their actions, this is intolerable.

Read it.

We’ve all heard the claim that a rail line can move as many people as an eight- (or sometimes ten-) lane freeway. Not so much. Orlando’s billion-dollar commuter-rail line carries less than 2,000 people to work each weekday morning and home in the evenings. (Amortized over 30 years at 3 percent, it would have cost less to buy every single daily round-trip rider a new Prius every year for the next 30 years.)

Read it.

Thirty-five years after they were seized and held in captivity for 444 days by Iranian revolutionaries, the 53 Americans – or their families – are to receive $4.4m in compensation.

Reports said that buried in the details of the huge $1.8 trillion package of spending and tax cuts passed last week, was a provision to make the payments to the former hostages, or their next of kin. Victims of state-sponsored terrorist attacks such as the 1998 American Embassy bombings in East Africa, will also be eligible for benefits under the law.

“I had to pull over to the side of the road, and I basically cried,” Rodney Sickmann, who was a Marine sergeant working as a security guard at the embassy in Tehran, told the New York Times.

Yeah, dude, your government’s got your back — see how this knife fits.

Read it.

Very short post. I read today that Palestine has been granted full member status in the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

I also recall from a few years ago that when Palestine was admitted to UNESCO, the US had to cut off funds to UNESCO because of US law. As an article at the time said, this was the result of “US laws that force an automatic funding cutoff for any UN agency with Palestine as a member” …

Do I see an opportunity for our lawmakers here? Yep. Will they act on it? Possibly not, but if it is indeed the law, seems like they could be forced to act …

Time for Paul Ryan to step up to the plate and ‘demonstrate his quality’.

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My favorite is the F-35 … $400 billion and counting.

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Quietly, on December 18, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a change of the rules for the use of body scanning technology at airport security systems across the country. Now, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) can opt out of letting you opt out of using the body scanners. That is to say, they can decide—for reasons!—that you must go through the body scanners. Julia Angwin, an investigative reporter from ProPublica, made note of the rule change last night on Twitter.

The longer the American people put up with crap like the TSA, the more money will be wasted, and the more travel will be disrupted, and the more we will come to resemble Soviet Russia. You Have Been Warned.

Read it.

A lunch lady at an Idaho school who gave a hungry 12-year-old a free hot meal after the girl said she had no money has been fired following the incident.

Dalene Bowden, who worked at Irving Middle School in Pocatello, Idaho, said she offered to pay the $1.70 (£1.14) lunch charge for the girl, but her supervisor refused the offer.

Read it.

Read it.

I’m still scratching my head about the results of the omnibus budget that passed last week, in which it appears Republicans snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

As is traditional.

I’m not sure I agree with brother Paul here that Paul Ryan is essentially a double agent for the Democrats, but at the very least Ryan and the rest of the GOP leadership need to give a better account of things. It is possible that they can’t give a better account, without making things worse. At the very least, we should add the word “omnibus” to the word “comprehensive” as terms that should be expunged from our legislative vocabulary and practice. Better luck next year? Can we please get back to the prescribed practice of passing separate appropriation bills for the major departments of government as the law calls for, instead of this annual ritual of an “omnibus” bill that is always a defeat for our side?* Maybe, though surely the Chicago Cubs can be forgiven for laughing at the GOP right now.

I think that there is a contact poison on the handle of the Speaker’s gavel that changes the DNA of whoever touches it to act like a Democrat.

Read it.

Well, here’s some good news: We now have proof that the Obama administration acts as though it were on a wartime footing. Bad news? It’s acting that way here at home.

The New York Times reports that the administration broke the law when it used social media to gin up support for a clean-water rule. Through a campaign on Twitter, Facebook, and similar media, it tried to get people to share messages supporting the rule, a practice known as astroturfing (which generates fake, as opposed to real, grass-roots support). The Government Accountability Office, which investigated the campaign, concluded that the EPA engaged in “covert propaganda.”

This isn’t the first time the administration has tried to use psy-ops against the American people. In its early days, the White House Office of Public Engagement teamed up with the National Endowment for the Arts to encourage artists to produce art supporting the president’s initiatives. HHS secretary Kathleen Sebelius warned insurance companies there would be “zero tolerance” for criticism of White House health-care policies.

The New York Post is on the case.

Who needs a White House press secretary when The New York Times will cover for the president, no questions asked?

…

Obama, the Times reported online, “indicated that he did not see enough cable television to fully appreciate the anxiety after the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, and made clear that he plans to step up his public arguments. Republicans were telling Americans that he is not doing anything when he is doing a lot, he said.”

What? The president of the United States of America didn’t realize how people felt in the wake of two terror attacks because he doesn’t watch enough news?

Pathetic as that excuse is, far worse is that the Times soon removed the passage from its online story, and kept it out of Friday’s print version.

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

Read it.

Whenever Senator Mike Lee, or some other Leniency for Drug Dealers stalwart, defends his sentencing reform legislation, he points to the case of one or two drug felons who received a sentence that seems unduly harsh. Such cases aren’t impossible to find.

But invoking them raises an obvious question and then a more subtle one. The obvious question is: if this sentence is egregious, why hasn’t President Obama commuted it? The more subtle question is: does this poor fellow languish in prison because supporters of sentencing reform want to use him as a talking point?

These questions come to the fore in light of Obama’s latest round of commutations.

Read it.

More bad news about the Omnibus spending bill: the Gosar Amendment language has been stripped out. This language would have prevented the Obama administration from implementing its Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule (AFFH), a radical plan to use the power of the national government to create communities of a certain kind, each having what the federal government deems an appropriate mix of economic, racial, and ethnic diversity.

Apparently, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan weren’t up to defending the freedom of Americans to decide, through their local governments, how they will live — just as they weren’t up to slapping down the Department of Education’s assault on freedom of speech and due process.

If Donald Trump gets the Republican Presidential nomination, the Congressional Crust will have nobody to blame but themselves.

Read it.

Remember the mom put on Illinois Child Abuse Registry for letting her kids, ages 11, 9, and 5, play at the park just outside her house?

The state’s appellate court has thrown out the “child neglect citation” against her, after a mere two-and-a-half-year battle with the Department of Child and Family Services. She was helped by the scrappy, brilliant Family Defense Center in Chicago.

Unbelievable.

Read it.

There are terrorists in our midst and they arrived here using legal means right under the noses of the federal law enforcement agencies whose mission is to stop them. That is not due to malfeasance or lack of effort on the part of these officers; it is due to the restrictions placed on them by the Obama administration.

I was a firsthand witness to how these policies deliberately prevented scrutiny of Islamist groups. The two San Bernardino jihadists, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, may have benefited from the administration’s closure of an investigation I initiated on numerous groups infiltrating radicalized individuals into this country.

Obama, the gift that keeps on shivving.

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The government is interested in creating monopolies and oligopolies that operate as public utilities, which are the functional equivalent of state-owned enterprises. “Such domestication is part of ObamaCare’s goal of political control, and it may well be that only fewer, larger and more centralized insurers can survive financially.”

Substitute “Obama” for “ObamaCare” and “companies” for “insurers” and the sentence will be true for all other industries. Since 2008, this has been occurring in my world as banking has come to be dominated by a few players who are closely tied to big government and the Democratic party, under the guise of reining in Wall Street (“Don’t let a good crisis go to waste”). The financial services industry has been dramatically reshaped by administrative agencies accountable to no one.

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The professor’s name is Bree Picower, associate professor of Early Childhood, Elementary Education, and Literacy Education at Montclair, and the workshop she teaches is called “Social Justice Curriculum Design for the Elementary Classroom.”

“This workshop is designed to help teachers visualize social justice education by providing examples of projects, making social justice in K-6 setting accessible, practical, and achievable,” the workshop’s description reads.

The workshop also requires students to “explore issues of social injustice, learn about social movements, raise awareness, and engage in activism.”

In Russia, the name for this is Komsomol; in Germany during the 30s, HitlerJugend. All they need is the snappy uniforms.

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THE Pfizer-Allergan deal is a travesty. Pfizer, which is based in New York, will move overseas by merging with Allergan, based in Ireland, in a maneuver known as a corporate inversion. The point isn’t to find corporate synergy. It is to leave behind our uncompetitive international tax system.

Not only is this the largest inversion in history, but it will also open the floodgates for other companies to leave the United States, further eroding our tax base, damaging our economy and costing many thousands of jobs.

This is not just me speculating. I have spoken to many chief executives who confirm they are planning to follow Pfizer’s lead. But while this inversion has set off a firestorm of public statements by our leading presidential candidates and other politicians, Congress continues to do nothing.

The United States has the worst corporate tax system in the world. In the world. And all the whining about corporations ‘not paying their fair share’ won’t persuade them to cut their own throats by remaining in the U.S.

Read it.

Vox had a piece yesterday on the Cruz-Lee proposal to make it easier for U.S. patients to access drugs and devices already approved in other developed countries. The Vox piece had some howlers. Most notably this:

“There’s no evidence the FDA blocks innovation or makes innovation harder or makes it more costly,” said Kesselheim.

Frankly, that would be laughable were it not coming from a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. It costs well over a billion dollars to get the average new drug approved and much of that cost comes from FDA required clinical trials. Longer and larger clinical trials mean that the drugs that are eventually approved are safer. But longer trials also mean that good drugs are delayed. And the more expensive it is to produce new drugs the fewer new drugs will be produced. In short, longer and larger trials mean drug delay and drug loss.

Read it.

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

Ohio’s recent cigarette tax hike has sent smokers over the border to purchase cheaper tobacco, according to Kentucky’s State Budget Director John Cilton. The Kentucky Budget Office’s latest report notes a hefty spike in the percent of tax receipts collected from cigarettes, up 6.5 percent in November and 1.9 percent overall, citing Ohio’s “recent increase in tobacco taxes” as the most likely culprit.

With House Bill No. 64, the Ohio General Assembly unwisely chose to push millions of dollars in commerce and tax revenue into northern Kentucky, where the excise tax on cigarettes is less than half of Ohio, coming in at 60 cents a pack. With the 35-cent increase from the previous rate of $1.25 per pack, Ohio now has the 23rd highest tax on cigarettes in the nation at $1.60 per pack.

One of the problems of democracy is that periodically new people grasp the reins of power and have to learn all over again that what they want to have happen with their bright ideas isn’t always what happens. The Law of Unintended Consequences is always waiting in the bushes to bite those who do not think things through right square on the butt.

Read it.

On Wednesday, FBI director James Comey alleged that the San Bernardino shooters were already plotting a mass-murder attack on the United States before Tafsheen Malik received the K-1 visa admitting her to the United States. Her husband-to-be, Syed Farook, was born a U.S. citizen. Yet his family’s immigration history should also raise searching questions about the process by which would-be Americans are selected.

And didn’t, of course, because our government is incompetent in areas where Political Correctness disapproves of the Thought Crime of Noticing.

However one assesses that chain and its consequences, it seems clear that the large majority of legal immigrants choose to come—or, more exactly, are chosen by their relatives—for their own reasons. They are not selected by the United States to advance some national interest. Illegal immigrants are of course entirely self-selected, as are asylum seekers. Even the refugee process, reportedly the most tightly screened, operates to a considerable extent outside national control: The first assessment of refugees is typically made by the UN High Commission on Refugees from within camps it operates. That explains why, for example, Christian Syrians make up only about 3 percent of the refugees admitted to the United States, despite accounting for 10 percent of the country’s population: Fearing violence from Sunni Muslims, they apparently hesitate to enter UN camps in the first place.

And who could blame them? The ‘UN camps’ were created and maintained for the purpose of exacerbating squalor among refugees and thereby creating political pressure in whatever direction the transnational bureaucrats want it placed.