Read it.

At least 72 employees at the Department of Homeland Security are listed on the U.S. terrorist watch list, according to a Democratic lawmaker.

Rep. Stephen Lynch (D., Mass.) disclosed that a congressional investigation recently found that at least 72 people working at DHS also “were on the terrorist watch list.”

“Back in August, we did an investigation—the inspector general did—of the Department of Homeland Security, and they had 72 individuals that were on the terrorist watch list that were actually working at the Department of Homeland Security,” Lynch told Boston Public Radio.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

This past summer when Dylann Roof killed nine black churchgoers in Charleston, SC, US Attorney General Loretta Lynch—a black woman—expressed zero concern about protecting neo-Confederates against a looming public backlash.

But last week, a mere day after two radical Muslims slaughtered 14 people in San Bernardino, she told a group of Muslim advocates that her “greatest fear” is that the shooting would lead to anti-Muslim “rhetoric.”

The day after she said that, she announced publicly that the feds were opening an investigation to determine whether a Muslim teen in Texas had his civil rights violated after being arrested for bringing a homemade clock to school that officials had mistaken for a bomb.

As we learned in Animal Farm, some animals are more equal than others.

Read it.

Last week’s Congressional passage of the 1,301-page Fixing America’s Surface Transportation (FAST) Act represents, for the most part, a five-year extension of existing highway and transit programs with several steps backwards. Once a program that was entirely self-funded out of dedicated gasoline taxes and other highway user fees, over the past two-and-one-half decades the surface transportation programs has become increasingly dependent on deficit spending. The FAST Act does nothing to mitigate this, neither raising highway fees (which include taxes on Diesel fuel, large trucks, trailers, and truck tires) nor reducing expenditures.

…

Aside from deficit spending, the greatest mischief in federal surface transportation programs come from competitive grants. When Congress created the Interstate Highway System in 1956, all federal money was distributed to the states using formulas. But in 1991 Congress created a number of competitive grant programs, supposedly so the money would be spent where it was most needed. In fact, research by the Cato Institute and Reason Foundation showed that Congress and the administration tended to spend the money politically, either in the districts represented by the most powerful members of Congress or where the administration thought it would get the greatest political return for its party.

The 2012 surface transportation law contained no earmarks and turned all but two major competitive grant programs into formula funds, thus taking the politics out of most transportation funding. This upset some members of Congress because they could no longer get credit for bringing pork home to their districts. So it is not surprising that the FAST Act goes backwards, putting more money into political grants than ever before.

Read it.

Vagrants are urinating in the street, hassling passers-by for cash — and now they’ve ruined Christmas in The Bronx.

The annual outdoor Christmas tree lighting in the borough’s famed Little Italy section was canceled because the soaring panhandler population forced the sponsors to spend so much on security that there was no cash left for the celebration.

Read it.

During a press event on Wednesday, the NFL singled out San Diego as a problem city, in danger of losing our professional football team. The problem, they said, is what we lack. We lack certainty. We lack a simple, uncomplicated plan. And most of all, we lack the will to build an expensive stadium, using public money, without voter approval. “Certainty means no further votes required,” NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said. He demanded competing cities have their certain, uncomplicated, voter-unapproved plans delivered to him by Dec. 28.

Why the citizens of football cities (and baseball, and basketball, and hockey cities) fall for this scam is beyond me. Fortunately, when Jerry Jones wanted to offload his costs while holding on to the profits for the new Cowboys Stadium, Dallas passed and Arlington took the bait. (Arlington is the Blue pimple on the ass of the DFW metroplex, being the home of University of Texas at Arlington and thereby having a average level of intelligence lower than anywhere else in North Texas.)

Read it.

The problem is, Kozinski is one of a very few judges to question the integrity of prosecutors. And for all the umbrage being hauled in by the semi-truckful, Kozinski was rather restrained when discussing federal prosecutors. Still, the DOJ cannot sit idly by while someone suggests a few prosecutors don’t play by the rules and that the rules themselves are faulty. So, it does what the DOJ always does in these situations: defends the honor of the (not even directly) accused. When the DOJ takes down a local police force for misconduct or abuse, it always makes sure to rub the bellies of the police force at large before getting to the bad stuff.

Read it.

California has stunned green advocates, by excluding rooftop solar from their renewable energy mandate.

…

LA Times speculates that this shift in policy was due to pressure from utilities and unions – rooftop solar installers are not extensively unionised, compared to workers in large solar utility plants.

California: Run By Demoncrats = Crony ‘Capitalism’ = Politicians In Bed With Businesses That Give Them Money.

Seems pretty clear to me.

Read it.

Automakers are removing the spares to save money and trim weight to improve efficiency as they face increasingly stringent fuel economy standards. Trading a spare tire for an inflation kit removes about 25 pounds from the car.

They are also “eliminating the spare tire well to increase usable interior space in downsized vehicles as well as to improve the aerodynamics of the underside of the vehicle for better mileage,” said Megan McKernan, manager of the Auto Club’s Automotive Research Center.

So you have government-mandated fuel economy regulations to thank.

Read it.

ATR President Grover Norquist today sent a letter to members of Congress urging support for H.Res.494, a resolution to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, introduced by House Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

It is imperative that the IRS be perceived as an impartial, nonpolitical agency. Its job is to administer the tax code in a fair way. But under Commissioner Koskinen the agency has inserted itself in the political arena, misled investigators, and deceived the American people.

Americans for Tax Reform is one of the few organizations that stick up for the rights of taxpayers. Koskinen is just the latest in a gaggle of Administration officials who have deeply politicized the Executive branch of the government (don’t get me started on the Attorney General). I think it would be a good thing to start impeaching and removing from office these partisan trolls, as an example to future officeholders.

Read it.

The Washington, DC, public housing authority has figured out how to solve the region’s affordability problems: Evict people from public housing, convert the dwellings into luxury homes, sell them at a profit, then use the profits to build more affordable housing. This cycle can be repeated endlessly, especially since it won’t really solve the problem.

The housing authority claims it is only selling homes at “scattered sites,” especially ones in “more desirable neighborhoods,” while it concentrates the subsidized homes in what must be less-desirable neighborhoods. In other words, it is increasing income segregation, exactly the opposite of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s goal of promoting more integration of both races and incomes. Apparently, DC’s housing authority didn’t get the memo.

I’m sure that the real-estate developer friends of public officials (all Democrats, of course; this is D.C.) are quite pleased with the arrangement.

Read it.

Following in the footsteps of so many people before him, Juan Pimentel saw opportunity in restrictive laws. It’s an old story; government officials tell people they can’t have what they want, and that prohibition creates a lucrative business opportunity for anybody willing to break the law to keep buyers happy. But when Pimentel was pulled over two weeks ago north of Tucson, Arizona with 150 pounds of forbidden cocaine destined for Chicago, there was something a little special about him: he was a U.S. Border Patrol agent—one of the people hired and trusted to enforce government officials’ will.

Sarah Furay’s case is a little different, since she had no badge in her wallet when she was busted last month in College Station, Texas with commercial quantities of cocaine, marijuana, Ecstasy, psychedelics, hash oil, and hydrocodone (one-stop shopping, indeed).  But she is the daughter of Bill Furay, a Drug Enforcement Administration official with the U.S. embassy in Panama and the former head of the DEA office in Galveston, Texas. No doubt, she’s had ample opportunity to see the potential for profit in the laws her dear old dad enforces.

Read it.

At the G-20 Summit in Antalya, Turkey, Barack Obama gave one of the most bizarre performances of his presidency. The November 16, 2015 speech was notable, first, for its gloating over imaginary successes at a time when failures are evident and, second, for the emergence of a new strategy against the Islamic State (ISIS).

In the gloating category, the president touted his administration’s handling of Libya 26 days after Congressional hearings exposed the lies of Benghazi, boasted of improving worldwide airline security 17 days after an ISIS bomb downed a Russian passenger jet, and hectored his political foes for suggesting he reconsider accepting thousands of refugees from Syria just 2 days after it was learned that one or more of the Paris suicide bombers had come to France from Syria as refugees. It was as though he was trying to eclipse the bad timing of his November 13 interview with George Stephanopoulos, when he claimed to have “contained” ISIS only hours before the Paris attacks.

But the short speech and the long Q&A session were even more remarkable for illustrating the administration’s deliberate tactic of attempting to embarrass and belittle ISIS verbally – as though words alone will halt its growth.

Worst. President. Ever.

Read it.

Funny how that works.

Actually, it’s not funny at all, considering how much we’re paying this clown.

Read it.

The CIA recently has a crises on its hands when it was realized that finding out what is happening inside Russia has become much more difficult. This has been a growing problem since the 1990s but has gotten worse since Russia began invading its neighbors and reviving the Cold War era police state. All that went into high gear with the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and escalated in 2014 with attacks on Ukraine. Now Russia is threatening most of East Europe and the CIA finds itself blinded. The CIA is seeking to regain some of its Cold War era competence in this era and that is proving difficult.

Steven Hayward at PowerLine blog passes the popcorn.

I’m not sure what’s going to be more fun over the next 10 days—watching John “Long Face” Kerry prattle on, or reading the predictable stories in the media about how the conference is “deadlocked,” “going into overtime,” and announcing, at the 11^th hour, a “breakthrough!” that will save the planet—at least until we can all meet again next year to repeat the farce.

Read it.

A federal program, once launched, is impossible to kill. It doesn’t matter if the scheme wastes money. It doesn’t matter if the program doesn’t work. It doesn’t even matter if the program does the very opposite of what it is supposed to do. Every government program enters the world with an army of fairy godmothers prepared to fend off any effort to cut the cord. Hence, the staying power of ethanol.

Read it.

A firefighter who was allowed to graduate the Fire Academy despite failing physical tests has already gone out on medical leave — just 10 days into the job, The Post has learned.

Probationary firefighter Choeurlyne Doirin-Holder injured herself Monday while conducting a routine check of equipment at Queens’ Engine 308 in South Richmond Hill. Getting off the truck, Doirin-Holder missed a step and landed on her left foot, suffering a fracture, sources said.

I suppose it would be considered a cheap shot to point out that something like this was predicable and predicted. The mythologies of Political Correctness, which ignore actual physical differences between men and women in service of The Narrative, have as little mercy on their supposed beneficiaries as on their nominal enemies.

Doirin-Holder, who turns 40 this month, is one of 282 “priority hires” passed over in 1999 and 2000. Federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis ordered they must get preference as victims of past discrimination against minorities.

Which is fine when it’s just a question of hiring and paying government workers who are members of politically favored groups (all of whom just happen to vote most often for Democrats — purely a coincidence, I’m sure), but when they’re actually called on to do the job, things get a little bit embarrassing.

Since she was injured on duty, she is eligible for a disability pension that would pay three-quarters of her annual salary, tax-free, if deemed unfit to return.

Thereby accomplishing the original political purpose without any benefit to the public. Win-Win!

Read it.

Feinstein’s seven-year quest to convince Congress to sequester over 1560 square miles of the Mojave Desert into three new national monuments under her proposed ‘Desert Conservation and Recreation Act” has gone nowhere. Feinstein has argued that the area she wants designated as ‘Mojave Trails, Sand to Snow and Castle Mountains’ is home to mountain lions, the California desert tortoise and bighorn sheep. But the real effort is to ban off-roaders, hunters and miners.

Feinstein is the Nurse Ratched of the U.S. Senate.

Read it.

The IRS recently proposed a rule to weaken the effectiveness of non-profits. Under this proposal, the IRS would give 501(c)(3) non-profit organizations, which includes charities, religious groups, and educational foundations, the option to collect the social security numbers of donors giving more than $250 so that they can be sent to the IRS. While optional at the moment, it is obvious that the rule is simply a way for the IRS to transition to mandatory collection of social security numbers. This rule should frighten all Americans because it opens up a whole pandora’s box of security concerns. Additionally, the IRS can use this to further their political agenda, targeting not only conservative non-profits but also individual supporters of these groups.

Read it.

A peanut glut “threatening to hand American taxpayers a near $2-billion bailout bill over the next three years”….

Aren’t we lucky.

Read it.

Two senior Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) officials accused of scamming the agency for personal financial gain were demoted on Friday, according to a statement released by the VA.  Diana Rubens and Kimberly Graves, formerly senior executives, are now “general workers” within the Veterans Benefits Administration (VBA) as a result of an investigation that concluded the duo had “misused their positions of authority for their own personal benefit.”

…

According to Stars and Stripes, a House committee staffer said “the VA is not taking steps to recoup the relocation benefits and both executives will continue to earn well over $100,000 a year.”

As Jerry Pournelle says, the purpose of government is to hire and pay government workers.

Read it.

Apparently the most commonly-used phrase in Administration commentary about Obamacare is ‘unexpectedly’. This article explains why it wasn’t unexpected at all … if you were paying attention.

ObamaCare co-ops were supposed to provide lower cost health insurance alternatives because they weren’t driven by the profit motive. Now, just a couple of years after the Affordable Care Act (ACA) was implemented, 12 out of 23 co-ops have failed, costing taxpayers $1.2 billion in defaulted loan repayments. The failure rate even outstrips the Labor Department’s 2011 projections of 36 percent, and as The Carpenters used to sing, “We’ve Only Just Begun.”

The impact on 100,000 New York state users of the failed Health Republic Insurance of New York co-op means they will have to find new health insurance. The New York Post writes, “Add 250 New York cancer patients to the long list of victims of ObamaCare’s lies — just one more snapshot of the program’s ongoing death spiral.”

The reason cancer patients are now scrambling for healthcare? The collapsed co-op was the only insurance provider that covered treatment at the world-renowned Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, and now with the co-op gone, cancer patients need to find new insurance, new doctors, new treatment centers all at the most vulnerable time in their lives. The naive idea that the co-op could offer premium coverage at non-premium pricing and survive has left patients stranded and taxpayers stuck with the price tag.

But failing co-ops are only a small part of the problem for the ObamaCare house of cards. The largest health insurer in the country, UnitedHealthcare, just announced that they are unlikely to participate in the ObamaCare health exchanges in 2017 and are limiting their marketing for customers through exchanges in 2016.

Read it.

This short video from the Pacific Legal Foundation details an attempt by government – in this case, that of the city of Palo Alto, CA – to extort money on a grand scale from innocent people.

…

…those people who have been especially active at artificially reducing Palo Alto’s supply of housing for low-income people are – under the pretense of being great champions of low-income people seeking housing in Palo Alto! – now unjustly (and unconstitutionally) penalizing other people (those who, again, have actually worked hard over the years to make low-income housing more available) for now moving into another line of work.

This is the sort of cronyism hand-in-glove with government in which the Democrat party specializes. Under the guise of ‘doing something for the underprivileged’ they stand in the way of those actually doing something for the underprivileged. The poster child for this system is the whole minimum-wage scam.

Read it.

I am not making this up.

An American university has held a three-day retreat for students who “self-identify as white” to discuss “white privilege” in the midst of the ongoing racial tensions overwhelming campuses across the US and Canada.

‘Self-identify as white’? Who does that any more? Everybody ‘self-identifies’ as a fashionable victim group. I would refuse to attend such an explicitly racist event — and, since this is a state-supported University, bring a lawsuit against it on civil-rights grounds.

This all makes Bernie Sanders a lot more understandable; obviously there’s something in the water.

Read it.

A threat by the nation’s largest health insurer to pull out of ObamaCare is a sign of the industry’s growing angst about the viability of the federal exchanges, sources close to the industry say.

UnitedHealthcare’s warning sent new shockwaves across the healthcare sector after weeks of mounting anxiety among private insurers whose participation in the exchanges is critical to the viability of the president’s signature law.

In the last month alone, insurers have learned that the Obama administration has significantly lowered its expectations for new customers and will have far fewer federal dollars to help cushion insurer losses.

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

“We’ve been very clear with the Administration about the serious challenges facing consumers and health plans in this exchange market,” Marilyn Tavenner, the CEO of the powerful insurer group America’s Health Insurer Plans, wrote in a statement.

Leading insurers have already given strong warnings that the Obama administration needs to step up its funding commitment for companies that are still struggling with less-healthy — and therefore more expensive — customers. Some believe that Thursday’s announcement by UnitedHealth could be an attempt to pressure the administration into action.

Gee, it costs more than predicted and doesn’t work as well. Who could have seen that coming?

More news from the whitest city in the nation.

The latest is that Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, has decided that there is no need to expand the region’s urban-growth boundary as there is plenty of room to accommodate the 400,000 new residents that region is expected to gain in the next two decades. Metro’s plans calls for housing 80 percent of those new residents in multifamily housing primarily located in downtowns and along transit corridors.

As Texas transportation official Mike Heiligenstein pointed out at the American Dream conference in Austin two weeks ago, the idea that huge numbers of people can live downtown is absurd. Downtown Austin today seems to be a forest of high-rise condos, yet only 10,000 people live there. He pictured what it would look like with 20,000 more residents and it seems impossibly dense–yet 20,000 is less than 5 percent of the region’s anticipated growth. Most Americans simply don’t want to live in Manhattan, and given the nation’s wide-open spaces, they shouldn’t have to–yet planners in both Portland and Austin think they should.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

We’re constantly being lectured about White Privilege, but the long term trend in the United States over the last half century is for groups on the margins of whiteness, such as Hispanics, South Asians, and, now, Arabs, to demand that the government grant them the status and associated privileges of being officially Nonwhite in modern America.

Rezd it.

I’d compare them to the Gestapo, but the Gestapo were never this silly.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, speaks sense to stupidity.

Whenever I hear politicians and their deputies discuss the subject that I know best, economics, they typically get it wrong.  And they get it wrong not in minor ways; they get it wrong in fundamental ways.  They frequently speak and write as if trade-offs don’t exist – as if the titles of statutes determine the outcomes of statutes – as if prices are arbitrary numbers that can be manipulated by government with no undesirable or unintended consequences – as if the benefits of international trade are “our” exports while the costs of such trade are our imports – as if nations “compete” against each other economically – as if the destruction wrought by natural disasters has an economic upside – as if government officials are immune to the knowledge constraints and self-interested motivations that affect actors in private markets.

Ain’t that the truth.

In short, when the subject of discussion or the object of action is the economy, politicians and their deputies typically sound and act as if they are imbeciles (or as if the audiences they aim to please are made up largely of imbeciles).  So why should I trust that these same politicians and their deputies, when they discuss and act on matters about which I know far less than economics, are not imbeciles?  Why should I suppose them to be any more informed, reasonable, and wise – and less politically motivated – than they are when they discuss economics?

A very good question that I wish more people would ponder.

I admit it: I don’t know a great deal about foreign affairs and military matters.  But I do know that the same politicians and deputies who consistently act in ways that I am certain are ignorant and dangerous when they intrude into the economy are the same politicians and deputies who I am asked to trust when they intrude into foreign affairs.

I do know quite a bit about foreign affairs (and military matters) and I can testify that they are just as ignorant and dangerous in those fields as in economics.

Read it.

Polls indicate that most Americans oppose importing thousands of Syrian refugees in particular, and more immigrants in general. So naturally, in his first important act as House Speaker, Paul Ryan is reported to be rushing to the floor, as early as tomorrow, a bill that will insure that President Obama gets his way on the issue.

Paul Ryan has a lot of ‘splainin’ to do.

The legislation the House will vote on is called the American SAFE Act. It is a misnomer and the bill is, frankly, a fraud. It is premised on the idea that the Obama administration will be able to identify potential terrorists among Syrians who claim to be refugees, a claim that everyone knows is false.

Speaking as someone who just wasted a morning dealing with the Social Security Administration, I am loathe to believe that the government is competent in any area that it touches.

Read it.

The Los Angeles Time seems surprised to report that Los Angeles’ 9-mile-long Expo Line has failed to relieve congestion in the corridor it serves. Rail and bus boardings increased about 6 percent after the line opened in 2012 (at least some of which would be due to transfers of passengers from bus to rail who previously could go the entire distance of their journey by bus), but the rail line had no “significant or consistent impact” on auto traffic.

Many people believe rail transit depends on population density, and if so then the Expo Line should be a perfect candidate, as the area it serves has 26,000 people per square mile (about the same as New York City and nearly ten times the average urban density in the United States). On one hand, even that’s not dense enough for rail to attract a lot of riders. On the other hand, light rail is really low-capacity transit, so is truly the wrong solution for areas of high transit demand.

The problem with trains is that they take you from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be at times convenient to the train but not necessarily to you. People always choose cars if they can. But politicians don’t like to let people choose their own way, with results as you see them.

Read it.

To see the full cynicism of the Obama approach to the refugee issue, one has only to ask President Obama’s least favorite question: Why is there a Syrian refugee crisis in the first place? Obama’s own policy decisions—allowing Assad to convert peaceful demonstrations into an increasingly ugly civil war, refusing to declare safe havens and no fly zones—were instrumental in creating the Syrian refugee crisis. This crisis is in large part the direct consequence of President Obama’s decision to stand aside and watch Syria burn. For him to try and use a derisory and symbolic program to allow 10,000 refugees into the United States in order to posture as more caring than those evil Jacksonian rednecks out in the benighted sticks is one of the most cynical, cold-blooded, and nastily divisive moves an American President has made in a long time.

Read it.

It’s not just stagnating cities in states like California or Illinois that are running into pension troubles. The pension vise is now tightening around Houston too, an oil-rich metropolis that has been enjoying rapid job growth for years.

NB: Run by Democrites, as all major cities are, even in Texas.

Read it.

Like many government agencies, the U.S. Postal Service is an expert at hemorrhaging money. Just last week, the USPS reported a $5.1 billion loss for fiscal year 2015, marking its 9th consecutive year of multi-billion dollar losses. Since 2007, the USPS has accumulated $56.8 billion in losses.

This is why people have misgivings about putting the government in charge of health care — which the history of the NHS in Britain and Obamacare in the U.S. fully support.

Although the Postal Service claims it does not receive taxpayer support, the fact is that USPS enjoys a variety of special privileges as a government agency. The USPS maintains a government protected monopoly over delivery to mailboxes. This gives the USPS a roughly $14.9 billion advantage in recent years over private competitors.

Additionally, the USPS is exempt from virtually all taxes and fees that its competitors must pay – it does not have to pay: state and local property and real estate taxes; sales and use taxes; state franchise taxes; license fees; title fees; and vehicle registration fees. The USPS is not even accountable for parking tickets and tolls. In all, these exemptions give the USPS an over $2 billion dollar edge over the free market.

Oh, a government agency lie to us? However did that happen?

Read it.

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist to detect a Freudian slip in Kerry’s statement that was “perhaps even a legitimacy” to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Charles Krauthammer was a psychiatrist and he detects it. Kerry, he says, inadvertently evinced the same mentality that caused President Obama to say “the future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam.”

Were is not for Hillary Clinton, John Kerry would certainly be the Worst Secretary of State Ever.

Read it.

Adjusted for inflation, tuition and fees at public four-year colleges have increased 394 percent since 1976, according to the College Board. Students aren’t necessarily paying the “sticker price” thanks to scholarships, grants, and other financial aid, but net tuition and fees have steadily increased, and even more so if room and board is factored into prices.

Federal and state largess has done little to restrain tuition and fees. While federal and state funding has different goals, public colleges and universities fund a larger percentage of their budgets from government sources (37 percent) than from tuition and fees (21 percent), according to research from the Pew Charitable Trusts.

The federal government also funds tuition and fee payments through its student loan program. In fact, by volume, “federal loans grew 376 percent between 1990 and 2013 in real terms, compared with enrollment growth of 60 percent,” and $103 billion in loans were issued in 2013, according to Pew.

The hefty government involvement, rather than helping students, has remained one of the reasons that college costs keep rising. Growing demand for college attendance, and a government willing to lend money to any prospective student, has let universities raise costs without a drop in enrollment as students hold more debt.

Read it.

It’s difficult to think of a piece of legislation that failed more abysmally than the ADA.

No Child Left Behind. But I’ll grant you that the ADA is certainly in the running.

So now what to we do? Will the supporters of the ADA concede that it failed and call for repeal? Not likely. A cynic might claim that the Americans with Disabilities Act is not about getting disabled people into the workforce, it’s about creating jobs for lawyers.

And the lawyers certainly appreciate it. Check any legislator’s campaign contribution list and you’ll find lawyers figured prominently.

Read it.

Sign it.

Read it.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s decision Tuesday to raise minimum pay for all New York state workers to $15 an hour underscores the powerful role governors and local governments can play in shaping the national wage fight.

And the [Union] crowd went wild.

Never has the Democrite agenda of using taxpayer dollars to buy votes been more blatantly displayed, nor more thinly veiled.

Read it.

Well, they’re Government and that’s what Government does. I see no difference between them and Obama, except that their wives don’t bitch you out about your diet.

Read it.

These are the people who want to be in charge of your health care.

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Oil and gas giant Exxon Mobil is the target of a new state investigation that seeks to determine whether the company deliberately misled the public about the risks of climate change. The New York Times reports that New York Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman issued a subpoena to the company on Wednesday, in which he demanded access to financial records, emails, and other documentation, dating back to the late 1970s.

If you can’t get them to shut up, see if you can cost them money. Your tax dollars at work, indeed.

Still waiting for the investigation of the ‘climate scientists’ who fudged the data to make ‘climate change’ appear to be a near and present danger. And waiting. And waiting….

Read it.

After years of indecision and short-term extensions, the House of Representatives passed a six-year transportation bill yesterday. Since the bill is not much different from a bill passed by the Senate a few months ago, it seems likely that the two will agree on a final bill later this month.

One of the main obstacles to the bill has been fiscal conservatives (and some liberals) who objected to $80 billion of deficit spending over the next six years. Many of the conservatives wanted to cut spending to be no more than gas tax and other highway revenues; the liberals wanted to raise gas taxes to cover the deficits and provide revenues for even more spending on roads and transit. Instead, the House stayed the course of spending more than is available, using various accounting tricks to cover the deficits.

What really happened is that newly minted House Speaker Paul Ryan wanted to prove his worth, so he twisted enough arms to get the bill passed. The bill even includes reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives hated. Apparently, the long-term opponents of this bank and transportation deficits just gave Ryan his honeymoon and allowed the bill to pass without a big fight: only 64 members of the House voted against the final bill.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Michigan’s Consumers Mutual Insurance put a notice up yesterday that it will not offer insurance in 2016, making it the 12th ACA co-op to fall—a number that’s more than half of the 23 co-ops set up by the ACA in 2014.

But, but, but, I thought that these co-ops would save everybody from expensive health care!

Democrats, of course, have blamed Republicans for cutting federal funding to co-ops, which they argue could have kept them afloat. But the structural causes of the closures appear to lie deeper. Every co-op’s financial situation is unique, but in the case of one early closure—Iowa’s Cooportunity Health—premiums were set too low to cover the cost of the sick patients it attracted. Another threatened co-op, meanwhile, looked at the possibility of raising premiums. In other words, there is a tradeoff between plan affordability and insurer sustainability that the ACA simply hasn’t solved. Insurers can make their coverage affordable, but then their viability is threatened. Or they can raise premiums and save themselves—but at the cost of increasing the financial burden placed on Americans, whether directly or through tax dollars.

Guess not.

Read it.

President Obama, with the help of some seriously misguided Republicans, is devoting the last segment of his presidency to helping one of his favorite interest groups — criminals. Not content with letting thousands of them out of jail early, the president is now attempting to improve their chances of obtaining federal employment by banning federal agencies from asking applicants about their criminal histories on job application forms. This policy goes under the slogan of “ban the box.”

Read it.

Well, bad news for those very few people (currently 14 out of 1,135 voters; see below) who think the TSA is more like a panther than, say, an elderly orangutan or the mythical skunk ape. John Roth, DHS’s hard-working but continually frustrated inspector general, is back in front of Congress today to talk about why the department’s least-popular child keeps coming home with big red Fs on its report card.

When we last left our heroes back in July, they had more or less shut down the Houston airport because they were worried it might be under attack by several hundred sorority members, an attack that came just one day after it allegedly caught Morrissey trying to smuggle his junk onto a plane in San Francisco. Granted, at the time the agency had just come under new management (see “New TSA Administrator to Explain Why Agency Will Fail Differently From Now On,” and this followup), so there was at least some reason to believe that it might at least, well, fail differently in the future.

This belief was unjustified.

Read it.

Peter Callaghan, a reporter for the Minneapolis Post, has figured out that rail transit planners routinely overestimate transit ridership. He calls this the Pickrell Effect, after US DOT researcher Don Pickrell, whose 1990 report found that most rail projects underestimated costs and overestimated ridership.

(Callaghan doesn’t mention the other Pickrell Effect, which is that government employees who report such shenanigans are likely to be sent to the local equivalent of Siberia. For his effort, Pickrell was told by a Deputy Secretary of Transportation that he would never be allowed to work on a transit study again.)

Read it.

The money for all of this Obamanomics has to come from somewhere, folks. Sooner or later we’re going to get a Republican President who’s going to worry about the national debt level and the only income the government has is ripped from your paycheck and mine; you KNOW Congress isn’t going to quit spending.