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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.

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

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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….

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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The UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency) is running short of money, which is donated by member nations; (over 90 percent from the U.S. and European states. One reason for the lack of money is the usual donor nations refuse to give more because UNRWA is seen as supporting Islamic terrorism, especially against Israel. The UN does not like to admit this, even when they were recently shown very visible of anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist support on social media by dozens of UNRWA staff running UNRWA schools for Palestinian children. The UN very quietly apologized and said it would discipline or fire the offending employees.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one. Considering the sort of stuff the U.N. does, it would be delusional to think that the vast majority of its functionaries aren’t the sort of goo-goo ‘progressives’ that infest so many international organizations.

UNRWA was established in 1949 because Arab nations refused to accept and absorb Moslems who fled (mostly) from what is now Israel on the promise of the Arab nations that they would soon mobilize sufficient military strength to destroy Israel, drive the Jews out and allow the refugees to return home. That never happened and the UN quickly recognized that there was a serious refugee problem. Not only was UNRWA established to take care of these refugees but in a very unusual move the 750,000 original Palestinian refugees were allowed to pass on their refugee status to their children. No other refugee group was allowed to do that by the UN. About the same number of Jews were driven out of Moslem countries after 1948 and they were all accepted and absorbed by other nations, mainly Israel and the U.S. Since 1947 the number of “Palestinian refugees” has grown to five million and Arab states continue to refuse to absorb them.

Imagine that.

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Ann Marie Corgill was told by the Alabama Department of Education that her qualifications were not up to scratch, despite being 2015 National Teacher of the Year and 2014-2015 Alabama Teacher of the Year finalist. She is also the author of teaching book called “Of Primary Importance”.

Ms Corgill said she was tired of having to prove herself and did not want to pay more fees, and sent Birmingham City Schools a letter of resignation.

In the letter, first obtained by Al.com, she wrote: “After 21 years of teaching in grades 1-6, I have no answers as to why this is a problem now, so instead of paying more fees, taking more tests and proving once again that I am qualified to teach, I am resigning.”

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way things are today:
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Alliance for the Separation of School and State here.

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The Social Security Administration requires that beneficiaries promptly report their work activity, including starting a new job or a change in wages.

But according to a GAO report issued on Thursday, the SSA staff has frequently bypassed established tracking procedures or provides limited oversight that have led to billions of dollars of unwarranted “overpayments” to beneficiaries.

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These states fully allow what’s known as “civil forfeiture”: Police officers can seize someone’s property without proving the person was guilty of a crime; they just need probable cause to believe the assets are being used as part of criminal activity, typically drug trafficking. Police can then absorb the value of this property — be it cash, cars, guns, or something else — as profit, either through state programs or under a federal program known as Equitable Sharing that lets local and state police get up to 80 percent of the value of what they seize as money for their departments.

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In particular, the EPA is by far the most expensive and active federal agency. The EPA leads the pack in both the number and costs of new regulations. From 2004 – 2014, the EPA passed 32 major rules, costing more than $45 billion annually. The EPA is responsible for more than a third of all regulations and almost half the costs of all the regulations included in the OMB report.

The costs of the EPA from this report should not be taken at face value. The OMB’s report is somewhat deceiving because it only reports a sliver of all federal regulations. The agency effectively picks and chooses which regulations to review because the law only requires the OMB to report on “major rules”. For example, this report only included 13 rules published in 2014, out of the total 3,581 that year.

The costs of these unreported rules add up to billions. In fact, the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimates that the OMB has left out more than $35 billion of annual costs since 2002 from other important and expensive, yet not “major” regulations. Thus, the true cost of the EPA’s endless regulation is much, much greater than the government reports.

Read it.

Yup.

Read it.

Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) introduced a resolution yesterday to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, stating that “Commissioner Koskinen violated the public trust. He failed to comply with a congressionally issued subpoena, documents were destroyed on his watch, and the public was consistently misled.”

The Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA) released a report on May 15, 2013 that found the IRS unfairly targeted conservative taxpayers. Commissioner Koskinen was issued a subpoena for “[a]ll communications sent or received by Lois Lerner, from January 1, 2009, to August 2, 2013” in an effort to investigate the “targeting of Americans based on their political affiliation.” The IRS destroyed the backup tapes that the communications were stored on instead of complying with the law.

Commissioner Koskinen has repeatedly given misleading statements regarding the status of Lerner’s emails and failed to examine and produce available sources of communication to congress. The TIGTA was able to investigate Lerner’s “blackberry, email server, loaner laptop, the IRS’s own backup tapes, and Lerner’s hard drive” in only 15 days.

It won’t go anywhere–the Crust takes care of its own–but it’s a nice thought.

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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is expanding a program that awards businesses bonuses when they hire alien college graduates over native-born graduates, according to an analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies.

The optional practical training program (OPT) awards alien college graduates a work permit to stay in the United States for 12 months. If these graduates have majored in science, technology, engineering, or math, also known as STEM fields, the graduates get an additional 17 months of work. This means alien college graduates who graduated in STEM fields would be able to stay in the United States for a total of 29 months.

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As the California High-Speed Rail Authority (CHSRA) continues planning out community meetings about the massive bullet train system it is allegedly going to build someday, more and more evidence that its economic model is utter nonsense is piling up.

Read it.

Hint: Too many.

While we are on the topic, would you like to know the difference between the United States Code and the Statutes at Large? According to the Government Printing Office, “the Statutes at Large, is the permanent collection of all laws and resolutions enacted during each session of Congress.” The laws are arranged by public law number and are published in the Statutes at Large. The set also includes concurrent resolutions, proclamations, proposed and ratified amendments to the Constitution, and reorganization plans. Until 1948, treaties and international agreements approved by the Senate were also published in the Statutes at Large. This set is organized by year. So, if you are interested in locating the laws of passed in 1996 you need to consult the volumes for that year.

As for the United States Code, the Government Printing Office explains that “the United States Code is the codification by subject matter of the general and permanent laws of the United States. It is divided by broad subjects into 51 titles and published by the Office of the Law Revision Counsel of the U.S. House of Representatives.” It is clear that the United States Code is a compilation of laws arranged by subject. However, similar to the Statutes at Large,  it does not include case law or regulatory provisions.

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The price of bureaucratic malfeasance is that much taxpayer money is spent but nobody gets fired and nobody goes to jail.

Lois Lerner is off the hook.

The former Internal Revenue Service staffer, who for the last two years has been at the center of an investigation into whether the tax agency improperly targeted conservative political groups for extra scrutiny, won’t be charged, the Department of Justice (DOJ) said in a letter today, according to CNN. And neither will anyone else.

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Thank you, Barack Hossein Obama. (um…um…um)

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DreamstimeIn a democracy, the people get the government they deserve. But Everett Middle School in San Francisco is not exactly a democracy, and Principal Lena Van Haren withheld publication of the results of a student council election because she didn’t like the outcome—too many of the winners were white.

And everybody knows that white people are incompetent to hold even such formality jobs as a Middle School Student Council.

That is consistent with the attitudes of every school principal I have ever met.

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The Obama administration is having trouble selling insurance plans to healthy people. That’s a big problem: When the young and healthy don’t enroll, premiums have to be hiked to cover the costs of older, sicker people, discouraging even more young people from signing up.

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

Read it.

In July the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit upheld a Connecticut regulation “whose sole purpose is to shield a particular group from intrastate economic competition.” Last week the Institute for Justice, a public interest law firm, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to review that questionable ruling. The Supreme Court should take the case.

At issue in Sensational Smiles, LLC v. Mullen is a regulatory rule promulgated by the Connecticut Dental Commission forbidding non-dentists from shining low-powered LED lights into the mouths of paying customers during the course of teeth-whitening services. Violation of this rule is a felony punishable by up to five years in jail or $25,000 in fines.

In more enlightened times, the passing of special interest laws (technically known as ‘privileges’, although ‘progressives’ are ruining the language there as well) in return for appropriate consideration (in the form of campaign contributions and often votes) would be termed ‘corruption’.

These, however, are not those times.

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It’s really very simple. Hillary Clinton sucked as Secretary of State and dropped the ball very badly in Bednghazi. The Republicans want to hang her for it and the Democrats want to save her ass because she’s the only non-ludicrous candidate they’ve got to run for President this election cycle.

This is just Bill Clinton’s impeachment part two. I predict that she’ll walk; nobody in the government ever loses a job or goes to jail for being incompetent.

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Of course. Businessmen can — and do — go to jail. I have never encountered any bureaucrat going to jail (or even being fired) for breaking an EPA or OSHA regulation.

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Colorado’s Obamacare co-op will shut down. The announcement comes just two days after Tennessee’s Obamacare co-op announced it will also close. Colorado becomes the seventh co-op to have shut down this year, joining co-ops in Tennessee, Nevada, New York, Kentucky, Louisiana, and Iowa/Nebraska, leaving taxpayers on the hook for almost $835 million. Despite this taxpayer funding, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has refused to release information about troubled exchanges, nor has it developed viability guidelines.

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Darrell Whitman, a former San Francisco-based investigator for the Whistleblower Protection Program administered by OSHA, claimed the agency failed to defend workers who faced retaliation for reporting illegal activity and public safety concerns.

“They got rid of the squeaky wheel,” Whitman said.

Hey, it’s what governments do.

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Wakey, wakey.

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Half of America’s Internal Revenue Service’s (IRS) servers are running Windows Server 2003, despite extended support for it ending in July.

That’s according to a report by the Treasury Inspector General that took a look at the IRS’ $139m upgrade program.

The report is distinctly unimpressed and notes that the IRS “did not follow established policies over project management and provided inadequate oversight and monitoring.”

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

Read it.

In case you missed it, the latest bad news for the Affordable Care Act came via the New York Times this past weekend: Americans who signed up for coverage through the law are dropping their insurance at least in part because the plans are too expensive.

That’s why they call it the Affordable Care Act, because you can’t afford it. Public laws are always named the opposite of the effect that they have — witness No Child Left Behind, which actually means No Child Gets Ahead.

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A couple of decades ago, the planning mantra in Oregon was “don’t turn Portland into Los Angeles,” meaning don’t make it more congested. So planners were a bit chagrinned to discover that their plans actually aimed to turn Portland into Los Angeles (see p. 7), meaning a dense urban area (L.A. is the densest in the nation) with a low number of freeway miles per capita (L.A. has the lowest of the nation’s fifty largest urban areas). Since then, Portland-area congestion (measured in hours of delay per commuter) has reached the Los Angeles’ 1985 level.

Today, the mantra is “don’t turn Portland into San Francisco,” meaning an extremely unaffordable housing market. So it should be no surprise that Portland planners are following exactly the policies that will turn Portland into San Francisco.

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Apparently the only good Redskin is a dead Redskin.

Another good reason to leave California.

Come to Texas, where we don’t do stupid shit like this.

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Clarke, a 24-year-old college student, said losing that $11,000 was “devastating.” He’s been forced to live with his mom, trumping his plans to move closer to school. He’s fallen back on other family for financial support. And he had to take out loans for school instead of paying for it up front — for which he’s still in debt. “It’s been a struggle for me,” Clarke, who’s now fighting in court to get his money back, said.

But law enforcement officials may have been working within the confines of the law when they took Clarke’s money. Under federal and state laws that allow what’s called “civil forfeiture,” law enforcement officers can seize and keep someone’s property without proving the person was guilty of a crime. They just need probable cause to believe the assets are being used as part of criminal activity, typically drug trafficking. Police can then absorb the value of this property — be it cash, cars, guns, or something else — as profit: either through state programs, or under a federal program known as Equitable Sharing that lets local and state police get up to 80 percent of the value of what they seize as money for their departments.

So police can not only seize people’s property without proving involvement in a crime, but they have a financial incentive to do so.

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

Read it.

U.S. Taxpayer: The need is not mutual.

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You’ll need some black guys named ‘George’.

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The Post describes the program as having the potential to become “a rare legislative victory in Washington for President Obama — not on Capitol Hill, but down Pennsylvania Avenue inside city hall.” If so, it would be a limited victory. The District’s largest employer would be exempt from the measure, because the city cannot force the federal government to comply.

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Of course, they don’t have to pay for it.

Look up how much U.S. taxpayers pay for WHO.

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Substitute the name of any other race in this story and watch what happens.

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Washington DC’s H Street streetcar ran down a police car last week. But, as the Washington Post headline notes, it’s “still not carrying passengers.”

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President Obama has the habit of offering advice to other leaders,  explaining how they should think. In 2014 he told Iran that an “Iraq in chaos on their borders is probably not in their interests”. Later in 2014 he told Vladimir Putin that a standoff in Ukraine was  not in the interests of either country”. In September of that same year he told Turkey that “it’s certainly not in their interest for all that instability and violence to be occurring so close to their border”.

Surely they see it; and just as surely they will respond as he has foreseen. It must come as a cruel disappointment that so many world leaders disregarded his counsel in 2015, often doing the opposite of what he suggested. Iran is deeply enmeshed in Iraq. Russia is building up forces in the Ukraine.  Turkey is in a renewed fight with the Kurds upon its borders.

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Earlier this week, I attended an event in Michigan that included a screening of a brand-new documentary called Farming In Fear. The film, just 28 minutes long, tells the story of Martha Boneta, who bought a small farm in Virginia and tried to make a go of it by selling produce and so on. She was viciously harassed by a variety of government agencies and environmental groups who evidently intended to drive her out of business.

It appears to be a classic example of the abuse of regulatory power to promote private interests and ideological agendas. Ms. Boneta’s farm home was subjected to repeated and apparently purposeless inspections of closets, bathrooms and so on. At one point, she was cited for holding an “event” without obtaining thousands of dollars worth of licenses and permits. The “event” was a birthday party for a friend’s daughter.

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Hey, look, it’s yet another victory for the Institute for Justice. They stepped in when the Kentucky Board of Examiners of Psychology said nationally syndicated advice columnist John Rosemond’s writings constituted the unlicensed practice of psychology in their state. They also said he could not identify himself as a “family psychologist,” even though he is, because he’s not licensed in Kentucky.

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Most Americans haven’t even heard of civil asset forfeiture. This is why the programs have run unchallenged for so many years. An uninformed electorate isn’t a vehicle for change. This issue is still a long way away from critical mass.

Without critical mass, there’s little chance those who profit from it will lose their power over state and federal legislatures. Forfeiture programs are under more scrutiny these days, but attempts to roll back these powers, or introduce conviction requirements, have been met with resistance from law enforcement agencies and police unions — entities whose opinions are generally respected far more than the public’s.

…

Even if awareness increases, legislators at the top end of the food chain are more interested in appeasing law enforcement agencies and prosecutors than pushing through reform bills that arrive on their desks with nearly unanimous support. Informing the electorate may put better people in office, but it won’t change the mindset that almost always believes law enforcement knows best.

This problem is compounded when the law enforcement lobby starts complaining about the budgetary shortfalls reform efforts will create. If they aren’t allowed to seize anything for any reason, they won’t be able to buy the things they want or offset the costs generated by their seizure efforts. Any state strapped for cash — and that’s most of them — will be hesitant to pick up the tab for “lost” revenue.

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Judicial Watch reports that the Obama administration has granted asylum or residency to 1,519 foreigners with terrorist ties. This information comes from an annual report to Congress by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

More than half of the terror supporters granted asylum or residency by Team Obama provided material support to terrorist organizations, according to the USCIS report. Other received military-type training from a terrorist organization (nine fall into this category), voluntarily provided medical care to members of a terrorist group, or solicited funds or recruited individuals for membership in a terrorist organization.

Nearly 200 of the terror supporters provided material support to “designated terrorist groups.” As Chuck Ross of the Daily Caller explains, designated terrorist groups are the most dangerous. They include groups like Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

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Many NYT editorials are run as part of a marketing campaign in conjunction with politicians who want to be seen as responding to public opinion, so I can’t tell whether this is just wishful thinking on the part of Carlos Slim’s minions or whether the fix might really be in on amnesty….