Read it.

Even as the White House continues to focus on the raw number of insured Americans in the lead-up to the next ACA sign-up period, the evidence continues to mount that the fundamental dynamics of U.S. health care are still hitting Americans where it hurts: the pocketbook. A new study show that costs are rising across the system, not especially dramatically, but consistently, making care more unaffordable year by year.

Like most recent legislation, the name of the law is precisely the opposite of what it winds up doing. No Child Left Behind is more accurately No Child Gets Ahead, and the Affordable Care Act is (wait for it) giving us care that isn’t affordable.

Read it.

The TSA, it appears, is just simply bad at everything. The nation’s most useless government agency has already made it clear that it is bad at knowing if it groped you, bad at even have a modicum of sense when it comes to keeping the traveling luggage of citizens private, and the TSA is especially super-mega-bad at TSA-ing, failing to catch more than a fraction of illicit material as it passes by agents upturned noses. And now, it appears, the TSA has demonstrated that it is also bad at pretending to give a shit.

In case you missed the recent news, the TSA’s specially designed master key to open all of the specially designed TSA-recognized luggage locks were especially super-hacked by someone with access to such privileged information and equipment as a newspaper subscription and a 3D printer. By using a picture in the Washington Post of a TSA agent’s master key and some documents from Travel Sentry, a group that generates and enforces TSA protocols, one security researcher was able to create 3D printer files to create his own master key.

The TSA is rapidly replacing the Post Office as the poster child for government incompetence.

Read it.

Whenever the government is put in charge of anything, it always winds up costing more and working less well.

Read it.

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

Read it.

The President’s string of misjudgments on the Middle East—on the peace process, Erdogan, withdrawal from Iraq, Libya, ISIS as the “J.V. team”, and Syria—is one of the most striking examples of serial failure in the annals of American foreign policy.

Generally speaking, what the President seems worst at is estimating the direction in which events are flowing. He thought Erdogan was taking Turkey in one direction; Erdogan was going somewhere else. He thought there was a transition to democracy in Egypt; there never was a prospect of that. He has repeatedly been caught flatfooted by events in Syria. And Putin keeps running rings around him.

Jimmuh Carter loves the hell out of Barack Obama, because Barack Obame means that Jimmuh Carter won’t go down in history as the Worst President Ever. No wonder you always see him with a big grin.

Read it.

In most of my classes I will either show the picture nearby of federal agency acronyms (remember that none of these are cabinet departments spelled out in the Constitution), or start writing them one-by-one on the blackboard while rattling off their name and purpose. If I show the slide I’ll see how many agencies students can identify from their acronym (usually not very many, and I’ve forgotten some of these myself), but if I recite them seriatim, after a few minutes students get the point: the government is massive, and largely beyond the direct—or even indirect—control of voters. (Recall Obama saying that he couldn’t control the “independent” National Labor Relations Board when it tried to stop Boeing from opening a plant in South Carolina. No reporter thought to follow up: “Mr. President, just who does control the NLRB if it’s not you?”)

Read it.

Wow, I guess that Affordable Care Act really works, huh.

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

Read it.

Of course. The Welfare State is going broke. They need the money.

Read it.

And since Every Kid Is Necessarily As Good As Every Other Kid, they will round up the usual suspects and throw more taxpayer money down the usual ratholes.

Read it.

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

Read it.

After nearly a year of deliberation, the state Supreme Court ruled 6-3 late Friday afternoon that charter schools are unconstitutional, creating chaos for hundreds of families whose children have already started classes.

The ruling — believed to be one of the first of its kind in the country — overturns the law voters narrowly approved in 2012 allowing publicly funded, but privately operated, schools.

More Left Coast madness.

In the ruling, Chief Justice Barbara Madsen wrote that charter schools aren’t “common schools” because they’re governed by appointed rather than elected boards.

Therefore, “money that is dedicated to common schools is unconstitutionally diverted to charter schools,” Madsen wrote.

“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” — Benito Mussolini

Read it.

Banks are sending notices of account closure out to small businesses across the country, to clients they’ve done business with for years, even decades. The reason? They often don’t provide one.

But a growing number of business owners believe they know why they’re being cut off from the financial system. It’s Operation Choke Point, ostensibly an attempt to crack down on fraudulent businesses, but in reality a dragnet that has ensnared innocent entrepreneurs unfairly classified as “high-risk” players.

Earlier this year, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) chairman Martin Gruenberg told Congress that Choke Point was over, but many business owners believe the FDIC and the Department of Justice have passed enforcement duties along to a newly created independent agency: the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), the brainchild of progressive senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). The CFPB operates under the guidance of the Federal Reserve and doesn’t rely on Congress for funding, which critics say allows it to operate without any meaningful checks on its power.

Read it.

So Quartz might be overstating it slightly with the headline “There is literally a U.S. government conspiracy against vegan mayo.” But emails uncovered by Massachusetts Institute of Technology researcher Ryan Shapiro do show that the American Egg Board (AEB)—an egg promotion group with members appointed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture—hired public relations professionals to help bring down vegan-mayo maker Hampton Creek, and advised the bigwigs behind Hellmann’s mayonnaise to report the California startup to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

‘Progressives’ will immediately go off on their ‘SEE! SEE! CORPORATE GREED!’ without pausing to think that if the government didn’t have power over food markets then food producers wouldn’t be spending billions trying to have government exercise that power in their favor. You can’t game the system unless there’s a system to game, and that system is the result of ‘progressive’ agitation.

In August, the FDA sent a warning letter to Hampton Creek about possible “misbranding.” Among the FDA’s complaints: Hampton Creek’s “Just Mayo” line doesn’t meet the legal requirements for labeling something mayo. Only products containing vegetable oil, eggs, and vinegar and/or lemon juice may use the term, providing they don’t stray beyond these and a few additional ingredients, like salt and sugar. The lack of eggs and presence of beta-carotene and pea protein puts Just Mayo at odds with federal condiment rules.

WE DO NOT NEED a world in which there are ‘federal condiment rules’. At least in a Zombie Apocalypse you can shoot the zombies.

Read it.

As has been noted frequently in this space, the odious 2010 Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), which requires foreign banks in U.S.-friendly countries to cough up information about and sometimes money from their American customers, has led to the predictable result of said financial instituions treating Americans like radioactive lepers. It’s not much fun to live in a country where you can’t open a bank account, and so record numbers of U.S. citizens—more than 14 per day, at last count—are simply turning in their passports.

Read it.

The success of Uber and other ride-booking companies in New York City has highlighted just how antiquated the services of the taxicab industry, a municipally enforced monopoly, are. It’s also demonstrated riders’ preference for choice in transportation.

But yesterday a new rule from the New York Taxi and Limousine Commission (TLC) that gives riders and drivers less choice in yellow cabs went into effect. The TLC now mandates that all new and replacement yellow taxis, with limited exceptions for alternatively fueled and handicap-accessible vehicles, be the same Nissan van for the next 10 years.

The nice thing about being a government is that you can create monopolies, and the nice thing about government monopolies is that you can force people to spend their money your way.

Read it.

In recent years, three American public school districts have provided taxpayer-supported lunches meeting Muslim students’ dietary standards. They have not similarly provided lunches satisfying any other students’ religious standards. The halal foods purchased with public funds are costlier than comparable non-halal foods.

I guest Muslims Are Special.

Read it.

Apparently this is the political version of the corporate conference in Aspen or Maui, a convenient excuse to take a vacation at somebody else’s expense.

Read it.

US brass-hats have decided when the F-35 “Joint Strike Fighter” will finally be ready to take on the ancient A10 “Warthog”: in another three years, give or take a little.

My prediction is that the game will be rigged to make sure that the F-35 wins. Nobody in the hierarchy can afford to have its pet pig appear without enough lipstick to disguise its innately porcine nature, even if it has to be added with Photoshop.

Read it.

Two programmes taught at Washington State University have set out clear restrictions upon the language students can use, banning terms such as “The Man”, “Coloured People” and “Illegals/ Illegal Aliens”.

The terms have been forbidden by certain professors on the basis that they are “oppressive and hateful”, according to one of the syllabuses reported by Campus Reform.

Yet another reason to avoid the Left Coast.

Breikss also bans the use of the words “male and female” in the course.

The Thought Police are alive and well and in control of certain parts of the educational system.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Yet another reason to take your shotgun with you when you go outside.

Read it.

The question thus becomes whether the Iran deal modifies the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. Furchtgott-Roth presents a good case that it does.

Obama doesn’t pay any attention to the law, why would he pay attention to a treaty? Assuming that he even knows it exists?

Read it.

If you like your flexible spending account … you might not be able to keep your flexible spending account.

Obamacare’s looming “Cadillac tax” on high-cost health plans threatens to hit 1 in 4 U.S. employers when it takes effect in 2018—and will impact 42 percent of all employers by a decade later, according to a new analysis.

And many of those employers will be subject to the heavy Obamacare tax because they offer popular health-care flexible spending accounts to workers, which, ironically, are designed to reduce the income tax burden to those employees.

As a result, the co-author of the analysis expects the health FSAs to start being phased out and “largely disappearing” over time by companies looking for reduce their exposure to the Cadillac tax.

Obamacare: The gift that keeps on giving.

Read it.

Let’s wait and see how long it is before you see this in the New York Times or the Washington Post.

Although you’ve got to admit, it takes some talent to be worse than Hillary Clinton….

Phil Gramm lays it out.

The Obama transformation was achieved by laws granting unparalleled discretionary power to the executive branch—but where the law gave no discretion Mr. Obama refused to abide by the law. Whether the law mandated action, such as income verification for ObamaCare, or inaction, such as immigration reform without congressional support, Mr. Obama willfully overrode the law. Stretching executive powers beyond their historic limits, he claimed the Federal Communications Commission had authority over the Internet and exerted Environmental Protection Agency control over power plants to reduce carbon emissions.

When Obama empowered himself to declare Congress in “recess” to make illegal appointments that the courts later ruled unconstitutional, he was undeterred. In an action that Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon would have never undertaken, Mr. Obama pushed Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid to “nuke” the rights of minority Senators to filibuster judicial nominees and executive appointments by changing the long-standing 60-vote supermajority needed for cloture to a simple majority.

American democracy has historically relied on three basic constraints: a shared commitment to the primacy of the constitutional process over any political agenda, the general necessity to achieve bipartisan support to make significant policy changes, and the natural desire of leaders to be popular by delivering peace and prosperity. Mr. Obama has transformed America by refusing to accept these constraints. The lock-step support of the Democrats’ supermajority in the 111th Congress freed him from having to compromise as other presidents, including Reagan and Mr. Clinton, have had to do.

Read it.

The problem with nearly every government program or regulation is that it spawns a private sector industry to leach off the regulation, as well as a new constituency group to support the perpetuation or expansion of the regime.

Today’s example is the egregious Title IX sexual assault protocols for college campuses, which, as noted here previously, isn’t even a formal federal regulation. It proceeded from a “dear colleague” “guidance” letter from the Department of Education—an example of what legal scholars call the growing practice of “informal rule-making.” It may seem informal to you, but when you’re on the receiving end, with the threats and blandishments of the federal government coming at you, it seems about as “informal” as a request from Don Corleone.

Read it.

Of course — if the government is involved.

The Ocheesee Creamery in the Florida Panhandle produces all-natural skim milk from grass-fed cows with absolutely nothing added, yet the state says they have to call it “imitation..”

And while they argue about it, the dairy is dumping hundreds of gallons of skim milk down the drain each week.

Creamery owners Paul and Mary Lou Wesselhoeft were in federal court Wednesday as part of their nearly three-year-old battle with the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Affairs, which argues that skim milk isn’t skim milk unless vitamins are added to it.

Read it.

Metro, Portland’s regional planning agency, funds its hundreds of planners out of garbage fees, which is why Portland has the highest garbage collection costs in the Pacific Northwest. But Metro also encourages people to recycle in order to reduce their garbage refuse.

As a result, Portland garbage has declined enough to threaten Metro’s budget. Metro’s response, naturally, is to tax recyclables, which would probably lead some people to stop recycling.

Funny how that works: When you tax something, you get less of it. You’d think that government employees would have realized that by now.

Read it.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) issued a regulation on Thursday to stop referring to midget raisins as “midget” after an activist group called the term offensive.

…

The government said the change was prompted by a request from the Little People of America, a nonprofit membership organization for people of short stature.

I am not making this up. (Cue Randy Newman.)

Read it.

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

Massachusetts Health Connector – the state’s failed Obamacare exchange – is faced with yet another challenge, this time a legal one. The U.S. Attorney’s Office is demanding the state exchange open its books in order to find out how the State government wasted hundreds of millions of dollars in a failed revamp of their healthcare exchange.

What’s to explain? They’re a state government. A Blue State government. Wasting hundreds of millions of dollars is what they do.

Although Massachusetts was the home of the Obamacare blueprint “RomneyCare”, the federal regulations imposed on the state broke an already working system and displaced thousands of Medicaid recipients.

Yeah, the Feds have a record of doing that.

While residents of the state were unable to get healthcare, the response from state officials was nonchalant. 41 days after the failed launch of the website Governor Patrick was asked about possible concerns with the exchange. His response was “No, none at all.”

He’s a black governor in a Democrite-run state. What could he possibly have to worry about? Tennis elbow? Having to wait for a tee time?

The skyrocketing costs and repeated malfunctions aside, the most disturbing aspect of the Massachusetts fiasco is the intentional concealment of the failures by the Commonwealth Connector Authority (CCA), the organization tasked with oversight of the transition.

Distburbing to whom? Not to anyone who has seen government employees (and their clients) in action before.

Read it.

We have written here and here about the EPA-caused spill of three million gallons of toxic liquid into the Animas River in Colorado. Private companies that have caused environmental disasters of that magnitude (or much less) have been criminally prosecuted; in some cases, individuals have been jailed. Will the EPA face similar accountability? Just kidding.

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

Read it.

Michigan-based market Meijer is attempting to expand into the state of Wisconsin, and they’re offering food for a steal. Who wouldn’t want Pop Tarts at $1.50 a box or tomatoes for $.79 a pound?

The answer to that question is, of course, protectionist bureaucrats and rival stores within the state of Wisconsin. Meijer is now under investigation for violating the state’s Unfair Sales Act, a depression-era law that forbids selling merchandise at below cost. A law firm in Milwaukee filed complaints on behalf of an unnamed client naming 37 products they believe are being sold below cost.

Read it.

Labor gangsterism—mob-run labor unions that loot pension funds, make back-room deals with both politicians and companies that favor union management over workers, and support crooked big city machines as part of a strategy to keep law enforcement at bay—is one of America’s oldest union traditions. How important has the mob been in labor history? Ask Jimmy Hoffa, if you can find him.

Now, a recent rash of minimum wage laws have created a huge new opportunity for mafia enrichment: laws that hike the minimum wage to utterly unrealistic levels, but allow companies to pay less than the minimum wage—if the low wages are part of a collective bargaining agreement with a labor union.

Read it.

Eighty years ago this month (on August 14th, 1935, to be precise), Uncle Sam foisted on its subjects a scheme that would make Charles Ponzi green with envy.  And to help hide the hideous nature of this spending-other-people’s-money fraud, Uncle Sam maintains a scam called the “Social Security Trust Fund” – which is simply I.O.U.s written by the government to itself.

Read it.

Because that’s what ‘progressive’ governments do.

Joseph Rose, the Oregonian reporter who proved that streetcars are slower than walking, has left the paper’s transportation beat. So it took another Oregonian reporter, Andrew Theen, to make the brilliant discover that Portland highways really are at or above capacity.

Of course, that shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who lives in the Portland area. According to the Texas Transportation Institute’s latest urban mobility report, Portland has more congestion today (measured by hours of delay per auto commuter) than Los Angeles did 30 years ago, when LA was considered to be about the worst congested city in the world.

…

Speaking of housing, Portlanders are now joining Seattleites in protesting the demolition of single-family homes to be replaced with higher-priced condos. But few of the protesters seem to understand that the real cause of their problems is the urban-growth boundaries that create artificial shortages of land for development, thus forcing builders to redevelop existing neighborhoods to higher densities.

Markets work even when you don’t want them to.

Read it.

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

In order to qualify for federal health insurance subsidies, which covers most or all of premiums for low-income people, one must have at least $11,700 in expected income over a year. According to a report by CNBC, the agent was reportedly instructing low-income individuals to apply for the subsidies with projected income generated from panhandling, selling drugs, and even prostitution.

This unusual activity was brought to the attention of North Carolina officials after an insurance software company in California noticed a high volume of applications with addresses at homeless shelters and expected income listed at the threshold of $11,700. Once brought to light, healthcare company Aetna immediately ceased their relationship with the agent and will investigate the matter fully, as does the administrator of Obamacare and the Healthcare.gov exchange, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Betcha he votes Democrite.

Read it.

… which can be summed up in one onomatopoeic sound: Ka-ching!

Steve Sailer has some thoughts:

My prediction: The Obamas will buy a Manhattan penthouse overlooking Central Park on the west end of Central Park North, so they can claim to live in Harlem but basically live on the Upper West Side.

Appearances are, after all, everything to the Democrites.

For a longer answer, Barack might point out that he hasn’t got caught cheating with an intern so he hasn’t had to agree to facilitate an aggrieved wife’s long-term plan for world domination like Bill Clinton had to.

True dat.

Read it.

And to continue to wax cynical, I think it would take an indictment of Herself, not merely an investigation that ultimately finds a fall guy in Clinton’s IT team or even among her intimates, to turn Democratic primary voters against Hillary or force her from the race.

Because absent an indictment— or, I suppose, an email showing her deliberately accepting payola from Vladimir Putin — the email affair, no less than the shady Clinton Foundation dealings, looks like the kind of scandal that Clinton supporters have long conditioned themselves to justify: An inappropriate and self-interested episode, clumsily covered over, but at once murky and slow-dripping enough for Democratic partisans to shrug, say, “LOLBenghazi” and move on.

Read it.

“The Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act” isn’t living up to its promise. Also known as Proposition 47, the California ballot initiative, which was approved in November 2014 with 60 percent of the vote, downgraded drug possession and many property crimes from a felony to a misdemeanor. Proponents argued that lesser punishment for low-level offenders would enhance public safety. San Francisco District Attorney George Gascon was the rare prosecutor who pushed for its approval. He told the San Francisco Chronicle, “What we have been doing hasn’t worked, frankly.”

…

In San Francisco, theft from cars is up 47 percent this year over the same period in 2014. Auto theft is up by 17 percent. Robberies are up 23 percent. And aggravated assaults are up 2 percent, according to San Francisco police spokesman Carlos Manfredi. Burglaries are down 5 percent.

The City of Angels saw a 12.7 percent increase in overall crime this year, according to the Los Angeles Times; violent offenses rose 20.6 percent, while property crime rose by 11 percent. Mayor Eric Garcetti says Prop 47 may explain Los Angeles’ change in course from crime reduction to crime increases.

“It used to be that if you were caught in the possession of methamphetamine, you would be arrested; you’d end up in drug court or in some other program, probably in custody receiving some type of treatment,” Yolo County District Attorney Jeff Reisig told the Daily Democrat. “Well, now the officers on the street just give them a ticket. So they have been arrested for a crime. The case actually gets forwarded to my office. We charge them with a crime, but they never show up to court. They get arrested again and are given another ticket for methamphetamine. And so we’ve seen that.”

Read it.

Hint: Probably.

A new report by a progressive think-tank says the astronomically expensive F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is inferior compared to other “near-peer” competitors and will be mismatched against emerging threats.

The study by the National Security Network states the jet, the most expensive weapons system in U.S. history, will not only be outmaneuvered and outgunned by Russian and Chinese aircraft but will also be limited in range and its stealth capabilities will be easily overcome.

They’ve been trying to buy one single plane for all three services since at least the sixties, and it’s never worked.

Read it.

“The F-35 is double-inferior,” Stillion and Perdue moaned in their written summary of the war game, later leaked to the press.

The analysts railed against the new plane, which to be fair played only a small role in the overall simulation. “Inferior acceleration, inferior climb [rate], inferior sustained turn capability,” they wrote. “Also has lower top speed. Can’t turn, can’t climb, can’t run.” Once missiles and guns had been fired and avoiding detection was no longer an option—in all but the first few seconds of combat, in other words—the F-35 was unable to keep pace with rival planes.

Read it.

While government bureaucrats are notoriously inefficient at their core missions, such as the EPA polluting the Animus River, the one thing they are consistently efficient at is losing taxpayer dollars. In addition to the EPA’s recent bungles, the U.S. Postal Service this week continued its long tradition of hemorrhaging money.

This week the Postal Service reported a net loss of $586 million for the third quarter of fiscal 2015. The USPS’s ability to lose over half a billion dollars in just three months would almost be impressive if it wasn’t a detriment to American taxpayers. The fact is the USPS receives roughly $18 billion in taxpayer-backed subsidies annually yet is still failing.

Despite this massive multi-billion dollar subsidies crutch, the Postal Service continues to prove incapable of financial accountability. The third quarter losses this week are not only a massive bureaucratic failure but also mean the Postal Service has now posted revenue losses 25 out of the last 27 quarters.

Read it.

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

Read it.

As the state of Illinois is struggling with budget problems, Northern Illinois University, a public school, just hired a “chief diversity officer” that will make more than almost every member of Congress and almost every governor. Vernese Edghill-Walden, whose full title is “senior associate vice president for academic diversity and chief diversity officer,” started working at NIU on August 1 and will make $205,000 a year — $185,000 in salary and $20,000 in allowances and expenses — according to an article in the College Fix. The website was originally alerted to the hire by a local site, USofArn.com Money is so tight in Illinois right now that state lawmakers struggling to figure out where to make cuts to balance the budget, while the state’s pension system nears bankruptcy. Still, NIU spokesman Joseph King is defending the hire and compensation as a good use of taxpayer money.

Having a black female diversity officer (Yeah, Michelle, I’m lookig at you) can keep you from expensive lawsuits — worth more than a Congressman any day.

Read it.

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

Read it.

It’s been apparent for years that America’s underfunded public employee pension system, one of the backbones of blue model governance, will have to face a brutal reckoning at some time or another, but new data suggest that the date of that reckoning may be sooner than anticipated.

Read it.

Of course, if a non-government group had done that, they’d have been fined within an inches of their lives, and possibly done some jail time.