Read it.

Hint: It ain’t happenin’.

The United States’ regulatory bureaucracy has vast power. Regulators can ruin your life, and your business, very quickly, and you have very little recourse. That this power is damaging the economy is a commonplace complaint. Less recognized, but perhaps even more important, the burgeoning regulatory state poses a new threat to our political freedom.

What banker dares to speak out against the Fed, or trader against the SEC? What hospital or health insurer dares to speak out against HHS or Obamacare? What business needing environmental approval for a project dares to speak out against the EPA? What drug company dares to challenge the FDA? Our problems are not just national. What real estate developer needing zoning approval dares to speak out against the local zoning board?

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I’d love to have such a job.

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Prof. Karma R. Chavez is an associate professor at UW-Madison’s Department of Communication Arts. According to a UW employee salary database maintained by the Wisconsin State Journal, Chavez made $87,224 during the 2014-2015 fiscal year, and has achieved tenure at the school.

Chavez teaches seven different courses, ranging from “Queer Theory” (CA 969) to “Queer Migrations” (CA 610) and “Rhetoric and Queer Theory” (also CA 610).

The name is perfect. This is somebody’s Platonic ideal of a ‘diversity’ hire.

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Taxpayers are spending vast sums of money on time-consuming teacher development programs that don’t actually improve teaching quality, according to a study conducted by The New Teacher Project.

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

Read it.

Bet you didn’t know we had a National Raisin Reserve, didja? Well, those raisins are a strategic asset, yesirreebob.

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Last week Denver District Attorney Mitch Morrissey charged a local political activist, Mark Iannicelli, with seven counts of jury tampering, a felony punishable by one to three years in prison, for handing out pamphlets in front of the Lindsay-Flanigan Courthouse. Morrissey’s office says “Iannicelli set up a small booth with a sign that said ‘Juror Info’ in front of the courthouse and provided jury nullification flyers to jury pool members.” According to the Fully Informed Jury Association (FIJA), he distributed a FIJA brochure explaining that jurors have a “right to judge the law itself and vote on the verdict according to conscience,” along with “a flyer from another organization.”

You may wonder how threatening someone with prison for passing out political literature can possibly be consistent with the First Amendment. The short answer is that it’s not. The longer answer is that local and federal officials periodically harass activists like Iannicelli under the pretense of preventing unlawful interference with jury deliberations. The statute cited by Morrissey makes it a Class 5 felony to “communicate with a juror” outside of judicial proceedings with the intent to influence the juror’s “vote, opinion, decision, or other action in a case.” But Iannicelli was not trying to affect the outcome of any specific trial at the courthouse. He was merely passing out pamphlets with general information about the rights of jurors.

Read it.

Everyone understands by now that our intervention in Libya produced a disaster. But many fail to appreciate the magnitude of the disaster. And few understand that the stated reason for the intervention, to prevent a bloodbath, lacked any real basis in fact.

Writing in Foreign Affairs, Alan Kuperman, an associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, provides clarity on these points. The article is called “Obama’s Libya Debacle.” However, given the leading role Hillary Clinton played, the former Secretary of State must take a major portion of the blame, just as she planned to take major credit (see her email traffic with Sidney Blumenthal) when she thought the policy had succeeded.

Read it.

Hint: No.

Aside from the basic numbers of budgetary imbalances and continuing fiscal pressures, Medicare’s institutionalization as the dominant payer in US health care also has locked in the worst features of a costly and inefficient fee-for-service delivery system that still rewards providing more volume, instead of better value, in most health care decisions. The mismatch between Medicare’s claims on the economy and our political willingness to pay for them in turn has produced an ever-more complex web of reimbursement rules and health care regulations in response that are far more successful in hiding or transferring costs than in reducing them. Moreover, although elderly Americans achieved substantial gains in insurance coverage and financial security through Medicare, younger ones fared far less well.

Imagine the worst insurance company you can think of. Then imagine it run by the government. That’s Medicare.

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Frankly, I’m surprised that it’s only that small a sum.

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When coal was king, it fuelled the generation of more than half of America’s electricity. And US presidential hopefuls paid homage to coal, courting mine owners and miners.

Barack Obama was no exception. As a state legislator in 2004 and again as a US senator, he supported proposals for huge federal subsidies to turn coal into motor fuel and ease America’s reliance on oil imports.

All of that has changed. Today, the Obama administration takes on the coal industry with the final version of rules it has dubbed the Clean Power Plan, a complex scheme designed to reduce, on a state-by-state basis, the amount of greenhouse gases the nation’s electric power sector emits. The main target? Coal.

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A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts.

If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court.

Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS, an outcome that drew criticism from some lawmakers who wanted a more extensive crackdown.

From that point on, UBS’s engagement with the Clinton family’s charitable organization increased. Total donations by UBS to the Clinton Foundation grew from less than $60,000 through 2008 to a cumulative total of about $600,000 by the end of 2014, according to the foundation and the bank.

The best government money can buy.

Read it.

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

Read it.

George Simolaris is a member of the Board of Selectmen (the town council) in Billerica, Massachusetts. According to him, some of the crosswalks around town have become unsafe because the paint has faded, and it’s been taking forever to get the town manager and/or Board to repaint them. After more than six months of waiting, he says, he decided to help, so he went out last week and painted several of the crosswalks himself, at no cost to the city. He even used his own paint. Then they looked nice and were easy to see.

For this, he will be prosecuted.

Read it.

As the Antiplanner noted a couple of weeks ago, the source of the gridlock is Congress’ decision ten years ago to change the Highway Trust Fund from a pay-as-you-go system to one reliant on deficit spending. This led to three factions: one, mostly liberal Democrats, wants to end deficits by raising the gas tax; a second, mostly conservative Republicans, wants to end deficits by reducing spending; and the third, which includes people from both sides of the aisle, wants to keep spending without raising gas taxes.

This third group is no doubt the largest because it is politically the easiest position to take, and it is responsible for the Senate bill. Gas taxes and other federal highway user fees bring in about $40 billion a year, while Congress is currently spending about $52 billion a year and wants to increase it by at least the rate of inflation. To make up the difference, the Senate bill includes a hodge-podge of ideas such as increasing customs fees and selling oil from the strategic petroleum reserve. As the Post noted, the one thing these sources of funds all have in common is that “none is related to surface transportation.”

According to the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis, these funding schemes will only be enough to last through 2018, after which Congress will have to find another $51 billion to keep the spending going for another three years. That shortfall alone is probably what killed the bill in the House, though it would be nice to think that House members were also wary of a 1,000-plus-page bill sprung on them at the last minute (scroll down to “SA 2266? or search for “DRIVE Act”).

Read it.

The EmDrive, an experimental propulsion device, may be producing a warp field.

According to posts on the NASA Space Flight forum, when lasers were fired into the EmDrive resonance chamber, it was found that some of the beams were travelling faster than the speed of light.

But, being a government agency, they will find some way to screw it up while making it impossible for anybody else to do anything with it.

Read it.

The legislative sausage-making process is apparently so streamlined that many sausage-makers are barely involved in the process. It’s not that they don’t want to be. It’s that other sausage-makers want their product to be pushed out the door with a minimum of inspection.

Senator Mike Lee posted a video to his Facebook page that contained a rather graphic depiction of expeditious sausage-making. As his printer whirred away behind him, Lee noted that a $47-billion, 1,033-page transportation funding bill was up for a vote. In less than an hour.

…

The bill — which failed to obtain the number of votes needed to open debate — was a bipartisan effort (led by Barbara Boxer [D] and Mitch McConnell [R]). That’s probably the best thing that can be said about it and the legislators behind it. Rather than prove lawmakers can occasionally put aside their differences and actually move forward with the business of legislating, this bill simply signals that both sides of the aisle are willing to resort to bullshit tactics.

The bill arrived at the last minute because the effort itself was last minute. Federal highway aid to states is up against a July 31st expiration deadline. Despite its length, the bill is still far from finished. It takes money from a variety of unrelated programs to fund federal aid for the next three years. The problem is the bill authorizes spending for the next six years. That’s the other reason the bill’s champions were hoping to shove this through with a minimum of debate: the bill leaves it up to the next Senate class to figure out where it’s going to get the other $45-60 billion it will need to keep the federal aid flowing.

Read it.

I’m always struck by the irony that the same kind of people who say government should stay out of your bedroom have no hesitation about getting into your bathroom, and have mandated such splendors as low-flow shower heads and toilets (or commodes that are no longer commodious). And then they moved on to light bulbs and clothes washers and dryers.

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A key part of President Obama’s legacy will be the fed’s unprecedented collection of sensitive data on Americans by race. The government is prying into our most personal information at the most local levels, all for the purpose of “racial and economic justice.”

Unbeknown to most Americans, Obama’s racial bean counters are furiously mining data on their health, home loans, credit cards, places of work, neighborhoods, even how their kids are disciplined in school — all to document “inequalities” between minorities and whites.

This Orwellian-style stockpile of statistics includes a vast and permanent network of discrimination databases, which Obama already is using to make “disparate impact” cases against: banks that don’t make enough prime loans to minorities; schools that suspend too many blacks; cities that don’t offer enough Section 8 and other low-income housing for minorities; and employers who turn down African-Americans for jobs due to criminal backgrounds.

Big Brother Barack wants the databases operational before he leaves office, and much of the data in them will be posted online.

So civil-rights attorneys and urban activist groups will be able to exploit them to show patterns of “racial disparities” and “segregation,” even if no other evidence of discrimination exists.

I wonder how many ‘fake black people’ these records will contain. I suspect that the ‘one drop test’ will get a new lease on life.

Read it.

Hey, it’s not as if they were black people killed by police or something significant like that.

Read it. And watch the video.

The following video was recorded at a town council or board of supervisors meeting in Kandiyohi County, Minnesota on July 7, 2015. The gentleman speaking — a concerned local citizen — has a good handle on the “refugee” scam being foisted on Minnesota by the federal government.

As he notes, the Somalis being unloaded on the state bring no skills and will generally be unable to support themselves for the indefinite future. Local welfare agencies will be picking up the tab, yet the “stakeholders” — unelected citizens, mainline churches, and NGOs — are making big money off the deal. After a few months the federal subsidy will expire, leaving the state holding the bill. In ten years or so the municipalities of Minnesota will be facing bankruptcy as their culturally enriched neighborhoods slide into Third World conditions:

Read it.

Having empowered Iran’s criminal regime and all but ensured its long-term survival, President Obama is turning his attention to doing what he can for American criminals. In one day this week, he commuted the sentences of 46 criminals, the most presidential commutations in a single day since at least the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, according to the White House.

The president also took the time to write a personal letter to each of the 46 criminals. He has not, however, contacted the family of Kathryn Steinle who was murdered in San Francisco by an illegal alien and convicted felon who was released from prison earlier this year.

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In January, Marilyn Tavenner stepped down from her position as the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).Tavenner was one of the administration officials most involved with the flopped launch of Obamacare’s federal health insurance exchange—the administration sent her to Congress to apologize—and her agency crafted thousands of pages of regulations ordered up under the law.

Essentially, Tavenner played the role of Obamacare’s caretaker within the administration, helping to craft its many tedious rules and procedures while serving as a public face when implementation failed.

Earlier this week, news broke that Tavenner would be joining America’s Health Insurance Plans (AHIP), the health insurance lobbying group, as chief executive. Tavenner, in other words, will continue to be Obamacare’s caretaker—only now she’ll be operating from the private sector.

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

‘And I say to you: Make unto you friends of the mammon of iniquity; that when you shall fail, they may receive you into everlasting dwellings.’

Read it.

Or even – gasp! – be given back to the people who actually earned.

Naw….

Read it.

Top ObamaCare official Marilyn Tavenner, who until February was “administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the federal agency that insures one in three Americans and has an annual budget of more than $800 billion,” will take over August 24 as the “top lobbyist for America’ health insurance industry,” taking over as “president and chief executive of America’s Health Insurance Plans, the trade group whose members include Aetna, Anthem, Humana, Kaiser Permanente and many Blue Cross and Blue Shield companies,” the New York Times reports.

Read it.

Rub your hands together real fast, like Superman.

Read it.

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

Oh, and then there’s this: HealthCare.gov Re-enrolled Fraudulent Obamacare Accounts—and Gave Some of Them Bigger Subsidies

Read it.

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

For extra credit, look up how many Congressmen send their kids to public schools in D.C. That will tell you everything you need to know about government education.

Read it.

Most of the water de Blasio carries for his backers these days flows from city reservoirs. He has awarded the richest labor contracts in city history, and support for his 2017 reelection bid from the union recipients of his public largesse may ward off any primary challenge.

SEIU signed one of those contracts — valued, when combined with the nurses union, at $879 million. Hotel workers don’t have a city contract, but are pleased no doubt by the mayor’s enforcement war against hotel competitor Airbnb. And de Blasio, whose chief of staff used to work for Wilhelm at HTC, backed a bill this year that banned the residential conversion of hotels for two years, an unprecedented restriction on property rights championed by the union.

In another bow to a backer, de Blasio didn’t just deliver big bucks to the teachers union, he’s effectively surrendered the management of the schools to it, even letting it vet the parents chosen to sit on school committees. The mayor has a nonprofit that collects gobs of donations to support his policy initiatives, and the American Federation of Teachers is its biggest donor, giving $350,000 shortly before de Blasio announced the new teachers contract.

SEIU contributed its own, equally timely, $250,000 to what’s called the Campaign for One New York — though it, too, may require a name change, to the Campaign for One New Yorker.

Further evidence that every ‘reformer’ is actually for sale to the highest bidder.

Read it.

There must be some law that in order to get a government paycheck you have to be ignorant of fundamental economics.

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The Minneapolis-St. Paul Metropolitan Council is gambling $8.7 million on a project to alleviate pedestrian congestion that might exist in 5 to 10 years if we’re somehow able to build two additional light rail lines and they are operating at full capacity for 10 days a year.

That’s like buying flood insurance on the house you have yet to buy.

Moral: Don’t live in a Blue State. They take your money and they break your heart.

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Most of us probably assume that if legal charges are filed against us and we consider them unjust, we have a First Amendment right to raise a ruckus in the press. But last week’s controversial Oregon cake ruling suggests that some public officials are not so sure about that.

This decision is very disturbing. Hopefully it will be overturned on appeal, but the fact that it was entered in the first place is frightening.

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17 of the 23 existing non-profit co-ops created by Obamacare are paying their executives exorbitant salaries as high as $587,000, according to reporting by the Daily Caller’s Richard Pollock. Not only do almost all co-op executives have zero insurance experience, but according to Pollock, their salaries may violate provisions in both federal law and Obamacare rules that limit executive compensation.

Several executives had portions of their salaries hidden in “obscure tax return footnotes” or did not report them at all. As Pollock points out, the median executive healthcare pay is $135,000 but at least five states paid their executives over $487,000 – more than three and a half times the average. These salaries likely violate a section of the Bipartisan budget Act of 2013 which prohibits federal contractor executive compensation from exceeding this amount. In addition, at least six co-ops (in New York, New Jersey, Oregon, Arizona, Louisiana, and Illinois) hid $26.5 million in additional pay in their footnotes as “management fees.”

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The United Nations Human Rights Council is a body whose essential purpose is to stigmatize the Jewish state for imaginary crimes. The Obama administration therefore deems it important for the United States to fund and participate in the work of the body, such as the farcical investigation of alleged war crimes conducted by its Gaza Conflict Commission of Inquiry. Having concluded its investigation and issued its report, the commission concluded that both Israel and Hamas may have committed war crime in the course of Operation Protective Edge last year, but the commission unloads on Israel.

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Around this time every year, Joseph Bankman, a professor of tax law at Stanford Law School and a longtime advocate of using technology to simplify tax filing, gets on the phone with reporters to explain what is wrong with how we do our taxes in the United States. Every year he says pretty much the same thing: No other industrialized country asks its citizens to jump through as many hoops to calculate their taxes as ours.

It isn’t just lawmakers or the hapless-seeming Internal Revenue Service that is perpetuating the annoyance of tax time, he adds. Instead it is the private sector — specifically, the software company Intuit, which makes TurboTax, the most popular tax program in the country.

Whenever there are burdensome regulations, there always arises an ‘industry’ to help people comply with those regulations — often built by people who were responsible for creating them (or administering them) in the first place. This ‘industry’ then becomes a powerful lobby against any attempts to break their rice bowl by simplifying the system. For example, in a world in which the wife of a Senator (and future First Lady) can get a bespoke job as ‘diversity officer’ at a public institution (which is then allowed to lapse when she moves on), ‘diversity’ is going to be hard to get rid of.

The reform plan would work like this: Today, employers, banks, brokerage firms and pretty much every other financial organization in the country send the federal government detailed records about our economic activity every year. These organizations also send you, the taxpayer, a similar set of documents, which are forms with names like W-2 and 1098. After you file your taxes, the government matches its two sets of documents to make sure you have filed correctly.

To Mr. Bankman, this double documentation doesn’t make much sense. If the government is already collecting financial data from employers and banks, why can’t the I.R.S. use that information to precalculate our tax returns for us? At the very least, why can’t tax software just connect to the government’s database to download all the information that the government has collected, saving us all that record-keeping and data entry?

I like it, although I also like the fact that it costs people time and money to do their taxes, thus creating a potential constituency for tax reform. (Just think of how people would scream if the withholding regime didn’t make the paying of taxes more painless than the filing of tax returns.)

But Intuit’s opposition to return-free filing has been ferocious. In the last five years, according to disclosure documents, Intuit spent nearly $13 million on federal lobbying. That is about the same amount that companies many times its size have spent on lobbying. Apple, which has an annual income about 40 times that of Intuit, also spent about $13 million on lobbying in the same period. While documents show that Intuit lobbies on several issues, including immigration, cybersecurity and intellectual property law, the company’s largest lobbying contracts all involve the issue of tax administration.

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

Intuit is far from the only opponent of return-free filing. Groups that call for lower taxes, like Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, say it is a “conflict of interest” for the government to both collect taxes and calculate how much people owe.

Bullshit. The IRS already calculates what people owe, and if that disagrees with the return, the IRS will send you a letter telling you that they are changing it, which taxpayers can challenge. Why not eliminate the burdensome front end? My wife and I both have MBAs and we have yet to see a year where the IRS doesn’t find something they think we did wrong, mostly in the application of some pissant rule that their software is built to catch. We’ve gotten to the point where we just fill in the information that we have and let them calculate the tax; this has the added advantage that if they think we owe something they send us a bill, which typically gives us a couple of penalty-free months after April 15 to come up with the money.

Read it.

There’s no word from the White House yet over whether the President will speak at the funeral of the American woman murdered on the San Francisco waterfront Wednesday by a five-time deported illegal alien from Mexico.

I’m thinking No, since she wasn’t of a fashionable color.

Read it.

When insurance companies across the country requested hefty hikes for their Obamacare plan premiums, we noted that regulators might deny or scale back the requests. But the first official numbers are in from Oregon, and the results aren’t pretty for the ACA. Not only did the state’s Insurance Commissioner approve big premium hikes, she has even required insurers that didn’t request any increases to raise their prices.

Be careful what you vote for; you just might get it.

Read it.

At taxpayer expense, of course.

This week, trustees of the cash-strapped, taxpayer-funded City University of New York (CUNY) system approved a hefty annual salary as well as the fancypants title of “distinguished professor” for Paul Krugman.

New York City’s public college system pays Krugman $225,000 each year to analyze the vexing problem of income inequality at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Luxembourg Income Study Center, Gawker notes.

Nice work, if you can get it. I can make up as many liberal fairy tales about ‘income inequality’ as Krugman; maybe I should apply.

The decidedly left-leaning economics professor is also employed by Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs as well as by the London School of Economics. Additionally, he works as a columnist at The New York Times. He has written books, too. His publisher is W. W. Norton & Company.

Pretty sweet.

Thus Krugman, who has long criticized substantial wealth inequalities in the United States, has a net worth that is over 39,000 percent of the net worth of the poorest quintile of Americans.

Well, I guess he won’t have to look far to start his study.

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

My stance as a critic of public education began while I was in fifth grade at Lithia Springs (Ga.) Elementary School, but it was not until our eldest daughter spent a year in kindergarten that I realized that the system is inimical to liberty. Your local public schools are destroying America, and are ultimately a greater threat to our nation’s survival than ISIS.

The first lesson of school is, your parents are idiots.

See, this is why we need school: If parents were smart enough to teach their own children how to read and write, there would be no need for this massive government bureaucracy to provide education to our youth. Silly parents! How dare you think yourselves competent to educate your own child! Education is only possible when conducted by a government-trained expert and provided in a government-controlled classroom under the direction of government-certified bureaucrats.

The second lesson of school is, your parents are wrong.

This was not really a problem so much when I was in school four or five decades ago, when our parents and our teachers shared similar or identical religious, moral and political beliefs. Adult authority in that time and place spoke in a single voice that was patriotic, Christian and dedicated to basic values like hard work and honesty.

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Big businesses can cope pretty well with regulatory uncertainty and regulation creep. When the minimum wage jumps to $15 an hour in a big city, a chain of drugstores can afford to install expensive automatic check out machines to replace all those human workers with some nice robots who won’t get $15 an hour plus overtime plus health care. A start up doesn’t have that freedom. At just the moment when our economy desperately needs a wave of innovation and small-scale entrepreneurialism, the Left has decided to do everything in its power to make the American system as inflexible and corporatist as possible.

Business is the horse that socialists beat to keep their kleptocracy running. A big horse can take this beating better than a small one, that’s why socialists favor the big horses. But you know all this.

Read it.

Here we see the Diversity Scam at its finest: Government makes burdensome regulations that eventually provide cushy jobs for ordinary people who are trying to cope with said burdensome regulations (and institutions desiring some assurance that they won’t be sued under said burdensome regulations). After all, who better to steer people away from the Regulation Rocks than the bureaucrats who were charged with enforcing them in the first place?

Read it.

In the last 10 months, the Islamic State has brutally executed four American hostages. As Americans died, their government was powerless to stop the slaying. For while European governments tirelessly toiled to secure the release of European hostages, President Barack Obama’s administration’s passive approach doomed their American cellmates.

…

The U.S. government’s principal channels with the four families largely consisted of mid-level officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the State Department’s Bureau of Consular Affairs. The FBI was useless. Its tasks were alternately to extract information and to comfort the family. It never shared intelligence. One European hostage, who was incarcerated with the Americans and subsequently released, told me he was shocked that the FBI seemed more interested in gathering evidence to prosecute the hostage-takers than it was in locating the Americans. Our lead agent misled me on several occasions, employing convoluted legalisms that would have impressed the greatest Talmudic scholars. His tactics so frustrated the Sotloffs that they finally asked him to address all queries to me. Though Steve is dead, our nightmare with the FBI continues. The bureau still refuses to give the Sotloffs the original letters he smuggled out of prison, claiming it is studying them for clues.

The FBI could have helped most when the Islamic State initiated contact with each of the families. Instead, it relied on hostage training manuals designed for dealing with psychopaths. That was the wrong approach. The hostage-takers did not have fractured egos that needed soothing. This was a pure money racket. Its ringleaders were not driven by ideology and displayed no psychological disorders.

The State Department was no better. When the mother of one of the hostages requested a senior point of contact at the White House, a State Department official rebuked her for going over her head. When Steve’s father asked that I attend a government meeting, a consular official claimed the room was too small. When Steve’s father offered to give up his seat, the official demurred. The decision to prohibit family representatives from government meetings was made at the administration’s highest levels. The White House knew that some representatives, like the one retained by the family of James Foley, one of the four slain hostages, had intelligence and political experience. Banning them allowed the administration to manage expectations and control the tempo of consultations. Indeed, some families were so confused on secure conference calls that they could not identify the government officials on the other end of the line.

Read it.

Kids in a school district in Indiana have created a black market in salt packets, which they trade and sell to help mitigate the disgusting taste of the so-called healthy lunches mandated under federal guidelines.

These guidelines were championed by First Lady Michelle Obama. Like so many other clumsy government attempts to make people healthier by forbidding the consumption of things they like, the initiative is a costly failure.

‘Black market’ is a tendentious slur-word for situations in which the pricing and availability of goods are dictated by someone’s political agenda rather than free exchange. They are always a symptom of tyranny.

Read it.

Read it.

Ten years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court issued one of the most destructive and appalling decisions of the modern era. In Kelo v. City of New London, a 5-4 majority allowed a local government to bulldoze a working-class neighborhood so that private developers would have a blank slate on which to build a luxury hotel, a conference center, and various other upscale amenities. The city’s goal was to erase that existing community and replace it with a new commercial district that would (hopefully) fill the local coffers with more abundant tax dollars. According to the Supreme Court, this unsavory land grab qualified as a legitimate use of the city’s eminent domain powers because the city “has carefully formulated an economic development plan that it believes will provide appreciable benefits to the community.”

…

In the wake of the Court’s decision, the final holdouts in New London were given the boot and the bulldozers rolled in, leveling the neighborhood. But then nothing else happened. The redevelopment scheme fell apart and the project died. If you visit New London today, you’ll find that the razed neighborhood still stands empty, a depressing monument to the folly of “expert” government planning.

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Sharp as a tack, that guy. What would we do without him?

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The good news is electric car battery maker A123 Systems is finally on track to turn a profit.

The bad news is taxpayers don’t figure to see any of the $133 million the federal government spent and the estimated $141 million in tax credits and subsidies secured from Michigan to help the company take off in 2009, only to see A123 Systems crash, declare bankruptcy in 2012 and then get purchased by a privately held Chinese conglomerate.

“In the case of A123, they created some jobs and a year or two later those jobs were gone, so taxpayers weren’t getting that money back,” said Jarret Skorup, a policy analyst at Michigan’s Mackinac Center, a free-market think tank.

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Civil-rights groups and the country’s largest teachers union are at odds over the role of testing as Congress moves to fix the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, also known as No Child Left Behind, setting up a battle among Democratic-aligned groups that could make it tough to forge a bill that will garner necessary votes for passage.

In a letter to senators, officials with the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and three dozen other organizations said the current Senate bill, the Every Child Achieves Act, doesn’t have sufficient provisions to identify poor schools and hold them accountable when students do not meet performance goals based on test scores. In addition, the civil-rights groups asked for requirements around data-reporting and equal funding for schools.

…

“The highest priority of civil rights community for improving this law is also the National Education Association’s highest priority to defeat,” said Ms. Haycock.

Leaders of the National Education Association, the country’s largest teachers union, say that the heavy reliance on testing to assess teachers and schools creates a toxic environment for schools. While testing could be one variable in that mix, union leaders maintain that it cannot be the only measure. They advocate instead for a “dashboard” of indicators on student progress.

Since laws can’t magically increase the intelligence and diligence of children, the only sure way to leave no child behind is to make sure no child gets ahead.

Read it.

It ain’t pretty.

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The number of people employed by New York City taxpayers will reach a record high this month — 282,767.

That’s according to the Office of Management and Budget, which estimates that by the end of June, the city will have increased its rolls by 11,000 in just the past year.

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