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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?

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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.

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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.

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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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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.

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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.

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But it won’t, until people die. Even then, it will fight tooth & nail to stick with the same old way of doing things.

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A new article by University of Alabama-Birmingham researcher Edward Archer and colleagues Gregory Pavela and Carl Lavie, published this week in the Mayo Clinic Proceedings, argues that the conclusions drawn by the federal government’s controversial Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) rest on fatally flawed assumptions about unusable data. Consequently, the authors conclude that the DGAC’s work—and the research used to support that work—is so off base as to be scientifically useless.

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The city and state officials who promoted construction of Honolulu’s rail transit line now admit that they don’t know how they are going to pay for the cost of operating that line. Between 2019, when the first part of the line is expected to open for business, and 2031, those costs are expected to be $1.7 billion, or about $140 million per year. In 2011, the annual operating cost was estimated to be $126 million a year.

Honolulu has about a hundred bus routes, which cost about $183 million to operate in 2013, or less than $2 million per route. The rail line will therefore cost about 70 times as much to operate as the average bus route.

What is mere money when we have a chance to make Hawaii look like 19th-century New York?

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As officials of the Obama administration announced that millions of sensitive records associated with current and past federal employees and contractors had been exposed by a long-running infiltration of the networks and systems of the Office of Personnel Management on June 4, they claimed the breach had been found during a government effort to correct problems with OPM’s security. An OPM statement on the attack said that the agency discovered the breach as it had “undertaken an aggressive effort to update its cybersecurity posture.” And a DHS spokesperson told Ars that “interagency partners” were helping the OPM improve its network monitoring “through which OPM detected new malicious activity affecting its information technology systems and data in April 2015.”

…

Meanwhile, the breach has triggered outrage from unions representing federal employees. In a letter to OPM Director Katherine Archuleta, American Federation of Government Employees president J. David Cox expressed displeasure at the way OPM had handled the breach, calling the 18 months of credit monitoring and $1 million liability insurance OPM is offering federal employees “entirely inadequate, either as compensation or protection from harm.”

So the union representing government employees is upset that government employees proved massively incompetent. I see.

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The  Nanny State takes itself seriously.

One afternoon this past April, a Florida mom and dad I’ll call Cindy and Fred could not get home in time to let their 11-year-old son into the house. The boy didn’t have a key, so he played basketball in the yard. He was alone for 90 minutes. A neighbor called the cops, and when the parents arrived—having been delayed by traffic and rain—they were arrested for negligence.

They were put in handcuffs, strip searched, fingerprinted, and held overnight in jail.

It would be a month before their sons—the 11-year-old and his 4-year-old brother—were allowed home again. Only after the eldest spoke up and begged a judge to give him back to his parents did the situation improve.

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The crash occurred around 9:30 a.m. in the tunnel’s center tube when a New Jersey Transit bus hit the back of a private bus, said Joseph Pentangelo, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. At least 18 people reported injuries that did not appear to be life-threatening and were taken to local hospitals, he said.

Note that: A government bus ran into a private company’s bus.

Prediction:

1. Nobody will get fired, except perhaps the driver of the private bus.
2. Nobody will go to jail, except perhaps the driver of the private bus.
3. If anybody has to pay, it will be the private company.

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The Obama administration wants to change the way American corporations that operate in foreign countries are taxed, increasing tax revenues to the federal government, and to use those revenues on infrastructure programs including the transportation bill. This is called “repatriation,” but the problem is that there is no relationship between corporate tax policy and transportation. On one hand, using repatriation for transportation weakens the user-fee links between transportation agencies and users; on the other hand, if Congress agreed to the change in tax policy, many other interest groups would line up with their hands out for a share of the take.

The program of the Democrite party is ‘Leave no source of revenue untapped’.

Though Republicans have the majority of both the Senate and the House, they are far from united about what should be done.

There is no ‘Republican party’. There is a Democrite party, and there is a not-quite-Democrite party that uses ‘Republican party’ as a Clever Plastic Disguise.

Fifty-two years ago, Congress had almost nothing to do with transportation. Though it had funded the Interstate Highway System in 1956, it acted mainly as a pass-through organization, taking revenues collected from refineries and oil importers and handing them over to the state highway agencies according to a simple formula. At the time, the United States was known for having the best transportation system in the world.

Ah, yes, the Good Old Days.

Since then, Congress has increasingly taken the reigns of transportation policy. It began funding mass transit in 1964. It started tinkering with highway funding, splitting the funds into more and more pots and specifying how each pot could be used, in the 1970s. In 1991, it gave cities incentives to build expensive rail transit projects.

The result has been little short of a disaster. The Interstate Highways are due for replacement yet there is no money to do so because Congress has diverted most of the federal gas tax to other things. Transit requires huge unsustainable subsidies that have done little to increase transit ridership. America’s rail transit systems are in deplorable condition as agencies eagerly build more lines even though they can’t maintain the ones they have.

The thing is that the business of government is buying votes, not all that other stuff. Until financial and performance incentives can be aligned somehow, things will just continue as they are.

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Well, I sure hope so….

Internet bloggers and Armageddon conspiracists are predicting the “end of days” event to happen between September 22 to 28.

My 15th wedding anniversary is in there. I appreciate the thought, but….

One blogger has worryingly suggested US residents retain their firearms after suggesting that the controversial military operation Jade Helm taking place between July and September in several southern states is in preparation for predicted anarchy that could ensue as the asteroid nears the planet.

It’s not the southern states that will be a problem; they can handle themselves. The coastal cities, however, full of room-temperature slum dwellwers, well….

Read it.

I wouldn’t be surprised.

Earlier this year, military translator Sakhidad Afghan, age 26, was kidnapped, tortured, and killed by Taliban militants. Afghan had been waiting for years for the U.S. government to make due on its promise to issue him a visa to the United States.

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Sacramento wants to build a streetcar, and since everyone knows that streetcars increase property values, the city asked property owners to agree to pay a tax to help pay for it. Under California law, two-thirds of voters must agree, but the city must have believed that everyone loves streetcars so much that they would overwhelmingly agree to pay the tax.

Not so much. In fact, they couldn’t even get half to support it. The final vote count was something like 48 percent in favor.

Not to worry. Even though a nineteenth-century technology makes no sense in a twenty-first-century city; even though the people don’t want to pay for it; even though it has so far taken ten years to plan something that was obsolete a hundred years ago and certainly can’t respond to the almost daily changes in tastes, technologies, and travel patterns we experience today; they’re going to try to find a way to build it anyway. “We’ll look for other sources of funds,” said one city councillor. “We’re really committed to keep the project on track.” In other words, committed to stupidity.

Read it.

Even Voice of the Crust The Atlantic admits it.

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A movement to bring “real food” to Northwestern University may have less to do with improving nutrition than paying into the coffers of a host of left-wing special-interest groups.

A group of students called Real Food at NU rallied last week to convince the school to buy 20 percent of its dining-hall food from “real” sources by 2020, according to The Daily Northwesterner.

The effort is part of a national organization, the Real Food Challenge, which lists its criteria for real food as “local and community-based,” “fair,” “ecologically sound” and “humane.”

…

Mark Swenson serves on the board of directors for the Food Alliance, and also works for Bon Appetit Management Co., which is closely affiliated with the Real Food Challenge. Another Bon Appetit executive, Maisie Greenawalt, advises the organization as well.

According to the Real Food Challenge website, some of its advisers are leaders of worker rights groups.

One such adviser, Richard Mandelbaum, the social justice coordinator for the Farmworkers Support Committee, gave a presentation on “food democracy” in 2009 at the Left Forum, a self-described socialist group.

Mandelbaum is also an original founder of the Agricultural Justice Project, one of the designated certifiers of whether or not food is “fair.”

In order to be certified as having fair labor practices, the project recommends workers join a worker rights group, such as the Food Chain Workers Alliance.

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Public sector jobs are in decline, and one community has been hit particularly hard: African Americans. Historically, the black middle class has relied on the government for good jobs. One in five African Americans are employed by the government, making them more dependent on public sector employment than whites and Hispanics. But those jobs are disappearing….

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Undocumented students graduating from San Francisco State University (SFSU) received an extra treat this week—a special celebration at the university in their honor.

California: Not really part of America.

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In his 1988 book, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of Mass Media, co-author Noam Chomsky decried how newspaper, radio, and television peddles “system-supportive propaganda” in the service of ideological goals. The masses are diverted from challenging the system by Necessary Illusions promoted by the political class. Of course, as a committed leftist Chomsky is convinced that a corporate power elite is in charge of the process of manufacturing consent and disseminating necessary illusions.

As it happens, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has apparently learned a trick or two when it comes to manufacturing consent. Earlier this week, the agency released its new surface water regulations. Let’s set aside for the moment whether or not the agency actually has the authority to adopt the new regs, and look instead at how the agency managed the process of creating the necessary illusions to justify their adoption.

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I am not making this up.

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When was the last time you got that level of service from a police department.

Veronique de Rugy pulls back the curtain.

While this continued faith in government’s ability to heal most wounds with funding is par for the course in Washington, it’s time to set the record straight. The reasons for Amtrak’s struggles have more to do with its history of poor management than they do with its lack of cash. One need only peruse reports from the Government Accountability Office and Amtrak’s own inspector general to see what can go wrong when the discipline of the market is absent. As the IG noted last year, Amtrak “has not consistently used sound business practices in each phase of the capital planning process, including developing sound project proposals with performance measures, learning from the execution and outcome of projects, and controlling unauthorized expenditures.”

Amtrak’s fundamental problem, however, is the same one that afflicts all government endeavors: Operational decisions are often made on the basis of political concerns rather than sound economic and financial reasoning. The clearest examples of this are Amtrak’s money-losing long-distance passenger routes, which are kept on life support with federal funds because politicians generally prefer to waste other people’s money than confront the tiny but vocal minority of people who benefit.

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Quentin Kopp, who once chaired the California High-Speed Rail Authority and led the effort to persuade voters to pass the 2008 law authorizing its construction, is speaking out against the project as currently planned. To succeed, he says, high-speed rail needs to run on dedicated tracks at high speeds and frequencies.

Instead, the current plan calls for California’s high-speed trains to run on the same tracks as slower Amtrak and commuter train. This will greatly reduce the average speeds because high-speed and conventional trains can’t be safely operated together. The current projected frequencies are two to four trains per hour (half in each direction), while Kopp says 10 to 20 trains per hour is needed for the trains to be “financially secure,” which presumably means that fares cover operating costs as required by the 2008 law.

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Los Angeles is the latest large city in recent years to lift its local wage floor well above the federal minimum of $7.25. Seattle and San Francisco are already implementing $15 minimums, which likewise have been proposed in New York City and Washington, D.C. Last year, Chicago passed legislation that will boost the minimum in stages to $13 an hour in 2019, a 58% increase over five years.

The biggest backers of these measures tend to be unions, who want to reduce the supply of labor by increasing its cost. Unions call for higher minimums in the name of helping the working poor, reducing inequality, increasing purchasing power and so forth. But a union’s primary objective is to protect its members, and Big Labor’s minimum-wage advocacy primarily is in the service of pricing nonunion workers out of the labor force. The average union worker in Los Angeles earns more than $27 an hour, a wage that is easier to command when people who will work for less are too expensive to employ thanks to a mandated minimum wage.

Yeah, unions — the workers’ friend.

Politicians like President Obama and civil-rights groups like the NAACP insist that the minimum wage is an effective antipoverty tool. But most minimum-wage earners do not hail from poor households, let alone head them. Rather, they tend to be teenagers or young adults working part time. The majority of poor families in the U.S. have no workers. What they need most is a job, not a raise.

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Uh, because she’s a statist lying Democrat weasel who was appointed by a statist lying Democrat weasel primarily because she was black and female?

That’s just a guess, you understand, but it fits the available evidence.

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In 2016, insurance premiums could go through the roof as big insurers across the country apply for large rate increases for their ACA plans. For example, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee, the state’s biggest insurer, wants to raise rates 36.3 percent on average. New Mexico (at a truly eye-popping 51.6 percent), Maryland, and Oregon are seeing similar big numbers. Even in states where insurers are requesting more moderate increases, the percentages are still high enough to give one pause (Michigan’s Blue Care Network, for example, wants a 10 percent bump). Only in Maine has a state’s main insurer signaled its intent to keep rates flat for 2016.

That’s why they called it the Affordable Care Act, because laws are always titled the opposite of the effect that they have.

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In more bad news for Obamacare exchanges, QSSI, the information technology firm that manages the federally run Healthcare.gov unexpectedly quit last Thursday. The IT firm, which is the third to manage Healthcare.gov in its brief two year history, has been marred by controversy over its relationship with administration officials.

While QSSI has been credited with saving the federal exchange following its disastrous 2013 rollout, its relationship with the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) has come under scrutiny for possible conflicts of interest. Andy Slavitt, formerly an executive at QSSI’s parent groups United Healthcare Group and Optum, was later made a senior advisor at CMS.

Slavitt was strangely allowed to pocket at least $4.8 million in tax-free income by indefinitely deferring capital gains taxes on the sales of millions in stock upon joining CMS. Slavitt was also granted a rare federal ethics waiver which allowed him ignore the one-year mandatory cooling off period and simultaneously be involved in contracting issues for Optum and United Healthcare while working at CMS.

The Affordable Care Act ought to have been named the Incompetents Full Employment Act.

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What do restaurant menus, refrigerators, community banks and escalators have in common? All were subjected to yet more federal regulation last year.

No fewer than 184 “major” new rules have been imposed since the start of the Obama administration, costing Americans about $80 billion per year in additional regulatory costs. And many more regulations are on the way. Another 126 such rules are on the administration’s agenda, such as directives to farmers for growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables; strict limits on credit access for service members; and another redesign of light bulbs.

A new Heritage Foundation study found that in 2014, red tape entangled virtually every aspect of American life. The largest single area was financial services, which has been inundated with hundreds of new regulations as a result of the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. The full effects of the act have yet to be felt, but its restrictions are already crippling community banks and increasing consumers’ banking costs, while doing little to reduce the threat of bailouts.

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Sister Diana Momeka, OP, finally made it from Kurdistan to Congress to testify about the fate of the Nineveh Christians among whom she lived before ISIS invaded Mosul. No thanks are due to the State Department for her visit, though it’s not clear who exactly held State’s feet to the fire for their original refusal of her visit. Their “reasoning” , if you remember my first post on this story was based on an idiotic estimation that Sister Diana would use the occasion of a week’s visit to become an illegal alien. We should be so lucky, considering the numbers of sketchy individuals that very same State Department dumps into the United States by the thousands every year.

For the ignorant among you, “OP” stands for Ordo Praedicatorum; she’s a Roman Catholic Dominican nun.

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It appears that the Amtrak crash that killed seven people Tuesday resulted from speeding, but big-government advocates are already using this accident to make their case for more infrastructure spending. In fact, the problem is not too little money, but too much money going to the wrong places.

In 2008, President Bush signed a law mandating that most railroads, including Amtrak, install positive train control (PTC) by December of 2015. PTC would force trains to slow or stop if the operator ignored signals or speed limits.

In 2009 and 2010, President Obama asked a Democratic Congress to give him $10 billion to spend on high-speed trains, and Congress agreed. Not one cent of that money went to installing PTC in Amtrak’s Northeast Corridor.

PTC would have prevented this accident. There was plenty of money available to install it, but the Obama administration, in its infinite wisdom, chose to spend it elsewhere. Two days ago, it would have been embarrassing to realize that the government-run Amtrak hadn’t yet completed installation of PTC on its highest-speed corridor. Today, it’s a tragedy. But how is it the fault of fiscal conservatives?

Steve Sailer fisks the Washington Post — granted, not a difficult task.

Racial segregation between blacks and whites in the U.S. has been declining for decades, but very gradually, and in some places less so than others. The recent uptick in segregation that Hall, Crowder and Spring measured is small but still significant. It was also particularly large in Western cities heavily hit by the housing bubble like Las Vegas and Sacramento.

Alternatively, you could say that the Housing Bubble that preceded the Housing Bust artificially increased integration by giving more mortgages to minorities, as President Bush had insisted at his 10/15/2002 White House Conference on Increasing Minority Homeownership. There, Bush demanded 5.5 million additional minority homeowners by 2010, and he told his federal regulators (as well as financial and real estate industry leaders) that the way to get to this higher level of racial equality was to stop being so persnickety about traditional credit standards, such as down payments and documentation.

Unfortunately, it turned out that the old-fashioned ideas about credit risks were more realistic about who could afford to pay back mortgages than Bush’s notion that outdated redlining prejudices were the cause of the racial Housing Gap.

Those who think that George W Bush was a conservative need to take a look at his record, not the contrast with more-Leftists Democrats.

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Reminds me of the scene in Monty Python and the Holly Grail where Lancelot is running toward the castle and never seems to get there.

He’s been ‘pressing ahead’ with that closure ever since he got elected six years ago.

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Significant amounts of natural gas on federal lands are being wasted, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars each year and adding to harmful greenhouse gas emissions, a congressional investigation has found.

The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office also said the Bureau of Land Management failed to conduct production inspections for hundreds of high-priority oil and gas wells — roughly 1 out of 5 — to ensure full payment of royalties to the U.S.

Prediction: Nobody will get fired, nobody will go to jail.

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Last December, Honolulu’s rail transit project was estimated to be $700 million over budget. Now they are saying it is closer to a billion. Never fear, however: the state legislature just agreed to extend a half-percent excise tax, which was supposed to expire in 2022, indefinitely to pay for the rail and its cost overruns.

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

Read it.

Hey, if you don’t like the facts you find, find some facts you like. It’s not as if anybody who works for the government ever gets fired.

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It is hardly surprising that the universities on the Left Coast are boot camps for Crustian activism.

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And these reasons pretty much go for anybody for whom the security and power of a government job doesn’t outweigh the stifling sclerotic atmosphere, or who have the wit and education to escape it.

It really all boils down to whether one can honestly say ‘I don’t have to put up with this shit.’

For those for whom that is a true statement, who presumably have the talent and qualifications to go elsewhere, then elsewhere they’ll go. For those for whom that is not a true statement, there they’ll stay.

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 Federal law says that states must accept and use a federal form for registering voters. But the federal form doesn’t require any proof that the person submitting the form is a citizen.

The form just asks the registrant to check a box.

Meanwhile, federal law mandates that voter registration forms be made available and pushed everywhere from licensing branches to welfare offices.

Of course not. Perish the thought.

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So, how come a generic drug that costs pennies compared to a new targeted agent that costs thousands of pounds isn’t in clinical use? The data is there, the drugs are there and certainly the patients are there. At this point we begin to stray from medicine and into the arena of intellectual property and incentives.

There is a huge regulatory burden and massive costs involved in running the largest Phase III trials normally required to convince doctors to change medical practice. What’s more, drugs need to be licensed for new uses and this also incurs costs. Who pays for all this?

With no guarantee of a return on investment, we’re left with a class of drugs that has huge potential but we don’t have the incentives in place to see the science confirmed and the drugs moved into clinical use after that confirmation.

And God help you, as a private citizen, attempting to do this on your own — they can’t put you in jail for using it but they can sure as shit put the people who make it and the people who sell it to you in jail (Hell, War On Drugs!).

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California’s housing prices plummeted after the bubble burst in 2008, but now are approaching levels not seen since the market’s height—especially along the Southern California coast and around San Francisco Bay. This has reignited the perennial question: What should policy makers do to promote “affordable” housing?

Of course, Stay The Hell Out Of It is never on the table.

In San Jose, the subject of the court case, the city requires builders of more than 20 housing units to set aside 15 percent of them at these lower prices—or build 20 percent as low-income housing elsewhere in the city, or pay the city a fee of $122,000 for each “inclusionary” unit. The city requires the buyers of these reduced-price houses to sell them to other lower-income buyers in the future, or turn over price gains to the city.

The legal issue isn’t solely about housing, but about whether cities have unlimited power to extract concessions from homebuilders for things that are not “impacts” from the project. In other words, it’s legitimate for government to require new developments to pay to mitigate the effect of the new residents on local infrastructure (roads, sewers, fire service), but is it OK for cities to require affordable housing just because officials want to see more of it built?

Apparently so.

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I’m surprised it’s that high.

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Officials with the South Bend, Indiana, school system have postponed college field trips for some third-graders. The trips were originally to include only black students, but after local media reported that students of other races would be excluded, many parents began to complain. The trips are reportedly being changed to include all students who qualify for free and reduced lunches as well as any who would be first-generation college students.

In other words, a way to ensure that they are predominantly black students without appearing to arrange it so.

It would be interesting to check back later and see how many of those students actually, you know, went on to graduate from college.

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We’re still a few years from the 2020 census, but federal agencies are already bracing themselves for the barrage of nosy questions they’ll fire our way. Well, actually, they’re bracing for the growing expense of getting us to answer those nosy questions. If the Census Bureau doesn’t get off its butt and make some already recommended changes, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns, the next nose-counting is likely to cost a bundle without being especially reliable.

As the GAO notes in a report published yesterday, the average cost of counting each household has risen, in constant 2010 dollars, from $16 in 1970 to $94 in 2010. That’s probably in part because the response rate has declined over that period. This just may—I’m speculating here—have something to do wth a muttered, “you gotta be kidding me” after a glance at the form, then a flick toward the trash.

The Census is a prime example of government bureucrats taking a legitimate government function and expanding it into a football stadium complete with luxury boxes.

The Census Bureau acknowledges that it faces growing resistance to lengthening surveys (both short and unbelievably long) and census takers. Part of its response, unveiled last year, is to bully us. What the Census Bureau should do, suggested Tasha Boone, Assistant Division Chief for the American Community Survey, is to write “YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW” in bigger letters than ever on the envelope.

Why more government workers don’t find a second career in marketing is a mystery to me.

The Constitution requires a count — nothing more, nothing less — of the people of the United States every ten years; it does not authorize a collective body cavity search of the American people.

The GAO also emphasizes that it’s made 121 suggestions regarding Internet surveys, research and testing, and improving IT management and security. “The Bureau needs to take action to address the recommendations GAO has made in prior reports. If these actions are not taken, cost overruns, schedule delays, and performance shortfalls will likely diminish the potential cost savings that the Bureau estimates will result from redesigning the census for 2020.”

So…We should pretty much just count on high costs and “performance shortfalls” then, eh?

Oh, and those nosy questions, of course.

UPDATE: A commentor referred me to this delightful response to Census nosyparkers, which I recommend to all.

Read it.

To the question of whether armed police can storm your house and take away your personal effects and tell you to shut up about it, based simply on your political advocacy, Wisconsin answered for years, “Why, yes, they can — now please, shut up about it.”

Read it.

To err is human; government rounds all those people up and points them in the same direction.