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We’ve noted repeatedly how the U.S. Department of Education, using authority it claims under Title IX and other federal laws, has arm-twisted the nation’s colleges and universities into stripping away procedural protections for faculty and students facing charges of sexual misconduct, sought to regulate speech as “verbal conduct,” and urged colleges to record microaggressive behaviors that do not rise to the level of harassment or assault but might add up in time to some future pattern. The resulting federal pressure has done much to generate a campus atmosphere in which administrators like those at the University of Virginia react even to unsubstantiated and soon-refuted assault claims with harsh crackdowns directed at whole groups of students against whom no misconduct whatsoever has been charged.

The substance of what the feds have been doing in this area has rightly stirred outrage, but another side of it also deserves scrutiny: it’s based on sheer fiat, on a series of “because we say so” edicts.

Remind me again why education is any business of the Federal governemnt…? Oh, right, teachers’ unions. Duh.

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IRS employees waste over 500,000 hours each year on “union activities” said House Ways and Means Oversight Subcommittee Chairman Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) on Wednesday.

As Roskam points out, this squandered an estimated $23.5 million in taxpayer funds, all while the IRS pleads poverty and makes excuses for not answering the phone.

As Jerry Pournelle has often said, the function of government is to hire and pay government workers.

I don’t know, Hugh. I vacillate between the various theories I’ve heard, but you know, if you had somebody as president who wanted to take America down, who wanted to fundamentally weaken our position in the world and reduce our capacity to influence events, turn our back on our allies and encourage our adversaries, it would look exactly like what Barack Obama’s doing. I think his actions are constituted in my mind those of the worst president we’ve ever had.

— Dick Cheney

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DreamstimeAn autistic 4-year-old wandered away from his home in Omaha, Nebraska, without his mom’s knowledge. She did the right thing: she called the cops. And what did she get for it? A neglect citation.

No good deed goes unpunished, especially by government.

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The United States government devotes about $40 billion each year to means-tested housing programs, plus another $6 billion or so in tax expenditures on the Low Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC).

Yet total subsidies for home ownership may run as high as $600 billion, most of those not going to the poor.

There are over twenty different federal subsidized housing programs and most of them are no longer producing new units.

My question is: How come it is somehow the job of the Federal government to provide people with housing at taxpayer expense?

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

Here’s a brand new article from the New York Times that nicely illustrates the theme of my Taki’s column about how the Eye of Sauron can only glare at a few instances of discrimination at a time. For example, the federal government is currently blithely rebuilding the civil service examination system, junked as discriminatory in 1981 due to disparate impact, but is also persecuting the very blue state of New York for trying to hire good teachers.

Does that make sense? Of course not, but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s more fun to be behind the Eye than in front of it.

Read it.

Transit-oriented developments (TODs) are supposed to promote economic growth because the demand for it is so high. But if so many people want to live in dense, mixed-use developments, why do they so often need subsidies?

Because in reality very few people want them, but those people control the public purse strings and can afford to build their utopia at our expense.

Read it.

The AMT is still alive and complicated. What lawmakers did was permanently tie the amount of income exempted from the AMT to inflation.

Those income levels, however, are still fairly low ($52,800 for singles this year; $82,100 for married couples filing jointly).

And the set of rules that governs what can and can’t be deducted under the AMT means it’s still hitting a fair number of people for whom it was never intended — those in the middle class and upper middle class.

Read it.

As the University of Virginia announced a plan to increase tuition by 11 percent—one of the highest increases in the country—the public university locked students out of the library where its board members were meeting Wednesday afternoon.

Read it.

Among business-owners’ responses to a mandated higher minimum wage are greater efforts to economize on the use of low-skilled labor.  (HT Jan Jorgensen)  A slice:

[Seattle restauranteur Quynh-Vy] Pham says they are considering scaling down employment, possibly ending sit-down service and transitioning to a “fast-casual” concept to cut down on labor costs.

This report also features the fatuous comments of Seattle’s mayor Ed Murray – comments that are quite annoying to read.  While actual, experienced, skin-in-the-game business owners deal with the very real cost consequences of a mandated artificial hike in wage rates – and while many actual, skin-in-the-game employees who are willing to work at wages below the mandated minimum are denied by ‘their’ government the right to so work and, thus, will find themselves unemployed – prancing and preaching politicians make economically ignorant and irrelevant pronouncements as their cruel handiwork causes hardship to innocent victims.

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A North Carolina State University administrator is encouraging student leaders to censor speech they don’t like in a tunnel dedicated to free speech on campus.

In an email sent to all student group leaders Friday evening that was obtained by Campus Reform, Eileen M. Coombes, Director of Student Involvement, encouraged students to be creative while fighting against “social injustices and other forms of hate.”

“One way to do so is through the new ‘State not Hate’ stencils now available in Student Involvement,” Coombes said in her email. “If you see hate speech or offensive language in the Free Expression Tunnel, cover that speech with the stencil, indicating that you, as a member of this community of scholars, will not stand for any form of hate at NC State.”

Those who hate truth see truth as hate.

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The U.S. government rented “85 single rooms, five office suites, five sleeping suites, and one conference room for 14 nights” at the Sofitel Angkor Phokeethra Golf and Spa Resort for Michelle Obama’s two-day visit to Cambodia, the Washington Free Beacon reports. The estimated cost to U.S. taxpayers for this adventure was $242,500, which seems like a lot of money to me, but I’m not used to traveling on a government budget.

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Connecticut Gov. Dannel Malloy announced on Twitter that he would issue an executive order later today prohibiting state-subsidized travel to Indiana. In practice, this would prevent state employees from taking trips to Indiana on the taxpayer’s dime, even for official government business.

If any taxpayers in Connecticut want to thank the Governor of Indiana for blocking of a section of the government trough, I’m sure it would be appareciated.

If Connecticut is going to prohibit government-subsidized travel to RFRA states, perhaps they should respond in kind and prohibit travel to Connecticut? (A libertarian can dream, I suppose.)

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Fly the friendly skies. Think of that the next time you get to the airport two hours ahead of your scheduled flight time in order to be sure to make it through the TSA chokepoint and maybe make your flight. Not that they care.

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An examination of the server that housed the personal email account that Hillary Rodham Clinton used exclusively when she was secretary of state showed that there are no copies of any emails she sent during her time in office, her lawyer told a congressional committee on Friday.

After her representatives determined which emails were government-related and which were private, a setting on the account was changed to retain only emails sent in the previous 60 days, her lawyer, David Kendall, said. He said the setting was altered after she gave the records to the government.

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

And those missing 18 minutes on the tape? Just a mistake, I swear.

Read it.

Never trust a teacher named “Mrs Porter”.

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Obama revenge for Netanyahu’s Congress talk? 1987 report on Israel’s top secret nuclear program released in unprecedented move.

In a development that has largely been missed by mainstream media, the Pentagon early last month quietly declassified a Department of Defense top-secret document detailing Israel’s nuclear program, a highly covert topic that Israel has never formally announced to avoid a regional nuclear arms race, and which the US until now has respected by remaining silent.

Obama is sort of the anti-Marine: ‘No worse friend, no better enemy.’

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The Democratic Party appears to take the sacramental view of abortion. Any act that might tend to deter an abortion is to be resisted. It’s the abortion equivalent of the positive good school of slavery. If the party as a whole doesn’t subscribe to this view, its funders certainly must.

Thus the dramatic turnaround in Democratic support for the Justice for Victims of Sex Trafficking Act of 2015. It passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with broad bipartisan support. Yet even the bill’s Democratic supporters in committee, such as Minnesota’s own lighter-than-air Senator Amy Klobuchar (a cosponsor of the bill) and angry former comedian Senator Al Franken, turned against it.

One of the core principles of the Peter Pan Party appears to be that nothing must be allowed to impede taxpayer funding of abortions.

Committee Democrats claim that they were shocked, shocked to discover the Hyde restriction on abortion funding in the bill. They didn’t know what they were doing when they voted for it! They didn’t mean it.

Klobuchar and other committee Democrats blame their staffers for failing to inform them that the bill included the language. Beyond that Klobuchar has not strayed.

I wonder if that would have worked at Nuremberg. ‘Honestly, judge, our subordinates failed to inform us that Jews were being killed! It’s not our fault!’

Read it.

Under Mr. Obama, friends are enemies, denial is wisdom, capitulation is victory.

Read it.

As he works toward a deal blessing Iran’s nuclear program, President Obama has undertaken a full-throated assault on Israel. The Obama administration treats America’s enemies as friends and friends as enemies. It is Obama’s version of “the world turned upside down.”

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The Antiplanner once wrote that “the definition of a socialist is someone who doesn’t understand that subsidizing something is not the same thing as making it affordable.” New York Mayor Bill de Blasio has often been called a socialist, and seems to fit the mold, proposing to make some housing “affordable” by confiscating money from others.

Specifically, de Blasio’s administration has demanded that, in order to get a permit to build a new school building, Collegiate School–a private school that traces its roots back nearly 500 years–must contribute enough money to build 55 units of “affordable housing.” Worse, those 55 units are estimated to cost at least $50 million (nearly $1 million per unit is affordable?), and if they cost more, Collegiate has to pay the difference. (If they cost less, the city pockets the difference.)

Read it.

And why not? He’s been a good friend. Republicans … not so much.

House Democrats fighting for leverage in the GOP Congress are hoping they can empower an unlikely ally: Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).

‘Unlikely’? Only if you haven’t been paying attention.

By banding together in veto-sustaining majorities against conservative proposals demanded by Boehner’s right flank, Democrats hope to both sink those GOP measures and grease the skids for more moderate compromises.

Which makes you wonder why Boehner is being such a pal.

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I wrote about President Obama’s March 19 statement on the Persian new year in “Our Supreme Leader is a Supreme Fool.” In the statement Obama asserted: “Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has issued a fatwa against the development of nuclear weapons, and President Rouhani has said that Iran would never develop a nuclear weapon.”

Obama’s assertion follows closely on Secretary of State Kerry’s assertion to the same effect. I quoted Kerry’s citation of the fatwa in “Of fatuity and fatwas.”

The fatwa, however, doesn’t exist. It has never been seen. As Andrew McCarthy explains, the fatwa is a patent hoax. Andy writes (emphasis in original): “The invaluable Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) has done extensive research into compilations of Khamenei’s published fatwas…No such fatwa has ever been published.” Andy links to MEMRI’s two 2013 posts in search of the fatwa in the omitted sentence.

Democrats are the Peter Pan Party — they refuse to grow up, and think that if they believe something hard enough, it comes into existence.

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

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

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With state cigarette taxes at $4.35 per pack and the Big Apple piling another $1.50 on top of that, New York has become a major destination for smuggled smokes. Up to 60 percent of all cigarettes sold in the state are smuggled from elsewhere (The Mackinac Center, which tracks these things, puts the number at 56.87 percent for 2012). By contrast, Virginia’s taxes per pack are only 30 cents, which makes it an excellent source for all of those smokes headed up I-95 to the Empire State. Logically enough, at least in the context of the political world, New York officials are concerned and think Virginia should do something.

Okay, let’s reduce the tax to 10 cents. Entrepreneurship ought to be rewarded.

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The Treasury Department Inspector General for Tax Administration has repeatedly warned that illegal immigrants are collecting billion of dollars in refundable tax credits to which they are not legally entitled. This outrageous situation can be corrected rather easily, by requiring tax filers to supply a valid Social Security number in order to claim the Additional Child Tax Credit. Today in the Senate Budget Committee, Jeff Sessions proposed an amendment that would do exactly that, thereby saving American taxpayers billions of dollars that are flowing improperly to illegal aliens.

Incredibly, the ten Democrats on the committee voted in lockstep to keep the illegal money flowing. It is hard to believe, but you can see it for yourself….

No surprises here. Their eventual goal is to give these criminals ‘a path to citizenship’,and when they become voters they’ll remember the Party that gave them Free Stuff.

Read it.

The Environmental Protection Agency has long been in the forefront of Obama administration lawlessness. Don’t forget: before Hillary Clinton’s secret email server came to light, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson was conducting government business off the books as “Richard Windsor,” which, she explained when caught, was the name of her dog.

The EPA’s current usurpation, an effort to remake America’s power supply system, is much more serious. The EPA has proposed a far-reaching regulation of power plants that would drive many of them out of business in the name of global warming. The EPA’s proposed regulation constitutes a statutory framework that Congress perhaps could have enacted, but didn’t. It represents the most extreme case, so far, of an administrative agency run amok.

The EPA is a major reason why Richard Nixon will rot in Hell for all eternity.

Read it.

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Perhaps because the U.S. Congress is incapable of doing anything constructive? That’s just a guess, you understand.

American defenders of Israel generally see the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as one of the worst UN agencies, an organization that harbors terrorists, teaches militant conflict with Israel and anti-Semitism in its schools, and perpetuates the Palestinian refugee issue as a source of tension. Yet the paradox is that the United States has consistently been the largest single-state donor to UNRWA.

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Administrators at a middle school in central Virginia suspended a sixth-grader last September for one-year after discovering a marijuana leaf and a lighter in his backpack. The sheriff’s department became involved as well and filed drug possession charges against the 11-year-old boy.

Months later, prosecutors had to drop the charge. Why? The leaf had thrice been tested for marijuana and come back negative.

The boy, unnamed in this excellent story in The Roanoke Times, returned to school this week. But officials have been loathe to admit that any mistakes were made—they now maintain that since “lookalike” drugs are also prohibited, the boy may still have violated district policy.

Well, of course, first they have to demonstrate that it’s a ‘drug’. Don’t see any hint that they even tried to do that.

Homeschooling is looking better and better. Just sayin’.

Bryan Caplan with some more inconvenient truth.

The global poor migrate to the First World, kiss the soil, then permanently go on welfare. Idle immigrants: Nothing short of outright criminality does more to tarnish the image of immigration. It smacks of ingratitude and parasitism. And while the prevalence of immigrant idleness is overstated, it is a very real problem, especially in Europe.

As a cosmopolitan libertarian, my first reaction is point fingers at the welfare state. If the problem is government subsidies for indefinite idleness, the solution is to curtail not immigration, but redistribution. When the law allows it, plenty of natives permanently go on welfare, too. Rhetorically sliding from the generic evils of the welfare state to the selective evils of immigrants is effective demagoguery, but fuzzy logic.

Yet on reflection, my first reaction misses a major part of the story. Countries with ample redistribution also tend to have strict labor market regulations. Despite their feel-good popularity, labor market regulations have a big negative side effect: unemployment.

This collateral damage is clearest for regulations that explicitly push up wages: If the law requires a 10% raise, employers can reduce the damage to their bottom line by employing fewer workers. But unless wages are perfectly flexible, any “pro-worker” regulation risks this disemployment effect. If the law makes employers give workers free health insurance, and workers bitterly resent offsetting pay cuts, hiring fewer workers is employers’ best remaining defense.

The moral: When you see an idle immigrant, you shouldn’t jump to the conclusion that he’s a lazy parasite. There’s another possibility: Labor regulations have priced him out of a job. He’s on welfare not because he doesn’t want to work, but because he’d rather go on welfare than starve.

Read it.

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What may be most baffling of all is the simple fact that this is not a green policy. At first glance you might believe it to be, with renewable right there in the title and the prefix “bio-” so often appended to descriptions of this corn-based fuel, but studies have shown the kinds of fuel being produced by the RFS are anything but green.

This is a policy mess that dates back to the Bush Administration, though it is one the current President was more than happy to continue in order to enhance his green credentials. It’s clear that it has failed, by any metric. Bills to repeal and reform the RFS are working their way through Congress at the moment; we’ll be watching their progress in the hopes that we can find a way to end this biofuel boondoggle.

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Let us celebrate that rare bird, a bureaucrat with a clue.

A panel of nutrition experts generated controversy last month when it pressed the federal government to consider the environment when issuing new dietary guidelines later this year. Generally speaking, that would mean asking Americans to eat less meat and more plant-based foods.

Ever since then, the question has been whether the agencies developing the recommendations – the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services – would take up the suggestion and weigh the impact of food on air and water quality, among other issues.

“I read the actual law,” Mr. Vilsack said. “And what I read …was that our job ultimately is to formulate dietary and nutrition guidelines. And I emphasize dietary and nutrition because that’s what the law says. I think it’s my responsibility to follow the law.”

Unlike his boss….

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Yesterday the president of the University of Oklahoma (OU) expelled two students who had been caught on camera leading a bus full of their fraternity brothers in disgustingly racist song. Despite agreement from all corners that their behavior was worthy of condemnation, legal experts and First Amendment advocates quickly pointed out that, well, um, kicking students out of a public college for something they said almost definitely violates the Constitution.

“The university president wrote that the students are being expelled for ‘your leadership role in leading a racist and exclusionary chant which has created a hostile educational environment for others,'” wrote the law professor Eugene Volokh on his blog at The Washington Post. “But there is no First Amendment exception for racist speech, or exclusionary speech, or…for speech by university students that has created a hostile educational environment for others.”

As my colleague Robby Soave put it, “You can’t expel students at a public university for their words. It’s that simple.”

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Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama (Um, um, um).

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More than 4,000 people availed of the government’s employment-verification system using Social Security numbers belonging to people over the age of 112. Trouble is fewer than 40 people are known to have reached that age. That’s one of the revelations from a review by the watchdog for the Social Security Administration.

Don’t you just love that term ‘watchdog’? You will notice that this alleged ‘watchdog’ is never identified in the article. After all, why do that? It’s a watchdog. We all know what watchdogs do! We’re NPR, a Voice of the Crust! You can trust us!

The review also said there were approximately 6.5 million Social Security numbers linked to people 112 years of age or older. The reason, the review said: “SSA did not have controls in place to annotate death information on the … records of numberholders who exceeded maximum reasonable life expectancies and were likely deceased.”

You would think that the Social Security Administration would have basic checks in place to make sure that their money (i.e. your money) is going to real people who qualify for it. But you would be wrong.

Watch it. Feel free to laugh.

Primarily, that’s because Lindsey Graham doesn’t have anything to say that anybody else wants to read. So it’s not really his fault.

Read it.

Of course, this comes as no surprise to people who have no difficulty remembering that the government approach to any activity leads to the Post Office more often than not.

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The shift means more restrictions on moneymaking ventures and loss of ownership. But nonprofit schools — defined as providing a public benefit — do not have to pay taxes, are eligible for certain state grants and can receive more money from the federal student loan program.

It’s all about government money — what it gives, and what it takes.

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Which just goes to show that the ACLU isn’t totally useless.

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He’s a Democrat. Of course he’s corrupt. This is not news.

What’s news is that this administration is actually doing something.

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A friend snapped a photo of this van, parked down the street from her Chicago apartment. It’s obviously severely burned. “The entire inside was reduced to ashes, the windows shattered from the force of the heat,” she writes. And yet, “tucked behind the skeletal remains of a melted windshield wiper,” what did she spy?

A city of Chicago parking ticket, obviously.

Just doin’ my job, man….

Read it.

Well, for one thing, that’s another welfare program that won’t be costing the taxpayers money.

For another, people might realize that the Affordable Care Act isn’t.

But I doubt it.

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The two lead Senate Democrats on a measure giving Congress oversight over any nuclear deal with Iran balked Tuesday when Senate Republicans moved to fast-track the bill through the chamber.

‘Hey, we weren’t serious about that…!’

Read it.

In Maryland, the government has decided to tax residents for the privilege of having rain fall on their property.  For the past 5 years, Maryland has taxed residents for simply having a roof over their heads.  In order to comply with EPA regulations, the Maryland State legislature has implemented a “rain tax.”  According to Forbes,

“This tax is an annual fee on impervious surfaces such as roofs, driveways, sidewalks, garages, and any other surface that could create drainage problems and water contamination situated on property owned by an individual or a business.”

Because of the nature of this regulation, it only affects nine counties and the city of Baltimore; making them responsible for paying the fee.  Along with being intrusive and frivolous, the “rain tax” is implemented differently in each county.  This makes it difficult for Marylanders to correctly follow the law.  For example,  Charles County levies a flat fee of $43 per property, while Montgomery County has fee rates ranging from $29.17 to $265.20 depending on size of impervious surfaces.

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But they can’t be bothered deporting illegal alien criminals. Sounds kinda racist to me.

I have a question: How does this differ from the ‘anchor babies’ that illegal immigrants from Mexico keep dropping? Where’s the ‘sting’ in that?

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President Obama’s outrage at Prime Minister Netanyahu is undoubtedly genuine, but every ground presented for it by the administration for it is a transparent pretext. One such ground is Netanyahu’s appearance before Congress within a few weeks of Israeli elections. The timing of the speech, however, is rather obviously dictated by the administration’s March 23 deadline for the outline of a final agreement with Iran. Obama’s outrage is keyed to Netanyahu’s opposition to the terms of the coming deal and his desire to explain his opposition to the American people before it is presented to them as a fait accompli.

Yesterday Secretary of State Kerry and others warned Netanyahu not to reveal details of the coming deal in his speech to Congress. One can only wonder why such details are to be kept from Congress and the American people when they have been entrusted to the mullahs.

Actually, one need not wonder. One can reasonably infer that Obama seeks to present a bad deal to Congress and the American people as a given fact.

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In Sacramento, a group of charitable housemates has been holding free giveaways on their front lawn. All recently homeless, the housemates say they benefitted from the kindness of strangers in their times of need and now want to pay the goodwill forward by distributing donated goods to others. But the city is trying to shut down the operation, which it says counts as an illegal garage sale.