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For years, I heard from my friends in the banking industry that the government was requiring them to make bad loans. They could stand it, on account of Freddie and Fannie taking the risk off their hands and transferring it to the taxpayers, at least as far as mortgages were concerned, although the bad loans didn’t end there. We all know how that turned out.

Dodd-Frank, legislation that was passed ostensibly to prevent future financial collapses, in fact institutionalized bailouts and bad banking practices.

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Banking is increasingly intertwined with government. We are steadily approaching the national socialist ideal in which all industries, while nominally private, are subordinate to government.

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The office headed by the woman poised to become the next attorney general has used an unusual method to keep many of its prosecutions hidden from the public, an NBC News investigation has found.

Federal prosecutors in New York’s Brooklyn-based Eastern District pursued cases against secret, unnamed “John Doe” defendants 58 times since Loretta Lynch became head prosecutor in May 2010. Two of the 58 are terrorism cases.

Eastern District prosecutors have also sought permission to close the courtroom to the public for 11 different Doe cases during the same period, and judges have granted permission in at least 10 of the cases, as recently as February 12.

Critics are concerned the practice may infringe the Constitution’s guarantee of a public trial.

Oh, ya think?

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At any given time, around 7,000 aircraft are flying over the United States. For the past 40 years, the same computer system has controlled all that high-altitude traffic—a relic of the 1970s known as Host. The core system predates the advent of the Global Positioning System, so Host uses point-to-point, ground-based radar. Every day, thousands of travelers switch their GPS-enabled smartphones to airplane mode while their flights are guided by technology that predates the Speak & Spell. If you’re reading this at 30,000 feet, relax—Host is still safe, in terms of getting planes from point A to point B. But it’s unbelievably inefficient. It can handle a limited amount of traffic, and controllers can’t see anything outside of their own airspace—when they hand off a plane to a contiguous airspace, it vanishes from their radar.

The FAA knows all that. For 11 years the agency has been limping toward a collection of upgrades called NextGen. At its core is a new computer system that will replace Host and allow any controller, anywhere, to see any plane in US airspace. In theory, this would enable one air traffic control center to take over for another with the flip of a switch, as Howard seemed to believe was already possible. NextGen isn’t vaporware; that core system was live in Chicago and the four adjacent centers when Howard attacked, and this spring it’ll go online in all 20 US centers. But implementation has been a mess, with a cascade of delays, revisions, and unforeseen problems. Air traffic control can’t do anything as sophisticated as Howard thought, and unless something changes about the way the FAA is managing NextGen, it probably never will.

And yet people believe all those movies that show the CIA and other federal agencies with super-tech gear. In their dreams….

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Jamiel Shaw, Jr. was murdered by an illegal alien–a “dreamer”–the day after the dreamer was released from jail after a trivially short sentence for assault with a deadly weapon, and left to roam the streets rather than being deported. There have been many such stories; Jamiel Shaw’s story only came to light because his father, Jamiel Shaw, Sr., was called to testify before an Oversight Subcommittee hearing. His heartbreaking testimony illustrates the human cost of our government’s failure to enforce the immigration laws.

Apparently it depends on whose political agenda is being served.

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But of course you already knew that. History tells us, if it tells us nothing else, that any action taken by government employees is probably the wrong action to take in any particular situation. There are occasional examples to the contrary, but not enough to seriously impair the rule.

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Mostly, because he’s a partisan asshole.

Professional agitators in the civil-rights community push false narratives to stay relevant, but we should expect more from the Justice Department. Instead, we have Attorney General Eric Holder channeling Al Sharpton . Last week Mr. Holder said that he will soon announce the results of his Ferguson investigation. CNN, citing “sources,” reported that Darren Wilson, the police officer involved in the shooting, is unlikely to be charged but that Justice is preparing to sue the Ferguson police department “over a pattern of racially discriminatory tactics used by police officers, if the police department does not agree to make changes on its own.”

After months of looking into the incident, the Justice Department seems to have come to the same conclusion as the Ferguson grand jury and found no grounds for a criminal prosecution of Mr. Wilson. Mr. Holder might now be trying to justify his bigfooting by suing the city, but there is probably no basis for that, either. Hence, the leak to the media that a civil lawsuit may be in the works. The leak was an egregious breach of protocol and, in effect, a threat. We’ve seen this movie before, too.

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A federal court has ruled that the Obama administration’s plan to issue work permits to illegal immigrants is–this is not exactly a surprise–illegal. But the Democrats are undeterred. Today, for the fourth time, they filibustered funding for the Department of Homeland Security, insisting that if Obama’s illegal program isn’t funded, the entire DHS must be shut down.

In the meantime, it has come to light that the Obama administration has been handing out illegal work permits for years. The Center for Immigration Studies has received documents in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that indicate millions of such illegal work permits have been issued since 2009. Here is the CIS report in its entirety:

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Undercooked? Then, obviously, what they need is some Global Warming!

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As President Obama readies his veto pen for a bill approving the Keystone XL pipeline, the primary alternative to the controversial infrastructure project is sending trains laden with volatile crude through cities and small towns across the country. Despite having access to the world’s most extensive pipeline network, producers have had to turn to trains to transport booming crude output to refineries. But as we saw last week in West Virginia, more oil trains means more fiery derailments.

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Hey, they’re learning how to be Tools of the Crust. That’s educational.

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Recall all those bullshit taxes and fees that get tacked onto your phone bill? If ISPs are regulated as common carriers, those (or one like them) will get tacked onto your Internet bill as well. “We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves to your money”.

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Ramon Cortines, the new superintendent, recently admitted that the district’s billion-dollar idea to buy every single student an iPad, Chromebook, or laptop was never affordable or practical in any sense—and in fact clashed with more urgent priorities, like procuring suitable textbooks and rebuilding infrastructure.

Yeah, that was a winner: Giving a $600 device to kids whose reaction would be “I wonder how much I can hock this for?”

Prediction: Nobody loses his job, nobody goes to jail. Your tax dollars at work.

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Human growth hormone is a specialty drug, a category of pharmaceuticals that includes medications for cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, hemophilia and HIV. As the name would suggest, specialty drugs aren’t cheap. There are no generic alternatives.

As such, insurance companies treat specialty drugs differently. Instead of having a flat co-payment, consumers pay co-insurance, which is a percentage of the price the insurer has negotiated with the drug’s manufacturer. Our co-insurance is 30 percent.

So specialty drugs have always been expensive, and co-insurance is not new. But the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act turned a cost problem into a bona fide cost crisis – pricing middle-class families out of an already heavily regulated market, sometimes forcing people to seek alternatives in Canada or Mexico, and leaving many patients to suffer.

Obamacare’s critics – many on the left as well as the right – weren’t wrong when they complained that the law would be a gift to insurance companies. Although the law capped out-of-pocket medical expenses, specialty drugs were exempt. But that only perverted an already distorted marketplace, encouraging insurers to raise consumer costs while narrowing their choices.

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

The interstates were successful because they provided transportation that is faster, cheaper (because it saves fuel), more convenient, and safer than before.

For the past two decades or so, however, much of our transportation spending has focused on infrastructure that is slower, more expensive, less convenient, and often more dangerous than before. Too many cities have given up on trying to relieve congestion. Instead, they have allowed it to grow while they spend transportation dollars (nearly all paid by auto users) on other forms of travel such as rail transit.

…

A very simple test can determine whether any particular transportation project will be faster, cheaper, more convenient, and/or safer than before: Will the users themselves pay for it? Users will pay for real improvements in transportation; they won’t pay for slower, more expensive, less convenient, and more dangerous transportation.

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As we all know, “Violent Extremism” is a euphemism for “Islamic Terrorism”. However, “violent” is pejorative and inherently discriminatory, and “extremism” implies a value judgment that says “moderate” ideologies are in some way preferable and superior to “extremist” ones.

Therefore I propose that we replace the outmoded phrase “Violent Extremism” with “Kinetic Activism”, which remains value-neutral while still addressing the dangerous tendencies of certain ideological radicals who interpret core documents in ways that negatively impact their fellow humans of all races, creeds, colors, and sexual orientations.

This past week President Barack Hussein Obama (pbuh) convened a summit in Washington D.C. to address the pressing issue of kinetic activism. The second day of the summit opened with an Islamic prayer in Arabic. No other religious invocations were offered — neither Christian, nor Jewish, nor Buddhist, nor Wiccan, nor Ásatruar. Only Muslim.

That makes sense, of course, since Mohammed was the final prophet of the only true religion, whose ministry made all previous avatars irrelevant. So let’s not quibble about the fact that a conclave of responsible theophostics chose to offer a prayer to Allah only, and nothing else. Those esteemed mantics have a legitimate claim to being the best of all people, beloved of Allah. They deserve their righteous privilege.

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To this day, to be treated as a farmer in America doesn’t necessarily require you to grow any crops. According to the Government Accountability Office, between 2007 and 2011 Uncle Sam paid some $3m in subsidies to 2,300 farms where no crop of any sort was grown. Between 2008 and 2012, $10.6m was paid to farmers who had been dead for over a year. Such payments explain why Tom Vilsack, the agriculture secretary, is promoting a rule to attempt to crack down on payments to non-farming folk. But with crop prices now falling, taxpayers are braced to be fleeced again.

American farm subsidies are egregiously expensive, harvesting $20 billion a year from taxpayers’ pockets. Most of the money goes to big, rich farmers producing staple commodities such as corn and soyabeans in states such as Iowa.

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Andy McCarthy points out that, even as the White House throws “a public hissy fit” over the upcoming speech to Congress by Benjamin Netanyahu, it chooses to be “chummy” with Salam al-Marayati, the Muslim activist best known for saying, right after the 9/11 attacks, that we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list.

You have to hand it Obama, he knows who his friends are. It’s America’s friends that he hasn’t a clue about, and that’s giving him the benefit of the doubt.

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Hey, he’s a Democrat — that’s what they do. ‘Vote for us and get free stuff!’

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As the only person to have won the Nobel Peace Prize on the basis of sheer hope rather than actual achievement, President Barack Obama might have been expected to do everything within his power to vindicate this unprecedented show of international trust. Instead he has presided over a clueless foreign policy that has not only exacerbated ongoing regional conflicts but has made the world a far more dangerous place. And nowhere has this failure been more glaringly manifested than in his much ballyhooed “new beginning” between the United States and Muslims around the world.

John Hinderaker at Powerline points out some inconvenient truth.

There is no serious debate about the fact that Obama’s recent amnesty/work permit decrees were illegal, but the Democrats just don’t care. Hence the current outrage, after a federal judge made the obvious decision. Have we ever had such a lawless administration? Not in my lifetime, certainly.

The Ramirez cartoon is especially apropos.

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Cops told sledders on the southwest side of the Capitol to pack it in on Tuesday, according to The Wall Street Journal, which also noted that the sledding ban has existed since 9/11. But if American children aren’t allowed to enjoy a bit of fun on public property, surely the terrorists have already won.

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

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Now that’s public service.

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WHEN Karen Pineman of Manhattan received notice that her longtime health insurance policy didn’t comply with the Affordable Care Act’s requirements, she gamely set about shopping for a new policy through the public marketplace. After all, she’d supported President Obama and the act as a matter of principle.

Ms. Pineman, who is self-employed, accepted that she’d have to pay higher premiums for a plan with a narrower provider network and no out-of-network coverage. She accepted that she’d have to pay out of pocket to see her primary care physician, who didn’t participate. She even accepted having co-pays of nearly $1,800 to have a cast put on her ankle in an emergency room after she broke it while playing tennis.

But her frustration bubbled over when she tried to arrange a follow-up visit with an orthopedist in her Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield network: The nearest doctor available who treated ankle problems was in Stamford, Conn. When she called to protest, her insurer said that Stamford was 14 miles from her home and 15 was considered a reasonable travel distance. “It was ridiculous — didn’t they notice it was in another state?” said Ms. Pineman, 46, who was on crutches.

She instead paid $350 to see a nearby orthopedist and bought a boot on Amazon as he suggested. She has since forked over hundreds of dollars more for a physical therapist that insurance didn’t cover, even though that provider was in-network.

How about that government-regulated health care, eh? God knows what kind of hell we’d be living in if we didn’t have that.

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An industry-sponsored study said that the large companies spend an average of $136 million on the development of a genetically engineered crop, including $35 million in regulatory costs. The Agriculture Department once took two to five years to review applications, though it is trying to reduce that to 13 to 16 months.

Look what the government does for you: Increased the cost of food research by a third, and delays things by years. Thanks, guys.

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Executives are supposed to deal with or avoid problems. Barack Obama, elected U.S. president with essentially no executive experience, prefers to wash his hands of them.

He washed his hands of Iraq, though now he has been forced to dirty them there again. He’s trying to wash his hands of Afghanistan. He just washed his hands of Yemen, presiding over an ignominious U.S. exit during which, reportedly, American Marines turned over their weapons, apparently, as a condition of their withdrawal [see UPDATE below].

Today, Obama washed his hands of a totally predictable consequence of Obamacare — reduced staffing and reduced working hours for workers.

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“Shaming” bad actors is fine for a fourth grade teacher. But the job of a leader is to anticipate the shameful — or in the case of companies that cut staffing or hours in response to Obamacare, the economically rational — potential behavior of those affected by his decisions, and to shape the decisions accordingly.

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Boy, I’d be hard put to pick only five.

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Too bad. He’d be a better pick than Obama’s nominee. (For anything.)

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Canada, America’s largest trading partner and largest foreign supplier of oil, has been amazingly patient over Obama’s clearly insincere dithering over approval of the Keystone XL pipeline. Back when I was still in Washington at AEI, Ken Green and I would occasionally put together panel discussions that included Keystone issues, and not only would the Canadian embassy decline to send anyone to participate, they didn’t even want to register for the event, so sensitive were they to mot wanting to be seen to intrude on domestic American politics. (Someone usually turned up from the embassy, but made no comments during discussion.)

That’s what makes notable the news stories yesterday that included public remarks of frustration from the Canadian ambassador to the U.S., Gary Doer. Doer made public a letter complaining about a new EPA analysis meant to undermine the Keystone pipeline—an analysis plainly intended to give Obama cover to block it since the State Department, no doubt against intense political pressure from John Kerry, looks to be playing the matter straight and issuing a favorable final ruling on Keystone.

James Taranto turns over a rock.

If the law is on your side, the juridical adage goes, argue the law. If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table.

Supporters of ObamaCare have reached the stage of pounding their heads on the table.

Perhaps it will wake their brains up, assuming that they have any.

At any rate, political promises do not have the force of law unless they are enacted into law. Congress didn’t sign a contract with HCA; it passed a statute. If the statute doesn’t live up to the promise, HCA is SOL.

You’d certainly think that.

“Greenhouse fails even to mention the government’s stronger, though ultimately unpersuasive, argument that the statute is ambiguous,” lawyer Howard Slugh, whose firm has filed a brief in King v. Burwell, notes in an entertaining rejoinder at National Review Online. “Instead, she insists that the plaintiffs’ reading of the statute is utterly frivolous.” She claims that the justices “all agree on how to interpret statutory text”—and that they all agree with her.

She ends by instructing the justices (her emphasis): “Read the briefs. If you do, and you proceed to destroy [sic] the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do—not to me, but to history.” As Slugh understates: “It takes a lot of chutzpah to admonish the Supreme Court in such fashion.”

Linda Greenhouse, for all that she has a prestige gig at Yale Law School and the New York Times, far too often makes mistakes for which any first-year law student would be spanked.

NRO’s legal blogger, Ed Whelan, makes one obvious point: “It’s difficult not to conclude that Greenhouse thinks, rightly or wrongly, that the Left’s efforts to intimidate Chief Justice Roberts in the first Obamacare case worked and are worth repeating.”

Favorite tactic of ‘progressives’ everywhere.

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An official US government report just has recommended that further research should be carried out into various methods of “geoengineering” the climate so as to combat global warming. But one of its authors disagrees with himself, saying that giving such technology to the current US leadership would be “like giving a loaded gun to a child”.

The report in question – actually two reports issued together – is from the hefty US National Academy of Sciences.

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The number of Americans choosing to give up their passports hit a record 3,415 last year, up 14% from 2013, and 15 times more than in 2008, when only 231 people renounced their citizenship.

Experts say the recent surge is coming from expats who no longer want to deal with complicated tax paperwork, a burden that has only gotten worse in recent years.

Unlike most countries, the U.S. taxes all citizens on income, no matter where it is earned or where they live. The mountain of paperwork can be so complicated that expats are often forced to fork over high fees to hire an accountant — some say they pay as much as $1,000.

Matt Welch connects the dots:

The main driver chasing our citizens away is the authoritarianly named Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), a gruesome bit of government money-grubbing of which Reason has written about plenty over the years. If you have more than $10,000 parked overseas, you have to disclose each and every account to the IRS, including the maximum value it had in the previous year, or face ruinous fines and even jail time. Foreign financial institutions, meanwhile, are deputized by FATCA to work as IRS tax collectors, which they obviously would rather not do, so many banks simply put up a “do not serve Americans” sign, which is a major pain in the ass for the 7 million or so Yanks living abroad. As Shikha Dalmia observed this week, the Obama administration’s approach toward runaway Americans (individual and corporate) is to further tighten the noose, which will only increase the number of defections.

Why would politicians knowingly harm their fellow Americans for what amounts to a trivial payoff in collections? Same reason a dog licks its naughty bits. Expats wield no political power, and all things being equal, the government prefers destroying financial privacy. The Republican National Committee one year ago approved a Sen. Rand Paul-led resolution to repeal FATCA; one of many indicators of whether the party will ever be worth a tinker’s damn will be if it plops a FATCA repeal onto President Barack Obama’s desk.

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The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA or “the T” for short) has a problem. It has a $3 billion maintenance backlog, and must spend $470 million a year just to keep that backlog from growing. It has all kinds of wonderful plans to close that backlog, but those plans are all in the future. In the meantime, its latest budget proposal spares less than $100 million for maintenance.

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

Of course, the extension wasn’t supposed to cost $2 billion or increase ridership by just 0.5 percent. Back in 2005, the major investment study for the project estimated it would cost just $390 million (see page 5-55). That’s in 2005 dollars, but adjusting for inflation to today’s dollars increases it to about $450 million, less than a quarter of the actual cost. Projected annual operating costs have also nearly quadrupled from $9.9 million in 2005 to $36.9 million today. The 2005 study also predicted the line would increase increase daily ridership by more than 14,000 trips, or 1 percent, not just 0.5 percent (same page).

That’s because (a) public works projects always cost multiples of their original estimates, because people think of taxpayer funds as ‘free money’ and wet their beaks at every opportunity, and (b) public transport always goes from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be, so very few people ride it. Reality is a stone bitch about that sort of thing.

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After years of telling Americans that high-cholesterol foods would kill them, the federal government may ease up on warnings about this much-maligned nutrient. The U.S. Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee will no longer list cholesterol among its “nutrients of concern,” according to The Washington Post.

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The move reflects updated scientific thinking on cholesterol. While high cholesterol levels in the blood can still be a bad health indicator, scientists no longer view high blood cholesterol as a direct result of eating a cholesterol-rich diet, at least not for most people. Genetics may make some individuals more vulnerable to cholesterol in food, but scientists estimate this group only includes about 25 percent of the population.

Well, if there’s one thing you can depend on, it’s a scientific consensus. Oh, wait….

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This year’s version of the budget included a number of provisions targeting retirement accounts. That was no surprise, as provisions aimed at retirement accounts have been a regular feature in budgets in recent years. What was a surprise, however, is how many proposals were targeting retirement accounts, and how many new proposals there were. All told, this year’s budget featured over a dozen provisions that, if they were to become law, could directly impact your retirement savings.

Retirement accounts are one of the last great pools of money that the government hasn’t yet drained. Obviously, leeches like Obama want to sink their teeth into them.

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Speaking of public figures who lie….

Holder’s hiring practices have also been marred pure politics, especially within the Civil Rights Division. The Department of Justice’s own Inspector General found that one office in that division “passed over candidates who had stellar academic credentials with some of the best law firms in the country” in order to hire others they preferred, a majority of whom came from just five advocacy organizations that are political allies of the Obama administration.

All too often, moreover, the positions taken in court by Holder’s DOJ have been so devoid of legal merit that they can only be understood politically and/or ideologically….

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And guess whose pocket is being picked to buy these particular votes?

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Obama’s and the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) new attack on Alaska oil production can have a consequence that extreme environmentalists have dreamed about all along—shutting down all remaining production bringing oil from the Arctic coast.

This would happen because the giant Alaskan pipeline must have minimal flow to function. Otherwise it must be totally dismantled in accord with the law allowing for its original construction. After years of delaying new production and causing billions of dollars of losses for the companies involved, Obama’s new attack may be the final blow. Already the pipeline is carrying only some 25 percent of its capacity of two million barrels a day. Less input will allow corrosion and other damages, making it impossible to operate.

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As Attorney General Eric Holder is about to leave office, Senator Ron Wyden has sent him a letter more or less asking if he was planning to actually respond to the various requests that Wyden had sent to Holder in the past, which Holder has conveniently ignored. Wyden notes, accurately, that the government’s continued secrecy on a variety of issues “has led to an erosion of public confidence that has made it more difficult for intelligence and law enforcement agencies to do their jobs.”

I’m thinking that the answer is No.

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Next step: Chaotic Well-Intentioned.

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Three University of California, Davis, students placed a community refrigerator on their lawn and invited neighbors to use it and share food. At the end of the first month, people were not only sharing food but books as well. Then the Yolo County health department stepped in. They said the fridge was an unregulated food facility and shut it down.

Well, what do you expect from a county named Yolo?

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When my father worked a Post Office job during college, there was a four-person crew in the local black hole of correspondence to which he was assigned in the Bronx. Well, two of them were actually in the office at any given time—the other two were down the street at a bar. They took turns, which is only right. Given that context, reports of increasing customer dissastisfaction and lousy management from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of the Inspector General don’t seem that bad after all.

Jerry Pournelle often says that the aim of government is to hire and pay government workers. I suppose that if they ever get around to doing some actual work, that’s gravy.

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America spends tons of money on education even though the final product isn’t very impressive. If children are indeed the future, then they’re certainly an expensive one: Of the $3.2 trillion in total expenditures for local and state governments in 2012, education accounted for nearly 28 percent, or $869.2 billion, according to the latest data from the Census Bureau. That figure topped government spending in any other sector, almost doubling the second-largest recipient of taxpayer dollars—public welfare.

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I guess it wasn’t Walmart after all.

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For six consecutive years, Ann Legra’s performance as a teacher has been declared “unsatisfactory.” Yet Washington Heights in New York City cannot seem to get rid of this arguably worthless first-grade instructor. Their most recent attempt to dump her from P.S. 173, the city’s second try, has failed.

Where is the Mafia when you really need them?

Administrators apparently found her classroom in chaos, with students running around, getting into fights, and attempting karate moves on a door, while she was off in the corner at a table, apparently “re-sharpening pencils” that were too sharp, in order to prevent accidents. In one school year she was absent 27 times and late 37 times.

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According to the New York Post, Legra has responded to her punishment by filing a federal lawsuit, accusing the city’s Department of Education of discrimination on the basis of her race, gender, national origin, and medical disability (asthma). She’s not going anywhere without a fight.

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The Obama budget calls for a stealth increase in the death tax rate from 40% to nearly 60%. Here’s how it works:

Under current law, when you inherit an asset your basis in the asset is the higher of the fair market value at the time of death or the decedent’s original basis. Almost always, the fair market value is higher.

Under the Obama proposal, when you inherit an asset your basis will simply be the decedent’s original basis.

Example: Dad buys a house for $10,000.  He dies and leaves it to you. The fair market value on the date of death is $100,000. You sell it for $120,000. Under current law, you have a capital gain of $20,000 (sales price of $120,000 less step up in basis of $100,000). Under the Obama plan, you have a capital gain of $110,000 (sales price of $120,000 less original basis of $10,000).

There are exemptions for most households, but this misses the larger point: the whole reason we have step up in basis is because we have a death tax. If you are going to hold an estate liable for tax, you can’t then hold the estate liable for tax again when the inheritor sells it. This adds yet another redundant layer of tax on savings and investment. It’s a huge tax hike on family farms and small businesses.

Not to mention everybody else.