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Federal prosecutors have stopped trying to steal $33,000 from an Iowa restaurateur who irked the IRS by making deposits of less than $10,000. The New York Times highlighted the case in October, noting that federal law lets the IRS “seize accounts on suspicion, no crime required.”

Mrs. Lady’s, Carole Hinders’ Mexican restaurant in Arnolds Park, does not take credit cards, so she has a lot of cash to deposit. There is nothing illegal about that, although the Bank Secrecy Act requires financial institutions to report deposits of $10,000 or more. Deliberately keeping deposits below that threshold to avoid the reporting requirement is a crime (known as “structuring”), but Hinders was never charged with it. Instead federal prosecutors argued that her bank account had facilitated the crime of structuring, making it subject to civil forfeiture.

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‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’

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

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Officials in San Luis Obispo, California, plan to buy houses in certain neighborhoods and sell them with deed restrictions requiring they be owner occupied. The goal is to keep college students from living in those neighborhoods.

Hey, you know what college students are like. (Mostly white and Asian….)

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Everything you’ve heard from the city of Portland about its streetcar lines is a lie. That seems to be the conclusion of the latest review of the operation by the city of Portland’s own city auditor.

Portland Streetcar, the private organization contracted to run the streetcar for the city, claims to have met the city’s on-time goals. The audit finds that it hasn’t. Portland Streetcar claims to have increased ridership by 500,000 riders in fiscal year 2014. The audit finds that that Portland Streetcar overstated ridership by 19 percent and actually ridership was 1.1 million trips less than claimed.

The auditor is also unimpressed by claims that the streetcar has generated billions of dollars worth of economic development. “Based on studies [Portland Bureau of Transportation] provided to us,” says the audit, “we conclude this research has yet to describe a causal relationship of how streetcars may affect economic development.” In other words, it’s just another fabrication.

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

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But only if they’re Irish. (Don’t tell Michelle; she’ll blow a gasket on all those carbs.)

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As Judicial Watch previously reported, there has long been ample evidence the Obama Administration was operating in anticipation of a surge in illegal aliens that it, in fact, clearly instigated. As Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) has said, “The rising crisis at the border is the direct and predictable result of actions taken by President Obama. He and his administration have announced to the world that they will not enforce America’s immigration laws, and have emphasized in particular that foreign youth will be exempted from these laws. The world has heard the president’s call, and illegal immigrants are pouring across the border in pursuit of his promised amnesty. President Obama is responsible for this calamity.”

After Judicial Watch’s HHS-BCFS FOIA lawsuit, we now have further evidence that this is the case. The start date of BCFS’s contract was October 1, 2013—a full eight months before the deluge of illegal alien children the US suffered in mid-summer 2014. The project’s end date of September 30, 2016, suggests that the Obama administration anticipates that the deluge will continue until near the end of his presidency.

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And why would they? That’s not their job. Their job is to spend money and buy votes, and more spending is always better for that.

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The Washington state healthcare exchange accidentally canceled coverage for some 6,000 accounts. Exchange officials say they don’t know how large a share of total accounts that represents because they don’t know how many people have signed up.

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Villagers call it “Loi Obama” — Obama’s Law.

The legislation compels U.S. companies to audit their supply chains to ensure that they are not using “conflict minerals” — particularly gold, coltan, tin and tungsten from artisanal mines controlled by Congo’s murderous militias. It was championed by influential activists and lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, and tucked into the massive Wall Street reform law known as the Dodd-Frank Act.

…

As it sought to comply with the law, Congo’s government began by shutting down the mining industry for months. Then, a process was launched to certify the country’s minerals as conflict-free. But the process is unfolding at a glacial pace, marred by a lack of political will, corruption and bureaucratic and logistical delays.

That has led foreign companies to avoid buying the minerals, which has driven down prices. Many miners are forced to find other ways to survive, including by joining armed groups. Meanwhile, the militias remain potent threats.

Way to go, Congress.

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As McClatchy’s Anita Kumar points out, Obama is known to many Native Americans as “Barack Black Eagle Obama” after receiving an American Indian name in 2008 during his campaign for president.

Wonder what the Crow is for ‘Barack Half-White Turkey Obama’ might be.

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Remind me how this is the business of the Federal government.

In an announcement today, the White House has pledged $263 million in new federal funding for police training and body cameras, set aside by executive order.

So that whole thing about Congress being the body that appropriates tax money for federal spending is out the window, too. Well, that’s at least consistent.

Steven Hayward points out that ‘progressives’ are more accurately termed ‘regressives’.

After the fetish for renewable energy that’s expensive and intermittent, the greatest fixation of the utopian left is mass transit, especially light rail—a 19^th century technology for 21^st century mobility needs. (Who says the left isn’t reactionary?) It has long been an embarrassment that the cars for our various light rail systems that taxpayers have been massively subsidizing come mostly from overseas manufacturers.

David Henderson, a Real Economist, lays out how much having the government run things sucks.

Some beneficiaries of Medicare, the federal government’s medical insurance system for the elderly, are finding that doctors are unwilling to accept them as patients. According to a study by Sandra L. Decker of the National Center for Health Statistics, in 2011, 17 percent of doctors would not accept new Medicare patients. The problem: Doctors cannot legally charge more for a service than the amount that Medicare pays, and Medicare often pays a low amount. That’s a classic recipe for a shortage of doctors.

Supply and demand, something that the government has heard of but treats as merely a rumor. Remember the bread lines in the Soviet Union? There was a reason for that.

The problem starts with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), the federal agency that sets prices for the medical services of Medicare patients. CMS is really a giant central-planning agency. It sets hundreds of thousands of prices. What are the odds that it sets all the right prices? Zero. In fact, with central planning, an organization like CMS cannot ever know what the right price is.

But by God they’re going to set it.

An obvious solution to this problem is to have a free market in healthcare—with no Medicare. But since that is unlikely to happen soon, incremental changes can be made to move closer to a free market. Despite the socialized system of CMS, it’s possible to approximate free-market prices with “balance billing.” In its purest form, doctors would be able to charge whatever they want for their services, and patients would pay the difference between that price and the amount Medicare pays. Today, doctors who accept Medicare reimbursement are not allowed to charge anything more.

This makes a great deal of sense, and so the chances of it happening are close to zero.

As any health economist can tell you, one of the biggest problems with our healthcare system, one that existed even before ObamaCare, is that the majority of what people spend on healthcare is “other people’s money.” One reason we know so little about prices is that few of us actually pay the price of medical care. Instead, we pay nothing, a small co-payment, or a small percent of the price. The main thing I learned in my two years as the senior economist for health care policy with President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers is that health care costs so darn much because we pay so darn little for it. Why hesitate to say yes to a $500 test your doctor wants to order if you know that you will pay only $50 for it?

Welfare for sick people, essentially.

Economists of various political stripes point out that a price system, aka the free market, works best when potential buyers get to see the actual prices. But under Medicare, as with much of the rest of the U.S. healthcare system, patients often don’t get to see prices. Or, more exactly, given that health insurers, whether government or private, pay so much of a typical bill, patients don’t get to see the relevant prices. As a result, they spend much less carefully than if they were spending their own money. This problem is especially acute with Medicare, a system in which people are spending mainly taxpayers’ money.

In today’s America, the customer isn’t the patient, it’s the government or the insurance company. It’s like taking your dog to the vet; the dog has very little to say about what happens.

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New lawsuits filed by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) challenge so-called workplace wellness programs that seek to provide financial incentives for workers who take steps to reduce obesity, smoking, and other lifestyle factors that can may result in costly illnesses, reports Reuters. The EEOC lawsuit contends that employers requiring medical tests may violate the Americans with Disabilities Act. Moreover, “the lawsuits are based on the view that it is no longer voluntary if employees face up to $4,000 in penalties for non-participation, loss of insurance or even their jobs,” reports Reuters.

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From $1.5 billion in cost overruns on its new D.C. headquarters, to $8.7 million a year in unearned employee overtime, the agency has not lacked for examples of fiscal mismanagement and lax oversight.

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

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One the victims wounded in the November 20 attack on the Florida State University (FSU) campus had a concealed carry permit (CCP) but was not allowed to carry his gun on campus for self-defense because of Florida law.
A bill to change that law and allow campus carry was thwarted by current FSU President John Thrasher in 2011, when he was a state senator.

According to Students for Concealed Carry at Florida State (SCCFS), shooting victim Nathan Scott has a CCP, but the campus carry ban rendered him defenseless when 31-year-old Myron May opened fire. In other words, although he had “the training and skills necessary to end the shooting… [Scott was] powerless due to Florida’s laws.”

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The poll finding probably says more about other federal agencies than it does about the nation’s mail delivery. Fortunately for the Post Office, it is mostly immune from the machinations of the Obama administration.

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Looks like the kids are smarter than their parents.

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Well, mostly it’s controlled by the government, for starters.

Who becomes a teacher in America? The answer keeps changing, and not in ways that should make any of us proud. In the first half of the twentieth century, as Goldstein notes, bookish urban immigrants used the profession to catapult themselves into the middle class. During the Great Depression, especially, teaching attracted people of outstanding academic achievement—including some with Ph.D.s—who couldn’t get work elsewhere. Since the 1960s, however, the proportion of top college students who have entered the field has steadily declined. Part of the reason lay in the feminist movement, which created new occupational opportunities for women outside of teaching. Rather than enhancing the profession’s status, as Susan B. Anthony had predicted a century earlier, this harmed it considerably, as many high-achieving women went into other professions.

The profession was also harmed by the campaign for racial integration, which closed all-black schools and threw thousands of experienced African-American teachers out of work. Those teachers had often achieved much within black school systems and then found themselves without jobs. By 1980, Texas Monthly published an award-winning article showing that public school teachers in Houston and Dallas scored lower on reading and math tests than the average sixteen-year-old in nearby suburbs did. It also reported that students of teacher education at Southwest Texas State University—where future president Lyndon Johnson received his teaching degree—were functionally illiterate. Teacher preparation, the article concluded, was “a hoax and an educational disgrace.”

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When the government provides goods, it provides goods of Government Quality. Think about that.

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Duncan, 33, who raps under the name Tiny Doo, is not accused of providing the guns or being present at the nine shootings that terrorized a neighborhood where the Lincoln Park gang has long used violence to protect its turf.

Instead, prosecutors are going after Duncan over something else: His latest album.

Entitled “No Safety,” the album features a picture of a gun and bullets on the cover.

Prosecutors say that shows that Duncan fits the legal definition of a gang member who “willfully promotes, furthers, or assists in any felonious criminal conduct by members of that gang.”

This is absurd and an obvious attempt to get around the First Amendment.

George Will blows the whistle.

It is as remarkable as it is repulsive, the ingenuity with which the Obama administration uses the regulatory state’s intricacies to advance progressivism’s project of breaking nongovernmental institutions to government’s saddle. Eager to sacrifice low-income children to please teachers unions, the Justice Department wants to destroy Wisconsin’s school choice program. Feigning concern about access for disabled children, the department aims to handicap all disadvantaged children by denying their parents access to school choices of the sort affluent government lawyers enjoy.

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

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Hackers seized a database from the City of Detroit earlier this year before unsuccessfully demanding $800,000 in Bitcoin.

The failed extortion attempt back in April was disclosed by Detroit mayor Mike Duggan at the North American International Cyber Summit conference on Monday.

The stolen database wasn’t needed by the cash-strapped city so the ransom was never paid, according to local reports.

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The ransom payment was first disclosed by Rep. Duncan Hunter in a Nov. 5 letter to Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. Mr. Hunter stated in the letter that Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) made the payment covertly as part of a release deal. But the money was stolen by the Afghan intermediary claiming to represent the Haqqani terrorist network.

These guys can’t do anything right.

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Such a broad definition of those subject to the IRS’s tender ministrations reaches far and wide. It reaches so far that American tax authorities say Boris Johnson (pictured), the mayor of London, owes capital gains taxes to the land of his birth, even though he hasn’t lived here since he was five years old.

The thing about Boris Johnson, who says he won’t pay, is that he’s not your average pushover for the thugs who keep the U.S. government fat and happy. He’s not just the mayor of an important city, but he’s a player in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, and discussed as a potential future prime minister of the country.

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

“Every time he opens his mouth about immigration and what he’s gonna do, there’s a huge negative impact on us that live out here along the border, especially in the rural areas where all the smuggling trails are,” Vickers said. “There’s no question if he takes an executive action for some kind of an immigration issue that allows amnesty, allows them to stay here. We’re gonna be covered up again. There’s gonna be another wave, a flood of people coming from all over the world to get in here.”

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Illegal aliens who get President Barack Obama’s likely forthcoming executive amnesty will have immediate access to welfare and other public benefits, according to a new report from the Federation of American Immigration Reform (FAIR) exclusively provided to Breitbart News ahead of its public release shows.

Of course. That’s what it’s all about — buying new Democrat voters with YOUR money.

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The Washington Post’s original three-part, in-depth look at the use and abuse of police civil asset forfeiture seems to have transformed into an open-ended, ongoing series. Over the weekend they posted a sixth installment exploring grabby police departments taking their citizens’ cash and belongings.

This time they kept it local, noticing that Washington, D.C.’s, police are actually attempting to plan in its budget for asset forfeiture proceeds in advance. This is considered a no-no for any law enforcement agency participating in the Department of Justice’s Equitable Sharing Program, the program where the feds and local enforcement agencies team up, and the local police get to keep 80 percent of whatever’s seized. This planning came to light to the Post last week because members of D.C.’s Council are attempting to overhaul the city’s asset forfeiture guidelines to increase the threshold of proof and requiring all asset seizures—including the ones that come from the DOJ program—to be placed in D.C.’s general fund, rather than the police’s budget, thus seriously reducing the police’s incentives for snatching whatever they can.

Funny how every story about corrupt city government deals with a city run by Democrats.

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Unlike with private enterprise, you can’t take your government business elsewhere.

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The New York Times reports that many Americans with health insurance purchased under Obamacare will face substantial price increases next year — in some cases as much as 20 percent — unless they switch plans. The Times report is based on data released by the Obama administration on Friday, just hours before the health insurance marketplace opened to buyers seeking insurance for 2015.

According to the Times, “the new data means that many of the seven million people who have bought insurance through federal and state exchanges will have to change to different health plans if they want to avoid paying more — an inconvenience for consumers just becoming accustomed to their coverage.” Beyond the matter of inconvenience, there is also the fact that the new plan, available at about the price of the old one, typically will be less desirable than the old plan, which now costs more.

Obamacare: The lie that keeps on taking.

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Well, this is fun. We just recently wrote about how Chicago’s speed cameras, ostensibly all to do with safety, failed to bring in as much money as Mayor Rahm Emanuel had suggested in his budget plan. Yes, tickets based on speed cameras were worked into the budget numbers, which is a strange thing to do if they’re supposed to be about safety and not money. Safe driving, in other words, should not trigger a budget crisis. But it turns out the ticketing revenue might still be inflated, even at the crisis number, as a bunch of speeding tickets were generated by cameras within school zones flagging drivers for driving over the school zone limit in the summertime.

Funny how all corrupt city governments are run by Democrats. Only a coincidence, I’m sure.

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Last month, the Seattle Parks Department ordered the destruction of a play area designed for special needs kids, claiming its four-foot rope ladder, tire swing, and “nest” made of rope and bike tires were “extreme dangers” and “hazardous conditions.” That’s an odd verdict: In 10 years of existence, no children were ever significantly injured on the play area equipment, according to Liz Bullard, who helped design the space.

That’s they way they do things on the Left Coast. Reality must conform to their preconceived notions, no matter who suffers.

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California has a new law that requires all eggs sold in the state to come from chickens that are housed in roomier cages. Specifically, the hens “must be able to lie down, stand up and fully spread their wings.”

So how many Californians have been arrested for eating the wrong kind of egg? Zero. Not even one? Not one. Actually, the law doesn’t take effect until January, but even then egg eaters will have nothing to fear. The reason: the law doesn’t apply to people who eat eggs. It only applies to people who sell eggs.

When you stop to think about it, that’s not unusual. Almost all government restrictions on our freedom are indirect. They are imposed on us by way of some business. In fact, laws that directly restrict the freedom of the individual are rare and almost always controversial.

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Does a good sun tan count? Or is this just more institutionalized Democrat racism?

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“Transit for Others” characterizes three decades of transit in Los Angeles County. Despite its massive $10 billion plus rail program, MTA bus and rail services carried fewer riders in 2012 (latest Federal Transit Administration data) than were carried by the buses in 1985 (MTA was formed in the early 1990s from a merger between the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission and the Southern California Rapid Transit District).

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Of course they do.

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You don’t have to be convicted of a crime — or even accused of one — for police to seize your car or other property. It’s legal. Several videos online are shedding some light on the controversial practice.

The practice is called civil asset forfeiture, and every year it brings cities millions of dollars in revenue, which often goes directly to the police budget. Police confiscate cars, jewelry, cash and homes they think are connected to crime. But the people these things belong to may have done nothing wrong.

In one video posted by The New York Times, Harry S. Connelly, the city attorney of Las Cruces, N.M., gleefully describes how the city collects these “little goodies,” calling it a “gold mine.”

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Obviously, by bringing a perfectly safe item—such as the confiscated faux-TNT packaged cologne pictured to the right—in your carry-on bag, you are at fault for holding up security checkpoint lines when Transportation Security Administration (TSA) officials mistakenly flag it as dangerous.

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Last week, senior officials of the Department of Justice’s Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) were quietly busted for using a student hiring scheme as a jobs program for their relatives. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General report (PDF) notes that nepotism has become widespread at the agency, with 16 percent of hires in the student program consisting of relatives of existing employees.

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Nationwide, the average worker spends 24.7 minutes, each way, traveling to and from work. People who drive alone spend 24.4 minutes; people who carpool spend 28.0 minutes; people who walk take 11.9 minutes; and people who take transit take 48.7 minutes.

Private transportation takes you from where you are to where you want to be. Public transport takes you from where it’s convenient for the public transport system to where it’s convenient for the public transport system to go. Those two are almost never the same.

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Two words: ‘home school’.

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But Obama’s response in Iraq looks robust compared to his plan for countering ISIS in Syria. There, current plans call for the training of 1,500 members of the Free Syrian Army next year (assuming it still exists next year). As Boot notes, ISIS is estimated to have some 30,000 fighters. Moreover, the Free Syrian Army must also combat the Assad regime and the Nusra Front, which recently routed it in Northern Syria.

In short, Obama’s response to ISIS remains pathetic. To say that it consists of half-measures is to give him too much credit.

Worst. President. Ever.

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Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Education wrapped up its investigation of Princeton University’s sexual harassment and assault policies. The findings were unsurprising, though still striking: the government essentially accused the university of violating federal anti-discrimination law by extending too much due process to accused students.

Of course, nobody cares, because, hey, it’s Princeton, but the principle is still important: The government is our enemy, not our friend.

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It seems that despite Abbott’s amazing charitable ways, the mayor of the city, Jack Seiler, has nothing but disgust for the selfless old man.

Seiler is, of course, a Democrat.

Seiler told Local 10, ‘Mr. Abbott has decided that he doesn’t think these individuals should have to have any interaction with government, that they should be fed in the parks. We disagree.’

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini. (Pretty much the motto of the Democrat party.)

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Is anyone surprised that school district rating systems for teacher performance are something of a joke? The Mackinac Center for Public Policy reports that the Flint Community School District in Michigan rated 94 percent of its teachers—and 99 percent of its administrators—as “effective” at their jobs, even though the district contains numerous “F” schools.

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Da’von Shaw, a Bedford, Ohio high school student, brought apples and craisins to school for a “healthy eating” presentation he was giving to his speech class. He took out a knife to slice an apple, and I’m sure you can all guess what happened next….

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way
Things are today—
Your tax bucks at work and play!

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The Obama Doctrine: “Do as little as necessary to appear to be doing something without actually committing to a cause or course of action.”

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Riffing off a survey conducted earlier this year by the Medical Group Management Association (MGMA), the conservative American Action Forum (AAF) estimates that upwards of 214,000 doctors are declining to serve patients covered by Obamacare exchange health plans. AAF gets that number by extrapolating the MGMA’s survey responses across the full population of practicing physicians, so take that number as seriously as you like. But there’s no doubt that physicians have real concerns about the president’s signature Affordable Care Act (ACA), and that exchange customers are having trouble finding doctors willing to take their business.

Obamacare, the gift that keeps on giving.