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Award-winning videographer Sean Malone had a raygun belt buckle confiscated recently by the good folks at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). You know, because all of the 9/11 hijackers were packing rayguns or something.

Security theater strikes again.

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Combine Jerry Pournelle’s dictum ‘The purpose of government is to hire and pay government employees’ with Rahm Emanuel’s giveaway ‘Never let a crisis go to waste’, and voila — DHS.

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The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has been trying to investigate the Fast and Furious scandal for years, but has been stymied by the Obama administration’s stonewalling. The House committee was willing to narrow its request for Department of Justice documents to an extraordinary degree; ultimately, the committee asked only that the Obama administration produce documents after February 4, 2011, relating to the false letter to Congress that bore that date, and the process by which Eric Holder’s DOJ decided to withdraw that letter. Notwithstanding this narrow scope, the Obama administration has stiffed the House committee for three years, asserting executive privilege over virtually all of the documents encompassed by the committee’s request.

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Minneapolis has become a focal point for testing out policies designed to force people to eat healthier. Or else.

The problem with living in a Blue state is that the more the government intrudes into your life, the more that intrusion is considered a precedent for further intrusions into your life. That’s a hole with no bottom.

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

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All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. — Benito Mussolini

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No problem, said the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). They’ll just declare all sorts of bonuses to be part of their base pay and force them right back into the pension calculations. CalPERS voted to have 99 bonuses sometimes given to certain public employees for various tasks that most of us would classify as expected job duties (like officers directing traffic) as part of their base pay. And so California’s multi-billion-dollar pension crisis gets worse.

And the suicide of California proceeds on schedule.

Read it. And weep.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) has published his fifth installment of Wastebook, an annual tragicomic testimony to the power of diffused costs and concentrated benefits. The catalog of 100 asinine government expenditures is wholesome fun for the whole fiscally conservative family—especially your earnest Republican aunt who sends you chain emails with that Mark Twain quote we’ve all seen a million times.

Read it.

Straight from the horse’s … mouth.

Asked whether terminating the ability to register to vote on the day that someone casts a ballot impacts blacks disproportionately, the DOJ’s witness, Charles Stewart, testified in court that it does. He reasoned that (1) people who register at the last minute “tend to be less sophisticated voters, tend to be less educated voters, tend to be voters who are less attuned to public affairs” and (2) “people who correspond to those factors tend to be African Americans.”

Does the Holder Justice Department really believe that African Americans are less sophisticated voters than whites? Does it really believe they are less attuned than whites to public affairs?

To be sure, blacks vote overwhelmingly in favor of Holder’s party. Other than that, I see no reason to conclude that they are less “sophisticated” and “less attuned to public affairs” than whites.

If a conservative were to so conclude, Eric Holder would be the first to condemn him as a racist. Yet the Holder DOJ is paying a witness to advance this position in a court of law on behalf of the United States of America.

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Former Secretary of Labor Bob Reich, on behalf of MoveOn, warns Democrats what will happen if Republicans take control of the Senate: they may use a “tricky, little-known maneuver” to “ram through” their “right-wing policies” with only 51 votes, instead of the 60 votes “usually required” in the Senate.

…

Reconciliation has never been a partisan issue; it has been favored by both Democrats and Republicans for budget matters. But the most controversial use of the procedure, by far, took place in 2010 when the Democrats relied on it to pass Obamacare without a single Republican vote, and without having 60 votes in the Senate.

Interesting how that works. Democrats can use any rules maneuver they choose, but if it looks as if Republicans will do the same, it’s the end of the world.

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Another day of school, another Common Core horror story. Parents in Royal Palm Beach, Florida complained to administrators that their children are languishing under Core-aligned instruction and standardized testing. One parent reported that her third-grade son comes home from school every day thinking he is stupid because he can’t pass his tests. “Mommy, please home-school me,” he begged, according to The Palm Beach Post.

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Though it’s a bedrock American principle that citizens can steer their own government by electing new officials, Glennon suggests that in practice, much of our government no longer works that way. In a new book, “National Security and Double Government,” he catalogs the ways that the defense and national security apparatus is effectively self-governing, with virtually no accountability, transparency, or checks and balances of any kind. He uses the term “double government”: There’s the one we elect, and then there’s the one behind it, steering huge swaths of policy almost unchecked. Elected officials end up serving as mere cover for the real decisions made by the bureaucracy.

Glennon cites the example of Obama and his team being shocked and angry to discover upon taking office that the military gave them only two options for the war in Afghanistan: The United States could add more troops, or the United States could add a lot more troops. Hemmed in, Obama added 30,000 more troops.

Glennon’s critique sounds like an outsider’s take, even a radical one. In fact, he is the quintessential insider: He was legal counsel to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a consultant to various congressional committees, as well as to the State Department. “National Security and Double Government” comes favorably blurbed by former members of the Defense Department, State Department, White House, and even the CIA. And he’s not a conspiracy theorist: Rather, he sees the problem as one of “smart, hard-working, public-spirited people acting in good faith who are responding to systemic incentives”—without any meaningful oversight to rein them in.

Freeberg is delightfully dyspeptic today.

There’s something peculiar going on here with the modern American left, and separating people. They take their sharpest and quickest departures off the plane of reality, when common sense says there is a partition in place, or if there isn’t one then there ought to be one. In these situations, they pretend all kinds of things even when they’re repeatedly reminded that pretending is all they’re doing.

…

The crisis won’t go away, so: Day 1, think about maybe interrupting golf game. Day 2, give a speech blaming Republicans. Day 3, in response to the simplest and most sensible solution, murmur a bunch of nonsensical homilies about why it’s completely out of the question. Day 4, invent a fancy title and give it to a lawyer. It doesn’t even matter what the problem is, that’s the Obama road map for all of it.

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Today President Obama announced the appointment of Ron Klain as his administration’s “ebola czar.” Mr. Klain is a lobbyist and long-time political operative who is currently an Obama aide and has served as chief of staff to both Al Gore and Vice-President Biden. Klain also served as Chief of Staff or Staff Director for Attorney General Janet Reno, the Senate Democratic Leadership Committee, and the Senate Judiciary Committee. He was a debate preparation advisor to Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, as well as Al Gore and John Kerry. Klain was General Counsel for the Gore Recount Committee in 2000, and was deeply involved in the Solyndra scandal. He has no experience or expertise relating to public health, infectious diseases or health care.

Which, of course, is why he was picked.

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 Small-business are facing a sharp increase in disabled-access lawsuits in the wake of a federal appeals-court ruling that allowed so-called disabled “testers” — private individuals who aren’t patrons but visit businesses to check for violations — to take the owners to court.

Sounds like a great business opportunity for Vinnie and Guido to take care of for a modest weekly fee. What better public service than to change ‘testers’ into actual disabled people?

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The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has been producing detailed topographic maps for more than 125 years. Today they are nearly all digitized and free to download through the USGS Map Store, an incredible treasure trove for both map junkies and casual hikers alike.

George Will finds that his bullshit alarm has gone off.

Wretched excess by government can be beneficial if it startles people into wholesome disgust and deepened distrust and it prompts judicial rebukes that enlarge freedom. So let’s hope the Federal Communications Commission embraces the formal petition inciting it to deny licenses to broadcasters who use the word “Redskins” when reporting on the Washington Redskins.

Using the FCC to break another private institution to the state’s saddle for the satisfaction of a clamorous faction illustrates how the government’s many tentacles give it many means of intimidating people who offend it. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, empowered to ban trademarks that “may” disparage persons, has already limited trademark protection of the Redskins’ name.

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Hey, it’s all about priorities.

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Aside from the obvious fact that government employees were obtained from the lowest bidder.

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In 2011, the Chicago Tribune exposed a pair of Illinois teacher union lobbyists, Stephen Preckwinkle and David Piccioli, who substitute taught for one day and stood to collect nearly $1 million in state teacher retirement pensions from a severely underfunded system. The five Illinois pension systems have a $100 billion liability and the teachers fund may run out of money as early as 2029. Newspaper editorials, elected officials, the governor and citizens cried foul. Legislation was quickly passed to stop the abuse.

…

In order to understand this massive pension “reform misunderstanding,” we questioned the Public Relations Spokesman for the Teachers Retirement System (TRS) David Urbanek, who explained:

“Mr. Preckwinkle and Mr. Piccioli received a TRS pension following the enactment of House Bill 3813 because House Bill 3813, now Public Act 97-0651, did not stop them from collecting a TRS pension.” read entire email response

Read it.

Including maintenance costs, the Air Force’s total tab was $596 million before officials decided to park the planes, and ultimately sell them for scrap at six cents a pound.

Read it.

On Wednesday, the Des Moines Register reported that the state’s insurance commissioner has approved Des Moines-based Wellmark to hike its rates between 11.9% and 14.5%.

The premium spike will affect 19,000 Iowans.

“That increase is for individual policyholders who have Affordable Care Act-compliant plans,” reports the Register.

CoOportunity, one of the main companies offering health insurance on the Obamacare exchange, will increase its rates 19%.

Mark Steyn looks at the dweebs who guard our borders. He is not impressed.

The legendary Gord Sinclair, longtime news director of CJAD in Montreal, had a ski place near Jay in northern Vermont, and he invited his engineer on the show to come down and visit him. “What’s the purpose of your visit?” asked the agent at the small rural border post.

“Oh, just a relaxing weekend at my boss’ place,” said Gord’s colleague affably, and then chortled, “although I don’t know if it’ll be that relaxing. He’ll probably have me out in the yard chopping wood all day.”

So the immigration agent refused him entry on the grounds that he would be working illegally in the United States.

They all had a good laugh about that back on the air on Monday, but it took forever to straighten out. A single man with contacts in the United States: He says he’s coming for the weekend, but we all know any Montrealer would willingly trade a job at Quebec’s Number One anglo radio station for casual yard work in Vermont, right?

And yet the unemployed guy from an Ebola hot zone gets in.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock.

The Urban Institute has a new report out to promote HUD Secretary Julian Castro’s speech calling for debasing home mortgage credit standards. But its snazzy data tools just make it easier to see what a huge role Hispanics — especially Castro’s mentor, Clinton HUD Secretary and then Countrywide Financial director Henry Cisneros — played in the Housing Bubble and Bust.

As is traditional, the Federal government attempted to ‘fix’ something that wasn’t broke, and wound up burning all of us.

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California Governor Jerry Brown has signed into law a bill that would require Medi-Cal, the state’s insurance program for the poor, to pay for dental services delivered by teams of hygienists and dentists connected through the Internet.

Better thee than me, brother.

Read it.

Read it.

About 70 percent of the tens of thousands illegal immigrant family units detained crossing the U.S./Mexico border and released into the United States have failed to fulfill their obligation to report back to immigration officials, according to a new report.

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

Read it.

Since the Microsoft ‘antitrust’ case of 1998, tech firms have had their noses rubbed in the economic fact of modern life that politicians and bureaucrats can (and will) destroy your business unless allowed to wet their beaks. Typically this is done through campaign contributions to the proper pullers of strings, participation in the revolving door between Washington and the two Left Coasts, and making the correct ‘diversity’ and ‘green’ noises for consumption by low-information voters.

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Responsibility is nowhere in modern government. Who’s responsible for the budget deficits? Nobody: Program budgets are set in legal concrete. Who’s responsible for failing to fix America’s decrepit infrastructure? Nobody. Who’s responsible for not managing civil servants sensibly? You get the idea.

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A pull-your-hair-out school discipline story is making the rounds: Weaverville Elementary School in California punished a 13-year-old boy who committed the crime of sharing his lunch with a friend.

Eighth-grader Kyle Bradford’s act of charity and kindness is strictly prohibited under school policy because one student may be allergic to another student’s food.

Anybody who voluntarily lives in California is a jackass.

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What the government pays for, the bureaucrats control.

You’d think people would realize that by now. But no.

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A significant benefit of the Affordable Care Act is the opportunity to receive money-saving tax credits up front to cut the overall cost of health insurance, but now hundreds of thousands of consumers could owe back some of that money next April.

Those affected took advance payments of the premium tax credit for health insurance. Some married couples could owe $600 or $1,500 or $2,500 or even more. It might feel like a raw deal for some who are already suffocating under the escalating costs of health insurance.

But it’s still Affordable Care — it says so right in the title!

Read it.

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio launched a new program giving illegal immigrants free access to the city’s zoo, its museums, and other attractions in order to cajole them into signing up for a new city-wide ID program that would allow them to rent apartment, get city assistance, and other things.

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Have individuals with known terrorist ties been apprehended trying to cross illegally into the United States through Texas? It seems like a straightforward question to address to the Secretary of Homeland Security. Asked the question by Rep. Jason Chaffetz at a House Homeland Security hearing yesterday, DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson took the phlegmatic approach and vaguely denied awareness of such a case.

Asked directly if he was aware of four such individuals who were apprehended trying to cross into Texas on 9/10 last week, Johnson gave the question the full Obama kissoff, scratching his nose with his middle finger while conceding he has “heard reports to that effect.” However, according to Johnson, he doesn’t know the accuracy of the reports or how much credence to give them. Observing his demeanor and affect, one might conclude that the whole business is somebody else’s job. Why bother him?

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Since its beginning, U.S. taxpayers have spent $22 trillion on Johnson’s War on Poverty (in constant 2012 dollars). Adjusting for inflation, that’s three times more than was spent on all military wars since the American Revolution.

…

But today the Census will almost certainly proclaim that around 14 percent of Americans are still poor. The present poverty rate is almost exactly the same as it was in 1967 a few years after the War on Poverty started. Census data actually shows that poverty has gotten worse over the last 40 years.

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Last year I wrote that Obamacare could leave doctors holding the bag for claims for patients who don’t pay their insurance premiums. That’s because the law includes a three-month grace period during which health insurers must continue to cover patients who sign up, but don’t pay the price of their insurance. If the patients eventually make good, there’s no problem. But if patients don’t pay the owed premiums, the insurance company has to cover the cost of claims filed during the first month. Providers are stuck with the tab for any claims filed during months two and three.

The piece I wrote last July was theoretical. The notification letter I’m holding in my hand, addressed to my wife’s pediatric practice, is reality. And reality costs, in this case, over $600. That’s the outstanding balance owed the practice by a patient insured by BlueCross BlueShield of Arizona. It’s a balance that my wife might have to eat, or else try to collect herself.

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

Read it.

An attitude that is, unfortunately, all to common among law enforcement people.

Eric Holder’s Justice Department, of course, doesn’t even bother.

Read it.

If a ditch fills with rainwater – and nobody’s around to see it – can it still be regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency?

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Global warming hysteria, as we wrote yesterday, is not science. The models on which it rests are known to be wrong, since they are refuted by observation. So why, then, does climate change hype persist?

Because a great deal of money depends on it. The purpose of global warming hysteria is to bamboozle voters into transferring vast amounts of wealth and power from the private sector to the government. This will be done via a carbon tax and regulations on, or prohibitions of, fossil fuels; but the scheme goes much deeper than that. Since virtually every human activity (including breathing) generates some quantity of carbon dioxide, global warming is an excuse to regulate pretty much everything, conferring unprecedented power on the federal government. Further, global warming justifies vast federal subsidies of “green” energy scams. The Democrats, in turn, are rewarded for those subsidies by enormous political contributions by the likes of Tom Steyer.

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Thank God for all those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

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Avery Gagliano was kicking some international piano-playing butt while maintaining straight As at her D.C. public middle school last year.

But traveling abroad for competitions meant she wound up with more than the 10 days of “unexcused” absences allowed by the district on her record. Despite her parents’ attempts to provide school administrators with supplementary materials about the educational nature of the trips, the district refused to budge.

In fact, this spring when Gagliano returned (victorious!) from a competition in Connecticut, D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) declared her officially truant and assigned an officer to her case.

Read it.

Back in the 1960s, many Americans paid for doctor and hospital services out of pocket or through modestly priced private insurance. Health care spending was about 6 percent of GDP.

Enter President Johnson and Medicare. He bought millions of votes by giving seniors free health care that they never paid for through payroll taxes during their working years. As insidious, he helped lay the foundations for the entitlement state with Medicaid. The latter, first conceived to help poor children, has been gradually expanded to include many working families.

Today health care spending is more than 17 percent of GDP. Life extending treatments are part of the jump, but Germany and Holland spend about 12 percent and have those. The extra US costs are federally mandated giveaways, inefficiencies and abuse—about $850 billion and much more than spent on defense.

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Last Sunday, a pedestrian was struck and killed by the Twin Cities new Green light-rail line, which opened for operation in June. Shannon Buchanan was apparently crossing a pedestrian way over the tracks and was hit by a train going about 30 mph.

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The FTA no longer includes fatality data in the National Transit Database, but the last time data were available, light rail was involved in about 12 fatalities per billion passenger miles carried while buses were involved in only about 4 fatalities per billion. Apparently, it’s a lot safer to get hit by a 50,000-pound bus than a 300,000-pound train.

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During his Labor Day speech on Monday, President Obama attempted to invent a new constitutional right – one that should alarm all conservatives, especially during this time of grave national security concerns. As he ticked off his litany of principle rights he supports, such as “women’s rights and civil rights,” he added an item to the list – “immigration rights.”

It is with this oblivious utopian ideology that the Obama administration plans to grant amnesty to illegal aliens, including those who overstayed their visas, offering legal protection to thousands of individuals who pose as a security threat. He is also threatening to expand immigrant and non-immigrant visas without the support of Congress.

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MyPlate serves as a good example of the sort of thinking I like to call “SimCity” progressivism. On this view, the government’s purpose is not necessarily to provide any particular goods or services, and not even (or only) the ones found in the Constitution.

No, the government’s purpose is to carefully curate the lives of the citizens—adjusting here, pruning there, maybe not necessarily forbidding, but managing, down to the last exquisite detail. Rather like one might do in a government simulator, only in real life.

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“Green card? We don’t need no steenkin’ green card!”

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What are those “immigration rights”? Legally, of course, no one has a right to violate our immigration laws, whether the Obama administration enforces them or not. So what does the president have in mind here? It seems clear that Obama isn’t suggesting that immigrants are somehow being denied their actual rights under American law. Certainly he made no such explicit claim. Rather, his point appears to be that some people–not everyone in the world presumably, but some unspecified group of people–have a “right” to enter the United States, or stay here, even though it is illegal to do so under U.S. law, as long as Barack Obama opposes the law in question.

No coherent theory of law or justice supports such a proposition, but when has that ever stopped Barack Obama? “Immigration rights,” implying the right to violate others’ actual, legal rights, has now become liberal dogma. Who in the Democratic Party news media will point out the absurdity of the president’s position? No one, I suspect.

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The numbers tell the story. Among private sector employees — the ones who work for for-profit companies or non-profit organizations that are not part of the government — the percentage who belong to labor unions plummeted to a mere 7.5 percent last year, from 23.3 percent in 1977, according to UnionStats.com. By the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics’ more restrictive accounting, a mere 6.7 percent of private sector workers were in unions in 2013.

Among government workers, it’s a whole different story: 40.8 percent of local government workers — teachers, police, firefighters, librarians — belong to unions, according to the BLS numbers. The public sector rate drops to 35.3 percent (38.7 percent by the UnionStats.com numbers) if you include state and federal employees — postal workers, corrections officers. That’s so much higher than the private sector that it’s almost a tale of two labor movements — one, in the private sector, that is diminishing to irrelevance, and another, in the public sector, that retains substantial clout.