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Why do we have a crisis in health care costs today? Because government “solved” the last one.

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Obviously, she was thinking that the rules don’t apply to her. Don’t they know who she is?

She also may have been thinking that Louisiana (‘flyover country’) is a place to be from, not in. You’ll note how much time the Clinton’s spend in Arkansas.

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WHO runs the world’s most lucrative shakedown operation? The Sicilian mafia? The People’s Liberation Army in China? The kleptocracy in the Kremlin? If you are a big business, all these are less grasping than America’s regulatory system. The formula is simple: find a large company that may (or may not) have done something wrong; threaten its managers with commercial ruin, preferably with criminal charges; force them to use their shareholders’ money to pay an enormous fine to drop the charges in a secret settlement (so nobody can check the details). Then repeat with another large company.

A variant of this, polished to a fine art by Willy Brown while he was Speaker of the California legislature, is to introduce a bill that would destroy a company’s business, and then withdraw it once one’s campaign coffers had been adequately ‘topped up’ by the potential victim(s).

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I remember Zumwalt. He was all hip & trendy and put the Navy into a crack that it took about ten years to get out of.

Let’s hope the ship does better.

The Other McCain jerks back the curtain.

There seems to be some confusion about President Obama’s “foreign policy.” At times, it has been alleged that he actually has a policy, but these allegations have never been substantiated.

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Yet there is one arena in which misleading the public not only is abided but is the norm: politics. In fact, much of what constitutes political discourse in this country is now built on a foundation of dishonesty. One of the most effective — and perfectly legal — ways to win votes and influence public policy these days is to pour millions of dollars into deception-based campaigns designed to manipulate public opinion.

And of course they cite an instance of Republican misfeasance, as if there weren’t ten times as many Democrat goings-on, starting with the Obama administration.

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BLUF: Government regulations.

LA’s deep-rooted culture of NIMBYism makes matters worse. If developers could build more high-rise or high-density housing, rents would fall. But thanks to restrictive zoning laws, they find this extremely hard.

The zoning code hasn’t changed much since the 1940s. More than 78% of the city’s residential land is currently zoned for single-family dwellings, according to the LA Department of City Planning. By comparison, only 24% of San Francisco and 25% of New York City is zoned exclusively for one- and two-family homes.

Some of California’s green rules drive up rents–and hurt the environment, too. The California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), signed by Governor Ronald Reagan in 1970, allows almost anyone to sue to block any development, and is used by the slow-growth lobby to thwart vertical expansion. “The irony is that CEQA is now preventing us from building high-rises near public transit, which would improve the environmental quality by allowing people to walk more and not use their cars,” says Richard Green of the University of Southern California.

Developers seeking to build in LA today find that they have to scale back their projects to get them built at all. Construction began on Ponte Vista, a cluster of 676 homes near the Port of LA, earlier this year. The original plans called for three times as many units, but the project was cut back after neighbours protested about the extra traffic it would bring.

In February a judge struck down what he called a “fatally flawed” plan to build taller, denser buildings in some parts of Hollywood, after community groups sued under CEQA, complaining that the plan would “Manhattanise” Hollywood.

Veronique de Rugy blows the whistle.

In the little time she’s been in Congress, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made a name for herself as a populist who talks tough about Wall Street and other large corporations. But is she going to do more than just talk about it?

Recently, Warren confirmed that she is renewing her support for the Export-Import Bank — an agency that lends money to foreign companies to buy U.S. goods and services. This may sound good on paper; however, Warren’s endorsement of the Ex-Im Bank is inconsistent with her otherwise populist stand.

The biggest Ex-Im Bank beneficiaries are giant corporations like Boeing, General Electric, Caterpillar and their very wealthy foreign buyers. These companies don’t need the bank, but they love it. It increases their profits and transfers onto taxpayers the risk that the companies should be shouldering since they pocket the benefits.

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Simple decency and respect for Foley’s horrified parents should have been enough to sober him. If that didn’t do it, the realization that the Islamic State had declared war on America in the most gruesome fashion imaginable should have sounded a call of duty in his head.

Instead, Obama continued with his vacation and was photographed looking as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Suddenly, that megawatt smile that often charmed voters wasn’t so charming. It was vacuous.

He looked like an empty-headed frat boy, numb to the world.

Maybe that’s not just an appearance. Maybe it’s the truth. Maybe that’s all there is.

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President Barack Obama may be unpopular, but members of his inner circle of advisers are finding themselves in high demand for big money consulting gigs with crony capitalist companies like Uber and Apple, reports The Hill.

This week, top Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe took a job with the $17 billion taxi app giant Uber.

It’s all part of the DC “Boomtown” cash dash to trade insider access from public service into cold hard cash. What’s more, as Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer chronicled in his New York Times best seller, Extortion, the Obama administration is engaged in a form of legal regulatory extortion wherein it makes complex, onerous, and costly regulations and then whirls through Washington’s revolving door to go to work for corporations who will pay a premium to help navigate big businesses through the very regulatory minefields those former staffers and advisers helped cement in place.

‘And I say to you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when you fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’
– Luke 16:9.

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As the Mackinac Center for Public Policy points out, Michigan lost roughly half a million jobs during Granholm’s eight-year reign. Even so, UC-Berkeley believes she is qualified to teach Public Policy 290: “Creating Jobs through Better Government Policies for Innovation and Education.”

‘We destroyed thousands of jobs, and so can you!’

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But I can. He’s got two years left as President, and he’s decided to phone it in. In 2016 he’ll retire to a cushy gig as a former President, with plenty of perks, and if he feels like doing a bit of work he can travel the world giving speeches as the Magic Negro at $250,000 a pop. In the mean time, he’s going to enjoy himself.

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‘Law? We don’t need no stinkin’ law!’

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Now playing: Jimmy Carter II — Return to the Vomit.

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Of course, it would be more truthful to say that the DoJ stands with the black people of Ferguson, specifically the black Underclass of Ferguson, on which Eric Holder and his Obamanation compatriots depend for the Low Information votes that keep them in power.

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While absenteeism is usually considered a student matter, in San Francisco – and many other districts – the average teacher misses more school than the average child.

If last year’s numbers hold steady, the 4,100 teachers in San Francisco, on average, will each be absent about 11 times this school year, about once every three weeks. That’s four to five days more than a typical student, out of 180 days total.

About seven of those days were for sick or personal leave, and the rest were training days offered or required by the district.

While the teacher absentee rate is about average, or even a smidge below average, for large urban districts across the country, it’s a lot higher than other industries, where the typical worker takes about four sick or personal days over an entire year.

Look for … the Union label….

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Cinthya Garcia-Cisneros, an illegal immigrant who came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and was shielded from deportation by DACA, was convicted of two counts of felony hit and run after she killed two Forest Grove, Oregon stepsisters — Anna Dieter-Eckerdt and Abigail Robinson ages 6 and 11 respectively — playing in a leaf pile last October.

Last week, as OregonLive.com reported Tuesday, a judge dismissed a deportation case against Garcia-Cisneros and as a result of the ruling, her attorney says she is able to go back under the protections of DACA — meaning she can obtain a work permit and Social Security number.

How about that for Diversity?

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What is a city for?

It’s a crucial question, but one rarely asked by the pundits and developers who dominate the debate over the future of the American city.

Their current conventional wisdom embraces density, sky-high scrapers, vastly expanded mass transit and ever-smaller apartments. It reflects a desire to create an ideal locale for hipsters and older, sophisticated urban dwellers. It’s city as adult Disneyland or “entertainment machine,” chock-a-block with chic restaurants, shops and festivals.

Overlooked, or even disdained, is what most middle-class residents of the metropolis actually want: home ownership, rapid access to employment throughout the metropolitan area, good schools and “human scale” neighborhoods.

…

In 2013, Houston alone had more housing starts than the entire state of California.

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Looters in Ferguson, Missouri, were “met with little police resistance” as business owners say they “were forced to protect their businesses with their own guns” on Friday.

A reporter from Fox2Now even said “police cars were seen driving past some of the stores being looted and did not respond.”

Makes you wonder where all that tax money is going. If the police are being militarized, it’s hard to figure out what military they’re emulating.

Paul Mirengoff at PowerLine gives a lawyer’s  perspective.

The Perry indictment also fits a pattern of harassment via the legal process of prominent Republican governors: Sarah Palin, Scott Walker, Chris Christie, and now Perry.

What do these four have in common? Why, they all are (or were) potentially viable candidates for the national office.

Invocation of the legal process against Christie may well be warranted. (So too with Bob McDonnell, whom I didn’t include in my list because, although once vaguely mentioned as a possible presidential candidate, his prospects never approached those of the other four). In the cases of Palin, Walker, and Perry, the charges seem plainly to have been ginned up in the hope of derailing the governors’ prospects for national office.

This sort of thing is standard operating procedure in countries like Russia and China. Now it is becoming part of the Democrats’ playbook.

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It is only logical that it is a bad thing to have a state official whose job is to investigate corruption charged with drunk driving. Yet because she is a Democrat and the governor is a Republican, Lehmberg refused to resign for strictly partisan reasons. The governor then exercised his prerogative in an effort to force Lehmberg to do the right thing — and Democrats then decided that the governor’s exercise of lawful authority was a crime.

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By hook or by crook, they will.

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

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The report comes as the Department of Education has made it clear that illegal immigrant students are “entitled to” public eduction and the southern border is in crisis with tens of thousands of unaccompanied minors entering the country illegally — many of whom are later placed with a sponsor in the U.S. as they await immigration hearings.

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Portland’s first light-rail line is only 28 years old, but it is already wearing out. Moreover, the most worn-out part happens to be a segment that all of Portland’s light-rail lines use. Shutting down this segment means shutting down the entire system.

TriMet, Portland’s transit agency, planned to have shuttle buses move passengers around the work, but the plan apparently didn’t work very well. To make matters worse, Portland temperatures rose above 90 degrees, leading TriMet to issue slow orders for all of its trains to avoid damage to wires or derailments due to kinks in the tracks. Funny; buses don’t have to slow down when the mercury rises.

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‘King Putt’ at his finest.

He just wants to be President, he doesn’t want to be bothered to do President.

From the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — High-speed rail was supposed to be President Obama’s signature transportation project, but despite the administration spending nearly $11 billion since 2009 to develop faster passenger trains, the projects have gone mostly nowhere and the United States still lags far behind Europe and China.

Don’t look at me, YOU voted for him.

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Yet another example of how heavy-handed regulations are killing small businesses.

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THE GOVERNOR’S State House digs just underwent “a museum quality” makeover.

It cost $11.3 million, ran $2 million over budget, and brings Deval Patrick’s interior decorating muse full circle.

When Patrick first took office, he was criticized for spending $27,000 of taxpayer money on new curtains and furniture. As he exits eight years later, he leaves behind a renovated suite that features historically accurate crown moldings and paint color, along with six plasma screen TVs and the equipment necessary for not-yet-installed facial recognition security cameras.

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Begun in 1997, the push to regulate the labels on Tic Tacs, Certs, and other breath fresheners has recently been restarted with a new 145-page document after the first one was withdrawn for being outdated. But that first document spawned a host of other documents from a rogues gallery of agencies about the all-important question of portion size.

Mickey Kaus blows the whistle.

Corporatism’s easy — you just get the leaders of society’s various bodily organs in a room and work the sucker out.  It’s especially easier to impose regulations on a few big players, who can foot the bill or pass it on, than on a near-infinite number of small players. That’s one reason modern liberals tend to accept corporatism when they should know better.

…

Maybe we shouldn’t read too much into a press conference, but Obama certainly seems to be groping for a formal argument here that would set out the circumstances in which he is justified in bypassing the legislature described in the Constitution — Congress — and acting on his own. The argument would be: “Where the key interest groups of society — business, labor, religious organizations and the MSM (who else is going to anoint a bill “common sense … legislation”?) — are lined up behind a policy, then if Congress doesn’t act, the President can.

In short, it’s an argument for bypassing archaic elected legacy institutions when they stand in the way of modern government by interest group elites.

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A Denver bar has been cited by the state’s Division of Civil Rights for discrimination because it refused to let a gay man dressed in drag enter. The bar is the Denver Wrangler, and despite what its name might suggest, it is not some Country Western joint. It is, in fact, a gay bar. So the state has determined that a gay bar has discriminated against a gay person.

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In Delaware, the poultry and petroleum industries have been hammered by the ethanol mandate.

Because corn and soybeans are more expensive thanks to the biofuels industry, the cost of livestock feed has gone up.

It creates “a very uneven playing field for chicken companies to compete for necessary feedstuffs,” said Tom Super, a spokesman for the National Chicken Council, the poultry industry trade group based in Washington, D.C.

The bottom line: over $44 billion nationally in higher actual chicken feed costs, Super said.

“Adding together the higher cumulative feed costs for chicken, turkey, table eggs and hogs, the total is almost $100 billion in additional feed costs,” he said. “Also higher feed costs for other agricultural animal producers, such as dairy and beef cattle, would add measurably to the $100 billion cost.”

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Well, there you have it: Straight from the Democrat’s mouth.

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What is it with insane NY-related bureaucrats and their attempts to “own” things? In the past, we’ve covered how New York State is a pretty big trademark bully over the “I ? NY” phrase, and did you know that the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) claims ownership over the phrase “If you see something, say something”? And, now, we find out that the controversy-ridden Port Authority of NY and NJ appears to be claiming ownership of the NYC skyline. No joke. It apparently sent a cease-and-desist letter to Fishs Eddy, a housewares store in Manhattan that is selling some city themed dishes.

Well: (a) New York, and (b) bureaucrats. ‘Nuff said.

Bet: These guys are mostly, if not all, Democrats. This is the way Democrats think. ‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

For a long time I’ve been pointing out that a number of liberal cities and suburbs that vote Democratic in Presidential elections adopt policies that have negative disparate impact on blacks and Hispanics, making housing expensive and diminishing the number of lower end jobs. Noah Millman has now christened this the Sailer Strategy in contrast to the Florida Strategy of the (confusingly named) Richard Florida.

But of course, my contribution has been less advocacy of these liberal measures but exposure of what they are up to. My moral stance is that everybody all across the country is entitled to be aware of what’s going on in liberal cities.

For example, Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel wants to drive out a sizable fraction of poor black Chicagoans and have them resettle in small towns in the Midwest. Any small town / small city opposition to his ethnic cleansing strategy can be denounced as racist, and Rahm’s former colleagues in the Justice Department can be sicced upon the recalcitrant. It’s a giant game of Hot Potato that is being played, and my view is that everybody is entitled to know what’s going on.

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A House committee will investigate the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) decision to allow a waiver granting favorable status in wireless auctions to an Obama donor, the committee announced Thursday.

Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee Fred Upton (R., Mich.) sent a letter to FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler asking for information and documents relating to the designation of Grain Management, LLC as a “designated entity” last week.

The status will allow the company to receive discounts designed for small businesses when bidding for wireless licenses. David Grain, a major bundler for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, owns the firm.

Democrats: The best political party that money can buy.

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According to a new report from the United States Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, a “club of billionaires” including Tom Steyer and Hank Paulson has effectively hijacked the Environmental Protection Agency for its own purposes – to grow the EPA and regulate the economy from stem to stern.

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Recall, for a moment, how health insurers were treated by Democrats in the Obamacare debate. They were the bad guys, in no uncertain terms. “They’ve been immoral all along,” Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), then the House Majority Leader said in July 2009, as the debate over the government-run public option raged. “They [insurers] are the villains in this. They have been part of the problem in a major way.”

Democrats found some success in casting insurers as the antagonists, and made a show of targeting health insurers. “It is well known to the public that the health insurance companies are the problem,” Pelosi said in October as she warned insurers how much the health law would cost them.

So, how did Obamacare end up punishing the big, bad insurance company villains? By creating a federal program to help cover their costs in the event of higher than anticipated spending—and then expanding that program at the request of the insurers following the launch of the health law’s exchanges last year.

They just wanted them on board. The National Socialists had this “join us or die” tactic down to a science.

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The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending over $200,000 to find out why Wikipedia is sexist.

The government has awarded two grants for collaborative research to professors at Yale University and New York University to study what the researchers describe as “systematic gender bias” in the online encyclopedia.

I’m a sexist, you’re a sexist, he’s a sexist, she’s a sexist, wouldn’t you like to be a sexist too?

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While shopping with her husband in Quincy, Florida, on July 19, 2010, Mickey Goodson stopped by a Winn-Dixie drugstore to pick up some allergy pills. The pharmacist on duty suggested she buy two boxes of Sudafed, which she did. Thus began Goodson’s entanglement with the criminal justice system, which featured searches of her car and home, along with drug charges that were not dropped until September 2011.

My advice: Avoid Florida.

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Shipping oil by train is much more dangerous than shipping by pipeline. But the federal government has a number of regulations that slow or even prevent building of pipelines. One intervention–preventing the construction of pipelines–leads oil to be carried in more hazardous ways. In response, the government does not reduce the regulation that slows the building of pipelines. Instead it regulates shipping by train.

High taxes motivate businesses to move their operations overseas. The government’s response is not to improve the tax climate, but rather to make it illegal to move operations overseas. Same principle.

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Hint: Quite possibly.

A $137 million three-mile train is coming to a nearly deserted avenue in a bankrupt city.

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SUBSIDIES for renewable energy are one of the most contested areas of public policy. Billions are spent nursing the infant solar- and wind-power industries in the hope that they will one day undercut fossil fuels and drastically reduce the amount of carbon dioxide being put into the atmosphere. The idea seems to be working. Photovoltaic panels have halved in price since 2008 and the capital cost of a solar-power plant—of which panels account for slightly under half—fell by 22% in 2010-13. In a few sunny places, solar power is providing electricity to the grid as cheaply as conventional coal- or gas-fired power plants.

But whereas the cost of a solar panel is easy to calculate, the cost of electricity is harder to assess. It depends not only on the fuel used, but also on the cost of capital (power plants take years to build and last for decades), how much of the time a plant operates, and whether it generates power at times of peak demand. To take account of all this, economists use “levelised costs”—the net present value of all costs (capital and operating) of a generating unit over its life cycle, divided by the number of megawatt-hours of electricity it is expected to supply.

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President Obama famously failed to act when warned that ISIS was preparing to mount an offensive in Western Iraq. This left ISIS free to conquer, with virtually no resistance, city after city in the defense of which American soldiers have shed blood.

Now Obama is receiving new warnings, this time from the Kurds in Northern Iraq. In fact, according to the Washington Post, the Kurds are “pleading for U.S. military aid.”

…

Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, the Obama administration has rejected Kurdish pleas for arms with which to fight ISIS. Its rationale is that assistance must come through the central government.

But the central government is (a) dysfunctional and (b) unwilling to lift a finger to help the Kurds in any case. In fact, the Iraq government’s unwillingness to “play nice” with the Kurds has been part of the Obama administration’s rationale for not doing more to help the government.

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Hey, he stole that money fair and square.

Former Los Angeles Councilman Richard AlarcónCredit: SEIU International / photo on flickrRichard Alarcón’s was convicted of four felonies this week, including voter fraud and perjury. It turned out he lied about where he lived in 2007 and 2009 in order to represent the city’s District 7. His wife was also convicted of three counts.

But he will keep his pension, which totals $116,000 a year for that short stint on the City Council.

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Texas Gov. Rick Perry has persuaded San Francisco brokerage firm Charles Schwab to bring 1,200 jobs to El Paso and Austin with nearly $6 million in cash grants from a state investment fund.

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Did you expect any less?

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