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And about fargin’ time, too.

More here.

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At a hearing in San Francisco federal court, Federico Buenrostro Jr., the former chief executive of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, consented to the government’s filing of a new complaint that described his receipt of cash bribes from Alfred J.R. Villalobos, a former pension fund board member and former deputy mayor of Los Angeles.

Yet another corrupt Democrat. Quelle surprise.

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Press reports now state that the U.S. tax code is more than 77,000 pages and growing at a rapid rate. Obviously, no one individual or even teams of lawyers and accountants can fully understand all of this, including people at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). When laws are too complex and increasingly subjective in their interpretation, it inevitably leads to corruption. All but the willfully blind now understand that the IRS has both become corrupt and incompetent.

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In a neglected speech by Calvin Coolidge entitled “The Limitations of the Law,” given to the American Bar Association in 1922 (but not available online that I’ve been able to find), Coolidge offers the following observation on one of the inherent defects of the Progressive theory of the Administrative State:

Under this weight [of ever larger government] the former accuracy of administration breaks down.  The government has not at its disposal a supply of ability, honesty, and character necessary for the solution of all these problems, or an executive capacity great enough for their perfect administration.  Nor is it in possession of a wisdom which enables it to take in great enterprises and manage them with no ground of criticism.  We cannot rid ourselves of the human element in our affairs by an act of legislation which places them under a jurisdiction of a public commission. . .  Its attempt must be accompanied with the full expectation of very many failures. . .

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In a stunning revelation this week, it was disclosed that former IRS official Lois Lerner told colleagues, “we need to be cautious about what we say in emails” and then proceeded to ask the IRS IT department, in an e-mail, “if [instant messaging] conversations were also searchable.” When she was told they were not, she e-mailed back, “Perfect.” This is a smoking gun e-mail in that it makes plain she had a cover-up in mind. There is no other plausible explanation.

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As Watchdog Wire reported in late June, local Colorado school districts are collecting detailed educational and psychological data on their students for use by private companies and the federal government. Parents, however, are having a hard time getting their hands on their own children’s information.

Ft. Collins parent Cheri Kiesecker, for example, has written to the Colorado Department of Education (CDE), asking for her children’s data, but was told the CDE cannot share that data with parents.

“The Colorado Department of Education does not have a mechanism for verifying parent/guardian relationships to students — and the release of student information to an unauthorized entity would be a violation of Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA),” replied Dan Damagala, CDE’s CIO of Information Management Services.

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Starbucks’ recently announced partnership with Arizona State University to help its employees pay for an online degree will be funded by the taxpayer, rather than from the global coffee chain itself.

While it was billed as “free tuition” by some when the partnership was first announced, in reality ASU is offering Starbucks employees a reduced tuition rate, while the students are expected to cover the rest of the cost with federal student aid or from their own pockets.

The “scholarship” portion in the form of a discount is essentially funded by taxpayers, as the university is funded by public coffers.

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State-licensed marijuana stores, which began serving recreational customers in Colorado at the beginning of the year and in Washington this week, are criminal enterprises under federal law. But as Al Capone could have told you, Uncle Sam still wants his cut: Selling marijuana is a felony, and so is failing to pay taxes on the money you earn by selling marijuana. The government does not make it easy to comply with federal tax laws, however. Section 280E of the Internal Revenue Code, for example, bars marijuana merchants from deducting standard business expenses (although they are, rather counterintuitively, allowed to deduct the “cost of goods sold,” including the cost of growing or obtaining marijuana). And when a business pays federal taxes withheld from employees’ paychecks, along with the employer’s share of payroll taxes, the Internal Revenue Service insists that it be done via the Electronic Federal Tax Payment System (EFTPS), which requires a bank account. Cannabusinesses have trouble obtaining bank accounts, what with being criminal enterprises under federal law. The IRS does not consider that a good excuse, so when marijuana merchants pay the monthly taxes in cash, they are charged a 10 percent penalty. That is how Allgreens, a Denver dispensary, ended up owing the IRS more than $20,000 in penalties.

Once again, tReason magazine airs its core philosophy that legal weed is a much more important issue than, oh, the government’s promotion of followers of an oppressive totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion. In this case, however, they may have a point.

It’s not a rare thing for someone acquitted of a crime at the state level to be subject to double jeopardy by zealous prosecutors under some Federal ‘civil rights’ law. (‘Oh, that’s not real double jeopardy; it’s an entirely separate crime!’) This would appear to be a similar case where regulations (not law, regulations, which under the Imperial Presidency are even better than laws because they don’t have to go through that messy stuff with Congress) criminalize behavior that is in conformity with the law on a different level.

This is a classic situation in authoritarian states, in which doing something makes you a criminal and not doing the same thing also makes you a criminal. Our legal system is rapidly becoming such a system.

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The Wall Street Journal found that “data from immigration courts, along with interviews with the children and their advocates, show that few minors are sent home and many are able to stay for years in the U.S., if not permanently.”

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

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According to an OSC press release announcing the settlement, “when fielding taxpayers’ questions on an IRS customer service help line, the employee repeatedly urged taxpayers to reelect President Obama in 2012 by delivering a chant based on the spelling of the employee’s last name.”

I predict that he will eventually be promoted. The Crust take care of their own.

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The Obama administration is prohibiting anyone from asking for the immigration status of the parents or family members who are picking up illegal immigrant children from detention centers.

At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Health and Human Services Acting Assistant Secretary for the Administration for Children and Families Mark Greenberg said that even if Obama administration officials knew illegal immigrant children were being released to other illegal immigrants, they would consider the “totality of the circumstances” and release the children to them.

But when pressed by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK), Greenberg admitted, “We do not verify the immigration status of the individual.”

Better keep your hands off our potential new Democrat voters.

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Arizona State University, perennial favorite for “nation’s least prestigious school,” is showing America why: students can now earn extra credit in a Women and Gender Studies class for being female and not shaving their armpits. One student—whose parents no doubt consider this either $6,000 (in-state tuition) or $10,000 (if she’s out of state) a year well spent—called her 10 weeks of stubble cultivation a “life-changing experience.”

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It’s common knowledge that insider trading is illegal. In fact, we have an entire government agency in place to regulate trading and to investigate insider trading allegations. Executives have been sentenced to months (sometimes even years) in plush, well-appointed hellholes for participating in insider trading.

Members of Congress, however, were exempt from insider trading rules until 2012. An 2011 expose by 60 Minutes let millions of Americans know that members of Congress had plenty of access to market-changing information and were acting on it.

In a rare (ha!) show of self-preservation, a united House full of Congresspersons facing reelection battles passed the STOCK Act, which basically made Congress and its staffers play by the same trading rules as every other American.

In 2013, with Congressional members safely re-elected, the House decided to roll back its previous legislative effort in order to get back into the insider trading business. It tore out the stipulation demanding disclosure of trading activity — the one thing citizens could use to verify adherence to the “no insider trading” rule — stating that these disclosures were a “security risk.” This sailed through with unanimous consent late on a Thursday afternoon (the end of the Congressional work week) and was signed by the President the following Monday.

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The National Institutes of Health (NIH) spent nearly $500,000 to study how getting mothers to dance with their daughters can fight obesity.

The three-year study is focusing on African-American girls, who the authors say “suffer disproportionately from obesity.” The aim of the research is to see whether “Afro-centric” dance can get girls to exercise.

For that money they could have sent them to Africa to learn the real thing.

Remind me how it’s the Federal government’s business to worry about whether people are obese…?

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More than half of legal and illegal immigrant households from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras are on at least one form of public assistance, according to an analysis of government data by a limited immigration group.

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The amount of taxpayer money involved is unprecedented. “Obamacare seems due to join Social Security and Medicare in one respect: as a public policy advertising phenom, a program that is reviled and perhaps eventually revered in political advertising for billions of dollars in ad spending to come,” Elizabeth Wilner, vice president for strategic initiatives at Campaign Media Analysis Group (CMAG), wrote in a press release last year.

Such government P.R. campaigns have become a regrettable staple of American politics, since the default attitude among those in power is that propaganda is only bad when the other guy does it. When the Bush administration got caught violating a statutory ban on “covert propaganda” by passing off fake news reports to local TV stations and paying a columnist hundreds of thousands of dollars to promote the “No Child Left Behind” law, Democrats were justly outraged. And yet, these days Democrats are untroubled that their own campaign to sell Obamacare is taking government propaganda to new heights-and depths.

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It’s state law: all public universities must teach about the nation’s founding documents, but University of South Carolina President Harris Pastides is refusing to follow it. He says teaching about the Constitution and other founding-era writings is “archaic.” Ironically, the college claims the law itself is unconstitutional. The Daily Signal reports:

When asked about this by a student at an academic forum in 2013, the vice provost of USC, Dr. Helen Doerpinghaus, claimed that while the university did not follow the letter of the law, it did follow the “spirit of the law” by handing out pocket-sized Constitutions on Constitution Day. Under this logic, the university must believe it could teach students chemistry by handing out a copy of the Periodic Table on World Science Day on Nov. 10.

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Lawmakers and regulators have tightened the requirements over the years after high-profile companies like Fruit of the Loom, Seagate and Tyco shifted some or all of their business to places like the Cayman Islands and Bermuda.

But with the trend seemingly on the rise, some say it is time for yet more stringent requirements. Among them is Rep. Sander Levin, a senior Democrat whose office distributed the CMS report.

Note that the response of Crustian legislators is to pass laws making it more difficult, not reforming the tax system. Show where their priorities lie.

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Coming soon to a Security Theater near you.

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President Barack Obama is fond of describing the deep inequality afflicting American society. And then he goes off to play golf. He’s getting near the 200-round mark for his entire presidency, a sporting feat perhaps worthy of Teddy Roosevelt for its sheer audacity.

Golf is the most unequal sport in America, demanding expensive fees or country club memberships. Yet if the president plays it so often, golf must be inherently patriotic–right?

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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel have been directed to no longer refer to illegal immigrant children crossing the border alone as “UACs” (unaccompanied alien children).

Instead these individuals are to be referred to as “unaccompanied children” in official correspondence, according to an internal ICE email obtained by the Center for Immigration Studies and shared with Breitbart News.

And the government prepares to cave once again.

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It’s no secret that one-percenters have occupied more than their share of Manhattan’s rent-controlled apartments. High profile freeloaders of the past include New Yorker editor William Shawn, singers Carly Simon and Cyndi Lauper, TV personality Alistair Cooke, Metropolitan Museum of Art Director Philippe de Montebello, former Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen, screenwriter Nora Ephron, Mick Jagger’s ex, Bianca, and Mayor Ed Koch (D). Manhattan Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-13th District) famously pigged out on four rent-controlled pads—three to live in and one for his campaign office.

Democrats – party of the 1%. That’s not on your copy, of course.

De Blasio, who ran on a promise to reduce inequality, is now enabling upper middle class New Yorkers to tap into these subsidies to serve their housing needs. In a city in which one in five households lives below the poverty line, spending limited government dollars so professionals earning six figures don’t have to leave their favored neighborhoods is obscene.

Suckers….

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Beginning on July 21, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) will increase its passenger security fees from $2.50 per flight to a flat rate of $5.60 each way. These fees help cover the TSA’s baggage and behavior screening programs.

Similar to the way concentration camps would remove gold fillings from the teeth of the people they gassed.

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Yeah, yeah, yeah, but at the end of the day, nobody will get fired, and nobody will go to jail. So this is all a circus act to entertain the Democrat base Great Unwashed.

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The Crust take care of their own. When Obama said, ‘We’re the ones we’ve been waiting for’, he didn’t mean you an me, he meant him and the rest of the Establishment.

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The Supreme Court ruled Monday in Harris v. Quinn that politicians can no longer force family members caring for disabled relatives into public sector unions.

In a 5-4 ruling, the court found the state of Illinois violated the constitution when imprisoned former Gov. Rod Blagojevich agreed to funnel a portion of home healthcare worker checks to political allies SEIU and AFSCME. The unions collected more than $50 million from about 20,000 such people over a five-year period.

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We’re here to help you! The Veterans administration keeps a database administrated by secret committees that lists vets as “disruptive” and “disgruntled,” which it then uses to restrict their treatment.

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I want to underline the basis of the Z-Street case: An IRS official admitted that this organization’s tax exempt status was being delayed merely because its “activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” Think about that. The IRS believes it can decide your tax liability and status based on your political opinion.

Doesn’t that capture in a nutshell the entire scandal, in which the IRS was used as a weapon to harass opponents of the Democratic Party and specifically of Barack Obama.

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A controversial, outspoken law professor who frequently bashes Republicans and specializes in poverty issues as a self-proclaimed champion of the poor earns $205,400 per year – for teaching one class per semester.

The University of North Carolina School of Law pays Professor Gene Nichol $205,400 annually for his one class per semester workload. On top of his teaching salary, he receives a $7,500 stipend as director of the law school’s Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity.

Doing well by doing good.

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Obamacare requires all doctors to keep electronic medical records. For every year a physician fails to keep their records electronically, they are fined. Outside companies typically charge doctors around $50,000 to provide this electronic filing service.

Brescia tried to comply with this mandate, but then the company he had hired to keep his records went bankrupt. Now the government Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services is charging him $18,000 for failure to comply.

People have been talking about how Obamacare hurts patients, but not enough attention has been paid to how it hurts health care providers.

“I think the Affordable Care Act is really going to eliminate small practices,” Brescia told his local news station. “You’re going to have to join an organization.”

And that’s one of its objectives. Democrats don’t like small businesses. They want big businesses that are easier to regulate and easier to squeeze for donations.

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U.S. diplomatic compounds overseas continue to be endangered by lax security measures and, in many cases, are highly vulnerable to potential attack, a fact that the State Department has failed to address for nearly 10 years, according to a newly released government oversight report.

Nearly two years after terrorists killed four Americans at a U.S. facility in Benghazi, Libya, the State Department still “has not fully developed and implemented a risk management policy for overseas facilities,” according to comprehensive new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

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I’ve always thought the EPA was full of shit, and here’s the proof.

And apparently I’m not the only one.

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Just as there used to be an NBC Blue network and an NBC Red network, we have an Establishment Blue (Democrat) Party and an Establishment Red (Republican) Party.

The Other McCain fills you in.

What’s going on here is that Hillary is caught between her lifelong allegiance to the Democrat Party — with its propaganda mythos of being for “the little guy” — and the reality of her own success. Politics can be a very lucrative business, and she and her husband have parlayed their investment in liberal politics into a fortune, or at least, what most people would consider a fortune.

The typical Democrat voter looks at a number like $100 million and can only think of hitting the lottery as a way to get it. But the Clintons haven’t gotten where they are in life by hanging around typical Democrat voters. Successful politicians spend most of their time in the company of the rich and powerful and, quite naturally, view their own financial situation in comparison to the power brokers and big-money donors whose support they must routinely solicit.

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The mayor of Springfield, Massachusetts has asked the federal government for a moratorium on sending refugees to the city, claiming that newly arrived families create a strain on city resources and the school system and do not receive sufficient aid from resettlement agencies.

Domenic Sarno, a Democrat, made his request in a letter sent Thursday to Rep. Richard E. Neal, D-Mass. Copies were also sent to Senators Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey, as well as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

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This ‘the iDog ate our e-mails’ schtick is not only a lie but a barefaced lie, to which the IRS cling because they know there’s no chance of anybody going to jail or losing their jobs under this President and this Attorney General.

Mafia Rule #2: If you’ve got the cops in your pocket you can break the law with impunity.

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Well, it’s a start.

Unfortunately, none of them were Congresscritters.

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Is food freedom—as I define it, your right to grow raise, produce, buy, sell, share, cook, eat, and drink the foods of your own choosing—really under attack?

Indeed it is. And as my definition makes clear, it’s not just that federal, state, and local governments have intruded on your right to eat what you want. It’s that the growers, the producers, and the sellers of food often face senseless and insurmountable regulatory obstacles.

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Thank God there isn’t anything more important going on in the world for the White House to deal with.

On the other hand, this ought to be within their demonstrated limited sphere of competence.

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Crapitalism at its worst.

A taxicab is a car remade by government, modified dozens of ways by edicts within subsections of articles of the city’s taxi code.

“Everywhere on this car has been regulated,” John Henry Assabil says. “Look at it!”

He throws up his arms in the direction of his gold-colored 2012 Ford Transit Connect. The car’s medallion number — 813 — is painted in black plain gothic figures (must be black plain gothic figures) on the driver’s-side hood, on both passenger doors and, for good measure, on the rear. Inside, there is a camera mounted over the rear-view mirror, a dispatch radio bolted to the console, a credit-card reader snapped to the passenger headrest.

From the back of Assabil’s seat hangs a sign — lamination required — spelling out the city’s fare structure: $3.25 for the base rate, $2 for the airport departure/arrival tax, $50 vomit cleanup fee. Everywhere, there are mandatory stickers. “That one costs a dollar,” Assabil says of a window decal reminding passengers to LOOK! before opening the door into the possible path of cyclists and pedestrians. “The fine for not having it is $100.”

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When Bill de Blasio crushed his Republican rival, Joe Lhota, by 49 points in 2013, more than a few New Yorkers were worried. De Blasio was an unabashed leftist who proudly served with Nicaragua’s Sandinistas and fervently condemned economic inequality, especially the pro-business administration of billionaire Mayor Bloomberg.

…

In a nutshell, de Blasio has turned out to be less a Lenin and more a Santa Claus and this pleases everyone. Unlike past soak-the-rich revolutionaries, he has ignored inequalities in power and instead uses government to bestow countless social welfare benefits on the poor. He has made the city’s poor so dependent on government for their daily existence that a revolution to upend the status quo is now unthinkable. Why would any poor person riot when that might interrupt the conveyor belt of government-supplied goodies? Thus understood, Mayor de Blasio’s policies are conservative in the sense of strengthening the status quo, even if that status quo undergirds capitalism.

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Apparently they didn’t love Big Brother enough.

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San Marino, California, Mayor Dennis Kneier has been cited for littering after he was caught on video tossing a bag full of dog feces onto a neighbor’s yard. The neighbor, Philip Lao, says he believes Kneier was upset by his opposition to a city dog park. Kneier faces a fine of $250 to $1,000.

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This is insane.

Like many of you I’ve been more or less averting my eyes helplessly from what I’ve come to call The Flood — i.e., the overwhelming number of “children” who have been permitted — nay, encouraged, enticed — to cross America’s southern border, where those nice people are waiting for them, herding the little peeps into buses and planes for an exciting journey even further into the interior of the continental forty-eight states. They will be provided for until their parents arrive to take them home to be joyfully reunited here and begin their new lives as Democrat voters. “Immigration laws”? They don’t need no stinkin’ laws, just do it. That’s the gist of the real “Dream Act” which is in reality America’s Waking Nightmare. It’s coming soon to a street near you.

Steve Sailer isn’t impressed.

Thank goodness that Mark Zuckerberg and Eric Cantor have a plan to address the crisis of soaring salaries among American workers by increasing H-1B visas. And kudos to the Obama Administration for having the foresight to invite in so many Central American adolescents to bolster America’s thinly stretched strategic supply of child labor.

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Can’t say that he’s wrong.

Freeberg has the skinny.

When seconds count, police respond in minutes.

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A new paper from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York seeks to inject more data into the discussion — and its findings suggest that the revolving door may be driven by an entirely different force. Instead of “regulatory capture,” the paper provides evidence consistent with “regulatory schooling” – the idea that people take regulatory jobs to become experts on complex regulations before cashing in with a private sector job. Instead of having an incentive to go easy on banks, the “regulatory schooling” hypothesis suggests regulators have an incentive to make rules more complex.

Free government training! Just like the military — except that it pays more, and you probably won’t get shot at! What’s not to like?

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The bad news is that we’re paying for them to come back as well.

The National Science Foundation (NSF) is spending tens of millions on its Antarctic “Artists and Writers” program, which includes taxpayer-funded trips for poets to visit the Southern Hemisphere.

The NSF has sent nearly 100 poets, writers, painters, and musicians to Antarctica over the past three decades, providing round trip economy air tickets from the United States as well as “in-kind” support such as food, shelter, and cold-weather clothing, which is returned by the artist at the completion of their trip.

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Prescott’s wonderfully bare-bones Ernest A. Love Field offers commercial service to LAX courtesy of Great Lakes Airlines. OK, it’s really courtesy of American taxpayers, who underwrite the operation to the tune of $2,094,235 (PDF) per year.

I’d add the technical detail that the service is offered on 19-seat Beechcraft 1900D turboprop planes, except that when we boarded, the plane was gutted. Ten of the seats had been ripped out.

“It’s because of me,” the pilot told a fellow passenger who asked about the very interesting configuration, though he meant the company’s pilots in general. “The FAA revised pilot qualifications last year for 19 seat planes. So now we only operate them with nine seats.”

…

For what it’s worth, Snyder sees no safety issue in the scheme, since the same pilots who were safely flying 19-seat planes are now operating the nine-seaters. It’s just an end-run around red tape.