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Alice Gilbert can vividly recall her first day of class last fall in a black studies course called “The Obama Phenomenon” offered by Professor Otis Madison at UC Santa Barbara.

That’s because before his introductory lecture was over, the scholar “warned Ted Cruz-supporting ‘teabaggers’ to get the hell out of his classroom before he sent them home to their mother in a body bag,” Gilbert said in an email interview with The College Fix.

“The comment is from memory, however there were other students with me in the class who can attest to them,” Gilbert said. “When Professor Madison made his comments in the very first lecture, I was taken aback and offended.”

Hm. I don’t know — if you’re trying to learn How To Be Black (and what else could ‘black studies’ be about?), it seems like an effective approach.

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In Illinois, there is no danger that extra cash will be squandered, because there is no extra cash. But state legislators know you can’t be too careful. So they are considering approving $100 million for the Barack Obama Presidential Library. Without that promise, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan fears, the president might put his monument somewhere else—Hawaii or New York or maybe Nairobi.

Without that promise, of course, Illinois would also save $100 million. A government that already spends and promises well beyond its means has no business taking on any new obligation it can possibly avoid. But if Illinois lawmakers were susceptible to logic or arithmetic, the state would not be insolvent to begin with.

Well, considering that for the next couple hundred years many people will be wanting to know What the fuck was he thinking?, it doesn’t seem excessive.

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No doubt Jay Carney has an appropriate lie ready.

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As if.

What happens to an economy when you do just about everything wrong? Say you spend $830 billion on a stimulus stuffed with make-work government-jobs programs and programs to pay people to buy new cars, you borrow $6 trillion, you launch a government-run health-care system that incentivizes businesses not to hire more workers, you raise tax rates on the businesses that hire workers and on the investors that invest in the businesses that hire workers, you print $3 trillion of paper money, you shut down an entire industry (coal), and try to regulate and restrain the one industry that actually is booming (oil and gas).

We made all of these imbecilic moves, and the wonder of it all is that the U.S. economy is growing at all. It’s a tribute to the indestructible Energizer Bunny that is the entrepreneurial U.S. economy that it keeps going and going even with all the obstacles. The problem is it isn’t going very fast. That’s what the Bureau of Economic Analysis told us this week when it reported that the GDP for the first quarter of the year grew an anemic 0.1 percent on an annual basis from January to March. The more meaningful measure of growth, private-sector GDP, rose by a still-meager 0.2 percent.

‘Put not your faith in princes, nor the sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.’ — Psalm 146.

Steve Sailer deals with some inconvenient truth.

The brighter folks within the Obama Administration are starting to figure out what I’ve been saying for some time: that a lot of the hype over Big Data and apps and the like are businesses trying to get around traditional regulations, including regulations against discrimination. For example, one of the costs that government imposes on licensed taxi drivers is that they are supposed to drive customers wherever they want. But with the new ride sharing apps, drivers can just look up possible gigs offered on their smartphones and say, “Florence and Normandie? Let me Google that … uh-oh. Re-ject-ed! Ventura and Laurel Canyon? Accepted!”

Back in 1982, my Advanced Marketing Models professor in B-School got to talking about predictive systems used by lenders, insurance companies, and the like. Somebody asked if they really work to identify bad risks. Oh, sure, they really worked, he replied. The problem is that the use of truly powerful predictive factors, like race, have been outlawed and the government is leery of the use of approximate factors like zip code. So they don’t work as well as they did a few years ago. This is a quiet way for the white majority to subsidize the black and brown minority in terms of mortgage defaults, insurance rates, etc.

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Even Voices of the Crust are waking up to the reality.

No matter what the exact number is, there’s no doubt the percentage of non-paying Obamacare enrollees will be much, much higher than anything private insurers have dealt with in the past. Default rates in that business usually run in the very low single digits. The kind of responsible and engaged people who got their own health insurance in the past tended to also be responsible enough to pay their bills on time. That’s one of the things that made the health insurance self-coverage business so good for so long.

But no one should be surprised by what looks like a serious problem with payments under the ACA. Because the same force that stopped tens of millions of Americans from getting health-care coverage of any kind even before the ACA is still at work now … and you still can’t fix stupid.

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I think they actually mean ‘more than it already is’.

The Affordable Care Act’s risk corridor program has drawn plenty of criticism from Republicans who have dubbed it a “bailout for insurance companies.” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) even introduced a bill to entirely scrap the program, which is intended to offset insurance company losses for selling policies on new exchanges. Now, it turns out, a little-known technical flaw in the law’s language might do that for him.

Unfortunately, the entire program is a ‘technical flaw’.

Read it.

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

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help … ourselves to your stuff.

The Antiplanner points out some inconvenient truth.

It’s been more than three years since much of Christchurch, New Zealand, was devastated by an earthquake, and recovery is far from complete. Now, a new report from the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development blames the government for hampering the recovery.

…

This is a familiar tale: after a natural disaster, instead of letting people rebuild, government planners attempt to impose their ideals of what the city should look like on the supposedly blank landscape. The same thing happened in New Orleans: people from New Urban architect Andrés Duany to the free-market Mercatus Center agree that government planners have impeded recovery of that city after Hurricane Katrina.

Steve Sailer turns over a rock to show us what crawls underneath.

A rare social policy success over the last generation was the 1998 rollback of “bilingual” education in California when Proposition 227 passed with 59% of the vote. The problem with “bilingual” education was that it worked to keep the children of immigrants monolingual in the language of their homes until after they’d passed the time period when they can most easily learn a new language. Ron Unz’s initiative has made English dominant in the schools, and the kids like it. English is cool.

Therefore, the Democrats in Sacramento want to repeal it.

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Covington, the firm where Eric H. Holder Jr. practiced law before becoming attorney general, will announce on Tuesday that Mythili Raman is the latest former senior Justice Department official to join its ranks. Ms. Raman, who will be a partner in Covington’s white-collar crime and litigation practices, led the Justice Department’s criminal division until last month.

“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.” — Luke 16:9.

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But imagine running into Border Patrol agents conducting a roving patrol on an isolated road, with only your children for company. That happened to Clarisa Christiansen, who lives outside of Tucson about 40 miles from the border. She says the agents threatened her with a Taser, forced her from her car as her kids watched—and slashed her tire for good measure.

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The 2014 edition of Wayne Crews’ annual Ten Thousand Commandments report comes out today; you can read it here. The report gives a big-picture view of the size and scope of federal regulations. This is something the government should be doing on its own as a basic transparency measure. But they don’t, so Wayne is kind enough to fill in the gap.

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The schools’ Department of Gender and Women’s Studies is offering the program because it believes biological science is “rife with sexism” and should be changed to reflect feminist thinking. Feminist biology aims to develop new theory and methods in biology that reflects feminist approaches.

I am not making this up.

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You can thank regulations and licensing rules for pricing child care out of the reach of many lower-income families while leaving wealthier women with gray market or black market solutions.

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

Happy Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day! Or as I prefer to think of it, Barack Obama/Samantha Power Sanctimony Reversal Day.

Never forget: Here is the current U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, and then-adviser to candidate Barack Obama, delivering an emetic of a video plea to Armenian Americans in February 2008, assuring them that when it comes to the April 24 “National Day of Remembrance of Man’s Inhumanity to Man”—in which U.S. presidents are (according to House Joint Resolution 247 from 1984) “authorized and requested to issue a proclamation calling upon the people of the United States to observe such day as a day of remembrance for all the victims of genocide, especially the one and one-half million people of Armenian ancestry who were the victims of the genocide perpetrated in Turkey between 1915 and 1923, and in whose memory this date is commemorated by all Armenians and their friends throughout the world”—Obama as president would at long last “call a spade a spade.”

‘Flounder! You fucked up! You trusted us!’

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

Actually, I’m most greatly surprised that a Voice of the Crust blew the whistle on their peeps in the government. Must be a slow news day.

Read it.

Paul Kupiec found that the average bank employee made $49,540 in 2012, similar to the average annual salary across all occupations, which is $45,790.

The average compensation at the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and the consumer Financial Protection Bureau was more than $190,000 in 2012. The Federal Reserve, which likely has even higher salaries, does not release its employees’ salaries.

Mark Steyn points and laughs.

Happy Earth Day! April 22nd is the day when President Obama and the rest of the gang demonstrate their commitment to saving the planet by flying in to plant a tree somewhere. And say what you like but, when you’re looking for fellows who know how to dig a huge hole, Obama and Harry Reid are pretty much at the top of the list. My township in New Hampshire is 90 per cent forested, but you can never have too many trees, so on Earth Day I always like to plant a couple more, get the tree cover in my town up to 97, 98 per cent, whatever it takes to send climate change into reverse. Of course, it’s always a big pain in the neck the morning after Earth Day, when the holiday’s over, and it’s time to take down the trees. So these days I generally just plant artificial trees with the nice silvery tinselly branches, and then you can just take them down and put ’em in the attic till next year’s Earth Day.

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The United States has spent much of the last 30 years subsidizing ethanol production under the pretense that it’s more environmentally friendly than gasoline. I say “pretense” because for years it’s been completely obvious that corn ethanol is actually worse for the environment, that the overall production cycle stokes global warming even more than typical fuel, and that, in addition, it drives up world food prices, contributing to global hunger problems in the process. Also, it makes your gasoline less efficient. And yet this is something that we’ve repeatedly mandated and paid for.

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The study, published in PLOS ONE, looks at data collected from 11 Oregon elementary schools where chocolate milk was banned from cafeteria sales. The idea behind these bans was to get kids to switch from chocolate milk to less sugary and more nutritious options, such as regular milk. Wanna guess how that turned out?

According to Cornell University researchers, the chocolate milk ban resulted in students buying 10 percent less milk overall and wasting 29 percent more of the milk they did purchase. At the same time, the school district saw a 7 percent decrease in overall lunch program participation, which may also be related to the chocolate milk ban.

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Last week, Scott Keyes, a senior reporter with the progressive news site ThinkProgress, reported on the idiotic outcome of one of the latest of such bans.

In that case, the city of Birmingham, Ala. has barred a local pastor from sharing food with the homeless from a church-owned vehicle because he doesn’t have… a food truck permit.

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Obama’s controversial DOE green energy loan program sparked a firestorm when Government Accountability Institute (GAI) President Peter Schweizer revealed that 80% of all $20.5 billion in DOE loans were given to Obama’s top campaign donors. In his New York Times bestseller Throw Them All Out, Schweizer called the Obama green energy loan slush fund “the greatest–and most expensive–example of crony capitalism in American history.”

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

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Wade Pulliam, manager of advanced concepts at Logos Technologies, told Defense Tech that the US military has a growing need “to operate small units far from logistical support.” So, he said, it will “increasingly rely on adaptable, efficient technologies like this hybrid-electric motorcycle.” Military officials have also enlisted a company called BRD Motorcycles to help build the bike, which will be used by special operations teams. There has been no announcement, however, about when the motorcycle will be completed — or where it will be deployed first.

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What’s the point of the Department of Commerce? If not for the Census and the Patent Office, the department would function as little more than a one-stop shop for special interests. Don’t believe me? Look at its record.

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Obama once publicly stated, “we’re gonna punish our enemies and … reward our friends.”  Executive Branch action on the Comcast/Time Warner deal will demonstrate if this caveat applies to merger policy.  A number of Congressional Committees will review the merger, including a Senate Judiciary hearing on April 9.

In addition to analyzing financial details of this merger, Administration history of crony capitalism screams for Congressional inquiry to determine if the Executive gives preferential treatment to corporations with friendly donors.   Merger approval or denial should be based on objective analysis, not which political party enjoyed the loudest clink in its campaign jar.

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

Read it.

“I ran for office pledging to make our government leaner and smarter and more consumer friendly,” President Barack Obama reminded a group of small businessmen at a January 2012 White House gathering.

You can see why the audience needed a refresher course. The president’s two signature legislative accomplishments, the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform, had heaped unprecedented amounts of regulation onto the business sector at a time when full-time jobs were scarcer than they’d been in three decades. So to bolster his economic bona fides, Obama was now advocating greater executive-branch power to make the federal bureaucracy more responsive to business concerns. “Let me be clear,” he vowed. “I will only use this authority for reforms that result in more efficiency, better service, and a leaner government.”

The target of Obama’s tweaking that day was the Department of Commerce, the century-old rectangular behemoth on Constitution Avenue. Currently headed by the wealthy Chicago businesswoman Penny Pritzker, whose family fortune derives from the Hyatt hotel chain, Commerce’s mission is to “promote job creation and improved living standards for all Americans by creating an infrastructure that promotes economic growth, technological competitiveness, and sustainable development.” Yet even the president recognizes that Commerce, like many other federal agencies at the nexus of the government and the private sector, has often been better at promoting its own bewildering bureaucratic growth.

Mark Steyn looks at the Bundy incident in Nevada.

These are low-level bureaucrats from a minor branch of the vast bottomless alphabet soup of federal agencies, and they’re running around pretending to be elite commandos. The county sheriff is supposed to be “the law”. But he had to broker a deal to get the BLM out of there because in America every jumped-up pen-pusher from the Bureau of Compliance has his own branch of “the law”, a personal SWAT team to act as judge, jury, executioner and, if necessary, as in Nevada, as army of occupation. In most parts of the developed world, there is “the police”, and that’s it. If a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Paperwork wants to have you seized, he has to persuade a judge to issue a warrant and then let the local coppers handle it as they see fit. There is an obvious conflict of interest when every tinpot regulatory agency has its own enforcement arm, and it imputes to even legitimate cases the whiff of something malodorous and, indeed, despotic.

…

It reminds me of 19th century Ireland, when most of the big estates belonged to absentee landlords in England. It’s an even less attractive arrangement when the absentee landlord is a distant national government. There is no need for the vast land holdings of the United States Government, especially given their ever more unpleasant and bullying attitude to public access to the land. As I’ve said, a 21st century America has fewer rights on “the people’s land” than a 13th century English peasant had in the King’s forest. If I ever do run for Senate in New Hampshire, my platform will include a pledge to return the White Mountain “National Forest” to the people of the state.

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

Read it.

Last month I noted that a GAO report had found that last school year’s disastrous rollout of the updated USDA National School Lunch Program helped drive 1.6 million paying students from the lunch rolls. The new rules led some schools to abandon the program, as I reported in 2012. What’s more, the new rules, championed by First Lady Michelle Obama, have also resulted in unprecedented mountains of food waste.

Big Brother isn’t much of a chef. And Big Sister Michelle doesn’t have a clue.

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

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The Texas EquuSearch Mounted Search and Recovery Team (TXEQ) saves lives. These volunteers conduct free search-and-rescue missions with remote-controlled airplanes. They’ve used these drones to find more than 300 missing people across the U.S. and seven other countries. Too bad, says the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA): The organization is violating federal drone policy.

John Stossel turns over a rock.

The tax code is now complex enough that most Americans now hire Bob, or his equivalent. Instead of inventing things, doing charity work or just having fun, we waste weeks (and billions of dollars) on tax preparation. And we change our lives to suit the wishes of politicians.

“What the tax code is doing is trying to choose our values for us,” complains Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute.

I think I choose my own values, but it’s true that politicians use taxes to manipulate us. Million-dollar mortgage deductions steer us to buy bigger houses, and solar tax credits persuaded me to put solar panels on my roof.

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Barack. Hossein. Obama. Um, um, um.

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Barack. Hossein. Obama. Um, um, um.

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Aunt Zeituni’s reason for getting asylum may even top Ibragim Todashev’s, which was more or less: My dad back home in Russia is only three levels down the org chart from Vladimir Putin, so if the 82nd Airborne ever installs Masha Gessen in the Kremlin to bring Russia democracy, good and hard, well, our family could face repercussions.

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Among the problems identified in the latest report is the lack of any consolidated system at the Department of Defense to contract for health care professionals. “For example, we identified 24 separate task orders for contracted medical assistants at the same military treatment facility.” Now, multiply that across the entire military establishment.

And the creeping police state around us may be intrusive and presumptuous—but it sucks at cooperation. The Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and the Treasury are independently modernizing their wireless communications systems. “As a result, their communications systems, which represent hundreds of millions of dollars in investment, may not be interoperable and may not enable the most effective response to natural disasters, criminal activities, and domestic terrorism.”

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During the White House briefing Monday, reporters asked Carney to explain why an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute found the median salary for female White House staffers was 12 percent lower than those of male staffers.

Carney struggled to provide an explanation, barely mustering “We, as an institution here, have aggressively, addressed this challenge. And obviously though, at the 88 cents that you cite- that is not 100, but it is better than the national average.”

The biter bit, forsooth.

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Although President Obama claimed victory on Tuesday due to the 7.1 million people who have signed up on federal or state exchanges for his health care law, the Affordable Care Act has been anything but ‘affordable.’

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Officials at Salem High School in Plymouth, Michigan, have agreed to take down bleachers and a score board paid for and built by parents for the school’s baseball team. After an anonymous complaint, the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights found the school was in violation of federal law because the baseball facilities are now superior to the girl’s softball field. The school can’t afford to upgrade the softball field, so it had to take down the amenities at the baseball field.

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North Carolina resident Steve Cooksey was ill, obese, and struggling with type 2 diabetes. In 2009, after being rushed to the hospital, nearly in a coma, he decided to do everything in his power to get healthy. By following a low-carbohydrate diet, Cooksey claims he was able to drop 45 pounds and get off insulin and drugs. He documented his story on his personal blog, where he provided advice to others practicing the “paleo” diet that he believes saved his life.

That sounds like a win-win situation, but not according to the North Carolina Board of Dietetics and Nutrition (NCBDN), which decided to go after Cooksey for the “crime” of offering nutritional advice without a dietitian’s license. In 2011, it sent Cooksey a letter, claiming that his blog, by giving readers “unlicensed dietetic advice,” even for free, violated North Carolina law. The NCBDN included a 19-page copy of his online writings with comments in red ink pointing out what he could and could not say.

Even more surprising, the notice asserted that Cooksey’s private conversations with readers and friends via email and telephone also constituted a violation of the state’s dietitian licensing law!

Government will git you if you don’t watch out….

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A federal regulation that took effect this week imposes a 15-cent assessment on every Christmas tree cut and sold in the U.S. or imported into the country.

The reason behind the fee: to fund a national marketing program.

These are trying times for Christmas tree growers. An industry task force on tannenbaums reported that the market share for fresh-cut Christmas trees in the U.S. declined by 6% from 1965 to 2008, while the market share for artificial trees increased by 655% in that same period.

A few years ago, the task force pleaded with the federal government for help, and this week the U.S. Department of Agriculture put a present under its tree: a regulation that creates a marketing program to match the heavy advertising the fake-tree industry does so well.

Included in the regulation, which was first published in 2011 but takes effect now, is the 15-cent assessment to pay for the program. The hold on the regulation was lifted as a result of a provision in the 900-plus-page farm bill, which President Barack Obama signed into law in February.

This is the very essence of fascism: Government imposing regulations on citizens in order to benefit a favored corporate interest.

Sarah Hoyt reminds us of some inconvenient truth.

As we’ve talked about before, the entire welfare bureaucracy seems to keep people there, once they fall in. This also I suspect leads even competent parents to the sort of state of despondent despair where they can’t make rational decisions.

But that is precisely the point. To render assistance to the children, we got through the parents. And if the parents weren’t broken to begin with, the system breaks them.

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The communications giant Comcast announced in February that it would buy Time Warner Cable for $45 billion, creating the largest cable provider in America, with more than 33 million customers. That is about one third of the U.S. cable and satellite television market. FCC approval is required for the merger to go into effect. Critics of the deal say it would lessen competition and lead to even shoddier customer service. They are probably right, as all of us will soon find out, because there is little chance the merger will be stopped. Comcast, Time Warner, and their political fixers have spent years preparing for this moment—by buying off the Democratic Party.

Comcast, which employs more than 100 lobbyists, spent almost $19 million last year on lobbying activities. Its president and CEO, Brian L. Roberts, is a golf buddy of President Obama’s, and a Democratic donor who has contributed thousands of dollars not only to the president’s campaigns, but also to the Democratic Party of Pennsylvania, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the DNC Services Corporation, and to Steny Hoyer, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Bob Casey. Roberts’ executive vice president, David Cohen, is a former aide to Democratic bigwig Ed Rendell. Cohen skirts lobbying regulations through loopholes, has raised more than $2 million for Obama since 2007, and in 2011 hosted a DNC fundraiser at which the president called him “friend.” Cohen has visited the White House 14 times since 2010, including two visits to the Oval Office. He attended the recent dinner for President Hollande of France.

He who has the gold makes the rules.

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But will anything be done about it? Of course not. Too many deep-pocket contributors have an economic interest in the profitable little tricks that their favorite congresscritters have placed in the dark recesses of the current code.

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Aside from the fact that the number of people signing up (under government compulsion) was never one of the core objections to Obamacare.

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Hey, Joe Camel can afford some primo lobbyists.

The State Department may have gotten a pretty good deal on the camel, since Baldessari has sold even less inspiring works for millions. But they could have done even better if they had opened the opportunity to competition. The department didn’t do that though, insisting that only this camel could satisfy the “unique artistic criteria” for the embassy.

After all, it’s not as if the American taxpayer has anything better to do with that money.

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If you consider stealing from people and wasting their money an economy.

And you’re paying for it. Aren’t you proud?