Read it. And watch the video.

The joys of living in a Blue State.

Read it.

When Oregon land-use laws and rules were written back in the 1970s, timber companies cut down trees, hauled them to the mill, cut them into boards, and sold them to homebuilders. Now, some homebuilders go into the forest, cut down trees, piece together a home on site, then carefully dismantle it to take to the homebuyer’s lot for final assembly.

The problem is that piecing together the home is considered secondary forest processing, which is illegal under Oregon land-use rules for land zoned “timber resource.” As a result, some log homebuilders are being regulated out of business.

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

Rules can be updated, but that takes a lot of time and effort and the mom-and-pop log homebuilders can’t afford to do it or wait for it. In the meantime, those rules stifle innovation and create a bias towards big corporations, which can afford to lobby for changes. They also lead to crony capitalism, in which the wealthy are able to get rules changed for themselves while everyone else pays the cost.

Yup. That’s the way things are in the Obamanation.

Bryan Caplan, a Real Economist, lays it out for ‘progressives’ and other dimwits.

 Walmart’s critics often argue that food stamps, Medicaid, and other poverty programs subsidize its labor force.  Since government pays a big part of its workers’ living expenses, Walmart doesn’t have to.  Is this true?

As long as non-workers remain eligible for poverty programs, the answer is no.  This is basic supply-and-demand.  When the government offers free stuff to people with low incomes, the marginal benefit of work falls – and so does labor supply.  When labor supply falls, hours of work go down, and wages rise.  This could be very nice from the point of view of Walmart’s workers.  From the point of view of Walmart’s stockholders however, it’s bad.

Not convinced?  Ask yourself: “If I ran Walmart, would I favor higher unemployment benefits?”  Of course not.  Why not?  Because higher unemployment benefits make it easier to not apply for a job at Walmart.  The same goes for any government program that makes idleness less unpalatable.

Read it.

Amtrak has so many empty seats on its trains that it is creating a writers-in-residence program offering free long-distance train rides to writers provided that they tweet their journeys. Despite my skepticism for government subsidies to trains, I love trains and have always dreamed of living on one. So I’m ready to take up my residency.

…

Should Amtrak offer residencies to photographers? Painters? Model railroaders? On average, Amtrak trains only fill half their seats, so there is plenty of room for this program’s expansion.

Read it.

Who will succeed John Dingell now that the long-time legislator is finally retiring from Congress at the age of 87? The smart money is on Debbie Dingell, the congressman’s wife who is three decades younger.

If this happens it will continue the family’s eight-plus decade hold on the seat. John Dingell succeeded his father in 1956.

Ever notice that political ‘dynasties’ are all either Democrats, like the Gores and Kennedys, or semi-Democrats, like the Bushes?

Read it.

With numerous Obamacare cancer patients now telling their nightmare stories, Democrats have declared war against individuals willing to share their struggles with fellow Americans.

Democrats’ latest target: Michigan cancer patient Julie Boonstra. Boonstra says attacks by Democratic Senate candidate Gary Peters’s campaign against her new Obamacare TV ad will not silence her.

“I’m very upset with them for trying to stop my ad,” Boonstra told Fox News. “They’re not scaring me. Cancer scares me. The growth of my cancer, possibly losing my life over this, that scares me. I battle cancer every day. They’re not going to intimidate me.”

Read it.

These are certainly among the basic lies that were repeated over and over by Obama and the Democrats leading up to passage of the law:

1. If you like your plan, you can keep your plan.

2. If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor.

3. Families will on average save $2500 annually.

4. Obamacare won’t add a dime to the deficit.

Read it.

The program will also come with some $250 million in private funding, but the $70 million in federal seed money will come from the Department of Defense. President Obama has arranged the funding without Congressional action as part of his pledge to go around Congress.

Read it.

 Back in late 2011 after the Occupy Wall Street protests, Fiat-Chrysler chief executive officer Sergio Marchionne gave a speech in Toronto to decry what he called “the most inane displays of greed.”

The reference was to behaviour he had observed while serving on various company boards over the years.

Just two years before that speech, Chrysler sought (and received) $2.9 billion from Canada’s taxpayers and $12.4 billion from the U.S. government, amid a doomsday scenario for the automotive sector. It was rather cheeky of Marchionne, then, to try and take the side of the “99 per cent.” Chrysler has always been a poster boy for the sort of avarice that some companies inflict on 100 per cent of taxpayers: the ever-constant demand that governments ante up money or a company will shift production to another jurisdiction.

And ‘progressives’ everywhere will criticize capitalism for this.

Read it.

But here is the real point: Why is Mrs. Boonstra in this situation at all? She had health insurance coverage that she understood, with which she was perfectly happy, and which provided her with the critical medical services and medicines that she needs to have a chance to stay alive. She was lied to. President Obama told her, dozens of times, that if she liked her health insurance, she could keep it. Other Democrats, like Gary Peters, told her the same thing, even though they knew it was not true. They lied because they needed to lie to pass legislation to concentrate power in Washington. Now, as the result of the Democrats’ lies, Mrs. Boonstra, like millions of other Americans, has lost the insurance policy that she had, and is forced to scramble around to try to cobble together coverage, via a pathetically dysfunctional exchange system, in hopes that it might turn out to be nearly as good as the coverage the Democratic Party took away from her. She is still trying to figure out what her new plan will cost (and when) and what it will and will not cover, even as she continues to battle for her life.

Read it.

A useful reference.

Read it. And watch the video.

Amy Julia Harris goes into detail about all the contracting problems, the resident complaints, the frustrations of the federal government over the mismanagement and the defenses by the city’s mayor, who would no doubt be calling for the owners head on a plate if these were private apartments and not publicly subsidized housing. Instead it’s Barack Obama’s fault for spending money on wars and bailing out banks. No, really; if you don’t want to read all of Harris’ reporting, watch the KQED segment below….

Read it.

That’s Affordable Care for you.

Read it.

Why take a chance? That’s all I’m sayin’.

Read it.

It’s about how when Peretz Partensky called 911 when he stumbled across an injured biker on a San Francisco street, it led to him being shoved, tackled, kneed in the temple, having an existing elbow injury exacerbated, cuffed face down on the street, his hands stomped on, arrested, told he “was going to be a problem,” denied medical attention, stripped and shoved into solitary confinement, then let out the next day. When he went to court he had his charges summarily dismissed.

Read it.

Thoughtcrime comes to the United States.

And the fine print of the latest announcement from the Administration is worse than the terrible headlines. This rule includes a provision that says you have to have the right motives for having a certain number of employees to be in compliance with Obamacare. Bear with me, that’s right: You must certify to the IRS – under the threat of perjury – that the reasons for your employee head count have nothing to do with your opposition to or avoidance of Obamacare. This president doesn’t just selectively enforce the law as he sees fit; now he is actually inventing new crimes.  It’s jaw-dropping that if you fall below 100 employees, the burden will be on you to prove that you meant no disrespect to Obamacare.  I can’t wait to see the video of the first Democrat who tries to defend this new threat of prosecution within Obamacare.  In fact, look for the White House to fix this and somehow drop this provision altogether.  It’s completely indefensible.

This from the Washington Post, the most certifiable Voice of the Crust around. (And if you’re betting that the White House ‘fixes’ this, I’ll be happy to take the other side of that bet.)

Read it.

The Transportation Security Administration is being criticized yet again, this time for embarrassing a cancer victim by proclaiming his incontinence issues to other travelers and strip-searching him before allowing the man to proceed.

The incident was detailed in an anonymous blog post on CafeMom.com, where the man’s wife claimed a TSA agent yelled that her husband was “wearing a diaper.” Another agent then reportedly laughed at the situation before escorting the man into another room for an inspection.

Read it.

The Obama administration announced on Monday that it would postpone enforcement of a federal requirement for medium-size employers to provide health insurance to employees and allow larger employers more flexibility in how they provide coverage.

Totally ignoring the fact that the law nowhere gives the administration the authority to do that. They just decided to ignore the law.

Read it. And watch the video.

Elijah Cummings is a key player in covering up and disseminating disinformation regarding the criminal misconduct of the IRS. From his perch as the ranking minority member of the House Oversight Committee, Cummings does his best to sow confusion as the committee pursues its investigation of the IRS. My daughter Eliana took a look at a piece of the Cummings story this past June in “The IRS’s best friend in Congress.”

Read it.

A number of years ago, a manager in my office was embezzling thousands of dollars in travel funds. His actions were common knowledge, but other managers, including a currently high ranking executive in the office of chief counsel, did not report him. I did report his conduct to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA), but they did not investigate the matter for a considerable length of time. After I complained to my local congressman’s office, TIGTA finally forwarded the matter to the office of chief counsel to be handled internally. Eventually, the office of chief counsel made the manager pay the money back, but took no other disciplinary action, even though others who committed the same type of scheme were punished severely.

Read it.

And who could blame them? Eric Holder is rather revolting.

First it was the Justice Department’s career prosecutors; now it’s FBI agents. The federal employees responsible for fighting crime are simply unable to digest the anti-law enforcement slop being served up by their boss, Attorney General Holder.

The FBI’s beef is with the selection of Debo Adegbile as Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division. The FBI Agents Association’s opposition is based on the way in which Adegbile defended, and led the cheers for, cop killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

The problem isn’t that Adegbile defended Abu-Jamal. The problem, as Bill Otis explains, is that Adegbile led a street campaign to denounce the policeman Abu-Jamal killed, Officer Daniel Faulkner, and the police in general, as an occupying fascist army.

Read it.

With just two days before America hits the debt ceiling deadline, Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) announced on Tuesday his desire to raise it.

“The goal here is to increase the debt ceiling,” said Boehner. “Nobody wants to default on our debt.”

Republicans = Democrats with a variable time delay + hot air.

Read it.

Some patients in California are finding out that once they’ve managed to sign up for a health insurance plan through the state exchange, it still may be difficult to determine whether or not a doctor actually accepts their insurance plan.

Obamacare — the gift that keeps on giving.

Read it.

There are three basic ways in which Obama’s behavior exceeds that of any his predecessors.

The first is that Obama is using executive orders and actions to alter his own legislation. It’s one thing to claim that you are forced to act because Congress will not. It’s quite another thing to re-write the law after Congress has done what you asked–and after you have offered, time and time again, to entertain formal amendments to the legislation. Obama has simply invoked executive authority to cover up his own errors. That’s unprecedented.

The second way in which Obama’s abuse of executive power is different is that he has done it to prevent the legislature from acting. It is now widely acknowledged that the president issued his “Dream Act by fiat” in 2012 not just because Congress wouldn’t pass his version of immigration reform, but to outflank Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), who was preparing his own version, embarrassing Obama among Latino voters. Such pettiness is rare.

The third way in which Obama’s behavior is unusual is that he commands sweeping executive power on some issues while arguing, on other issues, that he has no power to act. The president’s recent speech about the NSA surveillance programs is a prime example of such self-contradiction. There is no constitutional doctrine behind the president’s executive orders, actions, and omissions: there is just pure, cynical political expediency.

Read it.

The concept was first presented as a corollary of his broader “Parkinson’s law” spoof of management. He dramatizes this “law of triviality” with the example of a committee’s deliberations on an atomic reactor, contrasting it to deliberations on a bicycle shed. As he put it: “The time spent on any item of the agenda will be in inverse proportion to the sum [of money] involved.” A reactor is used because it is so vastly expensive and complicated that an average person cannot understand it, so one assumes that those that work on it understand it. On the other hand, everyone can visualize a cheap, simple bicycle shed, so planning one can result in endless discussions because everyone involved wants to add a touch and show personal contribution.

Read it.

From the “If you did this, not only would you be facing jail time but your state’s attorney general would send out a press release about it” files, a Mesa, Ariz., police officer who is receiving monthly worker’s compensation checks and successfully arranged for a medical retirement is racing in triathlons.

To quote John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia: ‘Get a government job!’

Read it.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama. (um, um, um)

Read it.

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

Read it.

The United States government paid for a study to analyze a Defense Department study that evaluated a series of other studies.

This really happened.

How much taxpayer money did the government spend in order to study a study of its studies?

Answer: The government doesn’t know.

I am not making this up.

Read it.

The top enforcement official at the Commodities and Futures Trading Commission, David Meister, is leaving to join Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, the New York Times reports….

Read it.

The former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., Sheila Bair, has reportedly joined the board of directors of Banco Santander, SA.

And 3D Systems, a 3-D printing company, has reportedly named Neal Orringer, a former senior adviser to the secretary of commerce on manufacturing policy and director of manufacturing at the Pentagon, as its new vice president for alliances and partnerships.

‘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

Read it.

Thank you, Barack Hussein Obama … um, um, um….

Read it.

Just in case you haven’t been keeping track, which I confess that I have not, since Hillary doesn’t loom all that large on my horizon.

On Monday, former Secretary of State and First Lady Hillary Clinton spoke at the National Automobile Dealers Association in New Orleans – where she quickly revealed that she has not driven a car for the past 18 years. At a convention of auto dealers.

And why would she? Driving themselves is for The Little People.

Read it.

Blue-ribbon panels were much in the news this past week. The Presidential Commission on Election Administration came out with a report making the case for expanding early voting options, allowing online voter registration and eliminating long lines at the polls. The little-known Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board issued an analysis concluding that the National Security Agency’s domestic phone records surveillance program is illegal and ineffectual.

Know what else is ineffectual? Recommendations from groups like these.

…

Ultimately, they’re the equivalent of those participation trophies handed out to every kid who plays in a sports league. They look nice on the shelf, but you can’t take them seriously.

Read it.

When you’re the Crust,
You’re the Crust all the way
From your first GS job
To your lobbyist pay!

When you’re the Crust
Let ‘em do what they can,
You won’t have to resign,
You won’t land in the can!

You’re always employed—
You’ve got remuneration…
If someone’s annoyed
With your administration,
You’ve got salvation!

Read it.

Tanaka will pay a combined marginal income tax rate of 56.1 percent – over half of his contract. For New York state and local taxes alone he will lose an estimated $2,811,257 a year. The combined marginal income tax rate Tanaka will pay is comprised of the federal, state and local tax rates, plus the Medicare payroll tax. The chart below shows Tanaka’s tax burdens as compared between the differing franchises.

After all, he didn’t build that.

Welcome to America, kid. Be careful not to step in the leadership.

Read it.

Betcha they find a problem. That is, after all, their job.

The Food and Drug Administration says it is conducting new studies of the safety of caramel coloring in soft drinks and other foods, even though previous research has shown no identifiable health risk.

The function of government is to hire and pay government workers, and they can’t do that without discovering a problem that only they are uniquely qualified to ‘fix’. The first step in the process is ‘panic with scary headlines’.

The agency’s announcement comes in response to a study by Consumer Reports that shows varying levels of 4-methylimidazole — an impurity formed in some caramel coloring at low levels during the manufacturing process — in 12 brands of soda from five manufacturers.

Ah, yes, Consumer Reports! What better group to report on consumers?

Read it.

Although the book is not what the advertising promises, it really does provide an accurate picture of life inside CIA. Its exclusive focus on how bureaucrats jostle and feel about one another is entirely consistent with my eight years of experience dealing with CIA’s top levels on the U.S. Senate’s behalf. The substance of any matter notwithstanding, it always came down to which bureaucrat would gain or lose what. The bureaucrats’ personal interests come first. The welfare and reputation of the agency come second. Everything else is incidental. This book seems to describe a collective human ice cream cone licking itself.

Read it.

It’s no secret that when it comes to education, America gets a D-minus. In the most recent global tests – scored on a 1,000-point scale – the U.S. scored a 481 in math, 497 in science, and 498 in reading comprehension. In comparison, international averages were 494, 501, and 496, and the U.S. lags well behind the world’s leaders, a list which includes some of the usual suspects like China, Japan and the Netherlands, but also has Latvia, Slovenia and Vietnam.

Why is the world’s largest economy so bad at teaching its children? One growing school of thought is that the U.S. education system, in its laudable quest to make sure the worst students reach minimal standards, is cheating its best pupils.

“Gifted children are a precious human-capital resource,” said David Lubinski, a professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University, in a recent news release. They are the “future creators of modern culture and leaders in business, health care, law, the professoriate, and STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics].” With fellow researcher Camilla Benbow, Lubinski’s team at Vanderbilt is tracking some of our country’s best and brightest. His project, known as the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY), although something of a misnomer, since it tests verbal abilities as well, began in 1971 at Julian Stanley’s lab at Johns Hopkins. From there it moved to Iowa State in 1986, and then again to Vanderbilt in 1998, where it has been ever since.

Read it.

New York City’s new First Lady, Chirlane McCray, will not receive a salary for her work at City Hall, the mayor’s office said this evening.

However, her new chief of staff, former Al Sharpton aide Rachel Noerdlinger, will make $170,000 a year. She will be based in the Office of the Mayor, and will be paid as a City Hall employee, the office said.

Other details on Ms. McCray’s staff, office, and issue portfolio have not yet been determined, but she is not expected to have a large staff footprint, the office said.

No-show jobs typically don’t.

Nice work,if you can get it;
And you can get it, if you’re a fashionable minority.

Read it.

Fox News and conservative radio figure Sean Hannity has announced he is going to follow Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and leave the high-tax state of New York for either Florida or Texas, which is something to remember the next time the left claims, as it regularly does, that the idea that the rich move away because of high taxes is phony.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

As the New York Times reported on Saturday, the Obamacare law, “adopted nearly four years ago, says employer-sponsored health plans must not discriminate ‘in favor of highly compensated individuals’ with respect to either eligibility or benefits.”

However, the Internal Revenue Services (IRS) now say they do not know how to define what “highly compensated means.”

Even though they’ve been dealing with rules on IRAs that cover what ‘highly compensated’ individuals can do for decades.

The ban on health plan discrimination was supposed to go into effect six months after Obamacare was signed into law on March 23, 2010, reports the New York Times.

I’m curious as to what provision in the law authorizes him to do this? Or is it just a power inherent in being The Magic Negro?

Read it.

Do tell.

Want to be a U.S. lawmaker considered friendly to big business? You should probably support raising the minimum wage and helping the unemployed, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich said Thursday.

Turning conventional Washington wisdom on its head, Mr. Reich told a congressional panel that policies usually trumpeted by Democrats to help the poor could actually be a huge boon for big business.

“What is a business friendly strategy to create jobs? It’s to create customers,” he told the Joint Economic Committee. “Business executives and Wall Street traders are not job creators. The job creators are customers and if the vast middle class and the poor don’t have enough money in their pockets they can’t be customers.”

Read it.

The reason for ER overuse is simple: Medicaid patients (like all insured patients) feel that their insurance card entitles them to health care anytime they want it. When office doctors aren’t available to provide it, they go to the hospital to get it.

But there’s a huge problem with expanding this mentality to ever more Americans, at least given the payment mechanisms in place for Medicaid.

Doctors aren’t available for Medicaid because it pays us poorly while highly restricting tests and treatments, including prescription drugs. Preventive services such as eye care, hearing and dental care are now being limited by most states. A 2013 study in Health Affairs revealed that only 67% of primary care doctors like me, and less than half of all specialists, accept Medicaid.

 Even those doctors who do accept Medicaid are reluctant to do so, and many limit the number of Medicaid patients they will see. A 2008 Health Tracking Physician Survey showed that only 40% of physicians accept all Medicaid patients who seek appointments.

Many Medicaid patients who lack a primary-care doctor see the hospital as the place to get all their care. It is not unusual for a Medicaid patient to come to the hospital for a urinary infection, and then ask if they can have their eyes or teeth checked while they are there.

But hospitals, too, are paid less for seeing Medicaid patients, approximately 85 cents on the dollar, and the last thing a hospital needs is a flood of new Medicaid patients rather than patients with private insurance.

Read it.

A funny thing happened on the way to President Obama’s “Promise Zones.” He stepped off track and delivered quite a smack to the teachers unions. In rolling out his newest anti-poverty program, Obama pledged federal support for five targeted communities, which share high unemployment and poverty and cited as a model the Harlem Children’s Zone.

That neighborhood initiative, led by founder Geoffrey Canada, is best known for bringing charter schools to Harlem. The Promise Academies have become the cornerstone of the community’s renaissance. Why? As Obama pointed out, “Last year, a study found that students who win a spot in one of the charter schools score higher on standardized tests than those who didn’t.” It’s that simple. But don’t expect the teachers’ unions to agree.

And they voted for him. Surprise!

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, in his weekly radio broadcast, turns over a rock.

Race news of the week: Attorney General Eric Holder has ordered American schoolteachers to practice racial profiling.

No kidding. The issue here is discipline in schools. Holder’s Justice Department, jointly with the federal Department of Education, carried out an investigation. Although black students made up 15 percent of students they investigated, they made up over a third of students suspended once, 44 percent of those suspended more than once and more than a third of students expelled.

Nothing very surprising there, if you have a realistic attitude towards race. Blacks commit far more crime than whites: seven times the per capita homicide rate, over thirty times the rate for some types of robbery. Black populations everywhere have high levels of crime and social dysfunction. In the Caribbean nation of Barbados, where Holder’s people come from, the homicide rate is ten per hundred thousand, more than twice the American rate — and Barbados is one of the more orderly black nations.

Behavior issues from personality, and all the dimensions of personality are heritable at around the fifty percent level, suggesting they are under genetic control. So population genetics is probably in play here.

Holder of course is having none of that. It’s not that he denies high levels of black misbehavior: he says it doesn’t matter. What matters is that the numbers for suspensions and other disciplinary measures come out equal.

Here is the relevant passage from the “Dear Colleague” letter sent out by the Justice and Education Departments January 8th. It’s on page 11 of the letter. Quote:

Schools also violate Federal law when they evenhandedly implement facially neutral policies and practices that, although not adopted with the intent to discriminate, nonetheless have an unjustified effect of discriminating against students on the basis of race.

End quote. Got that? You have a, quote, “facially neutral policy.” You implement it, quote, “evenhandedly.” You have no, quote, “intent to discriminate.” Yet if the numbers still come out wrong, you’ve broken the law! The instruction here is plain: You have to stop implementing that program evenhandedly. You have to practice racial profiling to make the numbers come out right.

You will recognize here the poisonous doctrine of Disparate Impact. If you give a written exam to a mixed-race group of firefighter applicants, and seventy percent of the whites pass the exam but only thirty percent of the blacks do, you have broken a law.

Same thing here. To stay out of trouble with the feds, schools must either go easy on misbehaving blacks or discipline more non-misbehaving whites and Asians. Gotta get the numbers right.

This is federal government policy in the present age. And while Eric Holder is certainly an exceptionally nasty piece of work, it wasn’t he who cooked up the evil and innumerate Disparate Impact doctrine. It’s been with us in one form or another for forty years, and been upheld by innumerable jurists. And one of the highest-profile uses of Disparate Impact against municipal firefighter exams was initiated by Alberto Gonzales, George W. Bush’s Attorney General.

It’s a systemic problem, rooted in some simple logic. The logic is: We can’t face the realities of intractable race differences, so we must profile to get the numbers right. All Eric Holder has done is spell it out in print.

Read it.

Paul’s post on the efforts of Colorado Democratic Senator Mark Udall behind the scenes to rewrite the history of the damage wrought by Obamacare in Colorado deserves further comment. It is a small story of great interest. Let’s pause over it and take another look.

Read it.

Completely unconstitutional, of course. But that’s Obama for you.

Read it.

Early in her career as a learning specialist, Mary Willingham was in her office when a basketball player at the University of North Carolina walked in looking for help with his classwork.

He couldn’t read or write.

Read it.

“What this has really done is allowed people to understand that this is another place where smoking isn’t allowed, and there is good reason for that,” said Barbara Ferrer, executive director of the Boston Public Health Commission, who spoke in favor of the ban before the Parks Commission vote Monday.

…

“Secondhand smoke in any concentration is dangerous,” Ferrer said. “There’s no safe level of exposure.”

Which is obvious nonsense, and underscores the fact that she is incompetent to hold public office. Prediction: She’s a Democrat.