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The polar vortex that supposedly was caused by global warming should have been a great opportunity for Amtrak to prove the worth of intercity trains, which advocates often claim are “all-weather transportation.” Instead, Amtrak preemptively cancelled trains in both the Midwest and Northeast Corridor.

…

Admittedly, three trains were stuck in the snow in Illinois in the middle of the night. Fortunately, Amtrak was able to rescue the passengers–with buses.

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Seminars on landing tenure-track jobs are common at annual gatherings of academic associations. And the recent meeting of the American Historical Association was no exception, with offerings on interviewing skills and more. But one of the most well-attended sessions here Friday centered on finding a position not in academe but somewhere else: government.

“Finding and Loving a Government Job: Part Deux,” was a follow-up to an unexpectedly popular session of the same name at AHA’s 2012 conference. Presented then as part of a workshop on the “Malleable Ph.D.,” which addressed alternative academic careers in light of the weak academic job market, AHA asked a number of historians with established careers in government to talk about the pros and cons of work in the public sector.

As John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, always says: Get a government job!

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For Obama’s big money backers, however, the Obamacare fiasco has generated massive profits and contracts. In 2008, the healthcare industry contributed an astounding $22,471,562 to Obama–a sum nearly three times greater than it donated to his Republican challenger. Their “investment” paid off in 2013, as the healthcare sector index gained 37.5%, making it the S&P 500’s best-performing sector.

Democrats — party of the 1%….

Crapitalism strikes again.

The ban is crony capitalism in its most seductive form—when it’s disguised as green.

Major light bulb manufacturers supported the ban from the outset. The profit margin on old-style bulbs was pitifully low, and consumers just weren’t buying the higher-margin efficiency bulbs. New standards were needed, a lobbyist for the National Electrical Manufacturing Association told Congress in 2007, “in order to further educate consumers on the benefits of energy-efficient products.”

So Philips Electronics and other manufacturers joined with environmental groups to push for tighter lighting standards. As the New York Times Magazine explained in 2011, “Philips told its environmental allies it was well positioned to capitalize on the transition to new technologies and wanted to get ahead of an efficiency movement that was gaining momentum abroad and in states like California.” After much negotiation, a classic “bootleggers-and-Baptists” coalition was born. Industry and environmental groups agreed to endorse legislation to increase lighting efficiency by 25 to 30 percent.

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

Somehow politicians never learn the simple fact that making it profitable to break the law is a losing game.

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Thanks to continuing glitches on the federal Obamacare exchange website, over 100,000 Americans who signed up for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) remain uninsured.

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Eight Democrats, two Republicans. You can probably fill in the list as well as JW; it’s not as if they make any effort to hide.

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Key question to ask: Which are more likely to vote Democrat?

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The new year will bring tough new health care decisions for many businesses, especially those that are too small to easily absorb new costs and too big to think about dropping coverage, experts say.

These midsize businesses, particularly those with 50 to 200 workers, are having the toughest time affording escalating health care costs, says Nancy Taylor, a health care lawyer with Greenberg Traurig.

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

Automation may be blamed for destroying middle-class jobs, but government ‘help’ is certainly as much a culprit.

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No doubt many of them voted Democrat, perhaps more than once.

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Should auld acquaintance be forgot….

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Probably not. The Crust has been at this game for a long, long time.

“The art of government is to make two-thirds of the nation pay all it possibly can pay for the benefit of the other third,” mused Voltaire. Even that cynical French Enlightenment writer couldn’t imagine what would transpire one day in California, where a portion of the mere 15.3 percent of the public that works for government has gotten the rest of the public to pay for an eye-popping level of compensation.

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Administrative bloat is not a new story, but there are two aspects of the causes of bloat that I seldom see discussed.  First, how much of the growth in administrative ranks is driven by political correctness along with federal mandates?  Most larger universities not only have large offices policing “diversity,” sexual harassment, and so forth, but often have deans and vice chancellors for these programs, usually paid at dean and vice chancellor salary levels.  Any many colleges now have administrative officers for “sustainability”—ironic since the cost model of higher education is clearly unsustainable.  (And insofar as any sensible notion of “sustainability” refers chiefly to simple resource efficiency, why isn’t this a prime candidate for outsourcing?)  The point is, liberals who moan about the high cost of college education today need to look in the mirror, for much of this cost expansion is probably the result of catering to the pressure groups who demand special programs to scratch their itch.  It would be good to see a detailed study—perhaps from our friends at the Center for College Affordability and Productivity—into this phenomena.  And it might be nice to break out the cost into line items; that is, include separate charges for “diversity” services at universities, and watch the backlash grow.

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Few things got—and still get—under the skin of liberals more than Ronald Reagan’s famous use of the term “welfare queen” in his 1976 campaign (he didn’t much use this theme in 1980, curiously enough).  Paul Krugman thinks it was a “minor” case of welfare fraud, while between the foam flecks of Chris Matthews you can make out that Reagan was a raaaccist for mentioning the subject.

So kudos to Josh Levin and Slate for setting the record straight.  Reagan’s “welfare queen” was a real person, and her name was Linda Taylor.

The Slate exposé is here.

When I set out in search of Linda Taylor, I hoped to find the real story of the woman who played such an outsize role in American politics—who she was, where she came from, and what her life was like before and after she became the national symbol of unearned prosperity. What I found was a woman who destroyed lives, someone far more depraved than even Ronald Reagan could have imagined. In the 1970s alone, Taylor was investigated for homicide, kidnapping, and baby trafficking. The detective who tried desperately to put her away believes she’s responsible for one of Chicago’s most legendary crimes, one that remains unsolved to this day. Welfare fraud was likely the least of the welfare queen’s offenses.

Paul Mirengoff turns over a rock.

The President’s Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies has released a report (available via link here), which calls for a significant scaling back of NSA surveillance activity. The report is basically what you would expect from a panel whose five members include two left-wing law professors (Cass Sunstein and Geoffrey Stone), a grossly dishonest former bureaucrat (Richard Clarke), the man who helped scrub the Benghazi points to eliminate references to “Islamic extremists,” and a long-time liberal privacy advocate (Peter Swire).

In other words, the report is, for the most part, ideologically-driven nonsense.

I suspect, moreover, that this is about what the White House expected from the panel it hand-picked. Team Obama is far too shrewd to have picked this sort of panel if it wanted anything like an endorsement of the status quo.

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The Progressive assault on the Constitution of limited government and divided powers succeeded in the creation of the apparatus of the administrative state. In the administrative state, executive branch agencies exercise judicial and legislative powers. The assumption of royal or dictatorial powers by the president has grown up along with the administrative state. President Obama has accelerated the process and aggravated the phenomenon.

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As John and others have pointed out, the Murray-Ryan budget compromise cuts spending by reducing cost of living increases in military pensions. The reduction even applies to disabled veterans.

Naturally, there has been a backlash against these cuts. So naturally, Patty Murray (but apparently not Paul Ryan) is trying to distance herself from them. Murray’s people are blaming Ryan.

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Because they’re doing such a fantastic job….

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

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The Census Bureau has released its list of the 13 counties with the highest median incomes for the year 2012, and eight of the 13 are in the Washington, D.C. region. The Washington Post’s explanation is that “The Washington area has reigned at the top of the most affluent counties for years, in large part because it has so many residents with college degrees working at professional jobs. That gives the region a disproportionately large share of two-income households in which both adults have well-paying jobs.”

‘Willie, why do you live in Washington?’ ‘Because that’s where the money is.’

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Jack Phillips is a baker who declined to bake a wedding cake for a same-sex couple because his Christian belief is that marriage exists only between a man and woman. Now a Colorado judge has ordered him to bake cakes for same-sex marriages, and if Phillips refuses, he could go to jail.

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You can buy a lot of health care for $14,000. Seems to me we’d be better off just giving people the money.

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The blue pustules of Democrat-ruled cities in Texas are doing their bit to create the ideal police state.

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“The Dallas Independent School District recently announced that every student in the school district will now get a free breakfast and a free lunch. The reason? So few students qualified for ‘full price’ or ‘reduced price’ meals that trying to identify them cost more than it was worth,” John Goodman reports. More and more schools are serving dinner, too.

The blue pustules of Democrat rule in Texas cities are doing their best to bring the Welfare State to their own little corner.

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In September, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Reid told reporters, “Let’s stop these really juvenile political games — the one dealing with health care for Senators and House members and our staff. We are going to be part of exchanges, that’s what the law says and we’ll be part of that.”

According to Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson, under the Affordable Care Act a Senator can allow that their committee and leadership staffers keep their attractive federal employee insurance plans. Reid has exercised that option. Jentleson said, “We are just following the law.”

The Crust takes care of its own.

Jacob Sullum lays it out.

For many Americans, religion is something you do on weekends and holidays. For others, it is the central organizing principle of life. That split helps explain the dispute over Obamacare’s requirement that businesses pay for their employees’ contraceptives, which is the focus of two cases the Supreme Court agreed to hear last week.

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Hey, we wouldn’t want to have any dangerous shit wandering around out there.

The Antiplanner points out where rhetoric trips over reality.

One of the many inane things about Obamacare is the Cadillac tax, which punishes employers who provide their employees with “too much” health insurance. The Democrats who supported this are now having to deal with the fact that the employers most guilty of providing Cadillac health insurance are public agencies. Of these, transit agencies have some of the most expensive plans of all.

Oops. There’s problem with ‘socking it to the rich’ when ‘the rich; are your own guys. Oops.

The unions, of course, want to repeal the Cadillac tax. Democrats in Congress are no doubt reluctant to open that can of worms which would likely lead to calls to repeal much of the rest of Obamacare.

The main reason why health care costs are so high in this country is that more than 80 percent of the population have been insured, so they have little reason to reign in costs. The Cadillac tax is meant to discourage insurance that doesn’t require people to at least co-pay part of their costs. But the fundamental basis of Obamacare, which is that health care can be made more affordable by insuring the other 15 to 20 percent, is completely backwards.

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The report looks at the January 1997 “handgun ban in England and Wales” to substantiate this.

Between the time of that ban and 2012, the “homicides rates” rose, exponentially at times, and fell, but they only fell to a level lower than 1996 rates in one year–and that was 2010. Studies that claim “success” for the handgun ban are frequently an outworking of crime numbers that have been manipulated to make the ban look effective.

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

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

    What perhaps puzzles the reader is why [Census] race statistics are so terribly important that they are announced simultaneously with the population figures mandated for reapportionment. You may also be puzzled that the census form dedicates so much of its space to the race and Hispanic question but has no space for education, health, employment, or marital status questions.

(Not to mention the absence of a citizenship question, which would ask about a simple yes-or-no legal distinction far less murky than race or ethnicity.)

Ask Willie Sutton: ‘That’s where the money is.’

An old-fashioned nice white Protestant liberal, Prewitt, who is now Carnegie professor of public affairs at Columbia University, expresses befuddlement at how a job he apparently assumed would be suitable for a technocratic good government Progressive like himself wound up plunging him into the maelstrom of modern racial politics. Thus his proposals for technical improvements in the Census quite unexpectedly (to him) degenerated into a donnybrook over race, complete with angry charges of, guess what, “racism.”

Prewitt points out that, from the disinterested perspective of promoting the commonweal, the federal government’s racial preoccupation synchronizes poorly with the lack of informed public discussion over the purposes of all this categorizing of people. Instead, the crucial process of drawing official racial and ethnic boundaries tends to be either hijacked by interest groups or is the remnant of bureaucratic inertia and lack of foresight.

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

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One day Corsi was handing out pamphlets at a county fair. One of the people who took a flyer was Ed Ryder, a Republican and a member of the local Board of Elections. Corsi didn’t have much nice to say about Ryder. So Ryder did what any petty Napoleon would do: He went after Corsi using Ohio’s campaign-finance laws.

Long story short: Because Corsi spent money, no matter how little (his website cost all of $40), the Ohio Election Commission said Corsi should have incorporated his group and registered with the state as a political action committee — hiring a lawyer to help with the “very complicated” process. As far as Ohio is concerned a political action committee can consist of as few as two people. Besides, Corsi engaged in “express advocacy” about politicians. The horror.

Two courts have ruled in the commission’s favor. The Center for Competitive Politics, which is based in Arlington, has asked the Supreme Court to hear Corsi’s case. Let’s hope the justices agree to do so, because the Corsi case epitomizes a growing problem: the censoring of free speech through back-door regulation.

That was precisely the problem at issue in the scandal over the IRS’ treatment of tea-party groups: Organizations with certain political views were singled out for special scrutiny — their applications sidetracked, their activities probed, their members’ reading habits and religious practices investigated — at the behest of government officials such as Sens. Chuck Schumer and Al Franken. (A few progressive groups got caught up in the sweep. But like dolphins caught in tuna nets, they were not the intended target.)

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Apple has issued a formal objection to the court-appointed lawyer assigned to monitor its compliance with the decision handed down in its e-book pricing fixing case back in July. The monitor was assigned by the DOJ back in October, and has apparently been charging Apple a very high price for his services – he made $138,432 in his first two weeks on the job, according to Apple’s official filing on the matter.

Apple says that’s the highest rate it’s paid a lawyer in its history, which is saying a lot given the company’s decidedly litigious streak. Apple’s lawyers explained in the filing that they believe Bromwich is charging so much simply because he can, as Apple has no say in who is chosen for the position, and must pay for the court-appointed monitor as per the decision handed down by the DOJ in the antitrust price-fixing case. Apple also objected to a provision in the DOJ’s ruling that would allow Bromwich to interview company personnel and report back to the court without Apple’s own lawyers around to represent the company’s interests.

The function of government is to hire and pay government workers. It’s rarely as blatant as this.

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Illinois copyKeep your eyes on Democrat-run Illinois over the next couple of weeks, where legislative leaders have hammered out a scheme to address the crisis of the state’s underfunded public employee pension scheme.  The unfunded liability for the state’s pension obligations is officially estimated somewhere around $100 billion over the next 30 years, but the actual figure is likely much higher as Illinois, like many self-serving public pension funds, still assumes very optimistic rates of return on assets going forward.

Charles Krauthammer turns over a rock.

We’ve now reached a point where a flailing president, desperate to deflect the opprobrium heaped upon him for the false promise that you could keep your health plan if you wanted to, calls a hasty news conference urging both insurers and the states to reinstate millions of such plans.

Except that he is asking them to break the law. His own law. Under Obamacare, no insurer may issue a policy after 2013 that does not meet the law’s minimum coverage requirements. These plans were canceled because they do not.

The law remains unchanged. The regulations governing that law remain unchanged. Nothing is changed except for a president proposing to unilaterally change his own law from the White House press room.

That’s banana republic stuff, except that there the dictator proclaims from the presidential balcony.

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The biggest lie of all is that 15-30 million additional people who will be enticed or shoved onto Medicaid will receive quality health care.

In reality, they will receive health care “insurance,” but there will be few doctors willing to see them because the reimbursement rates are so low.

I have mentioned before how, anecdotally, almost every doctor with whom I speak sings that same song, that Medicaid reimbursements are so low they either have to restrict or eliminate Medicaid patients.

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Ellen Richardson went to Pearson airport on Monday full of joy about flying to New York City and from there going on a 10-day Caribbean cruise for which she’d paid about $6,000.

But a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent with the Department of Homeland Security killed that dream when he denied her entry.

“I was turned away, I was told, because I had a hospitalization in the summer of 2012 for clinical depression,’’ said Richardson, who is a paraplegic and set up her cruise in collaboration with a March of Dimes group of about 12 others.

The Weston woman was told by the U.S. agent she would have to get “medical clearance’’ and be examined by one of only three doctors in Toronto whose assessments are accepted by Homeland Security. She was given their names and told a call to her psychiatrist “would not suffice.’’

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In regulations released just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, the administration signaled it is looking at ways to increase payments to insurance companies if they end up taking on more risk. That might happen in some states that agreed to the Obama administration’s mid-November request to let carriers reinstate policies that would otherwise have been canceled because they didn’t meet certain coverage requirements under the Affordable Care Act.

Unmentioned in this, or in any other, reporting on the subject that they are doing so with YOUR money. They don’t have any of their own; all they can do is give away yours.

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Eight Americans already feeling the sting of that broken promise work for Nancy Clark, a small business owner in New Hampshire who was featured in a White House online ad promoting ObamaCare. “The healthcare law is about me. It’s NancyCare,” Clark gushes.

The entire premise of Clark’s video ad is how ObamaCare will allow her to continue to offer health insurance for her employees and maybe even make it easier to hire new ones. Her expectation last years was that ObamaCare would make the employee-health insurance more affordable for company:

You broke it, you own it.

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“Bands played, balloons soared, fireworks banged and politicians and business leaders glowingly praised Richmond’s future yesterday as several thousand people attended the noontime grand opening of the Sixth Street Marketplace,” the Times-Dispatch reported back in the autumn of 1985.

…

Within five years, the “future of downtown” in Richmond was draining millions from the city’s public treasury just to stay afloat. Soon, experts from the Urban Land Institute were recommending it be torn down. Several years and many millions of dollars later, it was.

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We recently noted that black college students at Bowie State University in Maryland lost their low-cost student health insurance plan  due to Affordable Care Act regulations (“Obamacare”).

The College Fix provides some students reviews of the President and his signature legislation.  They aren’t flattering.

Hey, you broke it, you own it.

Take a look at this guy and tell me, with a straight face, that you would put him in charge of anything related to education at any level.

Michael Barone turns over a rock and watches what wiggles out.

The defects of the Obamacare website have become well known. But the problems with the law go further than the website. These problems are not incidental, but central to its design and the intentions of its architects.

Many Obamacare backers, including Barack Obama, would prefer “single-payer” health insurance. The government would pay for everything and you would get health care for free.

…

Government hasn’t yet proposed subsidizing the purchase of clothing. But the thought is that health care, imposing disproportionate costs on some individuals, should be provided for free.

Obamacare’s architects knew the votes weren’t there for single-payer insurance, so they fashioned their health care legislation and regulations to reduce out-of-pocket costs for people with different health care needs.

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Covered California, that state’s insurance exchange, has rejected President Obama’s request that people be allowed to remain in non-compliant health insurance plans for another year. This decision is highly significant because California has experienced by far the most insurance policy cancellations of any state, reportedly around 900,000 of them.

Obama: “Hey, guys, let’s just, you know, not obey the law. I won’t arrest you for it.”

And if you believe that one, he’ll tell you another one. Fortunately, the people being invited to break the law are wise to that game.

The irony is only superficial. Blue State leaders are saying no because, as liberals, they dislike private plans and, more importantly, want to offer no escape from Obamacare for the young and the healthy whose participation in exchanges is needed to subsidize the middle-aged and the sick.

…

This raises the question of whether Obama really wants states to agree to his fix. More likely, he views the situation the way California, New York, etc. do, and has offered his fix as a stunt to reduce the political damage resulting from his false promise that people who like their plan can keep their plan.

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A river runs through it — and Uncle Sam isn’t far behind.

That’s what several Republican lawmakers and even state farming groups and local governments are warning, after a draft rule from the Environmental Protection Agency proposed expanding which waterways are federally protected under the Clean Water Act.

The concern is that the move could give the feds authority over virtually any stream or ditch, and hand environmentalists another way to sue property owners. In other words, critics say, the government might soon be able to declare jurisdiction over a seasonal stream in your backyard.

If so, good luck getting a permit to expand building space on your property, or marketing your land to prospective developers.

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Hint: The Crust think they do.

A plan to squeeze most residents of the San Francisco Bay Area into multifamily housing offers a test case of whether land-use bureaucracies nationwide, encouraged by the Obama administration, should be allowed to transform American lifestyles under the pretext of combating climate change.

Currently, 56 percent of households in the nine-county Bay Area live in single-family homes. That number would drop to 48 percent by 2030, under a high-density development blueprint called Plan Bay Area, recently enacted by the Association of Bay Area Governments and the region’s Metropolitan Transportation Commission.

…

Planners admit this will make single-family housing in the already high-priced Bay area even less affordable.

Response Objection 1, quoting George Carlin: ‘The planet will be fine. But the people will be fucked.’

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Marty the Magician performed magic tricks for kids, including the traditional rabbit-out-of-a-hat. Then one day: “I was signing autographs and taking pictures with children and their parents,” he told me. “Suddenly, a badge was thrown into the mix, and an inspector said, ‘Let me see your license.'”

In “Harry Potter” books, a creepy Ministry of Magic controls young wizards. Now in the USA, government regulates stage magicians—one of the countless ways it makes life harder for the little guy.

Marty’s torment didn’t end with a demand for his license. “She said, from now on, you cannot use your rabbit until you fill out paperwork, pay the $40 license fee. We’ll have to inspect your home.”

Ten times since, regulators showed up unannounced at Marty’s house. At one point, an inspector he hadn’t seen before appeared. He hoped things had changed for the better.

“I got a new inspector and I said, oh, did my first one retire? She said, ‘No, good news! We’ve increased our budget and we have more inspectors now. So we’ll be able to visit you more often.'”

Here are your tax dollars at work.

The inspectors told Marty that the Animal Welfare Act required him to file paperwork demonstrating that he had “a comprehensive written disaster plan detailing everything I would do with my rabbit in the event of a fire, a flood, a tornado, an ice storm.”

The federal forms list “common emergencies likely to happen to your facility … not necessarily limited to: structural fire, electrical outage, disruption in clean water or feed supply, disruption in access to facility (e.g., road closures), intentional attack on the facilities … earthquake, landslide/mudslide/avalanche … “

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The Bureaus of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is writing up regulations on what other people should do when guns go missing.

The appropriate analogy to Obamacare is left as a not-very-difficult exercise for the reader.

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In a profanity-laced tirade at Eastern Michigan University, self-described animal rights activist Gary Yourofsky told students that eating meat is worse than the Holocaust.

In addition, Yourofsky compared eating meat to cheese or eggs, or drinking milk to bestiality, according to a report by Michigan Capital Confidential.

And people wonder why a college degree is no longer a sure way to a good job any more.

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Of course he does, in the Obamanation.

On his website Kimathi posited, “In order for black people to survive the 21st century, we are going to have to kill a lot of whites–more than our Christian hearts can possibly count.” He warned that “whites and their enablers like President Obama” are doing their best to “homosexualize” black males “in order to make them weaker.”

He also lashed out at blacks whom he viewed as not being militant enough, calling for the “ethnic cleansing” of “black-skinned Uncle Tom race traitors.”

Kimathi has been with DHS since 2009, and his income last year was $115,731.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

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Let’s hear it for the Transportation Security Theater Administration.