Read it.

Of course, ‘poacher’ is one of those weasel-words (like ‘price gouging’ and ‘profiteering’) used by the Crust for people who dare to do things of which they disapprove.

Read it.

An analysis found that the “area’s 1-percenters are most likely to be lawyers and executives, or those who work in management consulting or IT. Nearly 1 in 10 of those households is headed by a government worker.”

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

Read it.

Actually, I’m surprised it’s even that good.

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

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For decades, Head Start has consistently disappointed anyone who expected it to make a real difference in the fortunes of the poor.

Read it.

Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) and two other senators and joined Representative Tom Graves (R-GA) and 18 other representatives in introducing the Transportation Empowerment Act. This bill would phase out most federal involvement in surface transportation, including 80 percent of the federal gas tax, over five years. In the meantime, federal funds would be given to the states as “block grants” with few strings attached.

Read it.

Since 2007, the federal government has made an aggressive push into corn-based ethanol: oil companies are now required to add millions of gallons of ethanol to gasoline, and farmers are encouraged to plow more land in a bid to keep up with demand. But the stated goals of those efforts — produce more green energy and curb global warming — aren’t coming to pass. And the government may very well have known, early on, that they wouldn’t.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

Obamacare is a vast Rube Goldberg machine that, it turns out, doesn’t work at all–an airplane that has crashed on takeoff. And the fiasco that we have seen so far is only the tip of the iceberg. The thing will unravel further and cause even more damage and disruption if a stake isn’t driven through its heart soon. What does this episode reveal about the nature of liberalism?

One obvious lesson is that liberalism fails to appreciate the complexity of the world. The hubris required by the Democrats’ attempt to reorder not just a large sector of the economy, but an important part of the lives of millions of strangers, is breathtaking. Recognizing, at least dimly, the difficulty of the task, the Democrats responded by trying to draft a law whose complexity would match that of the reality that it tried to control. That made the situation worse, not better: the more convoluted the statute became, the more unworkable it was. Friedrich Hayek, call your office!

Obamacare also illustrates the inordinate faith that many liberals have in the power of words. Various aspects of reality are not as liberals would like them to be. What is the solution? The magical power of words: reams and reams of paper covered with sections and subsections, commands and requirements. If they can only get the words right, reality will certainly fall into line, just as liberals want it to be!

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

 Why do the Common Core educational standards (e.g., a list of what needs to be taught in each grade dreamed up by David Coleman) need to be common across the country? Why is it crucially important that 45 states upend what they’re doing to jump on board this untested bandwagon? Wouldn’t it make more sense to test Dave’s brainstorm in one state to see if it actually works before betting the country on it?

Well, no. Those who believe in the Factory Model of Schooling will always believe in the Factory Model of Schooling even when the circumstances that made the Factory Model of Schooling a good idea have long vanished, simply because they believe that what was good for Henry Ford and won World War II is how it ought to be forevermore. Such people, for example, join Unions.

 The only argument I’ve heard for why a Common Core being must be almost nationally common is that it would be nice for students who suddenly move from one state to another to find their new school is exactly where their old school left off. But how important is this?

The French minister of education is famously proud that in every school in the country the nine-year-olds are reading the same page at the same moment. Is this better or worse than a more federal system like Germany’s? Off hand, the results don’t seem all that different. The differing approaches seems more to reflect the French state’s obsession with centralization in case they want to put together an army big enough invade Russia again. In contrast, German federalism reflects their interest in decentralization so they aren’t tempted to put together an army big enough to invade Russia again.

Personally, I’d live to see both France and Germany invade Russia again. Perhaps they’d do it right this time. The way things are going, it would be French and German Muslims fighting Russian Muslims, and what’s not to like about that?

 America is just finishing up a colossal failure called No Child Left Behind, a plan dreamed up by President Bush and Senator Kennedy that mandated that every public school student in America score “proficient” in reading and math by next May. It was obvious from the get-go that it would never work, but it was wildly popular within the education industry for many years because it justified no end of conferences, meetings, pet projects, days out of the classroom to get “professional development,” and all the other things that are more fun than teaching other people’s children day after day after day.

Remember: Every government program involves lots of government workers spending taxpayer money on hiring more government workers, with a lot left over to Spread The Wealth Around to the non-government worker friends of the government workers. To paraphrase the hoary cliché about e-commerce: If you’re not the one getting government money, then you’re the one paying for it.

Read it.

The Congressional Budget Office on Wednesday released 103 ways to reduce the deficit.

Not one of which has any hope of being implemented.

Read it.

No one understands the significance of last month’s Illinois State Supreme Court decision better than FatWallet founder Tim Storm. A year after the affiliate nexus law’s introduction, Storm and his 54 employees piled into thirty-odd cars and moved from their business headquarters in Rockton, Illinois to Beloit, Wisconsin—a five mile drive across state lines.

This appeared a strange, if not foolish, business decision for Storm and FatWallet. The company spent upwards of $100,000 preparing for the move and left behind a $5 million custom-built office in Rockton. Yet, FatWallet’s bottom line depended on getting out of Illinois.

Read it.

The AP reports that the EPA bowed to lobbyist pressure and changed its assumptions, i.e., boosting its estimates of average yields to 230 bushels per acre and corn prices leveling off at $3.22 per bushel. In the 2013 bumper crop year, the U.S. Department of  Agriculture estimates yields will be just over 160 bushels per acre and corn prices are currently around $4.30 per bushel.

Read it.

Ethanol is proving terrible for the environment. Spurred by the absurd biofuel volumes mandated by the Federal Renewable Fuels Standard, farmers in recent years have plowed over 5 millions of acres of conserved land and virgin prairie. This has released massive amounts of carbon dioxide that had been locked in the soil. So much for ethanol’s promise of being a carbon-neutral replacement for oil.

Roughly 40% of America’s corn crop goes to support ethanol production. From the late 2000s through 2012 corn prices — stimulated by the federal ethanol mandates – soared, surpassing $7.50 a bushel last year before falling off. High prices naturally brought overfarming of corn, destroying animal habitats and causing massive water pollution from fertilizer runoff.

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“I was really shocked,” said Colorado Obamacare supporter Cathy Wagner upon receiving her cancellation notice. “All of my hopes were sort of dashed. Oh my gosh, President Obama, this is not what we hoped for, it’s not what we were told.”

ODF. ‘You break it, you own it.’

Read it.

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

Welcome to the Obamanation. How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

David Henderson, a Real Economist, points out ways that government makes life harder. One of his students makes an obvious point:

In many states, people who owe back child support are at risk of losing their driver’s licenses as well as their professional licenses. My brother has fallen into this trap several times over the past 5-10 years. Curiously, when his driver’s license was suspended, he was denied several jobs due to his being “irresponsible” and not being able drive a vehicle. This is an obvious Catch 22 because, without a job, he cannot pay the child support or pay to reinstate his license, and he will continue to be unemployed, which, in turn, leads to lost revenue for the federal government. Although my brother has never made much money, if he had been a lawyer or doctor and lost his practicing license due to back child support, the lost revenue would have been even greater.

The government should remove this punishment for failure to pay child support. No one benefits from making it more difficult for an individual who owes money to make money. According to Wikipedia, 1,372 drivers’ licenses were revoked in Tennessee in 2000. These individuals “owed more than $13 million of back child support.”

Read it.

A cancer patient whose health insurance was canceled due to Obamacare says he will “pay the $95 fine and let nature take its course” rather than “be a burden on my family” with new monthly premiums that are over $1,300 higher under Obamacare.

No doubt this is the fault of those mean-spirited Republicans.

Welcome to the Obamanation. How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

Read it. And watch the video.

I doubt even Bill Clinton, the undisputed heavyweight champion spinmeister, could spin his way out of the wreck of Obamacare.  But the lesser lights like Pebbles Pelosi, Watermouth-Schultz, Carney-Barker, etc really ought to give it up this cloddish effort.  This two-minute highlight reel captures the full farce….

For those who don’t catch the reference in the title, an explanation is here.

Read it.

The Manhattan Institute just published an analysis of the Obamacare individual policy insurance rates which demonstrates that the average cost will rise by 41% next year.

The results are very similar to the 2009 PriceWaterhouseCoopers analysis that predicted insurance rates would rise by 47%. The biggest hikes will hit the young people, whose rates will jump by an average of 98% for men and 58% for women. Insurance rates will also increase for everyone who is healthy and for all males.

Obamacare’s taxpayer-funded subsidies will primarily benefit those approaching retirement, despite substantially higher average net worth for that demographic compared to the young. But the real winners under Obamacare are huge insurance companies and HMOs whose stock prices have gone up twice as fast as the market, since Obamacare kills competition and creates monopolistic profits. National insurance companies are exempt from federal anti-trust supervision under Obamacare; whereas manufacturing, transportation and service companies are protected from “unfair” competition in the markets.

All hail the Magic Negro, who gave us less for more!

Read it.

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

 The Working Group said its findings were likely to underestimate the total farm subsidies that went to the billionaires on the Forbes 400 list because many of them also received crop insurance subsidies. Federal law prohibits the disclosure of the names of individuals who get crop insurance subsidies, the group said.

How convenient … for them.

Read it.

Maglev doesn’t solve any problems that high-speed rail doesn’t solve. It’s a little faster, but still not as fast as flying. It’s friction-free, but still requires a huge amount of energy to magnetically levitate a train. Most importantly, it doesn’t go where people want to go when they want to go there, which is why the Shanghai maglev has such poor ridership, filling an average of just 20 percent of its seats.

Some people wonder why the United States isn’t building a maglev line similar to the one planned for Japan. After all, says Slate staff writer Will Oremus, we spend more than $112 billion each year on highways. Yes, but unlike a 320-mile maglev, our 4 million miles of highways, roads, and streets go just about anyone someone could want to go.

And that’s why trains are stupid in the modern age. They’re good at taking a lot of people from point A to point B, but if you aren’t at point A, or if you don’t particularly want to go to point B, they don’t do you any good. Trains are primarily popular with people who live near the center of dense cities and can’t imagine anyone wanting to go anywhere except the center of another dense city, which is why they are loved by politicians and journalists. Ordinary people who need to get from their home to their job, neither of which is near (or likely to be near) a train station? Not so much.

Read it.

 When the US Air Force launched the F-22 program over two decades ago, it sought to deploy around 750 of these multirole fighters, to replace over 600 F-15 variants and 60 F-117A stealth fighters. At that time the F-22’s stealth capabilities and performance were specified to defeat a projected future Soviet air defence threat. Two decades later that exact threat capability has materialised – exactly as then predicted by USAF technological strategists – but on the global stage, rather than the territories of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact.

The common catchcry of F-22 critics that the aircraft is “designed to defeat an non-existent Soviet threat” is little more than a convenient deception: these threat capabilities do now exist but are being exported globally, making it very likely that the US will have to soon confront them in combat, as compared to the defunct scenario of fighting WW3 against the Soviets.

Food stamps buy votes, advanced fighter jets don’t, although the latter are an essential function of government and the former are not.

This is what happens when you let politicians run your government.

Read it.

The chickens are coming home to roost for supporters of Barack Obama in classic fashion: one San Francisco couple that donated to Organizing for America and worked the phone banks to ensure Barack Obama’s reelection has found that they are far worse off because of ObamaCare than they were before

Poor iddle babies….

The couple was paying $550 a month for their health coverage, but recently they were informed by Kaiser that their plan would be canceled by the end of 2013 because the plan couldn’t meet the standards of ObamaCare.

Hammack said, “From all of the sob stories I’ve heard and read, ours is the most extreme.” Health care reporter Charles Ornstein of ProPublica took a look at the couple’s coverage and found their plan was a good one; any new plan would be more expensive with less benefits, and the couple didn’t qualify for federal subsidies because their income was more than quadruple the federal poverty level.

Welcome to the Obamanation. You broke it, you bought it.

Read it.

Oh, ya think?

The Obama administration indicated last week it will propose exempting certain self-insured, self-administered insurance plans from two of the healthcare law’s three-year reinsurance fees.

The policies that would escape the fees include the multi-employer or “Taft Hartley” plans that are commonly held by union members.

Look for … the Union label….

Read it.

As the search for a missing autistic child continues in New York City, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) is proposing a tracking initiative that could help to prevent similar stories from happening across the country. Schumer has requested that the Department of Justice begin funding voluntary programs that would give tracking devices to schools and caretakers who ask for them. The tracking devices might be worn around the wrist or ankle or looped between shoelaces, and would allow local law enforcement to locate children with autism who have run away.

Chuck Shumer’s purpose in life is finding ever more ways to spend other people’s money.

Read it.

Of course he does. He’s a Democrat.

Read it.

The District’s ShotSpotter has detected 39,000 outdoor gunshot incidents in the past eight years. Sensors cover about a third of the city and are concentrated where gun crime is highest. It allows police to respond immediately to the exact location where shots are fired and provides a dramatic picture of the danger faced in many neighborhoods.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws. Otherwise it might wind up looking like Texas….

Read it.

Federal “Regulatory Impact Analyses” and regulatory bureaus generally, whether federal or state, aren’t particularly adept at capturing the value of lost liberty and choice.

While these costs don’t get attention or acknowledgment, they are genuine in the eyes of those impacted.

This brief series will describe a few of these hidden costs of big government, starting with simply the loss of liberty in our nanny-state, whose officials want to “nudge” us into behaviors they deem good for us.

Read it.

Great idea. Let citizens carry their personal firearms in airports, and you’ll HAVE armed guards at every checkpoint — and save the taxpayers a lot of money.

But I guess that isn’t what they meant.

(Every notice that every time a government employee suggests a solution to a problem, it always involves hiring more government employees?)

Read it.

In response to state laws and federal incentives, cities and metropolitan areas across the country are engaged in “sustainability planning” aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In many if not most cases, this planning seeks to reshape urban areas to reduce the amount of driving people do. In general, this means increasing urban population densities and in particular replacing low-density neighborhoods in transit corridors with dense, mixed-use developments. Such planning tramples on property rights and personal preferences. To increase urban area densities, planners use containment policies such as urban-growth boundaries or greenbelts.

Owners of land outside these boundaries are restricted from developing their land. Inside the boundaries, housing prices rise, making homeownership in general, and single-family homes in particular, unaffordable to large numbers of people.

Not that the Crust gives a damn. It’s all about the Narrative.

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The University of Texas at Austin’s spring 2014 course offerings include a graduate course on navigating Obamacare exchange enrollment. The university’s LBJ School of Public Affairs will give aspiring PhD students academic credit for examining the Obamacare enrollment process.

At U.T. Austin, of course, the blue pustule on the butt of Texas.

Read it.

The big insurance companies themselves are doing fine–they just jack up their rates to cover all the new patients and benefits, passing the costs along to their customers, who no longer have a choice but to buy (and to taxpayers, who will foot the bill for new subsidies). It’s the consumers’ side of the industry that has been gutted. We cannot choose a product we like the most, but must bear one we hate the least.

When “progressives” think about “industry,” they conjure images of fat, greedy barons; groaning, suffering workers; and and dirty, polluting smokestacks. They never think of the consumers who are made happier by what industry produces. They view selling a product to a customer who needs or wants it as a form of “abuse,” which is how Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) described the individual insurance market on Wednesday.

At bottom, they have contempt for consumers, because they cannot imagine that any purchase really happens of the customer’s own free will. They refuse to accept that a family might feel happier if it can buy bare-bones insurance that allows it to pay other bills, rather than bells-and-whistles insurance that forces it to make lifestyle changes, to go into debt or to become dependent on state assistance programs like Medicaid.

Rich Lowry kicks some left-wing butt.

Henry Waxman made a plea at the end of Wednesday’s House hearing grilling of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The California Democrat and liberal lion asked Republicans to reach across the aisle to work with Democrats to improve Obamacare.

Yes, Henry Waxman, who has made a career of ideological witch hunts and smash-mouth partisanship, wants a cease-fire over Obamacare, or so he says.

He just wants somebody else to whitewash his fence.

They insisted on this particular law, at this particular time. They own it. They own every canceled policy, every rate increase, every unintended consequence and every unpopular intended consequence. It is theirs, lock, stock and two smoking barrels.

But they can’t stop whining.

Hey, it’s what they do.

Read it.

Certain types of device are specifically excluded from the rules – chiefly GPS screens, media players, satellite radio systems, and display panels that are built into the car. Whether Glass, which projects images into your eyes, can be counted among these – it’s perfectly capable of displaying GPS information, for example – is something lawyers will have to figure out.

The future is here, it’s just locked away by government gatekeepers.

You may remember the Segway….

Read it.

A little-known campaign loophole allows members of Congress to make high-interest personal loans to their own campaigns and then never pay them off—a scheme that generates passive streams of profit worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And why not? They’re not in this business for their health, you know.

“What if the problem is not bribery… but extortion?” asks Schweizer. “What if the Permanent Political Class in Washington, made up of individuals from both political parties, is using its coercive public power to not only stay in office but to threaten others and to extract wealth, and in the bargain pick up private benefits for themselves, their friends, and their families?”

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

Read it.

What happens when health care is thought to be a fundamental right?

Hint: We’re all fucked, especially health care providers, who now officially become slaves.

Read it.

The Washington Times is preparing a lawsuit after federal agents raided the Maryland home of award-winning investigative reporter Audrey Hudson and confiscated her notes.

The agents had a warrant, but it was for unregistered firearms suspected of belonging to her husband. Only after they left did Hudson realize that some of her notes, which included interviews with confidential sources, were missing. The notes pertained to her reporting on problems within the Department of Homeland Security’s federal air marshal service.

During the raid, a Homeland Security agent asked Hudson if she was the reporter who had written the air marshal stories for the Times.

How’s that Hope & Change thing workin’ out for ya?

Read it.

 The Los Angeles Unified School District’s $30 million program to outfit 47 campuses with iPads is running substantially richer than planned, with the system paying nearly $100 more per tablet than originally budgeted.

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

Instapundit lays it out.

Not far from me is Norris Dam, the very first dam built by the Tennessee Valley Authority. It was filled in 1936, less than three years after the Tennessee Valley Authority Act passed Congress. Note that it was not less than three years after construction started, but less than three years after the act creating the agency that built it passed Congress. Norris Dam worked, and it’s still there today, more than 70 years later.

The Obamacare website — which took longer to create — doesn’t work, and certainly won’t be around in 70 years. And if you think about it, it seems like the moon landing was one of the last times the federal government delivered a big successful program ahead of schedule. I can’t think of many others since.

Read it.

Not that they won’t do their damnedest….

60 Minutes is normally a reliable Democratic Party news outlet, but tonight it turned its back on its friends in the Obama administration with a scathing report on the Benghazi scandal. CBS says the report was more than a year in the making; it’s too bad some of this couldn’t come out before the 2012 election.

Read it.

Rails to Trails is a government program to convert abandoned railroad tracks to recreational trails. Sounds great, except that the tracks run over private property, and the private landowners haven’t been paid for this permanent land grab.

Read it.

Americans who were recipients of means-tested government benefits in 2011 outnumbered year-round full-time workers, according to data released this month by the Census Bureau.

They also out-numbered the total population of the Philippines.

Read it.

Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Paul Howard has spent thousands of dollars of asset forfeiture funds making sure that he and his staff have a good time. According to a recent newspaper report, he’s used it to buy tickets to see Cee Lo Green, to throw holiday parties and to fund an office softball team. He also spent $16,000 of forfeiture funds on security for his home.

Hey, that money was just sitting there.

I guess we’re all Trayvon Martin now. (Except for white people, of course.)

Read it.

CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield revealed to the Washington Examiner that 76,000 of its customers will lose their health plans with the advent of ObamaCare. The people affected come from Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C. and comprise over 40% of the clients covered by CareFirst in those areas.

How’s that Hope & Change thing working out for ya?

Read it.

Citing the need for more public parking, the City Council of Seattle made a unanimous decision this week to force a 103-year-old woman to sell a plot of land that is already a parking lot.

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

Read it.

Of course he did. That’s what politicians do. Did they think he was Ted Cruz or something?

(Notice there isn’t a word about Democrats like Chuck Schumer who have done the same damned thing for decades.)

Read it.

It turns out that Dick Durbin wasn’t “lying” if by lying you mean saying something he knew to be untrue.  It was curious why Durbin would not name names.  Now we know.  He would have had to name Harry Reid as his source.

The White House gave the line to Harry Reid, who read it to the Democratic Senate caucus, one of whose members — Durbin — went public with it.  The story still was false, and the White House is claiming a “miscommunication.”

Yeah, that seems to happen a lot with this administration. Wonder why….

Read it.

This is like praising the Confederate States of America for what they’ve done for African rights.

Yet another proof of the worthlessness of the U.N.

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

Read it.

In his book, Schweizer said there is documentation that the Obama campaign and political committees associated with Obama solicited donations from companies after the Justice Department filed civil and criminal charges against them.

Schweizer said this is a “huge problem” and there is “statistical evidence” in the book that proves the chances of going to jail are lessened if political contributions are made.

“You cut your chances of going to jail in half if you make a contribution,” Schweizer told host Sean Hannity.

Schweizer said the top five positions in the Department of Justice, beginning with Holder, were all campaign bundlers for the Obama campaign, and this unlike what Washington has seen before.

“So, you had fundraisers who were raising money and put into power who are now making decisions about who they’re going to prosecute, who they’re not not going to prosecute,” Schweizer said. “You see this melding of DOJ and the campaign apparatus of the Obama campaign.”

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

Read it.

So Holder is telling us that since he took over as AG, mass shooting incidents have tripled. Normally that might be considered an admission against interest, inasmuch as he is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer. But of course Holder didn’t take any responsibility for the trend he described. As far as I can tell, Democrats are interested in crime only when it serves as an excuse for gun control; never as a reason to consider more effective law enforcement measures, or to step up prosecution and punishment of criminals.