Scott Johnson gloats.

Andrea Mitchell invited Romney campaign surrogate John Sununu to appear on her MSNBC show to discuss the Obama campaign talking point of the day (or is it month?): outsourcing. Mitchell had the Obama campaign memo, alright, and sought to execute like a good foot soldier.

But Mitchell was unprepared for the Romney campaign’s counterattack on Obama as outsourcer-in-chief. It has something to do with those vaunted green jobs brought to us by the administration. “When you’ve sent $500 million to Fisker and it goes to Finland immediately. When you send the solar money and it goes to Mexico. When you send the turbine money and it goes to Denmark. And we can go on all day,” Sununu said. “There is $29 billion worth of purchases that came out of this administration, outsourced jobs to foreign countries.”

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Seven years ago, the veteran Republican created a cash gusher for the touristy Alaska Railroad by giving it a share of Congress’s mass transit bucks. In June, he stared down the Senate to keep the subsidies flowing for another two years.

The price tag: $62 million.

Those millions were part of a package meant to help mass transit lines carry commuters, not send cargo and tourists through the Alaskan tundra. And Young pulled it off at a time where member-specific earmarks are supposed to be a thing of the past — a victim, in fact, of the outrage over Young’s much-maligned Bridge to Nowhere that would have connected an Alaskan town to an island of 50 people.

Lest anyone think that Republicans are immune from the disease of buying votes with taxpayer money.

“Throughout my career in Congress, I have fought hard to ensure a level playing field between Alaska and its lower-48 counterparts — and the Alaska Railroad is no different,” Young said in a statement to POLITICO.

In other words: ‘There’s loot to be had, and we want our share.’

“There is no reason why the Alaska Railroad should be treated differently than other American passenger rail systems — and that is exactly why this provision is so important.”

Sure there is — it’s not cost-effective. You’d think that a Republican would know that — which he certainly does; he just isn’t going to admit it.

Critics say it’s too much to spend on a train that carried 412,200 passengers last year, few of whom actually commute. The New York City subway system gave more than 1.5 billion rides last year. Even Salt Lake City’s light rail carries 40,000 people per day.

Any system can be gamed, and government systems more easily than others.

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Just can’t wait until these people are in charge of our health care.

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In just five months, the Obama administration has freed schools in more than half the nation from central provisions of the No Child Left Behind education law, raising the question of whether the decade-old federal program has been essentially nullified.

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

That whole thing in the Constitution about ‘he shall take care that the laws shall be faithfully executed’ was apparently just advisory.

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At some point, all teachers realize they are playing Whack-a-Mole in reverse, that the moles are never all up. Any new learning seems to overwrite or at bestconfuse the old learning, like an insufficient hard drive.

That’s when they get it: the kids were taught. They just forgot it all, just as they’re going to forget what they were taught this year.

All over America, teachers reach this moment of epiphany. Think of a double mirror shot, an look of shocked comprehension on an infinity of teachers who come to the awful truth.

The bell curve is there, like it or not, and by definition half of all kids are below average.

Teachers know something that educational policy folk of all stripes seem incapable of recognizing: it’s the students, not the teachers. They have been taught. And why they don’t remember is an issue we really should start to treat as a key piece of the puzzle.

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According to federal regulations, you may not, in fact, stick a feather in your hat and call it macaroni.

Trust the Nanny State to have an official definition of macaroni.

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

To quote John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia: ‘Get a government job!’ Oh, and be black or Hispanic — that will help.

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Sometimes it is profitable to live in a blue state.

In one instance, research conducted by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found that four sisters with 17 children bagged $540,000.00 in taxpayer monies since 2006 by simply staying home and babysitting for each other.  The most shocking part: it’s perfectly legal.

“It’s a loophole,” said Laurice Lincoln, administrative coordinator for child care with the Milwaukee County Department of Health and Human Services. “Do we have concerns about it? Yes, it can be a problem. But if it’s allowed, it’s allowed. We really can’t dispute it.”

Of course they do.

More than one in seven Americans are on food stamps, but the federal government wants even more people to sign up for the safety net program.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has been running radio ads for the past four months encouraging those eligible to enroll. The campaign is targeted at the elderly, working poor, the unemployed and Hispanics.

In other words, the traditional Democrat client groups.

The department is spending between $2.5 million and $3 million on paid spots, and free public service announcements are also airing.

Hey, I’ve got a radical idea: How about taking that money and give some free food to poor people?

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 The plan to use the government’s power of eminent domain to seize underwater home mortgages and sell them to private investors with ties to the Obama administration, reported here last week, is moving ahead.

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 Capital Bikeshare, which rents bikes at more than 165 outdoor stations in the Washington D.C. area, serves highly educated and affluent whites.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, except that the program has received $16 million in government subsidies, including over $1 million specifically earmarked to “address the unique transportation challenges faced by welfare recipients and low-income persons seeking to obtain and maintain employment.”

And, of course, we all know how much welfare recipients and low-income persons seeking to obtain and maintain employment desperately need rental bicycles.

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Under the Obama administration, spending on food stamps has skyrocketed, as an astonishing 46 million Americans, one-seventh of the population, are now on the program.

The Food Stamp President indeed. ‘What are you here for?’ ‘Money!’ ‘What money?’ ‘Obama money!’

So Senator Jeff Sessions tried to introduce a minimal amount of fiscal discipline into the food stamp program by offering amendments that incorporated two basic reforms: 1) preventing states from waiving federal eligibility requirements for the program, and 2) eliminating the bonuses that the federal government now pays to states that deliberately swell the ranks of food stamp recipients. Given that the federal government pays 100% of the program’s cost, such bonuses create perverse incentives in the states, with predictable consequences. And at least 28 states have no limit whatsoever on the financial assets a household can have, and still qualify for food stamps.

Tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect….

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Just the people we want in charge of our health care — think of how much money we’d save!

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Isn’t it entertaining the way politicians get away with doing stuff that would land somebody in the private sector in jail or on the street? (Well, I suppose there’s still time for the latter….)

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President Obama touts the bailout of General Motors and Chrysler as one of the signature successes of his administration. He argues that the estimated $23 billion the taxpayers lost was worth paying to avoid massive job losses. However, our research finds that the president could have both kept the auto makers running and avoided losing money.

The preferential treatment given to the United Auto Workers accounts for the American taxpayers’ entire losses from the bailout. Had the UAW received normal treatment in standard bankruptcy proceedings, the Treasury would have recouped its entire investment. Three irregularities in the bankruptcy case resulted in a windfall to the UAW.

For the Union makes him strong.

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Volusia County, Florida, officials are defending a nurse who withheld a student’s inhaler from him during an asthma attack.

Gotta love those government schools — you can trust your kid to the local bureaucrat, so long as all your papers are in order.

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

Actually, I’m surprised that the Federal debt hasn’t ballooned even more than it has, with Obama and his henchmen passing out taxpayer money to any flim-flam artist who wanders by muttering, ‘Green energy? Green energy?’.

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Historically, most foreign aid has been tied; that is, the recipient was required to spend the money on the donor country’s exports. Relative to cash, tying raises prices and reduces choice and recipient welfare–the deadweight loss of Christmas problem.

US food aid is a classic example. US food aid tends to peak after a glut. It’s cheaper for us to give food away when we have lots and not coincidentally giving food away after a glut helps to keep prices higher, benefiting US farmers. It’s precisely when food is plenty, however, that prices are low and aid is less needed. When food is scarce, prices are high and aid is more needed but then we would rather sell our food than give it away. In addition, we typically require food aid to be transported on US ships which raises costs. Finally, the food we give away is not always best suited to the recipient’s preferences or needs.

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The state debt clock for Connecticut indicates that 10% of the state’s population currently receives food stamps. Broken down by citizen, every state resident is approximately $11,000 in debt due to government spending. Given the state’s unemployment numbers, approximately 8%, combined with tax rates and breaks, we know not all of them will pay much, if anything, in taxes.

Despite massive debt and high unemployment, the state government of Connecticut will be giving Fishman’s group, Progressive Education and Research Associates, three hundred thousand dollars in hard-earned tax payer dollars for building renovations. Progressive Education and Research Associates just happens to share headquarters with the Connecticut Communist Party. Connecticut’s government isn’t broken, it’s actively working against the Nutmeg State’s working population.

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Maryland accounted for the largest taxpayer exodus of any state in the region between 2007 and 2010.

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

It’s pretty amusing how all the Democrats that work in DC live in Maryland, and all the Republicans that work in DC live in Virginia.

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Politicians are always quick to declare that America’s seniors depend on Medicare for their health. But seniors also depend on innovation in medical practice and technology. And Medicare’s top-down payment system represents a significant burden to improving both. In remarks given at a recent Harvard debate, Neil Minkoff, the founder of FountainHead Health and a commissioner on the Massachusetts Group Insurance Commission, does a good job of summarizing how Medicare’s centralized payment system discourages quality in medical servicing.

Gotta love that government health care. Before too long, government health care will be delivering the same quality product as government schools. What a paradise we’ll have then!

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It was found in a recent poll that only 28% of likely voters believe the EPA properly balances the need for economic growth with the need for environmental protection.  The Obama administration has done nothing to address these concerns, and still continues to support the agency’s harsh policies on fossil fuels.  These restrictions are hurting consumers, workers, the economy and our national security.  Fossil fuels like petroleum fuels and petrochemicals are proven, reliable and efficient sources of energy that keep us moving forward and sustain our modern lifestyles.

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

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If they know nothing else, they know upon which side their bread is buttered.

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Gov. Cuomo moved yesterday to end what he called the “stigma” of fingerprinting food stamp recipients, forcing the city to abandon the anti-fraud strategy.

Cuomo said he plans to issue regulations by mid-July to repeal the 14-year-old fingerprinting requirement.

The perceived dignity of our bought prole voters is more important than whether the people who paid taxes get defrauded.

Democrats: Party of waste, fraud, and abuse.

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In order to remain eligible for federal subsidies for school lunches, officials at Davis High School in Salt Lake City, Utah, knew they weren’t allowed to have active vending machines selling soda and candy in the school lunchroom during the 47-minute lunch period.

But rules designed to keep kids from washing down their lunches with something fizzy can be tricky. That lesson was driven home when the state Office of Education’s Child Nutrition Program hit the school with a $15,862 fine—75 cents per violation over the period of many months that it turns out students had been illicitly selling soda in the school store.

Paging Nurse Rached … Paging Nurse Rached….

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Taxpayers footed the bill for a Tucson Police Department security detail assigned to protect first lady Michelle Obama during her political fundraising stop here on Monday.

Tucson police Sgt. Maria Hawke said the department is still calculating how much was spent on the 39 officers, including 14 who were paid overtime, in response to an Arizona Daily Star inquiry. But she said TPD does not anticipate being reimbursed by the Obama campaign or anybody else.

A helicopter, one patrol car, 14 motorcycles and one bomb-trained dog were also used during Michelle Obama’s 2 1/2 hours in the Old Pueblo, Hawke said.

Michelle Obama was in town to raise money for her husband’s reelection campaign.

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Iran imported weapons worth over £350 million in the space of three years despite being the target of a United Nations arms embargo, Oxfam will disclose on Thursday.

Yeah, that U.N. is really effective. That $5 billion (22% of which is provided by the U.S.) is certainly money well spent.

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A Defense Department employee was stopped at Newark Airport yesterday after inspectors found inert land mines in her luggage.

Roxan Hatcher, 32, of Union Township, was headed for an early-morning flight to San Francisco with two unarmed Claymore mines she planned to use in a Special Forces training exercise, law-enforcement sources said.

Hatcher, a mechanical engineer at the Army’s Picatinny Arsenal in Morris County, told cops that a co-worker headed for the same destination had an inert mine in her checked baggage that TSA inspectors did not detect.

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… the [New York] city’s Health Department recently suspended expansion of the Breakfast in the Classroom (BIC) program, which serves free breakfast in the classrooms of 381 of 1,750 public schools. The program is ostensibly meant to ensure that hungry kids start the day with something to eat.

But the school system already offers every kid, all 1.1 million of them, regardless of income, the opportunity to have free breakfast in the school cafeteria. BIC simply puts that breakfast on every kid’s desk.

Since when do schools, other than boarding schools, consider it part of their mission to provide breakfast? Shouldn’t kids be having breakfast with, oh, I don’t know, their families?

The Health Department reined in BIC after finding that roughly 20 percent of all kids might be eating two breakfasts: one before arriving at school and another at their desks, adding on average about 90 unneeded calories to their daily intake.

I guess some of them were. Who knew?

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Prior to today’s meeting of the Commissioners Court, the Austin American-Statesman reported on some of the tweaks to the contract, including language requiring Apple to pay the lowest-salaried 10% of its new employees at the site an average of $35,000 per year. Contractors, which may comprise up to 25% of the new hires, will be paid a minimum of $11 per hour.

Cool — they managed to buy a bunch of votes, and used Apple’s money to do it. High-fives all around the Commissioners Court today, for sure.

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Not that they ever did….

This comes back to mind with the firestorm over the comments of EPA regional administrator Al Armendariz where he described his philosophy of regulatory enforcement that’s right out of Scalia’s analogy:

    “I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement. It’s kind of like how the Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean: they’d go into little Turkish towns somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they’d run into, and they’d crucify them and then, you know, that town was really easy to manage over the next few years.”

Of course, Armendariz should be fired immediately.  Of course, that won’t happen.  Instead, he’s issued a lame apology: “I apologize to those I have offended and regret my poor choice of words. It was an offensive and inaccurate way to portray our efforts to address potential violations of our nation’s environmental laws.”  Yes, it was offensive, but it was a highly accurate description.  His only mistake was candor.  The White House is backpedalling just as fast as it can, but Jay Carney has become an especially unconvincing liar.

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Brademeyer and her two chldren flew to Wichita, Kansas, the weekend before last for her brother’s wedding. On the way back to Missoula, they shared a flight to Denver with Brademeyer’s mother, who lives in California. Brademeyer and her kids, ages 4 and 6, passed through the metal detector without incident, but her mother made the machine beep. Unable to determine what had triggered the alarm, a transportation security officer informed her that she would have to wait for a pat-down. At that point, Brademeyer reports on her Facebook page, her 4-year-old daughter, Isabella, noticed her grandmother and excitedly ran back through the checkpoint to hug her. “They made very brief contact,” Brademeyer says, “no longer than a few seconds.”

Brademeyer says the TSOs at the checkpoint reacted to this breach of protocol by screaming at Isabella, telling her she would have to undergo a pat-down as well. They darkly suggested that her grandmother might have passed a gun to her during their brief embrace, even though Isabella was not carrying anything or wearing any clothing with pockets. They refused to let her go back through the metal detector, insisting that she be frisked. Isabella began crying and ran away from the TSOs, enraging them further. They threatened to close down the airport in light of the “high security threat” posed by the terrified little girl. Although they at first insisted that Brademeyer keep her distance from Isabella, they eventually let her follow her daughter into a separate room for the pat-down. To the dismay of the TSO doing the groping, Isabella would not stop crying even when commanded to do so.

A President who wasn’t owned by the public employees’ unions would personally fire these assholes, much as Reagan fired the illegally striking air traffic controllers.

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Last summer, as part of the agreement that resulted in raising the federal government’s debt limit, Congress passed the Budget Control Act, which set spending caps for future years. These spending caps represented “cuts” in the Washington sense; that is, spending was allowed to increase, but not as fast as might otherwise have been projected. When it has suited their purposes, the Democrats have been champions of the Budget Control Act. Thus when House Republicans adopted a budget that would have spent less than the maximums under the BCA, Democrats alleged that the budget “violated” the Act. They thus turned the Budget Control Act on its head, pretending that the maximum spending levels agreed on in the Act–caps–were actually minimums.

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No wonder the state is going broke.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-MO), chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, owes up to $1.5 million to Bank of America, thanks to a loan he took out to buy a car wash. So what, you ask? You’re paying for it.

The Small Business Administration supported the loan, meaning that if Cleaver fails to make payments, the SBA picks up the tab on $1.1 million. Cleaver is likely to default on the loan in toto – he’s spent ten years paying off the original $1.35 million loan, and still has $1.2 million in unpaid principle, plus another $300,000 in late fees and charges.

Damn those racist white people and their racial profiling.

An Informative Chart.

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When we hear the word “refugee”, we tend to think of “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free”. That image, however — the earnest but impoverished foreigner, lined up along with hundreds of others on Ellis Island eager to work hard for a pittance to make a new life in America — is at least a hundred years out of date.

The typical “wretched refuse” of the 21st century is an illiterate from a backward and barbaric Third World despotism, usually a Muslim one. He’s eager to make a new life in the land of milk and lavish welfare benefits.

An entire industry has been built around the “refugee” process, because big money can be made by the well-connected symbiotes of the federal government inhabiting the public-private penumbra that surrounds the American immigration bureaucracy.

Doing well by doing good.

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And sends even more of your tax money down the world’s largest rathole, solar power.

On Monday, yet another Department of Energy funded solar energy company –the world’s largest solar power plant—filed for bankruptcy.

The Oakland-based company has held rights for the 1,000-megawatt Blythe Solar Power Project in the Southern California desert, which last April won $2.1 billion of conditional loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. It is unclear how the bankruptcy will affect that project.

The Reuters story states that the company won the loan, but as the Washington Post reported that the company turned down the loan in late September of 2011. The CEO of Solar Trust, Uwe T. Schmidt thought that the loan was “too risky”. The Obama administration was willing to loan more than two billion taxpayer dollars to a company who was unwilling to take that kind of risk. The company’s bankruptcy filings indicate they employed only nine people.

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I guess some animals are more equal than others.

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The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018.

Because, you know, it’s a really bad thing to be dependent on foreign oil, and anyway gas prices are just too high.

In Britain, the chief criterion to qualify as Prime Minister is being able to line up enough votes in Parliament to pass a budget that gives the government the required funds to operate. If you can’t do that — or at least look as if you can — you won’t be Prime Minister, period.

In America, we don’t have that problem. President Obama’s budget didn’t get a single vote in Congress — not even from his own supposed supporters. But nobody gives a damn.

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What a guy! With Clinton, you only got coffee.

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New York City’s Consumer Affairs office fined Jamal Ahmad $30,000 after they found a 99 cent store he owned carried toy sheriff’s sets with fake handguns. Although the guns had bright orange tips, officials say they violate a city ordinance barring the sale of realistic-looking toy guns.

Too bad there isn’t any law barring the pretense that New York City bureaucrats have realistic-looking brains.

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Well, you know, you can’t take any chances — or, God forbid, do any ‘profiling’.

I notice that it’s a white kid. You know he wouldn’t dare do that to a black kid.

George Will blows the whistle on a practice that is sadly all to common.

The “gift clause” in Arizona’s Constitution and similar provisions in some other states’ constitutions are supposed to prevent the state government or municipal governments from conferring special benefits on “any individual, association, or corporation.” The proscribed benefits include gifts, loans of state credit, donations, grants or subsidies.

This clause has been largely vitiated by Arizona courts’ decisions allowing entanglements of government and private interests that supposedly serve a “public purpose” or provide a “public benefit.” These are loopholes large enough to drive a truck through — a truck carrying $900,000. That is the estimated value of the release time taxpayers are funding just for the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association (PLEA), the police union. The $900,000 pays union officials to work exclusively performing undefined union business, including lobbying, on the city’s time and the taxpayers’ dime.

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Amanda Clayton hit it big playing the Michigan Lottery. Like many winners, she used her $1 million prize to buy a new house.

But the Lincoln Park, Michigan, resident is receiving money in another form — $200 a month in state food assistance, according to CNN Detroit affiliate WDIV.

“I thought that they would cut me off, but since they didn’t, I thought, maybe, it was OK because I’m not working,” Clayton, 24, told WDIV when it asked whether it was appropriate for her to receive the money.

And that’s pretty much all you need to know about Michigan.

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‘Oh, we can’t possibly leave funding of the arts up to the private sector. The government has to provide the money, otherwise the arts will languish and all of us artsy people will have to get real jobs.’

An interesting point made by Carl Franzen, looking at the continued growth of Kickstarter raising funds for content creators, is that the site is expected to surpass the amount of funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts this year. They’re expecting to break $150 million (this past year it was closer to $80 million), while the NEA has $146 million to give out. Obviously, there are all sorts of differences between the two, but as a milestone, it seems interesting and noteworthy.

No shit.

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Comment: Now, could we please stop talking about how we need more taxes to pay for roads and bridges or to help the poor? The main function of our government is to write checks to middle-class and wealthy voters. And that’s the reason its finances are in the toilet.

Gone to goldbricks, every one….

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New Jersey: “The state Department of Environmental Protection requires permits and engineering work totaling $12,000 before the township can pull a tree out of a creek near Pittstown, Committeeman Scott Bauman told the Township Committee on Feb. 9.” The tree fell on private property and is causing a drainage problem by obstructing the creek.