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Sometimes it makes the Postal Service look competent.

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In Michael Goodwin’s column preceding his ground-breaking June 1 column that I posted yesterday, New York City teachers tell him that they are encouraged or required to pass 80 percent of their pupils, regardless of grades and attendance, though one teacher mentions a mandated pass rate of 60 percent. The school principals require these pass rates, because the alternative is to have the school closed by the federal Department of Education and for the administrators and teachers to lose their jobs. This is the result of George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law, which forces “failing” schools to close by withdrawing federal funds from them, and which defines such “failing” in terms of pupils’ non-attainment of a prescribed improvement in their grades and test results.. This means that a school with a large number of low IQ pupils will automatically be classified as a “failing” school and must be closed. So the principals and teachers, simply in order to protect their livelihood, are forced to pass students who are actually failing or who are not even attending.

In other words, government employees can be counted on to commit fraud rather than jeopardize their own jobs. Nice to know.

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When Joshua Kaufman’s MacBook was stolen, he pursued the thief who took it by using the “Hidden” software he had installed on the laptop. It allowed him to check in and capture snapshots of the guy in possession of the computer, using the built-in iSight camera. Kaufman created a blog with pictures of the man in various states of undress and activity as he used the MacBook. It took more than two months, but Tuesday, the Oakland police finally arrested the suspected thief, a limo driver who they tricked into picking them up.

And people want the government in charge of our health care? I don’t think so.

Oakland Police Department’s media relations officer, Holly Joshi, told us that it was “human error” that delayed Kaufman’s case. She said that the theft investigations unit handles 2,400 reports a month amongst three investigators, and that somehow, Kaufman’s report had been erroneously filed rather than put in the second priority category, which assigns investigators for follow up when evidence is present.

And if you believe that one, they’ll tell you another one.

Muthanna Aldebashi, 27, is charged with possession of stolen merchandise and is in jail on a $20,000 bail.

Obviously a fine, native-born American.

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

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Yesterday the U.S. Justice Department warned that the federal government may cancel all flights out of Texas if the state legislature approves a law aimed at preventing the Transportation Security Administration from groping airline passengers without probable cause. H.B. 1937, which was approved unanimously by the state House of Representatives and is being considered by the state Senate, applies to any government employee who, without probable cause to suspect a crime has been committed, “performs a search for the purpose of granting access to a publicly accessible building or form of transportation” and in the process “touches the anus, sexual organ, buttocks, or breast of another person including through the clothing, or touches the other person in a manner that would be offensive to a reasonable person.” Such a search would be a misdemeanor punishable by a $4,000 fine and up to a year in jail.

Works for me.

I should think that the Obamanation would love it. What better way to promote travel by rail?

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And, really, why should they? The whole point of getting taxpayer money is that you don’t ever have to pay it back.

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More than $20 billion has been given to Pakistan since Sept. 11, 2001. President Obama is proposing almost $3 billion in aid for the supposed ally in the War on Terror for fiscal year 2012.  That includes:

– $1.6 billion for police and military;

– $150 million for what the State Department calls “good government and democracy building”;

– $122 million for health, AIDS and “family planning”;

– $145 million for education.

The rest goes to economic development and humanitarian assistance.

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God forbid that anyone should eat something not certified by the government.

Michelle Malkin has the goods.

Bleeding-heart sympathizers seriously speculated that al-Murisi had simply mistaken clearly marked lavatory doors for the clearly marked cockpit door (because, you know, it’s normal to shout “God is great” repeatedly just before relieving yourself as your plane is about to land). Some federal authorities and media whitewashers proclaimed that al-Murisi’s motives were “unknown.”

So how, despite a massive transportation and homeland security apparatus, did al-Murisi get into this country and get on a plane? He had no keys, no luggage, $47 cash, two curious posted checks totaling $13,000, and a trove of expired and current state IDs from New York and California — where relatives said he had not notified them that he was coming. He is young, male, brought no family with him, had no job or other discernible income, and hails from the terror-coddling nation of Yemen. Yes, the same Yemen that is Osama bin Laden’s ancestral home, harbors al-Qaida operatives who are burning the “torch of jihad,” and is deemed a “special interest country” whose citizens warrant increased scrutiny by DHS when they cross the border illegally.

Well, you know, those TSA guys were too busy patting down suspicious-looking babies to pay attention. Only so many hours in the day, you know.

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13WHAM News has learned that a convicted rapist serving up to 40 years in prison, is being evaluated for a possible heart transplant.

The report goes on to estimate the cost of the procedure at $800,000. The bill, if the procedure is completed, would be paid by New York state taxpayers.

The felon in question, Kenneth Pike, 55, began serving time in 1996 after his conviction for raping and sodomizing a 13 year-old girl in Auburn, New York. Although the hospital admits having a patient with that name in their care in guarded condition, neither the hospital nor the New York State Department of Corrections would comment further on the matter.

Because that’s why they work so hard for that money. Sounds like another good reason to avoid New York — unless you’re a rapist.

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Cargo-cult politics: Dress like a superhero and you’ll be a superhero! What could be simpler?

Workforce Central Florida spent more than $14,000 on the red capes as part of its ‘Cape-A-Bility Challenge’ public relations campaign.

The campaign featured a cartoon character, ‘Dr Evil Unemployment,’ who needs to be vanquished.

I guess Florida is hiring its civil servants from former Sesame Street employees — that, and it thinks that the unemployed are mentally deficient. Hm. They may have something there.

(Of course, Edna Mode showed us why capes are a stupid idea for superheros. And a state agency would never adopt a stupid idea, would it?)

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Notice the way the Crust operates:

1. Pick a Bad Thing in which ‘minorities’ participate greater than their portion of the population;
2. Ascribe the cause of this ‘disparity’ to race, without any attempt to eliminate other possible reasons (such as, notoriously, poverty);
3. Create a taxpayer-funded race-based preference program that may or may not solve the problem but will certainly buy a lot of votes.

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Moments before a conference call with reporters was scheduled to get underway on Tuesday morning, Charles E. Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Democrat in the Senate, apparently unaware that many of the reporters were already on the line, began to instruct his fellow senators on how to talk to reporters about the contentious budget process.

After thanking his colleagues — Barbara Boxer of California, Benjamin L. Cardin of Maryland, Thomas R. Carper of Delaware and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut — for doing the budget bidding for the Senate Democrats, who are facing off against the House Republicans over how to cut spending for the rest of the fiscal year, Mr. Schumer told them to portray John A. Boehner of Ohio, the speaker of the House, as painted into a box by the Tea Party, and to decry the spending cuts that he wants as extreme. “I always use the word extreme,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is what the caucus instructed me to use this week.”

A minute or two into the talking-points tutorial, though, someone apparently figured out that reporters were listening, and silence fell.

A rare glimpse of the sausage being made.

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

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There’s a dog-bites-man headline if ever I saw one. I guess the ‘news’ here is, that it isn’t trillions in federal waste — which it undoubtedly is, but the government’s investigators aren’t any more competent than the rest of them, so they’ve surely missed a lot. Still, it’s something.

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It would appear that both the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of Central Intelligence are dumber than rocks — not to mention obviously incompetent.

It’s just another fine day in the Obamanation.

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Heck, forget the wealthiest two percent–the top one percent are pretty much pulling the wagon, as the Blogprof shows with this chart. The top one percent pay more income taxes than the bottom 95 percent.

We are rapidly reaching the point where a large majority of Americans are free riders. Whether democracy can survive under that condition is a wide-open question.

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A Seattle man has been acquitted of all charges brought against him when he refused to show ID to TSA officials and videotaped the incident at an airport security checkpoint.

Apparently resistance is not necessarily futile.

Mocek’s video, shot in November 2009 at the Albuquerque International Airport, portrays a passenger politely refusing officers’ request that he show ID and stop videotaping his encounter with them.

“Is there a problem with using a camera in the airport in publicly – in publicly accessible areas?” Mocek calmly asks.

“Yes, there is,” an officer answers.

“I think you’re incorrect,” the passenger replies.

As the confrontation continues, one officer tells the man: “You pushing it, OK? You’re really pushing it.”

Another officer says: “Buster, you’re in trouble.”

Papers, Please! says the acquittal proves what TSA critics have said all along: That checkpoint staff have no police powers, that contrary to TSA claims, passengers have the right to fly without providing ID, and yes, passengers are free to video record checkpoints as long as images on screening monitors aren’t captured.

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So, in Illinois, it’s okay for the police to record you, but it’s a felony for you to record the police. That’s the Chicago Way in this Obamanation.

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Jesse Jackson, call your lawyers.

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Goldman Sachs will offer the chance to invest in Facebook only to its clients outside the United States, the New York Times reports.

Advocates of a strong Securities and Exchange Commission, or those who believe that at $50 billion Facebook is overvalued, will perhaps see this as a success. American investors are protected from investing in Facebook, while foreigners who lack SEC protection are left undefended against Goldman Sachs and Facebook.

Critics of a strong SEC, or those who believe that at $50 billion Facebook is a bargain, will perhaps see this as a disaster. American investors are prevented from investing in Facebook, while foreigners are allowed to. And Facebook is deprived of American capital that it would have otherwise been able to raise.

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And so the old story goes: in 2001, the Illinois Cosmetology Association left their heads under the dryer too long and got steamed over people making money in the centuries-old art of African natural hair braiding. Braiders weren’t shelling out the $15,000 required for a beauty school degree. How could they possibly be trusted with hair care? The Illinois Legislature dutifully responded to the calls for “consumer protection.”

If Illinois had set out to eliminate minority- and woman-owned businesses while reducing the number of community gathering spots, it couldn’t have done better work. The new costs created an uneven playing field. Those who did comply saw that extravagant schooling and licensing costs made turning a profit nearly impossible. Many shops closed, eliminating formerly vibrant neighborhood social centers. As an added bonus, the state exposed its weak enforcement power: Braiders still operating illegally became so inured to cease-and-desist letters they trashed them on receipt.

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NYC Department of Sanitation workers dumped tons of dirty snow on graves in NYC’s largest Jewish cemetery, toppling tombstones and obliterating graves. The city is apparently not helping with the cleanup….

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Scozzafava, a Republican, dropped out of the 23rd Congressional District race three days before the 2009 election and infuriated some Republicans by throwing her support to Democratic candidate Bill Owens – not Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.

‘And I say unto you, Make to yourselves friends of the mammon of unrighteousness; that, when ye fail, they may receive you into everlasting habitations.’ Luke 16:9

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Defenders of public employee pension systems often make the case that pension benefits are not all that generous. The outrageous cases you see on the news — Long Island police retiring in their 40s with pensions in excess of base pay, administrators “retiring” with six-figure pensions and then going back to work with another government agency, one ex-FDNY firefighter running marathons on his $86,000 “disability” pension — are the exceptions, they say.

The data, however, tells a different story. According to the Census Bureau, the average New York retiree receiving a corporate or union pension — a retiree from the private sector — was receiving an annual benefit of $13,100 in 2009. For state and local government retirees, that figure was more than twice as high: $27,600. And that average figure includes retirees who were part-time workers or only spent part of their careers in government; full-career retirees often do far better.

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Two of the 10 Northeast states that agreed to dedicate millions of dollars to reduce carbon emissions and promote green energy have reneged on their promise, instead diverting substantial funds to saving their budgets.

New York and New Jersey over the past year have raided accounts set up under the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, the first mandatory U.S. cap-and-trade program for carbon dioxide. The accounts were created to pay for energy efficiency programs aimed at reducing the region’s pollution by 10 percent by 2018.

Citing their example, New Hampshire dipped into its fund in June to help balance its budget.

New York took $90 million last fall _ roughly half of its fund; New Jersey zeroed out its fund, taking all $65 million; and New Hampshire, a much smaller state, took $3.1 million in June. In all three states, the money was used to pay the state’s bills.

Hey, hiring and paying government workers is job one. Pollution control we get to if there’s anything left.

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The case – one of the most prominent ethics investigations undertaken by the committee – came apart as committee and staff members argued over whether documents should be subpoenaed and when the trial should be scheduled and for how long. They all expected Waters to agree to a negotiated settlement, which she ultimately declined.

The breakdown of the Waters inquiry highlights the difficulties that the ethics committee faces in policing House colleagues. The panel sought to restore public confidence in its work during the current Congress, scrutinizing nearly two dozen members for possible transgressions and preparing for several trials. But its staff of 14 was quickly overwhelmed.

Guess they’re more crooked than they looked.

Perhaps the only issue on which all of those involved in the probe agree is that they had expected Waters to concede that she had made mistakes and to accept an admonishment. Her refusal to do so caught everyone by surprise and caused the staff to renew the search for evidence.

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President Barack Obama signed an executive order Tuesday establishing a White House Council for Community Solutions, with Jon Bon Jovi – Democratic troubadour and hair band hero – as a founding member.

Pissing away taxpayer money like this is why the country is so badly in debt.

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Congress: 535 people generously paid by taxpayers to stick their noses into everybody else’s business, coast to coast and around the world.

Katherine Mangu-Ward points the finger.

Always intrepid, conservative Republicans are shrugging off the angry ghost of Newt and getting into the dirty business of redefining the word earmark in order to keep the cash flowing.

Megan McArdle runs the numbers on the tax deal and concludes that Democrats won more than they lost.

With the wailing and gnashing of teeth from many progressives, you would think that Obama had cut a tax deal to eliminate tax breaks on the wealthy in exchange for freeze-drying Guatamalan orphans in order to use them as decorations on the Family Research Council’s Christmas Tree.  Meanwhile, the conservatives I’ve seen are as proud of this deal as if they’d baked it from scratch.

I’m puzzled on both counts.  Let me get the personal stuff out of the way: I think this is a terrible deal.  I was rooting for gridlock to cause the tax cuts to expire entirely, which would probably have a moderately negative impact on the economy, but would at least somewhat forestall a devastating fiscal crisis down the road.  If it was politically necessary to do tax cuts, I wanted them to be as small as possible, not $900 billion over two years.

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A struggle inside the House ethics committee could spill out into the open later today when Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.), the subject of an ongoing investigation, calls for an official probe into the indefinite suspension of two people investigating her.

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Megan McArdle kicks over a rock.

The source said it’s very common for someone with seniority to bid on escalators they know to be well maintained so they can slide and and not do anything for the six months it’s under their “care.”

“They can coast for a while,” the source said. “Then when problems start, they can move on,” leaving an ailing escalator under the supervision of someone with less experience.

This way of doing things, the source said, “destroys the incentive” of the younger workers who know that if they do a good job, their escalators will be taken away by someone with more seniority.

“There’s a culture in which you don’t really have to perform to keep your job,” they said.

It’s not always possible to foresee this sort of thing–I’m sure this scheme didn’t sound crazy when it was proposed.  But clearly, it was a terrible idea that needs to be fixed.  Unfortunately, when you’re in a collective bargaining situation–especially a government agency collective bargaining situation–it’s really, really difficult to change the bad rules.  Workers will by now have come to see this as a perk of the job, and view any change to the system as a material loss for which they should be richly compensated.

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The Six Porkers:

Chuck Grassley
Kit Bond
Sam Brownback
John Thune
Mike Johanns
Mark Kirk

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That’s security, of a sort.

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

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Iowa’s outgoing Democrat Governor Chet Culver gave his union buddies at AFSCME a true ’sweetheart deal’ on Friday—a two-year contract worth $200 million taken from Iowa’s taxpayers.

The funny thing is, Culver didn’t even bother to negotiate a better deal for the state’s taxpayers. In fact, Culver didn’t bother to negotiate at all.  Instead, Culver took what was asked for by AFSCME and put it into effect leaving the next administration (and taxpayers) to deal with it.

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As a regulatory arm of the USDA, GIPSA is tasked with overseeing the trade of various meats, grains, and other agricultural products.  As an attorney in the Butler Farm and Ranch Law Group in Canton, Mississippi, Mr. Butler filed multiple lawsuits against poultry companies for alleged irregular and illegal business practices.  These suits met with limited success because of pre-existing GIPSA regulations.  Now, having been made Administrator of GIPSA by President Obama, Mr. Butler is changing the troublesome regulations to favor plaintiff’s attorneys, whose ranks may well again include him after his stint in public office.  This underhanded policy scheme was shoehorned into a GIPSA rulemaking mandated by the 2008 Farm Bill; straying from the proposed content on “undue preferences,” Mr. Butler wedged language into the final rule that opens the door to broader and more profitable litigation in the future.  Mr. Butler, to his credit, has been quite open as to what this regulation will accomplish:

“When you have a term like ‘unfair, unreasonable or undue prejudice,’ that’s a plaintiff lawyer’s dream. We can get in front of a jury with that. We won’t get thrown out on what we call summary judgment because that’s a jury question.

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In a letter to the Education Department’s inspector general Wednesday, Mr. Burr of North Carolina and Mr. Coburn of Oklahoma cited public documents indicating the proposed rules were leaked to short-sellers. The department, they wrote, “may have leaked the proposed regulations to parties supporting the Administration’s position and investors who stand to benefit from the failure of the proprietary school sector.”

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

Uh, I have a question: Why do we have a Federal Department of Education? Supposedly we have a Federal government of explicitly enumerated powers; I don’t find any mention of ‘education’ in the Constitution.

More to the point: How many people has the Department of Education actually educated?

The schools have ramped up lobbying efforts against the regulations, which would require career colleges and training programs to prove they’re preparing students for gainful employment.

Whoa — there’s a hole with no bottom. Take a look at most PhD programs. I’d like to see some proof that they’re ‘preparing students for gainful employment’. We could start with Harvard. We could start with Black Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Fashionable-Buzzword-of-the-Moment Studies, and any academic program that FDR never heard of.

For-profit universities have come under scrutiny because they receive federal dollars through financial aid programs, and critics say students are often left with big debts and little education.

Uh, I have a question: Why are there ‘federal dollars’ for ‘financial aid programs’, except maybe for veterans? Where is that in the Constitution?

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

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The Department of Justice annually awards millions of dollars in grants to local governments to compensate for the cost of jailing illegal aliens, even when those governments have policies obstructing immigration law enforcement or encouraging illegal settlement. In 2010, the grant program, known as the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP), doled out a total of roughly $400 million to about 850 cities, counties, and states.¹ Among them were 27 jurisdictions widely considered to be sanctuary jurisdictions, which together received more than $62.6 million, or 15.6 percent of the total (see Table 1).

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Americans are hearing the talking point that earmarks don’t cost the taxpayers any money.  This simply is not true.  Citizens Against Government Waste, a Congressional watchdog group, has put out a report on wasteful projects from Fiscal Year 2010.  They identify $16.5 billion in pork.

Of course, the whole issue is a red herring. When a legislator can direct general tax revenues into a particular local project, the obvious purpose of which is to improve his standing among his constituents, it changes the governmental appropriation process into a spoils system for which the term ‘corruption’ is perfectly appropriate.

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Remember the movies where the CIA and other government agencies have all of this sophisticated fancy equipment? Forget it. That’s fantasy, not reality.

The unsexy answer to this debate is that how government spends our money is just as important as what it spends it on. “Federal Procurement” is the process by which the federal government buys things. It’s governed in the 2,000+ page Federal Acquisition Regulation and the similarly sized Defense Acquisitions Regulations System. These tomes sit at the very root of all of the major issues we face today.

The Federal Acquisition Regulation is meant to optimize the dollars spent by the federal government. It’s designed to get government the best price for what it purchases, and it’s designed to make sure that those dollars get spent in a way that creates meaningful social impact. It fails at both, and in some cases— succeeds more at doing the opposite. It keeps small businesses under the thumbs of big ones, and creates so much overhead that government gets outrageous prices.

This foundational regulation that affects all of government is completely and totally broken. One need only look at CIO-Of-The-Federal-Government Vivek Kundra’s desk for the evidence. Last time I was in there, he had a 17″ all in one Gateway computer sitting on it because regulations prohibit him from buying a reasonable machine. He’s the CIO!

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The U.S. Embassy in Dublin has sponsored a seminar on Muslim entrepreneurs and business in Ireland. A main point of the conference was the need for Sharia law compliant financial products to be used.

WTF?

The U.S. Embassy supported the conference as part of President Obama’s outreach to Muslims around the world.

I’m waiting for Barry to figure out whose side he’s on.

There are 45,000 Muslims in Ireland and Islam is the third largest religion reported on census forms.

There’s a mistake.

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A total of $69 million (£43 million) paid to welfare recipients in California was spent on holidays, including gambling trips to Las Vegas, jaunts to Hawaii and pleasure cruises.

Hey, welfare leeches need to relax too….

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A new report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, commissioned by Republican Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and others, finds astounding proof of the total administrative failure of the administration in implementing Obamacare. According to the report, HHS has missed one-third of the deadlines contained within the legislation for the first six months under Obama’s new health care regime.

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

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What is going on? In a word: bribery.

Millions of $250 checks have been sent to Medicare beneficiaries in recent weeks — and more will be sent in the four weeks remaining until election day.

There’s more to the bribery than $250 checks.

It’s the old “something for nothing” trick. In this case, millions of old folks are getting something for nothing, while millions of younger folks will be getting nothing for something — their tax dollars. But the tax bill hasn’t come due yet because the federal government is still able to borrow money from abroad. And so, most of the people have been fooled — for the time being. By the time they understand what’s happening, it will be too late for them to do anything about it.

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California, which has money for about 20,000 people, has received fewer than 450 applications, according to a state official. The program in Texas had enrolled about 200 by early September, an official in that state said. Goldman, who runs the pool in Wisconsin, said they’ve received fewer than 300 applications so far, with room for about 8,000 people in the program.

That’s not how it was supposed to work.

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

C’mon, when did the government’s ‘plan’ every come true? But it certainly provides additional scope for bureaucrats to lie about it:

“We don’t think this is getting off to a slow start,” said Jay Angoff, director of a new insurance oversight office at the Department of Health and Human Services. “We think this is getting off to a good and orderly start.”

Read it.

I suspect that they’re trying to do too much with too little, here. But I suppose it’s worth exploring.

Update: Apparently I’m not the only one who thinks so.