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After Donald Berwick’s controversial recess appointment to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), his allies claimed that he was preparing a “point-by-point” rebuttal to his critics. Berwick does have a lot of explaining to do, after all.

He’s publically romanticized Britain’s government-run healthcare and is on the record arguing that most cities should ration the “number of centers engaging” in “cardiac surgery,” “neonatal intensive care” and “cancer care.”

It’s been three months now since his recess appointment, and still no word from the new CMS director. In fact, Berwick hasn’t granted any interviews, refuses to testify before Congress, and doesn’t take any questions at public events.

To put this in perspective, Donald Berwick oversees the healthcare spending for one-in-three Americans and, as the New York Times put it, “has a budget bigger than the Pentagon’s.”

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DETROIT—The Motor City has lots of drafty houses and tens of thousands of unemployed people. So when Congress proposed spending $5 billion to insulate homes as part of the stimulus bill, Detroit got excited. The director of the city agency managing the program advertised for construction companies before the legislation even passed.

But on the same day in March 2009 that Shenetta Coleman picked up applications from 46 companies, she received an email from the Michigan Department of Human Services telling her she couldn’t award work to anyone.

The problem: Ms. Coleman hadn’t met requirements for her advertisement. Those included specifying the precise wages that contractors would have to pay, and posting the advertisement on a specific website. There were other rules—federal, state and local—for grant and contract-award processes, historic preservation and labor standards.

The bureaucratic obstacles Ms. Coleman hit took more than a year to clear. Some were mandated by the stimulus bill, the same legislation that was supposed to rapidly create jobs. For example, there is a union-backed provision that requires that weatherization workers receive the prevailing wages in the area.

Now, imagine the government in charge of your health care….

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For two years Onyango said she lived in a homeless shelter, before she was assigned public housing despite thousands of legal residents also awaiting assistance. “I didn’t take any advantage of the system. The system took advantage of me.”

“I didn’t ask for it; they gave it to me. Ask your system. I didn’t create it or vote for it. Go and ask your system,” she said unapologetically.

In 2004 a judge ordered Zeituni Onyango out of the country, but she never left. She stayed, hiding in plain site. In 2005 she attended her nephew’s swearing in as the junior Senator of Illinois. In 2008 she was invited to, and traveled to D.C. for President Obama’s inauguration….

Onyango hired a top immigration lawyer from Cleveland to help fight her case. We asked how she afforded that lawyer, when she claimed poverty.

“When you believe in Jesus Christ and almighty God, my help comes from heaven,” she responded….She is still living in South Boston public housing, unemployed, and collecting about $700 a month in disability, she says. And now, Zeituni Onlyango is in this country legally.

Life in the Obama Nation is pretty sweet — for the leeches.

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This is a case study in how government expands. First there were free school lunch programs for poor kids. Then that got expanded to breakfast, and further expanded to summertime, when school isn’t in session. Now it’s being expanded from poor kids to everyone, so that instead of spending school time learning to read and write and do math, students are chowing down on Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms. And the responsibility for feeding children devolves away from parents onto the state, in partnership with the lobbyists for the manufacturers of Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms.

It’s funny how the same people who argue against tax cuts for the “wealthy” who don’t “need” the money have no problem dispensing Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms to children who don’t need them.

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But all you really need to know about this project is that the Community Redevelopment Agency is involved. The CRA’s post-1992 involvement in South L.A. has produced a nearly unbroken string of million-dollar projects that don’t get built. These projects come with big promises of affordable housing, high-end retail, world-class restaurants and private-public achievement. They proceed through costly subsidies and exploratory efforts. They nearly always involve eminent domain seizures of valuable land. They get gorged on by the friends and families of local politicians. And in the end, they produce vacant land.

The CRA maintains a euphemistic log of its failures, so you can see what I’m talking about. The 107-acre Watts Project has become nothing. The Normandie 5 Redevelopment Project has become nothing. The massive and heavily promoted Marlton Square project has become nothing. My personal favorite, the Vermont/Manchester project, has become nothing.

A public project is greeted with skepticism.

At the San Francisco Chronicle‘s “Open Forum,” retired Stanford professor Alain Enthoven and banker William Grindley count the ways that the California High Speed Rail project (funded in part by $2.25 billion of your money, non-Californians) deals in plain fiction.

The kind of comparison Enthoven and Grindley do here is part of the basic diligence a 14-year-old organization would have done somewhere in the course of spending its first $250 million. It’s easy to run comps in Europe and Asia, where high-speed rail has been commonplace for decades. Yet the California High-Speed Rail Authority has never bothered to find out. This is as good a time as any to bring up an old journalismism: When people are having trouble getting you information, there’s something wrong with the information.

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There have been a lot of unsurprising news stories lately. Rod Blagojevich going on TV. Tiger Woods and his wife divorcing. The economy racing along like an elderly tortoise. And the Food and Drug Administration saying the salmonella outbreak proves the agency needs more power.

We should have seen that coming. In the private sector, entities that fall short of doing their jobs find themselves forced to shrink. In the public sector, the opposite is typically true. Failure is an option, and often a beneficial one.

The Federal Reserve Board and Treasury facilitated the 2008 financial crisis? Then obviously we have no choice but to give them even more responsibility. The Securities and Exchange Commission let Bernie Madoff rob investors? A bigger SEC will be a smarter SEC.

It’s true that the FDA is charged with assuring food safety. But really, the government can’t do that. The task is too big and too complex. Fortunately, it doesn’t have to do it, because the pressures of competition force producers to make sure their goods are clean and wholesome.

What goes curiously unnoticed is that egg suppliers and grocery stores have nothing to gain from sickening their customers—and a lot to lose. It doesn’t take many obvious hygiene lapses for a company to get a bad reputation, and a bad reputation can be catastrophic.

In 1971, a New York man died of botulism after eating a can of Bon Vivant soup. If you’ve never heard of Bon Vivant soup, there’s a simple explanation: In no time at all, the company was bankrupt and the brand was as defunct as William McKinley.

Radley Balko overturns a rock.

That’s right. A hundreds-of-millions-of-dollars spending bill made its way through Congress, and no one even noticed that the damn thing didn’t have a name. Which also means you can probably count on one hand the number of lawmakers who actually know what’s in the bill—and still have a finger left over to let them know what you think of this nonsense.

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The Crust take care of their own.

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When I interviewed him for my column this week, Fraternal Order of Policy Executive Director Jim Pasco differentiated citizen-shot video from police dash cam and surveillance video this way:

How do you know the video hasn’t been edited? How do we know what’s in the video hasn’t been taken out of context? With dashboard cameras or police security video, the evidence is in the hands of law enforcement the entire time, so it’s admissible under the rules of evidence. That’s not the case with these cell phone videos.

Pasco may be right about the potential for citizen-shot video to be edited, though from what I understand that’s pretty easy to detect. The problem with Pasco’s statement is that there are too many stories where dash cam and surveillance camera video has gone missing, particularly in cases where there’s alleged police misconduct.

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Apparently not.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has been cracking down on efforts to disqualify potential hires with criminal records or bad credit history, arguing that the practice can be tantamount to discrimination, as such applicants are disproportionately black or Latino.

And whose fault is that? Not the employer’s; he has to make his best judgment on the information available to him.

The EEOC indicated its disapproval of such practices last fall, when it it filed a class-action discrimination lawsuit against Dallas-based Freeman Companies, an events planning firm. The EEOC alleged that Freeman Companies used credit history and criminal records to discriminate against against blacks, Hispanics and males.

This is Yet Another Stupid Bureaucracy at work.

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A Jewish Telegraphic Agency dispatch  from Washington provides a fascinating look at how government programs turn religious and non-profit groups into partners of the government: “President Obama signed an extension of vital Medicaid funding, which was a top priority of the Jewish community….The six-month extension of FMAP had been a priority of the Jewish Federations of North America, as 60 cents on every dollar of public revenue brought in by the federations or their partner agencies comes from Medicaid. Nearly $6 billion per year in government aid goes to Jewish hospitals, nursing homes, Jewish Family Service outposts and other social service agencies through Medicaid….The FMAP money will prevent cuts that could have cost the Jewish community $150 million to $200 million in social services funding.”

In convenient graphical form.

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Perhaps because the government is run by stupid people who think they’re smarter than the people who pay their salaries? That’s just a guess, of course.

In hidden vaults across the country, the US government is building a stockpile of $1 coins. The hoard has topped $1.1bn – imagine a stack of coins reaching almost seven times higher than the International Space Station – and the piles have grown so large the US Federal Reserve is running out of storage space.

Americans won’t use the coins, preferring $1 notes. But the US keeps minting them anyway, and the Fed estimates it already has enough $1 coins to last the next 10 years.

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President Obama is earmarking $1 billion in Stimulus money “to build FutureGen 2.0, a clean coal repowering program and carbon dioxide (CO2) storage network” in his home state of Illinois.  According to a Department of Energy press release, this billion is being provided to ”FutureGen Alliance, Ameren Energy Resources, Babcock & Wilcox, and Air Liquide Process & Costruction, Inc. to build FutureGen 2.0, a clean coal repowering program and carbon dioxide (CO2) storage network.”  That is right — $1 billion.  This is the largest earmark of money in U.S. history and they are taking money right out of your pocket to pay for it.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

Moe Lane overturns a rock.

Her name is Julie, she’s seven years old, and she decided to sell some lemonade at a Portland, Oregon art fair… yes.  You know precisely how this ends: it ends with a county public sector union employee with a clipboard making a seven year old cry by threatening her with several hundred dollars in fines for not having the right permits.  And with the spokesmen for various public health departments justifying having their public sector union employees making a seven year old girl cry because, hey, you have to protect the public and the law’s the law.

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Citing the need to ensure value for its taxpayers’ money, Canada plans to close its side of a Saskatchewan-Montana border crossing that sees just five travelers per day — even as the U.S. side is undergoing an $8.5 million stimulus-funded upgrade.

Canada’s decision to close the Big Beaver Port of Entry on April 1 underscores the criticism leveled against the U.S. government spending more than $23 million in Recovery Act funding to upgrade that and four other Montana border posts.

Far be it from me to say anything good about Canada, but perhaps they know something that our government bureaucrats don’t.ell, perhaps it’s there to serve all the people who are fleeing poverty in Montana for the golden paradise of Saskatchewan.

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Four months after U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi famously declared “We have to pass the bill so you can find out what’s in it,” a congressional panel has released the first chart illustrating the 2,801 page health care law President Obama signed into law in March.

Developed by the Joint Economic Committee minority, led by U.S Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas and Rep. Kevin Brady of Texas, the detailed organization chart displays a bewildering array of new government agencies, regulations and mandates.

Get a copy of the chart, and have fun.

‘We’re from the government, and we’re here to confuse you.’

The Other McCain is on the case.

More here.

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Recent reports from the L.A. Times show that since 2007, nearly $4.8 million in welfare funds have been withdrawn from ATMs in California casinos. And a new report shows that more than $12,000 from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program was withdrawn from ATMs in California strip clubs.

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With a recent publication in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the NAS seems to have comprehensively studied history and decided the proper role model for their institution is…Joseph McCarthy. The NAS has published a new “study” in the PNAS attempting to boost public trust in catastrophic climate predictions, which have been undermined recently by reports of scientific corruption, partisanship, skullduggery, and worse. Specifically, the “study” seeks to marginalize scientists who have dared to dissent from the “consensus” the United Nations (UN) asserts on climate science.

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Business executives who whine about government intrusion into commerce really ought not to accept positions on government ‘advisory’ bodies designed to promote government intrusion into commerce. That seems rather straightforward.

Why does the President even have an ‘Export Council’, anyway? And how much is it costing the taxpayers during this Era of Constantly Expanding Red Ink?

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Sometimes it is good to work for the government.

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What would we do without scientists?

Funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research….

‘There’s a grant for that.’

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Arthur Furano voted early — five days before Election Day. And he voted often, flipping the lever six times for his favorite candidate. Furano cast multiple votes on the instructions of a federal judge and the U.S. Department of Justice as part of a new election system crafted to help boost Hispanic representation.

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

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No one should be happy with the performance of the ODNI. It was born of compromise and expediency and predestined to fail miserably. The understandable outrage of the families of the victims of 9/11 and a surge of national sympathy on their behalf spawned the 9/11 Commission, whose report and recommendations then heavily influenced the substance and urgency of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, which carried Congress by large margins. Who could vote against it?! Rewiring the intelligence community was going to solve all our problems. Whatever misgivings President Bush had, he got the message—and he got out of the way. The bill created a new layer of bureaucracy called ODNI that hangs over the IC like the alien doomsday ship in the movie Independence Day. The Senate wanted the DNI to control the intelligence community. The House wanted the DNI to coordinate activity in the IC. Under current circumstances, the DNI can do neither.

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There are, indeed, two Americas: the increasingly straitened world of the private sector, where jobs are competitive, money is scarce, and job security is, for many, nonexistent; and the lush world of the government employee, where competition is more or less unknown, salaries and benefits often double those available to private workers, retirement is ten or more years earlier than in the private sector, and it may take a felony to get fired. This is the central economic conflict of our time, between lavishly compensated and ever more gluttonous government employees, and wealth-creating private citizens who are increasingly unable to support their public-sector masters in the style to which they have become accustomed.

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Not really news, but a useful reminder.

“It started off with an earmark that was placed into a defense bill years ago,” said Laura Peterson, who has been tracking the project for the nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense.

The money involved is not insubstantial. By some estimates, Congress has paid $3 billion to GE and Rolls-Royce since first setting aside money for a second engine in the mid-1990s, and it will take close to $3 billion more to have the engines tested, proven and in full production.

And top military brass say they don’t want or need it. One navy admiral told reporters it made no sense to try and carry spare parts two separate engines on an aircraft carrier. “Space is at a premium,” Adm. Gary Roughead said.

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But only if you’re a New York City bus driver.

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Regulation didn’t work? Why, then, we need … more regulation.

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MICHAEL MULGREW is an affable former Brooklyn vocational-high-school teacher who took over last year as head of New York City’s United Federation of Teachers when his predecessor, Randi Weingarten, moved to Washington to run the national American Federation of Teachers. Over breakfast in March, we talked about a movement spreading across the country to hold public-school teachers accountable by compensating, promoting or even removing them according to the results they produce in class, as measured in part by student test scores. Mulgrew’s 165-page union contract takes the opposite approach. It not only specifies everything that teachers will do and will not do during a six-hour-57 ½-minute workday but also requires that teachers be paid based on how long they have been on the job. Once they’ve been teaching for three years and judged satisfactory in a process that invariably judges all but a few of them satisfactory, they are ensured lifetime tenure.

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From a New York Times brief on the departure of a deputy under secretary at the federal department of education: “Mr. Shireman has been seen as such an important figure in the department’s effort to regulate for-profit higher education that the word of his departure, late Monday, caused stocks of the publicly traded higher education companies to soar.” Is this really the kind of country we want? When the news of the departure of not an elected president, not a cabinet secretary, not an under secretary, but a bureacrat with the title of deputy under secretary is enough to affect hundreds of millions of dollars of the valuations of publicly traded companies?

Does the underlying value of the education these companies are providing students change this much, this fast, depending on whether Mr. Shireman is or isn’t the deputy under secretary of education? No, the courses and teachers and requirements are all the same. But the government has the power to affect the perceived value of the education in the marketplace for degree-holders, and it controls the financing levers through student loans. What an amazing illustration of the power of government to destroy value by threatening regulation or to create it by leaving a business alone.

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So obviously to fix the problem we need more laws and regulations, right? Oh, wait….

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A consolidated list of leeches.

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Remind me why the taxpayers are funding this crap.

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The Crust uses the theory ‘Hey, you screwed up. Let’s give you more money and power until you get it right.’ Since they’re just paying themselves, they think it’s perfectly reasonable. Meanwhile, you’re wallet gets flatter and flatter.

Aren’t you proud?

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A common gout drug, colchicine, has been around for so long that pre-dated the FDA and until last year, it had never been approved by the agency. As part of a push by the FDA to bring such drugs under its umbrella, a company called URL Pharma commissioned studies to show that colchicine was safe and effective, and last summer the FDA approved the company’s version and gave URL three years of marketing exclusivity for the drug.

Here come the unintended consequences. While the FDA says it hoped there wouldn’t be a significant run-up in the price of colchicine — sold as Colcrys by URL — the retail cost has soared to more than $5 a bill from the previous pennies a tablet. URL Pharma also sued five makers of manufacturers of colchicine, saying they have been illegally marketing their colchicine products since Colcrys’s approval. One of those makers has settled the matter and stopped production. The other four companies are fighting the lawsuit.

This is what always happens when the government gets involved in anything — costs go up, availability goes down, people start suing each other, and nobody wins. Except the government, of course.

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Actually, the headline ought to read ‘Audit Finds EnergyStar Program Total Bullshit’.

Does a “gasoline-powered alarm clock” qualify for the EnergyStar  label, the government stamp of approval for an energy-saving product?

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Well, the people who knew it all along say, ‘Told you so.’

The government already has spent all of this money (and then some). All that is left in the “trust fund” is IOUs from one part of the government to another. And guess who has to make good on those IOUs? While there is budgetary significance to this accounting fiction (since Social Security cannot legally continue paying benefits after its notional reserve is officially exhausted), all this talk of a trust fund tends to obscure reality.

Ever notice how the government commonly does things that, were they done by any other entity, would have people going to jail?

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Gee, my heart bleeds for him.

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The suspension is the second roadblock the upgrade has faced. In 2006, Lockheed Martin was brought in as the project contractor after it stalled under Science Applications International Corporation. FBI officials said the earlier project had to be rebooted because problems had grown too big to be fixed.

Yeah, we totally want these people in charge of our health care.

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What goes around comes around.

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A cell phone application that will help illegal immigrants find water and key landmarks as they cross into the United States is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds and an irresponsible use of technology, critics say.

The Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), the brainchild of three faculty members at the University of California-San Diego and a colleague at the University of Michigan, is a software application that can be installed into a GPS-enabled cell phone. In addition to helping immigrants locate water and landmarks, it also could alert them to Border Patrol checkpoints. And to make the trek a little less arduous, it also plays recorded poetry.

May? Damned straight will.

Nearly two years later, the governor’s ambitious plan to reclaim the river of grass, as the famed wetlands are known, is instead on track to rescue the fortunes of United States Sugar.

United States Sugar dictated many of the terms of the deal as state officials repeatedly made decisions against the immediate needs of the Everglades and the interests of taxpayers, an examination of thousands of state e-mail messages and records and more than 60 interviews showed.

When a “fairness opinion” commissioned by the state found that those appraisals had overvalued the land by $400 million, Florida officials orchestrated a public relations campaign to discredit the findings, internal e-mail showed. Appraisers from the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, which was required to sign off on the deal, were also cut out of the process after raising concerns, e-mail messages showed.

Sure, we want government employees in charge of our health care. What a brilliant idea.

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There are two million civilian federal workers. 1.1 million of them have direct private sector equivalents. And they are laughing their asses off at those private sector suckers, who are doing similar jobs for less pay—often a lot less.

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We invented the federal Highway Trust Fund in 1956, promising motorists and truckers that all proceeds from a new federal gas tax would be spent on building the interstate system. They aren’t. Congress has expanded federal highway spending beyond interstates to all types of roadways. And ever since 1982, a portion of those “highway user taxes” have been diverted to urban transit. Today, the federal role in transportation includes mandating sidewalks, funding bike paths, and creating scenic trails.

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Just think of these people in charge of your health care.