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Apparently not.

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Back on November 3, after Berkshire Hathaway’s deal to acquire the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railroad was announced, FutureOfCapitalism.com wrote, “Compare Burlington Northern Santa Fe’s route map with the map of proposed high speed rail projects competing for $8 billion in federal stimulus funding and you can get a sense of some of the opportunities for Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett.” President Obama, in his State of the Union address last night, said, “There’s no reason Europe or China should have the fastest trains,” and said he’d appear at a high-speed-rail related event in Tampa today. The White House is releasing the details  now  of the high-speed rail projects getting funding, and, sure enough, a lot of the big ones mesh pretty well with the BNSF route map.

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The car hadn’t been operated and it wasn’t clear that it was even operable, but Minnesota, like so many states, has a strictly worded DUI law. “Intending to sleep off a night of drinking [is] treated as the same crime as attempting to drive home under [the state’s] legal theory which does not take motive into account.”

Minnesota is, of course, one of those northern tier blue states where idiotarianism seeps down from Canada. Perhaps we could persuade them to secede.

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In prehistoric times, these beautiful cats inhabited significant areas of the western United States, but in the past 100 years, there have been few, if any, resident breeding populations here. The last time a female jaguar with a cub was sighted in this country was in the early 1900s. (Jaguars — the world’s third-largest wild cats, weighing up to 250 pounds, with distinctive black rosettes on their fur — are a separate species from the smaller, tawny mountain lions, which still roam large areas of the American West.)

Two well-intentioned conservation advocacy groups, the Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife, sued the Fish and Wildlife Service to change its ruling. Thus in 2006, the agency reassessed the situation and again determined that no areas in the United States met the definition of critical habitat for the jaguar. Despite occasional sightings, mostly within 40 miles of the Mexican border, there were still no data to indicate jaguars had taken up residence inside the United States.

Despite the continued evidence, the two conservation advocacy groups continued to sue the government. Apparently, they want jaguars to repopulate the United States even if jaguars don’t want to. Last March, a federal district judge in Arizona ordered the Fish and Wildlife Service to revisit its 2006 determination on critical habitat.

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More evidence that TSA stands for “Terminally Stupid Agency”.

The airlines will tell you the higher scrutiny lists come from TSA. They’ll insist there’s nothing they can do about it. All you can do is write a letter requesting a review. And now that a family whose kid’s name somehow ended up on a list is getting some media attention, TSA condescendingly tells them it’s the airlines’ fault. As if that solves the family’s problem.

Yet more reasons Not To Fly.

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‘You might have less-than-perfect credit and we’re OK with that,” read an October credit-card solicitation from South Dakota-based First Premier Bank. The interest rate, however, will strike some as usurious: 79.9%. That’s a more than eightfold increase from the 9.9% the bank previously collected for a similar card.

Wait, wasn’t Congress supposed to have passed legislation against predatory lending? As a matter of fact, yes. The whopping rate increase is First Premier’s way of complying with the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility and Disclosure Act of 2009. Among other provisions, that law prohibits fees of more than 25% above a card’s credit limit. First Premier has been offering an account with a $250 limit and annual fees of $256. By law the latter figure must come down to $75. To compensate for the lost $181 in fees, the bank is raising the rate by 70% of $250, or $175, a year.

Markets appear even when you don’t want them to, and even when Congress doesn’t want them to. Clamp down on one part and a compensating bulge appears somewhere else. For some reason legislators never seem able to learn this simple lesson in elementary economics.

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The policy aim, Democrats say, was to maintain public services and aid. The political aim, although Democrats don’t say so, was to maintain public-sector jobs—and the flow of union dues to the public employees unions that represent almost 40 percent of public-sector workers.

Those unions in turn have contributed generously to Democrats. Services Employee International Union head Andy Stern, the most frequent nongovernment visitor to the Obama White House, has boasted that his union steered $60 million to Democrats in the 2008 cycle. The total union contribution to Democrats has been estimated at $400 million.

Democrats: Buying votes with your money since time out of mind.

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Socialism migrates from New England to the Great Lakes.

Ms. Berry owns her own business—yet the Michigan Department of Human Services claims she is a government employee and union member. The agency thus withholds union dues from the child-care subsidies it sends to her on behalf of her low-income clients. Those dues are funneled to a public-employee union that claims to represent her. The situation is crazy—and it’s happening elsewhere in the country.

A year ago in December, Ms. Berry and more than 40,000 other home-based day care providers statewide were suddenly informed they were members of Child Care Providers Together Michigan—a union created in 2006 by the United Auto Workers and the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union had won a certification election conducted by mail under the auspices of the Michigan Employment Relations Commission. In that election only 6,000 day-care providers voted. The pro-labor vote turned out.

Many of the state’s other 34,000 day-care providers never even realized what was going on. Ms. Berry tells us she was “shocked” to find out she was suddenly in a union. The real dirty work, however, had been done when the state created an “employer” for the union to “organize” against.

This is the way unions in Communist countries are made a partner of the State.

Today the Department of Human Services siphons about $3.7 million in annual dues to the union—from the child-care subsidies. The money should be going to home-based day-care providers—themselves not on the high end of the income scale. Ms. Berry now sees money once paid to her go to a union that does little for her. She says she is “self employed and wants nothing to do with the union.”

Your tax dollars at work.

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The chairman of the congressional watchdog panel overseeing the TARP says the bailout fund is not intended for job-creation program and thus should not be used for them, as the Obama administration is reportedly now considering.

The Obama administration plans to announce on Wednesday that it intends to extend the life of the $700 billion financial bailout fund until next October, sources told CNBC Tuesday.

An administration official told CNBC that it will dedicate $175 billion of TARP money to deficit reduction. The amount represents the total the Treasury expects to be repaid by banks through 2010.

Law? We’re the government! We ARE the law!

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Chicken Little is alive and seemingly employed as a finance analyst or reporter for an education interest group. If one relies on newspaper headlines for education funding information, one might conclude that America’s schools suffer from a perpetual fiscal crisis, every year perched precariously on the brink of financial ruin, never knowing whether there will be sufficient funding to continue operating. Budgetary shortfalls, school district bankruptcies, teacher and administrator layoffs, hiring and salary freezes, pension system defaults, shorter school years, ever-larger classes, faculty furloughs, fewer course electives, reduced field trips, foregone or curtailed athletics, outdated textbooks, teachers having to make do with fewer supplies, cuts in school maintenance, and other tales of fiscal woe inevitably captivate the news media, particularly during the late-spring and summer budget and appropriations seasons.

Yet somehow, as the budget-planning cycle concludes and schools open their doors in the late summer and fall, virtually all classrooms have instructors, teachers receive their paychecks and use their health plans, athletic teams play, and textbooks are distributed. Regrettably, this story is seldom accorded the same media attention as are the prospects of budget reductions and teacher layoffs.

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This  Washington Times editorial brings us up-to-date on the growing scandal at the Obama-Holder Justice Department over the New Black Panther case. As the Times reminds us, that case involves paramilitary-garbed Panthers caught on videotape engaged in intimidating activities outside a Philadelphia polling booth on Election Day 2008. A judge was ready to enter a default judgment against the Black Panthers, based on a case brought by career Justice Department attorneys, but the Obama administration decided last spring to drop three of the four cases and punish the final one with only a weak injunction.

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In Wayne County, law enforcement officials regularly seize vehicles without levying charges — even in cases in which they later concede no law was broken. The agency provides perhaps the most prolific and egregious example of what critics contend is the wrongful use of laws allowing the seizure of private property.

It’s a practice that’s paying off. The Wayne County Sheriff’s Office, which helps run the prosecutor’s forfeiture unit, took in $8.69 million from civil seizures in 2007, more than four times the amount collected in 2001. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office gets up to 27 percent of that money.

Remember: Whatever you think the government exists to do is wrong. Governments exist to hire and pay government workers, and they have guns at their disposal.

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“Albany should emulate New York City’s public financing of campaigns, which promotes competition and lessens the corrupting influence of special interests,” the New York Times advises in an editorial this morning. How’s that “public financing of campaigns” working out for New York City? Well, it’s hard to credit the law with promoting competition when, as this article notes, “Over the past two decades, incumbent New York City Council members have enjoyed a 97.5 percent rate of re-election.” And it’s hard to credit the law with countering corruption, when, as this article reports, the council “for years used slush funds, stowed in the names of fictional organizations, to sidestep budget rules and bestow political favors.

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As Mark Steyn said, perhaps it’s time to speak truth to bower.

In all it’s ugliness.

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The Los Angeles Times draws attention to news that, as part of the health-care overhaul, “A little-noticed measure would put Christian Science healing sessions on the same footing as clinical medicine.”

Tax dollars are already paying to promote unscientific medical treatments. Consider the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCCAM). Created at the behest of Senator Tom Harkin (D- Iowa), the federal unit has already spent more than $100 million to study non scientific treatments, and, it turns out, finding out that such treatments don’t work. Senator Harkin, at a hearing earlier this year, admitted as much, when complaining, “One of the purposes of this center was to investigate and validate alternative approaches. Quite frankly, I must say publicly that it has fallen short. I think quite frankly that in this center and in the office previously before it, most of its focus has been on disproving things rather than seeking out and approving.”

I can just imagine what the leftoid nutroots will say when they find this out — which they may not, given the general incompetence of the Dinosaur Media.

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Roy Dokka, the executive director of the Center for GeoInformatics at Louisiana State University, said up to 70 percent of the West Bank could be underwater if a monster storm were to hit it.

So why are the taxpayers being forced to subsidize the folly of those who wish to build in this vulnerable area?

“It’s the only land left for large populations to grow,” said state Rep. Ricky J. Templet, a Republican who represents a swath of the West Bank. “The sky’s the limit. On the West Bank, we were the last to get started on our flood protection. Some people will be able to sleep at night now.”

I guess the fact that there are other, non-flood-prone areas nearby is irrelevant.

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The Brooklyn Brewery is getting an $800,000 grant from the state of New York, the New York Times reports this morning.

Many of these taxpayers are less rich than this brewery owner is, making this deal another Reverse Robin-Hood.

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

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Recently, Democratic Representative Maxine Waters added an amendment to the bill establishing the CFPA that would add five seats to its powerful Oversight Board for “experts in the fields of consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgage loans.” All sorts of interest group representatives could easily get on the board under this amendment. For example, pretty much any bank or credit card company official could claim to have expertise in the “fields” of “consumer protection” or “fair lending.” Similarly, many banks can easily claim to “primarily serve underserved communities.” Finally, interest group representatives could pose as “representatives of communities that have been significantly impacted by higher-priced mortgage loans.” For example, lenders and real estate developers located in such areas would surely qualify; after all, they live in the community too. The majority of the board will still be made up of various federal government officials. But these officials are far from immune from interest group pressure, and of course that lobbying will be facilitated by the fact that several interest group representatives will now be sitting on the board itself.

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

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

Alex Tabarrok reveals the clay feet of the Pay Czar concept.

There is no way this will work as advertised.  If the administration actually follows through, most of these executives will quit and get higher paying jobs elsewhere.  Executives not directly affected by the pay cuts will also quit when they see their prospects for future salary gains have been cut.  Chaos will be created at these firms as top people leave in droves.  Will the administration then order people back to work?

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Democratic staff for the House oversight committee informed their GOP counterparts today that the majority has changed the locks on the committee’s hearing room. While Republicans previously enjoyed their own key to the room, they will now have to request access from Democrats. This followed a bitter partisan argument in which Republicans refused to take down a video from their website that contradicted Dem explanations about a closed-door meeting on the Countrywide VIP loan scandal.

Has there every been a bigger oxymoron than the ‘Democratic’ Party?

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KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

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As the cognoscenti predicted, most of the stimulus money went to stimulate — more goverment.

“We didn’t see much of anything,” noted Elaine Walker, mayor of Bowling Green, a relatively prosperous town of 55,000 in the western part of the state. “The money went to the state and was siphoned off by them. We got about zero from it.”

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An excellent summary of how the government helped cause the financial crisis, and how what they plan to do about it will make things worse, not better.

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The golf-cart boom has followed an IRS ruling that golf carts qualify for the electric-car credit as long as they are also road worthy. These qualifying golf carts are essentially the same as normal golf carts save for adding some safety features, such as side and rearview mirrors and three-point seat belts. They typically can go 15 to 25 miles per hour.

The problem with government programs is that the people who make a living gaming the system are smarter — and always will be — than the people who set up the government programs. Entrepreneurs are always a step ahead of bureaucrats, just by the nature of the personality types involved. This is why having the government run something leads inevitably to waste/fraud/abuse, and always will. You would think that people would eventually catch on to this, but apparently they never do.

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Casten’s original plan was to sell one-third of the recycled power to Cabot’s plant, and the rest to an industrial facility just down the road for around $45 per megawatt-hour–cheaper than the $55/MWh that electricity cost in the area, yet still high enough for the project to be profitable. But, in Louisiana, as in most of the United States, state law forbids anyone from stringing up private wires across a public street. Casten couldn’t market his power directly–he could only sell it to the local electric utility. And, because the utility, due to state rules, chiefly earned a profit from the power plants it built and ran itself, it refused to offer anything more than rock-bottom prices for Casten’s recycled power–prices too stingy for the project to work. After many months of bitter wrangling, Cabot gave up entirely. As a final insult, the utility later won approval from regulators to build a brand new fossil-fuel plant, a pricier way to generate electricity that would also add more carbon to the air.

The Louisiana utility wasn’t doing anything evil–it was just responding rationally to the rules laid down–but the end result was perverse. “It’s like we’re forcing citizens to pay extra to heat the planet,” Casten bristles. And similar roadblocks stand in the way of recycling across the country, with jaw-dropping consequences: One study for the EPA found that harnessing industrial waste energy had the potential to meet 19 percent of the country’s electricity needs–equal to 95 nuclear plants–while slashing fossil-fuel use in the power sector by one-quarter.

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But when you look at the current stimulus package — aka the Recovery Act — it’s a bit of a head scratcher, considering so little of it has been spent.

Let’s take a look at the big picture: According to information aggregated by recovery.gov, of the $499 billion in stimulus funds slated for spending —contracts, grants, loans and entitlements — only $251 billion has been made available. Of that amount, just $107 billion had been paid out as of September 30. That’s less than a quarter of the overall number.

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You would think that even stupid people like Congressmen would realize that, when you increase the price of something, the demand for it goes down — something that even high school students can grasp.

But of course they do understand that; they just don’t care. What they care about are the votes of union members, whose wages go up with each rise in the minimum wage, and to hell with unemployed students who aren’t old enough to vote anyway.

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Democrats on the Senate Finance Committee have refused to allow the final text of their health care bill to be posted online prior to their vote on it. They claim the language is too technically difficult for ordinary people to understand, so that releasing the text would just sow confusion.

More likely, the Dems don’t want people to see language like that which appears at pages 80-81 of the bill. There it says: ” “Beginning in 2015, payment [under Medicare] would be reduced by five percent if an aggregation of the physician’s resource use is at or above the 90th percentile of national utilization.” Thus, in any year in which a particular doctor’s average per-patient Medicare costs are in the top 10 percent in the nation, the feds will cut the doctor’s payments by 5 percent.”

So if a doctor authorizes care that a bureaucrat thinks is too expensive, the bureaucrat has the power to cut his reimbursement. So the doctor’s incentive is to provide cheap care in all cases, for fear of being shortchanged, since he doesn’t know what these national percentages are. Once again, we have bureaucrats second-guessing doctors. Oh, we won’t ration care! Heaven forbid. We’ll get the doctors to do it, so you can hate the doctors rather than us. If there are any doctors left after we get through with them. Death panels? We don’t need no stinkin’ death panels! Ha ha ha!

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

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Let’s see … stimulus money goes, not to private individuals or organizations, but to state and local governments … which are pinched for money, and so they spend it on … government programs and employees!

Saw that comin’.

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A new paper in The Economists’ Voice concludes that the costs of the “cash for clunkers” program exceed the benefits by approximately $2000 per vehicle.

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

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If the federal government funds art and other expressive endeavors, politicization is sure to follow.

And that’s a basic argument against the government funding anything except national defense and law enforcement.

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Republicans had their Bridge to Nowhere in Alaska, and now Democrats seem intent on wrapping themselves firmly around Congressman Jack Murtha’s Airport for No One in Johnstown, Pennsylvania. So much for changing the culture of spending in Washington.

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Meanwhile, we taxpayers in Massachusetts are stuck with the bill for housing Obama’s Aunt Zeituni. The Wikipedia entry on this illegal immigrant has a good explanation of how she has avoided deportation thanks to the U.S. court system taking years to process even the simplest cases, e.g., Should a woman who has already twice been ordered deported, but did not leave, be… deported? (Put some judges and lawyers like that into a tire factory and pretty soon you need tariff walls to protect them against the Chinese.)

Massachusetts taxpayers have been paying for Aunt Zeituni’s housing for six years. Ever since Barack Obama’s ascendancy to the White House, we’ve also been paying for extra police details to deter the curious and the press. The Obama family inflicted further cost and inconvenience on folks in this state during their family vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, when roads and airspace were shut down for up to a week.

What could Barack Obama do to help Massachusetts? He owns a 14-room, 6500 square foot house in Chicago (using fossil fuels to heat 6500 square feet for a family of four in one of the coldest parts of the U.S. is apparently a demonstration of one’s commitment to reversing global warming) that presumably sits vacant nearly all year. The house is guarded 24/7 by Secret Service agents. The street is closed to non-residents. Why can’t Aunt Zeituni live there? She wouldn’t be bothered by the rabble or the press. She wouldn’t be a drain on Massachusetts citizens.

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A most interesting slideshow. Inaccurate as ‘the most corrupt’, of course, because they have an equal number of Republicans and Democrats; but a good effort.

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Let’s say you’re preparing dinner and you realize with dismay that you don’t have any certified organic Tuscan kale. What to do?

Here’s how Michelle Obama handled this very predicament Thursday afternoon:

The Secret Service and the D.C. police brought in three dozen vehicles and shut down H Street, Vermont Avenue, two lanes of I Street and an entrance to the McPherson Square Metro station. They swept the area, in front of the Department of Veterans Affairs, with bomb-sniffing dogs and installed magnetometers in the middle of the street, put up barricades to keep pedestrians out, and took positions with binoculars atop trucks. Though the produce stand was only a block or so from the White House, the first lady hopped into her armored limousine and pulled into the market amid the wail of sirens.

I can’t believe that they actually published this in the Washington Post. Somebody obviously didn’t get the memo that the Obamas Can Do No Wrong.

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The scenario: Medicare’s three-year limit on payment for anti-organ-rejection drugs led to a woman needing a second kidney transplant, because she couldn’t afford to the medicine that would have allowed her to keep her first transplanted kidney in healthy, working condition.

The cost of anti-rejection drugs for the patient? $1,000 to $3,000 a month. Cost of the second transplant? $125,000. The average Medicare expenditure per kidney transplant patient care is $17,000 yearly, while it’s $71,000 a year for dialysis patients and $106,000 for a transplant, according to the Times.

That’s the problem with having the government pay for this stuff: If the law allows for discretion on the part of providers, it opens itself up to fraud and abuse; if it doesn’t, it leads to ridiculous (and expensive) outcomes. The only solution is to keep government completely out of the process.

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We wrote here and here about the corruption of the National Endowment for the Arts in the Age of Obama. Now comes word that on August 12, a group of 21 arts organizations endorsed President Obama’s health reform plan only 48 hours after a conference call in which a top National Endowment for the Arts official asked arts groups for help in advancing the administration’s policy agenda, including health care.

One reason the arts organizations may have been so swift to follow the administration’s suggestion is that 16 of the groups and affiliated organizations received nearly $2 million in grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in the 150 days before the conference call. According to the linked Washington Times analysis of NEA records, more than $1 million of that total came from the stimulus package. The NEA has moved from silence to disinformation regarding these events, but the money was obviously well spent.

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The thing about the bully pulpit is that Presidents can make the most fantastic claims and it takes days to sort the reality from the myths. So as a public service, let’s try to navigate the, er, remarkable Medicare discussion that President Obama delivered on Wednesday. It isn’t easy.

Medicare’s unfunded liability—the gap between revenues and promised benefits—is currently some $37 trillion over the next 75 years. Yet the President uses this insolvency as an argument to justify the creation of another health-care entitlement, this time for most everyone under age 65. It’s like a variation on the old Marx Brothers routine: “The soup is terrible and the portions are too small.”

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Here are the top 10 reasons this program should not be a model for reform, and why it would be dangerous for the federal government to be put in charge of any more of our health sector….

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

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It’s in the New York Times, so it must be true, right?

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The airport has an $8.5 million, taxpayer-funded radar system that has never been used. The runway was paved with reinforced concrete at a cost of more than $17 million. The latest investment was $800,000 from the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act to repave half of the secondary runway. (Never mind that the first one is hardly ever in use.)

Congressman John Murtha, the gift that keeps on spending.

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The U.S. Transportation Department, billions of dollars behind in paying “cash-for-clunkers” rebates, has hired private contractors and solicited volunteers from the Federal Aviation Administration and its own executive ranks to work overtime to clear the backlog.

And this program was absurdly simple. Imagine what will happen if they take over health care.

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