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You know why.

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Hillary had three. Laura only had one. How many does Michelle have? 23.

But Michelle is married to the Magic Negro. She is the Negro American Princess.

Even more than being a NAP, Michelle is a product of the Cook County political machine. Her whine about being a second-class citizen would be a joke were it not (a) such a big fat lie, and (b) so damaging to our social fabric.

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I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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The lawsuit—which we first wrote about in April—concerns Bailey Perrin & Bailey, a Houston law firm tapped by the Rendell administration to prosecute Janssen Phamaceuticals over the marketing of its antipsychotic drug Risperdal. When states lack the resources or expertise to bring certain suits, it’s not uncommon for them to seek help from private lawyers. But in this case, it appears as if pay-to-sue politics was involved in the choice of Bailey Perrin.

While F. Kenneth Bailey, the law firm’s founding partner, was negotiating a potentially lucrative no-bid contingency fee contract with the Governor’s office, he was also making political donations totaling more than $90,000 to Mr. Rendell’s 2006 re-election campaign. Janssen, a subsidiary of Johnson & Johnson, filed a motion in January with the state Supreme Court that cited these campaign contributions and questioned the appropriateness of the state hiring for-profit lawyers to sue on its behalf.

I’m shocked, I tell you, shocked.

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The president has decided — just days before the deadline he himself set for passage of health care bills in both chambers of Congress — that he wants to create a new and very powerful executive branch agency, the Independent Medicare Advisory Council (IMAC), which would be accountable only to him and have the authority to re-write the Medicare program from top to bottom by executive memo. Now that’s audacious.

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A series of bailouts, bank rescues and other economic lifelines could end up costing the federal government as much as $23 trillion, the U.S. government’s watchdog over the effort says – a staggering amount that is nearly double the nation’s entire economic output for a year.

What do they care? It’s not their money.

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Since December 2007, when the current recession formally began, the nation has lost approximately 6 million jobs. Only two states, Alaska and North Dakota, have lost a smaller percentage of jobs than Washington, DC, which has seen a job loss of 0.6%, or 4,400. Simply put, Washington has done better in this recession than 48 of the fifty states when it comes to job performance.

Washington has always been a one industry town: that’s why it has an intrinsically self-absorbed monotonic culture. Everyone there depends on government for their livelihood. It is fundamentally not a city of competitive industries, but a giant taxpayer-funded office park, surrounded by museums and memorials. The great presidents: Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson, have their own monuments, while more recent leaders have concert halls and office buildings named after them.

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

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Here’s some economic logic to ponder. The unemployment rate in June for American teenagers was 24%, for black teens it was 38%, and even White House economists are predicting more job losses. So how about raising the cost of that teenage labor?

Sorry to say, but that’s precisely what will happen on July 24, when the minimum wage will increase to $7.25 an hour from $6.55. The national wage floor will have increased 41% since the three-step hike was approved by the Democratic Congress in May 2007. Then the economy was humming, with an overall jobless rate of 4.5% and many entry-level jobs paying more than the minimum. That’s a hard case to make now, with a 9.5% national jobless rate and thousands of employers facing razor-thin profit margins.

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One of the purported benefits of nationalized health care is that it will be more efficient than private insurers since it would lack the profit motive and have lower administrative expenses, like Medicare. But one reason entitlement programs are so easy to defraud is precisely because they don’t have those overhead costs — they automatically pay whatever bills roll in with valid claims numbers.

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When President Obama signed legislation in mid-June to bring tobacco under FDA regulation, few seemed outraged that the legislation had been co-written by Philip Morris USA (PM). The bill was designed, critics say, to stabilize the place of cigarettes in our society: to diminish the threat of health-related lawsuits, to prevent competitive yet possibly safer products from being introduced, and to lock in Philip Morris’ market share. It’s not just the Harvard School of Public Health leveling these charges but even Sen. Bob Bennett, Republican of Utah, a supporter of the intent of the bill who was nonetheless “convinced we would do better if we told Philip Morris to stay out of the process of writing tobacco legislation.”

Five years after the tobacco buyout, and with the second prong of tobacco legislation newly passed, it’s worth checking in. As with other crops, the government had for years been paying some farmers not to grow tobacco to maintain prices for those who did. By the time 2004 rolled around, nearly 85 percent of tobacco permit holders weren’t growing tobacco at all. The permits were being bought and sold for their annual cash payments, like some sort of strange tobacco bond. The quota system, which could have been used to end domestic tobacco production altogether, worked in that it kept prices high and kept small farmers in business.

According to one story on the buyout, some farmers have stopped growing commodity crops like corn and wheat to switch to the wildly more profitable tobacco crop. “A reasonable profit for an acre of corn is about $100. For tobacco,” T.J. Vaughan said in that story, “it’s $1,000 to $1,500.”

With this new FDA move, no doubt tobacco will soon be added to the War on Drugs. I’m sure the Mafia is rubbing its hands and counting up the potential profits, with memories of Prohibition fresh in everyone’s mind — except that of the bureaucrats in Washington.

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

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No one can destroy an economy like the government.

Steve Sailer just keeps on nosing around.

In the meantime, here’s a great John Kass column from the Chicago Tribune on February 14, 2009 (or as the day is known in Chicago history, St. Valentine’s Day) that’s highly relevant to the Ricci case. The background is that in the 1990s, Chicago spent a fortune on devising the perfect unbiased police and fire promotion civil service tests. When the test creation process was complete, everybody in Chicago agreed that, finally, a non-discriminatory test had been perfected. Of course, it turned out that whites ended up earning 95% of the scores high enough for promotion, so a political firestorm ensued. For a while, Mayor Richard M. Daley stoutly defended a test on which no expense had been spared, but eventually he caved in and announced that some of the top scorers would get promotions but other worthies would get promotions too, based on “merit” in order to bring “diversity” to leadership positions. This “merit” system was extended to firefighters.

And don’t miss the adventures of the exciting Boyle brothers. Read The Whole Thing.

Congresswoman Betsy McCaughey is on the case.

No, you won’t be able to keep your insurance if you like it.

Steve Sailer has the goods.

Perhaps the higher-ups forgot to clue him into the secret Fingers-Crossed Clause in the Constitution about how that all equal protection of the laws stuff doesn’t apply in the case of Diversity.

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That’s why the White House just demonstrated where local mayors stand in this administration’s pecking order: the President will not fail to get re-elected in 2012 if he snubs the mayor of Miami Lakes, Florida. He will fail to get re-elected if he snubs the AFL-CIO too severely, and organized labor is having enough upsets already over Card Check. So not crossing the picket line is pretty much an easy way to score points with the entities that will be of most use to this administration in about three years. There’s nothing personal about this: I’m sure that the White House doesn’t particularly want to offend urban mayors.

It’s just that none of them are worth the effort it’d take to avoid giving offense.

Read it.

Sensible thinking from government officials? How much do you want to bet this goes nowhere?

I suspect that the chances are pretty good.

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“One of our government’s most powerful officials, a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was using his public office for private gain,” Lytle told jurors in his opening statement here at the federal courthouse in Alexandria this morning.

With that, Lytle launched explanations of a dizzying array of alleged bribery schemes involving African-American businessmen who would arrive at Jefferson’s office looking for the Congressman’s help in pursuing business opportunities in West Africa. In exchange, said Lytle, the businessmen would end up being forced to pay bribes to sham companies set up to benefit Jefferson’s family.

God forbid that they should mention he was a Democrat until the next-to-last paragraph, in passing. Perhaps corruption is just so much a part of the Democrat lifestyle that we can assume “corrupt politician” = “Democrat”.

Defense attorney Robert Trout of Trout Cacheris was expected to counter after a lunch break that none of Jefferson’s alleged actions relate to his official duties, such as voting or introducing legislation. Trout is expected to say they were private acts and therefore not crimes.

And people would have come to him for these “private acts” even if he hadn’t been a Congressman. Sure, I believe that.

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This week American private client account-holders at Lloyds’s received letters informing them of an “important change in policy regarding clients who are resident, domiciled or linked to the United States by property or asset holdings”. They were told the bank had “no choice” but to “cease acting as your investment manager.”

The proposals, which were unveiled in the President’s first budget, have been designed to clamp down on American tax evaders abroad. But bank bosses say that in practice they could be asked to take on the task of collecting American taxes at a cost and legal liability that make servicing the clients inexpedient. The rules have not yet been finalised and are still subject to debate in Congress.

Change you can believe in. Of course, so is being mugged.

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Democrats insisted they were so serious about keeping pork out of the stimulus bill that it was President Obama himself who blocked the FutureGen project from the massive spending package.

Oh, wait, that’s not what we meant.

The Department of Energy on Friday announced that the FutureGen project is on track after all, committing federal stimulus money to advance the project to its next stage. One reason: It was the only shovel-ready project that fits the requirements of the stimulus bill.

General rule: Whenever the government spends money, that money will be spent, if it can possibly be, in a way that will either buy votes for an incumbent legislator or increase the power of a government bureaucracy.

FutureGen had an enormous amount of political juice with the new administration. Not only had Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, been backers of the project but so had the new secretary of transportation, Ray LaHood, a former Republican congressman from Illinois.

I guess so.

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We’ve long disliked the position of inspectors general, on grounds that they are creatures of Congress designed to torment the executive. Yet this case appears to be one in which an IG was fired because he criticized a favorite Congressional and executive project (AmeriCorps), and refused to bend to political pressure to let the Sacramento mayor have his stimulus dollars.

Gee, wonder where all the froth-at-the-mouth folk are who bitched about Bush firing some U.S. Attorneys? Guess they must have something else to do.

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Bogart and Bergman will always have Paris, but that still leaves London, Copenhagen, the Vatican, Tokyo and the Bahamas if you’re a big Obama donor.

Not that Republicans are any different. But this is supposed to be “change you can believe in”.

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Last week, Rep. Barney Frank (D., Mass.) contacted General Motors CEO Fritz Henderson. He wasn’t happy with GM’s decision to close a distribution center in his district. He asked Mr. Henderson to reconsider.

Mr. Frank controls the funds upon which GM’s survival depends. His request was immediately approved, and the facility will stay open for at least another 14 months.

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

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Because that’s where the power is.

You can (a) make a lot of money but have a non-trivial chance of going to jail and/or being denounced nationwide, or (b) make less money but have a lot more actual power and a guarantee that you can’t be fired and won’t ever spend a day in jail. Which would you choose?

Michelle Malkin is on the case.

It is not a pretty sight.

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President Obama may have “no interest” in running General Motors, as he averred Monday. But even if that’s true, we are already discovering that he shares Washington with 535 Members of Congress, many of whom have other ideas.

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Gone to goldbricks, every one….

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

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Well, after all, they are lawyers….

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Hence the name, I suppose.

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That’s why I always have to laugh at movies where the CIA and other government agencies get these super-cool technical devices. They wish. Government equipment, even military equipment, is always about 10 years behind the commercial stuff. And ugly.

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Gone to goldbricks every one….

Steve Sailer is on the case.

Why is this sort of a scandal, but the First Lady having the equivalent make-work diversity racket job at the U of Chicago Hospitals, and getting paid $117k when her husband was chairman of the Illinois Senate Health and Human Services Committee and then getting her salary more than doubled when her husband got elected to the U.S. Senate, not a scandal?

What an excellent question.

(The existence of the Diversity Racket makes all this easier because it’s obviously unimportant whether they accomplish anything. The less they accomplish in, say, getting no-bid contracts for minority firms, the better for the general public.)

It does indeed.

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Congressmen are shocked, shocked that waterboarding was going on.

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In an effort to highlight the hidden burdens imposed by government, Americans for Tax Reform Foundation, together with CFA, has estimated average prices and taxes imposed on 13 popular targets for multiple layers of hidden taxes.

This could prove amusing.

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It’s pretty bad when companies can make more money through lobbying the government than even through manipulating financial paper, much less actually making and selling stuff.

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The U.S. Treasury took enormous powers for itself last fall by telling Congress they would use it to “ensure the economic well-being of Americans.” Six months after passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 Americans are worse off.

The Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) was sold to Congress and the American public as an absolute necessity to save the American Dream of homeownership. Once the legislation was passed and the funds were released, however, Treasury decided to give the money to banks with no restrictions on its use – no monitoring, no reporting requirements, no nothing. We are worse off today than we were when the legislation was signed – and are likely to remain so when TARP has its first year birthday later this year.

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Pay-for-performance, the personnel system President George W. Bush advanced in an effort to replace the traditional General Schedule wage scale, has come under tough scrutiny by federal employee unions and their allies on Capitol Hill.

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

But now, eight chairmen and subcommittee chairmen in the House have upped the ante and urged the Obama administration to suspend any further implementation — government-wide — of pay-for-performance.

The chairmen, all Democrats, questioned the justification for such programs in a Friday letter to Peter Orszag, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Yeah, everybody knows that government workers get paid without reference to performance. What was Bush thinking?

Steve Sailer is always worth reading.

Suppose a new president came to Washington and said, “I basically won’t change a thing. My motto is ‘Business as Usual.'” What kind of attention would that president get from lobbyists? Obviously, none. Campaign donations would drop precipitously. Corporations would lay off their lobbyists.

The opposite of that is a practice of keeping all the balls in the air, with massive regulation proposals in the works for all major industries. Massive financial system reform! Massive healthcare reform! Massive energy reform! This gets every lobbyist involved. It maximizes the shakedown.

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

Don’t think of it as selling out — think of it as buying in.

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The frantic passage of the Populist Rage Tax was a new low in the US government’s response to this crisis.  It shows just how likely we are to doom ourselves to a decade or more of misery–by choking our markets, closing our borders, turning our banks into tools of social policy, and wrecking what’s left of our economy.

If the “TARP bonus” bill the House passed today becomes law, any of the hundreds of thousands of people who work for Citigroup, Bank of America, AIG, and nine other major US corporations will have to fork over 90 cents of every bonus dollar that puts their household income over $250,000.

Believe it or not, hidden inside these companies are thousands of decent, competent people whose households bring in more than $250,000 a year.  Many of these folks had NOTHING to do with the gambling addiction that bankrupted their firms.  Many of them still have a choice where to work.  And now that they’ve learned that their family’s pay will be capped at $250,000 indefinitely, many of them will quickly decide that now is a good time to pursue their careers elsewhere.  (That is, unless their firm takes the easy and obvious step of just paying them a fatter salary, which just renders the whole thing a farce.)

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“We have a Facebook page,” said one official of the Department of Homeland Security. “But we don’t allow people to look at Facebook in the office. So we have to go home to use it. I find this bizarre.”

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And why not? They’re his natural constituency.

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It was Democrats who stuffed an estimated $524 million in defense earmarks that the Pentagon did not request into the 2008 appropriations bill, about $220 million more than Republicans did, according to an independent estimate. Of the 44 senators who implored Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in January to build more F-22 Raptors — a fighter conceived during the Cold War that senior Pentagon officials say is not suited to probable 21st-century conflicts — most were Democrats.

And last July, when the Navy’s top brass decided to end production of their newest class of destroyers — in response to 15 classified intelligence reports highlighting their vulnerability to a range of foreign missiles — seven Democratic senators quickly joined four Republicans to demand a reversal. They threatened to cut all funding for surface combat ships in 2009.

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A deal so corrupt that even the Washington Post notices.

“I called my Congressman, and he said, quote: ‘I’d like to help you, son, but you’re too young to vote.'”

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The omnibus spending bill now moving through the House includes language designed to kill the Opportunity Scholarship Program offering vouchers for poor students to opt out of rotten public schools. The legislation says no federal funds can be used on the program beyond 2010 unless Congress and the D.C. City Council reauthorize it. Given that Democrats control both bodies — and that their union backers hate school choice — this amounts to a death sentence.

Not every black kid can go to Sidwell Friends.

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“He can’t spend all that money — only we can spend all that money.”

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If you go into a restaurant and order a cheese pizza that arrived there frozen, the FDA is in charge of inspecting it, the AP says. But if it was frozen and has pepperoni on it, that would be the Agriculture Department’s problem. Meantime, both the FDA and the Agriculture Department would be responsible if the pizza were made fresh at the restaurant and the pizza had meat on it.

There’s more. Some fish is inspected by the Commerce Department, the AP explains. And while the FDA handles most food-safety work, at least 15 government agencies play some sort of role.

Government agencies, like labor unions, are hell on wheels when it comes to guarding their turf — unless it’s a disaster, and then their fingers are out and pointing.

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Under the auspices of fighting crime and preventing terrorism, Chicago’s Police Superintendent Jody Weis is hyping CCTV as having “limitless” crime-fighting potential. The reality, as is evident to anyone who has actually researched this type of thing, is that studies have shown municipal surveillance cameras to have little to no positive effect on crime. Further, London is widely known to have the most extensive CCTV network in the world, but that served as little deterrent to the terrorists of July 2005. But instead of bringing this up, the Sun-Times and Chicago officials point to a test in which “live video was used to catch a petty thief in the act of sticking his hand in a Salvation Army kettle outside Macy’s State Street.” Given the cost in both dollars and civil liberties, it is hard to justify catching petty criminals stealing some coins from charity.