7th July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
5th July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
5th July 2023
The Foundry.
Over the weekend, Ohio lawmakers passed a state budget that expands eligibility for the state’s EdChoice Scholarships to all K-12 students. Gov. Mike DeWine signed the bill into law on Monday, making Ohio the eighth state in the nation to pass a universal school choice policy and the sixth state to do so this year, following Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Utah.
Universal school choice is when education choice is offered to all students in a state, not just those who are low income or who have special needs.
Several other states also expanded their education choice policies already this year, including Alabama, Indiana, Montana, New Hampshire, and South Carolina.
Starting this fall, children from Ohio families earning up to 450% of the federal poverty line ($135,000 for a family of four) will be eligible for full scholarships worth about $8,400 (up from about $6,150 last year). Children from families earning above that threshold will be eligible for partial scholarships that will be adjusted based on income.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Ohioans Declare Independence From the District School Monopoly
5th July 2023
Read it.
Some U.S. senators have famously kept a pocket Constitution handy to use as a prop at political rallies; a few may have even read it. But at this point in American history it no longer matters whether they, or anyone else, can read the words of the Constitution because the words no longer mean what they say.
Take, for instance, the Supreme Court’s ruling last week that state legislatures do not have the sole discretion to determine how federal elections will be run in those states. Instead, state courts are given veto power over the decisions of the legislature.
The mainstream media (and of course their Democratic Party allies) celebrated the court’s decision in Moore v. Harper that rejected the so-called “independent state legislature” theory. The New York Times called the theory “dangerous.” Vox said the ruling was a “big victory for democracy.” Those who supported the independent state legislature “theory” were called extreme, fringe, radical, and worse. In other words, they were Trump supporters.
The only problem is that if the theory is extreme, then so is the U.S. Constitution, because no matter how much the 6-3 majority insists otherwise, it isn’t a theory at all. It is the plain language of the Constitution. Check it out for yourself.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on We Need A Constitution That Means What It Says
4th July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
4th July 2023
Washington Post.
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies, in an extraordinary injunction in an ongoing case that could have profound effects on the First Amendment.
The injunction came in response to a lawsuit brought by Republican attorneys general in Louisiana and Missouri, who allege that government officials went too far in their efforts to encourage social media companies to address posts that they worried could contribute to vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic or upend elections. The Trump-appointed judge’s move could upend years of efforts to enhance coordination between the government and social media companies.
The injunction was a victory for the state attorneys general, who have accused the Biden administration of enabling a “sprawling federal ‘Censorship Enterprise’” to encourage tech giants to remove politically unfavorable viewpoints and speakers, and for conservatives who’ve accused the government of suppressing their speech. In their filings, the attorneys general alleged the actions amount to “the most egregious violations of the First Amendment in the history of the United States of America.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Judge Blocks U.S. Officials From Tech Contacts in First Amendment Case
3rd July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
3rd July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
3rd July 2023
Bruce Schneier.
Police are already using self-driving car footage as video evidence.
…
“We’ve known for a long time that they are essentially surveillance cameras on wheels,” said Chris Gilliard, a fellow at the Social Science Research Council. “We’re supposed to be able to go about our business in our day-to-day lives without being surveilled unless we are suspected of a crime, and each little bit of this technology strips away that ability.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Self-Driving Cars Are Surveillance Cameras on Wheels
2nd July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
1st July 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
29th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
29th June 2023
CNBC.
Taxpayers are losing more than $100 billion a year to Medicare and Medicaid fraud, according to estimates from the National Health Care Anti-Fraud Association.
“That’s probably a conservative number,” Pérez Aybar said. “When we think about all lines of business in Medicare and Medicaid, that’s probably a drop in the bucket.”
The fraud runs the gamut: billing for unapproved Covid tests, phony billing for wheelchairs, braces and other medical equipment, genetic testing fraud, home health-care billing and a host of other schemes. Investigators say fraudsters have gotten more brazen in recent years — as Washington swiftly doled out trillions of dollars in Covid-19 relief funds and other aid in response to the pandemic.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Inside the Mind of Criminals: How to Brazenly Steal $100 Billion From Medicare and Medicaid
27th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
27th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
26th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
25th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
24th June 2023
Read it.
Most Americans pay state and local income taxes based upon where they reside. Accordingly, the shift to remote work made no difference to their tax liability. But some employees are subject to commuter taxes, which are assessed based upon where the work itself is performed.
Commuter taxes raise their own public policy concerns—after all, commuters have no say in how those tax dollars are used because they cannot vote in those jurisdictions. The antiquated justification for commuter taxes is that employees receive some tangible benefits while they are physically in the city, i.e., if an employee has a medical emergency while at work, it would be the city’s emergency services that would respond.
But what happens when commuters are no longer commuting to those cities?
…
When Massachusetts issued a rule requiring employees who had previously worked in Massachusetts but were now working elsewhere due to Covid-19 to pay Massachusetts income taxes anyway, its neighboring New Hampshire sensibly filed a case in the United States Supreme Court on behalf of its citizens who were neither living nor working in Massachusetts. Unfortunately, taxpayers got no clarification because the Supreme Court declined to hear New Hampshire’s complaint, leaving Massachusetts’ unconstitutional money grab in place for the time being.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Taxation Without Representation Meets the 21st Century
24th June 2023
Washington Free Beacon.
“Can the senator’s penis please be off the record?”
This remarkable sentence, uttered by a panicked press aide after his boss, the seven-fingered Sen. Jon Tester (D., Mont.), relieved himself in an organic pea field during an interview with Washington Post journalist Ben Terris, hardly stands out among the array of mind-boggling details recounted in Terris’s new book, The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind.
Tester’s rogue member is merely an aside in this collection of profiles highlighting the unelected power players who survived, thrived, and failed in national politics since Donald Trump annihilated the status quo, violating precious “norms” left and right. Washington may have “felt different” during the Trump presidency, Terris writes, but The Swamp proved as resilient as ever. Rather than being drained as promised, it simply “filled up with new creatures.” And, boy, are they something to behold. The Big Break is not for the faint of heart or stomach.
The book opens in December 2021. Leah Hunt-Hendrix, the 38-year-old granddaughter of billionaire oil tycoon H.L. Hunt, is throwing a holiday party at her $2.2 million Victorian mansion in a trendy Washington neighborhood. Her beloved Maltipoo, named after Malcolm X, roams the living room floor scrounging for crumbs. Ryan Grim, editor of The Intercept, is wearing a Harriet Tubman T-shirt and chatting with the half-brother of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. The host is trying to gin up support for Mandela Barnes, the left-wing Wisconsin Senate candidate she met at a pool party in Miami around the same time he accused the her grandfather’s industry of “destroying the world.” He was “riding in one of those inflatable unicorns.”
This is normal.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 1 Comment »
21st June 2023
ZMan turns over a rock.
It has been clear for a long time now that Biden is personally corrupt. His son is a drug-addicted degenerate who has made tens of millions for the Biden family by selling access to and favors from his father. Fifty years ago, Biden and all of official Washington would have said such behavior is a threat to the system and the offender must be removed from office. Today, they say talking about this is a threat to our democracy and you need to be removed.
Of course, the news of Hunter Biden’s sweetheart plea deal brings up another great parallel to the Nixon years. That is the modified limited hangout. A “limited hangout” is a bit of tradecraft used when the official story for an operation is blown. The operative then fully admits that the cover story is fake and volunteers some bits of the real story, but omitting the parts that he wants to conceal. This diverts public attention to the new narrative away from the real story.
In a meeting to discuss the unfolding Watergate scandal, H. R. Haldeman described to President Nixon the new public relations plan to contain the scandal. In the conversation he described it as a modified limited hangout. Interestingly, this is now common practice in Washington. We call it spin. Every day that goofy looking African woman reads the latest narratives to the Washington press zombies who then dutifully repeat the story on their platforms.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Nixon’s Ghost
21st June 2023
Washington Free Beacon.
“First of all, my son has done nothing wrong,” President Joe Biden told MSNBC last month. It was but one of a litany of such statements from Biden, who has behaved as if any question from the press about his son’s criminal activity—and there haven’t been many—is an affront, an indignity, and an insult to the office.
Well, he lied.
The younger Biden owed more than $1 million in taxes over several years, and over $200,000 for the years in which he struck the plea deal. Even then, his celebrity lawyer pal didn’t fork over the money to the federal government on his behalf until the Department of Justice started investigating him. He also copped to owning a gun while he was coked up, and lying about it when he bought the firearm in 2018. That’s a felony, but Hunter is getting off with a slap on the wri—uh, probation and enrollment in a “diversion program.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on A Tale of Two Systems
20th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
20th June 2023
The American Mind.
With the provisos that every American is entitled to a presumption of innocence, and much of what is known of the Biden family crime organization is “alleged,” there is powerful evidence that President Joe Biden committed multiple felonies as a co-conspirator in an international fraud and racketeering scheme, regardless of whether he personally received bribes.
It is only because the FBI and Department of Justice (DOJ) are weaponized against the right, and give a free pass to Democrat leaders and progressive violence, that the President’s son, Hunter, and brother, James, have not been indicted for their participation in this enterprise, or that the President has not been impeached, though fear that Kamala Harris would replace him also may be at play. The news that Hunter has struck a deal with the DOJ to plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and a failure to report drug use on his firearms application in exchange for probation with no jailtime, and a potential partial expungement of his record after two years, is a slap on the wrist that stays far away from implicating the President.
Democrats and the media—which usually functions as an arm of the Democrat Party—defend the President by observing there is no publicly available proof that he received a bribe, and they assert that he has not used his position to benefit the family’s benefactors. This rose-colored analysis fails in at least three respects: (1) there is no reasonable doubt that Joe Biden knew that Hunter, James, and other family members were engaged in influence peddling; (2) Biden assisted these efforts, at a minimum, by creating the appearance that he endorsed the family business; and (3) at least as to Burisma Holdings, there is strong evidence that he acted in his official capacity as vice president to create value for Burisma and its owner. At a trial, there is no distinction between the weight given to direct and circumstantial evidence.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Scammer in Chief
20th June 2023
The Antiplanner.
Back when I first began studying light rail, one of my first questions was, “Why rail when buses can work just as well for a lot less money?” That question is becoming less valid today as transit agencies have done their usual job of making something affordable into something grossly expensive.
A case in point is Charleston, South Carolina’s proposal for a bus rapid transit line. Local backers have the audacity to call it South Carolina’s first mass transit system, as if Columbia, Greenville, Charleston, and other South Carolina cities haven’t had bus systems for decades. But the real problem is that they want to spend $625 million on a 21-mile line, or about $30 million per mile.
Back in 2004, Kansas City built one of the nation’s first bus rapid transit lines, a six-mile route for $20.9 million. Not $20.9 million per mile but a total of $20.9 million, or about $3.5 million per mile. That would be about $5.5 million in today’s dollars. Kansas City opened a second line in 2011 that cost $30 million, but it was 13 miles long, so in today’s dollars it was only about $3.0 million per mile. In 2019, Kansas City extravagantly opened a third line costing $5.4 million a mile, under $6.0 million a mile in today’s money.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Making a Good Idea Bad
19th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
19th June 2023
The Antiplanner.
After wasting billions of taxpayer dollars, transit agencies love to give their transit lines cute names like Link, MAX, BART, and DART. Following this tradition, the Honolulu Authority for Ridiculous Transit (HART) agency has decided to name its new rail line the Skyline. This is a rather lame name, however, so it seems like we should think up a better one.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Name Honolulu’s Train
19th June 2023
Read it.
Monday, the nineteenth of June, is our newest federal holiday (just 2 years old), Juneteenth, and federal workers get yet another day’s pay without having to work for it.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Are You Ready For Today’s Juneteenth Federal Holiday?
18th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
18th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
17th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
16th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
16th June 2023
The American Mind.
The National Endowment for Democracy (NED) used to be one of those gloriously bipartisan institutions where Democrats and Republicans broke bread and shared ideas about how to expand democracy abroad. But like many once-neutral institutions, whether in the media, the universities, or publicly-funded foundations, the NED has become baldly partisan since the 2016 election. In doing so, it has put its mission and its integrity at risk.
Launched by President Reagan 40 years ago “to foster the infrastructure of democracy” around the world, the NED is governed by a bipartisan board. It gives grants to democracy activists overseas, holds events, publishes books and journals, and brings advocates for democracy from around the world to the U.S. on fellowships. It receives fierce criticism from both the anti-American Left and the isolationist Right—a good sign of its bipartisan nature. It is loud and proud about promoting democracy abroad despite the cavils. Its congressionally-approved budget from the Department of State for fiscal year 2022 was $300 million.
But since the election of Donald Trump, NED has repeatedly violated its supposed neutrality on American politics and engaged in openly-partisan advocacy against Trump and Republicans. This is a remarkable intellectual failure for an organization that lectures other countries about accepting the legitimacy of the political opposition, especially one you detest.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Their Democracy
15th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
15th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in War
14th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in BIPOC Privilege
14th June 2023
Wall Street Journal.
The law required companies that used the same machinery to produce sesame-containing foods and non-sesame-containing foods to thoroughly (and expensively) clean the machines between the two. Instead, the companies quite rationally added sesame (not enough to taste) to their non-sesame foods so that they would save the expense.
No government employee thought that through.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Sesame Allergy Sufferers Wanted Warning Labels. They Got More Sesame.
14th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
13th June 2023
The Foundry.
Chief Justice John Roberts famously wrote in a 2007 case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
He was exactly right in saying so in that Supreme Court decision in Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1.
Too bad Roberts didn’t follow his own admonition in Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting decision released last week by the Supreme Court.
Roberts has been a consistent disappointment.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Chief Justice Doesn’t Follow His Own Directive in Alabama Redistricting Case
13th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
12th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
11th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
10th June 2023
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Today in the Biden-Harris Slow-Motion Train Wreck
10th June 2023
Read it.
With experienced pilots and ground crew leaving the service in droves, the Army is struggling to balance equipment modernization and unit training for large-scale, drone-driven war.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on ‘Unmanned’ Drones Take Too Many Humans to Operate, Says Top Army Aviator
