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“The Northeastern states are cutting their own throats, and their leaders are doing it with a green knife,” Kish said.

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Jeff Bezos is not stupid, and he learned the Microsoft Lesson quite well. Governments at all levels are ready and willing to screw business entities unless their wheels get greased, and that has been a constant for time out of mind.

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Real estate brokers in New York are worried that foreign second home buyers are feeling “under assault” and may buy elsewhere as a result of “class warfare” in the form of a new planned tax, according to a new Bloomberg article. The proposed tax in New York is going to apply to properties of over $5 million that are owned by non-residents of the city.

And well they might. New York, like London and San Francisco, is increasingly becoming a ‘shell city’, comprising two classes of people: Those rich enough to afford to live there, and those too poor to go elsewhere. The basis of city finance, of course, is the rich, without whose taxes the city would be broke. This does not seem to impede the efforts of tax eaters to persuade the rich to go elsewhere, or to stay away, by means of oppressive taxes and regulations. How soon before New York winds up like Detroit? Not long, I’m thinking.

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Michelle Obama’s former Chief of Staff, Tina Tchen, attempted to have the Jussie Smollett case transferred from the Chicago Police Department to the FBI, according to texts and emails released by the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office.

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.

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Dozens of people died after getting lost in Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument because federal regulations prohibited officials from putting directional signs in place, a Utah county commissioner said.

This is insane.

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Say, anyone remember when Loretta Lynch claimed she was recusing herself from this case due to her speaking with Bill Clinton furtively on an airport tarmac?

Well actually she didn’t recuse herself — she said she would do as the FBI recommended. But she intended the media to sell that as a recusal, and the media so sold it.

Turns out, the DOJ did not defer to the FBI at all.

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

The Deep State takes care of its own.

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You knew this was coming.

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This is what happens when you elect Democrats — they ‘tax your asses off’, in Walter Mondull’s famous phrase.

If this thing passes, watch affluent people flee Chicago for neighboring lower-tax states, like Indiana and Wisconsin, both of which are within easy commuting distance — the North Shore and South Shore commuter trains are already in place.

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The EPA will introduce its final proposal sometime this spring that strips a waiver California and other states have long used to set tougher vehicle emission standards than the federal government, forcing every state in the U.S. to comply with the same rules.

Since manufacturers aren’t willing to make two products, one for a restrictive state and one for less restrictive states, California’s tight regulations have basically set the standard for mileage requirements for the country. This is the same trick that AlGore used to give us those wimpy 1.6 gallon flush toilets.

The move to revoke California of its waiver comes as the Trump administration is also looking to freeze Obama-era efficiency rules meant to cut carbon emissions from the transportation industry. The EPA, along with the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is finalizing a proposal to freeze vehicle efficiency standards for cars and light trucks, in lieu of raising them annually.

This could get entertaining. Proglodytes are finding out that centralizing power in Washington isn’t such a good idea after all.

Read it.

Five will get you ten that it never happens.

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This is what happens when the government handles health care.

I don’t think we want this.

Ace of Spades has the story.

Bias? What bias?

I’ll bet the police would have intervened if they’d tried to throw the guy out, though. You can depend on that.

Read it.

I’d be more impressed if Zuckerberg and Bezos announced plans to break up the U.S. Senate.

That might actually have a chance of coming off.

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Ticket punched.

Resume line added.

Time to move on.

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This is mostly about trains, but I suspect similar problems afflict roads and bridges.

Don’t expect our infrastructure to get better anytime soon. (Who knows? Now that Lake Erie has ‘human rights’, maybe roads will eventually be able to vote and politicians will give them some attention.)

Read it.

But that trick never works.

Steve Sailer reports.

It will be interesting to see whether the Democrat party’s adult supervision will survive much longer.

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Just in case you’re keeping track.

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Imagine forcing every kid to walk around holding an ad for Planned Parenthood. Well, in California, you don’t have to imagine it.

California state Assemblyman Jesse Gabriel is doing everything he can to seal the single largest free publicity deal in the history of abortion: a Planned Parenthood phone number on every student ID. Including kids at private and Christian schools.

He calls it the “Pupil and Student Health” bill, but critics of Gabriel’s AB 624 want people to know what it really is: an attack on the First Amendment.

I never had a student ID in high school. Our dress code (guys in coat and tie, girls in uniforms) was ID enough.

Read it.

Safest is never to set foot in them in the first place.

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The left achieved what it considers a major victory in New York when the minimum wage was raised to $15 an hour. In the aftermath of this victory, however, New York City has experienced its worst decline in restaurant employment since 9/11. So reports the Foundation for Economic Education (FEE).

Proglodytes don’t want Underclass people working and independent — they want Underclass people dependent on government benefits, so that they will keep voting for the people who will keep the benefits coming, i.e. Democrats.

Read it.

The proportion of foreign nationals attempting to cross the border illegally rather than reporting to legal ports of entry has risen in the past year, according to the data. Those crossing illegally made up 73 percent of all border crossings from October 2017 to January 2018 and then rose to 83 percent for the same period of time ending on Jan. 31, 2019, NBC News reported Friday.

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Pass the popcorn.

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Gee, when Trump says that, they call him the New Hitler.

I certainly hope that she survives the experience of finding out that she is not, in fact, the boss of anything.

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Two state policy groups, the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and the Civic Federation, have come out in favor of ending an exclusion in the state’s income tax for pension income and federally taxable Social Security income. Doing so, the organizations argue, would raise $2.5 billion in revenue, equivalent to a 0.5 percent income tax rate hike and a 0.85 percent corporate tax rate increase.

The problem, of course, is that Illinois does not have a revenue problem. Spending on pensions grew 663 percent between 2000 and 2018, and is projected to continue to grow. This isn’t surprising, given that 60 percent of state pensioners retire in their 50s and pensioners’ direct employee contributions equal only about 6 percent of the benefits they receive. The state is like a teenager with its first credit card, except it never grows up and stops thinking of its credit limit as its bank account.

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“The Green New Deal is the only way to save the earth from utter extinction. If you keep standing in the way, troglodytes, we are doomed.”

“OK, Democrats, let’s vote on your nonbinding resolution.”

“Why are you sabotaging our legislation?!”

If you think this is an exaggeration of the illogical position of Democrats and their Green New Deal, I give you Sen. Ed Markey. D-Mass.

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The Supreme Court reigned in state power to seize property and levy fines for criminal offenses Wednesday, unanimously ruling that the Eighth Amendment ban on excessive fines applies to the states.

Civil libertarians expect the ruling will curtail asset forfeitures at the state and local levels, a much-criticized practice through which law enforcement seizes property connected to the commission of a crime. Critics say such seizures are often disproportionate to the criminal offense at issue.

This is a huge win. The ‘war on drugs’ had spawned the pretext of Civil Asset Forfeiture whereby those who were suspected of breaking the law but who could not be prosecuted for lack of evidence would be impoverished by having their assets stripped from them on very specious grounds. Local governments have been using this as a honeypot to pad out their budgets by effectively stealing from people who they temporarily had at their mercy but who were not under the protective umbrella of the politically powerful or well-connected.

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According to a statement, the Federal Railroad Administration (FRA) plans to terminate $929 million in federal grant funds yet to be paid for the California high-speed rail project initially planned to connect the L.A. Basin to the San Francisco Bay Area.

In addition, the Department announced it is exploring every legal option to obtain the $2.5 billion in federal funds FRA previously granted California for the now-defunct project.

I think this is the first time Washington has asked for its money back from a state transportation boondoggle.

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The push for a border barrier marks President Donald Trump’s fourth declaration of a national emergency–about a third as many as his three immediate predecessors in their two terms.

The number of declared emergencies puts Trump on a par with Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

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Good constitutional arguments can be made for and against President Trump’s evocation of emergency powers to address the crisis at our southern border.  But the notion that such a declaration would encourage a future Democratic president to do something similar borders on the comic.  Democrats don’t need encouragement.

Under President Barack Obama, the Constitution was violated more wantonly than a goat at a Taliban bachelor party, and the faithful cheered every violation.

Read it.

You know, as they do.

You would think that these people would learn a little restraint. But they never do,

UPDATE: Smollett’s Attorneys Speak Out, Say Reports Claiming The Actor Planned Own Attack Further Victimizes Him

John Hinderaker at Powerline figures it up.

The two hottest commodities in the Democratic Party are Ilhan Omar and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Earlier this week, Omar exhibited stunning ignorance in her hostile questioning of Elliott Adams Abrams. Similarly, Ocasio-Cortez has often displayed a surprising lack of knowledge for someone who apparently is a college graduate. Don’t get me started on the “Green New Socialism.” But she outdid herself yesterday.

I think the best comment was by Tom Smith of the Right Coast:

Nobody seems to have made the point that AOC is not so dumb that she can’t count votes. A bunch of new voters in her district who are making about $150K per year are probably not going to vote for a far left former barista to represent them. She knows who’s putting money in her tip jar.

True dat.

Read it.

Easy to say, harder to do. Calling Jonny Ive….

Blast from the past.

The United States is in a perpetual state of national emergency.

Thirty separate emergencies, in fact.

An emergency declared by President Jimmy Carter on the 10th day of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979 remains in effect almost 35 years later.

A post-9/11 state of national emergency declared by President George W. Bush — and renewed six times by President Obama — forms the legal basis for much of the war on terror.

Tuesday, President Obama informed Congress he was extending another Bush-era emergency for another year, saying “widespread violence and atrocities” in the Democratic Republic of Congo “pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the foreign policy of the United States.”

Those emergencies, declared by the president by proclamation or executive order, give the president extraordinary powers — to seize property, call up the National Guard and hire and fire military officers at will.

Read it.

It’s your dog, Charlie Brown. I don’t see a lot of room for a Democrat Governor, even one who can be bought, complaining about Democrat ideologues doing what Democrat ideologues do best.

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As usual, Republicans got rolled.

Read it.

Another look at the California Rail Fail.

How did California’s dream of high-speed rail turn into the nightmare “train to nowhere?” Here are five big reasons the state’s high-speed rail project failed to pick up speed.

Joel Kotkin looks at the California rail fail.

Governor Gavin Newsom has canceled the bulk of the state’s long-proposed high-speed line between Los Angeles and San Francisco, leaving only a tail of the once-grand project—a connection between the Central Valley’s Merced and Bakersfield, not exactly major metropolitan areas. “Let’s be real,” Newsom said in his first State of the State address. “The project, as currently planned, would cost too much and take too long. There’s been too little oversight and not enough transparency.” The project’s cost, originally pegged at $33 billion, ballooned over the last decade to an estimated $77 billion (or maybe as high as $98 billion), with little reason to assume that the cost inflation would end there.

This effectively puts an end to former governor Jerry Brown’s “legacy” project, the lone tangible accomplishment for a second gubernatorial stint that had been far better at raising taxes and imposing draconian legislation than building things. Brown wanted to build his beloved train in a state with some of the nation’s worst roads (despite its second-highest gas taxes), a deteriorating water-delivery system, and massive pension debt. With Brown finally in retirement, Newsom took the opportunity to free up billions of dollars that his Democratic allies would like to spend in other ways.

Read it.

Democrat logic.

Perhaps Muslim logic, too.

UPDATE: Ilhan Omar in action: A sickening disgrace

Read it.

Those of us who don’t have to pay California taxes are grateful that we don’t have to pay California taxes.

Read it.

But will they learn from this? Of course not.

Read it.

I hope they enjoy watching their states’ economies tank.

Joel Kotkin points out how California is doing it wrong.

Newsom has promised to have 3.5 million homes built over the next seven years to solve the problem. That is, conservatively stated, more than 2.6 million that would be built at the current rate of construction.

This effort is doomed, though, since it fails to address the fundamental cause: regulations that block expansion of housing on the urban fringe, a housing area that serves to lower the price of both urban and suburban land. NIMBYs, who often block new projects, may contribute to the shortage, but by far the biggest problem lies in regulations, many issued from Sacramento, restricting lower-density housing construction on the urban fringe.

Former World Bank principal urban planner Alain Bertaud has pointed out that these regulations raise land prices and exacerbate housing shortages that particularly affect the poor. Before such policies were adopted, California’s housing prices relative to incomes were not far above the national average, even though the state’s population was expanding far more rapidly than today.

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I’m glad to hear it.

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Yeah, that sounds like about the most useful thing Ellison could do with his time.

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The inevitable effect of which will be to increase unemployment and destroy small business, especially in Chicago.

Plenty of room down in Texas, y’all.

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The Antiplanner has called streetcars an intelligence test: anyone who thinks they are a good idea is not smart enough to make decisions about urban transportation. Now Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has revealed a new intelligence test, this one dealing with high-speed rail.

Read it.

The problem is that Democrats ARE attempting to establish a ‘religious test’, as they have with the various ‘gay wedding cake’ cases; they just cast it in the form of ‘do you believe X’ rather than ‘are you religion X’.

Read it.

I propose that we send each Democrat member of Shit’s committee a witch’s hat.