Read it.

The 2008 California ballot measure authorizing billions in bonds to construct a high speed rail between San Francisco and Los Angeles was a massive bait-and-switch scam. Not only has the budget ballooned from the promised (if obviously absurd) low ball number on the 2008 ballot of $33 billion to $77 billion, but it remains quite unlikely that the bullet train can hit it’s legally promised downtown to downtown duration.

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As always, government is the problem, not the solution.

Typically such regulations are established to protect existing firms against competition by raising barriers to entry so that poor people can’t start their own businesses because they can’t afford the time/money to jump through all of the licensing hoops.

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Generally, Medicaid payments are required by law to go directly to medical care professionals after being allocated to states. But, the previous administration allowed a nice little carve out for unions.

Under the Obama administration, home health care unions were allowed to automatically deduct membership fees from the Medicaid money. By the tortured logic used by the previous administration (and the eleven states with unionized home health industries), health aides are state workers and Medicaid money is state money.

The implication that health workers can have Medicaid money taken away from them, often without their knowledge, is unfair and unsustainable.

Unions are like the Mafia without the accountability.

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All of these regulations are imposed with the best of intentions but that ol’ debbil The Law of Unintended Consequences comes back to bite us on the ass every time.

The Antiplanner turns over a rock.

Construction of Seattle’s latest streetcar line is late and over budget, so the mayor halted construction and hired a consultant to find out why. Now the consultant report itself is late.

The city knew that the problem had to do with the fact that construction turned out to be more complicated than the city anticipated. Now the consultant says that figuring out the problem turned out to be more complicated than the consultant anticipated.

Don’t you hate it when that happens?

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Note to self: Avoid California.

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The Crust takes care of its own.

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Democrat, of course. Everything we want ought to be free (except to the taxpayers).

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No. But it does shake the box, and that’s something.

UPDATE: ‘Highly Capable’: Sessions Defends Rosenstein Against Impeachment Effort

It’s not his capability that is questionable, it’s the ends to which that capability is put.

UPDATE: Steve Scalise Supports Impeachment Of Rod Rosenstein: ‘Has Not Done His Job’

Read it.

About fargin time.

However….

The Crust takes care of its own. Prediction: Nobody gets fired; nobody goes to jail.

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Prediction: Nobody will get fired; nobody will go to jail.

The Crust takes care of its own.

Ordinarily I’d be upset about this but the residents of Seattle elected this numbskull and it’s only proper that they have to live with the result.

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About time they got the Obama NewSpeak terminology flushed.

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You may recall my City Journal feature on Buffalo from 2015. This was written about the time New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion program – a pledge to spend $1 billion in state funds to bring back the city economically – was in the earlier stages of development.

Fast forward, and Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion chief Alain Kaloyeros and Buffalo construction magnate Louis Ciminelli were recently convicted on corruption charges. A lot of the heavy lifting journalistically that raised questions about the Buffalo Billion was done by Jim Heaney and his team at the Investigative Post.

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

Whenever a great new government program is announced, the first thing I do is wonder how much of the money will be stolen through cronyism, bribery, and featherbedding.

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The Crust takes care of its own. None of its rent-a-mob need fear jail time or fines.

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Being a Democrat elected official can be very profitable. Ask Nancy Pelosi.

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The Crust takes care of their own, preferably at taxpayer expense.

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Democrats in Power: Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Go Back on the Street….

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By non-citizens, that’s true. Ellison wants to give the vote to every warm body that wanders across the bofder.

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Can you spell L-A-W-S-U-I-T? I’m sure you can.

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But you knew that.

Whenever the government establishes a program, whether it be legitimate, like military procurement, or a boondoggle, like half of the Politically Correct fads these days, it’s like a dinner bell for those who specialize in gaming the system to profit from cheating the taxpayer. They do it for the same reason that Willy Sutton robbed banks: Because that’s where the money is, and a plentiful potful of money it is. They come out of the air like midges after dark, and most of them get away with it because no bureaucrat is as careful with YOUR money as he would be with his own, or with that of an employer would can (and would) fire him for what bureaucrats get away with daily.

It is a sad world that we live in.

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But you have to remember that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.

Just keep that in mind.

Absolutely nothing.

Oh, except maybe treason….

Read it.

Maybe the problematical relationship is between Obama and Putin, not Trump and Putin.

Funny, I don’t remember any media feeding frenzy at that time.

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Or anywhere else.

Wow, that’s news.

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The author suggests that it wouldn’t be good. However, there are at least two significant lies in this article.

Likewise, there’s the pervasive myth that Social Security’s cash is dwindling because its funds are being disbursed to undocumented immigrants. In reality, only American citizens who’ve earned the prerequisite 40 lifetime work credits are able to collect a benefit. If anything, it’s actually the other way around, with some undocumented workers contributing into the program via the payroll tax without ever having an opportunity to collect a benefit.

Yeah, well, supposedly only American citizens can vote in elections, too. That Polyanna view has been proven false and when Sanctuary Cities get around to allowing non-citizens to vote it will be formally false as well. I doubt that Social Security has tighter security than the voter rolls.

The second issue is that without allowing the government to borrow money, Social Security would be saying goodbye to one of its three funding sources: interest income. For those of you harping on Congress to pay interest to Social Security, the federal government already is. The average yield across its numerous maturities is currently 2.9%. If Social Security were simply to hold cash, the program would be giving up an estimated $78 billion to $83 billion in annual income, according to intermediate-cost model estimates, between 2018 and 2027. This would almost certainly push forward the program’s asset reserve exhaustion date from its current projection of 2034.

The problem is not that keeping Congress’s mitts off of Social Security money would starve it of interest income; the problem is that Social Security could get better returns elsewhere. The theory is that Social Security is supposed to invest in totally secure investment vehicles, and what could be safer than U.S. government bonds? The flaw with that is that it just shifts the money from one U.S. government pocket to another, and allows Congress to go on a spending spree with the promise that ‘we’ll pay you back later’. The Social Security ‘Trust Fund’ therefore winds up being just another general obligation of the U.S., which is exactly the position it would be in if they just spent the money as it came in and didn’t go through the whole hand-waving exercise of laundering the money through government bonds.

Getting 2.9% interest income is pretty anemic. The S&P 500 got a 22% return in 2017; AT&T, the classic ‘widow and orphan’ stock, is currently paying a dividend of over 6%. NO OTHER PENSION FUND HOLDS ITS ASSETS ENTIRELY IN U.S. GOVERNMENT SECURITIES. That ought to tell you all you need to know. Hence the classic complaint that if the money we paid in Social Security taxes were put into a 401k, we’d all be better off. I’ve run the numbers — I certainly would be better off.

Supposedly sites like The Motley Fool feature articles by people who know what they’re talking about. I’m here to tell you that It Ain’t Necessarily So.

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This is getting ridiculous.

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Note that the study was based on sea level rise ‘projections’ by NOAA, which has been demonstrated to be one of the chief ‘climate data manipulators’ around. Garbage in, garbage out.

The only thing worse than junk science is brain-dead ‘journalists’ to spread the fear.

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Welcome to America’s premier Sanctuary City.

Be careful not to step in the diversity.

John Hinderaker at Powerline chronicles the decline.

Gender nazis love to get people fired.

They do indeed.

Steve Sailer points out that porous borders are not the only flaw in our immigration system.

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Pass the popcorn.

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Works for me. (What ever happened to hanging?)

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Three Democratic congressmen declared on Thursday that they will vote “no” on their own legislation if House Speaker Paul Ryan puts their bill on the floor.

Reps. Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, Pramila Jayapal of Washington and Adriano Espaillat of New York introduced the Establishing a Humane Immigration Enforcement Act earlier Thursday, which would abolish ICE within one year of enactment, and also assemble a commission tasked with setting up a new immigration enforcement agency.

Hours later, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy announced he planned to bring the proposed “Abolish ICE” bill to the floor, reported The Hill.

The three congressmen promptly released a joint statement accusing Ryan of not taking their bill seriously, and as an act of protest, they will vote down their own legislation and instead use the opportunity to discuss Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, President Donald Trump’s zero-tolerance immigration policy and ICE.

Really, you can’t make this stuff up.

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From 1996 through 2016, just under half of all aliens who were set free pending a trial date—1.25 million in total—were ordered removed, i.e. deported. Of that number, 952,291 were removed for evading court. Less than a quarter of this same group actually appeared in court. Over the span of more than two decades of court business, nearly two-fifths (37 percent) of those who were let free before their trial ended up fleeing court.

Since 1996, an average of 45,000 migrants each year disappeared, adding to a backlog of unexecuted removal orders that in 2016 numbered 954,000. If predictions are correct, nearly 57,000 people will evade their hearings in 2018 and bring the 23-year failure-to-appear total to 1.05 million—that’s 9.3 percent of the illegal population in the U.S. as measured by a 2017 Pew Research Center study.

It is here that damage to the courts, immigration enforcement, and national security intersect.

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Lies have worked so long for proglodytes that it’s their default setting. A more accurate statement would be ‘We don’t put children in cages, even though Obama did, we put them in Re-education Camps that pretend to be schools.’

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Not Good News.

Yet another reason why I will not fly — I will not subject myself to the Security Theater Gestapo.

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Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees, you know.

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I don’t think that’ll happen.

I’m waiting for somebody to demand that Blumenthal recuse himself from any Senate vote concerning money.

Brought to you by the Federal Reserve System, inflating your money for over a hundred years now.

Read it.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo has announced steps it will take to continue decreasing the percentage of white students on campus.

The school’s white student population fell from 63 percent to under 55 percent from 2017 to 2011, but the administration says there “is still much work to do,” according to The College Fix.

Cal Poly SLO wants the school’s proportion of white students to come closer to parity with the state’s percentage, which sits at 39.7 percent.

They have to be careful not to fall the magic number of white students that causes schools to be good rather than failing.

Read it.

Send your kid ot a government school,
And he will grow up a fool;
That’s they way things are today:
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

Every time I see Trey Gowdy I think ‘There are aliens among us, and they have been elected to Congress.’

Which really explains a lot, if you think about it.

Seriously, people who indulge in eccentricities of dress or grooming are afflicted with a serious case of Second-Hander Disease (thank you, Ayn Rand). Their whole existence depends far too much on what other people think of them, and have not enough comfort with their own selves. Whenever I see somebody with tattoos or piercings or strange hair colors not found in nature, my brain supplies a chyron that shouts ‘Look at me! Look At Me! LOOK AT ME! I’m a somebody, not a nobody! LOOK AT ME!’. I avoid such people as if they were toxic waste dumps, which psychologically they are.

Read it.

The old system is the standard way the government does things and is the primary reason whyy we can’t have nice things.

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Really, it always has been. Dallas has ‘HOV” (high occupancy vehicle) lanes but the requirement starts at two people — that’s ‘high occupancy’? — which makes no sense until you realize that (a) me and my driver can use the lanes while (b) Joe Sixpack heading to a job site in his F150 cannot. Then it becomes clear.

Most rail transit systems are based on the premise that the jobs are Downtown and the people leave out some ways in the suburbs, but nobody puts their offices Downtown any more — except major corporations who have always been there and those companies who want that Downtown address for prestige.

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Of course. If parents knew what teachers were up to in government schools these days, homeschooling would blossom.

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You can’t say that Chuck Schumer doesn’t have a sense of humor.

I’ll bet Trump laughed so hard he stopped breathing.

I understand that Senator McConnell, in response, tweeting a video of Michael Jordan laughing until he cried.

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When President Trump pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement, he also pulled us out of paying any additional money to the so-called “Green Climate Fund” (GCF). Sorry, no more green for the greenies’ fund. This is the fund which has been given $7.2 billion dollars of taxpayer money from a variety of countries. It is the fund that countries around the world have been pushing hard to get their hands on. It is also the fund that was supposed to be given $100 billion, so they could parcel it out for corrupt third world politicians and greedy UN rent-seekers to swim around in for decades … dream on.

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NASA’s Office of Planetary Protection has tried to protect other worlds from us and us from other worlds since the Cold War. But the future wants a better way.

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This is in accord with the new Crazy Latina Demagogue Party Congressional candidate from Queens: Free government jobs for everyone!

John Hinderaker turns over a rock.

Justice Sotomayor wrote the dissent that Democrats were hoping for. It is a fiery denunciation of President Trump, but one that includes little material relevant to the case. She quotes, at great length, statements that candidate Donald Trump made during the campaign about wanting to restrict all Islamic immigration. One problem, of course, is that the order at issue doesn’t bar all Islamic immigration–it affects only a tiny percentage of it. The fact (if it is a fact) that Trump would have preferred to issue a different order, obviously can’t make the order he did issue unconstitutional.

Justice Sotomayor and Justice Ginsberg, who joined in her dissent, do not shy away from the conclusion that if another president had issued the same order, it would have been valid and constitutional. It is only Donald Trump who can’t issue this proclamation, on account of various statements he made that the justices interpret as being hostile to Islam. If Hillary Clinton had issued the same order, it would have been fine.

I therefore see the Sotomayor opinion (and the Breyer opinion, too, although it is more circumspect) as political, not legal, documents. They reflect the Democratic Party’s continuing refusal to accept the result of the 2016 election. In their view, Donald Trump isn’t really our president: he doesn’t have the powers that any other president would have.

So we have two Justices of the Supreme Court who would have made a blatantly wrong decision for partisan political purposes. I think that’s grounds for impeachment. But that’s me, and I have more testosterone in my hangnail than the whole Republican Congressional delegation.

Read it.

Republican legislators grow a spine. When did that happen?

UPDATE: MSNBC Contributors Awkwardly Defend Maxine Waters’s Call for Harassment