Read it.

And why not? If they can stick the taxpayer with covering their employees’ health insurance….

Read it.

Be careful what you wish for….

Read it.

We’ve heard a lot of election-year class warfare talk, from makers vs. takers to the 1% vs. the 99%. But Joel Kotkin’s important new book, The New Class Conflict, suggests that America’s real class problems are deeper, and more damaging, than election rhetoric.

Traditionally, America has been thought of as a place of great mobility — one where anyone can conceivably grow up to be president, regardless of background. This has never been entirely true, of course. Most of our presidents have come from reasonably well-off backgrounds, and even Barack Obama, a barrier-breaker in some ways, came from an affluent background and enjoyed an expensive private-school upbringing. But the problem Kotkin describes goes beyond shots at the White House.

In a nutshell, Kotkin sees California, once again, in its role as an indicator of where the nation is headed. And it’s not an attractive destination.

Read it.

See it on the evening news? Of course not — it goes against the Narrative.

Eric Holder sending swarms of FBI agents to investigate? Don’t hold your breath.

Read it.

The woman, Meredith Cole, told police she was sexually harassed outside the club by several of the black males on August 22. She quickly went inside to retrieve her boyfriend, Alex Vassey, a DJ at the Outland Ballroom. The pair then went outside to see if they could identify any of the harassers.

Once out on the street, a gang of six black youths snuck up behind them and started attacking the couple, beating them in their faces and kicking Vassey after he was knocked to the ground.

The video clearly shows Vassey being viciously assaulted, as well as showing the young woman being punched in the face and knocked to the ground twice.

Heard about this on the evening news? Of course not — it doesn’t fit the Narrative.

Heard about this from Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson? Of course not — it provides no grounds for them to shake down guilty white liberals.

Read it.

I agree: Obama voters are incredibly stupid. That’s his ‘base’, and he works it like a stripper on a pole.

Obama frequently seeks to exploit the ignorance of voters, but here he’s telling us what he’s going to do and when, and counting on enough voters to ignore it to make it worth his while. He must think the voters are really, really stupid, and of course he can testify to their stupidity from personal experience, if only from the lies they repeatedly bought from him regarding the nondisruptive character of Obamacare.

It reminds me of the voters who put Connie Mack III over the top when he ran for the retiring Lawton Chiles’s Florida Senate seat in 1988. Mack narrowly won the race through the wisdom of the voters who pulled the lever for him because he was a woman.

Read it.

I find the idea of her defective genes not being propagated into the next generation strangely appealing.

Read it.

The U.S. Navy is using Chicago’s Stoger Hospital to train and prepare doctors, medics, and nurses for battlefield conditions.

As with so many of the experiences awaiting military medical personnel once overseas, “Stoger Hospital… stands in the middle of a war zone… in its own way.”

Every cloud has a silver lining, if that’s what you can call the fact that the war zone into which each Democrat-machine-run city descends provide a domestic training ground for combat surgeons.

According to the AP, “the Navy doesn’t have any trauma training facilities in the U.S., [so] military medical teams” have to be sent elsewhere for “experience dealing with penetrating wounds.” And these teams have found that bullet wounds–“even a single bullet wound”–“[unleash] the same kind of massive infection inflicted by roadside bombs in Afghanistan.”

There are plenty of bullet wounds to learn from in Chicago, where Stoger Hospital has “one of the busiest… trauma units” in the country. In 2013 alone, Stoger Hospital “treated nearly 600 gunshot victims,” over 260 stab victims, “and almost 900 people injured in traffic [accidents].”

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

Read it.

When Ms. Furillo was 25, she was an active member of the Young Workers Liberation League, a youth arm affiliate of the Communist Party USA, and an editor of its Young Worker publication. She wrote in 1975: “It is clear that for youth today, there is no real and meaningful future under capitalism. Capitalism means joblessness, racism and degeneracy.”…

After Crain’s asked Ms. Furillo about her YWLL membership, a NYSNA spokeswoman said Ms. Furillo would no longer participate in an article and accused Crain’s of “red baiting” organized labor….

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

Read it.

Yep, barely a week into the fall 2014 semester, and we’ve already got our first official hate crime hoax of the school year.

Read it.

Liberal environmentalists, including billionaire Tom Steyer, are pumping cash into the Wolverine State to back up struggling Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI), opponent Terri Lynn Land (R) says.

That can’t be right — Democrats don’t have very many billionaires; Harry Reid told us so.

Read it.

To show what the CryptoPhone can do that less expensive competitors cannot, he points me to a map that he and his customers have created, indicating 17 different phony cell towers known as “interceptors,” detected by the CryptoPhone 500 around the United States during the month of July alone.  Interceptors look to a typical phone like an ordinary tower.  Once the phone connects with the interceptor, a variety of “over-the-air” attacks become possible, from eavesdropping on calls and texts to pushing spyware to the device.

“Interceptor use in the U.S. is much higher than people had anticipated,” Goldsmith says.  “One of our customers took a road trip from Florida to North Carolina and he found 8 different interceptors on that trip.  We even found one at South Point Casino in Las Vegas.”

Mark Steyn chronicles our slide into the abyss.

n Ferguson, Missouri, the “conversation”, as they say on MSNBC, is between the dependent class and the governing class that ministers to them and keeps them in line. If you’re a convenience store owner, your low-skilled service jobs are the only labor on offer, and, for your pains, you get burned and looted by the dependent class while your 911 calls go unanswered by the governing class, both of which you fund.

Read it.

Thank God for those strict gun control laws, or the place would look like Texas.

(Extra credit: How many of the victims were black? And how many news stories did you read about them?)

Read it.

Our technology may be getting smarter, but a provocative new study suggests human intelligence is on the decline. In fact, it indicates that Westerners have lost 14 I.Q. points on average since the Victorian Era.

And socialism is more popular now than it was then. Coincidence? I think not.

What exactly explains this decline? Study co-author Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, points to the fact that women of high intelligence tend to have fewer children than do women of lower intelligence. This negative association between I.Q. and fertility has been demonstrated time and again in research over the last century.

That’s it, blame it on women….

Read it.

The report uses the unfortunate term “Billionaire’s Club” to describe the funders who give groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council, and Sierra Club Foundation millions of dollars a year. In fact, in most cases it would be more accurate to describe it as the “Dead Billionaire’s Club,” as most of the money comes from foundations set up by wealthy people who were often fairly conservative, but their foundations are now run by their liberal children and/or left-wing staffs.

Read it.

Fruta Feia, formed in 2013 by Isabel Soares, is a co-op that’s fighting both inane EU food regulations and the food waste those regulations cause. The group pushes back against regulations that dictate the size and shape of fruit that can be sold throughout the EU. If fruit is misshapen, irregular, or fails to meet certain color guidelines, then the regulations state that it’s not fit for sale. The rules, published in 2008, state that apples, for example, may not be sold if they have certain cosmetic “defects” in “shape” or “coloring.”

At a time when the economic downturn means fresh fruits and vegetables are harder to come by for many—with small farmers struggling to make ends meet—and with food waste an enormous problem, these regulations couldn’t be more idiotic and infuriating.

The biter bit. Pass the popcorn.

Steve Sailer blows the whistle.

Why is there this kind of windfall available to bestow on about 20% of tenants of new luxury buildings? Because getting the political permission to build in NYC is a goldmine because the right to build is so restricted that anybody who does get all the permits approved is guaranteed a big profit, so the city makes the developers kick back some of their profits in terms of these crazy Fairy Godmother deals for some small fraction of all the people in New York. It seems like there ought to be about 10 better ways to do things, but that’s the current system, and the new mayor wants to crank it up.

Read it.

With the rise of “cashless” turnpikes, where tolls are collected via a device such as EZ-Pass rather than at tollbooths, rental car companies have found two ways to pass those costs on to their customers, both unpopular: Customers can choose to rent a pass for as much as $20 a day, which they’ll pay whether or not they pass through a toll plaza, or they can pay the fines for going through the lanes without a pass, plus a hefty processing fee tacked on by the rental company.

Customers are ticked at what seems like yet another charge, like fees for checked baggage. After a Florida Dollar Rent a Car added $30 in administrative fees to a bill for $2.74 in tolls, Roxanna Usher of Redwood Valley, Calif., vented her spleen on the entire state. “I’m angry beyond belief and can’t even imagine coming back to your state,” she wrote in a Jan. 13 complaint to Florida’s attorney general. “Talk about a corrupt state! It’s disgusting what you’re doing to tourists—the mainstay of your economy.”

Read it.

And that tells you everything you need to know about Democrats.

Read it.

Fifty percent of marriages are still ending in divorce, and women continue to be the gender that initiates those endings. In the past, their reasons for leaving most often had to do with infidelity, neglect, or abuse. Now they’re dumping men who are faithful, attentive, and respectful, the very men they said they have always wanted. Why would women who have accomplished the female dream suddenly not be satisfied with it? Why are they leaving these ideal guys, and for what reasons?

I am currently dealing with several of these great husbands. They are, across the board, respectful, quality, caring, devoted, cherishing, authentic, and supportive guys whose wives have left them for a different kind of man. These once-beloved men make a living, love their kids, help with chores, support aging parents, and support their mate’s desires and interests. They believe they’ve done everything right. They are devastated, confused, disoriented, and heartsick. In a tragic way, they startlingly resemble the disheartened women of the past who were left behind by men who “just wanted something new.”

You may think that these women are ruthless and inconsiderate. Those I know are far from that. More often, they still love their husbands as much as they ever did, but in a different way. They tell me how wonderful their men are and how much they respect them. They just don’t want to be married to them anymore.

Read it.

But of course Harry Reid assures us that there aren’t many billionaires in the Democrat party. I think Harry needs to read something other than Democrat talking points for a change.

Read it.

Thank God for all those strict gun control laws, otherwise the place would look like Texas.

(None of the shootings were by white police, which is why they didn’t make the evening news.)

John Hinderaker turns over a rock.

What is the point of being in power if you can’t help your friends and screw your enemies? That is the Democratic philosophy. Thus, the Democrats hand out massive tax breaks, subsidies and mandates to their “green energy” supporters like Tom Steyer, who in turn pledge tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to help the Democrats maintain control of Congress. So they can continue to subsidize the businesses that make Steyer a billionaire. Same thing with Wall Street, which supports the Democratic Party almost monolithically.

And, of course, while both parties use cash to “buy control of Congress”–i.e., try to persuade voters by putting ads on television–the Democrats always have more money to “buy control of Congress” than the Republicans.

Read it.

The mask comes off.

Read it.

With the median household income stuck at around $53,093 in 2014, an annual salary of nearly twice that still seems like more than enough money to succeed and thrive in any economy, no matter the circumstances. However, a convergence of factors have fundamentally changed what it means to rake in a “six-figure salary” in America, and many families who look rich on paper are merely struggling to get ahead along with everyone else.

Sad but true. I like the fact that they cite inflation as the first reason why six figures no longer means much.

Read it.

As higher education faces a crisis of epic proportions, a group of respected campus leaders from across the nation have called on their peers to proactively address the many issues plaguing universities today, saying in a detailed report that “the failure of higher education governance” has helped create the current debacle.

Problems cited in the report include: a lack of a return-on-investment with college degrees; a tenure system that “adds to cost and compromises quality”; political correctness run amok, “undermining the free exchange of ideas”; never-ending collegiate athletic scandals and binge drinking woes; studies that find grads do not leave college prepared for the real world; curriculum requirements that leave students with a “lack a fundamental understanding of their history and heritage”; tuitions that continue to soar far above inflation; and student debt that today tops $1 trillion.

Pardon me while I snicker.

Read it.

Consulting firm PwC recently published its outlook for work in 2022, based on interviews with 500 human resources experts and 10,000 others in the United States and several other countries. You probably won’t be surprised to hear that big companies could end up so powerful and influential they morph into “ministates” that fill the void when government is unable to provide essential services. Companies will also use sensors and other gizmos to monitor employees around the clock. And workers will mostly acquiesce to this digital leash, in exchange for job security, decent pay and important benefits.

Unspoken is the elephant in the room, that none of this would be possible without the active participation of the government.

Read it.

New Jersey Police are on the look-out for a man who allegedly committed three separate “knockout game” punches within a 15-minute time frame. The victims sustained bruised jaws and bloody faces. The assailant was described by police as a six-foot or taller black man with an athletic build wearing a Brooklyn Nets hat.

So where are the riots? Where’s Al Sharpton? Where’s Jesse Jackson? Bueller? Bueller?

Read it. And watch the video.

We don’t have all the evidence and I’m hesitant to try and litigate this in the press, but there’s also this false narrative being pushed out there by folks like Michael Eric Dyson and [Al] Sharpton and the rest of the hustlers is that black men live in fear of being shot by cops in these neighborhoods. That too is nonsense. I know something about growing up black and male in the inner city and it’s not that hard to avoid getting shot by a cop. They pull you over, you answer their questions, you are on your way. 

The real difficulty is not getting shot by other black people if you are a young black man in these neighborhoods and again that is something we need to talk more about. Cops are not the problem. Cops are not producing these black bodies in the morgues every weekend in Chicago, in New York and Detroit and so forth. That’s not cops. Those other black people shooting black people.

Read it.

Ever since the British parliament passed the Town & Country Planning Act in 1947, housing in that nation has gotten less and less affordable. As a result, the average size of new homes today is only 925 square feet, down 44 percent from the average size in 1920. Meanwhile, the average size of new home in the United States in 2013 was 2,598 square feet, up 56 percent from 1,660 square feet forty years before.

Read it.

Think Eric Holder will be showing up in Chicago any time soon? Only to touch base with old chum Ram Emmanuel.

John Hinderaker is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

Eight days ago, a Ferguson, Missouri police officer named Darren Wilson shot and killed Michael Brown, a young but very large (6? 4?, 300 pounds) African-American, under circumstances that remain murky. Since then, a ritual with which we have become tiresomely familiar has unfolded: demonstrations that turned into riots, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson–still!–descending on the scene, pleas for peace, intervention of federal authorities, calls for reappraisal of American race relations. Followed by more riots and looting.

We have been here before, too many times. But why? What is so special, so symbolic, about the death of Michael Brown? In the month before the Brown case exploded on the nation’s front pages, 40 people were murdered in Chicago, a large majority of them black. This led to no demonstrations or riots, no news coverage outside Chicago, no appearances by Sharpton and Jackson. So what made the death of Michael Brown so newsworthy?

Two factors: first, Brown was killed by a white man; second, the white man was a police officer. But here we come to a fork in the road. Was this particular death noteworthy because it was typical of so many others, or because it was so rare? Evidently the latter. Last time I checked the numbers, there were about 15 times as many instances where blacks murdered whites as where whites murdered blacks. Why do we never have riots over the murder of a white person by a black man? Such events happen, relatively speaking, all the time.

George Will speaks for common sense.

Progressives say corporations using inversions are unpatriotic, which is amusing. When the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision stipulated that Americans do not forfeit their First Amendment right to political advocacy when they act together through corporations (including, and especially, incorporated nonprofit advocacy groups), progressives ridiculed the idea that corporations should be treated as people. Now, progressives charge that corporations resorting to inversion are not behaving like patriotic people.

Hypocrisy is the sine qua non talent for Democrats.

A publicly held corporation’s responsibility is to its shareholders; its fiduciary duty is to maximize the value of their holdings. If businesses supposedly have other responsibilities, who decides what they are? Presumably politicians such as Sen. Dick Durbin, the Illinois Democrat, who must have learned economics from the nursery story “Rumpelstiltskin.”

A truth that politicians feel free to ignore.

This is the progressive premise in action: Because government provides infrastructure (roads, etc.) affecting everyone, and because government-dispensed money flows everywhere, everything is beholden to the government, and more or less belongs to the government, and should be subordinated to its preferences, which always are for more control of the nation’s wealth. Walgreens retreated, costing its shareholders, employees and customers billions.

The Other McCain looks deep into some pretty ugly places.

One thing you notice if you pay close attention to the autobiographical details that feminists let slip as they’re telling their narratives (because “the personal is political,” y’know, and feminism enthrones extreme subjectivity as “the authority of experience”) is that many of these women have psychological damage they channel into political belief because they can’t come to grips with it any other way.

Her misfortunes can never be chalked up to mere bad luck, nor can the source of her hurt feelings be accepted as “the way of the world.” Still less can any feminist look at her problems and ask to what extent she is responsible for her own failures and unhappiness. Instead, her ideology offers her ready-made rationalization that seem to explain her problems: Whatever is wrong with her life, somehow it can be blamed on men and the patriarchal system of male domination. In any other context, we recognize this as blame-shifting and scapegoating, but when women explain their personal miseries by yelping that they are victims of oppression by the patriarchy, we dignify their rationalization by calling it a political philosophy.

Steve Sailer looks at some history.

In the optimistic days after WWII, big cities built giant urban housing projects to accommodate the poor. For example, Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis was designed by Yamasaki, architect of the World Trade Center, on the most advanced principles of modernism. Obviously, taking poor blacks out of their lead paint-encrusted tenements and raising them in advanced Bauhaus designs would prove the bigots wrong.

Yeah, that worked great, didn’t it?

Poor blacks are the biggest Hot Potato in modern America. Liberal white urbanites realize today that their ancestors made a terrible mistake in the Postwar era by ceding much of the most valuable urban land in America to poor blacks. So they are offloading poor blacks on the less powerful, such as residents of second rate suburbs and of undistinguished small towns. But for this process, in which trillions of dollars of real estate values are at stake, to proceed smoothly without complaints from the less well connected about what is coming their way, it’s important to Control Discourse, to periodically demonize various minor league white people for engaging in pattern recognition.

If you think intelligently, while everybody else had had crimestop pounded into their heads so all thought shuts down when the topic of race comes up, you can make a lot of money in real estate.

Read it.

The Department of Justice compelled a Dearborn, Michigan, high school district to hire more translators and teachers to accommodate Arab students who are not proficient in English.

According to USA Today, the “31-page agreement with the Department of Justice” calls for the Crestwood School District, which is in an area with “a growing Arab-American population,” to “‘take appropriate action to overcome language barriers that impede equal and meaningful participation by’ students with limited English skills.” USA Today noted that the agreement “doesn’t specify Arabic, but given that the agreement centered around complaints from Arab-Americans, it will probably include that.”

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reportedly “ruled that the Crestwood district had violated federal civil rights laws” last year. The settlement, which was reportedly released in English and Arabic, “requires the district to provide school documents in both English and foreign languages such as Arabic and to promote a more diverse staff” and that all “teachers must be rated on how effectively they administer” various diversity programs.

Gavin McInnes blows the whistle.

Today’s youth are sitting on the couch in the basement because they can’t find work in their field. “Gender and Film” is a degree that cost them $60k to get but nobody cares if Star Wars is sexist. They avoid blue-collar work because their parents always hired illegals for those tasks and it instilled within them a kind of 18th-century classism. Menial labor isn’t beneath anyone. It builds character, gets you in shape, and makes you a successful entrepreneur.

Steve Sailer shows us the man behind the curtain.

Mexico in the 20th Century was a good example of corporatism under the PRI or Institutionalized Revolutionary Party that emerged over the course of the 1920s when the caudillos got tired of getting shot by each other and announced rules under which every organized power group in society would get a payout if they just waited their turn. Mexico had kind of a left-of-center non-charismatic fascism.

…

This discussion of corporatism reminds me of something I’ve never seen mentioned: here in America we are supposed to be becoming more multicultural and not so ethnocentric, more sensitive to the diversity of cultural traditions that the changing face of America brings to the national conversation, etc etc. There are now 35 million people of Mexican background in the United States. But how often do you read in the press a discussion of the political ideologies that Mexicans bring with them from Mexico?

Not very often. I read a lot in the media about political ideologies in Israel and Britain, and there’s some coverage of France, but even French ideological concepts, despite their immense fame, are hard for Americans to grapple with. Mexico elicits very little interest, despite being a country of 120 million with a 1,950 mile border with the U.S.

Steve Sailer continues his chronicle of those attempting to pass as non-white.

Of course, not everyone is race-obsessed:

“Then there are people who don’t want to rock the boat, who are like, ‘I’m fine; I consider myself American,’” he said.

That attitude is unacceptable. It risks depriving one’s fellow MENAs of the cash benefits that come from being non-white. When Benjamins are at stake, it is no time to be noble.

…

One thing about MENA: the Middle East includes Jews and Iranians, two of the highest-income ethnic groups in the U.S. Does that matter? Perhaps not. Victimhood isn’t what it used to be. Why shouldn’t the most prosperous among us get their slice of government preferment? I am still waiting for us Norwegian-Americans to get a little special consideration.

Read it.

Electoral democracy shorn of constructive leadership in an environment of degraded institutions and appalling ethical standards is a recipe for unaccountable government, unimaginable levels of corruption and the exacerbation of conflict and divisions.

Iraq? Sounds like the Obamanation to me.

Read it.

No doubt Jesse Jackson is already there.

Rich Lowry shows the man behind the curtain.

“You know I say what I mean and I mean what I say,” he told crowds during his re-election campaign. “I said I’d end the war in Iraq. I ended it.”

Anyone can end a war by surrendering. The fact that you declare victory and go home doesn’t mean that you won, despite ‘progressive’ attempts to alter the nature of reality by loudly exclaiming ‘LALALALALALALALALA’ and putting their hands over their ears.

Read it.

Riots and looting in Ferguson, Missouri, over the shooting of 18-year-old Michael Brown by a police officer represent just the latest spate of race-based mass violence to break out in President Obama’s post-racial America. When Obama was elected in 2008, many Americans hoped that racial conflict in the country would calm. Instead, precisely the reverse seems to have occurred.

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

John C. Wright blows the whistle.

One drawback is that perpetual victims give up on attempting to be virtuous and hardworking. The only thing they are taught to think and to do to get ahead in life is roll in the mud shrieking and whining for attention, kicking their legs in the air, and threatening violence they are rarely in a position to carry out. They are not just brats, but brats without boundary, reason, pause, or cease. They are infinite brats, because the whole of the endless universe is so very unfair to them.

The Infinite Brats are eternal losers. They do not want to be winners, because all winners are cheaters, so they adopt the behaviors which make them losers.

Joel Kotkin sounds the alarm.

In ways not seen since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, America is becoming a nation of increasingly sharply divided classes. Joel Kotkin’s The New Class Conflict breaks down these new divisions for the first time, focusing on the ascendency of two classes: the tech Oligarchy, based in Silicon Valley; and the Clerisy, which includes much of the nation’s policy, media, and academic elites.

Both of which constitute key components of the Crust.

Perhaps nothing reflects the descent of the yeomanry than the fading role of the ten million small businesses with under 20 employees, which currently employ upwards of forty million Americans. Long a key source of new jobs, small business start-ups have declined as a portion of all business growth from 50 percent in the early 1980s to 35% in 2010. Indeed, a 2014 Brookings report, revealed that small business “dynamism”,  measured by the growth of new firms compared with the closing of older ones, has declined significantly over the past decade, with more firms closing than starting for the first time in a quarter century.

Gradually being crushed out of existence by government regulations and bureaucracies that are much more comfortable dealing with the Fortune 500.

Read it.

Yet another news story you won’t see in the Lamestream Media.

Read it. And watch the video, if you have a strong stomach.

“If someone takes something from me, I’m going to grab it right back out of their cold, twisted, sick hands and say it is mine!” Mulgrew shouted. “You do not take what is mine!”

“And I’m going to punch you in the face and push you in the dirt because this is the teachers!” he continued. “These are our tools, and you sick people need to deal with us and the children we teach. Thank you very much!”

Uh, I wouldn’t want this moron anywhere near any children of mine, thank you very much.

Send your kid to a government school,
And he will turn out a fool;
That’s the way
Things are today —
Your tax bucks at work and play!

Read it.

This is currently the most-read story on the Minneapolis Star Tribune’s web site: “Stillwater cafe faces heat for adding ‘minimum wage fee’ to tab.” Minnesota’s Democratic legislature recently voted to raise the state’s minimum wage to $8 an hour, 75 cents more than the federal level. Naturally, that increase is leading to higher prices….

…

What is unique about the Oasis is that the cafe wants its patrons to know where the higher prices are coming from….

…

“We believe that the industry is overreacting,” Wade Luneburg of the MN State Council of UNITE HERE Unions told the Star Tribune this week. “Putting [minimum wage] fees on tickets and passing the cost on to consumers directly is strange at best, and creates an ‘us against them’ mentality while ordering dinner.”

Uh, guys, businesses don’t pay taxes; their customers pay taxes. This business is just refusing to pull the wool over the expense to the customer that is caused by pursuing your political agenda. Honesty is always the  chief enemy of ‘progressives’.