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 Steven P. Lanza, reporting in The Connecticut Economy, published quarterly by the University of Connecticut, found that “excessive regulation plays a role in hamstringing business owners and entrepreneurs who simply don’t have the resources of larger firms to cope with these constraints.”

Former U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern learned all this the hard way.  In 1988, he bought, renovated and operated a 150-room hotel and conference center in Stratford, Connecticut.  The business went bankrupt two years later.  McGovern reflected on his experience in the Wall Street Journal: “My business associates and I lived with federal, state and local rules that were all passed with the objective of helping employees, protecting the environment, raising tax dollars for schools, protecting our customers from fire hazards, etc. While I never have doubted the worthiness of these goals, the concept that most often eludes legislators is: ‘Can we make consumers pay the higher prices for increased operating costs that accompany public regulation and government reporting requirements with reams of red tape.’ It is a simple concern that is nonetheless often ignored by legislators.”

…

Connecticut’s tax base is eroding as more and more people conclude there’s a better future someplace else.

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Long past time, really.

The Kurds outnumber Palestinians several times over, and unlike Palestinians, have a real ethnic and cultural distinction from surrounding Arabs (and in Turkey, Turks). But for Europeans drawing lines on maps and Turkish national ambitions, there should have been an independent nation for the Kurds decades ago.

But, then, Muslims have never been all that fond of other Muslims.

The Kurds are the world’s largest stateless nation, numbering well over 30 million spread across Turkey, Iran, Syria, and Iraq, according to figures in the CIA Factbook, though exact population numbers are hard to pin down. Iraq’s 6 million Kurds have achieved the greatest measure of independence; they run the autonomous Kurdistan Regional Government, or KRG, within the federal Iraqi system since 2005 (though de facto autonomy began after Saddam’s army was forced out of the region during the 1991 Gulf War). But despite a booming economy and striking freedom of action, the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraq still has presented no concrete plans for independence.

Read it.

They’re the modern Brownshirts, the street fighters of the Crust. Of course they’re funded with taxpayer dollars.

Read it.

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo bagged $100,000 in campaign donations from a developer that, two days later, received tax breaks that will cost New York taxpayers $35 million in revenue over 10 years.

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

Read it.

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

The protest was organized by the Chicago Federation of Labor in collaboration with the Chicago Teachers Union, the SEIU, Action Now (formerly ACORN), and were accompanied by a large contingent of anarchists.

‘Anarchist’ being a media code-word for ‘violent mob’.

One protester told Breitbart News they were angry with ALEC because, “ALEC is an organization that helps to create state legislation and encourages state legislators to introduce that legislation in their home states.”

Dude, in this country we call it democracy; what do they do in your country?

Ah, well; unions and democracy have never really gotten along.

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The world is full of busybodies, whose goal in life is to force you to live your life they way they want you to.

Health activists, nutrition nannies, medical paternalists, and just plain old quacks regularly conjure up a variety of menaces that are supposedly damaging the health of Americans. Their scares ranging from the decades-long campaign against fluoridation to worries that saccharin causes cancer to the ongoing hysteria over biotech crops to fears of lead in lipstick. The campaigners’ usual “solution” is to demand that regulators ban the offending substance or practice. Here are five especially egregious examples.

Any time you get somebody whose claim to fame is the ability to look good in front of a camera supporting an issue, you can safely bet money s/he’s on the wrong side.

Read it.

City officials would use eminent domain — i.e., the power to take property by force, upon the payment of “fair compensation” to the owner — to wrest control of hundreds of mortgages held by private-equity firms. They’re not taking the actual property, mind you, but grabbing the notes held by those who financed the homes.

Read it.

A month after saying New Jersey has “enough gun laws” already,  Governor Chris Christie signed 10 of 13 new gun control bills into law on August 8.

I predict that he’ll be the next guy to lose a Presidential election for the Republicans.

Read it.

As part of the climate change agenda he unveiled this year, President Obama made a commitment to significantly reduce the federal government’s dependence on fossil fuels. The government, he said in a speech in June at Georgetown University, “must lead by example.”

But just two miles from the White House stands the Capitol Power Plant, the largest single source of carbon emissions in the nation’s capital and a concrete example of the government’s inability to green its own turf.

Obama lied? Obama says one thing and does another? Obama can’t carry through on his promises? None of that is news.

But it’s all the Republicans’ fault, of course….

Read it.

In most fields of human endeavour the complete invalidation of a person’s formal training and skillset generally takes decades, if not generations.

Within IT the tools, applications, operating systems and cloud services learned at the beginning of a bachelor’s degree can already be defunct before that degree is completed.

Read it.

An experimental malaria vaccine called PfSPZ is showing promise after it was found to have blocked the disease in early clinical trials, according to a new study published by Science magazine on Thursday. Researchers are calling the vaccine a breakthrough while also cautioning that PfSPZ isn’t ready for prime time just yet. The vaccine, which is made using a weakened form of the disease, was administered in varying doses to a group of more than three dozen volunteers. Six people, each of whom were given a full five doses of the vaccine, were unable to contract malaria when exposed to the disease, the study says. This is the first time any vaccine has achieved 100% effectiveness in any trial, researchers report.

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Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?

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…whoever fed the “Friends of Hollywood” Congressional Reps their questions last week forgot to make careful notes of who they gave which questions to… leading to a repeat. Congresswomen Judy Chu and Karen Bass both represent different parts of Los Angeles, so it’s no surprise that they’d be there to carry water for the legacy entertainment industry. But,having both of them ask identical questions, word-for-word, one right after the other? That kinda reveals that they were fed that question, doesn’t it? You can watch the full video here, or to make it easier, I’ve made a short YouTube video that shows the two questions back to back….

Best Congresscritters money can buy.

Read it.

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

No biggie, right? Rich, famous people put their kids in fancy private schools all the time. He probably looked at his options and made the best decision he could for his family.

Just one thing: Damon, whose mom is a public school teacher, frequently makes a big stink about the importance of public education. A really big stink.

Hey, when the Obamas put their kids in D.C. public schools, then Damon will put his in L.A. public schools. Fair’s fair.

Read it.

In the aftermath of the tornado that devastated Joplin in 2011, Remote Area Medical, a Tennessee-based charity that provides free health care, sent its mobile eyeglass laboratory to Missouri to help.

But it wasn’t allowed to assist because Missouri law makes it extremely difficult for doctors, nurses and other health-care professionals to offer free services.

Your tax dollars at work.

In May, state legislators passed the Volunteer Health Services Act, which would have allowed health professionals licensed in other states to offer free care in Missouri and also would have relaxed medical malpractice liability for volunteer health workers.

Gov. Jay Nixon vetoed the bill last month, writing that the VHSA “is unnecessary given that Missouri already has a system in place that encourages volunteerism.”

Governor Nixon is (of course) a Democrat.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

What appears to be happening, in other words, is a threshold effect. People hovering around the borderline—just above 30 hours—are seeing their hours capped. And new positions that might have offered 32 or 34 hours of work in the past are being created as 25-29 hour a week jobs.

And Obamanomics is good with that: It creates more people dependent on government benefits, in one form or another, to survive — and that means more votes for the Party of Government Benefits, the Democrats.

The President is a lot smarter than you think.

Read it.

“The scanned images look correct at first glance, even though numbers may actually be incorrect,” writes David Kriesel, who uncovered the worrying bug last week while scanning construction documents. Numbers were randomly being altered, with 6 and 8 proving especially susceptible.

Read it.

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

Don’t know much about the Middle Ages…
Looked at the pictures and I turned the pages…

Don’t get me started.

Read it.

The Crust take care of their own.

Consider the HOV lane: Joe Sixpack on his way to a job site can’t use it. My chauffeur and I can. Your tax dollars at work.

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Alex spent time at two foster homes. Her parents noticed bruises on her body and mold in her bag when they saw her while she was at the first home. Her father says he told Child Protective Services they’d have to put him in jail because he didn’t want to return her to the foster home, and in January she was placed in a second home. Alex is now dead, and the foster mother was arrested after her description of what happened to Alex didn’t match the injuries Alex sustained. The mother admitted to slamming the two-year-old girl’s head and is charged with murder.

Consider it a very very late-term abortion.

Read it.

Wouldn’t it be nice if these guys quit pretending to be Republicans?

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When the Bank of America Tower opened in 2010, the press praised it as one of the world’s “most environmentally responsible high-rise office building[s].” It wasn’t just the waterless urinals, daylight dimming controls, and rainwater harvesting. And it wasn’t only the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification—the first ever for a skyscraper—and the $947,583 in incentives from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority. It also had as a tenant the environmental movement’s biggest celebrity. The Bank of America Tower had Al Gore.

The former vice president wanted an office for his company, Generation Investment Management, that “represents the kind of innovation the firm is trying to advance,” his real-estate agent said at the time. The Bank of America Tower, a billion-dollar, 55-story crystal skyscraper on the northwest corner of Manhattan’s Bryant Park, seemed to fit the bill. It would be “the most sustainable in the country,” according to its developer Douglas Durst. At the Tower’s ribbon-cutting ceremony, Gore powwowed with Mayor Michael Bloomberg and praised the building as a model for fighting climate change. “I applaud the leadership of the mayor and all of those who helped make this possible,” he said.

Gore’s applause, however, was premature. According to data released by New York City last fall, the Bank of America Tower produces more greenhouse gases and uses more energy per square foot than any comparably sized office building in Manhattan. It uses more than twice as much energy per square foot as the 80-year-old Empire State Building. It also performs worse than the Goldman Sachs headquarters, maybe the most similar building in New York—and one with a lower LEED rating. It’s not just an embarrassment; it symbolizes a flaw at the heart of the effort to combat climate change.

Read it.

Looks to me like a trend.

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Nothing teaches critical thinking and reinforces math skills like race baiting, right? If Mary, who is white, has five apples and John, who is not white, has two apples, how many of Mary’s apples is John entitled to take?

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Occupational licensing rules allow trade schools in some states to force students to attend them, enabling the schools to charge students lots of tuition for training that is not worth remotely what it costs. At Slate, columnist Matthew Yglesias writes that “beauty schools are ripping off their students. Terrible licensing rules deserve some of the blame.”

Economists call this ‘rent-seeking’ and it depends on special interests using the power of government to force people to do it their way. And yet people like Yglesias are always first in line when it comes to demanding more regulatory power for government. Sometimes the term ‘clueless’ is wholly inadequate….

Read it.

Based on the stories we cover at College Insurrection, bathroom use has clearly become the new civil rights battleground.

Hey, it’s not as if they’re out catching criminals or something.

Read it.

Only in America can white people organize an event intended to mock poor Southern whites, have black people crying that it’s racist against blacks, and then have white people apologizing to blacks about it.

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I despise open-plan offices, and will not work in one. Open-plan offices are suitable for drones and paper-pushes, but it’s impossible to get anything done that requires even the most superficial amount of thought.

Read it.

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

Christopher Buckley’s review of Mark Leibovich’s “In This Town,” a Thackeray-esque exposé of official Washington, uncovers this buried morel on page 330 of the book. In 1974, just 3% of retiring members of Congress became lobbyists. Today, 50% of retiring Senators and 42% of retiring House members stay in DC and become lobbyists. The more than 1,500% increase goes a long way towards explaining how an entrenched, permanent political class has risen in DC.

There’s gold in them thar shills….

Read it.

Data from the 2011 American Community Survey indicates that the median value of owner-occupied homes in Denver is nearly four times median family incomes. It should be just two times, which is typical for cities that don’t have urban-growth boundaries or other restrictive land-use laws. So housing prices are nearly twice as high as they ought to be.

As this city document explains, Denver’s “inclusionary zoning” ordinance requires developers who build 30 or more homes or condos at one time to sell at least 10 percent of those homes at “affordable” prices. Typically, this means an average of about $40,000 less than market prices, which is likely below the actual cost of constructing the homes. To make up for the losses, developers have to sell the remaining 90 percent for more than they would otherwise.

The people who buy these homes don’t really get a windfall. They are required to live in the houses themselves (i.e., they can’t rent them out at market rates) and, if they sell them within 15 to 30 years after buying them, they can’t sell them for more than they paid for them plus inflation. None of the buyers are really poor; anyone who earns up to 80 percent of the city’s median income is eligible. It is likely that many of the buyers are young people whose lifetime earnings are likely to be well above median incomes.

Markets do what markets do, despite what cities tell them to.

Read it.

Detroit’s sixty year decline, culminating in its recent bankruptcy, has many causes. But one that should not be ignored is the city’s extensive use of eminent domain to transfer property to politically influential private interests. For many years, Detroit aggressively used eminent domain to promote “economic development” and “urban renewal.” The most notorious example was the 1981 Poletown case, in which some 4000 people lost their homes, and numerous businesses were forced to move in order to make way for a General Motors factory. As I explained in this article, the Poletown takings – like many other similar condemnations – ended up destroying far more development than they ever created. In his prescient dissent in Poletown, Michigan Supreme Court Justice James Ryan warned that there was no real reason to expect that the project would produce the growth promised by GM and noted that Detroit and the court had “subordinated a constitutional right to private corporate interests.”

Detroit: Nobody Left to Steal From.

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What happens if Walmart starts offering to pay cashiers and shelf stockers $22/hr? As it raises wages, the kind of people who compete for Walmart jobs changes. As wages go up, workers with greater skill, human capital, and experience start to compete for these jobs, and, being better workers, they will beat out the kind of workers who are currently getting Walmart jobs. Call this phenomenon job gentrification. If Walmart increases its wage significantly, this will be very good for the people who end up working at Walmart. But that doesn’t mean it will be good for the kind of people who currently are getting the low-paying jobs at Walmart.

Eh, who cares about them? Obviously not the people on the D.C. city council.

Read it.

In the course of researching my new book, Men On Strike: Why Men Are Boycotting Marriage, Fatherhood, and the American Dream – And Why It Matters, I talked with men all over America about why they’re avoiding marriage. It turns out that the problem isn’t that men are immature, or lazy. Instead, they’re responding rationally to the incentives in today’s society.

Read it.

For more than 30 years, syndicated advice columnist John Rosemond has dished out old-school, no-nonsense tips to parents.

Now, Mr. Rosemond is getting a spanking of his own.

Kentucky officials say he violated state law by presenting himself as a psychologist and then giving parenting advice without a proper license. Mr. Rosemond is a licensed “psychological associate” in his home state of North Carolina, but not in Kentucky.

‘All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.’ — Benito Mussolini

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In 2009, Mr. Anderson loaned his son some tools to dig for arrowheads near a favorite campground of theirs. Unfortunately, they were on federal land. Authorities “notified me to get a lawyer and a damn good one,” Mr. Anderson recalls.

There is no evidence the Andersons intended to break the law, or even knew the law existed, according to court records and interviews. But the law, the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979, doesn’t require criminal intent and makes it a felony punishable by up to two years in prison to attempt to take artifacts off federal land without a permit.

I can see a new Jeff Foxworthy tour: ‘If you were minding your own business, you might be a Federal criminal.’

Wendy Olson, the U.S. Attorney for Idaho, said the men were on an archeological site that was 13,000 years old. “Folks do need to pay attention to where they are,” she said.

How does that help them when they don’t know, and can’t be expected by any rational adult to know, that there is a law that they might be breaking? Was the site posted? Did it say ‘two years in prison if you dig here’? I rather think not.

As federal criminal statutes have ballooned, it has become increasingly easy for Americans to end up on the wrong side of the law. Many of the new federal laws also set a lower bar for conviction than in the past: Prosecutors don’t necessarily need to show that the defendant had criminal intent.

Which is a basic component of the Common Law, and its abandonment is a significant step toward tyranny.

Jim Goad looks at the future of George Zimmerman.

George Zimmerman is now a free man. He is free to be stalked, threatened, harassed, persecuted, and possibly killed at the hands of the perpetual malcontents who are sorely displeased with his acquittal late Saturday night.

But he is not free to sleep soundly—not now, nor possibly for the rest of his life. Like O. J. Simpson after his murder acquittal, he is likely to face big-money civil suits from Trayvon Martin’s family members. And like the LAPD officers who were originally acquitted on charges of using excessive force against Rodney King, he is now vulnerable to a federal civil-rights prosecution. In fact, the Justice Department is investigating precisely that possibility, despite the fact that an FBI investigation found no evidence that Zimmerman is “racist,” as if such a thing can actually be proved.

But if someone were to kill him, there would be no DOJ investigation into such a violation of his ‘civil rights’ (if the right to be free from random murder isn’t a civil right, what is?) because, as a ‘white Hispanic’, he has no rights that a black person need respect.

Read it.

In Horne v. Department of Agriculture, a decision issued in June, the justices unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s argument that raisin farmers did not have the right to go to court to contest the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of raisins. The Fifth Amendment states that the government must pay “just compensation” whenever the government takes private property for “public use.” But the administration claimed that farmers could not even raise the takings issue in court without first enduring lengthy delays and paying a $483,000 fine.

Horne was the administration’s third unanimous defeat in a property rights case in 18 months. In Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency, it claimed that a couple had no right to go to court to seek compensation after the EPA blocked construction of their “dream house.”

In Arkansas Game & Fish Commission v. United States, it unsuccessfully argued that the Fifth Amendment doesn’t require compensation when the federal government repeatedly and deliberately floods property owners’ land. Even liberal justices normally skeptical of property rights claims, including one of President Obama’s appointees, found these arguments too much to swallow.

The Obama administration has also suffered unanimous defeats in several other important cases.

Last year, the justices rejected the administration’s position that the religious freedom guaranteed by the First Amendment does not apply to churches’ decisons to hire and fire employees with religious duties, such as teaching theology. Obama appointee Justice Elena Kagan called the administration’s position “amazing.”

In United States v. Jones, another 2012 case, the justices unanimously rejected the administration’s claim that the Fourth Amendment does not restrict the government’s authority to attach a GPS tracking device to a car.

Read it.

THE meanest streets of Kent are to be found in little pink boxes. Or at least they are if you look at them through the crime-prediction software produced by an American company called PredPol. Places in the county east of London where a crime is likely on a given day show up on PredPol’s maps highlighted by pink squares 150 metres on a side. The predictions can be eerily good, according to Mark Johnson, a police analyst: “In the first box I visited we found a carving knife just lying in the road.”

I can predict where crime will occur: Any place that has more than 10% Muslims, as Sweden, Norway, Britain, France, Italy, Spain, and Dearborn have discovered.

Read it.

Let’s see. The current Democratic standard-bearer (and U.S. president) believes that Ho Chi Minh was inspired by America’s founding fathers and, apparently, that Harry Truman should have cooperated with the mass murdering Vietnamese Communist.

The previous Democratic standard-bearer, John Kerry, considered the U.S. troops who fought against Ho Chi Minh’s forces to be like “the Army of Genghis Khan.” Kerry is now the U.S. Secretary of State.

It almost makes you nostalgic for the days when the Democratic standard-bearer was merely a war-hating draft dodger.

Read it.

Note: AFTER the election. There’s a politician’s wife.

Read it. And watch the video.

A very successful CiCi’s Pizza franchise owner says he had to sell his top performing pizza restaurants because he couldn’t afford the $221K in penalties that ObamaCare was going to impose on him.

Memo to Barack: Your plan to destroy small business in America is working like a charm.

Read it.

In ancient times, rich men vied with each other to build monuments to glorify their city and enhance its reputation.

The same thing happens in modern times, except that they aren’t spending their own money, but yours.

Read it.

Attorney General Eric Holder has launched a war against Texas, and in doing so is defying the Supreme Court of the United States. The imminent judicial beat-down of Holder highlights that this case is not about the rule of law and instead abuses the federal courts for political purposes to rile up the far left and demonize Republicans.

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

Read it.

Forbes provides a breakdown. First, he’ll forfeit over 44% to the United Kingdom, despite spending all of two weeks there.

Then, U.S. tax collectors get in on the fun. Although Mickelson can avoid being double-taxed by writing off his gains as a foreign tax credit, he’ll pay in other ways. Mickelson is still subject to a self-employment tax and a Medicare surtax. To the state of California, he’s obligated to pay another 13.3% of his earnings. In total, one of the world’s most successful golfer’s is losing 61% of the money he made from the tournaments.

USA Today points out that if the governments gouging him of his gains are not bad enough, “that’s before Mickelson pays his caddie, pays for his hotel and expenses, pays his agent, etc,” and speculated that when all is through, Mickelson will be left with a meager 30% of his original winnings.

‘Hi! We’re from the government, and we’re here to stick our hands in your pockets.’

Read it.

Change.gov, the website created by the Obama transition team in 2008, has effectively disappeared sometime over the last month.

While front splash page for for Change.gov has linked to the main White House website for years, until recently, you could still continue on to see the materials and agenda laid out by the administration. This was a particularly helpful resource for those looking to compare Obama’s performance in office against his vision for reform, laid out in detail on Change.gov.

Down the Memory Hole!

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 It’s interesting that the National Council of La Raza appears to be hoping in the future to just go by their acronym NCLR, although that might not please the the National Center for Lesbian Rights.

Like the other great explicitly racist organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, I’m sure they’d prefer that people not dwell on their explicit racism.

The horror….

Get Ignored, As Usual

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For Kevin Pace, the president’s health-care law could have meant better health insurance. Instead, it produced a pay cut.

Like many of his colleagues, the adjunct music professor at Northern Virginia Community College had managed to assemble a hefty courseload, despite his official status as a part-time employee. But his employer, the state, slashed his hours this spring to avoid a Jan. 1 requirement that all full-time workers be offered health insurance. The law defines “full time” as 30 hours a week or more.

“We work so hard for so little pay,” he said. “You would think they would want to make an investment in society, pay the teachers back and give us health care.”

I guess not.

Read it.

In China, of course — in the U.S., the government would shut him down six ways from Sunday.

Pretty pitiful when a Communist dictatorship has more freedom for entrepreneurs than America.