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If you’ve ever been in trouble for sleeping on the job, take heart: you can still achieve upward mobility in a local union.

Take, for instance, Mark Rosenthal, the president of Local 983 of District Council 37 in New York. Rosenthal makes $156,000 a year and apparently spends only two hours a day at work–much of that napping, according to his colleagues who spoke out to the New York Post.

Marvin Robbins, a union vice president, paints an unflattering portrait of his boss’s routine: “He eats lunch when he arrives at work at 2 p.m. Then, like clockwork, he goes to sleep with a cup of soda on the table and the straw in it. Then he wakes up, looks at his watch and says, ‘I have to get out before the traffic gets bad.’ He’s usually out by 4 p.m. after being at the office two hours.”

Look for … the Union label … if you can find it….

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Karl Rove, arguably one of the biggest losers of the 2012 election, inexplicably won the RNC contract to revamp its voter contact database. Rove, who was a specialist in direct mail, has no obvious expertise in technology or social media. Yet, the well-connected operative was able to win a contract on which the GOP has pinned its future electoral success. It is going about as well as expected.

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A high school social studies teacher in Batavia, Illinois, faces disciplinary action for informing students of their Fifth Amendment rights in connection with a survey asking about illegal drug use. The survey, ostensibly aimed at assessing the needs of students at Batavia High School, was distributed on April 18. After picking up the survey forms from his mailbox about 10 minutes before his first class of the day, John Dryden noticed that they had students’ names on them and that they asked about drinking and drug use, among other subjects. Dryden, who had just finished teaching a unit on the Bill of Rights, worried that students might feel obliged to incriminate themselves—an especially ticklish situation given the police officer stationed at the school. Since there was no time to confer with administrators, he says, he decided to tell his students that they did not have to complete the forms if doing so involved admitting illegal behavior. Tomorrow the school board will consider whether and how to punish Dryden for taking advantage of this teachable moment.

Of course, if he had been talking about their 2nd Amendment rights (not likely, I’d say, just looking at him) rather than their 5th Amendment rights, he’d already have been fired and it wouldn’t be thought newsworthy.

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It’s a simple thesis and no one wants to hear it: hipsters may lack drive, but the world they live in wasn’t set up by them, it was set up by their parents, i.e. the Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The World, the ones who magnified the importance and cost of college without having any idea of what should be its purpose, let alone its content.

…

So start with an interesting hypothetical: does everybody need to work anymore?  I understand work from an ethical/character perspective, this is not here my point.  Since we no longer need e.g. manufacturing jobs– cheaper elsewhere or with robots– since those labor costs have evaporated, could that surplus go towards paying people simply to stay out of trouble?  Is there a natural economic equilibrium price where, say, a U Chicago grad can do no economically productive work at all but still be paid to use Instagram?  Let me be explicit: my question is not should we do this, my question is that since this is precisely what’s happening already, is it sustainable?  What is the cost?  I don’t have to run the numbers, someone already has: it’s $150/mo for a college grads, i.e. the price of food stamps.  Other correct responses would be $700/mo for “some high school” (SSI) or $1500/mo for “previous work experience” (unemployment).  I would have accepted $2000/mo for “minorities” (jail) for partial credit.

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Diagnosis is not the same as disease.  This just coordinates the language, “from now on we’re going to call this this.”  “Then why is it called a disorder?”  Ah, you must have no insurance or the best insurance.  Healthcare policy is set by Medicaid/Medicare, you Blue Cross suckers are merely collateral damage.

In Medicaid America, i.e. America, if you come through the door and I ask you all the questions and I determine there is absolutely nothing wrong with you, two things will happen at the exact same time: 1. You will punch me.  2. I won’t get paid, can’t get paid for no diagnosis, no matter how hard I work.

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When the guy swung at Mark Donnelly, his only means of defense was a black umbrella—and a foppish one at that. But, ducking under a roundhouse punch, he jabbed the pointy end of the umbrella into the attacker’s gut, stopping him cold.

Mr. Donnelly, who is 43 years old and several inches short of 6 feet tall, then straightened his waistcoat, and the two men shook hands.

The skirmish was a rare demonstration of Bartitsu, an obscure Victorian system of gentlemanly self-defense practiced by Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective.

You can laugh, but in Britain, where their Olympic shooting teams have to practice overseas because the gun laws are so totalitarian, it’s all they’ve got.

Steve Sailer learns that he’s not a member of the Crust and so has no opinions worth listening to.

You know, I haven’t bought concert tickets in a few years, but when I was paying 40% service charges to Ticketmaster so my son could go to shows, my impression was that the concert industry “serves” fans mostly in the Rod Serling sense.

Heh. It’s like the IRS charging you a ‘service fee’ for filing your tax return electronically, which saves them about 90% of their cost. And of course the DMV here in Texas does the same with car registrations; bureaucrats do love having a legal monopoly.

 When I pointed out to Krugman in (I believe) 1999 this long history of corruption within the concert ticket business, he was offended. There was no place in economic theory for this kind of insinuation, so why was I bringing it up? We went back and forth for awhile, but Krugman became increasingly acrimonious at the very idea that the music industry wasn’t completely on the up and up.

Whenever I think ‘Krugman’, I think ‘clueless’. Glad I’m not alone.

In the European Union, of course.

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I guess Ohio is officially a Blue State now.

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If memory serves, Irving Kristol once remarked that the term “peace,” as it was used by the left, “is a Stalinist concept,” since the intent of the so-called “peace movement” was the unilateral disarmament of the West and the triumph of Communism.  Today the term “diversity” works the same way: it has become a term meaning the opposite of its dictionary meaning, and is a vehicle for racial division and resentment.

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Oddly enough, 100 years ago is just at the dawn of the ‘Progressive Era’. Probably just a coincidence. Yeah, that’s the ticket….

One of the authors of the study, Dr. Jan te Nijenhuis, professor of work and organizational psychology at the University of Amsterdam, says the cause of the movement toward stupidity is that smarter women have fewer children while those of lower intelligence have more children.

Funny how that works. (A Leftist conundrum: How to keep supporting evolution while denying that it applies to human beings? Is puzzle, as Boris Badenov would say.)

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The bad news is that she’s Obama’s nominee as Secretary of Commerce.

Of course, considering how he and his socialist friends think of commerce, it’s probably appropriate.

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Makia Smith has sued the Baltimore Police Department and four police officers she says beat her and broke her camera when she tried to photograph police beating someone else. “You want to film something, bitch? Film this,” one of the officers said, according to the lawsuit.

Baltimore is, of course, run by Democrats, and is the capital, of course, of a Blue State.

Judging by her name, I suspect that she is a Woman of Color as well — can we expect the LameStream Media and the Feminists to react with outrage? Let’s wait and see.

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No, it’s not about Obama.

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It will be entertaining to watch major cities dissolve while various unions battle it out for control like Roman Legions trying to install the next Emperor in order to get a cut of the swag.

There is nothing new under the sun.

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Forgive me if I fail to join the national worship of the NHS. Mencap has been campaigning to prevent these deaths, logging at least 100 cases over the past six years. The charity blames poor communication with parents and carers as the main cause – but it has concluded that the only explanation for so many preventable deaths is prejudice. Doctors and nurses reflect views prevalent across society that people with profound disabilities are second-class citizens, their lives not worth saving. Imagine the furore if any other minority group was dying in such numbers.

How about that government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?

Obama does.

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Complex legislation and regulatory schemes inevitably spawn a whole ‘industry’ of people who will be happy to help you navigate the law — for a fee. This, in turn, establishes a fervent (and well-funded, which they are willing to share with legislators of the right attitude) lobby to keep, and even to increase, the complexity upon which their business model is built. And don’t think legislators don’t know it — and exploit it.

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Good luck with that.

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Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine, is an institution of good reputation and high quality, where I have some friends. It offers a liberal arts education typical of the best available in America today. It troubles me that Bowdoin, rather than, say, Harvard—a bigger and richer place where I work—should be made an example of. Nonetheless, Peter Wood and Michael Toscano have done just that in a comprehensive new study, “What Does Bowdoin Teach?” the first of its kind and probably destined to be the best, which shows in the practices and principles of one college what political correctness in our time has done to higher education in our country.

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Occupy Roanoke is on record opposing “fat cats” and lobbyists. Terry McAuliffe made his fortune on his connections to the Clinton administration as one of the most prominent lobbyists and crony capitalists in the country.

The Occupy movement was always about supporting the Democrat party. Their partnership with McAuliffe, who pioneered bundling political donations and famously auctioned off stays in the Lincoln bedroom, is a welcome admission of that fact.

Let’s call them the “Obama Youth”. Or OY for short.

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Hint: Yes.

It wouldn’t be surprising if there were more cases like this we’ve never heard about. Here’s why: The Justice Department’s rules only say the media must be informed about “subpoenas” for “telephone toll records.” The FBI’s operations guidelines interprets those rules quite literally, making clear the requirement “concerns only grand jury subpoenas.” That is, these rules don’t apply to National Security Letters, which are secret demands for information used by the FBI that don’t require judicial approval. The narrow FBI interpretation also doesn’t cover administrative subpoenas, which are issued by federal agencies without prior judicial review. Last year, the FBI issued NSLs for the communications and financial records of more than 6,000 Americans—and the number has been far higher in previous years. The procedures that do apply to those tools have been redacted from publicly available versions of the FBI guidelines. Thus, it’s no shocker the AP seizure would seem like an “unprecedented intrusion” if the government doesn’t think it has to tell us about the precedents. And there’s no telling if the Justice Department rules (and the FBI’s interpretation) allow the feds to seize without warning other types of electronic communications records that could reveal a journalist’s e-mail, chat, or Web browsing activity.

Hey, Mother Jones: These are the guys you guys have voted for ever since the sixties. Enjoy.

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President Barack Obama has an important new ally as emboldened Republicans work to derail his agenda: John McCain.

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.

As Otter said to Flounder: ‘You fucked up! You trusted us!’ The resemblance between our government and Delta House is becoming stronger and stronger every day; Joe Biden already has the Bluto part nailed.

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The Obama administration has gotten itself into a fix between its contradictory stories about the Benghazi incident, reports of the IRS targeting conservative groups, and the Justice Department’s grabbing of phone records from AP reporters. There are few things more fun to watch than arrogant political leaders — folks who spend their lives bossing everyone around — getting a comeuppance.

Not that the dimwitted among the electorate will pay any attention. They’re too busy signing up for their free Obama Money.

My favorite take wasn’t from any serious commentator but from comedian Jon Stewart, who noticed that the president routinely claims ignorance about embarrassing events by saying that he learned of them while watching the news: “I wouldn’t be surprised if President Obama learned Osama bin Laden had been killed when he saw himself announcing it on television.”

Wouldn’t surprise me.

I visited DC last week and was astounded at the booming economy, the endless new construction, the astronomical prices, and garish displays of wealth everywhere — not to mention the haughty attitudes of every pissant assistant to the whatever. That’s what Other People’s Money buys you. When Ronald Reagan talked about the Shining City on the Hill he was speaking metaphorically about America, but the new shining city is DC — funded on the backs of all those Americans who blithely vote for people who promise to solve their problems.

Your tax dollars at work.

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

 The week after Republicans’ historic 2010 midterm election landslide, President Barack Obama appointed the union president that represents “tens of thousands in the IRS,” Colleen Kelley, to a key Administration post. Two years later, that union, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU), contributed $580,412 to federal candidates—94% of which were Democrats.

The position Obama appointed Kelley to: the Federal Salary Council, an advisory group charged with recommending federal employee raises.

Representing 150,000 members from 31 federal agencies and departments including the Internal Revenue Service, the NTEU bills itself as the nation’s largest independent federal union. Kelley, herself a former IRS Agent, commands her union brigade with partisan ferocity.

I’d be more inclined to credit hand-wringing on the part of union employees if it weren’t for the fact that most of them look to be sub-clinically obese. Have you ever seen the women in charge of the NEA? Pigs in space, every one of them.

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As a Chicago parent discovered, city officials can’t hand over records if they’ve already destroyed them.

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Cook is expected to appear in front of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations to explain why Apple has failed to repatriate up to $100bn in cash stashed in foreign countries.

Uh, so that they don’t lose 35% of it to the IRS? That’s just a guess, you understand….

Had Cupertino returned its money to the US, it would have been hit with a punitive 35 per cent tax rate, meaning it was cheaper in the long run to issue bonds and pay interest at market rates.

The technical financial term for that is ‘DUH’.

The investigations committee has also grilled other companies that use slick methods to keep their tax bills down, including Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard.

‘Slick methods’ meaning ‘perfectly legal methods that the all-your-money-is-ours crowd don’t like and so have made up a derogatory term for’. (Unfortunately, they can’t be called ‘tax cheats’, legitimately, because they aren’t cheating; they’re following the law. Although that doesn’t prevent some of the all-for-the-state crowd doing it anyway. You know how they are.)

An Apple spokesman insisted the firm paid all its taxes. “We’ve been working with the subcommittee to answer their questions about Apple, and we welcome any further questions they might have,” Apple said in a statement. “Apple is one of the largest taxpayers in the United States, having paid $6 billion in federal corporate income tax in fiscal 2012.”

It’s not enough, of course; it’s never enough. As long as you have money left after the taxman gets done with you, you are somehow a ‘dodger’.

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Surveying the crimes that were eagerly devoured by the public in papers such as News of the World, Orwell said the elegant middle-class criminals of the past, often involving sex triangles or desperate murderous attempts to stop sliding down the class ladder, had gone forever.

Well, if he were alive today Orwell would look around him and conclude that whatever else you can say about modern Britain, the art of murder is in vigorous good health.

And we have our diverse new immigrant population to thank for its modern-day flowering.

Whether it’s the polonium poisoning of a Russian dissident, the honor killings of errant Muslim daughters, or the voodoo dismemberment of “possessed” African children at the urging of unhinged witch doctors, murder has never been so varied.

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The parents of Gurkiren Kaur Loyal, 8, say their daughter was being treated for dehydration during a trip to India when staff reportedly gave her a mystery injection.

“I asked what was the injection for, but he gave me a blank look and injected the liquid into her,” Gurkiren’s mother Amrit Kaur Loyal told the Birmingham Mail. “Within a split second, Gurkiren’s head flipped back, her eyes rolled in her head, and the color completely drained from her. I knew they had killed her on the spot.”

The family guarded Gurkiren’s body after her death so her organs could not be harvested right away, but when her body was flown home to the UK, the family discovered all of Gurkiren’s organs had been removed and only her eyes remained, the Birmingham Mail reports.

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

Progressive nonprofit Great Education Colorado claims to be the most effective education advocacy group in the state, but less than 30 percent of Great Education’s funding actually finds its way to education campaigns and issues. The small amount spent on education has supported initiatives that would drastically raise taxes on Coloradans.

A prime Job of the Crust is as a well-paid employee of a ‘non-profit’ that rakes in lots of cash from the politically-correct but dimwitted public and then never does anything useful, even by their own warped standards.

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Good question.

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But not, you’ll note, Hillary Clinton. ‘Look! Over there!’

I’m shocked–shocked, I tell you–to find the IRS targeting conservatives….

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 In an era when everything is customizable, why not customize your child’s education?

Hint: Because it threatens the rice bowl of a lot of government employees (unionized government employees, the Ruling Class’s natural prey).

“What about home schooling? You know, it’s not just for scary religious people any more.” That’s a line from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and it should strike fear into the hearts, not of vampires, but of public-school administrators everywhere.

But it doesn’t, because they provide the votes that make the whole machine run, and the governing bureaucracy is very well aware of it.

“That first year, chatting with other homeschooling parents at soccer games, picnics, and after-church coffee hours, I found that our decision was far from unusual. Homeschooling has long been a philosophical choice for religious traditionalists and off-the-grid homesteaders, but for the parents we met — among them several actors, a jazz composer, a restaurateur, a TV chef, a Columbia University physical-plant supervisor, and a handful of college professors — it was a practical alternative to New York’s notoriously inadequate education system.”

An education totally created by people for whom these hip & trendy urbanites religiously (if I may use so incongruous a term) vote. Savor the irony.

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But my experience — both on the way up and the way down — is a good window into one of the central questions facing President Obama as he prepares to take the oath of office for a second time on Jan. 21: What role, if any, should the government play in nurturing entrepreneurs and, by extension, jobs, in America? In our case, we really had no expectation that government would play any role whatsoever. Unfortunately, though, we were wrong. Dead wrong. It did play a role and, for the most part, it was not a good one. It doesn’t have to be that way; there are fixes that can be made.

You may not be interested in the fucking government, but the government is interested in fucking you.

The mere debate, however, prompted tremulous bureaucrats at the U.S. Commerce Dept. — congenitally allergic to even the slightest whiff of controversy — to tell the registries (who are regulated by Commerce) to knock it off. We thought the complaints were nonsense. After all, how bad could it be to get rid of errors and replace them with relevant search results? But it didn’t matter. The government had, effectively, dealt us a death blow.

Your tax dollars at work … or not, as the case may be.

Despite repeated efforts at reform, almost always stymied by political gridlock in Washington, federal rules make it a snap, and potentially quite lucrative, for people to file civil lawsuits, no matter how ludicrous.

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

And it’s all about the funding.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) is alarmed today at a letter from the Departments of Justice and Education to the University of Montana.

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We often focus on the ideological biases of the university, where the more lunatic examples of political correctness get the most attention. But in education as in economics, there is a trickle-down effect. The grandees at the elite universities train the PhD’s who go on to second and third tier institutions, where they in turn train the students who get high school and grade school teaching credentials. They also write most of the textbooks that end up in K-12 classrooms. Thus the progressive ideology metastasizes throughout the educational system, determining the curriculum, the textbooks, and the point of view of the teachers. At that level the ideas may be garbled, half-baked, incoherent, and a collection of clichés and slogans. But they are still toxic and effective at transmitting a world-view to impressionable minds.

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Beneath the radar, drowned out by Benghazi, a splashy murder trial, and an even splashier kidnapping, there was one of those inconsequential “inside baseball” career stories that is normally of interest only to a select few inside the nation’s ruling class.

In this case, however, there are teachable moments well above and beyond the people involved. It was a tiny event, and yet, it explains so much about how and why Mitt Romney lost the 2012 presidential election, as well as how and why the GOP establishment so often does.

A key Romney aide and spokesperson, who committed one of the biggest blunders of the entire 2012 Presidential Campaign, was recently hired by a big Obama supporter to handle communications for a liberal propaganda group.

My, what a surprise! Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised. The Crust take care of their own.

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Union bosses think that veterans deserve the best, i.e. union membership.

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Yeah, we can laugh, but modern life has place educrats between a rock and a spiky hard place. If they don’t want to get sued, they can take a chance on exercising ‘discretion’. In order to avoid exercising ‘discretion’, they put in place ‘mandatory’ policies. ‘Hey, it’s not my fault, the policy left me no option. Go complain to that guy over there.’ And mandatory policies, when pursued in a it’s-not-my-fault mode, lead to absurd results. But they’d rather look stupid (or at least dull followers of stupid policies) than be sued. Nobody ever got fired for following policy, no matter how stupid the policy might be, and bureaucrats are all about not getting fired. (If they can teach some kids along the way, that’s gravy, but that’s not what they’re there for.)

It’s just that simple.

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Whiskey Row in the Arizona mountain town of Prescott has seen its share of bar fights, biker gangs and rowdies.

But the bar fights aren’t supposed to involve a biker gang made up of police officers carrying brass knuckles and knives. The fallout from such a brawl in December has led to the retirements of a police chief and two senior sheriff’s officials and recommendations of felony charges against the former chief for his alleged role in trying to cover it up.

Hey, it’s Arizona — what else is there to do? It’s not as if they’re allowed to arrest illegal immigrants, after all.

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Head Start teachers and administrators told The Daily Caller that their most pressing concern is not budget impacts from sequestration but changes coming from President Barack Obama’s health-care law.

In 2014, the impact of 2010 Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act “is probably going to be a 9 percent [cost] increase, and significantly more the next year,” said Nancy Nordyk, director of the Head Start program in southern Oregon.

Rising healthcare costs will likely force Oregon to reduce some Head Start workers’ hours so they’re not eligible for the medical program, said Nordyk, who spoke to TheDC during a national Head Start conference held just outside D.C. in Maryland.

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

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It is no accident, as we conspiracy theorists say, that campuses that are the steamiest hothouses of “diversity” — often the most elite, selective institutions — frequently experience the most dissatisfaction with their racial “climate.” When race is like a constantly picked scab, the sore never heals.

The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the hard questions. (Well, not so hard, in this case.)

What did Mitt say to provoke Marcotte’s bizarre rant? He simply gave this advice to college seniors: “If you meet someone you love, get married. Have a quiver-full of kids if you can.” But Amanda Marcotte hates babies. She is such a bloodthirsty enthusiast for abortion that one imagines that she would have paid Kermit Gosnell for the opportunity to come to his clinic and help kill babies.

Amanda Marcotte is not “pro-choice.” She is pro-death.

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 After a sex scandal forced Eliot Spitzer from the governor’s mansion in Albany, he turned up at City College, teaching a course called “Law and Public Policy.” After another sex scandal forced James E. McGreevey from the governor’s mansion in New Jersey, he turned up at Kean University, teaching in the global M.B.A. program.

More recently, Parsons the New School for Design announced that John Galliano, the celebrated clothing designer who lost his job at Christian Dior after unleashing a torrent of anti-Semitic vitriol in a bar, would be leading a four-day workshop and discussion called “Show Me Emotion.”

And David H. Petraeus, the general turned intelligence chief turned ribald punch line, will have not one college paycheck, but two. Last month, the City University of New York said he would be the next visiting professor of public policy at Macaulay Honors College. On Thursday, the University of Southern California announced that Mr. Petraeus would also be teaching there; he will split his time between coasts.

The traditional path to an academic job is long and laborious: the solitude and penury of graduate study, the scramble for one of the few open positions in each field, the blood sport of competitive publishing. But while colleges have always courted accomplished public figures, a leap to the front of the class has now become a natural move for those who have suffered spectacular career flameouts.

The Crust takes care of their own.

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The problems lie not with college-educated engineers or graduates with general bachelor’s degrees but in the dearth of skilled machinists, welders, robotics programmers and those who maintain equipment.

Apprenticeships could help reduce youth unemployment, widen opportunities for young people who do not want to sit in class all day and help ensure that the potential resurgence in manufacturing is not thwarted by a mismatch of skills. With effective apprenticeship systems, highly developed economies sustain jobs in manufacturing. Employment in manufacturing accounts for 20 percent of jobs in Germany and 16 percent in Switzerland but only 10 percent in the United States.

But nobody in authority cares because these jobs aren’t taken by Scions of the Crust, all of whom have to go to college and take glorified finger-painting degrees until their trust funds come through.

The young women, that is. Lefty rag Business Insider examines the conjunction of feminism and our litigious society.

In Sheryl Sandberg’s new book, “Lean In“, she suggests that part of the problem facing women in the workplace is reluctance from male executives to mentor younger female employees.

Actually, it’s reluctance to get sued for sexual harassment.

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Late last year, within the service world, this change was already occurring – at restaurants, at hotels, and in retail stores, managers were already formulating plans.  In a large sense, by making this prediction, I was betting on the score of a game that had already been played — all we are doing now is waiting for the media to catch up and report the results to the public at large.

And you can thank Obama for putting the final nail in its head. Aren’t you proud?

But one thing has been very clear:  The best way to be “safe” and avoid the costs imposed by the law was to have one’s workers be classified as “part-time”, or for this particular law working less than 30 hours per week.  The other fact that emerged from some IRS rule-making (yes, the IRS is in charge of creating and enforcing many of the rules, and doesn’t that make you feel better) was that whether a worker was to be classified as part-time on January 1, 2014 would be based on his or her work patterns in 2013.   This is why savvy companies, including ours, were planning hard for work force changes last year.  Our goal was to get every worker in the company under 30 hours a week before 2013 even started.

All part of the long-term Democrat program to make every American who isn’t a Scion of the Crust one of the welfare-dependent class.

The service industry generally does not operate 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, so its labor needs do not match traditional full-time shifts.  Those of us who run service companies already have to piece together multiple employees and shifts to cover our operating hours.  In this environment, there is no reason one can’t stitch together employees making 29 hours a week (that don’t have to be given expensive health care policies) nearly as easily as one can stitch together 40 hours a week employees.   In fact, it can be easier — a store that needs to cover 10AM to 9PM can cover with two 5.5 hour a day employees.   If they work 5 days a week, that is 27.5 hours a week, safely part-time.  Three people working such hours with staggered days off can cover the store’s hours for 7 days.

Based on the numbers above, a store might actually prefer to only have sub-30 hour shifts, but may have, until recently, provided full-time 40 hours work because good employees expect it and other employers were offering it.  In other words, they had to offer full-time work because competition in the labor market demanded it.  But if everyone in the service business stops offering full-time work, the competitive pressure to offer anything but part-time jobs will be gone.  The service business may never go back.

How soon before erstwhile fully-employed middle-class people drop below the ‘poverty line’ (which keeps inching upward) and start depending on SNAP and Medicaid to keep body and soul together? We see before us the modern equivalent of the Company Store: The politicians who provide you with food and education and health care are going to demand (and get) your vote,  or else the trough goes empty. Like immigrants at the turn of the 20th century, what used to be the backbone of the country are going to be working two or three jobs just to keep afloat.

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I suppose that in a Blue State having educators burn books is not that big a deal.

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Because ‘progressives’ are compulsive liars? Because they need an enemy, even a fictional one, in order to feel good about themselves?

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In the technology capital of the world, we’re making very scant use of the technologies of steel frame construction and elevators. Land is scarce in the corridor running between I-280 and US-101 from San Jose up to San Francisco, but it’s not all that scarce. It’s just not being used very intensively. Because zoning generally mandates low-density uses and because the California Environmental Quality Act perversely hyper-empowers NIMBYs to block projects even though California’s pleasant climate makes it one of the most ecologically sustainable places for new housing to go. There is no housing boom there, but the region—and the country as a whole—would be a much better place if there were.

And this is in the heartland of people who vote for politicians who constantly push for higher and higher urban densities, along with its traditional infrastructure, such as rail lines.