Read it.

Republican leadership in the Ohio Senate has received nearly $200,000 in labor union donations since 2011, secretary of state records reveal. Senate President Keith Faber (R-Celina) announced on May 1 that he does not expect the Senate to pursue workplace freedom, signaling majority support for forced unionism.

Nine of Ohio’s top ten Republican recipients of union contributions since January 1, 2011 are state senators – and three of those are members of Senate leadership.

Read it.

Students today can choose courses on prostitutes or “queer gardens”; on brain science or ancient democracies. But how is a freshman supposed to figure out whether it’s better to take the class on women in the European Union or the one on the Korean War — to know which is most important, which will be of lasting value and which would form a good foundation for the study of other subjects?

As Mark Bauerlein of Emory University notes, “You’re handing the choice to people who don’t know what to choose. They don’t think five years ahead and say, This will be better for me when I’m 25. The kind of discretion that the student-centered progressives want to give is actually damaging to students.”

It’s “a catastrophe,” says Peter Berkowitz of the Hoover Institution. “On the one hand, colleges have abandoned any actual structure,” so kids need help figuring out how to put together a serious plan for graduating. “But the faculty aren’t there. They’re off studying ‘queer gardens.’” He calls it a maze — and one where “those who come from poor academic backgrounds will do even less well.”

Read it.

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

Consider the city of Long Beach. It is limiting most of its 1,600 part-time employees to fewer than 27 hours a week, on average. City officials say that without cutting payroll hours, new health benefits would cost up to $2 million more next year, and that extra expense would trigger layoffs and cutbacks in city services.

Even bureaucrats get the Obamassiah blues….

Read it.

After years of persistently high unemployment, states have drained their unemployment trust fund accounts.

The result is that states collectively owe the federal government $30 billion — money that they are now having to pay back with interest.

“States are forced to come up with all sorts of strategies to pay the money back, but they are also rejiggering their entire systems,” says Sujit CanagaRetna, a senior fiscal analyst with the Council of State Governments.

Funny how that works.

Read it.

The Stack Overflow data showed that, contrary to received wisdom, veteran coders are just as able as young pups to adopt new programming languages, and in some cases they enjoy an advantage. Knowledge of C gives them a statistically relevant advantage when it comes to iOS and Windows Phone programming, for example.

Programmers in their 50s and 60s did as well if not better than their younger counterparts in some skill ranges, and Dr. Murphy-Hill cited research in Finland showing older coders were adept at picking up new skills.

Yeah, well, tell that to the hiring managers.

Read it.

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

f you make it more expensive to employ people, say by mandating health coverage and also hiking the cost of that coverage with a giant government program we’ll call “Obamacare,” employers have a limited set of options: They can eat the cost, if they’re lucky enough to have a healthy profit margin that can be partially sacrificed; they can find a way to employ fewer workers; or they can reduce the cost of the workers they have. All of the approaches are likely to be used to one extent or another. We already know that many companies are reducing workers’ hours and turning to temp workers. And there’s evidence of firms eliminating health coverage that’s not required by law or else self-insuring if they employ disproportionately young and healthy workers. Now comes word that many firms are cutting the overall cost of worker benefits so that they can better shoulder the costs of Obamacare.

Everything the government touches turns to shit, and winds up costing ten times what it ought. You can carve that in stone.

Read it.

The New Hampshire Union Leader has an editorial pointing out that the Boston Marathon bombing victims who lost limbs and who will be fitted with prosthetic or artificial legs will be stuck paying the ObamaCare medical device tax.

Soo-prise, soo-prise, soo-prise….

Read it.

The only thing missing is somebody playing the race card. Wait for it….

Read it.

After its stock price fell to dismal lows of sub-$400 last week, Apple promised to return up to $100bn to shareholders by starting up a share-buyback programme and paying out increased dividends.

Reports have suggested the total size of the bond issue could soar up to $16bn, which has never been matched by any other non-bank bond sale in America.

The move is surprising because Cupertino has no debt and is currently riding high on cash reserves thought to be worth around $145bn.

However, as an estimated $100bn of these reserves is locked up overseas, Apple would have to pay 35 per cent tax to repatriate it. It is cheaper for Cupertino to borrow the cash from the markets and pay interest on it, than to repatriate its cash from overseas and pay the resultant swingeing taxes.

Read it.

California is moving to join Massachusetts, Vermont, Rhode Island, and the District of Columbia on the list of places where health insurance companies are not allowed to charge higher premiums to smokers, NPR reports. The proposed law in California “has so far encountered no formal opposition from anti-smoking groups, cigarette companies, insurance companies or the American Lung Association,” NPR says.

I guess they figure that, if they had their way, there wouldn’t be any smokers, so it’s a moot point.

Another example of how government refuses to allow private parties to shit on groups that government spends it’s time shitting on. Chalk it up as an example of ‘pre-emption’.

Read it.

Fox News has two related stories regarding State Department and CIA employees who reportedly have information they wish to offer about the Obama administration’s conduct in relation to the Benghazi attack. According to a lawyer for one of these whistle-blowers, the information pertains to (1) the State Department’s failure, prior to the attack, to provide proper security despite warnings that should have led to a security beef-up (2) the government’s response (or non-respone) during the attack, and (3) the Obama administration’s inaccurate and/or misleading statements about the attack after it had occurred.

Those of us who remember the media feeding-frenzy during the so-called ‘Iran-Contra scandal’ in Reagan’s second term are not surprised at all that this isn’t getting any attention from the Usual Suspects.

Read it.

 A special operations member who witnessed the attack on the U.S. Mission unfold in Benghazi, Libya on September 11 last year, as well as debriefed those who took part in the response, spoke with Fox News’ Adam Housley on Monday night and revealed information that directly contradicts the administration’s insistence that there was not enough time nor resources to send to Benghazi to help State Department employees, contractors, and intel operatives who were under a terrorist attack. FNC kept their source’s identity hidden, as witnesses to the Benghazi attack have reportedly been intimidated  by the administration into silence. The assault left four Americans dead, including U.S. ambassador Chris Stevens.

“I know for a fact that C110 was doing a training exercise not in the region of northern Africa but in Europe and they have the ability to react and respond,” the special ops member told FNC.

Read it.

The ridiculous overreaction of the day is brought to you by a school in Cupertino, California.

The Land of Fruits and Nuts lives up to its reputation.

Moral: Don’t send your kid to a government school.

Read it.

Having turned harsh words between kids into grounds for formal legal action, New Jersey officials are now astonished that children and families on the receiving end of bullying charges are actually making use of the tools at their disposal to defend themselves. In application, this means that judges, attorneys and educrats are wasting time in court parsing the offensiveness of calling a classmate a “fat ass.” Actual quote from the Ridgewood school board attorney during a courtroom proceeding: “There is no evidence she condoned being called a horse.”

Yet another step toward the Obama future in a police blue state.

Read it.

Modern Farmer has an in-depth look at the “pig bomb,” a population explosion of wild boars that is devastating crops, destroying natural terrain, and spreading disease around the world. The animals cause $1 billion in damage every year in the US alone. The exact causes of the pig bomb are uncertain and vary by country, but the population in the US has been increasing ever since European wild boars were imported sometime around the nineteenth century.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

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

Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the man suspected of being a co-conspirator in the Boston Marathon bombings, was mirandized after only 16 hours of questioning. According to Fox News, FBI officials were “stunned” when federal District Court Judge Marianne Bowler arrived at the hospital and read Tsnarnaev his rights. Sources told Fox News that this premature action might have hurt the investigation.

The only thing that saves us is that we don’t get all the government we pay for.

Steve Sailer points out how a British newspaper is doing a job American (‘journalists’) won’t do.

 As I mentioned yesterday, Tavon is the head of the Black Guerilla Family prison gang inside a Baltimore jail, where he fathered five babies by four lady prison guards.

I’m not sure why the Washington Post and other American outlets hadn’t posted Tavon’s picture. Perhaps they were trying to battle racial stereotypes. After all, without pictorial evidence, how could anyone have guessed that Tavon White is black? Or maybe they couldn’t find a picture of Tavon at age 12 like they found of Trayvon?

Steve, the check is in the mail.

Steve Sailer looks at a Blue State.

     The indictment described a jailhouse seemingly out of control. Four corrections officers became pregnant by one inmate. Two of them got tattoos of the inmate’s first name, Tavon — one on her neck, the other on a wrist.

Sounds like they ought to have been called mistaken officers, not corrections officers.

 Have you ever noticed that white prison gangs are always described as “white supremacist,” but black prison gangs and Mexican prison gangs are never described as “black supremacist” and “Mexican supremacist?”

Even those that belong to organizations like La Raza, ‘the race’, which would be denounced as an explicitly racist organization were it not in Spanish, so of course it doesn’t count.

 Five kids fathered by an attempted murderer in prison. Anybody want to bet whether these five will turn out to be, on the whole, net taxpayers or tax consumers?

And, of course, if these malefactors were white, that would be explicitly mentioned right at the start. But it wasn’t, so we are left to read between the lines.

     According to an affidavit for search warrants for the homes of the prison guards, who were arrested Tuesday, gang leaders strategically recruited female officers who they thought had “low self-esteem and insecurities.”

Oh, ya think?

 George Gilder wrote a book, Visible Man, about a charming young inner city black man who idled his days away in low brow stupidity, except for when he was in prison. Suddenly, he would turn into a King Rat-style business mastermind, only to relapse into a layabout sponge as soon as he was freed to return to the company of women he could exploit with his looks and personality. (Of course, they didn’t have gender-integrated prison guard staffs back in the 1970s, so we’re more advanced now.)

They call that ‘progress’, which is another way of saying ‘we are screwed’. Which leads to natural speculation about the meaning of the word ‘progressive’….

     Officers can be fired for associating with inmates, but the women in this case are suspended and still employed.

Read it.

The benefits ran out in 2012 after Russell started earning enough to disqualify him for benefits, apparently working some 80 hours per week as a home health aide while Tamerlan hung out at home and cooked up plots to bomb things. Welfare was a way of life in the Tsarnaev household; both parents received it as well. Massachusetts will not say what sort of benefits the Tsarnaevs received, and stonewalled until late on Tuesday evening after the Boston Herald began questioning local lawmakers on the matter.

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

Read it.

The emergence of renewable power has had essentially no effect on the amount of carbon emissions involved in energy generation, according to a new report.

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

Acting against these mitigating factors has been the massive world upsurge in coal burning, particularly in China – though lately, Europe has also turned to coal in a bid to wean itself off insecure and pricey Russian gas. Coal is a very carbon-intensive way to generate energy, so all this has effectively wiped out the carbon reductions achieved by gas, hydro and nuclear (and the tiny additional ones from wind, solar etc).

So rapid is the growth, indeed, that the IEA expects coal to supplant oil as the world’s most-used energy source in 2017 on current trends.

Joel Kotkin turns over a rock, one well-tended by the Crust.

Perhaps no idea is more widely accepted among urban core theorists than the notion that higher population densities lead to more productivity and sustainable economic growth. Yet upon examination, there are less than compelling moorings for the beliefs of what Pittsburgh blogger Jim Russell calls “the density cult,” whose adherents include many planners and urban land speculators.

The Crust, you see, like to have all of the proles crowded into slums where they will be conveniently at hand for any purpose, from providing Union thugs to Get Out The Vote and intimidate Wrong-Thinking People to being servants and wait staff. And, of course, if they are stuffed into the cities, they aren’t in the suburbs or the Hamptons, leaving more room for golf courses and country estates.

Read it.

And why should they? Sheriffs and immigration agents are not, after all, of the Crust.

Read it.

Drawing on the old adage, “if you want more of something, subsidize it; if you want less, tax it,” politicans around the country have turned to burdensome tariffs on stuff they don’t like as a proxy for the hard work of passing formal prohibitions. Booze, tobacco and ammunition have been popular targets of late, But maybe politicans need an annotated version of that adage. As the cigarette market demonstrates, when you wield revenue collection as a tool of social engineering, what you get is less of the legal version of the product that you’re trying to tax the hell out of. As outright prohibitionists discovered (but ignored) long ago, savvy black marketeers always stand ready to dodge the law to give people what they want. And among the things people want are smokes at an affordable price. That’s an important point to remember just days after the president called for a 94 cent hike in federal cigarette taxes.

But Obama is a politician, and politicians never learn.

Read it.

 It has seemed quite strange to see how strongly Rogers has been fighting for CISPA, refusing to even acknowledge the seriousness of the privacy concerns. At other times, he can’t even keep his own story straight about whether or not CISPA is about giving information to the NSA (hint: it is). And then there was the recent ridiculousness with him insisting that the only opposition to CISPA came from 14-year-old kids in their basement. Wrong and insulting.

Of course, as we’ve noted all along, all attempts at cybersecurity legislation have always been about money. Mainly, money to big defense contractors aiming to provide the government with lots of very expensive “solutions” to the cybersecurity “problem” — a problem that still has not been adequately defined beyond fake scare stories. Just last month, Rogers accidentally tweeted (and then deleted) a story about how CISPA supporters, like himself, had received 15 times more money from pro-CISPA group that the opposition had received from anti-CISPA groups.

So it seems rather interesting to note that Rogers’ wife, Kristi Clemens Rogers, was, until recently, the president and CEO of Aegis LLC a “security” defense contractor company, whom she helped to secure a $10 billion (with a b) contract with the State Department. The company describes itself as “a leading private security company, provides government and corporate clients with a full spectrum of intelligence-led, culturally-sensitive security solutions to operational and development challenges around the world.”

Although the article doesn’t say, Rogers is a Republican, which makes this sort of corruption even more shameful. Black people are famous for criticizing other black people for ‘acting white’; I think it would be a Good Thing if Republicans started criticizing other Republicans for ‘acting Democrat’.

James Taranto turns over a rock.

Thus today’s insight: To be white in America is to have the privilege of being able to define one’s political identity in terms of one’s own superiority, whether real or imagined, over other members of one’s own race.

Breitbart News gives you a little access.

I haven’t read it, and I don’t intend to, but I predict that it will turn out to be a piece of shit, because huge bills that Democrats have a hand in making always are.

Go ahead — prove me wrong.

Steve Sailer reminds us that what is ‘in the news’ is a cleverly constructed shadow play in service of the Crust.

Covert agendas play a sizable role in the gun-control debate. If you were to pay attention solely to the handful of homicide cases the press emphasizes, you would assume that the country’s biggest problem is white males committing mass shootings. Yet the total death toll from all mass shootings in the entire country over the last three decades is only about as bad as 2012’s murder count in Chicago alone.

The vast majority of which was — dare we say it? — the result of activities of Persons of Color.

As I pointed out in “Guns and Race” a couple of weeks ago, an obscure Obama Administration report noted that blacks accounted for 56.9 percent of all gun-homicide offenders over the years 1980-2008. During that era, blacks comprised about 13 percent of the American population, so the black rate of gun homicides was far greater than that of the rest of the population.

But you won’t read that ‘in the news’.

Read it.

Organized labor was instrumental in getting the Affordable Care Act passed in 2010, but more recently has voiced concerns that the law could lead members to lose their existing health plans. The United Union of Roofers, Waterproofers and Allied Workers is believed to be the first union to initially support the law and later call for its repeal.

I suspect that they didn’t so much see the light as felt the heat.

B.O.G.U.S.

Read it.

Monday, Regal Entertainment Group, the largest movie theatre chain in the country, announced that thousands of employees will have their work hours cut — as a direct result of the added cost of the new ObamaCare mandates that become effective later this year.

In a memo to employees, management was blunt: “To comply with the Affordable Care Act, Regal had to increase our health care budget to cover those newly deemed eligible based on the law’s definition of a full-time employee.”

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

Read it.

The UK’s “irrational” use of biofuels will cost motorists around £460 million over the next 12 months, a think tank says.

A report by Chatham House says the growing reliance on sustainable liquid fuels will also increase food prices.

The author says that biodiesel made from vegetable oil was worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

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

Read it.

Welcome to the buckraking phase of the Obama era. If the campaign was about hope, and the early presidency was about change, increasingly the administration has settled into a kind of normalcy in which it accommodates itself to Washington far more than Washington accommodates itself to Obama. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when the result is a bipartisan schmooze-fest at the Jefferson Hotel. But when it comes to the D.C. custom of trading a White House security clearance for a private-sector sinecure, there’s a lot to be said for not going native so easily.

…

There is, for example, a loose taboo against joining a K Street lobbying shop and explicitly trading on administration connections. And while joining a consulting firm is acceptable, those who do are reluctant to work for clients reviled by liberals: gun makers, tobacco companies, Big Oil, union busters. Above all, there is a simple prohibition against excessive tackiness. “It’s like: Don’t embarrass yourself. You were part of something special,” says a longtime Obama adviser. “I think if [Obama] were to send an all-staff e-mail, it would be along the lines of Ron Burgundy—‘Stay classy, San Diego.’ ”

Read it.

Well, Ponzi schemes are like that — eventually you run out of new suckers to include in the program, and it all comes apart.

Read it.

Here is something I don’t understand: liberals are often revealed as vile, vulgar hatemongers–not all of them, of course, but far too many–yet they never seem to pay a penalty at the polls. Why is that?

Margaret Thatcher’s death has been the latest occasion for the Left to show its true stripes. All across the U.K., there have been demonstrations–vulgar at best, and violent at worst. In Bristol, lefties celebrating a Thatcher “death street party” started fires, destroyed property and battled police….

…

Here in the U.S., the last similar display from the Left was the Occupy Wall Street movement, but liberal violence and general hatefulness have a long and consistent history. Recall, to cite just one of many examples, the liberals who attacked buses containing delegates and dropped cement blocks on cars from a highway overpass during the 2008 Republican convention in St. Paul. It is notable that violent leftists are never denounced by Democratic Party politicians. On the contrary, as we have seen most recently with Kathy Boudin, they find them well-paid jobs as professors when they can. And it is not hard to understand why liberals tend to be so angry; nearly every communication that emanates from the Democratic Party is a hateful, over-the-top smear against Republicans.

Read it. And watch the video.

Of course, people will say, ‘Fine — who needs all that money?’ But remember that the thin edge of the wedge eventually becomes much larger — originally, the income tax rate was only 1%, and we see what happened there.

Read it.

One problem that stems from the relatively unchanged nature of higher education is its geography. The country looks very different from the way it did 100 years ago, but the distribution of our leading universities still has 19th-century echoes.

Yeah, the fact that the top colleges are located in Blue areas leads to an economy dominated by socialists, and we all know where that leads — East Germany. (Of course, you won’t read that in the New York Times….)

Read it.

The man who spread himself across a street in Mortlake, London, after falling from an aircraft undercarriage has been identified. Police finally managed to crack open the SIM in his pocket and study it to discover who he was.

Jose Matada was the chap’s name and he was 30 years old, the BBC tells us. He landed on Portman Avenue with a “massive bang” at 7.42am on 8 September last year, but the impact of the fall made identifying him a huge challenge.

An aeroplane from Angola was coming into Heathrow at the time, and would have dropped its landing gear at roughly the right moment to place the bloke on that street. But despite creating a photofit of his face and circulating copies of his tattoos, it was the SIM that finally gave investigating officers a name.

You don’t want to be the guy who they identify by his tattoos. Trust me on this.

Gavin MacInnes lets it go.

Examining New York politics is like dipping a ladle into the sewer: Any random sampling will yield nothing but toxic shit water.

New York City’s 2013 mayoral election is seven months away, but the stench of New York politics is already intense enough to make you gag.

Welcome to the Blue States. Be careful not to step in the diversity.

Read it.

Don’t you just love that government-provided health care? Don’t you just wish we had a system like that in the United States?

The Other McCain turns over a rock.

You seldom see those two words in the same sentence, except when a Democrat is convicted of ethics violations or — as occasionally happens — pleads guilty to felonies. The Democratic Party is the most successful criminal organization in American history, and the amazing thing is that they haven’t yet stolen everything that’s not nailed down.

But have patience, they’re trying as hard as they can.

Read it.

Uh … because they can?

The horror.

I have always been of opinion that the essence of a Jayne Hat is that it be handmade by a friend or relative.

Read it.

Jeri Wright was charged with seven counts of giving false testimony to a grand jury, two counts of money laundering, and two counts of making false statements to federal officers in a case involving a $1.25 million state grant for a non-profit program called “We Are Our Brother’s Keeper.”

Just pets of the Crust wetting their beaks. Nothing to see here — move along, move along….

Read it.

In a move that foreshadows the radical left’s plans for churches should gay marriage become the law of the land, the California legislature is moving to strip the Boy Scouts of America – a private organization – of its non-profit status for refusing to allow gay scoutmasters. The Youth Equality Act, created by Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Long Beach), would deny nonprofit status to any youth groups that “discriminate on the basis of gender identity, race, sexual orientation, nationality, religion or religious affiliation.” This would invalidate any Christian nonprofit that does not accept non-Christians, any youth group restricted to boys or girls, or any similar group.

Read it.

Maryland Democratic Governor Martin O’Malley has instituted a tax on citizens for the amount of rain that falls on their property.

The tax, officially known as a “storm water management fee,” will be enforced in nine of the state’s counties. The state legislature passed it in 2012 purportedly to “raise revenue to cleanup [sic] the Chesapeake Bay,” according to MarylandReporter.com.

I am not making this up.

If you drive a car, I’ll tax the street,
If you try to sit, I’ll tax your seat.
If you get too cold I’ll tax the heat,
If you take a walk, I’ll tax your feet.

Don’t ask me what I want it for
If you don’t want to pay some more
‘Cause I’m the taxman, yeah, I’m the taxman

Read it.

Hint: Not you.

While there appears to be no acceptable level of alcohol consumption to participants at the Alcohol Policy 16 Conference, which met last week in Arlington, Virginia, they certainly don’t mind profiting from people who do drink. During a discussion on alcohol tax policy, these “public health advocates” discussed ways to hike the rates as much as possible and earmark the funds to their own organizations.

Read it.

Small businesses, who employ the bulk of American workers, don’t plan to hire additional staff, in another sign the job market is deteriorating again.

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

Read it.

Isn’t it great how ‘weapons bans’ manage to catch the guys with weapons before they hurt somebody?

Almost as great as the way people determined to hurt others pay any attention to ‘weapons bans’.

Amazing how that works.

Read it.

Just looking at her I’d say that she’s Legally Black, although her skin color isn’t any darker than my mother’s.

Read it.

Thank goodness we let in all those illegal immigrants to do the jobs Americans are just too disabled these days to do. Who knew that working class Americans would suffer an epidemic of vague back pain and balky knees after decades of business, political, and economist elites conspiring to hammer down their wages through non-enforcement of immigration laws? Fortunately, our political, economic, intellectual, and moral betters somehow sensed that their fellow citizens would be getting more disabled in the future (apparently, arthroscopic surgery has been disinvented, or something), so our leaders brilliantly took action ahead of time to make sure America had an ample supply of unskilled foreign laborers to replace the Americans overwhelmed by this mysterious epidemic of disability.

Yup, totally mysterious.

Read it.

Thank you, Barack Obama. You’re our only nope.