Thomas Sowell blows the whistle.

San Francisco is a classic example of a city unexcelled in its liberalism. But the black population of San Francisco today is less than half of what it was back in 1970, even though the city’s total population has grown.

Severe restrictions on building housing in San Francisco have driven rents and home prices so high that blacks and other people with low or moderate incomes have been driven out of the city. The same thing has happened in a number of other California communities dominated by liberals.

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President Obama has only once submitted his budget on time. Obama’s first budget wasn’t submitted until May, his second came on deadline, and his last two were submitted in late February. That, says Rep. Ryan’s office, gives Obama the distinction of missing more budget deadlines than any president since the 1920s.

What are they going to do? Fire him?

Unmentioned in the article is the fact that when he actually does get a budget, it is overwhelmingly voted down in the Senate, which is controlled by his own party.

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Not that we want to be controversial or anything….

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Insert here my standard rant about health care and education being the last two major human endeavors in which automation hasn’t been intelligently applied, and which are therefore overly and increasingly expensive.

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I’d have to add AT&T to the list.

Joel Kotkin blows the whistle.

The demographic dilemma facing California today might be better illustrated by pictures of aging hippies with gray ponytails, of legions in wheel-chairs, seeking out the best rest home and unemployed young people on the street corner, watching while middle-age families drive away, seeking to fulfill mundane middle-class dreams in other states.

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We recently covered the fact that some students were selling their eggs to fertility clinics in an effort to fund their education.

I don’t see how you can call it ‘donation’ when you’re getting cash for your body part.

One individual, understanding the new market dynamics, placed an ad in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s student newspaper that requested  a donor who met specific requirements.  This act generated a response typical of feminist groups from two of the campus’ activist organizations.

Saw that coming. As in other fairy kingdoms of ‘progressive’ never-never land, for feminists, some choices are more equal than others.

‘I thought feminism was about choice?’
‘It was never about THAT choice!’

As expected, David Gregory has been given a pass.

OAG has made this determination, despite the clarity of the violation of this important law, because under all of the circumstances here a prosecution would not promote public safety in the District of Columbia nor serve the best interests of the people of the District to whom this office owes its trust.

In other words, rich important white people aren’t subject to the same laws that everybody else is.

If he were a Republican — Rush Limbaugh, say — he’d already be in jail with the entire national media and Washington establishment baying for his head.

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As just one example, below are some of the taxes that will impact the purchase of dental braces….

And the hits just keep on comin’….

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Due to the declining birth rate and the number of immigrants decreasing, the economy of California will suffer. The number of older-age natives will put an immense burden on the younger generations to support them.

I guess there aren’t enough Republicans in the state to make up for the fact that Democrats consider children just another inconvenience.

The decline in children is not unique to California; New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Michigan also have the same problem.

Them Blue State blues….

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The 2nd Amendment wasn’t given to us to protect our right to duck or deer hunt but to defend our lives and our property and to repel tyranny, period.

When the left twists the 2nd Amendment to make it about hunting, they do so to effectively cut all non-hunters out of the equation, which lessens the size of the opposition by lopping off those who own guns for other purposes (self-defense). And this also gives them grounds to limit guns and gun-types based on hunting applications.

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Even Elaine Chao, former labor secretary for President George W. Bush, agrees that Obama ”can do better,” than he has in regards to diversity. “In an America that is so diverse these days,” Chao recently told Charlie Rose, “We should have a cabinet that looks like America.”

Obama doesn’t want a cabinet that ‘looks like America’, he wants a cabinet that looks like The Obamanation — and he’s got one.

When leftists squeal about “diversity,” what they are really talking about, of course, is skin color and gender. This focus on the outside is highly instructive of the progressive worldview, which sees people as categories (rather than individuals), defined by qualities that are quite literally skin deep. (It is a worldview that both perpetuates and necessitates the statist policies that so enamors the left.)

Content of your character? Not so much.

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I’m glad I don’t give a shit about sports, or this would piss me off big time.

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So much has been written — some of it by me — about how poor Al Gore was all but forced to follow in his daddy the senator’s footsteps, eventually succumbing to pressure to take up his line of work, and take on his unfulfilled ambitions.

Yet now that the former vice president is without any question writing his own script, and can follow any path he likes, the one he’s chosen with the sale of his Current TV network to Qatar-funded Al Jazeera is not just hypocritical, but awfully familiar to those who remember what his father did after leaving public life.

Of course, had he been named ‘Bush’ he’d have been crucified in the press and investigated by the Justice Department.

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Rather, it is the mediocre to poor authors who nevertheless sell tons of books that best serve this purpose.  Your shades of grey, or twilights, or malnutrition for fun and profit, or even your tales about zombies are what shed light down into the recesses of the oversized societal gut.

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For many years, watching Congress has been like watching a football game where both teams punt every play.  The beginning of 2013 has continued to prove the rule.  More recently however, every time the Republicans punt, the President grabs the ball, spikes it, and acts as if he’s in the end zone.  The media cheers right along with him, no flags are thrown, and the country is left thinking that he’s scored a touchdown regardless of his field position.  If we have learned anything over the past few months, it’s that the Republicans need to keep the ball and go on offense.  As legendary Georgia football coach, Erk Russell, would have said, “GATA.”

Good luck with that.

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I blame George W. Bush.

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Two remarkable legal proceedings are currently wending their way through the federal criminal courts. The cases involve very different parties: Conrad Black, one of the most consequential public intellectuals and businessmen of our era, and James “Whitey” Bulger, a Boston-based alleged racketeer and serial murderer. But both cases highlight some of the same profound problems with the way federal prosecutorial business is done these days.

In both cases, as in countless others, the feds have used certain techniques that virtually assure convictions of both the innocent and the guilty, the wealthy and the poor, the violent drug dealer and the white collar defendant, indifferent to the niceties of “due process of law,” particularly the right to effective assistance of legal counsel. In order to prevent a defendant from retaining a defense team of his choice, federal prosecutors will first freeze his assets, even though a jury has yet to find them to have been illegally obtained. They then bring prosecutions of almost unimaginable complexity, assuring that the financially hobbled defendant’s diminished legal team (or, as is often the case, his court-appointed lawyer) will be too overwhelmed to mount an adequate defense.

Your tax dollars at work.

These techniques are the rule, not the exception, when the Department of Justice really wants to win a case. When federal drug enforcers decide to go after physicians who recommend drugs for the alleviation of chronic pain in quantities or for conditions that roam outside of drug warriors’ notions of the “good faith” practice of medicine, they indict the doctors under statutes aimed at drug dealers, then freeze their bank accounts.

We’re from the government, and we’re here to help.

When corporate executives are investigated and charged, the Department of Justice has been known to pressure their employer corporations to refuse to live up to contractual agreements to pay attorneys’ fees for indicted executives. This practice was immortalized in a series of Department of Justice directives, one of which, signed June 16, 1999, is known as the “Holder Memorandum” in honor of its drafter, the current attorney general, at that time the deputy attorney general in charge of the Criminal Division at the DOJ. (In 2006, United States District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan declared the DOJ’s practice unconstitutional, a decision affirmed by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. Judge Kaplan wrote that the corporation only “refused to pay because the government held the proverbial gun to its head.”)

Welcome to the Obamanation. Leave your wallet at the door; you won’t need it in jail.

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Sorry, but Brendan Greene-Walsh looks like the poster child of a SWPL beta male. At least we can be confident that they’ll have at most one child, whose name will no doubt sound like a fashionable disease.

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Four days before Christmas, the Friends’ world was rocked by the sort of violence they have devoted their lives to stamping out.

Vandals with an acetylene torch crept onto the project’s muddy construction site in the middle of the night. Working out of view in the meetinghouse’s freshly cemented basement, they sliced off dozens of bolts securing the bare steel columns and set fire to the building crane, causing $500,000 in damage.

Police detectives deemed the attack arson because of a series of confrontational visits from union officials days before the incident. They say the torch could only have been operated by a trained professional, and believe it was almost certainly the work of disgruntled union members. The city has assigned extra investigators to the case and is working with federal forensic experts to track down the vandals, said Michael Resnick, the city’s public safety commissioner.

Look for … the Union label….

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The military is perhaps as selfless an institution as our society has produced. But in its current form, Mr. Kane says, it stifles the aspirations of the best who seek to serve it and pushes them out. “In terms of attracting and training innovative leaders, the U.S. military is unparalleled,” he writes. “In terms of managing talent, the U.S. military is doing everything wrong.”

Check it out.

Gives ‘techno’ a whole new meaning.

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While economics could have played a part in any decline, Eberstadt sees other things at play.  He points to the continuing fracture of the U.S. family structure. People of all ethic backgrounds are running from marriage and family formation. No way this couldn’t affect fertility rates. There may be lots of babies being born out of wedlock but you have to believe that most single mothers are not having multiple babies that way. They learn how to stop pretty quickly once reality dawns that their single motherhood won’t be like Madonna.

Let’s hope the Octomom is listening.

What does religious belief have to do with embracing children? Eberstadt says there is a strong correlation. Nones in the U.S. and Europe have matching low fertility rates while religious people in the U.S. have the same relatively high fertility rate as their counterparts in Europe. The problem for Europe is they have so many Nones. Our problem could be that we are catching up.

Why such a correlation? It could be that Nones look at this world and see nothing beyond it. This is it. There is no more. In Woody Allen’s Annie Hall, Alvy Singer is scolded for not doing his homework. “The universe is everything,” he says, “and if it’s expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything! So what’s the point?” Such nihilism must do something to the psyche and to the desire to multiply. Woody Allen had only one biological child.

I am comfortable in a world where Woody Allen has only one biological child.

Face it, children are inconvenient. When my wife and I married we went to Europe a lot. When our first daughter came, we still went to Europe but less. Our second daughter has never been to Europe.

My, what a hardship.

For many people such things really matter. They want to be able to go to Europe or Bermuda or Patagonia. They want a new car every two years. They want a vacation house. Those inconvenient children can stand in the way of all of this. Even one child can stand in the way. Now think about two or three or four children and then ponder a future of vacations not in Paris but at the small lake down the road.

The horror! The horror!

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According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Lesley University in Cambridge, Mass. was in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act because it failed to

* Continually provide ready-made hot and cold gluten- and allergen-free food options in its dining hall food lines;

* Develop individualized meal plans for students with food allergies, and allow those students to pre-order allergen free meals, that can be made available at the university’s dining halls in Cambridge and Boston;

* Provide a dedicated space in its main dining hall to store and prepare gluten-free and allergen-free foods and to avoid cross-contamination

The ADA is one of the reasons that George H.W. Bush deserves to burn in Hell for all eternity.

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Starbucks … they’re everywhere.

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Just when you thought that the Land of Fruits and Nuts couldn’t get any more ridiculous….

John Derbyshire, Patron Saint of Dyspepsia, shares his wisdom.

Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens, observes one of Schiller’s characters sagely: “Against stupidity the gods themselves struggle in vain.”

We all know the feeling.

(If you don’t know what vade mecum means, feel free to look it up.)

Freeberg encounters the Crust, and is Dismayed.

There is no significant change anywhere, even though the public at large is about as disenchanted with the way things are going, as they have been for quite some time. It’s like a bigger version of California. The electorate isn’t firing anyone, anywhere, and it isn’t because they’re pleased with the state of things. It’s because they’re tired. They’re not fixing anything because they don’t see how; and they refuse to admit that they don’t know what to do.

A comic that is far from comical.

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In praising Congress’s huge new tax increase, President Obama said Tuesday that “millionaires and billionaires” will finally “pay their fair share.” That is, unless you are a Nascar track owner, a wind-energy company or the owners of StarKist Tuna, among many others who managed to get their taxes reduced in Congress’s New Year celebration.

All of whom paid big bucks to the appropriate government officials, of course.

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Well, you could always move to Canada, right? Think again. The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA) comes more fully into effect this year, and as The Globe and Mail’s Barrie McKenna explains, “FATCA will force the hand of many Americans in Canada, making them choose between compliance or giving up their U.S. citizenship.”

Well, there’s always Russia.

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At the University of Minnesota, the number of employees with “human resources” or “personnel” in their job titles has grown from 180 to 272 since the 2004-05 academic year. Since 2006, the university has spent $10 million on consultants for a vast new housing development that is decades from completion. It employs 139 people for marketing, promotions and communications. Some 81 administrators make $200,000 per year or more.

In the past decade, Minnesota’s administrative payroll has gone up three times as fast as the teaching payroll, and twice as fast as student enrollment.

Oh, and tuition more than doubled in that same period, to more than $13,000 per year.

Gotta love that Blue State life … if you can afford it.

Americans and their elected leaders have grown used to discussing college “affordability” as a matter of distributing ever more government aid — in the form of tax breaks, direct assistance or subsidized loans.

Actually, this is self-defeating: by making it possible for students to pay higher tuition, federal and state aid reduces institutions’ incentive to make the hard budgetary choices that might hold tuition down in the first place.

Oh, ya think?

The Other McCain is on the case.

 According to Louisville police, Browning went to the Valley Station Walmart and tried to purchase two iPads with an Electronic Benefit Transfer card. When the transaction was denied, she assaulted a store clerk, pushed another employee to the ground and fled from the store with the merchandise.

And the Entitlement Mentality chickens come home to roost. Note that the perp is an Obama-tinted person; perhaps she thought that the free Obama phone was just the first step on the road to a free Obama electronic device universe.

We’re subsidizing stupidity and, as everyone who has studied economics knows, when you subsidize something, you get more of it.

Yup.

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Delaware taxpayers appear to be getting soaked twice under a deal in which the Democratic governor loaned $21.5 million to a hybrid electric carmaker to set up shop in the state. The company has yet to produce a car in Delaware, and taxpayers are footing the electric bill for the idle plant.

The deal was enthusiastically announced in 2009 by Gov. Jack Markell and Vice President Biden — formerly Delaware’s senior senator — as a way to bring as many as 2,500 green jobs to the state. But California-based Fisker Automotive Inc. has since suffered a series of setbacks that have compounded its shaky financial situation.

Life in a Blue State. You’d think they’d learn, but they never do.

“It has not worked out the way he had envisioned,” Markell spokeswoman Cathy Rossi acknowledged Monday in a statement to FoxNews.com.

Sort of an archetype of Democrat ‘crapitalism’ everywhere.

“We didn’t know and couldn’t have known about the underlying technical and financial problems.”

Not that they made any effort to find out. Asking somebody who knew something about business — a banker, say — would have been a good first step.

The $21.5 million from Delaware is composed of a $9 million grant and a $12.5 million loan that includes so-called “claw backs” should Fisker fail to meet deadlines. However, recovering that money should the company fold will not be easy.

No shit.

Guy Somerset has some news for you.

So the apocalypse didn’t quite happen last year. It’s good news for some, but perhaps not as good as we think. This world has changed immensely in the past fifty years. Here are six signs that maybe the Mayans were more right than we know.

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Illinois is the only state in the Union that does not allow some sort of concealed carry statute for its law-abiding citizens. Illinois is also home to the city with the highest murder rate in the country.

Gee, I wonder whether those two facts might be connected.

According to the source, the bill would not include any grandfathering and would require Illinois gun owners to turn in their guns to the Illinois State Police, where the weapons will be destroyed.

I see some Fifth Amendment problems with that….

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One of the lines that many progressives and TV talking heads are reiterating is that no one really wants to take away Americans’ guns. Senator Dianne Feinstein apparently missed that directive. She admitted as far back as 1995 that she does, indeed, wish to take everyone’s guns away from them.

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

Which Harry Potter character would she be? Why, this one, of course.

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

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I’m waiting for the inevitable calls to force doctors to take Medicare patients.

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And the more the Crust raises the minimum wage, the sooner these will start putting the Underclass out of work and onto the dole. Way to go, Democrats!

Freeberg is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

How t’heck did we get here? The nation’s in recession still, government is supposed to fix it, and it’s going to fix the problem by keeping people from being rich?

Welcome to the Obamanation.

My point is, since The Specialty has become so important to our country’s future in 2013 and beyond, we should identify what exactly it is. I can respect the plain fact that we are demanding something of all our elected officials regardless of their political allegiances, and this demand is sufficiently vigorous that it precludes any sort of genuine dummy ever becoming a congressman, senator or president. But still & all, at the same time I think we can admit that pure-smarts is not it. President Obama is plenty smarter than quite a few people who’ll never be president; but, there are other people smarter than He is, and they’re not ever gonna become president either. It’s plain to see there’s something remarkable about Him, in a “You’re not likely to ever meet another” kind of a way. But it isn’t any functional kind of intelligence that does that.

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This is the sort of thing you ought to be seeing in the New York Times and Washington Post.  But that was then; this is now.

Mostly Democrats (My, what a surprise!) but there are a leavening of Republicans as well — corruption is, after all, no respecter of parties.

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Remember when the media used to cover the war in Afghanistan almost daily? Back then it worked to the media’s advantage to report those stories because the president was a Republican. In the age of Obama, this war has become a footnote.

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Local official SS Meenakshi Sundaram said some 700 tea garden workers surrounded the manager’s bungalow on Wednesday evening and set it on fire. Two vehicles belonging to the manager were also torched.

The charred bodies of Mridul Kumar Bhattacharyya and his wife, Rita, were later recovered from the debris, Mr Sundaram said.

I guess the SIEU still has a way to go.

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If germs hung a recruiting sign for their hosts, it would probably be a version of the World War I poster of Uncle Sam pointing: We want YOU to help us reproduce. All hosts were equally eligible for service, infectious-disease researchers thought. Assuming the recruits weren’t immune due to a prior infection or vaccination, anyone should have roughly the same potential to spread a disease’s pathogens. But then came severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS.

This pandemic started as just another strange pneumonia from southern China, but in 2003 it turned into a global outbreak that infected 8,098 people and killed 774. Key to the disease’s spread, researchers found, was a small but crucial portion of the population that became known as “superspreaders,” people who transmitted the infection to a much greater than expected number of new hosts. The more scientists learn about superspreaders, the more they are beginning to realize that this tiny segment of the population is the driving force behind the emergence and spread of infectious diseases.

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Proving that there are idiots even in Texas.

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Hugh White, a professor at Australian National University and a former Australian defense official, believes this is the latest sign the two countries are heading to war.

And the U.S. will be dragged in.

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Washington State has found a way to make up for revenue lost from owners of electric cars: everyone who took advantage of the thousands of dollars in federal and state incentives to purchase a gas-free vehicle will now be charged a $100 annual fee.

The new tax will take effect February 1, 2013; lawmakers claim the electric car owners are avoiding paying the taxes for roadway usage because such taxes are included in the price of gasoline. The state of Washington includes a 37.5 cents per gallon tax on gasoline, the state’s largest source of transportation dollars.

Road and highway improvements are primarily funded through taxes at the pump, and Washington State lawmakers are demanding electric car owners compensate the state for the loss in tax revenue. The $100 “fee” will be required to be paid upon annual vehicle registration renewal. This tax will be in addition to the standard vehicle registration fees already charged.

‘Save the planet! Pay the government!’

Suuuuuccccckkkkkeeeeerrrrrsssss….

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Chicago is one of the most heavily gun controlled cities in the nation. The state of Illinois has an all-out ban on concealed weapons. All firearms in the city of Chicago are registered. The permit must to purchase must be renewed every three years at a cost of $100. Chicago has an assault weapons ban and a ban on magazines that carry 10 rounds. In November, shootings jumped 49 percent over the prior year. Nonetheless, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is calling for even more gun control.

1970: Four white college kids dead in Ohio — a nation weeps.

2012: Seven (probably nonwhite) people dead in Chicago on Christmas — a nation yawns.

How ‘progressive’.

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