Latest global warming scare: internet & power disruptions

Not satisfied with scaring you about oceans rising, glaciers melting, more powerful hurricanes, droughts, floods, famine, cats & dogs living together, the global warming cultists have more doom & gloom in store because of “climate change” – internet and power disruptions. Oh, the humanity! With all of the above soundly debunked (well, maybe not the dogs & cats living together thing), they needed something, anything, to really invoke fear. And what could be more fearsome than disruption of your internet connection? Crap – there goes my Facebook and Netflix! (story here from The Telegraph)

Already the transport sector is preparing for temperatures above 104F (40C) this summer, which could lead to breakdowns on the railways.

Speaking at Blackfriars Station in London, which Network Rail is currently fitting with solar panels and rainwater harvesting systems in order to be more resilient against power cuts, Ms Spelman said the UK is already investing £200 billion (US$287B) over the next five years.

But that will not be enough to stop economic impacts of climate change if it is invested in the wrong areas.

She warned of intense rainfall, droughts and heatwaves in the next 50 to 100 years because of man-made global warming. The signal from wi-fi cannot travel as far when temperatures increase. Heavy downfalls of rain also affect the ability of the device to capture a signal.

For a country like Britain, with a GDP of roughly $2T (compared to the US GDP of $14T), $287B is a big chunk of change to waste on global warming scares. In other words, we need to savage the economy so you don’t lose your WiFi connection. Algore approves, of course.

How long before this idiocy becomes the subject of a congressional investigation…

Ethanol is ruining small engines

The ethanol controversy (more here) is heating up again as the EPA announced a mandate last fall to increase the amount of ethanol in gasoline from 10% to 15% (more here). Despite the growing evidence that ethanol costs more, is not really environmentally friendly, drives up the price of food, and is actually ruining engines on vehicles (older than 2007). The ultimate slap in the face is that your tax dollars are being used to ruin your car (more here).

The recent revelation that ethanol ruins small engines (like lawn mowers and weed whackers) has created a niche market for “Boutique Fuel” – pure (no ethanol) gasoline for small engines. Of course, this comes at a pretty stiff premium (story here from Popular Mechanics).

Small-engine repairmen tell PM that ethanol mixed with gasoline is corroding and damaging chain saws, string trimmers and other outdoor equipment at an alarming clip. As a result, a new market is growing in U.S. hardware stores: Ethanol-free gas packaged in small cans that sell at a premium but promise to make your small engines last.

Repairman and small-business owner Rich Herder doesn’t mince words about the damage ethanol in gasoline is doing to the small engines in outdoor power equipment. “It’s the biggest disaster to hit gasoline in my lifetime,” Herder says. He owns McIntyre’s Locksmith & Lawnmower, a service business in Westfield, N.J. Founded in 1898 to refurbish saddles, the business today repairs more than 5000 machines a year—mostly pieces of outdoor power equipment, and many of them, according to Herder, damaged by the alcohol in today’s gasoline, known as E10 for the 10 percent of alcohol it contains.

Herder estimates that as much as 75 percent of that work is not due to normal wear and tear, but results from the use of ethanol, which can cause rust and carbon deposits inside the engine, dissolve plastic parts and more. And if repair shops like Herder’s are already busy, you have to wonder what will happen this summer when gas pumps begin dispensing E15 gasoline; the Environmental Protection Agency recently approved the fuel for cars built after the 2000 model year, but the fuel could hit small engines even harder than E10 does. But now, because of all that ethanol-based wear and tear, a nascent industry is starting up: Ethanol-free gas, distributed in cans for owners of small engines.

Deposits and corrosion aren’t the only reasons alcohol is hard on today’s small engines. The power plants are easily ruined by bad fuel because they lack the sophisticated computer-controlled ignition systems found in today’s cars and trucks. The alcohol can cause the fuel to ignite at the wrong time in the combustion sequence, ruining parts in the process. “The pistons are the first to go,” Herder says. “They look like they’ve been hit with a hammer.” Clearly the time for an alternative has come.

With congress in the pocket of agribusiness and the EPA mandating even more ethanol in fuel, the alternative is Boutique Fuels. Thank you government – BOHICA consumers!

The phenomenon of fuel-related problems has become so severe that the niche market for specialized fuel is growing fast. Tidily packaged little metal cans containing ethanol-free gasoline were just an oddity a few years ago; now they’re sold in hardware stores and by power equipment dealers, and people are taking specialized fuel seriously. There are at least three brands to choose from: MotoMix, from outdoor power equipment manufacturer Stihl USA, SEF from VP Racing Fuels and Truefuel from TruSouth. Of the three, only Stihl relies on an outside-contract chemical manufacturer to make its boutique fuel: Johann Haltermann, Ltd., a company that makes, among other things, precisely blended fuel for testing vehicles. Stihl was likely the first outdoor power equipment company to enter the boutique fuel market when, more than 20 years ago, it was so concerned about fuel quality in Germany that it introduced packaged fuel for its equipment sold in Europe.

The market for these fuels is still so new that there’s no generally recognized name for them. But regardless of whether you call this stuff—boutique fuel, packaged fuel or canned gas—it’s an end run around the gas pump. Sold as straight unleaded gasoline or blended with oil for high-rpm two-cycle engines in chain saws, blowers and string trimmers, it’s expensive stuff, costing anywhere from $5 to $8 per quart. Despite the high price, customers might be willing to pony up if it means seeing an engine or its components run for several trouble-free years rather than seeing the engine destroyed or damaged by ethanol—after all, avoiding just one ruined engine might be worth the cost.

Imagine that – pure gasoline at $20 – $32 a gallon. That works for me. I just love my government so much – BLECH!

New passport application – Kafka’s Catch-22

If you don’t have a US passport you might want to get one now before a proposed new application form is adopted. This is particularly true if you don’t have a copy of your long form Birth Certificate. According to this story, many of the questions are almost impossible to answer.

The U.S. Department of State is proposing a new Biographical Questionnaire for some passport applicants: The proposed new  Form DS-5513 asks for all addresses since birth; lifetime employment history including employers’ and supervisors names, addresses, and telephone numbers; personal details of all siblings; mother’s address one year prior to your birth; any “religious ceremony” around the time of birth; and a variety of other information.  According to the proposed form, “failure to provide the information requested may result in … the denial of your U.S. passport application.”

The State Department estimated that the average respondent would be able to compile all this information in just 45 minutes, which is obviously absurd given the amount of research that is likely to be required to even attempt to complete the form.

It seems likely that only some, not all, applicants will be required to fill out the new questionnaire, but no criteria have been made public for determining who will be subjected to these additional new written interrogatories.  So if the passport examiner wants to deny your application, all they will have to do is give you the impossible new form to complete.

This form is a bureaucrat’s dream come true – Kafka’s Catch-22. With the stroke of a pen some government drone who may be having a bad day has the power to deny your passport.

You’re probably thinking, “How could they possibly know any of this – I’ll just make up a bunch of stuff.” That’s true, but that’s also the beauty of it. They don’t have to know any of it. If they deny your application, the onus is on you to prove it.

Please make it stop…

Regime threatens Boeing over new SC plant

In an effort to meet increasing demand for its new 787 Dreamliner, Boeing needs to expand its production capacity. In 2009 the company concluded that they needed to ramp up production in the face of stiff competition from Airbus (380) for the jumbo jet market. So Boeing went to the largest employee union to negotiate terms for the additional manufacturing capacity, even though it was not required to do so. After losing $1.8B to a 2008 strike, Boeing wanted some assurances that the unions wouldn’t cause problems for the new production lines. The union balked on the no strike terms, demanded a seat on Boeing’s board of directors and a guaranty that all future aircraft production remain in the Seattle area. Since the union refused to bargain in good faith, Boeing decided to move the new production lines to South Carolina – a Right To Work state. They bought a Vought production facility and began constructing the plant.

This story should have ended right there. Boeing tried to negotiate with the union for the new production lines and the union wouldn’t budge so the company decided to go elsewhere. Boeing announced their decision 18 months ago. The new production facility is scheduled to start running in July and there are currently 1000 new employees in South Carolina. Last week the story took a new and dangerous turn as the NRLB, part of the regime, decided to sue Boeing in an effort to block the new facility. Their reason for the suit? That Boeing did this in retaliation against the union (stories here, here, and here).

This week, the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint over Boeing’s plans to open a plant in South Carolina. Boeing is not seeking to outsource work to a foreign country. Boeing has chosen a manufacturing location in the U.S. based on cost and risk factors. It plans to open a second production line of its 787 Dreamliner plane there. The plant has been built.

Boeing executives have acknowledged that they were reluctant to expand in Washington state because of the risk of a labor strike. Boeing’s workers in Washington belong to the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. Its plant in South Carolina would be nonunion.

Seizing on the words of Boeing executives, the NLRB inferred that the decision to choose South Carolina was retaliation against the union. The labor board demands that Boeing open the second production line in Washington.

Retaliation? Sounds more like the U.S. government — the NLRB — is retaliating against Boeing for seeking a better business climate in South Carolina. Appointments by President Barack Obama have given the five-member NLRB a pro-labor tilt.

Boeing tried to negotiate with the union – two years ago. The company is not moving all Dreamliner production, just the new capacity. No union jobs in Seattle are affected. If Boeing really wanted to stick it to the union, they could have moved the whole shebang to South Carolina.

The question here is this: Does the federal government have the authority to prevent a company from opening a plant wherever they choose? Apparently they believe they do. And, according to this piece (from the Washington Examiner), Boeing might be facing an uphill battle.

Boeing is not free to make its jets at the factory of its choosing, according to the National Labor Relations Board — it must make them in Washington state, using union labor.

This extraordinary abridgement of economic freedom might suggest an anti-Boeing vendetta from President Obama, except that this administration’s Export-Import Bank has subsidized Boeing with nearly $15 billion in loan guarantees in the past two years — roughly three-quarters of all of Ex-Im’s guarantees during that time.

This puts Boeing in an awkward position. The NLRB is surely overreaching in trying to block Boeing from making some of its 787s in South Carolina, a right-to-work state (NLRB calls this illegal retaliation against the machinists and aerospace workers union for its 2005 and 2008 strikes). In its effort to fight back, Boeing could be defanged by its reliance on big government. It’s a cautionary tale for Obama’s other corporate allies — from the drug industry that benefits so much from Obamacare to the tech, agrichem, coal, and other industries that have benefitted from the president’s corporatism.

Boeing and Obama, both based in Chicago, have a real political friendship. In 2008, Obama was by far the biggest recipient of campaign contributions from Boeing employees and executives, hauling in $197,000 — five times as much as John McCain, and more than the top eight Republicans combined.

So Boeing could be talking out of both sides of its mouth here. If you suck up to the government and politicians for benefits, don’t complain when they call in their chips.

In Boeing’s situation, it’s not only Uncle Sam who has leverage purchased with corporate welfare.

Washington state, Illinois and Chicago have given Boeing billions in favors. Do you think these Democratic governors wouldn’t squeeze Boeing, too? Does anyone doubt the new mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel, would play politics with Boeing’s subsidies in order to help his old boss, Obama? (Of course, the disputed Boeing factory in South Carolina got hundreds of millions in state subsidies, too.)

Forever, business has been seduced by the promise of free money from government, along with regulation to clear out competition. Boeing has been the foremost among businesses partnering with Uncle Sam.

This is what our system of “Crony Capitalism” is all about…

Government wants to regulate icemakers (sigh)

Remember the “old” refrigerators before ice makers? You had those 2 ice trays that you had to keep refilling and you never had enough ice if you had more than 3 people at a party. As someone who loves a glass full of ice with my drink, I appreciate the convenience of the ice maker. Most of us don’t even think about it any more – we just put the glass under the ice dispenser and enjoy a cold drink. Well, in an effort to save you from “climate change,” your government is about to do something about that horrible, wasteful ice maker (story here).

In its latest effort to save the planet from global warming, the U.S. government is on the verge of regulating ice makers commonly found in many refrigerators because they increase energy consumption by a good 12 to 20%.

This could be detrimental to the environment since there are more than 100 million refrigerators across the nation and they devour a substantial chunk of the electricity used by all households. Energy consumed by refrigerators as a whole has long been documented but not what the ice makers inside their freezers use individually.

Americans can finally sleep soundly through the night because government scientists have completed the ice maker study and the findings have been beautifully laid out in a 79-page report titled Energy Consumption of Automatic Ice Makers Installed in Domestic Refrigerators. The information is being used to make a case for regulating the popular little machines that are contributing to the planet’s destruction.

In a nutshell, the culprit is the tiny motor inside the freezing system that’s used to release ice from the mold and into a tray. Because the motor is specially built to function in a cold setting, it requires an internal heater to keep it from freezing up. Here’s where it gets serious; heating elements require a lot of power and that’s where the extra energy consumption kicks in.

OK, I get it – refrigerators consume a lot of power (we have 3 of them). But what if I’m OK with that and am willing to pay for it? What if I don’t mind paying a little extra for the convenience of having as much ice as I want, whenever I want it? It’s a simple matter to disconnect the ice maker if you don’t want to use it. The salient question is this: Do we really need some government apparatchik controlling the use of our refrigerator?

The Obama Administration has been quite active in its campaign to enlighten Americans about the ills of global warming. A few months ago a group of esteemed scientists from several public universities warned that climate change will make food “dangerous” and add to the malnourishment of millions worldwide.

Before that separate government evaluations revealed that global warming causes mental illness and cancer and that it creates national security threats by spreading disease among people and animals. Authored by government scientists from various agencies, the mental illness/cancer report claims global warming is one of the “most visible environmental concerns of the 21st century” The separate national security assessment, made by intelligence and health officials, says climate change will destabilize developing nations as well as the U.S. economy and military.

Mental illness? I guess that explains this nonsense. SHEEESH!

Politician: Detroit “deserves” bailout or something

Detroit, home of the “Big 3″ US auto manufacturers (2 of which are on government life support), is the epitome of failed government social policies. Mired in political corruption (more here and here), with an abysmal school system (more here) and fleeing population, the city has become an economic and industrial wasteland (more here and here). While mayor Dave Bing deserves some credit for at least trying to turn things around, others in the city government believe that Detroit deserves a taxpayer bailout (story here from the Detroit News). Huh? WTF?

Councilwoman JoAnn Watson is reiterating her call for a government bailout of Detroit, saying the city that built the middle class deserves as much help as Wall Street or General Motors.Addressing the City Council today during Mayor Dave Bing’s budget presentation, Watson gave a spirited pitch for federal funds to help the city whose population declined 25 percent since 2000 to 713,777.

“We are worth it. We are worth at least as much as General Motors or Chrysler or the Wall Street bankers,” Watson said. “It was this city that built military vehicles for World War II. It was this city that (invented) the middle class and the five-day work week.

“We should not be in a position to be victims. We are victors. And we should demand respect.”

General Motors received $52 billion in government aid, while Chrysler received $12.5 billion, according to published reports. Mayor Dave Bing has traveled to Washington, D.C., repeatedly seeking more federal funds for Detroit.

Watson has floated the idea for years. The liberal magazine the Nation named Watson one of its 14 MVPs in 2009 for promoting a “multifacted Detroit Marshall Plan to revitalize her economically battered city.”

In the past, Watson has said the city deserves at least $1 billion.

Declared a “Model City” by the LBJ administration in the 1960′s, Detroit has received hundreds of millions in taxpayer funding. And now Detroit demands “respect.” How sad…

For a pictorial view of this disaster see these photo essays:

• The Ruins of Detroit
• Detroit vs Hiroshima 65 years later

Last minute deal averts government “shutdown” – FAIL

Congressional leaders and the regime cut a last minute deal to fund the federal government through the end of the fiscal year and avoid a government shutdown. With the democrats whining about “extreme” cuts, seniors being starved, and women being denied health care, the spineless republicans scaled back their budget cut proposals. Everyone involved has been patting themselves on the back claiming some sort of victory. BFD.

In a previous post I said that no one was serious about cutting the deficit. In case you were starting to believe the democrat’s “extreme” blather or the republican’s boasts of meaningful spending cuts, here are a couple of stories to bring this political kabuki theater of the absurd into perspective. While our political “leaders” were scrambling to avoid a federal shutdown, the federal government was spending outlandish and obscene amounts of your money (more here from CNSNews).

The federal government spent $142.3 billion on Thursday alone, according to the Daily Treasury Statement released at 4:00 pm on Friday afternoon.This $142.3 billion in spending took place on a day when the White House and congressional leaders were deadlocked over whether to cut between $33 billion and $40 billion in federal spending for the rest of the year.

To fund the $142.3 billion it spent on Thursday, the U.S. Treasury borrowed $132.8 billion during the day by selling new debt instruments—and almost all of these ($129.9 billion) were short-term Treasury bills that mature in one year or less.

By far, the federal government’s top expense on Thursday was paying off old debts that came due and that the government had a legal obligation to meet. During the day, Treasury reports, it paid off $130.75 billion in Treasury securities that had matured.

So in one day the government spent more than 3 times the paltry amount of “extreme” and “meaningful” cuts negotiated by the politicians. And the vast majority of that spending was servicing the debt. Yeah, that will get us out of trouble. This is like someone who makes $50K/yr, spends $90K/yr, and has $350K in debt saying, “Jeez, I need to save some money; I think I’ll skip lunch at McDonalds one day this week.”

And here’s another helpful little factoid (story here from CNSNews).

The federal debt increased $54.1 billion in the eight days preceding the deal made by President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D.-Nev.) and House Speaker John Boehner (R.-Ohio) to cut $38.5 billion in federal spending for the remainder of fiscal year 2011, which runs through September.The debt was $14.2101 trillion on March 30, according to the Bureau of the Public Debt, and $14.2642 on April 7.

Since the beginning of the fiscal year on Oct. 1, 2010, the national debt has increase by $653.4 billion.

The next political battle will be when congress takes on raising the debt ceiling, which will be reached sometime in the middle of May. Two things you can bet on – the wailing & gnashing of teeth by the democrats and the spineless republicans caving in. They will raise it and the destructive spending will continue.

BOHICA!!

NYC nanny state fatso politician wants to ban Happy Meal toys

The idiotic nanny state notion that banning toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals will somehow solve childhood obesity is not new (more here). I suppose the idea is that kids actually want Happy Meals because of the “toys” inside, rather than the burger & fries – after all, the toys probably taste better. And, of course, parents can’t actually say “no” to their kids so the government needs to step in. What makes this story (from NBC NY) so funny is the nanny who is proposing legislation to ban the Happy Meal toys (and the headline to the story). Meet NYC Councilman Leroy Comrie:

Happy Meal victim

A city lawmaker thinks free toys and other giveaways cause children to clamor for fast food, and he planned to introduce a bill Wednesday that will ban them from meals that fail to meet nutritional guidelines.

The bill would create an incentive for restaurants to cook up healthier options, Councilman Leroy Comrie said.

“If we can get the fast food companies to brand and create nutritious meals where children could receive toys, they would be just as excited,” he said.

Meals would be required to be less than 500 calories, as well as low in fat and sodium, according to the proposed law outlined by Comrie’s office Tuesday. Any single food would have to be less than 200 calories. Violators would initially be fined $200 to $500.

So in other words, a Happy Meal would have to consist of carrot and celery sticks and maybe a half of a tuna fish sandwich (on whole wheat) to include a toy. I’m sure kids will be “just as excited” for that – LOL!

What makes this career apparatchik such an expert on childhood obesity and the fast food business? Why, his vast personal experience – and obvious girth.

Comrie, who is himself overweight, has publicly acknowledged his battle with weight and said he ate Happy Meals regularly as a child. He also said he failed to set a good example for his own children by allowing them to eat fast-food.

“Clearly, my weight has always been an issue, and it’s something that has given me the impetus to do this bill,” Comrie, who has confessed he weighs more than 320 pounds, said, according to The New York Post.

He regularly ate Happy Meals (probably several at a time) but he doesn’t say it was because of the wonderful toys inside. I guess we’re just supposed to assume that. He also failed to set a good example for his own kids by allowing them to eat fast food. Hmmm, I guess he’s on a guilt trip or something.

McDonalds has been in the food business for more than 50 years so they probably know more about it than this barrage balloon.

No one is serious about cutting the federal budget

This Friday is the deadline for congress to pass another continuing budget resolution to avoid a “shutdown” of the federal government (more here). The republicans are eager to impose budget “cuts” which the regime and the democrats characterize as “extreme” (more here). Of course this absurd political kabuki theater could have been avoided if the previous congress had done their job and passed a budget for 2011. Spineless republicans, who gained control of the House in the last election largely on the promise of fiscal responsibility, initially proposed $100B in spending cuts to the current budget and are now dialing back their proposal after being demonized by democrats and the state-run media. It appears that the magic number to reach a compromise is now around $33B. And just how significant is this figure? This story (from CATO) explains it:

Today the Cato Institute placed an ad in major newspapers highlighting specific spending cuts that policymakers should make to restore our country’s fiscal sanity and economic stability. Our public call for policymakers to demonstrate leadership on spending cuts comes in the midst of the on-going battle on Capitol Hill over funding the government for the remainder of fiscal 2011.

A graphic at the top of the ad measures the $61 billion in cuts that Republicans have proposed against fiscal 2011 estimates for total spending, the deficit, and interest on the debt. As the graphic shows and the ad notes, it is clear that “leaders and members of both parties are in deep denial about the fiscal emergency we face.”

There are news reports that Republican and Democrat negotiators are heading toward a compromise figure of $33 billion in spending cuts. Let’s put that figure in perspective alongside the GOP’s original proposal to cut a whopping $61 billion:

This is not serious

Record spending levels…trillion dollar plus deficits…mountainous debt…a weak economy…

What, Congress worry?

Kind of puts it into perspective, doesn’t it? And what about that government shutdown? Rep. Mike Pence (R-TX) sums it up nicely (more here):

“…if congress can’t cut $61 billion from the budget, the government should be shut down.”

Here’s a great idea: Shut it down. After all, it doesn’t shut down completely – just “non-essential” services. (Don’t you just love that phrase? If they’re non-essential, why do they exist in the first place?) People will still get their social security, medicare/medicaid, and welfare checks. Taxpayers will still pay their taxes. Better yet, lets give the entire government a 21 month vacation – just keep a skeleton crew in DC. Congress could meet with their constituents, campaign for the 2012 elections, schmooze with lobbyists, whatever; then come back and start fresh in 2013. Twenty one months free of government FAIL – imagine the savings to the taxpayer!

Big government gets bigger – A nation of takers

This piece (by Stephen Moore at the WSJ) is a must read. Mr. Moore says that we have become a nation of takers, not makers. And he is 100% spot on.

If you want to understand better why so many states—from New York to Wisconsin to California—are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, consider this depressing statistic: Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.

It gets worse. More Americans work for the government than work in construction, farming, fishing, forestry, manufacturing, mining and utilities combined. We have moved decisively from a nation of makers to a nation of takers. Nearly half of the $2.2 trillion cost of state and local governments is the $1 trillion-a-year tab for pay and benefits of state and local employees. Is it any wonder that so many states and cities cannot pay their bills?

Every state in America today except for two—Indiana and Wisconsin—has more government workers on the payroll than people manufacturing industrial goods. Consider California, which has the highest budget deficit in the history of the states. The not-so Golden State now has an incredible 2.4 million government employees—twice as many as people at work in manufacturing. New Jersey has just under two-and-a-half as many government employees as manufacturers. Florida’s ratio is more than 3 to 1. So is New York’s.

At one time the US was the world’s leading industrial powerhouse. In fact, our industrial prowess was the primary reason we were able to defeat the Axis powers in World War 2. The Allies (especially France & Britain) were on the verge of defeat before America entered the war. Militarily the US was woefully unprepared for war at the end of 1941. It was our overwhelming industrial might that made the difference. Unfortunately we could not do this today – we’ve gone from a nation of makers to a nation of government drones.

Even more sad, the trend for more government continues as more college grads consider government employment.

Don’t expect a reversal of this trend anytime soon. Surveys of college graduates are finding that more and more of our top minds want to work for the government. Why? Because in recent years only government agencies have been hiring, and because the offer of near lifetime security is highly valued in these times of economic turbulence. When 23-year-olds aren’t willing to take career risks, we have a real problem on our hands. Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Moore ascribes some of this to productivity gains in the private sector, perhaps allowing business to do more with less. This is exactly opposite of government where the overall trend is to accomplish less with more.

The employment trends described here are explained in part by hugely beneficial productivity improvements in such traditional industries as farming, manufacturing, financial services and telecommunications. These produce far more output per worker than in the past. The typical farmer, for example, is today at least three times more productive than in 1950.

Where are the productivity gains in government? Consider a core function of state and local governments: schools. Over the period 1970-2005, school spending per pupil, adjusted for inflation, doubled, while standardized achievement test scores were flat. Over roughly that same time period, public-school employment doubled per student, according to a study by researchers at the University of Washington. That is what economists call negative productivity.

But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. If education had undergone the same productivity revolution that manufacturing has, we would have half as many educators, smaller school budgets, and higher graduation rates and test scores.

The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.

Most reasonable steps to restrain public-sector employment costs are smothered by the unions. Study after study has shown that states and cities could shave 20% to 40% off the cost of many services—fire fighting, public transportation, garbage collection, administrative functions, even prison operations—through competitive contracting to private providers. But unions have blocked many of those efforts. Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.

President Obama says we have to retool our economy to “win the future.” The only way to do that is to grow the economy that makes things, not the sector that takes things.

Well said, Mr. Moore, well said…

Top execs score big $$ as Fannie & Freddie swirl in the toilet

The BOHICA goodness that is Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continues (more here, here and here). As these two giant turds swirl around a flushing financial toilet, their top executives are collecting big paychecks (story here from the NYT). Since the government (that means you, the taxpayer) took over these two FAILs in 2008, we have pumped almost $154B into this toilet with no end in sight. This is the epitome of government double down on FAIL.

Regulators have approved generous executive compensation at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the taxpayer-backed mortgage finance giants, with little scrutiny or analysis, according to a report published Thursday by the inspector general of the Federal Housing Finance Agency.

The companies, whose fates are to be decided by Congress this year, paid a combined $17 million to their chief executives in 2009 and 2010, the two full years when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were wards of the state, the report found. The top six executives at the companies received $35.4 million over the two years. Since Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over in September 2008, the companies’ mounting mortgage losses have required a $153 billion infusion from taxpayers. Total losses may reach $363 billion through 2013, according to government estimates.

Charles E. Haldeman Jr., a former head of Putnam Investments, the giant fund management concern, joined Freddie Mac as its chief executive in 2009. He made $7.8 million for 2009 and 2010. Fannie Mae’s chief is Michael J. Williams, who has worked at the company since 1991. He received $9.3 million for the two years. Company officials declined to comment.

With hundreds of billions in government support necessary to keep the companies running, questions are arising about the nature of the pay packages and how performance goals are determined. The pay was approved by the housing finance agency, which is charged with conserving the assets of Fannie and Freddie on behalf of taxpayers.

Of course this is nothing new for Fannie & Freddie, which have been run like patronage mills for politically-connected plunderers. Using Enron accounting schemes, Clinton appointee Frank Raines skated away with over $90M in salary & “bonuses” after 5 years at Fannie. He and corruptocrat senator Chris Dodd also got sweetheart VIP loans from Countrywide pal Angelo Mozilo, who was recently fined $67.5M for securities fraud and insider trading violations.

The response from the FHFA (Federal Housing Finance Agency), government overseer of Fannie & Freddie, is not surprising. Apparently we need to pay big for quality management or the taxpayers will be harmed.

Edward J. DeMarco, acting director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, testified before Congress on Thursday about proposals to overhaul Fannie and Freddie. “I am concerned that legislation to overhaul the compensation levels and programs in place today with the application of a federal pay system to nonfederal employees carries great risk for the conservatorships and hence the taxpayer,” he said.

Last year, Mr. DeMarco testified that the executive compensation plans at Fannie and Freddie were designed to achieve the goals of the conservatorship and “align executive decision-making with the long-term financial prospects of the enterprises, and minimize costs to the taxpayer.”

Because shares of both Fannie and Freddie have little value, the companies’ executive compensation consists solely of cash paid out in base salary, deferred salary and long-term incentive pay.

One thing that Mr. DeMarco is forgetting here is that since the government has taken over these two turds, these executives are government employees. So his argument about attracting top management geniuses to “minimize costs to the taxpayer” is fallacious.

Why not find a retired business person with a track record of saving failed companies to take over and do what really needs to be done with Fannie & Freddie – shut them down with a minimal loss to the taxpayers. Someone like Herman Cain would probably do the job for nothing. Actually I’d rather see Mr. Cain in the White House.

2010 Census: Detroit population down 25%

Lions and Tigers and FAIL, Oh My… That the city of Detroit is a FAIL is not in question (more here, here, here, and here). That it is this big of a FAIL was made apparent with the 2010 Census results. In its heyday (1950s) Detroit had almost 2 million residents. Home of the Big Three US auto manufacturers, Detroit was an industrial and economic powerhouse. Today, it is an economic and industrial wasteland that has lost more than half of its population and more are fleeing every day. Current predictions are that Detroit’s population may sink to below 500,000 by the end of the decade.

Detroit’s population has fallen steadily since the heyday of the auto industry in the 1950s, when it peaked around two million, but the declines have accelerated in recent years as manufacturing jobs have disappeared and the mortgage crisis has devastated even stable, middle-class neighborhoods. The number of vacant housing units doubled in the past decade to nearly 80,000, more than one-fifth of the city’s housing stock, the Census Bureau reported.

“For those of us who have been out in the neighborhoods, we knew that the foreclosures and the abandonment were really extreme and accelerating,” said Lyke Thompson, director of Wayne State University’s Center for Urban Studies. “The question is, can you put a bottom under it?”

In 1950, Detroit was the fifth-largest city in America, behind New York, Chicago, Philadelphia and Los Angeles, and it was in the top 10 as recently as the 1990 Census. Now, Detroit is likely to fall to 19th, behind Indianapolis and Columbus, Ohio.

Former NBA star Dave Bing is the mayor of Detroit and according to most sources, he’s been trying very hard to turn the city around. Bing replaced former mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, currently serving time in a federal prison for a variety of corruption charges. Mayor Bing is said to be incredulous about the Census results and will likely call for a recount – mostly because Detroit will lose federal (taxpayer) money.

The flight of middle-class African-Americans to the suburbs fueled an exodus that cut Detroit’s population 25% in the past decade to 713,777, according to Census Bureau data released Tuesday. That’s the city’s lowest population level since the 1910 census, when automobile mass production was making Detroit Detroit.

The decline, the fastest in city history, shocked local officials, who had expected a number closer to 800,000. Mayor Dave Bing said the city would seek a recount.

“If we could go out and identify another 40,000 people that were missed, and it brings us over the threshold of 750,000, that would make a difference from what we can get from the federal and state government,” Mr. Bing said at a news conference Tuesday.

In all, the city lost more than 237,000 residents, including 185,000 blacks and about 41,000 whites. The Hispanic population ticked up by 1,500. Meanwhile, the black population in neighboring Macomb County more than tripled to 72,723, constituting 8.6% of the county’s population in 2010, compared with 2.7% a decade earlier. Oakland County’s African-American population rose 36% to 164,078.

While Bing has made some positive changes, the answer shouldn’t be finding 40,000 phantom residents so they can get more taxpayer money. They should instead focus on fixing the problems that continue to drive residents from the city. This article (from the WSJ) explains how massive infusions of taxpayer money, coupled with failed social and economic policies, have turned Detroit into a wasteland.

Most Americans did not need to be told that Detroit is in a bad way, and has been for some time. Americans know all about white flight, greedy unions and arrogant auto executives. The recent census numbers, however, put an exclamation mark on a cold fact: A once-great American city today repels people of talent and ambition.

“Detroit is a classic example of how a culture that was legendary for enterprise and innovation was slowly eroded by toxic politicization from the 1960s on,” says the Rev. Robert A. Sirico, president of the Michigan-based Acton Institute. “It’s been class warfare on steroids, and the inevitable result is that so many Detroiters who had the means—black and white—have fled the city.”

Another way of putting it is this: Unlike New Orleans and Japan, the ruin we see in Detroit is entirely man-made.

While the decline of the US auto industry has had a huge impact on the city, Detroit’s problems go deeper and are systemic.

What happened to this Detroit? In many ways the answer is liberal politics and expanding government. In the 1960s, for example, Detroit became one of Lyndon Johnson’s “Model Cities.” That meant it was on the receiving end of hundreds of millions of federal dollars to transform a nine-mile-square section of the city. It would be just the first of many government-funded redevelopment schemes that left behind one of the most blighted urban landscapes in the nation.

Notwithstanding its failures, government continued to grow while city services—e.g., police and fire protection—continued to decline. Whites moving to the suburbs took much of the tax base out of the city in the 1960s. The latest census numbers show that blacks are now following in the path of the whites before them. Apparently they don’t like crime and the lack of decent schools for their kids either.

What’s left is the city so embarrassingly exposed by the census figures, a place that people are fleeing as fast as they can. Think of all the dysfunctional measures you can: poverty rates, unemployment, crime, failing public schools, falling home values. Detroit has them all, and most of its indicators rank among the worst in the nation.

The epitome of government FAIL…

Leading advocate of obamacare – maybe NYC needs a waiver

Weener, Whiner, Whatever

Since Alan Grayson (more here and here) was landslided out of the House of Representatives, perennial runner-up Anthony Weiner (D-NY) has taken over the spot of Top Congressional Moonbat. (More on Weiner here, here, and here.) A passionate proponent of obamacare, Weiner could often be found on the House floor equating opponents of the massive government takeover of the health care system to Nazis, child killers, and the like. With the regime handing out over 1000 waivers to the obamacare boot-to-the-face (more here), it seems that Weiner now thinks that NYC would be better off without this hideous legislation he so passionately promoted (story here from the DC). Huh? WTF?

Rep. Anthony Weiner said Wednesday he was looking into how a health law waiver might work for New York City.

Weiner, who is likely to run for mayor of New York, said that because of the city’s special health care infrastructure, his office was looking into alternatives that might make more sense. Weiner is one of the health care law’s biggest supporters; during the debate leading up to reform, he was one of the last holdouts in Congress for the public option.

The congressman was trying to debunk Republican “myths” about the health care law during a speech at the Center for American Progress. He used the waivers as way to describe how flexible the law actually is and how “this notion that the government is shoving the bill down people’s throats” is not true.

“The administration needs to make this argument more forcefully,” he said. “A lot of people who got waivers were … people who are our friends.”

Oh, I see. Obamacare is wonderful for everyone else – just not you and your “friends.” The irony of this is just too delicious.

Education Dept: The anti-bully bully

At a recent anti-bullying conference our dear comrade leader claimed that he was a “victim” of bullying and vowed to throw the full weight of the government leviathan behind efforts to stop it (story here). Apparently the regime has solved all the other problems facing America today.

Speaking as a parent and as a victim, Obama urged everyone to help end bullying by working to create an atmosphere at school where children feel safe and feel like they belong. He said that even he felt out of place growing up.

“I have to say, with big ears and the name that I have, I wasn’t immune,” said Obama, who moved around a lot as a boy, being born in Hawaii and growing up there and in Indonesia. “I didn’t emerge unscathed,” he said.

Notice the obligatory “being born in Hawaii” reference – as if that has anything at all do do with the story. Our poor dear comrade leader was a “victim” of childhood bullying. Perhaps that would explain why he’s such a bully now.

Possibly as an outcome of this conference, the Department of Education has announced new mandates for school administrators to stop bullying by any means necessary or face federal lawsuits. The new mandates include monitoring student behavior outside of school (story here from the DC).

Education Department officials are threatening school principals with lawsuits if they fail to monitor and curb students’ lunchtime chat and evening Facebook time for expressing ideas and words that are deemed by Washington special-interest groups to be harassment of some students.

There has only been muted opposition to this far-reaching policy among the professionals and advocates in the education sector, most of whom are heavily reliant on funding and support from top-level education officials. The normally government-averse tech-sector is also playing along, and on Mar. 11, Facebook declared that it was “thrilled” to work with White House officials to foster government oversight of teens’ online activities.

The agency’s threats, which are delivered in a so-called “Dear Colleague” letter,” have the support of White House officials, including President Barack Obama, who held a Mar. 10 White House meeting to promote the initiative as a federal “anti-bullying” policy.

The letter says federal officials have reinterpreted the civil-rights laws that require school principals to curb physical bullying, as well as racist and sexist speech, that take place within school boundaries. Under the new interpretation, principals and their schools are legally liable if they fail to curb “harassment” of students, even if it takes place outside the school, on Facebook or in private conversation among a few youths.

“Harassing conduct may take many forms, including verbal acts and name-calling; graphic and written statements, which may include use of cell phones or the Internet… it does not have to include intent to harm, be directed at a specific target, or involve repeated incidents [but] creates a hostile environment … [which can] limit a student’s ability to participate in or benefit from the services, activities, or opportunities offered by a school,” according to the far-reaching letter, which was completed Oct. 26 by Russlynn Ali, who heads the agency’s civil rights office.

School officials will face lawsuits even when they are ignorant about students’ statements, if a court later decides they “reasonably should have known” about their students’ conduct, said the statement.

So let me get this straight. School teachers and administrators are supposed to monitor every student’s behavior both inside and outside the school for something that might conform to some federal bureaucrat’s nebulous description of bullying? Is this for real? According to the government description, someone with a sufficiently thin skin could point to a Facebook post or hallway conversation that would bring the full force of government down on the school. What planet are these people from?

The remedies being pushed by administration officials will also violate students’ and families’ privacy rights, disregard student’s constitutional free-speech rights, spur expensive lawsuits against cash-strapped schools, and constrict school official’ ability to flexibly use their own anti-bullying policies to manage routine and unique issues, said the NSBA letter. The government has not responded to the NSBA letter.

The leading advocate for the expanded rules is Kevin Jennings, who heads the Education Department’s Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools. Jennings founded the Gay Lesbian Straight Education Network advocacy group, and raised at least $100,000 for the Obama campaign in 2008, according to Public Citizen, a left-of-center advocacy group. In an September 2010 interview on the government’s StopBullying.gov website, Jennings said that “in a truly safe school … students feel like they belong, they are valued, they feel physically and emotionally safe.”

Kevin Jennings and his GLSEN organization have a decidedly nefarious past (more here). Here’s an excerpt from the linked post:

Out of curiosity to see exactly what kind of books Kevin Jennings and his organization think American students should be reading in school, our team chose a handful at random from the over 100 titles on GLSEN’s grades 7-12 list, and began reading through.

What we discovered shocked us. We were flabbergasted. Rendered speechless.

We were unprepared for what we encountered. Book after book after book contained stories and anecdotes that weren’t merely X-rated and pornographic, but which featured explicit descriptions of sex acts between pre-schoolers; stories that seemed to promote and recommend child-adult sexual relationships; stories of public masturbation, anal sex in restrooms, affairs between students and teachers, five-year-olds playing sex games, semen flying through the air. One memoir even praised becoming a prostitute as a way to increase one’s self-esteem. Above all, the books seemed to have less to do with promoting tolerance than with an unabashed attempt to indoctrinate students into a hyper-sexualized worldview.

This whole thing sounds like something out of Orwell’s 1984. The best thing we can do is demand that congress abolish the Department of Education.

Feds to Dayton: Too few minorities passed your police test

The city of Dayton, OH desperately needs to hire new police recruits to replace a number of recent retirees. Unfortunately, the hiring process has been derailed by the US Department of Justice because not enough minorities passed the civil service test (story here).

The Dayton Police Department is lowering its testing standards for recruits.

It’s a move required by the U.S. Department of Justice after it says not enough African-Americans passed the exam.

Dayton is in desperate need of officers to replace dozens of retirees.  The hiring process was postponed for months because the D.O.J. rejected the original scores provided by the Dayton Civil Service Board, which administers the test.

Under the previous requirements, candidates had to get a 66% on part one of the exam and a 72% on part two.

The D.O.J. approved new scoring policy only requires potential police officers to get a 58% and a 63%.  That’s the equivalent of an ‘F’ and a ‘D’.

So, the Justice Department of Attorney General Eric “my people” Holder is putting race ahead of competence in matters of local law enforcement (more here). I thought the DOJ was supposed to be for all people of the US. I mean, isn’t this supposed to be the the era of the “post racial” presidency? I guess not…

And how do the folks in Dayton feel about this boot-to-the-face? Apparently even the local chapter of the NAACP doesn’t like it.

“It becomes a safety issue for the people of our community,” said Dayton Fraternal Order of Police President, Randy Beane.  “It becomes a safety issue to have an incompetent officer next to you in a life and death situation.”

“The NAACP does not support individuals failing a test and then having the opportunity to be gainfully employed,” agreed Dayton NAACP President Derrick Foward.

“If you lower the score for any group of people, you’re not getting the best qualified people for the job,” Foward said.

“We need to work with the youth and make them interested in becoming law enforcement officers and firefighters,” said Beane.  “Break down the barriers whether they are real or perceived, so we can move forward in this community.”

This is clearly a case where Holder and the DOJ are overstepping their authority. This is a local, not federal, civil service issue. It’s too bad the city doesn’t have the resources to tell Holder to butt out.

SEC employees “disciplined” for accessing porn on govt. computers

The SEC has finally “disciplined” 33 employees for accessing porn on their government computers (previous posts here and here). According to this story (from WLS-TV) all of the employees have now been “disciplined” or are receiving “counseling.”

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has now disciplined 33 employees for accessing pornography while on the job, using government computers.In this Intelligence Report: Many of them were lawyers and senior officials, and some were in Chicago.

Some of the employees spent every working hour looking at internet pornography then attributed their behavior to an addiction.

This conduct went on for at least five years in some cases and involved numerous high-ranking employees of the federal agency that regulates the securities industry in at least seven SEC offices including Chicago.

In the three years since the American financial system nearly crashed, some top staffers of the federal agency in charge of market recovery spent their days doing something else on their computers– including a senior attorney who spent eight hours a day in his office accessing so much pornography he ran out of hard drive storage and had to transfer photos and video to CDs and DVDs.

According to results of an internal pornography investigation, 33 employees at SEC offices, including Chicago, have now been disciplined or are receiving counseling, including an SEC accountant who searched for pornography via his government computer 16,000 times in a month, bypassing an internal government filter. He received a 14-day suspension.

All of the SEC workers cited for government ethics violations were paid at least $99,000 a year. Seventeen of them were considered senior-level employees earning annual salaries of as much as $222,000.

The SEC has almost 4000 employees and will soon hire more to accommodate the Dodd-Frank boot-to-the-face legislation passed last year. These 33 are just the ones they decided to go after. You can be sure that there are many, many more who either slipped under the radar or where considered little fish.

No details on the “discipline” but none were fired – some even claimed “victim” status. How do you think a private sector company would have handled this? Would any of these porn surfers still be employed?

Stop calling it Obamacare!

For over two years the massive government takeover of the health care industry, passed against the will of the people, has been known as “Obamacare.” Politicians, pundits, news media, bloggers – for and against, have used this term. After all, who wants to call it The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), when one word is sufficient? And wasn’t this massive, economy-killing boot-to-the-face a shining legislative victory for our dear comrade leader and the democrats? It should have an appropriate moniker.

According to this story (from The Hill), at least one democrat now believes that the term is somehow “divisive” and shouldn’t be used.

House Republicans and Democrats started Friday morning’s debate over whether to defund last year’s healthcare law, and as part of this debate sparred over whether members should be allowed to call that law “ObamaCare.”

After two House Republicans called it “ObamaCare,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) asked the chairman whether these “disparaging” remarks should be allowed on the House floor.

“That is a disparaging reference to the president of the United States; it is meant as a disparaging reference to the president of the United States, and it is clearly in violation of the House rules against that,” she said.

Because Wasserman Schultz only asked if it would be appropriate to curb the use of the term “ObamaCare,” the chairman said he would not rule on a hypothetical. But he did urge members to “refrain from engaging in personalities or descriptions about personalities in general.”

Hey Debbie, if this is such a good piece of legislation, how can it be disparaging to call it Obamacare? You would think the dear comrade would want his name attached  to it. And where have you been for the last two years while everyone has been calling it Obamacare?

The indirect warning had no effect on Republicans. Rep. Denny Rehberg (Mont.), who sponsored the amendment to defund the law, said he refers to it as ObamaCare and said, “You would think he wants his name attached to his signature legislation.

“So we call it what it is,” he continued. “It is ObamaCare. It’s a travesty. It is big government. It is not controlling healthcare costs, and it needs to be repealed and today we’re going to try to defund it to the best of our ability. And if we’re not successful this time, we’re going to try again and again and again until we either have a Senate that’s willing to pass it or a president that understands that we cannot do this to the American people.”

Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) followed Rehberg, and within minutes also called the law “ObamaCare.”

It is what it is…

FAIL: Feds “accidently” shut down 84,000 websites for bogus child porn

With laser-guided precision, the DOJ and Homeland Security dropped the hammer on some child porn websites over the weekend – 84,000 of them. The websites were seized and home pages were replaced with a page accusing them of distributing child porn. Great! Uh, wait a minute… I smell a FAIL coming… Ah yes, here it is (from Gizmodo):

“Operation Protect Our Children” sounded great! The Department of Justice and Homeland Security’s tag-team beatdown was supposed to seize ten criminal sites this past weekend. Instead, it shuttered 84,000 innocent domains. And replaced them with a banner labeling them as child porn traffickers. Whoops!

The 83,990 sites that weren’t hosting underage porn were stuck with a the gigantic graphic seen here for days after the error was realized. Not exactly a trivial accusation—and an extremely damaging one for the sites, which were mostly personal and small business pages. FreeDNS—the domain service behind the affected sites—was forced to comply with the takedown request by court order, but was clearly (and rightfully) pissed at the misuse of their system: “freedns.afraid.org has never allowed this type of abuse,” they commented. At the moment, nobody has any idea how the tremendous screwup happened.

The government’s response to this grossly inept boot-to-the-face? Oh well, at least we got those 10 kiddie porn sites shut down.

Surely, DoJ and DHS must be a little red in the face over the whole thing. Right? Right..? Nope. In a beaming statement released yesterday, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano heroically explained that “Each year, far too many children fall prey to sexual predators and all too often, these heinous acts are recorded in photos and on video and released on the Internet. DHS is committed to working with our law enforcement partners to shut down websites that promote child pornography to protect these children from further victimization.”

Child porn is certainly a disgusting problem and the purveyors should be vigorously prosecuted. Unfortunately the assclowns at DOJ and DHS used a tactical nuke instead of a flyswatter. The failure to at least admit that they made a mistake only rubs salt in the wound.

Why is our FAIL tolerance level so high for government?

“Operation Protect Our Children” sounded great! The Department of Justice and Homeland Security‘s tag-team beatdown was supposed to seize ten criminal sites this past weekend. Instead, it shuttered 84,000 innocent domains. And replaced them with a banner labeling them as child porn traffickers. Whoops!

FAIL: SEC fails audits seven years in a row

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was established in 1934 following the crash of the stock market. Its primary responsibility is the enforcement of federal securities laws and regulating the securities industry, the nation’s stock and options exchanges, and other electronic securities markets. While it may have done a decent job in the past, its recent performance (since about 2000) has been less than stellar, to put it mildly. It has been asleep at the switch for some of the biggest scandals and financial failures of the century and it has failed its own audits seven years running (story here from the NYT).

If a company’s financial reporting were so bad that its auditor had pointed out significant weaknesses in its accounting for seven years running, the Securities and Exchange Commission would most likely be all over it.

But what if the company were the S.E.C. itself?

Since the commission began producing audited statements in 2004, the Government Accountability Office has faulted its reporting almost every year. Last November, the G.A.O. said that the commission’s books were in such disarray that it had failed at some of the agency’s most fundamental tasks: accurately tracking income from fines, filing fees and the return of ill-gotten profits.

“A reasonable possibility exists that a material misstatement of S.E.C.’s financial statements would not be prevented, or detected and corrected on a timely basis,” the auditor concluded.

Since 2000 its budget has tripled and its staff has ballooned to almost 4000 employees.

…the S.E.C. is far from starved for money. Its $1.1 billion budget in 2010 was 15 percent higher than the $960 million it received the year before — and nearly triple its $377 million budget in 2000.

Representative Spencer T. Bachus, the Alabama Republican who is chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, said last week that the tripling of the S.E.C.’s budget occurred in a period that included some of the agency’s biggest failures — the Ponzi schemes of Bernard L. Madoff and R. Allen Stanford and the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers.

FAIL.

With the Dodd/Frank boot-to-the-face avalanche of new financial regulation coming into play, the SEC is about to become even more powerful – and costly.

Dodd-Frank did authorize a doubling of the commission’s budget, to $2.25 billion, over the next five years — without providing the money for it. It also authorized the commission to spend as much as $100 million beyond its operating budget for new technology systems.

Anticipating new employees, the S.E.C. has been busily leasing more office space — an effort that has drawn the attention of the agency’s inspector general. Last week, he began investigating the S.E.C.’s decision last July to lease more than a million square feet of prime office space in Washington, one of the largest federal leases in a decade.

Within a few months of that decision, its prospects for bigger budgets fading, the S.E.C. began negotiations to return some of the leased space. The latest inquiry is the second investigation of the S.E.C.’s leasing practices in a year. Last September, H. David Kotz, the inspector general, reported that a lack of adequate policies led the agency to make lease payments that could have been avoided, including more than $15 million for space in Manhattan that no S.E.C. employees have occupied in the last five years.

Typical. Government. FAIL. With no end in sight…

Half-cocked: NYC mayor investigates gun purchases – in Arizona

There’s little doubt that NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg is one of the top commanders of the Nanny State brigade. After literally buying his way into Gracie Mansion, Bloomberg has left little in the way of daily life untouched by NY nanny-statism (more here).

He’s added laws to the books that fine storeowners for having too many letters in their awnings, or ticket cars that are rendered immobile by snowstorms. And don’t even think about lighting up in a bar, sitting on a milk crate, or putting your bag down on the adjoining subway seat. The kind of velvet fascism that rules American corporate culture now rules Gotham, a city once celebrated for its louche glamour and gritty countercultural style, something many puritans wrongly misremember as being only coexistent with rampant crime.

Bloomberg is also one of the nation’s leading advocates of strict gun control policies because, you know, if we disarm the public, everyone will be safer. After all, everyone knows that criminals obey gun laws – right? He has long been an outspoken critic of “lax” gun laws in neighboring states – blaming them for the proliferation of guns in NYC. To prove his point about this, Bloomberg has sent “investigators,” paid by NY City, to make gun purchases at various locations – particularly gun shows in nearby states which do not require FBI background checks for private gun sales. While it may make some sense for someone to drive from NYC to Virginia or North Carolina to purchase a gun, Bloomberg’s latest foray is nothing but over-the-top grandstanding (story here).

Weeks after the shooting in Tucson, sellers at an Arizona gun show allowed undercover investigators hired by New York City to buy semiautomatic pistols even after they said they probably couldn’t pass a background check, Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Monday.

“After Tucson, you would think that people, particularly at a gun show in Arizona, would have been much more careful in enforcing the law,” he said. “That unfortunately in some cases wasn’t the case.”

Bloomberg has authorized similar sting operations around the country as part of a push for tougher federal laws to help keep guns off the streets of New York.

But in the sensitive aftermath of the shooting Jan. 8 that killed six people and critically wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, the mayor was questioned about the time and place of his hidden-camera investigation, a $100,000 operation conducted almost clear across the country.

“Let me get this straight: From New York City, they are going to send people to Arizona to look into this?” said state Sen. Ron Gould, a Republican. “They might take a look a little closer to home if they are concerned about guns getting in their state.”

Jim Cavanaugh, a retired agent for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, where he was in charge of the Nashville division, said he didn’t believe the sales described by the mayor were, in fact, illegal.

“It’s not a prosecutable offense” because the purchasers were not truly felons, minors or drug abusers and because they didn’t tell the sellers definitively that they were, Cavanaugh said. As for Bloomberg, he said, “ATF has asked him not to do it and to please coordinate with ATF if he thinks a violation is occurring.”

In 2007, the U.S. Justice Department warned in a letter to City Hall that such civilian operations risk “legal liabilities” and can “unintentionally interrupt or jeopardize ongoing criminal investigations.”

NYC to Phoenix, AZ – 2452 miles. Not exactly a day trip. So what’s this nonsense really about? Publicity for his cause.

The mayor conceded that most illegal guns in New York City are coming from states along the East Coast, but said the rampage in Tucson would bring national attention to the investigation.

The city-hired investigators also obtained a Glock gun and 33-round extended magazine similar to those authorities have said Jared Loughner used to open fire as Giffords met with constituents outside a supermarket.

Investigators have said Loughner legally purchased his ammunition the morning of the attack. He had cleared a federal background check and legally bought a Glock 19 at a big-box sporting goods store two months earlier.

So the whole point of this stunt is undermined by the fact that the Tucson gunman broke no federal or state laws and had actually cleared an FBI background check. Way to go Mike, now you’ve pissed off the toughest sheriff in the country to boot (more here).

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio is grumbling about Mayor Bloomberg’s undercover sting. He says his office wasn’t notified about the operation — and he’s taking aim at Bloomberg via Twitter.Arpaio tweeted about sending deputies to New York City to check out their gun and immigration laws. He also called out Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon.

“Where’s the coordination with this mayor flooding this area with investigators, paid by him or the City Council in New York?” Arpaio told FOX 10.

“I wonder if he got in touch with his buddy here the Mayor of Phoenix… I’ll be glad to send my volunteer posse or my people into New York to determine his problems that he has, so why is he worried about Arizona? We have good weapon laws; every citizen has the right to possess guns, so why is he concerned about it?”

Attorney General Tom Horne is blasting Bloomberg, calling the investigation nothing more than a publicity stunt.

The Phoenix Police Department told FOX 10 it was unaware of the sting.

Phoenix Police Chief Jack Harris said, “I think it was a little bit unfair to the city of Phoenix. To try to make an assumption or comparison that the tragedy down in Tucson had something to do with not doing background checks at a gun show, that there’s a correlation there, I don’t see that. The gun involved in the Tucson incident was purchased legally at a gun store.”

With a huge budget deficit, failing schools and crumbling infrastructure, mayor “No Salt” should probably direct his attention to issues closer to home. There must be some more things like “distracted walking” he needs to protect NYers from.

TSA bars more airports from converting to private security

While the TSA backed off on its Holiday travel grope-a-thon (more here), several airport authorities announced that they would be dropping TSA security for private screeners (more here). Since 2002 sixteen airports have replaced TSA screeners with private security and a larger number began considering similar moves.

Some of the nation’s biggest airports are responding to recent public outrage over security screening by weighing whether they should hire private firms such as Covenant to replace the Transportation Security Administration. Sixteen airports, including San Francisco and Kansas City International Airport, have made the switch since 2002. One Orlando airport has approved the change but needs to select a contractor, and several others are seriously considering it.

The Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority, which governs Dulles International and Reagan National airports, is studying the option, spokeswoman Tara Hamilton said.

For airports, the change isn’t about money. At issue, airport managers and security experts say, is the unwieldy size and bureaucracy of the federal aviation security system. Private firms may be able to do the job more efficiently and with a personal touch, they argue.

Airports that choose private screeners must submit the request to the TSA. There are no specific criteria for approval, but federal officials can decide whether to grant the request “based on the airport’s record of compliance on security regulations and requirements.” The TSA pays for the cost of the screening and has the final say on which company gets the contract.

Up until last week the TSA has remained “neutral” on these moves. According to this story (from CNN) that has changed. TSA head John Pistone is shutting down the program because he “sees no advantage” in continuing it. No advantage, that is, for the TSA.

A program that allows airports to replace government screeners with private screeners is being brought to a standstill, just a month after the Transportation Security Administration said it was “neutral” on the program.TSA chief John Pistole said Friday he has decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports, saying he does not see any advantage to it.

“I examined the contractor screening program and decided not to expand the program beyond the current 16 airports as I do not see any clear or substantial advantage to do so at this time,” Pistole said.

He said airports that currently use contractor screening will continue to be allowed to.

During the grope-a-thon brouhaha Rep. John Mica (R-FL) wrote a letter encouraging airports to dump the TSA in favor of private contractors. Mica is not amused with Pistone’s move to shut the program down.

Told of the change Friday night, Mica said he intends to launch an investigation and review the matter.

“It’s unimaginable that TSA would suspend the most successfully performing passenger screening program we’ve had over the last decade,” Mica said Friday night. “The agency should concentrate on cutting some of the more than 3,700 administrative personnel in Washington who concocted this decision, and reduce the army of TSA employees that has ballooned to more than 62,000.”

“Nearly every positive security innovation since the beginning of TSA has come from the contractor screening program,” Mica said.

Of course, the union that covers TSA employees supports Pistone’s decision.

A union for Transportation Security Administration employees said it supported the decision to halt the program.

“The nation is secure in the sense that the safety of our skies will not be left in the hands of the lowest-bidder contractor, as it was before 9/11,” said John Gage, president of the American Federation of Government Employees. “We applaud Administrator Pistole for recognizing the value in a cohesive federalized screening system and work force.”

In its 9 year existence the TSA has not caught a single terrorist or prevented a single terrorist attack. They have, however, stopped a 4 year old boy with leg braces (potential terrorist) from boarding a plane to Orlando for a trip to Disney World (more here). And they’ve groped thousands of old folks and children because, you know, they may be terrorists. Even pilots and flight crews have been subject to TSA abuse, although they’ve been forced to modify those procedures (more here).

As with any other government agency, the TSA has been a miserable failure. At an annual cost of over $10B/yr it represents the type of low hanging fruit ripe for picking by congressional budget cutters. While private contractors may not provide a significant security advantage over the TSA, you can bet that they would be more responsive to the needs and concerns of the traveling public. You know, the folks who are paying for it.

TSA hard at work

NY lawmaker wants ban on “walking & talking” – Huh? WTF???

In the race to determine which state can impose the most ridiculous nanny-state sanctions on its beleaguered citizens, NY is certainly a perennial top contender. In the pitifully small and simple minds of NY’s ruling elite, New Yorkers are just incapable of protecting themselves from the dangers of daily life. Thus, being the benevolent shepherds that they are, the ruling class must do what they can to steer their flock through the minefield of life in the Empire State. After all, New Yorkers, this is for your own good. These people are trying to save you.

Without supporting research, it is difficult to discern what type of threshold must be crossed to trigger a nanny-state reaction in the pea brain of a NY politician. The only known fact is that the threshold is exceedingly low, and it covers a broad spectrum of seemingly innocuous activities. According to this story the latest activity that must be banned is “distracted walking.” You know, like crossing a street while talking on a cell phone or listening to music. Huh? WTF?

After targeting distracted drivers, some New York lawmakers want to go after distracted walkers. They are looking to ban them from using iPods, music players and cell phones while walking and crossing the street.

At E.A.T. restaurant on Madison Avenue they still haven’t gotten over the death of co-worker Jason King, killed last month when a truck hit him as he crossed the street while listening to his iPod.

Jason was just 21 and his death and along with other accidents involving people using electronic gadgets while walking is why Brooklyn Sen. Karl Kruger is looking to ban things like cell phones and iPods for pedestrians crossing the street.

“We have people who are literally dying in the street,” Kruger said.

Dying, Kruger said, not because they are distracted drivers but because they are distracted walkers.

OMG! People are literally dying in the street! Not from gunshots or assaults, but from “distracted walking.” Oh, the humanity! They even found some sheeple who agree with this.

Charles Tabasso, 14, admitted he’s one of them because he listens to his iPod constantly.“I would probably get run over right now if it weren’t for my awesome parents,” Tabasso said.

His mom agreed.

“As a parent I am definitely in favor of banning these things,” Tullia Tabasso said.

And as a parent, Tullia, you’re an idiot for wanting the government to do your job for you. You’re part of the problem and the government is not the solution.

Some said they object to the move as an intrusion by government into the everyday lives of people — the nanny state syndrome.

“When people are doing things that are detrimental to their own well being, then government should step in,” Kruger said.

No senator Kruger, the government should not step in. Shit happens, and sometimes bad shit happens. Millions of people walk the streets of NY every day and it’s probably safe to assume that at least 50% of them are “distracted” in one way or another. As much as you would like to wrap everyone in your government-issue straight jacket, it is not the role of government to protect a few stupid people from harm by punishing everyone.

Taxpayers bail out Fannie & Freddie for legal bills too

Back in 2004 the top officials of Fannie Mae were forced to resign in disgrace for an Enron-like accounting scandal that was designed to boost their bonuses and executive compensation (more here). Fannie Mae was also forced to pay hundreds of millions to settle lawsuits and fines by the SEC. At the head of this political criminal enterprise was Franklin Raines, appointed CEO by president Clinton in 1999. From 1999 – 2004 Raines received over $90M in salary and bonuses, of which, according to the SEC, $52M was “improperly awarded.” Raines, along with corruptocrat former senator Chris Dodd, was also part of the Countrywide VIP loan scandal. In 2008 dear comrade candidate employed Raines as a “financial adviser” because of his, um, extensive experience (more here). More on Raines extensive experience here (from Michelle Malkin).

While Raines and his plundering crew may have left Fannie in 2004, the legal bills associated with his criminal enterprise continue to mount. Thus far, the federal government has spent over $160M in legal fees defending Fannie & Freddie (story here from the NY Times) in civil lawsuits. Great – talk about adding insult to injury.

Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.

The bulk of those expenditures — $132 million — went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating.

Not included in this $160M are the tens of millions in legal fees spent by the GSEs prior to the government takeover.

In addition to the $160 million in taxpayer money, Fannie and Freddie themselves spent millions of dollars to defend former executives and directors before the government takeover. Freddie Mac had spent a total of $27.8 million. The expenses are significantly larger at Fannie Mae.

Legal costs incurred by Mr. Raines, Mr. Howard and Ms. Spencer in the roughly four and a half years prior to the government takeover totaled almost $63 million. The total incurred before the bailout by other high-level executives and board members was around $12 million, while an additional $18 million covered fees for lawyers for Fannie Mae officials below the level of executive vice president. Many of these individuals are provided lawyers because they are witnesses in the matters.

After the government moved to back Fannie and Freddie, the Federal Housing Finance Agency agreed to continue paying to defend the executives, with the taxpayers covering the costs.

Jeffrey Skilling (former Enron president) got 24 years in the slammer for his part in the Enron scam. Ken Lay (Enron CEO) would have gotten a similar sentence but he died before his sentencing hearing. Yet the taxpayers are forced to defend the perpetrators of the same scams at Fannie & Freddie. It would have been cheaper to prosecute them and send them off to prison.

US still gives “foreign aid” to China – Huh? WTF?

There’s little doubt that China has become a major player in the world economy. While using virtual slave labor to flood the world marketplace with cheap goods, their own markets are all but closed to foreign trade. Foreign companies (including US companies) have packed up and moved to China to take advantage of cheap labor and try to gain a foothold in the Chinese marketplace.

While the Chinese economy has shown signs of weakening in recent months, they are still buying US long term debt and have even offered to bail out the failing EU. So the question of the day is this: Why is the US still sending foreign aid to China? (story here from Investor’s Business Daily)

While Chinese President Hu flaunted his country’s power during his Western tour, his No. 2 economy raked in billions in Western aid. That’s right. We’re still subsidizing China. Why?According to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, foreign aid to China totals $2.6 billion a year. The biggest donor is Japan, followed by Germany, France and Britain, then the U.S. All of these countries, meanwhile, are in debt to China and running massive deficits.

U.S. aid, at $65 million a year, is relatively small thanks to sanctions imposed following Beijing’s 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators at Tiananmen Square. Still, why are we sending China any succor at all?

OK, so $65M a year is chump change when you consider we spend about $50B (that we don’t have) on foreign aid. But why are we giving anything at all to China? Especially when we’re essentially borrowing it from them in the first place. Couldn’t that $65M be better spent, say, on cancer research? With an average tax liability of approximately $10,000 per family, $65M represents the sweat equity of about 6500 US families to pay for this foolishness.

If the government is really serious about cutting spending, here’s a no brainer…

FCC conditions for Comcast-NBCU merger – BOHICA Comcast customers

After agreeing to stipulations by the FCC, the Comcast-NBC Universal merger is a done deal. While some of Comcast’s costs for this deal would be passed on to their customers anyway, the conditions mandated by the FCC will more than likely add even more to the monthly Comcast bill. BOHICA!

Here are some of the more interesting mandates from the FCC (post here).

“Comcast will make available to approximately 2.5 million low income households: (i) high-speed Internet access service for less than $10 per month; (ii) personal computers, netbooks, or other computer equipment at a purchase price below $150″ and “we require Comcast-NBCU to increase programming diversity by expanding its over the-air programming to the Spanish language-speaking community, and by making NBCU’s Spanish-language broadcast programming available via Comcast’s on demand and online platforms.”

So Comcast must provide computers and $10/month internet service to 2.5M “low income” households because, you know, internet access is a human right. While Comcast must provide this benefit, you can bet that they aren’t going to pay for it out of the goodness of their heart. No, Comcast will simply pass this along to their subscribers as a cost of doing business. So get ready for yet another rate increase courtesy of the FCC.

 

Dear comrade to propose even more deficit spending

Imagine this scenario: You get a brilliant idea that you can beat the odds in Las Vegas. You mortgage your home to the hilt, empty your savings accounts and your kid’s piggybank and drop it all on a single roll of the roulette wheel. Naturally, you lose everything. So, what now? Well, being broke you don’t have a lot of options. But if you’re a bureaucrat and you’re playing with someone else’s money, the answer is simple – double down. That’s essentially what our dear comrade leader will be suggesting in his upcoming State Of The Union (SOTU) speech. Because he’s, you know, focused like a laser on the economy (story here from the WSJ).

President Barack Obama will call for new government spending on infrastructure, education and research in his State of the Union address Tuesday, sharpening his response to Republicans in Congress who are demanding deep budget cuts, people familiar with the speech said.

Mr. Obama will argue that the U.S., even while trying to reduce its budget deficit, must make targeted investments to foster job growth and boost U.S. competitiveness in the world economy. The new spending could include initiatives aimed at building the renewable-energy sector—which received billions of dollars in stimulus funding—and rebuilding roads to improve transportation, people familiar with the matter said. Money to restructure the No Child Left Behind law’s testing mandates and institute more competitive grants also could be included.

“Targeted investments.” Isn’t that what his mega-”stimulus” was supposed to do? It’s clear now that the “stimulus” only stimulated trillions of new debt and was a total FAIL. It’s clear that the government only created government jobs while killing private sector employment. The regime’s economic “geniuses” predicted that unemployment would be around 7% right now, yet it continues to hover around 9.5% – higher than they predicted it would be without “stimulus.” With the national debt breaching $14T there’s nothing left to spend.

It is also anticipated that the dear comrade will propose “significant” budget cuts. We’ll just have to wait for the details to see how serious he is about this. I have my doubts.

While proposing new spending, Mr. Obama also will lay out significant budget cuts elsewhere, people familiar with the plans say, though they will likely fall short of what Republican lawmakers have requested.

In arguing that U.S. competitiveness is at stake, Mr. Obama plans to use his nationally televised speech to try to frame the spending debate with Republicans that is expected to dominate Congress in the coming months. “We seek to do everything we can to spur hiring and ensure our nation can compete with anybody on the planet,” Mr. Obama said Friday after touring a General Electric Co. plant in Schenectady, N.Y. He cited clean-energy manufacturing, infrastructure and education as keys to competitiveness.

Previewing the expected theme of his speech, Mr. Obama on Friday appointed GE Chief Executive Jeffrey Immelt to lead a new President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

Commenting on the new advisory panel, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) said that unless its “first recommendations are to reverse the damage the policies of the last two years have done to the business climate, job creation and the exploding national debt, I fear it will do more to create good public relations for the White House than good jobs for struggling Americans.”

Republicans are casting the White House’s pivot toward competitiveness as an excuse for bigger government and more spending. They say a surge in federal spending and a $1.3 trillion budget deficit are impeding job creation, and dramatic spending cuts are needed immediately.

While House republicans are calling for $100B in spending cuts this year, I hold no hope that they have the guts to do what really needs to be done. Cutting $100B from a $4T budget (with $1.3T in deficit spending) is not significant. That’s 2.5% – pretty much a rounding error. It’s like trying to use a band aid when you really need a tourniquet.

UPDATE: I found this post over at Powerline pretty interesting. The graphic clearly shows the effects of massive government “stimulus” on job growth.

Yet if there is one thing we know with an empirical certainty, it is that increasing federal spending will not, on balance, create more jobs. Of course, whenever the government spends money someone is employed, or, at least, gets to cash a check. This is what Obama had in mind when he said–in a moment of supreme cluelessness–”spending equals stimulus.” What Obama apparently does not understand is that government spending consumes resources, often inefficiently, that could better be used elsewhere. Whenever the government wastes resources, the country grows poorer and job growth is suppressed. This, in crude terms, is why the ballooning public expenditures of recent years have not caused a boom in the job market.

It is blindingly obvious that spending does not equal stimulus, and increasing federal spending will not create jobs. There are two possibilities here. One is that Obama is one of the last people in America who have not figured this out. The other is that Obama knows his proposals are dumb, from an economic standpoint, but doesn’t care. The one thing that more government spending will accomplish is to slide more money to Barack Obama’s cronies and to various constituencies of the Democratic Party. Maybe that is all Obama ever wanted.

Good points.

Million$ in college grants for bogus “green jobs”

The federal government has been very busy on the “green jobs” front – spending lots of your money creating nebulous jobs (which they couldn’t define) that ultimately end up in China. Recently the regime simply labeled all jobs as green jobs (more here), including financial advisers, wholesale buyers and reporters. This allowed them to speciously claim that the government has created 200,000 “green jobs.” Hmmm…

According to this story (from the Daily Caller), the Labor Department has gotten into the act by providing grants to colleges and universities to train students in “green jobs” technologies. What could possibly go wrong?

The Department of Labor has issued several million dollars in grants to community colleges and specialized universities around the country to train students for “green jobs” in renewable energy fields. While the grants are supposed to fund the future “rank and file” workers of the renewable energy industry, there’s a glaring problem the DOL seemingly overlooked — those jobs are either non-existent or scarce.

A former college official who has applied for these grants and has in-depth experience working with the Department of Labor and the Department of Education told The Daily Caller that colleges will often fudge expected job placement numbers just to get extra government cash.

“On ground level – it’s a real struggle – my grant writers came to me and honestly said, ‘I don’t have any job projections, what do I tell them?’ You do your best to make up job numbers,” said the former college official, who wished to remain anonymous to prevent jeopardizing future job opportunities. “But it’s not like lying – it’s just guessing what we might be able to do in a best case scenario, but you don’t say it’s not likely for many jobs.”

The former college official told TheDC that, though his college received five different “green jobs” grants from the Department of Labor to train students, no program has been set up yet.

Let me see if I’ve got this straight:

• The government is giving taxpayer money to colleges to train students for jobs that either don’t exist or can’t be defined.
• The colleges don’t have a clue on job projections so they’re making up numbers based on “best case” scenarios.
• The colleges may be inflating the numbers of potential jobs to get more money.
• While they have already received the grant money, few of the programs have actually been implemented.

Jeez, sounds like a winning formula to me. I think I’ll start Da Mook College of Green Stuff. I could offer courses in “How to Use 7 Union Workers to Screw in a CFL Bulb” or “Let’s Build a Wind Turbine – In China.” The feds would fall over themselves to give me grant money! SHEESH!

It’s not like these grants are being given to research and development programs at big name schools focusing on developing new renewable energy technology, either. They’re being given to universities and community colleges to train students in technical or associate degree programs to work in yet-to-be-developed fields. Many of the grants are promised to colleges that pledged to push “green jobs” or “new energy technology,” but don’t go into much more detail about how they plan to go about doing that.

The former college official told TheDC that, though solar and wind are emerging energy sources and though some people around the country are interested in making their homes or businesses “greener,” he thinks there isn’t enough business to support the people being trained to go into these industries. Colleges, he said, are simply incapable of turning down free government money.

Free money indeed. Who the hell do they think pays for this bullshit?

HUD punishes Marin County, CA for being “too white”

Bucolic, affluent, ultra-liberal Marin County (California) apparently has a minority problem – at least according to the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). You see, Marin Co. is over 80% white so there must be a “diversity” problem. Forget the fact that even after housing prices have taken a steep plunge, the average price of a single family home in Marin Co. is still $676,000. HUD is out to change the landscape – they simply can’t abide these bastions of rich white folks (story here from PajamasMedia).

Did you see the hilarious spoof in The Onion the other day — “Marin Agrees to Seek Out Minorities”? “Marin County,” the post begins, “has agreed to research why it has so few minority residents relative to the rest of the Bay Area and to take specific actions to attract more low-income people and ethnic minorities to the affluent county, which is more than 80 percent white.” This agreement, the post continued in the same vein, was not really voluntary; it was forced upon the affluent suburban county, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, by the federal diversity police.

How funny is that?

Way too funny, it happens, for The Onion to dream up — or anyone else. No, “Marin Agrees to Seek Out Minorities” was not an Onion spoof but an actual article in The New York Times about an actual agreement that HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity for Region IX foisted on Marin.

The agreement, signed last month with the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development, came more than a year after the agency found that the county failed to comply with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and two other antidiscrimination statutes.

The review found that Marin County’s federally financed affordable-housing programs failed to reach out adequately to minorities and people with disabilities, failed to adequately track which ethnic groups were benefiting from those programs, and failed to take steps to ensure that low-income and minority residents were not pushed out.

“The jurisdiction has an obligation to take actions that affirm housing is fair and that there’s choice,” Charles E. Hauptman, regional director for fair housing and equal opportunity at HUD, said in an interview.

HUD obliged Marin County, represented for five terms by legendary liberal “Call Me” Senator Barbara Boxer, to expatiate its guilt for discriminating against minorities who weren’t there by recruiting and housing more of them.

Being ultra-liberal and suffering from extreme white guilt, Marin simply caved to the HUD assault instead of telling the feds to take a hike.

After all the meetings and forms and data collection and training, of course, is the required affirmative action: wherever “under-representation” was identified, “affirmative marketing and outreach strategies targeting the under-represented groups” must be developed and implemented. Where “Asian and Hispanic populations” with “Limited English Proficiency” are among the under-represented, a “Language Assistance Plan” must be developed “as a means of increasing their participation in affordable housing programs and public service activities.”

These sorts of requirements go on for over eight pages. Many are stellar, but perhaps my favorite is III(E), which requires “Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH).” Section 1 requires the County to complete “an Analysis of Impediments to Fair Housing Choice (AI)” that must include, among other items, identification and analysis of “the causes of lower racial and ethnic minority residency in the County relative to adjacent counties” and “the actions the Recipient will take to address those impediments.”

So there it is. The biggest “Impediment” to fair housing in Marin, one of America’s 25 richest counties, would seem to be that, according to the 2000 Census, it is only 2.9% black and only 5.7% Mexican. (It is also 0.2% Puerto Rican and 0.1% Cuban; does HUD care if those groups are “under-represented” among the Hispanics who are “represented”?) Both Sonoma County to the north (6.6% black in 2009) and San Francisco County to the south (6.7%) are doing much better. Those counties are also doing far better than Marin in attracting people of Limited English Proficiency. According to this November 2010 “Assessment of Limited English Proficient Populations” in the Bay Area, only 7.5% of Marin’s population speaks English “less than very well,” compared to 10.5% in Sonoma County and 22.1% in San Francisco County.

HUD is right; clearly Marin is falling down on the job of attracting minorities. Perhaps it could offer relocation bonuses, homestead tax exemptions, and other tax benefits to minorities to move there, especially Hispanics and Asians with limited English proficiency, so they could not be discriminated against in public housing and other services.

This is not only ridiculous on a social level, it completely ignores the economic factors of the situation. Like, you know, most poor minorities simply can’t afford a $675,000 home. Perhaps HUD should carpet bomb the area with Section 8 housing vouchers – that would teach those white snobs.

What’s next for the federal government? There are still a bunch of states that are over 90% white – a target rich environment for the diversity police.

Illinois pounds taxpayers with 66% income tax increase

With a hat tip to the hideous 111th congress, the Illinois legislature passed, and governor Pat Quinn signed, a whopping tax increase on personal and corporate income. The 66% increase in personal income taxes (from 3% to 5%) and 49% increase in business taxes (from 4.8% to 7%) vaults Illinois to the top nationwide in combined personal and corporate taxes. Of course, since businesses only pass their taxes along to consumers as a cost of business, the taxpayers of Illinois will bear this burden as well (story here).

Closing out a contentious lame-duck legislative session, Illinois Democrats handed Gov. Quinn a major political victory early Wednesday by voting to raise the state income tax by 66 percent and buy him some financial stability for his first full term in office.

The state Senate voted 30-29 at 1:20 a.m. to send the tax-hike package to the governor about 10 minutes after paramedics carried state Rep. David Miller (D-Lynwood) off the Senate floor on a stretcher.

Miller was taken to St. John’s Hospital, but as of 6 a.m., he had been released, according to hospital spokeswoman Sherry Puccetti. Puccetti said she believed he was treated for dizziness.

Miller, the Democratic candidate for state comptroller in the November elections, collapsed at about 12:45 a.m. while watching the Senate debate. The 48-year-old lawmaker’s sudden illness cast a pall over the tax vote.

The boost in the amount the state withholds from workers paychecks from 3 percent to 5 percent would drain $800 from the household budget of a family earning $40,000 a year and take effect immediately if the governor signs off.

The tax vote represented only part of what Quinn, House Speaker Michael Madigan (D-Chicago) and Senate President John Cullerton (D-Chicago) sought to shore up an expected $15 billion budget deficit.

Also included in the toxic legislation was authorization to borrow an additional $4B to cover out of control state employee pension obligations – in other words, to kick the can further down the road. Clueless majority democrats lamented the fact that they might have “left something on the table” as they considered even more pain for the taxpayers.

“It wasn’t easy, but we made it through. We accomplished a lot,” said Madigan, who passed the tax hike by a razor-thin 60-57 margin in his chamber. “We could have accomplished more.”

After the Senate vote on the income-tax hike, senators approved a $4 billion borrowing plan already approved by the House that would cover what the state owes this year to its five pension systems.

In the House, the budget vote followed roughly 90 minutes of debate in which ruling Democrats argued there was no other alternative but to raise the income tax to fund vital state-funded human services and education programs afloat.

“Illinois is in crisis, absolute financial crisis, and there is no way we can dig ourselves out of the crisis without increased revenues,” said House Majority Leader Barbara Flynn Currie (D-Chicago), the bill’s chief House sponsor.

Of course spending cuts don’t come to mind with these morons. The $15B deficit is a result of years of profligate spending, political corruption, and unrealistic benefit concessions to the public employee unions. But let’s pound the taxpayers to make up for it. BOHICA!

Meanwhile this has not gone unnoticed by surrounding states who are hoping to capitalize on the anticipated exodus of businesses and wealth producers from dysfunctional Illinois (story here from the WSJ).

Illinois this week earned the honor of becoming the first state in 2011 to sock it to taxpayers, passing a tax hike the size of Lake Michigan. Citizens cried out, legislators deflected, but the most interesting response came from neighboring Wisconsin, where newly elected GOP Gov. Scott Walker had three words for Illinois businesses: “Escape to Wisconsin.”

Across the country, dozens of new governors are taking office, fine-tuning state-of-the-state addresses, polishing budgets. With each event we are seeing a growing national divide.

On one side are wide swathes of the country that this past midterm elected reformers intent on slashing spending and reviving growth. On the other are the holdout pockets—Illinois, California, Massachusetts, Connecticut—drifting further into the abyss of tax and spend. The chasm has huge implications, not just for local and regional politics but for Washington.

Mr. Walker is painting that gulf as big as the Grand Canyon, this week blitzing the Chicago media markets to let suffering Illinois businesses know that while their governor, Pat Quinn, levies a 50% increase in corporate income taxes, Wisconsin is working to enact the total elimination of corporate income taxes for two years for firms that migrate. The “Escape to Wisconsin” line comes from an old tourism campaign, but Mr. Walker thinks it sums up the business choice perfectly. “We’re going to send out that line to every employer in the state of Illinois,” he tells me.

And Wisconsin isn’t the only state willing to siphon off Illinois wealth producers. Indianna Governor Mitch Daniels, a potential 2012 republican presidential candidate, has been doing it for years.

Indiana GOP Gov. Mitch Daniels, who has spent six years taking competitive advantage of dysfunctional neighbors, jokes that living next to Illinois is like “living next to the Simpsons.” He attests to the benefits, noting that Illinois-based Caterpillar recently chose to direct a major investment to build locomotives to Muncie, Ind. And while he recognizes he’s now got some competition, he sees the combined force of reformers in Wisconsin, Michigan and Ohio creating a “divide that could operate long-term in the Midwest’s favor.”

Many states have slashed budgets and used pro-growth tax policy to revive their fortunes. No state has taxed and spent itself to prosperity. As the road that Indiana and Wisconsin and Ohio are on diverges ever more successfully from that of high-tax states, Mr. Daniels says the pressure for change in the latter will grow: “The federal system has a wonderful built-in self-correction mechanism.”

By perpetuating the corrupt Chicago machine-driven government, the taxpayers of Illinois only have themselves to blame. Will they reject their hideous government or leave for friendlier environs? Only time will tell but the clock is ticking on the fiscal collapse of the state economy. If things keep going the way they are, it won’t be long before the rest of us will be forced to bail them out.

UGH…

US Customs saves woman from chocolate egg

Dangerous contraband

More nanny-state drama. According to this story (from Reason Magazine), US Customs confiscated a Kinder Chocolate Surprise candy egg from a Canadian woman at the US border.

Lind Bird had no idea she was in posession of illegal goods when she tried to cross the border from Canada to the United States with a $2 chocolate Kinder Surprise egg in her car. But astute U.S. customs officials detected her confectionery contraband at once, and seized it from the appropriately-named Bird.Little did Bird know, the Kinder egg could have resulted in a $300 fine. The toy surprise inside has been declared an unacceptable choking hazard by U.S. officials. (I’ve never had a Kinder Surprise egg, but a gander at the image at right suggests you’d have to be awfully intent on getting that chocolate into your system not to notice the huge, bright yellow plastic capsule inside.)

Instead of getting to chow down on a chocolate egg when she got home, Bird was treated to a 7-page letter from U.S. customs officials seeking official permission to destroy the egg.

“I thought it was a joke. I had to read it twice. But they are serious,” she said.

The letter states if Bird wishes to contest the seizure, she’ll have to pay $250 for it to be stored as the two sides wrangle over it.

Bird is far from along in having run afoul (afowl?) of the anti-egg law:

The U.S. takes catching illegal Kinder candy seriously, judging by the number of them they’ve confiscated in the last year. Officials said they’ve seized more than 25,000 of the treats in 2,000 separate seizures.

Please MAKE IT STOP!