Internet Scofflaw

Zero-tolerance policies are generally stupid, because they are rarely written with enough care to ensure justice is done and injustice is not. If you’re going to institute a sloppy policy, you had better not make enforce it punctiliously.

When you do, you get asinine situations like the 17-year-old North Carolina girl who has been expelled from school because she accidentally brought a paring knife to school in her lunch box.

But that’s not the bad part. The really bad part is the school’s officials are lying to justify their decision.

The end-of-life planning provision is back. It was deleted from the health care nationalization bill over concerns that the elderly would be pressured into consenting to end their lives, but now it’s back, as part of the regulations being written by the Obama administration.

The new provision is more aggressive than the earlier attempt, in that it pays for the planning sessions every year, rather than every five years:

Section 1233 of the bill passed by the House in November 2009 — but not included in the final legislation — allowed Medicare to pay for consultations about advance care planning every five years. In contrast, the new rule allows annual discussions as part of the wellness visit.

Supporters of the provision did their best to keep it quiet:

After learning of the administration’s decision, Mr. Blumenauer’s [D-OR, the provision’s original author] office celebrated “a quiet victory,” but urged supporters not to crow about it. “While we are very happy with the result, we won’t be shouting it from the rooftops because we aren’t out of the woods yet,” Mr. Blumenauer’s office said in an e-mail in early November to people working with him on the issue. . .

Moreover, the e-mail said: “We would ask that you not broadcast this accomplishment out to any of your lists, even if they are ‘supporters’ — e-mails can too easily be forwarded.”

The e-mail continued: “Thus far, it seems that no press or blogs have discovered it, but we will be keeping a close watch and may be calling on you if we need a rapid, targeted response. The longer this goes unnoticed, the better our chances of keeping it.”

(Previous post.)

That’s what the New York Post is reporting:

Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned.

Miles of roads stretching from as north as Whitestone, Queens, to the south shore of Staten Island still remained treacherously unplowed last night because of the shameless job action, several sources and a city lawmaker said, which was over a raft of demotions, attrition and budget cuts.

“They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,” said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.

This would be a delicious story, and I hate to pour cold water on it, but I’m skeptical. This sort of thing is done all the time in Europe — screw the public to show your union’s power — but it’s always done openly. Doing it in secret doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. What would it accomplish?

(Via Instapundit.)

Sometimes unintended consequences are also entirely predictable consequences. The credit card “reform” act is drying up credit for poor credit risks, which is forcing them to payday lenders.

Nice job, Democrats. Once again, you’ve screwed the people you professed to be trying to help. As bad as credit card interest rates are, payday lending rates are an order of magnitude worse.

Congress find a new way to earmark that circumvents the earmark ban and is almost impossible for the public to track.

Iowahawk has some good employment tips for people leaving Capitol Hill.

At what point are the “rich” paying enough? Taxation is more progressive in the United States than any other leading economy.

(Via Instapundit.)

Over the last few months we’ve been noticing around here that our dishwasher doesn’t work as well as it used to. I assumed that it was simply wearing out (which would be annoying since it’s only a few years old). But it turns out that my dishwasher is innocent: Pennsylvania instituted a phosphate ban in July. Phosphate-free dishwashing detergent doesn’t work as well.

It seems that phosphates are bad because they act as a fertilizer. Sewage treatment plants can’t get all of them out, so they end up in the water where they promote algae and aquatic vegetation. Too much algae and plants, environmentalists say, are bad for fish.

This strikes me as an idiotic environmental tradeoff, entirely apart from the reduction in human quality of life. People aren’t going to accept dirty dishes; they are going to wash them again. So in order to cut back on algae, these bans are going to increase human water usage. You think algae is bad for fish, how do you think the fish will react to not having any water?!

Okay, the coefficients of the tradeoff probably aren’t as bad as that for the fish, but many places have severe water shortages already. Imposing a rule that requires more water is idiocy, aside from being a pain in the posterior.

(Via the Corner.)

UPDATE: Replaced a stale link.

Sigh. In a competitive market there are two kinds of price caps: caps above the equilibrium price, which are irrelevant, and caps below the equilibrium price, which cause shortages. There are no exceptions. Ever. This is literally day one of any introductory economics class.

I guess President Obama feels that just because it has never worked and fundamentally can’t is no reason not to try.

POSTSCRIPT: Nice editorializing, NYT:

In a move to protect consumers, the Obama administration said Tuesday that it would require health insurance companies to disclose and justify any rate increases of 10 percent or more next year.

(Emphasis mine.) Price controls may have many effects, but the one thing they won’t do is protect consumers.

(Via the Corner.)

Well this doesn’t instill confidence:

The White House counterterrorism adviser acknowledged Wednesday that the reason the nation’s top intelligence official was stumped on an interview question two days ago about a major set of terror arrests in Great Britain was because his staff hadn’t told him about it.

Adviser John Brennan said that Director of National Intelligence James Clapper should have been kept abreast of the situation and that “steps” are being taken to ensure he’s not kept in the dark on such significant developments in the future. But Brennan defended Clapper, calling him the “consummate DNI.”

It doesn’t help that Brennan went on to defend Clapper’s ignorance on the matter.

UPDATE: At first Clapper’s office tried to blame Diane Sawyer, claiming her question was “ambiguous”, before admitting the truth. (Admit nothing, deny everything, make counter accusations.)

Also, Janet Napolitano tries to defend Clapper:

NAPOLITANO: Well, let’s — let’s be fair. It — I knew. John Brennan knew. We also knew there was no connect that had been perceived to anything going on in the homeland and that we were in perfect connectivity with our — our colleagues in Britain. So one of the things I think that should be very clear to the American people is that those of us in homeland security who needed to know, we knew.

This is idiotic. Obviously, because the DNI’s mandate is not just the homeland. But more importantly because the US embassy was a target. (Via Hot Air.)

Sarah Palin is frequently quoted as saying “I can see Russia from my house.” I never heard her say that, so without knowing the context, I assumed that she was using hyperbole. Obviously you can’t see Russia from Wasilla or Juneau and no one is likely to be confused on that point.

But, as it turns out, there is a reason I never heard Palin say it: she didn’t. The line is not from Palin, but from Tina Fey’s parody of Palin.

. . . is found to be not-so-mythical in Oregon. That state imposed a confiscatory tax on high-income ($200k) taxpayers, and saw it fall flat on its face:

Instead of $180 million collected last year from the new tax, the state received $130 million. The Eugene Register-Guard newspaper reports that after the tax was raised “income tax and other revenue collections began plunging so steeply that any gains from the two measures seemed trivial.”

One reason revenues are so low is that about one-quarter of the rich tax filers seem to have gone missing. The state expected 38,000 Oregonians to pay the higher tax, but only 28,000 did. Funny how that always happens. These numbers are in line with a Cascade Policy Institute study, based on interstate migration patterns, predicting that the tax surcharge would lead to 80,000 fewer wealthy tax filers in Oregon over the next decade.

The Laffer Curve is always stronger at the state and local level. People don’t want to leave America, so at the national level their only choice is between work and leisure. Not so at the state and local level; it’s easy to move to another state. And on that point, Michael Barone’s latest is relevant:

For those of us who are demographic buffs, Christmas came four days early when Census Bureau director Robert Groves announced on Tuesday the first results of the 2010 census. . .

Growth tends to be stronger where taxes are lower. Seven of the nine states that do not levy an income tax grew faster than the national average. The other two, South Dakota and New Hampshire, had the fastest growth in their regions, the Midwest and New England.

Altogether, 35 percent of the nation’s total population growth occurred in these nine non-taxing states, which accounted for just 19 percent of total population at the beginning of the decade.

John Fund, at the Wall Street Journal, takes a look at the organizations that are pushing for net neutrality. Amazingly, an actual communist plot is involved:

The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney’s agenda? “At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies,” he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. “But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control.”

A year earlier, Mr. McChesney wrote in the Marxist journal Monthly Review that “any serious effort to reform the media system would have to necessarily be part of a revolutionary program to overthrow the capitalist system itself.” Mr. McChesney told me in an interview that some of his comments have been “taken out of context.” He acknowledged that he is a socialist and said he was “hesitant to say I’m not a Marxist.”

For a man with such radical views, Mr. McChesney and his Free Press group have had astonishing influence. Mr. Genachowski’s press secretary at the FCC, Jen Howard, used to handle media relations at Free Press. The FCC’s chief diversity officer, Mark Lloyd, co-authored a Free Press report calling for regulation of political talk radio.

Free Press joined with other leftist organizations and got funding from the usual sources (Soros, Pew, the Ford and MacArthur foundations, etc.). Their rhetorical tack is to call to protect the internet, not to impose government control on it. That strategy was the result of polling:

In 2009, Free Press commissioned a poll, released by the Harmony Institute, on net neutrality. Harmony reported that “more than 50% of the public argued that, as a private resource, the Internet should not be regulated by the federal government.” The poll went on to say that since “currently the public likes the way the Internet works . . . messaging should target supporters by asking them to act vigilantly” to prevent a “centrally controlled Internet.”

And, of course, there’s always the fake research:

To that end, Free Press and other groups helped manufacture “research” on net neutrality. In 2009, for example, the FCC commissioned Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society to conduct an “independent review of existing information” for the agency in order to “lay the foundation for enlightened, data-driven decision making.”

Considering how openly activist the Berkman Center has been on these issues, it was an odd decision for the FCC to delegate its broadband research to this outfit. Unless, of course, the FCC already knew the answer it wanted to get.

The Berkman Center’s FCC- commissioned report, “Next Generation Connectivity,” wound up being funded in large part by the Ford and MacArthur foundations. So some of the same foundations that have spent years funding net neutrality advocacy research ended up funding the FCC-commissioned study that evaluated net neutrality research.

The FCC’s “National Broadband Plan,” released last spring, included only five citations of respected think tanks such as the International Technology and Innovation Foundation or the Brookings Institution. But the report cited research from liberal groups such as Free Press, Public Knowledge, Pew and the New America Foundation more than 50 times.

(Previous post.)

Rasmussen finds that, for the first time, a majority of voters expect the health care nationalization act to be repealed. An even larger majority think that it should be.

I wonder if Joe Biden could be any more irresponsible if he tried?

Despite uneven progress in Afghanistan, Vice President Joe Biden said next summer’s planned withdrawal would be more than a token reduction and that the U.S. would be out of the country by 2014 “come hell or high water.”

Biden’s prediction appeared to go further than statements by his boss, President Barack Obama, who just last month said there would be a reduced U.S. footprint in Afghanistan by 2014 but that the number of troops that would remain was still in question.

Obama has discussed maintaining a counterterrorism capability in Afghanistan after 2014. As recently as Dec. 16, he said the U.S. and its NATO allies would have an enduring presence there after 2014, although the details of that were unclear.

The AP also points out that the outcome of the 2012 presidential election may have some effect on troop withdrawals.

The Senate has passed the food regulation bill (that’s the one they passed before, but accidentally didn’t follow the Constitution) by unanimous consent.

I seriously thought they wouldn’t start backsliding until the next Congress convened. But this is weird. Unanimous consent? Where was DeMint?

If you google “Obamacare”, most of the top results point to web pages critical of it. That’s presumably why the federal government decided to spend taxpayers’ money to buy a sponsored link at the top of the page to direct people to a pro-Obamacare propaganda page.

(Via Instapundit.)

Megan McArdle looks at historic levels of health care spending across the world and makes a good case that Americans pay more for health care because of the tax subsidy.

Recall that John McCain proposed eliminating the tax subsidy for health care but the idea was shamelessly demagogued by the Obama campaign. (For example, they dishonestly portrayed the proposal as a tax hike, ignoring the tax credit that would compensate for taxing health benefits.)

Also note that the health care nationalization act does nothing about the problem, other than an excise tax on high-value plans that probably will never take effect.

A breathtaking photo gallery of China’s ghost towns. The classic ghost town is empty because its people moved away, but China’s ghost towns were erected by central planners and were never inhabited in the first place.

(Via Instapundit.)

The FDA is poised, for the first time, to withdraw its approval for a drug because it is too expensive.

Is communism evil or merely foolish? Glenn Reynolds discusses.

I was taught in public school that communism is a laudable idea that simply doesn’t work in practice. Certainly the latter part is true, and for a long time I never really thought about the former. I think that a lack of scrutiny is the way that notion manages to survive.

Once you start thinking about it, it’s not hard to see that communism, even in its imaginary ideal form, is about slavery. The people, all of them, are enslaved to the worker’s state. (In practice, the people are enslaved to the nomenklatura, but we’re talking about the hypothetical perfect implementation here.) The moral question then is simple: is slavery evil, or can it be good under certain circumstances?

Once you ask that question, we can readily dispense with the notion that communism would be good if only it worked.

Democrats have given up on the omnibus budget bill. This is great news; this bill was a disaster. The problem wasn’t so much the overspending and the earmarks (although those were bad), but the money appropriated to implement Obamacare.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal is dancing on the budget’s grave.

One of the fascinating things about watching Sarah Palin is how her opponents, by assuming Palin is stupid, expose themselves as ignorant fools. We’ve seen this several times recently, on topics as varied as the date of the Boston Tea Party and the doctrine of fair use. Indeed it goes back to the presidential campaign, when the AP misunderstood the Air-Defense Identification Zone.

In the latest instance, MSNBC commentator Richard Wolffe mocked Palin for saying that she draws divine inspiration from the works of CS Lewis, who he says is merely the author of a series of children’s books.

As anyone even fractionally educated in Christian apologetics knows, CS Lewis wrote many books beyond The Chronicles of Narnia. I included three of them on my list of the ten books that influenced my thinking the most. The Screwtape Letters, in particular, is probably his most famous work.

I suppose assuming your opponents are stupid can save you time and effort, if you’re right. If you’re wrong, you look like an idiot.

UPDATE (12/21): Apparently Joy Behar made the same mistake. Ignorance from Behar isn’t so surprising though.

When a state refuses “stimulus” funding, the federal government just reallocates that money to another state.

It’s disgusting to watch what’s going on in London right now: privileged kids rioting because their share of the public trough is being diminished.

It’s particularly disgusting when you consider that the enrollment caps that are the inevitable consequence of the government subsidy are preventing countless of these students’ peers from receiving the benefits of higher education at any price. These brats want to deny an education to others, to avoid paying the cost of their own education.

Here’s an interesting fact in should-we-hike-taxes-on-the-“rich” debate: 70% of American manufacturing concerns are taxed as individuals. A tax hike on the “rich” means a tax hike on manufacturing investment; less investment means lower productivity; lower productivity means fewer high-paying jobs.

House Democrats slipped a provision into their stopgap spending bill that would make it much easier for Indian tribes to operate casinos.

Britain’s NHS is reaching the “breaking point”, according to a study by the UK Royal Colleges of Physicians. (Via the Corner.)

That’s the system that Medicare and Medicaid should be modeled after, according to the man who runs Medicare and Medicaid.

Abolishing the secret ballot in union certification votes has been a bridge too far even for the Democratic Congress. But the National Labor Relations Board has gone ahead and done it by itself. A new decision from the NLRB allows unions to dispense with the secret ballot if the employer agrees.

The decision makes a mockery of the idea that certification votes protect the rights of the workers. Now an employer can allow a non-secret ballot (at the associated intimidation by union organizers) in exchange for (temporary) union concessions, and the workers — who this is supposedly all about — have no protection.

In the past, the SEIU has struck such deals to increase its own power, to the clear detriment of the workers its purported to represent, according to the liberal San Francisco Weekly:

Instead, it’s merely a re-hash of the sort of sweetheart company-union labor deals that have marred the reputation of trade unionism throughout history. It has involved trading away workers’ free-speech rights, selling out their ability to improve working conditions, and relinquishing their capability to improve pay and benefits, in order to expand the SEIU’s and Stern’s own power.

The vote was 3-1, with three Obama appointees outvoting the one remaining Bush appointee. (Craig Becker, formerly of the SEIU, whom Obama recess-appointed to the NLRB after the Senate would not confirm his appointment, did not vote — probably because his vote wasn’t needed.)

1199SEIU, a powerful health care union affiliated with SEIU, is dropping its health coverage for children, in part due to the new costs imposed by Obamacare:

“In addition, new federal health-care reform legislation requires plans with dependent coverage to expand that coverage up to age 26,” Behroozi wrote in a letter to members Oct. 22. “Our limited resources are already stretched as far as possible, and meeting this new requirement would be financially impossible.”

1199SEIU was a big supporter of Obamacare.

More anti-semitism from the former “dean of the White House press corps”:

[Helen] Thomas, who grew up in Detroit the daughter of Lebanese immigrants, was in Dearborn today for an Arab Detroit workshop on anti-Arab bias. . . In a speech that drew a standing ovation, Thomas talked about “the whole question of money involved in politics.”

“We are owned by propagandists against the Arabs. There’s no question about that. Congress, the White House, and Hollywood, Wall Street, are owned by the Zionists. No question in my opinion. They put their money where there mouth is…We’re being pushed into a wrong direction in every way.”

When someone refers to “the Zionists”, it’s not hard to tell whether they are using the term (1) to refer to persons who support a Jewish homeland in Eretz Israel, or (2) as code for Jews. Obviously, Thomas is using the term in the second fashion, since she is spouting a standard anti-Semitic slander.

She also retracted her apology for her earlier anti-Semitic and apparently pro-Holocaust remarks:

Striking a defiant tone, journalist Helen Thomas, 90, said today she absolutely stands by her controversial comments about Israel made earlier this year that led to her resignation. . .

“I paid the price for that,” said Thomas, a longtime White House correspondent. “But it was worth it, to speak the truth.”

POSTSCRIPT: Also note that Thomas got a standing ovation from the Arab Detroit workshop on anti-Arab bias. It occurs to me that applauding anti-Semites might not be helping on the anti-Arab bias front.

(Previous post.)

The acting chairman of the FCC (a Democrat, of course) wants to regulate the news. (Via Instapundit.)

Yep, he really said that. This guy really has no idea how a president is supposed to behave, does he?

POSTSCRIPT: Last week Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) called Republicans terrorists. Could this be a deliberate meme?

UPDATE: Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) says “a ransom was paid”. I guess this really is the Democratic line.

I trust you will not be surprised to learn that Al Sharpton does not believe in free speech.

It seemed certain that the new movie Fair Game on the Valerie Plame pseudo-scandal wouldn’t be truthful. The truth would not make a very good story. The Washington Post editorial page confirms my expectation:

WE’RE NOT in the habit of writing movie reviews. But the recently released film “Fair Game” – which covers a poisonous Washington controversy during the war in Iraq – deserves some editorial page comment, if only because of what its promoters are saying about it. The protagonists portrayed in the movie, former diplomat Joseph C. Wilson IV and former spy Valerie Plame, claim that it tells the true story of their battle with the Bush administration over Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Ms. Plame’s exposure as a CIA agent. “It’s accurate,” Ms. Plame told The Post. Said Mr. Wilson: “For people who have short memories or don’t read, this is the only way they will remember that period.”

We certainly hope that is not the case. In fact, “Fair Game,” based on books by Mr. Wilson and his wife, is full of distortions – not to mention outright inventions. . .

Hollywood has a habit of making movies about historical events without regard for the truth; “Fair Game” is just one more example. But the film’s reception illustrates a more troubling trend of political debates in Washington in which established facts are willfully ignored. Mr. Wilson claimed that he had proved that Mr. Bush deliberately twisted the truth about Iraq, and he was eagerly embraced by those who insist the former president lied the country into a war. Though it was long ago established that Mr. Wilson himself was not telling the truth – not about his mission to Niger and not about his wife – the myth endures. We’ll join the former president in hoping that future historians get it right.

(Emphasis mine.) (Previous post.)

The Washington Post reports:

In reaching 392,862 deportations, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement included more than 19,000 immigrants who had exited the previous fiscal year, according to agency statistics. ICE also ran a Mexican repatriation program five weeks longer than ever before, allowing the agency to count at least 6,500 exits that, without the program, would normally have been tallied by the U.S. Border Patrol.

When ICE officials realized in the final weeks of the fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, that the agency still was in jeopardy of falling short of last year’s mark, it scrambled to reach the goal. Officials quietly directed immigration officers to bypass backlogged immigration courts and time-consuming deportation hearings whenever possible, internal e-mails and interviews show.

Instead, officials told immigration officers to encourage eligible foreign nationals to accept a quick pass to their countries without a negative mark on their immigration record, ICE employees said. . . A voluntary return doesn’t bar a foreigner from applying for legal residence or traveling to the United States in the future. . .

The surge to break the deportation record in the final weeks of the fiscal year consumed the agency, said a high-ranking immigration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the person wasn’t authorized to discuss the matter publicly.

“They had everyone burning the candle at both ends to reach 390,000,” the official said. “They were basically saying anything you can do to increase the overall removal number, that’s what you should do – over everything else.”

In summary, the ICE’s record number of deportations was in part due to creative accounting, and in part due to weakened enforcement.

And then the administration lied about it:

But at a news conference Oct. 6, ICE Director John T. Morton said that no unusual practices were used to break the previous year’s mark.

“When the secretary tells you that the numbers are at an all-time high, that’s straight, on the merits, no cooking of the books,” Morton said, referring to his boss, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. “It’s what happened.”

(Via Instapundit.)

The Obama administration spent millions of taxpayer money on a (failed) propaganda campaign to shore up support for health care nationalization:

A new Judicial Watch investigation has found that President Obama spent millions of taxpayer dollars on a “misleading” propaganda campaign to help foster public support for his extremely unpopular “health care reform” law, also known as Obamacare.

Using the Freedom of Information Act, our investigators obtained documents from the Obama Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) regarding a series of three Medicare television advertisements featuring actor Andy Griffith, which were deemed misleading by a number of press outlets, including the nonpartisan (but left-of-center)FactCheck.org.

The new documents show the Obama administration spent $3,184,000 in taxpayer funds to produce and air the advertisements on national television in September and October of 2010 to educate “Medicare beneficiaries, caregivers, and family members about forthcoming changes to Medicare as a result of the Affordable Care Act.”

(Emphasis mine.)

President Obama has asked for the authority to shift spending from one part of the budget to another. It’s quite obvious why the he wants such authority. Why Congress would want to grant it is quite another question.

Such authority would clearly be an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power, but who knows if that means anything any more.

Andrew Klavan:

The point is: religions are sacred. Otherwise they wouldn’t be called religions. They would be called systems of metaphysical ideas that can be discussed, criticized, and even ridiculed by free people with free minds. And we wouldn’t want that. . .

Who is regularly accused of using extremist political language? Republicans of course. Who actually does it? Democrats, such as Senator Bob Menendez (D-NJ) who says that negotiating with Republicans is like negotiating with terrorists.

Amtrak has lifted its ban on transporting firearms in checked luggage. (Passengers still will not be allowed to carry guns on their person.)

The ban served no conceivable legitimate purpose, it was just a way to inconvenience gun owners. The anti-gun crowd looks ridiculous trying to argue otherwise.

For the first time in as long as I recall, more Americans now identify as Republicans than as Democrats.

(Via Power Line.)

Fox News reports:

An ACORN affiliate in New Orleans was improperly awarded a fire safety and prevention grant worth nearly a half-million dollars, according to a new report from the Department of Homeland Security’s inspector general. . .

In the findings, obtained by FoxNews.com, the inspector general’s office said that FEMA went against the advice of an evaluation panel to hand out the $450,484 grant to the ACORN Institute in New Orleans. From there, not all of the money could be tracked. . .

The report said that ACORN applied for the fire safety and prevention grant — meant to fund efforts to distribute and promote the use of smoke detectors and fire extinguishers – by claiming to operate programs that did not yet exist. The institute claimed to have partnerships with local fire departments through the “Urban Fire Initiative,” when in fact, that initiative “did not exist prior to the grant application.”

FEMA reduced the grant request from its original $1 million. But the report said the institute could not provide documentation to support how it spent nearly $161,000 of the money it did receive.

Lots of blame to go around here: ACORN for committing the fraud, of course, and FEMA for letting them do it after being warned.