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Since Newtown, we have seen an alarming pattern of schools punishing students (severely in some cases) for possessing objects that aren’t guns, but are vaguely reminiscent of guns: fingers, a Hello Kitty bubble gun, a vaguely gun-shaped scrap of paper, a transparent plastic toy gun, a photograph of a gun, an imaginary hand grenade, or a partially eaten breakfast pastry in the shape of a gun.

This is hysteria, plain and simple. No one this out-of-touch with reality should be running a school.

Barack Obama wants us to respect his nonsense:

The canceled tours prompted a pointed question to Obama from House Administration Committee Chairwoman Candice Miller (R-Mich.) during the president’s meeting with House Republicans on Wednesday. Miller asked why Obama put an end to the tours instead of just cancelling the congressional Christmas party or the congressional picnic.

When Obama said the decision was prompted by the Secret Service, some lawmakers groaned in disbelief.

“Now, now, let’s be respectful,” Obama replied.

Note that, when he says “let’s be respectful”, he means “you be respectful to me”. He’s not going to respect them even enough to refrain from obvious, ridiculous lies.

POSTSCRIPT: By the way, if a well-deserved groan in private is disrespectful, what was this?

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When it comes to horribly complicated legislation, Obamacare was no piker (1600 pages!), but the legislation itself pales to what it became once the bureaucrats got their hands on it:

That’s 20k pages and counting. When we started letting Congress delegate its power to bureaucrats, this was the inevitable result.

It used to be that Congress’s time would impose some practical limit on the number of rules they could impose on us, but now that the executive branch makes most of the rules without the messy process of legislation, there’s no practical limit on the rules they can burden us with.

(Via Power Line.)

Fox News reports:

The top U.S. immigration enforcement official acknowledged Thursday that the Obama administration has in fact released thousands of illegal immigrants from local jails over the last month despite prior claims that the release was only in the hundreds.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton, at a House appropriations subcommittee hearing, said the agency released a total of 2,228 illegal immigrants from local jails “throughout the country” between Feb. 9 and March 1 for “solely budgetary reasons.” . . .

But Morton’s acknowledgement that more than 2,000 were released appeared to conflict with prior claims from the administration, which said it was only releasing hundreds.

The Associated Press first reported March 1 that the administration had released more than 2,000 illegal immigrants since at least Feb. 15 and planned to release 3,000 more in March due to looming budget cuts, but Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said days later that the AP’s report was “not really accurate” and that the story had developed “its own mythology.”

(Emphasis mine.)

Do not believe anything the Obama administration says, ever.

Barack Obama, March 13:

President Obama said his administration was looking at ways to resume White House tours for school groups. “This was not a decision that went up to the White House,” noted Obama in an ABC News interview aired on Wednesday, saying the directive came from the Secret Service.

White House spokesman Jay Carney, March 7:

In order to allow the Secret Service to best fulfill its core mission, the White House made the decision that we would, unfortunately, have to temporarily suspend these tours.

(Emphasis mine.) One of these two statements, certainly, is a lie.

Almost certainly, it’s the former. Is the White House really going to cease tours without directions from the White House? Come on. Besides, we have plenty of examples of the White House directing its people to make the sequester as painful as possible, so this would be well within precedent.

Moreover, when Jay Carney was questioned on this, he explained that the decision absolutely did go to the White House. (Trying to square the circle, he also explained that the decision nevertheless was really made by the Secret Service.)

(Previous post.) (Via the Corner.)

Try to read this story without getting angry.

Remember when the Obamacare’s health exchanges were supposed to make shopping for health care easy? The reality is quite the opposite:

Applying for benefits under President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul could be as daunting as doing your taxes. The government’s draft application runs 15 pages for a three-person family. An outline of the online version has 21 steps, some with additional questions. . .

That’s just the first part of the process, which lets you know if you qualify for financial help. . . Once you’re finished with the money part, actually picking a health plan will require additional steps, plus a basic understanding of insurance jargon. . .

Some are concerned that a lot of uninsured people will be overwhelmed and simply give up.

Of course, giving up isn’t actually allowed. With the individual mandate, giving up means paying a heavy fine.

(Via Hot Air.)

The Obama administration is cutting White House tours and national park visiting hours, but a $704 thousand gardening project in Belgium for the US ambassador to NATO is going ahead.

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As part of his make-the-sequester-hurt strategy, Obama is cancelling White Hours tours. That will save $74,000 per week (about $7 for each visitor).

But Michelle Obama’s gigantic birthday bash is going ahead. Priorities, you know.

(Somehow, that bunch got away with portraying the Romneys as out-of-touch with ordinary people. Amazing.)

UPDATE: The White House says they weren’t responsible for the decision to cancel tours, and they’re trying to figure out a way to restart them. Amazing how little influence the White House has when it doesn’t want one.

One obvious way to restart them (other than just, you know, restarting them) would be to accept the contributions of various persons who have offered to pay for tours, “but the White House has turned down the request, saying that it could not allow private individuals to pay the Secret Service.” Because that would defeat the purpose of cancelling tours in the first place.

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A Colorado Democrat admits that her gun-control bill will not serve its purported purpose:

I make no assertion that this bill will either increase or reduce violent crime. That is not the premise of the bill.

So what is the purpose of the bill? Hmm?

Gabby Gifford’s husband buys an AR-15. Having been caught, he now says he’s not going to keep it.

POSTSCRIPT: I wonder if this story is burying the lede, though. Mark Kelly impulse-bought an AR-15. That means there’s a gun store in Arizona that has AR-15s in stock!

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: C’mon, this doesn’t even pass the laugh test:

Appearing on CNN’s The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer on March 11, Mark Kelly said he planned from the start to hand over an AR-15 rifle he purchased to the Tuscon Police Department.

Please. If you’re doing it to make a point, you make a media circus out of it. Doing it quietly accomplishes no purpose but throwing your own money away.

(Via Instapundit.)

People argue against universal government-run preschool on grounds like (1) it’s too expensive, or (2) it doesn’t work, or (3) the government has no business doing  it anyway. All of that is true, but Katherine Mangu-Ward has an even better point:

Which do you think is more likely?:

(a) We make preschool universal and that starts a cascade of awesomeness into the general public school system, or

(b) we graft a universal preschool entitlement onto the existing universal K-12 entitlement, and preschool starts to suck just as much as the rest of the system?

Call me a cynic, but I’m going with (b).

(Via Hot Air.)

Fox News reports:

Another federal employee has come forward to claim the Obama administration resisted efforts to ease the impact of sequester.

A U.S. park ranger, who did not wish to be identified, told FoxNews.com that supervisors within the National Park Service overruled plans to deal with the budget cuts in a way that would have had minimal impact on the public. Instead, the source said, park staff were told to cancel special events and cut “interpretation services” — the talks, tours and other education services provided by local park rangers.

“Apparently, they want the public to feel the pain,” the ranger said.

Yesterday I spent much of the day in a waiting room with Fox News on the television, and they were going after the administration hammer and tongs, with case after case of the administration deliberately making cuts hurt. I don’t think it’s going to work. The White House tours and national parks won’t stay closed forever, and when they reopen them, how will they explain it?

Meanwhile, while cutting services that people can see, the administration has advertised for 2596 new jobs since sequestration went into effect.

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Glenn Kessler, who has been doing yeoman’s work debunking the White House’s stream of sequestration lies, debunks another. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan:

It just means a lot more children will not get the kinds of services and opportunities they need, and as many as 40,000 teachers could lose their jobs. … There are literally teachers now who are getting pink slips, who are getting notices that they can’t come back this fall.

Lie. After being pressed for days for an example, the White House finally produced a single district in West Virginia, but even that wasn’t true. In Kanawha County, five or six teachers (not 40,000) are being transferred (not laid off), due to a change in state policy (not due to sequestration).

Megan McArdle sums up this way:

These aren’t matters of opinion where the administration can simply argue assumptions; these are easily checkable statements with hard numbers attached.  From this I infer that the administration is having a hard time finding concrete examples of bad things that the sequester is going to do.  Nor is that a huge surprise.  Whether you’re for or against the sequester, we are talking about relatively small sums, in the scope of the federal deficit.  They’re simply not going to show up in much measurable way as devastating hardship.

POSTSCRIPT: Despite being on the front line of the administration’s lies, Kessler still wants to give them the benefit of the doubt:

In other words, Duncan’s scare story about teacher layoffs — right now, at this moment — was apparently too good to check. If the Obama administration had learned anything about the Susan Rice-Benghazi debacle, you would have thought it was to make sure the talking points for the Sunday shows are rock-solid. Given that Duncan had made this claim once to reporters, couldn’t anyone in his office have bothered to pick up the phone and double-check the information?

It’s not a matter of checking. The Benghazi misinformation wasn’t a mistake; it was a lie. So is this.

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Caught on tape: Jan Schakowsky (D-IL, Democratic chief deputy whip) admitting that the proposed “assault weapons” ban is just the first step, and they will ultimately try to ban all guns, Second Amendment or not.

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Has there ever been a US president who spent more time bellyaching about about the constitutional separation of powers than Barack Obama? It’s really quite unseemly.

But more worrisome than the president’s disdain for constitutional government is the left’s lack of concern about his disdain. If half the country and nearly the entire media are tired of constitutional government, we are in serious trouble.

In the latest instance, Obama complains in his radio address that “our democratic debates messy and often frustrating.” Which they are, of course, but that’s by design.

Obama goes on to say that “what makes us special is when we summon the ability to see past those differences.” Wrong. What makes us special is not when we get past differences, but when we see the beauty in having differences!

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

Doubling down on President Obama’s earlier lies about the effects of the sequester on Capitol janitors, the White House is now offering this:

On the issue of the janitors, if you work for an hourly wage and you earn overtime, and you depend on that overtime to make ends meet, it is simply a fact that a reduction in overtime is a reduction in your pay.

Glenn Kessler looked at this one too:

Still, the White House has kept up its spin offensive, claiming that a cut in “overtime” was a de facto pay cut and thus the president was right — or at least not wrong.

So, we wondered: How much overtime do Capitol Hill janitors actually make? . . .

It averaged $304 per employee in fiscal year 2012 and $388 per employee thus far in the current fiscal year. “Cleaning technicians do not earn what I would consider to be a great deal of overtime pay,” Swanson said.

In other words, overtime amounts to only pittance of the overall pay — about $6.50 a week on top of wages of $1,000 a week. That’s much different from Carney’s claim of having to “depend on that overtime to make ends meet.” Indeed, even before the sequester was implemented, Capitol Hill janitors have already earned more overtime pay than they did in all of last year.

A White House spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.

I’ll bet.

Finally, Kessler had an insight on how the White House messaging machine works:

First of all, we should note that the White House’s story kept evolving as we reported last week’s column. It’s almost as if the president’s aides had to scramble to come up with reasons why the president could be correct, without actually knowing the facts.

So, when we forwarded to White House aides an AOC memo saying no furloughs were planned, White House aides latched onto a line about overtime reductions. For a couple of hours, we were also told that the janitors were on contract — and contracts were being curtailed. But that line of reasoning turned out to be incorrect. Then, after the statements from the Capitol were issued, there was no longer any response.

But, as seen by the quotes above, the talking point about “overtime” did not fade away.

Kessler is too charitable. When this bunch repeatedly says things “without actually knowing the facts”, it’s reasonable to assume that they don’t actually care what the facts are. Still, I’m glad he’s starting to figure this out. Maybe he will be less willing to cover for them in the future.

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The gun banners are telling us that shotguns are the responsible alternative to semi-automatic rifles. (Well, Joe “shoot through the door” Biden doesn’t exactly stress the responsibility part. . .) But the gun control bill that looks likely to pass in Colorado would ban semi-automatic and pump-action shotguns, which is to say nearly all shotguns in use.

A bill in Florida would require citizens to undergo psychological counseling before they can buy ammunition.

A leaked email from the Agriculture Department shows the administration rejecting plans to mitigate the consequences of the sequester:

We have gone on record with a notification to Congress and whoever else that “APHIS would eliminate assistance to producers in 24 States in managing wildlife damage to the aquaculture industry, unless they provide funding to cover the costs.” So, it is our opinion that however you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be.

(Emphasis mine.)

It would an injustice of historic proportions if the Democrats get away with blaming Republicans for the sequester when the Democrats are deliberately making it as painful as possible. But with the press on their side, they might still get away with it.

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Remember when Obama promised if you like your health care you could keep it? Yep, that was a lie. Obamacare’s Medicare cuts which will push millions of seniors from their Medicare Advantage plans into standard Medicare, are going ahead.

More anti-anti-rape Democrats in the Colorado legislature. That party’s got a real problem.

Time was when our presidents were proud to be part of the Constitutional system, limited by checks and balances. George Washington turned aside an effort to make him king. Thomas Jefferson famously was wracked with guilt for carrying out the Louisiana Purchase without clear Constitutional authorization.

But those times seem to be past. Today our president laments that he is not a dictator, and laments that the can’t overcome our separation of powers using mind control (a “jedi mind-meld”).

Obama says that we don’t need the sequester because he’s already made $2.5 trillion in budget cuts. It turns out that that figure is based on current law, which includes the sequester. He’s arguing that we don’t need the sequester, because we’ve got the sequester.

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In a recent post, I argued that gun-control advocates want you to be at the mercy of aggressors, and you’ll probably never find a better example of their mandatory victimhood than this one:

A Florida high school student wrestled a loaded gun away from another teen on the bus ride home this week and was slapped with a suspension in return. . .

The student said the suspect, a football player, threatened to shoot a teammate because he had been arguing with his friend.

Authorities confirmed to WFTX the weapon was indeed loaded, and the arrest report stated the suspect, identified by WVZN-TV as Quadryle Davis, was “pointing the gun directly” at the other student and “threatening to shoot him.”

That’s when, the teen told the station, he and two others tackled the suspect and wrestled the gun away. The next day, all three were suspended. . . The school’s referral slip said he was given an “emergency suspension” for being involved in an “incident” with a weapon.

The hero of the incident, who was unarmed and did nothing wrong, is being punished for preventing a shooting. Tar and feathers are too good for these jackals.

(Via Instapundit.)

A brief history of the sequester: (1) Democrats and Republicans were supposed to work together to devise a deficit reduction plan based on spending cuts and no tax increases. (2) If the parties couldn’t agree, the sequester would automatically impose spending cuts. (3) Both parties were supposed to be motivated to avoid the cuts, but Democrats never negotiated in good faith because they planned to renege on the ground rules and demand tax hikes. (4) Once this became clear, Republicans decided that it would be better just to let automatic cuts take place, but proposed legislation that would give the president the power to allocate those cuts to the least damaging places. (5) Senate Democrats killed that legislation, because they want the sequester to be as painful as possible. (6) The Obama administration, now, is making sure the sequester is as painful as possible.

Before the sequester, the White House promoted sequester pain by lying about what would happen. For example:

Starting tomorrow everybody here, all the folks who are cleaning the floors at the Capitol. Now that Congress has left, somebody’s going to be vacuuming and cleaning those floors and throwing out the garbage. They’re going to have less pay. The janitors, the security guards, they just got a pay cut, and they’ve got to figure out how to manage that. That’s real.

That’s President Obama, telling an outright lie. Glenn Kessler obtained two different documents explaining that capitol janitors and guards would not be effected. In Kessler’s assessment, “nothing in Obama’s statement came close to being correct.”

Now that the sequester is under way, the White House plan is to promote pain, using the time-honored “Washington Monument strategy”, in which you cut key functions but preserve the waste. Thus, in one example, the Department of Agriculture is cutting meat inspectors, but preserving a wine-tasting junket.

Will Obama get away with this cynical strategy? I wouldn’t bet against it. It all depends on the honor of the press: will they act as the administration’s lackies, and report only the painful cuts, or will they also report the wasteful spending that the administration did not cut? We’re in trouble.

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There is a bizarre, pernicious myth that the left are the defenders of civil liberties. I can’t fathom how they managed to get that reputation, since they always are coming out in opposition to free speech. In Minnesota, Democrats have proposed an “anti-bullying” bill that would prohibit K-12 students from saying anything unkind about another student.

Gun-controllists complain that “assault weapons” (i.e., rifles that look scary) have no legitimate self-defense purpose, but that complaint is being undermined by the Department of Homeland Security, which says select-fire weapons can be “suitable for personal defense”.

In a recent solicitation, the DHS is looking to buy “5.56x45mm NATO, select-fire firearm[s] suitable for personal defense”. Basically, this refers to either the M-16 or M-4. In particular, select-fire means that the weapon can be switched from semi-automatic to fully automatic.

So the DHS is saying that fully automatic weapons (in particular the M-16 and M-4) are suitable for personal defense. The AR-15 is the same gun, except it does not support select fire, and is semi-automatic only. So while the controllists claim (falsely) there is no self-defense use for the AR-15, DHS is saying that a strictly more effective weapon is suitable for self-defense.

The University of Michigan is following Vanderbilt’s lead and forcing Christian student organizations off-campus. As at Vanderbilt, the pretext is the organizations’ refusal to allow non-Christians to be leaders of the group.

The end goal of the gun-controllists is to confiscate all firearms. Some Democratic politicians try to deny this, but their denials are undermined by the rhetoric of  gun control groups, their own unguarded remarks, historical precedent, and by the actions of politicians (such as in New York, Oregon, Missouri, etc.) who are proposing and indeed enacting gun confiscation bills.

The good news (as Glenn Reynolds observes) is that the government is no more competent at confiscating guns than at anything else it does. They can’t even confiscate the guns they’re supposed to be confiscating:

California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.

Those gun owners have roughly 39,000 firearms, said Stephen Lindley, chief of the Bureau of Firearms for the state Department of Justice.

Leftists who say that we should get past our obsession with the Constitution don’t realize the slender thread on which their tyranny rests. Glenn Reynolds puts it well:

Here’s the problem with public officials . . . deciding to ignore the Constitution: If you’re the president, if you’re a member of Congress, if you are a TSA agent, the only reason why somebody should listen to what you say, instead of horsewhipping you out of town for your impertinence, is because you exercise power via the Constitution. If the Constitution doesn’t count, you don’t have any legitimate power. You’re a thief, a brigand, an officious busybody, somebody who should be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail for trying to exercise power you don’t possess.

Louisiana officials have decided that it’s better for homeless to go hungry than to eat venison:

Hunters across Louisiana are outraged after state health officials ordered a rescue mission to destroy $8,000 worth of deer meat because venison is not allowed to be served in homeless shelters.

The Dept. of Health and Hospitals ordered the staff at the Shreveport-Bossier Rescue Mission to throw 1,600 pounds of donated venison in garbage bins – and then ordered then to douse the meat with Clorox – so other animals would not eat the meat. . .

The mission’s chef asked if they could at least return the meat to the processing plant – but the state officials said no. “They actually took it out to the dumpsters, split the packages open and poured Clorox on it,” Martin told Fox News.

Remember, government does not operate on autopilot. Some human being thought it would be a good idea to destroy $8000 of venison and leave homeless people hungry. Which brings us back, once again, to this.

This is two years old, but it’s appalling enough to be still worthy of note. The Bank of England is telling people (or, at any rate, told people two years ago), to stop saving money and spend their savings:

Savers should stop complaining about poor returns and start spending to help the economy, a senior Bank of England official warned today.

Older households could afford to suffer because they had benefited from previous property price rises, Charles Bean, the deputy governor, suggested. They should “not expect” to live off interest, he added, admitting that low returns were part of a strategy. . .

He continued: “Savers shouldn’t necessarily expect to be able to live just off their income in times when interest rates are low. It may make sense for them to eat into their capital a bit.”

Now, this is manifestly awful, but it’s even worse than it appears at first appears. Those who do as they are told and blow through their savings are still going to need income to survive. They will have to go on the public dole. So what the British government is doing is taking people who want to provide for themselves, and have saved their whole lives in order to do so, and move those people into dependency on the government.

This isn’t just bad economic administration. It’s immoral.

It’s a good thing that voter fraud never happens, because otherwise I might be worried about the news that unknown fraudsters nearly obtained 2,552 absentee ballots, and they remain at large.