Internet Scofflaw

Chicago is bringing sex education to kindergarten. This being Chicago, they don’t care that parents are against it.

If you discourage work, destroy opportunities, and encourage dependence, then surprise! labor force participation hits a 34-year low.

Shockingly, if you dump tens of thousands of criminals onto the streets, the crime rate goes up.

Because we subsidize the US cotton industry, we apparently must also subsidize the Brazilian cotton industry. It’s not clear whether US agricultural policy could get any more stupid.

(Via the Corner.)

As predicted:

For the vast majority of Americans, premium prices will be higher in the individual exchange than what they’re currently paying for employer-sponsored benefits, according to a National Journal analysis of new coverage and cost data. Adding even more out-of-pocket expenses to consumers’ monthly insurance bills is a swell in deductibles under the Affordable Care Act.

Health law proponents have excused the rate hikes by saying the prices in the exchange won’t apply to the millions receiving coverage from their employers. But that’s only if employers continue to offer that coverage–something that’s looking increasingly uncertain. Already, UPS, for example, cited Obamacare as its reason for nixing spousal coverage. And while a Kaiser Family Foundation report found that 49 percent of the U.S. population now receives employer-sponsored coverage, more companies are debating whether they will continue to be in the business of providing such benefits at all.

(Via Instapundit.)

This Slate piece (apparently Slate still exists!) really quite amazing:

If You Send Your Kid to Private School, You Are a Bad Person
A manifesto.

You are a bad person if you send your children to private school. Not bad like murderer bad—but bad like ruining-one-of-our-nation’s-most-essential-institutions-in-order-to-get-what’s-best-for-your-kid bad. So, pretty bad.

I am not an education policy wonk: I’m just judgmental. But it seems to me that if every single parent sent every single child to public school, public schools would improve. This would not happen immediately. It could take generations. Your children and grandchildren might get mediocre educations in the meantime, but it will be worth it, for the eventual common good.

Wow. She says that I should give my kids a “mediocre” education, and indeed that people should do so for generations, and she calls me a bad person?

Not only is she a bad person, she is also an ignorant person. Apparently she believes that if everyone buys a product irrespective of its quality, then its quality will improve. Oh, I see:

I went K–12 to a terrible public school. My high school didn’t offer AP classes, and in four years, I only had to read one book.

Whatever book she read, it clearly wasn’t economics.

(Via Instapundit.)

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey adds:

Benedikt’s entire argument is that non-participants in an organization ruin it by their non-participation.  It’s not the actual participants who are to blame for the institution’s failures – not the teachers, not the administrators, and not the policy-makers — but the people who avoid the failure that should be blamed.

Mayors Against Illegal Guns is a cleverly named organization. The name is intended to give the impression that they aren’t looking to ban guns, just to keep them out of the hands of criminals. But the name is a lie. While they work vigorously to ban guns and accessories, they seem to have no interest at all in actually enforcing the gun laws that exist:

The districts that contain Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City ranked last in terms of federal gun law enforcement in 2012, according to a new report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which tracks federal data. . .

The districts of Eastern New York, Central California, and Northern Illinois ranked 88th, 89th and 90th, respectively, out of 90 districts, in prosecutions of federal weapons crimes per capita last year, but it wasn’t always this way. All three districts fell lower on the list than they had been in years past. In 2010, for example, Chicago was 78th in federal weapons prosecutions.

These cities also have some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws, as well as the most active mayors in championing gun control. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are all members of the national Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign.

88th, 89th, and 90th, out of 90.

Megan McArdle has an interesting article about how Treasury Secretary Jack Lew’s history of lying to Republicans about budget numbers, and then crowing about it, will make it difficult for the White House to strike a budget deal with Republicans. The Republicans, justifiably, simply don’t believe his numbers.

Glenn Reynolds adds:

These people aren’t even competent liars. A competent liar doesn’t brag about how he snookered people he’ll have to deal with in the future.

Without denigrating James O’Keefe’s work at all — I think it’s great — he’s not doing anything that other enterprising investigative journalists couldn’t do. The fact that he’s the only one doing this stuff is an indictment of the entire field.

(Via Instapundit.)

Surprise, surprise. GreenTech’s denials that it lobbied for green cards for its “investors” aren’t true:

Government documents contradict claims made by GreenTech Automotive officials that they did nothing to press federal officials to approve the visa application of Zhenjun Zhang, a foreign investor with ties to a Chinese company on a U.S. spy list.

Documents show that attorney Simone Williams and CEO Anthony Rodham, executives at GreenTech’s investor relations arm, wrote on Jan. 29 to USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas seeking to fast track stalled petitions for foreign investors under the government’s EB-5 program. One of those that had been languishing was Zhang’s, according to government documents.

(Via Instapundit.)

For an explanation of the GreenTech scandal, see here. In essence, they were selling green cards. GreenTech’s founder is Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic candidate for governor of Virginia and the former chair of the Democratic party.

Anthony Rodham has no experience in the automotive industry (at least, not according to Wikipedia), but his sister is Hillary Clinton, until recently the Secretary of State. That should give an indication of whether GreenTech’s real business was green cars or green cards.

From Barack Obama’s Twitter feed:

More than 57,000 pre-K children are feeling the affects of the #sequester:

(Via PJ Tatler.)

Cheap shot? Yeah, probably. But after watching his cronies and the media (but I repeat myself) go after Republicans for comparable gaffes — or for things they never even said — I have no inclination to be charitable left.

Lots of employers are cutting health coverage as a result of Obamacare.

I thought this was a very interesting point:

I noted last week that arguments for a uniform [public school curriculum] standard seem rather weak. Nevertheless, Bill Keller of the New York Times devoted some column space this week to one such argument:

The Core does call for schools across the states to deliver their lessons in the same sequence. Does it really matter if children in Alabama and New Jersey start algebra in the same grade? It matters a lot to a kid who moves from Alabama to New Jersey. . .

This argument for national standards is an illustration of how politicians recommend more centralization as a way to fix problems caused by centralization. The public-school monopoly is what limits choice and creates the potential curriculum conflict. If parents had adequate choices in the first place, then interstate migration would not pose a major problem — parents could likely just choose a school in New Jersey whose curriculum is most similar to the child’s previous school in Alabama.

(Emphasis mine.)

It’s not about education, it’s about control of education. Richmond’s rule applies.

Another major Obamacare provision is being suspended (without any legal justification):

In another setback for President Obama’s health care initiative, the administration has delayed until 2015 a significant consumer protection in the law that limits how much people may have to spend on their own health care.

The limit on out-of-pocket costs, including deductibles and co-payments, was not supposed to exceed $6,350 for an individual and $12,700 for a family. But under a little-noticed ruling, federal officials have granted a one-year grace period to some insurers, allowing them to set higher limits, or no limit at all on some costs, in 2014.

The grace period has been outlined on the Labor Department’s Web site since February, but was obscured in a maze of legal and bureaucratic language that went largely unnoticed.

Be sure to notice the last bit (emphasis mine). The Obama administration set aside a major portion of the law, and didn’t even tell anyone.

It’s not just this and the employer mandate. In fact, the Obama adminstration has missed or skipped half of its statutory deadlines. (Via Instapundit.) Half of them! And that’s his own law. This truly is a lawless administration.

Does Eric Holder’s Justice Department tell the truth about anything?

The Justice Department and FBI have quietly acknowledged they grossly overstated the scope of a mortgage fraud crackdown, which the administration heralded with much fanfare a few weeks before last year’s presidential election.

According to a memo circulated by the FBI and a correction posted online by the Justice Department, the number of defendants, the number of victims and the size of the losses are, in reality, a fraction of what officials claimed last October.

In the long run, I think that the Democrats are making a big mistake by identifying the Justice Department with political chicanery. Some day the DOJ might need that reputation they’re ruining.

Two things about the Million Muslim March on Washington, scheduled for September 11: First, they have a legal right to do it. Second, doing it on that particular day is crass, unseemly, and will inflame the anti-Muslim sentiment that they claim to be marching against — much like the Ground Zero Mosque built on the footprint of a building damaged beyond repair by an airplane impact on 9/11.

POSTSCRIPT: Actually, a third thing: they’re expecting a thousand people.

UPDATE (9/11): They didn’t even get that many.

There is a pernicious notion that the essential quality of the American system of government is democracy. This is a very basic misunderstanding, and one that seems to be ingrained early. In my case I picked it up as a child, so early than I’m not even sure when.

But it’s nonsense. Democracy, also sometimes called more forthrightly “majority rule”, is the idea that 51% of the people have the right to impose their will on the other 49%. We know instinctively that this is wrong.

ASIDE: I’m considering democracy under its narrow meaning here. It’s true that democracy (or “liberal democracy”) sometimes is used to refer to whole collection of ideas, not just majority rule. But in that case I am arguing that using “democracy” as an umbrella term is inapt.

The essence of the American system is liberty. Democracy is but a means to an end. As Heinlein’s Jubal Harshaw put it (paraphrasing): democracy is a poor system; the only thing to be said in its favor is the other systems are worse. Since haven’t figured out a realistic way for society to survive without government, putting its management into as broad hands as possible impedes it becoming a tyranny.

Impedes, but does not prevent. Democracy is just one mechanism we use to protect our liberty; others are the rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and a bill of rights. Democracy is probably the least important of these.

The most important is the rule of law. Friedrich Hayek explains it this way (in his brilliant sixth chapter of the Road to Serfdom):

Nothing distinguishes more clearly conditions in a free country from those in a country under arbitrary government than the observance in the former of the great principles known as the Rule of Law. Stripped of all technicalities, this means that government in all its actions is bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand — rules which make it possible to foresee with fair certainty how the authority will use its coercive powers in given circumstances and to plan one’s individual affairs on the basis of this knowledge. . .

While every law restricts individual freedom to some extent by altering the means which people may use in the pursuit of their aims, under the Rule of Law the government is prevented from stultifying individual efforts by ad hoc action.

The rule of law says that people can live their lives, run their businesses, raise their families, in a system whose rules are known to them in advance. The government will not interfere capriciously.

In the American system of government, laws are made, interpreted, and carried out by three distinct branches. The laws are changed only with difficulty (by the legislature), they are interpreted consistently (by a judicial system bound by precedent), and they are “faithfully executed” (by the executive).

Alas, this system has gone off the rails. When the legislative and executive powers are in the same hands, the potential for capricious interference increases dramatically. Once the Constitution was interpreted under the nondelegation doctrine (which dates back at least to 1689), which provided that the legislative power could not be delegated. However, in 1928 the Supreme Court ruled in Hampton v. United States that legislative power could be delegated, provided the law provided an “intelligible principle” to guide the executive branch.

The intelligible principle needn’t be particularly detailed either. Laws have almost never been struck down due to unconstitutional delegation, and in 1989 the Supreme Court made the low standard explicit in Mistretta v. United States, stating:

Congress simply cannot do its job absent an ability to delegate power under broad general directives. Accordingly, this Court has deemed it “constitutionally sufficient” if Congress clearly delineates the general policy, the public agency which is to apply it, and the boundaries of this delegated authority.

Today, Congress “delineates the general policy”, while executive-branch bureaucrats make all the rules that govern our lives. That it does so capriciously cannot be denied. For example, when the EPA decides that carbon dioxide is dangerous, it gains the power to shut down coal-fired power plants, and anyone who invested money under the old rules is simply out of luck. And the EPA did so on its own; there was no legislative action, indeed, Congress considered the question and chose not to act.

Very recently, however, the problem has gotten much worse. President Obama has now arrogated for himself the power to decline to carry out portions of the law he doesn’t want to carry out, even in the absence of any delegation of power to do so. This is in direct violation of the Constitution’s provision that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

He has done so by refusing to enforce the Defense of Marriage Act (justified by his claim that it was unconstitutional, which the Supreme Court later backed), refusing to enforce immigration law for certain classes of illegal immigrants (justified by prosecutorial discretion), and declining to carry out certain provisions of Obamacare (justified by nothing whatsoever).

To be clear: some or all of these may well be good policy. That is entirely beside the point; they are not the law. Under the rule of law, the government is “bound by rules fixed and announced beforehand,” regardless of how the executive might judge their wisdom from moment to moment.

Today we have democracy (mostly), but without the rule of law, democracy merely gives us an elected tyrant.

POSTSCRIPT: A number of people have written elegantly on the dangerous implications of Obama’s arrogation of the power to ignore the law: Michael McConnell, John Yoo, and George Will. Andrew Klavan has recently written about the problems with democracy in another context.

UPDATE: Another example, Obama is unilaterally changing drug laws. Again, I agree as a matter of policy, but that’s not the point. He should push for the law to be changed, but he won’t do that. Respecting the rule of law would require political effort.

Mock the president at the Missouri State Fair, and receive a lifetime ban. Just to cover the bases: Yes, the Missouri State Fair is a government operation (and its board is appointed by the governor) so the First Amendment does apply. Yes, presidential masks have been used this way before, without inspiring outrage. Yes, the same people who are now oh-so-offended had no problem with mockery and assassination fantasies directed toward George W Bush.

And yes, the NAACP is demanding a federal investigation. Of a rodeo clown.

Glenn Reynolds is right. We have a weak president who can’t bear the criticism that is routinely directed at the president. The rodeo clown is guilty of lese majeste.

UPDATE: “Obama were a classy guy, he’d ask the folks that run the rodeo to un-fire the clown. He’d say, Hey, I can take a joke.” Indeed he would. And since he hasn’t, we may apply the contrapositive.

NBC News reports:

Employers around the country, from fast-food franchises to colleges, have told NBC News that they will be cutting workers’ hours below 30 a week because they can’t afford to offer the health insurance mandated by the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. . .

NBC News spoke with almost 20 small businesses and other entities from Maine to California, and almost all said that because of the new law they’d be cutting back hours for some employees – an unintended consequence of the new law.

Obamacare may succeed in a sweeping change, but a different one than the one he intended. He may be making a 30-hour work week standard.

(Via Instapundit.)

President Obama’s brobdingnagian stimulus package was a massive waste of money that accomplished nothing, but at least we got some improved infrastructure out of it, right? I mean, the idea was to “invest” in rebuilding our “crumbling infrastructure”, wasn’t it?

Nope. It turns out that building infrastructure is unfairly slanted toward jobs for “burly men”. Once the radical feminists got their claws into it, infrastructure became “human infastructure”, which means stuff other than infrastructure.

So in the end, we paid for Hoover Dam and we didn’t even get Hoover Dam. Remember this the next time the Democrats plead that we need to rebuild our infrastructure.

Many Americans hopes that electing a black president would prove that we had turned a corner in race relations. Some actually voted for Obama for that reason; others saw it as a salutary consequence of an otherwise dreadful president.

Alas, it was not to be. For the left, race relations are not something to be improved. Quite the contrary, they are a political weapon. And as this administration has floundered — the economy still not recovering, foreign policy in ashes, and half a dozen major scandals swirling — the more they have turned to race baiting to distract from their failures.

They paint any opposition to Obama’s policies as racist. (In a classical example, under a white president we would have been fine with nationalizing health care, apparently). They deliberately inflame any racial incident they can. And they make explicit calls for racial retribution.

Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that a new NBC/WSJ poll shows that race relations have dramatically worsened during Obama’s time in office:

Only 52 percent of whites and 38 percent of blacks have a favorable opinion of race relations in the country, according to the poll, which has tracked race relations since 1994 and was conducted in mid-July by Hart Research Associations and Public Opinion Strategies.

That’s a sharp drop from the beginning of Obama’s first term, when 79 percent of whites and 63 percent of blacks held a favorable view of American race relations.

That’s a 27-point drop among whites and a 25-point drop among blacks.

The 9/11 Memorial Museum takes care not to be too pro-American. Sigh.

(Via Instapundit.)

The Obama administration’s new Obamacare call center is keeping all its employees part-time so they won’t have to offer health care.

It’s been months since the IRS admitted that it was targeting Tea Party organizations for special scrutiny, but according to the Congressional testimony of an IRS agent, it has never stopped doing so:

In a remarkable admission that is likely to rock the Internal Revenue Service again, testimony released Thursday by House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp reveals that an agent involved in reviewing tax exempt applications from conservative groups told a committee investigator that the agency is still targeting Tea Party groups, three months after the IRS scandal erupted.

In closed door testimony before the House Ways & Means Committee, the unidentified IRS agent said requests for special tax status from Tea Party groups is being forced into a special “secondary screening” because the agency has yet to come up with new guidance on how to judge the tax status of the groups.

After all these months, they are still at it! Whoever might have been responsible originally, this is Obama’s baby now. He had months to put a stop to this, and chose not to.

UPDATE: The Wall Street Journal comments (subscription required).

(Previous post.) (Via Instapundit.)

I understood there would be no geography:

OBAMA: If we don’t deepen our ports all along the Gulf — places like Charleston, South Carolina, or Savannah, Georgia, or Jacksonville, Florida — if we don’t do that, those ships are going to go someplace else.

UPDATE: I think this is remarkable, because this is a prepared remark for the softest of softball interviews. Whoever prepped Obama didn’t realize that Charleston, Savannah, and Jacksonville are on the Eastern Seaboard, not the Gulf Coast, and he didn’t know any better. George W Bush got a reputation as an intellectual lightweight for much less than this: the Bush-as-idiot meme started when he failed to identify all of the people on a list of obscure world leaders (e.g., the president of Chechnya) in an ambush quiz. Here we have Obama making basic geographic mistakes about the United States in a remark volunteered during a softball interview.

UPDATE: Good heavens he does this a lot.

In May, the White House said that “nobody’s been more outraged” by the IRS’s misconduct than President Obama. But many of us were skeptical that there was any real outrage, as opposed to mere regret that the IRS’s misconduct had come to light.

Sure enough, the White House now calls the IRS scandal a “phony scandal”.

A sad story.

The federal government is spending $2 billion a year to pay for free mobile phones and service. And if you’ve suspected that the safeguards to ensure that they only go the the truly needy might not be effective — or even exist at all — you’re right of course.

I think Frank J. Fleming has it exactly right.

The Obama administration — indeed the president himself — is telling us we needn’t worry about NSA surveillance; they aren’t spying on Americans:

“We don’t have a domestic spying program,” Obama said, according to the media pool report. “What we do have is some mechanisms that can track a phone number or an email address that is connected to a terrorist attack. … That information is useful.”

According to the New York Times, he’s lying:

The National Security Agency is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country, hunting for people who mention information about foreigners under surveillance, according to intelligence officials.

The N.S.A. is not just intercepting the communications of Americans who are in direct contact with foreigners targeted overseas, a practice that government officials have openly acknowledged. It is also casting a far wider net for people who cite information linked to those foreigners, like a little used e-mail address, according to a senior intelligence official.

(Previous post.) (Via Hot Air.)

The implementation of Obamacare is a complete shambles, and the administration is lying about it:

In February, Sen. Orrin Hatch pressed Gary Cohen — who is heading up much of the ObamaCare implementation efforts at the Health and Human Services Department — about the status of “service-level agreements” required with all the agencies before they can open their data to the hub. The agreements define services, responsibilities, performance and other terms for data sharing.

Hatch asked Cohen whether HHS had “signed service-level agreements with IRS, the Social Security Administration, homeland security and all the other agencies that will be providing information to the data hub.”

“We have,” Cohen said.

But at that time there were no service-level agreements in force, according to an inspector general report. HHS didn’t sign its first — with the IRS — until March. And all but two of the seven still haven’t been signed.

At that same hearing, Cohen claimed that the agency was “well along” on its data-sharing tests with “Social Security, with homeland security and with IRS” and would “be able to complete that testing by this spring.”

But a June report from the Government Accountability Office found that such tests didn’t even start until May, and that they won’t be finished until September.

At the time the administration was saying that all its agreements in place, it didn’t have any. When it said its tests were well along, they hadn’t even begun.