Internet Scofflaw

In government-run schools, bureaucratically dictated procedures reign supreme, and common sense is nowhere to be found:

A Minnesota public high school was so committed to obeying its fire drill policy to the exact letter of the law that it forced a female student–dressed only in a swimsuit, and sopping wet–to stand outside in the freezing cold for ten minutes. As a result, she suffered frostbite.

Administrators wouldn’t let the student retrieve her clothes, sit in a car or wait inside another building, according to WCCO.

Someone ought to be prosecuted, but I expect no one will even be fired.

(Via Instapundit.)

I forgot to crow about this when it happened a couple of weeks ago:

Volkswagen workers in Chattanooga, Tenn., have rejected the United Auto Workers, shooting down the union’s hopes of securing a foothold at a foreign-owned auto plant in the South.

The vote was 712 to 626, said the UAW, which blamed the loss on “politicians and outside special interest groups.”

“Outside special interest groups”? The UAW is the outside special interest group.

Soon, when the federal government is running all medical care in the United States, we’ll see stories like this:

Employees of the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) destroyed veterans’ medical files in a systematic attempt to eliminate backlogged veteran medical exam requests, a former VA employee told The Daily Caller. . .

“The committee was called System Redesign and the purpose of the meeting was to figure out ways to correct the department’s efficiency. And one of the issues at the time was the backlog,” Oliver Mitchell, a Marine veteran and former patient services assistant in the VA Greater Los Angeles Medical Center, told TheDC.

Oops, that’s not the future, that’s the past, coming from the VA, where the federal government already runs health care. In order to improve their “efficiency”, they cancelled exam requests, and then destroyed medical records so that no record of those requests would exist.

But since the federal government will be running all medical care before long, it’s also the future.

The Sacramento Bee reports:

Senate Democrats on Thursday blocked a move to expel their Democratic colleague Sen. Rod Wright by sending a Republican proposal to the Rules Committee, where it could permanently stall.

Sen. Steve Knight, a Republican from Palmdale, introduced a resolution to expel Wright from the Senate because a jury found him guilty of eight felonies last month for lying about living in the district he represents.

There was a time that Democrats felt it necessary to maintain the appearance of decency, but now they are all about the naked exercise of partisan power. They have no other principles.

(Via Hot Air.)

Barack Obama used to have this thing he did were he would give the opposing argument its due before disagreeing with it. It was the only thing I liked about him. For example:

[Theodore Roosevelt] believed then what we know is true today, that the free market is the greatest force for economic progress in human history. It’s led to a prosperity and a standard of living unmatched by the rest of the world.

But Roosevelt also knew that the free market has never been a free license to take whatever you can from whomever you can. He understood the free market only works when there are rules of the road that ensure competition is fair and open and honest.

But that was back when Obama thought he had the winning argument. Now he knows he doesn’t, so all he does is demagogue:

The bottom line is there are folks out there who don’t want to see this program succeed, and there are folks out there who don’t want to see you get health insurance if you don’t have it.

Yeah, right. We don’t want people to get health insurance. That’s exactly it. Geez.

Yep, Barack Obama said that:

That’s the good thing as a president. I can do whatever I want.

The context was relatively benign, breaking the rules for Monticello visitors, or something like that. (It wasn’t like he was claiming the right to unilaterally alter the law or anything outrageous like that.) What’s troubling is the mentality that leads him to say things like that, out loud, in public.

This is America, and Obama is a president, not a king. You’re not supposed to talk like that. The president serves the people, he is not above the people. And he does not seem to understand that at all.

The only surprising thing here is that someone wrote it down:

Shortly before Hillary Clinton’s effort to pass health care reform died in the summer of 1994, the first lady asked a close friend and confidant for advice on “how best to preserve her general memories of the administration and of health care in particular.”

When asked why, according to the friend’s June 20, 1994, diary entry, Clinton said, “Revenge.”

Hillary must be furious, because she knew better than to keep a diary:

“She told me she does not keep a diary and thinks it best not to keep one,” Blair wrote about Clinton in June 1994.

Blair later wrote in January of 1995 that Clinton said “she dare not… keep records of inti9mate (sic) thoughts and conversations” for fear of “subpoenas.”

The New York Post reports:

A politically connected Brooklyn pastor was arrested for a pair of open warrants — but was spared a night in jail after Mayor de Blasio called an NYPD boss to inquire about his close pal. . . Findlayter — the head of Brooklyn’s New Hope Christian Church who was instrumental in delivering the black vote to de Blasio — was pulled over at 11:21 p.m. Monday in East Flatbush for making a left turn without signaling, police said.

This is how it always is under a progressive regime. They proclaim equality for all, but there are always different rules for the nomenklatura. Some are more equal than others.

(Via Instapundit.)

Glenn Reynolds has an insightful observation:

When you no longer can be sure that there are things the government wouldn’t do, you have to base your assessments on the things that it could do. As I’ve noted, making “crazy” conspiracy theories seem more-or-less sane is one of Obama’s toxic legacies.

There’s an old adage that in geopolitics you need to prepare based on your enemy’s capabilities, not his intentions. It used to be that adage didn’t apply domestically: we didn’t have domestic enemies (other than fringe elements), only opponents. But now it’s clear that Obama does view us as enemies, so we have to do the same.

Ah, the community organizers:

Trader Joe’s wanted to build a new store in Portland, Oregon. Instead of heading to a tony neighborhood downtown or towards the suburbs, the popular West Coast grocer chose a struggling area of Northeast Portland.

The company selected two acres along Martin Luther King Blvd. that had been vacant for decades. It seemed like the perfect place to create jobs, improve customer options and beautify the neighborhood. City officials, the business community, and residents all seemed thrilled with the plan. Then some community organizers caught wind of it.

The fact that most members of the Portland African-American Leadership Forum didn’t live in the neighborhood was beside the point. “This is a people’s movement for African-Americans and other communities, for self-determination,” member Avel Gordly said in a press conference. Even the NAACP piled on, railing against the project as a “case study in gentrification.” (The area is about 25 percent African-American.)

After a few months of racially tinged accusations and angry demands, Trader Joe’s decided it wasn’t worth the hassle. “We run neighborhood stores and our approach is simple,” a corporate statement said. “If a neighborhood does not want a Trader Joe’s, we understand, and we won’t open the store in question.”

Hours after Trader Joe’s pulled out, PAALF leaders arrived at a previously scheduled press conference trying to process what just happened. The group re-issued demands that the now-cancelled development include affordable housing, mandated jobs based on race, and a small-business slush fund. Instead, the only demand being met is two fallow acres and a lot of anger from the people who actually live nearby.

“All of my neighbors were excited to have Trader Joe’s come here and replace a lot that has always been empty,” said Nghi Tran. “It’s good quality for poor men.” Like many residents, Tran pins the blame on PAALF. “They don’t come to the neighborhood cleanups,” he said. “They don’t live here anymore.”

“There are no winners today,” said Adam Milne, owner of an area restaurant. “Only missed tax revenue, lost jobs, less foot traffic, an empty lot and a boulevard still struggling to support its local small businesses.” The store was to be built by a local African American-owned construction company.

Instead of a new development bringing shoppers and jobs, they have an empty lot. That’s what the community organizers do. Bringing money to the neighborhood if of no use to them if they can’t control where it goes. “You can’t bring jobs here unless you let me wet my beak a little.”

If a development’s projected profitability is large enough, maybe the developers will pay protection. If it’s marginal, they won’t. And here’s the thing: in a struggling neighborhood, every potential developments is marginal! Places like northeast Portland are never going to get ahead while they let self-interested community organizers speak for them.

(Via Instapundit.)

David Gregory tries to trap Rand Paul into playing into the Democrat-media complex’s “war on women” narrative. Paul will have none of it. I hope other Republicans learn from his example.

The New York Times reports that Republican dominance in the House is mostly not the result of gerrymandering:

The problem for Democrats is that they have overwhelming majorities not only in the dense, poor urban centers, but also in isolated, far-flung college towns, historical mining areas and 19th-century manufacturing towns that are surrounded by and ultimately overwhelmed by rural Republicans.

A motivated Democratic cartographer could produce districts that accurately reflected overall partisanship in states like these by carefully crafting the metropolitan districts and snaking districts along the historical canals and rail lines that once connected the nonmetropolitan Democratic enclaves. But such districts are unlikely to emerge by chance from a nonpartisan process.

So Republican dominance results not from Republican gerrymandering, but from the lack of Democratic gerrymandering. If you group nearby people together, Republicans win.

That’s interesting, but what I found particularly telling is how the NYT introduced these results:

The results were not encouraging for reform advocates.

If the results — showing that reform wouldn’t help Democrats — were not encouraging to reform advocates, that tells us what the actual goals of “reform advocates” are, doesn’t it?

(Via Instapundit.)

Barack Obama:

There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues.

It can be particularly hard to disentangle those issues when your party and you personally are doing everything you can to entangle them!

Then he does that thing (he used to do it a lot, back when he was doing the unity schtick) where he gives lip service to the other side before expounding his own, far-left view:

. . . I think it’s important for progressives not to dismiss out of hand arguments against my Presidency or the Democratic Party or Bill Clinton or anybody just because there’s some overlap between those criticisms and the criticisms that traditionally were directed against those who were trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans. The flip side is I think it’s important for conservatives to recognize and answer some of the problems that are posed by that history . . .

The key point that Obama leaves out here is that history of criticisms against those “trying to bring about greater equality for African-Americans” is the history of the Democratic party!

Now that the Democratic party has made its 11th-hour transformation from an anti-minority racist party to a pro-minority racist party (no exaggeration), they want to project their own evils onto their opponents, who have (more or less) been arguing for a color-blind society all along.

New Jersey’s “bridgegate” scandal (in which the state government intentionally snarled traffic as political payback) has certainly captured the media’s imagination. The big three networks dedicated over 34 minutes of airtime to it in a single day, which is 17 times as much as they dedicated to the IRS scandal over the past half year.

And with good cause; the allegation is very serious indeed.  Chris Christie stands accused . . . of behaving like a Democrat.

Dealing out political retribution has been the Democrat playbook going all the way back to Martin Van Buren, who — with Andrew Jackson — founded the modern Democratic party. (Jackson himself was more direct. When he was particularly incensed with someone, he would shoot him.)

Today’s Democratic party is rife with this sort of thing. The closest analogue is Seattle’s Democratic mayor closing city streets, out of an explicit desire to inconvenience drivers.

But a better example of callous political retribution was Barack Obama’s shutdown theater last year. During the government shutdown, the Obama administration directed the government to “make life as difficult as possible“. And so they did:

• They stopped an individual from mowing the lawn at the Lincoln Memorial.
• They barricaded wheelchair ramps.
• They removed handles from water fountains.
• They (illegally) closed Alaskan lands.
• They closed the Grand Canyon, and refused to let the state reopen it at state expense.
• They sent armed rangers to lock tourists into a Yellowstone lodge and ensure they could not see Old Faithful.
• They closed the only safe road through Blount County, forcing parents to take their kids to school on “white knuckle” routes.
• They shut down the AMBER alert web site.
• They (illegally) evict elderly people from their own homes.
• They closed the parking lot at Mount Vernon, which isn’t even government property.
• They barricaded highway viewing areas at Mount Rushmore.
• They cut off cancer treatment for children.
• They closed the Claude Moore Colonial Farm, which received no government funding and is operated entirely by volunteers.
• They barricaded national open-air monuments, and closed privately operated parks.

None of these (save one) were mandated by the shutdown; they actually cost the government money to perpetrate. (The exception, cancer treatment for children, Republicans sought to fund, but the Democrats refused.)

The most recent example to come to light is how the White House took extraordinary steps to ensure that the budget sequester hurt rural schools. (Via Instapundit.) In this instance, the Agriculture Department had already determined that the sequester would have no effect on funds already disbursed the previous year. However, the White House overruled that determination, and ordered them to claw back the money they had already spent.

It’s wrong for anyone to behave like this, and we do expect better from Republicans. Christie ought to be in hot water over it. But all the furor from the Democrats and their media allies over this is very much the pot calling the kettle black.

The governor of New York says if you don’t agree with him on social issues, you have no place in his state:

The Republican Party candidates are running against the SAFE Act — it was voted for by moderate Republicans who run the Senate! Their problem is not me and the Democrats; their problem is themselves. Who are they? Are they these extreme conservatives who are right-to-life, pro-assault-weapon, anti-gay? Is that who they are? Because if that’s who they are and they’re the extreme conservatives, they have no place in the state of New York, because that’s not who New Yorkers are.

To be clear: when Democrats talk about uniting red America and blue America, they don’t mean by respecting diversity of thought. They mean that red Americans must become blue, or else.

(Via Hot Air.)

UPDATE: Cuomo: I never said what I said. I would have thought it hard to accuse people of being “entirely reckless with facts and the truth” when they quote you verbatim, but he’s up for it.

This is why the government cannot be trusted with information. They will abuse it:

The Environmental Protection Agency has told farmers and ranchers it is sorry for handing private information about them over to environmental groups, but agriculture advocates who fear attacks from eco-terrorists say it’s like closing the barn door after the horses escaped.

In response to Freedom of Information Requests, the federal agency released information on up to 100,000 agriculture industry workers, including their home address and phone numbers, GPS coordinates and even personal medical histories.

Whether this was accidental or not is beside the point. If they face no consequences, it will keep happening.

In 1974, the polar vortex phenomenon was evidence of global cooling. Now it’s evidence of global warming.

(Via Best of the Web.)

Maybe the reason New York state officials are so anti-gun is they think that gun owners are as irresponsible with them as they are:

Jerome M. Hauer, Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s director of homeland security, took out his handgun and used the laser sighting device attached to the barrel as a pointer in a presentation to a foreign delegation, according to public officials. . . These officials, one of whom claimed to be an eyewitness, said that three Swedish emergency managers in the delegation were rattled when the gun’s laser tracked across one of their heads before Hauer found the map of New York, at which he wanted to point.

[Hauer] isn’t a law enforcement official. He carries the loaded 9-millimeter Glock in a holster into state buildings, an apparent violation of state law barring state employees from bringing weapons to the workplace. . .

Appalling. He should be required to take an NRA gun safety class. Perhaps the version for kids.

(Via Instapundit.)

I frequently see it alleged by liberals that getting health universal coverage is as simple as expanding Medicare so that it covers everyone. Many of them probably actually believe it, so I want to explain some basic economics.

The reason Medicare’s cost to the government is as low as it is (which is not all that low, by the way) is because Medicare’s reimbursement rate is just barely above marginal cost. That means that it is barely profitable to treat them, given that — and this is the key point — all the fixed cost has already been paid for by other patients.

In other words, Medicare is cheap (that is, cheaper than it would otherwise be) because its share of the cost of all our health care infrastructure (hospitals, equipment, etc.) is shifted onto other patients.

But you cannot shift the fixed cost off of everyone! For Medicare to work, there need to be people left off of it to bear Medicare’s share of the fixed cost. Try to put everyone on Medicare and the whole thing collapses.

This is nothing more than elementary economics. Whenever you see a politician proclaim we should have “Medicare for all”, they are proclaiming that they don’t understand economics. Or, if they actually do (I’m looking at you, Paul Krugman and Robert Reich) then they’re engaging in pure demagoguery.

This is interesting:

The FBI’s creeping advance into the world of counterterrorism is nothing new. But quietly and without notice, the agency has finally decided to make it official in one of its organizational fact sheets. Instead of declaring “law enforcement” as its “primary function,” as it has for years, the FBI fact sheet now lists “national security” as its chief mission. The changes largely reflect the FBI reforms put in place after September 11, 2001. . .

After noticing the change, [lawyer Kel] McClanahan reviewed his records and saw that the revised fact sheets began going out this summer. “I think they’re trying to rebrand,” he said. “So many good things happen to your agency when you tie it to national security.”

(Via Hot Air.)

Officially the filibuster is only partly dead, but Reid is hinting at changing that:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Sunday said he was not currently considering an elimination of the filibuster for legislation, but he warned that the country could not remain “paralyzed” by Republican obstruction. . .

[Democrats] left in place a 60-vote threshold for legislation. But in a rare Sunday television interview, Reid stopped short of categorically ruling out such a move in the future.

What he’s trying to do is get the benefit of abolishing the filibuster without actually doing it, by pressuring the opposition into giving him what he wants in return for keeping the filibuster. That worked once last year (once more than it should have), but when Democrats kept doing it, Republicans caught on and declined to play along.

When the Democrats abolished the filibuster, they did it narrowly, for only the things (presidential nominations) they wanted to do that very day, and pretended to leave it in place for other things, such as legislation and Supreme Court nominations. No matter; the filibuster is dead now and everyone knows it. From now on, there will be a new exception whenever anything is filibustered.

If you’re on the Obamacare exchanges, don’t have a baby. There’s no way to add a baby to your plan:

Insurers say computerized “change in circumstance” updates to deal with family and life developments were supposed to have been part of the federal system from the start.

But that feature got postponed as the government scrambled to fix technical problems that overwhelmed the health care website during its first couple of months.

Maybe this is why they are so concerned about contraception. . .

(Previous post.)

According to NY Governor Andrew Cuomo, make a new law that turns hitherto law-abiding persons into criminals, then arrest those people. Voila, people are safer!

Don’t ask whether there’s been any improvement in actual crime statistics. That would be rude.

The EU is banning cinnamon rolls.

Answer: because of liberalism. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Item #1: The blogosphere is abuzz over this ad from Barack Obama’s twitter account:

As many have pointed out, this tells you a lot about this how they see their own followers. I think it’s even more insulting to Obama’s non-followers: the very idea that grown men and women with jobs and families are going to change their opinion of the government taking over health care, just because a spoiled man-child came home from college for the holidays carrying marching orders from the president to harangue his parents with hope, change, and ironic eyebrows.

More on this in a moment, but first, item #2: Americans are sorting themselves into red and blue communities:

Democrats and Republicans are much less likely to live among each other than they were a generation ago.

Back in 1976 — the year of a close presidential election — just over a quarter of the population lived in “landslide counties,” where the winning margin was greater than 20 percentage points. . . Last year, more than half the country lived in landslide counties. . .

States themselves have become more polarized, with most legislatures and governorships controlled entirely by one party. As a result, not only are blue and red states tracking different courses on just about every issue, but some people are seeking to escape their states.

But if Americans are sorting themselves into like-minded communities, are they doing so on purpose? In other words, are people voting with their feet by consciously moving to states or counties that reflect their own partisan preferences?

Researchers at the University of Virginia and the University of Southern California suggest that, yes, they may be.

This comes as no surprise to me. The fact is, blue-state liberals are very frequently a pain in the neck to work with. (Or to live with, I would guess, but fortunately I don’t have pajama boy in my family.) Why? Because of the constant political harangues in what ought to be non-political contexts. Exactly the kind of harangues that President Obama is asking ironic pajama-clad children to inflict on their parents this Christmas.

Case in point: Years ago I related the story of how a discussion of candidates for an important position in my department was turned to a nonsensical slam on Sarah Palin, apropos of nothing at all.

Case in point: More recently, at a retirement party for a valued member of our faculty (who happened to be female), another faculty member launched into a speech about how the departing faculty member reminded him of Hillary Clinton who was then leaving her job as Secretary of State. This was intended as a high compliment. In fact, the comparison was absurd and insulting; the two women have nothing at all in common other than their gender, and the departing woman was quite accomplished, in contrast to Clinton’s complete lack of any accomplishments at the State Department (unless you count her courageous stand against security at overseas consulates).

Case in point: More recently still, a colleague sent me an essay he wrote on the government shutdown. It rambled a bit, but I can summarize its key points: (1) Republicans claim to oppose Obamacare. (2) Obamacare is obviously great; no one could honestly oppose it. (3) So why are Republicans really shutting down the government? (4) It must be because they’re racist. He asked me for my comments, which I duly provided him.

I could go on, but I won’t. (Indeed, I’m leaving out the more painful harangues I’ve received.) In short, if blue-state liberals in general are anything like the liberals I know in ultra-blue academia, it’s no wonder conservatives and libertarians prefer nothing to do with them.

For all I know, red-state conservatives are just as insufferable. To some extent, I’d be surprised if they weren’t. Nevertheless, it’s still the fault of liberalism. The phenomenon at work is the intrusion of politics into all aspects of life. To some extent that’s because of the liberal media and the president’s pajama-clad minions, but fundamentally it’s because of the intrusion of government into all aspects of life.

Liberalism is at war with civil society. Civil society is the collection of disparate institutions, independent of the government, that make society work. The problem with civil society, to liberals, is that independence. Liberals can’t control it, so sometimes it does things of which liberals don’t approve. In fact, it often does such unacceptable things, since civil society, being made up of churches, other civic organizations, and individuals, has a strongly conservative character.

As a result, liberals have been very deliberately trying to crowd out civil society with government, by replacing activities that people just did on their own — but sometimes in a fashion that didn’t comport with liberal preferences — with government programs that liberals can control.

For instance, in the Obamacare HHS mandate you see a very deliberate effort to get religious organizations out of the business of charity. For years, Democrats have been trying to raise taxes on charitable donations, since any monies spent by private charities would be better spent by the government.

As the government supplants more and more of civil society, and as it simultaneously takes increasing control of our individual lives, politics — which ought to be a sideshow — is becoming dreadfully relevant. We have to fight over it, because it affects us so much.

And that’s why politics sucks. In part it’s because of liberal jerks like Barack Obama’s pajama-clad harangue brigade, but in greater part it’s because of liberalism itself.

Ohio Democrats recently introduced a bill to make it very difficult for parents to homeschool their children — after all, outside the public school who knows what those kids will be learning! (The bill was quickly withdrawn in the face of public outrage.)

In the public schools, we can be sure that the kids are learning the right things, thanks to the new federal “Common Core” that teaches important truths like “government officials’ commands must be obeyed by all” and “an individual’s wants are less important than the nation’s well-being.”

POSTSCRIPT: We can be sure that Common Core isn’t offered in good faith. If it were, the Obama administration wouldn’t be making clumsy efforts to turn it into a racial wedge issue.

You can close the books on the GM bailout. All it took to rescue GM and give it to the unions, other than screwing all GM’s creditors, was $10.5 billion in taxpayer money.

UPDATE: The Washington Post has its own version of this.

(Via Ed Driscoll.)

Could an embattled spy agency possibly be more tone deaf than this?

This is the real mission patch for a NRO mission, tweeted out proudly by the Office of Director of National Intelligence.

(Via Instapundit.)