What the Hell is Happening to My Country, Part 49,926...

Kimberley Strassel, writing at the Wall Street Journal, points out a relatively small, but telling piece of corruption: a single oil refinery (out of 143) has been granted an exemption from the mandate to include ethanol in the gasoline they produce.  The other 142 refineries are being told to take up the slack for the one exempted.

What refinery is the lucky recipient of this exemption?  And by what process was the exemption granted?  Here's where the stench of corruption really starts pouring forth: the EPA (the government agency responsible for assigning ethanol mandate targets) refuses to say which refinery was exempted, or why.  Furthermore, they even fiddled the public numbers to hide which refinery it was.

Ms. Strassel concludes:

Dozens of small refineries are being crushed by the mandate, and a number have petitioned the EPA for exemptions. If "disproportionate economic hardship" is the agency's standard, no doubt plenty would qualify. Yet only one got the nod. The rest of the industry is dying to know what is so special about this refinery, especially since the EPA is making every other refinery shoulder its burden.

The public should want to know too. Washington is rife with secret deals that reward select corporate players, and the numbers have only accelerated under this "most transparent" of administrations. If the process by which the EPA issued this exemption was aboveboard, it should have no problem divulging details. Until that time, the public might fairly assume funny business. 

Go read the whole thing, then write your Congresscritters (I just did).  My conclusion?

   Rope.
   Tree.
   EPA Administrators.
   Some assembly required.

Free Obamaphones, in Apparently Limitless Quantity...

Jillian Melchior is a reporter for National Review Online (NRO).  Without trying hard, and without any deception at all (in fact, quite the opposite), she acquired three free “Obamaphones”.

Just imagine what a deceptive, dishonest person might do.  The 20 or 30 phones reported in some stories seems quite plausible, especially when you read the details of how the program is run.

Billions of taxpayer dollars are being fraudulently spent annually on these phones.  Who benefits?  Two companies that are big supporters of the Democratic Party in general, and Obama in particular.

Surprised?  What rock have you been hiding under?

Government Efficiency...

Do you harbor some lingering belief that government is the most efficient way to get big jobs done?  This story should cure you of that mental illness.

The outline:

• The federal government has long had a “Lifeline” program that provides free phone service to poor people.  This program is paid for by a charge on your phone bill.
• The program originally provided free land lines, but was recently extended to provide free mobile phones (the notorious “ObamaPhone” that was the subject of a viral YouTube video last year).
• Mobile phone retailers make money by giving away these free mobile phones.  They're supposed to follow federal guidelines about who gets the phones, but there's no enforcement and the financial incentive is for them to give more away, not fewer.
• People approach the phone retailers, tell them that they're going to resell (“flip”) the phone to raise money for drugs, shoes, whatever, and the retailers still give them the phones.

Personally, I find this completely unsurprising.  Of course that's what happens; it's almost as if someone designed the program like that.

A business, operating with profit motive, would never behave in such a stupid and inefficient way with our tax dollars.  Only the government has that capacity.

Something for you to think about...  When you think of the tax dollars that you pay to both the federal government and the state government, what percentage of that do you think is utterly wasted (like above)? 

For the federal government, I'm guessing around 50% or 60%.  For the state (California), I'm thinking more like 70% or 80%...

Time to Reexamine Our Government's Structure...

Jay Cost:

The Declaration of Independence vested all sovereign power in the people alone, while the Constitution established a government to manage that power in a republican fashion. While the people still swear fealty to the founding ideals, they have not put much thought recently into the problems the Founders tackled. As society has become more complex, the government has, too; Americans have not reexamined the structure of government, in an age in which it accounts for more than 20 percent of the national economy, to ensure it still reflects the republican spirit. In fact, there has not been a serious public discussion about the organization of the bureaucracy since the 1880s, even as it has doubled in size many times over. And so today, it is a vast enterprise of millions of workers, with precious little oversight from the people’s elected representatives.

Read the whole thing...

I Sense a Pattern...

Some elements of the pattern:

For decades, American businesses have been held liable for the reasonably foreseeable (and sometimes not so foreseeable) criminal behavior of their employees.  So American businesses did the obvious thing: they started making criminal background checks before they hired people.  People with an alarming criminal history would be rejected.  Now the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) is suing two American companies (just the beginning, I'm sure) to prevent them from making pre-employment criminal background checks.  Why?  Because blacks fail these background checks more than others, so therefore the background checks are discriminatory.  Why do blacks fail these background checks more often?  Because they're convicted of crime more often!

Scottsdale, Arizona had (until recently) a thriving pedicab community.  Recently the city passed legislation requiring pedicab operators to carry million dollar liability insurance policies.  This was provoked by a drunk driver striking a pedicab.  These insurance policies cost at least $250 a month – far more expensive than a pedicab business can support.  A Scottsdale policeman expressed surprise about the steep decline in the number of pedicabs.  Similar things have happened in the other major cities of the area.  Never underestimate the ability of government to completely screw small business, and government bureaucracy's cluelessness about business...

A British immigrant to the U.S., here for eight years, says: 'I’m a U.K. citizen hoping soon to become a U.S. citizen, a lifelong admirer of the American project and its founding principles. But after living here for eight years, I’ve started to wince when I hear the expression, “It’s a free country.”'

Senator Lindsay Graham – a Republican – says: 'If I thought censoring the mail was necessary, I would suggest it, but I don't think it is.'  Censor our mail to protect us against terrorism?  Why do I suspect that censorship would not include Senator Graham's mail?

A guy with a large Twitter following is very critical of Obama.  He is careful never to actually threaten him, but the fact that he despises Obama is abundantly clear if you read his Twitter feed.  This is America, and we have freedom of speech; there's nothing wrong (or illegal) about his behavior.  So why am I noting this?  Because this Twitterer was visited in his home by the Secret Service – and they were there only because of his legal, Constitutionally-protected free speech.

So I examine the elements of this pattern, and the result is a single word:

Doom...

The Great Farm Bill Rip-Off...

An excellent primer (from Reason magazine) on just what's wrong with the farm subsidy bill currently moving through Congress...

Your Tax Dollars At Work, Part 546,232...

Forgive me...

Shameless...

The little people in California are being screwed again.  No surprise there, really, though this is a little more blatant than usual.  Consider:

– California, under Jerry Brown's “leadership,” decides to build a high-speed railroad.  Not between two cities that could conceivably need such a thing, as California has no such pair of cities.  Not even between two large cities, as we can't possibly raise the gargantuan sums required to do this.  No, instead we're building a high-speed “demonstration” railroad that has no intent of actually making sense.  It's just a way to muster the political will to get this turkey started.

– The job is put out for bid under a set of rules designed to balance technical merit and price.  Fair enough.  But the initial set of rules would have eliminated the California-based firm Tutor Perini, along with a Swedish firm.  So the California High-Speed Rail Authority quietly, secretly changed the rules in mid-process, to allow Tutor Perini's bid to be considered.

– Tutor Perini was declared the winner.  Their bid was the lowest price (by a wide margin), and also scored the lowest on technical merit (also by a wide margin).  Something to note: Tutor Perini has been frequently accused of “lowballing” their bids – deliberately submitting unreasonably low bids to win, then finding ways to jack up the price as the job proceeds.  In fact, they have been remarkably successful at doing so.

Now the part where we get screwed: the principal owner of Tutor Perini is Richard Blum.  If you don't know that name, you will most likely recognized the name of his wife: Diane Feinstein, one of our California Senators.  The political operators would say here that the optics look bad.  I say something else: there's no way this happened without corruption, however subtle and soft.

Rope.
Tree.
A whole bunch of politicians.
Some assembly required.

For All Those Who Think “It Can't Happen Here!”

How many of us have looked at history (say, of Germany in the 1930s) or recent events (say, of Hugo Chavez's systematic dismantling of representative democracy in Venezuela), and then comforted ourselves by saying “That can't happen here!”  I know I'm guilty of that.

Read this story of government intimidation in Fresno, California.

This is how takeovers start, when the government starts placing itself above the people it governs, and (most especially) when those who are governing start treating themselves as above the law.  When the powerful get away with intimidating the citizenry, it of course only encourages more of this.   These small acts of intimidation are actually very important, much like the early stages of a bacterial infection are very important – they are a warning sign, which, if taken seriously, provide an opportunity to wipe out the infection before it gets completely out of control.

Debbie and I had a conversation yesterday on a related topic.  She keeps reading about efforts to allow Obama to run for a third (and further) terms as president, by somehow repealing or getting around the 22nd Amendment.  My response is two-fold: First, I don't think such a thing is very likely in the U.S.  Second, if it did happen, that would be a clear signal to us to make our home somewhere else...

Karzai Accuses U.S. of Colluding with the Taliban...

This morning I read that Afghan President Karzai just accused the U.S. of colluding with Taliban ($WSJ) to persuade the Afghan public that they really needed foreign forces (which are, of course, primarily American) to stay past the announced withdrawal date in 2014.  The specific accusation is that the U.S. “coordinated” the Taliban suicide bombings in Kabul yesterday.

I caught myself in a very uncomfortable moment as I read, when I realized that I was actually considering that Karzai was telling the truth.  Ordinarily I'd have dismissed such as statement as the delusional ravings of a hard-pressed foreign politician frantically searching for a scapegoat.  Not this time.  I'm not saying that I believe Karzai is correct; in fact, I still think that's very unlikely.  But...I'm keeping an open mind about it.  Should some actual evidence surface, I'll be paying close attention. 

Why this change in attitude?  It's really very simple: I have absolutely zero faith that the Obama administration's actions are guided by America's interests.  I am persuaded that only their own interests guide their actions.  If they thought colluding with the Taliban would help them, I have no doubt they'd find a way to justify it to themselves.

I am saddened to find myself thinking this way...

Of Course They Did...

As we explained a few days ago, of course the bureaucrats are going to first cut the services the public wants...

The Standing Joke...

For anyone who even halfway follows politics in America, the bureaucracy's response to a threatened budget cut is entirely predictable: they will say that the public's most cherished service provided by that bureaucracy will be cut.  Hence when a politician dares to suggest that the San Diego City budget be cut, the first thing we hear from the bureaucracy is: fired cops, fired firemen, closed parks and libraries, etc.  You absolutely never hear that the public art budget will be slashed, bureaucratic staff will be reduced, or pensions will be cut.  Never.  It's achieved the status of a standing joke amongst political insiders.

The really sad part is that it works, at least most of the time.  It scares the politically unaware, or the parents with kids in school (when they threaten to fire teachers), or other similarly affected.  Most of the time, the bureaucracy's budget is restored (or even increased!).

I think of this as a slightly subtle form of corruption, with the bureaucrats playing the voting public for the fools they unfortunately are...

Friend and reader Doug W. points out this editorial by one of my favorite writers, Thomas Sowell.  It makes the same point more effectively.  Here's the lead (with Doug's emphasis):

Back in my teaching days, many years ago, one of the things I liked to ask the class to consider was this: Imagine a government agency with only two tasks: (1) building statues of Benedict Arnold and (2) providing life-saving medications to children. If this agency's budget were cut, what would it do?

The answer, of course, is that it would cut back on the medications for children. Why? Because that would be what was most likely to get the budget cuts restored. If they cut back on building statues of Benedict Arnold, people might ask why they were building statues of Benedict Arnold in the first place.

Do read the whole thing...

Criminal!

If this isn't a crime, it should be:

In the email sent Monday by Charles Brown, an official with the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service office in Raleigh, N.C., Mr. Brown asked “if there was any latitude” in how to spread the sequester cuts across the region to lessen the impacts on fish inspections.

He said he was discouraged by officials in Washington, who gave him this reply: “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.”

Translation: A government official asks if he can spread the sequestration effects around so as to minimize the impact.  Answer: not if doing so prevents the sequestration impacts we've been warning about.

The Obama administration wants the sequestration to be as painful as possible, and as visible as possible, to further their political aims.  The best interests of American citizens are not part of their calculus...

Rope.
Tree.
Obama official.
Some assembly required. 

Corruption, California-Style...

Via CoyoteBlog, this post from SLO Leaks:

Like me, [Steve Blank] is in the high tech industry. Like me, he has started several high tech companies....

After Steve sold his last startup company he applied for a permit to build a house in the California Coastal Zone in 2000. And, just like me, Steve’s land use permit was appealed to the California Coastal Commission. The reason for the appeal was “sensitive habitat” issues. (I don’t have any sensitive habitat issues because my proposed house is in the middle of a field of non-native weeds.)

Unlike me, Steve’s appeal to the Coastal Commission went pretty smoothly. He had his hearing in only 8 months – start to finish. It has taken me a year and a half, after waiting a year and a half for SLO County to issue the permit in the first place. And there were no onerous “Special Conditions” imposed on Steve by either San Mateo County or the Coastal Commission.

Here is the list of “Special Conditions” that the Coastal staff wants to impose on me.

Superficially Steve’s house and my house are similar. I have a main house and a barn on 37 acres, Steve has a main house, two barns, and a farm labor house. But Steve’s house is 15,780 sq. ft., with a swimming pool, and a 2,500 sq. ft. barn, and another 3,040 sq. ft. barn 31 ft. high, and a 1240 sq. ft. farm labor house all on 261 acres. So Steve’s house is around 3 times larger than my proposed house (and much taller). Steve also got to have a fence and there was no requirement for public access. And Steve was able to build his house to look anyway he wanted. No “rural agricultural theme” architecture for Steve, that’s for sure. Steve can also plant in his yard pretty much any damn thing he wants.

Steve is pretty proud of his house. A picture of his house is the banner to his web page, which ishere. You can see the front gate of his house here. And this is an overhead view.

Steve Blank is one of the current California Coastal Commissioners.

This is the sort of thing one expects in a third-world country, or Russia, or Chicago.  Not here.

Really?

Cross dressing, meth selling, sex toy store owner, sex in the rectory – naturally, we're talking about a Roman Catholic priest.  Really.  The criminal complaint is online there.

AAA Wants E15 Gas Delayed...

Passed along by friend and reader Tom B.:

The American Automobile Association (AAA) is calling for legislators to suspend the sales of E15 gasoline (gasoline that is 15% ethanol) until concerns about vehicle damage and consumer confusion can be allayed.

I'd like to see sales suspended for a completely different reason: the utter stupidity of substituting corn-derived alcohol for gasoline.  Why is it stupid?  For starters, it's actually worse for the environment than using gasoline (though the environment is the excuse being used).  Secondly, it's an inferior fuel for the vast majority of internal combustion engines on the road today.

If you do the research that I have done, and convince yourself (as I have) that the above statements are true, you might wonder why on earth the federal government is mandating ethanol-polluted gasoline.  As always, just follow the money.  The corn industry is beside themselves with joy at this mandate, as it provides extremely high demand (and therefore high prices) for their product – and they don't even have to do any marketing to get it!  Naturally, they show their appreciation by showering the federal politicians with money (all very well documented).

Just follow the money.  As always...

Mark Steyn on the David Gregory Flap...

If you haven't been keeping up with the news, here's the David Gregory flap in brief...

David Gregory is a “TV journalist” and moderator of NBC's Meet the Press.  On the December 23rd show, Gregory waved around a 30-round bullet magazine – an item that is illegal in Washington, D.C., where he was at the time.  It turns out that NBC asked the D.C. police for permission to display the magazine before the show aired – and that permission was denied.  Gregory waved it around anyway.  Now the police are investigating him for possible prosecution under the aforementioned law.

Journalists all over the U.S. are raising a stink about this.  “It's obvious he had no criminal intent!” is the basic line.  Now Mark Steyn:

David Gregory intended to demonstrate what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws. Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws. His investigation, prosecution, and a sentence of 20–30 years with eligibility for parole after ten (assuming Mothers Against High-Capacity Magazines don’t object) would teach a far more useful lesson than whatever he thought he was doing by waving that clip under LaPierre’s nose.

To Howard Kurtz & Co., it’s “obvious” that Gregory didn’t intend to commit a crime. But, in a land choked with laws, “obviousness” is one of the first casualties — and “obviously” innocent citizens have their “obviously” well-intentioned actions criminalized every minute of the day. Not far away from David Gregory, across the Virginia border, eleven-year-old Skylar Capo made the mistake of rescuing a woodpecker from the jaws of a cat and nursing him back to health for a couple of days. For her pains, a federal Fish & Wildlife gauleiter accompanied by state troopers descended on her house, charged her with illegal transportation of a protected species, issued her a $535 fine, and made her cry. Why is it so “obvious” that David Gregory deserves to be treated more leniently than a sixth grader? Because he’s got a TV show and she hasn’t?

Anything involving guns is even less amenable to “obviousness.” A few years ago, Daniel Brown was detained at LAX while connecting to a Minneapolis flight because traces of gunpowder were found on his footwear. His footwear was combat boots. As the name suggests, the combat boots were returning from combat — eight months of it, in Iraq’s bloody and violent al-Anbar province. Above the boots he was wearing the uniform of a staff sergeant in the USMC Reserve Military Police and was accompanied by all 26 members of his unit, also in uniform. Staff Sergeant Brown doesn’t sound like an “obvious” terrorist. But the TSA put him on the no-fly list anyway. If it’s not “obvious” to the government that a serving member of the military has any legitimate reason for being around ammunition, why should it be “obvious” that a TV host has?

Just so, Mr. Steyn, just so.

If they'd arrest and prosecute me for waving a 30 round magazine around in Washington, D.C. ... then there's no good reason why they shouldn't do the same to David Gregory.

You want some indication of how this is going to play out?  Try this: yesterday David Gregory interviewed ... President Barack Hussein Obama.

Is This for Real?

Simon M. passes this along, saying “If I'd read this on April 1st I'd have thought it was a joke.”  Here's the start of the piece:

Harvard University geoengineer and environmental scientist David Keith has a "plan B" in case of an environmental emergency.

Keith's unusual proposal is this: Force reflective particles into the Earth's upper atmosphere -- the stratosphere -- to reverse global warming.

"One approach is to disperse particulates at high altitude to reduce the effective solar flux entering the atmosphere," Keith and his fellow researchers report in the Nature Climate Change journal and Environmental Research Letters.

I'm guessing Simon would be very surprised to learn that many such schemes have been proposed, generally followed by a round of raspberries from the warmist crowd.  It seems that even if one accepts the notion of runaway global warming, proposing to fix it by engineering a solution is automatically bad – even if said solution is vastly easier and cheaper than the solutions being proposed by the warmists (e.g, carbon taxes, huge reductions in carbonaceous fuel use, etc.).  Several scientists who have proposed engineered global warming fixes have reported being harassed, having their funding threatened (and, in at least one case, actually withdrawn), and so on.  It's Mann's way or the highway, it seems...

Big Science: Perverse Incentives...

This post in Nature is about the biological sciences, but it's just as applicable to climate science.  The old saw “Follow the money!” leads you to bad science – corrupted science – in both cases.

Systems of incentives are really, really hard to get right.  Just ask any manager if you'd like to understand the how and why of that.  I was a manager for more years than I care to think about, and putting the right incentives in place for those employees who weren't self-motivated (that would be most of them!) was always an enormous challenge.  The failures were much more numerous than the successes.

I've often noted to myself how easy it is to motivate our dogs.  Just give them a tiny hint that a dog treat is in the offing, and they're instantly prepared to do absolutely anything that they know now to do.  That leads directliy to a desire: for a box of “developer treats” that would work the same way on the developers working for me.  Never did find those damned treats...

AGW Watch: Leaked IPCC Report Admits Solar Forcing and No Recent Warming...

As Anthony Watts says, this is a major bombshell.

The IPCC is in the midst of its process for finalizing and releasing AR5, its next report on anthropogenic global warming.  Alec Rawls is one of the IPCC “expert reviewers”, and he decided to break his confidentiality agreement with the IPCC and released the working draft.  You can read all about his reasons, and download the working draft itself, from Mr. Watts wonderful site WUWT.

I know of two big pieces of news in the leaked report, though I'm sure there will be more, as more people get to chew on the data.  The first one is illustrated in the graph (from the report!) at right: the IPCC is itself reporting that observed temperatures have not trended upwards since the late '90s, in direct contrast to the upward trends predicted by all of the IPCC's climate models.  Skeptics have been reporting this for five years, and until now the IPCC has been denying it.

Probably even more relevant, though, is the discussions in the draft report about solar forcing.  The IPCC scientists (some of them, at least) are reporting strong evidence for amplified solar forcing, even though they don't know the mechanism.  This is precisely what many skeptical scientists have been saying for years: that there is strong evidence that climate variations are caused (in large part, anyway) by variations in solar radiance.  Much of the evidence is observational: high correlation between solar radiance and global temperature.  Some is experimental, most especially the recent experiments (and related observations) about solar wind, cosmic rays, and cloud seeding.  The IPCC has heretofore resolutely denied that solar forcing was playing any part at all in climate change – this represents a radical revision of that position.

This is the first time a draft IPCC report has been leaked.  The first thought I had upon reading the news (and the report) was this: has this same sort of information been in prior reports, but then removed before publication?  That would be precisely the sort of thing a corrupt science bureaucracy would do to protect its own funding...