It’s hard to get rid of a career bureaucrat, even at the supervisory level. “After you’ve been here for a year, it’s easier to kill you than fire you.” That’s what my co-workers at the Bureau of Labor Statistics would tell me on a sunny day, after we’d used up our lunch hour, but didn’t want to go back to work yet.
Bureaucracy
Even an IRS of Billy Grahams would be tyrannical
It is no surprise that the government agency responsible for taxing the rich and funding the liberal management of our lives for the collective would be a bastion of the most partisan members of the Democratic Party, willing to wield the hammer that is government power for the various factions of the gangster-like mob it has become.
Current tax law, or what passes for “law,” requires tyranny in its enforcement. The Internal Revenue Service has always been uniquely above the law with its unique right to preemptive seizure of a target’s property and a reverse burden of proof that requires accused taxpayers to prove their innocence.
PC police in D.C. outlaw ‘mutt’ to describe mixed breed in favor of Xoloitzcuintli
‘Here, Xoloitzcuintli, Xoloitzcuintli”
Paging Mister Mxyzptlk: We have your dog.
From the “you just can’t make these things up” department. Who but government could come up with an idea like this? The Washington Post reports that the District of Columbia’s health department, which oversees pet licensing, sent out a letter to pet owners on Wednesday explaining changes in its system.
‘I’m asking for help, and all you give me is papers’
Gian Carlo Menotti’s first opera, The Consul, seems out-of-date now that communist Russia and its satellites have crumbled. This story of a poor wife trying to get a visa to join her dissident husband in a free land just doesn’t resonate much nowadays.
The gray Soviet-style waiting room where its heroine, Magda, goes to fill out “endless paperwork which is never quite correct” just doesn’t resonate with anyone’s experience of government today, right?
IRS investigated groups for teaching about the Constitution or opposing deficit spending
The IRS didn’t just investigate groups based on their perceived political views, but also targeted groups for “educating on the Constitution and Bill of Rights” or advocating limits on government or deficit spending, reports the Washington Post. Meanwhile, the Obama Justice Department is demanding that colleges adopt sweeping unconstitutional speech codes that ban even speech that would not offend a “reasonable person,” but only hypersensitive people, notes a prominent law professor. The Post describes the additional groups targeted by the IRS:
Passenger who stripped naked when TSA screened him fined by agency
The TSA should make its mind. First its agents get all wee-weed up when a passenger refuses to cooperate. Then when a passenger capitulates to their demands to search his person, they want to slap a fine on him.
Some clothes, too. At least that was the case with passenger John Brennan of Portland, Ore., who was stopped at a security checkpoint last year at Portland International Airport.
SC woman ran up $400K tab using EMS ambulance as private chauffeur
Audrey Ferguson, 51, of Charleston, S.C., knows how to live in style. When she wants to go downtown, she takes a limo. Each ride costs a cool $425.
But it’s not her money that she spends. And it’s not really a limo either. It’s an ambulance dispatched by the local EMS.
EEOC flouts federal laws, discourages hiring by creating bad legal climate
One way the current political climate discourages job creation is by turning problem employees into lawsuits for the employers who took the risk of hiring them. A bad legal climate has gotten worse over the past several years due to the appointment of more left-wing, anti-employer judges by President Obama and an increasingly out-of-control Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
What difference does it make?
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as readers may remember, famously asked this question when she testified before Congress last January. She used it to deflect questions about the attack on the U.S. installation in Benghazi that left four U.S. officials dead, including Ambassador Chris Stevens.
The State Department is nothing if not consistent.
Gun laws and trusting the government
Gun rights rally in Albany (Tim Roske/AP)
Reportedly, a pair of U.S. Senators – Republican Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia – have put together a compromise on extending background checks, as a way of keeping some element of President Obama’s gun-restrictions proposal alive in Congress.
Toomey was reassuring about the concern that “universal background checks” Continue reading