Fighting Dirty to Save Affirmative Action | Cato Institute

Fighting Dirty to Save Affirmative Action | Cato Institute: "its�Top-Ten Percent Plan�— by which the top 10% (since changed to eight) of graduates in every high school in the state are guaranteed admission — had already created a campus with some of the highest “diversity” in nation"

SAFE Act an Expensive Boondoggle | Cato Institute

SAFE Act an Expensive Boondoggle | Cato Institute: "Since 1933, the federal government has deported over 5.5 million people. Twenty-nine percent of those deportations, or 1.5 million, occurred during the first term of the Obama administration. George W. Bush’s two full terms netted just over 2 million deportations, or 36 percent of all deportations since 1933."

"For American citizens, .2 percent of job applicants run through E-Verify are falsely flagged as unauthorized to work. That may sound small, but it means that hundreds of thousands of Americans will be initially labeled as illegal workers. The appeals process can then be relatively easy in most cases but for some it can take weeks or months.

Embarrassingly, error rates for permanent residents and visa holders have increased from 1.5 percent to 2 percent over the last few years. Nobody should have to ask government permission to work."

"The Legal Workforce Act punishes E-Verify violations with a $5000 fine per violation that can climb to $25,000 for each repeated violation and jail time up to ten years — which is comparable to manslaughter or second-degree murder penalties in some states"

"E-Verify will be far more costly — an average of $141 per check"

OK Preschool Study Provides No Evidence of Lasting Benefits from Preschool | Cato @ Liberty

OK Preschool Study Provides No Evidence of Lasting Benefits from Preschool | Cato @ Liberty: "There is little evidence in the research that these kinds of preschool programs impart lasting gains to low-income students and no evidence that they benefit middle-class kids. The real-world evidence demonstrates that the test scores of children in Oklahoma have eroded significantly, as have our nation’s performance on international tests, at the same time that preschool programs have massively expanded and the quality of those programs has supposedly improved."

Spending by Wisconsin unions on lobbyists plummets, records show

Spending by Wisconsin unions on lobbyists plummets, records show: "In just two years, spending by the state's public employee unions on lobbyists has plummeted from the summit of Wisconsin politics, a new report shows.

The figures show the Wisconsin Education Association Council, the state's largest teacher union, spent nearly $2.1 million in the first six months of 2011 and $1 million in the first half of 2009, but a mere $84,000 in the first six months of this year.

The new leaders in lobbying spending at the Capitol are large business groups, which are more numerous than large unions.

That means their total spending adds up, though they spend less individually than the largest unions once did. In fact, the top five lobbying groups in the capital for the first half of 2013 spent less combined than what WEAC spent in the first half of 2011."

House narrowly rejects bid to curb NSA domestic surveillance | Politics and Law - CNET News

House narrowly rejects bid to curb NSA domestic surveillance | Politics and Law - CNET News: "In an indication that Edward Snowden's disclosures about broad government surveillances are having a political impact, the U.S. House of Representatives came within seven votes on Wednesday of curbing a program that vacuums up the logs of all Americans' phone calls.
An amendment that would have ended the National Security Agency's use of the Patriot Act to conduct mass surveillance of Americans' phone call metadata failed by a vote of 205 to 217."

Oregon woman wins $18.6 million over credit report mistakes | Fox News

Oregon woman wins $18.6 million over credit report mistakes | Fox News: "A Federal Trade Commission study earlier this year of 1,001 consumers who reviewed 2,968 of their credit reports found 21 percent contained errors. The survey found that 5 percent of the errors represented issues that would lead consumers to be denied credit."

Red State Socialism makes you sick - Campaign for Liberty

Red State Socialism makes you sick - Campaign for Liberty: "Taxpayers spent $84.4 billion on corn production, $8.1 billion of which funded production of corn starch and sweeteners. Of the total domestic corn produced, 9.6 percent ended up in junk food and beverages as sweeteners or thickeners.

Apples, the only fruit or vegetable to receive significant federal subsidies, garnered $689 million during the same period.

By contrast, nutritionists point to the “Twinkie subsidy.” Of 37 ingredients in the fattening, empty-calorie confection, taxpayers subsidize at least 17, including corn syrup, high-fructose corn syrup, vegetable shortening and corn starch."

Congress's Obamacare Waiver | Cato Institute

Congress's Obamacare Waiver | Cato Institute: "Supporters say President Obama merely held Congress harmless. Exactly. Kevin Pace and countless others like him aren’t being held harmless, because they’re not members of Congress."

"Things would be unseemly enough if Congress’s Obamacare waiver were legal. But experts say the president had no authority to grant it.

That didn’t stop even Republicans from praising him, however. Tin-eared Representative Chris Stewart (R., Utah) gushed: “There’s no question it was the right thing to do. Not just for me, but for my staff. Heavens, I have staff who don’t make much money. This would be a really big bite for them.”

Congressman, you also have constituents who don’t make much money, and who can’t make it appear out of thin air. Enjoy your waiver."

"Obamacare actually kicked members of Congress out of their current health plans and imposed that $5,000 to $11,000 pay cut immediately upon enactment in 2010. But President Obama just ignored that part of the law. He let members and staff stay in their current health plans and kept the taxpayer money flowing in their direction."

"A significant share of congressional Democrats just voted to delay the individual mandate. With once-loyal Democrats now upset over how the law hurts them personally, who knows what else Congress would discard?

President Obama circumvented a potential legislative defeat by giving each member and staffer thousands of taxpayer dollars he had no authority to touch. He’s buying votes from members of Congress — with stolen money, no less."

SWAT Teams Make Cops Look More Like Special Forces than Peace Officers | Cato Institute

SWAT Teams Make Cops Look More Like Special Forces than Peace Officers | Cato Institute: "Where Special Weapons and Tactics raids occurred only a few hundred times a year nationwide in the 1970s, they’d risen to over 50,000 annually by the mid-2000s, the bulk served “to enforce laws against consensual crimes.”"

"D-list action star Steven Seagal has a cameo in Chapter 9, a “ride-along” guest when an Arizona SWAT team smashed into a private home with a tank and shot the owner’s dog (he was suspected of violating animal cruelty laws). In a wrong-door child-pornography raid in Virginia in 2006, the terrified homeowner looked up to see NBA star (and law-enforcement buff) Shaquille O’Neal among the semiautomatic-toting officers. (How often is it, exactly, that a suspected Internet creep greets the police with a hail of bullets and a cry of “You’ll never take me alive, coppers!!”?)

Another section tells the story of the Martins, a Brooklyn couple who suffered some 50 wrong-door raids from 2002 to 2010, ostensibly because someone at NYPD programmed their address into the computer system as a placeholder."

FBI let informants commit more than 5,000 crimes in a single year, documents show | Fox News

FBI let informants commit more than 5,000 crimes in a single year, documents show | Fox News: "agents signed off on 5,658 crimes that year, but did not reveal specifics."