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I’m not going to opine (much) on this but this one thing.  Here is proof that government treats itself far better than us ordinary people doing the same malfeasance.  It says “Oopsies, sorry about that” when if this was a private company that deliberately dumped 3 million gallons of toxic pollution into peoples’ drinking water, you would have seen the C-suite officials hanging under the yardarm after taking every dime in their pockets – then throw them in jail.  Double standard doesn’t even come close!  A few headlines I’ve gathered pretty much tell all of the tale you need to know:

EPA SAYS: DO AS WE SAY, NOT AS WE DO

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From Son of Spengler, this observation that Administrative State (re: Bureaucracy) may now be the Republicans’ bane of existence even if they hold the House and Senate AND gain the Oval Office (emphasis mine):

In fact, Obama has not achieved his successes through formal, Constitutional means, but through executive agencies and the courts. Those democratically-unaccountable institutions are comprised of people who share Obama’s vision and have largely been happy to stretch the boundaries of their institutions’ power and the law. The only arena in which Obama has been obliged to persuade, cajole, or fire is defense; even there, a culture of deference to elected civilian authority has made Obama’s job fairly easy. Otherwise, he just rode the Federal Beast in the direction it already wanted to go. He has been able to spend his days golfing, while the media — a cadre of progressive activists — has been there to cheer him on.

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OC Register (emphasis mine):

Across the nation, progressives increasingly look at California as a model state. This tendency has increased as climate change has emerged as the Democratic Party’s driving issue. To them, California’s recovery from a very tough recession is proof positive that you can impose ever greater regulation on everything from housing to electricity and still have a thriving economy.

And to be sure, the state has finally recovered the jobs lost in the 2007-09 recession, largely a result of a boom in values of stocks and high- end real estate. Things, however, have not been so rosy in key blue-collar fields, such as construction, which is still more than 200,000 jobs below prerecession levels, or manufacturing, where the state has lost over one-third of its employment since 2000. Homelessness, which one would think should be in decline during a strong economy, is on the rise in Orange County and even more so in Los Angeles.

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MAGINE AN ELECTION—A close one. You’re undecided. So you type the name of one of the candidates into your search engine of choice. (Actually, let’s not be coy here. In most of the world, one search engine dominates; in Europe and North America, it’s Google.) And Google coughs up, in fractions of a second, articles and facts about that candidate. Great! Now you are an informed voter, right? But a study published this week says that the order of those results, the ranking of positive or negative stories on the screen, can have an enormous influence on the way you vote. And if the election is close enough, the effect could be profound enough to change the outcome.

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Uh-huh, another day, another problem from the Feds (w/contributions from the States, too).  This is what happens when the Smart People decide they know better for everyone than each of those hundreds of million everyones making their own decisions for themselves.  Get that – those in govt believe that they not only have the Smarts but the Right to outweigh the millions of choices made by individuals whom each is making those choices out of their OWN self-interest.  This is the thing that Statists can’t grasp or accept – that people are better at this individually and in the aggregate bottom up than they are. So here we go again (reformatted, emphasis mine):

Federal subsidies have created a massive “green bubble” in the solar industry that is in danger of bursting when they expire next year, leaving taxpayers on the hook for billions of dollars, according to a report by theTaxpayers Protection Alliance(TPA). Homeowners and businesses that install a solar energy system are currently entitled to a 30 percent Solar Investment Tax Credit (ITC), which was initially passed by Congress in 2006 and extended for another eight years in 2008.

However, the ITC will drop to 10 percent for commercial and zero for residential properties on Dec. 31, 2016.  And even members of the heavily-subsidized solar industry, which provides less than one percent of the nation’s electricity, are worried that it cannot stand on its own without government handouts.

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We can’t build a wall!  We can’t deport them all!  They won’t self-deport!

Well, Israel has shown that a wall works very well indeed (not 100%, but very well when compared to prior to the wall.  And there is a country that is taking on the other two as they have decided they have no choice, given how they have boxed themselves in.

As we have been watching Great Britain, the Labour Party (which would be called outright Socialists here, and I don’t mean it well) self-decided that it hated its own base and fellow countrymen.  So once gaining power, they basically opened their borders (re: no borders) and decided multiculturalism was far better than their own culture.

Sidenote: that’s what Socialists are and do – they are self-loathing of their own country and its traditions.  Remind you of a certain political Party?  Or is that two of ’em?

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Er, not so much.  Just like how the Government standards on saturated fats have just been dropped (e.g., meats, dairy, eggs) and now it seems that the low carb diet is now falling out of favor.  Yes, so much for settled science.  And again, we are seeing that in governmental policy that the best watt is the watt not used – not as much of an ROI as we’ve been told by the Greenies and the Left (who have been trying to deindustrialize us and lower our standard of living (Weekly Standard, emphasis mine):

This change involves environmentalists having to undergo an embarrassing about-face and recognize that one of their favorite slogans isn’t true. For years environmentalists have promoted energy conservation measures for buildings and homes with the claim that such improvements “paid for themselves” and were more cost-effective than building new power plants. The EPA and the Department of Energy happily touted claims that conservation resulted in lower energy bills, and were therefore competitive, cost-effective investments.

But there’s a growing body of economic research going back more than 15 years that finds the conservation claims to be exaggerated, when they are not completely wrong.

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Snippets from a post by Ruben Navarrette, Jr., a 30-year pro-choice male who is starting to realize, with prompting from his wife, of a major responsibility of being a man (reformatted, emphasis mine):

…As I’ve only realized lately, to be a man, and to declare yourself pro-choice, is to proclaim your neutrality. And, as I’ve only recently been willing to admit, even to myself, that’s another name for “wimping out.”  At least that’s how my wife sees it. She’s pro-life, and so she’s been tearing into me every time a new video is released. She’s not buying my argument that, as a man, I have to defer to women and trust them to make their own choices about what to do with their bodies. To her, that’s ridiculous—and cowardly.

“You can’t stand on the sidelines, especially now that you’ve seen these videos,” she told me recently. “That’s b******t! These are babies that are being killed. Millions of them. And you need to use your voice to protect them. That’s what a man does. He protects children—his own children, and other children. That’s what it means to be a man.”

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Scare quotes around “epidemic” because, once again, the common language is being abused.  Epidemics are spread by germs – not choices made by people to put needles into arms or powder up noses.  That said, this is typical when help is asked for by locals of the Feds.  That “free” money is never free – first to the taxpayers and as we see here, all the rules and “strings attached” cost plenty, too – and result in LESS help than more – Union Leader (reformatted, emphasis mine)

Drug treatment beds: Reduced by order from Washington

In the midst of a heroin addiction epidemic in which Democrats, Republicans and substance abuse experts all agree that more treatment center beds are desperately needed, the federal government is forcing treatment centers in New Hampshire to reduce the number of available beds. Such is the logic of the federal bureaucracy.

And you expected otherwise?  This is why I have said for years that local should stay local – the cost is too high.  Yes, you can get the money, but any control you had for this local problem dissipates quickly.  And in this case, the Feds go “bossy” (isn’t that the word that Hillary hates?)

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After this, then there is this from Instapundit (emphasis mine):

JOEL KOTKIN: More Local Decisions Usurped by Ideological Regulators. “Nothing is more basic to the American identity than leaving basic control of daily life to local communities and, as much as is practical, to individuals. The rising new regulatory regime seeks decisively to change that equation. To be sure, there is a need for some degree of regulation, notably for basic health and public safety, as well as maintaining and expanding schools, parks, bikeways and tree-planting, things done best when supported by local voters. But the current regulatory wave goes well beyond traditional methodology. It reflects policies more akin to those central planners, who, as Chapman University researcher Alicia Kurimska suggests, dominated city planning in the once-massive Soviet bloc.”

And as we all know, how well did all those massive Public Housing high-rises work out?  Not well – crime ridden, drug filled, and broken family filled.  Most of them were torn down.  Lesson learned? Hardly.  They do consider themselves the Smart People who know what is best for all. And instead of learning the lessons, they just keep going.  It’s like they are micro-tyrants:

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