Purchase of three able-bodied twenty-somethings whose other cargo was a 12-pack of Shock Top beer.

Supplemental “Nutrition” Assistance Program indeed.

The San Diego County Taxpayers Association on Thursday issued its annual awards for bad government — and good.

[...]

The group gave its top award, the Grand Golden Fleece, to the Poway Unified School District for a $105 million bond issue that will cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion to repay. The unfavorable rate structure was exposed by former reporter and blogger Joel Thurtell of Michigan last year.

$105 million that will cost $1 billion? Who would approve of such idiocy? Oh. That’s right, the San Diego County Taxpayers Association:

The bond also had considerable cachet, thanks to a coveted endorsement from the San Diego County Taxpayers Association. Indeed, association President Lani Lutar’s name was first on a list of five local dignitaries named on the ballot as supporting the bond.

(Full ballot argument with Lutar’s signature here.)

The San Diego County Taxpayers Association represents developers and crony capitalist interests, not taxpayers. It is a pay-to-play organization, and its board and executive committee are a who’s who of people doing business with government agencies.  No doubt some of them expected to get lucrative construction contracts from the Poway school bond.  Lutar herself is a government insider with no taxpayer advocacy experience but plenty of experience with unaccountable big-money government bureaucracy SANDAG and the crony capitalist convention center project.

But giving the Golden Fleece Award to Poway for a bond the SDCTA themselves endorsed? I hereby pronounce the SDCTA the winner of the Golden Gonads Award.

Sadly, it is now a complete farce and a left-wing political machine, labeling everyone to the right of David Brooks a “hate group.”

Well, by its own standards, the SPLC is clearly a hate group, as domestic terrorist Floyd Lee Corkins admitted in a videotaped interview that he was inspired to shoot up the Family Research Council’s headquarters by the SPLC’s hate rhetoric.

A: Karma.

S&P 500 divided by Federal Reserve balance sheet.

In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity – the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels – would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded.

Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, says the lower than expected temperature rise between 2000 and the present could be explained by increased emissions from burning coal.

For Hansen the pause is a fact, but it’s good news that probably won’t last.

International Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently told The Weekend Australian the hiatus would have to last 30 to 40 years “at least” to break the long-term warming trend.

But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.

Research by Ed Hawkins of University of Reading shows surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range projections derived from 20 climate models and if they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

“The global temperature standstill shows that climate models are diverging from observations,” says David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change,” he says.

Pachauri and his ilk are the science-deniers. They simply discard any scientific facts, so that they can cling to their outdated beliefs.

If a brother and sister have children, shouldn’t they be allowed to marry? The “voice of the children” demands that they be allowed to do so!

If a Muslim man has children by four wives outside the United States, shouldn’t all four marriages be recognized by the United States? The “voice of the children” demands that they be recognized!

If a man and a woman have children without being married, shouldn’t they be compelled to marry? The “voice of the children” demands it!

The inertia of central planning:

[...] the future of housing finance in this country seems to be coming down to two taxpayer-backed concepts. One is the status quo, with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac continuing to back the vast majority of mortgages. The other is a newly conceived public guarantor with some of the same problems that got Fannie and Freddie into trouble. Let’s begin with the status quo. The taxpayer rescue of Fannie and Freddie in September 2008 has cost $137 billion so far. While this has been paid down from an initial $187.5 billion, taxpayers aren’t likely to get their money back anytime soon. Last fall, the regulator charged with overseeing Fannie and Freddie estimated that the taxpayer bill for the companies could be $200 billion by the end of 2015.

Remember when University of Wisconsin professor Menzie Chinn mocked Sarah Palin for calling Fannie and Freddie “too big and too expensive to the taxpayers?”  Who’s the idiot now?

[The alternative plan's] details differ from the broken system that the commission aims to replace, but there are many similarities. For example, the plan requires the government to be sophisticated at pricing the risk in the mortgages it will back. If it isn’t, the premiums it receives will be insufficient to pay future loss claims. This sophistication is not a given. Neither Fannie nor Freddie has been adept at setting an appropriate price for their guarantees — that’s why they’re choking on more than $100 billion in losses. Why would a new public guarantor do the job any better?

And what would central planning be without crony capitalism? The corrupt, bankrupt government agencies made some politically-connected appointees fabulously wealthy:

Among the retirees receiving pensions courtesy of the taxpayer are Franklin D. Raines, Fannie Mae’s former chief executive; J. Timothy Howard, the company’s former chief financial officer; and Leland C. Brendsel, former chief executive of Freddie Mac. All three men were ousted from their companies amid accounting scandals — Freddie’s in 2003 and Fannie’s a year later. All were paid handsomely through their tenures. Between 1998 and 2004, for example, Mr. Raines received $90 million in compensation, regulators found. Mr. Howard received $30 million over the period. When Mr. Brendsel left Freddie Mac, he was earning $1.2 million a year in salary. Even so, Mr. Raines receives a pension of $2,639 from taxpayers each month, the documents show; Mr. Howard receives $4,395 and Mr. Brendsel $8,039. Requests for comment from the former executives’ lawyers were not returned. The documents show that taxpayers spent $11 million last year on medical costs for 1,392 Fannie and Freddie retirees. And from September 2008 through 2012, taxpayers also spent $114 million for legal bills racked up by former executives and directors testifying in lawsuits relating to the accounting scandals or financial crisis inquiries.

There’s two bulls standing on top of a mountain. The younger one says to the older one: “Hey pop, let’s say we run down there and f*** one of them cows”. The older one says: “No son. Lets walk down and f*** ‘em all”.

- Robert Duvall in Colors

The world was shocked this weekend to learn that the European Union would fund the bailout of Cyprus by confiscating the assets of ordinary bank account holders.  Core Europeans and Americans no doubt comforted themselves that such a confiscation could never happen here.  They would be wrong.  In fact, it already has happened here.

What occurred this weekend in Cyprus was a theft from responsible savers to benefit irresponsible banks.  Small depositors get screwed while bank bondholders (largely other banks and large institutions) get made whole.  Which, it turns out, is exactly what has happened in the U.S. the past five years.

Bank CD rates were around 4% in 2008.  Since that time, the Federal Reserve’s interest rate manipulation has kept CD rates pinned between 0% and 1%.  This has allowed the banks to borrow at near-zero, whether from depositors or directly from the Fed, and invest in Treasuries or mortgage-backed securities earning 2%, 3%, or more.  Using this free-money interest rate spread, banks have indeed earned their way back to solvency.  But savers have had their 4% annual interest confiscated by the Fed.

So laugh at Cyprus all you want.  Those depositors lost 6.75% or 9.9% once.  You’re losing 4% annually for the fifth year running.  Who’s the chump?

Ben Bernanke and Eurogroup President Jeroen Dijsselbloem are standing on top of a mountain.  Dijsselbloem says to Bernanke: “Hey Ben, let’s say we run down there and rip off a bank’s depositors.”  Bernanke says: “No Jeroen.  Let’s walk down and rip off ALL the banks’ depositors.”

Roll Call:

At a closed-door meeting between President Barack Obama and House Democrats, [Michigan Democratic Rep. Dan] Kildee introduced himself as a freshman, to which Obama said, “Wow, you’re really classing up the place then.”

Kildee then proceeded to ask what one person described as a somewhat “long-winded” question about the importance of creating jobs for his economically distraught district.

“I can tell you’re a freshman because you didn’t pay much attention to the State of the Union,” Obama joked. “I talked about that.”

Amid the resulting laughter, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Xavier Becerra of California then offered to provide Kildee a printout of the speech.

Obama was referring to his $1 billion proposal for 15 manufacturing “innovation centers,” the details of which are still somewhat hazy.

Because nobody does innovation like federal bureaucrats.

Weren’t there about 15 districts in The Hunger Games? One Innovation Center for each of them. How convenient.

Around a year ago this time, I wrote about the shooting death of Florida teen Trayvon Martin and how it fueled talks with my son about racial biases. The U.S. Department of Education’s statistics showing that black students nationwide are disciplined at higher rates and with harsher penalties has spurred another conversation with my child about the need to be beyond reproach at school.

Now, this is Seattle, a city with an actual statue of Lenin. But still, outraged Seattle Times readers burst out at the columnist. For example:

Teach your kid to respect others like he’d want to be respected, and he’ll get along just fine.

On the other hand, if he’s constantly on guard against being ‘dissed’ and walks around with a chip on his shoulder, trouble will find him.

Even here, in the deep blue Pacific Northwest, people can recognize race-baiting when they see it.

What has Chávez bequeathed his fellow Venezuelans? The hard facts are unmistakable: The oil-rich South American country is in shambles. It has one of the world’s highest rates of inflation, largest fiscal deficits, and fastest growing debts. Despite a boom in oil prices, the country’s infrastructure is in disrepair—power outages and rolling blackouts are common—and it is more dependent on crude exports than when Chávez arrived. Venezuela is the only member of OPEC that suffers from shortages of staples such as flour, milk, and sugar. Crime and violence skyrocketed during Chávez’s years. On an average weekend, more people are killed in Caracas than in Baghdad and Kabul combined. (In 2009, there were 19,133 murders in Venezuela, more than four times the number of a decade earlier.) When the grisly statistics failed to improve, the Venezuelan government simply stopped publishing the figures.