They came before dawn, a squad of six armed officers, banging on the door of Maria Elena Hernandez, 62, a Los Angeles grandmother. When she identified herself, one of the officers twisted her arms behind her back and slapped her in handcuffs. Hernandez protested that the officers had the wrong person, but they duly…
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In recent years the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting groups for extra scrutiny and abuse based on their political views favoring limited government, lower taxes and accountability. According to the President of the United States “there were some boneheaded decisions,” but “not even a smidgen of corruption” was involved. As we noted, IRS…
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Shirley Hufstedler, the nation’s first federal Education Secretary, has passed away at 90. That news might surprise some, and not just the younger set, who imagined that the first federal education secretary appeared way back in 1776. There wasn’t one, because the Constitution gives states, not the federal government, domain over education. Under these…
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The California Department of Transportation hired Alex Morales III as statewide coordinator for compliance with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). As Jim Miller notes in the Sacramento Bee, Mr. Morales III, who was paid a base salary of $74,912, has been arrested for allegedly accepting “at least $100,000 in bribes, including an…
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As we observed in “Financial Crisis and Leviathan,” in its first 14 months the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, a new federal agency, did little besides expanding an already bloated and wasteful government. The CFPB duplicates the work of existing regulators and worsens a crisis government played a major role in causing through programs such…
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The U.S. Department of Energy claims lineage from the Manhattan Project of World War II, and its official history cites none other than Albert Einstein. Actually, the DOE dates its inception from 1977: “[T]he twelfth cabinet-level department brought together for the first time within one agency two programmatic traditions that had long coexisted within…
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The Obama administration promised to be the most transparent administration in U.S. history, but according to a recent report by the Associated Press, the reverse might be true. More often than ever, the administration “censored government files or outright denied access to them last year under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, cited more…
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The Pentagon plans to add the Defense Clandestine Service to the nation’s Intelligence Community (IC). This is being billed as an advance in national security but it shapes up as a costly bureaucratic turf war that could leave the nation less secure. The current IC boasts 17 member agencies: Air Force Intelligence Army Intelligence…
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On a recent C-SPAN show, Richard Cordray, director of the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, (CFPB) confirmed that the new federal agency that hasn’t done much in its first 14 months except expand an already bloated and wasteful government during a recession. The CFPB is the result of the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform…
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