Here is an exhaustive review of Obamacare — what was promised versus what we got — complete with multiple videos and analysis.

A fine bit of reporting.

Someone should pass a law requiring Congress to mind its own business. Oops, I forgot, the Constitution does that.

But no matter…

The crusade for an education jobs bill, led by the Obama administration and Democratic leaders in Congress, has always struck us as more of an election-year favor for teachers unions than an optimal use of public resources.

Billed as an effort to stimulate the economy, it’s not clearly more effective than alternative uses of the cash. Yes, school budgets are tight across the country, but the teacher layoff “crisis” is exaggerated. In fact, as happens each year, many teachers who got pink slips in the spring have been notified that they’ll be hired after all. Many layoffs could have been — and indeed have been — avoided by modest union concessions.

As of last school year, the money for 5.5 percent of the 6 million K-12 jobs nationwide came from Washington through the 2009 stimulus; the new money reinforces this dangerous dependency.

Nor does the legislation target areas with the most projected teacher layoffs; Maryland, for example, is slated to get $179 million, yet officials have no estimate of layoffs for the school year that begins in a few weeks. The Baltimore Sun noted in May that “most of [the state's] school systems are not planning to lay off teachers,” and that several were hiring new ones. No matter: The bill allows school systems to use the money to expand their teaching staffs or even to raise teacher salaries.

Or subsidize extravagant school districts such as Los Angeles that build $578 million high schools.

New York Times:

The haves are retirees who were once state or municipal workers. Their seemingly guaranteed and ever-escalating monthly pension benefits are breaking budgets nationwide.

The have-nots are taxpayers who don’t have generous pensions. Their 401(k)s or individual retirement accounts have taken a real beating in recent years and are not guaranteed. And soon, many of those people will be paying higher taxes or getting fewer state services as their states put more money aside to cover those pension checks.

At stake is at least $1 trillion. That’s trillion, with a “t,” as in titanic and terrifying.

The figure comes from a study by the Pew Center on the States that came out in February. Pew estimated a $1 trillion gap as of fiscal 2008 between what states had promised workers in the way of retiree pension, health care and other benefits and the money they currently had to pay for it all. And some economists say that Pew is too conservative and the problem is two or three times as large.

So a question of extraordinary financial, political, legal and moral complexity emerges, something that every one of us will be taking into town meetings and voting booths for years to come: Given how wrong past pension projections were, who should pay to fill the 13-figure financing gap?

And let’s not overlook how these golden deals were wrought: by the influence of public service unions and their Democrat puppets.

Consider what’s going on in Colorado — and what is likely to unfold in other states and municipalities around the country.

Earlier this year, in an act of rare political courage, a bipartisan coalition of state legislators passed a pension overhaul bill. Among other things, the bill reduced the raise that people who are already retired get in their pension checks each year.

This sort of thing just isn’t done. States have asked current workers to contribute more, tweaked the formula for future hires or banned them from the pension plan altogether. But this was apparently the first time that state legislators had forced current retirees to share the pain.

Sharing the burden seems to be the obvious solution so we don’t continue to kick the problem into the future. “We have to take this on, if there is any way of bringing fiscal sanity to our children,” said former Gov. Richard Lamm of Colorado, a Democrat. “The New Deal is demographically obsolete. You can’t fund the dream of the 1960s on the economy of 2010.”

But in Colorado, some retirees and those eligible to retire still want to live that dream. So they sued the state to keep all of the annual cost-of-living increases they thought they would be getting in perpetuity.

Naturally, they are fighting back in court, claiming a deal is a deal.

Taxpayers, whose payments are also helping to restock Colorado’s pension fund, may not be as sympathetic, though. The average retiree in the fund stopped working at the sprightly age of 58 and deposits a check for $2,883 each month. Many of them also got a 3.5 percent annual raise, no matter what inflation was, until the rules changed this year.

Private sector retirees who want their own monthly $2,883 check for life, complete with inflation adjustments, would need an immediate fixed annuity if they don’t have a pension. A 58-year-old male shopping for one from an A-rated insurance company would have to hand over a minimum of $860,000, according to Craig Hemke of Buyapension.com. A woman would need at least $928,000, because of her longer life expectancy.

Who among aspiring retirees has a nest egg that size, let alone people with the same moderate earning history as many state employees? And who wants to pay to top off someone else’s pile of money via increased income taxes or a radical decline in state services?

Guatemalan Flight’s Data-Recording Parrot Holds Clues To Crash

Heather Macdonald:

The New York State Task Force on Police-on-Police Shootings recently concluded that black police officers who wield a gun out of uniform face an elevated chance of getting fatally shot by their fellow officers because of those officers’ racial bias. The report, publicized by the New York Times and embraced by the Obama administration, is a classic example of fitting nonexistent evidence to a predetermined conclusion. Yet however faulty the report’s methodology, it will undoubtedly become a standard piece of anti-cop ideology and further fuel the hostility that makes police work in black neighborhoods so difficult.

Governor David Paterson commissioned the study of the role of race in officer-on-officer shootings following two fatal shootings of black off-duty cops: a Mount Vernon Police Department officer in 2008 and a New York Police Department officer in 2009. The task force, headed by Kennedy School professor Christopher Stone and Zachary Carter, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, found that over the last three decades, 26 police officers nationally have been killed by other law enforcement officials—a risk of fatality roughly akin to being hit by lightning. What typically happens in such tragic incidents is that an officer in street clothes, his gun drawn, accosts a criminal. He is observed by other officers and fails to comply with their commands. Fourteen of the officers slain since 1981 were white, ten were black, and two were Hispanic. Most of the minority officers have been killed since 1995, and most were off duty. The white officers, by contrast, were almost all killed while on duty in plainclothes assignments. Among officers killed since 1995, minorities outnumber whites more than two to one, whereas whites outnumbered minorities five to one from 1981 to 1994.

And that’s the sum of the evidence that the task force offers for its thesis that minority officers who wield their guns while out of uniform are shot because of police bias, while white officers are shot because of nonracial mistakes. The task force rejects the growing racial diversity of police forces nationwide as a possible explanation for the increasing proportion of minority officers among those killed in friendly-fire incidents, though without explaining its reasoning. The report never reveals what being shot while off duty (as opposed to being shot while working in plainclothes) has to do with police bias, though it places great emphasis on the off-duty status of the slain minority officers. It notes the possibility that minority officers are more likely to witness criminal activity in their home communities—and thus more likely to take police action when off duty—than white officers, but declares that the sample of off-duty officers killed since 1981 is too low to hazard any hypotheses on that score. In the next sentence, however, the report concludes from the same small sample that “regardless of location, . . . off-duty officers of color [are] more likely [to be] mistaken for a criminal . . . when they display their weapons.”

Such a conclusion, along with the confident identification of racism as the reason for the alleged higher risk faced by minority officers generally, is wholly unsupported by the study. The task force fails to analyze the behavior of the slain officers, though it delicately acknowledges that “many of the victims failed to comply with commands to freeze or drop their weapons.” That’s an understatement. The brief synopses of the off-duty shooting cases show serious tactical deficiencies on the victims’ part—and sometimes bad tactical decisions by the confronting cops on the trigger side as well—that have nothing to do with race.

During their training, officers learn: When you’re off duty, you’ll be mistaken for a crook if you behave like a crook. Never pull your gun unless it’s absolutely necessary. If you do pull your gun, make sure that you have your badge in hand. If you take action off duty, identify yourself as a cop and keep your distance from the perp. Few of the victims in the study followed these rules, much less the commands from confronting officers to freeze and drop their weapons, as the task force admits. To make its case that racism lies behind the black officer victimization rate, the task force would have to show that white off-duty officers who made similar tactical errors did not get shot. This it has not done.

From a New York Times story about Michelle Obama’s Spanish holiday.

…The first lady is paying for her own room, food and transportation, and the friends she brought will pay for theirs as well. But the government picks up security costs, and the image of the president’s wife enjoying a fancy vacation at a luxury resort abroad while Americans lose their jobs back home struck some as ill-timed. European papers are having a field day tracking her entourage, a New York Daily News columnist called her “a modern-day Marie Antoinette” and the blogosphere has been buzzing.

The White House said it would not comment. “The first lady is on a private trip,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said this week. “She is a private citizen and is the mother of a daughter on a private trip. And I think I’d leave it at that.”

Oh, please.

by Burt Prelutsky

Apparently, one of Obama’s orders to NASA was to reach out to Muslim nations, celebrating them for their contributions to science, math and engineering.  So, in short order, we’ve gone from reaching for the moon to reaching for Tehran.

            I say if we’re going that far back in history, we should also take a moment to thank whomever was responsible for coming up with shoes, because in living memory, the only contribution to science made by the Muslim world was turning human beings into delivery systems for bombs.

            But it’s not just Obama who seems to be taking his directions from Mecca.  The town council of Darlaston, England, painted over the windows at its public swimming pool at the insistence of the local Muslims.

            One elderly Englishwoman complained that after her recent cataract operation, she had looked forward to seeing the trees outside the facility while swimming her daily laps.  Instead, thanks to the paint job, she felt as if her cataracts had returned.

            Several questions occur to me, aside from the most obvious one: Why are the English kowtowing to Sharia law?

            To begin with, why are Muslim women swimming in public?  Even if those outside the pool can no longer ogle them, what about all those randy English blokes who are splashing around inside?  Will they be forced to don blindfolds?  How about reaching a compromise by removing the paint and making the Muslim women swim in burqas?

            Even though Obama seems to regard Muslims as God’s chosen people, and by “God” he obviously means himself, I’m here to remind everyone that the most important off-year election in our history is now less than four months away.  Even if the Republican on your ballot isn’t your conservative ideal, please keep in mind that he or she is part of the antidote to ObamaCare, Cap and Trade, increased taxes and additional stimulus bills.

            If nothing else impels you to get out and vote on November 2^nd, remind yourself that if the GOP regains control of the House, Nancy Pelosi will not only have to surrender the Speaker’s gavel, but that jumbo jet she’s grown to love.  Surely that should be enough to get you off the couch, come Election Day.

            Additionally, if the GOP takes back the House, the Republicans will control the nation’s purse strings, which will help transform the turkey in the Oval Office into a lame duck.

            It’s hard to believe, but after the 2008 elections, I worried that the Whigs would make a comeback long before the Republicans.  But, then, I never imagined that the Democrats in Congress would enter into political suicide pacts on behalf of Obama’s loony, leftist agenda.

            In a way, Obama reminds me of an old-time movie director named Mitchell Leisen.  Although Leisen was only moderately successful, he inadvertently played a major role in the history of motion pictures.  In the 1930s, Preston Sturges was a screenwriter at Paramount Studios.  He became so dissatisfied with the way Leisen directed his scripts, he begged the higher-ups for the chance to direct them himself.  They finally capitulated, and Sturges went on to write and direct such comedy classics as “Hail the Conquering Hero,” “The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek” and “The Lady Eve.”

            As if that weren’t reason enough to earn a nation’s gratitude, Leisen also managed to aggravate screenwriter Billy Wilder, who then used Sturges’ success as leverage with the studio bosses.  That, in turn, led to “The Major and the Minor,” “Lost Weekend,” “Double Indemnity,” “Sunset Blvd.,” “The Apartment” and “Some Like It Hot.”

            So, just as Leisen led to Sturges and Wilder, and Jimmy Carter led to Ronald Reagan, one can only hope and pray that, in 2012, Obama leads to someone who is man or woman enough to clean up his unholy mess.

            Finally, even in the gloomiest of times, I like to find something that will lift my spirits and make my soul sing.  So it is that between now and November 2^nd, no matter how bleak things may look, I know that I’ll get through it by reminding myself that a Portland masseuse got to call Nobel Peace Prize recipient Al Gore “a crazed sex poodle.”