More Anti-Semitism Among Occupy Wall Street Cohorts

Florida Governor: Let's Stop Funding Liberal Arts Degrees

Readers of the compelling Inside the Law School Scam blog know that going in hock up to your eyeballs to become a jobless Juris Doctor may be a waste of time in today's dismal economy. But let's face it; there are lots of worthless or semi-worthless degrees issued at the undergraduate level, too, that provide minimal marketable skills.

With that in mind, Florida Governor Rick Scott wants to overhaul public funding priorities in his 2012 legislative agenda:

Leading Scott’s list of changes: Shifting funding to degrees that have the best job prospects, weeding out unproductive professors and rethinking the system that offers faculty job security...

Scott said Monday that he hopes to shift more funding to science, technology, engineering and math departments, the so-called “STEM” disciplines. The big losers: Programs like psychology and anthropology and potentially schools like New College in Sarasota that emphasize a liberal arts curriculum.

“If I’m going to take money from a citizen to put into education then I’m going to take that money to create jobs,” Scott said. “So I want that money to go to degrees where people can get jobs in this state.”

There has been a lot of knee-jerk opposition to Scott's proposal, but the state legislature seems receptive.

Even if you enjoyed your liberal arts education, doesn't Scott's approach when it comes to taxpayer funding make sense given the condition of the economy? In retrospect, and of course knowing what we know now, would you--if you are a liberal arts graduate--have changed majors to math, science, or business? Haven't the Occupy Wall Street protesters found themselves stuck with dead-end liberal arts degrees?

Added: Washington Times columnist Dr. Milton Wolf (President Obama's cousin) expounds on this issue:

Enter the disillusioned “Occupy Wall Street” protesters... If there’s one thing these overcredentialed but undereducated people excel at, it’s taking up space. They occupy university campuses for years without learning skills that can actually contribute to our society’s economy....Another demand: Forgive all student loan debt. Imagine this thought process: A hapless student goes $75,000 into debt pursuing a worthless degree in community organizing appreciation and then blames not the university that swindled him out of his money but instead, the bank that gave him a loan.

Fast-Food Restaurants Becoming America's War Zones?

Having it your way--Maybe. Thinking outside the bun--perhaps.

Lovin' it? Not so much...

More and more, smartphone cameras and surveillance videos show irate customers freaking out at fast-food stores in the U.S. (and elsewhere). Even more disturbingly, the violence often involves females.

Perhaps this trend provides a new or alternative definition for "fast and furious"?

Usually the staff is on the receiving end. But here, a McDonald's cashier in NYC gives a beatdown to two women who allegedly assaulted him. Criminals charges are pending against all three.

Fail: Long-Term Obamacare

CLASS dismissed.

When analysts who weren't blinded by ideology warned that the long-term care provision of Obamacare--which is called the Community Living Assistance Services (CLASS) Act--was fiscally unsustainable, they were just steamrolled in the mad rush to get the dreadful bill passed. A Democrat senator even called it a Bernie Madoff-style "Ponzi scheme" (terminology that later got Rick Perry in hot water in connection with Social Security), yet voted for it anyway.

But it turns out the the administration is abandoning the program:

The Obama administration cut a major planned benefit from the 2010 health-care law on Friday, announcing that a program to offer Americans insurance for long-term care was simply unworkable.

Although the program had been dogged from the start by doubts about its feasibility, its elimination marks the first time the administration has backed away from a key piece of President Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner explains:

Democrats structured the program to collect premiums for years before beginning to pay out benefits -- thus, it appeared to reduce the deficit when it would in fact greatly increase the deficit once it began making payments. As a voluntary program, it would become acutely unworkable if, as expected, only those in need of long term care signed up for it.

At National Review Online, Yuval Levin points out that "the the administration’s own [Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services] actuary said it would never work."

Levin adds that this is just one provision of the overall law that must be replaced by market-based insurance reforms:

This confirmation that Obamacare cannot in fact defy the laws of mathematics and accounting should serve as a warning regarding the implementation of the broader law, most of which would begin in 2014 if it is not repealed by then. The other major provisions of the statute are also grossly ill-designed. If it is permitted to take effect in full, the law will cause premiums to rise rapidly in the individual market and create major dislocation in the employer market, driving people into vastly overregulated exchanges that would push premiums higher still, and then initiate a program of subsidies whose only real answer to the mounting costs of coverage will be to pay them with public dollars and so inflate them further. It aims to spend a trillion dollars on subsidies to large insurance companies and the expansion of an unreformed Medicaid system, to micromanage the insurance industry in ways likely to make it even less efficient, to cut Medicare benefits without using the money to shore up the program or reduce the deficit, and to raise taxes on employment, investment, and medical research. CBO does not expect it to make a real dent in the inflation of health-care costs or to avert the fiscal implosion of Medicare. Instead, it will double down on price controls and centralized administration and make a real reform of our system much more difficult.

Again, can anyone explain why any rational lawmaker operating in good faith could have voted for this bureaucratic monstrosity?

HotAir.com elaborates that the Democrats knew all along that the CLASS Act was a financial disaster but "no one on the Democratic side was willing to halt it before the bill passed because their fiction about 'bending the cost curve' was too precious to ObamaCare salesmanship."

ATF Allowed Grenade Trafficking to Drug Cartels

The Fast and Furious gunrunning scandal, orchestrated by the Obama administration agencies such as the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Justice Department, also involved grenades: