On a tip from Chuck A.

The Democratic Party is loyally supported by the explosively proliferating bureaucrats infesting the Beltway because it is the Party of Big Government. Its mission — whether in the name of equity, the climate, or whatever other pretext — is to move the ratchet ever further toward more powerful and intrusive government at the expense of individual liberty. To give young people an idea of what awaits at the end of this path, PragerU takes them on a tour of the ultimate leftist utopia, where government is omnipotent and omnipresent — North Korea. Here’s a video kids might watch in school if education had not fallen to the Long March Through the Institutions:

At least Democrats wouldn’t ban pets, like North Korea’s rulers. Oh wait…

On a tip from Blackjack.

It pays to let yourself be absorbed by the government borg and subsist as a bureaucrat. Workloads are light, vacation days numerous, pay extravagant, retirement packages opulent — and as an added bonus, you don’t have to pay back your student loans.

Having been bought by Big Education, Joe Biden has put off the requirement to make loan payments until December 31, and unconstitutionally “forgave” (i.e., transferred to the rest of us through inflation) $10,000 on most loans — $20,000 on Pell grants, explicitly due to racial favoritism (blacks are more than twice as likely to receive Pell grants). Not a bad deal for those who ran up student loan debt and would prefer to have other people pay it. But the deal is better still for government employees.

Posted at your expense on Whitehouse.gov:

If you have worked in public service (federal, state, local, tribal government or a non-profit organization) for 10 years or more (even if not consecutively), you may be eligible to have all your student debt canceled. Now, for a limited time, it is easier than ever to receive that forgiveness, or get credit toward forgiveness, if you have not yet served 10 years.

The Party of Government looks after its own.

It also looks after the ruling class that the American government has been subverted to protect and to serve:

At some point, the people forced to finance it will get angry enough to upset this applecart.

On tips from Kevin R and Anonymous.

On a tip from Jack Bauer.

During the 2008 campaign that disastrously resulted in his election, Barack Obama yelped,

“We cannot continue to rely on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.”

During his current third term, Obama is finally achieving that goal through the blowout tax-and-spend Inflation Acceleration Act, which will supersize the IRS with $80 billion and 87,000 new employees.

The much-hated IRS will be larger than the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and Border Patrol combined. Obama’s weaponized IRS is undergoing fundamental transportation into an American Gestapo — or as Obama himself would say, a “national security force.”

Its vastly increased power will not render the IRS more benevolent. Its recruiting efforts have emphasized that new agents must “be willing to use deadly force.” This spring, it spent $700,000 on ammunition to shoot Americans with.

This is the kind of training agents undergo:

In the Internal Revenue Service 2021 annual report, IRS Criminal Investigation special agents can be observed simulating an armed assault on a suburban home at the agency’s National Criminal Investigation Training Academy (NCITA), located within the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center (FLETC) in Brunswick, Georgia.

Keeping the IRS out of your life is not intended to be easy.

According to the report,

“Through frequent use of force training, [IRS agents] maintain their skills and abilities to ensure good judgement and to apply the appropriate degree of force necessary to safely carry out enforcement activities, including issuing search warrants, arrests, surveillance, dignitary protection, undercover activities, and seizures.”

The undercover activities and seizures sound especially ominous. Next time Democrats want to throw a scare into the opposition, they may sic the IRS instead of the FBI on Mar-a-Lago.

Only a tiny fraction of the $80 billion of our money that Democrats are heaping upon the IRS is targeted to improving its infamously awful customer service, whereas $45.6 billion is devoted to “enforcement.”

“Abolish the IRS” would be a winning campaign slogan. Candidates might elaborate by adding, “While We Still Can.”

On tips from Chris Neilson and Chuck A.

As moonbattery causes the wheels to come off civilization, psychos become ever more abundant. None of them is so nuts that help from Big Government can’t mess them up worse:

In 2014, President Obama launched the Now Is the Time Initiative, which focused on mental health. According to The Mental Health First Aid website, the program received $15 million in federal grants to launch Mental Health First Aid programs in classrooms. One year later, Obama gave the organization another $15 million and a commitment to annually fund the program.

From such modest acorns grow the mighty oaks of vast federal bureaucracies.

The point was to find and treat budding maniacs before they go off the rails and shoot up schools. It has worked as well as any other government program. That is to say, it has wasted taxpayer money while worsening the problem it was supposed to solve:

In a report by the Manhattan Institute, MHFA studies’ results were collected and put into a table showing the program’s ineffectiveness. … The results varied between cases, but all of them showed detrimental results as a consequence of MHFA programs.

In addition to making crazy kids crazier, MHFA may also result in sane kids being treated as if they were crazy.

MHFA also creates an overdiagnosis dilemma: those who receive training are more likely to be on alert for signs of mental illness. This may lead to perfectly healthy students who merely exhibit occasional symptoms of mental distress receiving unnecessary or even harmful treatments that could have gone to an in-need student.

If we really want to address the mental health crisis, we need to reject leftism in favor of the stable, traditional society that it seeks to destroy.

On a tip from Blackjack.

Absolute moonbattery means absolute government. That means being at the mercy of the sort of arrogant a-hole bureauweenies who run ultraliberal San Francisco.

It isn’t easy to find a place to park in San Francisco. Fortunately for Ed and Judy Craine, they have a car pad, where they had been parking for the past 36 years — until:

Out of the blue, the couple got a ticket for parking in their own driveway. …

It came with an enormous fine: $1,542 dollars, plus another $250 per day if they didn’t get the car off their carpad.

The city’s Planning Department said maybe they could get a waiver and be allowed to use their own property — provided they could “prove that parking was a historic use on the lot.”

The couple dug up and submitted various photographic evidence that cars had been parked there since at least 1938. But bureaucrats sniffed that the proof was unsatisfactory.

Why was this elderly couple suddenly forbidden to park their car at their own home?

Planning Chief Dan Sider … said someone made an anonymous complaint to the city.

Two types benefit from government hypertrophy: petty tyrants and rats.

In their condescending benevolence, SF’s pencil-pushing overlords deigned to let the fine slide — so long as the Craines never park on their car pad again.

No American should have to live like this.

On a tip from R F.

Shortages caused by government hypertrophy apply to more than baby formula. Thanks to steady strangulation by bureaucratic growth, we are also running out of pilots:

Just so long as politicians can posture as if they are “doing something” about some problem hyped by the media, that’s the important thing.

At least there is a silver lining. If flights are reduced because there aren’t enough pilots, that will cut down on harmless carbon emissions. According to the ideology of our government, this could save life on earth.

Meanwhile, what pilots are recruited are increasingly selected on an identity group basis. Would you trust Ketanji Brown Jackson to pilot a jet?

Sooner or later, Affirmative Action hiring will lead to disasters. It may come as a relief when Democrats make flying illegal so as not to offend the climate.

On a tip from KirklesWorth.

In case you were wondering why mothers are no longer able to find baby formula, the primary answer can be summed up in three letters: FDA.

The Daily Mail reports on how the federal bureaucracy prevents children from receiving proper nourishment:

The biggest baby formula supplier in the U.S. has denied its Michigan plant is responsible for the deaths of two children despite the FDA closing it down.

The Abbott Laboratories plant in Sturgis was shut down by the feds in February. There was a nationwide recall of formula, which “has significantly disrupted the supply chain.”

An Abbott spokesperson told DailyMail.com Tuesday that ‘thorough investigation’ by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Abbott revealed ‘infant formula produced at our Sturgis facility is not the likely source of infection in the reported cases and that there was not an outbreak caused by products from the facility’.

However, despite the findings of the investigation, the plant remains shuttered nearly three months later, fueling the nationwide baby formula shortage.

Abbott says there is no problem. But the FDA won’t say when the plant can reopen.

Abbott phone representatives have also been telling parents the FDA is ‘holding back’ metabolic formula made during the recall period, which is why the current supply hasn’t gone out, Politico reported.

Children with special nutritional needs are reliant on formula, reminding us as Covid often did how unhealthy it can be for Big Government to protect our health.

The FDA has predictably responded to the crisis it helped cause by demanding more power:

‘No law requires manufacturers of infant formulas or essential medical foods to notify FDA when they become aware of a circumstance that could lead to a shortage of these products,’ the agency penned, noting it would like to see new protocols requiring companies to notify the FDA of anticipated supply chain interruptions.

We could import baby formula from abroad — except the FDA won’t let us:

[T]he FDA requires specific ingredients, labeling requirements, and mandates retailers wait at least 90 days before marketing a new infant formula. Therefore, if U.S. retailers wanted to source more formula from established trading partners like Mexico or Canada, the needs of parents cannot be quickly met because of these wait times. …

Many parents demand formula from the EU not only because of the current scarcity but because European formula meets other preferences, including a perceived higher quality, and more varieties like goat’s‑milk-based formula. Technically, it is illegal to import baby formula from the EU for commercial purposes, but parents can (and do) import it for personal use. Recently, the FDA recalled some European infant formula because it did not comply with FDA labeling requirements. It is agreed by many medical experts that the differences between American and European formula are minor and are not worth the expense imposed by these regulations.

On top of the regulations, our government piles high tariffs on baby formula.

Meanwhile, FDA Commissioner Robert Califf is focused on “misinformation,” which he barks is the leading cause of death in the USA. He must have been relieved to see the Biden Regime establish the new Ministry of Truth.

At least the Regime is aware that there are shortages. Biden’s response is to snarl dementedly about his “MAGA crowd” scapegoats:

As for the Republican leadership:

The House just passed a bill shoveling another $40 billion that we don’t have at the Ukraine, for reasons our rulers choose not to share with us, driving inflation higher still. No Democrats and only 57 Republicans opposed it. Maybe now they can spare some attention to the severe problems in a country of less interest to them, the USA.

On tips from Varla, Wiggins, and Mr. Freemarket.

More data equals more control. Big Government is able to collect more data on us than totalitarians of the past could have imagined. In communist China, this data is converted into control through the social credit system, which serves as a role model for authoritarian leftists in the West.

Pei Li, an escapee from behind the Bamboo Curtain, sounds the alarm:

Social engineers will find applications for this tool that regular Americans are not devious enough even to imagine.

Via FrontPageMag, on a tip from Blackjack.

Congratulations, New Jersey readers. As of today, you live in a state that has been purged of bags. This makes you good people, because liberals regard the bags used to bring purchases home from the store as problematic:

A ban on single-use plastic bags hits New Jersey retailers May 4, yet most residents aren’t aware of what that actually means according to a poll by Monmouth University released last month.

Some New Jerseyans deserve the extreme inconvenience social engineers are putting them to, having let the moonbat media convince them that bags are bad.

More than half (61%) of residents support a plastic bag ban.

But what many don’t realize is, unique to New Jersey, the bag ban extends to paper bags, too, for retailers with a grocery section of more than 2,500 square feet: only 28% of those polled know that; and fewer than half (47%) support it.

If you turn over power to the government to regulate every miniscule aspect of existence according to fashionable whims, it would be foolish to expect petty tyrants to stop at any particular point.

“A lot of people who think that they will simply bag their groceries in paper instead of plastic at the checkout next month are in for a surprise,” said Patrick Murray, who runs the Monmouth poll.

Retailers are not even allowed to provide plastic or paper bags for a fee. As usual with Big Government overreach, certain exceptions apply, but they may not apply to you.

Tomorrow cultural appropriators will at least be able to transport their goods home on their Cinco de Mayo sombreros.

The idea for leftists is to force us to use inconvenient and unhygienic reusable bags. The plastic bags that are repurposed for trashcan liners, animal waste, et cetera will have to be purchased new.

Next, liberals may decide that shoes are offensive to the environment, so that they can force us to walk around barefoot.

On a tip from Wiggins.