Back when I was an Angry Young Bureaucrat, the slide in our neighborhood playground was, by today's standards, a death trap. The slide was this giant red monstrosity: twenty feet off the ground, solid welded steel. If you weren't careful, you could get your tiny hand caught in the metal crevasses, a...

One of the benefits of reading a lot of judicial opinions, as I do, is that you get to see a lot of retail examples of how our government operates at its most legalistic-bureaucratic. Yesterday’s opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in River Street Donuts, LLC v. Napolita...

While I was off air yesterday, I was sent loads of links to so much good reading that I was in no position to post. So I figured I’d take a ramble through it all this morning. How bad is the world’s economic crisis?  Take it from George Soros, who while never entirely disinterested is alway...

If we want to fly the government skies, anyway....

A colleague down in the stock broker belt sends me a copy of the latest emission from the commissariat. It lays out in detail what the PCT is not prepared to pay for. It runs to 38 pages. A line has to be drawn and there are many treatments listed that few would say the taxpayer should pay for....

I’ve worked in the central office bureaucracy of our overly-large school district long enough to know that one thing bureaucracies love to do is reorganize themselves. It’s pretty much a given that when the leadership at the top changes, the org chart is going to get rewritten not long a...

From the "The Government Can't Protect You" File, Example Number ... well, pick a number. This time, though, it's the Securities and Exchange Commission failing to protect private investors from fraud allegedly committed by Bernard Madoff . The Securities and Exchange Commission ha...

This is the sort of thing that only government bureaucracy can come up with: Australian immigration authorities have decided that Rosabelle Glasby couldn’t bring her identical twin sister into the country because … they’re not related! Adopted by different families shortly after th...

By Anne E. Kornblut, Staff Writer, Washington Post If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama o...

Dear Barry, Tomorrow you will take your place as America's next tyrant-in-chief. Heretofore you have made it very clear that the lives of ordinary Americans should revolve around the state. Like the vast majority of your predecessors, your vision of the federal government comprises t...