What’s interesting in the news today?

1. Just one question……

What didn’t they cave on?

From HumanEvents  “As they had a habit of saying throughout the interstellar empire of “Dune,” the spice must flow.  Money is once more flowing out of Congress to all manner of follies and outrages, thanks to an omnibus spending bill that funds everything except Homeland Security through September of 2015 – throwing away every scrap of leverage the incoming Republican majority could possibly exercise against Emperor Obama, ensuring that no one outside the authors of Democrat Party fundraising email spam will be talking about shutdowns, and effectively neutering freshly-elected conservatives.  The GOP leadership can get through another year with its favorite wheezy excuse for not standing up and fighting for anything: Our hands are tied.  Sure, the knots are a bit clumsy, but that’s to be expected when you tie your own hands.  It’ll be good enough for the permanent Beltway culture, which can have a very merry Christmas, riding their one-horse open sleighs down streets coated with a fresh blizzard of taxpayer dollars, jingling all the way.

Americans with some vague memory of how the system is supposed to work might be wondering what happened to the sober deliberation of budgets, the careful spending of every dollar, and even the basic rules of accounting.  Welcome to the new millennium, old-timers!  We don’t do things that way any more.  Government by perpetual crisis is so much more exciting, and lucrative for the Ruling Class.  Now we wait until the hands of the fiscal doomsday clock stand at one minute to midnight, and the political class has to fund everything with “emergency spending bills,” scribbled in blind haste and posted on glitchy websites for public review in a half-hearted ritual of “transparency.”  We live in the shadow of the cromnibus, an appropriately clunky word that combines “continuing resolution” emergency tactics with “omnibus spending” irresponsibility.  The Cromnibus is a flabby beast a gaping maw and many tentacles to feed itself, but it lacks eyes, ears, and a frontal lobe.

Anyone who raises the slightest objection to this panicky spending bonanza is denounced as a penny-pinching extremist monster who just wants to kill children, puppies, and kittens for fun, by shutting down the government that keeps them alive.  You don’t want Obama to throw up barricades around your national parks and memorials again, do you?  No?  Then shut up and spend.“

Even when they win, they still find a way to lose.

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2. Interesting tactic. But will it accomplish anything?

From FoxNews  “”75 of 91 homicides Black lives,” read a recent headline in the renowned black newspaper’s crusade against black-on-black violence. It was accompanied, as always, by a literal body count: The name, race and manner of death for every homicide in Pittsburgh in 2014 — with victims being overwhelmingly black, as the headline shows.

For years across the news media, stories have focused on cases like the killing of Michael Brown, the unarmed black 18-year-old, by a white police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. And for years, the Courier has kept asking: What about all these other black lives lost? That gun on its front page might as well be a finger pointed at black America — from a mirror.

 “We are challenging the community to own this problem,” says Rod Doss, editor and publisher of the 107-year-old weekly newspaper, which sometimes does an in-depth story on a particular victim but unfailingly updates and reprints its list, including whether anyone has been arrested.

 The campaign began almost a decade ago because editors at the Courier simply felt black-on-black killings were not getting the attention they deserved. At first, it met with strong resistance from the paper’s readership — “almost like we were uncovering dirty laundry. Nobody wanted us to talk about it,” Doss says. 

 Slowly, though, that attitude started to change. The number of rallies and vigils increased. Mothers of the dead banded together to try to stop the tragedies. Police were pressured to solve more of the murders.”

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3. Social Security continues it’s policy of trying to collect overpayments from survivors, despite assurances that it would stop the practice.

From MSN  “The Social Security Administration, which announced in April that it would stop trying to collect debts from the children of people who were allegedly overpaid benefits decades ago, has continued to demand such payments and now defends that practice in court documents.

After The Washington Post reported in April that the Treasury Department had confiscated $75 million in tax refunds due to about 400,000 Americans whose ancestors owed money to Social Security, the agency’s acting commissioner, Carolyn Colvin, said efforts to collect on those old debts would cease immediately.

But although some people whose refunds were seized were reimbursed in recent months, some of those same taxpayers have since received new demands from Social Security, asserting that the debts remain and seeking repayment.

In March, the U.S. government intercepted Mary Grice’s tax refunds from both the IRS and the state of Maryland. It turned out that after Grice’s father died in 1960, when she was 4, her mother got survivor benefits to help feed and clothe her five children. Social Security says it overpaid someone in the Grice family — it’s not sure who — in 1977. With Grice’s mother long since dead, the government came after Mary to pay the debt.

The Takoma Park woman, now 58, filed suit against Social Security, challenging the government’s right to take her money without notice to satisfy her mother’s debt. After The Post wrote about her case, the government returned Grice’s tax refunds to her. But in August, she received a new bill from Social Security, seeking the same $2,997 that the agency had refunded to her four months earlier.”

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4. Obama’s new college ratings system is already under fire and it hasn’t event launched yet.

From FoxNews  “A controversial Obama administration rating system for colleges and universities already is being scrutinized ahead of its late-December rollout by educators who claim the government’s goal of more transparency could come at the expense of schools that don’t happen to fit the ivory tower model. 

The federal government, with its long-awaited rating system, is trying to hold the country’s 7,000 colleges and universities accountable not only to taxpayers, but also to prospective students trying to weigh the pros and cons of different institutions.”

“But critics say the government should butt out and worry a broad system could lead to unintended consequences — like creating perverse incentives for schools in pursuit of higher ratings. They worry it could hurt institutions that serve low-income and underprivileged students, as well as junior colleges and those that feature liberal arts programs. 

“What we are opposed to is the federal government taking the factors IT thinks is important from a policy perspective and putting a federal letter grade INSTEAD of leaving that judgment up to students and families depending on their individual needs,” Pete Boyle, vice president of public affairs for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, told FoxNews.com in an email. “

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