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Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said the Obama administration has “a lot of reeducation to do” heading into the midterms.

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Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn't violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn't tracking your movements.

That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.

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The NIH has funded various grants on unusual studies such as $60,000 to study Hookah smoking among Jordanian college students; $314,613 to study a supposed increase in family violence after viewing of NFL games; $1.4 million to study the “social milieu” of male prostitutes in Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi; $181,406 to study the sex drive of Japanese quail and $410,624 on the aforementioned study, which involved teaching Chinese meditation to cocaine addicts.

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“I love how our opponents have nitpicked some of the research money that we have given to NIH. It reflects that they know nothing about science,” Biden said in announcing a report about the $100 billion from the stimulus package being spent on energy, science and health research."

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The biggest long-term threat to taxpayers and budgets is the pension crisis. Bell City Manager Robert Rizzo was raking in a salary of nearly $800,000, and a total compensation package of more than $1.5 million that included benefits such as 28 weeks worth of vacation and sick time. That puts taxpayers on the hook for over $600,000 a year for Rizzo’s pension—for the rest of his life—when he retires.
The Bell scandal is a microcosm of a new class struggle—in California and across the nation—between taxpayers and government employees. Government employees have become the new privileged class.
The argument of public workers has always been that they do not earn as much in salary as comparable private-sector workers, so governments must make up for this inequity through increased job security and greater pension benefits. If this was true a generation or two ago, it certainly is not today. The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report on employee compensation revealed that, as of March 2010, state and local government workers earn, on average, nearly 44 percent more than do private-sector workers, including 34 percent higher salaries and wages and over 66 percent greater benefits.

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