April 10, 2026

WELL, YEAH — BUT THAT WAS BEFORE ANYBODY CALLED THEIR BLUFF:

Posted at 2:34 pm by Stephen Green

I’M STILL CURIOUS: I’m not usually accused on believing in conspiracy theories.  I’m more likely to be the one chastising my friends for believing them.  And yet … for years, I’ve wondered why suddenly the disability rights groups were knocking themselves out to fight special minimum wage laws applicable to severely disabled persons.  Who was bankrolling all this?  My guess at the time was the SEIU.  I’d still like to know … but I suppose there’s a good chance I never will.

Under very limited circumstances, Section 14(c) of the Fair Labor Standard Act permits individuals with severe disabilities (think Down Syndrome) to accept employment from certain specially licensed and regulated businesses that are allowed to pay less than the minimum wage.  The program is strictly optional.  If an individual with Down Syndrome can find an employer willing to pay bigger bucks, then more power to him.

The program is very popular with the parents and family members of severely disabled individuals.  When the Commission on Civil Rights did a report on this issue in 2020, we received about 9,700 comments from the parents and other family members.  That was a record number for us.  Almost all of them argued strongly in favor of Section 14(c).  The Commission nevertheless sided with the disability rights folks and called for the program’s elimination.

I dissented, figuring the parents and other family members knew more about what was good for their loved ones than the disability rights folks.  The family members certainly knew that without 14(c) there would be no jobs at all for most Down Syndrome sufferers.  Not too many Down Syndrome sufferers get jobs as engineers at Google, Apple, or Tesla.  The disability rights advocates who testified before the Commission brought along a young man with Down Syndrome who testified that he wanted a more challenging job and would prefer a job where he could carry a briefcase to the office like his father.  We were evidently supposed to nod and pretend that this man’s hope was a realistic option for Down Syndrome sufferers generally.

Nevertheless, the disability rights advocates were pulling out all stops to get rid of the law.  They were lobbying state legislatures around the country to override it with a state provision that requires minimum wage.  And they were succeeding in getting the programs phased out.

As part of the report, we interviewed the Commissioner at the Vermont Department of Disabilities, Aging, and Independent Living, where 14(c) workshops were being done away with.  She admitted that the jobs had disappeared.  Instead, the state (with taxpayer money) was providing “minders” to keep these now-jobless individuals entertained.

I got the feeling that creating state-funded jobs for the “minders”—who might then join a union like the SEIU—was the central feature not a bug in this plan.  Chris Rufo and Kenneth Scrupp have been writing about this kind of cycle:  At the union’s behest, left-wing politicians fund programs that employ large numbers of low-skilled employees, who in turn join the union, which in turn donates big bucks to the left-wing politicians.   Government gets bigger and bigger.  Maybe the controversy over the Section 14(c) is another example of this.

Posted at 2:25 pm by Gail Heriot

IT’S TIME FOR VICTORIA TAFT’S West Coast, Messed Coast™: Hey, Where’d All That Money Go? “Here’s the truth. The insiders in Sacramento, Salem, and Olympia have been using social service non-profits, NGOs, and questionable charitable groups as passthroughs for their friends and pet constituencies for years. Billions have been gifted to insiders and friends. And now — at long last — actual taxpayers have gotten wise to the grift. You can thank independent journalists for highlighting these absurd expenses in a much simpler and understandable way than thick books or endless PDFs filled with intentionally confusing stats, opaquely written conclusions, and puffed-up executive summaries that don’t reflect the data can ever do.”

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green

KEIR STARMER’S REGIME WOULD BE A CLOWN SHOW IF IT WEREN’T FOR ALL THE RAPES AND STABBINGS:

UPDATE (From Ed): Metaphor alert:

Posted at 1:35 pm by Glenn Reynolds

GOD AND MAN AT THE OBAMA LIBRARY:

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

TODAY TRUMP SETTLES ALL FAMILY BUSINESS*: Trump goes off on ‘NUT JOBS’  Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, Alex Jones over Iran war criticism.

President Trump lashed out at four right-wing critics of the Iran war Thursday, describing them as “NUT JOBS” and “losers” who will say anything for attention.

“I know why Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Alex Jones have all been fighting me for years, especially by the fact that they think it is wonderful for Iran, the Number One State Sponsor of Terror, to have a Nuclear Weapon — Because they have one thing in common, Low IQs,” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social post.

“They’re stupid people, they know it, their families know it, and everyone else knows it, too!” the president raged. “Look at their past, look at their record. They don’t have what it takes, and they never did!

“They’ve all been thrown off Television, lost their Shows, and aren’t even invited on TV because nobody cares about them, they’re NUT JOBS, TROUBLEMAKERS, and will say anything necessary for some ‘free’ and cheap publicity.”

* Rather than a Godfather callback, maybe I should have gone with a Return of the Jedi reference:

UPDATE:

To boldly go where Bill Kristol went during Trump’s first term:

Related: Megyn Kelly is imagining Mark Levin as Luca Brasi:

Posted at 1:05 pm by Ed Driscoll

I BELIEVE IT:

UPDATE: Hell, it feels better than our grandparents felt waiting in gasoline lines.

Posted at 1:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

DISPATCHES FROM THE TIME CAPSULE:

In his 1980 book The Third Wave, Alvin Toffler wrote:

No one today, from the experts in the White House or the Kremlin to the proverbial man in the street, can be sure how the new world system will shake out—what new kinds of institutions will arise to provide regional or global order. But it is possible to dispel several popular myths.

The first of these is the myth propagated by such films as Rollerball and Network, in which a steely-eyed villain announces that the world is, or will be, divided up and run by a group of transnational corporations. In its most common form this myth pictures a single worldwide Energy Corporation, a single Food Corporation, a single Housing Corporation, a single Recreation Corporation, and so forth. In a variant, each of these is seen as a department of an even larger mega-corporation.

This simplistic image is based on straight-line extrapolations from Second Wave trends: specialization, maximization, and centralization.

Not only does this view fail to take into account the fantastic diversity of of real life conditions, the clash of cultures, religions, and traditions in the world, the speed of change, and the historic thrust now carrying the high-technology nations toward de-massification; not only does it naively presuppose that such needs as energy, housing, or food can be neatly compartmentalized; it ignores the fundamental changes now revolutionizing the structure and purpose of the corporation itself. It is based, in short, on an obsolete, Second Wave image of what a corporation is and how it is structured.

On April 1st, 1976, Congress rolled up seven bankrupt Northeast Corridor railroads into Conrail, a 17,000-route mile behemoth that was eventually privatized 11 years later. Also on April 1st, 1976, two college dropouts formed Apple Computer in Steve Jobs’ parents’ garage, and unleashed the personal computing revolution.

As I wrote on Tuesday, Paddy Chafesky’s 1976 film Network is a brilliant movie, but it’s a time capsule of an era of mass media that was already in its twilight upon the film’s release.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

NEW ELECTRONIC FRONTIER FOUNDATION DIRECTOR EXITS THE CLOSEST THING TO A FREE-SPEECH PLATFORM ON THE INTERNET:

Meet the new boss, not at all like the old boss.

Posted at 12:28 pm by Stephen Green

THE DONROE DOCTRINE: Tracking China in the Americas: Adiós, Amigos.

A few years ago, I was on a road trip in Costa Rica with a friend who lives there — we were driving across the country from Tamarindo to Puerto Viejo — and we stopped at a gas station to get some drinks. He came out and handed me my Gatorade Zero and said, “Are there a lot Chinese businesses in Atlanta?”

It wasn’t something I’d thought much about, so I told him I wasn’t sure, and he told me they were popping up all over Costa Rica at rapid speed. He said something like, “I don’t know how they do it. It all just falls into place. It’s like they sold their souls to the devil. Everything works out for them.”

Later, he asked me what I thought of Chinese car brands. I told him we didn’t really have that in the United States, and he told me they were flooding the Costa Rican market, and the cars were awful. “Give me a Ford over a Chinese car any day,” he said.

Up until that point, I had no idea just how much China had infiltrated Costa Rica and/or Latin America, but after that I started learning. It was ugly. It’s what prompted this “Tracking China in the Americas” series that I began writing last fall.

But here’s the good news: The tides are turning in many places.

Read the whole thing.

Posted at 12:15 pm by Stephen Green

M-SNOW’S STEPHANIE RUHLE PRAISES IRAN’S MORAL COURAGE:

My first reaction was, “No, you don’t have to hand it to them.” What the Iranians of whom she speaks are “sacrificing” for is pure evil. While it is true that self-sacrifice is a key component of any moral system, and the pursuit of pure pleasure is morally degenerate, the “what” of that which one is willing to sacrifice matters as much or more than the mere fact of being willing to die for a cause.

Suicide bombers die for a cause. Do I have to “hand it to them?” Parents who put their children in harm’s way to make them martyrs are sacrificing. That is morally abhorrent.

Walter Sobchak could not be reached for comment:

Posted at 12:00 pm by Ed Driscoll

THAT SEEMS BOTH WISE AND OBVIOUS: Don’t ask students to ‘discover’ math before they’ve learned fundamentals. “‘In many classrooms, students are encouraged to ‘discover’ math principles, come up with multiple problem-solving strategies and explore patterns before they’ve mastered core procedures, such as 6 x 8 = 48, she writes. ‘he intention is deeper understanding. But teachers frequently report student frustration, uneven mastery, and widening gaps between those who enter with strong background knowledge and those who do not.'”

So many of today’s teaching fads leave the weaker students even further behind that you have to wonder if that’s the intent.

Posted at 11:44 am by Stephen Green