• America’s unemployment rate has nothing to do with immigration.
• It’s possible to cut waste in government without succumbing to the Washington Monument ploy.
• Does this anti-obesity crusade make me look fat? (No, the junk science behind it shaping policy does.)
• Did Wall Street greed create the housing crisis? Or did government subsidies incentivize subprime lending by buying up 40% of new private-label subprime mortgages during the height of the housing boom?

In the Washington Post, Dana Milbank rounds up a lot of bills introduced into state legislatures by conservatives, some of them a bit odd, and blames them all on “the Tea Party.” “Tea Party” has sort of replaced “neoconservative” as an all-purpose pejorative for liberals. Meanwhile, a tiny AP story down in the small type among the nail fungus ads reported some real Tea Party-style news. The Miami Herald covered it in more detail:

Voters swept Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Alvarez out of office by a stunning margin Tuesday [88 percent], capping a dramatic collapse for a politician who was given increased authority by voters four years ago to clean up much-maligned county government but was ushered out in the largest recall of a local politician in U.S. history.

The spectacular fall from power comes after two years of missteps, ranging from granting top staffers big pay hikes to construction of a publicly funded stadium for the Florida Marlins to implementation of a property-tax rate increase that outraged an electorate struggling through an ugly recession.…

Tuesday’s vote served notice that the public is thirsting for widespread reform at County Hall, long dominated by entrenched politicians and insiders. County Commissioner Natacha Seijas was similarly recalled Tuesday in a resounding defeat. For 18 years she represented a district that includes Miami Lakes and Hialeah and was widely regarded as the most powerful politician on the commission.

The two ousters come on the heels of Dorrin Rolle’s defeat in November, which marked the first time a sitting county commissioner has been defeated in 16 years.

More than 200,000 people cast votes in the election.

Miami is no right-wing hotbed. Obama got 58 percent of the vote there. This should worry tax-hikers everywhere.

Thursday evening, “Stossel” on FOX Business Network moves to a new time — 10 p.m. ET. This week’s show looks at waste in government, with Rep. Jeff Flake, Cato’s Chris Preble on military spending, and John McWhorter on the drug war.

Set your DVRs. Or, come to think of it, you can still watch TV live.

Nathan Gardels at the Huffington Post writes (emphasis added):

No one — least of all someone like myself who has experienced the existential terror of California’s regular tremors and knows the big one is coming here next — would minimize the grief, suffering and disruption caused by Japan’s massive earthquake and tsunami.

But if one can look past the devastation, there is a silver lining. The need to rebuild a large swath of Japan will create huge opportunities for domestic economic growth, particularly in energy-efficient technologies, while also stimulating global demand and hastening the integration of East Asia.

But as French political economist Frédéric Bastiat noted, destruction isn’t stimulative because it cannot create wealth:

At least one report has it that a Commerce Department official will announce the Obama administration’s support for “baseline privacy legislation” at a Wednesday Senate Commerce Committee hearing.

You mean, like, the Fourth Amendment? If only it were so.

The action is in the House Government Reform Committee, which is holding a hearing on the Transportation Security Administration’s strip-search machines. What’s the administration’s “baseline privacy policy” on that?

I’ve already written two posts in the last year (1, 2) titled “Physician, Heal Thyself”…

For once, a new poll on the political attitudes of young Americans brings some good news. The poll, “D.C.‘s New Guard: What Does the Next Generation of American Leaders Think?”[.pdf] is from the Brookings Institution, and it’s the subject of my Washington Examiner column this week:

“It’s a survey of the type of kids who run for student government and choose to spend their summer vacations working in Washington,” the authors explain, “youth who already have the ‘Washington bug’ and have set themselves towards a career in politics and policy.” In other words … creeps!

If you’re the rare bird who favors limited government at home and abroad, you can hardly expect good news from a poll of this generation’s Tracy Flicks*. After all, aren’t these just the sort of model U.N. types who’ve always wanted to run the world?

Maybe not: The Brookings study contains some surprisingly encouraging findings about the attitudes of our future policy elites.

When given a list of possible foreign policy actions and asked to prioritize them, our precocious politicos put “build a stronger military force to ensure deterrence” near the bottom. Moreover, nearly 58 percent of these “young leaders” agreed with the statement that “the U.S. is too involved in global affairs and should focus on more issues at home.”

Only 10 percent “thought that the United States should be more globally proactive.”

I’ve read a lot of polling data on the Millennials’ politics, and, from a libertarian perspective, they’re a mixed bag. On the plus side, they’re socially liberal, and totally uninterested in culture-war politics. On the minus, they exhibit higher levels of faith in government than do older generations, leading the Center for American Progress to call them “The Progressive Generation.”

But if, as the Brookings survey suggests, even GenY’s model-UN types don’t want to run the world, then the future looks less bright for neoconservatives than it does for libertarians.

* reference is to the Greatest Political Movie of All Time, 1999’s “Election”:

It may be Michael Kinsley who first said that the scandal in Washington is not what’s illegal, it’s what’s legal. Maybe a corollary is that the scandal is what people don’t even notice when it’s exposed. The Washington Post splashed a huge story of corruption across the front page of its Sunday Business section. The pull quote in the center read

A D.C. lawyer and her associates secured $500 million in federal contracts to benefit Alaska native corporations. Less than one percent made it back to Alaska.

And so far this impressive story by Robert O’Harrow Jr. has generated 4 comments, 7 tweets, 11 “likes” on Facebook, and only one other blog post that I can find. Are we so jaded that a full-page investigation of self-dealing and corruption involving affirmative action, small business, defense contracting, and complicated financial maneuvers just doesn’t get our juices flowing? And if one diligent reporter, who obviously spent a lot of time on this story, could find this much fraud by one well-connected contractor, how much could a hundred reporters find? I generally don’t think that “waste, fraud, and abuse” is the key to cutting federal spending; you have to go after the big programs, like transfer payments and military spending. But as Everett Dirksen almost said, $500 million here, $500 million there, pretty soon you’re talking real money. So let me just turn the floor over to O’Harrow to tell you what he found:

For years as a lawyer in Washington, Paralee White had helped small and disadvantaged firms break into the federal contracting market.

Then she decided to help herself.

She started a business and was soon making more than $500,000 a year through a contracting program intended to help poor Alaska natives, even though she isn’t an Alaska native.

White also helped her family. She hired her sister and brother, paying them as much as $280,000 a year. She helped her sister’s boyfriend set up his own firm in partnership with Alaska natives. He made more than $500,000 a year.

White’s story offers a look at how Washington insiders can make fortunes from government programs intended to benefit small, disadvantaged and minority entrepreneurs. It also illustrates how government officials who are supposed to keep tabs on these programs often fail to do so.

White’s native partners eventually accused her and her siblings of fraud and self-dealing, saying they were paid more than the rules allowed and hid the transactions from the government. The allegations spilled out in a civil lawsuit in Alaska, and the case was quickly settled.

Although officials at the Small Business Administration say they knew about the dispute, the U.S. government has taken no action.

Over several years, White and her associates landed more than $500 million in construction contracts for the Navy and other Pentagon departments, nearly all of them through an SBA program aimed at boosting Alaska native corporations. But less than 1 percent of that money made it back to the native-owned corporations, a Washington Post investigation found.

Government officials say they were not monitoring the contracts for compliance with the rules to ensure that the natives were doing a significant portion of the work and receiving the correct share of the revenue.

In statements, Navy and Air Force officials said that responsibility fell to the SBA. But SBA spokeswoman Hayley Meadvin said her agency long ago transferred that authority to the Pentagon and other agencies.

White, 59, declined to answer questions about the contracts. In e‑mails, she said the questions involve “events several years in the past and I don’t have the files or time to research or reflect on them sufficiently to give you accurate information.”

There’s more, much more. Read it all.