1099 NATION: Obama extends overtime pay to 4.2 million Americans.

The updated rule, which takes effect Dec. 1 and doubles the salary threshold below which workers automatically qualify for time-and-a-half wages to $47,476 from $23,660 a year, or from $455 to $913 a week. Hourly workers are generally guaranteed overtime pay regardless of what they make.

“We’re strengthening our overtime pay rules to make sure millions of Americans’ hard work is rewarded,” President Obama said in a statement. “If you work more than 40 hours a week, you should get paid for it or get extra time off to spend with your family and loved ones.”

But the NPR writeup adds this:

“What our members have told us, what many other employers have told us, is there’s not a golden pot of money out there sitting in employers’ pockets where they can all of a sudden pay a lot more overtime pay,” said David French, vice president of the National Retail Federation. “Instead, they’re going to make the rational change and they’re going to change jobs.”

Dropping full-time workers with their costly benefits and overtime requirements, then hiring new workers as 1099 employees, means never having to say you’re sorry for supporting Obama.

And one more thing:

Secretary Perez says employers have a variety of ways they can comply with the new rule when it takes effect Dec. 1. “People are going to get at least one of three benefits,” Perez said. “They’re either going to get more money … more time with their family, or everybody is going to get clarity.”

Clarity?

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1105.

WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-RUN CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF IDEOLOGICAL REPRESSION? You can be fined for not calling people ‘ze’ or ‘hir,’ if that’s the pronoun they demand that you use.

FORGET NATO, TRUMP SHOULD DEFUND THE UN, Roger Simon writes. You’re fired, Ban Ki-moon!

REVOLVING DOORS ARE SPINNING AT HYPER-SPEED AT THE CONSUMER FINANCIAL PROTECTION BOARD: Three of the top four executives at the CFPB – the questionably constitutional hybrid agency created by President Obama and Elizabeth Warren – have left the bureau in recent months for lucrative positions in the financial industry, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock.

Obama, Warren and the Democratic Congress in 2010 put CFPB under the Federal Reserve, ostensibly to insure its independence of financial industry special interests, but also effectively insulating it from congressional oversight, As Pollock reports, however, CFPB has instead become “a breeding ground for bureaucrats becoming highly paid executives in the very industry the bureau was created to regulate. The CFPB has an unusually high turnover rate for a government agency as nearly 50 top CFPB officials have abandoned the agency since its creation to take high-paying jobs in the industry.”

CULTURE OF CORRUPTION: The ABA Cartel.

Do lawyers’ generous salaries merely reflect the fact that talent and brilliance are rewarded in a competitive marketplace—and that very few people are able to perform the tasks that most lawyers do on a daily basis? Not exactly, according to a new essay in the American Economic Review by Brookings’ Clifford Winston and Yale Law School’s Quentin Karpilow.

The reality, they say, is that the American Bar Association functions as a kind of pseudo-cartel that controls the marketplace for legal services by throwing up gratuitous barriers to entry for individuals and firms, squelching technological innovation, and blocking innovative new delivery methods that might be unleashed through deregulation. As a result, lawyers enjoy artificially-inflated wages, and working class Americans struggle to afford legal help when they need it. . . .

The truth is that allowing people without law degrees to perform basic legal tasks—and allowing firms run by technologists or businessmen, rather than lawyers, to enter the legal services market—would probably dramatically cut costs without any appreciable impact on quality. In fact, a more open market might well dramatically improve the quality of service available to low-income populations, many of which are shut out of the market altogether.

Occupational licensing is never about protecting consumers, and always about preventing competition. Meanwhile, on this particular subject, I strongly recommend my colleague Ben Barton’s Glass Half Full: The Decline And Rebirth of the Legal Profession, which discusses it at length.

HOW WILL THIS PLAY WITH POLISH-AMERICAN AND HUNGARIAN-AMERICAN VOTERS? ‘Putin-like?’ Not us, say Poland and Hungary in response to Bill Clinton.

Poland and Hungary returned fire Tuesday after former U.S. President Bill Clinton accused the two countries of thinking that “democracy is too much trouble” and wanting “Putin-like leadership.”

“Poland and Hungary, two countries that would not be free but for the United States and the long Cold War, have now decided this democracy is too much trouble,” Clinton said Friday during a campaign stop in New Jersey on behalf of his wife, Hillary, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination. “They want Putin-like leadership: Just give me an authoritarian dictatorship and keep the foreigners out.”

Clinton was making a broader point about the danger posed by populists like Donald Trump, the likely Republican candidate, and used Poland and Hungary as handy examples of an international trend. Both countries are also among the most vociferous opponents of taking in refuges from the Middle East.

That prompted a sharp reaction from Jarosław Kaczyński, leader of ruling Law and Justice party and Poland’s most powerful politician, who told reporters Tuesday afternoon: “If someone feels that there is no democracy in Poland, they should be medically examined.”

Is there such a thing as Peyronie’s-related dementia?

AN IDEA SO SIMPLE, IT JUST MIGHT WORK: To Reclaim America, Abolish the Federal Agencies.

To build on Michael Walsh’s article, tell the left that you’re doing it because you hate Nixon with a passion, and you’re halfway there.

MICROAGGRESSED: Students protest Seattle dean who recommended book with racial slur in title.

Jodi Kelly, the dean of the university’s Matteo Ricci College, told a black student last year that she should read the book “N—–: An Autobiography by Dick Gregory.” The unnamed student told The Stranger that she was unable to attend class after hearing Kelly, who is white, say the book title.

The student said Kelly “used the n-word… she said it three or four times. The full word.”

Goodness gracious.

REMINDER: Document theft and destruction nothing new for Hillary Clinton.

AT AMAZON, fresh deals on bestselling products, updated every hour.

Also, coupons galore in Grocery & Gourmet Food.

Plus, Kindle Daily Deals.

And, Today’s Featured Digital Deal. The deals are brand new every day, so browse and save!

ALL COMEDY IS CONSERVATIVE: SNL and Julia Louis-Dreyfuss mock the prospect of a battery-powered Mercedes in one of SNL’s funnier recent commercial parodies.

(Classical reference in headline.)

VICTOR DAVIS HANSON ON THE PAJAMA BOY WHITE HOUSE:

In a case of life imitating art, Ethan Krupp, the Organizing for Action employee who posed for the ad, offered a self-portrait of himself that confirmed the photo image. He is a self-described “liberal f***.” “A liberal f*** is not a Democrat, but rather someone who combines political data and theory, extreme leftist views, and sarcasm to win any argument while making the opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he explains. “I won every argument but one.” I suspect that when Krupp boasts about “making opponents feel terrible about themselves,” he is referring to people of his own kind rather than trying such verbal intimidation on the local mechanic or electrician.The ad was no right-wing caricature of an urban twerp. Through photo, text, and commentary, Krupp confirmed the self-portrait of an in-your-face adolescent who somehow ended up with his 15 minutes of notoriety.

Krupp is emblematic of an entire class of young smart-asses found in Silicon Valley, on campuses across the nation, and in Hollywood, and now ensconced at the highest levels of American government and journalism.

Including — but not limited to — Ben Rhodes, Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, Jonathan Gruber, and Josh Earnest. “Who hires and promotes Pajama Boys?”, VDH asks “Why, of course, Barack Obama, the Pajama Boy in Chief.”

Read the whole thing.

WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF THUGGERY? Bernie Sanders Issues Statement on Nevada: ‘Nonsense’ to Say Campaign Has ‘Penchant for Violence.’

Anyone who runs against Hillary will be a racist, sexist, misogynist with a penchant for violence, at least in the press and until November.

CIVIL WAR ON THE LEFT, PART 27: Rift Between Labor and Environmentalists Threatens Democratic Turnout Plan.

Related: Democratic Civil War: Cops Sweep In to Shut Down Nevada Caucus; Chairs and Death Threats Thrown Around.

CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: U.S. judge strikes down D.C. concealed-carry gun law as probably unconstitutional.

A federal judge ruled Tuesday that a key provision of the District’s new gun law is probably unconstitutional, ordering D.C. police to stop requiring individuals to show “good reason” to obtain a permit to carry a firearm on the streets of the nation’s capital.

U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon found that the law violates the “core right of self-defense” granted in the Second Amendment, setting aside arguments from District officials that the regulation is needed to prevent crime and protect the public.

“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” Leon wrote in a 46-page opinion, quoting a 5-to-4 Supreme Court decision in 2008 in another District case that established a constitutional right to keep firearms inside one’s home.

Leon said the right applies both inside and outside the home.

“The District’s understandable, but overzealous, desire to restrict the right to carry in public a firearm for self-defense to the smallest possible number of law-abiding, responsible citizens is exactly the type of policy choice the Justices had in mind,” he wrote.

Exactly right. Related: Ninth Circuit rules that right to buy guns is part of Second Amendment, strikes down county gun-store ban.

WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE IT’S NOT: More than 30 states offer online voting, but experts warn it isn’t secure.

I say, go back to paper ballots.

“WE THOUGHT MAO WAS DOING A WONDERFUL THING.”

THEY DON’T CALL IT JIM CROW TV FOR NOTHING: MSNBC’s Chris Matthews to Dr. Ben Carson: Non-White People Are Handicapped.

Flashback: ‘Meet MSNBC. Better Described as Jim Crow TV.’

IS FACEBOOK AFRAID OF A TRUMP PRESIDENCY?

MICHAEL BARONE: America Today Resembles 1910 More Than Postwar Era:

America in 1910, with nearly 100 million people, was in important ways less like the postwar America of 150 million than like today’s America of 300 million. Studying how Americans handled — or mishandled — similar challenges may prove more fruitful than yearning to restore the unique and non-replicable America of Charles Murray’s, Robert Putnam’s and my youth.

Just to shift the timeline forward only a few years from 1910, our current president is far more like Woodrow Wilson, his fellow “Progressive” Democrat academic, than either man would care to admit.

A SMALL VICTORY IN THE CULTURE WARS: Despite opposition from leftist faculty, George Mason Law School will be named for Antonin Scalia.

HEH: “Do you think I spend my day wondering about how Chuck Grassley will go down in history?”

A DEPARTMENT THAT NEVER SHOULD HAVE BEEN CREATED: Homeland Security Helps Take Down Unlicensed Massage Therapists.