…Until the politicians figure out a way of imposing a national sales tax. More specifically, the crowd in Washington is salivating at the idea of adding a value-added tax (a European-style national sales tax) on top of the income tax. A VAT  will allow them to finance a big expansion in the burden of government, which is exactly what happened in Europe after the tax was levied (notwithstanding promises that the revenue would be used to lower and/or eliminate other taxes). Here’s a worrisome Bloomberg report featuring comments by one of President Obama’s main political allies:

George Santayana said that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.  This is certainly true in Missouri where the governor is embroiled in a burgeoning scandal dubbed ‘Ecoligate.’  His top staff apparently decided to keep secret a health report about a lake infected with higher-than-safe levels of E. coli.  As every political junkie knows, it’s rarely the infraction that brings down a politician, it’ the coverup that ensues.  Not only is Missouri’s governor a former 16-year attorney general, his name is Nixon.

These are the facts: On May 28, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources (DNR) learned that regular tests of the Lake of the Ozarks found dangerous levels of E. coli.  In two areas, tests indicates levels 19 times greater than state standards, and half the swimming areas tested higher than federal standards.  In fact, some of the tests hit the ‘maximum sample limit.’ Department procedure dictates that this report should be released to the public.

But the results were not released.  Instead, the DNR deputy director and general counsel, Joe
Bindbeutel, claims he believed recent rainfall might have only temporarily elevated the levels and that an announcement could scare away tourists.  The results were kept secret.

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According to a 2008 annual progress report from the Illinois Housing Development Authority, ”ACORN Housing” was listed as a recipient of a $100,000 capacity building grant for a “Predatory Lending Database Program.” The funding was announced in November 2008.

Rebecca Boykin, Communications Manager for the Illinois Housing Development Authority, provided this update on the grant:

The Illinois Housing Development Authority (IHDA) awarded a $100,000 grant to ACORN Housing Corporation, Inc. as part of the Predatory Lending Database Program, which helps provide counseling for homebuyers facing predatory loans, in an effort to decrease the likelihood of future foreclosures. ACORN Housing was selected for funding following an application process that included a review of its HUD certification. Under the grant guidelines, ACORN Housing is required to submit a progress report later this month. They’ve been granted a portion of the $100,000. The remainder is under review in light of recent events.

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Over the past several tumultuous months America has seen the Democratic Party’s ambitious attempt to restructure health care slam head-on into the obstacle of public opinion.

The American people are learning first hand the answer to the age old question of what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.  President Obama has spent months pronouncing that action must take place on health care and stating “failure is not an option.”

Speaker Pelosi has chimed in with one of her definitive statements (the kind that keep getting her in trouble) that the Democrats will absolutely pass a health care package within weeks.  These proclamations come after weeks of unprecedented turmoil resulting in the public’s support for “reform” plummeting and taking confidence in the president with it.

What is truly amazing in this situation is that neither the White House, nor Democrat leaders in Congress have adjusted their positions or tactics one bit since widespread concern, uncertainty, confusion, anger, opposition and even rage over “reforms” swept much of the nation. 

At the White House the campaign team remains steadfast in their apparent belief that there is no problem that the President can’t talk himself out of.  They drove their seventy percent approval rating square into the brick wall of an always skeptical populace.  David Axelrod and friends promptly threw it in reverse, backed up, and then drove into the wall even faster. 

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On numerous occasions, to tout his own agenda President Obama told America to “take a look at what’s happening in countries like Spain” to witness his model for a “green jobs” economy. Well, a team of Spaniards produced an academic study, officially of King Juan Carlos University in Madrid, which revealed that Spain’s scheme has proven a disaster.

In response, Obama’s administration provided a lesson in how Big Government can be abused when its officials are angered and embarrassed, turning its institutions on a private individual, even a foreign academic whose offense was to produce scholarly research about his own nation’s policy failures.

Here is what happened. The Spanish “green jobs” study received substantial play in the U.S. media and gained favorable attention in the Wall Street Journal’s U.S., Europe and Asia editions, among other outlets. It came up in a White House press conference, embarrassing spokesman Robert Gibbs who boasted how he disagreed with the study and its conclusions while admitting he had not read it.

The rest of administration’s three-fold response was in sum highly troubling. The benign second step was to substitute, without missing a beat, Denmark for Spain in Obama’s ritual “look at what’s happening in…” litany of our environmental superiors (though that experiment, too, has been defrocked). Then things got ugly.

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Over at the American Spectator, Big Government Contributor Matthew Vadum writes:

Newly discovered evidence shows the radical advocacy group ACORN has a man in the Obama White House.This power behind the throne is longtime ACORN operative Patrick Gaspard. He holds the title of White House political affairs director, the same title Karl Rove held in President Bush’s White House.

Evidence shows that years before he joined the Obama administration, Gaspard was ACORN boss Bertha Lewis’s political director in New York.

 Lewis, the current “chief organizer” or CEO of ACORN, was head of New York ACORN from at least 1994 through 2008, when she took over as national leader of ACORN. With Gaspard at work in the White House, Lewis might as well be speaking to President Obama through an earpiece as he goes about his daily business ruining the country.

Read the whole story here.

Wall Street Journal is reporting that Bank of America will cut off funding to ACORN:

In response to questions from The Wall Street Journal, a spokesman for the banking company said it has “suspended current commitments” to Acorn Housing, an affiliated group, and “will not enter into any further agreements with Acorn or any of its affiliates,” pending assessments by the bank of the organization’s operations.

Last year, whistleblower documents revealed that in just 2005-2006, Bank of America had given over $1.3 million to ACORN. An internal ACORN memo even crowed:

B of A pays quartly. Chase when they feel like and are tired of getting bugged by me.

Full WSJ story here.

Michael Moore discussed his new film on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann last week, which excoriates the 2008 financial bailouts, corporate welfare and various other flaws in a system in which the government gives favor to corporations that can afford lobbyists in Washington DC. Moore also calls capitalism “evil,” even when you strip away all the sweetheart deals with the government.

While his initial frustration with crony capitalism may be justified, while on Olbermann’s show, Moore completely failed to mention that General Electric, the company that keeps Olbermann on the air, received billions in bailout money last year. He also neglected to point out that Olbermann received a  $3.5 million pay raise around the same time that taxpayers paid to keep General Electric afloat. (Olbermann regularly scolds corporate employees who receive bonuses from bailed out companies.)

Despite calls to put his money where his mouth is and return his own bonus, Olbermann has remained silent. And while Moore is usually so quick to attack anyone benefiting from government-backed corporate profits,  he didn’t even mention his host’s own hypocrisy.

You see, to guys like Moore and Olbermann, it’s perfectly okay to make millions from taxpayers and capitalism, so long as it’s their bank account getting filled with the cash.

On Fox News Sunday, anchor Chris Wallace named James O’Keefe the Power Player of the Week. For those keeping score at home; the Census has cut ties with ACORN, the House and Senate have voted overwhelmingly to cut off federal funds to ACORN, the IRS has severed its ties and placed tax liens on the organization, the Treasurary Department’s Inspector General has opened a review, and numerous state and local government have opened investigations of the troubled community organizer. Better yet, a certain leftist organization continues to spin itself far beyond any credibility it might ever have possessed.  Yes, that adds up to a Power Player in our book.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel won a resounding reelection in today’s balloting in Germany. That was mostly expected. What wasn’t expected was the absolute drubbing suffered by SPD, the labor/left party. Until this election, Merkel’s conservatives were in an uneasy, ‘grand coalition’ with the SPD. Those days are over. Now Merkel’s conservatives will form a government with the pro-free market (libertarian) FPD party. Hmmm…hints of things to come?:

Together with the FDP, Mrs Merkel is expected to push for a new era of deeper economic reforms and tax cuts for Europe’s biggest economy. Mrs Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and the FDP benefited from dissatisfaction over spiralling national debt and stagnant income levels.

The CDU retained its position as Germany’s largest party with 33.5 per cent and the Free Democrats jumped to 15 per cent.

The result marked a humiliating blow for Germany’s venerable Social Democratic Party, which took just 22.5 per cent.

Predictions of a tight outcome were confounded by frustrated voters embracing Mrs Merkel’s case for a stronger hand to deal with Germany’s long-term financial problems.

Read the whole thing here, in a non-US newspaper.

Chancellor Merkel’s party support actually dropped slightly from the last election. However, the FDP, the pro-market, libertarianish party almost doubled their support. And, the labor/left collapsed. Totally.

More of that please.

This week’s Washington Times column:

A telling event occurred on Sept. 15, Day 6 of the drip, drip, drip ACORN video rollout. President Obama met for lunch with former President Bill Clinton at trendy Il Mulino in New York City.

For the second consecutive day, the New York Post featured the ACORN scandal on its cover – complete with James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles in their outrageous “pimp and ho” costumes.

Does anyone think the president and the former president were unaware that the city in which they were dining was mesmerized by the ACORN scandal – especially since ACORN had bragged that its employees had kicked Mr. O’Keefe and Ms. Giles out of their New York office?

The Sept. 15 edition of the New York Post explored the political angles and directed attention to the Brooklyn District Attorney’s investigation into why an ACORN office in its jurisdiction helped instruct a prospective brothel owner how to hide his prostitution proceeds in a tin in his backyard.

No one in the morally superior media world has asked, why did Mr. Obama have lunch with Mr. Clinton that day? So let me take a guess, and it seems like an obvious answer. Mr. Obama, under siege by a video-a-day expose that was exposing the Democratic Party to an avalanche of consequences (ACORN defunded in the House and Senate, ACORN delinked from the census, etc.), needed advice from the last president to navigate through a major political scandal.

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The health care plan advocated by President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senator Reid and The Democratic Majority is hazardous to the health of every American. What the President would like to do with your health care is currently being widely debated, but what is lesser known is a panel has already been created in Part I of his two-part health care plan  through buried language in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the Stimulus Bill, which became law last February.

The name given to this panel in the President’s Stimulus Bill is The Federal Coordinating Council for Comparative Effectiveness Research, and is an already funded $1.1 billion enterprise run by federal bureaucrats—not practicing doctors on the front line or patients.  All 15 members of The Council have already been appointed by President Obama.  The two part Plan consists of 53 boards and councils, whose underlying method of cutting costs is based on rationing and denying care, not preventing health care need, much like the British Health Care System.

Part II of the Obama health care plan, dubbed “America’s Affordable Health Choices Act,” empowers this Council to create another level of bureaucracy, The Center for Comparative Effectiveness Research, which as in The British System, will determine whether to approve or reject treatment for patients based upon the cost of treatment and the number of years the patient will likely benefit from the treatment.  This will have the biggest impact on seniors, but rightly has caused concern for Americans of all ages.

Part I of the President’s plan dictates that doctors and hospitals will be overseen and reviewed by The National Coordinator of Health Information Technology.  This “Coordinator”, who has already been appointed by President Obama, will be responsible for monitoring treatments to ensure doctors and hospitals strictly follow what the government deems appropriate and cost effective, and to “guide medical decisions at the time and place of care.”  

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At the end of last week, I was watching President Obama’s speech before the United Nations. I must admit it was given with eloquence and was quite moving. However, for the most part it was rhetoric and the dreams of an idealistic man in Fantasyland. I do not want to really beat a dead horse, but as stated in my last article about the ideology of liberals, President Obama’s foreign policy completely ignores reality. It is almost delusional. Obama dreams about everything being utopian, but ignores the writings on the wall. And, in the process he insults our trusted ally Israel by demanding it stop building settlements without requiring the Palestinians to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist.

The speech was also very Wilsonian. I could imagine the words of Woodrow Wilson pitching the League of Nations to the United States Congress after the end of World War One. The League of Nations “is a definite guaranty of peace. It is a definite guaranty by word against aggression. It is a definite guaranty against the things which have just come near bringing the whole structure of civilization into ruin. Its purposes do not for a moment lie vague. Its purposes are declared, and its powers are unmistakable. It is not in contemplation that this should be merely a league to secure the peace of the world. It is a league which can be used for cooperation in any international matter.” In fact, parts of President Obama’s speech today mirrored these themes exactly. (more…)

From syndicated columnist Kathleen Parker:

Now picture a triangle. One point is ACORN; another point is the SEIU; the third point is the taxpayer. Now picture arrows flowing back and forth, representing the exchange of greenbacks and services.

While various government agencies funded ACORN to help poor people become voters and homeowners, ACORN under Rathke created SEIU Local 100 (Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Texas) and SEIU Local 880 (Illinois, Indiana and Kansas). In turn, the SEIU wrote checks to ACORN for political activities and union organizing, according to ACORN whistle-blower affidavits. In 2008, the SEIU and Change to Win, a coalition of labor unions, gave ACORN $1,729,462, according to union financial reports filed with the Labor Department.

To break it down, ACORN and the SEIU are hand and glove. Rathke himself referred to the SEIU as “one of the pillars of the ACORN family of organizations” in a June 9, 2007, blog posting. This coziness has been long known among conservative watchdog groups, but Washington has paid little attention until now.

Read the whole thing here.

Across America community organizations operate in impoverished, disadvantaged, low-income or minority communities. No matter the phrase used to describe the special interest, a group exists to represent it. Often these organizations initially have good intentions and seek to give back and serve the community in which they operate. When government money, power and influence become part of the equation however, lofty principles tend to fall by the wayside. Other organizations are created to cause chaos and disrupt the system.

The Association for Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) was perceived by many as a well-intended organization, but it appears that the association that Wade Rathke founded was increasingly driven to cause chaos and disrupt the system whenever it could.

BEFORE the Dale Rathke embezzlement finally became last year, John Fund, in “Grapes of Rathke: ACORN, a liberal activist group, comes under scrutiny. About time,” reported: (more…)

From New York Times Public Editor Clary Hoyt:

ON Sept. 12, an Associated Press article inside The Times reported that the Census Bureau had severed its ties to Acorn, the community organizing group. Robert Groves, the census director, was quoted as saying that Acorn, one of thousands of unpaid organizations promoting the 2010 census, had become “a distraction.”

Clark Hoyt

What the article didn’t say — but what followers of Fox News and conservative commentators already knew — was that a video sting had caught Acorn workers counseling a bogus prostitute and pimp on how to set up a brothel staffed by under-age girls, avoid detection and cheat on taxes. The young woman in streetwalker’s clothes and her companion were actually undercover conservative activists with a hidden camera.

It was an intriguing story: employees of a controversial outfit, long criticized by Republicans as corrupt, appearing to engage in outrageous, if not illegal, behavior. An Acorn worker in Baltimore was shown telling the “prostitute” that she could describe herself to tax authorities as an “independent artist” and claim 15-year-old prostitutes, supposedly illegal immigrants, as dependents. (more…)

This week, President Obama took the unprecedented step of personally chairing a meeting of the United Nations Security Council. In an address to the General Assembly the day before, The President of the United States, with American power and influence on the decline around the world, declared yet again that, “No world order that elevates one nation… over another will succeed.”

It seems lost on the American President that he was not elected to create or perfect a world order, but to elevate the interests of the United States. He was not selected by a world assembly but by Americans, who extracted from him a sworn oath to defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign or domestic. That same Constitution calls the president the Chief Executive of the Untied States. Imagine if the chief executive of Wal-Mart attended an economic forum and suggested a willingness to make his company less successful in the interest of promoting the perceived success of his competitors. It is unlikely that he would remain CEO for long… (more…)

Statement by Carter L. Clews to Steve Capus via the Americans For Limited Government website:

The increasingly hysterical responses by NBC news boss Steve Capus to the escalating Stonegate Scandal are disappointing at best and chilling at worst. Here is a man who runs what used to be a highly respected major news bureau who now finds himself conjuring up gremlins in cyberspace to defend what appears to be horrendously bigoted behavior within his own news room.

Having spoken directly with Mr. Capus for nearly 15 minutes Friday afternoon, I want to once again repeat my offer to him: if you really don’t believe that Ms Stone sent the “Bite me, Jew boy” email to ALG staffer Alex Rosenwald, we will be happy to work with you to track down who sent it from her Blackberry using her email address.

This is precisely the same offer I made to Ms Stone at 11:00AM Friday morning, when she denied having sent any such email to Alex Rosenwald. Now, Mr. Capus has changed her story to say that, yes, she sent an email on Thursday, but it did not say “Bite me, Jew boy.”

Again, we are more than willing to help NBC resolve its internal problems, but Mr. Capus needs to work with those trying to ferret out the full story, not against, us. Tom Brokaw, one of Mr. Capus’s closest friends has said of the NBC news boss, “He does have a little bit of a hair trigger. He could blow. But I could always walk in and close the door and say, ‘Take a breath.’ ” (more…)