National Science Foundation studies gossip and workplace politics in elementary school

$1.47 million grant from the National Science Foundation will fund a 3-D virtual recreation of the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair

National Science Foundation funds self-help for Members of Congress

$1.57 million stimulus grant to search for fossils… in Argentina

Thirty companies ranked among the most egregious offenders of state and federal laws awarded more than $1.2 billion in federal stimulus contracts

Taxpayers paid $24,000 per car under federal Cash for Clunkers program

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With the health care debate raging and, what seems like, new bills being proposed everyday, it is easy to get bogged down in the details and corresponding rumors. One aspect of Democratic healthcare plan that will never change is whatever bill Democrats end up with, they intend to pay for it through taxes on so-called “Cadillac health care plans” (and several other tax increases).

While the “tax anything we can” rhetoric delights most on the Left, it doesn’t play so well with the party’s largest contributor and loyal ally, organized labor.

Unions have spent the past few decades bullying employers into giving them overly generous health care plans (think United Auto Workers) often to the detriment of the companies they work for. Unfortunately for labor, the healthcare plans they spent years negotiating are now considered “Cadillac plans” and are under attack by the same people they helped spent $450 million to put into office.

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One of the last people you’d expect to be a catalyst for the near collapse of history’s most advanced financial system is the secretary of Housing and Urban Development. Though not the masterminds of the nation’s economic woes, Andrew Cuomo and Mel Martinez were willing musclemen for the Congressional and White House driven mandates that housing be made more affordable to all through government subsidy.

Those mandates, policy stemming back to the 1960s, were driven by compassion, but have turned out to be the chief cause for the current rampant rates of default, foreclosure, and economic pain striking particularly hard at low-income families.

Such is the story Charlie Gasparino tells in his new book, The Sellout: How Three Decades of Wall Street Greed and Government Mismanagement Destroyed the Global Financial System. Gasparino notes that Cuomo as much as boasted in the late 1990s about forcing Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to expand their subprime mortgage portfolios. Not slowing down, the George W. Bush appointed Martinez carried the ball forward with great speed, presiding over a period of time where Fannie and Freddie grew to hold a combined $1 trillion in subprime mortgages.

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Just how far is the Obama administration willing to go to reward big donors?  In the wake of yesterday’s explosive report regarding “scores of top Democratic donors” being rewarded with “VIP access to the White House, private briefings with administration advisers and invitations to important speeches and town-hall meetings,” it’s a question that’s on the minds of many politically-engaged Americans, and one likely to grab yet more attention, thanks to this article in today’s USA Today.  It notes that: 

“More than 40% of President Obama’s top-level fundraisers have secured posts in his administration, from key executive branch jobs to diplomatic postings in countries such as France, Spain and the Bahamas, a USA TODAY analysis finds.”

 USA Today goes on to report that one top-level fundraiser apparently awarded with a plum job is Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski. 

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The New Hampshire State Council on the Arts has handed out $230,000 in federal stimulus money to help preserve jobs in the arts. The money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is the first round of $293,100 in total arts funding for the Granite State under the $787 billion stimulus package.

The Arts Council claims that the money will save 42 jobs at 12 music, theater, and visual arts and crafts organization throughout the state. The Governor and Council approved the grants last week:

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Lots of attention—appropriately—is being paid to the federal government’s new, extended reach into the private economy, setting salaries and owning auto companies.  But, beneath the radar, a combination of Obama Administration initiatives is  extending government influence over philanthropy and charitable organizations, as well.   

New tax rules may pull up to $7 billion away from private charity—at a time when six of ten United Ways already report steep drops in giving.  And a new White House office (of Social Innovation)  will make its own grants to non-profits—but only for select purposes. 

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Charles Gasparino does a very nice job exposing Freddie Mac,  Fannie Mae, and their advocates for the destructive forces that they are. Everyone, even Obama for a while, recognizes that at the heart of the financial markets meltdown was the collapse in the US housing market, which itself was a bubble enabled in various ways by government programs explicitly designed to increase the percentage of people owning homes.

Whether through the Community Reinvestment Act or through a relentless Federal Reserve bank policy of next-to-zero percent interest rates or guarantees of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae (and major incentives to them to buy any mortgage on secondary markets no matter how dubiously documented or financed), it’s clear that pro-home-ownership policies massively increased housing prices and risky loans.

Yet what blows my mind, is that currently the government is again pumping billions of dollars into various programs to increase home ownership rates and to stabilize or increase home values throughout the country.

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Bertha Lewis of ACORN appears to be tired of losing arguments, credibility, and government funding. With her “colleagues” at the White House behind her and the memory of  being forced off her talking points fresh in her mind, Bertha Lewis strikes back.

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The Democratic majority objected to my appearing at a House hearing this morning addressing AstroTurfing in the global warming advocacy industry. The majority were not amused by the prospect of a discordant note being struck. As such, the Republicans will have no witnesses. They have agreed to this after being challenged. In Washington, we call times such as these “weekdays”.

The hearing actually has devolved into something of an effort to rehabilitate certain Members who are now imperiled by their vote for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, particularly Tom Periello of Central Virginia (my Congressman, who has been hoodwinked by someone into stating, in defense of his vote, that the reason we are losing jobs to India and China is because they’ve already passed Waxman-Markey-type laws. Really. I agree we need to find out who is spreading such scurrilous tales to our lawmakers).

So, Rep. Periello will open the proceedings with a statement. The hearing was already delayed once because he refused to let anyone see what he was going to say in advance. They might ask questions. I don’t think that’s much of a threat.

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A new citizen action group is committed to exposing the danger that ACORN and the Working Family Party poses to our democracy based on their record of subverting elections through voter fraud, falsifying petitions and engaging in absentee ballot fraud for favored candidacies, looting government housing programs, blackmailing corporations and cheating the public campaign finance system.

Nutbusterz will serve serve as a clearinghouse for media coverage of the illegal activities of ACORN. Media reports on ACORN and the New York Working Families Party (WFP) will be updated daily. Candidates and causes that ally themselves with ACORN will be exposed and held to account.

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Despite the few voices of caution, risk and leverage had become a national fixation, embraced both on Wall Street and in government. The SEC and the Fed, the main regulators in charge of monitoring the buildup of risky assets on the banks’ books, together with the rating agencies, were the modern-day equivalents of Nero fiddling as Rome burned.The fire in this case was the massive and rapid buildup of mortgage debt on the balance sheets of the banks; by 2006 it was approaching $1 trillion and heading higher without so much as a peep from the traditional watchdogs.

Still, the risk taking and leverage went beyond the brokerage houses and the banks. The GSEs, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, were in the game as well. By now, Fannie and Freddie had fully and completely conceded their original mandates to the whims of the Washington political class, which demanded “affordable” housing for all, even those who couldn’t afford it. The politicians were giddy with Fannie and Freddie’s conversion from staid mortgage banks to subprime lenders that would make Angelo Mozilo, the CEO of the largest subprime lender in the markets, Countrywide Financial, envious.

It was an evolution that took years in the making. As HUD secretary, Andrew Cuomo boasted in one report in the late 1990s that the new mandates he was imposing on Fannie and Freddie to ramp up subprime lending “could be of significant benefit to lower-income families, minorities, and families living in underserved areas.”

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Today, in 1929, was ‘Black Tuesday.’  This final day of the great stock market crash, with a powerful assist from boneheaded government policy, helped usher in the Great Depression.

This Friday, taxpayer funded researchers will brief politicians in Congress on how to improve their approval ratings by avoiding face-to-face townhall meetings with voters.   

After receiving tongue lashings from outraged taxpayers across the country at townhall meetings this summer, career politicians no doubt will eagerly listen to this briefing to learn how to avoid direct contact with voters and simultaneously increase their approval ratings.  Taxpayers already upset by out of control, wasteful Washington spending would, however, probably be even more upset if they were told that  this research was all paid for with tax dollars by the National Science Foundation.

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President Obama’s decision to appoint so many czars is  clearly troubling members of Congress, who have taken the  unusual step of holding hearings on the issue.  The decision of the two Senate committees is remarkable because a President’s management style is rarely questioned by the Senate or House during the first year of his term, especially when they are all members of the same political party.   But, Obama’s decision to appoint almost 40 policy czars, and then give them broad powers and budgetary responsibilities, has created a more serious constitutional issue.  

The Senate is primarily concerned that President Obama may be end-running the Constitution, along with the growing fear, shared by many citizens, that the power and the extraordinary amount of funding that is controlled by the Czars may be undermining the authorities of the senate-confirmed agency heads on whom the Senate has placed its imprimatur and its trust. 

Czars currently influence or directly control over a trillion dollars of government spending, which is more than the spending of the entire federal government during the Reagan Administration.  And, yet, few of the Obama  czars were ever vetted through the traditional review process where potential conflicts of interest are revealed.  Nor are Obama’s czars accountable to the Senate to justify policy or spending decisions. 

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There are millions of tweets every day, and the government is paying scientists $678,000 to read them and measure the happiness of the written expressions

National Science Foundation discovers the cure for politicians’ dismal approval ratings; Taxpayer funded researchers to brief Congress on how to increase constituent trust and approval ratings this Friday

The right to free speech now includes government subsidized cell phones; Phone companies receive up to $10 a month in government subsidies to cover what amounts to about $3 in service per beneficiary

“Cell phone ownership is a right,” says company that provides taxpayer subsidized phones

Taxpayers subsidize about $32 of the cost of a train ticket for every Amtrak passenger

Despites the massive $787 billion in federal stimulus spending, the national unemployment rate rises to nearly 9.8 percent and the nation marks the 21st month of net job losses, longer than at any time since the Great Depression…

The White House says stimulus spending has already had its biggest impact and probably won’t contribute to significant growth next year

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Over the next month, we will be exposing new evidence about the activities of the Council on American Islamic Relations, known as CAIR.  The evidence – and ensuing requests for formal investigations of CAIR – will be submitted to members of Congress, to the Departments of Justice and Treasury, as well as to the public here at Big Government.  To set the scene, here’s a brief “CAIR for Dummies” backgrounder  from author Paul Sperry, whose just-published best-seller Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld that’s Conspiring to Islamize America unmasks CAIR and its foreign backers:

The Council on American-Islamic Relations bills itself as a “civil-rights advocacy group,” much like the NAACP, but for Muslims

However, the FBI says that far from being a benign nonprofit, CAIR is a front group for Hamas terrorists and the radical Muslim Brotherhood in America. And the bureau recently cut off formal ties to CAIR’s national office in Washington and all 30 of its branch offices across the country.

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A year or two ago, only the most radical leftists would have dreamed that we’d be living in a country where the government owns a majority share in GM, bailed out private insurers, took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and handed over billions of dollars to the financial sector.

It continues to bailout homeowners doing more of the same policies that put us in this mess in the first place. The government now plans to bailout seniors and small businesses and it won’t be long before Obama proposes to bailout children. Also,  as the debate over health care reform continues, we are left to wonder: how much is this going to cost us? One trillion dollars or two?

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The “Pimp and Pro” ACORN story hit America hard a few weeks ago. It is a ripe story with endless angles to report on, and yet the Mainstream Media’s favorite approach seems to be the method in which James and I orchestrated and gathered the information.

It’s like going fishing, but instead of taking a picture and raving about the 750lb Mako shark you caught, you blather on about the bait that was used.

What happens when people get bored? They stop paying attention. What happens when people stop paying attention to an already suffering press industry?

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President Obama’s ACORN/SEIU bussed in 100s of union protesters from across the country to stage 2 days’ worth of media events outside of the 2009 American Bankers Association meeting in Chicago.

SEIU leaders Andy Stern and Thomas Balanoff (DSA member) joined with Jesse Jackson and others, demanding that members of the American Bankers Association stop using taxpayer bailout funds to lobby against Progressive banking “reforms.”

From the SEIU website:

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