*UPDATE Below*

Alinsky Rule #1: “Power isn’t only what you have, it’s what the enemy thinks you have.”

Now that ACORN lied to you, Media Matters, what are you going to do?

**UPDATE 2:24 PM EST** We muted the audio of the ACORN employees on the video released today due to ACORN’s legal attack upon us.  We call upon ACORN to state publicly now that it has no objection to the public release of any its employees oral statements to us.  If they are interested in the truth, why wouldn’t they do so?

The public option has been a political football since early summer. The President has said more than once that he prefers it but will not demand it. This was considered capitulation by many on the left who see the public option as necessary for “real” reform. Meanwhile, belying the President’s public statements, there are reports that the President’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel has been quietly but firmly twisting arms in the back rooms to insure the public option is included in the final bill. Even now, pressure is mounting on Harry Reid to include the public option in the health reform bill he brings to the Senate floor.

In response to the tumult over what appears to be a small feature of the effort, more than one critic has wondered aloud why Democrats don’t just give up on the public option – which is opposed by every Republican – in order to reach a more bipartisan outcome. What exactly is so important about the public option anyway? And why do Democrats in particular seem so wedded to the idea?

There is a simple answer to these questions, but it’s an answer you’ve likely not heard from any institution in the mainstream media. The truth is that the public plan is a carefully devised scheme, a sneaky strategy, to deceive American voters. It’s a political marketing ploy designed to move the nation to a single-payer system – like the one in Canada – over the next decade. The public option is the Trojan horse. On the outside it’s all about “choice and competition”, but once it has been dragged within the walls of American medicine it’s true nature will become evident. By that time, it’ll be too late.

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Happy Trafalgar Day!

Today’s edition identifies at least $333 million in wasteful Washington spending.

-$300 million stimulus program to promote energy efficiency may not be energy efficient after all, audit finds

-Quid Pro Pork: Department of Justice investigates link between the exchange of congressional earmarks and campaign donations

-Washington, DC, city government steered $4.5 million in federal funds to an AIDS housing group that never filed federal tax returns and has been plagued with service and cost complaints

-DC mayor launches investigation of groups that misspent more than $25 million of public AIDS assistance

-Political scientists debate the relevancy of the research they conduct with federal funds; “We’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it.”

-National Science Foundation funds political science study of online town hall meetings held by Members of Congress (more…)

Like everyone else who is a fan of the NFL, I have heard of the recent firestorm over Rush Limbaugh being ousted by Roger Goodell in his bid to become part owner of the St Louis Rams. Apparently Limbaugh has been accused of being racist in some way towards African American players.

I listen to Limbaugh’s radio show quite a bit and as a result I know he is a huge fan of the NFL. That’s the very reason why these charges of racism just don’t sit well with me. Common sense alone would lead a reasonable person to question how such a huge fan of the NFL, or of any professional sport for that matter, could be racist towards the very players whose tremendous talents and athleticism create the excitement that contributes to one’s being such a huge fan of the sport. It’s just not logical. There is no denying that Limbaugh is a lightning rod for controversy. There is also no denying that he makes statements that some people might find offensive. Even he doesn’t deny that. But to charge him with racism towards the very players he loves to watch and was willing to invest his money in, just doesn’t make sense. (more…)

Did ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis say anything that was true in her recent speech at the National Press Club?

The embattled ACORN CEO deserved an Academy Award nomination for her virtuoso performance in which she not only depicted ACORN as an innocent victim but also as a whistleblower that tried to nip the subprime mortgage crisis in the bud.

She blamed everyone but herself: “We’ve seen this play before, whether it was the civil rights movement or whatever, when you organize poor people to have real power, what you do is often turned against you.”

She blamed Republicans: “The RNC…because we’ve been inflated as the boogeyman, raises almost $2 million a day, every day, and this form of modern-day ACORN McCarthyism has got to stop.”

Lewis’s statement about the Republican National Committee was immediately torpedoed by RNC chairman Michael Steele who defended ACORN.

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The always enjoybable Byron York has this (funny?) piece in today’s Washington Examiner:

Are you, by chance, a conservative? A Republican? Did you vote for John McCain last November, as well as the GOP candidate in your local congressional race?

If your answer to these question is yes, then you are very, very strange — and perhaps not even fully American. At the very least, you’re not one of the rest of us.

If you don’t believe it, just read “The Very Separate World of Conservative Republicans,” a new report by Democracy Corps, the political research firm run by Democratic operatives James Carville and Stanley Greenberg.

“The self-identifying conservative Republicans who make up the base of the Republican Party stand a world apart from the rest of America,” write Carville and Greenberg. Conservative Republicans, according to the Democracy Corps research, don’t trust Barack Obama; are scared by the speed with which the president and Democrats in Congress are attempting to enact new programs; don’t like government takeovers of business; and believe that many of their fellow Americans don’t fully appreciate the threat posed by the Democratic agenda.

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Whoever said, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” never went to Congress.

Sometime this year, perhaps very soon, both chambers in Congress likely will be asked to vote on a monumental healthcare bill — monumental in its scope, its cost, and the actual number of pages in the legislation.

And while many important questions about the final draft of the bill remain, here’s one that most Americans are shocked we even have to ask: “Will members of Congress be given enough time to read and understand the bill before casting a vote?”

The answer, based on prior behavior, is “probably not.”

Earlier this year, members, the public, and press were given 12 hours to review the 1,073-page long stimulus bill that cost future generations of Americans (since we’re borrowing just about everything at this point) $787 billion. Not a single member I talked to read it before the vote. I doubt Evelyn Wood could have even pulled it off.

The cap and trade bill, which would cost $846 billion and weighs in at 1,428 pages, was available for 16.5 hours before the House vote.

But this isn’t a partisan problem: under Republican rule in 2003, for example, the 852-page Medicare Part D bill was available for 29 hours before a vote was called on the $395 billion legislation.

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Tea Partier and blogger Michael Leahy reports:

In an exclusive interview with the TCOT Report, George Joseph, Republican Party Chairman of Oneida County, one of the eleven counties in New York’s 23rd Congressional District, today slammed Republican Party nominee Dede Scozzafava. This damaging news comes on the heels of Scozzafava’s ill advised attempt to intimidate a reporter from the Weekly Standard by calling the cops on him after he asked persistent questions about her position on card check legislation at a meeting held last night in Lowville, New York. Lowville is located in Lewis County, immediately to the north of Oneida County.

According to Joseph

“ I wasn’t sold on Dede from the beginning. That race represents 8% of Oneida County. Throughout the nomination process, I would have thought there would have been more sensitivity, in light of what happened with Tedisco in NY 20, who was the annointed front runner. [Republican Tedisco was defeated in a special election for an open Congresssional seat earlier this year]. Just with [Dede] coming out of Albany — any legislator in Albany is so tarnished why would we nominate them ? We acted very tone deaf in how we selected this nominee.”

(more…)

When we read about the firing of Louisiana ACORN head Beth Butler, wife (“longtime companion”?) of ACORN founder Wade Rathke, we knew ACORN was still girding its loins.

It all came about when a local ACORN volunteer, Vanessa Gueringer, remarked to the Times-Picayune that President Obama should spend more time in the Lower 9th Ward of New Orleans when he was going to visit there last week.  The Lower 9th, of course, was hardest hit during Hurricane Katrina 4 years ago.

It seemed like a fairly harmless request, and one that would certainly expect to read from ACORN in a newspaper.

Well, it appears Bertha Lewis and ACORN national still are a bit touchy (and powerhungry?).  Lewis was supposedly coincidentally flying down to New Orleans the very next day.

Lo and behold, Lewis cited “a lack of accountability to process” in figuratively lopping off Butler’s head, who apparently failed in her duty to keep her minions quiet.  From the Times-Picayune:

On Sunday,  ACORN Chief Executive Bertha Lewis said the remarks,  which were not uttered by Butler,  were “without authority and do not reflect the position of the national leadership.” Lewis said she would “be personally going to New Orleans to deal with the individual involved.”

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Probably isn’t long before DOJ orders the election outcomes, as well. From today’s Washington Times:

Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department’s ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their “candidates of choice” – identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters’ right to elect the candidates they want.

Read that last sentence again. Then, read the whole thing here.

Illinois’s home health care workers have rejected an attempt to unionize providers under the auspices of SEIU and AFSCME. From CBS Chicago:

Illinois workers who are paid by the state to care for severely disabled people in their homes have voted down an effort to unionize.

More than 3,000 home health care workers mailed in their ballots this month; the ballots were counted on Monday and most of those workers voted not to join a union, according to Alan Symonette, an arbitrator with the American Arbitration Association, which counted the vote.

The workers could have voted to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees or the Service Employees International Union, but more than half of them voted to remain non-union.

Michelle Malkin has the vote totals:

SEIU – 293 votes
AFSCME – 220 votes
NO UNION – 1018 votes

(more…)

The Scariest Jobs Chart…Ever

H/T: The Business Insider

The GOP candidate is the most liberal in the race. As Big Government readers know, there is a philosophical battle brewing in upstate New York. A special election to replace departing Congressman John McHugh features a GOP candidate, Dede Scozzafave, backed by national GOP ‘leaders’, DailyKos and the state teachers’ union, a Democrat, Bill Owens and a Conservative Party Candidate, Doug Hoffman.

National GOP figures claim Dede Scozzafava is the best candidate hold the seat for the GOP. If that is true it begs a question, is it worth holding? Dede Scozzafava has regularly sought the support of ACORN’s Working Families Party, supported higher taxes, increased government spending, the stimulus bill, bailouts, Card Check…oh, lets just stop there. Newt Gingrich has called her “the future of the Republican party.” Well.

I call upon my fellow tea partiers, if you think the GOP should be commited to limited government, individual liberty and lower taxes, join with me in the DumpDede campaign. To act as a clearinghouse and mobilize our support, I’ve created the following website:

www.DumpDede.com

Pass it on to your friends. Battle is engaged.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission will consider “a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on policies to preserve the open Internet.” That’s a long way of saying that the FCC, led by Julius Genachowski, Obama’s old friend from Harvard Law School, will take its first steps towards forcing through net neutrality, a controversial policy that critics say would amount to a government takeover of the internet.

 
Internet Service Providers—the ones who have actually invested in the architecture and infrastructure that enables us all to access the internet—have long been opposed to net neutrality, as have conservatives and libertarians concerned about maintaining free markets and promoting innovation and quality service.  
 
But, with concerns that the FCC might now act to push net neutrality through, some voices less traditionally associated with opposition to the policy are speaking out regarding the proposed rulemaking, too.  In fact, a number of Democrats and groups typically aligned with the left—the online component of which has long treated net neutrality as a top three policy objective—seem to be feeling less than warm and fuzzy about increased government intervention with regard to the internet.

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Free golf carts available from federal stimulus program

Annual U.S. federal budget deficit reaches an all time high of $1.42 trillion in 2009; Government spending jumped to more than $3.5 trillion, increasing over 18% in one year

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan

As AIDS patients die in the streets of our nation’s capital, millions of dollars in federal AIDS funds misspent by the city on nepotism, ghost employees, and executive travel and pay

No punishment for National Park Service employee, paid $145,000-a-year, who used his government computer to view thousands of sexually explicit images?

National Science Foundation pays to develop a reverse karaoke application for iPhone

As Florida’s jobless rate reaches 11 percent…

… More than $2.3 million in federal economic stimulus grants go to Florida cosmetology and massage schools to pay tuition for the hairdressers, masseuses and nail technicians of tomorrow

In the wake of a series of embarrassing hidden-camera exposes and mounting congressional pressure to cut off its federal funding, Bertha Lewis, CEO of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now announced that ACORN will seek independent review.  However, the ACORN review which followed the million dollar Rathke embezzlement was merely a smokescreen; eight former ACORN board members previously sought a complete forensic examination of ACORN and its related entities followed by an independent audit from a Big Four accounting firm.

Lewis noted that ACORN’s advisory council would assist her in choosing an outside auditor, former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger. The ACORN advisory council includes John Podesta, head of the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank; Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union; and former Maryland Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.

“As a result of the indefensible action of a handful of our employees,” Lewis said in a statement, “I am, in consultation with ACORN’s Executive Committee, immediately ordering a halt to any new intakes into ACORN’s service programs until completion of an independent review.” Mind you, these are the same senior staff and executive committee members who concealed and covered up a million dollar embezzlement, but who themselves were never terminated.

Besides, ACORN already had its chance to do the right thing following the Rathke embezzlement when the board of directors appointed an interim management committee to investigate this fraud and reorganize ACORN. So what happened the last time that ACORN claimed to put in place its own internal management committee? (more…)

When we at the Education Action Group Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-partisan, non-profit organization, launched AFTexposed.com this fall to examine the agenda, finances and tactics of the American Federation of Teachers, little did we realize we would draw such an immediate, ugly response.

AFT10809letter –

On Friday, October 9, we received a threatening letter from the AFT’s general counsel (which was carbon copied to AFT President Randi Weingarten), demanding we immediately stop using the acronym ‘AFT’ anywhere on the site, effectively neutering it, and turn over the domain registration to the union. [See the letter here.] How can we have a website completely dedicated to analyzing the AFT and its agenda if we aren’t allowed to use the acronym ‘AFT?’

It was an outrageous attempt to squelch our First Amendment rights to voice our opinions, which are based in fact.

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On May 27, President Obama remarked to an audience gathered at Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada that Americans, “pioneered solar technology, but we’ve fallen behind countries like Germany and Japan in generating it, even though they get less sun than we do.  They certainly get less sun than Nevada.”  Today, Vice President Biden and a handful of Cabinet secretaries releases the Recovery through Retrofit report that will extol the virtues of green jobs and energy savings to be had if only the government had its way.

Observers of national policy may want to look at other countries’ experiences to see how they have fared with efforts to improve environmental policies.  Previous research on green jobs policies in Spain showed that costs were high and benefits short-lived.  But what of the President’s example of Germany?

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