Today the Center for Constitutional Rights sued the federal government on behalf of ACORN.  They are alleging that Congressional efforts to defund ACORN constitute an unconstitutional Bill of Attainder.  This tired argument has been thoroughly rebutted, but the Center for Constitutional Rights is going to make it anyway.  Republican National Lawyers Association Chairman David Norcross has noted that: “The actions of Congress to defund ACORN clearly do not meet the definition of a Bill of Attainder.”

Real Estate Developer Bruce Ratner and Bertha Lewis

The Center for Constitutional Rights is going to stand up for this corrupt organization, and I think I know the reason why.  It’s all about family.

The President of the Center for Constitutional Rights is Michael Ratner.  Michael Ratner is a well known liberal lawyer who has fought against the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay.  He also teaches at Columbia Law School.

If you haven’t heard of Michael, that’s all right, I’m sure you’ve heard of his brother Bruce.  He’s a prominent developer and owner of the New Jersey Nets.  His company is Forest City Enterprises.

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When a small sampling of the White House guest list was revealed several days, Obama campaign bankroller SEIU was at the top of the list.  Having spent over $60 million to elect Obama, why should we expect anything different?

Earlier this year, SEIU president Andy Stern admitted he holds weekly meetings at the White House and, according to the guest list, several with the president himself.  That makes Andy Stern one important man.  Perhaps one of the most important in Washington, in fact.

Andy Stern has long been labeled a ruthless, bare-knuckled union organizer.  His union has a significant portion of its membership made up of health care workers and, not surprisingly, has been of the groups most aggressively pushing for socialized medicine.

Stern’s SEIU has been very aggressive at increasing its membership, often employing intimidation to meet its ends.  Just one example: In, 2008 SEIU thugs beat up members, mainly women, from rival unions at a labor union convention.  SEIU then issued a press release entitled, “SEIU Members Stand Up for the Future of the Labor Movement and the Interests of All Workers.”

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So, now that we’ve opened this can, just how sweeping is the “global warming” bills’ curiously identical Sec. 707?

At risk of getting into a peeing match which my time budget may not allow me to finish, I believe that the dispute between Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air and the folks at the WashingtonExaminer joining Sen. David Vitter (and, by implication, I suppose me) is not necessary but worth resolving. Caution: it is also for the legislatively inclined or otherwise the pointy-headed. But, since I arguably joined the fray here on Big Government on Tuesday, here goes.

At issue is a provision buried in both the Waxman-Markey and Kerry-Boxer “global warming” bills.

I had to leave for a few hours after starting my comment on this, in which time I decided not to wage the war over how strongly we need to argue that it prima facie nullifies the rest of the respective legislative language that too many lobbyists tout was carefully crafted to provide “certainty”. Lobbyists of course tend to say things reflecting well on their defense of client interests.

What is inescapable is that this language dispels such notions of certainty. But that shouldn’t be shocking. The bills statutorily establish “global warming” causation, for every existing or new increment of GHGs (read: employers, economic activity), as well as harm caused. And they fail to preempt states and elsewhere EPA as needed, or the National Environmental Policy Act, Clean Water Act or Endangered Species Act, or every other tool that’s already being tried out as a “global warming” law. Let alone the rest of the U.S. Code. All of which is relevant to context, as we shall see.

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“…California remains one of the best places in the world to start a successful small business.  All you have to do is start with a successful large business”

US Rep. Tom McClintock; (R) Rocklin (CA)

This week, the ordinary American citizens known as Tea Party Patriots— the pesky nemesis of power-drunk, spendthrift politicians—have laid down a gauntlet, building on the momentum of the protests in towns all across America as well as the 1+ million Tea Partiers who took part in rallies across the country on September 12th.

Making the transition from single-event political protest rallies to a sustained political activism campaign, the Tea Party Patriots have filed an initiative to appear on the November 2010 ballot in California.  The initiative is the first official act within the true grass roots’ political activism platform we’ve titled “The Citizen Power Campaign”.

What is the first target the Tea Party Patriots’ ‘Citizen Power Campaign?’

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From Politico:

A non-profit organization filed a lawsuit against the federal government Thursday morning, seeking to overturn a law stopping the flow of federal funds to ACORN.

The suit, filed in federal court in New York, claims that bills passed by the House and Senate to defund the group qualify as bills of attainder, legislation that unfairly targets one group. Such bills are unconstitutional.

The suit will seek to restore funding and roll-back the ban, which was passed as part of the legislative branch appropriations bill in September.

ACORN claims that the legislation was of “malicious and punitive intent.” The suit also claims Congress violated the Fifth Amendment by skirting due process before doling out the punishment of the funding cut. OMB Director Peter Orszag and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner are listed as co-defendants in the suit.
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To commemorate the 20^th anniversary of the collapse of the Berlin Wall, a group of students at Washington University in St. Louis chose to stand up to the tyranny of socialism and bring awareness to its consequences.

The students erected a Soviet gulag on the quad of the University to vividly display the ultimate “solution” to dissidence in socialist societies sparking campus intrigue, discussion, and debate.  Although an officer initially arrived on the scene and found everything was peaceful, undercover video reveals smarmy Washington University administrators continuing to press and make excuses to shut the fake-Gulag down.It took the bureaucracy hours to find an obscure policy to use against the students.

The group responsible has plans to make more gulag demonstrations on campuses around the country.

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According to the Wall Street Journal, a rival union to the Service Employees International Union is alleging the purple juggernaut “with changing ballots and threatening to report a worker to immigration officials,” which “experts say the feud is a costly and embarrassing distraction for unions as they lobby Congress to pass” legislation known as card check, which would allow for intimidation of workers.

BigGovernment.com has more on SEIU here and TheTruthAboutEFCA.com adds:

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As Washington extends its reach farther into our lives and limits our freedoms, the Fed destroys the value of the dollar and our savings, and Wall Street continues to make billions of dollars using taxpayer money without creating any sustainable growth for the economy, Americans should begin to ask ourselves who our enemies really are. Sure, Iran, Syria, and North Korea are evil. I would love to see their regimes destroyed, but they haven’t really done anything to interfere with my life as far as I know. On the other hand, I can identify exactly the many ways that Washington, the Fed, and Wall Street are destroying our freedoms and our economy and stealing our and our children’s future.

Let’s begin with Washington. They want to take a broken health care system and make it worse by further injecting government. They’re going to raise taxes even though people are struggling with the worst economy in decades. They’ve started a job-killing trade war with China–our largest trading partner and our largest lender–to pacify Big Labor. They’ve given hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to insolvent and poorly managed, but politically connected, Wall Street banks and Detroit car companies in the name of saving our economy. We’ve continued to lose millions of jobs anyway. They’ve spent additional hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars on a stimulus that was supposed to create jobs. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner says there will be jobs some day, but should we really believe him? This is the same guy who thought subprime lending wasn’t a problem. The same guy who thought it made sense to give billions to lender CIT. How did that work? Oh, right, they’re bankrupt now.

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Ronald Reagan once quipped that when you start referring to government as “we” instead of “they,” you have been in office too long. Not only is Senator Harry Reid referring to his liberal majority in Washington as “we,” he complains to reporters about the “smell” of American taxpayers when they visit our nation’s Capitol. Harry Reid has been in Washington far too long.

While families struggle in the face of rising unemployment, the housing crisis, and falling income, Harry Reid has chosen to carry out the bidding of Washington’s special interests and his party’s extreme liberal base. He has proven to be completely out-of-touch with overburdened taxpayers in my home state of Nevada. Currently, Nevada leads the nation in home foreclosures and we are second in the nation in unemployment. And despite Harry’s promises, Nevadans continue to lose their jobs and homes.

In 2004, voters held another out-of-touch Senate Democrat Leader accountable for failing the American people and his constituents. It took the right leadership, conservative principles and the support of conservatives from across the nation to defeat Tom Daschle.  Now we have the chance to do it again.

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Today, in 1998, Vice-President Al Gore signed the Kyoto Protocol (yeah, we don’t know where the constitutional authority is for that either):

Especially, since, by a vote of 95-0, the Senate had already rejected the Kyoto Protocols. Still, Al Gore has been able to parlay his work on the issue into a financial windfall.

From the Associated Press:

Longtime CNN host Lou Dobbs shocked his viewers Wednesday by announcing that he would be leaving the network effective immediately.The daily host of “Lou Dobbs Tonight” addressed his viewers after giving the day’s headlines and told them Wednesday’s show would be his final time in the anchor chair.

“This will be my last broadcast,” he said.

He said CNN had allowed him to be released from his contract early and that he was considering a number of options for the next stage in his career.

“I will let you know when I set my course,” he said. He said he wanted to “contribute positively to a better understanding of the great issues of our day.”

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On February 22, 1983, I raised my right hand in the Los Angeles MEPS (Military Entrance Processing Station) and said, “I, Charles Stuart DeVore, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; That I will bear true faith And allegiance to the same…” With those words, I became United States Army Private First Class DeVore, joining the millions of others since 1789 who swore with their lives to “support and defend the Constitution.”

Unlike many veterans, I have been fortunate not to see combat. I was “officially” shot at only once; during the Los Angeles riots in 1992 (well, there was that time in Lebanon, but that wasn’t official; and I was carjacked in 1988 by Panamanian paramilitaries).

When the members of the armed forces of the United States of America fight, they do so not just for their colleagues in uniform next to them – virtually every soldier in history has done that – they do so not for king or country – they fight to preserve a document, the Constitution. In that, the United States Armed forces have become the greatest force for good, for freedom, that the world has ever seen because the Constitution exists to make a reality out of the promise of the Declaration of Independence to secure our “unalienable rights” of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

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With much of the health care reform debate still focused on the wisdom of including a government-run, “public” health insurance “option,” too many of us are neglecting a far more insidious feature of the Democratic proposals:  the mandatory purchase requirement.  Under each of the bills moving through Congress, every person living in the United States would be required by law to have health insurance.  And, if your employer doesn’t provide you with it, you’ve got to buy it yourself or pay a monetary penalty.

What’s more, the proposals would make it more difficult to get some of the options that are available now — particularly the low-cost insurance plans that cover only catastrophic health events and have substantial cost-sharing features.  And, depending on which bill would eventually be enacted into law, Congress, state insurance commissioners, and/or a federal Health Choices Commissioner would get to dictate what benefits have to be covered in every policy, and would be empowered to determine whether any given plan even qualifies as health insurance.  The end result will be considerably higher costs for almost every person living in the country.

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This is why we have the Office of Labor Management Standards (OLMS), the only arm of the federal government to work on behalf of the rank-and-file union members to monitor union finances and catch fraud and abuse…too bad the left wants to cut their funding.

As Union Corruption Update reports:

At least Christine Pawlowski’s thefts will go into the record books as less than what they were. On September 28, Pawlowski, formerly financial secretary for Local 812 of the United Auto Workers, pleaded guilty in Huron County, Michigan (Bay City) District Court to embezzling between $1,000 and $20,000 during January 2007-December 2008. Prosecutors had charged that Pawlowski, now 42, a resident of Minden City, skimmed more than $20,000 from the Harbor Beach, Mich. union, which has 35 members. Sentencing is scheduled for November 9. The guilty plea follows a joint investigation by the Labor Department’s Office of Labor-Management Standards and Harbor Beach police.

While it might not be shocking to some that members of the UAW are embezzling money (the car industry is suffering after all), the below allegation is associated with a company that has a more happy image.

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From the Washington Times:

Charles Rangel (D-NY) was first elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1970.

Sen. Jim DeMint says Washington politicians are like fruit on the vine: the longer they hang around, the more rotten they get.

The South Carolina Republican – hearkening back to the days of the party’s “Contract with America” – on Tuesday offered a fix to the corrupting influence of “permanent politicians,” introducing an amendment to the Constitution that would limit Senate members to three six-year terms and House members to three two-year terms.

“As long as members have the chance to spend their lives in Washington, their interests will always skew toward spending taxpayer dollars to buy off special interests, covering over corruption in the bureaucracy, fundraising, relationship building among lobbyists, and trading favors for pork – in short, amassing their own power,” said Mr. DeMint, who is running for a second term next year. (more…)

In a somewhat surprising decision yesterday, former Bear Stearns hedge fund managers Ralph Cioffi and Matt Tannin were found not guilty by a jury of their peers in federal court. Nearly a month to the day after their trial began, the jury ruled that Cioffi and Tannin did not mislead investors nor commit fraud. The AP reports:

A jury in federal court in Brooklyn deliberated about eight hours over two days before finding Ralph Cioffi and Matthew Tannin not guilty of conspiracy and other charges in an alleged scheme that cost 300 investors about $1.6 billion and nearly caused the demise of Bear Stearns itself. The firm avoided bankruptcy in a rescue buyout by JPMorgan Chase & Co.

Both men had been charged with three counts of securities fraud and two counts of wire fraud. Cioffi was also charged with insider trading.

After the verdict, some jurors told reporters that they concluded that the evidence against Cioffi and Tannin was flimsy and contradictory. Other suggested the pair were being blamed for market forces beyond their control.

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According to the legendary Greek Historian Plutarch, when asked why he divorced his wife, Caesar stated that:  “All women shall be as Caesar would have his wife, not only free from sin, but from suspicion.”  At the time, Caesar’s wife, Pompeia, was loosely associated with the commission of a sacrilege by someone else.  As recent events have confirmed, Attorney General Jerry Brown is hardly burdened by suspicions – let alone high ethical standards.

As most everyone in the political world now knows, ACORN is under investigation in many states, and by the federal government, for a host of crimes.  The same holds true in California – or does it?

Notwithstanding the purported investigation of ACORN by the California Attorney General’s Office, according to David Lagstein, ACORN’s chief organizer in the San Diego:  the Attorney General Jerry Brown is a “political animal” and that “certainly every bit of communication we have had with them has suggested that the fault will be found with the people that did the video — not with ACORN.”

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We’ve just started to lay the groundwork on the Kenneth Gladney story and the shameful failure of the county prosecutor Bob McCullough to pursue criminal prosecution of SEIU assailants.  Left wing blogs, mainstream newspapers, and of course SEIU, having concluded a smear the messenger campaign, have now resorted to a blackout strategy.  The first rule of union beatings is you do not talk about union beatings.

With the healthcare bill having just passed the house, this story couldn’t have come at a worse time for Democrats.  Falling poll numbers for congressional Democrats and the President, waning support for the Pelosi/Reid bills, and renewed, often heated conflict between the progressive and moderate wings of the Democratic party gives a very small window to pass this bill. Discovering that the story of union members attacking a man outside a Townhall was covered up and ignored by politicians, unions, local papers and the mainstream media is a live grenade rolled into the middle of the healthcare debate.  There is no hiding from the scandal if Gladney’s story comes out.  Careers and campaigns will be ruined in St Louis.  Conservatives will have a convenient club with which to beat the St Louis Post Dispatch for their shameful coverage, and the strong ties of HCAN’s Missouri members to the Obama administration will continue to taint all of the enablers.

But this isn’t just about Kenneth Gladney.  Let’s set aside that travesty of justice and focus on the second assault that night.  After the police arrive, an OFA volunteer by the name of Cheryl Johner struck a Tea Party activist in the face.  A police officer saw the assault, and immediately arrested Ms. Johner.  Furthermore, the entire event was recorded on video, as the Tea Party Activist had her camera on the entire time.  We see Johner approach the camera, punch the girl in the face, and then we immediately see Johner cuffed and taken away.  This is the relevant portion of the video.

There is no doubt what happened.

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In a city as mercurial as Washington DC words are often ascribed additional weight and meaning.  It is the rare politician that can cut a man down to size with a word or a turn of phrase.  Recently we’ve seen two men who have perfected this, Bill Clinton and Dick Cheney.

Clinton described Barack Obama and his presidential bid as “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.”  With one phrase, Clinton managed to diminish Obama and his accomplishments.  Rather than conjure to mind images of Kennedy and Camelot, Clinton’s phrase brought forth vivid images of Alice in Wonderland.  Bill Clinton is a calculating man and he understood the weight of his words.  He even had to defend them as the mainstream media finally caught wind of the insult.

Dick Cheney managed to similarly impact Obama’s image with one word, dithering.  The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines dither as:”to act nervously or indecisively.”  When used by Cheney to describe Barack Obama’s stance on Afghanistan it carried more weight.  With the use of one word Cheney managed to portray Obama as weak, indecisive, and unfit to lead.  Dithering certainly doesn’t conjure to mind images of Barack Obama as a mythical figure who can do no wrong.

It’s a rare skill to be able to so dramatically impact one’s image with the use of merely a word or a pithy phrase.

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