The other day I pointed out the fact that President Obama has yet to donate the money he was awarded as the Nobel recipient. Obama stated he would donate the $1.4 million prize to charity. It’s been several weeks since he received the money and no one knows what’s happened to it.

The US Code is very clear in Receipt and Disposition of Foreign Gifts and Decorations. The code states:

1) The Congress consents to—
(A) the accepting and retaining by an employee of a gift of minimal value tendered and received as a souvenir or mark of courtesy; and
(B) the accepting by an employee of a gift of more than minimal value when such gift is in the nature of an educational scholarship or medical treatment or when it appears that to refuse the gift would likely cause offense or embarrassment or otherwise adversely affect the foreign relations of the United States, except that—
(i) a tangible gift of more than minimal value is deemed to have been accepted on behalf of the United States and, upon acceptance, shall become the property of the United States; and

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Part one of a series

In researching the ever-intensifying Massachusetts Senate race between Democrat Martha Coakley and her Republican challenger Scott Brown, it only takes a few keystrokes to unearth her ongoing history of questionable judgment and puzzling prosecutorial decisions.  Even though the election has been effectively nationalized, with some polls showing the underdog Brown within two points or so of the colorless Coakley, she remains largely unknown outside New England.

So as a public service to the voters of the Bay State, during the run-up to the special election on Jan. 19, Big Journalism will be offering some of the Martha’s Greatest Hits, so that they can fully make up their minds whether she would make a suitable successor to the late Edward Moore Kennedy – who, as you recall, began his illustrious career by being expelled from Harvard for cheating, went on to drown Mary Jo Kopechne at Chappaquiddick, and then turned to a life of drinking and debauchery, including the infamous “waitress sandwich” with soon-to-be-retired Connecticut Senator Christopher Dodd, before attempting to inflict “universal health care” on the country shortly before his death last year.

You can read all about Ted here in this classic profile of the last and worst of the Kennedy brothers by the late Michael Kelly.  Be sure to read the whole thing, just to get a flavor of the kind of candidate Massachusetts voters seem to like.

Homework done?  Good.  Because Martha Coakley, the current Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and thus its top law enforcement officer, is shaping up as a worthy heir to the Lion of the Senate.(more…)

From the U.K. Telegraph:

2009 was the breakout year for the irrepressible Andrew Breitbart, 40, a conservative firebrand operating deep in enemy territory in Los Angeles, and the sky will be his limit in 2010. A regular presence on Fox News and a Washington Times columnist, Breitbart cut his teeth working for Matt Drudge’s eponymous website and also had a spell with the Left-wing Huffington Post. He took on Hollywood in his group blog site BigHollywood and broke the ACORN scandal when the young unknown filmmakers Hannah Giles and James O’Keefe approached him with undercover footage of employees of the Left-wing community organising group condoning under-age prostitution by illegal immigrants. The mainstream media were slow to pick the story up but eventually they could not ignore it. (more…)

Wednesday, the Washington Post reported: “For months, economists and government watchdogs have warned that the job-creation reports should be taken with a heavy grain of salt. . . . Trying to count the number of jobs created or saved may have been a fool’s errand that needlessly undermined the credibility of the overall reporting effort.”

No kidding. Now, the AP reports that the White House

has abandoned its controversial method of counting jobs under President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus, making it impossible to track the number of jobs saved or created with the $787 billion in recovery money. Despite mounting a vigorous defense of its earlier count of more than 640,000 jobs credited to the stimulus, even after numerous errors were identified, the Obama administration now is making it easier to give the stimulus credit for hiring. It’s no longer about counting a job as saved or created; now it’s a matter of counting jobs funded by the stimulus.

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Remember Brent Southwell, the business owner who says SEIU threatened to “kill” his company? Sadly, his experience isn’t unique. While BigGovernment.com readers have become increasingly acquainted with the tactics of unions like SEIU (and their allies in ACORN) to demonize American employers, the practice remains unknown to millions of Americans. Yesterday, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce held an event in Washington to spotlight smear campaigns (known in the jargon as “corporate campaigns”).

David Bego, a business owner in Indianapolis whom my fellow BG bloggers have referenced, gave an often emotional keynote speech outlining in great detail the nightmare experience of SEIU attacking his company. After telling the union he would not sign away the secret-ballot rights of his employees, he says the union responded that it would begin its attack, warning: “We enjoy conversation, but we embrace confrontation.”

In his book, The Devil At My Doorstep (Amazon), Bego writes:

One minute, we were enjoying the fruits of our labors minding our own business, and the next attacks begin lambasting the company as a “rat contractor” that cleaned buildings dubbed “Houses of Horror” for janitors who were exploited, intimidated, threatened, and abused all in the name of corporate greed. For the first time in our history, multiple National Labor Relations Board filings, frivolous charges with questionable evidence, would be filed against us for employee rights violations and for firing union supporters as the EMS image was dragged through the mud.

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For the past year, Francis Cianfrocca and Ben Domenech sat down every weekday morning to chat about politics, economics and the shifting global marketplace. For 2010, we’ll shift to recording once a week. We hope you don’t mind, and we’ll still jump in with an emergency episode or two if breaking news demands it. Thanks for listening, and welcome to today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, a weekly podcast from The New Ledger, brought to you by BigGovernment.com.

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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Cianfrocca: China is the World’s Most Keynesian State

Bloomberg: Obama to Announce Fee on Large Banks

Tapper: Question for Gibbs

TAPPER: On the fee for banks, without asking for any details,* how can you guarantee that this, that this fee, tax, levy, whatever it ends up being, is not passed on to consumers and they take another hit when it comes to Wall Street?

GIBBS: Yeah, well, look, obviously, Jake we’ll have a chance to go through the structure of this. The economic team has worked for quite some time on a structure that will ensure that what taxpayers gave to banks to ensure their safety and security, in a time of crisis, is paid back in full. And I can assure you that is one of the things the economic team has taken into account in the structure.

The California chapter of ACORN has split from the group and changed its name.

Thousands of Californians who live in or close to poverty in the state have worked hard for decades to score victories that level the playing field. They’ve passed laws that increase affordable housing and raise the minimum wage, so they can provide for their families. They’ve also spent their personal time, which is in chronically short supply, pushing for better teachers and textbooks so the kids in their neighborhoods can have better opportunities. On these and other issues the odds have been against them, but these Californians leveraged their significant numbers with coordinated grassroots organizing to achieve victory.

Until now, they carried out this work as a chapter of the national organization ACORN. Until now, governance and financial management resided at the national level. In recent months it has become increasingly clear to the leadership, staff and members in California that the serious challenges ACORN is facing are jeopardizing the important work we are doing here in California.

The new entity will be called Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment (ACCE). It will, on paper at least, be entirely separate now from ACORN. The relationship will be what Wade Rathke characterized the relationship between ACORN and ACORN Housing. ACORN is its own entity and ACCE is its own entity and the two are fighting for common goals.

It’s important to note that most, if not all, of the staff and board of ACORN in California will be kept on with the new company. In fact, at the bottom of the press release the contact person is Amy Schur. Schur, according to a source, was privvy to the knowledge that Dale Rathke had been involved in embezzlement from ACORN and kept that knowledge from the board.

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The voters are getting angry at The One. A majority disapprove of how he’s handling health care “reform” AND the economy. The AP reports that the billions spent on road construction has done nothing to lower unemployment. The “most popular government program” in years, Cash-4 -Clunkers was actually, predictably, a flop. Unemployment is way higher than they said it would be if we didn’t rush through the borrow and spend porkulus bill.

So, what to do to keep the rabble from voicing their displeasure? Blame someone else! Obama wants to tax the big bad banks. He says it’s to get our TARP money back and to reduce undue risks by the greedy bankers. The One wants you to believe that the big banks are the kind of guys who would take the last piece of pizza from the birthday boy at Chuck-E-Cheese (see above photo).

Obama has been strident in his criticism of bankers, calling them “fat cats” last month in an interview that aired on the eve of their visit to the White House. With public anger over the bailout still strong, Obama has embraced populist rhetoric in an effort to shame bank executives into paying back the government more quickly and their executives less lavishly.

At the White House on Monday, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs jabbed at the perceived disconnect between Wall Street executives and their customers. The spokesman said the disparity angered his boss.

(more…)

Oddly, we would feel better and safer with these folks in charge:

With the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) expected to conclude this week a comment-seeking exercise relevant to net neutrality rules proposed last fall by Julius Genachowski, top telecommunications and tech policy observers are claiming that the FCC Chairman could be set to receive a major blow.  Not only is the momentum in the net neutrality debate increasingly shifting away from proponents, but a number of experts say the White House itself is souring on Genachowski’s plans—a major knock that could signal the death of efforts to advance net neutrality, at least for now.

Historically, net neutrality had been treated as a top policy priority by President Barack Obama, a former classmate and friend of Genachowski.  But recently, that has appeared to change.

In October, Susan Crawford, a strong supporter of net neutrality, resigned from the White House.  It has since been rumored that economic adviser Larry Summers wanted her gone due to concerns about her facilitating the tagging of Obama advisers as overly radical by virtue of her own agenda.

Numerous Democrats (including 72 in the House) have raised questions about the policy and/or spoken out against it.

In addition, multiple groups with strong connections to Democrats and progressives, including minority and women’s organizations, have begun to raise flags regarding the possible impact of net neutrality rules.

(more…)

Only weeks ago the New York Post reported that former Massachusetts Attorney General Scott Harshbarger gave a whitewash to ACORN, the shady community action/organization that specialized in voter fraud and sucking up public funds. Harshbarger, a liberal democrat whose career was funded by the same Labor unions who fund ACORN, is hardly an unbiased analyst.

More ominously, the New York Post predicted a similar Whitewash of the Working Families Party.

In an exclusive for Big Government, it can now be reported that Justice Kaye has a prior association with the WFP leadership and in fact ruled for the WFP Bosses in a lawsuit.
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On conservative talk shows, defenders of President Obama have frequently asserted that it is too soon into the term of the new administration to fairly judge the policies and performance of our President.  Well, nearly a full year has elapsed since the Obama administration took office and we’ve now all had plenty of chance to “give Obama a chance.”  The oft-repeated mantras that “It’s too soon to tell” and “It’s all George Bush’s fault” won’t hold beer any longer.   If his plummeting poll numbers are any indication, many who fell for Obama’s neatly packaged utopian vapors of hope, change, and transformation are finally starting to emerge from their media-induced slumber.  And, while many of us could easily predict that the shallowness residing at the core of Barack Obama would soon lead to a precipitous disillusionment, the speed with which that is taking place is actually quite breathtaking.

Despite what European Socialists may think of us, Americans are not entirely stupid.  While the well-oiled hype machine of the Left-biased news media and the air headed Hollywood crowd helped to induce the large scale brain freeze that got Obama elected, as his serious failures of policy have mounted and the significant impact of those failures is felt, no amount of propaganda will suffice to resurrect the messianic fervor that once surrounded the heady days of Obama’s campaign.  Daily some new facet of the administration’s incompetence (at best) and fecklessness (at worst) is displayed, and increasing numbers of those who initially fell under his thrall are awakening to the profound danger Obama’s Presidency poses to both world peace and our American way of life. (more…)

One cannot drink oneself into sobriety. Yet that is precisely what Congressional Democrats and the Obama Administration have attempted with our economy for the past year with predictable and painful results.

Unemployment continues to stand at an official 10% for the third month in a row, the worst joblessness in 27 years.  The real unemployment rate is far worse.  Included in the December economic figures was a shocker – the percentage of adult men who are working has fallen to the lowest level in recorded U.S. history at just 80%.  That means that one in five men in this country between 18 and 54 are neither working nor claiming unemployment.  They have fallen completely out of the workforce.

That helps explain why December’s unemployment rate remained at November’s 10% rate in spite of an additional 85,000 Americans losing their jobs.  At the same time the new jobless claims were added, many of the previously unemployed were simply removed from the workforce numbers altogether.

Economists estimate our true jobless rate as high as 17%, and that could grow in coming months as more Americans exhaust their unemployment benefits and lose homes to foreclosure.

(more…)

In August 2003, then-Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi issued a press statement demanding to know from President Bush, “Where Are the Jobs?” The statement was released in response to the monthly Bureau of Labor Statistics jobs report, which, at that time showed that over 400,000 Americans had given up looking for work and had left the labor force. It should be noted that today, every job measurement she cited is worse now than it was in 2003. We must have overlooked her similar question for President Obama.

From Pelosi’s statement:

Washington, D.C. — House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi released the following statement today on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ announcement that 470,000 people abandoned their job searches in July and that 3.2 million private sector jobs have been lost since President Bush took office:

Of course, in December 2009, almost twice as many (929,000) had “abandoned their job searches” on Speaker Pelosi’s watch and with a Democrat in the White House.

(more…)

Big Government contributor Dana Loesch has reported on the Coakley staffer who attacked a Weekly Standard reporter outside a Martha Coakley fundraiser on Capitol Hill. A number of outlets have identified the culprit as Michael Meehan, a long-time Democrat political operative. Mr. Meehan was dispatched to the struggling campaign by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committe (DSCC).

Mr. Meehan, however, also happens to be a recent Obama appointee. On November 19, President Obama nominated Mr. Meehan to serve on the Broadcasting Board of Governors.

From the White House press release:

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I guess his question as to why she could say, during her debate with Scott Brown, that the “Taliban are gone” in Afghanistan after Taliban blew up eight CIA officers in Afghanistan was too tough for her.

From the Weekly Standard reporter himself:

A tipster tells me that the man who was pushing me outside of a Capitol Hill fundraiser Tuesday night for Massachusetts Democratic Senate candidate Martha Coakley is Michael Meehan.

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Republicans are continuing to insist on behalf of the American people that any legislative negotiations pertaining to health care reform be made public. Today, Rep. Vern Buchanan (R-FL) is filing a discharge petition which, if signed by 218 Representatives, would force an up-or-down vote on his bipartisan resolution (H. Res. 847) requiring that health care talks be public and open to the media, as President Obama promised they would be.

We’re taking this step because something as important as the Democrats’ health care bill, with its Medicare cuts and tax hikes, should not be slapped together behind closed doors.  Secret deliberations are a breeding ground for mischief, including sweetheart deals that end up not being discovered until it’s too late (see: Sen. Ben Nelson’s “Cornhusker Kickback.”)

Of course, the American people should be able to see how every bill is coming together, but it’s even more important to adhere to this common-sense standard when we’re talking about transforming one-sixth of our economy and implementing drastic changes to the way in which Americans live.

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It’s amusing to watch President Obama try to stick it to his friends in organized labor by proposing a tax on union-negotiated health care benefits.

If it weren’t for the fact that the tax proposal would have a  devastating effect on the American economy, the situation would be downright hilarious.

Richard Trumka, AFL-CIO President

On Monday, a group of top leaders from the American labor movement gathered at the White House to share their concerns with the president.

The irony of the discussion was delicious. During the campaign, Obama and the Democratic Party (including the unions) attacked John McCain for suggesting that health care benefits should be taxed as income.

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As an ongoing feature at Big Government, the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowlege, with Peter Robinson, will continue posting clips from its current interviews, as well as from many of it’s greatest shows from the past:

While the Left continues to push the meme that the Right is “anti-intellectual,” it is worth examining what really troubles so many Americans about the desire of self-styled “experts” to run the world we all live in.  Hint: it ain’t about intelligence.  There is a species of person in America, in the West, which believes it knows better than the rest of us, and would like us to simply get out of the way so it can take the collective wisdom of its many post-graduate degrees and get on with the business of re-making the world as it sees fit.  In these clips from a longer and wonderful piece (available at the Hoover Institution), Peter Robinson interviews one of America’s greatest actual intellects, Dr. Thomas Sowell, who makes some strong criticisms about the vanity and danger of the intellectual class: they do not know everything, but in fact lack at least 99% of the “consequential knowledge” needed to function in the world; they manufacture the need for themselves, with one dubious crisis after another; and they have an often terrible track record when given the reigns of society, as with McNamara’s Whiz Kids, FDR’s Brain Trust, and the disarmament movement following WWI.  The “Stimulus” and health care “reform” come to mind as well…

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