It’s just so amazing how the Progressive Left is the champion of minorities and the elderly. Champions that is, so long as those demographics don’t dare dissent from the rigid party ideology. If any among the members of these otherwise protected groups are struck by an independent thought, they become targets for derision from the enlightened progressive movement.

Case in point: Condoleezza Rice being labeled an Uncle Tom (or worse).
Case in point: Sarah Palin being labeled stupid.

Both of these labels are inventions and slurs of the Left, reserved for anyone who strays from the Progressive reservation.

Another case in point is the Left’s rumblings over the older demographic on display at the Tea Party Convention last weekend.

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The fiscal crisis in Greece is fascinating political theater, in part because the Balkan nation is a leading indicator for what will probably happen in many other countries. The most puzzling feature of the crisis is the assumption in other European capitals, discussed in the BBC article below, that a Greek default is the worst possible result. It certainly would not be good news, especially for investors who thought it was safe to lend money to the government, but there are several reasons why the long-term pain resulting from a bailout would be even worse.

1. Bailing out Greece will reward over-spending politicians and make future fiscal crises more likely. In a four-year period between 2005 and 2009, Greek politicians expanded the burden of government spending from an already excessive level of 43.8 percent of GDP to an even more excessive level of 51.3 percent of GDP. Subsidies are rampant, the public sector is bloated, civil service pay is way too high, and entitlements are wildly unsustainable. A fiscal crisis – with no escape options – is probably the only hope of reversing these disastrous policies. So why, then, would it make sense for Germany and other nations to provide an escape option?

2. Bailing out Greece will reward greedy and short-sighted interest groups, particularly overpaid government workers. Greece is in trouble because the the people riding in society’s wagon assumed that there would always be enough chumps to pull the wagon. In reality, Greece is turning into a real-world version of Atlas Shrugged. Government has become such a burden that the job creators and wealth generators have given up and/or moved their money out of the country. Should taxpayers in other nations reward the greed and narcissism of Greece’s interest groups by being forced to pull the wagon instead?

3. Bailing out Greece will encourage profligacy in Spain, Italy, and other nations. The hot acronym in public finance circles is PIIGS, which is shorthand for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and Spain. Greece is getting all the attention now, but these other countries have the same problems of excessive spending, bloated and dysfunctional public sectors, and unsustainable finances. What happens in Greece will send a very clear signal to the politicians in these nations, much as a parent who lets the oldest child run rampant is sending signals the younger siblings. Does anybody doubt that a bailout of Greece will discourage the other PIIGS from undertaking needed reforms?

4. Bailing out Greece is not necessary to save the euro. This is the most puzzling feature of this Greek tragedy (sorry, I couldn’t resist). There is a pervasive assumption that a default somehow would cripple the common currency of most European Union nations. But why would a default in Greece undermine the euro? If California went under, after all, that would not cripple the US dollar. There are unpleasant things that would probably happen following a Greek default, but the stability and strength of a currency is a function of central bank behavior. And so long as the European Central Bank does not crank up the proverbial printing press to monetize Greece’s debt, the euro should be fine.

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First Lady, Michelle Obama, has decided to take a whack at solving the American obesity epidemic. Splendid.

She should start by looking at one of the biggest roots of the problem: liberal government and its most favorite project of the past 40 years, the welfare state.

There is a surprising, yet undeniable, correlation between skyrocketing obesity rates and race and socioeconomic status. The group most disproportionately affected by obesity is poor black women.

A survey of the available research on obesity was conducted in 2004 by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Center for Human Nutrition. Among the results:

• The U.S. obesity prevalence increased from 13 percent to 32 percent between the 1960s and 2004.
• Women 20–34 years old had the fastest increase rate of obesity and overweight.
• 80% of black women aged 40 years or over are overweight; 50% are obese.
• Less educated people have a higher prevalence of obesity than their counterparts.
• 16% of children and adolescents are overweight and 34% are at risk of becoming overweight in 2003-2004.
• White children and adolescents had the lowest prevalence of overweight and being at risk of overweight compared with their black and Mexican counterparts.

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Super Bowl Sunday in Texas. You’d think football-centric Texans would be preparing for the big game. Beer buys, card table set-ups of chips and dip, backyard BBQs firing up. Politics definitely not on the menu. But you’d be wrong.

This Super Bowl Sunday, at least in Houston, was all about the re-election campaign of incumbent Republican Governor Rick Perry.

About 5,000 Texans gathered at the Berry Center in northwest Houston, to hear the Governor and a very special guest – Sarah Palin.

State Senator Dan Patrick warmed up the crowd. Patrick gleamed with Pro-Texas sentiment, reminding the crowd:

“We’ve got the strongest economy in the United States,”

And then Ted Nugent took the stage to give his guitar solo rendition of the Star Spangled Banner. A bit clichéd but received approvingly, Nugent blurted out:

“I wasn’t born in Texas, but I got here as fast as I could. Texas is the Number One State in the Nation.”

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Here’s the latest in the question of the New York Fed, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and the AIG bailout, as we’ve covered here at Big Government before (here and here). Last year, Iraq war vet Kevin Murray brought a lawsuit against the Treasury Department and Ben Bernanke (Murray vs. Geithner, et al) for its acquisition of AIG– a scheme that made the US taxpayer the world’s largest provider of Shariah-compliant insurance products. Lawyers David Yerushalmi and The Thomas More Law Center’s Robert Muise found, in the course of discovery, that that was just the tip of the iceberg.

Yerushalmi and Muise quickly realized that, in acquiring 77.9% of AIG, the New York Fed may have set up an illegal trust, with the knowledge that what they were to do was illegal. Tuesday, Murray’s attorneys issued a subpoena for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

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The Senate is about to act on the nomination of militant leftist Dawn Johnsen to be the chief of the U.S. government’s elite legal team. But that post is a stepping-stone for top judicial offices, including the Supreme Court itself. That’s likely Barack Obama’s plans for Johnsen, and it’s why she must be stopped now.

Ultra-liberal activist Dawn Johnsen, currently a professor at Indiana University School of Law, is President Obama’s nominee to be assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). As the OLC chief, Johnsen would shape the legal positions of the Obama administration on every issue. OLC is the elite legal team for the federal government, giving legal advice on every important issue to the attorney general, other department heads in the government, and to the president himself. That’s why the head of OLC is called “the attorney general’s lawyer.”

The problem is that Johnsen is a radical. As the former legal director for the extremist abortion-rights group NARAL, Johnsen argued in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court that denying a pregnant woman the right to demand unrestricted abortion is to subject her to slavery, which was outlawed by the Thirteenth Amendment after the Civil War.

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Nashville, TN:  As Sarah Palin spoke to the standing room only, sell out crowd at Tea Party convention, activists from across the nation were putting together the finishing touches on a strategy to channel the activism in an entirely new way.  The result is Ensuring Liberty, a 501(c)4 and affiliated PAC.

Many pundits debated the lessons from the the New York “23rd race” and the heralded defeat of Dede Scozzafava and subsequent loss of Doug Hoffman.  A couple things were clear.  The Club for Growth money that went to Hoffman was not enough to bring home a winner.  It was equally obvious from the loss, that the national outpouring of grassroots support from Tea Party activists all over the Country was not enough.

What was clear to those closer to the campaign was that all of the assistance poured into a flawed operation could not put humpty dumpty together.  An axiom from business holds that before you automate a process you must first perfect that process.  The cash and volunteer support were in effect the automation that the Hoffman campaign desperately needed.  The “machine” however, lacked the fine tuning so that most of the “inputs” ended up as waste and proportionally little product flowed out of the campaign apparatus.

Every campaign needs at least two critical element pairings; campaign and money or campaign and people.  Hoffman had plenty of money and people but too little campaign.  Next time, the Tea Party supported candidates will have all three elements.  Enter, the Ensuring Liberty PAC.

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And that’s the point, I guess. Watch this ad for a “clean diesel” car by Audi, and good luck getting this slightly modified version of the Cheap Trick classic “Dream Police” out of your head. I couldn’t get it out with a lobotomy. It’s been playing off and on in my brain since it first aired during the Super Bowl.

But beyond the diddy, I also can’t get the vision of a fascist “green” future out of my head — even if it’s portrayed with a heavy dollop of of “Reno: 911“-style cop-show parody. Good comedy has to have a grain of truth in it to work, and this spot has plenty. It’s not just a peek at a ridiculous future, but a look at our “be green or else” present. An overreaction? Tell that to the chief of America’s Green Police, San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom, who Tweeted:

“Ok .. That ‘green police’ Audi commercial hits home..”

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The original Cloward-Piven Strategy, born in a 1966 article in The Nation magazine, was to overwhelm the welfare system by flooding the rolls with new recipients.  The government would not be able to keep up (this was a time when a government could actually go bankrupt), the system would crash and a Democratic presidential administration would be “forced” to implement a “guaranteed annual income” for Americans.

Fast forward to the 21^st Century.  America’s in the midst of a home foreclosure crisis.

Piven’s new strategy?  Force the government and banks to deal with the problem by convincing approximately two million people to refuse to leave their homes.  ACORN has been implementing this strategy with its Home Defenders program.

Is it possible ACORN sting man James O’Keefe could have spoiled the implementation of this new strategy?  The O’Keefe-Giles videos surfaced at precisely the right time to disrupt the Home Defenders scheme.

The organization was rocked by the major scandal and knocked on its heels politically and financially.

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Today, in 1996, the computer Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov in a chess match. It was the first time a computer had beaten Kasparov.

Thanks to numerous BigGovernment.com readers taking action, along with other concerned Americans, several national organizations, and Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) hold on Obama’s NLRB Nominee Craig Becker – several senators changed their positions and voted with the senate’s newest Senator, Scott Brown (R-MA) to continue debate on Becker’s qualifications to serve as one of five National Relations Board Members.

President Barack Obama’s nomination of Craig Becker to the National Labor Relations Board has failed on a 52-33 vote. The nomination required 60 votes to proceed. (Politico)

The two Democrat Senators who voted against cloture are Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Ben Nelson (D-NE).

CAUTION

Though Craig Becker’s was put on hold as a result of the cloture vote; President Obama may still appoint Becker to national Labor relations Board as a recess appointment to the Board as early as February 15^th if congress keeps its current schedule.

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More than three-quarters of the $2 billion in federal stimulus funds intended to create green-energy jobs in the U.S. has gone to foreign-owned companies

Despite millions in federal tax credits, wind-equipment manufacturers cut thousands of jobs in the U.S. last year

Las Vegas receives $4.5 million federal grant to build the neon museum

Alaska Senators fight to restore funding for earmark that both President Bush and Obama have tried to eliminate

New Jersey Senator prodded the Federal Reserve to aid a struggling bank whose chairman and vice chairman were big campaign contributors

Media critics agree the U.S. Census Bureau’s $2.5 million Super Bowl ad was one of the worst

$501,940 of federal stimulus aid will help finance an animal shelter, which will include pet bathing areas and a kitten nursery

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If there’s anything that should convince China to become more capitalist, and put less faith in socialism, it is American progressives.

Yesterday Matthew Yglesias’ head shook violently and he barked out like Paul Krugman with Tourette’s :

…you could start musing allowed about how many we just won’t pay the Chinese the money we owe them. Or you could reflect on the fact that if the People Bank of China is determined to buy bonds and prevent the dollar from falling at all costs, then we may as well totally forget about the short-term deficit and just not collect any taxes at all for the rest of FY 2010.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe this marks the first time in modern history a liberal has suggested we stop collecting taxes.

Welcome to the naked liberal mind.  Technically, it shouldn’t shock us, Matt is just riffing off the subtext of Paul Krugman’s prescription for what ails us – massive inflation.  Liberal economics springs forth from this assumption: We just keep printing money to payoff Dem voters until our debts aren’t so big any more.

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Three terror attacks on U.S. soil in their first year and the Obama administration dares lecture us?

It takes a special kind of arrogance to lecture the American people about terrorism. Especially when in the past year, your administration has allowed three al Qaeda-related terrorists to carry out attacks on U.S. soil.

But that’s what the Obama administration has done with Deputy National Security Advisor John Brennan’s op-ed in today’s USA Today entitled We Need No Lectures.

Brennan even goes so far as to accuse critics of the Obama administration of aiding al Qaeda.

Brennan boasts of the Obama administration’s successes against global terrorism:

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Contact Your Senators NOW and Urge them To Vote No on Radical Craig Becker’s Nomination.

The Senate is scheduled to vote TODAY on the nomination of radical union apologist Craig Beck to the National Labor Relations Board.

It’s vital you contact your Senators IMMEDIATELY to help derail this out of control union lackey from being on this board.

You can find your Senators direct lines through this link.

One recent piece of evidence to add to the growing Becker rap sheet:

In last week’s U.S. Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing, Obama nominee Craig Becker clearly tried to put distance between himself and his former client ACORN:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) asked Becker this question:

“Do you perform work for and provide advice to ACORN or ACORN-affiliated groups while employed by your current employers or on a volunteer basis?”

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In the wake of his divisive subpar first year, it is plainly evident that Obama has switched to campaign mode.  If we recall that Reagan told us that Democrats campaign for President as moderates and govern from the Left, we understand well why Obama sounded centrist in 2008, pursued a Leftist agenda in 2009 and, in this midterm election year, is now reaching out to Republicans.

We know that Obama has given his Presidential campaign advisor an “expanded” White House role.  In addition to that, Obama, in a high profile manner, met with Congressional Republicans on Health Care and is reaching out to them on a jobs bill among other tactics.  In the face of such Clintonesque triangulation, the questions become:  What should the Republicans do?  Meet Obama half way?  Stonewall him?  Or offer their own agenda?  Given that the political handshake can often be the kiss of death, especially in a Tea Party World, Republicans need to go on the offensive by framing the debate if they are going to avoid Obama’s Bermuda Triangulation.

It is essential to note that whoever frames the election debate is the likely winner of the election. Democrats win elections by promoting what government can do in the face of adversity that they blame on capitalism or the market.  Republicans win elections by exposing the limits and detriments of government in addition to trumpeting the limitless values of freedom and the American spirit.

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Last Tuesday, Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas wrote an op-ed in The Hill claiming the center-right nation was a myth. In the article he points out that it is impossible for it to be a center-right nation due to the fact that there are strong democratic majorities in the House and the Senate. He also cites Gallup polls claiming that even though 40% identify themselves as conservative, it is not a majority. It is unclear if he is trying to convince us, or himself, that we are not a center-right nation.

It is true that there is a strong liberal majority in the House and Senate. However, that cannot be explained to the fact that this nation leans to the left. Moulitsas makes no mention to the fact that without Obama at the top of the ticket, conservatives have done very well. In the special runoff election a month after Obama was elected, Saxby Chambliss was elected with 57 percent of the vote, nearly 10 more percentage points then he had a month earlier in the general election. Or the stunning victory of Scot Brown in MA by 5 percentage points to win a seat that had been  inhabited by a Democrat for 47 years. He also pays no mention to the fact that Virginia, who has two Democrat Senators and voted for Obama in 2008, elected a strong conservative by a margin of 19 points in 2009. He also ignores the fact that in New Jersey they elected a Republican governor.

In the election of 2006 and 2008 voters wanted change, but they did not want the major change that the Obama administration is trying to achieve. Obama won the election by running on conservative ideals like cutting taxes and cutting spending.  In fact, Obama’s plan to tax people that made over $250,000 was a highly contested issue in the election. The American people did not vote a complete government takeover of health care.

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Congress is out of control.  The public overwhelming opposes a government takedover of our health care. But Congressional leaders are telling us they don’t care – that they know best, and they’re going to pass it anyway.

We are getting the same attitude on other issues, from global warming regulation, to taxes, government spending, deficits, federal debt, energy policy, welfare, corporate bailouts, and beyond.  Too many of our elected Members of Congress are making behind-closed-door deals and ignoring their constituents, calling them “yahoos,” “Nazis”,“and “tea-baggers.”

This isn’t American democracy — this is a shop-worn, elitist, authoritarianism closer to abuses we see in countries like Venezuela.

So, what would happen if the people could change this rotten situation?

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