As the clock winds down on the Illinois Governor’s race, the question on everyone’s mind is whether a newcomer like me, running on robust policy and an American success story, can beat a gaggle of Country Club Republicans and also-rans.

I’m Adam Andrzejewski, the entrepreneur who grew up in central Illinois, worked hard, and ended up successful enough to retire at age 37. Instead of hanging out the beach while managing my portfolio, I started up a non-profit focusing on transparency, and quickly got over $1 billion of public spending placed on-line.  That kind of ‘Every Dime on Line, in Real Time” transparency, coupled with my aggressive ethics reform modeled after those passed in Louisiana by Bobby Jindal, are the foundation of my policy agenda to reform Illinois.

The question is, can I  pull this off?  I was written off early by the cynical and jaundiced political press, but I perservered through months of Lincoln Day Dinners, radio interviews, and candidate forums, all of which were fantastic opportunities to meet the people of Illinois.  I noticed something interesting every time I was out on the campaign trail.  When people saw me and heard my message they liked what they heard – a lot.  No matter how much money was dumped into the campaign by the connected donors financing the other 5 establishment candidates, I was always within striking distance.

Then, just in the last 2 weeks, our campaign started to capture the imagination.  With just over one week to go, it was announced that Lech Walesa was coming to Chicago to endorse me.  That set off a firestorm of press coverage and interest in the blogosphere.  Now, the level of national interest has brought in a flood of small donations and volunteers from around the country.  As you read this, people from across the country have offered to log in to call centers and send e-mails, all to assist the my Campaign.

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So, do you think Punxsutawney Phil reads IPCC Global Warming reports? Actually, Phil is probably verifiably more reliable.

Tonight on “Hannity,” James O’Keefe gave his first public interview since his arrest in New Orleans:

“The People’s Office”

From FoxNews:

The same day the man who first published James O’Keefe’s explosive videos exposing wrongdoing at community organizer ACORN came to his defense Monday, claiming the conservative filmmaker “sat in jail for 28 hours without access to an attorney” while the prosecutor made his case to the media, the U.S. attorney involved stepped down.

O’Keefe, accused of trying to tamper with the phones of Louisiana Sen. Mary Landrieu, was “framed” by the media and the U.S. attorney’s office, Andrew Breitbart, publisher of BigGovernment.com, told Fox News Monday.

Hours later, Jim Letten, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Louisiana, recused himself from the case.

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Wow! Rush Limbaugh just endorsed conservative and tea party candidate Adam Andrzejewski today on his radio show.

Adam is the true conservative in the Illinois gubernatorial race.

Rush Limbaugh just called Republican gubernatorial candidate Adam Andrzejewski the “Scott Brown of Illinois.” Adam experienced a surge in the polls this past weekend and is quickly gaining momentum in the final sprint of the campaign for the Illinois primaries.

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Senators vote against eliminating government waste and duplication, including reducing Congress’ budget for itself, while proclaiming “the United States is prepared to stand up and deal with this debt threat”

Taxpayers billed $1,000 per week for booze and other “in-flight services” for the Speaker of the House that “read like a dream order for a wild frat party”

Hundreds of convicted criminals may have been hired by the U.S. Census Bureau

California wine trail will be getting signs, a new map and an iPhone application thanks to a $98,500 federal stimulus grant given to the Monterey County Growers and Vintners Association

Federal stimulus funds supporting Napa Valley Wine Train, despite local opposition

The federal government “likely overspent by millions” when it negotiated a no bid contract for the $54 million Wine Train stimulus project

The pork bell curve: Boston College has more than doubled what it spends on lobbying and, according to the college’s spokesman, “our earmarks have increased since we started paying [the lobbyists] more.”

The Wine Institute receives $7 million grant to promote wine in foreign countries; Raisin Administrative Committee receives $3 million and the California Walnut Commission pulls in $4.5 million

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Barack Obama came into office with a promise of ushering in a new post-racial era.  One year into his term and Chris Matthews has already declared, “Mission Accomplished!”  He forgot Obama was black, you see.  America is now post-racial!  Sadly, the facts tell a very different story.  Over the last year, we have witnessed a proliferation of indiscriminate accusations of racism, or a period of what I like to refer to as hyper-racialism.

Paul Krugman insured that 2009 got off to a fast start when it came to race-mongering, writing on January 1st that the GOP is the “party of racial backlash.”  It turns out, according to the Nobel Prize bearing economist, that skeptics of big government aren’t concerned about upholding the constitution or protecting liberties.  Oh, no.  Our real motivation for opposing liberalism is that it means giving money to “Those People.” Wink, wink.

Paul Krugman must have been on to something, because as we saw throughout the rest of the year, pretty much everything said by the right turned out to be code for racism.

MSNBC’s Carlos Watson wondered whether “socialist is becoming a code word.”  CNN questioned whether there were “racial overtones” at the Tea Parties, while David Shuster dubbed them an “intolerance festival.” Janeane Garofalo out and out pronounced all Tea Party attendees as racist.

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It was kind of hard to stop laughing when I read that Joe Biden is leading a Task Force to study what’s on the mind of middle class Americans. Give me a break.

It would be funny if it were not so sad that those in Washington need a special commission to figure out what America thinks. How can we be represented in the first place if the people we hired to carry our hopes and fears are so clueless?

Here’s my suggestion Mr. Biden—take a trip to any town or city and sit down for an early breakfast in a coffee shop. Stop talking long enough to listen. Try a barber or beauty shop for the same lesson. Have a beer in a tavern. The key here, Mr. Biden—and all you folks from Washington, D.C. who have become so frightened that people are expressing their independent will at the polls—is to stop pontificating long enough to actually hear what we are saying.

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The  Office of Management and Budget has released the President’s FY2011 budget and the Congressional Budget Office has released its semi-annual Budget and Economic Outlook. Much of the coverage of these documents has focused on deficit numbers. This is not a trivial concern, particularly since the Bush-Obama policies of bigger government have dramatically boosted red ink.

But the most important numbers in the budget documents are the estimates of what is happening to government spending. The good news is that burden of government spending is projected to decline over the next few years from about 25 percent of GDP to less than 23 percent of GDP.

That’s the good news.

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Past Reason.tv Nannies of The Month have included New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg (anti-salt, smoking, trans fat, you name it), a New York state senator who wanted to ban fish pedicures, and a Phoenix pol who banned churches from feeding the hungry on their own property.

So who is the first Nanny of The Month of this brand-new, sparking decade? Well, it’s NOT Brownsville, Texas, for banning plastic shopping bags. And it’s NOT Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.) for terminating trans fat in the Golden State.

But it IS a town council somewhere in California that banned something natural and pure. And it does involved the great rapper Snoop Dogg (though not in the way you might think).

Click through to find out. Approximately one minute.

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Don’t you hate it when you go to a 50% off sale and then realize the store marked up all the prices in order to offer the big savings? Welcome to President Barack Obama’s spending freeze.

It’s hard to keep up with the shocking numbers under Obama. Federal spending was up 18% in his first year and the deficit was $1.4 trillion, almost three times greater than it was the previous year. That’s 9.9% of 2009’s GDP, more than three times the post World War II average. (Sorry, Barry, but you can’t blame it all on Bush. That budget was done under a Democrat House and Senate and signed by you. ) Depending on whose numbers you believe federal nondefense discretionary spending will increase another 7-10% for 2010.

The Congressional Budget Office says we’ll run at least another $1.35 trillion deficit. The average deficit for 2011-2020 will be around $600 billion per year. Even in Washington that’s a lot of money.

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Graham Smith of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has revealed to Jonathan Leake of the London Sunday Times that his office has uncovered wrongdoing on the part of the University of East Anglia’s (UEA) Climate Research Unit (CRU). In a letter to Leake, Smith writes:

The emails which are now public reveal that Mr Holland’s requests under the Freedom of Information Act were not dealt with as they should have been under the legislation. Section 77 of the Freedom of Information Act makes it an offence for public authorities to act so as to prevent intentionally the disclosure of requested information..

Climate Email -

Currently the law prevents the authorities from taking any action against CRU, and the ICO office will recommend changes to the law to close the loophole.

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Ten minutes prior to the start of a December 15^th, 2009 board meeting of the Riverside Community College District in California, board members are handed a 52-page document filled with millions of dollars in projects to be funded by the district’s taxpayers, who themselves are struggling under the state’s 12.4% unemployment rate.  The document, a draft Project Labor Agreement (PLA), will commit long-term construction and ancillary projects for the next several years to labor unions.

At least twenty-three members of the public, many of them local private business owners who oppose the PLA, have attended to publicly comment on the proposal.  Two of the board members have never even seen the PLA prior to today, and have asked for a special session to review it.  Despite opposition from the public, and the concern voiced by those two board members, the remaining three board members have moved that the Board of Trustees authorize Chancellor Greg Gray to negotiate the final PLA with the Riverside and San Bernardino Building and Construction Trade Councils. Board Trustees Virginia Blumenthal and Janet Green dissented.

So, without adequate time for all to review the draft, without any backup analysis provided to justify the use of up to $350,000,000 in Measure C taxpayer funds, without giving the public reasonable time to voice their opinions, and with an unemployment rate of over 12% when non-union workers are in even greater need of jobs than union workers…why would three of Riverside’s five board members vote to move forward with a final negotiation anyway? Why the rush? Residents and business owners in Riverside are wondering the same thing, and hope to have the chance to weigh in before the PLA’s final draft is signed.

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The recent statement published on Big Government by James O’Keefe and the existence of videotape showing the full project intended for Senator Landrieu’s office should put an end to the irresponsible chatter about Watergate Jr. or any other slanderous attacks of wiretapping by the “objective journalists” of the mainstream media.

We’re not naïve enough to believe the attacks will stop, but there is something to be said about holding your fire until you have some clue about what’s going on. The Washington Post and other outlets have been forced to walk back their outrageous statements of wiretapping and apologize for their accusations of seeking to destroy a phone system of the federal government. As amusing as it’s been to see O’Keefe’s antics demonstrate media bias, there is the concern about an obscure portion of the United States Code about misrepresenting yourself to gain access to a federal facility.

According to O’Keefe, videotape of the event will fully exonerate him. If we take that at face value, then all that is left is the charge of misrepresentation to gain access to a federal office. This may be the cause of some squirming by the four young men, because the federal government and
its officers do not like to be trifled with, and the ability to bring punishment to US citizens for minor offenses isn’t limited to smoking a joint without the benefit of having a judge as a blood relative.

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On January 28th, President Obama traveled to Tampa, FL. This is how he greeted the mayor of Tampa, an American city the last time we checked. These gratuitous displays of public humility suggest a deeper narcissism than we feared.