As ACORN pretends to “dissolve” around the country, internally, there appears to be a mad dash to get out ahead of prosecution. Not surprisingly, ACORN has a history of shutting offices down when an investigation gets too close. For example, in 2004 ACORN’s affiliate Project Vote abruptly closed its national office in Ohio and shipped boxes stuffed with un-cashed checks and paperwork to Washington, DC.

ACORN appears to have honed these tricks and has now decided to re-brand on a national scale. However, given its history, many are skeptical:

“If you want to see whether ACORN is really changing its ways, check to see whether the signatories to those local ACORN bank accounts are changing. When it comes to ACORN, the money is the organization, and the name is just the name.”

In order to operate effectively, ACORN requires little public scrutiny and a lot of lore and misdirection (think registering Mickey Mouse to vote). For 40 years ACORN’s organizing model has survived social revolutions and political upheavals and to understand ACORN a review of the 1970’s “manifesto” of ACORN founder Wade Rathke is essential.

Acorn Organizing Model
(more…)

Showing complete disregard for the free speech rights of small business owners, the City of Dallas bans businesses from putting commercial signs in the upper two-thirds of any window or glass door, and on more than 15 percent of any window or glass door. Only ineffective signs are allowed by the government: tiny signs placed at people’s feet. The law also bans signs that cover more than 25 percent of a building’s façade. Failure to take down the signs means you are at risk to be hit with a fine up to $2,000.

(more…)

A conversation with Jimmy LaSalvia, Executive Director, GOProud

BOB: Hi Jimmy, just wanted to touch bases and find out what your thoughts were about the rather rude outburst by that punk at CPAC. I was getting ready to videotape a following speaker and found the kid’s comments rude and uncalled for.

JIMMY LaSALVIA: It was unfortunate that happened. You know there was a little controversy when we signed on as co-sponsors back in December, but I thought all of that had blown over. I was surprised when Ryan Sorba made those remarks, but it was heartening to see and hear the crowd boo and voice disapproval.

BOB: Why was there controversy? I can imagine but let’s hear it from you. Considering we’re all Republicans and we probably vote close to each other on the issues, what was the problem?

JIMMY: There are some on fringe, some single issue groups, who disagree with GOProud on an issue or two. They threatened to boycott CPAC, but in the end most everyone was there. It was the biggest CPAC ever. I always tell people that there is a difference between policy and principles. We can disagree on some policies, but we share the same conservative principles.

BOB: Specifically, where was the agreement and disagreement?

(more…)

Several videos of Andrew Breitbart attending CPAC 2010 are making the rounds on the interwebs. Salon.com has posted an article entitled “Breitbart’s breakdown: A video tour”, based on four of the clips floating around.

In these videos, a visibly angry Breitbart tears into Progressive writers Max Blumenthal, Mike Madden, and others, in response to their baseless charges and innuendos of racism surrounding Breitbart, Hannah Giles, and James O’Keefe.

Apparently, Salon.com doesn’t think that anger and outrage are normal reactions for a human being to have in response to being falsely smeared and branded a racist.

Salon.com sees the videos of an angry Andrew Breitbart as not much more than an opportunity to ridicule someone with whom they disagree.

By using these videos in this particular way,  Salon reveals that it considers the righteous indignation of a man falsely accused to be funny.  A real knee-slapper.

That’s very revealing because the videos that the folks at Salon.com are promoting clearly demonstrate why Breitbart is so furious. He explains it to their cameras repeatedly. Perhaps the editors at Salon.com are too politically tone deaf to hear the message.

Just in case, we’ve produced a little video to help illustrate what we’re talking about.

(more…)

Today, in 1815, Napoleon escaped from his exile in Elba. Yeah, weird, but we actually celebrate this.

When it comes to health care, who gets treated better—man or man’s best friend? Of course, it’s hard to make an apples-to-apples comparison when you’re comparing four-legged patients to people, and there are many ways in which human care tops pet care. But pet owners told Reason.tv there are some ways where it would be a step up to be treated like a dog.

Pet owners like the convenience of animal care; they also like the client-focused atmosphere. “I think one of the things that human health care can learn from veterinary medicine is the client service side of things, the relationship side of things,” says Dr. Peter Weinstein, executive director of the Southern California Veterinary Medical Association. Various reasons explain why people often find animal care so pleasant, says Weinstein. One reason—animal care workers love what they do. Another reason—competition.

Weinstein notes that vets work hard to differentiate themselves from their competitors because “there are a large number of vet hospitals, many located very closely to one another.” And vets know even more competitors could emerge because less red tape makes it easier to open an animal hospital. Weinstein recalls opening his clinic, which offered everything from X-rays to operations: “I believe it was 12 weeks from the time I signed the lease to the time I saw my first client. Try doing that with human health care.”

(more…)

Imagine, if you will, that you are living in a changed America, or in President Obama’s words, an America that begged “re-making.”  In this now-changed America, hope is in big government and her closest ally, big science.

Now imagine that you and your spouse give birth to a child in this brave, new America, in a hospital linked by law to the federal citizens database.  Immediately upon your child’s birth, a hospital clerk assigns your newborn with a “Unique Health Identifier” (UHI), a specially coded number, which is then put into a national electronic database, along with your newborn’s fingerprints and any other identifiers the bureaucrats in D.C. have demanded.

Sex.  Weight.  Length.  Race. APGAR score.  Health appraisal at birth, including any disfigurements or handicaps, identifying traits or birthmarks, and DNA markers.   Information about the child’s parents, such as names, age, race, number of prior pregnancies, number of prior births, number of prior abortions, education attained, occupations, finger prints and criminal records, if any, are also stored.  Almost anything can be included in the database for future government needs, whatever those might be.

Imagine that all constitutional safeguards for an individual’s privacy are deemed to have been complied with, when compiling this database, because healthcare is an interstate activity that the Feds can regulate and government access to the information improves the “general welfare.”  Imagine that it is even required that your newborn, before leaving the hospital, be fitted with a surgically implanted microchip, the way babies are now, in many states, required to be vaccinated and blood-typed.  The implanted microchip can then be accessed with a scanner by anyone who has a scanning device, with or without parental consent.

(more…)

Imagine tons of explosives being stolen in Mexico and then transported by truck across the border into the United States. Could it happen? Over the weekend, it did. Almost.

On Friday, according to an article in the Latin American Herald Tribune, 18 tons of industrial explosives were stolen from a cargo container during a robbery along the Monterrey-Saltillo Highway in the northern Mexico state of Nuevo Leon. According to subsequent reports, Mexican officials located and recovered the stolen explosives within hours. The thieves, however, remain at large.

But should Americans rest easy now? Not after this near-miss event.

According to officials with the Mexican industry association, Canacar, thefts from cargo trucks on Mexico’s highways increased 40 percent last year.

North of the border, officials with the Owner-Operator Independent Drivers Association are calling upon the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative to immediately challenge the legality of the tariffs implemented one year ago by Mexico so that the debate regarding cross-border trucking with Mexico can be shifted from economics to highway safety and security.

(more…)

When John Spring was campaigning for re-election as mayor of Quincy, Illinois in the spring of 2009, his primary selling point to the citizens of Quincy was that he had close, personal relationships with people in Washington D.C. (especially Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Illinois and his old high school football teammate, U.S. Rep Phil Hare, D-Rock Island) and he could deliver the goods for the many pie in the sky projects he had in mind for the city.

Spring used a popular former mayor, Chuck Scholz, in his campaign commercials along with the head of the supposedly non-partisan local economic development arm, the Great River Economic Development Foundation.

Spring won re-election by less than 800 votes over a Republican whose lone political experience consisted of a couple of terms on the Adams County, Illinois Board.

So what did those people get for supporting Spring as heavily as they did?

(more…)

The One’s network, NBC, is live-streaming the Health Care “Summit.” Lots of rich theater to enjoy.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Congress can raise taxes because it can persuade a sizable fraction of the populace that somebody else will pay.

– Milton Friedman

How dare you save and invest your hard earned money while other people waste it can’t afford to. It’s just not fair that you’re making “unearned” income and we need to take more of that from you to pay for our big government programs.

Terrence Jeffrey has the details from Obamascare 2.0:

“Under current law, workers who earn a salary pay a flat tax of 1.45 percent of their wages to support the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund, but those who have substantial unearned income do not, raising issues of fairness,” says the summary.

Fairness?! The Redistributor in Chief wants to go there? Seriously?

Right now, the people who earn very little, or nothing, get way more back in Medicare than they’ve ever paid in and there is no income cap on the Medicare tax. The rich are already paying more than their “fair share.” In addition the money being used to make unearned income has already been taxed at least once.

The Wall Street Journal points out the unprecedented nature of the taxes and how anti-growth it is:

This new ObamaCare bargain would for the first time apply the 2.9% Medicare payroll tax to “interest, dividends, annuities, royalties and rents,” so-called passive income that we are told includes capital gains, though the latter wasn’t explicitly mentioned in the proposal. This antigrowth investment tax would apply to singles earning more than $200,000 and joint filers over $250,000 and comes on top of the Senate’s 0.9-percentage-point increase in the payroll tax, which would bring the combined employee-employer share to 3.8%

Hey, wait a second, didn’t Obama say he wouldn’t raise any tax on families making less than $250k/year?

(more…)

You remember the iconic call by American labor to “look for the union label” (and ignore the price tag)? Well, U.S. union officials have turned to a new slogan, calling for “Buy American” provisions of bailout and stimulus legislation.

In fact, the AFL-CIO labor federation is highlighting its new website, which it says “gives workers, people who have lost their jobs and activists a chance to take action, share their stories, find resources and, most importantly, be part of a grassroots movement to help the nation climb out of its 10-million jobs hole created by the recession.”

But what if those people lost their jobs to Canada? Perhaps it would be best if union bosses stopped being hosers and checked their own Internet host, where the IP address resolves to our brothers in the Great White North (Oh Canada!). We ran this trace from Washington, D.C. to the AFL-CIO’s website:

(more…)

What everyone needs to recognize before the Health Care Summit later today is that the uninsured can be covered at modest additional net cost without the government takeover of health care, government health care rationing, 100 new health control bureaucracies and programs, and trillion dollars in new taxes and spending (woefully underestimated) involved in Obamacare.

The lack of a clear safety net for the uninsured is what gives Democrats the political lift to keep coming back for socialized medicine.  Republicans should advance the modest reforms necessary to establish a true safety net that will ensure that no one will be denied essential health care.  Only that will permanently protect the health care of the American people from government takeover and control.  Republicans should trumpet this point at the health care summit tomorrow.

Reform should start with Medicaid, which already spends over $400 billion a year providing substandard coverage for 50 million poor Americans.  Congress should transform Medicaid to provide assistance to purchase private health insurance for all who otherwise could not afford coverage, ideally with health insurance vouchers.

(more…)

President Barack Obama’s highly anticipated Blair House Summit was sold as a bipartisan negotiation on ObamaCare between House and Senate leaders of both parties.  The White House claims that this day long meeting is an opportunity for the American people to witness a negotiation between Republicans and Democrats.  If you tune into this event, you will not see any negotiation.  You will witness a desparate President trying sell a warmed over version of ObamaCare.  Even for a President well known for his exceptional ability to communicate, the Administration’s attempts to sell a plan that is offensive to a substantial majority of Americans has proven to be an epic failure.

The fact of the matters is that in anticipation of this so called negotiation, the Democrats are crafting a reconciliation strategy.  Reconciliation is a fast track partisan strategy for the Democrats to change the rules of the game so they can avoid a filibuster in the Senate.  I call this new strategy to pass Obamacare the Health Care Nuclear Option because it will blow up what remains of bipartisanship in the Capitol and put the United States on a pathway to European style government run health care.

Furthermore, the American people explicitly reject ObamaCare and don’t want it.  So much for consent of the governed.  This Summit is going to be a day long press conference for President Obama and the ObamaCare Cheerleading Squad to try one last time to sell the President’s health care plan that includes unpopular mandates, higher taxes and cuts to health care providers. (more…)

As they say, if the snowmen are on your side…(God love the Lansing, MI Tea Party folks…)

Max Blumenthal has an amazing thesis:  All conservatives and Republicans are beneath contempt.  He also has an amazing line of work.  He is underwritten by various media organs to prove his thesis.

In a previous era, Blumenthal and said media organs (Salon, Independent Film Channel, Huffington Post, etc.) were able to get away with this pathetic arrangement.   But now, we are on to Max, the spawn of Sid “Vicious” Blumenthal – he who attempted to ruin Monica Lewinsky’s life by falsely portraying her as Bill Clinton’s “stalker.”

The Blumenthal operation is now under the extremely close scrutiny of a camelid named “Retracto.”

The movement formerly known as the “Tea-Baggers” (with their flip cameras and new media skills) and various conservatives who have had enough with the excessive Alinsky tactics used most egregiously by Max and Sid but representative of main stream media’s odious guilt-by-association, repeat-the-same-lie-until-it-sticks, smear-any-conservative-as-racist-sexist-homophobic skill set, are now fighting back.

If the last two weeks have not humiliated him enough — and this Huffington Post rage-fest from yesterday with its title “Feeling the Hate at CPAC 2010 With Andrew Breitbart, Hannah Giles and the Crazy Mob” suggests they have not – then perhaps this coup de booger will tell him that we say what we mean and we mean what we say.

Max gallivanted around CPAC looking for prey.  He was treated with respect as he sought to make good and decent people look foolish on camera.  He decided he would go after a 20-year-old girl, one Hannah Giles.  And perhaps due to sexism or ageism he underestimated her ability.  Max should have called Bertha Lewis before he went after this young heroine.  Instead, he went to a gunfight with a knife – and a dirty nose.

Ladies and gentlemen, the much awaited, “Max Blumenthal Picks a Booger Out of His Nose at CPAC” video:

Max Blumenthal, this is what you do for a living. I can do it too (**wink **wink** Independent Film Channel).

Salon has already corrected his initial attempt to paint James O’Keefe as a White Nationalist.  They corrected his baseless assertion that O’Keefe planned the “Race and Conservatism” forum held at Georgetown Law Center, but he continues to hold that James O’Keefe is a racist, and that he was in some way involved with the “execution” of the forum.  His source for this claim?  Daryle Jenkins, whose credibility was recently eviscerated by Kevin Martin from Project 21.

(more…)

As Republicans are preparing for the Press Event with Obama on Thursday, I’d like to see a specific point be made with regard to costs.  Something like this:

“Mr. President, our plan removes the barriers to Interstate Insurance sales, so individuals and families can purchase insurance with specific benefits across state lines.  We’re sure you are aware with insurance every new benefit mandated with the force the Federal government, will increase costs for every US citizen’s own policy.

“As such, we’d like to go over this list of Benefits / Services currently mandates by the states:*

Healthcare Mandates _2_

“Mr. President, you’ll note that there are very few benefits that even 25 of our states require, but there are more than 130 potential mandates.  And if all the state plans are forced to cover the same fifty Federal mandates, people won’t actually have any real choice.  Republicans believe there have to be both low cost, bare bone plans and plans that cover specific types of patients.

“Why do mandates happen Mr. President? Largely because special interest groups (good people in a state all suffering from the same condition and their doctors and drug makers) lobby their state government to have their problem covered by everyone, so their own costs are lower.

“Who can argue with: If special education for autism is covered,  why not home healthcare?  If an Osteopath is covered, why not a Psychiatric nurse. If HIV drugs are covered, why not morbid obesity, why not sickle cell, why not an athletic trainer, why not massage.  Mr. President, special interests have succeeded in getting ALL of these covered in different states.  Do you really believe the federal government can be trusted to say NO?

“Mandates pit patients and their doctors against other patients and doctors.   Who’s health is most important?

(more…)

In a strongly-worded 14-page letter to Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Julius Genachowski, the nation’s largest internet service providers Monday cautioned the agency that reclassifying broadband internet services from an “information service” to a “telecommunication service” would have “far-reaching and destructive consequences,” including deterring continued broadband investment and innovation.

The “extremist” move to regulate internet service in a similar manner to telephone service, which some observers called a transparent, albeit indirect ploy to enact net neutrality, “would be untenable as a legal matter, and, at a minimum, would plunge the industry into years of litigation and regulatory chaos,” the letter read.

Signed by Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, and Qwest, among others, the letter comes amid an important federal appeals court decision in the larger net neutrality debate, in which a ruling against the FCC would likely derail the agency’s quest to institute “open internet” regulations.

(more…)

The Poker Players Alliance — a million-member strong grassroots organization that defends poker rights — cosponsored the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for the second consecutive year.  Poker players, still reeling over past efforts to ban online and other forms of poker, have been actively reaching out to conservatives for support for their right to play, and cosponsorship of CPAC is part of this outreach effort.  They were pleased at their reception at this year’s event and feel support for their position within the broader conservative movement will continue to increase.

Displaying the confidence that a year of solid wins on Capitol Hill has earned them, the PPA went to CPAC ready to take on the dwindling minority who would ban poker as well as those who believe poker rights ought not be a conservative concern.  They came armed with handouts on why principled conservatives ought to oppose a big government prohibition on online poker, copies of pro-poker articles by George Will, Walter Williams, and Jacob Sullum, free t-shirts, and 2004 World Poker Champion Greg Raymer, who was on hand to sign autographs.

2004 World Poker Champion Greg Raymer at CPAC

They also showed off the alliances they have with many within the conservative movement, including FreedomWorks, CPAC straw poll winner Rep. Ron Paul (video of Rep. Paul backing PPA’s position), and Americans for Tax Reform.

(more…)