[Note: This is part of an ongoing series about the Clinton Redux, the Obama Administration and their political wars against Americans. Click here for Part I]

As Big Government reported here, the Clintonistas have reunited to take down the tea party movement. The same tactics they used in the 1990’s to keep the Clintons in power are now being used to keep the Democrats in power. It was only a matter of time when President Bill Clinton would fire a round to vilify the tea party movement. That time has come.

It happened last week when the former President used the 15th anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, where 168 men, women and children were killed, to smear the tea party participants. In a New York Times op-ed President Clinton wrote:

“… we should never forget what drove the bombers, and how they justified their actions to themselves. They took to the ultimate extreme an idea advocated in the months and years before the bombing by an increasingly vocal minority: the belief that the greatest threat to American freedom is our government, and that public servants do not protect our freedoms, but abuse them…. Civic virtue can include harsh criticism, protest, even civil disobedience. But not violence or its advocacy. …. the line was crossed in Oklahoma City. In the current climate, with so many threats against the president, members of Congress and other public servants, we owe it to the victims of Oklahoma City, and those who survived and responded so bravely, not to cross it again.”

For months tea party participants have gathered at peaceful rallies across the county but in President Clinton’s narrative these gatherings are reminiscent to Timothy McVeigh, the terrorist, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah building.

His smear reminded me of a prophetic warning that Linda Tripp of Lewinsky-Clinton fame told me years ago: “If you believe nothing else, believe this. If the Clintons can do it to me, they can do it to you.”

Looks like she was right.

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As we reported a few weeks ago, White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin became ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy controversy when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Buzz profile, which included 28 senior Google lobbyists and lawyers.

The controversy has prompted a slew of letters and FOIA requests to the White House and Department of Justice from watchdog groups.  Last week, Congressman Darrell Issa sent a letter to McLaughlin asking whether the deputy CTO may have been using Gmail to communicate with his former employer, thus circumventing the laws associated with openness and transparency.  Issa gave McLaughlin a deadline of this week to answer a series of questions on what the Deputy CTO is doing to comply with official recordkeeping rules.

Now we’ve learned that another ex-Googler working in the Administration, Katie Jacobs Stanton, has been snagged by Google’s lax privacy settings as well. Like McLaughlin, Stanton — the New Media Director at the State Department — had 17 Google employees in her Gmail account exposed in the Buzz privacy flap, as the screenshots below indicate:

Katie Jacobs Stanton was President Obama’s appointee to the newly created position of Director of Citizen Participation in March of 2009 and recently moved to the State Department as the New Media Director.  Her previous responsibilities at Google included Google Moderator, Google Finance and Google’s Open Social initiative.

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The Associated Press has a story this morning called “Unemployment challenges Obama’s economic narrative.” No kidding.

I never get tired reminding stimulus advocates that before the stimulus bill was passed, the president scared the bejesus out of many people by claiming that if the Stimulus bill wasn’t passed, unemployment would reach 8.8 percent. Also, his team promoted the idea that the stimulus would create 3.3 million jobs (not just saved). They even had numbers and a model to prove it.

So the president got his cash, $789 billion which grew to $862 billion, and unemployment kept going up. It even passed 10 percent at one point and is now stagnating at 9.7 percent–where it’s scheduled to stay for a while.

And it’s not the only “job bill” that was passed. There was one in March 2020 ($18 billion) and another one in April 2010.

By the president’s own logic, the stimulus failed. That’s why he  has shifted his argument. Sure, the economy lost jobs, he now says, but without the stimulus it would have lost nearly 2 million more jobs. How you go about proving that this is not true is impossible and this is why it’s not powerful. It doesn’t make it right.

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Under Secretary Janet Napolitano, the Department of Homeland Security has allowed law enforcement officials to ignore immigration laws already on the books so this Administration’s political agenda can be achieved. The ‘open borders’ Obama Administration has postured itself in favor of amnesty over the Rule of Law.

Now states like Arizona are being forced to step up and fill the void left by DHS and the Obama Administration. I commend Arizona for standing up for the Rule of Law and protecting American workers.

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The Wall Street Journal’s William McGurn takes a closer look at an important bipartisan effort underway in Illinois:

Contrary to all the obituaries, hope and change and a new spirit of bipartisanship are alive and well in Barack Obama’s America. Just not in Washington.

In the state legislature of post-Obama Illinois, a largely white Republican Party is joining forces with reform-minded African-American and Latino Democrats. Together they are challenging two establishments: machine Democrats backed by teachers unions, and suburban and downstate Republicans mostly indifferent to inner-city issues.

The vehicle is an educational voucher bill that needs only the approval of the full Illinois house to land on the governor’s desk. Introduced by the Rev. James Meeks—a powerful Democratic state senator who has also been one of Mr. Obama’s spiritual advisers—the bill provides a voucher of up to $4,000 for as many as 22,000 elementary students now languishing in the worst Chicago public schools. The voucher will give them the opportunity to attend the private school of their choice. The state Senate passed the measure last month, and last week the leadership-dominated House Executive Committee approved it by a vote of 10 to 1.

The article included a quote from my colleague Collin Hitt, Illinois Policy Institute’s Director of Education Policy, who noted:

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Yesterday, we revealed yesterday’s examination of Rep. Andre Carson’s contemporaneous account that he gave reporters versus actual video footage of the events at the Cannon Office Building.   The video showing the congressmen walking down the steps unencumbered by the hostile, racist mob that we had been told was there proved that Rep. Carson’s description was exaggerated at best, fabricated at worst.

We asked our readers for any other footage and testimonials they might have from that day in Washington DC.  In the true spirit of citizen journalists holding our government accountable, we received many tips.  The following compilation further exposes the myth that Rep. Carson passed on to the eager media that day.

Yesterday, Republicans held firm against bailouts to big banks and Wall Street.  They held firm against creation of a super regulatory bureaucracy.  They held firm against a massive government intervention in our economy.  All in all it was a good day.

But a word to the wise:  DO NOT SNATCH DEFEAT FROM THE JAWS OF VICTORY.

Republican leaders have been making noises about a compromise measure for a week.  Now is not the time to get weak.

The Democrats continue to deny the bill is a bailout.  But they are slowing losing that battle.

NPR said:

“A vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts,” Obama said in his speech in New York on Thursday.

I cannot find any experts — of any party — who are willing to agree with Obama on this one.

“We’re not seeing a very forceful step on the too-big-to-fail problem,” said Carmen Reinhart, an economist at the University of Maryland. “If there’s any doubt that the crisis may be systemic, we will bail out again.”

So, if a major bank says, “Hey, save us or the economy will go under,” the government’s going to save the bank. Full stop.

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In my last article, we began a discussion of GOV2.0.  Over the next couple weeks, I’ll sketch some sexy details.   Commenters, keep tossing out your ideas.

Tea Partiers!  Here’s how to save every state budget.  Let’s hoist our pirate flag high.

In New York City a movie ticket costs $15 – about $7.50 a hour.   Three months later it is out on DVD, and you can own it for $15.  Twenty eight days later, you can put it, along with thousands of other movies, in your Netflix queue for $9 a month.  Eighteen months later, it plays on HBO, along with a great show about having multiple wives, for $10 a month.

Or, if you prefer, you can download a watchable copy of the movie the day it comes out for free… because a lone pirate secreted a HDcam into a theater and jacked into the hearing impaired outlet in his seat.

The movie cost $150MILLION to make.  The hooligan did it for free.

And oh, by the way, if your kid is still buying music, you might sit her down for a talk about the virtues of sharing.

For the rabid capitalist, it is crucial to recognize that property rights emerge from the scarcity of the atomic.   There is value in creative ownership, but let’s be rational… if we could copy land, food, and oil, the concept of “ownership” would be radically different; there would be riots in the streets if limits on these staples were artificially enforced.

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Buffy Wicks, remember, was the Deputy Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement who was implicated (along with Yosi Sergant) in orchestrating a propaganda campaign for health care reform with the National Endowment for the Arts. Sergant ended up resigning over this incident, but I believe “Buffy the Integrity Slayer” was more to blame.

Anyway, I’m not sure how this news slipped through the cracks but according to this press release posted by Politico on April 4, Buffy has joined David Axelrod’s old firm, AKPD Message and Media:

AKPD Message and Media today announced that political strategist Buffy Wicks has joined the firm as a vice president. Wicks will join AKPD media buyer Debra Schommer Klein in the firm’s West Coast operation, located in Los Angeles, California.

A veteran of the Obama presidential campaign and White House, Wicks will advise AKPD’s clients on matters of campaign strategy, field organizing, and grassroots mobilization.

“Buffy is one of the most respected political organizers in the country, and she knows what it takes to build a strong and successful relationship with campaign supporters,” said AKPD partner John Del Cecato. “As AKPD continues to serve our local, state, and federal clients across the nation, we’re thrilled to add someone with Buffy’s expertise to our firm.”

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DEMOCRATS HID DAMNING HEALTH CARE REPORT FROM PUBLIC UNTIL A MONTH AFTER VOTE

More hope and change–

A damning health care report generated by actuaries at the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department was given to HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the health care vote. She hid the report from the public until a month after democrats rammed their nationalized health care bill through Congress.

The results from the report were troubling. The report released by Medicare and Medicaid actuaries shows that medical costs will skyrocket rising $389 billion 10 years. 14 million will lose their employer-based coverage. Millions of Americans will be left without insurance. And, millions more may be dumped into the already overwhelmed Medicaid system. 4 million American families will be hit with tax penalties under this new law.

Of course, these were ALL things that President Obama and Democratic leaders assured us would not happen.

Via Special Report:

The American Spectator reported, via FOX Nation:

The economic report released last week by Health and Human Services, which indicated that President Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actually increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on consumers, had been submitted to the office of HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius more than a week before the Congressional votes on the bill, according to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the document before the vote was taken.

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According to Editor and Publisher, newspaper circulation fell another 8.7% in the last six months. This is a trend that will not be reversed.

Unlike the “experts” on both sides of the political spectrum who will state with absolute certainty who the Tea Partiers are and what they stand for (invariably to support the reporter’s political persuasion), we will admit that at this point in time, we can only say for certain what the movement is not.  Like the storied Boston Tea Party of 1773 where the citizens of Massachusetts protested British taxes being imposed on them without any representation and dumped three shiploads of British tea into the harbor, the current movement is not a political party, at least not yet, and it probably never will be.

Of course every commentator and pollster is ready to tell us definitively what the meaning is of this unique new political movement.  Former President Clinton likened its followers to the odious Timothy McVeigh of Oklahoma City notoriety.   The former President knows better but as a loyal Democrat he apparently is willing to share in the heavy lifting to demonize the Tea Party.  Many Republican leaders say the movement is nothing more than an outcry against the policies of the current Administration, but in our view that would be an over simplification as well.

The common philosophical thread which does seem to run all through Tea Party adherents who speak out appears to be a sense that government has become too large, too overbearing, too much in debt and that it is muscling into our private lives as never before.  True, many attendees who are interviewed are outraged about specific issues like high taxes, the recently enacted health care bill and the tactics used to force its passage.  Divining coherency and consistency out of all of this is impossible even though we are treated daily to talking heads and newspaper analysts who state with absolute assurance what it all means.

Our take is that the movement can be attributed simply to frustration with the “political class” and a free-floating anxiety about whether any elected officials can provide inspiration and leadership in troubled times.  But any review of the history of the shifting political tides in our nation clearly shows that this movement has numerous antecedents . . . and that it is very healthy for our democracy.

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Ever since Andrew Breitbart offered $100,000 to be donated to the United Negro College Fund if anyone could produce video evidence of the racial slurs that Rep. Andre Carson claimed he heard on March 20 in Washington DC, I’ve been looking all over YouTube. All of my searches were for video of the moment the congressmen were walking down the steps of the Cannon Office Building on their way to the Capitol.

Lee Fang, employee of the liberal think tank American Progress, posted a video he claimed happened five minutes after the congressmen were rushed by an angry mob at Cannon. I had been searching and searching for those five minutes of angry mob action for weeks. I never found it because it never happened.

What did happen, as seen in this video, is that Rep. Andre Carson and Rep. John Lewis strode down the steps of the Cannon Office Building with a wide berth and completely unencumbered. There was no angry mob. And no one “rushed” the congressmen. And no one yelled a racial epithet at them.

If you have any video footage of this moment from March 20th, or of the next two minutes when Rep. Carson and Rep. Lewis continue walking toward the Capitol after they cross Independence Ave., please email us at tips@biggovernment.com.

FINAL National Tea Party Federation – CBC – ALL_SIGS v1.0 –

Rep. Andre Carson wants to change the subject. I don’t blame him.

On April 13, 2010 he told AP reporter Jesse Washington, “I think we need to move toward a dialogue that explores why this kind of divisive and reprehensible language is still making it into our political debate.”

The “divisive and reprehensible language” that Rep. Carson is referring to is his claim that while he left the Cannon office building on March 20 with Rep. John Lewis, they were verbally assaulted by health care protesters hurling the “N-word” at them. He said the scene was so hostile he “expected rocks to come” when he was coming out of Cannon.

I wanted to see the evidence. I wanted the truth. In the course of our search we have actually uncovered further video evidence that casts serious doubt on Rep.Carson’s claims:

Now this story is much more important than the accusation of fifteen racists among the thousands of protesters that day. This is now about the accusers.

It’s not just that Congressmen Carson’s accusation of an extraordinary racist verbal assault by the tea party participants on March 20 doesn’t appear to have occurred, it’s that the accusers have now gone into the bunker and, having raised the incendiary subject, are doing everything they can to avoid the discussion. Why? What’s changed? (more…)

So we know that Sen. Lindsey Graham has stormed away from today’s scheduled 11 a.m. Eastern Senate press conference stage, and taken with him his support climate legislation, putting on hold what will surely in this latest form also represent the biggest tax increase in our history. All of which is, of course, “for now”.

No, that won’t last. But the unfolding/ongoing theater deserves commentary for when it returns.

This is the same bill that John Kerry now says was put off until this week from last so the voters didn’t confuse it around “Earth Day” as an “environmental” measure, and that Graham now says is an “energy independence” bill. This is even though the bill was breathlessly touted instead by all of its supporters just months ago as what it is designed to be: a “global warming” law to address what they apparently no longer view as that big an issue.

Or else they took Stanley Greenberg’s advice and realized you aren’t buying and are scrambling to re-brand their Power Grab. And this seems more likely given what we know about the bill is that it’s core design remains, with tweaks aimed at luring political support by various constituencies –

First, about this dance, Rich Galen wrote in his Mullings blog last night that “So, by putting off – perhaps until the next Congress – meaningful legislation which might have led to reducing our dependence on foreign oil, in favor of legislation which may maintain our dependence on foreign workers Harry Reid and Barack Obama have chosen convenient politics over good policy.”

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Sen. Chris Dodd’s financial regulatory reform bill, on which the Senate is slated to take a cloture vote this afternoon, has been the subject of much criticism of late, primarily for what opponents say amounts to a de facto institutionalization of “too big to fail” with regard to the biggest power players in the financial sector.

However, Capitol Confidential has learned that there is another, equally troubling aspect of the bill that observers say is going unnoticed in the debate surrounding Dodd’s proposals: Its hammering of community banks.  Relatively small institutions compared to the names often cited in the news, community banks typically operate in small towns, urban neighborhoods or the suburbs.  Their remit usually involves funding small businesses that require credit in order to operate payrolls and to expand, and lending to families financing home purchases or college.   Many of those familiar with the banking industry, overall, say that community banks bore little to no responsibility, on balance, for the financial meltdown that occurred in 2008.  Nonetheless, an analysis of the Dodd bill indicates that if it passes, community banks will be subject to a whopping 27 new regulations that one individual who has worked with banks professionally and is closely tracking the legislation says “could threaten to put many community bankers out of business, thus reducing competition in the banking sector overall, and diminishing consumer choices.”

That individual further asserts that while the bigger, Wall Street banks will likely be able to adapt to the bill (though their efficiency and ability to compete internationally could take a knock), the community banks will not—potentially making the system more risk-prone, also.

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“Where were you when George Bush was President?”   You know that question well.  It’s been asked of each of us more times than any of us would care to count.  Do you know how I usually answer it?

I was home, enjoying my life.  I went to work every day and focused on doing the best job that I could do.  When I wasn’t working, I hung out with family and friends.  I went to baseball games, and barbecues, and obscure little hole-in-the-wall joints to hear some of my favorite live music over a couple of Guinnesses.  Yum.

Why?  Because while George Bush was president, we had a media establishment that was challenging our government, not our citizens.

I wasn’t necessarily happy with the direction of the country in those days.  But I could sleep at night, knowing that we had media that pressed George Bush and our Congress on every single issue.  I could know at any given moment what the “death count” was in Iraq because just about every channel splashed a persistent counter in the bottom corner of the television screen.  When bills like the Patriot Act were first introduced in Congress, I never lacked for any detail on the dangers of the legislation.  There was barely a single detail that went uncovered in the daily political grind.  When there was a scandal to research and report, I certainly never had to do that myself.  There were reporters who did all that.

Yep, I’m actually missing the Bush days now.  I had so much more free time.  Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always done my homework and researched issues on my own anyway.  I recognize that all media is biased to some degree (and has been for quite some time).  But I could always count on the media to challenge the government in the days of George Bush.  I wrote my fair share of letters, I called and complained about the spending, even attended a few protests, but I can’t say that I ever felt there just wasn’t anyone challenging the president in the mainstream media.  Quite the contrary, there was never any lack of DC pushback from the collective press in those days.

But we live in extraordinary times today.  There now exists this giant, open cavity where that healthy pushback against government used to be.  And when the mainstream media stepped away from that opening in 2008, two things happened:

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Here we go again. Harry Reid intends to force a vote at 5pm on Monday in a desperate attempt to push yet another bloated bill that will do more harm than good.

This time, the Democrats seem to have zeroed in on reforming the entire American finance system without bothering to read, or even consider, the many, negative, unintended consequences to our economy (and especially to small businesses) that this legislation will unleash.

Once again, the Democrats are keen to push a flawed agenda to capitalize on the remarkably convenient timing of the ever-so-welcomed, SEC fraud charges levied against Goldman Sachs.

Once again, Democrats are keen to push long standing, left-wing, ideological dreams that Americans have long resisted.  But, pity the poor small business community that will, once again, be forced to pay a disproportional cost of the 1336 page monstrosity of a financial reform bill.

Embedded deep within the Democrats’ financial bill is an inexplicable assault on Angel Investors who help drive small business expansion and entrepreneurialism.  Sections 412 and 413 (p.380-381) adjust (i.e.increase) the “Accredited Investor” dollar threshold to $1 million dollars—which could affect the amount of angel investing, especially those that invest in small businesses.

If that isn’t enough bad news, in Section 740B“Small Business Loan Data Collection”, (p.1219-1224), Congress requires the collection of proprietary data, and storage for three years of data that must be obtained from any small business attempting a loan.

Then, Congress stipulates that this information about the small business must be made available to the public upon request.  These are the kinds of intrusive requirements that could only be drafted by persons who have no experience in what it takes to start, maintain and grow a business.

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