Saturday’s New York Times reported the leak of a secret January memo from Defense Secretary Gates to “top White House officials” warning that “the United States does not have an effective long-range policy for dealing with Iran’s steady progress toward nuclear capability…”

The article quoted an unnamed senior official who called the memo “…a wake-up call.”  But the day after the initial report, Gates told the Times, “The memo was not intended as a ‘wake-up call’ or received as such by the president’s national security team.” He added, “Rather, it presented a number of questions and proposals intended to contribute to an orderly and timely decision-making process.”

Was it that, or something else? All evidence leads to the latter.

This is an example of one Washington game played by “senior administration officials” from time beyond memory.  The clues to who and why are not well-hidden.

Who leaked Gates’s memo?

The first Times article differentiates the anonymous “senior official” who described the memo from White House officials who “disputed” his view.  That means the most probable leaker was Gates himself or someone on Gates’s staff acting with his knowledge.

Obama’s National Security Advisor, Gen. James Jones, chafed at the Gates memo.  The first NYT article quoted him as saying, “On Iran, we are doing what we said we were going to do. The fact that we don’t announce publicly our entire strategy for the world to see doesn’t’ mean we don’t have a strategy that anticipates the full range of contingencies – we do.”

But that’s no answer.  Gates said Obama’s policy was inadequate, not that he didn’t have one.  But the fact that Gates so quickly downplayed the meaning of the memo indicates two things. First, that he doesn’t view the Iran policy disagreement to be a serious dispute with Obama, at least yet.  Second, that he stands by the memo in a clear vote of no confidence in Obama’s closest advisors.

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The organized crime syndicate known as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), which has been making much ado about its feigned withdrawal from the national political stage, continues doing business as usual.

Proof comes in the form of an email, which went out to ACORN supporters on April 16 and which came two weeks after ACORN’s faked dissolution on April Fool’s Day as a national organization.

ACORN_email_April162010

Writes ACORN chief organizer Bertha Lewis:

ACORN is not dead!

ACORN is alive because you are alive and still fighting for justice. Over the past 40 years, ACORN members have been through a lot in the fight to empower working families and families of color — and it has been the commitment of people like you, regular folks doing extraordinary things, that has made it possible.

In the email the perennially truth-averse Lewis, whose lies throughout the undercover video saga are well documented, continues to play the victim card arguing that ACORN, dozens of whose employees have been convicted of election-related crimes, was set up by shadowy corporate forces.

Nathan Henderson-James, director of ACORN’s online campaigns, already admitted ACORN isn’t really going away.

ACORN will probably run out of money and fold by year’s end but a dozen ACORN state chapters reincorporated to seem like new, independent organizations will spring up to carry on ACORN’s business, his leaked email suggested. At least a dozen of the group’s state chapters have already broken away under new names.

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We have learned of an apparent conflict of interest for a senior Obama administration official already in hot water over questions about his communications with his former employer.  Andrew Mclaughlin is the Deputy Chief Technology Officer for the Office of Science & Technology Policy at the White House. His prior job was as the top lobbyist for Google. President Obama made numerous promises about not having lobbyists in his administration.

Big Government previously reported that privacy flaws in Google Buzz’s social networking tool exposed McLaughlin’s Buzz account to the public.  The analysis showed that McLaughlin’s Gmail included more than two dozen senior lobbyists and lawyers from Google with whom he is apparently still communicating.  Following a consumer group’s FOIA request for all of McLaughlin’s communications with his former employer, his Google Buzz account was deleted.

Now we’ve learned that McLaughlin may be actively advocating on his former employer’s behalf in his position as Deputy CTO — a big no-no for government employees who are required to abide by rigorous conflict of interest policies. For reference here is the pertinent part of the ethics agreement former lobbyists sign and agree to abide by.

“2.Revolving Door Ban – All Appointees Entering Government.  I will not for a period of 2 years from the date of my appointment participate in any particular matter involving specific parties that is directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients, including regulations and contracts.

“3.Revolving Door Ban – Lobbyists Entering Government.  If I was a registered lobbyist within the 2 years before the date of my appointment, in addition to abiding by the limitations of paragraph 2, I will not for a period of 2 years after the date of my appointment:

(a)participate in any particular matter on which I lobbied within the 2 years before the date of my appointment;

(k)”Directly and substantially related to my former employer or former clients” shall mean matters in which the appointee’s former employer or a former client is a party or represents a party.

This past January when the earthquake hit Haiti, one aspect of the U.S. emergency response was to determine how to get some form of communications restored to the island as quickly as possible.

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On Friday April 9, 2010, GOP official Allee Bautsch and her boyfriend Joe Brown attended a Republican dinner at Brennan’s restaurant in New Orleans. When they left this event the young Republicans were followed from the restaurant by a group of five white men who hurled insults at them calling Allee a “little blond bitch” and calling Joe a “f**king f*ggot.” They savagely beat and stomped on the young Republican couple just blocks from the restaurant.

This photo shows the look of horror on Allee’s face after she was stomped on by the thugs.
Via The Hayride:

Allee Bautsch suffered a broken leg from the beatdown outside to the SRLC dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant in New Orleans. She had her leg operated on over the weekend and it will take her months to recover. Her boyfriend Joe Brown suffered a broken nose, a broken jaw, and a concussion. They were attacked after leaving the Southern Republican Leadership Conference dinner at Brennan’s Restaurant.
(Photo from Jindal’s Facebook Page via The Hayride)

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The Service Employees International Union has been waging a long-running campaign against food service provider Sodexo, with the ultimate goal of unionizing the company.  SEIU’s modus operandi is if a company doesn’t bend to the union’s will, the smear machine gets cranked up and the company is attacked.  In this case, it’s the food service provider for the college football and basketball stadiums.  Liberty Chick provides more coverage here.

As pawns in SEIU’s unionizing game, 20 Ohio State University students were arrested for blocking a major campus street, according to the union-sympathizing campus newspaper, The Lantern.

After meeting with the university president, the union pawns claimed he “was rude and hardly let us talk.”

On High Street, the students sat in the crosswalk, facing the potential of being struck by traffic.  But, likely in their minds it was justified – whatever it takes to accomplish SEIU’s goal!

The Lantern story reads:

The mission statement for Service Employees International Union is to “improve the lives of workers and their families to create a more just and humane society.” And coordinated chants of “si se puede!” and “yes we can!” echoed the protestors’ collective commitment to those ends.

Collective commitment?  How about lemming-like mentality to enable the SEIU in securing more dues-payers?  President Obama, call your office: SEIU has stolen your slogan!

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Last week, in CFPA Czar or Fox in the Hen House? You Decide, I brought you more details about the people and structure of the ACORN-esque Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) and the Center for Community Self Help (CCSH) as part of a series of pieces we’ve been writing about the financial crisis and the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The importance of the pieces in this series cannot be understated.  As Congress faces down a massive power-grabbing partisan financial reform bill this week, it seems to have lost sight of many of the causes of the financial crisis in the first place.  While we hear about the exemptions in the bill of institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stories we’ve been covering on CRL and CCSH further illustrate the dangers of unchecked entities and a government with too much intervention and far too much power.

At the peak of the subprime mortgage boom and the subsequent financial crisis, primary donors to CRL and CCSH basked in billions of dollars in pure profit, thanks in large part to that very intervention and power.

Next, we’re going to introduce you to the questionable lobbying activities of this complex organization.  But before we do, let’s review a few pertinent details from our previous posts about this organization:

• John Paulson is the largest single donor to the Center for Responsible Lending.  Paulson owns one of the world’s largest hedge funds, and most recently, the SEC has alleged “that Paulson & Co. paid Goldman Sachs to structure a transaction in which Paulson & Co. could take short positions against mortgage securities chosen by Paulson & Co. based on a belief that the securities would experience credit events.”
• Herb and Marion Sandler are the second largest donors to CRL, and together with Paulson appear to comprise the majority of the organization’s funding.  The couple owned GoldenWest Financial/World Savings bank, before selling it for over $2 billion to Wachovia, which tanked shortly thereafter
• Eric Stein, who once worked for Fannie Mae (an institution currently exempt from regulation in the financial reform bill), was also the longtime leader of CRL and Sr. Vice President of CCSH.  Today, Stein sits in Obama’s Treasury Department in charge of crafting the current financial reform legislation and the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

Now, onto the lobbying.

A complaint that was filed with the House, Senate, and the IRS alleges that CRL, CCSH, and its vast network of non-profit and for-profit companies may have committed serious violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) and the Honest Leadership in Open Government Act (HLOGA).  The complaint was filed in the Fall of 2009 by the Consumers Rights League.

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Guillermo Fariñas lies in a bed in Santa Clara, Cuba, ready to die. Six weeks ago, Cuban political prisoner Orlando Zapata Tamayo died while on hunger strike in protest of the torture he had endured for seven years and in protest of the Cuban government’s treatment of all of its prisoners.Since his death, Fariñas has refused food in solidarity with Zapata.

Like Zapata, Fariñas is prepared to die so that the suffering of people inside Cuba exacts a heavy price on the Castro regime’s international reputation.

These photographs, published here for the first time, were taken by an independent journalist in Cuba four days ago.

Guillermo Fariñas is a journalist and a doctor of psychology. Like his father, Fariñas was a soldier of the Cuban revolution. He fought in Angola and received military education in Moscow. Later, he was elected General Secretary of Healthcare Union Workers. Fariñas was jailed in 1995 for speaking out about the corruption of Cuban healthcare. As they do with all such dissidents, the Cuban government labeled him a “mercenary” and a “CIA agent.” (more…)

Today, for the first time, I share three and a half minutes of uncut audio of a phone conversation I had Friday morning with Steve Belosi, one of two “party crashers” who cited free speech as his justification for interrupting speakers at the recent Tax Day Tea Party in downtown St. Charles, Mo. Truly, this recording takes you inside the mind of this tea party provocateur who represents the local embodiment of the Left’s “Crash the Tea Party” effort. [Warning: Graphic Language].

Its release comes two days after my publication of Missouri Tea Party Provocateur Spills ‘Beans’, a post based not only on my interview with Belosi, but also on two conversations I had with a lady he’s accused of verbally abusing at the event.

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The self-delusional world in which liberals wallow truly is amazing. It takes an Olympic gymnast’s level of agility to warp your logic enough to think like one of them and a recent report on the left-wing blather site Newsvine is yet one more example of the backbreaking contortions that liberals must indulge to make themselves feel better.

In this post on the presumed falling numbers of the tea party protests and an amusing subsequent praise of the coffee party effort, this left-winger calling himself “MoeZilla” desperately tried to massage the truth in order to make his losing left appear as if they are holding their own in the American political debate. The truth is, of course, that our pal Moe warped reality in multiple ways in order to make it seem as if his side is winning — or at least is treading water — while the tea party is losing.

He began his “report” saying that organizers for a tea party protest in Stockton, California were “hoping for 1,000 people to join the protest,” but only about 250 showed up (according to ABC News 10). MoeZilla segues on to reveal that the tea party event in Sacramento “was only around 2,000.” Moe estimates that the April 15 protest was an 80% drop from last year’s tea party protest.

Then MoeZilla goes on to imagine that the Sacramento tea party folks are trying to stop the free speech of those that oppose them.

But the low turnout is even more ominous when you consider the chilling effect it had on other organizations. According to the city officials, Tea Party organizers reserved all four sides of the capitol building, so no counter-protesters could be issued a permit for the same day. (In a Facebook comment, one Tea Party member had warned that “You may be escorted off the premises,” adding “the police have been put on notice.”) Tea Party organizers even reserved the capitol grounds for the entire day, though their protest wasn’t scheduled to start until noon.

“Ominous.” Now that is funny.

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After more than a decade of sports with no score kept as not to hurt the feelings of the defeated, the banning of Tag and Dodgeball during recess, “Do Something!” state legislatures are now poised to outlaw bullying because young people are too intimidated by Facebook posts and mean text messages.

In the uproar around the suicides of Ms. Prince, 15, and an 11-year-old boy subjected to harassment in nearby Springfield last year, the Massachusetts legislature stepped up work on an anti-bullying law that is now near passage. The law would require school staff members to report suspected incidents and principals to investigate them. It would also demand that schools teach about the dangers of bullying. Forty-one other states have anti-bullying laws of varying strength.

While what happened to Phoebe Prince was truly tragic, what are today’s youth going to do tomorrow should they be in charge during an international crisis with a taunting, foreign enemy? I’m sorry but dealing with bullies is a part of childhood that develops character. How you deal with it determines what kind of person you’ll be.

While in second grade and attending the Blessed Sacrament School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I was the target of the school bully (whose name I won’t mention because he may be a nice person now).

I remember it going around one day that he was going to beat me up after school. It was a terrifying experience as the threat loomed.

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Conservative luminaries led by anti-abortion rights activist Phyllis Schlafly and anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist last Thursday penned a decidedly anti-Net Neutrality open letter to Members of Congress, in which they warned that the new regulations proposed by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) would curb innovation and severely limit the ability of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to prioritize valuable content over otherwise objectionable and obscene material.

“There is no evidence of a market failure to justify the burdensome government regulations some are proposing,” the letter read. “Unfortunately, it appears that a few FCC commissioners lack an understanding of how regulations affect investment.”

Proponents of the FCC’s proposed broadband rules note that the issue of Net Neutrality is one in which conservatives are purportedly split. The Christian Coalition of America, a social conservative advocacy group, endorsed the Left’s overtures at re-regulating the Internet.  Likewise, Gun Owners of America have also voiced support for the controversial policy.

But last week’s letter–whose signatories include the likes of American Family Association President Tim Wildmon, Tom McClusky of the Family Research Council, prominent Catholic Deal Hudson and Mrs. Schlafly–suggest the Right, as a virtually unified whole, has turned a page in the debate over a dynamic Internet, and now is staunchly and almost uniformly opposed to what some critics call “a government takeover of the Internet.”

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The number of jobs in the U.S. is currently 129.7 million.  So to justify the Administration’s current claim of 2.8 million jobs “created or saved” by stimulus, they need to also claim that without that stimulus there would be only 126.9 million jobs.  That’s exactly what they do, displayed as the “baseline projection” level in the graphic below from an April 14, 2010 report:

An inconvenient truth, at least for the Obama Administration, is that once upon a time, in their January 2009 Romer/Bernstein Report they told America that without their stimulus there would be 133.9 million jobs.  That’s right, in order to make it look like their stimulus has “created or saved” 2.8 million jobs, the Obama Administration first had to whack 7 million jobs from their previous estimates.

Here’s the math:

Step 1: How many jobs does the Administration currently claim there would be, without stimulus?

129.7 million Current number of U.S. jobs

-  2.8 million Jobs currently claimed to be “created or saved”

126.9 million Jobs the Administration currently claims there would be without stimulus

Step 2: How does that compare with the number of jobs the Administration used to say there would be without stimulus?

133.9 million January 2009 projection of jobs without stimulus

- 126.9 million Current claim of jobs without stimulus

= 7 million Jobs removed from the Administration “baseline” to justify their latest stimulus job creation claims

Here’s the story problem:

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On March 27, 2010 writer Frank Rich was quoted in the New York Times Op-Ed section The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. Is this true? He then closed his article with Are these politicians so frightened of offending anyone in the Tea Party-Glenn Beck base that they would rather fall silent than call out its extremist elements and their enablers? Many media outlets, including MSNBC, the Washington Post, CNN, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Huffington Post among others are insinuating that there is racism in the Tea Party movement. Take a look for yourself.

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Short answer: no… but then again, we seriously doubt that we’re in any greater danger either.  The new policy is both revocable and subject to review and modification if circumstances so warrant.  The questions we want to explore are the rationale for announcing a new policy in the first place and whether the recent summit of 47 nations to deal with nuclear risks accomplished any positive good.

The argument which is made by the right against the president’s newly announced policy, namely that enemy nations that are in compliance with the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPR) can attack us with non-nuclear weapons of mass destruction with complete impunity from nuclear retaliation seems a bit hysterical. One way or another, any nation that attacks us with biological or chemical weapons should count on a rendezvous with their stone-age ancestors.   On the other hand, the argument from the left, that we have moved the hands of the doomsday clock back several minutes, seems like wishful thinking.  America and the world is not safer… not yet, anyway.

Some of those who have been the biggest critics of our Iraq, Afghanistan and anti-terror policies, and whose main motivation in life seems to be to prove George Bush’s policies were wrong contend that Iran or North Korea may, as a result of the new policy, be incentivized to abandon their plans to build nuclear arsenals and now comply with the nuclear non-proliferation agreement.  This seems more the stuff of Saturday Night Live than serious foreign-policy thinking.

We do not expect that the President will ever answer the phone in the oval office to,.. “Hello, Barack, this is Mahmoud Admadinejad.  Sorry I haven’t responded earlier to your outstretched hand, but your new nuclear policy made me realize that I owe you an apology.”  Or “Hi there Mr. President, Kim Jong-Il calling to let you know that your new policy is so impressive that I, today, personally ordered the dismantling of all our nuclear forces.”

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Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) understands that the Dodd Financial Reform bill they are trying to ram through the Senate is a bailout.  She has publically opposed the legislation.  But that hasn’t stopped the Administration from pressuring her to change her mind.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner will be meeting with Sen. Collins to try to get her to see a different version of reality.

But, the American Enterprise Institute’s Peter Wallison says that not only is the bill a bailout but it would benefit Goldman Sachs”  “That act—paying off the creditors when the government takes over a failing firm—is a bailout. It doesn’t matter that the management lose their jobs, or that the shareholders get nothing. When the creditors are aware that they will get a better deal with the failure of a large company than they will get with a small one that goes the ordinary route to bankruptcy, that is a bailout.”

To top it off, the fees for the Dodd bill’s resolution fund that would pay off a failing firm’s creditors would come not just from banks but from a broad array of Main Street businesses. Stable life, auto and home insurance companies would have to pay into this fund to subsidize the failure of the next high-roller, and the fees they pay would likely be passed on in the premiums their policy holders pay. And the bill’s definition of  “nonbank financial company” is so broad that it could cover manufacturers only tangentially involved in extending credit, such as those that lease equipment to their customers. This would raise prices and cost Main Street jobs.

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I approach the issue of marijuana legalization as an economic conservative and libertarian. It is an estimated $5 billion underground industry in my home state of New York. I say legalize, regulate and tax it to create new revenues so New York’s more regressive income and property taxes an be cut.

When economic recessions decimate state coffers, politicians usually turn to their traditional streams of revenue to replenish their budgets. In other words, they raise taxes and strain the very system that is already overburdened. Currently, New Yorkers carry one of the highest tax burdens in the country, and city and local budgets all over the state are straining for every dollar. It is clear that New York State has reached critical mass in the taxation of its citizenry. New York needs innovation and recent developments in California can serve as a model for our state.

Californians who use marijuana are asking the government to tax and regulate its use as a potential solution to their current budget crisis. New York should follow suit.

I know talk of legalization of pot immediately sets off a clamor among the anti-drug crowd, but their rhetoric is generally exaggerated, erroneous or plain wrong. They are misinformed and the unfounded fears surrounding marijuana use has stuffed our prisons full of nonviolent people and saddled our state with outlandish incarceration costs for decades. The demonization of marijuana must stop. There is a plethora of scientific opinions that debunk marijuana myths, but the true tragedy is that marijuana criminalization has been an epic failure.

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The most dangerous place in D.C. may well be between retiring SEIU president Andy Stern and a microphone, but the next-most-dangerous place may be as a taxpayer paying for his work. Now, in an exit interview with the Washington Post’s respectable liberal blogger Ezra Klein, the ever-controversial Stern has added one more wopper to confuse public dialogue, saying of organized labor: “It is the greatest middle-class, job-creating mechanism that we have ever had in America that doesn’t cost taxpayers a dime.”

Emphasis added, because let’s not kid ourselves: Stern’s statement is technically true enough, if the literal meaning is organized labor costs billions and billions of dimes. And that’s just in the private sector, which reason.tv has addressed admirably:

1. They cost too much. As USA Today recently noted, federal employees make on average almost $8,000 more than their private-sector counterparts. When you add in benefits, the gap spreads to about $30,000. State and local government workers make around the same as private-sector counterparts, but their health and retirement packages mean they make significantly more in the end.

2. We can’t fire them. The private sector has shed positions in response to slackening demand and the economic downturn. That sort of adjustment is painful but necessary, as it allows the economy to adjust to changing circumstances and workers and employers to move into new activities. Because it is guaranteed certain amounts of tax revenue and has a non-market mind-set, the public sector is largely insulated from such forces and keeps or even adds workers despite changed conditions. The result? We keep paying for things that we don’t use, need, or want.

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Liberal pundit Michael Kinsley once defined a political gaffe as an instance of a politician accidentally telling the truth. House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, D-Mass., recently made a gaffe that fits Kinsley’s definition to a tee.

In a debate with Ralph Nader on MSNBC’s “The Ed Show,” in which Nader was accusing Frank of being too timid on the financial regulation bill then moving through the House, Frank responded, “We are trying in every front to increase the role of government in the regulatory area.”  Conservative blogs took note of Frank’s use of the word “every front”, as did Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), and earned a brusque “tsk- tsk” from The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait.

This is an example of “the conservative misinformation feedback loop in action,” Chait exclaimed. Frank was only talking about banking, Chait claimed, and “not confessing to a plan to expand government in every area.”

Actually, in prefacing his comments, Frank moved the topic from Nader’s point about derivatives to the broader issue of how “the right wing took control of government and ruined it” and how it is supposedly benefitting from its “own incompetence.”  But if one still doesn’t want to take this as Frank’s confession of wanting to increase government intervention “in every front,” one need look no further than the bill by Frank that passed the House in December and Chris Dodd’s Senate “financial reform” bill that Democrats are trying to ram through the Senate.

In the debate, Democrats never tire of accusing Republicans of siding with “Wall Street banks.”  But last week Republicans made headway when Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out that the bill $50 billion resolution fund would institutionalize bailouts for big banks, whether these banks failed themselves or acted as creditors to too-big-to-fail institutions.  Even an editorial in the Washington Post stated that “Mr. McConnell is partly right” and that “creditors might fund systemically important firms on artificially advantageous terms, thus enabling them to grow bigger and riskier.”

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