Today, in 1790, Ben Franklin died. It was a substantial life.

Republicans would benefit tremendously from appreciating the heritage of our Grand Old Party, founded in 1854 to oppose the Democrats’ pro-slavery, anti-freedom agenda.

As they campaign for the mid-term elections, Republicans should ignore the lefty media spin and recognize that they hold the moral high ground.  From the first chapter of Back to Basics for the Republican Party: “How can we expect to convince voters to place their confidence in us when we lack confidence in our own heritage.”

Today, the nation’s capital celebrates Emancipation Day.  In his proclamation, the Democrat mayor, Adrian Fenty, omits something very important: the holiday commemorates the Republican Party’s abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.  That’s right, the Republican Party freed the slaves in DC.  And yes, the Democratic Party opposed freeing the slaves in DC – a fact which Democrats today dare not mention.

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Health insurance company CEOs will apparently be spared the public thrashing planned for April 21 by House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-Hollywood). Waxman notified committee members of the cancellation in a memo released Wednesday.

The memo implies that the companies which had been asked to appear – Verizon, Caterpillar, AT&T and Deere & Co. – were being less critical of the new healthcare law, but there is nothing to support that implication.

The memo says that, “…several companies and their representatives expressed the view that the new law could have beneficial impacts on large employers if implemented properly.”  But the memo appears to back away from the accusatory letters and press releases which preceded it.

The hearing – the sort of public lashing that the Energy and Commerce Committee became famous for under Waxman’s predecessor, John Dingell (D-Mi) – was called because Waxman wanted to bash the companies for making (legally-required) financial disclosures of huge expected losses to be incurred due to Obamacare. (Caterpillar alone expected to lose $100 million in 2010, according to its financial filings).

In his demand letter, Waxman had demanded that the companies produce an enormous quantity of potentially proprietary (and some legally-privileged) documents.  This demand was apparently canceled along with the hearing.

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Democrats’ collective fixation on Frank Luntz’s memo on Financial Reform misses the point entirely but it is very telling.

The now famous Luntz memo makes strategic recommendations based on an aggregation of voters’ responses to being informed about various portions of the Dodd Blank Check Bailout bill in factual, common sense, simple language.  The public spoke and Luntz recorded it. He didn’t make up the fact that there is a $4 trillion dollar bailout in the bill. Its right there in black and white.

But what has Democrats completely possessed is that what the public said is inconvenient to their Orwellian plan to dupe America into believing that up is down, black is white and that the Dodd bill will end “too big to fail”, contains no new bailouts and will possibly save endangered animals.

Their plan is a two step process: First, use oblique language about “protecting consumers” and “ending too big to fail” to convince the public that the Dodd bill is somehow “financial reform”. Then, bully Senate Republicans into voting for Dodd’s government takeover bill by portraying them as against said “financial reform.”

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At some point in the past few weeks, Illinois Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias was sitting in his million-dollar Chicago condo wondering how he could possibly stop the death spiral of his campaign for the United States Senate.

It had all seemed so perfect just a few months ago—The dashing and urbane Alexi had burst on the political scene only four years ago spending millions of his parents money to win statewide office in his very first foray into politics.  He shot hoops with his role model and political patron, Barak Obama.  He had wealth, charisma, connections and unbridled ambition and a solidly blue state in which to make all his dreams come true.

But things started to go poorly from the start.  His entry into the race for his idol’s Senate seat was met with a collective wince from Democrats.  From the White House on down, political operatives made overtures to nearly every possible alternative candidate short of Rod Blagojevich.  State Attorney General Lisa Madigan, Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart, Chris Kennedy, and Dem mandarin Bill Daley are just the alternatives that readily come to mind.  Even with all these A-listers taking a pass, Alexi still drew four primary opponents.  The scuttlebutt was that Democrat insiders felt Alexi lacked depth and that, coupled with troubles at his family’s Broadway Bank, he would be a very weak candidate.

He spent a ton of cash to eke out a primary win.  But 61% of Democrats wanted someone else to be the nominee.  Meanwhile, moderate GOP Congressman Mark Kirk cruised with nearly 60% of the Republican primary vote against six challengers.  Since then, things have gotten progressively worse for Alexi.

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LEFTIST PROTESTERS SUSPECTED IN BRUTAL BEATING OF GOP OFFICIAL & HER BOYFRIEND!

The GOP official was savagely attacked after she left the Southern Republican Leadership Dinner last Friday night.

Allee Butsch 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)

NOLA.com is reporting:

A report on Yahoo! News says an attack last Friday that left Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaign finance director with a broken leg and her boyfriend with a concussion and broken nose may have been politically motivated.

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We Bostonians fancy ourselves a sophisticated, intelligent type of folk, even if it manifests itself in a quirky local vernacular, foul-mouthed self-righteousness and a self-absorbed elitism built upon the glory days of 1775, back when we ruled the school.

New Englanders, for example, boast t-shirts and bumper stickers which tell us that the “Yankees suck” — despite the 27 World Series rings for the Bronx Bombers and the seven for the Red Sox that would seem to indicate that we, in fact, are the ones who suck.

We also call Boston The Hub, as in the Hub of the Universe. That’s right. Our tiny little city’s got megalomania issues … which probably explains why 90 percent of  diversity-loving voters in Brookline and Cambridge pulled a lever for Obama in November 2008. No Bostonian worth his chowder, by the way, has ever called the city Beantown.

The intellectual elitism is so profound here that the average plumber in Boston — and I come from a long, proud line of Local 12 guys — thinks that he’s wicked smaht, smahtah even than a brain surgeon from Alabama. It’s just the way we’re raised — snobbish old blue-blood Brahminism adopted by everyone from Boston’s nouveau riche to the old Irish-Catholic working class.

So the arrival of Sarah Palin in Boston Wednesday was like a visit by an alien being from the planet of idiots in the eyes of the local so-called intelligentsia.

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As long as the Democrats continue to control Congress, we’ll have to endure an endless procession of initiatives for the federal government to take over industry after industry. Health insurance and college loans went under federal hegemony with passage of a single bill, known as “ObamaCare.”

Now, a new bill, referred to by the name of its chief sponsor, the ethically challenged Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut, aims to consolidate a federal takeover of the nation’s entire network of financial institutions.

As Peter Wallison of the American Enterprise Institute notes:

Does the bill, as [Republican Senate leader Mitch] McConnell said, “institutionalize too big to fail?” Of course. There can’t be any reasonable doubt about this. The bill authorizes the Fed to regulate all non-bank financial institutions that are “systemically important” or might cause instability in the U.S. financial system if they failed. . . .

The market will see immediately that the government has created Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs in every sector of the financial system where these large companies are designated for Fed regulation, including insurance companies, hedge funds, finance companies, bank holding companies, securities firms, and any other kind of financial institution the government wants to regulate. Since these firms will be too big to fail, they will be seen in the market—as Fannie and Freddie were seen—as ultimately backed by the government and thus safer firms to lend to than small firms that are not government backed. This will permanently distort the financial market, favoring large companies over small ones, and eventually force a consolidation of each market where these firms exist into a few large competitors operating under the benign supervision of the government.

In other words, this is another huge step toward fascistic corporatism, completing a de facto government takeover of today’s nominally “private” financial firms. These corporations would be reduced to the status of politically managed public utilities.

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On Wednesday, I testified before the Congress about the biggest Rip-Off of the century.  And I can’t say that anyone really cared.

I was arguing that the deceptive  accounting techniques used by  the federal government–techniques that would send anyone to jail in the private sector– is hiding the fact that $4 trillion (more than the federal government spends in a year) is unaccounted for. Well, it’s accounted for but as if the money still exists, when in fact, it has been gone for a while. And guess who will be stuck with the tab?

Okay, now bear with me because it’s a little geeky. However, I promise that this is a story worth reading  about (if you like sickening stories that is).

Remember Al Gore’s lock box or FDR’s bank-account-with-your-name-on-it? Yes, the lock box in which your payroll taxes were supposed to go to produce interests until you can get it back in the form Social Security and Medicare payments when you are old and sick. Well, as it turns out, the federal government had the key of that lock box and helped itself with the $4 trillion accumulated to pay for its daily consumption of wars, Prescription Drug Bill, Freddie and Fannie and ACORN and else.

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Back in 2008, the SEIU took out a $90-plus million loan to fund its campaign activities, most notably, to elect Barack Obama president of the United States.

Since that time, the union has been incurring huge interest fees.  Consider these, just from 2009:

A couple weeks ago, I explained that SEIU is preparing a major offensive against Bank of America, its largest creditor.  The likely reason is to either pressure the bank into forgiving some of the huge principle on the loan or to negotiate a more favorable interest rate.

When the union spends nearly $4 million in interest payments alone, it’s no wonder it’s doing whatever it can to get out from under that burden.

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Leftist and racist infiltrators were forced to flee at tea party rallies in St. Louis, San Francisco, Oceanside and Greensboro.

Patriots -4 Alinsky Thugs -0

In St. Louis last night local patriots drove this racist infiltrator with Nazi symbols on his shirt from the rally:

The sign pointing down at the white supremist plant was from the Big Government tool kit. It came in handy. The infiltrator scurried off after he was confronted by several patriots including local blogger Adam Sharp who got up in his face. “Just know that you’re not going to come here and pretend that you’re with us.” Adam told the plant. Adam was fearless. The hater left shortly after the confrontation.

Adam’s parting words… “GO HOME NAZI.”

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The activity surrounding the controversial Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA) in the financial reform legislation is really picking up these days.  But many Americans would never know it.  It seems Democrats may have learned something from the experience of the health care bill after all.  In their efforts to avert a repeat disaster of losing control of the message, they appear to be taking every step necessary to ensure that the public engages as little as possible in this debate.

But I assure you, this is a debate that the American public should engage in, pronto.

Because behind the scenes, certain lobbyists are quietly but aggressively scurrying about, pushing hard for the passage of the CFPA in a power grab by the Executive Branch that would dwarf the Health Care Reform bill and the Patriot Act.  And with the passage of the proposed CFPA, one man in particular with a history tied to some of the deepest tentacles in the financial crisis – and to the Community Reinvestment Act changes of 1995 – would gain the power to selectively manipulate the entire landscape of the financial, small business and housing markets.

Last week, we reintroduced you to an early trigger in the financial crisis, with good reason. In “Death by Senator: As Financial Reform Looms, We Revisit IndyMac,” we revisited the role that Senator Chuck Schumer’s (D-NY) very public letter played in the fall of one financial institution.  As I ended that piece, I teased that there was more to the story that would soon follow.

So, let’s pick up from June 30, 2008.

Merely days after the now infamous Schumer letter triggered a run on the bank that would total over $1.3 billion, this lengthy and scathing report was released to the public:

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The “Tea Party Crashers“, bless their hearts, think that if they publicly announce they are going to infiltrate tea party rallies with outrageous signs they will be able to…we don’t know…make people like ObamaCare? Convince people to pay more in taxes? It is all very confusing, but the leftist mind has never suffered from an overabundance of clarity. Well, the good people of the Central Texas 9-12 Project know exactly how to handle these “crashers”. Consider yourselves advised.

Like a good peasant, I have already filed an extension, so I am at least temporarily compliant with the friendly people at the IRS. But since it is tax day, perhaps a slight bit of criticism of the tax code is warranted. I have already posted on Biggovernment.com my video on the flat tax and warned about the risks of adding a value-added tax on top of the income tax in another video. I also posted a very successful video narrated by a former Cato intern about the harsh compliance costs of the internal revenue code.

So now it is time for some jealousy. There are more than 25 jurisdictions around the world that have flat tax systems and do not face the horror and anxiety of complicated tax systems. This is a remarkable change compared to 20 years ago, when there were less than five jurisdictions with simple and fair tax regimes. Some of these flat taxes, such as the ones in Hong Kong, Estonia, and Slovakia, are very close to the theoretical ideal and are great role models for other nations. Here is a video looking at this global flat tax revolution.

A few caveats are worth mentioning. Iceland no longer has a flat tax. After the financial collapse, a leftist government was elected that has reinstated a discriminatory rate structure. This is unfortunate, but I am not too upset since I was never comfortable defending a flat tax with a punitive tax rate higher than the highest tax rate in the American tax code.

Also, a flat tax is better than a so-called progressive tax, but it is not a silver bullet for economic growth. There are many factors that determine whether a nation is prosperous. As the video explains, Ukraine has a flat tax, but it is hardly an economic powerhouse since almost all other government policies are misguided. Sustained and rapid economic growth requires that politicians implement good (or at least decent) policy in a wide range of areas.

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Some people may not abhor Planned Parenthood for its past and present racism and abortion profiteering.  Others may shrug at its systemic, criminal avoidance of statutory rape laws, and tawdry “sexual education” guides aimed at teenagers.  But perhaps even some of the group’s most ardent defenders will recoil from the latest addition to the odious outfit’s ongoing carnival of moral degradation.

The following CNS News report speaks for itself (emphasis added):

In a guide for young people published by the International Planned Parenthood Federation, the organization says it opposes laws that make it a crime for people not to tell sexual partners they have HIV. The IPPF’s “Healthy, Happy and Hot” guide also tells young people who have the virus that they have a right to “fun, happy and sexually fulfilling lives.”

“…Some countries have laws that say people living with HIV must tell their sexual partner(s) about their status before having sex, even if they use condoms or only engage in sexual activity with a low risk of giving HIV to someone else,” the guide states. “These laws violate the rights of people living with HIV by forcing them to disclose or face the possibility of criminal charges.”

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This Tax Day I’m sure we’ll all raise a glass to our friends at the IRS.

After all, their ranks are only growing. While the private sector is still struggling, with unemployment hovering just under 10 percent and real unemployment (including those who have quit looking for work) estimated at over 16 percent, this is a boom time for hiring at the IRS. Come to think of it, it’s always a boom time for government hiring in general.

All the tax increases in the health care takeover legislation – more than $500 billion – and the new enforcement mechanisms required to make sure every American is purchasing health insurance mean thousands upon thousands of new IRS employees.

But there’s more on the tax front. Almost another $1 trillion in tax increases are heading our way on December 31, 2010, when the Bush tax cuts expire. I don’t think Americans are ready for this massive tax hike. They’ve forgotten it’s coming. They’re still having trouble finding new jobs, or getting their mortgages in order. They’re not ready for higher capital gains taxes, a return of the death tax, and a tax penalty slapped on married filers.

And with President Obama and Speaker Pelosi still looking to “spread the wealth around” as part of their radical liberal agenda, we’re looking at additional tax threats in coming months. First, there’s the cherished Holy Grail of Al Gore’s nutty environmental movement: cap-and-trade, with its crippling new energy taxes.

Gas is already headed back toward $4 a gallon, but the environmental movement and President Obama want to take us to European levels with $6- or $7-a-gallon gas. I was in Copenhagen for the U.N. “Climate Change” conference last December, and we shot a video at a local gas station where gas was the equivalent of $7.50 per gallon because of their cap-and-trade energy tax.

Now prominent economic names like Paul Volcker, a former Federal Reserve chairman, are getting behind the idea of a Value-Added Tax (VAT). It’s grossly misnamed, because it doesn’t add value to anything you buy – it only adds cost. How many new IRS workers would we need to implement and enforce a new tax like the VAT that would hit every good produced at every step of the production process? I shudder to imagine.

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Obamacare has become a TEA Party issue, and that’s a good thing for the TEA Partiers, and all freedom-loving Americans.

At the April 15 TEA Party gathering here in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, speakers will include a hopeful candidate for Congress, a pastor, and even a law enforcement official.  What really caught my eye, though, was the announcement beforehand that “a local orthopedic surgeon will address the recently passed health care  legislation.”  This is hardly an isolated incident.

Think about it — the TEA Party is all about protesting massive, out of control government spending, and the excessive taxation that is necessary to support it.  Obamacare has been largely debated as healthcare reform.  Why should TEA Partiers care about healthcare reform?  You may think that the TEA Party is branching out into more areas than the core issue that has made it such a huge and ever-growing success.  You may find this risky and perhaps alarming.  Let me disabuse you of that notion, and assure you that Obamacare was destined to be a core TEA Party issue from the very beginning.

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Pump this up, please:

And I live in Canada.

The reason I’m here is that I saw such American arrogance being born in the Clinton Administration with Janet Reno’s assaults upon violence on television.

They were as ominously totalitarian as her assaults upon Waco.

When I knew I was losing my battle with the Clinton Administration, I went North.

Now I watch with equal helplessness as Fox News, Sarah Palin, Paul Ryan and the Tea Partiers raise a similar hue and cry against Obama.

All will be for naught as long as Roe v Wade still stands on the books.

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