A must read in today’s New York Times: (it happens)

With the Senate’s passage of financial regulation, Congress and the White House have completed 16 months of activity that rival any other since the New Deal in scope or ambition. Like the Reagan Revolution or Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, the new progressive period has the makings of a generational shift in how Washington operates.

First came a stimulus bill that, while aimed mainly at ending a deep recession, also set out to remake the nation’s educational system and vastly expand scientific research. Then President Obama signed a health care bill that was the biggest expansion of the safety net in 40 years. And now Congress is in the final stages of a bill that would tighten Wall Street’s rules and probably shrink its profit margins.

If there is a theme to all this, it has been to try to lift economic growth while also reducing income inequality. Growth in the decade that just ended was the slowest in the post-World War II era, while inequality has been rising for most of the last 35 years.

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Maryland’s intrepid state Delegate Pat McDonough has announced a plan to deal with illegal immigration in Maryland similar to the law recently passed in Arizona. He will introduce this bill in the next legislative session. Maryland’s Montgomery County Gazette issued a predictably critical assessment of the plan, saying McDonough, “never let political reality stand in the way of his crusades,” and declared his proposal dead on arrival before it has even been introduced.

The Gazette response, typical of leftist news media everywhere, displays in microcosm the arrogant myopia that is driving newsrags out of business across this nation. Who in God’s green earth do these people think they are? When and how can any problem be addressed if every controversial proposal is attacked and written off before it is even aired? This is precisely the kind of attitude that gave rise to the Tea Party movement and it is causing a seachange in national politics. The Gazette should take note. Trouble is, liberals are so smug and self-righteous, they can’t see reality even when it is dangled in front of their noses.

Unfortunately, it is the rest of us who pay for their self-serving, destructive polices, and we are frankly fed up. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer deserves credit for braving the denizens of political correctness to enact the Arizona bill. She has set off a chain reaction that has already seen similar legislation proposed in at least nine other states.

Before they start criticizing the Arizona law, which mirrors federal law – not that such irony would ever stop them –  Obama and the Democrats should read the sixteen page bill. Or maybe they should learn why it is the federal government’s failure that prompted passage of the law in the first place. The Montgomery County Gazette got exactly one sentence correct in their diatribe against McDonough when they said, “The federal government basically has abdicated its would-be, should-be role.”

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Today the leading Austrian economic think tank, the Ludwig von Mises Institute held a conference at the University Club in Manhattan in which Marc Faber, famed contrarian investor and publisher of the “Gloom, Boom and Doom Report” gave his perspective on the financial crisis and his outlook for the future.

Below are his main points and entertaining quotes:

• Central banks will never tighten monetary policy again, merely print, print, print
• Bubbles used to be concentrated in 1 sector or region in the 19th century, but off of the gold standard this concentration has ended
• “The lifetime achievement of Greenspan and Bernanke is really that they created a bubble in everything…everywhere.”
• “Central banks love to see asset prices go up,” and their policy reflects their desperation to perpetuate this
• US housing bubble that Greenspan could not spot (even though he has recently spotted bubbles in Asia) stands in stark contrast to that of Hong Kong in 1997, where prices fell by 70%, yet none of the major developers went bankrupt; this was a result of a system not built on excessive debt like that of the US
• “You have to ask what they were smoking at the Federal Reserve,” during the housing bubble, as prices were increasing by 18% annually when interest rates started to steadily rise in 2004
• Over the last couple of years, when the gross increase in public debt has exceeded the gross decrease in private debt, markets have risen, whereas when private debt growth has outpaced public debt growth, markets have tanked
• The next 3-5 years will be highly volatile

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From the Honolulu Advertiser:

Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou has won the special election in urban Honolulu’s 1st Congressional District, the first Republican sent to Washington, D.C., to represent the Islands in two decades.

According to the state Office of Elections, Djou leads with 39.5 percent of the vote, followed by 30.8 percent for state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa and 27.6 percent for former congressman Ed Case. The remaining 11 other candidates attracted the rest of the vote.

The results are for ballots mailed in or dropped off through Friday and a portion of ballots received today, accounting for most of the votes cast in the winner-take-all special election. The Office of Elections plans to release a final count later tonight.

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From today’s Washington Post:

Democrats are bracing for the loss of a House seat Saturday in President Obama’s birthplace of Hawaii, where a special election in a heavily Democratic district has inflamed tensions within the party.

Recently, I reported here on the environmentalists’ trumped-up scare campaign targeting atrazine, a valuable, widely used agricultural herbicide. I quoted a Wall Street Journal editorial that observed, “The environmental lobby also figures that if it can take down atrazine with its long record of clean health, it can get the EPA to prohibit anything.”

In fact, the attack on atrazine is just part of the total war against man-made chemicals that is waged today by environmentalists inside and outside of government.

On May 6, the President’s Cancer Panel fired the latest salvo in this battle, in the form of its annual report, Reducing Environmental Cancer Risk: What We Can Do Now. The report follows in the scare-mongering tradition established by the Natural Resources Defense Council, a major green lobby. As I noted earlier, the NRDC’s 1989 pesticide report—citing bogus rodent experiments—fomented a nationwide panic over the chemical alar, abetted by media sympathizers. Last year, the group issued a similar faux “study” to gin up alarm over atrazine.

The presidential panel’s report similarly relies on “junk science” to reach alarmist conclusions, and was pre-released to reliably green journalists to maximize its visibility. Columnist Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times was one. In “New Alarm Bells About Chemicals and Cancer,” Kristof proclaimed that “the mission control of scientific and medical thinking, the President’s Cancer Panel” was “poised to join ranks with the organic food movement and declare: chemicals threaten our bodies.” Reuters likewise reported the story under the scary title, “Americans ‘Bombarded’ with Cancer Sources: Report.”

Yet, jarringly, the first sentence in the report’s cover letter to President Obama begins: “Though overall cancer incidence and mortality have continued to decline in recent years . . .”

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Last week, I published a column that details the disgraceful silence of the Obama Administration over the election of Iran to the UN women’s rights commission.

This week, I’m happy to update this story with a positive development — Representative Thaddeus McCotter (R-MI) introduced House Resolution 1371, “Condemning the selection of the Government of Iran to serve on the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.”  The original Cosponsors of this measure represent a diverse, bipartisan group including Rep. Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Rep. Burton (R-IN), Rep. Campbell (R-CA), Rep. McCaul (R-TX), Rep. Inglis (R-SC), and Rep. Polis (D-CO).

On April 28, Iran was handed a seat on the UN Commission on the Status of Women despite efforts by Iranian “gender-equality activists” and supporters to block this appointment.  The US Ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, made no attempts to thwart Iran’s bid for a seat on this committee and on the day of the election, she did not even bother to show up for the meeting.  Despite public outcry, the Obama Administration still fails to publicly condemn the appointment of Iran to the UN Commission on the Status of Women.

Several members of Congress, however, have taken the lead in voicing the concerns of the American people.

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In an interesting development the House Armed Services Committee unanimously approved legislation that would block Gitmo, Illinois from coming to fruition. In fact, they’ve blocked any Gitmo terrorist from being transferred anywhere into the interior of the USA. This is a blow to Obama’s desires to shut Gitmo down and to bring terrorists to a prison near you.

Wednesday the committee approved a defense bill for 2011 that includes language to prevent moving detainees into any US facility inside our borders and also blocked any funding to even study the possibility.

The bill does, however, state that the Secretary of Defense must submit to Congress a full report that “adequately justifies” any such proposal in the future which seems to signal that they haven’t shut the door on the possibility of a later opening of a detainee facility inside US borders.

This would appear to be a case of Congress telling the president that he overstepped his position when he announced that he had the power to transfer terrorists to the states.

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Whittaker Chambers had a secret. He had worked in the American Communist underground for most of the 1930s. His break from that underground had been hazardous; he hid his family for quite some time before surfacing. When he did, his unique writing talent earned him a place at Time magazine, where he eventually rose to be one of its senior editors.

Whittaker Chambers at His Desk at Time Magazine

In 1939, with the outbreak of WWII, Chambers decided he needed to inform the FDR administration of what he knew about those currently working in the underground. Through an intermediary, he obtained an interview with Adolf Berle, the Assistant Secretary of State in charge of security. During his evening with Berle, Chambers disclosed a long list of individuals who could be threats to the country during a war that he sensed the U.S. would eventually have to enter.

Berle seemed alarmed by the revelations. Chambers was relieved that now the truth would come out. Yet when Berle took this information to FDR, he was rudely dismissed—FDR didn’t care.

When Chambers finally realized the administration was apathetic to the traitors in its midst, he had to reassess what he knew of FDR and his policies.  In his classic autobiography, Witness, he describes how this rebuff affected him:

And with astonishment I took my first hard look at the New Deal. . . . All the New Dealers I had known were Communists or near-Communists. None of them took the New Deal seriously as an end in itself. They regarded it as an instrument for gaining their own revolutionary ends. I myself thought of the New Deal as a reform movement that, in social and labor legislation, was belatedly bringing the United States abreast of Britain or Scandinavia.

What shocked Chambers was that he recognized for the first time that the New Deal was far more than a reform movement. It was ”a genuine revolution, whose deepest purpose was not simply reform within existing traditions, but a basic change in the social, and, above all, the power relationships within the nation.”

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We’ve always known that there’s no equivocation a like leftist’s equivocation.  But this one has raised the bar (or do I mean lowered?).

Megyn Kelly interviewed Erica Payne on the thug-like tactics of SEIU this past Sunday as hundreds of them stormed the front door of Bank of America executive Greg Baer’s home.  Payne barely gets out a perfunctory condemnation of the mob tactics before she launched into a hilarious attempt at blaming the Tea Party activists as the root of the problem:

Yes, you saw right.  This is a laughable attempt at equating the organized and approved mob scene sponsored by the SEIU with one lone nut who posted a ridiculous and offensive suggestion on his blog in the wake of the health care vote.

And as she uses one side of her mouth to pretend to condemn this sort of behavior, she quickly uses the other side to throw more gasoline on the fire with class-warfare rhetorical talking points such as “300 billion dollars in bonuses”, “600 million dollars on lobbyists”, “They (the bankers) walk around in a bubble”.

Right up to the end she continues to dismiss the SEIU mob and tries to point back at the lone blogger who identifies himself with the Tea Party movement.  According to her she just wants to “make sure we realize we have problems on both sides of the political aisle”.

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Today, in 1964, President Lyndon Johnson outlined his “Great Society” program in a speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. Boy, did it take in that state. Judging by how things have turned out there, we’re confident Michiganders wished he’d given that speech elsewhere.

The incredible reporting by my colleagues at Big Government and Big Journalism on the shameful demonstration of intimidation by SEIU President Mary Kay Henry and her purple-shirted thugs this past Sunday in Washington DC has brought to light so many revelations exposing the corrupt nature of this union and their bought and paid-for allies.

SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, protesting Bank of America, her union's biggest creditor

But one over-riding story has yet to be discussed.  And to me, it is the obvious one:  What have we come to when these kind of bullying tactics are allowed to occur in our society?

The plan to invade the neighborhood and storm the front door of the private residence of a bank executive to shame them or intimidate them into changing the bank’s policy must be denounced from all sides of the political spectrum.  What kind of America do these people want?

Do they really want to encourage this kind of disturbance of the peace and sanctity of an individual’s home merely as a means to a political end?  Is this a road we as a society are willing to go down?

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Colorado’s 9News has the latest on ACORN:

Dan Bishop figured that when scandal-plagued ACORN went out of business it would stop deducting donations from his bank account. He was wrong.

“They supposedly shut down several months ago,” Bishop said. “I just assumed they would stop taking money.”

9Wants to Know has learned donations are still being collected for ACORN Colorado, the local branch of the liberal advocacy group.

Bishop says he signed up for automatic monthly payments several years ago, payments that continued being withdrawn after ACORN’s collapse.
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Yesterday, Scott Brown caved, and the Senate passed its “financial reform.” That story is at the top of every news web site.

But what the establishment media didn’t tell you – unless you waded through the details in a select few news articles or saw this fairly balanced short article in the Washington Post – is that Wednesday evening,  hours after the first cloture vote failed and hours after  I informed BigGovernment.com readers about an effort by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), to narrow the scope of what I have been calling the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s A Bank Bill, Democrats blinked and Vitter’s amendment passed without objection by voice vote.

Vitter’s amendment to the so-called “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” gives a precise meaning to the term “financial company” – changing the definition from Dodd’s original language of “substantially engaged in activities in the United States that are financial in nature” to that of the much stricter “predominantly engaged.” And his amendment precisely defines “predominantly engaged” as a business that makes no less than 85 percent of its revenue from financial activities.

As a result of Vitter’s measure that passed during the brief 24-hour period of most of the GOP standing together in opposition (along with Democrats Maria Cantwell and Russ Feingold for their own reasons), a very important change was made.

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In this week’s edition of of Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, we’re talking about the fall of the Euro, the unemployment situation, and how Wall Street gamed financial reform on Capitol Hill. We’re brought to you as always by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com.

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You can subscribe to the podcast by following the links above, and if you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

TNL: The Trichet Put and EuroTarp
TNL: Republicans and the Volcker Rule
Pethokoukis: Wall Street Scores a Win on Finreg
Paul Ryan: Wall Street Reform Just More Crony Capitalism
TNL: Politics of False Promise: New Labour and Barack Obama

A comment made by a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) staffer at last week’s NCTA 2010 Cable Show is attracting attention of the wrong sort. As the debate surrounding net neutrality, and alleged FCC moves to institute it by the back door, continues, Reason’s Peter Suderman notes that Jennifer Schneider, a legal adviser to FCC Commissioner Michael Copps, let slip last week a remark that her boss “would love to have jurisdiction over everything.”

The slip was followed by laughter and so arguably connoted an attempt at political humor. However, some involved in the battle over net neutrality agree that it could also be fairly seen as a “Kinsley gaffe,” in which the speaker accidentally tells the truth. According to observers, Copps is a major proponent of net neutrality regulation, and indeed, even additional “clean-up” remarks made by Schneider suggest that he sees Internet regulation as an eventuality. Per Schneider, “… if/when things move along and there are issues, which I can’t imagine happening anytime soon, someone will have to step in and I guess we’ll have to wait and see if [it's] the FCC or some other agency or who knows…”

Schneider’s comments are likely to add to the concern already felt by opponents of net neutrality, which include Internet Service Providers, one prominent union, minority and civil rights groups, and elected Democrats at both the state and federal level.

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Article I, section 2, of the Constitution requires the populations of the various states to be enumerated every 10 years. The first such census was conducted in 1790; its main purpose was to apportion seats in the House of Representatives among the original 13 states.

The Founders scarcely could have foreseen the stunningly costly and politically sensitive undertaking the census now has become.

There is much at stake. Census figures will be used to shift representation in Congress from states where populations have declined since 2000 to those where they have grown. By 2012, every state also will have redrawn its own legislative district boundaries to reflect recent population trends.

Moreover, the 2010 headcount will determine how every state and community fares over the next decade when federal funds are allocated for a host of social programs, including health care and job training; highway, bridge and tunnel construction; public education; and much else. The jackpot of taxpayer-financed loot to be doled out based on census results now amounts to about $400 billion. With federal spending reeling out of control, billions more likely will be up for grabs.

How much will it cost to count noses this year? No one really knows. The Census Bureau began planning for 2010 immediately after 2000. It is not yet fully ready. Preparations for 2010 have been plagued by fraud, cost-overruns and failures of computer hardware and software.

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U.S and world stock markets are slumping badly as intensified systemic risks from the Greek and European debt-default contagion continue to spread. Disciplinarian markets of stocks, bonds, gold, and currencies are signaling the inadequacy of European Union rescue plans and the global fear that economic recovery will be blunted.

Europe is the main source of the current upheaval. Specifically, the biggest issue right now is short-term funding. Key funding risk indicators, such as LIBOR and various short-term swap spreads, are showing credit and liquidity stress in Europe. Interbank funding looks increasingly sloppy and worrisome. These are dangerous market signals.

The repo market for bank-to-bank loans was the source of the credit freeze back in the fall of 2008. And while today’s funding risks are not even remotely as bad as they were back then, liquidity stresses seem to worsen with the passing of each day. If these funding problems keep worsening, along with stock markets that keep declining, all hell will break loose. Another meltdown is possible.

So I have a thought.

In the autumn of 2008, when financing markets completely froze up during the very worst of the credit meltdown, the FDIC guaranteed all bank debt, from 30 days out to 30 years. In addition, the Fed and Treasury essentially guaranteed overnight lending in the repo market and the commercial-paper market for bank debt. It worked.

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Writing for Fortune.com, Nina Easton relays her first-hand account of the uncivil disobedience and “mob”tactics exhibited by SEIU and the National People’s Action (NPA), as they terrorized a teenage child in his own home.

Baer’s teenage son Jack — alone in the house — locked himself in the bathroom. “When are they going to leave?” Jack pleaded when I called to check on him.

Liberty Chick has covered this SEIU-NPA attack-action here, and Huffington Post wrote a disgusting whitewash of the mob’s behavior:

Passersby and dogwalkers smiled at the sight of people gathered all over Baer’s lawn and blocking the road.

SEIU and NPA also loudly stormed into bank buildings, occupying and shutting down their lobbies.  How much would you like being in one of those bank lobbies during an SEIU-NPA Progressive Democrat hijacking of the property? How is anyone supposed to know that the loud angry mob coming through the front door isn’t there to rob it, or worse yet, burn it down?

Just an aside -  isn’t it against Federal law to purposely shut down the normal operation of Federally insured banking institutions? Or is that sort of thing being encouraged now?

This is all a part of an ongoing campaign which SEIU and NPA have titled “Showdown In America.”

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