By now, readers of BigGovernment.com know that that the Democrats “Wall Street Bank” bill, which may get a final vote as early as this week, will reach far beyond Wall Street and ensnare businesses not typically thought of as “banks.” Stories here by this author and others have laid bare provisions of the Obama-Dodd-Frank-Everything’s-A-Bank bill that broadly define a “financial company” as any business “substantially engaged” or “significantly engaged”  in financial activities. And if your business happens to fall in such a category, it could be subject to a bailout “assessment” tax to bail out a high rolling financial firm, intrusive regulation by a banking agency or the new Bureau of Consumer Financial Protection, or even outright nationalization if the troika of the Federal Reserve, Treasury Secretary, and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation decide your firm is a threat to “financial stability.”

Trouble is, though its audience is growing by leaps and bounds every day, this site is still at the point in which not every American relies on it for essential political info. And because Republicans have done a mediocre job of explaining how far this bill would reach, and the establishment media largely has no interest in explaining these facts, supporters of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd’s “Restoring American Financial Stability Act” have been able to get away with saying, “If you’re against this bill, you’re against reform of Wall Street.”

Or at least, that was the case until a couple days ago. That’s when Sen. David Vitter (R-La.) introduced an amendment with a straightforward message: A bill that claims to be about fostering transparency on Wall Street should itself be transparent in its objective and not sneak regulation on Main Street manufacturers and retailers.  Call it (and I just did) the Not-Everything’s-A-Bank Amendment.

Vitter has distinguished himself with his dedicated efforts in fighting for real financial reform.  He co-sponsored with self-proclaimed (but not necessarily sole) Senate socialist Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.)a bipartisan amendment similar to the measure in the House bill to have the Government Accountability Office audit the Federal Reserve. When Sanders and others went for the Obama administration”compromise” of a one-time audit of a limited part of the Fed’s operation, Vitter carried the flag of Fed transparency.

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When New Jersey teachers union members refused to make room for students in a legislative committee hearing, the chairman took the meeting to the students.

Approximately 1,500 New Jersey schoolchildren and school choice supporters witnessed democracy in action on Thursday, May 13, when they attended a rally at the state capitol to support a private school choice bill under debate in the state Senate.  The rally was set to support S1872, legislation that would establish a five-year scholarship tax credit pilot program for students in failing schools, which was heard by the Senate Economic Growth Committee that day.

When State Senator Ray Lesniak (D-Union), chairman of the committee and longtime supporter of school choice, prepared to call the committee to order, he noted that all of the seats had been taken by New Jersey Education Association (NJEA) members.

The chairman requested that half of the seats be made available for the children who supported the school choice bill.  The union members refused to offer the children any seats.  (

So, the senators’ desks were moved, and Chairman Lesniak took the committee hearing outside:

“The NJEA and their supporters packed the room.  I asked them to allow for fifty percent of supporters of the legislation in the room or else I was going to have them take the meeting outside so that everybody can see it.  They refused to leave the room, so we’re going to have the committee meeting right here.  Outside.”

In the end, the committee agreed that if they could meet outside of the government-assigned committee room – and instead outside, in the light of sunshine and in the view of taxpayers – students in failing schools should have the same flexibility to find a better venue that meets their needs.

The committee unanimously passed the legislation.

If enacted, the pilot program could fund up to $24 million in scholarships for up to 4,000 children the first year. After five years, up to 20,000 children would receive $120 million in scholarships. Scholarship funds would come from corporate contributions, for which the corporations would receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit.  The full Senate must approve the measure before it advances to the state Assembly.

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Newt Gingrich is among those who have noted a serious chink in the protective armor the Obama administration and Elena Kagan’s other defenders have tried to throw up around her Supreme Court nomination.  The vulnerability has taken on increased importance insofar as it involves one of the few concrete positions or actions taken by the nominee in a long career almost completely bereft of written or spoken positions that shed light on her judgment and potential judicial philosophy.

It turns out that, at the very moment Ms. Kagan was pushing aggressively to remove military recruiters from the Harvard Law School campus during her tenure as its dean, she was very supportive of having what amounted to Saudi recruiters ensconced there for the purpose of enlisting some of the nation’s finest young lawyers to work for the industry known as Shariah-Compliant Finance (SCF).

The first insight this record suggests is that Ms. Kagan’s true motivation in barring the armed forces was, indeed, an animus towards the military, rather than concern about its supposed mistreatment of homosexuals.  After all, the theo-political-military-legal code that authoritative Islam calls “Shariah” and that is the law of the land in Saudi Arabia is infinitely more homophobic than the Pentagon’s efforts to enforce the U.S. statute that prohibits avowed gays and lesbians from serving in uniform.  The former requires the murder of homosexuals; the latter simply kept them out of the ranks.

Ms. Kagan’s troubling tolerance of Shariah would, of course, have vastly more far-reaching implications should she reach the Supreme Court.  Consider several examples of her direct and indirect role in its insinuation into key U.S. institutions – several of which could be matters upon which the Court may have to rule:

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During recessions, people lose their jobs,see their salaries reduced or frozen and find that life is harder than it used to be. Well, that’s if you work for the private sector. As I am mentioned here, since the beginning of the recession, the private sector have lost many jobs while the public sector managed to gain some. Also, data shows federal workers earned more money for occupations that exist both in government and the private sector, and that’s before  the value of health, pension and other benefits are included to the value of the compensation.

Today, I look at the increase in compensation during the recession between the private and the public sector. This chart above compares percent changes in public and private worker compensation within each of the five largest sectors in the United States during the 12 months ending March 2010. Compensation includes health and retirement benefits (roughly 30% of compensation), salary (roughly 70% of compensation), and legally required benefits such as payments for Social Security and Medicare.  The sectors examined here employ over 65 million workers, or nearly half of all employed Americans. These sectors are (in order from largest to smallest by total employment): Office and Administrative Support, Sales, Food Preparation and Service, Production, and Transportation and Material Moving.

Across the sectors examined, compensation costs in the private sector increased 1.78% from March 2009 to March 2010.  Public sector compensation increased by 8% more than its private counterpart at a level of 1.92%.

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Last week, I wrote here at BigGovernment about Ben Scott, Policy Director for the liberal advocacy group Free Press, being outed as the true author of a pro-net neutrality letter supposedly written by Representative Jay Inslee (D-WA).

Soon after, The Hill’s technology blog “Hillicon Valley” ran a story with an explanation from Inslee’s staff:

“But Inslee’s office told Hillicon Valley on Tuesday that Scott did not, in fact, draft the letter on behalf of the congressman. Rather, as Inslee’s staff scrambled to put out something last week in support of the FCC’s goals, it consulted old documents and industry talking points for ideas. A staff member ultimately typed the new letter on top of the Word document that Free Press previously sent Inslee — the date of which was May 7 — meaning the meta-data still reflected Scott as its author.”

At first glance, this sounds halfway plausible. While I’m not an expert on meta-data as it relates to documents like this, my understanding is that it’s possible that writing over top of another person’s original document could lead to a situation where the content is attributable to one person (or organization) while the meta-data suggests authorship by another. This led me to a couple of questions. Did the National Journal, which originally reported the story, get it wrong? Did Inslee’s office legitimately make a mistake by overwriting talking points from Free Press with their own letter, leading to this confusion? Was I, then, wrong to point out the potential conflict associated with a group that decries “astroturfing” allegedly writing a letter for a Member of Congress? To help answer those questions, I decided to reach out to Representative Inslee’s office directly to clarify exactly what happened. The result was…not encouraging.

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Post updated with author’s note.

Author’s Note: This article includes three images that clearly denigrate Islam and the Prophet Mohammed. So there is absolutely no question about the provenance of these images, I would like to direct all readers to Wikipedia’s authoritative write-up on the matter. These images were included in a dossier that aggrieved imams living in Denmark took with them to the Middle East specifically to stoke outrage at a dozen cartoons published in September 2005 in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. The images include an amateurish doodle identifying Mohammed as a pedophile, a dog humping a prostrate praying Muslim (with the caption, “This is why Muslim pray five times a day”), and a photocopy of a French comedian in a pig-squealing contest (with the phony caption, “Here is the real image of Mohammed”). It is nothing less than amazing that holy men decrying the desecration of their religion would create such foul images, but there you have it. It is as if the pope created “Piss Christ” and then passed it off as the work of critics of Catholicism. The images below may indeed give offense, not just to Muslims but also to people of all faiths and even atheists. If they do, remember who created and distributed

******

The deadline for submitting work to Reason’s Everybody Draw Mohammed contest has passed; winners will be announced at Reason.com on Thursday, May 20.

All that remains is anticipation, both of the artwork that will be displayed and the possible threats of violence that will likely follow. Or should that be “the likely threats of possible violence”?

Before the calendar page turns to Thursday, it’s worth meditating on the whys and wherefores of the contest, which was inspired by a jihadist death threat against the creators of South Park and was originally suggested by Seattle artist Molly Norris. Soon after asking everyone to draw the Prophet in solidarity with the arguably millions of people repressed by threats of theologically justified violence, Norris herself went into ideological hiding, suggesting instead that everyone draw another target of South Park satire: former Vice President Al Gore.

While Gore, who likes to credit himself with understanding the architectonics of cyberspace (if not creating them) and who way back when convened Congressional hearings to discuss the dread menace of satanic heavy metal lyrics (via con diablo, Ronnie James Dio!), is certainly worthy of the sort of ongoing abuse that only a fully distributed Internets can deliver, the obvious reason that Norris changed her target is real and potential violence.

Who can blame her? People have been killed for representing Mohammed in ways that displeased Islamic terrorists. People have been punched and kicked and forced into hiding. No wonder, then, that Norris, like Galileo in front of a Catholic tribunal, apologized to ”everyone of the Muslim faith who has or will be offended” by her drawing (visible at the right). This conditionally unconditional language is the language of the forced penitent, of the prisoner in a totalitarian world, of the sad sack on the Catherine Wheel who will say anything, will confess anything to get off the rack. We all understand exactly why such language is being used: The threat of violence.

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PA Senator Arlen Specter lost his bid for reelection last night. He famously abandoned the GOP because he was worried he wouldn’t be able to win the party’s primary. Turns out he couldn’t win the Democrats’ primary either.

A recap of tonight’s festivities:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Party-switching Sen. Arlen Specter fell to a younger and far less experienced rival in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary, and political novice Rand Paul rode support from tea party activists to a Republican rout in Kentucky on Tuesday, the latest jolts to the political establishment in a tumultuous midterm election season.In another race with national significance, Democrat Mark Critz won a special House election to fill out the term of the late Democratic Rep. John Murtha in southwestern Pennsylvania. The two political parties spent roughly $1 million apiece hoping to sway the outcome there, and highlighted the contest as a possible bellwether for the fall when all 435 House seats will be on the ballot.

On the busiest night of the primary season to date, Arkansas Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a potentially debilitating June runoff election against Lt. Gov. Bill Halter in her bid for nomination to a third term. Rep. John Boozman won the Republican line on the ballot outright. (more…)

From the Associated Press:

Rand Paul defeated Republican establishment favorite Trey Grayson in the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, a closely watched race that was a test of the tea party movement’s strength.

Paul, the son of former presidential candidate U.S. Rep. Ron Paul, on Tuesday gave a tea party activist a key win in a statewide election that could embolden the fledgling political movement in other states. With 43 percent of precincts reporting, Paul was leading with 60 percent to Grayson’s 36 percent.

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Polls have closed in Pennsylvania. There are other primaries across the country tonight, of course, but Pennsylvania features a hard-fought Democrat primary for U.S. Senate, where party-switcher Arlen Specter may have finally reached the end of his political career, and a special election to fill the remaining term of recently deceased congressman, John Murtha. Watch for updates throughout the night.

With the latest crisis that can’t go to waste, the Obama Administration is now using the Arizona immigration law to codify the Latino vote against Republicans in an attempt to save the Democrat majority. I guess one could say it’s ironic that the same party that excused its own segregationist past by revising the intent of the ‘Southern Strategy’, has now implemented its own.

It does so at its own peril.

Blacks are not impressed by the law-breaking, self-inflicted adversity suffered by illegal aliens, in fact some are downright hostile. All one need to and look at the make up of South Central Los Angeles, formerly the black community.

It is brown and the Latinos there have been quite public with their intent to drive blacks out. Peacefully by breeding, violent if necessary.

In South Central Los Angeles, only one of the many areas and regions (Washington Times reporter Steve) Miller surveyed, the predominant feeling among those few blacks who remain in the neighborhood is that “They took our homes and our schools,” as one black resident complained. “They,” of course are the Hispanics who have largely displaced the blacks in the area that was the center of the 1992 “Rodney King” riots.

But it’s not just South Central that’s a war zone as a result of mass immigration. The war zone seems to extend all over the country, especially where blacks and Hispanics confront each other.

David Cortez, a 22-year-old immigrant who spent two years in jail for shooting a black, told Mr. Miller, “Just give us three or four years, and we’ll take over. There will be more of us.” Blacks at least, if not the Open Borders lobby, know he’s on to something.

As for blacks, they see no reason to welcome a population that takes their jobs for lower wages and competes with them for political favors from largely white politicians. “Why should we be in coalition with some group that wants to outnumber us?” asks Shannon Frank Reeves, head of the Oakland, Calif., NAACP.

As I’ve been arguing for years, this is what happens when blacks blindly give their support to party that has to be reminded every two years not to take it for granted. Obama Democrats, too, believe they have the black vote locked and now can devote the rest of their time using the usual racebaiting tactics aimed at illegal Latinos.

Today, the question is what will blacks do?

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You have to live in Michigan and pay attention to the political news to understand how obnoxious the Michigan Democratic Party and its chairman Mark Brewer really are.  While we all expect such behavior from hyper-partisan outfits, Brewer gives it a whole new meaning.

He was behind the famous “sleeping justice” ads – photos of a now-former Michigan Supreme Court justice allegedly sleeping during a hearing.  He has now supposedly is putting up money for similar “evidence” against another conservative justice.

So it comes as no surprise that the entrance of a “new” political party in Michigan, The Tea Party, might have Democratic Party fingerprints all over it.

For a better part of the last decade, Michigan has been in the true-blue column.  It was so hopeless in 2008 the McCain campaign actually pulled out of Michigan many weeks before Election Day.

And this year, given displeasure with Obama, the Democratic Congress and more so Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Republicans’ prospects look pretty good.

So leave it to Mark Brewer and the Democratic Party to pull out all the stops in their cynical ploy to cling to power.

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The Precinct Judge of Elections at North Union 4 in Fayette County says she mistakenly gave 175 people 2 ballots this morning. She claims she thought the Special Election to fill the vacancy in Congressional District 12 required her to give a seperate ballot for the Primary and the Special Election. As of now, it is unknown the partisan breakdown of the 175 voters. Jack Murtha carried the precinct with 62% in 2008. His death in February caused the vacancy in the district.

Developing…

Daniel Pearl was not beheaded because he was a journalist.

Daniel Pearl was beheaded by Islamic extremists because he was an American and a Jew.

“My name is Daniel Pearl, I am a Jewish-American.”

On February 21, 2002, a videotape was released titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl. The text from the video reads in Arabic: “My name is (Daniel Pearl), I am a Jewish-American.”

Yesterday Barack Obama signed the toothless Daniel Pearl Freedom of the Press Act of 2009 named in honor of the Wall Street Journal reporter who was killed by terrorists in 2002. The bill promotes press freedom. The president declined to take questions from the media at the signing event.

Jennifer Rubin at Contentions Blog pointed out that Barack Obama forgot to mention that Daniel Pearl was murdered by Islamic extremists.

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Most of you know Jon David from his famous Big Hollywood “My Date With a Liberal” series that debuted not long after the site launched. After the Tea Party movement caught fire, so did Jon’s “American Heart,” which also had its premiere right here.

My congratulations to our friend Mr. Kahn who set an example for all of us with his willingness to throw off those shades and fight the good fight. There are right-of-center “sleeper agents” like Jon all over Hollywood. He is not alone. And when others throw off the shades and declare themselves the movement to reclaim a piece of the Hollywood/pop culture pie for pro-American and pro-liberty ideas and ideals can only grow stronger.

Jon is proof that you are not alone. It’s time to activate yourselves. Join the fight.

Or, as Robert Davi memorably put it, “After all we’re only talking about saving our country.”

The Wall Street Journal:

Jerry Jackson, notorious member of the New Black Panther Party, who was seen in the video below intimidating and threatening voters in 2008, is running for re-election as a member of the Democratic Executive Committee in Philadelphia.

Here is the “sample ballot” for the 14th Ward, 4th Division. A sample ballot is posted outside of each polling location. You can see Jackson is listed first in a field of three. The top two vote getters will be elected to a four year term as a member of the Democratic Executive Committee. In 2008, Jackson was issued a certificate by the Democratic Party to be inside of the polling place where he was seen intimidating voters.

Jackson and King Samir Shabazz were originally indicted for intimidating voters, but the Department of Justice spiked the case.

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People on the left are constantly asking Andrew Breitbart who funds his “operation.”  It’s grown to become rather amusing, actually.  For those of us who are bloggers on The Bigs, we know the truth, we see how things operate. We know there’s no giant conservative-leaning lump of cash greasing this machine.  If that were the case, I for one think Andrew would probably be home with his family even more, rather than traveling around, worrying about advertising or other ways of self-funding this little “hobby” of his, as the left often like to refer to it.

But let’s just look for one moment at where some of that line of thinking comes from on the other side.  I’ve written previously about the birth of Media Matters as a spawn of Rob Stein’s Conservative Message Machine Money Matrix road show, from which the Democracy Alliance was born.  It’s through this organization from which much of the organization’s funding had come; in recent years, more has been spread out across other progressive organizations, but the funders often remain the same names in most cases.  For instance, The Tides Foundation gave Media Matters and their Action Network over $175,000 just last year.  In earlier years, groups like Montclair, New Jersey-based (hometown of Media Matters’ Eric Boehlert) Schumann Center for Media & Democracy gave the organization $500,000.

The donors’ list is vast and diverse, and we plan to cover that in detail in the future.  So I’ll focus in on one set of donors to Media Matters, which is the Labor Unions.  More specifically, in light of some recent posts regarding the Kenneth Gladney incident, I thought it appropriate to revisit donations made to Media Matters specifically by the Service Employees International Union.

When you look at the timeline of events and the media calendar in general leading up to the Gladney incident last August, it’s difficult not to conclude that there was collaboration amongst White House staff, components of Big Labor, and certain liberal media outlets.  However, we know that all will continue to deny it.

Further, just as the flurry of media activity finally starts to wind down a bit around October last year, this is when SEIU makes three separate donations to Media Matters totaling $50,000, under the classification of “Communications”, according to the SEIU LM-2 report. (In reviewing other LM-2s for several previous years, this appears at least to be the first time that SEIU has donated to Media Matters, and there does not seem to have been another donation recorded since these.)

This is the type of funding that I would question in return to Media Matters.  With their membership being so low and their unfunded pension expenses so high, can the SEIU really afford to be randomly donating funds to an organization like Media Matters?  Perhaps SEIU purchased advertising on Media Matters’ website, but then I’d think it would be categorized as such, as others ad expenses in the LM-2 were.  If not advertising, if not random donations,  then what’s the reason for SEIU having donated these funds?  One could logically conclude that Media Matters performed a service in return.  Only they can answer that.

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President Obama is coming to Youngstown today to tout his administration’s recovery efforts, but its policies are only making matters worse in the Mahoning Valley.

While it’s encouraging that the factory in Youngstown that the president will visit on Tuesday has recently expanded, the city’s painfully high 15.1 percent unemployment rate is a harsh reminder that the “stimulus” has not created jobs “immediately,” or held our national unemployment rate (9.9 percent) below eight percent as the president promised.

Worse yet, the policies of the Obama Administration could quickly put jobs at the factory, which manufactures steel pipes for oil and gas drilling, on the chopping block as it continues to push a “cap-and-trade” national energy tax that will raise energy prices, drive thousands of American jobs overseas to countries with less-stringent environmental regulations, and devastate our domestic oil and gas industries.

Last December the administration unilaterally acted to pave the way for this bureaucratic nightmare, and it’s not looking back. In fact, last week the EPA finalized new rules for manufacturers and power plants scheduled to go into effect in January of next year, regulations that American Iron and Steel Institute President and CEO Thomas Gibson warns “will impose significant new costs on manufacturing industries at the worst possible time… [and] arbitrarily picks winners and losers.”

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The recent law passed in Arizona raises some tough questions.  How does one respond to a state law that enforces federal law?  Our President said it was “misguided.” Many state and city politicians in California have said it is time to boycott Arizona for its “harsh” immigration policy.  One Los Angeles Councilmen said that Arizona is acting like it is its own country.  One Texas Congressman said that the law is something he wants in his state.  A city councilman in Costa Mesa, CA said that the city is going to copy it and make it an ordinance.  Many activist groups have now filed legal suits against Arizona’s newest law, but many experts say that the law will stand.

Having grown up the son of an immigrant, I know firsthand the hardship of having no roots and being in a strange place.  I was born in New York and moved to the San Fernando Valley.  My father struggled to put food on the table, and I had to work as a young man.  I had my own paper route and worked hard.  When I graduated high school, I received a scholarship to USC.  This is the dream that most immigrants have for their children.

California became the place where dreams came true for my parents and me.  My father taught me that to be a good citizen you have to follow the laws.  I believe that still today.  I am successful because I have followed the laws of this great nation.  I believe, to find success in this country it must first start there.  I have driven past Home Depots, like many of you.  I think about the lives those men are living and my heart hurts for them.  I know they struggle to put food on the table just like my father did.  I know they came here seeking a better life for their children.  I understand their plight, but their method in achieving that goal is what I cannot understand.

Our current system has moved beyond common sense.  Our President has failed to uphold the laws set out by Congress and states are not allowed to enforce the federal laws.  Immigration and Customs Enforcement lack funding and staff to handle the current situation.  We have judges and district attorneys that are more dedicated to sentencing ICE agents then to enforcing our immigration laws.

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