Today, voters in 12 states go to the polls to decide party nominees for this fall’s elections. Among the biggest state races to watch are California, Nevada and South Carolina. Also on tap tonight, Sen. Blanche Lincoln will likely lose her party’s nomination for reelection. It is going to be that kind of year for incumbents.

UNBELIEVABLE! How’s this for HOPE AND CHANGE?

Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola this past weekend. Crude oil has already been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi, and has impacted about 125 miles of Louisiana coastline.

It didn’t have to be this way.

(Reuters)
There are miles of floating oil containment boom in warehouse right now and the manufacturer Packgen says it can make lots more on short notice.
There’s just one problem… No one will come get it.

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Charlie Gasparino breaks down the “financial reform” bill at FoxNews:

Goldman executives say they have conducted an internal study of the various proposals in the financial-reform legislation, which while still incomplete, is likely to pass in some semblance of its current form and signed into law by President Obama by the end of the year.

The areas that are likely to be in any final package will include cutbacks in proprietary trading, or trading with the bank’s own money, a new consumer-watchdog agency and forcing firms to give up positions in hedge funds.

But, dig deeper inside the bill and there are plenty of new rules and regulations that will be squeezing commercial banks, and that will directly impact JPMorgan’s bottom line. These regulations include capping fees on debit cards and limits on how many bank branches can be owned in a particular geographic area.

Even the so-called Volcker Rule, named after presidential economic adviser Paul Volcker, with its limitations on prop trading and hedge fund ownership, will likely hit JPMorgan hard.

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From Palo Alto, Oaklahoma City, Washington DC, the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, Instanbul Turkey, to The Republic of Georgia, we go totally global this week. But enough about us, here’s our new and improved and by popular request Ricochet podcast index:
0:00 to 9:45  Peter and Rob chat
9:45 to 21:23  Mickey Kaus on his quixotic run for US Senate in California as he battles the unions and pension funds.
22:50 to 37:10  Matt Continetti on his travels to the Republic of Georgia.
39:50 to 1:06:34    Claire Berlinski from and on life in Istanbul. Key phrase: 7 cats.
1:09:30 to 1:33:33  Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour talks about oil in the gulf and catfish in Central Park.
1:33:35 to End    Wrap Up

Remember all of those bold statements that the so called “Troubled Assets Relief Program” (TARP), the Bailout of Wall Street Bill, was a one time deal and our federal government should and will never do it again.  Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner testified in January of this year before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

Many Americans look at what happened with AIG, and the rest of the financial rescue, and simply ask:  Why was it necessary?  Why was it fair for the government to take taxpayer money and put it into an institution that had mismanaged itself to the edge of collapse?  The answer is that it was not fair, and it was not something our government should ever have to do.  But those Americans, those families and business owners who played by the rules and played no role in giving rise to this recession, should understand that if the government had failed to act, that failure would have unleashed substantially greater damage upon them.

If TARP “was not fair” and not “something our government should ever have to do,” then why is Congress trying to impose the TARP model on small business?  Congress will consider legislation this week to establish TARP, Jr. for small businesses to be administered and run by none other than Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner. The House is considering H.R. 5297, the Small Business Lending Fund Act that provides “temporary authority to the Secretary of the Treasury to make capital investments to eligible institutions in order to increase the availability of credit for small businesses.”

The legislation creates a federally run new bureaucracy called the “Small Business Lending Fund. ”  To qualify a financial institution has to have less than $10 billion in assets and the new creation would have up to $30 billion in new investment authority.  This allegedly temporary program is set up “without further appropriation of fiscal year limitation,” i.e. not temporary, to purchase “preferred stock and other financial instruments” from small business as a means to infuse money into local banks with the condition that they lend to failing small business.  Local banks will be lending in exchange for equity small business, therefore these banks will be using federal monies to buy equity in companies.  This is an idea born from socialism and one that will harm the free market for small business, because failure will be rewarded by federal subsidies while success will be punished.

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On April 22nd we published an article entitled IndyMac Attack: Did Schumer, Paulson, Soros, and the CRL Kill the Bank and Profit From Its Collapse? We summarized the story as follows:

At the end of 2007, hedge fund billionaire John Paulson invested $15 million in the leftist non-profit, Center for Responsible Lending, their largest single donation ever. Around the same time, Paulson and his employees contributed over $100,000 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, headed, at the time, by Sen. Chuck Schumer. Roughly six months later, CRL and Sen. Schumer both launched a highly public attack on the California-based mortgage lender, Indymac. The lender failed, wiping out the investment of thousands of people. Roughly six months after that, John Paulson, in partnership with George Soros, bought up the remnants of Indymac for pennies on the dollar.

…a top executive of CRL when this deal went down, Eric Stein, is now working at the Treasury Department, heading up the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency. Mr. Stein will be the chief federal official designing regulations to protect consumers. Right.

At the time, we asked if this could all be coincidence.  Today, we are getting closer to answering this question.

As reported by hedge fund blog AbsoluteReturn+Alpha, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA), ranking member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform is probing John Paulson on his relationship with the Center for Responsible Lending.

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Since the BP Deepwater Horizon oil rig blew up on April 20, President Obama has been rightly and roundly criticized for his lethargic, passionless, and ineffective response to the crisis.  We’re now into the 7th week of this catastrophe, and the president still looks weirdly disengaged: not only that he either doesn’t know what he’s doing or isn’t that interested in the crisis.  It’s that he looks like he doesn’t belong in the job.  He looks like a little boy stomping around the house wearing his father’s suit and shoes.

Stung by the attacks on his competence, character, and emotionlessness, Obama contrived some “passion” the other day.  In an interview with the “Today” show, he said, “I don’t sit around just talking to experts because this is a college seminar.  We talk to these folks because they potentially have the best answers, so I know whose ass to kick.”

Oh no!  Anything but a Bama ass-kickin’!  The terror of that prospect I’m sure has BP shaking in its boots. (By the way, running college seminars is ALL the Bama knows how to do, so he probably should be doing that.  Maybe some college senior somewhere has a Descartes-inspired idea on how to plug the damn hole.)

Rule #1 in politics:  Do not try to be something that you’re not.When President George H. W. Bush was running behind Bill Clinton in 1992, he went into a grocery store and pretended to love beef jerky.  You know: to demonstrate that he was just a regular guy.  The problem was: he wasn’t just a regular guy.  He was Andover and Yale and the Eastern establishment.  His father had been a U.S. Senator.  Bush didn’t even know what beef jerky was, for crying out loud.  He lost the election.

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Greece, Portugal and President Barack Obama have at long last combined to turn the common Washington wisdom about government spending on its head.

Washington insiders insisted for decades that those who say they favor fiscal restraint in the abstract really want more government benefits – regardless of cost. As a result, neither Republicans nor Democrats have made serious attempts to restrain spending.

Republicans usually promise to cut spending but have instead concentrated on keeping taxes low and arguing, not entirely incorrectly, that lower taxes stimulate economic growth and produce more revenue. The problem is that this argument has given Republicans an excuse to talk tough while doing little to fight spending.

Democrats have been even worse. They have simply tended to argue that deficits and debt don’t matter. In the sixties and early seventies the late Hubert Humphrey derided fiscal conservative concerns about growing deficits and debts as irrelevant since “we only owe the money to ourselves.” That was before the Chinese bought up our debt and before interest on the debt threatened to eat up more tax revenues than the Cold War.

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Many conservatives and libertarians think of labor unions as merely the grassroots muscle behind the progressive movement. Showing up as a swarm of purple shirts, with the forearms of a lumberjack and a penchant for terrorizing teenagers, labor unions have always been considered the rough and rugged group that intimidate their opponents through the “persuasion of power.”

But if you haven’t thought of the labor movement as a cerebral bunch, think again. Meet Peter Dreier, Donald Cohen, Nelson Lichtenstein, and their syndicate of progressive university professors – the “intellectual infrastructure” of the progressive labor movement.

It is no secret that progressives have created a self-cloning machine by hijacking our educational system. Their indoctrination efforts are well documented. But we rarely think of research institutions as propaganda factories. A Request for Proposal (RFP) — see document above — recently obtained by Big Journalism gives us a rare look at how progressives and labor unions attempt to manipulate the national media narrative.

And their process? you may ask. Use the credibility and resources of the American higher education system to create researchprop – biased collegial research papers that serve as propaganda to support political policies.

Entitled Cry Wolf, the RFP proclaims a desire to look “for faculty and graduate students… interested in writing short (2,000 word) policy briefs” that “construct a counter narrative that demonstrates the falsity or exaggeration” of conservative claims. Writers of briefs selected by the project coordinators will receive 100,000 pennies for their thoughts. (more…)

For most of you, this is old news by now, but I hesitated to report it because it would probably just make you more angry. It recently came out that most of America’s new jobs are temporary Census Bureau positions that will soon end, which is dismal news for the economy. As MyTwoCensus.com observed, some people on the right are outraged by what they report as false job statistics since Census Bureau employees have been hired and let go (for various reasons) and then re-hired to work for other 2010 Census operations down the road.

FoxNews published reports from Commerce Department and Bureau of Labor Statistics spokespersons:

Commerce Department spokesman Nick Kimball:

“The Census Bureau — like all other employers — reports the number of individuals on its payroll for the specific week the Labor Department uses as a point of reference for measuring the nation’s level of This is not a tally of positions filled during the past month — instead, it is the number of actual individual human beings who received paychecks that week. That number can then be compared to the reports from previous months to understand the changing jobs environment over time.”

Bureau of Labor Statistics spokeswoman Stacey Standish:

“Each month the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) Current Employment Statistics (CES) program publishes the employment levels for total nonfarm and component industries. Establishments, including the Census Bureau, are asked to report the total number of workers on their payroll. That is, the establishment is asked to report the total number of employees who worked or received pay for the pay period that includes the 12th of the month. The CES program does not ask establishments to report the number of new hires or created, or the number of persons who were laid off.”

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President Obama surely didn’t intend it, but he deserves some credit for last year’s 7.4 percent drop in murder rates. His election caused gun sales to soar, and crime rates to plummet.

While gun sales started notably rising in October 2008, sales really soared immediately after Mr. Obama won the presidential race. 450,000 more people bought guns in November 2008 than bought them in November 2007, that’s over a 40 percent increase in sales. By comparison, the change from November 2006 to November 2007 was only about 35,000. Over the last decade, the average year-to-year increase in monthly sales was only 21,000.

The increase in sales continued well beyond November 2008. From November 2008 to October 2009, almost 2.5 million more people bought guns in the 12 months after the election than in the preceding 12 months. The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, doesn’t tell us how many guns each person bought just the number of people who bought them. Most likely though, gun sales rose by more than the number of people who purchased them.

At the same time gun sales were soaring, there was an unusually large drop in murder rates. The 7.4 percent drop in the murder rate was the largest drop in murder rates since the 1999. For those who don’t remember, 1999, when President Bill Clinton and Columbine occurred, was another time when gun sales soared. With people such as Elena Kagan serving as Mr. Clinton’s deputy domestic policy adviser were pushing hard for more gun control, Americans were worried that more gun bans were coming. And in response gun sales soared.

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The always informative RealClearPolitics looks at other races to watch in today’s Super Tuesday primaries:

Today’s elections feature top-tier Senate and gubernatorial races in California and Nevada, as well as a Senate runoff in Arkansas and competitive GOP primary in the South Carolina governor’s race. Those are just the highlights of a full slate of primaries, but there are a handful of intriguing races that will likely fly under the radar as the results pour in tonight.

Here are five races that may not make major newspaper headlines but are certainly ones to keep an eye on:

Iowa’s 3rd District GOP Primary

The Iowa Republican Party is preparing to hold a July 10 convention to decide the nominee in the 3rd district, where no one in Tuesday’s crowded primary is expected to meet the 35 percent threshold to win the nomination. The GOP sees the district has a potential pick-up opportunity, as Democrat Leonard Boswell runs for an eighth term in office.

One could also be necessary in the 2nd district, where four Republicans are vying to take on second-term Democrat Dave Loebsack.

Conventions are in many ways much different animals than primaries. As state GOP Chairman Matt Strawn said last week on local TV, “It’s not the kind of campaign that’s waged on the airwaves, but literally hand to hand and house to house.” The winner will be decided by 422 previously elected district delegates.

By most accounts, the three leading candidates in the 3rd district are aviation security consultant Dave Funk, financial adviser and former Iowa State wrestling coach Jim Gibbons and state Sen. Brad Zaun.

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On June 6^th, the date of D-Day, scores of patriots from across the nation poured into Zuccotti Park at the corner of Liberty and Trinity, across the street from Ground Zero to protest the 9/11 mosque being built just 600 feet from our country’s most painful wound.

Many have spoken to the horrible insensitivity of this mosque, arguing that it is an affront to American sensibilities, a planting of the victory flag as evidenced by its 9/11/11 opening date and the name of the project itself, the “Cordoba Initiative,” and a reflection of the growing stealth Sharia in the United States given the mosque’s Imam’s pro-Islamic law stance.  Indeed Muslims have been building mosques for centuries as symbols of conquest and dominance, and this one in particular will mark the first to stand on US soil.

The 9/11 mosque however has far greater implications with regard to the fundamental principles of our nation.  As reflected by the guffaws of many in the crowd when one of the speakers at the rally argued in favor of the mosque on Constitutional grounds regardless of the abhorrence of its location, many find it hard to reconcile that Islam is allowed to use our freedoms to subvert or mock our freedoms.  The religious tolerance of our culture alone deems us largely unable to prevent against mosques in which Islamic supremacism is preached, creating fertile protected grounds for jihadists both peaceful and violent.

If in fact we are unable to safeguard against such institutions, or even criticize the ideology of Islam at all, then we are going to be neutered in a war against those who use Islam to justify murdering innocents and implementing universal Sharia law both overtly and stealthily.

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The Senate will soon vote on the American Jobs and Closing Tax Loopholes Act; a counterproductive bill that, purportedly, extends unemployment benefits for millions of out of work Americans. And yet ironically, found in the bowels of this legislation is a dangerous, anti-business tax increase that promises to harm American investors, kill American jobs and slow the nation’s long-term economic recovery.

A little-known element of the version of that legislation adopted last week by the House, the “Carried Interest Tax” raises taxes on private equity firms, venture capitalists and real estate partnerships. These partnerships make much-needed investments in American startup ventures, and their returns, upon which they rely for sustained investing, are taxed at the regular capital gains rate of 15 percent.

But under the pending bill, taxes on these investments would increase 40 to 150 percent. Such a tax increase would severely curtail investment, development and growth in urban communities nationwide where real estate investors have created jobs and had a substantive impact on the lives of low-income families. Business leaders and think tanks alike have panned the idea; Steve Forbes characterized it as “economic suicide.”

Of course, the bill’s fate is not sealed.

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Since the early twentieth century, periods of real or perceived national emergency have been “critical episodes” in the growth of government’s size, scope, and power in the United States and in many other countries. Hence, the concise conceptualization: Crisis and Leviathan (the main title of my 1987 book on the growth of government in the United States from the late nineteenth century to the late twentieth century).

In the past century, the first five such critical episodes in the United States were: World War I; the Great Depression; World War II; a multi-faceted set of crises associated with the civil-rights revolution and the Vietnam War, roughly coincident with the presidencies of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon; and the post 9/11 events associated with the so-called War on Terror and the U.S. attacks on and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. We are now amid another such critical episode, which springs from the housing bust that began in 2006, the economic recession that began late in 2007, and the financial debacle that reached its climax in September 2008.

The current troubles are complex and raise a multitude of questions. Many books and articles no doubt will be written to analyze these various issues in scholarly depth and detail, and certainly anything we might say today must be regarded as preliminary, at best. I focus here on a few aspects of the present episode that relate closely to my own research on the growth of government, a field of study to which I have returned again and again over the past thirty years.

I

The current recession has elicited many comparisons with earlier business downturns, especially with the Great Depression. Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is often described as an expert on the Great Depression who takes its lessons, as he understands them, deeply into account as he formulates and implements Fed policies. Likewise, many other economists have revisited the Great Depression recently in search of lessons applicable to current policy-making. In all of these reflections, the mainstream economics profession in general has distinguished itself by an astonishing superficiality of historical knowledge and lack of theoretical prowess.

The swiftness with which a great many mainstream economists have reverted to the simplistic “vulgar Keynesianism” that had its heyday from the late 1940s to the late 1960s has been nothing short of shocking, given that by the end of the 1970s such old-fashioned Keynesianism seemed to have been completely discredited and superseded in the leading echelons of the mainstream economics profession. Now it has come roaring back.

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Sent along by Jim, this sign from a BP station makes us laugh.

So, as usual, I was at the gym straddling the stairclimber (Sven, he’s Dutch) watching CNN against my choice, when the network reported some seemingly positive news: apparently the U.S. just saw the biggest gain in employment in a decade!

Break out the champagne! Do a little dance! Make a little love! Throw another houseboy on the rotating action pit!

Yep, thanks to President Obama, this month the economy added 431,000 jobs, the biggest monthly gain since March of 2000. But of those new jobs, 390,000 were government. Private sector jobs actually came crashing down from 218 thousand in April, to just 41,000.

Eh.

So the gain CNN was championing, it turns out, was made up of census jobs. Which, to me, is cheating. It’s kinda like saying you won the lottery, and proving it by flashing a large wad of Monopoly money.

That’s how I feel about census jobs. they’re phony. (more…)

Kristin Davis rose to notoriety as the madam who provided New York Attorney General and Gov. Eliot Spitzer with the escorts that led to his demise. Davis ended up going to jail for providing a business populated by and for consenting adults. Spitzer’s penalty? Possibly getting a show on CNN.

Now Davis herself is running the Empire State’s top slot in Albany, on a platform this is simple and straightforward in libertarian sanity: She wants to legalize (and tax) marijuana and prostitution. For a state as deep in the red as New York, that’s no joke. She has also proposed liberalizing gaming laws and called for gambling casinos in the Catskills.

I built a multi-million dollar escort service from scratch before pleading guilty to promoting prostitution.  Prostitution in New York is estimated to be a $5 Billion a year business. Legalization and a reasonable tax rate could bring $ 1Billion in new revenues to New York State each year. Legalizing Marijuana would reap another $2 Billion a year. Then New York could balance the budget and still cut property and income taxes.

Additionally, she wants to legalize gay marriage because the state shouldn’t discriminate and highlight the inequities of a criminal justice system that treats the politically powerless far worse than the politically powerful. Read more here.

Davis’ official campaign site is here.

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Avik Roy, a savvy health care analyst in New York City who writes an excellent blog on health policy, took the time to talk with me for The Heartland Institute’s Health Care News podcast about what we learned last week when it comes to the White House’s fraudulent case for Obamacare. It’s well worth a listen.

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In case you missed it — because for some reason, the Washington media types didn’t find time to cover this story — Congressional Budget Office Director Doug Elmendorf offered an astounding rejection of the notion that the new health care regime, which President Obama frequently cited as a profound and necessary deficit-lowering measure, does anything to improve America’s deficit picture.

This is less news to you, of course. But it’s newsworthy because of who’s saying it. As Keith Hennessey put it, “Never before have I seen a CBO Director so bluntly refute the policy claims of a President and his Budget Director.”

Despite the best efforts of OMB chief Peter Orszag and others, the spin that Obamacare was a budgetary cure has already been revealed as a complete falsehood, even before the implementation costs of the vast majority of its policies are fully known. As Roy writes:

At this point, there are only two camps of honest people: those who believe Obamacare will blow up the budget, and that this is a problem; and those who believe that Obamacare will blow up the budget, and that this is not a problem (because wealth redistribution is more important, and because the wealthy can be taxed more if needed).

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