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Afghanistan and McChrystal top the conversation this week as Rob Long and Peter Robinson are joined this week by columnist James Lileks, John Yoo, and Victor Davis Hanson. Well, not all the time. Peter does manange to wedge in some discussion of soccer too. Questions? Comments? Join the conversation at Ricochet.com or write us at podcast@ricochet.com.
Run Down:

5:04 — James Lileks
25:55 — John Yoo
30:15 — Victor Davis Hanson
1:07:15 — Close

This weekend (starting today) looks like it is shaping up to be the next chapter in the ongoing Progressive-Marxist revolution now underway across the globe. Previous chapters of the revolution include, but are not limited to, the 1999 WTO meeting in Seattle, the “anti-war”* protests during the Bush presidency, the 2004 and 2008 protests against the Republican conventions, the Bank of America protests, the Gaza Flotilla movement, etc…  *The asterisk marks the discredit earned by the “anti-war” movement through their silence since President Obama took office, despite the continuation of the wars allegedly being protested against.

Here is their description of the event they are holding Saturday night:

GET OFF THE FENCE
Confrontational Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist
Convergence in solidarity with the
People’s First Demonstration
26 June 2010, 1pm, Queen’s Park
And then onwards to the Fence

If you want to understand the art of confrontational anti-capitalism, look no further than this Organizing Manual produced by one of the leading organizers of confrontational street (and flotilla) demonstrations. Pay special attention to the sections entitled, “198 Methods of Nonviolent Action” and “Tools for White Guys who are Working for Social Change and Other People Socialized in a Society Based on Domination”. Below is an excerpt from their section about the intentional tactic of getting arrested.

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Today, USA begins its next stage of the World Cup with a match against Ghana. For those of you who like to trot out the canard “how can a game end in a tie,” rest assured; at this stage there are no ties. Either the USA wins, or they go home.

So what exactly is the real message of the tea parties? And how large an impact will they have on the upcoming elections? These are just a couple of the questions I posed to my old friends Rick Santelli and Lou Dobbs on last night’s Kudlow Report.

Rick Santelli’s rant on CNBC a little over a year ago helped launch the whole tea party movement. We also welcomed David Webb. David is a big tea party player and is the co-founder of TeaParty365. I guess you could call it a tea party trifecta.

Click to watch last night’s fireworks:

In this week’s edition of Coffee and Markets, featuring The New Ledger’s Francis Cianfrocca, we’re talking about Capitol Hill’s new financial regulations, the China revaluation that wasn’t, the spectre of deflation, and the poor gamesmanship of the Business Roundtable. We’re brought to you as always by Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com and LibertyPundits.com.

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Related Links:

TNL: Obama’s Rule by Scapegoating
TNL: The Overblown Yuan Revaluation
Health Care News: The Patients Bill of Rights (Podcast)
Kim Strassel: How the White House Pwned Business
TNL: The Latest News on Housing

From Reuters:

In its final estimate on the first quarter on Friday, the Commerce Department said gross domestic product expanded at a 2.7 percent annual rate instead of the 3 percent pace it reported last month.

Although the growth pace was below market expectations for a 3 percent rate, it still marked three straight quarters of expansion as the economy digs out of its most brutal downturn since the 1930s.

However, recent data have suggested the recovery lost some momentum in the second quarter, with persistently high unemployment restraining consumer spending, and home building and purchases faltering.

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The Little Pink House that changed America still stands strong.

Five years ago this week, the U.S. Supreme Court issued what would soon become one of the most despised decisions in its history.  In a controversial 5-4 opinion, the Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that governments could take your home—or business, farm or church—and hand it over to another private individual, provided the new owner promised to generate more tax revenue with your property.

The Institute for Justice, the libertarian public interest law firm that litigated Kelo and cases like it around the country, just released this video announcing that, while they lost the Kelo battle, they are winning the eminent domain war:

Simply put, the backlash to Kelo has been unprecedented.  In the past five years:

• 9 state high courts have limited eminent domain powers
• 43 state legislatures have passed greater property rights protections
• 44 eminent domain abuse projects have been defeated by grassroots activists
• 88 percent of the public now believe that property rights are as important as free speech and freedom of religion

The U.S. Supreme Court typically leads the state courts, which usually adopt its rulings and interpret state laws in a similar manner.  But with Kelo, the exact opposite happened.  In January 2006, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled unanimously to reject the Supreme Court’s eminent domain analysis. The Oklahoma and South Dakota supreme courts soon followed in expressly rejecting the high court decision.  So far, Kelo has prompted nine state high courts to limit eminent domain powers.

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To the American mind there may be nothing more quintessentially Swedish than the leggy, blond supermodel.

But there’s another Swedish model that inspires almost as much admiration—the Swedish economic model. With a generous welfare state and high living standards, Sweden seems to prove that socialism works. Much of the hope that swept Barack Obama into the White House rests on the belief that America could reach new heights under a regime of enlightened progressivism, that we could be more like the Swedes.

Not so fast, warns Stockholm University sociologist Charlotta Stern: “If an American told me that the US should be more like Sweden I would say I don’t think it’s possible.” The United States can centralize its health care system and pass other laws that mimic Sweden’s welfare state polices, says Stern, but it’s impossible to replicate a culture that allows those policies to operate about as smoothly as possible. Swedish bureaucracies inspire trust, but their American counterparts (DMV, TSA, IRS) inspire punch lines, if not outrage.

But America could emulate some of the Swedish policies that don’t require extensive bureaucracies. Take school vouchers. Teachers unions in America regard the idea as free-market radicalism, but families in Sweden enjoy universal school choice. Sweden adopted its famously progressive policies during the 1970s, but after years of sluggish economic growth the land of ABBA altered its course in the 1990s, adopting a host of free-market reforms, from deregulation to tax cuts.

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Kids placed in schools their parents chose for them – not the ones the government chose – graduate at a higher rate and are safer at school.  Who would have guessed?

According to an evaluation released yesterday by the US Department of Education Institute of Education Sciences, the DC Opportunity Scholarship Program (OSP) has “significantly improved students’ chances of graduating from high school.”  The same study finds that “parents had higher satisfaction and rated schools as safer if their child was offered or used an OSP scholarship.”

With these dramatic success indicators, it must be no surprise that DC OSP is the only federal education program that the Obama Administration is intent on killing.

Dr. Matt Ladner, vice president of research at the Goldwater Institute reports:

“…students who were randomly selected to receive vouchers had an 82% graduation rate.  That’s 12 percentage points higher than the students who didn’t receive vouchers.  Students who actually used their vouchers had graduation rates that were 21% higher.  Even better, the subgroup of students who received vouchers and came from designated Schools in Need of Improvement (SINI schools) had graduation rates that were 13 percentage points higher than the same subgroup of students who weren’t offered vouchers–and the effect was 20 percentage points higher for the SINI students who used their vouchers!”

That’s right.  Students who used their voucher to attend a school of their parents’ choice had a 21 percent higher graduation rate than those who were eligible for a voucher but were not offered one in the lottery process.  DC OSP is a federally-funded program that provides scholarships up to $7,500 to low-income families in Washington, DC – a pittance compared to DC Public School spending.

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In last year’s federal budget, Illinois Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky introduced and then withdrew what appears to have been a multi-million dollar earmark for the Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), a now-defunct nonprofit that claims to have provided first aid training for nearly two million students, many of them in the Chicago Public Schools.

Problem #1: Three years earlier, SALF had been the subject of a series of hard-hitting ABC7 Chicago investigative reports that raised serious questions about every aspect of the organization: its founder, its operations, and its funding.

Problem #2: The Chicago Public Schools can’t or won’t produce records that support SALF’s claims.

Problem #3: Rep. Schakowsky won’t answer easy questions like these:  What was the dollar amount of her intended earmark for SALF? Why was she funding a non-profit that years before had been the subject of four scorching ABC7 exposes? What’s her relationship with the charity’s founder/president Carol J. Spizzirri, a convicted shoplifter who obtained millions in federal and state funds over the years? Does Rep. Schakowsky think SALF should be investigated in order to determine if those millions were properly spend?

The Progressive Politician

Jan Schakowsky’s district is north of Chicago and includes Evanston, Skokie, and west to Des Plaines. She’s the Democrat’s Chief Deputy Whip in the House and serves on the Steering and Policy Committee, the Energy and Commerce Committee, and chairs the House Select Committee on Intelligence’s Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations. A member of the Democratic Progressive Caucus, she’s considered one of the most liberal members in Congress.

The Discredited Foundation

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From today’s Politico:

An all-night House-Senate conference committee delivered President Barack Obama and Democrats a far-reaching and historic achievement Friday – a realignment of the rules that govern Wall Street and a second victory toward Obama’s legislative triple crown.

The compromise bill now goes to the House and Senate for approval. For all the messiness of the process, financial reform and March’s health care reform win cumulatively make clear Obama and Democrats are governing in consequential ways – and once again Friday, without a single Republican vote. The results make clear the argument over Obama is no longer whether he’s effective or not, but whether voters will like the results.

The agreement came at 5:39 a.m., after 20 straight hours of work in the committee, a marathon session that tested the negotiating skills, patience and endurance of several dozen lawmakers tasked with reconciling two competing approaches to reining in Wall Street.

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In the wake of the BP oil spill, efforts have been afoot on the part of the Obama administration to ban drilling off the U.S. coast outright, ostensibly to stop future disasters like that which continues to unfold in the Gulf.

Part of the rationale for such a proposed moratorium is the notion that BP’s practices were not uniquely bad among industry actors, but rather typical and common—a conclusion that appears to be reinforced by a cursory glance at records obtained from the Department of the Interior, as written up by Greenwire today:

To look at the safety records of the offshore drilling companies before the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank on April 20, there was little difference between BP America Inc. and its peers in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

But in a revelation that Big Government readers are unlikely to find surprising, sources tell Capitol Confidential that a broader review of relevant governmental data demonstrates that in fact, BP had a far worse record on safety matters than other oil companies.

Indeed, by one measure, BP’s practices were exponentially less safe than those of environmentalists’ favorite oil industry bogeyman— Exxon-Mobil—a conclusion BP opponents say may support the proposition that a lighter touch regulatory approach, which does not punish companies with good safety records and standards, is more appropriate than a ban.

According to Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) data compiled and detailed to Capitol Confidential, two refineries owned by BP accounted for an astonishing 97 percent of the most serious violations flagged by government inspectors in the last three years.

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Today, in 1998, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Line Item Veto Act, passed in 1996 was unconstitutional. It is tool used, in varying forms, by most of the nation’s Governors.

According to an LA Weekly investigation, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa “has very quietly accepted — and even angled for — free tickets to as many as 80 pricey events, then failed to report all but one of them, as well as failed to keep records of his actions or the sources of this largesse.”

From an article published today:

It is not known who gave him the tickets, or the precise number of these events Villaraigosa actually attended, although it is known that he frequently did show up. The 80 events, which appear on the mayor’s private official schedule, were recently sent by Villaraigosa to the Ethics Commission amid an outcry from the public over his freebies. The Weekly obtained a copy of the list. Click here to see the Weekly’s exclusive ticket-price values of Mayor Villaraigosa’s 80 freebies.

According to L.A. Weekly’s calculations, Villaraigosa has taken tickets worth $50,000, and perhaps as much as $100,000 — a staggering amount for an American politician at any level, and more than he could cover with his $223,000 salary and extensive family obligations.

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The House Financial Services Committee voted Wednesday to launch an investigation of the ShoreBank bailout, a scandal that was first revealed here at BigGovernment.com. Of the dozens of banks that have failed this year, only ShoreBank received help from Washington and Wall Street. The reasons: its connections to the White House, its close relationship with Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), and its importance to the radical left.

After I broke the story in January, other bloggers, notably the Central Illinois 9/12 project, connected more of the dots. Soon, the Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, and even the New York Times began following the story. Two weeks ago, my campaign joined Rev. Isaac Hayes (who is challenging Jesse Jackson, Jr. in IL-2) and the Illinois Tea Party in a spirited protest outside ShoreBank’s offices on LaSalle Street in downtown Chicago.

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That’s because when the entire country is hurting and the private sector continues to lose jobs, bureaucrats are being hired.

The following chart makes that case. Since the beginning of the recession (roughly January 2008), some 7.9 million jobs were lost in the private sector while 590,000 jobs were gained in the public one.  And since the passage of the stimulus bill (February 2009), over 2.6 million private jobs were lost, but the government workforce grew by 400,000.

Plus, as you know, according to the latest numbers from Bureau of Economic Analysis, the average federal civilian worker now earns double what private-sector workers earn when factoring in wages and benefits ($119,982 vs. $59,909). And the gap is increasing.  According to Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute, in 2000, the average federal worker earned 66 percent more in total compensation than the average private-sector worker. By 2008, that ratio had risen to 100 percent. That’s serious money.

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From the Los Angeles Times:

California welfare recipients are able to use state-issued debit cards to withdraw cash on gaming floors in more than half of the casinos in the state, a Los Angeles Times review of records found.

The cards, provided by the Department of Social Services to help recipients feed and clothe their families, work in automated teller machines at 32 of 58 tribal casinos and 47 of 90 state-licensed poker rooms, the review found.

State officials said Wednesday they were working to determine how much money had been withdrawn from casino ATMs by people using the welfare debit cards.

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Aside from breaking her word to the AMA and physicians across the country, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has effectively demolished doctor reimbursements for most of the healthcare industry.  The 21.2% Medicare fee schedule cut has taken effect, but what most do not realize is that the Medicare fee schedule is the gold standard for provider reimbursement fee schedules across the nation.

Essentially, where Medicare goes, insurers follow for the guidelines in covered services and baseline physician fee schedules for private payers as well as worker’s compensation and automobile insurance companies in most states, as well as Medicaid and Medicare itself.

What Pelosi has effectively done is saved the insurance companies who use the Medicare fee schedule millions of dollars of payouts to physicians on their claims–regardless if the patient is a Medicare patient.  I’m not seeing the insurance lobby out there right now, are you?  However, on the provider side, the doctor’s lobby groups are outraged at Pelosi’s failure and the damage this inaction will cause physicians–especially private–and force them to layoff employees to make up for the loss in reimbursements to cover their enormous monthly overhead costs.

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Professional radical shill Peter Dreier, an Occidental College professor, has been very busy writing propaganda for his paying customer ACORN in recent days. Dreier is the driving force behind the “Cry Wolf” project, a push to encourage academics to help spread more lies about the corrupt group.

Now, taking a cue from America’s BP-Asskicking-Commander-In-Chief, Dreier affectionately oozes that the dissolving ACORN assaulted posteriors like nobody else. There was “[n]o group [that] was better at kicking ass,” Dreier writes.

What Dreier should have written was that there is no group better than ACORN – at kicking its own ass!

In a review of his friend John Atlas’s new institutional hagiography of ACORN, Seeds of Change, Dreier writes that ACORN brass “expected Obama’s victory in 2008 to give the organization even greater influence.”

But the New York Times and eeevil right-wingers spoiled the party.

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