Judge Andrew Napolitano took the helm of the Glenn Beck Show and made a strong case against the Obama Administration’s handling of the oil disaster in the gulf. The Judge detailed how an incompetent government coupled with the crony capitalism of special interests laid the foundation for the current tragedy. Big Government’s Mike Flynn and the awesome pollster Pat Caddell joined in for the discussion.

A recent blog post by economist Scott Sumner got me thinking about another way we could quickly improve our government.

We should require Public Employees to take personality exams before they are hired.

At issue is human “spite” and how it affects economic development.  If you’ve ever dealt with public employees, certainly you know them to be some of the most spiteful monkeys in the barrel.   They are capricious and angry, they forget who they work for, and they wield power arbitrarily.  Somehow, you feel lucky when they actually do their jobs.

Caveat: Some aren’t bad.  But WHY do we have to accept it at all?

Yes, firing them is next to impossible, but setting up new rules for hiring them is easy as pie.

The GOP should promise to establish a Civil Service Personality Exam for all public employees that weeds out those who don’t realize their job is to make private life easy.

What would the test look like?  This:

In a trade, you can receive either

1. $5 while your trading partner receives $4.
2. $4 while he receives $1.

In a trade, you can receive either

1. $1 while your trading partner receives $10.
2. $0 while your partner receives $5.

To grade this test we just need the definition of economic spite:

A spiteful individual is willing to forgo material gains from trade unless the terms of trade give him a large share of the pie.

So if someone doesn’t say #1 to both questions, she does not work for the government.

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Remember: The Gulf Oil Spill Is Like 9-11

Three days after the Gulf oil rig explosion, the Netherlands offered to send in oil skimmers to pump oil off of the surface of the ocean. The Obama Administration turned them down because they were not 100% efficient and small amounts of oil would be pumped back into the Gulf with the excess water. EPA regulations do not allow for residue water to contain any oil. So rather than use equipment that was not 100% efficient the Obama Administration chose to let all of the oil run into the Gulf.

This is not just bad policy, it is criminal.

Since the Obama Administration turned down assistance from The Netherlands at least 125 miles of Louisiana coastline has been ruined by the BP oil spill. Tar blobs began washing up on Florida’s white sand beaches near Pensacola days ago. And, crude oil has also been reported along barrier islands in Alabama and Mississippi.

Clean-up workers pick up blobs of oil in absorbent snare on Queen Bess Island at the mouth of Barataria Bay near the Gulf of Mexico in Plaquemines Parish, La., Friday, June 4, 2010. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

The Examiner reported, via Free Republic:

The U.S. Government has apparently reconsidered a Dutch offer to supply 4 oil skimmers. These are large arms that are attached to oil tankers that pump oil and water from the surface of the ocean into the tanker. Water pumped into the tanker will settle to the bottom of the tanker and is then pumped back into the ocean to make room for more oil. Each system will collect 5,000 tons of oil each day.

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CNN is planning to bring disgraced former New York governor on as a commentator to replace the leaving Campbell Brown- thus condoning the criminal actions of Eliot Spitzer which he has never admitted or atoned for after using his influence to avoid prosecution.

WHY WOULD CNN TRUST SUCH A MAN ?

Should CNN now be called the Criminal News Network ? Eliot Spitzer violated federal money laundering laws as well as the Mann Act, which prohibits transporting a woman across state lines for the purposes of prostitution, which a Republican New York State Supreme Court Justice was charged, convicted and jailed for in 2009. Why not Spitzer?

WHY WOULD CNN CONDONE THIS BEHAVIOR?

Eliot Spitzer also violated Federal Money Laundering laws which were reported by two New York banks (North Fork Bank and HSBC) with the U.S. Treasury department and the Internal Revenue Service after Spitzer moved large sums of cash in bank accounts he controlled. The banks reported the transactions because they looked like “structuring” transactions. A structured transaction, according to the FFIEC’s Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) exam manual, is used to evade BSA reporting and certain recordkeeping requirements. They are used to hide the source, destination or reason the money is being sent. Spitzer broke the law.

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Democrat Representative Bob Etheridge was recently asked if he fully supports the Obama agenda, provoking an angry and violent response from the Congressman.

We had no idea that this was such a provocative question – and we wanted to find out why it’s such a dangerous line of inquiry.  So at great risk to our own personal safety, we took our cameras to the underground walkways of Chicago, the epicenter of Obamamania, to see if the question was just as dangerous to ask here as it is in D.C.  What we discovered will shock you.  Viewer discretion is advised.

ACORN demanded and received changes to a congressional report that –surprise, surprise– fails to find ACORN did anything wrong.

Longtime ACORN lawyer Arthur Z. Schwartz sent a letter to the Government Accountability Office (GAO) which was examining federal grants to ACORN, under orders from Congress. Schwartz’s demands appear at pages 32 and 33 of the report which is called “Preliminary Observations on Funding, Oversight, and Investigations and Prosecutions of ACORN or Potentially Related Organizations.” The paper is available at GAO’s website.

ACORN’s election fraud assurance division, Project Vote, which used to employ President Obama, even threw in a few helpful suggestions in an effort to trick Americans into believing it no longer has anything to do with ACORN. Project Vote lawyer Brian Mellor’s letter appears at pages 35 and 36 of the report.

The preliminary -as in incomplete, insufficient, and downright superficial- report is less than enlightening. I got the distinct impression while reading it that its authors hadn’t actually been following ACORN’s troubled history. You can’t expect much from a federal investigation when the question posed, namely, whether some of the grants ACORN received, were misused. Instead of doing actually shoe-leather investigating, all GAO appears to have done is talked to other government agencies and compiled existing data.

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“Health overhaul to force changes in employer plans.” “Draft health rules set hurdles.” “Employer health care costs to jump 9% in 2011.” With headlines like these splashed across the nation’s newspapers, it’s no wonder the American public remains steadfastly opposed to the government takeover of health care signed into law by President Obama in March. Just this week, the Obama administration released bureaucratic new health care regulations that could change or eliminate more than half of all employer-provided health care plans, affecting tens of millions of Americans. Apparently, “If you like it, you can keep it” was an Obama promise too good to be true – one of many, as it is turning out.

Indeed, ObamaCare’s broken promises are piling up for America’s families, seniors, and job-creators and stifling the economic recovery we all hope to achieve. Bureaucratic mandates, higher taxes, and record deficit spending are proven job killers – yet these very principles lay at the heart of the Democrats’ government takeover of health care.

During the Blair House summit, Speaker Pelosi decreed the Democrats’ health care plan would “create four million jobs — 400,000 jobs almost immediately.” With a national unemployment rate stuck near 10 percent, and with 15 million Americans searching for work, Republicans and the American people continue to ask: Where are the jobs?

One of the lasting lessons of the health care debate is this: The American people will no longer accept a federal government that is tone-deaf to their concerns. Men and women who never before have spoken out about politics are now standing up and demanding to be heard. And Republicans are using every resource and seizing every opportunity to bring their voices to Washington D.C.

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The July issue of Playboy (available on news stands Friday) has an awesome feature story, “Rogues of K Street: Confessions of a Tea Party Consultant.” The piece is by Anonymous. We bring you our first installment below. The whole article can be found here.

Everything I know about being a good consultant comes from Fight Club. Discretion is everything. Rule number one is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. Rule number two is you don’t talk about consulting for the Tea Party. The story about the wild characters who are shaping this campaign cycle is worth telling, but please excuse my anonymity.

I hold as many meetings as possible over Tanqueray and tonics at the St. Regis hotel on K Street in Washington, D.C. The bar is dark and private, with comfortable couches. Even the gin tastes better there. On weekday afternoons the only people in the bar are foreigners and political consultants long past caring about who actually wins.

“You’re going to see something spectacular,” an old friend who has a knack for black-bag operations said as he proudly downed his vodka. “About a month from now you’ll see ACORN explode from within.” Right on schedule a video was released that showed undercover conservative activists James O’Keefe and Hannah Giles getting advice from employees at the Baltimore office of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now on how to smuggle underage El Salvadoran girls into a fictitious brothel.

That’s when I realized this isn’t an average fringe movement. This one is credible, legit and-for the first time in a decade-scaring the crap out of the left. In my years as a campaign hack and then as a consultant, I’ve created more than my share of fake grassroots organizations. Some were downright evil but effective beyond expectations. Did you get an automated call from the sister of a 9/11 victim asking you to reelect President Bush in 2004? That was me. Did you get a piece of mail with the phrase ’supports abortion on demand as a means of birth control’? That may have been me too.

Conservatives had been trying to take down ACORN for three decades. Where they failed, BigGovernment.com and my friends succeeded. In one magnificent explosion, a loose group of troublemakers, libertarians and Republicans took its first scalp. Sonja Merchant-Jones, former co-chair of ACORNís Maryland chapter, told The New York Times in March, “That 20-minute video ruined 40 years of good work.”

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Putting aside for a second the fact that this speech was given about 50 days late, last night’s oval office speech proved that the President is not ready to be honest with the American people.  For the first 30 days of this crisis, President Obama was ignoring the fact that the crisis existed, and now when he uses the oval office to give the people confidence that he is on top of the problem  he spends more time trying to sell cap and trade than discussing capping the well. Essentially, he is still ignoring the crisis.

Lets take a look at the key points of the President’s speech. He begins by trying to convince America that he has been doing a great job at managing the disaster:

“… I assembled a team of our nation’s best scientists and engineers to tackle this challenge – a team led by Dr. Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and our nation’s Secretary of Energy. Scientists at our national labs and experts from academia and other oil companies have also provided ideas and advice.”

Nobel prizes have not been impressive since  Obama recived one for doing nothing and Al Gore got one for a hoax.  The key is how the ideas from those great minds are implemented. The President’s management of the crisis has been horrible.  Even the progressive bible  the NY Times trashed Obama’s  management of the crisis:

“The information is not flowing,” Senator Nelson said. “The decisions are not timely. The resources are not produced. And as a result, you have a big mess, with no command and control.”

In other words,  the leadership and management coming from the executive branch of the government has been a disaster.

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Today, in 1858, Abraham Lincoln delivered his “House Divided” Speech:

A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new — North as well as South.

The parallels to 1994 are all around us.  A Democrat president is elected.  He pushes big government agenda items like health care.  His presidency gets mired by scandal and circumstances.  His poll numbers begin to drop quickly.   In 1994 Republicans rallied around a set of principles and won a congressional majority.  Today, unfortunately, those principles often appear to be missing.

The Contract with America was a critical piece of the Republican victory in 1994 because it let voters know there was an alternative to the big spending ways of the Democrat Party.  Today, not so much.

Republicans appear to be all over the map and the clear principled default lines are missing.

Nowhere does that appear more evident than on the Financial Reform legislation.  The bill passed the Senate after the Democrats broke the Republican dam.  Sen. Scott Brown joined others in moving the bill to a House Senate Conference where things are going from bad to worse.  Republicans didn’t help make the bill “better” by voting for amendment’s like the Durbin price control amendment.

The time has come to for Republicans to begin to draft distinctions between Democrats and their big government policies.  The Financial Reform legislation is a good place to start.  The bill contains bailouts, takeovers, and price control schemes — via the Durbin Amendment — that is corporate welfare at it’s worse.

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So President Obama is meeting in the White House tomorrow with BP’s chairman. The focus of public discussion of this event has been on it taking until the 57th day or so since the Deepwater Horizon rig caught fire following a well explosion, precipitating the ongoing oil leak.

The more relevant figure is 4,700. If my quick calculation has it right, that’s the number of days since the last time a BP CEO was in the Oval Office.

On that day, August 4, 1997, then-CEO, (then-Sir) John Browne, joined by Ken Lay, met in the Oval with President Clinton and Vice President Gore.

Their mission that day? As revealed in the August 1, 1997 Lay briefing memo whiih I was later provided — having left a brief dance with Enron after raising questions about this very issue — it was to demand that the White House ignore unanimous Senate instruction pursuant to Art. II, Sec. 2 of the Constitution (“advice”, of “advice and consent” fame), and to go to Kyoto and agree to the “global warming” treaty.

Oh, and to enact a cap-and-trade scheme.

Oddly, President Obama tonite will telegraph that he’s really going to stick it to BP tomorrow and give ‘em…the cap-and-trade scheme they concocted with Enron (spare me the hysterics, comrades, as I have detailed and explained in various ways here, here and here, I was in the room).

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The Gaza Flotilla incident, which would really be more aptly called the Hamas Flotilla incident, needs to be viewed from a wider perspective to be more fully understood and appreciated for what it represents – A Marxist-Progressive Jihad on Israel, and by proxy, the United States, wherein the American Progressive Left is engaged in an open and working relationship with Islamist radicals.

The Hamas Flotilla action was not an isolated event. It was but the latest in a carefully programmed series of actions that have been taking place since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in a violent coup in 2007, designed by community organizations that have been operating in the region since at least the mid-1990s.

The umbrella organization of this recent series of actions is called the Free Gaza Movement, and represents several international organizations, as well as many prominent American Progressive organizations.

The international organizations include George Galloway’s Viva Palestina, IHH, and the International Solidarity Movement (ISM).

The American Progressive community is organized against Israel under the banner of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation.

The US Campaign to end the Israeli Occupation is a co-production of Global Exchange/CodePink/United for Peace and Justice (UFPJ) (All founded by Medea Benjamin), and a group called the Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR).

The Center for Economic and Social Rights (CESR) has been organizing on the ground in Palestinian territories since 1996.

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Nearly every election year, a series of analysts and candidates suggest to American voters that the election that year may be the most important of its age.  In retrospect, few can argue that the election of Obama has not been momentous.  The midterm election of 2010 may be a turning point as well – especially for American business.

For decades, American business has wined, dined and lobbied the American politicians. Some have sought preferential tax benefits for themselves or their industries.  Others have sought preferential regulations or corporate welfare for the same reasons.  Still others feed the alligator that is government in hopes that it will be kind to them in the future while it consumes others today.

Perhaps no greater example of the latter mentality exists in California.   Year after year, business interests donate millions of dollars to Democrats in the hope that they will act reasonably.  The coup de grace of which was the 2002 election for Governor between then Governor Gray Davis and challenger, and business man, Bill Simon.  Under no uncertain terms, Simon campaigned on lower taxes and regulations.  Davis offered record deficits and coming tax increases – not to mention an ever increasing regulatory burden.  Incredibly, Big Business gave to Davis three to one over Simon.  They did so because they did not give Simon much of a chance and they wanted to curry favor with Davis – hoping he would be kind to them when he won.

Without a doubt there were two losers in that election.  Simon lost by less than 5 points (far closer than business imagined) and California businesses now face the highest combined tax and regulatory burdens in American history.  In other words, California businesses have received a very poor return on their investments into California Democrat politicians – so much so that California’s desert neighbor, Nevada, leads the nation in new business development.

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Rep. Bob Etheridge’s assault of student videographers clearly hit a nerve with the American public. The video of his attack was the most watched video on YouTube yesterday. How to explain that?

For months, the legacy media and national Democrats have struggled to convince the public that the Tea Party movement was a dark harbinger of violence. Yet, all acts of violence and intimidation have come from the left. We’ve seen-and reported-these events, but the Etheridge video encapsulated it better than any other. We have a political class. They don’t like criticism and have a general disdain for the American public. Today, though, we have tools to hold them accountable.

Big Government Editor Mike Flynn joined Sean Hannity last night to discuss the Etheridge video and the fall-out from the assault.

Even though the Obama Administration claimed that squandering $800 billion on so-called stimulus would  keep the joblessness rate below 8 percent, the unemployment rate today is almost 10 percent. There are many reasons for the economy’s tepid performance, including a larger burden of government spending and the dampening effect of future tax rate increases (tax rates will jump significantly on January 1, 2011, when the 2003 tax cuts expire).

A closer look at the unemployment data, though , suggests that minimum wage laws also deserve a big share of the blame. In this Center for Freedom and Prosperity video, a former intern of mine at the Cato Institute (continuing a great tradition) explains that politicians destroyed jobs when they increased the minimum wage by more than 40 percent over a three-year period.

Mr. Divounguy is correct when he says businesses are not charities and that they only create jobs when they think a worker will generate net revenue. Higher minimum wages, needless to say, are especially destructive for people with poor work skills and limited work experience. This is why young people and minorities tend to suffer most – which is exactly what we see in the government data, with the teenage unemployment rates now at an astounding (and depressing) 26 percent level and blacks suffering from a joblessness rate of more than 15 percent.

Since the video is focused on economics, it does not examine why politicians would enact legislation that destroys jobs.

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Today, in 1800, Napoleon snatched victory from the jaws of defeat and won the Battle of Marengo. Expect a big spike in google searches of this on November 3rd. We are marching to the sound of the guns.

Democrat Congressman Bob Etheridge assaults a student who asked a pretty straight-forward question on the street and here’s Mediaite’s Colby Hall in an article absurdly titled: Congressman Loses Cool To Students With A Flip Cam, But Comes Out The Hero?

Mediaite wonders: Actions of a “hero?”

Colby Hall, one of the editors of a major news site, is trying to start some kind of meme/talking point that a Congressman laying his hands on a couple of polite college students might make the Congressman some kind of hero. Incredibly, Hall calls this assault ” only partially defensible.” Looks like Hall’s on the same page as the Democrats who just issued talking points ordering their minions to blame Andrew Breitbart (who’s out of the country, by the way) for the assault.

Worse than that, Hall wants to put part of the blame on Big Government, James O’Keefe and Jason Mattera: (more…)