On Monday, World Wide Web Big Players Verizon and Google made officially public their seven self-agreed-to principles on how they think it’s best to run the Internet railroad.

This was–-and is–a bit of news, given that the two have been on opposite sides of the Network Neutrality debate since its inception–-Google for, Verizon against.

This deal was too much for the whacked-out, way-out fringe pro-Net Neutrality Leftists like Free Press and Public Knowledge, and they immediately collapsed into conniption fits.

The heads at Free Press have yet to stop spinning.

In dread anticipation of Monday afternoon’s announcement, they (along with MoveOn.org Civic Action, CREDO Action, the Progressive Campaign Change Committee and ColorofChange.org) delivered to Google’s Washington, D.C. offices 300,000 signed petitions against the proposed deal.

No one’s sure just how many of the 300,000 actually knew what they were signing, given Free Press’s horrendously dishonest track record on these sorts of things.

After the announcement, they immediately issued Free Press Urges Policymakers to Reject Google-Verizon Pact.  But they still weren’t done–later in the day giving us Google-Verizon Pact Worse than Feared.

You can hear them hyperventilating all the way from where you are, can’t you?

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The progressive Democrats in power must believe that the citizens of this country are absolute morons, either that or they haven’t read a newspaper in two years and don’t realize that George Bush is no longer president. The Democratic party plans on retaining their change message for their 2010. Their new tag line is “vote for us, or its back to the bad old economic policies of George Bush. That’s right Barack Obama and his progressive majority are going to campaign as if they were all still in kindergarten “Its not my fault….blame Bush.”

Not only is that approach childish, but it belies the truth.  Allow me to suggest that the policies of Barney Frank had more to do with the bursting of the housing bubble, the resulting bank crisis and the “great recession,” than the policies of George Bush. Led by Frank the Democratic party brought down the banking industry by forcing banks to give loans to people who couldn’t afford them, then he   blunted the Republican attempts to regulate the industry

Frank aggressively fought reform efforts by the Bush administration. He told The New York Times on Sept. 11, 2003, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s problems were “exaggerated.” Exaggerated? Thanks to Fannie and Freddie the housing market collapsed and we fell into this “great recession.”

“These two entities – Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac – are not facing any kind of financial crisis,” Frank Opined to the Times. “The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing.”

The 10/8/03  Washington Post reported that Frank opposed giving the Bush administration the approval rights over banking business activities that “could pose risk to the taxpayers.” He worried the Treasury Department “would sacrifice activities that are good for consumers in the name of lowering the companies’ market risks.”

In the video below Frank sits in a 9/10/03 House Financial Services Committee hearing and says Fannie and Freddie are sound, and there is no housing disaster coming.

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Yesterday, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs lashed out at the “professional left,” for their criticism of President Obama. The “professional left” was predictably and very professionally outraged. For once, we kinda feel Gibbs’ pain.

Tommy Christopher at Mediaite has decided to wade into the “Phantom N-Word” story and do the heavy lifting of the Congressional Black Caucus, Media Matters, MSNBC and all of the networks and publications that spread the false charges of racism emanating from the health care protests in Washington DC on March 20^th. After reading Tommy’s lame attempt I see now why the other apologists for the Congressional Black Caucus have stayed silent for months on this issue.

Let me answer his two main arguments immediately and then provide detailed and sourced evidence to support me answers:

1.  There is corroborating evidence from three eyewitnesses who said the racial slurs occurred

WRONG:  There is one witness with no corroboration.  And that witness is NOT civil-rights hero Rep. John Lewis.  (more below)

2.  The five videos showing the moment the slurs were supposed to have taken place don’t reveal what each and every person present is saying, therefore, it does not prove the racial slurs didn’t happen.

WRONG: The videos we have provided of the incident unequivocally prove that the scene described by the one witness is a complete fabrication.  Furthermore, it is not incumbent on the accused to prove something did not happen, it is incumbent on the accuser to prove that it did.

To back-up his claim that there is corroborating evidence from three respected congressmen, Tommy links to two articles: The original report from McClatchy that started the “N-word” story in the first place and a subsequent piece in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution by Cynthia Tucker where she discusses the matter with Rep. John Lewis.

For three eyewitness testimonies to be “corroborating” they need to support one another’s version of the events. Let’s look at each person’s testimony:

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From Prager’s column today:

The title of this column seems unbelievable, but it is in fact what happened in America this past week. And almost no one has noticed.

After 50 years of being inundated with stories of white racism, and being taught in college that in this white-dominated society, only a white can be a racist, the American public has been properly brainwashed into accepting the otherwise incredible: A black man murdered eight white people at his place of work because they were white, and the media story is about the murderer’s alleged experiences of racism.

Here’s the Associated Press Report from Aug. 7, four days after the murders. It was reprinted in The Washington Post and throughout America:

To those closest to him, Omar Thornton was caring, quiet and soft-spoken … But underneath, Thornton seethed with a sense of racial injustice for years that culminated in a shooting rampage Tuesday in which the Connecticut man killed eight and wounded two others at his job at Hartford Distributors in Manchester before killing himself.

‘I know what pushed him over the edge was all the racial stuff that was happening at work,’ said his girlfriend, Kristi Hannah.

‘He always felt like he was being discriminated (against) because he was black,’ said Jessica Anne Brocuglio, his former girlfriend. ‘Basically they wouldn’t give him pay raises. He never felt like they accepted him as a hard working person.’

‘Thornton changed jobs a few times because he was not getting raises, Brocuglio said.

The New York Times Aug. 3 headline read: “Troubles Preceded Connecticut Workplace Killing,” and in the second paragraph, the Times reported: (more…)

The White House’s ever-optimistic economic cheerleading squad is in shambles.  Over the last six weeks, Peter Orszag, Director of the Office of Management & Budget and Christine Romer, Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisor, have now euphemistically “resigned to spend more time with their families”.  Both Orszag and Romer were highly credentialed and respected academicians who provided a veneer of elitist credibility to offset the enormous skepticism regarding the lugubrious Larry Summers and the dubious Timothy Geithner.  Orszag and Romer had been reduced early on to a  level of authority similar to Saturday Night Lives’ iconic Spartan Cheerleaders, Will Ferrell and Cheri Oteri.  They trotted out each week dressed for the part to enthusiastically give the “World’s Greatest Cheer”, but they were never actually allowed on the team.

The Obama Administration has fancied itself as the new Camelot of American Politics.  Their campaign march to power was capped by a highly choreographed speech near Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate where Presidents Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy rallied the Free World to oppose tyranny with “tear down these walls” and “ich bein Berliner”.

Obama was successful demonstrating the he could match America’s two most photogenic Presidents for good looks and beautiful wives.  But his appeasement message of “the walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand” seemed the antithesis to Reagan’s: “Democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by mAan.”and Kennedy’s: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Presidents Reagan and Kennedy championed supply-side tax cuts and reductions in regulations to support spur the economic triumph for America’s brand of free market democracy, whereas President Obama seems much comfortable with bureaucratic orthodoxy.  Both Reagan and Kennedy respected the profit motive and extolled the creative virtues of the capitalism.  Reagan stated: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

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One of the promises every president since Richard Nixon has failed to deliver on is the recurring pledge to somehow free the nation from its ever-growing “dependence on foreign oil.”

Until fairly recently, the need to find other ways to meet our growing energy needs was driven primarily by national security rather than economic or environmental concerns; both are often in conflict with worries about instability or outright hostility in those nations on which we have depended for so long.

In the early ’70s there was a belief that nuclear power might replace oil as a source of energy. Later in the decade, the spike in oil prices following the Arab oil embargo convinced the Carter administration to waste billions in an attempt to develop new unconventional domestic sources that made little sense even at the time.

Since then, politicians have tried to “wean” us from our dependence on oil by artificially raising prices, using regulations to hamstring oil and coal producers, subsidizing or even mandating more fuel-efficient technologies and trying to persuade voters that wind, solar and alternative sources of fuel are the answer.

Most energy experts believe that regardless of our ability to replace oil in the longer term, in our lifetimes we will continue to need oil to fuel our economy and to maintain a 21st-century lifestyle. The question is not whether America needs oil, but where we get it. There are really three main sources: We can buy it from our enemies; find and develop reserves within the confines of our own borders or in the waters off our shores; or buy it from stable, friendly nations.

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ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP) – Former Sen. Ted Stevens, an uncompromising advocate for Alaska for four decades who delivered scores of expensive projects to one of the nation’s most sparsely populated states, has died in a plane crash at the age of 86.

Family spokesman Mitch Rose says Stevens was among five people killed in the crash outside Dillingham, about 325 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Stevens began his career in the days before Alaska statehood and did not leave politics until 2008, when he was convicted on corruption charges weeks before Election Day. But a federal judge threw out the verdict because of misconduct by federal prosecutors. (more…)

AFL-CIO union boss Richard Trumka says this country doesn’t have a deficit crisis… And any suggestion that we do is the fault of the Republicans and their willing allies in the press.

Seriously, he really said that!

Here, take a look:

Here are a couple of things to keep in mind about the veracity, logic, and intelligence of Mr. Trumka’s fiscal analysis of our country:

• The AFL-CIO is one of the single largest contributors to President Obama and the Democratic Party
• They reap enormous, direct benefits from the ever-expanding size of the federal government
• The AFL-CIO ran itself insolvent in the 2008 presidential election–spending millions more than the union had taken in from dues, and later engaged in “creative accounting” to conceal their financial hardships
• The AFL-CIO has pledged to spend upwards of $53 million in the waning days of the midterm election
• Mr. Trumka has also said that he “watched (tea party protesters) spit at people, I watched them call John Lewis the n-word,” even though he is nowhere to be found on any of the videos of the alleged incident
• Mr. Trumka has also said, in reference to the Tea Party Movement: “There are forces in our country that are working hard to convert justifiable anger about an economy that only seems to work for a few of us into racist and homophobic hate and violence directed at our President…”

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In an action that one Florida GOP consultant said could be a late game-changer, a lawsuit was filed on August 9, 2010, seeking the release of a videotaped deposition given by GOP Gubernatorial candidate Rick Scott in April 2010, just days before he announced his candidacy.

The lawsuit, filed by Florida attorney Steve Andrews, contends that in March 2004, a company owned and directed by Rick Scott, Solantic LLC applied for a Florida Medical Care License for six clinics.  The application listed Dr. Mark Glencross as the “Medical Director” for each of the clinics. Dr. Glencross, who had been an employee at Solantic, claimed he had never been asked nor given consent for his name to be included on the application.  And he was never the Medical Director for the clinics.  Under Florida law, it is a felony of the third degree to file false or misleading information on facility licensure applications. Glencross filed a lawsuit against Solantic in 2008 alleging fraud.  Although it is uncommon for top executives to be questioned in cases such as this, Rick Scott was personally deposed on April 6, 2010 – six days before announcing his Gubernatorial bid.  Almost immediately after the deposition, Solantic settled the lawsuit with Glencross for an undisclosed sum.  As part of the agreement, the videotaped deposition of Scott was not filed with the Duval County Clerk’s office. (more…)

The New Hampshire Department of Transportation sought and on August 28, 2009 was awarded $150,045 to refurbish “a historic stone arch bridge [which] will be preserved and resurfaced to better accommodate pedestrians and bicycles.”

The NH DOT lists the following for the rationale for the project: “Facilities for Pedestrians and Bicycles. Preserve/Create jobs; and economic recovery. Invest in transportation.”

The project is nearly complete now but you still can’t cross the bridge to get to the other side. That’s because there is no other side.

As can be seen from the photos from Hillsborough, NH the word “bridge” does not adequately describe the structure. It’s really more of a pier. Nor does it appear there will ever be a bridge. The railing at the lopped-off end of the structure seems pretty permanent.

An actual bridge that crosses the Contoocook River is about 100 feet away.

Despite the $150,000 of stimulus money spent to resurface a bridge that doesn’t go anywhere, the state of New Hampshire does not have sufficient funding to repair the many functioning bridges that are falling apart. A recent report by TRIP indicates that almost one-third of all New Hampshire bridges are either “structurally deficient” or “functionally obsolete.”

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Ten months back, at the very end of September, I posted online a brief piece entitled Obama’s Wrecking Crew, in which I drew attention to a column in The New York Post in which Charles Gasparino reported two items of interest. First, that the titans of Wall Street – men such as Morgan Stanley’s John Mack, BlackRock’s Larry Fink, Greg Fleming (once at Merrill Lynch), JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, and Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein – were beginning, in private, to express grave misgivings concerning the Obama administration’s stewardship of the economy. And, second, that these insiders were also telling him that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and chief economic adviser Lawrence Summers were complaining to them that they had almost no say in policy decisions. “Obama,” these two were said to have lamented, “is acting as if he has a blank check to do what he wants, while ignoring the longterm costs of his policies.”

In that post, I predicted that Geithner, a young man whose time had come, would suffer, at least for a while, in silence, and I suggested that self-respect would cause Summers to bolt. “Within the world of economics,” I wrote, “his is a name to be conjured with; and, unlike Paul Krugman, he has not in public prostituted himself for partisan advantage. It must be excruciating to watch while Obama’s wrecking crew destroys the foundations for American prosperity.”

As I predicted, Geithner is still there and is still willing to parrot the administration line regarding matters such as marginal tax rates. But Summers has not yet bolted – perhaps because he has nowhere to go. He rose to become Treasury Secretary under Bill Clinton, and he failed ignominiously as President of Harvard. Where, he has no doubt asked himself, do I go from here?

However this may be, my general point was correct – as has become evident in the last few weeks. Not to put a fine point on it, the rats have begun leaving Obama’s ship. The first to announce his departure was our current President’s Director of the Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag, who had been a budget hawk when – as head of the Congressional Budget Office in 2007 and 2008 – he scored the various budget proposals submitted by President George W. Bush. Last Thursday, Christina Romer , Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, announced that she would soon follow Orszag’s example.

Neither Orszag nor Romer is a fool. They were party to a con, and they surely knew it.

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Today, the U.S. House returns from recess to pass a fresh bailout of state government. Billions of dollars we don’t have will be shoveled to politicians in state capitals around the nation. All in time for the midterms! The Age of Pericles this ain’t.

From AFP:

Troubled US mortgage firm Freddie Mac reported Monday a second quarter net loss of six billion dollars and sought another 1.8 billion dollars from the Treasury to contain the red ink.

The government-backed company said its strategies to boost business and “sustainable homeownership” were taking hold but cited high unemployment posing “very real challenges” for the already embattled housing market.

Freddie Mac suffered a 6.009 billion dollar net loss attributable to common stockholders in the April-June period from a loss of 7.980 billion dollars in the first quarter and 840 million dollars in the year ago period.

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What do you get when you combine: 1) a political radical who has been arrested and charged with conspiracy after causing civil disruptions including riots and 2) bureaucratic agencies in California with a record of environmental extremism that are focused on putting in place regulations on businesses that far exceed those set by the federal government?

The answer is massive job loss and industry displacement that satisfies ideologues on the far left and hurts both Americans and the economy.

And that’s exactly what California is confronting concerning the Scientific Review Committee (SRC), which was appointed by the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) to focus on reviewing new pesticides, which also happens to have significant overlap with the Scientific Review Panel (SRP), which is charged with evaluating the risk assessments of substances proposed for identification as toxic air contaminants by the Air Resources Board (ARB), the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) and the DPR.

You got that? And folks wonder why there is uncertainly in the marketplace and businesses are packing up and heading overseas due to the weight of government.

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Sound familiar? Most everyone has heard it time and time again. It’s the way many TV sales pitches end after seeming to give the viewing audience something for nothing.  It’s a sucker’s pitch. It usually works like this: you are offered the gadget of the moment for the bargain price (typically) of $19.95, and you get an additional gadget for free.  Then comes the addendum (very quickly and often in a whisper) “just pay separate processing and handling.” The fee is never disclosed, but it’s always there (typically $9.95 for each gadget, or another $19.90 for both which brings the total to $39.85 exclusive of shipping charges) proving there are no free lunches.  This deceitful advertising used by television pitchman works so well that its equivalent has become the new Obama-Pelosi-Reid pitch to disguise the true cost of their programs.

And while this may not be a precise analogy for the way things are done in Washington, it’s close enough.  “Just pay processing and handling” is our metaphor for the entire panoply of Washington speak that produces programs, the costs of which are often orders of magnitude more than originally represented.  We are, almost daily it seems, pitched free lunches or  “benefits” by our government.  And while the seemingly irreversible debt we are currently piling on our children and grandchildren is truly unprecedented in American history, this administration did not invent the government “free lunch” shell game; they’ve simply refined and extended it with complete abandon.  As Ronald Reagan so aptly warned, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”

Let’s count a few of the ways American consumers and taxpayers have been sold a bill of goods whereby the bill for the goods is, or will be, much higher than the assurance given in the Obama-Pelosi-Reid sales pitch.

Everyone can recall the “deficit neutral” healthcare reform bill.  It wasn’t going to add a dime to the deficit “now or in the future.”  Then, no sooner than you could transfer a bill into an Act (a law) the essential quarter-of-a-trillion dollar “doc fix,” which had been yanked from the original healthcare reform bill to make it “deficit neutral,” was, a short time later, enacted separately blowing the deficit neutral promise to smithereens — just pay separate processing and handling.

The Pelosi-Reid-led Congress established new high-risk pools in the new legislation and allocated $5 billion to take care of the chronically ill and uninsured until the government-controlled insurance exchanges, which are to be set up under the new law, are up and running in 2014.  But no sooner, it seems, was the legislation signed into law than the Chief Actuary for Medicare estimated that the tax-payer funded high-risk pools would run dry in 2011 or 2012, “resulting in substantial premium increases to sustain the program” — another new, hidden and unexpected cost compliments of Obamacare.  Just pay separate processing and handling.

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Over the course of the past week I’ve written several entries that have infuriated the would-be tyrants among us.

• A Nation on the Edge of Revolt warned that “either the American people—not extremists, but good and decent patriots like your neighbors and yourselves—will revolt and destroy the ruling class and reform our government based upon first principles, or the United States we know as our forefather conceived it is dead.”
• Closer to Midnight attempted to answer a veteran’s question about why patriotic Americans that value our First Principles should prepare for a possible conflict if the corruption of our government cannot be tamed at the ballot box.
• We Get Letters! and We Get (More) Letters! chronicle the typical threats issued by followers when they cannot intellectually defend their unconstitutional actions with a reasoned justification for their behavior.
• The Edict-Makers notes the continued destructive path of the would-be ruling class, and the abuses they would heap upon the Constitution and citizens in their desperate quest to grab more power for themselves.
• Pre-Revolutionary, last but not least in this series of posts, highlights the revelations of experienced Democratic operative Pat Caddell as he notes the fracturing of his party and the attempt of the elites in the party to rule instead of serve the American people.

It will come as no surprise at all that those institutions and individuals that serve as adjuncts to the would-be ruling class have attacked this series of posts.

Media Matters attacked them twice. Conservative media figures openly discussing revolution…again places me among the company of Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck, and Rush Limbaugh as some of the conservatives in the media that note well and understand this point in history… though they obviously offer their own spin to evoke a response from their readers.

Wash. Examiner’s Owens suggests right-wing violence will be necessary, hopes we “feel threatened” is their same-day response to Closer to Midnight (link above), partnered with a none-too-subtle attempt to pressure the Washington Examiner into silencing me and others who would raise the alarm about the constitutional abuses and usurpations being orchestrated by their masters.

Other leftists have followed the lead of Media Matters, and continue down the path of disinformation they hope will help them divide and conquer this nation’s citizens.

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The “Ground Zero” Mosque project should not go forward and let’s hope that Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf that is behind this $100 million project gets this message and backs off.

But given what he is hearing from the liberals in New York, including the city’s Mayor, the congressman in whose district Ground Zero sits, and the New York Times, it’s hard to be optimistic that he will change his mind.

Opposition to the Mosque is being portrayed, as the New York Times editorial page put it, as abandoning “the principles of freedom and tolerance.”  But the Times makes its own tenuous grasp of reality clear as it goes on in its editorial embracing the Mosque and Islamic Center to say that “The attacks of September 11 were not a religious event.”

We can only wonder what those at the Times think was motivating the young Muslims who, while embracing their Korans and chanting to Allah, committed suicide, taking 3000 innocent Americans to their deaths along with them.

The website for the project, the Cordoba Initiative, advertises itself as “Improving Muslim-West Relations”, and “steering the world back to the course of mutual recognition and respect and away from heightened tensions.”

But if Feisel Abdul Rauf is primarily motivated to “reduce heightened tensions,” why would he do something as obviously provocative as building a Mosque and Islamic Center a few feet away from 9/11 Ground Zero?

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Will higher tax penalties on investment really spur jobs and faster economic growth? Most commentators would say no. It’s really a matter of economic common sense. But Tim Geithner says, Yes!

Speaking to a group in Washington this week, the Treasury secretary said that extending tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans would imperil the fragile economic recovery. He argued that government needs the revenues from those top-end tax hikes. So failure to raise taxes would harm growth. And then he went on to say that the trouble with the wealthy is that they save more of their tax breaks than do other groups.

Okay. Are you confused now? Most people would be.

Let’s start at the top. The coming tax bomb would raise the top marginal tax rate on capital gains from 15 to 20 percent, on dividends from 15 to 20 percent (or perhaps all the way to 39.6 percent), and on top incomes from 35 to 40 percent. Meanwhile, the estate tax could go as high as 55 percent.

Now, it is indisputable that cap-gains, dividends, and estates are essentially investment. What’s more, most successful earners who pay top personal tax rates are by near all accounts the folks who are most likely to save and invest.

But Mr. Geithner is suggesting the economy doesn’t need more saving. This thought was echoed by Jared Bernstein, a top White House economist, who told me in an interview that the saving and investment multipliers for economic growth are way below the stimulative effects of government transfer payments, such as more aid to state and local governments and further extensions of unemployment benefits.

Echoing that thought, the Senate this week voted to approve $26 billion in aid for state and local governments — partly funded, by the way, by an $11 billion yearly tax increase on the foreign earnings of U.S. multinational corporations. Here, too, a tax on profits is a tax on investment. The Senate also rejected an amendment by South Carolina Republican Jim DeMint that would extend all the Bush tax cuts.

In effect, pulling all this together, the position of the Democratic party in power in Washington is that transfer payments (taxing and borrowing from Peter to pay Paul) are good for growth, and that investment is bad.

Go figure.

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