Anyone who claims that defense contract negotiations are uninteresting has yet to discover the battle brewing over who gets to build the next Air Force tanker.

American aerospace giant Boeing and European mega-corporation Airbus are locked in a war over who gets to deliver $35 billion worth of refueling planes to the Defense Department to replace about 80% of the Air Force’s refueling fleet – planes that average almost 50 years old, according to the Lexington Institute.

Just a few short weeks ago, Boeing and Airbus officially submitted bids to manufacture the tanker, and now both will compete to see who can create 179 tankers for less cash, who’s plane will be ready in time and who hits closer to the mark on meeting the Pentagon’s needs. Right now the momentum seems to be in Boeing’s favor, but the stakes are high.

From the Wall Street Journal:

For Boeing, the fight is to defend its home market and an area of expertise—tanker planes—that it once dominated. Boeing in 2001 beat Airbus to supply Japan with four 767 tankers. They are now in operation but differ substantially from what Boeing has offered the Pentagon…

For EADS, a U.S. win would cement its position as the new world leader in tankers. Since 2004, it has won orders for 28 tankers from Australia, the U.K., Saudi Arabia and United Arab Emirates. The Airbus design has also faced some delays in development.

Airbus has a version of the needed tanker that they will deliver to Australian forces this week, which they say will be about 90% identical to the version they want to deliver to the Pentagon. Boeing doesn’t have a version of the tanker in production, but they say they’re more willing to wait to develop the tanker so that it could be better in line with the Pentagon’s immediate needs, though it will be based on Boeing 767 plane.

(more…)

This past week White House Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, suggested that had the government not bailed out two failing auto manufacturers, “that’s a million more people that would have been on unemployment benefits.” As will be explained herein, this claim of the Press Secretary is wrong and misleading.

Mr. Gibbs also suggested that critics of the auto bailout wanted to walk away from a million jobs. Such talk is unfounded political speak. One would have a hard time finding any serious critic who advocated such a thing.

Quoting Mr. Gibbs,

“I’ll let those that sat in the cheap seats a year and a half ago and wanted to walk away from a million, explain to every one of those workers why they made that decision and… whether they thought the decision they made 16 or 18 months ago, different than that of the president of the United States, whether they still stand by it.”

As one who sat in the so-called cheap seats, Mr. Gibbs, I never advocated walking away from a million jobs, but I absolutely do stand by the position that the GM/Chrysler bailout was a terrible thing to do and made no economic sense.

It seems that the President is unable to grasp – or unwilling to accept – some of the most basic economic principles surrounding this issue.

(more…)

The Central Illinois 9/12 Project became the first to expose — beginning this past March on BigGovernment.com – Shorebank’s extensive green and microfinancing agendas, in anticipation of that bank’s impending bailout.  Shorebank, a Chicago-based, community investment bank, is focused on domestic and foreign microfinancing, is heavily engaged in the financing of “green” projects and “green” jobs, and has a host of ties to the Obama and Clinton administrations. The Central Illinois 9/12 Project has most recently highlighted the bank seeking and obtaining funds from larger banks–such as Chase, Banks of America, and Goldman Sachs — to secure the necessary funding to remain viable.

The fact that Shorebank had the opportunity to be rescued while other banks were allowed to fail proved to be curious to Illinois residents, and for a time it was unknown if the bank would receive enough funds from private entities to qualify for a federally-funded bailout. Such curious treatment sent up a red flag for some Congressional members and thus influenced the formation of the financial reform bill.  Through an amendment offered by Congresswoman Judy Biggert and Congressman Spencer Bachus, the House Financial Committee voted to approve inquiries into the negotiations between the White House and any bank that had been ordered to cease engaging in unsound banking practice, via an amendment to the House finance reform bill in late June.

The Central Illinois 912 Project has learned from an assistant for Biggert that Biggert’s office sent a letter to the White House regarding this probe, but the White House denied receiving that initial letter. Biggert’s office sent a second letter which the White House acknowledged receiving; however, the White House has never responded to it.  This probe would not only have been for Shorebank, but for all other banks that have received bailout funds since June 2009 — and it would have prevented those banks from receiving any TARP funding while under investigation. Potentially, if the bill was passed and signed into law and the probe was started within the given amount of time, Shorebank would have folded without the needed TARP funds to match the private sector’s matching funds (i.e., funds from larger banks).   However, when this bill was passed by the House, the amendment was removed by Senate negotiators.

(more…)

Pollsters Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell, both Democrats, took on President Obama in a column in the Wall Street Journal last week, criticizing him for not being true to his campaign promise to unify the country.

“Rather than being a unifier,” they say, “Mr. Obama has divided America on the basis of race, class, and partisanship.”

They don’t see Republicans as any better. They claim that Republicans have just followed the administration in trying to exploit hot buttons of race and class.

“….the Republican leadership has failed to put forth an agenda that is more positive, unifying, and inclusive.”

Although it seems so warm and cuddly to consider the idea of national “unity”, what does this really mean? Particularly, what does it mean in a free country?

Isn’t the whole point and beauty of freedom that we recognize differences among us as natural and that we view debate, differences of viewpoint, and dissent as healthy? Doesn’t the idea of “unity” – of uniformity – conjure up images of exactly what this country is not about?

(more…)

When President Barak Obama was inaugurated back in 2008, I wrote a piece called “Father of the Bride: My View of the Inauguration of Barak Obama” in which I liked my feelings to that of a father who’s daughter was about to marry a man of whom he did not approve. Well now the honeymoon is over and it is time to say, “I told you so!”

Today, in 1987, the FCC rescinded the Fairness Doctrine, ushering in an era of diverse and robust viewpoints on the nations’ airwaves. Ever since, the Left has dreamed of reinstating the federal regulation of speech, but that dream seems more of a fantasy now.

MISSOURI VOTERS REJECT OBAMACARE!

Prop C passes in Missouri!

Over 70% of voters reject the democrat’s nationalized health care plan.

WOW! The Show Me State showed Obamacare the door tonight.

Over 70% of Missouri voters rejected Obamacare by passing Prop c.

It’s too bad local KMOV St. Louis Channel 4 could not find any one who voted for the proposition.

Missouri rejects the Pelosi-Obama Rationed Health Care Plan

All eyes were on Missouri today. The Show Me voters were voting for or against the new federal health care law.

(more…)

So far - Prop C is passing by 75% in Missouri.

Missouri rejects the Pelosi-Obama Rationed Health Care Plan

All eyes were on Missouri today. The Show Me voters were voting for or against the new federal health care law.

Missouri showed Obamacare the door.

FOX KC reported:

Election officials are hoping the heat won’t keep people from getting out to vote. One of the hottest races in Missouri is Proposition C. It’s an issue that is getting a lot of attention across the country.

All eyes will be on Missouri’s Proposition C results because it’s the first time voters in the country vote for or against the new federal health care law. Basically Proposition C would create a state law against federal mandates requiring people to buy health insurance.

Missouri’s top U.S. Senate candidates are divided on the measure. If passed, it will will reject part of the new federal health care law. Republicans Roy Blunt and Chuck Purgason both support Proposition C. Democrat Robin Carnahan plans to vote against it.

Christie Herrara has more on Prop C at Big Government.

Republicans today were out in force to vote in the primaries. This likely helped Proposition C in Missouri.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

Andrew Breitbart strips off his blazer, windmills it over his head and lets it fly to the stage with a matador’s flourish. He booms into a microphone, sneering, taunting. Breath sprints to keep up with words.

A Breitbart boil is under way, before a cheering throng of tea partiers on a moonlike strip of Nevada desert back in March.

A finger stabs overhead as the conservative online publisher declares Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., a racist. An arm lances outward as he decries Republican leaders as apologists. Voice rising, Breitbart pledges $10,000, then $20,000, then $100,000 for the United Negro College Fund if proof is found to corroborate claims of racial name-calling during tea party protests on Capitol Hill.

“They decided to play lowball, hardball tactics,” Breitbart seethes. “Well, we’re going to have to play it right back at them.”

You could argue he has done just that.

(more…)

With the midterm elections approaching, it is now clear that cap-and-trade, Democrats’ main weapon in their war on energy companies, is effectively dead—that is, at least until after the election, when some Democrats who may then be exiting Congress will feel more comfortable supporting it.

However, the demise of cap-and-trade does not mean Democrats have put what some dub “plans” to target energy companies on hold completely, or placed them on the back burner.

The Obama administration has worked hard to impose a moratorium on deepwater drilling, which one prominent expert says could directly result in a loss of $2.1 billion in output, nearly $100 million in forfeited tax revenue, and close to 10,000 mostly middle-class job losses.

In addition, the agency responsible for issuing new permits to drill in the Outer Continental Shelf (“OCS”) has issued just four permits during the last three months, as compared to 56 permits in the three months prior to that.

(more…)

The Empire State has a long list of sad-sack governors, ranging from the current one, the previous one, the one before that (who served three too many terms, and Nelson Rockefeller, who jacked up spending and passed draconian drug laws before eventually expiring in the arms of a woman not his wife (who was unironically named Happy).

Kristin Davis, who ran the escort service that provided former Gov. Eliot Spitzer with call girls and served time (while Spitzer remained free to purchase all the black socks he wanted), is running for governor on what some have called a “pot and pussy platform.” She wants to legalize marijuana and prostitution and collect tax revenue from them; she wants to open casinos in the state’s great vacation areas; she wants to legalize gay marriage and address a legal system that nets the poor and unconnected and leaves the big fish to swim free.

Besides running prostitutes, what qualifications does she possess for the top job in Albany (as if that isn’t enough)? She was valedictorian of her high school and worked at a hedge fund, which pretty much makes her more qualified than Andrew Cuomo and whoever the Republican candidate is. But judge for yourself in this, the best campaign video so far this year (in a non-Basil Marceaux category).

(more…)

Presidents tend to get upset when they discover that their agenda isn’t a carbon copy of the agenda of the voters who put them in office.

Some presidents adjust to reality; others seem willing to resort to almost any means to get what they want. When the public rejected his early big-government schemes, Clinton simply announced that “the era of big government is over” and went on. Nixon, on the other hand, decided that if he couldn’t accomplish what he wanted with public support, he’d work in the dark.

It is becoming clearer by the day that President Obama and his team are more attracted to the Nixon model. Maybe it’s his Chicago background or the fact that, unlike Bill Clinton, the man’s a true believer who meant it when he said he’d rather have a “successful” one-term presidency than be reelected.

The significance of that statement hinges heavily on how the president defines “success.” If one identifies success with popularity, it would follow that if his first term could be counted as “successful,” a president would be rewarded with a second. If he were using “success” in that way, the statement makes little sense; it only makes sense, in fact, if he equates the word with “consequential” and was saying that he would be willing to risk the voters’ wrath to advance his agenda rather than theirs.

Most presidents want it both ways. They want to advance their own agenda without risking personal popularity or the future of their party, but each has to weigh whether to follow the polls or risk everything for policies he truly believes to be in the best interests of the country. This led President George W. Bush, who was (rightly or wrongly) convinced that confronting a terrorist enemy in Iraq and Afghanistan was essential, to pursue the war on terror aggressively even in the face of developing public opposition.

Democrats trashed Bush and his allies in Congress for their bullheadedness and failure to bend to growing public opposition. The 2006 and 2008 elections turned in part on this developing opposition to his policies, but even more importantly on the public’s growing sense that its president was out of touch with Americans and unwilling to listen seriously to a concerned public.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

Supporters and opponents of Elena Kagan painted vastly different portraits of the Supreme Court nominee on Tuesday, as they got their final say on the Senate floor before a near-certain vote to confirm her later this week.

Democrats praised President Barack Obama’s nominee as a highly qualified legal scholar who would add a sorely needed note of fairness and commonsense to a court whose conservative majority, they argue, has run amok. Republicans charged she’s an inexperienced cipher who would use her post to mold the law to her own liberal beliefs.

Despite the partisan divide, Kagan was on track for easy confirmation with the support of nearly all Democrats and a handful of GOP senators. In line to become the court’s fourth woman, she’s not expected to alter the ideological balance of the court in succeeding retired Justice John Paul Stevens, a leader of its liberal wing.

(more…)

Senate Democrats were set to vote on a $10 billion bailout for public schools, claiming all along the measure was “paid for with spending cuts.”  When the Congressional Budget Office revealed it was going to add $5 billion to the deficit, the vote was delayed until Wednesday.

The National Education Association, the biggest beneficiary of the legislation, perpetuated the lie on its website.  The NEA stands to gain about $36 million in dues dollars.

While news reports indicate it could come up again Wednesday, here’s to hoping it won’t see the light of day again.

Americans can ill afford to continue adding to the deficit for a jobs plan that does little for the future and continues funding the status quo.  Public education has become little more than a public works project, throwing good money after bad.

Democrats in Washington are throwing a bone to the teachers unions – a very expensive bone at that – and it should continue to be opposed by sensible Senators from both parties.

(more…)

A motorcycle rally to support one imprisoned soldier has blossomed into a nationwide ”freedom ride” to support a group comprised mostly of Army soldiers who have become known as “The Leavenworth 10.“

On July 18, Scott and Vicki Behenna, parents of Army Ranger 1st Lt. Michael Behenna, informed me that plans were in the works to stage a motorcycle rally to bring attention to the plight of wrongfully-imprisoned soldiers such as her son, whose story has been highlighted in several posts at BigGovernment.com and is now serving a 15-year sentence for killing a known Al-Qaeda operative in self-defense.  Today, it appears those plans are coming to fruition.

“FREEDOM RIDE FOR THE LEAVENWORTH TEN” will originate in many states and culminate the morning of Sept. 4 in Leavenworth, Kan., according to the Behennas, and Army Lt. Col. Allen West, a congressional candidate from Florida, scheduled to be the keynote speaker at the event.

“The intent of the Freedom Ride is to bring awareness to how our soldiers are being imprisoned for killing the enemy during a time of war which one news commentator compared to ‘giving speeding tickets at a NASCAR race,’” the Behennas said in a recent e-mail. “These soldiers, serving multiple deployments, are provided complex and ever changing rules of engagement and then have to deal with untenable ‘catch and release’ policies against an enemy the U.S. military generals have yet to figure out how to defeat.”

Organizers are also looking for celebrity involvement in the ride to help increase the amount of attention paid to the plight of soldiers behind bars.

(more…)

It must be getting a bit cramped in the office of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman’s Julius Genachowski, at least figuratively speaking.  Every day delivers more and more people opposed to his “Title 1.5,” promises-of-forbearance laden Internet reclassification push.

The Chairman spent the first half of the year meeting incessantly with the Media Marxist likes of Free Press, Public Knowledge and the Media Access Project – those opposed to free speech, free markets and private property rights, otherwise known as Network Neutrality (NN) proponents.

Genachowski went out of his way – and outside the proscribed bounds of his and his Commission’s authority – to bend over backwards to do these Leftist groups’ bidding on over-regulating the Internet.  Up to and including reclassifying broadband to the oppressive Title II.

Bipartisan opposition to Genachowski’s unlawful unilateralism continues to grow.  There was the Clinton-appointed led D.C. Circuit Court decision against the Commission’s actions in the Comcast-BitTorrent case.  There were the three separate letters sent to Genachowski by blocks of Congressmen and Senators – 282 in all, both Republicans and Democrats.  And yet another letter was sent by seventeen minority groups who almost NEVER oppose anything proposed by any Democrat.

Perhaps the Commissioner has begun to hear the rising din.  In the last month his staffers began to host what has become a series of meetings with Net Neutrality opponents like AT&T, Verizon and the National Cable and Telecommunications Association – along with the same old NN proponents.

At least both sides are now getting in the room.  Another one of these meetings was held on Saturday, and two more are scheduled this week.

As it becomes clearer that a rational, reasonable Internet regulatory solution might be achieved, we will see more people rush to join the opposition to the FCC’s proposed “Third Way.”

(more…)

The federal government is capable of enormous waste, which obviously is bad news, but the worst forms of government spending are those that actually leverage bad things. Paying exorbitant salaries to federal bureaucrats is bad, for instance, but it’s even worse if they take their jobs seriously and promulgate new regulations and otherwise harass people in the productive sector of the economy. In a previous video on the economics of government spending, I called this the “negative multiplier” effect.

One of the worst examples of a negative multiplier effect is the $100 million that taxpayers spend each year to subsidize the Paris-based Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is an international bureaucracy that publishes lots of innocuous statistics but also advocates bigger government and higher taxes in America. This video has the unsavory details, including evidence of the OECD’s efforts to push a value-added tax, Al Gore-style carbon taxes, and Obamacare-type policies.

The OECD’s relentless advocacy of higher taxes (as well as its anti-tax competition agenda) is especially galling since the bureaucrats receive tax-free salaries. Maybe they would be more reasonable if they were not so insulated from the real-world consequences of big government.

To be fair, the OECD is not always on the wrong side. Like other international bureaucracies, the folks in Paris generally oppose protectionism. And the scholars working in the economics department often write excellent papers – which often contradict the statist policies advocated by other bureaucrats in the organization (particularly the policy-making committees).

But the fundamental question is whether American taxpayers should be spending more than $100 million to belong to the organization.

(more…)

Today, Missouri voters will vote on Proposition C, the nation’s first statewide referendum on Obamacare.

The measure—based on the American Legislative Exchange Council’s model Freedom of Choice in Health Care Act now proposed in 42 states—challenges the individual mandate, a key provision of the new federal healthcare law that requires people to have health insurance or pay fines by 2014.

Predictably, special interest groups and their big-government allies have launched a full-scale assault on Proposition C and the concept of health care freedom.

But as the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.”

Let’s look at the most common accusation launched by Proposition C opponents and why the Show Me State would benefit from a little truthtelling.

The Missouri Hospital Association charges that, without a requirement to purchase health insurance, people will become “freeloaders” who impose their costs on taxpayers and clog emergency rooms.

Although the cost of treating the uninsured is borne by those of us with health insurance, researchers estimate these costs to be just 2-3% of overall health spending.

And the most recent study from the National Center for Health Statistics shows that people on Medicaid—a program that, thanks to Obamacare, will add 300,000 Missourians to its rolls—are more than twice as likely to visit the emergency room than the uninsured.

What Proposition C opponents don’t tell you is that so-called “freeloaders” will continue to show up in the emergency room with or without a mandate.  Massachusetts, a state that imposed an individual mandate in 2006, has seen its ER use climb by 17% since the law was enacted.

(more…)

Today, in 1923, Calvin Coolidge was sworn in as the 30th President of the United States. We can think of no other President who has been as underrated as Coolidge. May we see another like him someday.