And as with all Leftist things, the more they know the less they like

On August 11, more than 150 organizations (including 35 TEA Party groups), state legislators and bloggers signed onto a pair of letters urging the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to give up on their unilateral Internet power grab – the reclassification of the Web under the oppressive 1930s land line telephone regulatory regime, and the implementation of Network Neutrality.

(Full disclosure: As StopNetRegulation.org’s Editor in Chief, I signed on.  As did the President and Vice President of Legal Affairs of the Center for Individual Freedom, the organization that publishes StopNetRegulation.org.)

We became part of a great and growing bipartisan chorus all singing the same song – that the FCC is dramatically overreaching in trying to assert this sweeping new authority.  More than 284 members of the United States Congress – from both Parties – have also signed letters stating the same.

Seventeen minority groups did so as well.  And the Washington, D.C. Circuit Court – led by a Democrat-appointee judge – ruled 3-0 that the FCC isn’t empowered to do what it’s trying to do.

The FCC only has the authority to do what Congress and the President have given it via legislation.  And they have not sanctioned the FCC to regulate the Internet.  The Right understands this.  The Left does not – or chooses to willfully ignore it.

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The person who agrees with you 80 percent of the time is a friend and an ally — not a 20 percent traitor. -Ronald Reagan

Website World Net Daily (WND) has decided to drop conservative pundit and author, Ann Coulter as the keynote speaker for its “Taking America Back National Conference” next month, because of her plan to be the keynote speaker at “Homocon,” an event put together by GOProud the first genuinely conservative group for gay Republicans (Coulter’s column will still be carried by the site).

According to Joseph Farah, the Editor-in-Chief of Chief of WND, the reason for dis-inviting Ms Coulter from the WND conference (and their rejection of GOProud) is the Gay organization’s support of same-sex marriage and military service for open homosexuals.  If Farah took the time to look at GOProud’s  web site he would have seen that those issues are not the group’s priorities. GOProud describes its goals as:

GOProud is an organization that is committed to a traditional conservative agenda that emphasizes limited government, individual liberty, free markets and a confident foreign policy.

In other words they are more conservative than most of the Republicans in office today. But it doesn’t seem that those conservative goals are not important to WND’s Joseph Farah as you can see by this exchange with Ms Coulter:

Asked by Farah why she was speaking to GOProud, Coulter said: “They hired me to give a speech, so I’m giving a speech. I do it all the time.”

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From the Associated Press:

Employers appear to be laying off workers again as applications for unemployment insurance reached the half-million mark last week for the first time since November.

Initial claims for jobless benefits rose by 12,000 last week to 500,000, the Labor Department said Thursday. It was the fourth increase in the past five weeks and evidence that the economic recovery has weakened.

Homebuilders and other construction firms are laying off more workers as the housing sector slumps after the expiration of a popular homebuyers’ tax credit. State and local governments are also cutting jobs to close large budget gaps.

“This is obviously a disappointing number that shows ongoing weakness in the job market,” said Robert Dye, senior economist at the PNC Financial Services Group.

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For the last 7 1/2 months your labor has belonged to someone else – the state.    You have slaved away for the majority of the year to pay for the bailouts, subsidies, vote buying, earmarks and redistribution schemes that make up the majority of spending by governments at all levels, in addition to the price of burdensome regulations.   Today, August 19, is the day you have finally payed off your share of the cost of big government.

Every year, Americans for Tax Reform calculates Cost of Government Day, or how long it takes the average American to earn enough to pay off the financial burdens imposed by government.  In 2010, it took 231 days of work.  That’s 8 more than last year, and more than an extra month from 2008, before Obama took office.

The Cost of Government site provides a detailed breakdown, along with the full report by ATR.  The report includes a lot of information, including a breakdown by state.  The earliest COGD occurs in Alaska, while the latest is in Connecticut.

The factor which not as many people see, but is captured nonetheless by COGD, is the economic burden created by government regulation.

Not only are the federal bureaucrats enforcing these regulations excessively overpaid, but what they are paid to do also does harm to the economy.  The average American works 74 days out of the year to make up for these dead-weight losses.

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There’s been a bit of chatter in the blogosphere about a recent post on Ezra Klein’s blog featuring estimates from various economists about the revenue-maximizing tax rate. It won’t come as a surprise that people on the right tended to give lower estimates and folks on the left had higher guesses. Donald Luskin of National Review estimated 19 percent, for instance, while Emmanuel Saez, Dean Baker, Bruce Bartlett, and Brad DeLong all gave answers around 70 percent.

There are two things that are worth noting.

First, every single answer is to the right of the Joint Committee on Taxation. The revenue-estimators on Capitol Hill assume that taxes have no impact on overall economic performance. As such, even confiscatory tax rates have very little impact on taxable income. The JCT operates in a totally non-transparent fashion, so it is difficult to know whether they would say the revenue-maximizing tax rate is 90 percent, 95 percent, or 100 percent, but it is remarkable that a mini-bureaucracy with so much power is so far out of the mainstream (it’s even more remarkable that Republicans controlled Congress for 12 years, yet never fixed this problem, but that’s a separate story).

Second, very few of the respondents made the critically important observation that it should not be the goal of tax policy to maximize revenue. After all, the revenue-maximizing point is where the damage to the overall economy is so great that taxable income falls enough to offset the impact of the higher tax rates. Greg Mankiw of Harvard and Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal indicated they understood this point since they both explained that the long-run revenue-maximizing rate was lower than the short-run revenue-maximizing rate. But Martin Feldstein of Harvard explicitly addressed this issue and hit the nail on the head.

Why look for the rate that maximizes revenue? As the tax rate rises, the “deadweight loss” (real loss to the economy rises) so as the rate gets close to maximizing revenue the loss to the economy exceeds the gain in revenue…. I dislike budget deficits as much as anyone else. But would I really want to give up say $1 billion of GDP in order to reduce the deficit by $100 million? No. National income is a goal in itself. That is what drives consumption and our standard of living.

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Today, in 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev was put under house arrest in an attempted coup by pro-communism forces. Countered by the leadership of Boris Yeltsin, the coup would fail.

Here’s what Fox local news in Chicago reports:

Jurors who have been interviewed so far will not identify the juror, other than to say the juror was a female.

FOX Chicago News reported that speculation is centering on juror Jo Ann Chiakulas of Willowbrook, after a second-hand acquaintance said that she has been saying for weeks that she would find Blagojevich not guilty.

Chiakulas is a retired director from the Illinois Department of Public Health.

Contacted Tuesday night, she told FOX Chicago News she would call on Wednesday if she wished to talk about the case.

On one count at least, Chiakulas voted with her fellow jurors, agreeing to convict Blagojevich of lying to federal agents.

This was since confirmed by CBS local news Chicago.

They actually could have reported more — because pre-trial, they had this to say about a female “retired public health director” on the jury panel:

Juror # 106, a black female believed to be in her 60s, is a retired state public health director who has ties to the Chicago Urban League. She has handed out campaign literature for a relative who ran for public office. She listens to National Public Radio and liberal talk radio shows.

Media accounts mention the campaign literature, but they don’t mention NPR and liberal talk radio. Why?

We know they read this description — why do they end their repetition of it at that point?

The media is quick to stereotype conservative-tilting Americans and attribute to them bad motives.

Think they’ll do the same here?

What were her motives for so egregiously ignoring the law to set a guilty man free that her fellow jurors had to confront her with her own oath to render a true verdict? (more…)

From the Hill:

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) rolled out a new slate of endorsements of Republican women on her Facebook page Wednesday, including congressional candidate Renee Ellmers in North Carolina.

Ellmers gained some brief national attention earlier this summer after a video surfaced of her opponent, Rep. Bob Etheridge (D), in an altercation with a student on a street near the U.S. Capitol.

Palin references the incident in her endorsement of Ellmers, writing, “Renee has an uphill battle against a truly out of touch incumbent who made news not too long ago when he was caught on video assaulting a student who asked him if he supported the Obama agenda.”

Palin continues: “Simple enough question, but this Democrat congressman who’s been in Washington for 14 years turned violent rather than answer it.” (more…)

I have a hypothesis about the “New Normal” economy we face. Most, if not all, of the unemployment crisis can be blamed on Public Employees. A bold statement to some…. but on paper it looks suspiciously valid.

Essentially, upper and middle taxpayers have always paid the tab for government. But historically we have paid civil servants less money.  And the amount they are now overpaid is very near how much our unemployed have lost in wages.

Public employees are stealing from the poor and lower classes. Republicans need to make this message clear as day.  Why they don’t astounds me.  Is Chris Christie the only politician with elephant balls?  You too, Paul Ryan, stop screaming you are being picked on, and stand for something IMMEDIATE with teeth.  Win my plan, and then we can win yours.

If we commit immediately to significant productivity gains in the Federal, State, and Local Government, we could have ZERO UNEMPLOYMENT.   With the easily achieved gains ($369,462,330,189) I describe here routinely, we could pay each of the 15 MILLION unemployed $24,600 per year to go out in their backyards, dig holes, and fill them up.  Do the math.

These, of course, would just be Obamajobs.  So imagine how much more could be achieved if, instead, we put the savings to good use — say cutting corporate taxes to zero, further reducing prices, and allowing consumers to have more to spend elsewhere – creating real jobs, the right way.

But that’s not specific enough proof, instead let’s look the real lost wages of the unemployed and see how close that amount is to what we overpay for government .  To do this, I pulled data from the Center for Labor Studies. First, I sorted the number of jobless in each decile of 15M unemployed, and then established how many hires would be needed to achieve Full Employment (4%) in every single decile.  Then I multiplied each group by their median lost wages.

Overpaid: $369 BILLION.  Lost Wages: $306 BILLION.

Holy Shit, huh?  Turns out this stuff isn’t complicated. Pay public employees too much money, and you don’t have enough cash left over to run the economy at full capacity.

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Scott Powell, in today’s Investors Business Daily:

‘Atlas Shrugged” — Ayn Rand’s fourth and last novel, published in 1957 — may be second to the Bible as the most influential book read in America, according to a Library of Congress survey. It is required reading in management training at BB&T, the 12th-largest bank in the U.S. and one that resisted taking TARP bailout funds.

Since the Obama administration took office, “Atlas Shrugged” has been enjoying a renaissance with rising sales and library waiting lists, partly because it explains our current economic woes more straightforwardly than most of what we hear from today’s experts.

What happened in Rand’s narrative is coming to pass today, with an anti-business administration reviling private industry and capitalizing on crisis to expand and redirect investment within and between sectors of the economy — setting quotas, prices and compensation.

Businesses responded by retrenching — ceasing to invest, innovate and expand. Whole industries contracted, closed down or moved offshore, much like the U.S. gas and oil drilling industry is doing today. Then, just as now, management became frustrated, discouraged and reluctant to create jobs in an environment of excessive government meddling.

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$2.5 million of federal stimulus money went to an energy firm in the Chicago area that used the grant to build a new heating system for the headquarters of Local 150 of the International Union of Operating Engineers, located in Chicago’s southwest suburbs.

Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) with Indie Energy Systems Co., LLC, Aug. 18, 2010

The company, Indie Energy Systems Co., LLC, is located in Evanston, IL. According to Crain’s Chicago Business, it was previously a “stealth” company, relying on loans from ShoreBank and other investors to stay afloat. The $2.5 million stimulus grant brought Indie Energy out of the shadows, and into the world of big government. The money for the new heating system at the union HQ created “13.78” jobs, according to Recovery.gov, at an average cost of $181,422 per job–though it was supposed to “create and preserve 51 jobs,” according to the official description of the project.

The International Union of Operating Engineers is the biggest contributor to the re-election campaign of Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), giving the Political Action Committee maximum of $10,000 for the 2010 primary and general elections. Interestingly, the union gave its contribution in March 2009, shortly after the stimulus was passed last February. That suggests a quid-pro-quo could have occurred, with Indie Energy used as the conduit.

[UPDATE: Local 150 makes its political contribution decisions independently of the national organization’s Political Action Committee, to which Local 150 also contributes.]

Yesterday, Schakowsky visited another Indie Energy project, this one located on the Evanston campus of Northwestern University. She touted the company as “an innovative small business that can help grow our country’s evolving clean energy economy.” She neglected to mention its connection to the union heating project, its links to ShoreBank, or its heavy reliance on federal stimulus funds. Nor did she explain how the benefit of $2.5 million in federal funds found its way to her biggest contributor.

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The Washington Times reports and provides audio that Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi supports the investigation into those who disagree with her:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, called for an investigation of those who are protesting building the Ground Zero Mosque on Tuesday. She told San Francisco’s KCBS radio:

“There is no question there is a concerted effort to make this a political issue by some. And I join those who have called for looking into how is this opposition to the mosque being funded,” she said. “How is this being ginned up that here we are talking about Treasure Island, something we’ve been working on for decades, something of great interest to our community as we go forward to an election about the future of our country and two of the first three questions are about a zoning issue in New York City.”

Calls to investigate the funding for those proposing the $100 million “Cordoba House” have fallen on deaf ears, though, as New York’s Mayor Mike Bloomberg has described such an investigation as “un-American.”

Is Pelosi referring to every day Americans, the families of the victims of 9/11, or her fellow Democrats–including Harry Reid–who have come out against the mosque?   She must also be endorsing that the only free speech in America is the speech where everyone agrees with her.  Remember when dissent was patriotic?

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A top network neutrality advocacy group is weathering a flap over its sketchy lobbying disclosures after it was reported last week the group had taken numerous unreported meetings with senior aides at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA).

Free Press, among the fiercest and better funded Beltway groups lobbying for the adoption of net neutrality rules, has taken great pains to criticize industry groups for holding off-the-record meetings with FCC officials. But the group’s staff had lobbied FCC officials on more than two dozen undocumented occasions since January 2009. Additionally, discrepancies were discovered between the group’s filings relating to lobbying.

Federal legislation mandates the disclosure of lobbying efforts directed at federal employees with regard to the formulation of federal rules and laws. According to recently-obtained ex-parte data, serious discrepancies were discovered between filings with the Internal Revenue Service–which are to disclose generic, grassroots lobbying expenses–and those figures reported under the Lobbying Disclosure Act–which is to monitor federal-specific lobbying expenses.

Between the years 2005 and 2010, Free Press LDA disclosures showed the group had spent little more than $150,000 on direct lobbying of legislators and federal employees. But tax filings with the IRS–only presently available up to the year 2008–revealed the organization had spent nearly $1 million on lobbying in little more than half that time.

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The economy is suffering from something like a summer swoon. In the words of business columnist Jimmy Pethokoukis, the recovery summer has gone bust. We all know this from the sloppy statistics coming in for jobs, retail sales, and most recently manufacturing. But market-based indicators are telling the same story.

Let’s start with the Treasury bond market. Yields have fallen to 2.6 percent today from 4.1 percent last April. Decomposing this Treasury rally shows that real yields have dropped 79 basis points, which is a signal of lower economic expectations.

Meanwhile, inflation break-even TIPS (Treasury inflation-protected securities) have fallen 64 basis points, showing that price expectations also have dropped. The consumer price index is only rising 1 percent over the past year. And long-term inflation fears have fallen all the way to 1.7 percent. It’s not deflation. It’s disinflation.

The corporate-bond market shows a similar decline of economic-growth and profits expectations. Credit-risk spreads are widening. The spread between investment-grade corporate bonds and risk-free Treasuries have widened 62 basis points, while higher-yielding junk-bond spreads have increased 138 basis points.

Now, all these bond-market indicators don’t tell us a whole lot about the future. But they are corroborating the summer slump in the present. Lower inflation is a good thing, but lower growth is not.

And here’s another hitch in the story. Using the break-even TIPS, the Federal Reserve’s zero target rate is really minus-1.7 percent, which is the same sort of negative real interest rate we had in the early and mid-2000s. This is undoubtedly why Kansas City Fed president Thomas Hoenig is worried about a new boom-bust cycle.

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Here’s a classic example of how the so-called Republican media — in this case Talk Radio — controls who is offered up as a candidate (example: John McCain).

On an Orlando radio station Tuesday morning, a caller asked the host why he wasn’t bringing on Florida Republican gubernatorial candidate Mike McCalister for any interviews. The caller asked the host why we don’t hear of any candidates other than republican gubernatorial hopefuls Rick Scott and Bill McCollum. A good question.

McCalister’s name will be on Florida’s GOP primary ballot on Aug. 24th. He is a retired U. S. Army Colonel who worked at CentCom; holds a PhD and MBA and taught in several colleges, and operates a business growing palm trees in Plant City.  Judging from his resume, he is eminently qualified to lead a growing state of more than 15 million residents.

The morning show host answered that he wasn’t going to waste his time on someone who was only drawing 1% in the polls. End of phone call. End of subject. He didn’t explain how he knew McCalister was drawing 1%, or the polling source from which he was getting his information.  Or why he was limiting the candidates he’d bring on the air for his listeners’ review, edification, and inspection.  The host hung up and went on to something else.

Typical.

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Our nation is in trouble and it goes far deeper than the current economic crisis of the past few years.  Nor, despite all the rancor and the loud shouting back and forth, is the problem attributable to any single controversial issue . . . albeit the important issues that are dividing us are clearly a symptom of our woes.

Since we are a nation of immigrants, there have always been tensions within our vibrant democracy from divisions along obvious fault lines:  race, religion, class, geography, national origin and even age.  But what has, from the beginning, distinguished our collective ethnic citizenry and made America wonderfully unique among the nations of the world was that, unlike virtually all of the countries from which we came, once we attained citizenship we were accepted, truly accepted, as Americans.   We have overcome many crises because, with the obvious exception of the stain of slavery, our constitutional system of division of power between the states and the federal government and the separation of federal authority among these distinct branches of government, has depended on, indeed even demanded, political compromise to advance policies with any semblance of shared goals.  But over the last two decades the notion of shared goals and the ability to fashion compromises have all but disappeared, widening the fault lines and leaving the nation polarized and government often paralyzed.

There is irony in this increased polarization given our preoccupation, sometimes to the point of absurdity, with political correctness.  Either we have become unbelievably thin-skinned as a people or our preoccupation with political correctness has led to a process of balkanization as each ethnic group sees the “national pie” as a zero sum game:  “we win, you lose.” This comes at the expense of putting America first.  The price has been high.

When our president feels that apologies are necessary to improve our relationships with long- time allies and to reset our relationships with others, including those who have, for many years, been hostile to the United States; when an American ambassador, by his mere presence, implies an American apology for the awful devastation visited upon the victims at Hiroshima, without any acknowledgement by the Japanese government, after more than 60 years, that it was an imperialist Japanese government that was responsible for bringing war to the Pacific with their unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor, we diminish the noble cause for which over one-half million Americans gave their lives. The Japanese are certainly entitled to convene in memory of those who lost their lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it is their national day of remembrance. Our presence was neither called for nor appropriate. They and we have gotten past that dark and deadly time.  We are, today close allies and trade partners.  The last war-related joint ceremony in which we participated with the Japanese was in 1945 on the deck of the US Missouri in Tokyo Bay.   We should have left it there.

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Today, in 1963, James Meredith became the first black man to graduate from the University of Mississippi. (Yes, we had to read over that a couple times, too.)

After 30 days of trial and 14 days of deliberation in the up-and-down Rod Blagojevich corruption trial, the jury has announced it’s verdict.

Of the 24 counts against Rod Blagojevich, the jury found Rod Blagojevich on only one count, the Martha Stewart offense (making false statements to investigators stemming from a 2005 interview). The jury was hung on all other counts. That offense carries a maximum of 5 years and a $250,000 fine.

Of the 4 counts against Robert Blagojevich (his campaign chief towards the end of 2008), the jury was unable to come to any unanimous conclusion on any count.

As a result, the judge has declared a mistrial on the remaining counts enabling the prosecution to try again, which they said in court they will absolutely do. A hearing was scheduled for August 26th to discuss that matter.

In theory, the prosecution could attempt to retry on any counts that came back as hung but they will have time to decide that issue. However, this is good news for Blagojevich and signals that his defense team, despite much criticism, masterfully managed to dodge the bullet for their client… this time.

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