Recently the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) banned “flavored” cigarettes, preventing the sale of clove and (the hitherto unknown) “chocolate” cigarettes. These “candy flavored” smokes hook teenagers by masking, according to one anti-smoking activist, “the taste of the poison.” And earlier this year, the FDA prevented the branding of cigarettes as “light” or “medium,” instead forcing manufacturers to rechristen them with innocuous names like “Marlboro Gold” and “Marlboro Blue.”

At the end of September, the FDA will announce the formation of a Menthol Subcommittee, which will review the available scientific literature on the health effects of menthol cigarettes. But are menthol cigarettes any worse for smokers than “non-flavored” cigarettes? Are they harder to quit, as anti-smoking activists suggest? Or is the government campaign against menthol simply another step on the road to the complete abolition of cigarettes?

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Oops.

Massachusetts Democrat Senator John Kerry was his Party’s 2004 nominee for President.  Two hallmarks of his losing campaign were his incredible stiffness – he managed to make 2000 Democrat nominee Al Gore look lively – and his notorious assertion that “I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it.”

This linguistic whiplash was part of a Kerry pattern, and led to his being branded “Senator Flip Flop.”

We are still learning just how long-standing and ingrained this Kerry pattern is.

Mike Riggs at the Daily Caller has an amazing document from the Senator’s past.  A 1998 Congressional letter to then Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman William Kennard onto which Senator Kerry signed.  The letter reads in part:

“The overarching policy goal of the 1996 Act is to promote a market-driven, robustly competitive environment for all communications services.  Given that, we wish to make it clear that nothing in the 1996 (Telecommunications) Act or its legislative history suggests that Congress intended to alter the current classification of Internet and other information services or to expand traditional telephone regulation to new and advanced services.”

Meaning Senator Kerry was stating that the 1996 Telecommunications Act did not authorize the FCC to apply its oppressive Title II telephone regulatory regime to the Internet.

Oh what a dozen years will do to Senator Flip Flop’s outlook on things.

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The New York Times’ headline said it all: “Democrats plan political triage to retain House – Fear Republican Wave.”  Indeed, there will be a wave of losses for the Democrats stretching from coast-to coast this Fall.   No clearer indication of that is the declared Democrat strategy for the Fall election:  “We are going to have to win these races one by one.”  That same strategy was declared by the Republicans in the 2006 election – an election that cost Republicans the House.  Amidst even stronger resentment today, the Democrats won’t win 435 different elections either and will lose the House.

The truth about Congressional elections is that a not insignificant percentage of the population barely knows the name of their Congressman or Congresswoman.  Far less know the details of the actual policy views of their representative.   By the time they get to the ballot box, however, most voters know how they feel about the direction of the country, the economy and have a general opinion about the job the President and Congress are doing.  That’s why so many prognosticators pay attention to the Generic Congressional ballot, consumer confidence, the Presidential approval rating and Party identification.

Further, while it is true that incumbents have a significant edge in ordinary years, when it comes to Congressional elections in this mass-media era, large swings in one direction or another are based on the pervasive feeling about the Partys in general, i.e. the Party brand  - not the individual candidates.  Put another way, we no longer live in an age where all politics are just local.

So in 1994, the Republican’s took over Congress not so much because Republicans had so many better candidates – although they likely did on the margin – but that the Contract with America presented an attractive brand for the Republican Party as whole and the direction it wanted to take the Country. The Democrats, on the other hand, were branded as tax-raisers.   In 2006, the view the country had of free-spending Republicans as a whole was not so flattering and the Republicans wound up losing the House.

At a large meeting of Republicans insiders in early 2006, I specifically asked a Congressional election strategist whether the Washington Republicans intended to run 435 different elections that Fall or run one national election.  The answer to my question was exactly what I did not want to hear.

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Now that elections are around the corner members of Congress who voted for the healthcare reform bill are spending a lot of time back-peddling, avoiding the topic all together or digging themselves in a deeper hole by claiming that Americans will have better healthcare with choice of doctors, and expanded coverage at an affordable price.

Let’s look at the facts:

• The bill was written by and for Big Pharma and the medical insurance industry. Senator Max Baucus a member of the congressional brain trust who brought us the healthcare reform bill admitted he never fully read it and has no idea what is even in it. Now he admits to having no clue what was in the bill he helped shove down our throats…. Unbelievable? Surprising? No just business as usual.

• Those on Medicare were told that they would see no change in their benefits and would be able to keep their physician. In fact, 11 million senior citizens will see premiums go up because of cost cutting including the removal of Medicare advantage. Furthermore, since there has been a decline in the number of physicians who currently are accepting new Medicare patients or who take Medicare at all, it is likely that seniors will not be able to keep their doctor and will pay more for less.

• The nomination of Donald Berwick to head CMS means a philosophical shift of our healthcare system to the British model of medicine that puts a premium on cost and not the needs of the individual. An example of this is the decision by the FDA remove Avastin from the medication available to treat advanced cancer because it is deemed that the good of extension of life is outweighed by the cost of the medication. Medicare has already stopped covering the use for Avastin to treat  ovarian cancer in Colorado.

It is clear that the relentless drive to reform the health care system was a cynical political push for a win at all costs. We were told what we wanted to hear and there was no attention paid to the consequences. Every single card was played – from the class card to the race card, and getting us to fight among ourselves achieved the goal of distraction. Now that the smoke has cleared it is pretty obvious that in the name of expanding healthcare to approximately 30 million more people, we have sacrificed what is best about our healthcare system – individualized patient care, the doctor patient relationship, and the drive towards innovation. However, the costs have not changed.

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Yet another story not from The Onion. From WGN Chicago:

The White House has tapped a former leader of the Indiana Department of Natural Resources and the Indiana Wildlife Federation as the Asian carp czar to oversee the federal response to keeping the invasive species out of the Great Lakes.

On a conference call today with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and other congressional leaders, President Obama’s Council on Environmental Quality announced the selection of John Goss to lead the near $80 million, multi-pronged federal attack against Asian carp.

“This is a serious challenge, a serious threat,” Durbin said. “When it comes to the Asian carp threat, we are not in denial. We are not in a go-slow mode. We are in a full attack, full-speed ahead mode. We want to stop this carp from advancing.” (more…)

It’s no secret that Democrats and organized labor have long shared a love affair that’s lasted for decades and burns even stronger under the Obama administration.  As more and more legislation has been enacted over the years in the interest of protecting workers, including state and federal safety and environmental regulations, voluntary union membership in the private sector has decreased.  Yet, public sector unions have grown under big government policies.  And they continue to grow.

Creating union jobs has become far less of a worker protection issue and far more a political tool for vote pandering.  With 12% of the overall workforce, labor union leaders invest their members’ dues in Democrats and rally their members to turnout at the polls and check off the box for those candidates.  Democrats in turn reward the unions with bigger government – more public sector jobs, more government projects, more schools and other facilities…more spending means more union dues.  And more union dues means more money to spend on political campaigns.  And so the cycle goes.  All too often, big government is a reflection of special interest paybacks, not of well-intended policy.

But for the other 88% of us equally hard working Americans who, primarily by our own choice, are NOT union members, where does that leave us?  Usually, with more taxes and without much of a voice.  And nowhere near as much voting power as Big Labor has amassed over all these years.

But all that is about to change, thanks to The Concord Project.  Finally, a tool for liberty-loving Americans that’s sure to bring out the community organizer in all of us.  And give the average voter a fighting chance against powerful unions and overbearing lefty groups during election season. (more…)

When John Boehner was first elected Republican leader, he said he felt like the dog that caught the car. This is a metaphor for someone who works hard to achieve a major goal, only to be confronted with the age old question “What do we do now?” If Republicans take back the House and Senate, the party will actually be the dog that caught the car.

Victory at the polls means Republicans will inherit an angry electorate that has been voting for change since 2006.  The country is at a crossroads. In one direction there is big, centralized government that usurps the rights of states, local communities, and individual Americans. It’s the job of the Republican leaders to outline another direction, but that direction is not yet clear to them.  This must change before the next election.

Americans punished Republicans in the 2006 and 2008 elections. Conventional wisdom said the country wanted change. The truth is that Americans saw no real difference between Democrats and Republicans. The Republican brand has gone stale and paved the way for a new era of big government and socialism. As Newsweek boldly proclaimed in early 2009, “We are all socialists now.”

Thankfully, the prospect of this socialist era enduring is slim. The American public has learned what socialistic polices really mean. A budget deficit that was $161 billion when the Democrats took control of Congress in 2007 and four years later projected to be $1.47 trillion; and a national debt held by the public that was $5 trillion and four years later projected to be $9.2 trillion. This and a lot more, including a projected $2.6 trillion cost to implement the Democrats’ healthcare bill, have soured the experience of most Americans with a Socialist Golden Age.  As Margaret Thatcher said, “…Socialist governments traditionally do make a financial mess. They always run out of other people’s money.” We just didn’t know that the White House and the Democratic Congress would run out of other people’s money so soon, or that they could accelerate our financial mess so rapidly.

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Edging closer to his death-bed, Fidel Castro seems to be trying to atone for his sins. He is even saying that the “Cuban Model” doesn’t work. These near death-bed confessions may ease his mind, but they do nothing for the millions who suffered under his rule.

As if the work of disgraced Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) on the housing and banking sectors, and subsequently therefore the larger economy weren’t enough already, I see this heads-up from the American Policy Center passed along to me. Apparently we suffer from too little government, not enough planning, and a few “Sustainability” offices are needed to more gently minister to how you and your families lead your lives and can better do so to meet the state’s desires.

This is not unexpected. As I wrote about this creeping “livability” agenda in Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America:

Team Obama’s efforts to “fundamentally transform” the United States of America” were immediate, widespread, and sweeping. The National Journal featured a debate about “livability” after someone there noticed that “the Obama administration and leading congressional Democrats appear to be making the creation of ‘livable communities’…a central transportation policy goal.” However, the “livability” and “happiness” indexes fetishized by the Left are code for coerced inconvenience, discomfort, or merely sameness, trading off individuals’ liberties to remove distinctions brought about by unfair quirks such as differences in ingenuity or hard work. But our superiors know that these differences are really only the product of a world in which the successful have won life’s lottery, so the spoils need to be spread around a bit.

Livability and the like serve as the rationale for all manner of intrusions. Innovation Newsbriefs in October 2009 noted that it was “the Administration’s intent to increase the federal role in shaping local development patterns and influencing travel behavior. ‘Smart growth’ planning and shifting more automobile travel to public transportation have been long-standing goals of progressive planners and assorted anti-sprawl activists, but these goals may now become a matter of federal policy under the Administration’s ‘livability’ initiative.”

Secretary of Transportation Ray LaHood did Obama no favors by candidly defending against inquiries about this, stressing that it’s no big deal. In fact, he pointed out, “about everything we do around here is government intrusion in peoples’ lives.” (House Majority Whip James Clyburn helpfully added soon thereafter, “There’s nothing in the Constitution that says that the federal government has anything to do with most of the stuff we do.” (What a team.) (citations omitted)

Dodd’s bill isn’t going anywhere, one would assume. Except that it has been reported out for full Senate consideration by the Banking Committee he still somehow chairs. It is one lame-duck tantrum away from being reality (two, if you count the House where the numbers make most things possible until January).

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Members of the American Federation of Teachers, along with AFSCME, SEIU and several other national labor unions, are showing their true political stripes by joining the “Labor for Palestine” movement.

These groups are not just calling for a Palestinian homeland in the Middle East and a peaceful resolution to the Palestinian/Israeli standoff. They’re suggesting that the creation of Israel has been a disaster for the Palestinian people.

It’s clear that they don’t share the commitment to Israeli security that American presidential administrations – Republican and Democrat – have maintained since 1948. They are radically anti-Israel, and they offer no apologies for that. The following passage can be found on the Labor for Palestine website:

The establishment of Israel in 1948 inflicted on the Palestinian people a continuing campaign of displacement, discrimination, exploitation and brutality that has continued to this day.

The anti-Israel rhetoric is just the tip of the iceberg. The group suggests that American foreign policy was to blame for the terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania on Sept. 11, 2001. In other words, 3,000-plus people deserved to die due to American support for the continued existence of Israel.

The group also protests recent U.S. military actions in the Middle East – calling them an endless “war of terror,” – and suggests that Iran may be the next innocent victim of American “colonialization.”

Their allies — including racist demagogue Pam Geller, the Anti-Defamation League, Rudolph Giuliani and prominent Neocons — promote bigotry to fuel increasingly unpopular U.S. wars against the Muslim world, while shielding Israeli apartheid from growing international isolation.

Workers, abroad and at home, have long paid the price for these disastrous policies. On 9/11, we suffered blowback from decades of U.S./Israeli war, occupation and colonialism.

9/11, in turn, has been the pretext for an endless bipartisan war of terror. This war has devastated Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia, Yemen and other countries.

It has left thousands of G.I.s dead or maimed. It has tortured prisoners and undermined civil liberties. It has squandered trillions of dollars.

Now it targets Iran.

For these reasons, it is essential for trade unionists and all workers to stand up in defense of the Muslim, Arab, and South Asian communities.

Excuse me?  The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 were “blowback” for the “US/Israeli war?”

The leadership of these unions can’t possibly believe that a majority of their members buy into this left-wing rhetoric.  They ought to denounce the radicalism within their ranks, or risk being tainted with it.  Or does AFT President Randi Weingarten really believe we deserved what we got on 9/11?

Meanwhile teachers, many of whom are professionals and work hard every day, ought to demand better than the radical positions of their union leaders.

If he were alive today, Saul Alinsky would be beaming over President Obama’s Labor Day speech at the Milwaukee Area Labor Council Laborfest. It hit all the right divisive, class-warfare notes, each one sounded to prod the down-trodden Have-nots into even greater envy of the evil Haves. And to no one’s surprise, the Milwaukee mice were more than happy to take the bait—cheering, smiling, applauding, even as the metal bar of the mousetrap is about to snap their necks.

Despite campaigning for the office as the Great Unifier, once in it Obama displays over and over his preferred role of Great Divider. His true talent is not in uniting America, but in fomenting, fragmenting, fracturing it. He wields his Alinskyite ideology like a giant chisel, cleaving America into two fractious lumps of stone, probably beyond reunification, at least under the current will-of-the-people-ignoring administration.

The first third of Obama’s 3422-word oration is dedicated to a platitudinous paean to America’s historically aspirational work ethic, a flattering, feel-good affirmation no one could disagree with. Even so, early on, Obama hints at the class-envy rhetoric that later wall-to-wall carpets his speech:

When I was still a candidate for this office…we talked about how, for years, the values of hard work and responsibility that built this country had been given short shrift…about how some on Wall Street took reckless risks and cut corners to turn huge profits, while working Americans were fighting harder and harder just to stay afloat.

In the Alinsky-Obama world paradigm, it’s always Us (the working downtrodden) versus Them (the non-working, reckless greedy). In the A-O paradigm, the housing bubble was unilaterally caused by rapacious brokers and bankers, while borrowing-beyond-their-means Tulipomaniac home-buyers are absolved of all blame.

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Pay just a bit of attention to what has been going on in Australian politics the past few months and you will quickly get the sense you are reading a U.S. 2010 midterm preview.  President Obama and congressional Democrats will not find solace in the many parallels between the current political climate in the United States and that unfolding Down Under.  The tides have turned in Oz and its waves are set to hit U.S. shores on November 2nd.

Batter Up.

The huge swing away from the liberal Labor Party’s agenda has left Australia in the center of the Federal political spectrum, as the major parties worked towards resolving the nation’s second hung parliament in its Federal history.  The deadlock ended this week.  This occurrence marks a new era for federal politics in Australia―with the formation of a new government hinging on three independents, two of which finally cut a deal with Labor to give them the 76 seats needed to form a minority government, barely fending off the conservative coalition’s 74.

One thing is certain, although the Labor Party swept in 2007 (with a twenty-three seat swing from 60 to 83), Labor has managed to lose the confidence of a majority of Australians in the space of less than a year.  The architects of the policy failures which brought this about through their cynicism and self-importance have received a stern message: Aussies are not interested in more government.

The parallels between the U.S. and Australian political landscapes are eye-opening.

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A major Internet company is under investigation by more than 30 state attorneys-general for alleged wiretapping violations.  In Europe and now Texas that same company faces anti-trust inquiries on whether it unfairly penalizes its competitors, and its operations face criminal wiretapping inquiries throughout Europe, as well as in Australia and South Korea.

Yet, inside the Beltway, it’s business as usual.  The Obama Administration plans to award the company a sweetheart, no-bid contract for satellite imagery and access to classified data.  After protests, the Administration backtracks, allowing other companies to bid, but still intends to award the contract to the company.  According to industry sources the total spending in that segment on intelligence outsourcing in 2009 was $161 billion.  This is no small contract.

Surprising? Then how about this: This same company’s executives were among the Obama campaign’s largest contributors. Its CEO stumped for candidate Obama, while he and other senior executives ponied up $150,000 to help pay for the inaugural celebration.

But, it gets even better: The CEO and another senior company official serve as technology advisors to the Administration on issues that directly impact their company.  The company’s senior lobbyist has had multiple secret meetings with senior officials at the National Security Council. Meanwhile, the company’s former top Washington lobbyist now works in the White House overseeing national policy over issues on which he used to lobby.

Is it Halliburton? Exxon? Boeing?  Nope.  The company is Google, the CEO is Eric Schmidt and the joke is on us.

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In the Mother of All Political Machines, there will be a changing of the guard. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, scion of the most ruthless and relentless political machine in American political history, has announced that he will not seek a whopping SEVENTH term. Wants to retire, he says. Interesting. Daleys don’t retire. They just stay in office, abusing power, forever.

But this Daley has decided to bow out, for some real reason we’ll find out later. That means Chicago will be getting a new mayor soon. And that new mayor just may be…Rahm Emanuel?

Obama’s Chief of Staff is a Chicago boy. He was a Clinton White House senior adviser, a Chicago-area Congressman, and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee before his current gig. By the way, he’s just not that into his current gig. He was into it when they were riding high, but now that Obama’s sucking salt, he’s dying to get outta there.

So, he’s going to run for mayor of Chicagoland. And he’ll win, because Chicago is Chicago. Beautiful city, ridiculously stupid politics. In Chicago, if you’re not indicted, you’re not invited.

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It must be a condition of employment that a journalist who writes about the current recession include in his article the statement, “consumption makes up more than two-thirds of the economy” or “consumption spending accounts for 70 percent of GDP.” This seemingly simple, factual statement, however, is nearly always intended to carry some explanatory weight, and on occasion the writer spells out this explanation by adding a statement such as, “unless consumers begin to open their wallets and spend more, recovery from the current recession will be impossible.”

At first glance, this journalistic commonplace appears to make sense. Anyone can understand that, say, a store at the mall will not hire additional employees unless its sales increase enough to justify the additional expense. Hence, would-be employees will remain unemployed; they will purchase fewer consumption goods than they would have purchased if they had jobs; and therefore the stores will not hire more workers; and so forth. The circle of a theory of income and employment seems to be closed, and thus an explanation provided for the lingering recession: consumers are not spending enough.

One does not need a Ph.D. in economics, however, to discover that something must be wrong with this way of thinking about prosperity and recession. Checking the national economic accounts produced by the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis (Table l.l.6), one finds, for example, that the most recent quarterly peak in real personal consumption expenditure occurred in the fourth quarter of 2007. This spending ($9,244 billion at an annual rate) equaled 69.2 percent of contemporary GDP ($13,364 billion at an annual rate)—where the data are expressed in dollars of 2005 purchasing power. Real GDP did not fall significantly until the third quarter of 2008. When it reached its trough in the second quarter of 2009, it had fallen to $12,810 billion, down about 4 percent. At that time, real personal consumption spending was $9,117 billion, down only 1.4 percent, and equal to about 71 percent of GDP. Thus, as usual over the course of a boom and bust, consumption spending varied proportionately less than GDP as a whole.

As every student of the business cycle learns early on, the most variable part of aggregate expenditure is private investment. When real gross private domestic investment peaked, in the first quarter of 2006, it was $2,265 billion, or 17.5 percent of GDP. When it hit bottom in the second quarter of 2009, it had fallen by 36 percent to $1,453 billion, or 11.3 percent of GDP. (Deducting investment expenditures aimed at compensating for depreciation of the private capital stock [Table 1.7.6], we find that real net private investment—the part that contributes to economic growth—in the most recent quarter was only one-third as great as it was at its peak in early 2006.) The ups and downs of the business cycle are obviously driven not by consumption spending, but by investment spending.

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Today, in 1974, President Gerald Ford pardoned Richard Nixon. The act ushered in Jimmy Carter, which ushered in Ronald Reagan. So, it was at least a wash.

The Associated Press reports:

Chicago Mayor Richard Daley says he’s not running for re-election after decades in office.

Daley said Tuesday he’s been thinking about not running for several months and has become comfortable with his decision over the last several weeks. Daley says “it just feels right.” Daley says the time to move on “is now.” (more…)

On September 12, 2009, grassroots activists from coast to coast flooded the streets of Washington D.C., making history in protest of a wasteful and oversized government.

This year, FreedomWorks and our fiscally conservative allies will assemble once again on September 12th to renew our commitment to a constitutionally limited government, and to remind Washington in one, strong, united voice that we will “Remember in November.”

We’re happy to announce that we will be welcoming Andrew Brietbart to the stage on the West Lawn of the Capitol as part of this year’s event. Andrew will be joining Erick Erickson, Deneen Borelli, Rep. Mike Pence, and many other leaders in the liberty movement to speak out against the out of control spending and the growing size of government. All of the details are listed on our website.

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