From the Associated Press:

The FBI and the U.S. Labor Department are investigating prominent labor leader Andy Stern in their probe of corruption at the Service Employees International Union, according to two people who have been interviewed by federal agents.

The two organized labor officials met with federal agents this summer to answer questions about a six-figure book contract that Stern landed in 2006 and his role in approving money to pay the salary of an SEIU leader in California who allegedly performed no work.

Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the investigation. The FBI and the Labor Department’s office of inspector general declined to comment for the record.

The disclosure about the federal inquiry of Stern—who abruptly resigned as president of the 2.2-million member SEIU in April—comes just weeks ahead of contentious congressional elections in which the union is spending an estimated $44 million to support its favored Democratic candidates.

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Two of the targets of last Friday’s raid against “anti-war” revolutionaries were early prominent leaders of Barack Obama’s New Party in Illinois.

From the Illinois New Party website on May 5th 1998:

Building the People’s Machine in the 35th Ward

The thirteenth precinct did superbly. We won it big in ‘96, and did so again this time – by about 25 votes. And then the 15th came in. Joe Iosbaker, our precinct captain there, was almost in tears. He had been working election day at this same precinct for progressive candidates for about a decade – since Harold Washington won re-election in 1987. But in all that time, he had never seen results like this. Elba Rodriguez: 47, Willie Delgado: 92! Other precinct workers were patting Joe on the back and shaking his hand. “It was a team effort,” he kept repeating, acknowledging the great work done by the 15th precinct crew of Yakira Nunez, Mary Robles, Sergio Vargas, Peter Shearn, and Stephanie Weiner – Joe’s wife, who has also been working that precinct for about 10 years.

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Carla Main wrote an outstanding book called Bulldozed.  A veteran journalist, she brought to life a heart-wrenching, true-life tale of eminent domain abuse in a Texas fishing town.  She told the truth.  And for that, she’s being sued.

Today, Carla is fighting back.

This morning, Carla asked a Texas appeals court to dismiss a defamation lawsuit filed against here by a developer involved in the Texas case.

Some background:

The Texas developer behind this abuse project is H. Walker Royall.  As the video makes clear, millions of taxpayer dollars later, the project is now an epic debacle.

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Another town hall meeting, another embarrassing gaffe by President Obama.  But this time, the President’s honesty revealed an arrogant defiance toward poor, mostly African-American parents trying to provide a better life for their children.

While President Obama was conducting a town hall meeting on MSNBC this morning with Matt Lauer, he was asked (by a parent in the crowd) if he thought his children could get the same education in a DC Public School vs. the elite private school he sends them to now.

His bombshell hypocritical answer caused no ripple and nary a peep from the national media. What a shock…

The following is an abbreviated transcript via the NBCWashington.com.

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A lot has been written on this site and elsewhere concerning the Pledge to America that the Republicans unveiled on Friday. For the most part, bloggers have been critical. Some have argued that it will not do the Republicans any good in November. Others dismiss it as milquetoast. Emily Esfahani Smith has done a good job collecting the comments.

I think the critics are wrong, quite wrong – and for two reasons. First, those who drafted the Pledge took great care to ground everything that they had to say in first principles. They drew the attention of the nation to the principles enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the Constitution. Then, they pointed to our departure from these principles in recent years, asserting that the Democrats bear prime responsibility for this, but acknowledging Republican failures as well.

And, finally, they spelled out the corrective measures that are most pressing – a repeal of Obamacare (not a collection of minor adjustments); a reduction of federal expenditures (apart from those devoted to national defense) back to the level of 2008; and an extension of the tax cuts introduced by George W. Bush.

Should they have gone further? Perhaps, perhaps not. This is a document devised for three purposes. It is aimed at winning an election, at preparing a party now in opposition for legislative hegemony, and at initiating an enduring partisan realignment. In such circumstances, two things are necessary. A simple straightforward set of principles needs to be announced, and the most pressing concerns need to be directly addressed.

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Obama administration officials repeatedly denied that politics had anything to do with its Justice Department’s (DOJ) decision to abandon its lawsuit against the Black Panthers, a “civil rights” group that brandished weapons, blocked a polling station and hurled racial insults at voters on Election Day 2008. In fact, at least one Justice Department official swore to it under oath.

But according to evidence uncovered by Judicial Watch, this is yet another Obama administration falsehood.

On September 21, released a draft Vaughn index prepared by the Department of Justice (DOJ) that shows that the two top political appointees at the DOJ were involved in the decision to dismiss the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense (NBPP).

The index, which we acquired pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, describes documents the government is withholding from the public. Among those documents are internal DOJ emails regarding the Black Panther case between the highest political appointees inside the DOJ, including former Deputy Attorney General David Ogden and the Associate Attorney General Thomas Perrelli, the second and third ranking officials at the DOJ.

Here’s one example: A May 10, 2009, email from Associate Attorney General Perrelli to Deputy Associate Attorney General and former Democratic election lawyer Sam Hirsh. “Where are we on the Black Panther case?” Perrelli asks in the subject header. The email also includes Deputy Attorney General Ogden’s “current thoughts on the case.”

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Today, in 1781, American forces, with support from the French, began the siege of Yorktown.

Woah! Radical AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka is calling for the left to take control over private industry.

Can we call them “socialists” yet?

“We need to fundamentally restructure our economy and re-establish popular control over the private corporations.”

The AFL-CIO blog reported:

With the economy continuing to stagger and job creation not moving quickly, “working people are justifiably angry and frustrated” as they approach the Nov. 2 elections, says AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Trumka and Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, Eric Alterman, journalist and senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, and moderator Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of the Nation, led a panel discussion—Which Way for the Working Class? Elections 2010 and Beyond—Friday afternoon in New York City.

More than 400 people attended the event at the Great Hall at Cooper Union.

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The challenge for the Tea Party movement is to identify specifically: What would you do?” the president said. “It’s not enough to say ‘get control of spending.’ I think it’s important for you to say, ‘I’m willing to cut veterans’ benefits,’ or ‘I’m willing to cut Medicare or Social Security or ‘I’m willing to see taxes go up.’

Ahem, can we please stop letting Obama get away with this false choice?

Can we please just start saying, “I’m willing to cut Public Employee Compensation (PCE) at the Federal, State, and Local level by 25%.”

Can we please just start saying, “Mr. President, HOW DARE YOU give us a false choice of new taxes and cuts in services?”

25% cuts in PCE are not draconian; they are common sense:

1. We get rid of the least productive 10-25% in every department, like businesses do when times are tough.
2. We increase the hours worked by Public Employees (by 10%) to match the private sector.
3. We outsource responsibly to private sector companies that are chomping at the bit to replace fat bloated government.

With 25% cuts in PCE, the savings are close to $300B annually, and that’s AFTER we spend $100B letting private companies bid to replace the services currently provided by public employees.

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The Republican Pledge to America released last nearly perfectly addresses the problems being created by the current leadership of our federal government. Its first sentence, making the point that Nobel Laureate economist Friedrich Hayek made fifty years ago in his The Constitution of Liberty, America is an idea, is something of major import that has been forgotten in this era of using government in an attempt to escape individual responsibility.

The reference to the Declaration of Independence contained in the rest of the Pledge should be obvious to us all, but unfortunately our education system is today more about garnering largesse for political unions than about educating our children on what ideas form the basis of our country.

The current jobs recession and the financial crisis that created it are the result of those in charge of an expanded federal government attempting to make the world in their own vision—in this particular case the vision that everyone has the right to own a home.

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“I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.”
Thomas Jefferson

As you probably know, a budget crisis has stymied California legislators for nearly three months. In case you missed it, California is $19 billion (and growing) in the hole and no one seems to have a real solution to the problem. For the Democrats who control the Senate and State Assembly, the way out lies in canceling tax breaks to increase revenue. For the minority Republicans and Governor Schwarzenegger, it means making cuts to state funded programs to decrease spending. Both suggestions are short-sighted and lacking real reform- only temporary measures that will leave us no better off next year.

On the ballot this November in California are two propositions that are worth mentioning in the discussion about the condition of California’s finances: Prop 25 and 26. On the surface, Prop 25 seems like the perfect way to end the budget stalemates that have become so common in California and so devastating to the economy. Scratch through the shiny gloss about increasing government accountability and you will find a bill that is designed to give legislators more power to pass a budget filled with gimmicks and pet projects.

Proponents point to the provision that legislators won’t get paid if a budget doesn’t pass, which hardly matters. Eliminating the super-majority provision means lawmakers will be able to pass any budget they want- even if they know it has no chance of getting past the governor’s office. This proposition does nothing more than put a mask over the real problem facing the budget: we don’t have any money left to spend.

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In response to the success of the Tea Party rallies in April 2009, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) accused the nascent movement of being “astroturf”–a political term of art for a faux movement funded by traditional powers to give a cause the appearance of independent grassroots support.

Pelosi repeated the “astroturf” slur in August 2009 as Tea Party activists showed up in large numbers at healthcare townhall meetings.

Five national tea party-related rallies have been held in our nation’s capitol in the past year and half. If there was evidence that thousands of tea party activists were getting free bus rides to these rallies, surely the media would have made certain the whole world knew about it.

On October 2nd, the NAACP and national labor unions will give tens of thousands of people free bus rides, free lunches, free T-shirts and free Metro farecards as inducements to attend the One Nation Working Together rally being organized by a coalition of radical leftist organizations at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has promised to give free bus rides from major metropolitan areas within twelve hours of D.C. The United Steelworkers are also busing in demonstrators from across the Northeast. Even the Screen Actors Guild is ‘getting on the bus.’

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It didn’t get as much attention as it should have, but GOP Pollster Glen Bolger has done a fascinating poll.  He finds Republicans leading the generic congressional ballot, 44% to 39%.   No biggie.  But look at the crosstabs:   ”Besides all of the usual regional crosstabs, we also broke it out by the type of district. We looked at the sample in the 66 Democratic INCUMBENT districts that Charlie Cook lists as either toss-up or leaning Democratic at the time of the survey. In that key crosstab of Swing Democratic Incumbent Seats, the Republican lead grows to 49%-31% on the generic ballot. That is a very powerful crosstab that says the wave is coming. Among the remaining Democratic districts (Likely/Safe Dem, and open seats), the generic ballot is an unsurprisingly 33% GOP/51% Dem — a sign that the historically safe Dem seat will remain so, while the swing seats will be a bloodbath.”

Bolger is on to something.  This is not a presidential election year.  What counts are the states and congressional districts with competitive races.  It’s clear that Republicans hold a huge advantage at this point.  But there is another critical point to consider — who will vote.  Another poll released yesterday showed that Independents are breaking toward the GOP as well.

On top of that, 60 Plus’ recent poll showed that seniors — the citizens with the highest propensity to vote — are angry and getting madder by the day thanks to the FDA’s consideration of rationing of the late stage cancer treatments. Poll showed that 78% of registered voters worry that the FDA decision on the drug Avastin represents the start of rationing and 71% would vote against any candidate siding with the FDA on the issue–pretty devastating numbers for Democrats who promised the public this wouldn’t happen.

And just when you think things couldn’t get much worse, progressive Democrat Zoe Loffgren’s invites Steven Colbert to testify before a congressional subcommittee.  Colbert is a perfect metaphor for the Democrat controlled Congress — it is a joke.

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Congressman Steve King (R-IA), a Member of the House Agriculture and House Judiciary Committees, has written Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack to request a meeting next week to discuss allegations of serious fraud in the disbursement of Pigford v. Vilsack settlement money. Pigford v. Vilsack is the class action lawsuit initiated by black farmers who claimed to have been discriminated against by the United States Department of Agriculture. King’s request was mailed to Secretary Vilsack this afternoon.

“There is a growing firestorm over the allegations of massive fraud in the Pigford settlements,” said King. “According to sworn testimony by John Boyd, President of the National Black Farmers Association, there are 18,000 black farmers. They could not all have been victims of discrimination. To date, there have been over 94,000 claims made. These numbers speak to massive fraud, meaning that American taxpayers are on the hook for what Pigford judge Paul Friedman called ‘forty acres and a mule.’”

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I just returned from speaking to two terrific groups about California’s looming ballot initiative, Proposition 23, to delay implementation of the state’s climatically meaningless, economically suicidal state-level adoption of the Kyoto agenda, called AB 32.

On the flight out I pulled out my pocket Bastiat reader, which I carry everywhere but hadn’t re-read in a while. There, in the opening, brilliant essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen” — a work that perfectly nails Obamanomics, and the entire ‘green jobs’ fallacy that is the latest re-branding of central planning (if in its most devastating form: mandating energy price hikes on top of generational debt) — I ran across a stunning reminder:

In noting what the state is going to do with the millions of francs voted, do not neglect to note also what the taxpayers would have done—and can no longer do—with these same millions. You see, then, that a public enterprise is a coin with two sides. On one, the figure of a busy worker, with this device: What is seen; on the other, an unemployed worker, with this device: What is not seen. The sophism that I am attacking in this essay is all the more dangerous when applied to public works, since it serves to justify the most foolishly prodigal enterprises. When a railroad or a bridge has real utility, it suffices to rely on this fact in arguing in its favor. But if one cannot do this, what does one do? One has recourse to this mumbo jumbo: “We must create jobs for the workers.”This means that the terraces of the Champ-de-Mars are ordered first to be built up and then to be torn down. The great Napoleon, it is said, thought he was doing philanthropic work when he had ditches dug and then filled in. He also said: “What difference does the result make? All we need is to see wealth spread among the laboring classes.”

Spread the wealth around. So here we have Obamanomics in a nutshell.

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From Black Voices News:

Approximately 80,000 black farmers missed the deadline for the 1999 settlement. In February 2010, the Obama Administration announced a $1.15 billion agreement to resolve the second round of claims, with the purpose of bringing “these long-ignored claims of African-American farmers to a rightful conclusion.”

The funding has passed the House but has been stalled in the Senate, where it has been attached to several bills only to be scratched out.

Senators Kay Hagan (D-NC) and Blanche Lincoln (D-AR), chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, also stood with Boyd, during the news conference to announce they are introducing a standalone bill with Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) to fund the $1.15 billion settlement. “We’re working together to send this language to the President as quickly as possible because our Black farmers have waited too long,” said Sen. Hagan. “We want to ensure Black farmers in our country finally receive the justice they deserve,” she said.

“More than 4,000 African American farmers in North Carolina and over 75,000 nationwide have been discriminated against and denied just compensation for decades. Today, I join with my colleagues from Louisiana and Arkansas, Senators Landrieu and Lincoln, to introduce a bill to fund the settlement once and for all, and we are working to send this language to the President.”

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Bryan Binkholder has no problem investing money to fix up homes. But when it involves spending more than $381,000 per home to fix up homes that will be worth $80,000 to $110,000 each upon completion, he draws the line.

“Chalk this up to another case of government gone wild, attempting to do something the free market would and will do at a greater efficiency and without tax payer dollars,” said Binkholder, a financial expert, investment adviser, active real estate investor and host of “The Financial Coach Show” on FM News Talk 97.1 in St. Louis. He shared his opinion with me during an online discussion stemming from the Friday publication of an article about the efforts of the nonprofit group, Beyond Housing, in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

The article in question used a plethora of facts and figures to highlight efforts to rehab homes in the crime-ridden North St. Louis neighborhoods that populate the Normandy School District. Unfortunately, however, it did not provide a cost-per-house breakout of dollars being spent or provide a glimpse of how many of those dollars were coming directly from taxpayers.

After reading the Post-Dispatch article, I set out to find people whom I hoped could provide just such a breakout.

Among those I talked to Friday were Jim Holtzman, director of the Office of Community Development for St. Louis County Government, and Chris Krehmeyer, president and CEO of Beyond Housing. It was a third person, however, who provided the kind of comprehensive information that caused me to seek Binkholder’s opinion.

Margaret Lineberry, the new Kansas City-based executive director of the Missouri Housing Development Commission, offered the most-detailed answers to my questions during an e-mail exchange that followed a friendly phone call Friday morning. In case you’re not familiar with MHDC, it’s an organization that administers federal and Missouri Low Income Housing Tax Credit programs, federal HOME funds, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Project Based Section 8 rental assistance contracts, the direct MHDC funding of several housing assistance programs and the Affordable Housing Assistance Program Tax Credit.

Most notable in my exchange with Lineberry was her reply to one of my questions:

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There’s a wise old saying about “don’t bite the hand that feeds you.” But perhaps we need a new saying along the lines of “don’t subsidize the foot that kicks you.” Here’s a good example: American taxpayers finance the biggest share of the budget for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is an international bureaucracy based in Paris. The OECD is not as costly as the United Nations, but it still soaks up about $100 million of American tax dollars each year. And what do we get in exchange for all this money? Sadly, the answer is lots of bad policy. The bureaucrats (who, by the way, get tax-free salaries) just released their “Economic Survey of the United States, 2010” and it contains a wide range of statist analysis and big-government recommendations.

The Survey endorses Obama’s failed Keynesian spending bill and the Fed’s easy-money policy, stating, “The substantial fiscal and monetary stimulus successfully turned the economy around.” If 9.6 percent unemployment and economic stagnation is the OECD’s idea of success, I’d hate to see what they consider a failure. Then again, the OECD is based in Paris, so even America’s anemic economy may seem vibrant from that perspective.

The Survey also targets some very prominent tax loopholes, asserting that, “The mortgage interest deduction should be reduced or eliminated” and “the government should reduce further this [health care exclusion] tax expenditure.” If the entire tax code was being ripped up and replaced with a simple and fair flat tax, these would be good policies. Unfortunately (but predictably), the OECD supports these policies as a means of increasing the overall tax burden and giving politicians more money to spend.

Speaking of tax increases, the OECD is in love with higher taxes. The Paris-based bureaucrats endorse Obama’s soak-the-rich tax agenda, including higher income tax rates, higher capital gains tax rates, more double taxation of dividends, and a reinstated death tax. Perhaps because they don’t pay tax and are clueless about how the real world operates, the bureaucrats state that “…the Administration’s fiscal plan is ambitious…and should therefore be implemented in full.”

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Since the dawn of the financial crisis, author and investor Nassim Taleb has been a favorite of the Huff Post crowd. When Arianna Huffington guest-hosted CNBC’s Squawk Box last year, he was one of the few guests she brought on the show. Well, Taleb went up to Canada last week and gave a speech slamming Obama’s economic policies. Of course, he gave the speech in French. From Bloomberg:

U.S. President Barack Obama and his administration weakened the country’s economy by seeking to foster growth instead of paying down the federal debt, said Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of “The Black Swan.”

“Obama did exactly the opposite of what should have been done,” Taleb said yesterday in Montreal in a speech as part of Canada’s Salon Speakers series. “He surrounded himself with people who exacerbated the problem. You have a person who has cancer and instead of removing the cancer, you give him tranquilizers. When you give tranquilizers to a cancer patient, they feel better but the cancer gets worse.”

Today, Taleb said, “total debt is higher than it was in 2008 and unemployment is worse.”

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