We at Eyeblast.tv at the Media Research Center hit the streets of Alexandria, VA to ask people their opinions on the Republicans effort to repeal Obamacare, a vote which they expect to take place on January 12. On the flip-side, we wanted to know what they thought of the Democrats vowed effort to block the repeal.

Here is what they had to say:

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Debbie Wasserman Schultz back in 2007, when Democrats took control of Congress: Self-described proud “minority bomb thrower” (starting : at :13 seconds in the clip below)

Now, as she and her party have been ushered back into the House minority, she is whistling a slightly different tune. She is claiming that as a minority member, she was a “relationship builder” (4:15 in this Fox News interview). Excerpt below:

So is Debbie Wasserman Schultz a relationship builder or a bomb thrower?

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NBC News and Politico are reporting that Bill Daley, brother of Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, former Commerce Secretary under Bill Clinton and long-time executive at Wall Street’s JP Morgan Chase will join the Obama Administration as White House Chief of Staff.

Poor Robert Gibbs. In what are his apparently final days in the White House, you’d think he’d like to take some last wistful walks around the place and maybe stop by a going away party or two. Instead, it looks like much of his final time will be explaining why President Obama really thinks we should increase the debt ceiling now, having voted against increasing it in 2006.

Back then, total federal debt was about $8.5 trillion, just over 60% of GDP. Auditioning for the role of a fiscal hawk, then-Senator Obama took to the Senate floor:

The fact that we are here today to debate raising America’s debt limit is a sign of leadership failure. It is a sign that the U.S. Government can’t pay its own bills. It is a sign that we now depend on ongoing financial assistance from foreign countries to finance our Government’s reckless fiscal policies. … Increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally. Leadership means that ‘the buck stops here. Instead, Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.

I gotta admit, the man had a point. We certainly did, and do, deserve better. Of course now that he’s in the White House, Obama thinks we absolutely must increase the debt ceiling. One his chief economic advisors recently went public, warning that if we don’t increase our ability to borrow money:

The impact on the economy would be catastrophic. I mean, that would be a worse financial economic crisis than anything we saw in 2008

So let me gets this straight, back when our debt was 60% of GDP Obama thought that an increase in the debt ceiling was a ‘failure of leadership’ and ’shifting the burden of bad choices.’ Now, our debt is over $14 trillion or, more ominously, just about 100% of GDP and Obama thinks that NOT increasing the debt ceiling would be an economic ‘catastrophe’?

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Education Action Group has produced an eye-opening chart illustrating the torturous, time-consuming and expensive process New Jersey schools must follow when attempting to fire a tenured teacher for “inefficiency, incapacity, conduct unbecoming or other just cause.”

EAG created this chart after consulting with James Smith, the executive director of school security for Paterson, NJ schools. We believe the chart is a clear indication that lawmakers in New Jersey and other states must seriously consider reforming and streamlining the tenure process, to make it quicker and easier to remove bad teachers from public school classrooms.

Click here for the full version.

Recently, Paterson schools made national news after it successfully fired a tenured special-education teacher.  The defendant was found guilty of “unbecoming conduct,” which included hitting and/or punching a handicapped student.  It took Paterson officials four years and over $400,000 to successfully fire the teacher.

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Progressives have been lining up against Speaker Boehner’s plan to open tomorrow’s House session with a reading of the United States Constitution. Their objections come even though the Democrats have been invited to participate in the ceremony.  Rep. Bob Goodlatte’s (R-Va.) office told the Washington Post that he would issue a letter advising Democrats they are welcome to take part.

But that is not good enough for the  progressive Congressman from New York Jerrold Nadler, he believes that the Constitution is not a document that should be treated with reverence.

Big Labor and politicians across the United States have transferred union costs to taxpayers.  For example, SEIU Local 444 (The Sanitation Officers Association, see related snow  slowdown stories) has six full-time union officials who are paid full-time city benefits and salary, yet work 0.00% of the time for New York City.  These Sanitation Officers are working on everything but New York City business – including political activities and golf outings – all on the taxpayers’ dime.

SEIU sanitation union transfers its costs to NY City taxpayers and provides an excellent place to cut the budget.

This means taxpayers are essentially paying for union bosses’ no-show jobs.

In 2009, SEIU Local 444 local President Joseph Mannion was paid $108,340 plus benefits, including seniority credits, for working fulltime for the union.  According to the union’s 2009 IRS report, Mannion was paid an additional $83,046 by the union. That’s over $190,000 plus benefits.

This type of union cost transfer to taxpayers is commonplace.

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Today, in Congress, the House will open its session with a reading of the Constitution. That this has never happened before is an historical quirk…that so many lefties are upset about it is, as we say in poker, a ‘tell.’ I mean, of course this is a bit of political theater…so, why get so upset? Remember, all the complaints or snark are about reading our foundational governing document. And, really, theater or not, why isn’t this done at the start of every new Congress?

As socialists progressives gear up to take on the filibuster, again, Jim Hoft shares some important filibuster myths that you’ll likely see parroted by many in the media as they struggle to carry Harry Reid’s increasingly heavy water pail.

I spoke with Brian Darling, who is a Big Government contributor, after the event yesterday at Heritage Foundation. He later sent me his “List of Myths” that the democrat-media complex will try to push on the American public this week as they go for their power grab in the US Senate.
With his permission, I am posting those “myths” here.

Four Myths about the Filibuster

There are four myths that you will hear over and over again about the filibuster. Don’t believe the left when they claim that the filibuster is unconstitutional and was an accident of history. Furthermore don’t believe it when you hear that the Senate is not a continuing body and therefore the Senate can only change rules in the first day of a new Congress. The explicit words of the Constitution, the Senate’s written rules and the history of the Senate show that the filibuster was created by design, it is constitutional and the Senate is a continuous body.

Myth: The Filibuster is Unconstitutional. Senator Tom Udall (D-NM) argues that “When the authors of the Constitution believed a supermajority vote was necessary, they clearly said so. And while the Constitution states that we may determine our own rules, it makes no mention that it require a supermajority vote to do so. In addition, a longstanding common law principle, upheld in Supreme Court decisions, states that one legislature cannot bind its successors. To require a supermajority to change the rules, as is our current practice, is to allow a Senate rule to trump our U.S. Constitution and bind future Senates.”

Fact: The Filibuster is constitutional and efforts to restrict debate in the Senate may be unconstitutional. The Constitution empowers the House and Senate to establish rules of procedure. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution states that “each house may determine the rule of its proceedings.” This provision in the Constitution empowers the Senate to make rules governing debate. The Senate in 1917 established the cloture rule requiring a 2/3rds vote of all Senators present and voting to shut down debate after years of not having a means to shut down debate. Senate Rule 22 today states “invoking cloture on a proposal to amend the Senate’s standing rules requires the support of two-thirds of the Senators present and voting.” The clear letter of the Senate’s rules mandate a supermajority vote to change the Senate’s rules.

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So now a new group has appeared claiming to eschew all political labels. Appropriately, they have taken the moniker “No Labels.” A closer examination of this group, however, seems to indicate that this is about as artificial as artificial can get.

The “No Labels” approach is inherently contradictory. Simply by creating the group and giving it a name, it has been labeled. Now we have Republicans, Democrats, and No Labelers. While it claims to be inclusive, it seems to attract primarily those to the left of center, whether Democrats or Republicans. The thing is, they don’t consider themselves left of center; rather, they place themselves squarely at the center and conclude that anyone not of their ilk is a “wingnut.” In fact, one of this group’s founders, John Avlon, wrote a book using that term.

I think it’s also instructive that this movement, such as it is, arose only after Republicans took back the House, made gains in the Senate, swamped governorships, and dominated state legislatures in the November elections. Why all of a sudden the need for a centrist party? Obviously because the Republicans did so well—and they must be stopped.

This effort is probably not going to make much of a dent in American politics. The idea that there are no “sides” in political debate is fanciful. Even the Founding Fathers had to face up to that. The Constitution, as originally written, did not take into account the development of political parties. There was this high hope that statesmen would govern for the good of all. Yet during Washington’s administration, we divided into Hamiltonian Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans.

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The news is going from bad to worse for Ireland. The Irish Independent is reporting that the Swiss Central Bank no longer will accept Irish government bonds as collateral. The story also notes that one of the world’s largest bond firms, PIMCO, is no longer purchasing debt issued by the Irish government.

And this is happening even though (or perhaps because?) Ireland received a big bailout from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund (and the IMF’s involvement means American taxpayers are picking up part of the tab).

I’ve already commented on Ireland’s woes, and opined about similar problems afflicting the rest of Europe, but the continuing deterioration of the Emerald Isle deserves further analysis so that American policy makers hopefully grasp the right lessons. Here are five things we should learn from the mess in Ireland.

1. Bailouts Don’t Work – When Ireland’s government rescued depositors by bailing out the nation’s three big banks, they made a big mistake by also bailing out creditors such as bondholders. This dramatically increased the cost of the bank bailout and exacerbated moral hazard since investors are more willing to make inefficient and risky choices if they think governments will cover their losses. And because it required the government to incur a lot of additional debt, it also had the effect of destabilizing the nation’s finances, which then resulted in a second mistake – the bailout of Ireland by the European Union and IMF (a classic case of Mitchell’s Law, which occurs when one bad government policy leads to another bad government policy).

American policy makers already have implemented one of the two mistakes mentioned above. The TARP bailout went way beyond protecting depositors and instead gave unnecessary handouts to wealthy and sophisticated companies, executives, and investors. But something good may happen if we learn from the second mistake. Greedy politicians from states such as California and Illinois would welcome a bailout from Uncle Sam, but this would be just as misguided as the EU/IMF bailout of Ireland. The Obama Administration already provided an indirect short-run bailout as part of the so-called stimulus legislation, and this encouraged states to dig themselves deeper in a fiscal hole. Uncle Sam shouldn’t be subsidizing bad policy at the state level, and the mess in Europe is a powerful argument that this counterproductive approach should be stopped as soon as possible.

By the way, it’s worth noting that politicians and international bureaucracies behave as if government defaults would have catastrophic consequences, but Kevin Hassett of the American Enterprise Institute explains that there have been more than 200 sovereign defaults in the past 200 years and we somehow avoided Armageddon.

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This morning, at a special swearing-in ceremony for the Congressional Black Caucus, outgoing Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi offered the GOP an olive branch and the promise of cooperation:

“We extend the hand of friendship to create jobs, grow the middle class and reduce the deficit. We look for common ground to solve the problems of the American people: their health, their housing, their jobs, their savings, their children’s education.”

But, just hours later, and about a minute after the House elected John Boehner as the new Speaker, Pelosi blasted out a fundraising email to supporters. Big Government was forwarded a copy:

This is our first test of how grassroots Democrats will respond to the Republicans’ disgraceful attempt to roll back our progress for America’s middle class families. We must hold House Republicans’ feet to the fire for taking government funded health care for themselves while voting to deny it to American families.

That is why we urgently need your support to raise $100,000 in grassroots contributions to hold Republicans accountable before their shameful vote on Wednesday.

Contribute $5, $10 or more today to help us respond to the Republicans’ shameful vote to take away quality, affordable health care from the American people and put insurance companies back in charge.

Classy.

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The past is not always a prologue to the future. But looking at some of the big winners and losers of 2010 does provide some strong hints of a positive 2011.

The biggest winner last year was the Tea Party, which shellacked President Obama in the election. Mr. Obama becomes the biggest loser. And the economy and stock market will be the beneficiaries.

The elections were the first major step toward restoring free-market capitalism and rolling back big-government controls, planning, and spending. This is a money-politics issue. Stocks roared 20 percent during the second half of last year, as markets sniffed out the huge political change. Post-election, stocks also had a big move, finishing the year at better than two-year highs — going all the way back to pre-Lehman Brothers.

Sure, there were important economic factors involved. Europe didn’t fall apart. The dollar didn’t collapse. And better U.S. economic numbers started coming in. (Double-dip bears also were big losers last year.) But rising political confidence helped, too.

The emergence of Tea Party free-market populism — what I call Reaganomics 2.0 — is hugely bullish for stocks and the economy in 2011.

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The Jeopardy category of “Strange but True Facts About Minnesota Pro Athletes” just got a little thicker.  To the recent revelations that Vikings star quarterback Brett Favre is, ahem, an aspiring photographer, comes evidence that Twins star catcher Joe Mauer isn’t exactly a “hometown hero.”

That’s right, according to real estate tax records, Mauer has been a legal resident of Florida, not Minnesota, since 2006.  While some may view this as evidence that Mauer’s well-burnished image is a fraud, I suspect most will conclude just the opposite – that Mauer’s residency status only makes him even more All-American than anyone realized.

You see, Mauer moved his legal residency to Florida for the same reason that LeBron James, Tiger Woods, Shaquille O’Neal, and many other star athletes and celebrities have done so – to benefit from the fact that Florida has no personal income tax.

In fact, fittingly, Mauer bought himself a place on a street named Prosperity Way.

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This week the world discovered that Goldman Sachs and Russian investor Digital Sky Technologies are planning to invest $500 million in Facebook, a deal which values the company at $50 billion.

As a part of the deal, Goldman also plans to raise $1.5 billion by peddling $2 million stakes in Facebook among its most wealthy clients.  With all the recent Chinese internet IPOs (DangDang, Youku) it’s no surprise that major US players want to get bullish on untapped American internet companies (Facebook, Twitter, Groupon, LivingSocial).  There’s an angle.  In order to circumvent the financial disclosure requirements set by the SEC that would force Facebook to go public, Goldman has come up with a ‘special purpose vehicle’ according to Business Insider:

The best thing about the vehicle: It will bypass SEC requirements that firms with over 499 investors have to disclose their financial results to the public, since the vehicle will be managed by Goldman, which, despite pooling the funds of thousands of investors, is deemed to be a single investor.

Bravo, Mark Zuckerberg and Goldman Sachs.  Zuckerberg has raised a serious amount of capital through a backroom deal, effectively bypassing the scrutiny of an initial public offering and listing on the New York Stock Exchange.  This is what we call a loophole.  What does this loophole mean for the future?  Well for one, we can almost be certain that the SEC will continue to overcomplicate the process of companies going public.  More laws, more regulation.

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On December 23, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia denied a motion by the Federal Deposit Insurance Company (FDIC) to dismiss a Judicial Watch FOIA lawsuit filed on behalf of our client, former FDIC employee Vern McKinley.

Actually, U.S. District Court Judge Emmett G. Sullivan did more than deny the motion to dismiss.  He also granted, in part, Judicial Watch’s motion for summary judgment and criticized the FDIC by saying the agency “has not fulfilled its obligations under FOIA.”  Now the FDIC must conduct a new search for responsive records and demonstrate that the records have been provided or properly withheld under FOIA law.

This lawsuit, filed on March 15, 2010, is one of several we’ve filed on behalf of Mr. McKinley.  (You can find them all here.)  And all of these lawsuits have a similar purpose:  to determine under what legal authorities and lawful rationales the federal government initiated these massive financial bailouts.

In this case we’re seeking records related to the FDIC’s decision to guarantee $306 billion of loans and securities held by Citigroup, Inc., and $118 billion held by Bank of America.  The lawsuit also seeks information about the Temporary Liquidity Guarantee Program (TLGP), the FDIC program that now guarantees $394 billion in bank deposits and debt.

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Well it seems that the President’s designated liar is about to exit the revolving door and go rake in some satchels of cash as a private, rather than public, political tool. Uh buh bye Gibby, it will be tough to replace your smug, smirking, professionally, un-informed visage, but I have a suggestion. I have been campaigning for the job of Press Secretary since watching the jackals of the White House Press Corps batting the feckless Scott McClellan around like a cat toy. So the time is now, and the tool is me. Here is the cunning plan. I have prepared 3 audition Press Briefs and with some grass roots support I could be beating the jackals like wet dogs in a dry house. You can let them know by tweeting Uncle Jimbo for Press Secretary to @presssec.

Episode 1 is “Reefer Madness”

Team Steele promised something akin to a prize fight at the recent RNC Chairmanship debate.

A Steele insider tells Power Play that the embattled chairman will “name names” and “make it personal” when he faces off with the four candidates looking to replace him as RNC chairman at today’s debate hosted by The Daily Caller and Americans for Tax Reform.

That it didn’t happen causes me to wonder if the pre-debate statement wasn’t simply stage craft, perhaps designed to get the others taking shots at him. I think Steele handled himself very well, in fact, but he has shown a tendency to enjoy playing the victim a bit too much during his term. If he wanted a me against them debate, he didn’t get it and he certainly didn’t start any fights. And while I continue to like Steele, that he lost so many PR and narrative battles, some of which he didn’t deserve, it’s that, almost as much as anything, that convinces me the RNC needs to turn the page. In prize fight terms, I ranked him fourth of the five RNC Chair contenders that took to the ATR/DailyCaller stage yesterday.

In lieu of judging it as a fight against one another, I’ve been thinking in terms of ranking them based upon how well they would likely perform as fighters for Republican candidates and the party going into 2012, especially given the unique demands of the job.

I liked Maria Cino more than I thought I would. Still, she struck me as someone who may very well need to be working for the next RNC Chair in an important role, as opposed to leading the team. She can spin it however she wants, but lobbying for Pfizer, which supported Obamacare, even to improve it on their behalf, means she was doing precisely what she now claims to have not been doing. Given that, plus the fact that even NRO didn’t buy her explanation of her supposedly Pro-Life stance, while acting contrary to it, she gets a DQ for disqualified. Frankly, after hearing her out, I’m glad we have someone like Maria Cino in the GOP. I’m just not convinced she’s the right person to be one of the leaders of it as RNC Chair right now.

I came away seeing Saul Anuzis as an able fighter, but ultimately second best in this particular case. He’s a favorite in some corners of the grassroots and I can see why. However, even as a member of the grassroots, my sense is, we need more than that. If Saul does come up short, it’ll be on the high-end fund raising side. We need a Chairperson who can work both with the base and high-end donors. It’s a fact of politics today, one to be taken seriously. For now, that ring is one in which I’m unconvinced Saul would truly shine.

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The left has been messaging for over a year that the Senate should abolish the filibuster.  They now are desperate to seize complete control of one chamber of the federal legislature so they can play defense against Speaker of the House John Boehner’s (R-OH) conservative agenda and lock Senate Republicans out of the legislative process.  Now is the time and the liberals are ready to pull the trigger of what some call the “Nuclear Option” to restrict the rights of individual members of the Senate to engage in extended debate.

Liberals in the Senate are ready for high noon today as the moment for them to start a procedural fight to chip away at the filibuster.  They hope this ploy will result in a successful power grab.  Liberal Senators and allies on the left have been preparing for months for this moment so they can strong arm through the Senate a change in the rules that will grant them complete control over the Senate’s agenda.

Expect liberals in the Senate to offer a resolution to lower the threshold to shut off debate.  They plan on arguing that the Senate is not a continuing body, notwithstanding the fact that the Senate’s rules state otherwise.  They are intent on forcing through this change to the rules with only a simple majority of Senators.  This ploy is a violation of the constitutionally authorized rules of the Senate and may be an unconstitutional power grab.

I wrote almost a year ago on Big Government that the filibuster is the friend of conservatives.

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