From The New York Times:

Since the government took over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, taxpayers have spent more than $160 million defending the mortgage finance companies and their former top executives in civil lawsuits accusing them of fraud. The cost was a closely guarded secret until last week, when the companies and their regulator produced an accounting at the request of Congress.

The bulk of those expenditures — $132 million — went to defend Fannie Mae and its officials in various securities suits and government investigations into accounting irregularities that occurred years before the subprime lending crisis erupted. The legal payments show no sign of abating.

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Jay Greene is the author of numerous studies demonstrating that more choice in education leads to better outcomes. A professor of education reform at the University of Arkansas and a fellow at the George W. Bush institute , Greene is also the author of Education Myths: What Special-Interest Groups Want You to Believe About our Schools—and Why It Isn’t So.

Reason.tv’s Nick Gillespie sat down with Greene at the National Summit on Education Reform in Washington, D.C., to talk about why competition makes schools better.

This interview is part of National School Choice Week, a non-partisan initiative to raise awareness of how competition and choice can transform K-12 education.

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Newsweek is running a distinctly condescending take on the recent Arizona Massacre. The clippings below are from their latest print addition.

The gist of their argument is that there are parallels to be drawn between the racist assassination of MLK, and the massacre committed in Arizona.

An Echo of the King Killing

Then, as now, the country was fighting an intractable and apparently interminable war against a hard-to-find enemy on the other side of the planet — a conflict that had drained the nation’s coffers and left the populace fatigued and paranoid. Then as now, the airwaves seethed with reactionary speech. Then, as now, gun sales were going up, up , up.

What a sweeping and condescending generalization, “fatigued and paranoid”.

When Newsweek cites reactionary speech, are they referring to Frances Fox Piven’s call for violent rioting,  or are they referencing the rioting Democrat-party-organized “arrestables” who have been purposefully unleashed on American cities over the past several years, with the explicit goal of political intimidation and disruption? (RICO, anyone???)

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Nearly two weeks ago, I did two interviews with farmers in Georgia who both made a serious accusation against Congressman Sanford Bishop related to the Pigford v. Glickman black farmers settlement — that when they brought up excessive lawyer fees and allegations of fraud, the congressman told them that an investigation of those issues might “shut down” the settlement.

Here are the clips I posted with farmers Eddie Slaughter and Willie Head.

Within a couple of days, Congressman Bishop responded to three different newspapers. His story was different each time.

• Rep. Bishop told the Albany Herald that he was aware of the fraud but it wasn’t his job to police it. This admission is significant because USDA Sec. Tom Vilsack has claimed that there was almost no fraud in Pigford.
• When speaking to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Rep. Bishop was suddenly stunned and perplexed and suggested that the farmers had been drinking.
• Most recently, Rep. Bishop told the Columbus Ledger-Inquirer him that he remembered the meeting, repeated that he wasn’t responsible for monitoring fraud, suggested that there were antifraud provisions in the second Pigford bill and again insulted the farmers calling them disgruntled and irresponsible.

In order to clear up some of the issues raised by Congressman Bishop and these newspapers, tonight I recorded a phone interview with Willie Head.

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From Lee Stranahan writing at the Huffington Post:

While I was conducting a video interview with a Georgia farmer named Eddie Slaughter a couple of weeks ago, he made a surprising and stunning allegation: that he had told his congressman about fraud in the multibillion dollar Pigford v. Glickman settlement and that the congressman responded by telling him that an investigation into Pigford would “shut it down.” Mr. Slaughter’s congressman — a man you may not have heard much about despite his nearly two decades as a Blue Dog Democrat and Congressional Black Caucus member — is Sanford Bishop.

I followed up with Mr. Slaughter and I asked him if others were in the meeting with Congressman Bishop. I’ve since interviewed two of those farmers — one on the phone and one, farmer Willie Head, on video. Both confirmed Mr. Slaughter’s story.

Here’s a a segment of my interview with Mr. Slaughter where he says:

We went to him [Sanford Bishop] several times about this fraud. [We asked] ‘why don’t you have them tell you how many of these people that are getting this money have an actual farm ID number and are actual farmers?’ [Bishop responded] ‘no, no, no — man, they’ll shut this thing down.’

And here is Willie Head:

I posted these videos to my YouTube account and then wrote pieces for Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com site. The controversial Mr. Breitbart is funding the documentary I’m working on but has given me complete journalistic freedom and has had no direct involvement in shooting any of the more than 12 hours of video interviews I’ve done so far. As a liberal, I disagree with Breitbart on most issues, but I also found him to be a very different person than he’s been portrayed as in the media, and working with him has been a great experience, just like my previous work for MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. I also don’t believe he’s a racist. If he were, I wouldn’t be working with him. (more…)

From Chicago Sun-Times:

Rahm Emanuel was thrown off the ballot for mayor of Chicago today by an appellate court panel, a stunning blow to the fund-raising leader in the race.

An appellate panel ruled 2-1 that Emanuel did not meet the residency standard to run for mayor.

Appellate judges Thomas Hoffman and Shelvin Louise Marie Hall ruled against Emanuel. Justice Bertina Lampkin voted in favor of keeping President Obama’s former chief of staff on the Feb. 22 ballot.

“It’s a surprise,” said Kevin Forde, the attorney who argued on Emanuel’s behalf.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss venture capital funding and the White House search for solutions to unemployment.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

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Was that a memorial for the victims of the Tucson shooting tragedy or a pep rally for President Obama that was held  at the University of Arizona? Many were discomforted by the constant screams and cheers at a memorial service for the victims of the shooting.

Adding to the inappropriate atmosphere were thousands of blue “Together We Thrive,” t-shirts and posters plastered all over the place, an obvious play on a popular Obama presidential campaign theme from 2008.

Perhaps it was also the fact that the whole event was “branded” in the first place: “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America.”

Perhaps it was the cheering throngs of Obama fans whooping and hollering as the President took to the stage, making the whole event seem more like a pep rally than a memorial. (And the same goes for Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, who also reportedly received a thunderous reception.)

Or, conversely, perhaps it was the smattering of boos that erupted when Governor Jan Brewer, a Republican, took to the stage to deliver her remarks — a reaction that “would have been hard to imagine, say, in the days after the Oklahoma City bombing,” the New York Times noted.

Perhaps it was all of those shameless attempts by liberals to play politics with this massacre leading up to the memorial event — suggesting, if not outright claiming, that this tragedy was the fault of “right wingers” in general and Glen Beck and Sarah Palin specifically. (I documented many of these ridiculous statements previously.)

Even the President himself made a subtle attempt to put the shooting in a political context — during his 31 minute speech! — when he talked about the “sharply polarized” nature of political discourse in our country.

Given the political nature of the event, many questioned how it was set up and, specifically, whether the White House was involved in the t-shirt controversy. Being the curious folk we are, Judicial Watch filed a public records request with the University of Arizona asking for the following information:

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Every movement that seeks to enslave a country, every dictatorship or potential dictatorship, needs some minority group as a scapegoat which it can blame for the nation’s troubles and use as a justification of its own demands for dictatorial powers. In Soviet Russia, the scapegoat was the bourgeoisie; in Nazi Germany, it was the Jewish people; in America, it is the businessmen.

Ayn Rand, Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal.

_________________

Here’s the scene:

Imagine yourself a small business owner with 50 employees or so. You’ve just spent the last two years of the Great Recession barely keeping your head above water, taking on some debt to keep your business viable. You’ve made a promise to yourself not to lay any of your employees off, but you also haven’t been able to give any raises, you’ve had to take away dental benefits, and everyone’s health care costs are going up this year because of ObamaCare.

At last, though, things are starting to look up a little and you finally have enough business to hire a couple of new employees.  After a fairly extensive search, you find a couple of candidates who seem like good fits. They’ve been unemployed for a while and seem really grateful that you’ve given them a job. It turns out, they’re pretty knowledgeable on running equipment and seem to get along really well with your other employees.

Well, a few months go by and one Friday afternoon, just before you’re to head home for the weekend, you get a fax from the National Labor Relations Board. The fax states that “unfair labor practice” charges have been filed against you and your company. Among other charges are those alleging that you fired a pro-union employee, interrogated employees, solicited grievances, made promises of benefits, and threatened to close…all illegal acts. (more…)

Verizon Communications has become the first of what many expect to be many, to sue the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to undo its voting themselves Internet Overlords on December 21^st.

This is an FCC self-inflicted wound; they flung wide open the door to lawsuits aplenty with their dictatorial vote – and the sloppy, self-contradicting and unauthorized order on which they voted.

The FCC decided to again usurp authority over the Internet – so as to then impose Network Neutrality – in a manner similar to the one it attempted in 2007 with the Comcast-BitTorrent situation.

A manner which the D.C. Circuit Court last April unanimously said the FCC is not statutorily authorized to execute.

A manner which FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski himself – just two months before calling for the vote and casting an “Aye” – readily acknowledges he and the FCC don’t have the juice to execute.

For their outrageously outsized part – completely unqualified “Public Interest” Group (PIG) Free Press was cited in the FCC order a ridiculous 53 times – the Media Marxists were livid with the order, somehow asserting that the FCC didn’t go nearly far enough outside its clearly demarcated legal bounds.

Leftists, after all, never allow facts to get in the way of a good beating.

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Not much more than an hour after nutter Jared Loughner shot a Congresswoman in the head and killed several others, Sheriff Clarence Dupnik starting blaming the Tea Party and the right-wing for the killing. Some of the victims were not even pronounced dead yet and this law enforcement official sought not to stick to the facts or calm the public, but being the cycle of beating his political opponents over the head with the dead bodies. We expect such gutter-dwelling rhetoric from sites like the DemocraticUnderground or the DailyKos. When a law enforcement official does it moments after one of the worst attacks against a federal official in years, it speaks to the character (or lack thereof) of the person in question.

In the days following, Dupnik doubled-down on his rhetoric, naming Rush Limbaugh by name. The mainstream media piled on laying clear blame on the Tea Party, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party in general. It must be news to me, but I didn’t realize saying “cut taxes” meant “go shoot someone in the face.”

Sheriff Dupnik played a critical role in bringing an all-time low to American politics and drove a wedge deep between right and left. At a moment when we all should have come together as a country to denounce the attacks of a mentally ill individual (one whom, I might add, was known to be mentally ill by Sheriff Dupnik’s office and who was previously investigated for making threats on others by Sheriff Dupnik’s office), Dupnik stood center stage and began the national blamestorming discussion.

The fact that a politician does not even possess a residue of character isn’t surprising, unfortunately. However, for a law enforcement official to demonstrate such a lack of integrity is unacceptable. Calls for his resignation are completely appropriate, however, the citizens in Pima County have something else in mind: they have begun the process to recall the Sheriff.

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Today, in 2003, the Department of Homeland Security officially opened its doors. (We almost called this post the “told you so edition.”

American Federation of Teachers’ President Randi Weingarten has been doing her best to make sure Big Labor has a say in education reform.  She wants to drive the train.  The National Education Association, on the other hand, is taking the tact of putting dynamite under the tracks.

While Weingarten says all the right things and uses all the necessary poll-tested phrases, she really wants to maintain the status quo.  No tenure reform.  No need to judge teachers by any measure other than seniority.

But in an interview with Newsweek, she made this curious statement, in response to Bill Gates saying, “We need to measure what they do, and then have incentives for the other teachers to learn those things:”

“Football teams do this all the time,” Weingarten responded. “They look at the tape after every game. Sometimes they do it during the game. They’re constantly deconstructing what is working and what isn’t working. And they’re jettisoning what isn’t working and building up on what is working, and doing it in a team-like approach.”

That’s correct – they do. It’s too bad that public education does not operate more like the NFL.

Here’s an idea. Let’s have the NEA and AFT become the owners of a new NFL franchise. For a lack of a better name, we’ll call the new team the Thugs.

Players on the Thugs’ roster would receive tenure after two years, like they do in New York City Public Schools.

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From Yahoo News:

[Dr. Kermit] Gosnell was charged last week with killing seven babies born alive and with the 2009 death of a 41-year-old refugee after a botched abortion at the clinic, which prosecutors have called a drug mill by day and abortion mill by night. The medical practice alone netted him at least $1.8 million a year, much of it in cash, they say.

Prosecutors said uncounted hundreds more babies died there.

“(He) regularly and illegally delivered live, viable babies in the third trimester of pregnancy and then murdered these newborns by severing their spinal cords with scissors,” said a report of the grand jury that investigated Gosnell and his clinic for a year.

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George Will in today’s Washington Post:

By the time Huntington’s book appeared, American had had four of what he called “periods of creedal passion” – the Revolutionary era (1770s), the Jacksonian era (the 1830s), the Progressive era (1900-20) and the 1960s. We are now in the fifth.

The American Creed’s values are liberal, as that term was understood until liberalism succumbed to 20th-century statism. The values, expressing the 18th century’s preoccupation with defending liberty against government, are, Huntington said, “individualistic, democratic, egalitarian, and hence basically anti-government and anti-authority.” The various values “unite in imposing limits on power and on the institutions of government. The essence of constitutionalism is the restraint of governmental power through fundamental law.”

What made the American Revolution a novel event was that Americans did not declare independence because their religion, ethnicity, language or culture made them incompatible with the British. Rather, it was a political act based on explicit principles. So in America more than in Europe, nationalism is, Huntington said, “intellectualized”: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Who holds them? Americans. Who are Americans? Those who hold those truths to be self-evident.

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Part I traced the sustainable development movement to longstanding U.N. environmental and population initiatives with unmistakably Marxist goals. They talk about saving the environment, but most of the fine print refers to “equity,” “social justice,” “fair distribution” and other Marxist terms. “Global warming” is the latest scare tactic, but population control never left the scene. The U.N.’s answer: free condoms.

As I said before, these people are nuts.

The discredited work of Dr. Paul Ehrlich, population prophet of doom, and Obama’s lunatic Science Czar, John Holdren, are referred to in U.N. population studies, and Ehrlich was cited in Agenda 21’s Biodiversity Assessment Report under “Gender Perspectives.” That’s right; the feminists have a special perspective on global warming too.

So the pretext doesn’t matter. They will always find one, because in their minds the solution to everything, poverty, overpopulation, environmental degradation, or even who should win Dancing with the Stars, is Socialism. And the way they get there is by creating a crisis.

To promote their socialist nightmare, Marxists must use deceptive language and tactics. In “Sustainable Development” they have found a magic mantra. It has allowed them to insinuate all their socialist fantasies into our legal code, under our noses, with little or no fanfare, scant public debate and graveyard noises from our treacherously AWOL mass media, right down to the local level – with our permission. Agenda 21, a UN initiative that was never endorsed by the U.S. Senate, as all international agreements must be, has penetrated into the ordinances of county and city governments all over America.

ICLEI Website

They have accomplished this through a little-known (to us) vehicle called the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI) – Local Governments for Sustainability.

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Today…Bears v. Packers to decide NFC Championship. Now, this is real football.

From the Associated Press:

New Hampshire Republicans elected a tea party figure as their leader and rejected the establishment-backed candidate, a sign that activists in this early voting presidential state have embraced the anti-government message that helped them make major gains in November’s election.

Former gubernatorial candidate Jack Kimball edged businesswoman Juliana Bergeron in a race that pitted first-time voters against White House veterans. Kimball, who said he would “send Barack Obama packing” and elect a Republican governor in 2012, promised not to shy from a fight.

“We are in a war and we are going to win it,” Kimball said. “We are going to pull ourselves from the brink. We are going after the Democrats the whole time.”

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