Yesterday at CPAC, Lee Stranahan and Andrew Breitbart led a press conference detailing new developments in Big Government’s ongoing Pigford Investigation.  We will be highlighting key moments in the conference for you and posting them here at Big Government.

The first “highlight” is the full audio of a two-hour session conducted by Thomas Burrell, President of the Black Farmer Agricultural Association, Inc., where Mr. Burrell advises approximately 150 black non-farmers on how to fill out applications to receive Pigford settlement money.  Listen to the audio and follow along with the roadmap below.

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As Chairman of the Water and Power Subcommittee of Natural Resources, my colleagues and I are excited and eager to undertake the mission outlined in House Resolution 72: to identify the federal regulations in this field that are impeding job creation and slowing the economy.

The only problem is deciding where to begin.

A generation ago, the principal objective of our water and power policy was to create an abundance of both. It was an era when vast reservoirs and hydro-electric facilities produced a cornucopia of clean and plentiful water and electricity on a scale so vast that many communities didn’t even bother to measure the stuff.

But that objective of abundance has been abandoned in favor of rationing shortages caused by government.

The result is increasingly scarce and expensive water and power that now undermines our prosperity as a nation.

Nowhere is that more evident than in the Central Valley of California. The last Congress sat idly by as this administration deliberately diverted 200 billion gallons of water away from the most abundant agricultural region of our nation – all to satisfy the environmental left and its pet cause, a three inch minnow called the Delta Smelt.

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The single-largest annual meeting of conservatives and small-government fellow travelers, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), kicked off in Washington, D.C. today on Thursday, February 10, 2011.

The big story leading up to the conference was a high-profile boycott by outfits such as The Heritage Foundation and figures such as Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) due to the participation of GOProud, a gay conservative group that lobbies for lower taxes and equality under the law. As a spokesman for Heritage put it, “We want to promote economic freedom, a strong national defense and social conservativism. We think these policies are indivisible…It’s not a boutique. You can’t pick one and not the other.”

Reason’s Michael C. Moynihan was on hand to gauge the mood of CPAC. While some anti-gay conservatives stayed away, libertarians and small government types proliferated, agitating for less spending, an end to the drug war, and greater social freedom.

And, in the case of the John Birch Society, a smiting from on high.

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Rep. Tom Price (R-Georgia) took the time to chat with us for a brief podcast today regarding his impressions of Don Berwick’s fractious testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee. A physician himself, Price pressed Berwick, the controversial head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on questions regarding the rationing of care, whether it was a falsehood for the White House to claim “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it” and other key matters.

This line of questioning led to a side-by-side moment that is really made for TV — Berwick today saying: “I abhor rationing. My entire life has been spent fighting rationing.”

Compare that to a quote from Berwick in 2009: “The decision is not whether or not we will ration care — the decision is whether we will ration with our eyes open.”

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Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Director Dr. Donald Berwick and Chief Actuary Rick Foster testified before the Ways and Means Committee today to provide answers to pressing questions about the trillion dollar health care law.  Dr. Berwick, having been in office eight months, had never testified before the Ways and Means Committee even though the committee oversees health care policy for the entire country.  Chief Actuary Foster didn’t testify before the committee in the last Congress even though health care was being “debated.”

To put it in perspective two Obama Administration officials control a budget at CMS larger than the entire budget of the Department of Defense.

Play the videos or read the excerpts of CMS Director Berwick’s evasive responses followed by excerpts from Chief Actuary Foster’s testimony.

Dr. Berwick

What is your opinion on a rationing system and universal health care?

Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp: “Well, regarding the British National health service, you made a statement, and that is a service that is notorious for rationing care, you said and I quote ‘I fell in love with the NHS…to an American observer, the NHS is such a seductress.’ Are you still in love with the NHS?”

Dr. Berwick: “There are strengths and weaknesses for every health care system around the world.”

Chairman Camp: “Well you also wrote and I am quoting here, ‘I admit to my own devotion to a single-payer mechanism as the only sensible approach to health care finance I can think of.’ Do you still feel a government run single payer health care system is the only sensible approach?”

Dr. Berwick: “I am really excited by the promise the Affordable Health Care Act offers, Mr. Chairman, to American health care.”

Is there anything you would change to the Democrats’ Health Law?

Rep. Dave Reichert (WA): “Is there anything that stands out in your mind that you would change? What don’t you like about the bill, or is it all good?”

Dr. Berwick: “It is a very complicated bill sir.”

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Rep. Mike Pence (R-Ind.), a former member of GOP leadership, said Republicans must uphold the promise in their Pledge to America and cut “at least $100 billion in the first year.” His comments came as conservatives continued to lobby leadership to cut a full $100 billion in non-security discretionary spending.

Pressure from the conservative Republican Study Committee prompted House appropriators to head back to the drawing board for additional cuts Thursday. Their latest offer: $84 billion.

That’s still short by $16 billion — a figure under dispute between conservatives and leadership. The official leadership plan includes $16 billion in security cuts, money the RSC maintains should not count toward the $100 billion promise. Conservatives might support those security cuts, but want at last $16 billion more in non-security discretionary spending cut from fiscal 2011.

Pence, a former chairman of RSC who last Congress served as GOP conference chairman, made it clear that Republicans must cut $100 billion — no ifs, ands or buts.

“In the Pledge to America, Republicans said that we would save taxpayers at least $100 billion in the first year,” Pence said on Fox News today. “And what’s going on right now on Capitol Hill are negotiations among Republicans to keep our word and I believe that we will.”

Pence applauded the work of House appropriators, but added bluntly, “House conservatives believe we can do better, we believe we can hit that $100 billion mark, and I think we should.”

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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stunned the world by refusing to step down from power. As if we needed another example, the Obama Administration is not ready for prime time.

While more and more in the government and media slowly catch on to the fascinating story of Pigford fraud and corruption we’ve thoroughly documented here at BigGovernment, there’s one important group taking the charges we’ve made in this space very seriously: the National Black Farmers Association.  The event is to take place February 15, 2011; we received the release today:

Our last Republican to hold statewide office was Governor Pete Wilson who left the office in 1999. I’m not counting the last, failed action-star who just left the office and was about as Republican as Nancy Pelosi. Schwarzenegger supported both Cap and Trade, and Obamacare. The Republican brand has died in California. Many folks have been doing the post mortem. In the last election cycle, despite the Republican resurgence throughout the country, not a blip of hope was on the screen here.

How bad was it during the last election cycle? When the electorate chooses Barbara “general, call me senator” Boxer over a former HP chief Carly Fiorina, it’s bad. They chose an anti-death penalty Attorney General, Kamala Harris who even refused to apply a death penalty to cop killers. California chose Ms. Harris over Steve Cooley, a republican who was a successful DA from Los Angeles. Additionally, Ms. Harris had the lowest conviction rate of any big city district attorney.No Republican won any constitutional office in the state in 2010. It was a wipeout.

“There’s been a broad repudiation of traditional conservative Republicans in California,” said Tony Quinn, a former GOP analyst and co-editor of the California Target Book, which tracks state politics. “There are almost no areas in the state that can be considered safely Republican anymore.”

To add insult to injury, since 2004 GOP registration shrank by 317,000 at the same time Democrats picked up 563,000. That’s a whopping democrat advantage of over three quarters of a million voters.

Where’s our leadership? Here’s where -attending mock funerals for the party. There was one recently held for the GOP where Duf Sundheim, a former state GOP chair declared, “Republicans, as a brand, are dead.” Can we please resolve now not to elect GOP chairmen named; Duf, or Biff or Buff or any other caricature names of the idle white and rich?

Ok, we get it. It’s now time for our wake up call. We need to shift gears and get this beat up truck down the track. I haven’t heard much in the way of new or inspiring ideas from any of the state GOP party apparatchik.

Here are some positive ideas:
Focus on economic issues.
Face reality. As much as they’re important to many of us, social issues are a loser in California. Although the GOP won on the defense of marriage initiative; they just barely won. It’s not a winner issue for the GOP particularly if they want to attract new and younger voters going forward. That’s just the facts.

We need to focus in on putting statewide ballot propositions before the voters that are sponsored by Republicans working in coalitions and improve the GOP brand. Ideas that show we are the leaders.

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The House failed to pass an extension of provisions of the Patriot Act this week.  House leaders put the bill on the House Suspension Calendar which requires a 2/3rds vote to pass and forecloses the opportunity for amendments to the bill.  Senator Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) has pledged to slow down the legislation in the Senate.

Senator Paul feels so strongly about this issue, he has put out a YouTube video describing in great detail why he opposes the continuation of this Act.

This fight is going to play out over the next two weeks in the House and Senate.  Conservatives should not rubber stamp this Bush era power in the name of anti-terrorism, because the complex provisions of the Patriot Act deserve a full and fair national debate.  The federal government already has extra-ordinary powers to monitor behavior without the Patriot Act, Americans need to give expressed consent to any further authorization of these powers to comply with the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. (more…)

Proponents of higher taxes are fond of claiming that Bill Clinton’s 1993 tax increase was a big success because of budget surpluses that began in 1998.

That’s certainly a plausible hypothesis, and I’m already on record arguing that Clinton’s economic record was much better than Bush’s performance.

But this specific assertion it is not supported by the data. In February of 1995, 18 months after the tax increase was signed into law, President Clinton’s Office of Management and Budget issued projections of deficits for the next five years if existing policy was maintained (a “baseline” forecast). As the chart illustrates (click to enlarge), OMB estimated that future deficits would be about $200 billion and would slightly increase over the five-year period.

In other words, even the Clinton Administration, which presumably had a big incentive to claim that the tax increase would be successful, admitted 18 months after the law was approved that there was no expectation of a budget surplus. For what it’s worth, the Congressional Budget Office forecast, issued about the same time, showed very similar numbers.

Since the Clinton Administration’s own numbers reveal that the 1993 tax increase was a failure, we have to find a different reason to explain why the budget shifted to surplus in the late 1990s.

Fortunately, there’s no need for an exhaustive investigation. The Historical Tables on OMB’s website reveal that good budget numbers were the result of genuine fiscal restraint. Total government spending increased by an average of just 2.9 percent over a four-year period in the mid-1990s. This is the reason why projections of $200 billion-plus deficits turned into the reality of big budget surpluses.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech discuss Donald Berwick’s testimony on Capitol Hill today. Then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about Mubarak and the White House.

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:

Berwick to Testify Before House for the First Time
Don Berwick Online
Politico Arena: Has Mubarak Already Won? – Pej responds
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A decision by a federal court in Florida sent shock waves through the Obama administration last Monday. Judge Roger Vinson ruled the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare as it is commonly known, unconstitutional in a consolidated lawsuit that involved 26 states challenging the law.

According to The Los Angeles Times: “A federal judge in Florida dealt President Obama’s healthcare overhaul a sweeping blow Monday, ruling the law unconstitutional because of its requirement that Americans have health insurance starting in 2014.”

Judge Vinson did not mince words in his summary judgment:

It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be “difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power” [Lopez, supra, 514 U.S. at 564], and we would have a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended.

If the government can force you to buy health insurance, Judge Vinson reasoned, it can also force American taxpayers to decide “whether and when (or not) to buy a house, a car, a television, a dinner or even a morning cup of coffee.” Vinson did not think the Constitution allowed the federal government that type of unbridled power.

I encourage you to read Judge Vinson’s ruling in its entirety, as it is an excellent way to learn more about the U.S. Constitution’s limits on the federal government. You can find a link to the 78-page decision here.

What to do next?

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When the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was launched in 1970, its stated mission was to “conduct environmental research, provide assistance…[in] combating environmental pollution, and assist the Council on Environmental Quality in developing and recommending…new policies for environmental protection…to the President.” From these things, it’s clear that President Richard Nixon’s goal in creating the EPA was to put an agency in place that would fill a research and advisory role for both himself and future presidents. There was no indication that he intended an ideologically driven juggernaut that not only researched but actually took unto itself the power to mandate the most stringent of eco-centered, blatantly anti-capitalist environmental guidelines and regulations imaginable.

In fact, the EPA is so far from its original purposes that in just the past few years officials from that agency have addressed everything from regulating to livestock emissions (cow flatulence) to regulating America’s water supply to putting their own Cap and Trade regulations in place. The latter truly reveals just how much power the EPA has taken unto itself, insofar as members of that agency are trying to put Cap and Trade in place although the American people and the U.S. Senate have already rejected it on face value. (Cap and Trade would be a boon to the already burgeoned EPA in that it would not only allow them to write guidelines and flood manufacturers with new regulations, but it would also put them in the catbird seat as the ones who would enforce and oversee the implementation of the regulations they write.)

Fortunately, Republicans in the new Congress have seen the EPA’s latest power-grab for what it is and have offered two pieces of legislation to curtail the power of that mammoth agency. The bills, one of which was introduced by Senator John Barrasso (R-Wo) and the other by Senator James Inhofe (R-Ok) and Representative Fred Upton (R-Mi), bar the EPA “from using its regulatory authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate industrial emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide.” In doing this, the bills literally roll back the clock by taking away powers the EPA has unilaterally given itself during the last 40 years (like the power to regulate CO2 emissions).

The only disappointing thing about what Barrasso, Inhofe, and Upton are doing is that they don’t go far enough. In other words, it’s not just time to rein in the EPA but to abolish it.

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From the Associated Press:

President Hosni Mubarak will meet the demands of protesters, military and ruling party officials said Thursday in the strongest indication yet that Egypt’s longtime president may be about to give up power and that the armed forces were seizing control.

Gen. Hassan al-Roueini, military commander for the Cairo area, told thousands of protesters in central Tahrir Square, “All your demands will be met today.” Some in the crowd held up their hands in V-for-victory signs, shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” a victory cry used by secular and religious people alike.

The military’s supreme council was meeting Thursday, without the commander in chief Mubarak, and announced on state TV its “support of the legitimate demands of the people.” A spokesman read a statement that the council was in permanent session “to explore “what measures and arrangements could be made to safeguard the nation, its achievements and the ambitions of its great people.”

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Sometimes the greatest threats to an organization (or even a nation) are internal dangers from within, not external threats from enemies.

The internal threat of ever-growing budget deficits and our massive national debt may very well outweigh any nefarious intentions posed by external forces.  This is not just about money; this red ink is lethal in its own way.  Every day, more Americans are more convinced than ever and time for action is now.

How did we get here?  The blame goes in various directions: political and policymaking short-sightedness, public employee and labor union greed, the shenanigans of Wall Street, feckless politicians who are concerned with self-preservation and, finally the millions of Americans who want everything at no cost or sacrifice.

America has placed itself in a precarious position that no foreign enemy could force upon us today.

Do not mistake this pronouncement as not realizing the manifest threat of radical Islam, China’s growing military presence or the paranoid hermit dictatorship of North Korea.  It also does not disregard the national disgrace of our flawed public education system and what that means for our future.

But we are simply not able to confront those challenges unless we get our financial house in order – quickly.

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Governments throughout the world – Egypt, Iran, Syria, China, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, and on and on – block or dramatically control their peoples’ access to the Internet.

We in America have enjoyed a government-free Web.  Which has led to it becoming a free speech, free market Xanadu.

That all changed December 21^st, when the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) executed a completely unauthorized power grab – and voted themselves Internet Overlords.

These three unelected Democrat bureaucrats did this, they say, to “protect” us from the non-existent threat of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) affecting our access to the Internet.

And the enforcer of this “protection” of our unfettered Internet access?  The government – the entity responsible for myriad instances of Web censorship all over the world.

And these three Donkeys did this in truly authoritarian fashion – in a manner unnervingly reminiscent of what we’ve seen from the aforementioned dictatorial regimes.

Now we are told we need an Internet “kill switch” – granting the President the power to shut down or commandeer control of the nation’s ISPs.

Much like the recent moves of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

Does not this cognitive dissonance cause you policy whiplash?

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Few school districts in America rival the dire condition of Detroit Public Schools: staggering dropout rates, functionally-illiterate high school graduates, a dysfunctional school board and a sea of red ink.

Emergency Financial Manager Robert Bobb has been trying to fix the city’s public schools which are historically awful. At times, it seems that he is the only one trying to fix a school system that is failing its students.

The Detroit Federation of Teachers has consistently called for Bobb’s removal. The radical socialist group, By Any Means Necessary, makes every effort to stir up racial division and strife. One of BAMN’s leaders was nearly elected president of the teachers union, which shows how radical the union has become.

Watch ‘An Epic Failure: Detroit Part 1’ and ‘Part 2’ – Episodes 4 and 5 – “Kids Aren’t Cars”

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