After years of obstructing efforts to reform public education, the nation’s teacher unions are using this week’s national education conference in Denver to push for a spirit of “collaboration” among education reformers and teacher unions.

It’s too bad that the unions’ new-found interest in “working together” has not been reflected in very recent teacher union behavior.

In a recent radio interview, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten said, “Let’s solve problems for kids rather than making them pawns in an economic austerity budget.”

In a recent press release, Weingarten said, “When collaboration trumps conflict, it helps create the conditions for teachers to teach and students to learn.”

Such happy talk makes for a good press release, but it does not match reality. Across the nation, teachers unions are attacking reformers and have not resisted the temptation of using children as political pawns.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Benjamin Zycher to discuss Obamacare, the FDA and the importance of competition in health care, then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about Mitch Daniels and CPAC.

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.

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Fire the FDA Now
The Role of Public-Sector Research in the Discovery of Drugs and Vaccines
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Is He Reagan? Or Is He Gorbachev?
Mitch Daniels at CPAC
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As School districts across the nation face what administrators are claiming is a lack of funding, Texas Conservatives counter such claims in their own state by citing examples of irresponsible appropriations and misuse of funds on top of gargantuan administrator salaries.

As scores of teachers are either being laid off or forced to dig deeper into their own pockets for classroom supplies, some Texas school administrators and left of center political interests have been quick to direct blame at Texas Governor Rick Perry for his defending of the state’s educational sovereignty. By refusing federal dollars, Governor Perry also rebuffed the attached efforts of the Obama administration to further regulate the education and curriculum of Texas students.

In an indicting editorial posted today on Texas-based texasgovote.com, a young Army National Guardsman named David Bellow took his local school board administration to task for the blatant mishandling of tax-payer funds. Bellow went further to shine light on another Texas school district’s blatant wasting of monies. He pointed out that Texas’ Beaumont ISD serves a city of approximately 100,000 individuals, yet the superintendent receives an annual $360,000 salary. He also pointed out that this gargantuan salary is amongst the highest of any public-sector official in the state and well over two times what the Texas Governor earns overseeing the entire state.

When trying to understand how such disrespect for tax-payers and their dollars could exist, it’s important to note that both of the school districts referenced by Bellow reside in long-time, good ol’ boy, Democrat-controlled counties where liberal fiscal irresponsibility abound and are the norm. Though many in the referenced counties vote conservative in national elections, they have historically voted for Democrats in local races. This has allowed a network of cronies and what would now be called “Chicago-style” politics to thrive without accountability. And much like their national party, local Democrats spend irresponsibly and make every effort to frame the problem as not having had enough tax-payer money in the first place. This dynamic is not unique to Texas and the feasible solution is not unique to the state either. (more…)

When Batton Lash and I decided to take on the Obama Administration with our strip 16 months ago, few people were willing to mock the president. Yet we both saw that this president was at times foolish, mendacious, clueless and vain. Perfect fodder for a political cartoon.

Batton and I are not so much conservatives as libertarians. We’re believers in small government because, as I outline in my political thesis, it’s the only workable form. President Obama is very much a big government fan. He has tripled the debt and deficits in his first year in office. His new budget would add another three trillion. These are things we don’t like about him. We also don’t like the lies. Which seem to be second nature to the man.

So last Sunday we turned in what we thought was a very mild cartoon mocking the first lady’s over reach of her powers. And I decided to show her eating hamburgers like Wimpy from the old Popeye cartoons to mock the fact that she tends to scold other people’s eating habits, yet every time we read about what they’re eating at the White House, it’s extreme. And to throw in a gag we used before, the President is shown eating hardly anything.

The cartoon did not get a lot of comments at first. I figured it was rather mild. I would try to be funnier next time. Little did I expect the firestorm that followed a few days later.

The propaganda wing of the Democrat party known as Media Matters for America, who is out to destroy all critics of this administration, ran an article saying the cartoon attacked the first lady’s weight and gave out our emails, encouraging people to send us hate mail. Like pigs to the trough the mainstream press jumped on the story. Yesterday morning I got up and saw it mentioned on several websites like Salon. The NY Daily News wanted to interview us. And it was on the local TV news. We started getting inundated with hate mail. But the worst was yet to come.

The Daily News article came out and basically said we were mocking her weight, which wasn’t true at all. We posted our full response on the Big Sites and my blog. Most of the emails and comments we received during the day were about us allegedly mocking her weight. And I had to set people straight over and over again. Some of them accused us of racism. Which is just the left’s way of telling you to shut up. One e-mailer suggested our cartoon was going to inspire teen suicides because we were supposedly mocking body issues.

But then they died down. As evening came, I got a message that MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was taking us to task, calling us mentally disturbed racists. He showed our pictures. He gave out where we lived. Told people to go after us. Even mentioned Batton’s wife who had nothing to do with the cartoon.

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Yesterday, Eyeblast wrote a post on Nir Rosen, a fellow at NYU’s Center for Law and Security, and his outlandish comments he made of the sexual assault of CBS correspondent Lara Logan- which was posted on here. Jim Geraghty from National Review and Steve Nelson at the Daily Caller did the same.

Rosen’s comments were most likely directed at Lara Logan in retaliation to her defending General Stanley McChrystal last year after a controversial Rolling Stone interview. After looking into what he has done in the past and given his past statements, it is actually not surprising that he would make such horrendous comments. He has appeared on many TV shows essentially defending Al Qaeda against the United States.

Here is Rosen appearing on Russia Today saying that Al Qaeda’s threat to the U.S. is a lie.

Oh, and this little tidbit as well: (h/t diggrbiii)

Good for Dave Dilegge for speaking out in Small Wars Journal about the October issue of Rolling Stone magazine, wherein Nir Rosen, an American reporter, described his visit with Taliban forces in Afghanistan. Rosen left no doubt about his active cooperation with the Taliban fighters. “They have promised to take me to see the Taliban in action: going out on patrols, conducting attacks,” he wrote, “…. once we are on the road we should take the batteries out of our phones, to prevent anyone from tracking us.”

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Pigford documentarian Lee Stranahan had an exclusive interview with congressman Steve King at his Capitol Hill office Tuesday where King explains an area where he and Shirley Sherrod agree — that the Obama White House was responsible for Sherrod’s resignation and that USDA secretary acted as the fall guy.

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Fiscal policy wonks (like me, I’m forced to admit) sometimes miss the forest because we focus too much on individual trees.

So while I think my posts on the spending and revenue sides of Obama’s new budget contained lots of useful information, I didn’t pay any attention to the elephant in the room (I’m really going overboard with metaphors, huh?).

The most important number in Obama’s budget is that he is proposing $5.7 trillion of spending in 2021, about $2 trillion more than is being spent this year, according to table S-1 of the budget.

Here’s everything you need to know about Obama’s budget, in one chart.

It’s important to make three additional observations. First, Obama’s budget is based on all sorts of optimistic assumptions and rosy scenarios, as explained by Brian Riedl of the Heritage Foundation. When CBO produces a re-estimate of the President’s budget, it almost certainly will show hundreds of billions of dollars of additional spending.

Second, the slope of the line if the graph is very revealing. The first two years look very impressive, with almost no change in spending, but the goal of fiscal policy, to borrow a phrase from the health care debate, should be “bending the cost curve” of government. Short-run gimmicks, to put it mildly, don’t have any long-run impact. That’s why the most important number in Obama’s budget is the $5.7 trillion burden of spending in 2021. That’s a mark of fiscal failure, and it exists because Obama’s budget increases spending at twice the rate of inflation between 2013 and 2021.

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Freshman lawmakers have served less than two months in Congress, and they’ve already had a sizable impact. Now, as the House considers a $100 billion spending cut, they’re leading the charge to rein in out-of-control government spending.

Last week during an internal GOP debate about the size of the cuts, freshmen rose up to push their party in the right direction. That shouldn’t come as a surprise. As the newest members of Congress, they are the farthest removed from Washington’s ways of doing business.

The result: Republican leaders added $26 billion more in spending cuts and promised to support additional cuts during the floor debate.

Some of the outspoken freshmen included Reps. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.) and Allen West (R-Fla.), who made it clear that cutting spending is their top priority.

“The Beltway braintrust seems to think it’s OK to spend beyond your means and just keep doing it and kicking the can down the road,” said Kelly, the oldest member of the GOP’s freshman class. “I was home this weekend in Erie and I was also down in Butler, and as you go up and down the district, everybody there understands you can’t spend more than you make without causing harm to the future.”

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As the nation’s debt reaches 102% of the GDP and the President pushes a $3.73 trillion budget with more government spending than America can afford, there are innumerable ways in which the politicians should be slashing spending, but aren’t. One agency that could use a budget-cutting knife to the heart is the union-controlled National Labor Relations Board.

While the allegedly-independent agency is ostensibly designed to protect employee rights, over the past few years, the NLRB itself has been contaminated with so much rancor and partisanship that its very mission of protecting workers from both employers and (especially now) unions, has been demonstrably nullified. Moreover, given that the purpose of the NLRB is to 1) conduct elections, and 2) prevent and remedy unfair labor practices by both employers and unions, the current caseload (as well as its lack of ideological neutrality) calls for the agency’s budget to be cut back to levels prior to pre-Bush budget levels, at a minimum.

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Last year I voted to extend the PATRIOT Act for one year. I regret that vote and was glad to have been able to correct it, although I am pained that the House voted otherwise yesterday.

During this past year, I have become convinced that the provisions of the so-called PATRIOT Act are an affront to the Bill of Rights and a serious threat to our fundamental liberty as Americans.

The Fourth Amendment arises from abuses of the British Crown that allowed roving searches by revenue agents under the guise of what were called “writs of assistance” or “general warrants.” Instead of following specific allegations against specific individuals, the Crown’s revenue agents were given free rein to search indiscriminately.

In 1761, the famous colonial leader, James Otis, challenged these writs, arguing that “A man’s house is his castle; and whilst he is quiet, he is as well guarded as a prince in his castle. This writ, if it should be declared legal, would totally annihilate this privilege.” Two hundred and fifty years later, the PATRIOT Act restores these roving searches.

In the audience that day in 1761 was a 25-year-old lawyer named John Adams. He would later recall, “Every man of an immense crowded audience appeared to me to go away as I did, ready to take arms against writs of assistance. Then and there was the first scene of the first act of opposition to the arbitrary claims of Great Britain. Then and there, the child, ‘Independence’ was born.”

The American Founders responded with the Fourth Amendment. It provides that before the government can invade a person’s privacy, the executive branch must present sworn testimony to an independent judiciary that a crime has occurred, that there is reason to believe that an individual should be searched for evidence of the crime and specify the place to be searched and the things to be seized. The John Doe roving wiretaps provided under the bill are a clear breach of this crystal clear provision.

The entire point of having an open and independent judiciary is so that abuses of power can be quickly identified by the public and corrected. The very structure of this law prevents that from occurring.

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Today, six years ago, the Kyoto Protocols, intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, came into force. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that no country has followed its commitment. That’s good, but also a cautionary tale about the validity of international agreements built on unicorns and pixie dust.

This afternoon, atrocious news surfaced that CBS correspondent Lara Logan had been subjected to “brutal and sustained sexual assault” while covering the celebrations in Egypt.

According to a full statement released by CBS:

On Friday February 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS Correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a 60 MINUTES story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into a frenzy.

In the crush of the mob, she was separated from her crew. She was surrounded and suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers. She reconnected with the CBS team, returned to her hotel and returned to the United States on the first flight the next morning. She is currently in the hospital recovering.

There will be no further comment from CBS News and Correspondent Logan and her family respectfully request privacy at this time.

When the news initially broke, I was on Twitter as people began talking about it. Almost everyone was shocked, appalled, and deeply sympathetic for Logan, except for one man.

That man was Nir Rosen. Rosen is a fellow at the NYU Center for Law and Security. When he realized what he said was outrageous and others began informing him of that, he deleted his worst comments. However, some were captured using a “screen grab.”

The ones grabbed show Rosen letting everyone know that he “ran out of sympathy” for her and that everyone should “remember her role as a major war monger”. Also stating, we have to “find the humor in small things”. Rosen also deleted his bio as people began to tweet him. (click pictures to enlarge.)

These are not the kinds of things anyone should say, let alone a fellow at the NYU Center for Law and Security. If you would like to contact NYU about the matter, click this link for the contact information.

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President Obama’s budget hit Capitol Hill with all the enthusiasm a close talker with bad breath receives when getting on an elevator.  Republicans rushed to news cameras with vigor usually only seen from Senator Chuck Schumer to rightly denounce it and Democrats released written statements with tepid “good starting point” type phrases in it. While Republicans have offered varying degrees of good ideas for places to cut the budget, few have dared to touch the Defense Department. This is a fool’s game. National defense is the first priority of the federal government, or should be, but to assume there aren’t cuts and savings that could be found in a department with a nearly $700 billion budget is as crazy as it is dishonest.

Medicare and Social Security should, no, HAVE to be on the table. Reforming those and getting their long-term costs under control are as important to our nation’s future as is winning the War on Terror is. If our elected officials continue to refuse to address the coming crush of these programs Al Qaeda doesn’t have to fire another shot or do anything but wait us out in caves until we collapse under their unsustainable weight to win. Unfortunately “progressives” have, for years, refused to even acknowledge they are facing any problems, let alone that they’re potentially a cancer that can bring this country down.

Every attempt to reform these entitlements in the past has been met with indignation, denial and demonization, and they were successful in blocking them. But times have changed, the old playbook is as useful as the Statue of Liberty play in football – it might work every once in a while, but it’s no longer something for which people are unprepared.  The mood in the country is different. All the old talk of the sky falling if these sacred cows are touched has been drowned out by the fact that these sacred cows are going to crush us long before the sky gets its chance. If we don’t address the crisis with these programs it will be like getting hit by a train and blaming the conductor. We were on the tracks, we saw the light and we knew it wasn’t going to swerve. Not getting off the tracks is our fault, not the train’s.

Republicans know this and will use it to their advantage when it comes time to make the tough choices they were elected to make.  Hopefully…

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Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Rep. Steve King (R-IA), and farmer Eddie Slaughter at the press conference in Washington, DC presenting newly discovered evidence showing fraud and corruption in the Pigford settlement:

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From David Weigel’s report for Slate:

On Saturday, [Shirley] Sherrod finally sued Breitbart. I talked to Breitbart about the suit today. “The National Black Farmers Association is holding a press conference tomorrow,” he argued, citing an event that the organization is holding at the National Press Club. “They’re trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.”

According to Breitbart, the lawsuit is a massive and expected distraction.

“Those including Ms. Sherrod, who continue to uphold the grotesque premise that the Pigford settlement helped the black farmers, are fully aware that the Pigford house of cards is falling around them,” said Breitbart. “The NBFA is having a press conference three days after I was served. The timing is not a coincidence. Their press statement said that there’s an emerging crisis. We are the emerging crisis. Lee Stranahan is the emerging crisis. Internal investigations by the federal government are the emerging crisis. This lawsuit is a last-ditch attempt to shock me into silence, and it won’t work.” (more…)

How far will unions go to enusre that citizens of California never enter a Wal-Mart? Citizens there are about to find out.

When unions in San Diego failed to convince the San Diego City Council and San Diego residents that a ban on big box retail was necessary to “protect” that municipality from the horrors of low-priced consumer goods and hundred of jobs, union leaders decided to take their crusade statewide in an effort to ban Wal-Mart completely from the West Coast.

Less than 24 hours after the San Diego City Council rescinded a law requiring costly economic impact reports from developers of big-box superstores, a South Bay lawmaker says he wants some restrictions in a bill he plans to introduce at the state level.

Sen. Juan Vargas, D-San Diego, said his bill, like the local measure, will target proposed stores 90,000 square feet and larger that dedicate 10 percent of floor space to groceries.

Vargas couches his opposition in the traditional rhetoric that banning Wal-Mart is a boon to the surrounding community, preventing harm to a local economy and small businesses. It’s clear from surrounding evidence, though, that the effort to ban Wal-Mart from San Diego, and subsequently the the state of California, is a smokescreen for isolationist – and arrogant – union policies meant to preserve and protect union jobs at all costs to the communities they claim to serve.

In the case of San Diego, the ban on big box retail was against the wishes of the community itself, and against the recommendations of the City Attorney, the city’s planning commission, San Diego’s Developmental Services Department, the code monitoring team and an independent budget analyst who warned the “overly restrictive” ban would lead to dramatic economic consequences. The city council originally adopted the ordinance only to have the mayor veto the measure. Faced with the death of the bill, union leaders waged an eleventh-hour effort with the city council to over-ride the mayor’s veto just before new city council members – who supported the mayor – were sworn in.

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It’s official.  The New York Stock Exchange has been sold to, in one CNBC anchor’s words, ‘a bunch of foreigners’.    The iconic trading floor of the NYSE was tense this morning as CNBC’s Mark Haines’ grilled CEO Duncan Niederauer on the just announced merger of Deutsche Börse and the NYSE, a deal resulting in the creation of the world’s largest share- and derivatives-trading platform.

According to the Wall Street Journal,

Under the terms of the deal, Deutsche Börse shareholders will own 60% of the newly merged company, with NYSE shareholders controlling 40%. Each Deutsche Börse share will be exchanged for one share of the new company’s stock, while each share of NYSE Euronext will be swapped for 0.47 share of the new company stock.

The announcement was not a surprise, as talks surrounding a possible merger have been floating around for years, further indicating global consolidation of the exchange industry.  Those in support of the deal have recognized the NYSE’s strategy to increase its scale of trading by merging with the Frankfurt based exchange.  In today’s global environment, Niederauer argues:

‘It isn’t a sale, we’re trading from strength…It gives us opportunities to create our own destiny going forward… If you think about it, what I’ve said for two years is exchanges should be competing across the value chain.’

Let’s be clear– this is a German acquisition of a US company.  The Board of Directors is split up 60/40 with respect to ownership, which equates to 10/7 seats respectively.    That puts Deutsche Börse shareholders at a majority. Something of interest: Niederauer overtly ignores Haines’ inquiry on who initiated dialogue.

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Our latest Obama Nation cartoon has caused quite a stir. It’s gained national attention. Naturally, the shills for the Obama Administration at Media Matters decided to draw national attention to it because, why deal with real issues like the President’s nation destroying budget?

The media was asking for our response to calls that the cartoon is racist. So here they are:

James Hudnall:

As a classical liberal (aka Libertarian) I’m opposed to the nanny state. The first lady has every right to express her opinions about obesity or try to bring awareness to the issue, but when an unelected official starts dictating what industries should do, it deserves our scorn. She’s decided to tell schools what foods and drinks they can sell to kids. And now she started telling the National Restaurant Association (NRA) what they should be doing regarding portion sizes and options. When you combine her actions with recent attempts by other politicians like NYC mayor Bloomberg to legislate salt and transfats, it’s starting to come off like creeping fascism.

The government has no business intruding on citizens personal lives beyond enforcing reasonable laws. But control freaks never tire of interfering with other people’s choices and options.

There is nothing racist about the cartoon. The artist (Batton Lash) merely drew the first couple in caricature, which is what political cartoonists do. All we’ve done was to take a mild poke at the hypocrisy of the first lady. The press has already detailed the kind of foods served at white house dinners. It’s rarely diet friendly. Such as the menu at their super bowl party.

When someone steps out on to the political stage, they have to expect criticism from people who disagree with them. It doesn’t matter what their race is. Race doesn’t give them a free pass. Our criticism was very mild. The reaction the cartoon has gotten, which has been fueled by political agitators like Media Matters, has been over the top. The true measure of success of any political cartoon is how it effects the other side in the argument. Apparently, this one was a home run.

Batton Lash:

Why/How did you decide to create this?

Writer James Hudnall and I collaborate on a political cartoon every week for Big Government.com. We find the “do as I say, not as I do” approach of the Obamas hypocritical and ripe for ridicule. The First Lady seeks to enforce healthy eating on the nation, while indulging on snacks in public appearances. And that White House Super Bowl party menu! If good leaders lead by example, the Obamas are sending mixed messages.

What would you say to critics that are offended about the depiction of the President and those who argue the cartoon is racist?

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Have you ever seen a school administrator add up the last four digits of a teacher’s social security number to determine whether or not that teacher will remain on the staff?  How about teachers flipping a coin to see who will have a job next school year, and who will be standing in the unemployment line?

When faced with downsizing a teaching staff, normal Americans would try to keep the best possible teachers in the classrooms, for the children’s sake.

But that is not how teacher unions, and therefore public schools, think, and unions’ distorted priorities are the only ones that matter.

Watch ‘Years Trump Effectiveness: Tenure and Seniority’ – Episode 6 – “Kids Aren’t Cars”

Many school districts across the country are facing shrinking school budgets, forcing them to lay off teachers.  But districts that are infested by the teacher unions cannot get rid of the least effective teachers on staff.  No way.  That would violate the time-honored union principle of seeing teachers as interchangeable cogs in a machine.

Unions do not allow teachers to be viewed as individuals, but rather as part of a group. When layoffs occur, the teachers with the most seniority keep their jobs.

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