It may just be wishful thinking but Politico’s ‘Morning Energy’ today was dropping heavy hints they expected President Obama to use this morning’s presser to defend against any culpability of his policies in ’skyrocketing’ gas prices.

Yeah, any such connection between Obama policies and energy prices is a pretty hard case to make, what with the Obama administration having immediately upon taking office canceled oil and gas leases, placed more areas off limits for domestic exploration and production, changing the Minerals Management Service to an offshore windmill permitting agency since all we need is some offshore windmills (not one but two senior administration officials have said this, including a cabinet secretary), then not letting the Gulf spill ‘go to waste’ by seizing it to strangle our biggest domestic source of oil.

Of course, there is also that long trail of aspirational comments, well beyond vowing to cause electricity prices to ’skyrocket’, indicating this steady gas price hike is their objective, even if overseas developments are causing problems for them [helping the rise advance too quickly such that people pay attention, with these developments adding to the price hikes the admin have built in, with much more obviously undone but hopefully on the way]. As I detailed with many more admissions ten months ago in Power Grab.

Obviously, this is one of the items worrying Team Obama, along with their foreign policy fecklessness. And — in lieu of gimmickry to redirect voters’ gazes from policies that contribute to this, such as by releasing Strategic [NB: not 'Political'] Petroleum Reserve crude — Obama cheerleaders (like Politico) note he could take the opportunity to push his “Clean Energy Standard”.

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Patriots and activists from 23 states are about to gather together on March 25 and 26 in Houston, Texas to attend the True The Vote Summit, an effort to make “true” the electoral system in every polling place in the country, to stop voter fraud, and to quash the intimidation of voters. Organizers hope to make sure that we again have free and fair elections.

A local Harris County activist group named The The King Street Patriots built the True The Vote Summit upon their experiences of attempting to “true” the 2010 election in Harris County, Texas.

Back before the recent election, the KSP got together to try and find out what sort of shape the voting rolls were in Harris County, Texas were. What they found was shocking. Due to its investigation, an ACORN organizer was exposed for having registered over 23,000 fake voters in the county. The story made national news.

With that success under their belts the KSPers and their chief Catherine Engelbrecht decided to step it up a notch. And so, during the 2010 midterm election, the group set out to organize citizen poll watchers to monitor every polling place in Harris County. The goal was to make sure that what went on in each polling place followed the letter of the law, was free of cheating and fraud, and was open and welcoming for every voter.

Naturally the floodgates of hate were opened upon them. Leftist agitators let loose a smear campaign against these patriotic folks calling them haters, racists, and worse. The Black Panthers even came out in force to intimidate both the KSP and the voters they were observing.

The attacks on the True The Vote Summit have also continued unabated by the left today. So we know how the left is worried about this movement. Vote fraud is almost exclusively practiced by Democrats and left-wing activists in this country, so an effort like this threatens their operations.

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Disingenuous filmmaker Michael Moore is using the Wisconsin public labor dispute as a tool to get his bulbous head back in front of the TV cameras.

He held up handcuffs during Rachel Maddow’s nightly left-wing rant on MSNBC.  He wants to use them to arrest very wealthy people – presumably including himself. The last time we checked, he lived in a very big mansion in northern Michigan and has an estimated personal fortune of about $50 million. Has anybody noticed Moore redistributing his own wealth to the poor, working masses?

He’s also called for a student walk-out in Wisconsin High Schools. He’s may be on to something here. The instruction in some of these schools is so bad, students may actually experience less harm by leaving and stay away for awhile.

But I have a great idea for my fellow Michigander. Mike should go on a hunger strike. If he really believes in his liberal causes as much as he says he does, he should be willing to sacrifice something near and dear to his heart, like those midnight triple cheeseburger runs.

Setting aside the obvious personal benefits, think of the headlines!  He could turn into a novelty like John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their “Bed-Ins for Peace,” or magician David Blane, who was suspended in a glass box over the River Thames for 44 days.

Moore could refuse to eat until all the “rights” are restored for government employees and they again have the power to demand free $27,000 health insurance policies from cash-strapped schools, demand full coverage for their Viagra prescriptions, and enjoy job security, regardless of performance, through union-created policies like tenure and “last in, first out.”

That’s the American Way, isn’t it?

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From Politico:

The Republican’s top voice on tech and telecom issues says National Public Radio will suffer a “consequence” on Capitol Hill if “there’s this attitude inside the organization that would appear to be as partisan as what’s come out.”

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Communications and Technology, said Thursday that public broadcasting’s standing in Congress has been badly undermined by a videotape in which NPR’s top fundraiser disparages the Tea Party movement and says the organization would be better off “in the long run” without federal money.

“I think there’s a role for public broadcasting,” Walden said. “The question is how much should taxpayers support it. And if there’s this attitude inside the organization that would appear to be as partisan as what’s come out, there’s going to be a consequence. That’s a reality. It’s political. You’re getting taxpayer money and taxpayers are asking, ‘Are we really funding that?’ It’s hard to defend.”

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This article first appeared at the Huffington Post.

The latest James O’Keefe success story against NPR has taken a predictable pattern — panicked press releases and firings, followed by denunciation of O’Keefe in a belated attempt to discredit him. Naturally, conservatives are crowing about it, but I wanted to give a little perspective to those Huffington Post readers–whatever your political stripe–who share my passion for free speech, honest debate, and fairness in the media.

Over the past year, the mainstream media has collaborated with the White House in an attempt to paint the Tea Party as racist. Remember the protests on Capitol Hill last March against ObamaCare, and the media’s lie that members of the Congressional Black Congress had awful racial slurs hurled at them by Tea Party members that weekend? Did you know that there’s video evidence that it isn’t true?

Not just one video, either. Four of them. Yes. Four. Of. Them. There’s not one shred of objective evidence that corroborates the “Tea Party N-Word” story. But the mainstream media has allowed the lie to live on as one of the central “proofs” of Tea Party racism. It’s been debunked, but it’s raised time and time again by those claiming “reality” as their mantle.

The mainstream media promotes the idea that the Tea Party is racist because they want to delegitimize an authentic, grassroots movement that stands up to big government. And the “Tea Party N-word” story ties all the other lies about the Tea Party together–that it’s violent, that it’s extreme, that it’s a “mob.” If you want to see what a violent, extreme mob looks like, go to Madison to see the crazed throngs the media refuses to scrutinize. (more…)

There’s a significant debate now taking place in Washington – largely behind closed doors, but sometimes covered by the media – on whether fiscal conservatives should maintain a rigid no-tax-increase position. One side of the debate features Grover Norquist of Americans for Tax Reform, which is the organization that maintains the no-tax increase pledge. The other side features Senator Coburn of Oklahoma, who is part of a small group of GOP Senators who might be willing to increase the tax burden as part of a deal that supposedly reduces deficits.

I’m a huge fan of Senator Coburn, who was in favor of cutting wasteful spending before it became fashionable. His office, for instance, releases a “Pork Report” every couple of days. But you shouldn’t read it if you have high blood pressure, because it will confirm (and reconfirm, and reconfirm, ad nauseum) your worst fears about tax dollars getting wasted.

Nonetheless, I’m on Grover’s side on this tax debate for two reasons.

First, we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem or a deficit/debt problem. Red ink is undesirable, to be sure, but it is a symptom of the underlying problem of a government that is too big and spending too much.

But don’t believe me. Here is a chart from the House Budget Committee showing long-run projections for spending and revenues over the next 70 years. As you can see, the long-run fiscal shortfall is completely caused by higher spending. In other words, 100 percent of red ink is due to government spending. So why put taxes on the table?

But this chart actually understates the case against tax increases. It uses revenue numbers from the Congressional Budget Office’s “alternative” forecast, which shows taxes steady at 19.3 percent of GDP. That’s more than the historical average of about 18 percent of GDP, which surely indicates that revenues are not the problem.

However, that 19.3 percent estimate is completely artificial. As CBO states in its long-run forecast, “the alternative fiscal scenario also incorporates unspecified changes in tax law that would keep revenues constant as a share of GDP after 2020.”

I’ll actually be delighted if we can permanently keep federal revenues below 20 percent of GDP, but I’m not overly optimistic because the tax burden is projected to automatically increase over time. And I’m not talking about the expiration of the Bush tax cuts or the alternative minimum tax. Yes, those factors would push up tax revenues (at least based on static revenue estimates), but the tax burden also is expected to climb because even modest economic growth slowly but surely pushes more and more people into higher tax brackets.

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From the Associated Press:

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker has officially taken away nearly all collective bargaining rights from the vast majority of the state’s public employees.

Walker signed the bill to do so privately Friday morning. He planned an afternoon news conference in the Capitol.

The explosive measure passed the Assembly on Thursday following more than three weeks of protests that drew tens of thousands of people to the Capitol in opposition. The Senate cleared the way for passage with a surprise move Wednesday that allowed them to vote on the bill without 14 Democratic senators present.
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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca and Wisconsin Assemblywoman Michelle Litjens to discuss the union protests in Wisconsin and the passage of Governor Walker’s legislation.

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:

Governor Walker: Why I’m Fighting in Wisconsin
Assembly passes union measure after bitter debate
Why do these people, many of whom are professionals, feel no fear in expressing such death wishes in the open?
Capitol Chaos: Legislative Leaders Call Capitol “Unsafe”
Michelle Litjens
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In 2006, the last full year in which the U.S. federal minimum wage was a constant value throughout the whole year, at least before 2010, approximately 6,595,383 individuals in the United States earned $7.25 per hour or less.

For 2010, the first full year in which the U.S. federal minimum wage was a constant value through the year since 2006, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that an average of just 4,361,000 individuals in the United States earned the same equivalent of the current prevailing federal minimum wage of $7.25 or less throughout the year.

In terms of jobs lost, that means that 2,234,383 of the jobs lost in the U.S. economy since 2006 have been jobs that were directly impacted by the series of minimum wage increases that were mandated by the federal government in 2007, 2008 and 2009.

Interestingly, the average number of employed members of the civilian labor force in 2006 was 144,427,000. In 2010, the average number of employed members of the civilian labor force in the U.S. was 5,363,000 less, standing at 139,064,000.

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In North Carolina, collective bargaining in the public sector has been banned by the state for over 50 years.  A statute implemented in 1959 declared collective bargaining by state and local government employees “to be against the public policy of the State, illegal, unlawful, void and of no effect.”

To unionists, it seemed like a drastic and unfair law, but for years it has protected the individual’s right to choose whether or not to join a union and the right to work without being forced to pay union dues as a condition of employment.  In addition, it has protected the interests of the taxpayers of the state of North Carolina.

But a 2007 decision issued by a United Nations agency against the North Carolina law is back in the spotlight today, as labor unions are gearing up to use the argument in a mass campaign to repeal all currently existing Right to Work laws in response to Wisconsin’s collective bargaining outcome.

In an Emergency Labor Meeting that occurred last week in Cleveland, Ohio, nearly 100 labor leaders and activists met to construct an emergency action plan and strategy for the future to deal with what they say is an “assault on the unions.”  The meeting produced plans to hold a National Day of Action on March 12^th and again on April 4^th, as well as a “Perspectives” document that will serve as a framework for 15 key objectives.

Within the framework document are two specific objectives that are of special concern to supporters of the worker freedom movement and Right to Work laws. Labor unions and solidarity federations in the US and across the globe intend to use the UN-based International Labor Organization (ILO) decision to put pressure on US government officials and the public to repeal the Right to Work laws that exist in 22 states.

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Teacher tenure is considered holy gospel in most of America’s public schools.

But this policy does nothing for children, and tends to protect teachers who don’t necessarily deserve job security.  Why is it we never hear stories about tenure protecting “good” teachers instead of helping “bad” ones?

One bad teacher was former band instructor-turned convict Matt Lang, who is now sitting in an Illinois state penitentiary.  Lang was convicted of having sex with a 16-year-old student from Alton (Illinois) High School. But the mother of his victim is suing the nearby O’Fallon school district, where Lang previously worked, claiming administrators and union officials conspired to hide his previous relationship with an underage student.

And there was such a relationship. Lang ended up marrying a former student from O’Fallon High School, and it’s a legally accepted fact that he had sex with her while she was a student.

O’Fallon administrators and union officials deny knowledge of that sexual relationship. But for one reason or another, they conspired to hide the reasons for Lang’s forced resignation. The lawsuit claims their conspiracy allowed Alton school officials to unwittingly hire Lang.

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On March 23, 2011, the National Education Association (NEA), the nation’s largest teachers’ union, will partner with Rock the Vote, a self-professed “nonpartisan” organization, for the first annual Democracy Day. This event is advertised as a celebration of the 40th anniversary of passage of the 26th Amendment, which gave 18 year-olds the right to vote. The NEA claims that this amendment was passed because of a joint effort by teachers and students, and so will mark this occasion by providing high school teachers with a lesson plan and a free video that will hope to “empower students to navigate the election system, register to vote, and use their rights in our democracy.”

The fact that the liberal teachers’ union organization, which has access to millions of American adolescents, will hope to bolster Democratic voter turnout for the 2012 presidential election by couching their political agenda in a “civics lesson” is, at the very least, unethical, and consistent with the incestuous nature of public sector unions. The fact that it is partnering with Rock the Vote, which produced a video, in support of President Obama’s Healthcare bill, that urged young people to abstain from sex (aka, the “f” word) with anyone who did not support Obamacare, makes their pitch laughable. Yes, NEA is even touting that this Democracy Day lesson will meet the national educational standards.

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For weeks the discussion among talking heads and columnists has been  about a “looming” government shutdown. Then, last week, our elected officials gave us, through yet another Continuing Resolution (CR), another two weeks to debate a budget for the year that is already half gone. Is it any wonder that Congress is held in such low esteem?  Both parties correctly claim that a shutdown was never the objective and, in truth, it was not.  A shutdown is simply the necessary consequence of a failure by Congress to authorize an appropriation of federal expenditures.  In and of itself, a shutdown doesn’t save money . . . it simply postpones spending until the Congress finally agrees to a compromise plan and the President signs it into law.

The current spending stalemate is, in reality, the most important domestic congressional legislative battle in at least a half century because the different governing philosophies of the two major parties, as crystallized by the results of the 2010 Congressional elections, have come into sharp relief.  After the Democratic sweep in 2008 and their control of both houses of Congress and the presidency, the new majority embarked on the most major federal spending binge in U.S. history and increased our annual budget deficit to $1.3 trillion and the accumulated national debt to $14 trillion with no discernable benefit to the nation.  The Obama promise that the unemployment rate would fall was vastly wrong. As everyone now understands, it actually increased.

During 2010, the electorate’s focus shifted to the risks to this nation of continuing to incur unsustainable debt at the federal and local levels, (witness the threat of national bankruptcies throughout the Euro zone), the increased threat of inflation, and the consequences of the loss of international confidence in the U.S. dollar and U.S. debt obligations. Currently, a dollar will buy 1/1400^thof one ounce of gold which means that gold (as good a measure as we have of how investors value our currency) has increased 60% in dollar terms since Mr. Obama took office.  For the first time in a long time politicians focused the public’s attention on the need for austerity and a smaller and less intrusive role for government in our lives.  The rise of a faction of fiscal conservatives loosely affiliated in what is called the Tea Party (albeit not really a party) provided much of the energy for a seismic congressional shift in November, providing the Republicans with a large majority in the House of Representatives.  These freshman congressmen, of course, know they are serving on borrowed time, and that if they don’t deliver real progress on their promises to balance expenditures with income along with far less debt, their constituents will recall them faster than one can say “you’re outta here.”

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Things aren’t looking good for NPR. And, we say that as big fans of NPR.

The fallout from independent journalist James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas investigation has been fast and furious. NPR is obviously in major damage control mode and throwing liabilities that look an awful lot like high-powered executives overboard just as fast as they appear on video and audio. All good and proper, but there’s this small detail that like a pebble in one’s shoe is increasingly impossible to ignore. Twice now NPR has made the declarative statement that they rejected the phony $5 million dollar donation offered by an organization posing as a Muslim Brotherhood front group. But twice now seemingly contradictory information has also been released by NPR puts those statements into question.

The first statement was release the same day the first investigative video was released, Tuesday, March 8th:

The fraudulent organization represented in this video repeatedly pressed us to accept a $5 million check, with no strings attached, which we repeatedly refused to accept.

Repeatedly refused. Strong words.

However, a second statement released later that same day appeared to contradict the first:

NPR’s David Folkenflik reports that there were clear signs that the Muslim Education Action Center Trust was not a long-standing organization …

CEO Vivian Schiller tells David that NPR became aware of those peculiarities, and that NPR was vetting the organization. And he has obtained e-mails (not from an official NPR source, but which have been verified by NPR) showing that the network last week asked the fictitious Ibrahim Kasaam for, among other things, verification that the Muslim Education Action Center was qualified as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. It was not, of course.

These seemingly dueling positions were enough of a red flag to prompt my colleague Larry O’Connor to raise the question of how these statements might be reconciled. And today, it looks as though this same scenario’s repeated itself.

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Cross-Posted: TobyToons (Conservative Political Cartoons)

From Josiah Cantrall, BG’s man-on-the-scene in Madison:

Capitol is in an uproar! A man sported a sign, “burn Walker”. Complete with a drawing of Gov. Walker withering in flames of fire.

Protesters recognized me from my Fox News appearances. One lady refused to leave me alone and began yelling my name and position to anyone who’d listen.

She approached a burly union man and continued with her, “Josiah” rant. He then followed me around for over ten minutes. I went up three floors, turned corners, visited every wing of the building and yet, he remained on my trail. He was at least two inches taller and 100 lbs heavier than me.

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Project Veritas:

On Tuesday, Project Veritas released Part 1 of its investigation of National Public Radio. The investigation, in which Project Veritas investigators posed as members of a fictional group founded by “members of the Muslim Brotherhood,” was widely reported in the media and produced a dramatic response from NPR and its board members.

The following video contains conversations between Project Veritas undercover investigator, Simon Templar, and Betsy Liley, NPR’s Senior Director of Institutional Giving.