Derek Hunter gives a thoughtful, thorough review of Righteous Indignation at The Daily Caller:

You won’t find too many people who are indifferent toward Andrew Breitbart. But love him or hate him, you can’t ignore him. With his ever-growing collection of “Big” websites (Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Journalism and Big Peace so far), Andrew has redefined how the political right views and uses the Internet. He makes no apologies for his “in your face” style, nor should he. That style has won him many victories and many enemies. He seems to occupy the time of a disproportionate number of left-wingers, including many employees of the ultra-left-wing censorship factory called Media Matters. Those “senior fellows” are about to have their weekends ruined as Breitbart moves from the virtual world to the book world with Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World (2011 Grand Central Publishing) this Friday, April 15th.

If you know Andrew, or have ever cornered him for a few minutes of conversation, you know his brain is like a shotgun — going a thousand miles an hour in every conceivable direction at once. He attributes this to ADHD, but constantly being pulled in 50 directions at once by everyone in the room doesn’t help either. But in Righteous, Breitbart is more focused than he’s ever been. He has a tale to tell — three, actually. (more…)

Today, in 1912, HMS Titanic sunk in the North Atlantic. Considering Obama’s budget ‘framework’ speech was just two days ago, yeah, there’s a metaphor there.

Whether you agree with Ayn Rand’s philosophy or not, her novel Atlas Shrugged has touched the lives of millions and influenced many of today’s center-right thinkers. The Wall Street Journal noted this morning:

Book sales for “Atlas” have always been brisk—and all the more so in the past few years, as actual events have mirrored Rand’s nightmare vision of economic collapse amid massive government expansion.

Rand’s belief in the primacy of the individual over the collective has garnered her vilification from some on the Right and many, especially, on the Left.

Yet, there is no denying that Atlas Shrugged’s portrayal on the devolution of society at the hands of the Left was prescient as it was one of the most cogent attacks on the excesses of liberalism. Today, it seems as though the lines of fiction and reality have blurred in our nation.

Tomorrow, the film Atlas Shrugged, Part One opens nationwide, which is a faithful adaptation of Part One of her 1957 novel.

Today, we offer you, Atlas is Shrugging, a new short film by Ben Howe.

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The “Internal Revenue Service” is such a bland name for an agency that stirs so much passion.

With Tax Day just around the corner, the time is right to figure out what the initials “IRS” really stand for.

WARNING: Immature Subject Matter. Viewer discretion is advised.

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Individual earmarks may have swum upstream for the winter, but there’s still something very fishy going on with Congress in terms of spending. Despite all the discussion about austerity and countless campaign promises to cut spending, the crafters of the Continuing Resolution let stand a rulemaking policy no one can be proud of: a special interest-driven program that will create over 100 new government employees, more red tape, and hundreds of millions of new federal spending, without any benefit to taxpayers…all for – you guessed it – a fish.

You may have thought that Ted Stevens’ giant salmon of a private plane was the most spectacular fish-related waste of taxpayer dollars in history, but you’d be wrong. It turns out that the government’s handling of real fish -specifically, catfish – dwarfs that million-dollar monstrosity.

A special interest provision tacked onto the 2008 Farm Bill mandated that the USDA inspect all imported catfish.  Proponents, who unsurprisingly included those with a stake in the American catfish industry, cited safety concerns as the reason behind the program, patriotically claiming that protecting Americans from bad foreign catfish was as important, if notmore important than protecting them from foreign terror groups.

Unfortunately, their argument for a sort of “catfish TSA” doesn’t hold water. As it turns out, all catfish are already inspected by the FDA, so this second inspection would be superfluous at best and at worst, a complete waste of taxpayer funds. Second, catfish are actually low on the threat-level scale, labeled a “low-risk” food by both the CDC and – get this – the USDA itself.

You read that right.

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The militant “community organizers” who run the California Teachers Association union have been forced to pull back on some elements of their controversial plan for a Wisconsin-type takeover of the state capitol after it was exposed here on BigGovernment.com.

The Sacramento Bee reports that once the news media and the public got to see just how extreme the union’s plans are, leadership decided to pull back on some of the more “creative” (read: kooky) elements of the plan set to be implemented the week of May 9 – 13.

“Some of the union’s ideas went beyond the usual letter-writing and rallying,” the Bee reported this morning, but, “By Wednesday, the more creative ideas on the list had been removed.”

The union’s plans to provoke a major confrontation in the state capitol to force the legislature to raise taxes were exposed in this 10-page plan, which contains instructions for using public school facilities and children to which the union has direct access in the campaign culminating in a takeover of the capitol in Sacramento.

While union officials have not backed down on their plans to take over the building and yank thousands of teachers out of classrooms and put them into protests, they are awkwardly running away from plans to use the kids.

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The state of our national government is in shambles. We are so far removed from the traditional political divide. To explain what is going on in Washington would require use of a metaphor such as The Mariana Trench to explain it. The Democrats might as well be speaking Mandarin and the Republicans, Latin. The American people as a consequence are, of course, def, blind, and dumb. Our politics has really devolved into the ‘us-them’ model and the only real losers are the American people.

The Republicans, led by House Speaker Boehner, promised a principled stand against spending. Their target at first was $100 billion, than $60 billion before settling for roughly $36 billion. While that was disappointing to many, it did show life on the side of the Republicans. It turns out now that all of it was a lie. A numbers game with no real impact on the budget or the deficit: CBO Says Budget Deal Will Cut Spending by Only $352 Million. Remember this was touted as an “historic” budget deal.

Here’s how the great game was played.

All the cuts in the deal aren’t equal. The ones that matter most are the cuts in discretionary spending that reduce the budget baseline in future years. Even with more the details of the deal released early yesterday morning, the exact numbers are still shrouded in confusion, but it is clear the cuts are much less than meets the eye — the gimmickry is not merely around the edges.

The $38.5 billion includes real cuts, but also a dog’s breakfast of budgetary legerdemain. According to the Associated Press, the deal purports to save $2.5 billion “from the most recent renewal of highway programs that can’t be spent because of restrictions set by other legislation.” It gets another $4.9 billion by capping a reserve fund for the victims of crime that also wasn’t going to be spent this year — a long-standing trick of appropriators. The Washington Post reports that a notional $3.5 billion cut from the Children’s Health Insurance Program “would affect only rewards for states that make an extra effort to enroll children. But officials with knowledge of the budget deal said that most states were unlikely to qualify for the bonuses and that sufficient money would be available for those that did.” And so on. There’s realism and then there’s cynicism. This deal — oversold and dependent on classic Washington budget trickery — comes too close to the latter. John Boehner has repeatedly said he’s going to reject “business as usual,” but that’s what he’s offered his caucus. It’s one thing for Tea Party Republicans to vote for a cut that falls short of what they’d get if the controlled all of Washington; it’s another thing for them, after making so much of bringing transparency and honesty to the Beltway, to vote for a deal sold partly on false pretenses. (National Review)

Then you have the most partisan and socially dividing president in American history adding fuel to the fire.

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Loaded with misleading statements, demagoguery, political rhetoric and outright lies, Mr. Obama’s speech announcing his debt reduction plan was no more than the formal start to his re-election campaign with the establishment of a clear ideological line in the sand.  The American people now will begin a long debate on which side of that line they will stand.

On one side is the America that those who came before us worked hard for; sacrificed for; and many died for.  This is the America where individualism and self-reliance is real, not just the throw-away line that Mr. Obama opened his speech with.  This is the America where all are guaranteed equal opportunity, not equal outcome; the America where the efforts of citizens determine the winners and losers; the America where the current generation pays for itself and passes on the freedom to increase prosperity to the next generation.

On the other side stands a perverse vision of our country where the government makes choices for the citizens; determines who the winners are; and pays for all of the current generation’s desires with liens on the labor of future generations.

In his own words, Mr. Obama declared, “This is not about debt reduction; this is about what kind of country we want to be.” However if we don’t begin to focus on the run-a-way spending of the federal government, our national debt will exceed our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) before the end of this year and will double over the next ten years.  Our economy will collapse under the weight of that debt and the only kind of country we will be, is a failed one.

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First, he won the health care debate handily. President Obama had no answer to Paul Ryan’s charge that ObamaCare double-counted the $500 billion “savings” it had cut from Medicare to spend elsewhere. Later, even Obama’s own head of Health and Human Services had to admit that Ryan was right.

Then Ryan won the debate over the budget and the economy. His 2012 budget, which was the first in modern political history to tackle the fundamental causes of America’s long-term public debt, was so much better than Obama’s that the President asked for a “do-over.” Yesterday, he flubbed that chance.

In the foreign policy debate, Ryan has won by forfeit. (To be fair, almost anyone, aside from the tiny isolationist minority inside both parties, would defeat the President’s policy of appeasement and incoherence, which has drastically reduced American power and strengthened our enemies.)

What is even more remarkable about Rep. Ryan’s victories in these debates is that he has been able to bring the rest of the country along with him on some of the most controversial and consequential issues facing our Republic, arguing from conservative principles that the left had once dared the GOP to try.

When Paul Ryan joined me in Chicago last September–just seven months ago!–for my congressional fundraiser, only 13 Republicans in Congress had endorsed his fiscal Roadmap. The hard-left and their rent-a-crowd protestors picketed the event, even bursting into the hall at one point.

When he heard the shouting at the back of the room, Ryan smiled and winked. “That’s when you know you’re winning,” he told me quietly.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by David Hogberg to discuss Barack Obama’s speech on deficit reduction responding to Paul Ryan’s budget plan.

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:

Obama Reboots Deficit Plan, Big Divide Vs. GOP’s Ryan
The Presidential Divider
Obama’s budget speech shows his unyielding ideology
Jobless Claims Unexpectedly Rise; Inflation Pressure Grows
David Hogberg’s Capital Hill at IBD
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We thought tax reform meant lowering rates and broadening the base by eliminating or cutting back on various deductions, credits, and loopholes. That’s what the Bowles-Simpson commission proposed. That’s what Paul Ryan and David Camp are working on. And that’s the pro-growth model.

But President Obama unveiled a much different tax-reform vision in his much-anticipated debt speech on Wednesday. He would raise tax rates on upper-income earners and small businesses. He also would eliminate deductions and credits, or so called “tax expenditures.” The president referred to these tax-expenditure reductions as “spending cuts.” In his context, they most certainly are not. They are more tax hikes.

Basically, the president is giving successful earners and small-business filers a double tax hike. That’s what it really is.

Of course, the president’s formula of estimating higher revenues to lower the deficit is completely wrong. The reality is that higher tax rates will slow the economy, inhibit new start-up companies, penalize investors, and may very well lose revenues and increase the deficit.

In the latter part of his speech the president did mention some kind of middle-class and corporate tax reform. But he gave no specifics.

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Several months ago, Education Action Group published a scathing exposé on the Wisconsin Education Association Council-affiliated WEA Trust, a union-contrived insurance entity that is forced upon the majority of Wisconsin schools during collective bargaining negotiations.

It is difficult to determine the extent to which the union benefits from this cozy arrangement, but judging by a similar set-up in Michigan, the union is likely doing very nicely.

In Michigan, the state’s largest teachers union (the Michigan Education Association) owns MESSA, a health insurance company used by the vast majority of public schools in the state.

MESSA has a reputation for being the Cadillac of insurance plans – and for good reason.

When one district successfully switched away from MESSA, it saved big bucks and teachers only lost coverage for “massages, sex-change operations and a treatment for Christian Science practitioners.”

Let that marinate for a moment.

According to the Kalamazoo Gazette, taxpayers were paying for massages and sex-change operations for teachers.  Isn’t that grand?

As MESSA, which gives millions of dollars a year to the teachers union, continues to jack up rates each year, school districts have wisely capped how much they will pay for employee health insurance, allowing districts to control costs. If the union still demands its brand, the teachers end up paying the difference.

Well, the union’s chickens are coming home to roost.

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Today, in 1865, President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated.

Responding to widespread criticism of his AWOL status on the budget fight, President Obama today unveiled a fiscal plan. It already is being criticized for its class warfare approach to tax policy, but the most disturbing feature may be a provision that punishes the American people with higher taxes if politicians overspend.

Called a “debt failsafe trigger,” Obama’s scheme would automatically raise taxes if politicians spend too much. According to the talking points distributed by the White House, the automatic tax increase would take effect “if, by 2014, the projected ratio of debt-to-GDP is not stabilized and declining toward the end of the decade.”

Let’s ponder what this means.

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On May 5, 2009, I testified in front of Barney Frank’s Financial Services Committee that if Congress provided a guarantee of municipal bonds, the United States of America would lose its’ AAA credit rating. Over the next year and a half, I was labeled the “typical Orange County ultra-conservative alarmist” when I spoke at dozens of investment conferences on growing risks of munis to investors.

Even as the general market price of long term munis dropped over 20% in the fourth quarter of last year, virtually every major Wall Street investment bank continued to reassure investors that municipal bonds were a great buy. All that hoopla ended last week, when Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase Bank, acknowledged at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce event in Washington D.C., that hundreds of tax free municipal bonds issues will “not make it” and default.

Mr. Dimon has intimate knowledge of the municipal bond market, because his firm is the third largest underwriter and issued $47 billion of munis last year. Mr. Dimon added: “I don’t think it’s going to shatter America, I just think it’s a part of the credit cycle.” Mr. Dimon and his bank have obviously sold their municipal bond holdings, but perhaps the timing of the release this insider’s perspective on a coming market crash has something to do with his bank’s own needs.

Currently there are 50,000 municipal bond issuers in America and they have sold over $3 trillion in bonds to mostly individuals, mutual funds and money market funds. A good portion of tax free bond sales were to fund local government worthy projects, such as roads, schools and even city halls. But another huge portion of the money raised in the municipal bond market has gone to support politically connected contractors and other crony capitalists.

Mr. Dimon has real insider knowledge of this dark side of the muni market; since his firm recently paid $75 million in penalties and forfeit $647 million to settle SEC charges in an “alleged” municipal bond kick-back and derivative scam. It seems those nice people at JP Morgan Chase somehow got $3.5 billion in underwriting business after sprinkling $8 million in cash on the friends of elected sanitation officials in Alabama.

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Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)

We have repeatedly written about our having to endure between now and November 2012 the intentional policy and political schizophrenia of the Barack Obama Administration.

For public consumption – with the perpetual assistance of his servile media – there will be the “new” President Barack Obama.  The “shellacked,” humbled man who claims to get that his Party’s policies were historically rejected by the American people.  Whose now moderated, bipartisan, Triangulated work with the Republicans will make former President and 1994 “shellackee” Bill Clinton look recalcitrant and amateur….

Going forward, in real terms, President Obama is incapable of a (President Bill) Clinton-esque move to the Middle.  He will do his best to put on a public show, but his Big-Government-At-All-Costs agenda will continue unabated.  It will just be done behind the scenes via rampant, abusive expansion of the vast regulatory authority at his disposal.

Every Commission, every Agency, every Board in the federal pantheon will ratchet up their orders, rules and directives.  To impose via executive branch regulatory fiat what President Obama can no longer get done in Congress.  In other words, bypass the obviously expressed will of the American people for smaller, more accountable government – so as to continue jamming through his on-all-fronts Titanic Government plan.  And do so without the People’s representatives at all involved in the process.

The Administration’s first post-election, venomous bite at this secret apple was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s December 21^st under-cover-of-Christmas vote to illegally commandeer control of the wired Internet – so as to then impose Network Neutrality.

Which puts a regulatory hammer lock on the Internet free market.

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