In the midst of a massive fiscal crisis, a take-no-prisoners budget battle, a historically long recession, and two (make that three) wars, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) knows what really matters.

He’s pushing the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to only sell bobble-heads, T-shirts, snow-globes, and other souvenirs that are made in America. After getting a letter from and taking a meeting with the self-described Green Mountain State socialist, the folks at the Smithsonian have agreed to increase the amount of domestically produced junk for sale in their gift shops. They’re even constructing a new gift shop solely to products manufactured in America that will be called the Price of Freedom.

During a recent trip to the National Mall, Reason.tv found that such nativist grandstanding plays well with the man in the street, but CATO policy analyst Sallie James says protectionism doesn’t come cheap. In fact, top-down attempts to keep Americans in low-level manufacturing jobs is a great way to ruin the economy, whether we’re talking about Founding Father thimbles or higher-end electronics.

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One of the many blessings of running my own accounting firm are the relationships that I build with people I would have never met otherwise. After running in the Republican primary for my congressional district last spring, I had yet another group of incredible new friends and partners. Through some of those new friends, I was put in touch with an American businessman living in Japan who had an absolutely incredible story of how the recent tsunami had affected his life and the lives of those closest to him.

Phil Foxwell grew up and has since raised his family in Japan, maintaining a summer home in the rolling hills of a sleepy Japanese fishing town called Shichigahama, which lies northeast of Sendai, the city hardest hit by the tsunami. Set in an idyllic, pine wooded valley surrounded by hills on three sides, it was a refuge for harried Tokyo-ites wishing to escape the summer heat. For Phil, a trip to Shichigahama is more than just a getaway, it’s a family reunion. For years, he has invested in the aging community, many of whom he has known since his childhood and grown up alongside. They are his friends, and his family. His first-hand account of a journey to find what he was certain would be more death and desolation ended as something very different indeed.

This is an incredible story of God’s provision and protection in a time when people question how God could let such a thing happen. This is a story that has motivated me to go above and beyond the ordinary in supporting those who have lost their home and livelihood, or even a loved one. I want to encourage you to get involved in the rebuilding of Japan as they suffer through what is described as the most devastating natural disaster in the modern era, upwards of 20,000 lives lost and $250 billion in damages. In addition, please pray for the survivors and their families, and also the rescue workers who are doing what they can with scarce resources and constant threat of radiation exposure. Japan is in dire need of a miracle. Read this incredible story by Phil Foxwell to see one that already happened.

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Alright you evil, rotten, racist, white oppressors, it’s time once again for the “White Privilege Conference,” this year to be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota on April 13 – 16. Come on out you white teachers so we can get your rotten minds right about how racist you are and so that you can go back to your students and let them know how racist they are.

I’ll bet you think I am being sarcastic with the name of that conference, right? Nope. It really IS called the “White Privilege Conference,” and this year is its 12th year!

So, what is it? Why it’s a conference for America’s teachers to explore the full length and breadth of multifulcuralism. We are all the same, you see, Indians, Hispanics, Blacks, all at harmony and all equal… well, unless you are a whitey, of course. If you are a whitey, well you have some splanin’ to do! You are the one black mark on this wonderful multicultural world, doncha know? And it’s about time you admitted your malevolence, dang it!

Yes, it’s a “toxic cultural environment” we monstrous whites have created for our children… never mind that this is the greatest nation on earth, and all.

But the WPC has the cure.

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More than 18 months after publishing a piece about the whereabouts of the unedited versions of the Oklahoma City Bombing surveillance tapes, I learned Wednesday that a federal court hearing concerning a Freedom of Information Act request for those videotapes is set to take place May 11 in Salt Lake City.

The hearing will take place with Judge Clark Waddoups presiding in the U.S. District Court for the District of Utah, Central Division. It comes some three and a half years after Utah attorney Jesse Trentadue used FOIA to request the FBI turn over copies of surveillance video captured April 19, 1995, by more than 20 cameras operating in the vicinity of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City.

I don’t agree with Trentadue’s belief that the bombing was likely a U.S. government-sponsored operation; instead, I side with the conclusions offered by Jayna Davis, award-winning investigative reporter and best-selling author, in her 2004 book, “The Third Terrorist: The Middle East Connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing.” Still, I remain troubled that the FBI has fought the release of videotape footage likely to reveal the identity of at least one additional person involved in the bombing that took place less than 30 minutes from where I was living at the time.

Specifically, Trentadue requested footage captured prior to 9:02 a.m. Central, when a truck bomb exploded, killing 168 people, and footage from the dashboard camera of Oklahoma Highway Patrolman Charles Hanger’s vehicle showing the arrest of Timothy McVeigh. He received footage from several cameras, but not from the cameras on the Murrah Building itself; hence, the reason for the May 11 hearing.

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Today, in 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” was first published.

I have a crazy idea: let’s save millions of dollars by not spending money to build broadband networks where they already exist. The insanity of so-called “broadband stimulus” projects has been covered quite nicely here at BigGovernment by Seton Motley, but my good friend Dave Williams of the newly-formed Taxpayers’ Protection Alliance wrote about a part of this debate that hasn’t been covered enough: loan guarantees given out by the Rural Utilities Service, a division of the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

With a budget deficit that is as large on its own as the entire federal budget of 1998, the folks in Congress who’d like to avoid a crippling debt crisis (those crazy kids!) are looking for ways to trim the fat. Luckily for legislators there is an area of “USDA prime” waste they can carve out: the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s desperate dash for taxpayer cash in the form of superfluous subsidies for rural broadband efforts.

USDA’s Rural Utilities Service (RUS) is an outdated agency whose roots go all the way back to FDR’s New Deal-era Rural Electrification Administration. Originally meant to help bring electricity to farmers in remote areas, its mission was expanded in 1949 to include telephone service and, half a century later, Internet service. Ostensibly, its goal is to subsidize the construction of broadband networks in sparsely-populated areas that do not have them.

But in its ham-fisted attempt to bring high-speed Internet service to areas where there is none, RUS has consistently given money to organizations which build over existing private broadband networks. A 2005 report from the USDA Inspector General found that “RUS has not maintained its focus on rural communities without preexisting service.” The same report determined that “in one of the more highly publicized cases, RUS issued loans to a company providing broadband access to affluent suburban communities a few miles outside of Houston, Texas.”

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There is no escaping the pro-union tone included as part of some of the advertising material President Obama’s labor attorneys have placed on Google. That should be a no go for anyone serving on the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which is responsible for investigating allegations of unfair labor practices. However, it has been evident for some time the NLRB is out to do the bidding of union bosses who are now working to reshape public policy without congressional consent.

Fortunately, the National Right to Work Legal Foundation has stepped in to call out the NLRB with a Freedom of Information Action (FOIA) request that seeks all documented business transactions between the Board and Google related to online ad buys beginning in 2008.

Foundation attorneys have expressed concern that the NLRB’s ad buys publicized information about workers’ rights to organize or join a union without providing equally important information about the rights of employees to refrain from union membership or eject unwanted unions from their workplaces.

“We’ve raised persistent questions about the impartiality of the NLRB that have yet to be addressed, and what looks like a selective information campaign through Google Ads is another example of this trend,” said Patrick Semmens, Legal Information Director for the National Right to Work Foundation. “We call upon the NLRB to immediately release any and all information related to this ad campaign to address public concerns about its perceived pro-Big Labor bias.”

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First, we all know that Republicans, as well as Democrats, have spent a lot of our money. However, it seems the GOP is slowly trying to turn the ship around, with the help of continued pressure from grass-roots conservatives represented by the new freshmen.

But Democrats? After refusing to follow through with their constitutional responsibility to pass a budget last year, many of them have suddenly become indignant that their pet programs may get cut. In short, the nation’s fiscal plight is not seeping in.

Democrats are being dragged, kicking and screaming, to the cutting trough as they still attempt to convince unthinking Americans that Planned Parenthood doesn’t perform abortions at taxpayer expense, and that, if Planned Parenthood is defunded, women will die, or, as Rep. Louise Slaughter says, be “killed” by Republicans.

In this budget showdown theater, the Republicans clearly have had their share of problems, but the liberal Democrats are acting like bratty teens who have maxed out their parents’ credit card and are whining that the fact that the card has been shredded is denying their “freedom.”

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The Coffee Party is at it again.

Desperately seeking a raison d’etre other than NOT to be the Tea Party, the Brew Crew has just issued a Congressional chain-letter which it hopes its tens of followers will co-sign. Pulling no punches, the Political Percolators are telling Congress to…to…well, to quit being so darn mean to Us the People. Here’s the full venti cup of their scalding scolding:

Dear Congress,

Please remember: you are fighting over how to spend our money.  We the People pay 33.7% of the Federal Fund while corporations pay 7.2%. Many corporations pay no taxes at all.  Yet your entire focus during this budget battle has been on how much to hurt the people.

We did not cause the recession, the deficit, or the national debt.  We know this, and we need you to know that we are aware of a corrupt system in which corporations spend their vast wealth to lobby and manipulate you.

We know that’s why the tax code so unjustly burdens us while favoring them. We know this is why Elizabeth Warren and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are under attack from the US Chamber of Commerce and other powerful lobbyists. We know that is why your policies reward multinational corporations, including those that DID cause the recession, with bailouts, bonuses, and tax benefits.

As you wrangle over how much to hurt our quality of life and jeopardize our future, consider ways to create jobs and invest in our future.

Congress should work together on how to help us, not fight over how to hurt us.

Sincerely,

Annabel, Eric B, Lynda, Eric W, Gloria, Mark, Beth, Tina, Corinne and the Coffee Break to Save America Team

The note to Coffee Party mailing list members is oleaginously signed with first names only. But the letter to Congress itself is a rich pu-pu platter of economic naivete.  Annabel Park—the dark liquid organization’s founder—and her co-scolders have obviously never heard of the Laffer Curve—or if they have, they think it’s a baseball pitch.

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There were reports about 10 days ago that the crowd in Washington reached a budget deal, for the remainder of the 2011 fiscal year, with $33 billion of cuts. That number was disappointingly low. I wrote at the time that if this was a kiss-your-sister deal, we didn’t have any siblings that looked like Claudia Schiffer.

knew it was unrealistic to expect the full $61 billion, but I explained that $45 billion was a realistic target.

We now have a new agreement, which supposedly is final, and the amount of budget cuts has climbed to $38 billion. So our sister is getting prettier, but she still isn’t close to being a supermodel. Here are the highlights (or lowlights) from the New York Times story.

Congressional leaders and President Obama headed off a shutdown of the government with less than two hours to spare Friday night under a tentative budget deal that would cut $38 billion from federal spending this year. …the budget measure would not include provisions sought by Republicans to limit environmental regulations and to restrict financing for Planned Parenthood and other groups that provide abortions.

As with all deals (such as last December’s agreement extending the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts), there are good and bad provisions. The good news is:

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Can you hear that great sucking sound? It’s the sound of government shrinking around the world, as Portugal just joined Greece, Ireland and soon many others in acknowledging they are bankrupt and asking their European brethren for a bail-out. What is frightening to the big government advocates is this collapse was caused by a doubling of Portugal’s borrowing costs in just three weeks. The klaxon horns are going off in Europe and America; cut deficit spending or be destroyed by rising interest rates.

Over the last two decades, governments in Europe and the United States have been massively using taxpayer subsidies to sponsor favoured industries, under the smoke screen of National Industrial Policy. The theory, developed by Harvard economist and former Secretary of Labor in the Clinton Administration, Robert Reich, stated that governments must “deliberately and strategically” speed the movement of capital and labor into “higher-valued production” or suffer social decline; with infant mortality rates rising and employment and life expectancy falling. Reich championed National Industrial Policy planners would more efficiently allocate capital and labor resources to satisfy consumer demand than large corporations who inefficiently use marketing to bend customer demand to their needs. He claimed it was the duty of government to induce through direct subsidies and worker retraining grants uncompetitive companies to scrap production and steer investment in industries of the future.

Europe adopted National Industrial Policy through the introduction of the Euro currency and banking deregulation. Southern European countries like Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain got low-interest German and French bank loans to scrap supposedly uncompetitive local manufacturing and “cushion” the transition of workers into leisure services and retirement housing development. Germany and France got elimination of competition and export growth to Southern Europe. Europeans were ecstatic for 15 years; the South had a real estate and banking boom, the North had a manufacturing and banking boom.

The U.S. adopted a National Industrial Policy during the Clinton Administration in 1999 by tying bank deregulation to a colossal expansion of the Community Reinvestment Act. The big banks got unlimited ability for multi-state banking and abolition of the 1933 Glass–Steagall Act prohibitions against banks engaging in high risk securities and derivative trading for their own accounts. Planners got huge quota requirements for loans to inter-city and rural communities. President Clinton hailed that the signing of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act “establishes the principles that, as we expand the powers of banks, we will expand the reach of the [Community Reinvestment] Act”.

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Today, in 1865, Gen. Robert E. Lee finally woke up to reality and surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to Gen. U.S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse. His vanity would claim no more lives.

From Associated Press:

Perilously close to a government shutdown, congressional leaders reached agreement with the White House late Friday night on a deal to cut tens of billions of dollars in federal spending and avert the closure.

House Speaker John Boehner informed the GOP rank and file of the accord, reached in grueling negotiations over several weeks, an official said.

“We have an agreement,” concurred a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Jon Summers.

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Police in Chandler, Ariz., have used money seized in drug stings to buy a new vehicle for the agency’s SWAT team, new guns for its officers, surveillance equipment, even a dog for its canine unit.

They use it to pay confidential informants, who work in the drug underworld putting together new drug deals that will lead to more cash being confiscated and converted to the exclusive use of the agency. In an 18-month period, one confidential informant was paid $248,598, according to city records. Another received $193,568 and a third $81,575 during that same time frame.

Forfeited money is kept in separate accounts under the exclusive control of department administrators. By law it must be used to supplement the agency’s regular budget, not to replace funds budgeted for normal operations.

In the last five years, Chandler police have raised more than $6.8 million through forfeitures. About $3.2 million of that came in the year leading up to the fatal shooting of an undercover narcotics officer engaged in a “reverse sting,” a lucrative but risky operation in which police pose as drug sellers rather than buyers. Chandler police staged 20 reverse stings in those 12 months, all but four of them far outside the city’s boundaries, according to court records.

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Washington shutdown fears are sinking the U.S. dollar, according to some news reports. Surely there’s something to this, as investor confusion rises and confidence falls, and as Washington seems to be gridlocked over a few billion dollars.

Frankly, the GOP could easily declare victory and accept a $35 billion to $40 billion spending cut for the final strokes of the 2011 continuing resolution. This kind of deal would move the domestic discretionary baseline back towards 2008. No mean feat.

Over ten years, estimates range above $400 billion in real cuts in the level of those domestic programs. Considering where the process started — with the failure of the Democrats to propose a budget, and then the early Democratic response of only $5 billion in CR budget cuts — the GOP has come a long way in the absolute right direction.

So from here the GOP could move from billions in CR cuts to trillions in cuts in the Paul Ryan budget.

Yet however this works out, the principal cause of the declining dollar is not a threatened government shutdown. It’s the excess money creation of the Fed, which is falling further and further behind the international curve of currency stability.

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In the wake of Thursday’s stunning news that Waukesha County failed to report over 14,000 votes in the city of Brookfield, a cacophony of allegations quickly swirled around the unexpected turn of events.

As soon as the news was confirmed from Waukesha County Clerk Kathy Nickolaus at a Thursday evening press conference, the topsy-turvy race between Justice David Prosser and Asst. Attorney General JoAnne Kloppenburg for a ten-year term on the Wisconsin Supreme Court took another leap into the bounds of the unpredictable and incredible and in turn, has caused many to leap full-on into the conspiratorial realm.

Now, no one is defending Ms. Nickolaus’ competence or lack thereof, and it certainly does not help her credibility that she has been the subject of audits and complaints regarding her antiquated and unreliable record keeping. There is no question that an investigation needs to take place to explain and prevent this from happening again on such a large scale.

But the head-first dive into conspiracy reveals a hypocrisy to match the already unbelievable events in Waukesha. A sampling of statements in the last 24 hours:

• “The mysterious, and arguably timely, discovery of ballots on a personal computer appears to be the latest example of Governor Walker and his friends unfairly using the levers of government to silence Wisconsin voters…this is yet another reminder of the lengths this administration will travel to side with partisan politicians and corporate donors rather than Wisconsinites.”- SEIU Press Release 4/8/11
• “But in order to steal the election, they NEED to be able to keep a recount from occurring, because a recount would expose their attempted fraud to the light of day…They will do EVERYTHING they can to make sure NO ONE checks the paper trail. Because the paper trail will be the nail in their coffin.We must not let them succeed in this attempted fraud.” - Daily Kos “Why Prosser Needed EXACTLY 7500+ votes…” 4/7/11
• “It stretches the bounds of credibility to think that over 14,300 votes were somehow “overlooked” until two days after the election.”- Sen. Mark Miller (D-Madison) 4/7/11
• “Tuesday, the people of Wisconsin took away David Prosser’s seat on the Supreme Court. And yesterday, the Waukesha County Clerk, Kathy Nickolaus, served as Prosser’s sleazy accomplice trying to steal it back.”- One Wisconsin Now 4/8/11
• “Wisconsin is facing the largest potential election fraud case perpetrated in the history of this state and law enforcement must act immediately.”- Scot Ross, Executive Director of One Wisconsin Now 4/8/11

Reflected in these statements is frustration and denial at the thought that despite months of anger and marching in the streets, despite the efforts of millions of dollars, and despite the fairly effective attempt to make a non-partisan judicial race a referendum on Governor Scott Walker, a narrow majority of Wisconsinites still turned out and voted in favor of Justice Prosser.

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The world is in turmoil. In the Middle East there are uprisings, in Japan natural disasters, in Mexico blatant lawlessness, and in Europe the slow but certain death of Western Civilization at the hands of Muslims who have learned to use a combination of fear tactics and appeals to western guilt to their advantage.

As a result of these things, there is international uncertainty that has caused commodities like silver, gold, and black gold (crude oil), to skyrocket in value. And although this isn’t a bad thing for investors who began stockpiling gold when it was $200 an ounce and silver when it was $14, this is an absolutely terrible thing for lower and middle class families who have to fill up the SUV with gasoline twice a week in order to get to work, church, school, and the grocers.

In other words, while rising gold and silver prices may contribute to the increased wealth of a few, rising crude prices threaten to decimate the savings (and savings plans) of the many. (As I type, crude is approximately $108 a barrel, but predicted by some to go as high as $200-300 a barrel if Middle East unrest continues.)

Sadly, in the midst of these rising crude prices, and the resulting higher gas prices Americans have faced at the pump, Obama has stayed the course on green energy alternatives with bans on offshore drilling and a continued refusal to broaden onshore domestic production. Remember, oil formations in North Dakota alone contain enough crude to raise that state to the status of one of “the 13 or 14 largest producing countries [in the world].” And the amount of oil lying in Alaska’s outer continental shelf (OCS) is so great that tapping into it “would make Alaska the eighth largest oil province in the world – ahead of Nigeria, Libya, Russia, and Norway.”

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Tax Day (April 18) is fast approaching, which means anxiety and night sweats for about 99 percent of us.

And bitching and moaning by those at the top of the income pyramid about how they aren’t forced to pay even more in taxes. (The top 1 percent of filers pay about 40 percent of income taxes.)

Secretary of state and cattle-futures queen Hillary Clinton, super-investor Warren Buffett, and best-selling author Stephen King have all recently carped about how rich folks like them should be paying more in taxes. King recently told a Florida rally, “As a rich person, I’m paying 28 percent in taxes. What I want to ask you is, why am I not paying 50?”

But when it comes to the country’s balance sheet, the U.S. doesn’t have a revenue problem or a tax-rate problem. We’ve got a spending problem. Since 1950, revenue from all sources has averaged around 18 percent of Gross Domestic Product, despite top tax rates that have fluctuated from over 90 percent to the high 20-percent range. Regardless of all efforts to jack up revenue (or reduce it), that’s what the government can expect to work with.

Yet spending has averaged about 20 percent of GDP – and is currently at a whopping 25 percent of GDP, a figure not seen since World War II. President Obama’s budget plan forecasts spending at 23 percent of GDP over the next decade while Rep. Paul Ryan’s GOP plan calls for 20.5 percent. There’s your deficit right there, folks.

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