By all means, let us pursue the president’s new approach to the budget, the Orwellian ‘reduce spending in the tax code’. But, wherever will we find good examples of wasteful ’spending in the tax code’?

Hey, look here! The Feds are taking your money to create 1,000 jobs! Of course, these jobs wouldn’t exist without this wealth transfer, and are mostly temporary anyway. But, still, it’s only $2 million per temporary job. Guess we’ll make the cost up in volume.

And T. Boone only wants a billion dollars. Then he promises to quit. Really. He’ll be the first.

The Nation also joins in:

[T]he primary problem facing clean alternative energy is the ‘price gap’—they are still more expensive than fossil fuels. As I’ve outlined in these pages previously (see “The Big Green Buy”), economies of scale, along with subsidies and planning, will help close this price gap. Only when clean technologies—like wind, solar, hydropower and electric vehicles—are cheaper than other options will global capitalism make the switch away from fossil fuels.

Of course, the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind mostly doesn’t blow so windmills and solar panels require massive redundancy as well as enormous swathes of land, and wind- and solar-powered electricity are just as old as the coal-fired variety, just practical losers. Those are possibly greater challenges than a mere ‘price gap’, and indeed they make this idea of comparing renewables with hydrocarbons as if they were apples to apples endearingly absurd.

But, anyway. While ‘planning’ is euphemistic for preferences and mandates, here you also see green econ 101 amid the author’s ostentatious advertisement of having escaped brushing up on the actual experience and history of these boondoggles.

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Rhetorically, President Obama prides himself on bashing “greedy corporations.”  Insurance companies, the health care industry and Wall Street have all been subjected to verbal abuse from the president.  Despite his statements, the Obama Administration policy often rests on corporatism – the policy of using government to enhance market share of a few favorite firms.

The record is clear — President Obama has little reservation about plying companies with tax incentives, bailout money, secured loans – even to promote off-shore oil drilling in Brazil — or policy initiatives if it fits his worldview.  The president continues to tout the “success” of corporate bailouts for Wall Street and the car companies.

A classic example of corporatism is the recent news reports that Steven Westly a major contributor to the Obama campaign and a promoter of “alternative energy,” received half-billion dollars in federal aid for his venture capital firm.   The Center for Public Integrity discovered that since Westly raised the money for Obama, four companies in the portfolio of The Westly Group, his venture capital firm, received $510 million in loans, grants and stimulus money from the U.S. Department of Energy. And, the report added, Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, on the White House’s recommendation, appointed Westly in August to the 12-member Secretary of Energy’s Advisory Board.

The sad reality is that Westly will look like a piker when Google is done ravishing the Treasury.  Google has entered the political ring siding itself clearly in the left’s corner.

Google is President Obama’s favorite corporation.

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Last year Representative Maxine Waters (D-CA) landed on Judicial Watch’s “Washington’s Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians,” and for good reason. Waters (and her partner in crime, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA)) helped secure a TARP grant for the failing Massachusetts bank OneUnited — a bank in which her husband had a significant investment. (Michelle Malkin reports that Waters’ husband, Sidney Williams held a $350,000 stake in OneUnited as recently as June 2008.)

Could the conflict of interest be any more egregious?

We didn’t think so. And for a while it appeared the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct (a.k.a. The House Ethics Committee) agreed. The Committee announced last fall there would be a speedy trial to consider the charges against Waters. And, on the heels of the massive investigation and very public trial of Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), there was reason to be somewhat optimistic that Waters would be held accountable.

That is until House Ethics Committee Chairman Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) started meddling in the process. Not only did Lofgren fail to issue subpoenas for records related to the scandal, but she also delayed the ethics committee hearing after doing everything in her power to undermine the professional committee staff leading the investigation. And, as if that were not enough, Lofgren then improperly fired two attorneys working on the investigation.

Now the Waters investigation is stuck in the mud.

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McDonalds Corp. conducted its much-publicized one-day, national hiring event Tuesday. Seeking to hire up to 50,000 employees, both full-time and part-time, the fast-food giant and its franchisees state that, while many of the jobs are of the minimum wage variety, sometimes sarcastically referred to as “McJobs,” managerial level positions are also available. Thousands arrived at McDonalds Restaurants across the country to apply for positions, many of which, according to McDonalds, are entry-level, but capable of leading to larger opportunities. While the company usually hires more employees at this time of year, prior to the summer traveling season, this event is different in that all the hiring is getting done in one day. A McDonalds executive stated that most McDonalds restaurant franchises pay more than the minimum wage, which is $7.25 per hour, nationally.

While it’s hopeful that many will be able to obtain much-needed jobs, even if on a temporary basis, the hiring event is also a sad commentary on the state of the nation’s economy. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports that, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average age of a fast-food worker is almost 30 years old, up from 22 in 2000.

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Last weekend, His Presidency Barack Obama was captured making potentially offensive comments to a group of big money donors who had paid large sums of money for special access to His Presidency.

We observed that CBS only released “selectively edited” moments from the raw tape. We know how much the mainstream media values complete and full disclosure of recordings of this nature, so we found it curious, to say the least, that there was not one drop of intellectual curiosity from these guardians of media purity regarding the content of the full recording.

Maybe CBS’s motive has nothing to do with protecting His Presidency from potential embarrassment. Perhaps, like Nixon before them, CBS accidentally erased the portions of the recording that they have not released. Anything is possible, right?

Alas, no. John Romano, Publisher of the blog “Yes, But, However!” has confirmed with CBS’s Mark Knoller (via Twitter) that CBS has decided that they are not going to release the complete recording.

@markknoller Why haven’t you released all of the audio of President Obama’s “donor meeting”? If you have please link?

@markknoller This is my third request. Why will you not release the full audio of Obama’s donor conversation?

@yesbuthowever My editors decided against it.

People can speculate as to what their motive is, but we suspect that they do not want to jeopardize their White House access leading into campaign season by being the ones to release the audio of His Presidency referring to Americans as “slugs.”

If you tuned in to Rush Limbaugh yesterday, you probably caught El Rushbo talking about Andrew’s new book.  Rush reminds us that Andrew, yes, Andrew Breitbart, “was a big lefty until he heard me.”  Me, meaning…Rush Limbaugh.

By the way, great news!  Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World has been hovering between #1 and #2 on the Amazon Bestseller’s List in Non-Fiction, and between #10 and #12 Overall. Congratulations, Andrew!!!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

Today, in 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil well exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. It would spew oil for 5 months. President Bush had his Katrina, President Obama had his…oh…wait…nevermind, nothing to see here.

Judicial Watch continued its aggressive, nationwide campaign against illegal alien sanctuary policies. Last Monday, I sent a letter to the Chairman of the Board of Trustees for New Jersey’s County College of Morris (CCM) challenging the school’s policy of providing discounted tuition for “undocumented” aliens.

And I got a quick response, too. CCM informed Judicial Watch that it will reevaluate its illegal alien tuition policy on April 20, 2011.

As I noted in my letter — illegal aliens are ineligible for state and local public benefits, such as discounted tuition, under federal law:

There is no way to reconcile CCM’s policy with federal law. The policy provides a public benefit to individuals who are clearly ineligible for benefits [under federal law], and New Jersey has not authorized the provision of such benefits…CCM may not ignore federal laws when those laws are not consistent with its own policy preferences. We hope that CCM will reevaluate its new policy and conform it to the requirements of federal law.

Judicial Watch was tipped off to CCM’s illegal policy by the February 18, 2011, edition of The New Jersey Star-Ledger:

For the first time in nearly a decade, illegal immigrants will be allowed to take classes at the County College of Morris in a policy change that is drawing praise from some education officials and sharp criticism from immigration policy activists.

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At least two years after most sentient Americans have known what the ruling class has been perpetrating upon us, S&P has declared that the spending gig is over. But has the machine taken over? Has the destructive pact between the redistribution demagogues, the elites of academia, Hollywood, and the media who spread the propaganda, the crony capitalists who collude with the state, and the takers of society who re-elect their benefactors—overwhelmed us?

Like Hal in this haunting scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps the machine cannot be turned off.

Stanley Kubrick’ 2001 espouses a fear of technology, a common theme in Hollywood. Yet America’s greatest threat turns out not to be technology, but man’s nature. Control disguised as altruism. Envy & greed disguised as fairness. We knew that self government—a constitutional Republic—was an experiment; even a long shot.

Can America’s only hope, the media-vilified Tea Party, beat the machine?

(more…)

Union bosses have been engaging in class warfare for so long now that it’s become standard for the media to echo the meme without challenge. An example of such mainstream Marxism is in today’s Bloomberg piece entitled ‘Runaway CEO Pay’ Could Support 102,000 U.S. Jobs, AFL-CIO Says. Bloomberg’s piece relies heavily on the AFL-CIO’s Executive Pay Watch, which was set up years ago to conduct a haves vs. have nots class warfare campaign to eventually have CEO pay limited by law or regulation. This was something union bosses accomplished to some degree with last year’s “Wall Street Reform.”

However disdainfully un-American it is to argue whether someone makes too much money in what was once the nation known as the land of opportunity, sometimes you have to roll with the pigs in the pigsty to show how stupid their arguments are. So here goes:

Here is the AFL-CIO’s statement:

In 2010, Standard & Poor’s 500 Index company CEOs received, on average, $11.4 million in total compensation. Based on 299 companies’ most recent pay data for 2010, their combined total CEO pay of $3.4 billion could support 102,325 median workers’ jobs.

Using a simple calculator, it is easy to determine that the “workers’ jobs” would pay $33,227 per year (about $16 per hour), not counting union dues, of course.

Given the AFL-CIO’s penchant for pushing an eat the rich ideology, it seemed worthwhile to use the unions’ own logic to run our own set of numbers to determine how many workers’ median jobs one years’ worth of union dues could support.

(more…)

I’m a Trump cheerleader. After 25 years as a lobbyist for Trump and Chairman of his 2000 Presidential Exploratory Committee, I like the man. I have studied mountains of polling conducted by the Trump casino interests studying the Trump brand for twenty years. I have studied the shocking new polls that show Trump vaulting to a lead over conventional politicians. A new PPP poll for Talking Points memo showed Trump leading the field.

Trump is a middle class phenomena. Middle aged, middle income, middle class voters are Trump’s core. Hispanic voters give him high favorable ratings as do African Americans and poor whites. The higher your level of education the more likely you are to loath Trump. If you are self-made you are 70% more likely to like Trump than if you have inherited money. Small businessmen like Trump, Wall Street Gekkos do not. The Apprentice has enhanced his standing because his short segments show him being cool, tough and decisive, things voters are looking for after the vacillation of Barrack Obama.

Trump appeals to the strivers. Trump lives as they would live if they were rich. Trump’s over the top lifestyle of the biggest and the best appeals to these voters. The Ivy League educated? Not so much. Old Money? Forget it. Trump appeals to the Perot and Buchanan voter suspicious of both parties. The Tea Party is a natural launching pad for Trump.

Now the Club for Growth is bashing Trump for positions he took ten years ago under far different circumstances. Trump favored a tax on the super-rich to kill the deficit. He was willing to pay himself. He is opposed to the idea today. Hard to imagine voters seeking consistency will switch to Mitt Romney who used to be a pro-abortion, pro gay marriage liberal.

Political operatives who come to work for Trump will soon realize he doesn’t need words put in his mouth and has a very clear sense of what he wants to say and do. Trump is soaring in the polls now because he is following his own populist instincts and expressing himself in street language the average person can understand.

It takes stature, money, energy and discipline to be elected President. Trump has the stature and the money, so far he has demonstrated the energy but whether he has the discipline to stay on his core themes and to parry the attacks on him without getting personal remains to be seen. Much of this furor is about the Trump brand. At last weekends Tea Party Tax rally in Boca Raton Trump asked his host if he should take off his trademark pastel tie for his speech. “No,” he was told, “you gotta look like you look on TV.”

Andrew Breitbart sits down with FOX News’ Sean Hannity on April 18, 2011 to discuss his new book, “Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World,” released April 15, 2011.  It wasn’t all just book conversation though…you’ll have to watch it and see!

Check out Andrew’s list of upcoming appearances and other press coverage.

The former Governor of Massachusetts and semi-declared candidate for President, Mr. Romney, has the Massachusetts health care “solution” called now “RomneyCare” (a plan upon which the widely unpopular “Obama Care” plan is based) to discuss with the American people. For some on the Left this provides Mr. Romney with a strong gravitas, but how will RomneyCare play on the Right?

“RomneyCare’s” association with “ObamaCare” and the rampant unrealistic, excessive nanny-statism (and legislative strong-arm process that passed the national plan) combines to create a difficult marketing/public relations challenge for Mr. Romney in the upcoming election should he decide to run.

Michael Graham in the Boston Herald of April 12, 2011 writes,

As a health care plan, Romney care is an unmitigated fiasco. It has caused costs to skyrocket, insurance premiums to soar and nonprofit providers like Blue Cross to suffer hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Illustrative of the deep rift across the country about RomneyCare/ObamaCare and too many other contentious issues to discuss, Graham cites a new Suffolk University poll showing dissatisfaction with the Massachusetts Romney Plan.

But after five years of actually experiencing this new universe, even the Kennedy Democrats have had enough. A new Suffolk University poll showed that nearly half of Massachusetts voters say the law isn’t helping, while just 38 percent say it is. As Michael Cannon at the Cato Institute pointed out, Romney care is almost as unpopular here as Obama- care is across America.

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We all know how important energy is in our lives, just as commercial energy is critical to free market capitalism and the pursuit of prosperity in America. Now, thanks to environmental activists and several states, that may all be at risk in the US Supreme Court.

In 2004, unhappy that the duly elected Bush administration wasn’t restricting carbon emissions in the alleged cause of global warming, environmental activism prompted several states to file a “public nuisance” lawsuit, which would empower the courts in this regard.

They lost in the lower court but that was reversed in 2007.

This case is novel, and far more aggressive and disruptive than the global warming case the Court previously permitted. In a 2007 decision, Massachusetts v. EPA, a closely divided Court agreed with 12 states and several cities that the Environmental Protection Agency has authority to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act. Though that case dealt with a narrow claim to enforce a federal statute, the Court’s decision emboldened what had already become a cottage industry of lawsuits designed to slow global warming by asking federal courts to enact what interest groups have been unable to secure through the democratic process: carbon caps and other limits on the way energy is produced in this country.

Under the guise of “public nuisance,” the plaintiffs in these suits seek to impose enormous damages and binding emissions caps on energy companies. The plaintiffs have acknowledged that their goal is a veritable sea change in the way energy is produced, sold, and used in this country. Incredibly, they assert that these companies can make major changes to lower emissions – such as the adoption of wind and solar alternatives – “without significantly increasing the cost of electricity.” But never before has the “public nuisance” doctrine been used to set national economic and energy policy. While litigation may be therapeutic for those frustrated by political inaction, this case is at odds with this country’s legal tradition.

Meanwhile, a recently elected Republican House is taking steps to go in the other direction through budget cuts to the EPA. Environmental activism in the US is, in effect, looking to up-end the democratic process – an all too common theme across the Left – by empowering the courts to make policy in perhaps the single most critical policy area for American prosperity.

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Has President Barack Obama been deceiving America, with his Ethics Executive Order 13490?  It certainly appears that the actions of the Obama Administration are far from his recent statement that he has “put into place the toughest ethics laws of any Administration in history [pause] in history.” A host of Obama’s appointments call into question the President’s commitment to his own Ethics Order.  Appointments such as U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) Sec. Hilda Solis, DOL Deputy Solicitor Deborah Greenfield, and NLRB Board member Craig Becker undermine Obama’s claim of “toughest ethics.”

Now, the National Right To Work Committee introduces John Lund,  Obama’s “overseer” of union financial reporting and disclosure at DOL’s Office of Labor-Management Standards (OLMS).  This Obama appointee is a former director of the now-defunct Pacific Northwest Labor College,  a former SEIU union employee , a fomer IUOE union employee, and former director of the University of Wisconsin School for Workers.   Lund’s appointment means that he is now in charge of investigating financial mismanagement and irregularities by the very labor union officials he has trained for decades. (click to view the NRTW shocking handout on Lund)

Big Labor Payback Job One for Obama

Even though Obama campaigned on transparency and a focus on ethics, cronies at DOL focused on eliminating basic financial union disclosure and union officials’ conflict-of-interest disclosures requirements.

At DOL, John Lund cut the number of labor union investigators, rescinded disclosure of union officer benefits, eliminated financial reporting for unions like the Wisconsin Education Association Council, and eliminated conflict-of-interest reporting for thousands of union officials.  Each of these actions benefits Big Labor Bosses, but undercuts those forced to pay union dues and fees as a condition of employment.

John Lund Conflicts-of-Interest

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Ben Domenech is joined by Jeffrey H. Anderson to discuss the costs of Obamacare, the danger of IPAB and taxes.

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:

Obamacare ‘Rule,’ 347 Pages, 118,072 Words
Congressional Democrats Buck Obama, Call for IPAB’s Repeal
Obama Picks a Strange Fight
Tax Day: Our Progressive Tax Code — and Obama’s Push to Deny the Facts
Jeffrey H. Anderson at The Weekly Standard

Follow Ben on Twitter

Though it is often hidden, covered up, or excused, every now and then, union bosses give the public a glimpse of what they really think about unions when it comes to their own workers being unionized. In fact, it’s really not that uncommon for union bosses to engage in the same so-called “union-busting” activities they like to accuse companies (and Republicans) of doing.

Last year, for example, there was the incident of the longtime employee who tried to unionize the United Federation of Teachers, only to be fired. There was also the incident just a couple of month ago when the staff reps at UFCW Local 400 petitioned to unionize, only to be called ”completely clueless, unappreciative, and incompetent” by a member of the UFCW’s management. Of course, there was incident of the UAW imposing cuts on its own union staff last year, as well as the Teamsters’ Jim Hoffa getting tough when the union staff at the Teamsters headquarters threatened to walk off the job in 2009.

Despite all of these examples (and more), it is somewhat unusual, though, for union bosses to get caught so blatantly seeming to act in concert to bust a union within their union as the Amalgamated Transit Union bosses have been accused of doing: (more…)

In his song, “With God On Our Side,” Bob Dylan pondered just whose side God was on in conflict and war.

In Michigan, union sympathizers think it’s theirs.  Strangely, I’ve never found the words “collective bargaining” or “pension” in the Bible.  And no offense, but I think God is a little bigger than worrying about material things given by the state.

But that apparently didn’t register with Rev. D. Alexander Bullock, head of the Detroit chapter of the Rainbow PUSH coalition.

In his prayer before the latest union protest on the Capitol steps, he prayed for God to “wither” the hands of anyone that would sign bills reforming pensions or collective bargaining.  I have to admit I don’t think I’ve ever heard a prayer – especially in such a public setting – seeking physical harm to opponents.  The video comes courtesy of the Lansing State Journal.

Seeing that the protests and cruel signs are doing the trick, Rainbow PUSH and all the unions are bringing in the big guns: God.

Should I be nervous?

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Tricia Willoughby, fourteen, kicked off the Madison Tea Party by reflecting on America’s revolt against British tyranny. Apparently such patriotic words were too much for the Trumka-Obama mob. One man responded by screaming, ” who the fuck are you to lecture me you little brat”. During the remainder of her speech, he continued to drop f-bombs and finished up by calling her a “little god-damn brat”.

It now appears this same man is connected to several disturbing emails received by Madison talk show host, Vicki Mckenna.

<<<Larry Sellnow [ldsellnow@gmail.com]

Sent:   Mon 4/18/2011 10:49 AM  To:   Cc:     Subject:   GO FUCK YOURSELF  Attachments:  View As Web Page  YA THINK YOU GOT ISIDE MY HEAD YOPU ARE SADLY MISTAKEN YA SKANKY WHORE YOU WOULD NOT EVEN MAKE A GOOPD PIMPLE ON MY ASS BUTCH>>>

Another one:

Larry Sellnow [ldsellnow@gmail.com]

GIO gfuck youirself ya walker whore

In a photo comparison of the video and Larry Sellnow’s facebook page, it appears the same man is behind both acts.  What do you think?

Though Larry Sellnows facebook photo was originally posted eight months, his facial characteristics, nose, chest size, hairline and age match that of the man in the video.

In an email exchange, Larry Sellnow denied shouting at Tricia and claimed he wasn’t even in attendance.  Though, you can hardly expect him to fess up to swearing at a child.  He also refused to comment on his emails to Vicki Mckenna or his perception of her as a, “skanky whore”.

However, he did willingly offer these thoughts on the Tea Party:

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