It seems as if everything is finally beginning to add up. According to several dozen interviews conducted by Politico, Americans of the Jewish faith are finally waking up to the fact that Barack Obama is not a friend of Israel. And the best efforts of Democratic spin-masters isn’t going to change the truth.

David Ainsman really began to get worried about President Barack Obama’s standing with his fellow Jewish Democrats when a recent dinner with his wife and two other couples — all Obama voters in 2008 — nearly turned into a screaming match.

Ainsman, a prominent Democratic lawyer and Pittsburgh Jewish community leader, was trying to explain that Obama had just been offering Israel a bit of “tough love” in his May 19 speech on the Arab Spring. His friends disagreed — to say the least.

One said he had the sense that Obama “took the opportunity to throw Israel under the bus.” Another, who swore he wasn’t getting his information from the mutually despised Fox News, admitted he’d lost faith in the president.

But its not just this particular speech, it seems as if it is a cumulative effect of all of the times Obama has thrown Israel and its leaders under the bus since he was elected President.

“It’s less something specific than that these incidents keep on coming,” said Ainsman.

Ainsman is correct Obama’s “war on Israel” began just a few days after inauguration and continued through his first year and even through today. For example, these are only some of the articles I wrote about Obama and Israel during his first months in office, and all this happened prior to his getting involved in the Israeli/Palestinian issue.

(more…)

Over the weekend, news broke that the White House intends to push for fuel efficiency standards that would require cars and light trucks sold in the U.S. to average 56.2 miles per gallon of gasoline by 2025.

The latest effort at establishing highly green regulation would add about $2,400 to the cost of each new vehicle sold in the U.S., a cost that could have an effect on the overall auto market, and therefore employment numbers.

Environmentalists seem to be greeting the news positively.  However, consumers might have a different view.  Setting aside that few new car buyers are likely to want to have to pay an extra $2,400 for their car or light truck, they may find their vehicle choice rather limited by virtue of the White House’s preferred number.

According to the federal government’s own fueleconomy.gov website, a grand total of three cars currently on the market in the U.S. get 56.2 miles to the gallon or better.  They are the Nissan Leaf, and two varieties of Smart car.  The famed green Toyota Prius is a dirty polluter by this standard. So would be 2009 and 2010’s green cars of the year.

Is the White House really serious about this number, or is this a negotiating stance assumed at the outset, aimed at enabling the White House to push automakers to accept the highest efficiency standard that they are apparently willing to concede (46.7 mpg)?

(more…)

By Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer

In a capitulation to Islamic supremacists and violent radical Leftists, French and European Union authorities have canceled a free speech rally that we had planned with a coalition of American and European human rights organizations in Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament.

Our human rights organizations Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) and its sister group, Stop Islamisation of Europe (SIOE) were planning to hold their first-ever transatlantic summit in Strasbourg, France, on July 2.

The SIOA/SIOE summit was dedicated to the defense of the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and the equality of rights of all people before the law – all principles denied by Islamic law.

But the Strasbourg police could not guarantee our safety. When the thugs of the Antifa group and Islamic supremacist organizations announced plans to hold a violent counter-demonstration and to do everything they could to disrupt our activities, the authorities canceled permission for our demonstration and conference, instead of standing up to these violent neo-fascists and their Islamic supremacist allies.

Strasbourg authorities told us that they could not guarantee our safety at the conference and demonstration location, the Place de la Republique. Efforts were made to hold the demonstration nearby, but the authorities still considered security to be too much of an issue.

(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined by Pejman Yousefzadeh and Ben Domenech to discuss Jon Huntsman’s recent comments on Afghanistan and how he appeals to the isolationist wing of the Republican party. Then we’ll talk about Michele Bachmann’s meteoric rise in the polls and how she matches up with the rest of the field.

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:

Jon Huntsman’s Foreign Policy
Is Huntsman a Republican?
Jon Huntsman Goes Obamaesque
Bachmann in Strong Position as She Enters 2012 Race
The Tea Party Divide Grows

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter
Follow Pej on Twitter

In 1978, New York City was crumbling and the leading indicator of America’s seemingly irreversible decline. The South Bronx, once a thriving middle-class neighborhood, had became a national symbol of urban horror. From 1960 to 1980, New York’s murder rate tripled. Out-of-control spending had brought the city to the brink of bankruptcy, leading to a state takeover of its finances. The city’s subway was plauged by crime, graffiti, and equipment breakdowns.

On July 13th, 1977, the city reached its nadir when a 24-hour blackout gave way to mass looting. Bushwick, a working-class neighborhood in Brooklyn, was practically burned to the ground.

Then in 1978, Edward Irving Koch became New York’s 105th Mayor.

(more…)

Here’s a question: Why is repealing the Bush tax cuts such a constant obsession for the Democratic Party? Especially the top rates for the most successful earners and small business entrepreneurs?

It seems this is the Democratic answer for every single issue, every problem, every debate.

This, of course, saddens me enormously.

And so, always ready to help, I am recommending a 12-Step program to help them overcome their anger, resentment, and obsession over the Bush tax cuts. Democrats really need a Higher Power on this.

First, when tax rates were lowered across-the-board in mid-2003, the incentive effect kicked in to jump-start the economy immediately. Over the next four and a half years, before the financial meltdown slammed the economy– and that was a credit event, not a fiscal one—8.2 million jobs were created.

(more…)

Last night in Pella, Iowa – a town of 10,000 citizens – Steve Bannon’s documentary “The Undefeated” was finally premiered. Far from the glitz and glamour of Hollywood, nowhere close to the social elites in Manhattan, and an eternity away from the beltway insiders of DC, 340 people sat and watched an honest presentation of the left’s relentless (and often vulgar) attacks on Palin, with a subsequent portrayal of the fact that Palin has withstood those attacks – has weathered their storm – and in spite of them, remains undefeated in her spirit and her convictions.

For those who are paying attention, the setting for the premiere as well as the guest list both serve as a microcosm of what President Palin’s White House will look like.

For example, the documentary wasn’t premiered in front of members of the Republican establishment, but in front of salt-of-the-earth, real-life Americans who sweat when they work, hug their kids when they get home, and probably keep guns in their houses: and just as the mainstream media was denied special access (or even an itinerary) for Palin’s recent bus tour, so too they were not coddled at the premiere of “The Undefeated.”

As a matter of fact, rumor has it that some reporters traveled in excess of 1,000 miles under the presumption that they’d have no trouble getting into the premiere. After all, they probably worked for “reputable” outfits like CNN, MSNBC, or the New York Times, yet they found themselves locked out.

Once again, they were forced to tuck their tails between their legs and whimper while Palin stood undefeated. (I love it, I love it, I love it!)

(more…)

Planned Parenthood’s legal team has been extremely busy these days trying to stop various states from defunding their group. Texas, Wisconsin and New Hampshire joined Indiana, Kansas and North Carolina this week as they decided that taxpayer dollars should not fund the mega abortion chain.

But Indiana is Ground Zero in the fight to strip Planned Parenthood of its taxpayer dollars. After Indiana defunded the abortion group in May, President Obama has threatened to withhold billions of dollars in Medicaid funds from the state of Indiana if the state does not continue to funding Planned Parenthood. To make matters worse, an Obama-appointed judge ruled late last week that Indiana had to reinstate funding to Planned Parenthood because it would not be in the public interest if President Obama withheld billions of dollars from the state of Indiana and consequently hurt over a million patients on Medicaid. Forget the merits of that case!

Planned Parenthood emphatically defends its public funding by arguing that women have no other place to go for their healthcare needs.  According to an official Planned Parenthood press release, the legislation would “take away health care from thousands of women in Indiana, leaving them at greater risk for undetected cancers, untreated infections and unintended pregnancies.”

Oh really? Planned Parenthood in Indiana serves 9,300 Medicaid patients, which only accounts for less than 1% of the total Medicaid patients in the state. And in the counties with Planned Parenthood clinics alone, women can choose from over  800 other qualified Medicaid providers.

Live Action is releasing an undercover video today showing that Planned Parenthood’s claims of Medicaid women losing their healthcare if they are defunded are bogus and unfounded. View here:

Our undercover investigators called 16 of the 28 Indiana Planned Parenthood clinics posing as women on Medicaid concerned about where they could receive services if Planned Parenthood’s funding was not restored.

(more…)

Thousands of Greeks have resorted to violent street protests in the wake of proposed budget cuts needed to right Greece’s fiscal policy. Consider it a foreshadowing.

On June 24, 2011, thousands gathered outside New York City’s Stonewall Inn, anxiously awaiting the New York State Senate’s vote on legalizing gay marriage.

When news came that the bill had passed on a narrow 33-29 vote, the crowd erupted with joy.

Stonewall is widely considered the birthplace of the modern gay rights movement. Forty-two years ago this weekend, a brutal raid by the New York’s Police Department set off a spontaneous and prolonged rebellion that lead to the establishment of annual “Gay Pride” weekends around the world, and the slow and steady march toward equal protection under the law.

As the New York Times reported (and Nick Gillespie noted on Hit & Run), the bill’s approval ultimately swung on Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s appeal to several libertarian-leaning investors.

“Gay marriage is really just a fight about whether the government should be allowed to regulate personal liberty,” noted New York Magazine’s Chadwick Matlin. “On that, libertarians side with liberals.”

(more…)

Will Be In Effect Wednesday, June 29th

On Tuesday, June 28, 2011, the Wisconsin Secretary of State’s office published Act 10, the law that included provisions to limit public sector unions’ ability to collectively bargain. The office says the law will be in effect starting Wednesday.

There weren’t any cameras or fanfare when Secretary Doug La Follette enrolled the law.

“It was business as usual,” Susan Churchill, Deputy Secretary of State, told the MacIver Institute.

Governor Walker signed Act 10 on March 11th. Secretary of State Doug La Follette decided to wait the full 10 working days allowed by law before enrolling it. That was originally scheduled to happen on March 25th, and the law would then be in effect on March 28th.

However, Dane County Judge Mary Ann Sumi placed a temporary restraining order on the Secretary of State from publishing the law. The controversy got even more convoluted when the legislative reference bureau, not named in the TRO, published the law on March 25th anyway, and the Department of Administration considered that sufficient to enforce it.

Sumi, again, took action to block the law, this time making the restraining order permanent. All this put Act 10 on a course to the Supreme Court.

(more…)

According to Senate rules Members of the U.S. Senate can neither simply “keep the change” and pocket the unused portions of their travel per diems nor use them to buy gifts for campaign donors. That seems like common sense to me. These per diems, after all, are paid for by the taxpayers. Judicial Watch filed an ethics complaint with the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee on Ethics in March 2010 after press reports documented widespread abuse of travel per diems by individual Members.

JW’s efforts appear to have paid off…at least in part.

On June 3, 2011, the Senate Ethics Committee sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to all U.S. Senators and staff to make certain they “understand and adhere to the rules on unused per diem,” following our complaint. The Senate Ethics Committee refused, however, to hold accountable individual Members of Congress referenced in press reports documenting per diem abuse.

According to a June 8, 2011, Senate Ethics Committee letter to Judicial Watch:

…based upon review of the information you have provided, it appears that your complaint lacks merit and further Committee action is not appropriate with respect to this matter. The Committee, however, has recently circulated a “Dear Colleague” letter to ensure that all Members and staff, especially those who are new to the Senate, understand and adhere to the rules on unused per diem. [Emphasis added]

(I find it difficult to understand how the Committee can in one breath say there’s nothing to investigate regarding the per diem scandal and then in the next indicate that it had taken action to address the issue.)

(more…)

In an interview with The Heritage Foundation, Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) criticized her liberal colleagues for opposing Social Security reform, warning that they would rather increase taxes on businesses.

Hutchison singled out Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) for his repeatedly claiming that Social Security is not in trouble. Reid has gone so far as to call it a conservative “myth”. As Hutchison retorted:

“It’s clearly in trouble if its own trustees say its going bankrupt in 25 years. If that’s not a signal to everyone that we’ve got to do something now, then I don’t know what it would take. You can either do something gradually so that it doesn’t hurt very much, but will keep it solvent in the long run, or you can do drastic things, which of course Harry Reid would like to increase the taxes on employers.”

(more…)

Virginia’s Former-Governor George Allen again rises to defend Right To Work and the principles of liberty embraced by our Founding Fathers against attacks from the Obama Administration and the acquiescent U.S. Senate.

It is time for all freedom-loving people to stand up against the forces of tyranny that have taken hold of numerous government agencies such as the NLRB. It is time that elected officials and candidates for office to declare their positions for or against individual liberty. If for liberty, then they must act to oppose the tyranny of forced unionism and its suppression of the individual. (For Governor Allen’s full Op-Ed in Politico click here.)

President Thomas Jefferson defined the sum of good government as, “a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

Those words are the uplifting principles of a free society.

Unfortunately these principles are being ignored by the powers in Washington.

(more…)

You probably have seen plenty of evidence of the Obama administration’s hostility to existing immigration law, from supporting illegal alien sanctuary cities, to suspending the deportations of illegal alien criminals, to the infamous Obama administration memo outlining “administrative” ways to bypass Congress and enact illegal alien amnesty.

But if you needed more convincing, just follow the money trail. As first reported last week by our own Corruption Chronicles blogger Irene Garcia:

A Judicial Watch investigation reveals that federal funding for a Mexican La Raza group that for years has raked in millions of taxpayer dollars has skyrocketed since one of its former top officials (Cecelia Muñoz) got a job in the Obama White House. [Muñoz currently serves as Obama’s Director of Intergovernmental Affairs.]

How high has the funding skyrocketed? Government cash infusions to the radical Chicano organization, known as the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), almost tripled the year Muñoz joined the White House, from $4.1 million to $11 million!

According to Irene’s report, the funding came from a variety of sources within the Obama administration:

(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson is joined Christian Tappe, a book editor and roving blogger, and Josh Zerkle from Kissing Suzy Kolber, With Leather and House of Punte to discuss the recent scandal at Ohio State University, then ask whether the NCAA’s rulebook should be rewritten to accommodate the new economics of college football.

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:

Liberty in college football? Not so much
Terrelle Pryor apologizes for actions that led him to leave Ohio State
The Tressel Problem
Did Colt McCoy’s wife just blow a hole in Texas football?
Kissing Suzy Kolber
With Leather
House of Punte on iTunes

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter
Follow Christian on Twitter
Follow Josh on Twitter

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

Riot police fired tear gas at youths hurling rocks near the Greek finance ministry Tuesday, trying to quell the anger unleashed by a general strike as parliament debated new cost-cutting measures.

The latest austerity measures must pass in two parliamentary votes Wednesday and Thursday if Greece is to receive bailout funds from the EU and the IMF to stave off a possible default in July. If the votes don’t pass, Greece could become the first eurozone nation to default on its debts, sending shock waves through the global economy.

The clashes with police came at the start of a two-day strike called by unions furious that the new euro28 billion ($40 billion) austerity program will slap taxes on minimum wage earners and other struggling Greeks. The measures come on top of other spending cuts and tax hikes that have sent Greek unemployment soaring to over 16 percent.

(more…)

Marc Nuttle – lawyer, businessman, and consultant to leaders in a dozen different countries – makes an interesting point about government debt. While Washington is atwitter over the pending vote to raise the debt ceiling, Nuttle says the real issue is the debt wall.

He defines the Debt Wall as that point at which there isn’t enough loose money in the world to fund the deficits of the 185 nations currently running in the red.

The U.S. of course is the biggest offender with a current deficit in excess of $1.6 Trilliion and a total debt around $14 Trillion.

Typically, a person’s solvency is measured by looking at their debt to equity ratio. For countries, it is the debt to Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The preferred maximum is 70% to 80%. Greece is now at 125%. The U.S. is at 100%.

Based upon world liquidity, the amount of money available to fund the annual deficits of the world’s governments, is about $9 trillion max. But projections for the total deficits actually accrued by nations this year is more like $10 trillion – and rising.

To fund that additional debt, money will have to be taken out of other markets and investments. Attracting that money will require huge interest rate increases. Today our government pays about 1%. Once we hit Nuttle’s Debt Wall, the government will have to pay 6%, or 7% or even more. Greece is now offering its bonds at 30% and not finding many takers.

(more…)

This new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity explains why Medicaid should be shifted to the states. As I note in the title of this post, it’s good federalism policy and good fiscal policy. But the video also explains that Medicaid reform is good health policy since it creates an opportunity to deal with the third-party payer problem.

One of the key observations of the video is that Medicaid block grants would replicate the success of welfare reform. Getting rid of the federal welfare entitlement in the 1990s and shifting the program to the states was a very successful policy, saving billions of dollars for taxpayers and significantly reducing poverty. There is every reason to think ending the Medicaid entitlement will have similar positive results.

Medicaid block grants were included in Congressman Ryan’s budget, so this reform is definitely part of the current fiscal debate. Unfortunately, the Senate apparently is not going to produce any budget, and the White House also has expressed opposition. On the left, reducing dependency is sometimes seen as a bad thing, even though poor people are the biggest victims of big government.

(more…)