I am not sure what other states charge for an annual license and registration fee, but $111 seems a bit high. It is certainly a healthy deterrent against middle-income families owning more than one car in the state.

But I digress…

My problem with my registration fee is not the cost (though I still think it is high), but the payment deadline.

I received a bill from the state of California on a Saturday that is due this coming Tuesday. Of course, I cannot mail anything on Sunday.

In essence, if I had been on vacation for a short four-day weekend, I would surely have missed my deadline and had to pay a penalty.

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When it comes to former GOP Governor and Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin, if any ordinary Republican politician could generate as much contemporary free media coverage, including a new high profile cover story from Newsweek, while a positive full length documentary on their legitimate political career, The Undefeated, was opening nationally on July 15, the Republican establishment and most all of the base would be clamouring for him or her to enter the race for President in 2012. But Sarah Palin is no ordinary Republican politician.

Based upon my own observations, along with some recent conversations with friends, including Andrew Breitbart, who recently spent some time talking with Palin, my image of Palin has been becoming more well-defined of late. Take, for instance, the only real criticism I could find in the Newsweek piece. It jibes with another criticism I’ve observed, that she too often engages her critics directly, as opposed to allowing surrogates to do it for her. Are these valid criticisms of Palin? Along with providing some insight into her - she’s a fighter, it might also tell you much about how you view Palin. If you’re looking for an ordinary politician, Sarah Palin ain’t it.

This formula—bucking Republicans and counting on the situational cooperation of Democrats—made for a fragile governing model, one further attenuated by the fact that political insiders found Palin too sensitive to criticism and too eager to deal in payback. But to the public she was a heroine, with an approval rating above 80 percent two years into her term, making her by far the most popular governor in the country.

Once I put aside any notion of a mostly plastic, glad-handing politician and contemplated how I myself might actually react in this, or that, situation Palin has faced, a clearer image of her as an every man politician began to take shape. There’s a good chance I’d have handled a good deal of the criticism precisely as has she in this, a new media age. And she is far more in touch with the concept of new media, than is almost any other American politician – hence the reliance on Facebook and Twitter to get her message out.

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Remember that story from a few days ago, the one about the Obama administration giving ACORN a $79,819 grant in March despite a federal law that prohibits the government from giving money to ACORN?

It turns out that sum is a lowball figure.

I discovered Obama’s Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) gave ACORN another $461,086 in January. The funds were earmarked for ACORN Housing Corp. in January under HUD’s Self-help Homeownership Opportunity Program (SHOP), according to the government website USAspending.gov.

In order words, the Obama administration gave fraud-ridden ACORN nearly a half million dollars to be used on housing development.

The administration isn’t even trying to conceal the fact that it gave this money to ACORN.

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Politico March 26th:

“The strategy that we had had toward Fox was basically a strategy of containment,” said Brock, Media Matters’ chairman and founder and a former conservative journalist, adding that the group’s main aim had been to challenge the factual claims of the channel and to attempt to prevent them from reaching the mainstream media.

The new strategy, he said, is a “war on Fox.” [emphasis mine]

Do you think a war on Fox is where it will end? Let’s say that Media Matters succeeds and Fox News goes off the air (that won’t happen – ever – but just for argument’s sake, stay with me). Will Media Matters just pack up and go home? Is Fox News the only outlet that Media Matters covers? Certainly not. They cover Rush Limbaugh incessantly as well as make numerous posts about what happens on Big sites (like this one) and cover a whole array of other conservative outlets. The “war on Fox” is not the end, it’s the beginning.

Frankly, I don’t care that Media Matters declared a war on Fox News. I don’t care that they simply use their site as an outlet to regurgitate talking points from the White House under the guise of “fact checking” conservative media. I DO care that they do this while being considered a tax-exempt charitable organization. Media Matters enjoys a comfy 501(c)(3) status which not only is a vehicle for them not to pay taxes, it gives them a “charitable organization” status and allows others (like Soros) to give large amounts of money while being able to make a deduction on their own taxes.

This war won’t end here.

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Background: a few weeks back Time magazine published, as its cover story, an article by Richard Stengel on the Constituion.  Reading it, I was stunned to discover fourteen clear factual errors in his piece, and I have been on a bit of a crusade since then to force Time to either correct or retract the article.  And in the process I have been examining how other media outlets and organizations have treated Stengel.

Now, on the right we have the Federalist Society, a group of generally conservative scholars and other interested citizens devoted to the preservation of the Constitution.  So the left decided it needed an organization like this too, so someone formed the American Constitution Society (ACS), meant to be a liberal alternative to the Federalist Society.  (This shouldn’t be confused with the National Constitution Center, which by all appearances is an unrelated entity.)  They state on their website that:

The American Constitution Society for Law and Policy (ACS) promotes the vitality of the U.S. Constitution and the fundamental values it expresses: individual rights and liberties, genuine equality, access to justice, democracy and the rule of law. The abiding principles are reflected in the vision of the Constitution’s framers and the wisdom of forward-looking leaders who have shaped our law throughout American history.

So they seem to care about the Constitution itself, or at least that is the implication.  So I found it curious that their website presented Richard Stengel’s piece on the Constitution without any criticism.  Go ahead, read their blog entry announcing Stengel’s piece.  It’s not long.  If they aren’t endorsing it (and it sure sounds like they are), they are definitely promoting it and without the slightest hint of criticism.

But even worse than that, they actually quote from this passage, again without a word of criticism:

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the worsening debt crisis in Greece, it’s spread to Italy, and the latest on the debt negotiations here in the U.S.

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:

Euro Zone Debt Crisis: Italy, Spain Will Mean More ‘Carnage’
Stocks Fall at Open Amid European Jitters
Obama Challenges Republicans for Debt-Plan Details
No big budget deal? Blame Obama, not Boehner

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In June we attended the Printer’s Row Literature Festival in Chicago. City blocks were closed off for tents and booths full of all types of literature. We presented a board with a selection of well known book covers and asked visitors of the event if they could choose to ban any of the books on the board, which if any, they would in fact ban. They were allowed to choose any three of the eleven choices.

The authors of the books we offered to ban were Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter, Andrew Breitbart, Ayn Rand, Michael Savage, Bill Clinton, Michael Moore, Karl Marx, Adolf Hitler and Barack Obama. While there were in fact less than two handfuls of individuals who did tell us they don’t think any books should be banned, unfortunately there were a shocking amount of guests at this book fair who were quite open to the idea, and in fact lined up quite excited for the opportunity to voice their opinion.

Participants overwhelming chose Sarah Palin who received 53 votes putting her at 36% overall, Glenn Beck at 23% and Ann Coulter at 22%.

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From the Associated Press:

With the clock ticking toward an Aug. 2 deadline, congressional leaders return to the White House Monday for another round of budget bargaining with President Barack Obama, who has warned top lawmakers he will call daily meetings until they break their partisan stalemate.

Monday’s discussion will focus on formalizing the tentative agreements lawmakers reached in talks led by Vice President Joe Biden. Republicans say the Biden group identified more than $2 trillion in cuts, but Democrats put the true figure significantly lower—in large part because many of their concessions on spending cuts relied on the assumption Republicans would accept some new tax revenues.

The two sides appear to be no closer to a deal to stave off a potentially disastrous first-ever default on U.S. obligations than they were when the Biden talks hit an impasse last week on the tax issue.

Obama will give his take on the status of negotiations during a news conference at the White House Monday morning.

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We were viciously criticized as naïve in April for heralding “The Death of the American Social Welfare State”.  Yet the failure this weekend of the supposedly $4 trillion deficit reduction “grand compromise”; with President Obama offering to cut $100 billion dollars in Social Security payouts over 10 years in exchange for Republican agreeing to raise taxes by $200 billion a year; essentially means a default on all the federal government discretionary spending Social Welfarists live for. The Federal government’s spendable tax revenue of approximately $170 billion per month; is roughly just enough to cover legally required Social Security / Medicare payments ($90 billion) and debt service (ranging from $10-40 billon per month) – and the most politically sensitive payments for military and unemployment ($40 billion).

The Privateer Newsletter presents some interesting factoids about how America got to this point:

• Not one penny of U.S. debt has been repaid for 51 years: the last time US government funded debt actually decreased on a year-over-year basis was 1960;
• 97% of today’s funded debt has been accumulated since August 1971 – the end of the Bretton Woods agreements when President Nixon took America off the gold standard;
• President Obama for the budget through 2020 projected only a 2.5% interest rate on the federal debt, whereas the actual interest cost since 1980 has averaged 5.7%. If the 5.7% interest cost was used, the US deficit would increase by another $4.9 trillion by 2020;
• President Obama projects 4.2% growth rate of the economy for the next 3 years. If growth is only 2.5%, deficits would increase by another $4 trillion by 2020;
• The US government borrows 40-50 cents for every dollar it spends. A balanced budget without reducing the existing debt will require cutting government spending in half.
• The current agreement to cut $2 trillion of spending over ten years, in exchange for raising the debt ceiling $2.4 trillion debt ceiling will only fund the Treasury until before the next presidential election.

The Treasury will need to borrow $20 trillion or ten times more than the proposed deficit reduction agreement over the next decade.

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After a health care town hall meeting in August 2009 St. Louis native Kenneth Gladney was beaten, kicked and called racist names by Rep. Russ Carnahan’s SEIU supporters. Gladney was beaten so badly that he was hospitalized for the night.

Gladney, a cancer survivor, was selected by the Carnahan supporters for the beatdown because he was handing out “Don’t Tread On Me” flags and because he was black.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reported at the time:

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When it comes to the Barack Obama Administration and “deregulation,” their words are often belied by their actions.

In January, President Obama placed quill to parchment for the Wall Street Journal and claimed his Administration had since Day One worked tirelessly “to strike the right balance” between the free market – which works – and the federal government and its pantheon of regulations – which mostly do not.

Which is a quintessentially disingenuous statement.  The Executive Branch panoply of departments, agencies and commissions was during that time frame in overdrive to execute as many power grabs via regulatory fiat as possible.

To briefly discuss but a few….

The Democrat Congress couldn’t pass the energy sector-killing Cap & Trade?  No problem, President Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just began to implement it as if it did.

The Democrat Congress couldn’t pass the union-payoff, anti-free choice Employee Free Choice Act?  No problem, President Obama’s National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) just began to implement it as if it did.

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Today, in 1960, To Kill a Mockingbird was first published.

We are not generally known here to spend a lot of time defending Socialists, but we are in the business of calling things as we see them and to rooting hard to see justice prevail.

Normally when you hear of a prosecutor being the object of scorn it’s a scenario such as the Duke Lacrosse case – where the now disbarred and disgraced District Attorney Mike Nifong was determined to prosecute a case against the players come Hell or high water, regardless of the sketchy evidence at hand. Nifong was obviously swayed by politics and pressure groups to pursue charges and demonize the accused in spite of mounting evidence contradicting the story and credibility of the accuser.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. took the accusation of rape against former IMF Chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn very seriously as of course he should have. Strauss-Kahn, a member of the Socialist Party in France and, until very recently, thought to be the front-runner in the race to be the next President of France, was arrested, charged and held without bail. The accusations against him were so horrible and the possibility of him fleeing the country was apparently so high that those actions were clearly warranted. Ultimately he was allowed to post millions of dollars in bond and be placed under house arrest.

Suddenly holes began to emerge in the accusers story and extraordinary revelations about her background emerged, and the wheels seem to have came off the case.  As the prosecutor’s investigation continues, it seems more and more likely that the evidence in this case may will lead to a dropping of charges and, perhaps, charges against the accuser for filing a false police report.

It would have been pretty easy for Vance to pull a “Nifong” and turn a blind eye, but he hasn’t.

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When I write the term…. “American Exceptionalism” on any computer or writing program there seems to be a very visible red squiggly line underneath the word Exceptionalism (seriously, try it).   In a world of a million ‘isms, why is this not one of them?  Why is this term not even recognized ?

So I went to the Wikipedia page to find out the “definition” of the word.  The information on this page was stunning.  Most of the page was spent refuting anything worth a damn.  It argued against American Exceptionalism, taking every chance possible to marginalize and debunk this belief in America. It was stunning … literally.

Think about it … is there anything we are excessively proud of in this country anymore?  Is there a person or a group of people you can point to and say … “Now THAT is America!”? (keep military out of this, for now).  There is nothing unsullied about the American Way.  You are hard-pressed to see any movie, show or kids’ show having moral cohesion with values you were brought up with and try to live by. The heroes are more often than not anti-heroes — bad people begrudgingly forced to do good — and at the end of the movie, there is nothing redeeming about all they have done and the good done is relegated to necessity.

In order to find people and ideals to look up to, setting an ideal for American Exceptionalism, we have to first be able to find and identify what American Exceptionalism really is and from what it came.  On a personal level, there are not many Americans who we can look to and say “Now THAT is America!” Or there are ideals and values solid enough, we can point to and say “Now THAT is America!”

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As I’ve written about before, when Iowa Congressman Steve King recently tried to stop funding for the fraud infested Pigford settlement he was opposed by a number of his fellow Republicans.  At least one of them —  Florida’s Allen West — has admitted that his vote was “a mistake” while others such as California’s Darrell Issa have so far remained silent.

Now Missouri Congressman Billy Long has gone on the record with one of his constituents about why he wanted to continue funding a bill that doesn’t actually help the black farmers that it was designed to aid in the first place.

Here’s what he said in a recent letter…

Thank you for contacting me regarding Roll Call Vote number 444, which addressed the Pigford discrimination case at the United States Department of Agriculture; I appreciate hearing from you.

As you know, the amendment offered by Congressman Steve King (R-IA) would have prohibited funding for payments relating to the final settlement of claims from the Black Farmers Discrimination Litigation, also known as the Pigford case.  I voted against this amendment, along with several other Republicans, because stopping payments could increase the risk for additional litigation.  I firmly believe I must take every step I can to curb costly litigation, which hurts businesses and job creation in this country.  I also believe I must take every step to slow out-of-control government spending at every turn.

A fear of “additional litigation” is a horrible reason to support Pigford. In fact, one of the main reasons that it’s important to stop Pigford II as soon as possible is because of the additional litigation that it supports.

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How do unelected Obama appointed NLRB board members bring about Card Check and bypass congress and secret ballot elections? On Thursday July 7th as the House Education & Workforce Committee was trying to get to the bottom of the NLRB actions in a Capitol Hill Hearing, the National Right To Work was busy giving the answers to congress.

Enclosed in the book The Devil At My Doorstep, a first-hand account written by Dave Bego of the extremes Big Labor is willing to go to avoid having a secret ballot election, was a letter briefly explaining the NLRB’s steps toward implementing Card Check through regulations and other NLRB activity (click image to read letter).

On Thursday, The National Right To Work Committee distributed the book to members of congress to provide them the opportunity to read about the turmoil that card check corporate campaigns have on the lives of individual employees, their families, and communities.

In the hearing on Thursday, Larry Getts, a former union steward, who lived through a community dividing UAW campaign, was prepared to answer any questions regarding the anguish individual workers, their families, and his community suffered.

But, Democrat members refused to actually ask a real employee about what happens or how he felt about the NLRB’s actions. Outrageously, one congressman spent his five minutes reminiscing about the wonderful 1930’s and the Wagner Act that created the NLRB and federally sanctioned forced unionism.

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From The Washington Post:

House Speaker John A. Boehner abandoned efforts Saturday night to cut a far-reaching debt-reduction deal, telling President Obama that a more modest package offers the only politically realistic path to avoiding a default on the mounting national debt.

On the eve of a critical White House summit on the debt issue, Boehner (R-Ohio) told Obama that their plan to “go big,” in the speaker’s words, and forge a compromise that would save more than $4 trillion over the next decade, was crumbling under Obama’s insistence on significant new tax revenue.

“Despite good-faith efforts to find common ground, the White House will not pursue a bigger debt reduction agreement without tax hikes,” Boehner said in a statement released less than 24 hours before the White House meeting was scheduled to begin. “I believe the best approach may be to focus on producing a smaller measure, based on the cuts identified in the Biden-led negotiations, that still meets our call for spending reforms and cuts greater than the amount of any debt limit increase.”

Boehner’s decision leaves negotiators reexamining a less-ambitious framework — aimed at saving roughly $2.4 trillion over the next decade — that had been under discussion between Vice President Biden and a bipartisan group of lawmakers. But that framework is hardly complete; the group broke up last month when Republicans walked out over the tax issue.

The sweeping deal Obama and Boehner had been discussing would have required both parties to take a bold leap into the political abyss. Democrats were demanding more than $800 billion in new tax revenue, causing heartburn among the hard-line fiscal conservatives who dominate the House Republican caucus. Republicans, meanwhile, were demanding sharp cuts to Medicare and Social Security, popular safety net programs that congressional Democrats have vowed to protect.

Read the whole thing here.

Sometimes we wonder if what has become obvious to a majority of Americans really has eluded our ruling class in Washington.  “We don’t have a precise read on why this slower pace of growth is persisting,” said Federal Reserve Chief Ben Bernanke at the Fed’s June 22 press conference.  President Obama also recently shared with us his insight regarding the sorry state of the economy with this gem:

“There are some structural issues with our economy, where a lot of businesses have learned to become much more efficient, with a lot fewer workers. You see it when you go to the bank and use an ATM — you don’t go to a bank teller. Or you go to the airport, and you’re using a kiosk, instead of checking in at the gate.

Small wonder then that the latest Bloomberg poll reveals that only about one third of Americans believe the economy is in better hands now than it was under the Bush Administration.  That is a remarkably poor assessment of the job the people feel the President and his economic team (whoever and wherever they are) is doing managing our economy.

These data are consistent with the most recent assessment of consumer confidence, which has sagged to new lows with only 17% of American households expecting conditions to improve over the next six months.  Should anyone be surprised? The Administration seems to be betting on Keynesian strategy from a 1930’s playbook.  It didn’t work then and it isn’t going to work now, and the people know it.

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