Three weeks ago, I published two posts about a vote in the U.S. House of Representatives to continue funding for the colossal case of fraud known as the Pigford II Settlement. Today, I offer a third piece in which I cast light on the thought process — or lack thereof — behind one congressman’s decision to vote in favor of making payments of $1.25 billion to a large group of people. Each person in the group claimed to be a black farmer discriminated against by the USDA but, not surprisingly, many turned out to be con artists backed by hungry class-action lawyers.

Unlike Tea Party rock star U.S. Rep. Allen West (R-Fla.), the subject of my first post who later apologized for casting a vote in favor of the funding, U.S. Rep. Billy Long (R-Mo.) appears unapologetic in standing behind his vote.

In response to a recent inquiry from constituent Greg Cable, the freshman Republican from Missouri’s 7th Congressional District sent a 432-word reply via email to “explain” his vote in favor of funding Pigford II payouts.

Disappointed with Long’s response and a firm believer in the saying, “Sunshine is the best disinfectant,” the Ozark, Mo., father of four and grandfather of just as many shared it with the folks at BigGovernment.com. Finally, Editor-in-Chief Mike Flynn shared it with me.

Noteworthy in Congressman Long’s reply was the following statement he made about voting against the amendment proposed by U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) that would have prohibited Pigford II funding:

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From the Associated Press:

Hiring slowed to a near-standstill last month. Employers added the fewest jobs in nine months and the unemployment rate rose to 9.2 percent.

The economy generated only 18,000 net jobs in June, the Labor Department said Friday. And the number of jobs added in May was revised down to 25,000.

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The Left and Democrat establishment have made a cottage industry out of bashing the Koch brothers, most especially post-Wisconsin union battles. So, what to make of a letter and phone call from DSCC Chair Senator Patty Murray promising the Koch’s access and accommodation in exchange for cash?

Sure, this kind of fund raising goes on all the time, though not all get a personal phone call from the DSCC Chair herself. Would it be unfair to speculate that were a little cash to flow the right, or perhaps that’s the Left’s way, Democrat’s might call off the dogs? It is curious, to say the least. Finally, I wonder how the unions will react knowing that powerful Democrats are also currying favor with the Koch brothers, while they remain dissatisfied with some Democrat policy moves?

For many months now, your colleagues in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee leadership have engaged in a series of disparagements and ad hominem attacks about us, apparently as part of a concerted political and fundraising strategy. Just recently, Senator Reid wrote in a DSCC fundraising letter that Republicans are trying to “force through their extreme agenda faster than you can say ‘Koch Brothers.’”

So you can imagine my chagrin when I got a letter from you on June 17 asking us to make five-figure contributions to the DSCC.

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News about Operation “Fast and Furious” is now ubiquitous. Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson’s Fourth of July testimony to Senator Charles Grassley and Representative Darrell Issa blew the cover off what appears to be one of the biggest political cover-ups in the last 50 years.

In the middle of it is Attorney General Eric Holder, who now feigns a blissful ignorance about the whole mess: having nothing to say about its beginnings as Operation “Gunrunner” or its latest incarnation as “Fast and Furious.”

For those who might not know, Operation “Gunrunner” was the plan to sell guns to “straw purchasers” with suspected ties to the Mexican cartel. Apparently, ATF was then banking on those purchasers to walk the guns across the border into Mexico. Operation “Fast and Furious” was the plan to follow those guns until they were in cartel hands and then make apprehensions. (For the record, I concur with those who believe this was all an attempt to flood the border with weapons in order to create a degree of chaos sufficient to convince us of the supposed-need for more gun control in America.)

Anyway, the problem with Holder’s feigned ignorance is that he gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico, on April 2, 2009, in which he boasted about Operation “Gunrunner” and told Mexican authorities of everything he was doing to insure its success.

Holder told the audience:

Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels.  My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion. (Italics mine)

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There’s lots of talk in Washington about spending cuts, with almost everybody saying that there needs to be at least $2 trillion of cuts in order to boost the debt limit. Since the federal budget is about $3.8 trillion and is riddled with waste, fraud, and abuse, this sounds like great news.

But, as you can imagine, things are never what they seem in Babylon on the Potomac. As I’ve repeatedly noted, a spending cut means something different for politicians than it does for those of us in the real world. The political elite claim they are cutting spending anytime they don’t increase spending as fast as previously planned.

You think I’m joking?!? I wish. Take a couple of minutes to watch this new video from the Cato Institute and you’ll understand how politicians are playing us for fools.

Rather than getting sidetracked by empty rhetoric, here’s the best way to understand what’s really happening in Washington. Apply this simple 5-step process when a “deal” is announced.

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Proving that the Democrat party has never understood economics, today, in 1896, William Jennings Bryan made his “Cross of Gold” speech. Thankfully, the public didn’t buy it. We’ll see what happens next year.

What a shock. Another violent bomb-planting leftist…

Democratic strategist and bomber– Milton H. “Skip” Ohlsen III. (P-D)

Top local democrat Milton Ohlsen III was indicted today for planting a bomb in a parking garage that injured a local attorney.

The democrat hid his identity behind balloons after planting the bomb.

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It’s not enough for ACORN and community organizers across the land just to swing a wrecking ball at the foundations of this great republic – they have to gloat about it too.

It’s no secret that ACORN and other radical groups such as La Raza, SEIU, and MoveOn are delighted that the welfare rolls are exploding everywhere. An appalling 1 in 7 Americans now receives food stamps and there are 70 bloated federal welfare programs. It’s the legacy of the failed $16 trillion War on Poverty – and President Obama, who erased the welfare reforms of the 1990s, wants to spend $10 trillion more.

These radical mob-o-crats are so enamored of the social decay and dependency their half-baked schemes inflict on the nation that they also hijack songs that Americans hold dear.

As I write in my new book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers, ACORN uses songs and chants to reinforce identity and boost morale. ACORN songs typically contain three recurring themes: ACORN’s growing power, the solidarity of “the people,” and a definition of the group’s enemies.

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“Can anyone recall when any rushed-through plan ever lived up to its hype?”

Our future should not be determined behind closed doors.  Yet that’s where the White House and Congress are holding secret talks about our debt ceiling and about taxes and spending.

We deserve openness instead.  We don’t need another farce when the players suddenly burst from their huddle, line up Members of Congress, and rush through their plan on a quick count.

The two keys are first, frequent and detailed progress reports from the now-secret talks, and second, ample time for review of any agreement.

We’ve been told that participants supposedly agree on how to save $1-trillion.  But they’ve given zero details.  Their $1-trillion claim is suspect because they could be planning political gimmicks rather than true and immediate spending cuts.

In addition to ending the secrecy, we need complete and thorough disclosure of any agreement well in advance of any votes.  Those who don’t do their work on time should not claim that things have become too urgent to give us time to study and discuss their agreement.

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The much anticipated Sarah Palin documentary by filmmaker Steve Bannon comes out in theaters next Friday, July 15th. People can now see the trailer for the first time. I’ve now seen the film three times and one thing that stands out is how Sarah Palin has always been on the offensive and refuses to apologize for who she is. Subsequently, there are tens of millions of Americans who not only relate to her, but her ballsyness contrasts more with the Republican Party than the Democratic Party. If Sarah Palin doesn’t run for the Presidency, someone in the Republican Party should take note on what real leadership looks like.

Democrats who watch this will see somebody they wish they had on their side—and they did once, in Alaska. Governor Palin stood up to the deservedly vilified ExxonMobil whose criminal misconduct with the Exxon Valdez was exacerbated with years and years of legal wrangling and deep-seated corruption that Governor Palin took on directly. Bannon’s movie is not a woe-is-her exercise in victimology; it’s a jarring look at how entrenched politicians and entrenched media can distort reality to maintain the status quo.

I have built a brand and a mission based upon pointing out media distortion and lies. I have never seen a greater disparity between the media Sarah Palin and the real one. Mainstream media types who have seen this movie are admitting as much but claim that it’s Sarah Palin who drastically changed into a completely different person. No, this was a manufactured Palin, manufactured to destroy her in the pursuit of protecting Barack Obama.
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Los Angeles City Councilwoman Janice Hahn is locked in a surprisingly close race in the special election for California’s 36th District. The special election is Tuesday, as in 5 days from now.

Back in the early part of the last decade, America, and especially California, was living high on a speculative real estate bubble. Local and state governments were absolutely awash in tax receipts and felt, you know, we can probably afford just about any crazy idea you can come up with. Councilwoman Hahn became a cheerleader for just about the craziest idea since we decided to turn food into fuel; paying gang members to be ‘gang intervention specialists.’ What could go wrong?

As the above local news report shows, quite a lot, actually. Supporting this program was a dumb move. But, hey, politicians were on something of a spending bender back then, so maybe we can just chalk it up to a ‘youthful indiscretion.’ Dumber, though, and harder to explain away, was Hahn walking out of an interview when first confronted about the program in 2008.

Dumbest of all, though, is Hahn firing up her lawyers to go after the news organization reporting on the story. These Clarence Darrows actually tried to use a “Cease and Desist” threat against a news station…over a news story. This isn’t just dumb, this is a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad-day kind of dumb.

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Google has built an empire by collecting, storing and using the personal data of their users. Every email sent through Gmail; every document created with GoogleDocs; every purchase made with Google Wallet; every thing users do is stored on Google’s servers and used for whatever marketing purpose the company sees fit.

The model goes something like this: offer a “free” product and then just sit back and collect all the valuable data users turn over.  Next, store this data forever and finally use the aggregate and historical data to develop behavioral and preference models to sell to advertisers.

But the cache of data that Google has amassed is apparently not enough.  Now the company is seeking to get its hands on personal data from non-Google users and they want their current users to help to get it.  Some might call it crowd sourcing a data heist.

Google’s new product, Google +, is their effort to enter the social media space. Incredibly, they have built a tool to import all the personal information obtained from users’ Facebook accounts onto Google servers—where it will remain forever and be used just as Google uses other data streams.  Not just users’ own private information, rather all of the information on their Facebook accounts including names, addresses, phones numbers, interests, birthdays and websites of their friends.

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And there is more on the way…

[Madison, Wisc…] A national labor union dumped $778 thousand into the We Are Wisconsin PAC just one week before recall elections take place, according to campaign finance documents reviewed by the MacIver News Service.

The AFL-CIO Committee on Political Education Treasury Account sent the money on Tuesday, July 5^th, according to Government Accountability Records.

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Back in May Judicial Watch uncovered explosive documents from the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) indicating Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was heavily involved in crafting a defense for Obamacare while she served as Solicitor General. The documents appear to contradict Kagan’s contention that she was merely an uninvolved bystander. Well, now Congress has joined the effort to get to the truth in the matter, calling for a full investigation.

According to  The Washington Times:

Forty-nine Republican members of Congress have asked the House Judiciary Committee to “promptly investigate” Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s role in preparing a legal defense for President Obama’s health care law when she served as solicitor general.

In a letter to committee Chairman Lamar Smith, Texas Republican, and the panel’s ranking Democrat, John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, the lawmakers said that “contradictory to her 2010 confirmation testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” recently released Justice Department documents show that Justice Kagan “actively participated with her Obama administration colleagues in formulating a defense” for the law.

Here’s a copy of the letter that was issued from the congressional office of Rep. John Fleming, who is also a physician, by the way. The letter states: “This revelation raises serious questions about Justice Kagan’s ability to exercise objectivity in any case relevant to [Obamacare] that comes before the U.S. Supreme Court.”

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On June 14^th Congressman Robert Dold (R-IL) introduced a new legislation, H.R. 2162, that would nullify the pension received by politicians convicted of a felony. This new legislation is known as the Congressional Integrity and Pension Forfeiture Act of 2011.  The bill is an amendment to United States Code Title 5 for the purpose of denying retirement benefits accrued by an individual as a public official if such individual is convicted of certain offenses.

In the House press release Senator Kirk (R-IL), author of the Senate version of the bill, was quoted saying, “American taxpayers should not be on the hook for the pension benefits of convicted felons. The proposed legislation will expand regulations to include the solicitation of political contributions, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, theft or bribery related to programs receiving federal funds, interfering with commerce using threats or violence, or promising political appointments. The expansion will help block pension benefits for Members who fail to honor their pledge to defend the Constitution and uphold the laws of the United States.” The Congressional Integrity and Pension Forfeiture Act of 2011 will reinforce current laws and protect tax payers. In a note on Facebook Senator Kirk said, “According to the National Taxpayers Union, former Members of Congress who committed public corruption crimes are currently receiving more than $800,000 per year in taxpayer-funded pensions”.

When asked in an interview by Fox News about the fiscal note on the bill, Congressman Dold said that is wasn’t so much about the financial aspect rather the integrity of public officials. “It sends a clear message about integrity. Your integrity determines your identity… It sends a clear message that we are very serious about integrity and how you conduct yourself not only while you are in Congress but also what you do outside of Congress”. Although the bill will not stop current cases, like Former Governor Blagojevich, from receiving funding it will begin the path for a higher standard of ethics for our leaders. Later during the interview Dold re-emphasized the importance of our politicians’ integrity, “We as public officials need to make sure that we are living by and meet a higher standard”.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Ben Domenech is joined by John Garen a professor in economics at the University of Kentucky and adjunct scholar at the Bluegrass Institute to discuss what lessons can be learned from the state of Kentucky where one in five people are enrolled in Medicaid as costs skyrocket and quality of care plummets.

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:

An Unsustainable Path: The Past and Future of Kentucky Medicaid Spending”
More Medicaid Delusion
Kentucky looks at Medicaid concerns
Beshear close on Medicaid plan but misses deadline
The Bluegrass Institute

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“Each time in history that a society has tried to materialize a utopic vision of a perfect world, it has produced the most brutal and criminal regimes.” – Mario Vargas Llosa

Nobel Laureate and Atlas Templeton Leadership Fellow, Mario Vargas Llosa, was once a typical left-wing artist.  But after witnessing first-hand the evil regimes created by government socialism, he is now one of the world’s most important free market advocates.

Watch the short video here:

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Seniors who are on Medicare are finding that more of their doctors are opting out of this government health insurance program. But, currently, if they choose to purchase another health insurance plan, or pay out of pocket to see a doctor, seniors must forfeit not only their present Social Security benefits, but also all prior Social Security benefits they have received as well. While we have been understandably focused on the intrusion of Obamacare in our lives, a lesser known federal health mandate, which has linked together Medicare and Social Security, is intruding upon the privacy and healthcare freedom of seniors.

Fortunately, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) and some other Republican senators have introduced a new bill entitled the Retirement Freedom Act (RFA), which hopes to allow individuals to opt out of Medicare Part A without forfeiting Social Security benefits. In addition, the RFA  is expected to bring an estimated immediate savings of $1.5 billion of taxpayer funds, even if only 1 percent of eligible seniors opt out of Medicare Part A in favor of private health care insurance.

Medicare and Social Security first became linked together in 1993, when a Clinton administration program rule, i.e. government bureaucrats, unnecessarily tied these two government programs together without review by the elected representatives of the American people. However, in 2008, a lawsuit, entitled Hall v. Sebelius, filed by several seniors, challenged the Clinton-era rule. The seniors, who had all contributed to Medicare and Social Security throughout their employment histories, argued that the applications for Medicare and Social Security benefits are voluntary and not dependent on each other, and that forced participation in Medicare violates the right to privacy. They concluded that they should be able to opt out of Medicare, as their health insurance plan, without forfeiting their Social Security benefits.

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About a week ago I published a post at Big Journalism outlining fourteen clear factual errors in Richard Stengel’s essay on the Constitution.

I said at the time that I considered it a journalistic scandal that such an error-ridden piece appeared in Time magazine, a once-respected publication.  For instance, in the article he stated remarkably that “[i]f the Constitution was intended to limit the federal government, it sure doesn’t say so.”  I have dubbed this scandal “Stengel-gate.”

I also considered it scandalous because of who the author, Richard Stengel, is:

The author is not only the Managing Editor for Time, but he spent two years as President and CEO of the National Constitution Center.  And even today, he works with the National Constitution Center’s Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution, whose stated mission is “to help both professional journalists and students interested in journalism understand constitutional issues more deeply.”  That is right.  He is there to help journalists understand the Constitution better.

It has been about a week and the story has even appeared on Fox News.  And yet there is apparently no correction, no retraction of the story, or even a defense of it.

So frankly in an effort to keep the heat on, I decided to explore the other end of the scandal: what on earth was he doing working at something called the National Constitution Center?

I plan to spend several days discussing that issue and to kick it off, I decided to write a letter to its current President and CEO, the man holding the position that Richard Stengel once occupied: David Eisner.

So on Tuesday night, I wrote to him directly.  You can see the letter I wrote below the fold (the format is slightly altered by wordpress itself).

I do not know if he will respond or how he will respond.  But whatever his reaction is, even a non-response, will reflect on him and his organization.  And that in and of itself is noteworthy.

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