With the unemployment rate at 9.2%, a contentious budget battle underway in Washington and small businesses- the very backbone of the U.S. economy- burdened by an ever growing list of government regulation, many might wonder what would Ronald Reagan would do today.

Well Arthur Laffer the famed economist who served as economic adviser under Reagan, tells me the Gipper would go after burdensome regulations to stimulate the economy, starting with President Barack Obama’s health care plan.

Laffer also says Americans should applaud Obama’s life story but reject his policies.

“He would repeal Obamacare. Obamacare makes no sense at all frankly.  Remove Dodd-Frank, bring spending down and minimize government regulation”, Laffer told me in an interview.

“Obama is an example of an American success story but he is wrong on every issue.  He is a terrific person but a very poor President”, he told me.

(more…)

Cross-Posted: TobyToons.com (Conservative Political Cartoons)

From the Associated Press:

House Speaker John Boehner abruptly broke off talks with President Barack Obama Friday night on a deal to cut federal spending and avert a threatened government default, sending compromise efforts into an instant crisis.

Within minutes, an obviously peeved Obama virtually ordered congressional leaders to the White House for a Saturday meeting on raising the nation’s debt limit. “We’ve got to get it done. It is not an option not to do it,” he declared.

(more…)

FreedomFest is the biggest annual conference for libertarians, held in July in Las Vegas. About 2,000 believers in free minds and free markets came out to see featured speakers such as Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), former New Mexico governor and Republican presidential hopeful Gary Johnson, Whole Foods co-founder John Mackey, Fox Business’ Judge Andrew Napolitano, PayPal founder Peter Thiel, and many more.

This year’s conference also featured Reason Day, a lineup of presentations from David Nott, Nick Gillespie, Matt Welch, Lisa Snell, Anthony Randazzo, Harris Kenny, Adam Summers, and others affiliated with Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this website.

In coming weeks, Reason.tv will have loads of content from the event, including interviews with Fox News Channel commentator Juan Williams, political consultant Dick Morris, author George Gilder, investment guru and radio host Peter Schiff, the Cato Institute’s David Boaz, and many more. So stay tuned!

(more…)

Las Vegas CEO Steve Wynn drew attention for a boardroom rant denouncing the intolerable business climate fostered by the White House. He’s hardly the first. What’s happening is emblematic of a bigger problem.

On a Monday conference call, the casino magnate credited with revitalizing Las Vegas slammed President Obama, declaring him “[T]he greatest wet blanket to business, progress and job creation in my lifetime.”

Wynn’s statement was remarkable for two reasons: First, the hotelier has been a staunch supporter of the Obama administration from the beginning and still considers himself a Democrat. Even more remarkable, it’s historically out of character for CEOs such as Wynn to express their views in such blunt terms on political matters.

“A lot of people don’t want to say that. They’ll say, ‘Oh God, don’t be attacking Obama.’ Well, this is Obama’s deal, and it’s Obama that’s responsible for this fear in America,” said Wynn, “The guy keeps making speeches about redistribution, and maybe ‘we ought to do something to businesses that don’t invest or (are) holding too much money.’ We haven’t heard that kind of talk except from pure socialists.”

Business is being hammered, he said. “I’m telling you that the business community in this country is frightened to death of the weird political philosophy of the president of the United States.”

Assuming she has outside advisers advising her, Barack Obama’s Money Maven, Penny Pritzker,  is exactly the type of individual Labor Secretary Hilda Solis will likely be targeting when the Department of Labor pushes through its new rules targeting “anti-union” employers.

In fact, it is rather odd that Ms. Pritzker’s anti-unionism hasn’t had a light shined on it by the union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board. Perhaps Craig Becker and his union cronies on the Obama board are just too busy haranguing Boeing and a myriad of other job creators for them to notice. Then again, perhaps Ms. Pritzker’s friendships within the Obama administration give her “special” consideration.

Pritzker, with a net worth of $1.1 billion and #204 on the 2009 list of Forbes 400 Richest Americans, according to her website, is the Chairman of the board of TransUnion, Chairman/CEO of Pritzker Realty Group, and Chairman and co-founder of Vi (formerly Classic Residence by Hyatt), The Parking Spot and Artemis Real Estate Partners. She also serves on the board of Hyatt Hotels Corporation and is a past board member of the Wrigley Company, Marmon Group and LaSalle Bank Corporation. She was also, at one time, considered to be a contender for Obama’s Commerce Secretary.

Now, Pritzsker serves on the President’s Council for Jobs and Competitiveness which advises the Obama Administration on economic growth and job creation, as well as Rahm Emmanuel’s Chicago Board of Education. (more…)

Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA), the chairwoman of the subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade, has opened hearings on the issue of privacy and the Internet. Not surprisingly the poster child for privacy violations — Google–came up often.

Google’s policy toward individual and personal privacy of its users can be summed up by comment of their CEO Eric Schmidt who said, “Google policy is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it.” Unfortunately for consumers, it appears that Google cross that line – often.

Google’s history of privacy violations is long and often appears to be part company policy. Google has admitted it collected personal information and data for three years across the globe while its cars traveled through neighborhood snapping pictures for its Street View program. The cars also collected information from Wi-Fi’s from people’s homes.

Former House Commerce Committee Chairman Joe Barton initially called for hearings into Google’s Wi-Fi scandal. “[Google] made fairly significant verbal assurances that they would improve their behavior but apparently that’s all they did,” Barton said. “They really didn’t change their business model and it appears to me Google had adopted a model of saying one thing in Washington and doing another in their business practices. We might need to drop the ‘G’ from Google and just call them ‘Oogle’ because of what they appear to be doing,” he said.

If the Wi-Fi incident were the only instance where Google grabbed personal information from consumers, it might be excused but there appears to be a clear pattern of apathy towards personal privacy.

(more…)

You can sum up in one word why Republicans find it tough to build public support for major spending cuts before the debt limit might be raised.  That word is “secrecy.”

By agreeing to closed-door meetings, Republicans enabled President Obama to mislead the country about his positions and to mischaracterize the GOP’s goals.  Using his bully pulpit, the President can promote a false picture of what’s gone on outside of the public view while the other side is muted.

Obama’s messaging has been trumpeted loudly by the media.  Meanwhile, details leaked from the meetings that don’t jibe with his message have gone mostly unheralded. Those details reveal that the “cuts” Obama supposedly would accept are mostly an agreement that politicians would reduce spending years from now—but almost nothing would happen any time soon.

For example, Obama’s supposed willingness to raise the age of Medicare eligibility?  Turns out it wouldn’t happen until 2029, and then it would rise by only one year, to age 67. That ballyhooed $1 trillion in “agreed” spending cuts?  Turns out to be maybe $55 billion, with only $2 billion of that in the first year.

Oh, and by the way, the President also wants over $100 billion in new spending added to the package.  No wonder the White House insisted on secrecy in its budget talks!

(more…)

Remember when Barack Obama – with the dignity and off-prompter grace, evincing deep understanding of the issues and the eloquence for which he is fawned over by the media – offered this gem:

Everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma, they end up taking up a hospital bed, it costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early and they got some treatment, and a, a breathalyzer, or inhalator, not a breathalyzer. (crowd laughing) I haven’t had much sleep in the last 48 hours.

Here he was promoting his health care takeover, though he and his also invoke children with asthma to push his global warming, anti-energy agenda — asthma being on the rise as emissions from cars and coal-fired power plants dramatically declined; obviously emissions from coal-fired electricity and cars air pollution must be the culprit. Or something. Expect to see a few in the debt-ceiling fight.

Well, things do get more confused with his own administration guilty of escalating a war on these breathalyzers or inhalators or gassificationators. You see, the best and cheapest inhalers have been phased out because their propellants are Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), substances targeted as ozone depleting substances. Replaced with extraordinarily powerful greenhouse gases, incidentally. Necessitating a…war on coal-fired electricity. Wash, rinse, repeat.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

Police say they are sending anti-terror police to a youth camp outside Oslo after reports of a shooting there following the bomb blast at the government headquarters.

The news site VG reported that a man dressed in a police uniform opened fire at the camp. It says several people were injured.

Oslo police chief Anstein Gjengdal said anti-terror units were being sent to the camp at Utoya, outside the Norwegian capital.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

The Senate on Friday blocked a House Republican bill to require Congress to slash spending and pass a balanced-budget amendment before raising the nation’s borrowing powers. The vote left unresolved, with just days to go, the urgent issue of how to lift the debt limit to avoid a U.S. government default.

The 51-46 Senate vote against the tea party-backed measure—which had been expected in the Democratic-run chamber—came shortly after House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, told reporters he and President Barack Obama had not reached a separate agreement to resolve the debt crisis.

(more…)

When Deputy Attorney General James Cole released a letter on July 11^th announcing that the Justice Department’s fix-it-all for “Fast and Furious” would be new gun control measures aimed at keeping better track of long guns, I thought hypocrisy had hit its limit. (After all, hundreds upon hundreds of long guns are currently in the hands of criminals in Mexico and along our southern border because of the duplicity of the Justice Department and the ATF.)

But 10 days later – July 21^st – I realized that Deputy Cole’s hypocrisy was nothing compared that demonstrated by Big Sis and her video crew at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). I say this because the DHS just released a video ostensibly designed to encourage Americans to report suspicious terror-related activity when they see it: however, the message of the video is not actually about terrorism the way we’ve experienced it in the real world. Rather, it’s a public relations stunt in which every terrorist is depicted as white and almost every one who reports the suspicious activity is black, Asian, or Middle Eastern.

And early in the video, as the narrator describes the tragedy of terroristic acts against our nation, pictures of Ted Kaczynski, Tim McVeigh, and other white criminals are shown on the screen.

I actually believe that deep down inside, some of the hardcore lefties are thrilled with what McVeigh did because it finally gave them an example of a white bomber they can flash on the screen every time a Muslim extremist attacks the U.S.S. Cole or the World Trade Centers or the Pentagon or tries to blow up a plane with an underwear bomb or a shoe bomb or opens fire on Ft. Hood or shoots recruiters at the Little Rock recruitment center or blows himself up in a roadside attack against out soldiers, etc., etc.

The theme of the DHS video is, “If you see something, say something.” But to be honest with you, they should have called it “middle class white guys with bad intentions,” because it is completely framed around the idea that middle class white guys are the gravest threat our country faces (as far as terrorism goes).

(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 and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca and Congressman Paul Ryan to discuss the latest in the debt ceiling negotiations, the Senate’s Gang of Six plan, and the need to means test entitlement reform.

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:

Paul Ryan: The Gang of Six Budget Effort
Why I oppose the Gang of Six plan
Boehner and Obama Nearing Deal on Cuts and Taxes
Paul Ryan: Debt Negotiations and Taxes
At 15 Federal Agencies, Death More Common Than Job Loss
Congressman Paul Ryan

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter
Follow Francis on Twitter
Follow Paul Ryan on Twitter

The media reform cabal is at it again.  The same professional Soros-funded astroturfers who brought us Van Jones to demand “media justice” and SaveTheInternet and Net Neutrality have been focused on a new target.  For months now, Free Press, Media Access Project, Public Knowledge, Consumers Union, and the New America Foundation have been thwarting the proposed merger of cell phone providers AT&T and T-Mobile, saying the move would raise prices for consumers and cost jobs.  As the deal sits with the FCC, which just this week temporarily halted its review of the proposal, AT&T and T-Mobile have tried to reassure consumers and activists that the merger would lower prices, increase access to service in rural areas and give consumers better choices.  The AFL-CIO, which represents 42,000 AT&T workers through the CWA, agrees with AT&T and T-Mobile.  Ironically, that puts the country’s most powerful labor federation on the opposite side of its progressive media reform allies.

But as these supposed media reformers actively work with community groups and state and federal agencies to oppose corporate interests on behalf of consumers, they fail to divulge their own ties to competitive corporate interests. And now, there are reports that a state commission may also have played a role in helping the competition.

As Amanda Carey has detailed at The Daily Caller, these Net Neutrality advocates have a long history of opposing these very companies, with the support of corporate competitors.

(more…)

This is one part of a running series entitled “Indoctrination Fridays,” a weekly review of leftist propaganda incorporated into public school curriculum, much of it geared towards elementary students.  For more of the series, please visit PublicSchoolSpending.com.

Any good community organizer knows an effective protest requires two things: a bully to excoriate and a catchy slogan that resonates in the public mind.

Even though most protestors are “uncomplicated” people, don’t be deceived; staging an effective rally is not a simple task.

First, a bully must be identified. For progressives, a bully is anybody who disagrees with you politically, so there is no shortage of candidates. However, as Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals” explains, it’s best to settle on one target to isolate and attack.

Next, protestors need to come up with a catchy slogan to shout at the designated bully. Most people don’t have the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s “gift” of reducing complex ideas into simplistic rhymes. This skill must be taught.

Which brings us to this week’s installment of the Indoctrination Fridays series:  Gender doesn’t limit you – A research-based anti-bullying program for the early grades.

This charming six-part lesson plan is designed to stamp out (mostly) gender-based bullying from Pre-K all the way through 6^th grade.

Most readers will agree that bullying is a problem and that teachers should talk to students about it in a thoughtful, reasonable manner.

But thought and reason are totally absent from the “Gender doesn’t limit you” lesson plans, which only provide children with a designated slogan to shout at suspected bullies.

(more…)

On the morning of April 12, 1981, I had the privilege of doing something few other 6-year-olds got to do: I watched the very first Space Shuttle launch from the air near Cape Canaveral.

My father, at the time, owned a helicopter charter company and was flying press runs and national news anchors from hotels to the Cape (Dan Rather was nice enough to let me get some sleep in his hotel room the night before the launch). At the time, the launch of Columbia marked the end of a six-year American-less era in space, as the Shuttle program succeeded the Apollo program that by the year 1975 had become a service vehicle for the joint Russian Skylab program.

The optimism that spring morning was palatable, as thousands of people camped out all night and filled the causeway over the Banana River and lined the streets and beaches of Titusville and beyond. They had reason to be optimistic about this new age of space exploration. This “Space Shuttle” — designed in the 1960s, built and tested in the 1970s — would usher in a new era of cheap and frequent manned space flight. In fact, it would become so commonplace people would probably cease to notice. With space flight being affordable and accessible, it was only a matter of time before the idea of growing up to become an astronaut wouldn’t require all those years of studying and hard work; why, anyone could go!

As we know now, it was not to be. NASA’s first attempt to put a civilian in space ended in spectacular tragedy when the Shuttle Challenger broke up during liftoff on a frigid day in January, 1986.

This disaster, later attributed technically to an O-ring failure in the shuttle’s solid rocket booster, but more broadly attributed to a rushed and overambitious schedule and bureaucratic negligence, grounded the program for 2 1/2 years.

(more…)

Today, in 1934, the criminal John Dillinger was killed outside a movie theater in Chicago.

Remember the story of sisters Caitlin and Abigail Mills, the St. Louis-area girls who were told to close their cookie stand by local bureaucrats who insisted they were violating city ordinances? Well, the girls — 16 and 14, respectively — are back in the news and headed to court.

On Thursday morning, according to attorneys Dave and Jenifer Roland at the Freedom Center of Missouri, St. Louis County Judge Maura McShane will hear arguments on Hazelwood’s motion to have the Mills’ cookie stand case thrown out.

I reported the basics of the case in a post April 8:

Each February and March for the past six years, Caitlin Mills, 16, and Abigail Mills, 14, have put a card table in front of their home in Hazelwood, Mo., and sold Girl Scout cookies to drivers passing by. This year, however, the city of Hazelwood notified their mother, Carolyn Mills, that the girls’ cookie stand violated city ordinances and must be shut down.

Despite much national media attention, including coverage at Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, city officials have, according to the Mills’ attorneys, “dug in their heels.”

In a media advisory today, the Rolands said the City of Hazelwood “has enlisted four high-priced attorneys to fight to ensure the government’s power to prohibit these icons of American childhood, and those attorneys have asked the court to dismiss the Mills family’s case.”

(more…)