Brian Hayes, Esq.
Member
National Labor Relations Board
1099 14th St. N.W.
Washington, D.C. 20570-0001

Dear Member Hayes:

Our nation stands at the precipice of disaster, its future generations are indebted due to the overindulgent spending of politicians from both political parties. Our unemployment is untenably high, our welfare roles expanded beyond reason, both with no signs of easing. Meanwhile, our nation’s job creators are burdened with an over-regulating, activist government whose sole existence at this point is to appease special constituencies. It is for these reasons, and more, that you are urged to resign your position as a member of the National Labor Relations Board.

Given last year’s Supreme Court decision in New Process Steel, you know that the National Labor Relations Board must have three members to effectuate its rulings and decisions. You may recall the reason for the New Process Steel decision stemmed from Senate Democrats’ purposeful and calculating decision not to allow President Bush’s nominees to be confirmed as members to the National Labor Relations Board, as well as the blocking of any recess appointments. (more…)

As a trial lawyer, I appreciate the panicked attempts of the liberal elite and its mainstream media suck-ups to focus the upcoming election on the religious views of the Republican candidates.  I face – and defeat – this kind of tactic all the time.  But don’t underestimate it, and don’t think we can just ignore it.  Misdirection is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the desperate, and let’s face it – if the liberal demographic they’re aiming to terrify with the specter of a GOP nominee dedicated to the goal of becoming the John Lithgow of a Footloose-esque theocracy was smart enough to see through such a transparent appeal to raw bigotry, its members wouldn’t be liberal.

The problem for the liberal elite is that its guy has made such roadkill out of the economy in his attempt to transform America into a socialist utopia that if the 2012 election revolves around the fact that most Americans are struggling to stay afloat because of him, Obama is going to be sent packing right back to Bill Ayers, Reverend White, and the rest of his commie pals in his old Chicago neighborhood.

So, the lib establishment’s strategy is crystal clear – play to the primitive prejudices of the Democrat base by doing its very best to convince them that should Perry or Bachman or Romney or any of those conservatives get elected, then Kevin Bacon shall boogie no more!

Bill Keller, editor of something called the New York Times, which used to be a newspaper of some note in the old days before the free flow of information, eagerly capered for his liberal overlords last week with a couple of columns that set out a series of questions to the GOP candidates about their religious views.

Note that these questions are only directed at Republicans – the liberals know that with a few exceptions the religious posturing of their Democrat favorites is a sham designed to appeal to the few sub-constituencies of the Democrat Party (like black women) who actually do hold sincere religious beliefs.  For most liberals – especially the base – religion is just one more wedge issue to be exploited in pursuit of a collectivist nirvana.

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The number of youth (under 24) in the labor force in July was the lowest on record…like, ever. No doubt this was “unexpected.”

Libya is refusing to extradite the Lockerbie bomber, while claiming he is near death. That’s the same claim made when he was released from prison two-years ago.

Europe tries a Hail Mary pass to save its banks. No time for Schadenfreude, since everything they are experiencing is coming to a drive-in by you very soon.

Reuters claims Bernanke’s Fed is just buying time for more options. At this rate, he’ll end up being one of the few Americans buying aything. U.S. Stock Exchanges will open on time today, despite the storm.

JACKSON HOLE, Wyo., Aug 28 (Reuters) – Like a skilled poker player, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke kept some cards close to his vest when facing fellow central bankers in cowboy country.

It’ll be business as usual in Washington, D.C. today, as well.

Is Google+ about users or Google? The company is collecting an awful lot of data about its users.

It appears Barack Obama is determined to duplicate the Carter Presidency on every level. He may not have a brother Billy, but his Uncle Onyango, an illegal immigrant arrested for a DUI, among other charges, is apt to drawn even more comparisons between the two failed administrations.

He was later charged with DUI among other violations. I spoke to Framingham Public Information Officer Lieutenant Delaney who told me that when Onyango Obama was asked at booking if he wanted to make a telephone call to arrange for bail, the Kenyan immigrant replied: “I think I will call the White House.”

Hurricane Irene may not have wreaked quite the havoc some feared, but it’s sure to be enough for most. Some politicians are being scoffed at for crying wolf; however, had the storm maintained its strength as expected and the same politicians failed to warn constituents, they’d be getting pounded worse than the New Jersey shore-line today. You never can predict the weather, unless you’re Al  Gore. Then you know it ten thousand years before everyone else. Maybe Obama should put him in charge if the National Weather Service. Obama is warning that the recovery will take time. He’s been saying that about the economy for years.

Hurricane Irene lost much of its bluster by the time it was downgraded to a tropical storm Sunday morning. But as it continued to course up the Eastern Seaboard late Sunday, its destructive wake — which left at least 21 dead and 4.5 million without electricity — will be felt for weeks.

Ron Paul: FEMA Needs to be Shut Down.

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Is Obama Smart?  It’s a question that more and more people are asking.  His devoted fans like to note that he made it through Columbia and Harvard—supposedly a stark contrast to Rick Perry’s less-than-stellar transcript from Texas A&M, though Obama’s refusal to release his own transcripts does blunt the comparison.

More to the point though, the evidence seems conflicting.  On the one hand, he ran a remarkable campaign in 2008.  He sensed what the American people needed to hear, and he emerged from nowhere to defeat vastly more qualified opponents.  On the other hand, his performance as President has been dismal.  Most Americans recognize that his policy preferences range from the irrelevant to the counterproductive, and leftists contend that he has been ineffectual in pursuit of their agenda.

So is Obama smart?  Yes.  Obama is a certain kind of smart.  Unfortunately, it’s the wrong kind.  President Obama is the sort of smart that our finest institutions recognize, promote, and reward.  There is no surer path to academic success than learning the orthodoxy of your field and the particular bent of your professor; explaining why only those blessed with suitable experience, training, and insight can comprehend the complex problem under consideration; and then parroting the professor’s previously articulated answers shortly before he or she reveals them to the class.  Mastery of this skill continues to pay dividends in the real world, most prominently among business consultants versed in telling corporate boards what they want to hear, and attorneys capable of tailoring their arguments to the predispositions of the judges before whom they appear.

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Today, in 1632, John Locke was born. He is widely considered the Father of Liberalism (in the Classical, non-American Lefty use of the term.) It is hard to imagine the American Revolution without his ideas.

Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi is joining her Kentucky colleague Jack Conway in waging a war on for-profit colleges – with taxpayer funds – while turning a blind eye to problems in non-profit and state schools.  Except, in Bondi’s case, there are demonstrable instances of mismanagement, fraud, and abuse in those taxpayer-funded colleges that she appears to be ignoring for the time being.

A few examples of taxpayer waste that Bondi should be focusing on:

• State-funded Daytona State College, Florida A&M University, Edison State College, and Miami-Dade College all currently face losing their accreditation due to issues ranging from low performance standards to admitting students without required courses to employing too few professors.

• Florida’s biggest state universities are under fire for rampant abuses within their athletic programs.  Numerous Florida State University athletic teams have been forced to vacate wins due to academic misconduct, while University of Miami athletes have been discovered accepting illegal gifts and money.  The University of Central Florida is also under investigation for recruiting misconduct.

• The Florida state college corruption extends all the way up to state elected officials; former Florida House Speaker Ray Sansom came under fire for securing funding for a building at Northwest Florida State College that was in fact an airport hangar for political donors’ private jets.

Sounds like enough material for some high-profile state investigations, right?  Actually, Attorney General Bondi is focusing her government investigation on a handful of small, for-profit schools.  The charges against the schools largely revolve around allegedly false claims used by recruiters leading to enrollment of students who were under-qualified and/or unable to repay their loans upon completion.

Could it be that Bondi and others, including federal regulators, are attacking for-profit colleges chiefly because they have taken a piece of the higher education pie in recent years that was traditionally serviced by state-run community colleges and vocational schools?  The fervor with which state officials in Florida, Kentucky, Texas, and other states are going after for-profit schools suggests motivation beyond the desire to prevent a few gullible students from falling for glitzy ad campaigns.

At the federal level, the Department of Education’s proposed ‘Gainful Employment’ rule would create new narrow metrics to define “gainful employment” based on student debt-to-income levels and loan repayment rates.

What the DOE’s formulaic approach is missing is that these institutions serve student communities with significant risk factors such as low incomes, full-time employment, and delayed enrollment which adversely impact degree attainment and account for their having a higher loan default rate than less inclusive institutions.  Even with these challenges, the fact remains that for-profit colleges have a better record of graduating low-income and minority populations than public institutions and private, not-for-profit schools, at a substantially lower total government and taxpayer cost.

WaPo reports on the back of its A section Saturday that

An Interior Department scientist returned to work Friday, six weeks after he was suspended in connection with a probe of whether he improperly assisted another polar bear researcher in obtaining a federal contract….

Monnett was being investigated for improperly helping a researcher at Canada’s University of Alberta draft a response to a federal request for proposals on a polar bear study. Monnett chaired the committee that eventually awarded the contract to the university.

In the letter, the special agent in charge quotes the contract officer as saying that if Monnett had informed her about his collaboration with the University of Alberta researcher, “she would have warned you that such actions would have been highly inappropriate under procurement integrity policies and procedures.”

Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement spokeswoman Melissa Schwartz wrote in an e-mail that Monnett “was informed that he will have no role in developing or managing contracts of any kind, and will instead be in our environmental assessment division.”

Because, apparently, integrity is not so much a concern there.

Although I do think I recall other such problems arising when such foxes guard the hen house. Oh, yeah, then there was this, too. Er, and this. A whole pattern of isolated incidents.

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America is holding its breath in anticipation for President Obama’s big post-Labor Day jobs plan. September is when Congress is due back in session. It will be then the president will discuss regulations and their damaging effects on job creation. Wait. What? Are we supposed to forget the fact that President Obama has been our president over the last three years? And out of those three years, he had a super majority in Congress for two of them?

So then, what exactly is the regulation industry looking like these days? Booming is your answer.

If the federal government’s regulatory operation were a business, it would be one of the 50 biggest in the country in terms of revenues, and the third largest in terms of employees, with more people working for it than McDonald’s, Ford, Disney and Boeing combined.

[snip]

Meanwhile, employment at these agencies has climbed 13% since Obama took office to more than 281,000, while private-sector jobs shrank by 5.6% (Investor’s Business Daily).

We only need to turn back to last year and move forward to see how comical the president’s new found eagerness is on deregulation.

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On August 24, 2011, Obama’s DOJ sent agents armed with fully automatic weapons into the Gibson Guitar factory in Memphis, TN. The scene was certainly a unsettling one for Gibson employees, as the company had been given no advanced warning that Obama’s jackbooted thugs were going to march into a place where people were unarmed, pull machines guns on them, and confiscate portions of their guitar making materials.

To be honest, when I first read the story, I thought maybe Gibson Guitars had done something terrible like sell 2,500 guitars to straw purchasers who were then going to do something crazy, like illegally transporting the instruments out of the country and into the hands of Mexican cartel members south of the border.

But alas, as the details of the raid have come out it’s apparent that the reasons behind it were far less substantial: in fact, the reasons behind it seem to be flimsier than flimsy.

This is because the reason provided for raiding Gibson and confiscating half a million dollars worth of guitar making material is an alleged violation of environmental standards on Gibson’s part. (The DOJ is alleging Gibson used other-than-legal wood from India for its guitar fingerboards.)

I stress alleged because Gibson has documentation that proves the charges are baseless and the materials they’re using to make fingerboards for their instruments were acquired under the law, rather than in circumvention of it.

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Today, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana and Mississippi. No one was prepared for what would follow.

In the latest turn of events relevant to California’s move to force out-of-state, online-only retailers to collect and remit to it California sales taxes– an effort that legal experts say is likely unconstitutional– Golden State liberals are pursuing a new legislative scheme to invalidate a referendum that appears headed to the ballot and which would nix the “Amazon Tax.”

From the Sacramento Bee:

A group of California legislators plans to push a new online sales tax bill in a move to thwart tax opponent Amazon.com.

Lawmakers today used a “gut-and-amend” procedure that takes an existing bill and substitutes an online sales tax measure. The bill passed the Senate Appropriations Committee today.

In late June, Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill requiring Amazon and other online retailers to begin collecting sales tax on California transactions. The bill passed on a regular, majority vote. Amazon has refused to collect the tax and launched a referendum to have it overturned.

But Larry Levin, a spokesman for Sen. Loni Hancock, D-Oakland, said the new legislation would be different. It would pass on a two-thirds supermajority and would carry an “urgency” clause. That means it can’t be subject to ballot referendum, Levin said.

Backers of the legislation reportedly believe they can get two-thirds of each chamber to vote for the bill in question.  Skeptics however charge that that will be tough in light of Republican numbers in both chambers, and GOP opposition to the “Amazon Tax” already exhibited during previous legislative battles.

Proponents of the tax increase will need to get the support of three GOP members in the Senate and two in the Assembly to clear the two-thirds majority hurdle.

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Sigh.

Look what happened when Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker dared to go to a successful inner city school to read to a group of young kids.

The event was a perfect storm for the unhinged Left: A chance to combine their absolute hatred of the Republican governor with their complete disdain for the nation’s longest running school choice program.

SEIU, AFSCME and Milwaukee Public School officials combined forces with Students for a Democratic Society, self-professed Hippies and others to march, sing, chant and yell at not only the governor, but the students and staff of Messmer Preparatory School.

The Messmer story is inspiring, and one I’ll tell in greater detail here soon. What’s really striking to me is this obnoxious display of thuggery comes onthe heels of the release of the MacIver Educational Choice Census, which shows that throughout Wisconsin, parents are embracing educational options. In Milwaukee, nearly 4 out of 5 children attend a school other than the one geographically assigned to them by the public school bureaucrats.

The Left and the perpetually offended, who despite spending millions of dollars in national money have been losers now in several consecutive elections and policy debates in Wisconsin, must resort to civil disturbances, vandalism and thuggery.  Their well of vitriol has no bottom, apparently.

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Obama finally got something right. Can you believe it? In a recent interview, Obama said he is confident we will not enter a double dip recession. Brilliant Sherlock. No, we are not entering a double dip. That is because we never left the first dip. Only Obama could get something so right, because he is so wrong.

While Obama, Fed Chief Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Geithner, and various other Obama economists, lackeys and socialist cabal members drone on about double dip, or not to double dip, common folks on Main Street understand that there has never been a recovery.

The continuing Great Recession started on Bush’s watch in 2007 and has never ended. Like Herbert Hoover, another Republican President who panicked, and failing Capitalism 101, abandoned fiscal conservative principles, George W. Bush turned to big government to “save us.” And as usual, the more government tries to save us, the worse it gets. So Bush channeled Hoover, starting the bailouts, stimulus, and insane levels of spending and government intervention.

Then, just when you thought it could not get any worse, along came Obama with his “Axis of Evil” game plan. What is the “Axis of Evil,” you ask? It is the principles to which Obama’s life is dedicated: Taxation, Regulation, Government Strangulation, Unionization and Litigation.

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Two names loom large in this week’s news. Two names that ordinarily we wouldn’t think about together.

But, in the great struggle now unfolding before us for our nation’s future, it seems to me these two quintessential Americans are worth thinking about in light of each other.

One is Steve Jobs.

The other is Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.

Jobs, of course, is in the headlines because of his decision to step down and retire from Apple Computer, the company he co-founded, from which he later got fired, and to which he subsequently returned and resurrected.

Dr. King is in the news because of the opening of the King monument in Washington, D.C.

Other than being in the news at the same time, why might we think of these two very different Americans together?

I think they are icons of two essential but different and opposing aspects of American life. One is the individual and the other is our social reality.

It’s these two aspects of American life, the dignity and potential of individuals living free, and the social reality, the rules by which we all agree to live and to which we all submit, that has always caused tension in American life. And this tension is becoming particularly acute today.

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These latest numbers are a good snapshot and measurement of people’s disgust with our federal government and everyone in it. I posted recently on several polls that show Americans are at their lowest in terms of how they view their leaders, the direction of the country, and belief on whether the government is operating with the full consent of the people.

We are treading towards troubled waters when there is this much discontent. Clearly there is a divide between the elected and those who elect them. A few social and political scientists are speculating that America is in a pre-revolutionary stage. That sounds scary but what exactly does that mean? What kind of revolution, should there be one, would take place? A revolution, to me, is hard to imagine. A country as populated and wide as our own renders it incapable of any kind of revolution in the strictest use of the term. Instead, should the government lose its legitimacy; we would have isolated pockets of chaos and anarchy. Presumably, the most likely places would be in major cities where the majority depends on welfare and government assistance.

Of course, the most likely scenario is that our government will continue to struggle until reality grows heavy enough to force our leaders to make necessary reforms. Until then, our government, our economy, and our prestige will continue to suffer. But something has to give one way or another. Preferably, most Americans would like to envision a civic revolution where the people take back ownership of the country but even that scenario has its problems. There is no one direction or majority opinion on how our government should function. There are many with the main two being a socialists-welfare system, and the other being a traditional form of Republicanism.

The interpretation of our political culture is a battle between diametrically opposed systems of social order and governance. Ideology is no longer a justification for action than as a guide to action and away to separate friend from foe. Politics today centers less on conflict of interests between rivals for power than on a contest between opposing views and belief systems about alternative ways of life. Such contests allow no room for compromise, as they pit right against wrong, good against evil; diametrically opposed belief systems require victories and vanquished foes. Such an outlook virtually guarantees pure conflict: Intolerance of competing belief systems is rife, and cooperation or conciliation with ideological foes entails no virtue. Instead, our politics — just down stream from social life — views the contest in zero-term terms. One side has to win, the other side necessarily loses.

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I’ve commented on the failure of Obamanomics, with special focus on how both banks and corporations are sitting on money because the investment climate is so grim. Not exactly flattering to the White House.

Using Minneapolis Federal Reserve data, I’ve compared the current recovery with the expansion of the early 1980s. Once again, not good news for the Obama Administration.

And I’ve shared a couple of cartoons – here and here - that use humor to show the impact of bad public policy.

But here’s a Bloomberg story that provides what may be the most damning evidence that the President’s big government agenda is a failure.

U.S. regulators have asked some banks to take more deposits from large investors even if it’s unprofitable, and lenders in return are seeking relief on insurance premiums and leverage ratios, according to six people with knowledge of the talks. Deposits are flooding into the biggest U.S. banks as customers seek shelter from Europe’s debt crisis and falling stock prices. That forces lenders to raise capital for a growing balance sheet and saddles them with the higher deposit insurance payments. With short-term interest rates so low, it’s hard for financial firms to reinvest the new money profitably. …At least one firm, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., tried to recoup some of the costs by charging depositors 13 basis points, or 0.13 percent, for holding unusually high balances.

Let’s think about what this article is really saying. Banks normally make money by attracting deposits and then lending that money to people and businesses that have productive uses for the funds.

Yet the economy is so weak that banks are leery of taking more money. The story is complicated by other factors, including flight capital from Europe, taxes (or premiums) imposed by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and various regulatory issues.

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