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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Ben Domenech is joined by Rand Simberg to discuss the end of NASA’s manned space program, Paul Krugman’s latest idiocy regarding space, and preview of what Rand thinks the future of space exploration looks like.

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:

Mothball The Space Shuttle
Space Policy, Explained (Part 3)
Krugman calls for space aliens to fix U.S. economy?
Paul Krugman Calls for Space Aliens to Attack Earth Requiring Massive Defense Buildup to Stimulate Economy
Perry slams Obama for closing down NASA’s space shuttle program
Rand Simberg’s Transterrestial Musings
Rand Simberg at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (more…)

Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teachers Union is angry.

There’s a gross injustice being perpetuated in Illinois’ public schools, and the CTU isn’t going to take it anymore.  In fact, the powerful teachers union is considering a strike in hopes that it would create so much public pressure that the Powers That Be have no choice but to correct this outrageous injustice.

Like many Illinois citizens, the CTU has seen reports that three out of four state high school graduates are not ready for college.  And the union’s response has been, well … the CTU hasn’t really said anything about it.

You see, the fact that students are leaving Illinois’ K-12 public education system totally unprepared for college, the workplace or life in general – that’s not really the CTU’s thing.

Instead, the union is “upset” and feeling very “disrespected” because the Chicago Board of Education doesn’t have the money to pay CTU members the four percent pay raise they were promised in their contract.

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It probably would not surprise you to learn that the Obama administration is apparently using the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) as a battering ram to aid powerful (and financially supportive) unions. The target is the Boeing Corporation. And Judicial Watch has launched a full investigation into the matter.

On Monday, August 15, we filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the NLRB to obtain records concerning the agency’s decision to file its lawsuit against Seattle-based Boeing for opening a $750 million non-union assembly plant in North Charleston, South Carolina to manufacture its Dreamliner plane (Judicial Watch v. National Labor Relations Board (No. 11-1470)).

Now why would the NLRB insert itself into the private business decisions of Boeing? Because powerful unions are up in arms over the fact that Boeing would choose South Carolina, which is a “right to work” state, for its manufacturing plant. (In a “right to work” state, workers cannot be forced to join a union or pay union dues as a condition of employment.)

We want access to the records so that we can see, among other concerns, just how involved the unions and the Obama White House were in this extraordinary assertion of federal government powers.

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Enough with the nonsensical term of “racers” they are racists!  Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC)  joined by other prominent African Americans  supposedly for a series of job fairs.  What they are really doing is spewing vile false racist charges against the tea party.  Prominent in this pack of traveling racists is Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who was recently caught on tape telling the tea party to go to hell… pretty strong words for a woman charged with misusing her office to help her husband’s bank get some TARP funds.

The most recent stop for this group of African American racial agitators  was Miami Beach.  The night before the jobs fair they held a town hall so they could talk politics. Rather than  discuss politics this group set up on their objective widen the racial divide in America.

The Congressional Budget Office has just released the update to its Economic and Budget Outlook.

There are several things from this new report that probably deserve commentary, including a new estimate that unemployment will “remain above 8 percent until 2014.”

This certainly doesn’t reflect well on the Obama White House, which claimed that flushing $800 billion down the Washington rathole would prevent the joblessness rate from ever climbing above 8 percent.

Not that I have any faith in CBO estimates. After all, those bureaucrats still embrace Keynesian economics.

But this post is not about the backwards economics at CBO. Instead, I want to look at the new budget forecast and see what degree of fiscal discipline is necessary to get rid of red ink.

The first thing I did was to look at CBO’s revenue forecast, which can be found in table 1-2. But CBO assumes the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts will expire at the end of 2012, as well as other automatic tax hikes for 2013. So I went to table 1-8 and got the projections for those tax provisions and backed them out of the baseline forecast.

That gave me a no-tax-hike forecast for the next 10 years, which shows that revenues will grow, on average, slightly faster than 6.6 percent annually. Or, for those who like actual numbers, revenues will climb from a bit over $2.3 trillion this year to almost $4.4 trillion in 2021.

Something else we know from CBO’s budget forecast is that spending this year (fiscal year 2011) is projected to be a bit below $3.6 trillion.

So if we know that tax revenues will be $4.4 trillion in 2021 (and that’s without any tax hike), and we know that spending is about $3.6 trillion today, then even those of us who hate math can probably figure out that we can balance the budget by 2021 so long as government spending does not increase by more than $800 billion during the next 10 years.

Yes, you read that correctly.

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Yesterday, Steve Jobs resigned as CEO of Apple. He revolutionized the world. A good reminder that visionary individuals, working in the private sector-for profit, are the real agents of positive change.

As our imperious head of state takes his most recent ill-timed vacation and the stock market falls, the ranks of unemployed Americans grows, and crises and commotions remain unresolved the dustbin of history is being prepared.

Anger at failed leftist policies and leadership from the American black left in the guise of Representative Maxine Waters of the Black Congressional Caucus and the growing American black right as represented by Congressman Allen West of Florida appear to show that a flash point has been reached.

The founders used the term “experiment in self-government” to describe the new nation they had created because they had no expectation that it would be permanent, only a hope that it would be. The founders understood that nothing is stable across the ages but for change – therefore, they made our system of government flexible.

Maxine Water’s legitimate abandonment complaints about the president’s recent big-black-bus tour across several mid-western states were that no black communities had been visited. Allen West said on August 18th “I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman to kind of lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility.” Congressman West was referring to the Democratic party and the failed liberal policies that it espouses by his use of the term “plantation”.  Both West and Waters, representatives of black America from two opposing political worldviews agree on this point that the Democratic party and its progressive liberal policies have been a great disappointment, if not a complete failure.

The simultaneous disaffection and anger of Waters and West (and those they represent) signals an end to the paradigm of the Democratic party as the sole political defender of the black community and thus the likely demise of the now definitively failed political ideologies of progressivism and fantasist Utopianism.

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Herman Cain must be suffering from Stockholm Syndrome, according to Janeane Garofalo. There is no other way to explain why he thinks for himself rather than doing what the liberals tell him to do. This kind of racist talk seems to be becoming her norm. Isn’t she just a doll?

To see some background video, click HERE (H/T Breitbart.tv)

Cross-Posted: TobyToons (Conservative Political Cartoons)

In this 1 minute video preview, Whole Foods co-founder, John Mackey, makes a moral defense of business in The Morality of Capitalism, a new book from the Atlas Network and Students for Liberty.

“Business has always had a bad rap.  Throughout almost all of history, business has been despised by the intellectuals, it’s been heavily regulated by governments, it’s one of the reasons the world didn’t make much progress…as little as 200 years ago, 85 percent of people on planet Earth lived on less than a dollar a day, 85 percent, we’re down to 20 percent now.”

Order a copy of the book at www.atlasnetwork.org/Morality

We told you, a couple of weeks ago, that following the release of SEIU’s internal “Contract Campaign Manual” we’d continue exploring the tactics and dirty tricks it exposed. And we feel we owe it to you reader (and USAS members, if you’re still around) to give you a little background on this internal manual. For that reason, we’d like to share with you a few extracts from a Labor Watch report on the SEIU that provides an extremely accurate and relevant insight into the development of the union’s tactics.

First, let’s give a little context to the highly controversial manual. It appears that the tactics it teaches are not exactly new in America. Beyond pure politics, their first widespread use began with the rise of the “New Left” in the 1960′s and campus-based activists groups such as Students for a Democratic Society. But for the introduction and systematization of corporate campaigns among unions’ repertoire of strategies, we must turn to John Sweeney, SEIU’s president between 1980 and 1995.

John Sweeney had the brilliant idea of taking the concept of corporate campaigns and structuring and formalizing it in a way that could be systemically useful for unions’ seeking recognition. In the process, he penned the “Contract Campaign Manual” we - and others – previously exposed on this blog. As a 2002 report by Labor Watch and the Capital Research Center put it:

“Corporate campaigns are coordinated assaults on a company’s reputation. The union goes outside ordinary procedures for seeking representation or pressing its grievances. Instead, it mounts a full-scale political and public relations campaign, often enlisting other social and religious groups as allies and threatening the employer with an economic boycott. The implicit threat: We unionize your workforce or we destroy your reputation. Under Sweeney, SEIU helped bring corporate campaigns into the mainstream of union organizing tactics.”

These few sentences could hardly do a better job at summing up what the SEIU has been all about in its campaign against Sodexo. The grand strategy is here: coerce by any means possible a company into recognizing a union by directly pressuring management instead of trying to convince employees. And the Contract Campaign Manual is at the center of this strategy, just look at how the tactics it outlines are relevant to the campaign:

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There is one thing you can say about Google – they don’t give a damn. They don’t care about intellectual property rights. They don’t care about privacy of their users. And they don’t appear to care about the law in general.

Google has been fined an incredible $500 million by the Department of Justice for knowingly and illegally assisting Canadian pharmacies illegally importing drugs into the United States.

Google has admitted that as early as 2003 they were made aware that it was illegal for pharmacies to ship controlled and non-controlled prescription drugs into the United States from Canada. But Google facilitated the sales and importation of these drugs by marketing their AdWords program to Canadian pharmacies.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) takes the position that they cannot ensure the safety and effectiveness of foreign prescription drugs. In fact, even though Canada has its own regulations regarding drug safety, Canadian pharmacies that ship prescription drugs to U.S. residents are not subject to Canadian regulatory authority, and many sell drugs obtained from countries other than Canada that lack adequate pharmacy regulations.

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From National Journal’s Hotline:

Texas Gov. Rick Perry has vaulted to the front of the field of Republican presidential candidates, according to the first Gallup poll conducted since Perry declared his candidacy earlier this month.

Perry now leads former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 25 to 14 percent. Last month, Perry ran a close second to Romney, trailing the erstwhile frontrunner by just two points despite the fact that Perry had yet to officially announce he would run.

Perry expands his lead to 12 points, 29 to 17 percent, when Gallup substituted the second choices of respondents who selected former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who have not ruled out bids but are considered unlikely to run.

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One of the main components of the legislative “solution” to the debt ceiling “crisis” that occurred a few weeks ago is the formation of a new bipartisan Super Committee that is charged with cutting $1.2 trillion out of the budget over the next ten years by November 23, 2011. (Technically, it’s called the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction.)

Well, the Super Committee members have now been selected, and here they are: Senators Pat Toomey (R-PA), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), Rob Portman (R-OH), Patty Murray (D-WA), John Kerry (D-MA), and Max Baucus (D-MT) and Representatives Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), Fred Upton (R-MI), Dave Camp (R-MI), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Xavier Becerra (D-CA), and Jim Clyburn (D-SC).

Of course, when you’re dealing with these kinds of numbers ($1.2 trillion), lobbyists and special interests immediately come crawling out of the woodwork to do anything they can to avoid being placed on the chopping block. The press is already putting the campaign donors of these committee members under the microscope.

The 12 Super Committee members have received $64.5 million in campaign contributions from political action committees (PACS) and employees over the last decade (numbers courtesy of Maplight). At the top of the list are PACS funded by the legal profession, Wall Street firms (such as Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, and JP Morgan Chase), and Democratic/Liberal groups, who contributed $9.6 million to committee members.

(Interestingly, these Democratic/Liberal groups contributed more campaign funds than healthcare interests and professionals. Democrats on the committee received more than double the amount of donations from these special interest groups than their fellow Republican committee members.)

Rep. Xavier Becerra (or, more exactly, his lobbyist cut-outs) is already using his Super Committee membership to began to raise campaign money. As I tweeted at the time:

Ka-ching! Super-committeeman Rep. Becerra puts out for the “for sale” sign on his public office. Bribes welcome? http://t.co/UVHJ7aD

And it doesn’t help that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) appointed Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) to the debt panel.

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President Obama’s home state of Illinois is proving to be an example of “what not to do” when it comes to promoting job growth, and a massive income tax hike was among the poor policy choices recently pursued by Democratic state leaders.

Illinois lost more jobs during the month of July than any other state in the nation, according to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report. After losing 7,200 jobs in June, Illinois lost an additional 24,900 non-farm payroll jobs in July. The report also said Illinois’s unemployment rate climbed to 9.5 percent. This marks the third consecutive month of increases in the unemployment rate.

Illinois started to create jobs as the national economy began to recover. But just when Illinois’s economy seemed to be turning around, lawmakers passed record tax increases in January of this year. Since then, Illinois’s employment numbers have declined. When it comes to putting people back to work, Illinois is going backwards. Since January, Illinois has dropped 89,000 people from its employment rolls.

A petition to repeal the state’s income tax hike needs your signature.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross to talk about his book Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror. We’ll discuss how al Qaeda has been working to deplete American resources, forced us to implement non-strategic counterterrorism policies both at home and abroad, and the rope-a-dope strategy they have employed against the United States.

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:

Bin Laden’s Legacy: Why We’re Still Losing the War on Terror
Book Review: Bin Laden’s Legacy by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross
Daveed Gartenstein-Ross at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies

Follow Pej on Twitter
Follow Kevin on Twitter
Follow Daveed on Twitter

As I write this, my Android handset is flashing with Twitter updates. I have been engaging in a virtual “war” with a fellow user, who has accused me of being a conservative who wants to murder President Obama and his family ( his exact words). I have several tabs open in my internet browser: Facebook, Drudge Report, Google +. Each page is focused on something I care most about at this point in American political discourse: the economy, the GOP presidential debate, the constant barrage of ludicrous left-wing assumptions that the Tea Party is racist. Again, my phone alerts me that a new blog post has appeared on this very site, and I proceeded to read it. In fact, every little bit of my involvement in conservative politics was birthed from my deep connection to social media, and while I reside here in Dallas, it allows me to keep tabs on the Left, Washington politics, and the various conflicts worldwide.

But this article is not about me. It is about how social media seeks to engage those who have a desire to understand every shift in American politics, but don’t have the luxury of living in the political hotbed of Washington D.C. It does exactly that, but furthermore, it has altered our very perception of the political parties, world leaders, economic, foreign, and social policy, science, and history itself. Our means of communicating ideas has changed dramatically, allowing us to post 140 character statements of the things that matter to us, or create groups on Facebook to promote our beliefs and concerns, or even write lengthy essays on popular websites that push forth certain ideologies. Some would say that this doesn’t affect politics in any significant way, but when simple things, such as a video, have the ability to end corruption at the deepest levels, none can deny just how effective social media has become.

But as we accept just how invaluable social media is to our political discussion, we also must accept just how damaging it can be. While both the Left and the Right have turned to Twitter and Facebook to combat each other, the Left has used these tools more for accusing the Right of immense racism, homophobia, sexism, elitism, and terrorism, and less for espousing rationality and reason. Some even advocated lying for the purposes of winning political debate at one point or another. It isn’t hard to see just how erratic some liberals behave through social networking sites.

Even with the addition of Twitter and Facebook to the equation, blogging is the defined medium for expressing political views. Blogs are where the most impassioned debates on current events take place. Most blogs, such as the ones controlled by new media leaders like Michelle Malkin, Glenn Reynolds, Matt Drudge ( and of course this very site ran by our own Andrew Breitbart), have succeeded in presenting a new type of conservative thought, with a fair perspective on our ever shifting political scene. They hold no punches, and at times, are critical of people within our own movement. If only such civility were commonplace throughout the entirety of the blogosphere. Big name liberal sites like Huffington Post, Daily Kos, and Talking Points Memo have used soaring rhetoric and violent language when talking about the things that conservatives care most about, and when discussing conservatives themselves.

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Just last week, I made fun of Paul Krugman after he publicly said that a fake threat from invading aliens would be good for the economy since the earth would waste a bunch of money on pointless defense outlays.

Yesterday, there were rumors that Krugman stated that it would have been stimulative if the earthquake had been stronger and done more damage, but he exposed this as a prank (though it is understandable that many people – including me, I’m embarrassed to admit - initially assumed it was true since he did write that the 9-11 terrorist attacks boosted growth).

But while Krugman is owed an apology by whoever pulled that stunt, the real problem is that President Obama and his advisers actually take Keynesian alchemy seriously.

And since President Obama is promising to unveil another “jobs plan” after his vacation, that almost certainly means more faux stimulus.

We don’t know what will be in this new package, but there are rumors of an infrastructure bank, which doubtlessly would be a subsidy for state and local governments. The only thing “shovel ready” about this proposal is that tax dollars will be shoveled to interest groups.

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As the Tea Party and its Less Government agenda continue its ascendancy, Leftists and the DC GOP,  the establishment, chequed-golf pants Republicans, have gone through serial ideological and numerical contortions.

So as to feign the appearance of getting with the government cutting program – while carrying on with the Huge and Huger Government status quo.

One need only momentarily, cringingly recall the debt ceiling debacle for recent evidence of the Big Talk, No Action nature of all of this.

Where we saw the Tea Party, Insurgent-supported plan – which would have seriously cut and capped spending, started the ball rolling on a Balanced Budget Amendment and averted U.S. credit downgrade – be almost summarily dismissed by the DC Establishment so that they could instead force feed us a non-cutting, Super (Stupor) Committee alternative that fails utterly to address our catastrophic deficits and debt.

Wonder why Congress’ poll numbers are so low these days?  This is why.

Perhaps the worst faux government cutting offenders of all are to be found in the Barack Obama Administration.  Members thereof have been making so many head fakes towards Less Government that many must by now be suffering from whiplash.

(Luckily for them, ObamaCare has not yet gone into effect.)

Leading this disingenuous charge is the Commander in Chief his own self.

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ACORN wants a cut of the huge international remittance business, valued worldwide at US$444 billion.

So the organized crime syndicate is trying to shake down the financial services companies that handle those international money transfers.

In Canada, the local arm of ACORN is trying to shake down Money Mart and Western Union. ACORN, which used to employ President Obama, is hitting these two companies because it wants them to pay it protection money. The corporate shakedown is just one of the dubious methods ACORN uses to victimize businesses.

ACORN Canada’s new president Kay Bisnath complains the fees banks and other companies charge for money transfers are “exorbitant.” Ostensibly to help poor people, ACORN is demanding that Western Union charge no more than 5 percent for overseas remittances.

Canada’s biggest daily newspaper, the Toronto Star, which is left-wing even by Canadian standards, is helping ACORN’s Canadian affiliate by providing political propaganda disguised as news. (Canada’s taxpayer-funded TV network, CBC, is also doing its bit to promote ACORN.) The Red Star, as some Canadian conservatives half-jokingly call it, is home to America-hating socialist writers such as Thomas Walkom and Linda McQuaig.

The pairing actually makes a lot sense. Both the Star and ACORN are on the far left and both have an impressive record of union-busting.

In the latest in a series of pro-ACORN puff pieces, the Star’s immigration reporter, Nicholas Keung, wrote a feature article that used Rassel Mohammad, a Bangladeshi immigrant to Canada, as a prop.

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