Today, in 1805, Vice-Admiral Lord Nelson defeated a combined French and Spanish fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar. It ended Napoleon’s dreams of maritime dominance and reinforced Britain’s status as a naval power.

Big Government has learned of a shocking new dimension to the emerging Fisker Karma scandal: not only is the U.S. taxpayer-backed car manufactured overseas, but it is far less fuel-efficient than its main American competitor, the Chevrolet Volt.

ABC News reports this evening that the U.S. Department of Energy gave $529 million in loan guarantees to Fisker Automotive to assist in the production of the sporty Karma, a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle.

Instead of manufacturing the Karma in the United States, however, Fisker is building the electric vehicle in Finland–creating 500 jobs overseas with American taxpayers’ money:

“There was no contract manufacturer in the U.S. that could actually produce our vehicle,” the car company’s founder and namesake told ABC News. “They don’t exist here.”

Industry insiders have told Big Government that they are alarmed by another, largely unreported fact about the Fisker Karma: the car only gets 20 miles per gallon (mpg) of fuel when its gasoline engine is running.

Fisker revealed this week that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has rated the Karma at 52 MPGe (miles per gallon equivalent)–the car’s effective fuel efficiency range when its electric motor is combined with its range-extending gasoline engine.

However, Fisker communications director Roger Ormisher revealed that the gasoline engine itself only performs at 20 mpg.

Even General Motors’s Chevrolet Volt performs better, according to Green Car Reports:

The comparable figures for the 2012 Chevrolet Volt–which has a less powerful single 111-kilowatt (149-hp) drive motor and an 80-hp, 1.4-liter range extender–are 94 MPGe in electric mode, and 37 mpg on gasoline, with an electric range of 35 miles. (more…)

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

Gibson Guitar is an American icon. Musicians ranging from blues legend B.B. King to rock stars with Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith have used its guitars.

Today, however, the guitar maker is facing a high-profile persecution from its own government. The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing a case that smacks of overcriminalization.

Federal agents raided Gibson’s Nashville headquarters in August, the second raid on the company since 2009. Agents were working off a tip that Gibson broke laws in India and Madagascar, two countries that supply Gibson with ebony and other scarce woods for its guitars.

Even though both countries say Gibson did nothing wrong, the company is facing an uncertain future. The Justice Department has yet to press charges under the Lacey Act, but it also refuses to drop the case. It has left Gibson in legal limbo.

Gibson chairman and chief executive Henry Juszkiewicz, himself a conservationist devoted to preserving natural resources, testified in Washington last week about the ordeal. He also visited Heritage to recount the story and how it is illustrative of Washington’s overreach. (more…)

Last Sunday a local chapter of YAF affiliated with Principia College organized a small and peaceful counter presence to the ongoing Occupy St. Louis demonstration at Keiner Plaza in downtown. According to the organizer the group of mostly collegians and minors was met with violent language, intimidation, and death threats. The police, says the organizer, were contacted after self-identified occupy participants called the school and left a message in the voicemail box of Principia’s main line. The school, we’re told, has the message and is reviewing its options with law enforcement.

The organizer details further via email:

As you know, on Sunday, October 16^th a St. Louis area chapter of Young Americans for Freedom staged a counter protest against Occupy St. Louis in Kiener Plaza in downtown St. Louis. The message was one of freedom, capitalism, and limited government. The conservative group was met with a remarkable amount of verbal hostility while at the protest, however it remained physically peaceful.

The night after the protest, two death threats were made against the group of students (which includes a minor.) These threats were made through the students’ school, one was sent as an email, the other was a phone call.

(more…)

With the Occupy Wall Street movement descending into violent crime, threatening local jobs, and simply causing chaos, conservative Republicans are using their opposition to #Occupy to raise money for their campaigns.

Former Florida House Majority Leader Adam Hasner, a Tea Party favorite and Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in 2012, sent out the following fundraising appeal today:

Dear First Name,

President Obama and the Democrats have chosen sides.

Instead of standing with the millions of middle class Americans who work hard, play by the rules, and want government to get off their backs and out of their way – President Obama is siding with a collection of left-wing activists, anarchists, and extremists who are occupying cities from New York to Miami.

This is who our President supports? Thugs tackling police officers?

The front lines of President Obama and the Democrats’ new supposedly anti-capitalist army is manned by kids decked out in the latest designer logoed clothes and sporting the latest high-tech toys from some of the world’s most successful corporations. They’re joined by born-again communists and ranting anti-Semites who want to destroy Israel.

But behind the scenes, the Occupy Wall Street protests are just an excuse for the same old liberals and far-left radicals to wage class warfare. Backed, funded, and organized by people like George Soros, big labor unions, and the mainstream media, this is obviously a desperate bid to keep President Obama in office. (more…)

Just because they spent millions in their failed attempt to gain control of the Wisconsin State Senate this fall doesn’t mean the Big Labor-Dem Party coalition is out of gas. Or funds. Or manpower.

The effort to recall Governor Scott Walker is underway and is highly-organized, with dozens of employees set to work out of more than 20 planned regional offices.

The Democratic Party of Wisconsin laid out its initial plan to recall Governor Scott Walker at a volunteer training meeting in Madison Tuesday night.

The Wisconsin Reporter website sent a journalist to the local AFSCME offices where the meeting was held. The reporter collected some printed materials before being asked to leave. Those materials reveal a two-phased operation that only takes the recall effort to January 13.  Phase one is underway now, and involves building capacity and organizational structure. Phase two is the actual petition process, which goes from November 15 to January 13.

(more…)

“I’ll tell you a secret. I got some money and I should be taxed more.”

That’s what an #OccupyWallStreet protester told Republican presidential candidate and former two-term Gov. Gary Johnson (R-N.M.) as he toured Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park on the evening of Tuesday, October 18.

“I actually inherited money when George W. Bush decided to have no estate tax,” the protester continues, “and I think that is totally outrageous. So I decided to keep 20 percent for myself and give 80 percent away. But I think if we rely on the kindness of strangers that the poor will keep getting screwed, so civil libertarians don’t work for me for the poor.”

(more…)

The boosters of the #Occupy movement would like you to believe that they have massive support and are turning out really big numbers of people who agree with them. This is a classic “fake it till you can make it” strategy that tries to build a bigger crowd by pretending that there’s already some sort of big crowd. Let’s examine some of those claims, shall we?

One method the #OWS cheerleaders are using is to call the long-standing, ongoing protests that have been going on in Europe for months now part of the “occupy protests”. Statistic twister Nate Silver did it this morning in the New York Times…

The nascent movement known as Occupy Wall Street had its largest single day of protests on Saturday. And a funny thing happened: most of the action was far from Wall Street itself.

No, I don’t mean at Zuccotti Park — which is not, technically, on Wall Street. Nor do I mean Times Square — all of 19 minutes away from Wall Street on the ‘C’ train — where large crowds of protesters gathered on Saturday.

Instead I mean Europe, where crowds in cities like Rome, Barcelona and Madrid were estimated at 200,000 to 500,000 per city (more, probably, than the protests in the United States combined).

And BuzzFeed did it a few days ago. The headline was “#OccupyWallStreet Protests In Madrid” complete with a pretty picture showing a huge crowd.

It sure looks like they were inspired by #Occupy  but a quick Google search reveals the truth in about 10 seconds. Correlation does not equal causation. The protests in Europe would have happened #Occupy or no #Occupy. If anything, the Occupy protests have piggybacked onto what is happening in Europe, not vice versa.

(more…)

The Occupy movement has refused to heed the Anti-Defamation League’s call for “organizers, participants and supporters” to condemn the antisemitism in their midst.

Yesterday, the Anti-Defamation League applauded the decision by the Los Angeles Unified School District to fire an antisemitic substitute teacher who had made her views known at #OccupyLA protests.

However, organizers have refused to condemn that individual’s statements, or to dissociate their protest from her views–even after she doubled down on her initial statements, saying: “Jews have been run out of 109 countries throughout history. And we need to run them out of this one.”

From #OccupyLA:

Apparently, liberals have a problem differentiating the literal meaning of certain words. Either that, or they feel comfortable altering meanings to accommodate things they say they stand for but would rather not actually have to live out.

#OccupyWallStreet began as movement for economic justice but has grown into a situation where demonstrators appear to be confused about what the movement and the word “occupy” actually means.

As thousands of uninvited progressives take to the highways and byways to inhabit places like Wall Street, Cleveland, Hartford, and Seattle, the same tendency to accommodate amorphous definitions of the word “occupy” seems to be infiltrating a nationwide liberal movement.

Growing numbers of protesters are taking a stand against greed, corporate wealth and economic inequity.   Yet amongst marchers who demonstrate to uphold sharing and caring in Tarpaulin Towns springing up across America, there are some who are exhibiting counterproductive behavior. (more…)

The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) is the winner in the recently-concluded Ford contract negotiations. While its rank and file members will not see pay raises or recoup concessions, the union stands to gain millions in dues.

On Tuesday October 18, two large UAW local unions—Local 600 in Dearborn, Michigan, and Local 862 in Louisville, Kentucky—voted to approve their contract with Ford. The two locals had enough votes to push the contract over the line for company-wide ratification.

Before Tuesday’s vote, the fate of the contract seemed uncertain. Ford workers were almost evenly split on the new deals. An interior-parts plant in Saline, Michigan had almost 60 percent of its production workers vote against the contract. The vote totals went from 53 percent against last Friday to 63.2 percent in favor Tuesday.

Several local union leaders felt the contract did not go far enough. “People feel they deserve more,” Gary Walkowicz, a UAW Local 600 official who led a “Vote No” campaign, told Bloomberg Business Week days before the vote. “There is a lot of anger out here.”

One member went so far as to say that national leadership was more interested in gaining more dues than in what was best for workers.

Jeff Redden, a 16- year truck plant veteran and one of the leading voices against the contract at local 862 accused the union of becoming “too cozy with the company.”  Speaking to WHAS11, a Louisville news station, he criticized the union for agreeing to a $6,000 bonus instead of fighting for pay raises. (more…)

Some called it a gaffe when current Vice President Joe Biden was caught on video saying, “No Coal Plants Here in America,” during the 2008 campaign. Now, thanks to a bit of curious timing, the Obama administration may be a step closer to achieving that very thing, destroying up to 1.4 million jobs in the progress. The move will also lead to a significant increase in energy prices; however, it may be too late to do anything about all that by the time the information comes to light. And yet some think Wall Street, not Washington, is the problem.

Here’s the issue–one part of it, anyway. Connect the dots, beginning with this Federal Energy Regulatory Commission item.

FERC has scheduled a hearing next month to discuss the reliability of the power grid, particularly in regards to concerns stemming from new EPA regulations. Critics of the EPA have made reliability a central theme of their attack on new pollution regulations for power plants and pressed FERC to evaluate their concerns. The hearing is set for November 29.

That sounds good, until one realizes that the EPA intends to put some of said new regulations in effect, over the objections of many states, before their likely impact is discussed more broadly. (more…)

From The Hill:

In Thursday’s retirement announcement, [U.S. Rep Dennis] Cardoza said he’s “dismayed by the administration’s failure to understand and effectively address the current housing foreclosure crisis.”

“Home foreclosures are destroying communities and crushing our economy,” he said, “and the administration’s inaction is infuriating.”

Cardoza also took a shot at the news media for what he characterized as a “general lack of attention to moderate members of Congress.”

(more…)

One of the boldest labor thugs in America today is Stephen Lerner, a crafty economic terrorist who manages to sound like a folksy self-improvement seminar leader while he explicitly calls for the overthrow of capitalism.

“People are ready to move,” said Lerner, an organizer with the radical Service Employees International Union (SEIU). “We have solutions. We just have to build it bigger and larger,” he said during a panel discussion Oct. 3 at the Take Back the American Dream conference in Washington, D.C.

If we are really serious about movement building then we think one part is we have to act heroically, that we have to inspire people by our actions and we have to be willing to take incredible personal and collective risks, that that’s the time and there’s moments where history shifts and we’re going to decide if it shifts. That’s where I think we are and it’s a wonderful place to be because for the last couple of years it’s been shifting the other way.

An SEIU board member, Lerner is one of the architects of a subversive plan that aims to destroy the nation’s financial system through intimidation, mass protests, and the mob violence that accompanies it. As part of it, Lerner targeted JPMorgan Chase for attack earlier this year because the bank would be “a really good company to hate.”

Lerner told a receptive union audience that it is necessary to demonize people like JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in order to generate hatred and envy that will help to foment revolution. “We’ve got to be clear on the human beings who are bad,” he told the SEIU 775 convention in Seattle on Sept. 22. Wealthy corporate leaders must be made into social outcasts, despised even by their children, he said. “How do we make it so politicians don’t even want their money because their money’s toxic, it’s dirty, it’s evil.”

“It’s one thing if we say JPMorgan Chase crashed the economy. It’s another thing if we say Jamie Dimon makes $20 million a year, who is involved in the opera and all these philanthropies, and thinks he’s a nice guy, and he’s destroying our lives.”

Lerner also calls upon state and local governments to stop doing business with banks that refuse to pay their “fair share” in taxes, slash interest rates, and forgive overextended homeowners’ mortgage principal. He urges students and local governments –which employ many public sector union members— not to pay back “[u]nfair [d]ebt” unless interest rates are lowered. Such a loan strike “would threaten CEO bonuses and bottom lines of the banks.”

(more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Elizabeth Blackney are joined by Aaron Blake to discuss the attacks on Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 plan and the Rick Perry vs. Mitt Romney battle royale from Las Vegas. Then we’ll talk about Herman Cain’s pro-life but pro-choice abortion position, and the winners and losers from the last fundraising quarter.

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.

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Elizabeth Warren, Ron Paul and ‘supercommittee’ members big winners in the third-quarter fundraising wars
The role of delegates in the presidential campaign, explained
Aaron Blake at the Washington Post (more…)

From The Hill:

The FBI and U.S. Capitol Police are investigating an online threat made against Rep. Bobby Schilling (R-Ill.) offering a $75,000 reward for his assassination.

Schilling learned of the threat in an email alert Tuesday night, according to his spokeswoman, Andrea Pivarunas. Sherriff’s deputies reportedly responded to the congressman’s district home, and have passed the matter on to the FBI and Capitol Police.

(more…)

A search of the email cache that BigGovernment released last week reveals that the #Occupy movement is largely driven by socialists and anarchists who realize they need to conceal their actual message and goals in order to appeal to the political mainstream. The goal of #Occupy is to build large enough numbers where a ‘mob mentality’ takes over so they achieve their real aim of overthrow, as evidenced by a statement from one of the #Occupy movement’s earliest and strongest advocates:

…when the numbers are big enough, they will feel their oats, get impatient, and start demanding more than you could have imagined.  (Never underestimate mob mentality.)  But if you talk about overthrowing governments, capitalism or wholesale changes, most of the 99% will be scared off, and we’ll never have the power we need to affect real change.

This “Trojan Horse” agenda of deceiving the public about the real nature of the #Occupy movement was discussed in casual terms in the emails by John McGloin, a New Yorker who was one of the early organizers of #Occupy this past summer. I spoke with Mr. McGloin this week to confirm his involvement in the #OccupyWallStreet demonstration at the earliest possible stage, and I have included his (unedited) response to this article below.

In a story on CBS New York’s website in early September about the early planning for “Occupy Wall Street,” McGloin acts as a sort of unofficial spokesman in the comments section. His remarks indicate that he is clearly involved in the event planning, and he fields questions and invites people to participate in the #Occupy event.

In the email cache, McGloin introduced himself on October 8^th and said he had been working with the “General Assembly” of the movement a month and a half before #Occupy launched:

(more…)

The Occupy Wall Street mobs are getting plenty of attention from the media. The microphones are on.  The cameras are rolling.  The reporters are standing by, eager to get the mob’s message out.

But as is being chronicled all over the country, the radicals are the ones grabbing the limelight.

KTLA 5 recently did a news story about how #OccupyLA has now spread to the school district. Leftists have now claimed residency at #OccupyLAUSD.  Progressive activists have ruled those schools for years, but at least now they are being open about it.

The KTLA 5 story included comments from two far left LAUSD teachers: Sarah Knopp and Ron Gochez. Both are well known radicals.

In an EAGtv video from earlier this year, Knopp, along with a representative of the International Socialist Organization, discussed ways in which she pushes Marxism in the classroom.

Ron Gochez, a self-described Marxist, ranted in a different video about “global struggle against imperialism and capitalism.” He described Los Angeles as “stolen, occupied Mexico.”

(more…)