Contrary to recent media reports, the Brazilian Blowout hair treatment is safe for use.

You’d never know it, though, because the mainstream media has been perpetuating one myth after another about Brazilian Blowout while ignoring the facts.   Last time, I wrote about a hatchet job made to appear as a legitimate study by Oregon OSHA [Note to Editor: Please link to Part 1] that was covered ad-nauseum by the media.

Yet, when a respected scientific association issued a balanced statement regarding Brazilian Blowout, the media spun it to make it appear that the company was fighting regulatory sampling of the product.  To wit: The American Chemistry Council, which actually manufactures formaldehyde, released a statement ten days before Oregon OSHA unveiled its biased “report”.

“We encourage the company that makes the Brazilian Blowout to cooperate fully with government officials to ensure that the product meets federal and state standards for formaldehyde use”.

Brazilian Blowout fully cooperated and, as thanks, was subjected to a biased and editorialized government report from Liberal environmentalists at Oregon OSHA.  Yet Time Magazine would have you believe that “The chemical industry is actually sort of coming down on the side of regulators and activist groups on the issue”, while quoting hack anti-capitalist enviro-wackos like Siobhan O’Connor.  The company’s side of the story, however, was omitted.

So, with the house already stacking the odds against Brazilian Blowout, Federal OSHA entered the fray.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Carrie Severino, to discuss Elena Kagan’s involvement in Obamacare while serving as Solicitor General, what inside knowledge she may have, and why she should recuse herself from hearing this case as a sitting Supreme Court Justice.

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:

Elena Kagan: The Justice Who Knew Too Much
Judicial Crisis Network
Kagan controversy good for the public, court watchers say
Carrie Severino at the Judicial Crisis Network
NRO: Bench Memos

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Gallup’s numbers as of today.

Republicans are most likely to name Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich as their first choice for their party’s 2012 presidential nomination, with Herman Cain close behind. Among all Republicans nationwide, Romney is the choice of 20% and Gingrich 19%. Among Republican registered voters, Gingrich is at 22% and Romney at 21%.

Ever get the sense there is no leadership anywhere in Washington right now?

(AP) WASHINGTON – Failure by Congress’ debt-cutting supercommittee to recommend $1.2 trillion in savings by Wednesday is supposed to automatically trigger spending cuts in the same amount to accomplish that job. But the same legislators who concocted that budgetary booby trap just four months ago could end up spending the 2012 election year and beyond battling over defusing it.

Judd Gregg marks Obama “present” on fiscal responsibility. Is that a surprise to anyone outside the GOP political establishment?

Throughout his term, President Obama has avoided leading on the issue of fiscal responsibility. He walked away from his own commission, the one led by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) and former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, when he found its report filled with inconvenient choices.

Now that the SuperCommittee has failed, automatic spending cuts of $1.2 Trillion, over the next ten years, kick in. Sounds like a lot, right? Keep in mind that over that same period overall spending will be around $50 Trillion, including an additional $10+ Trillion in new borrowing. This chart shows why we’re still screwed, even with the big-sounding cuts:

DOOM: So it’s like that

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It appears that the most far-left Democratic party in the history of the nation may finally be figuring out that the man who was supposed to part the seas and cure all sorts of social illness isn’t doing too well in the polls. In a Wall Street Journal editorial, moderate Democratic pollsters and pundits, Patrick Caddell and Douglas Schoen, have sounded the call for President Obama to give up his bid for another term, and for Secretary of State HIllary Clinton to become the party’s nominee.

To support their cheer for Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Caddell and Mr. Schoen write:

Even though Mrs. Clinton has expressed no interest in running, and we have no information to suggest that she is running any sort of stealth campaign, it is clear that she commands majority support throughout the country. A CNN/ORC poll released in late September had Mrs. Clinton’s approval rating at an all-time high of 69%—even better than when she was the nation’s first lady. Meanwhile, a Time Magazine poll shows that Mrs. Clinton is favored over former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney by 17 points (55%-38%), and Texas Gov. Rick Perry by 26 points (58%-32%).

But, are the authors under the impression that Mrs. Clinton would be more of a central candidate than President Obama? Likely not, on all the important domestic issues. Do the authors believe that Mrs. Clinton would have less “personal baggage” than any of the Republican candidates? Hardly, given her husband’s record, and the likelihood, in light of the size of the former president’s ego, that a “Hillary nomination” would really mean a “Hillary and Bill” nomination. Of course, we all know that Democrats are permitted to have untold pieces of “personal baggage” that are miraculously “lost.” The “personal baggage” of Republicans is right there on the luggage belt, on time and up front.

The fact that Mr. Obama’s highest level of favorability appears to be in the area of foreign policy, the domain of Mrs. Clinton, is also only curious, at best. Despite the fact that he has succeeded in knocking off a few terrorists and dictators, the president’s foreign policy has been clear on only one point: that the United States must apologize to the rest of the world for its exceptional nature. The rest of his policy abroad has been vague and unfocused, and his initial “rock star” domestic image has not spread to other nations. After nearly three years, the United States’ role in the world is considerably weaker due to this administration.

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HAINESPORT, New Jersey – The Hainesport Township School District needs to cut expenses, and officials think outsourcing the school’s custodial, maintenance and groundskeeping jobs to private, for-profit companies might be one way of doing so.

This has caused Hainesport’s school employee unions to launch a scare campaign against the concept of privatization. At a recent school board meeting, a handful of union supporters warned against letting “strangers” into the schools, and hinted that student safety might be compromised.

It’s a scenario being played out in communities all across the nation. Cash-strapped school boards are turning to private companies for huge savings, while school employee unions are fighting for their positions by resorting to every cheap scare tactic listed in the National Education Association’s “ Beat Privatization: A Step-by-Step Crisis Action Plan.”

The National Education Association, the nation’s largest labor union, has been hemorrhaging members for several years, and is desperate to retain as many dues-payers as possible – even if it means overwhelming thin school budgets with unnecessary labor costs.

When a school board tries to save money by hiring a few non-union workers to fill support positions, the unions react by trying to demonize private sector employees, as if they are not dedicated or moral enough to work in public schools.

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On July 17th, while debt ceiling talks were at their height, I had a post on Big Government in which I wrote:

Look folks, we literally have Obama right where we want him. Not only is he beatable, he has actually already beaten himself by spending this country into the ground. Now is no time to do him a favor by raising the debt ceiling and letting him off the hook.

Republicans had the world by the tail for a brief moment and, but lacking the courage to do it, they could have stood their ground and guaranteed Obama was going to be a one term president.

Instead, Speaker Boehner—with the encouragement of that great conservative stalwart John McCain—entered into an asinine agreement to allow a Super Committee to form and make decisions in lieu of Congress’s unwillingness to do so. As a result, Obama not only got a bit of breathing room but actually received a reprieve yesterday, when the Super Committee failed to reach an agreement on spending cuts. Now Obama can stand back and fault the Republicans for the committee’s failure, thereby shifting the blame for our faltering economy from his horrid policies to their unwillingness to meet the Democrats half-way.

Thus, as soon as the Super Committee’s gridlock was announced, Obama pounced on the chance to paint Republicans as inside-the-beltway politicians who are out of touch with what the people need: “There are still too many Republicans in Congress who have refused to listen to the voices of reason and compromise that are coming from outside of Washington.”

As a result of the Super Committee’s failure—which is really Obama’s success—our military will face a $600 billion cut in funding. So now McCain is all worked up and issuing press releases that describe these cuts as a “threat to the national security interests of the United States” and vowing that they must not “be allowed to occur.”

Earth to John McCain: We told you this back in July when we, as conservatives, opposed Boehner’s attempts to reach across the aisle and throw Obama a life preserver. You, however, responded to our concern by describing Tea Partiers as “hobbits” given to “crack political thinking.”

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Since I’ve written before about Canada’s remarkable period of fiscal restraint during the 1990s, I am very pleased to see that the establishment press is finally giving some attention to what our northern neighbors did to reduce the burden of government spending.

Here are some key passages from a Reuters story.

“Everyone wants to know how we did it,” said political economist Brian Lee Crowley, head of the Ottawa-based think tank Macdonald-Laurier Institute, who has examined the lessons of the 1990s. But to win its budget wars, Canada first had to realize how dire its situation was and then dramatically shrink the size of government rather than just limit the pace of spending growth. It would eventually oversee the biggest reduction in Canadian government spending since demobilization after World War Two. …The turnaround began with Chretien’s arrival as prime minister in November 1993, when his Liberal Party – in some ways Canada’s equivalent of the Democrats in the U.S. – swept to victory with a strong majority. The new government took one look at the dreadful state of the books and decided to act. “I said to myself, I will do it. I might be prime minister for only one term, but I will do it,” said Chretien. …The Liberals thought their first, rushed budget – delivered in February 1994, three months after taking office, was tough. It reformed unemployment insurance entitlements, and cut defense and foreign aid… The upstart Reform Party, then the main national opposition party, had campaigned on “zero-in-three” – balance the budget in three years. “We were always trying to go faster,” said Reform’s leader at the time, Preston Manning. …The Liberals were stung by the criticism and, at first reluctantly but then with gusto, they got out the chain saws. …Cutting government spending programs went against the Liberal grain. Contrary to the Reform Party, the Liberals saw a more important role for government. Paul Martin now has a lasting reputation as the finance minister who slayed Canada’s deficit, but the conversion from spender to cutter was painful. His father, also called Paul, had helped create Medicare, Canada’s publicly funded health care system, and suddenly here was Paul Junior contemplating massive cuts.

This is a remarkable story. My only real quibble is that the fiscal restraint actually started the year before the Liberal Party took power, as the chart (click to enlarge) illustrates.

But the key thing to understand is that Canada enjoyed a five-year period when government spending increased by an average of only 1 percent each year.

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We last week passed the $15 trillion national debt mark.  It continues hurtling upward, almost completely unabated.

We the People did our job and then some in the historic 2010 election, delivering more than 70 new Republicans to the Congress – on their promises to rein in out-of-control Washington spending.

We sent these folks to D.C. in large part to prohibit President Barack Obama and his Democrats from continuing to explode the budget – and the deficits and debt along with it – the way they had when exclusively in the Majority in 2009 and 2010.

So when President Obama campaigns asking for reelection and more D.C. Democrats – to undo this “do nothing” Congress – remember that stopping Obama and his Party colleagues was what We the People elected these “do-nothings” to do.

Serving as an impediment (modest though it may be) to the Democrat fiscal train wreck is, in fact, doing something.

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From the Houston Chronicle:

Two Houston bike patrol officers subdued a gunman who was pointing and shooting a rifle in downtown’s Tranquillity Park near the Occupy Houston encampment late Monday afternoon, bringing moments of terror to an otherwise routine rush hour.

Despite hails of gunfire from both law enforcement and the rifle-waving man, no bystanders or officers were injured.

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In 2007, the deficit was $160 billion. In 2008 it was $454 billion. Then Obama took office and for two years under a Democratic-led Senate and Congress, he got everything on his wish-list passed.

The result:

• 2009 deficit: $1.4 trillion — with a “t”
• 2010: deficit: $1.3 trillion
• 2011 deficit: 1.3 trillion

So what was the all-important goal of this fabled and fabulously stupid Super Committee? To lower the deficit by … $1.2 trillion.

Yep, that’s it. A measly $1.2 trillion — to which I say, why even bother? If that’s all you’re going to lower the deficit by, you’ve already accepted the premise that most of what Obama’s done to explode the size of government is acceptable.

To the bigger point.

One of the only hopes this failed president has to win re-election is to convince enough voters his failed economy isn’t his fault. So what better way to pin the blame on a “do nothing” Congress (meaning: Republicans) than with this Super Committee nonsense? What the Democrats effectively did with this committee was to put Republicans in a no-win situation. Either they could betray the message of 2010 and raise taxes, or they would be blamed for the committee’s failure.

And as we are seeing today, the corrupt MSM was in on the scheme.

Ladies and gentleman, Exhibit A: an absolutely giddy Carol Costello…

—–

Everything Costello’s asking and pushing in that segment is based on the immoral and ignorant premise that raising taxes will somehow — and for the first time in history! — help the economy grow. Because, you know, taking money out of the private sector and throwing it into the black hole of that same genius public sector that found green energy so worthwhile and wasted $900 billion on the failed stimulus will create jobs.

Except…

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Today, in 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

With Operation Fast and Furious headlining the news, there is no doubt civilian arms have been trafficked into Mexico. However, many of the arms used by Mexican cartels are NOT supplied by civilian gun outlets in the United States. Based upon the statistics I have compiled, our State and Defense Departments may be the premier suppliers of weaponry to Mexican drug cartels — not the US civilian.

From 2003-2009, over 150,000 Mexican soldiers deserted from their ranks. Drug cartels became so confident in their recruitment of military personnel that they posted help wanted ads for hit men, traffickers, and guards. When these soldiers desert, their US-supplied weapons (grenades, sniper rifles, assault weapons, etc.) often accompany them over to the cartels. In 2008 and 2009, 13,792 and 20,530 small arms were exported to Mexico from the US. Over 92% of these arms were civilian legal semi-automatic or non-automatic firearms, a number eerily similar to the debunked 90% number echoed by the ATF. A 2008 State Department memo to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi shows a $1,000,000 shipment of select fire M4A2 assault rifles to the Mexican Federal Police Force, (AKA Federales) one of the most corrupt Mexican government agencies.

The most recent numbers from 2010 show the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) — the State Department agency responsible for overseeing the exportation of military goods — authorized the transfer of 2.5 million units of small arms, weapon optics, silencers, and related components. In that same year, over 11 million units of ammunition and 127,000 units of explosive ordnance were cleared for exportation to Mexico. This amounted to $25 million worth of small arms, ammunition, and explosives shipped to Mexico authorized by our State Department.

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In case you thought the Black Panther voter intimidation case, Fast and Furious, cracking down on Gibson Guitars, and attempting to give Kaleid Sheikh Mohammed a civilian trial weren’t enough, get ready to add another entry to Attorney General Eric Holder’s greatest hits:

NEW YORK (AP) – Federal authorities declined to pursue a case against an “al-Qaida sympathizer” accused of wanting to bomb police stations and post offices in New York City because they believed he was mentally unstable and incapable of pulling off the alleged plot, two law enforcement officials said Monday.

New York Police Department investigators sought to get the FBI involved at least twice as their undercover investigation of Jose Pimentel unfolded, the officials said. Both times, the FBI concluded that he wasn’t a serious threat, they said.

The FBI concluded that 27-year-old Pimentel “didn’t have the predisposition or the ability to do anything on his own,” one of the officials said.

The officials were not authorized to speak about the case and spoke on condition of anonymity. The FBI’s New York office declined to comment on Monday. New York City authorities said that the FBI was involved in the case, but did not specifically say they declined to pursue the charges.

“We just believed that we couldn’t let it go any further. We had to act,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. (more…)

In July, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH), chair of the Republican Study Committee, was made to apologize to party leaders for opposing the debt ceiling deal that created the now-failed super committee.

Photo credit: UPI/Kevin Dietsch

Now that events have proved his opposition to have been well-founded, Rep. Jordan is reminding the public that House Republicans have already passed the Cut, Cap, and Balance plan, along with many other bills proposed and/or passed to balance the budget and generate economic growth at the same time:

Jordan Responds to the Super Committee’s Lack of Agreement

Washington, DC – Republican Study Committee Chairman Jim Jordan offered the following statement after the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction failed to come to agreement, triggering $1.2 trillion of automatic spending cuts over a ten year period beginning in 2013:

“Throughout the year, the Republican Study Committee has offered solutions to address the debt crisis, including the Cut, Cap and Balance plan that passed the House with bipartisan support.  But instead of a solution, Washington wanted a deal, and thus the Super Committee was created.”
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Four years ago, Mitt Romney was the last, best hope of the conservative movement as a surging John McCain looked set to clinch the Republican nomination. Romney’s concession speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) (parts a, b, and c) cemented his bond with the delegates, who understood their ideals were about to yield to the compromise politics of the moderate–and ostensibly more electable–McCain.

Today, Romney is considered the compromise candidate, regarded with suspicion by the conservative base as the emissary of the Republican establishment. That is not, as the left (and David Frum) alleges, because the party has become more “extreme.” Rather, it is because Barack Obama’s far-left agenda has produced a strong desire for new leadership that will aggressively oppose the dramatic growth in the size and cost of government.

The Obama agenda was a challenge the Republican Party seemed unprepared, unable, and–at times–unwilling to resist in early 2009. That is why the Tea Party emerged–first in response to the Obama “porkulus,” then ObamaCare. It could not reverse those policies right away, but after the 2010 elections it ensured Republicans would refuse to raise taxes to close the deficit, or to approve bailouts of profligate state governments.

For the Tea Party, the next goal is to repeal ObamaCare and to pass entitlement and spending reforms that ensure the financial stability of the U.S. government, without raising taxes that will constrain economic growth. In so doing, Tea Party conservatives hope to do more than restrain the expansion of government, but to also restore the robust vision of individual freedom that enabled America’s rise as a global industrial power.

That is a different mission than the one many Republicans shared in 2008, when the unifying goal was to protect the military gains of the war on terror from the radical anti-war agenda that had seized the resurgent Democrats. McCain was a better fit for that agenda, and Romney is a weak standard-bearer for the new one, having supported big government interventions–albeit at the state level–in both health care and energy.

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The novelty of the #OccupyWallStreet movement is long gone for most Americans. Although it began ostensibly as a revolt against corrupt Wall Street bankers, the drugs, the sex, the defecation in the streets, and the intentional destruction of property associated with it have long since wiped that lie away. When we look at the occupiers now, we see 1960s retreads. We see Bill Ayers in his youth.  We see the community Obama has organized. And we are disgusted.

In short, the occupy movement is now typified by the kinds of things we’ve seen with the occupiers in Santa Cruz, CA, where “county workers and others have documented drug and alcohol use, public urination, littering, bathing in public restrooms, fights and more.” Moreover, in Santa Cruz, the occupiers left so much human feces on the ground that a Hazmat team had to be called in over the weekend to clean up 200 pounds of human waste.

And while the Hazmat team was cleaning up the filth in Santa Cruz, Newt Gingrich was at a “Thanksgiving Table” forum in Iowa doing the same thing:

Let me describe Occupy Wall Street. All the occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything. They take over a public park they didn’t pay for, to go nearby to use bathrooms they didn’t pay for, to beg for food from places that they don’t want to pay for. [All] to obstruct those who going to work to pay the taxes to sustain the bathrooms and to sustain the park, so they can self-righteously exclaim that they are the paragons of virtue to which we owe everything.

This hits the nail right on the head—they want to live free of charge, period. (Newt’s words were given even greater veracity today when occupiers announced their pledge to NOT pay back their student loans and restated their demands for “free public colleges, no-interest loans, greater transparency at private and for-profit colleges and complete forgiveness of all existing student debt.”)

And when we don’t give them the free stuff they demand, they pee themselves and defecate in the grass to teach us a lesson.

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(Washington D.C.) – Today, the Co-Chairs of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, Representative Jeb Hensarling and Senator Patty Murray, released the following statement.

“After months of hard work and intense deliberations, we have come to the conclusion today that it will not be possible to make any bipartisan agreement available to the public before the committee’s deadline.

“Despite our inability to bridge the committee’s significant differences, we end this process united in our belief that the nation’s fiscal crisis must be addressed and that we cannot leave it for the next generation to solve. We remain hopeful that Congress can build on this committee’s work and can find a way to tackle this issue in a way that works for the American people and our economy.

“We are deeply disappointed that we have been unable to come to a bipartisan deficit reduction agreement, but as we approach the uniquely American holiday of Thanksgiving, we want to express our appreciation to every member of this committee, each of whom came into the process committed to achieving a solution that has eluded many groups before us. Most importantly, we want to thank the American people for sharing thoughts and ideas and for providing support and good will as we worked to accomplish this difficult task.

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Some background to the presentation below:

After observing the trends on the Left for many years, in early February 2009, during a meeting with a friend familiar with the “hydra” that the Left had built, we lamented on how there was nothing on the Right to combat the behemoth that had been built by unions, the institutional Left, with the help of the mainstream media, to tear down the Right and propel Barack Obama and his fellow Democrats to their huge 2008 victories.

Knowing what was on the agenda, “we’re finished as a nation,” was the overriding feeling. A short time later, the first Tea Party rally was held.

During the summer of 2009, I attended my first Tea Party meeting as an observer. It was, as they say, beautiful chaos. People who, for the most part, had been apathetic to politics were suddenly engaged and outraged. Nevertheless, I left that meeting with the thought, ‘these people really have no idea what they’re up against.’

A little more than a year later, as we were launching the Concord Project for the mid-term GOTV , there was opportunity to speak at several other Tea Party events. As part of the presentation, several slides were devoted to “what we’re up against” (explaining the leviathan that the Left had built).

Following that meeting, someone stated that the attendees loved the information, but it “scared the crap out of them.” This was surprising since the Tea Party had been in existence for more than 18 months at that point. How can you fight something you don’t understand? More importantly, how can you expect to win? (more…)