Tonight, the leading contenders for the GOP nomination meet in Iowa. Tonight’s debate, starting at 9pm EST on FoxNews is the last contest before voting starts January 3rd. For many of the candidates, its now or never. Check back throughout the night for reactions from the Breitbart world. On Monday, BG Editor Mike Flynn will make his own personal endorsement.

Is Europe worse off than the United States economically? If the EU does collapse, will it take another form? Is the Green Movement based on junk science?

In a recent interview, James Delingpole provides a different perspective on the future of the EU and the dangers of the modern Green Movement.

While many people originally thought creating a European super-state would avert war, James Delingpole believes it has had the opposite effect. “Like the Titanic, the ship is doomed,” he explains. A journalist for the London Daily Telegraph and The Spectator, Delingpole asserts that Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron has been a disaster for conservatives – no Margaret Thatcher by any means.

In his recent book, Watermelons: The Green Movement’s True Colors, Delingpole argues that the Green Movement is the “greatest threat Western Civilization has ever known.” With activists taking the moral high ground, and scientists distorting scientific facts, the circumstances are dangerous. President Obama has neglected to look at the cost-benefit analysis of the Green Movement, and has wasted $38.6 billion of taxpayer money by investing in clean energy start-ups.

So is the EU destined to decline? And is the Green Movement a dangerous ideology? To hear explanations for these questions and more, watch the full interview below.

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Since the Obama administration took office, youth unemployment (now around 17.4 percent) has gone up faster and stayed higher than any other major demographic.

Thanks unions! Especially public sector unions!

Public sector unions live on government spending. Government spending sucks money out of the private sector and into the heavily unionized public sector—killing private sector jobs. The few jobs that actually come from the public sector rarely go to young people because of union seniority protections. Any jobs left in the private sector tend to go to recently unemployed older workers who are becoming more willing to work for less and take starter jobs.

Governor Scott Walker echoed this message in his speech to over a hundred young people at Young America’s Foundation’s West Coast Leadership Conference at the Reagan Ranch. After his speech, he sat down with me for an interview to explain how his budget reforms in Wisconsin are helping young people.

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Mr. Speaker:

I rise in opposition to Section 1021 of the underlying Conference Report (H.R. 1540, the National Defense Authorization Act).

This section specifically affirms that the President has the authority to deny due process to any American it charges with “substantially supporting al Qaeda, the Taliban or any ‘associated forces’” – whatever that means.

Would “substantial support” of an “associated force,” mean linking a web-site to a web-site that links to a web-site affiliated with al-Qaeda?  We don’t know.  The question is, “do we really want to find out?”

We’re told not to worry – that the bill explicitly states that nothing in it shall alter existing law.

But wait.

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FORT WAYNE, Ind. – Board members at Fort Wayne Community Schools have found a crafty way of preventing charter schools from moving in on their territory, despite new laws designed to help the schools acquire underutilized public school buildings.

They voted to simply transfer the title of their closed elementary school, Pleasant Center, to the Fort Wayne Allen County Airport Authority, which is expected to vote on a resolution to acquire the school building next week.

Unfortunately, it’s the area’s low-income students and their parents who will ultimately pay the price.

Last month, officials at Timothy L. Johnson Academy – a charter school that serves primarily low-income students in southeast Fort Wayne – expressed interest to FWCS officials in moving to Pleasant Center under new laws that allow charters to lease or buy underutilized public school buildings for $1.

Johnson Academy currently operates out of a church and another former school downtown, but enrollment has continued to increase and school officials are looking for room to grow.

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For the better part of a year, I have been saying that the end goal of Fast and Furious was more gun control. Rush Limbaugh has said this, Sean Hannity and other FOX NEWS personalities have said this, and the NRA and Gun Owners of America have said this, among others. (I had a post on Big Government on July 13th dedicated to making this very point.)

Throughout this time, I have had a copy of an email that was sent to me back in March of 2011. It’s an July 2010 email from ATF Special Agent in Charge Mark R. Chait to ATF Supervisor William Newell. It is copied to a third ATF Supervisor, William McMahon. Newell and McMahon were assigned to the Phoenix area at the time (and Phoenix just so happened to be ground zero for Fast and Furious.) In it, Chait asks Newell if he can find enough “anecdotal cases to support a demand letter on long gun multiple sales.” In other words, Chait was asking whether, in the midst of the flood of new weapons hitting the streets via Fast and Furious, a means could be found to justify more gun control.

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Today the grassroots movement in St. Louis takes a leap forward with the launch of the Gateway Grassroots Initiative. This is the next wave of local activism in Saint Louis. The time for rallies has passed, it’s time to get on with the work of conservative activism.

We are looking for conservatives who want to stand up and get active in their communities.  The centerpiece of GGI is The Initiative Project.  It is an effort to get individuals to take personal responsibility for their lives and communities.   We want the grassroots to self-source the direction of their movement.  GGI is not an organization dedicated to telling grassroots activists what to do.  It exists to facilitate grassroots action. We have five levels of initiative: Individual, Local, Regional, State, and National, and we are looking for ideas at every level.  Initiatives will begin rolling out in the coming days, and weeks so keep your eyes out for how you can get involved.

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Naturally I disagree with much of the opposition and my well-meaning colleagues on the left in regards to Keynes and his school of economics. Many in this school of thought cannot accept the fact that Keynesian economics has never worked; it did not work in the depression nor has it worked any time since then. The only time stimulus has “worked” is after the economy has already recovered and then becomes overheated by the stimulus. Keynesian economics is an excuse for politicians to buy off special interest and voters with other peoples’ money. Let me address some of the opposition’s specific points:

Stimulus spending creates jobs

False, stimulus spending financed by taxes substitutes relatively inefficient government spending for private spending. In other words, government spending “crowds out” private spending. The opposition may disagree that public spending is less efficient but the recent analysis of the government spending does not support their point of view.

It is not taxation but debt that is financing the government spending

I maintain that government debt crowds out private borrowing and investment. Many of my anti-capitalist colleagues say that government spending is not crowding out private investment because interest rates are low. Therefore there is plenty of money to finance private investment. Unfortunately, in an attempt to protect depositors, and the government guarantee of such deposits, the bank regulators have increased the credit underwriting requirements on banks. Consequently, they are not lending to small and medium sized businesses.

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Today, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) and Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) will formally introduce a new, bipartisan plan for Medicare reform. People 55 years of age or older would not be affected; everyone else, starting in 2022, will receive premium support that will allow them to choose between private insurance and traditional, fee-for-service public insurance.

As Yuval Levin notes in National Review, the Ryan-Wyden plan also plans to keep the cost of premium support low by using competitive bidding among private insurers to provide a defined minimum amount of coverage. That mechanism, Levin adds, is “an even more market-based reform than the original Ryan proposal” passed in the House budget earlier this year.

Sen. Wyden and Rep. Ryan (Photo source: TPM/CQ/Roll Call)

Rep. Ryan’s staff notes that he has always been willing to tinker with his Medicare proposals, and has done so in the past with Democrats such as former Clinton budget director Alice Rivlin. They stress that the key to the Ryan-Wyden plan is that Medicare would move from a defined benefit plan to a defined contribution plan–and they hail Sen. Wyden for his willingness to embrace that step, which is common in the business world but has traditionally been a conservative approach in the public policy arena.

The prospect of bipartisan entitlement reform is shaking the political world–not just because the Ryan-Wyden plan appears closer to Gov. Mitt Romney’s proposals than those of any other presidential contender, but also because it may thwart Democrats’ most cynical, and effective, campaign tactic: scaring seniors.

The left-wing Talking Points Memo predicts: “The move will infuriate other Democrats, all the way up to President Obama, who has been preparing a national campaign that emphasizes — not obscures — the contrast between the parties’ different visions of the social safety net.”

(Update: As expected, the White House has attacked the Ryan-Wyden plan almost immediately, claiming that it would “undermine, rather than strengthen, Medicare.” Even Sam Stein’s not buying the administration spin, noting that the Ryan-Wyden plan contains reforms Obama has previously supported.)

At the Huffington Post, Robert Creamer–the felon who apparently hatched Democrats’ political strategy for Obamacare from federal prison–is furious, claiming that the Ryan-Wyden plan will still “eliminate” Medicare and replace it with “vouchers,” and venting his frustration at Wyden: “What was he thinking?” (more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Ted Cruz to discuss his race for the US Senate, his ideas for entitlement reform, and how he would fix the economy.

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In 1776, three powerful words, “Taxation without representation!,” incited a small faction of brave American colonists to take up arms against the world’s greatest superpower, the British Empire. In this old regime, our early forefathers were politically voiceless and therefore unable to influence how the State spent its money. Yet they were still taxed to pay for government expenses that they never approved or voted for. In order to ensure that none of their descendants would ever undergo that same injustice, these colonists established a new, democratic society where the government would serve the interest of the nation’s citizens, both contemporary and future, not the other way around.

Nevertheless, 235 years and 15 trillion dollars later, the United States government has abandoned that moral foundation, instead preferring to pile all its expenses on top of the only demographic in this nation largely without a vote — youth and future citizens. Through record annual deficits and unsustainable debt, this President and members of his ideological faction have passed on the ruinous results of their fiscal irresponsibility to future generations (which never voted for or approved such financial imprudence). Just as the British Empire did not consider the needs or grievances of its colonists when drafting legislation, this current administration no longer takes into account the adverse affects its actions will have on American citizens in years to come. Whether debating energy policy, immigration policy, tax rates, or federal spending, this government does not consider our future prosperity to be an important priority, yet they still expect us to pay for their fiscal malfeasance after we reach adulthood.

When the British crown began abusing their repressed subjects across the Atlantic, our forefathers rose up and produced the Declaration of Independence in order to voice their demands and needs. Today we, the youth of America, are the repressed subjects that are witnessing our future prosperity being mortgaged away due to our current government’s inability to live within its means. Hopefully by outlining bold, new conservative reforms for the nation’s future, this organization can be our Declaration of Independence. We want to restore the voice and hope of America’s youth and lead us on to victory in our revolution against “deficits without representation!”

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With the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee having advanced a bill explicitly banning congressional insider trading in a 7-2 vote, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) is receiving well-deserved praise for offering significant improvements to the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act.

“The American people deserve the right to know their lawmakers’ only interest is what’s best for the country, not their own financial interests,” said Sen. Gillibrand.

In addition to banning insider trading by members of Congress, Sen. Gillibrand’s improvements to the bill ensure that so-called “tipping” of nonpublic information will be explicitly barred, shortens the time period for public disclosure of investments by members of Congress from 90 days to 30, closes a major loophole that would have extended the law only to pending legislation, and brings the insider trading laws governing elected officials, their staffs, and family members into alignment with those governing citizens.

“In sum, Senator Gillibrand and her staff are to be highly commended for coming up with a ban on Congressional insider trading that is simple, effective, comprehensive, and workable,” says insider trading expert and UCLA Law Professor Stephen Bainbridge.

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Last night I was on the NRA’s Cam & Company with Cam Edwards, and talked about the way Attorney General Eric Holder and his associates have thus far been able to spin and twist their way out of the prosecution they deserve for Fast and Furious. As we talked and I thought of how Holder has vacillated on what he knew and when he knew it, I couldn’t help but think of how helpful it would be to provide somewhat of a timeline of when information on Fast and Furious was made available to Holder long before he admits. As you read it, keep in mind this is only a partial record.

On April 2, 2009 Holder gave a speech in Cuernavaca, Mexico in which he boasted about Operation “Gunrunner” and told Mexican authorities of everything he was doing to insure its success. In that speech he told the the audience:

Last week, our administration launched a major new effort to break the backs of the cartels.  My department is committing 100 new ATF personnel to the Southwest border in the next 100 days to supplement our ongoing Project Gunrunner, DEA is adding 16 new positions on the border, as well as mobile enforcement teams, and the FBI is creating a new intelligence group focusing on kidnapping and extortion.

Following that speech, Project Gunrunner began and was followed by Fast and Furious. During the earliest parts of Fast and Furious, there were three people in the White House who received email updates on Fast and Furious: Kevin O’Reilly, Dan Restrepo, and Greg Gatjanis. And for the purposes of this article, the important thing about those updates is that they came from the ATF’s William Newell, a supervisor who ultimately answers to Holder.

Then came March 2010, which is when the ATF briefed Acting Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler on Fast and Furious. (The briefing was literally one in which the ATF briefed the DOJ on Fast and Furious using a slideshow that can be viewed here.) If you’re thinking it’s hard to believe all these things could have happened without Holder knowing about Fast and Furious then join the club. I would go further and say it seems almost impossible that he didn’t.

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From the Washington Times:

September 12, 2009. The Quincy Tea Party. Quincy, Illinois. A singer/songwriter from Los Angeles donned a baseball cap and sunglasses. What little one could see of his face was obscured by 4 or 5 days growth. He was completely out of his element…an outsider. He felt something he hadn’t felt in a long time: he felt safe.

Thousands of hard working patriots listened to Andrew Breitbart explain the dangers of being a conservative in the entertainment industry…the bias, the vitriol, the potential loss of work should the liberal power brokers of Hollywood discover one’s conservatism.

It was Breitbart who introduced this singer/songwriter to the tea party… and the tea party to living proof that conservatives do exist in Hollywood.

This was the first time I performed at a tea party. I didn’t use my real name.

I didn’t use my real name but I was hooked. I was hooked on a strain of patriotism I had not been privy to in Los Angeles but had always felt inside. Hooked on the beauty and power of the individual with a voice…and a collection of voices that could actually affect change unified by the message of freedom. The tea party was bigger than any one individual and its goals were bigger than anything I ever dreamed I’d be part of.

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WASHINGTON (AP) – Democrats are abandoning their demand for a surtax on millionaires to help finance payroll tax cuts in a sign that lawmakers are trying to broker a compromise on Congress’ highest-profile year-end dispute.

Even so, there is no clear path to quick bipartisan agreement on the legislation, which would prevent an automatic Social Security tax increase on 160 million workers and the expiration of jobless benefits for people out of work the longest. Both would occur Jan. 1 without congressional action.

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From The Hill:

A Senate committee easily cleared legislation explicitly prohibiting members from profiting by trading on inside information, despite objections from some GOP lawmakers who called it unnecessary and politically motivated.

The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee advanced the bill by a vote of 7-2 Tuesday. GOP Sens. Tom Coburn (Okla.) and Ron Johnson (Wis.) dissented, calling the bill unnecessary and rife with potential unintended consequences. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) also opposed the bill, but was absent from the vote.

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The Communist Party USA/Democratic Socialists of America aligned Congressional Progressive Caucusis pushing a huge government jobs bill.

Reps Grijalva and Ellison at the Capitol press conference

“Responding directly to national demand for a massive jobs program”, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, December 13, 2011, introduced the Restore the American Dream for the 99 Percent Act into the House of Representatives.

The bill would create more than 4 million jobs and reduce the deficit by more than $2 trillion over the next 10 years, making it the biggest government effort thus far to marshal the resources needed to address the economic crisis.

While no one expects the bill to pass in the Republican-controlled House, the left views the Bill as a blueprint of what must be done by the Obama Administration must do hold “progressive” support in 2012. The socialist wish list is all there, from the Works Progress Administration like works schemes, so successfully colonized by the communists in the ’30s, trade protectionism, tax increases, a financial transactions tax, to massive increases in government intrusion into health and education.

This “jobs” bill even calls for “eliminating unneeded weapons systems” and the reduction by half of US forces in Europe. No doubt the Communist Party’s old allies in Russia will be very happy about this one.

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On Tuesday, December 13 a rally was held near the LBJ Library at the University of Texas, Austin to highlight the attack on election reforms launched inside by U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. Holder went to Texas to denounce the Lone Star State’s voter ID laws and claimed that simple voter ID laws were somehow discriminatory. Holder ominously claimed that he would use the power of his office to “enforce civil rights protections” during the upcoming 2012 elections.

Outside the LBJ Library nearly 200 citizens gathered to hear a multi-racial panel of six speakers denounce Holder’s partisan attempts to push the administration’s agenda to turn a blind eye to continuing voter fraud that consistently favors candidates from the Democrat Party.

The rally was sponsored by the Houston-based True The Vote, a grass roots voter integrity project staffed by volunteers. True The Vote is a nation-wide organization that has affiliates across the country, every day citizens interested in the integrity of the elections in their home district.

True The Vote President Catherine Engelbrecht said she was thrilled by the turnout that was arranged on only a few day’s notice.

We gathered for the purpose of setting the record straight and people came from all over Texas to hear a host of speakers all representing different sides of the issue. All were clearly saying that the thought that photo voter ID laws would in some way suppress the vote or would in some way disenfranchise voters is on its face a farce. This is only being done to advance a politically motivated agenda that has at its core the themes of victimization and race baiting.

In his comments AG Holder cited one Republican in Maryland that was convicted of trying to trick black voters into staying home on Election Day, but what this single case has to do with voter ID laws was unclear. Holder’s intent, it seems, was to dismiss vote fraud from Democrats while shifting the blame to this one Republican. Holder did not mention such Democrat fraud as that seen in the 2008 Indiana primary, the New York Democrat that recently pleaded guilty to vote fraud, or any of the other such cases that can be easily found in the news.

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Today, in 1791, the Bill of Rights became law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly. 3…2…1…Drink!