From The Hill:

The Senate on Wednesday defeated each party’s version of a constitutional amendment that would have required a balanced federal budget.

The rival proposals would have prohibited Congress from spending more each year than it receives in revenue.

But each one fell well short of the two-thirds majority needed to send them to the states for ratification.

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Democratic activist and former member of the Obama administration, Elizabeth Warren, has opened up a seven-point lead against incumbent Republican, Sen. Scott Brown, in the 2012 Senate race in Massachusetts, according to a recent poll.

Sen. Brown, who portrayed himself as a guy who “drives a truck,” won a special election in January of 2010 to fill the Senate term of the late Ted Kennedy, becoming the first Republican senator from “blue” Massachusetts since 1972. Mr. Brown ran against Democrat Martha Coakley in a stunning, come-from-behind campaign. Sen. Brown’s victory inspired him to say, “Tonight, the independent voice of Massachusetts has spoken. This Senate seat belongs to no one person, no one political party. … This is the people’s seat.”

The election of Scott Brown was significant in several ways. First, it broke the Democrats’ 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Second, it was the forerunner of the “shellacking” President Obama and the liberal Democrats experienced the following November when a group of conservative Republicans won back the House for their party and redefined the core principles and values of that party. Third, it legitimized the power of the grass roots Tea Party, which remains the primary thorn in the side of the president and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid.

With the support of the Tea Party and other conservatives across the country, Scott Brown was swept to victory. However, only a month after his historical election, he began distancing himself from the grass roots group, refraining from joining the Tea Party caucus, stressing, instead, his desire to be an “independent voter and thinker and focus on the very real issues and where we find commonality.”

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MONROE, Ohio  – What a difference a month makes.

On November 8, over 60 percent of Ohio voters shot down SB 5, the law designed to save school budgets by limiting the collective bargaining privileges of school employee unions.

Like their Big Labor brethren, teacher unions rejoiced over SB 5’s demise. They knew that their expensive collective bargaining agreements – stuffed full of automatic pay raises, free or low cost health insurance, sick day payouts and retirement bonuses – were safe.

One month later, Ohio communities are beginning to see just what SB 5’s defeat means for their local public schools. With collective bargaining alive and well, school boards can no longer hope to control labor costs, which typically consume 75 percent of a district’s budget.

Instead, many school officials are left with only painful solutions to their districts’ budget woes: laying off young teachers, increasing class sizes, cutting academic programs, and raising pay-to-play fees on students who wish to participate in extracurricular activities.

In other words, Ohio’s families can soon expect to pay more in school taxes and fees, for less education. That’s the reality of Big Labor’s victory over SB 5.

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Judicial Watch has done it again. It has produced–following a Freedom of Information Act request filed with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ)–documents that suggest extensive coordination and communications between the DOJ Voting Section and former ACORN affiliate Project Vote.

Project Vote appears to be directing DOJ resources toward particular states; is having meetings with DOJ staff; and is even recommending lawyers to work in the Justice Department Voting Section that will oversee the 2012 presidential election.

Project Vote also appears to have played a role in the Justice Department’s lawsuit against Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s administration, which aims to force the state to increase voter registration in welfare agencies and drug treatment offices.

The documents also appear to show that Project Vote receives special access to, and meetings with, DOJ officials. So do other voter fraud-deniers, such as the NAACP Legal Defense Fund; Tova Wang at Demos; and the Brennan Center for Justice. I write about numerous similar instances in my book, Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.

These activist groups have enjoyed access to the top political appointees at DOJ over voting–including Aaron McCree Lewis, in the Office of the Attorney General; Sam Hirsch, Deputy Associate Attorney General; and Deputy Assistant Attorney General in charge of voting issues, Matthew Colangelo.

Emails obtained by Judicial Watch also suggest that Project Vote was directing complaints to the persons at DOJ responsible for deploying election monitoring resources, urging them to devote resources to races around the country–particularly where Tea Party groups were active in efforts to combat voter fraud. (more…)

I’m not a big fan of Senator Schumer of New York. As I’ve noted before, he’s a doctrinaire statist who wants the government to have control over just about every aspect of our lives.

But that describes a lot of people in Washington. I guess what also bothers me is his willingness to say anything, regardless of how divorced it is from reality, to advance his short-run political agenda (sort of a Democrat version of Karl Rove).

For example, here’s part of what the clownish Empire State  Senator recently had to say about fiscal policy, as reported by a Washington Post columnist.

Schumer said, “…Republicans came in and said, `We can solve your problem by shrinking government’…We tried their theory…The American people resent government paralysis, but most of them would say that government is doing too little to help them, not too much.”

What’s remarkable about this statement is that it’s so inaccurate that we can’t even decipher what he means. I’ve come up with three possible interpretations of what he might have been trying to say, and they’re all wrong.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Michael Totten, to discuss his book The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel, Iranian, Syrian, and Hezbollah efforts to control Lebanon, and Totten’s own personal encounters with Hezbollah.

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:

Buy The Road to Fatima Gate: The Beirut Spring, the Rise of Hezbollah, and the Iranian War Against Israel on Amazon
Winners of the 2011 Washington Institute Book Prize
Michael Totten
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Sen. Roy Blunt (R-Missouri) has won the position of Vice Chairman of the Senate Republican conference, one that is considered to be the conference’s Number 5 leadership post. Sen. Blunt, who announced his candidacy only last week, was elected, via secret ballot, over Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisconsin), a conservative Republican who won his Senate seat in 2010 with the support of the Tea Party. Sen. Johnson had been publicly endorsed by 11 Members of the Senate, including Sens. Jim DeMint (R-S. Carolina), Tom Coburn (R-Oklahoma), and Marco Rubio (R-Florida).

Prior to his election to the Senate in 2010, Sen. Blunt was a member of the House of Representatives for 14 years where he served in leadership capacities. According to the Washington Post, he is presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s chief advocate on Capitol Hill.

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One year ago tonight—the night of December 14 / 15, 2010—Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was gunned down with weapons sold to a straw purchaser in Operation Fast and Furious. Originally, two Fast and Furious weapons were said to have been found at the murder scene, but there has since been evidence that a third weapon, also tied to Fast and Furious, was found there too. However, it’s very existence still being covered up by the FBI. So we’ll just say “at least two” Fast and Furious weapons were found at the murder scene the night that Terry was killed.

There are so many sad aspects to this story that I don’t know where to begin.

For starters, Terry was just days away from going home to see his parents and his siblings for Christmas. (In the days after Terry’s death, his father highlighted again and again the fact that his son had already purchased his plane tickets to come home for Christmas.)

Following his death, U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke did everything he could to cover up the connection between Terry’s murder and Fast and Furious. He even went as far as to deny “victim of crime” status to the Terry family, in order to prevent government liability for what had taken place with Fast and Furious weapons.

But it must be noted that there is absolutely no doubt that Terry was killed with Fast and Furious weapons: no doubt whatsoever. The name of the straw purchaser who bought the weapons is known, Jamie Avila, and the name of the gun store from which he purchased the weapons is known as well: Lone Wolf Trading Company in Phoenix. (If the name “Lone Wolf Trading Company” rings a bell, that’s because it’s where the secret ATF recordings were made that indicate Attorney General Eric Holder had a thorough working knowledge of Fast and Furious at least as early as mid-March 2011.)

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Yesterday, Sen. Joseph Lieberman said he “doesn’t have any evidence of insider trading by members of Congress.”

Nevertheless, said Lieberman, the 60 Minutes report and the book by Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer have left his constituents with the impression that members of Congress are engaged in insider trading.

Despite seeing no evidence of congressional insider trading, Sen. Lieberman said it’s still important to have a bill clarifying that members of Congress are covered by the same insider trading laws that apply to all citizens.

Lieberman said a compromise has been struck between the versions of the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act offered by Sens. Scott Brown and Kirsten Gillibrand and that they will bring the bill to a markup today and then report the bill to the Senate floor.

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Sometimes union thugs wear pinstriped business suits. Investment banker Ron Bloom is one of those thugs.

He decided in the 1970s to devote his life to helping labor unions stick it to America’s corporations. As an organizer, negotiator, and researcher for the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Booth observed that many union negotiators didn’t have the skills they needed to bargain effectively with management.

“Unions were being backed into corners by companies and couldn’t understand on a sophisticated level, the company’s arguments … Labor needed to be armed with the equivalent skills.”

A longtime leftist, Bloom acquired the skills he needed to run circles around management. He went to Harvard Business School and built up his resume.

Bloom, who was President Obama’s car czar and then manufacturing czar, excels at wheeling and dealing. Last year Time magazine fawned over Bloom, naming him as one of the “100 Most Influential People in the World.” Bloom’s “role in brokering the rescue of General Motors and Chrysler while preserving more than 100,000 jobs demanded a synergist who could work both sides of the equation with authority and respect.”

Although it is true that Bloom was one of the principal architects of the auto industry bailout, Time failed to mention that he made certain that the deal enriched the United Auto Workers at the expense of bondholders. Bondholders accept low rates of return on their investment in the expectation that if the company goes belly-up they will be among the first creditors paid back, but Bloom and his colleagues in the Obama administration upended that ancient rule of repayment priority in the name of so-called “social justice.” They made sure that President Obama’s allies in the labor movement got far more than their fair share.

In his career as an investment banker, Bloom has used his considerable skills as a negotiator to engineer deals that benefit trade unions.

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Tom Cotton, born and raised in rural Arkansas, is also a Harvard graduate (college and law school), an experienced lawyer and management consultant, and a U.S. Army veteran with combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He’s a conservative with a grounding in political philosophy and a sense of humor. He’s running for the newly-open seat in Arkansas’s newly-redrawn fourth congressional district, which has a Cook rating of R+8.

In short: Tom Cotton is one of the best candidates running for Congress this election cycle–and possibly ever.

If he wins the Republican primary on May 22, 2012, he will likely go on to win the seat–and he will likely serve for a very long time. Given the fact that Cotton is only in his mid-30s, and with his impressive record, he is likely to be a force in Republican politics for many decades, shaping the future of the party and the country. (more…)

Predictable. From AFP:

Time magazine named the collective “protester” around the world as its person of the year Wednesday, citing the change brought by street demonstrations from Arab countries to New York.

The shared honor for protesters beat the traditional individual contenders, who included Admiral William McCraven, commander of the US mission to kill Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.

“There’s this contagion of protest,” managing editor Richard Stengel said on NBC television.

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$787 billion.  Plus interest.  At downgrade – and thusly increased – rates.

Behold the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 – the “Stimulus.”  Brought to you by President Barack Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and their Congressional Democrat cohorts.

Passed in the panicked wake of the 2008 Community Reinvestment Act-Fannie Mae-Freddie Mac-government-induced global economic collapse.  Because “you never want a serious crisis to go to waste.”

Passed, we were told, to create “or save” jobs.  In places like non-existent Congressional districts.

Passed, we were told, to keep unemployment below 8%.  How’d that work?

The unemployment rate when Obama took office was 7.6%. The stimulus was passed in February 2009. According to Obama, it was never supposed to go above 8% — well, it was already at 8.1% when the stimulus became a law. And it never got any better. According to the Bureau of Labor & Statistics, the unemployment rate remained high. There were some predictions that it would stay above 9% until 2012 (and this was from the White House no less). The CBO also predicts that the unemployment rate would be 8.2% come November 2012 which is higher than when he took office.

It worked swimmingly.  Drowning-ly, actually.

As we said way back in February:

Government attempting to “assist” the private sector is the D.C. version of the elementary school game Red Light-Green Light.

If the government has given itself the Green Light – and is lumbering and lurching around the free market, blindly and ignorantly throwing around laws, regulations and money – the private sector freezes in place, afraid to move in any direction for fear of the next federal anvil to fall.  The overactive government has thusly emplaced a Red Light in front of the private sector.

Rarely if ever has the federal government been more active than they have been these past two plus years.  And as a result the private sector has been exceedingly timid – which explains why our “recovery” has been so pathetic – if not non-existent.

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Which brings us to the government “helping” the Internet.

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Today, in 1812, the French invasion of Russia ended.

Attorney General Eric Holder delivered a speech in Austin, Texas Tuesday in which he invoked the history of the civil rights movement in targeting state voter identification laws. His approach mirrors that of the NAACP, which considers such laws racist, and echoes Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, who recently claimed that Republicans want to “literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws.”

Holder claimed that the Department of Justice would be “fair” in reviewing such laws, but also quoted a misleading charge made by Rep. John Lewis (D-GA), who claimed there was a “systematic attempt” to prevent minority voters from exercising their rights. Holder specifically singled out “new photo identification requirements” in Texas and South Carolina, and applauded Maine’s voters for preserving same-day registration.

The fact is that requiring voters to provide photo identification is standard practice in much of the democratic world–even, and especially, in poor countries with a history of struggle against racism and colonialism.

In South Africa, for example, where black people were denied the vote until 1994, the new democratic government requires every registered voter–black or white, rich or poor–to bring official photo ID to the polls.

Indians show photo ID to vote (Photo credit: AP/Biswaranjan Rout)

India’s election commission issues a special photo identification card to voters when they register, which they must present at the polls:

The Election Commission of India has made voter identification mandatory at the time of poll. The electors have to identify themselves with either Electors Photo Identity Card (EPIC) issued by the Commission or any other documentary proof as prescribed by the Commission.

In Europe, the official EU Handbook for Election Observation acknowledges that voters are required to show identification in many countries, and suggests that observers verify that all voters are subject to the same ID check (166). Even the Carter Center for Human Rights, which monitors democratic elections all over the world, identifies “a requirement for identification” as a “reasonable limitation” on universal suffrage.

(Update: That’s not to say international practice should govern American practice at the federal, state, or local level, but it certainly undermines the notion that photo identification is somehow motivated by a desire to keep people from exercising their rights. The opposite is true: voter ID laws are intended to protect voters’ rights against fraud and manipulation by those who would subvert their will.)

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“Ever since the War on Drugs, everything has hit the fan,” says Romesh Bhattacharji, former Narcotics Commissioner of India. Rather than continue the unnecessary and costly drug war, Bhattacharji advises the United States to simply “Relax, take it easy, [and] tolerate.”

Last month, at the Cato Institute’s “Ending the Global War on Drugs” conference, Bhattacharji’s sentiments were echoed by ex-drug czars, cops, politicians, intellectuals, liberal and conservative journalists, and even the former President of Brazil.

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CARY, Ill. – For the past several years, Illinois’ Cary District 26 was a prime example of the damage a demanding teachers union and a weak school board can inflict on a public school system.

District 26 was in such bad financial shape that it started cutting student programs and borrowing against future tax revenues just to pay its bills, including the irresponsible and unsustainable retirement benefits it was paying out to teachers.

As required by the teachers’ union contract, retiring Cary teachers were given 6 percent annual pay raises during the last four years of employment, in order to drive up their pension benefits from the state. This practice gained notoriety as the “6-6-6” format, which is an accurate description of the plan and its effect on the budgets of schools and the state of Illinois.

Retirees were also given $20,000 cash bonuses, as stipulated by the contract.

It was no surprise that Cary’s labor costs kept going up, even as student programs and services went down. Seventy-five of the district’s 225 teachers were laid off. Class sizes skyrocketed, and any academics not required by the state – such as music and art – were cut.

Turned off by the district’s big-spending, self-destructive ways, taxpayers refused to increase the property tax limiting rate, a form of permanent taxation used to fund Illinois schools. Things looked so bleak that a state takeover seemed imminent.

But no longer.

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I just sent a comment to the US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) regarding its proposal to list the Dunes Sagebrush Lizard (DSL) on the “endangered” list of the Endangered Species Act, and I feel great about it.   Absolutely great!  After I pressed the “enter” button on my computer and sent this comment to the FWS, I celebrated by eating a third of a roll of raw Christmas cookie dough instead of baking these cookies for an up-coming Christmas party.  My friends at the party will understand – this was done in the name of something big!

My comment to the FWS can be found here.  I encourage everyone in west Texas and eastern New Mexico to submit a similar comment (either e-mail or snail-mail) to the FWS by using this link.  Your jobs and economy are at stake. All comments are due by January 19, 2012.

In fact, you don’t even need to live in west Texas or eastern New Mexico to submit a comment to the FWS.  You can write as an American who will be affected by such a ruling.  And believe me, if this little lizard is listed as “endangered,” we will all be affected in a big way.

Here is how it works: some critter somewhere gets listed as endangered, and the US government springs into action.  To stop everyone else’s actions.

In this case, this lizard hangs out in a small bush called the shinnery oak tree and sleeps in the sands nearby.  This lizard seems to live only in an oil-rich part of the country (oil exploration companies, take note), specifically the Permian Basin area of west Texas and eastern New Mexico.  There have been previous efforts to list this lizard as endangered, and last year a formal proposal was made to do just that.  The proposal was originally to be acted on by this month, but Senators Cornyn and Inhofe wrote a letter to the Interior Department, which prompted new deadlines for this proposal, including the new comment deadline.

An endangered listing for the DSL would ruin the oil drilling industry in the Permian Basin, that area of west Texas and eastern New Mexico that produces about 20% of all the oil from the lower 48 states and 5% of total oil produced in the US.  The oil produced there also constitutes 68% of all oil produced in the state of Texas.

The FWS proposal itself, found here, contemplates not only denying all new oil-drilling permits, but curtailing current oil drilling, seismic testing and even operating oil pipelines in the area.  All these activities supposedly disrupt the DSL, possibly leading to its extinction.

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