NEW YORK (AP) - Donald Trump says he is pulling out of a Republican presidential debate he had agreed to moderate in Iowa.

Donald Trump says he is pulling out of a Republican presidential debate he had agreed to moderate in Iowa.The real estate mogul announced Tuesday that he was stepping back in order to preserve the option of running for president in case he’s not satisfied that the eventual Republican nominee can defeat President Barack Obama. The conservative website Newsmax was to host the debate Dec. 27.

But the debate has been in jeopardy ever since Mitt Romney signaled he would not participate. Other candidates bowed out. Only Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum agreed to take part.

Many Republican strategists warned that a presidential debate moderated by Trump, star of “Celebrity Apprentice,” would create a circus-like atmosphere that might diminish the candidates vying to challenge Obama.

Far be it from me to call the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board a Mickey Mouse operation.

Big Labor Gets Big Boost by Goofy Wisconsin GAB Decision

Madison, Wisc…] The Government Accountability Board needs over $600,000 to verify the anticipated 1.5 million recall petition signatures against the Governor and several State Senators.

However, the process it will be using, which was unanimously approved by the Board, will assume every signature is from a valid Wisconsin elector… even if their name is Mickey Mouse or Adolf Hitler.

Testifying at a meeting of Wisconsin’s Government Accountability Board, GAB staff made several stunning admissions Tuesday. GAB representative stated, on the record, that all signatures that include a proper date and Wisconsin address are presumed valid, even those of Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler.

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Yesterday, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin outlined a four-part solution to end congressional insider trading and vowed not to “give up until we get the sudden and relentless reform we deserve.”

Citing the numerous deficiencies in the versions of the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act currently under consideration, Gov. Palin wrote in a USA Today op-ed that official Washington’s response to the congressional insider trading scandal has thus far been disappointing and “predictable.”  As Palin notes:

First they denied it, then they dismissed the problem as much ado about nothing.  Some said there was no need for new laws or action because the Securities and Exchange Commission could prosecute members of Congress under existing laws against insider trading.

For these reasons, Palin argues a comprehensive four-step reform measure is desperately needed.

First, writes Palin:

We must reassert the rule of law through strong new legislation that holds Congress accountable and prevents retaliation against whistle-blowers and regulatory agencies investigating corruption.

This provision is especially important given the Security and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) reticence to prosecute members of Congress for fear that they will slash the agency’s budget in retaliation.  In 2006, the Justice Department suffered a similar threat from Congress when the FBI searched Rep. William Jefferson’s office after it received evidence that the former congressman was taking bribes.  Absent whistle-blower protections, says Palin, the SEC could suffer a similar fate by investigating members of Congress for insider trading.

Second, Palin argues that members of Congress must submit to immediate disclosure of all trading activities.

The bills by Sens. Scott Brown, R-Mass., and Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., are particularly weak. Members of Congress should disclose all trading activities immediately, not after 90 days as their bills propose. More immediate disclosure deadlines (similar to the strict deadlines corporate executives adhere to when trading certain amounts of stock) are imperative for real transparency.

A House bill introduced by Rep. Sean Duffy embodies the spirit of Palin’s disclosure rule.  Specifically, the bill requires members of Congress to either set up a blind trust or submit to a three-day disclosure rule for investments.   Palin says that while Rep. Duffy’s bill is a “step in the right direction,” she would nonetheless prefer to see members of Congress abide by “even stricter deadlines like the ones for corporate executives.”

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How else to explain this photo from the Machinists’ Union recent contract election?

Unions and other leftist partisans bleat ad nauseum photo ID requirements for voting would disenfranchise voters, especially the poor and minorities. Just this past weekend, the AFL-CIO co-sponsored a march for “voting rights” in New York City. In the coalition statement announcing the march, the unionists noted:

photo ID requirements will introduce the first financial and document barrier to voting since the poll tax

The pro-labor site Unions.org was breathless in it’s report on these proposals [emphasis added]:

The right-wing billionaire Koch brothers are big proponents of these new laws. The American Legislative Exchange Council, funded heavily by them, prepares model voter-suppression legislation.

Critics call the new laws a modern-day version of the Jim Crow-era poll taxes and literacy tests — which are no longer limited to the South or African Americans.

“There is once again a quiet but systematic movement that would deny many African Americans and other American citizens the ability to vote with 21st century versions of old exclusionary practices,” said Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children’s Defense Fund, in an article in the Huffington Post.

“The generations ahead of us had to face Jim Crow,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton at the Nov. 8 press conference to launch the “Stand for Freedom” campaign. “We face his son, James Crow Jr., Esq.”

Of course, when union bosses are pushing workers to approve a new contract, damn straight they’re going to make sure only those eligible to vote are able to do so.

Racists.

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We never thought that there would be a problem with an Obama administration regulatory agency not regulating enough, but that bizarre day has come. The Federal Electric Reliability Commission (FERC), which is charged with ensuring that the nation’s power grid remain operational, is frozen like a deer in the headlights when it comes to a pair of incoming EPA rules that pose a grave threat to reliability.

To repeat: in the one instance when we actually need federal regulators to intervene, the agency in question is failing to do its job.  Oh, the irony.

From Politico:

A FERC DIVIDED – It’s not only lobbyists and lawmakers who are arguing over whether EPA regulations pose a threat to the U.S. electric grid. The debate has consumed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the board tasked with ensuring the nation a reliable supply of electricity.

The most outspoken commissioner, Philip Moeller, is pushing for his agency to scrutinize EPA’s proposals more closely, while saying the EPA should consider delaying implementation of some rules for more than a year. But fellow Commissioners Cheryl LaFleur and John Norris argue that delaying the rules might run afoul of the certainty that Moeller is seeking.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech discuss the race for the GOP presidential nomination, Newt Gingrich’s meteoric rise to become the “not Mitt,” and who Ben thinks will be the nominee.

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:

Romney’s role: The Hillary Clinton of 2012?
Bret Baier: Mitt Romney called questions ‘uncalled for’
Gallup Daily: Obama Job Approval
If Newt trips, Paul could steal Iowa
Bright light but no clarity in New Hampshire
The South is up for grabs

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A study issued by the Public Policy Institute of California (PPIC), a non-partisan think-tank, just confirmed that during the 2009-2010 recessions, every income bracket in California lost income faster than the rest of the United States. But even more disturbing, all but the top 25% of earners now make less than equivalent income classes in other states. Once known as a job magnet for its sunny climate, world-class universities, and burgeoning high-tech opportunities, California has been transformed into a toxic anti-business state that works hard at drive businesses away.

From 2007 when the recession began through its end in 2009, family incomes across all income classes dropped by over 5%. But instead of going back up during the recovery, they continued to plummet by another 6% in 2010. The declines weren’t spread evenly across the income classes. Families with incomes in the top 10% saw their family incomes decline 5%, but the bottom 10% of California’s poorest families saw their incomes plummet by 21%.

In surveys, business executives regularly call California one of the country’s most toxic business environments and one of the least likely places to open or expand a new company. Many firms still headquartered in California consciously refuse to expand their workforce. Brutalized by the bursting of the housing bubble and currently suffering an unemployment rate of 11.7%, 3% above the national average, California family incomes continue to rapidly lose ground.

Already boasting the lowest credit rating of any state in the nation, State Controller John Chiang just released his monthly financial report covering California’s cash balance, receipts and disbursements for November that demonstrates the state’s grim economic circumstances: (more…)

Ralph Bradbury is an Arkansan, through and through. At 55 years old, his blocky frame says less about his years as a Razorbacks baseball standout and more about his career in the hardscrabble trucking industry. But it’s his experience on the ball field that’s helping him get through hard days recently.

Bradbury isn’t suited up in the cardinal and white; he’s not wearing his glove and kicking up diamond dust. He’s in the thick of a game that could cost him his savings, his career, his family – even his future. Ralph Bradbury is in a fight with the Internal Revenue Service.

The father of two is fighting for his life against the IRS, who he says is trying to force him to pay $800,000 in unpaid taxes he doesn’t owe for Continental Express, a trucking company he never owned.

Allied against him: the IRS, an influential US Senator and the legislator’s mother-in-law, already caught once by the courts for quietly siphoning off Continental assets. Yet nobody is trying to find out who embezzled almost two million dollars in unpaid payroll taxes.

It’s a tale that boggles the mind.

Soon after graduating from the University of Arkansas in 1975, Ralph Bradbury took his management skills to the trucking industry. He had a head for logistics and organization and knew how to convert an array of hundreds of tractor-trailers and thousands of accounts into positive cash flow.

Ed Harvey, a Little Rock entrepreneur, recognized Bradbury’ God-given talents and in 1985 invited him to build up his one-man owned Continental Trucking into a national force. Part of the deal: Harvey promised to make him an owner of the firm in the future.

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BALTIMORE (AP) – Occupy Baltimore demonstrators who spent 10 weeks protesting economic disparity were removed peacefully from a downtown plaza near the Inner Harbor tourist district during a pre-dawn raid Tuesday.

Baltimore City police in full riot gear moved into McKeldin Square about 3:30 a.m. to remove the protesters, who had been camped out at the site since Oct. 4. City police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi told WBAL-AM the scene was “extremely peaceful, very, very civil.”

Demonstrators said about 30 people were camped out in the plaza at the time. A spokesman for the city’s mayor, Ryan O’Doherty, said 23 people were taken to a city shelter and that no arrests were made. O’Doherty said “the city made it very clear that they were allowed to protest all day and into the night, but that camping is prohibited.”

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From Gallup:

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Americans’ concerns about the threat of big government continue to dwarf those about big business and big labor, and by an even larger margin now than in March 2009. The 64% of Americans who say big government will be the biggest threat to the country is just one percentage point shy of the record high, while the 26% who say big business is down from the 32% recorded during the recession. Relatively few name big labor as the greatest threat.

Historically, Americans have always been more concerned about big government than big business or big labor in response to this trend question dating back to 1965. Concerns about big business surged to a high of 38% in 2002, after the large-scale accounting scandals at Enron and WorldCom. An all-time-high 65% of Americans named big government as the greatest threat in 1999 and 2000. Worries about big labor have declined significantly over the years, from a high of 29% in 1965 to the 8% to 11% range over the past decade and a half.

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John Case

One of the Communist Party USA’s leading economic commentators John Case, has come out in support of President Barack Obama’s recent agenda setting speech at Osawatomie High School in Kansas.

Case sees the speech for what it was – a signal to Obama’s “progressive” base that the president will fight next year’s election from the left, on a program of government jobs schemes, guided investment, increased union power , and amped up state direction of the economy in the interests of reducing “inequality”.

Comrade Case writes in today’s People’s World;

President Obama’s speech last week in Osawatomie, Kansas was the true “pivot” towards jobs and away from the austerity debates of last summer for which workers, occupy protesters and tens of millions more have been waiting. As (Communist Party vice chair) Jarvis Tyner commented, “we can criticize Obama and when it is done in a united front way he has shown that he can be moved.” We can also note that no amount of unemployment, suffering, wage-cuts, or desperation appears to move any Republican candidate for president in the slightest degree.

The Osawatomie speech was an important and revealing look at Obama’s domestic policy agenda as the election year begins in earnest. He clearly judges the possibility of serious compromise with the Republicans before the voters cast a judgment next November as minimal. He took a big step toward a serious jobs program while embracing the principle of bipartisanship by invoking the progressive side of Republican Teddy Roosevelt’s campaign against the rising inequality of his time. Obama anchored all his arguments with an assault on the growing inequality in the US today, clearly showing the impact of the Occupy movement, and the labor-led victories in Ohio, New Jersey, Wisconsin, Arizona and Maine.

Case thoroughly approves of Obama’s tactics – invoking the program of Republican president Teddy Roosevelt in order to calm Middle America, and even appeal to moderate Republicans, and hopefully split his opposition. Never mind that Roosevelt was a “progressive” Republican, a man of the left, a position common in the GOP of that era;

Without negating any of the downside of TR (his racism, for example) Obama’s association with the progressive side of TR’s reforms was an artful tactic. A tactic that appeals to the moderate Republican constituencies whose support he hopes to-in fact must-split away from the Republican agenda. Dividing the enemy is an art most trade unions excel in, but some on the left seem to have an allergy to it. Fear of somehow being seduced by the dark side is involved I think. But one need not be concerned that associating TR with a modern assault on reducing inequality will weaken the movement-when reducing inequality is beginning to look like a revolutionary demand to the right-wing monopolies.

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I’ve commented many times about the misguided big-government policies of both Hoover and FDR, so I can say with considerable admiration that this new video from the Center for Freedom and Prosperity packs an amazing amount of solid info into about five minutes.

Perhaps the most surprising revelation in the video, at least to everyone other than economic historians, is that America suffered a harsh depression after World War I, with GDP falling by a staggering 24 percent.

But we don’t read much about that downturn in the history books, in large part because it ended so quickly.

The key question, though, is why did that depression end quickly while the Great Depression dragged on for a decade? (more…)

The honorable member of the Senate delivered this intellectual commentary from the floor yesterday. We’re not sure which is more ludicrous; stating that millionaire job creators don’t exist or that unicorns are impossible to find.

From The Hill:

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) suggested on Monday that millionaires who create jobs are a mere figment of Republicans’ imaginations.

“Millionaire job creators are like unicorns,” said Reid from the Senate floor.  “They are impossible to find and don’t exist.”

Reid’s frustration has grown in past weeks as Republicans have repeatedly and overwhelmingly blocked almost every fragment of President Obama’s jobs package brought to the floor because Democrats have attempted to pay for them by raising taxes on millionaires. Republicans say they oppose that tax because it would hamper job creation.

But Reid said Monday morning that there was no evidence of a correlation between taxes on the wealthy and jobs.

“Republicans say the richest of the rich in our country … shouldn’t contribute more to put our economy back on track,” said Reid. “They call our plan time after time a ‘tax on job creators,’ and I say so-called job creators because … every shred of evidence contradicts this red herring.”

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Today, in 1862, General Robert E. Lee defeated the Union army at Fredericksburg, VA.

WASHINGTON (AP) – Weary after a year of partisan bickering, lawmakers tried Monday to wrap up a sprawling $1 trillion-plus spending bill that chips away at military and environmental spending but denies conservatives many of the policy changes they wanted on social issues, government regulations and health care.

The measure implements this summer’s hard-fought budget pact between President Barack Obama and Republican leaders. That deal essentially freezes agency budgets, on average, at levels for the recently-completed budget year that were approved back in April.

Drafted behind closed doors, the proposed bill would pay for the war in Afghanistan but give the Pentagon just a 1 percent boost in annual spending, while the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget would be cut by 3.5 percent.

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High, persistent unemployment and a sluggish economy underscore what all but the most-dedicated supporters of Barack Obama know to be true: The president’s 2009 stimulus program was a massively expensive bust.

Understanding why the stimulus failed is an important step in understanding how the government can—and cannot—goose economic recovery. To get a better sense of how and where the stimulus went wrong, Reason.tv focused on Silver Spring, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., that’s home to a large number of government contractors and other recipients of money earmarked for the sorts of “shovel ready” projects that were going to bring the economy back to life.

President Obama’s top economic advisor Larry Summers laid out ground rules for how stimulus dollars should be spent: The funds must be ”targeted” at resources idled by the recession, the interventions must be ”temporary,” and they needed to “timely,” or injected quickly into the economy.

None of that turned out to be true. “Even if you were to believe that government spending can trigger economic growth,” says Veronique de Rugy, Reason columnist and senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center, “the money is never spent in a way that’s consistent with the conditions laid out by the Keynesians for it to be efficient.”

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Our national debt has soared past $15 trillion- forcing a historic debate about the proper size and scope of our government. This debate is an enduring one in our great Republic. It will define who we are as a nation – about our future for our children and grandchildren.

The American people are demanding dramatic action. But standing in the way is a President who refuses to back away from his failed agenda of higher taxes and higher spending. This is a President who has presided over the single largest reduction in employment in modern times. This is a President who has tried to tax almost anything that moves. This is a President who has increased the national debt by 35 percent on his watch.

There is only one response to this President and to our spending-fueled debt crisis – that is a constitutional balanced budget amendment that would put a straightjacket on our nation’s addiction to spending money we simply do not have.

This week, the Senate will once again consider a balanced budget amendment, backed by all 47 Republicans in the Senate, to make sure we never face this level of debt again. It requires Washington to balance its budget every year like American families do, ensures that any tax increase only occurs with supermajority approval in Congress, limits Congress’ ability to raise the debt ceiling, and caps spending at 18 percent of our nation’s economy.

It will be a divisive debate, because the President and his liberal allies in Congress cannot allow a balanced budget amendment to succeed. They want to grow government, encroach on liberty, and expand our debt to levels we simply cannot sustain.

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As you may know, the merger process at the FCC and DoJ is a mess.  In fact, some believe the entire process is not much different than extortion.  Not only do we have some newly reported shenanigans going on around the AT&T merger – with FCC staff last week playing fast and loose with data in an effort to sink the merger once and for all – now we have this gem.

To fulfill part of its merger “penance” with the FCC from earlier this year, Comcast / NBC-U announced the other day it has entered into agreements that:

…create new and innovative cooperative news gathering and reporting arrangements with a series of locally-focused, non-profit news organizations.

The partnerships are with ProPublica, which will work with all ten owned stations, serving the following markets: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, San Francisco Bay Area, Dallas-Fort Worth, Washington, D.C., Miami, San Diego and Connecticut; The Chicago Reporter which will work with NBC 5 Chicago; WHYY which will partner with NBC 10 Philadelphia; and KPCC which work with NBC4 LA. (Emphasis and links added)

As I wrote about previously on these pages, the Comcast Merger Order “voluntarily” commits the new company to foster local journalism via the “Voice of San Diego Model,” a socially progressive news organization.  ProPublica, The Chicago Reporter, and KPCC make good on this promise.  They are archetypical liberal media outlets, which are supported in large measure by the usual suspects among America’s top progressive foundations (like Soros, Ford, MacArthur, Knight, Pew, etc.).

What’s amazing is it’s happening as I had predicted – coming just in time to boost progressive messaging for the 2012 elections, all in key urban cities that are vital to Obama maintaining the White House.

Quite a “voluntarily agreed to” platform, huh?  And, go figure, a progressive one at that.  Hmm…

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From The Brody Files at CBNNews:

This just in – Newt Gingrich provides a written response to The FAMiLY LEADER, an evangelical Iowa organization, on the group’s Marriage Vow.

Newt’s entire response is below, but if you want the CliffsNotes, know this:

- Gingrich pledges to uphold the institution of marriage through personal fidelity to his spouse.

-Gingrich says he will enforce DOMA (the Defense of Marriage Act), and he will support a federal marriage amendment defining marriage as one man, one woman

-Gingrich says he believes life begins at conception, he will reinstate Reagan’s Mexico City policy, and repeal Obamacare and defund Planned Parenthood

-Gingrich says he will defend religious liberty, and promote the right of conscience for health care workers so they are not compelled to participate in abortions or other procedures that violate their religious beliefs

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