Today, in 1913, President Woodrow Wilson signed legislation creating the Federal Reserve. All has been pixie dust and unicorns ever since.

LAS VEGAS – While the Great Recession has affected almost all Americans, Nevadans may be the hardest hit. The state leads the nation in unemployment (13 percent) and home foreclosures (three times the national average).

Because of the faltering economy and slowed tax revenue, the Clark County School District needs to cut $78 million from its budget over the next two years. The district must do this either by freezing teacher pay and finding a more affordable employee health insurance carrier, or by laying off 1,000 educators as early as next month.

The first alternative is obviously preferable, because students would be adversely affected by larger class sizes and the loss of many enthusiastic young teachers. Unfortunately, the second option may be unavoidable, because the district has been unable to negotiate a new contract with its teachers union, the Clark County Education Association (CCEA).

CCSD is the fifth largest school district in the nation, serving around 310,000 students in 340 schools in and around Las Vegas. The district is also the largest employer in Nevada with some 33,000 employees, 18,000 of which are teachers.

The main sticking point seems to be the district’s desire to find a less expensive health insurance provider. CCEA members currently receive health insurance from the Teachers Health Trust, a company actually owned and operated by their union. (more…)

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the the top stories in politics, the marketplace and sports for 2011.

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:

Newt Gingrich on Entitlement Reform, the Federal Reserve and the Eurozone
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Is This the Beginning of the End for the Euro?
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NBA players, owners ratify collective bargaining agreement
Tebow Mania: Special On ABC, Tebowing Students Suspended

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The primary field really is bad–for Democrats. As the media and voters scrutinize the Republican contenders, it is easy to forget how weak and unpopular the incumbent is. Polls suggest a majority of Americans want to replace President Barack Obama in 2012, and Democrats are hitting the panic button–even as Obama enjoys a slight bounce in approval–because they realize he has failed.

In the end-of-the-year countdown spirit, here are the top ten Democrats who would be better presidential candidates than Barack Obama in 2012:

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10. Rep. Harold Ford, Jr.

Losing his Senate race in 2006 seems to have freed the former Tennessee congressman to speak his mind. He has bucked liberal dogma on foreign policy and the Keystone XL pipeline, and offers independent, common sense ideas.

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9. Sen. Joe Manchin

West Virginia’s junior senator can tout his experience as governor and his victory in a tough political climate. He appeals to independents with his opposition to climate change legislation, and his criticism of his own party’s stalling in the Senate.

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Ironic that the movement has forced the kind of austerity measures it protested coming from Congress.

From CBS Los Angeles:

City agencies have been ordered to calculate what was spent on the Occupy LA protests.

Repairs to City Hall’s lawn where the Occupy group set up camp on Oct. 1 will require an estimated $400,000. The police action to clear out the encampment on Nov. 30 cost more than $700,000.

Additional expenses are attributed to hauling away debris from the camp, and cleaning up graffiti that defaced City Hall marble walls and trees. (more…)

When one hears someone say “communism is a great concept, a wonderful idea on paper, etc,” you know right away one is dealing with a political novice. For someone to make such a ludicrous statement in light of insurmountable evidence is either ignorant or is willing to suspend reality to entertain their own thinking, which is in essence, liberalism.

Communism runs counter to everything we know about human nature. Humans cannot reach their fulfillment while existing under arbitrary restraints. Communism is indeed a concept; a concept of shared misery. Liberals only fluff up the language and call it shared sacrifice. Either way, it brings man down to a lowly state of existence by force of a badly flawed human idea and, if removed, humans will do what comes naturally. That is produce, trade, think freely, and continuously challenge their environment where innovation and abundance comes naturally.

To say communism is a great idea on paper is like an engineer who designed a bridge except once the bridge was constructed it collapsed under its own weight. The engineer would certainly not say his design was right on paper. He would have to concede that his idea was flawed from the start, both on paper and in application.

The great flaw of communism was identified in the earliest days of the communists heyday. Back in 1920, Ludwig von Mises, argued that communism calls for the abolishment of free markets and because of this, central planners would effectively be flying blind during planning production. “Every step that takes us away from private ownership of the means of production and from the use of money also takes us away from rational economics.”

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It has never been a secret in Ohio that there are tensions between Governor John Kasich and Ohio Republican Party Chairman Kevin DeWine. However, earlier this month, DeWine took the squabble public, which Ohio’s press gleefully reported. Democrats and anti-Kasich liberal blogs are now using DeWine’s words against Kasich. The conservative blogosphere in Ohio has reacted unanimously. Some have been long weary of DeWine, while others have remained neutral, but not any longer.

Fellow BigGovernment.com contributor Jason Hart said on Third Base Politics:

Chairman DeWine has also taken heat for his allegiance to Jon Husted. Husted, a former speaker of the Ohio House, positioned himself as a conservative during the 2010 secretary of state campaign only to kneecap election reform a year later. When the House tried to pass a photo-ID voting requirement, Secretary Husted opposed the measure, handing a rhetorical victory to the Ohio Democratic Party’s race-baiters and class-warriors.

Whatever DeWine’s merits or Kasich’s mistakes, Ohio needs Republican leaders on the same page going into 2012. DeWine should step down, Kasich should offer a replacement conservatives can rally behind, and we should all get back to work against Sherrod Brown and Barack Obama.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the disappointing GDP numbers, Chipotle’s call for immigration reform, and the need for skilled workers to fill America’s jobs.

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:

Jobless Claims Drop Again; GDP Growth Slows to 1.8%
A CEO’s Demand: Fix Immigration
Chicago’s Plan to Match Education With Jobs

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If we judge Barack Obama by his own promises, we must conclude that he has failed miserably. After all, it was he—not others in his stead—who spent the 2008 campaign promising to “provide care for the sick and good jobs for the jobless,” blah, blah, blah. It was he who used rhetoric so far removed from reality that some people actually thought Obama’s election would mark the end of every conceivable worry a human could possess. People grounded in reality knew this wasn’t true, but many among us who were already accustomed to living off the mercy of the government were easily fooled.

Think about it this way:

What good has Obama’s stimulus package done? Our national unemployment is ranging between 8.6 & 9.1%, and it only appears that low because those keeping tabs on it stopped counting people who have given up on ever finding jobs. Moreover, because of the Democrat’s tax and spend approach, our national debt is now at $15, 182,756,264,288.80, and Obama’s plan to change this is “more EPA, more NLRB, more Dodd-Frank, and more Obamacare.”

As Larry Kudlow put it: “Obama’s economic policies have failed.”

And if you want a microcosm of Obama’s failed presidency, of his ridiculous approach to economic policy, look no further than the Chevy Volt. The sticker price on a Volt is $40,000, but the cars are so technologically challenged that each one is subsidized to the tune of approximately $250,000. Now that’s Obama-nomics in a nutshell: Brag about your car company’s $40,000 electric car, but never mention that the $40,000 price tag costs tax payers a quarter of a million dollars per car.

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The Occupy Movement has sworn to fight for the poor, underprivileged, needy and exploited at the hands of the 1 Percent right? Well, not if you actually want to feed, job train and counsel those needing the hand up.  Accuracy in Media’s Benjamin Johnson found that the Occupiers aren’t too friendly with competition.

Ron Paul is the presumptive frontrunner of the Iowa caucus, but this comes with its share of caveats, oftentimes lost in the news cycle.

First, the implications of a Paul victory are muted in a state where, at most, only 125,000 people will show up to vote out of a total eligible voter pool of 1.28 million people.  It’s difficult to draw any clear implications about a national election in which 125,000 people cast ballots in a nation of 300 million.

Iowans are correct when they say organization matters, but sometimes the most organized people can oftentimes have the most radical message or simply the most voter identification. In 1988, Kansan Bob Dole and the Reverend Pat Robertson beat Vice President George H. W. Bush.  In 1992, native Iowan Tom Harkin bested Bill Clinton, but lost the nomination. In 2008, Mike Huckabee placed first, while John McCain, who won the nomination, placed fourth.  It takes a lot of organizing to turn out the vote and with at least seven candidates. Even now two-thirds of likely voters have yet to decide how they will vote. This is why you should expect to see more of these last minute endorsements and calls for candidates to drop out, lest one voting bloc be split.

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In their attempt to spin the debate over a deeply problematic two-month payroll tax holiday against Republicans, Democrats have resorted to the sort of religious demagoguery that they routinely accuse conservatives of using.

Democrat strategist (and convicted felon) Robert Creamer recently invoked the New Testament in a tirade against Republicans, and accused the GOP of “an attack on the spirit of Christmas.”

His spouse, Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), who often borrows from Creamer’s talking points (as do other Democrats), took that attack to the floor of the House of Representatives:

And so, Happy Chanukah to middle class Americans lighting the first candle tonight who won’t get their $1000 tax break.  Happy New Year to our seniors and persons with disabilities who may lose their doctors.

Merry Christmas to the jobless Americans, desperate for work, looking for work, who barely survive on unemployment checks.  The House Republicans are the Grinches who stole your Christmas.

That is nothing new–Democrats frequently (mis)invoke religion when it suits their purposes, eagerly discarding concerns about church-state separation. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is a repeat offender, as is Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN), who in 2008 compared Barack Obama to Jesus and John McCain to Pontius Pilate:

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I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for many of the people working on Wall Street these days, but the Occupy movement’s decision to solely target the private sector for financial corruption only distracted Americans from the real financial crisis – white collar crime.

According to recent Securities Exchange enforcement actions and news reports, financial corruption is also coming from government sponsored agencies and even Congress

As of Sept. 30, the Securities and Exchange Commission has filed a record 735 enforcement actions for the fiscal year, and of those 146 were related to investment advisers and companies – a 30 percent increase from last year. Broker-dealers also made up 112 of the actions, a 60 percent increase from before.

The SEC has also filed a lawsuit against executives with Fannie and Freddie Mae, saying that the two government-sponsored agencies played a significant role in creating the demand for sub-prime mortgages contributing to the 2008 financial crisis.

The fact of the matter is that white-collar crime, insider trading and unethical financial practices are rampant not only on Wall Street, but in government sponsored agencies and even Congress (check out Peter Schweizer’s new book, ‘Throw Them All Out’ which was recently featured by CBS’ 60 Minutes).

The word ‘greed’ doesn’t even come close to what corrupt brokers, financiers and politicians have done to this country. Criminal is more appropriate.

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As so often happens in California, the worst of consequences comes from the best of intentions. “We need a system where voters choose the politicians, not where politicians choose the voters,” Governor Schwarzenegger proclaimed and so, with much fanfare, Californians passed Prop. 11 in 2008, hoping to change forever the way the state redraws its state office political boundaries every ten years.

Proposition 20 passed in 2010 added the task of re-drawing the boundaries of California’s congressional Democrats to the California Citizen’s Redistricting Commission. Voters put redistricting in the hands of a supposedly indifferent citizens’s commission. Decisions were to be guide by public testimony and open debate, and not by state legislatures with their supposed self-interest and constituents to appease.

But California’s congressional Democrat delegation still found a way to tinker with the results. Today ProPublica, a non-profit investigative journalism organization, published a piece titled, “How Democrats Fooled California’s Redistricting Commission,” that lays out this bold conclusion:

As part of a national look at redistricting, ProPublica reconstructed the Democrats’ stealth success in California, drawing on internal memos, emails, interviews with participants and map analysis. What emerges is a portrait of skilled political professionals armed with modern mapping software and detailed voter information who managed to replicate the results of the smoked-filled rooms of old.

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Today, PJ Media breaks a bombshell that an employee in the federal Department of Justice (DOJ) Voting Section, where I used to work, has admitted to lying three times under penalty of perjury during a DOJ Inspector General’s investigation.

The revelation may well affect congressional redistricting, because of the key role Voting Section staff play in approving state legislative plans, including the staffer in question.

For example, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott might use these allegations of perjury involving Texas redistricting to fight the ongoing redistricting litigation. Impeachment of a different sort–that of a testifying witness–is his for the taking.

The wide ranging DOJ Inspector General investigation is examining the harassment of conservative leaning DOJ employees who were willing to enforce civil rights laws equally against all wrongdoers, such as the New Black Panther party.  You read that right–the harassment of employees who were willing to enforce the law against the New Black Panther Party.

The particulars of the DOJ perjury, as reported by Has von Spakovsky at PJ Media, are even more troubling. They involve the leaking of internal memos about Congressional redistricting to the Washington Post by leftist DOJ staff who hoped to hurt the Bush administration. The current Texas redistricting plans are being litigated in both San Antonio and Washington D.C. courtrooms.

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Today, at 5:30 Greenwich Mean Time, is the Winter Solstice.

And another one bites the dust…

Politico is reporting that Governor Gary Johnson of New Mexico is dropping out of the Republican primary to run as a Libertarian candidate in the 2012 elections.

Ironically, at a time of national deficit, Governor Gary Johnson is among the few candidates running for president who has actually cut government, but the media has repeatedly cut him from the debate. In the New Mexico statehouse, he vetoed 750 bills, fired 1,200 state employees and left the state with a billion-dollar budget surplus, which is the sort of toughness that Republicans claim to long for, but Johnson has only been invited to two of the nationally televised debates, much to his dismay.

Johnson reportedly expressed frustration that he was not being invited to the debates and that, despite doing better in the polls than Jon Huntsman or several of the other established candidates, he could get no media attention. In early September, Johnson polled higher than Jon Huntsman and Rick Santorum, yet he wasn’t invited to the Reagan debate. He polled the same as Herman Cain at one point.

Media attention has been key for this election. Just ask Newt Gingrich, who used the force of his personality and the platform afforded by the mainstream media networks to run for president. For weeks Gingrich lacked organization, and his campaign had defections that seemed to have left it moribund, but he debated his way back into the game. That’s a lot easier to do if you actually get invited to the debates.

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Following a tip from a reader, Big Government has discovered that a radical immigration group, Voces De La Frontera (Voices of the Frontier/VDLF), has infiltrated the public school system in Racine, Wisconsin by working with an approved student group.

School Officials in the Racine Unified School District tell Big Government that they had no idea that the approved group, Youth Empowered in the Struggle (YES), had become the youth arm of Voces De La Frontera (Voices of the Frontier/VDLF), a well-financed leftist movement with a membership of several thousand, headquartered in Milwaukee with two satellite offices in Racine and Kenosha.

According to sources within the school district, several hundred students have joined YES and affiliated themselves with VDLF, an organization that has also recruited some of the teachers–who apparently promote the group’s agenda in their classrooms.

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