TALAHASSEE, Fla. – What’s happened to Florida Gov. Rick Scott?

When Scott took office earlier this year, he wasted no time establishing himself as a bold education reformer by placing limits on teacher tenure, basing teacher pay on student achievement, and increasing the number of charter schools.

Scott deserves credit for getting those reforms across the finish line, but he seems to have lost his nerve for bold action in the current fight over school funding.

Instead of explaining to taxpayers how Florida’s public school budgets are being overrun by special interest labor unions, Scott is sounding like a spokesman for the Florida Education Association, telling lawmakers he will “not sign a budget … that does not significantly increase state funding for education.”

Scott says he wants to “invest” – a favorite union buzzword – a billion more dollars into public education, and would pay for it by cutting $2 billion in Medicaid reimbursements to hospitals.

State Democrats wasted little time in framing Scott’s proposal as “school books versus seniors.” That’s a pretty harsh but nonetheless accurate analysis.

Scott is buying into (and selling) the faulty premise that Florida’s public schools are being underfunded by taxpayers. Instead, the governor’s focus should be on how school employee unions divert millions of dollars away from classrooms and into expensive, goodie-filled labor contracts that benefit adult employees at the expense of students.

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I’ve grown weary reading about the disappointing nature of the Republican field for President.  So allow me to take a contrarian view: We have a solid field of candidates that seems to be leading to an exciting choice.

First, a disclaimer.  Way back when there were twenty or thirty names being tossed about, Newt Gingrich was my first choice—largely because of the clarity with which he sees the civilizational challenge from the Islamic world.  So it may appear cheap and easy for me to laud a process that has resurrected my candidate after I (and almost everyone else) had left him for dead.

Next, a concession.  There are plenty of great candidates who bowed out of the race.  Personally, as a fourth generation Brooklynite, there is something I find refreshingly familiar about Chris Christie.  It would have been a real pleasure to have a President who understands the difference between arrogance and chutzpah.  Perhaps some other time.

Finally, the field we do have.  As we head towards the political hiatus also known as Christmas, the two leading candidates appear to be Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.  It is hard to imagine two more different politicians:

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Ever wonder why the Occupy protester became the Occupy protester?

“….upon waking each morning in the Tent City, he was struck by an overwhelming feeling of being part of a family.”

If you see their signs and hear their chants, you might conclude that they are more than displeased with corporate fascism, bank bailouts, and special-interest favors paid by politicians in return for hefty political contributions. However, The Frontier Lab, a marketing research nonprofit in Chicago, has just completed a study that applies science to that question. Their report, “Short-Selling America,” finds that while the messages on their signs might convey an anger with cronyism in the financial sector, this isn’t the whole story and, in fact, is only true at the surface level. There are deeper values, ones The Frontier Lab mapped through a series of research in-depth interviews, that must be examined for a more comprehensive understanding of their movement.

“While their rhetoric might decry crony capitalism or bank bailouts, their values reveal self-centered and fear-based motivations.”

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Pejman Yousefzadeh and Kevin Holtsberry are joined by Joseph Bottum to discuss his book Dakota Christmas and his childhood Christmas on the South Dakota plains.

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.

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A young fruit vendor, overcome by desperation, sets himself on fire in a public square in Tunisia. His suicide sparks protests around the globe. Millions take to the streets. Untold thousands die. Entrenched dictatorial regimes crumble seemingly overnight.

To commemorate this worldwide struggle for freedom, TIME magazine honors “The Protester” as Person of the Year, featuring a cover photo of … Sarah Mason, an Occupy L.A. activist who adamantly refuses to pay her credit card bills.

Take that Wall Street.

“I still have debt and I’m not paying it back because I feel like at this point, I have an obligation to try and disrupt and upset the financial industry, the credit industry,” Sarah told 360 Magazine. “Why would I miss this beautiful opportunity to say, ‘no, you don’t get your money back’?”

Despite a valiant effort to lionize her, 360 Magazine acknowledges, “Her unabashed attitude falters slightly, however, when asked about how she incurred significant personal debt.”

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From KCRG News:

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa – Just two weeks before Iowa’s first-in-the-nation precinct caucuses there’s a new leader, but the race remains “remarkably fluid,” according to a new Iowa State University/Gazette/KCRG poll likely Republican caucus-goers.

Texas Rep. Ron Paul has moved into first place – the fifth candidate to hold that spot since the mid-August Iowa GOP Straw Poll. The data collected between Dec. 8 and 18 suggest that unlike the previous frontrunners, Paul’s support is more solid.

Paul is the first choice of 27.5 percent of 333 likely caucus-goers among the 740 registered Republicans and 200 registered independents contacted by ISU. That’s up from 20.4 percent in an ISU/Gazette/KCRG poll in November. He’s followed closely by former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich whose support increased from 4.8 percent to 25.3 percent. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney came in at 17.5 percent, up from 16.3.

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We all know the story by now.

Former Speaker of the House–and current Minority Leader–Nancy Pelosi and her husband, Paul Pelosi, bought 5,000 shares of Visa stock at a preferential IPO price in 2008. That same year, Speaker Pelosi failed to support a bill that would have protected consumers and amended anti-trust laws so that credit card companies would have to negotiate their “swipe fees.”

The Pelosi-Visa IPO story has made the rounds ever since Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer revealed the connection in his new book, Throw Them All Out, which was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes in November (Schweizer’s book and the CBS report were targeted by Pelosi’s Congressional office in a November 13 statement).

According to Schweizer, the Pelosis were granted the IPO opportunity from Visa just before Nancy could supported the Credit Card Fair Fee Act, a bill which had cleared the Judiciary Committee and reportedly had 77 percent support from the American public (according to the Merchant’s Payment Coalition). If passed, the bill would have dented Visa’s profits by reducing so-called “interchange fees,” the 1 to 3 percent charge retailers pay Visa when customers use their credit cards for purchases. The four major credit card companies reportedly collected $48 billion in 2008 from interchange fees.

Although Pelosi has been known to crusade against credit card companies, disclosure reports indicate that she and her husband bought between $1 million and $5 million of Visa stock (Congressional members are only required to report ranges, not specific amounts) at the IPO price of $44 a share. Two days later, the stock soared to $65 a share, producing a 50 percent profit. The Pelosis then bought more Visa stock, and by the time they engaged in their third purchase on June 4, 2008, Visa was selling for $85 a share.

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So, it turns out Wisconsin’s election watchdogs are choosing to do the bare minimum when it comes to making it easier to detect duplicate and fraudulent signatures on the recall petitions.

Color me shocked.

GAB’s Refusal to Create Recall Database a Choice, Not Based on State Law

MADISON, WI — The Wisconsin Government Accountability Board could be doing more to make it easier to ensure the recall process is not tainted by fraud the MacIver News Service has learned.

“The statutes do not impose explicit barriers to the creation of a GAB database that contains the names and addresses of individuals who sign recall petitions or to public availability of the database,” said Katie Bender-Olson, Staff Attorney with the Wisconsin Legislative Council in a memo to Assembly Speaker Jeff Fitzgerald.

“To the contrary, the statute enumerating the powers and duties of GAB may support the agency’s authority to create a recall signature database and make it accessible to the public.”

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It’s so reassuring to have the intellectual elites in our nation’s teachers unions, like Sandy Hughes of Tennessee, looking out for us rubes.

Hughes, a local union president, is pitching the idea that school board membership be limited to people who “have worked in the education field,” because the issues at hand are “so complex” and too complicated for average citizens.

In other words, all will be well if taxpayers just get out of the way and let the wise and wonderful union folks run our schools, no questions asked. All we have to do is keep paying the taxes, then mind our own business.

This is a perfect example of the snobbery and arrogance that is so pervasive in the public education establishment.

A stay-at-home mom that wants to be on the board?  Sorry.  Business owners who know how to control labor costs and balance budgets? They don’t have the right skill set, according to Hughes. Public education is too “complex” for them.

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The hacking collective known as Anonymous has allegedly targeted the Iowa caucus’s voting machines.

According to the Associated Press, there are two tools that the “hacktivists” could use to create some chaos. The first is a “denial of service” request, which sends thousands of requests to a website server and makes it useless. The second is a SQL injection, which inserts a code into a website’s software, thereby exploiting its vulnerabilities and forcing it to execute the hacker’s code.

It wouldn’t be the first time that SQL insertions were used to try to rock the vote. In Sweden’s elections in 2010 a voter tried to insert an SQL insertion in the vote by hand-writing. Presumably a hacker could try something similar at the Iowa caucus.

There are other worse examples of SQL insertions being dangerous. In 2010, Washington D.C. conducted a pilot project to allow overseas and military voters to download and return absentee ballots over the website. The city made the system open to the public for only three days, but that was just enough time for J. Alex Halderman, a professor in computer science at the Univesity of Michigan, to expose some of the systems flaws. Within 36 hours of the system going live, our team had found and exploited a vulnerability that gave us almost total control of the server software, including the ability to change votes and reveal voters’ secret ballots,” Halderman wrote.

Alas, were such an attack carried out in the Iowa caucus, it wouldn’t be the first time an SQL inserted caused great harm. The Royal Navy’s website was attacked in that manner by a Romanian hacker.

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Today, in 1620, the Pilgrims aboard the Mayflower landed at Plymouth Rock.

An Occupy Wall Street activist and veteran of the Trotskyist International Socialist Organization, Pham Binh,  has written a widely circulated article, which explains how socialists should attempt  to  manipulate rank and file police officers against society’s so called rulers – the “1%ers”.

According to Pham Binh;

Occupy is a once in a lifetime opportunity to re-merge the socialist and working-class movements and create a viable broad-based party of radicals, two prospects that have not been on the cards in the United States since the late 1960s and early 1970s. Occupy is broader in terms of active participants and public support and, most importantly, is far more militant and defiant. Tens of thousands of people are willing to brave arrest and police brutality. ..

Binh goes onto outline how some of the numerous Marxist sects operating inside the O.W.S.  movement have attempted to inflame hatred against the police;

One of the socialist left’s most consistent criticisms of Occupy has concerned the issue of the police. PSL’s Liberation News ran an article entitled, “Are the police forces part of the 99% or tools of the 1%?” The Internationalist Group attributed the predominance of whites at OWS to its “line” on the police: “A main reason why there are relatively few black and Latino participants in Occupy Wall Street is this positive attitude toward the police, who day-in and day-out persecute the oppressed.”

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In all this debate, I fear both parties have missed a critical point.

Both versions of this bill impose a permanent new tax on every mortgage backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

To pay for an additional two months of tax relief under the Senate version or 12 months under the House version, more than $3,000 of new taxes will be imposed on every $150,000 mortgage backed by Fannie or Freddie.

A family taking out a $250,000 mortgage will pay $5,000 more in taxes–directly and solely because of this bill– hidden in their future mortgage payments.

This is atrocious public policy.

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Occupy Chicago’s presence in the financial district may seem to have quieted down a bit from the circus show it was earlier this fall, but organizers in the group are just beginning to put the pieces in place to continue their assault on America. The revolutionaries have identified a desirable piece of real estate for their new headquarters where the movement leaders will be able to thrive during the cold months ahead as they finalize plans to disrupt the G-8/NATO summits in Chicago this spring.

Occupy Chicago’s New Lair

The Occupy leaders could not have found a more perfect location to occupy. A loft warehouse just far enough off the beaten path, yet close enough to the city’s financial district to continue their strategizing.

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In seasons past, Grandma only had to worry about getting run over by a reindeer. With “Grandma Got Run Over by TSA,” web sensation Remy gets us in the holiday mood with a song about Christmas, Homeland Security, and the joys of civil rights abuses.

“Grandma Got Run Over by TSA” is one of a series of collaborations between Remy and Reason.tv. To watch Remy’s other videos, go here.

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Frances Fox Piven, one of the co-authors of the Cloward-Piven strategy to overwhelm the state with millions of additional welfare claimants, has published an article in the Nation calling for the Occupy Wall Street movement to re-invigorate itself by recruiting the poor.

Photo source: aeu.org

In a telling admission that Occupy does not, in fact, represent the poor, Piven criticizes both liberals and unions for their repeated use of the term “middle class” in their political campaigns. Instead, she said, Occupy must appeal to issues that poor Americans care about:

To fully realize an ethic of inclusion, the poorest and most benighted Americans should become part of our protest movement. We need to increase their numbers at our demonstrations, and we need to undertake the protest actions that deal with their most urgent needs—including the attacks on the social safety net that hit them hardest.

While remnants of the ACORN organization did, apparently, pay poor people to attend Occupy Wall Street, Piven envisions a strategy that has a clearer ideological component. Instead of overwhelming the welfare system, as she once advocated, Piven now believes poor people should be mobilized to defend it–ironically, perhaps, since the long hoped-for possibility of financial insolvency is no longer distant.

Piven believes that an Occupy movement that succeeds in recruiting “a proud and angry” poor could bring about the kind of radical change that the American left had long sought (and which, perhaps, it had hoped to achieve in the Obama presidency):

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Against the expressed wishes of Obama White House lawyers, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to resolve the Obama Department of Justice’s lawsuit against the State of Arizona over its get-tough illegal immigration law (SB 1070). The decision comes just weeks after the High Court announced it would take on a lawsuit over the constitutionality of Obamacare, setting the stage for two extremely contentious legal battles in the middle of a heated presidential election year.

According to Bloomberg:

The U.S. Supreme Court said it will consider reviving the trailblazing Arizona law that would use local police and prosecutors to crack down on illegal immigration.

Already set to rule on President Barack Obama’s health-care law by the middle of next year, the justices today added another high-profile case that has implications for similar laws around the country and for the 2012 elections.

On April 11, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against the enforcement of some of the law’s provisions, prompting the State of Arizona to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

Back in September, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of our client, the Arizona State Legislature, which is now a defendant in the lawsuit in support of the Supreme Court petition. And as I said in a press statement at the time, “We hope the Supreme Court accepts the State of Arizona’s petition, protects the rule of law and upholds the rights of the States to protect its citizens.”

Well, we’re one step closer. (more…)

The “education experts” that are giving leadership to the National Education Association have come out in favor of tougher testing measures for prospective teachers. The NEA, the nation’s largest labor union, announced last week that it favors “national standards for teacher preparation and licensing.”

“All teacher candidates should have one full year of teaching residency, and pass a performance-based assessment before entering the classroom,” NEA President Dennis Van Roekel said, according to Education Week.

The news site reports that the “pilot pre-licensure assessment” would take student outcomes into consideration.

While we do not support attempts to nationalize the teacher certification process, assessing prospective teachers on classroom effectiveness sounds reasonable to us. So how about using those same tests to evaluate current teachers?

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Late yesterday, House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa’s office sent me an email with a copy of a letter the Congressman had sent to Attorney General Eric Holder on December 15 — a letter to which the A.G. has yet to respond. In it, Issa informs Holder that the Committee would like him to appear for more testimony on January 24, 2012.

In other words, Fast and Furious isn’t going away any time soon.

Issa wrote:

The hearing will examine flaws in the management structure of the Justice Department as demonstrated in the genesis and implementation of ATF’s Operation Fast and Furious. Specifically, the hearing will focus on what senior Department officials could and should have done to put a stop to this reckless program, as well as the specific areas where failures in communication and management occurred.

As those of you who watched the hearings on December 8th certainly noticed, Holder isn’t a big fan of the way Issa deals with him.

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