Frank Rich’s column in the New York Times opinion section this weekend was at the very least two things: Lies and the rehashed work of another writer. But it was also a third thing and that third thing was cover for his buddy in the Oval office and for the hard-core left-wing agenda he’s trying to force down our throats. Rich lent that cover by desperately trying to discredit “the Tea Party “as a funded-from-the-top, sham of a movement. The truth is, though, that “the Tea Party” is not funded by shadowy, rich right-wingers. It isn’t funded at all in most cases.

First of all most of what Rich wrote was but rehashed words from Jane Mayer’s slam against the Koch Brothers of New York. Three quarters of what Rich penned really came from Mayer’s New Yorker piece on the philanthropists. So, big demerits for Frank Rich for simply appropriating Mayer’s piece.

But the real point of Rich’s piece was to pile onto Mayer’s slanted attack piece with some echoed slams against the Tea Party movement in order to discredit it all. Rich is desperate to make the movement seem like a marionette show with rich “sugar daddies” funding it and controlling it from the top.

“There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising,” Rich says of the Tea Party events, “the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the ‘death panel’ warm-up acts of last summer.”

Rich then rehashes Mayer’s examples of where the Koch brothers put their money in the form of Americans For Prosperity and Freedom Works, two nationwide, very active, and successful conservative advocacy groups.

Now, it is absolutely true that both AFP and Freedom Works have had the cash to put on large events in Washington D.C. and other cities. But it is not true that either of these groups controls and runs “the Tea Party” movement from above.

(more…)

Are you a blogger in the city of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania? Do you have Google Adsense or some other sort of low-return ads on your blog? If so expect a letter soon from your friendly city treasurer demanding that you pay a $300 tax on your “money making business.”

For most people that maintain an active blog it is just a hobby. Some people blog daily but most only do so a few times a month. Many bloggers also participate in Google’s advertising program called Adsense but few make much more than $20 or $30 a year from the effort.

But according to the City of Philadelphia, you have a lucrative business one that you need to register with the city and either pay $50 a year tax or a “lifetime” fee of $300 to be allowed to operate.

Naturally the Philly bloggers that have gotten this letter are flabbergasted. None of them were even aware they have a taxable business with their blog. Ah, but the city disagrees.

(more…)

The Obama administration and the Democrat Party has yet again instituted new rules, rolling back requirements that forced unions to report their financial doings to their members and the public.

Obviously as far as Obama is concerned “transparency” is one of those things that only enemies should be forced to observe. If you are an Obama friend, no transparency is required.

It is interesting to note the language that Democrats used to excuse their newest roll back of transparency requirements, too (my bold).

“The [Labor Management Reporting and Disclosure Act’s] various reporting provisions are designed to empower labor organizations, their members, and the public by providing certain information about the finances of labor organizations and union officers and employees. A fair and transparent government regulatory regime must consider and balance the interests of labor organizations, their members, and the public, including the benefits served by disclosure, the burden placed on reporting entities, and preserving the independence of unions and their officials from unnecessary government regulation.”

Federal Register, Vol. 75, No. 153; Tuesday, August 10, 2010; Proposed Rules, P. 48416

So how does allowing unions to misuse, abuse, and hide expenditures from their own membership, the public and the government by skipping transparency requirements help anyone but the union chiefs that want to hide what they are doing from the prying eyes of reformers?

(more…)

Well, folks, this is bound to happen more and more as time rolls onward in this New Media world of ours. A blogger is in trouble with local Ohio officials who are trying to Shut him down using a badly applied campaign finance law all because he has been critical of county officials on his blog. That’s right, a county board is trying to silence the free political speech of a local Ohio blogger because he is critical of them.

The Geauga County Board of Elections has filed charges against the owner of the Geauga Constitutional Council blog, independent blogger Ed Corsi. The Board claims that Corsi’s pseudonymously published blog violates O.R.C. 3517.20(A)(2), a code meant to assure that political campaign publications, signs, and handouts have their source transparently identified.

The reason the Board is going after Corsi is because he publishes on his blog critical assessments and lists of local officials that he calls “R.I.N.O.S.” Board officials feel that because he does not affix his name to his blog posts he is violating the transparency rules.

However, Corsi is just an independent blogger and is not a paid operative of any party or campaign and all his blogging expenses are paid for with his own funds. The 1851 Center for Constitutional Law and the Rutherford Institute, non-profit legal advocacy firms, filed arguments with the OEC on behalf of Corsi saying that the Board of Elections overreached the application of the law in this case.

“This case has the potential to severally limit free speech in Ohio,” said 1851 Center Executive Director Maurice Thompson. “Should independent bloggers in Ohio be subject to registration, political disclosure laws, and fines simply because they discuss Ohio politics, and are critical of certain politicians? The Constitution says otherwise.”

“When applied to Corsi’s activities, the law violates the First Amendment right to anonymous political speech,” said Thompson. “It places an impermissible prior restraint on core political speech. And, it applies an overbroad regulation and/or prohibition on political speech that is not express advocacy.”

Clearly the Board is reaching in this case. This code is meant to make sure that politicians don’t get the unrevealed assistance of secret financial backers in elections and is not meant to quash the free speech of lone citizens like Corsi that have a blog and want to spout off about local politics.

(more…)

Let’s go back to those hopey-changie days of the Obama campaign for president when he railed constantly against all those “special interests” and evil lobbyists that he claimed were ruining the political process. Let us recall that once elected he claimed he’d have the “strictest ethics rules” of any president ever.

Obama has made sure that his message has been anti-special interests, anti-lobbyists, anti-business-as-usual… heck just plain anti-business, for that matter. It’s all been quite a show. Unfortunately for all the talk his actions speak to the opposite of his spin — more on that in a moment. But even if President Obama was serious about his anti-lobbyist rhetoric his party has utterly ignored him on the issue.

A recent Bloomberg report reveals that lobbyists have raised $1.5 million for Democrat campaign funds during the first six months of the Obama regime despite Obama’s constant anti-lobbyist refrain. That is far more than the GOP has been able to raise.

As much as Obama rails against the influence held by lobbyists in Washington, candidates rely on them to help fund increasingly expensive campaigns. Reports released today show lobbyists also personally contributed to Democrats including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Bloomberg reports that just two campaign donation “bundlers” have brought in a combined $860,700 into the coffers of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee since Obama took office. The most successful fundraiser, former Pelosi operative Ryan Rudominer, brought in $716,300 from the electric energy lobby while the second highest fundraiser was Tony Podesta. Podesta represents BP oil, among others and brought in $144,400.

Apparently the party at which Obama sits as headman isn’t paying much mind to the boss’ entreaties. More likely, they all know it’s just hokum and hopey-changie jaw-jaw and not really meant to be taken seriously.

(more…)

When companies are found to have violated regulations that govern their industry, is it right that a jury of non-experts can award damages the amount of which will wipe the company off the face of the earth? That is a question that has been raised in a case recently decided against Skilled Healthcare LLC of California.

A class action lawsuit (lawsuit info here) brought by trial lawyers was filed late last year against Skilled Healthcare of California claiming that the company had violated state regulations that stipulates that nursing homes must maintain 3.2 nursing hours per patient, per day (ppd). The lawsuit claimed that the nursing homes operated by Skilled Healthcare often did not meet the requirement.

Interestingly, there was never any claim from any patient that they’d been harmed or put in danger. Not a single patient claimed personal injury before these lawyers began to file their class action lawsuit.

After a six-month trial the jury decided that the company did violate the rules and awarded the plaintiffs $613 million in statutory damages and $58 million in restitutionary damages.

There is a problem with this award, however. The company only has borrowing credit of $94 million. If the company were to be held to this outrageously high award it would go bankrupt and would be forced to close its doors.

Not only that but some 32,000 people — patients/residents and healthcare workers alike — would lose their heatlhcare facilities and jobs if this award were enforced.

Does this make sense?

(more…)

For the last few decades sports teams across the country have nosed up to the public trough and demanded that states and cities chip in millions for the construction of new sports stadiums. To justify the public expense the claim has been made that these monstrous construction projects bring a wealth of jobs and spending on entertainment and are a boon to any city that will fund them. But are they? Do these multi-million dollar projects bring such lucrative benefits to the cities and states that pay through the nose for them?

For many years the “economic boom” idea of building stadiums seemed to make sense and city after state pumped billions of taxpayer’s dollars into such projects. But starting in the early 2000s, economists began to have enough data to show that the claims of beneficial end result of building stadiums was not as advertised.

In fact, these days economists that disagree amongst each other about so much have developed a wide consensus based on the belief that sports teams in and of themselves are not great economic engines for a city and that building giant new stadium complexes are not the automatic boon to the area such as they were sold.

The reason that these stadiums are not as great an investment as previously thought is threefold according to Andrew Zimbalist, the Robert A. Woods professor of economics for Smith College and renowned sports economist. Zimbalist spoke in early 2009 to Freakanomics author, Stephen J. Dubner in the pages of The New York Times.

For one thing, Zimbalist says, the money that will be spent on the events held at the new sports arena or stadium is money spent by local residents. This is not new money but money that would simply have been spent on other entertainment in the metropolitan area if the stadium didn’t exist. Secondly, the big money that goes to players, owners and investors does not stay in the area but is invested elsewhere. Third, the city or state is often chipping in up to a third of the continuing costs and this is tax money wasted, not revenue made.

(more…)

In his recent trip to Racine, Wisconsin, President Obama claimed that his stimulus policies worked and “saved jobs.” He also said that his policies staved off another Great Depression. But lets take a look at some of the graft, waste and pointless, useless, wild-eyed spending that was in his so-called stimulus.

• $5 million to create a geothermal energy system for a shopping mall in Tennessee. The mall is over half empty of tenants and has had falling shopper attendance for years *
• $1.57 million to Penn State University study fossils in Argentina *
• $100,000 to a puppet theater in Minnesota *
• $2 million to build a replica railroad tourist trap in Carson City, Nev. *
• A boat cruise company in Chicago got almost $1 million to “combat terrorism” *
• $500,000 went to Ariz. State Univ. to study ant genetics *
• Another $450,000 went to Uinv. of Arizona to study ants *
• Almost $400,000 went to Univ. of New York to pay students to drink beer and smoke marijuana for a study there *
• $219,000 to the Nat’l Institute of Health to study if young people “hook-up” after getting drunk *
• $210,000 to the Univ. of Hawaii to study bees *
• $700,000 to crab fishermen in Oregon to pay for lost crab pots *
• $5,000 a person tax rebate if you buy a new electric golf cart (Wall Street Journal)
• Up to $1 million went to prisoners in $250 stimulus checks (FoxNews)
• $54 mil to a New York Indian tribe to run its casino (New York Post)
• $1 billion for a power plant in Mattoon, Illinois that is based on speculative science and may not even work **
• $15 million to back-road bridges that get little traffic in Wisconsin **
• $800,000 for a practically unused airport in Pennsylvania **
• $3.4 million for an animal walk way under a road in Florida **
• $1.15 million to install a guard rail for a lake that doesn’t even exist in Oklahoma **
• $10 million to renovate a rail station that has stood unused for a decade **
• $578,000 to battle homelessness in Union, New York even though the town says they have no homeless people there **
• $233,000 to the Univ. of Calif. to study why Africans vote… in Africa ***
• $2 million to build a new fire house in a Nevada town that has no firemen ***
• North Carolina schools got $4.4 million for literacy and math coaches… to teach their teachers! ***
• $54 million for a railroad project in Napa Valley went to a minority-owned company that then hired a local construction company for half the price, pocketing the rest ***
• A California company was given $15 million in stimulus money to monitor water quality in a stream it was under indictment for polluting previously***

(more…)

At long last the 2nd Amendment has been considered a personal right per the Supreme Court of the United States. In McDonald v the City of Chicago the Supreme Court has ruled in a 5 to 4 decision that Chicago’s gun banning laws are not in keeping with the right to self-defense as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. After 200 some years we are finally accorded our rights officially. Further, the Court found that the 2nd Amendment was meant to protect the very people that Mayor Richard Daley and his comrades are trying to forcibly disarm: black Americans.

The decision threw out the Seventh Circuit ruling upholding Chicago’s gun ban and ordered the Seventh to revisit its decision. This new ruling does not specifically strike down Chicago’s gun ban but the opinion leaves little room for the Seventh to up hold Mayor Richard Daley’s gun banning efforts.

One of the main questions before the Court was whether or not the 14th Amendment served to shore up the rights in the 2nd. The Court found that it did, indeed. In fact, it is interesting to note that the ancestors of the very people that the 14th Amendment was meant to specifically protect — newly freed slaves, called freemen — are today those that Mayor Richard Daley and others like him want to disarm. Daley and his ilk want to disempower blacks and other minorities and tie them plantation-like to their government authority.

In the majority opinion in the McDonald decision specifically notes the history of the 14th Amendment and its preceding basis for being the protector of the freemen.

After the Civil War, many of the over 180,000 African Americans who served in the Union Army returned to the States of the old Confederacy, where systematic efforts were made to disarm them and other blacks. The laws of some States formally prohibited African Americans from possessing firearms. For example, a Mississippi law provided that “no freed- man, free negro or mulatto, not in the military service of the United States government, and not licensed so to do by the board of police of his or her county, shall keep or carry fire-arms of any kind, or any ammunition, dirk or bowie knife.” (pg 23)

There was but one reason why freedmen were prohibited from having firearms and that was so that they would be unable to defend themselves against terrorists like the Klan or be able to enjoy the fruits of citizenship. Scalia notes that the Freedman’s Bureau began to add rules to its repertoire to specifically affirm the newly freed black’s right to self defense (pg 27).

(more…)

Congress has suddenly realized something. Animals could be dangerous! Gosh. One wonders what magick faierie dust was sprinkled on these stalwart protectors of the public weal that made them realize that animals are dangerous? Whatever fantastic episode befell Congress they have acted and hence these high mukety-mucks last year introduced an ominous sounding bill called the Nonnative Wildlife Invasion Prevention Act (H.R. 669).

According to the summary this bill is supposed to, “prevent the introduction and establishment of nonnative wildlife species that negatively impact the economy, environment, or other animal species’ or human health, and for other purposes.” But like most federal laws it has an element of overreach to it.

That overreach is a stipulation that would require all dealers in pets to “prove” that their animals are “safe” and “noninvasive” and to present scientific proof to that end. As specified, the act would require, “sufficient scientific and commercial information to allow the Secretary to evaluate whether the proposed nonnative wildlife species is likely to cause economic or environmental harm or harm to other animal species’ or human health.”

In other words, pet sellers would have to engage scientists, economists, medical experts and the like to assemble a report that shows the government that the pet they are selling is safe for humans and the environment. And even at that rate the final decision is in the hands of the government and any capricious decision could be returned even after all that expense is incurred by pet sellers.

As I said, the idea almost sounds reasonable.

(more…)

In an interesting development the House Armed Services Committee unanimously approved legislation that would block Gitmo, Illinois from coming to fruition. In fact, they’ve blocked any Gitmo terrorist from being transferred anywhere into the interior of the USA. This is a blow to Obama’s desires to shut Gitmo down and to bring terrorists to a prison near you.

Wednesday the committee approved a defense bill for 2011 that includes language to prevent moving detainees into any US facility inside our borders and also blocked any funding to even study the possibility.

The bill does, however, state that the Secretary of Defense must submit to Congress a full report that “adequately justifies” any such proposal in the future which seems to signal that they haven’t shut the door on the possibility of a later opening of a detainee facility inside US borders.

This would appear to be a case of Congress telling the president that he overstepped his position when he announced that he had the power to transfer terrorists to the states.

(more…)

Widely reviled by the left, Bush’s faith-based initiatives were claimed to be evidence that Bush was a “religious zealot” trying to destroy America with evil Christianity. Now, two years into the Obama administration, we are seeing what Obama intends to do with his continuation of Bush’s faith-based offices: he wants to use them to push the religion of Greenicanism on America’s churches.

This month Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships issued its final report of recommendations and the result is nothing short of astonishing. (download .pdf file)

The question that immediately comes to mind, of course, is if the left will explode in excoriation of Obama’s faith-based policies as it did with Bush’s?

The left was out of its mind over Bush’s ideas. In 2004, for instance, the website TheocracyWatch.org hyperbolically said, “Under the Bush administration, our country is experiencing a major transformation from a secular to a religious government. The President’s faith-based initiative is central to this transformation and raises serious questions about church-state separation.” This was the left-wing talking points du jour on Bush’s faith-based programs.

It wasn’t just the left, but even from the libertarian side Bush’s ideas were attacked. Alex Epstein of the Ayn Rand Institute said that the faith-based initiative was a “direct violation” of the Constitution.

(more…)

Big Brother says elderly visitors to federally funded meals at a Georgia senior citizen’s center aren’t allowed to pray to that Christian God of theirs. Obama’s Big Brother government contends that since it has paid for their meals the government has the right to slam its iron boot heel down on the necks of those seasoned citizens that dare to engage in such an apostasy toward the state.

Seem absurd? Well it is but that is what happens when the feds roll into town and begin to hand out money. They feel the right to dictate what everyone is allowed or not allowed to do and in the case of Port Wentworth’s Ed Young Senior Citizens Center near Savannah that is to tell these old folks that they are not allowed to pray before a meal.

There are federal “guidelines” to observe, after all and the federal government’s rules say none of that ridiculous Christian stuff will go on if the feds supply even a penny of funding. Old folks that want to pray are banned from doing so and if they don’t like it, why they can go hungry because the new Uncle Sam is a crusader against religion.

Well, at least one religion, anyway.

(more…)

In 2008 Patrick Swayze was treated with an advanced medical tool called a “CyberKnife.” It helped add months to his life as he tried to beat the cancer that was consuming him. But, Swayze wasn’t the only American with the good fortune to have this highly advanced medical technology available to him. In fact, there are 100 such machines across the United States. From California, to Minnesota, to Illinois and Washington D.C. Americans currently have the luxury of these wonderful new devices.

Sadly, Britons are not so lucky. There are two CyberKnife machines in the Britain, but they aren’t going to do anyone in the country’s socialist healthcare system any good because despite how successful these machines are British authorities won’t allow them to be used on patients.

Despite that the Mount Vernon cancer hospital in London is part of the National Health Services, despite that they spent £3m to purchase the machine, and quite despite the praise the machines receive in the U.S. and throughout the world, British NHS authorities won’t let NHS doctors use the machine on their patients.

Sadly, these heartless, uncaring socialist healthcare officials are uninterested in helping the estimated 10,000 British patients a year that could benefit from use of the CyberKnife. And why is this? Why, it’s because the treatments are expensive, of course.

You see money is far, far more important to Britain’s socialist healthcare system then patients.

As I said above, the U.S. is lucky to have many of these machines on our shores. In fact we have 100 of the 150 machines world-wide, all available for anyone that needs them. But this happy situation will not survive the implementation of America’s own socialist healthcare system when it institutes its rationing rules as the English have done. Sooner rather than later advanced tools like the CyberKnife will be eschewed as too expensive by Obamacre bean counters and such advanced technology will dwindle and wither away despite the lives it could save.

This is what is meant when it is said that Obamacare features death panels. After all, a socialist healthcare system that won’t pay for advanced technology because it’s just too darn expensive — just as is happening right now in England — is a defacto death panel.

(more…)

Rush Limbaugh and a few other radio hosts have made it a center piece of the attack against President Obama, the Tea Partiers have often put such sentiment on their protest signs, and the conservative chattering classes have been abuzz with the question: does Barack Obama want to destroy the United States?

The only real answer is “yes, but…” Yes he does, but only if it’s your ox being gored. Yes he does but there is more to it than that. And if it’s someone else’s veritable Oxen the answer might still be “yes, but…”

Conservative radio host Michael Medved, for one, emphatically denies that Obama wants to “destroy the country.” Medved employs the conventional logic that a politician that wants to be re-elected would not want to destroy the very nation that he has been elected to lead. That would make sense if only Obama were a conventional politician and if only Obama himself hadn’t told ABC News, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” That very sentence straight from this president’s own mouth seems to shoot full of holes Medved’s conventional logic.

Still, in a way, Medved has stumbled upon a certain amount of truth no matter how small. The problem is that what we really have here is a misunderstanding of concepts. The fact is, following his straight down the line, left-wing, anti-American, radical ideology, Obama does want to destroy the U.S.A. as it is now. But in his mind he is not trying to destroy America simply because he wants utter destruction and devastation to be the only outcome. You see, mere destruction isn’t his end goal as those on the right fear. In his left-wing ideology, he thinks after America’s fall he and his left-wing comrades will be building a new and better U.S.A. Where real Americans see destruction and the end of everything, the leftists see a re-birth to a better and, in their eyes, more moral America. He and his left-wing friends see the U.S. as a Phoenix rising from the ashes of the bad old days.

(more…)

The self-delusional world in which liberals wallow truly is amazing. It takes an Olympic gymnast’s level of agility to warp your logic enough to think like one of them and a recent report on the left-wing blather site Newsvine is yet one more example of the backbreaking contortions that liberals must indulge to make themselves feel better.

In this post on the presumed falling numbers of the tea party protests and an amusing subsequent praise of the coffee party effort, this left-winger calling himself “MoeZilla” desperately tried to massage the truth in order to make his losing left appear as if they are holding their own in the American political debate. The truth is, of course, that our pal Moe warped reality in multiple ways in order to make it seem as if his side is winning — or at least is treading water — while the tea party is losing.

He began his “report” saying that organizers for a tea party protest in Stockton, California were “hoping for 1,000 people to join the protest,” but only about 250 showed up (according to ABC News 10). MoeZilla segues on to reveal that the tea party event in Sacramento “was only around 2,000.” Moe estimates that the April 15 protest was an 80% drop from last year’s tea party protest.

Then MoeZilla goes on to imagine that the Sacramento tea party folks are trying to stop the free speech of those that oppose them.

But the low turnout is even more ominous when you consider the chilling effect it had on other organizations. According to the city officials, Tea Party organizers reserved all four sides of the capitol building, so no counter-protesters could be issued a permit for the same day. (In a Facebook comment, one Tea Party member had warned that “You may be escorted off the premises,” adding “the police have been put on notice.”) Tea Party organizers even reserved the capitol grounds for the entire day, though their protest wasn’t scheduled to start until noon.

“Ominous.” Now that is funny.

(more…)

For decades abortion supporters argued that restrictions on abortion would cause women to die in unsafe “back alley abortions” all across the land. This scare tactic was a mantra that seemed to work quite well to spread abortions throughout the states and helped spur the Supreme Court to penumbra its way to a pseudo Constitutional “right” for abortions. But the main thrust of the tactic was ostensibly warning about unsafe medical procedures, a situation that they wanted to change. Flash forward to 2010 and we see President Barack Obama and his Democrats about to send not just abortions, but our entire medial system into a veritable “back alley” situation with a shortage of doctors, rationing, denials of service, and outrageously high insurance premiums.

And now we can add a new twist to the dangerous situation that Obama is forcing on patients in the U.S. The Associated Press reports that 28 states are already seeing a shortage of primary care physicians, a dearth of doctors that will only get worse with Obamacare, and these states are looking toward expanding the medical responsibilities of nurses to cover the shortage.

So, what we see here is a situation where less qualified practitioners will see their roles expanding in the era of Obamacare! Healthcare practitioners with less training and experience are being given more responsibilities in our healthcare system even as Obama claimed that his goal was to improve our nation’s healthcare.

This news comes out on the very same day that a Massachusetts judge ruled that the not-for-profit insurance industry in the Bay State is not allowed to raise its premiums to cover rising expenses.

(more…)

Unionism is failing miserably in this age of a greater world market and an increase in competition for business across the globe. More nations than ever have left behind the 18th century and are taking bold steps into a world made smaller by technology. No longer is but a handful of nations leading the world in manufacturing while the rest wallow in abject poverty. This greater competition is increasing the standard of living in nearly every corner of the earth but because there is so much competition, unions in the U.S. are dying out.

American unions are not conducive to the 21st century and companies shackled by them are finding that either unions have to lose their once overpowering control over production or the businesses simply have to shut their doors as foreign competitors beat them up in the world market place.

But these antiquated, jobs killing unions won’t go quietly into the night and they’ve found their path to existence: government. Unions are growing wildly in the public sector because there are no market forces to curb their excesses.

The latest statistics from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that overall unions lost 771,000 members in 2009 and the percentage of private sector jobs held by union members fell to 12.3 percent, the lowest since unionism became de rigueur in the U.S.

But while they are falling to new lows in the private sector, unions are growing rapidly in the public sector. Government is unionizing at an increased rate.

(more…)

The Washington think tank New America Foundation has been reporting on drone strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iraq for quite some time and its tally of kills by U.S. drones reveals an interesting thing. It shows that drone kills under President Obama are far and away higher than those under Bush.

Reliable numbers of those killed by U.S. drones are obviously hard to come by. Strikes are deep in unfriendly territory and subject to obfuscation by both a U.S. government that isn’t too keen on reporting kills as well as its enemies that try to downplay the strikes in order to discredit their effectiveness. Because of this the NAF reports a range between which the truth may lie.

For instance, in these first few months of 2010 NAF reports that so far between 141 and 240 people have been killed by U.S. predator drones. This includes “collateral damage” as well as the deaths of actual terrorists.

That is a pretty wide span, to be sure. But if we choose some middle point between the NAF’s estimates of predator drone kills we can see that during Obama’s year in office drone kills have gone up precipitously.

Between 2009 and today a middling estimate of drone kills clocks in at 692. However, according to the NAF the kills tallied by U.S. drones during the Bush years — all of the Bush years — is about 392.

The kills during this one year of Obama’s term in office seem to have doubled compared to the number during the Bush years. I’ll say that again: in just one year Obama has doubled Bush’s drone kill rate.

(more…)

On the campaign trail, now President Obama regularly excoriated lobbyists. He said he’d make the government “open and transparent” and said he’d make it hard for lobbyists to “curry favor” with his administration “based on how much they can spend on a fancy dinner.” Once elected, John Podesta, a member of his transition team, said that Obama would be implementing the “strictest ethics rules ever applied” to those scoundrel lobbyists. In his 2009 State of the Union address Obama puffed up his chest, proud of himself that he “excluded lobbyists” from important jobs in his administration.

With all that bombast and populist wind from Obama and his cohorts, then, one would expect to see a dearth of lobbyists in important positions in Obama’s Washington. One’s expectation, however, would easily be dashed by the truth.

Remember the rarefied air of Obama’s campaign for president? Wanna see some, shall we say, “broken promises”?

Transcript of Obama campaign appearance: (My bold for emphasis)

I’ll also institute an absolute gift ban so that no registered lobbyist can curry favor with members of my administration based on how much they can spend on a fancy dinner. I’ll make our government open and transparent so that anyone can ensure that our business is the people’s business. Justice Louis Brandeis once said “Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant,” and as president I am going to make it impossible for congressmen or lobbyists to slip pork barrel projects or corporate welfare into laws when no one’s looking because when I’m president meetings where laws are written will be more open to the public… no more secrecy, that’s a commitment I make to you as president. No more secrecy!

And, when there’s a bill that ends up on my desk as president, you the public will have five days to look on-line and find out what’s in it before I sign it so that you know what your government’s doing. When there are meetings between lobbyists and a government agency we’ll put as many as pos… as many of those meetings as possible on-line for every American to watch. When there’s a tax bill being debated in Congress you will now the names of the corporations that would benefit and how much money they would get. And we will put every corporate tax break and every pork barrel project on-line for every American to see, you will know who asked for them and you can decide whether your representative is actually representing you!

Oh, the dreamy dream of hope-n-change. It’s what you voted for, America. So did we get it?

Not even close.

In fact, at least 50 some lobbyists have won the Obama lottery and found themselves landing plumb jobs in the Obama administration. All sorts of Obama’s favorite special interests have found their lobbyists suddenly riding the gravy train. From Big Agriculture, to Big Financial and Big Banking, to Trial Lawyers, to Military, Communications, and Big Bio, Obama’s buddies have lined up around the block to get his favor and found the honey pot well supplied.

(more…)