A new documentary to be released later this year will illustrate the ongoing tooth-and-nail battle of one Andrew Breitbart against the mainstream media’s decades-long monopoly on disseminating information and shaping public opinion. Watch the trailer (language warning) below:

From the film’s website:

“Hating Breitbart” tells the story of how one man with a website upended the traditional press and repeatedly found himself the target of a media feeding frenzy.

The filmmakers have been following Andrew Breitbart since the birth of the Tea Party movement in 2009, and they’ve got behind-the-scenes access to many of the media controversies in which Breitbart was a key player–from the ACORN takedown to Congressman Anthony Weiner’s crotch-shot Twitter scandal. (more…)

Present at the Creation: Adam Hasner, with Marco Rubio Against the Florida GOP Establishment

“A day in politics is like an eternity. A lot of recent events have altered the political landscape,” Adam Hasner told me by phone. Until last week was running for the U.S. Senate, but he is now running for the congressional seat vacated by Allen West.

Though Hasner hesitates to compare himself to West, the two have a lot in common. They are both principled, “minorities of minorities” who have to make  the case to groups not necessarily receptive to the conservative message. “When you are a black Republican or a Jewish Republican, you have to be even more firm in your beliefs and more principled,” Hasner explains.

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Is it possible these days to be a new, active conservative running for Congress for the first time and not know who Andrew Breitbart is? Me, I’d reckon that an in-the-know, new candidate who claims to be conservative and a spokesman for Tea Partiers could not possibly be so isolated that he is unaware of conservative media-crusader Andrew Breitbart. But there is a candidate in Ohio who displayed right on his own campaign website just such a display of ignorance on Breitbartania, Breitbartism, or Breitbartness… whatever you want to call it, it just appears that this guy is stone-cold out of touch with the current conservative movement not to know thing one about Andrew Breitbart.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I am sure there are plenty of 90-year-old, Brahmin conservatives who get flummoxed at “the Facebookings.” I am sure there still exist out-of-touch, elder statesmen of the movement that just haven’t caught up with those newfangled Internet tubes that our friend Al Gore created. I am sure that there are more than a handful of aged establishment types shaking their fist at the Fox News and those darn websheets positive that they’ll never catch on, just as they were sure rock-n-roll was a passing fad. But can you be an up and comer in the conservative movement and be wholly unaware of one of the newest icons of conservatives everywhere?

I am here at CPAC this week and just ran into Joe “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher who was telling me about his run for Congress in the 9th Congressional District. Joe made me aware of a hilarious little example of the abject cluelessness of his opponent. So let me introduce to you one Mr. Steve Kruas. Professional auctioneer actually licensed with the Ohio State Ag Department with well over 300 “successful” auctions under his belt. I guess you don’t need the Internets, talk radio and TV news shows to sell used farm equipment.

Anyhoo, the “strong fiscal conservative” is running in the 9th Congressional District GOP Primary against Wurzelbacher both of whom are vying to face Marcy Kaptur (D, OH) in the general election this year. Steve is a bit miffed that Joe isn’t giving him much notice at this point in the campaign.

Certainly, Kraus is happy to link himself with the Tea Party and even helped put on an event in Sandusky, Ohio where he set himself up as a spokesman for those venerable homegrown activists.

But it’s Kraus’ website where all the action is. There Kraus attacks Joe as a scurrilous sort of scoundrel. Why? Well, because Joe claims to be a limited government guy but he and all his friends work for BIG Government, darn it!

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When Peter Schweizer uncovered evidence of insider trading by Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Spencer Bachus (R-AL), and 60 Minutes reported on it, I was the first person to call for Rep. Bachus to resign.

That was November 14, 2011.

Now, with news that the Office of Congressional Ethics has launched an insider trading investigation of Rep. Bachus, among possible others, I once again call on the Alabama Republican to do the right thing and leave Congress for good.

At the historic moment when the American people were looking to their elected leaders to protect them and their families’ portfolios, Rep. Bachus was busy using nonpublic information to enrich his own portfolio. In the summer and fall of 2008, Spencer Bachus’s position as the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee gave him access to high-level private meetings and conversations with the then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other senior officials. The meetings Bachus was privy to were so secretive that those in attendance were not even allowed to bring cell phones into the meetings so as to prevent sensitive information that could threaten our nation’s financial system from leaking out.

And what did Congressman Bachus do with such trust and responsibility?

From July to November 2008, Bachus executed at least 40 well-timed, highly risky options trades throughout the turbulent period that netted him as much as $50,000 in capital gains. As Americans were losing their life savings, Bachus was padding his. (more…)

Fear the sweater vest!

So much for Governor Mitch Daniels’ “truce” on social issues. Rick Santorum refused to raise the white flag on his principles and charged ahead. Tonight he celebrates a trifecta victory in Missouri, Minnesota, and Colorado, all but shattering the myth of Romney’s inevitable cruise to victory in the presidential primary.

I’ll admit it. I didn’t see it coming. To be sure, this victory comes with caveats, as I wrote here. Santorum picked up only five delegates tonight and has 22 delegates to Romney’s 106, but it’s a move in the right direction. (The delegate count is here.)

But Santorum understands something that few of the other candidates can put into words: that the power to mandate is the power to compel and compulsion must be grounded on something higher than the mere will of the sovereign. This is a very effective argument against Barack Obama, but it it also a very effective one against Mitt Romney and Newt Gingrich, who also supported the Wall Street bailouts, cap and trade (taxing breathing) and of course, the individual mandate in health insurance. Both Gingrich and Romney are essentially progressives in their view that there is nothing government mustn’t do.

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“The new debate in the Republican party needs to be between conservatives and libertarians,” says Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.). “A lot of the libertarian ideas that Ron Paul is talking about…should not be alien to any Republican.”

Yet right after the 2010 midterm elections, the influential Tea Party favorite proclaimed that “you can’t be a fiscal conservative and not be a social conservative,” a comment that was widely viewed as a slap at libertarians. And South Carolina’s junior senator is also a staunch pro-lifer, has favored a constitutional ban on flag burning, and is on the record saying that gays shouldn’t be allowed to teach at public schools.

More recently, DeMint has been leaning libertarian. His new book, Now or Never: Saving America from Economic Collapse, is a warning to the nation that we need radical spending cuts (including putting defense spending on the table) or else face economic oblivion. And he was instrumental in getting Tea Party Republicans elected in 2010, including the most libertarian member of the caucus, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), who also wrote the foreword to DeMint’s book.

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Imagine the police ignoring evidence of a crime because the right person didn’t call 911. Welcome to the the latest episode of Wisconsin Recall Election Follies.

Wisconsin's Elections 'Watchdogs'

The latest:

[Madison, Wisc...] Citizens not affiliated with either the recall organizations or the office holders targeted for recall this spring have found scores of problems with the petitions, but Wisconsin’s elections watchdogs have decided they will not consider any of their evidence.

GAB Director and General Counsel Kevin Kennedy said there is no process in place for accepting information from outside groups and individuals. Governor Scott Walker and the four Republican state senators against whom recall petitions were filed last month are the only parties that can contest the validity of signatures, according to Kennedy.

The GAB will not investigate or consider independently-submitted evidence of recall petition fraud. This includes circumstances wherein individuals might notify the board that their own name and forged signature were submitted.

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I’ve come to a cross roads, and I believe many of you are with me. I no longer have faith that members of the Grand Old Party can represent me as a classical liberal or more specifically as a Conservative-Libertarian, and neither do I believe the majority of the members of the party share true forms of those ideologies.

This feeling began developing after the 2010 election when several friends and colleagues of mine and I developed ConservativeCongress.com to assess every single candidate self-proclaimed to be running as a conservative in the entire country. Thousands of unpaid and thankless hours were put into the project by myself and my friends. I myself put in roughly 2,000 to 3,000 hours alone. Then I watched as various state Tea Party groups and supposedly conservative minding groups signed off on the status quo. I became sick as state after state sent D.C. main stays and beltway insiders back to flap their gums about conservative principles while we all watched continuous compromise and a lack of any leadership with the House at their disposal.

The final blow personally for me was when I watched a man take my home district who had not lived in his home state in 18 years and also did not even own property in the state in which he was running for office. I’ve had the great privilege in my lifetime to travel extensively and live in various areas of our great nation. I remember very clearly living abroad in Australia some seven years ago and then upon returning spending the next four years moving around for graduate school and work. When I made it back home I hardly recognized the place in which I grew up. Everything had changed.

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I have watched Ron Paul for a very long time and one trend I see over and over is the split that emerges between people of roughly under the age of 40 and those who are older when his name is mentioned. I have no polling data to back this up, but young people seem to like Ron Paul and older people seem not to.

This is by no means uniform. I know plenty of older folks who love the good doctor and plenty of young people who do not like him, but generally the above statement holds I think. Why is this?

Fundamentally I believe it comes down to faith in the markets and whether or not one is playing for the future, or if one is clinging to the past.

Young people have much to lose in the economic quagmire we find ourselves in, namely their future. They recognize that times have changed, that the old economic regime is corrupt, and in order to get things going in any real way (not government stimulated) fundamental reforms must be implemented. Many, including myself would embrace a gold standard or a standard based on a basket of commodities. This is a radical departure from the Fed centered fiat currency regime. It would disrupt the current economic order, but a reset is needed and many young people recognize that it is vital that we head in this direction before it is too late. The economic hubris of the 20th century has come home to roost. We would like a real economy.

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Florida Communist Party USA leader Josh LeClair interviews Scott Douglas , executive director of Alabama’s Greater Birmingham Ministries. Douglas is leading the charge against Alabama’s comparatively tough new anti illegal immigration laws.

Douglas poses as a man of faith, a religious leader of Birmingham’s black community.

In reality, Douglas was a long time Communist Party USA member, from at least 1972 to 1991. He was a member, at one point of the Party’s Religious Commission, the body charged with expanding communist influence in the churches. In 1991 Douglas left the Party to support the breakaway Committees of Correspondence.

Douglas, like many former CoC members appears to have returned to the Communist Party orbit.

Fighting for Immigrant Rights in Alabama from Scott Marshall on Vimeo.

Scott Douglas on the Colbert Report:

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On Thursday, the Senate voted 96-3 to ensure that the same insider trading laws that apply to citizens also extend  to members of Congress.

But as the Associated Press points out, elected officials enjoy at least seven legal exemptions that the rest of us do not:

On Tuesday, Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) fired a frontal assault on the Obama Administration when he took to the floor of the Senate to offer a series of amendments to the congressional insider trading bill known as the STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act designed to “bring an end to the revolving door between federal employees and companies lobbying for federal funding or loans,” reads a press release from Sen. Paul’s office.

In his Senate speech, Sen. Paul singled out the Obama Administration’s approval of billions of dollars of so-called green energy loans and grants, 80 percent of which went to companies connected to or owned by President Obama’s fundraisers, supporters, or bundlers:

Currently there are some large donors that have been giving to this Administration who have profited enormously and disproportionately.

This will allow this bill to apply to the Administration, and I don’t believe people who are multimillionaires and billionaires should use the apparatus of government as was used in the loans that were given to Solyndra by someone who is profiting off of their relationship and ties to the President, profiting off of people who used to work for these companies now, who are now employed in the administration and using these connections to get taxpayer money to go to private individuals.

This is wrong and this should stop.

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It’s not quite an online database, but it’s a start.  After reneging on their promise to post pdfs of the Scott Walker recall petitions online, the misnamed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board has relented.

The signatures are now online, here.

Earlier Tuesday, before their latest change of course, I sent the GAB this letter.

January 31, 2012
Kevin Kennedy
State of Wisconsin Government Accountability
Board 212 East Washington Avenue, Third Floor
VIA EMAIL AND HAND DELIVERED Madison,
Wisconsin 53707-7984

Dear Executive Director Kennedy:

This letter is to request the following records, under the state’s Open Records Law (19.31-39, Wisconsin Statutes):

Copy of the electronic record of the scanned petitions which seek the recall of Governor Scott Walker. This electronic record has been, under information and belief, created and is in your possession. Creation of a duplicate copy of said electronic record should, therefore, be able to be produced immediately and at a minimal cost, if any.

Please be aware that the Open Records law defines “record” to include information that is maintained on paper as well as electronically, such as data files and unprinted emails. Wis. Stat. § 19.32(2).

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Back in 2010, I crunched the numbers from the Congressional Budget Office and reported that the budget could be balanced in just 10 years if politicians exercised a modicum of fiscal discipline and limited annual spending increases to about 2 percent yearly.

When CBO issued new numbers early last year, I repeated the exercise and again found that the same modest level of budgetary restraint would eliminate red ink in about 10 years.

And when CBO issued their update last summer, I did the same thing and once again confirmed that deficits would disappear in a decade if politicians didn’t let the overall budget rise by faster than 2 percent each year.

Well, the new CBO 10-year forecast was released this morning. I’m going to give you three guesses about what I discovered when I looked at the numbers, and the first two don’t count.

Yes, you guessed it. As the chart illustrates (click to enlarge), balancing the budget doesn’t require any tax increases. Not does it require big spending cuts (though that would be a very good idea).

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Here’s an idea from the misnamed Wisconsin Government Accountability Board: Let’s make the attempt to recall Governor Scott Walker even nuttier.

On Monday morning the Wisconsin ‘Elections Watchdogs’ alerted media that the Walker recall petitions would be available sometime later that day. By dinnner time, they basically said, never mind.

You can’t make this stuff up.

From our coverage:

Stunner: Walker Recall Petitions NOT Available for Online Review

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Former New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine had little trouble finding $500,000 in his role as a top Obama campaign bundler, but locating the missing $1.2 billion in customer funds he oversaw as the head of MF Global funds is proving far more difficult–impossible even, reports the Wall Street Journal.

A person close to the investigation told The Journal that a “significant amount” of customers’ money appears to have “vaporized”:

Nearly three months after MF Global Holdings Ltd. collapsed, officials hunting for an estimated $1.2 billion in missing customer money increasingly believe that much of it might never be recovered, according to people familiar with the investigation.

As the sprawling probe that includes regulators, criminal and congressional investigators, and court-appointed trustees grinds on, the findings so far suggest that a “significant amount” of the money could have “vaporized” as a result of chaotic trading at MF Global during the week before the company’s Oct. 31 bankruptcy filing, said a person close to the investigation.

Many officials now believe certain employees at MF Global dipped into the “customer segregated account” that the New York company was supposed to keep separate from its own assets—and then used the money to meet demands for more collateral or to unfreeze assets at banks and other counterparties as they grew more concerned about their financial exposure to MF Global.

During a House hearing in December, Mr. Corzine said he “doesn’t know” where the $1.2 billion went or is.

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In the wake of Monday’s bipartisan 92-3 Senate vote to take up legislation that would ban members of Congress and their staffs from profiting from the use of nonpublic information when investing, freshman Congressman Sean Duffy (R-WI) believes the much-discussed STOCK (Stop Trading On Congressional Knowledge) Act contains significant flaws that render the measure a largely symbolic gesture.

“The truth is, there are loopholes in that bill [the STOCK Act] you can drive a truck through,” said Rep. Duffy in an interview with Big Government.

A far better solution, says Rep. Duffy, would be to pass the bill he has introduced known as the RESTRICT (Restoring Ethical Standards, Transparency, and Responsibility in Congressional Trading) Act, which has been endorsed by the person responsible for spearheading insider trading reform, Breitbart editor Peter Schweizer, author of Throw Them All Out.

The RESTRICT Act’s strength, say supporters, lies in its simplicity: the bill would require all members of Congress to either place their assets in a blind trust or submit to a three-day public disclosure requirement for any and all investments.

Rep. Duffy believes that the RESTRICT Act’s straightforward approach solves at least three significant weaknesses found in the STOCK Act.

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This past weekend Occupy Wall Street protesters engaged in violent protest that led to the arrest of some 300 protesters, just as Adbusters now calls for protestors to descend upon Chicago this summer in the tradition of the 1968 riots.

The City of Oakland found itself griped in domestic terrorism as Occupy protesters took to the streets in violent rampages that included breaking into city hall, burning an American flag, and pelting police officers with rocks at the Henry Kaiser Convention Building as the protestors tried to take over the vacant center by tearing down perimeter fencing.

Police officers in riot gear were forced to use smoke and tear gas to disperse protesters, which led to hundreds being arrested at City Hall and the convention center. Oakland Mayor Jean Quan denounced the unholy acts of pure violence and terrorism, calling on the protesters to stop using Oakland as their personal playground.

The violence in Oakland follows the recent warning by the U.S. Park Police to Occupy protesters here in Washington D.C. that they have until 12:00 Monday to remove their tents from both McPherson Square and Freedom Plaza, which are federally owned parks. Some protesters interviewed have vowed in the local media to violently resist any attempt by U.S. Park Police to remove their tents (temporary structures), kitchen, and other creature comforts from both parks as the noon time Monday deadline draws closer.

The U.S. Park Police were finally forced to take action against the protesters after numerous complaints from city residents and officials about rodent infestations and health concerns. The Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-CA) wanted to know “why the Department of Interior, which has control of the U.S. Park Police, was being so lenient with Occupy DC Protesters until called before the committee.”

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Contrary to what some may believe, the Tea Party, aka main-stream America, did not evaporate after their big victory in the 2010 mid-term elections. This year, members of Tea Party groups across the nation are focusing on other activities that are necessary to grass roots organizations: training future activists, working to support the election of more conservatives to Congress and state legislatures, and assisting in teaching young Americans about their Constitution and why they need to defend it.

In addition, Tea Party Patriots has its own response to President Obama’s State of the Union Address:

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Back in October, Sherrod Brown (D-OH) made one of his frequent MSNBC appearances to chat with Chris Matthews about the hot new show in town: Occupy Wall Street. Matthews and Brown seemed equally enthusiastic about the left’s answer to the Tea Party movement.

Here are two of the most telling exchanges from the segment, which you can view in its entirety courtesy of YouTube user toddfein:

My favorite part of this clip is Sherrod’s self-contradicting statement, “this isn’t a liberal/conservative, left or right, it’s whose side are you on?” Sherrod is a Progressive, you see, so he’s not divisive – he just wants you to pick a side, and if you pick the wrong side he’s going to demonize you.

As reported in November at Third Base Politics, an Ohio conservative blog I help manage, Sherrod Brown’s campaign site even used the Occupiers’ “stand with the 99%” rhetoric for an email-harvesting web petition. Occupy Wall Street’s whiny demands that government do everything are a perfect match for Sherrod’s pitiful class warfare, and it seems obvious Sherrod had high hopes for the movement.

In an October 2010 USA Today editorial titled “How to fight Tea Party’s faux populism,” Sherrod was less excited about organized protest:

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