So after this whole Shirley Sherrod thing, I’m thinking, Andrew Breitbart has a point.

Let’s review:

1. The Tea Party was born, causing a frightened media to drum up accusations of racism
2. Later, Congressman John Lewis claims Tea Partiers shouted the “N-word” at him. The press runs with it. Breitbart posts a $100K reward for evidence. None comes.
3. The NAACP creates a race-baiting resolution to smear the Tea Party.
4. Breitbart responds with the Sherrod video – becoming the first conservative to use leftist tactics on the left.
5. It works: the White House and the NAACP look stupid.

Moving on, from the Powerline blog, New York Times reporter Matt Bai writes this of the Tea Party movement on July 17th: (more…)

In an interview with Politico, Mary Frances Berry — a former chairman of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights last reappointed by President Bill Clinton — called the progressive tactic of trying to smear the tea party movement as racist an “effective strategy” that she chose not to denounce.

Berry’s cynical remarks are drawing rebukes for members of the Project 21 black leadership network.

“As an active participant in the tea party movement, I know the movement’s motivation is about Obama’s policies and not his race,” said Deneen Borelli, a Project 21. “Race card politics is the last-ditch effort to shift the debate away from President Obama’s harmful policies such as the government’s takeover of health care and his failure to create jobs — both of which are having an impact on his popularity. This diversion may also help Obama to try to jam through cap-and-trade legislation through Congress. It’s a grand distraction from policies and may unfortunately increase racial tensions.”

In an interview posted on the Politico web site, Berry — now the Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought and History at the University of Pennsylvania — was asked the question “[W]ill branding the tea party ‘racist’ work?” Berry replied:

Tainting the tea party movement with the charge of racism is proving to be an effective strategy for Democrats. There is no evidence that tea party adherents are any more racist than other Republicans, and indeed many other Americans. But getting them to spend their time purging their ranks and having candidates distance themselves should help Democrats win in November. Having one’s opponent rebut charges of racism is far better than discussing joblessness.

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From the Associated Press:

A federal judge dealt a serious rebuke to Arizona’s immigration law on Wednesday when she put most of the crackdown on hold just hours before it was to take effect.

The ruling by U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton sets up a lengthy legal battle as Arizona fights to enact the nation’s toughest-in-the-nation law. Republican Gov. Jan Brewer said the state likely appeal the ruling and seek to get the judge’s order overturned.

But for now, opponents of the law have prevailed: The provisions that angered opponents will not take effect, including sections that required officers to check a person’s immigration status while enforcing other laws.

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Last year, President Obama promised to focus “every single day” on getting Americans back to work:

“My commitment to you, the American people, is that I will focus every single day on how we can get people back to work, and how we can build an economy that continues to make real the promise of America for generations to come.”

Of course, today the President seemed to take a mulligan on his jobs’ vigil, opting instead to do a taping of “The View” and attending a few fundraisers in NYC.  But not to worry, just yesterday, one of the President’s staunchest allies, Rep. James Clyburn (D-SC) introduced legislation to amend the Stimulus legislation to promote an obviously important component of sustained economic growth:

By Mr. CLYBURN:

H.R. 5878. A bill to amend the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 and the Internal Revenue Code of 1986 to make funds and tax benefit available to assist job creation and workforce diversification in the golf industry, and for other purposes; to the Committee on Ways and Means, and in addition to the Committee on Education and Labor, for a period to be subsequently determined by the Speaker, in each case for consideration of such provisions as fall within the jurisdiction of the committee concerned.

Of course, in a certain way, this makes perfect sense.

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How bad is the fallout over the NAACP’s and Obama Administration’s handling of the Shirley Sherrod affair? This bad.

Rush is right.  And, he has never been more right than he is about Right To Work being a winning issue. Decades of polling prove that Americans overwhelmingly believe that a person should not be forced to join a union in order to get or keep a job.  Yet, only the elected officials of 22 states continue to allow workers the right to choose to pay a union or not without it being a condition of employment.

RUSH:  You want to know whether Right-To-Work would help Michigan?

CALLER:  Yes.

RUSH:  Yeah… You know, I don’t like any prerequisite, “In order to do this job you’re going to have to be a member of the union.” Reality is what it is and it is the case, but I think the evidence is in that it’s time to try something else in the state of Michigan.

Why should anyone be denied in any way the right-to-work? Stop and think of this.  (more…)

Every now and then, I kind of feel sorry for President Obama.  If there’s anyone that has seen bad schools, it would be a community organizer from the south side of Chicago.

President Obama has rolled out a series of education reforms, tepid as they may be, with the goal of improving America’s schools.

To say the least, many of America’s schools, particularly in urban areas, are downright pathetic.  You can almost count on dismal student performance, union employees sucking the financial life out of the district, and an assembly line, one-size-fits-all mentality that actually produces graduates who can’t read their own diplomas.

A quality education has been called -  rightly so -  the civil rights issue of the 21st Century.

It’s no secret Big Labor stands opposed to any meaningful education reform:  Labor leaders oppose charter schools because they’re usually not unionized, performance pay because it rewards hard work and innovation, and tenure reform because it threatens the concept of lifetime employment that’s not tied to performance.

President Obama has made tiny steps towards addressing these problems, but instead of demanding better results from urban schools, “civil rights” organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League are standing with the adults, not the children.

Shame on them.

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If government is serious about job creation, it should get out of the way of the entrepreneurs who actually create them.

That is the message of a new campaign launched this week by the Institute for Justice—the nation’s leading legal advocate for economic liberty. A series of studies called The Power of One Entrepreneur highlight the tremendous impact that a single entrepreneur can have on their family, employees, community, other entrepreneurs and beyond.

Consider Melony Armstrong of Tupelo, Mississippi.

Melony is an African hairbraider and a mother of four.  She is the owner of Naturally Speaking, a hairbraiding salon that serves her community and has employed dozens of women.  In addition, Melony has taught more than 125 individuals how to braid.

But before she could even open her doors, she had to battle through mountains of red tape. The state forced her to spend 300 hours in cosmetology classes.  And to teach others how to braid, she had to obtain a special license that required over 3,000 hours of additional classes.  Here’s the kicker:  In all of this government-mandating training, she received no actual instruction in hairbraiding.

In August 2004, Melony teamed up with the Institute for Justice to challenge these needless barriers that had the effect of keeping grassroots entrepreneurs just like her from being able to open their own businesses. Less than a year later, her case resulted in a new law that lifted the restrictions, paving the way for hairbraiding entrepreneurship throughout the state.

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Vice President Joe Biden met with state and local government officials from across the country last year to provide guidance on spending federal stimulus funds. Biden implored local leaders to focus on only essential infrastructure needs that will put people back to work and to avoid frivolous projects: “No swimming pools! No tennis courts! No golf courses! No Frisbee parks!”

Since then, dozens of Minnesota cities and counties have taken advantage of a little known stimulus bond program, borrowing $684 million for projects that include municipal swimming pools, a multi-million dollar golf course renovation and a new mega-community center, a Freedom Foundation of Minnesota analysis shows.

The Build America Bonds program offers a substantial subsidy by the federal government to help cover interest payments and entice local governments to borrow money, making it the fastest growing portion of the municipal bond market.

While most of the 65 bonding projects across Minnesota appear to be public improvement projects for roads and basic infrastructure, concerns have been expressed that Build America Bonds could encourage borrowing for unessential government projects, as well.

The City of Plainview approved borrowing $1.5 million through Build America Bonds for renovations to its municipal swimming pool. The City of Coon Rapids leveraged Build America Bonds for a $4.23 million facelift to the city-owned Bunker Hills golf course. Despite a budget crunch, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman pitched using Build America Bonds to help fund $24 million in projects.  The construction work includes installing a new $7.2 million swimming pool with a “lazy river”at Como Park, renovations to the Highland Park swimming pool, and building a 36,000 square foot community center.

(more…)

From the always interesting Michael Barone, in the Washington Examiner:

In 1994, I wrote an article in U.S. News & World Report arguing that there was a serious chance that Republicans could capture the 40 seats that they needed then, as now, for a majority in the House. It was the first mainstream media piece suggesting that, and it appeared on newsstands on July 11.

I cited as evidence five polls showing incumbent Democratic congressmen trailing Republican challengers. None of those Democrats had scandal problems; all five lost in November.

Today a lot more Democratic incumbents seem to be trailing Republican challengers in polls. Jim Geraghty of National Review Online has compiled a list of 13 Democratic incumbents trailing in polls released over the past seven weeks.

Some of these poll numbers are mind-boggling.

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The FDA attempt to de-label Avastin for breast cancer patients is the first skirmish of the rationing wars.  The battle must be fought and won.  This isn’t an issue of government paying the cost of these late stage drugs.  This is an issue of the government manipulating data to deny care to late stage cancer patients—even those with private insurance.

The issue at hand is whether or not the drug Avastin should be used to treat late stage terminal cancer patients. The FDA is seeking to de-label Avastin for breast cancer patients. Labeling is the FDA’s method of approval for using certain drugs for certain illnesses.  Like Medicare, private insurance companies use these labels to determine whether or not they will cover the use of that drug to treat a certain illness.

Fair enough, right? But what’s particularly scurrilous about the FDA’s attempted actions with Avastin is not that they are attempting to de-label it for use with late stage breast cancer patients its how and why they are doing it.

Standard practice for evaluating drugs is to use data-driven objective endpoints to evaluate effectiveness and safety. In the case of Avastin, the FDA has arbitrarily and unilaterally stopped using this objective criterion and are applying a highly subjective criterion of “clinically meaningful”—to cut costs.

No one disputes that the drug helps extends life for terminal patients.  The FDA is arguing that it just doesn’t do it for long enough to be worth the cost. So now the FDA is deciding how much life is “meaningful” and what it is worth?  This should be a decision for patients, doctors and family members and the FDA should not be replacing their own value judgments about how much time is ‘meaningful’.  While six months might not be significant to a statistician or a bureaucrat, for the families of a loved one or a dying patient, it’s a lifetime.

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Today, in 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, in reaction to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It would not end well.

During a 45-minute conference call with journalists from 40 major media outlets this morning, Jack Gerard shared some startling predictions about the future health of the nation’s oil and natural gas industry if the Obama Administration gets its way in adding more regulation and increasing taxes on offshore drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. The biggest one of all is enough to cause anyone to take pause:

“The administration’s moratorium, if continued indefinitely — or similar legislative proposals which would make the deep water unavailable or uneconomic — would cost this country 175,000 jobs every year between now and 2035, according to our latest analysis,” said Gerard, president of the American Petroleum Institute, a group representing some 400 oil and natural gas companies.

And that’s not all!

“The Gulf of Mexico accounts for 30 percent of our domestic oil production and 13 percent of natural gas,” Gerard explained. “The deepwater areas account for 80 percent of the Gulf’s oil production and 45 percent of its natural gas production. Twenty of the highest-producing leases are in the deep water.”

When one considers that the oil and natural gas industry, according to Gerard, supports 9.2 million workers and 7.5 percent of all U.S. gross domestic product, even a small percent of decline can have a tremendous impact on the economy.

According to an API-produced report released today, the economic impact of a complete shutdown of deepwater drilling would yield some awful results. For instance:

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Amazon.com, the online retailing powerhouse, last week announced a shift in stance on net neutrality that has tech policy observers in the nation’s capital buzzing.

The company, a long-time backer of the controversial policy and member of the pro-net neutrality Open Internet Coalition, signaled in an op-ed by its Vice President for Global Public Policy, Paul Misener, openness to a compromise measure, which would allow what are known as “managed services” to be offered by Internet Service (ISPs) subject to certain conditions.

Specifically, Misener argues that “Internet content providers (and consumers) should be able to purchase ‘quality of service’ or ‘managed services’ from network operators on the same basis–equal availability and no harm to other content.”

Previously, net neutrality proponents had been unwilling to sanction the marketing of such services, irrespective of equal availability or non-prejudicial impact—a position still held by many on the “pro” side of the debate.

The shift was therefore dubbed a “major departure” by one expert tracking the net neutrality debate with whom Capitol Confidential spoke, and one that could have significant ramifications for the way the net neutrality battle plays out moving forward.

(more…)

California is facing nearly The Toughest of Times.  We face historically high unemployment, perennial budget crises and more.  Don’t think it could get any worse?  Think again.  If Jerry Brown is elected, in one short stroke, he could deal a potentially crippling blow to the California economy before it gets a chance to get back on its feet.

Even for a committed political observer, volunteer and commentator such as myself, it seems implausible – but true – that the stakes for elections grow with each successive election.  For California, the 2010 gubernatorial election unquestionably could be the most important election ever – and not necessarily for a good reason.  If Jerry Brown is elected, he and his fellow Democrats could deliver a devastating blow to California.

We well know that California’s unemployment rate is above 12%.  We also know that well over 100,000 people are leaving California on a yearly basis.  Beyond that, California faces an exodus of businesses – large and small alike.  So it can be no surprise that state revenues have declined nearly $40 billion over the last three years as a result of the declining taxpayer base.

We also well know why California is having a tougher time than many other states.  In recent years, California is consistently ranked near the bottom of states in which to do business.  According to Joseph Vranich, president of JV Executive Consulting Inc. in Irvine:  “It’s no mystery what causes companies to leave California: High taxes, undue regulation, workers’ comp costs, a legal environment stacked against businesses and lengthy and costly construction permitting requirements.”  Indeed, California finished tied for last in the Country in Forbes’ Overall Tax Burden survey measuring tax burdens and structure.

(more…)

Angelo M. Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, has written an extraordinary essay for the July/August issue of The American Spectator. It’s called “America’s Ruling Class – And the Perils of Revolution,” but it deals much more extensively with the anatomy and functioning of the class system in the United States today than with the prospect of revolution.

Codevilla cuts immediately to the core: the United States today is divided into (a) a ruling class, which dominates the government at every level, the schools and universities, the mainstream media, Hollywood, and a great deal else, and (b) all of the rest of us, a heterogeneous agglomeration that Codevilla dubs the country class. The ruling class holds the lion’s share of the institutional power, but the country class encompasses perhaps two-thirds of the people.

Members of the two classes do not like one another. In particular, the ruling class views the rest of the population as composed of ignoramuses who are vicious, violent, racist, religious, irrational, unscientific, backward, generally ill-behaved, and incapable of living well without constant, detailed direction by our betters; and it views itself as perfectly qualified and entitled to pound us into better shape by the generous application of laws, taxes, subsidies, regulations, and unceasing declarations of its dedication to bringing the country—and indeed the entire world—out of its present darkness and into the light of the Brave New World it is busily engineering.

This class divide has little to do with rich versus poor or Democrat versus Republican. At its core, it has to do with the division between, on the one hand, those whose attitudes are attuned to the views endorsed by the ruling class (especially “political correctness”) and whose fortunes are linked directly or indirectly with government programs and, on the other hand, those whose outlooks and interests derive from and focus on private affairs, especially the traditional family, religion, and genuine private enterprise. Above all, as Codevilla makes plain, “for our ruling class, identity always trumps.” These people know they are superior in every way, and they are not shy about letting us know that they are. Arrogance might as well be their middle name.

The ruling class, not surprisingly, is also the statist party:

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So, if you had any qualms with this article headlined on Drudge as “ GOLDMAN reveals where bailout cash went — overseas banks!“, you might want to check out this one in today’s Environment & Energy Daily (subscription required):

CLIMATE: Lawmakers to ponder U.S. aid commitments without cap-and-trade revenue

With prospects for a broad climate bill nearly dead this year, a House Foreign Affairs subpanel will meet tomorrow to probe how the United States can honor its climate finance commitments to the developing world without cap-and-trade revenue…

The world’s wealthy nations, including the United States, have pledged to raise $100 billion a year by 2020 for climate aid to low-emitting impoverished countries that, through one of climate change’s cruelest twists, are among the most vulnerable to the drought and floods that will accompany global warming.

That pledge, which includes $30 billion in quick-start funding over the next three years, was one of the most tangible successes of last December’s U.N. climate summit. The deal was critical in winning over many developing nations to sign onto the Copenhagen Accord, sparing the United Nations and President Obama a total fiasco in Denmark.

However, how this money will be raised remains very much in doubt in the United States, especially with the failure this year of comprehensive climate legislation. Both the House’s Waxman-Markey bill and the Senate’s Kerry-Lieberman bill shunted portions of their cap-and-trade revenue toward international climate aid.

Without this money, it will be extremely difficult to raise significant climate funds, wrote Michael Levi, senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, on his blog.

“Raising [the funds] without cap-and-trade will almost certainly be impossible,” he wrote. “If others conclude from the current debacle that cap-and-trade is permanently dead in the United States, Washington will be in for a rough ride at the climate talks in Cancun in December.”

Oh. Well. We wouldn’t want that. If we can avoid people being mean to the State Department because those stingy American taxpayers won’t give them enough money, we should, at (apparently) all costs.

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