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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Roger Bate of the American Enterprise Institute to discuss problems facing the Global Fund. Then Pejman Yousefzadeh talks about the continuing unrest in Egypt.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Sweden, Germany Suspend Grants to Global Fund
Global Fund Corruption, Continued
Corruption at the Global Fund
New Test Finds More Fake Medicines
With Friends Like This, Egypt Doesn’t Need Enemies
The Pharaoh Comes Closer to Falling
Pej: And Now, Yemen and Jordan
(more…)

JournoList scandal is back and prepare for it to be a driving force in the news for quite some time. The Daily Caller published an article tonight indicating they’ve obtained emails from the JournoList and the initial details are as damning as we expected when the list-serv, founded by the Washington Post’s Ezra Klein in 2007, surfaced with the Dave Weigel kerfuffle last month.

Snippets from the article below, but make sure to read the whole thing at the Daily Caller and return to Big Journalism early and often as we unpack the details that emerge and track the fallout from this seminal event in the history of left-wing media bias. It’s unclear exactly what the Daily Caller has, but there’s certainly no indication from this article they’ve already laid all their cards out on the table.

According to records obtained by The Daily Caller, at several points during the 2008 presidential campaign a group of liberal journalists took radical steps to protect their favored candidate. Employees of news organizations including Time, Politico, the Huffington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Guardian, Salon and the New Republic participated in outpourings of anger over how Obama had been treated in the media, and in some cases plotted to fix the damage.

In one instance, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent urged his colleagues to deflect attention from Obama’s relationship with Wright by changing the subject. Pick one of Obama’s conservative critics, Ackerman wrote, “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares — and call them racists.” (more…)

Other than the Klan, is there a more useless organization in American than the NAACP? Violent crime in black urban communities remains unsettling, the learning gap between black and other students still exists, marriage is all but nonexistent among poor blacks, and all too many households are headed by single mothers.

So where does the NAACP level its attack? Beyond street crime, apart from dysfunctional communities, ignoring the skyrocketing rates of HIV AIDS, they say the real problem for black folks is … the Tea Party movement. Benjamin Jealous, the NAACP’s president, says Tea Party activism is “pushing the country backwards.”

But wait, the problems facing urban black communities pre-date the growth of Tea Party formations by a significant number of years. But facts aside, since the end of the 1980s, the NAACP has been completely unable to craft an authentic agenda dealing with the real issues facing black communities.

So what’s a stuffy, out-of-step civil rights group to do? It throws down the victim card and places blame for its organizational failures in odd places.

Last time I checked, most Tea Party formations are organized around issues like limited government, maximum individual liberty, free markets and fiscal responsibility. Issues of race have not been a featured part of any Tea party gathering in any place that I’ve been aware of.

But, facts to liberals are like kryptonite to Superman. And neither facts nor logic seemingly played a role in the NAACP’s decision to take up a resolution at its national convention condemning “The Tea Party”for“explicitly racist behavior.

(more…)

Today’s edition identifies at least $333 million in wasteful Washington spending.

-$300 million stimulus program to promote energy efficiency may not be energy efficient after all, audit finds

-Quid Pro Pork: Department of Justice investigates link between the exchange of congressional earmarks and campaign donations

-Washington, DC, city government steered $4.5 million in federal funds to an AIDS housing group that never filed federal tax returns and has been plagued with service and cost complaints

-DC mayor launches investigation of groups that misspent more than $25 million of public AIDS assistance

-Political scientists debate the relevancy of the research they conduct with federal funds; “We’re kidding ourselves if we think this research typically has the obvious public benefit we claim for it.”

-National Science Foundation funds political science study of online town hall meetings held by Members of Congress (more…)

Free golf carts available from federal stimulus program

Annual U.S. federal budget deficit reaches an all time high of $1.42 trillion in 2009; Government spending jumped to more than $3.5 trillion, increasing over 18% in one year

The Pentagon pays an average of $400 to put a gallon of fuel into a combat vehicle or aircraft in Afghanistan

As AIDS patients die in the streets of our nation’s capital, millions of dollars in federal AIDS funds misspent by the city on nepotism, ghost employees, and executive travel and pay

No punishment for National Park Service employee, paid $145,000-a-year, who used his government computer to view thousands of sexually explicit images?

National Science Foundation pays to develop a reverse karaoke application for iPhone

As Florida’s jobless rate reaches 11 percent…

… More than $2.3 million in federal economic stimulus grants go to Florida cosmetology and massage schools to pay tuition for the hairdressers, masseuses and nail technicians of tomorrow