When the Democrats aren’t cheating on their taxes like Charlie Rangel or forgetting to pay them like Timothy Geithner, they’re busy lambasting Republicans for actually paying theirs—albeit at a rate unsatisfactory to them.

In yet another fantastic display of hypocrisy, the liberal mainstream media spent the week attacking Governor Mitt Romney for having a 15% tax rate.  Since the media is loath to engage in any actual investigative journalism when it comes to the Democrats, I decided to do a little of my own.  Here’s what I found.

Start with Senator John Kerry who is among the 400 richest Americans thanks to his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry’s, inheritance.  Their last publicly released tax returns in 2003 revealed that they paid a rate of 13.4% on a declared income of $5.5 million. This from the man who, just last year, tried to avoid half a million dollars in taxes by anchoring his yacht in Rhode Island rather than Massachusetts. Estimates pin Kerry’s net worth somewhere between $700 million and $3.2 billion compared to Romney’s lower net worth of $202 million.

Take a look at former Vice Presidential Candidate John Edwards’s 2003 tax returns, and you’ll find that he paid an astonishingly low rate of 5.1%.  Seems a bit low for a man with a net worth hovering around $54.7 million.

But, of course, Kerry and Edwards’ income tax rates were protected under lock and key by the mainstream media during the 2004 presidential race against President George W. Bush.   Speaking of Bush, you’ll also never hear anyone mention the fact that he paid a rate of 27.7% in the same year.

Tax rates aside, in yet another attempt to make something out of nothing, the media has been reporting relentlessly on Romney donating millions in cash and stocks to the Mormon Church, as if tithing to one’s church is somehow a negative.  Thanks to donations like Romney’s, the Mormon Church is able to sustain a large philanthropic network and send young men on two year missions that provide extensive humanitarian aid to a countless number of people in need.  If you call that bad, I’d hate to see what you call good.

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Accusations of financial malfeasance–including that money donated to Occupy Wall Street is being given to people with the suggestion that they “buy drugs with it if they want–are just the latest sign of deep internal problems within the #Occupy movement, according to internal emails and online messages.

One such message comes from Jacki Di Salvo, PhD, an organizer for Occupy who is also a teacher at Baruch College and CUNY. Di Salvo seems to be locked in a struggle with 18-year-old Nan Terrie, who has a group called Strong Women Rule. In an email from New Year’s Eve, Ms. Di Salvo refers to Ms. Terrie as “the disrupter” for suggesting that the finances of Occupy be audited.

Ms. Terrie has actually been mentioned on Big Government before. She was one of the people calling for a safe house at Zuccotti Park after all the crime that was occurring at Occupy Wall Street. Terrie also was a victim of theft in the Occupy movement, something she also spoke out about publicly. Exposing what’s really going on at Occupy Wall Street in regards to sexual assaults and violence doesn’t seemed to have endeared her to Ms. Di Salvo, as it contradicts the picture painted by the mainstream media and Occupy boosters like Nancy Pelosi and President Barack Obama.

Here’s the email from Ms. Di Salvo:

Nan, the disrupter, tried to get a proposal passed tonight for auditing Accounting (Finances). She wanted the Audit to be done by her dubious group Strong Women Rule, which only has 4 members & which she uses to be a spoke at SpokesCouncil. This is very suspect. A Times reporter recently was told I knew something about OWS finances and wanted to talk to me. I declined because I am afraid the press is fishing around for something for which they can criticize OWS.  My sense is That Accounting has been hard working, transparent and characterized by integrity. The questions I raised about Finances was about GA approval of  so many budget requests that we could soon go broke, although I notice that in recent days people at the GA have become much more cautious and prudent.

There are reports that Ms. Terrie was ejected from a “SpokesCouncil” meeting and that Occupy organizers were attempting to find a private location, so as to exclude her and her disruptive questions. The next SpokesCouncil meeting was assigned a ‘To Be Determined’ location, as this post went to press.

There is clearly some dissent in the ranks of Occupy on management issues. Someone using the name They Use Fake Names posted this last night:

It doesn’t take a family of ten working 60 hours a week to provide for their family.
It doesn’t take 100 people working themselves to death to provide for a community.
We’re producing nothing. We get nothing. We’re getting a shitty quality of life for more work.

These complaints of a “shitty quality of life for more work” shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone who’s studied the history of collectivist movements. Last week the same They Use Fake Names account posted the following:

This is what’s really going on:

The people with access to the office get the $100 daily allotment of money. They use it on whatever they want. I heard one member of finance state, ”Buy drugs if you want, just make a receipt for something…”

The OWS COMHUB Group recently ratified the NYCGA so that many groups will be pushed out. In this way the pool of money will have less hands to go for. And the people in the office with direct access to the finance working group will have money longer. Meanwhile, they encourage you to go out and get arrested and stand up for the cause and raise donations! Any and all donations must be taken by the Finance Working Group because your autonomous beautiful self is too stupid to handle the money! The finance group should handle it for you  We’re all brother’s and sister’s in one occupation though, so don’t worry! We will take care of you!

Ya, right! After the raid, the finance working group completely disappeared. And time and again they are no where to be found when shit hits the fan and people need resources. However, large sums of money have routinely gone missing! And there is no effort made to be transparent or show who the people controlling the money really are…

Reports of people getting $100 a day, for any purpose, being told to fake receipts; complaints about “shitty quality of life for more work”; and a vanishing finance committee–these don’t appear to be a concern for some Occupiers like Ms. Di Salvo, who apparently ducks interviews if she thinks the press may possibly report something negative.

She has “a sense” that everything is fine, though, so the people who gave money to #Occupy should be relieved.

The Greater Boston Food Bank intended to have a fundraising event in Boston’s Dewey Square over the weekend of the 14th of October. It was to be called the “Greenway Mobile Food Fest” and was supposed to help raise funds to feed the poor and needy. However, due to the tantrums being thrown by the Occupy Boston protestors, the event had to be canceled.

Despite the selfishness of these pointless, clueless protesters, though, conservative bloggers stepped in and raised over $3,000 for the food bank. An important question is, where is the media on this story? Isn’t this a perfect sort of human-interest story that media types usually love?

The media should love this. It’s got clueless, uninformed, cretins hurting an organization that helps feed the needy. It has a more caring group rising to the challenge to help replace those lost donations. Perfect story, right?

Ah, except that it is conservatives in the role of good guy and the Old Media can’t have that, now can they?

Now, the anti-capitalists of the so-called “Occupy” events pretend that they are for the downtrodden, the low man on the totem pole, but in Boston the Occupy-Whatevers were more interested in their tantrums than in actually helping anyone. So, the food bank and the small-business festival associated with it lost out to those selfish whiners that claim to be for “the little man.” Nice, eh? (more…)

Illinois taxpayers are given the option to donate money to charity each year when they file their state tax returns.

Now, America’s most indebted state is raiding those funds to pay for wasteful spending that the Democratic governor and legislature refuse to cut.

As Chicago’s local NBC affiliate reported recently, it’s a form of theft made possible by a law that then-Gov. Rob Blagojevich passed in 2003 allowing “unused” money to be swept into the state’s general fund.

Illinois Tax Return. Source: NBC Chicago

A spokesperson for Blagojevich’s successor, Gov. Pat Quinn, claims the charity money was used to pay for Medicaid expenses, and that without those funds, the state would have lost critical federal funding.

Even some Democrats, including former gubernatorial candidate Dawn Clark-Netsch, find such excuses unacceptable. They are outraged at behavior that would likely result in criminal prosecutions, were it to be done by a private company or individual.

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With the setting of the sun this Wednesday night, Jews across the world will begin the observance of the Yomim Noraim (Days of Awe), a ten day period book-ended by the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. This year’s High Holiday period comes at an interesting time for America as the first night of Rosh Hashanah comes a mere fifty-four days before the United States goes to the polls to between two radically different directions, one which emphasizes personal responsibility, the other emphasizes a reliance on government. Only one of those directions is compatible with the true meaning of the High Holidays.

Last week, in CFPA Czar or Fox in the Hen House? You Decide, I brought you more details about the people and structure of the ACORN-esque Center for Responsible Lending (CRL) and the Center for Community Self Help (CCSH) as part of a series of pieces we’ve been writing about the financial crisis and the proposed Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

The importance of the pieces in this series cannot be understated.  As Congress faces down a massive power-grabbing partisan financial reform bill this week, it seems to have lost sight of many of the causes of the financial crisis in the first place.  While we hear about the exemptions in the bill of institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the stories we’ve been covering on CRL and CCSH further illustrate the dangers of unchecked entities and a government with too much intervention and far too much power.

At the peak of the subprime mortgage boom and the subsequent financial crisis, primary donors to CRL and CCSH basked in billions of dollars in pure profit, thanks in large part to that very intervention and power.

Next, we’re going to introduce you to the questionable lobbying activities of this complex organization.  But before we do, let’s review a few pertinent details from our previous posts about this organization:

• John Paulson is the largest single donor to the Center for Responsible Lending.  Paulson owns one of the world’s largest hedge funds, and most recently, the SEC has alleged “that Paulson & Co. paid Goldman Sachs to structure a transaction in which Paulson & Co. could take short positions against mortgage securities chosen by Paulson & Co. based on a belief that the securities would experience credit events.”
• Herb and Marion Sandler are the second largest donors to CRL, and together with Paulson appear to comprise the majority of the organization’s funding.  The couple owned GoldenWest Financial/World Savings bank, before selling it for over $2 billion to Wachovia, which tanked shortly thereafter
• Eric Stein, who once worked for Fannie Mae (an institution currently exempt from regulation in the financial reform bill), was also the longtime leader of CRL and Sr. Vice President of CCSH.  Today, Stein sits in Obama’s Treasury Department in charge of crafting the current financial reform legislation and the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency (CFPA).

Now, onto the lobbying.

A complaint that was filed with the House, Senate, and the IRS alleges that CRL, CCSH, and its vast network of non-profit and for-profit companies may have committed serious violations of the Lobbying Disclosure Act (LDA) and the Honest Leadership in Open Government Act (HLOGA).  The complaint was filed in the Fall of 2009 by the Consumers Rights League.

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Dear Friends of Freedom Alliance:

This week, false and malicious allegations about Freedom Alliance were posted on the Internet and we want to address them with you. We don’t know the motivation for these vicious smears, but we will not allow them to go unanswered.

First, we want to thank you for your support and assure you that Freedom Alliance’s record of financial stewardship and programmatic achievements not only meets, but exceeds standards of program efficiency set by most charity evaluators. We are extraordinarily proud of our work at Freedom Alliance and stand by our efforts 100 percent.

False Accusations

1. The blog posting accuses our friend Sean Hannity of personally benefiting from Freedom Alliance. This is FALSE. Freedom Alliance has never provided planes, hotels, cars, limos, or anything else to Sean. Sean gets nothing from Freedom Alliance except our gratitude for his personal generosity and for all he has done to help the troops and our organization. We have never had to ask Sean for anything, he always generously offers his help before we have a chance to ask him. But to be clear Sean pays for all his own transportation, hotels, and all related expenses for himself and his family and friends and staff, which over the years has added up to tens of thousands of dollars. He does not use any Freedom Alliance Funds or Concert funds in any way, period. (more…)

I reached out to Andrew Breitbart over the weekend with a simple plea: Haiti needs assistance. Can you help? Within seconds, I had the answer I was hoping for — a resounding “Yes!”

I own a jet charter service that operates a fleet of Boeing 737s. Haiti needs medical supplies, surgeons, nurses, rescue workers, food, water and the only way to get it there quickly is by air.  Haiti needs to Medevac the critically injured to US hospitals, and orphans need to be flown to homes in the US. The vital link in all the countless ways people are providing help in Haiti is air transportation.

This is our mission, to support the ongoing relief effort in Haiti with air transportation logistics.

We have three Boeing 737’s and two King Air turbo props. What we don’t have is fuel (yet).

We need you. We need immediate donations to cover our fuel and related expenses. Fuel costs money.

Please visit www.airlifthaiti.org and give. Time is of the essence and many lives are precariously hanging in the balance.

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