Gov. Mitt Romney (Photo source: Christian Science Monitor)

Mitt Romney now says that he will “probably” release his tax records in April after telling NBC in December that he would not, even if he were to become the GOP nominee.  ”Never say never, but I don’t intend to do so.” Romney told NBC on December 21st, 2011.

Romney estimated in a press conference earlier today in Florence, South Carolina that he “probably” pays only about 15 percent in federal taxes. The DNC quickly seized on Romney’s declared tax rate to attack him for it, launching a website, WhatMittPays.com, within 24 hours with a built-in income tax calculator that compares Romney’s income taxed under investments to income earned through work. This is, in essence, the DNC’s attempt at rehashing President Obama’s “Buffet Rule.”

Romney’s capital gains tax rate is not all that unusual. After all, most of Romney’s earnings come from capital gains, which is taxed at a lower rate than income. (more…)

A company went into bankruptcy (Smith Corona) and was sold to another company (Ampad). The new company, 80% of which was owned by Bain Capital, tried to make the old company profitable—and even offered to rehire the old employees at slightly lower wages—but the union (United Paperworkers International Union) insisted on the status quo and went on strike. All of the employees lost their jobs when the company moved to a right-to-work state.  So who is to blame for the workers losing their jobs?

Not Mitt Romney, as Newt Gingrich, the DNC, and MSNBC would have you believe, but Randy Johnson, the union vice president who refused to compromise.

Johnson even coordinated with Ted Kennedy to help prolong the strike so as to damage Mitt Romney’s candidacy. Romney was leading in the polls against Ted Kennedy or tied before the story broke. Johnson and Kennedy had even met at an AFL-CIO rally. Johnson admitted after the election that he and Kennedy had stayed in touch about the strike all along. (“Romney’s retribution – and Kennedy’s response,” Robert A. Jordan, The Boston Globe January 8, 1995, Sunday)

The strikers were convinced by Johnson that Romney could solve the strike, despite his leave from Bain to run for Senate. He eventually got a meeting with Romney in a Newton, but they still couldn’t resolve the strike and by then the narrative had been that Romney was seen as coldhearted and heartless, which was the point.

(more…)

From the Associated Press:

Obama’s election year retreat from legislative fights means this term will end without significant progress on two of his 2008 campaign promises, an immigration overhaul and closing the military prison for terrorist suspects atGuantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Presidential directives probably won’t make a big dent in the nation’s 8.6 percent unemployment rate or lead to significant improvements in the economy. That’s the chief concern for many voters and the issue on which Republican candidates are most likely to criticize Obama.

In focusing on executive actions rather than ambitious legislation, the president risks appearing to be putting election-year strategy ahead of economic action at a time when millions of Americans are still out of work.

(more…)

Breitbart News editor Peter Schweizer writing in Newsweek:

When President-elect Obama came to Washington in late 2008, he was outspoken about the need for an economic stimulus to revive a struggling economy. He wanted billions of dollars spent on “shovel-ready projects” to build roads; billions more for developing alternative-energy projects; and additional billions for expanding broadband Internet access and creating a “smart grid” for energy consumption. After he was sworn in as president, he proclaimed that taxpayer money would assuredly not be doled out to political friends. “Decisions about how Recovery Act dollars are spent will be based on the merits,” he said, referring to the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. “Let me repeat that: decisions about how recovery money will be spent will be based on the merits. They will not be made as a way of doing favors for lobbyists.”

In February, when the Democratic National Committee chose Charlotte, North Carolina as the host city for its September 2012 convention, it left the door wide open for the Charlotte-area’s union-free workforce to be discriminated against in favor union workers. Although Charlotte’s Democrat Mayor, Anthony Foxx  (who is facing GOP challenger Scott Stone in Tuesday’s election), has denied the allegation, it appears Foxx has been misleading Charlotte residents on both his (alleged) job creation record as well as the outsourcing of DNC convention jobs to union labor.

On Friday, RedState’s Ben Howe broke the story of the Democratic National Committee discriminating against a Charlotte-area business for the 2012 convention because its workers were not unionized.

When John told him he was not, the Committee member told him, “We were just told that we cannot accept bids unless they are from companies that are unionized.”

Politico also had another Charlotte business owner who was told the DNC was looking to use union labor for its Convention:

He was told the Convention was looking to use local contractors to run the project, but union labor to staff it — and then, he said, he was told he would have to sign an agreement stating he would use union labor for the project.

“We asked the question, how do you want to use local when no one local is unionized?” Webb told POLITICO.

(more…)

The Working Families Party, an infamous ACORN front group notorious for corruption, was instrumental in organizing the Occupy Wall Street protests, according to radical journalist Laura Flanders of Free Speech TV.

The protests, which have spread to several other large U.S. cities, are part of what ACORN’s neo-communist founder Wade Rathke calls an “anti-banking jihad.”

Working Families Party (WFP) organizer Nelini Stamp has “been here since day one and she is part of the organizing team and the outreach team that has managed to bridge the distance between that first day and this day and between the grassroots folks here and the labor movement,” Flanders said at the protest in lower Manhattan.

We are “actually trying to change the capitalist system we have today because it’s not working for any of us,” Stamp told Flanders in an interview. Demonstrators are asking “how do we really reform and bring revolutionary changes to the states?”

(more…)

The final results from the special election held in New York’s uber-liberal 9th Congressional District could be both an ominous sign and political tide that may roll over the Democrat Party in Florida in 2012. NY-9 was considered one of the “safest” congressional districts that Democrats neve rthought they would lose.  But with greater numbers of traditional Democrats becoming increasingly hostile towards President Obama’s toxic agenda and his mistreatment of Israel, this 40% Jewish district has shifted Republican.

Suffice to say, the Republican Party is positively giddy over the results and smells blood in the waters of other once “safe” congressional districts- especially those in Florida.

“The results of New York 9 send a message for all incumbents, but especially Democrats who live in the delusion that their reelection is certain. NY-9 implies that even some of Florida’s most traditionally Democrat districts understand a principled-Republican message of economic prosperity through less government and more freedom.”-Brian Hughes, RPOF Communications Director

All eyes will be on Florida in next year’s Presidential election, one could say that it will be the proverbial Mount Megiddo where political Armageddon will take place in November 2012.  Could the once supposedly “safe” Democrat Congressional seats in Florida now be in play?  The most high-profile “safe” seat is in Congressional District 20, held by DNC Chair and Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman-Schultz spun the NY-9 defeat rather incredulously, stating that it was a “tough district” for Democrats to win even though it was Warren Harding who was President when Republicans last held the seat in 1923.  But Debbie’s real problem is that NY-9 was a complete rebuke of Obama’s policies, and make no mistake about it- Debbie, as DNC Chairwoman, is married (figuratively) to the President and his policies. The deal breaker for many Jews which set off alarm bells may have been when Obama stated that Israel should return to its indefensible 1967 border lines as a precondition for future peace negotiations with the Palestinians.  As President Obama’s hand-picked DNC Chairwoman, Debbie is in a major bind- her inability and refusal to separate herself from the President’s failed and offensive policies could ultimately send her packing from Congress- a situation she might not have been in had she not accepted the appointment of DNC Chairwoman.

(more…)

Tonight, CNN and Tea Party Express co-host a debate of GOP candidates in Tampa, FL, site of the upcoming GOP convention. I’m not really sure how the ‘tea party’ is going to be represented in this debate, since the moderators are pulled from CNN, but there is no way it can be any worse than the MSNBC/Politico forum last week. In that fiasco, John Harris and Brian Williams drew deeply from lefty activists like ThinkProgress to launch attacks on the GOP candidates. It was as if the DNC had done a mind-meld with Harris and Williams (redundant, I know!), and got 90+ minutes to prospect for material for negative campaign ads.

Color me naive, but CNN is not MSNBC. Liberal, sure. But, it at least tries not to seem totally in the tank for the left, unlike Politico and MSNBC. So, I don’t think the DNC will own the same real estate in Wolf Blitzer’s brain as it had in Harris/Williams. Then again, according to news reports today, it won’t have to. Amazingly, two leading candidates for the GOP nomination, Mitt Romney and Michele Bachmann, look set to take a page from the DNC and ThinkProgress playbook and attack Gov. Rick Perry for daring to speak the truth about Social Security. Below is a flier the Romney campaign is distributing in Florida.

And, yesterday, Bachmann’s campaign had this to say to Byron York:

“Bernie Madoff deals with Ponzi schemes, not the grandparents of America,” says a Bachmann adviser. “Clearly she feels differently about the value of Social Security than Gov. Perry does. She believes Social Security needs to be saved, that it’s an important safety net for Americans who have paid into it all their lives.” … “She strongly disagrees with his position on that…”

So let me get this straight; we now have TWO GOP candidates against any kind of entitlement reform? Really? We can’t begin to get out from under our overwhelming debt burden unless we tackle these auto-pilot programs. You could close every government agency and slash defense spending in half and we’re still screwed if we don’t reform Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. How can Romney or Bachmann seek to be President if they don’t understand this basic fact? I mean, its not just a theory…its math.

(more…)

Don’t you just love it when a political figure opens up his or her mouth and out comes STUPID?

Unfortunately, the blubbering of absolute absurdity happens on the left AND the right, but former DNC chairman Howard Dean, appearing this week on ‘Face the Nation’, barfed up something so ridiculous it spawned many Google searches on my part.

In discussing this nation’s debt crisis, Dean joined John Kerry, Charlie Rangel and even John McCain to some extent, in throwing the Tea Party Conservatives under the proverbial bus, blaming them for the inability to reach better deal on the debt ceiling. Dean’s comment went a little somethin’ like this:

“I think this is [the] Tea Party’s problem. I think they’re totally unreasonable and doctrinaire and not founded in reality. I think they’ve been smoking some of that tea, not just drinking it,” Dean said …

Smoking tea … Well, call me sheltered (and not many do …) but I certainly hadn’t heard of any such thing … Smoking tea? Do people do that?

And if they do, what kind?

Lipton? Nestea? Celestial Seasonings? Herbal?  Green tea? Will a Target generic brand suffice? I just had to find out exactly what would happen if one did actually fire up a tea doobie instead of steeping and drinking tea (I’m a journalist … don’t knock me for being curious.).

(more…)

Does President Obama approve of the SEIU/ACORN-led economic terrorism campaign that is now directed at JPMorgan Chase?

It seems like a reasonable question to ask. SEIU is President Obama’s favorite union and ACORN is his favorite community organizing outfit.

The campaign, engineered by SEIU board member Stephen Lerner, is designed, in Lerner’s words, “to disrupt and create uncertainty for capital, for how corporations operate … there are actually extraordinary things that we could do right now that would start to destabilize the folks that are in power and start to rebuild a movement.”

According to White House visitor logs, “Stephen Lerner” paid four visits to the Obama White House. On two of those visits he apparently met with then-White House political director Patrick Gaspard, a former executive vice president at the militant SEIU Local 1199. Gaspard, a longtime ACORN operative and Alinskyite, is now executive director of the DNC where he oversees the odious Organizing for America project.

I wonder what they talked about. Hmmmm.

(more…)

Democratic National  Committee (DNC) Chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Shultz has never been known as the sharpest pencil in the box, but since she took over as the head of the DNC she has added nasty to her profile. Her latest project is to try and water-down the impact GOP votes by allowing voter registration fraud across the country, and she is using the ‘Republicans are bigots” card to do it. She wrote an op-ed in US News and World Report claiming that Republicans are trying to restrict voting, especially minority voting with laws aimed at reducing voter fraud and requiring people to show ID when they show up to vote.

Has the Obama White House stolen a few pages from the Clintons’ well-worn campaign fundraising playbook?

According to last week’s  New York Times, recent secret meetings with Wall Street executives inside the Obama White House are more than raising eyebrows:

A few weeks before announcing his re-election campaign, President Obama convened two dozen Wall Street executives, many of them longtime donors, in the White House’s Blue Room.…

The event, organized by the Democratic National Committee, kicked off an aggressive push by Mr. Obama to win back the allegiance of one of his most vital sources of campaign cash — in part by trying to convince Wall Street that his policies, far from undercutting the investor class, have helped bring banks and financial markets back to health.

Of course the Obama White House response was predictable: “Nothing to see here.” Politico reported White House Press spokesman Jay Carney told reporters aboard Air Force One, “What needs to be made clear is, contrary to suggestions otherwise, this was not a fundraiser.”

Really? Nothing wrong with the meeting? Then why was there no mention of it on the President’s public schedule?

(more…)

It’s all over. The Democrats finally have owned up to what everyone else in America has known for the past two and a half years. Dual-hatted Congresswoman and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Shultz claimed that her party “owns the economy.” She recently told POLITICO’s Mike Allen, “We own the economy. We own the beginning of the turnaround and we want to make sure that we continue that pace of recovery, not go back to the policies of the past under the Bush administration that put us in the ditch in the first place.”

Alright, that’s not exactly a total coming out of the denial closet, but it’s a start. Rep. Shultz is right about the first part of her statement. The Democrats, and in particular President Obama, own this economy. The “beginning of the turnaround” part is a bit disingenuous; however, unless the turnaround consists of dropping from 9.8% unemployment in November 2010 to 8.8% in March 2011. But not so fast. It’s back up to 9.1% today. Not much of a turnaround, unless Rep Shultz meant a turnaround of the turnaround.

How about that “continue the pace of recovery” comment? If you are one of the perpetually-unemployed (especially if you are one of the newly-unemployed during that turnaround from 8.8% to 9.1%) then you probably don’t exactly like the “pace of the recovery.” I suspect the 14 million unemployed Americans would tell Rep. Shultz to stop – don’t continue – the Democratic version of a recovery.

(more…)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download Podcast | iTunes | Podcast Feed

On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss the claim by DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz that Obama has turned around the U.S. Economy, Michele Bachmann, and whether or not the Fed’s dual mandate should be reconsidered.

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:

Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Obama Was Able “To Turn The Economy Around”
Debbie Wasserman Schultz: Democrats Turned the Economy Around, Or Something!
‘On the Beach, I Bring von Mises’

Follow Brad on Twitter
Follow Ben on Twitter
Follow Francis on Twitter
(more…)

Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz is a Democrat Congresswoman from Florida and is currently the head of the Democrat National Committee. She is also one of the most vitriolic, off base, half informed demagogues of the far left in America today. There are tons of examples of her lies and calumnies out there — it’s an almost daily occurrence now that she is DNC head — but today we have a new one. This time DWS is lamenting how Republicans want to make illegal immigration, well, illegal.

Yes, Debbie Wasserman Schultz is not bright enough to catch the “illegal” part in the phrase “illegal immigrant.” Apparently the question, “what part of illegal don’t you get,” is one she doesn’t get.

Naked Emperor has the video of Wasserman Schultz from May 26 of this year.

Transcript:

I think the president was clearly articulating that his position — Democrats position — is that we need comprehensive immigration reform. We have 12 million undocumented immigrants in this country that are part of the backbone of our economy. And that, that is not only a reality but a necessity. And that it would be harmful if some — you know, the Republican solutions that I’ve seen in the last few years is that we should just pack them all up and ship them back to their own countries, and in fact it should be a crime and we should arrest them all. I mean that was in legislation that Jim Sensenbrenner advanced a couple of years ago.

(more…)

Convicted fraudster Robert Creamer, husband of Representative Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), has announced that he is opening a nationwide political consulting firm, Democracy Partners.

Democracy Partners already “has offices in eight cities including Washington, D.C., Chicago, Minneapolis, Las Vegas, Miami, San Francisco, San Diego, and Portland, Maine”–and, presumably, a budget running into many millions of dollars.

Schakowsky & Creamer at the White House, November 2009

(more…)

Speaking to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) Winter Meeting in Washington, D.C., over the weekend, Labor Secretary Hilda Solis admitted she was biased toward unions.

Unions only account  for 11.9 percent of the workforce, but Solis’ favoritism puts them ahead of the other 88 percent of the American workers.

From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama is staying mostly quiet about the union battle going on in Wisconsin. His labor secretary, Hilda Solis, is not.

“The fight is on!” Solis told a cheering crowd at the Democratic National Committee’s winter meeting over the weekend in Washington. Giving her support to “our brothers and sisters in public employee unions,” Solis pledged aid to unionized workers who are “under assault” in Wisconsin and elsewhere.

It’s no surprise Solis sympathizes with the unions against Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker’s budget reform proposal. After all, Solis often tells audiences how proud she is that her father was a Teamsters shop steward and her mother belonged to the United Steelworkers union. “Admittedly, I am a little biased,” she told the DNC, “because … I come from a union household.”

But is it the role of the secretary of labor to take sides in a fight that pits public employee union members against workers and taxpayers who support Walker’s reforms? After all, the Labor Department mission statement says its purpose is “to foster, promote, and develop the welfare of the wage earners, job seekers, and retirees of the United States.” It doesn’t say anything about unionized wage earners, job seekers, and retirees.

While Obama downplays his links to the Wisconsin protesters, Solis’ language is quite similar to the president’s original knee-jerk reaction.

(more…)

These are dangerous times.

With one-in-seven Americans living in poverty, with unemployment at record levels, with an unprecedented national deficit, with foreclosures up and businesses down, you’d think the Obama Administration and Democratic National Committee (DNC) would be focusing on the economy.  You’d be wrong.

Instead, the Community Organizer in Chief and the radical left is focusing its energy on stalking and harassing top conservatives and tea party patriots.

On Saturday, September 18th, Glenn Beck and Andrew Breitbart headlined an event entitled “Right Nation 2010,” held just outside of Chicago, Illinois. When Andrew Breitbart arrived at the Sears Centre west of Chicago, he was met by an angry mob of radical protesters who were “praying” for an “end to hate” while also hurling insults and homophobic slurs toward the targets of their enmity. One of the prayer leaders at the event and the lead organizer, C.J. Hawking, is also a noted socialist from the Chicago area. (more…)

We have no other details, but a tipster from fly-over country forwarded us this text they received this afternoon:

DNC Chair Tim Kaine is making a major announcement on the future of the Democratic Party tomorrow. Attend the announcement at 12:30 p.m. at GWU [George Washington University], 805 21st St NW.

Again, we have no other details and have no idea what Chairman Kaine is announcing. We doubt he is going to say, “Okay, we get it. Big Government policies don’t work and are unpopular with the American people. We are going back to being JFK Democrats.” But, the words “major” and “future” pique our interest.

(more…)

After my article last week, Michael Steele and the Southern Strategy, now is time for some truth-telling about the Democratic Party.  The Democrats’ own southern strategy was far, far worse than even worst accusations aimed at the Republicans.

In his recent speech criticizing the GOP’s so-called southern strategy, RNC Chairman Michael Steele scored big points… for the other team.  Instead of criticizing his own party, he would do well to focus the public’s attention on the appalling heritage of the Democratic Party – the party of slavery and big government, socialism and the Ku Klux Klan.

“The Republican Party, on the contrary [to the Democrats], holds that this government was instituted to secure the blessings of freedom, and that slavery is an unqualified evil.  [Republicans] will oppose in all its length and breadth the modern Democratic idea that slavery is as good as freedom.”

In this classic speech, Abraham Lincoln condemned the pro-slavery policies of the Democratic Party.  The founders of our Grand Old Party knew to call Democrats ‘slave-ocrats.’  And another Republican, Robert Ingersoll, observed: “Every man that loved slavery more than liberty was a Democrat.”  One of Lincoln’s friends, Rep. Owen Lovejoy (R-IL), had this to say:

“The principle of enslaving human beings because they are inferior, is this: If a man is a cripple, trip him up; if he is old and weak, and bowed with the weight of years, strike him, for he cannot strike back; if idiotic, take advantage of him; and if a child, deceive him.  This, sir, this is the doctrine of Democrats and the doctrine of devils as well, and there is no place in the universe outside the five points of hell and the Democratic Party where the practice and prevalence of such doctrines would not be a disgrace.”

Very definitely, slavery was a southern strategy of the Democratic Party.

(more…)