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.

(more…)

Judicial Watch, the public interest group that investigates and prosecutes government corruption, today released its 2011 list of Washington’s “Ten Most Wanted Corrupt Politicians.” The members of the Senate on the list include:

Former Senator John Ensign (R-NV)

Dishonorable Mentions for 2011 include:

• Former Senator John Edwards (D-NC)

Former Senator John Ensign (R-NV): John Ensign, former U.S. Senator from Nevada and former Chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, was forced to resign from office in May 2011 as the result of an investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee. In a scandal that first broke in 2009, Senator Ensign publicly admitted to an affair with the wife of long-time staffer Douglas Hampton. Ensign then allegedly tried to cover up the affair by bribing the couple with lucrative gifts and political favors.

According to The New York Times, after Hampton discovered the affair involving his wife Cynthia, the senator bought his silence by giving him “a strong boost into a lobbying career.” Ensign asked political backers to find Hampton a job. “Payments of $96,000 to the Hamptons also were made by Senator Ensign’s parents, who insist this was a gift, not hush money. Once a lobbying job was secured, Senator Ensign and his chief of staff continued to help Mr. Hampton, advocating his clients’ cases directly with federal agencies.”

These lobbying activities seemingly violated the law related to the Senate’s “cooling off” period for lobbyists. According to Senate rules, former Senate aides “may not lobby the Member for whom he worked or that Member’s staff for a period of one year after leaving [their] position.” Hampton began to lobby Ensign’s office immediately upon leaving his job on Capitol Hill. (more…)

From The Associated Press:

A federal grand jury indicted two-time presidential candidate John Edwards on Friday over $925,000 spent to keep his mistress and their baby in hiding during the peak of his 2008 campaign for the White House.

The case of USA v. Johnny Reid Edwards contains six counts, including conspiracy, four counts of illegal campaign contributions and one count of false statements.

The indictment said the payments were a scheme to protect Edwards’ White House ambitions. “A centerpiece of Edwards’ candidacy was his public image as a devoted family man,” the indictment said.

(more…)

Something ominous is happening within the Democratic Party, and Barack Obama will soon have to start paying attention. For weeks now, James Carville has been railing against the Obama administration’s handling of the oil spill in the Gulf. On Tuesday, Ed Rendell, Governor of Pennsylvania, added further fuel to the flames by issuing a warning. If Obama did not start pulling troops out of Afghanistan in July, 2011 as promised, he predicted that there would be a political insurrection within the party and that the President might face a primary challenge. It is in no way surprising that the Republicans have revived Hillary Clinton’s famous “3 a.m.” political advertisement and have given it a new spin, for they smell blood in the water. “Hillary was right,” they say. After the oil spill, the proverbial telephone rang and rang and rang, and the President . . . golfed, partied with celebrities, and went on vacation again and again.

Carville and Rendell have this in common. They are Democrats; they are fiercely partisan; and they were strong supporters of Hillary Clinton during the primaries back in 2008. Their maneuvers should perhaps be read in light of an op-ed piece that Leslie Gelb published in The Wall Street Journal back in the middle of June, suggesting that, when Robert Gates retires, Hillary be made the first female Secretary of Defense; that, in 2012, she be put on the ticket in place of Joe Biden; and that Biden be awarded the booby prize and be named Secretary of State.

I have no idea whether Gelb ran his piece past the Clintons before publishing it. But I would not be surprised. He, too, is a restless, frustrated, critical Democrat on the outs, and the scenario that he paints is by no means ridiculous. Joe Biden is not an asset, and Barack Obama views him with obvious disdain. Bill Clinton is a talented campaigner and a master in the art of staging comebacks, and in 2012 Hillary might be able to turn out a host of white women to vote for Obama who would otherwise sit on their hands.

As it happens, on Saturday, President Obama will have a priceless opportunity that he would be ill-advised to pass up. On that fateful day, in Rhinebeck, New York, on the estate of John Jacob Astor IV, if the rumors are borne out, Chelsea Clinton will marry Marc Mezvinsky in the presence of 400 of their parents’ best friends. And, although Bill Clinton is not a Sicilian, he would certainly be hard-pressed on so auspicious a day to deny anyone who asked of him a favor – least of all a sitting President of the United States who came to him, saying, May their first child be a masculine child!

(more…)

Journalists love whistleblowers. Just not when the whistle is blown on them.

Journalists love transparency.  As long as they’re not the ones being exposed.

No steadfast journalism rule is unbendable when it comes to justifying and protecting the racket that is modern journalism, specifically, political journalism in the United States today. The ends justify the means for the Democrat Media Complex. They lie when they claim to be objective. They lie when they claim to be unbiased, because these so called “truth seekers” are guilty of engaging in open political warfare. And when the whistle is blown, they simply double down. “Journolist” — like Media Matters, but more insidious, if that’s possible — is an attempt to put the genie back in the bottle, technology and “the masses” uncovered the conspiracy:

Talk radio and the Internet have allowed outsiders the ability to challenge a multiple generational shift from journalism being about the story, to journalism being crafted toward a partisan end. From Newsweek killing the Lewinsky story to the Swift Boat veterans (until the undermedia pressure got too big) to the Dan Rather implosion to the open attempt to keep the Al Gore masseuse story under wraps to the John Edwards/Rielle Hunter debacle to the Van Jones admission of missing the story to the networks ignoring the ACORN video footage to the media playing up trumped up charges of racism in the Tea Party — while ignoring exculpatory evidence — to the mother of all media-as-political weaponry: the non-vetting of candidate Obama, the mainstream media has shown that it is in an ideological death spiral. And the ground is right here. (more…)

It’s almost hard to believe but Wednesday, January 20 marks exactly one year since President Bush left the White House.

During his last public ceremony as commander in chief, he was booed by thousands of Americans who simutaneously cheered for Barack Obama as he was sworn into office on the steps of the U.S. Capitol.

Except for a June 17 speech in Erie, Pennsylvania in which Bush defended his policies and criticized Obama’s, the former president has been remarkably silent about his successor. He has not fired back at Obama despite the new administration inappropriately blaming Bush for all of their failures.

One year after taking office however, Obama has done a total reversal on his isolationist, non-interventionist foreign policy, and is now pushing President Bush’s neo-conservative philosophy as a justification for starting a new war in Afghanistan. What the Democratic Party once criticized as an over-simplified good vs. evil argument has become the cornerstone of Obama’s reasoning.

(more…)

Hands down, the ’00s were the worst political decade at least since the 1990s.

Reason.tv celebrates the (lack of) personalities, the scandals, and the screw-ups that made us all want to forget the first 10 years of the 21st century.

(more…)

In part I of this article, I provided a little background on the history of the public option, including how John Edwards was actually the first to propose it during the Democratic primary campaign. I also demonstrated how the media has largely ignored the glaring inconsistencies between Edwards’ characterization of the public option during the campaign, and how Obama has promoted it to the public this year. Edwards quite openly acknowledged that a public option could result in the entire health system gravitating towards a government-run, single payer system. Obama, on the other hand, has flatly denied this is the case saying it’s all about “choice and competition”.

I also singled out Julie Rovner from NPR as an example of a media health policy expert who has failed to fully (and fairly) report on the public option. Including the fact that many of its original (and current) proponents believe it could ultimately lead to a single payer system. Instead, Rovner has been a consistent voice of support for the Administration’s assertion that this is only a “myth”. I asked Rovner to comment on this prior to publishing part I. Here is the relevant excerpt from her response (emphasis mine):

(more…)

Most casual followers of politics did not pick up on the debate over healthcare reform until some time this past summer. They mostly ignored the umpteen news conferences held by the President since the spring, but they couldn’t miss the broader media coverage of town hall outrage. But for a small number of media experts on health policy, and an only slightly larger number of interested followers, the healthcare debate actually began much earlier. In fact, even prior to this year, when the initial policy formulation and political posturing took place during the Democratic primary campaign.

All three leading Democratic candidates for President – Obama, Clinton, and yes, John Edwards – proposed virtually identical plans for healthcare reform. The only real substantive difference being that the Clinton and Edwards plans included an individual mandate for insurance, whereas Obama’s plan did not. (Obama has since come around to supporting this mandate.) But importantly, all the Democratic plans included the creation of a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers. What is now called, the “public option”.

Although he was destined to be a marginal candidate, Edwards played an important role in the healthcare debate. He was the first candidate to announce the details of his plan, and really put down a marker for liberal ambition on this issue leading into the election. Especially with the inclusion of the public option. And ultimately the other candidates largely followed his blueprint, even if they failed to credit him for his leadership on this issue.

(more…)