Can This Possibly Be True? New Obama Missile Defense Logo Includes A Crescent

The Obama administration’s determined effort to reduce America’s missile defense capabilities initially seemed to be just standard Leftist fare — of a piece with the Democratic base’s visceral hostility to the idea of protecting us against ballistic missile threats. A just-unveiled symbolic action suggests, however, that something even more nefarious is afoot.

The former would be bad enough, starting with Candidate Obama’s pledge to block “unproven missile defenses.” Once in office, he cut over a billion dollars from the Missile Defense Agency’s budget.  He cancelled the deployment of interceptors and radars in Eastern Europe designed to defend this country, as well as our allies over there.

Among other reprehensible actions, Team Obama terminated the nation’s only program capable of providing a near-term ability to intercept ballistic missiles early in their flight (i.e., the boost-phase).  This Airborne Laser Program nonetheless was successfully tested earlier this month — destroying not one but two missiles similar to those arrayed against us and our friends today and making the case that such systems should be operationalized and deployed as a matter of the utmost urgency.

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Tags: airborne laser program, anti-ballistic missile treaty, ballistic missiles, christopher logan, missile defense
Posted Feb 24th 2010 at 11:29 am in Defense, Obama | 79634635 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/fgaffney/2010/02/24/can-this-possibly-be-true-new-obama-missile-defense-logo-includes-a-crescent/Can+This+Possibly+Be+True%3F+New+Obama+Missile+Defense+Logo+Includes+A+Crescent2010-02-24+19%3A29%3A28Frank+Gaffney

Why Obama is Wrong about Net Neutrality and His Scheme Must Be Defeated

As Capitol Confidential noted the other day, net neutrality is an issue that that is dear to the left, but has flown under the radar of most Americans. It’s a rather technical and arcane subject, but can be summed up rather simply: Net neutrality rules enforced by the Federal Communications Commission would allow government bureaucrats to micromanage the Internet — thus sucking out the lifeblood of the digital economy and threatening the dynamism and freedom we’ve come to take for granted online.

Proponents of net neutrality claim that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) abuse their position as “gatekeepers” to the Web, and the public needs government to establish strict “rules of the road” to protect us from their scheming. Trouble is, the evidence of abusive practices by ISPs is anecdotal and thinner than an iPod mini. The digital economy is currently so dynamic and cutthroat that free-market forces work quickly to correct any undesirable hiccups that arise — all without any micro-managing of the tech industry by government.

Net neutrality advocates insist we need government to preserve an “open” and “free” Internet and claim the market has failed. But they cannot point to any market failures that make the Internet less open or free. In short, the Internet isn’t broken. And it doesn’t need a government fix. No matter. The left presses ahead, because the facts are irrelevant. The goal is to put government in charge of digital policy, taking away your freedom as a consumer to shape the Internet with your own choices.

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Tags: Barack Obama, FCC rule making, Heartland Institute, Internet, internet service provider
Posted Feb 15th 2010 at 7:04 am in Obama, Politics, Technology | 7500662 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/jlakely/2010/02/15/why-obama-is-wrong-about-net-neutrality-and-his-scheme-must-be-defeated/Why+Obama+is+Wrong+about+Net+Neutrality+and+His+Scheme+Must+Be+Defeated2010-02-15+15%3A04%3A18James+G.+Lakely

Obama’s Labor Department Gives Big Labor and Its Front Groups Another Gift

Thursday, the Obama Administration announced that it will rescind rules requiring the disclosure of financial information for Big Labor slush funds and front groups.  And, the Obama Administration is giving you only 11 (eleven) days to comment!

At least they are consistent!  Just as they did for union conflict-of-interest disclosure reporting that SEIU’s Andy Stern may be ignoring and just as it rescinded union-boss perk disclosures, the Obama Administration continues to rollback union financial disclosures.

It is not surprising that Obama’s Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis would rescind these financial disclosure rules since she is the former treasurer of the Big Labor funded American Rights at Work (ARAW) lobbying and political group.   These disclosures would reveal much about the group’s expenditures on behalf Big Labor’s agenda; the very types of expenditures Solis would have signed-off on as ARAW Treasurer.

Union officials have fought these financial disclosures since 2003.  One of the AFL-CIO lawyers involved in opposing these disclosure requirements was Deborah Greenfield.   Now, Greenfield is the Obama Administration’s Acting Deputy Solicitor of Labor and Director of the Office of the Secretariat.  As Deputy Solicitor, Greenfield oversees these regulations.

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Tags: Americans Rights at Work, Andy Stern, Big Labor, comment period, conflict of interest
Posted Dec 4th 2009 at 6:57 am in ACORN, Big Labor, Featured Story | 4090276 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/dloos/2009/12/04/obamas-labor-department-gives-big-labor-and-its-front-groups-another-gift/Obama%E2%80%99s+Labor+Department+Gives+Big+Labor+and+Its+Front+Groups+Another+Gift2009-12-04+13%3A57%3A55Don+Loos

ObamAmerica: Reign of the Czars

President Obama’s decision to appoint so many czars is  clearly troubling members of Congress, who have taken the  unusual step of holding hearings on the issue.  The decision of the two Senate committees is remarkable because a President’s management style is rarely questioned by the Senate or House during the first year of his term, especially when they are all members of the same political party.   But, Obama’s decision to appoint almost 40 policy czars, and then give them broad powers and budgetary responsibilities, has created a more serious constitutional issue.  

The Senate is primarily concerned that President Obama may be end-running the Constitution, along with the growing fear, shared by many citizens, that the power and the extraordinary amount of funding that is controlled by the Czars may be undermining the authorities of the senate-confirmed agency heads on whom the Senate has placed its imprimatur and its trust. 

Czars currently influence or directly control over a trillion dollars of government spending, which is more than the spending of the entire federal government during the Reagan Administration.  And, yet, few of the Obama  czars were ever vetted through the traditional review process where potential conflicts of interest are revealed.  Nor are Obama’s czars accountable to the Senate to justify policy or spending decisions. 

(more…)

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Tags: Barack Obama, Carol Browner, czar, Ken Feinberg, Obama administration
Posted Oct 28th 2009 at 2:15 pm in Congress, Obama, Politics | 2220260 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/ldoan/2009/10/28/obamamerica-reign-of-the-czars/ObamAmerica%3A+Reign+of+the+Czars2009-10-28+21%3A15%3A41Lurita+Doan

Global Warming: Your (Big) Government at Work

Even for those not paying very close attention to the news in recent months, this headline from today’s “Climate Wire” may strike you as a tad incongruent:

MILITARY: Coastlines plumbed for ancient data in Pentagon climate study

Possibly the Pentagon’s advice on this matter will find favor in the White House.

The hook for the $5.5 million boondoggle is “how rising seas and strengthening storms could affect coastal bases, perhaps causing facilities to be abandoned or moved over the next century.” Of course, the idea of shrieking press releases (and headlines soon thereafter) of a “Pentagon study predicts inundation” never entered anyone’s mind and are nothing we should look forward to, if history is any guide.

Yet, outside of certain hysterical quarters, sea level rise is not that great a mystery: it rises between coolings, particularly glaciations (ice ages) which we fortunately find ourselves in between. It does so at a fairly constant rate of about 8 inches per century. That remained true following the end of the Little Ice Age in the mid 19^th century until today, with no statistical change in the pace since then (unless you count the most recent years; read on). Then it falls. When things cool, as has been the case in recent years, sea level rise plateaus and even reverses depending on how great the cooling. Indeed, the satellites we already pay so much for – and which, like those measuring the (cooling) atmospheric temperatures, are being ignored – tell us that sea level rise peaked in 2005 (wow, this guy works fast!).

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Tags: Al Gore, Alliance for Sustainable Energy, Catherine Zoi, CIA, Climate Wire
Posted Oct 6th 2009 at 8:47 am in Defense, Environment, Obama, Politics | 1335436 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/10/06/global-warming-your-big-government-at-work/Global+Warming%3A+Your+%28Big%29+Government+at+Work2009-10-06+15%3A47%3A41Christopher+C.+Horner

White House Creates ACORN for the Arts

Over the last week, Big Hollywood and Big Government have been extensively covering the August 10 conference call between the National Endowment for the Arts and a group of artists – a call on which the artists were encouraged to support President Obama’s agenda, with the tacit promise that they would be handsomely rewarded with government grants.  The NEA representative on the call was then-Communications Director of the NEA Yosi Sergant.

Now we have new evidence that the White House itself has been using its sway to recruit artists – not just to support President Obama’s “volunteerism” initiatives, but to support basic planks of his political agenda, including health care.  In fact, the White House has been tapping its extragovernmental political allies to work with artists with the tacit promise that NEA funds will be in the offing for those who join the Obama Administration political program.

According to a briefing report from Arlene Goldbard, the Pratt Center for Community Development, State Voices, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation, on May 12, 2009, “more than 60 artists and creative organizers engaged in civic participation, community development, education, social justice activism, and philanthropy came together for a White House briefing on Art, Community, Social Justice, National Recovery.”  Each of the sponsors of the meeting was contacted by – yes, you guessed it – Yosi Sergant, who had just been promoted from the Office of Public Engagement to serve at the NEA. (more…)

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Tags: ACORN, Anita MonCrief, Arlene Goldbard, Center for Community Change, Communications
Posted Oct 5th 2009 at 9:35 am in ACORN, Culture, Featured Story, Obama, Politics | 1259451 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/bshapiro/2009/10/05/more-evidence-at-may-12-meeting-the-white-house-creates-an-acorn-for-the-arts/White+House+Creates+ACORN+for+the+Arts2009-10-05+16%3A35%3A37Ben+Shapiro

Climate Change: The ‘Planned Recession’ Strategy

Well, the admissions just keep on coming. In the UK, lead canary for all things “climate change” — for example, polls show a majority of their public now see the agenda as just a new excuse for the state to extract more wealth from its citizens — we have a paper by the Tyndall Centre for  Climate Change Research saying the agenda demands “reducing the size of the economy through a ‘planned recession’”, in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Tyndall is an activist consortium of British academic institutions known for carrying the banner on the “climate” agenda.

The Telegraph offers an eye-catching sub-head: ” Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric cars and shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a ‘planned recession’ to avoid dangerous climate change.”

This should only surprise you if you have relied upon claims by the global warming industry — itself a consortium of activists inside and outside of government, Big Science, Big Academia, and other rent-seeking industry crafting schemes to profit in the near-term from the wealth-transfers — or the Obama administration, desperate to walk-back the president’s admission that his plan of cap-and-trade will “bankrupt” all sorts of facilities and cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

(more…)

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Tags: Big Academia, Big Science, climate agenda, climate change, Daily Telegraph
Posted Oct 2nd 2009 at 3:15 pm in Congress, Environment | 1145483 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/chorner/2009/10/02/climate-change-the-planned-recession-strategy/Climate+Change%3A+The+%27Planned+Recession%27+Strategy2009-10-02+22%3A15%3A28Christopher+C.+Horner

Astroturfing the NEA: Winner & Associates in on the Scheme?

Color me unsurprised to find out that an employee of Winner and Associates — who you’ll recall we revealed were behind the astroturfing campaign to discredit Sarah Palin — was in on the National Endowment for the Arts phone call outlining how the Obama Administration would use that government organization to push its agenda.

From a list of those participating in the conference call:

After we uncovered the link between Winner and Associates, David Axelrod, and the smear campaign against Sarah Palin designed to look as though it was coming from the “grass roots” we begged — literally begged! — the MSM to look into whether the large campaign consulting firm was subcontracted by David Axelrod for work on the Obama campaign. As I noted at the time, I’m just a blogger and don’t really have the resources necessary to conduct a thorough investigation.

As Ace notes here, once Ethan Winner confessed that he was behind the video, the MSM concluded that there was nothing more to investigate. This despite the fact that I showed that at least two other Winner and Associate employees — a subdivision of the largest advertising agency in the world — participated in the astroturfing campaign during normal business hours.

Three employees, one of them the President of the subdivision and another a VP, claimed they were doing this on their own time — which we showed could not have been the case — and on their own dime. On their own dime? Maybe, but it still seems unlikely.

And now we have another Winner and Associates guy at the NEA conference call? He’s also listed as one of the founders of Generation Obama. (more…)

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Tags: astroturfing, Bim Ayandele, Buffy Wicks, David Axelrod, Ethan Winner
Posted Sep 22nd 2009 at 12:03 pm in Culture, News, Politics | 672262 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/rshackleford/2009/09/22/astroturfing-the-nea-winner-associates-in-on-the-scheme/Astroturfing+the+NEA%3A+Winner+%26+Associates+in+on+the+Scheme%3F2009-09-22+19%3A03%3A04Rusty+Shackleford

‘Big Government’ Rises Again

n7h6ycxmg5In 1995, President Bill Clinton stood before the nation and proclaimed, “The era of big government is over.” The following year, the federal budget deficit stood at 1.4% of GDP. Thirteen years later, in 2008, the deficit had doubled, to just over 3% of GDP. This year, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that the federal budget deficit will equal 11.4% of GDP.

As George Will would say, “Well.”

This is the real source of our “summer of discontent.” Yes, millions of Americans spent the month of August holding Tea Parties, attending town halls, organizing, marching and protesting against ObamaCare, i.e. Congressional and Administration proposals to reconstruct the entire health care sector. But to suggest that health care alone is at the root of this backlash is to miss the forest for the trees. To paraphrase Democrat strategist James Carville, “It’s the big government, stupid.”

Since last September when the financial markets stumbled, we’ve seen a Wall Street bailout, government takeovers of AIG, Citigroup, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, GM, Chrysler, and numerous banks. The Federal Reserve has opened its discount window to almost all-comers and has taken the unprecedented step of aggressively buying up the federal government’s own debt. Congress rushed through a “stimulus to nowhere,” moved closer to a “cap-and-trade” remake of the energy sector and openly talked about higher taxes and more regulation. (more…)

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Tags: AIG, American Revolution, banks, Bill Clinton, Boston Tea Party
Posted Sep 9th 2009 at 5:26 pm in Congress, Culture, Economics, Featured Story, History, Justice/Legal, Media Criticism, News, Obama, Politics | 98274 Commentshttp://biggovernment.com/mikeflynn/2009/09/09/big-government-rises-again/%27Big+Government%27+Rises+Again2009-09-10+00%3A26%3A17Mike+Flynn