Now imagine facing a lawsuit for requiring perhaps one of the most basic qualifications for job applicants – a high school diploma. You don’t have to imagine that last part. It’s now an unfortunate reality thanks to guidance recently issued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

The “informal discussion letter” states that requiring a high-school diploma as a qualification for employment may violate the Americans with Disabilities Act, which the EEOC enforces. Therefore, an employer must prove a high school education is “job related and consistent with business necessity,” or face potential fines or lawsuits brought under ADA.

Employers should take note. Despite this being an “informal” letter, EEOC investigators and trial lawyers will undoubtedly use this to their advantage. It continues an unfortunate pattern of federal agencies quietly making policy and stepping up enforcement on small businesses for the slightest missteps.

Take the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, for example. The agency plays an important role in setting standards for safety in the workplace, but, since President Obama has taken office, OSHA has shifted from a focus on compliance assistance to a regimen of heavy fines for violators. The agency’s statistics show they are issuing far more costly fines and requesting more money in the federal budget for enforcement.

OSHA chief David Michaels brags that the average penalty more than doubled in 2011 from the previous year not only to punish violators, but to set an example to entire industries. The only example he’s setting is that it’s a bad time to start or expand a business. His words and OSHA’s actions reveal a government operation that is completely out of touch with the economic reality faced by small businesses today. He’d rather shut down a business to set an example than help them comply, grow, and thrive.

I’d be remiss not to mention another group, appointed by President Obama, that is having a significant, negative impact on the American economy: the National Labor Relations Board. Conceived as an impartial arbiter between labor and employers, it has transformed into a pro-union advocate under President Obama’s leadership. One recent example, in a favor to labor unions, is the NLRB’s decision to issue a potentially unconstitutional rule requiring all private sector businesses to prominently post something that amounts to an instruction guide for employees on how to unionize. NFIB is suing to have the rule overturned.

The decision that made the NLRB downright infamous in the job-creating business community was, of course, their complaint last year against Boeing. It nearly stopped the company’s ability to open a new plant in South Carolina, a right to work state.

The government has come to think it’s in the business of telling small businesses what’s right or wrong for them. Bureaucrats in obscure federal agencies are under the impression that they know better than job creators. This amount of meddling in the private sector is absurd as the economy attempts a recovery from one of the worst recessions in history – the government is absolutely the last group we should trust with the well-being of private businesses.

It makes you wonder why the Administration would guide its agencies to manipulate and punish employers at the worst possible time in our economy. By President Obama’s logic, he’s making things better for workers. In reality, he’s creating an atmosphere of fear and apprehension among small businesses wishing to expand, which has a chilling effect on employers, slowing potential job creation. That’s not good for workers and it’s terrible for the economy as it shows signs of bouncing back.

Small businesses want to comply with the law, but thanks to an ever-changing labyrinth of workplace rules and regulations, it’s nearly impossible. There are new traps being set every day to prevent them from creating jobs.

The Administration knows that backdoor rulemaking and punitive enforcement on small businesses won’t attract big headlines, or even much attention from Congress in some cases. In doing so, they are quietly picking winners and losers. Sadly, the losers are the nation’s biggest job creators, job seekers, and the economy as a whole.

Many people don’t know that one of the most important people in the Autism Speaks camp is an anti-vaxer. It would be an embarrassment to Autism Speaks if they had to admit that they still hold onto a bogus theory that could potentially kill children.  Thank goodness Left Brain/Right Brain’s Kevin Leitch is paying attention.

There is more. In January of 2009, Autism Speaks withdrew its support of the Inter-Agency Autism Coordinating Committee’s (IACC) Strategic Plan for Autism Research when IACC made a decision not to include research objectives connecting vaccines to autism. As a result, Alison Singer, a high-ranking official from Autism Speaks resigned. In an interview with Newsweek, Singer stated:

At some point, you have to say, “This question has been asked and answered and it’s time to move on.” We need to be able to say, “Yes, we are now satisfied that the earth is round.”

Maybe it is wrong to assume that Bell–being the high-level autism advocate that he is–actually is a tinfoil-hat-wearing fool. Perhaps his views have changed since Wakefield has been discredited.  Therefore I’d like to ask him a simple question:

Mr. Bell, do you still believe that vaccines cause autism?

While we are waiting for an answer, there are other problems with Peter Bell and Autism Speaks. In their mission statement, Autism Speaks says they are “dedicated to funding global biomedical research into the causes, prevention, treatments, and cure for autism.” Bell’s goal is to eliminate autism; therefore I do not feel he would be concerned with improving the quality of life of people with intellectual disabilities.  He would rather see the disability prevented, treated, “cured.”

Why not eliminate autism and other intellectual disabilities, right? I mean, all you hear from parents is how devastating and horrible it is to raise an autistic child. Wrong. There is an entire community of autistic adults, therapists, parents and educators that would rather we focus on their quality of life instead of figuring out a way to prevent them from being born. As a society, our goal should not be to destroy what we don’t understand—especially when it is a human life.

As you can see, there is much more work we need to do to change the conversation. The President, who loves to tout how much more pro-science he is compared to the GOP, needs to reconsider the appointment of Mr. Bell, and parents of autistic children and autistic adults should express their concerns to this Administration.

Indeed, while the past few months have seen tiny signs our economy might be growing despite Obama’s anti-job policies, the White House is ramping up its effort to make sure our labor force is expunged of every last coal job it can find. It’d be humorous if it wasn’t so real.

If we start exposing this radical nonsense coming out of the Obama EPA, conservatives can push back on these bad policies. Environmentalists rarely get their way when people actually pay attention to what they want to do.

The latest battle will be coming any day now, as the EPA has said it will issue its Utility NSPS (New Source Performance Standards) sometime in January. Any new utility plants will have to meet a new set of environmental standards – standards that conveniently work out great for natural gas but are prohibitively expensive for coal plants, even new ones, to meet.

In capitalist terms, this means the United States can say goodbye to the construction of any new coal plants on its soil.

Sadly, this war on coal didn’t start here. Last month, moments before Christmas weekend, the EPA released its new Utility MACT (Maximum Achievable Control Technology) rule, which set new emissions standards for pre-existing U.S. coal and oil power plants. The EPA did this in spite of the fact that the North American Electric Reliability Council (NERC) warned in November that such a rule would shut down as many as 300 coal power plants at the same time. Some of the older plants would be unable to meet the post-modern standards so quickly.

Nearly half of total U.S. electrical supply is provided by coal. It’s one of the most vibrant and successful industries in the country. It’s a home-grown resource, begging for U.S. workers to mine it out of the ground and convert it into electricity that millions of Americans can use to power their homes and small businesses.

27 states have filed complaints asking for a delay, arguing the strict standards under such a short time span are realistically unfeasible.

I’d start asking why the Obama Administration has decided to demonize the coal industry, risking massive power shortages and thousands of American jobs just to satisfy the environmentalist left. They’ve always hated coal, and under this White House, as early as this year, they might get their wish.

• Attorney General Eric Holder
• President Barack Obama

Dishonorable Mentions for 2011 include:

• Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano
• Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius

Attorney General Eric Holder: Attorney General Eric Holder now operates the most politicized and ideological Department of Justice (DOJ) in recent history. And revelations from the Operation Fast and Furious scandal suggest that programs approved by the Holder DOJ may have resulted in the needless deaths of many, including a federal law enforcement officer.

Fast and Furious was a DOJ/Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) “gun-running” operation in which guns were sold to Mexican drug cartels and others, apparently in hopes that the guns would end up at crime scenes. This reckless insanity seems to have resulted in, among other crimes, the murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, who was killed in a shootout with Mexican criminals in December 2010. Fast and Furious guns were found at the scene of his death.

The Fast and Furious operation by itself should have resulted in Holder’s resignation, but it is the cover-up that has prompted serious calls for Holder’s ouster.

On May 3, 2011, in a House Judiciary Committee hearing chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Holder testified: “I’m not sure of the exact date, but I probably heard about Fast and Furious for the first time over the last few weeks.” Newly released documents show he was receiving weekly briefings on Fast and Furious as far back as July 5, 2010. It appears Holder lied to Congress. Judicial Watch sued the DOJ and the ATF to obtain Fast and Furious records. The Judicial Watch investigation continues.

Unfortunately, when it comes to Holder’s corruption and abuse of office, Fast and Furious is just the tip of the iceberg.

On February 23, 2011, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that DOJ lawyers would no longer defend the constitutionality of Section 3 of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), as applied to homosexual couples. DOMA had passed Congress by a vote of 85–14 in the Senate and a vote of 342–67 in the House. President Clinton signed the act into law on September 21, 1996.

Judicial Watch filed two Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits against the DOJ (including one on behalf of the Family Research Council) for records related to this pro-homosexual marriage decision. This failure to defend this federal law is unprecedented and raises serious questions as to whether President Obama and Eric Holder are upholding their oaths of office and following the Constitution’s command to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.”

The DOJ continues to stonewall the release of information regarding Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s participation in Obamacare discussions when she served as Solicitor General. In addition to forcing Judicial Watch to file a lawsuit to obtain this information, Holder’s DOJ thumbed its nose at Congress by failing to release this material to the Senate Judiciary Committee during Kagan’s judicial confirmation hearing. Holder continues to personally resist requests from Judicial Watch and Congress for additional information on this controversy. Kagan’s role in these discussions is especially significant now that the U.S. Supreme Court has announced it will consider challenges to the constitutionality of Obamacare in Spring 2012.

New revelations emerged in 2011 about the DOJ’s Black Panther scandal. Judicial Watch uncovered evidence that the liberal special interest group National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) may have had an inappropriate amount of influence on the DOJ’s decision to drop its voter intimidation lawsuit against the New Black Panther Party for Self Defense. This comes on the heels of sworn testimony that the Civil Rights Division of the Holder DOJ makes enforcement decisions based upon race.

Most recently, Judicial Watch obtained shocking documents suggesting the Holder DOJ is conspiring with scandal-ridden Project Vote (President Obama’s former employer and ACORN front) to use the National Voter Registration Act to increase welfare voter registrations. One former ACORN employee (and current Project Vote Director of Advocacy), Estelle Rogers, is even helping to vet job candidates for the Justice Department’s Voting Rights Division! ACORN and Project Vote have a long record of voter registration fraud.

Seeming to affirm ACORN’s hijacking of the DOJ, Holder recently said in a speech that he plans to use “the full weight” of the agency in 2012 to attack states that are enforcing laws that protect against fraud in the voting booths. This speech ended the pretense that the DOJ is independent from the Democratic National Committee and the Obama campaign – as it repeated almost verbatim the partisan arguments made by the Democratic Party against voter ID laws.

Holder must go. Pick your reason – Black Panthers, race-based decision making, abandoning the Defense of Marriage Act, Fast and Furious killings and lies, or turning the DOJ into an arm of the radicalized left – but Holder must go.

President Barack Obama: President Obama makes Judicial Watch’s “Ten Most Wanted” list for a fifth consecutive year (the former Illinois Senator was also a “Dishonorable Mention” in 2006). And when it comes to Obama corruption, it may not get any bigger than Solyndra. Solyndra was once known as the poster child for the Obama administration’s massive “green energy” initiative, but it has become the poster child for the corruption that ensues when the government meddles in the private sector. Solyndra filed for bankruptcy in September 2011, leaving 1,100 workers without jobs and the American taxpayers on the hook for $535 million thanks to an Obama administration stimulus loan guarantee.

Despite the Obama administration’s reticence to release details regarding this scandal, much is known about this shady deal. White House officials warned the president that the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program was “dangerously short on due diligence.” Nonetheless, the Obama administration rushed the Solyndra loan through the approval process so it could make a splash at a press event. The company’s main financial backer was a major Obama campaign donor named George Kaiser. While the White House said Kaiser never discussed the loan with White House officials, the evidence suggests this is a lie. And, further demonstrating the political nature of the Obama administration’s activities, the Energy Department pressured Solyndra to delay an announcement on layoffs until after the 2010 elections. Despite the public outrage at this scandalous waste of precious tax dollars, President Obama continues to defend the indefensible and has refused to sack anyone over the Solyndra mess.

President Obama continues to countenance actions by his appointees that undermine the rule of law and constitutional government:

• Despite a ban on funding that Obama signed into law, his administration continues to fund the corrupt and allegedly defunct “community” organization ACORN. In July 2011, Judicial Watch uncovered a $79,819 grant to AHCOA (Affordable Housing Centers of America), the renamed ACORN Housing organization which has a long history of corrupt activity. In absolute violation of the funding ban, Judicial Watch has since confirmed that the Obama administration has funneled $730,000 to the ACORN network, a group that has a long personal history with President Obama.In 2011, JW released a special report entitled “The Rebranding of ACORN,” which details how the ACORN network is alive and well and well-placed to undermine the integrity of the 2012 elections – evidently with the assistance of the Obama administration.

• Barack Obama apparently believes it is his “prerogative” to ignore the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law when it comes to appointing czars. According to Politico: “President Barack Obama is planning to ignore language in the 2011 spending package that would ban several top White House advisory posts.” Obama said this ban on “czars” would undermine “the President’s ability to exercise his constitutional responsibilities and take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” In other words, Barack Obama believes he must ignore the U.S. Constitution to protect the U.S. Constitution. Many Obama administration czars have not been subject to confirmation by the U.S. Senate as required by the U.S. Constitution. In 2011, JW released a first-of-its-kind comprehensive report on the Obama czar scandal, entitled “President Obama’s Czars.”

• In an historic victory for Judicial Watch and an embarrassing defeat for the Obama White House, a federal court ruled on August 17, 2011 that Secret Service White House visitor logs are agency records that are subject to disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell issued the decision in Judicial Watch v. Secret Service. The Obama administration now will have to release all records of all visitors to the White House – or explain why White House visits should be kept secret under the law. The Obama White House continues to fight full disclosure and has stalled the release of records by appealing the lower court decision. Judicial Watch gave Obama a “failing grade” on transparency in testimony before Congress in 2011. Read the testimony in full, as well as additional congressional testimony during a hearing entitled “White House Transparency, Visitor Logs and Lobbyists.”

• In 2011, the Obama National Labor Relations Board sought to prevent the Seattle-based Boeing Company from opening a $750 million non-union assembly line in North Charleston, South Carolina, to manufacture its Dreamliner plane. Judicial Watch obtained documents from the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) showing this lawsuit was politically motivated. Judicial Watch uncovered documents showing NLRB staff cheerleading for Big Labor, mouthing Marxist, anti-American slurs and showing contempt for Congress related to the agency’s lawsuit against Boeing, including email correspondence attacking members of Congress. And it starts at the top. Obama bypassed Congress and recess-appointed Craig Becker–who is connected to the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and ACORN–to the NRLB.

• Obama’s corrupt Chicago dealings continued to haunt him in 2011. Obama’s real estate partner, campaign fundraiser, and Obama pork recipient Antoin “Tony” Rezko was finally sentenced to jail this year, as was former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who is now set to serve 14 years for attempting to sell Obama’s former Senate seat to the highest bidder. The FBI continues to withhold from Judicial Watch documents of its historic interview of then-Senator Obama about the Illinois corruption scandal. The FBI interview was conducted in December 2008, about one month before Obama was sworn into the presidency.

DISHONORABLE MENTIONS:

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano: While Attorney General Eric Holder was busy attacking states seeking to protect themselves from uncontrolled illegal immigration in 2011, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano presided over a campaign to bypass Congress and provide amnesty to millions of illegal alien lawbreakers, all in an obvious attempt to garner more Hispanic votes for Obama’s reelection.

At first, Napolitano’s campaign was begun in stealth. But in 2011 the Obama administration finally admitted that illegal alien amnesty is now the official policy of the United States of America, courtesy of Janet Napolitano’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

According to The New York Times:

The Department of Homeland Security will begin a review on Thursday (November 17, 2011) of all deportation cases before the immigration courts and start a nationwide training program for enforcement agents and prosecuting lawyers, with the goal of speeding deportations of convicted criminals and halting those of many illegal immigrants with no criminal record.

Don’t believe for a second DHS’s line that criminal illegal aliens won’t find themselves “outside the department’s priorities.” This is an outright lie.

In 2011, Judicial Watch uncovered documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) proving that immigration officials were urged to use “prosecutorial discretion” to dismiss deportation proceedings against a wide variety of illegal alien criminals — including those convicted of serious crimes such as sexual assault, solicitation of murder, aggravated assault, assaulting a police officer, and kidnapping, as well as numerous drug charges.

And to highlight the depth of this amnesty scheme, consider the case of Carlos Martinelly-Montano, the drunk-driving illegal immigrant from Bolivia who killed a Catholic nun and severely injured two others in Prince William County, Virginia, on August 1, 2010. Napolitano ordered an investigation into Montano’s background but initially refused to release the agency’s findings — until Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit. On March 3, 2011, Judicial Watch finally got hold of the “cleaned up” version of the Homeland Security report (after a lengthy back-and-forth with DHS).

And what did Judicial Watch uncover? Montano should have been deported, but thanks to the illegal alien sanctuary policies of the federal government, local authorities and the courts, he was allowed back onto the streets.

Evidently, Janet Napolitano believes her agency may simply choose to ignore illegal immigration laws to help Obama get reelected. Moreover, the DHS seems more than willing to stonewall and obfuscate in order to conceal its questionable activities. As some key of members of Congress wrote Napolitano:

“This new [backdoor amnesty] policy undermines the rule of law and intrudes on the role of Congress to make the law, while denigrating the role of the executive to carry out the laws enacted by Congress.”

Napolitano’s attempt to rewrite immigration law on her own is an affront to constitutional government.

Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius: What did Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius discuss during all of those secret Obamacare meetings she held with Vice President Biden and Big Labor leaders? Obamacare waivers would be an excellent guess.

In September 2011, HHS announced an arbitrary cut-off to waiver applications, which had skyrocketed to 1,472 unions and companies seeking to get out from underneath the Obama administration’s healthcare overhaul. At the time of the cut-off, approximately 50% of the waivers granted covered employees of unions, even though union workers represent about 12% of the total workforce!

From the beginning, HHS has kept these waivers shrouded in secrecy. Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against HHS on December 30, 2010, and yet the agency refuses to explain to the American people how decisions were made regarding which organizations received or did not receive a waiver.

While HHS was disproportionately doling out waivers to unions, JW also obtained documents from HHS that provide new details on a massive, taxpayer-funded, multimedia campaign designed to promote Obamacare. The total cost of this campaign, which notably targets Obama’s electoral coalition, could reach as much as $200 million over the next five years.

And this is how HHS describes the key to success for this campaign: “Health and program-related messages are processed by the target audience according to a particular reality, which he or she experiences. Attitudes, feelings, values, needs, desires, behaviors and beliefs all play a part in the individual’s decision to accept information and make a behavioral change.” In other words, the Obama administration is paying hired guns a lot of your money to manipulate American taxpayers into “accepting” the Obama way and “changing” their behavior.

This is certainly what HHS was trying to do with a series of three Medicare television advertisements featuring actor Andy Griffith. As Judicial Watch uncovered through FOIA, the Obama administration spent $3,184,000 in taxpayer funds to produce and air the advertisements on national television in September and October 2010. According to FactCheck.org, a project of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center, the advertisements intentionally misinformed the American people.

And then there’s health care rationing. The Centers for Medicaid and Medicare (CMS), which is under the auspices of HHS, proposed that Provenge, a Food and Drug Administration-approved treatment for prostate cancer, be placed under a controversial “review.” After enormous public scrutiny, CMS relented and recommended the potentially lifesaving drug be covered by insurance. According to a Judicial Watch investigation, while the Obama administration claimed the cost of Provenge had nothing to do with their review process, records obtained by JW suggest otherwise (Medicare, the FDA, and private companies are legally prohibited from denying approval of a medical treatment based solely on cost).

And then there is Sebelius’s war on the Catholic Church and other “conservative” religious organizations. Sebelius’s HHS has written Obamacare regulations to punish long-held religious views that don’t comport with liberal ideology and would force hundreds of religious institutions to drop insurance coverage or risk running afoul of Sebelius’s pro-abortion Obamacare regulatory scheme.

The constitutionality of Obamacare may ultimately be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court. But in the meantime, Kathleen Sebelius has turned HHS into a political machine, using underhanded tactics to stack the deck in favor of Obamacare, while greasing Big Labor and other Obama political campaign allies.

According to Bloomberg:

The U.S. Supreme Court said it will consider reviving the trailblazing Arizona law that would use local police and prosecutors to crack down on illegal immigration.

Already set to rule on President Barack Obama’s health-care law by the middle of next year, the justices today added another high-profile case that has implications for similar laws around the country and for the 2012 elections.

On April 11, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction against the enforcement of some of the law’s provisions, prompting the State of Arizona to petition the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case.

Back in September, Judicial Watch filed an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief with the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of our client, the Arizona State Legislature, which is now a defendant in the lawsuit in support of the Supreme Court petition. And as I said in a press statement at the time, “We hope the Supreme Court accepts the State of Arizona’s petition, protects the rule of law and upholds the rights of the States to protect its citizens.”

Well, we’re one step closer.

The State of Arizona will now have the opportunity to demonstrate that SB 1070 is completely consistent with federal law. As the Legislature argued in its court filing:

The [Arizona] Legislature invoked its well established police powers in crafting SB 1070, for the purpose of protecting the people of Arizona. Rather than welcoming the Legislature’s enactment, the United States sued Arizona.

Contrary to the view of the United States, not every state action related to aliens is preempted by federal law…Only the determination of who should or should not be admitted into the country, and the conditions under which that person may remain, is the regulation of immigration.

Accordingly, the Legislature enacted SB 1070 in reliance on the principle that it had authority to utilize well-established police powers in areas touching on immigration…

Look, the Obama administration’s game plan on illegal immigration is crystal clear: bypass Congress and grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens by suspending deportations; tell sanctuary cities that they will not be prosecuted for ignoring federal immigration laws; and attack any state that attempts to protect citizens from the scourge of illegal immigration through law enforcement. The endgame for the Obama administration is to legalize millions of dependably liberal voters before the 2012 elections and to curry favor with the all-important Hispanic voter demographic – politics over the rule of law.

I expect the Supreme Court Justices who hear this case will ignore the political scheming and conniving by the Obama administration and will instead look purely at what the law dictates. And if they do, they will see that SB 1070 is a commonsense and constitutional response to the significant problems Arizona faces as a border state on an uncontrolled border.

As former Arizona State Senate President Russell Pearce, the author of SB 1070, has stated:

States have an inherent duty under law and the Constitution to protect their citizens from those who break our laws. I pray the Supreme Court honors states’ inherent authority and right under the police powers and supports Arizona in the protection of our state from the Obama administration, who has sided with foreign governments against our state and our citizens. The Obama administration’s attack on our state’s sovereign right to defend itself from the illegal alien invasion is unconscionable.

Former Senator Pearce also noted that the enacted provisions of SB 1070 have already helped reduce crime significantly and have led to a mass exodus of illegal aliens from the State of Arizona. So not only is SB 1070 lawful, it’s also effective. Let’s hope the Supreme Court overturns the lower court’s moratorium and SB 1070 (along with similar state laws also under attack) can be put into full force!

From MSNBC:

Speaker Boehner’s position on Sunday was not the position that he had on Saturday when the 89 Senators came together to pass a two-month extension of the payroll tax cut. Let’s think on that. 89 Senators, the Republican leadership. You can’t get 89 votes in this day and age for apple pie, yet they all supported this. The did it with the understanding that the House would approve this two-month extension and Speaker Boehner got on the phone with his caucus, tried to sell it. He had a Tea Party revolt. He reversed his position and he’s now putting danger, a tax increase of a $1000 on 160 million Americans in like 12 days now.

Mr. Pfeiffer couldn’t make his intentions more clear; the White House Communications office aims to turn attention away from the President’s failed record and shift blame onto his detractors in the Tea Party… again.

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the “bad timing” file, especially for the Obama Administration and the UN.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (whose scams I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a “science czar” John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to for developing his “environmental”’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, operating domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding — including but not limited to — user names and passwords for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA, thereby also seeking to undermine the Presidential Records Act (PRA) of 1978.

The IPCC, you will recall, is Al Gore’s co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize and the host over the years of numerous scandals involving fudged and twisted climate data, research plagiarized from student theses, popular magazine articles, and green-group press releases, and, of course, the infamous Climategate emails which showed coordinated efforts to “hide the decline” in temperature data. This is not just one more scandal, however. This is much bigger.

Until the Request is posted at CEI.org, consider the following:

* CEI’s FOIA request details how the UN informed participants that it was motivated by embarrassing releases of earlier discussions (“ClimateGate” key among them) and, to circumvent the problem that national government transparency laws posed, the group itself.

* CEI reminds OSTP that this practice was described as “creat[ing] non-governmental accounts for official business” and “using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications” in a recent analogous situation involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. CEI expects similar congressional and media outrage at this similar practice to evade the applicable record-keeping laws.

* This effort has apparently been conducted with participation — thereby direct assistance and enabling — by the Obama White House which, shortly after taking office, appointed Holdren’s office to the lead role on IPCC work from the Department of Commerce. The plan to secretly create a FOIA-free zone was then implemented.

* This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU, and US bureaucrats and political appointees to avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.

* CEI also reminds OSTP of a similar, ongoing effort by the administration to claim that records on U.S. government computers belong to the UN IPCC, refusing to produce them under FOIA. This practice was affirmed in a report by the Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General earlier this year.

As talks resume next month to forge legislation to act as a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, CEI looks forward to OSTP ceasing this unlawful activity and providing prompt access to the requested records so the taxpayer can know what they, and the IPCC, are up to.

So this morning, we requested all relevant records under FOIA, including all records sitting on that server, as they all were provided to US government employees for official purposes. This was filed with OSTP run by controversial “science czar” and, we now know, former Mitt Romney “climate” adviser John Holdren. The taxpayer deserves to know about this coordinated effort between Holdren’s OSTP and the UN.

Possibly one Republican candidate will call in the next debate for ending US funding of the IPCC, now shown to be actively working (with the Obama White House) to subvert US law. Enough is enough is enough. Possibly Governor Romney could defend Holdren and the IPCC.

In the meantime, we look for Rep. Henry Waxman to reprise the level of outrage he displayed over Abramoff to prove it was also not political and come down hard on the practice he so aggressively condemned and pursued, demanding preservation of records, threatening subpoenas, the whole works. With our request, that’s essentially what we’ve done, and we’d appreciate the company. You too, NPR.

Of course, it may not be of interest to the media, because it only uncovers unlawful dealings to hide an effort impacting our entire economy, the premise for that “fundamental transformation” of America, with the sleazy lobbying operation being the UN. We’ll wait on OSTP’s response and hope for the best from the Hill and Republican candidates.