Mark Twain famously wrote, “There is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.” Peter Schweizer’s new book, “Throw Them All Out,” reveals this permanent political class in all its arrogant glory. (Full disclosure: Mr. Schweizer is employed by my political action committee as a foreign-policy adviser.)

Mr. Schweizer answers the questions so many of us have asked. I addressed this in a speech in Iowa last Labor Day weekend. How do politicians who arrive in Washington, D.C. as men and women of modest means leave as millionaires? How do they miraculously accumulate wealth at a rate faster than the rest of us? How do politicians’ stock portfolios outperform even the best hedge-fund managers’? I answered the question in that speech: Politicians derive power from the authority of their office and their access to our tax dollars, and they use that power to enrich and shield themselves.

The money-making opportunities for politicians are myriad, and Mr. Schweizer details the most lucrative methods: accepting sweetheart gifts of IPO stock from companies seeking to influence legislation, practicing insider trading with nonpublic government information, earmarking projects that benefit personal real estate holdings, and even subtly extorting campaign donations through the threat of legislation unfavorable to an industry. The list goes on and on, and it’s sickening.

Astonishingly, none of this is technically illegal, at least not for Congress. Members of Congress exempt themselves from the laws they apply to the rest of us. That includes laws that protect whistleblowers (nothing prevents members of Congress from retaliating against staffers who shine light on corruption) and Freedom of Information Act requests (it’s easier to get classified documents from the CIA than from a congressional office).

The corruption isn’t confined to one political party or just a few bad apples. It’s an endemic problem encompassing leadership on both sides of the aisle. It’s an entire system of public servants feathering their own nests.

None of this surprises me. I’ve been fighting this type of corruption and cronyism my entire political career. For years Alaskans suspected that our lawmakers and state administrators were in the pockets of the big oil companies to the detriment of ordinary Alaskans. We knew we were being taken for a ride, but it took FBI wiretaps to finally capture lawmakers in the act of selling their votes. In the wake of politicos being carted off to prison, my administration enacted reforms based on transparency and accountability to prevent this from happening again.

We were successful because we had the righteous indignation of Alaskan citizens on our side. Our good ol’ boy political class in Juneau was definitely not with us. Business was good for them, so why would they want to end “business as usual”?

The moment you threaten to strip politicians of their legal graft, they’ll moan that they can’t govern effectively without it. Perhaps they’ll gravitate toward reform, but often their idea of reform is to limit the right of “We the people” to exercise our freedom of speech in the political process.

Read more here.

When President Obama denied that the biggest Republican victory since the 1920s was a referendum on the policies embraced by his party and his administration, he was either lying or deep in denial – and the same thing can be said about The New York Times, which opined yesterday in an utterly predictable manner that – while “Tuesday’s election was indeed a ’shellacking’ for the Democrats, as President Obama admitted after a long night of bad news” – it “was hardly an order from the American people to discard the progress of the last two years and start over again.”

Mr. Obama was on target when he said voters howled in frustration at the slow pace of economic recovery and job creation. To borrow his running automotive metaphor, voters threw the keys at Republicans and told them to drive for a while, but gave almost no indication of what direction to drive in.

To believe this, one would have to be convinced that the voters were unaware that the Republicans were committed to repealing and replacing Obamacare, to extending the Bush tax cuts, and to reducing federal expenditures to the level of 2008. To argue its truth, one would have to ignore the Pledge to America – which is, of course, what our President and our erstwhile newspaper of record did.

This was, in fact, an election fought regarding first principles. Knowing that, the Democrats desperately sought to localize the conflict, and where they succeeded in demonizing individual Republican candidates, they won. In most districts, however, the results turned on national public policy. Over the last two years, the Democrats have been united for and the Republicans united against a set of measures that the voters were well aware of, and no legerdemain practiced on the polling data can obscure this fact. To say, as E. J. Dionne did in The Washington Post yesterday, that, “in fact, Democrats held onto moderate voters while losing independents,” is to avert one’s gaze from the obvious.

Fortunately, among the liberal prognosticators, there are a few honest men. William Galston, who was Bill Clinton’s domestic adviser, is one such. He is, alas, an unabashed proponent of extending Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. But he does not live in a bubble. Like William Daley – Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Commerce – he saw the debacle coming, and for The New Republic he has written a brief, but sober analysis of what happened on Tuesday.

First, he points out, 2010 was in most respects a mirror image of 2006. The Republics got the same share of the vote in this year’s midterms that the Democrats got four years before – and vice-versa. Second, partisan turnout was very similar to that in 2006, and the same can be said for partisan mobilization. There was a slight decline percentage-wise in the turnout of voters under 30 and a marked increase in the turnout of seniors over 65. But this was by no means decisive.

What was decisive was a dramatic shift in voting by those who self-identify in the polls as independents. In 2006, the Democrats received 57% of their vote and the Republicans 39%. This year, the Republicans got 55% of their vote and the Democrats 39%. “If Independents had split their vote between the parties this year the way they did in 2006,” Galston writes, “the Republicans share [of the national vote] would have been 4.7 percent lower—a huge difference.”  What, he then asks, accounts for this shift?

Here we reach the nub of the matter: The ideological composition of the electorate shifted dramatically. In 2006, those who voted were 32 percent conservative, 47 percent moderate, and 20 percent liberal. In 2010, by contrast, conservatives had risen to 41 percent of the total and moderates declined to 39 percent, while liberals remained constant at 20 percent. And because, in today’s polarized politics, liberals vote almost exclusively for Democrats and conservatives for Republicans, the ideological shift matters a lot.

To complete the argument, there’s one more step: Did independents shift toward Republicans because they had become significantly more conservative between 2006 and 2010? Fortunately we don’t have to speculate about this. According to the Pew Research Center, conservatives as a share of total Independents rose from 29 percent in 2006 to 36 percent in 2010. Gallup finds exactly the same thing: The conservative share rose from 28 percent to 36 percent while moderates declined from 46 percent to 41 percent.

Moreover, Galston adds, the drift of independent voters towards conservatism has been going on for at least twenty years. “In 1992, moderates were 43 percent of the total; in 2006, 38 percent; today, only 35 percent. For conservatives, the comparable numbers are 36 percent, 37 percent, and 42 percent, respectively.” His conclusion should provoke rumination:

The 2010 electorate does not represent a disproportional mobilization of conservatives: If the 2010 electorate had perfectly reflected the voting-age population, it would actually have been a bit more conservative and less moderate than was the population that showed up at the polls. Unless the long-term decline of moderates and rise of conservatives is reversed during the next two years, the ideological balance of the electorate in 2012 could look a lot like it did this year.

President Obama, the editors of The New York Times, and that reliable flack E. J. Dionne would be well-advised to do some rethinking. And John Boehner, Mitch McConnell, and their merry women and men should take their cue from the Pledge to America. The conservatives are winning the argument. If, over the next few years, they stick to their principles and gently but firmly press their advantage at every opportunity, the realignment that I predicted on 2 August 2009 will become a reality.

“It’s Dr. Evil,” he huffs. “I didn’t spend six years in Evil Medical School to be called ‘mister,’ thank you very much.”

This is how I feel when I’m referred to as a “blogger,” sometimes with a political qualifier like “liberal” or “conservative” attached. I’m a reporter. I’ve been a reporter since high school. Like a lot of other people, I lucked into some reporting jobs that took advantage of the speed of the web — thus, I blogged. And I left the Washington Post because I was intoxicated by this medium by and the privileges of reporting. The leak of my private e-mails wouldn’t have been possible 10 years ago; but then, neither would have my career been possible.

Let’s go back to the start. I started in journalism in a fairly typical manner, by discovering how much I liked writing articles and doing interviews at my high school paper. I chose to go to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. It was there that I became editor of the campus’s weekly conservative paper, and became plugged into the campus conservative journalism network.

Was I really that conservative? Yes.

I interned at the libertarian Center for Individual Rights in the summer of 2001. I supported the Iraq War and crashed an anti-war protest on my campus. I voted in Republican primaries in 2002 and 2004. (Since I was in Illinois, I voted in 2004 for Jack Ryan to get the GOP’s nomination for Senate, to oppose Barack Obama. I’m better off than one of those guys.)

But I was never combative against liberals. Reporting in a close-knit campus community made it impossible and untenable to pick political fights every day. I was more interested in covering politics than in advocating for a political stance (outside of columns I wrote for my paper and later the daily campus paper). I cared more about finding out stories first than about advocating positions — those stories would get me the jobs I wanted, not the opinions I had. And I knew that I didn’t want to be pigeonholed.

In 2004, when I was graduating, I was offered two jobs — an editing role at the libertarian magazine Liberty and a fellowship at USA Today, sponsored by the conservative Collegiate Network. I chose the USA Today job, but kept freelancing, mostly for magazines like The American Spectator and Reason.

A few months after my USA Today gig ended, I was offered a full-time job at Reason. For the first time I had a byline at a national media outlet, and part of my job was to feed a blog with reporting and takes on the news. It became clear that two things were rewarded with traffic and respect — original reporting, and arguments with other blogs.

This was the start of my success, and it was the start of my problems. Remember how I said it was “impossible and untenable to pick political fights every day?” When I started doing real reporting, I realized that political fights happened every nanosecond. It was just a matter of managing them, and picking them. As I got to find out about gossip and news, I’d banter about it privately and publicly. That’s what everyone did. Let’s let David Brooks explain this:

So every few weeks I find myself on the receiving end of little burst of off-the-record trash talk. Senators privately moan about other senators. Administration officials gripe about other administration officials. People in the White House complain about the idiots in Congress, and the idiots in Congress complain about the idiots in the White House — especially if they’re in the same party. Washington floats on a river of aspersion.

To use a phrase that I’m rolling my eyes at even as I type it: Nobody told me this in journalism school. Seriously, though, nobody did! The fact that one part of journalism in Washington was a give-and-take of gossip, and that sources learned to trust one another by bitching about people and projects they didn’t like, was a total mindfuck. Put me in a room with a 9/11 conspiracy theorist and I ask about where his “controlled demolitions” theory comes from. Put me in a room with a union organizer and I push him about how depressed he is about card check. Put me in a room with a GOP strategist and I tell him, in confidence, what the people I know on the left are saying about his candidate’s chances. How do I get people to tell me what they don’t want people to know?

Being at Reason allowed me to do this while broadcasting a clear opinion. Rep. Ron Paul (R, Tex.) knew that I liked him, and that I was voting for him — although that didn’t stop me from co-writing a story about the history of racist comments in newsletters he published. Bob Barr knew that I liked him, and trusted me enough to tell me, off-the-record, what he thought of people. I kept that trust with people, and people kept it with me. In this business you have to keep that trust or no one will talk to you, and then you can only learn what people want you to know.

Here’s an example from a bit later in my career. In September 2009, Virginia Democratic gubernatorial candidate, Creigh Deeds, bumbled and fumbled his way through an impromptu press event, utterly unable to explain whether or not he would raise taxes, and at one point calling a reporter “young lady.” I was at the Values Voter summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, where I pulled Rep. Eric Cantor (R, Va.) aside for an interview.

“Fair warning,” I said, framing him with my iPhone’s video camera. “I’m going to tape this. So let’s not have a Creigh Deeds moment.”

Did that comment make it unfair for me to write about Deeds? (His communications director, who appeared in the video wincing as his candidate imploded, was a college friend.) But can we assume no reporters joked about Deeds after the implosion? “The opinionless man,” as Jeff Jarvis put it in a post on my current adventures, does not exist. (Here I’d make a reference to the perfect-but-boring human prototypes that survive the end of civilization in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, but that would just be showing off.)

You’ve read this far, so you must think I’m trying to explain away the emails leaked this week. I’m not. Here’s what happened.

After the 2008 election, I drove up from Atlanta to D.C. and was greeted by my editor, Matt Welch, with surprising news. It would be better, he said, if I worked somewhere else. I’d voted for the Obama-Biden ticket (having joked, semi-seriously, that I was honor-bound to vote for a ticket with a fellow Delawarean on it) and wasn’t fully on board with the magazine’s upcoming, wonky focus on picking apart the new administration. My friend, Spencer Ackerman, immediately bought me Ethiopian food and suggested I come to work at his magazine, The Washington Independent. I was dicey about the suggestion, partly because I was already doing some work for The Economist. At Reason, I’d become a little less favorable to Republicans, and I’d never been shy about the fact that I was pro-gay marriage and pro-open borders. But could I do the same work if I jumped to a left-leaning web magazine? I figured that I could, largely because I wouldn’t change at all.

A few weeks later, Ezra Klein invited me to join Journolist — which I’d known about for a year. I don’t know why he did, but I think it was an assist to a friend trying out a new job, and a way to build my list of sources. I was dazzled by the sudden, immediate access I had to more than a hundred journalists and academics, mostly on the left, some without an ideology I could discern. And I was encouraged that they were so blunt about what they were thinking about and working on. My first big contribution to the list, in response to a question about which conservatives “mattered,” was sent out on January 26, 2009.

Hugh Hewitt, as buffoonish as he can seem, is incredibly well-used by Republicans. Check out the guest list for a week of his show – plenty of governors and congressmen show up. If you count Newt Gingrich as a pundit (I do and I’d be stunned if his yearly rumblings about political comebacks were anything more than book promotion stunts) I’d rank him near the top of this list, if not at the top. Hill Republicans who weren’t actually there for his screwed-up tenure speak of him as a prophet. Gingrich had a LOT to do with the drilling obsession and messaging that hit the GOP conference last summer. Finally, I’d nominate the very young Rob Bluey of Heritage for a place near the bottom of this list. He’s done a lot work convincing Republicans that they need to copy Democrats on internet outreach/YouTube/Twitter, and of course now they’re all obsessed with that stuff as the path back to victory.

One thing I’m watching is whether insulting Sarah Palin or occasionally praising Barack Obama is enough to drum someone out of the conservative movement in a real way – being disinvited from dinners, for example, as David Brock was after his Hillary book. I haven’t seen that yet, although conservative blogs are trying to write David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, etc out of the movement. This is a reason why President Obama scored more of a direct hit telling the GOP conference to “stop listening to Rush Limbaugh.” They really do stop and listen to talk radio, or their talk radio-massaged constituent mail/phone calls, before they take big steps.

This would become typical of what I sent to the list. I was talking, largely, to liberals who didn’t really know conservatives. So I assumed they thought Hugh Hewitt was “buffoonish.” I said Gingrich had a “screwed-up tenture” because Republicans I admired, like Sen. Tom Coburn (R, Ok.) and Dick Armey, had serious problems with how Gingrich ran the House.

But I was cocky, and I got worse. I treated the list like a dive bar, swaggering in and popping off about what was “really” happening out there, and snarking at conservatives. Why did I want these people to like me so much? Why did I assume that I needed to crack wise and rant about people who, usually for no more than five minutes were getting on my nerves? Because I was stupid and arrogant, and needlessly mean. Yes, I’d trash-talk liberals to Republicans sometimes. And I’d tell them which liberals “mattered,” who was a hack, who was coming after them. Did I suggest which strategies might and might not work for liberals, Democrats, and the president? Yes, although I do the same to conservatives — in February, for example, I told many of them that Scott Brown’s election hadn’t killed health care reform, and they needed to avoid dancing in the endzone, because I was aware of what liberals were saying about how to come back.

Still, this was hubris. It was the hubris of someone who rose — objectively speaking — a bit too fast, and someone who misunderstood a few things about his trade. It was also the hubris of someone who thought the best way to be annoyed about something was to do it publicly. This is the reason I’m surprised at commentary accusing me of misrepresenting myself. One other part of my career that wouldn’t have been possible a decade ago is my Twitter account, which has been popular — I’m assuming — because I’m sarcastic and don’t hide my biases. That Twitter account has echoed the way, described above, that I talk to liberals and conservatives in private. And it’s flashed like Drudge’s siren with every take I have on Republican politicians, on Democratic politicians, on fringe movements — everything. When I tweeted that Van Jones needed to resign, I was also e-mailing this to Journolist:

Jones had five years to distance himself from this bullshit. Five years. He didn’t do it. And I can’t believe that a man who spoke at basically every left/liberal event in 2007 and 2008 did not see what the Truthers were up to.

Yes, as [Charles] Johnson points out, they’re liars who try and suck everyone into their orbit. One year ago I was backstage at a Ron Paul event with Kevin Barrett, the lunatic University of Wisconsin professor, who deliriously informed me of all these famous people he’d gotten on board with the Truth movement. He was full of shit–they were people who’d been accosted by Truthers and said nice things to blow them off. Here’s an example of a Truther baiting Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand into indulging his nonsense.

But there was nothing preventing people like Paul, or like Jones, from brushing aside people like Barrett from releasing clear statements that they didn’t believe in these conspiracy theories.

I’m talking to a few media companies about what I’ll do next. Anyone who wanted to force me out of this business will have to settle for the consolation prize of me having to tediously inform sources of a new e-mail address. No serious journalist has defended the leak of my private e-mails; no one who works in politics or journalism would accept a situation where the things they said off the record could immediately become public.  But no serious journalist — as I want to be, as I am — should be so rude about the people he covers.

In the United States Senate, the indomitable James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma was very nearly alone in standing up to denounce the whole enterprise as a hoax, and in turn he was himself denounced by all right-thinking people as a scoundrel and a fool. There were, of course, scientists proficient in meteorology who entertained grave doubts, and some of them made a great fuss, but they were soon denied federal funding for further research, and young entrants into the profession quickly learned that if they wished to have successful careers it was incumbent on them to join the chorus who denounced global-warming skeptics as lackeys of the fossil fuels industry. The global-warming cabal was to the liberal democracies of our time what  Trofim Denisovich Lysenko and his disciples were to biology in the Soviet Union of Josef Stalin.

When he became President, Barack Obama pledged to “roll back the specter of a warming planet” and “restore science to its rightful place,” implying – graceless as always – that the administration of George W. Bush had suppressed inconvenient scientific truths in the interests of ideology. In fact, Obama seems not to have understood what he was saying, for a specter is “an apparition inspiring dread,” and it is one of the principal functions of science to dispel illusions of this very sort; and, instead of debunking “the specter of a warming planet” and restoring “science to its rightful place” thereby, he embraced that specter and sought by way of inspiring dread in the American people to railroad his compatriots into subjecting the entire economy to the supervision of the administrative state.

One could, of course, argue that President Obama did not know any better – that, like Senators McCain and Graham, he believed the propaganda spread by the global-warming cabal. Such a presumption cannot, however, be sustained. By the time that our President left the United States for the United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen this past December, it had become clear that that the work done by the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, which formed the basis for the four reports issued by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), was a sham – that the data was doctored, that the computer simulation was a fraud, and that systematic efforts were made by the most prominent climate scientists to corrupt the peer-review process and suppress legitimate criticism: all for the purpose of imposing a strait jacket on the world economy. In Copenhagen, President Obama could have acknowledged the truth: that some of the most prominent climate scientists had betrayed their calling, that the global-warming hypothesis remained, in fact, unproven, and that the reports issued by the IPCC provide no basis for the making of public policy. He could have recommended that there be further study, that the raw data collected and the computer code written be made available for inspection by all, and that research funds be apportioned equally between those who assert and those who deny that we are threatened by anthropogenic global warming. He did nothing of the sort, of course, and it was only thanks to the stubbornness of the Chinese that we have been spared the submission to the Senate of a treaty designed to hamstring the American economy. Even now our President remains committed to the passage of a cap-and-trade bill designed to achieve that end and to the use of the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency to a similar end.

In the meantime, the scandal has deepened, as claim after claim included in the putatively authoritative reports issued by the IPCC have been proven groundless. The posture of the mainstream press within the United States in the face of all of this is arguably the scandal’s most shocking aspect. We are used to being lied to by politicians: Barack Obama is a recognizable type. We have encountered his like before. But the press, however partisan any given newspaper or television station may be, is supposed to be vigilant, and it is in its interest to be vigilant.

We buy newspapers and magazines, we watch television news and listen to radio programs because we want to know what is going on. Very few of us are apt to be satisfied with a press no more informative than was Pravda in the heyday of the Soviet Union. This scandal, worldwide in its proportions and profound in its import, was ready-made for enterprising reporters, and, to be fair, they have made their mark . . . in foreign countries such as Great Britain – where The Guardian, a left-wing daily firmly committed to the global warming hypothesis, has nonetheless distinguished itself by the vigor it has displayed in pursuing evidence of scientific fraud in this regard. None of the news outlets mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay has pursued the story. At best, long after the facts have come out, they have noted their deployment by the global-warming skeptics. Were it not for the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal, Americans who limited their purview to the mainstream media would have hardly a clue as to what is happening.

This is, of course, part of a larger trend. The mainstream press has largely forgotten its function, and these days it flacks where it used to report. It is this that explains why fewer and fewer Americans subscribe to newspapers and magazines and watch the television networks listed above. And this explains why the internet has been such a boon. But, this fact notwithstanding, we are in a pickle – for, to date anyway, none of the operations on the internet that report the news have the resources requisite for pursuing such a story. We are, in fact, dependent on the foreign press.

Witness Der Spiegel – a German imitator of what Time was like when we still had newsmagazines in the United States. In its current issue, one can find a lengthy and devastating survey of the state of climate science entitled Climate Catastrophe: A Superstorm for Global Warming Research. It is a must-read: meticulous, cautious, and intelligently skeptical. Its authors do not claim that there is no such thing as global warming. They suspect that something of the sort may be taking place. What they insist on, however, are the limits of our current knowledge, the attempt by a politicized profession to pull a con, and the economic and social dangers associated with making radical shifts in public policy on the basis of unfounded speculation. We can now be confident that the global-warming hoax is history – for, if the pious purveyors of environmentalism in Germany have lost faith, the game is up. I doubt, however, that any of the politicians, press outlets, universities, or scientific journals associated with this scam will backtrack. My bet is that they quietly change the subject and that the perpetrators of the hoax get off scot free.

But this leaves one question unanswered. Why do we have to go abroad if we are to be well-informed concerning matters of public policy pertinent to our own well-being? Someone should put that question to those responsible for news content in the mainstream media. If they want to survive, they had better wake up.

I agree with Paul Krugman on at least one thing: the continued prospects for high unemployment in America is a bad thing. In his NYT column Monday, Krugman the Keynesian wrote:

The damage from sustained high unemployment will last much longer. The long-term unemployed can lose their skills, and even when the economy recovers they tend to have difficulty finding a job, because they’re regarded as poor risks by potential employers. Meanwhile, students who graduate into a poor labor market start their careers at a huge disadvantage — and pay a price in lower earnings for their whole working lives. Failure to act on unemployment isn’t just cruel, it’s short-sighted.

Unemployment is currently 10.2 percent, and if you factor out the part-time workers it is 17.5 percent. Banks aren’t lending to the limited demand from manufacturers, further depressing employment opportunities. And the recovery outlook right now is bleak. Krugman is right, we have to do something.

His plan, however, is not the answer. Not even close.

It’s time for an emergency jobs program….  Such a program should shy away from measures, like general tax cuts, that at best lead only indirectly to job creation, with many possible disconnects along the way. Instead, it should consist of measures that more or less directly save or add jobs.

So Krugman wants another stimulus package. Just a question first though, uh, wasn’t the point of the first stimulus to create jobs? And how did that work out?

Krugman responds:

The 2009 Obama stimulus bill was focused on restoring economic growth. It was, in effect, based on the belief that if you build G.D.P., the jobs will come. That strategy might have worked if the stimulus had been big enough — but it wasn’t.

That is something Krugman has repeatedly harped on—the stimulus was too small. But this ignores that GDP growth stimulated by government spending is not sustainable. Roughly 85 percent of the GDP growth from the third quarter this year was due to Cash for Clunkers,  the First-Time Homebuyer tax credits, and direct government spending (defense and non-defense). This is not a recipe for a strong, vibrant economy.

What does Krugman envision the new jobs focused stimulus to look like?

One such measure would be another round of aid to beleaguered state and local governments, which have seen their tax receipts plunge and which, unlike the federal government, can’t borrow to cover a temporary shortfall. More aid would help avoid both a drastic worsening of public services (especially education) and the elimination of hundreds of thousands of jobs.

Okay, let’s stop and consider something. Imagine someone gets a good paying job and keeps it for five to six years. During this time, that person buys a house, a car, a boat, a couple jet skis, and goes into significant credit card debt. But it is okay because the good job allows the person to make payments on the items every month. Then the job goes away. Suddenly all that debt isn’t so easy to handle. This is what happened to the states.

State and local governments aren’t beleaguered as much as they are obstinate. They just don’t want to make necessary cuts. When times were good (roughly 2002-2007) the states ramped up spending given their increased revenues. Now the revenues are gone, but states aren’t making the hard budget choices. They aren’t pursuing efficient government opportunities like divesting assets and streamlining state operations. Sell the boat, get a smaller house, divest the jet skis.

When it comes to stabilizing services, as Krugman suggests, it is also unnecessary to throw more money at them. According to research for the Reason Foundation, if states had limited increases in their budgets from 2002 to 2007 to just the rate of inflation, plus increases in population, then the 50 states collectively would have had a $2.2 trillion surplus to get them through the recession. Yes, the states increased spending on state services by $2.2. trillion more than they had to during the years of plenty. On the whole, state services aren’t suffering as much as they are returning to reasonable levels.

A “job creating” stimulus focused on keeping states from having to make hard, but necessary choices in their state budgets won’t solve the employment problem in America.

So what should we do? Well, stop trying to help. The more companies get bailed out, the more the government is inflating wages, decreasing how many people firms can hire. The more the government taxes companies and increases their compliance costs, the less people those firms hire or keep on. The more the government decreases the incentives to start new businesses, the less places there are to find employment.

There is no silver bullet to fixing employment overnight, but the government can take the necessary steps to ensuring it doesn’t perpetuate the problem further into the future.

A version of this first appeared at Out of Control: A Job Stimulus Is a Bad Idea

The mainstream media were complicit in their coverage of the ACORN scandal. Their behavior was and continues to be an insult to democracy and journalistic responsibility as the Fourth Estate has ignored facts, engaged in one-sided sourcing, and avoided basic and inherently important journalistic questioning.

First, there was avoidance. Some media outlets simply ignored the story. On Sept. 15, five days after the Maryland tape was released, ABC’s Charlie Gibson said, “I don’t even know about it… so you’ve got me at a loss” and said that the story might be “just one you leave to the cables.” But, Gibson was not alone in his lack of knowledge. The New York Times did not cover the story for nearly a week. On Sept. 26, Clark Hoyt, The Times’ Public Editor, acknowledged the paper’s tardiness, but insinuated that the story was lacking in facts:

But for days, as more videos were posted and government authorities rushed to distance themselves from Acorn, The Times stood still.  Some stories, lacking facts, never catch fire…But others do, and a newspaper like The Times needs to be alert to them or wind up looking clueless or, worse, partisan itself.

Then, there were cases of gratuitously sloppy journalism.  Some of the outlets that did cover the story simply skipped over basic interview questions. In several instances, Bertha Lewis made the false claim that the filmmakers were turned away in “dozens of cities.” In a CNN interview with Rick Sanchez, Lewis said, “…the filmmakers went to dozens of offices. They were turned away.” In a more flagrant example of corroborating untruths, Lewis reiterated her “dozens” on MSNBC, stating, “…They were thrown out of dozens of offices. And, in fact, in Philadelphia, we called the police, filed a police report.”

Similarly, Wolf Blitzer, failed to adequately question Lewis. While on his show, Lewis made the following statement: “This sort of notorious crew went around to dozens of our offices. What you don’t see are the offices that threw them out… offices that filed police complaints.”

The lack of depth of these interviews with Lewis has been egregious. Upon hearing of the “dozens,” even the most unseasoned journalist would know to ask, “What were the cities where filmmakers were thrown out?” And, what about the police reports (plural) that were filed by multiple “offices”? Like Sanchez’s treatment of the “dozens,” Blitzer failed to ask for a list of cities that took such action. Lewis was granted a free pass, as no probing questions were asked about the issues in question.

On Sept. 12, just two days after the Maryland tape was made public, Lewis released a statement on ACORN’s Web site, writing, “This recent scam, which was attempted in San Diego, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia to name a few places, had failed for months before the results we’ve all recently seen.”

Following subsequent video releases, New York and San Diego were dropped from ACORN’s list of cities where the filmmakers were allegedly “turned away” and the aforementioned statement was removed from ACORN’s Web site, thus erasing evidence of inconsistency.  Big Government copied her statement and posted it in it’s entirety at the time of it’s release (notice the broken link to the ACORN website in the Big Government post). This change can also be viewed in a story published on Sept. 17 by The Washington Post. According to the Post, “An ACORN spokesman said they were turned away in Miami, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, where workers called police and filed a report.”  Notice the missing cities.

Where were the media to catch this glaring glitch in ACORN’s own reporting? The answer: Nowhere to be found. And, it was on the same day (Sept. 17), that Lewis appeared on MSNBC to discuss the fact that “dozens” of cities turned the filmmakers away.

And who could forget the glaring corrections that were issued by The Associated Press and The Washington Post. Both the AP and the Post published stories that attributed an incorrect, racially-driven motive for O’Keefe’s decision to conduct the ACORN investigation . Fortunately, the outlets were forced to correct their journalistic faux pas. Here is the Post’s correction:

A Sept. 18 Page One article about the community organizing group ACORN incorrectly said that a conservative journalist targeted the organization for hidden-camera videos partly because its voter-registration drives bring Latinos and African Americans to the polls. Although ACORN registers people mostly from those groups, the maker of the videos, James E. O’Keefe, did not specifically mention them.

Despite the fact that Bertha Lewis’ credibility had been completely compromised on September 14th with with the release of the New York ACORN investigation (not to mention the San Diego videos released on Sept. 17), she was granted a forum with The National Press Club on Oct. 6; the conference was broadcast on C-SPAN. In that presser, Lewis used the debunked information from the Associated Press and Washington Post articles that had since been corrected. Yes, the NPC gave her a platform to continue touting untruths that were previously purveyed by the supine media. She said, “O’Keefe, himself, told The Washington Post, ‘They’re registering too many minorities. They usually vote Democratic. Somebody’s got to stop them’…”

Perhaps the most perplexing media coverage – or lack thereof – surrounds a video that ACORN Housing’s Philadelphia office released back in September. On Sept. 16, a YouTube account was created and on Sept. 17, a video featuring Philadelphia Office Director Katherine Conway Russell was released. The video, which is intended to respond to O’Keefe and Giles while defending the Philadelphia office’s handling of the filmmakers went largely unnoticed by the mainstream media.

In the video, Russell describes a July meeting with O’Keefe and Giles and uses a police report filed after the filmmakers left the office as evidence that the Philadelphia office was taken aback by the prostitution story line. Aside from the fact that the series of events that lead up to the police filing described in the video lead to more questions, the police report itself does not mention anything about discussion content; the report merely claims that O’Keefe was responsible for a verbal “disturbance.”

While the media vastly ignored this important video, many outlets did delve into the police report. According to The Washington Post, “ACORN emailed a copy of a Philadelphia police report dated July 24 to The Post to verify its account that police were called and the couple was shown the door.” And concerning the Philadelphia office’s involvement, WPVI Philadelphia wrote, “…by every account, the Philadelphia office is not part of the problem.” And, WBUR-FM wrote, “…in ACORN Housing’s North Philadelphia office, the scene is far from the one seen in the videos, which were made by a conservative activist”

Here, the media takes sides without interviewing or speaking with O’Keefe and Giles. Aside from the issue of ignoring ACORN’s own video, such selective sourcing is disturbing. Nowhere in the police report is ACORN’s rejection of any subject matter mentioned, therefore the report, in itself, does not prove wholeheartedly what ACORN’s officials in that city have said.

And finally: The insinuation that the videos were creatively edited was repeated in a plethora of mainstream news media. In an opinion piece for True/Slant, Allison Kilkenny wrote,

The videos are edited very creatively — if I’m being generous — to show only the ACORN employees who engaged in shady behavior, and not the dozens of other ACORN offices from which O’Keefe and Company were ejected, and in a few cases, ACORN employees called the police on the duo.

Aside from the fact that the videos weren’t edited in any way to deceive the viewers, that dozens of offices did not dispel O’Keefe and Giles, and only one office has come forward with a report, entire audio and transcript versions of the investigations are available on BigGovernment.com, right at the top of the homepage. This falsehood (that full versions are not available) has been repeated by Lewis herself on CNN and in other mainstream outlets (and, surprise, virtually no journalist has corrected her).

The ACORN story has, once again, shown the media’s inability to fulfill its duties. The media should adequately inform the public while asking the questions needed to provide a full and robust picture of what is occurring. ACORN coverage has been biased, incomplete, and sloppily mishandled. Let’s hope the aforementioned examples help to set the record straight.

They were not going to report this blockbuster unless they were forced to. And they were. What’s more, it ain’t over yet. Not every hint I dropped in that piece about what was to come has played itself out yet.Stay tuned.

When filmmaker and provocateur James O’Keefe came to my office to show me the video of him and his friend, Hannah Giles, going to the Baltimore offices of ACORN – the nation’s foremost “community organizers” – dressed as a pimp and a prostitute and asking for – and getting – help for various illegal activities, he sought my advice. In the past, Mr. O’Keefe created brilliant social satire that rocked his college campus and even made its way on to the talk-radio and cable-news shows, but the magnitude of his latest adventure had the potential to rock the political establishment.

I was awed by Mr. O’Keefe’s guts and amazed by the footage, but explained that the mainstream media would try to kill this important and illuminating expose about a corrupt and criminal political racket, and that the well-funded political left would go into “war room” mode, with 25-year-old Mr. O’Keefe and 20-year-old cohort Miss Giles in the cross hairs. I felt I had a moral obligation to protect these young muckrakers from the left and from the media, and to devise a strategy that would force the media’s hand.

Once the American public saw with its own eyes the grotesque, common practices of ACORN’s housing offices, Mr. O’Keefe and Miss Giles could no longer be a legitimate focus of media scrutiny. Kill the messenger doesn’t work with the American people when they realize that the message is so devastating and honest. I think the video exposed the misuse of public funds and systemic manipulation of the tax code in the name of “helping the poor.”

If Mr. O’Keefe dumped the videos on YouTube, the political powers would have killed the expose before it got traction. I half-joked that he should secretly tape pitching the major television networks exclusive use of his videos for their nightly news broadcasts. But a simpler, less controversial method proved as fruitful.

I told him that in addition to launching his compelling and stylized Web videos, we needed to offer the full transcripts and audio to the public in the name of transparency, and to offer Fox News the full footage of each video before each was released.We had to devise a plan that would force the media to see the evidence before they had enough time to destroy these two idealistic 20-something truth seekers. Mr. O’Keefe agreed to post the full audio and full transcript of his video experiences at BigGovernment.com.

Thus was born a multimedia, multiplatform strategy designed to force the reluctant hands of ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Videos of five different ACORN offices in five separate cities would be released on five consecutive weekdays over a full week – Baltimore, Washington, New York, San Bernardino and San Diego. By dripping the videos out, we exposed to anyone paying attention that ACORN was lying through its teeth and that the media would look imbecilic continuing to trot out their hapless spokespeople.

Read the full article at the Washington Times.