I can think of no better way to upset the lefties in your life – and please the inner you – than pre-ordering my forthcoming coming-of-rage® book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World. Learn how I went from left to right, then decided to take on the world and become an unexpected culture warrior.

Buy it at Amazon.com

Come one, come all. Come Tea Partiers, come conservatives, RINOs, classical liberals, drum circle types, SEIU/ACORN community organizees! This book is about love, rage, righteousness, a great media correcting, and about cultural and political renewal!

Come people who have met me at restaurants, tapas bars, taquerias, expensive cupcake shoppes. People who have gone to grade school, high school and college with me. Kids who grew up playing little league with me. The teachers whose lives I often made miserable.

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Common Cause would have us believe they aren’t responsible for hateful rhetoric spewed at the Right from protesters at a recent Koch brothers protest they organized. A statement was issued only after it came to light that a protester had called for the lynching of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. But a review of the official event video proves that Common Cause actually worked to inspire such hate through the selection of official speakers. They cannot simply disown it now.

Common Cause condemns bigotry, hateful statements caught on film at rally

Common Cause’s 40 year history of holding power accountable has been marked by a commitment to decency and civility – in public and private. So we are of course outraged to find that a few of those attending the events around a gathering Common Cause helped to organize Sunday near Palm Springs voiced hateful, narrow-minded sentiments to an interviewer in the crowd.

In their own clips of chosen and highlighted speakers for the formal panel they organized at the protest, you will repeatedly hear the Right, their honest political opposition, cast as hateful, evil, cruel, and worse. Writing at Hot Air, John Sexton pointed out just some of the official unhinged rhetoric from Van Jones at the Common Cause event.

We will not live on an economic plantation run by the Koch brothers.

In this video, another official panelist, DeAnn McEwan, claims the Koch’s “have their fingers on the pillows that are suffocating all of us,” while citing the plight of various individuals needing intensive medical treatment. In effect, official Common Cause panelist McEwan is accusing the Kochs of being murderers. She even details a patient’s failed struggle to cling to life, in essence, blaming her death squarely on the Kochs. (more…)

Last year Big Journalism chronicled Occidental College professor Peter Dreier, who served on the Obama campaign’s urban policy task force and as an adviser to ACORN, using his position with the university to recruit operatives for the “battle with conservative ideas” (new tone, anyone?).  According to an email obtained by BigGovernment.com, Dreier is at it again, this time drafting activists to protest a meeting headed up by conservative businessmen Charles and David Koch.

He also encourages people to attend a panel discussion before the protest featuring, among others, UC Irvine Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky, U.C. Berekely Professor and former Obama adviser Robert Reich, and Van Jones.

The top activists on the left aren’t just confined to Soros-backed fringe groups like Code Pink or Media Matters; they’re often the professors we pay thousands to teach our children.  And it’s from their perch atop the ivory towers of academia that they recruit and reeducate the next crop of activists.

dreier pdf 2 –

If you know anything about my background at all, you know I’m a liberal. I’ve been posting stories about the  Pigford scandal here on BigGov and my usual haunt, the Huffington Post. I’ve worked for MoveOn.org and Brave New Films. I voted for Obama although like many progressives, I’m not thrilled with him.

So, since I’m the stranger in a strange land here on the Bigs, maybe you nice conservatives can explain something to me — why hasn’t the right wing blogosphere picked up on Pigford?

Don’t get me wrong. The mainstream media hasn’t picked up on it either and I’m willing to grant that most of the MSM leans left. The left wing blogosphere has totally ignored the Pigford reporting I and others here have done. But I UNDERSTAND that. This story isn’t good for Democrats.

But where are your guys?

I mean, we have a congressman, Sanford Bishop — a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, for goshsake — admitting he knew about fraud. Admitting it to newspapers. Where’s Rush or Fox News or Malkin or Red State or Coulter or Beck, or…anyone? Instapundit has covered it. Derbyshire did a piece on Pigford a few weeks back but didn’t mention the stuff on this site. And that’s about it.

Again. Democratic Congress. Fraud. Scandal. Billions. And — crickets on the right.

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Van Jones is the gift that just keeps on giving. The Van Joneses, Ezra Kleins, and other all too honest liberals just can’t help but completely affirm everything that conservatives have been saying about the left for years. In this case Van Jones might as well have gotten “Glenn Beck is right about social justice” tattooed across his forehead before giving this speech:

Oh. I see so the entire green movement is really just about forwarding a radical leftist agenda in order to restructure society. Gee, everyone on the right hasn’t been saying that for years on end.

Sometimes you have to wonder if guys like Van Jones aren’t just some brilliantly diabolical scheme by our side to expose the true intentions of the left for all to see. I mean Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, or myself could go off on a daily basis about how the green and social justice movements might not seem connected on the surface but that they most certainly are at a deeper level and we would reach some people. However, when someone in those movements goes around saying the same thing how can anybody question it?

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A new human rights curriculum that was recently introduced to middle schools and high schools all across New York is a disservice to students because it wastes precious instruction time which would be more wisely spent on academic fundamentals.

Lost in the news of the elections is a blockbuster story soon to be swept under the carpet, Politico reports:

“The White House rewrote crucial sections of an Interior Department report to suggest an independent group of scientists and engineers supported a six-month ban on offshore oil drilling, the Interior inspector general says in a new report.

In the wee hours of the morning of May 27, a staff member to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited versions of the department report’s executive summary back to Interior. The language had been changed to insinuate the seven-member panel of outside experts – who reviewed a draft of various safety recommendations – endorsed the moratorium, according to the IG report obtained by POLITICO.”

In weasel words that even make this Washingtonian of twenty years blush, the Department of the Interior Inspector General writes:

“’The White House edit of the original DOI draft executive summary led to the implication that the moratorium recommendation had been peer-reviewed by the experts,’ the IG report states, without judgment on whether the change was an intentional attempt to mislead the public.” (emphasis added)

One can certainly “lead to an inference“. But … led to the implication? Oh, right. You are trying not to say “implied“.

This is Exhibit A why law school drill into every first year’s head do not use the passive voice. It obscures meaning, begs questions, and diminishes confidence and credibility in the speaker. You come off as trying to weaselly avoid saying something. Like this guy.

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How do you keep the Van Joneses and other radicals from going off the deep end and spouting Marxist propaganda for national TV cameras?

By using the World’s Largest Teleprompter.

Every speaker used this from the podium, positioned below the lecturn.  There were unconfirmed reports that it had been borrowed from the White House.

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Excerpted from Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance Between Barack Obama and Wall Street. Published by Sentinel. Copyright Charles Gasparino, 2010.

But despite his trials, [Lloyd] Blankfein had taken time out of his grueling schedule to help a firm that wasn’t a Goldman client, not even a prospective one. The firm was ShoreBank Corporation, a small community bank located in Chicago that lent money to inner-city businesses and was exploring the possibility of financing nascent and as-yet-unprofitable “green” businesses through so-called conservation loans and environmental banking, according to the bank’s Web site.

The bank’s self-described mission was to “change the world.” And yet despite its seemingly good intentions, the bank’s urban commercial borrowers were suffering greatly from the lower property values and high unemployment that stemmed from post–financial crisis recession. Without Blankfein’s help (and the help of other
major Wall Street firms) ShoreBank would follow the fate of dozens of other banks during the great recession and face almost certain collapse and government liquidation.

To be sure, helping out a struggling bank that wasn’t even a client was a most un-Goldman-like thing to do. Goldman dealt with only the biggest companies in corporate America or with superwealthy individuals (typically, those with $10 million or more to invest with the firm). More thanthat, this was a firm that had a reputation for screwing just about any company, clients included, when business was on the line. Goldman, of course, would deny that assertion. Even so, in the normal course of business, a bank like ShoreBank, with its modest funds and do-gooder reputation, wouldn’t even appear on Goldman’s radar as a potential customer.

Yet for some seemingly inexplicable reason, Lloyd Blankfein—who had a net worth close to $500 million and until recently had never heard of ShoreBank—started imploring his friends at other firms, like Morgan Stanley, GE Capital, and others, to help this little bank. Not that Blankfein suggested there was money to be made here. Quite the contrary; it was simply the right thing to do.

To any casual observer, this puzzling scenario raises the question: Why would Blankfein possibly want to save ShoreBank?

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Conservative author Dinesh D’Souza recently published an insightful, much-discussed article in Forbes, “How Obama Thinks.”

Drawing upon Obama’s writings and history, D’Souza concludes that his policy agenda—so at odds with traditional American values and principles—is rooted chiefly in the anti-colonialist intellectual influence of his Kenyan-born father:

What then is Obama’s dream? We don’t have to speculate because the President tells us himself in his autobiography, Dreams from My Father. According to Obama, his dream is his father’s dream. . . .

[T]o his son, the elder Obama represented a great and noble cause, the cause of anticolonialism. . . . Anticolonialism is the doctrine that rich countries of the West got rich by invading, occupying and looting poor countries of Asia, Africa and South America . . . .

Obama Sr. was an economist, and in 1965 he published an important article in the East Africa Journal called “Problems Facing Our Socialism.” Obama Sr. . . saw state appropriation of wealth as a necessary means to achieve the anticolonial objective of taking resources away from the foreign looters and restoring them to the people of Africa . . . . As he put it, “We need to eliminate power structures that have been built through excessive accumulation so that not only a few individuals shall control a vast magnitude of resources as is the case now.” The senior Obama proposed that the state confiscate private land and raise taxes with no upper limit. In fact, he insisted that “theoretically there is nothing that can stop the government from taxing 100% of income so long as the people get benefits from the government commensurate with their income which is taxed.”

Like father, like son, says D’Souza:

It may seem incredible to suggest that the anticolonial ideology of Barack Obama Sr. is espoused by his son, the President of the United States. That is what I am saying. From a very young age and through his formative years, Obama learned to see America as a force for global domination and destruction. He came to view America’s military as an instrument of neocolonial occupation. He adopted his father’s position that capitalism and free markets are code words for economic plunder. Obama grew to perceive the rich as an oppressive class, a kind of neocolonial power within America. In his worldview, profits are a measure of how effectively you have ripped off the rest of society, and America’s power in the world is a measure of how selfishly it consumes the globe’s resources and how ruthlessly it bullies and dominates the rest of the planet.

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As we mentioned in our last article, the prevalence of the Triple Bottom Line philosophy is signaling a changing paradigm, a time of transformation. Our question, then, is this: What exactly are we transforming into?  The knee-jerk answer might be that we are transforming from a capitalist system to a socialist system. However, the widespread adoption of 3BL belies such a simple answer. Socialism, with its complete government control of production, is hardly desirable for private business interests. American corporations are willingly embracing 3BL without even a government mandate. There is something deeper going on than simply a tug of war between two economic systems, and we are seeking to explore just what that may be.

Our first clues as to where we are going lay in the past, with the origin of the term “Triple Bottom Line.” For that we can credit John Elkington (his personal website and blog is here), who introduced the public to the term for the first time in his 1997 publication Cannibals With Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business. Elkington is a longtime advocate for corporate environmental and social awareness, having cofounded the business development consulting firm SustainAbility in 1987. In fact, we may consider him a “founder” of corporate sustainability, having been called a “dean of the corporate responsibility movement for three decades” by BusinessWeek.  Elkington currently serves as the Executive Chairman of the sustainability think tank Volans, which he helped found in 2008. His work with Volans is what provides a real glimpse into the end game of 3BL, in a concept termed “The Phoenix Economy.”

The Phoenix Economy is a concept professing that the failure of an existing economic system will leave a void and an opportunity for a new system to take its place.  (The term “phoenix” refers to the bird of that name which, in ancient mythology, dies in a self-created fire and is then reincarnated from the ashes.)  Old paradigms and established principles are replaced by a new way of approaching economics — and indeed the culture. Elkington recognizes this as an opportunity to establish a new paradigm based on 3BL philosophy. Global sustainability is the principle by which the economic and social culture will be driven. The Volans website provides a concise explanation of the Phoenix Economy.

According to Volans:

From the ashes of the downturn, a new economy is self-assembling—focused on providing social and environmental solutions, where markets and governments have failed.

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

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

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

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

In the first (and still best) “Austin Powers” film, a United Nations representative makes a faux pas and calls the film’s villain “Mr. Evil.”

“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. (more…)

You may have missed President Obama’s euphemism for massive wealth transfers involved in his “green economy” — central planning rebranded — that he said last week he will seek to use the Gulf oil spill to impose. That euphemism was:

“When I was a candidate for this office, I laid out a set of principles that would move our country towards energy independence. Last year, the House of Representatives acted on these principles by passing a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill –- a bill that finally makes clean energy the profitable kind of energy for America’s businesses.”

This is his fourth high-profile use of the phrase “finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy”, most recently his State of the Union speech. I addressed this in Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’” from Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America:

That is the objective of various “green jobs” schemes: make everything else so expensive as to give life to the uneconomical. But that is incredibly economically harmful.

Also, note what President Obama said in his September 2009 UN “global warming” speech, a comment that should strike anyone who ever took an economics course or simply possessed the capacity for critical thought:

“Most importantly, the House of Representatives passed an energy and climate bill in June that would finally make clean energy the profitable kind of energy for American businesses and dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

The key word there is that lawmakers passed a scheme to make inefficient projects “profitable”, not “cost-effective”. That’s corporate welfare. These mandates and subsidies would , however, add value to the investment portfolios of many leading lights among Obama’s allies, such as George Soros who, by chance, soon revealed plans to sink one billion dollars into “green jobs” schemes. Lo and behold, another of his investments, the Center for American Progress, furiously pushes “green jobs” schemes.

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Yesterday’s announcements of slitting our own throat of domestic energy production gives cause to revisit who the man is and where he wants to take us.

Rahm Emanuel among others in the Obama administration are on record asserting their philosophy that no “crisis” should ever go to waste. This mentality, of course, carries the moral hazard of promoting “crises” in the news cycle, and as an operating mentality. We have seen this among green activists (including Obama appointees) for decades.

With crises being your strategic plan for hooks to impose an unpopular and radical agenda, you might even allow crises to develop where they could have been nipped into mere incidents. Who knows.

We do know that Obama has a record of words and now deeds declaring war on all sources of energy that work, including their domestic production: shale gas, coal, oil shale, and petroleum.

Barack Obama and his gloomy band seek to force you out of your lifestyle, meaning your freedoms, all of which they find intolerable and that you cannot be trusted with. Obama even noted in a speech that, in a world where he is president, we can’t eat what we want, drive what we want, or put our thermostat where we want (other than that, you are perfectly free to do what you wish…until further notice).

His “energy czar” later added policy meat to these very strange rhetorical bones when she told U.S. News that you shouldn’t even have the right to control your own energy use. But changing that, she comforted readers, will be a savings to you. They’re saving a fortune in India and other poor countries right now, for example.

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ShoreBank’s connections to the White House and Capitol Hill, as well as to the green jobs movement, have been documented here at BigGovernment.com. Yesterday, Angela Caputo of Chicago Now revealed that the “community development” bank became a predatory lender in African-American and Hispanic communities when it ran short of cash.

New video evidence (after the jump) reveals that Rep. Jan Schakowsky promoted ShoreBank to consumers in January 2010, even as she was trying to get taxpayers to bail it out.

And the recent mob protests of the SEIU, also exposed at BigGovernment.com, illuminate another aspect of the scandal: the use of intimidation and even illegal tactics to force Americans to comply with the corrupt self-dealing of the Obama administration–before it even took office.

SEIU rallies workers at illegal Republic Windows strike, Dec. 2008

ShoreBank is about to receive $75 million in federal taxpayers’ money for a bailout that has become the prime example of “crony socialism” under the Obama administration. It is not the first federal money ShoreBank has received. In May 2009, it was awarded $35 million in stimulus credits for “green projects” in Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland. The grant was part of Van Jones’s “green jobs” push, with a focus on home weatherization.

President Barack Obama was so enthusiastic about weatherization that he made it the centerpiece of his jobs program, prompting a nonplussed Jon Stewart to comment on the Daily Show: “These ideas sound like the people we got tired of.” President Obama and Vice-President Joe Biden praised one company in particular, Serious Materials, which was the only “green” window company to receive tax credits in the stimulus bill.

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Today it was reported that Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein has been calling Wall Street friends to cough up $125 million to save ShoreBank, which faces federal closure next week. Rep. Jan Schakowsky suggested in January that Illinois taxpayers foot the bill. That would have been the first state-led bank bailout in U.S history. The idea was abandoned–so it appears the government is shaking down Goldman Sachs instead.

ShoreBank has close connections to the Obama administration, including controversial figures such as former “green jobs czar” Van Jones. Its executives have contributed in the past to Rep. Schakowsky and other Illinois politicians. ShoreBank did not just make loans in poor communities–there are other local banks that do that without getting into trouble–but also specifically made loans that the recipients had little hope of repaying.

Now ShoreBank is calling in some political favors, and the politicians are responding with a classic Chicago-style shakedown. It is probably no coincidence that Goldman Sachs suddenly took an interest in ShoreBank after it was slapped with a federal civil fraud lawsuit and a criminal investigation. Many Wall Street observers believe that the charges against Goldman Sachs were politically motivated, in timing if not in substance.

Regardless, Mr. Blankfein got the message, telling Goldman Sachs shareholders last week that he would try to rebuild the company’s image. He called up other bailed-out institutions that are being threatened with federal charges–Bank of America, Citigroup, and JP Morgan Chase–and got them to cough up millions for ShoreBank. So although the ShoreBank bailout is “private,” American taxpayers are still indirectly on the hook.

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The video vault has now provided us another glimpse into the fever swamp occupied by President Obama’s moonbat science czar John Holdren. Holdren of course is the man brought in to put a scientific imprimatur on the Left’s latest excuse for much of its economic agenda, wrapped as it is in the cloak of averting environmental crisis.

First, the merely good news arising from Holdren’s odious openness: it floated to the surface just in time for my new book coming out Monday (but available for pre-order now, before today’s ’s Ways and Means Committee “green jobs” hearing causes a run on them! Really.). In these pages Holdren, Carol Browner and a few others receive close inspection, particularly in Chapter 3 “Van Jones Was No Accident: Obama’s Radicals” (also relevant to this discussion is Chapter 6, “Green Eggs and Scam: The Wholesale Fraud of ‘Green Jobs’”).

More on all of that, including some pretty startling internal documents, in a few days.

Now for the even better news. As detailed in “Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America“, Holdren is a longtime global-cooling-then-warming alarmist who’s also on record advocating the constitutionality of sterilizing the public through the drinking water supply to address the “population crisis” when it reaches the point that his kind believe is just  too much to bear.

As is also detailed, he and his ilk like to see (and shriek) crisis pretty much everywhere they look, and transparently as an excuse for their real obsession with massive government usurpations of individual liberties — or, ahem, Power Grabs. So to them that point where statist seizures are urgently required is always right…about…nnnow.

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In this ObamaEconomy, you, like most Americans, may be struggling to find work. Well, you’re in luck. We’ve created a convenient checklist so that you can see if you quality to work at John Podesta’s left-wing “think” tank, the Center for American Progress.

1. Did you ever sign a petition that stated “high-level government officials may have deliberately allowed the September 11th attacks to occur”?
2. Do you support the convicted cop-killer, Mumia Abu-Jamal?
3. Are you a street agitator committed to Marxist revolution?

If you answered yes to all of the above questions, then you and Van Jones are kindred spirits. But, more importantly, what it really means is that your next paycheck could be cut and signed by Podesta himself. After all, it was Podesta who scooped up Van Jones after he was forced out of the White House from his perch as the “green jobs” czar, once the eco-princess’s sordid past and radical worldview were uncovered by intrepid bloggers.

Just exactly how delirious does one need to be in order to work at the Center for American Progress? I was curious.

Smile, John, you’re on camera:

If you want the revealed strategy of how John Podesta’s cronies at the Center for American Progress use voters under 30 as shills and sheep to support Barack’s socialist agenda, be sure to check out my new book Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation. It’s all there.

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