1. Rasmussen: 75% Angry at Gov't Corruption
2. Iran moves closer to nuke warhead capacity
3. Congressman: Murtha's intestine damaged in surgery
4. Obama: Murtha 'a respected voice on issues of national security'
5. Administration, GOP Start Listing Demands Ahead of Health Care Talks
6. AP: Obama's health care summit just for show?
8. Hanson: 5 Reasons to Fear Big Government
9. NBC: Yep, Prop 8 Trial Judge Is Gay
10. Sowell: The Fallacy of 'Fairness'
11. Rasmussen: Americans Reject Keynesian Economics
12. Under Investigation, ACORN Chief Bertha Lewis Quits Working Families Party
13. Palin Writes Note on Hand: 'Hi Mom'
14. New Republic: Breitbart swoops into Nashville, calls for 6th Avenue Tea Party
Yesterday, President Obama announced his plan to create a new federal agency tasked with climate change. Later that day, the National Weather Service announced that DC was due to receive another 10-20 inches of snow today. (On top of the 2 1/2 feet of snow over the weekend.) Now THAT is some climate change.
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Rob Long and Mark Steyn are joined by guests law professor John C. Yoo and Breitbart.com’s Andrew Breitbart. Topics covered include Miranda rights for terrorists, a report from the Tea Party convention, the joyless MSM, Al-Qaeda’s potential new bomb making strategy that may be particularly problematic for certain parts of Los Angeles, and some unconventional Super Bowl picks.
(Click on PLAY button and subscribe to podcast)
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From ABC News:
The Obama administration on Monday proposed a new agency to study and report on the changing climate.
Also known as global warming, climate change has drawn widespread concern in recent years as temperatures around the world rise, threatening to harm crops, spread disease, increase sea levels, change storm and drought patterns and cause polar melting.
Commerce Secretary Gary Locke and Jane Lubchenco, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, announced NOAA will set up the new Climate Service to operate in tandem with NOAA’s National Weather Service and National Ocean Service.
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Politicians in Washington have come up with something far more impressive than turning lead into gold or water into wine. Using self-serving budget rules, they can increase the burden of government spending and say they are cutting taxes instead.
This bit of legerdemain is made possible, thanks to the convolutions of the personal income tax, by adopting or expanding refundable tax credits. But in this case, “refundable” does not mean the government is returning money to taxpayers. Instead, it means that money is being redistributed to people who do not earn enough to be subject to the income tax.
This is hardly a trivial issue. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the amount of income redistribution being laundered through the tax code is now so large that the bottom 40 percent of the population has a negative “effective” income tax rate. In simple terms (though perhaps with profound political implications), the income tax is a revenue generator for a big share of the population.
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From the Associated Press:
Spokesman for Rep. John Murtha says the Pennsylvania Democrat has died at 77.
ED Note: Rep. Murtha was a close political ally of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He was her choice for Majority Leader, but he was edged out in a caucus-wide vote by Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD). He became a darling of the on-line left as a fierce critic of the Iraq War. For many conservatives, he was a personification of the Congressional earmark system and its potential for abuse. His final months in office were marked by serious questions surrounding his steering of millions of dollars in Pentagon appropriations.
Consider this an open thread.
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Imam Zaid Shakir came to speak at my school, Claremont McKenna, on December 9th to respond to the “tragedy of Ft. Hood.” Rather than respond to the massacre of American servicemen, Shakir spent the evening indicting the United States – saying “we were born in genocide.” The reason for the Ft. Hood Massacre, according to Shakir? Not jihad or Islamic fundamentalism, but the “pervasiveness of violence in our society” and because of Americans’ “easy access to guns.”
Zaid Shakir – Final from The Claremont Conservative on Vimeo.
For those wondering who Mr. Shakir is, he’s the go-to expert on Islamic issues for the mainstream media. The New York Times describes him as a “leading intellectual light,” while rap scholar, Cornel West says “he is one of the towering principle [sic] voices not only in contemporary Islam, but in American society,” according to this biography. Most recently, he was described by John Esposito as one of the “500 Most Influential Muslims.”
After comparing the massacres at Ft. Hood by Major Nidal Hassan to the Columbine killers and Maurice Clemmons, of Mike Huckabee pardon fame, Shakir said that the violence we have seen was not a “Muslim problem,” but a problem for everyone. You never quite know when someone will “snap.” [The following is extracted from a transcript from audio I took of the public lecture at my college.] (more…)
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From The American Spectator:
ACORN and other left-wing advocacy groups could be eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in the $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint that President Obama unveiled last week.
ACORN and other left-wing advocacy groups could be eligible for up to $3.99 billion in federal funding included in the $3.83 trillion fiscal 2011 budget blueprint that President Obama unveiled last week.
The $3.99 billion comes from a congressional slush fund known as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) $48.5 billion fiscal 2011 budget. CDBG grants, which are awarded to states and localities, pass indirectly to ACORN.
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Slate’s Jacob Weisberg came unhinged on Friday and gave the country the finger.
“Down with the People!” he screams from Bill Gates lap. As Jacob sees it, we the people are demanding two mutually exclusive things: premium government services and tax cuts, and when we can’t have what we want, we become unruly children.
There is of course a third option, and I think it is the voting issue for the 2010 elections. It frankly amazes me that TPM-style Democrats going after Paul Ryan’s Roadmap, don’t see it coming…
You can thank me later, but I just saved the United State of America at least $278,309,600,000.00 PER YEAR. You read that right. $278 BILLION per year. That’s almost entirely what Medicaid will spend this year for children and the disabled. That’s what our normal deficit looks like without TARP and stimulus.
The crazy thing is how easy it was to do. It took me like three minutes. And since I’m a big open source, creative commons guy I’m even posting my magical formula shown here using 2008’s budget:
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California has the worst bond rating in the nation, hovering just above junk bond status. A lower bond rating means higher interest rates when selling bonds – and California already spends $10 billion per year in bond principal and interest repayments.
In this, as in many other things, California leads the nation, for better or for worse (repaying the money borrowed for President Obama’s Stimulus will cost every American $280 a month for life).
Some people place a portion of California’s debt problem at the feet of voters who approve nearly every bond initiative, from $3 billion for an embryonic stem cell research bond to $10 billion in debt to build a high-speed rail system.
It’s hard to blame citizens of the Golden State for voting for debt when the most famous Californian, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, proclaims bonds “a gift from the future.” It’s also hard to blame voters for approving bonds when the bond ballot descriptions and arguments are chock full of shaky claims.
Take November 2008’s much promoted High-Speed Rail Initiative, Proposition 1A. Voters approved it by 52-48 after proponents, such as train manufacturers and unions poured $2.5 million into the effort. As with almost every bond measure, there was no funded opposition. The measure’s proponents, big business and labor unions, claimed that the trains would offer time-saving travel “AT A CHEAPER COST!” than air travel or car. And that, the train would, “give Californians a real alternative to skyrocketing gasoline prices and dependence on foreign oil while reducing greenhouse gases. Building high-speed rail is cheaper than expanding highways and airports to meet California’s population growth.”
Really? Who checks these claims?
(more…)
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Throughout much of 2009, Glenn Beck extensively covered the “Cloward-Piven Strategy” that was first brought into the public domain in a May 1966 article in The Nation magazine. In the article, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two Columbia professors, developed a strategy by which the welfare system could be overwhelmed with demand, broken, and replaced with a “guaranteed annual income.”
Beck has successfully made the argument that the Cloward-Piven Strategy was a blueprint for success at overwhelming that system. Don’t think it worked? Ask the leaders of New York City. The strategy worked so well, the mass rush for welfare benefits bankrupted the city in the 1970s.
So as Beck has brought new light to this strategy, no one has asked Frances Fox Piven’s opinion. Until now.
Piven dismisses Beck’s opinion as “silly.” But she also went a step farther.
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Net neutrality supporters have long argued that institution of “open internet” rules is critical for job retention and creation. However, according to some opponents of the proposed policy, a study released on Friday by Entropy Economics undercuts that assertion—just as much discussion in the political world is re-centering on the topic of job creation and as the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) continues to move closer to a decision on controversial, proposed net neutrality rules.
The study, entitled “What Would Net Neutrality Mean for U.S. Jobs?” analyzes comments submitted by companies within the Internet industry to the FCC as of January 15, 2010. It excludes those submitted by trade associations, individuals, and academics, and breaks commenters down into two categories: Supporters and Skeptics. It also attempts to exclude “non-U.S. employees of foreign-based Skeptics” but includes “any foreign employees of Supporters.”
The results are bound to unsettle net neutrality advocates: Even with the filtering out that Entropy conducted, Skeptics—many of whom have expressed concern about the negative ramifications of net neutrality on their businesses— employ nearly ten times the number of employees that Supporters do. More specifically, Skeptics directly employ 1,440,021 workers, whereas Supporters directly employ just 148,936 workers.
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Today, in 1996, President Clinton signed into law the Communications Decency Act, an attempt by the then-GOP led Congress to regulate content on the Internet. Just over a year earlier, the GOP had won control of Congress on a promise of limited government. File this away for November 3, 2010.
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RIGHT ON— On Sunday the left went bonkers after they discovered that the TelePrompter-less former Governor Sarah Palin wrote notes on the palm of her left hand for her speech to the National Tea Party Convention in Nashville. The far left absolutely freaked over this non-issue rather than focus on her brilliant speech knocking the Obama Administration’s horrid record on economics and national defense.
Today Sarah fired back…
She wrote “Hi Mom!” on her palm during her campaign stop with Governor Rick Perry of Texas.
Hah!
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The media and the Left cannot let a Sarah Palin appearance go by without trying to find something–anything–to discredit her. It’s become not only predictable, but downright funny. The latest drive-by assault on Palin–that she wrote 6 words on her hand–is being treated like a national scandal.
How short their memory is. For that last year we’ve witnessed numerous examples of President Obama’s staged press events and town halls–most recently the Politico reported on Obama’s preselected questions for an Organizing for America forum on February 5, 2010:
The four pre-selected questions Obama took were the exact issues he stressed this week: health care, small businesses, jobs and education, in that order.
Obama is rarely seen without a teleprompter and in the off chance his speech writers can’t put together a masterpiece for him, it’s a disaster.
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NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell spoke out against Rush Limbaugh’s being a potential minority owner of the St. Louis Rams because he was “divisive”. Since then, two minority owners of the Miami Dolphins (Jennifer Lopez and Fergie) have engaged in present and past conduct that could be considered divisive, but nothing that caught the attention of Goodell or the NFL.
How about this…?
Let’s Get Retarded
This song was remixed for The Black Eyed Peas’ fifth studio album The E.N.D. as “Let’s Get Re-Started. “Retarded” is considered a derogatory term for the mentally impaired, making the song unsuitable for play on some radio stations and at sports games. In 2004 the song’s lyrics were edited and “Let’s Get It Started” found its way onto radio airwaves, movie soundtracks, and video games.
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Founding Bloggers can confirm that we too captured an image of the writing on Governor Palin’s hand which was breathlessly reported on Huffington Post. The notes appear to be very innocuous.
On the other hand, the outrage on the left is being completely misunderstood by the right. Democrats don’t mind that she needed a few notes for her speech. They’re upset that Sarah used her hand, proving once again that she is an unsophisticated hick. Everybody knows that whether you are talking in a sixth grade classroom, or talking dirty to the First Lady, using anything other than a presidential-level teleprompter is simply pedestrian.
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Facing what could become a bruising primary battle, appointed U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) is embracing one of President Obama’s best known communist appointees, former green jobs czar Van Jones.
The Hill reports Gillibrand will share the stage with Jones at a panel discussion sponsored by the Advocacy Project at the Harvard Club in New York. Jones, a self-described “communist,” was pushed out of the Obama administration five months ago following the embarrassing revelation that he was a 9/11 “truther” who had signed a petition accusing the U.S. government of orchestrating the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
For a time, Jones had been politically radioactive to Democrats but Gillibrand’s decision to work alongside him appears to bring Jones’s political exile to an end.
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The progressive movement is often difficult to pin down because allied groups use multiple names and organizations to spread confusion and give the appearance of both overwhelming numbers and independent expenditure. We should not be fooled by this host of political malcontents attempting to co-opt state and local politics in the name of a national agenda. Examining the tactics of these groups gives us the key to understanding the purpose of organizations like the Secretary of State Project, ACORN, and Project Vote. Our states are under concerted judicial assault from progressive lawyers, and they are many.
Let us first address the networks of influence. Project Vote is the legal arm of ACORN, and in the cases we’ll study, conducted all of the informational build-up to bring suits against potential swing states. It works like this: Project Vote files state versions of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, gathers relevant data, conducts studies, and contacts various state officials to coordinate these activities. Once Project Vote gathers the minimal amount of information needed, ACORN then files a complaint in federal district court. A rotating pinwheel of other progressive groups join the suit and, often, The Brennan Center for Justice provides additional help through legal counsel.
The lawsuits at issue all involve violations of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA). The NVRA requires states to conduct voter registration through (1) motor vehicle registration agencies, (2) mail, and (3) public assistance agencies. HAVA (1) provides funds to states to improve election administration, (2) establishes minimum election administration standards for states, and (3) creates the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). NVRA and HAVA require states to designate a “chief state elections official” to coordinate and implement state responsibilities under the acts. Most states have designated their secretary of state as the chief state elections official. Project Vote directs information-gathering to the secretary of state for each targeted state. If the secretary of state becomes a stumbling-block to the efforts of Project Vote, SoSP targets that secretary of state for removal. If the secretary of state aids and abets Project Vote, SoSP supports that secretary of state for re-election.
We start with a look at the past suits brought against the states.
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Today, in 1962, the United States banned all trade with Cuba. The Castro regime capitulated soon after…oh, wait…
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HERE WE GO–
Andrew Breitbart just introduced tonight’s speaker SARAH PALIN.
Mindy and Madison were excited to hear Sarah Palin. They blogged this weekend, too.
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It was almost a dream come true.
The media reported that a group of a National Tea Party Convention counter-protesters were going to flock to the Opryland Hotel for a showdown.
But only 4 people showed up.
The mainstream media, of course, swarmed them.
The protesters belonged to the Tennessee Tea Party Coalition. They told the media they represent 35 of 44 tea party groups in Tennessee and they were upset with the event this weekend.
Right Wing News posted the group’s press release.
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On Friday, I appeared on Bill Moyers Journal with Harvard law prof and cyberspace theorist Lawrence Lessig to discuss the whys and wherefores of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling. From the show’s writeup:
The Supreme Court’s January 2010 decision of the Citizen’s United v. Federal Election Commission on campaign finance regulations has caused a stir around the political spectrum. A poll from Angus Reid Public Opinion found that 65 percent of people surveyed disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision — 67 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans, and 72 percent of independents.
Libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie says all that worry is misplaced in a much-watched video “Three Reasons Not to Sweat Citizens United.” “If you want to get bent out of shape about something, direct your ire at a massive and constantly growing government that has its hands in virtually every aspect of economic and social life in America,” Says Gillespie.
Harvard legal scholar Lawrence Lessig disagrees, viewing the ruling as a another step in the takeover of democracy by big money. In an article for THE NATION entitled “How to Get Our Democracy Back: If You Want Change, You Have to Change Congress,” Lessig calls for a constitutional convention to make public financing of campaigns the law of the land, “What both sides must come to see is that the reform of neither is possible until we solve our first problem first — the dependency of the Fundraising Congress.”
As you might guess, we didn’t agree on much, but it was a spirited and civil conversation well worth having. A full transcript is available, along with video of the segment and links to related materials, by clicking on the image below.
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Here are a couple of shots from the Tea Party convention news conference which should answer the question, “Can you hear me now?”
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Andrew Breitbart raised the roof at the National Tea Part Convention this morning in Nashville, Tennessee. Speaking to the dozens of reporters assembled in the back of the room, Andrew said this:
“It’s not your business model that sucks, it’s you that sucks.”
Andrew finished his speech with this warning to the media:
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Popular conservative Erick Erickson has a change of heart at National Tea Party Convention.
Early in January RedState blogger Erick Erickson slammed the National Tea Party Convention. Erickson compared the convention organizers to Nigerian scam artists.
Let me be blunt: charging people $500.00 plus the costs of travel and lodging to go to a “National Tea Party Convention” run by a for profit group no one has ever heard of sounds as credible as an email from Nigeria promising me a million bucks if I fork over my bank account number.
I am led to believe a number of the sponsors who lent their names early on have grown wary of the event. That lines up with what I am hearing.
The tea party movement was always about the unorganized masses of concerned, passionate Americans uniting together with a common voice to protest the direction of the country. From that passion, others have sought to make money off the tea party movement. Some have done it for good. Many have not. And more and more we are seeing some people rise up to claim the mantle of “leader” of the tea party movement. Many of us who have been around for a while just want to know who the heck these so called leaders are.
But Erick Erickson had a change of heart. Today he is not as suspicious of the event. The RedState blogger actually was impressed with the convention and thinks it may bode well for the future of the tea party. We caught up with Erick earlier tonight:
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No president of the 20th century had a more positive and enduring influence than Ronald Reagan, who was born 99 years ago today. Other presidents, from Wilson to FDR, exceeded Reagan in their impact, but much of it was negative. Sure, they won wars, but they almost destroyed the American economy as well.
Reagan, by contrast, won the Cold War and also revived the American economy from decades of abuse. He was successful both at home and abroad.
Since President Reagan left the White House in 1989, the U. S. has stumbled, so it is wise to ponder why Reagan did so well. Was it natural intelligence or careful political training? Not really—and that fact both galls and baffles his critics. Reagan was a C student at lowly Eureka College and from there he went into small-town broadcasting, and then to Hollywood. He didn’t try to be governor of California until he was 55 years old.
Reagan had three parts to his genius. First, he was a visionary; he believed that people wanted freedom and would do well when more of it was given to them. Whether he was undermining the Soviets, challenging an unlawful union, or deregulating oil production he tried to move in a consistent direction of greater freedom and less government. According to Dinesh D’Souza, “Reagan’s greatness derives in large part from the fact that he was a visionary—a conceptualizer who was able to see the world differently from the way it was.” Reagan knew where he wanted to go: Jimmy Carter, by contrast, had multiple plans to create energy, to generate revenue, and to cut inflation. Often they were contradictory; all of them failed. Reagan was more consistent because he had vision: He knew where he wanted to go and how he wanted to get there.
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Today, in 1911, Ronald Wilson Reagan was born in rural Illinois. He’s the kind of leader who ordinarily comes along only once in a life-time. We’re hoping we can beat those odds.
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Chuck Johnson is at it again. He must be out on a weekend pass. I was compelled to answer the Little Green Monster after I saw him go after James O’Keefe with that same tired wet noodle of a charge he has leveled at so many, calling him a white nationalist. Johnson claimed in an LGF post that “according to a group called ‘One People’s Project,’ ACORN sting filmmaker James O’Keefe was photographed attending a 2006 white nationalist conference titled ‘Race and Conservatism.’”
Sounds terrible, right? Sure, until you get the facts that Johnson doesn’t tell you. When it became clear that it wasn’t a “white nationalist conference,” Johnson tried to slither out of responsibility for his words by saying in a new post: “It’s very clear that I attributed the ‘white nationalist conference’ claim to One People’s Project; that’s what the words ‘according to’ mean.”
Busted! As if it weren’t obvious that in his original post, he was approving of and endorsing what One People’s Project said. But this is typical of Johnson’s weaselly hit-and-run smear tactics.
Meanwhile, Larry O’Connor at Big Journalism uncovered the truth about O’Keefe’s supposed participation in this conference:
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This week we broke the story of possible criminal wrongdoing in the government takeover of insurance giant AIG. In the last several months, the US government has tried, unsuccessfully, to throw out plaintiff Kevin Murray’s case, alleging that the government’s takeover of AIG puts it in the position of supporting and promoting Islam and Shariah finance.
In the discovery process attorneys for Murray, David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise (of the Thomas More Law Center), discovered that the takeover itself may have been illegal, and have attempted to get Treasury Secretary under oath to try and untangle this mess. Again, the Fed and the Treasury Department tried to stonewall.
This past Tuesday, Federal district court judge Lawrence P. Zatkoff rejected the Treasury Department’s and the Fed’s effort to prevent any further discovery while the government attempts to convince the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals to overrule Judge Zatkoff’s earlier ruling rejecting the government’s motion to dismiss the federal lawsuit challenging the government’s takeover of AIG on First Amendment-Establishment Clause grounds.
Tim Geithner: The “extraordinary move to depose a sitting Treasury Secretary”
The lawsuit, captioned Murray v. Geithner et al., was brought by attorneys David Yerushalmi and Robert Muise, representing the plaintiff, Kevin Murray, a tax payer and former combat Marine who served in Iraq. The federal lawsuit alleges that the U.S. government’s takeover and financial bailout of AIG was in violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
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