Mark Tapscott

New Hampshire reporter to announce candidacy for phantom congressional seat UPDATED!

Grant Bosse will announce today that he is seeking a seat in Congress by becoming a candidate for New Hampshire's 00 congressional district. Bosse, an investigative journlist associated with the Watchdog.org group, is thus the first candidate in the nation to announce for one of the estimated 440 phantom congressional districts in which officials with President Obama's economic stimulus program credited their program with creating thousands of jobs at a cost of more than $6.4 billion. Why is he doing it? "Because even a fake district needs real leadership," Bosse said. For more details, go here. Bosse is expected to be only the first of a wave of candidates announcing in the...

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Louisiana Tea Party Protesters to picket Landrieu for $100 million health care sell-out

Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-LA, has been the subject of intense speculation this week that she has sold her vote for Obamacare in return for $100 million worth of federal goodies for the Bayou State. Jonathan Karl at ABC reported the details of the $100 million payoff yesterday. Lousiana Tea Party Protesters are planning protests today at Landrieu's four state offices, following a conference call last night in which 20 organizers confirmed...

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Lou Dobbs on The Kudlow Report tonight

Former CNN anchor and program host Lou Dobbs will be grilled tonight by Larry Kudlow on CNBC at 7:00 pm EST to discuss the economy, interest rates, immigration, TARP, health care reform, his recent departure from the original cable news channel and who knows what else. More details here....

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Santa Cruz's superior intellects on Palin book

Owners of a Santa Cruz bookstore are offering buyers of former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's runaway best-seller a free bag of nuts to go with their purchase, according to the Santa Cruz Sentinel. "We know some customers have to buy it because it's on some uncle's wish list, but it's not a big seller for the Santa Cruz market," Casey Coonerty-Protti told the Sentinel. The bookstore's customers must all be Harvard, Berkley, and Yale graduates....

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Mark Tapscott: One step forward, one back for government transparency

It's been a rough week for advocates of government transparency and accountability, with one hero striking an almost completely unnoticed blow and a goat who by remaining silent is inflicting terrible damage on the cause. The hero and the goat are Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and President Obama -- two guys who not that long ago were often mentioned in the same breath as Senate co-authors of "Coburn-Obama," the bill President George W. Bush signed into law in 2006 as the Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act. The FFATA mandated establishment of USASpending.gov, the searchable Internet database that puts most federal spending within a few mouse clicks for every...

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Watchdog.org issues state- by-state breakdown of jobs in phantom congressional districts

G. Edward DeSeve, President Obama's chief aide overseeing Recovery.gov doesn't think a few data entry errors are anything to worry about. But investigative reporters from around the country with Watchdog.org have identified multiple phantom districts in all 50 states. In Arizona, for example, Recovery.gov invented 14 new congressionl districts containing $84 million worth of stimulus spending. In tiny Idaho, 10 phantom districts received $1.2 million in stimulus spending. Even Puerto Rico, which is not a state and has no congressional districts, is credited by Recovery.gov with having 11. Maybe this incident sheds light on why Obama thinks there are 57 states?...

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Survey finds only 43 percent would re-elect Obama now

Only 43 percent of voters surveyed by the Zogby/O'Leary Poll would vote for President Obama less than a year after he was elected, or about the same level of support President Clinton won in 1992 in a three-way race with the first President Bush and former EDS executive and national political gadfly Ross Perot. Perhaps even more worrisome for the president is that only 37 percent of independents queried in the survey said they would support Obama. That figure appears to be consistent with exit polling following the Virginia and New Jersey governorship races which indicated a seismic shift among independents away from Obama and to Republican candidates Bob McDonnell and Chris...

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Obama's recovery chief thinks Recovery.gov is a 'great success,' says data errors aren't important

G. Edward DeSeve, the man running President Obama's economic recovery effort has a post up today on Recovery.gov that deserves a special place in the Out-of-Touch Government Officials Hall of Fame. DeSeve is Special Advisor to the President, Assistant to the Vice President and Special Advisor to the OMB Director for Implementation of the Recovery Act. Titled "Looking at the big picture on the Recovery Act," DeSeve claims all those "mistakes," like the thousands of jobs created in congressional districts that don't exist or counting raises as jobs created by stimulus funding, "are relatively few and don't change the fundamental conclusions one can draw from the...

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Obama creates stimulus job creation miracle, doubles size of Congress

President Obama claims to have saved or created hundreds of thousands of jobs, but he isn't telling the American people about what is arguably his most amazing economic recovery accomplishment yet - He has doubled the size of Congress and it only cost about $6.4 billion! You only thought Congress has 435 congressional districts. Thanks to the Obama stimulus program, 440 new districts have been created. How? By creating new congressional districts out of thin air, or bringing back old congressional districts long ago left in the dustbin of redistricting history, or .... well, I'll let Bill McMorris of Watchdog.org tell the tale: "According to data retrieved from recovery.gov,...

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Obama to weed out Bush political appointees who careered in; Establishes new political test for career jobs UPDATED!

John Berry, President Obama's director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM), has issued a new directive that is clearly designed to weed out any Bush administration political appointees who "careered-into" the civil service. The directive also effectively establishes a partisan political factor in hiring for career civil service positions in the federal bureaucracy. Berry's agency oversees the federal government's 1.9 million career civil servants. The OPM was created during the Carter administration to replace the old Civil Service Commission, which was once headed by Teddy Roosevelt in his pre-White House days. The career service was intended to end the spoils...

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Mark Tapscott: No, term limits is not a fool's errand

Somewhere in the liberal print and broadcast media today very important people are using the words "DeMint" and "Coburn" in the same sentence with words like "fools," "doomed" or 'hopeless." And, as usual, these very important people are wrong. Jim DeMint and Tom Coburn, of course, are the Republican senators from South Carolina and Oklahoma, who today introduced a constitutional amendment providing for a maximum of two six-year terms for members of the Senate and three two-year terms for representatives. Co-sponsors include Sens. Sam Brownback of Kansas and Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas. DeMint-Coburn is, uniquely, one of the most radical proposed changes in American politics in...

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DeMint, Coburn, Hutchinson, Brownback introduce term limits constitutional amendment

Four Republican senators have introduced a constitutional amendment to limit senators to no more than two six-year terms in office, and representatives no more than three two-year terms. To become law, the amendment must be approved by two-thirds majorities of both the Senate and House, and by three-fourths of the states. Senators Jim DeMint, South Carolina, Tom Coburn, Oklahoma, Kay Bailey Hutchinson, Texas, and Sam Brownback, Kansas, are the co-sponsors. The 22nd amendment to the U.S. Constitution limits presidents to no more than two terms in office. Fifteen states have term limits for various officials, as do many local governments across the country. DeMint said the amendment is...

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Pelosi was for three-day "read the bill" rule before she forgot it on Obamacare

There are two ways to view this video of a 2005 floor speech by then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, condemning Republican leaders for not allowing members three days to read "a bill of thousands of pages" before voting on it. The video is posted on Breitbart TV and is well worth watching in the aftermath of Speaker Pelosi's legislative blitzkreig of the past week to gain passage of her version of Obamacare at all costs. It was done with not even a token nod in the direction of allowing the sort of legislative transparency she promised voters during the 2006 campaign enroute to becoming House Speaker. The most obvious and immediate take on the video is disgust with...

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Boston firm shifts 'green jobs' to China

President Obama and the Democratic majority in Congress are spending billions of tax dollars to subsidize development of "green jobs" - positions for people and companies designing and manufacturing alternative energy sources such as biomass, wind and solar. One of Obama's buddies, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, is also a vocal advocate of such subsidies. Last year, Patrick put Massachusetts taxpayers' money where is mouth is by backing a $58 million package of incentives and subsidies to Evergreen Solar, which manufacturers collector panels used in solar energy units. Now barely a year later, Evergreen has announced that it is moving its final assembly phase to a...

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China's state-owned energy firm buys U.S. off-shore leases UPDATED!

Gas prices here in the U.S. are creeping back up towards the $3-per-gallon mark even as news breaks today that China's state-owned energy firm just closed a deal to buy interests in four development leases on the American Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) in the Gulf of Mexico. The deal, which requires approval of the U.S. government, is between Norway's Statoil and China National Off-Shore Oil Corporation (CNOOC). This is the same CNOOC that would have bought Unocal four years ago for $18.5 billion but for pressure from Congress, according to The New York Times, quoting an energy industry trade publication. Because it must be approved by the U.S. government, the Statoil/CNOOC deal puts...

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So you want to know why Hoffman lost to Owens in NY-23?

Former Readers Digest editor-in-chief and Corporation for Public Broadcasting board chairman Ken Tomlinson explains everything about why Conservative Party of New York congessional nominee Doug Hoffman didn't quite pull off a "Buckley" - winning a three-way race. It all goes back to Jim Buckley, Spiro T. Agnew, Charles Goodell, and Christine Jorgensen. And yes, I know I just revealed my age. Go read Tomlinson anyway, in The Weekly Standard. Actually, American Conservative Union chairman David Keene explained everything and Tomlinson provides a typically evocative report from an absolutely delightful lunch....

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Nothing purple about Virginia now

One year ago, Barack Obama did something that no Democrat had done since LBJ, carrying Virginia for Democrats in a presidential race, garnerng 53 percent of the vote in a record turnout. Democrats everywhere pointed to Virginia as the bell-weather state, moving from being solidly red to purple and on its way to being fully blue. What a difference one year makes! Or more precisely, what a difference is made by a $787 billion economic stimulus package, a complete government take-over of the one-sixth of the economy represented by the health care system, and a world apology tour in which an American president repeatedly confessed the nation's alleged international sins. Bob McDonnell...

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32 years for Uncle Sam to recoup cost of job created by economic stimulus

Ed Morrissey at Hot Air did some calculating on the time required for the federal government to receive back in taxes what it cost to create each job under President Obama's economic stimulus program. Here's what he found: "At an effective tax rate of 15%, it would take 32 years and five months — almost the entire career of the person holding it. At an effective tax rate of 20%, it would take less … just 24 years, four months. "Or let’s consider the administration’s wildest claim, that of a million jobs saved or created at $159,000 per job. At the 15% effective tax rate, it would still take almost 21 years to pay back the principal; at the 20% rate,...

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Obama now a 40 percent president?

It's the last frantic day before Election Day 2009 and the question on everybody's mind in the nation's capitol is simple - What will tomorrow's results indicate about the political status of President Obama and the Democratic majority in charge of Congress? Republican pollster Brad O'Leary took at a look at the latest data on the Virginia and New Jersy gubernatorial races, plus the NY-23 special congressional election in upstate New York and offered the following possibility: “New York’s 23rd is a high priority for the White House, and still the Democrats can’t top 35% in that race. And it’s looking like the Democrats’ gubernatorial candidates in Virginia...

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If Interior Department can't stop off-shore energy, NOAA has a backup plan

Urban zoning in cities and suburbs divides land up into bite-size parcels and typically makes their use and development dependent upon securing approval from multiple levels of planning bureaucrats in government. But imagine if government tried to apply the same nghtmarish process to the ocean floor. Sound outlandish? Don't bet on it. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) administrator Jane Lubchenco is working with the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) on just such a plan, according to WhatAboutAlaska.com. The plan would seek to impose on 1.76 bilion acres of the American Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) the same sort of block-by-block bureaucratic...

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'Republican' Scozzafava endorses Democrat against Conservative Party's Hoffman UPDATED!

Only hours after suspending her campaign for the good of the Republican Party, liberal Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava has now endorsed Democrat Bill Owens for in Tuesday's special election to fill the upstate New York congressional seat vacated by Rep. John McHugh, R-NY. In a statement published by the Watertown Daily Times and linked at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee web site, Scozzafava encouraged voters to support her former Democratic opponent instead of Conservative Party of New York nominee Doug Hoffman, who is in a dead heat with Owens, according to polls. "I am supporting Bill Owens for Congress and urge you to do the same," Scozzafava said. "In...

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Scozzafava suspends campaign in face of declining support

It's official now, liberal New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava has suspended her campaign as the Republican nominee to succeed Rep. John McHugh, R-NY, in the Empire State's 23rd congressional district. Scozzafava released the following statement earlier this morning: "Today, I again seek to act for the good of our community," Ms. Scozzafava wrote in a letter to friends and supporters. "It is increasingly clear that pressure is mounting on many of my supporters to shift their support. Consequently, I hereby release those individuals who have endorsed and supported my campaign to transfer their support as they see fit to do so. "I am and have always been a...

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Pelosi bill creates Health Care Super Czar

President Obama has appointed more than three dozen "czars" to oversee various parts of the federal executive branch, but none of them would have power even remotely like that to be granted under the latest House version of Obamacare to the newly created position of Health Choices Commissioner. The Colossus of Rhodes allegedly stood astride an entrance to the harbor of a great Greek shipping city as one of the ancient world's seven wonders, but not even that guy could match the reach of Pelosi's HCC, who would be responsible for: * Managing both the government-run health insurance program and the regulations overseeing all health insurance plans offered by private insurance...

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Paranormal legislative activity captured on video in nation's capital

Sure, it's Halloween and weird stuff happens just in the normal course of things in Washington, D.C., but this extraordinary video of an alien concept stalking an innocent couple on Capitol Hill has to be seen to be believed. And trust me, if you watch it, you will believe....

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Newly disclosed emails link White House directly to NEA politicalization scandal

Former actor and present White House associate director of public engagement Kalpen Modi was directly involved in planning the controversial conference call hosted by a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) flack to encourage tax-supported artists to create propaganda for President Obama, according to emails obtained by Judicial Watch via a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. The emails reveal that Modi worked with now-former NEA national communications director Yosif Sargant in planning the August 10 conference call that was first revealed by Andrew Breitbart's Big Hollywood.com web site. Participants in the conference call were encouraged to use their talents to generate public...

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All 40 GOP senators want Reid Obamacare draft posted on web

Earlier this week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sent a copy of the draft Obamacare bill drawn up behind closed doors in his office to the Congressional Budget Office for scoring. That sparked a letter signed by all 40 Republicans in the Senate asking that the full text of the bill be posted on the Internet for public examination. Here's the text of the letter, which was initiated by Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC: "On Monday, you announced that you had sent health care legislation to the Congressional Budget office (CBO). As you know, this legislation will have a profound impact on the lives of every American, including the next generation who will be forced to pay for it. Our national...

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Which part of judge's decision does Obama White House not understand?

Last year, federal Judge Royce Lamberth ruled that the Executive Office of the President (EOP) is covered under the Privacy Act. In that decision, Lamberth tartly added that “...this court holds that under the Privacy Act, the word ‘agency’ includes the Executive Office of the President, just as the Privacy Act says.” So this year, the Obama White House comes back in the same case and asks Lamberth to grant a motion for summary dismissal, arguing that “the White House is not an agency under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and it necessarily follows that it is not an agency subject to the Privacy Act.” Amazing, but true. This exchange is the...

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13 new tax hikes found in 1,990 page House Obamacare text

Here's the list of tax hikes included in H.R. 3962, the revised House version of Obamacare, otherwise known as "The Affordable Health Care for America Act." The text of this bill runs to 1,990 pages, all of which can be read here in pdf format. The page number references to each of the tax hikes noted below correspond to those in the pdf. Employer Mandate Excise Tax (Page 275): If an employer does not pay 72.5 percent of a single employee’s health premium (65 percent of a family employee), the employer must pay an excise tax equal to 8 percent of average wages. Small employers (measured by payroll size) have smaller payroll tax rates of 0 percent (<$500,000), 2...

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Which is the bigger hoax, cap-and-trade jobs or balloon boy?

This just in - a cap-and-trade balloon carrying millions of new jobs for unemployed Americans has been sighted. Go here for the full report, produced by American Solutions for Winning the Future....

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New Sunlight Lab iPhone app brings home stimulus spending

Being yet a Blackberry kind of guy, I have little experience with the iPhone, but so far I have heard nothing but excited exclamations of "cool" from folks who do use Apple's ubiquitous device when they see a new application developed for it by the Sunlight Foundation's Sunlight Lab. It's an Augmented Reality Mashup of stimulus spending data from recovery.gov. What is so cool about it? Well, let's say you are walking down the street, iPhone 3GS (or Android) in hand in downtown Pittsburgh, arguing with your best buddy from Philly about which town got the most stimulus spending. If you've downloaded the app from Sunlight, you can do a search for either "recovery" or...

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Number of stimulus jobs created overstated. Imagine that!

Obama administration claims to have created at least 30,000 jobs as a result of the $787 billion economic stimulus program were over-stated by about 5,000 jobs, according to an analysis by the Associated Press. There was no evidence the administration purposely sought to inflate the jobs creation data, AP reported, but its own numbers suggest otherwise: AP said it "found some counts were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of jobs; some jobs credited to the stimulus program were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced. "For example: · A company working with the...

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Cash-for-Clunkers debacle generated few new sales

Nearly 700,000 new vehicle were sold using incentives provided by the government's $3 billion Cash-for-Clunkers program that was intended to spark the sagging fortunes of the U.S. auto industry and put legions of newer, more fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles on the roads. But an analysis by Edmunds.com found that the program actually generated only about 125,000 sales that wouldn't have happened anyway in the normal course of things, meaning each new sale cost taxpayers $24,000 instead of the $3,500 to $4,500 rebates that were offered. Predictably, rather than responding to the specifics of the Edmunds.com' analysis, a spokesman for the Transportation Department,...

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Heritage to EPA, Boxer, Kerry: Show us (and the world) the bill

There are four key players in the following scenario: * Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, is chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee and one of the title sponsors of the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill approved earlier this year by the House. * Bill Beach is director of the Center for Data Analysis at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank, which does widely respected, exhaustively detailed econometric studies of proposed legislation. * Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, is chairman of the Senate's Environment and Public Works Committee, and a name co-sponsor of the Senate version of Waxman-Markey. * Sen. John Kerry, D-MA., was the...

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Surprise! Tax-supported press covers government corruption less often

Wow! Can you believe? A new multiple regression analysis-based study of four Argentine newspapers found journalists there provided less coverage of government corruption as their newsrooms received more government support in the form of official advertising and other forms of public revenue, according to the Nieman Journalism Lab. The study was conducted by Harvard’s Rafael Di Tella and Northwestern’s Ignacio Franceschelli. "Their analysis found a 'huge correlation' between, in any given month, how much money went to a newspaper and how much corruption coverage appeared on its front page. For example, if the government ad revenue in a month increased by one...

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Mark Tapscott: New York race exposes the big tent GOP myth UPDATED!

Conservatives owe Dede Scozzafava a big thank you because her candidacy in New York's special congressional election has exposed the utter bankruptcy of the "Big Tent" school of faux Republicanism. Scozzafava has been a New York Assemblywoman since 1998 and is now running for New York's 23rd congressional district seat vacated earlier this year by incumbent Rep. John McHugh's acceptance of President Obama's appointment as Secretary of the Army. 'She is opposed by Democrat Bill Owens and Conservative Party of New York nominee Doug Hoffman. Surveys show the race is tightening, with Owens and Hoffman battling for the lead and Scozzafava fading in third place. Scozzafava was...

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House panel makes ACORN eligible to share regulatory authority

Besides giving advice on avoiding taxes and fraudulently getting home loans for brothels featuring 13-year-old Salvadoran girls illegally smuggled into this country, ACORN officials could soon be helping regulate your local bank, thanks to an amendment adopted by Rep. Barney Frank's House Financial Services Committee. The amendment was sponsored by Rep. Maxine Waters, D-CA, and provided that five slots on the oversight board for the proposed new Consumer Financial Protection Agency be reserved for representatives of "consumer protection, fair lending and civil rights, representatives of depository institutions that primarily serve underserved communities, or representatives of...

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China, Iran steal U.S. technology most often, documents show

China and Iran are the most frequent international thieves getting their hands on classified U.S. military technology, according to documents obtained by Judicial Watch under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). "In October 2008, the Department of Justice announced that criminal charges had been issued against more than 145 defendants in the previous fiscal year. Approximately 43% of these cases involved munitions or other restricted technology bound for Iran or China," Judicial Watch said....

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FEMA says it can't show return on $29 billion in spending

Federal Emergency Management Agency deputy administrator Timothy Manning told a congressional panel today that his organization had spent $5 million during the last 18 months reviewing how it spent $29 billion since 2002, but still doesn't know what it got for the money. Testifying before the House Homeland Security Emergency Communications subcommittee, Manning said he is confident the $29 billion was well-spent but "existing data tells us very little about the return on investment." In response, subcommittee chairman Rep. Henry Ceullar, D-TX said: "Free advice: For $5 million, I think we can do better," according to Congress Daily's Terry...

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What a difference five years makes on flu vaccine shortage

Hardly a negative word has been uttered in the mainstream media this week about President Obama and the shortage of swine flu vaccine shots, despite assurances from his administration in September that an "ample supply" would be available by "mid-October." But five years ago when it was George W. Bush in the White House and sufficient supplies of flu vaccine were not available in a timely manner, folks in the media were jumping all over the administration. Earlier today, a friend pointed me to a bunch of examples of such coverage, including these two: “While many Americans search in vain for flu shots, members and employees of Congress are able to obtain them...

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New survey has Hoffman leading in NY-23

It has a small sample of only 300 likely voters, but a new survey finds Conservative Party of New York congressional candidate Doug Hoffman leading for the first time over his Democrat and Republican rivals in the special election to fill the 23rd district congressional seat vacated by Rep. John McHugh, R-NY. The survey was conducted by Basswood Research pollster Jon Lerner and has a margin of error of 5.66 percent, which is rather wide. Even so, the results are consistent in terms of overall trend with recent surveys by other pollsters that showed Hoffman's support heading upwards. Basswood's results show Hoffman leading with 31.3 percent, while Democrat Bill Owens is second at 27...

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Prosecutors subpoena journalism students' grades

Chicago prosecutors have subpoenaed the grades and other material regarding the classroom performance of Northwestern University journalism students, according to The New York Times. Seems the prosecutors are tired of being second-guessed by the J-students, who are participants in The Innocence Project. The Innocence Project is an effort by Northwestern's Medill School of Journalism to provide students with real-life experience in scrutinizing the actions of police and prosecutors in old cases. Their work has led to the release of at least 11 inmates who were shown to have been wrongly convicted. It's that success rate that has the local DAs filing motions with little precedent,...

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From the people who brought us the swine flu vaccine shortage - Government-run health care! UPDATED

President Obama's late-night declaration of a nationwide public health emergency last night shouldn't be allowed to obscure the most important lesson of the developing swine flu crisis - The same government that only weeks ago promised abundant supplies of swine flu vaccine by mid-October will be running your health care system under Obamacare. On Sept. 13, Kathleen Sebelius, Secretary of Health and Human Services, told ABC's This Week program that the government was on schedule to deliver an "ample supply" of swine flu vaccine by mid-October: "We're on track to have an ample supply rolling by the middle of October. But we may have some early vaccine as early as the first...

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Millions watching Rep. Mike Rogers' opening statement on health care reform

It's not often that something said by a congressman anywhere but on C-SPAN is heard by millions of people, but more than 5.6 million people have viewed the opening statement on health care reform delivered recently by Rep. Mike Rogers, R-MI, in the House Environment and Commerce Committee. Possibly the reason the Rogers statement is generating so much attention is his reference to the lengthy list of cancers - breast, prostate, etc. - on which the survival rate is expected to decrease under a government-run health care system here in the U.S. like those in Canada and Great Britain, Go here on YouTube watch view the Rogers statement....

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Ghost Sighting! Bob Michel - Voice from GOP's losing past UPDATED!

Former House Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois never led a Republican majority during his years as the top GOPer in the House from the 97th through the 103rd Congress. But he did get be House Speaker Tip O'Neill's golf partner occasionally, and he was properly grateful to receive a few other crumbs from the Democrats who ran things with an iron hand. He retired just as Newt Gingrich and the Contract with America generation swept aside the 40-year Democratic reign and took control of both the House and Senate in the 1994 elections. They did so by completely ignoring Michel's guiding political strategy - be moderate, always compromise with the Democrats, seek accommodation no...

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Palin endorses Hoffman in hot NY-23 congressional special election

Former Republican vice-presidential nominee and Alaska governor Sarah Palin has endorsed Doug Hoffman, the fast-rising Conservative Party of New York nominee for the congressional seat of former Rep. John McHugh in upstate New York. Palin confirmed her decision to endorse and make a maximum contribution to Hoffman in a message to The Weekly Standard: "The people of the 23rd Congressional District of New York are ready to shake things up, and Doug Hoffman is coming on strong as Election Day approaches! He needs our help now. "The votes of every member of Congress affect every American, so it's important for all of us to pay attention to this important Congressional campaign in...

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Mark Tapscott: Obama's thug politics dirty health care endgame

So this is what "change we can believe in" done the Chicago way really looks like - Barack Obama and his White House capos muscling recalcitrant opponents and promising to crush those who don't get in line. Obama has zeroed in on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Fox News and doctors. There's nothing coincidental about this trio of targets, either: They are, respectively, the nation's most powerful business lobby, the television voice for Middle Americans worried about where Obama is taking the country, and the professional group with the greatest potential power to kill Obamacare. How the muscle is applied differs in detail from case to case, but the common message is there for...

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Devastating drop in job approval numbers for Obama in new Gallup survey

President Obama's push for health care reform during the third quarter of 2009 has seriously damaged his public standing, according to new data from the Gallup Daily tracking poll. His job approval rating dropped nine points from the second to the third quarter, from 62 percent to 53 percent. The nine-point second-to-third quarter drop is the highest Gallup has ever measured for an incumbent president during his first year in office, and among the highest quarter-to-quarter drops measured for any president at any point: "Obama's 9-point slide between quarters ranks as one of the steepest for a president at any point in his first year in office. The highest is Truman's 19-point...

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President Obama has something important in common with Edward I, aka "Longshanks"

It has received far less notice than it deserves, but last week the United States joined with Egypt in sponsoring a resolution appoved by the UN Human Rights Council that could blow a gaping hole in the First Amendment's protection of freedom of speech and other civil liberties most of us take for granted. The resolution encourages member nations to define as criminal "any advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility or violence." Who defines what constitutes "national, racial or religious hatred?" Why, the government, of course. Who decides whether any given statement "constitutes incitement?"...

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Another Obama administration czar agrees - 'kind of' - with Mao

First, it was White House communications chief Anita Dunn telling a high school commencement audience that the murderous Chairman Mao was one of her "two favorite philosophers." Now, it's manufacturing czar Ron Bloom who it turns out "kinda" agrees with modern history's most prolific genocidal murderer that "power grows out of the barrel of a gun." Leave it to the irrepressible Glenn Beck to dig up the video of Bloom speaking to a labor audience in 2008 and explaining what they had learned in the recent past. Here's the relevant passage: "Generally speaking we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to...

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Energy Secretary Steven Chu, meet Interior Secretary Ken Salazar UPDATED!

Rising oil prices are always followed by more expensive gasoline at the pump, so Energy Secretary Steven Chu is worried, according to Reuters: "The rising cost of oil could damage the world economy just as it begins to rebound, U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said on Tuesday. Wide swings in oil prices are difficult for industries to manage and the U.S. government is concerned about another price spike, Chu said. ‘Even $80 is making me nervous,' he told the Reuters Washington Summit.” Reading the Reuters account of Chu's concern reminded Emily Lawrimore, who flaks for the minority on the House Natural Resources Committee, of an AP account of something Secretary of the...

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Oops, we lied! Scozzafava flak admits Weekly Standard's McCormack didn't scream questions

When AP asked John McCormack last night whether he shouted his questions at liberal Republican congressional candidate Dede Scozzafava Monday evening, as her flak charged yesterday, The Weekly Standard reporter calmly turned on his tape recorder and let the facts be heard. Scozzafava flak Matt Burns has now withdrawn his accusation. So the next question is whether Scozzafava will let Burns keep his job despite the fact he clearly lied about McCormack's conduct. She might also want to rethink letting her husband continue as campaign strategist since he's the genius who called the police on McCormack in the first place. Here's betting neither Burns, nor Mr. Scozzafava suffer in any way as...

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No wonder Scozzafava called the cops, Hoffman is gaining fast, Right rallies for upset UPDATED!

Politicians like far-left New York Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava who have Republican congressional nominations handed to them by local GOP poobahs sometimes turn out to be lousy candidates. Evidence is accumulating fast that such is the case in the rapidly heating-up special election campaign to fill the seat vacated by Rep. John McHugh, R-NY. New York GOP leaders could have gone with Doug Hoffman, a well-known and successful entrepreneur of clear and unquestioned conservative principles. Instead, they chose Scozzafava, who has been endorsed in years past by ACORN's Working Families Party, and who supports the Obama-Reid-Pelosi agenda across the board, including Big Labor's Card Check...

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Jake Tapper challenges Obama White House to justify Fox News gambit

This from today's face-off with Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs is what White House reporters - no, make that all journalists - are supposed to do all the time - Ask those in power, regardless of who is in power, the tough questions they don't want to answer: "Tapper: It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one – (Crosstalk) "Gibbs: Jake, we render, we...

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Sir Christopher Monckton: Copenhagen treaty eviscerates U.S. sovereignity

Sir Christopher Monckton is a global warming skeptic. Former Vice President and Nobel Prize winner Al Gore has for years refused to accept Monckton's repeated challenge to a public debate on global warming. He's also a very close reader of the proposed UN Climate Change Treaty President Obama is expected to sign along with other world leaders in Copenhagen in a few weeks. Monckton says that 200-page treaty cedes U.S. sovereignity to the UN, mandates a massive transfer of wealth from the U.S. and Europe to pay our "Climate Debt" to the Third World, and creates a new enforcement mechanism to make it all happen. Is Monckton right? I don't know because I haven't yet read the...

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Scozzafava calls cops on reporter who asked her about Card Check UPDATED!

John McCormack is a reporter working for The Weekly Standard. Dede Scozzafava is the extremely liberal New York Assemblywoman running as a Republican to succeed Rep. John McHugh from the Empire State's 23rd congressional district in the upcoming special election. Scozzafava was speaking at a GOP dinner Monday evening. McCormack was reporting on Scozzafava's campaign, including her recent pledge to the AFL-CIO to support Big Labor's top legislative objective, the Card Check proposal - currently stalled in Congress - to abolish the secret ballot in workplace representation elections. Scozzafava apparently didn't appreciate being asked about her support of Card Check because after she...

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Does Obama's communications chief know the bloody truth about Chairman Mao?

President Obama's acting chief White House communications advisor, Anita Dunn has been much in the headlines of late, owing to her comments during a CNN interview last week branding Fox News as an arm of the Republican Party. Interestingly, Dunn delivered a commencement address in June in which she named Mao Tse Sung, the genocidal founder of Communist China, as one of her "two favorite philosophers," with the other, she chirpily noted, being Mother Teresa. Mao and Mother Teresa are, Dunn explained, "the two people that I turn to most to basically deliver a simple point, which is to say you are going to make choices, you are going to challenge, you are going to say why...

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Rolling Stone Report: Tea Partiers, Town Hall demonstrators too dumb to know they're being used by evil rich guys

Well, isn't that interesting - an Obamacare advocate and former health insurance communications strategist explains why all those angry mobs showed up to protest at the August Town Hall meetings. Those folks thought they were there because they chose to be there, on their own volition, but they were deceived. Why? Because it turns out that the protesters were actually just a bunch of puppets, unconsciously being manipulated by sinister hidden forces of evil Rich Right Wingers determined to frustrate health care reform yet again, just as they did when the heroic Hillary Clinton tried in 1993. And how do we know this? Because a former top strategist in the manipulation told a Rolling...

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Mr. President, meet your administration

President Obama said something yesterday during his New Orleans stopover that caught the eye of Patrick Creighton of the Institute for Energy Research. Here's what Obama said: "What I think we need to do is increase our domestic energy production... I'm in favor of finding environmentally sound ways to tap our oil and our natural gas." That statement got Creighton's attention because one of his jobs is to follow the progress of Washington's processing of applications to explore and develop energy resources in places like federal lands in the western U.S. and in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) areas off the U.S. coast. Here's what the Obama administration has done in...

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Can we see White House visitor logs? Who is asking?

Judicial Watch's request for copies of White House visitor logs has been denied by the U.S. Secret Service, which claimed the documents are covered by the Presidential Records Act and thus are subject to the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Craig Ulmer, the Secret Service's FOIA officer, helpfully pointed out to Judicial Watch, however, that the Presidential Records Act gives the White House discretion to release such documents as it thinks proper. In other words, whether we get to know who is meeting with the President and Vice-President during the Obama administration is strictly up to them. Stay tuned. Judicial Watch rarely gives up without a fight....

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Coburn: 'What is it we don't want the American people to see?'

Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, stopped the Senate dead in its tracks yesterday and posed a question that made many of his colleagues squirm in their seats: "What is it we don't want the American people to see?" The Oklahoma Republican was referring to a Senate-House conference committee's decision to drop from the $33.5 billion energy and water appropriations bill, a Coburn-backed provision approved unanimously by the Senate in July. The dropped provision represented what AP reporter Andrew Taylor perjoratively described as one of Coburn's "pet ideas." Usually, a senator's "pet idea" involves some kind of special favor for a campaign contributor, or an earmark to...

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Mark Tapscott: Lindsay Graham is the Senate's densest Republican

And the winner of this week's (ig)Noble Award for Densest Senate Republican is .... Lindsay Graham. He thinks he's brokering a bipartisan deal on cap and trade. What he's really doing is pulling the Democrats' fat out of the fire on global warming. (For those who think Olympia Snowe is more deserving of the award, she came up short this week because, frankly, nobody was really surprised by her vote Tuesday for Obamacare on the Senate Finance Committee. Providing "bipartisan" cover for Democrats comes easy for her.) Earlier this year, House Democrats approved a 1,400-plus page Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade energy bill that was then promptly pronounced all but dead on arrival in...

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'High fliers' probe finds widespread abuse of government preferences

Governments at all levels award contracts for billions of tax dollars every year using Affirmative Action preferences for businesses and individuals based on their ethnicity, gender, income status, or other characteristics having nothing do with the skills or services being provided. Affirmative Action opponents have long claimed that, besides being unconstitutional forms of discrimination, such preferences are also open invitations to every sort of official corruption, influence-peddling and conflicts of interest because they replace competition and merit with access to political insiders. But critical reporting to determine who is right - defenders of government-sanctioned...

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Why no celebration of 1989, the most liberating year in two milleniums of human history?

Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch poses the arresting question in the headline above in the November number of his rightly esteemed publication. It is a timely and important essay entitled "The Unknown War," which bookends perfectly with the Weekly Standard piece by Charles Krauthammer, "Decline is a choice." It was an eleven-week period in 1989 in which a sequence of events that started with the Communist Party of Hungary's decision to stop policing its border with the Free World culminated in the incredible spectacle of East and West Berliners jointly bringing down the wall that so coldly symbolized communist repression. For those involved in recent decades in the...

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'Jobless recovery' means another year of bad unemployment news

If past is prologue - as it surely is - then we can expect discouraging unemployment numbers for at least another year and no official announcement from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) that the recession ended this summer until 2011. That's according to Mark J. Perry, writing on Enterprise, the AEI blog. Perry reached his conclusions by looking at the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) data for the two previous 'jobless recoveries' in 1990-91 and 2001. There he found that unemployment in the first of those recessions continued to go up for 15 months to a peak of 7.8 percent in June 1992. The unemployment numbers remained pointed north for 19 months in the 2001 slowdown,...

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The 'other ACORN story' is how little it does with your millions

One of the over-looked angles on the growing ACORN national scandal is how little the far-left activist group actually does with the millions it receives from taxpayers, corporations, and foundations. The group says it provide lots of services for poor people, but a recent NewsBusters post by Tom Blumer exposes the hollow facts behind the claims. Blumer compiled ACORN claims about its services from the group's web site and from various press accounts, then began applying some simple arithmetic. The results are quite revealing and raise more troubling questions about what ACORN does with its millions: “Since its inception, according to its Web site, the corporation has assisted...

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A little weekend reading: They still spell it 'Amerika'

For those of us who grew up in the era when Weather Undergrounders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dorhn were familiar names in the news, it is always discomforting to be reminded of Barack Obama's many associations with people of the radical left - Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Van Jones, etc. Such folks' political thought never progressed beyond the 1960s because the revolutionary New Left didn't disapear, it simply went on to graduate school and then careers, mostly in the mainstream media, academia, the non-profits, the bureaucracy of state and local social work, and Blue State politics. Many bought BMWs and flat screens who nevertheless never stopped dreaming of revolution. In their hearts,...

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Obama seeks to silence the U.S. Chamber of Commerce

Steven Chu, President Obama's energy secretary, is putting the power of the federal government behind a budding movement among politically correct Fortune 500 executives to pull out of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Chu told attendees at a solar power conference Thursday that it was "wonderful" to see the companies leaving the Chamber. The chamber opposes many of the Obama administration's major energy policies and has called for a "Snopes Monkey trial-like" examination of the evidence for and against global warming. Among the firms pulling out of the Chamber, which has long been the chief lobbying voice on behalf of Fortune 500 and other business interests in the...

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SOS for Soldiers' Angels

Soldiers' Angels is a tax-exempt 501(C)(3) volunteer group that provides aid and comfort to members of the U.S. military stationed overseas. The group was started by Patti Patton-Bader, whose oldest son served in Iraq 2003-04. Her youngest son has been in Afghanistan since last year. Patton-Bader started Soldiers' Angels after receiving a letter from her older son in which he mentioned that some of his buddies never received any kind of mail or packages from back home. She contacted some family members and friends, and one thing led to another, and the Internet-based group was off and running. It now has more than 200,000 volunteers and supports soldiers, sailors and airmen around the...

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Read this bill on making CRS reports available to the public

There is much controversy these days over the failure of Members of Congress to read so many of the bills they vote on because they are either too long, as with the 1,000+ health care reform bills, or they are too complex, as described recently by Rep. John Conyers. But here's a refreshingly simple, short, and straightforward bill that should take no more than a few minutes to read, even for the busiest senator or representative. The purpose of the bill is to make reports of the Congressional Research Service (CRS) available to the public. Sponsors of the bill are Rep. Frank Kratovil, D-MD, and Rep. Leonard Lance, R-NJ. The Examiner is printing this bill text to make it as a easy as...

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Citizens group files FOIA on HHS health care gag order

A federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request has been filed by a citizens activist group seeking the rest of the story behind the recent gag order issued by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services against health insurance companies to prevent them from providing customers with information about Obamacare. Let Freedom Ring has posted the text of its FOIA request on its web site. The key graph reads: "Pursuant to the Federal Freedom of Information Act, 5 U.S.C. § 552, I request access to and copies of all correspondence, notes, emails, faxes, telephone logs, office visit logs, records of meetings and related documents exchanged between United States Senator Max...

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McConnell: Reid, Democrats will write real health care bill behind closed doors

That much-ballyhooed Baucus version of Obamacare is irrelevant, according to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid will write the real Senate version of Obamacare and he will do it in secret. “This partisan Finance Committee proposal will never see the Senate floor since the real bill will be written by Democrat leaders in a closed-to-the-public conference room somewhere in the Capitol,” McConnell said. He pointed to a Politico story yesterday and a New York Times story last week in which Reid's top aides began drafting the text that will actually be sent to the Senate floor, perhaps as early as next week. Only a select group is...

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Boehner to Dems: Stop changing bills in secret UPDATED!

Democrats in the Senate are secretly adding amendments they favor and removing those they oppose, even after congressional committees have voted on them, according to House Minority Leader John Boehner, who plans to introduce an amendment requiring the full text of all committee-approved legislation to be posted on the Internet within 24 hours of being adopted. Boehner said more than 70 changes were made in a health care reform bill approved by the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee after it was approved. The changes were made without informing the GOP members of the committee, according to Boehner. For the full Boehner statement, go here. We've asked for...

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Mark Tapscott: Somebody should explain ACORN to Pete Sessions

Just when it seems congressional Republicans have finally gotten the message about standing on principle before grasping for power, they go and pull a Dede Scozzafava. Scozzafava is the "Republican" New York assemblywoman selected by the GOP establishment as their candidate in the upcoming special election to succeed Rep. John McHugh. He recently resigned from his seat representing the Empire State's 23rd Congressional District on Capitol Hill to become President Obama's secretary of the Army. Incredibly, National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, is throwing its money and resources behind Scozzafava. And what kind of Republican is...

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Court clears suit to affirm voluntary Medicare, Social Security

A federal judge has cleared the way for consideration of a class-action lawsuit in which plaintiffs - including former House Majority Leader Dick Armey - are asking for a ruling upholding an existing law that declares participation in Medicare and Social Security to be voluntary, not compulsory. According to Allison Bell, a reporter for National Underwriter, an insurance industry trade publication, U.S. District Court Judge Rosemary Collyer rejected a motion to dismiss the suit by Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, and Michael Asture, Commissioner of the Social Security Administration (SSA). The case is Hall v Sebellius. It stems from an HHS...

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Not sure why you should listen to Hollywood celebs on Obamacare? PJTV's Zonation explains everything

Yes, it can be difficult to sort out all the conflicting claims about Obamacare, especially all those famous celebrities telling the rest of us why we should always do what they tell us is best for us. Well, have no further fear. Check out Pajamas TV's Zonation explains everything, including why it's always free when the government does it....

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Post comedy 'critic' clumsily reviews charity standup event UPDATED: With video!

Among the first things journalists once learned was the Chicago News Bureau maxim that "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." Dan Zak of The Washington Post must have missed that lesson in j-school, judging by his review of last night's D.C.'s Funniest Celebrities charity event at the Improv. I was honored - and terrified, quite frankly - to have the opportunity to be among 11 contestants invited to do a three or four minute routine on the famous stage. Among the other contestants were repeat performers like former Agriculture Secretary Dan Glickman, and Americans for Tax Reform honcho Grover Norquist, who graciously invited me. You might think that doing a...

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Obama appointee lauded NAMBLA figure

Kevin Jennings, President Obama's Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug FreeSchools at the U.S. Department of Education, is in hot water this week for having failed to report that a 15-year-old sophomore student in his school had told him of having sex with an older man. But failure to report what appeared to be a case of statuatory rape of a child may be the least of Jennings' worries. Lori Roman of Regular Folks United points to statements by Jennings a decade or more ago when he praised Harry Hay of the North American Association for Man-Boy Love Association (NAMBLA), which promotes the legalization of sexual abuse of young boys by older men. Roman provides...

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ACORN's 'Power Plan" found in documents group left behind in Oklahoma City

A five-year ACORN plan to "make Oklahoma a progressive state in the way it was 100 years ago" was found amid thousands of documents left behind last year in an abandoned office formerly used by the Oklahoma City branch of the controversial leftist community organizing outfit. The tax-exempt non-profit is required by federal law to avoid partisan politics but the heart of the "Power Plan" makes clear the organization's goal of transforming the Sooner State from one of the nation's most consistently red states to the blue side of the spectrum, like California and New York: "Therefore, the route to power is twofold: First, build powerful city organizations in...

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Mark Tapscott: Media's Homers yawn as Obama cons

President Obama and his friends in Congress are running multiple con jobs in the nation's capital, but don't expect to hear about it from most of the Homers for big government in the liberal media. Just as some sports reporters never say anything bad about the home team, too many journalists see no evil at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue these days. Take the health care debate. Obama has made all sorts of ridiculous claims about his health care reform proposal, most prominently that, unless you're rich, your health insurance costs won't go up. At the center of this particular con is the public option issue. Will there be a government health insurance option to compete with those...

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Who are the Branch Carbonians?

Are radical environmentalists members of a political movement or more like the devotees of a religious cult, one that might dubbed the Branch Carbonians? Truespeak.org’s Jim Guirardi suggests the label and offers an illuminating case for the latter in this post from the American Thinker. There is much more to Guirardi’s piece, but as a sample, here are his 10 reasons these fanatical devotees qualify as participants in a cult. If these sound somehow familiar, they are based on the criteria elaborated upon in the 2003 book, “Kingdom of the Cults,” by Walter Martin and Ravi Zacharia: 1. Leadership by a self-glorifying, manipulative New Age Prophet -- in this...

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Mark Tapscott: Beware the Stalin in progressive hearts

If nothing else, the Obama eruption in American politics is steadily revealing the stark reality behind the progressive movement - the totalitarian temptation is always there and, for more than a few, possessing the official power to compel sooner or later becomes irresistible. Not everybody on the left, of course. Some of the folks I most admire in this town are liberals whose work on behalf of values like transparency in government and protecting civil liberties is remarkable and essential. Still, that this danger is real and growing becomes more obvious as public opposition grows to the president's across-the-board campaign to turn Washington into the all-powerful, centralized...

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"Architects of Ruin" hints of why Obama disses medical malpractice caps

Hoover Institution research fellow Peter Schweizer has a potential blockbuster of a new book hitting the shelves Oct. 6 entitled "Architects of Ruin: How Big Government liberals wrecked the global economy and how they will do it again if no one stops them." Whew, is that a mouthful of a title or what? Anyway, Schweizer - whose past books include the superb "Reagan's War," as well as "The Bushes," "Makers and Takers," and "Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy" - documents in grinding detail how progressive and Democratic politicians and radical activists used the federal government to force lending institutions to give...

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Obama energy secretary to Americans: Stop acting like teenagers!

When Secretary of Energy Steven Chu thinks of the American people, he apparently sees a bunch of unruly teenagers who need to be told how to act. Asked at a seminar on reconstructing America's electrical grid about the Obama administration's efforts to persuade people to conserve energy, Chu said “the American public…just like your teenage kids, aren’t acting in a way that they should act. The American public has to really understand in their core how important this issue is,” according to The Wall Street Journal. And, notes the Journal's Ian Talley, the Obama administration is spending big to tell us what we should be doing on the energy issues: "The...

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Mark Tapscott: Which way for America's energy future?

To hear President Obama and the green members of his administration tell it, all America has to do to achieve energy independence and end global warming is to stop using carbon-based fuels like oil, natural gas and coal, and instead use "clean" energy from solar, biomass, wind and other alternative sources. Would that it were so easy. The reality is that America uses the most energy among the nations of the world, but we also produce vastly more goods and services than all the others, and we do it more efficiently and cleanly. To achieve that enviable position, we rely almost, though not quite, exclusively on those carbon-based fuels, and will continue to for many decades,...

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Rasmussen Reports wraps up the week's poll results

Every week, Rasmussen Reports posts a comprehensive and extremely useful summary of the week's most important survey results on major national issues, officials, and political campaigns. Here's the top of this week's report, noting that President Obama's "game-changer" address to a joint session of Congress on health care reform produced a modest and quite temporary popularity bounce, followed by a return to majority opposition to Obamacare: "Actions have consequences, politically speaking. Just check the first set of Rasmussen Reports Election 2010 surveys. "First, it looked like the controversial health care reform plan proposed by President Obama and...

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Mark Tapscott: What next for the Middle America Rebellion of 2009

A day before the event, organizers said a mere 20,000 or so folks had registered for Saturday's amazing 9/12 march on Washington to protest out-of-control government. What they got was hundreds of thousands of intensely patriotic people who came to the nation's capitol to yell "Stop!" Whatever the number of attendees, this was possibly the most significant Washington protest since the civil rights movement's epic March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. Indeed, about all that was lacking was a charismatic leader like Dr. Martin Luther King to deliver an "I have a dream" address for the ages. As the 1963 gathering meant America's blacks would no longer accept...

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Maryland state government promotes Baltimore ACORN office

Now that the U.S. Census Bureau has terminated its relationship with ACORN, will Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley do the same and stop promoting the Baltimore ACORN office as an honest source of counseling for people facing forceclosure? Check it out here on the state's web site. HT: Jeff...

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Want to know who is Hannah Giles?

Hannah Giles, the young woman who dressed up and posed as a whore in the BigGovernment.com ACORN child prostitution sting videos, is an aspiring investigative reporter and National Journalism Center intern. You can read her Townhall.com bio here. Not familiar with NJC? Go here. Actually, I shouldn't say "aspiring," as she's already accomplished something nobody from 60 Minutes, The New York Times, or any other mainstrream media thought to do, and that is find a way to expose the dirty truth behind the closed doors of ACORN. She was able to do that because she asked the right question, unemcumbered by the liberal conventional wisdom that blinds so many Mainstream Media...

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Why is ACORN giving tax advice? Started with shakedown of H & R Block

Wondering why anybody would go to an ACORN office for tax advice, as Jamie O'Keefe and Hannah Giles did for their child prostitution sting operation? There is actually a very good reason to think of ACORN and tax advice in the same sentence and it was exposed by The Washington Examiner's Kevin Mooney several months ago in a Special Report: "The program’s biggest score came against H&R Block, MonCrief said. The company was targeted beginning in January 2004 when ACORN promised demonstrations by its members in front of H&R Block offices protesting 'overpriced tax refund loans' in at least 30 cities. "Eventually, H&R Block agreed to pay for the establishment...

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Maryland may charge ACORN video-makers, State's Prosecutor heads anti-child abuse group UPDATED!

James O'Keefe, the intrepid filmmaker who teamed with National Journalism Center intern Hannah Giles in the ACORN video sting, now faces the prospect of being prosecuted by the Baltimore City State's Attorney for violating a Maryland that makes it illegal to tape an individual without their prior permission. If he is convicted, O'Keefe could spend five years in the Maryland State Prison. Yes, you read that right. Here's the complete statement issued late yesterday by the prosecutor, Patricia Jessamy: "Baltimore, MD – September 11, 2009 – We have received inquiries from citizens and the media asking whether the Baltimore City State’s Attorneys Office would initiate...

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Treasury releases - finally! - TARP lobbying rules

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geitner's crew made public yesterday rules for lobbying the government for a piece of that $700 billion in TARP funds. The release comes a mere 226 days after the department announced with much fanfare in January that it would be issuing new guidelines for such lobbying. The Sunlight Foundation's Daniel Schuman has looked over the new rules and reached an interesting initial conclusion - they're an awful lot like the government's previously announced guidelines for lobbying on the $787 billion worth of stimulus projects Congress approved earlier this year. Notes Schuman: “Considering the nearly-identical nature of the TARP lobbying rules with the...

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Obama's top five tax fibs in Wednesday evening speech

This is according to the Americans for Tax Reform (ATR): 1. Middle class tax hikes: “The middle class will realize greater [health] security, not higher taxes.” FACT: This would be a big departure from the House bill and the Baucus draft. The House bill has four tax increases on families making less than $250,000. President Obama himself endorsed another when he called for an individual mandate with a tax penalty. Earlier this week, he floated the idea of a “soda tax.” The Baucus draft, like the House bill, contains a new tax on over-the-counter medicines purchased with an FSA or HSA 2. Individual mandate tax: “Under my plan, individuals will...

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Mark Tapscott: Health care reveals another Washington wink-wink

You need look no further than the first three letters in the word "Congress" to get an essential fact about Washington politicians: Most of what most of them say ought to remind us of John Nance Garner's assessment of the vice-presidency as "not worth a bucket of warm spit." The latest illustration of this fact is seen in the debate about whether or not Congress has already exempted itself from the Public Option government-run health insurance program that President Obama and his Democratic congressional allies are determined to impose on the rest of us. Nobody is surprised to hear that Congress wants to exempt itself from Obamacare since no sane person wants to...

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Same Old-Same Old from Obama tonight? UPDATED: Demonstration Projects are for suckers

Excerpts from the prepared text of the President's speech tonight to the nation and Congress have been released by the White House and if these are indicative of the tone and level of detail that will be displayed throughout the address, it will likely come across as just more of the same old rhetoric, evasion, double-talk, and straw-man tactics we've seen for months from Obama. Here's is the excerpt in which Obama provides the specific details of his plan: "Here are the details that every American needs to know about this plan: "First, if you are among the hundreds of millions of Americans who already have health insurance through your job, Medicare, Medicaid, or the VA,...

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Congress has already exempted itself from Public Option

One of the clearest messages from the Town Hall forums during the August congressional recess was that people want Congress to be covered by the same health care reform plan they impose on the rest of us. Members of Congress presently get health insurance coverage through the Federal Employee Health Benefits Program (FEHBP), which offers enrollees nearly 300 choices among a variety of plans, coverages and costs. The FEHBP covers federal employees and retirees, as well as Members of Congress, though the latter have additional perks of office that make their health coverage far better than that available - or affordable - for the vast majority of working Americans. Public anger may...

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Major school systems won't be open when Obama speaks to kids

Hot Air's Ed Morrissey - joined by bloggers Baseball Crank and Moe Lane - notes that Los Angeles public schools won't be in session next Tuesday when President Obama delivers his speech to the nation's children. Neither will those in the Boston schools. Or the New York City public schools. Or those in Seattle, Buffalo or Eugene (Oregon). It's the Obamatuerism of the day on this one, but it may be indicative of a new theme concerning the Obama administration's managerial and strategic political competence. All presidential teams tend to get high marks during their honeymoons. But the Obama honeymoon has clearly been over since early summer. Now, the school speech was poorly thought out,...

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Mark Tapscott: Tea Party leaders are wasting chance to replace Congress UPDATED!

It's not often that leaders of the moment's most significant political movement miss the critically important public opinion shift of their time, but that is exactly what is happening right now with the Tea Party crusade. Just when 57 percent of the American people - including most independents - are ready to throw all the bums out of Congress and start over, Tea Party leaders are wasting time, resources and their precious credibility fighting a comparatively minor skirmish with the unions. Don't get me wrong, I admire Whole Foods Chief Executive Officer John Mackey, whose courageous critique of Obamacare has put him and his innovative operation square in the cross hairs of a union-led...

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More AARP evasions, spin doctoring on Obamacare

A key AARP official went on Hugh Hewitt's nationally syndicated talk radio program yesterday and demonstrated yet again what a disaster Obamacare has become for the credibility of the 40 million-member seniors organization. Hewitt, whose weekly column appears in The Washington Examiner on Mondays, asked all the right questions, but AARP legislative policy director David Certner had few credible answers.I strongly encourage you to read the entire transcript of the interview, then come back to this post. Okay, did you notice how, on question after question, Certner hemmed and hawed, providing in the process a classic illustration of the Washington insider spinning facts to conceal the...

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Chevron reveals video of $3 million Ecuadorian bribery scheme UPDATED: Plaintiffs claim Chevron may have faked it

Chevron Corp. officials have just posted video that they allege "reveal a $3 million bribery scheme implicating the judge presiding over the environmental lawsuit currently pending against the company and individuals who identify themselves as representatives of the Ecuadorian government and its ruling party." According to Chevron, the videos shows the judge in the case confirming "that he will rule against Chevron and that appeals by the energy company will be denied – even though the trial is ongoing and evidence is still being received. A purported party official also states that lawyers from the executive branch have been sent to assist the judge in writing the...

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Memo to suburbanites: Government doesn't want you to live there any more

If you like living in the suburbs, having your own little piece of God's green Earth, and being part of the community schools, churches and civic groups, well, too bad because the "Smart Growth" progressives in Congress and the National Reseach Council have a new report that shows how much better things would be if instead you and your family lived in an urban high rise. According to a news alert from the NRC, the report examines "how suburbanization -- made possible largely due to the prevalence of automobiles and the extensive U.S. highway system -- impacts the number of miles we drive, our reliance on petroleum fuel, and the percent of greenhouse gas emissions from...

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Stop embarrassing us, Mr. Rangel. Resign

Want to understand why 2009 has witnessed the eruption of Tea Party and Town Hall protests of unprecedented intensity? Look no further than Rep. Charles Rangel, the New York Democrat who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee that writes tax law for the rest of us. A parade of steadily more serious revelations was capped with news that Rangel somehow forgot to report as much as half a million dollars in assets and income on his 2007 financial disclosure report. It's impossible to know exactly how much he forgot to report because Rangel and most of the rest of the career politicians in both parties who have run Congress for the past several decades conveniently designed their...

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Mark Tapscott: Let's talk about your gold-plated, tax-paid compensation, Mr. Waxman

Ever notice how Henry Waxman's cherubic face pops up so often? Most recently, he's been in the news with his letter to 52 health insurance executives demanding that they cough up mountains of data about their compensation, expense accounts, retirement benefits, travel schedules, and shoe sizes. Okay, not that last item, but you get the drift here. Recipients of the Waxman letter - which was co-signed by Rep. Bart Stupak, D-MI - have no choice but to comply. So if Waxman - who is chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee - finds even the faintest whiff of scandal in the furthest corner of the health insurance industry, expect to be treated to the hollow spectacle of yet another...

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Dean says Obamacare authors don't want to challenge trial lawyers

Whatever else he said Wednesday evening at the town hall hosted by Rep. Jim Moran, D-VA, former Democratic National Committee chairman and presidential candidate Howard Dean let something incredibly candid slip out about President Obama's health-care reform bill in Congress. Asked by an audience member why the legislation does nothing to cap medical malpractice class-action lawsuits against doctors and medical institutions (aka "Tort reform"), Dean responded by saying: “The reason tort reform is not in the [health care] bill is because the people who wrote it did not want to take on the trial lawyers in addition to everybody else they were taking on. And that’s the...

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Obamacare won't cover illegal immigrants? Yes it will, says Congressional Research Service

Among the many claims being made durng the August recess by Democrats from President Obama, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-CA, to the lowliest back-bencher is that Obamacare absolutely, positively, cannot possibly ever in a million, zillion years provide coverage to illegal immigrants. Just this past weekend during his regular Saturday address - devoted to addressing what he called "false claims about reform" - Obama said he wants "an honest debate" on health care reform, "not one dominated by willful misrepresentations and outright distortions." In what he called the "first myth" being spread by...

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Obama's 09 deficit exceeds all eight years of Bush red ink

How much is President Obama boosting federal spending? The Heritage Foundation's Brian Riedl puts a little perspective on the numbers made public today: · This year, Washington will spend $30,958 per household, tax $17,576 per household, and borrow $13,392 per household. This spending is not just temporary: President Obama would permanently keep annual spending between $5,000 and $8,000 per household higher than it had been under President Bush. · The 22 percent spending increase projected for 2009 represents the largest government expansion since the 1952 height of the Korean War (adjusted for inflation). Federal spending is up 57 percent since 2001. · The 2009...

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Reagan and Obama: One view of the basic difference UPDATED: My mistake

A few weeks after his innauguration, I wrote a column predicting that President Obama would be a one-term chief executive if he stayed with the policy course with which he launched his presidency. A litte past the six-month mark of his first year in the Oval Office and things are going pretty much as I expected. Over at Hot Air, Allahpundit offers an interesting comparison between the charisma of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama. Both men are superb communicators, but Allahpundit points to the factor that most separates them: “The failure of the Carter years was, in Reagan’s view, the failure of the man at the helm and the policies he had pursued at home and abroad. At no...

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No health care rationing? Even The New York Times sees it now UPDATED: Hewitt assesses

President Obama and his congressional Democratic allies miss no opportunity to accuse critics of government-run health care of spreading false information when they claim Obamacare will produce health care rationing, particularly in the treatment of the terminally ill, the handicapped, and seniors. But check out these seven graphs from Robert Pear at the end of his story of The New York Times, entitled "A basis is seen for some health plan fears among elderly." Read them carefully because they reveal, without saying it directly, that seniors and Obamacare critics have a serious point : "In effect, Mr. Obama says he can cut bloated Medicare payments to inefficient health...

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Obama issues YouTube Ramadan message

President Obama, who skipped the National Prayer Day ceremony, has released a special message for Muslims, commemorating Ramadan. You can view it here. It's stuff like this that makes a lot of people think Obama goes out of his way to insult those with whom he disagrees. And the White House rationalization for this one is .......

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Palin: Can't have health care reform without medical malpractice reform

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has again taken to her Facebook page, again to position herself on a key aspect of the national debate over health care reform. Last week, it was on the "death panels" Palin believes will inevitably result if Obamacare becomes law. This week, Palin takes on another aspect of the debate and stakes out a position that seems designed to highlight one of the biggest weaknesses of President Obama and Democratic congressional leaders - their dependance upon trial lawyers for funding. Palin notes the inextricable link between controlling health care costs and getting spiralling medical malpractice insurance premiums under control, and quotes from a...

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Mark Tapscott: Boycotts can work both ways, Wal-Mart

Wal-Mart has joined a handful of craven corporations caving to demands from the radical Left that they withdraw their advertising from Glenn Beck's Fox News program to protest what the repressive zealots view as unacceptable speech by the controversial cable host. Beck's critics are four political activists with an outfit called ColorofChange.org. They are outraged that Beck called President Obama a "racist" with "an abiding hatred of white people." Is Beck correct? I have no idea, but he has a right to voice his opinion, just as the four people with ColorofChange have a right to theirs. But this quartet beating the drums for repression aren't satisfied just to...

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CBS News, AP report AARP losing thousands of members protesting group's Obamacare support

Earlier this month, I reported that a revolt was breaking out among AARP's 40-million members in response to the enthusiastic and extensive lobbying by the group's Washington leadership on behalf of Obamacare. Now, other media are beginning to notice and we are starting to get a trickle of numbers that hint at the magnitude of the outrage among AARP's members. CBS News reported Monday that a top AARP official admits the organization has lost at least 60,000 members who specifically cited the Obamacare issue as their reason for leaving. And the CBS report also noted a spike in new membership at a conservative rival to the AARP, the American Seniors Association. And today AP follows...

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Health Care Quiz: Which one of the following statements doesn't belong?

Please note the credit for these statements doesn't lie with me but with a friend on the Senate side who prefers to remain nameless. President Obama says he's not trying to vilify insurers (AP) President Obama says insurers are trying to block change (New York Times) President Obama says insurance companies holding U.S. hostage (Reuters) President Obama assails health insurance companies...

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Palin responds to Obama on 'Death Panels'

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has responded to comments yesterday by President Obama concerning her observation last week that Obamacare will lead to "death panels" making decisions about who lives and dies, to the disadvantage of seniors, the terminally ill and the handicapped. Palin's response is posted on her Facebook page. It's a bit long, but I think it removes all doubt that, at the very least, Palin is making a case that is absolutely reasonable, given the language of the current legislation in Congress, and that others on the Left have essentially agreed with recently. Here's the top of Palin's response to the president: "Yesterday President Obama responded to...

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Mark Tapscott: Three big stories the media's 'homers' missed

Sports writers who never have a harsh word for the local team are called "homers," but one doesn't have to look far in the news sections or broadcasts of the mainstream media to realize that this problem starts on the front page. Take, for example, these three significant stories that got little or no play in The Washington Post, The New York Times or the network news outlets. First, remember that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "report" warning of the danger of domestic terrorist attacks by right-wing extremists? With only a few exceptions, major mainstream media outlets uncritically repeated the report's assertions, which were allegedly based on credible...

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ALG's Wilson demands Napolitano resignation for using 'kook website'

Bill Wilson is steamed at Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, so much so that he is demanding her resignation in the wake of revelations of a "kook website" as a major source for that controversial "threat assessment" issued earlier this year warning of an allegedly growing threat of terrorism by RIght-wing extremist. "Janet Napolitano must resign immediately from her post at Homeland Security over this outrage," Wilson said earlier today. Wilson is chairman of Americans for Limited Government, a conservative activist non-profit. "The Department of Homeland Security used a kook website to indict the American people in...

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Astro-turfing? Let's talk about Craigslist, paid Leftists and Obamacare

Amazing what can be found these days on the Internet. Caleb Howe at Red State, for example, went looking for paying jobs promoting grassroots activism on behalf of Obamacare - doing things like attending Democratic congressional town halls - and lo and behold, old Caleb found a gold mine! Looks like there are beaucoup paying jobs out there if you want to help generate grassroots support for government-run health care. Go here for the full report on Red State....

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New email endorsement shows AARP going all-out for Dems, Obamacare

Not that there was any doubt about it, but a new email campaign by AARP's liberal Democrat-dominated Washington staff makes it crystal clear that the leadership of the 40-million member seniors group is going all-out for Obamacare and the House Democrats' version of it, H.R. 3200. The email alert is especially interesting because AARP is a tax-exempt non-profit that is barred from participating in partisan campaigns, though it is allowed to do a limited amount of legislative lobbying of Congress. No doubt the AARP leadership in Washington will argue they aren't doing anything they aren't allowed to do as a 501(c)(4), but this new email campaign throws the spirit of the law right out the...

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Revolt is brewing among AARP members against AARP leadership

Last week I wrote in this space that Obamacare could be the death of AARP because it would expose to the rank-and-file of the 40 million member seniors group - most of whom oppose Obamacare - how their Washington leaders have been taking them for a ride for many years. The AARP leadership scoffed at that suggestion, but check out the video of a Dallas AARP meeting in this post by Moe Lane at Red State. The leadership wanted to give the members the usual dog-and-pony show in favor of government-run health care, but the members weren't buying it. So the leaders got up and left. Evidently, you either sit down, shut up and listen to your leaders in AARP, or they abandon you. If it happened...

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Angry Mobs Department: That was then, this is now

Democrats screaming to high heaven about those disrupted town hall meetings could use a little refresher on recent history concerning their partisans' conduct in 2005 in response to President George W. Bush's attempt to get Congress to move on a genuine Social Security reform. My friend Jon Henke at The Next Right offers these tidbits: · NW Progressive Institute, March 2005: "a boisterous crowd which frequently interrupted the discussion with shouts and hard nosed questions. ... Democrats in the audience who were interrupting the panel.... the crowd erupted in anger... Democrats in the audience started shouting him down again." · Savannah Morning News,...

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Mark Tapscott: Tripping up AARP's dance with Pelosi and the Democrats

Washington Wink-Winks were flying fast Monday when a memo surfaced from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi describing the Democrats' plan to "partner" with AARP, SEIU and others in an August recess PR blitz for Obamacare and against Republicans who oppose it. Triple Ws are the lame excuses Washington elitists like Pelosi and AARP activists hide behind whenever they are caught red-handed. Then they deny what is obvious to everybody else while winking reassurance to their momentarily puzzled supporters that they don't really mean the denials. Here's how it came down Monday. Connie Hair of Human Events reported on the Pelosi memo, including this key graph: "The Leadership is...

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Group calls on Obama to remove GE's Immelt after firm agrees to $50 million SEC fraud fine

President Obama should remove General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt from the chief executive's Economic Recovery Advisory Board after the firm agreed to pay a $50 million fine for what the SEC described as bending "the accounting rules beyond the breaking point," according to the National Center for Public Policy Research's Dr. Tom Borelli. "It's outrageous for President Obama to keep Immelt as an advisor when the SEC charged that GE engaged in a series of efforts to manipulate earnings to mislead investors," Borelli said. "The pattern of corruption raised by the SEC is deeply concerning and during a time of economic crisis, the last thing America needs is a Bernie...

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BBC reports Russia set to drill for oil in Gulf of Mexico

American energy experts have been warning with increasing urgency in recent years that other nations are moving rapidly to exploit the Gulf of Mexico's rich reserves of oil and natural gas, even as the U.S. hobbles itself by refusing to give the go-ahead to develop its own easily accessible areas that contain billions of barrels of petroleum and trillions of feet of natural gas. The BBC reports Russia is moving ahead with its plans to drill in the Gulf off the Cuban coast: "Russian Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin signed four contracts securing exploration rights in Cuba's economic zone in the Gulf. Havana says there may be some 20 billion barrels of oil of its coast but the...

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Gallup finds seniors most skeptical of Obamacare UPDATED WITH AARP RESPONSE

Here's an interesting addition from Gallup to the discussion about AARP's lobbying for Obamacare and the massive financial support for Obama and other Democratic candidates and causes from members of the association's Washington staff: Seems that seniors are the group most skeptical of Obamacare. When asked if they believe a new healthcare reform law will improve or worse health care quality in the U.S., 43 percent of respondents 65 years of age or older said it will worsen care, while 34 percent said it will improve it. That compares to 45 percent of those age 50-64 who think it will improve care quality, and only 33 percent who think it will worsen care quality. Note that those two...

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Updated: Five reasons why Obama and Congress will make Cash-for-Clunkers a permanent federal entitlement

Thousands of people are rushing to get in on the Cash-for-Clunkers deal from Washington that pays them up to $4,500 to trade-in an old gas guzzler for a shiny new fuel-efficient car or truck. Dealers love it because it brings people they haven't seen for years back into their showrooms. Customers love it because $4,500 is a good chunk of "free" money. Much to the chagrin of many, however, it was announced yesterday that the response on the part of buyers has been so over-whelming - more than $850 million of the $1 billion made available was spoken for in a mere four days! - that the program is being temporarily suspended out of fear that it will run out of money by the...

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GAO: Bridges, roads rot while Highway Trust Fund billions go to everything but bridges, roads

Want to know the two senators least likely to be elected Most Popular With Colleages? Sen. Tom Coburn, R-OK, and Sen. Jim DeMint, R-SC. are the first two names that come instantly to mind. And taxpayers should thank them for putting the truth ahead of popularity because no other pair of senators does as much to highlight waste, fraud, abuse, hypocrisy and apathy in government. They recently asked the Government Accounting Office (GAO) to see how much money from the federal Highway Trust Fund goes to pay for projects other than road and bridge maintenance. They just got the response back from GAO. Here's a small selection of the $87 billion GAO found that should have been spent to keep...

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Mark Tapscott: Obamacare could kill AARP

Marketing operations don't get any slicker than the one behind AARP. Their invitation to join arrived in my mail box even before I turned 50. I joined for one year, but never renewed because I knew the truth about this famous group. That truth is this: Millions join AARP and in return receive a host of useful services and resources. But their money and influence are hijacked to support causes that are absolutely inimical to their best interests. The hijacking is the work of AARP's Washington staff, which is an integral part of the tireless liberal lobbying machine that runs 24/7 in the nation's capital pushing to protect and expand current government entitlements and to create costly...

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No end to Dems' bad news on health care, Gallup finds growing opposition

Gallup's latest survey of public attitudes on Obamacare was conducted after the White House news conference last week and the associated pr blitz the administration launched in its effort to get something through Congress before the recess. But instead of shoring up support, the blitz appears to have strengthened the opposition. Here are the main takeways, according to a GOP source on the Hill: Impact on cost: A top selling point by the administration for the Democrat bills in Congress is that their legislation will reduce costs. People aren’t buying it. · By two to one (34-18) Americans believe the cost of their health care will go up. · 45 percent believe...

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Mark Tapscott: Biden's 'Jesus Christ' expletive is hate speech.

People say you should never make small talk on politics or religion with mere acquaintances or strangers because those are topics about which many people have strongly held views that they don't care to have challenged by just anybody. It's also long been the rule among prudent politicians with national aspirations to say nothing unkind about anybody's religious faith. But the silence that has greeted Vice President Joe Biden's use of "Jesus Christ" as an expletive in an on-the-record interview with The Wall Street Journal, suggests that such prudence has been tossed aside. Biden isn't the first nor will he be the last politician to abuse the name of the man revered for two...

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Will Biden apologize for using Christ's name as a curse word? UPDATED WITH AN APOLOGY

Can you imagine the uproar that would ensue if the Vice President of the United States used the name of Islam's supreme being as a curse word? They rioted all over the Muslim world when a Danish newspaper cartoonist penned a series of satiric pieces on Mohammed, so making "Allah" a curse word would likely incite far more serious violence. And does anybody doubt that the editorial pages of The New York Times and other liberal newspapers would instantly demand an apology before further damage is done to America's supposed standing in the world. Joining in that chorus would be the National Council of Churches, Democratic congressional leaders and, of course, CAIR. So where is the...

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Peer-reviewed study from Down Under points to nature as global warming source

This ought to stir things up royally. Three Australasian scientists have published a study in the Journal of Geophysical Research claiming that virtually none of the observed temperature increases in the Earth’s atmosphere in recent years can be attributed to man-made factors. Instead, researchers Chris de Freitas at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, John McLean from Melbourne, Australia, and Bob Carter from James Cook University in North Queensland, Australia, ), point to the El Nino-Southern Oscillation (ENSO). The Down Under trio also contend that volcanic activity tends to produce significant cooling trends in the atmosphere. "The surge in global temperatures...

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Mark Tapscott: Founders wisely blocked Obama's health care reform rush

President Obama’s desperate pleas this week for Congress to pass his massive health care reform before leaving town for its August recess ran head-on into constitutional roadblocks erected by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton and the other Founders in 1787. Put another way, the smart guys in the powdered wigs who met in Philadelphia saw the demagogic politicians coming, with their grandiose plans to remake America, so they built into our constitutional system a series of speed bumps designed to leave Obama and his ilk sputtering in frustration. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi may yet find a way to steamroller Obama’s radical reform through the lower chamber before the recess,...

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Obama advisor would ration medical care to seniors, young children, the demented

No wonder President Obama is in such a rush to get his health care reform package through Congress before the August recess. And before the public finds out about Ezekiel Emanuel, special advisor to Peter Orzag, Obama's director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and brother to White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. Emanuel has written in medical journals of how health care should be rationed, with priority given to younger people over seniors and over those suffering from dementia, according to John Goodman, president of the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA). Ezekiel also believes that very young children should be lower on the priority list than younger people who...

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Would Obama's America return to the Moon?

Monday is the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong becoming the first man on the moon and making America the first - and to this day the only - nation to achieve such a magnificent and technologically challenging feat. This anniversary comes amid renewed talk of a new U.S. space program with a goal of returning to the moon. But there was something even more important behind the moon shot of 1969 than the billions of dollars, thousands of incredibly capable scientists and engineers, and advanced technology. There was will to dream the biggest dreams and a national character capable of realizing those dreams. I was reminded of this fact today while re-reading JFK's famous "Why does...

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More strangeness on $18 million Recovery.gov redesign contract

Just when you think it couldn't get any weirder, something else pops up concerning that $18 contract issued by the federal government last week to redesign Recovery.gov - the web site that is supposed to show people how their $787 billion of tax money is being spent on economic stimulus. Seems that a Washington, D.C. advertising agency known as Syneractive is going to get a piece of the contract for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Web 2.0 work on the project. It's not clear if this is as a sub-contractor to Smartronix, the Southern Maryland defense firm that won the overall contract last week from the General Services Administration (GSA), which oversaw the bidding and award process....

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Mark Tapscott: Where did all the liberals go?

This may come as a shock to some but a liberal college professor was among the most influential people in this conservative's life. In fact, I often wonder whatever happened to liberals like Dr. Jerry Polinard. Polinard was my constitutional law professor at Oklahoma State University - I know, shocker, I didn't go to an Ivy League school like the really smart people - and I loved his class more than any other, even though he and I passionately disagreed on just about everything. He was an inspiring teacher who clearly loved the teachable moments made possible in the humorous and constructive repartee between teacher and student in the college classroom. More important, he always made a...

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Happy Anniversary! OCS bid revenue to government all but dried up

No, the headline is not a jumble from two separate posts. Tuesday is the one-year anniversary of President Bush lifting the executive branch ban on oil and natural gas exploration and production from the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off the U.S. coastline. Remember the "Drill Here, Drill Now" campaign by House Republicans? Not much has happened in the year since Bush acted, thanks to the Obama administration's Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, the President's allies in the environmental movement, and congressional Democrats like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who appear determined to stop all energy production in the U.S. that doesn't involve windmills or solar panels. Normally,...

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Has the rehabiliatation of Jimmy Carter begun?

Those too young to recall cannot appreciate what a terrible state the country was in during the four long years in which President Jimmy Carter was in the White House. The nation lurched from one crisis to another, with double-digit inflation, soaring interest rates, long gas lines during the summer, and natural gas shortages in the winter. There were Democrat majorities in Congress determined to make everything worse with higher taxes, government-guaranteed jobs for everybody, and an unprecedented blizzard of new bureaucratic regulation issuing from Washington departments and agencies, including two new ones created at Carter's suggestion, the Department of Energy and the Department of...

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Many unanswered questions about Hoyer, $18 million Recovery.gov redesign award

One of the great things about journalism is that you never know where a story is going to lead. So it was earlier this week when I saw a notice that the federal government had awarded an $18 million, multi-year contract to redesign the Recovery.gov web site to Smartronix, an obscure Maryland firm. Recovery.gov is the federal government's web site that is supposed to provide up-to-date data on how funds are being spent under the $787 billion economic stimulus bill that was approved by Congress in February. The site has been criticized by folks across the political spectrum for being full of praise for the Obama administration but lacking in timely data on recovery spending. A private...

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Does calling your congressmen still work? Just ask Rep. Eric Massa

Rep. Eric Massa, D-NY, planned to vote for the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill, but then the phone calls started coming into his Capitol office and to his offices back home in New York's 29th congressional district. And coming. And coming. And coming. The calls were 19-1 against Obama-Waxman-Market, according to Massa. Chris Bowers, one of the Left's most intelligent new media observers, thinks conservatives usually win telephone calling contests, but he concedes in this guest post at Think Progress's Wonk Room about Massa's experience that 19-1 is quite a margin....

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Browner has history of deceit on government files

Obama White House climate czar Carol Browner's instruction to auto executives to"write nothing down" on those secret negotiations to jump the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards up significantly higher was not the former EPA head's first time for trying to suppress official documents. Soon after leaving EPA at the end of the Clinton administration, Browner was implicated in a federal court decision against EPA for destroying official computer files. Here's how the AP reported the decision: "A federal judge held the Environmental Protection Agency in contempt Thursday for destroying computer files during the Clinton administration that had been sought by a...

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Mark Tapscott on why a new Morning in America could be closer than we think

Lost in the clamor about Sarah Palin's resignation were two developments that provide persuasive evidence for the proposition that a renaissance is in the offing for the conservative movement, properly understood. First, there were the crowds that thronged to the latest round of Tea Party Protests, with many of the attendees marveling at their first-ever protest. The mainstream media barely noticed, obsessing on Michael Jackson's passing and heaping more derisive commentary on Palin. But for those paying attention, the July 4th Tea Party Protests offer more concrete evidence that what began as a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens standing up and shouting "Stop!" to the...

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Would a government-run program cost less?

Advocates in the Obama administration, the mainstream media, and congressional Democrats routinely claim that a government-run health insurance program would have lower administrative costs than those of the private sector. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, for example, puts it this way: "But it's a fact that insurers spend a lot of money looking for ways to reject insurance claims. And health care providers, in turn, spend billions on "denial management," employing specialist firms -- including Ingenix, a subsidiary of, yes, UnitedHealth -- to fight the insurers." Those costs are passed on to consumers "in the form of higher health care prices and higher...

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'Put nothing in writing,' Browner told auto execs on secret White House CAFE talks; Sensenbrenner wants investigation

Carol Browner, former Clinton administration EPA head and current Obama White House climate czar, instructed auto industry execs "to put nothing in writing, ever" regarding secret negotiations she orchestrated regarding a deal to increase federal Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-WI, is demanding a congressional investigation of Browner's conduct in the CAFE talks, saying in a letter to Rep. Henry Waxman, D-CA, that Browner "intended to leave little or no documentation of the deliberations that lead to stringent new CAFE standards." Federal law requires officials to preserve documents concerning significant policy decisions,...

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First stimulus package spending at glacial pace; Obama wants another?

It was touted by its supporters as the emergency cure for the worst economic crisis since the Great Depressions, but only $21 billion of the $787 billion stimulus bill has been spent, and only $90.7 billion is "in the pipeline," according to the Seattle company that is tracking the expenditures. Mike Pickett, CEO of Onvia, told the House Government Reform Committee today that 1,330 contracts valued at a total of $21 billion have been awarded. Using the Obama administration's controversial formula for measuring job creation, Pickett said Onvia estimates that 230,000 jobs have been created or retained as a result of the $21 billion. Many economists outside the administration...

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Gallup sees more Americans moving right

Gallup is out today with a new survey showing more Americans are moving to the Right politically than to the Left, including people in all three major groups, Republicans, Independents and Democrats. "Despite the results of the 2008 presidential election, Americans, by a 2-to-1 margin, say their political views in recent years have become more conservative rather than more liberal, 39% to 18%, with 42% saying they have not changed. While independents and Democrats most often say their views haven't changed, more members of all three major partisan groups indicate that their views have shifted to the right rather than to the left, " the polling organization said in a special...

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Conventional wisdom cannot explain Palin (With multiple updates)

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's announcement of her resignation cannot be read in terms of the conventional wisdom of politics - i.e. that she's getting out ahead of some damaging political revelation she knows is right around the corner, or that she's finally fed up with the constant personal attacks on her and her family, or even that she's running for president in 2012 and wants to be free of the constraints of office. A close reading of her actual words in her announcement reveals otherwise. The key fact about Palin is that she is not a conventional politician. She actually means what she says, which is why her statement must be read in light of that fact, not with the assumption that she...

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A czar here, a czar there, everywhere a czar

Quick, how many "czars" do you think President Obama has appointed since becoming president? Eight? A dozen? Guess again. Try 31, at least according to Taxpayers for Common Sense, which actually counted them. Washington czars are not new, President Ronald Reagan had one in "White House drug czar" Bill Bennett. But Obama has taken the practice to a new high, effectively creating nearly three dozen. Taxpayers for Common Sense describes the growing czar ranks: "By our count there are at least 31 active Czars (see our list here), giving the current administration more Czars than Imperial Russia had in its history. We have a Mideast Peace Czar and a Mideast Policy...

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Transportation panel to post earmarks; received 6,868 requests

Earlier this week in an editorial entitled "Washington's spending corruption is a bipartisan rot," we took to task Rep. James Oberstar, D-MN, the chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, along with Rep. John Mica, R-FL, the ranking minority member, for their collaboration in crafting a $500 billion transportation spending bill. We also included in that critique Rep. Peter DeFazio, D-OR, and Rep. John Duncan, R-TN, chairman and ranking minority member, respectively of a key subcommittee of that panel. In the editorial, we noted, based upon calculations by Taxpayers for Common Sense, that "the bill includes nearly 12,000 earmarks, together worth...

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Mark Tapscott on let's leave the gutter to the Left

Take a conservative stand in the blogosphere, cable television and the mainstream media and you can count on being attacked in the rudest, crudest, and foulest possible language, much of it unprintable in a daily newspaper, by zealots on the Left. I ignore such stuff, knowing that Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" encourages the use of abusive, garbage language as a tool to isolate and discredit people and institutions. Perhaps that makes it easier to send those the commissars deem utterly evil or hopelessly ignorant to re-education camps, or worse. But I never expected to hear such language from people on the Right. Then, in a Beltway Confidential post Tuesday, I asked...

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Suppressed EPA scientist breaks silence, speaks on Fox News

Alan Carlin, the senior EPA research analyst who authored a study critical of global warming that was suppressed by agency officials, has broken his silence and spoken on Fox News about his situation. Carlin told "Fox & Friends" Steve Ducy and Gretchen Carlson that his most important conclusion in the study was that the U.S. should not rely upon recommendations of the UN in making policy decisions regarding global warming. "The most important conclusion, in my view, was that EPA needed to look at the science behind global warming and not depend upon reports issued by the United Nations, which is what they were thinking of doing and in fact have done," Carlin...

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"Cap-and-Traitor" versus "General Betrayus"

Could somebody please explain the difference between people on the Right calling the eight GOP congressmen who voted for the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill "cap and traitors" and the far lefties at Moveon.org calling Gen. David Petraeus "General Betrayus"? Sorry, folks, but, as much as I agree this bill is a disaster for America, calling these eight RINOs "traitors" is beyond the line. Here's why: The word "traitor" has specific reference to national loyalty. Benedict Arnold was a traitor, as were spies like John Walker, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Aldrich Hazen Ames. The traditional penalty for treason is...

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Mary Lou Forbes, R.I.P.

Journalism lost one of its great ones this weekend with the passing of Mary Lou Forbes, 83, after a brief battle with cancer. She was Commentary Editor of The Washington Times from its earliest days and was one of a core group of former Washington Star newsroom characters who helped launch the upstart conservative daily. Forbes was among the first women to succeed at the highest levels of news reporting and commentary journalism, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1959 for her reportage in covering the civil rights struggle in Virginia. She also tutored the early careers of folks like Carl Bernstein, and created a prize-winning multiple-page commentary section, which helped the Times challenge...

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Obama-Waxman-Markey impacts by industry detailed

The Center for Data Analysis (CDA) at The Heritage Foundation has conducted an econometric model study on the likely impact on major sectors of the U.S. economy if the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill being voted on in the House of Representatives today ultimately becomes law. On average, the measure would cost more than 50,000 jobs annually just in the transportation equipment segment of the economy. Transporation equipment sounds like a pretty dull area, but it actually is among the most dynamic sectors of the economy because it includes the car and truck industries, aircraft, ships, trains, motorcycles and bicycles. For data on other major sectors,...

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Survey finds three-fourths of African-Americans have big worries about Obama-Waxman-Markey

With a vote likely to be taken today in the House of Representatives on the Obama-Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade anti-global warming energy bill, a new survey of African-Americans finds significant concerns that the measure will have a disproportionately harmful impact on Blacks. The survey was conducted for the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR) by the Wilson Research Strategies firm and has a margin of error of +/- 3.4 percent. The survey can be found here. Among the findings, according to NCPPR: * 38% believe job losses from climate change legislation would be felt most strongly in the black community. 7% believe job losses would fall most on Hispanics and 2%...

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'Green jobs' studies contain fundamental flaws, think tank experts say

There are three kinds of liars - liars, damned liars and statisticians, right? Well, for nearly a decade, I have opened my Database 101, Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) boot camps at the National Press Club for journalists and bloggers with a description of two of my dreams. The first is that the day will soon come when all journalists and bloggers are as comfortable using spreadsheets and databases as they are now with dictionaries and spell-check. The second is that the day will soon come when every time a public official, think tank spokesman or individual expert claims to have a study proving X, the first question they will hear from a journalist or blogger is...

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Can you guess which state has the most effective financial disclosure requirement for its legislators?

This will probably come as a shock to anybody who has read Robert Penn Warren's "All the King's Men," or who has even the mos passing familiarity with Louisiana politics, but the Bayou State ranks on top of the Center for Public Integrity's latest compilation of state legislative financial disclosure requirements. Go here for CPI's color-coded inter-active map that provides info on how all 50 states compare. Joining Louisiana with a grade of A and ranking second is Washington state, while Hawaii is third and the only other state getting the top grade. States getting a B include Texas, Alaska, Arizona and Georgia. Way down in the ranking are Maryland and Virginia, with the...

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Pelosi will profit from Obama-Waxman-Markety cap-and-trade energy bill

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has vowed to bring the Obama-Waxman-Markey (OWM) anti-global warming cap-and-trade energy bill to the floor for a final vote Friday, which raises an interesting question: How much money will Pelosi make if the measure becomes law, as seems quite likely? Pelosi, of course, is not the only member of Congress to own significant shares of energy companies. Senators and representatives from all over the country do, not just the "oilies" from energy states like Texas, Oklahoma and Louisiana. But as House Speaker, Pelosi's ownership of an unknown number of shares in the Clean Energy Fuels Corp. (CLNE) valued at between $15,000 and $50,000, may deserve...

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Study finds most Americans not swamped with credit card debt

Another myth bites the dust, as a new study published today by the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER) finds that "the majority of Americans are not struggling with persistent credit card debt." The study was done by Polina Vlasenko, Ph.D., a research fellow at the Great Barrington, Massachusetts-based think tank. Vlasenko reviewed data drawn from the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) for the years 1989 to 2007. The Fed updates the SCF every three years. Vlasenko found that 27 percent of U.S. families have no credit or charge cards at all, and among those that do, the median number of cards was only two. The latter figure was unchanged from...

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Holocaust shooter is a Christian-hating Socialist

Lincoln famously said it is better to remain silent and thought a fool than to speak up and remove all doubt. There are a bunch of liberals in the media and the blogosphere today who really ought to heed Lincoln before they presume to report or comment on yesterday's tragic events at the Holocaust Museum. The conventional wisdom among these folks is that because Holocaust Museum murderer James W. Von Brunn hates Jews, he must therefore be a "right-wing hater" clearly have not read Von Brunn's stuff, or they read only the parts that serve their ideological agendas. Erick Erickson of Red State points to these facts that are clear from Von Brunn's writings: - Hated...

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Global warming causes more storms but less wind?

Readers of anAP story written by Seth Borenstein this morning may be forgiven if something seems not quite right with the study being reported as showing that global warming is causing less wind in the American midwest and east. Here's how Borenstein reports the study: "The idea that winds may be slowing is still a speculative one, and scientists disagree whether that is happening. But a first-of-its-kind study suggests that average and peak wind speeds have been noticeably slowing since 1973, especially in the Midwest and the East. "'It's a very large effect,' said study co-author Eugene Takle, a professor of atmospheric science at Iowa State University. In some places...

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Breast cancer soars under government-run health care

Here's a sobering thought inspired by the prospect of President Obama and Congress nationalizing the U.S. health care system: Breast cancer rates in Europe under nationalized health care systems are significantly higher than they are here, and women are much more likely to have breast cancer there than here. Gateway Pundit's Jim Hoft looked at the data and the clips on this issue and found some extremely disturbing facts: "Currently the United States leads the world in treating breast cancer. Women with breast cancer have a 14 percent higher survival rate in the United States than in Europe. Breast cancer mortality is 52 percent higher in Germany than in the United States,...

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Lott doubts political influence in closed Chrysler dealers, sees size as key

John R. Lott, the professor best known for his books, "More guns, less crime: The bias against gun rights" and "Freedomnomics," called earlier this week to talk about the possibility of partisan political considerations in the Obama administration's closing of nearly 800 Chrysler dealerships. "I just don't see the evidence for partisanship," said Lott, who is a senior research scientist at the University of Maryland. He's prevously held professorships at the Wharton School, University of Chicago and Yale. When this guy has an opinion about an issue that is subject to data-driven analysis, I listen. Turns out Lott's oldest son, Maxim, is a chip off the old...

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Glenn Beck got the shaft

Fox News' Glenn Beck had a little encounter with Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters of "The View" and it became an explosive encounter indeed. Scott Baker of Briebart TV breaks it down and concludes that "a rising conservative voice" was portrayed as "lying sackful of dog mess." In other words, Beck got the shaft from two of the celeb world's most famous media/movie figures. Call it an ambush. Baker does a superb job of bringing real sunlight to the darkness that is The View....

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Obama's Top 10 Apologies (So far)

Those devilish research elves behind The Morning Bell at The Heritage Foundation have come up with a list of President Obama's Top 10 Apologies. Can you imagine Harry Truman or Ronald Reagan on World Apology Tours? Anyway, here's what the elves came up with. I am sure this will be a dynamic list - i.e. changing with regularity in coming days as Obama finds more sins for which he must apologize on our behalf: 10. Apology for Guantanamo in Washington: “There is also no question that Guantanamo set back the moral authority that is America’s strongest currency in the world. … Rather than keeping us safer, the prison at Guantanamo has weakened American national...

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Pelosi moves to make House office expenses available online

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi deserves praise for directing Dan Beard, the chief administrative officer of the House of Representatives, to begin posting online on a quarterly basis expense reports for each House member's office account, as well as those of House committees and House leaders. This is a significant move forward in the effort to bring greater transparency and thus accountability to Congress. You can read Pelosi's letter to Beard here.I've not had much by way of praise to offer for the Speaker, but she deserves high praise for this decision. Of course, it would be better to have those accounts posted in real-time, as if they are checking accounts, but at least getting them...

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VIP lessons for today's Right in Reagan's interregnum strategy

Noemie Emery's fine cover story on "Reagan in Opposition" in the June 1 edition of The Weekly Standard is must-reading for everybody and anybody on the Right who hopes to see a victory for limited government in the 2010 and 2012 elections. Emery, a Weekly Standard contributing editor who also writes a sterling column of political analysis for this newspaper in its Wednesday print and online editions, describes how Reagan recovered from his loss of the 1976 GOP presidential nomination contest to Gerald Ford by following a strategy that redefined the party from its green-eyeshade roots to an expansive, optimistic, populist vehicle for achieving fundamental conservative reforms...

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Sunlight maps Visclosky's 'pay-to-play' earmarks

Federal investigators are probing the relationship between three prominent Members of Congress and their relationship to a now-defunct lobbying firm that appears to have been the fulcrum of a massive "pay-to-play" scheme in which the representatives offered earmarks in return for campaign contributions. The three congressmen are Representatives John Murtha of Pennsylvania, Jim Moran of Virginia and Pete Visclosky of Indiana, all Democrats. The defunct lobbying group was known as the PMA Group. It was started by a former Murtha aide. Last week, the FBI issued subpoenas to Visclosky employees and his congressional and campaign offices, seeking documents in connection with the...

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Is American politics becoming a hate sport?

What do John Brown, Scott Roeder and an anonymous poster at Talking Points Memo have in common? All three believe killing those who disagree with them politically is justified. Brown lived more than a century before and helped incite the American Civil War, but Roeder and the TPM poster are walking among us today. And there is one key point on which Roeder differs from Brown and the TPM poster. Roeder shot and killed Kansas' infamous abortion doctor George Tlller this past Sunday as the latter ushered in his local church. Roeder has a long history of anti-abortion fanaticism. His terrible deed was immediately and completely denounced as evil and unjustified by every pro-life leader in...

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Rappin' Jesus, Ronald Reagan and Atlas Shrugged

Remember the names David Rufful and Josh Riddle. Both are Dartmouth students and both are "Young Cons," or young conservatives. They do rap. They do politics. Boy, do they. Their YouTube video "The Young Con Anthem" has been up a few days and has already garnered more than 120,000 views and multiple praise. Rufful and Riddle have done something rather remarkable in many ways. For one thing, they've shown the continued relevance of a fusionist conservatism that unites otherwise disparate communities of admirers of individual freedom, republican liberty and American pride. When was the last time you saw college kids rapping in admiration of Jesus, Ronald Reagan and...

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President Obama meet Sen. Obama on judicial nominations

Some folks in Washington think it's downright unfair to quote politicians' own words against them, but it seems to me that's the heart of accountability. In any case, Barack Obama is not the first politician to have his feet firmly planted on both sides of an issue, nor will he be the last. So, here's what he said Saturday regarding a potential Senate Republican filibuster against his Supreme Court nomine, Judge Sonia Sotomayor: “But what I hope is that we can avoid the political posturing and ideological brinksmanship that has bogged down this process, and Congress, in the past.” And here is what he said in 2006 on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos"...

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Quantitative analysis finds "highly positive correlation" between Chrysler dealer survival and Clinton donors

Now this is the way these kinds of issues should be addressed. Zero Hedge, a blog run by some guys who know the difference between a slide rule and a dipstick, ran a quantitative analysis of the data concerning whether a Chrysler dealer is being closed or not and the political contributions of its majority owner. They found a "highly positive correlation between dealer survival and Clinton donors." Not exactly what some might have expected, but there it is. One caution, which I stress in my Database 101 Computer-Assisted Research and Reporting (CARR) course, correlation is NOT causation. The rooster crows and the sun comes up, but the one doesn't cause the other. There may be...

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White House moves to restrict criticism of stimulus projects

A new White House policy on permissible lobbying on economic recovery and stimulus projects has taken a decidedly anti-First Amendment turn. It's a classic illustration of Big Government trying to control every aspect of a particular activity and in the process running up against civil liberty. Check out this passage from a post on the White House blog by Norm Eisen, Special Counsel to the President on Ethics and Government Reform (emphasis added): "First, we will expand the restriction on oral communications to cover all persons, not just federally registered lobbyists. For the first time, we will reach contacts not only by registered lobbyists but also by unregistered ones, as...

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MUST SEE VIDEO: If Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer run the world

You gotta watch this!...

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You ain't seen nuthin' yet, America!

Speaking at a $30,000-per-table fund raiser for an exclusive group of Los Angeles corporate executives Wednesday night, President Obama gave them a grand review of the accomplishments of his first four months in office, boldly claiming his record compares favorably with any chief executive since FDR. Then, to a thunderous round of cheers from the assembly, Obama declared: "Los Angeles, you ain't seen nuthin' yet!" It has indeed been an eventful four months. Here are some of the highlights, as compiled by the mischevious research elves at The Heritage Foundation and published today in the must-reading Morning Bell circular: - Continued to fast-track government control of...

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Is Obama closing GOP-leaning car dealers?

There appears to be a side to the Chrysler bankruptcy that has the look of an ugly partisanship not seen in this town since Tricky Dick Nixon was in the White House composing his enemies list and checking it twice every night while watching the evening TV newscast. Bloggers on the Right side of the Blogosphere are up in arms over data suggesting that President Obama’s White House auto industry potentates are targeting for closure Chrysler dealers with records of contributing either to Republicans like John McCain or to other Democrats in the 2008 presidential primary. Posts at RedState, Reliapundit, American Thinker, Gateway Pundit, Joey Smith and Doug Ross pointed intitially at...

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96 senators post their earmarks online

One of the unsung heroes in the nation's capital is Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation. Bill is a former investigative reporter and has for the past three years at Sunlight been a leader in the trans-partisan movement for greater transparency and accountability in government. He didn't get much sleep Tuesday night because he spent most of it tracking down what every current member of the U.S. Senate did to satisfy a requirement that they post their earmark rquests on their official web sites. The rules don't say how those requests are to be formatted, so, as Allison found in doing the same exercise with House members, there are almost as many ways to post senators' earmarks as there...

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Florida is Ground Zero in struggle for GOP's heart and soul

Marco Rubio versus Charlie Crist. Sounds like a heavyweight prize fight, doesn’t it? The primary battle for the GOP nomination for the Senate seat of the retiring Mel Martinez of Florida promises to be a monumental slugfest with nothing less at stake than the future heart and soul of the Republican Party. Rubio, the former speaker of the Florida House of Representatives, is the son of parents who were Cuban exiles. At age 38, he is one of the youngest Cuban-Americans ever to rise to a position of power in Florida state government. His rise was fueled by hard work and a willingness to speak forcefully on behalf of conservative principles and programs. He supported Gov. Jeb...

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Editorial Guidelines for Oped Contributors

General Observations: Oped submissions should be emailed to threads@dcexaminer.com as a Word file, 12-point Times New Roman, single-spaced within paragraphs, double-spaced between, maximum length of 350 words. Yes, I know that’s awfully short, but clarity, which is the sire of understanding, is also the son of brevity. The Washington Examiner follows the AP Stylebook. Be sure to include a one-line author credit at the end. Authors who thoroughly edit their work for style, spelling and grammar prior to submission will be significantly advantaged over those too lazy or careless to do so. No matter what your college English instructor or former copy desk chief told you, split...

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GOP in wilderness because leaders left Reagan legacy behind years ago

Excuse me, Jeb Bush, but your daddy and brother already helped push the Republican Party beyond “the good old days” of its Reagan legacy, and we all see how well that’s been working for the GOP since 2006, don’t we. And excuse me, Gen. Colin Powell, but which election did you win because “Americans are looking for more government in their lives, not less …”? Forgive me if I seem a bit cranky here, but, being a card-carrying Reaganaut since 1964, it’s hard not to be whenever the national media lectures the GOP on how to regain voters’ trust. Inevitably, the advice involves abandonment of Ronald Reagan and the core conservative...

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Obama’s transparency is clear as mud

Other than the blinding speed with which he abandoned the moderate image so crucial to his winning the White House, President Obama has done little since Jan. 20 to surprise anybody who listened closely to what he said on the 2008 campaign trail. But Obama’s actions in one area are surprising and disappointing. He promised the most transparent government ever, yet in a mere 100 days, he’s made it extraordinarily difficult to find basic information about economic recovery spending. How can this be, considering the landmark Federal Financial Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 was more commonly known as “Coburn-Obama,” after Obama and Tom Coburn, the...

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Tea Party protesters show same dissident spirit that Burke saw in 1775

He was known as the “Dinner Bell of the House of Commons,” thanks to his lack of rhetorical eloquence, but Edmund Burke’s powerful arguments against the French Revolution saved Britain and made him one of the 18th Century’s most influential statesmen. Burke was a friend of the American Revolution, however, and his speech on reconciliation with the colonies in 1775 speaks directly to two issues around which our increasingly polarized politics revolve - whether America is a “Christian nation” and the Tea Party Protests. President Barack Obama summoned the former to the public debate with his comment last week in Turkey that “although…we...

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Not a Christian nation, Mr. President?

President Obama told a news conference in Turkey last week that America “is not a Christian nation,” thus demonstrating that it is indeed possible for a Harvard Law graduate to be correct strictly as a matter of law and otherwise completely out to lunch on the facts of history. Here’s how our chief executive put it: “Although…we have a large Christian population, we do not consider ourselves a Christian nation, or a Jewish nation, or a Muslim nation. We consider ourselves a nation of citizens who are bound by ideals and a set of values.” Technically, Obama was right. America’s government provides no official support for any particular...

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Congress may give Obama power to shut down the Internet, ignore privacy laws

Civil libertarians were aghast when news leaked in 2002 of a Pentagon research program designed to give national security officials advance warning of terrorists attacks by analyzing trillions of bytes of computer data in search of tell-tale activities in everyday life. Known initially as the Total Information Awareness (TIA) program in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the name was subsequently changed to Terrorism Information Awareness in a bid to blunt the explosion of negative publicity occasioned by TIA’s exposure. People feared civil liberties abuses would inevitably follow giving government security bureaucrats unlimited access to supposedly private...

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Too late to save Detroit from the Washington wink-winks

Puzzled by politics these days? No need to be. Just follow the wink-winks and the click-clicks, and keep in mind that modern politics is a legalized con game in which politicians and bureaucrats are the scammers and we taxpayers are the marks. Click-clicks are heard more frequently these days, especially if you drive in the District of Columbia or Maryland, thanks to the red light and speed cameras that are proliferating like rabbits because politicians smell easy cash to be had. These cameras automatically photograph vehicles running red lights or exceeding speed limits, then issue tickets to the owners. Guilt is presumed, not because the owners were actually driving, but because their...

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Webbs would cheer Obama’s bid to normalize nationalization

Somewhere First Baron Passfield and his devoted wife Beatrice are beaming at the latest move by the American president who is systematically applying their strategy of methodically burying individual freedom one gradual step at a time. Not familiar with Passfield? He was better known to Edwardian England as Sidney Webb, the man who, with Beatrice and playwright George Bernard Shaw, made the Fabian Society the icon of socialist gradualism. The Webbs also founded the London School of Economics, and stoutly defended Stalin’s brand of Soviet Communism to their dying days in the late 1940s. But what they are best known for is the concept of Fabian patience, the idea that a western...

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When America becomes Obamaland

There is one certainty about the shape of things to come if President Barack Obama wins approval of his extraordinarily ambitious proposals to remake America: We won’t recognize our country when he’s finished. - York: Candidate Obama vs. President Obama - Mason: Stumbling along the learning curve - Carney: AIG mess clips the wings of high-flying Obama team - Tapscott: When America becomes Obamaland - York: Obama pushes his agenda, deficits be damned - Stirewalt: Politics as hardball, not as higher calling - Tapscott: Bush spent big, Obama spends even bigger...

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Tea Party protests are flash crowds of gathering movement to stop Obama

Thousands of Americans in dozens of cities large and small, coast to coast have assembled recently to protest President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus spending, proposed budget deficits and tax hikes on small business and other entrepreneurs. But odds are that the vast majority of people who depend solely on the mainstream media’s print and broadcast giants for their news know little or nothing about the protests. Why? Because the MSMers regularly miss significant political news when it is happening right in front of them, thanks to the ideological blinders that make so many otherwise intelligent people in those newsrooms think the only real news happens in Washington...

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Obama's strategy requires the perpetual crisis his economic policy produces

Lost in the hue and cry over Rush Limbaugh’s hope that President Barack Obama “fails” is this key fact – it’s the Chief Executive, not the mighty mouth of Talk Radio, who sees an opportunity in the nation’s suffering to change America. Whatever one thinks of Limbaugh, he’s not the one trying to use rising unemployment, a plummeting stock market, the alleged impending collapse of the financial system and a host of other fears about the future to advance his policy agenda. White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel gave the game away back in November with his observation that: "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. What I mean...

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Charities get offer they can't refuse

For years, political shakedown artists like Jesse Jackson and the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) have used demonstrations, boycotts and racial intimidation to dragoon millions of dollars, sub-prime mortgages and other assets from local and state officials, Fortune 500 corporations and federal bureaucrats. Now an aggressive group of non-profit activists using a somewhat more sophisticated version of the same approach is targeting the billions of private dollars given annually by tax-exempt philanthropic foundations and charities to groups and organizations spanning the spectrum of human need and improvement. Rather than simply flinging...

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The two Donna Hanks and the crisis of the Mainstream Media

Which Donna Hanks of Baltimore is the real one - the hapless foreclosure victim portrayed by Washington Post reporter David Montgomery or the chronic-debtor-turned radical political activist uncovered by blogger Michelle Malkin? The difference here illustrates much about why the Mainstream Media has lost its credibility and consequently is in desperate financial straits these days. First, there is Montgomery’s version of Hanks, which appeared Oct. 2, 2008, in an article on the Post’s C-Section front headlined “the foreclosees protest an American Dream turned nightmare.” Hanks was a “foreclosee,” Montgomery’s label for people who lost their...

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A Potemkin village on the Left called 'Transparency'

It seems like only yesterday that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were promising “the most open and honest Congress ever” in American history. Reid and Pelosi – as well as President Barack Obama – have flooded the airwaves in recent years with fine-sounding words extolling transparency in government, but their actions on the $787 billion economic stimulus package prove the hollowness of their talk. Somebody, someday – probably an out-of-work newspaper journalist - will write the definitive “Gucci Gulch” edition of the story behind passage of this legislative monstrosity. One indicator of the author’s...

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Obama is headed for a one-term presidency

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than a month ago, Barack Obama was sworn-in as chief executive amid historic promises of “change we can believe in.” But there won’t be a second Obama term if he doesn’t admit that, no matter how adroitly he wraps himself in Reaganesque rhetoric, Leviathan is no better suited for 2009 than it was in 1933 for FDR. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the New Deal’s Big Government spending failed to end the Great Depression. That is clear to anybody who reads Paul Johnson’s masterful chapter on the New Deal in “Modern Times.” Or Amity Schlaes’ superb “The Forgotten Man: A New History of the...

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Congress making rotten 'sausage' with economic stimulus package

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-CA, told a C-SPAN audience yesterday that drafting the Senate’s version of an economic stimulus bill is “like making sausage.” Taxpayers might want to add the word “rotten” to Boxer’s formulation. Despite the fact several now former colleagues are in jail for earmark-related crimes and strong public dissatisfaction with earmarks and the congressional culture of corruption such spending encourages, both chambers of Congress are larding up legislation faster than ever. The House-passed $825 billion economic stimulus bill was chock full of pork barrel spending, so much so that the Congressional Budget Office estimated that only...

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Audit them all and make the results public

Tom Daschle prudently withdrew his nomination as Secretary of Health and Human Services, but that’s not the most important tax story on Washington politicians, influence peddlers and lobbyists. People typically believe big guys in this town are treated one way and little guys another, usually far more harshly. Too often, those people are absolutely right. Daschle was only the most visible of President Barack Obama’s nominees with serious tax problems. Nancy Killefer was going to be Obama’s “performance czar” until we found out she forgot to pay payroll taxes on her household help. And Timothy Geithner failed to pay $34,000 in taxes over a four-year period...

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Editorial Guidelines for Oped Contributors

Editorial Guidelines for Oped Contributors to The Washington Examiner Mark Tapscott Editorial Page Editor threads@dcexaminer.com General Observations: Oped submissions should be emailed as a Word file, 12-point Times New Roman, single-spaced within paragraphs, double-spaced between, maximum length of 500 words. Yes, I know that’s awfully short, but clarity, which is the sire of understanding, is also the son of brevity. The Washington Examiner follows the AP Stylebook. Be sure to include a one-line author credit at the end. Authors who thoroughly edit their work for style, spelling and grammar prior to submission will be significantly advantaged over those too lazy or...

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Coal Lies From A Progressive Fable Factory

You’ve no doubt seen the TV spot where the guy in the hard hat steps through an industrial-looking door into the desert and begins mocking “clean coal,” which he says doesn’t exist. This clever advocacy campaign is courtesy of the imaginatively misnamed Reality Coalition of the Alliance for Climate Protection, League of Conservation Voters, National Wildlife Federation, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Sierra Club. Despite the millions of private donors, lucrative investments and big endowments received by members of the Reality Coalition, your tax dollars helped finance some of its richest members. The NRDC, for instance, got a $400,333 federal...

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Obama’s policy crossroad will be on the web

Barack Obama will either be the last liberal president of the 20th century or the first Internet chief executive of the 21st century. It will become clear earlier rather than later in his White House tenure which he will be. It’s all in the boundary costs and it will split Democratic Party politics right down the middle. What in blazes are boundary costs, you ask? In business, a basic management question is always whether it makes more sense to do something required to produce a product within or without the firm. In the 20th century model of centralized organization for mass production, vertical integration produced economies of scale that made it cheaper to do as much as...

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Then They Wonder Why They Aren't Believed

You can learn a lot just by observing things like the juxtaposition of events as they unfold here in the nation's capital (there must be a Yogi-ism in that somewhere). Take, for example, revelations about Joe the Plumber's talk on the campaign bus with John McCain, the looming approval of the Dulles Rail Project, and the 11,391 "infrastructure projects" the nation's mayors want Uncle Sam to fund. Politico reports that Joe was "appalled" by answers he got from McCain about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout then being debated. McCain and other bailout supporters said it would restore confidence in the nation's banking system and get credit flowing again. It has...

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Isn't This Where We Came in 30 Years Ago?

It was at a somber gathering of conservative poo-bahs at The Heritage Foundation two years ago where I first heard the question posed in the headline. It was Richard Viguerie's ironic response to Paul Weyrich's weary observation that the GOP desperately needed new ideas and leaders in the wake of the Democrats' regaining power in Congress. Surveying the doleful results of yesterday's election this morning reminded me of that scene, as well as how similar things look today, compared to how they looked for the GOP on the mornings-after LBJ's 1964 landslide and Jimmy Carter's 1976 victory over Jerry Ford. When I first came to Washington, D.C. in 1976 to be assistant editor of Conservative...

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Sarah Palin is the real rebel in the race

Oh, this is going to be fun, watching the myrmidons of conventional wisdom getting their well-dressed derrieres kicked from one end of America to the other between now and November. No, not Achilles and his Thessalians at Troy. I’m talking about members of America’s political class. You know the type I mean — the politically correct, mostly Ivy League moderates and liberals pronouncing ex cathedra from Boston-Los Angeles-New York-San Francisco-Washington who dominate the mainstream media, the academy and foundations, and other establishment outposts of sophisticated opinion. These folks lecture the rest of us about how to run the country; they are keepers of the...

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Why this conservative wanted to vote for Obama …. but won’t

Some of my friends on the Right are puzzled whenever I say I’d like to vote for Barack Obama, while others nod in agreement. As the Democrats convene in Denver, it is becoming clearer by the hour why there is no way I will do so. For many months, Obama’s appeal to this Reaganaut since the night of The Speech in 1964 consisted of two elements, one personal and the other a consideration that transcends any particular political or ideological consideration. The first can be summarized in two words - Coburn-Obama, aka the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006. That’s the landmark bill that resulted in the establishment of a Googlelike, searchable...

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RINO disease strikes again, this time on energy

I was there the first time Republican Sen. Lindsay Graham, the senior senator from South Carolina, sabotaged his party just when it seemed to be on the brink of achieving a major victory on behalf of conservative reform. This particular moment came during a panel at the Heritage Foundation, following President Bush’s re-election victory over Sen. John Kerry in November 2004. Bush won on a platform that included his pledge to push Congress to reform Social Security by giving every American the option of investing a percentage of his or her government retirement funds in a private account. Social Security provides about on average about a 1 percent return on investment, compared with...

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Mark Tapscott: Bush should use the ‘mother of all vetoes’

Democrats in Congress appear determined to force a showdown with President Bush this week on the budget, daring him to veto their $520 billion omnibus spending bill with funding for all major federal departments and agencies, plus token funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.This has "bad plan" written all over it because it puts Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a losing position eerily similar to that in which then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and new House Speaker Newt Gingrich found themselves with......

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New leadership for the GOP or a new party?

Doomsayers always appear when one of the two major political parties suffers an epic electoral disaster. It happened to the Republicans after the Goldwater and Nixon debacles in 1964 and 1974, and to the Democrats following the Contract with America insurgency in 1994. Obviously, both parties came back strongly from those defeats.But there are three factors that may make it different today with the GOP. This terrible trio could render......

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There they go again, stifling free speech

Congressman Michael Capuano probably means well – and Big Government enthusiasts always try to sound like they really do – but I've never met the man, so I don't know for sure.What I do know for sure – because the Massachusetts Democrat said so himself - is Capuano thinks the rest of us are too stupid to figure out that a YouTube video of him or one of his esteemed Continued...

 

Past was Spitzer’s prologue

Former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s blindingly fast fall from grace was portrayed by many of his media sympathizers as a temporary slip in judgment, an unfortunate exception to the high ethical standards he exemplified himself and demanded of others.In fact, nobody who closely watched Spitzer’s monumental displays of arrogance, recurring abuses of office and flagrant hypocrisy during his near-meteoric rise to power beginning in 1994 could have been surprised when Spitzer confessed to his February tryst with a high-priced whore in Washington’s stately old Mayflower Hotel.Not coincidentally, a few......

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Some ‘little guys’ treated better than others

When the New York Common Fund and CalSTRS won a record-setting $3.2 billion settlement in 1999 from the Cendant Corp. it included $262 million for the lawyers, including those from two lead plaintiff counsel firms, Bernstein Litowitz & Grossman, and Barrack, Rodos and Bacine.But a young lawyer with the city of New York was upset by the settlement, which worked out to an hourly rate of $10,861 per hour. She asked the court to re-examine the work of the lawyers. The battle that ensued ended up in federal appeals court......

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Terayon silence shielded donors

It was a case that epitomized the worst of the securities class-action lawsuit abuses of the 1990s.Federal Judge Marilyn Hall Patel became concerned after a 2003 newspaper article reported that a suit she was hearing — In re Terayon Communications Systems Inc. Securities Litigation — was filed the day after Terayon’s stock plunged 26 percent following what looked like a systematic campaign by a plaintiff in the case to drive the share price down.Patel had previously approved Milberg Weiss, the controversial New York law firm, as lead counsel and Cardinal......

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Mark Tapscott: ‘Leave Us Alone’ reminds that demographics favor the Right

Grover Norquist is a formidable political strategist in part because he listens closely to smart people like Arthur C. Brooks. That’s one of many reasons why Norquist’s new book, "Leave Us Alone: Getting government’s hands off our money, our guns, our lives," could be the most prescient political work of 2008.Brooks, of the Maxwell School......

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Mark Tapscott: Bloomberg boomlet is old news in Internet age

Nothing but old news will be made next week at the University of Oklahoma when remnants of the last century’s New Deal model politics gather to crown themselves with the mantle of an independent third force in the 2008 presidential campaign.Without New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the meeting organized by former Sens. David Boren of Continued...

 

Mark Tapscott: Went to court and all they got was a lousy coupon

Funny slogans come and go rather swiftly in popular culture, but it wasn’t that long ago when a familiar sight was somebody wearing a message along the lines of "I did such-and-such and all I got was this lousy T-shirt." Thanks to a bunch of class-action liability lawyers, an estimated 1 million people living in four states took Ford Motor Co. to court because their Explorers allegedly tended to roll over, and all they got in return was a......

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Bush should use the 'mother of all vetoes'

Democrats in Congress appear determined to force a showdown with President Bush this week on the budget, daring him to veto their $520 billion omnibus spending bill with funding for all major federal departments and agencies, plus token funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. This has "bad plan" written all over it because it puts Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in a losing position eerily similar to that in which then-Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and new House Speaker Newt Gingrich found themselves......

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Mark Tapscott: Right Mitt speech, wrong place

Republican presidential contender Mitt Romney has often said he thinks he should give the JFK speech — explaining why people should not vote against him because of his Mormon religion — but his aides advised against it.Now, the former Massachusetts governor is smart to follow his own instincts in deciding it’s time to deliver the speech, Thursday, Dec. 6, at the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas. He’s wise to give the speech but doing it before an audience of anything but born-again evangelicals in the South is......

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Mark Tapscott: Congress IS the train wreck

Google "train wreck in Congress," and the first links appearing are two journalists discussing Capitol Hill’s inability to resolve debates about President Bush’s federal budget proposal, FISA, Pentagon spending, energy legislation and even digital TV.They’re missing the point. Congress itself is the train wreck.Only a couple of the dozen annual appropriations bills required to keep the federal government’s doors openhave been passed and sent to President Bush, which means the mother of all omnibus spending resolutions is right around the congressional corner.No previous Congress has arrived at the weekend before......

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Mark Tapscott: Congress giving democracy a bad name

Evidence continues to pile up that Congress, as it is currently constituted, is making itself useless as an effective tool for carrying out the clear will of theAmerican people.Most Americans want Congress to stop the waste and corruption spawned by anonymous earmarks that allow senators and representatives to send tax dollars to themselves, family and staff members, favored special interests and campaign donors.But not only has this Congress refused to heed the public on earmarks — as seen in how majorities of both parties gutted transparency provisions of the ethics......

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Mark Tapscott: Spitzer kept more than $40,000 in Milberg Weiss contributions

Shortly before he was elected New York’s governor last year, Eliot Spitzer made headlines by returning $124,445 worth of campaign contributions he had received since 2003 from lawyers associated with the then just-indicted Milberg Weiss law firm.At the time, Spitzer’s spokesman claimed that he and his campaign strategists "held ourselves to a higher standard" regarding acceptance of contributions. The returned Milberg Weiss funds were hardly missed, however, as Spitzer raised more than $20 million in campaign cash on the way to a landslide victory last November running on a "Clean......

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Mark Tapscott: Firm gets dose of own medicine

Not only do lawyers for Milberg Weiss lawfirm have to worry about a 20-count federal indictment, but now they also must defend against a class-action lawsuit much like those the firm specialized in filing against others for decades.The suit was filed earlier this month in federal District Court in New York by six former shareholders represented in three major cases in which Milberg Weiss was lead counsel. Also named in the suit is the firm of Lerach Coughlin & Robbins LLP, a California offshoot of Milberg Weiss.Plaintiffs in the suit......

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Mark Tapscott: Can a law firm be a criminal enterprise?

When Justice Department lawyers filed a 20-count indictment of the New York-based Milberg Weiss Bershad & Schulman LLP, it was the first time they had ever used federal anti-racketeering laws against a law firm, claiming it was a criminal enterprise.But then, for more than 20 years, Milberg Weiss had often been among the key players in unprecedented court cases, but always on the plaintiff side, not as defendants.The May 2006 indictment following a Los Angeles grand jury probe alleged that for two decades, senior members of the widely celebrated firm......

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Mark Tapscott: Who will play requiem for the GOP in Congress?

W atching Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ramrod through Congress this week the "Honest Leadership and Open Government" reform bill they negotiated in secret makes it difficult to believe the GOP will regain a majority in Congress anytime soon.This is not because Reid and Pelosi are particularly gifted operators. They got lucky last November by being the only alternative game in town as GOPers blinded by a dozen years in power got their just desserts from voters fed up with tax-paid corruption and con games.Now,......

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Mark Tapscott: America needs a transpartisan citizens political movement

Neither Democrats versus Republicans nor liberals versus conservatives will define 21st-century politics. Citizen legislators versus career politicians will. The citizen legislators will win by embracing the Internet and the wisdom of crowds.Politicians in both major parties who repeatedly seek re-election to keep "bringing home the bacon" while feathering their own nests are careerists. Candidates in both parties who bring the real world to Washingtonto clean it up — and who can’t wait to return home — are citizen legislators.Careerists thrive on the power, perks and prestige that come with being......

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Mark Tapscott: Which part of ‘stop’ don’t they understand?

Have you noticed yet how so many Washington politicians and bureaucrats are ignoring the last election?Voters tossed Republicans out of congressional power last November and gave it to Democrats promising to clean up the culture of corruption epitomized by anonymous earmarks, well-connected lobbyists and other influence peddlers.But the truth is nothing much really has changed and isn’t likely to anytime soon, regardless of which party is in power. Many in the Washington establishment — Democrats and Republicans, elected officials and career civil servants — are determined to keep right on......

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Mark Tapscott: For more information on earmarks and federal spending

There is a growing list of Web sites with valuable resources for readers who want to know more about federal spending in general and earmarks in particular, and who want to do something about them. Although it’s not fully operational yet, the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006 mandated creation of a Google-like Internet database of most federal spending. The U.S. Office of Management and Budget is building the FFATA spending database. A preliminary informational Web site is up now at www.federalspending.gov/comments/comments.do.In the meantime, OMB Watch, a Washington-based......

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Mark Tapscott: Andrews, Floreen leading on the road more traveled

It’s confession time, folks. I did Nancy Floreen wrong two weeks ago. I mistakenly included her among Washington region politicians who didn’t respond to The Washington Examiner’s request for comment on a controversial new book on congestion. Instead of being among what I called the ostriches on the Montgomery and Fairfax county councils who resolutely refused to read and comment for the record on the book, "The Road More Traveled," Floreen was actually the first official to offer her reaction. The Examiner provided review copies of the book to each......

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Mark Tapscott: Too many ostriches on Fairfax, Montgomery boards

It’s getting easier to see why traffic is jammed in Fairfax and Montgomery counties when local officials responsible for transportation decisions act like ostriches, with their heads firmly buried in the sand. Phil Andrews of Gaithersburg was the only one of the 19 members of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors and the Montgomery County Council who was willing to speak his mind about a controversial new book that exposes most of what passes for smart transportation policy — "more mass transit, force people out of their cars" — as......

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Mark Tapscott: Pork-stuffed Iraq bill shows Bush weakness on earmarks

President Bush vows to veto an Iraq emergency supplemental funding bill if it comes to his desk stuffed with pork unrelated to keeping U.S. troops in Iraq properly armed, clothed and fed.But Bush may have undercut his ability to shape the Iraq bill and indeed all other spending measures with a State of the Union promise. You will recall that Bush condemned earmarks and challenged Congress to work with him to cut them in half.Earmarks are spending orders anonymous members of Congress slip into bills and committee reports behind the......

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Mark Tapscott: They aren’t laughing now about the Internet and government transparency

There were more than a few skeptical chuckles seven years ago when I first wrote in a Knight Ridder column that posting federal contracts and other spending documents on the Internet could restore public confidence in government by making it more transparent.They aren’t laughing anymore. Using the Internet to foster greater transparency and accountability in government has not only become one of the few points of agreement between liberals and conservatives, it has even become official government policy.Exhibit A here, of course, is passage last year of Coburn-Obama, aka......

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Mark Tapscott: Will what’s left of freedom of speech survive 2007?

Joe Smith of Smith & Sons Plumbing has been told by the government to remove his "Hillary for President" bumper sticker from the company pickup truck because he failed to report it as an independent expenditure. Smith could face jail or heavy fines if he refuses.Not familiar with that incident? Don’t worry, it’s fictitious. Sen. Hillary Clinton hasn’t even officially announced her campaign for president, right? But the Joe Smith incident is based on something that really did happen, something that ought to make your blood boil. If you......

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Mark Tapscott: Pelosi preparing new shackles for free speech

Incoming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has cooked up with Public Citizen’s Joan Claybrook a "lobbying reform" that actually protects rich special interests and activists millionaires while clamping new shackles on citizens’ First Amendment rights to petition Congress and speak their minds.Pelosi tried earlier this year to move H.R. 4682, the "Honest Leadership and Open Government Act of 2006," which is now cited by Public Citizen’s Web site as the vehicle it is helping the incoming speaker to craft for the new Congress. The proposal Claybrook is helping craft for introduction......

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ACORN head claims a home is lost every 13 seconds; here's rest of the story

Bertha Lewis, national president of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN), issued a news release yesterday repeating a claim she has previously made that "every 13 seconds another American family loses its home." Curious about how that figure was calculated, I called the contact person on the release, Austin King, director of the ACORN Financial Justice Center. "Oh, we got that figure from the Center for Responsible Lending," he said. "We have been using that figure for about five months now." When asked if he had double-checked the accuracy of the figure, King said "we've ball-parked it, but I didn't do the numbers. They maybe...

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Joe Kennedy for Senate? Are you kidding me? UPDATED: New Republic's kIrchick nails the Chavez link

Predictably, the push has begun to get a Kennedy into the Senate seat held for lo those many years by Ted Kennedy. The Kennedys favorite newspaper - the Boston Globe - all but annointed Joe in a news story by Frank Phillips that also handily reminded everybody that the seat is, after all, the permanent property of the Kennedy family. Said Philips: "With Massachusetts having paid its final respects to Senator Edward M. Kennedy, the politics of succession begins in earnest this week - candidates will emerge, a race will take shape, and the Kennedy clan will have to reveal whether it wants to keep the seat in the family. "All eyes now are on Joseph P. Kennedy II, the former...

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Society of Environmental Homers protect Gore UPDATED

It's been years since former Vice President Al Gore took questions from journalsts willing to ask challenging and probing questions about either alleged flaws in the evidence for his global warming views or details of his financial interests in the adoption of government policies based on those views. But for at least one question at the annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ), Gore was presented with an opportunity to address his critics and defend his views. Unfortunately, as this video of the encounter shows, not only did Gore do what politicians usually do - evade the question - but his SEJ buddies made sure there would be no followup questions by turning...

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