[Committe Chairman Rep. Darrell] Issa’s panel was discussing the GAO’s biennial report, released this week, on areas with high risk for waste. In its study, Congress’ investigative agency placed the Interior Department’s oversight of oil-and-gas resources on to the list . . .
The study found that Interior’s management of oil-and-gas issues faced challenges in collecting revenue, hiring and training sufficient staff, and in its efforts to reorganize. The department announced last year that it was breaking down what was once known as the Minerals Management Service.
[A] House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing on Thursday to examine ways to trim the budget deficit devolved into a public-vs.-private battle, with Republicans looking to cut bloated federal programs and Democrats blaming not-always-accountable federal contractors.
In a nearly four-hour hearing, committee Republicans and fiscally conservative witnesses listed a host of government programs and offices that should be cut, eliminated, privatized, or more highly scrutinized. Committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., cited the pay and benefits of federal employees while others cited waste in the Recovery Act or billions lost in improper payments through Medicare and Medicaid.
“The president’s [fiscal 2012] budget adds approximately 15,000 employees to the federal payroll at a time when private sector unemployment has remained above 9 percent for the longest duration since the Great Depression,” Issa said.
But Democrats, led by ranking member Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., repeatedly directed the conversation back to federal contractors. Cummings cited the Government Accountability Office’s 2011 High-Risk List, released on Wednesday, which included six programs directly related to federal contracting.
“When you examine all of these together, they have a massive impact, accounting for hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year,” Cummings said. . . .
Thomas Schatz, president of the advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste, called on Congress to defund the Export-Import Bank, which is charged with aiding foreign exchange; the Essential Air Service, which provides subsidies to continue airline service in less populated regions; and the Agriculture Department’s Market Access Program, which helps farmers and growers promote U.S. products overseas.
Schatz also recommended repealing the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires contractors to pay the prevailing wage on federal construction projects costing more than $2,000. “The mandate raises the cost of government projects by 15 percent and costs taxpayers more than $1 billion annually, not including $100 million in administrative costs,” he said.
Others offered even bolder proposals. Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, argued the private sector rather than the government is best-suited to run Amtrak, the U.S. Postal Service and the air traffic control system.
The man in charge of taking back the House for Democrats is talking about rape. When the Republicans took Congress, says Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat, they didn’t focus on creating jobs. “They focused on redefining rape.”
He’s referring to the No Taxpayer Funding for Abortion Act, the first of several bills Republicans introduced to chip away at the unpopular bits of “Obamacare” . . .
“We need to bring out 9 million independent voters,” Israel explains. “If you do a geographic analysis of them, they live in about 37 fairly suburban, moderate districts across the country. Those 9 million independent voters, in those 37 [districts], elected Republicans because Republicans said that they would, on Day One, focus on revitalizing jobs. And what did they do on Day One? They redefined rape. That is not what those independent voters expected from the new Republican majority.”
And guess which target is at the top of the DCCC’s list?
The new members include lots of people who took over suburban districts that had been trending more liberal. The Republicans who won, in most cases, didn’t run on abortion. They got pro-life support—the pro-life Susan B. Anthony List endorsed 14 Republican congressional candidates who took over Democratic seats. But Democrats remain convinced that the new class was never smoked out.
Take Rep. Ann Marie Buerkle, R-N.Y., one of the Democrats’ favorite examples. She started in politics as a spokeswoman for Operation Rescue in the 1980s. She didn’t hide this fact, but when she began running, she said she’d “be really careful not to make this a referendum on abortion.” Her opponent, incumbent Rep. Dan Maffei, tried to make abortion an issue. He lost. And when Buerkle got to Congress she immediately became a prominent pro-life advocate.
Buerkle is a member of the important House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and, as one of her constituents said in a letter to the editor, she is fighting against regulations that business leaders “believe are hindering job creation.”
“Issa to investigate Obama? They must be scared to death of what Issa could learn. They must be scared to death of what Issa could produce, because they’re now out to do what they did to Robert Bork. Go down the list, Robert Bork, Clarence Thomas, any number of people, Ken Starr. Now it is Darrell Issa’s turn.”
— Rush Limbaugh, Wednesday, Feb. 16
The chairman of a House oversight panel issued a broad subpoena Wednesday seeking documents related to a controversial VIP lending program run by Countrywide Financial Corp., with the goal of finding out which public officials benefited.
House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R., Calif.) sent the subpoena to Bank of America Corp. (BAC) , which acquired Countrywide in 2008. Countrywide’s former chief executive, Angelo Mozilo, has long faced allegations that he approved loans for favored borrowers in violation of the company’s lending policies.
The subpoena is Issa’s first as chairman of the oversight panel after Republicans assumed control of the House last month. Issa had clashed in fall 2009 with the committee’s former Democratic Chairman, Rep. Edolphus Towns (D., N.Y.) over whether to investigate the program. Towns ultimately agreed to a narrower subpoena. Towns received two mortgage loans under the program, The Wall Street Journal reported in August 2009. At the time, he contended that he had no knowledge that he was in the program and didn’t receive any special treatment. The loan program, known as “Friends of Angelo,” provided loans at rates and terms more favorable than what Countrywide offered to the general public. Lawmakers have been scrutinizing whether those VIP loans were also aimed at influencing public officials.
“Countrywide orchestrated a deliberate and calculated effort to use relationships with people in high places in order to manipulate public policy and further their bottom line to the detriment of the American taxpayers even at the expense of its own lending standards,” said Issa. “This subpoena will allow us to obtain the information needed to answer the outstanding public interest questions regarding the full size and scope of the VIP program. The American people have a right to know the totality of who participated in the Countrywide’s VIP program and what they did in return for access to it. Our role is to get all of the facts so that the American people can judge for themselves who should be held responsible and accountable.”
The differences between the Issa probe and the limited investigation conducted under Towns’s chairmanship are explained by Politico‘s Jake Sherman:
Last year, the subpoena directed Bank of America to give all documents identifying House members to the House Ethics Committee. This year, the subpoena directs all documents to the Oversight Committee.
Also, whereas last year the committee spared senators — who are governed by their chamber’s ethics panel — this year they will be part of Issa’s probe. Issa’s aides would not say they’ll shield senators who might surface in the probe — last year they said they’d hand documents over to the Senate ethics committee — although they don’t have the authority to punish them.
Behind closed doors on Capitol Hill last week, I asked a Republican source about the investigative efforts of Democratic staffers for the House Oversight Committee. “Honestly?” the source said. “They’re useless.” . . .
Despite the “grave concerns” expressed by Towns and Issa three weeks ago [about the unexpected retirement of the Amtrak IG], however, Republican sources on Capitol Hill have complained that Democratic staffers on the Oversight Committee have not shown much zeal for the investigation. Sources say Democratic staffers have skipped meetings and conference calls to which they were invited by GOP investigators, who are attempting to work with Grassley’s staff in order to prevent unnecessary duplication of efforts. Sharing documents and scheduling interviews with witnesses, allowing Republican and Democratic investigators from both chambers an opportunity to question these witnesses, is a demanding logistical task. And GOP staffers complain that this task seems to be lacking in terms of bipartisanship.
Now with the GOP in the majority, Issa has a much larger investigative staff and, most importantly, wields subpoena power and the chairman’s authority to schedule public hearings. This is going to be the “action” committee to keep an eye on in coming months. Continue reading Darrell Issa: Unintimidated →
In the Alternet article beneath that headline, pseudonymous writer Chauncey De Vega employs a lot of academic “race theory” talk to justify insulting Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain. And when he’s not merely insulting, De Vega is simply wrong:
Let’s consider the routine. First, Cain enters the stage to Motown music. Then Cain feigns swimming after rolling up his sleeves to show them his black skin and how he is a hardworking negro (not like those other ones). Cain bellows in a preacher affected voice and channels the folksy negro down home accent of his late grandpappy.
First, as Duane Lester at All-American Blogger points out, the gesture that De Vega describes as intended “to show them his black skin” was actually Cain doing a “no tricks up my sleeves” gesture like a magician, meant to show that not only was he speaking without a Teleprompter, but he was also speaking extemporaneously — without notes of any kind.
Second, De Vega’s suggestion that Cain’s “down home accent” is an affectation is simply false, as anyone who has listened to Herman Cain’s radio show would know.
Having known Herman Cain since 2007, I can testify that what you see is what you get. And the thousands of people who’ve met Cain at Tea Party rallies and other events would tell you the same thing. This Alternet article was e-mailed to me by my cousin Brian Buchanan with this note:
We all knew it was only a matter of time before it happened. I find it an odd dichotomy that if you disagree with Obama you are a racist but if you agree with Herman Cain then you are only supporting him because he “acts white.” I hope that people are finally waking up to see that the race baiters have cried wolf too many times. I wonder what they think of Allen West.
Exactly, and as Duane Lester writes: “Cain has called for the article to be taken down. In one of those rare instances, I disagree with him. I want them to keep it up. . . . Leave the article up. Sooner or later it can be used to wake someone up to the left’s unnoticed history of racism.”
But if they take down the Alternet article, expect to see a lot more of this type of stuff as support for Cain’s campaign grows: Liberal writers playing armchair psychologist to explain What It Really Means.
UPDATE: Apologies for omitting The Right Sphere from the commentary roundup. By the way, to explain why I was so late getting to this article today: I went down to D.C., got back about 5 p.m., and then took a five-hour nap. I’m still still recovering from “CPAC fever.”
This latest countertemps reminds me of when Rush Limbaugh was denounced for having employed the term “magic negro,” a phrase borrowed from liberal writer David Ehrenstein’s column in the Los Angeles Times. Here’s the “Today” show segment about that ginned-up “controversy”:
Americans are belatedly realizing that Peter Brimelow nailed it when he defined “racist” as “someone who’s winning an argument with a liberal.”
UPDATE III: As background — to show that Herman Cain is no Johnny-come-lately conservative — here is my May 2007 feature article:
Speaking out with a smile Radio host Herman Cain keeps cancer, GOP in line By Robert Stacy McCain THE WASHINGTON TIMES
ATLANTA — Herman Cain laughs a lot, and he has lots to be happy about — including a successful business career and a popular talk radio show. Inside the Atlanta studios of WSB Radio on a recent Saturday, he told his listeners about a local newspaper columnist who wrote that “being a black Republican is not only oxymoronic, it’s simply plain old-fashioned moronic” and singled out Mr. Cain as a “token” and a “sorry opportunist.”
“He forgot – I’ve got a radio show,” Mr. Cain says as he issues an on-air challenge for the columnist to call in, then goes to commercial, laughing all the while.
Such cheerfulness might seem surprising for a man who, in March 2006, was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer that had spread to his liver. After two months of chemotherapy, Mr. Cain underwent surgery in August — doctors removed one-third of his colon and 70 percent of his liver, he says — and then it was another two months of chemotherapy. And he is laughing.
“Now you’re looking at a man who’s cancer-free — and all my liver’s grown back,” says the 61-year-old former executive. But don’t call him a “survivor,” he says. “I’m a winner,” says Mr. Cain, former chief executive officer of the Godfather’s Pizza chain.
A graduate of Atlanta’s Morehouse College, he worked for the Department of the Navy and Coca-Cola before joining the Pillsbury Co. in 1977. When Pillsbury acquired the Burger King restaurant chain, he went to work managing the chain’s operations in the Philadelphia area. His success with Burger King won him appointment in 1986 as president of Godfather’s, another Pillsbury acquisition. He helped turn around the division and then led a management team that bought the chain from Pillsbury.
Now retired from the restaurant business, Mr. Cain keeps busy. He is a member of four corporate boards (including Hallmark Cards and Whirlpool), a member of the Morehouse board of trustees, an author and syndicated columnist, a regular guest on Fox News Channel’s “Cost of Freedom” business program and, most recently, a radio talk-show host, frequently filling in on Atlanta-based Neal Boortz’s syndicated program as well as hosting his own two-hour show each Saturday.
Then there is politics. In 2004, Mr. Cain sought the Senate seat vacated by the retirement of Sen. Zell Miller, Georgia Democrat. In the Republican primary, he placed second to Johnny Isakson, who later won the Senate seat. But Mr. Cain’s outspoken conservatism during the campaign won him many admirers – including Mr. Miller, who wrote the foreword to Mr. Cain’s 2005 book, “They Think You’re Stupid: How Democrats Lost Your Vote and What Republicans Must Do to Keep It.”
What Republicans have done lately doesn’t please Mr. Cain, who expresses the same frustrations that many other conservatives have voiced about the party in recent years.
“They didn’t stick to principles,” he says, when asked why Republicans lost control of Congress in the 2006 elections. He criticizes Republicans in Washington for spending irresponsibly, failing to pass Social Security reform and, especially, not heeding their grass-roots supporters on immigration policy.
“They were not listening to people outside Washington. If they would have listened, they wouldn’t have lost,” says Mr. Cain, explaining that he finds people are eager to tell him their views on political issues.
“I’m like a walking poll. … It’s not scientific, but it’s pretty darned consistent,” he says of what he heard about immigration last year “Republicans were screaming, ‘Secure the borders first.’ ”
Republicans in Washington “are too afraid of their political shadows,” Mr. Cain says. He adds that many of his colleagues on corporate boards are so “disgusted” with Republicans that they have stopped contributing to the party, telling him: “When they start acting like Republicans, I’ll write some more checks.”
Considering the party’s prospects in 2008, he asks, “Where’s the excitement? Where’s the fun? There is none.”
Yet, Mr. Cain is clearly having lots of fun. He performs his two-hour radio show standing up, and provokes a reaction with his criticism of the Rev. Al Sharpton (“He gets away with inciting racial tensions, but doesn’t want to be held accountable.”) and liberals who, he says, use “name-calling … to discourage black people from thinking for themselves.”
Soon, callers fill the phone lines, waiting to share their opinions with Mr. Cain, who keeps smiling and laughing even when talking with angry callers who disagree with him.
Mr. Cain is grateful for simple pleasures such as “watching my grandkids grow up,” he says, recalling the months he spent in treatment after his cancer diagnosis. “I was saying my prayers … and I had a whole lot of people sending up prayers for me,” he says.
“You don’t stop living because you’re fighting cancer. … If everybody stopped living because they were fighting cancer, one-third of the adult population would be sitting home waiting to die,” Mr Cain says, adding that he has no interest in sitting around. “Death’s going to have to catch me, and it’s going to have to run fast.”
Democrats are understandably obsessed with Darrell Issa — he’s built himself up as a one-man investigative machine aimed straight at the Obama presidency.
But a handful of liberal political operatives . . . are taking their anti-Issa passion to a whole new level, launching a nonprofit group, a website and even paid media advertisements aimed at undermining and investigating the rabble-rousing chairmanof the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
They say they’re leaving no stone unturned in digging into Issa’s personal and business history. . . .
The purpose of this new group is to . . . make life difficult for Issa and sow seeds of doubt on his investigations. They plan to run TV advertisements and other paid media in the future, saying they already have a “significant commitment” of cash. . . .
The group will be run by the principals of SCN Strategies, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. . . . One of those deeply involved is Averell “Ace” Smith — who ran Hillary Clinton’s successful 2008 California and Texas primary operations and is known as one of the more cutthroat political operatives in the business.
Dan Newman of SCN Strategies, one of the three people leading the anti-Issa campaign, declines to disclose how much is being spent on the effort or who is bankrolling it . . .
If it weren’t for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.
My first thought: Who anointed Alexander Burns as the Decider?
Why does a liberal columnist for a liberal newspaper get to decide who are the winners and losers at a conservative conference? A little research revealed that Alexander Burns is a graduate of Harvard University, so there’s your answer. Upon receiving his disploma, every Harvard graduate acquires the right to tell the rest of us what to think. And here’s what Alexander Burns (Class of 2008) tells you to think about Herman Cain:
The former Godfather’s Pizza CEO is in a category of his own, even among the obscure candidates of 2012. Cain, who hosted a radio show in Georgia and has never held public office, has traded on his reputation as a dynamic speaker to win attention as a long-shot presidential candidate. Cain didn’t live up to that reputation at CPAC. He had one or two memorable lines, such as: “Stupid people are ruining America.” But one or two middling zingers do not a credible candidate make.
Given his flat performance, Cain’s going to have to work extra-hard going forward to win a place in the 2012 process.
If you watch one speech in its entirety, this may be the one to choose. Herman Cain, so far the only declared candidate for the GOP presidential nomination, stole the show yesterday with his speech in the late afternoon. People left the ballroom saying that he moved them to tears.
As for the “winners/losers” question, permit me to make a suggestion: Wait until April, when we will see the first-quarter Federal Election Commission filings for Herman Cain’s presidential exploratory committee, and see how many donations he got Feb. 11-12.
Someone told me at a reception Saturday night that during and after the CPAC speech there was a “surge” of contributions big and small to the Cain campaign. And you can go give a donation to the Herman Cain campaign right now.
Or you can let Harvard Boy do your thinking for you.
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Despite his Yale Law degree, Professor Reynolds somehow manages to avoid believing that his job is to decide what everybody else should think about everything.
Security at CPAC recognized me when I rolled down to the front row to get a picture. Pretty freaking cool. Ann ended her speech with what every Southern Baptist would recognize as her testimony, and it was 31 flavors of awesome. “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.”
UPDATE III: CPAC straw poll results: Ron Paul 30%, Mitt Romney 23%, everybody else in single digits, including Newt Gingrich 6%, Tim Pawlenty 4%, Michelle Bachmann 4%, Sarah Palin 3% and Herman Cain 2%. Note the names below Cain in the straw poll: Mike Huckabee, Rick Santorum, John Thune, Jon Huntsman and Haley Barbour.
Some have blamed CPAC Fever on Dana Loesch’s leather pants — ?!?! –but we know that a major contributing factor is weakened immune systems, caused by the excitement generated by Herman Cain:
As to the impact of Cain’s speech, I quote Ed Morrissey: “[Cain] stole the show yesterday with his speech in the late afternoon. People left the ballroom saying that he moved them to tears.” Cain drew 10 standing ovations.
