The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Democrats, Republicans Battle in Oversight Committee Hearing

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 7 Comments

The hearing was about a new report from the GAO exposing waste in government:

[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.

Democrats will fight against any cut to any government program anywhere — except the Pentagon:

[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.

Category: Darrell Issa

Democrats Believe Secret to Winning Back Congress Is … Pro-Abortion Voters?

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 15 Comments

Dave Weigel at Slate has the lowdown on their strategy:

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.

Regular readers here know all about Ann Marie Buerkle. Barely two weeks before Election Day, a poll showed her trailing by 12 points, but she won by 567 votes and was the last Republican to clinch victory in the historic mid-term election.

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.”

No GOP freshman is more vulnerable. None will be attacked harder in the 2012 campaign. In fact, Democrats are already running attack ads against her. And the only way she can fight back is if the people who helped get her elected will give now to help fund Ann Marie Buerkle’s re-election campaign. Every $25 or $50 helps.

Category: Abortion, Ann Marie Buerkle, Democrats, Election 2012, New York

Cheesehead Revolution?

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 20 Comments

They elected Ron Johnson to the Senate, elected Scott Walker governor, and elected Reince Priebus as RNC chairman. Now the Wisconsin Republicans have chased Democrats out of the state senate:

Law enforcement officers are searching for Democratic senators boycotting a Senate vote on Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair plan Thursday in an attempt to bring the lawmakers back to the Capitol to allow Republicans to act on the bill.
Stymied by the missing Democrats, Republicans adjourned the Senate Thursday shortly before 5 p.m. and said they would come back Friday morning to try to take up a bill that would cut public employee benefits and most union bargaining rights.
One Democratic senator said that he believed most of the members of his caucus have gone to another state to prevent enough lawmakers from being present in the Senate to take a final vote on the controversial measure. A Democratic source familiar with the senators’ whereabouts said they were at the Clock Tower Resort & Conference Center in Rockford, Ill., but might be leaving soon.
Walker Thursday afternoon called for Democrats to call off their “stunt” and “show up and do the job they’re paid to do.”
“It’s either a matter of making reductions and making modest requests of our government employees or making massive layoffs at a time when we don’t need anyone else laid off,” Walker said.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Jim Hoft reports at Gateway Pundit:

The Rockford Tea Party just chased the Wisconsin democrats out of the Best Western. They just boarded their bus and are leaving the Best Western!

UPDATE II: I’m sure Wisconsin voters will be glad to learn that Team Obama has helped organize the union goons in their state:

The Democratic National Committee’s Organizing for America arm — the remnant of the 2008 Obama campaign — is playing an active role in organizing protests against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s attempt to strip most public employees of collective bargaining rights. . . .
OfA Wisconsin’s field efforts include filling buses and building turnout for the rallies this week in Madison, organizing 15 rapid response phone banks urging supporters to call their state legislators, and working on planning and producing rallies, a Democratic Party official in Washington said.

UPDATE III: Important background from Reason‘s Tim Cavanaugh:

The teachers union in a state whose public schools get solid C-minus grades in state-by-state rankings have decided to take a break from failing to teach children and bring busloads of Ms. Krabappels up to Madison as well. At least 15 school districts around the state reportedly cancelled classes today as teachers declined to show up.
Wisconsin’s budget standoff is drawing national attention, and like so many states where demands for increasing public largesse and special privileges for government employees are getting louder, the Badger State is out of money. Before taking office, Walker, a Republican, was told by his Democratic predecessor Jim Doyle that without spending cuts beyond what Walker has proposed, the deficit could go from $2.2 billion to $3.3 billion.

UPDATE IV: Jimmie Bise Jr.:

This is The Week that Should
End Public Sector Unions

Category: Unions, Wisconsin

Bahrain Burning, Silver Soaring

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 11 Comments

Trouble in the Sunni kingdom in the Persian Gulf that is home to the U.S. Navy’s 5th Fleet:

MANAMA, Bahrain — Troops and tanks locked down the capital of this tiny Gulf kingdom after riot police swinging clubs and firing tear gas smashed into demonstrators, many of them sleeping, in a pre-dawn assault Thursday that uprooted their protest camp demanding political change. . . .
Foreign Minister Khalid Al Khalifa justified the crackdown as necessary because the demonstrators were “polarizing the country and” pushing it to the “brink of the sectarian abyss.”
Speaking to reporters after meeting with his Gulf counterparts, he also said the violence was “regrettable.”

Here’s a video report from Euro News:

Raw footage from Russia Today:

Instability in the Middle East is bad for business: 

Qatar benchmark stock index fell to the lowest this year and Bahrain’s 2020 dollar bond dropped to a record on concern unrest in the Persian Gulf may spread after protests escalated in Bahrain. . . .
Markets in the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Oman are closed today for an Islamic holiday, while Saudi Arabia’s is shut for the weekend.
Investors are “de-risking due to the events in Bahrain mainly,” said Mahdi Mattar, head of research at Abu Dhabi-based CAPM Investment PJSC, an investment banking company. “Both local and the few international investors might want to reduce their exposure” amid the unrest and as most markets are shut.

Instability always creates a market demand for security. Gold hit a five-week high today, but the real hot action is in silver:

Silver hit a session high of $31.38 an ounce and was up 2.4 percent at $31.37 an ounce in afternoon trading.
The gold-silver ratio — the number of silver ounces needed to buy an ounce of gold — fell to a low of 44, a key area near its lowest level in five years, as silver has outperformed gold. Year to date, silver was nearly 2 percent higher, swinging to positive territory with Thursday’s rally, while gold was still 3 percent lower.
The prospect of rising inflation, not only in areas currently affected by the phenomenon such as China and India, but also in the United States and Europe, has become an oft-cited reason to hold gold in recent weeks.
“The mood of the market is that an inflation story, a war story, an Egypt story, a Bahrain story will all be bullish for gold, because the market is looking for those at the moment,” said ANZ Bank analyst Peter Hillyard.

In 1986, you could buy silver for $6 an ounce. It’s now trading at five times that price.

Category: Bahrain, Economics

VIDEO: Fun With Fireworks

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 2 Comments

Watch this low-breaking shell set off car alarms:

Being a serious fireworks buff, let me explain what appears to have happened here: The shell was either fired from the wrong size mortar or else the lift charge was just weak, resulting in the “break” being at least 50 feet too low for safety.

Judging from the size of the break, I’d say that was at least a 3-inch shell, which is much larger than the largest consumer mortar shells (1.75-inch) sold in the U.S. There are consumer 3-inch shells, but they’re sold either in pre-loaded #500 tubes or in the so-called NOB (“nine on a board”) 500-gram finale racks, to avoid the risk of injury from idiots trying to re-load a “hot” tube.

The risk of injury from consumer fireworks, when used according to proper safety instructions, is really quite small, as I explained in a 2006 Reason magazine article, “Light Fuse, Get Away.” And as it’s now less than five months until the Fourth of July, its probably time for me to start planning my next big purchase for the annual Alabama show.

That’s the 2009 show. In 2008, I wrote an American Spectator article about my preparations for the show at Camp FUBAR on Lake Weiss.

Hit the tip jar — this year’s show is gonna be awesome.

Category: Fireworks, Video

Nirs Rosen, Moonbat

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 8 Comments

“Certainly, if the goal of the war is to reduce the threat from this group called al-Qaeda — which may not even exist anymore — then nobody has explained why increasing American occupation in Afghanistan, where you don’t even have al-Qaeda, is going to help weaken al-Qaeda . . . A couple hundred guys who got lucky and crashed a few towers with planes — not really a big threat. . . . September 11 wasn’t really a big deal.”
— Nirs Rosen, January 2010

This is the guy whose Tweets about “war monger” Lara Logan cost him his fellowship at New York University, but the question I have is, “Whose idea was it to award him a fellowship in the first place?”

What the hell is going on at NYU? This guy is a disgusting wad of hate, as Jeffrey Goldberg explains:

Nir Rosen, the journalist who infamously mocked Lara Logan . . . has been saying hugely outrageous things for years. . . . He is sympathetic to the Taliban; he thinks al Qaeda poses no threat to America; he wishes Americans would “get over” 9/11; and he thinks Israel is an “abomination” that should be destroyed.

Goldberg’s readers called attention to an article Rosen wrote in 2002, at age 25, calling Israel a land of “bloody nationalism, paranoid identity and violent religion” and actively wishes for the “punitive bombing of Tel Aviv.”

Given that sort of sentiment, how would you expect Rosen to explain his comments about Lara Logan?

A part of me was bothered by how celebrities, especially white ones, get so much attention, and before I realized it was a sexual assault I was sort of anticipating a return to the old theme about unleashed brown natives attacking a white woman.

In other words, Rosen was expressing his contempt for white “celebrities” and his concern about stereotyping of “brown natives.” Never mind that “brown natives attacking a white woman” was, in fact, what happened in Cairo — Rosen cares more for the propaganda value of the news than he cares for the unfortunate facts.

Rosen’s quote dismissing the threat from al-Qaeda and saying 9/11 “wasn’t really a big deal” comes from this Jan. 15, 2010, Russia Today interview via Fire Andrea Mitchell:

Category: Crime, Egypt, Israel, Liberals, Racism, Terrorism

The Return of Stagflation?

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 11 Comments

The inevitable effects of Keynesianism are beginning to make themselves felt:

U.S. core consumer prices rose at the fastest pace in more than a year in January, indicating a long period of slowing inflation had run its course. The Labor Department said on Thursday its core Consumer Price Index, which excludes food and energy costs, increased 0.2 percent — the largest gain since October 2009. The index rose 0.1 percent in December. The increase, which was above economists’ expectations for a 0.1 percent gain, was driven by rises in the cost of apparel, shelter and airline fares.

More “unexpected” news:

Stocks headed lower Thursday morning after the government said first-time applications for unemployment benefits jumped more than expected last week.
The Labor Department said Thursday morning that the number of people filing for unemployment benefits rose to 410,000, up 25,000 from the previous week. That was more than economists expected.

So inflation is back in the picture and unemployment is rising again. Does the phrase “Carteresque” come to mind?

And here’s Jake Tapper causing trouble at the White House press briefing: “The president seems to think that that borrowing money to pay the interest on the debt is not adding to the debt. I don’t understand that math.”

Hey, Jake, have you ever considered running for president? Because evidently an inability to understand math is a major qualification for the job.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers!


Category: Economics

Darrell Issa: Unintimidated

Posted on | February 17, 2011 | 9 Comments

“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

As couple days ago, I blogged about the Left’s smear campaign against Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) the newly-installed chairman of the House Oversight Committee. It’s apparent that these tactics won’t stop Issa, who has just subpoenaed records relating to the Countrywide mortgage scandal:

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.

(Via Jammie Wearing Fool and Instapundit.) Here is Issa’s official statement on the investigation:

“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.

Two words: Chris Dodd. In 2009, when I was covering the “IG-Gate” story — the pattern of Obama administration pressure against inspectors general — the reluctance of the Democratic majority to conduct serious oversight investigations was obvious:

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. Read more

Category: Congress, Corruption, Darrell Issa, Democrats, Scandal, Shoe Leather Fund
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