New IG-Gate Scandal? OMB Reportedly Makes ‘Not So Veiled Threat’ to IG

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New York Daily News reports:

[A]n inspector general for Congress alleged today in a letter to Brooklyn Rep. Ed Towns that the Office of Management and Budget tried to intimidate him because he wanted to warn Congress his budget was being slashed too low.
The IG of Congress’ Office of Personnel Management, Patrick McFarland, alleged that his office got a “not so veiled threat from OMB” that it “will make life miserable” if he informs legislators of his complaint.
Under law, IGs are supposed to tell Congress when their budgets are being cut to the point where they don’t think they can do their jobs.
“I am alerting you about a very serious matter that represents an attempt to thwart an authority provided to us by the Inspector General Reform Act of 2008 and that creates a risk of compromising our operational independence,” McFarland alleged.
Towns, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, said in a statement tonight that he was demanding explanations from OMB and investigating whether other inspectors general got similar threats.
“If such statements were made they were entirely improper and pose a direct threat to the independence and integrity of Inspectors General, and an affront to clear Congressional intent as expressed in statute,” said Towns.

Press release from Americans for Limited Government:

Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson today applauded Congressman Ed Towns for ordering an investigation into the White House Office of Management and Budget for allegedly threatening an Inspector General from Congress’ Office of Personnel Management, Patrick MacFarland.
“Congressman Towns should be praised for investigating his own party’s Administration, who in this case threatened an inspector general,” said Wilson. . . .
“Especially with the inspectors general whose purpose it is to monitor wasteful spending, OMB’s threats to any inspector ought to be investigated.”
Wilson continued, “Under law, any inspectors general who believe that they are being cut either maliciously or in error has a duty to inform Congress, and neither OMB nor any other arm of the Obama Administration should be targeting those inspectors as a result.”
“Nobody should be threatened by the White House for doing their jobs as stipulated by law,” Wilson added.

UPDATE: PDF of Chairman Towns’ letter to OMB Director Peter Orzag.

UPDATE II: The investigation is growing:

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee raised concern about a claim that a budget employee tried to intimidate the inspector general in another office and expects to receive a report Friday on whether other inspectors general have received similar threats. A Senate panel got involved Thursday, urging Office of Management and Budget Director Peter Orszag to launch an “immediate investigation.”  . . .
Paul Feeney, who is on the legal staff with the inspector general’s office that is handling the survey of other IGs, said the results will be sent to the committee this week. 
“It would be premature to comment at this point,” he said, when asked about the findings. McFarland’s office also declined to comment further. 
With the House inquiry underway, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Thursday expressed its concerns about the same incident in a letter to Orszag. 
“The allegations the OPM IG has made against OMB are serious and call for an immediate investigation,” Chairman Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., and other committee members said in the letter.

That’s more like it, Joe!

UPDATE III: PDF of IG’s letter to Rep. Stephen Lynch.

Pudding and Other Sex Scandals

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Let’s face it, when Samantha from “Day By Day” joins the AOSHQ Pudding Patrol, a genuinely transformative viral phenomenon has begun. And when Little Miss Attila decides to dip the girls, we could be on the verge of a synergistic online breakthrough. PuddingBalls 2.0!

All because of one man with balls. And one man with pudding. And some dude with a weird video. My chief contribution has been this cyber-guru gibberish to create the illusion that this is something other than the usual moron inside joke.

I wanted to say something about the shocking Scott Brown “they’re both available” scandal and about the shocking Scott Brown’s wife-in-a-bikini scandal, but the afternoon is running away and I have other important work that must before 5 p.m. ET. So there’s no time just now.

Briefly, however, the best way to undermine the stereotype of uptight sex-phobic puritanical right-wingers is . . . well, don’t be an untight sex-phobic puritan. (For example, I’m blogging commando today, IYKWIMAITYD.)

Also, smoke two packs a day and drive like you’re qualifying at Talladega.

UPDATE: “She’s hot and funny and that’s a hard combination to beat.” Mmmmm, smoothies!

Rush Limbaugh, Jew-Hater?

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One of the silliest smears in recent memory from the despicable Abe Foxman:

Rush Limbaugh reached a new low with his borderline anti-Semitic comments about Jews as bankers, their supposed influence on Wall Street, and how they vote.

What Limbaugh was actually talking about was the possibility that the Obama administration’s attack on “Big Banks” involved an undercurrent of anti-Semitism:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting? He’s assaulting bankers. He’s assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there’s – if there’s starting to be some buyer’s remorse there.

This is a fragment (which Foxman got from Media Matters, naturally) of a longer discussion about voters feeling “buyer’s remorse” about the Obama administration. Limbaugh pointed out that 78% of Jewish voters went for Obama and, after some discussion of that, then tied it into the Obama administration’s push for punitive action against the financial services industry.

Limbaugh was suggesting that any populist rhetorical offensive against “Big Banks” has a certain kind of nudge, nudge you-know-who-we-mean appeal. Liberals like Foxman are evidently blind to this element of coded sub rosa anti-Semitism in the Left’s assault on economic liberty. And so Limbaugh gets smeared.

Small Victories

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From a Blogmocracy commenter:

“P.S. Rush has finally removed LGF from his blogroll.”

Meanwhile, “We’re gonna need a lot of pudding,” and Mike Hendrix issues an ELEVENTY!!1!1! alert.

UPDATE: One of the many victims of Charles Johnson’s libel campaign against conservatives sends this e-mail:

You probably already know, he is gonna be profiled in the NY Times Mag this Sunday
Big puff piece, most likely
We all should be ready to hit back hard and fast

If the New York Times had no trouble whitewashing Stalin’s show trials, we shouldn’t be surprised when they perform journalistic fellatio on Johnson.

Union Rank-and-File in Massachusetts Deserted Democrats in Droves

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The Wall Street Journal today notes that Republican Scott Brown got more union votes than Martha Coakley. That would be big news if I hadn’t already reported a week ago that SEIU members were supporting Brown and if I hadn’t reported on Election Day that an AFSCME local official was supporting Brown.

The plural of anecdote is data, and with the help of Da Tech Guy, I got plenty of anecdotal evidence in Massachusetts of a massive blue-collar backlash against Coakley, Obama and the shove-it-down-our-throats approach to politics.

But it’s not just Massachusetts, it’s everywhere nowadays. People are tired of the “insider consensus.” They’re tired of experts and intellectuals and politicians who don’t seem to understand that “We The People” want meaningful input into the process of governance. Last year, I explained the concept of The Ordinary American:

The Ordinary American is not a journalist, a movie producer, an academic or a politician. News media, entertainment, education and politics are endeavors that shape public attitudes, and for this reason the elite have striven f or decades to exclude from those fields anyone who might dispute their consensus. . . .
Ordinary Americans may be Democrats or Republicans or neither. They may be gay or straight, black or white, Hispanic or Asian. They may be rich or poor, but most are somewhere in the broad middle. They don’t define themselves by the categories of ideology or identity politics that are so important to the elite.

Liberals just don’t seem to understand why Ordinary Americans are fed up with the Obama administration’s arrogant we-know-better-than-you type of governance. Here’s another anecdote: My buddy Chris Cassone — the “Take Our Country Back” singer — was talking to one of his liberal musician friends. When Chris said he was performing at a Tea Party rally, the friend said dismissively, “Did those people ever figure out what they’re so angry about?”

Of course, if you actually listen to Tea Party protesters, they’re quite specific about their grievances, especially the out-of-control deficit spending that is heaping debt on the heads of their children and grandchildren. This is why I despise yuppie NPR Republicans like David Brooks who use “populism” as a pejorative and turn up their noses at grassroots conservatives. These elitists are effectively urging the GOP not only to abandon the limited-government principles of Ronald Reagan, but also to abandon the kind of working-class voters who powered the Reagan Revolution.

Whether it’s moose-hunting Sarah Palin or truck-driving Scott Brown, voters will listen to a limited-government message if it is presented to them by an Ordinary American candidate who doesn’t talk down to them. In 2008, I dubbed this concept “Libertarian Populism,” and it’s the real secret of why the GOP is starting to get its mojo back.

SMALL GOVERNMENT = BIG VICTORIES

Planned Parenthood’s Federal Bailout

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The nation’s largest abortion provider will be opening a new office in Fitchburg, Mass. — Da Tech Guy’s hometown — thanks to your tax dollars:

FITCHBURG — The Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts will open an office on Main Street in Fitchburg this spring, with the goal of reducing the area’s high teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease rates, according to the agency’s chief executive officer, Dianne Luby. . . .
“We want to be on Main Street in Fitchburg. We want to be in a location that’s easily accessible along major transportation routes, where people will be able to get high-quality care in a nicely redone office space,” Luby said. . . .
Services will be provided at no cost to those who cannot pay, Luby said. . . .
Abortion services will not be offered, because Planned Parenthood of Massachusetts is opening the Fitchburg office using federal grant money it received in December, which carries the stipulation that abortions will not be provided, Luby said. (Emphasis added.)

Bovine excrement. The new office won’t provide abortions, but you can bet your bottom dollar they’ll provide referrals to Planned Parenthood’s abortion services elsewhere.

Beyond that, a basic principle of economics is that money is fungible. If Planned Parenthood gets a $1 million federal grant, that’s $1 million they don’t have to raise from their own donor base. And the fact is that contributions to Planned Parenthood have been down, in part because of the collapse of Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme:

The left-leaning Picower Foundation gave away almost $213 million since 1999, according to a philanthropy database.
The giant foundation had the misfortune to choose Madoff to manage its more than $1 billion in assets.
A sizeable chunk of its funding has gone to abortion groups, including NARAL ($3.2 million), Center for Reproductive Rights ($2.5 million), Planned Parenthood ($2.4 million), and Center for Reproductive Law and Policy ($625,000).

So giving federal grant money to Abortion, Inc. — let’s not mince words about what Planned Parenthood really is — is a very timely bailout.

And why was it so important for Planned Parenthood to have a clinic in Fitchburg, Mass.? There are a growing number of Hispanic immigrants — the city’s population was 15% Hispanic in 2006, according to a Census estimate — and Hispanics have higher teen-pregnancy rates.

As I’ve explained before, I have a deep suspicion toward “teen pregnancy crisis” alarmists. Teen pregnancy rates are now actually much lower than they were in the 1950s, the Golden Age of Family Values. The problem, as Maggie Gallagher has pointed out, is not an increase of teen pregnancy but a decline of marriage:

“What we have called our ‘teen pregnancy’ crisis is not really about teenagers. Nor is it really about pregnancy. It is about the decline of marriage. . . .
“What has changed most in recent decades is not who gets pregnant, but who gets married . . . The single biggest change in recent decades has been the declining proportion of pregnant single teens who marry.”

In point of fact, according to official data (Powerpoint download) Massachusetts is below the U.S. average in both its overall fertility rate (55.6 Mass. vs. 66.7 U.S.) and its teen birth rate (21.7 Mass. vs. 40.4 U.S.). The total fertility rate (average lifetime births per woman)  in Massachusetts is 1.74 — which is 17% below the “replacement level” of 2.1 — and if it weren’t for pockets of higher fertility like the Hispanics of Fitchburg, the state’s demographic decline would be even more stark.

Instead of funding Planned Parenthood’s misanthropic agenda in an unsubtle effort to suppress Hispanic birth rates, Massachusetts ought to be encouraging marriage. But the only kind of marriage Massachusetts cares about now is gay marriage, and so Planned Parenthood gets a federal grant for an “easily accessible” Fitchburg office.

The irony? One of the reasons Scott Brown is now the 41st vote in the Senate is because Martha Coakley lashed herself to the mast in support of federally-funded abortion, inciting the hostility of working-class Catholics, which was why the “bellwether” town of Fitchburg went 59% for Brown.

Pro-life wins elections, and yet tax money pays for the Culture of Death.

UPDATE: Dan Collins calls my attention to these statistics:

The Planned Parenthood Federation of America has released its annual report for fiscal year 2007-2008. The document shows the nation’s largest abortion business is getting bigger as it showed an increase of five percent more abortions and increased taxpayer funding.
According to Planned Parenthood’s latest report, abortions increased to 305,310 abortions up from 289,750 in 2006. . . .
The total government grants and contracts received by PPFA affiliates from government sources including state, local and federal governments, increased from $337 million to $350 million. (Emphasis added.)

Meanwhile, Da Tech Guy reports a backlash from the people of Fitchburg:

Six members of the City Council voted Thursday to draft a resolution urging the Planned Parenthood League of Massachusetts to abandon its plan to locate in Fitchburg, after the organization announced plans to open an office on Main Street earlier this week. . . .
State Rep. Stephen DiNatale signed on to the late-filed petition calling for a resolution, and said he planned to sit down with Planned Parenthood officials and explain to them why Fitchburg is not the right community for them to come to. . . .
“We do not need them on Main Street,” DiNatale said.

Last Sunday, I talked to Rep. DiNatale at St. Anthony of Padua Church. He’s a pro-life, blue-collar Catholic Democrat who understands the importance of representing the people who elected him — and most of those people voted against Martha Coakley’s Culture of Death agenda.