As the chart shows, America’s debt is currently $15.1 trillion, while the Eurozone (which includes France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain, the U.K., and others) has a combined debt of $12.7 trillion. (All dollar amounts are in U.S. dollars, and the data refers to closing 2011 numbers.)
The Eurozone is larger than the United States, so America’s debt per capita also exceeds the Eurozone’s. According to the Census Bureau, the U.S. has a population of 313 million, whereas the Eurozone has a population in excess of 331 million.
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney frequently warns that the United States should not become like Greece. “We need to rein in government and unleash the extraordinary vitality and creativity of the American people,” Romney wrote in a December op-ed. “We must not wait to suffer a crisis like Greece’s or Portugal’s to right the ship of state.”
But with charts like this, that formulation might already be out of date, considering the enormity of America’s debt burden.
Across America, spending on local and state governments made up 19.8 percent of the average state’s economy in 2008. California spent 22.5 percent, compared with Texas’s 15.4 percent. Simply put, Californians spend 46 percent more of their income on their government than do Texans.
Comparing major categories of spending really brings home the difference.
The average state spends 5.7 percent of its economy on education. Neither California (at 5.6 percent) nor Texas (5.4 percent) deviates far from the average. But Texas stretches its spending much further, employing 17 percent more educators per capita than does California, with its strong teachers’ unions and highly paid teachers.
Welfare spending shows a shocking contrast, with California spending 5 percent of its economy on wealth-transfer programs, compared with the national average of 4.6 percent and Texas’s 3.1 percent.
California also spends more than Texas on law enforcement and prisons, 1.5 percent to 0.9 percent, as well as parks, recreation, and natural resources, 0.7 percent to 0.3 percent.
Mass transit and other state and locally run utilities constitute 1.4 percent of the average state’s economy. California spends 1.9 percent here, Texas, 1.2 percent. California’s proposed high-speed-rail system will significantly grow this outlay. By comparison, heavily urbanized New York, with its mass-transit systems and extensive network of government-run toll roads, outlays 2.2 percent of its economy towards government-run utilities.
Texas manages to spend more in one category than does California: roads. Though Texas has diverted as much as $1.2 billion from its highway fund lately, it still manages to spend 1.2 percent of its economy on highways, compared with California’s outlay of 0.9 percent. The national average is 1.1 percent. California used to spend far more on its roads, but cut back in the 1970s, the last time Jerry Brown was governor — he suggested then that if you build road and water infrastructure, they will come. California stopped building but they came anyway.
The spending category showing the largest divergence between California and Texas should come as no surprise to anyone following the impending bankruptcy of Stockton, California’s 13th-largest city: spending for government-employee benefits. Nationwide, states spend an average of 1.6 percent of their economy in this area. California spends 2.2 percent of its economy — $1,105 for every person in the state — to keep government employees comfortable in their golden years. Texas spends 0.9 percent of its economy for this purpose — $467 for each man, woman, and child in the state. While most Texas civil servants don’t have collective-bargaining rights, they experience about one-third the job-turnover rate of private employees, showing that the State of Texas is seen as a good employer.
Last month, Texas added 27,900 jobs. The official unemployment rate is 7.1 percent in Texas, compared with 8.3 percent nationally. California added 4,000 jobs and has an official unemployment rate of 10.9 percent.
A little blurb I found on a bible study site that is important to share.
I drew that conclusion from Matthew 12:1-8:
“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pick some heads of grain and eat them. [2] When the Pharisees saw this, they said to him, “Look! Your disciples are doing what is unlawful on the Sabbath.” [3] He answered, “Haven’t you read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? [4] He entered the house of God, and he and his companions ate the consecrated bread–which was not lawful for them to do, but only for the priests. [5] Or haven’t you read in the Law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple desecrate the day and yet are innocent? [6] I tell you that one greater than the temple is here. [7] If you had known what these words mean, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. [8] For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.”
In other words, God’s mercy trumps God’s laws. You can’t read the gospels and all the accounts of Jesus healing on the Sabbath or fraternizing with the “unclean” and miss that! God’s first priority is to always love people.
Just as Jim Hansen, the head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, has recently likened man-made global warming to “a great moral issue” like “slavery,” a group of 49 former NASA scientists issued a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolton asking for the administration refrain from including “unproven and unsupported remarks” about climate science in its communications.
The letter, sent at the end of March, includes former scientists, astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center who believe climate science is “not settled” and wish for NASA to look at all available scientific data before making claims of carbon dioxide’s “catastrophic impact”.
Several blogs that do not consider man-made global warming a done deal, such as Watt’s Up With That, have recently picked up the story and posted the full letter.
Here’s it is:
March 28, 2012
The Honorable Charles Bolden, Jr.
NASA Administrator
NASA Headquarters
Washington, D.C. 20546-0001
Dear Charlie,
We, the undersigned, respectfully request that NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) refrain from including unproven remarks in public releases and websites. We believe the claims by NASA and GISS, that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.
The unbridled advocacy of CO2 being the major cause of climate change is unbecoming of NASA’s history of making an objective assessment of all available scientific data prior to making decisions or public statements.
As former NASA employees, we feel that NASA’s advocacy of an extreme position, prior to a thorough study of the possible overwhelming impact of natural climate drivers is inappropriate. We request that NASA refrain from including unproven and unsupported remarks in its future releases and websites on this subject. At risk is damage to the exemplary reputation of NASA, NASA’s current or former scientists and employees, and even the reputation of science itself.
For additional information regarding the science behind our concern, we recommend that you contact Harrison Schmitt or Walter Cunningham, or others they can recommend to you.
Thank you for considering this request.
Sincerely,
(Attached signatures)
See a full list of the signatures here.
That’s right. High level Obama advisor Hilary Rosen, who visits the White House regularly, said that Ann Romney, who suffered from Cancer and MS and raised five children, hasn’t worked a day in her life.
This is what is called in politics a “Trial Balloon”. It is an attack made by a surrogate so they can poll on the attack later to see how it turns out. If it helps them the other Democrats pile on, if it hurts them it was just “in-artful phrasing by a lone supporter”.
As we reported in July 2008: The Obama Campiagn was paying women less, when McCain was paying them more; all while Obama accused McCain of not supporting equal pay for women – LINK.
Female employees in the Obama White House make considerably less than their male colleagues, records show.
According to the 2011 annual report on White House staff, female employees earned a median annual salary of $60,000, which was about 18 percent less than the median salary for male employees ($71,000).
Calculating the median salary for each gender required some assumptions to be made based on the employee names. When unclear, every effort was taken to determine the appropriate gender.
The Obama campaign on Wednesday lashed out at presumptive GOP nominee Mitt Romney for his failure to immediately endorse the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act, a controversial law enacted in 2009 that made it easier to file discrimination lawsuits.
President Obama has frequently criticized the gender pay gap, such as the one that exists in White House.
“Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income,” he said in a July 2010 statement. “And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole.”
It is not known whether any female employees at the White House have filed lawsuits under the Ledbetter Act.
The president and his Democratic allies have accused Republicans of waging a “war on women,” and have touted themselves as champions of female equality. Obama’s rhetoric, however, has not always been supported by his actions.
White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters last week that Obama believes it is “long past the time” for women to be admitted to the traditionally all-male Augusta National Golf Club, site of the Masters golf tournament.
But the president has demonstrated a strong preference for all-male foursomes in his frequent golf outings, a bias that extends well beyond the putting green and into the Oval Office.
“Women are Obama’s base, and they don’t seem to have enough people who look like the base inside of their own inner circle,” former Clinton press secretary Dee Dee Myers told the New York Times.
“There’s a looseness to Obama when he’s hanging out with the boys club that doesn’t appear in co-ed gatherings,” she wrote. “The president blows off steam on the golf course with male colleagues and friends. He takes to the White House basketball court with NBA stars, men’s college players, and male cabinet members and members of Congress.”
A photo of Obama’s “army” originally posted on the campaign’s Tumblr site and run in conjunction with a BuzzFeed story on the Obama campaign reveals a stunning lack of diversity among the president’s Chicago staff.
The Obama campaign’s Chicago headquarters has it all—from Jack Daniels and Ping Pong to bouncy balls and ironic desk mementos.
Yet the “army of twenty-somethings” campaign manager Jim Messina has assembled in the president’s hometown is almost uniformly white, according to photos contained in a detailed BuzzFeed report Monday.
Further examination of the Obama’s campaign’s Tumblr site over the past month reveals very few black individuals—apart from the president and his wife, Michelle—in the pictures posted in the feed.
One of the only featured pictures to include a black individual is one from a recent White House visit by Star Trek actress Nichelle Nichols.
Think a University of California degree is worth its weight in gold? Think again. According to a new study, you might want to rethink that second mortgage needed to send junior to a UC campus.
The California Association of Scholars, a division of the National Association of Scholars, have just released an incendiary report showing that all nine of the University of California’s campuses have been compromised by too many politicized courses and radical faculty members. CAS members include a number of current or past professors from the UC system who have taught at UC-Berkeley, UCLA, UC-Santa Cruz, and UC-San Diego.
Conservatives have long complained of a strong liberal bias in college classrooms, and this new study shows just how far off track it has gone in one of the most prestigious public university systems in the country. You can read the full CAS 81-page report here.
CAS’s president John Ellis knows very well of what he speaks; he’s a professor emeritus of German Literature from UC Santa Cruz. “The quality of education at the University of California has been jeopardized by political activism,“ Professor Ellis said in a phone interview. “Dogmatism is rapidly displacing open-minded inquiry, especially in the social sciences and humanities, to the severe disadvantage of students.”
A Crisis in Competence: The Corrupting Influence of Political Activism in the University of California isn’t trying to purge the system of differing left of center opinions. The well-documented study just hopes to even the playing field so students get a quality education – an education that has standards and teaches students to look at all sides of the issues. The CAS report emphasizes common sense observations that seem to be beyond the grasp of the assumed intelligent members of the UC Board of Regents.
One observation points out that “a political science department with one half of the spectrum of political thought missing cannot be considered a competent department.” It seems only a Marxist professor with an agenda and no common sense would disagree with that idea from this new study. Unfortunately, as the study shows, there are a lot more Marxists now teaching in the University of California system than you would think.
The CAS report took the time to carefully vet the studies it cites from various institutions, including George Mason University, the Center for the Study of Popular culture, and many others. They even scoured carefully scrutinized and recorded students complaints on the subject, many of which you can read here.
Here a just a few of the conclusions about the University of California system that CAS came to:
There has been a sharp increase in faculty members who self-identify as radicals. This has led to “one party” academic departments, such as at Berkeley, where left-of-center faculty members outnumber their right-of-center colleagues in Political Science by a ratio of 28:2, in English 29:1 and in History 31:1. A number of these professors are openly avowed Marxists! (Has Van Jones applied for one of these positions?)
Many curricula promote political activism, in violation of UC regulations. Critical Race Studies at UCLA’s School of Law, for example, aims to be a “training ground” for advocates committed to racial justice theory and practice (sounds like Harvard during the Professor Derrick Bell/Obama years).
Several departments attempt to erase the study of Western tradition. History majors are now not required to take a survey course in Western civilization on any of the nine University of California campuses. Four more UC campuses have dropped their American History requirements (many UC students cannot even answer basic questions about American or World History).
Suppression of free speech is commonplace. Speakers at UC Berkeley who have been shouted down by protesters include Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Secretary of State Madeline Albright, and Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Conner (but Columbia welcomes Iran’s Ahmadinejad to speak with open arms).
Radical and left-of-center UC professors favor hiring like-minded new academics and block the hiring of new professors who don’t “think the right way.” (Why would a conservative incur the enormous debt and hassles pursuing a Ph. D. if the possibility of a professor’s job is little or nil?)
The advancement of “social justice” is now the open aim of a number of UC faculty members and even whole departments in the system (if a student asks questions or writes answers or papers that challenge these professors and their radical assumptions they can expect a poor grade).
The UC curriculum has been gutted because too many professors now show an open preference for promoting a partisan political agenda. These are just a few of the important issues confronting the UC system that the CAS study raises and documents in very credible fashion.
Eric Holder is President Obama’s Attorney General and he says that vote fraud is not a problem (hello he is part of the Chicago Machine) and that voter ID laws are not necessary…….
Attorney General Eric Holder is a staunch opponent of laws requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls to improve ballot security. He calls them “unnecessary” and has blocked their implementation in Texas and South Carolina, citing the fear they would discriminate against minorities.
I wonder what Holder will think when he learns just how easy it was for someone to be offered his ballot just by mentioning his name in a Washington, D.C., polling place in Tuesday’s primaries.
Holder’s opposition to ID laws comes in spite of the Supreme Court’s 6–3 decision in 2008, authored by liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, that upheld the constitutionality of Indiana’s tough ID requirement. When groups sue to block photo-ID laws in court, they can’t seem to produce real-world examples of people who have actually been denied the right to vote. According to opinion polls, over 75 percent of Americans — including majorities of Hispanics and African-Americans — routinely support such laws.
One reason is that people know you can’t function in the modern world without showing ID — you can’t cash a check, travel by plane or even train, or rent a video without being asked for one. In fact, PJ Media recently proved that you can’t even enter the Justice Department in Washington without showing a photo ID. Average voters understand that it’s only common sense to require ID because of how easy it is for people to pretend they are someone else
Filmmaker James O’Keefe demonstrated just how easy it is on Tuesday when he dispatched an assistant to the Nebraska Avenue polling place in Washington where Attorney General Holder has been registered for the last 29 years. O’Keefe specializes in the same use of hidden cameras that was pioneered by the recently deceased Mike Wallace, who used the technique to devastating effect in exposing fraud in Medicare claims and consumer products on 60 Minutes. O’Keefe’s efforts helped expose the fraud-prone voter-registration group ACORN with his video stings, and has had great success demonstrating this year in New Hampshire, Vermont, and Minnesota just how easy it is to obtain a ballot by giving the name of a dead person who is still on the rolls. Indeed, a new study by the Pew Research Center found at least 1.8 million dead people are still registered to vote. They aren’t likely to complain if someone votes in their place.
In Washington, it was child’s play for O’Keefe to beat the system. O’Keefe’s assistant used a hidden camera to document his encounter with the election worker at Holder’s polling place:
Man: “Do you have an Eric Holder, 50th Street?
Poll worker: “Let me see here.”
Man: Xxxx 50th Street.
Poll Worker: Let’s see, Holder, Hol-t-e-r, or Hold-d-e-r?
Man: H-o-l-d-e-r.
Poll Worker: D-e-r. Okay.
Man: That’s the name.
Poll Worker: I do. Xxxx 50th Street NW. Okay. [Puts check next to name, indicating someone has shown up to vote.] Will you sign there . . .
Man: I actually forgot my ID.
Poll Worker: You don’t need it; it’s all right.
Man: I left it in the car.
Poll Worker: As long as you’re in here, and you’re on our list and that’s who you say you are, we’re okay.
Man: I would feel more comfortable if I go get my ID, is it all right if I go get it?
Poll Worker: Sure, go ahead.
Man: I’ll be back faster than you can say furious!
Poll Worker: We’re not going anywhere.
Note that O’Keefe’s assistant never identified himself as Eric Holder, so he was not illegally impersonating him.
Nor did he attempt to vote using the ballot that was offered him, or even to accept it. O’Keefe has been accused by liberals of committing voter fraud in his effort to expose just how slipshod the election systems of various no-ID-required states are, but lawyers say his methods avoid that issue. Moreover, he has only taped his encounters with election officials in jurisdictions that allow videotaping someone in public with only one party’s knowledge.
The American public doesn’t support Obamacare, and a new survey shows that doctors have an even worse opinion. No one has a better grasp on the state of the health care system than physicians, and according to the Doctors Company survey, 60 percent of them believe that Obamacare will have a negative impact on overall patient care. This survey is consistent with the findings of another doctor survey taken in October 2010, which also showed doctors’ lack of confidence in Obamacare.
The survey was conducted to unveil physicians’ concerns about health care reform. The Doctors Company, which is the largest insurer of physician and surgeon medical liability in the nation, received more than 5,000 surveys, including all specialties and every region in the country. The results weren’t good for the President’s signature piece of legislation.
Not only do doctors believe that Obamacare will not improve the health care system, they also anticipate that it will worsen the current condition. According to the survey, nine out of 10 physicians are unwilling to recommend health care as a profession to a family member, and one primary care physician even commented, “I would not recommend becoming an M.D. to anyone.”
Obamacare doesn’t just discourage entrance into the medical profession; it encourages those who are already practicing to leave it. The survey states that “health care reform is motivating doctors to change their retirement timeline.” In fact, 43 percent of respondents said they are considering retiring within the next five years as a result of the law. A surgeon from Michigan wrote that under Obamacare, “We will be moving further away from humanity-based health care and more towards the patient as a commodity. This was not the way my father practiced—nor will I. Winding down to retire early.”
Currently, the United States is on the brink of a severe physician shortage. According to the American Association of Medical Colleges, by 2020, the nation will need an additional 91,500 doctors to meet medical demand. Dr. Donald J. Palmisano, former president of the American Medical Association, warns, “Today, we are perilously close to a true crisis as newly insured Americans enter the health care system and our population continues to age.” If current physicians leave the practice early because of the health law, the problem will be exacerbated even further.
Finally, the survey revealed concerns that the health law will compromise the doctor-patient relationship. Slightly more than half of doctors surveyed believe “that increased bureaucracy is reducing the personal interaction with patients essential for building a close relationship and understanding the nature of patient health.”
Under Obamacare, Heritage expert Robert Moffit writes, “physicians will be subject to more government regulation and oversight, and will be increasingly dependent on unreliable government reimbursement for medical services. Doctors, already under tremendous pressure, will only see their jobs become more difficult.” To reverse this trend, the U.S. needs health care reform that doctors and patients alike can eagerly support.
Teresa Wagner, pictured above, is suing a former dean at the University of Iowa College of Law for employment discrimination after she was turned down for a faculty position. The law school rejected her candidacy because of her conservative political views.
Iowa Republicans are taking aim at the state’s top law school for denying a faculty position to a conservative law professor, who an assistant dean once said embraces politics the rest of the faculty “despises.”
Teresa Wagner, who works as an associate director of writing at the University of Iowa College of Law, is suing former dean Carolyn Jones for employment discrimination, claiming she was not hired for a professor position because Jones and other law faculty disapproved of her conservative views and activism.
To hold a law faculty position at the publicly funded university is viewed as a “sacred cow,” Wagner said in an interview, and “Republicans need not apply.”
The case, which goes to trial this October, has become a chief concern for Republicans in Johnson County, who on Monday passed a resolution calling on the Iowa House of Representatives’ oversight committee to investigate hiring practices involved in Wagner’s case and others like it.
“We think the hiring policies need to be such where there a
re certainly non-discriminatory practices which relate to political philosophy, as well as to race and gender and other issues,” said Bob Anderson, chairman of the Johnson County Republican Party. He claims students are deprived of “diversity of political thought” when conservative thinkers, like Wagner, are rejected based on their politics.
“We have a very active, conservative Republican community within the University of Iowa, which has not been met with an appropriate sense of respect for their ideas,” he told FoxNews.com. “We see generally the climate as unfavorable.”
Wagner, who graduated with honors from the law school in 1993, has taught at the George Mason University School of Law. She has also worked for the National Right to Life Committee, which opposes abortion, and the conservative Family Research Council.
In 2006, Wagner applied for a full-time instructor position with the law school and was denied. She was also rejected for an adjunct or full-time position in four subsequent attempts, according to her attorney, Stephen T. Fieweger.
“For the first time in years, there are more registered Republicans in the state of Iowa than there are Democrats, which is obviously not reflected at the University of Iowa,” Fieweger told FoxNews.com.
Fieweger said Wagner’s candidacy was dismissed because of her conservative views, and he cited a 2007 email from Associate Dean Jonathan C. Carlson to Jones in which Carlson wrote: “Frankly, one thing that worries me is that some people may be opposed to Teresa serving in any role, in part at least because they so despise her politics (and especially her activism about it).”
He had an accident while working out and injured his wrist so he want to the local hospital to make sure he was alright. It is forbidden to take pictures in the hospital and you are about to see why. The lines are the first thing you notice. It is like the BMV on steroids.
The video is HERE and his blog post about it is HERE.
Barack Obama on the Ellen DeGenerous Show in 2008:
If mandating that everyone could buy healthcare would solve the healthcare problem, than government could just mandate that everyone should buy a house to solve homelessness. It isn’t that people don’t want healthcare, they can’t afford it.
It is the same story over and over and over… a contributor or bundler for Obama asks for a loan from the taxpayers. He gets the loan, starts or gets involved with a solar panel company, they pay themselves big money, give money to the Obama campaign or a campaign group – and then go out of business.
The story isn’t always exactly like this, but generally this is how it has worked.
On Monday, yet another Department of Energy funded solar energy company –the world’s largest solar power plant—filed for bankruptcy. Reuters reports:
Solar Trust of America LLC, which holds the development rights for the world’s largest solar power project, on Monday filed for bankruptcy protection after its majority owner began insolvency proceedings in Germany.
The Oakland-based company has held rights for the 1,000-megawatt Blythe Solar Power Project in the Southern California desert, which last April won $2.1 billion of conditional loan guarantees from the U.S. Department of Energy. It is unclear how the bankruptcy will affect that project.
The Reuters story states that the company won the loan, but as the Washington Post reported that the company turned down the loan in late September of 2011. The CEO of Solar Trust, Uwe T. Schmidt thought that the loan was “too risky”. The Obama administration was willing to loan more than two billion taxpayer dollars to a company who was unwilling to take that kind of risk. The company’s bankruptcy filings indicate they employed only nine people.
This $2.1 billion loan guarantee would have been equivalent to more than three Solyndra sized loans. Solar Trust is one of the companies Peter Schweizer mentioned in his book Throw Them All Out who were offered or received large Department of Energy loans or grants and also have ties to President Obama. Schweizer notes in his book that Citigroup Global Partners and Deutsche Bank have invested $6 billion in this project.
Until recently, the vice chair of Citigroup Global Partners was Louis Susman who sat on the National Finance Committee for Obama’s campaign in 2008. In return, Susman left Citigroup to become President Obama’s ambassador to Britain.Another partner in this project is Chevron, who favored candidate Obamaover his 2008 rival Senator McCain in campaign donations.
Solar Trust partnered with Chevron (NYSE: CVX) to develop the Blythe project, which is located on federal land. It and eight other projects were selected by the Bureau of Land Management for a fast-track program that reduced the time it took to get land permits.
Lots of people watch RT online. It is very popular. But what most Americans do not understand is that the “hip and flashy” RT is actually “Russia Today” which is a mouth piece for chief oligarch Vladimir Putin.
You will see that every turn around, misdirection and myth about the laws and about the Trayvon shooting is employed by the “reporter”. When Crowder gets done deconstructing all of her BS at the end you can hear her contempt for him.
The Republicans are proposing real budgets and the Democrats, in violation of the Constitution, refuse to pass any budget and haven’t for three years.
This is a must see video at Real Clear Politics – LINK.
“Virtually none of the claims he makes about our budget are actually true,” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) tells CNBC’s Larry Kudlow. “He’s distorting the truth, he’s dividing the country, and he’s becoming more bitter and partisan by the day. Frankly, it’s kind of sad to see.”
“This is surreal. Really bizarre,” Ryan told CNBC’s Larry Kudlow.
Yesterday the Obama administration announced a delaying tactic which will put off the possibility of new offshore oil drilling on the Atlantic coast for at least five years:
The announcement by the Interior Department sets into motion what will be at least a five year environmental survey to determine whether and where oil production might occur.
Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell notes that a planned lease sale, which the administration cancelled last year, will now be put off until at least 2018. As you might expect, Republicans were not impressed with the decision:
“The president’s actions have closed an entire new area to drilling on his watch and cheats Virginians out of thousands of jobs,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, R-Wash., who chairs the House Natural Resources Committee. The announcement “continues the president’s election-year political ploy of giving speeches and talking about drilling after having spent the first three years in office blocking, delaying and driving up the cost of producing energy in America,” he said.
Why would Occidental Petroleum, America’s fourth-largest oil company, donate $250,000 to a tax-hiking ballot initiative in California?
California’s expansive state government has found itself chronically short of funds as much due to a 31 percent boost in state spending from 2003-07 as to the economic slowdown. As a consequence, it may seem that tax-increase proposals have outnumbered jobs created in recent years.
Many big corporations backed Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s $24 billion tax increase in 2009, reasoning that the taxes proposed beat the alternative: hiking taxes on business or the state’s oil industry.
California has the third-largest proven U.S. oil reserves, with the highest gas tax and the fifth-highest overall tax on the oil industry. But, taking more from California’s oil producers is a perennial favorite as it satisfies two important constituencies: environmentalists and consumers of government services.
Squeezing tax revenue out of oil isn’t that simple, however. California crude is heavy and sulfur-laden, making it more costly to refine and thus discounting its value by about 10 percent. A California oil “extraction tax” would act to destroy oil reserves by making locally produced oil more costly to recover, inadvertently boosting foreign oil, which California can’t tax. As a result, the value of Occidental’s California oil reserves drop to the extent taxed.
The power to tax is the power to destroy. What you tax, you get less of.
With this in mind, Occidental’s $250,000 contribution to Gov. Jerry Brown’s $9 billion tax hike initiative for the November ballot looks less like civic-minded corporate charity and more like a prudent investment. Especially since higher oil taxes would reduce the value of Occidental’s California oil reserves by hundreds of millions of dollars.
But there’s another rationale for Occidental’s assistance to the governor.
Last October, Occidental Petroleum’s CEO cited the snail’s pace of drilling-permit approvals in California as the reason for a slowdown in Occidental’s oil and natural-gas production. California granted 14 drilling permits out of 199 applications received through October 2011, a 7 percent rate. In 2009, 37 of 52 were granted, 71 percent.
WASHINGTON — Law enforcement tracking of cellphones, once the province mainly of federal agents, has become a powerful and widely used surveillance tool for local police officials, with hundreds of departments, large and small, often using it aggressively with little or no court oversight, documents show.
The practice has become big business for cellphone companies, too, with a handful of carriers marketing a catalog of “surveillance fees” to police departments to determine a suspect’s location, trace phone calls and texts or provide other services. Some departments log dozens of traces a month for both emergencies and routine investigations.
With cellphones ubiquitous, the police call phone tracing a valuable weapon in emergencies like child abductions and suicide calls and investigations in drug cases and murders. One police training manual describes cellphones as “the virtual biographer of our daily activities,” providing a hunting ground for learning contacts and travels.
But civil liberties advocates say the wider use of cell tracking raises legal and constitutional questions, particularly when the police act without judicial orders. While many departments require warrants to use phone tracking in nonemergencies, others claim broad discretion to get the records on their own, according to 5,500 pages of internal records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union from 205 police departments nationwide.
The internal documents, which were provided to The New York Times, open a window into a cloak-and-dagger practice that police officials are wary about discussing publicly. While cell tracking by local police departments has received some limited public attention in the last few years, the A.C.L.U. documents show that the practice is in much wider use — with far looser safeguards — than officials have previously acknowledged.
The issue has taken on new legal urgency in light of a Supreme Court ruling in January finding that a Global Positioning System tracking device placed on a drug suspect’s car violated his Fourth Amendment rights against unreasonable searches. While the ruling did not directly involve cellphones — many of which also include GPS locators — it raised questions about the standards for cellphone tracking, lawyers say.
The police records show many departments struggling to understand and abide by the legal complexities of cellphone tracking, even as they work to exploit the technology.
In cities in Nevada, North Carolina and other states, police departments have gotten wireless carriers to track cellphone signals back to cell towers as part of nonemergency investigations to identify all the callers using a particular tower, records show.
In California, state prosecutors advised local police departments on ways to get carriers to “clone” a phone and download text messages while it is turned off.
In Ogden, Utah, when the Sheriff’s Department wants information on a cellphone, it leaves it up to the carrier to determine what the sheriff must provide. “Some companies ask that when we have time to do so, we obtain court approval for the tracking request,” the Sheriff’s Department said in a written response to the A.C.L.U.
And in Arizona, even small police departments found cell surveillance so valuable that they acquired their own tracking equipment to avoid the time and expense of having the phone companies carry out the operations for them. The police in the town of Gilbert, for one, spent $244,000 on such equipment.
Cell carriers, staffed with special law enforcement liaison teams, charge police departments from a few hundred dollars for locating a phone to more than $2,200 for a full-scale wiretap of a suspect, records show.
From left, Butch Morgan, Pam Brunette, Beverly Shelton and Dustin Blythe were charged April 2, 2012, in an election fraud case from the 2008 Indiana Democratic primary
For our previous coverage of this story go HERE. South Bend is the editor’s home town.
Felony charges related to election fraud have touched the 2008 race for the highest office in the land.
Prosecutors in South Bend, Ind., filed charges Monday against four St. Joseph County Democratic officials and deputies as part of a multiple-felony case involving the alleged forging of Democratic presidential primary petitions in the 2008 election, which put then-candidates Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the Indiana ballot.
The officials are accused of taking part in a scheme to fake signatures and names on the primary petitions needed to run for president. Court papers say the plan was hatched by local Democratic Party officials inside the local party headquarters.
Among those charged is the former long-time chairman of the St. Joseph County Democratic Party, Butch Morgan, who allegedly ordered the forgeries. He was forced to resign when the allegations were first made public last October, even though his lawyer, Shaw Friedman, told Fox News at the time that Morgan did not do anything wrong.
The St. Joseph County Board of Voter Registration’s Democratic board member, Pam Brunette, Board of Voter Registration worker Beverly Shelton and Democratic volunteer and former board worker Dustin Blythe also face charges.
According to affidavits, St. Joseph County Voter Registration Office worker Lucas Burkett told investigators that he was part of the plan that started in January 2008 “to forge signatures on presidential candidate petitions instead of collecting actual signatures from citizens.”
The documents state that Burkett told investigators that “he was heavily involved in St. Joseph County political activities with the local Democratic party,” and that “he had, in fact, personally forged several such signatures,” and had attended meetings at the local Democratic party headquarters, where it was agreed to forge the petitions. Morgan, the County Democratic Chairman, allegedly “instructed Mr. Burkett, Pamela Brunette, Beverly Shelton, and Dustin Blythe to forge ballot petitions for presidential candidates,” and that “all of them agreed to follow these instructions” by copying names and signatures from old election petitions.
According to affidavits, Burkett told investigators it was his job to “forge petitions for candidate Barack Obama,” Shelton “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate Hillary Clinton” and Blythe “was assigned to forge petitions for candidate John Edwards.” When Edwards dropped out of the race at the end of January 2008 and Burkett refused to continue the forgeries, Morgan allegedly ordered Blythe to then forge petitions for Barack Obama.
Indiana State Police investigators identified a total of 22 petitions that appeared to be faked, yet sailed through the Voter Registration Board as legitimate documents. The signature of the board’s Republican supervisor, Linda Silcott, which is required for legal certification, appeared to be rubber stamped on the documents. She told investigators that she did not remember signing or authorizing her rubber stamp to be used.
Silcott also told investigators that she recognized the handwriting on the alleged forged Obama petitions as that of Blythe’s.
The South Bend Tribune and independent political newsletter Howey Politics Indiana have reported that a handwriting analyst concluded last fall that Blythe’s handwriting matched some of the alleged Obama fakes. When Fox News caught up to Blythe as he left the Voter Registration Board last November and asked him if he forged any signatures or faked any petitions, he repeatedly replied, “I don’t have anything to say.”
The case raises the possibility that the president’s campaign and that of Clinton’s, could have been legally challenged in Indiana if the alleged forgeries were discovered during the race.
Under state law, presidential candidates need to qualify with 500 signatures from each of Indiana’s nine congressional districts. Indiana elections officials say that in St. Joseph County, which is the 2nd Congressional District, the Obama campaign qualified with 534 signatures; Clinton’s camp had 704.
But the signatures, which were certified by the elections board, were never challenged. If the number of legitimate signatures for Obama or Clinton fell below the legal requirement of 500, they could have been bounced from the state ballot. Reports have previously put the number of phony signatures for both candidates at about 150, but state investigators plucked names from the petitions at random and cited only 20 individual alleged forgeries as part of their case. They say their investigation of the petitions continues.
Multiple voters, including Indiana’s former Democratic Gov. Joe Kernan, told Fox News that their names and signatures were phonies.
“That’s not my signature,” Charity Rorie told Fox News as she sat in her kitchen in Mishawaka, Ind.. The mother of four was stunned that her name and signature, and those of her husband, appeared on one of the Obama petitions. She said they “absolutely” were fakes and was troubled that personal details such as their address and birthdays were also included.
“It was shocking,” she said. “Why did they do that, and where did they get it from?”
“I did not sign for Barack Obama,” Democratic voter Robert Hunter told Fox News as he stared at the Obama petition that included his name and purported signature supporting the candidate. While he observed that the scrawl looked “very close” to his real one, it was not.
“I always put ‘Junior’ after my name, every time… there’s no ‘Junior’ there,” Hunter told us. “I don’t like anybody using my name for anything other than myself.”
“It’s scary,” Charity said. “A lot of people have already lost faith in politics and the realm of politics and that solidifies our worries and concerns.”
As for Burkett, a 26-year-old lifelong Democrat, “he is the whistle-blower in this,” his lawyer, Andrew B. Jones, told Fox News.
“Lucas really is the hero in this situation. He is someone who stood up for good government, and has cooperated with the state police and will continue to do so.”
If you suspect voter or election fraud where you live, tell the Fox News Voter Fraud Unit: voterfraud@foxnews.com
“If you are not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.” – Malcolm X
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