RedState is going in to maintenance mode tonight at 9pm to correction some issues. We’ll be down over night and back up in the morning.

So the contact email address is getting inundated by people sending links to Drudge’s top story — the CNBC call for a modern Boston Tea Party over Captain Bull Crap’s crap mortgage plan.

People respond viscerally to this. They might not had Porkulus not overreached. But it did. And now there is this.

Most people bought their homes responsibly. They bought what they could afford. Some people tried to take advantage of the system or did not think ahead. They’ve gotten burned.

No one wants to bail out irresponsibility, which is exactly what Captain Bull Crap’s plan would do.

The result of Obama pushing forward with this could be transformative societal change against him with the middle class in revolt.

Excellent work guys.

House Republicans are setting up “a stimulus-watch program” that will allow watchdog groups and private citizens to report findings as contractors and agencies start spending billions of dollars on roads, schools, renewable energy projects and other initiatives, said House GOP Whip Eric Cantor of Virginia.

Here’s the thing: the stimulus will fail. Even the Congressional Budget Office says the stimulus, as passed, will drag out the recession. Obama can make statements claiming the bill will save 4 million 3.8 million 3.5 million 2 million jobs. The media will give him a pass spinning it as “if the stimulus hadn’t passed, you would have lost your job.”

That does not, though, somehow validate the idea that the stimulus will stimulate the economy. It won’t. But in the meantime, a lot of bad stuff will happen. A lot of waste will be generated. A lot of corruption will be uncovered.

And because the GOP held the line and refused to vote for the stimulus, the Democrats and Barack Obama will own it.

This is getting ridiculous.

Just about a month ago, I reminded Florida legislators that cigarette taxes used to balance the budget don’t work.

To be clear here, if you want to get rid of cigarette smoking, raise taxes to the point people can’t afford it. That’s fine.

But don’t say you are going to balance the budget with a cigarette tax increase because all the data shows us that raising cost of buying cigarettes lowers the use rate, which decreases the revenue generated therefrom.

It’s Economics 101.

The Florida Legislature thinks otherwise.

According to the Miami Herald:

State Rep. Juan Zapata, R-Miami . . . filed a bill (HB 887) to increase the cigarette tax by 65.1 cents per pack, bringing the total to $1 a pack. It could raise $471 million a year.

“The (budget) situation calls for action,” said Zapata, who is chair of the Human Services Appropriations Committee. “We can sit here and try to hold true to our principles but at the same time we need to be pragmatic.”

Zapata and the Florida Republicans, including Charlie Crist who went from outright opposition to tacit support of a cigarette tax increase, should remember New Jersey:

In 2006, New Jersey raised its already high cigarette tax, thinking it would bring in an extra $30 million a year. It didn’t. Worse, it caused their actual collections to drop by more than $20 million. The tax increase threw the state’s budget off by $50 million, money that had to be made up by other taxpayers. This isn’t unique to the Garden State. Since 2003, there have been 57 cigarette tax increases across the country. In 37 (68 percent) of those cases revenues failed to meet projections.

Look – I don’t smoke. I don’t like cigarettes. I love the restaurant smoking ban in Georgia. But don’t try to balance the budget on cigarette taxes. It won’t work. It’s bad policy.

We should all be fans of nuclear energy. I am for sure.

But I am deeply concerned that our state legislature is so committed to nuclear energy that they are willing to advance terrible legislation to make it happen.

Right now, Senate Bill 31 (SB 31) is before the State House. The bill would destroy every incentive Georgia Power has to keep costs down on new nuclear power plant construction and would end all incentives to mitigate problems related to the construction.

It would do this by requiring Georgia Power customers to pay for the plant now, instead of the company fronting the money. In effect, Georgia Power customers would be forced into buying a car we had no say in choosing before it’s even put together, and would have to pay all the extra charges for overruns too.

Please considering clicking here. If you follow the link and put in your zip-code, you’ll get the phone number of your state representative. Please call him and tell him to vote against the Georgia Nuclear Energy Financing Act. There has to be a better way than S.B. 31.

Thanks.

California Congresswoman Grace Napolitano, Chair of the Natural Resources Committee’s water and power subcommittee, sure knows how to make a profit on a loan. Bloomberg’s Timothy J. Burger reports that she has pocketed $221,780 “by charging as much as 18 percent interest on money she loaned to her campaign” in 1998.

In a situation that Michael Toner, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission, properly characterized as “extraordinary,” Napolitano has used campaign donations made by lobbyists and PAC’s with business before her subcommittee (like the owner of California’s largest electric utility, Edison International) to collect interest in an amount that exceeds the loan balance by over $70,000. Her campaign has reduced the principal on the loan by less that $65,000, so she will obviously be able to continue to collect interest payments for some time to come.

Napolitano certainly has made a good investment. According to Burger, this loan has far outperformed stocks since it started accruing interest: “Over the same period, an investment in the Standard & Poor’s 500 stocks, with reinvested dividends, would have lost more than 7 percent.”

The ethical impropriety of a congressional officeholder making a profit from campaign contributions made to her campaign is obvious. I don’t usually agree with Public Citizen, but their government affairs lobbyist pegged it exactly when he said that “this practice is reprehensible…candidates are not supposed to personally benefit from these campaign funds.” Rather than easily paying off the principal years ago, Napolitano’s campaign organization has instead paid interest to Napolitano to provide her with a continuing profit.

Perhaps some of the banks who are besieging the Treasury for TARP funds because of their losses should hire the congresswoman as a consultant – after all, she seems to have done a better job of making a profit from investing other people’s money then they have.

It was bound to happen.

“I’m not predicting any third waves here,” the Maryland Democrat said in remarks at a forum sponsored by Georgetown University and Politico.

“If you look at first midterm elections historically, the president’s party loses seats,” he said. “The historical trend is pretty clear for Democrats.”

Rather than trying to expand the Democratic House majority in 2010, Van Hollen believes his job is “to hold the line.”

The GOP has unified rapidly under President Obama. The economy is going to go downhill because of the stimulus. When stories about the welfare queens coming back make the local paper, the populace as a whole is going to be up in arms.

The whole thing is pretty bad for the Big O and his party.

The key for the GOP is to start good recruiting early. They’re having problems in places like Georgia 8 against Jim Marshall. He’ll finally be vulnerable this year. I’ve declined to run against him. Perhaps the GOP can convince Austin Scott, who is thinking of a Georgia gubernatorial run, to run against him.

Likewise, the GOP is going to need to find someone to run against Heath Shuler and many of the other lap blue dog Democrats.

I don’t really think the GOP is going to be able to take the House back in 2010, but they’ll make great strides.

More importantly, the GOP needs to get a plan in place to take back state legislatures in 2010. The anti-Democrat wave we should be facing will help them in the states and that will help with redistricting.

Here we go folks.

The Fairness Doctrine is going to make a comeback under the Obama administration. It just won’t be via Congress and it won’t be called the “Fairness Doctrine.” It’ll come via the FCC, involve restrictions on media ownership and content, and it’ll apply to the internet too.

As Brian Darling noted, the administration and leftists in Congress will be using the Center for American Progress’s outline.

From the Prowler:

“This isn’t just about Limbaugh or a local radio host most of us haven’t heard about,” says Democrat committee member. “The FCC and state and local governments also have oversight over the Internet lines and the cable and telecom companies that operate them. We want to get alternative views on radio and TV, but we also want to makes sure those alternative views are read, heard and seen online, which is becoming increasingly video and audio driven. Thanks to the stimulus package, we’ve established that broadband networks — the Internet — are critical, national infrastructure. We think that gives us an opening to look at what runs over that critical infrastructure.”

Here’s the gist of what’ll happen. Congress will restrict how many stations a company can own in a market. They’ll also require advisory boards for each station and make it easier to address consumer complaints against stations.

One of the requirements will be diversity of ideas on the air, so if a company is just broadcasting Rush Limbaugh on all stations in a state, consumers can file complaints. Likewise, the advisory boards’ demands will have to be adhered to by the stations.

If the stations’ advisory boards are filled with liberals who demand Rush Limbaugh be taken off the air, the station will have to comply in order to keep its license.

In addition, there’s this:

Also involved in “brainstorming” on “Fairness Doctrine and online monitoring has been the Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, which has published studies pressing for the Fairness Doctrine, as well as the radical MoveOn.org, which has been speaking to committee staff about policies that would allow them to use their five to six million person database to mobilize complaints against radio, TV or online entities they perceive to be limiting free speech or limiting opinion.

So it’ll no longer be what the market wants. It’ll be what the left demands.

Following up on Moe’s point that Mickey Kaus notices Obama’s Porkulus eradicates the 1996 reform of welfare, the London Telegraph puts in perspective what has happened.

The dangers are beginning to pile up for the novice president and his struggling economic crew. Tim Geithner, his treasury secretary, tripped up with opaque attempts to explain how the administration would fix the banking crisis, while from every corner of the country there were alarming indications that increased government intervention in the lives of ordinary Americans could prove an invitation to waste.

In Wisconsin, the state that forged a pioneering path in welfare reforms in the 1990s, residents were astonished by a newspaper investigation that disclosed that a $340m (£236m) programme offering taxpayer-financed child care to low-income working parents was riddled with fraud and expensive loopholes.

In one case, a family of four sisters who had 17 children between them put all of them together, took it in turns to babysit them and over the past three years claimed $540,000 (£374,000) in perfectly legal state childcare subsidies.

Examples like that fuel American suspicion that so-called “big government” invariably turns out to be inefficient, expensive and easily exploitable. And there has been no bigger government action in the US than the stimulus package presented by Obama.

This suggests the Republicans have missed a key talking point on the stimulus that they can probably now capitalize on as Obama pursuing an even more expansionist government policy — Obama wants to bring back the era of the welfare queen. The Democrats are all too eager to throw out all the Republican reforms from the Gingrich revolution and risk an enraged electorate because of it.

Brian Darling, Derek Hunter, and I have fired up a new project: a RedState response to Barack Obama’s weekly address to the nation.

We’re not sure if we should call it a weekly radio address or a weekly youtube address — what exactly is he doing?

In any event, we take him on paragraph by paragraph.

One note on this episode: Toward the end I call Obama what I call him behind the scenes here at RedState, which necessitates a small profanity warning. But you’ll be warned to turn off the podcast before you get to that point.

So listen here or go to iTunes and download to your iProduct. And enjoy.

Here’s a hard link to the podcast.

or listen here:

I mentioned earlier that the Democrats’ math does not add up when it came to jobs numbers.

Congressman Eric Cantor has prepared a chart that shows just how screwed up the White House’s numbers are. The White House attributes the error to a rounding error. That doesn’t quite add up though.

Small states have significant deviations from totals by the state versus total by the congressional district. And states with just one state wide congressional district have +20% swings.

Is this the same type of math and rounding they’ll use for census numbers?

These tidbits come from John Boehner’s office. — Erick

The Democrats’ trillion dollar spending bill provides $1.10 per day in tax relief to workers, while saddling every American family with $9,400.00 in added debt.

Following are some very tentative quick facts on the trillion-dollar “stimulus” spending deal slated to be rushed through the House and Senate today or tomorrow by Congressional Democrats, as compiled by the Office of House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-OH). These are based on best estimates on legislative text and scoring and may be subject to revision. Keep in mind that the Democrats haven’t actually released the actual text yet.

1. Generational Theft. The final agreement will cost each and every household more than $9,400 in additional debt (including interest on the bill), paid for by our children and grandchildren.
2. Paltry Tax Relief for Working Families and Small Businesses. The “Making Work Pay” tax credit at the center of the plan amounts to $1.10 a day, not even enough to ride the bus one-way to work.
3. Massive Government Expansion. The final agreement is almost as much as the annual discretionary budget for the entire federal government.
4. A Trillion-Dollar Spending Bill. The $789.5 billion final agreement slated for a House vote either today or tomorrow will exceed more than $1 trillion when adding in the interest of approximately $300 billion between 2009-2019.
5. Unnecessary Spending That Won’t Create Jobs. Apparently included in the final “jobs” bill is money for plug-in vehicles, money for STD prevention, and money for ACORN (via the Neighborhood Stabilization Program and CDBG program). The final agreement also creates new programs and funds existing programs that can be used to fund earmarks and pork-barrel projects.
6. The bill contains enough spending – $789.5 billion – to give every man, woman and child in America $2,600. $789.5 billion is enough to give every person in Ohio more than $68,000.
7. Supporters of the bill say it saves or creates 3.67 million new jobs. But, the data they are circulating shows only 3.46 million – that’s 210,000 fewer than their talking points claim, 500,000 fewer than President Obama promised, and a staggering 2.74 million fewer than the 6.2 million jobs that would be created by the House GOP alternative.
8. The bill creates 31 new programs totaling $97 billion (31% of all appropriations) and expands 73 programs by $92 billion which are part of the regular appropriations process, not “stimulative spending.”
9. Almost one-third of the so called “tax relief” in the bill is spending in disguise, meaning that true tax relief makes up only 26% of the total package – a far cry from the 40 percent that President Obama had requested.
10. A provision tucked in the bill will further increase government involvement in health care by putting bureaucrats – not doctors – in charge of health care choices for families and seniors.

Senator Judd Gregg has withdrawn his name as Barack Obama’s Commerce Secretary nominee.

It was pretty obvious the Obama administration intended to marginalize Gregg as Commerce Secretary. Maybe now he’ll be pissed off enough to start punching the Democrats.

Gregg’s statement mentions his disagreements with the administration on Porkulus and on Obama’s politicization of the census.

From his actual statement:

“I want to thank the President for nominating me to serve in his Cabinet as Secretary of Commerce. This was a great honor, and I had felt that I could bring some views and ideas that would assist him in governing during this difficult time. I especially admire his willingness to reach across the aisle.

“However, i”t has become apparent during this process that this will not work for me as I have found that on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me. Prior to accepting this post, we had discussed these and other potential differences, but unfortunately we did not adequately focus on these concerns. We are functioning from a different set of views on many critical items of policy.”

Folks, we’ve added CapWiz to RedState effective immediately.

GO HERE.

You’ll be able to take direct action on RedState Alerts. The site will be jointly used by RedState and Human Events.

Go plug in your zipcode and it’ll give you the local office phone number for your member of Congress since the switch board is full in Washington.

From: olivier.strauch@gmail.com

Subject: Let’s cut all taxes..are you the biggest moron to ever live?

Date: February 12, 2009 2:11:07 PM EST

To: REDSTATE


Seriously. Your answer to the devastation caused by the dogma of rightwing deregulation of everything is.. to cut 100% of federal taxes?

So how do we pay for your favorite President Bush’s most brilliant achievement – the war in Iraq? Shall our troops eat dust and drink happy thoughts, and shoot magic bullets filled with your pee and propelled by wingnut farts? How about Afghanistan? How about border guards, customs, INS, the FBI, the CIA, Guantanamo, federal prisons, airport security, and all the other things even disphits [yeah, he really wrote it that way] as braindead s you agree government needs to do?

Seriously – you are a f***ing [profanity edited by Erick] over the top, blue-ribbon winning, one in a million tool.

Please never, ever reproduce.

McCain is raising money for his 2010 run. He’s been damn good on the stimulus issue.

On Tuesday, the 2008 Republican presidential nominee sent out a fundraising solicitation to subscribers to johnmccain.com asking for donations to his 2010 Senate re-election campaign.

Jim Gerlach (R-PA) may run for Governor in 2010:

Rep. Jim Gerlach’s (R-Pa.) possible departure from the House to run for governor in 2010 may finally be the opening that Democrats are looking for to pick up his suburban Philadelphia seat.

That’s probably not a terrible thing, though it could be a Democrat pick up. His district will probably cease to exist in 2011 after the census. Pennsylvania will lose one seat.

Read on for more race roundups.

Read More →

Well this is a new one on me.

According to Congressional Quarterly this morning, House Republicans led by Jack Kingston (R-GA), took to the House floor to demand to see Porkulus.

Despite a unanimous vote of the House of Representatives to not vote on the bill until people had 48 hours to see it, the Democrats sought to back track and vote on Porkulus sight unseen.

From CQ:

Rep. Jack Kingston, R-Ga., complained this morning on the House floor that lawmakers were being asked to vote, sight unseen, on “the largest single bill in the history of Congress.” Some Democratic lawmakers fired back that Republicans didn’t need to see the bill anyway, since none of them voted for the stimulus when it moved through the House the first time and would probably stand in opposition.

There you have it. The GOP will have to remember this when they get the House back. If you are inclined to vote against something, you don’t get to see it.

America’s Mother-in-Law, by the way, caved around noon and decided not to bring Porkulus up for a vote.

Look, we always joke that the left is more about indoctrination than education, but this is ridiculous.

Bill Ayers (yeah him), the Woods Fund of Chicago that Barack Obama used to manage, and George Soros are funding some program called the “Fair Test.” And it’s not just them. The Fair Test has ties to NARAL, various Democratic party sub-groups, and a host of other left wing interests.

The “Fair Test” isn’t really a test at all. It’s a movement to scrap standardized tests for college admissions standards because the left is convinced they discriminate. In fact, under the “Fair Test”, the left doesn’t even really want colleges to look at a student’s grade point average.

Why?

The left has so bought in to the notion that standardized tests discriminate against preferred groups, they need a new end-run around the growing effort to get rid of race-based preferential admissions policies.

Given how entrenched the Fair Test movement is in the Democrat Party, watch for Congress to start whittling away at standardized tests for college admissions in favor of a more “holistic” approach.

Fox News is reporting Senator Mitch McConnell late this afternoon insisted that Republican senators let porkulus go to a vote on the Senate floor without a fight. McConnell apparently reasoned that obstructing the vote would make the GOP look bad and it would be better for the plan to pass and fail than be stopped cold by the GOP. Of course, there would be no guarantee of a successful obstruction given Specter, Snowe, and Collins’ support, but some Senators were frustrated by what they perceived as a McConnell’s insistence that the Republican conference sit on its hands.

I’m hearing that Jack Kingston has had conversations with people suggesting he may run for Governor.

That’d be interesting. Leaving his congressional seat would free up that spot for Eric Johnson, who could transition his campaign easily from Lt. Governor to Congress.

It’d also potentially make it likely that we could forgo at least one bloody primary.

Now if we could weed out some people in the Governor’s race.

UPDATE: I asked a Kingston staffer for comment and got this reply:

He’s not actively campaigning for anything – right now, Jack’s biggest priority is representing the people of Georgia in Congress and making sure that their voices are heard in crafting the ‘stimulus’ and in the upcoming omnibus negotiations.

Looks like a yes to me. heh.