Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown, an Occupy Wall Street supporter who is rated by the National Journal as the Senate’s most liberal member, is at it again. A hard-line leftist, he is putting his ideology above the needs of his constituents.

Brown has declared war on coal, which is incredible considering his state generates 86% of its electricity from coal and the state’s mining industry employees 27,000 Ohioans. Over the summer,  Brown joined Obama in the trenches to destroy coal jobs and cheap energy. One of Obama’s new regulations abuses executive power and is called Utility Maximum Achievable Control Technology, or Utility MACT. It would make the building of new coal plants an impossibility and cost existing plants tens of billions of dollars to retrofit their systems. Many will choose to just close down, just like six of FirstEnergy’s plants. And, just like Obama predicted, and desires, MACT will cause electricity rates to necessarily skyrocket. Brown was one of the 4 deciding votes to keep the new regulation.

Now, Brown continues to stand with President Obama and the EPA, which through new regulations is essentially banning the creation of new coal power plants, while shutting down dozens of fully functional plants across the country and favoring imperfect natural gas. As reported in Human Events:

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has enacted three significant regulations for new air emission standards with an annual cost expected to total more than $13 billion. Several more, including two proposed rules dealing with air and coal ash, could cost an additional $20 billion to $90 billion annually, according to a recent energy report by the Senate Republican Policy Committee.

The coal industry estimates its labor force at 135,000—Black is one of 2,000 who lost their jobs this year. Another 10,000 layoffs in direct and related jobs are expected in the coming months, and job loss estimates leaked from the Obama administration on the effects of just one water rule predicted another 7,000 coal jobs would be eliminated.

New coal-fired plants banned

The regulatory barrage is expected to close 175 coal-fired electric generating units, and effectively bans the opening of any new coal-fired power plants, diminishing the reliability of electricity and increasing the cost across half the nation, the Senate report said.

“I think the EPA is doing real harm to the United States with their heavy-handed activities,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), policy committee chairman and the report’s author. “It’s not just the coal plants that are suffering, it’s the entire communities because of the jobs related to it.”

“Energy security is part of our economic security and our national security, and coal is the most available, affordable reliable and secure source of energy that we have in America,” Barrasso said. “We have hundreds of years of supply, we cannot as a nation allow this to become a stranded asset.”

The Senate report expressed concerns from power companies they would be forced out of business because the upgrades are too expensive. Southern Company, a utility that covers states from Mississippi to Georgia, said electricity rationing is almost inevitable if the EPA’s timelines cannot be met.

“The cost of those regulations are real, but the benefits are unknown,” Barrasso said. “The EPA seems to be held hostage by environmental extremists, who seem to not want us to use fossil fuels of any sort.”

The U.S. has more than 1,400 coal-fired electric generating units at more than 600 power plants that produce nearly half of the country’s electricity to 60 million homes and 3.4 million businesses.

By regulating coal into oblivion, President Obama hopes that preferred alternative energy sources like wind and sun can be more competitive, Barrasso said.

Because of these regulations, natural gas which Ohioans use to power their homes has skyrocketed in price to 52%, which is the last thing that struggling, out-of-work Ohioans need.  According to Reuters data, as demand is expanding globally, natural gas is quickly approaching a price which is $2 more than the same per unit, which results in higher energy prices for cash-strapped consumers who already heat their homes with natural gas.

In the last five years, Sherrod Brown quickly made the leap from an insignificant career politician from Lorain, to becoming an effective poster boy for special interest groups such as the Sierra Club and Greenpeace – organizations with nationwide campaigns to eliminate coal-fired power plants and other energy resources important to Ohio.

Brown’s negative impact has reached far outside of Ohio.  By voting to prevent by stopping the Keystone pipeline, he prevented the creation of 13,000 construction jobs and 7,000 manufacturing jobs. This is in addition to giving oil markets the additional supply necessary to keep gas prices lower than the current average of more than $4.00/gallon.

And as Ohio slowly tries to rebuild after the devastating economic recession, Brown’s policies are wrong for his state and America.

Today, U.S. Sen. Jim DeMint (R-South Carolina), the Senate’s strongest voice for principled conservatism, joined with John Tillman, CEO of the Illinois Policy Institute at the Cato Institute to pledge his opposition to a federal bailout of underfunded state pension systems.

In the era of Obama, as the national debt surpasses $16 trillion(!), the answer to all economic questions seems to involve massive Federals bailouts.

Therefore, the Illinois Policy Institute, a non-partisan policy think tank which is part of the State Policy Network, has launched a new campaign, called the Pension Project, to sound the alarm as state bureaucrats attempt to cover up their mismanagement of employee pensions by giving taxpayers the bill.

Here is an interactive map to see how bad the public pension problem is in your state, and here is a list of what states will be “winners” or “losers” if the Federal government bails out pensions.

Across the nation, state government pension systems are underfunded to the tune of $2.5 trillion. Rhode Island and Utah are among a handful of states that have tightened their belts and are aligning retirement promises with reality. Meanwhile, other states continue to spend beyond their means. Illinois, for example, faces more than $167 billion in state pension debt. Yet the state’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget book identified “a federal guarantee of [pension] debt” as one of the possible ways to reconcile this massive red ink. As IPI notes, their state of Illinois has failed to pass meaningful pension reform.

“The only way to force recalcitrant states to put fiscal reform on the table is for Congress to take state bailouts off of it. Congress must make plain that the taxpayers will not protect reckless state policymakers from the consequences of their policies,” said Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). “Prudent states cannot be forced to shoulder the bad decisions of irresponsible states. State policymakers whose failures created this crisis must be responsible for solving it. It is simply wrong for taxpayers who live within their means to be forced to bailout governments that did not.”

IPS has has developed a model to measure the impact of a federal bailout of state pension debt. To finance a bailout of all state pension systems, the federal government would have to raise taxes and cut federal spending by $2.5 trillion. States with the biggest pension liabilities, such as Illinois, would benefit tremendously from a bailout. Meanwhile, most other states would suffer.

For too long, states have been able to delay reforming public pensions, with exaggerated forecasts and accounting practices which would be criminal in the private sector. As states find other ways to spend taxpayer dollars, too little is invested in pensions compared to what is promised. And as more teachers, police officers, and state employees reach retirement age, the strain on these pensions become even greater.

Ideally, pensions should not be touched by the political process. There are enough private portfolio managers in the Yellow Pages who can offer clients a decent rate of return, depending on the amount of risk and time they have until retirement.

But right now, state pensions need reform, and quickly!  The federal government should not be in the business of proping up states which don’t know how to balance their books.

Ohio, birthplace of the great Senator Robert “Mr. Republican” Taft, who lead the fight against the New Deal, hasn’t elected a conservative to the Senate in my lifetime. But with endorsesments from FreedomWorks and Senator Jim. DeMint’s Senate Conservative Fund, Mandel has shown himself to be a true movement conservative.

With polls showing the Senate race is tied, outside groups are lining up to help Mandel combat Brown’s support from the environmental lobby and Washington lobbyists.

One such group is the Government Integrity Fund, run by a group of Ohio conservatives, who are running tough ads such as this:

And this:

According to today’s Politico influence email update, they are on air now:

OHIO-BASED CONSERVATIVE GROUP BUYS ADS AGAINST BROWN: Government Integrity Fund, a tax-exempt nonprofit, dropped $1 million on ads against Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) between Aug. 17 and Sep. 6. The ads aired in Columbus, Dayton, Cincinnati, Lima and Zanesville. The group has previously spent at least an additional $500,000, on ads against Brown and in support of his Republican challenger Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel.

Predictably, far-left groups (who, hilariously, hide their donors too!) are outraged. The Soros-Funded ProPublica published an attack piece today, which was re-printed in The Columbus Dispatch:

Like many other such nonprofit groups that are playing a dominant role in this year’s elections, the Government Integrity Fund is shrouded in mystery. It isn’t required to reveal donors, nor has it answered questions about who runs the group. The Fund’s barebones website lists no contact information beyond a P.O. box.

The only name listed on incorporation papers for the group is a Columbus lawyer, William Todd, who told ProPublica, “I really have no role in their affairs.” (In June, Todd also declined to respond to questions from a Huffington Post reporter, citing attorney-client privilege.)

But previously unreported documents filed with an Ohio television station pull back the curtain a bit: the Government Integrity Fund is run by a state lobbyist who in turn employs a former top Mandel staffer.

The lobbyist, Tom Norris, is listed as the Government Integrity Fund’s chairman and treasurer.

I contacted Tom Norris for comment, and he was rightfully indiginant about this blantant assault on free speech:

In the Citizens United case, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the basic principle of the First Amendment that all Americans have a right to speak out on public policy matters. By protecting this important right, the Court created new avenues for Americans to be involved in the political process.

Many new groups have taken advantage of the protection provided by the Supreme Court to speak up about policy matters. At the national level, large organizations, such as Priorities USA, and the Majority Fund are fully engaged in the debate over federal issues such as Congressional spending, health care reform, and reinvigorating our economy.

In Ohio, groups like Our Future Ohio, have also taken advantage of their protected, First Amendment freedom to discuss issues of importance in the Buckeye State.  Similarly, the Government Integrity Fund was created in order to focus on those important public policy matters that have a direct impact on the lives of Ohioans.

While there are reputable groups like the US Chamber and Crossroads GPS who are operating in as many as 20 states, the Government Integrity Fund has chosen to operate solely in Ohio at this time, focusing on issues important to Ohioans.

The Government Integrity Fund is simply another independent voice in the robust debate that all Americans wish to see in the public arena. The Fund operates in a manner consistent with our Constitutionally protected First Amendment freedoms and strictly follows federal and state campaign finance laws in its operations.

As Justice Brandeis once noted, the cure for bad speech is more speech. And as liberal public-sector unions have been funding message campaigns for decades, conservatives are only now attempting match the independent political firepower that the left has.

The Government Integrity Fund’s donors have a right to speak. And I applaud their efforts to elect a solid conservative to the U.S. Senate.

Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown has been a busy statist.

First, he attacked his Republican opponent, Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel for promoting his Tea Party credentials.

What was Josh’s sin? It certainly wasn’t a lack of conservatism. Mandel, a rising conservative leader, is Endorsed by FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth. Josh once represented a portion of Rep. Dennis Kucinich’s district in the Ohio House of Representatives while standing firmly to the right of the Republican caucus.

Josh’s fault was noting in a television ad an endorsement from a dubious conservative group. Brown’s crack team of communications wizards must have spent hours digging through Archive.org’s snapshots of my now-defunct Ohio blog before sending my 2010 commentary to the Talking Points Memo.

Then, Team Brown attacked Mandel for dropping his vowels and sounding “southern” at a Romney rally.

While I’m flattered by the attention brought to MY TWO YEAR OLD BLOG POST during a competitive U.S. Senate race, it is sad to watch an incumbent Senator be so desperate.  After spending his entire adult life in elected office, Sherrod must have serious issues to discuss, right?

Wrong! As the Senate’s most liberal member, Sherrod knows his rigid ideology and environmental radicalism put him so far out of Ohio’s mainstream, voters would toss him out of office if they find out the truth.

Republicans need to win this seat. To win, Mandel’s campaign should focus like a laser on Sherrod Brown’s abysmal vote on energy.

With Ohio’s abundance of shale, coal and natural gas, Brown has shockingly amassed an anti-energy record which puts far-left special interests and campaign contributors ahead of Ohio families and businesses.

Outside liberal groups such as MoveOn.org and the ALF-CIO Super PAC are spending millions of dollars in the race to support this radical Senator, who is currently tied with his opponent. Instead of fighting for his state, Sen. Brown has been quick to repay campaign favors to groups that care only about pushing their green agenda, and not Ohio families.

In pandering to the environmental extremists, Brown voted against the Keystone pipeline, which resulted in fewer jobs and higher energy prices for consumers. He also voted cap and trade, which would have had the same effect.

On November 10, 2011, Sherrod Brown voted against S.J. Resolution 27, which would have nullified an EPA rule regarding cross-state air pollution. With a price tag of $9.6 billion, it is perhaps the most expensive decision in EPA history. This was after voting, in April 2011 against blocking the unelected bureaucrats at the EPA to unconstitutionally impose cap and trade without Congressional approval.

Brown, being careful not to discuss these politically sensitive topics with Ohio newspapers, admitted in a November 2011 radio interview that he supports the Obama’s Department of Agriculture’s  decision to prevent oil and gas exploration on 3,200 acres of federal land in Ohio. This interview took place in the same month that Republic Steel announced the creation of 450 jobs to support Ohio’s growing oil and gas sector.

Ohio needs better representation in Washington. We can’t afford a Senator whose policy positions are driven by a desire to run oil companies and related industries out of business.

A number of pro-family, socially conservative groups, such as the Family Research Center and Concerned Women for America, are refusing to participate in next month’s CPAC conference, which is the largest annual meeting of movement conservatives from across the country. From the Politico:

A leading conservative in the House of Representatives is joining a move by social conservative activists to boycott the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, which they have criticized for including a gay Republican group.

The chairman of the Republican Study Committee, Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, will skip this year’s event, spokesman Brian Straessle said.

Jordan is the most prominent elected official to publicly pass on the event. His predecessor as chairman, Mike Pence, has not yet announced whether he’ll attend.

The conflict over CPAC reflects both personal rifts on the right and an argument over how large the conservative tent can be stretched.

In addition to legitimate concerns about malfeasance in the American Conservative Union, the group the organizes CPAC, the problem that has outraged traditional conservatives is CPAC has teamed up with GOProud, a group of homosexual activists claiming to be to the right of the Log Cabin Republicans. However, they were vocal in their opposition to the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell Policy, want to relax state marriage laws, and want to find a place for a political identity group which works almost exclusively with liberal Democrats.

Rep. Jordan, who was recently elected to lead the Republican Study Committee and is one of only two members of the Ohio delegation conservative enough to have support from the Club for Growth, could have easily gone along with this lazy libertarianism. After all, in the era of Obama, TEA Party activists, perhaps out of necessity, have put social issues aside to combat insane fiscal policies. And Jordan, a former wrestling coach, has spent years as a vicious grappler against statism in the state legislature and Federal government.

However, the realm of liberty is not merely fiscal but moral and cultural as well. The conservative aim of limited government can only be furthered when the close connection between moral culture, religious freedom, and economic development is recognized. Individuals and markets must be liberated in tandem. To safeguard the right of the individual to determine the way in which he or she works, procures wages, and sustains his or her existence is to defend the sanctity of human life, while policies that support the traditional family, protect innocent life, and encourage personal responsibility provide for a culture conducive to self-government.

Rep. Jordan understands that the social cannot be divorced from the fiscal, and is standing with conservatives who understand that the ENTIRE POINT of our movement is to stand athwart such radicalization of middle America and yell “Stop!” As as noted at recent meeting of conservative bloggers, compromise is not in the vocabulary of the new RSC Chairman:

“We all know what the elections were about: cutting spending, not raising taxes on a single American and repealing health care,” [Rep. Jim Jordan] said. “I would add a fourth thing: not forgetting those basic human values that make us a great country in the first place — respect for human life, respect for the family and that key institution that ultimately determines the health of our entire culture, and respect for the [hard] work ethic and the free market.”

The modern Republican Party, Jordan said, has always stood for four things: strong defense, fewer taxes, less spending and traditional values.

“All four have got to be in play,” he said. Keeping them in play, in Jordan’s view, won’t include compromising.

“People talk about the word ‘compromising,’” he said. “Typically, when the left talks about ‘compromising,’ it means doing things their way and that’s not what we want to do.”

Nor, he says, is that what the election was about.

“The election was not about compromising; it was about stopping,” he said. “It was about stopping what they’re doing, stopping the tax increases, stopping the crazy spending, stopping the health care bill. … I don’t know if we can work with these guys [on the left] much. I think more importantly we’ve got to do what we told people we would do.”

Perhaps the issue here is CPAC is just losing touch with the movement- Their organization has been involved in pay-to-play and embezzlement. And last year, they allowed the wacky, conspiratorial John Birch Society to co-host CPAC, even though William F. Buckley threw them out of the movement in the 1960s.

But whatever the problem with CPAC is, as more people reject the failed policies of the left and get involved in conservative politics, it is important to remember that an adherence to tradition and promotion of the traditional family unit is what we’re all about. I applaud Jordan’s principled stance.

You have heard all of the clichés: “talk is cheap” or they “talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk.” Unfortunately, the first describes the lip service many in Congress give to a Balanced Budget Amendment.  They claim to support fiscal discipline but refuse to change their big spending ways.  The latter refers to many non-profit groups who support a Balanced Budget Amendment, yet have not aggressively demanded action or held Members of Congress individually accountable for inaction.

We are different, we are solely focused on passing a BBA now, we will not compromise our sole mission for some other legislative agenda priority.  We want results now and will push for them now. We are going to run a 50 state media and grassroots campaign that forces Congress to vote on October 1, 2011 for a Balanced Budget Amendment. Those who vote against it will be singled out and removed in 2012.  No excuses, no “special passes” and absolutely no compromises.

Balanced Budget Amendment Now will:

• Gather 5,000 – 10,000 signatures and postcards from registered voters in every Congressional District. Postcards and signatures will be sent to the targeted members of Congress and U.S. Senators.
• Starting in April 2011, we will post on www.balancedbudgetamendmentnow.com a list of Congress Members and U.S. Senators who have signed our pledge to vote for the Balanced Budget Amendment on October 1, 2011. For those who have not signed, we will double and triple our efforts to inform their voting public of their irresponsible behavior.
• Work with Congress to start a Balanced Budget Amendment Caucus in November 2010. Congress has caucuses for Arts, Community College, Internet, Travel & tourism, et al, but we don’t have one for a Balanced Budget Amendment.

We are seeking results by passing a Balanced Budget Amendment in the 112 Congress. It is time to protect our nation from enslavement by foreign bondholders and provide our children and grandchildren with an opportunistic society that can allow them to pursue the American Dream. No other legislation is more important than passing a Balanced Budget Amendment.

Blackwell, who is on the board of directors of the Club for Growth, is pleased to report that Club-approved fiscal conservatives Rep. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Rep. Tom Graves of Georgia may run the appropriations committee:

Fiscal conservatives like Reps. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and Tom Graves (R-G.A.) are gaining momentum within the Republican caucus as exactly the type of principled leaders needed to bring fiscal sanity to the appropriations committee.

Rep. Flake, of course, is well known to fiscal conservatives, but Rep. Graves is a rising star who is not yet widely known.

Having won four races in less than one hundred days (including a special election and two run-offs) to fill the seat for Georgia’s ninth congressional district this summer, Rep. Graves wasted little time in becoming an outspoken opponent of earmarks.

Prior to being elected to Congress, Graves was a leader in the Georgia General Assembly’s successful effort to cut $3.1 billion from Georgia’s budget and authored legislation to implement zero-based budgeting to bring transparency and accountability to the state budgeting process

In just his first month in Congress, Graves authored legislation to defund the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010.

Republicans have an opportunity to change the way Washington works by putting proven conservative leaders in a position to lead by example.

This is fantastic news, as this committee was once a coveted position by members of congress who wanted to “bring home the bacon” with various pork projects and expenditures to their district but may now be run by two conservative stalwarts who have fully embraced the small government principles of the Tea party movement. Ending wasteful earmarks and stopping deficit spending are of the utmost importance.