A lot of people focus on the federal level when they think about politics. On the day after the 2010 election, I urged people to continue the fights at the state level. The unions — and especially the public employee unions — know that. Recall that in October of last year, the Wall Street Journal broke a very important story that found that AFSCME, the main non-teacher public employee union in the country, was the largest spender of the 2010 election. Their political director said, “we’re the big dog.”

I urge you to turn your eyes to the state level. The National Institute on Money in State Politics has an excellent site on money in state politics. Who are the #1 spenders in state politics? The public employee unions. #2 the gambling industry. In Wisconsin? The teachers unions are first and third, with the trial lawyers in fourth. Oh, and the Democrats themselves are in second.

And ultimately, that’s why the Democrats in the state legislature are AWOL. They are worried about their money getting cut off. You can see what the unions get for their money. They get state legislators who won’t even allow for a vote to ask public employees contribute to their health care and pension, even at levels below the national or Wisconsin average.

However, one of the Democrats has realized the flaw in their plans. A budget requires 20 votes to pass in the state senate. But simply removing the collecting bargaining rights only requires a simple majority. Let’s hope that the Republicans take the opportunity of Democratic absence to deal with the situation appropriately.

The 2009 primary election in Troy, NY attracted much attention for election shenanigans from Democratic officials who are associated with the Working Families Party. Well, yesterday, a grand jury issued indictments on 116 charges against a Democratic City Councilmember Michael LaPorto and Democratic Election Commissioner Edward McDonough. The Albany Times-Union and the Troy Record have been all over this.

Basically, those two Democratic officials have been indicted of forging absentee ballot applications and then actually voting those people in the Working Families Party primary. Almost everyone who was voted illegally by these officials were poor people living in housing projects. To make clear what this means: Democratic officials stole the right to vote from poor people.

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The Washington Post has a great story about the meltdown of the green movement. It is about the need of the movement to refocus because, at a critical point, voters — you — rejected their ideas and the people who carried their water in Washington and in the state capitals. What really struck me was that the Sierra Club is shifting focus from raising the cost of energy in Washington to raising it in the states and making less of it:

The Sierra Club, meanwhile, is bolstering its long-standing campaign to block the construction of power plants across the country, assembling a team of 100 full-time employees to focus on the issue in 45 states.

After all, with a growing population, why would the American people need more energy? What is so astonishing about the left is that it refuses to learn from the practical experiences of others. For example, the UK energy crisis.

Last night was an epic victory for conservatives and Republicans. We pushed back against the arrogant, over-spending Congressional Democrats and, by proxy, President Barack Obama. Much of the commentary has talked about the coming gridlock in Washington. For example, The Economist has described “two years of nothing.” But that’s not true. Even if there is little agreement on jobs and other policies, Congress and state governments will have to pass budgets and spending bills.  That provides us an opening to continue to channel our activism, especially at the state level to have profound impact in actually reducing the size of government.

But first, let’s talk about the scope of the victory last night in the state capitals. This afternoon I spoke with GOPAC Chairman Frank Donatelli about the scope of our victories. Republicans picked up 23 chambers of state legislatures and the most Republican state legislators since 1928. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, Republicans now control both houses of the state legislature in 25 states. Many of these states are in fiscal crisis. Obama and Congressional Democrats bailed out the states — and their public employee unions — twice. And much of that money was turned around and spent attacking Republicans. Recall that the Wall Street Journal found that AFSCME — the largest public employee union — was the largest spender of the cycle.

But bailouts from Washington should not happen again. House Republicans can stop it from even coming to the floor. We have to continue pressure to make that happen, but we can and will win that fight. The next step is the states. With Republican control of so many state legislatures, we can now force states to reform and their services while cutting government employees. Mitch Daniels did it in Indiana, and with both chambers of the state legislature, they are likely to do more. If our new conservative leaders do this, we can get better service, smaller government, and less union money fighting for more spending in the future. That’s a virtuous circle.

So here’s what we have to do. We have to continue to be involved at the local level. We have to find out what is happening in our state legislatures. And we have to find out who is spending the money and who wants to raise taxes. And we have to fight back and stop them. The next nine months will be critical in wounding Leviathan. If we do, the unions will have less money to spend in 2012 when we defeat Barack Obama.

Chicago, where I grew up and lived for 26 years, has been the butt of jokes about corruption and election fraud. This behavior has seeped across the border at times into Indiana. For example 31 people were convicted for voter fraud in the 2003 East Chicago (Indiana) Democratic mayoral primary. At the very least, this year the Illinois Democratic Party and election apparatus has become the butt of jokes. Thirty-five counties sent absentee ballots late to military voters, including the county with the largest military vote. (incidentally, Mark Kirk, the Republican candidate for Senate is a Navy Reserves vet) The Illinois Democratic Campaign Committee, chaired by Senator Dick Durbin, sent out nearly 1,000,000 absentee ballot applications late, with return addresses to the state party. A similar operation in Bucks County, PA has resulted in all the absentee ballots to be impounded.

As Hans von Spakovsky noted in a 2008 Heritage Foundation research paper, this has sometimes been a good reason. In this paper, von Spakovsky reviewed media reports and court records from the 1982 election and recount. That year incumbent Republican Governor James Thompson was polling at a 15-point lead, but won by only 6,000 votes. Adlai Stevenson, the Democratic candidate alleged voter fraud downstate and filed suit. The FBI investigated those and charges that it occurred in Chicago.

What particularly struck FBI agent Ernest Locker was how routine vote fraud was for the pre cinct captains, election judges, poll watchers, and political party workers he interviewed. They had been taught how to steal votes (and elections) by their predecessors, who had in turn been taught by their predecessors. Based on his investigation, Locker came to believe the claims, hotly debated among historians, that Mayor Daley threw the 1960 presidential election for John Kennedy with massive ballot stuffing in Chicago. This type of voter fraud, stated Locker, “was an accepted way of life in Chicago.”

Von Spakovsky’s quote of the FBI agent is important. If ballot stuffing in Chicago is an “accepted way of life”, it may be happening today. So why do I raise this? Because it could happen again. Like 1982, the Dems started with legal challenges. This time, they have filed FOIA requests with all the county Boards of Elections. 

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You might recall that in Illinois, it is illegal to “electioneer” inside a polling place. You might recall that this issue came up recently when Michelle Obama, a Harvard Law School graduate and the daughter of a Chicago Democratic Machine precinct captain, discussed with voters inside a polling place why it was important to support Democrats this cycle. Naturally, the Robert Gibbs and the White House didn’t take that seriously.

Well, at an early voting rally in Chicago, Rep. Jan Schakowsky, whose husband is a felon, did the same thing. Watch the video:

Joel Pollak, a friend of mine, is running against her. He schooled Barney Frank in 2009.

Big Government and Election Journal have a great new resource for fighting voter fraud: a free iPhone app. From them:

Brought to you by ElectionJournal.org, the website that broke the Black Panther intimidation story in 2008.  iReport is the first iPhone application dedicated to reporting voter fraud, intimidation and other election irregularities.

The app is available for free and allows you to join EJ’s nationwide network of citizens dedicated to raising public awareness of election fraud.  With iReport you can send information, along with photos and video, directly from your polling location with your iPhone.

The best way to stop fraud is expose it.  Download the app and join the team.

Available in the App Store as iReport2010

Barack Obama and the Democrats have a story about this election. It goes like this. The Supreme Court ruled that corporations have free speech rights in the Supreme Court decision Citizens United. Since then, all this corporate money has flowed into campaigns, blah blah blah. And the press has completely accepted this line of thinking.

It is complete nonsense. They probably want to concoct a falsehood so that this election somehow is not about the White House. But the reality is that their core narrative is simply false on its face.

The basic claim of the left and the media is this: Citizens United allowed (a) a new flood of corporate money that is (b) completely undisclosed. Both (a) and (b) are false. Find out why after the jump.

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The “Young Guns” have a book. They also have a promotion tour and a video. Now, the Democrats could engage in a battle of ideas. But that’s not what they do. (are you surprised?)

Instead the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee files a complaint with the Federal Election Commission that promoting the book violates election law. Really. By their interpretation, a book publisher cannot promote a book if it is political.

What is the mechanism? The publisher posts a  video by the authors about their book that contains a link to a website that takes political contributions. It is after all, a political manifesto.

Restating, Democrats use the power of the federal government to attempt to prohibit the political speech and promotion of speech by their political enemies. That’s the kind of thing that lead to the American Revolution. Tea Parties make perfect sense in this context.

The G-8 and G-20 meetings in Canada were remarkable in historic terms. European governments criticized the United States for being spendthrift. Brazil provided political cover to the US on behalf of the developing countries. This has been a consequence of something truly remarkable happening in Europe. Keynsianism has lost in Europe. There is no political support for it. And Barack Obama got hit in the face with this reality.

Since the beginning of the financial crisis, conservative and liberal parties have defeated socialist parties in nearly every election in the European Union. They won the European elections and elections in the UK, Italy, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, the Czech Republic, Hungary, etc. A reformist, pro-market right has beaten a traditionalist right in Poland. There is no credible political voice for more spending in Europe. The Greek and Portuguese financial crises have destroyed a political argument for deficit-funded stimulus packages. (note that this opportunity is not being wasted: European countries are raising retirement ages and trying all sorts of other strategies to cut their extensive entitlement systems)

Furthermore, the only European Union members with Socialist governments are Portugal, Greece, and Spain. (note that Austria has a “Grand Coalition” where the right and the left share power) You will note that this is three of the four “PIGS” countries that are the weakest economic performers in Europe. Furthermore, the Greek Prime Minister is the leader of the Socialist International, which coordinates policy and political positions internationally across all the parties of the left. How is that working out?

It is pretty astonishing that Barack Obama went to this crowd to demand that they spend more. It was both tone deaf about the epochal changes in European politics and indicative of a broader incompetence in our foreign policy.

In the last couple of years, many of us have been laid off, worked at places where people have been laid off, had friends who were laid off, or had to lay people off. It is tough, but often it has to be done by management for them to be responsible stewards of the organization. Last week, the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles (and former Speaker of the California Assembly) Antonio Villaraigosa described the “tough decisions” that he had to make in “extricat[ing]” the people of LA from 3,500 government employees.

In Villaraigosa’s own words, “we’re doing furloughs and layoffs, we’re doing everything we can, including early retirement, to reduce the size of our payroll.” Sometimes a responsible leader in the private sector or the public sector has to do this. But that isn’t what you are going to hear from Democrats this year. Democrats like Barbara “Ma’am” Boxer are going to demonize Republicans, like Carly Fiorina, who were involved in layoffs because it was the responsible thing to do. Of course, the dems will have supporters and fundraisers, like Mayor Villaraigosa, who sometimes do the right thing. Not because they want to, but because they have to.

Erick has lead the charge in picking candidates who will do the right thing in office. They will fight against ridiculous bailouts for the public employee unions. (that’s what these state stimulus bills are, just like the auto-bailout was a bailout for the pension plans of the United Auto Workers) These leaders will also need to make the “tough decisions.” We And when they do it, regardless of party, we need to support their efforts to shrink public expenditures and public payrolls.

And when the Democrats attack on “layoffs” and similar demonization of responsible leadership, we need to fight back harshly and expose their hypocrisy.

Over the past 72 hours, the online left has collectively ripped into Carly Fiorina  for an ad that shines a spotlight on Barbara Boxer’s assertion that “One of the very important national security issues we face, frankly, is climate change.” Naturally, the media has been carrying Boxer’s water in wildly distorting Fiorina’s point.

Ultimately, this election is going to be fought over questions about who can address the problem faced by our national economy (hint: taxes and debt bad) and who can address the real problems faced by Americans. That’s why it is important to get Fiorina’s point right on both national security and the economy.

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Today the New York Times had a shocking story: this year the Social Security Trust Fund will pay more out in benefits than it takes in in revenue. There are several reasons this is an important story.

First, it is important because it reminds us that our country is on the edge of a fiscal precipice. The baby boomers will begin retiring next year. Indeed, with the recession some have started to retire early. As the story notes, “payments have risen more than expected during the downturn, because jobs disappeared and people applied for benefits sooner than they had planned.”

Congress added to this crisis this week by passing ObamaCare. The left has argued that we can afford this $1 trillion spending program because, with the taxes, it will actually reduce the deficit. That’s what CBO says!

But, and this is the second point, CBO got Social Security wrong. They didn’t see this coming. From NYT:

This year, the system will pay out more in benefits than it receives in payroll taxes, an important threshold it was not expected to cross until at least 2016, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Just at the moment that we our entrusting our countries fiscal future on guestimates on the health care bills from CBO, it turns out that they completely failed us on Social Security.

Just something to keep in mind.

Allyson Schwartz (D-PA-13) represents a district that John Kerry won 54-43. In 2008, she won 63-34. But she’s scared this year. How scared? Scared enough to put the screws into the leaders of the national and state firefighters union to get a firefighter and bar owner named Brian Haughton to not run:

Haughton described himself as aggressive and passionate and told the crowd that Schwartz called the heads of the national and local International Association of Fire Fighters to ask them to get him out of the race, saying, “I don’t want to run against a firefighter.”

He thinks she fears a blue-collar Philadelphian as an opponent.

Rachel Magnuson, Schwartz’s chief of staff, said the congresswoman spoke to the union leaders, but only to seek support, not to derail Haughton’s candidacy. Magnuson noted that Schwartz has been supported by the fire unions in the past and added that the office will not have a comment on the campaign until a Republican candidate emerges. She did indicate that the incumbent is focused on jobs as the primary issue.

Not only did Schwartz make the call, but her staff weren’t shy about it. In what would probably be a safe district — in 2002 the Republican did get 47%, but Schwartz beat her by outspending her almost 3-1 — she has to put on the screws to stop a blue collar firefighter.

Oh, and I have been told, but I have not been able to confirm, that the fire fighters have endorsed Haughton, one of their own. (this may just be in the Republican primary)

All politics is local, or so said former Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-MA). One wonders if Democrats lost the thread of what was happening in Massachusetts when they tried to nationalize the Massachusetts Senate special election around Barack Obama’s universal health care plan.

You see, Obama’s plan borrowed much conceptually from Massachusetts plan that Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney worked on. The key concepts: a mandate implemented through the tax code, exchanges, and an increase in the regulatory burden on insurance plans and therefore costs. Indeed, the costs of health care in Massachusetts are rising and people are dissatisfied.

Read on …

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The Senate has been called the world’s greatest deliberative body. Not today. You see, Harry Reid cut a deal with the Democrats. Then he introduced that deal as a substitute to the bill. And then he “filled the tree”. That’s a short-hand to describe a parliamentary manuever by which no amendments are allowed to the action currently on the floor. The Majority Leader can always do this because of some quirks of Senate procedure.

That’s right. No amendments. No changes. No improvements, even minor ones. No Republican ideas. Why?

Either it is perfect? Or it would fall apart on the slightest tweak.

That sounds like running the Senate like a plantation. And when you consider that this is how he is trying to get a massive government over-reach into our economy, it puts a new twist to the Hayek’s title “Road to Serfdom.”

Yesterday, the Washington Post broke a blockbuster. A memo was leaked detailing all the current House Ethics Committee investigations. And guess what, most of them are Democrats. In fact, the only Republican mentioned in it was Sam Graves, who has been cleared by the Committee.

So what did we learn? The Post says, regarding the inquiry of lawmakers tied to PMA, a now defunct lobbying shop, that “the inquiry was broader than initially believed”. And we learned that there is yet another investigation of Charlie Rangel:

Ethics committee staff members have interviewed House Ways and Means Chairman Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) about one element of the complex investigation of his personal finances, as well as the lawmaker’s top aide and his son. Rangel said he spoke with ethics committee staff members regarding a conference that he and four other members of the Congressional Black Caucus attended last November in St. Martin. The trip initially was said to be sponsored by a nonprofit foundation run by a newspaper. But the three-day event, at a luxury resort, was underwritten by major corporations such as Citigroup, Pfizer and AT&T. Rules passed in 2007, shortly after Democrats reclaimed the majority following a wave of corruption cases against Republicans, bar private companies from paying for congressional travel.

This is in addition to all the other problems that Rangel has, including his not disclosing bank accounts, breaking New York City laws about rent control, and his holding hostage Puerto Rican grandmas for his rum buddies.

David Corn at Politics Daily has a smart take that Rangel will ultimately become a symbol of a corrupt Democratic Congress and Nancy Pelosi’s broken promise to drain the swamp.

Why might the Post article and this widening investigation of ties between lawmakers and lobbyists — neither of which relate to Rangel — matter for him? Though the probe has not yet found any of these House members guilty of wrongdoing, this episode will place pressure on Pelosi and her colleagues to show they’re not a party of sleaze. Consequently, Rangel is more vulnerable to the Republican’s campaign against him. If the PMA investigation heats up, he would make a great sacrificial lamb. And if the GOP continues to pursue Rangel, his party, burdened by this other ethics investigation, will have a tougher time protecting him.

National Review’s Jim Geraghty has a tremendously important story. Jon Corzine is trying to build an absentee ballot slush fund to win a recount in the New Jersey Governor’s race. Basically, the Democratic Party has asked the Secretary of State to send provisional absentee ballots out to people whose signatures on their absentee ballot requests don’t match:

In a development that is depressingly predictable, the New Jersey Democratic party is asking the state to provide provisional ballots for all these voters. Those ballots could, presumably, be used to overcome any narrow lead by Republican Chris Christie over Democrat Jon Corzine on Election Day.

Now, let’s be clear how the absentee process works in New Jersey. Third parties can pick up and return absentee ballots.  A couple of weeks ago, a Democratic operative in Atlantic City plead guilty to a lesser charge of tampering with ballots. One practice mentioned in the indictment was the person picking up ballots from people and throwing them out if they weren’t for his candidate.  Another example was:

They allegedly solicited applications for messenger absentee ballots from individuals not qualified to receive them and had the voters not fill in the name of the messenger, so they could fraudulently designate themselves as the authorized messengers or bearers.

And:

They allegedly obtained messenger ballots from the county clerk and submitted them to the board of elections as vote s on behalf of voters who, in fact, never received or voted the ballots or, in some cases, were given only the security envelope for the ballot and were told to sign it. Those voters were not given the opportunity to vote in most instances.

So when ballots are getting into the hands of people who didn’t even ask fro them, you have to wonder what is going on.

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Last year, we covered some of the problems in the counting of military absentee ballots in Virginia, as did others. This problem has not gone away. It has just moved. The day before election day 2008, the McCain campaign filed a complaint in the Eastern District of Virginia to force Virginia to count military absentee ballots that came in after election day. McCain lost Virginia by more than enough votes, but the case went on with the Department of Justice replacing the McCain campaign.There were filings last month and will likely be a hearing this month. So what?

The Virginia State Board of Elections argued in their most recent filing that they have no legal obligation to send out military absentee ballots in a timely manner. Restated, the State of Virginia has argued in a federal court filing that they can legally send out absentee ballots to active duty soldiers the day before an election. Restated again, theDemocratic Chairwoman of the Virginia State Board of Election (appointed by the Democratic National Committee Chair Tim Kaine, in his capacity as Virginia Governor) Jean Cunningham just claimed a legal basis for massively raising the barrier to voting for soldiers at war.

Really. Read on for details.

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