Recently, Judge Ellis decided that Jefferson is not a flight risk and may remain free pending appeal, a process that may take a year or more. During that time, Jefferson must wear a monitor and may not travel without prior court approval.

Today, Judge Ellis agreed that Jefferson’s legal expenses will be covered by the court during his appeal. Jefferson and his wife recently filed for bankruptcy, due in large part to the legal bills incurred during his trial.

Admittedly, Jefferson might have problems paying for new legal bills out of his Congressional pension, estimated to be $40,000 to $55,000 per year. Then again, once he’s incarcerated, he won’t be shelling out a lot on food, clothing or shelter.

William Jefferson’s legal bills to be paid by taxpayers during appeal

Trial Judge T.S. Ellis III Friday OK’d the appointment of Robert Trout and Amy Jackson, two of the three attorneys who represented Jefferson almost from the first day the federal investigation of the nine-term New Orleans Democrat became known on Aug. 3, 2005, with raids of the then congressman’s Washington and New Orleans homes.

Their fees will be covered by the court, though the rates will be similar to those provided public defenders and far less than the prominent white collar attorneys generally charge.

Ellis also said that a transcript of the eight-week trial, which the court reporter estimated would cost $26,000, will be paid for by the court.

The case directly involves $700,000 in damages to three people and a business, but opens the door to claims by as many as 100,000 residents and former residents of the affected neighborhoods. If upheld, this judgment could lead to damage claims in the $billions.

“The people of this city have been vindicated,” said attorney Joseph Bruno, a leader of the large team of lawyers who represented the plaintiffs. “They didn’t do anything wrong and it’s time they be compensated.”

The corps has estimated that it received more than 490,000 claims forms in the aftermath of Katrina and Hurricane Rita in 2005, but those forms include many from areas not covered by this decision. …

Bruno and [Los Angeles-based plaintiff's attorney Pierce] O’Donnell said they expect to travel to Washington, D.C., as early as next week to try to convince members of the administration of President Barack Obama and members of Congress to consider revisiting requests for compensation by New Orleans-area residents  in both the areas covered by the decision and in other areas flooded by corps-related failures of levees.

Duval had ruled last year that, while failures of flood control structures might be the cause of damage in other areas, a 1928 federal law granted the corps immunity from damages. In that ruling, however, he said that the immunity clause did not extend to the MR-GO, which was a navigation channel and not a flood control structure.

The Feds are expected to appeal this ruling all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary. The Corps has declared its intention to hold of on any actiion on the outstanding claims pending a final ruling.

So they wrote a position paper for the website www.carbonfees.org. They wrote an editorial that was published in The Washington Post.

And they made the following video:

Their conclusion — that what we need is a big old tax on fossil fuels with energy rebates back to folks to help them buy more renewable energy — is harebrained, but on the way there they make a good case that the Cap and Trade offsets are just an invitation for hustlers to game the system.

According to The New York Times:

The Environmental Protection Agency has directed two of its lawyers to makes changes to a YouTube video they posted that is critical of the Obama administration’s climate change policy.

The agency, citing federal policies, told the two lawyers… that they could mention their E.P.A. affiliation only once; must remove language specifying Mr. Zabel’s expertise and their years of employment with the agency; and must remove an image of the agency’s office in San Francisco.

They have been told that if they do not edit the video to comply with the policy, they could face disciplinary action.

The video has been pulled from YouTube, but is still available at the website of The Heritage Foundation.

Ms. Williams, Mr. Zabel, something tells me now would be a good time to pull out that resume and give it a quick once-over…

Yes, food prices. Right there in the segment where today you’d expect to see updates on gasoline prices, you’d have David Brinkley or Walter Cronkite or Howard K. Smith used to report on the prices of beef, chicken, bread, milk or eggs.

Food was dear back then. About 1972, Big Government changed that, and thereby sewed the seeds of today’s “Health Care Crisis”. Let’s connect the dots.

The early ’70s were the era of Nixonian price controls. Around that time, agricultural policy changed, too. Beginning with the New Deal, the USDA actively managed agricultural commodity markets with a system of price supports and by telling farmers what they could and could not grow. This was an effort to avoid the farmer’s #1 dread, the commodity surplus, in which a bumper crop leads to price collapse and financial failure for the farmer.

Nixon’s Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz instituted direct payments to farmers, effectively ending the “price floor”. Instead of paying farmers to leave fields fallow, Uncle Sam actively encouraged the production of soybeans, wheat, corn or whatever crop. Some of the excess commodities made their way overseas as foreign aid, and some were sold to the Soviets who had busted a Five-Year Plan or two. From the blog Alterdestiny:

The effect of Butz’s policy was to make it in farmers’ interests to grow as much corn as possible. This led to an immense amount of corn. The food industry began inventing ways to use that corn. The most profitable and widespread was high fructose corn syrup. This was invented in 1980 and today makes up an enormous part of our diet. Corn syrup replaced sugar in many products, most notably soda. And when just changing from sugar to corn syrup wasn’t enough to consume all that corn, the soda companies just made their products bigger. Americans liked that a lot. High fructose corn syrup found its way into many other foods as well, from hot dogs to ketchup to chips to bread. All of this corn-based sugar that Butz and his agribusiness friends forced us to eat has led to not only high levels of obesity but also the epidemic of Type 2 diabetes that we are now only coming to terms with.

[emphasis added]

So food is no longer dear.

Fast food chains now compete, not on price, quality or service, but on how many calories they can pack onto their $1 menu: “Want to ‘Biggie Size’ those fries?” The smallest size soft drink at McDonald’s today was the biggest size you could buy in 1973, when I worked there. Since corn is also used as animal feed, beef and pork are cheaper. Corn surpluses led to the search for new markets, so now we have to burn ever-increasing quantities of inefficient and environmentally-damaging corn ethanol in our cars. We’ve effectively subsidized ADM’s and Cargill’s entry into the motor fuel business.

Another USDA policy changed in 1969. Up until then, USDA maintained stockpiles of agricultural commodities that it would distribute, in kind, to the needy. In particular, I remember the large blocks of “government cheese” and the generic labels on honey and canned goods that were distributed.

Those were replaced with Food Stamps, and the government commodities were replaced in poor people’s diets by whatever they chose to eat, regardless of caloric content or nutritional value.

Hey, all of that high fructose corn syrup’s got to go somewhere.

Thanks to government-subsidized food prices and free government money, America now has the fattest, sickest and most nutritionally deficient poor population on the planet.

And so we need government-run health care.

Huh? Are we nuts?

Climate change belief given same legal status as religion

In a landmark ruling, Mr Justice Michael Burton said that “a belief in man-made climate change … is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations”.

The ruling could open the door for employees to sue their companies for failing to account for their green lifestyles, such as providing recycling facilities or offering low-carbon travel.

Photo credit : PA

Mr Nicholson hailed the Employment Appeals Tribunal ruling as “a victory for common sense” but stressed climate change was “not a new religion”.

He said: “I believe man-made climate change is the most important issue of our time and nothing should stand in the way of diverting this catastrophe.

“This philosophical belief that is based on scientific evidence has now been given the same protection in law as faith-based religious belief.

“Belief in man-made climate change is not a new religion, it is a philosophical belief that reflects my moral and ethical values and is underlined by the overwhelming scientific evidence.”

Early last month, Caldwell’s office issued subpoenas for records from ACORN’s New Orleans office, where the organization — now moving its national headquarters to Washington — has long been based. …

In a statement, ACORN’s attorney Pamela Marple said the group was told the raid was ordered because of reports that workers loyal to Beth Butler, the recently fired head of ACORN’s Louisiana branch, had been taking computer data and other items out of the office.

“Over the last two months, ACORN has been cooperating with a variety of governmental entities across the country to provide requested information and documents,” Marple wrote. “We were told that the AG’s office has no criticisms of ACORN’s cooperative efforts, but rather that the warrant was issued because of concern that former local ACORN staff members had, and may intend in the future to remove or alter electronic documents.”

An ACORN official also said Caldwell’s investigators will copy the hard drives from ACORN’s computers and return them next week. The computers contain all payroll information for the national organization, the official said.

H/T dennism

Anything approaching the recommended punishment would be the longest sentence ever meted out on given to a U.S. Congressman.

Jefferson will be sentenced on November 13 by Federal Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, VA.

The New Orleans Times-Picayune reports:

“Because Congressman Jefferson’s crimes against the people of the United States were exceptional in their sheer number, length and breadth, the United States respectfully requests that this Court sentence the defendant within the applicable guideline range,” the memorandum states. “While the guidelines sentence calculated by the Probation Office is lengthy, it is appropriate, in that Congressman Jefferson’s criminal activities have surely caused or substantially added to the loss of public confidence and trust in our nation’s highest levels of government.”…

According to the memorandum, “law enforcement agents learned of several wire transfers from offshore territories into U.S. financial accounts that were either controlled by the defendant or whose proceeds were made available for his benefit.”

The government’s conclusion: “Given the age of the defendant, the severity of the sentence calculated by the Probation Office, the defendant’s frequent travel overseas and unexplained wire transfers from overseas locations to financial accounts used by the defendant, the defendant cannot rebut the presumption at sentencing that he is a risk of flight.”

{emphasis added}

Maybe Republican Party leaders could stand a review.

Coke was more than just an iconic brand. Coke invented Santa Claus as we know him today. The hourglass Coke bottle’s silhouette identified the product universally. So sacrosanct was the Coke name that the brand line consisted of a single product until Diet Coke was introduced in 1982, 96 years after Coca-Cola’s market debut.

Concerned by Coke’s loss of market share to arch rival Pepsi, Coke’s marketing gurus gave in to the taste tests and focus groups by releasing New Coke in 1985. New Coke matched the sweeter crowd appeal of Pepsi. It was designed to compete head-to-head for the Pepsi Generation.

But the Coca-Cola Corporation had not counted on the resentment of a hard-core nucleus of consumers to the absence of their familiar Coke from store shelves and soda fountains:

Despite New Coke’s acceptance with a large number of Coca-Cola drinkers, a vocal minority of them [estimated to be 10-12% of Coke drinkers] resented the change in formula and were not shy about making that known ….

Due to the strong backlash, Old Coke, newly dubbed “Coke Classic”, was returned to market less than three months after the launch of New Coke. Eventually New Coke disappeared from store shelves.

And Classic Coke emerged a stronger brand than before.

The lessons?

• Ignore your most passionate customers at your peril.
• Don’t trust focus groups. People in focus groups are easily swayed.
• Don’t compete by trying to be more like the competition.
• Recognize your mistakes quickly, take your lumps, and concentrate on the brand.

One example: the “eat local” movement seems to be getting some traction among concerned urban types. The premise: It must be a horrendous waste, in this post oil-peak world, to transport your strawberries by jet from New Zealand and your haricots-verts and arugula from California, when you can get them at the quaint little Farmer’s Market or a funky co-op in town. Furthermore, industrial farming is not only bad, but doomed by the shortage of energy [link]:

The age of the 3000-mile-caesar salad will soon be over. Food production based on massive petroleum inputs, on intensive irrigation, on gigantic factory farms in just a few parts of the nation, and dependent on cheap trucking will not continue. We will have to produce at least some of our food closer to home.

Not so fast, according to the blog “Peak Oil Debunked”.

LOCAL FOOD GUZZLES MORE FUEL THAN LONG-DISTANCE FOOD

The inconvenient truth is that inefficient gasoline guzzling lies at the very heart of the local food model. And, as we’ve seen, this totally defeats the purpose of local food:

In the worst scenario, a UK consumer driving six miles to buy Kenyan green beans emits more carbon per bean than flying them from Kenya to the United Kingdom. Source

…

Here’s a quick calculation to give you a feel for the problem. Suppose Joe Sixpack gets in his 20 mpg vehicle, and drives 4 miles to pick up a pack of hot dogs at 7-11. This will consume 0.4 gallons of gas per pound of hot dogs (1 pack = 1 pound).

Now, a semi truck gets about 90 net ton-miles/gallon, assuming that it makes the return trip empty. So a semi can deliver a load of hot dogs (20 tons) coast-to-coast and return empty on 1333 gallons. That translates to .03 gallons per pound.

In other word, Joe Sixpack will burn 13 times as much fuel, per dog, driving to 7-11 than the semi which brought those dogs 3000 miles across the country.

Now, I’d be the first to admit to the superiority in taste and texture of locally-grown tomatoes, but in terms of fuel efficiency, that container of trey-balls from California’s Central Valley has them beat by a mile.

Our national policy makers on energy and the environment are thoroughly infected with feeling as opposed to thinking. What could possibly feel better than using a fuel that we grow? Well, it turns out that corn-based ethanol is a sham economically and a disaster environmentally.

What could possibly feel better than staking our energy future to the wind and the sun? Nothing, except maybe using energy sources we have now, at least for the time being, until we see if wind and solar can be efficiently scaled up from the miniscule percentage of the energy pie that they currently provide.

What could possibly feel better than sticking it to Big Oil and Big Coal? Given that the fossil fuels provide 85% of today’s energy picture, it’s mighty foolish to think that we can raise taxes on them, or otherwise alter the economics of their business, without making the bulk of our fuel supply significantly more expensive in the future.

Congress is highly reactive to a short attention span, “feeling vs. thinking” electorate. The typical voter considers herself well-informed on a technical subject if she’s seen a relevant segment on 60 Minutes. Watching an hour of Oprah is likewise tantamount to a PhD. We, as a society, need to stop this nonsense, and get some grownups involved for a change.

P.S. This episode made me remember this anecdote:

The First Arab Oil Embargo hit in 1973, when I was a freshly-minted driver (on weekends I was hell on wheels in my Dad’s three-on-the-tree 1964 Rambler American). For the first time, Americans were conscious of gas mileage and fuel waste.

A letter to the editor of the local newspaper noted: “18 wheelers get only 2 miles to the gallon. A Toyota Corolla can get 35 mpg. It’s outrageous that 18 wheelers get such poor mileage, in the middle of an energy crisis!”

It doesn’t require much ciphering to puncture the letter writer’s logic. Imagine using Toyota Corollas to distribute, say, refrigerators.

To the NRDC, companies that stick with the Chamber’s anti-Cap and Trade position are motivated strictly by greed, whereas the companies listed above are driven by the purest of altruism.

U.S. CHAMBER CLIMATE CREDIBILITY CRISIS COUNTER:

Quit the U.S. Chamber over climate: Apple, Exelon, PNM Resources, PG&E, PSEG, Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Mohawk Paper.

Quit the U.S. Chamber Board over climate: Nike.

Refused to join the U.S. Chamber over climate: NRG Energy.

Companies that say the U.S. Chamber doesn’t represent their views on climate: Johnson & Johnson, General Electric, Alcoa, Duke, Entergy, Microsoft, Toyota, Royal Dutch Shell, Seventh Generation, Dow, PEPCO, Cisco Systems …

Altruistic? Ehhhhh. Let’s follow the money.
Rearranging the list:

HOLDING COMPANIES FOR COAL-BURNING REGULATED ELECTRICAL UTILITIES: Exelon (Chicago), PNM Resources (Albuquerque), PG&E (San Francisco), PSEG (Newark, NJ), NRG Energy (Princeton, NJ), Duke Energy (Charlotte), Entergy (New Orleans), PEPCO (D.C.) (In aggregate, these companies have over $100 billion market capitalization.)

GREEN ENERGY WHORES: General Electric, Royal Dutch-Shell, Duke Energy

REPRESENTING ECOTOPIA (San Francisco/Pacific Northwest): Apple Computer, Nike, Levi Strauss & Co, San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Microsoft, Cisco Systems, PG&E

OTHERS: Mohawk Paper, Toyota (hybrid cars), Seventh Generation (a maker of “green” cleaning products), J&J, Dow Chemical, Alcoa.

Do you find it a little odd that nearly half the list is comprised of electric utility holding companies?

What do they have in common?

For one thing, they all own old-technology coal fired electrical generating plants. The Dems have offered them beaucoup carbon credits in return for their support of Cap and Trade.

For another, their utility businesses are monopolies which enjoy guaranteed returns, under the watchful and protective eye of the various state regulatory bodies.

Regulated monopolies are outside the realm of entrepreneurial capitalism. They are insensitive to capital costs (whether it be a “smart grid” or a “clean coal” power plant), because the more it costs, the more profit they make. New capital investment is just rolled into their rate base, upon which their state public service commission allows double digit returns, at no risk to the utility.

And in this case, that capital investment will be financed by the funny money of carbon credits.

It’s odd that the same folks who got their panties in a wad over Halliburton’s no-bid cost-plus contracts in Iraq have no problem with such a sweetheart deal.

Today’s lesson in Saving the Planet comes from Britain, where the Lord High Poo-Bah of Climate Change, Lord Stern of Brentford, has declared:

“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases. It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”

Save the Planet. Eat your arugula.

Direct emissions of methane from cows and pigs is a significant source of greenhouse gases. Methane is 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide as a global warming gas.

Hold on. If we eat less beef, pork and poultry, we’ll be eating a lot more beans, broccoli and cabbage, and producing a heck of a lot more methane ourselves. Since each fart is worth 23 times its weight in carbon dioxide, won’t we be accelerating Global Warming?

H/T dennism

Washington (CNSNews.com) – Andrew Revkin, who reports on environmental issues for The New York Times, floated an idea last week for combating global warming: Give carbon credits to couples that limit themselves to having one child.

Revkin later told CNSNews.com that he was not endorsing the idea, just trying to provoke some thinking on the topic.

Revkin calls it a “thought experiment”.

Well, isn’t that special.

Around my office, we have a few running jokes. Well, more than a few actually; we have 947 of them, to be precise.

One of the all time faves is based on truth: during a brainstorming session, a young professional prefaced his contribution with his remarks by saying, “Now, I’m not thinkin’ this, I’m just sayin’ it.”

“Not thinkin’, just sayin’” serves to absolve the “sayer” of the logical consequences of whatever words follow. Yeah, right.

Revkin goes on to not think, just say:

Well, should there be carbon credits for a family planning program in Africa let’s say? Should that be monetized as a part of something that, you know, if you, if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward an accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn’t there be a carbon value to that?

… [P]robably the single-most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the lights or driving a Prius, it’s having fewer kids, having fewer children. … [E]ventually you get … credit–If we’re going to become carbon-centric–for having a one-child family when you could have had two or three.”

In a Sept. 19, 2009 blog entry, “Are Condoms the Ultimate Green-Technology?” Revkin cited an August 2009 study by the London School of Economics that highlighted having fewer children as a solution to diminishing our carbon footprint.
[emphasis added throughout]

I’ve warned in these pages of the dangers of carbon credits as new “funny money” — off-balance-sheet financing for whatever hare-brained idea strikes the Congress’s fancy.

This proposal would let them play the role of the Chinese Politburo. Since it’s only a “thought experiment”, wouldn’t the most efficient use of those valuable carbon credits would be to pay for the, um, negating of children who’ve already been conceived … or to pay for voluntary sterilizations … hmmm?

H/T Doug Bandow, of the American Spectator blog, who comments:

Heck, if Congress votes to wreck the economy with cap and trade, and nationalize the health care system, who is going to want to have kids? Maybe that’s the Obama administration’s secret plan. Make us so miserable that population growth will drop to zero!

It is the first court challenge to wind power under the Endangered Species Act, lawyers on both sides say. … At the heart of the Beech Ridge case is the Indiana bat, a brownish-gray creature that weighs about as much as three pennies and, wings outstretched, measures about eight inches. A 2005 estimate concluded that there were 457,000 of them, half the number in 1967, when they were first listed as endangered.

Go ahead. Enjoy a moment of schadenfreude.

OK. Now that we have that out of the way, let’s ponder the policy implications.

First: This conflict was utterly foreseeable. Everybody likes the idea of wind energy, it’s the wind farm in their back yard they have a problem with. But every wind farm is in somebody’s back yard (or yacht harbor).

Second: The Endangered Species Act is absolute. If it can be shown that there is a deleterious impact on a species categorized as endangered or threatened, the species wins and human interests lose. There is no cost-benefit analysis or other means of assigning a relative worth to the species, no matter how obscure or ill-adapted for survival it may be.

Third: There are Endangered and Threatened Species everywhere. Check your state out. And for every lovable and huggable Florida manatee, ivory-billed woodpecker or Ridley’s sea turtle, there’s an inflated heelsplitter, earth-fruit or Louisiana quillwort, just to name three from my home state.

Fourth: The United States currently uses 100 quadrillion BTUs of energy every year. That’s a staggering amount of energy. It’s one thing to prove that an alternative energy source works; it’s quite another to demonstrate that it is feasible, scalable and efficient. Even with government help in the form of tax credits, wind energy is a very expensive way to generate an unreliable BTU, when compared with conventional sources of energy. This latest episode is an example of the difficulty developers will have with scalability. They are not going to be able to roll out new wind projects without public and interest group opposition.

Fifth: Back to point one. This permitting obstacle was totally foreseeable. Has the Administration naively made unkeepable promises, or has this been a cynical political manipulation? The grownups involved, if there are any, must realize that their promised future of Rainbows and Unicorns and Magic Windmills has a long, long way to go.

Currently, wind energy supplies about 1% of electrical generating capacity, with a stated Administration goal of doubling renewables by 2012. With that goal in mind, one wonders what the Administration’s stance will be when decisions need to be made between the conflicting environmental priorities of Saving the Indiana Bat vs. Saving the Planet.

Ray Nagin: Cuba’s government is ideal for storm response

“I think they do a much better job than we do on knowing their citizens at a very, very detailed level, block by block, ” Nagin said.

In Cuba, Revolutionary Defense Committees on nearly every corner watch their neighbors. They help with evacuations and provide social services such as vaccinations, but also are supposed to report any behavior considered subversive.

Right, Ray. Just think of those Revolutionary Defense Committee persons as nosy Community Organizers, who are just there in the community, close to the people, to help out with hygeine. Politcal hygiene, in particular.

Nagin praises Cuba’s handling of its citizens and hurricanes

Recalling the botched response to Hurricane Katrina, the mayor told the AP’s Havana correspondent that “one of the biggest weaknesses we had (was that) it wasn’t clear who was the top authority.”

There’s no such problem in Cuba, where Raul Castro and his brother, Fidel, have been the unquestioned commanders since 1959.

George Fowler, a local maritime lawyer who is vice president of the Cuban-American National Foundation, an anti-Castro organization, said he could have saved Nagin the trouble of international travel by explaining why the regime he escaped at age 9 is so effective at evacuation.

“I could have said, ‘Ray, they do move people very fast in hurricane because if you don’t get on the bus real quickly, they kill you, ‘ ” Fowler said. “He didn’t need to go to Cuba for six days to learn that.”

Added Fowler: “Ray Nagin has said a lot of strange things in the past, but this one is really right there are the top.”

They’re usually uttered in the midst of a speculative boom, to explain why this boom is different from the last one that went disastrously bust.

In a market driven by capitalist rules (supply & demand, creative destruction), they’re nearly always wrong.

But in a centrally-planned system, where the government picks winners and losers, where dinosaur businesses are too big to fail, where investment in capital-wasting non-economic ventures (read: “green jobs”) is actually encouraged, where labor unions are exalted and private property trod upon, where the government is expected to be the engine that drives job growth, and where John Maynard Keynes has been restored from the economic dustbin of history to be beatified, economic stagnation and high unemployment are to be expected.

Just ask any fiscal conservative.

AP: Higher jobless rates could be new normal

WASHINGTON — Even with an economic revival, many U.S. jobs lost during the recession may be gone forever and a weak employment market could linger for years.
Advertisement

That could add up to a “new normal” of higher joblessness and lower standards of living for many Americans, some economists are suggesting.

The words “it’s different this time” are always suspect. But economists and policy makers say the job-creating dynamics of previous recoveries can’t be counted on now. Here’s why:

# The auto and construction industries helped lead the nation out of past recessions. But the carnage among Detroit’s automakers and the surplus of new and foreclosed homes and empty commercial properties make it unlikely these two industries will be engines of growth anytime soon.

Maybe organic growth could come from an unexpected area of the economy like it did in the ’90s, if government would just get out of the way.

# The job market is caught in a vicious circle: Without more jobs, U.S. consumers will have a hard time increasing their spending; but without that spending, businesses might see little reason to start hiring.

# Many small and midsize businesses are still struggling to obtain bank loans, impeding their expansion plans and constraining overall economic growth.

And with impending tax increases and the possibility of mandated health care, businesses are justified in sitting on the sidelines until they see what the landscape is going to look like.

# Higher-income households are spending less because of big losses on their homes, retirement plans and other investments. Lower-income households are cutting back because they can’t borrow like they once did.

Well, duh.

What a shame. A stagnant economy and persistently high unemployment are the direct, predictable result of the President’s policies. Maybe instead of changing our expectations we should look into changing those policies. Or changing politicians.

As soon as the objectionable poll was noticed, the site’s management pulled it down. (Actually, they disabled the poll application. DailyKos poster Vann has a diary up at that site; seems he was the app’s developer.) The Secret Service quickly determined that the perpetrator was a kid of unspecified name & age: “There was no intent on the part of this juvenile,” FBI Agent Ed Donovan said. “We’re just characterizing it as a mistake.”

Now, take another look at the screenshot.

Right away, there are two obvious red flags to tell anyone with an IQ above room temperature that the poll’s author was either a kid or a moby: 1) the lack of capital letters, and 2) the poll option “if he cuts my health care”.

Please.

Room temperature IQ not being a registration requirement at the Huffington Post, the Facebook Obama Assassination Poll, and its fantasized connection to “right-wingers” and “the GOP” had HuffPo commenters’ collective panties in a wad for several days.

“Kill Obama” Facebook Poll Investigated By Secret Service

Obama Facebook Poll: “Should Obama Be Killed?” Pulled From Site, Secret Service Investigate - UPDATED (PHOTOS)

GOP Must Disavow the Nut Jobs

Meanwhile, over at DailyKos, one commenter observed: “Can you imagine what would have happened if there had been a FB poll like this about Bush? It would have been taken down in a nanosecond, and the poster would have received a special ‘visit’ from the FBI.”

Can we imagine? Well, as a matter of fact, “Yes, We Can!”

For starters, there are at least three of them. Technically, not Facebook polls which allow the author and the voters near total anonymity, but Facebook group pages, where identities are on display for the world to see:

Let’s take a closer look, shall we? The first charming and witty page, titled “We all Want To Kill George Bush” is in the category “Just for Fun - Fan Clubs”.

Discussion topics range from the direct “i want to kill the president of the united states of america”, dated January 2008, to the thoughtful “If Saddam gets hung for war crimes… Then Hang George! Who’s wit me?”, last post dated August 2007. Mr. Bush was a sitting President then, by the way.

Mr. Amir Sousi (arabian_legend@hotmail.com) is the Administrator of the page, which has attracted 428 other nitwits to be members. Mr. Sousi apparently graduated from a St. Francis Xavier High School in 2007.

By contrast, the FB group “Who wants to kill bush!!!!!” has only 15 members, but it falls into the category “Community Organizations”. Presumably, its Admin, a Mr. Martin Alexander, can claim to be a “Community Organizer!” His educational affiliations (Oak Park and River Forest HS ‘06 and Lewis ‘10) suggest a Chicago background, so who knows, Martin, the sky’s the limit for your political career!

Lastly we have the droll and urbane “LETS KILL BUSH WITH SHOES”, which implores its members thusly:

JUST UPLOAD EVERY PICTURE OF YOUR BEST SHOES…TO SHOW THAT ITLL BE THE SHOES THAT ULL USE TO KILL BUSH

Gee, do you think it would be expecting too much, uh, consistency, for Facebook to pull these pages? Are you afraid the ACLU will invoke the First Amendment? How about the Secret Service pretending to care?

H/t Jeff Emanuel

Since it’s hard to fire an unpaid volunteer, the Big Wigs from HQ showed up on Tuesday and sacked Beth Butler, longtime executive director of Louisiana ACORN.

But there might be more to the story. Pass the popcorn.

On one hand, there’s the official line:

As it happens, ACORN officials agree with Butler that her termination was not carried out only as retribution for the Obama critique. Rather, according to an ACORN official who would speak only on background, the episode was “reflective of a lack of accountability to process” on Butler’s part.

Butler had repeatedly breached ACORN protocol, and this was the most recent instance, he said.

Butler says it’s about the control of some assets:

Butler, who has worked for ACORN for 37 years, said her real sin in the eyes of the national organization’s leaders was a failure to concede (sic) to their demands. In particular, she said, she had led resistance to a demand to turn over the land trust, called the ACORN Community Land Association of Louisiana, to the national group.

“We were told by national ACORN that we had to give it up to them, ” she said. “We got e-mails threatening our jobs because we didn’t push the land trust people to hand over property and money to the New York people who took over ACORN.”

Butler passed along an e-mail message from Lewis calling Butler’s behavior regarding the land trust “unacceptable.”

The national entity is also making a play for roughly $90,000 in hurricane relief money controlled by the local group, Butler said.

More likely, the move on the part of the national organization is an attempt to purge the unpleasant memory of Wade Rathke & the $1 million (at least) that his brother embezzled:

That [Breitbart video] scandal was preceded by revelations that ACORN employees had registered dozens of phony voters before the last election. And before that, it emerged that Dale Rathke, brother of ACORN’s founder, New Orleans-bred Wade Rathke, had embezzled nearly $1 million from the group. Instead of announcing he’d been caught, selected group leaders allowed him to quietly repay the money over a period of years.

The last scandal resulted in the ouster of Wade Rathke, who also happens to be the longtime companion of Butler. The two have lived together for decades and raised two children together, Butler said.

The moral? Never trust a Community Organizer.

It’s the story of two very different men that we chose to lead our country, and how, in the unlikely setting of New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast, we have a chance to compare and contrast their characters.

The world knows one as a blue-blooded faux Texan, bumbling idiot, spoiled child of privilege and draft dodger. The other is a compassionate man of the people who will soon join Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer and Nelson Mandela in the Pantheon of recipients of the Nobel Prize for Peace.

Amazing.

Say what you will about former President George W. Bush and his administration’s handling of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath — the man knew how to put together a post-Katrina White House visit to New Orleans and the Gulf Coast.

They were exhaustive, exhausting, sunup-to-sundown, sometimes multiday and multistate affairs. And there were a lot of them: 13 in all to the New Orleans area in the three years after the storm. …

“He wanted to hear multiple voices from across the community on a one-on-one level,” recalled [retired Marine Gen. Douglas] O’Dell, who said Bush packed every crevice of his visit with interactions with people of every stripe. “He made unbelievable use of his time,” said O’Dell.[O'Dell served as the second coordinator of the Office of Gulf Coast Rebuilding under President Bush.] …

Thursday will mark the first presidential visit to New Orleans since Bush’s last, which he made just ahead of the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in August 2008, and, according to the latest word from the White House, Obama’s visit will include a town hall event at an as yet unspecified time and location, and a second unspecified event. …

“This is an iconic event — I don’t know what the hell they are thinking,” [Tulane University historian Lawrence] Powell said. “He shouldn’t come at all if he’s coming for a glorified layover.”

And then, the punch line:

“All presidents make calculations as to the value of their time,” O’Dell said. “This may be the (White House Chief of Staff) Rahm Emanuel treatment: ‘You didn’t vote for us, to hell with you guys.’ That’s how this White House views things.”

[emphasis added]

Update: A new T-P article details the wrangling of the LA Congressional delegation in trying to get the Nobel Prize-winning President to extend his visit beyond a closed townhall.

Obama’s visit to New Orleans is hemmed in by an engagement the same day in San Francisco. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Obama is scheduled to be in San Francisco later in the day Thursday for a $500- to $1,000-a-person fundraiser at the St. Francis Hotel for the Democratic National Committee and Organizing for America.

When you’re poor, bad times threaten your job, your family, your health, or your life. Bad times hurt people at the margins.

The liberal ruling class displays an astonishingly callous disregard of the human cost of bad economic times on the huddled masses whose interests they claim to safeguard.

But even the most clueless patrician among our elected elite would never suggest that a recession is a good thing.

Would he?

Get this:

John Kerry: If You Enjoyed This Year’s Recession, Just Wait for Cap and Trade

Let me emphasize something very strongly as we begin this discussion. The United States has already this year alone achieved a 6 percent reduction in emissions simply because of the downturn in the economy, so we are effectively saying we need to go another 14 percent. [emphasis added]

So it’s the nebulous value of a speculative decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide, measured as a change in concentration of a few parts per million, versus the tangible certainty of human hunger, pain and privation for millions of Americans.

John Calabrese at the North Star National elaborates:

What did Kerry just unwittingly admit? He admitted that cap-and-trade advocates and like-minded global warming believers see economic prosperity as a huge source of the supposed problem. That’s why they’re proposing the perfect solution – from their perspective – in the form of a massive tax increase directly on industry.

Nothing discourages productive economic activity like confiscatory taxes on said activity. The same people who lament the loss of manufacturing jobs in the United States now seek to multiply these losses many times over by making it economically impossible for manufacturers to operate. …

But the recession, hey, that’s working like a dream. Carbon emissions are down 6 percent. Damn. How many more big industrial conglomerates do we have to put out of business to get to 20 percent?

ACORN embezzlement was $5 million, La. attorney general says

The organization, until recently headquartered in New Orleans, had tried to keep the details of an embezzlement quiet. The embezzler, Dale Rathke, was the one-time bookkeeper for the organization. His brother, Wade Rathke, was President of ACORN International at the time, and saw to it that the unpleasantness was handled when he and “a donor” repaid $1 million of Dale’s improper credit card charges.

Now, however, AG Caldwell is following up on an ACORN internal report that the embezzlement was closer to $5 million.

Attorney General Buddy Caldwell has been conducting an investigation of ACORN since June. He issued subpoenas in August seeking documents related to former ACORN International President Wade Rathke and his brother Dale Rathke, who kept the group’s books. Those subpoenas were focused on possible ACORN violations for non-payment of employee withholding taxes, obstructing justice and violating the Employee Retirement Security Act. No charges have been made. …

“Current high-ranking members of ACORN have publicly acknowledged that embezzlement did in fact occur, but the exact amount of the embezzlement was unknown until it was recently acknowledged in a board of directors meeting on Oct. 17, 2008, by Bertha Lewis and Liz Wolf that an internal review had determined that the amount embezzled was $5 million, ” the new subpoena says.

The subpoena says, “It is still unclear if some of the monies embezzled are from state, federal or private funds.”

More money quotes from the subpoena:

ACORN was founded by Wade Rathke in 1970 and is the primary corporation which has 361 [!] related tax-exempt and non-tax exempt subsidiary entities.

Sounds like Buddy’s investigators have their work cut out for them. The documents they have requested are all the financial books, check registers, expense accounts, employee records, correspondence, emails, etc., etc., for a period encompassing several years.

A review of the records maintained by the Orleans Parish Recorder of Mortgages on August 3, 2009 revealed that 57 liens have been filed by the United States Treasury - Internal Revenue Service for the failure to properly pay withholding tax which was due. … Copies of the documents from sixteen of these liens which were filed between May 23, 2007 and September 9, 2008 were collected from the archives and the total amount of taxes due and not paid is $1,122,680.70.

Similarly, ACORN and related entities were deadbeats to the State of Louisiana to the tune of at least $306,000.

The AG’s investigation has drawn heavily on a July 2009 report to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform titled “Is ACORN Intentionally Structured As a Criminal Enterprise?”

Heh.