Vermont’s Sen. Bernie Sanders is a different kind of socialist: the kind who will partake in the capitalist venture of freely exchanging money for products… at least when it comes to selling his own book.

The self-described socialist is out promoting his straight-to-paperback The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class, and was eager to sign and sell copies at corporate entities like Barnes & Noble in Washington, D.C.

That’s where HUMAN EVENTS caught up with Sanders to ask him how exactly an avowed socialist squares his collectivist worldview with the fact that he’s taking a bite of the forbidden fruit of capitalism? Is he giving away his “profits” to the federal government?

Watch:

Sanders’ response: I’m giving the money to “the children of Vermont.”

To be clear, that’s not actually a nonprofit organization in the Green Mountain State, but, his office told HUMAN EVENTS, was instead a general statement about the kind of group he’ll likely give the book proceeds to, although the specific decision hasn’t been made just yet. Meanwhile, if Sanders follows through on his pledge, there’s no word on whether or not the Senate’s only (admitted) socialist will use the “donations” to lower his taxable income for 2011.

Cross-posted from Human Events

“The balanced budget amendment has good aspects, but it is simply not good enough in dealing with fundamental constitutional change for our country.” And thus with that 23-word statement in 1997, Democrat Sen. Robert Torricelli of New Jersey sunk conservative spirits. No longer did the U.S. Senate have the two-thirds it needed to enshrine a fundamental principle of governing into the highest law of the land: that politicians should pay for what they spend.

Controversial, I know. Pfft.

Due to Democrat Torricelli’s jellyfish backbone, the 1997 Balanced Budget Amendment fell one vote short of hitting the needed threshold, which was the same margin of failure as just one year before. And liberals couldnt have been happier. Their penchant for obligating the taxpayers of tomorrow to pay for the spending binges of today remained unbroken.

Not that the dissenting senators worded their objections that way. Nope. To Vermont’s incorrigible leftist Sen. Patrick Leahy, inserting a mechanism into the Constitution that would enable our government’s books to mirror the realities American businesses and families face daily was “bumper sticker politics” and “sloganeering.” The way toward rectifying Uncle Sam’s balance sheet was, according to Leahy, “political courage,” not tinkering with the Constitution. Thirty-three of Leahy’s Democratic colleagues agreed.

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Obama must think we’re fools.

In his State of the Union address, he pledged to freeze “discretionary” spending for the next five years, which is a pitiful promise to make after he’s been treating the American taxpayers as his own personal ATM machine. In fact, this “freeze” is so paltry that, according to a Congressional Budget Office baseline, it will reduce discretionary spending by a meager .69%.

That’s it!

Keep in mind since Obama took office, he’s jacked up non-defense discretionary spending by 84%.

Imagine an exercise routine that was billed in a similar fashion: “For every 84% of caloric increase, we’ll help you shed .69% of them! Thank me!”

Fortunately, it looks like the GOP isn’t duped by Obama’s vacuous rhetoric. As Congressman Jim Jordan of Ohio noted in an exclusive interview with HUMAN EVENTS, “there is a window of time rapidly closing where, if we don’t take action, really bad financial things are going to happen to this country.”

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Bobby Jindal wasted no time assessing this administration’s approach to fighting terrorism, mocking Obama’s strategy as a “treatise on social justice.” In part two of his exclusive interview with HUMAN EVENTS, the Louisiana Governor argued that Obama’s inability to talk honestly about radical Islam stems from the President’s erroneous perception of why the threat even exists.

“We just need to give these poor people more money and there will be more opportunities, less violence, less terrorism,” Jindal said of the White House’s way of tackling global Jihad.

It’s a reference to an op-ed Obama penned eight days after September 11 for Chicago’s Hyde Park Herald, where he argued that Americans needed to demonstrate “empathy on the part of the attackers.”

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It seems like an insurmountable task for GOP candidates to take out the liberal fixtures of Nancy Pelosi, Charlie Rangel, and Barney Frank in congressional elections, but how about making them part-time workers instead? Perhaps that’s one way to minimize the amount of unpopular legislation coming out of Washington these days. Bobby Jindal thinks so. According to him, it’s about time we slice and dice the number of hours lawmakers have in a work day.

“We used to pay farmers not to grow crops, let’s make congressman stay out of Washington, D.C.,” the Louisiana Governor said in an exclusive interview with HUMAN EVENTS. “Our liberty, our wallets are safest when the legislature’s not in session,” he added, borrowing the line from Mark Twain.

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When Speaker Nancy Pelosi cast the deciding vote to adjourn the House until after the midterm elections, it was a vote for tax increases. As we reported on HUMAN EVENTS, there were 39 Democrats ready and willing to vote to maintain the tax rates at the current levels. But Pelosi balked at such a choice, thus shielding her party from a tough vote in an election cycle where news grows worse for the Democrats by the day. Effective on January 1, 2011, every income bracket, not just the much-maligned “rich,” will see their taxes go sky high.

The dirty little secret is that Nancy Pelosi and her leadership team could call the House back into session tomorrow in order to ensure that taxes are not raised. But will they?

HUMAN EVENTS approached House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer leaving a D.C. fundraiser and asked why he lacked the courage to bring members back from recess and vote on whether or not to extend the Bush-era tax cuts. Americans deserve to know, with an up-or-down vote, which House members favor increased taxes and which do not.

As you’ll see in this video exchange, Hoyer doesn’t even have the courage for an honest conversation, let alone the stones necessary to break the adjournment and vote to keep the tax rates from surging up.

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With rallies dubbed “Move America Forward,” Barack Obama is out trying to rev up his increasingly shrinking base of supporters before the midterm elections. One talking point that seems to be a favorite of his lately is how, if the GOP does take back Congress, the nebulous forces of “special interests” will once again be in the driver’s seat in Washington. “[Republicans] can ride with us if they want, but they’ve got to get in the back seat, because we want to go forward,” Obama told a Philadelphia crowd over the weekend. “We don’t want the special interests riding shotgun.”

Forget for a moment Barack Obama himself benefited from mother cash loads of “special interest” dough. (During the 2008 presidential cycle, the Service Employees International Union spent $27 million big ones to help elect Obama.)

And let’s conveniently overlook the fact that by adding Michael Moore-sized bureaucracy to an already burdened economy, our Prez has only incentivized the number of lobbyists in the nation’s capital to increase, as companies seek legislative carve outs and favorable governing rules to be attached to the flurry of new laws.

What’s really insidious about Obama’s hackneyed references to “special interests” is that members of his own party are huge benefactors of the type of financing that he’s on the stump deploring.

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Either Tim Geithner has elephant-sized chutzpah or he’s completely clueless. How else to explain his insistence that Congress follow the Obama plan to spike taxes on the top income brackets?

Forget for a moment that it is sheer economic lunacy to raise taxes on any quintile when our country is struggling with anemic private-sector growth, coupled with the fact that we’ve had unemployment above 9% for 16 straight months now. Geithner himself doesn’t have the moral authority to push tax hikes on anyone. He’s a tax cheat.

Recall that before his confirmation hearings to head the Treasury Department, Geithner paid $42,702 in back taxes and interest for the years 2001 through 2004. He blamed this “error” on TurboTax. Now he’s out pimping the Obama proposal to repeal portions of the Bush tax cuts, recently telling Fox Business that such tax increases are “good policy” that will “help the economy in the short term and in the long run.”

HUMAN EVENTS caught up with Mr. Geithner to ask him how exactly he squares his support for tax increases with his own tax-dodging days:

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Obama’s America, folks: Where not only is our Treasury Secretary a tax cheat, but an advocate of higher taxes to boot.

Cross-posted from Human Events.

After Donald Berwick’s controversial recess appointment to head the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), his allies claimed that he was preparing a “point-by-point” rebuttal to his critics. Berwick does have a lot of explaining to do, after all.

He’s publically romanticized Britain’s government-run healthcare and is on the record arguing that most cities should ration the “number of centers engaging” in “cardiac surgery,” “neonatal intensive care” and “cancer care.”

It’s been three months now since his recess appointment, and still no word from the new CMS director. In fact, Berwick hasn’t granted any interviews, refuses to testify before Congress, and doesn’t take any questions at public events.

To put this in perspective, Donald Berwick oversees the healthcare spending for one-in-three Americans and, as the New York Times put it, “has a budget bigger than the Pentagon’s.”

And yet he remains mum. Human Events recently caught up with Berwick after a Washington, D.C., event, and asked him if he’s still a proponent of government bureaucrats deciding who gets treated and who doesn’t. He fled to his car, hiding behind a security detail:

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