Senator Ron Johnson (R-WI) asked Ben Bernanke at the recent Senate Budget Committee if the lack of Presidential leadership was hurting the US economy. He asked, “I’m afraid President Obama has just been phoning it in here the last couple years in terms of our debt and deficit issue. … Can you speak to how harmful that is in terms of economic growth?”

Now Bernanke can’t answer these sorts of things straight away. But he basically got there. Here’s what he said:

Well Senator, I’m not going to comment on parliamentary maneuverings, but Senator Wyden made exactly the same question. You know, is uncertainty about the future of the tax code, government programs, and so on a negative for growth? I think it is because firms like to have certainty, like to be able to plan. And again I would take on the same responsibility as a regulator, that we need to make regulations as clear and as effective as possible.

So he’s saying that firms like to have certainty and that as a regulator, Bernanke wants things to be clear and effective. Today Jake Tapper asked Jay Carney about this. Should Senate pass a budget? Does the President have an opinion on this? Turns out that the answer is no

TAPPER: The White House has no opinion about whether or not the Senate should pass a budget? The president’s going to introduce one. The Fed chair says not having one is bad for growth. But the White House has no opinion about whether –

CARNEY: I have no opinion — the White House has no opinion on Chairman Bernanke’s assessment of how the Senate ought to do its business.

I think it is worth recalling why the Senate stopped passing budgets. Because they are politically difficult, and being accountable is hard in an election year. The Senate last passed a budget on April 29, 2009. They didn’t work on a budget in 2010. Why? Because a budget requires taking responsibility for the fiscal state of our country. And it was clear that the 2010 election was going to be rough for Democrats. So what did they do? They ducked. They dodged all responsibility. Republicans were willing to do it in the House, but the Senate was not. They didn’t even bring a serious budget to the floor and haven’t since.

And since the Republicans have been able to put their ideas up for inspection by the American people. See the Ryan Budget. Republicans are willing to fight an election on ideas and tell the American people what sacrifices will need to be made to address our fiscal crisis.

But now, not only is the Senate failing the American people, but President Obama is helping the Senate in dodging this responsibility. The fact is that he has no opinion on running the country like an adult. He has “no opinion” about giving business certainty.

Thank you Ron Johnson for asking the question and getting the clarity on this from Chairman Bernanke. And thank you to Jake Tapper for asking the White House if they are interested in leading.

They aren’t.

There’s an interesting scandal right now in New Mexico right now. You see, the New Mexico constitution tries to stop corruption, a real problem in the  state as the Economist recently noted, by requiring that state legislators cannot draw a salary from other sources during the legislative session. But Channel KRQE has reported that there is a set of legislators who do not abide by this constitutional requirement: teachers, and in particular teachers union members. One of the state legislators has come under particular scrutiny, Rep. Cheryl Williams Stapleton, a Democrat from Albuquerque:

The issue became salient after reports on KRQE-TV about APS paying House Majority Whip Sheryl Williams Stapleton, D-Albuquerque, her salary while she was in Santa Fe on legislative business. According to a Journal analysis, she was paid more than $63,000 in salary during the past three years while she was away from her administrative job as coordinator of vocational education.

Stapleton’s paid leave was approved by supervisors even though it wasn’t allowed under district policy. That policy said all nonteachers who served in the Legislature should take unpaid leave while in Santa Fe.

So recently, in discussions with her fellow member of the state House’s education committee, Nora Espinoza (R), Whip Stapleton decided to share her perspective on attempts to resolve and understand this complicated legal and constitutional issue. You see, she said that Espinoza was “carrying the Mexican’s water on the fourth floor.” This was a reference to Governor Susanna Martinez, whose office is on the fourth floor of the Capital building.  So the Democratic Whip in the most Latino state in the country is referring to the first Latina Governor in the country as “the Mexican.” I wonder if the Democrats will try to hold her accountable for this kind of speech? Probably not. After all, Harry Reid said that doesn’t know how any Hispanic could be a Republican.

Now, cleaning up the state is something that the teachers unions have long been opposed to. They funded a nasty attack ad against Martinez that backfired when it turned out that Martinez had convicted the husband of the woman the teachers union put in the ad to attack Martinez:

But maybe they are just trying to stop the person trying to take away their gravy train?

So, I confess, I had to look up who Luther Campbell was, aside from a guy who came in fourth in a race for county mayor in Miami-Dade County. He was a somewhat high-profile music promoter, fronting for groups like 2 Live Crew. But it is his electoral experience, as described in his column in the Miami New Times, that draws our attention today. He describes some of the more ugly experiences that someone like him has when trying to put together a campaign in Miami and the strange offers he gets:

The only way to get that many absentee ballots is by hiring brokers who charge candidates thousands of dollars to deliver bundles to the county elections department. The brokers are the ones responsible for dead people voting in the ’80s and ’90s. Now they go around strong-arming the elderly residents at assisted living facilities or fooling them with free breakfast at the local IHOP. The brokers also pay off preachers so they can set up shop inside houses of worship to sign up absentee voters.

I saw it firsthand when I ran in the recent county mayoral race. One guy, who I won’t name, guaranteed he could deliver thousands of absentee ballots in North Miami and North Miami Beach for $3,000. I took a pass. It showed on Election Day. I had more early and Election Day ballots than absentee votes.

Sure would be neat if he said more about this. We know that this problem isn’t necessarily unique to south Florida, as there were a bunch of arrests in more rural north Florida earlier this month. One wonders if these are the sorts of “manufacturing ballots” stories that former Rep. Artur Davis was talking about in neighboring Alabama.

For a number of reasons, I tend to avoid claims of media bias, as I am often reminded of Silberman’s Law, from Rumsfeld’s Rules, that notes that we often overstate “conspiracy,” while “underestimat[ing] incompetency and fortuity.” However, I have trouble explaining this one any other way. The New York Times editorial page editor, Andy Rosenthal, says, “A half-dozen times or so I’ve asked followers of my Twitter feed for examples of voter fraud – particularly of a scale that would justify erecting barriers against whole groups of voters. Haven’t gotten any.” Now, this was the first that I had heard of it because, well, I don’t follow Mr. Rosenthal. However, I am not convinced that I will start following him, as he seems unequipped with the basic tools of research.

Now, like Mr. Rosenthal, I do get frustrated with discussions of election fraud that don’t detail specific convictions. And while I believe that ACORN-style registration fraud is a real problem, I try to avoid discussing it. After all, we should lead with our strongest argument.

So let’s review some recent convictions, just to remind ourselves that election fraud happens, it is well documented, and it sways elections:

• My favorite example is the 2003 East Chicago (Indiana) Democratic mayoral primary. There were 32 convictions. The election results were also thrown out by the Indiana Supreme Court. Note that that last link is to a story in the Chicago Tribune, my home-town paper, that discusses the conviction of the “reform” candidate in that election, with the splendid sentence, “On Thursday, a federal judge sentenced former Mayor George Pabey to five years in prison, the third consecutive East Chicago mayor to come to grief in a federal courtroom.” This case galvanized support for a voter ID law in Indiana that was eventually argued in the US Supreme Court, where the opinion upholding the law was written by former Justice Stevens. Some noted at the time that Justice Stevens, who was normally a reliable liberal vote, grew up in Chicago.
• Then there’s another favorite case, that of Ophelia Ford. Mrs. Ford is the sister of former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford, Sr., sister of former State Rep. John Form, now serving time in federal prison for bribery, and the aunt of former Democratic Congressman Harold Ford, Jr., now a New York resident, and, undoubtedly, a subscriber to the New York Times. In this case, Mrs. Ford, a Democrat, defeated an incumbent Republican by 13 votes. The local newspaper, the Commercial Appeal, smelled something and dug. In the end, the State Senate vacated the election on a vote of 26-6, and three people plead guilty to felonies. In that case, the judge noted that the guilty plea actually prevented a full record of the fraud from being documented. But the guilty pleas did involve both dead and moved people voting.
• Closer in both time and space to the New York Times, there is the ongoing investigation of the Troy City Council race from 2009, which I have written about in the past. The city clerk has plead guilty.
• I also noted a series of convictions in Alabama that may have triggered the recent op-ed by former Alabama Representative Artur Davis backing voter ID laws.

I have been writing up a storm about absentee ballot fraud in various places around the country. Today, the FBI arrested eight people in Florida who appear to have committed some pretty severe fraud in a 2010 School Board election in Madison,. The violations are pretty straight-forward, but also pretty brazen.

Read the story:

The investigation revealed that Johnson and her husband, Ernest Sinclair Johnson, Jr., approached voters and obtained their agreement to vote, after which the voters were asked to sign an “Absentee Ballot Request Form.” Without the voters’ knowledge or consent, an alternate address was handwritten on the form, causing the ballots to be mailed to a third party rather than directly to the registered voters. In 2010, Florida law required ballots to be sent to a voter’s registered address unless the voter was absent from the county, hospitalized, or temporarily unable to occupy their residence. The Johnsons retrieved the ballots from the third party locations, brought the ballots to the voter, waited for the person to vote, and then returned the ballots to the Supervisor of Elections. In some instances, the voters were only presented with the absentee ballot signature envelope to sign and never received the actual ballot to cast their vote.

Among the people arrested was the Madison County Supervisor of Elections, who appears to have known about all of this. The list of arrests is actually pretty striking:

• Abra “Tina” Hill Johnson, 43, was charged with 10 counts of fraud in connection with casting a vote, and two counts of absentee ballots and voting violations.
• Her husband Ernest Sinclair Johnson, Jr., 45, was charged with 11 counts of fraud in connection with casting votes, one count of corruptly influencing voting, and one count of perjury by false written declaration.
• Jada Woods Williams, 34, Madison County Supervisor of Elections, was charged with 17 counts of neglect of duty and corrupt practices for allowing the distribution of these absentee ballots, contrary to Florida state statute.
• Judy Ann Crumitie, 51, charged with four counts of fraud in connection with casting a vote, and one count of providing a false report to law enforcement authorities.
• Laverne V. Haynes, 57, charged with two counts of fraud in connection with casting a vote, two counts of perjury by false written declaration, and one count of providing a false report to law enforcement authorities.
• Ora Bell Rivers, 41, charged with seven counts of fraud in connection with casting a vote, three counts of perjury by false written declaration, and one count of providing a false report to law enforcement authorities.
• Raven Simona Williams, 20, charged with two counts of fraud in connection with casting a vote, two counts of perjury by false written declaration, and one count of providing a false report to law enforcement authorities
• Shalonda Michaelle Brinson, 36, charged with nine counts of fraud in connection with casting a vote, and one count of provided a false report to law enforcement authorities.

Two weeks ago, we noted a Chicago Tribune story about fraud by either the Indiana Democratic Party or the Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns in the 2008 Democratic Primary in Indiana. Now Indiana Republican Party Chairman Eric Holcomb is doing what I urge GOP chairman to do: document all the fraud that actually happens on the ground and the convictions that occur. I always like to point to the 32 convictions from the 2003 East Chicago Democratic Mayoral primary because the election was overturned, and we have testimony under oath of how the various sides try to cheat each other.  One example was sort of boring. In 2010, a Muncie city councilman who had been on the city council since 1987 was convicted of mishandling absentee ballots. But the tastiest was a new one.

Mike Marshall, who is running GOTV for the re-election of the Democratic mayor of Jeffersonville, right across the river from Louisville, just got indicted on 65 counts of absentee ballot fraud, along with his son and another guy. Now it wasn’t on behalf of the Democratic mayor. Mr. Marshall was responsible for a huge chunk of campaign expenditures:

Marshall was one of several people that Galligan personally thanked during his victory speech on primary night in May. According to the latest campaign finance reports, filed Friday, Galligan’s campaign paid Marshall’s business, North Vernon-based At Your Service Co., more than $52,710.23 through the year  — almost a third of the campaign’s total expenditures.

“He was in charge of getting out the vote,” Galligan said. When asked to elaborate on what those duties entailed, he referred questions to campaign manager Phil McCauley.

Get out the vote, eh? Well, it turned out that they knew about one allegation of the vote being gotten out improperly.

Republicans in Jennings County challenged several absentee ballots that were submitted in 2010, according to Negangard. Democrats subsequently ran an advertisement in the North Vernon Plain Dealer accusing the Republicans of trying to deny those absentee voters their constitutional rights. One of those voters identified in the ad was a Marine named Ben Cook, who later signed a sworn affidavit stating he’d never cast a ballot. That initiated the larger investigation.

It looked like the Dems improperly voted a Marine, depriving him of his rights. And once they investigated, they found enough material to indict on another 64 charges. Sounds more like a modus operandi than an isolated incident.

H/T Rick Hasen

Today the Senate voted for an amendment to give a subsidy to rich people. Not the first time, and it won’t be the last time. But is a perfect microcosm of today’s politics and the politics that got us into the housing crisis. Next time any of the Senate Democrats say anything about “Occupy Wall Street”, they should get asked a simple question: if you are so worried about the 99%, why are you subsidizing housing for the wealthy.

Here’s what happened. Senators Bob Menendez and Chuck Schumer, who represent rich Democrats in New Jersey and New York respectively, offered an amendment to raise the amount of a mortgage that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will backstop. The level that was backstopped by Fannie and Freddie was lowered to $620k, but they raised it again to $729k. So the government will offer a loan guarantee so that people can buy a $720k house. From Bloomberg:

The U.S. Senate adopted a measure that would raise the maximum size of a home loan backed by mortgage companies Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and the Federal Housing Administration to $729,750.

Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, offered the increase as an amendment to a spending bill today. The measure was approved less than a month after the limit on so-called conforming loans was automatically reduced to $625,500.

Now in the lefty narrative is that Republicans vote themselves more power and more money, but that’s not what happened here. There were 31 votes against this upper-middle class subsidy. All Republicans. Every Democrat voted for more federal money for rich people.

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So the left would have you believe that the voter fraud debate is really about racist Republicans trying to prevent African-Americans and other minorities from voting. The New York Times ran this argument earlier this month, conveniently ignoring that the right-wing bastion Rhode Island passed a voter ID sponsored by leading African-Americans and Latinos, all Democrats.

Well, today we are greeted by an op-ed by former Congressman Artur Davis, who was one of the shining lights of African-American Southern Democrats. Davis says that he made a mistake in opposing voter ID and that the real thing that needs immediate action is “manufactured” ballots in Alabama’s Black Belt, which refers to the color of the dirt.

Let’s check out Davis’s own words, which are pretty striking:

I’ve changed my mind on voter ID laws — I think Alabama did the right thing in passing one — and I wish I had gotten it right when I was in political office.

When I was a congressman, I took the path of least resistance on this subject for an African American politician. Without any evidence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of various partisans and activists who contend that requiring photo identification to vote is a suppression tactic aimed at thwarting black voter participation.

The truth is that the most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African American community, at least in Alabama, is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt.

Now, it is worth pointing out the record that we are talking about here. He is addressing a real problem. After all, Alabama has an extraordinary record of convictions for election fraud. Let’s give some examples:

• Heritage noted in 2008 a long record of the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference working hard to stop investigations of election fraud that resulted in the convictions of 11 people involved in long-term vote “manufacturing.”
• In 2010, a Pike County Commissioner plead guilty to absentee voter fraud. She knowingly submitted improperly witnessed and/or fabricated ballots in an election she won by 6 votes. The election was eventually overturned by a judge.
• In 2009, two women plead guilty to absentee ballot fraud. In grand jury testimony related to an event in 2004, they testified that they witnessed a bunch of absentee ballots in room, misspelling the names of the people that they were voting for.
• In 2010, the former Hale County Court Clerk plead guilty to a number of charges relating to the 2004 and 2005 elections. The indictment found that she was committing fraud for a number of candidates including her brother and her husband.
• In 2008, even NPR had a report about the problems in Alabama.

Getting a candidate on the ballot in Indiana is not easy. I know, from first hand experience, that many campaigns struggle to do it. But it now appears that in 2008, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton took a short-cut. They just cheated.

It turns out that someone appears to have forged the signature of former Democratic Governor Joe Kernan on the petition to get Barack Obama on the ballot:

Former Gov. Joe Kernan says a signature on a petition to place Barack Obama‘s name on Indiana’s 2008 primary ballot isn’t his, putting him among dozens of dubious signatures found in a newspaper’s investigation.

While that is the appealing headline that gets lots of attention, the more nefarious story is that it happened on a more systematic basis:

The Tribune first reported Sunday that it and the Howey Politics Indiana newsletter had found pages from Clinton and Obama petitions with names and signatures that appear to have been copied by hand from a petition for 2008 Democratic gubernatorial hopeful Jim Schellinger. The petitions were filed with the Indiana Election Division after the St. Joseph County Voter Registration Office verified individuals’ information on the documents.

Copying pages and pages of names demonstrates a certain level of disregard that is a little hard to imagine. Every time I have seen a campaign doing ballot access, there is relatively continuous oversight as campaigns try to figure out whether they need to spend more money for paid collectors, where they need to engage more volunteers, etc. It is hard for me to imagine how a campaign could be so disengaged from the details that something like this would happen. Especially to two campaigns (and the only ones on the ballot, as I recall). This is important stuff. You don’t just let the local guys do it without oversight.

Especially when the local guys are Chicago and northern Indiana, where there appears to be a pattern of  systemic fraud.  I noted some precinct results from Chicago that got over 100% turnout in previous elections. Both the Alderman and his dad went to prison for misusing their office for personal gain. Chicago is notorious for ongoing problems. And Indiana had one of the most remarkable cases of election fraud in the 2003 East Chicago Democratic mayoral primary in which 32 people plead guilty to varieties of election fraud.

Today, the New York Times has an editorial attacking so-called voter ID bills. According to Democratic and New York Times (but I repeat myself) mythmaking, voter ID is a racist Republican scheme to stop minorities and Democrats from voting:

Of course the Republicans passing these laws never acknowledge their real purpose, which is to turn away from the polls people who are more likely to vote Democratic, particularly the young, the poor, the elderly and minorities. They insist that laws requiring government identification cards to vote are only to protect the sanctity of the ballot from unscrupulous voters.

When I read this piece, I thought I might have missed a discussion of Rhode Island, which might be called an inconvenient truth for the Democratic conspiracy theorists. Let me remind you what happened in Rhode Island. As the Providence Journal noted when the bill passed:

This year, voter-ID legislation was backed by a coalition of Democrats and Republicans, including two prominent black lawmakers: House Speaker Gordon D. Fox and Sen. Harold M. Metts. Sen. Juan M. Pichardo, the first Latino elected to a Rhode Island Senate seat and the first Dominican-American elected to a state senate seat in the country, also supported it. Fox, Metts and Pichardo are Providence Democrats.

So the Democrat, African-American Speaker of the Rhode Island House, the leading African-American state Senator, and the first Dominican elected state Senator in the country all supported the bill. They are all Democrats.

I wonder what the New York Times explanation of why these Democrats and minority leaders supported a voter ID bill. And I wonder why the Grey Lady didn’t mention this dreaded provision passing in a deep, deep blue state like Rhode Island… Maybe it is just an inconvenient truth?

Yesterday the press announced a bipartisan compromise over the FAA. Of course, that wasn’t what happened. One reporter told me that the deal was bipartisan because “that was how Reid framed it in his statement.” What really happened was that Harry Reid and Senate Democrats proved themselves to be venal, the press fell down on the job, the White House had a panic attack, and the bipartisan deal seems to be brokered between the White House’s token Republican, Ray LaHood and Harry Reid. So here’s what actually happened.

Senate Democrats decided to go home after the debt ceiling bill was passed. They ignored the FAA situation completely. A Reid staffer told the Washington Post:

But the administration’s effort faltered by late afternoon, with Reid spokesman Adam Jentleson saying that the Senate would not allow House Republicans “to jam through a policy” in a stop-gap funding extension bill.

Just a couple of hours ago, that’s precisely what happened. The Senate passed the House bill, and after a couple of weeks, construction restarts and the FAA goes back to work. So the record is clear: Harry Reid made a decision to leave 75k+ workers stranded.

But once attention shifted from the debt ceiling to the alleged “pivot” to jobs, people realized what Harry Reid’s decision meant. It meant that 75k people would be effectively unemployed. That might show up in the early September job number (recall that Congress was coming back September 7th). That’s a pretty lousy way to start a jobs pivot, eh?

So the White House freaked out. The Department of Transportation blamed Congress. The DNC claimed that Republicans weren’t compromising. But the blood was on their hands. Harry Reid left them hanging.

And this morning he ate crow and decided to let people work over his vanity. Thanks Harry. The American people know what you mean when you care about jobs… You mean fake attacks on Republicans.

In Jaunary, I wrote about indictments in a New York State election fraud investigation. In a September 2009 Working Families Party primary in Troy, NY, there were allegations of voter fraud. Two Democratic members of the Troy City Council were indicted on 116 charges related to absentee voter fraud.

Now the (Democratic) City Clerk has resigned and plead guilty to a felony as part of the investigation. He is also singing. The Clerk, William McInerney is a Democratic Committeeman, and the police seem to have the goods on him going back to at least 2007, suggesting that this may be a way of life in Troy, NY.

The plea offer made to McInerney, a Democrat, is based, in part, on information compiled by State Police showing McInerney may have helped forge absentee ballots in previous campaigns dating to at least 2007.

McInerney, 47, is a former state Assembly worker who has been a Democratic committeeman in Troy for years. He was appointed to the clerk’s position by the City Council when Democrats took control of the Troy council in January 2008.

Just to emphasize the point: this guy was appointed by the Democrats to run elections in 2008. The cops have him for election fraud back to 2007. So the Democrats appointed someone who knew how to steal elections to run elections.

In January, I noted that there may be something systematic about this, as one of the indicted Democratic officials is also the son of a Democratic official who was convicted of voter fraud. From the Times Union:

For the McDonoughs, this is the second time in 20 years that a family member has been indicted. McDonough’s father, the late Rensselaer County Democratic Party Chairman Edward F. McDonough Jr., was indicted by a federal grand jury, convicted and sentenced to federal prison in 1994 for a municipal insurance kickback scheme that brought him $637,000.

It looks like this McDonough fellow will be a prime target of McInerney’s cooperation:

State Police, in court documents, have said they have evidence that McDonough delivered a bundle of forged WFP absentee ballots to McInerney on the eve of the 2009 primary election.

I would note that absentee voter fraud seems to be the easiest and most common form of voter fraud in our country these days. Today, Taegen Goddard, a Democratic operative, quoted from a book by former Arkansas Supreme Court Justice Tom Glaze entitled Waiting for the Cemetary Vote:

“If you want to steal an election, the absentee box is the place to begin, and if you want to calculate the likelihood of fraud in a county, first figure the percentage of its total vote that is cast in absentia.”

Later today, Mitt Romney will be giving a speech about ObamaCare. My first thought when I heard this was that it was a great way to change the subject from his own record in Massachusetts. After all, the question is really about what Mitt Romney did and what he learned about it.

Therefore, I submit some questions to his campaign and I urge the press to ask them:

1. If you were to run for and be elected Governor of Massachusetts would your first act be a repeal of Romneycare?
2. Which parts of Romneycare do you still like?
3. For which states do you think Romneycare would be a good model? What is different about those states?
4. When did you change your mind and begin opposing federal individual mandates, considering that you like mandates and believe they work?
5. Why did you change your mind on a federal mandate?
6. Why did you sign a bill that covers abortions?
7. Why did you sign a bill that would explode government costs without doing a single thing to offset them?
8. Why did you completely eliminate competition in the health care marketplace by limiting the number of insurance plans?
9. Why did you think that government was best positioned to negotiate rates with insurance companies instead of letting the market work?
10. What would you say to small business owners who now have 6 more pages of rules and regulations on their tax forms thanks to Romneycare?
11. Do you still think that Romneycare is a model for the nation?
12. When did you change your mind about any of the above questions? Was it about the same time that it became politically convenient for you to do so?

On Monday, the Conservative Party of Canada took its first majority in its history. This was a victory on several levels. First, after a disastrous 1993 election in which the Progressive Conservative party was reduced to two seats after its base split off in the west into the Reform Party and rise of the Bloc Quebecois in Quebec. Now a reconstituted Conservative Party (note the absence of the word “progressive”) with a different geographic base and electoral logic is dominant. Second, the regionalism that marked that 1993, has been replaced by what could come to be a two party system. The “natural governing”, center-left Liberal Party has been reduced to little more than 10% of Parliament. The Bloc Quebecois Quebec nationalist party has been reduced to 4 seats, the minimum necessary to be recognized as a party. And now, for the first time in Canadian history, the New Democratic Party, a leftist social democratic party will be the Opposition party.

There are several lessons for American conservatives.

Read More →

I have tended to be a big fan of Open Secrets, a website by a lefty group that shows how money is spent in politics. The nice thing is that they provide data. And the nice thing about data is that it gives you good apples-to-apples comparisons. Based on data, you can argue things like “the largest donors and lobbyists in Wisconsin are the teachers unions” and have something to back that up with.

So I was really disappointed to read this recent piece by Michael Beckel at Open Secrets entitled “Union Muscle Eclipsed by High-Profile Conservative Groups During 2010 Election”. They reviewed the publicly disclosed spending information and concluded that the unions spent less money than American Crossroads, the Chamber, et al. in the 2010 cycle. In particular, they found that the unions spent $46.7m while business groups spent $97m or so.

There’s a catch though. AFSCME, the largest of the public employee unions, told the New York Times that they spent $91m. That number was actually up $3.5m from four days before then when a union representative told the Wall Street Journal, “we’re the big dog, but we don’t like to brag.” Open Secrets claimed that AFSCME only spent $12.6m, less than 1/7th of the total amount that the union says that they spent.

Now I am not saying that the apples-to-apples study of disclosed data to disclosed data isn’t valuablein some cases. But when your study understates the expenditures of one organization by a factor of 7 you have to think that you are barking up the wrong tree in how you are collecting your data. It isn’t so much that your methodology is bad. It is that it is irrelevant and misleading.

Of course, the guy who did the analysis used to work for the extremely liberal Mother Jones. Maybe he just knew what answer he wanted and picked the parameters to hit it.

Forgive me for being a broken record on this, but the right has won yet another election in Europe, this time in Estonia. Last June, I wrote that Keynesianism is dead in Europe as a political force. This weekend, the Estonian right has won another election fought over government spending. The coalition of the right went from 44% of the vote in the last parliamentary election in 2007 to over 50% in this one. The New York Times made it very clear that the left’s attack on the government was that it cut too deeply.

The vote reflects approval for a government that continued to embrace laissez-faire capitalism during the painful months after the global downturn. After Estonia’s economy shrank nearly 15 percent, the state reduced its budget by the equivalent of 9 percent of gross domestic product. Demand fell steeply, and unemployment crept up, early in 2010, to 19.8 percent. [...]

Meanwhile, the economy has been projected to grow by 4 percent this year, and unemployment has dropped to around 10 percent, according to the Estonian Unemployment Insurance Fund.

The opposition leader Edgar Savisaar, the mayor of the capital, Tallinn, and head of the Center Party, argued during the campaign that the government had overlooked the suffering of average people in its drive to join the euro zone.

Just to reiterate this now-tired fact: Keynesianism is dead as a political force in Europe. Small government and economic liberty has been winning elections throughout the continent.

We need to learn the lesson here.

One of the things that has been missed in the debate over public employee unions in Wisconsin is the impact on city and county budgets. Governor Scott Walker’s proposal doesn’t just impact the state’s fiscal situation, but it attempts to help the cities and counties. And, as the former Counter Executive of 2-1 Democratic Milwaukee County, Walker has a real familiarity with how the fiscal crisis is impacting city and county budgets. Aaron Rodriguez from the Hispanic Conservative has done us all a great service by reviewing the budget fights with the unions that Walker won in his county. Rodriguez, a leading Wisconsin school choice activist, has great examples of how the teachers unions have put their own interests ahead of the children.

LaborUnionReport had a nice review of the corruption involved in one of the more corrupt practices that impact county finances. Union collective bargaining agreements require  school districts, for example, to purchase health care through the Wisconsin Education Association Trust. Simply put, it is not enough for the unions to require that the union members get good health care. They also want to force the school districts to purchase health care from a union-owned health insurance company. The state-enforced monopoly provider of education services is using their monopoly position to force the school districts to purchase.

Obviously, these additional costs hurt. But how much? Green Bay’s ABC affiliate WBAY-2, has a summary of the issues. The numbers are pretty remarkable.

Currently many school districts participate in WEA trust because WEAC collectively bargains to get as many school districts across the state to participate in this union run health insurance plan as possible.  Union leadership benefits from members participating in this plan.  If school districts enrolled in the state employee health plan, it would save school districts up to $68 million per year.  Beyond that if school districts had the flexibility to look for health insurance coverage outside of WEA trust or the state plan, additional savings would likely be realized.

I note the figure $68 million. This is not state budget costs. These costs are faced by cities and counties which have even less flexibility than state budgets. The left tries to focus the problem as narrowly as possible on the state fiscal situation. But the number of impacted governments are much larger.

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.