1. The Fordham Foundation Yet Again Pretends to Lean Right to Attack Rick Perry From the Left

2. Of ATMs, Mousetraps and Watches

3. Judd “Goldman Sachs” Gregg Paid to Fight BBA

4. Operation Fast and Furious’ fast and furious unraveling.

5. Agriculture Appropriations Bill Update

6. The California Amazon Tax violates Props 25 and 26

7. NLRB Judge on Length of Boeing Fight: ‘I’ll be retired or dead…’

1. The Fordham Foundation Yet Again Pretends to Lean Right to Attack Rick Perry From the Left

Yesterday on National Review Online, Checker Finn took one pot shot after another at the state of Texas and publicly displayed his hand-wringing over Texas Governor Rick Perry’s potential influence on national education policy. You see, Mr. Finn tries – quite unsuccessfully in my view – to target Texas “bravado” as the threat to a sound education policy. On the one hand, he attempts to criticize Governor Perry by lumping him in with George W. Bush’s efforts to push No Child Left Behind, despite Perry’s resistance to embrace it. Then he turns around and says now we will somehow suffer because Perry’s national policy prefers to leave education to the states (heaven forbid).

Now before I go too far, my purpose of responding to Mr. Finn is not to defend or promote the Governor as much as it is to point out the absurdity of what Mr. Finn purports to say on an objective basis and the curious placement of such a piece in National Review given the leftist connections of the Fordham Foundation, which tries assiduously to portray itself as center-right despite those connections.

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2. Of ATMs, Mousetraps and Watches

“If you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door.” Judging from his comments regarding ATMs and unemployment, President Obama blames the better mousetrap for 400,000 out-of-work cats. Cats who are starving for the lack of mice.

Creative destruction is a necessary and vital feature of a healthy and free capitalist economy. Business people intuitively know and embrace it (or at least they should). Smart workers anticipate it.

Creative destruction is the mechanism by which labor and capital are redeployed to more efficient uses. It’s how a healthy capitalist economy reinvents itself, rewarding the flexible and efficient while penalizing those who say “But this is how it’s always been done”.

My Dad was a worker who experienced three separate cycles of innovation and creative destruction in his career of almost 40 years. His story is below.

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3. Judd “Goldman Sachs” Gregg Paid to Fight BBA

It didn’t take long for former Senator Judd Gregg to use his influence to try to push the bidding of Wall Street at the expense of middle America.

Yesterday, Gregg wrote an Op Ed for The Hill where he thrashed the Balanced Budget Amendment “to dodge debt-ceiling action.” Gregg tries to redefine conservatism.

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4. Operation Fast and Furious’ fast and furious unraveling.

So. Somebody in the Obama administration is telling lies to the House Oversight/Government Reform Committee. That’s not smart. When people tell lies to House committees, people go to jail.

Background on this: this is all about the BATF/Justice Department Operations Gunrunner and Fast & Furious, which were originally purported to be methods by which [illegal purchases of] guns could be detected and arrested*. However, they instead turned into methods by which Mexican drug cartels were able to get their hands on [illegally-purchased semi-automatic] weapons. You see, the problem was that while selling the guns to middlemen (’straw purchasers’) [who intend to sell the guns illegally] is in itself a standard ’sting’ operation, somehow the guns continued on down the supply chain until they resurfaced in Mexico. The end result was inevitable: somebody used a BATF-supplied gun to kill Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

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5. Agriculture Appropriations Bill Update

Yesterday, the House is debating the annual Agriculture Appropriations bill, which appropriates funds for the Department of Agriculture and similar agencies. The committee-passed bill provides a spending level of $17.25 billion, which is $2.7 billion less than FY 2011 appropriations.

While $2.7 billion is a good start -enough to invoke the most vile class warfare from Democrats – there is still more to cut. This is part of a growing pattern with all of the appropriations bills. The Republican-led committees have offered some solid cuts around the edges, but fail to strike deeper, more consequential cuts. Keep in mind that while these cuts might appear significant, when compared against the profligate baseline of recent budgeting, they will not reverse the tide of the debt insolvency that awaits us. That’s one job that Obama’s ATM will not execute successfully. To that end, the RSC is offering an amendment today which would cut an additional $1.8 billion from the USDA.

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6. The California Amazon Tax violates Props 25 and 26

Don’t our elected officials have access to Ballotpedia? If the California Democrats did, they’d know that the Amazon Tax being taken up this afternoon in the legislature is unconstitutional under the state Constitution. And it’s not some old, obscure provision that’s violated either. It’s the brand-new Proposition 26, a constitutional amendment passed in November, that the tax violates.

Put simply, Proposition 26 doesn’t let the state raise new revenue without a 2/3 requirement, so the Amazon tax cannot be passed with a simple majority. And no, Proposition 25, another constitutional amendment also passed in November, doesn’t change that fact.

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7. NLRB Judge on Length of Boeing Fight: ‘I’ll be retired or dead…’

It appears the National Labor Relations Board does not like being the subject of the intense scrutiny its pro-union extremism has brought on. If it did, it wouldn’t be trying really, really hard to get the Boeing Company to reach some sort of settlement with the Machinists’ union.

In fact, on Tuesday, the first day of the NLRB’s hearing to destroy South Carolina jobs, Administrative Law Judge, Clifford Anderson, urged (unsuccessfully so far) the parties to reach a settlement, even bringing up his own mortality.

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