This has got to be the bazooka of all Joe Biden blowhardisms. The nation’s vice campaigner in chief went on the attack against Republicans this week, clad in full populist armor. “These guys don’t have a sense of the average folks out there,” said The Everyman. “They don’t know what it means to be middle class.” But who was his audience?

Nope, not blue-collar workers in Allentown, Pa. Biden was speaking to an exclusive club of $10,000-per-couple campaign donors gathered at the home of the Senate’s $200 million man, Democratic Mass. Sen. John Kerry, in Georgetown, D.C.

That’s smack dab in the middle of Beltway America, where they like a twist of cognitive dissonance with their aperitifs.

The White House is once again drawing on the fantastical myth of middle-class Joe to portray Republicans as out-of-touch elitists. A Washington Post headline described Biden “digging back into his roots to move Obama forward.” But the administration’s leading populist poster child is a wretched symbol of entrenched Washington power. And his fables are getting oldy-moldy.

At another campaign event in Ohio, Regular Joe rolled up his sleeves and pumped out the common-man colloquialisms. “It’s good to have a dad in the automobile business, man,” he said. Yeah, man. Preach it, man. Oh, hey, weren’t you the man who savaged average-guy Joe “the Plumber” Wurzelbacher in Ohio four years ago by lying about his income and mocking his American dream to own a small business? Man.

While Biden’s family came from humble beginnings, the wheeler-dealer politician and his family (including two lobbyist sons) have reaped the benefits of public office for nearly a half-century. The entrenched senior senator from Delaware amassed wealthy donors and crooked cronies over six Senate terms. These are some of the stories, reported in my book “Culture of Corruption,” that have been whitewashed out of the loquacious veep’s campaign folklore:

–Biden’s custom-built house in Delaware’s ritziest Chateau Country neighborhood, assessed at $2.5 million four years ago, is the Bidens’ most valuable asset. He secured the estate with the help of a corporate executive who worked for Biden’s top campaign donor, credit card giant MBNA. In 1996, Biden sold his previous mansion to MBNA Vice Chairman John Cochran. The asking price was $1.2 million. Cochran forked over the full sum. Biden then paid $350,000 in cash to real estate developer Keith Stoltz for a 4.2-acre lakefront lot. Stoltz had paid that same amount five years earlier for the undeveloped property.

–Among Pal Joey’s dearest old pals: campaign finance “rainmaker” William Oldaker, who showered generous benefits on both the elder Biden and his lobbyist son, Hunter; Baltimore-based Peter Angelos, whose law firm gave Biden $156,250; Wilmington-based Young Conaway Stargatt and Taylor, which kicked in $127, 979; and Pachulski Stang Zielhl and Jones, which donated $145,625, according to The American Lawyer.

–Disgraced trial lawyer Richard Scruggs donated $11,500 to Biden in 2008. After Scruggs was convicted of attempting to bribe a federal judge, Biden tried to show his ethical bona fides by donating the money to a worthy charity. But Biden couldn’t steer clear of nepotism. The money ended up with the National Prostate Cancer Coalition, a charity where, The American Lawyer pointed out, Biden’s son Hunter sits on the board of directors.

–Another Biden family pal in the trial lawyers’ community: Jeff Cooper. With his partner, John Simmons, the 39-year-old Cooper built one of the biggest asbestos litigation firms in the country. SimmonsCooper, based in Madison County, Ill., has donated a whopping $196,050 to Biden’s campaigns since 2003, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics in Washington, D.C. In that same time frame, the firm poured $6.5 million into lobbying against a key tort reform bill, which Sen. Biden worked hard to defeat. Without a hint of irony, Cooper extolled Biden’s anti-tort reform stance: “He understands the plight of the little guy and is against huge corporate interest.” But what Biden did was help fuel lucrative business for the tort bar. When courts in SimmonsCooper’s home base in Illinois finally started cracking down on what had become “America’s No. 1 judicial hellhole” for filing out-of-control tort claims, the firm turned East. And in Joe Biden’s Delaware, they created a new sanctuary.

Back on Obama 2012 Fantasy Island, Biden insists on marketing himself as the humble “son of an automobile man.” Give him this: He spins like a used-car salesman. His lot’s full of lemons. And “bamboozle” is his middle name.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin ~

There’s no escaping Solyndra Syndrome. Here in my home state of Colorado, citizen journalists have uncovered our own gaping government green loan sinkhole. The stench of Chicago-on-the-Potomac is fouling the fresh Rocky Mountain air.

Meet Loveland-based Abound Solar, the lucky winner of a $400 million federal loan guarantee from the Obama administration. Earlier this month, the thin-film cadmium telluride solar module-maker announced layoffs of nearly 300 employees (70 percent of its workforce). In addition, the firm froze plans to build a new factory in Indiana. Abound says it will ride out bad market conditions and “hopefully” survive until the market recovers.

But White House hope-a-nomics is what got Abound and taxpayers into trouble in the first place.

Back in 2010, President Obama promised America in his weekly radio address that Abound would “manufacture advanced solar panels at two new plants, creating more than 2,000 construction jobs and 1,500 permanent jobs.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu waves his green pom-poms, too. “Not only is this investment creating thousands of jobs, but it is also increasing our renewable energy manufacturing capacity and putting us on the path for our future prosperity.”

Like the rosy projections Obama and Chu used to justify pouring half-a-billion dollars in eco-subsidies down the now-bankrupt Solyndra solar drain, Abound’s financial outlook was based on mathematical make-believe. Hope plus change equals fail. Turns out Abound raked in green government funds despite big red flags from Fitch Ratings.

GOP House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairman Darrell Issa wrote: “Fitch describes Abound as lagging in technology relative to its competitors, failing to achieve stated efficiency targets, and expecting that Abound will suffer from increasing commoditization and pricing pressures. DOE’s willingness to fund Abound, despite these concerns, calls into question the merits of this loan guarantee.”

The financial mess was reported by ABC News, but the Obama administration has so far escaped real scrutiny of his crony venture socialism.

How were Fitch’s warnings ignored? Thanks to the intrepid investigative work of Colorado’s Todd Shepherd at CompleteColorado.com, Amy Oliver at the Independence Institute and Michael Sandoval at the People’s Press Collective blog, the crass political science driving this latest Department of Energy loan scandal has been exposed. The loan deal appears to be textbook “pay-for-play” between Team Obama and one of Colorado’s wealthiest progressive activist scions, Pat Stryker. She’s the billionaire heiress whose family founded a medical device and software company. Her investment firm, Bohemian Companies, dumped nearly $500 million into Democratic coffers between 2008 and 2012. Bohemian also invested considerably in Abound.

Colorado Democratic Rep. Betsy Markey, a backer of job-killing cap-and-trade policies and other stifling environmental regulations, pushed for the massive Abound DOE loan. As CompleteColorado.com noted, Stryker donated personally to Markey’s campaign, and Abound ran ads thanking Markey for her eco-radical voting record. Like Solyndra chief investor George Kaiser, Stryker has visited the White House on more than one occasion. Like Kaiser, Stryker is a top Obama bundler.

This week, CompleteColorado.com obtained a new set of documents revealing “that Abound Solar created an unexpected, and previously unreported 10 day production shutdown over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, and then went on to tell employees, ‘Don’t let the rumor mill create false purposes for this shutdown.’ The shutdown was announced to employees just after Thanksgiving by company president Craig Witsoe.”

On Thursday, Chu refused to tell House lawmakers and the public how many more DOE solar boondoggles are at risk of going under. He couldn’t “recall the exact number.” Funny how fraudulently exact they can be in cooking up jobs numbers, but how chronically amnesiac they are when it all blows up.

Hope-a-nomics: It’s every green bundler’s paradise and every taxpayer’s nightmare.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

I’m sorry Rush Limbaugh called 30-year-old Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “slut.” She’s really just another professional femme-a-gogue helping to manufacture a false narrative about the GOP “war on women.” I’m sorry the civility police now have an opening to demonize the entire right based on one radio comment — because it’s the progressive left in this country that has viciously and systematically slimed female conservatives for their beliefs.

We have the well-worn battle scars to prove it. And no, we don’t need coddling phone calls from the pandering president of the United States to convince us to stand up and fight.

At his first press conference of the year on Tuesday, the Nation’s Concern Troll explained that he phoned Fluke to send a message to his daughters and all women that they shouldn’t be “attacked or called horrible names because they are being good citizens.” After inserting himself into the fray and dragging Sasha and Malia into the debate, Obama then told a reporter he “didn’t want to get into the business of arbitrating” language and civility. Too late, pal.

The fact is, “slut” is one of the nicer things I’ve been called over 20 years of public life. In college during the late 1980s, it was “race traitor,” “coconut” (brown on the outside white on the inside) and “white man’s puppet.” After my first book, “Invasion,” came out in 2001, it was “immigrant-hater,” the “Radical Right’s Asian Pitbull,” “Tokyo Rose” and “Aunt Tomasina.” In my third book, 2005′s “Unhinged,” I published entire chapters of hate mail rife with degrading, unprintable sexual epithets and mockery of my Filipino heritage.

If I had a dollar for every time libs have called me a “Manila whore” and “Subic Bay bar girl,” I’d be able to pay for a ticket to a Hollywood-for-Obama fundraiser.

Self-serving opponents argue that such attacks do not represent “respectable,” “mainstream” liberal opinion about their conservative female counterparts. But it was feminist godmother Gloria Steinem who called Texas Republican Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison a “female impersonator.” It was NOW leader Patricia Ireland who commanded her flock to vote only for “authentic” female political candidates. It was Al Gore consultant Naomi Wolf who accused the late Jeanne Kirkpatrick of being “uninflected by the experiences of the female body.”

It was Matt Taibbi, now of Rolling Stone magazine, who mocked my early championing of the tea party movement by jibing: “Now when I read her stuff, I imagine her narrating her text, book-on-tape style, with a big, hairy set of (redacted) in her mouth. It vastly improves her prose.”

It was Keith Olbermann, then at MSNBC and now at Al Gore’s Current TV, who wrote on Twitter that columnist S.E. Cupp was “a perfect demonstration of the necessity of the work Planned Parenthood does” and who called me a “mashed up bag of meat with lipstick on it.” He stands by those remarks. Olbermann has been a special guest at the White House.

Some of us have not forgotten when liberal Wisconsin radio host John “Sly” Sylvester outrageously accused GOP Lt. Gov. Rebecca Kleefisch of performing “fellatio on all the talk-show hosts in Milwaukee” and sneered that she had “pulled a train” (a crude phrase for gang sex). (Earlier, he called former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice a “black trophy” and “Aunt Jemima.”)

Or when MSNBC misogynist Ed Schultz called talk show host Laura Ingraham a “talk slut” for criticizing Obama’s petty beer summit. Or when Playboy published a list of the top 10 conservative women who deserved to be “hate-f**ked.” The article, which was promoted by Anne Schroeder Mullins at Politico.com, included Ingraham, “The View’s” Elisabeth Hasselbeck, former Bush spokeswoman Dana Perino, GOP Rep. Michele Bachmann and others. Yours truly topped the list with the following description: a “highly f**kable Filipina” and “a regular on Fox News, where her tight body and get-off-my-lawn stare just scream, ‘Do me!’”

And then there’s the left’s war on Sarah Palin, which would require an entire national forest of trees to publish.

A reporter asked Obama to comment on examples of liberal hate speech at Tuesday’s press conference. He whiffed, of course. This is, after all, the brave leader who sat on his hands while his street thugs attacked tea party mothers and grandmothers as “Koch whores” during the fight over union reform in Wisconsin. (As I reported last week, his re-election campaign is now targeting the Koch brothers’ private foundation donors in a parallel effort to chill conservative speech and activism.) He’s leading by example.

So no, we won’t get any phone calls from Mr. Civility. Acknowledging the war on conservative women would obliterate The Narrative. Enjoy the silence.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

The White House fairy tale about the Happily Ever After Auto Bailout is missing a crucial, bloody page. While President Obama bragged about “standing by American workers” at a rowdy United Auto Workers meeting Tuesday, he failed to acknowledge how the Chicago-style deal threw tens of thousands of nonunion autoworkers under the bus.

In a campaign pep rally/sermon billed as a “policy speech,” Obama nearly broke his arm patting himself on the back for placing his “bets” (read: our money) on the $85 billion federal auto industry rescue. “Three years later,” he crowed, “that bet is paying off for America.” Big Labor brass cheered Obama’s citation of GM’s “highest profits in its 100-year history” as the room filled with militant UAW chants of “union made.”

“Union made” — but who “paid?” Scoffing at the criticism that his bailout was a massive union payoff, Obama countered that all workers sacrificed to save the auto industry. “Retirees saw a reduction in the health care benefits they had earned,” Obama told the congregation, er, crowd. “Many of you saw hours reduced,” he sympathized, “or pay and wages scaled back.”

Let’s clear the fumes (again), shall we? The bailout pain was not distributed equally. It was redistributed politically.

Bondholders standing up for their property and contractual rights got shortchanged and demonized personally by the president. Dealers and suppliers faced closures based on political connections and lobbying clout, rather than neutral efficiency evaluations. And as I first reported in September 2010, in the rush to nationalize the auto industry and avoid contested court termination proceedings, the White House auto team schemed with Big Labor bosses to preserve UAW members’ costly pension funds by shafting their nonunion counterparts.

These forgotten nonunion pensioners (who worked for the Delphi/GM auto parts company) lost all of their health and life insurance benefits. Hailing from the economically devastated Rust Belt — northeast Ohio, Michigan and neighboring states — the Delphi workers had devoted decades of their lives as secretaries, technicians, engineers and sales employees. Some have watched up to 70 percent of their pensions vanish. They’ve banded together to seek justice in court and on Capitol Hill under the banner of the Delphi Salaried Retiree Association.

Through two costly years of litigation and investigation, the Delphi workers have exposed how the stacked White House Auto Task Force schemed with union bosses to “cherry pick” (one Obama official’s own words) which financial obligations the new Government Motors company would assume and which they would abandon based on their political expedience. Obama’s own former auto czar Steve Rattner admitted in his recent memoir that “attacking the union’s sacred cow” could “jeopardize” the auto bailout deal.

Ohio Republican Rep. Michael Turner last month called attention to the glaring conflicts of interest that entangled Obama moneyman Tim Geithner’s multiple meddling roles in screwing over the Delphi workers. Geithner served simultaneously as co-chair of the Auto Task Force, board member of the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (the federal agency overseeing pension payments to bankrupt companies) and Treasury Secretary. The General Accounting Office raised eyebrows at Geithner’s “multiple roles” in the deal-making.

Thanks to a separate Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, we already know that Geithner’s department and General Motors closely coordinated their PR strategy and collaborated on making fraudulent claims about GM repaying all of its government loans. The cash-strapped Delphi retirees are suing the transparency-ducking PBGC in federal court to unearth documents that may yield key details of the improper Obama administration influence over Delphi’s bankruptcy organization.

As ebullient UAW officials hooted and hollered on Tuesday, Obama smugly attacked Republicans for “anti-worker policies” and their “same old you’re-on-your-own philosophy.” The Delphi workers know better: One union’s government-subsidized, government-manipulated “success story” is the rest of the workforce’s nightmare.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

If you like how the Obama administration’s multibillion-dollar “investments” in bankrupt solar companies have turned out, you’ll love the latest federal loan program to nowhere. It’s the Obamacare loyalty rewards program for progressives.

To appease liberal Democrats pushing for the so-called “public option” (the full frontal government takeover of our health care system), the White House settled for the creation of a $6 billion network of nonprofit “CO-OPs” that will “compete” with private insurers. It’s socialized medicine through the side door. House Republicans sliced about $2 billion from the slush fund in last spring’s budget deal and proclaimed the program dead. Hardly.

On Wednesday, the White House trumpeted the release of nearly $700 million in taxpayer-funded low-interest loans for seven CO-OPs in eight states. Administered by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the fund will pour more money into CO-OP plans nationwide throughout the next year. In 2014, according to Washington bureaucrats, the plans will be offered on the federally approved and federally monitored state health exchange “marketplace.”

Some marketplace. Given how Team Obama has dispensed special Obamacare waivers to scores of campaign donors, it’s a sure bet the CO-OP/exchange mechanism will be brazenly rigged against non-subsidized, for-profit insurers. And against taxpayers. Obama health officials assure us that there will be an “early warning system” in place before loan recipients get into financial trouble. But we know from the half-billion-dollar Solyndra scam that when this administration sees red flags, it’s full speed ahead.

In fact, the Obamacare CO-OP overseers already predict a nearly 40 percent default rate for the loans, according to Kaiser Health. Welcome to the Chicago-on-the-Potomac reverse rule of holes: When you’re in one, keep digging.

So, who are the lucky winners of the Obamacare slush fund lottery? Freelancers CO-OP of New Jersey, New Mexico Health Connections, Midwest Members Health in Iowa and Nebraska, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative in Wisconsin, Freelancers CO-OP of Oregon, Montana Health Cooperative, and Freelancers Health Service Corporation in New York.

You won’t be surprised to learn that the Freelancers Union — the largest CO-OP loan beneficiary to date, with a total $341 million subsidy — is a left-wing outfit founded by a self-described “labor entrepreneur” and MacArthur “genius.” Sara Horowitz has already snagged countless grants from the city and state of New York, the liberal Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Horowitz and Obama served together, along with former green jobs czar Van Jones, as advisers for the progressive think tank Demos — which in turn partnered with fraud-ridden community organizers ACORN and Project Vote. She also runs a political action committee called “Working Today” that crusades for an expanded government safety net. Crowing about the CO-OP loan from her fellow progressive warrior, Horowitz exulted: “It’s like venture capital for health care.” Or more accurately, to borrow South Carolina GOP Sen. Jim DeMint’s phrase, venture socialism.

While Horowitz plots to rope in 200,000 new clients, existing customers protested in The New York Times over lousy customer service and abrupt changes that resulted in “higher premiums, higher deductibles and more holes than their current plans.” Horowitz is more preoccupied with ensuring that the “social-purpose company” meets social and environmental justice goals than with customer needs.

Another of the Obamacare slush fund winners, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative in Wisconsin, scooped up a $56.4 million federal loan. The group describes itself as a “coalition of religious groups and other organizations.” Its pedigree is much more radical than that. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted, Common Ground “is the Milwaukee affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, founded in 1940 by Saul Alinsky, a famed community organizer and author of ‘Rules for Radicals.’ The organization, based in Chicago, bills itself as the oldest and largest community organizing network.”

The Industrial Areas Foundation was funded largely by the Gamaliel Foundation, which employed Obama in Chicago. As I first reported in 2009, Gamaliel’s Gregory Galluzzo wrote that he “met with Barack on a regular basis,” that Obama “acknowledged publicly that he had been the director of a Gamaliel affiliate,” and that “we are honored and blessed by the connection between Barack and Gamaliel.” No kidding.

As Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson put it:

“These grants/loans reek of political payola.”

Cronies reap. Taxpayers weep.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Two years ago this month, as public debate over Obamacare raged, former President Bill Clinton rushed to the hospital because of a heart condition. He immediately underwent a procedure to place two stents in one of his coronary arteries. It was a timely reminder about the dangers of stifling private-sector medical innovation. No one listened. Stents don’t grow on trees. They were not created, developed, marketed or sold by government bureaucrats and lawmakers. One of the nation’s top stent manufacturers, Boston Scientific, warned at the time that Obamacare’s punitive medical device tax would lead to worker losses and research cuts. The 2.3 percent excise tax, the company said, “would be very damaging to Boston Scientific, and the medical device industry as a whole. In a nutshell, it would raise costs and lead to significant job losses. It does not address the quality of care but the political scorecard of savings.”

Two years later, Bill Clinton’s doing just peachy. But many medical device manufacturers are suffering, and many more are preparing for the worst as the White House gears up to collect on an estimated $20 billion from the lifesaving industry. In typical Obama-transparent fashion, the Internal Revenue Service quietly released a complex thicket of medical device tax implementation rules in a Friday document dump earlier this month. Barring congressional intervention, the medical device tax will go into full effect in 2013.

Cook Medical, which manufactures products for everything from endovascular therapy, critical care medicine and general surgery, to diagnostic and interventional procedures, to bioengineered tissue replacement and regeneration, gastroenterology and endoscopy procedures, urology, and obstetrics and gynecology, has called for the levy’s repeal. Cook Group chairman Stephen Ferguson noted the tax burden amounted to a whopping 55 percent of its profits.

“For a company like ours, which pays 35 percent of our net earnings in federal corporate taxes and another 4 to 5 percent in state and local corporate taxes, the excise tax translates to another payment that will consume 15 percent more of our earnings,” he estimated. “This creates tremendous pressure for us to move manufacturing to Europe and other parts of the world.” According to the trade publication Mass Device, the company has already canceled plans to build a new factory in the U.S. because of the Obamacare tax burden.

Stryker, a maker of artificial hips and knees based in Kalamazoo, Mich., announced in November that it would slash 5 percent of its global workforce (an estimated 1,000 workers) this coming year to reduce costs related to Obamacare’s taxes and mandates.

Covidien, a N.Y.-based surgical supplies manufacturer, recently announced layoffs of 200 American workers and plans to move some of its plant work to Mexico and Costa Rica, in part because of the coming tax hit.

Mass.-based Zoll Medical Corp., which makes defibrillators and employs some 1,800 workers in the U.S. and around the world, says the medical device tax will cost the company between $5 million and $10 million a year. Its profit in 2009 was $9.5 million. “Running our company at close to break even would not be a sustainable position for us,” CEO Richard Packer said in a public statement, “so we will be forced to look at alternatives.”

Those “alternatives” include cutting payroll, cutting R and D and passing on the costs to patients, of course. Industry estimates put the tax-induced job losses at 43,000. So far, the number-crunchers at 1600 Pennsylvania are mum on the number of potential jobs — and lives — destroyed by the medical innovation death tax.

In fact, the Obama administration’s response so far has been a flippant shrug. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, whose only manufacturing claims to fame are faulty tax returns and near-double-digit unemployment figures, brushed off concerns this week about the medical device tax. Obamacare’s expanded access to health care, he argues blithely, will create more consumers for their products. “On balance, it is a good package for people in the health care business,” he told Bloomberg News.

Fewer jobs. Fewer entrepreneurs. Fewer medical advances. Only with a gallon of self-delusion does the Obamacare medical tax medicine amount to anything other than economic and medical malpractice.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

With public attention focused on the GOP primaries, the White House quietly promoted another self-dealing lobbyist to serve as President Obama’s top domestic policy adviser. Promises? What broken promises?

Cecilia Munoz, (pictured) the current director of intergovernmental affairs at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., will now serve as head of the Domestic Policy Council. She’ll wield heightened influence at Obama’s daily morning briefings and expand her reach from immigration issues to education, health care and beyond.

Gushing headlines heralded the advancement of Obama’s top Hispanic civil rights “advocate” as a win for the “middle class.” But Munoz is a veteran member of the Beltway lobbyist class whose former organization is reaping a taxpayer-funded windfall as she climbs the government ladder.

Before joining Team Obama, Munoz spent two decades as chief registered lobbyist for the National Council of La Raza (“The Race”). Whose “middle class” does The Race represent? I’ve tracked the radical identity politics-driven group for years as it promoted drivers’ licenses and in-state college tuition breaks for illegal aliens; opposed cooperative immigration enforcement efforts between local, state and federal authorities; and opposed a secure fence along the southern border.

Under Munoz, The Race advised the Mexican government on how to lobby for illegal alien amnesty in the United States. Mexico’s Institute for Mexicans Residing Abroad rewarded her with its Ohtli Prize for her service to the country. Their country, not ours.

The Race vehemently protested post-9/11 homeland security measures and joined a failed lawsuit to block immigration information-sharing between the feds and local police. The group also has called for TV and cable news networks to keep immigration enforcement proponents (including yours truly) off the airwaves, in addition to pushing for Fairness Doctrine policies to shut up their foes.

Most recently, The Race and other open-borders groups pressured the White House to deliver the DREAM Act illegal alien student bailout by executive fiat — after it was defeated repeatedly by bipartisan majorities on Capitol Hill. Obama started issuing the amnesty waivers last August. This week, the White House announced an even wider expansion of waiver status to illegal aliens claiming “hardship.”

Who has benefited from Munoz’s Beltway lobbying? No, not the American middle class. The biggest beneficiary has been La Raza’s coffers. According to analysts at nonpartisan Judicial Watch in Washington, The Race raked in $4.1 million in federal subsidies in 2009 and more than $11 million in 2010. Much of that money came straight from the Obama stimulus boondoggle, and much of it went to mortgage counseling.

As a result of “strategic partnerships” with Wachovia and Bank of America, The Race has succeeded in lowering mortgage application requirements and watering down documentation standards. Illegal aliens have secured countless federal and private home loans over the past decade thanks to the lending industry’s version of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

In addition, Munoz’s group collected a $1 million Democratic earmark that funded “community development” projects. And the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services kicked in $25,000 to co-sponsor the group’s annual conference in 2010.

Munoz’s multi-culti armor has shielded her radical lobbying from scrutiny. You’ll recall that the Obama administration made a lofty vow to end lobbyist conflicts-of-interest as we know them. The declaration was crystal-clear: “No political appointees in an Obama-Biden administration will be permitted to work on regulations or contracts directly and substantially related to their prior employer for two years. And no political appointee will be able to lobby the executive branch after leaving government service during the remainder of the administration.”

But something got lost in translation when the White House brought registered lobbyist Munoz aboard — to work on the very open-borders agenda she pushed at The Race. Team Obama invoked a shady “public interest” exemption to waive the lobbyist ban because, it determined, “Ms. Munoz’s knowledge and expertise are vital to the functioning of the Office of Intergovernmental Affairs.”

Has Munoz recused herself on any of the myriad public policy issues she has advised the president on over the past two years? Who knows? The most transparent administration ever refuses to disclose recusal orders involving the nearly 100 lobbyists and ex-lobbyists on its payroll. Obama’s “Razist” revolving door isn’t a victory for “civil rights” or the 99 percent. It’s a triumph of politically correct business as usual.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Richard Cordray

Here is the operating motto of the Obama White House: “So let it be written, so let it be done!” Like Yul Brynner’s Pharaoh Ramses character in Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments,” the demander in chief stands with arms akimbo issuing daily edicts to his constitution-subverting minions with an imperious wave of his hand. His entourage of insatiable usurpers never rests.

Can’t delude legislators into adopting a $1.5 billion Kabuki summer-jobs makework boondoggle? Create an unfunded program through executive fiat.

Can’t muster up a filibuster-proof majority for radical nominees? Czar-ify ‘em.

Can’t get Congress to approve vast wild lands designations? Grab them under cover of a holiday lame-duck session.

Can’t get the illegal alien bailout DREAM Act passed on Capitol Hill? Executive-order it.

“So let it be written, so let it be done!”

In keeping with the dark and defiant habits of this administration, the new head of the half-billion-dollar Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was sworn in behind closed doors on Wednesday night. The nomination of former Democratic Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray to serve as Dodd-Frank regulatory enforcer had been soundly defeated in the Senate before Christmas. But as I reported last month, progressive zealots funded by billionaire George Soros goaded Obama to ignore the Senate’s constitutionally grounded advice and consent role.

At his left flank’s urging, Obama vowed to follow in President Theodore Roosevelt’s footsteps (TR recess-appointed 160 officials during a recess of less than one day) and install Cordray even though the Senate technically remained in pro forma session. Fresh from his Hawaii vacation, Obama returned to Washington and for once delivered on a promise.

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters Thursday that the administration expects no retaliation for the end-run around the deliberative process. Playing the pharaoh’s helper, Carney airily dismissed widespread bipartisan questions about the legality of the power grab as “esoteric discussion.”

The GOP knew the installation of Obama’s latest super-czar was coming a month ago, but is now scrambling to respond. Republicans will get clobbered with the class warfare card again unless they forcefully counter the Democrats’ narrative of the president’s “bold” actions for “middle-class Americans.”

Obama’s liberal media supporters have rationalized the tyrannical maneuver as a response to GOP “nullification.” But it’s those who oppose common-sense reforms of the gravely flawed Dodd-Frank law — a 2,600-page monstrosity that no lawmaker read before passing it — who are obstructing good government.

As Senate Republicans have been pointing out for months, Dodd-Frank threw out judicial review, removed CFPB from the congressional appropriations process, provided five-year tenure protection for the director and transferred the agency from the Treasury Department to the opaque and unaccountable Federal Reserve.

Obama and Democratic leaders themselves recognize the recklessness of vesting so much unfettered power in a single individual. In 2009, Obama floated a bipartisan board to oversee enforcement. Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin of Illinois, Charles Schumer of New York and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island all co-sponsored legislation backing a commission. Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Barney Frank was also an original sponsor of a bill creating the very kind of five-member panel Republicans have proposed.

The House passed these and other structural reforms last year, but the Senate has failed to act, and the White House insists on demagoguing reformers. Moreover, taxpayers remain in the dark about how and how much the CFPB is spending, because Dodd-Frank allows the agency to draw funds from the Federal Reserve’s operating expenses. Out of sight, out of mind.

This is not “bold.” It’s jackboot. It won’t benefit “middle-class Americans.” It’ll line lobbyist pockets, soak taxpayer dollars and fuel a Beltway rule-making bonanza. It’s not about reining in Wall Street abuses. It’s about consolidating bureaucratic authority and granting unprecedented immunity to a single super-cop from congressional and public oversight.

Where, ahem, are those Occupiers when you need them?

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

The Iowa caucuses may not have much predictive value, but they did a wonderful job of unmasking both elitist whingers on the left and incompetent whiners on the right.

As they do every presidential election cycle, progressives of pallor wore their indelible disdain for Middle America on their sleeves. Pale-faced University of Iowa journalism professor Stephen Bloom launched a 6,000-word jeremiad, littered with factual errors, against his home state’s residents. The abridged version: Raaaaaaaacists! Hicks! Christians! Argggh!

In the safe harbors of The Atlantic just a few weeks before Tuesday’s electoral event, Bloom sneered: “Those who stay in rural Iowa are often the elderly waiting to die.” The rest are “(a)n assortment of waste-toids and meth addicts with pale skin and rotted teeth or those who quixotically believe, like Little Orphan Annie, that ‘the sun will come out tomorrow.’” One of the poison-tongued prof’s own former journalism students, Kirsten Scharnberg Hampton, took him to task for citing faulty demographic statistics, derisively stereotyping hunters and falsely accusing a local newspaper of “splashing” the headline “He Is Risen” across its front page (it was a small, boxed quotation marking Easter Sunday).

But the damage was done; the bait dangled. And at the overwhelmingly white “NBC Nightly News” on Sunday, Andrea Mitchell swallowed the Iowa-bashing chum whole — and then dutifully regurgitated the attack on the state as, “Too white, too evangelical, too rural.” She was quick to slip in a “critics say” disclaimer, of course. But let’s not kid ourselves about the network’s prejudices.

This is the same news organization that attempted to conduct Islamophobia stings at NASCAR races to expose how racist racing fans supposedly were; whose “Meet the Press” host David Gregory smeared GOP leaders as “Grand Wizards” in November; and whose execs were forced to apologize last month for MSNBC goons who falsely linked GOP candidate Mitt Romney to the Ku Klux Klan.

One local Hawkeye State veteran journalist, David Yepsen, tried to correct the coastal myth of the redneck-hick-outlier Iowa voter by politely pointing out Barack Obama’s triumph in the 2008 Democratic caucuses at the hands of, yes, mostly white voters. Moreover, over the past four presidential election seasons, the Iowa popular vote has “closely tracked national preferences.”

Census statistics show that the majority of Iowans are urban, not rural; the median age is 38 (nationally, it’s 36.7); and out of a population of 3 million people statewide, some 90,000 are farming families. But snobs and demagogues on both sides of the aisle eschewed the facts and instead indulged in racial and class warfare. The Hispanic News website issued a clarion call: “In Diverse and Urban Nation, Time to Kick Iowa White, Racist Farmers to Curb.” GOP strategist Roger Stone, who spearheaded the bungled bid to turn statist, pro-bailout, eminent-domain abuser Donald Trump into a Tea Party/GOP “Mr. Everyman” candidate, also jumped ugly. He railed against Iowans as a “bunch of hayseeds” who are “not representative of America today.”

More Iowa sins according to Stone: “The food is awful, the people are stout, and a lot of them smoke.”

If only a utopian state of non-smoking, vegetarian supermodels and “Apprentice” reality-show contestants had first-in-the-nation status. Imagine how much better off we’d all be.

Joking aside, I’d have no problem with a rotating, kick-off caucus slot. But intermingled with the bi-coastal bigotry against Iowa is the distinct odor of sore-loser-dom. Split voters in Iowa simply reflected the wider discontent among grassroots conservatives and tea party activists with the current Pageant of the Imperfects.

Besides, Iowa caucus critics have had years to change the status quo. Like some of Tuesday’s big losers, the whingers and whiners who complain about the process have failed to get their act together. All talk, no follow-through.

Take Newt Gingrich. The vaunted intellectual field marshal of the GOP whose campaign bubble quickly burst under the weight of his own gross incompetence blamed his fall on money, staff, a “failed system,” negative ads and the electorate’s inability to appreciate “big ideas.”

But if you can’t convert a surge into an electoral win, if you can’t effectively rebut opponents’ charges without resorting to tears and tantrums, and — most damaging for Gingrich — if you can’t put people on the ground in places like Iowa and Virginia who can deliver votes and signatures when it counts, how can you win a general election? Frankly, to use a favorite Gingrich verbal crutch, the fault lies in just one place: on Gingrich’s shoulders.

When I was a kid, we took something called the Iowa Test of Basic Skills — a nationally standardized test of minimum competence in core subjects. The Iowa caucuses serve a similar purpose. When campaigns fail to meet the most elementary requirements of organizational politics, don’t blame the messengers. Blame the test-takers.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

With 2011 drawing to a close, it is time to account. As an early-and-often chronicler of Chicago-on-the-Potomac, I am amazed at the stubborn and clingy persistence of President Barack Obama’s snowblowers in the media. See no scandal, hear no scandal, speak no scandal.

Dartmouth College professor Brendan Nyhan asserted in May — while Operation Fast and Furious subpoenas were flying on Capitol Hill — that “one of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals.” Conveniently, he defines scandal as a “widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.”

So as long as left-wing Ivy League scribes refuse to perceive something to be a scandal — never mind the actual suffering endured by the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry, whose death came at the hands of a Mexican cartel thug wielding a Fast and Furious gun walked across the southern border under Attorney General Eric Holder’s watch — there is no scandal!

Self-serving much?

Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum likewise proclaimed: “Obama’s presidency has so far been almost completely free of scandal.”

This after the year kicked off in January with the departure of lying eco-radical czar Carol Browner. In backroom negotiations, she infamously bullied auto execs to “put nothing in writing, ever.” The previous fall, the White House’s own oil spill panel had singled out Browner for misleading the public about the scientific evidence for the administration’s Draconian drilling moratorium and “contributing to the perception that the government’s findings were more exact than they actually were.”

The Interior Department inspector general and federal judges likewise blasted drilling ban book-cooking by Browner and Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, who falsely rewrote the White House drilling ban report to doctor the Obama-appointed panel’s own overwhelming scientific objections to the job-killing edict.

In February, federal judge Martin Feldman in Louisiana excoriated the Obama Interior Department for defying his May 2010 order to lift its fraudulent ban on offshore oil and gas drilling in the Gulf. He called out the administration’s culture of contempt and “determined disregard” for the law.

This spring saw rising public anger over the preferential Obamacare waiver process (which I first reported on in September 2010). Some 2,000 lucky golden ticket winners were freed from the costly federal mandates — including a handful of fancy restaurants in Aloha Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district, the entire state of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s Nevada, and scores of local, state and national Big Labor organizations, from the Service Employees International Union and Teamsters on down. Meanwhile, as The Hill newspaper reported last month, other not-so-lucky Republican-led states seeking waivers, such as Indiana and Louisiana, were rejected.

But it wasn’t just Republicans objecting to the president’s arbitrary Obamacare fiats. In July, congressional Democrats turned on the monstrous federal health bureaucracy known as the Independent Payment Advisory Board. The constitutionally suspect panel — freed from normal public notice, public comment and public review rules — would have unprecedented authority over health care spending and an expanding jurisdiction of private health care payment rates.

Obama’s health and human services secretary, Kathleen Sebelius, faced separate legal questions over her overseer role in a hair-raising document-shredding case when she served as governor of Kansas. In October, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. Bombshell court filings showed that Kansas health officials “shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces” and failed to disclose it for six years.

That same month, Bloomberg News columnist Jonathan Alter gushed: “There is zero evidence … of corruption. Where is it?”

Alter’s declaration of the “Obama Miracle” came just weeks after the politically driven half-billion-dollar Solyndra stimulus “investment” went bankrupt, prompting an FBI raid and ongoing criminal and congressional probes of the solar company funded by top White House bundler and visitor George Kaiser.

As Solyndra and an avalanche of other ongoing green subsidy scams erupted, so did the LightSquared debacle — a federal broadband boondoggle involving billionaire hedge fund managers and Obama donors Philip Falcone and George Soros. In September, two high-ranking witnesses — William Shelton, the four-star general who heads the Air Force Space Command, and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Director Anthony Russo — exposed how the White House had pressured them to alter their congressional testimony and play down concerns about LightSquared’s interference threat to military communications.

The White House continues to block efforts to gain information about the Federal Communications Commission’s approval of a special waiver for the company, even as new government tests this month showed that the company’s “signals caused harmful interference to the majority of … general purpose GPS receivers.”

The Obama White House closed out the year with Democratic Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri demanding a probe of the smelly $443 million no-bid smallpox antiviral pill contract with Siga Technologies — controlled by big lefty donor Ron Perelman. Then there was the small matter of massive voter fraud in Indiana, where a Democratic official resigned amid allegations that “dozens, if not hundreds,” of signatures were faked to get Obama on the state primary ballot in 2008. And while Americans busied themselves with the holidays, White House and Democratic campaign officials were dumping more than $70,000 in contributions from another deep-pocketed contributor — scandal-plagued pal and former New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine, who oversaw the collapse of MF Global.

All this — and so much more — yet erstwhile “conservative” journalist Andrew Sullivan of Newsweek/The Daily Beast scoffed, “Where are all the scandals promised by Michelle Malkin?”

There’s none so blind as those who will not see.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

The road to gastric hell is paved with first lady Michelle Obama’s Nanny State intentions. Don’t take my word for it. School kids in Los Angeles have blown the whistle on the east wing chef-in-chief’s healthy lunch diktats. Get your Pepto Bismol ready. The taste of government waste is indigestion-inducing.

According to a weekend report by the Los Angeles Times, the city’s “trailblazing introduction of healthful school lunches has been a flop.” In response to the public hectoring and financial inducement of Mrs. Obama’s federally subsidized anti-obesity campaign, the district dropped chicken nuggets, corn dogs and flavored milk from the menu for “beef jambalaya, vegetable curry, pad Thai, lentil and brown rice cutlets, and quinoa and black-eyed pea salads.”

Sounds delectable in theory. But in practice, the initiative has been what L.A. Unified’s food services director Dennis Barrett plainly concludes is a “disaster.” While the Obama administration has showered the nation’s second-largest school district with nutrition awards, thousands of students voted with their upset tummies and abandoned the program. A forbidden-food black market — stoked not just by students, but also by teachers — is now thriving. Moreover, “(p)rincipals report massive waste, with unopened milk cartons and uneaten entrees being thrown away.”

This despite a massive increase in spending on nutritional improvements — from $2 million to $20 million alone in the last five years on fresh produce.

This despite a nearly half-billion-dollar budget shortfall and 3,000 layoffs earlier this year.

Earlier this spring, L.A. school officials acknowledged that the sprawling district is left with a whopping 21,000 uneaten meals a day, in part because the federal school lunch program “sometimes requires more food to be served than a child wants to eat.” The leftovers will now be donated to nonprofit agencies. But after the recipients hear about students’ reports of moldy noodles, undercooked meat and hard rice, one wonders how much of the “free” food will go down the hatch — or down the drain. Ahhh, savor the flavor of one-size-fits-all mandates.

There’s nothing wrong with encouraging our children to eat healthier, of course. There’s nothing wrong with well-run, locally based and parent-driven efforts. But as I’ve noted before, the federal foodie cops care much less about students’ waistlines than they do about boosting government and public union payrolls.

In a little-noticed announcement several months ago, Obama health officials declared their intention to use school lunch applications to boost government health care rolls. Never mind the privacy concerns of parents.

Big Government programs “for the children” are never about the children. If they were, you wouldn’t see Chicago public school officials banning students from bringing home-packed meals made by their own parents. In April, The Chicago Tribune reported that “unless they have a medical excuse, they must eat the food served in the cafeteria.” The bottom line? Banning homemade lunches means a fatter payday for the school and its food provider.

Remember: The unwritten mantra driving Mrs. Obama’s federal school lunch meddling and expansion is: “Cede the children, feed the state.” And the biggest beneficiaries of her efforts over the past three years have been her husband’s deep-pocketed pals at the Service Employees International Union. There are 400,000 workers who prepare and serve lunch to American schoolchildren. SEIU represents tens of thousands of those workers and is trying to unionize many more at all costs.

In L.A., the district’s cafeteria fund is $20 million in the hole thanks to political finagling by SEIU Local 99. The union’s left-wing allies on the school board and in the mayor’s office pressured the district to adopt reckless fiscal policies awarding gold-plated health benefits to part-time cafeteria workers in the name of “social justice.” As one school board member who opposed the budget-busting entitlements said: “Everyone in this country deserves health benefits. But it was a very expensive proposal. And it wasn’t done at the bargaining table, which is where health benefits are usually negotiated. And no one had any idea where the money was going to come from.”

Early next year, Mrs. Obama will use the “success” of her child nutrition campaign to hawk a new tome and lobby for more money and power in concert with her husband’s re-election campaign. It’s a recipe for more half-baked progressivism served with a side order of bitter arugula.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

As a rueful Queen Elizabeth once said of a particularly rough year for the royal family, 2011 is “not a year on which” Queen Nancy Pelosi “shall look back with undiluted pleasure.” The former House Speaker relinquished her crown — er, gavel — in January. It’s been an epic downhill ski crash ever since.

Most recently, Pelosi faced questions from liberal “60 Minutes” and conservative investigative author Peter Schweitzer about a 5,000-share Visa stock purchase she made with her husband as the House was considering credit card regulations. She made a “killing” off the highly sought-after initial public offering. The stock holdings more than doubled in a few weeks; the credit card regulations were put on ice somewhere in the back of Pelosi’s fridge.

While she makes grand gestures toward banning congressional insider trading, San Fran Nan’s financial conflicts of interest are once again on display. This week, Reuters columnist Dan Indiviglio pointed to pending House legislation titled the “New Alternative Transportation to Give Americans Solutions Act of 2011,” which is stuffed with natural gas vehicle subsidies: $9 billion worth, to be precise. These very subsidies are championed by Texas billionaire and failed wind farm evangelist T. Boone Pickens. He just happens to be a major stockholder in the company that would benefit from the bill: Clean Energy Fuels.

Question the timing? Indeed. As The Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney observes: “While Pickens, a longtime oil and gas man, has been lobbying for natural gas subsidies for decades, his cause has become particularly urgent this month. Pickens owns options to buy 15 million shares of Clean Energy Fuels at $10 per share, according to SEC filings. Those options expire Dec. 28. If Congress could pass the NATGAS Act this month, shares of Clean Energy would skyrocket.”

Pelosi just happens to be a stockholder in — you guessed it — Clean Energy Fuels. The then-Speaker bought between $50,000 and $100,000 of stock in Pickens’ CLNE Corp. in May 2007 on the day of the initial public offering. As I reported in a column three years ago, Pelosi’s 2007 financial disclosure form listed “assets and ‘unearned income’ of between $100,001-$250,000 from Clean Energy Fuels Corp. — Public Common Stock.” If the natural gas giveaway passes, Pelosi profits.

Of course, an endless parade of dirty Democratic scandals earlier this year had already completely obliterated what was left of Pelosi’s Mop-and-Glo reformer image. She and other liberal feminists rallied around disgraced Twitter freak and former N.Y. Democratic Rep. Anthony Weiner even as evidence mounted that he lied to them. And used taxpayer resources and government buildings while sexting. And recklessly neglected to ensure that his Internet paramours were of legal age.

Pelosi and fellow femme-a-gogue Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., led from behind, calling for Weiner’s resignation only after the public tide had shifted. Pelosi showed similar reticence in dealing with basket-case Oregon Democratic Rep. David Wu — whose sexually aggressive, alcohol-addled erratic outbursts stretched over decades. Despite knowledge of Wu’s staff’s panic about his infamous 2010 Tigger costume photos and despite months-old pleas for help from an underage victim of Wu’s sexual indiscretions, House Democrats sat on their hands. In July, Pelosi finally called for an investigation by the House Ethics Committee.

That’s the same panel that slapped Pelosi pal and New York Democratic Rep. Charlie Rangel on the wrist for serial tax-cheating and has yet to move forward with California Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters’ ethics trial after charging her last year with three violations related to her crony TARP bailout intervention on behalf of minority-owned OneUnited Bank in Los Angeles.

What a way to close out her annus horribilis. Nancy Pelosi, the proud feminist who boasted she would clean up Washington, is covering up and cashing in. Just like all the other self-dealing good old boys.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

Scruffy progressive protesters locked themselves together across railroad tracks, blocked traffic and shouted profanities at police on Tuesday in a coordinated “West Coast Port Shutdown.” Truckers lost wages. Shippers lost business. This is what the Occupy Wall Street movement calls “victory.”

Aging Big Labor bosses toasted one another from the sidelines as they declared the “rebirth of the labor movement.” What’s really going on? It’s an old-school power grab by a decrepit union wrapped in self-deluded social media do-goodism.

Peace-loving agitators wielding guitars and iPhones may earnestly believe they stood up to corruption and stood up for workers this week. A socialist website promoted the port shutdown as an expression of “solidarity” for the workers’ “struggle.” One Oakland, Calif., agitator decried “exploitation by capitalism” as the shiftless busily divided their work blockages into what they called — chortle — “shifts.”

In reality, it’s the young Occupiers who are being exploited as human shields for the economy-strangling agenda of the violence-prone International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU). These ignorant punks are putting the “front” in “waterfront.”

Few remember now that the left’s three-month-long “Day of Rage” festivities kicked off in September at the Port of Longview, Wash. — a far cry from Goldman Sachs and the rest of New York’s financial district. Unionized longshoremen stormed the port there and took a half-dozen guards hostage. They damaged railroad cars, dumped grain, smashed windows, cut rail brake lines and blocked a train for hours while the ILWU and AFL-CIO cheered them on.

The violence followed a similar outburst in July, when longshoremen tore down a chain link fence on EGT’s private property and blocked railroad tracks to prevent a grain delivery — a clear violation of the 1946 Hobbs Act, which makes it a crime to employ robbery or extortion to impede interstate commerce.

Despite breaking federal law, violating a judicial restraining order and committing systematically planned sabotage and trespassing, most of the union thugs got away with wrist slaps. The ILWU received a $250,000 fine to cover damages from the vandalism — a fine that will be paid with rank-and-file workers’ hard-earned dues money.

So, what’s their beef? No, it’s not about the “right” of unions to “organize.” It’s not about the welfare of the “99 percent.” It’s about one union losing its seven-decade-old grip on West Coast port operations. It’s about six-figure-salaried union suits at the ILWU, established by bloody radical Marxist Harry Bridges, throwing a lawless tantrum against economic efficiency and technological progress.

The ILWU is trying to break the will of EGT Development, a multinational agribusiness that recently built a $200 million grain terminal in Longview. It’s a state-of-the-art facility with unprecedented automation features that will speed unloading, increase shipping capacity and bring in tens of millions of dollars in lease and tax payments alone to the region.

EGT needs a nimble 21st-century workforce. The entitled overlords of the ILWU, who have ruled West Coast ports since the 1930s, are demanding a monopoly on the company’s master control system, control over the work hour structure, excessive mandatory breaks and extortionist man-hour “premiums” to bail out the union’s underfunded pension. “We’ve worked these elevators since 1934, and we’ve always been in that master console,” local ILWU President Dan Coffman told public radio.

EGT refused and instead brought in an outside contractor with a different union to fill about 50 jobs. But the ILWU water-carriers in the Occupy movement don’t care about those workers. Or the American farmers who have been hurt by the port saboteurs. Or the independent non-union truckers who were forced to forgo work in the name of worker empowerment. Trucker Hai Ngo of San Leandro, Calif., told the San Francisco Chronicle: “The Occupy people handed out flyers to us, but never asked what we thought before they planned this. I will lose about $350, and at holiday time that hurts. It’s just a waste of our time and money, and won’t accomplish anything.”

Unfortunately, Ngo and blue-collar workers like him are collateral damage in the ILWU’s ruthless battle for Big Labor survival. Coffman, who has stoked violence for months, vowed earlier this year that “we will fight to the end to secure what is rightfully our turf.”

And now the gasping longshoremen’s union has a whole new set of Occu-tools to do the dirty work for them.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

It was a rough week for the corruptocracy. White House officials better ho-ho-hold on tight because the sleigh ride isn’t going to get any smoother.

On Wednesday, disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich, D-Ill., received a 14-year prison sentence for scheming to sell President Barack Obama’s Senate office, along with several other pay-for-play schemes. Blago played the distressed daddy for the federal judge, invoking his young daughters and wife (who held her notoriously foul tongue in check) to bemoan how his “life is in ruins.”

How far Blago’s fallen from the glory days of 2008, when he was gloating at the prospect of naming a candidate to fill then-President-elect Obama’s seat. “I’ve got this thing, and it’s ***king golden,” he crowed. All that glitters now, though, are the paparazzi flash bulbs that Blago faces on his perp walks.

Earlier this week, Bill Richardson, former Democratic governor of New Mexico, disgraced former presidential candidate and failed Obama Commerce Secretary nominee, faced new reports of a federal grand jury into his possible violations of campaign finance laws. The funny-money business is tied to an alleged mistress payoff a la disgraced former presidential candidate and Sen. John Edwards, D-N.C.

Additionally, the Wall Street Journal reports, investigators are probing how “Richardson’s close allies steered more than $2 billion of public money into investment funds run by money managers who in turn agreed to pay millions of dollars in consulting fees to high-profile Democratic fundraisers and other supporters of Richardson.”

The star that joined together this little constellation of sleaze? Disgraced U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

Holder and Blago go way back. Holder himself suffered selective amnesia about the relationship during his confirmation hearing. He somehow “forgot” to mention that Blagojevich had appointed him to probe corruption in Illinois casino licensing decisions. State officials had objected to Blago’s crony appointment of fundraiser Christopher Kelly to the state Gaming Board. Kelly’s business partner was now-convicted felon and shakedown artist Tony Rezko, Obama’s former bagman and real-estate fixer.

Holder pocketed $300,000 from Blago to “investigate” and — surprise, surprise — concluded that no corruption existed. They stood shoulder to shoulder at a 2004 news conference to make the announcement. But Holder failed to disclose it on his Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, which he signed five days after Blagojevich’s arrest in December 2008 for putting Obama’s U.S. Senate seat up for sale.

After duping a Senate majority (including 19 Senate Republicans) into approving his AG nomination despite multiple admissions of failure, neglect and sabotage of the rule of law, Holder moved up to perform more cover-ups for Obama’s pals. In August 2009, Holder’s DOJ announced it was dropping federal corruption charges against Richardson after a yearlong federal probe into pay-to-play allegations involving one of his large political donors and state bond deals.

“It’s over. There’s nothing. It was killed in Washington,” a source close to the investigation told the Associated Press. Even as they tapped Richardson to serve as Obama’s first Commerce Secretary, the White House transition team knew about Richardson’s pay-to-play scandal involving a California company, CDR Financial Products. FBI and federal prosecutors had launched their probe of CDR’s activities in New Mexico in the summer of 2008.

The feds had been digging into a nationwide web of favor-trading between financial firms and politicians overseeing local government bond markets. CDR was tied to a doomed bond deal in Alabama, which, according to Bloomberg News, threatened to cause the biggest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. CDR raked in nearly $1.5 million in fees from a New Mexico state financial agency after donating more than $100,000 to Richardson’s efforts to register Hispanic and Native American voters and to pay for expenses at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, the news service reported.

The state agency that awarded the money consisted of five Richardson appointees and five members of his gubernatorial cabinet. CDR made contributions both shortly before and after securing consultant work with the state of New Mexico. CDR’s president also contributed $29,000 to Obama’s presidential campaign. After Holder dropped the case, New Mexico Republicans blasted the lack of transparency in the decisions and the refusal to heed the advice of experienced, non-political prosecutors and FBI investigators.

Mother Jones writer James Ridgeway’s comment on the day of Richardson’s Commerce Secretary nomination withdrawal proved quite prescient: “It may be premature to say that Obama and his team have too high a tolerance for corruption. But this first self-destruct among his cabinet picks could well prove all the more damaging because it’s something they should have seen coming from miles away.”

The same applies, of course, to Holder himself — who admitted at a House hearing that the Operation Fast and Furious scandal under his watch was “flawed,” “reckless,” “tragic” and deadly.” How much longer will America tolerate this reign of error and terror?

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

Wrapping himself in the mantle of Theodore Roosevelt’s “National Greatness” agenda, President Obama urged the nation to stand strong and unite behind … his umpteenth regulatory czar. Nothing symbolizes American strength and vigor more than another unaccountable Washington bureaucrat.

If Richard Cordray, (pictured) the stalled White House nominee to enforce the Dodd-Frank financial bureaucracy, is not approved, the wheedler-in-chief warned in Osawatomie, Kan.:

“Every day we go without a consumer watchdog in place is another day when a student or a senior citizen or member of our Armed Forces could be tricked into a loan they can’t afford — something that happens all the time.”

In Obama’s America, you see, “greatness” springs from vastly expanding government power to shield every last borrower in the country from poor financial behavior.

Senate Republicans have vowed to block Cordray or any other candidate for the job until key reforms are made to the sweeping law and its half-billion-dollar enforcement arm, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The common-sense changes include subjecting the CFPB to the congressional appropriations process instead of the Federal Reserve; restoring independent judicial review; ensuring that it takes into account the impact of new rules on the safety and soundness of financial institutions; and creating a bipartisan oversight board instead of a single director to run the agency.

Obama himself supported such a panel — before he opposed and demagogued it. As it stands, the bureau remains under the Treasury Department. The minute a director is sworn in, the agency will transfer to the Fed for administrative purposes, but will effectively have free rein. The Fed’s authority over it is illusory. And it would be impossible for the Dodd-Frank czar to be removed by a change of administration, because his term is five years and his tenure protected.

While crusading as a consumer watchdog who’ll take on Wall Street, Cordray (whom voters booted from the Ohio Attorney General’s Office last fall) is tight with securities class-action lawyers. As Daniel Fisher at Forbes Magazine reported, Cordray has a record of “taking money from lawyers who profit from private litigation that often follows closely on the heels of government investigations.” In other words: exactly the kind of cozy crony relationships that created our financial crisis in the first place.

As for Cordray’s ability to police shady behavior by others, his own record as Ohio attorney general raises more doubts than it allays. When local papers spotlighted shady campaign account-shifting involving nearly $800,000, even a liberal Ohio Citizen Action leader responded:

“I’m sure he’s following the letter of the law. It’s certainly not following the spirit of the law.”

A vote on Cordray is scheduled for Thursday, and the White House doesn’t have the support to secure a filibuster-proof approval. Thus, the taxpayer-funded barnstorming tour this week (which just happens to provide a handy pretext for targeting GOP senators in seven swing states).

But Obama’s radical supporters aren’t about to let the deliberative process stand in their way. They’re pushing the president to follow in TR’s footsteps and ram Cordray through by recess appointment. The George Soros-funded propaganda outfit Think Progress led the rallying cry. In 1903, Theodore Roosevelt recess-appointed 160 officials during a recess of less than one day. “Such an appointment would not be without political controversy — but would likely be upheld as legal given the Roosevelt precedent,” a Soros operative opined. “Simply put, it’s time for President Obama to speak softly and carry a big stick.”

Obama has been thwacking the economy with a Chicago-crafted billy club and wielding brass knuckles against critics, whistleblowers and true regulatory reformers for the past three years. Memo to the White House: This is not what TR meant when he used his favorite phrase: “Bully!”

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

She’s perfect. Miley Cyrus, Hollywood’s perpetually half-dressed wild child with an insatiable appetite for attention, jumped in front of the Occupy Wall Street bandwagon this week. The young Disney mogul unveiled a YouTube anthem hailing the aimless, anti-capitalist protesters. Smells like opportunistic teen queen spirit.

Like so much of the warmed-over, Big Labor-underwritten Occupy movement, Miley’s musical tribute to its foot soldiers is a worn-out derivative remix. She took “Liberty Walk,” a year-old single; spliced in video footage of union marchers carrying carbon-copy “TAKE BACK OUR DEMOCRACY” signs; tossed in random scenes of global discontent from London to China to San Diego to Salem, Oregon; slapped on a treacly dedication to “the thousands of people who are standing up for what they believe in” (like, whatever that is); stirred; auto-tuned; and released:

“Sayin’ goodbye to the people who tied you up/ It’s a liberty walk, walk/ Feelin’ your heart again/ Breathin’ new oxygen/ It’s a liberty walk, walk/ Free yourself, slam the door, not a prisoner anymore!”

Somehow, all the Occupier outbreaks of lice, public defecation, property destruction and rape got left on the cutting room floor.

Hipsters are horrified by the Hollywood hijacking. To borrow a favorite Occupier phrase, they rained “downtwinkles” on the starlet. One Occupy activist prominently distanced herself from Hannah Montana, Teen Revolutionary, and issued a challenge. Priscilla Grim, an Occupy flack, told the website TMZ that while Miley’s music video “‘rocks’ in spirit … she doubts the singer has the guts to actually hit the streets.” Grim dared “Ms. Cyrus” to “fight on the front line of economic civil rights” and join the agitators at Los Angeles City Hall.

Will Miley put her Louboutins where her vocal cords are? With an estimated net worth of $120 million, the radical chic poseur is no dummy. While her video stokes anti-police hostility and anti-bank rage, she and her managers can safely raise their figurative fists with one hand while inking new corporate deals with the other.

One YouTube commenter decried Tinseltown’s “cynical ploy”:

“This is disgusting. Another celebrity cashing in on the Occupy movement for their own profit. First (rapper) Jay-Z selling T-shirts and giving no money to the movement and now this. It might be different if she was giving all the profits from this song to the movement, but she’s keeping all of it for herself. I am an active member of Occupy — and on behalf of the movement I would like to say **** you Miley Cyrus and **** you Jay-Z. You are blood-sucking scum!”

That’s just a bit harsh. After all, diehard Occupiers themselves are hawking photos, documentaries and all manner of assorted swag from one coast to the other, while live-streaming their nocturnal, police-obstructing parties over corporate airwaves. They’ve opened bank accounts with the same companies their masked peers have vandalized. Their union elders are cutting deals with the same retailers they besieged on Black Friday.

In so many ways, Miley and the Occu-mob are a match made in heaven. Vacuous. Hypocritical. Entitled. Vain. Nihilist. Exhibitionist. Coddled. Forever adolescent, treating life like an endless “Party in the U.S.A.,” and demanding that everyone else pay for it.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

At the dawn of his administration, President Obama opined: “A democracy requires accountability, and accountability requires transparency.” Magical rays of white-hot sunlight emanated from his media-manufactured halo. And then bureaucratically engineered darkness settled over the land.

For three years, White House officials have rolled out countless executive orders and initiatives touting open government. Just this week, they unveiled plans to move federal archival records from a paper-based to an electronic system. But behind the scenes, Obama’s lawyers systematically have stymied public information requests, carved out crater-sized disclosure loopholes, fought subpoenas on scandals from Fast and Furious to Solyndra, and made routine the holiday document dump.

The latest meeting of the Government Accountability and Transparency Board, attended by Vice President Joe Biden, was closed to the press two weeks ago.

The Justice Department stealthily attempted to sabotage the Freedom of Information Act last month with a regulation change that would have allowed federal agencies to legally and deliberately deceive the public about the existence of requested records. After a massive backlash, DOJ retreated and sheepishly admitted that the license-to-lie rule “falls short” of the Obama “commitment” to transparency. (Actually, it’s the perfect embodiment of the administration’s contempt.) The same DOJ, it should be noted, banned reporters from a FOIA training workshop in 2009.

In October, the Interior Department and Energy Department spurned attempts to gain information about the administration’s $1.2 billion loan guarantee to Democrat-connected solar company SunPower. The deal, championed by powerful Democratic Rep. George Miller III, was approved hours before the program expired on Sept. 30. Miller took Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on a tour of the SunPower plant last year; Miller’s son is a lobbyist for SunPower. Conservative newspaper Human Events and the nonprofit legal watchdog group Judicial Watch have now filed several pending FOIA requests.

In September, State Department officials refused to go on record during a briefing on its new global government transparency program. Earlier this spring, a ceremony to honor Obama’s commitment to openness was closed to the media — after which dutiful (sup)press secretary Jay Carney boasted that his boss “has demonstrated a commitment to transparency and openness that is greater than any administration has shown in the past.”

As evidence of this historic openness, Obama flacks point to farces like last week’s Thanksgiving-timed release of White House visitor logs — which even left-wing good government activists have criticized for their incompleteness. As the Center for Public Integrity reported earlier this year, the logs (which disclosure advocates forced into the public eye after suing) “routinely omit or cloud key details about the identity of visitors, whom they met with and the nature of their visits. The logs even include the names of people who never showed up. These are critical gaps that raise doubts about the records’ historical accuracy and utility in helping the public understand White House operations, from social events to meetings on key policy debates.”

Occasional holiday document dumps have always been a mainstay in Washington. But the agents of Hope and Change have turned the ritual into a weekly punch line. If it’s Friday, it’s dump day. The plan worked. As of Tuesday, no mainstream news outlet had reported on the contents of the Black Friday document trove.

None showed interest in the nearly 60 visits from Robert B. Creamer, a convicted felon and tax cheat, left-wing Huffington Post agitator, husband of Illinois Democratic Rep. Jan Schakowsky and vocal champion of the Occupy Wall Street movement. According to the newly released records I reviewed, Creamer was at the White House five times in August 2011 meeting with various officials, including Jon Carson, Cecilia Munoz and Stephanie Cutter.

Nor has there been interest outside conservative blogs in the five White House visits by former Deputy Attorney General Gary Grindler, a key Fast and Furious scandal bureaucrat, in July and August 2011, or in the five visits from former Solyndra CEO Brian Harrison, including on Aug. 18, 2011, just before the tax-subsidized firm declared bankruptcy.

Nor did any journalism ethics mavens show any curiosity whatsoever about the Aug. 5, 2011, appearance of MSNBC host Rachel Maddow and her party of seven (names not identified) to visit “POTUS.” Maddow made no mention of the visit on her August 5 show, which promoted the latest batch of White House stimulus proposals. According to the White House logs I reviewed, this was Maddow’s fifth trip to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — and the fourth to see the president personally.

Instead, as Newsbusters noted, a Washington Post political blogger was busy trolling Twitter for help digging up “outlandish/incorrect predictions from Newt Gingrich’s past.” And the only documents The New York Times is interested in crowd-sourcing are Sarah Palin’s e-mails.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

You can’t spell “accountability” without “A,” “C” and “T.” But in Washington, government officials routinely get away with “taking personal responsibility” by mouthing empty words devoid of action. Heads nod in collective agreement that mistakes were made. But heads never roll. The Obama administration has raised this accountability charade to an art form.

At a House Energy Committee hearing on the half-billion-dollar bankrupt Solyndra loan-guarantee disaster, Energy Secretary Steven Chu made a grand pretense of falling on his sword. The neon-green solar energy zealot told lawmakers in prepared testimony that the “final decisions on Solyndra were mine, and I made them with the best interest of the taxpayer in mind.” But again and again, Chu admitted, those decisions were made with serial cluelessness about the political jockeying, dire financial warnings, legal red flags and conflicts of interest that “everybody (else) and their dog” knew about (as GOP Rep. Joe Barton of Texas politely pointed out).

While former Democratic chief inquisitor Henry Waxman praised Chu’s “reputation for integrity” as “unimpeachable,” Chu came across as more Mr. Magoo than Mr. Clean.

Chu said he was “unaware” of the Department of Energy’s own staff predictions two years ago that Solyndra would face a serious cash-flow crisis today.

Chu said he was “unaware” of administration pressure on Solyndra to suppress layoff announcements until after the November 2010 midterm elections. “I don’t know. I just learned about that,” he shirked.

In fact, he used the phrase “I am aware of it now” at least a half-dozen times. If there were a Nobel Prize for Unknowing, Chu would be two-time shoo-in. GOP House Energy Committee Chairman Cliff Stearns summed up:

“We talked about the August 2009 email predicting Solyndra would be out of cash in September 2011. You knew about that, but you didn’t seem to know about that.

The PricewaterhouseCoopers concerns about Solyndra, you didn’t seem real concerned or weren’t aware of it.

The White House emailing your chief of staff regarding their concerns with the PricewaterhouseCoopers report, you didn’t seem to know too much about your chief of staff’s awareness of that.

The request to hold off announcement of the DOE loan, and request by your agency to Solyndra to hold off on announcing layoffs till after the midterm election, you don’t have any recollection of this. So what I am saying is that through all of this you seem to have an unawareness.”

In short, Chu took full responsibility for everything he wasn’t aware of … until it was too late.

Sound familiar? It was the leitmotif played in last week’s Fast and Furious hearings with Attorney General Eric Holder.

Despite a raft of briefing memos with his name on them, Holder claimed he never received or read them. Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse ran interference, sanctimoniously explaining for all the non-career government attorneys in the audience — including the family of murdered Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry — that nooooooo one in the top echelons of the federal lawyers’ bureaucracy actually reads memos addressed to them. It’s merely a “convention” for junior staff to feel better and more important about themselves.

Taking his boss’s lead, former Holder Chief of Staff Kevin Ohlson — who is seeking a federal judicial slot — explained away his failure to do anything about the festering Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal. He had “been informed that routine courtesy copies of weekly reports were forwarded to me that referred to the operation by name, but that did not provide any operational details and did not refer to gun walking or anything similar.”

Although his name was on the documents, Ohlson just didn’t bother to read them because they weren’t marked important or sensitive. Imagine an ordinary small businessman or taxpayer trying that one out on the IRS.

Situational unawareness in the private marketplace or on the battlefield will cost you your livelihood or your life. In the Age of Obama, however, such willful ignorance is a job prerequisite. The less you know the better.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Senator Patty Murray (D-WA)

The bipartisan debt panel to nowhere is exactly where K Street lobbyists want it to be: hopelessly deadlocked. A November 23 deadline for agreement on $1.2 trillion in budget savings is looming, but no real reductions in the size, scope or spending of government are on the table. Instead, we are witnessing another obscene special-interest splurge to preserve the status quo. All in the name of “reform,” of course.

The only thing “super” about the so-called budget control super committee is the size of lobbying muscle exerted on its members. Almost 100 registered lobbyists who are former employees of super committee members are now “representing defense companies, health-care conglomerates, Wall Street banks and others with a vested interest in the outcome of the panel’s work,” the Washington Post found in September. This includes two dozen former staffers to Democratic Sen. Max Baucus of Montana, including three former chiefs of staff.

On the other side of the revolving door, 10 out of the panel’s 12 members have now raked in donations from foreign registered agents totaling more than $50,000 in direct campaign contributions during 2011 alone, according to government watchdogs. The additional amount raised through fundraisers held by these lobbying firms is unknown, according to the Project on Government Oversight. Moreover, all 12 super committee members have been contacted by foreign lobbyists, eager to secure targeted exemptions, loopholes and protectionism.

Super committee co-chair Patty Murray, who refused to step down from her fundraising duties as head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, recently met with South Korean lobbyists employed by D.C. powerhouse firm Patton Boggs. Roll Call reported that while the panel’s negotiations wouldn’t have direct bearing on free-trade deals, Murray “could have access to information about how the timing of the debt deliberations could affect passage of the free-trade agreements.”

Patty “Pork Chop” Murray’s in-your-face embrace of influence peddlers has her populist Pacific Northwest constituents cringing. Mind you: Murray’s office boasts no fewer than 17 revolving-door staffers turned lobbyists. That’s on top of her DSCC fundraising conflicts of interest.

This week, the Seattle Times disclosed that Murray held a two-day staff retreat at heavyweight lobbying outfit Strategies 360, which was founded by Democratic political operative Ron Dotzauer. The group donated meeting space to Murray’s team and skirted ethics rules by offering similar deals to nonprofits. Murray’s former deputy state director, Karen Waters, is now a senior vice president at the firm. Another of its lobbyists, Melanie Mihara, used to work for Murray’s Democratic colleague Sen. Maria Cantwell. According to OpenSecrets.org, Strategies 360 has conducted $985,000 worth of lobbying targeting more than a dozen government agencies this year.

A spokesman for the senator (who made her name attacking the Beltway insider culture) sniffed that the report was a “non-story.” Given Murray’s status as the second highest recipient of lobbying money among all members of Congress behind Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, her staff is right:

This little perk is chump change compared to her career haul.

Lobbying, of course, is perfectly legal. It’s Murray’s pretense as a white hat public-interest crusader that should gall both sides of the aisle. One left-wing Seattle blogger rather generously called Murray “tone-deaf” and spelled out the rank hypocrisy of Murray’s entrenched and unrepentant lobbying ties: “This while members of her own party are up in arms over the increasing influence of money in American politics. This while a giant hunk of the liberal electorate is “Occupying” the streets to protest corporate greed and disproportional representation. This while the very term “lobbyist” has come to represent all that is bad about special interest influence.”

Yep, all that and a bag of back-scratching chips.

Murray’s backroom meetings come as business as usual as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi grandstands over the need for more “transparency” in the super committee dealings. After ramming through Obamacare in secret (with the help of top staffer Brendan Daly, who is now a lobbyist for groups opposed to the law he helped pass), Pelosi has now called for televised debt panel hearings. On publicly broadcasting the debt panel members’ meetings with lobbyists, Pelosi will no doubt remain mum. Remember:

The “K” in “K Street” stands for “Kabuki.”

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

The next stage of the Aimless Occupation of America is upon us: On Wednesday, rabble-rousers in the San Francisco Bay Area will walk off jobs they don’t have and encourage everyone else around the country to abandon work to protest high unemployment.

The Occupiers are calling their organized day of inaction a “Mass Day of Action.” The Carpenters Local 713, the Service Employees International Union, the United Auto Workers and the Industrial Workers of the World have all endorsed the “general strike.” Longshore workers and their union agitators are rooting for the shutdown of the Port of Oakland. Teachers unions will push students and educators to play hooky. Their posters urge: “No Work. No School. Occupy Everywhere.”

A city suffering from chronic poverty, out-of-control crime, a $76 million budget deficit and a 15 percent unemployment rate (nearly 50 percent for Oakland’s youth) can hardly afford such social justice follies. But a pushover Democratic mayor and an overwhelmed police force have left what’s left of gainfully employed Oakland taxpayers at the mercy of professional freeloaders and anti-capitalism saboteurs.

Instead of unequivocally condemning efforts to paralyze downtown commerce, Oakland city officials have all expressed sympathy for the protesters. For a brief moment, the city council president fretted meekly about the city’s image after a violent clash between Camp Chaos inhabitants and law enforcement officers last week. Nevertheless, city leaders — or rather, city enablers — have informed public employees that they can use vacation or other paid time to ditch their offices and raise their fists in solidarity with the Occupiers.

Instead of targeting local bank branch managers and private-sector entrepreneurs, the protesters should be camping out at government offices and asking where all the tens of millions of dollars in federal Obama stimulus funding went over the past two years — including $40 million from the Department of Health and Human Services, nearly $30 million from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, $26 million from the Department of Justice, $24 million from the Transportation Department, $15 million from the Department of Education, and $5.3 million from the Environmental Protection Agency.

One local analysis found last year that the Oakland Housing Authority squandered nearly $11 million in federal project renovation and clean-up stimulus grants to create a measly 10.7 jobs.

It would all be an amusing object lesson on the impotence of the welfare state, if not for the looming shadow of violence that hangs like stubborn Bay Area fog over the movement. In 2003, a like-minded mob of police-provoking anarchists, anti-war organizers and progressive activists descended on the Port of Oakland to coordinate a “Day of Action.” They hurled concrete, wood and iron bolts at cops while attempting to block military shipments to soldiers in wartime — and then whined about police brutality.

Fast-forward eight years. This week’s “Day of Action” is spearheaded by the likes of Oakland rapper Boots Riley, a militant, self-declared “communist” who penned “5 Million Ways To Kill a CEO” (“Toss a dollar in the river and when he jump in/If you find he can swim, put lead boots on him and do it again”) and “Lazy Muthaf**kas” (“You ain’t never learned to drive or tie your shoe/I got my ear to the street and my eye on you/… You’re a lazy **********! Lazy **********!). After the 9/11 attacks, I reported on Riley’s appalling album cover depicting him partying in front of a doctored image of the World Trade Center being blown up.

Like fellow Occupier, 9/11 conspiracy theorist and Oakland community organizer Van Jones, Riley has long stoked anti-police grievances. In “Pork and Beef,” he rapped: “If you got beef with c-o-ps/Throw a Molotov at the p-i-gs.”

Add to this toxic mix the thugs of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union. The planned march on Oakland’s port is being billed as an expression of “solidarity with longshore workers in their struggle” against grain importer EGT. In Longview, Wash., wildcat union workers cut train brake lines, smashed windows, dumped grain and took hostages earlier this fall to protest the company’s decision to employ not non-union workers, but workers from a competing shop. A federal judge fined the ILWU $250,000 after it defied a court restraining order. Even Obama’s National Labor Relations Board was forced to issue a complaint against the union’s “violent and aggressive” actions.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

If a private health insurer had engaged in the kind of criminal obstruction that Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been tied to in her home state of Kansas, it would be a federal case. Instead, it’s a non-story in the Washington press. Nothing to see here. Move along.

On Monday, a district judge in the Sunflower State suspended court proceedings in a high-profile criminal case against the abortion racketeers of Planned Parenthood. World Magazine, a Christian news publication, reported on new bombshell court filings showing that Kansas health officials “shredded documents related to felony charges the abortion giant faces.” World Magazine reported: “The health department failed to disclose that fact for six years, until it was forced to do so in the current felony case over whether it manufactured client records.”

The records are at the heart of the fraud case against Planned Parenthood. Kansas health bureaucrats now shrug that the destruction of these key documents — which they sheepishly admitted had “certain idiosyncrasies” — was “routine.” Who oversaw the agency accused of destroying the evidence six years ago? Sebelius.

As governor of Kansas, Sebelius fought transparency motions in the proceedings tooth and nail for years. Prosecutors allege a long-running heinous cover-up to manufacture false records of patients who had late-term abortions — and to whitewash Planned Parenthood’s systemic failures to report child rape.

Former GOP state Attorney General Phill Kline’s investigation turned up massive discrepancies in reported child rape statistics compared to Planned Parenthood and the late late-term abortionist George Tiller’s bogus claims. Planned Parenthood of Overland Park and Tiller together performed abortions on 166 girls aged 14 and under and only reported one each to authorities. So, 164 cases of underage rape or statutory rape went unreported and were not investigated by authorities.

Where is Joe Biden to decry actual rape atrocities and Nancy Pelosi to decry dire hazards to women’s health when we need them?

A Kansas district judge found probable cause of criminality in the abortion providers’ records; another district judge found probable cause to believe Planned Parenthood committed 107 criminal acts. Sebelius’ response? A bloody ideological soul mate of Tiller’s, she launched a vengeful witch-hunt against Kline. The state ethics board accused him of lying. The left-wing state Supreme Court Sebelius appointed stymied Kline’s subpoenas and appeals.

Kline was cleared of all ethics violations. In fact, for 20 full months, the state’s disciplinary board for lawyers suppressed an internal investigative report concluding there was zero probable cause to justify the ethics complaints.

Where there’s obstructionist smoke, there’s corruption fire. Under Sebelius’ watch as governor, an inspector general also reported that her appointed health policy board had “applied pressure to alter an audit report, restricted access to legal advice and threatened to fire her for meeting independently with legislators,” according to the Topeka Capital-Journal.

Entirely fitting, of course. The war on whistleblowers and inspectors general has been a hallmark of the current White House. And the radically pro-abortion rights Sebelius has ruled ruthlessly from her Beltway perch: policing citizen critics of Obamacare through a taxpayer-funded Internet snitch brigade; threatening private companies and insurers who have increased rates to cope with Obamacare coverage mandates; lashing out at newspapers who dare report on the costly consequences of the federal law.

As she bullies private companies to meet discriminatory and arbitrary disclosure demands, Sebelius has yet to be held accountable for overseeing state government agencies that conspired to hide the deadly truth about the Big Government/Big Abortion alliance from taxpayers. Like her boss in Washington, Sebelius’ political playbook has a single page: Destroy the messenger.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

The trash generated by the “Occupy Wall Street” protests keeps piling up. So do the bills. Liberal media outlets claim the anarchic, anti-capitalist movement is more popular than the tea party. But wait until Americans across the country get a full picture of the costs of the aimless occupiers.

In New York City, government officials estimate the month-long siege of Zuccotti Park has now imposed $3.2 million in overtime police costs on the public. On Thursday, as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office pressured left-wing activists to vacate the park for cleaning, Occupy Wall Street urged sympathizers to flood the city’s customer services lines: “Call 311 and tell Bloomberg not to evict us!”

In Philadelphia, Mayor Michael Nutter told the press that demonstrators outside city hall have incurred $164,000 in overtime public employee costs and $237,000 in regular time. “At the current rate, if Occupy Philly continues to the end of the month, the city would spend another nearly $690,000 on police overtime alone,” the local NBC affiliate reported. “Besides the extra police presence being dedicated to the Occupy Philly protests, other city departments have also incurred costs.”

In Seattle, police have so far billed $30,000 in overtime, and the parks department racked up nearly $4,000 in additional costs related to the protests there. Occupiers have blocked traffic, assaulted an officer and pitched illegal tents. Merchants in the area have been hurt as the riff-raff deter customers. One business owner in Westlake Park, where hundreds of protesters remain camped out, told Seattle TV station KIRO: “There’s definitely fewer people you can identify as people out, just walking through the area.”

Seattle’s pushover mayor, Democrat Mike McGinn, now faces even greater demands from the insatiable mob — which wants a “guaranteed parking space near City Hall Plaza that allows for around-the-clock parking,” “24-hour access to the first floor of City Hall for restroom access, and a written statement from the mayor approving the protesters’ long-term occupancy of City Hall Plaza.”

In Boston, City Council President Stephen Murphy anticipates a $2 million hit to taxpayers if the protests refuse to disband by the end of October. The local Fox affiliate notes the tab represents 8 percent of the yearly budget for police overtime. “While we’re all sympathetic with our protesters down there,” Murphy said, “Wall Street isn’t picking up the tab on this thing. It’s the Boston taxpayers.”

When fiscally conservative tea party activists held protests over the past two years, they filed for all the required permits and paid for their own power. Occupy Boston, by contrast, neither sought nor obtained any proper permits at any level, according to the Boston Globe. Instead, city and park officials have been cowed into providing them gratis electricity and camp space lest there be “conflict.”

Many of these occupiers are primarily occupied as paid rent-a-mobsters for unions, left-wing think tanks and the radical Working Families Party. While one collective hand soaks the taxpayers, the other hand is busy soliciting free stuff. Occupy Los Angeles activists took to Skype on their laptops to solicit donations of iPhones and iPads.

Occupy Wall Street members on Twitter organized an ongoing “#needsoftheoccupiers” drive for everything from batteries and tarps to “gently used” coats and sweaters, wool socks, sleeping bags and energy bars. Occupy Austin organizers publicized their wish list, including a free barbecue grill, portable toilets, extension cords, a Bobcat forestry cutter for clearing brush and network cameras for a livestream.

These are not principled advocates of fiscal responsibility. They are professional freeloaders.

Unlike tea party activists who focused like a laser beam on politicians in both parties responsible for redistributing wealth to Big Business cronies by force, the Occupy Wall Street movement is everywhere and nowhere. The entitled Kamp Alinsky Kids are poaching WiFi and trespassing on private property under the guise of “social justice” but in plain service of themselves.

Their T-shirts and speeches glorify Marxist radicals Che Guevara, Emiliano Zapata and Chairman Mao. They lionize convicted death row cop killer Troy Davis and WikiLeaks collaborator Bradley Manning. They condemn “Nazi Bankers,” Jews, Fox News, the American Legislative Exchange Council, Wisconsin GOP Gov. Scott Walker, the Koch family and the New York Police Department (“Pigs!”). They promote the illegal alien DREAM Act and 9/11 Trutherism.

They spout bumper-sticker profanities and inanities: “F**k banks.” “Unf**k the world.” “F******k.” “Free education.” “Smash nationalism.” “People not profits.”

They flash peace signs while celebrity supporter Roseanne Barr calls for beheading financial industry workers and fellow marchers call explicitly for “violent revolution” or for Obama to “Send SEAL Team 6″ to Wall Street.

Then they huff and puff (preferably in a creepy uniform chant they call the “human microphone”) that we just haven’t taken the time to understand what they’re all about — as they hawk $20 “Eat the Rich” polo shirts and license their protest photos to Getty Images.

Viva la revolucion! Up with people! Stop the greed! (Ka-ching. Ka-ching.)

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

Here is your high-resolution teachable moment of the week: anti-capitalist, anti-corporate extremists of “Occupy Wall Street” mourning Apple Inc. founder Steve Jobs without a trace of irony.

While the Kamp Alinsky Kids ditch school to moan about their massive student debt, parade around in zombie costumes and whine about evil corporations over poached Wi-Fi connections, it’s the doers and producers and wealth creators like Jobs who change the world. They are the gifted 1 percent whom the “99 percenters” mob seeks to demonize, marginalize and tax out of existence.

Inherent in the American success story of the iMac/iPhone/iPad is a powerful lesson about the fundamentals of capitalism. The “Occupiers” chant “people over profit.” They call for “caring” over “corporations.”

But the pursuit of profits empowers people beyond the bounds of imagination.

I blog on an iMac. When I travel, I bring my MacBook Pro. I Tweet news links from my iPhone. My kids are learning Photoshop and GarageBand on our Macs; they use metronome, dictation, video and camera apps daily. I use the technology for business, pleasure, social networking, raising awareness of the missing, finding recipes and even tuning a ukulele.

None of the countless people involved in conceiving these products and bringing them to market “care” about me. They pursued their own self-interests. Through the spontaneous order of capitalism, they enriched themselves — and the world.

One of my favorite economics essays from which I’ve drawn bottomless inspiration is Leonard Read’s “I, Pencil.” He turned a mundane writing instrument into an elementary study of free-market capitalism. What goes for the pencil goes for any of the products Jobs introduced.

“I have a profound lesson to teach,” Read wrote in the voice of a metaphorical lead pencil. “I can teach this lesson better than can an automobile or an airplane or a mechanical dishwasher because — well, because I am seemingly so simple. Simple? Yet, not a single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me.”

Read traces the family tree of the pencil from the Oregon loggers who harvest its cedar wood, to the California millworkers who cut the wood into thin slats, to Mississippi refinery workers, to the Dutch East Indies farmers who produce an oil used to make erasers. All of these people, and many more at the periphery of the process, have special knowledge about their life’s work in their separate corners of the earth. But none by himself has the singular knowledge or ability to give birth to a pencil. Few will ever come in contact with the others who make the production of that pencil possible.

It’s not because they “care about each other” that they cooperate to deliver any one good. It’s the result of self-interest, multiplied millions of times over.

Read illuminates: “There is a fact still more astounding: The absence of a master mind, of anyone dictating or forcibly directing these countless actions which bring me into being. No trace of such a person can be found. Instead, we find the Invisible Hand at work.” This spontaneous “configuration of human energies” is repeated endlessly in our daily lives. Think of the countless and diverse people involved in producing a Slinky, jump rope or baseball, a diaper, refrigerator or Boeing 747.

And, of course, an iMac, iPhone or iPad.

Appreciating this voluntary configuration of human energies, Read argued, is key to possessing “an absolutely essential ingredient for freedom: a faith in free people. Freedom is impossible without this faith.” Indeed. Without that faith, we are susceptible to the force of class-warfare mobs and the arrogance of command-and-control bureaucrats in Washington who believe the role of private American entrepreneurs, producers and wealth generators is to “grow the economy” and who “think at some point you have made enough money.”

The progressives who want to bring down “Wall Street” will snipe that Jobs was one of “theirs,” not “ours.”

He belonged to no one. He was transcendently committed to excellence and beauty and innovation. And yes, he made gobs of money pursuing it all while benefiting hundreds of millions of people around the world whom he never met, but who shed a deep river of tears upon learning of his death this week.

From “I, Pencil” to iPhone, such is the profound, everlasting miracle of iCapitalism — a triumph of individualism over collectivism, freedom over force and markets over master planning. To borrow an old Apple slogan: It just works.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

The Washington Post’s stoning of Texas GOP Gov. Rick Perry is journalistic malpractice. Instead of calling the newspaper to task, other national media outlets have joined in. And now, the Post is doubling down on slander.

The Post dispatched reporters to the remote hunting grounds of a Perry-linked ranch — “associated” with Perry through “his father, partners or his signature on a lease” — because it once had a rock on it somewhere that had the word “Niggerhead” painted on it. The term is an embarrassing vestige of past racism not just in Texas but on geographical landmarks across the country.

The Washington Post interviewed dozens of people about the remnant, which Perry says his family painted over and turned over years ago. The New York Times piled on Perry with its own crack investigation of hazy memories of bygone days. They unearthed one Perry hunting pal who never saw the sinful stone, but “could not be sure it was the same parcel that was the subject of the Post article.” Another friend, Fred McClure, who is black, also could not recall ever seeing the rock and emphatically added that the paper’s stone-cold insinuation that Perry is a bigot “is not only untrue but also extremely unfair.”

But the actual testimony of black Texans counts for nothing at the newspaper that infamously “Macaca’ed” former Virginia GOP Gov. George Allen after he clumsily traded barbs with a young liberal operative of Indian descent during his failed Senate bid. Recycling the tried-and-true “GOP equals racist” narrative, the Post composters published a second Stone-gate piece on Tuesday claiming that unidentified “minority legislators” had a problem with Perry’s “complicated record on matters of race.”

Perry appointed the first black Texas Supreme Court justice, hired several top minority aides and “enjoys warm associations with many black leaders,” according to the Post. So what’s “complicated”? Unidentified minorities don’t like his “embrace of the tea party movement” (which currently favors black GOP candidate Herman Cain, but never mind that). They, whoever “they” are, also seem to be upset that he featured race-hustler Jesse Jackson (you know, the demagogue who called New York City “Hymietown”) in an old campaign ad.

You don’t have to be a Perry supporter (and I am most certainly not) to spot the Post’s boulder-sized double standards. These rubble-rakers vetted the origins and whereabouts of a painted-over inanimate object with far more investigative zeal than they did with any of the actual living, fire-breathing race-baiters Barack Obama consorted with before and during his first presidential run.

Case in point: the continued whitewashing of Obama’s ties to the New Black Panther Party and its leader Malik Shabazz, a Jew-bashing, America-hating, 9/11 conspiracy theorist who inveighed: “If 3,000 people perished in the World Trade Center attacks and the Jewish population is 10 percent, you show me records of 300 Jewish people dying in the World Trade Center. … We’re daring anyone to dispute its truth. They got their people out.”

Former Justice Department attorney J. Christian Adams blows the lid off the Obama administration’s coddling of Shabazz and the NBPP’s voter intimidation thugs in his new book, “Injustice” — and uncovered photos of Obama and the race-hustlers appearing at a 2007 civil rights event in Selma, Ala. The Post’s response to Adams’ whistle-blowing over the past two years? Liberal columnist E.J. Dionne sneeringly dismissed the career civil servant as a “Republican activist.”

But, hey, let’s get back to squeezing blood from stones.

Has Perry himself actually used the racial epithet that was once painted on the rock — you know, like the late former KKK leader Robert Byrd did as recently as 2001 when he referred to “white niggers”?

Did Perry condescendingly refer to a black politician as “articulate and bright and clean” like Joe Biden did when he described Barack Obama in 2007?

Did Perry racially stereotype Hispanics for political gain or refer offensively to President Obama’s “light skin” and “lack of a Negro dialect” like Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid did just last year?

What does it all say about Rick Perry? Nothing. Nada. Zip.

While the Post cites unnamed minority pols decrying Perry’s right-wing “racially tinged rhetoric,” this is the guy who has indulged in (SET ITAL) left-wing (END ITAL) impulses and disparaged his own base as racist in two separate GOP debates. First, he shamelessly suggested that opponents of in-state tuition discounts for illegal aliens were xenophobes who didn’t like the sound of foreign last names. Then, he told them they were haters who lacked compassion: “I don’t think you have a heart.”

That sounds a lot like the very suggestion the Macaca Media is leveling against him.

It stinks to be falsely accused of racism. Maybe Perry, now under siege by the ruthless race card-playing media, will remember that the next time he’s tempted to accuse conservatives who disagree with him of heartless bigotry.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/

Michelle Malkin

The Obama administration’s crony green subsidy scandal is erupting like a solar flare in Washington. But do you know what your kids are learning in their environmental education classes about this red-hot taxpayer eco-scam? Chances are: not much.

Instead, the U.S. Department of Energy and the Democratic apparatchiks at the National Education Association are disseminating solar power propaganda masquerading as math and science curricula.

Titled “Solar Power and Me: The Inherent Advantages,” the lesson plan for middle-school and high-school students directs them to “take note of how solar energy is incorporated into the infrastructure of various cities nationwide and write a short essay about how they would encourage solar energy use in their own town.”

A worksheet labeled “All About Solar!” makes the blanket assertion that solar technologies are “a sound economical choice as they can reduce or eliminate exposure to rising electricity rates, or even eliminate one’s need to pay an electrical bill! In addition, solar panels can be a smart long-term investment, with many solar vendors offering 20-30 year warranties on their products.”

The only warranties worth anything from bankrupt, half-billion-dollar solar company Solyndra Inc. are the warranties on the Disney whistling robots and saunas that adorned its Taj Mahal headquarters. But I digress.

Another worksheet cheerleads the “financial savings” of “solar power and me” and coaches students to “imagine you live in amazing and sunny Anaheim, CA, where the combination of local and federal rebates covers 74 percent of your total cost of a solar panel system!” The exercise then entices the student to take out a 20-year loan on a new solar panel system to produce even greater illusory savings.

Yet another question-and-answer key reads: “How would switching to solar energy affect energy use at your home and school?” Answer: “In general, switching to solar energy would lower your home’s electrical costs and reduce your emissions, thus saving money and improving the environment.”

But as Brian McGraw of the free-market Competitive Enterprise Institute points out: “There might be a small niche market, but solar energy is still largely incapable of producing reliable electricity at rates that are even in the ballpark of cost competitiveness compared to coal or natural gas.” Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the force behind billions of dollars’ worth of rushed green energy loans overseen by deep-pocketed Obama bundlers, himself acknowledged that solar tech will need to improve five-fold before it even begins to have a cost-competitive shot.

After examining decades’ worth of failed subsidized solar efforts at home and around the world, the Institute for Energy Research concludes: “Although stand-alone solar power has a certain free-market niche and does not need government favor, using solar power for grid electricity has been and will be an economic loser for ratepayers and a burden to taxpayers.”

The DOE/NEA curriculum encourages students to pressure politicians to pour more money into supposedly underfunded green energy schemes. But the House Budget Committee reported last week: “The president’s stimulus law alone included tens of billions in new government subsidies for politically favored renewable-energy interests: $6 billion in loan guarantees for renewable energy investments; $17 billion for the Department of Energy’s energy efficiency and renewable energy programs; $2 billion for energy-efficient battery manufacturing; and billions more on other ‘clean-energy’ programs for a total of $80 billion. Two years later, the president’s promise of millions of jobs stands in stark contrast with reality.”

A more useful homework assignment would be to have these future taxpayers calculate how much their moms and dads are spending to prop up Obama’s green jobs industry and its elite Democratic campaign finance donors/investors. The White House projected 65,000 new jobs from nearly $40 billion in green job stimulus spending. Instead, fewer than 3,600 jobs were created. Get out your calculators, kids: That’s $4.85 million per job. Investor’s Business Daily crunches the numbers further on the taxpayers’ return on its DOE green loan guarantee “investments” and finds that the program will cost a whopping $23 million per job.

A separate NEA solar energy lesson plan marketed with Dow Corning teaches 5th- through 8th-graders “how solar panels work.” A more apt, real-world lesson would teach them how they don’t work. The myth that this alternative energy source “pays for itself” is busted with just a cursory glance at the Denver Museum of Science and Nature.

President Obama staged a photo-op on the facility’s solar panel roof in 2009 when he signed the green jobs goodie-stuffed stimulus law. The museum refused to disclose electric bills before and after installation of the solar array. But after digging into the lavishly taxpayer-funded project, the Colorado-based Independence Institute discovered that the panels — which only last 25 years — wouldn’t “pay for themselves” until the year 2118, more than a century from now.

It’s elementary. The government shouldn’t be in the business of picking any eco-winners or losers. “Too Green To Fail” redistributes wealth from viable private projects to pipe dreams, forces higher taxes and energy costs on everyone, and rewards partisan funders at public expense. Teach your children well. They’re inheriting the bill.

FamilySecurityMatters.org Contributing Editor Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies (Regnery 2009).

Read more excellent articles from Family Security Matters . http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/