Obama’s Labor Department Blasted in Public Comments Over Dangerous ‘Persuader’ Proposal

by LaborUnionReport 

Last week, the public comment period closed on the Obama Labor Department’s proposed regulatory change to alter a 1959 law that would make employers and their service providers (attorneys and various consultants) file financial disclosure statements and make personal information public, all in order to give union bosses hit lists of individuals and companies to target. Prior to the closing of the public comment period, there were nearly 6,000 comments—4,000 of which came within the last ten days or so as more people became aware of  the union-backed proposed rule.

So far, it has been remarkable that
almost no attention has been given to this issue on Capitol Hill. However, it may be that very few have actually understood the DOL proposal’s unprecedented overreach and broad ramifications until these last few weeks. Yet, since so many of the law firms who donate to high-ranking Democrats (as well as to Republicans) will likely be deemed ‘persuaders’ and be required to report their incomes under the DOL’s proposal, there may yet be some interest raised in Congress over the issue.


Nevertheless, in addition to many of the comments from individuals urging the union appointees within the Department of Labor to drop this unbelievably broad proposal, several larger groups expressed their harsh criticism through their comments.

Among those comments, Over 1500 came from persons affiliated with the Society of Human Resource Management. Outside of attorneys, with 250,000 human resource professionals, SHRM members are probably the single largest grouping of individual service providers who will be affected by the DOL’s proposed change.

What follows below are some excerpts [with emphasis added] of a few of the comments received by the Department of Labor:

In its 31-page comment to the Department of Labor (which also goes into the legislative history of the 1959 law), SHRM was pointedly criticized the DOL proposal, stating:

SHRM disputes the so-called contemporary research as not so contemporary; in some cases it is marred by obvious bias as well as flaws in methodology. In all cases it fails to mention, let alone consider, the actions of organized labor as a root cause of employer response. Even if there is some validity to this “research” (which seems to not be the case), it fails to take into account organized labor’s actions. Organized labor hardly has been quiescent these last decades. Employers have been subjected to the “corporate campaign” tactics, where unions undertake whatever means necessary, lawful and unlawful, to inflict enough damage to the target employer’s business so that it will accept the union without a government supervised secret ballot election. [p.3]

[snip]

The research cited by the Division in support of the proposed change contains flaws which support the need for independent inquiry into the current labor relations climate. For example, No Holds Barred: The Intensification of Employer Opposition to Organizing (“No Holds Barred”) is quoted extensively in the NPRM in support of the need for increased reporting. This document on its face raises serious questions as to its usefulness:

• The study itself states that it gathered information only from talking to lead union organizers, not from the employees and not from employers…. [p.15]

In addition to calling into question the Department of Labor’s unquestionably union-biased “research,” SHRM also called out the effects of the DOL’s proposal on businesses, large and small.

SHRM is concerned that the Division’s proposed interpretation will encompass activities far removed from any actual or even potential organizing. SHRM as an organization is devoted to assisting its membership in developing initiatives to improve employee retention, morale and productivity. These initiatives can, among other things, include employee surveys, policy changes, and training. Sometimes an object or a part of an object of these types of initiatives is to prevent union organizing even when there is no union activity. Improving morale of employees in particular has the side effect of reducing the possibility an employee will go outside of his or her employer to seek assistance. [p. 27]

You can view SHRM’s entire 31-page public comment here.

Though it took no position on non-attorneys’ potential reporting requirements, the American Bar Association weighed in with its “serious concerns” about the potential loss of attorney-client privilege.

According to one attorney quoted by Labor Relations Today:

The ABA’s position here is important because on many labor & employment matters, it abstains because there is typically not a consensus between management-side and employee-side attorneys. This issue, however, touches all attorneys and is necessary, in the ABA’s words , to defend “the confidential client-lawyer relationship” and would impose an “unjustified and intrusive burden on lawyers and law firms and their clients”.

The rule is still in its proposed stage, but the ABA’s input here could be quite important for another reason as well. The ABA’s involvement in the “red flag” rules was crucial to getting that rule overturned. Time will tell if the ABA’s involvement here will have a similar impact.

[Given that even the law firm of the legal team for the Democratic National Committee would also be impacted by the Department of Labor's proposal (as would large Democrat-leaning law firm Akin Gump, Nancy Pelosi's second largest contributor), the ABA's involvement may what ultimately gets the union appointees in the Department of Labor to see the unintended consequences of their overreach.]

In a strongly-worded rebuke of the DOL’s proposal, the Coalition for a Democratic Workplace stated in its 29-page comment:

The Labor Department’s proposed rules are anti-employer, especially anti-small business, and, perhaps most significantly, anti-employee. Indeed, the proposal, when taken in concert with the NLRB’s proposed “ambush” election procedures, amounts to a radical attempt by the Executive Branch to shift the balance of private sector labor relations, in defiance of the neutral policies established by Congress over many decades.

The Department’s proposal is contrary to the plain language and congressional purpose of the LMRDA, conflicts with the National Labor Relations Act (“NLRA”), and is unconstitutionally vague. Moreover, the Department has failed to provide reasoned justification for its sweeping changes, which depart from more than 50 years of uninterrupted precedent both within the Department and in the courts. The proposed rules will interfere impermissibly with the attorney-client relationship, will interfere with the right of trade associations to communicate with their employer members, and will interfere with the ability of employers to obtain much needed advice from their peers, their lawyers and experienced labor relations consultants.

Furthermore, the proposed rules do not comply with the requirements of the regulatory rulemaking process. Indeed, the proposed changes go beyond the legitimate scope of administrative rulemaking, and are so significant and substantive that only Congress could properly enact them. Coming on the heels of the failure of unions to obtain passage of the Employee Free Choice Act (“EFCA”), this proposed “no advice” regulation, combined with the NLRB’s nearly simultaneous proposal for “ambush” Representation-Case rules, is but a thinly veiled attempt to circumvent Congress and implement “back door” EFCA. [p. 3]

[snip]

Indeed, the proposed rules are designed to ensure that employers—especially small business employers—are effectively denied critical legal counsel and entirely legitimate management training by associations and other consultants. [p. 3]

The US Chamber of Commerce also weighed in on the biasness of the DOL’s proposal in its 25-page comment, stating:

As part of its campaign for radical amendments to American labor law, organized labor and its allies have fabricated a narrative that portrays the long decline in private sector union density in the United States as the result of flawed National Labor Relations Board (NLRB or Board) processes and employer campaigns. According to this narrative, employers have become increasingly aggressive in campaigning against unions and routinely employ coercive, illegal, and otherwise deplorable tactics in order to defeat union attempts to organize. Organized labor attempts to buttresses this narrative with numerous studies or reports of dubious credibility. [p. 2]

[snip]

In addition, at a time when the Labor Department should be focusing on policies that will lead to economic growth and job creation, it is a travesty that instead the Department is investing resources in policy changes that will not create a single new job, but will instead create a further drag on job creation. Furthermore, we agree with President Obama’s recent statement that “We should have no more regulation than the health, safety, and security of the American people require.” Unfortunately, this proposal fails that test. [p. 3]

[snip]

Nor is the proposed rule limited to labor-management relations consultants. The proposed rule is so far-reaching in its scope and implications that an interior decorator who is engaged by an employer to recommend office furnishings, arrangements, lighting and paint colors to create a pleasant and productive work environment, could trigger the proposed reporting and disclosure requirements if the intent in the mind of either the employer or the service provider involves the purpose of persuading employees in any way (for or against) regarding the exercise of their rights to organize and to bargain collectively (e.g., the employer directs the decorator to make his shop a more pleasant workplace than the union shop down the street). [p. 4]

This last example is not out the realm of possibility, given how broadly the Department of Labor drafted the definition of what could constitute ‘persuader activity,’ and the Chamber explores other possible seemingly innocuous scenarios (like the attending of a seminar) that could suddenly become reportable to the Department of Labor.

While none of the comments reviewed addressed the physical danger that the DOL’s proposal could lead to if firms that provide security guards or replacement workers are required to disclose their personal information—which could include the individual guards and/or replacement workers—hopefully, enough pressure will be placed on the Department of Labor to reconsider this dangerous and unprecedented overreach.

Big Government

BREAKING: Gov. Sarah Palin Sends Letter to Crown/Random House, Warns Not to Destroy Documents Ahead of Potential Defamation Suit

Posted by P.J. Salvatore Sep 26th 2011 at 3:48 pm in Featured Story, Mainstream Media, Palin, Print Journalism, Sexism, Uncategorized, journalism

Attorneys representing former Alaska governor Sarah Palin have written to Crown Publishing, a division of Random House, serving notice of possible litigation for defamation in connection with Joe McGinniss’s recent anti-Palin biography, and warning the company not to delete or destroy relevant documents.
The letter reads, in part:

Enclosed is an e-mail by your author Joe McGinniss. In this e-mail, Mr. McGinniss admits that your own lawyers instructed him that “nothing I can cite other than my own reporting rises above the level of tawdry gossip.”….Indeed, Mr. McGinniss admits that the allegations are false unless he can find someone or something to show they are true. We know from the final book that he was unable to do so.

It is malicious for your company to publish a book wherein it, and the author, admit that they were fully aware the statements in the book were false, intended to be false, and were intended to harm…

Accordingly, since both your company, and the author, clearly knew the statements were false, admitted they had no basis in fact or reality, but decided to publish in order to harm Governor Palin’s family, you and Mr. McGinniss have defamed the Palins. This letter shall serve as written notice under AS.09.30.070 (b) that a claim may be brought against you, your company and Mr. McGinniss for knowingly publishing false statements.

In the interim, please take note of the following:  It is unlawful to delete emails or destroy records upon being notified of the need of business records for litigation purposes. In addition, courts may impose civil sanctions against a defendant that destroys emails and other documentation.

 Please immediately provide notice to your employees to save and back up all records pertaining to the Palins and the book “The Rogue.”…

Big Journalism

Watergate and Today: How the Voters Swing Back to Normal

September 25, 2011
By Roger D. Luchs

A quotation in the September 19, 1926 edition of the Chicago Tribune included the following observation on the electorate of the day:

No one in this world, so far as I know - and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me - has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.  Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

Its author was H.L. Mencken, a noted journalist.  Could it be that President Obama, another Chicagoan, took his inspiration from Mencken as well as Alinsky?  A bit of political history, starting with 1974, may provide an answer to this question.


In that year, voters sent the Republicans packing because they refused to confront Nixon early on about his obvious defalcations, choosing instead a strategy of defending the indefensible.  The Democrats saw this as a golden opportunity to cloak their passion for European-style social and economic policy inside a Trojan horse they called "clean" government.  A few Democratic candidates in 1974 and the years immediately thereafter were honest enough to unabashedly proclaim their true ideological colors, but within a few election cycles, they were yesterday's news.  Iowa presents a good case study on this point.


In 1974, H.R. Gross, a Republican gadfly who served in the House from 1949 to January 1975, decided to retire.  His claim to fame was that he voted "no" on virtually anything that involved spending taxpayer funds.  
He was safely ensconced in his long-held congressional seat until his retirement.  In fact, most of Iowa's congressional delegation in 1974 was Republican.  After that year's election, however, the party's ranks consisted of just one: Chuck Grassley.  For his part, Grassley stuck by Gross's stewardship of his constituents' tax dollars, and because of this, he has been reelected just last year to a sixth term.


On the other hand, Tom Harkin, one of the House's most liberal members, was also elected for the first time in 1974.  He was a product of Watergate, not some sudden embrace by the voters of his ideological bent.  Along with Harkin, other liberal Democrats succeeded to historically Republican seats, such that a traditionally conservative Midwestern  state was represented by individuals who expressed, at best, the ideological viewpoint of at most 20% of the state's electorate.


By 1980, however, times had changed.  The country had had its fill of Jimmy Carter and most of the other beneficiaries of the Watergate mess, and Iowa, like other states that had followed the same course in 1974, decided that some ersatz notion of cleanliness was a nonstarter.  The voters' change of heart, not surprisingly, was one of the key byproducts of Ronald Reagan's emergence as the Republican standard-bearer, and until 2006,  it remained the rule rather than the exception.  It was in 1980 that Grassley was first elected to the Senate, and he has continued to be elected by wide margins ever since.  Sincerity and a genuine concern for how Congress spends other peoples' money, it appears, have a perpetual attraction the Democrats have never been able to come to grips with or overcome.


Unlike Grassley, whose genes are hardwired with a strong dose of conservative DNA, Harkin has always been solidly in the "progressive" camp -- i.e., the camp that to this day tries to further centralize power in Washington in order to advance the "grand illusion" of a Western European "utopia."  But to survive, Harkin early on had to don the mask of a centrist fighting for the needs of his "plain" constituents.  From the outset, he has used this charade to hide his ultimate goal: to steer the country leftward with his liberal compatriots in Congress.


When Pelosi and Reid took charge of Congress in 2006, it never occurred to them to reassemble the party's Watergate-era Trojan horse.  They were imbued with the same arrogance as were their precursors in 1974, and Obama's election in 2008 blinded them to what would ultimately become payback time.  They ramped up what liberals do best -- i.e. spend other people's money without the least regard for the impact of their policies.  Had he been alive in November 2008, Mencken might have read Obama's election as confirmation of his disdain for the "plain people," yet had he hung around just a little bit longer, he might also have been befuddled, as the Democrats have been of late, by the "plain people" realizing that they were had in 2006 and 2008.


The 2010 election and the recent election in New York's 9^th Congressional District are signposts along the path to November 2012.  Come next year's elections, the remaining detritus of the Democrats' left-wing ideology will be on life support, awaiting some modern-day Diogenes to timidly tiptoe into the party's ICU and put it out of our misery. 


A singular curiosity remains, however, for which there is no ready answer.  Why in the world would so many Democrats who were never as far to the left as Pelosi, Reid, and Obama throw their lot and livelihoods in with this calamitous troika rather than stand up for their own constituents?  While, at heart, the terms "Democrat" and "unthinking liberal" may be synonymous, in years past the instinct for self-preservation trumped all.  Could it be that these hangers-on have all along been the clueless "plain people" Mencken took the hoi polloi to be?  After all, in November 2010, just as in November 1980, more than a few Democrats lost their seats because they grossly underestimated the intelligence of their constituents and the American people at large, choosing instead to follow the dictates of their party leadership. 


No matter the explanation for such political myopia, it is now indisputable that Obama has become his party's Captain Ahab, ready, willing, and able to sacrifice what little legitimacy the party has left to pursue his obsession with cutting America down to size.  For the rest of us, this is actually good news, because the ingrained duplicity that has been central to the Democrats' game plan since 1974 has at long last come home to roost...and laid a big fat goose egg on their upcoming  electoral prospects.


Democrats at large, urged on by their increasingly detached leadership, have displayed a cold indifference to, and disdain for, ordinary peoples' hopes and dreams.  They have never recovered from the 2000 election, when voters chose Bush over Gore.  This was, to them, incontrovertible proof that the citizenry is simply incapable of discerning what is in its own best interest.  The 2006 election deluded the party leadership and many of its rank and file into believing that voters had finally come to their senses and were at long last cognizant that the nation should be governed by a small band of leftist philosopher-kings.  In 2008, there were cheers that Obama had become the band's king of kings.  But of late, Democrats, to their horror, have come to realize that Obama is simply a false prophet behind whose mask lurks a Jimmy Carter redux on steroids.


The rest of us have known all along that, in the real world we are consigned to live in each day, Americans want to live their lives as best they can, provide for their families, and experience those blessings that naturally fall upon a free people with an elected government of limited reach.  If there is a lesson to be learned from the Democrats' implosion, it is that Americans of all stripes and from all walks of life will, despite an occasional deviation from the norm, sooner or later return to the government the Founding Fathers had in mind -- i.e. a government in chains, firmly secured by a tamper-proof lock to which only we, the people hold the key.

American Thinker

How the Dual Income Destroys the Lower Classes

September 25, 2011
By Jeremy Egerer

It is oftentimes complained, partially unfairly, that the American lower classes are getting poorer and poorer. 

 But enough has been written, by practically every conservative think-tank, about how the welfare state and anti-discrimination legislation destroy neighborhoods and promote the business interests of those with poor moral constitutions (leftists, primarily) by providing layabouts with an arsenal of unreasonable lawsuits.  This article, recognizing the above socioeconomic maxims, will seek instead to show how two-income households have played an equal, if not greater role in impoverishing American lower classes.  This aspect of American poverty has not been adequately addressed -- perhaps, considering how feminism pushes women into the workplace, because it is now culturally offensive to do so.


When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, he noted that although the wages of the lowest classes were oftentimes determined by the lowest their employers could pay, humankind's present population acknowledges that at large, even with an imbalance of wealth, employers could not sustainably pay their workers less than would maintain a family of four (Book I, chapter VIII).  If employers were to seek to pay less, then populations would shrink until competition over labor would force the wages of even the lowest classes higher.  And since the population of the world is now greater than in past years, especially considering that Western societies are generally monogamous in terms of marital structure, then the poorest working classes must have been able, even without minimum wage regulations, to afford families of five and greater.  If this was not the case, then wealthy families would have been primarily responsible for the present population -- a highly unlikely scenario, considering even Smith acknowledged that wealthier women were less inclined toward childbearing.


But there was a circumstance in which Smith noted that wages could fall below this natural floor.  Assuming that a household were to have a second source of income, the worker was likely to compete for employment at a lower price than his neighbors, bringing wages below standards of maintenance.  Today, that second income is provided either when welfare payments are received from the state or when two breadwinners exist in the same home.  And the natural result of either circumstance is that the once-sustainable wages of the single employment are compromised, and though two breadwinners now occupy one household, their wealth is not greatly augmented.


The U.S. Census Bureau confirms this hypothesis with its 2010 study on household income demographics. 
  The lowest classes, those most likely to be touted by left-wing organizations as oppressed, are the least likely to be dual-income families, while those in wealthier middle-class categories are a minimum of close to four times more likely to have dual incomes.  Compared with the bracket with the highest percentage of dual income households, the lowest quintile is somewhere around eleven times less likely to have a second income.  If this is the case, then poverty and the number of incomes are absolutely correlated.


The dual income, of course, has an equally disastrous effect upon housing affordability.  In past generations, a man could buy a small home with his own savings.  Today, not only has the housing market become radically inflated through government-sponsored usury, but since home prices are essentially monopoly prices, selling for the maximum amount the market will bear, having two breadwinners in a majority of homes can only make a landed lower class even less possible.  According to the same Census Bureau report above, the quintile most likely to have only one income (the poorest quintile) constitutes one third of all renters.


Americans do not often consider that such a trend toward dual full-time incomes -- and subsequently, toward the impracticability of properly raising a traditional family with two children -- has already harmed this country substantially.  Conservatives complain of the unfathered children of the most criminal classes, yet they often neglect to propose that a missing mother could harm the family as well.  They complain about a public school system's advocacy for increasingly bankrupt leftist causes, but they will not encourage mothers to fulfill their duty to raise their children.  They complain of the incredible burden associated with an aging population without wondering whether it is actually affordable anymore for traditional families to properly raise more than one to two children.  Simply put, the economic (and thus reproductive) power of the individual household is vital to a host of conservative causes, and yet, for reasons neither logical nor moral, the sacred cow of feminism takes precedence over all of them.


It may perhaps be complained that the woman's worth is not realized when she remains at home, that she is disempowered in her motherly duty.  But the wise know -- not just with their minds, but also with their hearts -- that a mother's value is not reflected solely in the peace of the home and in the stability of nations.  On the contrary, if a society of women arise to their honorable calling, they are amply rewarded in the fortified paychecks of their husbands, and in the affordability of their homes.  This was yesterday's America, steeped in the honor which accompanies the dutiful.  Yet today, the husband depends upon his wife to sustain a wealth they once had without her leaving the home -- a deteriorating financial and reproductive state of the American household for which leftists, of course, propose "remedies."


Toward such a solution, leftists remove capital from the American economy, destroying the growth of industry -- a growth which Adam Smith recognized alone as the poor man's insurance of equitable pay -- only to distribute that money in welfare programs well-known by all studious men to destroy the household further.  This, as well-documented, results in more illegitimate childbirth, more crime, and perhaps most offensively, more cries for more government programs to further the cycle of plunder.


The second "remedy" proposes to open American borders, either officially or effectively, thereby replacing the missing American children with desperate foreigners from even the most ideologically opposite states.  But this endeavor not only greatly immerse Americans in a crime wave of epic proportions, but, combined with leftist refusal to assimilate newcomers, it destroys the very fabric of identity which gives Americans a reason to live together.  Certainly, some leftists and libertarians argue that such importation cannot take too many jobs from Americans, as an open border guarantees that the same people who come in search of employment may easily leave when they cannot find it.  But if foreigners are forced to leave because employment cannot be found, that can only mean that the native working class has already reached its most pathetic state, incapable of bargaining any lower for the jobs which would at one time have fed a family equitably.  There is perhaps no greater guarantee for an impoverished lower class than the combination of a feminized household and a completely open border, calling every unemployed person across the entire globe to compete in a finite market.


The wise know another method of restoring household stability, and it is a restoration of the traditional, biblical nuclear family.  It will do little good to have both parents live in the same home if they refuse to subscribe to the natural roles provided by the God of nature.  How the husband and wife manage themselves -- the man laboring as the breadwinner and the giver of law, the woman laboring with equal nobility to raise her children and ensure the propagation of heritage -- is as important as marriage itself.  This is not to say that women should never seek maximum productivity, as even the Bible praises the woman who, above and beyond her duty to her household, operates a business from her home.  But her income must remain in most cases a responsibility secondary to both the care of her children and the economic liberty of the family.  This structure is intended by God.  And if mankind is not wise enough to heed His call, as shown above, it will be enforced by the iron hand of nature.


Jeremy Egerer is a recent convert to Christian conservatism from radical liberalism and the editor of the Seattle website www.americanclarity.com.

American Thinker

Solyndra: Obama's Marble Boat

September 25, 2011
By Clarice Feldman

The dowager empress of China, Cixi, famously took the admiralty funds intended for building up an Imperial Admiralty and used them to construct a boat carved of marble on the shore of Kumming Lake for her amusement and the pleasure of her royal entourage.  The embezzlement was condoned by the controller of the Admiralty, despite the disadvantage to the nation, because he owed his position to Cixi.


Solyndra is Obama's equivalent of the Marble Boat.  It represents, we think, what may be the largest in a series of enormous federal expenditures to Obama's friends and supporters for their benefit and to buy him votes, with others deluded into thinking that traditional energy is too destructive of the planet and too cheap for our own good.  Just as Cixi's marble boat impoverished China and placed it at risk, the foolish actions of this administration impoverish us and place us at risk.  But the optics!

To the left, which includes the president and many of his staunchest supporters, fossil fuels are a "source of 'death and destruction.'"


This plays into the hands of the Middle East oil producers.  An outfit called Ethical Oil has exposed the ridiculous thinking behind those who are fighting Canadian oil sand production and transmission to the U.S.  Ethical Oil created an ad that explains that the choice for consumers is not no oil; on the contrary, it is between ethical oil -- that is, oil produced in Canada -- or unethical oil produced in Saudia Arabia, an ad whose truth so roiled the Saudis that they tried to halt its continued airing.

Correctly, The National Post observed:

The reality is that the oil they love to hate makes modern civilization possible. The world is not going to end its dependence on fossil fuels any time soon, indeed, until other forms of energy are price-competitive. This will only happen when oil becomes too expensive, either due to scarcity or the invention of a cheaper (read: non-subsidized) form of alternative energy.

Until that happens, the ethical thing to do is not to eschew all fossil fuels, but to make choices between their sources, just as we have done with other products.

Because of the prejudice against fossil fuels in administration quarters, and undoubtedly because so many Democrat fundraisers and lobbyists are lining their pockets on "green projects," the government, which should not be providing debt capital for new tech energy start-ups, has jumped into this area, feet first, and landed on its nose, at huge cost to us.  The risk should be taken by high-flying investors, not the taxpayers.  Moreover, the evidence is overwhelming that the administration utterly lacks people with the business acumen to make the decision between competing technologies and companies.  Successful silicon valley investors simply are not hanging around looking to jump ship for a slot at the Department of Energy or this White House.  As a wise man once said about taking advice from stock brokers, if they are so smart, why aren't they making the money for themselves?


The evidence already establishes not only the connection between Solyndra's investors and lobbyists with the Democrats, but as well that its representatives met multiple times with Obama's closest aide, Valerie B. Jarrett, "to push for loans, tax breaks and other government assistance."


But cronyism is not the only shortcoming in this picture: as the New York Times article linked above makes clear, aside from the possibility of political corruption, the question of incompetence in the doling out of half a billion in funds to this company is damning:


Industry analysts and government auditors fault the Obama administration for failing to properly evaluate the business proposals or take note of troubling signs already evident in the solar energy marketplace.

"It was alarming," said Frank Rusco, a program director at the Government Accountability Office, which found that Energy Department preliminary loan approvals -- including the one for Solyndra -- were granted at times before officials had completed mandatory evaluations of the financial and engineering viability of the projects. "They can't really evaluate the risks without following the rules."

The Energy Department's senior staff has acknowledged in interviews the intense pressure from top Obama administration officials to rush stimulus spending out the door...
"There was just too much misplaced zeal at the Department of Energy for this company," Mr. Mehta said.

Were this the only instance of waste of substantial sums of federal funds made public this week, it might escape so much attention, but it comes at the same time that we learn of expenditures of $16 muffins and $8 cups of coffee by the Department of Justice on a series of conferences and $16.5 billion paid out erroneously for unemployment claims.  Is it a wonder that Americans tell Gallup that we think half of every federal dollar is wasted?


Were there a grown-up in the White House, someone could be counted on to whisper to the chief that now is not the time for more spending bills.


Instead, he's asking for even more money.  As the president stood before a bridge that ironically was ineligible to receive the additional funds he was seeking (another example of how bad the White House staffing is), others noted that Solyndra alone received more stimulus money than did 35 states the last time the Congress gave Obama trillions in walking-around money.


And were the loss on Solyndra the only instance of money misspent on faulty energy projects, it might pass without much further concern, but who knows?  Given the atmosphere -- Democrat biggies, green propaganda, foolish notions about fossil fuels and green energy -- how many more such projects we will find once we start turning over rocks or people come clean?


Even worse, all takes place in a background of consistent Interior Department and EPA efforts to choke off so much vital, productive, and essential activity.  The most recent example comes from the Central Valley in California, which was starved of water to save the delta smelt because of what a judge now calls "illegal actions and abuse of power" based on dishonest testimony.

Big Green environmentalists claim that the delta smelt is threatened with extinction by diversion of water from the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers to supply farms in California's Central Valley and cities in Southern California.  Those diversions are handled by the Central Valley Project, a Depression-era federal water project designed to move water from California's northern area to its arid southern region.  The issue before Wanger was where Department of Interior officials should set boundaries between the fresher water of the rivers the fish prefer and the saltier waters from the San Francisco Bay.  The 2-inch-long fish mainly breeds in marshy estuary areas where the fresh and salt water mix.

By diverting more fresh water for the delta smelt, federal officials reduce the amount available for people on farms and in cities.  California's Central Valley was long among the nation's richest agricultural areas, producing fruits and vegetables shipped to grocery shelves across the country.

 Increased water diversion under President Obama and Interior Secretary Kenneth Salazar, however, has wreaked Depression-like economic havoc on the region, costing thousands of jobs, increasing food prices nationwide, and destroying a way of life for many California farm families.  Unemployment in some areas of the valley has reached 40 percent.

Wanger was angered by testimony from the two scientists, Frederick V. Feyrer and Jennifer M. Norris, that he said was "false," "contradictory," and "misleading."  He accused the Interior Department of "bad faith" in providing the two scientists as experts and claimed that their testimony was "an attempt to mislead and to deceive the court into accepting not only what is not the best science, it's not science."  [Source: Washington Examiner.]

[T]he National Park Service and the Department of the Interior have manipulated science in an effort to paint the oyster farm as an environmental hazard. Science can play a key role here, if in fact evidence showed that the oyster farm was an environmental detriment to the area. But the science doesn't support this argument. So the Park Service issued a series of reports with bad, incomplete, misleading, or cherry-picked evidence of impacts to seagrasses, seals, water quality, and fish diversity. Equally egregious, Park Service employees withheld or selectively excluded scientific evidence that they knew contradicted their claims, even after requests by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, Senator Dianne Feinstein, and external scientists seeking to independently review their claims.

And now a new internal report on this debacle from the Department of the Interior has been released (the "Frost Report") that simultaneously acknowledges that the scientific arguments of damage from the oyster farm are false, yet whitewashes the actions of National Park Service employees in producing, disseminating, and repeating those false arguments. The Frost Report uses semantics, logical twists that would amaze even a wise and practiced Marin County yogi, and incomplete and incorrect assessments of events. The local newspaper, the Marin Independent Journal carried a cartoon on March 26th by George Russell calling the Frost Report "a shell game on the half-truths" in a play on words on "oysters on the half-shell."

In the Report, practices and actions that any scientific society, scientific journal, or scientific ethicist would clearly identify as scientific misconduct and reprehensible, are treated by the Department of the Interior as simply worthy of a slap of the wrist, a verbal tisk tisk. In a remarkable semantic twist, the Frost Report found that five National Park Service employees violated the Department's Code of Scientific and Scholarly Conduct but chose to label those violations as "administrative misconduct" rather than "scientific misconduct" because of the difficulty of proving "intent" to deceive. Yet this "administrative misconduct" included four years of withholding and cherry-picking data in public reports, writing journal articles with incomplete or wrong data, failing to present complete materials, data, and scientific observations to a National Academy of Sciences Committee, even after multiple requests, and issuing repeatedly false public statements. And this "misconduct" was all in the direction of exaggerating the adverse impact of the oyster farm. No intent?  [Source: Huffington Post.]

While I believe this kind of false testimony was used by the Department of Interior on other such occasions, I'm sure readers are fully aware of more instances of this than the two I have quickly culled.

In any event, there remain two questions for me.


(1)   How do people square the endangered species act with their belief in evolutionary theory?

Take for example, the spotted owl.  Thousands of jobs were lost after President Clinton signed the Northwest Forest Plan ,which was designed to protect spotted owls and other species which live in old-growth forests.  And what was the consequence?  Those owls are still in decline, barred owls having moved into their range and habitat.  Now there's a proposal to kill the barred owls.  Will this nonsense never end?  What about an Endangered Workers and Taxpayers Act?

(2)   As my friend porchlight notes, if the sun is such a perfect energy-producer that we can immediately eschew fossil fuels, why is its natural fluctuation an insufficient explanation for any increase in the world's temperature?


I guess you have to be an Interior Department scientist or a former Democrat officeholder or staffer lobbying for green energy to understand stuff this complex.

American Thinker

Arguing Against Waterboarding In The Absence Of Reality

Posted by Paul Hair Sep 24th 2011 at 2:24 pm in History, Intelligence, Strategy, Terrorism, human rights

I read “NBC’s Lauer to Cheney: You’re the ‘Most Divisive Political Figure in This Country in a Century’” at Newsbusters and was struck by Lauer’s inability to comprehend reality.

The relevant portion of the Newsbusters’ transcript of the televised interview includes the following exchange:

LAUER: Enhanced interrogation techniques: In your book, you state bluntly you have no regrets about being in favor of things like waterboarding – I think you say even if circumstances were the same today you’d make the same decisions….If an American citizen were to be taken into captivity in Iran, for example, and the government of Iran were to look at that person and say, ‘We think you’re a spy for the U.S. or you’re here to carry out a covert operation. Would it be okay for the Iranian government to waterboard that American citizen?

CHENEY: Well, we probably would object to it.

LAUER: On the grounds that it’s torture?

CHENEY: On the grounds that we have obligations towards our citizens. And that we do everything we can to protect our citizens and to put them through a process that we think is appropriate.

LAUER: So why was it okay for us to use what most people would say was torture against terror suspects?

CHENEY: Well, remember, first of all, these were not American citizens. We weren’t dealing with American citizens in the enhanced interrogation program. Secondly, it was people like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, there were a handful, two or three, for example, that actually got waterboarded. Third, we had good reason to believe they had information that we could only get from them and that they knew more than anybody else.

LAUER: But if the government of Iran were capture someone and say, ‘We have reason to believe that you’re a spy or you’re carrying out an operation that could be damaging to our country, would you object or would you say they did what they had to do to get the information they needed at the time?

CHENEY: Well, I think we would object because we wouldn’t expect an American citizen to be operating that way. When you’re dealing with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, for example, a man who was the self-admitted mastermind of 9/11, killed 3,000 Americans. And at a time when we had very little knowledge and understanding about Al Qaeda and what they were doing. And after we’d gone through a lot of other procedures and interrogation efforts, then at the end of that process, he was subjected to the program. It was very carefully supervised. None of the techniques used were things that we hadn’t already used on our own people in training.

Lauer’s questioning comes out of a reality where the attacks of September 11, 2001 never occurred. I’m not saying that that is what Lauer believes, but I am saying that his line of questioning sounds as if it is coming from someone pre-September 11, 2001 or from someone who doesn’t acknowledge that September 11, 2001 actually happened.


Asking how Cheney (or the U.S.) would respond to Iranians waterboarding and torturing U.S. citizens is inane. In doing so Lauer does two things: he effectively ignores the September 11, 2001 attacks on the U.S.—the events that led us to waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and a select few others for the moral purpose of saving the lives of others—and he supposes that the Iranians would have a legitimate reason for waterboarding U.S. citizens. And it is this moral relativity—a denial of objective good and evil—that largely contributes to Lauer’s (and other moral relativists on the left and Right) denial of reality.
Lauer also ignores the fact that our enemies constantly torture us and never have to worry about being interrogated by their own people or getting into legal trouble for what they do. Furthermore, Lauer ignores that there are people like me who think we actually should torture terrorists if that’s what it takes to save lives.

Here are some questions I would like to ask Matt Lauer:

— If waterboarding is “torture” and “immoral,” how much more is it torture and immoral to shoot an unarmed man in the face?

— Is abortion torture? If not, what crime have the unborn committed that justifies the horrendous butchering of them?

— If the answer to the above question is that, “Not all people believe that the unborn are people or that abortion is wrong,” then why can’t I say in answer to the questioning that “torturing” terrorists is wrong: “Not all people believe that terrorists are people or that waterboarding them is wrong”?

— Speaking of abortion, was Gianna Jessen tortured when doctors tried to execute her with a saline solution that burned her while alive? What do you think of those who not only support abortion, but have publicly voted against medical care and protection for babies who survive failed abortion attempts?

— Does the fact that we now know that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed personally beheaded Daniel Pearl (HT: The Washington Post) make you feel any better over our “torturing” of same said terrorist?

— Does the fact that waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used on terrorists, such as Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, were designed specifically not to torture them but to make it feel as if they were being tortured in order to appeal to their culture and beliefs make you feel any better about our “torturing” of same said terrorists?

— Why do you defend the immoral position of not waterboarding (and truly torturing) terrorists in order to save the lives of innocent people?

— If I guarantee to you that I would never “torture” any terrorist in order to learn information that might save the life of you, your family, or anyone else on the left, would you accept that as a bipartisan compromise on which we all could agree?

The bottom line is that we live in an evil world where the employment of force is necessary, where the bad guys don’t play by the rules, and where the rules and agreements of the Geneva Convention are long outdated. Perhaps no one better expressed this than Warren Kozak when he wrote, “The Real Rules of War” in The Wall Street Journal in 2009. Kozak wrote:

You don’t have to dig too deep to understand that war brings out behavior in people that they would never demonstrate in normal life. In Paul Fussell’s moving memoir, “The Boys’ Crusade,” the former infantryman relates a story about the liberation of Dachau. There were about 120 SS guards who had been captured by the Americans. Even though the Germans were being held at gunpoint, they still had the arrogance—or epic stupidity—to continue to heap verbal abuse and threats on the inmates. Their American guards, thoroughly disgusted by what they had already witnessed in the camp, had seen enough and opened fire on the SS. Some of the remaining SS guards were handed over to the inmates who tore them limb from limb. Another war crime? No doubt. Justified? It depends on your point of view. But before you weigh in, realize that you didn’t walk through the camp. You didn’t smell it. You didn’t witness the obscene horror of the Nazis.

Rules of war are important. They are something to strive for as they separate us from our distant ancestors. But when only one side follows these rules, they no longer elevate us. They create a very unlevel field and more than a little frustration. It is equally bizarre for any of us to judge someone’s behavior in war by the rules we follow in our very peaceful universe. We sit in homes that are air-conditioned in the summer and warmed in the winter. We have more than enough food in our bellies and we get enough sleep. The stress in our lives won’t ever match the stress of battle. Can we honestly begin to decide if a soldier acted in compliance with rules that work perfectly well on Main Street but not, say, in Malmedy or Fallujah?

In his book, Mr. Fussell probably sums up the feelings of many soldiers when he quotes a British captain, John Tonkin, who experienced a great deal of the war. “I have always felt,” Capt. Tonkin said, “that the Geneva Convention is a dangerous piece of stupidity, because it leads people to believe that war can be civilized. It can’t.”

War can’t be civilized.

That’s good advice for all of us to remember as we fight against foreign enemies, and as we fight against domestic enemies who live in a fantasy land where evil people are the good guys and good people are the bad guys.

Big Peace

From the Trenches: A Personal Story of Obama Job-Killing Regulation

by Lawrence Meyers 

I occasionally broker commercial loans between finance companies and small businesses.  It gives me a lot of pride when I bring together an American entrepreneur who is ready to risk all his assets on his own business, with a finance company that sees a way to help that businessman and make a profit himself.

For the past month, I’ve been working with a financier to bring funding to 30 entrepreneurs, eager and ready to start up their businesses.  Yesterday I had the most dis-spiriting conversation of my professional career with my financier, whom I’ll call “Joe”.

Joe has a credit line with a Gigantic American Bank.  The Federal Reserve has slapped the Bank, and all other banks big and small, with new regulations regarding how they loan their money, who they loan it to, and issued a mountain of compliance rules.  The Bank cannot rely on their internal compliance auditors any longer, either.  They must use independent auditors.

The Bank, in order to remain in compliance, must shove all these same regulations and compliance rules onto whomever they loan money to, including Joe, who also must engage an independent compliance auditor.  Joe must shove all these same regulations and compliance rules onto whomever he loans money to, including these entrepreneurs, who also must engage an independent compliance auditor.



The cost of all these regulations and compliance audits, at the entrepreneur level alone, is $30,000.   It costs a heck of a lot more as you move up the chain.

The entrepreneurs cannot afford this.

As a result, the entrepreneurs’ dreams of starting their own businesses die on the vine.  They now must go back into the depressed job market to (not) find a job.


Sixty other jobs that would have been created by these entrepreneurs never get created.

The money these employees would have spent never enters the economy.

The commission I would’ve earned by brokering the deal is never earned, so that money never gets spent into the economy.

Joe never earns the interest he would have earned on the deal, so that money never gets spent into the economy, or invested in any other businesses.

The Bank never earns the interest it would’ve earned from the financier, so it has less money to grow, return to shareholders, or to hire other people to work at the Bank.

The independent auditors don’t even get hired because no deal exists to audit.

Does anyone — anyone at all — see a winner in this scenario?

I do.  It’s anyone who calls Barack Obama a “Socialist”, a “Marxist”, or “anti-Capitalist”.



I have to be honest, until today, I never branded President Obama as any of these.  I merely regarded him as misguided, foolish, and just economically clueless.  But not anymore.   Here’s why:
I asked Joe where this set of regulations come from, and why were they put into place. He replied:

“Barack Obama created these regulations by Presidential fiat. They are unrelated to any form of legislation.  They have nothing to do with bank solvency. They have everything to do with his anti-capitalist ideology.  This is the mindset of the current Administration: kill American business.”

Now, consider that this is just one story of one bank, one broker, one financier, and one set of entrepreneurs. 
Now extrapolate this to every American bank, broker, financier, and entrepreneur.

And is it any wonder — any wonder at all — why unemployment remains high?

Is it any wonder — any wonder at all — why Liberals complain about how workers are being trampled on, when it is their own policies that are trickling down to keep people on the unemployment lines?

I’ve been writing articles over at SeekingAlpha.com and InvestorPlace.com.  Lately I’ve been doing a series on the Dow Industrials, and discovered that every company I was writing about had billions of dollars of cash on their balance sheets.  In some cases, it was tens of billions.   Why, I wondered, isn’t that money being spent?

My old high school math teacher taught me that if one uses reason, no question can go unanswered.

The answer is apparent.  American businesses have no idea what to expect from an anti-Capitalist President.  What regulations will he impose on businesses?  They have no idea what’s coming down the pike.  Why spend billions on some new initiative, some new invention, some expansion, some hiring, when it all may yield nothing because some regulation kills it?  What costs will be imposed by Obamacare?  How much will it cost to pay for a new employee’s health insurance?  Will the GOP take over Congress and the White House next year and repeal Obamacare?  They don’t know.  So they don’t hire.    Will the economy fall into a double-dip recession?  Well, with anecdotes like mine, it sure as heck seems like it will!  So why spend money to expand and hire?  So they don’t.

I really, really want a Liberal reader to try and justify this course of action by the government.  And I want it to lack schadenfreude.  Because if it doesn’t, all it does is confirm the stereotype of the anti-profit Liberal.

Then I want that same Liberal to justify voting for Obama again next year.

Big Government