Rossputin.com

Last week, the Democratic staff of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a report purporting to show that low wages for Walmart employees hurts taxpayers and economic growth.

It is a follow-up to a 2004  paper by the Walmart-obsessed Rep. George Miller (D-CA), himself a wholly-owned subsidiary of big labor (unions represent 19 of his top 20 campaign contributors), entitled “Everyday Low Wages: The Hidden Price We All Pay For Wal-Mart.” (In 2009, Walmart officially removed the hyphen from its name.)

The new report, like the original, is full of economic nonsense and confusion, and so much union-fueled anger against the nation’s largest retailer and private-sector employer that it is bound to be accepted widely among Democrats and the “mainstream” media.

Indeed a Huffington Post article about the report gathered more than 32,000 Facebook “likes” and almost 13,000 “shares” along with nearly 1,700 “Tweets” and almost 22,000 comments in its first 72 hours online. Confirmation bias abounds, though there are many skeptics among the commenters.

In short, the Democrats’ report says that Walmart pays low wages and offers few benefits because, to the left’s dismay, of “aggressive avoidance of collective bargaining with its employees,” which is the true focus of Rep. Miller’s anger and frustration.

Please read the entirety of my article for The American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/06/04/the-democrats-walmart-obsessio

Only in the United States Congress could a legislative provision entitled “Market-Based H-1B Visa Limits” actually mean that “the number of visas calculated under subparagraph (A) for any fiscal year shall not be less than 110,000 or more than 180,000.”

If you read even a few pages of the so-called Gang of Eight immigration bill trudging its way through Congress—a bill that contains many provisions as horrendous as that one—you can’t help but think of Otto von Bismarck’s famous sausage-making analogy and wonder “who the hell wrote this mess?” The answer, sadly but not surprisingly, is special interests, namely the Chamber of Commerce and big labor unions. Speaking on background for this article, an aide to a Senate Judiciary Committee member put it plainly: “Neither the Chamber nor the AFL-CIO is interested in a free market. The Chamber is interested in delivering for their big business cronies and labor is interested in protectionism. So they work out a secret deal together, and that’s how our legislation gets made.” It is a frightening shotgun marriage that embodies the old tale of two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for dinner. And guess who’s the lamb, my fellow citizen.

Much of the debate about the bill centers on legitimate questions of cost and border security along with illegitimate concerns such as unions’ desire to allow increased immigration only to the extent that they can capture more dues-paying members.

Some opponents of the current legislation yell “secure the border first!” (a not inappropriate suggestion that bill drafters claim to be working into the text) while some supporters, through crocodile tears, bemoan cruel racism in the dark hearts of those who have the temerity to think that borders matter at all. In a time of trillion-dollar deficits, hearken back to Milton Friedman’s warning that “It’s just obvious that you can’t have free immigration and a welfare state.”

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/24/real-immigration-reform-requir

With the hornets nest of conservative and libertarian anger which Colorado Governor John “I’m a moderate” Hickenlooper stirred up by supporting a raft of anti-gun legislation in this once-red state, I thought there was little chance he would pardon or commute the sentence of Nathan Dunlap. Particularly since Hickenlooper made sure that a bill ending the death penalty in Colorado did not get a vote in the state legislature.

Today, with a “temporary reprieve,” the governor may have just done the politically unthinkable: He has made it possible for a Republican to beat him in 2014.

Nathan Dunlap shot five people, killing four of them, in a Chuck E. Cheese restaurant in Aurora, Colorado in 1996. He later said that killing the people was “better than sex.”

Hickenlooper says that the time since the conviction has given “the benefit of information that exposes an inequitable system.” Whether or not the system is inequitable is not relevant. There is no question as to Dunlap’s guilt. Zero, nada, zilch. He did it, and he was proud of it.

He deserves to die.

Furthermore, if Dunlap doesn’t deserve death, then what is the purpose of having a death penalty in Colorado?

How about also pardoning the other people on death row here, including one who murdered the son of Colorado State Representative Rhonda Fields?

As usual, Hickenlooper wants to have it both ways: By doing this by executive order, and as reprieve, it means a future governor could undo today’s move and send Nathan Dunlap to his just reward unless Hickenlooper does something more permanent before leaving office.

My prediction: This will make many Coloradoans, not just Republicans, extremely angry. And it will cause several Republican gubernatorial hopefuls who had been on the sidelines because Hickenlooper had seemed extremely difficult to beat now put their hats in the ring. The number one campaign slogan for the eventual Republican nominee: “I promise that Nathan Dunlap will get what he deserves.”

One thing which occurred to me when the anti-gun legislation was being shoved down the throats of unwilling Coloradoans was this: Hickenlooper is aiming to get a high-paying job working for Michael Bloomberg.

Today’s events make me think I may not have been unduly conspiracy-minded after all.

John Hickenlooper just stabbed his state, and the justice system, in the back. Now it’s time to hope that voters do the same to his political career in 18 months, and return this state to some sense of sanity.

During Friday morning’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing on the IRS targeting scandal, Liberal Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) at least had the honesty to say “I don’t like the right.”

Each committee member had his own axe to grind. McDermott’s was campaign finance reform, and his view was shared by several Democrats.

He argued that the beginning of the “problem” of “secret money” going to politically motivated groups was the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, which eliminated restrictions on independent campaign expenditures by organizations.

McDermott and many others who share his view are wrong. Though it was not our first major campaign finance legislation (FECA 1971), the problem began in earnest with the unconstitutional McCain-Feingold “reform” law, passed in 2002.

Please read the rest of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/21/mccain-feingold-gave-us-the-ir

Last Thursday, Congressman Darrell Issa (R-CA) started a Twitter prairie fire with his call for people to describe #ObamacareInThreeWords. (My contribution was “Sorry, Doctor retired.”)

Other gems included “Max Baucus regrets,” “A massive failure,” “Rammed down throats” and the extremely uncomfortable proof of Godwin’s Law, “Arbeit. Macht. Frei.”

Liberal participation brought “Win for kids,” “Republicans suck balls,” “Republicans hate me” (a nice reminder of how liberals take everything personally), and — stated without any sense of irony by a “dreamer, dancer, organic food eater” — “Free birth control.”

The White House, never shy to jump into social media, responded with a flurry of tweets, including “It’s. The. Law.” which smacked, more than anything, of typical Obama chest-thumping.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/20/itsthelaw

Who would have guessed that the State of Delaware’s third largest revenue source would essentially be a mafia-like combination of extortion and theft?

That’s certainly how it sounds when you read Douglas Lindholm’s article in Forbes magazine entitled “Once A Friendly Locale To Business, The Modern State Of Delaware Is A Bully.”

I commend the entire article to you, but the short version is this:

Under the guise of “unclaimed property” laws, the state forces companies to prove that they are not holding unclaimed property, even from 20 or 30 years ago, then fine the companies if they can’t prove it.

We’re talking big money here, the sort of thing that would make John Gotti proud: “Last year alone, Delaware seized $319.5 million from liquidated property, while returning only $18.9 million of unclaimed property to its rightful owners. The State’s estimated General Fund revenue from unclaimed property for FY 2013 is over a half billion dollars.”

As if this isn’t bad enough, the state pays an auditor on contingency, meaning the auditor has self-serving financial motives to go after the state’s business particularly aggressively. And as Lindholm notes, it’s working out well for the auditor, Kelmar Associates, which earned $30 million in the second half of 2012: “It is astounding to think that the payout to this one auditor for six months of its ‘auditing’ was almost twice the unclaimed property returned to all owners all of last year.”

This is not entirely a new story: In 2009, Delaware assessed McKesson Corporation $4.5 million dollars when a Kelmar audit – which took six years to perform – came up with four vendors (out of 116 questions) who claimed that McKesson owed them a total of $19,337.

McKesson settled out of court; I do not believe the amount of the settlement was ever made public. To add insult to McKesson’s injury, roughly at the same time as the settlement, Delaware amended their unclaimed property statute so that the type of “property” which McKesson was fined for is no longer subject to that law.

According to attorney Scott Smith at the law firm of Baker Donelson, while Delaware is probably the most aggressive state in this area, they are far from alone, and it’s becoming a bigger revenue source for many states: “They see it as easy money – even if it’s not theirs.”

Smith also believes that third party auditor firms like Kelmar are as much the driving force behind the extortion of companies as the states are: “These outfits are really targeting the companies and then marketing themselves to the states.” Sounds a lot like a mafia boss offering a lower-level thug protection for a cut of the money.

We can only hope that with a Forbes article and perhaps some help from these pages and elsewhere, Delaware, and other states which are behaving similarly or even thinking about it, will be shamed – or competed, such as by Nevada, Texas, or other states which are making major efforts to attract business – into ceasing their mafia-like tactics.

In the meantime, i encourage any state which uses Kelmar Associates for any services to switch to another provider until such time as Kelmar agrees not to be a co-conspirator in Delaware’s extortion. Given that they made $30 million stealing from Delaware corporations in just six months, it’s easy to guess their response: Like a mafioso, once you get it, you never get out.

 On Friday, senior IRS official Lois Lerner offered an apology of sorts after non-profit organizations which were applying for tax-exempt status were targeted for IRS audit if the groups’ names included “Tea Party” or “patriots.” Lerner said she had learned of this activity only last year.

Few places seem less likely to find humor than a New York Times article about rogue IRS agents, but this line from Friday’s article was laugh-out-loud funny: “[Lerner] insisted that the move was not driven by politics.” Nearly as ridiculous was Lerner’s assertion that the behavior was little more than the activity of overzealous low-level employees and that more senior IRS officials were unaware of the “absolutely inappropriate” behavior.

Lerner did herself no further favors during a subsequent conference call with reporters in which she couldn’t calculate one quarter of 300, saying “I’m not good at math.” Then she and her staff complained about “repetitive” questions, prompting liberal Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter David Cay Johnston to say, according to a Washington Post report (entitled “The IRS’ public relations disaster”), that “it was because they weren’t answering the questions.”

One wonders whether anybody, even New York Times readers believed that the actions were only those of low-level IRS employees in Cincinnati. If so, they couldn’t believe it for long: Barely 24 hours later, the Associated Press revealed that a draft of an IRS inspector general’s report shows, contrary to lying Lerner’s assertions that the Tea Party-targeting was confined to 2012, that senior IRS officials including Lerner learned of the targeting no later than June 29, 2011.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/13/the-taxman-cometh-for-tea-part

If ponies rode men and grass ate cows,
And cats were chased into holes by the mouse …
If summer were spring and the other way round,
Then all the world would be upside down.

Once in a long while, an event evokes one of my favorite historical images: the British Army band, at Lord Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which sealed the Americans’ revolutionary victory, playing “The World Turned Upside Down.”

In this case, the event is the dramatic change over the past two weeks in the “mainstream” media’s coverage of President Obama.

From reporters to opinion writers, from newspapers to television, after a mere four and a half years of economic fecklessness, foreign policy failure, unseemly narcissism, and a Nobel Prize for deeds to be named later, prominent liberal-leaning pundits and organizations may have finally realized that reality, if not journalistic ethics, demands a more clear-eyed look at the president they have been so deeply invested in.

Or maybe they’ve just noticed that their fawning and sycophancy has meant declining circulation and viewership.

But whatever the reason, the dominant establishment mass media’s turn is as remarkable as it is welcome.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/05/07/turning-on-obama

The city council of Mission Viejo (California) released a “rule of law” resolution last year.

While I do have some reservations about e-Verify, nevertheless it’s good to see a city government not be cowed by the political correctness that seems to take over local governments when it comes to immigration issues.

You can read the resolution here:
http://www.rossputin.com/MissionViejoRuleOfLaw.pdf

The Washington Times covered it in 2001. And so did Fox News. Jennifer Rubin wrote about it in 2008, and many writers on these pages have mentioned it since then. In 2011, Andrew Breitbart made it one of his most cared-about causes, following from his outing of on-again off-again, (formerly?) racist, USDA employee Shirley Sherrod (about whom more in a minute).

Congressman Steve King (R-IA) has for years been a lonely voice willing to risk charges of “racist!” coming his way when he fought against it.

But when a fraud against the federal government and all American taxpayers is as big and as obvious as what has resulted from the Pigford case against the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), even the New York Times, protector of Democrats, must eventually take notice.

Please read the entirety of my article for the American Spectator here:
http://spectator.org/archives/2013/04/30/the-pigs-of-pigford