Want to protest your government by going to a Tea Party event? DENIED!

Remember this report from our nation’s history?

CNN (Continental News Network) Boston, 1773: The city of Boston canceled a proposed protest over tea taxes today, citing the fear that too many people dressed as Indians would be gathered near the wharves. Organizers expressed sadness over the cancellation, but meekly returned to their homes fearful of upsetting the officers of the Crown. Taxmen breathed a sigh of relief as the tar and feathers were put away not to be used this day.

You don’t remember that pre-revolutionary history? I should say you shouldn’t, because it didn’t happen. But flash forward a few hundred years and you’ll find it is happening today in Cape Coral, Florida where city officials canceled a tax day tea party gathering because they “feel too many people could show-up.”

That’s right, folks, the God-given, long-held American right to assemble and protest the actions of our government has been canceled due to too much popularity of the protest.

And what does it come down to? Money. You see, the city officials want an insurance policy taken out so that organizers can cover any loss that might occur as a result of the rally. And those insurance policies cost hundreds of dollars.

The tea party organizers of Cape Coral, though, aren’t the only ones to find this restriction of their free speech and rights to assemble. Tea party organizers all across the country have begun to find out just how difficult, if not impossible, it is to be “allowed” to exercise their God-given right to speak their minds against government excess and criminality. City governments all across the country are charging fees for “permits,” forcing organizers to pay out huge sums for “insurance policies,” and binding tea party organizers in all sorts of government red tape.

In many instances, organizers are being told that they aren’t “allowed” to hold rallies on government property. Imagine that? We, the taxpayers of the city/state/federal government aren’t “allowed” to gather on property that our own taxes paid for.

And then there are the “permits” required to reserve the day, arrange the police protection, and clean up afterward. Often those “permits” can only be applied for at certain times a year, precluding any spontaneous assembly. Also, these “permits” can be denied with no reason stated quashing at birth any plan to exercise the right of assembly.

Here one might wonder how it is that we so often see those lefties appearing on our TV sets engaging in their many organized protests? Don’t the flotsam and jetsam of the far left seem to have large protests all the time? One might be drawn to imagine that the government is involved in some sort of grand conspiracy to allow those with anti-American sentiment, the moonbats of the left, to march with impunity. But, hold the tinfoil hats, won’t you? Because the wackjobs of anti-war ilk and the shrill, circus acts of the Code Pinkos are expected to cut through the same red tape the tea party organizers have been confronted with. The lefties are just better at it.

You see, contrary to popular conception, the far left has some deep-pocketed backers (your George Soros types, unions and even government funds) and a raft of organizations that do “protests” as a full time job. Their protest marches and rallies are far from spontaneously organized. These groups are thoroughly knowledgeable about the red tape and governmental hoops through which they must jump to carry off a successful protest assembly. After all, the hatemongers of the left are intimately intertwined with city governments all across the country. They understand what needs to be done because, by and large, city officials used to belong to, or belong still to the sorts of groups that plan lefty protests. Your new president is one of them. Being part of government, these leftie protest marchers help write the rules, being intimately associated with government they are quite well informed about what is required and how to get around or satisfy those rules.

But the obstacles are coming as a shock to the average citizens that love this country. For their whole lives peace-loving, work-a-day Americans have taken for granted that there exists the freedom to assemble completely unaware that those rights have been eliminated by stealth regulation by governments all across the land.

And now the folks in Cape Coral, Florida have learned their lesson.

Americans do not have the rights they always thought they did. There is no right to protest government. There is no right to assemble. The people have no rights at all to voice their displeasure. Shut up people. Go home. Nothing to see here. Go quietly back to your IPods and DVDs. Big daddy government will take care of you. The Obemmessiah will decide what’s best for you. Don’t worry your little heads. Oh, and thank you for your payments on April 15th.

Put away the tar and feathers, won’t you? There’s a nice fella.

-Warner Todd Huston

In this Dec. 11, 2008 file photo, President Obama stands with former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle at a news conference in Chicago. (AP Photo)

Tom Daschle has withdrawn his nomination for health and human services secretary, after fielding mounting criticism over his failure to pay more than $130,000 in taxes.

President Obama stood by Daschle Monday, telling reporters that he “absolutely” supports the former South Dakota senator. But the president accepted Daschle’s withdrawal with “sadness and regret” Tuesday morning, according to a White House statement.

“Tom made a mistake, which he has openly acknowledged. He has not excused it, nor do I,” Obama said. “But that mistake, and this decision, cannot diminish the many contributions Tom has made to this country, from his years in the military to his decades of public service.”

Obama said he had hoped Daschle could bring his expertise on health care to his drive to make health care more accessible and affordable.

But Daschle said in a statement that his presence would have complicated that effort.

“If 30 years of exposure to the challenges inherent in our system has taught me anything, it has taught me that this work will require a leader who can operate with the full faith of Congress and the American people, and without distraction,” Daschle said. “Right now, I am not that leader, and will not be a distraction.”

“I will not be the architect of America’s health system reform, but I remain one of its more fervent supporters,” he said.

It was unclear whether Daschle, with his deep network of ties in the Senate stemming in part from his time as majority leader, would have been able to weather the criticism over his tax problems in confirmation.

Senators were reluctant to state publicly any opposition to Daschle’s nomination in recent days. But that started to crack Tuesday morning, as Republican Sen. Jim DeMint called for Obama to withdraw the nomination — becoming the first senator to say that the former majority leader’s tax problems are disqualifying.

DeMint told FOX News that Daschle’s failure to pay $134,000 in federal taxes reflects a “problem with integrity” that the government cannot afford to tolerate. DeMint spoke out against Daschle as a number of prominent newspapers, including The New York Times, called for the South Dakota Democrat to drop his bid.

DeMint said he came to that conclusion after it became “obvious” that Daschle knew about the tax problems long before his nomination and did nothing to make it right.

“The average American would likely face criminal charges with tax evasion of this size, yet he did not address the issue until he was nominated,” he said.

Daschle has since paid $146,000 in back payments and interest, and apologized on Monday for what he called income tax errors.

The New York Times, in its editorial, complained that Timothy Geithner was already confirmed as treasury secretary despite his tax problems.

“It would send a terrible message to the public if we ignore the failure of yet another high-level nominee to comply with the tax laws,” the Times wrote.

Several other newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune, Philadelphia Inquirer, Boston Globe, and Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, also have called for Daschle to withdraw.

But Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer earlier said Daschle’s own admission that he had failed to pay the taxes was reason enough to forgive his sin.

“Clearly it was a bad mistake, and Daschle was the first to come up with this in June 2008,” Schumer said. “It wasn’t discovered by the administration’s vetting team but rather by Daschle himself much earlier and he brought it to the attention of the administration’s vetting team when he was chosen as a potential nominee for HHS.”

Obama’s pick to be the White House’s first performance officer, Nancy Killefer, also withdrew her nomination on Tuesday because of her own tax liabilities, namely a $946 tax lien imposed by the D.C. government for failure to pay $298 in unemployment compensation tax on household help.

Noting the importance of the post, Killefer wrote in her withdrawal letter to the president that “my personal tax issue of D.C. unemployment tax could be used to create exactly the kind of distraction and delay those duties must avoid.”

With Oprah Winfrey, the intersection of politics and education is making for strange bedfellows. Federal tax returns and other reports confirm that she’s accepted at least $5 million for her self-named South African girls’ school from perhaps Barack Obama’s single greatest political enemy.

Oprah was front and center in her support of Obama's presidential bid -- not so for her acceptance of $5M in contributions from one of his staunchest foes.

Oprah is probably the most well-known celebrity to back Senator Barack Obama’s bid for the presidency. She threw him a lavish launch party, endorsed him on her show, stumped for him in the early primaries, and cried — as captured by photographers — in a Chicago park when he won the election. Her loyalty seemed fierce.

But it turns out that Winfrey is very close friends with Dallas billionaire named Harold Simmons, a leading Republican donor and supporter of John McCain.

This past August it was revealed that Simmons was the single donor to a 527 committee called American Issues Project. Its only issue: to run ads linking Obama to William Ayers, the political activist who was once part of the Weather Underground. Simmons paid $2.9 million to try and make Ayers the Obama campaign’s “Swift Boat,” an issue that might have sidelined permanently the Illinois senator’s chances and advance John McCain — Simmons’s candidate — to the White House.

Nevertheless, Winfrey has cultivated her friendship with Simmons on many social fronts since 2001, resulting in his being second only to her in donating funds to her Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.

According to the 2006 federal tax filing for the Oprah Winfrey Operating Fund, Winfrey accepted a $1 million donation to the school from Simmons. That amount, The Dallas Morning News reported in 2007, was only part of a $5 million pledge to the Academy. Simmons is considered Dallas’s leading philanthropist to worthy causes. In this case, though, it might have been unnecessary, since Winfrey herself has donated over $60 million to the school.

It’s not like Simmons is a new Republican donor. He gave over $100,000 in the 2007-2008 election cycle to Republican candidates, separate from his Ayers campaign. He has always been an active Republican. In 2004 he was a major donor to the Swift Boat Veterans, the group credited with destroying the campaign of John Kerry for president.

Winfrey has long been close friends with Simmons and his wife Annette. She’s their neighbor in Montecito, California, having bought the estate next to them in 2001. As recently as two weeks ago, Oprah mentioned the couple on her show during a telephone discussion of the Montecito fires with another neighbor, actor Rob Lowe.

(Winfrey was not available for comment, according to her representative. Simmons, who doesn’t have a press representative, did not return our call.)

The Dallas Morning News—thanks to the dogged byline of Alan Peppard — is full of stories over the years documenting Oprah’s friendship with the Simmonses. They are often at each others’ homes and parties. When Oprah’s significant other, Steadman Graham, spoke to a group in Dallas, it was noted that he dined with the Simmonses. In April, 2006 — two years after the Swift Boat scandal was revealed — Oprah sent a camera crew to a Dallas luncheon hosted by Annette Simmons showcasing the thousands of tulip bulbs surrounding the lake on her property.

It’s unlikely though that the Simmonses were at Oprah’s house next door on September 9, 2007. That’s when she hosted an all-star fundraiser for Obama with Stevie Wonder and guests like Halle Berry, Will Smith, and other A-list Hollywood names. One can only imagine what Simmons thought as the sound of “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now” blared over the loudspeaker system.

Interestingly, that was the last time either Oprah or Graham, for that matter, contributed any money either to the Obama campaign or to the Democratic Party. While they could have each made donations to Obama’s presidential bid, they gave just for the primary. And neither of them showed any interest in the Party itself, which funneled money to Obama.

Simmons, on the other hand, is a regular and constant Republican donor. And it’s not like the Obama campaign hasn’t taken notice of him. On August 21st and 25th, Robert Bauer, general counsel for Obama for America, wrote letters to John C. Keeney, Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Criminal Division, concerning the American Issues Project.

On the 25th Bauer wrote: “New facts have come to light that underscore the patently illegal nature of AIP’s formation and operation, and also demonstrate a knowing and willful violation of law on the part of its contributor, Howard Simmons [sic].” Bauer then attaches the Federal Election Committee filing by AIP that states its sole purpose: to defeat Barack Obama. Contran Corporation, owned by Simmons, is listed as AIP’s owner.

Bauer finishes his letter demanding Simmons’s prosecution: “We reiterate our request that the Department of Justice fulfill its commitment to take prompt action to investigate and to prosecute the American Issues Project, and we further request that the Department of Justice investigate and prosecute Howard [sic] Simmons for a knowing and willful violation of the individual aggregate contribution limits.”

Simmons, Bauer complained, had exceeded his personal donation limit because he’d given $2.88 million — roughly $2.7 million more than was allowed by FEC guidelines that state only $42,700 may be given to organizations other than candidate committees or party committees.

It wasn’t the first time Simmons had had trouble with political donations. In 1993, the FEC fined him just under $20,000 for exceeding limits in donations from 1988 and 1989. According to the New York Times, Simmons’s Swift Boat group was fined almost $300,000 for illegally spending $20 million to influence the election. Another Simmons-backed anti-Kerry group, Progress for America, was fined $750,000. They’d spent $31 million.

Simmons’ contentiousness is not limited to the backing of the Swift Boat Vets and the Ayers campaign to smear Obama. In December 1997, according to reports in the New York Times and elsewhere, Simmons was sued by two of his four daughters for abusing his powers in controlling millions of dollars he placed in trust funds for them. A jury agreed that he’d breached his financial duty as guardian of their inheritance, but were undecided on other issues. The case ended in a mistrial. Unusually, the case had been catalyzed when Simmons served her legal papers on one of the daughters by dropping them in her baby’s crib. The child had been born premature and was susceptible to infection, according to the New York Times and other reports.

Read more at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,460109,00.html

President-elect to formally unveil his team of economic experts to battle the most severe U.S. financial crisis in eight decades

WASHINGTON – President-elect Barack Obama names his economic team Monday and may call for the next Congress to quickly pass a massive stimulus plan that would dwarf even his campaign proposals to salvage the country’s financial wreckage.

Timothy Geithner, left, and Larry Summers (AP Photo).

Obama speaks at a Chicago news conference against a backdrop of increasing calls for him to assert himself well before he takes office Jan. 20 in the midst of the most severe U.S. financial crisis in eight decades.

Obama senior adviser David Axelrod confirmed that the president-elect would name Timothy Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve president, as his treasury secretary. Wall Street stocks jumped on Friday when word of Geithner’s appointment began to leak. Geithner will team with Lawrence Summers, a treasury secretary under former President Bill Clinton and former Harvard University president, who will take over the National Economic Council. Both Geithner and Summers will appear with Obama at a Monday news conference in Chicago.

Democratic officials also said Obama plans to name New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson as commerce secretary, adding a prominent Hispanic and one-time Democratic presidential rival to his Cabinet. Richardson served as U.N. ambassador in the Clinton administration and later as energy secretary.

The troika will confront an economic crisis that continues to deepen in spite of hundreds of billions of dollars in federal emergency spending in recent weeks.

Top aides said Sunday that Obama also wants Congress to use its large Democratic majority when it convenes Jan. 6 to prepare tax cuts for low- and middle-income earners as part of the massive government intervention designed to pull the country out of its frightening economic nosedive.

Some economists have endorsed spending up to $600 billion to revive the economy. Sen. Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and former labor Secretary Robert Reich, a member of Obama’s economic advisory board, both suggested $500 billion to $700 billion. Before winning the presidency Nov. 4, Obama had said he looked to create a $175 billion stimulus package. While the new plan will be significantly larger, it was expected to incorporate his campaign other ideas for new jobs in environmentally friendly technologies and tax cuts.

“I don’t know what the number is going to be, but it’s going to be a big number,” Obama economic adviser Austan Goolsbee said on Sunday. “It has to be. The point is to, kind of, get people back on track and startle the thing into submission.”

Over the weekend Obama directed his team to erect plan to create 2.5 million new jobs by the end of 2010, and aides said his broader economic program was designed to quickly offer tax relief to lower- and middle-income earners. Significantly the plan would not offer an immediate tax increase on wealthy taxpayers. During the campaign, Obama said he would raise taxes on people making more than $250,000.

Axelrod unambiguously voiced Obama’s overall expectations.

“Our hope is that the new Congress begins work on this as soon as they take office in early January, because we don’t have time to waste here, ” he said on Sunday. “We want to hit the ground running on January 20th.”

Congress will have two weeks to hold hearings and write legislation between its return to Washington in early January and Obama’s inauguration.

Rep. Steny Hoyer of Maryland, the second-ranking Democrat in the House of Representatives, acknowledged a readiness for quick action.

“We expect to have during the first couple of weeks of January a package for the president’s consideration when he takes office.”

Axelrod also warned executives of the U.S. auto industry to draw up plans to retool and restructure their industry if they want the billions of dollars they are seeking from Congress. Otherwise, Axelrod said, “there is very little taxpayers can do to help them.”

Obama also delved into one of the most pressing foreign policy issues facing his presidency, calling Afghan President Hamid Karzai by telephone and telling him that fighting terrorism there and in the region would be a top priority, Karzai’s office said on Sunday.

The Saturday conversation between Obama and Karzai was the first reported contact between the two leaders since the Nov. 4 U.S. election. The United States has some 32,000 American troops in Afghanistan, a number that will be increased by thousands next year.

Fighting terrorism and the insurgency “in Afghanistan, the region and the world is a top priority,” Karzai’s office quoted Obama as saying during the conversation.

Read more at http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2008/11/24/obama-set-unveil-new-economic-team/

It is not a flashy company, and you almost certainly won’t see it featured in Fortune anytime soon. In fact, you’ve probably never heard of it, but the ‘Big 3” ought to study up: Baldor Electric Company (BEC) paved a business model for companies to follow in bleak economic times. Trouble is ‘loyalty’ isn’t as catchy as ‘bailout’.

At a time when our nation cowers under a 6.5% unemployment rate, and the stock market is as volatile as Bob Knight on the side line of an Indiana college basketball game, millions of Americans are wondering what went wrong, how did it get this bad. Tonight, 1-2 million auto workers are not sleeping because the nightmares of ‘layoffs’ and ‘cuts’ flush slumber and sweet dreams down the proverbial tube and Congressional ‘leaders’ pander to their constituents on a daily basis – hedging against party loyalties, soft money contributions, and lobbyists. In the wake of an American icon failing and going belly-up, top executives plead for billions of your tax dollars in hopes of saving their company, and their defense is not failed management strategy but rather global financial stress.

Here’s The Deal…Teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, in 1929, BEC vowed no layoffs for any of its workers – and none were. Restructuring pay kept each worker employed, and the rising manufacturer weaved its way through the Great Depression and emerged as leading small motor company in the U.S. And, during the early 1980’s as the nation again faced economic downturn, the company invested in employees who could not read by starting a literacy program, and re-writing the instruction manuals.

Capitalism is not void of compassion; it just goes by a different name…loyalty. Those who say we should save GM should compare GM to BEC. In times of trouble and consternation loyalty can be the difference…and for those who believe the unions are to blame remember that for years those same unions tried to get into BEC and were rejected every time. Where’s the loyalty, where’s the accountability for GM?
The American people should not be loyal to a bailout.