New site in the sidebar

and I do mean new—Andrew Breitbart's latest venture, Big Government.com, only launched yesterday. It launched with a splash, though, an exposé of ACORN that would have made the old 60 Minutes proud: ACORN's Baltimore office facilitating child prostitution and tax evasion. It's quite a story, and quite a scoop for the folks who pulled it together. Check out the posts.

We're all Chicagoans now

So, let's see. The Inspector General for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), which among other things runs AmeriCorps, starts investigating the mayor of Sacramento, Kevin Johnson, and his nonprofit foundation, St. HOPE Academy; the foundation had applied for AmeriCorps money for a project called the Hood Corps. When Gerald Walpin audited the program,

The IG audit found that the program misused virtually all its funds and did little of what was outlined in its grant proposal.

Specifically, the audit found that Johnson and other officials of Neighborhood Corps used AmeriCorps volunteers to recruit students for a charter school run by its parent program, improperly paid at two school employees with AmeriCorps funds for duties they did not perform, improperly used volunteers to perform personal errands for Johnson (including washing his car and driving him to personal appearances) and used the AmeriCorps volunteers to engage in political activities in connection with a board of education election.

Rooting out abuse of government funds—clearly he's doing his job well; that deserves a raise, or at least a pat on the back, right? Nope—because you see, Johnson isn't just a former NBA star or a mayor, he's a friend and supporter of Barack Obama. As a result, Walpin didn't get a commendation, he got a pink slip.

Of course, that's not the only case IG Walpin has investigated; he also found significant problems in an AmeriCorps project at the City University of New York. Despite his findings, however, the CNCS decided it didn't feel like doing anything about it.

Funding for the largest AmeriCorps program—the Teaching Fellows Program, run by the Research Foundation of the City University of New York—is in abeyance pending resolution of widespread problems identified in a recent audit. Although Walpin recommended that funding be curtailed and that previous funds (perhaps as much as $75 million) be repaid to the corporation, the corporation has said it will take no action on that matter.

Walpin concluded that nothing was being gained by the grants to CUNY and that the money was simply being used to subsidize an existing and funded program.

That's not to say, of course, that the administration isn't doing anything about this—they did, after all, remove the embarrassing IG who insisted on making an issue out of it. What's more, to ensure that nothing so disturbing happens again, Michelle Obama is kindly donating the services of her chief of staff Jackie Norris, who was appointed as a senior advisor to the CNCS. In the absence of a CEO (the last appointee for that slot having withdrawn her name last month), Norris will have particularly great influence; and word is that Michelle Obama is taking the lead in the selection of a new CEO for CNCS as well. After all, we have to make sure that whoever runs this corporation is willing to toe the administration's line.

Which isn't how it's supposed to be, especially when it comes to IGs; these folks are supposed to be insulated from executive pressure, as Byron York notes:

Last year Congress passed the Inspectors General Reform Act, which was designed to strengthen protections for IGs, who have the responsibility of investigating allegations of waste, fraud and abuse within federal agencies, against interference by political appointees or the White House. Part of the Act was a requirement that the president give Congress 30 days' notice before dismissing an IG. One of the co-sponsors of the Act was then-Sen. Barack Obama.

The Act also requires the president to outline the cause for his decision to remove an IG. Beyond saying that he did not have the “fullest confidence” in Walpin, Obama gave no reason for his action.

There are two big questions about the president's actions. One, why did he decide to fire Walpin? And two, did he abide by the law that he himself co-sponsored?

According to Republican Sen. Charles Grassley, a strong advocate of inspectors general, Walpin received a call from the White House Counsel's office on Wednesday evening. Walpin was told that he had one hour to either resign or be fired. Senate sources say Walpin asked why he was being fired and, according to one source, “The answer that was given was that it's just time to move on. The president would like to have someone else in that position.” Walpin declined to resign.

Grassley fired off a letter to the president on Thursday saying that, “I was troubled to learn that [Wednesday] night your staff reportedly issued an ultimatum to the AmeriCorps Inspector General Gerald Walpin that he had one hour to resign or be terminated,” Grassley wrote. “As you know, Inspectors General were created by Congress as a means to combat waste, fraud, and abuse and to be independent watchdogs ensuring that federal agencies were held accountable for their actions. Inspectors General were designed to have a dual role reporting to both the President and Congress so that they would be free from undue political pressure. This independence is the hallmark of all Inspectors General and is essential so they may operate independently, without political pressure or interference from agencies attempting to keep their failings from public scrutiny.”

Ed Morrissey offers an interesting comment on this:

Congress gave IGs this level of protection precisely to avoid this kind of action by the White House. Obama doesn’t want IGs investigating his cronies and political allies, and the evidence for this is rather clear from the way the White House handled it. Instead of going to Congress, which the lawyers in the White House should have known was the correct procedure, they attempted to intimidate Walpin out of his job first. Apparently they didn’t have a good enough case for the proper procedure.

What we're seeing here is a clear case of Chicago-style cronyism and machine politics on the national stage. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone; I certainly saw it coming, and I was far from the only one. After all, this is how Barack Obama learned to do politics; this is the system that formed him. How else is he going to govern? How else would he behave? This is a man who has repeatedly said that his formative experience as a young man was as a community organizer—with ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), which includes among its activities political intimidation and massive voter-registration fraud for political and financial profit. ACORN doesn't practice transparency and accountability—why would we expect Barack Obama to do so? Why would we expect him to govern with a high level of integrity when the people and environments that shaped him as a politician don't reward integrity?

The bald truth is that we elected as president a Chicago machine politician and community organizer for a corrupt organization that considers fraud an appropriate tool for advancing its political agenda and filling its coffers, and we now have an administration run by people who are used to operating in those ways and on those principles; we should not expect any of them to be other than what they have been. Rather, we should expect national politics to look a lot like Chicago writ large—and so far, that's what we're seeing.

We're seeing an administration that admits that the $800 billion it demanded be spent as “stimulus" is already being misappropriated, misused, and even flat-out stolen—Joe Biden went so far as to say, “Some people are being scammed already”—and can't seem to be bothered to do anything about it. After all, the money is going to liberals, isn't it? And we're seeing an administration whose preferred response to the voter-registration fraud investigations going on against ACORN in numerous states is not to launch a federal investigation, but rather to give them billions of dollars. That's why Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) has introduced the Taxpayer Protection and Anti-Fraud Act,

which would restrict access to taxpayer dollars available through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) for groups that have been indicted for violations of state or federal laws.

“No one has a right to federal funds,” she said. “We have a fiduciary responsibility as members of Congress to establish criteria by which groups can gain access to federal dollars. I believe we should be able to raise the bar above indictment and not be restricted solely to convictions. This in no way denies someone their due process rights in court.”

Under her new bill a determination would be made on a “case by case” basis to determine whether or not a particular organization should be eligible for federal support, despite indictments.

The White House, predictably, is opposed; but it seems clear to me that the government needs to be careful about giving out money, and that if there's enough reason to issue an indictment against an organization, the government should at least be required to take notice of that indictment and evaluate it carefully before giving that organization so much as one red cent. (If you agree, sign the petition.) To the current administration, giving money to groups like ACORN is just business as usual; to my way of thinking, that's precisely the sort of usual business we need to do away with. The Chicago machine is bad enough in Chicago; there's nothing we can do now to keep it out of D. C., so we need to do everything we can to keep it from putting down roots and taking over. We're all Chicagoans now; let's do our best to make sure we don't stay that way.

The last hurdle for an Obama victory

I've been working for a while on a post, which I'm planning to get up later today, on what I expect out of an Obama presidency—and at this point, that pretty much is what I expect. I believe John McCain has a chance to win, but I don't believe he'll make his case forcefully enough to do so. Still, because there are significant unanswered questions about Barack Obama, he does have the ability to do so, and as a consequence, the McCain campaign has been starting to show some signs of life again. A lot of that is due to Sarah Palin; now that they've let her off the short leash to campaign on her own and do things like local TV interviews (that one's with a Tampa station), she's once again injecting some energy into the ticket. It also helps that the MSM are finally starting to notice some of the things the Obama campaign has been trying to keep behind the curtain, as with this CNN report on the relationship between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers:

This is an issue for which the Obama campaign has no good answer, as Mark Halperin's interview with Robert Gibbs shows. All Gibbs, a senior adviser to the Obama campaign, could do was try to answer questions Halperin wasn't asking and refuse to address the question he was asking: "Does Barack Obama think it's appropriate to have professional ties to an unrepentant terrorist?" Gibbs ended up (on a question about his favorite country-music lyric) with this: "I'll say it to you, Mark, but not to your listeners: 'Here's a quarter, call someone who cares.'"

Some might say that Sen. Obama's association with Ayers shouldn't matter; if the Obama campaign wants to take up that challenge, address it straight on, and make that case, more power to them. So far, though, they're refusing to do that, trying to duck the question and hope people just don't care; and as Peter Wehner notes, that's not a responsible approach.

Some may believe it should matter a lot, some may believe it should matter a little, and some may believe it shouldn’t matter at all. But that association, like the associations with the Reverend Wright and Tony Rezko, are part of Obama’s history and deserve to be discussed in a temperate, reasonable, factual way. Mark Halperin attempted to do just that. Team Obama’s evasive and clumsy response simply raises additional doubts about its candidate and his past. If there’s a simple explanation to Obama’s past associations, it would be helpful to hear what it is.

The thing is, as Sen. Obama knows full well and most people don't realize, for him, "just some guy who lives in my neighborhood" isn't nearly as dismissive as it sounds. He lives in Hyde Park, in a fairly tight-knit community of intellectuals who range from "very liberal" to "extremely liberal"; folks like the Obamas, Ayers, and Rashid Khalidi, the radical Palestinian advocate who lived in the neighborhood until 2003, formed a much closer group, a much stronger community, than the word "neighborhood" suggests to most people these days. The folks who live in the Obamas' neighborhood, including Ayers and Khalidi, have done a lot to shape them into the people they are.

Along with these associations goes another one, Sen. Obama's ties to ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now); this is a bit of an odd case, since he likes to talk about his time as a community organizer, but doesn't want people to know about the organization that would show them what that was really all about. That might have something to do with the fact that ACORN is being investigated for voter-registration fraud (we now have, for instance, 105% of the eligible population of Indianapolis registered to vote—and it's not just happening there, it's all over the place), which is particularly troubling since the Obama campaign has paid ACORN $800,000 for voter-registration efforts. You'd think his campaign would know that this is what they mean by "getting out the vote," given his long association with them. (Earlier, during his time on the board of the Woods Fund, that fund gave ACORN almost $200,000.) Then again, in Chicago, this is just standard operating procedure, so maybe it doesn't seem unreasonable to them. Even so, you can understand Sen. Obama and his campaign not wanting people to know what "community organizing" really looks like:

Acorn’s tactics are famously “in your face.” Just think of Code Pink’s well-known operations (threatening to occupy congressional offices, interrupting the testimony of General David Petraeus) and you’ll get the idea. Acorn protesters have disrupted Federal Reserve hearings, but mostly deploy their aggressive tactics locally. Chicago is home to one of its strongest chapters, and Acorn has burst into a closed city council meeting there. Acorn protestors in Baltimore disrupted a bankers’ dinner and sent four busloads of profanity-screaming protestors against the mayor’s home, terrifying his wife and kids. Even a Baltimore city council member who generally supports Acorn said their intimidation tactics had crossed the line.

Obviously, that sort of strategy isn't any visible part of Sen. Obama's run for the White House; but this isn't the image he wants people to have in mind when he talks about being a community organizer.

In a lot of ways, it seems to me, what the Obama campaign is really trying to do is to keep people from thinking about him as a Chicago politician, because everybody knows what that means. I think that's the big reason they want us all to forget about Bill Ayers, and Tony Rezko, and the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, and for that matter Richard Daley; because if you start thinking about him in terms of those people, and then throw in the questions about the legitimacy of a lot of the money the Obama campaign has raised (and their failure to answer those questions), then Sen. Obama stops looking like a new figure in politics and starts looking like nothing more than old-style Chicago corruption with a new face. I've said before that the McCain campaign needs to tie Sen. Obama to Nancy Pelosi (and also Harry Reid), and they do (and they've tried, at least somewhat, but so far without enough success); the other thing they need to do is tell the public that he's just another Chicago politician. Gov. Palin has started making that case; Sen. McCain needs to step up and drive it home.

HT for several of the ACORN links: The Anchoress

The crowning irony of a strange campaign

Paul Hinderaker of Power Line has brilliantly captured something I’ve been thinking about but hadn’t quite put together like this:

If it turns out to be the financial crisis that puts Barack Obama over the top in his quest for the White House, the irony will be difficult to overstate. First, the biggest driver of the financial crisis was not any conservative policy such as the kind of deregulation John McCain supports. Rather, as Diana West argues, the biggest driver was the “race-based social engineering” that “virtually created the sub-prime mortgage industry.” The implosion of that industry, in turn, triggered the present crisis.

The operative vision, then, was leftist and racialist, not free-market. As West puts it, the social engineers decided that not “enough” minorities had homes because not “enough” minorities were eligible for mortgages. The solution was to junk the bottom-line, non-racial markers of mortgage eligibility traditionally used by banks to distinguish between good and bad credit risks—steady employment, clean credit, and a down payment. Obama, then, is the beneficiary of the terrible failure of affirmative action style policies in the mortgage banking sector.

But the irony extends further. For it turns out that intimidating banks into making bad loans to minorities was a major activity of “community organizations” during the 1990s. And, according to Stanley Kurtz, Obama himself trained and funded ACORN activists who engaged in such intimidation.

Using a combination of intimidation and white guilt to plunge the banking industry into the crisis that brings a radical activist to power—even Saul Alinsky couldn’t have drawn it up this well.

A win-win rescue plan

The biggest mistake the federal government has made with respect to its economic rescue plan has been allowing it to be described as a "bailout." It isn't; rather, it's a plan for the government to interject necessary capital into our financial markets, thereby enabling them to get through this period without collapsing, by buying assets. The problem for the markets is that these assets have dropped in value, but that doesn't mean they have no value; they will generate income for taxpayers while they're in government hands, and assuming they're purchased at a reasonable price, it should be possible at some point in the relatively near future for the government to sell them at a profit. As such, this isn't really a case of the government giving away hundreds of billions of dollars; rather, it's a case of the government investing that money in order to bridge our economy across a difficult period and, ultimately, pay down some of the national debt.

That's why it's good news that a deal appears to be coming together for a clean plan—one that includes additional protections for taxpayers, but not diversions of money to left-wing interest groups; and that's why no less a conservative economist than Larry Kudlow says, "For taxpayers, the bank rescue plan is a win-win-win-win."

Update: a tentative deal appears to be in place despite the efforts of a handful of Democratic senators who crashed the negotiations and began making various additional demands, including the reinsertion of the slush fund for ACORN. Apparently, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid couldn't control his own troops, but the people who were actually empowered to put the deal together found a way to work around them; this was partly due to his opposite number, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, who used the power of her office to help get the deal done. If the deal holds and both parties are able to support it, a lot of the credit will also belong to John McCain, who played a significant role in bringing the House Republicans into the process. As Hugh Hewitt says, this deal represents "a reassuring return of purposeful legislating by the Congress."

Thirty years of economic history in ten minutes

The value of this video, imho, isn't the McCain/Palin commercial at the end, it's the sheer volume of source material, mostly from the MSM, that's referenced here in mapping out the trail that led us to this point; some of these stories I've seen and posted on (here, for instance), but others were new to me.

HT: The Anchoress, who has an excellent rant on the egregious behavior of the Democratic (and some of the Republican) “leadership” of Congress in this crisis:

I need to first opine that the Democrats yesterday blew my mind with their last-minute addition of 56 billion to the bail-out, their sneaky, slippery attempt to play political games with some of this money—directing it to ACORN (!) - and their subsequent attempt to lie and to blame the GOP—the president—anyone but themselves for not passing a bill which the GOP CANNOT BLOCK. We already know that Nancy Pelosi has no leadership skills except in spite and obstruction—we see she is completely out of her depths here, but Barney Frank’s behavior last night, and his disrespect toward the GOP and the President was particularly egregious in a time of crisis. He behaved like a trapped animal trying to distract the hunters toward anyone but him. Meanwhile Chuck Schumer is unusually, uncharacteristically silent; Barack Obama—except when mentioned by a press pretending he is leading—seems irrelevant to the process and to have no genuine ideas or input, or a desire to lead. All he seems capable of doing is whining about the debate while Rome falls about his ankles. McCain is quite right that the debates would be less urgent if Obama had done the Town Halls McCain had asked for—debates Obama said he’d have “anytime, anywhere” before refusing all of them. I say at this point SCREW the moderated debates that tell us nothing and insist that these candidates town-hall it and speak DIRECTLY to the people who will be most affected by all of this—that would be the ordinary folk. And do the same for Biden and Palin if they debate. And seriously, if there is a debate, it should be on economics, and energy just now, not foreign policy. Speaking of foreign policy, in the midst of all of this, Israel is asking the American president to give a green light to bomb Iran. Imagine having all that on your plate for one day! I don’t know that John McCain is the “perfect” man for the White House, but I’m pretty damn sure at this point that a man with 150 days experience in the Senate, no instincts to lead, a whiny disposition, and a frightening willingness to use the Justice Department as his private thug-corps is the guy we need in the Oval Office in there very serious times. And finally, to end the rant, Charles Krauthammer says we need a few good public hangings re this financial mess. I think—after seeing our “leadership” demonstrate that they haven’t the balls to lead without political cover—we should put them out of their miseries by demanding a few resignations from the leadership of BOTH parties, and both banking committees.

The Ayers/Obama campaign to radicalize education

Maybe this is why the Obama campaign tried to stop Stanley Kurtz from delving into the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge—they didn't want him telling people what the CAC was all about:

The CAC's agenda flowed from Mr. Ayers's educational philosophy, which called for infusing students and their parents with a radical political commitment, and which downplayed achievement tests in favor of activism. In the mid-1960s, Mr. Ayers taught at a radical alternative school, and served as a community organizer in Cleveland's ghetto.

In works like "City Kids, City Teachers" and "Teaching the Personal and the Political," Mr. Ayers wrote that teachers should be community organizers dedicated to provoking resistance to American racism and oppression. His preferred alternative? "I'm a radical, Leftist, small 'c' communist," Mr. Ayers said in an interview in Ron Chepesiuk's, "Sixties Radicals," at about the same time Mr. Ayers was forming CAC.

CAC translated Mr. Ayers's radicalism into practice. Instead of funding schools directly, it required schools to affiliate with "external partners," which actually got the money. Proposals from groups focused on math/science achievement were turned down. Instead CAC disbursed money through various far-left community organizers, such as the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (or Acorn). . . .

The Daley documents show that Mr. Ayers sat as an ex-officio member of the board Mr. Obama chaired through CAC's first year. He also served on the board's governance committee with Mr. Obama, and worked with him to craft CAC bylaws. Mr. Ayers made presentations to board meetings chaired by Mr. Obama. Mr. Ayers spoke for the Collaborative before the board. Likewise, Mr. Obama periodically spoke for the board at meetings of the Collaborative. . . .

Mr. Ayers's defenders claim that he has redeemed himself with public-spirited education work. That claim is hard to swallow if you understand that he views his education work as an effort to stoke resistance to an oppressive American system. He likes to stress that he learned of his first teaching job while in jail for a draft-board sit-in. For Mr. Ayers, teaching and his 1960s radicalism are two sides of the same coin.

Mr. Ayers is the founder of the "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." He believes teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system. (His teacher-training programs were also CAC funded.) The point, says Mr. Ayers in his "Teaching Toward Freedom," is to "teach against oppression," against America's history of evil and racism, thereby forcing social transformation.

The Obama campaign has cried foul when Bill Ayers comes up, claiming "guilt by association." Yet the issue here isn't guilt by association; it's guilt by participation. As CAC chairman, Mr. Obama was lending moral and financial support to Mr. Ayers and his radical circle. That is a story even if Mr. Ayers had never planted a single bomb 40 years ago.

The fact that Ayers did plant bombs, and remains unrepentant about doing so, only makes it more of a story; this is why, before a national audience, Sen. Obama and his media subsidiary have done their best to keep it out of sight. It's worth noting, however, that when he was just running in Chicago, Barack Obama offered his work running CAC as a major qualification for office: