Madison Project

Not only did Freddie and Fannie cost taxpayers billions in bailout funds and destroy the housing market, now they are racking up expensive legal bills.  The Inspector General for the Federal Housing Finance Agency found that Freddie and Fannie shelled out $100 million to pay for the legal fees of three top executives.  They are being sued for allegedly using accounting tricks to inflate Fannie’s stock price and maximize their bonuses.  Taxpayers are being forced to foot the bill.

Earlier this month, government statistics from the BLS pegged unemployment at 8.3% and underemployment at 15.1% – trending down.  But Gallup is out with their latest survey results from mid February, and they paint a much different picture for the upcoming unemployment report.  Gallup found unemployment rising back to 9% and unemployment at 19% for February.  It will be interesting to see if the BLS reports a different trend next March.  If so, it makes you wonder why there is such a large discrepancy between the two surveys.

According to a new University of Texas/Texas Tribune poll, Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst leads Ted Cruz 38%-27%.  All the other challengers are far behind with 7% or less.  This is actually good news for the conservative star, Ted Cruz.  It is pretty clear that Dewhurst will be leading the pack for a while, due to his far superior name ID and organization.  However, with Cruz surging ahead of the pack for second place, he will easily deny Dewhurst the majority support required to avoid a runoff.  Once this becomes a two-man race -one moderate and one conservative – Cruz will have the edge.

As an aside, this poll shows that all the talk of  a horse race between Cruz and Leppert for 2nd place is overblown.  Liberal former Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert is way behind with just 7%.

Thought Democrats were done with recess appointments?  Think again.  Harry Reid is threatening to urge the president to make more recess appointments.  The problem is that the Senate is not scheduled to go into a real recess until the end of the year.  Then again, it didn’t stop them the first time.

Although the monthly increase was modest, the year-over-year CPI increased 2.9%.  That is unacceptable given how slowly the economy is growing.  Moreover, the increases were, once again, actualized in the food and energy sectors.  Those are the industries that are most heavily regulated and negatively effected by government interventions.

When Obama failed to pass his amnesty programs through Congress, he began implementing a form of administrative amnesty, in which he directed officials within the DHS to suspend some immigration enforcement laws.  Well, it appears that his hard work is beginning to bear some fruit.

Remember Solyndra? That was just the tip of the iceberg.  The Washington Post has uncovered 21 other green energy companies with ties to Obama that successfully secured grants, subsidies, and loan guarantees.  The total cost was $3.9 billion.  This is yet another reason why we need to close the departments of Energy and Commerce.  We need to stop picking winners and losers in the energy sector.  Sadly, this administration has a penchant for picking losers.

Making its way through cyberspace is a bold, brash and largely accurate depiction of the state of American government and politics.  Delivered on his last nightly broadcast, Judge Andrew Napolitano takes on the system in a five-minute rant about just how upside down the whole political process really is.  His conclusion?  It’s about them, not us.  “Them” refers to the elite class of elected officials, senior-level bureaucrats and political machinery who first created and now maintain a system in which people matter less and government matters more, or people I refer to as the Ruling Class.

Napolitano’s pseudo-endorsement of Ron Paul may be a bit off, but the general point is one all of us need to appreciate.   Ron Paul is not electable and some of his ideas, particularly on foreign policy, are outright dangerous.  But broadening Napolitano’s argument to suggest that we need to change the status quo beyond merely switching parties in control of Congress or the White House is a good dose of sense.

The two-party system hasn’t failed Americans.  A political culture that is too timid to challenge well-financed special interests has.  As Napolitano points out, both Republicans and Democrats, from Reagan to Bush have pledged to the American people to reduce the size of government and not only did they fail to keep that promise, all of them grew the size of government considerably.

Politicians of all stripes tell us that they want to cut programs, reduce regulations and scale back government’s impact on our lives because the majority of Americans have been and remain wary of government overreach.  They understand instinctively that too much government is bad for America and can destroy the promise of our nation.  However, those same politicians, due to financial benefit, donor interests or simply their own self-preservation, champion big government programs at the expense of our nation’s future. The media is complicit in the charade and the voters allow themselves to be led down this pathologically optimistic path toward the abyss.

In the end, there simply isn’t a real plan to reduce the size of government.  Obama doesn’t want to have one and no one else running has yet articulated one that will reverse our march toward a culture of dependency.  Conservatives fail to aggressively back policies to reduce entitlements while union bosses dump money into causes that perpetuate a downward spiral.

They’ve made the process about them and few if any among them has the guts or vision to tame the beast.   It’s been a long time since anyone really believed that government could actually do more with less and was willing to fight tooth and nail to make that a reality.

Napolitano will probably incur pounds of hate mail for stating that the Reagan revolution wasn’t really a revolution after all – but look at the numbers.  The so-called conservative movement in America roared into Washington a little more than thirty years ago pledging a smaller, more effective, more efficient government.  They vowed  to keep America strong and free by limiting government.  Any third grader can tell you that they’ve failed and the current path of government growth is unsustainable.

Andrew Napolitano’s rant may not be entirely the right message – but it’s a dose of something close to reality that we need more of in this country.  We’re in rough shape and it has the potential to get much worse.  If we aim to protect the America we love then we need to speak openly and plainly about the state of our nation.

Talk is cheap, America.  It’s time voters demanded a real plan for systemic change.  We can’t pay for our obligations now much less twenty years down the road.  I guarantee that the world will keep turning – and we will be stronger for it.

According to a new report by the Pew Center, about 24 million voter registrations are no longer valid, even though they are still on the rolls.  Among their ranks are 2.75 million people registered to vote in more than one state, 12 million with incorrect addresses, and 1.8 million who are deceased.  I’m wondering which party they vote for?

The Washington Times has an analysis of the Michigan Senate race.  The bottom line is that Debbie Stabenow is eminently beatable if we nominate the right Republican.  That man is Clark Durant.