US Action News

Transparency, CSPAN coverage of healthcare, and now READ HIS LIPS:MIDDLE CLASS TAXES Obama budgets spend 4 times as much as any in history and now to “reign in deficit” he wants to raise your taxes. Says he is “agnostic” on raising taxes.

On any given day or issue, and in every state and major city, odds are great that somebody out there is digging and exposing dirt the public has a right to know, whether its Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo Muckraker on the left or Michelle Malkin on the right, or one or a dozen of the thousands of “citizens journalists” (many of whom are unemployed, or formerly employed, traditional journalists).

“I think what you’re seeing morphing here — and it’s a concern to us — is you’ll see the concern related to somebody like a shoe bomber or the underpants bomber, the Christmas attack, or someone just strapping a backpack on them with weapons that are indigenous and blowing up, you know, walking into an airport,” Biden said.

In a January 29 report, they find that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began systematically eliminating climate measuring stations in cooler locations around the world. Yes, that’s right. They began eliminating stations that tended to record cooler temperatures and drove up the average measured temperature. The eliminated stations had been in higher latitudes and altitudes, inland areas away from the sea, as well as more rural locations. The drop in the number of weather stations was dramatic, declining from more than 6,000 stations to fewer than 1,500.

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has asked former U.S. President Bill Clinton to coordinate international aid efforts on Haiti.  Mr. Ban said Wednesday that he hoped Mr. Clinton, who he appointed as his Special Envoy for Haiti last May, would rally international assistance for the earthquake-stricken country. FULL STORY We hope that Mr. Ban is simply unaware that Bill Clinton’s history with Haiti is one of back room money deals, government corruption and human rights abuses. MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY, a Wall […]

The upshot here is that clintonista activity in Haiti was not the work of foreigners deeply committed to the well-being of a long-suffering people. Instead, it capitalized on the chance to make money using government power.

Now is time to break that habit. As one Haitian told me, if the country is ever to develop it needs “to rely less on cronyism and more on transparency and the vast resources of the Haitian expat community.” That would disqualify Bill Clinton.

Americans for Prosperity President Tim Phillips issued the following statement:

“With unemployment still near 10 percent and millions of American families struggling to get by, President Obama has proven how out-of-touch he is by announcing a new bureaucracy to try to prove what we should really be worried about is global warming. The new global warming service will cost millions of dollars we don’t have, and its real purpose will be to make the case for crushing new energy taxes and regulations that will impose trillions of dollars of costs on American families. Bad idea.”

The $3.99 billion comes from a congressional slush fund known as the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) program, which is part of the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s (HUD) $48.5 billion fiscal 2011 budget. CDBG grants, which are awarded to states and localities, pass indirectly to ACORN.

Disregarding criteria in the interest of “fairness”– in the sense of outcomes independent of inputs– adds to the handicaps of those who already have other handicaps, by lying to them about the reasons for their situation and the things they need to do to make their situation better.

Critics say the proposals would heavily favor unionized companies and significantly increase the cost and amount of time needed to award contracts. Estimates have the potential cost increase at 20 percent, adding about $100 billion a year to the federal budget.