President Barack Obama will raise money in early October with a Missouri businessman whose company benefited from a $107 million federal tax credit to develop a wind power facility in his state.
Tom Carnahan, a scion of Missouri’s most prominent Democratic political family, is listed on Obama’s campaign website as a host of a $25,000-per-person fundraiser to be held in St. Louis on October 4.
His energy development firm, Wind Capital Group, was helped by a sizable credit authorized in the stimulus, for an energy project in northwest Missouri.
Republicans argue that it’s inappropriate for the Obama campaign to raise money from a donor who has benefited directly from the Recovery Act.
Missouri Republican Party executive director Lloyd Smith compared the situation to the Solyndra affair, in which the Obama administration reportedly rushed federal support to a green-energy firm that subsequently collapsed.
“At a time when Barack Obama is under fire for steering hundreds of millions of dollars in stimulus funds to a failed company linked to a major campaign donor, it is stunning that he would come to Missouri and raise money with another recipient of stimulus cash,” Smith said in a statement to POLITICO. “Sadly, Missourians have come to expect this kind of pay-to-play from the Obama administration. November 2012 can’t come soon enough.”
The Obama campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
Do you know how to stop this? I’ll tell you. Put money in the hands of individual workers and businessmen who have to work to earn their money and are more careful with how it gets spent. When you raise taxes on individuals and businesses, big-spending liberal politicians use that to get elected, and to get re-elected. Democrats are also the party of taxpayer-subsidized voter fraud.
In a series of secretly recorded audio tapes believe to have been recorded last March and obtained by CBS News, an Arizona gun dealer and an ATF agent involved with ATF’s “Fast and Furious” operation worried about the unraveling scandal.
The tapes were made just weeks after CBS News broke the story in February.
The conversations were recorded by Andre Howard who ran the Lone Wolf Trading Company. Howard’s gun dealership had been cooperating with the ATF in “Fast and Furious.” At least two of his weapons were sold to a straw buyer before turning up later at the murder scene of Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry. Hope MacAllister, the ATF agent heard in the conversations, was the lead case agent.
The ATF’s controversial “Fast and Furious” operation allowed thousands of weapons to be smuggled into Mexico and into the hands of drug cartels. Agents involved describe it as “letting guns walk.”
Among other things, Howard and MacAllister expressed concerns about ATF Special Agent John Dodson, who by that point had gone public about “Fast and Furious” in an exclusive interview with CBS News correspondent Sharyl Attkisson.
They also spoke of their concerns that Senator Charles Grassley (R-IA) was investigating, with Agent MacCallister saying of her superiors in Washington, DC, “they’re gonna say have to say Grassley you’re just gonna have to sit your a– down.”
These recordings are important because MacAllister has never spoken publicly about her involvement in the operation and its fallout and Howard’s role as a gun dealer cooperating with the ATF placed him in position to see “Fast and Furious” firsthand . The audio recordings contain new revelations about the guns involved, and ATF’s efforts to respond to the breaking scandal. The tapes were turned over to Congressional investigators and the Inspector General in connection with their probe into “Fast and Furious.”
Why would the Democrats facilitate selling dangerous firearms to Mexican drug cartels? Arms that would later be used to murder American border patrol agents? Could it be that the Obama administration wanted to create a gun “crisis” that would allow them to impose draconian gun control laws? The left hates the idea that criminals might get hurt while committing crimes, and that means that law-abiding people shouldn’t be allowed to hurt the nice criminals. Never mind self-defense and the second amendment.
Now, another question. Why is it that only CBS News and the blogs are covering this story? Why can’t I hear about this story on the Comedy Channel and on MSNBC and on CNN? Are Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Chris Matthews and Rachel Maddow real journalists? Don’t they report on all the news?
You can listen to the tapes and read the transcripts at the CBS News web site.
As they filed out of the Capitol Thursday evening, a few Republican House members told the WEEKLY STANDARD what they thought of President Obama’s address to Congress on jobs:
Ben Quayle (R-Ariz.): “For somebody who keeps saying we should get beyond politics, that was a pure political speech tonight. It was unfortunate.”
Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.): “It was, um, I didn’t hear any new ideas. The only new idea from him that I was encouraged by is corporate tax reform. Broad based, lower rates. That’s something we called for in our budget, we’ve always wanted to do. So perhaps some room for common ground there…I lost count of all the straw men up there. I mean, I was losing count at about 14 or 15. But we’re used to hearing that. I think the last third of it was pretty much straw men…All the ideas in the front that he ticked off were the same things that he put in the stimulus that he proposed earlier, which are more Keynesian-style ideas that have already sort of proven to fail. I would rather we pass ideas that have proven to work rather than double down on ones that have proven to fail.”
Tom Price (R-Ga.): “I felt it was desperate. I felt he was desperate and I though the speech was desperate…He mocked many of the proposals that we’ve put forward, and none of it was productive or constructive to the political discourse. Somehow, he’s incapable of appreciating that many of the things that he says actually thwart positive political discourse.”
Diane Black (R-Tenn.): “There was something new. The president was saying we should look at Medicare, Medicaid. First time I ever heard that…What he does in there is like what my kids do. They take my credit card, they spend, and then they want me to pay for it.”
Renee Ellmers (R-N.C.): “At one point, he said, some of you believe if we cut regulation and cut spending, that’s going to be enough. I couldn’t have applauded harder. I believe that very much…His approach is not very pro-business. When he talks about Warren Buffett, that’s a little far-removed from the average businessperson. If any of those guys want to send in more tax dollars to the treasury, they can. They can just write the check.”
Michael Grimm (R-N.Y.): “I thought it was a little bit of a campaign speech…Part of it was a little bit demeaning. The president sometimes can be a bit arrogant.”
Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.): “It’s a rehash. I think this is the stimulus part deux or, I guess when you’re talking about multiple stimuluses, stimuli. You could call it the stimuli speech.”
Obama is just a petulant child. One minute, he is in his ranting mood and has a tantrum against the responsible grown-ups. The next minute he wants to borrow the car keys. We elected a 14-year old to be President. One who has no experience as a job creator in the private sector. He is out of his league.
In his remarks tonight, President Obama argued that his jobs proposal would create more jobs for teachers. He went as far as to say laying off teachers…”has to stop”.
But since 1970, student enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools has increased just 7 percent, while public elementary and secondary staff hires have increased 83 percent. Moreover, in the 1950′s, there were approximately 2.36 teachers for every non-teacher in a school district. Today, in our nation’s school systems, that ratio is closer to 1 to 1. So every teacher in the classroom has an administrative counterpart in your local public school district. That is a tremendous strain on state budgets. But it is also a huge boon the education unions.
President Obama’s call to spend more precious taxpayer dollars to “prevent teacher layoffs” may do more to inflate schools’ non-teaching rosters than to retain teachers.
On a per-pupil basis, federal spending on education has nearly tripled since the 1970′s. And those who have benefited the most from this profligacy aren’t the children sitting in the nation’s classrooms. No, the increase in federal education spending (and commensurate increase in Washington’s involvement in local schools) hasn’t led to improvements in academic achievement, to increased graduation rates, or even to a narrowing of the achievement gap. It hasn’t served to improve outcomes for children, but it has propped-up the public education jobs program that too often aims to meet the needs of the adults in the system, not the children it was designed to educate.
And more:
As expected, tonight President Obama called on taxpayers to send their hard-earned money to the federal government so that Washington can pour that money into public school construction. In an attempt to boost job growth, the president suggested spending billions on school infrastructure projects to “modernize 35,000 public schools.”
Since President Obama came into office, spending on public education has skyrocketed:
Education budget in 2008: $59.2 billion
Education budget in 2011: $69.9 billion
Department of Education “stimulus” award (Spring 2009): $98 billion
“Edujobs” public education bailout (Summer 2010): $10 billion
And state and local school construction spending has also seen significant increases.
By some estimates, inflation-adjusted school construction spending has increased 150 percent in the last two decades. And unfortunately, profligacy and waste are the norm. Remember the $500 million RFK high school in Los Angeles, built last year after a California bond referendum was enacted? There are certainly schools in ill-repair, but this maintenance should be a local concern. Washington should not be in the business of school window repair, updating facilities, or repainting buildings. Schools don’t need increased federal funding for school repairs; they need more flexibility with funding to be able to use dollars for needs they consider pressing.
The president’s proposal to funnel more taxpayer dollars into school construction has both constitutional and pragmatic problems. School construction has historically been – and should remain – the job of states and localities. Federal forays into school construction have been rare and indirect. Federally-funded school construction is also a terribly expensive way to build schools: Washington-funded jobs must pay prevailing wages, increasing costs on average by 22 percent.
In calling for federally-funded school construction, President Obama is once again supporting Washington overreach in education. But he’s also behind the game in terms of the direction school policy is trending. As states and localities begin embracing online learning – and as education shifts to a world outside of the walls of physical school buildings – President Obama is pushing to subsidize the old model. The administration might think “school construction” polls better than other government “jobs” projects, but it’s just as destined to be a waste of taxpayer money, and a public policy failure.
Robert Stacy McCain is a Herman Cain supporter. Wouldn’t it have been great to see Herman Cain debating Obama? The job creator against the community organizer?
WINTERY KNIGHT 