All that really needs to be said about the lat­est redis­trict­ing / media fel­la­tio ses­sion held by leg­isla­tive Democ­rats in the state capi­tol today:

Those lead­ers did not advance sim­i­lar leg­is­la­tion in 2009-’10, when Democ­rats con­trolled all of state government.

The true sign of the intent of any “power-sharing” leg­is­la­tion is to ask those propos­ing it, would you be propos­ing it if you ran the place?  If that answer is “No,” then you pretty much have all you need to know.

Yes­ter­day the House of Rep­re­sen­ta­tive passed “HR 3567,” which after a read through pretty much for­bids those on wel­fare ben­e­fits and food stamps from using them at casi­nos, strip clubs and the like.  After all, you’re poor, you should be spend­ing your tax­payer hand­outs from the safety net on food, not the Cham­pagne Room.

Here’s Politico explain­ing the bill in more detail as it waits action in the Senate.

The Republican-led House is going after strip clubs – again.

Voted on Wednes­day evening was a bill that would ban wel­fare recip­i­ents from using their ben­e­fits at strip clubs, liquor stores and casi­nos. It’s the same mea­sure that was included in a broader pack­age pushed by House Repub­li­cans in Decem­ber to extend the pay­roll tax hol­i­day, and it over­whelm­ingly passed the House, 395–27.

When he intro­duced the bill in Decem­ber, Rep. Charles Bous­tany (R-La.) said the leg­is­la­tion was needed to address the “fraud­u­lent mis­use of funds” in the Tem­po­rary Assis­tance for Needy Fam­i­lies pro­gram, which give grants to states for them to develop their own wel­fare systems.

On the House floor Wednes­day after­noon, Bous­tany said he hoped it would send a mes­sage that the “House is seri­ous about this bipar­ti­san, bicam­eral reform becom­ing law, ensur­ing wel­fare funds are spent on fam­i­lies and chil­dren as intended.”

Repub­li­cans also hope that the so-called “strip club loop­hole” could be included in the ongo­ing nego­ti­a­tions to extend the pay­roll tax hol­i­day through the end of this year.

Accord­ing to a 2010 report in the Los Ange­les Times, casi­nos in Cal­i­for­nia allowed wel­fare recip­i­ents to access ben­e­fits, lead­ing then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzeneg­ger to ban the prac­tice days later. The amount accessed at casi­nos was about four-tenths of 1 per­cent of all wel­fare funds, while funds accessed at adult-entertainment venues were one one-thousandth of 1 per­cent, accord­ing to the state.

The mea­sure was brought up under sus­pen­sion of the rules, which means it needs a two-thirds vote of the House to pass, not a sim­ple majority.

As stated, this passed by a vote of 395–27.  The only one of the Wis­con­sin del­e­ga­tion to vote against (more on that later) was Milwaukee’s Gwen Moore.  Here’s part of her rant on the bill from video via Jim Hoft, the Gate­way Pundit.

No, she was one of the 10 who slipped out of the cham­ber and didn’t vote.

Ron Paul’s out of DC run­ning for Pres­i­dent. Not sure what Gwen’s excuse was for not vot­ing, given she had just made her speech right there on the floor of the cham­ber min­utes before the vote.

H/T to my friend Soren Day­ton, who posted this on Face­book last night.

Artur Davis is a for­mer Con­gress­man from Alabama.  He is a Demo­c­rat, he is black, and he was once opposed to Voter ID for the same rhetor­i­cal rea­sons most lib­er­als do.

He now doesn’t, and in an op-ed to the Mont­gomery Adver­tiser, he explains why.

I’ve changed my mind on voter ID laws — I think Alabama did the right thing in pass­ing one — and I wish I had got­ten it right when I was in polit­i­cal office.

When I was a con­gress­man, I took the path of least resis­tance on this sub­ject for an African Amer­i­can politi­cian. With­out any evi­dence to back it up, I lapsed into the rhetoric of var­i­ous par­ti­sans and activists who con­tend that requir­ing photo iden­ti­fi­ca­tion to vote is a sup­pres­sion tac­tic aimed at thwart­ing black voter participation.

The truth is that the most aggres­sive con­tem­po­rary voter sup­pres­sion in the African Amer­i­can com­mu­nity, at least in Alabama, is the whole­sale man­u­fac­ture of bal­lots, at the polls and absen­tee, in parts of the Black Belt.

Vot­ing the names of the dead, and the nonex­is­tent, and the too-mentally-impaired to func­tion, can­cels out the votes of cit­i­zens who are exer­cis­ing their rights — that’s sup­pres­sion by any light. If you doubt it exists, I don’t; I’ve heard the ped­dlers of these bal­lots brag about it, I’ve been asked to pro­vide the funds for it, and I am con­fi­dent it has changed at least a few close local elec­tion results.

There is no ques­tion that a voter ID law, in order to pass legal muster and in order to be just, must have cer­tain char­ac­ter­is­tics. It should con­tain excep­tions for the elderly or dis­abled who may not drive, and as a con­se­quence lack the most con­ven­tional ID, a driver’s license. There should also be a process for non-drivers to obtain a photo ID, and the process has to be cost-free, for the sim­ple rea­son that even a nom­i­nal finan­cial imped­i­ment to vot­ing looks and feels too much like a poll tax.

It is my under­stand­ing that the Alabama statute con­tains each of these excep­tions and a few oth­ers, includ­ing a pro­vi­sion for on-site polling offi­cials to waive the require­ment if they attest that they know the voter.

The fact that a law that is unlikely to impede a sin­gle good faith voter — and that only gives vot­ing the same ele­ments of secu­rity as writ­ing a check at the store, or obtain­ing a library card — is con­tro­ver­sial does say much about the raw feel­ings in our cur­rent pol­i­tics. The ugli­est, hard­est forms of dis­fran­chise­ment were prac­ticed in our life­times, and its still con­ven­tional rhetoric in black polit­i­cal cir­cles to say those times are on the way back. Wit­ness a last-minute auto­mated call to black vot­ers in the 2010 gen­eral elec­tion by state Sen. Hank Sanders, an inge­nious lawyer and a skill­ful leg­is­la­tor who knew bet­ter, but who also knew the attack would resonate.

It also does not help mat­ters that Alabama has become a state where in a gen­eral elec­tion, race is a pro­hib­i­tive indi­ca­tor of how 2.5 mil­lion reg­is­tered vot­ers rou­tinely behave. If in 2008 or 2010, you had observed a white Alabamian stand­ing in line in any precinct in the state, and you had guessed he or she was vot­ing Repub­li­can, you had an 80 per­cent chance of get­ting it right — there are few safer bets in pol­i­tics, other than the near 100 per­cent cer­tainty that an African Amer­i­can stand­ing in the same line is about to vote Democratic.

Given those racial real­i­ties, any effort to reg­u­late vot­ing by a Republican-dominated Alabama Leg­is­la­ture will draw inevitable scrutiny. And Alabama hardly boosts its cause by pass­ing an immi­gra­tion law that rat­i­fies every national jibe about us, and that has no real effect beyond putting a social fence around a cer­tain class of Lati­nos. But demand­ing integrity in vot­ing is nei­ther racist, nor raw party politics.

It is inter­est­ing that with a few excep­tions that reflect polit­i­cal pres­sures I under­stand pretty well, the new Alabama ID law still has not become that much of a polit­i­cal foot­ball. The same can’t be said in other states or at the national level. I was dis­ap­pointed to see Bill Clin­ton, a very good pres­i­dent and an even greater ex-president, com­pare voter ID to Jim Crow, and it is chill­ing to see the intim­i­da­tion tac­tics brought to bear on African Amer­i­can, Demo­c­ra­tic leg­is­la­tors in Rhode Island who had the nerve to sup­port a voter ID law in that very lib­eral state.

The case for voter ID, how­ever, is a good one, and it ought to make pol­i­tics a lit­tle cleaner and the process of con­duct­ing elec­tions much fairer. I wish I’d got­ten it right the first time.

Artur Davis, a for­mer U.S. con­gress­man from Alabama, now prac­tices law in Wash­ing­ton, D.C.

Given his rhetoric in this recent arti­cle on Voter ID to the Jour­nal Sen­tinel, one expects Dave Obey to read the riot act to his for­mer col­league any day now.

This must be the post-high school list.

Con­gres­sional Black Cau­cus Chair­man, “If Obama weren’t black, we’d be march­ing on the White House!”

Unhappy mem­bers of the Con­gres­sional Black Cau­cus “prob­a­bly would be march­ing on the White House” if Obama were not pres­i­dent, accord­ing to CBC Chair­man Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.).

“If [for­mer Pres­i­dent] Bill Clin­ton had been in the White House and had failed to address this prob­lem, we prob­a­bly would be march­ing on the White House,” Cleaver told “The Miami Her­ald” in com­ments pub­lished Sun­day. “There is a less-volatile reac­tion in the CBC because nobody wants to do any­thing that would empower the peo­ple who hate the president.”

I don’t hate the pres­i­dent.  What I do is find the guy com­pletely inept when it comes to the topic of eco­nom­ics.  He either has sur­rounded him­self with incom­pe­tents (pos­si­bly) or is so entrapped by his ide­o­log­i­cal belief that gov­ern­ment can and should be the source for eco­nomic growth he knows noth­ing else (more likely).

If it’s the lat­ter, than it’s actu­ally sort of sad that he’s done that to him­self.  Noth­ing in his back­ground seems to indi­cate to me that he’s either taken many, if any, Eco­nom­ics or Busi­ness Admin­is­tra­tion courses in his edu­ca­tion.  So for all we know, Obama may hon­estly believe the New Deal hon­estly ended the Great Depression.

Even my col­lege Eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sors didn’t whole­heart­edly agree on that premise.  My col­lege His­tory pro­fes­sors sure did though.

Half the fun of any alliance of con­ve­nience with com­plete anar­chists is know­ing that even­tu­ally they’ll stick a knife in your back because, well, they’re anarchists.

And only squares fol­low rules!

Bud­get oppo­nents are try­ing to stop the JFC from doing its work tonight, with pro­test­ers being car­ried out by police.

The dis­rup­tion started just as the meet­ing began, with three men who oppose Gov. Scott Walker’s plan to strip in-state tuition to UW Sys­tem and state tech schools for chil­dren of undoc­u­mented immi­grants com­man­deer­ing the front of the room as the ses­sion was called to order.

The men refused to leave or stop read­ing their state­ments, and at least one was car­ried out by state troopers.

After that, the flood­gates seemed to open, with pro­test­ers com­ing to the front of the room to berate the com­mit­tee mem­bers. Assem­bly Co-chair Robin Vos, R-Rochester, tried to con­duct the meet­ing over the dis­rup­tion, putting an omnibus motion on the table on shared rev­enue. His voice could barely be heard among the din.

Rep. Jen Shilling, D-La Crosse, tried to quiet the crowd.

“Please stop,” she shouted. “Fel­low Wis­con­sinites, in order for us to do our work tonight we need decorum.”

“We don’t want you to do your work,” one man shouted back. “We want to stop them (the Repub­li­cans) from doing their work.”

“This isn’t going to stop them,” Sen. Lena Tay­lor, D-Milwaukee, said.

Vos threat­ened to clear the room, but the dis­rup­tion has con­tin­ued as the LFB tried to explain the motion. Pro­test­ers are com­ing one by one to the front of the room and being car­ried out. Pro­test­ers chanted “police state” as their cohorts were car­ried out.

Dur­ing all of this, the Twit­ter feeds of var­i­ous Madison-area reporters were quite a hoot.  Pro­test­ers appar­ently were ver­bally shut­ting down every mem­ber of the Joint Finance Com­mit­tee, Repub­li­can and Demo­c­rat alike.

It’s going to be an inter­est­ing month for Joint Finance; espe­cially if that protest per­mit is granted by the Madi­son City Coun­cil for the tent city.

And up until now Leg­isla­tive Democ­rats naively thought the protest mon­ster was on their side; when in real­ity most of the hard­lin­ers in Madi­son were noth­ing more but pro­fes­sional agi­ta­tors wait­ing for the right moment to strike.  They may have just found it.

The true “Capi­tol Chaos” has begun, and it may get only worse.

Adden­dum: Good to see the email meme went out to all lib­eral parts of the Ched­dar­Sphere about last night to urge for “Calm.”  Yes guys, con­vince your­self that this is just an iso­lated inci­dent and a bunch of bad apples.  Except of course, that it’s a bunch of bad apples who are there every day, with noth­ing to do, led by a nut­case on a Segway.

Your move­ment is very close to being hijacked if you don’t wake up.

The lib­eral eco­nomic mind at work…

Okay, so killing a train project no one wanted in the State of Wis­con­sin — BAD

Chang­ing a report inside the White House to force an off-shore drilling mora­to­rium which could end up killing 32,000 jobs in the Gulf Region where they want to drill for oil and nat­ural gas — GOOD

The White House rewrote cru­cial sec­tions of an Inte­rior Depart­ment report to sug­gest an inde­pen­dent group of sci­en­tists and engi­neers sup­ported a six-month ban on off­shore oil drilling, the Inte­rior inspec­tor gen­eral says in a new report.

In the wee hours of the morn­ing of May 27, a staff mem­ber to White House energy adviser Carol Browner sent two edited ver­sions of the depart­ment report’s exec­u­tive sum­mary back to Inte­rior. The lan­guage had been changed to insin­u­ate the seven-member panel of out­side experts – who reviewed a draft of var­i­ous safety rec­om­men­da­tions – endorsed the mora­to­rium, accord­ing to the IG report obtained by POLITICO.

“The White House edit of the orig­i­nal DOI draft exec­u­tive sum­mary led to the impli­ca­tion that the mora­to­rium rec­om­men­da­tion had been peer-reviewed by the experts,” the IG report states, with­out judg­ment on whether the change was inten­tional attempt to mis­lead the public.

The six-month ban on off­shore drilling installed in the wake of the Gulf of Mex­ico oil spill became a major polit­i­cal issue over the sum­mer, as Gulf State law­mak­ers and indus­try groups charged the White House with unfairly threat­en­ing thou­sands of jobs. House Repub­li­cans have said they plan on inves­ti­gat­ing the cir­cum­stances sur­round­ing the mora­to­rium when they take power next year.

Rep. Bill Cas­sidy (R-La.) and sev­eral other Gulf State mem­bers of Con­gress asked the Inte­rior IG to inves­ti­gate the mora­to­rium and the peer review claim.

“The inspec­tor general’s find­ing that the blanket-drilling mora­to­rium was dri­ven by a pol­i­tics and not by sci­ence is bit­ter news for fam­i­lies who, because of it, lost their jobs, sav­ings, and way of life,” Cas­sidy said Tues­day. “Can­di­date Obama promised that he would guided by sci­ence, not ide­ol­ogy. If that were true, at least 12,000 jobs and 1.8 bil­lion dol­lars of eco­nomic activ­ity would have been saved on the Gulf Coast.”

The Inte­rior Depart­ment per­son­ally and pub­licly apol­o­gized to the panel mem­bers in June for the insin­u­a­tion they pub­licly sup­ported the drilling moratorium.

Dur­ing my HUD days, I had to read a few IG reports.  So, I can under­stand the “edit” argu­ment the White House is making…to an extent.  But how, dur­ing the lev­els and lev­els of review — even inside the IG’s office — no one spoke up and said, “Hey, I have an issue with this change.” is sim­ply amazing.

By let­ting that change go unchal­lenged, the White House inten­tion­ally turned the Inte­rior Department’s IG report from being an inves­tiga­tive doc­u­ment to a polit­i­cal one.

Oops, wrong def­i­n­i­tion of “free” I sup­pose. (h/t Rob Port at SayAnything)

Tele­vi­sion sta­tion own­ers are mobi­liz­ing against a new Demo­c­ra­tic cam­paign finance bill that would force them to slash prices for many polit­i­cal advertisements.

The National Asso­ci­a­tion of Broad­cast­ers con­firmed late last week that it will oppose pro­vi­sions of the DISCLOSE Act, an attempt by House and Sen­ate Democ­rats — and a hand­ful of House Repub­li­cans — to roll back ele­ments of the Supreme Court’s deci­sion in Cit­i­zens United v. Fed­eral Elec­tion Com­mis­sion.

The high court’s deci­sion tossed out most restric­tions on polit­i­cal ad buys on tele­vi­sion by cor­po­ra­tions, trade asso­ci­a­tions and non­profit groups.

The bill would require tele­vi­sion, cable and radio out­lets to offer the Repub­li­can National Com­mit­tee, the Demo­c­ra­tic National Com­mit­tee and other polit­i­cal party com­mit­tees the same deeply dis­counted price — the “low­est unit rate,” in indus­try jar­gon — that tele­vi­sion sta­tions are now required to offer only to polit­i­cal can­di­dates. Although adver­tis­ing rates fluc­tu­ate dra­mat­i­cally, vet­eran media buy­ers esti­mate that can­di­dates’ cam­paigns often pay two-thirds of the retail price that reg­u­lar tele­vi­sion adver­tis­ers such as McDonald’s and Coca-Cola pay.

“NAB is review­ing the bill,” spokesman Den­nis Whar­ton said in a state­ment April 29. “We would have con­cerns with pro­vi­sions in the leg­is­la­tion that would expand the low­est unit rate dis­counts now afforded fed­eral can­di­dates to polit­i­cal par­ties and polit­i­cal committees.”

The upcom­ing fight over polit­i­cal adver­tis­ing rates also will offer a first look at NAB Pres­i­dent Gor­don H. Smith in a full-scale lob­by­ing bat­tle. The for­mer Ore­gon sen­a­tor, a mod­er­ate Repub­li­can, replaced GOP lob­by­ist David Rehr last year.

In the Sen­ate, the bill is spon­sored by Rules and Admin­is­tra­tion Chair­man Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Demo­c­ra­tic Sens. Russ Fein­gold (Wis.), Ron Wyden (Ore.), Michael Ben­net (Colo.) and Evan Bayh (Ind.). The House ver­sion is spon­sored by Demo­c­ra­tic Con­gres­sional Cam­paign Com­mit­tee Chair­man Chris Van Hollen (Md.) and Repub­li­can Reps. Wal­ter B. Jones (N.C.) and Michael N. Cas­tle (Del.).

Con­sul­tants who spe­cial­ize in pur­chas­ing air­time for polit­i­cal cam­paigns were split on what the bill may mean for TV sta­tion own­ers. If it passes, media con­sul­tant Doc Sweitzer said, sta­tions would bleed rev­enue. “It would effec­tively be a gov­ern­ment man­date to lose income,” he said.

It has often been the dream of the cam­paign finance lot to pretty much give — for noth­ing — air­time to politi­cians on tele­vi­sion.  This new bill seems to be a run-around on that.

Won­der if this sud­denly starts some ill-will towards Russ Fein­gold when for once, his quest to silence all speech but his and other incum­bents run­ning for re-election effects the bottom-line local affil­i­ates in Green Bay, Madi­son, La Crosse, Mil­wau­kee, and other mar­kets in Wisconsin.

As I was read­ing this at the Amer­i­can Spec­ta­tor, I kept ask­ing myself one thing: How would the MSM be react­ing if the Bush White House even dreamed of doing this?

The eco­nomic report released last week by Health and Human Ser­vices, which indi­cated that Pres­i­dent Barack Obama’s health care “reform” law would actu­ally increase the cost of health care and impose higher costs on con­sumers, had been sub­mit­ted to the office of HHS Sec­re­tary Kath­leen Sebe­lius more than a week before the Con­gres­sional votes on the bill, accord­ing to career HHS sources, who added that Sebelius’s staff refused to review the doc­u­ment before the vote was taken.

“The rea­son we were given was that they did not want to influ­ence the vote,” says an HHS source. “Which is actu­ally the point of hav­ing a review like this, you would think.”

The analy­sis, per­formed by Medicare’s Office of the Actu­ary, which in the past has been iden­ti­fied as a “non­po­lit­i­cal” office, set off alarm bells when sub­mit­ted. “We know a copy was sent to the White House via their leg­isla­tive affairs staff,” says the HHS staffer, “and there were a num­ber of meet­ings here almost right after the analy­sis was sub­mit­ted to the secretary’s office. Every­one went into lock­down, and peo­ple here were too scared to go pub­lic with the report.”

In the end, the report was released sev­eral weeks after the vote — the review by the secretary’s office report­edly took less than three days — and bore a note that the analy­sis was not the offi­cial posi­tion of the Obama administration.

Here’s pretty much what we now know after this report:

1) The White House and HHS knew the bill was going to blow up costs, and couldn’t release this report to the pub­lic because its facts would have derailed their leg­isla­tive agenda.  This is actu­ally worse than the whole “WMD” meme from the Left in the lead-up to the Iraq War.  At least with the WMD intel­li­gence, other nation’s had sim­i­lar facts and find­ings that the CIA and NSA had.  In this case, they actu­ally had the counter-intelligence telling them oth­er­wise, and acted anyway.

Maybe those sug­gest­ing Health Care Reform was Obama’s Iraq War were truly on to some­thing after all…

2) Every­thing the White House and other Democ­rats said in the final week up to pas­sage was a lie.

3) Any Demo­c­rat who par­roted the White House talk­ing points like a Cham­pion, is either a) Igno­rant, b) A Pup­pet, c) An Ide­o­logue d) Also Lying, e) All of the Above.

The act of bury­ing the report; for short-term leg­isla­tive gain, is going to end up cost­ing many Demo­c­ra­tic Con­gress­men and Sen­a­tors their jobs in the long-term.  The Obama White House must be so proud.

The “things being uncov­ered, now that it’s passed” just keep get­ting bet­ter and better.

Con­gress may be fined tens of mil­lions of dol­lars a year under its own health-care law, in part because the bill dumps mem­bers of Con­gress and their staffs from their cur­rent health-care plans.

But no one really knows for sure what the bill does, not even the experts. For instance, exactly who qual­i­fies as an “employer” — and there­fore is sub­ject to fines up to $3,000 per employee — is unde­fined in the bill.

If Con­gress were sub­ject to a $3,000 fine for each of its employ­ees, it would need to shell out approx­i­mately $50 mil­lion each year to Uncle Sam. Congress’s research arm, the Con­gres­sional Research Ser­vice (CRS), infor­mally con­firmed the pos­si­bil­ity to Repub­li­can aides.

Kath­leen Sebe­lius, Pres­i­dent Obama’s top health-care cab­i­net offi­cial, will be respon­si­ble for estab­lish­ing most of the details of how the law is imple­mented. Many Repub­li­cans who have raised the issue of Congress’s fin­ing itself believe Sebe­lius likely will exempt Con­gress with a reg­u­la­tion nar­rowly defin­ing “employer,” for instance.

Still, the pos­si­bil­ity of the fines, and the uncer­tainty sur­round­ing them, are draw­ing heck­les from the health-care law’s critics.

“That’s the irony — here we may be the first major employer in the coun­try to be fined for not pro­vid­ing proper health insur­ance for our employ­ees,” Rep. Dan Lun­gren, Cal­i­for­nia Repub­li­can, told The Daily Caller while laugh­ing. “Isn’t that con­trary to the very premise of the bill?”

State and local gov­ern­ments may be on the hook for the fines, but unlike for mem­bers of Con­gress and their staffs, the health-care bill doesn’t specif­i­cally dump them from their health-care plans.

If HHS Sec­re­tary Sebe­lius does indeed exempt Con­gress while the pri­vate sec­tor takes a hit, oh what insan­ity will surely follow.