In a weekly newsletter NRO columnist and author Jonah Goldberg had this to say regarding the Jerry Sandusky Penn State scandal:

“My father always used to say that the biggest source of corruption isn’t money, but friendship. He’s right. Go offer a newspaper editor or politician $10,000 to hire someone. Most won’t even consider it. But if a friend asks for a favor, the answer is much more likely to be yes. Friends strike bargains with friends, even though they could get a better deal elsewhere. Friends forgive mistakes in business because that’s what friends do.

Not all such transactions are corrupt so much as part and parcel of how civil society works. Besides, because friendship goes both ways, paying a premium for the trust and reliability of such relationships might actually be a good business decision. Which is simply to emphasize the fact that corruption is a very complicated thing, with variables and considerations not immediately apparent to those looking from the outside in. Still, tribal, familial, and social allegiances most certainly can be corrupting, in large ways and small. After all, in many circumstances we’re more likely to lie to our friends than to strangers. “I loved your column!” “I read your book!” “Your daughter’s beautiful!”

Anyway, this is a long way of saying I don’t think there’s any amount of money — nor any job — that would cause me to turn a blind eye to something like this. But I could see it taking more effort and time to do the right thing if it were a friend or a loved one. I told one of my best friends yesterday that if it was him, I’d give him 24 hours to turn himself in or to commit suicide. I’d like to believe that’s true. I know I never want to be put to the test.

Here’s the former CEO of American Express, Harvey Golub, expressing a less than complimentary opinion on the business savvy of the Obama Democrats:

Meanwhile, [President Obama] he’s ignored entitlement reform, retarded the development of our energy resources, and added new layers to our regulatory burden. He’s also increased the uncertainty inherent in an already dysfunctional and perverse tax code, added trillions to our national debt, spent taxpayer money ineffectively and inefficiently, tried to micromanage the economy, and acted as an incompetent venture capitalist by investing in “green jobs” and high-speed rail. This administration routinely grants and withholds favors by substituting its judgment of what is valuable and good for that of the people. What stimulus spending can do to create jobs is entirely temporary, whether in the public or private sector, and is rooted only in a political calculus.

Well said, sir.

It takes a lot of hubris to believe in the concept of central planning. The idea that a bunch of government “experts” could plan strategies and execute decisions in the free market better than the collective choices of 300 million American consumers — plus millions more globally — takes, to quote Hillary Clinton, a willing suspension of disbelief.

And yet here we are with a trifecta of failures in which the government thought it could determine winning companies.

Let’s start with General Electric, which of course began its crony capitalism relationship with government long before the Obama Democrats too power, but nonetheless continues to receive mountains of taxpayer subsidies based on its “Green” technologies. These are technologies — such as their hyperexpensive light bulbs, wind turbines that provide nothing if the wind isn’t blowing, and absolutely Orwellian carbon credit trading schemes –  which no consumer seems to really want and which wouldn’t survive in an unsubsidized environment.

It is particularly galling, given that the former GE CEO is now Obama’s job czar, and that GE is one of those favored government companies that enjoys paying $0 in taxes — this even as Obama, from the other side of his mouth, attacks “millionaires and billionaires” attempting to do the same. The reason? Because it provides American consumers with things they don’t want and produced with their tax dollars.

But as said, subsidies are as old as the apostles. The next two examples are far more sinister.

First, Soylendra: Despite repeated warnings from private auditors like PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP that the Soylendra solar-panel manufacturing company was a a lousy investment, the Obama administration nonetheless assisted it in receiving $535 million in federal loan guarantees. All that taxpayer money is now gone, Soylendra having declared bankruptcy in early September, and raided by the FBI a few days later.

ABCNews reported that “the White House closely monitored the Energy Department’s deliberations over a $535 million government loan to Solyndra,” and ultimately backed the loan despite warnings from White House employees. Worse, the Obama administration promised that should the company fail they would work to recoup losses of private investors — but we taxpayers are screwed. This is something that should be investigated, says former prosecutor Andrew McCarthy:

As Andrew Stiles reported here at NRO, Republicans on the Oversight and Investigations subcommittee say this arrangement ran afoul of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. This law — compassionate conservatism in green bunting — is a monstrosity, under which Leviathan, which can’t run a post office, uses your money to pick winners and losers in the economy’s energy sector. The idea is cockamamie, but Congress did at least write in a mandate that taxpayers who fund these “investments” must be prioritized over other stakeholders. The idea is to prevent cronies from pushing ahead of the public if things go awry — as they are wont to do when pols fancy themselves venture capitalists.

As if that weren’t bad enough, a key Obama supporter named George Kaiser was also involved in Soylendra, and “contributed $10,000 to the Urban Health Initiative, a notorious program created by now-First Lady Michelle Obama while she was at the University of Chicago Medical Center.” Oh, yeah, nothing to see here.

Rubbing Obama’s nose in this steaming, smelly mess, Forbes Magazine terms it a “teachable moment.” Says Forbes:

The fact that federal loan guarantees were even necessary for Solyndra tells us that few, if any, lenders thought that giving the firm money was a very good idea.  Given the fact that lenders who bet “right” on companies with strong prospects but insufficient capital are lenders who will make money, we can rest assured that hundreds if not thousands of bank loan officers took a long, hard look at Solyandra and said … no thanks.  Are we to believe that President Obama knows more than all of these profit-hungry capitalists about Solyndra’s real prospects in global solar energy markets?  That President Obama has even stronger incentives than private investors to ensure that money parked in this company or that is money well spent? To ask these questions is to answer them.

Next, Michelle Malkin has been all over a similar Obama embarrassment called LightSquared — a company that is crafting an open wireless broadband network that, regrettably to our national security, overpowers our commercial and military satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) devices.

Where this becomes scandalous is because the White House attempted (but failed) to curb the damning testimony of U.S. Air Force Space Command four-star general William Shelton and National Coordination Office for Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing director Anthony Russo.

General Shelton had noted earlier this year: “Within three to five miles on the ground and within 12 miles in the air, GPS is jammed by [LightSquared’s] towers. . . . If we allow that system to be fielded and it does indeed jam GPS, think about the impact. We’re hopeful we can find a solution, but physics being physics, we don’t see a solution right now.”

Despite industry-wide protests, the firm somehow received fast-track approval for a special FCC waiver that grants LightSquared the right to use wireless spectrum to build out a national 4G wireless network on the cheap. Ken Boehm, of the conservative watchdog National Legal and Policy Center in Washington, D.C., summed up the deal earlier this year: “LightSquared will get the spectrum for a song, while its competitors (e.g., AT&T and Verizon) have to spend billions.”

… LightSquared used to be known as “Skyterra.” In 2005, Obama put $50,000 into the speculative firm — raising eyebrows even among his water-carriers at the New York Times. The paper noted that Skyterra’s principal backers at the time of the investment included four Obama “friends and donors who had raised more than $150,000 for his political committees.”

One of those pals who urged him to buy stock in Skyterra was George Haywood, a major Skyterra investor and campaign donor who chipped in nearly $50,000 to Obama’s campaigns and to his political action committee, as did his wife.

Coincidentally, Obama bought his Skyterra stock the very same day the FCC “ruled in favor of the company’s effort to create a nationwide wireless network by combining satellites and land-based communications systems.” The Times reported that immediately after that morning ruling, “Tejas Securities, a regional brokerage in Texas that handled investment banking for Skyterra, issued a research report speculating that Skyterra stock could triple in value.”

Coincidentally, Tejas and its chairman, John J. Gorman, were also major backers of Obama — flying him in a private plane for political rallies and pitching in more than $150,000 for his campaign coffers since 2004. Obama sold his stock at a loss in November 2005, but his political relationship with the company was cemented. In 2009, billionaire hedge-fund manager Philip Falcone — whose firm Harbinger Capital Partners is reportedly under investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission for market-manipulation abuses — acquired Skyterra.

Coincidentally, Falcone, his wife, and LightSquared CEO Sanjiv Ahuja have contributed nearly $100,000 between them to the Democratic party during critical White House meeting periods and negotiations over LightSquared’s regulatory fate.

Oh, and coincidentally, there’s $6 billion earmarked for a “public safety broadband corporation” buried in the Obama jobs proposal just as LightSquared pushes into that market, too.

It’s all just one strange quirk of timing, Team Obama shrugs. Except, as we all should know by now: There are no coincidences in Chicago-on-the-Potomac. Just an endless avalanche of quids, quos, and taxpayer woes.

I think it goes without saying that were Obama’s last name Bush or Cheney the term “LightSquared” could be well known in American households.

There are lies, there are damned lies, and there’s Barack Obama. His presidential address to the nation regarding the BP Deepwater Horizon oil leak was filled with some big fibs.

Starting with:

“But make no mistake:  We will fight this spill with everything we’ve got for as long as it takes. .. And we will do whatever’s necessary to help the Gulf Coast and its people recover from this tragedy.”

If the Obama administration is doing “whatever’s necessary,” then why has he not granted a waiver for the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, also known as the Jones Act, “a protectionist law that requires vessels working in US waters be built in the US and be crewed by US workers”? The federal head of the cleanup effort, National Incident Commander Admiral Thad Allen, has previously stated that there hasn’t been a need for this? Really? Tell that to the people of the Gulf coast. As Fox’s Brian Wilson explains, “But that [the foreign assistance currently used] is largely technology transferred to US vessels. Some of the best clean up ships – owned by Belgian, Dutch and the Norwegian firms are NOT being used.”

Even the typical cheerleader for liberal Democrats, Time Magazine, agreed that the refusal for help was bizarre. Also hurting Obama is that President George W. Bush waived the Jones Act during Katrina response, which perhaps explains why a recent poll of Louisianians found that Bush had higher ratings than Obama, including among 31% of Democrats polled.

It gets worse — the Dutch, for example, made a pair of offers of assistance. First to build the very sand berms along the Gulf coast like those Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindel requested from Obama. And second, sophisticated ships designed to filter oil from water via huge vacuum arms. Both offers were initially rejected. It’s, of course too late for the berms. The oil has arrived. But now, more than 50 days after the accident, the Obama administration has accepted the Dutch equipment, which works by sucking in oily water and pumping it back into the ocean after filtering.

What was the holdup? Apparently the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) “regulations do not allow water with oil to be pumped back into the ocean. If all the oily water was retained in the tanker, the capacity of the system would be greatly diminished because most of what is pumped into the tanker is sea water.” Greg Yardale comments, “Get it? The EPA wouldn’t let them suck lots of oil out of the ocean because they would be returning small amounts of oil into the ocean.” Wow, and these bureaucratic types want to run your health care too!

And they said Bush was incompetent? Here are some numbers as to what the Dutch could have done on day 3 of the leak: “One ton of oil is about 7.3 barrels. 5,000 tons per day is 36,500 barrels per day. 4 skimmers have a capacity of 146,000 barrels per day. That is much greater than the high end estimate of the leak. The skimmers work best in calm water, which is the usual condition this time of year in the gulf.”

That’s just the first lie. Here’s the next:

Obama: “After all, oil is a finite resource.”

It is? Can he offer some proof? The truth is not only can no scientist prove that oil is finite, but scientists aren’t even sure regarding the source of oil. Decades ago some scientists theorized it came from billions of years of dead things, thus “fossil fuels.” But that’s been largely disproved, particularly through a NASA discovery that found a moon of Saturn, Titan, made up of LPG, or liquefied petroleum gas. Gee, were there dinosaurs on Titan too? Hardly, say the discoverers. Titan, after all, averages temperatures of negative 180-degrees Centigrade.

“We have determined that Titan’s methane is not of biological origin, so it must be replenished by geologic processes on Titan,” Hasso Niemann of the Goddard Space Flight Center told the NYT in 2005. If it’s geologic on Titan, it could be geologic on Earth as well. And if it’s geologic, that means oil could be perpetually produced for as long as the Earth’s core stays molten. (And even if it did come from dead things, are we to believe we used up 4+ billion years of dead things in just a century or so?)

No, rather the Peak Oil theory is based on the same scare-tactic politicization of science, central economic planning, and artificial scarcities as the  population disaster of Thomas Malthus, or the current Climate Change fearmongering.

Back to the Fibber in Chief:

Obama: “We consume more than 20 percent of the world’s oil, but have less than 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves.  And that’s part of the reason oil companies are drilling a mile beneath the surface of the ocean — because we’re running out of places to drill on land and in shallow water. “

This might be the most brazen of his lies, because the above statements are only true due to the direct interference by government and environmental extremists. The truth is we have no idea what our proven oil reserves are because the government and environmentalists forbid our energy companies the ability to explore and drill to the extent the market demands! The only reason these companies are attempting to drill 5,000 feet deep is because the government and environmentalists deny them the ability to drill in shallower water or on land. One word: ANWR!

More Obama: “For decades, we’ve talked and talked about the need to end America’s century-long addiction to fossil fuels.  And for decades, we have failed to act with the sense of urgency that this challenge requires.  Time and again, the path forward has been blocked — not only by oil industry lobbyists, but also by a lack of political courage and candor.

Here’s where the Crony Corporate machine — the strange bedfellows of government and corporation — effectively lie to even liberals: Those who drool at the mouth to get off oil and coal in order to stick it to the petroleum companies don’t realize that those same companies are poised to make grand profits off of Cap-and-Trade and similar schemes designed to punish carbon output and push “renewable” energy.

Indeed, BP’s head, Lord Tony Hayward, wsa critical in formulating the Cap-and-Trade system. BP Chairman Lamar McKay supports it. As does Shell President Marvin Odum, and ConocoPhillips CEO James Mulva (very Seinfeld, btw). As did former Enron Chairman Kenneth Lay, whose subordinates “buried a an Enron-funded study that dismissed the notion that calamity could come of global warming!” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

But why?

Because, as Michael Morris, the CEO of the largest national coal-burning utility, American Electric Power, told Forbes Magazine (without shame), the way the carbon trading schemes are organized the company gets to pass the entire cost of the regulation on to the consumers, padded for additional profit through “administrative” fees. The more it costs them the more they make. And the more you pay. [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Added Exelon’s John Rowe, “Exelon would gain simply because a price on carbon would raise the cost of production for fossil-fuel-powered electricity. Most of that would be passed on to customers, raising the wholesale price of power. Exelon’s revenues would rise, but its costs wouldn’t.” [Power Grab, by Chris Horner]

Despicable, eh? All enabled by your president. It’s to be expected. The insurance companies helped craft his health care legislation, just as the “Trusts” of yesteryear co-authored legislation with Teddy Roosevelt regarding trust-busting and industrial regulation. They do this because the large companies can handle the costs while the nimble smaller companies must pack it in. You see, the one thing large corporations fear more than government is free-market competition. In this way, the federal government picks the winners and losers. By the way, the American consumer is always the loser.

Let’s wrap it up.

Obama:  “Countries like China are investing in clean energy jobs and industries that should be right here in America.”

Ah, the Democrats are always such Chinaphiles, aren’t they? Actually, this is just a half-truth by Obama. The full truth is that we import most of our oil from Mexico and Canada. In other words, our neighbors are happy to drill and sell us oil in territories where we could be doing the same. The full truth is that China is importing massive quantities of oil from countries like Iraq. Chinese companies (i.e., state-owned) are also attempting to purchase European-owned oil facilities operating in the Gulf of Mexico. China intends to drill in the Gulf even if we don’t.

This begs the question: If it’s good enough for one billion Chinese…

Here’s a hoot, the U.S. Justice Department announced it will begin a fishing expedition to see if there was any criminal activity in the British Petroleum’s (BP) Deepwater Horizon oil spill.

“If we find evidence of illegal behavior, we will be extremely forceful in our response,” Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. said in New Orleans after viewing spill damage, which he described as “heartbreaking to see.”

Hmmm. A good place to begin investigation might be President Obama’s energy secretary, Steven Chu. While at the Energy Biosciences Institute Mr. Chu received, according to a rare honest piece of reporting at the New York Times, “the bulk of a $500 million grant from the British oil giant BP to develop alternative energy sources.”

But who would dare insinuate that the Obama energy secretary was a little too cozy with BP and the oil industry? That’s crazy talk!

Dr. Koonin, who followed Dr. Chu to the Energy Department and now serves as under secretary of energy for science, is recused from all matters relating to the disaster because of his past ties to BP, said Stephanie Mueller, an Energy Department spokeswoman.

Dr. Chu, she said, “has never had a financial interest in BP.” [except $500 million...]

Ms. Mueller added, “No one in their right mind would suggest that Dr. Chu is beholden to oil companies, especially since he’s spent the past decade working to cut America’s dependence on oil and move us toward a clean-energy economy.” [thanks to a payment from BP for... 500 million dollars!]

Well I can think of 500 million reasons why someone might be in a right mind to suggest that Mr. Chu is beholden to oil companies. After all, has the brilliant Ms. Mueller not stopped to consider that the oil companies just might be the very same companies who one day also own the “alternative” energies? Or has that possibility not crossed her brilliant Beltway intellect?

Did you know that the Department of the Interior’s Mineral Management Service the Summer before the Deepwater accident gave the rig an award for safety, or that BP was “one of three finalists for a federal award honoring offshore oil companies for “outstanding safety and pollution prevention.”"

Better yet, perhaps Eric Holder could investigate President Obama, since the prez himself is the #1 recipient of money from BP’s political contributions in 20 years! Wait, wait, I thought oil was evil. I thought corporations were evil. Isn’t that what the Left always tells us? But they’ll take their money like the rest of us, eh?

Now I write all this tongue in cheek, of course, although the ties between our energy secretary and BP are quite interesting, aren’t they?

But the hypocrisy here is staggering, truly embarrassing, absolutely extreme. That is, almost as bad as the hypocrisy of say the lack of coverage of Iranian police bashing in the skulls of students during a pro-democracy march to, say, I don’t know, the overblown and totally slanted coverage of Israeli soldiers defending themselves during an attempt to search a ship of militant, crowbar- and knife-wielding “peace activists” who clearly had a single goal of provoking a violent response.

Were we to replace the words Obama and Chu with Bush or Cheney and BP with Haliburton or, heck, just keep the word BP, and you can bet dollars to navy beans that the press would be screaming about how our government is beholden to oil and corporations, and how secretive this all was, and how evil Cheney was, and how the Justice Department investigation would be like the fox guarding the hen house, and Bush was playing golf while Rome burned, and what a sham it was that the federal government had been passing out safety awards to BP, etc., ad nauseum.

One last word. As Charles Krauthammer has pointed out, why not investigate why BP needs to drill 5,000 feet under water. Isn’t that the first question? Why do we feel it necessary? What have these lawsuit-happy environmentalists and legislators bought us by blocking oil drilling on shore, or gee, at least closer to shore. In most ways, as we’re now learning, drilling 100 miles off shore is far more environmentally dangerous than drilling 5 miles off shore. Got a leak 5 miles off (and a couple hundred feet down)? No problem. Divers can fix that. Got a leak 5,000 feet down? You’re screwed. Much harder to fix. Did I mention that the current leak is 5-G.D.-thousand feet down? Thanks envirowackos!

[ABC's The Note] ABC News’ Rick Klein reports: The chairman of the Obama administration’s Recovery Board is telling lawmakers that he can’t certify jobs data posted at the Recovery.gov Web site — and doesn’t have access to a “master list” of stimulus recipients that have neglected to report data.

Super bang-up job there! Imagine how efficient they’ll be at running health care!

The Washington Examiner is keeping track, complete with a Google Map, of the 700,000 and counting jobs ‘not really created or saved’ by the Stimulus.

Some highlights include:

Stetson University claimed to have created or saved 483 jobs with a grant of only $193,469. (which would mean employees make $400 a year).

A month-long roofing project that received less than $30,000 in stimulus funds and involved six workers was erroneously reported as creating 450 jobs.

Teach for America reported that a $2 million grant created or saved 1,425 jobs. In fact, all of the jobs created were accounted for by another grant.

The California State University system received $268.5 million in stimulus funds and claimed that the money allowed them to save over 26,000 jobs or half its workforce. But when pressed, the California State University system admitted they weren’t really going to lay off half their workforce, and that in fact few or none of these jobs would have been lost without the stimulus. “This is not really a real number of people,” a CSU spokesman said. “It’s like a budget number.”

Here’s John Stossel. All American taxpayers should share his sentiments:

I’ve written before about the conceit of politicians who dole out taxpayers’ money and then expect that people worship them for the help they give. Occasionally, a politician says it outright, like in this short video of Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell that came out today:

“State workers – I’ve arranged for them to get a $15,000 loan with no interest…… they should put a statue of me up on their mantleplace,” Rendell says.

Why should they get statues for spending YOUR money?

A similarly revealing incident happened last month, when Maxine Waters shouted at and shoved fellow Democrat and House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey. His offense? Refusing to approve funding for the “Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center.”

Give me a break. Lets limit the power of politicians, and start thanking the people who actually create the wealth that the politicians freely give away.

Count it. Paragraph one, two, three, four, five.

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye’s staff contacted federal regulators last fall to ask about the bailout application of an ailing Hawaii bank that he had helped to establish and where he has invested the bulk of his personal wealth.

The bank, Central Pacific Financial, was an unlikely candidate for a program designed by the Treasury Department to bolster healthy banks. The firm’s losses were depleting its capital reserves. Its primary regulator, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., already had decided that it didn’t meet the criteria for receiving a favorable recommendation and had forwarded the application to a council that reviewed marginal cases, according to agency documents.

Two weeks after the inquiry from Inouye’s office, Central Pacific announced that the Treasury would inject $135 million.

Many lawmakers have worked to help home-state banks get federal money since the Treasury announced in October that it would invest up to $250 billion in healthy financial firms. But the Inouye inquiry stands apart because of the senator’s ties to Central Pacific. While at least 33 senators own shares in banks that got federal aid, a review of financial disclosures and records obtained from regulatory agencies shows no other instance of the office of a senator intervening on behalf of a bank in which he owned shares.

Inouye (D-Hawaii) declined a request for an interview but acknowledged in a statement that an aide had called the FDIC to ask about Central Pacific’s application. Inouye said he was not attempting to influence the outcome. The statement did not address Inouye’s personal role in the inquiry, including whether he directed the aide to make the call or knew at the time that it had been made.

The liberal media pile-on over the Sanford and Ensign extra-marital affairs aren’t just a collaboration of double standards, they’re off base too.

Consider the New York Times’ Gail Collins:

I’m thinking it’s time for the Republicans to apologize for putting us through the Clinton impeachment. We seem to have pretty well established that sexual stone-throwing is a dangerous sport.

Gov. Sanford and Sen. John Ensign (R, NV) may be cheating idiots who didn’t have the decency to divorce their spouses first, but they weren’t found guilty by a federal judge for perjury and then use their office to obstruct justice — as did Clinton.

That’s the point: despite the historic revisionism by the liberal base the rationale behind the Clinton impeachment wasn’t that he was an immoral anathema to family values, but that he lied during a sworn deposition in which his prosecutors were establishing a pattern of abuse during a sexual harassment case. Once more the “feminists” at the NYTs and their ilk show they are only feminists when it’s politically convenient for them.

Here’s another point: the brazen double-standard liberals follow in cases of politicians sexual misconduct. This shouldn’t be “The Long Winter” for Republicans, as today’s Washington Post puts the outing of Sanford and Ensign. Family values and such topics are no more dead today than the day before. It’s not Republicans who are smeared, but Sanford and Ensign, as they should be. The difference is that these men are officially outcasts in the eyes of fellow Republicans, whereas Democrats who do the same are excused by their apologists in the liberal base — who instead just hope and pray for the next Republican to foul up in order to even the score.

Whether the party plank is family values, free-market economics, limited government (this being Gail Collin’s biggest beef with Mark Sanford), or other, when our Republican leaders let us down the answer isn’t to disqualify the issue, it’s to purge the offending politician from the ranks.

In light of the Obama administration’s decision to ram down the throat of the American consumer Utopian fuel-efficiency standards I found the following excerpt from Mark Levin appropriate:

The modern liberal believes in the supremacy of the state, thereby rejecting the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the order of the civil society, in whole or part. For the modern liberal, the individual’s imperfection and personal pursuits impede the objective of a Utopian state. And this, modern liberalism promotes what French historian Alexis de Toqueville described as a soft tyranny, which becomes increasingly more oppressive, potentially leading to a hard tyranny (some form of totalitarianism.) As the word “liberal” is, in its classical meaning, the opposite of authoritarian, it is more accurate, therefore, to characterize the modern liberal as a Statist. The founders understood that the greatest threat to liberty is an all powerful central government, where the few dictate to the many.

Levin additionally quotes James Madison in Federalist #51: “you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself. ”

And so here we are now, where the Statists pursue legalized theft in the name of “public good, public interest, fairness, equality, safety,” etc. But who decides what is good for the public or in the best interest of the consumer?

As Levin reminds us, “there are nearly 1000 federal departments, agencies, and divisions that make laws and enforce them”:

“The Statist as also constructed a fourth branch of government — an enormous administrative state — which exists to oversee and implement his policies. It is a massive yet amorphous bureaucracy that consists of a workforce of nearly 2 million civilian employees. It administers a budget of over $3 trillion a year. It turns out a mind numbing number of rules that regulate energy, the environment, business, labor, employment, transportation, housing, agriculture, food, drugs, education, etc. even the slightest human activity apparently requires its intervention: clothing labels on women’s dresses, cosmetics ingredients, and labeling. It even reaches into the bathroom, mandating showerhead flow rates and allowable gallons per flush for toilets.”

Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, at 1400 pages, is just 1/53rd the size of the Federal Register. But the point isn’t just the size of the federal government so much as how it ignores the United States Constitution and abuses its power.

And so the last reminder from Levin: the point of the American Revolution was to diffuse and decentralize authority among many imperfect men who ran government by enumerating federal power, separating powers both within the federal government in between it and the state and local governments.these were the very basis of the Constitution, he signed to isolate and limit the possibility of even soft tyranny.

Yep, President Obama’s “Car Czar” is involved in a pay-for-play scheme. Oh, but none dare call it a bribe…

[WSJ] Steven Rattner, the leader of the Obama administration’s auto task force, was one of the executives involved with payments under scrutiny in a probe of an alleged kickback scheme at New York state’s pension fund, according to a person familiar with the matter.

A Securities and Exchange Commission complaint says a “senior executive” of Mr. Rattner’s investment firm met in 2004 with a politically connected consultant about a finder’s fee. Later, the complaint says, the firm received an investment from the state pension fund and paid $1.1 million in fees.

The “senior executive,” not named in the complaint, is Mr. Rattner, according to the person familiar with the matter. He is co-founder of the investment firm, Quadrangle Group, which he left to join the Treasury Department to oversee the auto task force earlier this year. Neither Mr. Rattner nor Quadrangle has been accused of any wrongdoing. Mr. Rattner did not return calls for comment.

What’s the difference between a Republican and a Democrat? When a Democrat is accused of corruption the mainstream media just ignores the story.