Emails Leaked Yesterday Directly Contradict Obama’s Repeated Claim that Solar Funding Had “Nothing To Do With Politics”

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Yesterday, Restoring Liberty posted an interview between Obama and reporter Kyle Clark, where the President was asked a series of challenging questions — something he’s unaccustomed to from the press.

One of Mr. Clark’s questions involved the controversy over the multiple failed loans to “green” energy industries, such as solar. In response, Obama stated, “And these are decisions, by the way, that are made by the Department of Energy, they have nothing to do with politics.” This statement was consistent with what he and his administration have said before on the subject, that all green funding was based on merits, not political cronyism.

In a series of emails leaked to CompleteColorado.com yesterday, Obama’s claim that politics had “nothing to do” with green energy loans was directly contradicted:

In addition to the foregoing email showing that the White House was pushing to move Abound Solar forward – by applying pressure directly on the Department of Energy – an earlier email, also leaked to CompleteColorado.com, confirmed that the Department of Energy was operating under significant pressure to get the Abound Solar deal done:

Americans should be outraged over this latest White House deception. But, as much as the administration has been lying recently, who knows whether anyone will really even notice.

University Faculty Lurching to the Left: Now, Less Than 12% Conservative

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Academics, on average, lean to the left. A survey being released today suggests that they are moving even more in that direction.

Among full-time faculty members at four-year colleges and universities, the percentage identifying as “far left” or liberal has increased notably in the last three years, while the percentage identifying in three other political categories has declined. The data come from the University of California at Los Angeles Higher Education Research Institute, which surveys faculty members nationwide every three years on a range of attitudes.

Gauging how gradual or abrupt this shift is is complicated because of changes in the UCLA survey’s methodology; before 2007-8, the survey included community college faculty members, who have been excluded since. But for those years, examining only four-year college and university faculty members, the numbers are similar to those of 2007-8. Going back further, one can see an evolution away from the center.

In the 1998-9 survey, more than 35 percent of faculty members identified themselves as middle of the road, and less than half (47.5 percent) identified as liberal or far left. In the new data, 62.7 percent identify as liberal or far left. (Most surveys that have included community college faculty members have found them to inhabit political space to the right of faculty members at four-year institutions.)

The new data differ from some recent studies by groups other than the UCLA center that have found that professors (while more likely to lean left than right) in fact were doing so from more of a centrist position. A major study in 2007, for example, found that professors were more likely to be centrist than liberal, and that many on the left identified themselves as “slightly liberal.” (That study and the new one use different scales, making exact comparisons impossible.)

Read more from this story HERE.

$60k Per Family: Go On Welfare, Live Better Than Average Middle Class Family

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New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Services.

“According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795,” the Senate Budget Committee notes. “If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011.”

This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. “If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 (see table in this link),” the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.

Read more from this story HERE.

NBA Commissioner Stern: Obama “Is Not As Good As He Thinks He is” (+video)

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Robert Wolf, a financier and a personal friend of President Obama, serves on the President’s Council for Jobs and Competitiveness and interviewed [NBA Commissioner David] Stern for a Reuters TV segment, Impact Players. In the interview, Wolf heaps praise on the Democrat for his enthusiasm and rated Obama as an impressive player.

‘He’s a hoop junkie, I’ve played with him. I’ve seen NBA players play with him. There’s a lot of NBA players that support him,’ Wolf said.

But Stern proved he was no sycophant, interrupting the starry-eyed host by stating bluntly, ‘He’s not that good.’

Wolf couldn’t stand the criticism, ‘He’s pretty good, he’s got a nice little crossover,’ he insisted.

Stern continued to dismiss the complimentary appraisal of the president’s game, ‘He’s a lefty and goes the same way every time,’ he said. ‘I’m a loyal Democrat okay, a passionate Democrat. He’s not as good as he thinks he is,’ Stern added, showing that when it comes to basketball, political persuasion doesn’t count for much. Read more from this story HERE.

Here’s the Reuter’s interview with Wolf and Obama:

IRS Audits of Small Businesses Soar Under Obama

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President Barack Obama and Governor Mitt Romney continue to tussle over tax rates and deductions. Ignored, however, have been questions about tax collection and enforcement—tools presidents use to achieve their economic policy goals. Hit a wall ramming your tax hike or cut through Congress, simply increase or decrease tax enforcement and audits.

Under the Obama Administration, the Internal Revenue Service has placed small and medium-size businesses—the engines of job creation—in its auditing crosshairs.

According to IRS statistics, from 2009 to 2011, the coverage rate (number of audits as a percentage of total returns filed) for corporations with assets between $10 million and $50 million has increased 32 percent. The coverage rate for corporations with assets between $50 million and $100 million has increased at the same rate. Some businesspeople file individual returns, and those with incomes higher than $1 million have experience a 94 percent increase in their coverage rate, and a 29 percent increase in the actual number of exams since 2009. Those with incomes $200,000 and higher have seen a 36 percent increase in their coverage rate.

So, has ratcheting up audits on small and medium-size businesses produced more revenue bang for the IRS’s buck? Hardly.

Using 2011 IRS data, the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University found that audits of a company with assets between $10 and $50 million yielded $702 in recommended additional taxes per hour. For large corporations with assets of $250 million or more, the recommended additional taxes are $9,173 per hour. Yet while the coverage rates of companies with assets between $10 to $50 million are up 32 percent, rates for companies with assets of $250 million or higher are up just 7.4 percent.

Read more from this story HERE.

Experts: Hackers WILL Crack US Voting Systems, Changing Results

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With the U.S. presidential election turning into a dead heat, every vote is going to count, but if some hackers had their way, your vote won’t matter.

Hacktivist groups like Anonymous and LulzSec are growing more sophisticated every day with their use of new collaborative hacking techniques, such as “crowdsourcing.” Meanwhile, voter databases are increasingly being put online on state and local computer systems that are often insecure and administered by part-time IT personnel.

“If big, Internet-based companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, or Sony can fall to hackers, then, yeah, big government databases and local authorities who actually administer the election process can be hacked,” said [computer security expert Stephen] Cobb.

While the voter databases carry mostly innocuous information, such as name and address, a hacktivist group could create havoc in an election if they were to make changes to that database.

A hacker could, for example, switch the addresses of people on a voting roll, putting them in a different precinct than where they actually live. An error like this could be done close to the election and could very well not be noticed until the day of the election. By then it would be too late. That person would be ineligible to vote that day.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hearing Set For General Charged With Sex Crimes, Sodomy With Subordinates

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An Army brigadier general who served five combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan has been charged with forcible sodomy, multiple counts of adultery and having inappropriate relationships with several female subordinates, two U.S. defense officials said Wednesday.

The defense officials spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to provide details on the case.

Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair faces possible courts-martial on charges that include forced sex, wrongful sexual conduct, violating an order, possessing pornography and alcohol while deployed, and misusing a government travel charge card and filing fraudulent claims.

Sinclair, who served as deputy commander in charge of logistics and support for the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan, was sent home in May because of the allegations, the officials said.

The charges were announced at a brief press conference Wednesday at Fort Bragg, the sprawling Army base in North Carolina that is home to the 82nd Airborne. After reading a prepared statement, base spokesman Col. Kevin Arata refused to take any questions. Reporters were told all questions would have to be made in writing and that no response was likely to come until the following day.

Read more from this story HERE.

Bernie Sanders: Multinational Corporations Raping the US Treasury, Outsourcing Hundreds of Thousands of Jobs

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After a group of CEO’s wrote an opinion piece today in the Wall Street Journal about the country’s deficit and the need to rein in social security, medicare, and other programs, Leftist Senator Bernie Sanders went on the offensive:

There really is no shame. The Wall Street leaders whose recklessness and illegal behavior caused this terrible recession are now lecturing the American people on the need for courage to deal with the nation’s finances and deficit crisis. Before telling us why we should cut Social Security, Medicare and other vitally important programs, these CEOs might want to take a hard look at their responsibility for causing the deficit and this terrible recession.

Sander’s Senate website went on to note that

Many of the CEOs who signed the deficit-reduction letter run corporations that, in total, evaded at least $34.5 billion in taxes by setting up more than 600 subsidiaries in the Cayman Islands and other offshore tax havens since 2008. As a result, at least a dozen of the companies avoided paying any federal income taxes in recent years, and even received more than $6.4 billion in tax refunds from the IRS since 2008.

Several of the companies received a total taxpayer bailout of more than $2.5 trillion from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

Many of the companies also have outsourced hundreds of thousands of American jobs to China and other low wage countries, forcing their workers to rely on unemployment insurance and other federal benefits.

“In other words,” Sanders said, “these are some of the same people who have significantly caused the deficit to explode over the last four years.”

Sanders then documented the CEO’s and their companies’ outsourcing, tax credits, and other benefits in a document that can be seen here.

Although Sanders and Restoring Liberty have little in common, he has identified a real problem: we have increasingly powerful multinational corporations in the United States that have absolutely no loyalty to our Constitution or nation. Many are not only actively involved in subverting national sovereignty but are also milking the treasury through corrupt relationships with political insiders in DC. Crony capitalism is not free market economics.

Economist gives Obama ‘F,’ Romney ‘D-minus’ for Economic Literacy

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Donald J. Boudreaux is on a mission to correct economic nonsense.

A professor of economics at George Mason University and a blogger at Cafe Hayek.com, Boudreaux has been writing letters to the editor of various American publications for years in an attempt to correct economic fallacies promoted in articles he read. He has compiled the best of his letters in a new book, “Hypocrites & Half-Wits: A Daily Dose of Sanity from Cafe Hayek.”

While Boudreaux says the ”typical American is quite uninformed about economics,” he doesn’t rate the current major presidential contenders much higher on that score.

“Neither man gives much reason to believe that he is economically literate,” he said. “Judging only by what they say, though, I give the edge to Romney. He’d likely earn a D- in my Intro econ class; Obama likely would earn an F.”

Boudreaux doesn’t shower scorn on every member of the media or politician for being economically ill informed, however. He praises Fox Business Network’s John Stossel, the Wall Street Journal’s Mary Anastasia O’Grady and conservative Washington Post columnist George Will for their grasp of economic issues. As for politicians, he suggests Indiana Republican Gov. Mitch Daniels and Michigan Republican Rep. Justin Amash are the best of the lot.

Read more from this story HERE.

Gloria Allred’s Court Case: Romney Attorney Says, “Have At It”

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As we posted yesterday, Gloria Allred is involved in a Massachusetts court case seeking to unseal testimony Romney allegedly gave to help his friend, founder of Staples, Tom Stemberg.

The court hearing that was supposed to occur yesterday was rescheduled for this morning. According to the Examiner, Romney’s attorney, Robert Jones, isn’t fighting Allred’s application. In fact, he apparently told Judge Jennifer Ulwick that, although he wanted to review the testimony, he “didn’t anticipate objections to its release. Jones also requested the case proceed quickly, to avoid speculation.”

In an interview with Time Magazine, Romney’s attorney went even further stating, “This is a decades-old divorce case in which Mitt Romney provided testimony as to the value of a company. He has no objection to letting the public see that testimony.”

Romney’s friend, however, wants to keep the gag order in place.

TMZ suggests that what Allred is trying to get is evidence that Romney testified falsely about the value of his friend’s company so that his ex-wife would receive less in the divorce:

Multiple sources connected with the divorce tell TMZ … during Tom’s uber nasty divorce case with ex-wife Maureen, Mitt Romney gave a deposition and testified during the trial that Staples was worth virtually nothing. Romney testified that the company was worth very little and Tom was a dreamer and “the dream continues.”

Romney characterized the Staples stock as “overvalued,” adding, “I didn’t place a great deal of credibility in the forecast of the company’s future.”

Partly as a result of Romney’s testimony, Maureen got relatively little in the divorce, but we’re told just weeks after the divorce ended, Romney and Tom went to Goldman Sachs and cashed in THEIR stock for a fortune.

Even if Allred and TMZ’s sources are correct and the court releases the testimony, a decades old case compared to the expanding firestorm over Obama’s lies about Benghazi and his utter incompetency in failing to respond to the American defenders’ pleas for help is likely to offset any damage to Romney.