The Western Center for Journalism reports,

”That thing was greased,” as they say in Chicago, referring to a political phenomenon known as “being handled before table.”  Well, bloggers are asking, was it?  Word now coming out reveals just two days after Secretary of State Brian Kemp gave Barack Obama the green light to appear on Georgia election ballots, the Department of Energy awarded Kemp’s state an eye popping $8.3 billion loan guarantee  to begin construction on two nuclear plants.

In the face of “a shocking dissent by Nuclear Regulatory Commission CHAIRMAN Director Gregory B. Jazcko,”  four other commissioners approved awarding Southern Energy the first nuclear construction licenses since 1978, just one year before the tragedy of the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster put a hold on new U.S. nuclear plant construction. . . .

While other viable nuclear construction projects await approval, the Georgia project got the green light in spite of the NRC director’s vehement objection as well as “12 sizeable construction change order requests (and) long-running site-specific design and fabrication problems (which) have confounded Westinghouse and its lead contractor for more than two years.”

Pro-life website LifeNews.com is attacking a new ad by the Ron Paul campaign which exposes some uncomfortable news for pro-lifers who support Rick Santorum. The ad (video below) simply exposes the fact that Santorum—a warhawk who describes himself as “consistently pro-life”—”even hooked Planned Parenthood up with a few million bucks.”

The statement in the Paul ad is absolutely true, and yet LifeNews’ headline reads “Paul Ad Wrongly Implies Santorum Supports Planned Parenthood.” The article then tries to defend Santorum’s vote, pointing out the vote was part of  ”an overall budget bill that funded the federal government that contained Title X funding,” and then showing that he has been a staunch supporter of funding abortions through PP.

Neither the headline nor the defense is acceptable. The ad does not argue or imply Santorum directly supports abortion, it just proves that he will compromise on the issue given the right circumstances. And it is an unavoidable fact that, for all of his boastful rhetoric about consistency on moral values, Santorum will flip-flop Mitt Romney style even here.

For example, although Santorum told Fox News “Look, I’m not a big fan of Title X, that is Planned Parenthood. No, I want to defund Planned Parenthood,” he turned right around and literally wore his funding vote as a badge in another interview. Tom Woods exposed this nonsense here. Santorum in his own words:

“Just look at my record,” he said smiling, “I was criticized by governor Romney . . . or maybe it was Congressman Paul’s campaign for voting for contraception! That I voted for funding for, I think it was Title X, which I have voted for in the past, that provides for free contraception through organizations even like Planned Parenthood.”

So in his own words, he voted to fund Planned Parenthood and that is exactly and all that the Paul ad states. What makes Christians and pro-lifers uncomfortable with this is not just the hypocrisy involved in voting to support, materially, PP while claiming to be “consistently” pro-life, but more importantly the fact that all funds are fungible. Giving PP funds for the purpose of contraception is just as bad as directly funding abortion because the money for other purposes simply frees PP’s other funds to be used for abortions. This is true for all federal funding in all areas of government.

And this is not just my argument, or Paul’s argument, it is Santorum’s own argument in yet another instance:

“I can’t imagine any other organization with its roots as poisonous as the roots of Planned Parenthood getting federal funding of any kind.”

Can’t you, Rick? Because YOU voted to give PP just that: federal funding, and the most general kind of federal funding there is, directly from Congressional approval.

How in the world can anyone square his vote with his own words?

So while LifeNews may find it ethical to report that Paul’s ad “Wrongly Implies Santorum Supports Planned Parenthood,” I’m not sure how else the giving of federal funds can be defined other than ”Support.” Sure, Mr. Santorum may indeed oppose abortion, but due to this vote it is not wrong to imply or even to state openly that he has supported Planned Parenthood. That may be difficult to admit for some people, but it is a clear and inescapable fact.

Did you know that defense spending in this country is nearly double what we get told every year? According to a report issued by a conservative at the group Center for Defense Information, the Defense Department’s reported total of $524.5 billion barely scratches the surface of the real spending—which approaches $1 trillion. The Atlantic comments,

A Republican, numbers-compulsive defense wonk at the Center for Defense Information, Winslow Wheeler, has published a great summary of what America’s defense budget ‘really’ is.

Wheeler offers a chart of the budget figures for both 2012 and 2013 — starting with what is called the “DOD Base Budget (Discretionary)”.  He then adds line items from different accounts throughout other parts of the budget that really should be part of what is considered defense and security — including the odd factoid that the Department of Defense and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issue different figures of what the DOD Base Budget really is — with the Pentagon shorting what it gives the media by about $6 billion.

You see, direct spending on “defense” is one thing, but wars and rumors of wars don’t just come and then disappear. There are very substantial related and lingering costs. You have to pay many of those soldiers into perpetuity: the injured ones, the sick ones, the retired ones, the VA hospitals, etc. (In fact, America’s push toward a total Welfare State first began with subsidies to Union soliders and then ballooned from there. See my articles here and here.) Then there are the additional burdens on diplomacy and foreign relations that result from meddling in other nations’ affairs. Bullying and cajoling ain’t as cheap as one might think. But there’s more yet. Consider the fact that the U.S. has to borrow huge sums in order to fund its military prowess to begin with. That means interest into perpetuity, and this is a significant sum according to Wheeler’s report. Plus, all that poking, prodding, peeping, fondling, and fingering done by TSA agents isn’t free either (as one might be tempted to think). No, we have to pay for those thrills. Put it all together and it looks like this (totaling $986.1 billion for 2012 alone):

Eighty-three plaintiffs representing over 300,000 organic farmers have joined together seeking a court ruling against big-Ag giant Monsanto. The groups are seeking legal protection from the threats and abuse of patent infringement lawsuits in which they can currently be held liable even when organic crops are cross-contaminated without the organic farmer’s knowledge or consent.

The case,  Organic Seed Growers & Trade Association, et al. v. Monsanto, or OSGATA v. Monsanto for short, saw a small advance earlier this month when a judge agreed to hear arguments in a motion to dismiss by Monsanto. Osgata.org reports,

It was standing room only as family farmers from around North America filled Federal Court Judge Naomi Buchwald’s courtroom in Manhattan on Tuesday, January 31. The topic was the landmark organic community lawsuit OSGATA et al v. Monsanto and the oral argument Monsanto’s pre-trial motion to dismiss which it filed last July. . . .

Daniel Ravicher of the Public Patent Foundation, lead lawyer for the Plaintiffs said,

“The judge graciously permitted both parties to raise all the points they wished in a session that lasted over an hour. While Monsanto’s attorney attempted to portray the risk organic farmers face from being contaminated and then accused of patent infringement as hypothetical and abstract, we rebutted those arguments with the concrete proof of the harm being suffered by our clients in their attempts to avoid such accusations. The judge indicated she will issue her ruling within two months.  We expect she will deny the motion and the case will then proceed forward. If she should happen to grant the motion, we will most likely appeal to the Court of Appeals who will review her decision without deference.”

In the following clip, Mr. Ravicher explains the situation and the case at a local organic expo. What he says near the end is highly important: Monsanto has the money and the connections in Washington; we must rely on grass roots and word-of-mouth to protect ourselves from their extraordinarily protected encroachments on the natural and organic farming world. Please forward this to a friend.

Here’s geke.com’s venn diagram of Monsanto‘s corporate influence in Washington. You can see they are in high places. Note that the one person who doesn’t appear on the list is Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas who was legal counsel to Monsanto in the 1970s, and who also penned the Supreme Court’s majority decision which allowed Monsanto to patent the very GMO seeds at the heart of the current controversy and case.

Federal bureaucrats, citing Constitutional powers over Interstate Commerce, shut down an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania for good. NaturalNews.com reports,

It is with much sadness that we report the two-year war waged by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) against Pennsylvania Amish farmer Dan Allgyer has been a success.The Washington Timesand others are now reporting that, following a ruling last month by Judge Lawrence F. Stengel that Allgyer could no longer ship raw milk across state lines, he is officially shutting down his entire Rainbow Acres Farm.

Provoking Allgyer to shut down his farm appears to have been the goal of the FDA all along, which back on February 4, 2010, conducted a gestapo-style raid on Allgyer’s Kinzers, Penn., property to search for evidence that he was shipping raw milk across state lines. After illegally trespassing on the man’s property, the agents proceeded to harass Allgyer about his supposed involvement in interstate commerce. . . .

A report on that February 4 raid relates the reference to Constitutional powers:

The agents – Schafer did most of the talking – said they had a right to be there because “you produce food for human consumption.”  Dan asked why they believed that and they said, “Well, you have cows.  You cannot be consuming all the milk you produce.” They further stated, “If you get a milk truck in to move all this milk you sell milk to the public, therefore we have jurisdiction.”

But Allgyer had already bent over backwards to avoid this problem:

With hundreds of happy and satisfied out-of-state customers that relied on him for fresh supplies of raw milk, Allgyer attempted to satisfy the FDA’s demands by restructuring his farm’s distribution process into private cow share agreements with customers. Such agreements allow individuals to directly purchase shares in the cows from which they get milk, which means they personally own them, and they are not subject to FDA jurisdiction. . . .

But on February 3, 2012, Judge Stengel decided that Allgyer was still in violation of interstate commerce laws,even with the restructured cow sharing arrangements, and ordered him to stop distributing raw milk altogether. Private cow share agreements do not constitute interstate commerce, of course, but Judge Stengel apparently pays no regard to individual liberty, having declared that the FDA basically now has jurisdiction over private property use.

For more on the abuse of interstate commerce clause, see my article “Highway to Hell: the Progressive Tyranny Over Interstate Commerce.”

See my other related article and solutions here.

Forbes reports,

Billionaire Peter Thiel has poured $1.7 million more into a super PAC supporting presidential candidate Ron Paul, bringing his total contributions to $2.6 million.

Reports filed with the Federal Election Commission today show that Thiel, a Silicon Valley investor, made the additional contributions to the Endorse Liberty PAC in the first half of January. . . .

With an estimated wealth of $1.5 billion, Thiel was a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook, LinkedIn and Zynga. He started the hedge fund Clarium Capital in 2005.

PayPal co-founders Luke Nosek and Scott Banister also have donated to Paul’s super PAC, although in much smaller amounts.

The news is that Ron Paul won the straw poll for the Gwinnett County Republican Party (GA) by a double-digit margin, but you would hardly guess that from the local press’s emphasis. The Suwanee Patch could barely bring itself to mention Paul’s victory, instead making the headline and the story focus on fading homeboy Gingrich: “Gingrich 2nd in Gwinnett GOP Straw Poll; Paul Wins.”

Buried deep in the story, only after a bunch of “Gingrich said this” and “Gingrich did that,” we find,

Paul collected 115 votes to Gingrich’s 73. Finishing third was former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum with 60 votes. Mitt Romney, currently the overall delegate leader among GOP candidates, got 25 votes.

Put in terms in which political polls are normally related to the public:

Paul – 42%
Gingrich – 27%
Santorum – 22%
Romney – 9%

Had any of the other three  won by such a wide margin in the local Party’s own straw poll, no doubt the virtually establishment-worshiping press would have announced it as a “double digit victory” or a “landslide.” The Suwanee Patch needs to patch the threadbare knees in its reporting.

Thankfully, at least one news source has something close to ethics. The State Column reports,

Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul defeated former House Speaker Newt Gingrich Saturday to win a Georgia straw poll conducted by the Gwinnett County Republican Party, Suwanee Patch reports.

The results of the Georgia straw poll suggest that the latest Georgia polls may not be accurately measuring Mr. Paul’s support in the Peach State. A recent Landmark/Rosetta Stone poll of likely voters in the Georgia Republican primary found Mr. Paul with 5 percent of the votes and Mr. Gingrich with 35 percent of the votes. Other Peach State polls have found Mr. Gingrich with more than 40 percent of the votes.

Mr. Paul’s victory over Mr. Gingrich in the Georgia straw poll is enhanced by the fact that the Georgia Republican spoke later in the day at the same school where the straw poll was conducted.

Back in Iowa, after the dust has long settled in their highly publicized beauty-contest caucus, state polls show that Paul leads all comers in a head-to-head contest with Obama in that State which has yet to award its delegates. Again, The State Column reports well:

Republican presidential candidates Ron Paul, Rick Santorum and Mitt Romney defeated President Barack Obama in a Des Moines Register poll of Iowa general election voters Sunday. Mr. Paul bested Mr. Obama by 7 percentage points (49 to 42) and Mr. Santorum bettered the president by 4 percentage points (48 to 44). Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney exceeded Mr. Obama by 2 percentage points (46 to 44).

John R. Lott and Gary Mauser report on a national gun registry experiment in Canada in which the government has finally admitted total failure after blowing $2.7 billion:

Despite spending a whopping $2.7 billion on creating and running a long-gun registry, Canadians never reaped any benefits from the project. The legislation to end the program finally passed the Parliament on Wednesday. Even though the country started registering long guns in 1998, the registry never solved a single murder. Instead it has been an enormous waste of police officers’ time, diverting their efforts from patrolling Canadian streets and doing traditional policing activities. . . .

The statistics are revealing: out of 4,257 homicides from 2003 to 2009, 1,314 were carried out with firearms. In fewer than 10 percent of these cases was the gun even registered, and in only 62 of these registered instances was the gun actually registered to the person committing the crime. Lott and Mauser comment,

To repeat, during these seven years, there were only 62 cases — nine a year — where it was even conceivable that registration made a difference.

Most importantly, they add,

But apparently, the registry was not important even in those cases. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Chiefs of Police have not yet provided a single example in which tracing was of more than peripheral importance in solving a case.

The authors get it wrong, however, when it comes to solutions:

The problem isn’t just that the $2.7 billion spent on registration over 17 years has produced no arrests, it is that the money could have been used to put more police on the street or pay for more health care or cut taxes. An extra $160 million a year pays for a lot of police or doctors or teachers.

Or, you could stop the spending altogether and shrink the size and scope of the State. One reason governments grow tyrannical and eventually push for greater gun control is that we keep feeding the State and demanding more social problems to be solved by it. Gun rights exist by definition as a last-resort defense against tyranny—and thus gun rights represent the preservation of a small State that fears the citizenry and honors individual rights. You negate this very principle when you demand more State-funded police and social services.

The Welfare and Warfare States are two sides of the same coin. Until conservatives understand this and discipline themselves accordingly, gun control advocates will always have ready access to the very infrastructure they need to advance their agenda: a strong police force, a strong agency of propaganda (“education”), and a strong facade of its necessary existence (benefits like education, health care, safety, etc.). The goal is to minimize the programs permanently and not use the money for something else. Use the money to pay down debts and restore freedom once again.

As AVNews reported yesterday, Rick Santorum attacked Romney for seeking a taxpayer “bailout” to save the 2002 winter Olympics he so often touts as a key leadership qualification. For Santorum this is a clear act of “hypocrisy.” It was revealed with great irony, then, just yesterday, that Rick Santorum himself voted for the very bailout for which he criticized Romney.

Cincinnati.com reports,

Regarding the earmarks for the 2002 Olympics:

Santorum voted in for H.R. 2216 , which appropriated $59,956,000 for security at the Salt Late Olympics. (Roll call vote No. 228 on July 10, 2001: Passed 98-1-1, Santorum voted yea)

Santorum voted for H.R. 3338, which appropriated $10 million for “emergency expenses” to respond to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. (Roll call vote No. 380 on Dec. 20, 2001, Passed 94-2-4, Santorum voted yea)

Santorum voted for H.R. 4425, which appropriated  $8 million to the Department of Defense for communications equipment, infrastructure and logistical support. (Roll call vote No. 106 on May, 18, 2000, Passed 96-4, Santorum voted yea).

Rick’s own words seem apropos: “Does the word hypocrisy come to mind?”

But perhaps he was not criticizing the bailout itself, just responding to Romney’s attack on him for earmarks. In that case he would not be a hypocrite, just a top-notch porker.

For that reason, the Romney camp was quick to fire back at Santorum over the nature of respective earmarks each party had sought in different instances:

“Sometimes when you shoot from the hip, you end up shooting yourself in the foot,” said spokeswoman Andrea Saul. “There is a pretty wide gulf between seeking money for post-9/11 security at the Olympics and seeking earmarks for polar bear exhibits at the Pittsburgh Zoo. Mitt Romney wants to ban earmarks, Senator Santorum wants more ‘Bridges to Nowhere.’ ”

Self-serving earmarks like these are often loaded into larger spending bills which makes them much easier to pass. Other Senators and Congressmen refuse to vote against the bill even if opposed to the smaller earmark lest they look like they oppose something larger and more politically charged like “Defense” or the like. So the earmarks roll on. It takes great political principle to stand against the bills in general.

It is worthy of mentioning, then, that for House versions of those three self-serving, earmark-laden bills mentioned above, all of which Romney sought and Santorum voted for:

H.R. 2216 (2001) - Ron Paul voted NAY
H.R. 3338 (2001) - Ron Paul voted NAY
H.R. 4425 (2001) – Ron Paul voted NAY

Does the word “principled” come to mind?

Trying to clarify Santorum’s description of Obama’s energy policy as being based on a “phony theology,” spokeswoman Alice Stewart herself claimed in an interview with Andrea Mitchell that the candidate was actually referring to Obama’s “radical Islamic policies.” Politico reports,

Mitchell later said on the air that Stewart phoned the show after the interview to say she had slipped up and said “radical Islamic policies” instead of Obama’s “radical environmental policies.”

Mitchell noted she had missed Stewart’s phrasing of “radical Islamic policies” during the live interview.

“She had repeatedly said during that same interview ‘radical environmental policies’ and she said she slipped when she apparently said [it],” Mitchell said. “I did not hear it, or I would have caught her on it and tried to get a correction at the moment. I really, frankly, did not hear her use the word Islamic, but the tape tells the tale.”

I’m not sure which is the bigger story here: that a campaign aide amid the sleepless fog of primary season had an apparent Freudian slip, or that a liberal news anchor was caught not really paying attention to what her interviewee said.