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Good Wednesday morning,

Here are the Must Reads according to Adam Bitely:

• Obama’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ health care buy
• With Romney and Santorum, the cause of limiting government looks bleak
• Who is responsible for the GOP?
• If economy’s improving, why is dependency growing?
• Democrats deliver on promise of higher gas prices
• Obama says high gas prices evidence of improving economy
• Sowell: The ‘Fairness’ Fraud
• We’re already Europe
• 49.5% of Americans don’t pay taxes
• Gov. Christie to Warren Buffett: “Just write a check and shut up”
• End College Sports Indentured Servitude: Pay “Student Athletes”

By Rick Manning — Not content with making the health insurance industry unprofitable, through rules and regulations set out in enacting Obamacare, the Obama administration released the first eight grants/loans under the Consumer Oriented and Operated Plan (CO-OP) program.

The CO-OP program was established under the Obamacare law to put into place one federal government selected group in every state that is supposed to provide an insurance alternative to those few companies that remain after the imposition of the law.

The grants/loans have raised the political antenna of Bill Wilson, the President of Americans for Limited Government who said, “These grants/loans reek of political payola as one group, the Saul Alinsky-affiliated, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative of Wisconsin was formed in August, 2011 just three short months prior to applying for the taxpayer money.   In true, Rules for Radicals fashion, Obama’s administration found this group worthy of receiving $56,416,000 in taxpayer largesse.”

Common Ground is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group the radical Saul Alinsky founded, as reported by the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee.

The provision of $56 million taxpayer funds by the federal government for health care organizing comes at a time when Wisconsin’s public employee unions are orchestrating a recall election of the Governor after failing in a retaliatory bid for power in the Senate last year.  Wisconsin’s state government moved forward with changes in the state’s collective bargaining rules early in 2011 over the objections of the unions.  Ironically, those changes have allowed the state to bring the budget into balance without having to lay off any public employees.

Wilson continued his analysis stating, “Only the most naïve would believe that this $56 million injection of money into the political charged atmosphere in Wisconsin is anything more than an attempt to buy votes in favor of the public employee recall election of Governor Scott Walker and to tip the balance in this important swing state in November.

“There are no lengths that Obama won’t go in his attempt to use Chicago-style politics to drive his election bid, and this $56 million to a group with no track record and dubious connections is just one more outrage,” Wilson concluded.

Shockingly, the rules governing the grants  issued by Obama’s Health and Human Services Department projected that the CO-OPs would have a 35-40 percent default rate.  With $3.4 billion budgeted for the program, the most conservative loss estimate is $1.19 billion, or twice the total cost to taxpayers of the Obama Energy Department funded Solyndra failure.

Other groups receiving grants are the Freelancers CO-OP of New Jersey, Freelancers CO-OP of Oregon, Freelancers Health Service Corporation (based in New York), New Mexico Health Connections, Montana Health Cooperative and Midwest Members Health (Iowa and Nebraska.)

According to Politico Pro, a private subscription news service, the CO-OPs have been termed government funded “venture capital for health care” by the executive director of the Freelancers Union Insurance programs.  Ironically, the Freelancers programs have come under fire over the years for inefficient operations and a variety of difficulties regarding member coverage.

The CO-Ops will be able to offer health plans starting on January 1, 2014.

Rick Manning is the Director of Communications for Americans for Limited Government.

By Adam Bitely — It seems like every presidential election cycle people get excited to nominate candidate that will roll back the expansion of government under the previous administration. For months, speculation of who the candidate will be that will stop the growth of government runs wild. But, as is always the case, reality sets in and those who thought they could stop the growth of government with a miracle candidate are left with choosing between the lesser of two evils.

2012 appears to be no different.

As it stands today, Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum are generating the most buzz for Republicans. With the GOP establishment lining up behind Romney and the social conservatives lining up behind Santorum, the media is focusing on these two candidates with Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul fighting to get in the mix.

People concerned about the out of control spending in Washington should be concerned about Romney or Santorum being the alternative to Obama.

Santorum’s record on spending leaves much more to be desired. He voted multiple times to raise the debt ceiling, supported the largest entitlement expansion since the Great Society programs started in the 1960’s and supported increased spending throughout the federal government especially to the Department of Education. He was known as a “yes-man” for the Republican form of Big Government spending during the Bush administration. Now he is campaigning as a small government conservative, even though his record is that of a Washington big spender.

Romney is no better. A supporter of the Bush bailouts of Wall Street, Obama’s auto bailouts and the author of the blueprint for ObamaCare, Romney should give any person who wants to stop Washington’s spending addiction pause. Romney has famously flip-flopped back and forth on various positions causing many voters to question how he will act in office. As a candidate for President though, Romney is suddenly “severely conservative” — whatever that means.

Both Romney and Santorum have records that show that if elected, the spending machine in Washington will keep running just as it always has. These are two people, who like most politicians, will maintain the status quo.

This cycle of politics and politicians as usual seems never ending. But that is how the system has worked for hundreds of years. The voters that decide elections are never the base of a party, rather, the decisive voters are in the middle and force the candidates on each side to cater to them in the run up to November. This leads to the party nominees moving to their true spot in the middle and saying whatever it takes to get the votes of the political middle. That is why the U.S. system rarely sees politicians elected that are way out on the wings politically.

Occasionally a candidate out on the wings will win, but this is rare. When it does happen, the voters usually send the person to retirement at the following election. This means that the people who do actually stand up to Big Government in Washington rarely get to keep their jobs.

What does this all mean?

If voters in the base of the Republican Party continue to settle for candidates whose records indicate that they will govern in a way that maintains the status quo, they should not be upset when what they hope to happen doesn’t. It’s the candidates that always move to the middle and tell you that their record isn’t who they really are.

If you want to keep the deficit rolling and the government expanding at a slightly slower pace than Obama, then Mitt Romney or Rick Santorum may be your best candidate. If you want to end the frivolous wasting of yours and other people’s money then perhaps you should keep looking for a better candidate and stop settling for what you know to be wrong.

Adam Bitely is the Editor-in-Chief of NetRightDaily.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @AdamBitely.

By Frank McCaffrey — The rising cost of gas is bad news for literally everyone in the U.S. Yet, somewhere in his mangled response to a question back in 2008, Barack Obama implied he wanted them to be higher.

Americans for Limited Government President Bill Wilson responded to the release of the first eight grants/loans under the Obamacare created Consumer Oriented and Operated Plan (CO-OP) program today.

The CO-OP program was established under the Obamacare law to put into place one federal government selected group in every state that is supposed to provide an insurance alternative to those few companies that remain after the imposition of the law.

“These grants/loans reek of political payola as one group, the Saul Alinsky-affiliated, Common Ground Healthcare Cooperative of Wisconsin was formed in August, 2011 just three short months prior to applying for the taxpayer money. In true, Rules for Radicals fashion, Obama’s administration found this group worthy of receiving $56,416,000 in taxpayer largesse,” Wilson said.

Common Ground is an affiliate of the Industrial Areas Foundation, a group the radical Saul Alinsky founded, as reported by the Journal Sentinel in Milwaukee.

“Only the most naïve would believe that this $56 million injection of money into the political charged atmosphere in Wisconsin is anything more than an attempt to buy votes in favor of the public employee recall election of Governor Scott Walker and to tip the balance in this important swing state in November,” Wilson continued.

“There are no lengths that Obama won’t go in his attempt to use Chicago-style politics to drive his election bid, and this $56 million to a group with no track record and dubious connections is just one more outrage,” Wilson added.

The rules governing the grants were issued on July 20, 2010 by Obama’s Health and Human Services Department and in those rules the CO-OPs were projected to result in a 35-40 percent default rate.

Other groups receiving grants are the Freelancers CO-OP of New Jersey, Freelancers CO-OP of Oregon, Freelancers Health Service Corporation (based in New York), New Mexico Health Connections, Montana Health Cooperative and Midwest Members Health (Iowa and Nebraska.)

According to Politico Pro, a private subscription news service, the CO-OPs have been termed government funded “venture capital for health care” by the executive director of the Freelancers Union Insurance programs. Ironically, the Freelancers programs have come under fire over the years for inefficient operations and a variety of difficulties regarding member coverage.

The CO-Ops will be able to offer health plans starting on January 1, 2014.

To receive the Must Reads in your inbox, click here!

Good Tuesday morning,

Here are the Must Reads according to Adam Bitely:

• Obama’s economic team never believed ‘stimulus’ would work
• Will Michigan be Romney’s Waterloo?
• Romney’s troubled Michigan homecoming
• Mr. Right eludes the GOP
• Is Rick Santorum a supporter of limited government?
• Paul: Santorum has an ‘atrocious voting record’
• Santorum donations soar
• In January, Mitt spent nearly 3 times what he fund raised
• Obama says high oil prices evidence of improving economy
• Trust the marketplace to deal with rising gas prices

By Bill Wilson — Obama thinks the current run up in gas prices is a good sign, evidence that the economy is improving. Except, in 2011, the global economy slowed down while oil and gas prices were rising along with a broad range of other commodities including gold even while domestic consumption was declining. Additionally, just last month, the International Energy Agency has cut its projections of the growth of global oil demand for 2012, and Saudi Arabia is once again lowering its production this year. With oil traded in dollars, that all indicates inflationary pressures and a weak dollar are moving prices, not increased demand.

In addition, last year, another part of the run-up in prices was the Libyan crisis. This year, the Iranian crisis is in effect, with the U.S. and Europe placing de facto embargos on Iranian oil exports. This too has an effect.

Then there is the domestic regulatory environment that makes these price spikes all the more acute here in the U.S. The nation’s refining capacity is declining along with continued restrictions on domestic oil production. We simply lack the domestic capacity to increase output when we experience these price shocks. In fact, we have declined from producing 9.6 million barrels of oil a day in 1970 to little more than 5.5 million a day now.

Overall, these huge run-ups in oil and gas prices are not good for the economy. They did not work well in the 1970′s and again in 2008, when the roof blew off the economy. They always lead directly to increased producer and consumer prices, both of which take money out of other parts of the economy, and are detrimental to the growth picture.

Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow him on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.

Photo Credit: edalisse/Flickr

By Kevin Mooney — Ronald Reagan’s “evil empire” speech delivered on March 8, 1983 “re-moralized American foreign policy” and reversed and era of détente in foreign policy that had given the advantage to the Soviet Union, Prof. Paul Kengor of Grove City College explained during an interview with Americans for Limited Government (ALG) at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).

Kengor, who is also a prominent Reagan biographer, said the speech had tremendous reverberations. It put the Soviet Empire back on its heels and help shifted the Cold War back in America’s favor.

The “evil empire” speech was delivered on March 8, 1983 and just a few weeks later on March 23 Reagan announced the “Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI).

“Reagan used his voice as weapon,” Kengor explained. “He destroyed this whole idea that there was somehow a moral equivalence to both sides and it made it plain and clear that America’s struggle against Soviet expansionism and Soviet communism was a just cause.

The same U.S. State Department officials who tried to strike out the “Tear Down this Wall” comment from Reagan’s 1987 Berlin Wall address, were also scandalized by the “Evil Empire” speech.

Kengor served as the moderator for a panel entitled “Rendezvous  with Destiny: What Can We Learn from Ronald Reagan in 2012.” Craig Shirley, author of “Rendezvous with Destiny” and Steven Hayward, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), also took part in the discussion.

During his presentation, Shirley expressed concern that the Republican Party has divorced itself from the principles that propelled Reagan to victory and has instead embraced big government. He traces the turning back to 2000 when the Republican Party dropped the elimination of the Department of Education and other federal agencies as party principle.

“I wish that Reaganism was alive and well in the Republican Party, but it is not,” he said. “Conservatism is alive in the Tea Party.”

Hayward, who is also the author of “The Age of Reagan,” described Reagan as “the most constitutionally literate and the most economically literate” of all modern presidents.

All of the current Republican Party candidates could do a better job of studying and learning from the example Reagan set, Hayward said.

Kevin Mooney is a contributing editor to Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Kevin on Twitter at @KevinMooneyDC.

By Bill Wilson — Former White House Council of Economic Advisors head Christina Romer apparently never thought the $800 billion “stimulus” that was supposed to turn the economy around would work, a new book shedding light on the early days of the Obama Administration says.

A memo brought to light in “The Escape Artists” by Noam Scheiber shows Romer originally proposed a spending plan that totaled $1.8 trillion, but the figure was dismissed as politically infeasible by Larry Summers, Director of the White House Economic Council. Romer came back with a watered down proposal of $1.2 trillion, but that was left out of the final proposal brought before Barack Obama himself.

Nonetheless, even though the final proposal was a full $1 trillion short of what she thought would work, Romer penned the political document that justified the $800 billion figure. Romer’s “The Job Impact of the American Recovery and Reinvestment” warned that “The recovery plan needs to be large to counter the tremendous job loss that is likely to occur.”

Based on her methodology, she wrote, “the package contains enough stimulus that we can have confidence that it will create sufficient jobs to meet the President-Elect’s goals.”

Then Obama was promising to “save or create” 3 million jobs, a promise he fell way short of.  Since he took office, the labor force participation rate has dropped from 65.7 percent to 63.7 percent, resulting in over 4.7 million people have been dropped out of the civilian labor force.

In fact, there were almost 142.2 million people employed when Obama took office. Now, that number dropped to a low of 137.9 million in Dec. 2009 and has only risen to 141.6 million since then. The economy is not even keeping up with the growth of the population, let alone reclaiming a single one of the lost 8 million jobs in this recession.

Romer’s call for more “stimulus” was similar to that of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.  In 2009, he claimed that the Obama “stimulus” was too small to fill a $2.1 trillion hole. So, with the sorry state particularly of the labor market, were Romer and Krugman right?

When actions by the Federal Reserve to expand its balance sheet are taken into consideration — it purchased $1.25 trillion of mortgage-backed securities, $150 billion of Fannie and Freddie debt, and $1.191 of trillion treasuries since Jan. 2009 — the total “stimulus” issued by government has totaled nearly $3.4 trillion.

That exceeds what Romer and Krugman called for by over $1 trillion — with little to show for it. Romer had claimed if the “stimulus” passed that unemployment would be down to 6 percent by now.

Not only did it pass, but the Fed threw $2.6 trillion on top of it for good measure. Yet, a true measure of unemployment that takes into account the drop in working age adults from being counted by the government shows that rate is at 11.01 percent. Those underemployed at 17.6 percent.

All together, that’s 28 million people that cannot find full time work in the Obama economy —in spite of the trillions of dollars the government threw at the problem.

“The Escape Artists” provides a convenient narrative for Obama apologists, following an old dictum from Britain: “The king can do no wrong.” If the king made any poor decisions, it was because he received poor advice.

In this case, Larry Summers is portrayed preventing Obama from ever seeing Romer’s original memo calling for $1.8 trillion in “stimulus”. The evidence, sadly, shows that it would not have made a difference — because the whole concept was flowed from the get-go.

Bill Wilson is the President of Americans for Limited Government. You can follow Bill on Twitter at @BillWilsonALG.

By David Bozeman — The idea that liberalism is a religion unto itself is by no means original.  Still, how frustrating that America has been conditioned to regard traditional religious influences as the gravest threats to our liberty.

We have become so jumpy that even the most benign sentiments—like saying Merry Christmas — in the private marketplace, no less, are uttered in measured tones or watered down altogether (holiday trees, anyone?), lest a creeping theocracy swallow our Bill of Rights.  But the truth is, liberals eschew religion in politics not out of any concern for liberty.  Quite simply, they can’t stand the competition.

Why is my freedom any less compromised if I must follow the edicts of Kathleen Sebelius as opposed to, say, Pat Robertson?  The insurance companies must provide contraception.  Must?

Liberals boast of their openness to abortion and unconstrained sexuality, but that is just a fig-leaf to cover their own statist leanings.  Conservatives, according to the gospel of conventional wisdom, are too concerned with what goes on in our bedrooms.  Still, liberals have the rest of your house pretty well covered.  The left currently regulates, or would like to regulate:  your light bulbs, the water flow in your toilet, your car’s gas mileage, your health insurance coverage, your child’s education, your retirement options, your fat intake, your salt intake, your child’s school lunch, your right to own everything from guns to plastic grocery bags, etc., etc.

Of course liberalism is a religion.  All of the qualities attributed to traditional faith equally apply to liberalism.  It has its own prophets (Barack Obama), clergy (the mainstream media, many public school teachers), churches (public schools, public employee union halls), revivals (Occupy Wall Street, storming the Wisconsin State House), tithing (taxes, particularly on ‘the rich’) and behavior- altering predictions for the end of the world (Al Gore’s award-winning ‘documentary’ An Inconvenient Truth).

While Christians tend to frown upon rampant sexuality and blasphemy, deadly sins and sinners against liberalism include: big profits, Wal-Mart, SUVs, the Boy Scouts, big oil, big pharmaceuticals, big insurance, McDonald’s, right-to-work states, unrestricted speech on college campuses, talk radio not hindered by a fairness doctrine and feisty Alaska moms who run for public office.  Ann Coulter said it best:  ”You haven’t seen religious indignation until you’ve seen a liberal react to a lit cigarette in the no-smoking section.”

Traditional-minded Americans invest their faith in such time-honored institutions as marriage, family, social mores, the free market and the swift arm of justice as checks on the foibles and limitations of human nature.  Liberals tend to exalt their own flowery visions of social justice as our binding social contracts, above even the Constitution.  President Obama has frequently harped on its limitations, and Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one-time counsel for the ACLU, recently advised Egyptians not to use it as a model in forming their new government.

It is not that traditionalists are less compassionate or idealistic, they simply realize that human imperfection makes utopia on earth impossible and that justice for everyone is best served by ensuring equality of opportunity as opposed to equality of outcome.

Election 2012 will hinge on the agenda of President Obama and two competing worldviews.  Whatever the advantages of one vision over another, make no mistake, President Obama and his acolytes possess the same religious fervor as any fire-and-brimstone preacher on Sunday morning community access television.  They are no less willing to use the power of the state to ensure that their ideals prevail.

If the religious right ridiculously blames social decay on Hollywood and The Playboy Philosophy, you haven’t seen caricature till you see the Democrat strategy for 2012:  Republicans portrayed as rich, white misogynists out seeking to ban contraception.

Finding bogeymen is one negative attribute of religion that liberals will master as they continue on their holy crusade to “transform” the greatest bastion of liberty the world has ever known.

David Bozeman, former Libertarian Party Chairman, is a Liberty Features Syndicated writer.