VoteKansas.org

MADISON, Wisc. — “I’m voting against Walker!” fumed a waitress at a steakhouse in downtown Madison late Sunday night, referring to Republican Gov. Scott Walker and his bid to survive a recall election Tuesday against Democratic Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett.  She went on to explain that the Republican governor “was a big reason I had to leave the University of Wisconsin when I was a junior last year.  My professors were canceling classes so often to go out in the square [site of the State Capitol] to protest his program [requiring some public employee workers to contribute about six percent of their salary and 12 percent to their health insurance premiums], that it just wasn’t worth it for me to go to college anymore.”

Gosh! While one was tempted to suggest to the waitress that her anger should be vented on the professors themselves for choosing to protest rather than teach, it is simply not worth it — not in Madison, capital of Wisconsin and a university town, long considered a hotbed of American leftism.  There are reports of numerous barfights at local establishments stemming from the mere mention of the name “Scott Walker.”

On the Monday before the nationally-watched vote on Walker’s fate, supporters of both the governor and Barrett are out early brandishing placards along the John Nolen Highway that goes through Madison.

With less than 24 hours to go before the voting, both sides are fully engaged and enthusiastic.

However, with even left-leaning polls giving Walker a slight lead and unaffiliated polls a larger advantage, state and national Democrats are beginning to repeat the mantra that even if the conservative GOP governor wins Tuesday, it won’t matter in terms of national politics or the November chances of Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

“It’s a Wisconsin-specific moment, not a national referendum,” veteran Wisconsin Democratic strategist John Lapp, told the Wisconsin State Journal Monday.

In Washington, Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz said recently that “[b]asically, there aren’t going to be any repercussions nationally, if Wisconsin voters decide to stick with Walker.”

Asked about Wasserman-Schultz’s remarks, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters: “ I think that there are issues obviously unique to that state and issues unique to the spending that’s happened in that particular matter that would suggest that she’s right, but I haven’t discussed it with the president.”

Unlike Bill Clinton, who recently came into the Badger State to stump with Barrett, President Obama has yet to appear with the Democratic nominee.  Asked whether Obama has so much as endorsed Barrett, Carney replied that he has not talked about it with him and “you’ll have to contact the [Obama re-election] campaign.”

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The degeneration of Greece into fiscal ruin and political anarchy is heartbreaking, but Spain is the real nightmare country for European investors and ministers.  Spain is far larger than Greece – in fact, it’s the fourth-largest economy in the Eurozone – and its impending collapse is literally unbearable for the European Union.

Oh, and the third largest economy in the Euro?  That would be Italy, which is almost as shaky as Spain.  The second largest economy, France, has launched a crusade against “austerity” under its new socialist president.  The Number One economy, Germany, is getting mighty sick and tired of financing the welfare states of Europe.  Gulp.

Lifeboats are already hitting the water.  A good $80 billion (in U.S. dollars) worth of investment fled Spain over the past month, pulling $40 billion out of local banks on their way across the border.  The New York Times reports that Spain will try selling 2 billion euros (about $2.5 billion U.S.) worth of bonds this coming Thursday.  “The sale is expected to include 10-year bonds,” notes the Times.  “There are doubts that banks, in the current environment, will jump to buy such long-term paper, given the increased risks in holding Spanish debt.  Even yields nearing 7 percent may not lure them.”  7 percent is the meltdown point for bond sales.  Beyond that point, the nuclear financial reactors powering big governments go super-critical.

The meltdown may already be in progress, as it appears government officials and investment analysts across Europe are quietly preparing for not just the expected Greek exit in two weeks, but the end of the Euro.  There’s no way to bail out Spain without also bailing out Italy, even if Greece floats out to sea without consuming another euro, and the European Union simply cannot afford to bail out both Spain and Italy.  The weak American economy totters on the verge of recession, and will pull Europe down with it… unless Europe tumbles first, and tugs America over the brink.

The flashpoint for Euro disintegration is the demand by dependent nations for bailouts without controls.  Everybody wants Germany’s money, but nobody wants to listen to German theories of spending restraint.

A few Eurozone ministers have spoken of centralizing more power in Brussels, to remove control from the hands of grumpy electorates prone to voting for whoever promises to abrogate austerity agreements most quickly.  That seems like a pipe dream when even local governments can’t maintain fiscal discipline, in the face of angry crowds packing rocks and firebombs, but it does seem as if the Eurozone is no longer willing to hand over bailout cash without stripping some degree of sovereign control from its welfare clients.

Spain wants the EU to pump money directly into its banks, without preconditions.  Germany says no dice – the money has to go to the Spanish government, in exchange for a surrender of national authority to the European Union.

Meanwhile, the CEO of American International Group, Robert Benmosche, suggested from the comfort of his seaside villa in Croatia that the solution to worldwide government insolvency was simple: “Retirement ages will have to move to 70, 80 years old.  That would make pensions and medical services more affordable.  They will keep people working longer and will take that burden off the youth.”

Oh, is that all we have to do?  Well, the problem is that every Western electorate has been taxed up, down, and sideways to support the promise of retirement at far younger ages… and they’re not going to give up those promised benefits easily.

Benmosche is saying that the entire premise of the Western intergenerational entitlement state, from Greece to the United States, was a lie.  There is no way for a vast, industrialized population with growing life expectancies to subsidize a tiny 30-year working life, nestled comfortably between extended adolescence and decades of retirement.  No electorate is prepared to wake up from that dream.  All will be eager to reward politicians who offer one more slap of the fiscal snooze bar.

The essential conflict between dependency and independence is playing out in every electorate across the Western world, from the Eurozone to ever level of American government.  Politics can only blind people to economic reality for a limited time.  Smart, well-connected investors are bailing out of Spain, and the European Union, while the public is still told to view their entitlements as sacred, and promised that government has not quite run out of private-sector pockets to pick.  The same thing will happen in the United States, when our system collapses.  We’ll wake up one morning to discover the smart guys already took all the lifeboats, right before the full size of the approaching insolvency iceberg became fully apparent.

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Late last week, the House Energy and Commerce Committee released more details of its investigation into the secret backroom deals that gave birth to ObamaCare.  A pile of emails from senior White House officials to pharmaceutical industry bigwigs reveal that all of President Obama’s public anger at greedy drug companies was actually part of what professional wrestlers call “kayfabe” – a choreographed act designed to create drama and tension.

Obama and those pharmaceutical executives stayed in character as adversaries to fool the public, while behind closed doors, they were inking lucrative deals to put tax money into the industry’s pockets, in exchange for vital industry support for ObamaCare.  This perpetuated the vital illusion that Obama was a brave crusader against drug company greed, at the same time he was privately offering various incentives to corporate honchos, to make certain they would fall into line and embrace ObamaCare at the pivotal moment.

The President was publicly denouncing efforts by pharmaceutical “special interests” to stymie his great reform efforts, while privately assuring PhRMA, the industry’s lobbying group, they would have unrivaled access to ObamaCare commissars, granting them valuable input into the crafting of that legendary legislative disaster.

Of particular interest is an email sent out by top PhRMA lobbyist Bryant Hall, on the eve of a fiery Obama speech in which he thundered that it was time for drug companies to “pay their fair share.”  As Hall assured his contacts, “Here’s the stuff.  Background is that the Pres’s words are harmless.  He knows personally about our deal and is pushing no agenda.”

Another White House email assured drug lobbyists that Rahm Emanuel would get together with White House Office of Health Reform Director Nandy-Ann DeParle to “make it clear that PhRMA needs a direct line of communication, separate and apart from any other coalition.”  All pigs feeding at the government trough are equal, but some pigs are more equal than others.

This secret relationship did have its rocky moments, and the White House did not hesitate to deliver some quiet threats to finicky drug lobbyists.  In May 2009, when PhRMA expressed some reluctance to get on board with the President’s agenda, they were explicitly told that the Administration would publicly vilify them at a major press conference unless they fell into line.  Hall warned his fellow lobbyists in an email, “We need to sign it.  [Then-White House Press Secretary] Robert Gibbs is going to call PhRMA out specifically by name as an outlier at the press conference if we do not.  Rahm is already furious.  The ire will be turned on us.”

In June 2009, PhRMA lobbyists were told that ObamaCare might just include two “poison pills” that could have cost them billions of dollars: a rebate of pharmaceutical costs for Medicare Part D enrollees, and the elimination of tax deductions for direct-to-consumer drug advertising.  They were told the President would use his weekly radio address to call for a full rebate of Medicare Part D, which Hall construed as “punishing us for being forward leaning.”  A week later, PhRMA wrote White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina to say they were ready to make a deal.

The drug industry ended up making concessions that were worth about $80 billion toward the cost of ObamaCare over the next 10 years, and they ran a multi-million dollar ad campaign in support of the President’s legislation.  In return, they were promised protection from price controls, guaranteed income thanks to ObamaCare’s mandates, and favorable language against drug importation.  The latter was explicitly presented as a reward for PhRMA’s good behavior.  Hall said in an email that he had spoken with Office of Health Reform Director Nancy-Ann DeParle, and she told him the White House “is opposing import on this bill, specifically linking to our willingness to be cooperative on [health care reform].”

Hall made it clear that loose lips would sink this crony capitalist ship in a subsequent email: “They have something pretty nice cooked up on importation.  But they want to keep it really quiet.”  In the end, PhRMA support for ObamaCare was portrayed as a deal they reached with the Senate Finance Committee, with the White House’s heavy-handed involvement discreetly concealed from the public.

The House Energy and Commerce Committee concludes that its review of the tactics used by the White House “identified a potent combination of policy threats and private reassurances that industry would be protected against policies it disliked in exchange for support of the legislation and acceptance of other policies.  Taken together, these findings help illuminate a previously opaque series of agreements that resulted in a fundamental reshaping of our nation’s health care system.”

This all stands in very unpleasant contrast to Obama’s promises of transparency and accountability.  In some cases, particularly the drug importation issue, the White House’s backroom deals with Big Pharma run directly counter to his campaign rhetoric.

But it’s also important to remember that this sort of thing is standard operating procedure for Obama-style Big Government corporatism.  ObamaCare isn’t about taxing the public to finance government-provided benefits – that’s coming next, after ObamaCare fails, and the Left begins urging single-payer socialized medicine.  Instead, this is a scheme to preserve the rudiments of a private sector, which marches to a tune called by Big Government.

Of course the government’s “partners” must have some input into the process, and it must be kept from public view.  The junior partners in this arrangement cannot be given mandates that would prove instantly fatal to their business model.  At the same time, they must occasionally be reminded that Big Government is the boss, and has acquired vast powers it can use to punish them.  Private sector moguls are assisting in the creation of powers that will quickly grow beyond their ability to control.  Their willing, enthusiastic cooperation will become increasingly less necessary.  More government means more compulsion, and the end product of compulsion is obedience.

In the years to come, Big Pharma might be surprised to see how much of Big Government’s bulk comes pouring through the door they have opened, as they discover much of their complex deal with the Obama Administration turns out to have been written in pencil.

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“Faith is the reason I switched parties.”

So said Jo Ann Nardelli when my office contacted her last week to talk to her about why she left the Democratic Party for the Republican Party. Nardelli is a former Pennsylvania State Democratic Party Committeewoman and former president of the Blair County Federation of Democratic Women.

Nardelli said she had felt a “distancing from the party” over the past six months to a year as President Obama took the party leftward and began pandering more and more to left-wing special interests.

Candidate Obama promised unity and pledged post-partisanship. But President Obama has become the most divisive politician in recent history, remarkably eager both to attack—his political enemies, the Catholic Church, critical news outlets, other branches of government—and to pander—to environmentalists, gays, public employee unions, feminists, abortion groups and others.

But Nardelli’s switch shows that as Obama’s slice and dice campaign continues, he risks taking significant slices out of his own Democratic Party.

The last straw, Nardelli said, came on Sunday, May 6, when, before heading off to mass, she and her husband watched Vice President Joe Biden on Meet the Press.

Nardelli calls Biden “a man of deep Catholic faith whose Irish Catholic ways remind me very much of my own father of Italian Catholic background.” She said she felt sick when she heard Biden announce his support for same-sex marriage.

She knew where things were headed. Once the president came out for same-sex marriage, it would lead to a change in the party platform and every Democrat would be forced to comply. “Therefore, I knew I had to resign my positions, dissolve my affiliations, take a stand and change to the Republican Party,” she said.

Obama’s same-sex marriage announcement may have helped him with gay-rights groups—he quickly raised more than $15 million off the decision—but it has hurt him among people like Nardelli, a practicing Catholic who’s been a registered Democrat for more than 40 years.

Nardelli’s not alone. With the HHS “contraceptive mandate,” Obama has made a political calculation that appealing to secular and liberal female voters is more important than the constitutional rights of faithful Catholics.

A subsequent “accommodation” did little to quell the anger that followed. It got Obama’s liberal Catholic allies back on board. But now the administration is being sued by dozens of Catholic and other religious entities for breach of First Amendment rights.

Polls suggest Obama’s attacks have hurt him. Obama enjoyed a 20-point advantage against Romney among women in the early spring. Now Obama and Romney are running even among them.

Several recent polls find Obama sliding among Catholic voters. Obama won Catholics by nine points in 2008. And he was ahead by nine points in early March, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center.

In its most recent poll, Pew found that 47 percent of Catholic voters would vote for Obama, while 52 percent would vote for Romney. If that margin were to hold on Election Day, it would mark a swing of 18 million voters away from Obama—enough for him to lose the election.

Obama’s fundamental problem is that he’s out of touch with ordinary Americans. You’ll remember that part of the wisdom in Obama selecting Joe Biden for the number two slot was that Biden’s Catholic, working class roots would help Obama with those voters.

It may have helped him marginally in 2008. But with his attacks on religious conscience, with his job-killing economic and nonsensical environmental policies, Obama has made it clear who matters to him, narrow ideological constituencies that he hopes will donate enough money to his campaign to get him re-elected. To that end, Planned Parenthood endorsed Obama last week with a $1.4 million ad buy.

Former Alabama Democratic Representative Artur Davis recently switched parties too. The former Obama ally has moved to Virginia and recently wrote on a blog, “If I were to run again, it would be as a Republican.”

Davis, who is black, blamed Obama’s divisiveness, particularly on racial issues, for his change. “Frankly, the symbolism of Barack Obama winning has not given us the substance of a united country,” he wrote. “I have taken issue with an administration that has lapsed into a bloc by bloc appeal to group grievances when the country is already too fractured.”

Nardelli and Davis aren’t the only Democrats having a change of heart. Recently, 42 percent of voters in Kentucky voted “uncommitted” on their ballots in the Democratic presidential primary. In Arkansas an obscure lawyer named John Wolfe got 42 percent of the primary vote.

In West Virginia a federal inmate garnered more than 40 percent of the vote, and in Oklahoma pro-life activist Randall Terry got 18 percent of the vote.

Echoing Ronald Reagan, Nardelli insists “I did not leave the Party, the Party left me!” That sentiment is no doubt shared by many other moderate and working class Democrats. In five months, we’ll know just how many.

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that two Secret Service agents are shielded from a lawsuit filed by a man they arrested after a confrontation with then-Vice President Dick Cheney.

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MADISON, Wisc. — With under 24 hours to go before the polls open in Wisconsin, there is growing agreement on the eventual outcome of the special election for governor: that embattled Republican Gov. Scott Walker will not only survive the challenge from Democrat Tom Barrett, but do so quite comfortably.

A weekend Rasmussen Poll showed Walker leading Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett among likely voters by a margin of 50-to-45 percent statewide.  Monday, a Marquette Poll showed Walker leading Barrett 52 to 45 percent, the largest lead for the 43-year-old governor in any survey since last year, when labor unions—furious at the legislature’s enactment of Walker-crafted measures to limit collective bargaining among some public sector employees and require them to pay for a greater share of their retirement and health benefits—collected more than twice the signatures on petitions required to place Walker on the Badger State ballot again.

On Sunday night, a survey conducted by Public Policy Polling, a Democratic polling firm, showed Republican Walker leading Democrat Barrett by a margin of 50-to-47 percent.

“The governor has  barnstormed the state, getting up early and working until late at night, and never retreating from conservative principles,” veteran Republican consultant Scott Becher told Human Events Sunday, “He has not strayed from his message.  And his months of hard work pushing Wisconsin are paying off.”

Little reported in the national press is the fact that the state’s first woman lieutenant governor and three GOP state senators who backed Walker on his controversial reforms are also facing the voters Tuesday.

Republican sources who spoke to Human Events generally agree that Lieutenant Governor and former television reporter Rebecca Kleefisch will overcome Democrat Mahlon Mitchell, a Firefighters Union leader.  But they also expressed concern over the fates of GOP Sens. Terry Moulton (Chippewa Falls) and Van Wanggard (Racine), whom unions and the Democrats have targeted for extinction.

“If either of them goes down Tuesday, then Democrats win control of the Senate,” said Becher, noting that Republicans and Democrats are now tied in the Senate, with 18 seats each and one vacancy.  “And that would make it more difficult to pass any further reform legislation dealing with public sector employees.”

Also on the ballot in a recall election Tuesday is State Senate Majority Leader Scott Fitzgerald, one of the key players in securing passage of the Walker proposals and the brother of Assembly Speaker Jerry Fitzgerald.  Also on the ballot is the special election to fill the vacancy created by the resignation of Sen. Pam Galloway.  Republican State Rep.  Jerry Petrowski is favored in the Wausau-area district.

With White House Press Secretary Jay Carney and Democratic National Chairman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz downplaying any possible impact of a Walker triumph on national politics, it is nonetheless very likely that they and their allies on the left will trumpet a Democratic takeover of the senate as proof that Walker’s conservative agenda was not endorsed completely by Wisconsin voters.  For now, the governor and his Republican allies are, to use a phrase of Ronald Reagan’s, “cautiously optimistic.”

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After the police entered with consent to seize ammunition, they saw other relevant stuff and they were able to “coax” an expanded consent with defendant’s wife, and it was effective. State v. Niles, 2012 Tenn. Crim. App. LEXIS 362 (June 1, 2012):

Although the record shows that Niles's wife initially objected to the detectives' attempts to seize the entire date planner and its contents and the computer, Niles's wife and the detectives were able to reach an acceptable compromise regarding these items. Niles's wife acknowledged at the suppression hearing that she consented to the detectives' photographing parts of the planner and seizing documents inside the planner. Although Niles's wife and William Niles testified that the detectives exceeded the scope of her consent, the trial court accredited the testimony of Detectives Crews and Merlo on that issue. As we have stated, "[q]uestions of credibility of the witnesses, the weight and value of the evidence, and resolution of conflicts in the evidence are matters entrusted to the trial judge as the trier of fact." See Odom, 928 S.W.2d at 23. Moreover, because the evidence from the computer and the letters between Niles and the victim were never admitted at trial, any issue regarding suppression of this evidence is moot. Accordingly, we conclude that the trial court did not err in denying Niles's motion to suppress.