Those of us who were close enough to the source of the response witnessed a group of “Occupy” protestors emerge from the back corner of the room where they had been hiding for several hours waiting for their 15 seconds of fame as they disrupted Palin’s speech. The problem for them is that the cat like response of the great patriots in the room stole 14 ½ seconds of their time in the spotlight and nobody heard a word of their rants.

Luckily, there was one journalist who caught the event from the front of the room and is the only footage from the speaker’s vantage point that shows the scene and the protestors being marched out. Our good friend William Landers of Ameriborn News was filming the speech from just in front of the podium and caught the action as it happened. His is also one of the best recordings of Sarah’s speech. See the footage here.

According to one report, the lead protestor’s feet hit the ground about every fifth step as he was “escorted” out by a particularly large Metro Police officer.

You can’t argue with protestors who don’t know what they are protesting let alone what they believe. We can however show them that while MSNBC may be happy to portray them as a peaceful movement, the truth will drown them out as fast as an audience that believes in America.

Image courtesy: verumserum.com

One of the big news items this week is that Obama threw an extravagant Halloween party at the White House in 2009, complete with decorations by Hollywood director Tim Burton and an appearance by Johnny Depp in full Mad Hatter gear.  That Obama threw this kind of lavish party at the height of American economic pain shows exactly how entitled and out-of-touch this president really is. That we are just now finding out about it now is a damning illustration of media corruption.

The Obama administration knew that the American people would be justifiably outraged if their taxpayer funded bash was exposed and so they had the media keep it to themselves. Interestingly, the CIA and Defense Department are also now investigating whether the White House leaked top-secret documents to Hollywood directors making a movie about the mission to kill Bin Laden. With powerful allies in the media covering up his massive parties while burnishing his only foreign policy “accomplishment,” it’s clear that the battle to end this Hollywood nightmare won’t be easy. At the same time, shocking revelations like these prove that nothing could be more important than taking this country back.

Armed with the truth and the support of proud patriots like yourself, The Western Representation PAC will never stop fighting!

Barack Obama has cemented two liberal, activist judges on the Supreme Court, likely to remain there for the next 30 years or more. But he couldn’t have done it without help from a few Republicans, and Sen. Dick Lugar proved again why he is Obama’s “favorite Republican” by voting to confirm both Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.

Dick Lugar has helped assure that Obama’s agenda will have a strong voice on the Supreme Court long after his defeat in 2012, but we can make sure that Lugar’s voice in the Senate is gone for good! We’re preparing to launch a full-scale campaign to take him out, and we need your support to help us compete against his special interest war chest.

Unlike establishment candidates, we rely on thousands of individual donations rather than just a few wealthy, big-money bundlers. Please stand with us as we oust another liberal Republican and make a generous donation today.

We’re still 14 Patriots short of the 25 we need to stand up and make a donation of $100 or more. But we can still hit our goal if instead of 14 Patriots giving $100 or more, we have 28 Conservative Heroes step up with donations of $50 or more. Please be one of those Conservative Heroes and make a donation of $50 or more today.

Decisions made on Wall Street literally destroyed millions of American lives, and it was their lack of prudence that caused skyrocketing unemployment and plummeting home prices. They failed the American people and while we suffered incredible hardship, they used their influence in government to keep their gravy train going. In a free market, they would have suffered the consequences of their bad decisions, but they had an ace up their sleeve: they controlled the Federal Reserve and the Treasury.

When they needed a bailout, former Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson was there to deliver $700 billion dollars worth of bailouts. Paulson and Fed Chair Ben Bernanke scared Congress into passing the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP) under the premise that Paulson would use that money to buy the toxic assets that we talked about yesterday.  After passage, Paulson changed his mind in favor of giving the banks a “cash infusion,” or gigantic handout. Paulson, Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner had already manipulated the free market when they arranged shotgun marriages between Merrill Lynch and Bank of America, and Bear Stearns and JP Morgan. While they helped consolidate power for some, they also let Lehman Brothers fail. After letting Lehman fail, they changed policies and opened up the Federal Reserve discount window to investment banks. This policy shift would have saved Lehman, but conveniently for Goldman Sachs it came just hours too late. Hank Paulson used his government position to eliminate one of his firm’s largest competitors.

Despite promises to the contrary, Obama continued Wall Street’s control of fiscal policy by reappointing Wall Street favorites Ben Bernanke (Fed) and Timothy Geithner (Treasury). Obama famously said to 13 Wall Street bankers, “I’m the only thing between you and the pitchforks,” and he has been delivering for them ever since.

I sympathize with the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors because when I joined the Tea Party movement, I wanted to see the criminals who caused this mess serving long prison sentences. I started researching how the whole thing happened, and what I found was that the people who needed to be put in prison were GOVERNMENT officials. The irresponsible Wall Street executives deserved to fail and suffer the same fate as the American people they stole from, but the true criminals are the corrupt government officials who betrayed the American people by manipulating the market in exchange for favors. As the ranking members of the House and Senate committees that oversaw fiscal policy, Barney Frank and Chris Dodd were the worst offenders. They were joined by a long list of bipartisan bastards who sold us all out, and as I learned, I focused my anger towards both defeating the corrupt politicians and electing patriots who would investigate their criminal behavior.

I could go on and on about how the government, at the behest of Wall Street, engineered the financial collapse, and for the sake of brevity have left out information about Clinton’s deregulation, the “Affordable Housing Act,” and hundreds of other corrupt policies purchased for pennies on the dollar from crooked politicians. Hopefully, the “Occupy Wall Street” protestors will realize the same way I did that the only reason Wall Street was able to rob the American people -searching to satisfy their unquenchable greed – was that a large group of corrupt politicians took control of a government that had far too much control over our lives. The solution is not MORE government; the solution is FAR LESS government.

I believe in limited government, personal responsibility, and FREE markets. The markets have been manipulated by a government that is far too powerful. I hate the corrupt bastards whose reckless gambling sank our economy, but I blame the corrupt government that both let them do it, and then protected them from the consequences that they had earned. I pray that these protestors will educate themselves and make the logical decision to join our political movement that is going to restore our great nation.

Wall Street created a series of financial “products” that were designed to broaden the risk associated with banking across the economy.  These “products”(which don’t produce anything) soared in popularity because they seemed to mitigate risk and offer a high reward. The “products” were especially popular in the commodities and housing markets because they also offered multi-tiered opportunities for the banks to make commissions.  When the Federal Reserve lowered interest rates to nearly 0, and then actually 0, it incentivized all of these financial institutions to take what is essentially free money and dump it into their magical no-risk, high-reward financial instruments.  The problem is that these financial instruments were, and continue to be, deeply flawed.

Here is how these “products” work in the housing market: A person takes a loan out with a bank to buy a home, a mortgage. The bank knows that a certain percentage of people will default on those loans, so they package those loans together with other loans to create a sense of security. That bundle of loans (mortgage backed security) can now be traded, sold, insured, and bet on, and every time a transaction happens with that loan, somebody makes a commission. Those commissions and unmitigated greed, coupled with the idea that these securities had no risk and free money from the Fed, led the institutions on Wall Street to abandon all prudence. Banks started borrowing more money to continue the betting on these securities, overleveraging themselves at a rate of 40-1, 50-1 or in some cases 80-1, but even that didn’t satiate their greed. They made a legislative push in all 50 states to repeal “prudence” laws that prevented administrators of state retirement and pension plans from investing in anything but the safest investments. To fuel their irresponsible gambling, these bastards literally used their money and influence to gain access to the money that hardworking people had set aside for their retirements.

The problem with these securities is that they blur the actual value of the collateral (the mortgages) and therefore cannot receive a proper valuation. As they are re-bundled and sold, they continue to get farther away from that original loan, which is the only source of real value. Even at the source, the loans were overvalued because the government had begun demanding that proper underwriting be waived to ensure “fairness.”  Basically, federal government idiots thought that not making a loan to somebody who couldn’t pay it back was unfair/racist/classist and therefore should be punished. To acquiesce, the banks developed a whole new set of “products” like Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs) and interest-only loans that created a false sense of ability to pay back. So a mortgage that was overvalued to begin with was then securitized with other overvalued mortgages, so that it could become even more grossly overvalued. Then the quietly unstable security was borrowed against to the tune of 50-1 or even 100-1.

Eventually, Wall Street realized that they had bet everything they had, everything they could borrow, and everything they could steal (retirement, pensions) on the incredibly overestimated value of these products, but by then everyone had bought into the game and the giant bubble they had created collapsed.

By law, private retirement plans are required to be pre-funded. Meanwhile the Federal government does not hold itself to the same standard, kicking the metaphorical can down the road by offering retirement benefits without creating a retirement account to pay the bills. Private pension plans hold over $2.3 trillion in stocks, bonds and other assets, and even state and local governments hold over $3 trillion in reserves to pay retirement benefits as they should.

Last year the federal government paid a record $268 billion in retirement benefits out of general fund revenues. All total, the unfunded liability for federal and military retirement benefits stands at $5.7 trillion, which is dangerously close to the unfunded mandate of social security which has an expected shortfall of $6.5 trillion. By abdicating their responsibility to assure the long term health of our economy, Congress chooses to kick the can down the road a little further each year, leaving us at a point where there is no more road to kick down.

The problem is not the government employees who were promised a retirement plan when they were hired. For many, retirement benefits were the deciding factor between a private sector career and choosing the security of a government pension program. My issue is with elected leaders who use money that should fund retirement benefits for government workers on pet projects and pork-barrel spending instead.

It is not a matter of stripping promised retirement benefits from retired federal workers, just as we have no desire to take away Social Security benefits from those who depend on them. The answer lies in significant reduction of the federal government by returning to Constitutional limits on federal power. Power must be returned to the states, ending the Big Brother mentality pervasive in Washington DC. We don’t need a Washington bureaucrat deciding what’s best for our communities, and it’s clear we also cannot afford it.

Our movement must stay vigilant and organized as we roar from the rooftops to stop the financial insanity running rampant in the halls of government before it is too late.

This proves what we’ve known all along: that Barack Obama is less concerned about improving the economy and getting people back to work than he is with advancing his ideological agenda of creating an ever-growing federal government. He did not propose paying for his jobs bill with spending offsets in other sectors of the federal government. He proposed paying for it by raising taxes!

The Administration is so committed to this agenda that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was able to say with a straight face that with that price tag, the jobs bill would be “a bargain.” Really? A bargain, Mr. Geithner?! The truth is this is an ineffective jobs bill, but Barack Obama and his liberal allies in Congress are pushing it because it serves their greater purpose: making government bigger.

And that’s something that “We the People” cannot get behind.

With the amount of debt that the country has allowed to pile up, the House of Representatives has shown a mature step in the right direction: we cannot continue to increase spending into perpetuity. If there are items that we must pay for, we need to offset those appropriations with cuts to programs that we, quite frankly, don’t need.

Unsurprisingly, the Democrat-led Senate killed the House appropriations bill, manufacturing an impending government shutdown in order to defend government spending on these wasteful programs. Not only that, but Harry Reid and his minions have the audacity to blame the Tea Party for the game of chicken they are playing over these wasteful programs!

At the end of the day, we can’t be surprised by the actions of the big-government liberals in the Senate. They will stop at nothing to protect and advance their ideological agenda of increasing the size and scope of the federal government. But what we can do is take notice, remember their refusal to represent our values, and vote them out of office in 2012!

Liberals in government love to champion green energy projects as the future of energy production but most are only viable with billions in government subsidies. There is a reason that private investors have not flocked to alternative energy; the technology has not reached a point where it makes economic sense.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to tour a new geothermal energy system at the Peppermill Hotel and Casino in Reno, Nevada with a group of engineers and energy policy leaders. The Peppermill’s project represents one of the most sensible “green energy” ideas I have seen to date but because it was built without government subsidies and the Peppermill cannot claim a tax credit for its use, projects like this are ignored by the media since politicians are not able to claim how “they” made it happen.

The owners invested $9.5 million in the project that required drilling a 4000 foot deep well to tap into a geothermal spring. Of course, not every property is situated on a geothermal source but the potential does exist in many areas and is both cost effective and highly efficient.

The first picture is one of four conventional boiler units used prior to the new system coming on line. The boilers are each about the size of a semi trailer and are powered by natural gas. Each boiler burns about half a million dollars in natural gas each year to run the property’s climate and hot water systems. The second picture is the new heat exchanger which is a little smaller than a child’s bunk bed and replaces all four of the larger boiler units combined!

 

To simplify the project, hot water from the geothermal well is circulated through the heat exchanger where it heats domestic water for the Hotel and Casino. A small power generating system runs off steam from the well and powers the pumps to circulate the water. Total carbon footprint: ZERO. With a savings of $2.5 million per year in energy costs, it will take less than four years to recover their investment.

Contrary to the Liberal talking points, Conservatives care about our environment just as much as they do. We simply believe that throwing taxpayer money at immature technology translates to the government picking winners and losers based on who is helping them win reelection rather than science and technology. Business owners make decisions based on factual evidence that a project will work. Government’s way of throwing money in hopes that something will work has proven exactly what we have been shouting for years; It does’t work.