A Lincoln County, West Virginia Sheriff and Clerk are to plead guilty to charges of vote fraud in the 2010 Democrat primary after the pair were arrested during an election fraud investigation conducted by state and federal authorities.

Sheriff Jerry Bowman and Clerk Donald Whitten were caught in a scheme to file fraudulent absentee ballots in an effort to get Whitten elected Circuit Clerk. Whitten will also plead guilty to lying to an FBI agent hired by WV Secretary of State Natalie Tennant to investigate the false absentee ballots.

Sheriff Bowman, who is at the tail end of a second term and is term-limited from running again, conspired with Whitten and a thus far unidentified candidate for county commissioner to help Whitten win a close election with the fraudulent absentee ballot scheme.

“The Candidates further agreed that they would complete absentee ballot applications for voters,” the agreement documents said. “The Candidates also agreed that on those applications they would state certain reasons that voters were legally eligible to vote absentee, regardless of whether those reasons were true.”

In 2004 several Lincoln and Logan County officials were convicted of vote fraud in a federal vote-buying case. Convicted included Lincoln County Circuit Clerk Greg Stowers and county Assessor Jerry Weaver. Amazingly, Weaver is now running for county sheriff.

But, remember… left-wingers and Democrats say there is no vote fraud in the USA.

If there was a single unifying argument that defined Obamaism from his earliest days in politics to his Presidential campaign, it was the idea of post-partisanship. He was proposing himself as a transformative figure, the man who would spring the lock. In an essay published in The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan, a self-proclaimed conservative, reflected on Obama’s heady appeal: “Unlike any of the other candidates, he could take America—finally—past the debilitating, self-perpetuating family quarrel of the Baby Boom generation that has long engulfed all of us.”

First, if you’re quoting Andrew Sullivan as an actual conservative, get out the chest high hip waders. Second, Obama was always good at talking the talk, but, could never walk the walk, because he himself was intensely partisan to the far end of the progressive spectrum. There is nothing wrong with that, people have their own set of beliefs. It’s when one acts on beliefs, forcing them on people, that the problems start. And James Pethokoukis at The American Enterprise finds 11 stunning revelations from a confidential Larry Summers memo to Obama in December 2008 that was a key source for the New Yorker article. Here are a few of them (the bold is James’ writing, the italic is Larry Summers own writing

The stimulus was about implementing the Obama agenda. The short-run economic imperative was to identify as many campaign promises or high priority items that would spend out quickly and be inherently temporary. … The stimulus package is a key tool for advancing clean energy goals and fulfilling a number of campaign commitments.

Team Obama knows these deficits are dangerous (although it has offered no long-term plan to deal with them). Closing the gap between what the campaign proposed and the estimates of the campaign offsets would require scaling back proposals by about $100 billion annually or adding new offsets totaling the same. Even this, however, would leave an average deficit over the next decade that would be worse than any post-World War II decade. This would be entirely unsustainable and could cause serious economic problems in the both the short run and the long run.

The financial crisis wasn’t just Wall Street’s fault. A significant cause of the current crisis lies in the failure of regulators to exercise vigorously the authority they already have.

The first one is the most significant, which highlights what we all inherently know, that the point of the stimulus was to give payback to campaign contributors and elected Democrats, as well as pushing Obama’s far left progressive agenda without regard for realities. Solyndra is the perfect example.

Oh, and then we see the “death panels” crop up even back then

IPAB was there at the very beginning. There are two possibilities for making tough decisions on the long-run budget, which could be done either separately or together: creating an executive-branch “health board” (which focuses on one part of the issue) and a Congressionally chartered commission (which could focus more broadly).

From the beginning, Team Obama wanted to implement the panel of 15 unelected and unresponsive bureaucrats to make decisions on our personal health care.

Doug Ross writes “The revelations in this document alone should be enough to bring down the Obama administration. The level of dishonesty laced throughout the Obama White House is both shocking and repellent.” Let’s add some fuel to that fire, looking at the very first paragraph in the Larry Summers memo

In the absence of fiscal stimulus the economy is projected to lose 3 to 4 million jobs in 2009. Together with the jobs we have already lost and population growth, we will be 7 million jobs short of full employment. The unemployment rate is projected to rise above 9 percent and not projected to start falling until 2011.

That is Summers saying what would happen without the Stimulus, which is mostly what happened with the Stimulus. Except, with the Stimulus, jobs loss was greater, and the unemployment rate didn’t start to fall until late in 2011, partly due to people dropping out of the job market, essentially giving up.

Summers also concluded that a core package more than $300 billion was not “feasible to design sensible proposals along these
lines that go much beyond this total size.” And then they go on to propose hundreds of billions more.

There are all sorts of interesting tidbits in both Pethokoukis’ article along with the Summers meme, which provided a blueprint for spending obscene amounts of taxpayer money for political payback and pushing Obama’s extremist political agenda, which wasn’t even in the same landmass as his supposed “post-partisan” coming together speeches. Read them both.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

(CBS News) Solar panel maker Solyndra received a $528 million Energy Department loan in 2009 – and went bankrupt last year. The government’s risky investment strategy didn’t stop there, as a CBS News investigation has uncovered a pattern of cases of the government pouring your tax dollars into clean energy.

Take Beacon Power — a green energy storage company. We were surprised to learn exactly what the Energy Department knew before committing $43 million of your tax dollars.

Documents obtained by CBS News show Standard and Poor’s had confidentially given the project a dismal outlook of “CCC-plus.”

Asked whether he’d put his personal money into Beacon, economist Peter Morici replied, “Not on purpose.”

“It’s, it is a junk bond,” Morici said. “But it’s not even a good junk bond. It’s well below investment grade.”

Was the Energy Department investing tax dollars in something that’s not even a good junk bond? Morici says yes.

“This level of bond has about a 70 percent chance of failing in the long term,” he said.

Here’s where it gets even better

CBS News counted 12 clean energy companies that are having trouble after collectively being approved for more than $6.5 billion in federal assistance. Five have filed for bankruptcy: The junk bond-rated Beacon, Evergreen Solar, SpectraWatt, AES’ subsidiary Eastern Energy and Solyndra.

In terms of the Central Government budget, $6.5 billion is chump change. For the 53% who do pay federal taxes, this is an obscene use of our hard earned money to prop up companies that are bound to fail in the name of making Obama’s politically motivated “green” energy initiative look good, at least in the short term, as well as hook up Democrat campaign donors and backers.

The long term shame here is that this type of malfeasance damages the future of clean energy. I believe that most of us can agree that these “alternative” energy sources are part of the future. They aren’t ready for prime time. Not yet. Not even close. Wasting taxpayer money on doomed and mostly worthless ventures will certainly erode any near term future investments in these types of companies, even ones that are probably going to be winners.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

Remember back in the days of the debate over Obamacare when unions were the biggest voices screaming in support of the legislation? Many labor union bosses said that nationalized healthcare was exactly what they wanted. Further they said it was what was good for the country. Yet now we learn that Obama has given waivers to some 550,000 union members so that they don;t have to suffer under Obamacare.

Paul Connor reports that a classic Friday evening document dump from the White House shows that unions employing up to 543,812 members have received waivers from the Obama administration.

Fridays are often the one day of the week when government agencies satisfy transparency rules and release documents that show what they’ve been up to. They release them on Friday in the early evening because they understand that reporters are already headed home for the weekend and TV news departments have already programed their evening newscasts. These agencies also understand that news agencies don’t often cover heavy news on weekends. Further, by the time Monday rolls around the document will be “old news” and many of them will simply escape attention.

But all these waivers really do make one ask a central question. If Obamacare is so great, why all the waivers? Why any waivers? More specifically, if Obamacare is such a well-accepted panacea for all that ails us, why are the unions who pushed so hard for Obamacare trying to get out from under it all?

It’s yet one more example of left-wingers making rules for the rest of us that they don’t want to suffer under themselves and then getting the politicians they bought and paid for to make sure that everyone but they have to suffer under those rules.

Rules are for you people, not liberals.

You might recall in October when it was discovered that a few union bosses had paid off Illinois lawmakers to write a law that allowed union bosses to serve as a substitute teacher for one day in order to qualify them for state pensions for life. Well, apparently one of those union bosses also got freebies from the state for his kids and extended family.

Steven Preckwinkle, the Director of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, not only got a free pension for life paid for by the taxpayers of Illinois after being a “teacher” for only one day, but the Chicago Tribune has discovered that Preckwinkle also got free college tuition for his kids and a nephew, also courtesy of the taxpayers.

Through a spokesman, Preckwinkle said that his undeserved pension and the freebie education for his kids was perfectly legitimate and that “political connections played no role” in his amazing good fortune. If you believe that I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.

The whole situation with Preckwinkle and fellow unionista David Piccioli is an affront to the people of Illinois and is just more proof that the political climate in Illinois is set up to benefit insiders not the people of Illinois.

The union thug’s kids got their free tuition through what is called a “legislative scholarship,” a program that allows Springfield pols to give away college tuition waivers to anyone they please. Governor Quinn has proposed eliminating the program but is meeting resistance in Springfield.

The Tribune also highlighted the crooked quid pro quo that occurs every single day in Illinois.

The pol that gave Preckwinkle his free tuition packages was Springfield Representative Mike Curran. Curran left the legislature in 1995 and guess where he works now? Yep, the very union that Preckwinkle works for.

After he left the state legislature Mike Curran got hired as a “consultant” by the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

Yeah. Imagine that, eh?

In the meantime, Preckwinkle gave hundreds if not thousands of dollars to Mike Curran’s various political campaigns. Quid pro quo.

This is the sort of corrupt bargain you get when you allow state employees to unionize. The best solution to eliminate such insider dealing, fraud, waste of tax dollars, and corruption is to eliminate all public employee unions.

Meanwhile and unsurprisingly, the children of Red Chinese Communist Party members are living lives of luxury in China while the rest of the nation struggles in poverty. Is it a parallel to the corrupt situation in Illinois? What do you think?

Think you came up a bit short trick-or-treating this year? It’s nothing compared to California, whose revenues in October came in $800 million below projections. Overall, California is about $1.5 billion in the red for the current fiscal year, which may trigger some nasty cuts to schools and public safety if revenues don’t start pouring in soon.

Of course, California didn’t get into these dire straits by accident. Years and years of reckless overspending pushed the state over the fiscal precipice resulting in the sorry state of affairs we’re seeing today. Apparently, despite billions in cuts to education and other critical programs, some people still haven’t gotten the message. Consider the so-called California Cancer Research Act, pushed by a former legislator. This nearly billion dollar tax increase not only would duplicate existing programs, but would spend up to $16 million annually on additional overhead and up to $117 million a year for new buildings and facilities. In short, it would create another new bureaucracy to pay for, even though we can’t pay for the programs already on the books.

California dug itself into the hole it’s in by giving in to wild spending schemes time and time again. Perhaps this June, voters will finally get the message.

Matthew Cunningham is a writer and new media pioneer in the public and private sectors. In 2004, he founded Orange County’s first political blog, OC Blog, which spawned the most influential regional blogosphere in California and evolved into a national network of more than 30 local blogs under the RedCounty.com banner. He’s also a contributor to the FlashReport Blog, California’s leading statewide conservative blog, and a regular guest on “The Filter with Fred Roggin,” NBC 4’s daily public affairs program.

Nearly $100 billion. That’s what High Speed Rail is now going to cost California taxpayers – more than double the costs initially promised by the proponents of Prop 1A, which contained the initial taxpayer financing for the project.

2033. That’s when the HSR project is now expected to be completed – 13 years after it was initially supposed to be completed.

So, in the three short years since voters were sold this bill of goods, the costs have gone up $50+ billion and the time to complete the project has doubled. How could that be? Maybe the cost of labor has skyrocketed, despite unemployment being in double digits? Or maybe the cost of purchasing land for the tracks has dramatically increased, despite the real estate market being down? Or – just maybe – the special interests that pushed High Speed Rail didn’t give voters all the facts when they sold this program in 2008.

Over and over again, California voters have been sold the benefits of a new program that ended up costing taxpayers more money, that lacked sufficient oversight or accountability, or that failed to deliver on the promised benefits. High Speed Rail, stem cell research, the First 5 programs … all of these programs have faced at least some of these problems.

But that hasn’t stopped special interests, who keep coming to California voters with more ballot measures to get more of our hard earned tax dollars for new programs. The latest ballot box boondoggle is being pushed by a former career politician, who wants to create a huge new taxpayer-funded bureaucracy with six political appointees. The so-called California Cancer Research Act – on the ballot next June – would raise taxes on tobacco by $1 a pack for this big new spending program.

California can’t even pay for the current programs on the books, and a former politician wants to start a new program. How long before this program has cost overruns, and Sacramento comes calling asking for more from California taxpayers?

Steve Maggi Is Host & Executive Producer of Free America Radio.

(Washington Post) An electric car company backed by more than a half-billion dollars in Department of Energy loan guarantees has missed early manufacturing goals and has gradually pushed back plans for U.S. production and the creation of thousands of jobs.

This week, Fisker delayed until 2013 the production of the moderately priced family car it plans to build in Delaware. It also learned that its Finnish-produced luxury model, the $96,000 Karma, which is two years late in reaching U.S. markets, failed to meet a promised energy-efficiency standard.

Anyone shocked? And what, exactly, will be “moderately priced”? The batteries cost $12-15k alone. Oh, and Fisker is known for building “luxury hybrid plugins.” This is the company that Obama gave over half a billion dollars of our money. $529,000,000 to be exact. Gotta love looking at all those zeroes.

“Without any excuses, yes, we did have some delays,” company co-founder Henrik Fisker said during a stop in the District this week to show off his company’s sleek new Karma. “But this is completely different. You can’t compare at all.”

We’ll see. But, you’ll simply love a few of their excuses for the delays. I’d love to excerpt from the Washington Post, except they changed their story this morning to not include the reasons. I guess they are embarrassing to the Regulator In Chief. But, if you search “fisker regulatory hurdles” on Google News, you find the original

Agency officials attributed Fisker’s delays to regulatory hurdles and issues beyond the company’s control. Henrik Fisker said in an interview Wednesday that….

So, the typical problems that so many other companies have due to The Government.

Shockingly, there’s a crony capitalism socialism component

The Fisker commitment was questioned by some from the start, partly because of the company’s political connections. A key investor is a venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, whose partners include former Democratic vice president Al Gore. The investment house raised $2 million for Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign.

How many times have we seen big Obama donors being rewarded with huge government “loans”? Why aren’t you protesting this in front of the White House, Occupiers?

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. Please sign the drill now petition.

Did Obama’s medical record czar, Judy Faulkner, hoodwink five members of Congress into pushing her own medical records company as the solution for the problem of electronic medical records for all government contracts? That’s what some wonder as Obama’s search for an electronic medical records solution evolves.

In a likely earnest effort to bring jobs to Wisconsin and help improve the fortunes of a home state company, five members of Congress signed onto a letter urging the Department of Defense to seriously consider EPIC Systems medical records computer architecture. (Download PDF of letter)

The letter, signed by Wisconsin Senators Herb Kohl (D) and Ron Johnson (R), as well as Representatives Paul Ryan (R), Tammy Baldwin (D), and Ron Kind (D), was written some two years after EPIC Systems CEO, Judith Faulkner was appointed (April 3, 2009) to Obama’s Health Information Technology Policy Committee. This is a committee established by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that will, “make recommendations on creating a policy framework for the development and adoption of a nationwide health information technology infrastructure,” for electronic medical records.

So, EPIC Systems bigwig Faulkner was somehow able to convince these members of Congress to sign onto a letter that seems to push her own company’s medical records system. Seems just a bit self serving, doesn’t it? To have one of Obama’s medical records czars pushing her own system on the government so that government can adopt her system and she can make billions of dollars?

Also, how is it that a woman that stands to make billions if the government adopts her company’s product can get on the very committee that is making recommendations for the country’s electronic medical records system, anyway?

Is it that she is a huge Obama donor?

There are quite a few questions, here. But the big question is, what was the intention of these members of Congress? What was the real point of the letter urging EPIC Systems into serious consideration?

I contacted each of these member’s offices, got a return call from three of them, but only one actually gave me a quote. That one was conservative favorite Paul Ryan.

Ryan’s spokesman told me that the congressman had no intention to push only the EPIC system as the sole solution to the medical records problem, but only that the government should be sure and consider it as one of the systems to be evaluated. He pointed out that the letter does not say “we should adopt EPIC.”

True enough. But the mystery still remains: how did an organization that allegedly has no lobbyists get 5 members of Congress to sign a letter that implicitly supports its product?

Of course, an even bigger consideration here is a matter of Obama once again imagining he should have the power to pick winners and losers instead of allowing the market to choose. If the market were to choose EPIC as a standardized electronic medical records solution for the nation, then so be it. But here we go again having another one of Obama’s all powerful committees deciding what all of us will be forced to live with.

Naturally, Obama stuffed his committee with bog donors.

When is a national park not a national park? When it is “themed” toward one small segment of the population by a government infected with PCism. That is what U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar did when he advocated recently for “Latino” themed national parks and historical landmarks.

One might ask if Salazar is Interior Secretary of the right country with such a suggestion?

To carry through with his penchant for identity politics, Salazar has also pushed the National Parks Service to forget about those evil dead white guys and try to find more places for our historic landmarks that are associated with women and minorities.

Less than 3 percent of all the national landmarks that we have the highest designation you can receive as a historic landmark are designated for women, Latinos, African Americans or other members of minority groups, Salazar said in a meeting with reporters last week. That tells you that the score is not even.

The timing for this story is, of course, suspect. Just when Obama is launching a new campaign for president, here comes his Interior Secretary pandering to Hispanics and minorities.

Imagine that.

So, what is one of the first new minority themed areas Salazar is ballyhooing? A paean to unions with a Cesar Chavez historic landmark.

To continue the left’s efforts to Balkanize the United States, Salazar will preside over the construction of a National Museum of the American Latino. Reports are that the project would cost $600 million. But you know darn well that the final tally will be double that — at least — due to the common waste, cost overruns, union skullduggery, and government failures.

This is just one more example of the left’s desire to separate Americans one from another and to make us hate our collective history and set us against each other.