WASHINGTON: Charlie Rangel stepped down as House Ways and Means chairman yesterday amid a House ethics investigation. The ethics committee last week finally admonished him for accepting corporate-sponsored trips to the Caribbean.

News first broke of impropriety in June of 2008. While rent controlled apartments in New York City are increasingly hard to find, the New York Times reported that Rangel had four of them, including three adjacent units overlooking Upper Manhattan. The next month Rangel officially requested an ethics probe to clear his name over the allegations. Two months later he acknowledged that he owed taxes for rental income he did not report. Finally that month on September 25, 2008 the House ethics panel convened an investigative subcommittee. Meanwhile many other allegations came to light.

Nearly two years later the investigation has censured Rangel on the least of the charges, forcing him to step down. This amounts to a slap on the wrist which will move Rangel out of the spotlight to enable Democrats focus their attention on ramming healthcare reform down the throats of the American people. Left unadressed are several issues:

• Failing to report hundreds of thousands in assets, including mutual funds and stock
• Failing to report ownership in an overseas luxury residence
• Using his official position to raise money for a school named after him
• Tax evasion on unreported assets and other ethics violations

This month millions of Americans will grapple with the complex US tax code as they prepare their tax returns for the upcoming deadline. Many struggle to pay their tax liability to fund this out of control government. Charlie Rangel as head of the Ways and Means Committee was in charge of writing this tax code. No one would know better than Rangel the illegality of hiding nearly one million in unreported assets. Yet he holds himself above the law, depending on his cronies who are still covering for him.

This is all too often the case with the ruling class. They pass laws that others must obey, taxing the serfs who serve to finance their power and decadence. Meanwhile they exempt themselves from the very laws they impose upon others.

Pelosi promised to “drain the swamp” when she took control in 2006. Instead she has pumped raw sewage into the bayou and has spritzed her private cologne to cover the stench.

Nick Popaditch "Cigar Marine"

JAMES SIMPSON: A common complaint we hear about members of Congress is that they have never served in the military. A total of 95 veterans of the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and the National Guard are current House members (the 96^th, John Murtha just died). This represents a mere 20 percent of sitting Members of Congress and is a record low. We can chalk this up as one good reason for Congress’s stunning ignorance regarding military matters.

“I will go to Washington to do battle against Nancy Pelosi, Barney Frank, Steny Hoyer and the rest of them. They have never seen anything like the Southern fried butt whipping that’s coming at them!” Lt. Col. Allen West (Ret.)

Among the many encouraging signs for the nation as we head into the 2010 midterm elections is the number of first-time Republican candidates for Congress who are recent military veterans. There is even an organization supporting them: Iraq Veterans for Congress (IVC).
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Obama is "Fixing" More Than Your Car

WASHINGTON (or is it Detroit?): The NIP was the first to call into question the Congressional witch hunts against Toyota. Our position was that all credibility of the National Traffic Safety Administration has been lost now that Obama is in the car business. Turns out we were right, but it goes much further.

When unions spend more than $60 million on an election, they demand results. That money put Andy Stern, head of the SEIU, in the White House more than any other visitor. Andy Stern warned us that the union thugs “prefer to use the power of persuasion, but if that doesn’t work we use the persuasion of power.”

Big money always means big influence. Unions came out on top when it came time restructure GM, ironic because unions were at the heart of the automaker’s troubles. Guess who receives barrels of union money:

We are told that 19 of the 36 Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee were given sizable checks by the UAW for their election campaigns. We also learn that 12 of 25 Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee got checks, too. In my opinion, such a conflict of interest puts Toyota at quite a disadvantage… Read more…

Market Manipulation?

WASHINGTON (or is it Detroit?): Just as one Federal investigation of Toyota is winding down, the National Traffic Safety Administration announced today that they are launching an investigation of possible flaws in Toyota’s steering system, this time in the bread and butter Corolla line:

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration will open an investigation into a possible flaw in the steering systems for the 2009-2010 Corolla, likely to lead to another massive recall for Toyota, ABC News has learned.

NHTSA says it has received 163 complaints about the steering causing the Corollas to veer from side-to-side. A number of accidents and injuries have been tied to the issue, according to federal officials. ABC News

While the NIP does not dispute the seriousness any Toyota car accident, we do have serious questions about the frequency of charges leveled against the automaker by the Federal government. Could the steady barrage of charges against the automaker be market manipulation? Read more…

BABE HUGGETT: Staggering under a national debt of £830 billion ($1.245 trillion) for a nation only about the size of California with a population about twice that state’s, the UK’s Labour Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, is selling off its hard asset Dover Port to its historical arch-enemy, France, in a benighted attempt at debt reduction through privatization.

Brits Selling What GI's Defended in WWII

Although the UK already has sold off its other major ports to private hands through the 1991 Ports Act, the sale of Dover Port and the White Cliffs to France has generated anger and outrage among the general British population, a large percentage of whom have living memories of WWII.

Confronted by the historically inverted, proposed sale to the regional council of Nord-pas-de-Calais, Tory candidate for MP, Charles Elphicke had this to say of Calais owning Dover:
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BABE HUGGETT: Over the years I’ve always made sure to purchase the September issue of Vogue and did so for more decades than I care to admit. I finally dropped Vogue in favor of Harper’s Bazaar when women of my age started disappearing from Vogue’s acknowledgement as savvy fashion consumers to be replaced with fashion-masquerading pro-leftist commentary. The conspicuous consumption and luxury-addicted Vogue never did catch on that the romance of revolutionary thought was just a façade to hide a grasping, murderous and rapacious political system based on greed and envy. In fact, the editors of Vogue still haven’t figured it out and even Harper’s Bazaar is guilty of it although to a lesser degree. At least with Harper’s, I can still find “women of a certain age” held up as fashionable icons but that’s about it.

However, women’s magazines in general and fashion commentary in particular are a surprisingly accurate means of forecasting who will be the winners in political elections. I’ve often written that if you want to know who will win American elections, look to the catwalk and check out the zeitgeist of the collections. When I saw even Madonna picking up the Wild West vibe of the runways by sporting her cowgirl hat and boots before the November 2000 elections, I knew George W. Bush would win despite the frantic efforts of the Al Gore camp to continue challenging the results until enough fraudulent votes could be manufactured by Democratic operatives.

It didn’t take a genius to discover that Obama was destined to win the 2008 elections either. All you had to do was see all the pro-Obama message tees on the runway to figure that one out. It was so blatant, it was depressing. The runways right now for Fall 2010 are full of Post-Apocalyptic wear featuring rips, tears, disjointed and mismatched patterns, and hard, funnel-necked leather jackets vying with cantilevered, architectural reinterpretations of the human form in such a way that has not been seen since the Mannerist fashions of the first Queen Elizabeth. Read more…

JAMES SIMPSON: Newly minted Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell will be presenting the “Republican Response” to President Obama’s State of the Union address this coming Wednesday evening. Given McDonnell’s victory in Virginia, Chris Christie’s upset win in New Jersey, and especially Brown’s stunning triumph in Massachusetts, it is absolutely critical that McDonnell capture the optimism, energy and momentum these victories have generated by sending exactly the right message.

I hope Governor McDonnell hears me on this.

The reason Republicans are having such stunning success is because Republicans are currently the only viable alternative to the willfully destructive policies of the radical leftist Democrats currently in charge, and those policies are deliberately destructive. As an economist and researcher of radical movements for 25 years, I can speak with authority on this subject. I know this by the enormous mass of evidence available. My writings are but the tip of the iceberg.

Many U.S. citizens however, now recognize the same thing intuitively and have been responding with justifiable alarm. Therein lies the reason for the Tea Party movement’s explosive growth. Therein lies the reason people are taking precious time away from work and families, attending evening-long meetings, showing up at rallies and pouring energy into upstart campaigns. Therein lies the reason middle-aged people who never carried a sign in their lives, are showing up – I’ve seen ‘em even in wheelchairs and on oxygen – to express their outrage. Read more…