JAMES SIMPSON: As reported at Daily Caller today, senior NPR executive Ron Schiller has been caught in a sting video orchestrated by investigative journalist James O’Keefe. O’keefe’s organization set up a fake Muslim Brotherhood group named the Muslim Education Action Center (MEAC) Trust, and approached NPR about donating $5 million to counter what they described as pro-Zionist coverage in the media.

In the video, Schiller compares the Muslim Brotherhood to the women’s movement, calls tea partiers “seriously racist, racist people,” and justifies NPR’s firing of Juan Williams as an action Schiller was “very proud of.” Schiller was accompanied by Betsy Liley, NPR’s Director of Institutional Giving, who compared the experience of the Muslim Brotherhood to Japanese Americans interred in detention camps during WW II. At one point the two Muslim pretenders joke that they and their friends referred to NPR as “National Palestinian Radio.” Schiller and Liley laughed in agreement.

The statements Schiller and Liley make in the video just get better and better, an eye-popping, monument to their towering arrogance and stupidity. The saddest part is that they personify the kind of presumptuous, conceited attitude endemic to the media left.

Here is the problem the US faces in a nutshell. This will make no sense to those members of Congress and the President who have never run a business, never studied accounting, and don’t know how to read a balance sheet. We are presenting the information here as a warning to NIP readers. If you read the full report you will understand the severity of the economic situation we are facing in the United States.

Mary Meeker, partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers served as a managing director and research analyst ad Morgan Stanley from 1991 to 2010. She states that the net worth of the US is a negative $44 trillion dollars. You need to download and study her entire analysis from Business Week. The graph below is taken from the report and shows revenue vs expenses. What the graph doesn’t show is the rapid growth of expenses and the comparatively minor growth of revenue.

The politicians and socialist media have control of what Americans read, view, and think. Their ignorance of finance and their predilection for social justice have driven this country into bankruptcy. It is the NIP’s position that the destruction of freedom and our way of life is the goal of the left. Like the British and Roman empires, our republic may soon become one more footnote of history. Beware the ides of March.

WASHINGTON: Have you ever driven through the great expanses of the US and wondered why so much of it is wide open? California’s land prices lead the nation in overpriced real estate, where a average family on one income can’t afford to own a home. Have you ever wondered why that is so, when there seems to be so much undeveloped land in California? It’s because the Federal Government owns 45% of all the land in California.

What impact would releasing that land to developers have in housing prices? Keeping this land locked up has artificially inflated real estate prices and made multi-millionaires of developers and contractors in California.

Such is the case in every state in the US, to a greater or lesser degree. The map below details the percentage of real estate owned by the government in each state. The top 10 list of states with the highest percentage of federally owned property are:

1. Nevada           84.5%
2. Alaska            69.1%
3. Utah               57.4%
4. Oregon           53.1%
5. Idaho              50.2%
6. Arizona           48.1%
7. California        45.3%
8. Wyoming         42.3%
9. New Mexico     41.8%
10. Colorado          36.6%

The Feds own nearly 30% of all US territory, almost 650 million acres of land. When we think of the US indebtedness (see US Debt Clock in right column), we do not take into account the assets this country owns. Just by selling “public” lands to private investors the US could raise significant capital. Much of this land is mineral laden and oil rich.

This doesn’t count all the offshore property the US owns. There are billions of barrels of oil lying beneath US territorial waters, forbidden to drilling. Does it make any sense that the price of gas at the pump is controlled by the Saudis when we have so much energy here in the US?

Our dollars flow out of the US like oil out of a gushing well, only to be used to prop up illegitimate regimes and to finance terrorist activities. Just think of the wealth the US could retain if we were paying ourselves for all that oil instead of OPEC.

Our roads and national infrastructure in the US lie in shambles while Arabs build skyscrapers that rival the tower of Babel. Airports and highways in Arab countries glisten while airports like LaGuardia look like third world countries. All of the developments in the Mideast are being paid for with US dollars.

The question you should be asking yourself is why does our federal government lock up our lands and oil? Our politicians have driven our country into bankruptcy. It’s time to sell off some assets and bring our debt back into control. While we are at it let’s quit sending our dollars overseas to prop up dictators like Qaddafi and the House of Saud.

JAMES SIMPSON: California is the unfortunate testbed for almost every new lunatic idea promulgated by the radical left—which is to say, every idea they offer—the complete explanation for why the state is such a train wreck. One of the worst examples is California’s oppressive environmental statutes. In combination with these, Agenda 21 has spread like cancer throughout California. Today I received some explicit examples of how this is playing out in Ventura County. The county Board of Supervisors is attempting to impose, almost word-for-word, the Wildland Project’s despotic edicts that will turn wide swaths of rural private property into complete wastelands.

A group called the Ventura County Coalition of Labor, Agriculture and Business (VC COLAB) detailed these problems in a recent seminar held by the Ventura County Libertarian Party. VC COLAB Executive Director Lynn Gray Jensen cited planned revisions to Ventura County’s Biology Initial Study Assessment Guidelines (ISAG), which they describe as “a lengthy and complex draft of terminology, thresholds, methodology and restrictive covenants to be applied to county projects that are subject to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).” Look at the 210 page document and see if you don’t agree. Simply mind-numbing.

ISAG had identified 19 practices and conditions determined to be “unsustainable.” Imagine yourself a VenturaCountyfarmer who owns a parcel of undeveloped land. You want to grow crops or build a structure, but it has been identified as “protected property” by California’s onerous environmental regulations. The restrictions identified by VC COLAB are nothing short of horrifying. Following is a partial list:

In addition to owners being prohibited, without express approval from the County Planning Director, from conducting normal agricultural activities such as filling, storing and removal of soil and rock; erection of buildings, fencing, corrals and other structures; placement of pavements, stones, gravel, etc., for pathways; and grazing of livestock, property owners must not keep pet animals or operate bicycles, mowers, tractors or any other vehicles (motorized or not) on their land. Other limitations apply to planting, harvesting, landscaping and irrigating. It bears repeating, these restrictions would be applied to the property by way of mandatory deed amendments, and thus remain in place permanently, even as the property is passed on to heirs or is sold.

No bikes? No pets?

Effectively, you couldn’t grow crops, keep livestock or clear a field. Your kids couldn’t even ride their bikes on the land! And if you ever sold or bequeathed it, subsequent owners would be subject to the same restrictions. In other words, your land would essentially be dead. Over time, it would become engulfed in an overgrown tangle, as the land was reclaimed by the wild. Your property value would fall to zero. Right now, this only applies to undeveloped land, but if they can take some of your property this way, why not all of it? The precedent has been set. Read more…

WASHINGTON: Today the Obama administration has announced another shocking decision, not so much for its impact but for its precedent. Today Eric Holder announced in so many words that the Obama administration does not care what the legislative branch of the federal government requires, and neither does the Obama administration care to wait for the judicial branch to determine the constitutionality of legislation. To heck with the balance of powers delegated to the federal branches of our government by our Founding Fathers. The Obama administration deems it their responsibility to only enforce laws that they feel they agree with. Other laws don’t matter.

The Obama administration announced Wednesday that it has pulled its legal support for the federal Defense of Marriage Act, stating that the law fails to meet constitutional scrutiny standards and therefore the administration is under no obligation to defend it.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said in a statement released Wednesday that President Obama has decided that his administration “will cease defense of Section 3,” which states that marriage is between one man and one woman.

“[T]he President has concluded that given a number of factors, including a documented history of discrimination, classifications based on sexual orientation should be subject to a more heightened standard of scrutiny,” Mr. Holder said. “The President has also concluded that Section 3 of DOMA, as applied to legally married same-sex couples, fails to meet that standard and is therefore unconstitutional. Given that conclusion, the President has instructed the Department not to defend the statute in such cases. I fully concur with the President’s determination.”

The decision effectively throws the defense of DOMA into the lap of Congress, which can instruct its own attorneys to defend federal laws. Mr. Holder said he had informed members of Congress of the decision so that “members who wish to defend the statute may pursue that option.” The Washington Times

Since when is Congress in charge of enforcing laws? That is the job of the executive branch. If the attorney general won’t enforce the laws Congress enacts, who will?

Is our citizenry that ignorant of our Constitution that it can swallow this nonsense? We know what Obama thinks of the Constitution, but we still harbor a glimmer of hope that there are those in this country that still understand our system of government. All of these officials swore to uphold the Constitution, but their sworn pledges obviously mean nothing. This disrespect to our system of laws is the same kind of behavior favored by regimes in Libya, Egypt, and Venezuela. With this kind of behavior would you really be shocked to see Obama someday declared Chancellor for Life? Where is the outrage in this country?

WASHINGTON: This one is just plain spooky. We are used to politicians lying to us face-to-face. Now they want to lie behind fake personalities on social media web sites.

The Feds are populating social media sites with fake people to manipulate a false consensus on any issue that they deem important. Tired of having their real identities made public, they are hiring contractors to figure out ways to more easily create and manage fake identities. This is net neutrality on steroids.

The Persona Management Software project has clear parameters:

Software will allow 10 personas per user, replete with background , history, supporting details, and cyber presences that are technically, culturally and geographacilly consistent. Individual applications will enable an operator to exercise a number of different online persons from the same workstation and without fear of being discovered by sophisticated adversaries. Personas must be able to appear to originate in nearly any part of the world and can interact through conventional online services and social media platforms. The service includes a user friendly application environment to maximize the user’s situational awareness by displaying real-time local information.

News regarding this contract was part of the HBGary’s leaked emails and was brought to media attention by Sean Kerrigan of the Examiner:

Even the most restrictive and security conscious of persons can be exploited. Through the targeting and information reconnaissance phase, a person’s hometown and high school will be revealed. An adversary can create a classmates.com account at the same high school and year and find out people you went to high school with that do not have Facebook accounts, then create the account and send a friend request. Under the mutual friend decision, which is where most people can be exploited, an adversary can look at a targets friend list if it is exposed and find a targets most socially promiscuous friends, the ones that have over 300-500 friends, friend them to develop mutual friends before sending a friend request to the target. To that end friend’s accounts can be compromised and used to post malicious material to a targets wall. When choosing to participate in social media an individual is only as protected as his/her weakest friend.”

Once again we are finding out the truth from hackers. The NIP was one of the first to report the ClimateGate leaks and make the emails public. Recently we learned from Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks that the US gave British nuclear secrets to Russia. Now we find out that we are being manipulated on social media sites. We discover the real truth only from the web. No wonder Obama wants the Internet Kill Switch.

Maybe you could tell usk why the NIP gets more traffic from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice than any other federal agencies.

WASHINGTON: Saturday saw the House pass a $1.2 trillion continuing resolution to fund the government through the rest of this year. The resolution contains cuts totaling $61 billion. Cuts target NPR, Planned Parenthood, border security, education and other federal programs. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other senate democrats have called the measure “extreme.” Speaker of the House John Boehner has threatened a shutdown of the federal government if the resolution is not passed. Obama and the democrats have vowed a fight on Boehner’s threat to shut down the government.

With all the posturing on both sides it is easy to not see the forest for the trees. $61 billion is only 5% of $1.2 trillion dollars. The US will have to borrow $516 billion to finance the $1.2 trillion and our politicians are arguing about defunding NPR and Planned Parenthood? What is needed is a much larger cut, say $516 billion.

Let’s look at it this way. Your household has a credit card limit of $25,000 and you are over the limit by $10,000, owing a total of $35,000. Your bank calls you to reign in spending and threatens to report you to the credit agency and downgrade your credit (think Moody’s). You tell the bank how serious you are about cutting back, and you tell your banker that you were thinking about adding another $20,000 to your debt this year but are going on an austerity spending program and are only going to spend another $19,000, that will hold your debt to “only” $49,000.  That’s the kind of “extreme” fiscal discipline the Republicans are suggesting.

BTW- your share of the Federal debt? $45,000 and climbing. (See the live counter to the right.) You will need to pay it back. Why aren’t you angry?