Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 41

Can We Tell the Truth?

The question arises: How effective are weasel words in fighting off weasel words?

With its leader having proposed to expand our deflating economy by redistributing another $1.5 trillion from private-sector producers to public-sector gluttons, the Obama Left’s talking point du jour is: “We are just asking the rich to pay their fair share.” The point here is not to rehearse the illogic of that assertion. The top earners in the economy already pay all of the income tax and virtually all of the taxes, period. You could look it up.

#ad#What I’d like to home in on is the single number the president and his diminishing ranks studiously ignore -- the “x” in the equation that never quite gets a value assigned. “Fair share” -- what is it?

Want to make a cable-news Democratic party-strategist squirm? Ask her what she means by the “fair share” that must be paid by the rich. (No point further tarrying over what she means by “the rich,” since we already know they are billionaires and millionaires who jump about in corporate jets while somehow making only $200,000 a year.) In response to the “fair share” question, you will hear how Bush single-handedly destroyed the economy. You will hear about the diabolical Republican plan to desert the elderly, starve the young, and exploit everyone in between. You will hear a vague concession that “the rich” must be allowed to keep some semblance of their wealth -- enough, at least, to keep them in the game of “paying it forward” to future generations of government wards. But what you won’t hear is a number.

This week, I had the pleasure of watching the Fox Business Channel’s Stuart Varney expertly press the Obama Left’s glib evaders on the subject. How much is a “fair share,” he doggedly inquired? A quarter? A third? Should the rich have to split their take 50-50 with Leviathan? Or is their success such a blight on social justice that the government (and the Teamsters, and the teachers’ unions, and the basket-case blue states) should get something much closer to all of it?

No answer. They cannot answer it.

The rise of the party-strategist class -- driven by the imperative to fill yawning gaps in the 24/7 cable-news cycle -- has contributed little to the coherence of our public-policy debate. It does, however, have its value: Its members will always show you what they most fear.

In this instance, they are deathly afraid of that number. The “fair share” can never be quantified -- not in theory, not in practice. Conceptually, it is a non sequitur, because it gets the Left’s premise exactly backwards. To peg the rich man’s “fair share” at anything greater than zero would be to admit that the wealth is his in the first place. Having intensely focus-grouped the matter, the strategists are quite sure you’re not ready to be told that all wealth belongs to the state, and that since it is theirs, not yours, “fair share” is whatever they decide under the exigencies of the moment.

In practice, the strategists cannot quantify “fair share” because today’s exigencies are pretty exigent. There can never be an enough. The entitlement state that the Left has steadily erected for 80 years (with no small amount of help from Beltway Republicans) features a business model that, by comparison, makes Solyndra look like Apple.

Our accumulated debt, counting unfunded entitlement liabilities, now outnumbers by a goodly margin not only the total net worth of our entire country, but also the combined GDP of every country on earth. Consequently, the moment you put a real number on “fair share,” the game is over: The irredeemable failure of the entitlement state becomes as clear as two plus two, as does the urgency of defeating the most unabashed champion that entitlement state has ever had in the Oval Office. For a political strategist, getting your candidate defeated is not a good strategy.

Any good cross-examiner will tell you: Find the question the witness doesn’t want to answer, and, again and again, make him answer it -- or, just as good, make him move heaven and earth to avoid answering it. Stuart Varney would have been a stellar trial lawyer if he hadn’t resolved to make a more honest living in finance.

But can you beat nothing with nothing? How effective are weasel words in fighting off weasel words?

In recent months, former Bush official Pete Wehner took issue with me for proposing that we end Medicare, a program in such dire straits that it will collapse of its own weight whether we end it or not. This week, the Manhattan Institute’s Nicole Gelinas vigorously objected to my defense of the proposition that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme. It is not my objective to rehearse the blow-by-blow of our exchanges. I admire both of them, and intramural debate is a singular asset of the Right, which encourages the diversity that actually matters: diversity of thought.

To boil it down to its essence, neither Pete nor Nicole took much issue with the legal, factual, or actuarial case I presented on these entitlement programs. Neither demurred from the contention that the programs are driving us over a cliff. Their principal point was that these programs are popular -- woven, as Pete said of Medicare, into the fabric of America. To associate oneself with the position that Social Security was of dubious constitutionality, conceived in fraud, and ultimately unsustainable is, Nicole argued, to drive away the voters needed to oust the White House incumbent.

No one I know, least of all me, is arguing that we need to repeal compassion or common decency. I acknowledge thinking that the Republican intelligentsia’s apparent fondness for -- or at least acceptance of -- the entitlement state is redolent of the Left’s lack of faith in American individualism and our cultural inheritance. If Leviathan collapsed tomorrow, the states and the American people would instantly develop private and public welfare programs for the truly needy. They would spend billions on education, science, and technology, the only difference being that, with Americans making their own choices rather than allowing Big Government to usurp them, those dollars would chase real value rather than line the pockets of the regime’s union cronies and campaign bundlers.

But let us assume for argument’s sake that due deference for stability requires that we yield to the purported need for a federal welfare state. Why on earth should that require preserving the ruinous, duplicative, dysfunctional edifice that fills this role so miserably today? If what we really need is honest, transparent, means-tested welfare for those who truly cannot fend for themselves, why have we decided we are too incompetent to convince the country that we can have such a thing without failed and unsustainable programs such as Social Security and Medicare?

If Republicans are too craven for that fight, then GOP strategists be forewarned: You are headed for your own form of “fair share” squirming.

So, are you really content to claim that, with just a nip here and a tuck there, the federal government can and should direct a retirement program and a disability program and a Medicare program and the education system and medical research and the mortgage market and the creation of a green-energy sector and a global Islamic-democracy project and#...#and#...#and#...#? If so, fine, but then you had better be ready to tell us how much it is going to cost and how we’re going to pay for it -- including how much you’re going to raise taxes to pay for it -- while paying the debt we’ve already run up, maintaining the unparalleled military might that makes prosperity possible, protecting the homeland from terrorist attacks, and running the DOJ, FBI, SEC, USDA, DOE, EPA, and on and on.

If the Left is going to be grilled on “fair share,” as it must be, we’d better be ready to counter with our own number. And we’d better be ready to explain how that number is going to cover the entitlement state we’re so earnestly promising to preserve.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America .

More Social Security & Ponzi Schemes

Nicole, c'mon. You've "never heard of the authorities trying to 'reform' a Ponzi scheme"? How long do you figure I'd have kept my job as a young government lawyer if I'd knocked on Rudy Giuliani's door and said, "Boss, I know this Ponzi thing looks bad. But it's been a good deal for a lot of people for a long time. Maybe, instead of enforcing the fraud laws, we should just persuade him to reform it!"

The reasons private Ponzi schemes get prosecuted have nothing to do with whether they are beyond salvaging. The fraudster cannot reform without confessing to having committed a crime to that point; his sudden desire to go straight would not be a legal defense against the fraud he has already perpetrated. And the government has no obligation to reform a fraud scheme it had no responsibility for designing in the first place. No one asks whether the private Ponzi scheme should be reformed. We prosecute in order to signal to other would-be Bernie Madoffs that society is not going to tolerate deceptions of this kind.

The difference between a fraudulent government program and a fraudulent private scheme is that the former cannot be prosecuted. As you know far better than I do, the government exempts itself from the regulations, bookkeeping requirements, and criminal laws it imposes on private businesses (and the Constitution's Speech and Debate Clause broadly immunizes members of Congress from prosecution for legislative activity). But the fact that officialdom holds itself above the law does not make its deceptive schemes any less fraudulent.

As a great admirer of your work, I'm very surprised by your claim that Social Security's designers and perpetuators have not attempted to perpetrate a fraud. The program was hatched in fraud. As I pointed out yesterday, FDR pretended it was an insurance program in order to sell it to the public; once Congress enacted it, he then told the courts it was not an insurance program but a tax in order to get it upheld (by justices he had successfully intimidated with a court-packing plan). He later admitted that disingenuously portraying the tax as a contribution for earned insurance benefits was "politics all the way through." The goal was never to make the economics work. As you correctly point out, they don't work, and FDR was well aware of that fact. The goal was to make sure, as he put it, that "no damn politician can ever scrap my social security program." Fostering a sense of public entitlement, he presciently reasoned, would induce politicians to position themselves as defenders of this entitlement -- and never you mind the math. 

Furthermore, the real objective of Social Security was not to set up a retirement insurance program. It was to lay the foundation for a full-blown entitlement state, complete with socialized healthcare. The original plan included a Medicare component, which was abandoned because FDR realized it would jeopardize passage of social security. (The push on Medicare, as I've recounted before, was renewed immediately after passage -- although it took 30 years, due to deep opposition from the public and the medical profession.) As Gov. Perry points out in his book, while feigning to address a "crisis," Social Security (like Obamacare) collected the taxes ("contributions") for several years (from 1935 to 1942) before any benefits were paid out; and the eligibility age was pegged at 62 even though life expectancy was then 60. The goal was not to ensure a decent retirement for "beneficiaries"; it was to erect -- in incremental stealth -- an entitlement state that the public would never have supported if Progressives had been forthright about their ambitions. Social security was the foot in the door. 

Your resort to "or should know" gives the game away. Yes, you admit, Social Security "has a long-run mismatch between revenue and expenses." And yes, it commingles the contributors' funds, just like a Ponzi scheme. But by your lights, this is not "outright fraud" (non-outright fraud is OK?) because, by now, "everyone knows, or should know" that this is how the system works. 

But why should we know? Is it because the pols have honestly disclosed it to us as they require private businesses to do? Emphatically, no: They've been jiving us for 80 years about an "insurance program" (i.e., a redistribution scheme) in which eventual "beneficiaries" (welfare recipients) make "contributions" (pay taxes) into a "trust fund"/"lock-box" (a pot that Congress raids at will) which protects our "accounts" (the IOUs with which Big Government replaces the funds it swipes -- paper promises that will have to be satisfied by crushing taxes imposed on future taxpayers). As you quite correctly say, the goal of a Ponzi scheme is "to perpetuate the fraud to enrich its designers." Big Government is duly enriched, probably beyond FDR's wildest dreams.

Your argument boils down to this: Social security can't be fraud because, after eight decades, the nature of the scheme is so palpable that we should be deemed to have consented to it even if it is not quite what it was advertised to be. This is reminiscent of Bernie Madoff's "net winners," to whom you referred in your first post. Upon inspection, a lot of the potential investors Madoff attempted to recruit told the early investors (a/k/a, the net winners) that the scheme seemed too good to be true. But the early investors didn't want to hear it. They rationalized: Sure something seems fishy, but it's been going on for years without interference from the regulators and prosecutors, and as long as I'm getting good returns, why should I ask questions about whether it's all on the up and up?

"Social Security is a government program," you say, "and a popular one[.]" Yep, Ponzi schemes are always popular ... until they collapse. And after they collapse, the fact that the early investors "should have known" that the scheme was a fraud is held against them. The neon clarity of the fraud, and their conscious avoidance of it, does not change the unpleasant fact that fraud it was. 

Re: Re: Romney Camp: Perry Wants to 'Dismantle' Social Security

Nicole, with due respect, that is a very incomplete description of the fix for a Ponzi scheme.

The civil remedy you describe is usually secondary. The priority is a fraud prosecution against the designers of the scheme. We do that because the designers have fraudulently induced people to invest their money -- they made false representations that the money would be responsibly invested and safeguarded, then they converted the money to their own purposes. Moreover, our understanding of fraud rests centrally on the duty of disclosure: Designers of the scheme have a fiduciary responsibility to tell investors that the designers were not actually managing investments but converting much of the money to their own use while recruiting subsequent investors in order to pay off earlier investors. If they fulfilled that duty, no one would willingly invest.

We prosecute Ponzi schemes and incarcerate their designers, often for decades, because it is society's judgment that this sort of chicanery merits our condemnation. There are many situations in which it is not possible to make the net losers anything close to whole, either by forcing the fraudster to forfeit his ill-gotten gains or by compelling the net winners to pay. But when that happens, we don't throw up our hands and say, "Well, since the civil remedy isn't a plausible solution in this case, no good is served by acknowledging that a Ponzi scheme occurred." To the contrary, we take great pains to prove it, and punish it, because we want people to understand we think it is reprehensible.  

The point is not whether the Ponzi civil remedy is a viable solution. Obviously, in the case of social security, it is not. Even if the social security system is both unconstitutional and unsustainable, provision should be made in the short term for people nearing retirement who have reasonably relied on the promise of government pay-outs. As in any Ponzi scheme, there have to be losers here, but they won't be those on the verge of collecting. More likely, they will be people my age who have paid into the system for over 30 years but are more than a decade away from statutory retirement age; and young people just starting out, who -- while politicians dawdle -- will be forced to pay into the system even though we know it will not be there for them (at least not in its present form).

But social security, unlike Bernie Madoff, is much more about politics than law. Congress and presidents can't be jailed or sued over fraudulent government programs. If this were a legal case, you're right that net winners would be liable. But in politics, that is an untenable result -- the brunt will be borne by less sympathetic losers.

Still, in arriving at a long-term solution, it is certainly relevant to ask (a) is financial maintenance of the elderly the sort of thing the federal government should be doing, consistent with the Constitution and with what we know about government's honesty/competence; and (b) assuming legitimacy and competence, shouldn't such maintenance be done as an honest, transparent welfare system for elderly people who are truly in need, rather than a faux universal "insurance" system -- in which the government pretends "contributions" are safeguarded in a "trust fund" rather than admitting that taxes are collected for an account Congress raids as it pleases, leaving future taxpayers on the hook to replenish the account?

We are in this mess because of the way social security was designed and perpetuated. People who disapprove of Ponzi schemes will not be surprised by that. It is thus a useful analogy because it helps people understand the problem and persuades them that any solution should resist repeating the Ponzi model.

Questions for Gov. Romney on the Constitutionality of Social Security

Reading Katrina's post, I think it's very interesting, and welcome, that Governor Romney is pressing Governor Perry to answer the question of Social Security's constitutionality. I just hope that he's also prepared to answer the question himself.

Governor Romney was very adamant during the 2008 primary campaign that he was committed to appointing originalist judges to the bench. It is a big part of what I like about him. I also think it is a great credit to him that Judge Robert Bork, a pioneer of originalism, is heading up Governor Romney's justice advisory committee, just as he did in 2008. Unlike some critics, I was obviously convinced (as were a lot of us NR folk and Judge Bork) that Mitt was sincere in this commitment to originalism -- not pandering to pro-lifers who were made skeptical by his prior inconsistency on abortion and Roe v. Wade.

So let's talk Social Security. I won't much belabor the sleight-of-hand involved in its creation -- how, much like President Obama with Obamacare, FDR first told Americans that the program was not a tax but an insurance program, and then, once Congress passed it, told the courts it was not an insurance program but a tax. Let's just focus on the Supreme Court's upholding of the law in Helvering v. Davis (1937). It was controversial, and the decision was driven more by FDR's threat to pack the Court than by any concern for originalism.

The government argued that Congress's constitutional authority came from the power to "lay and collect Taxes . . . to . . . provide for . . . the general Welfare of the United States" -- found in the preamble of Article I, Section 8. This called for an interpretation of the General Welfare Clause.

James Madison, the principal author of the Constitution, had contended that the clause was not a grant to Congress of an open-ended power to confiscate and spend public money for any purpose that Congress decided would further the general welfare. Such a construction would undermine the Constitution's federalist system, in which the states maintained sovereign power, the central government's powers were strictly limited, and the individual was protected from federal intrusions.

Instead, Madison said the General Welfare Clause had to be understood as limited by the powers enumerated in Article I, Section 8 -- i.e., Congress could tax and spend for those purposes and no others. That construction was also consistent with the Constitution's overall framework. Were we to adopt Madison's interpretation, Social Security would be unconstitutional: There is no enumerated power in Article I, Section 8, authorizing Congress to set up a national insurance system; and the Constitution, in the Tenth Amendment, explicitly reserves to the states and the people the powers not delegated to the national government. 

The competing interpretation of the General Welfare Clause, credited to Alexander Hamilton, regarded the clause as a stand-alone grant of overarching power to Congress to tax and spend for any purpose that Congress, in its wisdom, decided would be beneficial for the American people. Under this interpretation, the federal government has overwhelming authority -- Congress is not limited to its enumerated powers and the Tenth Amendment is virtually toothless.

Cowed by FDR's threat to pack the Court if it continued to block the New Deal, the Supremes adopted the Hamiltonian position in United States v. Butler (1936), and then reaffirmed it in Helvering, the Social Security case. But the fact that this is where the justices came out does not mean they were right -- as Governor Romney implicitly acknowledges when he condemns activist courts and argues that Roe was wrongly decided. In fact, the Helvering Court claimed that the General Welfare Clause, and the Constitution in general, are organic. In a passage that would seem anathema to an originalist, the majority asserted, "Nor is the concept of the general welfare static. Needs that were narrow or parochial a century ago may be interwoven in our day with the wellbeing of the Nation. What is critical or urgent changes with the times." Sounds like The Living Constitution 101.

So here are some questions I hope Governor Romney is asked:

Do you think Social Security is constitutional? 

Do you think Social Security is consistent with an originalist interpretation of the Constitution?

Do you think the Supreme Court of the New Deal era was correct to reject James Madison's interpretation of the General Welfare Clause?

Do you agree with the Supreme Court's assertion in the Helvering case that the meaning of the General Welfare Clause changes with the times?

If the General Welfare power gives Congress authority to set up a compulsory retirement insurance system, and a compulsory disability insurance system, would it not also give Congress the authority to set up a national healthcare system?

Are there any limits to what Congress may do under its power to provide for the general welfare?

The Solyndra Non-Investigation

As Andrew Stiles reported Tuesday on NRO, House Judiciary Committee chairman Lamar Smith (R., Texas) has written to Attorney General Eric Holder to seek the appointment of a special bankruptcy investigator in the Solyndra case. The operative word here is bankruptcy. The bankruptcy process conducted under the supervision of a trustee is very different from a criminal investigation conducted by a prosecutor. For those hoping for a full accounting of the $535 billion Solyndra debacle, there is less to Representative Smith’s request than meets the eye.

#ad#In my weekend column, I explained that if the Solyndra case came walking into a competent prosecutor’s office, the theory of the investigation would be fraud. We have the loss of over half a billion dollars in public money (in the form of government credits), which was pledged to back a company that had a hopelessly flawed business model and that was gushing losses with no realistic prospect of a turn-around. We have grossly misleading rosy-scenario pronouncements by key players (including President Obama and Vice President Biden) at a time when Solyndra backers were gearing up an initial public offering of stock -- and when Solyndra’s independent auditors had issued a dire warning that it was doubtful the company could continue as a going concern. In addition, we have executive-branch officials renegotiating the loan arrangement so that corporate insiders, including Obama administration cronies, would be given priority over taxpayers in the liquidation of assets when the company inevitably went belly-up -- a novation that appears to be as illegal as it is inexplicable.

But what is happening with Chairman Smith’s letter to Attorney General Holder is not what happens when a case comes in the door at a prosecutor’s office. Smith is not asking Holder for an ordinary criminal investigation in the sense of having federal prosecutors and agents pursue the case as they see fit.

To be sure, Smith would be delighted if that were an option. Alas, it is not, for three reasons. First, the deep and suspect involvement of the Obama administration in the facts of the case leaves the Holder Justice Department ineradicably conflicted when it comes to investigating Solyndra. Second, the conflict would not be cured if Holder were to appoint a quasi-independent counsel -- i.e., one who would still ultimately report to Holder, or to other high-ranking political appointees in the Obama Justice Department if Holder were to recuse himself. Third, because prosecution is an executive-branch function, the appointment of a fully independent counsel would be legally dubious -- and even if that weren’t so, independent-counsel investigations have a sorry history that we shouldn’t want to see repeated, regardless of which party is in power.

Representative Smith is obviously trying to find a way around this dilemma. His letter seizes on the happenstance that Solyndra is now a bankruptcy case. On the surface, bankruptcy law appears to permit some probing of fraud by an independent investigator. Unfortunately, when you dig a bit beneath the surface, it is not really very independent and it is far too circumscribed to be effective in a matter like Solyndra -- where the fraud may have caused the bankruptcy but has little if anything to do with the bankruptcy process. 

#page#Under federal law, companies in bankruptcy are the domain of the Office of the United States Trustee. It is part of the Justice Department: The 21 regional U.S. trustees are appointed by, and removable by, the attorney general. In a bankruptcy proceeding, the business or person who goes bankrupt is considered an “estate,” and a trustee-in-bankruptcy may be appointed by the court to wind down or restructure the estate’s affairs. The U.S. trustee, however, does not actually participate as the trustee in individual bankruptcy cases. Rather, he monitors the court-appointed trustees to ensure that they conform to standard practices. So yes, the trustees appointed in bankruptcy cases are somewhat independent in the limited sense that they are not government lawyers -- they are private citizens who need not be attorneys. But they are still overseen by a Justice Department official who serves at the pleasure of the attorney general.

#ad#When there are indications of fraud, bankruptcy law enables the U.S. trustee to appoint an investigator -- who, like the trustee assigned to the case, is a private citizen, not a federal agent or a government lawyer. But the fraud that a bankruptcy trustee and examiner are principally concerned about is fraud in the bankruptcy proceeding itself -- e.g., hiding assets.

It is not the purpose of a bankruptcy proceeding to conduct a criminal investigation. Bankruptcy is about liquidating assets, settling debts, and wiping the business slate clean. In fact, when evidence of fraud or other crimes is uncovered in the course of a bankruptcy case, federal law requires that the pertinent information be referred to the Justice Department (specifically, to the U.S. attorney in the appropriate federal district). The reason for that is obvious: If you find criminal conduct, you want the officials who are trained to conduct criminal investigations -- and who have access to grand juries, subpoena power, the ability to seek search warrants, etc. -- to run the show. Otherwise, a prosecutable case can be botched, which only benefits the wrongdoers. (That is not a knock against bankruptcy lawyers -- you wouldn’t want prosecutors running a bankruptcy case, either.)

So even if Representative Smith were to persuade the attorney general to appoint a special bankruptcy examiner for Solyndra, and even if that examiner were to find evidence of fraudulent conduct, we would end up right where we were in the first place: in need of someone to do a full-blown, credible investigation of the Solyndra fraud. 

For political purposes, one can see why Representative Smith would want to highlight the fact that the current Justice Department is compromised. Doing so underscores the disturbing role of the Obama administration in the Solyndra chicanery and serves as a reminder of how politicized has been Eric Holder’s stewardship of the Justice Department. Nevertheless, seeking a special bankruptcy examiner does not further the investigation as a practical matter.

The issue here is not bankruptcy fraud. It is whether fraud of any actionable kind was committed by anyone while Solyndra was a going concern. A special bankruptcy examiner is not going to get to the bottom of that. We can hope that the Energy Department’s inspector general, who is working with the FBI, is sufficiently independent that investigators will follow the evidence wherever it takes them. But this is a situation in which Congress is going to have to stay on the case itself: pressing the administration for information, using its subpoena power, holding public hearings, and exposing any indications of stonewalling.

— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

CEO: The government fined me for hiring too many people

Peter Schiff, president and CEO of EuroPacific Capital, testified last week before a House subcommittee investigating the Obama stimulus and business regulation. The transcript of his submitted testimony is here (the Fox Nation site, which also has a video of his appearance before the committee, credits Forbes for the original report). Every word of the testimony is worth reading, but especially remarkable is this excerpt:

In my own business, securities regulations have prohibited me from hiring brokers for more than three years. I was even fined fifteen thousand dollar expressly for hiring too many brokers in 2008. In the process I incurred more than $500,000 in legal bills to mitigate a more severe regulatory outcome as a result of hiring too many workers. I have also been prohibited from opening up additional offices. I had a major expansion plan that would have resulted in my creating hundreds of additional jobs. Regulations have forced me to put those jobs on hold.

 He's in finance. I guess he should have tried solar panels.

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: A Short History Lesson

At his Pajamas blog, Encounter Books publisher Roger Kimball presents a brief video history lesson on Palestinian statehood -- a history in which Israel and the West continually offer the Palestinians everything they'd need or want to live in peace, and the Palestinians make clear that there will be no peace as long as the Jewish state exists. The video runs less than 12 minutes, and I highly recommend it. 

The history is gleaned from a fabulous new addition to Encounter's Broadside series. It is called, "A Century of Palestinian Rejectionism and Jew Hatred," by Sol Stern. In it, Sol blows to smithereens the fiction that it is Israel which has been the obstacle to Middle East Peace. According to the Encounter site, you can get it for a tad over 4 bucks. A steal -- and one that couldn't be more timely.

Re: New Info on ATF's Fast and Furious

Robert, I've been bouncing too many balls and should have posted something about this last week. William Lajeunesse of Fox News reported that Fox had obtained documents indicating that a third gun linked to F&F had been found at the scene of Border Patrol Brian Terry's murder. Lajeunesse says government emails show that the FBI concealed the existence of the third gun in order to protect a confidential informant. According to his sources, "the FBI informant works inside a major Mexican cartel and provided the money to obtain the weapons used to kill Terry."

The disturbing report is here.

Obama's Solyndra Crony Kaiser Contributed To Michelle's Charity While Pressing For Public Funding

The Daily Caller is reporting that George Kaiser, the billionaire Obama campaign bundler who later convinced the administration to provide $535 million in taxpayer funds for Solyndra, contributed $10,000 to the Urban Health Initiative, a notorious program created by now-First Lady Michelle Obama while she was at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

The donation was made in 2009, the same year Kaiser was a regular White House visitor while the administration was considering approval of public loan guarantees for Solyndra, the disastrous solar-panel business backed by Kaiser's family foundation. Kaiser was responsible for $53,500 in donations to the Obama campaign.

In addition to Michelle Obama, several top Obama administration officials have close ties to the Urban Health Initiative, including Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod. The DC report adds that the George Kaiser Family Foundation rarely donates to organizations or causes outside Kaiser's home state of Oklahoma.

Solyndra Scandal Widening

My column this weekend is about the Solyndra scandal, and why I think it should be investigated as a criminal fraud. That would include a significant securities fraud angle: President Obama's speech at Solyndra on May 26, 2010, was grossly misleading at a time when it was known that independent auditors had issued dire warnings about the failing solar-panel business's chances of survival and when Solyndra's Obama-connected backers were trying to sell the company's stock on market.

Now there's more: The Daily Caller reports that Solyndra actually sought a second federal loan in the astronomical sum of $469 million (which would have aggregated to well over $1 billion in taxpayer financing, for a company that was gushing red ink and was careening toward inevitable bankruptcy). The Daily Caller got the info from Solyndra's SEC filing -- and the site reports that the filing does not make clear whether the company got the second loan ... and that Solyndra did not return the Daily Caller's call to inquire.

One other thing: I did a ton of research for my column, and Andrew Stiles has done the best reporting you'll find anywhere. There are links to it on the home-page (start here) and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to understand what the controversy is all about.