“I hope if anybody buys Shadowbosses they don’t keep it. They send it to a legislator. They need to read it more than anybody else.” -Mallory Factor

“The clout unions have in the Democrat part is because of their money, and that’s where compulsory dues become the issue. That’s the only way to turn this around.” -Mark Belling

Read more here.

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Dr. Yaron Brook, the president and executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, stopped by TheBlaze newsroom recently for a lively interview with contributor Mallory Factor.  With the recent release of Atlas Shrugged II and the presidential election right around the corner, many of the theories and philosophies Brook advocates are at the center of politics today.

After noting that Brook has a new book out– Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government– the two delved right into the issues.

“What about protecting all those people who need to be protected?” Factor asked, bringing up a common critique of what some call “unbridled” capitalism.  “Don’t we have moral obligations to people?”

“No, we don’t,” he said simply.  “Somebody else’s needs, somebody else’s suffering, somebody else’s desires are not your responsibility.”

When asked if he would help someone if they got hit by a car, Brook explained: “As a human being you want to help them, absolutely, but it depends on the cost!  If it’s in the middle of a highway and you might get run over going to help them, you’re probably not going to do it…So it depends on the cost to you.  The standard is your life.”

Reiterating that charity is good but that it should be your choice, Brook directly tackled the notion that capitalism is heartless and will leave the poor helpless:

“Under capitalism, the poor are the biggest beneficiaries!  No other system in history has benefited the poor more than capitalism…Capitalism is moral because it allows you the freedom to pursue your happiness, it allows you the freedom to take care of your life…So what happens under capitalism?  The poor go out there and they get a job…under capitalism, the standard of living of the poor rises dramatically.  So the poor under capitalism are a lot less poor than the middle class in any other system.  Capitalism is what created the middle class– not by lowering the wealth of the rich, but by increasing the wealth of the poor.”  [Emphasis added]

From there, the two switched to presidential politics.  When asked why he isn’t supporting Libertarian nominee Gary Johnson, Brook opted for the “realistic” approach that only Mitt Romney or Barack Obama have a chance of winning, but said that Johnson “absolutely” has better ideas than Romney on domestic policy.

“Congresman Ryan…was a fan of Ayn Rand until he became the vice presidential candidate, now he’s running as fast as he can away from it.  Why?” Factor asked.

According to Brook, it’s a little too early for Rand’s “radical” ideas in American politics.  “[We're] not for a little bit of free market, not for a little bit of slowing the rate of government,” he explained. “We’re for slashing government.”

But that’s not all.  Brook also thinks Rand’s atheism could alienate religious voters, adding that we’re far more religious today than we were in 1776:

“We’re a much more religious nation today than I think we were at the founding, when a deist like Thomas Jefferson could get elected…[Ryan] has to run from [Rand's] atheism, he has to establish his Catholic roots, and he has to articulate a defense of the entitlement state because America’s not ready yet for a free-market revolution.”

When asked what advice he would give to America’s leaders, Brook began with “deregulate, deregulate, deregulate” before proposing a novel way to get spending cuts through Congress:

“Start cutting spending by cutting all government subsidies to business…All farm subsidies, all energy subsidies, get rid of all tax deductions, all of them…Republicans are always described as ‘the party of big business,’ and they hate the poor.  Well, don’t start with the poor.  Start with big business this time, and you could cut close to half a trillion dollars off the U.S. budget not in ten years– today– if you just got rid of all the stuff that only hurts business in the long term.”  [Emphasis added]

Citing several specific examples of what he would cut, Brook concluded: “This is not hard.  Let’s start the process by deregulating and significantly cutting subsidies…Let’s get rid of cronyism, and the way to get rid of cronyism is to get government out of the business of business.”

Watch the entire interview, below:

Read the story here.

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“If you have someone cast a fraudulent vote, they disenfranchise, cancel out the vote of the legitimate voters, for example: someone who votes twice, someone who is voting out of state, someone who is dead, someone who’s impersonation someone else; all those things cancel out legitimate voters.”

So what can be done, and what can you do to protect your vote?

Prolific author and National Review columnist John Fund stopped by TheBlaze to discuss voter fraud and just how much it actually affects your life, from the value of your vote to the policies implemented regarding your health-care. Fund’s newest book on voter fraud, Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats put Your Vote at Risk, covers a variety of areas discussed in this interview including our confidence in our votes, where voter fraud exists, how fraudsters are getting away with their crimes, as well as the myths and arguments over the topic we see debated in the media relentlessly the past few months.

In the discussion Monday with Mallory Factor, contributor to TheBlaze, Fund exposes the massive amount of voter fraud which happens today, stating: “One out of eight (of our voter registration rolls), according to the Pew Research Center, are either invalid or contain major errors.”

Factor begins the conversation with a challenge, namely, the question many of us face during election time, “Aren’t only swing states to worry about when it comes to voter fraud?” Fund responds “sure, but not for all other elections down the line…” including electing your congressmen, senators, state representatives, mayors, and town councils. Fund desires to make it clear that not only is voter fraud immense and growing, as will be seen in just a moment, but it is an issue that affects all citizens, from who represents you the next four years to what health care policies get passed through the House and Senate.

The media has been all but absent on the voter id debate. Views have been all over the ideological spectrum, from calling those supporting voter identification requirements racist to emphatic arguments supporting the implementation of voter id laws as the duty of Americans who believe in a functional democracy. Realizing this, Factor jumps straight into the heart of the matter asking Fund whether or not preventing voter fraud “disenfranchises minorities?” Fund acknowledges that there are measures which could be seen as marginalizing or demeaning as well as unfortunate practices in our history, such as poll taxes and the Jim Crow laws, but all the efforts and suggestions he puts forth for preventing voter fraud in his new book that reject any practice of voter suppression. Fund states “voter suppression is not an option” and that the idea is to “make it easier to vote but harder to cheat.”

Fund’s view that “people will do incredible things to try and tilt democracy in their favor” leads him to share with his readers the value of our vote and the necessary measures which need to be taken to uphold the dignity of our Democratic-Republic. As a healthy reminder of just how important every vote is, Fund reminds us that the Florida race in the 2000 election of President George Bush was decided by only 537 votes. Continuing the idea that preventing voter fraud does not disenfranchise minorities Fund mentions:

“75% of the American people believe it is common sense to ask for id (at voting booths), common sense to scrutinize absentee ballots, common sense to clean up our voter registration rolls…One out of eight, according to the Pew Research Center, are either invalid or contain major errors. That is a scandal! No developing nation would actually out up with such a record! We have the sloppiest election system of any industrialized democracy; we have four million people who are registered in more than one state.”

Just recently TheBlaze covered the story of the Democrat staffer fired for allowing others to vote twice, not to mention the Maryland Democrat Wendy Rosen who stepped down from her congressional race under allegations she had been voting in two states for years. Fund makes it clear that this action happens all the time, and on both sides of the aisle. After mentioning that much of this fraud is being committed by Shadowbosses, the title and subject of Mallory Factor’s new book, Fund brings up the concern many of us have when this topic comes up, namely: How does all this fraud exist and what can be done to stop it?

Wittingly, Fund says that “voter fraud is a lot like shoplifting…If you put up a few precautions, a few preventative measures, you probably can reduce it (voter fraud) 25-40%, simply because there are a lot of people who won’t do it if there is some risk attached to it.”

Showing again how widespread and influential the fraud has become, Fund reminds Factor that Al Franken, whose controversial election bathed in allegations and evidence of voter fraud, actually gave the deciding vote on passing Obamacare. Fund shows that voter fraud, although you may not practice or see it, has drastic effects on even laws covering your health and insurance; “even a small amount of voter fraud in a very close election can make all the difference in the world.”

Still wondering why, if voter fraud is so widespread and common, it continues to be an issue we are unaware of? Fund discusses with Mr. Factor towards the end of the conversation that the average penalty for those convicted of voter fraud is “a $50 fine and 3 hours of community service. We don’t take this seriously enough!” exclaims Fund when describing how “we spend billions of dollars to protect our currency” but we continue to undermine our own votes and democracy by not putting into place common sense preventative measures.

See the engaging discussion with John Fund and Mallory Factor in full here:

Read this article on TheBlaze.com.

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AFL-CIO big boss Richard Trumka has been campaigning in swing states to get union members energized for Obama. He has pledged to put 400,000 union members to work for Team Obama.  Already, AFL-CIO says it has registered more than 450,000 new voters from union households over the past 18 months.  And they have registered 68,000 new voters in the key swing state of Ohio. Given the tightening polls, these efforts in the Buckeye State alone could bring President Obama to victory.

Publically, Obama has been distancing himself from the unions.  Scott Walker’s recall election showed Team Obama that public sector unions do not poll well with likely voters.  So President Obama has trying to show his independence from the unions and the unions have been expressing their disappointment with President Obama.  But President Obama is still the first union-label president, and the unions’ agenda remains his agenda.   The unions know their future growth and survival as a relevant movement depends on his re-election.

So, in these final weeks, the unions are going full out for President Obama.  The unions will spend over $500 million on this campaign.  And if President Obama wins, this will prove to be money well invested.  The unions will get greater access to the White House, new executive orders opening up new groups of workers for them to unionize, more favorable decisions from the National Labor Relations Board, and the opportunity to unionize millions more health care workers under Obamacare.  If Governor Romney wins, the unions will be out in the cold for four long years, or longer.  So, the unions are betting big on this race, and if Obama wins, he will owe the unions who will have made the difference

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TheBlaze.com – Casey is a name that has been familiar with Pennsylvania voters for decades. Tom Smith is new to politics but unintimidated by the name recognition of Democratic U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Bob Casey Jr., as he is set to challenge Casey this November for a seat once held by high-profile Republican legislators like Rick Santorum, John Heinz and Hugh Scott.

“My opponent Senator Bob Casey is a nice guy, not a leader” Smith told TheBlaze during an interview with senior contributor Mallory Factor last week. Smith is running on a campaign focused on getting the economy back on track by reforming regulations and the tax code to get rid of loopholes in addition to overbearing legislation and spending that harms American economic competitiveness.

“Our future generations, we cannot turn this amount of debt and deficit spending over to them,” Smith says in TheBlaze New York City Newsroom. “My father passed away when I was 20 so that’s when he turned this country over to me and it was in far better shape then than it is today. So I sold my major companies and I decided we’re going to try to make a difference, be a citizen candidate…”

Smith is a former coal industry executive from Western Pennsylvania that entered the mines after once working as a school bus driver but then going on to own several companies with more than 100 employees that he sold in 2010. Smith tells TheBlaze that he was motivated to run for statewide office after witnessing candidates like Ron Johnson of Wisconsin run in 2010–businessmen and family men who ran for office with an “enough is enough” attitude.

If elected, Smith tells TheBlaze he would work to create jobs by getting government out of the way. Smith points to the Dodd-Frank and Sarbanes-Oxley Acts as legislation that he would seek to repeal or reform to get the economy back on track.

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine percent of businesses and people want to do things the right way, the moral way, the correct way” Smith tells TheBlaze. “It’s that one or two percent–that’s why laws are there. They will break the laws. But what they(the government) did with Sarbanes-Oxley is just throw another layer and another layer of regulations on the ninety-eight percent that were doing it right. And its continued with Dodd-Frank.”

“We need reasonable regulations, everywhere, and in business,” Smith went on to tell Factor when asked about the need for government regulations to protect people. “What we have today is not reasonable, it is suffocating businesses.”

Smith and his campaign have put forth a “Restoring The American Dream” proposal which outlines his goals to simplify the tax code by instituting a flat tax and closing special interest loopholes; reduce annual spending to 20 percent of GDP by permanently ending earmarks, freezing non-defense hiring to the federal workforce, and controlling the expansion of federal programs; in addition to growing American jobs in the energy sector by removing restrictions and protecting energy protection without the use of government subsidies or directives.

Watch Republican candidate for U.S. Senate from Pennsylvania Tom Smith’s full interview with Mallory Factor below:

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By MALLORY FACTOR

WSJ - Imagine thousands of government employees reporting to work each morning at their government offices and then doing no government work. They use government workspace, government telephones and government computers, all while working on projects unknown and unidentified to their government employers. They receive hefty taxpayer-funded salaries, promotions, bonuses and benefits, plus generous government pensions when they retire—all without doing any work on behalf of the taxpayer. Instead, they work as paid political operatives for powerful government unions.

Welcome to the common practice of “official time.” Sometimes called “release time,” it’s a mechanism by which the government pays union officials to work on union matters during their government workdays. This mechanism—enshrined in law and contracts—is an enormous subsidy to public-employee unions, who defend it fiercely.

The Office of Personnel Management reports that federal employees spent over three million hours on official time in 2010, costing the taxpayers about $137 million in salary and benefits costs.

At the federal level, about 77% of official time (as reported to the OPM) is spent on “general labor-management,” a broad catchall for union activity other than contract negotiations or dispute resolution, which are the activities most directly related to employee representation. But when more than three-quarters of all official time is used for unspecified activities, red flags should be raised.

Some union officials split their time between union work and government work. Others, amazingly enough, work exclusively on union business while getting paid for their government “jobs,” and may not even show up at their government jobs for months at a time. The Department of Homeland Security alone had 62 employees on full-time official time as of July 2011, according to the department’s disclosure. It’s not clear how many other federal employees are on official time all the time, since the OPM doesn’t require federal departments and agencies to report that figure. The less that is reported, the harder it is to discover abuse.

The only thorough report on official time at the federal level was released in 1998, when the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee required the OPM to do so. At that time, 946 federal employees were on full-time official time, with another 912 spending at least 75% of their days on official time. Today the overall number is a mystery, because no law requires the federal government to disclose it.

States and municipalities don’t generally track official time for their employees, much less disclose it, so data on the subject are hard to come by. But based on the total number of unionized workers at all levels of government and the reported levels of official time in the federal government from 2010, we can estimate that American taxpayers are paying for some 23 million total hours of official time every year, at a cost of more than $1 billion. And that doesn’t include free government office space, equipment and services used by union officials.

All this persists even though 47 states have “gift clauses” in their constitutions that prohibit government subsidies to private entities. In June, Arizona’s Goldwater Institute successfully challenged official time for Phoenix police union officials. Arizona’s Superior Court enjoined the practice, concluding that official time violated Arizona’s gift clause because the union, not the city, “determines how the money is spent, by whom, and when.”

Such challenges to official time are in their infancy—another is pending in Albuquerque, N.M.—but with time they should become more widespread. (In a sign of enduring union power, though, Phoenix signed a new contract with the police union in July that included official time; the Goldwater Institute has filed for a second injunction.)

Why should official time exist at all? Government-employee unions argue that because they represent many workers who don’t become members, they should be subsidized by our government. But if workers don’t value union representation enough to join the union, why should taxpayers pay for it?

Official time is a ruse for getting taxpayers to support union activities in the government workplace, including the lobbying of legislators for ever-more benefits. This effectively subsidizes unions so they can spend more dues income on political organizing. And it’s all done without taxpayers’ knowledge. It’s a shadowy practice that must be stopped.

Mr. Factor, a professor of international politics and American government at The Citadel, is author of “Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind,” recently published by Center Street.

A version of this article appeared October 2, 2012, on page A19 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: How Public Unions Exploit the Ruse of ‘Official Time’.

Click here to view the online source.

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By David Von Drehle

This week’s literary quiz: is Barack Obama a) an amateur, b) a socialist anti-colonialist radical or c) a great destroyer? The answer, according to recent New York Times best-seller lists, is all of the above, which may be bad news for the President but is very good news for the uncannily sure-footed conservative publishing machine.

In fact, Regnery Publishing Inc. of Washington claims to have “the highest batting average” at producing best sellers in the entire industry–”by far.” Two of the top three hits on the most recent list are from the Regnery lineup. At No. 2, Obama’s America by Dinesh D’Souza makes the case that the President is secretly anti-American, bent on weakening the nation to atone for our imperialist sins. The NO.3 book, Edward Klein’s The Amateur, is a brisk mixture of previously reported stories and unverifiable anecdotes, salted liberally-I mean, conservatively- with warnings about European-style socialism.

Neither book is aimed at undecided voters; instead, they both offer a backslap and a high five to readers ticked off at the President and ready to be reminded of all the reasons why. And neither is likely to join the pantheon of Regnery titles by such seminal conservatives as Russell Kirk, William F. Buckley Jr., Whittaker Chambers and Willmoore Kendall. Founded in 1947 by Henry Regnery-who also co-founded the influential magazine Human Events-the house has been a leading force in the American conservative movement from the start. As the country moved to the right, the firm became a hit machine, first under Henry’s son Alfred, now under president and publisher Marji Ross. She credits a loyal core of readers, primarily men, who pay close attention to conservative media, along with a small outer circle of outraged liberals who want to know what their foes are saying.

Published in May and spurned by the mainstream media but given a splashy launch by buzz master Matt Drudge, The Amateur bounced straight to the top of the best-seller list; according to Ross, nearly 400,000 hardcover copies are in print. Meanwhile, D’Souza’s book is the product of a remarkable feat of multi-platform repackaging: Obama’s America renders into book form the author’s smash-hit documentary, 2016: Obama’s America, which is rapidly climbing the list of the highest-grossing documentaries in history. The film follows D’Souza as he travels the world in search of the roots of the President’s supposed hatred of America, finding them at last in the anticolonialism of his deceased father Barack Obama Sr. It is perhaps the first movie to attempt to make a cell-phone interview with a historian seem like nail-biting drama, and it’s certainly the first movie to show D’Souza learning to hula.

The documentary, in turn, is a dramatization of arguments that D’Souza made in his 20IO best seller for Regnery, The Roots of Ohama’s Rage. In other words, the new book is based on a film that is based on the earlier book.

Some of this is just equal-opportunity, election-year profiteering. When liberals were every bit as inflamed by the Bush presidency in 2004, they were able to jostle their way up the lists as well: AI Franken, Ron Suskind and Richard A. Clarke all reached NO.1 with their indictments of the Bush Administration. That same year, leftist filmmaker Michael Moore won top honors at Cannes for his anti-Bush movie Fahrenheit 9/11, which became the top-grossing documentary in history. But even then, liberals shared the summit with Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity and John O’Neill, who managed to climb to the top from the right slope. O’Neill’s book, Unfit for Command, was written with Jerome Corsi and completed the so-called swiftboating of presidential candidate John Kerry. It was Regnery’s biggest book ever, says Ross.

Compared with some of his earlier books, Klein’s latest best seller isn’t particularly rough. His 2005 Clinton book, The Truth About Hillary, was so scurrilous that conservative writer John Podhoretz said reading it made him want to take a shower. But it stayed on the New York Times best-seller list for seven weeks. The Amateur is tame by comparison; it read as if Klein wrote it with the same dull pencil he uses to ghostwrite the Walter Scott column in Parade magazine.

On the same best-seller list that featured D’Souza and Klein in the second TIME September ’7, 20I2 and third slots, businessman Mallory Factor takes aim at public-employee unions in Shadowbosses (No. 6; Center Street), while radio host Aaron Kleinno relation to Edward-teams with blogger Brenda Elliott to reveal Obama’s ”radical blueprint” for a “socialist takeover” during his second term in Fool Me Twice (No. 8; WMD). This summer the list also included Judicial Watch president Tom Fitton’s The Corruption Chronicles (Threshold) and David Limbaugh’s (brother of Rush) The Great Destroyer, about Obama’s “war on the Republic.”

Given Regnery’s track record, most large publishing houses have launched divisions aimed at conservative book buyers. There is Crown Forum inside the Random House empire and Threshold Editions within the Simon & Schuster operation. Hachette has Center Street, and HarperCollins has Broadside Books.

Adam Bellow, editorial director of Broadside, has been publishing works by conservative writers for decades, starting with D’Souza’s first best seller, Illiberal Education, in 1991. “It’s my shtick,” he says cheerfully. While his imprint is owned by conservative media baron Rupert Murdoch, Bellow has seen enough to know that some of the major houses lack ideological commitment to these projects. “It’s just like Fifty Shades of Grey,” Bellow explains, referring to the soft-porn series that has dominated the best-seller lists this year. Publishers care about sales. “That’s not for the highminded, but it pays for their homes in Sag Harbor.”

For her part, Regnery’s Ross reads the liberal Huffington Post and Salon websites to keep her thinking sharp. “I encourage people to read books they don’t agree with,” she says, adding, “Sometimes they get me mad.” But she is not interested in publishing authors from the other side, no matter how much emotion they stir_ “I don’t know how,” she admits, “to make one of those books successful.” -WITH REPORTING BY ANDREA SACHS/NEW YORK

View the PDF of this article here.

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Authors Mallory and Elizabeth Factor argue that unions have far too much influence in the U.S.

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