Look no further than one of the New York Republican Party’s godfathers, Former Senator Alfonse D’Amato.  John Fund reports in the Wall Street Journal that, because of his close ties to Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, it is widely believed that D’Amato worked “behind the scenes to make sure that no one, not even (former Gov. George) Pataki, challenged Ms. Gillibrand.”  Fund writes that many Republicans suspect he then handpicked Bruce Blakeman as a “paper candidate” to purposely lose against Gillibrand, but Blakeman ended up losing last week’s primary to Joe DioGuardi in a revolt by Republican voters against the establishment’s candidate.

Rick Lazio was simply another candidate, handpicked by New York’s conservative establishment to  run as a sacrificial lamb.  Republican leaders liked him because he would be the least offensive to Democrat Andrew Cuomo, whose election to governor they viewed as inevitable.  New York’s GOP leadership, Mr. Fund writes, is more of an “insider commercial party,” whose members don’t wish to offend the next Governor of New York and risk losing “the state’s business — whether bond sales, construction contracts or rigged development deals.”  These Republican leaders jettisoned Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy’s attempt to run for governor as a fiscal conservative, perhaps out of fear that he might provide a serious challenge to Cuomo.  Even after the primary, the state’s establishment refuses to give up.  New York Conservative Party Chairman Michael Long, who did his part to ensure that Lazio won his spot on the ballot as a nominee of the Conservative Party, is still pushing Lazio to continue campaigning as a third party candidate.  He has insisted that Lazio should be allowed to participate in any debates that the gubernatorial candidates have, and wants Lazio to run a robust campaign.  In an election which is getting very close, a third party challenge by Mr. Lazio could hand the election to Andrew Cuomo; showing that members of the establishment such as Michael Long have an outside agenda which is inconsistent with the conservative philosophies that they espouse.

When finally given a voice, New York’s Republican voters spoke with their ballots and overwhelmingly nominated Carl Paladino as the nominee.  Mr. Paladino’s nomination had little to do with the mainstream narrative of Tea Partiers seeking ideologically purer candidates; indeed, he supports same-sex civil unions while Lazio does not.  Instead, voters simply sought a chance to stand up to the establishment which has disregarded the interests of their party and their state for too long.

Why Republicans will spend energy on opposing a repeal overwhelmingly supported by the American voters is puzzling, when considering the necessity of saving political capital to fight upcoming Democratic bills on cap and trade, and another pork-filled “jobs” bill.  Republicans are wasting precious ammunition needed to stop a continued European-style liberal economic onslaught, just to make sure that our fighting men and women who are gay stay closeted.

It’s ironic that the same leaders who portend to support our troops also support making the lives of some of them miserable.  My cousin’s husband is a navy flight surgeon.  He’s terrified when he calls my cousin, for fear that others will overhear them talking and learn that he is gay.  Everything they say to each other is coded, and they can’t express any affection toward each other.

My cousin’s husband is fighting for our freedom, but he doesn’t even have the freedom to say “I love you.”  It’s bad enough to fear bullets, why should gay soldiers have to fear being outed?

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid drew the ire of the city of Toronto, which grants authority for the march to take place, funds it and provides security.  The city threatened to pull funding from the parade, which would effectively shut the entire event down, because it feared that allowing Queers Against Israeli Apartheid to march would constitute an endorsement of a political message that has nothing to do with the celebration of tolerance and diversity through gay rights that the parade is meant to signify.  Indeed, the Israeli Apartheid group has marched in several previous Toronto Pride Parades, and many people who had wished to attend the parade avoided it because they didn’t want to be associated with such radical groups.

The Toronto Sun detailed footage of a video of the group at least year’s parade:

200 QuAIA marchers carried anti-Israel signs, while marchers angrily chanted “Fist by Fist, Blow by Blow, Apartheid State, Has Got to Go” and at least one parade marcher was decked out in a shirt featuring a crossed-out swastika.

Everyone will have their own opinions about issues like Israel, but it remains to be seen why anyone concerned about gay rights would have such a high level of vitriol toward the only country in the Middle East which respects gay rights.

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, which is a collaboration of gay Muslim groups and gay Jewish groups, railed against their being banned in a rather unorthodox flier released to its members.  It decried “censorship” of “political expression” and sought the right to “free political speech.”  But no one in Toronto is denying the group this.  If Queers Against Israeli Apartheid wishes to express its views, it is welcome to hold its own demonstrations at a separate date.  Controversial political views on something as off-topic as Israeli border policy have got nothing to do with the Toronto Gay Pride Parade, and radical groups should not be allowed to detract from the parade’s overall positive message.

By coincidence, this week Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty vetoed a bill that would have given gay and lesbian couples custody of their deceased partners for funeral plans.  To any voter who sees gays or lesbians as at least close to being human beings, Pawlenty’s decision looks cruel.  Like Rand Paul’s opposition to the Civil Rights Act, Pawlenty makes the GOP look out of touch on issues like discrimination and other obstacles that minorities in America face.

Paul’s comments risk fracturing the Tea Party supporters that he and the Republicans need to win in November.  Many Tea Partiers are not socially conservative; they are simply tired of out of control spending, and bailouts for everything from car companies to bloated Greek pensioners.  Shifting the focus to divisive social issues could take away an important component of the Tea Party; voters who are socially moderate or liberal but fiscally conservative.

Just this week, it was discovered that the state of Connecticut had spent its recent grant of DHS funds on, among other things: thousands of coffee mugs for state workers, $15,000 for a television talk-show hosted by the Lt. Governor, and $230,000 for a state-of-the-art patrol boat for a recreational harbor in the small town of Norwich.  New Yorkers should be demanding to know why their fleet of Democratic leaders have done nothing about wasted funds for military boats in Connecticut yacht clubs while federal officials plan to slash New York City’s DHS funding.  The NYC region’s one Republican, Congressman Peter King, has also been the only elected official to take the administration to task over this issue.

Since 2003, DHS has handed out more than $30 billion to states in grants to help protect against terrorism.  Most of the money has been wasted, according to a report by The Heritage Foundation.  It discovered that as of this year, less than half of the money has gone to the big cities that face security threats. Indeed, most of it has gone to states and towns with small populations that don’t need it.  As early as 2004, Alaska received $2 million in DHS funds which the state didn’t know what to do with.  It proposed using the money to purchase a commercial jet for state officials.  The list of pork goes on and on, from brand new hazmat equipment for Zanesville, Ohio to $23 million awarded in 2009 for the New Mexico Institute of Mining.  Congress can allocate homeland security funds, in each year’s DHS appropriation act, and often uses it to cater to their favorite special interest group.  Three months before Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to blow up Detroit, Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) sought to strip $4.5 million for explosive detection screening at airports from the DHS budget and give the money as a grant to subsidize local firefighter salaries.  Dodd’s union backers were happy, but airport screening remained weak, as Mr. Abdulmutallab can attest.

Aside from pork grants, DHS has mismanaged its dealings with private contractors.  In 2008, Congress found that more than $15 billion of the projects that DHS hired contractors to work on were a complete waste of money.  They included ships built for the Coast Guard and then immediately junked, and a border security project with Boeing that DHS stopped after blowing $1.5 billion.

While DHS wastes billions of dollars each year, America is dangerously underfunding the vital parts of homeland security.  The Heritage Foundation’s report finds that funds for additional air marshals have been cut, along with a $225 million cut from border security.

DHS needs to be reformed into an effective organization focused on homeland security and not a slush fund for states.  The process of giving annual grants to states and municipalities should be either done away with or be cut down to only a dozen or so localities to ensure that the legitimate security needs in major cities are addressed.

Next, Congress needs to define what “homeland security” is.  Is it defense against terrorism, or subsidizing firefighter salaries?  Any spending outside of that defined mission needs to be eliminated.  DHS should then be broken up.  The bigger a government institution is, the harder it is to manage.  The idea after 9/11 was to have all of these organizations under one roof so that they could easily coordinate with one another.  Instead, DHS turned into a bloated bureaucracy too big for one Secretary of Homeland Security to control, and with too many appropriations spent in one annual congressional appropriations bill.  That’s one reason why Connecticut’s Lt. Governor can use DHS dollars to pay for his talk show and say it benefits homeland security: it’s too big to scrutinize.  TSA (transportation security) should be an independent organization, as should ICE (immigration and customs).

The Department of Homeland Security has been a case study in how gigantic government organizations are poorly run and incredibly wasteful.  DHS needs to be completely reformed, so that it can do what it was designed to do: protect Americans.

Spain, Italy and Portugal are in a similar boat, each weighed down with debt loads from cradle to grave government programs that are proving to be unaffordable.  Each country has also enacted sky-high taxes in an attempt to pay for at least part of the cost.  Spain’s VAT tax (a national sales tax) alone is 16%.  Higher taxes haven’t been good for Spain’s economy, where unemployment just shot above 20%: putting more people on welfare and adding to the country’s deficit.

In an attempt to trim its deficit, the Greek government has proposed modest cuts to government worker salaries, and wants to increase the retirement age (the age at which all Greeks can collect a pension from the government) to 63.  Doing this would only reduce the budget deficit from 13.6% of GDP to 8%, but even these “austerity measures” have provoked massive protests from a public that has never been told “no” by the government before.  One protester complained that if the cuts to her salary are enacted, she would have to forgo buying a new car, and would need to switch to using cheaper makeup.

One problem with an economy based around government spending is that, unlike a private-sector business, it’s nearly impossible to cut spending when times are bad.  Look at England.  UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron had been running as a strong fiscal conservative last year, proposing necessary cuts to Britain’s budget.  This quickly proved to be political suicide in a country where 53% of the economy is government spending and more than 6 million people work for the government.   Gordon Brown and the Labour Party pointed out the impact that cuts would have on healthcare, government workers, and the performance of an economy dependent on government spending.  Cameron blinked, dropping proposals for cuts that had any teeth.

Regardless of who’s in power, how will Britain find the political willpower to trim its exploding deficit?  By defunding the armed forces.  The UK’s military has already been hit by the budgetary axe, with many army battalions 1/5th below their regular size (2/5th when you count soldiers so injured they aren’t fit to deploy).  Many in England are already questioning the importance of remaining a world military power, reports the Economist, arguing that “Britain could limit itself to defending its national territory while sheltering under NATO and America’s nuclear umbrella.”  In a country dependent on government spending for social services, it’s easier for politicians to gut their militaries than to ask citizens to accept the cuts.  National security? Why worry about that when you know the United States can bail you out.

Last week Bill Maher pointed out the merits of Europe’s social safety nets over American capitalism, using statistics from infant mortality rates to life expectancy.  Even if one is to concede that Maher is correct, his argument misses the point: economies heavily dependent on big government are not sustainable.  One by one, European governments are beginning to show signs of breaking economically.  Greece may get bailed out for now but its debt will only grow, reaching 400% by 2040.  Long before then, the country will either collapse into bankruptcy or unwind its government-run healthcare and pension system.

Nations must adopt economic systems that are financially sustainable, by giving citizens control of their own destiny.  Cradle to grave systems will only push them into a grave.

We’ve seen this movie before.  Last year’s stimulus bill provided over $100 billion in aid to local school districts.  All that the aid did was prevent districts from having to make cuts that were necessary to balance their budgets.  With stimulus money running out this year, districts have had to begin making cuts.  In my district on Long Island, that meant the teacher’s union agreeing to a temporary freeze in pay increases as well as elimination of several staff members including the $47,000 position for the district’s “transportation consultant” (why a small district with only several thousand students needed a transportation consultant remains to be seen).

Districts across the nation, from Texas to California, have had to layoff teachers and make cuts to funding.  As painful as they have been, cuts are critical to rebalancing school district’s budgets so that they will be sustainable in the years ahead.  When times were good, districts ignored fiscal responsibility, hiring more teachers than were necessary and giving more in the way of pay hikes than could be afforded.  Such is the case with New York City.  Mayor Bloomberg wanted to impress voters by creating low class sizes, some with under 20 students.  He then wooed the teacher’s union by increasing teacher salaries 50% since he took office.  Now that is proving to be unsustainable.  New York City will have to make layoffs, and freeze salary increases.

All that a public school bailout will do is delay the inevitable at a cost of $23 billion.  It won’t just be used to stop layoffs or cuts to school programs.  Teachers’ unions will insist that the money be used to unfreeze their pay hikes (they did with the stimulus last year).  Costs will continue to rise.  Next year at this time, the money from Harkin’s proposed bailout will run out and school districts will be looking to finally enact the cuts that they were going to make this year.  Perhaps another bailout will be proposed.  After a while, such federal money will become routine and local school districts will be addicted to federal aid just as they have become addicted to state aid.

Public education is the lifeblood of America, and every student deserves a great education.  But public education must be delivered at a sustainable cost.  Continuous bailouts will only saddle our children with an even larger federal debt: darkening their future far more than a district’s proposed cuts will.

integrated steel operations would move to developing nations such as Brazil… Set up abroad, they would essentially emit the same amount of carbon — only without restrictions.

In other words, American factories would close down (sending more American workers to the unemployment line) and move to Brazil or China where they could continue to spew emissions.  But Brazil and China have far fewer environmental laws beyond even the regulation of carbon.  Relocated industry could thus take place with little regard for the surrounding environment, even in basic areas such as protecting the local water supply and proper disposal of wastes.  Cap and trade just outsources pollution: moving it from the United States to the developing world where lax environmental laws exacerbate the problem.

But to dodge allegations of being a “party of no,” Republicans need to come up with solutions to environmental issues.  The New Yorker documented an encounter between Mitt Romney and an independent voter in New Hampshire when he was running for President.  The voter asked, point blank, “It’s eighty degrees today. What are we going to do about global warming?” Romney went into a vague description of an America, under him, where “we’re going to get ourselves off foreign oil” by using the usual laundry list of “nuclear power, clean coal, more efficient vehicles” without offering much in the way of specifics.  It’s hard to use those ideas to counter a clearly spelled out cap and trade bill.

What about proposing a plan that offers tax credits to polluters to invest in more efficient forms of production?  Factories can be given credits to upgrade their machinery and facilities, or to retrofit their equipment to operate on natural gas instead of coal or oil.  Power plants can be given tax credits to switch to cleaner burning fuels.  For those who are averse to more government spending, the credits can perhaps be given out as loans which companies can pay back after they’ve made these investments.  This solution won’t solve every environmental problem (neither will cap and trade), but it will make American industry more productive, and will lower carbon emissions in the process.

Cap and trade will attempt to reduce carbon emissions by tearing our industry down. A tax credit system will reduce carbon emissions by building industry up, investing in it so that it becomes more efficient and uses less energy.

The only problem was that the LIRR retirement system is regulated largely by the federal Railroad Retirement Board, which also pays disability benefits to retirees.  The Railroad Retirement Board has a history of being lax; 98% of American railroad workers who file to retire on disability are granted such status.  When Cuomo launched his investigation, he had to have known that, as a state prosecutor, he would have little jurisdiction over federal regulations.

One year later, Cuomo announced that… surprise, he had delivered few results other than fining a crook employee $1,500, and asking the LIRR to hire someone to enhance its ethics training.

When asked why his office had accomplished so little, Cuomo and the LIRR blamed the Railroad Retirement Board, as if it was news to him that he had no jurisdiction over a federal matter.  But he didn’t appeal to the federal government to push the Railroad Retirement Board to change its rules to stop manipulation of the system.  Cuomo didn’t actually want the retirement rules to change for a large group of union employees whose money he’ll need when he runs for governor.

The LIRR case underscores a fact about Cuomo that the media will not report: other than suing investment banks and health insurance companies, along with anything that contributes to the state’s tax base, he hasn’t accomplished much.  Cuomo’s career as attorney general has been mostly a dog and pony show, making him look like a crusader against corruption, while in reality he has done little for taxpayers other than issue press releases about his do-nothing “investigations.”  All of which are snapped up by an adoring New York media.  Cuomo knew that he’d get nothing accomplished with his LIRR case.  But he also knew that the media wouldn’t hold him accountable for wasting money on a phony investigation.

Cuomo’s inaction as attorney general has occurred while corruption throughout New York’s government remains rampant.  Cuomo hasn’t even touched news that over 700 full-time New York City teachers get paid to not work. Of course he hasn’t: he needs the teachers’ union to support his bid for governor.

Cuomo is just another Albany politician who is, as Fred Dicker of the New York Post put it, “fiddling while New York burns.”

In reality, all that Obama is doing is using more taxpayer money to subsidize skyrocketing tuition.  Colleges, like states, have gone on spending sprees: hiring too many employees and giving these employees lavish contracts.  Why worry about keeping costs down when you can raise tuition with impunity?

Over the past ten years, the cost of college has risen by more than double the rate of inflation.  This is because payrolls have mushroomed as staff sizes for administrative positions have soared.  Daniel L. Bennett, in an article for Forbes last summer entitled “Bureaucrat U”, found that colleges have spent the past decade hiring armies of administrative staff, and creating positions like “recreation therapist” at the University of Florida and a “director of Fraternity and Sorority Life” at the University of Maryland.  By 2014, Mr. Bennett notes, there will be more administrative employees at America’s colleges than teachers.

Obama’s plan does nothing to rectify the situation.  All it does is “bail out” universities; they get additional subsidies in the form of grants given to students, and can continue to ignore their costs.  Perhaps a decade from now, when the costs of attending some four-year colleges will be nearing  $100,000 per year, Congress will again heed the call to “make college affordable” and will raise Pell Grants again, along with an additional burden to the national debt.  The president once said that “no one should go broke because they choose to go to college,” but taxpayers shouldn’t go broke because colleges choose to ignore costs.

What is the solution to actually making college more affordable?  It can start by rewarding colleges that work to get costs down.  Instead of perpetually raising the amount of grants to students, the government can award colleges grants if they have lowered their tuition rates through cost reductions.  Congress can also change the monopoly that colleges have on the information that is available to prospective students.  Mr. Bennett describes academia as a “sellers market,” in which America’s major colleges work together to ensure a Soviet-style dissemination of information to the public.  Mr. Bennett would like to see information about the value of each college’s education “publicly available in a digestible manner.”  Congress can start there.  Taxpayer handouts have only created a tuition system dependent upon more handouts.