No surprise, at all:

The billionaire hedge fund manager at the center of an alleged fraud hatched at Goldman Sachs, a leading investment bank…gave $30,400 to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in June, qualifying him as a major Democratic donor.

He also gave $2,300 to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) reelection campaign in February of last year and $4,800 to Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) last April, according to records filed at the Federal Election Commission.

The report notes that he’s given to Republicans – but that is what hedge fund managers do: they hedge their bets both in economics and politics. But he’s a major Democrat donor – and yet another bit of proof that Democrats are the party of Big Business.

We’ve got the video to the event in Las Vegas up at Noonan for Nevada. Here is my impression of the event and what it means:

The TEA Party Express endorsement of Sharron Angle for United States Senator may or may not shake up the Republican Senate primary, but it is abundantly clear that the TEA Party has shaken up American politics.

On April 15th I went down to Sunset Park in Henderson in order to observe the Tax Day TEA Party rally. When I arrived, I was disappointed – one guy parading with a “Don’t Tread on Me” banner, and not much else. But as I was heading out the door, as it were, a couple flag-bedecked cars arrived with people clearly there for a TEA Party. I followed them.

Turns out, I had just gone at the wrong end of park – and hadn’t realized just how big Sunset Park is.

As I followed along behind the activists, I noted more and more converging in the same direction. I also noted the “crash the tea party” infiltrators. About four or six fit, young men shouting obscenities at little, old ladies and mothers with children. Keep it classy, liberals – but it also shows the weakness of the left. Bereft of ideas or, even, a sense of decency, all they’ve got is insults. Great credit to all the people subjected to the insults – no one reacted.

At the event, itself, was a large crowd. Keeping in mind that TEA Party activists hold down jobs, this was a big turn out for a Thursday afternoon. When I arrived, at least 250 people, growing swiftly to about 500 and then steadily increasing from there.

Read the rest at Nevada News and Views.

UPDATE: Jewish TEA Parties?

Terrible, but not at all surprising:

When the New York Times published a series of articles on top-secret counterterrorism efforts at the National Security Agency in 2006 and 2007, supporters of the Bush administration reacted with outrage. Oddly, though, the same people who expressed outrage over the exposure of Valerie Plame as a CIA analyst never got terribly exercised over these breaches of national security (and to be fair, the same holds true in reverse). The Bush administration complained loudly about the Times’ decision to expose these programs but never made a public show of a probe to discover the source of the leaks.

Ironically, that effort apparently succeeded in uncovering at least one leaker — and the Obama administration gets the credit for it:

A former senior executive with the National Security Agency has been indicted on 10 felony charges related to the leaking of classified information to a national newspaper in 2006 and 2007, the Justice Department announced Thursday morning.

Thomas A. Drake, 52, headed an office in the NSA’s Signals Intelligence Directorate at Fort Meade between 2001 and 2005, and continued to work with the agency as a high-ranking contractor through 2008, U.S. officials said. The indictment alleges that Drake allegedly exchanged hundreds of e-mails with an unidentified reporter for a national newspaper and served as a source for its articles about Bush administration intelligence policies between February 2006 and November 2007, U.S. officials said.

Everyone on our side suspected this to be the case – that someone in the intelligence community was deliberately leaking info to the MSM. Only question: was this man a traitor for money, or for ideology? Meaning, was he getting paid for his stories, or was he doing it because he disliked Bush Administration policies.

If it was for money, 10 years or so in jail is sufficient – if it did it for ideology, then it must be life in prison. Why? Because employees of the government are not permitted to dissent from policy set by elected officials. They can put up with it, or they can quit – and that is all. Selective leaking of documents by a junior bureaucrat is not just a violation of trust, but also a threat to American security because the junior bureaucrat simply cannot know all the info which went in to making the decision he disagrees with.

And, yes, if any conservative in the ranks violates such a public trust to leak Obama Administration policy secrets then I’ll want him roasted on a spit, to (in a manner of speaking, of course).

As an aside, I take issue with Morrisey’s comparison of this to the Plame case – Plame wasn’t covert and her name wasn’t leaked. But, be that as it may, the assertion still stands: break trust, and pay a high price.

Record number of foreclosures in the first quarter, 2010.

But everything is all better, now. Obama and the Banksters say so.

Hot Air has the details of Crist’s veto of a Florida education bill which would have tied teacher raises to student test scores – and the very negative reaction not just of former governor Jeb Bush, but also Crist’s political mentor, former Senator Connie Mack, who has now resigned as chairman of Crist’s campaign.

Ok, so is this just a bit of boneheadedness on the part of Crist, or a preparation for switching to Independent? Sort of getting himself kicked out of the party as bogus-justification for ditching the GOP primary?

Time will tell.

We’ll update from time to time during the day as events transpire. I hope to get some video of local events which I’ll link to over at Noonan for Nevada. If you come across anything you think note- or link-worthy, let us know.

Meanwhile, what does it all mean to you? The TEA Party? The revolutionary ferment in the nation? The increasing unpopularity of Obama and his Democrats? Are you attending a rally today? Are you a kook leftist assigned to infiltrate a rally (OO, we’re looking at you)?

This is an open thread, but try to keep it to the various aspects of today’s TEA Party events.

UPDATE: Sorry about light updates today – but here we go.

I got to the TEA Party rally in Henderson, NV. At least 500, maybe as many as 1,000 showed up. Nice crowd, strongly libertarian and in another blow to the slander about TEA partiers being racist, there were black people there.

We did have infiltrators, after a fashion. They didn’t have the guts to get in to the thick of it – preferring to stay about 100 yards away, shouting obscenities at little girls and housewives as they walked towards the demonstration. Classy – and just oh, so liberal.

We’ve got some bad video up at Noonan for Nevada – with much, much better video to come.

UPDATE II: Pajamas Media has a run down on several “crashers”. Mostly, they are pathetic.

UPDATE III: A New York Times (yes, that New York Times) poll shows that TEA Partiers are, well, not at all what liberal bigots think they are.

Michael Barone writes up what the GOP should be thinking of in the upcoming debate over banking reform:

The big media tends to portray Republicans as opposed to all financial regulation. But every intelligent person knows that some form of financial regulation is necessary. And the 2008 financial collapse shows we need smarter regulation that will discourage, not encourage, government bailouts of Wall Street.

Republicans have good policy and political reasons to argue not for weaker regulation but for tougher regulation of Wall Street firms. They should oppose resolution authority that helps the big firms and, while they’re at it, seek to increase the capital requirements on such firms that are left vague in the Dodd bill. Democrats have taken the side of Wall Street. Republicans should stand up for Main Street — and taxpayers — instead.

It is a myth – but a durable one – that the GOP is the party of big business and/or bankers. It used to be so, but mostly since Goldwater and definitely since Reagan, big business types really haven’t found a home in the GOP – but they have found a home in the Democrat party.

There are two reasons for this: one, the leaders of big business tend to be educated at the same elite universities as the leaders of liberalism; they are steeped in the same worldview as the left. Two, the leaders of big business prefer to cut deals with big government rather than, say, make the best product or do a good overall job.

But the debate over banking reform will bring out the class war rhetoric from the Democrats – we GOPers will be cast as defenders of big business by Democrats who are raking in donations from same. The proposed reforms of the Democrats will thus be long on anti-business rhetoric, short on anything which might actually make big business more responsive to the needs of the American people.

And there in lies our big chance to break out of the liberal parameters of the debate. We can craft a reform message which attacks the actual problems – which actually will force big business to work for the benefit of America, rather than for the benefit of the corporate bosses and their kept politicians in the Democrat party.

Lots of things can be done, but I think the key element of a conservative reform of banking – or a conservative reform of any big business activity – is to enforce the notion that if you’re going to make piles of money, you’d better do so by creating something useful. Banking is vital in a modern, free market economy – it is the necessary mechanism for distributing capital around the economy. Our job is to ensure that this capital is directed towards wealth-creation, rather than merely piling up cash and awarding big bonuses to a select few.

It is an absurdity, for instance, that we would allow an investment firm to cook up screwball things like credit default swaps. Its nice for bankers because they can make money if an investment works, or goes south – but it doesn’t actually do anything to create wealth…and thus it doesn’t do anything to create jobs. Conservative reform would be to put an end to such scams (which have played such a huge role in our current economic crisis) and encourage wiser use of money.

This sort of reform would allow us to war on the bankers who have made such a hash of things while preventing us from falling in to a Statist model which would merely substitute government for corporate idiots in the mismanagement of capital. It would also, of course, put us on the side of the people – not “the people” in Democrat terms, which is just a mythical prop in a leftist morality play, but the real people – the people who do the work of this nation and who will astound the world if just given the chance to create wealth unfettered.

Interesting poll:

Americans are now pretty evenly divided about whether they would rather have Barack Obama or George W. Bush in the White House. 48% prefer Obama while 46% say they would rather have the old President back.

Meanwhile, the Ronulans will love this:

Pit maverick Republican Congressman Ron Paul against President Obama in a hypothetical 2012 election match-up, and the race is – virtually dead even.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey of likely voters finds Obama with 42% support and Paul with 41% of the vote. Eleven percent (11%) prefer some other candidate, and six percent (6%) are undecided.

The bloom is clearly off the rose…

I’d like to think that Crist has put this issue to bed – unless he’s a bald-faced liar, he has. And yet, the rumors that he’ll bolt the GOP and run as an independent just won’t die:

Florida Gov. Charlie Crist dodged another question Wednesday about whether he would run for the U.S. Senate as an independent, the Associated Press reports. The question referenced this story in today’s Wall Street Journal on how some of his advisers are pushing Crist to abandon his lagging Republican primary campaign.

Others are now wondering: How could Crist make such a move after his manager campaign, Eric Eikenberg, so vehemently denied it just last week. Eikenberg’s statement last week included this line: “To put these rumors to rest once and for all, as we have said countless times before, Governor Crist is running for the United States Senate as a Republican. He will not run as an Independent or as a No Party Affiliation.”

Which would, once again, seem to put an end on it for this story – but it keeps going and going and going. It could be, of course, that Democrats are keeping the drumbeat up in order to split the GOP vote – which is about the only way the Democrats could win in Florida this year.

Be that as it may, it is clearly decision time for Crist – his best move is to bow out gracefully and either try again another year, or wait for a Cabinet post in President Pal…errmmm…I mean, a Cabinet post in the next Republican Administration. Keeping at this forlorn race just hurts Crist’s chances elsewhere – while running as an Independent would mean the end of his career.

Its just as bad as you thought:

f you listen to certain politicians and talking heads you might get the impression that the federal fiscal sky is falling. Unfortunately, unlike Chicken Little, they may be right.

The Treasury Department recently issued the 2009 financial report of the United States government. Whereas there is lots of talk in Congress and in the press about the federal budget, the annual report was released to near silence. That’s too bad, not only because the annual report is untainted by creative accounting but also because its message is too important to ignore.

That message is that the sky is indeed falling…

Do read the linked article – but to nutshell it, our government is in the hole by at least $57.4 trillion dollars. If we don’t change course, then mere interest on government debt – just the interest! – will eat up 10% of GDP by 2040. That might seem like a long way off, but its when my grand-daughter will be trying to make a living and, presumptively, raise a family.

I’m not going to sit still for this – I’m not about to allow liberals in 2010 to steal the future of 2040. Revolutionary change is necessary, and it will be accomplished.