South Carolina State Senator Tom Davis has announced he is supporting Dr. Paul. U.S. Senator Jim DeMint from South Carolina now mentions embracing Libertarian concepts. The political winds in the U.S. have shifted. Voters are fed up with both major parties and realize that the best interests of American citizens have not been well represented in a long while. When it comes to cutting spending and downsizing government, no presidential candidate in my lifetime offers the message Ron Paul offers. And Dr. Paul’s message continues to resonate across America.

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Fun lesson on how to get that Rolling Stones sound with Marty from Next Level Guitar. Enjoy!

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For some states, the recession has been in the rearview mirror for a long time now. That’s certainly the case in North Dakota, where the unemployment rate is the lowest in the country at 3.4%. Oil and gas from the Bakken formation help, but as I’ve written, North Dakota ranks third in associate-degree-and-above educational attainment among 25- to 44-year-olds. It’s attractive to younger workers. Rounding out the top 10 after North Dakota are Nebraska (4.1%), South Dakota (4.3%), New Hampshire (5.2%), Vermont (5.3%), Iowa (5.7%), Wyoming (5.8%), Minnesota (5.9%), Oklahoma (6.1%), and Virginia (6.2%).

On the other end of the spectrum, where unemployment rates are the highest, it probably feels like the recession never ended. These states are Nevada (13%), California (11.3%), Rhode Island (10.5%), Mississippi (10.5%), North Carolina (10%), Illinois (10%), Florida (10%), South Carolina (9.9%), Georgia (9.9%), and Michigan (9.8%). Some of these states may quite possibly be stuck in a death spiral for years to come, but others will be able to rebound. There isn’t a magic bullet per se, but there are tools states can use that are like a flashing neon “Open for Business” sign. One tool is becoming a right-to-work state—meaning it’s illegal to force employees to join a union against their will.

Workers, like money, go where they’re well treated. College grads are moving to right-to-work states. The nine states with the greatest gains in college-educated adult population between 2000 and 2010 are listed below, courtesy of the November-December 2011 National Right to Work Committee Newsletter:

You can see in the table that South Carolina, Florida, North Carolina, and Nevada are among the nine states with the greatest gains in their college-educated adult populations and are right-to-work states. They are also among the states with the highest unemployment numbers that I discussed earlier.

But there’s a reason why Boeing set up its sophisticated 787 Dreamliner manufacturing facilities in South Carolina. Boeing recognizes that it needs workers who cannot be stifled by unions and can work freely to increase their merit-based wages. “The simple fact is, highly educated employees, like other employees, benefit from right-to-work laws,” says Matthew Leen, vice president of the National Right to Work Committee. “Employees of all kinds prefer to live in right-to-work states when they can because living costs are lower and real incomes are higher.”

There are two states that are in the group with the slowest growth in their college-educated adult population from 2000-2010 and the highest unemployment rates: Michigan and Rhode Island. The weak recovery may be self-perpetuating for the weakest states. In his Wall Street Journal piece “No Easy Balm for Joblessness Wounds,” Ben Casselman writes:

Unprecedented rates of long-term unemployment could threaten the economy’s recent gains. Some 5.6 million Americans have been out of work at least six months, 3.9 million of them for a year or more. Research shows that the longer people are unemployed, the less likely they are to find jobs. Economists aren’t sure why—to what degree it’s because workers’ skills deteriorate, or because they find ways to cope and give up looking for work, or whether the stigma of being unemployed for so long makes employers unlikely to hire them—but the effect is the same: Many of the people out of work the longest likely will never work again.

The risk, economists say, is that the U.S. will develop an underclass class of semipermanently unemployed workers, with severe consequences for productivity, public finances and even social stability. Europe, which faced a similar problem in the 1980s, is still dealing with the consequences.

States like South Carolina that are open for business and treat workers well will attract a mobile workforce. Those that are not attractive, like Rhode Island and Michigan, could be left with a non-mobile workforce, saddled with public debt and pension debt they didn’t spend or promise. How they pay it down when so many of the most productive workers have left has yet to be determined.

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President Obama has crossed the line by making recess appointments while Congress is not actually in recess. Congress was in pro forma sessions when the president appointed Richard Cordray to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau directorship and appointed three members to the NLRB. Contrary to the smoke and mirrors being set up by the liberal media to suggest that this is exactly what George Bush did, it is not.

George Bush made 171 recess appointments, but  they were all during actual congressional recesses. When Senate Democrats, including then-Senator Barack Obama, realized they could prevent President Bush from making appointments by keeping Congress in session through vacations, they seized on the chance. Bush, for once, abided by the Constitution’s mandate and did not make recess appointments during the pro forma sessions. President Obama has brashly, and perhaps illegally, made recess appointments during pro forma sessions of Congress. This is unprecedented no matter how much the liberal media tries to paper over it. (See this report by the Congressional Research Service for the whole story on Bush’s recess appointments.)

Were the president to be prosecuted for such an abuse of power, he would have a hard time pleading ignorance. During the 2008 campaign, Senator Obama’s purported credentials for office included, not in small amount, his constitutional scholarship. Back then, Ed Lasky at the American Thinker took on the task of vetting Mr. Obama’s scholarly credentials and found him lacking. Here are a few clippings from Lasky’s article.

Regarding the president’s days as the president of the Harvard Law Review:

One thing he did not do while at the review was publish his own work. The absence of a paper trail is a pattern throughout his academic and to some extent his political career.

On the president’s legal scholarship:

Indeed, he has left little in the way of a record for Americans to judge his legal abilities. No written records, no signed legal papers, no research papers authored or co-authored by him. Nothing.

Mr. Lasky continues:

Although he was president of the Harvard Law Review as a student, in which capacity he no doubt wrote some unsigned notes, a search of the HeinOnline database of law journals turns up exactly nothing credited to Obama in any law review anywhere at any time. This is yet more indication that his status as “lecturer” at Chicago was not a regular faculty appointment, since regular full-time faculty are expected to produce scholarship. Notwithstanding an apparent eleven-year teaching career in constitutional law at a top-flight law school, not one single article, published talk, book review, or comment of any kind, appears anywhere in the professional legal literature, under Barack Obama’s name.

So how does President Obama defend himself from the charge that he abused his constitutional power in making recess appointments while Congress was still in session? Perhaps the real legal scholars can figure it out.

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John W. Whitehead lays out a terrifying list of freedoms that Americans lost in 2011. It’s a New Year’s countdown of constitutional infringement by the American government. This trend was begun by the Bush administration, but has been extended and expanded under Obama. Here are a few of the intrusions Whitehead points out in his article.

The increase in U.S. security agencies surveillance:

Several years ago, government officials acknowledged that the nefarious intelligence gathering entity known as the National Security Agency (NSA) had exceeded its legal authority by eavesdropping on Americans’ private email messages and phone calls. However, these reports barely scratch the surface of what we are coming to recognize as a “security/industrial complex”—a marriage of government, military and corporate interests aimed at keeping Americans under constant surveillance.

Internet surveillance:

In late July 2011, the House Judiciary Committee passed the cleverly titled “Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011,” which laid the groundwork for all internet traffic to be easily monitored by government officials.

So-called Fusion Centers, which are:

data collecting agencies spread throughout the country, aided by the National Security Agency—which constantly monitor our communications, everything from our internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.

Pat-downs and strip searches:

Under the direction of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), American travelers have been subjected to all manner of searches ranging from whole-body scanners and enhanced pat-downs at airports to bag searches in train stations.

The list goes on and on. Read Whitehead’s article for the scary details.

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