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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Brown</title>
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		<title>Democrats Join The Ferguson Lynch Mob As The Case Against Officer Wilson Collapses</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/democrats-join-the-ferguson-lynch-mob-as-the-case-against-officer-wilson-collapses/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=democrats-join-the-ferguson-lynch-mob-as-the-case-against-officer-wilson-collapses</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2014 04:16:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[black votes]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243808</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An autopsy report shatters a leftist lie designed to pocket black votes.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p dir="ltr"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Fergusonprotests.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243809" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Fergusonprotests-450x192.jpg" alt="Religious leaders hold up their hands as the riot police move in during a protest at the Ferguson Police Department in Ferguson" width="291" height="124" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://dailycaller.com/">DailyCaller.com.</a></strong></p>
<p dir="ltr">Everyone who hasn’t drunk the progressive Kool-Aid is aware that during elections Democrats resort to the race card to scare African Americans, for whose intelligence they have limitless contempt, into voting for them. If Republicans are elected, their propaganda claims, “black churches will burn” or the racial clock will be turned back to the era of segregation, an era that Democrats happen to have been directly responsible for.</p>
<p dir="ltr">This year it’s the mythical threat white policeman allegedly pose to black youth, as Democrats and their media enablers encourage a “lynch mob” mentality — as Howard Kurtz <a href="http://www.mediaite.com/tv/foxs-kelly-kurtz-accuse-huffpost-sharpton-of-lynch-mob-mentality-on-ferguson/">put it</a> recently — in a desperate attempt to pocket black votes.</p>
<p dir="ltr">A flyer distributed by the Georgia Democratic Party (Ferguson is in Missouri) warns:</p>
<blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">“On August 9, 2014, an unarmed 18-year old African-American named Michael Brown was fatally shot six times and killed by a white police officer, his body left in a pool of blood for four hours. Ferguson Missouri’s population is 67% African-American. But the city’s mayor, 5 of its 6 city council members, and 94% of its police force are white. What are we going to do about it? If we want a better, safer future for our children, it’s up to us to vote for change.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p dir="ltr">Note first that this flyer was distributed in Georgia, not Missouri. In other words, according to Democrats: Republicans everywhere are racists. Moreover, if 67 percent of Ferguson citizens are black and they elect a white mayor and city council members shouldn’t that be applauded as a sign that they are committed to America’s inclusive ideal, and are not voting along racial lines? Wouldn’t Democrats be saying that if white majority populations were voting for blacks (as they in fact do)? Once again the claim that this reflects white racism is itself a racist claim, one that is typical of self-hating progressive whites.</p>
<p dir="ltr">The flyer’s timing couldn’t have been worse. The just released autopsy report shows that Michael Brown was only unarmed because he failed to wrestle Officer Darren Wilson’s gun from his holster, when he attacked Officer Wilson in his police car. How many innocent citizens attack a policeman in his police car and attempt to grab his gun from him?</p>
<p dir="ltr">According to the very liberal <em>St. Louis Post Dispatch,</em> “A source familiar with Wilson’s version of events, as told to investigators, said the ‘incredibly strong’ teen punched Wilson and then pressed the barrel of the cop’s gun against the officer’s hip and fought for control of the trigger.” You think the officer might have been in fear for his life after that?</p>
<p dir="ltr">The autopsy report further shows that Michael Brown’s hands were not in the air in a posture of surrender when he was shot – as the Ferguson lynch mob claims — but that the 6’4” 292lb individual was advancing on the much smaller officer, less than twenty feet away. In other words, the autopsy report supports Officer Wilson’s claims that there was a violent struggle and that he shot Wilson first with the intent to warn him to stop and finally – when he failed to do so — to stop him.</p>
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		<title>Hillary Joins the Ferguson Lynch Mob</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/hillary-joins-the-ferguson-lynch-mob/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillary-joins-the-ferguson-lynch-mob</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2014 04:53:25 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ferguson]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239841</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Stoking anger, hatred and fear to get into the White House.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/clinton1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239842" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/clinton1-450x300.jpg" alt="Former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton participates in &quot;A Conversation with Hillary Rodham Clinton&quot; in Manhattan, New York" width="282" height="188" /></a>Breaking her calculated silence on the issue, Hillary Clinton said young Michael Brown was a victim of police brutality in Ferguson, Mo., the latest in a long line of helpless black victims mowed down by racist cops who are part of America&#8217;s corrupt criminal justice system.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s just more left-wing sloganeering, staples of which are knee-jerk cop hatred and making excuses for black criminals.</p>
<p>Clinton, wife of the man some used to call America&#8217;s &#8220;first black president,&#8221; has a long history of race-baiting and race-based pandering. She patronized black Americans in her insultingly awful mock African-American accent when <a href="http://www.creators.com/conservative/walter-williams/insulting-blacks.html">she gave</a> her infamous &#8220;I don&#8217;t feel no ways tired&#8221; speech.</p>
<p>The all-but-declared candidate for the 2016 Democratic nomination for president&#8217;s media-hyped public epiphany about Ferguson and Michael Brown <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/michael-brown-funeral-prelude-to-a-cop-lynching-1/">comes days after</a> 18-year-old Brown was laid to rest following a grotesque political rally led by the abominable racial arsonist Al Sharpton.</p>
<p>The former U.S. secretary of state embraces the politically correct lie that a helpless 6&#8217;4&#8243; 292-lbs. Brown was shot in cold blood, arms raised while attempting to surrender to white police officer Darren Wilson, instead of the less convenient truth that Brown was trying to crush the decorated cop&#8217;s skull with his bare hands and reaching for the man&#8217;s handgun. Left-wingers like Clinton also prefer to ignore that fact that minutes before he attacked Wilson, Brown was captured on video bullying a much smaller East Indian shopkeeper during a robbery, an act that some might consider a hate crime. And the public is still waiting for Brown&#8217;s not-yet-released postmortem toxicology report.</p>
<p>The myth that Brown was a gentle giant won&#8217;t die. The racial-grievance industry, egged on by President Obama and his fellow radicals, won&#8217;t let it go. They need rampant racial tension and cop-hatred to persist in order to motivate their political base if Democrats are to have any hope of maintaining control of the U.S. Senate after the November congressional elections.</p>
<p>Clinton, the Benghazi bungler whose studied nonfeasance on Sept. 11, 2012, got four Americans, including U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens, killed by Muslim terrorists, told a San Francisco audience:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;This summer, the eyes of our country and indeed the world have been focused on one community in the middle of the American heartland, Ferguson, Missouri. Watching the recent funeral for Michael Brown, as a mother, as a human being, my heart just broke for his family, because losing a child is every parent&#8217;s greatest fear and an unimaginable loss.</p>
<p>But I also grieve for that community and for many like it across our country. Behind the dramatic, terrible pictures on television, are deep challenges that will be with them and with us long after the cameras move on. This is what happens when the bonds of trust and respect that hold any community together fray. Nobody wants to see our streets look like a war zone, not in America. We are better than that.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Although black violence is a persistent problem in America, Clinton, as always, has nothing to say about anything that might actually help black communities. They are always victims in the leftist narrative. She and her comrades have done everything in their power for the last half century since the War on Poverty was launched to weaken black families, yet they are always calling for more government programs and social engineering to cure the problems that they themselves have created.</p>
<p>Clinton spoke of the violence in Ferguson as if it had materialized in response to some kind of injustice, ignoring the role of what police called &#8220;outside agitators&#8221; played in driving the nightly street battles with police. She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;We saw our country&#8217;s true character in the community leaders that came out to protest peacefully and worked to restrain violence. The young people who insisted on having their voices heard and in the many decent and respectful law enforcement officers who showed what quality law enforcement looks like. Men and women who serve and protect their communities with courage and professionalism, who inspire trust, rather than fear. We need more of that, because we can do better.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Apart from her perfunctory praise of law enforcement officials and denunciation of violence, Clinton&#8217;s wording implies that Ferguson police officer, Darren Wilson, who shot Brown in self-defense, is not one of the &#8220;many decent and respectful law enforcement officers.&#8221; According to Clinton&#8217;s reasoning, Wilson must be a racist villain who is part of the problem.</p>
<p>Then Clinton began to sound like Barack Obama and other believers in the kooky legal philosophy known as Critical Race Theory, pretending that violent crimes in this country are not disproportionately committed by blacks. She ignores the fact that in some communities blacks receive heightened scrutiny from police because they seem to fit the profile of wanted suspects. If black crime were not prevalent in a specific area, chances are blacks would not receive much attention from police. But logic is not something left-wingers are often blessed with. They prefer to explain social ills by blaming white people.</p>
<p>Clinton continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;We can&#8217;t ignore the inequities that persist in our justice system that undermine our most deeply held values of fairness and equality. Imagine what we would feel and what we would do if white drivers were three times as likely to be searched by police during a traffic stop as black drivers. Instead of the other way around; if white offenders received prison sentences 10 percent longer than black offenders for the same crimes; if a third of all white men, just look at this room and take one-third, went to prison during their lifetime. Imagine that. That is the reality in the lives of so many of our fellow Americans and so many of the communities in which they live.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Whether the specific statistics Clinton cites are valid is an arguable point, but what is not arguable is that violent black crime in America is far more prevalent that violent crime committed by whites. The statistics for young black males are particularly horrifying.</p>
<p>As liberal Democrat academic John McWhorter, a black American, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/race-riot-romance-1/">wrote</a> last year:</p>
<blockquote><p>“[Y]oung black men do commit about 50% of the murders in the U.S. &#8230; Hardly uncommon are cases such as the two black guys who doused a white 13-year-old with gasoline and lit him on fire, saying “You get what you deserve, white boy’ (Kansas City, Mo.) or 20 black kids who beat up white Matthew Owens on his porch ‘for Trayvon’ (Mobile, Ala.) &#8230; [I]t’s just fake to pretend that the association of young black men with violence comes out of thin air. Young black men murder 14 times more than young white men. If the kinds of things I just mentioned were regularly done by whites, it’d be trumpeted as justification for being scared to death of them.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>But Hillary Clinton would never beat up a key political constituency. She&#8217;s too busy inflaming black voters, making them feel good about their dysfunctional communities, and reinforcing the worst pathologies of inner cities.</p>
<p>Of course Clinton is completely supportive of Eric Holder&#8217;s witch hunt in Ferguson, where Justice Department and FBI officials have been busy gathering evidence to use in what promises to be a high-profile trumped-up civil rights prosecution against Officer Wilson. Clinton said:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I applaud President Obama for sending the attorney general to Ferguson and demanding a thorough and speedy investigation, to find out what happened, to see that justice is done, to help this community begin healing itself. We should all add our voices to those that have come together in recent days to work for peace, justice and reconciliation in Ferguson, and beyond, to stand against violence and for the values that we cherish. We can do better.</p>
<p>We can work to rebuild the bonds of trust from the ground up. It starts within families and communities. It was 51 years ago today that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr called us to live out true meaning of our creed, to make the dream real for all Americans. That mission is as fiercely urgent today as when he stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in the hot August sun all those years ago.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Except that Clinton, a Saul Alinsky adherent just like Barack Obama, has no interest in rebuilding bonds of trust. Like Obama, she wants to tear down America in order to rebuild it and replace it with a socialist state. Talk of &#8220;equality&#8221; and &#8220;healing&#8221; are merely arrows in her rhetorical quiver.</p>
<p>Clinton&#8217;s attempt to stoke the flames of racial resentment came as up-and-coming independent investigative journalist Charles C. Johnson announced he <a href="http://gotnews.com/media-covers-reacts-got-news-lawsuit-michaelbrown-juvie-records/">has filed</a> a lawsuit after two law enforcement sources told him Michael Brown&#8217;s juvenile criminal record is under seal in a St. Louis court. Johnson also wonders why the so-called gentle giant <a href="http://gotnews.com/michaelbrown-choose-attend-st-louiss-violent-school-ferguson/">opted to attend</a> the most violent high school in the St. Louis area when he could have easily gone elsewhere.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, black leftists <a href="http://m.townhall.com/tipsheet/cortneyobrien/2014/08/28/we-need-to-get-ungovernable-dc-townhall-on-ferguson-gets-heated-n1884394">are plotting</a> further unrest to ensure the survival and flourishing of their narrative of cop-hatred.</p>
<p>At a Washington, D.C. branch of Busboys and Poets, owned by celebrated radical leftist Andy Shallal, an NAACP official and other neo-communist radicals like Hugo Chavez-loving actor Danny Glover vowed to escalate their activities.</p>
<p>The town hall-style meeting was titled, &#8220;Ferguson and Beyond – The Way Forward: A Town Hall Meeting on Police Killings of Black Men.&#8221;</p>
<p>Dr. Ron Daniels, former executive director of the Marxist public interest law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been essential in the Left&#8217;s long-running drive to dismantle the Global War on Terror, seemed to sum up the feelings of participants.</p>
<p>&#8220;We need to get ungovernable,&#8221; Daniels said. &#8220;We&#8217;ve been too tame.&#8221;</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton, who is determined to carry on Barack Obama&#8217;s agenda of racial antagonism, wholeheartedly agrees.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Brown University Retreats From Free Speech</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/stephen-beale/brown-university-retreats-from-free-speech/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brown-university-retreats-from-free-speech</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 19 Nov 2013 04:50:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Stephen Beale]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Academic Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[intellectual diversity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ray Kelly]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=211007</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The leftist Gestapo's choke-hold on intellectual diversity on full display.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211014" alt="ray-kelly" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly2.jpg" width="312" height="214" /></a>As champion of New York’s controversial stop-and-frisk policy—one riddled with accusations of racial profiling and saddled with a recent federal court ruling against it—police commissioner Raymond Kelly could count on some tough questions from students when he stopped at Brown University last month to talk about proactive policing.</p>
<p>Forty minutes out of the one-hour event had been reserved for just that purpose. But students would have none of it. Instead, Kelly was welcomed by a hall of hecklers and angry protestors chanting, <i>No justice, no peace! No racist police!</i> “Asking tough questions is not enough!” shrieked <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303471004579166202578075932">one audience member</a>. After 30 minutes of shouting, the event was canceled.</p>
<p>While new Brown president Christina Paxson <a href="http://brown.edu/about/administration/president/10-29-2013-Raymond-Kelly-talk-closed">publicly condemned the protest</a>, the university held a closed-door meeting with hundreds of students that effectively amounted to a giant group therapy session: students spoke of the emotional turmoil the mere presence of such a noxious speaker had induced while professors were all too eager to play the role of the cooing therapist. One professor praised the protesters. Another apologized for inviting Kelly.</p>
<p>If all this sounds eerily familiar, it should. Nearly twelve years ago, Brown was roiled by another controversy over free speech and race relations. In the spring of 2001, the slavery reparations fad was sweeping campuses across the nation with little substantive debate, prompting conservative commentator and FrontPageMag.com publisher David Horowitz to step in and offer a contrarian perspective—in the form of paid editorials in campus newspapers that outlined <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=24317">ten arguments against slavery reparations</a>.</p>
<p>When the <i>Brown Daily Herald</i> had the gumption to publish it, leftist students recoiled in horror. An <i>ad hoc</i> Coalition of Concerned Brown Students immediately snapped into action, demanding its own form of reparations from the <i>Herald</i>: a donation of the ad profits to the Third World Center and free advertising space for them.</p>
<p>When those demands were denied, coalition members reacted by stealing the entire press run of the <i>Herald</i>. Of course, the censorship impulse is always totalistic: after emptying newsstands of papers, an angry mob stormed the editorial offices, attempting to break in and destroy the last remaining copies of the <i>Herald</i>—apparently campus police couldn’t be bothered to keep the peace. And the professors were no better: a week later, a faculty panel overwhelmingly denounced the <i>Herald</i> and defended student activists. Faced with a warning of physical violence, the College Republicans canceled a scheduled speech by Horowitz in April 2001.</p>
<p>Horowitz was finally allowed on campus two and a half years later, to talk about the threatened future of academic freedom at Brown. But no violence was threatened. Nor did any hecklers shout him down. By then, the university had a new corps of conservative students and a new president, Ruth Simmons, who was committed to intellectual diversity and free speech.</p>
<p>Horowitz was pleasantly surprised by his reception: were he to return to campus, he said he would not again call his talk “Academic Freedom: A Vanishing Ideal at Brown.” The sentiment was shared by this author and other classmates who had been freshmen in 2001. By the time we graduated, we believed that Brown’s newspaper-stealing days were behind it. And, for the better part of a decade—other than a lone pie-throwing incident at <i>New York Times</i> columnist Thomas Friedman in 2008—the campus has been spared such flagrant assaults on freedom of speech.</p>
<p>But the Kelly incident last month has extinguished such hopes. Given the distance between the events—today’s freshmen were first graders in the spring of 2001—it’s hard to see the new assault on free speech as simply a continuation of student tradition. Rather, the Kelly affair suggests that Brown’s issues with free speech and intellectual diversity are deep-seated and institutional. This doesn’t excuse student misbehavior. But it does incriminate the professors who encourage them and the administrators who enable them.</p>
<p>Consider that two senior administrators were present at the Kelly lecture. They attempted to tame the mob scene, according to <a href="http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/10/30/ray-kelly-lecture-canceled-amidst-student-community-protest/">the <i>Herald</i></a>. But one can’t help but wonder: when diplomacy failed, why weren’t campus police called in to haul out recalcitrant students? Such action isn’t unprecedented: in 2009, a perennial local political candidate, Chris Young, was removed from an event after yelling at then-Congressman Patrick Kennedy over abortion. Young was not a student and has no apparent ties to the Brown community—but does that mean students get a free pass on disorderly conduct? Is a Brown admissions letter a get-out-of-jail free card?</p>
<p>Again, in all fairness, it must be noted that Paxson publicly denounced the protests and reaffirmed the university’s commitment to academic freedom. Paxson wrote in an Oct. 29 community letter:</p>
<blockquote><p>“This is a sad day for the Brown community. … our University is—above all else—about the free exchange of ideas. Nothing is more antithetical to that value than preventing someone from speaking and other members of the community from hearing that speech and challenging it vigorously in a robust yet civil manner.”</p></blockquote>
<p>But such words ring hollow. At an Oct. 30 campus forum convened to deal with the controversy, the head of the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions that hosted Kelly, Marion Orr, apologized to students for inviting him. Orr reportedly asked students to “submit a list of speakers whom they would not approve of coming to campus.” When that comment was printed in the <a href="http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/10/31/hundreds-assemble-confront-kelly-controversy/"><i>Herald</i></a>—at an event supposedly closed to outside media—Orr immediately backpedaled, writing in an e-mail to editors that he “meant to point out that a list of speakers like this should not exist and to provoke thought about such a list’s implications.” (The <i>Herald</i> ran his clarification as a correction, but did not redact its original report.)</p>
<p>Protests that prevent speakers from being heard—or block access to an event—are violations of the Code of Student Conduct. But, instead of referring the matter directly to the Student Conduct Board, it is being deferred to a special committee of faculty and students, Paxson announced in another community-wide e-mail on Nov. 6. That committee will conduct a two-phase investigation, first looking for problems in the planning and implementation of the event. Only then will Brown even consider enforcing its conduct code.</p>
<p>The committee also “will address the broader issues of campus climate, free expression, and dialogue across difference that have been the context for much of the discussion and activity of the last week. Specifically, the Committee will make recommendations regarding how the University community can maintain an inclusive environment while upholding our deep commitment to the free exchange of ideas,” Paxson wrote. That Brown is now confronting such issues more than a decade after what was arguably the most egregious attack on that principle in its history suggests a lack of urgency bordering on negligence.</p>
<p>Paxson’s letter notably danced the same two-step between defending academic principles and coddling student radicals on display during the reparations ad controversy: “For many members of our community, the topic of the lecture was a reminder of the visceral, emotional reality of their daily lives and the lives of others who have been subjected to racism and inequitable treatment,” she wrote.</p>
<p>Such words give the university an out—a way to condemn student actions without having to punish perpetrators. Strikingly, Paxson’s letter echoes students like senior Jenny Li, <a href="http://www.browndailyherald.com/2013/10/31/hundreds-assemble-confront-kelly-controversy/">who described the lecture</a> as an emotional “trigger” for those who had experienced racial profiling. Such language is commonly used in the context of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Presumably, protesters had been victims of racism so traumatic that it ranks with rape, physical abuse, and other experiences—firefighters running into burning buildings, soldiers on the battlefield—that usually lead to PTSD.</p>
<p>One wonders: if the students were merely exhibiting the signs of some kind of group PTSD flashback, how could the Student Conduct Board ever hold them responsible for their actions? The board certainly has precedent on its side: none of those involved in the theft of the <i>Herald</i> were ever disciplined or punished. Nor did the university ever investigate, or even take seriously, warnings about campus violence that were aired before Horowitz’s campus appearance in 2001. What students apparently need is therapy in the safe spaces of a campus closed to dangerous ideas and the ghosts of racism past—and that is exactly what they are getting.</p>
<p>Coincidentally, all this came on the heels of a local Catholic college’s decision to disinvite John Corvino, a pro-gay speaker, and reschedule his appearance so his views could be aired in a debate format. Progressives who had wasted no time in condemning the school, Providence College, didn’t skip a beat one month later in rushing to the defense of the Brown protesters. When this brazen hypocrisy was pointed out by Travis Rowley, <a href="http://www.golocalprov.com/politics/travis-rowley-progressives-liars-by-religion-and-trade/">a local columnist</a> (and fellow classmate), one of the accused, Steve Alquist, <a href="http://www.rifuture.org/an-indictment-of-travis-rowley-and-his-riduculous-rhetoric.html">insisted on the differences between the two cases:</a></p>
<blockquote><p>The difference between the Ray Kelly cancellation and the Providence College cancellation could not be more pronounced. At Providence College, the John Corvino event was canceled by the school’s provost, against the wishes of the majority of students and virtually the entirety of the faculty. …</p></blockquote>
<p>Rowley sees no difference between the free speech of people organizing for a cause, and the authoritarian cancellation of speech one person in power deems inappropriate. Rowley’s arguments are all bluster and bullshit, unspoiled by facts, logic or nuance. [<i>sic</i>]</p>
<p>Setting aside this author’s own failure to acknowledge the nuanced difference between canceling an event and rescheduling it, the implications of his statements are chilling. To be sure, the mechanisms for alleged censorship—individual administrators versus numerous students—are different. But this doesn’t change the fact that it is still censorship. Effectively, Alquist is saying that freedom of speech cannot be squelched by administrators but that is perfectly acceptable for students to do so. This is to democratize rights—put bluntly, to subject them to mob rule—something the very notion of rights is meant to guard against.</p>
<p>This is precisely the problem at Brown. Individual troublemakers are indeed punished (the pie-throwing incident, for example, resulted in at least one suspension). But mob tactics are treated with the kid gloves of committees and group therapy. Understandably, mobs are more difficult to deal with than individuals, but this only raises the question of how such mob scenes could be permitted in the first place. Again: where were the campus police?</p>
<p>Of course, this is not to say there hasn’t been any progress at Brown since 2001. The aftermath of the reparations ad controversy saw a veritable renaissance of right-leaning student groups, including the revival of the College Republicans and the founding of Students for Liberty, Students for Life, and <i>The Brown Spectator</i> (this writer was a founding editor). When those students graduated they continued their fight for intellectual diversity and academic freedom at Brown with an alumni organization, The Foundation for Intellectual Diversity.</p>
<p>There are other bright spots as well. In 2003, John Tomasi, a professor of political philosophy, founded the <a href="http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Political_Theory_Project/">Political Theory Project</a>, a sort of a department-within-a-department which hosts its own classes, sponsors a student-run journal of political theory, and even sports its own mini-faculty of post-doctoral fellows, who bypass the usual echo chamber-enhancing process that prospective new professors undergo when they are vetted by existing faculties. The signature events of the Political Theory Project, the Janus Forums—named after the ancient Roman two-faced god of gates, doors, and other passages—have featured full-throttled debates and discussions on the merits of capitalism versus socialism, the existence of collective bargaining rights, and the reinstatement of ROTC on campus.</p>
<p>But one worries that the <i>Spectator</i> and the Political Theory Project are less wellsprings of widespread renewal, than embattled oases of free thought and inquiry in hostile intellectual territory where the authentic life of the mind is being choked out by the weeds of ideological intolerance and political correctness.</p>
<p>Standing ready to deliver his remarks at Brown, on October 29, Kelly reportedly only got in a few words edgewise before being drowned out by the frantic hollering of students. His only recorded words come in the form of a question: “Are we ready to go forward?” Unfortunately, at Brown, the answer at the moment is a resounding “no.”</p>
<p><i>Stephen Beale is a freelance writer based in Providence, Rhode Island.<br />
</i></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
<p><i> </i></p>
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		<title>Brown&#8217;s Abuse of Ray Kelly: A Metaphor of the Academy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/jack-kerwick/browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=browns-abuse-of-ray-kelly-a-metaphor-of-the-academy</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 12 Nov 2013 04:27:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jack Kerwick]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The totalitarianism permeating higher education.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210426" alt="ray-kelly" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/ray-kelly1-422x350.jpg" width="295" height="245" /></a>Two weeks ago, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly arrived at the prestigious Brown University to deliver a speech.</p>
<p>It never happened. Student protesters, determined to silence Kelly, shouted him down.</p>
<p>In an attempt to abate the hostility of his audience, Kelly is said to have remarked:  “I thought this was the Academy…where we’re supposed to have free speech.”  A Brown administrator on the scene also expressed incredulity regarding the “inability” of these Brown students’—self-avowed “social justice activists” —“to have a dialogue[.]”</p>
<p>Jenny Li, the (Brown) student who organized the anti-Kelly demonstration, explained that in advance of Kelly’s appearance, she and other students petitioned the university to cancel the event. However, when administrators refused to accommodate them, Li and her fellow activists “decided to cancel it for them.”  Their victory in doing so, Li adds, is “a powerful demonstration of free speech.”</p>
<p>Christina Paxson, President of Brown, expressed her “deepest regret” to Commissioner Kelly and assured everyone that the protesters’ conduct is at once “indefensible” and “an affront both to civil democratic society and to the university’s core values and the free exchange of views.”</p>
<p>To date the disrupters have not faced any disciplinary action.</p>
<p>The significance of this episode has little to do with its specifics and everything to do with the fact that it supplies us with a microcosmic perspective on <i>the contemporary university. </i></p>
<p>First of all, <i>no one</i>, much less an eminently sensible man like Ray Kelly and seasoned academics like the aforementioned Brown administrators, can possibly believe that the contemporary Academy is an oasis of “free speech” and open-ended dialogue.</p>
<p>In fact, as anyone who’s spent any amount of time there knows all-too well, the university is much more like a <i>puddle </i>of free speech and dialogue than an oasis.</p>
<p>While the incident in question admittedly involves <i>students,</i> the latter are simply marching to the beat of the drums of the faculty and administration, not just of Brown, but of colleges and universities throughout the country.  They at once reflect and reinforce an academic <i>culture</i> that has been at least a half-of-a-century in the making.  <i> </i></p>
<p>It is at once tragic and scandalous—and let there be no mistakes about it, this <i>is </i>one of the great scandals of our age—that there is far <i>less </i>individuality and “free speech” in our country’s liberal arts and humanities departments than can be found among any random collection of construction workers or plumbers.</p>
<p>While there <i>are</i> exceptions (yours truly is a case in point), the overwhelming majority of academics in the liberal arts are left-wing ideologues.  This is no criticism—just a brute fact.  There is indeed a prevailing ideology, an <i>orthodoxy, </i>really, that draws the lines of acceptable inquiry, of discourse.  For lack of a better name, we can call this orthodoxy “Political Correctness,” for it is the same orthodoxy that has long drawn the lines of acceptable discourse in the popular culture.</p>
<p>The only difference is that non-academics, like construction workers and plumbers, say, have the daring and imaginativeness to transgress the orthodoxy’s boundaries.  Academics, in contrast, seek to <i>strengthen </i>these strictures on speech.</p>
<p>In other words, the relationship between the academic and his society has been radically subverted.  Worse, the lion’s share of the blame for this subversion rests upon his (or her) shoulders.</p>
<p>There is another point that can’t be lost upon us.</p>
<p>Traditionally, a liberal arts education was intended to render students preeminently <i>civil </i>by making them into articulate, knowledgeable conversationalists capable of both drawing upon the inheritance of their civilization—Western civilization—as well as enriching it.  It was an education that required great humility from those who would undertake it, for the present generation, it was understood, was just one voice in this millennia-old conversation linking the past with the present and future.</p>
<p>The attitude on display at Brown and exemplified by Jennifer Li is not only entirely incompatible with a traditional liberal arts education; the former and the latter are mutually antithetical.  There are two reasons for this.</p>
<p>For one, today’s students, like their teachers, are generally contemptuous toward the past.  The past is viewed as a “dark age” ridden with “white racism,” “sexism,” “homophobia,” “speciesism,” “xenophobia,” etc.  The present bequeathed to us by our past, as Barack Obama memorably remarked, is something the needs to be “fundamentally transformed”—i.e. <i>destroyed.</i>  As for future generations, while lip service is routinely paid to them, it is not difficult to show that if the interests of unborn human beings threaten to impede present designs, then they too must be marginalized.</p>
<p>Secondly, academics and the student activists who they are busy away creating are <i>angry. </i> And they spare no occasion to express that anger.  Since at least the time of the 1960s the expression of anger has been treated as tantamount with the expression of <i>authenticity.  </i>However, since no one cares to try to reason with an angry person—regardless of how authentic he may fancy himself to be—about any topic, much less controversial topics, conversation is impossible with the perpetually angry.</p>
<p>And so too is a genuine liberal arts education impossible as long as pride and anger are the emotions that the academy insists upon fostering.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Exposing the 18th Street Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/exposing-the-18th-street-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=exposing-the-18th-street-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:05:19 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Volpe]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=163507</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[And how the Bush administration's Secure Communities program has helped turn the tide. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/exposing-the-18th-street-gang/18-graf/" rel="attachment wp-att-163536"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-163536" title="18-graf" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/18-graf.gif" alt="" width="315" height="232" /></a>On March 2, 2008, Jamiel Shaw joined the likes of Len Bias and Ben Wilson in an exclusive group no one ever wants to be a part of. All three are one-of-a-kind talented athletes who died under tragic and disturbing circumstances. Each of their deaths was blamed in large part on real and perceived failed social policies. Because of the overwhelming media attention that each of the three stories generated, the shock from the deaths led directly to social change.</p>
<p>The cases of both Len Bias and Ben Wilson have become so famous that ESPN featured each in their 30 For 30 Series.</p>
<div id="attachment_163532" style="width: 194px" class="wp-caption alignright"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/exposing-the-18th-street-gang/photo-1-6/" rel="attachment wp-att-163532"><img class="size-full wp-image-163532" title="photo 1" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/photo-1.jpg" alt="" width="184" height="274" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Len Bias dunking during his college basketball career</p></div>
<p>Athletic University of Maryland forward Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose two days after the Boston Celtics took him with the second pick in the 1986 National Basketball Association (NBA) Draft. Many of the tough drug laws in place today (which often led to overcrowding in prisons) could be traced to the aftermath of Bias’ death.</p>
<p>In Chicago, Ben Wilson died on November 21, 1984 after he was shot by another youth following a confrontation. Wilson starred at Simeon Career Academy while in high school. (Leading Simeon to a state title earlier in 1984) Simeon also produced Derrick Rose. He was considered the best high school basketball player in America in his class. Some that saw him play believe he had the potential to be the greatest basketball player ever to come out of the Chicago area, an area that includes NBA Hall of Famer Isiah Thomas. While Chicago’s tough gun laws pre-date Wilson’s shooting, those views were crystallized and set in stone for a long time in Chicago following Wilson’s death.</p>
<div id="attachment_163533" style="width: 190px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/volpe/exposing-the-18th-street-gang/photo-2-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-163533"><img class="size-full wp-image-163533" title="photo 2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/photo-2.jpg" alt="" width="180" height="258" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Ben Wilson in 1984</p></div>
<p>Jamiel Shaw burst on the football scene as a junior in high school in 2007. He had rare speed; the kind necessary to be a football playmaker. Shaw was always on the field in a position to make a big play. He was the star running back on offense and the shut-down cornerback on defense.  On special teams, he returned punts and kick-offs. At the time of his death, Shaw was still looking forward to his senior year in high-school, which almost everyone believed would be even better than his junior year.</p>
<p>Shaw’s dad, Jamiel Shaw Sr. said the world lost a one of a kind talent.</p>
<p>“(It was the) equivalent to Michael Jordan dying,” said Shaw Sr. He continued, “He was super-fast; he had a chance at the Olympics.”</p>
<p>On March 2, 2008, he was walking home in the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles. In gang parlance, Arlington Heights was known for a large contingency of Bloods, an African-American gang.</p>
<p>The perpetrator of the murder is an individual named Pedro Espinoza. At the time, Espinoza was a member of the 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang in Los Angeles, rivals of the Bloods. Espinoza was in the neighborhood visiting Shaw’s neighbor, when he approached Shaw on his way home. Shaw was wearing a Spiderman backpack, which happened to sport the colors of The Bloods. After confronting Shaw, Espinoza shot Shaw execution style.</p>
<p>Immediately following the murder, the media blamed flawed immigration policy and specifically the “sanctuary city” policy of the city of Los Angeles. While flawed immigration policies contributed to this murder, laying proper blame becomes far more complicated.</p>
<p>Originally, Espinoza was what we now call a DREAMer. According to Alex Alonso, a gang expert in Los Angeles, Espinoza crossed the border illegally with his mother when he was between the ages of two and six.</p>
<p>In the initial aftermath of Shaw’s murder, lax immigration policies on the part of officials of the city of Los Angeles were initially blamed. LA presented an easy target. After all, LA was well known for implementing a so-called “sanctuary city” policy.</p>
<p>In fact, said Jessica Vaughan in an interview with Front Page Magazine, the city of LA has plenty of responsibility. Vaughan is a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies. She did extensive research on immigration policy’s role in certain gang activity in her role as policy analyst.</p>
<p>Vaughan said that Espinoza was in parts of the LA governmental system for years and no one alerted ICE. Vaughan said she was even able to speak with Espinoza’s juvenile probation officer. Vaughan said that Espinoza slipped through the cracks for years in LA.</p>
<p>Alonso said the truth is far more complicated. For instance, there’s the matter of whose fault it was that Espinoza was released following a gun charge. He was released the day before he committed the murder.</p>
<p>In late 2007, Espinoza was arrested on a gun charge and spent several months in prison before being released in March 2008.</p>
<p>Alonso points out that he was arrested on these charges in Culver City, California, not LA. Furthermore, he was taken to LA County Jail, a totally separate governmental agency from the city of Los Angeles.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, ICE should have had longstanding policies where ICE agents had an office on-site in LA County Jail. It would ultimately be their responsibility to investigate Espinoza. Yet, the entirety of the blame fell on the city of Los Angeles, even though that is the one entity not responsible in anyway for Espinoza’s arrest, incarceration, and release immediately prior to his killing of Shaw.</p>
<p>ICE declined to give any new comment on the matter, when contacted by Front Page Magazine. Instead, we were directed to a statement ICE gave to CNN in the immediate aftermath of the murder.</p>
<blockquote><p>U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is not going to provide an on camera interview regarding this case because the issues related to this subject’s prior assault arrest involve law enforcement agencies other than ICE.  As you know, the Culver City Police Department originally detained Mr. Espinoza for assault and took the booking information related to the case.  Based upon that information, Mr. Espinoza was not referred to ICE for a follow-up immigration enforcement interview after he was detained at the Los Angeles County Jail on the assault charges.</p>
<p>Following Mr. Espinoza’s latest arrest, ICE officers at LA County Jail sought him out and conducted an interview.  During that interview, Mr. Espinoza was untruthful and uncooperative.  The following day, the officers located one of the suspect’s relatives who stated that Mr. Espinoza was born in Mexico and he will come into ICE custody if, and when, he is released by local authorities.</p></blockquote>
<p>Furthermore, said Alonzo, based on his own research, illegal immigration has far less to do with gang activity than in many other cities. He said that he’s testified in about 300 gang cases and only 15 of those involved illegal immigration.</p>
<p>Alonso said that in his own research of LA gangs, he found that poverty rates were far better predictors of gang activity than were illegal immigration statistics. Alonzo said that neighborhoods with poverty rates of 40% and above were almost always ones infected with gangs.</p>
<p>However, the 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang itself has had longstanding ties to the illegal immigrant community, using that community as a sort of niche for recruiting new members. That’s where it gets even more complicated, said Alonso.</p>
<p>The 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang in Los Angeles has little in common with the 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gangs in cities like Houston and Chicago. That’s because 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gangs is a sort of gang movement and philosophy. All 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang members subscribe to the same philosophy, but there’s no central hierarchy controlling any of the local gang members.</p>
<p>In fact, Espinoza belonged to something called the Alsace Street Clique. That was his gang. It is one of hundreds, said Alonso, that each subscribe to the same philosophy. They are not necessarily interconnected in other ways. For instance, members of other gangs aren’t necessarily helping to plan crimes with members of this gang.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.streetgangs.com/hispanic/18thstreet">As of 2008</a>, there were about 15,000 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang members in the city of Los Angeles.  That makes them the largest Hispanic gang in the city. Writing about Shaw’s murder in 2008, Alonso also <a href="http://www.streetgangs.com/features/jamiel-shaw-gang-race">said that statistic was misleading</a>.</p>
<p>“Collectively they are the largest Hispanic gang operating under the same name, but in actuality, each of the 20 or so discreet 18th Street neighborhoods should be treated as individual autonomous gangs, since many of the separate neighborhoods clash and have internal rivalries in an unstable network.”</p>
<p>Nationally, the gang counts about 60,000 members, in thirty-seven states, and in 120 cities. It is estimated that as many as sixty percent are in the United States illegally, though Alonso puts the number between five and ten percent in the city of Los Angeles, where the gang originated in the late 1950s.</p>
<p>There are gang members that believe in the 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang philosophy at every level of the international drug trade, from helping the drug lords in South America start the smuggling route, to those that help drug mules smuggle drugs illegally over the Mexican border, to those that sell it on the streets.</p>
<p>The street pushers are not in contact with those that are helping to smuggle the drugs across the border.</p>
<p>Alonso said he didn’t discount the presence of illegal immigration in 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang nationwide, though ironically, he said that it was a relatively small problem in LA.</p>
<p>Whatever the truth, the response in LA was fierce and put the 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang in the crosshairs of authorities.</p>
<p>According to numbers from the ICE field office in LA, acquired exclusively by Front Page Magazine, gang arrests by the Los Angeles Special Agent in Charge (SAC) Office went up dramatically from 2007-2009. The spike started shortly after Shaw’s death. It’s important to note that when ICE participates in a gang investigation, those investigated are pro-active, targeted street arrests based on intelligence and operations, not people located in jails who were arrested for other things.</p>
<p>The arrests by ICE LA from 2007-2009 were 129, 451, and 502 of all gang members, and 11, 21, and 39 for members of the 18<sup>th</sup> Street Gang specifically.</p>
<p>Furthermore, points out Jamiel Shaw Sr., father of the victim, California was leading the way in implementing Secure Communities. Secure Communities is a data sharing program that would give ICE fingertip access to all sorts of inmate data from any inmate in any municipal prison in the network.</p>
<p>California was one of the first states to have each of the counties signed up, and leads all the States in the country in yearly deportations from investigations started by Secure Communities. Secure Communities was started under the Bush administration but popularized under the Obama administration. Currently more than 80% of all counties have signed up for Secure Communities.</p>
<p>In fact, Secure Communities became so popular that liberal groups attempted to ban most contact between ICE and local county jails in the state. A bill even passed the California legislature significantly curbing cooperation between jails in the State of California and ICE detainers. (ICE detainers are holds on municipal prisoners by ICE and they are often the result of Secure Communities investigations.) Governor Brown wound up vetoing that bill, a position that Jamiel Shaw Sr. vocally supported.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>California&#8217;s Choice: Bigger Worker Paychecks or Bigger Union Coffers?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/californias-choice-bigger-worker-paychecks-or-bigger-union-coffers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=californias-choice-bigger-worker-paychecks-or-bigger-union-coffers</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Oct 2012 04:45:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Will the crucial Proposition 32 initiative be approved this November by Golden State voters?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2012/arnold-ahlert/californias-choice-bigger-worker-paychecks-or-bigger-union-coffers/voter-online-610x406/" rel="attachment wp-att-147675"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-147675" title="voter-ONLINE-610x406" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/voter-ONLINE-610x406.gif" alt="" width="360" height="279" /></a>On November 6th, California voters will have an opportunity to choose whether or not they support serious fiscal reform. <a href="http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_32,_the_%22Paycheck_Protection%22_Initiative_(2012)">Proposition 32</a>, aka the &#8220;Paycheck Protection&#8221; Initiative, has three main thrusts: it proposes a ban on both corporate and union contributions to state and local candidates; a ban on contributions by government contractors to the politicians who control the contracts awarded to them; and a ban on automatic deductions by corporations, unions, and government of employees’ wages to be used for political purposes. Corporations and governments are relatively unanimated by the initiative. On the other hand, organized labor is furious.</p>
<p>The reason is obvious. As evidenced by Gov. Scott Walker&#8217;s victory in the Wisconsin recall election, coupled with overwhelming <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/301974/san-jose-and-san-diego-turn-right-john-fund">support</a> for ballot initiatives curbing the power of unions in San Jose and San Diego on the same night, organized labor is being challenged like never before. Prop 32 is a long-overdue reality check on their ability to dictate terms to government officials beholden to union campaign contributions. Equally obvious is the reason why: a combination of overly generous wages and/or health and pension benefits is becoming fiscally unsustainable for countless state and local governments around the nation.</p>
<p>In California, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/huff-wires/20121003/us-prop-32-union-dues/">2.4 million</a> government workers have enormous clout, courtesy of union leaders whose longstanding ties to Democrats have effectively turned that state into a one-party enclave. Despite a 2010 election that handed Democrats enormous losses across the country, their power in California remained unscathed. Democrats still control both chambers of the state legislature, and every statewide office.</p>
<p>The fight to rein in unions has produced mixed results. In November 2011, voters in Ohio overturned a law signed by Gov. John Kasich earlier in the year that sought to limit union power. Yet in Indiana, the state legislature passed “right-to-work” legislation in February 2012, that included a provision allowing workers to opt out of paying union dues. Wisconsin went through a saga that included massive demonstrations in Madison, Democratic legislators fleeing the state, a controversial ruling by a judge invalidating the measure limiting union power, the overturning of that ruling by the Wisconsin Supreme Court, and a mid-term re-call election affirming Scott Walker&#8217;s victory. Yet despite everything, Wisconsin Circuit Judge and Democrat appointee Juan Colas struck down the measure yet again. Attorney general J.B. Van Hollen immediately filed an appeal. And since the Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled in favor of the law the last time, this looks like little more than an ill-conceived effort by unions, who have no interest in a verdict delivered by the democratic process. Even when it&#8217;s delivered twice.</p>
<p>Thus, Prop 32 represents another huge challenge to the power of government unions. The measure&#8217;s supporters <a href="http://www.scpr.org/programs/airtalk/2012/10/04/28713/prop-32-organized-labors-influence-politics-unions/">point out</a> that its passage would return power to individual voters who, under current legislation, have no idea how their contributions are used. &#8220;The payroll deduction is automatic; that money is going wherever the corporation or union decides it goes,&#8221; said Jonathan Kraut, president of Net Check Investigations. &#8220;[Prop 32] allows an individual to decide where that money should go to some extent, and also, doesn&#8217;t preclude them from making an individual contribution. This takes the power away from the people who run the corporations and the people who run the unions, who use other people&#8217;s money.&#8221;</p>
<p>Opponents claim that loopholes in the initiative that exempt LLCs, partnerships, and real estate trusts, make it a boon for special interests. &#8220;Under Prop 32, a corporation CEO, its board members, its executives, all could still make contributions to candidates,&#8221; said Grant Davis-Denny, board member of California Common Cause. &#8220;Prop 32 exempts a number of forms of businesses that you would traditionally think of as corporations. The notion that this would somehow reduce the influence in corporations in Sacramento, I think, is a sham.&#8221; One is left to wonder why individual contributions from people who happen to work for corporations constitutes a sham. Davis-Denny also contended that automatic payroll deductions &#8220;have long been a convenient way for people to pool their money to participate in the political process. Just like it&#8217;s a convenient way to have money deducted to support our healthcare programs or retirement benefits,&#8221; he contended. That is utterly disingenuous. Convenience isn&#8217;t even a remotely viable substitute for free choice.</p>
<p>These rationalizations are nothing more but poor excuses to shield powerful union coffers and the wealth transfer from workers to the Democratic Party. The California Teachers Association is textbook example: in the last nine years, the CTA <a href="http://www.city-journal.org/2012/22_2_california-teachers-association.html">spent</a> nearly $102 million on political contributions&#8211;<em>99.92 percent</em> of which went to Democrats. And much of that money was spent on causes totally unrelated to education, but near and dear to progressive interests. They included the implementation of a single-payer health-care system in California, the blocking of photo-ID requirements for voters, and campaign support to defeat Prop 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative supported by the electorate 52-48 percent, but overturned by the courts.</p>
<p>Currently, California Democrats <a href="http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=526">out-number</a> Republicans by 7.4 million to 5.2 million. Independents number 3.7 million, but 41 percent of them lean Democrat, versus only 29 percent who lean Republican. Such an edge would indicate that Prop 32 will suffer the same fate as two previous efforts to get Californians paycheck protection. <a href="http://ballotpedia.org/wiki/index.php/California_Proposition_226,_the_%22Paycheck_Protection%22_Initiative_(1998)">Prop 226</a>, initiated in 1998, was defeated by a 53-46 margin, and Prop 75, on the ballot in 2005, suffered the same fate by an almost identical margin.</p>
<p>This time the numbers are closer. A <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/california-politics/2012/09/poll-finds-voters-split-on-proposition-32.html">survey</a> conducted last month by the Public Policy Institute of California indicates that Prop 32 is supported by 42 percent of the voters, with 49 percent opposed. The margin of error is 4.4 percentage points. If that survey held true on election day, it would seem a majority of Californians are still incapable of making some obvious connections.</p>
<p>What connections? Last June, Gov. Gerry Brown <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/06/28/us-economy-california-budget-idUSBRE85R02520120628">signed</a> a state budget that purportedly closed a $15.7 billion budget gap. Yet a portion of the revenue stream in that budget is based on the assumption that California voters will approve a November ballot measure raising the state&#8217;s sales tax, and increasing income tax rates on the wealthy. If they don&#8217;t, Brown has threatened to cut $5 billion out of popular education programs. June was also the month that Stockton, CA <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/06/27/Stockton-bankrupt-CA-Los-Angeles">declared</a> bankruptcy, due in large part to $800 million in <a href="http://www.fox40.com/news/headlines/ktxl-stocktons-budget-woes-get-another-look-20120620,0,7964301.story">unfunded</a> mandates for government workers&#8217; pensions and retiree health benefits. Los Angles may soon follow suit: it faces a $238 million budget shortfall in FY2012-2013&#8211;and <em>$27 billion</em> in unfunded pension liabilities for government employees, despite an annual budget that is only $7 billion.</p>
<p>In other words in California, despite catastrophic economic conditions, government unions continue to maintain a stranglehold on the public fisc. And they will continue to do so until the people wake up, and take their state back&#8211;or allow government unions to run it into insolvency. At that point California would undoubtedly ask the federal government for a bailout, courtesy of American taxpayers in the other 49 states. The bet here is taxpayers will answer that request with a familiar phrase usually associated with Las Vegas: what happens in California, stays in California.</p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n%3A133140011%2Ck%3Adavid+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
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		<title>Jihadist out on Parole</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/patrick-dunleavy/jihadist-out-on-parole/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=jihadist-out-on-parole</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/patrick-dunleavy/jihadist-out-on-parole/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 08 Jun 2010 04:05:47 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Patrick Dunleavy]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why has the media ignored cop-killer Shuaib Raheems's radical Islamic ties?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/32PAROLE-articleInline.gif"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-62375" title="32PAROLE-articleInline" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/32PAROLE-articleInline-247x300.gif" alt="" width="247" height="300" /></a></p>
<p>Recent press reports regarding the outrage at a convicted cop killer&#8217;s parole have all omitted one crucial fact about the subject Shuaib A. Raheem, a former New York State inmate.  He was in fact a member of the Dar ul-Islam movement and the incident in which Police Officer Stephen Gilroy was killed was an attempted by radical Islamic members of the group to obtain weapons to fight in a holy war.  That was in 1973 when little was known of the word &#8220;jihad&#8221; or the group.</p>
<p>Founded in the early 1960&#8242;s in a mosque in Brooklyn, Dar ul-Islam was an alliance between orthodox African American Muslim clergymen Yusef Abdul Mu&#8217;min and Yahya Abdul Karim and Middle Eastern clergyman <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/1973/Terror_Ends_After_47_Hours.html">Sheik Daoud Fasil</a>.  In 1968, Dar ul-Islam started a prison discipleship program with the goal of establishing a Sunni/Salafi mosque in each one of the state prisons.</p>
<p>In January 1973, four members of the movement stormed into John &amp; Al&#8217;s Sporting Goods Store in New York City in an attempt to procure weapons for a radical Islamic uprising.  The siege lasted two days before the hostages were released.  During the gun battle, one NYPD officer, <a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/1973/Terror_Ends_After_47_Hours.html">Stephen Gilroy</a> was killed.  All four of the members of the movement were arrested and sentenced to lengthy prison terms.  At the time of the incident, NYPD Deputy Commissioner Benjamin Ward described the four as members of an orthodox Muslim sect whose motive in the armed robbery was not to obtain money but weapons for jihad.</p>
<p>In prison, Gary Earl Robinson, 23, also known by the Muslim name Shuaib Abdul Raheem, Salih Ali Abdullah, Dawd Abdullah Ar-Rahm and Yusef Abdul, continued to preach the doctrine of the movement, which was the creation of an Islamic state separate from the United States.  They were encouraged and supported by the head Imam of the New York State Department of Corrections, Warith Deen Umar and his chosen clergy.  While incarcerated, they were also able to meet several Middle Eastern inmates such as El Sayyid Nosair, Rashid Baz, and Abdel Zaben who had ties to radical Islamic organizations overseas including Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood.</p>
<p>In 1999, Shuaib was named in an FBI report as a member of the Talem Circle in Shawangunk State Prison.  This Islamic Sharia group consisted of members of the Black Liberation Army, a Pakistani inmate, and a Saudi Arabian inmate with ties to Yemen.  The group’s goal was to train Muslim inmates in jihad and to coordinate the training between African American Muslim inmates and their Middle Eastern counterparts.  They were aligned with the Dar ul-Islam movement.</p>
<p>The spiritual leader of the movement, Jamil al Amin (formerly known as H. Rap Brown) is himself a former New York State inmate and a leader of the Black Panther Party.  H. Rap Brown&#8217;s method of choice for change was violence.  He is credited with the most memorable statement of this belief when he stated &#8220;violence is as American as cherry pie.&#8221;  His conversion to the more Salafist Sunnah of Islam, then know as Dar ul-Islam, or “house of Islam,” was completed in prison and he took the new name of Jamil Al Amin.  Following his release in October 1976, Brown made his <em>haj</em>, or pilgrimage to Mecca.  He later settled in Atlanta and started the Community Mosque of Atlanta in the West End district of the city.  His mosque was formally associated with about thirty others throughout the United States and was based on the founding principles of Dar ul-Islam in Brooklyn in the 60s.</p>
<p>Brown had hoped for a revival of the original movement&#8217;s Islamic fervency, but is currently serving a life sentence in the Federal Super Max Prison in Florence, CO for the shooting deaths of two policemen.  Another prominent member of the group was Imam Luqman Abdullah, who was killed by FBI agents in Detroit during a shootout in October 2009.</p>
<p>The Ummah or Dar ul-Islam movement has a long history of violence against authority and involvement in criminal activity in the name of Allah. If Shuaib Raheem had committed the same crime today and not in 1973, it would be classified as a terrorist act. Why this was overlooked by both the Parole Board or the mainstream media should be examined.</p>
<p><em>Patrick Dunleavy is the former Deputy Inspector General of New York State.</em></p>
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		<title>Terrorism, Witch Hunting the CIA, and National Security</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/terrorism-witch-hunting-the-cia-and-national-security/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=terrorism-witch-hunting-the-cia-and-national-security</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/frontpagemag-com/terrorism-witch-hunting-the-cia-and-national-security/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:20:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A unique discussion featuring John Yoo, Marc Thiessen and Andrew McCarthy. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mccarthy.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-full wp-image-59288" title="mccarthy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/mccarthy.jpg" alt="" width="375" height="276" /></a></p>
<p><em>Editors&#8217; note: At the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Santa Barbara Retreat this past weekend, one of the panels featured John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, and Andrew McCarthy in a fascinating and candid conversation about the effort on the part of Left-legal activists and Democratic Party officials to weaken American security by trying to broadly define as “torture” many of the efforts undertaken by the Bush administration to extract information from captured terrorists that would keep the American homeland safe.  Each of the three was crucially involved in major, behind-the- scenes decisions about national security over the last several years.  Each has remained a steadfast witness to the dangers America faced from terrorists and continues to face from those who would try to punish those who kept us safe since 9/11 &#8212; and, by so doing, to make us vulnerable to another attack.</em></p>
<p>David Horowitz Freedom Center<br />
Santa   Barbara, California<br />
April 23<sup>rd</sup> &#8211; 25<sup>th</sup>, 2010<br />
Karen Lugo, John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, Andrew McCarthy<br />
<strong>To watch the video, <a href="http://www.davidhorowitztv.com/retreat/2010/296-courts">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: First, I’d like to do a quick little, proud and very shameless plug for Muffin and Paul Vallely’s Soldiers Memorial Fund.  If you have not yet purchased your Swarovski crystal for the ladies, or men’s lapel pin, please see Paul and Muffin Vallely over there.</p>
<p>This panel that is about to present some thoughts and ideas, first on the problem, and then second, hopefully, a little bit about the solution &#8212; we’ve changed our title for today.  Originally, we were going to be addressing something about America or terrorism in the courts.  And so, we’ve expanded the title so that our panelists will be able to address a broader range of issues within the age of Obama.  And the subtopic is &#8212; when foes are treated like friends, when allies are alienated, and when jihad is not a word.</p>
<p>I think that when many of us originally heard that President Reagan had said that democracy, potentially, is always just one generation away from extinction; it was kind of recognized as a profound truth.  But many of us have had an epiphany within the last year, in acknowledging that it will be our generation that will be challenged to respond to this truth.  It will be our generation that must educate our peers &#8212; and, importantly, educate our children &#8212; as to what it is that’s at stake, and how that within one generation, we do stand to lose treasured, fundamental and irreplaceable liberties if we do not act &#8212; and that is, act between now and the next election in November.</p>
<p>We that fight Obama’s statist agenda of domestic entitlement and international appeasement have surely first recognized what Obama and Congress are destroying.  As we are the great resistance, and a rising army of patriots, we have learned of our extraordinary heritage of Judeo-Christian-inspired consensual government and a culture that once inspired initiative and independence.  We know the importance of keeping commitments to our allies and commanding respect &#8212; and, yes, some fear &#8212; in potential enemies.  We will hold our President accountable for the common defense of the nation.</p>
<p>Today, our panelists will discuss where this age of Obama is taking us, both in terms of domestic national security and international foreign policy standing.  You are all undoubtedly very aware of their backgrounds.  You’ve seen many of them on Fox News and read them, probably, almost daily.</p>
<p>So what I’d like to do is especially recognize books that they’ve written and that two of the authors will have for sale here  at the conference this weekend.  These three books &#8212; if that was all one would read between now and the election &#8212; could serve as a blueprint for America’s awakening, if only we read, and share, and educate.</p>
<p>So today, our panelists will share insights as to the challenges we face.  They will also spend a few minutes talking about how they see solutions that may be brought to bear on these challenges.</p>
<p>First of all, I would like to introduce Professor John Yoo.  Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty at Berkeley in 1993.  He has clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court and served as General Counsel of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee; also as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs and, yes, also worked on the definition of torture.  His third book, in a trilogy, is called “<em>Crisis in Command</em>.”  It is just out.  And it describes the history of Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush when faced with national security challenges, and what their Constitutional response was.</p>
<p>I’d also like to say very briefly about John Yoo &#8212; we talk a lot within this organization about education.  And I’ve been privileged to work with John Yoo and his students at Boalt on several projects where we have written amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court.  He’s worked with students at Boalt, I’ve worked with students at Chapman.  And in fact, this last year, we submitted an important brief on national security issues.  So this is something that is not discussed much.  But to understand that most of these organizations that do such things are on the Left &#8212; and I think we’re one of two or three operations in the United   States that uphold original understanding of the Constitution.  So I’d like to publicly thank John Yoo for that and introduce him now.</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Well, I’d like to thank Karen, and David Horowitz, for the invitation to come spend the morning with you.  I welcome any chance to leave the People’s Republic of Berkeley and venture to more conservative places, like Santa Barbara.</p>
<p>It’s also a great honor to be here.  Because finally, for the first time in my life, I get to be the most liberal person on a panel. This will probably be the first and last time that’s ever going to happen to me.</p>
<p>Before I start, I’d like to address a question that pretty much almost everyone I met during the cocktail hour last night asked me about, which is how did I beat John Stewart on “The Daily Show?”  So for those of you who didn’t see my appearance &#8212; and I also have a lot of thoughts about Marc Thiessen’s appearance, too, which followed a little bit after mine.  But I went on at the beginning of the book tour, back in the first week of January.  I think I so befuddled and confused him &#8212; after 30 minutes of jousting about what the definition of torture was, and when enhanced interrogation methods, as I would call them, can be used on terrorist leaders to reveal information about pending attacks &#8212; that he just kind of gave up.  And then, on the next day’s show, he said that I had beaten him.  And my students told me that was the first and only time he’s ever said that a guest on his show had beaten him.</p>
<p>So I went back and looked at the tape, and I tried to figure out, how did I defeat the great liberal talk show host of our day?  And I thought about it for a little bit.  And I think it has to do with the fact he’s probably never had a law professor on his show before.  Because if you think about what my job is &#8212; and has been for the last 17 years &#8212; it’s I confront an audience of 100 25-, 26-year-old people three times a week who are very smart, very clever &#8212; sometimes, occasionally funny &#8212; but are utterly unprepared for class and have done no reading.</p>
<p>So I think if any of you have the misfortune of being on “The Daily Show,” just treat him like a 21-year-old student, and you’ll be fine.</p>
<p>So my job on the panel today is try to put what we’re going to talk about in a historical context, which is to talk about where Obama sits in the course of the history of the presidency.  And my basic theme is that President Obama has brought to office what I think of as an upside-down or an inverted view of the presidency, where his view was that the presidency should be fairly weak office when it came to foreign affairs and national security, that should defer to the other branches; but that he should be a leader of domestic change, and domestic revolution in terms of the economy and society.  And this is the exact opposite, I think, of not just the framers’ design for the office but what his greatest predecessors have done.</p>
<p>So just to start off, in writing this book and giving some context, it’s important to figure out what we mean by greatest Presidents.  So the views of scholars and regular people are quite different on this question.</p>
<p>So one way to measure what regular Americans think &#8212; and I don’t have access to the sophisticated polling data of the last panel &#8212; but one way I approach such questions is to look at that great barometer of popular opinion, <em>Parade Magazine</em>.  So in January<strong>, </strong><em>Parade Magazine</em> did a poll.  And they asked regular Americans &#8212; which President should be added to Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>So I’d like to ask you all, who do you think the most Americans gave as the fifth President to be added to Mount Rushmore, after you correct for the fact that many Americans gave the names of Presidents who already were on Mount Rushmore?</p>
<p>Who do you think Americans, regular people, thought ought to be the next President added to Mount  Rushmore?  Most people did not put Reagan.  I heard Obama.  Obama did make the list; he was number five.  I’ve always thought it would be hard for a sculptor to do the Nobel Peace Price on the stone, but yes.  Exactly right.  John F. Kennedy was ranked by Americans the next President who should be added, right?  Glamorous, young President, image of activity.</p>
<p>In 2005, <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> editorial page did a poll of 300 scholars &#8212; I was one of them &#8212; to rank every President in order.  Kennedy was below average.  In fact, if you think about it, the more we learn about Kennedy, the worse his reputation tends to get.</p>
<p>Reagan was on the list, FDR was on the list, Clinton was on the list and, as I said, Obama was on the list.  This is somewhat at odds with whom we think of as the great Presidents, or these scholars do.  There’s wide agreement on who the top three are &#8212; Washington, Lincoln and FDR.  As you know, Washington and Lincoln are already on the monument.  The fourth and fifth greatest Presidents are Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, who are also on Mount Rushmore.</p>
<p>Reagan made sixth.  And actually, that’s a remarkable change.  Because if those of you who can remember back to 1988, when he left office, and remember what academics and people in the media were saying about Reagan, he was widely considered a mediocre President by the intellectual elites.  And now, it’s stunning that a poll of academics rates Reagan the sixth greatest President in American history.</p>
<p>The seventh is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention &#8212; was Harry Truman.  Right?  He left office with his opinion poll ratings in the low 30s, in the middle of an unpopular war.  He could have run for reelection and chose not to.  But now, we appreciate Truman because he set the basic foundations for our long-term strategy in the war against the Soviets.  I won’t ask any of the smart people here whether that reminds you of anybody.</p>
<p>The eighth greatest President was Dwight Eisenhower &#8212; again, a President who was criticized in many of the same terms that Reagan had been criticized, as sort of out of touch, grandfatherly; we like him, but not his policies.  Eisenhower’s considered now the eighth greatest President in American history.</p>
<p>The ninth greatest President is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention.  But if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be enjoying our nice day here on the coast in Santa   Barbara, James Polk, who deliberately triggered a war with the Mexicans in 1848.  He turned a border skirmish on the Texas-Mexican border between about 100 troops into a justification for launching an amphibious invasion of Mexico, capturing Mexico City and engaging in what we call regime change, and then taking away the one third of the best part of the country, and annexing it to the United States.  A guy who was so unpopular that when he ran for office, he had to go around promising he would not run for reelection.</p>
<p>Tenth greatest President &#8212; Andrew Jackson, whose face, of course, is on the $20 bill, who would be horrified at the idea that he would be on the $20 bill, since his great mission was to destroy the Bank of the United   States at the time.</p>
<p>Let me ask you one more question.  In this ranking of great Presidents, who do you think was ranked the worst President in American history? Carter, no.  Carter, actually, is about average these days, among scholars.</p>
<p>Buchanan.  So I just want to be clear &#8212; when I speak in college audiences, and I say Buchanan, the students pause, because they think I’m talking about Pat Buchanan -that he might’ve been President when they were kids, they don’t really know.  But we are, in fact, talking about James Buchanan, who was the President right before Lincoln.  Right.  And that’s the basic message of the book, and the basic context I want to set out, is &#8212; why is Buchanan the worst President, by universal acclaim, among scholars?  And why is Lincoln almost tied with Washington for being our greatest President?  It has everything to do with emergency and the power of the office.</p>
<p>Buchanan and Lincoln were both Presidents during the worst emergency that we have faced &#8212; the Civil War.  And Buchanan responded to it by saying &#8212; many people don’t know this &#8212; Buchanan thought that secession was unconstitutional.  He actually thought that the states could not leave the Union.  But he said, As President, I have no constitutional power to stop it from happening.  The presidency is powerless.  And he actually said, I call on Congress to reach a solution.</p>
<p>Those of you who’ve worked with a legislature can guess what Congress did.  They formed a special commission to study the problem.  Lincoln comes into office a few months later.  The period between election and inauguration was much longer then.  Lincoln says, I agree with President Buchanan &#8212; secession is unconstitutional.  But I have the power as President to protect the country, to protect its security.  And he took extraordinary measures to do that.  He raised an army and a navy, he took money out of the treasury, without congressional permission.  He started offensive operations against the South.  He suspended the writ of habeas corpus through the country, all with the goal of protecting the United   States during period of emergency.  His most famous act, and the one for which we as Republicans remember him the most &#8212; the Emancipation Proclamation &#8212; was what people today would call a unilateral exercise of executive power.</p>
<p>Does anybody remember what the Supreme Court’s opinion about emancipation was in 1863, at the time of President Lincoln’s order?  Supreme Court’s opinion still was Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which said no federal or state government law could eliminate slavery.  Lincoln brushed that aside.  He said, To win the Civil War, we have to free the slaves, which is actually why the Emancipation Proclamation only applied in the South, but not in the peaceful areas of the North.</p>
<p>So in the time I have remaining let me turn to President Obama.  Because the lesson, I think, that comes from the history of our great Presidents and their time during periods of emergency are twofold .  One is that the framers designed the presidency in the weird way they did.  They designed the executive branch with one person in charge, where all the power and responsibility goes to that one person, so that he could act quickly, swiftly, secretly, decisively, as the Federalist Papers talked about.</p>
<p>When it came to domestic policy, however, the framers thought that the presidency would be a modest office.  They were worried about Congress when it came to domestic policy.  Fact, they specifically gave the President the veto power, so that the presidency would moderate the legislative branch.  The framers were extremely worried about the idea that Congress, which had access to the power of the purse, would take money from one group of citizens and transfer it to another group of citizens.  Where would they have gotten that crazy idea from?  The President’s job was to stop Congress from enacting special-interest legislation and to pursue the national interest.</p>
<p>Just let me close by saying &#8212; and now set it up for Marc and Andrew, my good friends &#8212; look at what Obama did when he came into office.  Right?  He saw his job as pushing Congress to go farther.  And because of that, he’s undermining the legitimacy and power of the presidency, by combining it too closely with Congress, as we’ve seen with health care.  His job was to restrain Congress from passing health care, not to prod it to going farther.</p>
<p>At the same time, I’d say in national security matters, he has tried to retract the power of the presidency.  That’s the way to understand his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy who thought up the idea of the 9/11 attacks in civilian court in New York City.  There’s a lot of crazy reasons why this is not a good idea, not the least of which is spending $250 million a year on security in downtown New York, when it only costs, I think &#8212; I checked &#8212; only $108 million to build the Guantanamo Bay base.</p>
<p>But if you think about it, when you transfer the trial of terrorists to civilian courts, you are, as President, giving up the power to set terrorism policy on a lot of matters to another branch of government, something Presidents Washington and Lincoln and FDR never would have done.  Obama doesn’t want the responsibility, he doesn’t want to make the decisions about the war on terrorism.  But at the same time, he’s, I think, damaging the presidency by pulling the powers of the institution back, and hoping someone else will make the hard choices.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, that’s why we have a President.  If these jobs, these decisions, were easy, we wouldn’t need the President to make them.  And I worry that because of his efforts to avoid these hard choices when it comes to the most important function of government, which is protecting the security of its citizens, that President Obama will not use the powers of his office, as his greatest predecessors did, to protect the security of the country.</p>
<p>So thank you very much, and I turn it over to Marc and Andrew.</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen:</strong> Thank you very much.</p>
<p>Actually, the subtitle of my book could have just as easily been “How John Yoo Kept America Safe.”  So I’m proud to be on a panel with John Yoo. And there are two other people who are responsible for my screed, who are here today.  And they are David Horowitz and Peter Collier.  And the reason is that back in the 1980s, when I was an aspiring young leftist at Vassar College, I was purged from the Student Coalition Against Apartheid for having raised a question about necklacing, which was a practice that the African National Congress used to punish &#8212; I won’t go into the details of it, it was horrific.  And I was informed one night that there had been a vote, and I had been purged.  Because that’s what communists do, they purge people.</p>
<p>And so I was a leftist without a home.  And a conservative friend said, You’ve got to read this book, “<em>Destructive Generation</em>,” by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.  And I got it, and I read it overnight.  I’ve been going to the right ever since, and never turned back.  So as a result, here I am, having written a book in defense of the enhanced interrogation program.</p>
<p>You’ve undoubtedly heard the myth that Barack Obama is continuing the national security policies of the Bush Administration.  Because he’s doing Predator strikes, he hasn’t eliminated the Patriot Act or the National Security Agency’s listening program, using the state secrets defense, supporting indefinite detention, keeping a responsible drawdown in Iraq that Bush had set in motion, and he’s launched a surge in Afghanistan.  And so he’s continuing these terrible policies, as the Left says.</p>
<p>Imagine, if you would, that in the midst of World War II, Neville Chamberlain had come to power, and in the middle of World War II.  And he continued to fight the war, and he continued the bombings of Germany, and he continued the battle in North Africa and Italy, and launched the D-Day invasion.  But he eliminated the Ultra program that had broken the German codes.  And he spoke out and said that this &#8212; but listening in to the Germans was against our values, and then released the secrets behind this program to the public, and thus to the Nazi leadership in Berlin.</p>
<p>We wouldn’t say that Neville Chamberlain was continuing the policies of Winston Churchill, would we?  This is essentially what Barack Obama has done, in eliminating the CIA interrogation program, and then releasing all the secrets of how we interrogated terrorists and got them to tell us their plans for new attacks to the enemy.  Today, we are in growing danger of experiencing another 9/11 attack.  Because we are no longer capturing, detaining and interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>Think back for a minute to the period after 9/11.  We knew that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but we didn’t know who.  We didn’t know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 or the operational commander of al-Qaeda.  In fact, Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, says that he wasn’t even in our flowchart of senior al-Qaeda leaders at the time.  We didn’t know who his key accomplices were.</p>
<p>And unbeknownst to us, there were two terrorist networks out there, active, that we didn’t know the members of or what their plans were &#8212; the KSM network that had launched the 9/11 attacks, and the network called the Hambali network, which was a Southeast Asian terror network that KSM was working with to develop follow-on attacks against America.</p>
<p>We didn’t know who they were or what their plans were.  And in fact, we later found out that they had in fact set in motion plans for a series of terrorist attacks.  These included a plot to repeat the destruction of 9/11 in Europe by hijacking airplanes in Europe and flying them into Heathrow Airport and buildings in London’s financial district.  They included a plot to blow up our consulate in Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan in an attack that would have replicated the East Africa Embassy bombings in Pakistan.  They had set in motion a plot to blow up our marine camp in Jabuti using explosive-laden water tankers.  They had deployed a cell that was developing anthrax for attacks in the United States.</p>
<p>And most nefariously of all, they were working with Hambali.  KSM knew that after 9/11 we’d be on the lookout for Arab men.  So he developed a cell of Southeast Asians, thinking we wouldn’t be on the lookout for them, working with this terrorist Hambali, to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which is the tallest building on the West Coast, just south of here.</p>
<p>We didn’t know any of this.  None of it.  And then, the CIA began capturing and interrogating senior leaders of al-Qaeda.  We captured Abu Zubaydah, who was a senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he gave us information that led us to Ramzi bin al Shibh, who was one of the senior key operatives in the 9/11 attacks.  And together, they gave us the information that led us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the rest of these terrorist gave us information that led to the roundup of dozens of members of these two networks, and put them &#8212; dismantled them both and put them out of business, and stopped the attacks that they had set in motion.</p>
<p>These people were captured.  In fact, it’s ironic &#8212; I know Andy’s going to talk about the trials in New York &#8212; every single one of the people that Barack Obama wants to put on trial in New York City were captured as a direct result of CIA interrogations.  If it had not been for the CIA program, Barack Obama would have no one to put on trial.</p>
<p>So this is one of the most important intelligence programs, probably &#8212; certainly in the war on terror, and possibly in the history of the United States.</p>
<p>Now, fast-forward to beginning of 2009.  Barack Obama becomes President of the United States.  And he, on his second day in office, eliminates this program.  Almost simultaneously, as he is doing this, there is a new terrorist network forming on the Arabian Peninsula, called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is a merger between al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, which were two local &#8212; small, local terrorist networks that were basically focused on killing &#8212; attacking Western interests there.  And they form a transnational terrorist network, who has the intent and capability of striking the United States of America, here in the American homeland.  And the Obama Administration admits, by its own admission, that we did not know that they were either capable or had the intent to strike us here at home.</p>
<p>But on Christmas Day, one of their operatives got through all of our defenses and was on a plane, circling Detroit, and almost blew that plane up in what would have been the most catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil since the 9/11 attacks.  Why were we caught blind?  Because we were not trying to capture, detain and interrogate the leaders of al-Qaeda, who could’ve told us about this new terror network.  We didn’t know anything about it.</p>
<p>In fact, not only were we not interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda who could’ve warned us about this &#8212; when a high-value terrorist fell into our laps, like manna from heaven, we read him his rights and told him he had the right to remain silent, and gave him a lawyer.  It’s insanity.  It’s absolute insanity.</p>
<p>Christmas Day, we avoided disaster by pure luck.  Pure luck.  This was not a foiled attack.  The bomb malfunctioned.  If it hadn’t, he was planning to blow that plane up over Detroit.  So not only the couple hundred people on that plane but thousands of people on the ground would’ve died as a result of it.  You cannot keep this country safe unless you interrogate senior terrorist leaders.</p>
<p>Now, why is interrogation essential?  The failure to stop the Christmas Day attack was a failure to connect the dots.  You’ve heard that phrase.  In my book, “<em>Courting Disaster</em>,” I interviewed Mike Hayden, the former Director of the CIA.  And he explained it to me this way &#8212; why is interrogation important.  Intelligence, he said, is like putting together a puzzle.  And you got all the pieces laid out on the table in front of you.  And you have to connect the pieces, connect the dots.  But you’re not allowed to look at the cover of the box to see what the picture looks like.  That’s the challenge of intelligence.</p>
<p>There’s only one way to find out what that picture looks like &#8212; capture the people who know what the picture on the cover of the box looks like and get them to tell you.  When you capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it’s not that he’s giving you pieces of the puzzle that you could get another way.  He’s telling you how the pieces fit together.  He’s giving you the picture on the cover of the box.</p>
<p>And today, this is the capability we have voluntarily given up &#8212; the ability to see the picture on the cover of the box.  And so this is why we’re in danger of another attack.</p>
<p>A few weeks ago, the <em>Washington Post</em> reported, on its front page, that the US had tracked down the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa, which is a virulent terror al-Qaeda offshoot.  This was a big deal to find this guy.  And they knew where he was, and they were tracking him.  And so they went to the White House.  And they gave the President three options.  They said, We can capture him alive and interrogate him, we can kill him with a Predator strike, or we can send a helicopter in with commandos and kill him, and then repel down and get the DNA to confirm that he’s dead.  And the military said, We want to capture him alive.  The President said kill him.  And so they killed him with the third option, sending a helicopter team.  So we could’ve reached him, because the commandos went in and actually got his DNA to confirm that he was dead.</p>
<p>And think of the intelligence that was lost with that man, vaporized with that man being killed.  The information this guy had.  If President Bush had made that decision when we located Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there would be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York City.  A dead terrorist can’t tell you his plans for new attacks.  We have to capture these people alive and bring them in.</p>
<p>Now, why did the CIA interrogation program work so well?  All right, I’m winding down.  Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey is here.  He would probably have to report me to the CIA Security Office if I told you this story a year ago.  But now that Barack Obama’s released all the details, I can tell it to you.</p>
<p>The first guy that we captured was a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah, senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he was the first one who was waterboarded.  And after he was waterboarded, he said something remarkable to his interrogators.  I got to &#8212; one of the things about my book is it’s the first time you’ll hear from the actual interrogators.   I talked to them, the people who were in the room for these interrogations.  And Zubaydah &#8212; after he was waterboarded &#8212; they actually said to him, after he broke, you know, We don’t want to do this waterboarding.  Is there something else we can do?  He said, No, no, no.  You must do this for all the brothers.</p>
<p>Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell &#8212; he thanked us for waterboarding him, and said you must do this for the other brothers, you cannot stop waterboarding.  Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell us that?  What he explained was that the jihadi philosophy is that they &#8212; Allah is going to prevail, no matter what happens.  The victory is predestined.  His responsibility to Allah is to resist as far as he can.  And then, once he’s met the limits of resistance, he’s free to spill his guts and tell us everything he knows.</p>
<p>So if you know this, do you give him Snickers bars?  Do you try and develop a rapport with him?  No, you have to give him something to resist.</p>
<p>So what the CIA did was they developed this program, where they would give him &#8212; they gave him something that did not cross the line into torture &#8212; John, you made sure that was the case &#8212; with the least coercive technique first, escalating up to maximum of waterboarding, which is not torture, the way it was done by the CIA.  And they gave him a chance to resist something.  And almost &#8212; of the people who run the CIA program &#8212; there were 100 people brought into CIA interrogations &#8212; only 30 had any enhanced interrogation techniques used on them.  The rest said I’ll talk to you, CIA, I will tell you anything you want to know.  Thirty of them had enhanced interrogation techniques, and three made it to waterboarding.</p>
<p>And they developed techniques that were safe, that would not harm them, but got the information.  And it was the most successful program in &#8212; possibly in the history of the United States, in intelligence.  And Barack Obama has eliminated it.</p>
<p>Just in closing, a quick point -we are in danger because we don’t have this capability anymore.  And we’ve been asked to sort of give you the silver lining in the dark cloud.  It’s a pretty dark cloud, when it comes to the war on terror.  The silver lining is the American people are with us on this issue.  If you look at the polls &#8212; and I cite some of them in the book &#8212; 71 percent of Americans support enhanced interrogation.  Seventy-one percent.  Scott Brown, who they mentioned &#8212; Congressman Royce mentioned him in the early panel &#8212; campaigned as an open supporter of enhanced interrogation, and he won election in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.  If that does not tell you that Americans are with us on this issue, then I don’t know what does.</p>
<p>But for some reason, Republican legislators and Republican lawmakers are afraid to talk about this.  Because they don’t want to be tagged as supporting torture.  Well, it’s not torture.</p>
<p>In my book &#8212; I explain it in great detail, why &#8212; what the laws are on torture, you can read the Yoo memos &#8212; it’s not torture.  And the Democrats are vulnerable on this, because they’re putting us in grave danger.  And we need to be able to speak out about this.  Christmas Day was a wakeup call.  We almost suffered another 9/11 in our midst.  And it was just four months ago.  It’s been forgotten.  When’s the last time someone mentioned it to you?  This almost happened.</p>
<p>I hope and pray that it does not take al-Qaeda succeeding in a mass-casualty attack on our country for us to wake up.  But hope and prayer are not a sufficient national security policy.</p>
<p>Thank you very much.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Thank you, Marc.</p>
<p>Andrew McCarthy is Senior Fellow at the National Review &#8211;</p>
<p>&#8211; “<strong>Willful Blindness</strong>.”  I highly recommend that.  His new one is coming out &#8212; unfortunately will not be here in time for him to sign this weekend.  But the new one, called “<em>The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,</em>” I’m sure will be highly instrumental in educating people as far as what’s at stake for this next election.</p>
<p>So again, thank you very much for all of the work that you do, Andy.  And we welcome you to make comments this morning.</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy:</strong> Thanks so much.  And thanks, Michael, for inviting me here.  Imagine being placed on the extreme right of this panel.</p>
<p>But I think, actually, John’s too kind.  Because I guess we could’ve sat anyone anywhere, on this panel.</p>
<p>What I’d like to talk about is this whole issue of the civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 9/11 plotters.  And I think it’s important to talk about it.  Because what you’ve heard in the public domain about this is really, in my mind, a significant misrepresentation of what really is at stake, and what the position is of those of us who have opposed having a civilian trial in Manhattan &#8212; or, frankly, anyplace else &#8212; of these particular enemy combatants, or indeed of enemy combatants in general.</p>
<p>I don’t want to be presumptuous.  But I would suggest to you that if you’re being told that Eric Holder is more in favor of prosecuting bad guys than I am, you probably ought to check that, see if that makes a lot of sense.</p>
<p>We’re talking here about a very small category of &#8212; whether you would call it war criminal or defendant.  I hear the Attorney General say, Don’t take this tool away from us, we need this tool, prosecution’s an important tool.  Nobody &#8212; least of all, me &#8212; is saying that we shouldn’t be doing prosecutions in the civilian courts, or that prosecutions in the civilian courts are not part &#8212; and must not &#8212; or, not that they must be part of a total government counterterrorism strategy.  What we’re talking about is an approach to counterterrorism in the post-9/11 era that learns from the mistakes of the pre-9/11 era.</p>
<p>In pre-9/11 times, during the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department wasn’t just the tip of the counterterrorism spear; it was pretty much the entirety of the spear.  I mean, the intelligence community was doing some things.  But for the most part, the government’s national security strategy against terrorism during the 1990s was prosecution in the civilian system.</p>
<p>And what we learned from that experience, I think first and foremost, is that it is a provocatively weak response.  I’m not saying that we can’t prosecute people in the civilian system; we know we can.  We did it repeatedly in the eight years between the time the World Trade Center was bombed and when it was destroyed.</p>
<p>But think about what the bottom line of all that is.  Basically, in about nine trials, we took out 29 people, which is sometimes less than what our military does in a single day, in the post-9/11 era.  Most of the most important terrorists &#8212; bin Laden, Zawahiri, the rest of them &#8212; but for a very small number of those 29, the people that we took out by prosecuting were the lowest of the low-ranking players.  They were the low-hanging fruit, the most easily replaced terrorists in any of the cells or the organization.  I mean, there were a few differences &#8212; my guy, the Blind Sheikh, Ramzi Yousef, two or three others.  But of the 29, most of them were the most easily replaced.</p>
<p>And in fact, I think more than half of them were out of the 1993 Trade Center bombing itself.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Khobar Towers attack which killed 19 members of our air force.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Cole attack which killed 17 members of our navy.</p>
<p>So I think what we learned from that approach is that it is too limited, and it has too many downsides to it, to be a significant response to a national security challenge.  Osama bin Laden, for example, has been under indictment by the Justice Department since June of 1998.  That’s before the embassy bombings, before the Cole, before 9/11.  He’s still at large.  But the point is that obviously, the response of bringing al-Qaeda to court was not something that stopped al-Qaeda from not only continuing to attack but continuing to attack in a way that was much more &#8212; that became more aggressive and more audacious over time.</p>
<p>So how do we change after 9/11?  We don’t say no more prosecutions in the civilian court.  We say instead that the Justice Department has to have an appropriately subordinate role in what is a total government response to what is a national security challenge &#8212; a war, not a crime wave.  So there will be times, as we go forward in this struggle &#8212; and we will go forward for quite a long time, I think &#8212; but there will be times when it will be primarily a military task, an intelligence task.  There will never be a time, I don’t think, when our Treasury resources are unimportant, so that we’re tracking terrorism finances, not just to try to dry up the funding, but actually as a source of intelligence &#8212; to be able to follow the money, see where it goes, and try to figure out who is it who’s attached to the money.</p>
<p>After all, the only defense that we have in this war is really intelligence.  There’s never going to be a moment when we sit on a navy ship and sign a treaty with al-Qaeda.  Our defense in a war of this type, against a transnational enemy that attacks in stealth and that defies the laws and customs of war, is intelligence.  We have to know who they are, where they are, and what their plans are, what they’re next most likely to hit.</p>
<p>In that framework, the Justice Department still plays a crucially important role.  But it’s a subordinate role.  We heard a lot of debate, particularly in the three or four years right after 9/11, about the Patriot Act, and the powers that it gave to the &#8212; particularly the intelligence side of the executive branch, and, you know, whether that was appropriate, whether it was over the line.</p>
<p>Having actually had to deal with these cases, I think that the most important law that has been enacted with respect to counterterrorism is actually the 1996 overhaul of terrorism law, which gave prosecutors tools that were unavailable to me, for example, back in 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed.  After 1996, they gave us, you know, a terrorism conspiracy statute.  They added some bombing conspiracy provisions.  Most importantly, they put in a new offense called Material Support to Terrorism, which became a staple of counterterrorism prosecutions after that.</p>
<p>After those laws were put in in 1996, you could still have a healthy debate about whether, philosophically, we ought to be approaching this challenge as a war or a crime.  But prosecutors could no longer complain, as we complained back in 1993, that the tools we had were not adequate to the task.</p>
<p>But why are these tools so important?  Because what Material Support to Terrorism allows you to do is to strangle terrorism cells and terrorism plots in the cradle, before they gain momentum and before they’re able to strike.  And that really has to be what the role is for the Justice Department in a post-9/11 era, when we’re trying to move from prosecution to prevention.</p>
<p>The idea is now that we want to stop these things from happening well in advance, rather than try to content ourselves with prosecuting people after Americans and other innocents have already been killed, which was the 1990s model.  We don’t want less prosecutions in the civilian courts.  We want more prosecution in the civilian courts.  But they’re not going to be the same kind of cases as they were before 9/11.</p>
<p>And sometimes, frankly, they’re not going to be very attractive cases.  I think what we’re asking prosecutors to do now is, frankly, a lot harder than I was asked to do back in the early to mid-1990s.  I don’t mean to say that these cases aren’t difficult.  They present challenges that other sorts of cases don’t.  But it’s not the most difficult thing on the planet to prosecute even a bunch of terrorists after there’s been a mass-murder attack against Americans.  Even the <em>New York Times</em> could get behind a prosecution like that.</p>
<p>But what we’re asking prosecutors to do today is something that’s much more difficult.  Can you imagine what the <em>New York Times</em> would’ve said if the Justice Department had tried to bring a case against Mohamed Atta on the information that was known prior to 9/11?  Not only Atta, but any of the 9/11 hijackers?  They would’ve said it was overreach, they would’ve said it was profiling, they would’ve said that it was baseless.</p>
<p>What we’re actually asking prosecutors to do now, along with law enforcement and along with our intelligence community, is to anticipate what these guys will do next and stop them from doing it.  And those cases are going to have some ambiguity to them.  They’re not going to be as solid as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  They’re not going to have the same kind of public support as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  But it still is a very important role.  And it’s one that has to be done if we’re actually going to stop things from happening.</p>
<p>So I think that the important thing, from my perspective, that I’d like you to take away about this controversy over the civilian trial, is that what we’re talking about is whether it’s appropriate to bring into court actual war criminals who have either plotted to carry out or have actively carried out war crimes against the United States.  I would suggest to you that it’s not only a provocatively weak response, it not only is inappropriate, given the amount of intelligence that we have to turn over for due process purposes while we’re at war; it’s a betrayal of the very impetus for doing it, which is international humanitarian law.</p>
<p>The whole idea behind humanitarian law and behind the Geneva Conventions is to civilize warfare.  It’s not an automatic system, it’s an opt-in system.  You have to opt in by conduct.  You have to comply with the laws and customs of war.  And what we’re doing when we bring these particular offenders into civilian court is we’re taking the worst of the worst, the people who actually target civilians for mass murder, and carry out those mass-murder attacks.  And rather than handling them as military enemies, we are clothing them in all of the rights of Americans, in all of the rights of the people that they’re sworn to kill.</p>
<p>And let me just close by saying it’s not tripe; I think it’s a truism, to say that when you reward bad behavior, you’re only apt to get more of it.  And when we give this kind of a reward &#8212; the entrance into our own civilian justice system with all of the protections of the Bill of Rights &#8212; to people who are actively trying to make war &#8212; who are actively, actually, making war against the United States &#8212; we are inviting more of what we need to be preventing.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo:</strong> Thank you very much, Andy.</p>
<p>Andy mentioned the importance of being able to prosecute terrorist activity under this Material Support statute.  And in fact, the case that I worked on &#8212; the brief that my students and John Yoo’s students helped to draft, and Andy’s Center for Law and Counterterrorism cosigned &#8212; has to do with an attack on the statute under constitutional speech rights, in claiming that an individual who is supporting a charitable effort sponsored by a named terror organization has his speech rights infringed upon if he is not able to &#8212; if there is an ability to prosecute his activities in supporting the terrorist organization, but charitably.</p>
<p>So it’s going to be interesting to see how this one’s resolved.  Because from the line of questioning the day that the arguments were made, it’s hard to tell exactly what the split will be.  But the name of that case is Humanitarian Legal Project.  And there should be a decision on that within the next few weeks.</p>
<p>So I’m going to ask the panelists if they will talk for just a couple of minutes about what their solutions are &#8212; what they would advise that we do as citizens to see that national security is kept to the forefront, as far as on our national agenda.</p>
<p>John?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> Thanks, Karen.</p>
<p>So, three ideas.  One is, even though I think that the presidency has this great power of national security, it’s not to say that it’s without check.  Even in wartime, when the President’s power is at its height, Congress is still in control of funding and the size and shape of the military.  And I think electing members to Congress who are going to take a much more pro-national security stance is one of the most important things we can do.</p>
<p>President Obama wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay.  He gave an order in his first week of office to do that within a year.  Congress prohibited the use of any funds to transfer prisoners into United States and has so far managed to block his efforts to do that.  Perfectly within Constitution.  This is a Congress with huge Democratic majorities.  So I think more of that would be possible.</p>
<p>Second thing is judges, which we don’t think about much when we think about national security.  But the greatest obstacle, I think, to the effective fighting of the war on terrorism, unfortunately, has been our own judges.  If you look at a lot of the policies in the war on terrorism, the presidency and Congress, at least under the Bush Administration, actually agreed on enhanced surveillance.  [Congressmen], actually &#8212; as Marc shows in his book &#8212; did approve of the interrogation programs, although they don’t want anyone to know about it.  The judges are the ones who first started trying to pull down the policies in the war on terrorism.</p>
<p>Just to give you a small anecdote &#8212; I wrote a piece in <em>The Wall Street Journal</em> last weekend about Justice Stevens, who announced his resignation from the Court.  When Justice Stevens was a young intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II, he was allowed to listen in on the operation to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto, which was made possible by the breaking of the code secret &#8212; the Japanese naval codes.</p>
<p>Justice Stevens thought that it was wrong for the United States to specifically target and shoot down Admiral Yamamoto.  He later gave a speech, many years later, saying that he thought it violated humanitarian norms for the American military to specifically try to kill another member of the enemy.  And in fact, he then said, And that’s why I’m pretty much against the death penalty now, too.</p>
<p>Think about what Justice Stevens would think about the Predator drone program.  Justice Stevens has been the leader on the Court at trying to do what Andy has described would be the wrong answer, which is to give all terrorists the same constitutional rights as you and I would, if we were prosecuted for any garden-variety crime.</p>
<p>Last thing I’ll just say quickly is &#8212; aside from electing members of Congress, aside from pressing the Senate not to confirm judges who are weak on national security &#8212; third thing, I think, is that &#8212; collectively could do outside the arm of the government is to create some kind of [fund] organization to protect officers of the CIA.</p>
<p>Because &#8212; I think we probably would all agree to this, I don’t know &#8212; but there’s going to come a witch hunt against the men and women who are the subject of Marc’s book.  And I don’t think they’re getting a lot of support right now.  These people &#8212; I mean, they make $50,000, $60,000 a year.  And they’re going to come under the worst legal expenses and political harassment you can &#8212; I lived through this for the last year.  And luckily, I survived.  I was lucky to have one of the best attorneys in America volunteer to represent me for free.  Also, I made myself a real pain in the ass in the media.  And I think that actually scared them off a little bit.</p>
<p>But there’s going to be dozens of CIA officers who are currently, and will be, investigated for what they did to protect the country.  And I think that’s one thing we could all do that doesn’t involve the government, you know, would be to help defend those guys.</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen</strong>: I agree with all that.  Couple things &#8212; I would say the most important thing is for us as conservatives to speak out.  When the American people are with us as strongly as they are, speaking out works.  I mean, the fact is, there is no trial going on right now for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York because of public opposition.  And so we have the power, if we speak out, to stop these things from happening.</p>
<p>Andy laid out a number of the reasons why the trial was a bad idea.  Those legal &#8212; I’m the only one who’s not a lawyer here.  I’ll give you a different reason.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed disappeared from the face of the earth when he was captured in 2003.  He was in a CIA [black site], completely cut off.  Then he’s been Guantanamo ever since.  If he were to be put on trial, and suddenly emerge this heroic leader, with his flowing turbans, and all that, the effect that would have on the jihadi movement, the shot in the arm that would be, that after all &#8212; everything we did to him, that he’s still standing, and would put us on trial, it would make &#8212; that trial would make the O.J. Simpson trial look like a traffic court hearing.  So we know this is a bad idea.  We’ve stopped it so far, we got to keep the pressure on them.</p>
<p>Second thing is &#8212; push for the restoration of the CIA interrogation program &#8212; not the one that John approved, and that was in place in the first years of the Obama Administration; but the program that actually Barack Obama inherited.  There’s a myth out there that Barack Obama eliminated waterboarding.  Waterboarding had already been taken out of the CIA program when he came into office.</p>
<p>Mike Hayden &#8212; I told the story in my book, how Mike Hayden and Admiral McConnell, the head of &#8212; the Director of National Intelligence, scaled back the program, specifically to create a program that could be supported by even a Democratic administration coming in.  When Obama came into office, the techniques that were left were the tummy slap, the facial hold, a diet of liquid Ensure, which &#8212; I’m sure the makers of Ensure would love to know that their product was considered torture &#8211;and mild sleep deprivation, maximum of four days.  No one would consider that torture.  These were the techniques.  The program still worked.  Because the terrorists didn’t know that.</p>
<p>I’ll tell you another story that &#8212; Jim Woolsey’s going to be busy on the phones with the Security Office and the CIA.  When the program was scaled back, a terrorist named Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was captured.  You probably never heard of him.  He’s one of the most &#8212; he’s a very, very senior al-Qaeda leader.  He was a major in Saddam Hussein’s army who joined al-Qaeda, interestingly enough, and was one of bin &#8212; he was a member of the Shura Council &#8212; very senior guy.  And he was being sent by bin Laden to Iraq to run al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, and he never made it.</p>
<p>And he was brought into a CIA interrogation site.  And they took off his hood, and they said, We’re the CIA.  And he said, I know, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.  And he did.  Why?  Because he didn’t know what he would face.  He didn’t know that all he was going to face was the tummy slap and liquid Ensure.</p>
<p>So the idea that this is torture, and that we can do &#8212; we have to follow the Army Field Manual, which is the manual &#8212; local police &#8212; district attorneys have more authority to interrogate terrorists than the Army Field Manual provides.  A district attorney, on a daily basis, will say to a criminal in an interrogation, I’m going to put a needle in your arm if you don’t give up your accomplices.  You’re going to see the death penalty.  You can’t do that under the Army Field Manual.  We can’t threaten a terrorist in any way.  It’s crazy that we’re following the Army Field Manual for all interrogations.  So we got to push for a restoration of this program that is absolutely &#8212; there’s no reason why Barack Obama and the most liberal Democrat administration in history couldn’t even support using this program.</p>
<p>And then, I agree wholeheartedly with John about standing by these CIA interrogators.  These people are not torturers; they’re heroes.  They don’t deserve subpoenas; they deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  They kept this country safe and stopped the next 9/11.</p>
<p>One last story, just to tell you something about these people.  One of the interrogators who I spoke with &#8212; I tell the story in my book.  I call him Harry.  It’s not his name, but that’s the name I use for him in the book.  And he’s the guy who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And one night, he went into KSM’s cell.  And after the interrogation part was over, he actually had a very good relationship with KSM.  KSM called him Emir, which is a title of great respect in jihadi ranks.  They’re seen as respected adversaries in war.</p>
<p>And he came in.  KSM greeted him warmly, said how are you.  And they were talking.  And he said, And then KSM turned to me.  And he said, Just so you know, if I ever get out of this hole, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill your wife, I’m going to kill your sisters, I’m going to kill your whole family.  Because that’s what I do.  And he said, You know, this job is hard.  And sometimes I get down about it.  But then I think back to those two people standing on the ledge of the 90<sup>th</sup> floor of the World Trade Center, who held hands and stepped off into space.  I think of them, and I just go back to work.</p>
<p>This is the kind of people we have, who’ve been protecting our country.  And we’re threatening them with prosecution?  It’s insanity.  These people are heroes, and we need to stand up for them.  So I think that’s what [we should do].</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy:</strong> I want to say one general thing, and then maybe one specific legislative proposal that I think is important.</p>
<p>The general comment is I think that we need to keep doing what we’ve been doing.  What I think has emerged, particularly in the last year, is that the Left badly misread the election not only of 2008 but, I think, also of 2006, in the sense that they took what I think they were entitled to take as a very ambivalent attitude of the American people toward the war in Iraq.  And they read into that a generalized ambivalence, or even opposition, to the war on terror, to the actual threat by al-Qaeda and its affiliates to the American people.</p>
<p>And I think that was a very bad misreading.  I don’t believe there’s ever been a time, particularly after 9/11, that the American people have been anything other than completely supportive of the idea that we need to take aggressive measures &#8212; whether they’re surveillance, prosecution, interrogation, what have you &#8212; to protect the American people from attack.</p>
<p>And because this war still resonates with the American people, look at where we are.  Despite everything that Obama said in the run up to the election, Gitmo is still open.  And it’ll be open for some time.  We’re still using military commissions.  They did a couple of cosmetic tweaks on them, but they haven’t changed them.  And in fact &#8212; think how crazy this is &#8212; actually, they’re using the military commissions to prosecute the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole, even though the Cole was attacked at a time when we didn’t have military commissions and President Bush hadn’t even issued the order yet for military commissions.</p>
<p>So you might ask yourself, you know, rationally, what’s the predicate, what’s the foundation, for trying those guys in a military commission?  You know, the answer to that is 9/11.  But of course, we’re taking the 9/11 guys, and we’re putting them in a civilian trial.  You can’t even wrap your brain around how crazy that is.</p>
<p>But my point is that the military commissions are still up and running.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not getting a trial in Manhattan.  And if I were a betting man, I’d bet he’s not going to get a trial in a civilian court, either.  I think ultimately, just because of public support and public protest, those trials are ultimately going to take place in a military commission, which is exactly where they should’ve taken place in the first place.</p>
<p>Remember the issue a few months back of the CIA photos, the so-called prisoner abuse photos?  The Justice Department wanted to get those out into the public domain, even though everybody knew that they would be used by the enemy for propaganda and recruitment purposes.  Everybody knew it was a bad idea.  Justice Department wanted to put it out, anyway, in this ceaseless impulse that they have that there has to be a reckoning against the Bush Administration, which is something that Holder and Obama both talked about in the run up to the election.</p>
<p>Well, those photos never made it out.  They never saw the light of day, and they probably never will see the light of day.  And the reason is because there was very strong public protest.  Basically, the Justice Department had to back down.  Obama had to reverse Holder.  And despite the fact that you have very large Democratic margins in both houses of Congress, we managed to get legislation through that enabled the Secretary of Defense to sign a finding that made sure that those photographs wouldn’t see the light of day.</p>
<p>And the point is that even though the legislative numbers are daunting against us, this issue is still an issue that powerfully motivates the American people to make themselves heard, when they become aware that there is something to be heard about.  And we have managed, for that reason, to be able to stop them from doing a lot of things that they otherwise wanted to do.  So I think it’s very important that we continue to stay motivated and continue to do the things that we’ve done, which have stopped them from really acting on their worst impulses.</p>
<p>As far as a concrete legislative proposal is concerned, the worst thing about the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision &#8212; and we could spend hours talking about how bad it was &#8212; is that it dumped all of these habeas corpus cases, these detention cases, onto the district courts with no guidance about the rules or procedures that would govern those proceedings.</p>
<p>And as a result, district judges have actually been releasing people who obviously ought to remain held, and doing it under circumstances where we know at least one in five are going back to the jihad.  And I suspect it’s a much higher number.  I think Congress has to get into the game here and prescribe some strong procedural rules to guide the courts in how these habeas proceedings are going to take place.</p>
<p>In the criminal &#8212; in the regular criminal civilian courts, we don’t let judges make it up as they go along.  They have to follow the federal rules of criminal procedure and the federal rules of evidence, and all sorts of prescriptions that Congress gives them.</p>
<p>This is much more important.  We’re dealing with people who, if liberated, want to mass-murder Americans.  And I think it’s really incumbent on Congress to act to stop the judges from doing what they’re doing, which is releasing a lot of people who want to go back to killing Americans.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: We have time for three questions.  So I think I’m going to try to address one to each of the panelists.  And this one would be starting with Andy &#8212; what is the &#8212; what are the appropriate criteria to determine if alleged terrorists should be tried in federal courts or in military commissions?  And do you favor a national security court?</p>
<p><strong>Andrew McCarthy</strong>: I do favor a national security court.  And I could go on at great length about why.  But let me just try to answer the first part of the question, which is &#8212; I think when we’re talking about military commissions, we’re talking about war criminals &#8212; people who have either carried out or been caught in the act of carrying out, or plotting, war crimes against the United States.  Those people need to be tried by military commission.  If I had my druthers, I would stop having the big fight about, you know, should it be civilian or should it be military court, and try to develop a court that was more tailored to the threat that we’re dealing with.</p>
<p>But given that that’s not in the cards right now, those people belong in military commissions.  And I think other people who are &#8212; particularly if they’re captured inside the United States, doing things like Material Support to Terrorism &#8212; presumptively, they belong in the civilian courts.  And those are cases that we not only should do; we should do as many of them as we can.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: Thank you.</p>
<p>And to John Yoo, since you’ve already mentioned your brilliant column about Justice Stevens, and what Obama should do next as far as Supreme Court Justice &#8212; what do you think we can do, as far as influencing the decision on approval or confirmation of the next Supreme Court Justice?</p>
<p><strong>John Yoo:</strong> That’s a great question.</p>
<p>You know, I think Obama is going to have to nominate, for his own base, someone who’s pro-abortion and pro-affirmative action.  You know, those are the hot-button issues of the last 20, 30 years in Supreme Court nominations.  I don’t think anything anybody can do is going to change that.  But I think he has a lot of flexibility in who he chooses, in terms of their views on national security.</p>
<p>And so, if Republicans press for that issue, and pick that out as the most important issue to fight about, I think you could push Obama into picking someone much more centrist on those, even though they might not share the views Republicans have on those other two issues.  That’s one.</p>
<p>The second thing is, Democrats, I think, in the last election &#8212; I mean, the last administration declared open season on judges.  I think there’s no longer any deference that the Senate provides to President’s choice of a judge, which used to be, I think, the unbroken practice for many, many decades, where Justice Byron White &#8212; who was appointed to the Court by President Kennedy &#8212; didn’t even have a hearing when he was confirmed  &#8211; he showed up at the Judiciary Committee doors, ready for his hearing.  And they said, You don’t need a hearing.  And then they voted him, and sent him on to the Senate.  Then they confirmed him, all in one day.</p>
<p>That’s all out the window.  And so, I think that if the Democrats have opened up the floodgates on this &#8212; as they first started with Judge Bork, I’m afraid, and then with my old boss, Justice Thomas; but then, even lower court appointees in the last administration &#8212; I think that judges &#8212; for good or ill, but this is the way it is now &#8212; are subject for normal political activity and campaigning, [like] any other issue.</p>
<p>And so I think as part of that, then, what you and I can do is place pressure on our senators.  Right?  We can put up a filibuster now.  And I think that if we thought there was going to be someone who was going to approve the kind of policies we’re worried about in the war on terrorism, I think that would be legitimate grounds for a filibuster.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: Marc, I wish you had many more than a couple of minutes to address this &#8212; how do you feel President Obama’s speeches overseas have affected our national security?  In what way has his self-effacing tone of these speeches helped or harmed our national security?</p>
<p><strong>Marc Thiessen</strong>: Depends on the speech.  His speech in Cairo was a debacle.  I don’t know how many people saw it.  But he stood before a Muslim audience, speaking to the Arab world, and said that we had tortured people.  I mean, in one speech, he confirmed all of the al-Qaeda propaganda and lies that have been spread to the Arab world.  The damage that is done in such a speech is irreparable.</p>
<p>So yeah, he’s done a great deal of damage to our national security in confirming this propaganda.  The United States didn’t torture anybody.  We did what was necessary to protect our country.</p>
<p>And on top of that, the other thing that he doesn’t talk about &#8212; the word that almost never passes his lips &#8212; is freedom.  Whether you’re for the Iraq war or against the Iraq war, &#8212; they now have had an election where they’re having debates over &#8212; a big political fight over who’s going to be the next prime minister.  I mean, it’s a messy, functioning, young democracy, in the heart of the Middle East.  And we’ve done great damage to al-Qaeda by helping the Iraqis stand up this young democracy.</p>
<p>The other day, they killed &#8212; the Iraqi military, which is trained by the United States, with the help of the United States &#8212; killed the top two leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.  Wasn’t on the front page of the <strong>Washington Post</strong>, wasn’t on the front page of the <em>New York Times</em>.  And when the White House went and made a statement about it, the President sent Joe Biden out to make the statement in the press briefing room, announcing it.</p>
<p>I remember very well, when I was working for President Bush, getting the call late one evening that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed; not to tell anybody, but that I needed to draft a statement for him to deliver the next morning in the Rose Garden.  It’s considered a huge victory.  It’s a victory &#8212; the Iraqi people hated al-Qaeda.</p>
<p>I mean, think about what happened with the surge in Iraq.  Al-Qaeda came in to drive America out of Iraq and rally the Sunni masses against us.  And the Sunni masses joined with America to drive al-Qaeda out.  That’s a huge defeat.</p>
<p>And so the killing of a senior al-Qaeda leader in Iraq is a great moment.  The President couldn’t be bothered to even say something, or [issue a] paper statement on it.  He doesn’t care about freedom.  He doesn’t care about the war on terror.  He wants to be the Secretary of Health and Human Service. He was elected to be the Commander in Chief.  And being the Commander in Chief requires marshalling words.</p>
<p>President Bush always told us, when we were writing his speeches, that there were three audiences that he was always thinking about when he was speaking.  The first was the American people.  Actually, four audiences.  The first was the American people.  The second were our allies around the world, and what message they took from what he said, when we had troops around the world being contributed from all these countries &#8212; how they were going to take the message.  The third was the American troops &#8212; were they going to get a message of resolve from him.  That’s why he was always criticized for never acknowledging mistakes, or so on, so forth.  He wasn’t going to stand up &#8212; as he used to say, I’m not going to get up there as the Commander in Chief and wring my hands in front of our troops on national television.  And the last one was our enemies.  Our enemies are watching.</p>
<p>And so when the President doesn’t project resolve, when he’s apologizing for America, when he doesn’t talk about victory, or freedom, or the principles of our country, and this war, all of those four audiences are harmed, and are &#8212; their courage is undermined, and [he said] their morale is undermined.</p>
<p>So the President of the United States has the responsibility, as Commander in Chief, not only to run the war on terror but to rally the troops, rally our allies, and rally the American people to support the cause of freedom.</p>
<p><strong>Karen Lugo</strong>: These men would all continue to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on behalf of this country in doing what they do.  But let’s thank them for what they’ve done for our nation.</p>
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		<title>&#8220;Bigotgate&#8221; and the British Election</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/bigotgate-and-the-british-election/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bigotgate-and-the-british-election</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 30 Apr 2010 04:11:27 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[America]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Gillian Duffy]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Gordon Brown is undone by a moment of elitist disdain for the concerns of ordinary UK voters. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Gordon-Brown-and-Gillian-001.jpg"><img class="aligncenter size-medium wp-image-59277" title="Gordon-Brown-and-Gillian--001" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/04/Gordon-Brown-and-Gillian-001-300x180.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="180" /></a></p>
<p>Elitism can be a dangerous thing in politics, and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has imperiled both his reelection campaign and the fortunes of his Labor Party after a particularly unflattering demonstration of it.</p>
<p>The British media has dubbed it “<a href="http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/politics/article7110540.ece">Bigotgate</a>.” In one of those unscripted moments that so often spells political suicide, Brown this week suffered a ruinous encounter with a Labor Party voter in the working-class mill town of Rochdale. In the course of meeting “ordinary voters” – part of an electoral strategy designed to make the famously brooding prime minister seem more people-friendly and accessible – Brown paused to talk with one Gillian Duffy. As a 65-year-old widow and lifelong Labor voter, Duffy might have seemed just the kind of constituent Brown needs to burnish his credentials with the average British voter.</p>
<p>Alas for Brown, Duffy also had the presence to ask about a concern that increasingly has been on the minds of British voters in recent years: the record-high rates of immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe, and its impact on British towns like Rochdale. As the cameras flashed, Brown obligingly nodded along, praising Duffy as a “very good woman.” In the safety of his official car, however, Brown lashed out at his aides for forcing him to endure what he called “a bigoted woman.” The whole exchange with Duffy was “ridiculous,” huffed a flustered Brown. And there the matter might have rested but for one detail that Brown in all his ire had overlooked: the microphone on his lapel was still live; the media captured his entire outburst.</p>
<p>In its striking condescension, Brown’s moment of unaware outage called to mind President Obama’s equally revealing assertion, during a 2008 presidential campaign stop, that “bitter” voters in small-town America “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren&#8217;t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” Obama didn’t quite call these Americans bigots, but the implication was clear enough. But there the similarity ends. Politically, “Bigotgate,” which came on the day before the final British prime ministerial debate, will likely prove far more damaging for Brown than Obama’s off-the-cuff candor did for the president.</p>
<p>There are two main reasons for that. The first is that the scandal has served to underscore the considerable political weaknesses of Gordon Brown. After long dwelling in the shadow of the rhetorically deft Tony Blair, Brown has proved an inept successor. Not only does he lack Blair’s gift of eloquence, but he has no enthusiasm for the back-patting and handshaking that is the essence campaign politics and, hence, no talent for it. Little wonder that his calculated attempt to reach out to the average Briton has backfired in such spectacular fashion.</p>
<p>As expected, Brown has spent the hours post “Bigotgate” in a state of profuse apology, even making a 45-minute trip to beg forgiveness from the “bigoted woman” herself. He now insists that that was the wrong word to use and that he in fact shares Duffy’s concern about controlling immigration. Yet, these efforts to repair the damage have been clumsy and not at all credible. Bill Clinton may or may not have felt the voters’ pain, but at least he did a passable impression of empathy. A similar feat is clearly beyond Brown.</p>
<p>Bigotgate is also damaging because it reveals just how out of touch the UK’s governing elite is on an issue of paramount concern for voters: immigration. In worrying about the high rates of immigration, Duffy was in fact speaking for many in the country. Polls show that immigration is the second-most important topic for British voters, with 29 percent naming it as one of the most pressing issues facing the country.</p>
<p>Those concerns are well founded. Britain’s powers-that-be dramatically underestimated the impact of mass immigration into the UK over the past decade. In 2009 alone, Britain experienced a net migration – the sum total of immigration in and out of the country – of over 200,000. That figure, high for what is already considered one of Europe’s most crowded countries, was actually a decline from 2007, according to Britain’s Office for National Statistics, when the net migration reached 233,000. That was almost six times the rate of net migration that the UK had throughout the 1990s, when the rate was around 40,000-50,000 people per year. (The total population of the UK is around 61 million, 51 million of which resides in England.) In the context of this massive influx of foreign immigrants, it’s not surprising that Britons have started to wonder where it will all lead – whether in terms of social cohesion, quality of life, or the cost in taxes for the welfare and social services for which immigrants are eligible.</p>
<p>If Brown and Labor’s last-place standing in almost all of Britain’s major opinion poll is at least in part a reflection of that anxiety, then Bigotgate seems certain to contribute to the party’s defeat in the May 6 general election. Brown won’t lose solely because of immigration. But his inability to speak cogently about that issue – or even to tolerate its being raised by voters – is a good indication of why he and his party are so out of favor with the British public.</p>
<p><em><strong>Jacob Laksin is managing editor of </strong></em><strong>Front Page Magazine</strong><em><strong>.</strong></em></p>
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		<title>Politically Incorrect Fiction</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/politically-incorrect-fiction/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=politically-incorrect-fiction</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/davidforsmark/politically-incorrect-fiction/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Mar 2010 05:04:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Forsmark]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[agent]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=54174</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New novels challenge the liberal mainstream narrative. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156208?ie=UTF8&amp;amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;amp;linkCode=as2&amp;amp;camp=1789&amp;amp;creative=390957&amp;amp;creativeASIN=0399156208"><img class="size-full wp-image-54196 alignnone" title="I, Sniper" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/isniper.png" alt="" width="375" height="500" /></a></p>
<p>In <em>I, Sniper</em>, Stephen Hunter’s latest thriller, a Vietnam War hero is assumed to be a crazed killer, but a veteran FBI agent smells a rat.</p>
<p>As the agent and his colleague dare to challenge the media&#8217;s &#8220;narrative,” he delivers a wonderful rant that combines critiques of the mainstream press that Thomas Sowell and Bernard Goldberg have advanced:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;The narrative is the set of assumptions the press believes in, possibly without even knowing that it believes in them. It&#8217;s so powerful because it&#8217;s unconscious. It&#8217;s not like they get together every morning and decide &#8216;these are the lies we tell today.&#8217; No, that would be too crude and honest. Rather, it&#8217;s a set of casual non-rigorous assumptions about a reality they&#8217;ve never really experienced that’s arranged in such a way as to reinforce their best and most ideal presumptions about themselves and their importance to the system and the way they&#8217;ve chosen to live their lives. It&#8217;s their way of arranging things a certain way what they all believe in without ever really addressing it carefully. It permeates their whole culture. They <em>know,</em> for example, that Bush is a moron and Obama a saint. They <em>know</em> Communism was a phony threat cooked up by right-wing cranks as a way to leverage power to the executive. They <em>know</em>Saddam didn&#8217;t have weapons of mass destruction, the response to Katrina was f&#8212;-ed up, torture never works, and mad Vietnam sniper Carl Hitchcock killed the saintly peace demonstrators. Cheney’s a devil, Biden’s a genius. &#8230;The story was somewhat suspiciously concocted exactly to their prejudices, just as Jayson Blair&#8217;s made-up stories and Dan Rather&#8217;s Air National Guard documents were. And the narrative is the bedrock of their culture, the keystone of their faith, the altar of their church. They don&#8217;t even know they&#8217;re true believers, because in theory they despise the true believer in anything. But they will absolutely de-frackin-stroy anybody who makes them question all that. &#8230;&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>And this from a fellow who&#8217;s not only a former journalist but also a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his film criticism).</p>
<p>As this long, hard winter (sorry, Al Gore) winds down, here are a few red-hot reading choices to help you stave off that last bit of cabin fever by five authors who dare to challenge the intelligentsia’s conventional wisdom.</p>
<p><strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1416565159?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1416565159">I, Sniper</a><img style="border: none !important; margin: 0px !important;" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.com/e/ir?t=fronmaga-20&amp;l=as2&amp;o=1&amp;a=1416565159" border="0" alt="" width="1" height="1" /></strong> by Stephen Hunter</p>
<p>“Someone once defined a newspaper gun story as ‘something with a mistake in it.’&#8221;</p>
<p>While <em>I, Sniper</em> (Simon &amp; Schuster, $26) ostensibly is about iconic hero Bob Lee Swagger taking down snipers who have killed several Vietnam-era radicals and framed a war hero for the crime, Hunter’s crosshairs are really on the mainstream media in general and the New York Times in particular.</p>
<p>Hunter, a former film critic for the Washington Post, obviously is fed up with the media’s narrative about Americans who love their guns and the warriors who fight for our freedom.</p>
<p>After someone has taken out an actress who collaborated with the North Vietnamese and made a fortune out of exercise videos, then shot two Chicago academics who were &#8217;60s domestic terrorists (yes, the resemblance is intentional), FBI agent Nick Memphis has this exchange at a press conference:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;Do you have any opinions, special agent, on the use of &#8216;trained killers&#8217; in the military and the risks such men pose for society when they return to civilian world? I mean this seems to dovetail neatly with the report released by the Homeland Security Agency some months ago that &#8211;&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;You must be from the <em>New York Times</em>.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;Yes sir,&#8221; the young man said.</p></blockquote>
<p>This is Hunter’s sixth novel featuring Bob Lee Swagger, a combination of Sergeant York and Jack Bauer whom Hunter uses as an archetype of the small town, gun-handy American who does his duty as a matter of course and confounds the bad guys with toughness and know-how.</p>
<p>While the political jabs and media commentary are fun, <em>I, Sniper</em>’s main goal is to entertain, and it does.  In many ways this could be considered the ultimate Swagger tale. If this, indeed, is the final adventure for the 60-something hero with the stainless steel hip, it would be a fitting sendoff.</p>
<p>Though if Bob goes into retirement, I will certainly miss lines like this:</p>
<blockquote><p>&#8220;I sure wouldn&#8217;t want to be in your shoes,&#8221; said Bob. &#8220;I can&#8217;t help out with the papers. Never read ‘em. I get my news from Fox.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156208?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0399156208" target="_blank"><strong><em>The Midnight House</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Alex Berenson</strong></p>
<p>Speaking of New York&#8217;s Old Gray Lady, former Timesman Alex Berenson certainly hasn&#8217;t adopted the paper’s narrative that the United   States under George W. Bush became a lawless nation of torturing and liberties-violating rogues.</p>
<p>In the press material for <em>The Midnight House</em> (Putnam, $25.95), his latest best-seller, Berenson says:</p>
<blockquote><p>“If you take a fair-minded view of what the United States has actually been doing the last eight to ten years, you really can’t conclude that is torture.  When you’ve got one set of lawyers arguing that someone can be held in a room that is 46 degrees, while another set of lawyers argue it must be at least 48 degrees, you’d be hard pressed to say we’re torturing people.”</p></blockquote>
<p>Berenson also doesn&#8217;t cotton to the so-called experts&#8217; insistence that harsh interrogation techniques don’t work on terrorists.  In <em>The Midnight House</em>, he proposes an effective secret interrogation base in Poland where a group of interrogators goes considerably farther than Americans have actually gone — and his main concern is what the adverse effects might be on the good guys, not the bad &#8216;uns.</p>
<p>The Midnight House has been disbanded by the “new administration,” and someone is killing the retired interrogators one by one. CIA agent John Wells, on a well-deserved vacation after saving the nation from yet another big terrorist strike is put on their trail.</p>
<p>Like all of Berenson’s books, <em>The Midnight House</em> is well-researched, intelligent and suspenseful.  Unlike the others, this is not an action-packed yarn where Wells saves the world from terrorists. Rather, this is more of a whodunit with a jaded look at the bureaucracy that “Homeland Security” has become.</p>
<p>This book is less Vince Flynn and more John LeCarre — if LeCarre weren&#8217;t such a pedantic bore, that is.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0399156135?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0399156135" target="_blank"><strong><em>The First Rule</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Robert Crais</strong></p>
<p>Under the media&#8217;s current narrative, private military companies like Blackwater are the bad guys du jour. In Robert Crais’ excellent series of private eye novels, PMC contractor Joe Pike has mostly served as the dark Doc Holliday to series hero Elvis Cole’s Wyatt Earp.</p>
<p><em>The First Rule</em><em> </em>(Simon &amp; Schuster, $26.95) is the second novel featuring Pike, an ex-LAPD patrolman, former Marine, current gun shop owner and sometime mercenary whose protective instincts would even impress Sandra Bullock’s character in <em>The Blind Side.</em></p>
<p>Crais’ recent books have tended to stress the human need for family and the vital role of fatherhood, but Pike here takes on Serbian mobsters whose first rule is the direct opposite &#8212; family is nothing next to the criminal brotherhood.  But when the criminals kill a family that Pike loves, they learn a new primary rule: don’t incur Pike&#8217;s wrath.</p>
<p>The first rule for mystery or suspense fans should be read all the Robert Crais you can get your hands on.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0316045187?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0316045187" target="_blank"><strong><em>Hollywood</em></strong><strong><em> Moon</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Joseph Wambaugh</strong></p>
<p>In the dark days of the &#8217;60s and &#8217;70s, when “pig” was the word of choice for police among elite radicals, real-life L.A. cop Joseph Wambaugh changed the mainstream narrative with such powerful novels as <em>The New Centurions</em> and nonfiction masterpieces like <em>The Onion Field</em>.  The books were dark enough to appeal to critics but also told the truth about policing in a turbulent era. Wambaugh helped restore cops to their rightful place as American literary heroes (and led to a lot of cops taking writing classes hoping to emulate him.)</p>
<p><em>Hollywood Moon</em> (Little, Brown, $26.99) is the third book in his series about the LAPD&#8217;s wild and woolly Hollywood Station. As Wambaugh examines the near-impossibility of doing good police work under the federal oversight placed on the LAPD after the Rodney King riots, he offers a collection of riotous, bawdy, tawdry and tragic vignettes that one might hear a few beers into a good night in a cop bar; the yarns ofter are tied together with one overriding crime or group of criminals.</p>
<p>In <em>Moon</em>, a hen-pecked identity thief decides to recruit his clueless gopher to kidnap his ruthless wife and find out where she’s been hiding all the money they’ve been scamming.</p>
<p>Think of the usual Wambaugh antics taking place under a full moon, and you’ll get the picture.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061929379?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0061929379" target="_blank"><strong><em>Pirate Latitudes</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Michael Crichton</strong></p>
<p>I had to laugh at some of the critics who lamented that <em>Pirate Latitudes </em>(Harper $27.99), Michael Crichton’s last novel, which was posthumously discovered in his computer, was “not up to his usual standards.”  Most of these were the same blowhards who lambasted Crichton for trashing their narrative of man-made global warming in his provocative bestseller, <em>State of Fear</em>.</p>
<p>Crichton’s final novel, however, contains neither a political point nor a warning about the dangers of arrogant technology.  Instead, it’s just a swashbuckling entertainment about a British privateer attacking a Spanish stronghold for king, country&#8211;and a 50 percent share of the booty.</p>
<p><em>Pirate Latitudes</em> has the feel of a very polished first draft or the novelization of an action-packed miniseries, rather than a completed Crichton novel — which makes sense, since it wasn’t.  Still, it&#8217;s a fast moving, thoroughly enjoyable adventure; think <em>The Guns of Navarone</em> meets a Wilbur Smith sea-going swashbuckler. While it may not be as good as either, or up to Crichton’s normal standards, it’s a good, if imperfect, way to say bon voyage to one of the more dominant writers of his generation.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312380429?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=fronmaga-20&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=0312380429" target="_blank"><strong><em>The Lock Artist</em></strong></a><strong> </strong><strong>by Steve Hamilton</strong></p>
<p>As long as we’re talking about books that have no relation to the topic at hand, I&#8217;d like to take a point of personal privilege. I’ve long been an admirer of Steve Hamilton’s Alex McKnight mystery series set in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, describing it as Travis McGee in a cold climate.</p>
<p>After a lackluster stand-alone novel set in upstate New York, Hamilton returns to Michigan for an utterly original thriller set in Milford, one of my favorite small towns in the Detroit metro area.</p>
<p>In <em>The Lock Artist</em> (Minotaur, $25.96) Mike, a mute teenager, is known as “The Miracle Boy” since surviving an infamous atrocity as a toddler. He comes to the attention of an organized crime boss because a high school prank reveals his skill with locks of all kinds to the wrong people.  (On the plus side, it also brings him into contact with the girl of his dreams.)</p>
<p>Like all top thriller writers, Hamilton takes this unusual situation and relates it to everyday emotions and common fears and insecurities, from the longing to fit in, to the satisfaction of being really good at something.</p>
<p>As silent Mike tells his story in flashback from his prison cell, the reader finds an uncommon connection with this anti-hero and will root for him to find redemption.  Even the most jaded mystery readers who think they’ve seen it all will love this one.</p>
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		<title>Remembering the Dream of America</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/remembering-the-dream-of-america/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=remembering-the-dream-of-america</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/dennis-prager/remembering-the-dream-of-america/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 05:00:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Dennis Prager]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=48474</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[What I said to the Republican Members of Congress.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-48476" title="statue" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/statue.jpg" alt="statue" width="524" height="348" /></p>
<p><em>This past weekend, after President Obama addressed the annual retreat of  Republican Members of the House, I, along with my Salem Radio colleague Hugh  Hewitt, and John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, were also invited to address  them.</em></p>
<p><em>This is an abridged and edited version of my  remarks:</em></p>
<p>Thank you for this honor.</p>
<p>I have never been as proud to be a Republican as I have this past year  with your unanimity in opposing Obamacare and the other bills that would  transform   America . Please  know &#8212; you need this feedback &#8212; that your having been able to stand together  and do this has been a luminous moment in Republican Party  history.</p>
<p>I would like show you some of the large themes involved in your present  work.</p>
<p>First theme: It is harder to sell truths than to sell falsehoods.   It is very  easy to say, &#8220;Vote for us and we will give you, we will give you, we will give  you.&#8221; It is much harder to advocate what is right and to say, &#8220;Vote for us, but  no, we won&#8217;t give you&#8221; &#8212; even though that is the more moral and the more  American position. So you have the far more difficult  task.</p>
<p>John Rosemond, who writes books on child rearing, says that the most  important vitamin you can give to a child is Vitamin N, his term for the word  &#8220;No.&#8221; You have given America Vitamin N.</p>
<p>America needs it terribly because of  another way in which God has stacked the deck against the fight for goodness in  human history: Every change for good must be constantly renewed, but changes for  the worse are often permanent. Goodness must be fought for every day, over and  over. That is why every American generation has to be inculcated with American  values. But once the change for bad is made, it is close to irreversible. The  Democratic attempt to vastly expand the state&#8217;s power would likely be a  permanent change for the worse in American life. When they&#8217;re candid, they admit  that the health care bill is their way to get to single-payer medicine and, more  importantly, to a government takeover of another sixth of the American economy.</p>
<p>You have to know how important your work is, and how many of us know  this.</p>
<p>Second theme: You are not fighting liberals. You are fighting the Left.  Democrats were once liberals. But you are not fighting liberals any longer. You  are fighting the Left. And as leftists, they do not like to confront reality,  even if it means rewriting it.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll give you two examples.</p>
<p>This Jew battled to keep the cross in the  Los Angeles  County seal. Liberals and leftists in   California  fought to remove the smallest image &#8212; a cross &#8212; from the county seal. Through  my radio show, on a day&#8217;s notice, we gathered about a thousand people to  demonstrate at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors when the board voted.  The vote went along ideological lines: three liberals to two conservatives, to  remove the cross.</p>
<p>I remember testifying before the supervisors and telling them, &#8220;You are  rewriting our county&#8217;s history. This county was founded by Christians. That&#8217;s  why there&#8217;s a cross. Had it been founded by Wiccans, I would fight to keep a  broom on the seal. But it wasn&#8217;t founded by Wiccans. It was founded by  Christians. That&#8217;s why it&#8217;s named &#8221; Los  Angeles .&#8221; It is not &#8220;Los Secularistos.&#8221; If it were &#8220;Los  Secularistos,&#8221; I would expect an empty seal. But it is not empty. It was founded  by Christians. It&#8217;s not even a religious issue. You&#8217;re rewriting my history. And  it&#8217;s frightening to see you do that.&#8221;</p>
<p>The other example is what is now happening with Scott Brown&#8217;s victory in   Massachusetts .  Everybody knows why he was voted in. It was, after all, Scott &#8220;41&#8243; Brown. We all  knew why he was elected. But if you read left-wing commentators, this history is  being rewritten. They say it had nothing to do with opposing Obamacare. Nothing  to do with it! In the Soviet Union , it took 10  years to write Trotsky out of the Russian Revolution. But this is a rewrite of  history in one week! Scott &#8220;41&#8243; Brown&#8217;s victory was not about opposing  Obamacare.</p>
<p>In fact, the Left argues that the  Massachusetts voters were for the health care bill, but  simply &#8220;wanted to send a message&#8221; to  Washington . I must say the voters of   Massachusetts  are not only not bright, they must be truly stupid if they are for Obamacare and  send the man who will undo Obamacare as a protest on behalf of Obamacare. This  is what we are told by the Left.</p>
<p>Third theme: Most people on the Left are True Believers. This is critical  to understand. They are willing to lose Congress; Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid  are prepared to lose both houses to get this through. Why? Because losing an  election cycle means nothing compared to taking over more of the American  economy.</p>
<p>I can give you an example from our side. There are many folks on our side  who, if they could pass an amendment against abortion, would happily sacrifice  both houses for a period of time. Understand that just as strongly as some are  pro-life or religiously Christian or Jewish, that is how strongly many leftists  believe in leftism. Leftism is a substitute religion. For the Left, the &#8220;health  care&#8221; bill transcends politics. You are fighting people who will go down with  the ship in order to transform this country to a leftist one. And an  ever-expanding state is the Left&#8217;s central credo.</p>
<p>And finally, theme four: I have a motto that I offer to you because this  is the ultimate moral case for us: &#8220;The bigger the government, the smaller the  citizen.&#8221;</p>
<p>We have to learn to make our complex beliefs simple &#8212; though never  simplistic. And this is our powerful response to government doing more and more  for people: &#8220;The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.&#8221;</p>
<p>And here&#8217;s how we explain it: The bigger the government, the less I do  for myself, for my family and for my community. That is why we Americans give  more charity and devote more time to volunteering than Europeans do. The  European knows: The government, the state, will take care of me, my children, my  parents, my neighbors and my community. I don&#8217;t have to do anything. The bigger  question in many Europeans&#8217; lives is, &#8220;How much vacation time will I have and  where will I spend that vacation?&#8221;</p>
<p>That is what happens when the state gets bigger &#8212; you become smaller.  The dream of  America was that the individual was  to be a giant. The state stays small so as to enable each of us to be as big as  we can be. We are each created in God&#8217;s image. The state is not in God&#8217;s image,  but it is vying to be that. This is the battle you&#8217;re fighting. You are fighting  a cosmic battle because this is the most important society ever devised, the   United States of  America .</p>
<p>You  can easily forget the big picture &#8212; how could you not? You&#8217;re there every day,  battling. You are in dense jungle &#8212; excuse me, rainforest &#8212; you are in a  rainforest/jungle, fighting, and I am, because of the nature of my work, in a  little helicopter above the jungle telling you what it is you are fighting.    America really is the last, best hope  of mankind.</p>
<p>That is how important I consider the fights that are going on now,  especially with regard to the takeover of health care. How can they, with a  serious face, tell us that Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security are going  bankrupt, and therefore the solution is to take over more of health care? How  does one say that with a straight face? How does one look a fellow American in  the eye and say, &#8220;Yes, we have failed in almost every way that government has  significantly intruded, and that&#8217;s why we need more government  intrusion&#8221;?</p>
<p>It  is mind-boggling. But that is what has happened. People get smaller and pettier,  as the government and state get bigger. That&#8217;s what you are fighting. And that&#8217;s  why I came to tell you this is the proudest moment in my life as a Republican.  Thank you for doing what you are doing.</p>
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		<title>After Brown victory, Obama struggles to control message &#8211; AP</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/after-brown-victory-obama-struggles-to-control-message-ap/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 06:52:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47826</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[With the president&#8217;s State of the Union address coming up on Wednesday, the White House appears to be struggling to find its feet. Republican Scott Brown&#8217;s surprise victory in liberal Massachusetts has dominated the national conversation in the last week and made Obama&#8217;s goal of signing health care reform impossible before the big speech. Now, [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100126/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1077"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/videolthumb.95fe3d629eea0a4327b7ee7a232edfac.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>With the president&#8217;s State of the Union address coming up on Wednesday, the White House appears to be struggling to find its feet. Republican Scott Brown&#8217;s surprise victory in liberal Massachusetts has dominated the national conversation in the last week and made Obama&#8217;s goal of signing health care reform impossible before the big speech.  Now, even Obama&#8217;s apparent attempt to soothe voters&#8217; budget-deficit concerns by proposing a three-year freeze on some federal spending is being met with ridicule from both the right and the left.</p>
<p>The plan Obama will propose breaks down as follows:</p>
<p>- Freeze discretionary spending on non-security-related programs and government agencies whose budgets are set annually by Congress. Affected programs could include subsidies for farmers, child nutrition, and national parks.</p>
<p>- Exempt from the freeze would be budgets for federal entitlement programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, as well as the budgets for the Pentagon, the Veterans Administration, the Department of Homeland Security, and foreign aid.</p>
<p>The administration claims this will save the country $250 billion over the next decade, or about 3% of the $9 trillion deficits the U.S. is expected to accumulate over that period.</p>
<p>Conservatives have mocked the freeze as not doing nearly enough to get to the root of the country&#8217;s economic problems. The right-leaning blog RedState.com chided the effort, saying that it would have &#8220;virtually no impact on the financial standing of the United States of America.&#8221; On her Twitter page, right-wing commentator Michelle Malkin compared the freeze to &#8220;promising to slow down from 250 mph to 249.9.&#8221; House Minority Leader John Boehner likened the plan to &#8220;announcing you&#8217;re going on a diet after winning a pie-eating contest.&#8221;</p>
<p>via <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ynews/20100126/ts_ynews/ynews_ts1077">After Brown victory, Obama struggles to control message &#8211; Yahoo! News</a>.</p>
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		<title>Great Scott!</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/thomas-sowell/great-scott/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=great-scott</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 05:00:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47787</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Scott Brown’s stunning Senate victory proves that the people are not powerless against bad policies.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47788" title="brown3__1263965364_5222" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown3__1263965364_5222.jpg" alt="brown3__1263965364_5222" width="500" height="368" /></p>
<p>Some of the most melancholy letters and e-mails that are sent to me are from people who lament that there is nothing they can do about the bad policies that they see ruining this country. They don&#8217;t have any media outlet for their opinions and the letters they send to their Congressmen are either ignored or are answered by form letters with weasel words. They feel powerless.</p>
<p>Sometimes I remind them that the whole political establishment — both Democrats and Republicans, as well as the mainstream media — were behind amnesty for illegal immigrants, until the public opinion polls showed that the voters were not buying it. If politicians can&#8217;t do anything else right, they can count votes.</p>
<p>It was the same story with the government&#8217;s health care takeover legislation. The Democrats have such huge majorities in both houses of Congress that they could literally lock the Republicans out of the room where they were deciding what to do, set arbitrary deadlines for votes, and cut off debate in the Senate. The mainstream media was on board with this bill too. To hear the talking heads on TV, you would think it was a done deal.</p>
<p>Then Scott Brown got elected to the &#8220;Kennedy seat&#8221; in the Senate, showing that that seat was not the inheritance of any dynasty to pass on. Moreover, it showed that the voters were already fed up with the Obama administration, even in liberal Massachusetts, as well as in Virginia and New Jersey. The backtracking on health care began immediately. Politicians can count votes. Once again, the public was not helpless.</p>
<p>One seat did not deprive the Democrats of big majorities in Congress. But one seat was the difference between being able to shut off debate in the Senate and having to allow debate on what was in this massive legislation. From day one it was clear that concealing what was in this bill was the key to getting it passed.</p>
<p>That is why there had to be arbitrary deadlines— first to get it passed before the August 2009 recess, then before Labor Day, then before the Christmas recess.</p>
<p>The President could wait months before deciding to give a general the troops he asked for to fight the war in Afghanistan but there was never to be enough time for the health care bill to be exposed in the light of day to the usual Congressional hearings and debate.</p>
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<p>Moreover, despite all the haste, the health care program would not actually go into effect until after the 2012 presidential election. In other words, the public was not supposed to find out whether the government&#8217;s takeover of medical care actually made things better or worse until after it was too late.</p>
<p>Although even the members of Congress who voted on this massive legislation did not have time to read its thousands of pages, just the way it was being rushed through in the dark should have told us all we needed to know. For many voters, that turned out to be enough.</p>
<p>Even after Scott Brown came out of nowhere to make a stunning upset election victory, there were still some cute political tricks that could have been pulled to save the health care bill. But enough Democrats saw the handwriting on the wall that they were not going to risk their own re-election to save this bill that Barack Obama has been hell-bent to pass, even when polls showed repeatedly that the public didn&#8217;t want it.</p>
<p>President Obama&#8217;s desire to do something &#8220;historic&#8221; by succeeding, where previous presidents had failed, was perfectly consistent for a man consumed with his own ego satisfaction, rather than the welfare of the country or even of his own political party.</p>
<p>As for the public, it doesn&#8217;t matter if your Congressman answers your letter with a form letter, or doesn&#8217;t answer at all. What matters is that you let him know what you are for or against and, when enough people do that— whether in letters, in polls or in an election, politicians get the message, because they know their jobs depend on it.</p>
<p>As for what is likely to happen to health care, neither the bill passed by the House of Representatives nor the Senate bill can be expected to be enacted into law. Meanwhile, Obama&#8217;s reaction to his political setback has been to respond rhetorically and to call on the political operatives who helped engineer his successful election campaign in 2008. But the public did not know him then, and his rhetoric may not fool them again, now that they do.</p>
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		<title>Scott Brown is no radical on economics &#8211; Bloomberg.com</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/scott-brown-is-no-radical-on-economics-bloomberg-com/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=scott-brown-is-no-radical-on-economics-bloomberg-com</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 18:20:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47702</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Before and since Scott Brown locked up his Senate victory in Massachusetts, Democrats have tried to portray him as an economically illiterate radical.Senator Charles Schumer of New York distributed a fundraising appeal that called Brown a &#8220;far-right tea bagger,&#8221; an accusation that rose to a chorus after his election. Among serious followers of policy, it [&#8230;]]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.aei.org/article/101572"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/POL-Ele-0102-Stock.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>Before and since Scott Brown locked up his Senate victory in Massachusetts, Democrats have tried to portray him as an economically illiterate radical.Senator Charles Schumer of New York distributed a fundraising appeal that called Brown a &#8220;far-right tea bagger,&#8221; an accusation that rose to a chorus after his election. Among serious followers of policy, it didn&#8217;t help Brown that he once posed nude for Cosmopolitan magazine.The special election in Massachusetts sprung on everyone so quickly that somebody crazy certainly could have slipped through the cracks. A look at Brown&#8217;s platform and economic statements suggests exactly the opposite.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.aei.org/article/101572">Articles &amp; Commentary</a>.</p>
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		<title>Brown’s National Security Victory</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/brown%e2%80%99s-national-security-victory/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=brown%25e2%2580%2599s-national-security-victory</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jamie-glazov/brown%e2%80%99s-national-security-victory/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:27:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47472</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Massachusetts voters reject treating our terrorist enemies like common criminals. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47474" title="Democrats' Bad Week" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown1.jpg" alt="Democrats' Bad Week" width="450" height="323" /></p>
<p>Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute and a columnist for <em>National Review</em>. His book <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Willful-Blindness-Andrew-C-Mccarthy/dp/1594032653/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&amp;s=books&amp;qid=1262125302&amp;sr=8-4">Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad</a> </em>(Encounter Books, 2008), has just been released in paperback with a new preface. Check out <a href="http://www.encounterbooks.com/">a description</a> from Encounter Books.</p>
<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47525" title="andymccarthy" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/andymccarthy.jpg" alt="andymccarthy" width="320" height="240" /></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Andy McCarthy, welcome to Frontpage Interview.</p>
<p>I would like to talk to you today about Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts and how it was the issue of national-security that put Brown over Coakley.</p>
<p>Can you talk a bit about that? The people seemed to have cared about terrorism and the treatment of enemy combatants, yes?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Jamie, great to be here as always.  And you’re right.  The Brown campaign’s internal polling told them something very interesting.  While it’s true that healthcare is what nationalized the election and riveted everyone’s attention to it, it was the national security issues that put real distance between the two candidates in the mind of the electorate—in blue Massachusetts of all places.  Sen.-elect Brown was able to speak forcefully and convincingly on issues like treating our jihadist enemies as combatants rather than mere defendants, about killing terrorists and preventing terrorism rather than contenting ourselves with prosecutions after Americans have been killed, about tough interrogation when necessary to save innocent lives.  Martha Coakley, by contrast, had to try to defend the indefensible, which is Obama-style counterterrorism.  It evidently made a huge difference to voters.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What do you think of how Bush was treated on this whole issue?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>As many of us predicted during the Bush years when the president was being hammered by the Left and the press, history is treating him much more kindly on the national security front.  His movement of the country to a war-footing rather than treating international terrorism as a criminal justice matter was common sense, but common sense cuts against the Washington grain so it took a strong president to do it.  Now, on issue after issue, he is being vindicated—he and Vice President Cheney, who has become the country’s leading voice on national security, after spending years being vilified.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What role did McCain play?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Sen. McCain is, as ever, a mixed bag.  He’s recently been very good on the need to treat the enemy as an enemy, not as a defendant. So that was helpful to Brown. But it can’t be forgotten that McCain was the force behind the libel of Bush as a torture monger and the consequent ruination of our interrogation policy.  And it was the “McCain Amendment” that gave us, as a matter of law, the extension of Fifth Amendment rights to our enemies overseas, which has had awful ramifications even outside the issue of interrogation practices. McCain is responsible for a lot of the fodder that made Obama possible.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> What lessons should Republicans take from Brown’s success?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> These national security positions resonate with voters.  Healthcare, TARP, and the economic issues in general are very important, but they’re complex and make people’s eyes glaze over sometimes.  The national defense issues, besides being the most important ones confronted by a political community, are comparatively easy to wrap your brain around.  And strong, unapologetic national defense in a time of terrorist threat is appealing to voters.  So we should be arguing these issues forcefully, and not worry about the fact that the left-wing legacy media will say nasty things about us.  Their instinctive America-bashing is why they are speaking to—or, better, speaking <em>at</em>—a steadily decreasing audience.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> The Left pretends that its positions in how to confront terror (or not to) are somehow founded on the Constitution. What’s the mindset here?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Yes, because they reject the foundational fact that the Constitution is a compact between the <em>American people</em> and the government they created.  They think every person on planet earth is an American waiting to happen, born with the full panoply of American constitutional rights that can be asserted against the American people.  And they think the courts, rather than being a peer branch of our government, stand over and above our government:  a forum where the rest of the world, including enemies of the United States, is invited to make its case against the United States.  That’s a warped understanding of the Constitution.</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>What hope does Brown’s victory give? What do you think Obama, Holder and Napolitano are thinking – or not thinking?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>Well, I think it’s Brown combined with what’s happened in New Jersey and Virginia, with Obama’s plunging numbers, the unpopularity of the Democrats’ healthcare, employment and national-security policies, and the disgusting wheeling-and-dealing the supposedly “transparent” Left is doing behind close doors (i.e., not on C-SPAN). All these things give hope that freedom is on the march, that people are broadly rejecting statism.  But I don’t think Obama is a normal politician and that his administration is a conventional “let’s modulate to remain viable” administration.</p>
<p>Enacting their agenda is more important to them than being reelected, and they are not to be underestimated.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Why do you think that when I see or think about Janet Napolitano I am engulfed with a profound sense of doom and despair?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> Well, if I have this right, she is an official who is in charge of securing the homeland but &#8212; after ballyhooed, years-long investigations, including by the 9/11 Commissions &#8212; she didn&#8217;t know how the 9/11 hijackers got here, thought they snuck in from Canada, and believes that what they did when they got here was a &#8220;man-caused disaster&#8221; that had nothing to do with jihadist ideology (indeed, she thinks that saying &#8220;jihadist&#8221; is problematic). She does see ideology as a problem, of course, but only if it is &#8230; <em>conservative</em> ideology.  That is, she thinks the <em>real </em>terror threat comes from people with radical ideas like limited government, the sanctity of life, and the Second Amendment &#8212; especially if they&#8217;re military vets who&#8217;ve served in George Bush&#8217;s wars of aggression. And she is in charge of enforcing the immigration laws but wasn&#8217;t aware that entering the country illegally is a criminal offense.</p>
<p>I can&#8217;t imagine why you&#8217;d have a problem with any of that, Jamie.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Who needs horror movies or a tragic film to make you cry when you have things like this to think about?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p>Well, let’s move on:</p>
<p>What was this whole thing about Brown’s pick-up truck and Obama making fun of it? I thought Obama represented the common man?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy:</strong> This president has lived a very different kind of life from most Americans.  He lived his early, formative years in Indonesia, a majority-Muslim police state. After he returned to America at age ten or so, he dove into the fever-swamps of the Left and was steeped in the cynicism and nihilism of Saul Alinsky. For years, he&#8217;s surrounded himself with fawning sycophants who&#8217;ve told him he&#8217;s &#8220;The One.&#8221; And he&#8217;s extremely insulated from the real world of everyday Americans.  I don&#8217;t think the sudden burst of Obama-style populism is going to fly &#8212; and going after Brown&#8217;s pick-up is a good indication of why.  He thinks people who like their pick-up trucks are bitter-clingers.  Actually, they&#8217;re Americans.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Brown vs. Obama, 2012?</p>
<p><strong> </strong></p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>I don’t think we should get ahead of ourselves.  Brown’s an impressive, talented guy, but he’s also someone no one outside of Massachusetts had heard of until a few short weeks ago.  But this does underscore something I’ve been saying for a long time.  As late as 1991, few people really knew who Bill and Hillary Clinton were, and yet they’ve towered over our politics from 1992 forward.  The world changed on a dime on 9/11.</p>
<p>A year ago today, with Pres. Obama just inaugurated and with the Democrats having wide margins in Congress, the Republican party seemed dead and even conservative intellectuals were telling us we had to abandon Reagan conservatism—the conservatism that’s leading us out of the woods.  This is all a long-winded way of saying:  We may not yet know, even today, who the leaders will be when 2012 rolls around.  We’ve got a ton on our plate right now, and the unknown tomorrow.  You know the old saw, “You want to make God laugh—tell Him about your plans.”  Right now, I’m worried about today, and content to figure 2012 will take care of itself.</p>
<p><strong>FP: </strong>Well before we say goodbye for now, what is on your mind the most right now? What can you tell our readers that will give us all some hope that America, despite its current leadership, can prevail against the threats it faces?</p>
<p><strong>McCarthy: </strong>After slumbering for too long, the public &#8212; the great swath of Americans that is basically conservative, patriotic, and thinks the country is the best the world has ever known, not in dire need of transformative &#8220;change&#8221; &#8212; has asserted itself.  But even if he&#8217;s held to one term, Obama will leave us in a deep hole.  The reckless borrowing and spending would take decades to dig out of even if we stopped it tomorrow. There is a lot of mischief a sprawling executive bureaucracy can do in four years, and Obama is likely to stock the federal courts with very left-wing judges who will try to impose transnational progressivism by fiat if the Republicans don&#8217;t have the gumption to stop the president from appointing them.  And that last point is what I think about most.</p>
<p>The challenge for Republicans is not to win the next elections.  The smart Democrats have already factored elections in.  Obama Leftists are not conventional politicians. They are true-believers. Of course they hope their friends at ACORN and similar outfits will soften the blow come November.  But if not, they are willing to endure electoral losses for what they see as the greater good of using this one-time opportunity they have to transform this country radically.</p>
<p>Republicans don&#8217;t so much need a plan to win elections &#8212; the Democrats&#8217; statist policies and their irresponsible positions on national security will take care of that.  Stopping bad government is not enough. Republicans need a plan, after they win elections, to roll back what the Left has done and is doing.  That will require courage and skill.  I hope we have it, but I confess to worrying about whether we do.</p>
<p><strong>FP:</strong> Andy McCarthy, thank you, and a pleasure and honor as always to speak with you.</p>
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		<title>Today, Brown is Golden</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/today-brown-is-golden/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=today-brown-is-golden</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michael-reagan/today-brown-is-golden/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:08:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michael Reagan]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47511</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A stern rebuke of the Democrats’ national agenda.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47514" title="brown" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown.jpg" alt="brown" width="450" height="321" /></p>
<p><span><span>Last Tuesday, the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts sent an incredibly powerful message to the Democrats in Washington that their out-of-control spending and efforts to rush through healthcare legislation will not be tolerated by the electorate. In a stunning upset, Republican Scott Brown defeated his Democratic opponent in the bluest of blue states to capture the United States Senate position left vacant by the passing of the late Ted Kennedy.</span></span></p>
<p>Only a year ago pundits across the nation were proclaiming the Republican Party dead in the water &#8212; causing many Democrats to feel they had free rein. However, things are about to change in a different direction than anticipated by the president just one year ago.</p>
<p>There’s just no way to oversell this victory. Massachusetts hasn’t fielded a Republican Senator for 31 years. Senator-elect Brown will be the only Republican in the entire state delegation to Congress. Less than a year and a half ago, Barack Obama took Massachusetts by 26 points, which makes Scott Brown’s triumph a 31-point reversal.</p>
<p>Today, many Democrats are rushing in to do damage control &#8212; claiming that this was a case of a bad candidate in a challenging local environment, as was also claimed after Republican victories in Virginia and New Jersey earlier this year. However, coming into this race, Martha Coakley was not an unknown commodity who was quickly cast on the most public of stages. Rather, she came into this general election only after having earned her party’s nomination due, in part, to her position as a popular statewide figure who had previously received over 78 percent of the statewide vote earning her the commonwealth’s attorney general position. And she also had one of the strongest political machines in the country at her disposal. No, this was not a case of a bad candidate struggling in a tough local environment. (How anyone could call Massachusetts a tough local environment for a Democrat while maintaining a straight face is beyond me.) This was clearly a rebuke of the Democrats’ national agenda.</p>
<p>And not only did Scott Brown win a political race &#8212; he may have helped delay or defeat one of the most dangerous pieces of legislation to sniff passage in decades. And for Democrats who may hold on to the hope that the Massachusetts results were not about the Democrats’ national agenda &#8212; they only need to be reminded the Republican candidate Brown was victorious in Ted Kennedy’s own precinct.</p>
<p>I don’t often give advice to my friends across the proverbial political aisle, but I feel compelled to do so today. Democrats need to step back and realize that a wave of populism is taking hold in this country, uniting Democrats, Republicans and Independents alike.</p>
<p>If the fact that over 20 percent of registered Democrats in Massachusetts gravitated to the Republican candidate does not help my Democratic friends come to this realization, nothing will. Just 11 percent of voters in Massachusetts are Republicans. Republicans did not carry this victory. The people of Massachusetts did, people of every political stripe.</p>
<p>Democrats need to immediately suspend debate and votes on healthcare legislation until Scott Brown is seated &#8212; as was articulately stated by Democratic Sen. Jim Webb of Virginia. They also need to realize that when polling shows that a mere 38 percent of Americans support that legislation, it is time to make significant changes to their agenda.</p>
<p>It should not be lost on them that the 38 percent number equals former President George W. Bush’s approval at the end of this presidency &#8212; a number that Democrats once pointed to as proof that Americans clearly rebuked the policies of his administration past his final day in office.</p>
<p>Three consecutive times now &#8212; in the races for Governor in New Jersey and Virginia, and now in Massachusetts &#8212; independents have surged against the president and brought the Republican candidate to victory. Now that’s a rebuke!</p>
<p>The results in Massachusetts demonstrate that a tide of real change is finally taking hold in this country &#8212; rejecting excessive spending whether it is promoted by Republicans or Democrats. Republicans would be wise to take advantage of this sweeping movement by returning to their party&#8217;s roots of promoting a smaller, smarter and more efficient government &#8212; a government that is not in the business of running our nation’s healthcare programs.  Working together, holding to Americans&#8217; core principles, and speaking for the people, the Republicans can carry this momentum westward to electoral victory, even in the most blue of states and districts.</p>
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		<title>Conservatives: Beware of McCain Regression Syndrome</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/michellemalkin/conservatives-beware-of-mccain-regression-syndrome/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=conservatives-beware-of-mccain-regression-syndrome</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 22 Jan 2010 05:08:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Michelle Malkin]]></dc:creator>
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Gov. Jane Norton]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47231</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Because McCain isn't going gently into that good night.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47232" title="john_mccain2" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/john_mccain2.jpg" alt="john_mccain2" width="450" height="338" /></p>
<p>Pay attention: In the afterglow of the Massachusetts Miracle, there are flickers of peril for the right. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but like Paul Revere&#8217;s midnight message, consider this warning “a cry of defiance, and not of fear.” Conservatives have worked hard to rebuild after Big Government Republican John McCain&#8217;s defeat. But McCain isn&#8217;t going gently into that good night.</p>
<p>Red Flag No. One: A reader from Arizona informed me the day after the Bay State Bombshell that he had received a robo-call from Massachusetts GOP Sen.-elect Scott Brown. “He basically wanted me to vote for John McCain in November,” the reader said in his description of the automated campaign call supporting the four-term Sen. McCain&#8217;s re-election bid. “No wonder [Brown] said he hadn&#8217;t had any sleep. … He was busy recording phone messages!”</p>
<p>Red Flag No. Two: Also in the wake of the Massachusetts special election, the nation&#8217;s most popular conservative political figure Sarah Palin announced she would be campaigning for her former running mate in Arizona in March. Palin told Facebook followers that she&#8217;s going to “ride the tide with commonsense candidates” and help “heroes and statesmen” like McCain.</p>
<p>Facing mounting conservative opposition in his home state and polls showing him virtually tied with possible GOP challenger and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, McCain welcomed the boost: &#8220;Sarah energized our nation and remains a leading voice in the Republican Party.&#8221;</p>
<p>Savor the irony: After a career spent bashing the right flank of the party, McCain is now clinging to its coattails to save his incumbent hide.</p>
<p>And pay attention to the hidden, more troubling irony: While he runs to the right to protect his seat, McCain&#8217;s political machine is working across the country to install liberal and establishment Republicans to secure his legacy.</p>
<p>In Florida, McCain&#8217;s Country First Political Action Committee is supporting the Senate bid of fellow illegal alien amnesty supporter and global warming alarmist GOP Gov. Charlie Crist, whose crucial 2008 primary endorsement rescued McCain from disaster. Grassroots conservatives support former GOP state House leader Marco Rubio — who is hitting Crist hard for lying to voters about his embrace of President Obama&#8217;s pork-laden, fraud-ridden stimulus package.</p>
<p>In Colorado, McCain and his meddlers infuriated the state party by anointing former Lt.</p>
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<p>Gov. Jane Norton to challenge endangered Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet. She&#8217;s a milquetoast public official who has served on a lot of task forces and GOP clubs — and who happens to be the sister-in-law of big Beltway insider Charlie Black. An estimated 40 percent of her coffers are filled with out-of-state money (and much of that is flowing from the Beltway).</p>
<p>The mini-McCain of Colorado claims to oppose “special interests,” but has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from D.C. lobbyists at McCain&#8217;s behest — stifling the candidacies of strong conservative rivals led by grassroots-supported Weld County District Attorney Ken Buck, an amnesty opponent whose aggressive illegal-immigration prosecutions have earned him the rage of the far left and big-business right. A recent Rasmussen poll showed Buck and GOP candidate Tom Wiens beating Bennet — despite the huge cash and crony advantage of frontrunner and blank-slate Norton.</p>
<p>In California, McCain&#8217;s PAC supports former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina — a celebrity name with deep pockets of her own, massive media exposure and a checkered business record. Fiorina served as the economic adviser to McCain, who supported the $700 billion TARP bailout, the $25 billion auto bailout, a $300 billion mortgage bailout and the first $85 billion AIG bailout. As GOP rival and grassroots-supported Chuck DeVore&#8217;s camp notes, Fiorina has also vacillated publicly over the Obama stimulus. With taxpayer “friends” like this, who needs Democrats?</p>
<p>With all due respect to McCain&#8217;s noble war service, it&#8217;s time to head to the pasture. As the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, he was wrong on the constitutionality of the free-speech-stifling McCain-Feingold campaign finance regulations. He was wrong to side with the junk-science global warming activists in pushing onerous carbon caps on America. He was on the wrong side of every Chicken Little-driven bailout. He was wrong in opposing enhanced CIA interrogation methods that have saved countless American lives and averted jihadi plots. And he was spectacularly wrong in teaming with the open-borders lobby to push a dangerous illegal alien amnesty.</p>
<p>Tea Party activists are rightly outraged by Palin&#8217;s decision to campaign for McCain, whose entrenched incumbency and progressive views are anathema to the movement. At least she has an excuse: She&#8217;s caught between a loyalty rock and a partisan hard place. The conservative base has no such obligations — and it is imperative that they get in the game (as they did in Massachusetts) before it&#8217;s too late. The movement to restore limited government in Washington has come too far, against all odds, to succumb to McCain Regression Syndrome now.</p>
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		<title>Massachusetts to Obama: &#8216;No, You Can&#8217;t!&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/larry-elder/massachusetts-to-obama-no-you-cant/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=massachusetts-to-obama-no-you-cant</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/larry-elder/massachusetts-to-obama-no-you-cant/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 21 Jan 2010 05:10:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=47100</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Brown's astonishing win gives America a new lease on life.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-47102" title="brown5" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown5.gif" alt="brown5" width="450" height="290" /></p>
<p>&#8220;Let me be as clear as I can. There is no way in hell we&#8217;re going to elect a Republican to Ted Kennedy&#8217;s seat. Period.&#8221;</p>
<p>So said the man who finished second in the Democratic Massachusetts primary held to fill the seat occupied for 47 years by the late Sen. Ted Kennedy. State Attorney General Martha Coakley won the primary. Republican state Sen. Scott Brown once trailed her by 30 points in the polls.</p>
<p>On Tuesday, Jan. 19, 2010, Brown defeated Coakley by 5 points. This astonishing Republican win in Massachusetts is a flat-out repudiation of President Barack Obama.</p>
<p>This is now strike five. In 2008, Obama carried New Jersey and Virginia. Last year, he unsuccessfully stumped in both states for Democrats in gubernatorial races. Democrats previously held those seats. He twice flew to Copenhagen, once to lobby for the Chicago Olympics and later to get a meaningful international deal on &#8220;climate change.&#8221; Both times, he came home empty-handed. Now comes Massachusetts. Try to explain that one away.</p>
<p>Massachusetts had not elected a Republican senator since 1972. Its 10-seat House delegation is wall-to-wall Democrats. Obama, in 2008, carried the state by 26 points. Registered Democrats in Massachusetts outnumber registered Republicans by more than 3 to 1.</p>
<p>What happened? One, Obama. Two, the Democratic filibuster-proof Senate supermajority. Three, a party led by like-minded lefties.</p>
<p>But ObamaCare is ground zero. Brown campaigned against it and promised he&#8217;d try to stop it. The unpopular legislation would mandate that everyone carry health insurance. It would force insurance companies to accept those with pre-existing illnesses. It would tax — or, if you prefer, fine — employers for not providing health insurance and individuals for not having it. It would exempt union members from a tax on their employer-provided plans but force nonunion members with similar plans to pay it. Nebraska would get its new Medicaid costs exempted in perpetuity. Louisiana would receive $300 million in goodies.</p>
<p>ObamaCare, according to Obama, promises both deficit neutrality and eventual cost savings. Right. And the legislation ignores the fact that most Americans have and like their current health insurance.</p>
<p>The Democrats misread the country&#8217;s mood. They misunderstood why they won in &#8217;08. They thought that Obama&#8217;s election and their gains in Congress meant not just receptiveness, but an eagerness to embrace a New Enlightenment. They believed that people really want to tax &#8220;the rich,&#8221; to redistribute wealth, to punish success.</p>
<p>So Obama set sail to grow government — to use tax dollars to create &#8220;green jobs,&#8221; to tackle &#8220;climate change&#8221; with onerous regulations on businesses.</p>
<p>He showed the world his un-Bushness by apologizing for America&#8217;s alleged past arrogance and by employing a kinder, gentler approach to what we once called the War on Terror.</p>
<p>He called the passage of the partisan &#8220;stimulus&#8221; bill necessary to prevent unemployment from reaching 8 percent. It is now 10 percent. The bill promised to &#8220;create or save&#8221; millions of jobs. Instead, it created embarrassing headlines about money going to nonexistent ZIP codes and about spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per &#8220;created or saved&#8221; job. Brown called for tax cuts and criticized Obama&#8217;s stimulus plan.</p>
<p>The Obamacrats bailed out insurance companies, car companies and banks. Bank bailout recipients rang up huge profits, repaid the government ahead of schedule and then dealt themselves big bonuses. People looked at all the Wall Streeters in and/or advising the administration and wondered, &#8220;Why did they need our money in the first place?&#8221;</p>
<p>The Boston Massacre dooms ObamaCare — at the very least its current incarnation. It pulls the country back from the brink of this costly, irreversible leap into collectivism. Oh, sure, Democrats have procedural maneuvers to pull it off. But after this wake-up call, let them try. Gone are &#8220;cap and trade&#8221; and a second spendthrift &#8221;stimulus package,&#8221; as well as an attempt at &#8220;immigration reform&#8221; — even as our borders remain scarily porous. With Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security and interest on the federal debt on automatic pilot, ObamaCare was a pillow pressed over the face of the country.</p>
<p>Former Democratic National Chairman Howard Dean, representing the left-left wing of the left-wing party, says Massachusetts means that Democrats should turn further left. Does he know that only 26 percent of Massachusetts voters think RomneyCare, their own version of ObamaCare, is effective?</p>
<p>Dean thinks Democrats wussed out on providing a health insurance &#8220;public option&#8221; and calls the bill a sop to greedy &#8220;special interests.&#8221; Dean is obtuse. Other Democrats will trade ideology for self-preservation. They will reflect and redirect or suffer the consequences.</p>
<p>As for the late Sen. Kennedy, his death opened a seat that guarantees the defeat of ObamaCare 1.0. Kennedy&#8217;s death, therefore, stopped this wide-ranging health care &#8220;reform.&#8221;</p>
<p>And America now has a new lease on life.</p>
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		<title>Republican trounces Coakley for Senate, imperils Obama health plan &#8211; The Boston Globe</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/republican-trounces-coakley-for-senate-imperils-obama-health-plan-the-boston-globe/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=republican-trounces-coakley-for-senate-imperils-obama-health-plan-the-boston-globe</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/republican-trounces-coakley-for-senate-imperils-obama-health-plan-the-boston-globe/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:12:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46989</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Republican Scott P. Brown pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Massachusetts political history last night, defeating Democrat Martha Coakley to become the state’s next US senator and potentially derailing President Obama’s hopes for a health care overhaul. via Republican trounces Coakley for Senate, imperils Obama health plan &#8211; The Boston Globe.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/20/republican_trounces_coakley_for_senate_imperils_obama_health_plan/"><img src='http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/brown_cut__1263963260_6682-2.jpg' alt='' /></a></p>
<p>Republican Scott P. Brown pulled off one of the biggest upsets in Massachusetts political history last night, defeating Democrat Martha Coakley to become the state’s next US senator and potentially derailing President Obama’s hopes for a health care overhaul.</p>
<p>via <a href="http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2010/01/20/republican_trounces_coakley_for_senate_imperils_obama_health_plan/">Republican trounces Coakley for Senate, imperils Obama health plan &#8211; The Boston Globe</a>.</p>
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		<title>How the Democrats Lost Massachusetts</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2010/jlaksin/how-the-democrats-lost-massachusetts/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 20 Jan 2010 07:01:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jacob Laksin]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=46981</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Political excess and an unpopular agenda paved the way for Scott’s Brown’s improbable Senate victory. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-46982" title="539w" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/539w.jpg" alt="539w" width="539" height="338" /></p>
<p>On the one-year anniversary of his presidency, Barack Obama and the Democratic leadership in Congress have received a stinging verdict on their collaborative reign. By <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31674.html">electing</a> Republican Scott Brown over Democratic state Attorney General Martha Coakley to succeed in the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat, the voters of a state that Obama carried by 26 points in 2008 have sent a clear message that the legislative excesses of the majority party are too much for even the residents of the reliably liberal Bay State to bear.</p>
<p>Brown’s <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31674.html">stunning five-point upset victory</a> has already inspired its share of intraparty recrimination, much of it justified. It seems clear, for instance, that Coakley ran an inept and ultimately uninspired campaign, one that <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100120dems_slam_martha_coakleys_political_malpractice/">took victory for granted</a> <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100120dems_slam_martha_coakleys_political_malpractice/"></a>and paid the price for its complacency. One could also argue, as some Democratic insiders have, that the party’s campaign committee failed to foresee the dangers of Brown’s insurgent populist candidacy, intervening to save Coakley’s faltering campaign <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/us_politics/view/20100120dems_slam_martha_coakleys_political_malpractice/">only after it was too late</a>. Whatever the merit of these post-mortems, they also miss the broader lessons of Brown’s seismic triumph.</p>
<p><em>Domestic criminal trials for terrorists are a losing issue for Democrats. </em>Brown scored some of his greatest successes when he assailed Coakley for her stand on national security. Some of Coakley’s wounds were self-inflicted, as when she insisted, against all evidence to the contrary, that there were no terrorists active in Afghanistan. But Brown was also able to tap into the mainstream view, which runs counter to the Obama administration’s policy, that terrorist detainees should not be entitled to criminal protections. In the aftermath of the Christmas terror plot, when aspiring underwear bomber <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2010/01/11/why-the-rich-muslim-boy-became-a-terrorist-by-jamie-glazov/">Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab</a> kept mum after being granted an attorney, there is little public appetite for terrorists with possible knowledge of new plots to be afforded the right to remain silent. Extending these civil liberties to terrorists is not only a national security threat. Brown’s victory suggests that it also a political danger to Democrats.  </p>
<p><em>Even Democratic-leaning states oppose the Democrats’ health care overhaul. </em>In its final poll before the election, the well-regarded Democratic polling firm Public Policy Polling <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_MA_117468963846.pdf">found</a> that the Massachusetts’ electorate was deeply skeptical of the Democrats’ health care plan, with 48 percent of voters opposing the plan. Considering that the state’s 2006 health care law was seen as an early model for the national reform, Brown’s win is the latest indictment of the Democrats’ vision of an expanded government role in health care. Because Coakley was a supporter of health care reform, Brown was able to capitalize on popular skepticism by running as the self-styled “<a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2010/01/19/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry6116071.shtml">41<sup>st</sup> vote</a>” who could stop the health care bill. He will now have the chance to make good on that promise.</p>
<p><em>Independents are disenchanted with the Democratic leadership. </em>While Massachusetts is often seen as a liberal bastion, more than half the electorate is made up of independents. Their support proved critical to Brown’s victory. Even as liberal Boston voted the party line, independent voters from the state’s suburbs <a href="http://news.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20100120state_independents_lead_scott_browns_charge/">turned the tide in Brown’s favor</a>. That follows a pattern in other battleground states, including Virginia and New Jersey, where an independent-led insurgency helped down Democratic incumbents. Against this backlash from independents, President Obama’s influence was ineffectual. Despite a last-minute stumping effort on Coakley’s behalf, Obama did little to help her cause. With his approval rating slipping <a href="http://www.pollster.com/blogs/winston_drop_in_polls_threaten.php">below 50 percent</a>, yesterday’s redeemer of Democratic Party fortunes has become today’s bystander in defeat.</p>
<p><em>The anti-Democratic revolt has crossed party lines.</em> Although Democratic spinmeisters and partisans worked overtime to cast Brown as the tool of hateful right-wing interests and tea-party reactionaries – MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann <a href="http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0110/31648.html">scraped bottom</a> with an unhinged and invective-laden rant assailing Brown as an “irresponsible, homophobic, racist, reactionary, ex-nude-model, tea-bagging supporter of violence against women and against politicians with whom he disagrees” – the discomfiting truth for the party is that Brown’s appeal blurred party lines. Some polls had Brown drawing support from <a href="http://www.publicpolicypolling.com/pdf/PPP_Release_MA_117468963846.pdf">nearly 20 percent</a> of registered Democrats. That Democrats can no longer count on the loyalties of party faithful even in staunchly “blue” states is a poignant commentary on both the failures of Congressional Democratic leadership and a reflection of the growing populist backlash against Democrats’ misrule.</p>
<p>If Brown’s victory represents a severe judgment on the failings of the Democrats’ leadership, it’s not clear that they have gotten the message. One might think that Democrats would be chastened by the Massachusetts results. But the only lesson that Democrats seem to have learned from the race is that they need to be even more arrogant in pursuing an unpopular legislative agenda. When, in the final days of the race, it looked like Brown could indeed win, Democrats floated the idea of ramming the health bill through backchannels – whether by bypassing the Senate altogether and sending the House-approved version straight to President Obama or else by resorting to the “nuclear” option that would allow them to pass the bill with a 51-vote majority. Both options are widely considered political suicide, but such is the Democrats’ commitment to the legislation that even the prospect of certain defeat may be a weak deterrent.</p>
<p>Democrats’ missteps are of course only part of the story of the Massachusetts race. The other is Scott Brown. Savvy, charismatic and clued into voters’ concerns, Brown’s campaign was everything that Coakley’s was not. Both the Coakley campaign and President Obama poked fun at Brown’s regular-guy image – particularly the well-worn GMC truck with which he traversed the state. But it’s Brown who will have the last laugh. In one of his final campaign stops, Brown promised to pack up his “truck and drive it straight to Washington.” Thanks to the Democrats’ blunders and to his political skills, he’s on his way.</p>
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