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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; GOP</title>
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		<title>Amnesty Showdown</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-showdown/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-showdown</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-showdown/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2014 05:54:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246547</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How will the GOP respond to Obama's executive power grab? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-immigration.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246550" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-immigration-401x350.jpg" alt="Barack Obama" width="343" height="299" /></a>On Tuesday, Republicans <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/01/Scalise-Boosts-Yoho-Bill"><span style="color: #1255cc;">met</span></a> behind closed doors to plot their response to President Obama’s unilateral decision to grant de facto amnesty and work permits to five million illegal aliens. That response centers around the House’s control of government spending, and according to sources that contacted Breitbart news, the GOP rank-and-file will be setting the agenda. “It&#8217;s not just for show,” said Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ). “[Party leaders] don&#8217;t want to get something to the floor and then have some big rebellion, they really want to get it right the first time. And they&#8217;ve learned the hard way that the way to do that is to build everything from the bottom up instead of shoving it from the top down.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A number of different options are being considered, but all of them are seemingly aimed at avoiding a government shutdown. That’s because a government shutdown of any kind, regardless of who initiated it, is invariably blamed on the GOP, according to inside-the-beltway thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Columnist Charles Krauthammer <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/01/krauthammer-to-gop-see-a-psychiatrist-for-rage-over-exec-amnesty-dont-vote-for-govt-shutdown-video/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">illuminated</span></a> that reasoning Monday on Fox’s “Special Report” with Bret Baier. &#8220;There’s reality, and there’s the way reality is reported in the media,” he explained.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">We know that you’re right, if there were a government shutdown under these circumstances, it would be Obama being the one shutting it down with a veto. However, we also know that as night follows day, it will be reported everywhere as a Republican shutdown and they will suffer as they suffered last October, 2013, and it was a disaster. Republicans are finally ahead of Democrats in the poll about who do you favor, and this would be the worst time to blow it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">However, one cannot discount the impact the previous government shut down had on the 2014 elections &#8212; which was seemingly not very much. The GOP <a href="http://www.electionprojection.com/2014-elections/races/2014-senate-races.php"><span style="color: #1255cc;">picked</span></a> up at least 8 Senate seats to capture a majority and 11 House seats to strengthen one.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">On the other hand, there is little doubt the media would indeed blame Republicans for any shutdown. Most Republicans apparently understand this and were said to be discussing a normal “omnibus” spending bill, a hybrid “cromnibus” bill that provides a temporary funding extension for immigration, and a number of options for each. The omnibus part of the package would fund most of the government at current spending levels for ten months through September 15, while the cromnibus portion provides the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the government agency that oversees service related to immigration, funding for only a few months. House Speaker Boehner (R-OH) envisions a <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/225690-boehner-backs-two-step-plan"><span style="color: #1255cc;">two-step</span></a> process for passage, holding a vote on the omnibus bill this week, and the cromnibus bill next week.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One of the options being considered was introduced late last month by staunch conservative Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL). The sophomore lawmaker <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/20/Republicans-Leave-Town-Without-A-Plan-To-Fight-Obama"><span style="color: #1255cc;">proposed</span></a> a bill that would rescind the discretion by the executive branch to exempt entire categories of illegal aliens from prosecution and deportation. Though the gesture is chiefly symbolic, Boehner and other GOP leaders have reportedly embraced it as a way to simultaneously assuage conservative GOPers concerns with Obama’s unconstitutional overreach, and move them away from demanding a government shutdown.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In addition, Salmon wants to add language to the omnibus bill preventing the president from issuing work visas to illegals. It is an omnibus package House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said would include 11 appropriation bills, with the separate funding for the DHS maintained on a continuing resolution (CR) that would last until “sometime in March.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Time is of the essence. The current emergency funding keeping the government open expires on Dec. 11, giving the GOP six more days to get their strategic ducks in a row. And despite their cleverness, they still must contend with the reality that outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will scuttle any effort that would accrue to the GOP’s benefit. While Reid <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/house-gop-unveils-omnibus-plan-to-keep-immigration-pressure-on-obama-20141202"><span style="color: #1255cc;">agreed</span></a> to consider a spending package that only funds DHS through March, he said he would only do so if the deal didn’t include any riders unacceptable to his party.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reid stood in stark contrast to the position taken by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. She insisted it would be &#8220;dangerous and irresponsible to engage in stunts and gimmicks affecting funding for the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security.” She was echoed by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who testified at a House hearing Tuesday morning. He claimed temporary funding would make it harder to run his department in an efficient manner. As for Obama, White House Press Secretary John Earnest said the president would prefer a bill covering all spending for the entire year. But he <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/02/us-usa-congress-shutdown-boehner-idUSKCN0JG1MH20141202"><span style="color: #1255cc;">refused</span></a> to say whether the president would veto a bill with short-term funding for the DHS.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Both Houses of Congress are scheduled to go on recess December 12, but Reid <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/225597-reid-senate-might-work-the-week-before-christmas"><span style="color: #1255cc;">warned</span></a> the Senate that it might be necessary to extend their time in Washington through Dec. 19. “We have a lot to do and not a lot of time to accomplish it,” Reid said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One effort is aimed at passing a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-divided-over-renewing-tax-breaks-1417481046"><span style="color: #0433ff;">short-term extension</span></a> of approximately 50 tax breaks benefiting businesses, individuals and nonprofits. The vast majority of them expired at the end of 2013. The extension would last only until the end of the year, but that would allow those breaks to be claimed during next year’s tax-preparation period. The move was precipitated by a veto threat from Obama, <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/225584-house-moves-toward-vote-on-expired-tax-breaks"><span style="color: #1255cc;">undermining</span></a> a two-year, $400 billion deal being worked out between Reid and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI). It would have extended some of those tax breaks for two years and others indefinitely. “We were making really good progress until the president issued a veto threat,” Camp said Monday. “That brought a halt to everything,”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Obama objected to the deal because he considered it too favorable to business, and because it failed to extend an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit set to expire in 2017. The GOP contends those tax breaks have been illegally exploited by taxpayers and illegal aliens fraudulently claiming those credits, further insisting Obama’s recent action on immigration exacerbated the problem. Hence the House&#8217;s $45 billion extension, which could be voted on as early as today.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Democrats have mixed feelings regarding the proposed legislation. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) remained non-committal, Committee member Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA) was adamantly against it, and Rep. Sandy Levin (D-MI), the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, was in favor.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In other words, like everything else being proposed here, the outcome remains in limbo.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Some GOP conservatives still remained wedded to addressing Obama’s lawlessness, regardless of the consequences. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) wants even a short-term extension for the DHS to cut off funding for the president’s immigration agenda, even if the government shuts down as a result. &#8220;It isn’t us bringing about a shutdown,” he insisted. &#8220;We fund everything else, and then the president has to argue that he’s going to shutdown the government in order for him to carry out his lawless, unconstitutional act.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wasn’t buying it. &#8220;We need to quit, you know, kind of rattling the economy with things that are perceived by the voters as disturbing,&#8221; he told a Washington conference.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Voters themselves apparently agree. A Qunnipiac <a href="http://www.quinnipiac.edu/images/polling/us/us11252014_uh2ddgk.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">poll</span></a> released Nov. 25 shows they oppose shutting down “major activities of the federal government&#8221; as a means of blocking Obama’s agenda by a 68-25 percent margin. Even Republican voters oppose the idea by a 47-44 percent margin. “Americans seem divided on immigration, but they agree on one thing: They don’t want a government shutdown over President Obama’s action on immigration,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Those same voters, however, mostly oppose Obama’s immigration agenda. Democrats favor it by a 74-18 percent margin, but Republicans and independent voters oppose it by margins of 75-20 percent, and 51-40 percent, respectively. In short, ambivalence prevails.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">How long it prevails is hard to say. Much of it depends on how far next year&#8217;s GOP congressional majority is willing to go to illuminate the ideological differences between the two parties, and whether they are willing to frame an agenda, or continue reacting to the one proposed by Obama and a Democrat minority.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Immigration aside, it is worth noting that on Monday, America’s national debt <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-01/total-us-debt-rises-over-18-trillion"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reached</span></a> $18 trillion. That number represents a 70 percent increase in the debt amassed during Obamas’s tenure. On Tuesday it was revealed Social Security will become <a href="http://www.mrctv.org/blog/chart-social-security-s-end-date-fast-approaching-far-earlier-expected"><span style="color: #1255cc;">insolvent</span></a> by 2024. That’s 34 years earlier than originally projected. In other words, we remain on an unsustainable trajectory, one driven overwhelmingly by the exponential expansion of government championed by Democrats. Spending cuts aren’t popular, but genuine statesmen propose ideas that put the good of the nation above the good of the party. Embracing such statesmanship seems like a pretty good point of departure for next year’s GOP majority. If nothing else it would stand in stark contrast to the president’s me-first agenda and a Democratic party extremely comfortable with putting its own interests above those of the nation.</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>Pat Caddell: Midterm Elections a Repudiation of Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:52:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245909</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of America's foremost election experts analyzes the GOP's victory at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Pat Caddell&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112328603" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Yes, I’m basically happy.  The person I’m really happy about is that Harry Reid is no longer Majority Leader.  I say that certainly not because I’m a Republican.  I say that because I’m an American and, as I had said on television, he was the greatest danger to democracy, I said this election, that we&#8217;ve ever seen, and his damage to the institution of the Senate where no one was allowed to vote, where there were no amendments, where there were no bills considered unless he wanted to, where he killed all discussion and basically all effective work in the world’s most deliberative body, supposedly.  And what he did with the nuclear option overnight to roll back 250 years of protecting the minority, which now the Democrats are going to find out how much they like that, but all of that and I think for the sake of the democracy, his demise is the biggest and greatest news.  The fact that he stays on only shows you how my party cannot get beyond—he and Nancy Pelosi&#8211;the Democrats cannot get beyond their own myopia and thinking as they have a truly disastrous election.</p>
<p>An election, I want to point out that was not only &#8212; but has many interesting kernels to it.  And I want to say, first of all, and it has many instructions for the future and then it was also about not a lot, not a lot.  The one thing is that, first of all, yes, the Republicans won a big victory and, once again, left amazing possibilities on the table because their consultant, lobbying, whoever controls this Republican Party has the imagination of a French General staff in World War I.  They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into about a dozen states, and they did not put anything into what I thought was a pretty simple election.  First, the Republicans decided they didn’t have anything they were going to offer.  No economic plan, no message, nothing like what happened in &#8217;94 with which was the Contract for America.  Which no one knew what was in the Contract for America, but it set an image for the Republicans that year with Gingrich and the victory that year, which was that at least the Republicans had a plan, had an idea.  We’re most of all united.  Let me just say something about those kinds of things, misreading elections.  Newt Gingrich then misread that election that the country had voted for revolution.  The country had voted to stop Bill Clinton.  There is somewhat of a vast difference there.</p>
<p>This election, let me just say, the success.  I want to talk first about what was left there and then the success.  The strangest thing about the election, for those of you who don’t know, I’m on a program at 7:30 eastern time on Sunday nights live with Doug Schoen and John LeBoutillier called <i>Political Insiders</i> in which we basically try to tell the truth, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have quite a response, and sometimes I get a little carried away.  I called the President last week a raging narcissist, which is true.  The whole problem with this guy is not that he’s a radical Pres &#8212; he’s a raging narcissist, and he’s going to prove it in the next couple of weeks.  But the election hung for a long time.  Those close Senate races hung to the end.  You could not look at the national situation &#8212; the direction of America where it was more than two to one or going in the wrong direction, the President’s job rating poorly, all of his policies under attack and very negatively received, an economy that people believed was not helping them, and all of that &#8212; and you look at the historical record in the six years and you say, “My God, that’s got to be a Republican landslide.”  And then you look down at the individual race and you said, “My God, they’re all close.”  And I kept saying this tension could not hold.  And I thought, as I had said the Sunday before election, there was a good 30 percent chance or more that it would just blow open; that eventually the undecides would move in the direction they should and essentially that’s what happened.</p>
<p>But when I look at the election and say what was possible, and I don’t mean to be a sour note on what makes everyone happy, but it’s important to understand what it may tell you.  In the states that did not have big battleground Senate races, where none of the several billion dollars or $4 billion, whatever was spent, the Republicans put no effort whatsoever.  I had argued, as I had done in &#8217;12, and argued since, hey, this is a pretty simple election.  This is a referendum election.  And why the Republicans refused to take some of that money that they were wasting by piling even more.  For those of you who know economics, know the marginal gain, marginal differentials.  But when you keep pouring money into races where people are saturated beyond belief with television and where you’re watching 50 spots at one time and the whole thing, because of local buy, and the expense the stations are gouging, the people buying the media and whatever, why did the Republican National Committee, which does have the ability to do this, where the Senate can eat it up by national advertising amazes me, why didn’t they put air cover over the race?  Why didn’t they?  Very simple, first of all, remember we’ve had all of these crises.  Starting, you go to the VA, Benghazi, or anything you want to take, White House Secret Service, Bergdahl, on and on and on, a disaster after disaster this year.  And, voters, like all of us, there was one coming every week and then Ebola and ISIS and then you go, my God I forgot about the VA.  Well, in advertising there is a reason they keep reminding you.  So, what I’m wondering is why wasn’t there some kind of effort to put out a message that said to remind.  First of all, all it did was remind people.  Remember this, remember this, and ask a simple question.  Because we knew what the results were.  They were more than two to one people opposed his policies.  Once Obama handed the Republicans and shafted his party with the message that my policies are on the ballad, why didn’t they just quote that.  Put that up and say, “If you disagree with those policies and here’s an example, send him a message.  Vote Republican.”  If you weren’t going to say anything positive, that certainly was a major message.  And guess what, it would’ve been seen by everybody and cheaper and better placement, everywhere across the country.</p>
<p>And you know what would’ve happened?  Let me tell you what happens.  There were 15 House races that were undecided election night.  Most of them line outside of all of these states where the money was spent.  As of to date, nine of those 15 have ended up being won by Democrats because there was no national message.  If you look at Illinois, where the Republican Senate gubernatorial candidate won a surprising victory over one of the most corrupt&#8211;I mean really, I’m broke.  I mean what a disastrous place Illinois is&#8211;after Obama had campaigned for Pat Quinn, the incumbent.  Won by five, six points.  That’s even counting Chicago several times.  But Dick Durbin, the major force in Democrats in the Senate, Democrat Whitt got 53 percent of the vote.  Al Franken got 53 percent of the vote.  You go through some of these races and you think, my God.  Always when we have landslides, we have these surprise upsets.  Like Virginia almost was.  But we have them.  Now Gillespie had no more.  He couldn’t buy media pretty much the last month.  No one was supporting him.  Can you imagine what a little bit more push and a national message would have done or might have opened up in a couple of these Senate races?</p>
<p>Look, the Republicans have their best House position since 1946.  But if you’re going to win an election, take everything off the table you can is my theory.  But, unfortunately, the strategy I described does not enrich the political consultant, lobbyist class in the Republican party, which makes a lot more money by having only state races and does not require them to have any imagination other than storming across no man’s land in the same way they do.</p>
<p>Let me say this.  You look at the exit polls and there are some problems.  When everyone tells you how all the vote came out, let me tell you a dirty little secret for which I will probably be shot for having announced.  At the end of the process, after the votes come in, the people who run the exit poll reweight all of their actual results from the 20,000 people they interview and weight it to the results.  That’s like if you hired me to poll and I said to you, just wait election night I guarantee you I will give you the winner and the right result.  Well, they’ve got some bias problems in there.  So, take some of these divisions skeptically.  So, I went back.  I polled the numbers for the 97 percent before we had the magic of this.  And here’s part of the story of the election.  One, it is that the voters were not rewarding.  And this is important about misreading elections as I pointed out in &#8217;94.</p>
<p>This was a repudiation of the President and his policies and his party.  But it was not an endorsement of the Republican Party by any means.  This was voting for the lesser of which evil that was in front of you and the evil in front of you was the one that was in the White House and in power.  Now, that doesn’t mean the opportunities don’t exist for what you do, but to think that this was an endorsement, because mainly remember I don’t know if you can define.  I don’t know what the campaign was about other than beating Obama.  And in individual races, it worked.  But listen to this, and this goes to a message I’ll talk about at the end in a few minutes about 2016 and what’s coming and a project I’ve been working on.  But I want to tell you this.  What you had was both parties had high negative ratings.  The public was dissatisfied, to say the least, with Obama.  When asked angry or dissatisfied, it was around 60 percent.  The Republican leadership in Congress got the same number, 60 some percent, just to show you, and this is of Republicans.  I mean this is a Republican wave election.  Right?  Republicans are still getting even worse ratings relatively, if you think about how people are voting, than did the Democrats.  All of that pointed to me to the fact that one should be careful; that basically, this was a very dissatisfied election.</p>
<p>Remember, we had a drop off.  This is the lowest midterm election since 1942.  Now, in 1942 there was a reason a lot of people didn’t get to the ballot.  For those of you who are too young to know, there was a thing called World War II going on.  But the results are only slightly better than they were in the 1942 turnout because so many dissatisfied voters where both parties stayed home.  And they depended on area.  Someone has done this.  It’s quite an interesting analysis.  In the third most rural and, therefore, most Republican areas of the country, the turnout was down about 34 percent.  In the exurbs and the suburbs, it was 38 percent decline, and in the urban areas, the urban centers, it was 47 percent.  Now that does not mean that the black vote, for instance, necessarily, and this is where only when we get a genius like Mike Barone you get in the precinct and actual numbers analysis is what we know.  But we have a situation where the exit polls tell us that the black turnout, the African American turnout, was only a point less than it was in 2012.  The Hispanics really stayed home.  But as Tavis Smiley, I agree with Tavis Smiley, if you’re black or Hispanic or of any color, what the hell was your reason to turn out and vote Democratic.  What had you been given, an economy where your income had gone down, where your families are not benefited and where the very wealthy were.  Remember, this is a Fed, appointed by Barrack Obama, propping up the very richest people with this wonderful bond buying plan they had, which has stoked the stock market, but done nothing for ordinary Americans.  And the President can’t understand and the economists say, “Oh my gosh, look how good the economy’s doing.”  Well, the American people have a different perception whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Conservatives.  If they know that they are not doing as well, they know that the jobs being created, thanks in part to Obamacare, more than half of them and a vast majority of them now, are part-time.  People are not working.  They live on the edge and they are still very nervous even though things are getting better.  And that partly is reflected you could see in the exit polls.  Seventy-eight percent of the people thought that they were extremely or very worried about the economy in the next year or so, which is totally different than what we’re being told is the case.</p>
<p>And then finally, one of the points in the exit poll that was interesting was that 3/4th of the American people believe that we were going to have another terrorist attack.  That it was highly likely or more that we would have a terrorist attack.  Those numbers are actually higher than they were after 2001.  And I wonder why?  Well, because if you look to the feckless leadership of this White House.  I mean the only way I can even describe it in foreign policy is feckless.  Whether it is in Iran.  In search of a deal, you have to be panic.  Barrack Obama’s proven one thing.  In search of a deal, he will do anything.  And that’s what’s been happening with Iran.  They’re allowing Iran supposedly to stop their nuclear weapons plan to continue to enrich uranium.  Hardly a prescription.  And if they don’t get an agreement by the 24th, the Iranians have used this time and given up nothing that they said they would.  And we have the person, so you can feel certain at night and not worry, the very woman who crafted the wonderful plan with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration to keep them from having nucs and expanding is the one working with the Iranians that John Kerry has brought in to handle that.</p>
<p>And then we have the Ukraine.  Putin sees the President at this meeting in Asia for two days and immediately starts reinvading Ukraine because he was so amazed with the President’s toughness.</p>
<p>And then finally we do it in a climate deal with Chinese, which is wonderful.  They buy 20/30 somewhere in the future.  They will cut back their CO2 use, but with no plan.  And meanwhile, we’re supposed to cut even more in between.  Once again, the search free deal at all costs.  And it should frighten anybody that for two years this will happen and you have to look to the Republican Congress.</p>
<p>But the President’s lack of behavior during this ISIS, which most Americans support.  Fifty-eight, thirty-seven support.  And yet on the ISIS thing, you have a lot of the people who opposed it, Democrats and Republicans agreed equally in their support, but people who oppose this, Democrat and Republican, who oppose what’s going on with ISIS, voted Republican.  Why?  Because I suspect they think this is not working.  That this is another sham being presented.  And any plan that has five shorties a day for air cover with no one on the ground.  And now our new, in the spirit of Arvin, we are sending in deals to that crack Iraqi Army to take on ISIS, and with what will be, we promise, great results.  That whole unraveling, all of that has made the American people very, very nervous.  And yet the President seems to have learned nothing from the election.</p>
<p>And I want to talk about a couple of issues for now they are very important coming up, and they also relate to the election and what we also know.  And also the question of how the Republicans will behave because I think they’ve behaved badly on many of these issues, and I have said this before at this forum.</p>
<p>Let’s take Obamacare.  What I call the night it was passed, a crime against democracy.  To jam through something without any support, unlike Social Security or Medicare where we had massive support from both parties, jam through with lies.  And, by the way, when we really found out the lies, it was amazing but by, and basically on the basis of bribery.  And all those people this time who voted for it, except for Jeanne Sheehan, were defeated and Franken and Durbin.  But the point is is that the American people have never accepted Obamacare.  We are kept told how great it is.  And then we have this gift of Mr. Gruber.  I just can’t get over him.  All I can think is Goober peas.  Gruber, he’s out there with all his comments.  And the White House denies he had anything to do.  We were paying him $400,000.00 apparently not to do anything except write the plan.  He is a Romney hangover from Romneycare.  Which is one of the reasons I am so unenthusiastic about your last nominee, who should have won the election and lost the election that should never have been lost.  Again, and the same people who came up short in delivering what could have been this year and are running around crowing are the same people who delivered that mistake.</p>
<p>And the Supreme Court ruled Obamacare was legal.  But when John Roberts had that visitation that he wouldn’t be invited to Washington dinner parties anymore after <i>The Washington Post</i> warned him desperately.  Things in Washington, there are certain priorities in life, going to dinner parties.  Apparently, John Roberts is more important than the law.  So he changed his opinion, embarrassingly so, and then decided to call the mandated attacks.  And, as I said at the time, my God, in this terrible disaster, he’s handed one club to the Republicans that they must use, which is that they lied that it was a tax.  Right?  Now, you would have thought the Republican party would have taken that in the Senate and the election and pounded that, and they didn’t and they wouldn’t.  And, to this day, I don’t know.  I can speculate why, but they did not.  That message for the American people, because it was very simple for the Democratic opponents in some of these Senate races that year, which is were you lying.  Were you part of the lie or, if you didn’t know, will you vow to vote to repeal the mandate now that you were lied to too.  It’s only one of two choices.  Either you were fooled or you were part of the fooling of us.</p>
<p>But that kind of thinking doesn’t seem to make it into politics anymore, which I think would’ve been helpful.  I think all along the Republican establishment has been lukewarm about Obamacare.  They have gone through the motions, sometimes these useless repeals.  Why we had useless repeals after 27 of them or whatever after the Supreme Court decision, not move to specifically just repeal the mandate, which would’ve killed healthcare, I do not know.  We’re going to have more opportunities.  But the notion of let’s repeal it all or whatever the strategies are, Obamacare has been proven to be the big lie of American politics.  And the President and now Mr. Gruber has pulled the bandage off so we can all see what was the truth, and we’re hopeful that that will change.</p>
<p>The other issue is immigration.  I listen to the people saying how great things would be.  We’d all be holding hands and jumping up and down because Obama would now embrace the compromise.  So, I’m sitting with Neil Cavuto election night on his show on Fox Business about 10:00, and I’m getting this and someone’s arguing on a panel.  I’m going, wait a minute, didn’t we do this two years ago.  I sat right here while all you people were saying Obama now would have a legacy.  He’s got a second term.  He’ll now work with people.  And didn’t I tell you he just tore the country apart to win and that he hates his other opposition and he’s so arrogant.  I told you there would be no peace.  And now you people think he’s going to do anything.  He’s going to blow the country up.  And all of this we’re going to work together and whatever?  This is a President who has decided that with this immigration move, and here is a very important point if you take nothing back.  And I am going to stress it Sunday because it’s really important. I watched the Sunday shows last week and all of the commentators in the Beltway, all of the wonderful media, and I want to talk about them for one second in a minute.  But all of them talked about this in one sentence.  Well, the Republicans are going to be angry.  It’s going to be a firestorm among the Republicans.  No, the firestorm will be with the American people.</p>
<p>The attitudes on immigration have had a sea change in three months.  In September, Rasmussen had numbers that showed vast majorities of Americans both oppose the President granting amnesty, believe that he did not have the power to do so, and also believed that if they did, the Republicans should take him to court, which people had ridiculed before, and including a large majority of moderates, the most critical group in the election who were normally democratic.  They do not vote like liberals, but they generally follow that and they deserted on immigration.</p>
<p>Everything points to we had a referendum in Oregon election night.  Now, you wouldn’t know this because, even if you go to CNN or whatever, the only thing that you will find that was on the ballot in Oregon was the legalization of marijuana, which CNN and the people in the news organization mainly think that’s probably one of the more important issues.  But they didn’t cover, and they don’t even report to this day on their web site, is there was a ballot measure by the same people, liberal Oregon, which had just voted for marijuana, to allow illegal aliens to have driver’s license.  Almost 70 percent of the vote was no.  Okay?  You want to talk about canaries in the mine.  Actually, the Democrats will have to worry because they blow up the Democratic party with this.  But you know what happened in the election, and I said this weeks before.  I was talking about the sea change on immigration.  The fact that it went to the idea of the President was King, not President, and that even large numbers of Democrats were opposed, and what I didn’t understand is why wasn’t the Republican party making that a direct issue against Democratic candidates.  How are you voting on immigration?  The President’s going to sign this amnesty.  Will you reject the President or not?  Actually, make it explicit particularly in those places where you don’t have a chance.  But they didn’t and I’ll tell you why.</p>
<p>Because the unholy alliance.  And some of you won’t like this, but it’s the truth.  The unholy alliance on immigration is an alliance between unions and the left because they want more cheap votes and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, particularly, and a lot of major Republican donors who want a lot of cheap workers.  And, therefore, and that is best illustrated by <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, which takes all leave of its senses because of their support for total, open borders, along with <i>The New York Times</i>.  That’s when they stroll through the lilies together, skipping through and singing.  This is the problem.  The country doesn’t want this.  The country’s attitudes are changing.  And certainly, by the way, generically, and I love the way the institutions organize and put together the stuff on polling because they try to give a question that will give them some answer.  So, once it was clear that attitudes on immigration change, all of the major mainstream media polling outfits stopped polling on immigration.  As I pointed out, they didn’t even mention it in their election results.</p>
<p>And it goes to the other question.  The President’s right to constitutional power; that he is King.  But I have no confidence when Lindsey Graham, who got, by the way, 54 percent in South Carolina and a black man got 62 percent, tells you what might have been in South Carolina.  Some people, as opponents, are better to be lucky than to be good.  But Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who led the surrender on the appointments when the President was appointing these people on the Labor Practices Commission, laid down on that, which the court ruled unanimously was illegal.  And the Republicans were halfhearted.  It’s like the response when Harry Reid did the nuclear option.  Mitch McConnell and the Republicans could have stopped everything in the Senate.  Everything in the Senate requires unanimous consent, including the prayer in the morning.  Do you know what happens if Mitch McConnell had gotten up and said there will be no more business in this Senate until this is revoked.  You are not going to overnight have a coup de tat against the Constitution of the United States.  A stand for principle for once, the people would’ve supported.  Instead, they just said, “Oh my God, wait until we get to have it.”  It’s just those kinds of things that disillusion Americans.</p>
<p>Finally, the last point I want to really talk about other than the media.  And let me tell you something, whatever goes forward, the true enemy, and I’ve said this for years, is the media.  And it is not because of the truth they tell or the lies they tell, it is what they do not tell.  It is their decision not to report things.  For instance, the Gruber incident as of last night until yesterday morning, once, had been mentioned, only once, on any of the major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS.  Now, of course, CBS news is run by the man whose brother, Ben Rhodes, is the one who manufactured the talking points at Tom Donlan’s direction from Benghazi, and who makes sure to protect Obama.  But, they report nothing.  In the election, its stunning.  Numbers were in 2006, huge percentages.  I think it was like 150 some mentions on the evening news about President Bush being in trouble.  On the three networks this time, it was like 15 or 16.  And on ABC, it was zero.  ABC wasn’t even…and you wonder why interest was lower?  Because a lot of it wasn’t being reported.  And this has got to be taken on at a different level.  Too many Republicans in Washington and the establishment want to have nice relations with the press.  They want to be mentioned in the press.  They want to go along.  There needs to be a war on the press because it goes to the culture and it goes to whether or not we have a Constitution.</p>
<p>I was on the board at West Point.  I watched young men and women who were willing to stand on the ramparts and pledge with their very lives to protect our freedom, who thought it was an honor.  The press, which their ramparts, is a special deal on the First Amendment is that they would protect the American people from power from the Government.  And they have deserted those ramparts.  And in deserting those ramparts, they have endangered the freedom of every American, Democrat, Republican, Liberal or Conservative.  And there has to be a real war here.  And there is not.</p>
<p>You people, it’s like Bill Maher on television.  I mean HBO.  Bill Maher is not practicing free speech.  He’s practicing paid speech.  He gets paid by HBO.  He gets paid by you subscribers.  How many of you people in here subscribe to HBO?  Look.  Come on, let’s all be honest, I mean.  Yeah.  You know what you’re doing, you’re subsidizing all of that because Conservatives don’t know how to fight.  They don’t know how to take on HBO and say, hey, we’re not asking you take Bill Maher off.  How about put someone else on.  I have a friend in mind I would like to mention, but I won’t.  But, put someone on that balances that out or we will all cancel.  Do you know how fast Time-Warner would do if a million people in this country said they would cancel if they did not put a balance on HBO?  But you don’t fight.  You just give in.  It’s like the war on the culture.  This is a time to actually make definitions of these things.  The influence of the culture in Hollywood, as my friend Michael Barnes here says, every day on YouTube and everything else, they get up and then the score is at the end of the day is 845 to nothing.  Imagine if you cut that to two to one in the culture in terms of messaging and real things.</p>
<p>Finally, on 2016.  Nothing can be read from 2014.  The things I talk about is what I have discussed in my Smith Project.  The American people are united about one thing.  They hate the political class in Washington.  They hate the Democrats and Republicans, alike, with that.  They believe they are being screwed by both.  And I would like to remind the Speaker, again last night, Elizabeth Warren’s position about how the banks operate and about how they are getting off.  You know who agrees with that?  About 85 percent of the Republicans and Conservatives.  The entire country understands being screwed by crony capitalism which operates with the Chamber of Commerce and in Washington and the Democrats with all of their energy and all of their building bureaucracies for political machinery.  And they know they’re not being benefited and there is a common sense center that is gigantic, and it is coming.  It didn’t come in this election because we were squeezed between who would be in control of the Senate.</p>
<p>But I will tell you one last thing from the exit polls that has not been discussed.  There was a special sub sample of them, in which they asked people about several candidates would they be a good president.  Hillary Clinton was 42 yes, 53 no.  Then they asked about four Republicans, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Rick Perrin.  On the average, 26 percent said that each of them would make a good president.  On average, 60 to 63 percent said no, they wouldn’t.  And this is in a Republican sweep going on.  And when they asked to how the people would vote in an election, 39 to 40 percent said they would vote Republican.  Thirty-four percent for Hillary.  This is not good news for Hillary at all.  And the balance said that it all depended.  They weren’t sure.  They weren’t particularly happy.  Understand we’re going to have insurgencies in 2016.  The Republican party and for the first time in your lifetime, my lifetime, or anyone’s lifetime.  Well, I guess some people were born in 1940 when you had Wendell Willkie seize the Republican party.  It was an insurgency.  You could have one this year.</p>
<p>And let me give you one last example why.  I’ll give you an issue.  One of the things the American people most are upset about when you ask them about it.  I’ve done it, Heather Higgins has done it, on polling about the exemption for Congress and the Congressional staff in the healthcare bill that the President came down and negotiated with Harry Reid and with John Boehner.  And Boehner was then saying, oh, he was against this exemption except that Harry Reid got ticked off and leaked all the emails where they agreed, they came together, so that they protect the Congress from what the American people were doing.  When you ask that of American people, 2/3rds of Republicans believe that’s the reason to turn every single person in Washington out of office.  You have 15, 18, whatever number of candidates running for President or thinking about running or having dreams and visions of White House and oval offices.  Not a single one of them will raise this issue.  This issue, the agreement between the two parties was that it was not to be discussed in the election, and it wasn’t.  Did you know that?  They had an actual agreement they would not raise this issue.  Do you know what could’ve happened to some of the incumbents, Democrats particularly, who were vulnerable if that had been raised.  And it wasn’t.  And the reason is and that’s what I mean, there is an insurgency.</p>
<p>I will know the Republican party has life when there’s a Republican running for President willing to attack the establishment of his own party the way that Jimmy Carter and others did in the Democratic party that I was involved in in the 70s.  Then you may get somebody who represents the American people.  As long as this is controlled by the people, as I said to you for two years, in Washington whose only real ambition is to hold on to the power they have and the money they make, your prospects in 2016 are dim.</p>
<p>Anyway, thank you very much.</p>
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		<title>The GOP&#8217;s Policy on Iran, ISIS, and Al-Qaeda?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/tomsears/the-gops-policy-on-iran-isis-and-al-qaeda/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-gops-policy-on-iran-isis-and-al-qaeda</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/tomsears/the-gops-policy-on-iran-isis-and-al-qaeda/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 24 Nov 2014 05:04:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Sears]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Cold War]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245680</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[It's high time to tell it like it is about the “facts on the ground.”]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/is.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-245682" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/is.jpg" alt="is" width="279" height="181" /></a>Washington politicians confront new &#8220;facts on the ground&#8221; for the new Congress next year. With the Republican victory returning them to Senate control and buttressing their House majority, the new congressional leadership will face myriad urgent issues on the national security front. Numerous pre-election polls showed the burgeoning concern of voters on these issues. As ISIS and Ebola rose, they witnessed crises literally spanning US borders: from a surge of immigrants from Latin America to jihadist-inspired attacks in Oklahoma, New York and across the northern border with Canada.</p>
<p>Democrat attempts to address these threats have ranged from the ever-shifting &#8220;protocols&#8221; and &#8220;self-quarantine&#8221; guidance of the CDC to “executive amnesty” for millions of illegals&#8212;an unsurprising hodge-podge of responses given the Obama Administration’s perpetual state of political correctness.</p>
<p>That state must be broken if America hopes to address and resuscitate its national security posture. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union (precipitated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, which saw its 25th anniversary last week), the United States has lacked an ordering principle in its foreign and national security policy. Unnecessary, many would answer, with the collapse of the world&#8217;s only other superpower, and its one-party totalitarianism (i.e., Soviet Communism).</p>
<p>While generally atheistic in its implementation historically, communism nonetheless embraced the notion of its inevitable triumph&#8212;bourgeois and capitalist societies would collapse from the pressure of their “internal contradictions.” In this regard, communism was not unlike many other religious faiths. Its tenets promised the ultimate victory of “the proletariat” in realizing the utopian vision of a “classless” society. And in practically all communist countries, these tenets are not optional.</p>
<p>Among today&#8217;s threats, as they pertain to or intersect with radical Islamic and jihadist groups, organizations or nations, America has not reached the clarity and purpose that it attained while confronting and defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War. In order to address our present daunting challenges, and surely those we are yet to confront, the perspective of the American public on this account <em>must</em> be changed. The Obama Administration, in its anti-war, &#8220;lead from behind&#8221; policies, has thoroughly demonstrated not only its resistance to any such effort, but its dedication to an attitude of moral equivalency toward adversaries.</p>
<p>Today’s radical Islamists embrace their own totalitarian ideology. They seek the subjugation of the non-Muslim world in pursuit of a <em>caliphate </em>(a principal objective of ISIS, for instance&#8212;Islamic State of Iraq and Syria), which basically amounts to a nation governed by the doctrine of <em>sharia, </em>or simply stated, Islamic law. ISIS and similar radical organizations (and in the case of Iran, a present-day state) brook no dissent. They have little to no respect for Western notions of human rights or freedom of expression (for instance, brutally repressing women and <em>executing</em> homosexuals and <em>infidels</em>&#8212;non-Muslims).</p>
<p>The threat of Iran, ISIS, Al-Qaeda and associated Muslim radicals represents the same danger that communism did a generation ago. These totalitarian Islamists in their ultimate objectives present an ideological threat every bit as dangerous and existential as that posed by the Soviets to the West, and particularly the United States, during the Cold War. Americans may not know much about ISIS and <em>sharia</em> right now, but they expect their government to protect them. Republicans will be wise to begin speaking plainly about the source of America’s unease with these radicals and the <em>enduring</em> threat they pose. These enemies are committed, they are ambitious, and they mean to defeat us. If Republicans fail in naming these enemies and mustering the national will to confront them, their fortunes at the ballot box will prove trivial in the face of this ascendant religious tyranny. The GOP needs to start telling it like it is about these “facts on the ground.”</p>
<p><em>Tom Sears is the executive director of the &#8220;Center for Military Readiness&#8221; and a member of Andrew McCarthy&#8217;s &#8220;Benghazi Accountability Coalition.&#8221;</em></p>
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		<title>The Politics of Victimhood</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-politics-of-victimhood/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-politics-of-victimhood</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/the-politics-of-victimhood/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Oct 2014 04:09:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[emotion]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gabby Giffords]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gun Control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[John McCain]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243787</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The dishonest tactics of the Left that stifle debate. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/943-dsNVL.AuSt_.55.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243788" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/943-dsNVL.AuSt_.55-450x276.jpg" alt="943-dsNVL.AuSt.55" width="360" height="221" /></a>Originally published by<a href="http://www.hoover.org/research/politics-victimhood"> Defining Ideas</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Gabby Giffords, the former Democratic Congressman from Arizona who was shot in the head at a campaign rally in 2010, has come under fire recently for exploiting her horrific experience for political gain. Using her celebrity as a famous victim of gun violence, Giffords has created a Super PAC, Americans for Responsible Solutions, focused on gun control legislation. Her group has produced political ads for Democratic candidates that feature other victims of gun violence, and that suggest the candidate’s opponent supports policies that contribute to such violence.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Even supporters of Giffords’ own party are uncomfortable with this electoral tactic. At Politico, Alex Isenstadt wrote recently that Giffords “has unleashed some of the nastiest ads of the campaign season, going after GOP candidates in Arizona and New Hampshire with attacks even some longtime supporters say go too far. And Republicans on the receiving end are largely helpless to hit back, knowing a fight with the much-admired survivor is not one they’re likely to win.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Exploiting one’s personal experiences is, of course, nothing new in politics. Ancient Roman candidates were expected to show off their scars earned in fighting for Rome. Marc Antony fired up the Roman people after the assassination of Julius Caesar by brandishing his bloodstained and torn toga. During Reconstruction in the United States,  “waving the bloody shirt” became common among radical Republicans who used the casualties and suffering of the Civil War as a weapon against Southern Democrats.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In those cases, however, it was service and sacrifice in war that were used for political advantage. Today, any sort of suffering from any cause, especially on the part of those considered victims of historical oppression, is used to obscure rational discussion and debate with clouds of pathos and emotion.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The questionable assumption we often accept about suffering is that enduring terrible experiences automatically make one an expert on the broader issues related to the causes of suffering. That’s why like other public victims of gun violence, Giffords has spoken out as if her experience has made her an authority on gun policy. Thus she has attacked politicians for disagreeing with her on the issue of guns not by making a coherent argument, but by conjuring up her own experiences and sentimentalizing other victims of gun violence. Having created a fog of emotion, she then argues for policies, such as more restrictive background checks for those buying guns, even though there is no evidence that such procedures keep guns out of the hands of those determined to get them. After all, the man who shot Giffords had undergone a thorough background check. Worse yet, such emotionalism sets aside the critical Constitutional issue––the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Focusing on any one citizen’s unfortunate experience obscures the fact that public policy affects millions of people with differing views on what aims we collectively pursue and put into law. Moreover, policy must adhere to the constitutional limits on government action and conform to existing law. The complex clash of conflicting beliefs and respect for the law requires clear, coherent thinking of the sort difficult to achieve when issues are clouded with emotion and sentiment. It also requires open deliberation and debate, which are short-circuited by indulgence of the <em>ad misericordiam</em> fallacy, the use of pity, compassion, or sympathy to entice, or browbeat, people into accepting a conclusion not earned by argument. Giffords indulged this fallacy last year when the Senate did not pass gun-control legislation she favored. Speaking of Senators who had voted against the bill, she later wrote, some “looked into my eyes as I talked about being shot in the head at point-blank range.” It may sound harsh, but as <em>National Review</em>’s Kevin Williamson writes, “Being shot in the head by a lunatic does not give one any special grace to pronounce upon public-policy questions.” Nor does it give one the expertise, knowledge, and sober arguments necessary for public political debate on contentious issues.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Another example of the deleterious effects of using personal experience to trump sober reasoning was Republican Senator John McCain’s campaign against waterboarding, in which he freely exploited his own harrowing experience of being brutally tortured as a prisoner of war for six years during the Vietnam conflict. The pathos and horror of that experience made it difficult for critics to appeal to the simple fact that waterboarding was not torture under the U.S. law defining torture.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Yet calling on his own experience at the hands of the North Vietnamese, McCain clouded this critical discussion with lurid emotional appeals to most people’s lack of knowledge about what defines torture in U.S. law, and to their understandable sympathy for McCain’s six years of suffering. As a result, McCain’s efforts gave bipartisan cover to President Obama, who on entering office issued Executive Order 13491, which forbade waterboarding and other enhanced interrogation techniques that had successfully yielded actionable intelligence from enemies of the United States. As a result, our interrogation tools have been severely limited, which has lessened the value of capturing terrorists for interrogation. McCain’s remarkable fortitude and courage in surviving such an experience are worthy of our admiration, but they did not make him an expert on the legal complexities of interrogation, and the grim imperative to extract from terrorists information that could save lives.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Both Giffords and McCain personally suffered horribly so it’s understandable that their experiences would shape their responses to relevant political issues. Yet others use suffering by proxy as a political trump card. In particular, those endorsing identity politics depend on the historical suffering of their group in order to gain political leverage and foreclose deliberation and debate.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Proponents of identity politics define individuals by their race, ethnicity, or sex, which in turn are defined by a history of oppression and exclusion. This history casts members of those groups as victims, no matter how far removed they actually are from oppression today. As victims, then, these groups have grievances that they claim the larger society has a moral obligation to address, mainly in the form of various kinds of reparations, such as affirmative action, government transfers, or other government set-asides based on race or sex. In the political arena of deliberation and debate over policy, the emotions aroused by that historical suffering bestow a specious authority on the self-proclaimed victim, who now is beyond criticism or accountability for the coherence or validity of his arguments. Critics are instantly branded as “insensitive” or “uncaring” at best and “racist” or “sexist” at worst.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Attorney General Eric Holder has been a prominent example of this mentality. During his tenure, he aggressively has attacked states that have legislated voter identification requirements. In his retirement speech he said that protecting “voting rights” was his “top priority” as Attorney General, and he pursued this priority even after the Supreme Court upheld voter identification laws in their 2013 decision of <em>Shelby vs. Holder</em>. His efforts on this issue were predicated on the past history of Jim Crow era restrictions on black voters, a backbone of the segregation outlawed by the 1964 Civil Rights Act.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Holder has consistently referred to that history of discrimination last practiced more than half a century ago. In a 2012 speech before the Council of Black Churches, he subtly linked the Jim Crow voting restrictions to the photo identification laws when he said that these “discriminatory” laws threaten “some of the achievements that defined the civil rights movement”—achievements that “now hang in the balance.” Later on he added, “We have to honor the generations that took extraordinary risks” to gain equal access to the polls, and warned, “this fight must go on.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In July of this year, Holder repeated his commitment to this crusade: “I will not allow people to take away that which people gave their lives to give, and that is the ability for the American people to vote.” These references to the Civil Rights movement suggest that asking for a photo ID before voting is similar to the exclusionary legal restrictions such as literacy tests common in segregated states.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Supporters of Holder’s position have taken the same tact. Commenting on Florida’s pending voter ID legislation in 2012, the Advancement Project warned, “We are particularly concerned about the impact of this election year’s voter removal practice on eligible voters of color protected under the Voting Rights Act, given Florida’s documented history of erroneous discriminatory purges in the past.” The suffering of blacks during the Jim Crow period, which included lynching, legal exclusion, and everyday incidents of brutality and humiliation, has become a proxy for what in fact is, under state law, the mild inconvenience of acquiring a photo ID necessary for scores of other public transactions.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Like Giffords and McCain, Holder also appeals to personal experience. His sister-in-law was one of the students who in 1963 desegregated the University of Alabama, as Governor George Wallace famously blocked the “schoolhouse door.” Linking his own political efforts to this family history and iconic moment in the Civil Rights movement enhances Holder’s authority and provides cover for his constitutionally dubious and politically partisan efforts against red-state governments. Similarly, like many affluent and powerful blacks, Holder is fond of referencing personal experiences, such as being pulled over by the police for no reason, to gain some credibility as a victim of ongoing racism.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">By using suffering as a political trump card, people like Holder not only cloud sober debate with sentiment and emotion, but also shut the debate down by accusing critics of being racists attempting to undo the achievements of the Civil Rights movement. In July of this year, Holder leveled this charge against those protesting his arguably radical politicization of the Department of Justice: “There’s a certain level of vehemence, it seems to me, that’s directed at me [and] directed at the president,” Holder told ABC. “You know, people talking about taking their country back. . . . There’s a certain racial component to this for some people. I don’t think this is the thing that is a main driver, but for some there’s a racial animus.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Some of Holder’s supporters are less restrained. Michael Eric Dyson, a professor at Georgetown University, recently claimed that Holder has “weathered the storm of an enormous racial backlash against black people in power at the top,” and has had to endure “vicious and acrimonious, if you will, articulations by people in the Senate” disturbed by “American power in a black man.” Such <em>ad hominem</em>smears short-circuit a public discussion of the issues and policies Holder and others pursue.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The trump card of suffering might be politically useful, but using it is a dishonest tactic that inhibits informed deliberation and debate. Relying on emotion and sentiment, no matter how understandable they are as a response to suffering, have since ancient Athens been the agents of bad policies and dangerous political decisions, and tactics for pursuing political advantage at the expense of the public good. They have no place in our already conflicted and divisive public political discourse.</p>
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		<title>Why Republicans Don&#8217;t Get It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-republicans-dont-get-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-republicans-dont-get-it</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:47:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243544</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The folly of sidelining the conservative base. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aaavote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243546" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aaavote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="331" height="248" /></a>A new poll this week shows 2012 presidential nominee and 2008 primary candidate Mitt Romney leading the field of potential 2016 Republican candidates. According to ABC News/Washington Post, 21 percent of Republican voters would vote for Romney in the primaries; Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee tie at 10 percent, followed by Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. Altogether, some 44 percent of Republican primary voters want an &#8220;establishment&#8221; candidate — by which we mean a candidate for whom social issues are secondary, immigration reform is primary and economics dominates.</p>
<p>The establishment donors on the coasts see this poll and believe that a consolidated funding effort mobilized behind the Chosen One (Romney, Bush, Christie or Ryan) could avoid a messy primary and keep the powder dry for a 2016 showdown with Hillary.</p>
<p>The conservative base knows this, and they groan.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s because the conservative base understands that what motivates them is not the marginal tax rate — nobody in the country knows, offhand, his or her effective tax rate — but values. And none of the top priorities for Republican donors match the fire-in-the-belly issues that motivate the folks who knock on doors, phone bank and provide the under-$50 donations that could power a Republican to victory.</p>
<p>The divide between the establishment and the base represents a divide between the wallet and the working man, the penthouse and the pews, the Ivy Leagues and the homeschools. Which is why Republican leadership quietly assures its top donors that should Republicans win the Senate, their first legislative push will encompass corporate tax reform and immigration reform.</p>
<p>They will not push primarily for border security, or for protection of religious freedom, or for repeal of Common Core. They will not use their opportunity to govern as an opportunity to draw contrast between conservatism and leftism. Instead, they will seek &#8220;common ground&#8221; in a vain attempt to show the American people that efficiency deserves re-election.</p>
<p>And the American people will go to sleep, conservatives will vomit in their mouths, and leftists will demonize Republicans all the same.</p>
<p>Conservatives understand that politics simply reflect underlying values. That&#8217;s why they are passionate. They don&#8217;t vote their pocketbooks. They vote their guts, and their guts tell them that leftism is immoral on the most basic level.</p>
<p>Republicans, on the other hand, believe that politics are just business by other means. That means that Republicans think Americans, left and right, share the same underlying values. That&#8217;s a lie, and it&#8217;s a self-defeating lie at that.</p>
<p>Until Republicans begin to appreciate the moral conflict between right and left, they will dishearten the right and provide easy targets for the left. The nominee won&#8217;t matter; elections won&#8217;t matter. And the alienation of the American conservative will deepen and broaden, until, one day, it bursts forth with a renewed fire that consumes the Republican Party whole.</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>Lois Lerner&#8217;s Vendetta</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/lois-lerners-vendetta/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lois-lerners-vendetta</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 04:45:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Toxic partisanship revealed in new emails. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237489" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium.jpg" alt="medium" width="303" height="240" /></a>House Republicans have released a Lois Lerner <a href="http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/lerner_email_a.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">email</span></a> exchange from November 2012 that “clearly demonstrates why Ms. Lerner not only targeted conservatives, but denied such groups their rights to due process and equal protection under the law,” wrote House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R-MI) in a <a href="http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/camp_to_holder_-_referral_supplement_7_30_2014.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">letter</span></a> to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The emails were part of additional evidence the Committee turned over to the Justice Department (DOJ) to support a thorough investigation of the IRS’s criminal behavior. “While the Committee has not seen an evidence of a serious investigation by your Department, it is my sincere hope that in light of this new strong evidence that you immediately begin aggressively investigating this matter or appoint a special counsel. The failure to do so will only further erode public trust in not only the IRS, but the Department as well,” Camp warned.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The emails are indeed damning, and they were sent by Blackberry while Lerner was apparently traveling in Great Britain. Lerner begins an exchange with a personal associate who <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/irs-official-called-gop-crazies-email-24774313"><span style="color: #1255cc;">did not work</span></a> at the IRS, during which the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit makes no effort to hide her contempt.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Lerner begins this part of the exchange by saying she overheard some women say America was bankrupt and &#8220;going down the tubes.” The friend replies, “You should hear the whacko wing of the GOP. The US is through; too many foreigners sucking the teat; time to hunker down buy ammo and food, and prepare for the end. The right wing radio shows are scary to listen to.” Lerner responds, “Great. Maybe we are through if there are that many assholes.” The friend replies, “And I’m talking about the hosts of the show. The callers are rabid.” Lerner responds, “So we don’t have to worry about aliens terRorists (sic). It’s our own crazies that will take us down.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Camp is using this information to make the case that Lerner’s bias is self-apparent, and that the DOJ should get more involved in reviewing her, along with the IRS. He also reiterated his contention that Holder <a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/213792-new-emails-lerner-cursed-conservatives"><span style="color: #1255cc;">has yet</span></a> to make a determined effort to do so. “Despite the serious investigation and evidence this Committee has undertaken into the IRS’s targeting of individuals for their beliefs, there is no indication that DOJ is taking this matter seriously,” he said in a statement. “In light of this new information, I hope DOJ will aggressively pursue this case and finally appoint a special counsel, so the full truth can be revealed and justice is served.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In his letter to Holder, Camp reveals that the Committee also discovered that Lerner used her personal email account for official business “including confidential return information” and noted that the DOJ could use its resources to discover “whether there was unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information in violation of the law.” Camp further refers to an email dated February 22, 2012, in which Lerner contacted an IT professional about a “Virus on Home PC,’” further indicating  she kept work info on her home computer, “some of which may have been lost.” Lerner speculates that her computer may have been hacked “because my password was too simple,” raising additional concerns that taxpayer information may have been leaked.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“Leaked” may be too kind. In April, the House Oversight Committee released <a href="http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FN-Combined.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">IRS emails</span></a> revealing that staff members for the Committee&#8217;s Democratic Ranking Member, Elijah Cummings (D-MD), had a number of <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/04/09/new-emaisl-show-lois-lerner-fed-information-about-true-the-vote-to-democrat-elijah-cummings-n1822247"><span style="color: #1255cc;">exchanges</span></a> with the agency in 2012 and 2013 regarding True the Vote, a conservative entity that focuses on the prevention of vote fraud. Because the IRS and Cummings&#8217; staff asked for nearly identical information from True the Vote, there is a strong indication there was a coordinated and improper effort to share confidential information. Prior to this revelation, Cummings claimed no such communication had occurred and he labeled the IRS investigation a “witch hunt.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Lerner was directly involved in attempting to get True the Vote information to Cummings. In an email exchange with deputy Holly Paz, who has since been put on administrative leave, Lerner asked, “Did we find anything?” Paz said no, and Lerner replied, “Thanks, check tomorrow please.” The exchange occurred January 28, three days after Cummings staffers asked for info.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The latest revelations about Lerner follow an equally damning April 2013 exchange revealed earlier this month by the Committee. In that one, Lerner <a href="http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/lois-lerner-email-we-need-to-be-cautious-about-what-we-say-in-emails/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">expresses</span></a> the need to be “cautious about what we say in emails” because they might be part of a Congressional search. She then wonders about whether conversations contained by the OCS, the IRS’s internal messaging system, are “searchable.” &#8220;[Instant] messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exists within the software,&#8221; an IRS official wrote back. &#8220;My general recommendation is to treat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somewhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">&#8220;Perfect,&#8221; Lerner replied.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And of course <i>that</i> revelation, indicating that IRS officials may have routinely communicated through a system that wasn’t archived, follows the incredulous assertion last month by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen that two years&#8217; worth of Lerner’s emails were “lost” because her computer <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-lost-lois-lerners-emails-in-tea-party-probe/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">crashed</span></a> in 2011—and her hard drive had been <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/06/20/IRS-Head-Defends-Destruction-Lois-Lerner-s-Hard-Drive"><span style="color: #1255cc;">thrown away</span></a>. It was a revelation the agency withheld from the Committee for over a year, while it <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-leader-subpoenas-irs-chief-over-missing-emails/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">violates</span></a> the Federal Records Act (FRA) requiring the IRS to preserve key documents. Since then, deputy associate chief counsel<b> </b>Thomas Kane told the Committee that some of those emails might be available on backup tapes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/07/21/six-questions-from-it-experts-about-the-missing-irs-emails/">Six questions</a></span> posed by Barbara Rembiesa, president and founder of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM), a group of IT experts, provided a roadmap for getting to the truth. The first one, &#8220;What happened to the IRS’s IT asset managers who appear to have disappeared at a key juncture?” is followed by a revelation that at least three of the IRS’s IT managers were indeed moved out of their positions around the time the May 2013 Inspector General’s (IG) <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">report</span></a> detailing the agency’s improper targeting tactics was released. Other probing questions concern the lack of documentation proving Lerner’s hard drive was destroyed, by whom, and IRS policies and procedures for document preservation and disaster-recovery.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The final question was prophetic: &#8220;Where are Lois Lerner’s Blackberry e-mails?” Rembiesa pressed that particular issue. “It is difficult to imagine that none of the emails in question were done on a mobile basis,” she said. “If so, there may be a freestanding stream of email records that would not be impacted by the Lerner hard drive loss.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Two federal judges have made it clear IRS stonewalling on the issue is no longer acceptable. On July 10, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the agency 30 days to submit a written explanation—under oath—explaining how it lost the emails. The ruling was a response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. A day later, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2014/07/11/second-federal-judge-wants-info-on-lost-irs-emails"><span style="color: #1255cc;">demanded</span></a> to know what became of Lerner’s hard drive. If it was destroyed, he wants a sworn affidavit to that effect. He also wants information about the IG&#8217;s investigation. Walton’s ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by True the Vote, who is also asking the judge to appoint an independent expert to investigate the lost emails. True the Vote’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, explained why. &#8220;We don&#8217;t trust the IRS,” she told Walton.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Judicial Watch’s Jay Sekulow is calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor based on <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/jw-obtains-irs-documents-showing-lerner-contact-doj-potential-prosecution-tax-exempt-groups/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">emails</span></a> between Lerner and the DOJ regarding the targeting of conservative groups, as well as the reality that the DOJ investigation (such as it is) is being conducted by Barbara Bosserman. Bosserman is an attorney from the DOJ&#8217;s Civil Right division, not the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division that handles public corruption. She has also been a campaign contributor to President Obama and the Democratic Party, presenting what Sekulow, as well as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368132/real-and-perceived-bias-irs-investigation-hans-von-spakovsky"><span style="color: #1255cc;">members</span></a> of the Committee, consider a blatant “conflict of interest.” &#8220;There could be no more clear example of the need to appoint a truly objective and independent prosecutor than in this case,” Sekulow <a href="http://aclj.org/free-speech-2/testifying-before-congress-doj-compromised-justice-demands-special-counsel"><span style="color: #1255cc;">contends</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s not going to happen. It would be up to Eric Holder to do so, and the most transparently political Attorney General in more than forty years isn’t about to let it happen.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the meantime, Lois Lerner remains in the eye of the storm. And what little information has been gleaned from those emails discovered so far reveals her to be every bit the partisan hack those victimized by her efforts have accused her of being.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Committee should continue its investigation, but in a very measured way: it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Lerner’s emails exist, that they contain no more incriminating information, and that IRS officials who hid the revelation about their destruction are waiting to spring a politically-calculated trap aimed at blowing the investigation out of the water. If that possibility sound conspiratorial, Americans should ask themselves if a year ago, they could have imagined an Obama administration abetting human trafficking by allowing a wholesale invasion of our Southwest border, and shipping thousands of illegal aliens around the nation—in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/25/Over-200-Illegal-Immigrant-Children-Shipped-to-Indiana"><span style="color: #1255cc;">secret</span></a>. When the one rule that governs the implementation of one’s agenda is “by any means necessary,” all things are possible.</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>Cruz&#8217;ing the Tea Party/Republican Divide &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/jamie-glazov/cruzing-the-tea-partyrepublican-divide-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cruzing-the-tea-partyrepublican-divide-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 05 Jun 2014 04:30:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Jamie Glazov]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Bill Whittle, Karen Siegemund and Mell Flynn shed light on the GOP’s discomfort with grassroots conservatism.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boehnercruz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226650" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/boehnercruz-450x225.jpg" alt="boehnercruz" width="315" height="158" /></a>[<a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong> to <i>The Glazov Gang</i> and </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>LIKE</b></a><strong> it on </strong><a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang"><b>Facebook.]</b></a></p>
<p>This week&#8217;s <a href="https://www.facebook.com/glazovgang">Glazov Gang</a>, guest-hosted by superstar Josh Brewster, was joined by  Titans <strong>Karen Siegemund</strong>, Founder of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/RageAgainstTheMedia">Rage Against the Media</a>, <strong>Bill Whittle</strong> from <a href="https://www.billwhittle.com/">BillWhittle.com</a> and <a href="http://truthrevolt.org" target="_blank">TruthRevolt.org,</a> and <strong>Mell Flynn</strong>, President of <a href="https://www.facebook.com/groups/hollywoodrepubilcans/">Hollywood Congress of Republicans</a>.</p>
<p>The Gang gathered to discuss <em>Cruz&#8217;ing the Tea Party/Republican Divide, </em>analyzing the GOP’s discomfort with grassroots conservatism.<em><br />
</em></p>
<p>The Titans also focused on &#8220;<em>A Jailed Marine and a Silent Commander-in-Chief</em>,&#8221; &#8220;<em>The VA Hospital Scandal and Double Standards</em>,&#8221; &#8220;<em>Ted Cruz Rising</em>,&#8221; &#8220;<em>The Growing American Police State?</em>&#8221; and much, much more.</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss it!</p>
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		<title>Condoleezza Rice Takes on Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/joseph-klein/condoleezza-rice-takes-on-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=condoleezza-rice-takes-on-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 31 Mar 2014 04:53:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Joseph Klein]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Is the GOP finally ready to take the gloves off on foreign policy? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/condi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-222271" alt="condi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/condi-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice – our last competent Secretary of State – has been aggressive in criticizing President Obama&#8217;s failed foreign policy. And she has the experience and expertise to do so with authority. While nobody really expects the Obama administration or most Democrats in Congress to pay Dr. Rice any heed, the Republican Party better be listening and raise its collective voice against the dangerous path that Obama is taking this country down. </span></p>
<p>Dr. Rice is particularly concerned with the “vacuum” in world leadership resulting from the Obama administration’s leading from behind policies. The vacuum is being filled by the likes of Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Dr. Rice wrote in an op-ed article appearing in the Washington Post on March 7<sup>th</sup>, “dictators and extremists across the globe will be emboldened” if the United States abandons muscular diplomacy and eschews its global responsibilities as the leader of the free world.</p>
<p>The Obama administration’s attempt to extend “hands of friendship to our adversaries, sometimes at the expense of our friends,” such as the administration’s “reset” button with Russia, has obviously not worked, Dr. Rice has pointed out.</p>
<p>For those who might say that Condoleezza Rice is hypocritically skipping over Russia’s push into Georgia in 2008 during the presidency of George W. Bush while she criticizes the Obama administration’s ineffectiveness in dealing with the Ukraine crisis, Rice set the record straight in her op-ed article:</p>
<blockquote><p>After Russia invaded Georgia in 2008, the United States sent ships into the Black Sea, airlifted Georgian military forces from Iraq back to their home bases and sent humanitarian aid. Russia was denied its ultimate goal of overthrowing the democratically elected government, an admission made to me by the Russian foreign minister.</p>
<p>But even those modest steps did not hold. Despite Russia’s continued occupation of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, the diplomatic isolation waned and then the Obama administration’s ‘reset’ led to an abrupt revision of plans to deploy missile defense components in the Czech Republic and Poland.</p></blockquote>
<p>President Obama said last week in The Hague that he was “much more concerned when it comes to our security with the prospect of a nuclear weapon going off in Manhattan” than he was about any threat from Russia. Fair enough, but Obama’s agreement to fruitless negotiations with Iran and easing the pressure of sanctions in the meantime, while Iran advances its nuclear arms and missile delivery programs, is making that nightmare more likely. So is his failure to deal adequately with the spread of al Qaeda and its affiliates throughout the Middle East and Africa, as well as the infiltration of Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Latin America. And rather than worry about the real threat of nuclear and chemical weapons of mass destruction in the hands of terrorists as the most significant threat to homeland security, why is Obama’s Secretary of State John Kerry foolishly declaring that “climate change can now be considered the world’s largest weapon of mass destruction, perhaps even the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction?”</p>
<p>Dr. Rice expressed particular concern that withdrawing U.S. troops from Afghanistan without a reasonable amount of residual military presence may repeat the disastrous aftermath of the Obama administration’s precipitous decision to withdraw all American troops from Iraq. Al Qaeda returned with a vengeance to launch widespread lethal attacks in Iraq and threaten its viability after they had been largely defeated as a result of the successful surge that President George W. Bush had ordered in the face of opposition by then Senator Obama, John Kerry and many other members of the Democratic Party of Defeat.</p>
<p>Addressing more than two thousand people attending the National Republican Congressional Committee’s annual dinner on March 26<sup>th</sup>, Dr. Rice also warned about the dangerous consequences of a shrinking military budget:</p>
<blockquote><p>Our values and our interests require defense. As Ronald Reagan famously said, peace really only comes through strength. What are we doing? What are we doing when we&#8217;re talking about a defense budget that is so small that our military starts to tell us that we may not in fact be able to carry out all of the requirements put upon it?</p></blockquote>
<p>President Obama wants to reduce the force level of the United States Army to its smallest size since 1940 and drop an entire class of Air Force attack jets.</p>
<p>While understanding the weariness of the American people after two long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and more than a decade fighting global terrorism, Dr. Rice said that “leaders can&#8217;t afford to get tired. Leaders can&#8217;t afford to be weary.”</p>
<p>The Obama administration is operating on the dangerous assumption that America can lead from behind by relying on our European allies, even though they are unable to get their act together to take any effective measures against Russia over Ukraine, for example. President Obama also hides behind the apron strings of the fuzzy norms of international law, which he insists everyone in the 21<sup>st</sup> century is expected to follow as a matter of course. President Obama believes that even the Iranian regime can be dealt with rationally in good faith negotiations. This is the same regime ruled by Ayatollah Khamenei, who reportedly issued a fatwah declaring that he must be obeyed as the &#8220;representative of the Prophet Muhammad and [Shi'ism's] 12th Imam on Earth.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unfortunately, what President Obama says in his speeches regarding how he thinks all world leaders should act bears little resemblance to how the leaders of our adversaries are actually acting in the real world.</p>
<p>Republican leaders in Congress and elsewhere need to follow Dr. Rice’s example and directly challenge the basic tenets of Obama’s foreign policy. They need to clearly contrast Obama’s tenets with the principles that Republicans stand for, which if implemented will keep the United States and its allies free and secure. The United States must lead from the front, not from behind as Obama would prefer. An American president should give America’s allies such as Israel the benefit of the doubt, not those who time and again have proven that their word cannot be trusted as President Obama has tended to do. As Putin follows a more aggressive foreign policy and jihadists are expanding their bases of operations, now is not the time to radically cut America’s military defenses as President Obama wants to do. Peace is truly won through strength, not by planned weakness in cutting the U.S. military down to size in order to supposedly improve America’s image in parts of the world where we are not liked. As jihadists, who want to kill as many Americans as they can, get closer to possessing weapons of mass destruction, now is not the time for John Kerry to raise a red herring about climate change as possibly “the world’s most fearsome weapon of mass destruction.” In fact, to achieve energy independence for the United States and our European allies, the radical environmentalists should be told to return to their environmentally protected shells while such initiatives as the Keystone Pipeline and the export of liquefied natural gas are finally allowed to go forward.</p>
<p>Few Republican leaders in Congress have been as bold to date as Dr. Rice in directly challenging the foundational principles that animate the Obama administration’s foreign policy and have led to disastrous outcomes. Some are all too willing to give President Obama the benefit of the doubt, a courtesy that Democrats including Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, former Senator (now Secretary of State) John Kerry and Barack Obama himself refused to do in their relentless and at times vicious attacks on President George W. Bush’s foreign policies. It would be perfectly appropriate for Republicans to point out that while Bush’s surge was widely credited with winning the war in Iraq against the insurgents, Obama’s decision to withdraw all troops from Iraq managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. And it would also be perfectly appropriate for Republicans to point out that while Ronald Reagan helped win the Cold War, leading to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Obama is managing to midwife the rebirth of the Russian empire.</p>
<p>When some Republican congressional leaders such as Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham do level a sharp criticism, it tends to deal with specific episodes such as the Obama administration’s mishandling of the Benghazi debacle. Hopefully, as it becomes painfully obvious by mid-summer to all but the willfully ignorant that there will never be a verifiable deal with the Iranian regime to dismantle Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities and to curb its missile program, Republicans will insist on the passage of new sanctions against Iran and work with like-minded Democrats to ensure veto-proof majorities.</p>
<p>The world is a far more dangerous place than when President Obama first took office in 2009. A fundamental reason, as Condoleezza Rice said in her speech at the 2012 Republican Convention, is that under President Obama’s watch the world does not know where America stands. “You see,” she said, “when the friends or foes alike don&#8217;t know the answer to that question, unambiguously and clearly, the world is likely to be a more dangerous and chaotic place.”</p>
<p>This should be the key foreign policy message during both the 2014 midterm election campaign and in 2016. Particularly if Hillary Clinton runs for president, perhaps the Republican slogan against candidates from the Democratic Party of Defeat can be “Strong American leadership DOES make a difference.”</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>A Silver Lining for GOP Senate Hopes</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 04:23:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left is no longer enamored with stat guru Nate Silver. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221807" alt="vote-here" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vote-here.jpg" width="269" height="201" /></a>Statistical wunderkind Nate Silver, who analyzes baseball and elections, has bad news for Democrats. Appearing Sunday on ABC&#8217;s </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">This Week, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Silver </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/23/Nate-Silver-60-Chance-GOP-Takes-Back-Senate">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reporter Jonathan Karl that Republicans have a 60 percent chance to win the six seats they need to regain control of the Senate in November. &#8220;What&#8217;s the projection, how many are they going pick up?&#8221; Karl asked. &#8220;Exactly six,&#8221; Silver replied. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unsurprisingly, Democrats were not amused. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) executive director Guy Cecil </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/24/dscc-pushes-back-against-nate-silver/">fired back</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in a memo released yesterday morning. &#8220;Nate Silver and the staff at FiveThirtyEight are doing groundbreaking work, but, as they have noted, they have to base their forecasts on a scarce supply of public polls,&#8221; Cecil declared. &#8220;In some cases more than half of these polls come from GOP polling outfits. This was one reason why FiveThirtyEight forecasts in North Dakota and Montana were so far off in 2012. In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecasted a 61% likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority. Three months later Democrats went on to win 55 seats.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cecil&#8217;s memo is deliberately selective. Silver, who is editor-in-chief of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fivethirtyeight-senate-forecast/">FiveThirtyEight</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a website he recently </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/five-thirty-eight-espn-nate-silver_n_4980024.html?utm_hp_ref=media">relaunched</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in conjunction with ESPN, not only predicted Obama would win the 2012 election, he correctly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/nate-silver-obama-reelection_n_2086556.html">predicted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the electoral outcomes in 50-out-of-50 states. That followed him getting the call right in 49-out-of-50 states in 2008, missing only Indiana, where Obama won with a razor-thin margin of 0.1 percent. Silver’s triumph in 2012 was sweet retribution for the man who had endured </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://mashable.com/2012/11/02/nate-silver-twitter/">ridicule</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from media pundits who doubted his prognostications. &#8220;I think I get a lot of grief because I frustrate narratives that are told by pundits and journalists that don&#8217;t have a lot of grounding in objective reality,&#8221; he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=ZDPpoOaGLK4">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Charlie Rose shortly before the 2012 election.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Objective reality is the key. Silver is a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://mashable.com/2012/11/07/nate-silver-wins/">registered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Democrat, but maintains strict nonpartisanship when it comes to analyzing data. That data, which includes a number of factors such as the weight and accuracy given to each poll based on its historical accuracy, is fed into a computer, where an algorithm makes the ultimate calculations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This year, those calculations have Democrats on edge, especially since Silver takes trending into consideration. As he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fivethirtyeight-senate-forecast/">noted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on his FiveThirtyEight political blog, his last forecast in July &#8220;concluded the race for Senate control was a toss-up.&#8221; His contention that Republican are now &#8220;slight favorites&#8221; is based on president&#8217;s sinking approval ratings, which have fallen to 42 or 43 percent from a previous average of 45 percent, and the contention that &#8220;the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as ABC’s Karl </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/week-nate-silver-2014-23024622">laid</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> out the parameters of the 2014 election, which includes races for 36 seats that are mostly non-competitive, he set the stage for Silver&#8217;s prediction that Republicans would pick up &#8220;at least 3 seats&#8221;: &#8220;West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana,&#8221; Silver explained. After naming those three, Silver talked about the other states where he expected the GOP to do well. These included Arkansas, which Silver gives the GOP a 70 percent chance of wining, followed by Louisiana at 55 percent, and &#8220;purple&#8221; North Carolina at 50 percent. Other states Silver sees as possible pickups for the GOP include Alaska at 45 percent, and the blue states of Michigan, Colorado and Iowa at 45, 35 and 30 percent, respectively. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Republican Scott Brown in New Hampshire? &#8220;We think the Republican opportunity is a little over-hyped,&#8221; Silver concludes. &#8220;Scott Brown was extremely popular in a different state four years ago,&#8221; he adds, rating Brown’s chances at only 25 percent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as he predicted Republicans will likely gain 6 seats, Silver added a qualifier of &#8220;plus or minus 5,&#8221; meaning that they have a chance to gain &#8220;a really big win&#8221; of as many as 11 seats. He puts the odds of them getting that many victories at 30 percent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even before Sunday&#8217;s interview, Silver and his newfound status as an uber prognosticator was being exploited in a fear campaign conducted by Democrats. Over the last four months, Silver has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/who-scares-democrats-more-than-the-koch-brothers-nate-silver-20140311">featured</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in at least 11 fundraising emails, all of which contained his name in the subject line, along with words such as &#8220;fear,&#8221; &#8220;bad news&#8221; and &#8220;doomed.&#8221; &#8220;There&#8217;s a lot of testing, particularly for subject lines, to see what has the best open rates,&#8221; said Taryn Rosenkranz, a Democratic digital fundraising consultant unaffiliated with the DSCC. &#8220;Using that name over and over suggests it&#8217;s successful, and people are opening and giving.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/senate-races/201460-silver-republicans-slight-favorites-to-win-senate">echoed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that sentiment. “This is a snapshot in time,” he noted on “This Week.” “I think this is going to motivate our base.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It may take more than motivation. In his blog, Silver points to a number of factors breaking in the GOP&#8217;s favor. Despite a &#8220;rough tie&#8221; between the parties on the congressional generic ballot his organization considers the &#8220;single best measure of the national political environment,&#8221; Silver explains that superior GOP turnout in mid-term elections is the equivalent of a 6 point edge. He further notes that Democrats&#8217; other problem is based on the &#8220;constitutional mathematics&#8221; of the Senate&#8217;s six-year election cycle. The year 2008 was an &#8220;extraordinarily strong year for Democrats,&#8221; and that a neutral scenario, or even one that slightly favored Democrats this time, would still produce a &#8220;drop-off relative to that base line.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These calculations, which Silver calls &#8220;The National Environment,&#8221; is one of five factors that comprise his methodology. The other four include &#8220;Candidate quality&#8221; and its assessment&#8217;s of an individual&#8217;s fund-raising ability and ideology, &#8220;State partisanship,&#8221; comparing an individual states&#8217; voting patterns against the national popular vote, &#8220;Incumbency,&#8221; a huge advantage in most cases, and &#8220;Head-to-head polls&#8221; that have &#8220;some predictive power if evaluated carefully.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cold numbers aside, some leftists are aghast at Silver&#8217;s prediction. Aside from the rest of Cecil&#8217;s memo, which quickly deteriorates into a familiar screed, claiming Democrats &#8220;are fighting for the middle class and Republicans are fighting for Washington special interests like the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and their reckless and irresponsible agenda that voters despise,” Silver was also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/tarnished-silver/?module=BlogPost-Title&amp;version=Blog%20Main&amp;contentCollection=Opinion&amp;action=Click&amp;pgtype=Blogs&amp;region=Body">excoriated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> columnist Paul Krugman. In a piece entitled &#8220;Tarnished Silver,&#8221; Krugman contends the prognosticator’s website &#8220;looks like something between a disappointment and a disaster.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other leftists didn&#8217;t need to hear Silver&#8217;s latest pronouncement. He has apparently been the piñata-of-the-month for some time. Last Friday, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> columnist Tim Egan </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/opinion/egan-creativity-vs-quants.html?src=me&amp;ref=general">took</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Silver to task for relying too much on mathematics, and not enough on the &#8220;messiness&#8221; of creativity to make his predictions. Two days earlier, Think Progress&#8217;s Kiley Kroh </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3415984/nate-silver-science-writer-ignores-data/">hammered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Silver for hiring global warming skeptic Roger Pielke, Jr. to write for his website. On March 12, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://theguardian.com/">theguardian.com</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s Emily Bell </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/12/journalism-startups-diversity-ezra-klein-nate-silver">whacked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Silver and other journalism start-ups for having too many white males in their employment. </span></p>
<p>Yet perhaps the most bizarre attack of all was penned March 19 by the New Republic&#8217;s Leon Wieseltier who ludicrously chastised Silver for his nonpartisanship. &#8220;[Silver] dignifies only facts,&#8221; Wieseltier writes. &#8220;He honors only investigative journalism, explanatory journalism, and data journalism. He does not take a side, except the side of no side….<i>He</i> is the hedgehog who knows only one big thing. And his thing may not be as big as he thinks it is.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Silver is the hedgehog who successfully predicted 99-of-of-100 state electoral outcomes over the course of two presidential elections. To casually, or caustically, dismiss his efforts says far more about those who do so than Silver himself. It is certainly a long way until the mid-term election, but the American left would have to be delusional to believe that ObamaCare, an economy that benefits Wall Street at Main Street&#8217;s expense, a fantastically incoherent foreign policy, and the numerous scandals that afflict the Obama administration, don&#8217;t accrue to the benefit of the GOP. Taking on Silver smacks of killing the messenger. Yet much like their similar efforts to demonize the Koch brothers, Democrats may have little else going for them.</span></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>Republican Leaders Fight Back Against IRS Power Grab</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/republican-leaders-fight-back-against-irs-power-grab/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=republican-leaders-fight-back-against-irs-power-grab</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/republican-leaders-fight-back-against-irs-power-grab/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:55:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Oppose]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[power grab]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tea Party]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218433</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[GOP stands up for free participation in the democratic process.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/we.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218439" alt="we" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/we-450x243.jpg" width="315" height="170" /></a>Republicans are fighting back against proposed new IRS rules that they say would make formal the tax agency&#8217;s infamous crackdown on Tea Party groups that oppose the Obama agenda, stripping them of their free speech rights during election cycles.</p>
<p>&#8220;Every American needs to know about this abuse of power,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said in a recent speech on the Senate floor. “Let me be clear: What the administration is proposing poses a grave threat to the ability of ordinary Americans to freely participate in the Democratic process.”</p>
<p>The new rules, first unveiled around Thanksgiving when no one was paying attention, would prevent so-called 501c4 advocacy groups from participating in certain kinds of political activity. Such nonprofit organizations would be prevented from communicating with voters about candidates or political parties within 60 days of a general election.</p>
<p>On the House side, Speaker John Boehner (Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Dave Camp (Mich.), and Hal Rogers (Ky.) have signed a letter asking newly minted IRS chief John Koskinen to kill new proposed regulations dating from November that they say are intended to silence conservative groups.</p>
<p>On the Senate side, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Minority Whip John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (S.D.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and Richard Shelby (Ala.) also signed the letter that suggests Koskinen would be perceived as a puppet of the Obama White House if he didn&#8217;t pull back from the regulations. In the Obama era IRS officials have been accused of spending <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/10/irs-white-house-officials-that-shared-confidential-taxpayer-info-had-155-white-house-meetings/">an inordinate amount of time</a> at the White House and getting far too cozy with top administration figures.</p>
<p>“It is our view that finalizing this proposed rule would make intimidation and harassment of the administration&#8217;s political opponents the official policy of the IRS and would allow the Obama administration to use your agency as a partisan tool,” the lawmakers said in <a href="http://www.speaker.gov/sites/speaker.house.gov/files/UploadedFiles/IRS%20letter_140205.PDF">the letter</a>.</p>
<p>“This would be a serious error, especially in the light of the recent track record of intimidation at the IRS. It would also cement your reputation as someone who is unable or unwilling to restore the public&#8217;s faith in this important agency.”</p>
<p>Although Koskinen, who was sworn in as IRS Commissioner on Dec. 23, said he did not participate in drafting the rules, he has refused Republican demands to block their implementation.</p>
<p>“Everyone can make comments about our draft regulations as they are now,” Koskinen said in testimony before a House Ways and Means subcommittee last week.</p>
<p>“There will be a public hearing,&#8221; he said. &#8220;There will be numerous occasions for people to bring any information that they would like, or perspectives, about those regulations forward before they are finalized. And they&#8217;re not going to be finalized in the near-term future,” he added, noting that the administration had received 21,000 comments on the regulations.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.freedomworks.org/press-releases/freedomworks-activists-fight-newly-proposed-irs-ru">FreedomWorks</a>, the proposed IRS guidelines would restrict the political activities of tax-exempt 501c4 organizations, expand the already unchecked discretionary power of the IRS, and institutionalize the agency’s targeted harassment of conservative and libertarian nonprofits in the Obama era.</p>
<p>These &#8220;draconian IRS regulations &#8230; would make it virtually impossible for tea parties that want to participate in the political process to do their business,&#8221; said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks.</p>
<p>&#8220;They’re going after conservative groups, they’re going after libertarian groups, and they’re going after citizen groups that want to organize people based on the values of the constitution; based on the ideas of freedom and have an impact on the political conversation. If that sounds familiar, what they’re doing is formalizing the same persecution, the same targeting that we saw coming out of the IRS leading up to the 2012 election.&#8221;</p>
<p>What most of the news coverage of the sordid IRS saga misses is that Democrats are angry about Republican-friendly nonprofits. They are upset that nonprofits that oppose Obama are allowed to exist at all. They use specious arguments to justify the Obama administration&#8217;s increasingly naked repression of its domestic political enemies.</p>
<p>Democrats correctly view Tea Party groups, that is, right-wing populist groups, as an existential threat to the Left. These nonprofits tend to be Republican-leaning organizations and they have been successful so far in derailing, or at least slowing, parts of President Obama&#8217;s ongoing transmogrification of America.</p>
<p>Democrats don&#8217;t want any conservative nonprofits to enjoy tax-exempt status. Such nonprofits are all working against the Left, standing in the way and preventing America from becoming a leftist utopia.</p>
<p>Using the IRS to hurt right-of-center groups is fair game, according to left-wingers. President Obama can&#8217;t even bring himself to admit that what happened at the IRS was corrupt.</p>
<p>In an embarrassing television interview that aired Super Bowl Sunday, Obama lied shamelessly to save his skin in the horrendous IRS targeting scandal that could yet cost him the presidency. There was &#8220;not a smidgen of corruption&#8221; in the IRS saga, Obama told an incredulous Bill O&#8217;Reilly in the on-air mendacity marathon as he smeared Fox News Channel and blamed the network, instead of his own misdeeds, for his deepening political woes.</p>
<p>In fact we now know that officials at the highest level of the Obama administration had been conspiring for years, plotting a Chicago thug-style knee-capping of conservative opposition groups.</p>
<p>A congressional hearing <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2552413/Sparks-fly-knives-come-hearing-IRS-targeting-tea-party-groups-new-email-document-shows-agency-cover-mode.html#ixzz2sc0dedTs">revealed</a> last week that the IRS was planning to justify unfairly targeting nonprofit anti-Obama groups as early as 2012, long before a government watchdog exposed the depth of the targeting.</p>
<p>The smoking gun came in the form of an email from Treasury Department tax policy attorney Ruth Madrigal to several IRS officials including the infamous Lois Lerner who invoked the Fifth Amendment&#8217;s non-incrimination privilege to avoid coming clean during a high-profile congressional inquiry.</p>
<p>&#8220;Don’t know who in your organizations is keeping tabs on c4s,&#8221; Madrigal wrote, referring to the tax-exempt Tea Party groups recognized under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, &#8220;but since we mentioned potentially addressing them (off plan) in 2013, I’ve got my radar up and this seemed interesting.&#8221;</p>
<p>Congressional tax-writing chief Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said Madrigal&#8217;s missive meant that new rules were not being developed as a &#8220;remedy to the target[ing]&#8221; that took place in 2011 and 2012. &#8220;I’m pretty sure [off-plan] means &#8216;hidden from the public,&#8217;&#8221; said Camp, who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.</p>
<p>Investigators still haven&#8217;t interviewed many conservative groups that were denied tax-exempt status while their liberal counterparts sailed through the nonprofit status-granting process.</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>Are Labor Unions Preparing to Dump Obama and the Dems?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/are-labor-unions-preparing-to-dump-obama-and-the-dems/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=are-labor-unions-preparing-to-dump-obama-and-the-dems</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/are-labor-unions-preparing-to-dump-obama-and-the-dems/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 03 Feb 2014 03:02:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2014 elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Labor Unions]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217787</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The union gave $300,000 to the Republican Governors Association,]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ap11040413987-7bf49e1fd805344e1251b199f1ce7edb16997483-s6-c30.jpg"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-217788" alt="ap11040413987-7bf49e1fd805344e1251b199f1ce7edb16997483-s6-c30" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/ap11040413987-7bf49e1fd805344e1251b199f1ce7edb16997483-s6-c30-450x337.jpg" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>The left corralled a variety of groups with conflicting interests into a coalition using a combination of bribes, threats and promises. Everyone from the NAACP to unions to the labor movement to gay rights groups climbed on board and backed Obama Inc. to the hilt, but <a href="http://weaselzippers.us/170642-union-bosses-whine-obama-betrayed-us-with-obamacare-rollout/">now patience may finally be wearing thin</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/labor-union-officials-say-obama-betrayed-them-in-health-care-rollout/2014/01/31/2cda6afc-8789-11e3-833c-33098f9e5267_story.html">Labor leaders who have spent months lobbying</a> unsuccessfully for special protections under the Affordable Care Act warned this week that the White House’s continued refusal to help is dampening union support for Democratic candidates in this year’s midterm elections.</p>
<p>Leaders of two major unions, including the first to endorse Obama in 2008, said they have been betrayed by an administration that wooed their support for the 2009 legislation with promises to later address the peculiar needs of union-negotiated insurance plans that cover millions of workers.</p>
<p>Their complaints reflect a broad sense of disappointment among many labor leaders, who say the Affordable Care Act has subjected union health plans to new taxes and mandates while not allowing them to share in the subsidies that have gone to private insurance companies competing on the newly created exchanges.</p></blockquote>
<p>Unlike the NAACP, labor unions are more united and organized and less dependent on Third Party cash. And that means that they have options.</p>
<blockquote><p>Already, the Laborers’ International Union has established warm relations with one potential GOP presidential candidate, Chris Christie, endorsing his 2013 reelection as New Jersey’s governor. The union gave $300,000 to the Republican Governors Association, now headed by Christie. And there have been preliminary discussions between labor officials and aides to the governor over a possible appearance by Christie at a union convention.</p></blockquote>
<p>While labor unions aren&#8217;t going to go Full Republican, they are going Part Republican by donating to GOP Congressional candidates benefiting from the lack of a common agenda in the Republican Party. Even some unlikely suspects, such as teachers&#8217; unions are focusing on the GOP.</p>
<p>The obvious reason is that a midterm surge is expected. And unions are smart and organized enough to do what black voters aren&#8217;t doing, show that they have options.</p>
<p>While a GOP-labor alliance would seem implausible, we are witnessing a GOP-amnesty coalition that makes even less sense and has fewer rewards. Considering that the GOP&#8217;s fiscal reform talk has been mainly empty talk, it makes as much or as little sense as anything else. A lot of union members already vote to the right, that is in actual working unions, not SEIU.</p>
<p>And finally, with the GOP leadership increasingly talking about replacing rather than repealing ObamaCare, labor leaders may be thinking that they can get what they want more easily through that door.</p>
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		<title>Bracing for Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/bracing-for-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bracing-for-amnesty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/bracing-for-amnesty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Jan 2014 05:38:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=217664</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A jab at the Tea Party? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/John-Boehner-And-Paul-Ryan-500x298.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217667" alt="John-Boehner-And-Paul-Ryan-500x298" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/John-Boehner-And-Paul-Ryan-500x298.jpg" width="297" height="200" /></a>Unbelievable as it may be to their core constituency, House Republicans are now </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Boehner-immigration-GOP-retreat/2014/01/30/id/549922">embracing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> comprehensive immigration reform. Late yesterday, the Hill </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/197023-house-republican-leaders-back-legal-status-for-illegal-immigrants">obtained</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a one-page document outlining the GOP&#8217;s &#8220;statement of principals,&#8221; that endorses a path to legal status, once “specific enforcement triggers” have been achieved. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In an apparent sop to their base, House leadership stopped short of offering a path to citizenship, citing unfairness to those who have emigrated here legally, and the &#8220;harm&#8221; it would do to the rule of law. “Rather, these persons could live legally and without fear in the U.S., but only if they were willing to admit their culpability, pass rigorous background checks, pay significant fines and back taxes, develop proficiency in English and American civics, and be able to support themselves and their families (without access to public benefits),” the paper states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Earlier in the day, GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/30/Republicans-Embrace-Year-of-Action">confirmed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the GOP&#8217;s determination to move forward on the issue. “We heard the president say this should be a year of action and that is our goal,&#8221; she told reporters. &#8220;We join the president in this effort to make this a year of action.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A year of political suicide may be more accurate. One that includes a stunning level of collective shortsightedness. Republicans intend to grant some sort of probationary legal status predicated on the federal government meeting certain, unspecified &#8220;enforcement triggers.&#8221; Undoubtedly, one of them is &#8220;border security,&#8221; the key item that is supposed to make the rest of the amnesty agenda palatable. That would be the same border security that has been routinely ignored ever since it was promised to be an integral part of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act. Equally ignored was the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061026-1.html">Secure Fence Act of 2006</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, that called for &#8220;at least two layers of reinforced fencing.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A 2007 amendment to the bill gutted </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2011/may/16/barack-obama/obama-says-border-fence-now-basically-complete/">that</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> provision, giving the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) &#8220;discretion&#8221; to determine what type of fencing would be used. Thus, vehicle barriers or single layer pedestrian fencing was deployed, despite its ineffectiveness. Adding insult to injury, last June, the Senate </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.examiner.com/article/why-our-southern-border-will-never-be-secure">rejected</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by a vote of 54-39 an amendment offered by Sen. John Thune (R-SD). It called for nothing more than the funding and completion of the 700 miles of double-tiered fencing along our southern border. Five Republicans voted against the measure, including the insufferable Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who ran a 2010 campaign ad with the phrase, “let’s build the dang fence!” in it.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, what Republicans are willfully ignoring is the reality of a Democrat party and an Obama administration with a demonstrable record of selective law enforcement, whenever that selectivity suits their agenda. The notion that </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">this</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> time it will be different, is utterly laughable.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And that&#8217;s only the issue of border security. Even though Republicans stop short of granting citizenship to illegals, and opt instead for some sort of &#8220;legal status,&#8221; how long do they think it will be before Democrats and their media allies begin an all-out campaign against the unconscionable &#8220;two-tier&#8221; immigration system created by a &#8220;nativist&#8221; GOP?  The one that denies hard-working, tax-paying people the genuine justice that only a pathway to citizenship can provide?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On Wednesday, Paul Ryan </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2014/01/29/rep-ryan-gop-looking-at-legal-status-chance-for-citizenship/">admitted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> he envisions that &#8220;probationary&#8221; status, allowing illegals to work while government tightened border security and internal enforcement metrics, will be buttressed by a law the Obama administration &#8220;can&#8217;t avoid.&#8221; </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality, border metrics and/or other &#8220;specific enforcement triggers&#8221; may </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">already</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> be largely irrelevant. This week, the labor union that represents the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) officers and adjudicators, which is tasked with the application approval process, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/30/immigration-officials-warn-amnesty-overload/">explained</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> why. In a letter to Congress, they essentially made a mockery of the &#8220;rigorous background checks&#8221; promoted by the GOP, warning that they would be unable to handle the workload associated with investigating millions of applicants. “USCIS is not equipped to handle this workload, and due to political interference in its mission, is not empowered to deny admission to all those who should be denied due to ineligibility,&#8221; said National Citizenship And Immigration Services Council president Kenneth Palinkas. &#8220;We have become a visa clearinghouse for the world, rather than the first line of defense for a secure immigration system.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obama administration officials countered that assessment, saying they would be ready if Congress provides them the opportunity. Yet the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Washington Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> notes that key questions remain unanswered. It remains unknown what documents would be necessary to meet the criteria for &#8220;legal status,&#8221; and whether USCIS adjudicators would interview every applicant, &#8220;which would take longer but would be more likely to weed out criminals or fraudulent applications.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Those questions may remain officially unanswered, but who&#8217;s kidding whom? This is the same Obama administration that unilaterally suspended critical aspects of the healthcare law when the website they had three years to build &#8212; to </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">process applications </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8211; turned into an unmitigated disaster. On top of that, they forced both insurance companies and American citizens to rely on an &#8220;honor system&#8221; to verify subsidies and coverage based on income. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Do Republicans seriously believe the same administration would be above &#8220;streamlining&#8221; the process for verifying the eligibility of a constituency they rightly envision becoming future Democrats? How many thousands of illegal aliens might be granted probationary status based on a similar honor system, such as a promise to verify their eligibility at a later date?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That political reality is apparently a secondary consideration for Republican National Committee (RNC) chairman Reince Priebus.“I think politically speaking it&#8217;s a mixed bag, but the question is whether or not it’s something we have to do as a country, and I think that’s what’s trumping the political answer,” he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/jan/29/rncs-reince-priebus-general-consensus-something-bi/">insists</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. “You see in our party, whether it’s Rand Paul, who’s called for massive immigration reform, or Marco Rubio, I think you have general consensus that something big has to happen.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Columnist Ann Coulter, who was privy to a report produced by conservative stalwart Phyllis Schlafly, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.anncoulter.com/columns/2014-01-29.html">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> just how &#8220;big&#8221; immigration </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">per se</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> has been for the GOP. &#8220;Schlafly&#8217;s report overwhelmingly demonstrates that merely continuing our current immigration policies spells doom for the Republican Party,&#8221; Coulter writes, later adding that &#8220;there&#8217;s never been a period when a majority of immigrants weren&#8217;t Democrats.&#8221;</span></p>
<p>The statistics are daunting. For example, while 81 percent of native-born Americans believe schools should teach students to be proud of America, only half of naturalized U.S. citizens do. Sixty-seven percent of native-born Americans believe the Constitution supersedes international law, compared to only 37 percent of naturalized citizens. Immigrants also express substantial support for ObamaCare, bigger government, gun control, and affirmative action. Every one of those positions is (or ought to be) antithetical to the interests of the GOP. Coulter then gets to the central argument that apparently eludes them. &#8220;Republicans have no obligation to assist the Democrats as they change the country in a way that favors them electorally, particularly when it does great harm to the people already here.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The harm that would befall American workers is inarguable. The CBO </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/44346-Immigration.pdf">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that wages for Americans would be adversely affected for more than a decade, and that the unemployment rate would-be &#8220;slightly&#8221; higher until 2020. Black and Hispanic Americans, many of whom would be competing directly with the newly legalized immigrants for jobs, already endure unemployment rates higher than the national average. That the Democrats consider them temporarily expendable in their quest for electoral hegemony is understandable. That the GOP would blow a golden opportunity to make serious inroads with them while Democrats are pursuing that hegemony, is truly remarkable.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately the Republicans&#8217; ability to deceive themselves appears limitless. Again, is there any doubt that Democrats would insist on some sort of &#8220;readjustment&#8221; regarding fines and/or back taxes for a population that has long endured the economic deprivation engendered by &#8220;living in the shadows?&#8221;</span></p>
<p>How long before the same party that advocates for forgiveness of student loans, advocates forgiveness &#8212; along with welfare &#8212; for people who are struggling against the same “income inequality” that afflicts so many Americans?</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet perhaps the most disconcerting aspect of the GOP&#8217;s capitulation on the issue is political. In an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/01/30/Exclusive-Ted-Cruz-House-GOP-leadership-s-amnesty-plan-would-destroy-chances-at-retaking-Senate-this-year?utm_source=twitterfeed&amp;utm_medium=twitter">interview</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> with Breitbart, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) echoed what many Americans are undoubtedly thinking. &#8220;Republicans are poised for an historic election this fall &#8212; a conservative tidal wave much like 2010,&#8221; he said. &#8220;The biggest thing we could do to mess that up would be if the House passed an amnesty bill &#8212; or any bill perceived as an amnesty bill&#8211;that demoralized voters going into November. Rather than responding to the big-money lobbying on K Street, we need to make sure working-class Americans show up by the millions to reject Obamacare and vote out the Democrats. Amnesty will ensure they stay home.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A Republican Party that seems determined to alienate their core constituency should expect nothing less. Yet that determination raises an uncomfortable question. Why? Cruz may have inadvertently provided an answer. The &#8220;conservative tidal wave&#8221; that represents Tea Party sentiment, if not the Tea Party itself, irritates the establishment GOP. It may be possible that such irritation is severe enough for establishment Republicans to operate in tandem with Democrats on this issue, to mitigate the power of that tidal wave within their ranks. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">There are more than a few conservatives who believe the establishment GOP is content to be a minority party, as long as it is a minority enjoying the privileges that accrue to Washington insiders. That may not be the only explanation for their determination to embrace a position on immigration utterly inimical to their base. But it is certainly a plausible one given the irrational path House leadership is embarking on.</span></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>Cruz Control Should be Standard on All GOP Models</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/cruz-control-should-be-standard-on-all-gop-models/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=cruz-control-should-be-standard-on-all-gop-models</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/cruz-control-should-be-standard-on-all-gop-models/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 26 Sep 2013 04:14:49 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liberal]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=205392</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why attack Ted Cruz when Republicans could be attacking ObamaCare? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/budget-battle-talkathon.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-205396" alt="budget-battle-talkathon" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/budget-battle-talkathon-450x347.jpg" width="270" height="208" /></a>If I could briefly interrupt the Republican firing squad aiming at Ted Cruz, let&#8217;s talk about something we all agree on. And by &#8220;we all,&#8221; I mean a majority of the American people, the Teamsters, many Democrats and every single last Republican.</p>
<p>Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster.</p>
<p>It was passed illegally without the House ever voting on the Senate bill and became law absent a single Republican vote &#8212; even &#8220;the girls from Maine&#8221; and &#8220;the girl from Arizona&#8221; &#8212; the only major legislation ever enacted on a strict party-line vote. The Supreme Court had to violate the Constitution&#8217;s separation of powers to uphold Obamacare as a &#8220;tax&#8221; &#8212; despite the fact that no elected body could ever have enacted such a massive tax hike even with the sleazy parliamentary tricks used to pass this bill.</p>
<p>Proving that everyone hates it, Congress has now exempted itself from Obamacare&#8217;s provisions, having asked for, and received, a waiver from President Obama.</p>
<p>Yes, these are the exact same politicians who lecture us that Obamacare is &#8220;the law of the land!&#8221; (So are our immigration laws.) The same ones who huffily announce that the Supreme Court upheld it! (The court also upheld the First Amendment in Citizens United, but that doesn&#8217;t stop Obama from demanding Congress overturn the First Amendment.) They are the same sanctimonious frauds who tell us that Obamacare is &#8220;the right thing to do!&#8221;</p>
<p>Those guys waived Obamacare for themselves. If national health care is so great, why don&#8217;t they want it?</p>
<p>In every single category of Crap Forced On the Country by the Left, liberals always have a work-around for themselves.</p>
<p>They love the public schools and denounce school choice &#8212; but their kids go to St. Albans or Sidwell Friends. As Al Gore responded to a question from a black journalist for Time magazine who asked him why he opposed school vouchers while sending his own kids to private schools, &#8220;My children &#8212; you can leave them out of this!&#8221;</p>
<div id="end">
<p>Oh, now I see.</p>
<p>Liberals are always eager to release criminals and block crucial crime-fighting strategies such as stop-and-frisk &#8212; which they announce from the safety of their antiseptic, crime-free neighborhoods. They love the homeless, but try putting a homeless shelter in their doorman buildings.</p>
<p>They tell us guns won&#8217;t protect us &#8212; and then we find out the loudest of them all have armed guards. Staunch gun-control advocate Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago had three armed guards with him at all times, as well as an armored car. Mayor Rahm Emanuel also has armed guards and an armored car. Chicago aldermen are allowed to carry any guns they like. But until very recently (we hope!) the people of Chicago were virtually prohibited from being armed.</p>
<p>Are you beginning to see the pattern?</p>
<p>Liberals love affirmative action &#8212; provided their offspring still get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. How about they give up their kids&#8217; seats to disadvantaged minorities?</p>
<p>Class warriors Warren Buffett and the Nation magazine&#8217;s Katrina vanden Heuvel hired phalanxes of lawyers to fight the IRS when informed they weren&#8217;t paying the government what they owed. George Soros and the Kennedy family stash their money in offshore accounts, safe from U.S. taxation.</p>
<p>Liberals also strongly support every manner of environmental regulation &#8212; unless it blocks the view from the Kennedy compound. In deference to Teddy Kennedy&#8217;s ferocious opposition to wind farms off the coast of Cape Cod, the federal government reduced the number of turbines, moved them farther off the coast and ordered them painted white to blend in with the view.</p>
<p>And now these government do-gooders shoving Obamacare down our throats have managed to exempt themselves from its wonderful provisions. Supreme Court justices won&#8217;t have to suffer under Obamacare, but will continue to have their health care subsidized by us, the hapless taxpayers forced into this rotten system.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, most Republicans are too stupid to notice that Democrats are walking around with a gigantic glass jaw. Democrats must not be able to believe their dumb luck. <i>Instead of hitting our glass jaw, Republicans have decided to attack Ted Cruz!</i></p>
<p>Cruz, and his Senate colleague Mike Lee (who, for some reason, is being held harmless by both Democrats and Republicans), have demanded that the Senate vote on the House bill fully funding the entire government &#8212; except Obamacare. Most important, they want Democrats to allow more than one amendment to that bill.</p>
<p>The Democrats are refusing either of those options in the Senate.</p>
<p>Among the amendments Republicans might want to introduce is one requiring members of Congress and their staffs to live under Obamacare. Or an amendment delaying the law&#8217;s implementation for the whole country &#8212; and not just the big employers favored by Obama. And also an amendment taking the administration of Obamacare out of the hands of the utterly corrupt IRS.</p>
<p>Can we at least get Senate Democrats to vote on these urgent reforms? I&#8217;d especially like to see the votes of red state Democrats, such as Mary Landrieu, Mark Begich and Mark Pryor. I bet their Republican opponents in the midterm elections next year would, too.</p>
<p>Of course, for Cruz&#8217;s threat to work, it has to be credible. Too bad Republicans have been blanketing the airwaves proclaiming that: (1) They don&#8217;t have the votes to defund Obamacare; and (2) Republicans will get blamed in the event of any government shutdown.</p>
<p>Republicans: You never had to shut the government down! (And thanks for making it blindingly clear that you never intended to.) You could have waited to see how the public opinion was going and cried uncle at the last minute.</p>
<p>But instead of attacking Obamacare and the breathtaking hypocrisy of the Democrats over this massively unpopular law, far too many Republicans have been spending their time attacking Ted Cruz. (Why didn&#8217;t we see one-tenth as much venom directed at Sen. Marco Rubio for trying to give the Democrats 30 million new voters with amnesty as we have toward Cruz for trying to defund Obamacare?)</p>
<p>For every minute you spend attacking Cruz on TV, Republicans, could you consider spending two minutes attacking Obamacare?</p>
<p>Barry Goldwater didn&#8217;t &#8220;have the votes&#8221; when Ronald Reagan launched the conservative movement with his &#8220;A Time for Choosing&#8221; speech in 1964. But he galvanized conservatives and gave them the hope of future victories. Does Rep. Peter King think Reagan was a fraud who lost influence in the Republican Party with that speech? <i>We don&#8217;t have the votes, Ron!</i></p>
<p>Whether or not Cruz succeeds, we wouldn&#8217;t be talking about Obamacare this week without his efforts to defund it &#8212; at least those of us who <i>are</i> talking about this disastrous law, rather than attacking Cruz.</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>Bono: Capitalism Works</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/bono-capitalism-works/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bono-capitalism-works</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ben-shapiro/bono-capitalism-works/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 22 Aug 2013 04:28:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=201589</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[ Can free enterprise become part of the new counterculture?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/bono.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-201595" alt="bono" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/bono.jpg" width="300" height="309" /></a>Speaking at Georgetown University earlier this year, renowned rocker Bono, who has also become well-known for his push for aid to Africa, explained that the only way for the continent to rise from poverty is to embrace capitalism. “So some of Africa is rising and some of Africa is stuck. It’s a question of if the rising bit will pull the rest of Africa up or whether the other Africa will weigh the continent down. Which will it be? The stakes here aren’t just about them. Imagine, for a second, this last global recession, but without the economic growth of China and India, without the hundreds of millions of newly minted middle class folks who now buy American and European goods. Imagine that. Think about the last five years.” He added, “Rock star preaches capitalism. Wow. Sometimes I hear myself and I just can’t believe it. But commerce is real. That’s what you’re about here. It’s real. Aid is just a stopgap. Commerce, entrepreneur capitalism takes more people out of poverty than aid. Of course we know that.”</p>
<p>Bono is right. But that isn’t the point. The point is Bono’s throwaway line: “Rock star preaches capitalism. Wow.”</p>
<p>The fact is that capitalism isn’t supposed to be cool. Thanks to the counterculture of the 1960s, the prevailing wisdom remains that socialism is what the cool kids say; capitalism is what their parents do to fund their socialist kids’ hobbies. Rock stars are supposed to be redistributionists. They’re supposed to rage against the machine. John Lennon’s <i>Imagine</i> is supposed to be the anthem: “Imagine no possessions / I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger / A brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people / Sharing all the world&#8230;”</p>
<p>Rock music often exists to <i>counter</i> something. In Russia, the band Pussy Riot existed to counter Vladimir Putin. In Britain during the 1980s, bands existed to counter Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. For decades in the United States, the belief has been that the supposed entrepreneurial greed of Western civilization is the thing to be against, at least when you’re from the West.</p>
<p>But it doesn’t have to be that way, especially given the fact that the United States is no longer a capitalist country, having forsaken capitalism in the name of Keynesian corporatism. It is not the rich 1% who are the obstacles to wealth in America; it is the failure to embrace entrepreneurialism. That was always true, but the case for capitalism was an affirmative one, not about negating the <i>status quo</i>. But now that the status quo has changed, it’s time for the counterculture to change too.</p>
<p>This is what explains, at least in part, the popularity of Ron Paul among young people. Paul exists in opposition to the popular order. He is against spending, against government involvement, against foreign involvement, against regulation, against the Fed. Sometimes, as with his isolationism, he is not just wrong but anti-Semitic. But his draw was always among young people who worship those who oppose. The raised fist is the sign of the young, not the open hand. And that fist must be raised against something.</p>
<p>This is why the Republican Party must not fall victim to the temptation to play defense. It is not time to act as though the default status in America is conservative. It no longer is. The government is too big, the regulation too burdensome. To be a conservative is to be a rebel. When rock stars begin to speak about capitalism as though it’s cool, we’ll know we’re on our way back. Until then, no matter how many Bonos endorse capitalism, they’ll be doing it in a backhanded way – and in doing so, they’ll be emboldening a new generation of liberals to fight the supposedly conservative machine.</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>When Will the GOP Pursue Policies Americans Care About?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/when-will-the-gop-pursue-policies-americans-care-about/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=when-will-the-gop-pursue-policies-americans-care-about</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 07 Mar 2013 04:30:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ann Coulter]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gun Control]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Immigration]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mental illness]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=180301</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[There's only one way for Republicans to win elections again. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/ann-coulter/when-will-the-gop-pursue-policies-americans-care-about/6a00d8341c630a53ef01157131b584970c-500wi/" rel="attachment wp-att-180310"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-180310" title="6a00d8341c630a53ef01157131b584970c-500wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/6a00d8341c630a53ef01157131b584970c-500wi-450x325.jpg" alt="" width="243" height="176" /></a>Republicans don&#8217;t control the U.S. Senate and they don&#8217;t have the presidency. Instead of wasting time and energy in doomed efforts to defeat President Obama&#8217;s Cabinet nominees or sucking up to illegal aliens, why not focus on issues where Republicans can be off-the-charts popular while forcing Democrats into taking stupid positions?</p>
<p>After the slaughters at Virginia Tech, Aurora, Colo., Tucson, Ariz., and Newtown, Conn., every sentient person knows we need to do something about institutionalizing the mentally ill and &#8212; at the very least &#8212; keeping guns out of their hands.</p>
<p>That happens to be impossible right now. Involuntary commitments even for the severely psychotic went the way of vagrancy laws. Although federal law technically requires background checks to include records of mental illness, the states and mental health industry refuse to provide that information.</p>
<p>Of course, the vast majority of mentally disturbed individuals are not dangerous. But looking at it from the other end, more than half of all mass murder is committed by the mentally ill. Gun ownership doesn&#8217;t lead to random murder rampages; mental illness does.</p>
<p>And the good news for Republicans is: Democrats will only pretend to support keeping guns out of the hands of dangerous psychotics, while working frantically to gut and undermine such measures. Liberals fear &#8220;stigmatizing&#8221; the mentally ill more than they fear another mass murder.</p>
<p>Instead of proposing serious reforms, the Democrats play politics by demonizing responsible gun owners and the Republicans who defend them.</p>
<p>The Democrats&#8217; gun proposals are like the joke about the drunk looking for his keys under the lamplight:</p>
<p>&#8220;Is that where you dropped them?&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;No, but the light&#8217;s better here.&#8221;</p>
<p>Preventing crazy people from buying guns is hard. The ACLU will sue and we&#8217;ll be tied up in lawsuits for a decade, at which point a Democrat-appointed judge will rule that including records of paranoid delusions in FBI background checks is unconstitutional.</p>
<p>As former federal judge H. Lee Sarokin (a Clinton appointee) might say, &#8220;We should revoke their condition, not their gun permits.&#8221;</p>
<p>The light&#8217;s better over by the sane, responsible gun owners, who wouldn&#8217;t hurt a fly &#8212; unless it&#8217;s a schizophrenic shooting up a shopping mall.</p>
<p>Since the deinstitutionalization movement got under way in the 1970s, the mentally ill remain mentally ill, but now instead of living in warm, safe institutions, they live out on the streets, in homeless shelters and in soup kitchens, or drift back to their helpless families, occasionally showing up in &#8220;gun-free zones&#8221; to commit mass murder.</p>
<p>After the Virginia Tech shooting, an ABC poll showed that while Americans remained dubious about the effect of more gun control laws, 83 percent supported requiring states to provide information on the mentally ill for gun background checks.</p>
<p>Since then, the mentally deranged have continued committing mass shootings. There is still no way to prevent them from buying guns.</p>
<p>At the risk of joining the Republicans&#8217; circular firing squad when we ought to be fighting Democrats, here&#8217;s how I think Republicans should be looking at things:</p>
<p>&#8211; Pushing amnesty for illegal aliens: 80 percent of Americans ferociously oppose you.</p>
<p>&#8211; Pointlessly opposing Obama&#8217;s Cabinet nominees: 99 percent of Americans need a constant supply of NoDoz just to listen.</p>
<p>&#8211; Staking out an Amnesty International position on a president&#8217;s hypothetical ability to use a drone against an &#8220;American citizen&#8221; (named Anwar al-Awlaki) about to launch a devastating terrorist attack on U.S. soil: 70 percent of Americans are against you.</p>
<p>&#8211; Opposing the Democrats&#8217; idiotic proposals on gun control: 60-70 percent of Americans support you, but the other 30 to 40 percent will hate you because they want to &#8220;Do Something.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8211; Proposing the involuntary commitment of dangerous psychotics and implementing measures to prevent them from obtaining guns: 83 percent of Americans support you and will be furious at Democrats for trying to undercut such laws.</p>
<p>Liberals can&#8217;t help themselves &#8212; they&#8217;re like Dr. Strangelove with the Nazi salute. The Democratic base will wail, &#8220;Who&#8217;s to say who is crazy? Maybe we&#8217;re the crazy ones!&#8221; and bleat about stigmatizing the mentally ill. Or, to quote Judge Sarokin, again: &#8220;[O]ne person&#8217;s hay fever is another person&#8217;s ambrosia.&#8221;</p>
<p>Your choice, Republicans: Take positions that will make you extremely popular, reduce mass murder in America and simultaneously reveal the insanity of the Democratic Party, or keep prattling about topics of interest to no one. Take all the time you need. 2014 is a whole year away.</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>Winning the Latino Vote by &#8220;Evolving&#8221; on Global Warming</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/winning-the-latino-vote-by-evolving-on-global-warming/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=winning-the-latino-vote-by-evolving-on-global-warming</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/winning-the-latino-vote-by-evolving-on-global-warming/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 18 Feb 2013 17:36:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[latino voters]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sierra club]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=177965</guid>
		<description><![CDATA["It's quite possible that after this big ticket item of immigration is addressed, [the GOP] will realize they have to go through the whole broad range of issues that are of concern to Latinos," Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce said.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/?attachment_id=177979" rel="attachment wp-att-177979"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-177979" title="A6-vBtVCMAEfFGL" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/A6-vBtVCMAEfFGL-450x335.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="335" /></a></p>
<p>Why stop at Amnesty? Apparently to win the Latino vote you also need to back the whole raft of leftist policies. <a href="http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2013/02/13/Is-climate-change-next-for-GOP/UPI-25371360793316/">Including Global Warming</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>Much of the GOP&#8217;s rebranding is focused on immigration reform to appeal to the Latino electorate but Sierra Club Legislative Director Melinda Pierce said Latinos also strongly support clean energy initiatives.</p>
<p>A Sierra Club and National Council of La Raza survey released in August indicated 77 percent of Latino voters say they global warming is already under way and another 15 percent said it will occur in the future.</p>
<p>&#8220;It&#8217;s quite possible that after this big ticket item of immigration is addressed, [the GOP] will realize they have to go through the whole broad range of issues that are of concern to Latinos,&#8221; Pierce said.</p></blockquote>
<p>And by the time we&#8217;re done with that range of issues, the Republicans will be the new moderate Democrats. And they&#8217;ll still be evil racists.</p>
<p>Joining together the Sierra Club and La Raza is ironic considering that the Sierra Club originally opposed immigration for population reasons. The Sierra Club originally avoided controversy by putting a moratorium on any immigration position. And then the Sierra Club broke its own moratorium, first by opposing the border fence, and now by merging its own positions into the greater activism of the left.</p>
<p>This should surprise no one considering how the AFL-CIO is selling out its members by pushing amnesty while the NAACP endorses gay marriage. These various groups are exposing themselves as subservient to a larger leftist agenda, rather than the interests and wishes of their base.</p>
<p>But creating front groups targeting a specific demographic with &#8220;relevant&#8221; arguments is what the left does really well. And speaking of that, meet the Energy and Enterprise Initiative, a &#8220;conservative&#8221; organization offering &#8220;free market&#8221; solutions to Climate Changes.</p>
<p>And by free market solutions they mean a Carbon Tax. How is a Carbon Tax free market? <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/feb/14/bob-inglis-republican-believes-climate-change">Stop asking silly questions</a>.</p>
<blockquote><p>We believe that conservatives will ultimately come to embrace the power of their own ideas, which is, &#8216;Gee, a price signal works, and it&#8217;s powerful.&#8217;</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s not a Carbon Tax. It&#8217;s a Price Signal. It&#8217;s a Cost-Comparison. See now it&#8217;s Free Market.</p>
<p>Here is <a href="http://www.ocregister.com/opinion/tax-381174-costs-redistribution.html">how warped this argument</a> gets.</p>
<p>1. Eliminate all tax breaks for fossil fuels, including home heating subsidies for the poor</p>
<p>2. Add the &#8220;real&#8221; cost of Global Warming and pollution to raise the price of fossil fuels through a Carbon Tax</p>
<p>3. Call for equivalent tax cuts elsewhere</p>
<p>That&#8217;s your free market solution, which the totally free market Energy and Enterprise Initiative is pushing.</p>
<blockquote><p>We&#8217;re spending a lot of time on college campuses speaking to college Republicans, Federalist societies, and young evangelicals&#8230;</p>
<p>And so we want to help them to see there&#8217;s a way that you can be conservative, not want to grow government, and actually be for social-issue accountability, which is a key component of what social-issue conservatives believe. You&#8217;ve got to be accountable. Behavior has consequences, so attach the cost to something so that the market can judge it.</p>
<p>These students are open to that message, and we hope these students will be ambassadors to their parents and grandparents. Those are the harder demographics for us. Their parents and grandparents are harder – especially the grandparents, who feel an attack on their way of life.</p></blockquote>
<p>And who is<a href="http://rlch.org/news/lawmakers-show-little-appetite-carbon-tax-least-now"> funding this</a> incredible &#8220;accountability&#8221; based carbon tax free market message?</p>
<blockquote><p>Inglis&#8217; initiative is housed at George Mason University, which named the Rockefeller Family Fund and the Energy Foundation as backers of the project. Neither is a conservative organization.</p></blockquote>
<p>The <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderProfile.asp?fndid=5292">Energy Foundation</a> and <a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/funderprofile.asp?fndid=5208&amp;category=79">Rockefeller Family Fund</a> give money to left-wing environmental groups. They fund the ACLU, MoveOn.org and the Tides Foundation, among many others.</p>
<blockquote><p>He said the Rockefeller Family Fund, like him, opposed the House-passed climate bill. The Energy Foundation, which is linked to Hewlett-Packard Co., is also an appropriate partner, he said, &#8220;seeing as how the Hewletts and the Packards were all about free-enterprise innovation.&#8221;</p></blockquote>
<p>Clearly. That must be why they&#8217;re funding all those &#8220;free-enterprise&#8221; groups.</p>
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		<title>To Cook and Eat an Infidel &#8212; on The Glazov Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/politichick-warrior-unmasks-suhail-khan-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=politichick-warrior-unmasks-suhail-khan-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 08 Feb 2013 04:26:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ann-Marie Murrell]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cannibalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dwight Schultz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michael Finch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[muslim brotherhood]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politi-Chicks]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[suhail khan]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176008</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obama’s favorite Islamic university teaches Muslims on the delicacies of cannibalism.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/politichick-warrior-unmasks-suhail-khan-on-the-glazov-gang/unb-2/" rel="attachment wp-att-176950"><img class="size-full wp-image-176950 alignleft" title="unb" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/unb1.jpg" alt="" width="320" height="180" /></a>Don’t miss this special episode of <em>The Glazov Gang</em> in which <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell, </strong>the National Director o<strong>f </strong>PolitiChicks.tv, <strong>Mike Finch</strong>, the Chief Operating Officer at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and <strong>Dwight Schultz,</strong> a Hollywood actor who played Murdock on NBC’s <em>The-A-Team</em>, discuss: <em>To Cook and Eat an Infidel</em>. <em></em>The discussion occurred in <strong>Part II</strong>, during which the Gang tackled why Obama’s favorite Islamic university is instructing Muslims <a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/obamas-favorite-islamic-university-goes-zombie-tells-high-school-students-they-can-kill-and-eat-the-flesh-of-apostates-as-long-as-they-dont-cook-them/">to kill and eat the kafir</a>. The segment also included an analysis of Obama&#8217;s immigration reform policy and why the U.S. president has taken sides with an Islamist Jew-hating tyrant in Egypt. In <strong>Part I</strong>, the Gang focused on Ann-Marie&#8217;s courageous confrontation with Suhail Khan at CPAC 2012. Watch both segments of the two-part series below:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/EkGi6sJpMFY?list=UUqCK5RFjwgmx2z4sOjqd-kQ" frameborder="0" width="400" height="300"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/gSY4mzneO9Y?list=UUqCK5RFjwgmx2z4sOjqd-kQ" frameborder="0" width="400" height="300"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>You can make sure that </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong><em>Jamie Glazov Productions</em></strong></a><strong> continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong>clicking here</strong></a><strong> and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of <em>The Glazov Gang</em>, </strong><a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUqCK5RFjwgmx2z4sOjqd-kQ&amp;feature=plcp"><strong>click here.</strong></a><strong></strong></p>
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		<title>The Tea Party Is Not the Problem, The Establishment Is</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-tea-party-is-not-the-problem-the-establishment-is/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-tea-party-is-not-the-problem-the-establishment-is</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-tea-party-is-not-the-problem-the-establishment-is/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 03 Feb 2013 23:59:55 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[The Point]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican Party]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=176081</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The GOP can either "evolve" into liberalism, it can try to run as the unimaginative competent party or it can actually open the door to fresh ideas, which is the only thing that has saved it in the past.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-tea-party-is-not-the-problem-the-establishment-is/wake-up-america-2012/" rel="attachment wp-att-176082"><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-176082" title="wake-up-america-2012" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/wake-up-america-2012-450x337.jpg" alt="" width="450" height="337" /></a></p>
<p>In the 80s, every other stand up comedian wore a garish suit, a loud tie and began his act with, &#8220;Well what do you think about that?&#8221; or &#8220;Who were the geniuses who came up with that?&#8221;</p>
<p><a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/02/03/Rove-declares-war-Tea-Party">Ben Shapiro brings us word</a> that the geniuses who came up with the last two presidential elections, and I mean the ones on our side, are getting ready to get to the core of their problem. The Tea Party.</p>
<blockquote><p>Yesterday, the New York Times reported that the “biggest donors in the Republican Party” have joined forces with Karl Rove and Steven J. Law, president of American Crossroads, to create the Conservative Victory Project. The Times reports that this new group will dedicate itself to “recruit seasoned candidates and protect Senate incumbents from challenges by far-right conservatives and Tea Party enthusiasts who Republican leaders worry could complicate the party’s effort to win control of the Senate.” The group points to candidates like Christine O’Donnell in Delaware and Richard Mourdock in Indiana as examples of Tea Party primary picks going sideways in major Senatorial battles.</p>
<p>As the Times reports, Conservative Victory Project won’t merely protect incumbents – it will challenge sitting Congresspeople of the Tea Party variety, including six-term Iowa Republican Rep. Steve King, who may run for Senate. “We’re concerned about Steve King’s Todd Akin problem,” Law told the Times – with whom he seems far too friendly. “This is an example of candidate discipline and how it would play in a general election. All of the things he’s said are going to be hung around his neck.”</p></blockquote>
<p>The Tea Party, like any grass roots ideological movement, has made mistakes. But it&#8217;s the only reason that the Republican Party is even a viable proposition.</p>
<p>The Establishment has not had a single new idea since it tried rebranding Republicans as &#8220;Compassionate Conservatives&#8221; in 2000.</p>
<p>It&#8217;s debatable whether or not that strategy actually worked, but what&#8217;s not debatable is that it pushed the government deeper into the hole and that was followed by a muddled attempt to try selling austerity in 2012, after Obama proved that a liberal can always outliberal a compassionate conservative.</p>
<p>By 2016, perhaps Rove and Co. will figure out how to roll out a Republican who capitalizes on some of Obama&#8217;s appeal. Perhaps he&#8217;ll be a Super-Compassionate Conservative. But if that happens, it will likely be because Obama, like Clinton, will have imploded in his second term. And that will put us right back where we started.</p>
<p>The biggest problem with the Republican Party is that no one in the establishment paid the price for two straight presidential defeats. Instead the blame is being dumped in the Tea Party. And that&#8217;s only fair, what with the Tea Party being huge Romney backers.</p>
<p>Does the Tea Party bring out candidates who aren&#8217;t ready for prime time? Sure. Did the establishment bring out a candidate who after two elections, an army of consultants and foreign policy advisers blew a foreign policy debate against Barack Benghazi? Also yes. And that establishment set the narrative for tearing down Tea Party candidates that the media picked up. Remind me which branch of the Tea Party, Steve Schmidt worked for again.</p>
<p>In 2008 and 2012, the establishment told us that they knew electability. And their candidates were electable. They just didn&#8217;t get elected. Now they&#8217;re working overtime to safeguard their electability status by backing Amnesty for illegal aliens, tax hikes for the middle class and No Tea Party signs on front laws.</p>
<p>The Republican Party of suits and ties, weekend golf games and exciting business success stories is not going to catch fire. Their best shot at that was Mitt Romney who projected affability, competence and no clear message except that he was going to clean up Obama&#8217;s mess.</p>
<p>The GOP can either &#8220;evolve&#8221; into liberalism, it can try to run as the unimaginative competent party or it can actually open the door to fresh ideas, which is the only thing that has saved it in the past.</p>
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		<title>Obama, Not GOP, Retreats on Debt Ceiling</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 24 Jan 2013 04:39:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Tom Blumer]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Budget]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt ceiling]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[extension]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://frontpagemag.com/?p=174763</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[But who will have the upper hand when the new extension expires? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/tom-blumer/obama-not-gop-retreats-on-debt-ceiling/r-obama-economy-rhetoric-large570-3/" rel="attachment wp-att-174769"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-174769" title="r-OBAMA-ECONOMY-RHETORIC-large570" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/r-OBAMA-ECONOMY-RHETORIC-large5702.jpg" alt="" width="247" height="188" /></a>If it&#8217;s so obvious that the President and Democrats in Congress have the upper hand in discussions about raising the nation&#8217;s debt ceiling, why did Barack Obama and his administration backpedal on a threat he made just ten days ago?</p>
<p>At his first term-ending <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2013/01/14/president-obama-holds-news-conference#transcript">victory lap news conference</a> on January 14, Obama told reporter Major Garrett that he would not accept a short-term extension of three or fewer months of &#8220;the so-called debt ceiling&#8221; &#8212; that&#8217;s what a sneering Obama actually called it in his introductory remarks &#8212; in these specific words:</p>
<blockquote><p>[W]e shouldn’t be doing this on a one to three-month timeframe. Why would we do that? This is the United States of America, Major. What, we can’t manage our affairs in such a way that we pay our bills and we provide some certainty in terms of how we pay our bills?</p>
<p>&#8230; I’m not going to have a monthly or every-three-months conversation about whether or not we pay our bills. Because that in and of itself does severe damage. Even the threat of default hurts our economy. It’s hurting our economy as we speak.</p></blockquote>
<p>On Wednesday, the House of Representatives led by Republican Speaker John Boehner passed a three-month extension of the debt ceiling from February 18 to May 19. It included an <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2013/01/23/opinion/avlon-no-budget-no-pay/index.html">interesting</a> but <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/no-budget-no-pay-congress-2013-1">debatably effective</a> provision that is &#8220;designed to stop all pay to members of Congress until they pass a budget.&#8221;</p>
<p>The previous day, as the White House signaled that it &#8220;welcomed the (expected) move,&#8221; Jim Kuhnhenn at the Associated Press, aka <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2012/04/09/ap-the-administrations-press-and-propagandists/">the Administration&#8217;s Press</a>, <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_OBAMA_FISCAL_FIGHT?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2013-01-22-03-16-15">falsely characterized </a>it as a &#8220;retreat&#8221; &#8212; by the House, with Obama headlined as having stood his ground. Nice try, Jim and AP; no sale. Even though you and the rest of the press won&#8217;t report it, the reality is that Barack Obama is the one who retreated from a supposedly firm position on the very first day after his second inauguration.</p>
<p>Please note that the &#8220;bills&#8221; Obama wants Congress to unconditionally &#8220;pay&#8221; were almost entirely created or committed to during the first half of Obama&#8217;s first term when Democrats controlled both houses of Congress.</p>
<p>Reported spending during the final eight months of fiscal 2009 Obama&#8217;s first eight months in office &#8211; after <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2010/04/13/ap-cites-dramatic-march-deficit-reduction-due-to-non-cash-item-out-of-control-spending-continues/">correcting</a> for <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2009/05/31/the-federal-deficit-gets-indecipherable/">accounting shenanigans </a>&#8211; <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">averaged almost $280 billion</a> per month, a record up to that point. Ordinarily, one would say that Obama inherited that level of spending from predecessor George W. Bush, as the budget for fiscal 2009 should have been a done deal by September 2008. But it wasn&#8217;t. Then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (with then-Senator Obama firmly in their corner), banking on Obama defeating John McCain in November, effectively forced Bush to either accept continuing resolutions extending past the end of his term or risk the media-fed wrath of voters by shutting down the government just as the economy was tanking and the Democrat-driven housing mess arrived.</p>
<p>Once Obama took office in January 2009, Pelosi, Reid, and Obama, that terrible triumvirate of Democratic Party plunderers, worked on ramping up spending immediately &#8212; and as it has so far turned out, irrevocably &#8212; by passing a &#8220;stimulus&#8221; plan which stimulated nothing except higher spending and <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2012/09/12/43-months-of-depressing-misery/">economic malaise</a>.</p>
<p>Fiscal 2009 was just a warm-up. Since April of that year, Reid&#8217;s Senate has refused to pass a budget, putting spending into autopilot. Outlays (again after adjusting for accounting tricks) averaged <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">$298 billion per month</a> in fiscal 2010, and <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">broke the $300 billion per month barrier</a> in fiscal 2011.</p>
<p>Faced with Reid&#8217;s intransigence, Speaker John Boehner and his Republican House majority lacked the nerve to change the trajectory of spending during the rest of fiscal 2011, betting that they would have a better shot trying to control spending in fiscal 2012. Though in hindsight Boehner&#8217;s decision was a tactical blunder, that doesn&#8217;t change the fact that Pelosi and Reid, with Obama eagerly accepting their continuing resolutions, are responsible for <a href="http://bizzyblog.com/wp-images/SpendingInObamasFirst32Months.png">the $9.4 trillion in spending</a>, the $3.7 trillion in deficits, and the $4.2 trillion increase in the national debt which occurred from February 2009 through September 2011. Those Democrat-caused &#8220;bills&#8221; are the ones Obama wants the current Republican House to unconditionally &#8220;pay.&#8221;</p>
<p>Though it&#8217;s way too early to give the House any positive credit, it clearly didn&#8217;t cave to Obama&#8217;s press conference demand. Wednesday afternoon, Reid, who has usually thrown spending-related House bills into the trash can upon receipt and prevented the Senate from even considering them, <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/01/harry-reid-senate-will-pass-house-debt-ceiling-bill-86617.html?hp=l1">falsely claimed victory</a> and said that the Senate will pass the House bill as is.</p>
<p><a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_DEBT_LIMIT?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT">Another AP report Wednesday </a>by David Espo characterized the Republicans&#8217; move as &#8220;retreating with a purpose.&#8221; The purposeful retreaters are really in the White House.</p>
<p>As I <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2013/01/22/four-years-later-all-he-can-say-is-an-economic-recovery-has-begun/">noted on Monday</a>, there are good reasons to believe that the economy is once again sputtering. Economic growth in the fourth quarter appears to have <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-01-11/us-q4-gdp-25-sub-1-under-six-months">slowed by at least half</a> from the previous quarter. Job growth has continued to be unimpressive compared to what is needed to make a meaningful dent in the number of unemployed, under-employed, and discouraged. Though it was masked by a quirky seasonal adjustment calculation, raw initial jobless claims for the week ended January 12 were higher than the analogous week in 2012, the first time that has happened in a truly comparable full business week comparison <a href="http://www.bizzyblog.com/2013/01/17/initial-unemployment-claims-335-sa-nsa-layoffs-up-by-almost-6-year-over-year/">since October 2009</a>.</p>
<p>My take on the political maneuvering is that the White House is anticipating poor economic performance during the early months of 2013, and that it is looking for someone other than themselves to blame. So, with the help of their new <a href="http://www.barackobama.com/">Organizing for Action</a> shock troops, they&#8217;ll try to claim that Republicans are responsible for foisting a short-term debt ceiling extension on Reid and Obama (those poor helpless creatures), creating an unmanageable atmosphere of economic uncertainty.</p>
<p>Republicans, on the other hand, may have been emboldened by the belief that continued economic underperformance will work in their favor, expecting public opinion to move into their corner as more Americans become convinced that our struggling country cannot afford a never-ending regime of reckless spending.</p>
<p>Who&#8217;s right? I don&#8217;t know, but it appears that the playing field may be more level several months from now than the left and press would like us to believe.</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>Will Obama Come For The Guns? &#8212; on The Finch Gang</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-shattered-republican-spine-on-the-glazov-gang/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-shattered-republican-spine-on-the-glazov-gang</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 11 Jan 2013 04:01:39 +0000</pubDate>
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				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bill whittle]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservatives]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dwight Schultz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[fiscal cliff]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mike finch]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[paul croshaw]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[surrender]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[A frightening glimpse into the Radical-in-Chief's agenda for his second term. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-shattered-republican-spine-on-the-glazov-gang/gyu/" rel="attachment wp-att-173104"><img class=" wp-image-173104 alignleft" title="gyu" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/gyu-450x245.jpg" alt="" width="315" height="172" /></a>Don&#8217;t miss this special episode of The Glazov Gang in which Mike Finch, Chief Operating Officer at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, fills in for Jamie Glazov and hosts a fascinating discussion with Bill Whittle, Dwight Schultz and Paul Croshaw.</p>
<p>In <strong>Part I</strong>, the Gang focuses on <em>The Republicans&#8217; Shattered Spine. </em>In <strong>Part II</strong>, the Gang looks at <em>Will Obama Come For The Guns?</em> See both parts of the two part series below:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/bL7DcrdpBS8" frameborder="0" width="400" height="300"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/76TemM5NWjI" frameborder="0" width="400" height="300"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>You can make sure that </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong><em>Jamie Glazov Productions</em></strong></a><strong> continues to take you where no other media programs dare to go. Help us by </strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/donate.html?key=ASY2NUM6OSJ9" target="_blank"><strong>clicking here</strong></a><strong> and making a tax deductible contribution today. To see the archives of </strong><a href="http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUqCK5RFjwgmx2z4sOjqd-kQ&amp;feature=plcp"><strong><em>The Glazov Gang</em></strong></a><strong>, click here.</strong></p>
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