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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Government</title>
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		<title>An Ominous Omnibus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/an-ominous-omnibus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-ominous-omnibus</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:49:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cromnibus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Funding]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[house]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[omnibus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247245</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mammoth spending bill would fund amnesty and Obamacare --- and could be voted on today.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/boehner-mcconnell.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247246" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/boehner-mcconnell-407x350.png" alt="boehner-mcconnell" width="329" height="283" /></a>A mammoth spending bill aimed at preventing a repeat of the last government shutdown is coming under heavy fire from conservative groups for green-lighting President Obama&#8217;s executive immigration amnesty and continuing to fund Obamacare.</p>
<p>Republicans in Congress are inexplicably rushing through a catch-all $1 trillion-plus spending bill to prevent the government from running out of money at midnight tonight. The measure, which would keep the government funded through the end of the federal fiscal year (Sept. 30, 2015), is being called a <i>cromnibus</i>, which is a portmanteau of <i>CR</i>, as in continuing resolution, and <i>omnibus</i>, as in omnibus legislation.</p>
<p>The measure contains hundreds of policy provisions including a new prohibition on the legalization of marijuana in the District of Columbia and new funding to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Ebola virus in West Africa. It would continue funding two wildly unpopular Obama initiatives, Obamacare and President Obama&#8217;s extra-legal immigration amnesty. The Department of Homeland Security would be funded only for a few months, allowing lawmakers to delay a fight over amnesty until springtime.</p>
<p>&#8220;Importantly, the bill does nothing to block President Obama&#8217;s unilateral, unlawful actions which include granting quasi-legal status, work permits and Social Security numbers to those who are in the country illegally,&#8221; said Heritage Action for America spokesman Dan Holler.</p>
<p>&#8220;I suppose we shouldn&#8217;t be surprised that it&#8217;s taken the Republicans all of 35 days to drop that ball in spectacularly disappointing fashion,&#8221; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots said in a statement. &#8220;Make no mistake, this bill DOES fund Obama&#8217;s executive amnesty, and so much more.&#8221;</p>
<p>The measure makes sure that illegal aliens benefiting from Obama&#8217;s amnesty receive Social Security benefits and spends almost $1 billion to help illegals integrate into communities across the country. It also blows apart the budgetary ceilings agreed upon by House Budget Committee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).</p>
<p>There is, of course, no reason for Republicans to pass in a frenzied rush an all-encompassing bill funding almost all of the federal government. They could easily draft a stopgap spending bill to carry them over to January when Republicans will control both chambers of Congress and have greater bargaining power in negotiations with President Obama.</p>
<p>But conservative critics say House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have ulterior motives. Using the boogeyman of an impending government shutdown to keep lawmakers in line, the GOP leadership has been generating a false sense of urgency in order to get the omnibus legislation through. Boehner and McConnell, they say, have no intention of repealing Obamacare, so they are kicking the can into 2015.</p>
<p>Most elected Republicans still seem blissfully unaware that the the last shutdown in October 2013 was an unmitigated public relations success for Republicans even though it might not have felt that way at the time. Setting aside the relentless media propaganda that falsely painted the shutdown as a massive Democratic tactical victory, the episode sent the unmistakable message that GOPers were champions of freedom of choice in health care.</p>
<p>The shutdown boosted GOP public approval numbers all the way through the election this month, helped to revive the fight against Obamacare as millions of Americans were having their health insurance policies abruptly canceled, and helped to set the stage for the Republicans’ historic trouncing of the Democrats in congressional elections. The shutdown was an extended, cost-free infomercial for the GOP that reminded Americans that Republicans were on their side on an issue that mattered to them. In other words, it derailed what had seemed like an unstoppable leftist narrative that the always-unpopular Obamacare was a done deal and that resistance to it was futile.</p>
<p>Those gun-shy Republicans who oppose a government shutdown at all costs are never quite able to explain why, if the shutdown was so bad for the GOP, Republicans are now on the march. On Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning 54 seats. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 246 out of 435 seats.</p>
<p>Opposition to the spending measure has grown steadily since the bill was unveiled Tuesday night but Republican leadership in the House says it is confident it can get the bill passed.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, 10 grassroots conservative groups have <a href="http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/12/grassroots-revolt-10-conservative-groups-call-for-boehner-mcconnell-to-resign/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">signed a letter</span></a> demanding that Boehner and McConnell be removed from their posts for collaborating with the president on amnestying 5 million illegal aliens.</p>
<p>William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, said the pending bill betrays the values held by more than 70 percent of the people who cast ballots in the congressional elections last month.</p>
<p>“They’re mocking the public, and it’s a huge deception. We can’t allow that deception to prevail. What we need right now is, we need the phones ringing off the hook,” said Gheen. “Word in D.C. is Boehner is hell-bent on getting his plan through to help Obama with the budget, and American citizens out there now have less than 48 hours to respond and take action to change that.”</p>
<p>&#8220;Christmas has come early for the big spenders in Congress who have been experiencing long-term withdrawal from the earmark ban,&#8221; said Andy Roth, vice president of government affairs at the Club for Growth (a group that did not sign the letter). &#8220;This 1,603-page bill provides a &#8216;fix&#8217; for these jonesing politicians who carry water for their special interest buddies.&#8221;</p>
<p>A final vote on the spending legislation could come today.</p>
<p>Members of organized labor have come out against the bill. Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa Jr. <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/10/BLOOD-IN-THE-WATER-TEAMSTERS-JIMMY-HOFFA-JR-TO-CONGRESS-KILL-THE-OMNIBUS-BILL"><span style="color: #0433ff;">railed</span></a> against the measure because it &#8220;will slash the pensions of thousands of retirees who worked years for a pension that they thought would provide them financial security in their retirement years. That promise is now busted.”</p>
<p>“To add insult to injury, this Omnibus bill compromises highway safety by rolling back Hours-of-Service regulations, allowing truck drivers to work more than 80 hours per week – twice the normal 40-hour work week,” Hoffa added.</p>
<p>Yesterday House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi expressed reservations about the measure. “Once more, Republicans are working to stack the deck for the special interests against everyone else,” Pelosi said. She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>Buried in the more than 1,600 pages of the omnibus package Republicans posted in the dead of night are provisions to put hard-working taxpayers back on the hook for Wall Street’s riskiest behavior. This provision, allowing big banks to gamble with money insured by the FDIC, opens the door to another taxpayer-funded bailout of big banks – forcing middle class families to bear the burden of Wall Street’s mistakes.</p></blockquote>
<p>Even Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), normally a hyper-partisan member of the Democratic leadership, now opposes the bill. He is opposed to the proposed increases in caps for individual donors in elections that was slipped into the omnibus legislation.</p>
<p>Some of the more extreme left-wing members of Congress such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/warren-leads-liberal-democrats-rebellion-over-provisions-in-1-trillion-spending-bill/2014/12/10/c5c915e4-80b5-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">are opposed</span></a> to the omnibus for their own ideological reasons.</p>
<p>Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), currently the fringe-left favorite for the 2016 presidential nod, called the bill &#8220;the worst of government for the rich and powerful.&#8221;</p>
<p>The measure would ease some restrictions on derivatives trading which Warren says would help Wall Street and big banks. On the Senate floor she offered a self-serving version of history, saying the bill “would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.”</p>
<p>“These are the same banks that nearly broke the economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs,” she said, ignoring the role that meddlesome regulations and left-wing public policies played in inflating the mortgage bubble that deflated around that time.</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>Taxes and the Tale of Two Cities</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/taxes-and-the-tale-of-two-cities/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=taxes-and-the-tale-of-two-cities</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 20 Nov 2014 05:35:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[al sharpton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Bill de Blasio]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[liens]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245599</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Two sets of tax rules for those inside and outside the Democratic Party power structure. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obamasharpton.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245600" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obamasharpton-450x348.jpg" alt="*Apr 21 - 00:05*" width="383" height="296" /></a>In America and in New York City – much like anywhere else with law and order, there must be boundaries and rules.  There can’t be two sets of rules.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reverend Al Sharpton is a fixture for New Yorkers, and in the last few years, left-leaning cable news viewers have come to rely on his political and social commentary. Love him or hate him, he has been around forever and his brand has matured since the Tawana Brawley days.  Particularly in the current de Blasio administration, Sharpton has grown quite powerful; so powerful, that, as the New York Post says, he <a href="http://nypost.com/2014/08/02/cop-who-used-deadly-chokehold-should-be-charged-sharpton/">dictates policy to the police commissioner</a>. He is also very close with President Barack Obama, the United States Commander-in-chief.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Leaving aside Sharpton’s “colorful”<i> </i>history, how is it possible that powerful elected officials in this nation associate with and take advice from a national leader who does not pay his taxes?  Politicians avoid shady characters, and taxes are a matter of fact issue (which in fact pays the salaries of these folks.)</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As the uber-liberal New York Times reported today, in records they reviewed it was apparent that Sharpton owes, “more than $4.5 million in current state and federal tax liens against him and his for-profit businesses.”  While Sharpton’s friends de Blasio and Obama have been in power, his tax bills have grown – and the organization which he runs, the National Action Network, has not paid federal payroll taxes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Maybe the IRS has been too busy harassing the Tea Party to look at people on their own side of the political fence.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">During the 2012 election cycle, <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2012/ronn-torossian/sheldon-adelson-isn%E2%80%99t-to-blame-for-failing-leftist-newspapers/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">billionaire Sheldon Adelson</span></a>, an outspoken Republican donor, said a second Obama term would bring government “vilification of people that were against him [Obama].” In 2013 his words came true when the IRS admitted that conservative organizations were unfairly targeted and audited during the 2012 election.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #c0504c;"><a href="http://townhall.com/columnists/jaysekulow/">Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice said the IRS&#8217;s activity was </a></span>“McCarthyism” – and, in fact, the Obama Administration targets and harasses conservatives while allowing Obama allies to openly cheat the system.  During the 2012 election billionaire Frank VanderSloot raised up to $5 million for Romney’s campaign.  He was labeled by Obama election propaganda as a “presidential enemy;” and soon after, this American businessman – who had never before had legal issues — was audited by the Labor Department and IRS.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In this tale of two cities – or of two countries, where some of us pay taxes, and some do not &#8212; right-wingers have been harassed unfairly by the IRS, while left-wingers who evade taxes are giving counsel and setting policy. Are these American tactics or is Obama learning from Putin?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Do Obama and de Blasio ask Sharpton about taxes when he whispers in their ears? Does anyone in their offices even care that he is in violation of American law?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is ridiculous that Reverend Al Sharpton has a different set of rules than the rest of America.  <a href="http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/ronn-torossian-reverend-al-sharpton-pay-your-taxes"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Reverend Al: Pay your taxes.</span></a></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>Bill Whittle: Socialism &#8212;- The Loch Ness Monster of Politics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-socialism-the-loch-ness-monster-of-politics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-socialism-the-loch-ness-monster-of-politics</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 29 Sep 2014 04:20:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[loch ness monster]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[utopia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241906</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>The Loch Ness Monster is a &#8220;cryptid&#8221; &#8212; something rumored to exist but without actual proof. The Socialist Utopia of the progressives is a cryptid too. In his latest Firewall, Bill Whittle shows why Good Socialism, like the Loch Ness Monster, is a giant, air-breathing creature that (conveniently!) NEVER COMES UP FOR AIR. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe width="560" height="315" src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FvfHLr5aEqU" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">LOCH NESS SOCIALISM</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Ah, Progressives! You really have to – well, not admire them exactly – but if not admire them then at least grant them a grudging respect for the tenacity of their beliefs.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for them, the Socialist utopia is a Cryptid, which, according to Wikipedia’s serviceable definition, is “a creature whose existence has been suggested but has not been discovered or documented by the scientific community.” Here’s another example of a cryptid: it’s called the Loch Ness Monster. Like the socialist utopia, the Loch Ness Monster requires a lot of magical thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Magical thinking is not wishful thinking. “It sure would be cool if there was a Loch Ness Monster!” That’s wishful thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Magical thinking is the belief that belief can make things actually manifest themselves in the real world. Magical thinking not only dulls reason – it kills reason. Magical thinking is actually form of anti-thinking: belief in something not because of evidence, but in spite of evidence.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For example, people who believe in the existence of the Loch Ness Monster will almost universally claim that it is the last of the Plesiosaurs – giant marine dinosaurs that definitely did exist millions of years ago. Like all dinosaurs, Plesiosaurs are air breathers. So in order to believe in the Loch Ness Monster, you have to believe that an air-breathing creature the size of a city bus lives under the surface of Loch Ness.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now conservatives have beliefs too, but our beliefs are not based on what we wish to be true but what the evidence shows us to be true. We believe in the power of the free market, of individual effort and reward, and of the power of self interest to make life better for everyone. So we too believe that there are bus-sized creatures that breathe air and live under the surface of the water.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the creatures we believe in are called whales. We believe in whales not because we want to believe in whales. We don’t depend on a mystery wake, or a blurry, distant outline of what might be humps or might be a tree trunk. Conservatives believe in whales because there are thousands of pictures of whales taken every single day. We believe in the power of capitalism and the free market because there are billions of people that benefit from it every single day, and the evidence of that benefit – even and perhaps especially from former socialist economies like China and India – grows every single day.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The fact that there are no pictures of the Loch Ness Monster – not one – that is even close to the thousands and thousands of pictures of whales, tell those of us who do not believe in magical thinking something very important: and that is that whales exist, and the Loch Ness Monster does not.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If you could print wealth instead of money, that would be a close-up of the Loch Ness Monster. But you can’t print Cadillac’s: you can only print what people use to buy Cadillac’s and the more you print the less it’s worth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If Health Care were free, that would be HD video of the Loch Ness Monster being petted on the head. But Health Care is not free. Health Care is very expensive. And if the government pays for it – from your taxes – then the government controls it. Which means they can turn off the health care you pay for with your tax money.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">If war were a big misunderstanding that could be resolved though open discussion, well, that’d be Nessie in a tank at Sea World. But it’s not a misunderstanding. ISIS wants the world to pray to Allah five times a day, murder homosexuals, and keep women in tents, indoors. We don’t like that, so we’re going to have to fight those people.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now Progressives, to be fair, say that the history of socialism isn’t just the Great Terror of the French Revolution, the purges and enforced famine of the of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; the mass starvation of maybe fifty million Chinese peasants in the People’s Republic of China; seven, eight, ten million more teachers, doctors, and musicians murdered in the progressive socialist takeovers in Vietnam and Cambodia; plus throw in a couple more million murdered by socialists – but progressive socialists! – in Cuba, El Salvador, Nicauragua and Venezuela, etc. and so on. They say Socialism can work without killing hundreds of millions of people, and to prove it, they point to places like Sweden.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For many years, this was the best single piece of evidence for the Loch Ness Monster. It’s called the “Surgeon’s Photograph.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Surgeon’s Photograph was a hoax. And decades after this picture was taken, some researchers reproduced the hoax, to show how it was done. And the shocking thing about it was the little model monster they used for the picture was only about this big: about the size of a duck decoy. And it’s only knowing that that you can look at the Surgeons Photograph and see what’s wrong with it: the waves are too big, and too smooth – they are shaped like ripples. They’re shaped like ripples because they are ripples: the best evidence of the Loch Ness Monster was so poor that without magical thinking people would have seen through it right away.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now it is absolutely true that Sweden is a socialist country, in the real world. But “good” Socialism, as it exists in Sweden, is not real. It’s a plaster cast of socialism. Sweden has cradle-to-grave socialist benefits because for a while – and only a short while – because like the Loch Ness Monster, Sweden is a fake, for two beneath-the-surface reasons.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">First, Sweden can afford to pay all of these benefits –“free” health care, “free” maternity leave, and so on – because the cost of defending Sweden is paid by American capitalist taxpayers. I don’t want to hear about the few jets or token troops Sweden might have.  ALL of the money made by ALL of the Swedes could not pay for Sweden’s defense against the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Good socialism only exists because capitalists pay to defend the good socialists from the bad socialists.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And Sweden, and the rest of the socialist states, is a fraud for a second reason: All of the European socialist states – ALL of them – are dying.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Socialism is a Ponzi scheme. In order to pay for someone from cradle to grave, someone else has to do the work to come up with the tax money. As long as you have a pyramid – enough young people working – then you can afford these kind of benefits. And sure enough, that was the case for several decades after World War 2.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But…</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">A stable society – not a pyramid but just a column – requires about 2.1 births per woman: one to replace the man, one to replace the woman and point 1 to take the fire challenge on Facebook. That .1 belongs to Darwin – they’re not going to live long enough to have kids.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Sweden’s birthrate is 1.9. There are fewer Swedes every year. Norway is 1.9; Denmark is 1.7; Canada is 1.6; Japan is 1.4, and Spain and Greece are all 1.3. These social welfare states are dying. Turns out if the government gives people everything they need to live, they don’t seem to want to live anymore – not as a culture, anyway. They’re all dying – all of them – and their welfare states are propped up by importing workers from places like Yemen – where the birthrate is a robust 4.2. Unfortunately, these imported workers – many of them from Muslim countries, where they still do want to live – aren’t Swedes, no matter how hard Sweden tried to make them Swedes. So blonde Swedish women no longer feel safe going out in a mini-skirt. And for at least five years in Neighboring Oslo, Norway, the percentage of rapes caused by the Muslim minority was – 100%. All of them. As the brilliant mark Steyn said: demographics is destiny.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Bad socialists murdered at least 200 million people. Good socialists are committing suicide, and would have been extinct long ago without American capitalism to protect them from the bad socialists.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Progressive utopia is the Loch Ness Monster of politics: a giant, air-breathing creature that never surfaces for air. Progressives claim to love it because of their morally advanced love of the poor, but the fact is, the reason they love wealth redistribution to achieve income equality is because other people’s wealth is being redistributed to them. It’s not morality. It’s laziness, envy and it’s stealing, and the history – the photographs – show that time and time again they will murder those who create wealth and steal it before they would, you know, go out and create some of their own.</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>Bill Whittle: Tie-Dyed Tyranny</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-tie-dyed-tyranny/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-tie-dyed-tyranny</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Sep 2014 04:26:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Back in the Bad Old Days, tyrants bent others to their will with machine guns and death camps. But what fig leaf can modern, touchy-feely, petty tyrants use to make sure other people remain &#8220;in compliance?&#8221; How about Saving the Planet?</strong></p>
<p><strong>In his latest FIREWALL, Bill Whittle examines the Tie-Dyed Tyranny that has taken root under the guise of environmentalism in Washington State. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/NPJSAnm3NTQ" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TIE-DYED TYRANNY</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody. I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The first half of the Twentieth Century was a time of truly unbelievable oppression and murder. In Germany and Russia, secret police forces such as the Gestapo or the NKVD used terror – murder and random arrests – to make millions obey the will of the handful of those pulling the levers of power.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now of course, in the early Twenty-First Century, packing people into cattle cars or shooting them in the back of the head in the basement of the Lubyanka Building, is considered bad form. So how does one of those petty bourgeois tyrants – those genetic defectives who simply are not happy unless you bend a knee to their will – get their way in this touchy-feely, politically-correct era? What fig leaf is there for these naked power and money grabs, now that the Worker’s Paradise or the Aryan Superman shams have been exposed?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, how about if we save the planet? You like the planet, don’t you? You don’t want your children frying to a crisp or drinking insecticide, do you? Of course not. Give us all your freedom. That’ll be $40,000.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">That may sound a little hyperbolic, but that’s what’s a happening – all across the country but especially in the Northwest.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I was in Washington State recently on a speaking engagement, and on the two-hour drive from Seattle airport to Bellingham, Washington, I got a chance to hear tales of our new Tie-Dyed Tyranny, the Dictatorship of the D-Student, the Empire of the Eco-Weenies, as related to me by Glen Morgan, Property Rights Director of the Freedom Foundation.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">What kind of Patchouli-scented Police State is there in Washington, and coming for the rest of us? Well, this kind:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Let’s say you and your children are hiking in beautiful Olympic National Park.  Oh, look! Moose antlers! If you or your child – who didn’t shoot the moose I hasten to add; you simply found the molted antlers lying on the trail – pick up the antlers – again, not leave the park with them but simply pick them up – well, that is a five thousand dollar fine and up to six months in jail, according to  Federal Law 36 CFR 2.1(a)(1)(i). That fine, of course, will go to the US Treasury to help pay for the billboards that we have posted in Mexico saying that deported illegals are welcome to come back to the United States. The main thing is to keep our priorities straight.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">After fifty years of trying to eradicate the incredibly destructive pocket gopher, a small but exploding population of these pests lives and breeds in the innumerable shell holes and ground fractures caused by the Ft. Lewis artillery range. A subset of these gophers &#8212; of which we have no shortage – have been given endangered species protection by the US Fish and Wildlife Agency. Why give endangered status to a species that is in fact so out of control that it can only be called a pest? Well, because the males in this small sub-population apparently have larger-than-average reproductive organs. That’s not proven, by the way – merely asserted – but it was enough for the anti-growth, anti-human eco-weenie zealots in Thurston County to put draconian restrictions on what people can do own their own property in the name of protecting these fragile, delicate, large-membered gophers that were bred on an active artillery range. Since these are obviously conservative gophers the irony becomes almost unbearable.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Here’s an act of eco-terrorism that must not go unpunished. This outdoor sculpture, located on the private property of the 40 year old Lambiel Museum, was put up 19 years ago. But a permit was not filed 19 years ago, and so the artists who created this modest statue, on private property, two decades ago, are being fined $1000 per week, because…</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And while we could do this all day, let’s just close with the story of Joe Remenar, a former Department of Justice special agent who had performed drug interdiction missions in places as far away as Afghanistan. This domestic terrorist – in the eyes of Whatcom County, Washington State, at least – decided to put a pond on his own property. In order to process mercury tailings from his Gold mine? In order to bury radioactive waste from his nuclear reactor?</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">No, in order to build a wetlands habitat for migrating birds.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Joe was very careful when he built his pond. He did not apply for grants and spent not a dime of public money. He did not interrupt the flow of an existing stream. State fish and wildlife biologists reported that his pond was a clear and obvious wildlife enhancement project, which he built at his own expense on his own property.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But, as Glen Morgan reported, for this crime against bureaucracy he was going to be punished.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Whatcom Counties lead central planner – Lyn Morgan-Hill – determined that Joe Remenar must destroy his wildlife habitat in order to save his wildlife habitat. She ordered that the pond be filled back in, and that Mr. Remenar would have to pay one of the country-approved “preferred consultants” to have it done.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Then, with the clear understanding of whose property that really is, Joe could beg forgiveness, ask and pay for the hefty fees necessary to get the permit, and then would be allowed to construct the exact same pond in the exact same place on the exact same piece of so-called “private property.” Heck, they probably would give him a government grant to do it.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Once he takes a knee to his bureaucratic masters.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Washington State now employs high-tech drones to photograph everyone’s private property several times a year, and high-tech software allows our aristocracy to determine if a peasant has had brush cleared, or a tree removed, deep in what used to be called that person’s “private property.” If any of these things have been done without a permit, large fines will be levied. You might think that this is simply because they want the permit money – well, they do, but that’s not the real reason.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The real reason is because you will take a knee to your insect overlords and you will be in compliance with their lunatic regulations. It’s not about the environment. It’s about money and mostly it’s about power. And while it may still sound funny, or trivial, or both – it’s neither. Glenn calls the phenomenon Gang Green and the Government Staff Infection. It’s the bludgeon of control and extortion under the fig leaf of ecology, and it is – as Glen so cleverly puts it – an infection. It’s a disease.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">It’s a Tie-Dyed Tyranny, and it’s not just coming – it’s here.</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>&#8216;To Hell With the Constitution!&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/to-hell-with-the-constitution/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=to-hell-with-the-constitution</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Sep 2014 04:50:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The long road of soft tyranny that led to Obama. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239944" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/600x393-450x347.jpg" alt="600x393" width="289" height="223" /></a>In 1902 Theodore Roosevelt intervened in a strike by Pennsylvania coal miners, exceeding his Constitutional authority as president. When this was pointed out to him by Republican House whip James E. Watson, Roosevelt allegedly yelled, “To hell with the Constitution when the people want coal!”</p>
<p>This outburst reflected the novel Progressive view of the Chief Executive. Instead of the Constitution’s limited powers focused on specific needs, such as national defense, beyond the capacity of the individual states or local governments to address, the President needed more expansive authority in order to serve the “people.” Over 100 years later, Barack Obama has governed on the same assumption, one that undermines the Constitution’s structure of balanced powers and limited government, and puts at risk our political freedom and autonomy.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">In January of this year Obama famously asserted, much less honestly than did T.R., his willingness to shed Constitutional limits: </span>“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got phone.” And he’s been true to his belief during his nearly six years in office. He has changed his own signature legislation, Obamacare, 42 times. He has also used his “pen and phone” to change immigration laws, gun laws, labor laws, environmental policy, and many other statutes that should be the purview of the legislative branch, to which the Constitution gives the law-making power.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">Other presidents, of course, have used signing statements and executive orders. But Obama has pushed this traditional prerogative far beyond the bounds that presidents in the past were usually careful to respect. But the ideas behind this expansion of power are not peculiar to Obama, and transcend any one man. They come from the Progressive worldview that rejects the Constitution’s philosophical vision of humans as driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” and eager to amass power in order to gratify both. The Progressives, on the contrary, believe that human nature can be improved, and that technocrats armed with new knowledge of human behavior and motivations can be entrusted with the concentrated power necessary for managing that improvement and solving the new problems created by industrialism, technology, and the other novelties of modernity.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">In terms of the federal government, the key to this new vision is the executive branch, led by an activist president. Woodrow Wilson was quite explicit about these ideas. In 1890 he wrote of the need for a “leader of men” who has “such sympathetic and penetrative insight as shall enable him to discern quite unerringly the motives which move other men <i>in the mass</i>.” He knows “what it is that lies waiting to be stirred in the minds and purposes of groups and masses of men.” This sympathy is one “whose power is to command, to command by knowing its instrument,” and the leader possessing this “sympathy” cares only “for the external uses to which they [people] may be put.”</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">More frightening still are Wilson’s comments further expanding on this “sympathy.” “Whoever would effect a change in a modern constitutional government must first educate his fellow-citizens to <i>want</i> some change. That done, he must persuade them to want the particular change he wants. He must first make public opinion willing to listen and then see to it that it listens to the right things. He must stir it up to search for an opinion, and then manage to put the right opinion in its way.” Gone are the notions that free people decide their own political fate and choose representatives to serve their interests and principles, their autonomy protected by the Constitutional structure of checks and balances. Now an empowered elite presumably wiser about human nature will, like Plato’s Guardians, manipulate the people’s opinions so that they make the “right” choice. These ideas are on a continuum that at the extreme end lie Mussolini’s fascism and Lenin’s communism.</p>
<p><span style="color: #272727;">The president, then, must transcend the Constitution’s outmoded limits on government power. In 1908, for example, Wilson complained that the president was merely a “legal executive” and “guiding authority in the application of the law and the execution of policy,” which is the Constitution’s charge that the president “</span>shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” For Wilson, this was too limited an authority, for the president could only veto bad laws, and was not “given an opportunity to make good ones.” And explicitly rejecting the Constitution’s vision of clashing “factions” driven by conflicting “passions and interests,” Wilson writes, “You cannot compound a successful government out of antagonisms.” So much for Madison’s governing principle in <i>Federalist </i>51 that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” The Progressive collectivist “people” possessing uniform interests must have a “President as the unifying force in our complex system.”</p>
<p>We see in Wilson’s writings another Progressive assumption still with us today: defining Americans as an abstract, collectivist “people.” This unitary “people” rejects the Founders’ recognition of America’s great variety of economic interests, passions such as religion, and regional folkways that characterize the citizens of the United States. Indeed, it is just this variety that threatened political freedom, for a flawed human nature is intoxicated by power, and always seeks more power in order to gratify its peculiar needs and interests by forming “factions” of the like-minded. As John Adams wrote in 1787, the “selfish passions in the generality of men” are the “strongest.” Knowing that this selfish inclination is rooted in a human nature unchanged since the days of Athens, and so cannot be improved or eliminated, the Founders sought merely to balance faction against faction so that no one faction can amass enough power to threaten the freedom of all.</p>
<p>The proponents of centralized power, however, require a more homogeneous “people” to justify expanding government power. Such a “people” will have similar interests that only the central government can effectively identify and serve. Interests like “social justice,” “social duties,” and “social efficiency,” cannot be fulfilled by local or state governments, or by the parochial aims of civil society or the market, or by churches divided by sectarian beliefs. The federal technocrats of government agencies, more knowledgeable than the people about what they really want and need, must be given the power to trump those clashing local interests and manage polices that serve the larger “social” good––as defined not by the people in all their variety and complexity, but by federal bureaucrats and technocrats.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;"><span style="color: #000000;">Go back to Obama’s “pen and phone” statement and read what follows to see this same collectivist vision at work: </span>“And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.” The president assumes that in a country of some 330 million people, “the help they need” and their views on improving job creation, education, or job training are all the same, and thus one man can formulate policies that advance them, cutting out the several hundred representative of Congress, and state and local governments.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">The obvious danger is one evident from the 20<sup>th</sup> century’s history of totalitarianism from the Bolsheviks to the Khmer Rouge. Elites convinced of their superior knowledge and insight into human behavior and the proper aims people should pursue, demand the coercive power to achieve these goods. But true to the Founders’ vision of a flawed human nature, power is “of an encroaching nature,” as Madison and Washington both warned. It intoxicates and corrupts those who possess it. Moreover, it requires weakening the autonomy and freedom of the people, whose various interests will contradict the “vision of the anointed,” as Thomas Sowell dubs them, who claim to know what’s best for everybody, and use their power to neutralize or eliminate those who resist this superior wisdom.</p>
<p style="color: #272727;">We need to recognize that for over a century this Progressive vision has revolutionized the federal government, which now has a size, scope, cost, and coercive power that would have horrified the Founders. The ideas underlying this vision––for example, the notion that the federal government and its agencies are better able to “solve problems” than are local and state governments, or civil society––are taken for granted as self-evident even by many Republicans. Thus focusing on the spectacular incompetence of Barack Obama can blind us to the dangers that will continue after he has left office. Obama vowed to “fundamentally transform America,” but that transformation had started long before he became president.</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>Mob Rule and Free Stuff from Athens to Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/mob-rule-and-free-stuff-from-athens-to-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mob-rule-and-free-stuff-from-athens-to-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 29 Aug 2014 04:56:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton’s "Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents" exposes the perils of populism and the voting booth. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/democracys_dangers_and_discontent_cover.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239500" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/democracys_dangers_and_discontent_cover-233x350.jpg" alt="democracys_dangers_and_discontent_cover" width="201" height="302" /></a><strong>The David Horowitz Freedom Center will be hosting an evening with Bruce Thornton in Los Angeles on Wednesday, Sept. 3, 2014. For more information, click <a href="http://www.eventbrite.com/e/evening-reception-and-talk-with-bruce-thornton-tickets-12467323099">here</a>. </strong></p>
<p>21<sup>st</sup> century Americans have come to take democracy for granted as one of the comforts of modern life, like electricity or plastic, a thing that exists unconsidered as the foundation of their convenience. You hit a light switch and the light turns on. You push a button and politicians carry out your will.</p>
<p>The wars of the last century were defined as wars for democracy and the wars of this century have also been fitted into that mold, becoming not wars against external enemies, but wars for the assertion of the popular will of the peoples of Afghanistan and Iraq. All wars have become wars of democracy.</p>
<p>19<sup>th</sup> century America exported religion. 21<sup>st</sup> century America exports democracy.</p>
<p>Internally however democracy has degenerated into billion dollar elections fought with armies of consultants, polling firms and volunteers who expertly divide and conquer the populace through their infinite identity politics subdivisions on behalf of the wealthiest men in the country fighting to preserve and promote their status quo of a powerful central government and its oligarchic corporations.</p>
<p>The ruling left vocally demands that its leader fulfill their demands by violating the Constitution. They assert that since he won the popular vote in two elections, he can disregard the mere process of ancient laws. Democracy trumps republic just as the Democratic Party trumps the Republican Party.</p>
<p>It is this political climate of Obamaphones and attack ads, free stuff and mob rule, that Bruce Thornton enters with his new book, <i>Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents</i>. Thornton sees a country that has tilted too far toward the populism of the voting booth and too far away from the structure of a republic. Our collision of tyranny and greed has come from the mangling of a carefully constructed lawful structure.</p>
<p>Freedom requires firewalls, not only against the direct power of government, but also against the indirect power of the popular vote through government on the freedom of the individual. We need defenses not only against the tyranny of a tyrant, but also against the tyranny of King Mob.</p>
<p>The American system created firewalls against tyranny by limiting the power of any individual, in or out of politics, to influence the system. Not only did the branches of government have to be set against each other, but the popular vote could not be allowed to so thoroughly control the system that it would become a slave to the popular will and in turn enslave every individual to the latest poll and trending topic. As America has weakened its structural defenses, it has enslaved the individual to the group.</p>
<p>In <i>Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents,</i> Bruce Thornton traces the weaknesses of democracy from Athens to the modern revivals of democracy and the imbalances of power that they manufacture. Thornton suggests that the challenges raised by the critics of Athenian democracy remain unanswered and that those unanswered questions continue to haunt our system of government today.</p>
<p>The radical political transformations of the last century merged democratization and centralization into a soft tyranny that promised to fulfill the people’s short term wishes and needs at the expense of their autonomy. It plugged them into a collective system that exploited the populist image of democracy to erode the structural republicanism that made individual freedom and responsibility possible. The false association between political power and freedom continues to undermine our efforts, not only in the United States, but abroad where democratically elected Islamists implement populist tyrannies.</p>
<p>We think of Democracy as a means of empowering the individual and yet it’s difficult to look at the shapeless masses weeping over Obama’s election and see the individualism. The epithet of “mob rule” is often seen as an elitist critique of democracy, but it should instead be seen as an individualistic critique.</p>
<p>There is no room for the individual in the ranks of the mindless mob. Mobs operate on a hysterical consensus. They are as intolerant of the individual as any tyrant.</p>
<p>As Thornton shows us in <i>Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents</i>, the greatest threat to democracy has always been democracy. Unmetered democratization is far likelier to end in tyranny than a republic structured and steeped in law and tradition. And if it does not end in tyranny, then its own weaknesses, its unwillingness to sacrifice comfort for the steadfast virtues, Obamaphones for armies, will undo it.</p>
<p>The progressive shift generated a soft despotism of complex systems that are built on promising to meet the needs of the people, but never quite meet them, resulting in a constantly expanding system that is forever trapped in a race between populist demagoguery, unsustainable spending and frustrated anger.</p>
<p>The system promises to save us from ourselves while dismantling the processes that would allow us to save ourselves from it.</p>
<p>As America faces threats from barbarian bands such as ISIS and from rival states such as Putin’s Russia, its politics have concentrated away from the big questions of the future and toward the immediate demands of angry mobs for the free things that they assert a primal moral entitlement to.  Like Greece and Rome, the United States is being consumed by rival factions who vie for the favor of the mob, by sybaritic despots who play at being the patrons of the citizenry even as they despoil them and who think no further than their next cup of wine or their next golf game.</p>
<p>A republic vests power in the responsible, but unmetered democratization provides endless means of shifting responsibility. The people blame the leaders for fooling them with false promises. The leaders blame their predecessors. The buck keeps being passed around until it’s worn and torn to pieces.</p>
<p>Freedom and good government cannot exist without responsibility. Thornton argues that the progressive experiment with democratization is replicating the mistakes of ancient Athens. American exceptionalism is a powerful force, but underestimating the flaws of human beings and subsuming good judgment in empty idealism is a timeless formula for destroying nations.</p>
<p>Character, it has been said, is about transforming what you need to do into what you want to do. Democratization reverses that cycle of responsibility by pandering to human weakness. If we are to retain a republic, it must be built on character, on doing what we need to do as a nation.</p>
<p>America can either be a nation of free things or free people. It can be a place that upholds the dignity of the individual or subsumes him under the clutching hands of a grasping mob prying loose the free things that they were promised by their democratic masters.</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>Will Detroit Be Healed by Searching for &#8216;Subtle Racism&#8217;?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/will-detroit-be-healed-by-searching-for-subtle-racism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=will-detroit-be-healed-by-searching-for-subtle-racism</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 22 May 2014 04:31:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Detroit]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Economy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Eight Mile Line]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[management]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Racism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226010</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Denial and destruction in a once-great American city. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/detroit-fight-shows-why-public-pensions-are-bound-for-problems.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-226011" alt="detroit-fight-shows-why-public-pensions-are-bound-for-problems" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/detroit-fight-shows-why-public-pensions-are-bound-for-problems-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Just off of the James C. Lodge Freeway in Detroit is Eight Mile Road. The stretch near the freeway is just east of the famed area that provided the basis for the Eminem film of the same name. To its north lie predominantly white suburbs — over 77 percent of those who live in Oakland County are white — with median family income in excess of $65,000. Married couples comprise approximately half of households, with fewer than 15 percent of households led by a single female. Since 1990, the population of Oakland County has jumped from 1.083 million to 1.202 million.</p>
<p>South of Eight Mile Road lies the city of Detroit, with a nearly 83 percent black population and a median household income of under $27,000. Almost 74 percent of households in Detroit are led by single parents, nearly all women. The population of the city has dropped from 1.027 million in that same period to approximately 713,000.</p>
<p>Eight Mile Road itself paints a bleak picture. In the middle of a weekday, the streets are sparsely populated; old, solid-structure brick houses with rotten roofs dot the side streets; beaten-up Pontiacs from the early 1990s sitting forlornly in driveways. Hair salons, liquors stores and rim stores are open for business, but they&#8217;re located between defunct hair stores, liquor stores and rim stores.</p>
<p>What happened in Detroit? Horrific governance destroyed the industrial infrastructure that created the growing mixed-population base of the city; it centralized employment in the government while devastating the business and tax base. Businesses fled to the suburbs, as did whites. The bulk of the black population, trapped in a cycle of poverty and government dependence, sold a bill of goods by Detroit&#8217;s politicians, stayed behind.</p>
<p>Those politicians covered their mismanagement with racially charged rhetoric, from former Mayor Coleman Young to jailed former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. When Detroit went bankrupt in 2013, it was the final result of decades of failed policy decisions based on central planning.</p>
<p>When financial analysts look at Eight Mile Road, they see the tragedy of a once-proud city separated. On one side of the road, Detroit; on the other side, Detroit without the mismanagement. To fix the situation would require good governance — slashing regulations, lowering taxes, attracting business, creating jobs.</p>
<p>Instead, politicians offer more of the same. This week, Attorney General Eric Holder stated that America&#8217;s racial disparities are a result of continued racism and suggested that neutral laws had reinforced an enduring &#8220;subtle racism&#8221; throughout the country. Holder cited particular disciplinary practices in schools and sentencing guidelines as repositories of racism.</p>
<p>None of this will heal Detroit or places like it. Economic health requires a dedicated workforce, a free entrepreneurial climate, protection against crime. Those, in turn, require solid two-parent families, a competitive educational environment and a dedication to equal application of the law rather than equal results under it.</p>
<p>Eight Mile Road is a blot on a once-beautiful city. It will remain a dividing line so long as America&#8217;s politicians continue to use it as one.</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 Sharia-Tainted Businesses on the Ropes?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ronn-torossian/are-sharia-tainted-businesses-on-the-ropes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=are-sharia-tainted-businesses-on-the-ropes</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 13 May 2014 04:20:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ronn Torossian]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[adultery]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[beverly hills hotel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Brunei]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Chrysler Building]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[homosexual]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Road Runners]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[sharia]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225313</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Beverly Hills Hotel is only the tip of the iceberg. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/jay-leno-sultan-protest-600-reuters.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225328" alt="jay leno sultan protest 600 reuters" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/jay-leno-sultan-protest-600-reuters-450x253.jpg" width="315" height="177" /></a>Los Angeles liberals are –rightfully – abuzz at the decision by the government of Brunei to adopt strict Sharia laws.  The Beverly Hills City Council on Tuesday called for new ownership of the hotel so it &#8220;will not be tarnished by the Brunei government&#8217;s actions.&#8221; Even Kim Kardashian’s bridal shower, which was originally planned for the Beverly Hills Hotel, was relocated.  Protests have erupted over &#8220;extreme and inhumane&#8221; Sharia laws, and mainstream media has reported pressures against the Brunei government for their stance on human rights, homosexuality and other issues. Brunei’s laws call for strong punishments for those found guilty of homosexuality or adultery &#8212; including stoning the convicted to death.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rightfully, comedian Jay Leno said, &#8220;It&#8217;s not a political issue. This is not something that&#8217;s debatable. &#8230; It&#8217;s people being stoned to death.&#8221; Clearly this is the first time in many years that Hollywood has had its collective heads screwed on straight. One wonders what is next in terms of combating Sharia law countries and how far people will go to challenge Sharia law countries&#8217; ownership interests –and sponsorships – in America.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sharia money has a long reach.  This weekend, in Central Park, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://observer.com/2014/05/the-beverly-hills-hotel-nyc-road-runners-two-sides-of-the-same-anti-gay-coin/#axzz31N4MUgjt">the New York City Road Runners run was sponsored by the United Arab Emirates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> (UAE) embassy, in honor of the late President Sheikh Zayed.  The UAE also practices Sharia law &#8211; adultery and homosexuality are illegal, and wife beating is legal, assuming no physical marks are left on the woman.  Of course, today, if one is in the UAE they aren’t likely to use social media – as the freedom to use social media, does not extend to all. Under a 2012 cybercrime law that features vaguely defined offenses and harsh penalties, an American was arrested last year and served nine months in a maximum security prison for posting a negative video about the sons of powerful Dubai officials.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The race this weekend was run in honor of Sheikh Zayed. During Sheik Zayed’s time as ruler he was criticized for corporal punishment of prisoners and “conducting a slave ring of Bangladeshi children whom he would have kidnapped, starved, and then force to compete as jockeys in the country&#8217;s popular camel races.</span><sup style="line-height: 1.5em;">” </sup><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A 1994 report indicates that </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Amnesty International urged President al-Shaikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan to commute all death sentences and called for punishments such as amputation and flogging to be replaced with an alternative form of punishment which does not amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment. Amnesty International also called for the immediate and unconditional release of all prisoners of conscience.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And if the Beverly Hills Hotel is California, then what can be more New York than the Chrysler Building? The Abu Dhabi Investment Council, an investment arm of the Government of Abu Dhabi, owns the Chrysler Building, which paid over 800 million dollars for the 75% share it owns.  And if real estate is deemed to be boycotted by the elites, are the financiers also game? Sharia law authorities are in business with prestigious American banking institutions, including Barclays, Dow Jones, Standard &amp; Poors, HSBC, Citibank, Merrill Lynch, Deutschebank, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, UBS, Credit Suisse and others.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sharia Law is incompatible with Western values. And while Arab wealth stretches very far Sharia law is indeed dangerous. If, indeed, the uber-liberal Beverly Hills City Council succeeds in forcing out the Brunei government, will other businesses be far behind? </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>Governed by Rules, Not Men</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/walter-williams/governed-by-rules-not-men/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=governed-by-rules-not-men</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2014 04:01:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Congress]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[constitution]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[law]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[rule]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[tyranny]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220997</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The only way to combat tyranny. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/law_hammar_xlarge.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220998" alt="law_hammar_xlarge" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/law_hammar_xlarge.jpg" width="315" height="222" /></a>What kind of rules should govern our lives? I&#8217;d argue that the best rules are those that we&#8217;d be satisfied with if our very worst enemy were in charge of decision-making. The foundation for such rules was laid out by my mother. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>My mother worked as a domestic servant. That meant that my younger sister and I often lunched at home by ourselves during our preteen years. Being bigger and stronger than my sister, I seldom divided the food evenly, especially the desserts. After a tiring day at work, Mom would be greeted by sob stories from my sister about my lunchtime injustices. Mom finally became fed up with the sibling hassles. She didn&#8217;t admonish me to be more caring, fair, sensitive and considerate. She just made a rule: Whoever cuts the cake (pie, bread, meat, etc.) allows the other the first selection. With that new rule in place, you can bet that when either my sister or I divided food, it was divided equally.</p>
<p>You say, &#8220;That&#8217;s a nice story, Williams, but what&#8217;s the point?&#8221; The point is that the principle underlying Mom&#8217;s rule is precisely the kind that is necessary for rules to promote fairness. In general, the rules that we should want are those that promote fairness, whether it&#8217;s our best friend or it&#8217;s our worst enemy who&#8217;s the decision-maker. In the case of Mom&#8217;s rule, it didn&#8217;t make any difference whether I hated my sister&#8217;s guts that day or she hated mine or whether my sister was doing the cutting or I was; there was a just division of the food.</p>
<p>Think for a moment about rules in sports, say basketball. One team loses, and the other wins, but they and their fans leave the stadium peacefully and most often as friends. Why? The game&#8217;s outcome is seen as fair because there are fixed, known, neutral rules evenly applied by the referees.</p>
<p>The referees&#8217; job is to apply the rules — not determine the game&#8217;s outcome. Imagine the chaos and animosity among players and fans if one team paid referees to help it win or the referees were trying to promote some kind of equality among teams.</p>
<p>Billions of dollars and billions of hours are spent campaigning for this or that candidate in our national elections. You can bet that people are not making those expenditures so that politicians will uphold and defend the Constitution; they&#8217;re looking for favors. The Constitution&#8217;s framers gave us reasonably fair and neutral rules of the game. If our government acted, as the framers intended, as a referee or night watchman, how much difference would it make to any of us who occupies the White House or Congress? It would make little difference, if any. It would be just like our basketball game example. Any government official who knew and enforced the rules would do. But increasingly, who&#8217;s in office is making a difference, because government has abandoned its referee and night watchman function and gotten into the business of determining winners and losers. Unfortunately, for our nation, that&#8217;s what most Americans want.</p>
<p>Thomas Paine said, &#8220;Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.&#8221; Our Bill of Rights is an explicit recognition of the Founding Fathers&#8217; distrust of Congress. Just look at its language, with phrases such as &#8220;Congress shall not abridge,&#8221; &#8220;shall not infringe,&#8221; &#8220;shall not deny,&#8221; &#8220;disparage&#8221; and &#8220;violate.&#8221; If the framers did not believe that Congress would abuse our God-given, or natural, rights, they would not have used such language. If, after we die, we see anything like the Bill of Rights at our next destination, we&#8217;ll know that we&#8217;re in hell. To demand such protections in heaven would be the same as saying we can&#8217;t trust God.</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>Venezuelans Bleed Under Socialist Oppression</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-paulin/venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=venezuelans-bleed-while-left-worships-their-government</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Mar 2014 04:45:31 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Paulin]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Chávez]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Protest]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[student]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Venezuela]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220630</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[While the Hollywood elite cheer on the government. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220656" alt="A student takes part in a protest against Nicolas Maduro's government in Caracas, Venezuela." src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/A-student-takes-part-in-a-011.jpg" width="286" height="191" /></a>Massive and bloody anti-government protests have been roiling Venezuela for more than a month – provoked by an out-of-control murder rate, food shortages, and myriad instances of inept governance. But that didn&#8217;t stop a rogues&#8217; gallery of Latin leftists, including Cuban President Raul Castro, from turning up in Caracas to honor the late Hugo Chávez on the first anniversary of the Venezuelan leader&#8217;s death.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Security forces and pro-government militias have responded with a vengeance against the protesters, leaving at least 21 dead and hundreds injured. Most were students.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The tear gas, rubber bullets and </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chavista</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> thugs on motorcycles, however, were out of sight and mind for Castro and fellow leftists, including Bolivian President Evo Morales and his Nicaraguan counterpart Daniel Ortega. Like Castro, they enjoyed Chávez&#8217;s oil largess over the years. Chávez had promoted himself as the savior of Venezuela&#8217;s poor yet gave away billions of dollars of their oil wealth as a way to expand his influence and build alliances against the United States. The firebrand socialist, famous for his colorful anti-American broadsides, died a year ago of cancer, on March 5th, at age 58.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A couple of Hollywood heavy weights – director Oliver Stone and actor Danny Glover – lent their celebrity to Wednesday&#8217;s ceremonies that included a military parade and civic events. Glover and Stone considered Chávez a friend and ideological soulmate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Chávez&#8217;s hand-picked successor, Nicolás Maduro – a 51-year-old former bus driver and union leader – led the ceremonies at “El Comandante&#8217;s&#8221; sacred tomb – situated in a former military museum in Caracas that had served as the command center for a disorganized and bloody coup attempt that Lt. Colonel Hugo Chávez led on February 4, 1992, against a democratic government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Hugo Chávez was, without a doubt, the great leader who brought democracy. Never in history has there been a leader who so authentically loved the people of this country,&#8221; Maduro</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303824204579421441297723368?KEYWORDS=Venezuela&amp;mg=reno64-wsj"> told </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">cheering Chávez loyalists. The ceremony featured goose-steeping soldiers, columns of tanks, and low-flying Russian Sukhoi jets.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A lavish spectacle, it came amid the economic and social chaos produced by what Chávez called “21st Century Socialism,&#8221; and the bread-and-circuses populism is being deepened by Maduro in the oil-rich yet impoverished South American nation. Venezuela has long been a prize for Cuba, which sponsored leftist insurgences there in the 1960s. Now, socialist Venezuela has come to look more and more </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">like</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Cuba, where basic goods also are scarce.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Ironically, Chávez had portrayed himself during his first presidential campaign as a moderate seeking a “third way” between capitalism and socialism. Claiming he&#8217;d traded the bullet for the ballet, he pledged to reverse declining living standards and root out Venezuela&#8217;s rampant corruption. But months after his landslide election victory, he did an </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/539348/posts">about-face</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, praising Cuba&#8217;s communism and forming a close friendship with Fidel Castro. Soon he was forming anti-American alliances with Middle Eastern strongmen such as Iraq&#8217;s Saddam Hussein and Libya&#8217;s Moammar Gadhafi. He nationalized large swaths of the economy in Venezuela; or to be precise: the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela. Early into his first term, Chávez insisted on the name change &#8212; inspired by Venezulea&#8217;s aristocratic independence hero Simón Bolivar &#8212; as he pushed through a rewritten constitution in a Congress packed with his loyalists.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for Venezuela&#8217;s corruption, Chávez took it to new heights by allowing for the emergence of a new social class; what a Venezuelan journalist famously called the “Boliburguesía” &#8212; a portmanteau of the word&#8217;s Bolivarian and bourgeoisie. As has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0CiqzufsT4Y&amp;list=FLhcRY22v3s3rJFFMeVY3Qrw&amp;index=8">reported</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> often over the years, in print and broadcast media, they became rich overnight thanks to sweetheart contacts, cronyism, and corruption.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Glover, however, spoke only of Chávez as a man of the people to enthusiastic applause from Chávez loyalists. “His memory lives with us through the work that you do as citizens of this great nation,” </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://arts.nationalpost.com/2014/03/07/actor-danny-glover-supports-venezuelan-government-during-visit-to-honour-hugo-chavez/">he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Stone didn&#8217;t attend but in an interview with a local news outlet talked wistfully of his departed friend Hugo. “I miss Chávez, miss his spirit and presence,”</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://globovision.com/articulo/oliver-stone-extrano-a-hugo-chavez-extrano-su-espiritu-y-su-presencia"> he said</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Stone allowed his documentary film, “My Amigo Hugo,” to premier on Venezuela television. (The government</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/world/americas/one-year-after-chavezs-death-a-divide-in-venezuelans-fervor.html?_r=0"> required </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">all television stations, both state-owned and private, to broadcast it.)</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/gcwGp0yn9nk" height="315" width="560" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">An information war is underway. Government censorship – including twitter and Internet outages – have been another weapon the government has used in its battle against the protesters whom Stone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=102281">compared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to “the right-wing Cuban exiles in southern Florida.” Later, he complained that he&#8217;d been subjected to “verbal violence” over his support for the Chávez and Maduro regimes.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Social media, for its part, has helped organize the protests and shown the world the brutal handiwork of Venezuela&#8217;s security forces. Twitter&#8217;s SOSVenezuela has buzzed with photos claiming to show Cuban troops and military aircraft in Venezuela. Opposition protesters are convinced that Cubans are participating in the repressive crack-down against students. Over the years, Chávez invited many Cuban security agents and advisers into the country to help solidify his socialist rule.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Bread and circuses populism has a long history in Venezuela, as does statism and authoritarianism. But Chávez took these things to new heights. Now after 11 years of Chávez, and one year of Maduro, who is doubling down on Chávez&#8217;s policies, Venezuela is sliding toward basket case status. It has one of the world&#8217;s worst murder rates. Shortages of basic goods &#8212; including milk, medicines, and toilet paper – are common due to currency exchange and price controls that have made it unprofitable for business to import goods. And things are bound to get worse after recent government edicts requiring retailers and businesses to offer government-set “fair prices.” “</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=1599572&amp;CategoryId=10717">Good Morning, Communism</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">!” declared the respected newsletter VenEcomony after analyzing the impact of Maduro&#8217;s recent “economic war” against supposedly bourgeoisie retailers and businessmen. Maduro has called the opposition “fascists” and dupes of “Yankee imperialists.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Venezuela has become a polarized country divided into two ideological camps, thanks mainly to class-warrior Chávez. And last month, opposition leader </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-02-20/leopoldo-lopez-the-venezuela-oppositions-new-hero">Leopoldo López</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a 42-year-old Harvard-educated politician and former mayor, was sent to jail on trumped up charges, including murder and inciting rioters, for having lent his support to the ongoing street protests.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“HE WHO tires, loses”: that was the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.economist.com/news/americas/21596945-after-opposition-leader-arrested-violence-continues-unabated-tale-two-prisoners">slogan</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> printed on a T-shirt worn by López when he was arrested among a sea of supporters. To Maduro&#8217;s outrage, López had urged protesters to continue taking their grievances to the streets with peaceful protests; it&#8217;s the only option they have left against an authoritarian government. Unarmed student demonstrators have been using two valuable weapons: twitter (#SOSVenezuea) and YouTube. Powerful videos like this have gone viral:</span></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/EFS6cP9auDc" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In last April&#8217;s presidential election, Maduro prevailed over opposition leader Henrique Capriles, a state governor and former mayor, by a razor-thing 50.6 percent of the vote. Protesters rightly believe that Capriles ought to be leading the country in light of Chávez and Maduro&#8217;s demagoguery and populism on top of illegal campaign spending and threats against state employees who supported opposition candidates.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Students come mainly from the middle-class and have been the backbone of the nationwide protest movement. It started in early February in San Cristóbal, a college town in the Andean mountains of 650,000, following the sexual assault of a female student. Initially, the protests were provoked by out-of-control crime. But as they spread to every major city in Venezuela, students added additional grievances to their manifesto – corruption, electrical blackouts, and other quality-of-life issues. Here and there, there have been reports in social media of the protests spreading to working-class areas that have been traditional Chávez strongholds.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the hope of pulling off a Ukrainian-style revolution seems remote. The military is with Maduro, by all accounts. The students and other protesters are a minority; and so far their rage has been vented mainly against the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">symptoms</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of bread and circuses socialism – not against the system itself; and that system is without a doubt corrupt. It revolves in part around the popular belief, especially among the poor majority, that Venezuelans ought to be rich and entitled by dint of their oil wealth &#8212; an impossibility in Venezuela today. It&#8217;s a sirens song – the paradox of plenty, as some call it – that keeps free-market policies at bay, keeps power concentrated in the hands of a few, and lends itself to a mentality that blames others. In this culture, anti-Americanism flourishes. Free-market policies and investor-friendly laws, on the other hand, would create wealth – far more than could be pumped out of the ground.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The prophetic warning of Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, a Venezuelan intellectual who was instrumental in founding OPEC, is often cited and worth quoting in respect to Venezuela&#8217;s long decline and current crisis. “Ten years from now, twenty years from now, you will see: oil will bring us ruin… Oil is the Devil&#8217;s excrement.”</span></p>
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		<title>Freedom Is Not Free</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/freedom-is-not-free/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=freedom-is-not-free</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/freedom-is-not-free/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Mar 2014 05:03:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220218</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Is our generation up to fighting for it?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Irs.png"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-220229" alt="Irs" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Irs-450x306.png" width="450" height="306" /></a>There may be something to the claim that all people want to be free. But it is a demonstrable fact that freedom has been under attack, usually successfully, for thousands of years.</p>
<p>The Federal Communications Commission&#8217;s recent plan to have a &#8220;study&#8221; of how editorial decisions are made in the media, placing FCC bureaucrats in editorial offices across the country, was one of the boldest assaults on freedom of the press. Fortunately, there was enough backlash to force the FCC to back off.</p>
<p>With all the sweeping powers available to government, displeasing FCC bureaucrats in editorial offices could have brought on armies of &#8220;safety&#8221; inspectors from OSHA, audits from the Internal Revenue Service and many other harassments from many other government agencies.</p>
<p>Such tactics have become especially common in this administration, which has the morals of thugs and the agenda of totalitarians. They may not be consciously aiming at creating a totalitarian state, but shameless use of government power to crush those who get in their way can produce totalitarian end results.</p>
<p>The prosecution of Dinesh D&#8217;Souza for contributing $20,000 to a political candidate, supposedly in violation of the many campaign finance laws, is a classic case of selective prosecution.</p>
<p>Thugs who stationed themselves outside a polling place in Philadelphia to intimidate white voters were given a pass, and others accused of campaign finance violations were charged with misdemeanors, but Dinesh D&#8217;Souza has been charged with felonies that carry penalties of years in federal prison.</p>
<p>All of this is over a campaign contribution that is chicken feed, compared to what can be raised inside of an hour at a political fundraising breakfast or lunch.</p>
<p>Could this singling out of D&#8217;Souza for prosecution have something to do with the fact that he made a documentary movie with devastating exposures of Barack Obama&#8217;s ideologies and policies? That movie, incidentally, is titled &#8220;2016: Obama&#8217;s America,&#8221; and every American should get a copy of it on a DVD. It will be the best $10 investment you are ever likely to make.</p>
<p>It doesn&#8217;t matter what rights you have under the Constitution of the United States, if the government can punish you for exercising those rights.</p>
<p>And it doesn&#8217;t matter what limits the Constitution puts on government officials&#8217; power, if they can exceed those limits without any adverse consequences.</p>
<p>In other words, the Constitution cannot protect you, if you don&#8217;t protect the Constitution with your votes against anyone who violates it. Those government officials who want more power are not going to stop unless they get stopped.</p>
<p>As long as millions of Americans vote on the basis of who gives them free stuff, look for their freedom — and all our freedom — to be eroded away, bit by bit. Our children and grandchildren may yet come to see the Constitution as just some quaint words from the past that people once took seriously.</p>
<p>The arrogance of arbitrary power is not confined to the federal government. An egregious case in Massachusetts involves a teenage girl from Connecticut named Justina Pelletier, who was being treated for a rare disease by doctors at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts.</p>
<p>When her parents brought this 15-year-old girl to an emergency room in Boston, the doctors there decided that her problem was not medical but psychological. When the parents objected, and sought to take her back to the doctors who had been treating her at Tufts University, the Massachusetts Department of Children and Families charged the parents with &#8220;medical child abuse,&#8221; and were granted legal custody of the teenager.</p>
<p>Once given arbitrary power over Justina, the DCF bureaucrats kept her all but isolated from her parents for more than a year. To add insult to injury, a judge issued a gag order, forbidding the parents from discussing the case publicly.</p>
<p>Only after Megyn Kelly on the Fox News Channel brought this case to national attention did the Massachusetts bureaucrats back off and turn the teenager&#8217;s medical care back to the doctors at Tufts University. Whether her parents will get to see their daughter freely again is still up in the air.</p>
<p>Arbitrary power is ugly and vicious, regardless of what pious rhetoric goes with it. Freedom is not free. You have to fight for it or lose it. But is our generation up to fighting for it?</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>.<br />
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		<title>Refuting Robert Reich</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=refuting-robert-reich</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/refuting-robert-reich/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Feb 2014 05:55:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Robert Reich]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218816</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Seven tired left-wing arguments and why they fail. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-218824" alt="6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a012876c6c7fb970c019b00336fea970b-500wi-279x350.jpg" width="279" height="350" /></a>Former Clinton Labor Secretary and lifelong leftist Robert Reich has just released a new <a href="http://front.moveon.org/war_on_the_poor_reich/#.UvzUvV5CD1y">video</a> for MoveOn.org, <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">alleging that there is a &#8220;war&#8221; being waged on the poor and working families. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; Reich begins, never bothering to explain who &#8220;they&#8221; are. His rant connects &#8220;seven dots&#8221; that point to a conspiracy of class oppressors who are &#8220;sinking&#8221; the poor with their opposition to big-government dependency programs, such as Food Stamps and long-term unemployment benefits. And once &#8220;they&#8221; get their way, &#8220;you&#8217;ll do exactly as they tell you,&#8221; Reich says. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich&#8217;s seven spurious claims, as over-worn and tired as they are, deserve to be responded to individually. It should be no surprise that each of Reich&#8217;s proposed &#8220;solutions&#8221; does its own damage to the poor, while offering little in the way of genuine social improvement.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>1.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending unemployment benefits for people who have been out of work for more than six months.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The framing of this issue is dishonest at best. On first inspection, someone unfamiliar with the recent history of unemployment compensation extensions on Capitol Hill might sympathize with the idea of extending benefits for those out of work for &#8220;more than six months.&#8221; Six months, after all, is not an unimaginable amount of time to be chronically unemployed in the Obama economy. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The problem is, the recent benefit extension fight in Congress was not targeted just at workers who find themselves still treading water after six or seven months. Combined with state emergency benefits that usually last 26 weeks, federal add-ons initiated after the 2008 recession </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">raised that total to 73 weeks, meaning people were eligible to collect benefits for almost a year and half. This was an unprecedented extension of the unemployment compensation program, and many Americans justifiably question the wisdom of such exceedingly long durations of unemployment benefits. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">One reason for this skepticism has to do with the indisputable capacity of benefit extensions to exacerbate long-term unemployment. <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2014/01/05/unemployment-insurance-extensions-competitive-enterprise-institute-editorials-debates/4330603/">Analyses</a> </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">conducted by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) concluded that such extensions over the past five years have kept more than 600,000 out of the labor force by paying people not to work. Those claims were echoed in a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ideas.repec.org/e/pmu176.html">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of recently unemployed people in New Jersey commissioned by Alan Krueger of Princeton University and Andreas Mueller of the University of Stockholm. They discovered that after a burst of initial activity, people slack off on their job search and wait for something to happen. Moreover, it is likely more workers have been drawn into the mire of unemployment due to the benefit extensions: Another <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/368047/study-extending-unemployment-benefits-increased-unemployment-more-3-percentage-points">study</a> from the NBER concluded that unemployment benefit extensions have increased overall unemployment by over 3 percent. </span></span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Workers are not benefited by being encouraged to remain unemployed for such long periods of time. Long-term unemployment dulls skill sets and makes workers less attractive to potential employers. The longer workers are enticed to stay unemployed, prolong the job hunt, or even dismiss jobs with lower pay, the weaker their resumes become when they inevitably reenter the job market. </span></span></p>
<p>Leaving this aside, if Reich&#8217;s &#8220;they&#8221; bogeymen are meant to refer to Republican congressional leadership, his claim that &#8220;they are against&#8221; the benefits extension is also untrue. Republicans have approved renewal of the extension numerous times. This year, Republican lawmakers, led by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner, requested that the renewal of the extension be <a href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303595404579321010229177576">offset</a> elsewhere in the budget and accompanied by job-creations measures, which Democrats refused. If Democrats had conceded to these commonsense compromises, it is more than likely unemployment insurance extension would have been approved for 2014.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>2.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to raise the minimum wage.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A 2007 </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=961374">survey</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">100 studies</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on the effects of raising the minimum wage was conducted David Neumark and William Wascher at the National Bureau of Economic Research. It revealed that a &#8220;sizable majority&#8221; of those studies, including those with the &#8220;most credible evidence,&#8221; concluded that raising the minimum wage produced &#8220;negative employment effects, both for the United States as well as for many other countries.&#8221; Even more tellingly, &#8220;the studies that focus on the least-skilled groups provide relatively overwhelming evidence of stronger disemployment effects for these groups.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ibtimes.com/most-benefits-minimum-wage-increase-would-not-go-poor-households-1541342">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) only 5 percent of hourly U.S. workers made the federal minimum wage or less in 2012. Among those earning it, 63 percent were second- or third-wage earners from households with incomes equal to three times the poverty line or more. Only 11.3 percent of workers who would experience the increase live in households officially designated as poor. As the BLS survey also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2013/02/who-earns-the-minimum-wage-suburban-teenagers-not-single-parents">reveals</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, most minimum wage earners are young, part-time workers with an average family income of $53,000 per year. If Reich wishes to help teenage, middle class burger-flippers he might have a point. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>3.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re against extending Medicaid benefits.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, the disaster known as ObamaCare is doing precisely this. More than </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://freebeacon.com/factcheck-obamacare-and-the-state-of-the-union/">double</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the number of people who have signed up for healthcare via the exchanges have enrolled in Medicaid. Since Medicaid is government-subsidized insurance, it is paid for by a combination of funds from state and federal budgets. </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Prior</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to its expansion under ObamaCare, Medicaid had already become the largest line item in a typical state&#8217;s budget, exceeding such items as public safety, infrastructure, roads and, since 2009, education spending for kindergarten-through-12th-grade.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet there is a far bigger problem. Since Medicaid payments are 61 percent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.kevinmd.com/blog/2013/11/physicians-hesitant-medicaid-patients.html">less</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that what private insurance pays, an increasing number of doctors </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/12/26/doctor-wont-see-analysts-warn-obamacare-plans-could-resemble-medicaid/">refuse</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to accept new Medicaid patients. &#8220;About half of the physicians in many communities refuse to take Medicaid patients because the payment system is just too low,&#8221; reports James Capretta of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Many doctors are still willing to take a certain percentage of such patients in order to fulfill a moral obligation, but they are not willing to put themselves out of business to do so. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, many Americans enrolled in Medicaid are going to discover a reality that invariably eludes people like Robert Reich: &#8220;extending Medicaid benefits&#8221; isn&#8217;t remotely the same thing as getting actual healthcare. The end result will be rationing and denial of care for the millions of poor sold empty promises.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>4.</strong> <em>&#8220;They want to cut food stamps.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As with much of the progressive lexicon, &#8220;cut&#8221; is a euphemism. In reality, food stamp usage has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://cnsnews.com/news/article/ali-meyer/record-20-households-food-stamps-2013">exploded</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, with a record-setting one-in-five American households on the program in 2013, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.fns.usda.gov/pd/16SNAPpartHH.htm">according</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture. Furthermore, the cost of the program has increased a whopping 164 percent over the last decade, and 36.8 percent since the Obama administration assumed control in 2009. Thus a program that cost the nation $58.2 billion in 2009 cost $79.6 billion last year. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The latest Farm Bill under which the food stamp program operates does cut food stamp spending, but those cuts </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.latinpost.com/articles/7126/20140211/president-obama-signs-farm-bill-what-will-the-cut-to-food-stamps-mean-for-you.htm">amount</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $800 million per year, or approximately one percent of the overall total &#8212; a total that has grown exponentially, even as America remains saddled with a national debt of more than $17 trillion, along with unfunded liabilities that exceed $85 trillion. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>5.</strong> <em>&#8220;They refuse to invest in education and job training.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In reality the federal government alone </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/may/16/mitt-romney/mitt-romney-said-there-are-49-different-federal-jo/">has</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 job-training programs run by nine different agencies, according to the the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO). These programs </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/05/17/senator-questions-18b-spent-on-job-training-as-study-suggest-rampant-waste/">cost</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the taxpayer $18 billion per year, and a 2011 report by the same GAO concluded that some of them are riddled with mismanagement, waste, fraud, abuse and corruption. The report further noted that since 2004, only 5 of the 47 agencies involved kept tabs on whether participants had actually secure jobs. &#8220;Little is known about the effectiveness of most programs,&#8221; the GAO concluded.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for education, the federal government </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://febp.newamerica.net/background-analysis/education-federal-budget">spent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $138 billion in FY2013. In both real dollars and as a percentage of GDP, the United States </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-education-spending-tops-global-list-study-shows/">outspent</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> most of the world&#8217;s developed nations in education. When one factors in vocational training and college as well, the United States outspends all of them. Yet if bang for the buck counts, America comes up woefully short, routinely scoring well below other nations on international exams. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But this is only part of the story. Every one of America&#8217;s true educational wastelands &#8212; namely, most of our major inner cities where graduation rates hover around 60 percent or less, where budgets are routinely on the verge of bankruptcy or already there, and where teachers unions fight tooth and nail for the miserable status quo &#8212; are Democrat </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/atrocity/">strongholds</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. If Reich were truly interested in helping the poor and working class Americans he professes to care so deeply about, he&#8217;d be far more interested in challenging that status quo, which revolves around the unholy alliance of education unions and a Democratic Party beholden to their campaign contributions and marching orders.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>6.</strong> <em>&#8220;They don&#8217;t want to rebuild America&#8217;s crumbling infrastructure.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Reich has an exceedingly short memory. The American Recovery and Investment Act of 2009, more familiarly known as the stimulus bill, was supposed to target the lion&#8217;s share of its $787 billion appropriation (</span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://useconomy.about.com/od/candidatesandtheeconomy/a/Obama_Stimulus.htm">increased</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to $840 billion in 2012) on &#8220;shovel-ready jobs.&#8221; One year later, President Obama </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17obama-t.html?_r=3&amp;ref=magazine&amp;pagewanted=all%22">admitted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> “there&#8217;s no such thing.&#8221; To be fair to Reich, infrastructure spending has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/24/u-s-infrastructure-spending-has-plummeted-since-2008/">taken</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a nosedive since its peak before the recession began, but it&#8217;s not because the state and local governments that provide the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/why-cant-we-just-leave-infrastructure-spending-to-the-states/2012/03/21/gIQAjpYBSS_blog.html">vast majority</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of infrastructure spending don&#8217;t want to spend the money. It&#8217;s because they </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">can&#8217;t</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> afford to do so.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet even in the midst of such cuts, America </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/paulroderickgregory/2013/04/01/infrastructure-gap-look-at-the-facts-we-spend-more-than-europe/">spends</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> more on infrastructure than the progressive stronghold known as the European Union, at 3.3 percent of our GDP from 2006-2011, compared to only 3.1 percent for the EU. The clamor for increased spending is all about doing it with more borrowed money, with the American Society of Civil Engineers (hardly a neutral entity) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/">calling</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for a $3.6 trillion &#8220;investment&#8221; between now and 2020. Congress&#8217;s most recently passed budget </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://news.agc.org/2014/01/18/congress-passes-spending-bill-to-fund-government-in-2014-2/">allocates</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> $108 billion for federal construction accounts.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The only way we will likely see more infrastructure spending is with a growing economy. Obama could contribute to that growth if he would approve the Keystone pipeline, among other things. Perhaps he could explain why he won&#8217;t to Robert Reich.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><strong>7.</strong> <em>&#8220;They&#8217;re out to bust unions.&#8221;</em> </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unions are doing a good job of busting themselves. Nothing speaks louder to this reality than the debacle Big Labor perpetrated in Wisconsin, where their thug-like tactics were rejected by both Republican Gov. Scott Walker and the voters themselves. As a result of Walker&#8217;s triumph, a projected $3 billion-plus deficit </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/blog/hey-who-wants-to-talk-about-wisconsins-economic-miracle/?singlepage=true">turned</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> into a projected $300,000 surplus in 2011. Much of it was accomplished by getting government union members to pay for a portion of their own healthcare and pensions and eliminating automatic pay and benefit increases that are strangling states like New York, Illinois and California.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the national level, a recent </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mackinac.org/19051">study</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by the Mackinac Center reveals that right-to-work states have seen greater improvements in employment rates, income, and population growth than non-right-to-work states over the last 60 years. Critics attempt to obscure this reality by pointing to the fact that states with right-to-work laws have lower per capita incomes. Yet they </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.michigancapitolconfidential.com/18222">fail</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to factor in the cost of living, which is far more expensive in states where union monopolies push government budgets, and the taxes that pay for them, ever higher. When cost of living is factored in,  people in right-to-work states have 4.1 percent higher per-capita personal incomes than those in non-right-to-work states.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Furthermore, in cities that have gone bankrupt, such as Stockton, and Detroit, the primary drivers of that bankruptcy were out-of-control legacy costs for government union workers. Of Detroit&#8217;s $12 billion in outstanding debt, $9.2 billion of it is comprised of health and pension benefits owed to retired workers. When the city filed for bankruptcy, it </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/07/24/detriot-mess-why-future-stalled-in-motor-city/">had</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> 47 different public employee unions, and a worker at the Water and Sewer Department who collected $56,000 in pay and benefits for his job as a horse-shoer despite the department having no horses. Detroit also has three retired municipal workers collecting a pension for every two that are still working.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">According to Heritage Foundation&#8217;s chief economist Stephen Moore, more than 60 American cities may be </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://factsnotfantasy.blogspot.com/2014/02/us-is-going-bankrupt-one-city-at-time.html">facing</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the same fate as the Motor City. “Keep an eye on ‘too big to fail’ cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York,” he warns.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Moore goes on to cite the progressive ideology in general championed by Reich and others as the primary impetus for such failure. “For at least the last 20 years major U.S. cities have been playgrounds for left-wing experiments—high taxes on the rich; sanctuaries for illegal immigrants; super-minimum wage rules; strict gun-control laws; regulations and paperwork that makes it onerous to open a business or develop on your own property; crony capitalism with contracts going to political donors and friends; and failing schools ruled by teacher unions, with little competition or productivity.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Robert Reich had any intellectual honesty, he would answer his question, &#8220;What are they really after?&#8221; by examining who really benefits from</span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> large swathes of the population kept mired in poverty and being sucked into the mentality of dependency. It is no accident that every major American city </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/arnold-ahlert/big-dem-cities-big-dem-poverty/">besieged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by poverty, crime, economic disfunction and failing schools is a Democratic stronghold. </span>Reich&#8217;s proposals offer more of the same. They merely reassert a long-held belief by the American left that success is measured by how many people they get <i>on</i> government programs, not <i>off</i> government programs. Americas would do well to &#8220;connect the dots&#8221; regarding the utter bankruptcy of such ideology.</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>Mark Levin&#8217;s &#8216;The Liberty Amendments&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/spyridon-mitsotakis/mark-levins-the-liberty-amendments/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=mark-levins-the-liberty-amendments</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/spyridon-mitsotakis/mark-levins-the-liberty-amendments/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Jan 2014 05:06:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Spyridon Mitsotakis]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amendments]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Liberty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mark Levin]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[term limits]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214703</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The answer to the question, "What can we do to save America?" ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/MarkLevin_LibertyAmendments_Cover__33917.1373489734.251.374.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214750" alt="MarkLevin_LibertyAmendments_Cover__33917.1373489734.251.374" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/MarkLevin_LibertyAmendments_Cover__33917.1373489734.251.374-228x350.png" width="182" height="280" /></a>In her memoir of her childhood, <i>Prague Winter</i>, Madeleine Albright describes what it was like to witness the death of democracy in her native Czechoslovakia. She details how the enemies of democracy were able to elect a plurality of their followers to the parliament and, in coordination with the media that they controlled and the mobs in the streets that they themselves had orchestrated, they confused and divided the majority, which valued liberty. The nation was thus brought into a four-decade era of darkness. Years later, Czechoslovakia’s newly-installed tyrannical rulers in the Czech Communist Party would detail these tactics in an internal report called, “How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in Transition to Socialism,” which made its way to the West and was published by the United States House of Representatives in the 1960s as a warning to Americans of what can happen when the people are cowed by fear and lured by the siren song of utopia into voluntarily relinquishing their freedom.</p>
<p>The American left has learned the strategies of tyranny all too well. In the run-up to the 2012 election, the misnamed Democratic Party had their union cronies organize the malcontents of society into “Occupy Wall Street” and set them loose on the public. With the media covering up their filth, violence and rapes, “Occupy” distracted Americans from the looming threat of Obamacare and focused attention on “income inequality.” At the same time, the Obama administration turned the IRS into a weapon of political repression and used it against law-abiding citizens to suppress their peaceful voices of dissent.</p>
<p>This is where America stands today: a tyrannical president who is coldly robbing millions of Americans of their healthcare; a renegade judiciary that cannot be relied upon to faithfully follow the word of the Constitution; a power hungry, goose-stepping party that works relentlessly to drag the nation down the road to serfdom; and a castrated opposition party too afraid to fight for their principals. Faced with this bleak outlook, conservative freedom fighter and constitutional lawyer Mark Levin dedicated himself to answering the question callers to his popular radio show ask the most: “What can we do?”</p>
<p>Levin found his answers in Article V of the Constitution.  He explains that “[Article V] provides for two methods of amending the Constitution.” In the first method, “two-thirds of Congress passes a proposed amendment and then forwards it to the state legislatures for possible ratification by three-fourths of the states[.]” The second method “involv[es] the direct application of two-thirds of the state legislatures for a Convention for proposing Amendments, which would thereafter also require a three-fourths ratification vote by the states.” It is the second method he focuses on.</p>
<p>This process, it is important to point out, does <i>not</i> provide for a constitutional convention. Instead, it provides a way to offer Amendments to the Constitution over the heads of our inept political ruling class and at the same time preserves enough roadblocks to prevent a runaway caucus. Levin supplements all eleven of his proposed Amendments with the words of the Framers, showing that each of the ideas is in the tradition of their thinking, and offers examples of how these values are at risk by an ever-expanding and oppressive federal leviathan.</p>
<p>New Yorkers can appreciate and identify with many of the proposals:</p>
<blockquote><p>An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress: New York City had the foresight to put similar term limits on our City Council. After twelve long years we will finally be rid of Democrat Charles Barron, the loudmouthed former Black Panther who used his seat on the City Council to express his racism (“I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this. It’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”), shill for the world’s worst dictators (as long as they hate America), stunt the economy of his district (when it benefits the unions), and trash “terrorist” Israel and the “Jewish lobby” (comments which, irony of all ironies, earned him the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke). This also means that entrenched extremists like Democrat Melissa Mark-Viverito – whose support for Puerto Rican separatism is so extreme that she advocates clemency for FALN terrorists, a group infamous for their deadly bombing campaigns against New York – will not be around forever. This block against entrenchment is good for the City, and it would be good for the Country too.</p>
<p>An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy: In the 1960s radical academic Frances Fox Piven devised a scheme whereby the left would flood welfare rolls until “the system” (capitalism) collapses and thereafter build socialism in its wake. The idea took hold in New York and by 1975 the exploding welfare rolls bankrupted the city. In 2010, Piven told the Stalinist Brecht Forum that, “under the radar,” Obama has made appointments to the Federal Bureaucracy that meet her approval. The Bureaucracy wields enormous, and expanding, power over our lives, and the idea that it could be run by a bunch of Frances Fox Pivens should be a perfect enough example to explain why steps should be taken to reign it in:</p>
<p>An Amendment to Protect Private Property: Anyone who lived through Occupy Wall Street can testify to the importance of private property, which the Founding Fathers wisely held to be sacred. Once the malcontents convinced themselves that they had a “right” to “occupy” – or, as the Marxists would say, “expropriate” – the property of others, all semblance of civil society degenerated to the point where, as the <i>New York Post</i> reported at the time, we had “the nauseating spectacle of rapes being reported not to the police, but to the ‘Security Working Group,’ which hands down internal punishments to offenders. According to activist Channing Kehoe, those guilty of assault are punished by having their blankets taken away.” Private property is a central pillar in any decent civilization, and Levin is right to advocate its strengthening.</p></blockquote>
<p>Levin is fond of saying that Washington will not fix itself. It’s true. He has now shown us a way that we the people can save ourselves. We can take matters into our own hands with <i>The Liberty Amendments</i>, or lazily watch as our freedom is snuffed out by the specter of all-consuming centralized government.</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 New Year and Old Problems</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/a-new-year-and-old-problems/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-year-and-old-problems</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jan 2014 05:25:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[new year]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214312</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Facing our historic crossroads. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-sad-frown.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214313" alt="obama-sad-frown" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-sad-frown-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Whenever we stand on the threshold of a new year, we are tempted to forget the hazards of prophecy, and try to see what may lie on the other side of this arbitrary division of time.</p>
<p>Sometimes we are content to try to change ourselves with New Year&#8217;s resolutions to do better in some respect. Changing ourselves is a much more reasonable undertaking than trying to change other people. It may or may not succeed, but it seldom creates the disasters that trying to change others can produce.</p>
<p>When we look beyond ourselves to the world around us, peering into the future can be a very sobering, if not depressing, experience.</p>
<p>ObamaCare looms large and menacing on our horizon. This is not just because of computer problems, or even because some people who think that they have enrolled may discover at their next visit to a doctor that they do not have any insurance coverage.</p>
<p>What ObamaCare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts&#8217; Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects, whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the 10th Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>ObamaCare is more than a medical problem, though there are predictable medical problems — and even catastrophes — that will unfold in the course of 2014 and beyond. Our betters have now been empowered to run our lives, with whatever combination of arrogance and incompetence they may have, or however much they lie.</p>
<p>The challenges ahead are much clearer than what our responses will be. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that increasing numbers of people seem to have finally — after nearly five long years — begun to see Barack Obama for what he is, rather than for what he seemed to be, when judged by his image and rhetoric.</p>
<p>What kind of man would blithely disrupt the medical care of millions of Americans, and then repeatedly lie to them with glib assurances that they could keep their doctors or health insurance if they wanted to?</p>
<p>What kind of man would set up a system in which people would be forced by law to risk their life savings, because they had to divulge their financial identification numbers to strangers who could turn out to be convicted felons?</p>
<p>With all the time that elapsed between the passage of ObamaCare and its going into effect, why were the so-called &#8220;navigators&#8221; who were to be handling other people&#8217;s financial records never investigated for criminal convictions? What explanation could there be, other than that Obama didn&#8217;t care?</p>
<p>Caring is not a matter of words.</p>
<p>&#8220;By their fruits ye shall know them&#8221; — not by their rhetoric, image or symbolism.</p>
<p>Those who have still not yet seen through Barack Obama will have many more opportunities to do so during the coming year, as the medical, financial and other painful human consequences of ObamaCare keep coming out in ways so clear that not even the mainstream media can ignore them or obscure them.</p>
<p>The question then is: What can be done about it? Nothing can be done about Obama himself. He has three more years in office and, as he pointed out to the Russians, he will no longer have to face the American voters.</p>
<p>ObamaCare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed, even though it was a Constitutional Amendment that required super-majorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.</p>
<p>In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that ObamaCare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn — citizens or subjects.</p>
<p>This means that Republicans have to decide whether their top priority is internal strife among the different wings of the party — another circular firing squad — or whether either wing puts the country first.</p>
<p>A prediction on how that will turn out in the new year would be far too hazardous to attempt.</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>Dumb Politicians Won&#8217;t Get Elected</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/dumb-politicians-wont-get-elected/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 24 Dec 2013 05:03:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Politics]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[right]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Voters]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213779</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[When trashing the Constitution is the politically smart thing to do. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213800" alt="VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/VoteHereSignBethelFellowshipSTP640-432x350.png" width="302" height="245" /></a>Politicians can be progressives, liberals, conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, and right-wingers. They just can&#8217;t be dumb. The American people will never elect them to office. Let&#8217;s look at it.</p>
<p>For years, I used to blame politicians for our economic and social mess. That changed during the 1980s as a result of several lunches with Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., which produced an epiphany of sorts.</p>
<p>At the time, I had written several columns highly critical of farm subsidies and handouts. Helms agreed, saying something should be done. Then he asked me whether I could tell him how he could vote against them and remain a senator from North Carolina. He said that if he voted against them, North Carolinians would vote him out of office and replace him with somebody probably worse. My epiphany came when I asked myself whether it was reasonable to expect a politician to commit what he considered to be political suicide — in a word, be dumb.</p>
<p>The Office of Management and Budget calculates that more than 40 percent of federal spending is for entitlements for the elderly in the forms of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, housing and other assistance programs. Total entitlement spending comes to about 62 percent of federal spending. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that entitlement spending will consume all federal tax revenue by 2048.</p>
<p>Only a dumb politician would argue that something must be done immediately about the main components of entitlement spending: Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Senior citizens indignantly would tell him that what they&#8217;re receiving are not entitlements. It&#8217;s their money that Congress put aside for them. They would attack any politician who told them that the only way they get Social Security and Medicare money is through taxes levied on current workers. The smart politician would go along with these people&#8217;s vision that Social Security and Medicare are their money that the government was holding for them. The dumb politician, who is truthful about Social Security and Medicare and their devastating impact on our nation&#8217;s future, would be run out of office.</p>
<p>Social Security and Medicare are by no means the only sources of unsustainable congressional spending.</p>
<p>There are billions upon billions in handouts going to farmers, corporations, poor people and thousands of federal programs that have no constitutional basis whatsoever. But a smart politician reasons that if Congress enables one group of Americans to live at the expense of another American, then in fairness, what possible argument can be made for not giving that same right to other groups of Americans? Making a constitutional and moral argument against the growth of handouts would qualify as dumb.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine some statements of past Americans whom we&#8217;ve mistakenly called great but would be deemed both heartless and dumb if they were around today. In 1794, James Madison, the father of our Constitution, irate over a $15,000 congressional appropriation to assist some French refugees, said, &#8220;I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents.&#8221; He added, &#8220;Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.&#8221;</p>
<p>In 1854, President Franklin Pierce vetoed a bill intended to help the mentally ill, saying, &#8220;I cannot find any authority in the Constitution for public charity&#8221; &#8230; and to approve such spending &#8220;would be contrary to the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and subversive to the whole theory upon which the Union of these States is founded.&#8221;</p>
<p>Grover Cleveland vetoed hundreds of congressional spending bills during his two terms as president in the late 1800s. His often stated veto message was, &#8220;I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution.&#8221;</p>
<p>If these men were around today, making similar statements, Americans would hold them in contempt and disqualify them from office. That&#8217;s a sad commentary on how we&#8217;ve trashed our Constitution.</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>The Pope and Capitalism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-pope-and-capitalism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-pope-and-capitalism</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/walter-williams/the-pope-and-capitalism/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 17 Dec 2013 05:17:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Walter Williams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[charity]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Pope Francis]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Taxes]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213361</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Explaining the great blessing of the free market system to humanity. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PopeFrancis-finger.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213362" alt="PopeFrancis-finger" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/PopeFrancis-finger-450x339.jpg" width="315" height="237" /></a>Pope Francis, in his apostolic exhortation, levied charges against free market capitalism, denying that &#8220;economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world&#8221; and concluding that &#8220;this opinion &#8230; has never been confirmed by the facts.&#8221; He went on to label unfettered capitalism as &#8220;a new tyranny.&#8221; Let&#8217;s look at the pope&#8217;s tragic vision.</p>
<p>First, I acknowledge that capitalism fails miserably when compared with heaven or a utopia. Any earthly system is going to come up short in such a comparison. However, mankind must make choices among alternative economic systems that actually exist on earth. For the common man, capitalism is superior to any system yet devised to deal with his everyday needs and desires.</p>
<p>Capitalism is relatively new in human history. Prior to capitalism, the way people amassed great wealth was by looting, plundering and enslaving their fellow man. With the rise of capitalism, it became possible to amass great wealth by serving and pleasing your fellow man. Capitalists seek to discover what people want and produce and market it as efficiently as possible as a means to profit. A couple of examples would be J.D. Rockefeller, whose successful marketing drove kerosene prices down from 58 cents a gallon in 1865 to 7 cents in 1900. Henry Ford became rich by producing cars for the common man. Both Ford&#8217;s and Rockefeller&#8217;s personal benefits pale in comparison with that received by the common man by having cheaper kerosene and cheaper transportation. There are literally thousands of examples of how mankind&#8217;s life has been made better by those in the pursuit of profits. Here&#8217;s my question to you: Are people who, by their actions, created unprecedented convenience, longer life expectancy and a more pleasant life for the ordinary person — and became wealthy in the process — deserving of all the scorn and ridicule heaped upon them by intellectuals, politicians and now the pope?</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s examine the role of profits but first put it in perspective in terms of magnitude.</p>
<p>Between 1960 and 2012, after-tax corporate profit averaged a bit over 6 percent of the gross domestic product, while wages averaged 47 percent of the GDP. Far more important than simple statistics about the magnitude of profits is its role in guiding resources to their highest-valued uses and satisfying people. Try polling people with a few questions. Ask them what services they are more satisfied with and what they are less satisfied with. On the &#8220;more satisfied&#8221; list would be profit-making enterprises, such as supermarkets, theaters, clothing stores and computer stores. They&#8217;d find less satisfaction with services provided by nonprofit government organizations, such as public schools, post offices and departments of motor vehicles.</p>
<p>Profits force entrepreneurs to find ways to please people in the most efficient ways or go out of business. Of course, they can mess up and stay in business if they can get government to bail them out or give them protection against competition. Nonprofits have an easier time of it. Public schools, for example, continue to operate whether they do a good job or not and whether they please parents or not. That&#8217;s because politicians provide their compensation through coercive property taxes. I&#8217;m sure that we&#8217;d be less satisfied with supermarkets if they, too, had the power to take our money through taxes, as opposed to being forced to find ways to get us to voluntarily give them our earnings.</p>
<p>Arthur C. Brooks, president at the American Enterprise Institute and author of &#8220;Who Really Cares,&#8221; shows that Americans are the most generous people on the face of the earth. In fact, if you look for generosity around the world, you find virtually all of it in countries that are closer to the free market end of the economic spectrum than they are to the socialist or communist end. Seeing as Pope Francis sees charity as a key part of godliness, he ought to stop demonizing capitalism.</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>Sen. Ted Cruz: Turning America Around</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/sen-ted-cruz-turning-america-around/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sen-ted-cruz-turning-america-around</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/sen-ted-cruz-turning-america-around/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 06 Dec 2013 05:43:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Conservative]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[debt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Freedom]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Ted Cruz]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212484</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A conservative warrior explains the path to victory at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of Sen. Ted Cruz&#8217;s keynote speech at the Freedom Center&#8217;s 2013 Restoration Weekend. Restoration Weekend took place November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80239401" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80239401">Senator Ted Cruz</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Ted Cruz:</strong> Thank you. Wow. What a tremendous introduction. What a tremendous comparison to the Last Lion, Winston Churchill.</p>
<p>You know, I have to note &#8212; I can think of at least one person on the face of the earth who, in a tiny, tiny, tiny aspect, would agree with that comparison. And that is President Obama.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Because he would, I think pretty assuredly, like to send my head back to England.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Let me say a word about David Horowitz. David is profoundly principled. And he commits one very simple act that has incredible power over and over again. He tells the truth. Telling the truth is so rare in our modern world that it seems utterly bizarre. And yet, the truth has a powerful, powerful impact. And David is fearless. Utterly fearless.</p>
<p>You know, in Texas, we&#8217;re proud of a lot of Texans. The one Texan we&#8217;re particularly proud of is Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is a tough guy.</p>
<p>You know, a lot of kids across this country wear Superman pajamas. Superman wears Chuck Norris pajamas.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And Chuck Norris wears David Horowitz pajamas.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, the night is getting late. So I&#8217;m going to make a promise to you. I&#8217;m going to try my very, very best to speak for under 21 hours.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But you will know that I&#8217;m nearing the end if and when I begin to read &#8220;The Cat in the Hat.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Twenty-one hours is a long time. I mean, it&#8217;s really a long time. That&#8217;s almost as long as it takes to sign up on the Obamacare website.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, I haven&#8217;t talked about Forest Gump. I think President Obama has discovered Obamacare is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you&#8217;re going to find.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>All of us are here tonight because we love this country. We&#8217;re here tonight because we love our kids, we love our grandkids. And we&#8217;re worried about the future. And one of the great things of being a parent is that kids, I think, have a unique ability to instill humility, frankly, whether you want it or not.</p>
<p>Couple of weeks ago, Heidi and our girls &#8212; we have two daughters, Caroline and Catherine. Caroline&#8217;s five, Catherine&#8217;s two. Just turned three. They were up in DC. And it was a Sunday afternoon, we were driving down to Mount Vernon. And we&#8217;re driving down there, and Caroline asks her little sister, Catherine, she says &#8212; Catherine, what do you want to do when you grow up? And Catherine says &#8212; I want to work in the US Senate.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I want to work with Daddy. And Caroline says &#8212; oh Catherine, that&#8217;s boring.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We&#8217;re going to be in a rock band. And then she throws in the zinger. She says &#8212; besides, Daddy will be dead by then.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This is a true conversation. I&#8217;m sitting there, driving, going &#8212; hello, I&#8217;m right here.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Frankly, I kind of wondered if maybe Caroline had been speaking with Republican leadership.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>If maybe she knew something I didn&#8217;t know.</p>
<p>These are times of big challenges in this country. And yet, I want to come with a word of encouragement. I&#8217;m incredibly optimistic for turning this country around. And I want to tell you three things that we need to do together to turn this country around.</p>
<p>Number one &#8212; champion growth and opportunity. Number two, defend American interests. And number three, empower the people.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s start with the first one. You know, in the last four years, our economy has grown 0.9 percent a year on average. 0.9 percent. I can tell you, in the less than a year I&#8217;ve served in the Senate, every day my top priority has been bringing back economic growth, bringing back jobs. The reason is simple &#8212; because growth is foundational to every other challenge.</p>
<p>You want to turn around unemployment? You want to turn around our national debt? You want to maintain the strongest military in the world to protect our national security? You got to have growth.</p>
<p>You know, there&#8217;s only one other four-year period since World War II of less than one percent growth on average &#8212; 1979 to 1982. Coming out of the Jimmy Carter Administration, it was the same failed economic policies &#8212; out-of-control taxes, spending, and regulation. But it doesn&#8217;t work. Produced the exact same stagnation.</p>
<p>Now, President Obama is fond of saying that he inherited the worst economy in the history of the universe. Anyone here remember the 1970s?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Double-digit unemployment, 22 percent interest rate, stagflation, gas lines? And yet, in 1981, a very different President came into office.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Ronald Reagan came into office and implemented policies the exact opposite of Barack Obama&#8217;s. Instead of jacking up taxes by $1.7 trillion, Reagan cut taxes and dramatically simplified the tax code. Instead of exploding national spending and the debt, Regan restrained the growth of spending. And instead of unleashing regulators like locusts to destroy small businesses, Reagan pulled back federal regulation. The result was some of the most incredible economic growth this country has ever seen.</p>
<p>By the fourth year of Reagan&#8217;s presidency, 1984 &#8212; anyone know what GDP growth was? 7.2 percent. 7.2. Now, what does that mean? What does that mean in a real sense? One point David makes all the time &#8212; Republicans, we talk like a bunch of accountants. We put on green eyeshades. I&#8217;ll tell you, a friend of mine who&#8217;s an accountant said &#8212; how do you tell an extroverted accountant? He looks at your shoes when he&#8217;s talking to you.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Now, in the interest of all the accountants in the room, I&#8217;m obliged to tell a lawyer joke in response, which is that I don&#8217;t know if you&#8217;ve heard, a number of laboratories across the country have started using lawyers instead of rats in their experiments.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>This is true, this is true, this is true. But really, for two reasons. Number one, the scientists were getting too attached to the rats.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And number two, there&#8217;s some things even rats won&#8217;t do.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>What does that growth mean? What does 7.2 percent mean? It means that if Barack Obama coming into office, inheriting the same lousy economy Ronald Reagan inherited, had implemented the same economic policies Reagan implemented, and if the same economic growth had resulted, by today, we would have an additional seven million new jobs. Seven million. That is the equivalent of taking every single person who is unemployed in 46 of the 50 states and finding a new job for every one of them.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s transformational. That&#8217;s what we need to stand for. How do you get growth back? You do what has worked every time we&#8217;ve implemented it. You do tax reform, you do regulatory reform, you unleash entrepreneurs and get the economy growing. It worked in 1980, it worked in 1960, it worked in 1920. We stand for growth.</p>
<p>Fundamental tax reform &#8212; you know, every year we spend roughly $500 billion on tax compliance? That&#8217;s about the entire budget of our military. Wasted, pure deadweight loss. Lawyers and accountants filling out government paperwork. We need to dramatically simplify the tax code. I think the best solution of all &#8212; we should abolish the IRS.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You look at regulatory reform. The most important regulatory reform we could do is to repeal every single word of Obamacare.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And let me make a point about Obamacare. Boy, it is amazing how things can change in a couple of weeks.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Three, four weeks ago, in DC, people asked over and over again &#8212; why are you guys fighting so hard on this? Today, nobody asks that.</p>
<p>You know, a couple of weeks ago, Jay Leno came out on his show. He said &#8212; so, President Obama called me. He said &#8212; Jay, if you like your job, you can keep it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Last week on Leno, Leno came out and said &#8212; so, holiday season is coming up. Thanksgiving. You know, the first Thanksgiving, the pilgrims said to the Indians &#8212; if you like your land, you can keep it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>What a powerful indication, a barometer of where this country is. Look, Obamacare is a disaster.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>It is the biggest job-killer in this country. Millions of Americans have lost their jobs, millions of people have been forced into part-time work. Over five million people have already had their health insurance canceled.</p>
<p>Now, this compassionate President says &#8212; well, your health insurance was substandard. So now you don&#8217;t get any.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Thanks a lot!</p>
<p>And you know, the shoes will keep falling. One of the next steps that more and more people are going to discover is you can&#8217;t see the doctor that you&#8217;ve been seeing. We&#8217;re seeing hospital chains all over this country &#8212; Texas Oncology, one of the leading cancer providers in Texas, has just said it&#8217;s out. It&#8217;s not dealing with Obamacare at all. Visit with a cancer survivor whose doctor they suddenly can&#8217;t go to anymore.</p>
<p>One of the next steps we&#8217;re going to see this spring, since nobody is signing up for this thing &#8212; it was actually funny, &#8220;Saturday Night Live,&#8221; when they made fun of this, they made a joke saying &#8212; we designed the website for six people to sign up.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then we discovered, on the first day, six people signed up.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We talk about life imitating comedy. This spring, we&#8217;re going to see premiums skyrocket. Skyrocket, as people are going to get &#8212; they&#8217;ve already been hit with higher premiums. But more is coming. And in the next stage, you&#8217;re going to see the 90 million-plus people that have employer-provided healthcare getting their healthcare dumped and getting them pushed on the exchange.</p>
<p>This thing isn&#8217;t working. And we know now that the President said &#8212; 28 times at least, he committed a flat-out deliberate willful falsehood. Now, if you read the New York Times &#8212; well, that&#8217;s your first mistake.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But the New York Times Editorial Board said he misspoke.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, there are times when you don&#8217;t need to ridicule the Left. They engage in self-parody. Which part of &#8220;if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it, period&#8221; &#8212; that&#8217;s not misspeaking. That&#8217;s not being less than clear. That is perfectly clear, and entirely false.</p>
<p>We need to champion growth. And I&#8217;ll tell you the biggest reason we need to champion growth. Because growth is foundational to opportunity. The single biggest lie in politics is the lie that Republicans are the party of the rich. Complete and utter nonsense.</p>
<p>You know what? The rich do great with big government. Big business does great with big government. They get in bed with big government, they have armies of lobbyists and accountants and lawyers.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You know, the top one percent, the millions and billionaires that President Obama demagogues all the time &#8212; top one percent today earn a higher share of our national income than at any time since 1928. And everything worked out real well after &#8217;28.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Who are the biggest losers under the Obama economy? Mainstream media will never tell you this. The biggest losers are the people who are struggling the most. They are the most vulnerable among us. They are young people, Hispanic, African Americans, single moms. Why is that? Because they&#8217;re the ones who are losing their jobs. They&#8217;re the ones who are pushed into part-time work. They&#8217;re the ones who are losing their health insurance.</p>
<p>Opportunity &#8212; for a long, long time, I&#8217;ve advocated what I call opportunity conservatism. That every policy we think about, we talk about, should focus like a laser on opportunity, on easing the means of ascent up the economic ladder, on how it impacts those who are struggling to achieve the American dream.</p>
<p>What the men and women in this room understand is the free-market system in the United States of America has been the greatest engine for prosperity and opportunity the world has ever seen. Why is it that millions have come from all over the world to America? Because there has been no land in the history of the world where so many people could start with nothing &#8212; and it doesn&#8217;t depend on who your daddy was, doesn&#8217;t depend on what you born with &#8212; but start with nothing and, based on your talent and perseverance, and the content of your character, achieve anything.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The most tragic casualty of these failed Obama economic policies is the American dream. The American dream is becoming a more and more distant reality every day for people who are struggling.</p>
<p>If you&#8217;re a single mom working a job who suddenly had your hours reduced to 29 hours a week, you can&#8217;t feed your kids on 29 hours a week. So what do you do? You get another job at 29 hours a week. Now you got two jobs at once, with two bosses at once, both of whom want you to work on Tuesday. And you&#8217;re driving from one to the other. You still don&#8217;t have healthcare. But now you have two jobs, and you see your kids even less.</p>
<p>Those are the real people who are hurting. We need to be all about opportunity, all about creating an environment where people can achieve the American dream. That&#8217;s the first thing.</p>
<p>The second thing we need to do is we need to defend American interests. Let me say something to each of you who are here, who are supporting the Horowitz Freedom Center. David and the men and women here speak out about defending our nation at a time when that is sadly uncommon. We are facing a global war, not initiated by us, but launched by radical Islamic terrorists across the globe.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And we have a President of the United States who seemingly cannot utter the words &#8220;radical Islamic terrorists.&#8221; You can&#8217;t fight something if you won&#8217;t even acknowledge what it is. You know, my history book may be wrong. But I don&#8217;t recall on September 11th that it was 21 ticked-off boy scouts on those planes.</p>
<p>In Texas, you look at the 14 innocent souls that were murdered at Fort Hood by Major Hasan, and this administration calls that workplace violence. That wasn&#8217;t workplace violence. That was a radical act of terrorism. And I have to say the single greatest threat to US national security right now is the threat of a nuclear Iran.</p>
<p>You know, we just saw &#8211;</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>&#8211; in the past couple of weeks, John Kerry, on behalf of the President, attempt to negotiate a deal with Iran. That was a spectacularly horrible deal. It was &#8212; let&#8217;s call off the sanctions in exchange for what? Don&#8217;t dismantle even a single centrifuge. Don&#8217;t turn over even a pound of enriched uranium. But just give us a promise that maybe, kind of sort of, you&#8217;ll slow down and not sort of do the nuclear weapons tomorrow, maybe.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t know how many of y&#8217;all saw the video statement that Israel&#8217;s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, put out. It was extraordinary. And if you haven&#8217;t watched it &#8212; it&#8217;s one thing to read it; watch it &#8212; it was incredible as he looked in the camera and said &#8212; this is a very, very bad deal.</p>
<p>Now, there are a lot of men and women in this room who have followed US-Israeli relationships very closely for a long time. It is extraordinary. It is almost without precedent for an Israeli prime minister to so explicitly, so directly call out US foreign policy. And it illustrates how spectacularly dangerous what was about to happen was. But he felt he had no choice but to speak up.</p>
<p>You know, if there&#8217;s one principle true from time immemorial, it&#8217;s that bullies and tyrants don&#8217;t respect weakness. Appeasement doesn&#8217;t work. A responsible President of the United States would stand up and say on the world stage &#8212; under no circumstances will the nation of Iran be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons capacity.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And we will use every available tool to prevent it from happening, including overwhelming military force.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, the reason is simple. The risk of Iran acquiring nuclear weapons capacity is utterly unacceptable. Because if they acquire it, no reasonable person would be willing to risk that they will use those weapons against the United States or against our allies, like the nation Israel.</p>
<p>You know, a lot has been written about President Rouhani, the moderate. Well, he uses Twitter, so he&#8217;s got to be okay.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Mean, what utter nonsense. He&#8217;s described Israel as a wound. And his response was &#8212; well, I was taken out of context.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Okay, what was the context? Give the context that explains that.</p>
<p>One of the leading generals of the Iranian Guard &#8212; his last will and testament said that he wanted on his tombstone the words &#8220;This man sought the annihilation of Israel.&#8221; Well, God has a sense of humor. So he was assassinated, many expect, perhaps by the Mossad.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s a simple bit of advice &#8212; if somebody tells you they want to kill you, believe them.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>When Iran refers to Israel as &#8220;the little Satan&#8221; and the United States as &#8220;the great Satan,&#8221; those are not terms of endearment.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>You know, one illustration of that, that ought to be spoken of much, much more, is the tragic circumstance of Pastor Saeed Abedini. I suspect most of you all are very familiar with Pastor Saeed&#8217;s situation. Was born in Iran, but he&#8217;s an American from Idaho. Went back to Iran to start an orphanage. And he was sentenced to eight years prison time for preaching his faith.</p>
<p>So many of us take for granted the incredible constitutional liberties we have here in the United States to worship God with all of our heart mind and soul. He went sent to prison for doing that. First to the Evan Prison, a terrible, terrible place. And then, just over a week ago, he was transferred from the Evan Prison to the Rajai Shahr Prison, the infamous prison where they keep their death row, they keep the worst of the worst; and they send people to be tortured and disappeared.</p>
<p>The day he was transferred happened to be the 34th anniversary of the Iranian taking of American hostages. What they call Death to America Day. Mind you, this is by the moderate President Rouhani.</p>
<p>Everyone here realizes these are perilous times. I think the safety and security of Israel has never been more in jeopardy than it is right now.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll tell you, when the issue of the US-Israel alliance comes up &#8212; and in my view, US support for Israel should be absolute and unshakable.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But when our alliance comes up, many characterize the $3 billion in military aid we provide as foreign aid. I think that completely mischaracterizes the relationship. It is fundamentally a strategic partnership. A strategic partnership that yields immense national security benefits for the United States of America.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And there is right now a powerful illustration of that. Sadly, I think the mullahs in Iran have little to no reason to fear military reaction from the United States for continuing to develop and acquire a nuclear weapon. And as much as that may dismay every one of us, there is one Commander in Chief, and only one person who has the authority to order our military forces into combat.</p>
<p>And I will tell you, when I travel Texas, a point I make all the time that gives great comfort is if Iran gets too close to acquiring nuclear weapons capacity, I have deep confidence that Israel will act.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And what an incredible, incredible benefit to US national security interests for Israel to act to take out Iran&#8217;s nuclear weapon capacity.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, let&#8217;s be clear &#8212; Israel shouldn&#8217;t have to act; the United States should take care of its own problems. But I will underscore to the men and women in this room &#8212; the urgency is growing greater by the day. I think we could see a military attack within weeks or months. If that happens, the international pressure on Israel will be deafening. And I worry greatly about the response of this administration. And it will be incumbent on the men and women in this room and the men and women across this country to make clear that the United States stands with Israel. And we stand together, protecting our national security.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The third thing we need to do is empower the American people. If you remember nothing I said tonight, then you probably had too many glasses of wine.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>If you remember just one thing I said tonight, let it be this &#8212; that I am profoundly, profoundly optimistic about where we are, and that together we&#8217;re going to turn this country around.</p>
<p>You know, Harrison&#8217;s talk about the space program, and John F. Kennedy&#8217;s commitment that let us commit together we&#8217;re going to send a man to the moon, inspired me. And let me say, collectively, let us commit together today that we should send Congress to the moon.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And the best thing is, we only need to worry about one-way travel.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The answers to this country are not going to come from Washington. But the reason I am so excited is that we are seeing a new paradigm in politics. We are seeing the rise of the grass roots.</p>
<p>The Book of Ecclesiastes tells us there&#8217;s nothing new under the sun. And I think where we are right now is very, very much like the late 1970s. We had dismal economic conditions caused by failed presidential politics. You had a President in the late 1970s telling people to accept malaise. We had a President wringing his hands in impotence as our hostages languished in Iran for 444 days.</p>
<p>And yet, we saw in the late 1970s a movement, a grassroots movement, sweep this country &#8212; the Reagan Revolution &#8212; millions of men and women. A lot of the men and women in this room who bear the scars of that fight, who stood up and said there is a better way. We can get back to the free-market principles, the constitutional principles, that are the foundations of this country.</p>
<p>You know, if you look at the big fights we&#8217;ve had this year, you look back to the fight we had on guns &#8212; following the tragic shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, President Obama, instead of saying let&#8217;s go after violent criminals &#8212; and I think we ought to come down like a ton of bricks on violent criminals &#8212; but instead, he said &#8212; let&#8217;s go after the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens.</p>
<p>And Washington, the political class, said this is unstoppable. And what happened? The American people rose up in overwhelming numbers and said &#8212; no. Protect our rights.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>You look at what happened on immigration, where the President came out and said he supported a plan that doesn&#8217;t secure our borders and yet grants amnesty. And Washington said &#8212; this is unstoppable, you got to do it. It cannot be stopped. And you know what? The American people rose up in overwhelming numbers and said &#8212; we want our borders secured, and we don&#8217;t want amnesty.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And then you look at the fight over Obamacare. The fight over Obamacare, when it started months and months and months ago, it was clear that Washington had no interest in doing anything to stop Obamacare. And we saw, all across this country &#8212; we saw over two million people across this country sign a national petition at dontfundit.com and melt down the phone lines &#8212; calling and saying stand up and stop this train wreck of a law. What an incredible, breathtaking demonstration of the American people.</p>
<p>And we saw the House of Representatives stand up and stand strong and say &#8212; we&#8217;re going to fund the federal government and not fund Obamacare. Washington was shocked! Just a couple of months ago, they said it was impossible that would happen. And you know what? The House, people like Louie and Trent, stood strong and listened to the American people.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>That new paradigm, the rise of the grass roots, terrifies Washington. Terrifies them out of their minds.</p>
<p>You know, the single biggest complaint that my colleagues raised during the whole fight? They&#8217;d pound the table and say &#8212; my constituents keep calling me!</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I kind of thought we worked for them. That&#8217;s changing the rules of Washington.</p>
<p>You know, one of the powerful things with Obamacare is telling human stories. We&#8217;ve launched a national website &#8212; makedclisten.org. Makedclisten.org. It&#8217;s a portal where people can go and upload their stories about Obamacare, how it&#8217;s impacted their lives, their jobs, their healthcare. You can record on an iPhone your own video. And we&#8217;re trying to help tell those stories in a very real sense.</p>
<p>Let me just close. It&#8217;s always dangerous to pause after that phrase.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The terror you have at any remarks is when you say &#8220;in conclusion,&#8221; and rapturous applause bursts out.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But let me just close by observing that what I&#8217;m fighting for, what you&#8217;re fighting for, what all of us are fighting for, is the same thing. Freedom is not something we read about in a book. It&#8217;s something we&#8217;ve experienced in our lives. It&#8217;s part of who we are.</p>
<p>You know, I think of my mother, Irish and Italian. Her mother was the second youngest of 17 kids. They were Irish Catholic. They didn&#8217;t know what else to do on a Saturday night.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>My mom became the first in her family to go to college. Got a degree in math from Rice University in 1956. Went to work at Shell as a computer programmer in the 1950s, the dawn of the computer age. My mom used to tell me all the time when I was a kid &#8212; she very deliberately didn&#8217;t learn how to type. She said &#8212; listen, it was the 1950s. I understood the world I was living in. She said &#8212; I&#8217;d be walking down the hall, and men would stop me. And they&#8217;d say &#8212; sweetheart, would you type this for me?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And my mother wanted to be able to smile very, very sweetly and say &#8212; I would love to help you out, but I don&#8217;t know how to type.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>I guess you&#8217;re going to have to use me as a computer programmer instead.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then, my dad &#8212; many of y&#8217;all have gotten to know my father.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>As you know, he is a shy, retiring wallflower.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>One of my favorite reactions, David, was when he was actually on Glenn Beck. And he talked about, in Cuba, they had the Ministry of Disinformation. And he said &#8212; you know what? We have that here. It&#8217;s called the mainstream media.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Tell you a true story about my father that you&#8217;ll appreciate. April 15th, 2009, when the Tea Parties first started, my dad spoke in Dallas. About 20,000 people in downtown Dallas. My father stood up and said &#8212; you know, when I was a young man, I saw a young and charismatic leader come to power. And he promised hope and change. My father then described the enormous suffering and misery that Fidel Castro visited upon Cuba.</p>
<p>Now, at the end of those remarks, I posted a portion of it on my Facebook page. And some liberal journalists &#8212; although I repeat myself &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; posted a story about how crazy this was &#8212; this was ridiculous to compare Barack Obama to Fidel Castro. And about 1:30 in the morning, I&#8217;m reading all of these commentators, all of these lefties, who are just going nuts about how terrible it was. I did something I&#8217;d never done before &#8212; I signed up online, using my own name, and I said &#8212; I&#8217;ve just been reading through all of these hysterical comments about my father&#8217;s remarks. I want to make one simple point &#8212; if you look at what he said, he never once mentioned the words &#8220;Barack Obama.&#8221;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Now, what does it say about you that you hear what Fidel Castro did, and you immediately think &#8212; that&#8217;s got to be Barack Obama?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>But I&#8217;ll tell you, at every stage, when I think about the challenges we face, I think about them from the perspective of being the child of an immigrant who risked everything to come here. Fifty-five years ago, when my dad fled Cuba, he&#8217;d been imprisoned, he&#8217;d been tortured. He&#8217;d been beaten almost to death. When he landed in Austin, fleeing the Batiste regime, he was 18. He couldn&#8217;t speak English, he had $100 sewn into his underwear. Michael, I don&#8217;t advise carrying money in your underwear.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>His first job was washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour. Why&#8217;d he get that job? Because he couldn&#8217;t speak English. You didn&#8217;t have to speak English to stick a dish under hot water.</p>
<p>He learned English quickly. His next job was as a cook. Same restaurant, better job, paid a little more. With the money he made washing dishes and cooking, he paid his way through the University of Texas.</p>
<p><strong>Unidentified Speaker:</strong> [Book 'im].</p>
<p><strong>Ted Cruz:</strong> Book &#8216;im.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>From there, he got a job as a teaching assistant, teaching math to undergrads. And then he got hired by IBM as a computer programmer in the early 1960s. And then he went on to start a small business, a seismic data processing company in the oil and gas business, and worked towards the American dream.</p>
<p>Now, you know what? If he doesn&#8217;t get that first job washing dishes, making 50 cents an hour, he doesn&#8217;t get the second job. Or the third job, or the fourth job. He doesn&#8217;t get to start his business. The people who are being hurt &#8212; if my father were washing dishes today, he&#8217;d been one of the people that maybe is laid off because of Obamacare. He&#8217;d be one of the people forced into part-time work because of Obamacare. He&#8217;d be one of the people losing his health insurance because of Obamacare.</p>
<p>And as much as my dad is my hero, what I find most incredible &#8212; every person in this room could walk up here right now and tell a story just like that.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>The most fundamental DNA of what it means to be an American is we are all the children of those who risked everything for freedom. That&#8217;s what we are fighting for.</p>
<p>And I got to say, the window is short. We don&#8217;t have decades to turn this country around; we have a window right now. And the way we do it is the same way we did it in the 1970s &#8212; we energize and empower the American people to get back to free-market principles, get back to the Constitution, to get back together to that shining city on a hill that is the United States of America.</p>
<p>Thank you. And God bless.</p>
<p>(Applause)</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>ObamaGate: Obama’s Scandals &amp; The Totalitarian Future</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/obamagate-obamas-scandals-the-totalitarian-future/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamagate-obamas-scandals-the-totalitarian-future</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 04 Dec 2013 05:46:03 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Warriors against Obama's persecution campaign sound off at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the panel discussion &#8220;ObamaGate: Obama&#8217;s Scandals &amp; the Totalitarian Future,&#8221; which took place at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80152920" height="281" width="500" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><a href="http://vimeo.com/80152920">ObamaGate: Obama&#8217;s Scandals &amp; The Totalitarian Future</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user15333690">DHFC</a> on <a href="https://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: So let&#8217;s get right into this.</p>
<p>Our first panelist you all know. J. Christian Adams is truly just stupendous in his work. As a Department of Justice official, he handled voter intimidation and military voter protection. And he&#8217;s the author of a very interesting book, &#8220;Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.&#8221; So I&#8217;m going to let him open up the panel.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: Thank you very much.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Thank you all. And thanks for having me, David, Michael, and the rest of the Horowitz Center.</p>
<p>Let me tell you something that&#8217;s very simple to understand. I frequently have people ask me &#8212; when are we finally going to get Obama? Is this the scandal that&#8217;s going to do it? People will be outraged about this.</p>
<p>But what I&#8217;m here to tell you today is the scandals are features; they are not glitches in the software They are part of the underlying ideological foundation of this administration. And hence they have to be treated entirely differently than scandals of the past. Combat has to be delivered to the ideological foundation that produces the scandals.</p>
<p>Let me go through some particulars. When I worked at the Justice Department voting section during the Bush Administration, I saw how the law was sort of like a fence. Whatever we did had to be within those four corners of what the law said. But after the inauguration, the law became a mere suggestion on the way to a progressive destination. It completely changed the paradigm of how the administration functions.</p>
<p>Now, you saw this manifest first, perhaps, in the New Black Panther dismissal that I was a part of. And at the time, it seemed like an anomaly &#8212; why on earth would you dismiss a case against these radical, racist, anti-Semitic Black Panthers with billy clubs in front of a polling place? But once again, it&#8217;s a feature; it was not a glitch. It was representative of a worldview that people like that can&#8217;t be voter intimidators.</p>
<p>And you saw Holder in front of the House Judiciary Committee being grilled &#8212; I&#8217;m sorry, the House Oversight Committee &#8212; being grilled. And when he said &#8212; you need to understand the history of my people, that was a quote in relation to the Black Panther dismissal. These are features; they&#8217;re not glitches.</p>
<p>Now, what were scandals in any other era in American history would be completely overwhelmed by press coverage. Let&#8217;s look at some of them.</p>
<p>Fast and Furious &#8212; Fast and Furious was at its core an antigun program set up to create a media narrative that guns are bad; we need to crack down on gun shops along the border. It&#8217;s a feature, not a glitch, that that program went awry. Because it was ultimately an anti-Second Amendment crusade.</p>
<p>The IRS scandal, which you&#8217;ll hear more about &#8212; that again &#8212; it&#8217;s not a glitch; it&#8217;s a feature. It&#8217;s a fundamental opposition to Citizens United, a fundamental opposition that permeates this administration to free speech. And so, the IRS scandal was merely a manifestation of this view. It wasn&#8217;t some sort of quirky occurrence. It&#8217;s how people in these worldviews exercise power.</p>
<p>Benghazi &#8212; once again, feature, not a glitch. It was an effort to keep a small footprint in Libya, because they didn&#8217;t want to offend certain Muslim and Islamic interests around the world.</p>
<p>The tax on voter ID &#8212; people think this is nuts. You&#8217;re going after Texas, North Carolina voter ID, South Carolina. Once again, it&#8217;s a feature. These cases are coming out of the hostility toward any election integrity measure. Anything that increases the integrity of our elections is ideologically opposed in the most vehement terms inside the Justice Department, where I used to work.</p>
<p>The catch-and-release program for illegals crossing the border. It&#8217;s not some quirky new thing that everybody is caught and set free. It&#8217;s a feature. It&#8217;s an ideological feature, not a glitch.</p>
<p>Now, why does it matter whether something&#8217;s a feature or a glitch? It matters because your response is different to each one. When you have a software program with a glitch, you call tech support. When you have a software program with a bad feature, you don’t buy it in the first place. Okay? And so, the Republicans have got to stop treating these things like glitches, where the chief weapon is the strongly worded letter; and start treating them like features.</p>
<p>Now, I will give a tremendous amount of applause to Louie Gohmert. I saw Representative Trent Franks here last night. These are two guys who get it. Louie Gohmert and Trent Franks understand that these are features, not glitches, and they&#8217;re acting accordingly.</p>
<p>But they won&#8217;t enforce federal law as it relates to voter integrity issues. We had an election, folks, this last election, where there were four million ineligible voters on the voter rolls. Four million. And this is according to Pew, which is hardly a rightwing conspiracy outfit. And the Justice Department won&#8217;t do anything to clean up this, even though they have the power to do it.</p>
<p>We had one out of every eight voter records in the last election, according to Pew, had errors in it. But once again, it&#8217;s not a glitch the Justice Department won&#8217;t enforce the law to clean up the voter rolls; it&#8217;s a feature.</p>
<p>Now, let me close on two very important things you folks need to understand that&#8217;s happening &#8212; process matters to the Left. When it comes to elections, they know the ground rules of elections alter outcomes. Take a look at Texas. They know that if they stop Texas voter ID that an effort called Battleground Texas will be more successful in its effort to transform Texas to be a blue state. And they&#8217;re focusing on the Rio Grande Valley to do this. And once they get Texas as a blue state, it&#8217;s game over. There won&#8217;t be another electoral victory.</p>
<p>But look at Colorado. Colorado is perhaps the most glaring example of this, and it&#8217;s gotten very little attention. Colorado, of course, went all blue in the last election. And they decided to pass a radical new election process law. Now, most of you go vote either absentee, or you go to a precinct. In Colorado, from now on, they&#8217;re going to mail every single person on the voter rolls &#8212; whether they ask for it or not &#8212; a regular ballot. A regular ballot automatically. On top of that, they&#8217;re converting inactive voters to active status by statute. So these are people who have moved away, who are dead, who don&#8217;t live there anymore. Colorado has eight counties with more registered voters than people alive.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Okay? Now, match that with the all-mail auto-ballot, and you can see what&#8217;s going to happen. These, folks, are features; they&#8217;re not glitches. It&#8217;s part of an effort to fundamentally transform the country using process rules. Because they know if they pump 100,000, 200,000 bogus ballots into the system, into apartment complexes, they&#8217;re going to get a different election outcome.</p>
<p>So let me close with that. And thank you all very much for having me. And so good to meet so many of you here, as it always is. Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: All right, Christian. If we&#8217;re a minute over the panel, it&#8217;s your fault.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: I know.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: And you&#8217;re late for your plane.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Next, we&#8217;re going to talk with Catherine Engelbrecht. She&#8217;s the President of True the Vote and a tireless advocate of election reform. Catherine?</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: Thanks very much. Thanks so much for inviting me to be here. Thanks to all of you for coming to listen to such a warm opening panel to make you feel special and fuzzy all day long about totalitarianism.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Last night at dinner, I was thinking, during the presentation of the Annie Taylor Awards, I was very privileged, as was Christian the year previous. You got it in 2010, right?</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: Yes.</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: In 2010. And I received the Annie Taylor Award in 2011.</p>
<p>In 2010, I started an organization called True the Vote, and filed &#8212; among other things that we did in 2010, I filed for nonprofit status in July. When I was at the podium receiving that award, and receiving it as a result of efforts that we had undertaken as an organization &#8212; not for what was happening personally, but as an organization, True the Vote, through our attempts to train and mobilize poll watchers through our work in trying to identify anomalies in the voter rolls and turn those things over to appropriate authorities at the state and county level, and try to get the rolls cleaned up, trying to educate and advocate for common-sense election code reform &#8212; that set off a firestorm, not only in Texas, where I hail from, but also across the country.</p>
<p>What was happening behind the scenes, when I was receiving that award two years ago here, was something that I wasn&#8217;t telling anyone. You see, in 2011 alone, my husband and I were audited four times &#8212; twice personally, twice for private interests for the companies that we have. We were met with six inquiries from the FBI. And that was just 2011. I mean, this government was just getting started. To date, we&#8217;ve had 25 different either audits or investigations or inquiries from five different government agencies.</p>
<p>People ask &#8212; how do you deal with that? How do you wrap your head around such an invasion, such targeting? I&#8217;m going to tell you, this administration is trying to silence truth tellers. It is not an accident.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve gone through all the mental gymnastics that you have to grapple with when you are on the receiving end of that first audit. You think &#8212; well, maybe I drew the short straw. And then, the second audit, you think &#8212; that was a really short straw.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And then, you start going through agencies. Then it becomes the FBI. Then it becomes Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms. Then it becomes OSHA. Then it becomes the Texas branch of the EPA, something called the TCEQ.</p>
<p>It was the second BATF audit &#8212; and I&#8217;m very privileged to know that fellow panelists here, and Christian and Cleta, have been stalwart supporters of True the Vote. And Cleta and I were already &#8212; Cleta and her firm were responsible for helping us try to push back against the IRS in our nonprofit application because they kept asking question after question after question; questions like &#8212; what are your political aspirations? We want to see every Facebook posting you ever posted, every tweet you&#8217;ve ever tweeted. We want to know everywhere you&#8217;ve ever spoken since the inception of your organization, and to whom, and what you said, and where you intend to speak through 2013.</p>
<p>Are those questions germane to whether or not we&#8217;re a nonprofit organization? Really?</p>
<p>We submitted thousands of documents to the IRS under Cleta&#8217;s guidance. And she watched as all of these other agencies continued to attack, attack. And Cleta said &#8212; why don&#8217;t you say something? I said &#8212; you know, I just &#8212; I don&#8217;t know that it&#8217;s the time. And frankly, I was concerned about the security of my family. What the government was doing in its agency assault was really only one level. There&#8217;s an awful lot that still hasn&#8217;t been revealed publicly. And because Christian will miss his plane, I can&#8217;t tell you.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: I&#8217;ll miss it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: But it was the second BATF &#8212; Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms &#8212; audit. When they came out again &#8212; mind you, we have a federal firearms license to manufacture gun parts. That&#8217;s the business my husband and I are in. We have a small manufacturing company. We have that license. We&#8217;ve never made a single gun part. And BATF knows that very well, because you&#8217;ve got to file reports that state as much.</p>
<p>So when they came out for the second time and had us open our safes and take out the guns, and write the serial numbers down and such, I called Cleta. And I said &#8212; that&#8217;s it. Who can we sue? How fast can we sue them? The gloves are off.</p>
<p>And it was at that point that we moved forward in our lawsuit against the IRS. And I&#8217;ll let Cleta address that. But I&#8217;ll say this much about that lawsuit and about the general state of affairs of my personal life, and why it would be that True the Vote seems to matter so greatly to this administration.</p>
<p>They do not scare me. They should scare none of you; they&#8217;re bullies. The one thing they don&#8217;t count on is that we will stand our ground. If they think that what they are doing is going to make us back up, in my particular case, I can tell you, they have picked the wrong chick.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Are you done?</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: Well, you know, because we&#8217;re running out of time, there&#8217;s one little thing, and maybe it&#8217;ll come in questions. So somebody ask me this question and develop this a little more fully.</p>
<p>But a lot of what this has been about, I believe, for the purposes of True the Vote, is to keep us from meddling in a playground that has long been the province of the far Left. They do not want people that recognize the value of integrity or that demand that a standard of honor be acknowledged, that ask the tough questions. That doesn&#8217;t play well into their plan.</p>
<p>And I submit to you, ladies and gentlemen, that I think we are seeing one of the biggest plays to date by this administration play out in elections through Obamacare. When I saw that that website failed &#8212; you heard &#8211;</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Dr. Carson.</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: &#8212; Dr. Carson &#8212; I was going to say Carlton, right &#8212; Dr. Carson last night say that you should read &#8220;Rules for Radicals.&#8221; You absolutely should. Because when you read it, you understand exactly what&#8217;s happening. And they don&#8217;t make mistakes.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ll wrap this up. When that website failed, something told me that a presidential campaign that had found its way to victory twice by relying on the most sophisticated technology we have ever seen &#8212; that has in his sort of kitchen cabinet the who&#8217;s-who of Facebook and Google &#8212; the thought that they would put forward a website that would fail &#8212; you can&#8217;t convince me that that was not an engineered occurrence. They have to date processed 26,794 applications through the Federal Exchange. Put that in context &#8212; Google gets 50,000 hits a second. A second. So they can&#8217;t process south of 27,000 in six weeks? Something&#8217;s afoot.</p>
<p>And what is afoot is that they don&#8217;t really care about the public exchange. They have been very, very diligent behind the scenes working to develop 50 strong pipes into the states to make sure that Medicaid cases can be funneled straight through in digital packages that include &#8212; thanks to the NVRA, National Voter Registration Act, also known as Motor Voter, penned by Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward, that now has to mandate that you must register voters &#8212; they are celebrating these new additions to the voter rolls.</p>
<p>And the way it will play out is that, I believe, we will see an implosion at the state level because they will be unable to process the numbers of cases that are being transferred to them. That implosion will lead to federalization. And again, to come back with this morning&#8217;s theme of totalitarianism, the federalization will be the natural outcome if the states can no longer support the weight of the system.</p>
<p>And then, all the other things that have been circling around, like universal voter registration &#8212; like national popular vote, which was marginalized for quite some time and may now be rearing its head &#8212; moves us quickly to a place where there are no more state boundaries, where we&#8217;re just sort of one big, amorphous mob of voter registrants. And who better to lead us through that process than this administration?</p>
<p>So be very mindful of what (inaudible) thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Thank you, Catherine.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s move on to Eliana Johnson, who was a producer at Fox News, as you all know, but also is now the media editor at National Review.</p>
<p>Eliana?</p>
<p>Eliana Johnson: Thanks.</p>
<p>I come at this from a slightly different perspective, which is from reporting on the IRS scandal and working with sources in the IRS and at the House Oversight Committee. I&#8217;ve gone in and read all of the interviews that are available with the IRS officials involved in the scandal.</p>
<p>And the issue, I think, is one that not as many people are talking about. And that is the politicization of the bureaucracy. The targeting of conservative groups preceded the Obama Administration. And the issue is the enormous power of a couple of top-level but by no means well-known bureaucrats to, in this case, target conservative groups. And what do you do about this?</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t hear very many people talking about it, but I don&#8217;t know what the answer to that is. Because as you saw with Lois Lerner, it took months and months and months for her in the end to resign, with her pension &#8212; you know, a six-figure pension, which she got to keep. And as far as I know, everybody else involved in that scandal has gotten to keep his job, or to resign. And these people who were involved, I don&#8217;t think, have really &#8212; nobody knows their names, they haven&#8217;t really been shamed.</p>
<p>And so, that to me is a much bigger and more problematic issue than this administration. It will go on after. The people who tend to work in government, I think, are highly political people, and that&#8217;s a problem.</p>
<p>The second issue that I saw come up with this scandal is that Democrats very effectively made it into an issue of &#8212; this is only a scandal if the White House picked up the phone and ordered the IRS to target Tea Party groups. As I mentioned, that would surely have been a scandal. But this is a scandal that the White House and all Democrats should&#8217;ve been concerned about, whether or not the White House had a direct line into the IRS.</p>
<p>You know, in some ways, it&#8217;s far more problematic to have bureaucrats entrenched in the government who preceded the Obama Administration and who will stay there long after, with the power to do these sorts of things to conservatives or to liberals. That should concern the Obama Administration. And who is out there asking them what they plan to do about it?</p>
<p>And the final thing that I haven&#8217;t heard very many people talking about is &#8212; in terms of the involvement of Obama&#8217;s top officials, these people were called before Congress, and they were asked &#8212; when did you find out that these groups were being targeted? In almost every case, Timothy Geithner, his deputy, they said &#8212; I found out when the Inspector General, Russell George &#8212; who I&#8217;m sure all of you saw testify many times before Congress &#8212; he said &#8212; we found out in 2011 or 2012, when Russell George came to us and told us he was conducting this audit, which became public. And that&#8217;s what really allowed the American people to know that this was a big scandal.</p>
<p>So a year before that report was made public, all the top officials in the Treasury Department knew that he was investigating the targeting of Tea Party groups. And what they told Congress was &#8212; we did our job, we didn&#8217;t interfere with the investigation.</p>
<p>In my mind, you know, if I were a top official somewhere and I knew that people in the IRS may be politically discriminating against liberal groups or conservative groups, I would want to make sure that that stopped happening. And I haven&#8217;t heard anybody say &#8212; what did you do, did you do anything do make sure it stopped?</p>
<p>Clearly, nobody in the administration, these top officials, did anything to put that targeting to an end. In fact, it continued long after the scandal broke, until the President put in another person to head the IRS. And he issued a report that the targeting went on, you know, for weeks after the scandal broke.</p>
<p>So I haven&#8217;t seen Tim Geithner or anybody else called on the carpet by anybody for, I think, failing in their duties to do anything to put an end to malfeasance by their underlings in the IRS.</p>
<p>So these are just a few of the issues, I think, that conservatives in this case have let slide on the IRS scandal and that are, I think, more troubling than what President Obama or the Obama Administration were doing and that will go on long after he is gone.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Now, we&#8217;ll move along to Charles Johnson, write and author. You&#8217;ve seen his work in The Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the Orange County Register &#8212; my favorite paper.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And he has an uncanny ability, it seems to me, to get links on the Drudge Report. He&#8217;s also, at his young age, the author of &#8220;Why Coolidge Matters.&#8221; Charles?</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Thanks so much for having me.</p>
<p>Now, the country is going to hell, but I&#8217;m having a hell of a time.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And you know, this panel is a bit of a downer. So let me just say that one of my kind of ways that I make money is every time somebody clicks on one of my articles, I get a penny. And so what happens is that I have an incentive to go and find documents, many of which I find online or through basic computer programming; many of which are provided to me by sources &#8212; and I&#8217;ve been finding that the business of busting corruption is actually quite a good business. So thank you, President Obama, for creating at least one job.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I must say that we need to understand that hope &#8212; which is what we were promised &#8212; is not exactly readily apparent. But we should not tend to despair. You know, my priest often tells me that despair is the ultimate sin because it presumes that God is done with you. And there are an awful lot of us that are very despairing and dark and dreary.</p>
<p>So let me give you one example &#8212; and there are many. I mean, I could talk about Obamacare. I could really wonk out on this panel, but it&#8217;s probably not a good idea on a Saturday morning. But let me give you one example of where we won, and where it was quite easy to win.</p>
<p>So, I know that many of you know that we were about to go to war in Syria, and that there were many people kind of beating the drums for us going to war in Syria. And one such person was a 26-year-old Syria analyst named Elizabeth O&#8217;Bagy. So she wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed article. She said that all these Islamists that were in Syria, who were cutting people&#8217;s heads off and doing all sorts of unsavory things &#8212; that they were a bunch of moderates.</p>
<p>And this struck me as kind of odd. Because I&#8217;d seen videos. And you know, as we&#8217;ve learned from James O&#8217;Keefe, the video doesn&#8217;t really lie.</p>
<p>And so I called her on her cell phone and asked her how it came to be that she wrote this op-ed. And I talked to her for a little bit and found out that she was being paid by the pro-Syrian rebels group. I wrote it up. It got on the &#8212; hit the banner of Drudge Report. Liberals started claiming that they were the ones who had found it. So that&#8217;s usually when you know you win.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And it went viral. And she lost her job with both the neoconservative think tank she was working for and the Syrian Emergency Task Force, which was a pro-Islamist group that was receiving money from the Saudis and the Qataris, and all sorts of other unsavory characters.</p>
<p>And so, she was then hired by John McCain afterwards &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; which should give you a sense of the character of John McCain. But we won that one. And I did that entire article, by the way, from beginning &#8212; at 8:30 in the morning to 11:00 in the early morning, entirely in my pajamas from my kitchen table, drinking green tea.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: You&#8217;re one of those pajama-class bloggers.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Yes. That&#8217;s right. So we can actually win on these issues. And I would submit to you that there are lots of people in this room &#8212; many of them very successful, many of them who have had brushes and dealings with the government that has basically become a tyranny. But if you&#8217;re living in a system, as Solzhenitsyn said, where everyone&#8217;s lying, the way you win is you tell the truth.</p>
<p>And so, many of you have come to me. And I&#8217;ll be doing at least a few articles out of meeting people here. But we can actually roll back some of the administrative state.</p>
<p>And I would give just one more quick example of another victory that we had recently, which is the Veterans Memorial. Now, I got a document showing that the White House actually knew about these World War II veterans who were coming to &#8212; wanting to come, having honorably served, wanted to come to their memorial. And I found out that the White House were the ones denying them access. I got the document, I wrote up the article. Took my 15 minutes. Wrote it up, banner of Drudge.</p>
<p>And what ended up happening? Obama was, you know, not allowing these people, like my grandfather, who was a rear admiral and who won the Navy Cross &#8212; they weren&#8217;t allowing people like him to actually have access to their memorials. We kind of shifted the narrative on the shutdown.</p>
<p>See, what the Left really wants you to do is they want you to feel hopeless. They want you to feel like you&#8217;re going to lose, that there&#8217;s this whole demographic coalition of people that are coming along that are going to replace you. And they&#8217;re going to take the wealth, and they&#8217;re going to spread it around. That&#8217;s what they want you to think.</p>
<p>And so, don&#8217;t submit, don&#8217;t give up. And don&#8217;t despair. And happy to take questions later about some of my other reporting.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Thank you.</p>
<p>And last, but certainly not least, Cleta Mitchell, who is &#8212; as we all know, she practices political law in Washington, DC. Handled two cases against the IRS, dealing with these scandals. And prior to that, she was in the Oklahoma House of Representatives. Cleta?</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: Thank you.</p>
<p>Well, I&#8217;m going to tell you a little bit about what we are doing to continue the fight against the IRS. And in fact, at just a few moments before midnight last night, we filed our responses to the government&#8217;s motion to dismiss. I&#8217;ll talk to you about that in just a second.</p>
<p>But I like to think of &#8212; look, I mean, I practice political law. I say my day job is that I&#8217;m the consigliore to the Vast Rightwing Conspiracy and proud of it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And I began to realize, really in 2010 &#8212; late 2009 and 2010 &#8212; that there was something going on with the IRS. Because these applications for exempt status were not getting processed. Usually, it takes three or four &#8212; maybe 30 days to get a C4. And maybe a little bit longer, two months, for a C3 application to be processed and granted. And I was beginning to get &#8212; submitting applications for organizations, and it was taking &#8212; well, my first real inkling was a group that I submitted an application for in October of 2009. IRS cashed our check. Because you do pay them to preview your application. And they cashed the check within 30 days, and we never heard another word.</p>
<p>And when I did finally hear from the IRS, it was not from those rogue agents in Cincinnati; it was from the Washington, DC office. And that organization has done one thing since it was formed in the fall of 2009. Guess what that was? It was a 501(c)(4) application, and they were doing grassroots lobbying against Obamacare. That&#8217;s all they were doing. They did not one bit of political work.</p>
<p>In June of 2010, the IRS demanded to know all the ads that this organization had run against Obamacare. That&#8217;s the first thing we heard from them.</p>
<p>And fast-forward to the spring of 2011, when I met Catherine Engelbrecht, who told me &#8212; we&#8217;ve been now waiting for six months, and we haven&#8217;t gotten either our C4 application or our C3 application processed; we&#8217;ve heard nothing. We supplemented in the fall of 2011. And I was told by &#8212; I call these IRS agents our parole officers, because you check in with them regularly and tell them how you&#8217;re doing and all.</p>
<p>And so I asked this guy in Cincinnati &#8212; I told him that Catherine in True the Vote had asked us to supplement, and we were trying to see what we could do to expedite &#8212; you know, it&#8217;s kind of hard to use the word &#8220;expedite&#8221; in the same sentence as something that&#8217;s been pending for 18 months, that ought to take 30 days &#8212; but that we were going to be supplementing the application for True the Vote.</p>
<p>Because we wanted to show &#8212; one of the things I wanted to &#8212; a lot of times, when you&#8217;re dealing with the government &#8212; those of you all who deal with the government, you know this &#8212; that if you can tell some bureaucrat &#8212; here are all the prior decisions your agency has made that would support what it is we&#8217;re trying to do, so that they don&#8217;t have to go look anything up &#8212; that it&#8217;s just right there, you do their homework for them &#8212; here&#8217;s your term paper, honey, just use it, plagiarize it, take it. So we&#8217;re getting to be submitting it.</p>
<p>And as Catherine said, you have to understand, you have to understand, that these groups were a threat to this administration. They were a threat to the election process. And there was an intension &#8212; this was not accidental. And particularly, when you think about True the Vote, we have one organization on our side, one, that was formed by Catherine Engelbrecht to fight for voter integrity, and to really do something, not just talk about it.</p>
<p>I was president of an organization that likes to talk about it. But when I tried to get them to do something about it, it scared them to death. And so I know the difference between talking and doing.</p>
<p>And she and True the Vote became a huge threat to the Left. And what she didn&#8217;t tell you is about how Obama&#8217;s lawyer wrote a memorandum singling out True the Vote by name as a menace. That was sent out by the Democratic National Committee that True the Vote was a menace. Because, of course, they have hundreds and thousands of volunteers nationwide who are trying to ensure the integrity of the election. And that is pretty scary to the Left.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, on the other side &#8212; and I have to tell you this &#8212; if you have not written a check to True the Vote, shame on you. Because the Left is well funded. They have dozens of organizations on the left.</p>
<p>The first time I ever met Christian Adams was in the fall of 2008. Because he was at the Justice Department. And he called me and said that the Justice Department &#8212; the Bush Justice Department &#8212; was having a meeting, bringing in all these groups to talk about the election process and ensuring, you know, the smoothness of the process, blah-blah-blah. And Christian was out scrounging around to try to find someone who could come as a conservative.</p>
<p>And I go to this meeting, which has the Attorney General, for Pete&#8217;s sake, and all these dignitaries from the Justice Department, and 40 groups, and I&#8217;m it. And Christian and I had to come up with one group that I could say I was representing to get me in the door. And at the time, I was chairman of the American Conservative Union Foundation. I was also head of the National Republican Alliance. Christian&#8217;s &#8212; oh no, you can&#8217;t use that. It has to be something else that&#8217;s not partisan. And I go, and there are all these people who are Democratic, leftist advocates, who are 501(c)(3) groups involved in election activity protection, or whatever they call themselves.</p>
<p>So you have to understand that Catherine was a real threat, is a real threat. And this is not made up. She was named by name through an organization &#8212; members of Congress sent letters to the IRS demanding that something be done to stop these Tea Party groups, these organizations, these 501(c)(3)s and C4s. And Catherine&#8217;s group was named by name.</p>
<p>So I consider that this litigation is &#8212; I represent, through the ActRight Legal Foundation, which is a conservative public interest law firm &#8212; and we have these wonderfully smart young lawyers &#8212; but our goal is &#8212; this [is] the naming names project. This is what we&#8217;re doing. And I want to tell you, we have sued, on behalf of True the Vote, the IRS. And we have sued Lois Lerner. We&#8217;ve sued Holly Paz. Holly Paz is the Where&#8217;s Waldo of this IRS scandal. She was everywhere, and everywhere. Or maybe she was the Forrest Gump &#8212; she&#8217;s in all the pictures.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>She was a maxed-out Obama donor, which is not easy to do on a government salary, right? But she was sort of the top deputy to Lois Lerner. And when they first, quote, learned about there was perhaps this targeting back in 2012, and Steven Miller and Lois Lerner &#8212; they did this sort of internal review &#8212; who did they dispatch to work on this, to find out about this, but Holly Paz? Polly Paz, whatever her name is.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And she&#8217;s a leftist in the IRS. And they dispatched her to try to get fact-finding. Well, guess what? When the Inspector General started to do his investigation after Congress called for the investigation, guess who sat in on every interview that the Inspector General&#8217;s Office conducted? Holly Paz! And she was reporting back.</p>
<p>So you&#8217;ve got these employees, and this Inspector General&#8217;s asking these questions. And who&#8217;s sitting there but the person who&#8217;s going to report back to Lois Lerner?</p>
<p>So, we sued Steven Miller, who I think lied to Congress. He was the acting IRS commissioner. He knew within moments after Doug Shulman, the then commissioner, had told Congress there was no targeting, he knew that was a lie.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve sued William Wilkins, who is the chief counsel to the IRS, the only political appointee and the former counsel to Jeremiah Wright; Michael Seto, Cindy Thomas, Ron Bell, Faye Ng, Janine Estes, Susan Maloney and Steven Grodnitzky. So those are the names.</p>
<p>And we are going to do, through this IRS litigation &#8212; we&#8217;ve filed these. The IRS has taken the position, and these defendants have taken the position legally, and this is what we filed last night, saying &#8212; surely, that&#8217;s not the state of the law in America that they can&#8217;t be sued, no matter what they do. The IRS can&#8217;t be sued? Nope. And the individuals can&#8217;t be sued? Nope. Because we&#8217;re the IRS.</p>
<p>And I want to tell you something. This is an important legal principle. Because if it in fact &#8212; if we&#8217;re going to take this to the highest court we can get it to, and if in fact it is the state of the law in America today that you could be an IRS employee and you can violate the statutes, and you can violate the constitutional rights of the taxpayers, and there&#8217;s nothing, there&#8217;s no remedy &#8212; I actually think that&#8217;s something the people ought to know. I think that&#8217;s something we ought to know, and it&#8217;s something Congress needs to do something about. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s the stated law.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And you&#8217;ll be happy to know that we the taxpayers are paying for their defense. I knew you&#8217;d like that part.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve also filed another case. And then I&#8217;ll stop.</p>
<p>Speaking of naming names, there are two things that &#8212; if you really want to get the Left going nutzo, just make them foam at the mouth, talk about voter ID and election integrity, and talk about marriage. Talk about traditional marriage. They hate that. I represent both of those groups.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>In March of 2012, we woke up one day &#8212; I represent the National Organization for Marriage &#8212; we woke up one day to discover our confidential donor schedule posted on the website of the Human Rights Campaign. And knew fairly quickly, because this is these genius eight-year-olds that know how to do computer stuff &#8212; they should hire some of those eight-year-olds for healthcare.gov &#8212; but who were able to take off these attempted redactions to show that this was indeed the official document released by the IRS &#8212; I mean, it was the one that we had filed with the IRS. Our 2008 &#8212; it was NOM&#8217;s 2008 donor schedule.</p>
<p>What happened in 2008, people? Proposition 8. NOM races spent a lot of money on Prop 8 in 2008. And so we immediately demanded &#8212; it&#8217;s a felony to release confidential taxpayer information, right? Do you think the IRS would be on our side? Do you think the Department of Justice would be on our side? It&#8217;s not hard to figure out who did this. All they have to do is find out &#8212; because every IRS employee has a code, and they have to have access &#8212; they access information.</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: Well, I would just add, what happened in 2012 is Mitt Romney was running for President, and he had donated to NOM in 2008.</p>
<p>(Multiple speakers)</p>
<p>So it was more closely calculated then.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: Oh no, that&#8217;s &#8211;</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: They went back four years to find that and release it in 2012.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: And it was released the day &#8212; it was released right after Romney had become the presenting nominee, and the day before the head of the Human Rights Campaign was announced as one of the national cochairmen of the Obama Reelection Campaign. Yes, it&#8217;s all tied together.</p>
<p>So we asked for an investigation. And the IRS has conducted an investigation. I mean, the TIGTA &#8212; the Treasury Inspector General &#8212; conducted an investigation to find out who in the IRS had released NOM&#8217;s confidential taxpayer information. They won&#8217;t tell us. You know why? They interpret the law that protects the taxpayer from unauthorized release of your information as actually protecting whoever got into it and broke the law. That&#8217;s their interpretation. It&#8217;s a little convoluted.</p>
<p>So we have filed suit on behalf of NOM against the IRS to find out the name &#8212; what&#8217;s the name. But Eliana, two weeks ago, broke a story, which I should let her tell you about, which is that it didn&#8217;t go directly &#8212; and we did not know this, because of course they won&#8217;t tell us anything &#8212; it did not go directly from the IRS employee to the Human Rights Campaign and the Huffington Post. It went first to a gay activist, who then in turn turned it over to the Huffington Post and the HRC. And now we know his name.</p>
<p>And of course, it is a felony. And one must ask why haven&#8217;t either of these individuals been prosecuted.</p>
<p>So, look. I mean, people ask me what is the point of suing the IRS. The point is because we want to name names. We want to get the facts, we want to get to discovery. We want to know what they knew and when they knew it. We know that the White House called publicly for the IRS to do something about conservative groups. And they did. And we&#8217;re going to get to the bottom of it.</p>
<p>Thank you.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Just out of curiosity &#8212; and this is obviously an embarrassing question for some &#8212; but how many in the audience have been audited? Oh, wow. Yeah, I have, too. And for 2010 and 2011. That&#8217;s actually a pretty substantial number. Those of you in the front &#8212; I would say, what 10, 15 percent of the audience, at least, raised their hands?</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: And I didn&#8217;t even get into the &#8212; I think that that is the other great part of this scandal that we were really trying to figure out how to get our arms around. Because I absolutely believe that conservative donors &#8212; people who gave money, particularly people who raised money &#8212; have been audited. And I definitely think that there is &#8212; I know the Ways and Means Committee said they were going to look into that. But &#8211;</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Yeah, I&#8217;m not going to name names, but a donor on the board of a couple of conservative nonprofits &#8212; only gives to conservative nonprofits &#8212; showed me his list of donors &#8212; had been audited. And it was all conservative organizations, nine or 10 of them.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Yeah. I wrote a short booklet called &#8220;The Truth About the IRS Scandal.&#8221; And the day after it was announced it was being published, I received a letter from the IRS.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>I was a little disappointed, though, because they got all my friends, and I wasn&#8217;t included, and it seemed kind of odd.</p>
<p>But I would just say that one of the ways that they&#8217;d doing the targeting, which is what I talk about in the booklet, is the very same firm that Edward Snowden worked for, Booz Allen Hamilton, which is this contracting firm &#8212; they design a Google-like thing for the IRS. So you can type in &#8220;tea party.&#8221; You can type in, you know, &#8220;patriot&#8221; or whatever. And it&#8217;ll pull back people&#8217;s IRS returns. And they have this whole, elaborate system; it&#8217;s really kind of interesting and intricate. But one of the things we might consider is naming our things after leftwing organizations, just to maybe give the false flag (multiple speakers).</p>
<p>Brian Calle: That&#8217;s a good idea.</p>
<p>You know, we talked a lot about the IRS. We talked a little bit about Obamacare. But we haven&#8217;t really dove into the NSA, which I think is a huge scandal. And we haven&#8217;t really talked a lot about Benghazi. And so, keeping those in context &#8212; because I think all of these are equally important scandals &#8212; is President Obama the new Teflon President? Because there seems to be a scandal a week. Or, like Ann Coulter said yesterday, it&#8217;s Christmas &#8212; every day there&#8217;s a new scandal, for her. But is he the new Teflon President?</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: Well, I want to say something about that. Because I think it&#8217;s important to understand. When Lois Lerner made her ham-handed announcement &#8212; I want you to think about this for a moment &#8212; it&#8217;s May of this year, it was a Friday afternoon. Every year, she speaks to this group. And she planted a question, because she knew that the TIGTA report was coming out the following week that would say yes, there was targeted conservative groups.</p>
<p>She made this announcement on Friday afternoon and said, you know, it was a couple of rogue agents in Cincinnati. And then she said &#8212; we apologize. And they thought &#8212; and I have spoken to people who work in that office, in what we would call in the private sector the C Suite; I don&#8217;t know what you call it in the IRS. But they thought because of the way that all these other scandals had been treated by the press, which was basically totally disregarding, that they really had a theory that if she did this on Friday afternoon, it would over, and that would be it. And they had no reason to believe that anything else was going to happen.</p>
<p>And they really thought that the Teflon President, the way this media &#8212; they were shocked by the media firestorm created by this announcement. And if you&#8217;ll remember, on Monday, Steven Miller, then acting commissioner, decided oh, my goodness, they probably need to do something. So it was [on] Monday. Now, she said this on Friday. On Monday, he writes an op-ed that&#8217;s published on Tuesday &#8212; [yes, basically] denying that it had happened. That was the same day that the report was released.</p>
<p>So they really &#8212; these agencies and bureaucrats who are foot soldiers in the leftist, progressive movement &#8212; too many of them &#8212; really thought that &#8212; they really believed that the media would be complicit and would protect them.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Any other thoughts?</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: I mean, I would say, no, it&#8217;s just a question of numbers. I mean, there are basically 10 conservative journalists in the country, two or three of which are on this panel, in terms of actually breaking stories. We spend a lot of time on the right complaining, and being the alternative media. And we&#8217;re constantly critiquing what MSNBC &#8212; I don&#8217;t own a television, so I don&#8217;t even know what&#8217;s on MSNBC.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Al Sharpton.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Yeah. So what we spend all of our time doing is we spend our time criticizing. But we don&#8217;t &#8212; what the Left did, when they wanted to take over the insurance market, was they got somebody like an Ezra Klein, who &#8212; all he did every day was go in and study insurance markets. And then he went in and briefed the White House on how to take over the healthcare industry. And now he&#8217;s at the Washington Post.</p>
<p>And so, you got to understand, there are very few of us, and there are very many of them. And so, it&#8217;s amazing kind of what the few of us have been able to actually accomplish, given the numbers against us.</p>
<p>But I don&#8217;t think he&#8217;s a Teflon President. I just don&#8217;t think we&#8217;ve invested enough on research and on &#8212; we spend too much kind of focus on ideology and elections, and leftists spend all their time on systems and process. And we should spend more time considering those kind of things as well.</p>
<p>Eliana Johnson: Yeah. I would just add, Charles and I have talked a lot about the need for real journalists in the conservative movement who break news. There aren&#8217;t very many of them. But there is a tremendous need for that. Because there isn&#8217;t very much attention given to breaking news and to real stories, and attention given to that. But I found, in reporting on the IRS, I was amazed at how much there was to [define], and how the lack &#8212; I didn&#8217;t know if it was bias or stupidity. Because I found just so much news in documents that were readily available online that wasn&#8217;t reported.</p>
<p>So with Lois Lerner, for example, I was just able to go on the Oversight Committee&#8217;s website and read letters that she&#8217;d sent to the committee in years past, and basically find that, you know, it was pretty obvious she had lied to Congress; and what her history was. That was totally ignored by the media but was stuff that people were very interested in, and that I don&#8217;t think really &#8212; nobody else was doing.</p>
<p>And the other, I would say, frustrating thing was in terms of going on TV during that. I went on with conservative hosts. And I often found myself arguing against them. Because they weren&#8217;t based in the facts, either. There&#8217;s very little fact-based journalism going on in the conservative movement. And I think, as Charles suggested, we need more of that.</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: I would say that, again, to quote Saul Alinsky, the ends justify the means. And when we think about the scandals that we&#8217;re seeing, I don&#8217;t believe that this administration even sees them as scandals. I think they see them as mile markers.</p>
<p>And whatever it takes, they are counting on Americans having a very short attention span. They are counting on Americans, by and large, choosing with greater and greater frequency not to vote. Because &#8212; well, for a number of reasons. But at the top of that list is &#8212; I just don&#8217;t believe it matters anymore. And they play right into that.</p>
<p>At the end of the day, it becomes &#8212; as long as we still have a vote, it becomes a game of numbers. And as long as they have a better ground game, then the rest of this is just kind of, you know, the prelude. Because if they can mobilize bodies to the polls, they win. And they know it. And that is where they invest. They tell stories, and they invest in technology. And they get bodies to the polls. And so none of this really matters, because the ends justify the means.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: I try to disabuse folks of the idea that this is all run out of the Oval Office. I&#8217;ve been a federal employee. I promise you, there&#8217;s a culture that facilitates this.</p>
<p>Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn tells a great story that I thought of when I heard all the panelists talking about Lois Lerner, Paz, Paws, whatever. And he tells a story in &#8220;Gulag&#8221; about &#8212; doggone it, if we&#8217;d only started hanging out in the lobbies of our apartments with hatches when the NKVD came at night, we might&#8217;ve turned the whole tide. You know, the lowly bureaucrats wouldn&#8217;t show up to arrest you, because they were afraid of getting their head lopped.</p>
<p>Now, I am not suggesting that Lois Lerner get her head lopped. But let me explain why this is important. The media and the conservative movement all too often think everything is a top-down model, where it&#8217;s the agency head, or Holder, or Obama. No. It&#8217;s the underlings, this culture that exists inside the Beltway that lusts for power, that loves telling you what to do with your life.</p>
<p>And people like Lois Lerner are the problem. And that&#8217;s what it&#8217;s so critical, critical to name names. Like Cleta said, you have to name names.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve done a series of stories at PJ Media naming the names of the bureaucrats who are behind these policies. And you know, it makes some people very uncomfortable. Well, these folks didn&#8217;t sign up to do this; you shouldn&#8217;t be putting them in articles. I think we have to change the model. We have to change the model to name the names of the people. And in cases like Cleta and Catherine are doing, litigate against them if you can. And I think that&#8217;s &#8212; we&#8217;re in such dire circumstances, that&#8217;s what you have to do now to defend liberty.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: This Obamacare scandal is obviously the latest scandal. And it seems to be getting bigger. But we thought the same with Benghazi, with the NSA, with the IRS. You know, what are your predictions for what&#8217;s next? And does this ocre scandal stick?</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: Well, I think the thing that it&#8217;s important to realize is what Christian said. This whole collapse of the private insurance market &#8212; it&#8217;s not an unintended consequence; that was their goal. If you want to see something really interesting, go back and look at the 2008 speeches that Obama gave when he was running for President, and just listen to what he says in the context of today. I mean, we all knew. We all knew.</p>
<p>But it&#8217;s really interesting to go back and listen. Because he said it &#8212; it was hidden in plain sight. Their goal was to crash the private insurance market. Because if you get rid of the private insurance market, then everybody ends up being taken care of by the government. That was the goal.</p>
<p>And I don’t understand why our members of Congress are not saying that &#8212; that this is exactly what was intended.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: I would just add, very quickly &#8212; I think people don&#8217;t really yet understand what Obamacare is actually going to do to them. And when they finally understand &#8212; I mean, my traffic numbers are up as the President approval ratings are down. So we are actually &#8212; that&#8217;s how I kind of track these things.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: You&#8217;re going to have huge traffic the next couple of weeks.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: And I would say the next big thing are the Obamacare navigators. The website &#8212; as somebody who knows something about computers, it cannot be built. It will not work. It can&#8217;t be done. And you&#8217;ve got to understand that.</p>
<p>So what they&#8217;re going to do is &#8212; you&#8217;re going to put in your zip code. And they&#8217;re going to send an Obamacare navigator to your door. Now, James O&#8217;Keefe has done some great work on this. But I have a whole list of Obamacare navigators who don&#8217;t exist or who are convicted felons. So when I post the mug shot with them, you know, for breaking and entering, coming to your door to enroll you in Obamacare, I think that might have some effect on the low-information voters. So I hope.</p>
<p>Eliana Johnson: Yeah. Well, I think, in the history of this law as written, it&#8217;s going to be impossible to erase. I think the botched rollout is forever etched into the history of this law. And to the media&#8217;s credit, I think the entire media has done a very good job of covering it.</p>
<p>But probably the best report to look at is &#8212; NBC News had an &#8220;investigative report&#8221; that showed &#8212; hey, look, the administration knew people were going to lose their healthcare. It was written into the law. Like &#8212; hey, guys, where were you in 2010 when the law was written, to do your investigative report about what was written into the law, saying that you were going to lose your health insurance? That was there in 2010, when the Republicans had a vote on the language in the law. The media ignored this for three years. And now that&#8217;s coming out, for whatever reason. So we should be grateful for that.</p>
<p>But again, it goes to the importance of having, you know, people be extraordinarily attentive to what&#8217;s in this, and the reporters to draw it out. You know, the Republicans in the Senate did have a vote on that. And Mike Enzi did a good job calling attention to that.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Can I just piggyback? Because it&#8217;s been a theme. Being an opinion editor for the 10th-largest newspaper in the country &#8212; one of the problems with this idea of the investigative journalism is that the ones that we do have are often doing it only for conservative outlets, which means they&#8217;re only preaching to the choir. And that&#8217;s not true with everyone, but the vast majority that I see. And so we need more people who are at the LA Times, who are at the New York Times, who are engaging in left-leaning media as well. Because that&#8217;s where, I think, the independents are.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: Yeah, I don&#8217;t entirely agree with that.</p>
<p>I have a lot of friends at the New York Times. I mean, don&#8217;t crucify me, but I do.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And what they&#8217;re looking for &#8212; you got to understand, some of them are ideologues. But a lot of them are looking for really good stories. And when you go and hang out with them, and you&#8217;re like &#8212; hey, man, I&#8217;ve got all this stuff, you want a piece of it? They&#8217;re like yeah. And then you give it to them, and you see, you know, research that you did on the Clinton Global Foundation &#8212; you see that on the front page of the New York Times. And it&#8217;s kind of like seditious, right? You&#8217;re having your research go in their places.</p>
<p>And there are a lot of us out there who are nerd researchers, who are finding stuff and partnering up with people. Because even left-wingers are starting to come around to it.</p>
<p>And frankly, I get the banner on Drudge, I get three million people reading my story. I don&#8217;t really care about the New York Times. It&#8217;s maybe a million, even on the front page. So you got to understand, it&#8217;s a question of volume. We should spend less time thinking about the mainstream media, right, and complaining about how they don&#8217;t cover us because they hate us, which is true. We should spend less time on that, and that [leak] to people at the producer level; and we should spend more time thinking about how to replace them. They&#8217;re thinking all the time about how to replace us.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Let&#8217;s go to questions. Right here.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I want to salute heartily each and every one of you. It seems like &#8212; well, one thing is that a lot of this &#8212; the IRS and the government&#8217;s posture &#8212; and for that matter, as an overarching theme in Obama&#8217;s presidency &#8212; there&#8217;s the premise of the divine right of kings. And you know, if Obama hasn&#8217;t done 40 or 50 things that constitute invoking articles of impeachment, I&#8217;ll be damned.</p>
<p>Reminds me of &#8212; the most important document of the last thousand years, if not of all Western civilization, is the Magna Carta. Why? Two things &#8212; one it challenged the divine right of kings, in that the king wasn&#8217;t above the law; and two, it protected property rights, which are intimately connected.</p>
<p>And there is &#8212; to get more concrete, there&#8217;s a &#8212; I&#8217;m sure Cleta&#8217;s aware of this &#8212; there&#8217;s a Mountain States Legal Foundation precedent where bureaucrats in the forestry service were personally sued for not allowing a homeowner access to his own land. And I know there&#8217;s some precedents out there, and you&#8217;ve found them. So I salute all of your work. And the truth will set us free.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: Let me add one fact that you omitted from that case which I think is pertinent to this.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Yeah.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: It goes to Christian&#8217;s point, which is this is pervasive in the bureaucracy. Those BLM agents changed the date on documents &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: [CLM].</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: &#8212; BLM documents, in order to deny this homeowner the right to his own property.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: So fraud. Fraud among &#8212; in the &#8211;</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: And the court said that was okay.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: And it&#8217;s part of the institutional mentality (multiple speakers).</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Pat Caddell had a great quote at the beginning of his presentation yesterday about Lincoln. I looked everywhere last night, I couldn&#8217;t find it. But it basically talks about adaptation &#8212; that defenders of freedom at any given moment in history have a new fight they hadn&#8217;t seen before.</p>
<p>And I think we have a new fight we haven&#8217;t seen before. And you brought up impeachment. Everybody&#8217;s always focused on impeach Obama, impeach Obama, impeach Clinton. Impeach lesser federal officials. Right?</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Yeah. Hear, hear.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Yeah. Impeach them by the thousands.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Yes. The White House won&#8217;t &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Fire them first.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: &#8212; expend the political capital to defend them that they would if you impeach Holder or Obama.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Yeah. Good point.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: Impeach some low-level dag in the Justice Department.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: And the political consequences backlash aren&#8217;t nearly as probable.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: Let me just say real quickly, I think &#8211;</p>
<p>Brian Calle: I want to go to the next question. Quick.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: Yeah, very briefly &#8212; the welfare state &#8211;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Karl Marx that said &#8211;</p>
<p>Brian Calle: You can continue the conversation offline. But &#8211;</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: The welfare state (inaudible) the welfare state is a fraudulent enterprise. There&#8217;s a lot of fraud there, there&#8217;s a lot to be found. And when you show it to people &#8212; I mean, hypocrisy is really the only modern sin. And when people actually see government officials behaving badly, it changes their perception on things. Even liberals, even kind of centrists.</p>
<p>And I would just say, you know, I&#8217;d agree we spend a lot of time focusing on the President, a lot of time on impeachment, a lot of time fighting things in the courts. You should fight them in the press, right? Because what they do is they control people&#8217;s minds by creating narratives about things that aren&#8217;t true, right? So they give you stories about pregnant diabetic women that aren&#8217;t actually covered by Obamacare, anyway. They lie to you constantly.</p>
<p>And if you can destroy their narratives, they can stop forming narratives on people and defining them for the rest of the country, so that even the cowards on our side &#8212; which there are many, unfortunately &#8212; many of the cowards on our side go and see &#8212; hey, that guy Romney, he&#8217;s got a bad rap. Because they buy into the psychology of the Left. And we&#8217;ve got to be very careful about destroying their narratives as they&#8217;re forming them, and wasting their work.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Next question?</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Hi. I just wanted to know if you were also aware of some of the pro-Israel groups that were targeted and were not given 501(c)(3) &#8212; for example, Z STREET and Lori Lowenthal Marcus, and how she went ahead and sued, and actually did not have a hearing over three years until this past summer, soon after the whole scandal.</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: There&#8217;s still no decision.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: And there&#8217;s still no decision (multiple speakers).</p>
<p>And the reason she was denied and was told by an underling at one point that her organization was too pro-Israel, and not of the same mind in relation to this administration, which was &#8212; and that&#8217;s when she sued.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;ve also found out that there are some other pro-Israel organizations that took 15, 16, 17 months before they gave them a C3. And that&#8217;s when the lawyers started having, you know, pushback. And they finally did on that one. (Multiple speakers) &#8211;</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: There were not only &#8212; there were Tea Party groups, prolife groups and pro-Israel groups. Those were really &#8212; those were key targets. And the IRS even told the prolife group &#8212; maybe some of you heard this story &#8212; that they were not allowed to just talk about the importance of life; they also had to give the other side, about the importance of being able to have access to abortion.</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: They also targeted veterans&#8217; groups, too.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Yes.</p>
<p>Charles Johnson: And we have people who&#8217;ve been audited for writing op-eds in The Wall Street Journal. And I write about it in my short little booklet, &#8220;The Truth About the IRS Scandal.&#8221;</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I would &#8212; yes. Thank you. I assume, as many people are doing now, that our next contender for the presidency in the Democratic Party will be Hillary. I would like to know why we are not under attack against Hillary for all the work that she&#8217;s been involved with Benghazi. And we should start now to criticize her, so that the public knows that she has never done a single thing for either Israel or what was her involvement in Benghazi. Because she was deeply involved. She was also encouraging people to believe it was due to some poor guy who spent time in jail because he made a poor video.</p>
<p>Why don&#8217;t we start attacking the potential contenders? And certainly, Hillary is among the &#8212; most expected to be the one for the Democratic Party. The Republicans seem to criticize very easily. We are very divisive. And unfortunately, it hurts us. We have to go after those people who we&#8217;re going to have to face in the presidential election. And Hillary has to be shown to be a person of no moral character whatsoever.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: I interviewed the Benghazi filmmaker from his federal halfway house. I called him up on &#8212; finally tracked him down (inaudible) jail. And I interviewed him, I published a story on him.</p>
<p>We should not be doing Hillary stuff right now.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Why?</p>
<p>J. Christian Adams: Rest assured that people like me are [announcing] pull files on Hillary and on Martin O&#8217;Malley, and on Elizabeth Warren, and on a whole bunch more of these people. And what we&#8217;re waiting for is the narrative to shift. Right? There&#8217;ll be a time in which one of them will announce for President. And then there&#8217;ll be a little packet of information. If you don&#8217;t believe me &#8212; when Julian Castro was announced as the DNC speaker, I published all this stuff about how his mother was a Marxist. Right?</p>
<p>So we&#8217;ve got to be very strategic about how we do these things. What a lot of the Right does is it takes this stuff and publishes it right away. Right? And we&#8217;re all talking about Obamacare right now, right? Don&#8217;t take to me about Benghazi, don&#8217;t talk to me &#8212; I mean, even though I wrote about the IRS scandal, don&#8217;t talk to me about the IRS scandal. Talk to me about what&#8217;s on everybody&#8217;s mind. That&#8217;s how you win.</p>
<p>And what we spend a lot of time doing is &#8212; whenever we get something interesting, we just publish it. Right? And then what happens is the Left says &#8212; oh, somebody already published that, when it&#8217;s germane again, right?</p>
<p>So we&#8217;ve got to be very strategic. Like a chess game, we&#8217;ve got to be very strategic about this.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Go ahead.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Thank you for all you do, [guy], for devoting your life to this, to help us save our country.</p>
<p>This is a quick question about strategy on the election. Catherine, I&#8217;m passionate about this voter fraud. I think the election was stolen in 2012.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>What is the plan? What can we do to help you? We can contribute to you? What can we do on a local level, on a grassroots level, to &#8211;</p>
<p>Cleta Mitchell: And before Catherine answers, let me just say that when we filed the lawsuit, the IRS has now granted, suddenly, True the Vote&#8217;s C3 status. So your contribution to True the Vote is now tax-deductable.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: On the expedited fast track of three years and three months and a lawsuit. And we got the determination.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for that question. It is ultimately all about citizens being willing to stand up and take action. And if you want to find out more about our program and the things that you can do, you can check out truethevote.org and sign up.</p>
<p>But what does it actually look like to stand up for election integrity? Well, certainly, we need people to work inside of the polls. When we don&#8217;t have enough volunteers actually engaged in the process, then arguments like what we see in Colorado, where they&#8217;ve just kind of folded in and become an all-mail-in state, because &#8212; you know, just not really enough interest in participating; why do we need to have those checks and balances that seeing someone eye-to-eye reinforces? Let&#8217;s just whitewash through all of that.</p>
<p>We need people that are engaged enough in the process to recognize the dangers in that. We have systems that allow you to check your own voter rolls and do your own research. There are citizen challenges that you can put forward in your counties to try and help cull through, as Christian pointed out, the bad data that we all know exists in our voter rolls.</p>
<p>And then to help advocate for common-sense election code reform. You know, the Left is very, very prepared. When they go in to try and defeat pieces of legislation, they will band together in a way that I refer to as swarming.</p>
<p>And you will see groups of &#8212; case in point &#8212; we used to go to &#8212; in Texas, inside of the election office, election commission hearings, ever week. And it would just be crickets and tumbleweeds inside of that building. Nobody cared enough to show up. All of a sudden, after an edict came down from a group that again we don&#8217;t have enough time to discuss, called the Democracy Alliance, that decided one of their primary goals was going to be to stop photo voter identification &#8212; all of a sudden, all of these groups that had disparate interests were now coming together and swarming over what would seem to be innocuous election administration efforts.</p>
<p>And so, this little room, where this committee would normally hear out reform issues, was now filled with, in one instance, 35 groups who all came together to stop what would seem to be common-sense reform. So citizens have to be prepared to be engaged and to protect and defend this process. Because if we don&#8217;t, we will lose it. That&#8217;s it.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Thanks. Next question?</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: So I&#8217;d like to thank you all for what you do for us. I too fear for this country. I fear for my future, I fear for the future of my peers. I see all around me that the majority of voters in this country are ignorant, that most of the population of this country is ignorant, and that the Judeo-Christian values that drove our founders forward and drove our society forward have been completely eradicated from the school systems, from daily life, from pop culture.</p>
<p>And you know, I don&#8217;t want to get not admitted to my college of choice because of affirmative action. And I don&#8217;t want to have to stay on my parents&#8217; healthcare until I&#8217;m 26.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Brian Calle: How old are you?</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I&#8217;m 14.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: Wow.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Thank you.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: I think a bunch of people in this room want to adopt you.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: Thank you. And I was just wondering if there&#8217;s any promise in what the great people in this room are doing, if there&#8217;s any promise in what you&#8217;re doing, and if there&#8217;s any promise for the future of this country. Thank you.</p>
<p>Catherine Engelbrecht: Well, let me just say one thing &#8212; most of the people in this country are not ignorant. And the thing that restored my faith in America was the Tea Party movement, when people got up and out of their chairs.</p>
<p>(Applause)</p>
<p>And I really didn&#8217;t think that our citizenry &#8212; now, when you think about it, people, we finance all of our major purposes in our lives through debt. We buy our houses with debt, we pay for our kids&#8217; college education &#8212; unless you (inaudible) write a check, and many people are not able to do that &#8212; with debt. And we&#8217;re used to debt financing. And I really didn&#8217;t think that it would bother the American people when Obama came in with the stimulus package and all this incredible increase in our debt.</p>
<p>But I was wrong. And the American people got up and out of their chairs, out from in front of the televisions. They took the time off from work. People who had never done anything politically active before in their lives. And they came out in droves, and they reclaimed &#8212; they started the process of reclaiming America in 2010.</p>
<p>So don&#8217;t ever think the majority of the American people are stupid, because they&#8217;re not. They&#8217;re just busy trying to earn a living, take care of their kids and pay the damn taxes they get imposed upon them. But we can do these things if we pay attention to the processes. You all are here. You all care.</p>
<p>So yes, you should &#8212; I love this thing that Charles was telling me &#8212; that despair is not an option. So don&#8217;t despair.</p>
<p>Unidentified Speaker: I would say, too, as a young person &#8212; I&#8217;m 25, so I&#8217;m still eligible to be on my parents&#8217; health insurance &#8211;</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>&#8211; I bought my own health insurance. It just doubled; thank you, Obama. You know, I&#8217;m an adult child, and yet I&#8217;m married. And, God willing, we&#8217;ll have a kid someday soon. But I would just say, with young people, we&#8217;ve got work to do. All right? Many of our generation &#8212; we&#8217;re chicken voting for Colonel Sanders. Right?</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And we&#8217;ve got to do a lot of work on this. I&#8217;m so tired of all these baby boomers saying &#8212; oh, you young people need to have insurance. Really? You&#8217;re the flower girl generation. You&#8217;re like flower power. Were you really having insurance at 25 years old? Come on now.</p>
<p>And so what you got to do is you got to go out with the people. You got to go out and talk to them. What you got to do is meet people as they are, not as you wish them to be.</p>
<p>So even though I&#8217;m a Catholic &#8212; you know, I&#8217;m totally onboard with virtually everything the Religious Right is for &#8212; we&#8217;ve got to be very aware that we don&#8217;t live in the world we should live in. And so we have to try and persuade people as best we can. And that means meeting people.</p>
<p>Brian Calle: On that note, I got the high-five from Mike. And I want to make sure this guy gets onto his plane. Let&#8217;s get another round of applause for our panel.</p>
<p>(Applause)</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>Only Capitalism Can Fix Obama’s Socialist Website</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/only-capitalism-can-fix-obamas-socialist-website/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=only-capitalism-can-fix-obamas-socialist-website</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/only-capitalism-can-fix-obamas-socialist-website/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2013 05:51:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[bureaucracy]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Capitalism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Healthcare.gov]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Socialism]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212113</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Socialism only works until you run out of free-market talent.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/aca_marketplace_ap_605.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-212114" alt="Health Overhaul Florida" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/aca_marketplace_ap_605-450x305.jpg" width="270" height="183" /></a>Every leader has his great challenge. FDR had WW2. JFK had a trip to the moon. Ronald Reagan had the Cold War. George W. Bush had 9/11. Barack Obama has a website.</p>
<p>ObamaCare loyalists are calling the bid to repair the broken site a “moonshot” and quoting lines from Apollo 13 as if trying to fix an overgrown government website is like surviving a return to earth with a damaged spacecraft. America has gone from challenges like building 75,000 combat aircraft in a single year during WW2 and beating the Soviet Union to the moon… to trying to make a website work.</p>
<p>Obama’s two victories were widely credited to his Internet savvy. But the digital Hope and Change campaign was really more of a bait and switch. When it came to getting elected and staying popular; he outsourced the work to private sector professionals.</p>
<p>Obama’s digital strategy campaign was handled by talent from successful companies like Facebook and Google; including a Facebook co-founder. His health care website was put together by the usual crony contractors who were adept at pulling the right political strings to win no-bid contracts despite their terrible track records.</p>
<p>The Obama campaign would never have turned over its political fate to a company whose only virtue was that a top executive had gone to college with Michelle Obama. But it had no objection to tuning over the health care and private information of millions of Americans to their tender digital mercies.</p>
<p>Obama put his political fortunes ahead of the health and welfare of Americans. It was only when the Healthcare.gov disaster dealt a severe blow to his poll numbers that he called in a “tech surge” of engineers from Google and other politically friendly companies who had made his campaign work.</p>
<p>He didn’t call them in because he cared whether Americans had access to health care. If he had; he would have called them in a lot sooner. Instead he did it to bring his poll numbers back up again.</p>
<p>Obama’s bait and switch promised private sector level sophistication for a giant Socialist boondoggle. The digital strategy that had made him seem tech savvy was worlds away from the grinding bureaucratic mess that made Healthcare.gov the disaster that, despite all the claims to the contrary, it still is today.</p>
<p>Healthcare.gov could never have actually run like Amazon or iTunes; no matter what Obama promised. That idea was as ridiculous as trying to graft a water buffalo onto a greyhound. The private sector and public sector are different species of technology workflow.</p>
<p>Government employees are not all incompetent idiots and private sector employees aren’t all geniuses. There are plenty of smart people who work for the government and plenty of stupid people who work in the private sector.</p>
<p>It’s the process that is fundamentally different.</p>
<p>The Standish Group states that 94 percent of large federal information technology projects undertaken during the past decade were unsuccessful. These staggering numbers made the Healthcare.gov disaster inevitable.</p>
<p>Google and Facebook exist because small groups of students pushed themselves to accomplish ridiculously ambitious goals. If CGI, the primary Healthcare.gov contractor, had received a government contract to create Facebook to government specifications and with government oversight; there would be no Facebook today.</p>
<p>The issue isn’t difficulty level. It’s culture.</p>
<p>After Khrushchev’s visit to the United States; he tried to reproduce the innovations in agriculture and construction that he had been shown. These efforts proved to be a miserable failure.</p>
<p>Khrushchev bought seed corn from the United States and unveiled a massive corn planting campaign. But the Soviet agricultural system treated corn the way that it had wheat with disastrous results. Corn planting techniques weren’t a great mystery; but the Soviet system was a rigid bureaucracy incapable of learning anything new or adapting its methods to the task. Instead, like all bureaucracies, it tried to adapt the task to its usual methods and its ideological armor made its ignorance into a virtue.</p>
<p>The same thing happened with Healthcare.gov. Instead of trying to adapt the methods to the task, the system treated the construction of a website like any other policy; with rigid guidelines emerging out of constant meetings setting up an inflexible process for getting it done without actually understanding what it was that was being done.</p>
<p>Like the Soviet bureaucrats planting corn where it wasn’t meant to go; their American counterparts relentlessly kept spending money on a website built around their guidelines without even seeing if it worked. Like their Communist brethren, they refused to report failure up the chain of command and instead treated success as a function of their procedures… rather than of the functional outcome.</p>
<p>Obama, like Khrushchev, was humiliated and caught by surprise when he realized that his grand project had fallen apart. Both Socialist leaders had thought that it was enough to order their subordinates to imitate a successful free market product without understanding that it’s the production process that makes the product. Trying to imitate the product without the production process is a recipe for disaster.</p>
<p>To a bureaucracy, success is not defined by how much corn you grow or how many users a website can handle; but whether every proper procedure was followed in the production of the corn or the website.</p>
<p>For his tech surge, Obama has been forced to go outside the government bureaucracy and its crony capitalist clingers to private sector engineers. Like Lenin’s New Economy Policy or the Soviet Union’s increasingly desperate attempts at enlisting American aid to fix its agriculture; Obama has implicitly acknowledged that the ideological government he runs is unfit for the task that he has set it to.</p>
<p>A temporary free market fix may eventually get Healthcare.gov working again but can’t address the roots of its failure which are not in mere code; but in the bureaucratic DNA of government. A few engineers will eventually get the website working; but they can’t fix the entire broken culture behind it.</p>
<p>The website doesn’t matter. Healthcare.gov isn’t Facebook or Google where the service is the product. It’s meant to serve as a distribution gateway for products that have come out of the same dysfunctional bureaucratic process. Fixing Healthcare.gov isn’t like fixing Google or Facebook. It’s like fixing Amazon’s website without fixing its corporate culture, its warehouse distribution, its advertising and its products.</p>
<p>No matter how many Facebook or Google vets hack the Obama campaign or Healthcare.gov; they can’t fix the underlying problem with their real product… which is government bureaucracy.</p>
<p>Margaret Thatcher famously said that the trouble with Socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money. That’s the economic trouble with Socialism. The functional trouble with Socialism is that you eventually run out of the free market talent to make its projects plod along without breaking down.</p>
<p>Obama’s solution to everything is more government. And how is the same government process that can’t make a health care website work, going to make a health care system work?</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> on<strong> The Glazov Gang </strong>discussing his new collection of conservative writings, <strong><a href="https://secure.donationreport.com/productlist.html?key=SZLFMGIYTBFM">The Black Book of the American Left, Volume I: My Life and Times:</a></strong></em></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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>The Obama Who Stole Thanksgiving</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-obama-who-stole-thanksgiving/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obama-who-stole-thanksgiving</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/the-obama-who-stole-thanksgiving/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Nov 2013 05:51:43 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[dinner]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Health Care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Michelle Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama care]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Thanksgiving]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=211865</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The leftist hijacking of Thanksgiving. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/thanksgiving_dinner_1280x1024.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-211867" alt="thanksgiving_dinner_1280x1024" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/thanksgiving_dinner_1280x1024-437x350.jpg" width="262" height="210" /></a>Progressives have already tried to ruin Thanksgiving by condemning it as a genocidal holiday commemorating European colonialism or by giving snippy little speeches about consumerism.</p>
<p>But they didn’t have a way to actually get into living rooms to ruin the holiday until now.</p>
<p>Not content that <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/if-you-like-your-food-you-can-keep-your-food/">the price of a whole frozen turkey went up</a> 37% under his economic policies, Obama decided to completely ruin Thanksgiving dinner by turning it into an angry debate about ObamaCare.</p>
<p>If you were hoping to eat your turkey in peace; forget about it. Michelle Obama not only wants to control your menu; she also wants <a href="http://washingtonexaminer.com/article/2539881">to control the topic of your</a> family dinner conversation by exhorting your more impressionable relatives to sell you on her husband’s substandard ObamaCare junk plans.</p>
<p>The “Health Care for the Holidays” page on BarackObama.com, promoted by his wife, urges his remaining devoted followers to “pledge” to push ObamaCare on family members and advises “integrating the talk into family time.”</p>
<p>Because there’s nothing that says “family time” like teaching people to hijack family dinners to become used health care salesmen; BarackObama.com offers sales tips like “Make it memorable,” “Be Persistent, but keep it positive” and “Find a quiet place.” That last tip will prevent other family members from hearing their screams of horror at the size of their new ObamaCare premiums and deductibles.</p>
<p>These aren’t tips for talking to family members; but for scamming them out of money. They’re the sort of crude sales techniques that MLM affiliates get in the mail. Be positive, be persistent and eventually you’ll sucker some poor idiot into an ObamaCare plan with a bigger deductible than the national debt.</p>
<p>And if the poor idiot is related to you… that just makes him an easier mark.</p>
<p>Doing its best to make ObamaCare seem like a creepy cult, Obama supporters are instructed to badger family members with cries of “Have you thought about signing up,” “Would you like to sign up now,” “When do you plan on signing up” and “Have you signed up yet.”</p>
<p>The only thing missing is; “If you don’t sign up for ObamaCare; I won’t love you anymore.”</p>
<p>But it’s not just Organizing for America, the rebirth of Obama’s 2012 campaign as a mutated Super PAC, that is working on ruining your Thanksgiving. MSNBC, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post have also gotten into the Thanksgiving Knockout Game.</p>
<p>The Washington Post offers a guide for convincing all your relatives that ObamaCare is working great because 12,000 people have signed up in Washington.</p>
<p>There’s tips for convincing your mom and dad that ObamaCare isn’t a disaster, persuading your grandfather that ObamaCare doesn’t have death panels, assuring your brother that he won’t lose his employer health plan, brushing off your uncle’s complaint about his health plan cancellation and convincing your cousin’s girlfriend who has a degree in Computer Science that she doesn’t know anything about what’s wrong with Healthcare.gov and should just shut up.</p>
<p>Not only will the Washington Post preemptively map out your family arguments for you; but the answer to each of them is that Obama is always right.</p>
<p>Even Pravda couldn’t have done any better.</p>
<p>The Los Angeles Times offers the only honestly dishonest liberal debating guide with debate tips like “Flatter your opponent,” “Argue by anecdote” and “Call out the other person for arguing by anecdote.”</p>
<p>And if any family members get sick of your Los Angeles Times approved plan to hijack Thanksgiving by coming to a prepared debate with an assistant to look up things for you on a smartphone while you anecdotally compare Republicans to Hitler; the Los Angeles Times also offers tips for handling “annoying peacekeepers” who say things like “Why don’t we just try to have a nice time on Thanksgiving?”</p>
<p>The nerve of these people trying to have a family dinner on Thanksgiving instead of a screaming match about ObamaCare; don’t they know that their attitude is ruining your progressive Thanksgiving?</p>
<p>But what if you’re a fanatical progressive who doesn’t think that berating family members about ObamaCare over Thanksgiving dinner is in the spirit of the holiday? There are other liberal causes that you can scream at them about.</p>
<p>Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns has a Thanksgiving turkey placemat to print out and shove at family members so that they too can “demand a plan.”</p>
<p>The Bloomberg Turkey (not legal in New York due to its size and transfat content) is less about selling your family members on trashing the Second Amendment and more about celebrating Bloomberg’s pet taxpayer-funded lobby with quizzes that ask how many races the “Washington Gun Lobby” has won and whether they live in a state that requires background checks for firearms purchases.</p>
<p>Leave it to Mayor Bloomberg to find a way to make the ObamaCare Thanksgiving sales pitch look like fun.</p>
<p>But what if talking about shooting people just doesn’t feel like appropriate Thanksgiving dinner conversation? There’s always killing babies.</p>
<p>Planned Parenthood has been giving out tips for promoting abortion at Thanksgiving for years. The handout urges Planners to avoid discussing “when life begins” and focus instead on shared values like everyone having the right to decide “whether to become a parent” or to carry a dead baby in a handbag to a Victoria’s Secret store.</p>
<p>Planned Parenthood urges framing abortion as a personal issue instead of a political issue. But whether it’s personal or political; the baby is still dead and Thanksgiving dinner is still ruined.</p>
<p>But what if you don’t want to limit yourself to just one way of ruining Thanksgiving?</p>
<p>The Democratic National Committee has gotten into the fun with YourRepublicanUncle; a site that promises to do for Thanksgiving what the Democratic Party already did for America.</p>
<p>There are tips for debating family members on every liberal cause. Don’t just settle for screaming at your uncles about abortion, ObamaCare or ObamaCare’s abortions.</p>
<p>The Democratic National Committee also wants you to scream at family members about the economy, immigration and global warming with crazy lies claiming that Obama’s increase of the National Debt from 10 trillion to 17 trillion is actually a dramatic decrease, that ObamaCare saves businesses money and that illegal alien amnesty isn’t amnesty.</p>
<p>Despite all the energy being poured into turning Julia into the best community organizer that she can be; none of these debate preps are really about winning arguments. The debate prep comes packaged with heavy doses of contempt for “older” conservative relatives. The real theme isn’t winning arguments, but maintaining the mental bubble in which Obama supporters live when they go outside their natural urban liberal environment.</p>
<p>ObamaCare’s target population is the young. The debate prep is really about convincing them not to question ObamaCare by injecting a bunch of talking points directly into their brains and reinforcing their contempt for everyone who disagrees as a bunch of ignorant racist old people who don’t know nearly as much about health care as the guy who didn’t know that his entire health care plan was a turkey.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Jamie Glazov&#8217;s</strong> video interview with <strong></strong> <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> about Obama&#8217;s Destructive Agenda, his Muslim Brotherhood Romance, the Anthony Weiner-Huma Abedin saga, and much, much more:</em></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/hpyoCFF-iL8" height="315" width="420" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></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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