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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Republican</title>
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		<title>Rick Perry: Restore the 10th Amendment, Restore Freedom</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=rick-perry-restore-the-10th-amendment-restore-freedom</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Dec 2014 05:54:47 +0000</pubDate>
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				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Texas]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247758</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Former governor of the Lone Star State sheds light on the path to liberty at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Gov. Rick Perry’s keynote speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/114532350" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>David, as we gather here for this 20th anniversary celebration of the Freedom Center, it was similar circumstances that this country found itself in when you had the first Restoration weekend in 1994. Two decades ago Republicans had swept into power in both of the Houses, a revolution that changed the balance of power for the first time, Cleta, in 40 years. Twenty years later, Republicans again have won historic victories in the midterm elections and once again we are controlling both houses of Congress. In addition to picking up eight seats in the U.S. Senate, we picked up at least a dozen House seats, three governorships, several state legislative chambers. Today, Republicans control 68 of the 98 partisan state legislative chambers. That is the most in the history of our party. And we stunned the pollsters. It was a beautiful thing. We stunned the pollsters even more than we stunned President Barack Obama, who apparently doesn&#8217;t realize that November 4 even happened. He&#8217;s too busy representing those who didn&#8217;t vote to listen to those who did vote. But even if he didn&#8217;t hear the message, the American people delivered one. They said enough of the slow growth tax policies, enough of the smothering debt, they said enough to this colossal bureaucracy that we&#8217;ve seen, and these agencies of government that all too often are unaccountable to the people. They rebelled against government-run healthcare schemes, against a President who refuses to secure the border, and against bureaucracies that are broken, arrogant and abusive of power. That&#8217;s what the American people said Tuesday. The American people made it clear. They want a clean break from the economic policies that have slowed our recovery at home, and the foreign policies that Jim did an incredible job of laying out that have weakened our standing abroad.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m here to say that a congressional majority is a terrible thing to waste. The power that has been newly granted by the people must be used wisely to serve the people, that it&#8217;s not good enough to state what we are against. We must articulate what we are for. The election results leave us with a truly once in a generation opportunity to usher in an era of renewal and reform. You are here tonight through your commitment to the Freedom Center, and you&#8217;re going to be on the front lines of this battle. One of the ideas that has returned to the fore of the conversation, to the forefront of people&#8217;s minds, if you will, is the proper place of states within our constitutional system. Indeed, we have spent the last six years challenging edicts out of Washington that amount to federal control of our classrooms, our healthcare, and our environment and our economy. Washington&#8217;s assault on state sovereignty and individual freedom is a well-documented assault on the Constitution and, in particular, the Tenth Amendment. Some have ridiculed the binding power of the Tenth Amendment, but, of course, Jay, without that amendment, the Bill of Rights would have been incomplete, and the Constitution would never have been ratified. The question is whether Republicans in Washington, now in control, will pursue Washington-centric solutions to the problems that plague us, or will they look to and empower the states.</p>
<p>It was the liberal Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis who called the states laboratories of democracy which &#8220;tried novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.&#8221; Yet Brandeis&#8217;s political descendants have forgotten that lesson. In fact, they flipped it around trying these grand experiments in federal power, ostensibly for the common good. I like that Tocqueville observed that in the American system the actions of the federal government would be rare, but the reality is the federal government is involved in all kinds of things the Constitution doesn&#8217;t empower it to do, while ignoring basic responsibilities like securing our border. And it&#8217;s the states that are pushing back against federal overreach and the courts are starting to take notice.</p>
<p>In the infamous Obamacare case of 2012, Chief Justice Roberts upheld the law, but the Supreme Court also struck down the mandatory Medicaid expansion as a violation of the Tenth Amendment. Now a new Obamacare case is about to be heard. It uses the letter of the law to challenge the federal government&#8217;s use of subsidies on many of these healthcare insurance exchanges. Now we know that the federal government overstepped its powers. We know that, partly because we know there is now a new smoking gun: One Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of Obamacare. In less than a week&#8217;s period of time the Washington sin of prevarication has come to be known as &#8220;Gruber-ing.&#8221; He said repeatedly, I think, what is there now, six videos that we have, that the federal government had to lie to the voters because we are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for us. That shows exactly why the states are so important to defending individual freedom; because the states have stood up to the abuses of federal power in Obamacare. The law, as a matter of fact, it may collapse upon its own weight.</p>
<p>So if the states are these laboratories of democracy, I would suggest to you that Texas has found the formula for success. You know, it&#8217;s interesting, some people call it the Texas miracle, and I tell them, I said it&#8217;s not a miracle. I can&#8217;t explain a miracle. This I can explain. This is really pretty simple. This is not rocket science. You don&#8217;t spend all the money. Keep the taxes low, a regulatory climate that is fair and predictable, a legal system that doesn&#8217;t allow for over-suing, and accountable public schools so you&#8217;ve got a skilled workforce. This will work. It&#8217;ll work anywhere. Jay, it&#8217;ll even work in California, I swear to God, I&#8217;m telling you it will. And the results have been rather stunning. When you look at job creation, one-third, one-third of all the jobs created in the United States in the last 13 plus years have been in the Lone Star State. Over the last ten years, we have created four times more jobs than the state of New York, we have created nine times more jobs than the state of California. And some would say well it&#8217;s because you have all of that energy, and I will suggest to you we are glad we have that energy. America is glad we have that energy. But it&#8217;s not singularly the energy boom, that&#8217;s only part of the reason for our success. We&#8217;ve added jobs across the spectrum – 228,000 workers in education and healthcare, 156,000 in professional services, 162,000 in hospitality services, 130,000 in trade and transportation, according to the Texas Public Policy Foundation. I am particularly proud of the fact that as of January of this year, Texas became the number one high-tech exporting state in the nation, passing up California and the famed Silicon Valley. And we&#8217;ve been continuing to reach out to give California companies the opportunity to relocate to the great state of Texas, companies like Toyota, who moved their North American headquarters to Plano this last year, companies like Space-X, and we&#8217;re going to keep doing it.</p>
<p>And my point is, I want the Golden State to succeed. We need California to be a powerful, successful country. That was a Freudian slip. We would really like to bring them into the United States and be a part of this country. You know, for ten consecutive years now, Chief Executive Officer magazine has chosen Texas as the number one state to do business, and, thanks to the governor of this state, Rick Scott, they are doing a good job to push us. Rick Scott is an extraordinary governor, and Floridians were really wise to put this man back into office again because he really understands what the future of our nation, the future of this state is all about, and the focus on creating that environment, where the citizens of this state will be free.</p>
<p>Freedom is what this is all about. It is in the pursuit of freedom, and, on average, there is a thousand people every day moving to the state of Texas because they are in pursuit of freedom. Freedom from over-taxation, freedom from over-litigation, freedom from over-regulation. That is what needs to be the powerful Republican message as we go forward inside the boundaries of this country. And here are some of the results of those policies. Our crime rate is now the lowest that it&#8217;s been since 1968. We&#8217;re shutting prisons down in the state of Texas, not building them.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s the result of good, thoughtful public policy? There are those that would stand up and say you cannot have a growing economy and take care of your environment. That is an absolute false lie. Nitrogen oxide levels are down 63 percent in the state of Texas in the last decade, ozone levels are down by 23 percent during that same period of time, our carbon footprint which, by the way, is not a pollutant, but is down by 11 percent during that period of time because we understand that, even if it is, we want to make sure that we&#8217;re doing everything that we can to make that environment as pleasing as it can be for the future generations, and that&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve done in the state of Texas. Part of that&#8217;s been because of policies that we&#8217;ve put into place to move old polluting types of engines, diesel engines, out of the fleets. Part of it&#8217;s been moving to that natural gas. That&#8217;s what can happen all across this country. This isn&#8217;t a miracle. It&#8217;s a model and it&#8217;s a model that will work anywhere. We are an increasingly diverse state. We got a little of something for everybody. We have Austin, Texas. As I told you, we are a diverse state. I refer to it as the blueberry in the tomato soup. And, David, I encourage you to visit from time to time. You can talk philosophy and tenure to the professors at the University of Texas. They would love to have you.</p>
<p>But, in all seriousness, can we do more? Yes. Should we try to do more? Absolutely. But what Texas shows is that with a rapidly growing economy all else becomes possible. Clearly Texas is a model that works, but we&#8217;re not alone. America has just experienced a great test of governing principles. In the days leading up to the 2014 mid-term elections, we were told that Republican governors were in trouble. You read it everywhere. You saw it on multiple outlets. Scott Walker&#8217;s public union reforms in Wisconsin, Sam Brownback&#8217;s tax-cutting in Kansas, Rick Scott&#8217;s pro-growth policies in Florida, all were going to be punished by the voters. For example, the campaign for America&#8217;s future said that seven Republican governors were now &#8220;being judged harshly by voters now that their right-wing policies had failed to deliver.&#8221; It went on to say that these states were laboratories for the kind of small government trickle-down economics that Senate candidates hoped to bring to Washington, impose on the nation, and there is a real danger that the failed experiments in these seven states will be brought to Washington by a Senate Republican majority. But the experiment wasn&#8217;t quite over, and the voters decided in a very powerful conclusion on November 4. Not only did six of those seven governors win re-election, but Republicans picked up governorships in solid states for Democrats like Massachusetts, Illinois, and even Maryland. And there were a lot of people, a lot of people that were responsible for those Republican victories including a number of you, if not all of you, in this audience tonight. Yet in the end it was the people who decided. They told fellow Americans that the experiment and conservative governance is a resounding success and they want more of it.</p>
<p>There were a few places that bucked the trend though. Jay, your California being one of them. See, I tell people, I say California, for example, is as liberal as Texas is conservative. But that is not an argument against federalism. In fact, California is an example of how the state&#8217;s Tenth Amendment powers work for liberals too. You think about this. California has some policies that no other state in the union have tried, and in most other states, don&#8217;t want to try. Take cap and trade, for instance. I mean, not even Barack Obama, in those heady early days of his first administration, could pass cap and trade, but California has it. And it&#8217;s making new companies like Tesla a lot of money, even as it is at the same time forcing a lot of companies out of that state.</p>
<p>Nearly 20 years ago, California also became the first state in the nation to legalize medical marijuana. In 2012, Washington and Colorado legalized marijuana entirely. This year Alaska, Oregon, and the District of Columbia followed suit. The governor of Colorado said that he regrets it. Most conservatives oppose it. The federal government&#8217;s still fighting it, and the United Nations said this week that legalizing marijuana violates international law. But that is the beauty of the Tenth Amendment. I&#8217;m telling you, that is the beauty of federalism. If states can make their own decisions on matters of general policy, then we can have the kind of political diversity among the states that gives meaning to the pursuit of happiness. People can vote with their feet, they can vote with their pocketbooks, they can invest their dollars where they want, and that gives states an incentive to attract them, and to innovate. The reason welfare reform became so popular nationwide was because it succeeded in Wisconsin. The reason state provided healthcare is unpopular nationwide is they proved that it was costly in Massachusetts.</p>
<p>Some states want to cling to policies for various reasons. California is addicted to spending. Therefore, it&#8217;s addicted to debt and taxes. So, there&#8217;s a result. It&#8217;s losing people, and entrepreneurs, and homeowners, and that is another benefit of federalism. You can do what you want in your state. But you are forced at some point to pay the costs.</p>
<p>So, how do we ensure that the states protect and, I might say, regain their Tenth Amendment rights? One way is by continuing to fight the encroachments of the federal government. Whether bad laws like Obamacare, bad spending like the stimulus of 2009, or bad faith in immigration policy, but beyond that we can take political action. We can show the American people concrete results, how states work better, how states compete against each other, and, I might add, better than the federal government could do. And that&#8217;s exactly how Governor-elect Larry Hogan over in Maryland, that was the point that he made. He laid out the data. He showed people in that state how many people had left the state, how many billions of dollars it was costing the state because of the bad policies. If we show people the difference between conservative policies and liberal policies, I happen to think they&#8217;re going to demand conservative policies almost every time just as they did last Tuesday. And when people understand, when people understand that they have the power to choose these policies, they&#8217;ll resist. They&#8217;ll resist any attempt by the federal government to take that power away. There is a reason that people and states are included together in that Tenth Amendment. Individual liberty has shone brightest when it&#8217;s been protected from big government. Only successful states are strong enough to protect our freedom from those in Washington who think they know better. States are the essence of our national motto e pluribus unum, from many one. That is the common creed of the David Horowitz Freedom Center that defends it every day. They defend it now and I will suggest to you they will defend it 20 years from now. And that is what each of us must fight for every day.</p>
<p>God bless you, and thank you all for coming and being a part of this.</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>Budget Battle Royale</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/budget-battle-royale/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=budget-battle-royale</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/budget-battle-royale/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:25:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[cromnibus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrat]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[omnibus]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republican]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Spending]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Vote]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247279</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The “CRomnibus" bill pushes through. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141027-electionpoll-editorial.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247280" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/141027-electionpoll-editorial-450x300.jpg" alt="As Deadline On Debt Reduction Impasse Looms, Super Committee Meets Over Weekend" width="353" height="235" /></a>Thursday was filled with chaos in the capital. By a razor thin margin, the Republican-controlled House voted in favor of the $1.1 trillion “CRomnibus” funding bill. House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) was forced to cajole conservative GOPers to switch their votes after it appeared it was headed for defeat earlier in the day. All of the machinations were aimed at preventing a government shutdown beginning at midnight.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">For a brief moment in time early Thursday, the nay votes outnumbered the yeas for the current <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/11/Boehner-Omnibus-Bill-Size-Grows-An-Extra-171-Pages-Overnight-Now-1774-Pages-Long"><span style="color: #1255cc;">1,774-page bill</span></a> allocating $1.01 trillion of federal spending for FY2015. That’s because conservative Republicans remain infuriated by the reality ObamaCare remains <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/12/09/whats-in-the-spending-bill-we-skim-it-so-you-dont-have-to/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">fully funded</span></a>, save for a $10 million budget cut for Independent Payment Advisory Board, and the president’s executive amnesty program remains funded until February. Nonetheless, $948 million has been allocated for the Department of Health and Human Service’s (DHS) unaccompanied children program, increasing that budget by $80 million, and another $14 million is aimed at helping school districts absorb new immigrant students. Adding insult to conservative injury, the State Department is on track to receive $260 million to assist the Central American countries responsible for the onslaught of children crossing the Southwest border over the summer.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“The fix is in, which I’ve been saying all along,” <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/10/Conservatives-Express-Anger-That-Amnesty-Not-Defunded-In-Omnibus-The-Fix-Is-In"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ) following the Republican conference Wednesday morning. “Promises around here&#8211;regardless of who they are made by&#8211;don’t seem to mean anything,” he added, further explaining that lawmakers’ phones have been “lighting up” with constituents asking them to “do what [they] were elected to do.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Salmon was one of sixteen Republicans, including Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI), Michele Bachmann (R-MN), Dave Brat (R-VA), Mo Brooks (R-AL), Paul Broun (R-GA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Paul Gosar (R-AZ), Tim Huelskamp (R-KS), Walter Jones (R-NC), Jim Jordan (R-OH), Steve King (R-IA), Raul Labrador (R-ID), Tom Massie (R-KY), Bill Posey (R-FL), and and Steve Stockman (R-TX) who refused to accommodate GOP leadership on the debate vote.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Democrats were equally resistant, with most of their opposition aimed primarily at two riders. The <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/226788-dems-to-boehner-change-the-bill"><span style="color: #0433ff;">first one</span></a> waters down the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, allowing Wall Street banks to trade the risky derivatives banned by that bill. The second provision allows wealthy political donors to <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/12/09/spending-deal-would-allow-wealthy-donors-to-dramatically-increase-giving-to-national-parties/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">dramatically increase</span></a> the amount of money they can donate to national political parties. &#8220;Stakeholders from across the progressive community&#8211;including the AFL-CIO, Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, Public Citizen, Communications Workers, Common Cause, and many others&#8211;have expressed their opposition to passing a funding bill that includes these dangerous provisions,” said leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus (CPC), who were urging Democrats to vote no.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet many Democrats remained ambivalent due to the 2014 election that eliminated their Senate majority and increased Republican numbers in the House. While they don’t like the CRomnibus, some see it as their last chance to exert any influence over spending while they still retain their Senate majority. Furthermore, they were all aware of the reality that if the bill failed, GOP leadership was prepared to move forward with a shorter alternative.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">President Obama offered his support for the package both <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/226817-white-house-signals-support-for-cromnibus-ahead-of-critical-vote"><span style="color: #1255cc;">before</span></a> and <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/legislative/sap/113/saphr83h_20141211.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">shortly after</span></a> the vote took place. GOP leadership needed 50-60 Democrats to make up for the likely conservative defectors in their own party, and it appeared the president was well aware of that reality.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Yet even as Obama expressed his support, several Senate Democrats <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/226824-liberal-senators-threaten-to-oppose-omnibus"><span style="color: #1255cc;">rallied</span></a> around Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), viewed by many as that party’s newest star, to express their opposition to the aforementioned provisions for Wall Street and political donors. &#8220;It’s a very black mark on the omnibus if it comes over to the Senate with that in it. I certainly would consider voting no on it,&#8221; said Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR). Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) also contended there would be a “problem” if the current language on Dodd-Frank remained intact. Warren remained adamant. “A vote for this bill is a vote for future taxpayer bailouts of Wall Street,” she insisted.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Warren might have a tad more credibility were it not for the reality that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two lending giants at the center of the housing meltdown, will once again be <a href="http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/business/2014/12/09/mortgage-down-payments"><span style="color: #1255cc;">offering</span></a> 3 percent down payments on mortgages to “qualified” home buyers. Those would be the same Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae left <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/272368/dodd-frank-s-fannie-trap-john-berlau"><span style="color: #1255cc;">untouched</span></a> by Dodd-Frank.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Two upsides for conservatives in the package includes a $60 million cut in the EPA’s budget to $8.1 billion. That brings the agency’s budget down a total of 21 percent since 2010, and staffing to its lowest level since 1989. The IRS also takes a $345.6 million hit, and the bill includes a future ban on their now infamous efforts to target organizations seeking tax-exempt status based on their ideological beliefs.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">At 2 p.m. the drama intensified, when House leaders <a href="http://www3.blogs.rollcall.com/218/lacking-sufficient-support-house-gop-leaders-delay-cromnibus-vote/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">called</span></a> for a recess instead of a vote, with a GOP aide insisting “leadership teams are still talking to their respective members. We still plan to vote this afternoon,” the aide added. At that point, whether they were voting on the CRomnibus package or a short-term Continuing Resolution remained unclear. The delay indicated GOP leadership was having trouble corralling enough of their own membership, while Nancy Pelosi sought to undercut support by Democrats and Obama with a fiery floor speech, saying she was “enormously disappointed” with the Obama administration.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Ironically, it was a Tea Party congressman defeated by the GOP establishment who <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/394438/reindeer-farmer-saves-boehner-dramatic-procedural-vote-joel-gehrke"><span style="color: #1255cc;">managed</span></a> to get Boehner past the initial hurdle. With the vote tied at 213-213, Rep. Kerry Bentivolio (R-MI) change his no vote to a yes. The outgoing reindeer farmer saved Boehner from enduring a major embarrassment that not only had forced Boehner to cast a vote himself (a rarity), but forced him to keep the vote going after time had officially expired. Frustrated Democrats shouted, “Call the vote,” but the Speaker ignored them until he got the result he wanted.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Irrespective of that vote, Obama’s immigration excesses and the healthcare bill remain sticking points for the GOP. Regarding immigration, GOP leadership <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/226737-government-shutdown-would-not-stop-obama-action-on-immigration"><span style="color: #1255cc;">posits</span></a> they’ll be better positioned to take on de facto amnesty a month from now, when they get their Senate majority and larger share of the House. “If you’re gonna start a bar fight, start it when you’ve got as many friends in the bar as you can possibly have. Why would you start it now?” said Boehner ally Rep. Tom Cole (R-OK). A leadership aide echoed that contention, insisting the GOP has an “array of legislative and legal options” they can employ—without specifying any of them. The two flies in the proverbial ointment include an Obama veto, and regardless of funding or lack thereof, how many DHS workers could be deemed “essential,” preventing them from being furloughed. That’s why conservative GOPers preferred to fight using the entire budget as a hammer.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">ObamaCare is a different story. Obama still has veto power, but several Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Harry Reid (D-NV), have <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/04/after-midterm-drubbing-senior-dems-voicing-regret-over-obamacare/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">expressed</span></a> regret regarding its passage, and ObamaCare architect Jonathan Gruber embarrassed himself <a href="http://qpolitical.com/thats-the-best-you-got-trey-gowdy-embarrasses-gruber-on-his-insulting-comments-about-americans/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">during</span></a> testimony on Capitol Hill. There was also <i>another</i> video released yesterday in which he <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/12/11/in-a-new-video-jon-gruber-boasted-that-he-helped-write-obamacare/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">claimed</span></a> he “helped write” the bill. Moreover, the Supreme Court is <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/health-care/how-the-supreme-court-can-kill-obamacare-without-overturning-it-20141117"><span style="color: #1255cc;">poised to rule</span></a> on <i>King v. Burwell, </i>a case where the plaintiffs contend only healthcare exchanges “established by the state” can provide IRS tax subsidies to ObamaCare enrollees. If the Court rules according to the law as written, the roughly 4 to 5 million people now receiving financial assistance would lose it in the 36 states that didn’t set up their own exchanges. And the law, as <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/poll-obamacare-approval-112948.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">unpopular as ever</span></a> with the public, would essentially be gutted. All of this may provide impetus for a bipartisan effort to make majors changes to the law—even changes that might garner enough support to override a veto by Obama.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">At around 5:30 p.m. Democrats <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/12/2015-gop-budget-back-up-plan-113498.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">convened</span></a> a closed meeting to discuss the bill following a series of phone calls from Obama and Vice President Biden, urging party members to vote for it. Pelosi remained against it, insisting Republicans &#8220;don’t have enough votes,” while GOP leadership indicated they could either pass a three-month stop-gap measure avoiding a shutdown, or a weeklong measure giving Boehner more time to marshal support. “We expect the bill to pass with bipartisan support today, but if it does not, we will pass a short-term CR to avoid a government shutdown,” said Boehner spokesman Michael Steel.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The American public? <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/11/amnesty-protestors-crash-capitol-hill-switchboard/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Jamming</span></a> the congressional switchboard with calls most likely opposed to even a temporary funding of Obama’s de facto amnesty, much like a similar wave of calls opposing immigration legislation attempted by both parties in 2006 and 2007.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the end, the status quo—the member-added pork, the absurd outlays for outrageous inanities, the deficit spending adding to a national debt that now tops $18 trillion, and the public-insulting passage of bills unread by the people who pass them—remains undisturbed. The express train to fiscal oblivion, in a country where national sovereignty is becoming an anachronism in pursuit of cheap labor and cheap votes, and the concerns of the elitist few overwhelm those of an outraged public deemed too “stupid” to know what’s good for them, remains on track.</p>
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		<title>Kimberley Strassel on the GOP Game Plan Going into 2016</title>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:51:44 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[Wall Street Journal editor lays out the political battle ahead in Washington at Restoration Weekend.  ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Kimberley Strassel&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/113680186" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>A little bit more on me and my background.  I do sit on the editorial board of the <i>Wall Street Journal</i>.  We have a motto. We&#8217;ve had the motto, the same motto for decades, &#8220;Free Markets, Free People.&#8221;  It used to actually be &#8220;Free Markets, Free Men,&#8221; but then folks like me worked there, and we had to switch it up a little.  I&#8217;m the only member of the board who sits down in Washington and, from there, I write quite a few of the unsigned editorials that are the opinion of the editorial page.  Most of those focus on laying out our views on policy.  I separately also, under my own name once a week write a Potomac Watch column, and the idea of that is not to talk about policy but to try to explain politics which is, of course, infinitely harder, although infinitely more amusing.  It always reminds me of that famous Will Rogers line, &#8220;I don&#8217;t make jokes, I just watch the government and report the facts.&#8221;</p>
<p>So, we just had an election.  We are still waiting for a few last final results, Louisiana Senate race, some House seats, but the headline news is in and, of course, it is that the Republicans won and they won big.  This marks the first time in four years that one party has owned both houses of Congress, and the first time in the Obama presidency that he has faced a united Republican front.  In other words, after years of watching Harry Reid turn the Senate into an earthbound equivalent of the black hole, we are about to experience in Washington something very, very new, and I thought what I would do is just spend a few minutes talking about what I think we might expect.  What can we expect from President Obama in terms of his interaction with Republicans?  What can we expect from the GOP in terms of what they&#8217;re going to try to accomplish with domestic legislation and foreign policy and oversight?</p>
<p>Let me start with the President because I think that one&#8217;s pretty easy.  There are some, we can call them the world&#8217;s bipartisan optimists, who think that perhaps President Obama has been chastened by this loss.  They believe that he is like most Presidents, that he&#8217;ll be worried about his legacy, he hasn&#8217;t passed anything of consequence since 2010.  He&#8217;ll want to move up those approval ratings.  He&#8217;ll extend a hand to Republicans.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m a Conservative, and so I&#8217;m a born optimist, but I also try not to confuse optimism with insanity.  I think if we&#8217;ve learned anything about this presidency it&#8217;s that this President is fairly self-satisfied.  What you hear coming out of the White House is that he already believes he has written himself into the history books.  He did Obamacare.  He will take credit for restoring the economy.  He won the Nobel Peace Prize.  There is a view in the White House that what will in fact determine President Obama&#8217;s legacy is his party&#8217;s ability to keep the White House in 2016 and therefore protect programs like Obamacare.  And if that&#8217;s your guiding principle, then your impulse is going to be to spend the next two years trying to lay traps and create scenarios designed to make Republicans look bad, to make them look obstructionist and hostile to progress and therefore laying the groundwork for another Democratic President.  And I point out that he&#8217;s likely to get a lot of support for that strategy from Congress.  They are not chastened either.</p>
<p>One aspect of this recent midterm that has not been adequately noted is that most of the Democrats who lost their seats were the ones who at least claimed to represent the more moderate wing of the Democratic Party.  So the Democrats who were going to be returning to Washington in January are not only going to be greatly reduced in numbers, they&#8217;re going to be a far more liberal caucus than that party has probably seen in decades.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re already seeing the President&#8217;s approach.  I&#8217;d like to point out to you for any of you who didn&#8217;t watch it or didn&#8217;t note this, the most telling line in the President&#8217;s press conference after his midterm thumping, &#8220;To all the Americans who voted, I hear you.  To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you too.&#8221;  This is a story Democrats are already telling themselves.  They didn&#8217;t lose this because it was a referendum on Obama.  They didn&#8217;t lose it because people disapprove of their policies or their candidates or want to change.  Oh, no.  They lost because not enough people voted.  In particular, not enough people on their side.  And so the approach going forward is to double down, to reenergize the liberal base with more aggressive policies.</p>
<p>And that&#8217;s been the definition of Obama&#8217;s past week.  In the ten short days since this midterm, the President&#8217;s announced he&#8217;s going to unveil a series of unlawful immigration orders to get the Hispanic vote back onside.  He&#8217;s unilaterally cemented a new climate deal with China to get the Tom Steyers and the environmental base back onside.  He&#8217;s pressuring the Federal Communications Commissions on net neutrality to get all those Silicon Valley donors onboard.  And this in my view will be the definition of Obama&#8217;s behavior in his last two years in office.  This is going to be a White House that continues to break in every form and fashion and to new levels of the boundaries of Presidential power.  And the reason I think this is guaranteed is because I believe there is really only one lesson this President has learned in the last six years and that lesson is this.  He has discovered, to his delight, that when he does this stuff, there really isn&#8217;t anything anyone can do to stop him.</p>
<p>So, what about Republicans.  Republicans.  It is sometimes easy to look at the Republicans over the past few years and not be filled with huge amounts of rousing confidence that they&#8217;re going to successfully navigate the next couple of years.  But I think the glass-half-full side of all of this is that, in fact, the GOP has learned some very bruising lessons over the last couple of years, and they&#8217;ve learned them the hard way.  And so they come into this majority with those mistakes under their belt a little bit savvier perhaps than in recent years.  And their greatest insight, in my mind, and the one that their ability to remember I think is going to define their success, is that they can&#8217;t govern from Congress.  You can&#8217;t govern from Congress.  You can&#8217;t.  You can push, you can demand, you can block, you can exert influence.  They&#8217;re going to have a bigger megaphone than they did because they&#8217;ll now have both chambers.  But it&#8217;s the other guy who has the veto pen, and they know that this President is going to use that pen to draw lines around certain of his priorities and to protect them at all cost.  And so the trickiest thing the GOP is going to have to handle over the next two years is expectations management.  They cannot afford to go out and promise to repeal Obamacare because they can&#8217;t.  And they can&#8217;t reform Medicare.  And they can&#8217;t abolish the EPA.  That&#8217;s just not going to happen.</p>
<p>What they can do, and what they must do, is instead lay out on the national stage an optimistic, creative, pro-growth, problem-solving agenda by moving a steady stream of targeted, sometimes smaller legislation, to the President&#8217;s desk and daring him to say no to that.  Set peace battles in which the GOP highlights very specific positive changes and then forces congressional Democrats and President Obama to make choices.  And note this President has never had to do that before.  For six years he&#8217;s been protected by the Democratic Senate which spent its first two years only sending him his priorities, and the last four years shutting down the entire chamber to shield him from any controversial bills.  And by the way, most of the Senate has never had to take a difficult vote.  Do not underestimate the power of simply forcing the left to have to vote on some issues.</p>
<p>Look at Keystone.  I think this is a fabulous example.  It has been delayed for six years.  The House has passed legislation authorizing it nine times, and Harry Reid acted like the subject never existed, never had binding vote on it.  But now, Democrats came back and they realized that this was going to be one of the first things that Republicans took up when they took over the Senate.  They realized that 70 percent of Americans support the idea of the Keystone Pipeline.  They know that many of their members are going to get shellacked if they actually do vote no.  So rather than wait for Republicans to take credit for that, they&#8217;re moving it up, and they&#8217;re likely to have a vote on Tuesday.  And I will wager that there will be a number, a significant number, of Democrats who vote for this only because they are finally being made to.  So that&#8217;s an idea of the dynamic and how it changes.</p>
<p>Republicans are going to have a lot of avenues by which to make President Obama and Democrats have to make those choices.  In particular, because they have vowed to, and this is important not just for the country, I think, but for their success in Washington, they vowed to go back to regular order.  Something Washington has been missing a while.  We may finally have, for instance, an honest to goodness appropriations process.  Imagine that.  And that means the full use of the power of the purse which is the power that&#8217;s been largely obliterated by these many years of continuing resolutions and omnibus bills.  Those CRs have meant that if Republicans ever wanted to force a policy change via the federal purse, they had to hold the whole government hostage.  That&#8217;s what happened last fall with Obamacare and the government shut down, and it isn&#8217;t always good politics.</p>
<p>If you go back to the regular process, however, as both John Boehner and Mitch McConnell have promised to do, and it&#8217;s important that they be held to that, that&#8217;s a whole new ballgame.  You can put policy into individual funding bills.  You can pressure Democrats to join it.  You can send it to the President and then he has a choice.  He can agree to your policy, or he can be responsible for shutting down one piece of his own government.</p>
<p>Think about how much fun this could be with, say, an energy appropriations bill.  You put all this policy in there that the President and Democrats have for years, claims that they&#8217;re in favor of, more liquid natural gas terminals, offshore drilling, and you force them to vote on it, and you send it to the President and if he vetoes it, darn, he shut down his energy department, which would just be awful, right?  I mean he wouldn&#8217;t be able to send anymore subsidies to Solyndras.</p>
<p>If Republicans are going to lay out an agenda, that appropriations process is also going to be vital for another reason.  It&#8217;s going to be the main way to finally and again have a national debate on spending and priorities in government.  This is a debate the President has also been largely able to deep-six over the last few years because of the continuing resolution culture.  &#8220;Government Just Gets Funded,&#8221; it&#8217;s a little note on Page 36 of the newspapers.  Nobody talks about what was in it.  Republicans can once again talk about the sequester.  They can tie this into the foreign policy debate that we&#8217;re now having, the cuts President Obama has made to the military and what&#8217;s that meant for our national security, and even if they don&#8217;t send all their ideas to the President, they can tee-up via these process, budget process, their visions of healthcare reform and entitlement reform and give the country an idea of what would happen if there were a Republican President.</p>
<p>Some of these little set piece battles aside, there&#8217;s probably a few bigger and bolder things, if Republicans are very smart about it.  There is a push right now coming from the White House to work with Republicans on corporate tax reform.  Paul Ryan is taking over Ways and Means.  He&#8217;s very serious on this subject.  And the question is going to be whether Obama can be a trusted partner in a tax venture.  He never has been before.  We&#8217;ll see if he&#8217;s changed.</p>
<p>Immigration.  There is only one reason in my cynical little mind that the President is now threatening these immediate actions on immigration executive orders.  It isn&#8217;t to help the Hispanic community.  It isn&#8217;t to clarify the law.  It probably isn&#8217;t even likely because he believes that it&#8217;s great politics for him.  It is for one reason only. It is to goad Republicans into acting like lunatics.  And I know there is a very controversial question out there still, immigration, among the conservative ranks, but in my view Republicans would be very wise to act in a responsible way on some form of legislation and just clear this from their decks.</p>
<p>A little takeaway from the midterm that I didn&#8217;t think got a lot of attention, but it&#8217;s hugely relevant.  One of the reasons Republicans did better among Hispanics this midterm, and they did – a lot of senators, a lot of governors, a lot of house members.  Their numbers were higher with Hispanic voters.  I think it&#8217;s because immigration wasn&#8217;t really a topic.  The President didn&#8217;t want to talk about it because of what had gone on down at the border.  Republicans didn&#8217;t want to talk about it because it&#8217;s an uncomfortable subject.  And it just didn&#8217;t come up in a lot of races.  And as a result, the GOP had an opportunity to talk to Hispanic voters about other issues that matter deeply to the country, the economy, jobs, healthcare.  This ought to be the situation that Republicans are striving for.  Being able to talk to Hispanic voters about other issues that matter to them, and you can&#8217;t do that until immigration as a policy topic is neutralized.</p>
<p>So that&#8217;s legislative.  Beyond that, the next most important thing the GOP is going to have to do is tackle nominations.  It&#8217;s huge.  As many of you know, Mr. Reid at the end of last year blew up the Senate filibuster for Presidential nominations.  The consequences of that have been profound.  For years now Federal Appeals Courts have favored Conservative justices because of the legacies of Reagan and both Bushes.  Now for the first time in more than a decade, and a lot of people don&#8217;t know this, for the first time in more than a decade judges appointed by Democratic Presidents significantly outnumber judges appointed by Republicans.  Democratic appointees now hold the majority of seats of 9 of 13 appellate court circuits.  When Obama took office that number was one.</p>
<p>The most consequential of these as you may know is the DC Circuit which hears almost every important case out of Washington and now has seven Liberals and five Conservatives on it.  Four of those seven were picked by Obama, and most of them ran through just in this past year since the filibuster was blown up.  Obama has now not only appointed far more judges than President Bush had by this time in his tenure, those justices, because there has been no filibuster to provide a check on what kind of judges they are, they are far more Liberal than most justices that have been put on the court in decades.  And they&#8217;re going to serve lifelong terms.</p>
<p>Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell has said he&#8217;s going to return the Senate to regular order and also restore the filibuster to 60 votes to confirm nominees.  I know there&#8217;s a big debate out there among Republicans on whether or not this is a good idea.  I think it is.  I know a lot of people think that Republicans should give Democrats a taste of their own medicine, but if you don&#8217;t go back up to 60 votes, here&#8217;s one of the problems.  There are a lot of Republican Senators right now in the Senate who are of the mind frame that you need to show deference to Presidential appointments and nominations.  And there are plenty more Republicans who are up for election in 2016 in very tough states, and they are not always going to be reliable when it comes to the nominations questions.  And I think it&#8217;s going to be very, very hard.  I don&#8217;t think, I&#8217;m sorry, I don&#8217;t think it&#8217;s going to be very, very hard for Democrats to get 51 votes on most of these nominations, so if you don&#8217;t put it back up to 60, it becomes much harder to block things.  And I want everyone to think about that too in the context if there is a potential Supreme Court opening.</p>
<p>Finally, the other major priority for Republicans has to be oversight.  This is a Presidency that is a mountain of scandals: Fast and furious, Benghazi, the IRS, the Veterans Administration, the Pebble Mine veto.  And the only thing that all of these cases all have in common is that we don&#8217;t have answers to any of them.  We have very valiant people trying to get those answers.  I saw that Cleta Mitchell got your Annie Taylor award last night.  By the way, Cleta Mitchell took me to the bar last night, and if I don&#8217;t make it all the way through this speech, it&#8217;s her fault.</p>
<p>The individual agencies that are the subject of these probes backed up by the Justice Department and aided by Democrats in Congress have spent the past three years engaging in a fulltime outright effort to stonewall every one of these probes.  Will a Republican Senate get us all the answers?  No.  But what this does do &#8212; and Cleta actually wrote an amazing piece in the <i>Wall Street Journal</i> this last week which everyone should pay attention to because it&#8217;s correct &#8212; this ought to be a moment for the Republicans to finally get more serious about oversight, to be far more aggressive to get the right people at the committees who are actually going to go to the wall to get some of the answers.  And that&#8217;s a big moment for Republicans too, because unravelling some of these scandals, I think, it&#8217;s going to be important for laying the groundwork for 2016 for them.</p>
<p>And they&#8217;ve got to do all this because it plays back to the opening point.  The GOP&#8217;s challenge in a nutshell is this.  They were voted in because people in this country desperately want change, but it&#8217;s also the case that they can&#8217;t run all of Washington just from Congress.  There are limits on what they can do, so they&#8217;ve got get through what smaller things they can while every day showing what things could be like, how things could be different.  And every day master the impulse to react to Obama, because his only goal is going to be to paint them as obstructionists who can&#8217;t govern, who are driven by internal fights, and they&#8217;ve got to prove that that isn&#8217;t true.</p>
<p>And they have to too because this next Presidential race is going to be very tough and nobody should think otherwise.  The Republicans on the upside have a very neat, new, young generationally different crew of potential nominees coming up, and that&#8217;s very good for the party.  But it&#8217;s also going to mean potentially a very long and ugly nomination fight.  And the Democrats aren&#8217;t going to have that problem because they&#8217;re going to have Hillary.  I mean everyone keeps asking is Hillary going to run?  Hillary is running.  She&#8217;s running right now.  She&#8217;s running, running, running.  You don&#8217;t go out and write a book and campaign for everyone across the country unless you&#8217;re saying I&#8217;m running.  Now she could change her mind in the next few months, but right now we are going to have some Republican versus Hillary Clinton.  And not only does some Republican have to get through a potentially ugly primary, but that some Republican then has to run in a general election in which increasingly the demographics of this country do favor a Democratic party.</p>
<p>And it isn&#8217;t just the Presidency on the line.  I&#8217;ve talked to some Democrats in the last few weeks since this election.  They&#8217;re not really overly fussed that they just lost the Senate.  Why?  Because they&#8217;re convinced this is going to be the shortest term loss ever.  The last three election cycles have all favored Republicans in the Senate.  Far more Democrats up for reelection than Republicans.  In 2016, that situation is totally reversed.  There will be 24 Republicans up for reelection.  Many in states that are absolutely brutal for Republicans to hold.  Places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.  By comparison there will be ten Democrats up for reelection in 2016.</p>
<p>So, again, the ability for Republicans to prove that they can do something and to lay out, to lay out very clear, modest proposals, act on them, and then provide a vision could well shape the politics of this country for the next decade.  The policies the President&#8217;s passed, whether they&#8217;re allowed to stand, the shape of the courts, the final truth about these scandals, the biggest questions and whether they can ultimately be changed &#8212; entitlements, the tax code, tort reform, campaign finance, speech laws &#8211; this next two years are very important.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m just going to finish by telling you what I&#8217;m actually most excited about, and that&#8217;s actually the things I don&#8217;t yet know are going to come.  A major shift has actually been happening in Congress, one that tends to not get a lot of attention.  The media tends to be so obsessed with the split in the Republican Party, the Tea Party versus establishment and Libertarians versus Hawks.  The biggest change I&#8217;ve actually seen in Washington and particularly in the Senate in the decade I&#8217;ve been covering is in fact a generational one.  When I first started writing about the Senate, the average age of a Senator was about 180 years old.  And the real story of recent elections is how many of these older, distinguished politicians have retired or died in office and been replaced by a lot younger people with new ideas.  And that&#8217;s happened on both sides of the aisle, by the way.  It&#8217;s not just a Republican phenomena.  But given Harry Reid&#8217;s lockdown, hardly any of these guys have ever had a chance to make a mark.</p>
<p>And some of them are really impressive thinkers and policymakers.  I know you&#8217;ve heard from Ron Johnson last night.  Yeah.  Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and they&#8217;re about to be joined by what I would term the best crop as a whole of Republican Senatorial candidates in goodness knows how long.  Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Ben Sasse in Nebraska, Dan Sullivan in Alaska &#8212; woo hoo, just got Alaska! &#8212; Joanie Ernst in Iowa, Steve Daines in Montana.  This is a really impressive crew, all of whom have real expertise in the areas that are actually going to matter profoundly in the debates in the next two years, things like energy, things like foreign policy.  And you&#8217;re going to see them join the many reformers you&#8217;ve also seen in the House.  And you can have real opportunity, I think, for some ideas and innovation of the kind that the Conservative moment has been lacking for some time and I think that&#8217;s going to be a really fun thing to watch.</p>
<p>So, on that more optimistic note, I&#8217;m going to let you all get back to your lunch.  Thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me, and if there are any questions I&#8217;m happy to take them.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>The Democrats have really poisoned the well.  Everybody who is an uninformed voter knows full well that every Conservative, every Republican is mean, selfish, dishonest, homophobic, bigoted, racist and any other bad thing you can think of.  So the question is, if people are really convinced of this, we have to change that impression first.  How the heck do we do it?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel: </strong>Well, we have to show it, you know, and actually I think there were some remarkable examples of how people did that in this last election.  I think it&#8217;s why the Republicans won is because they did.  You know, the war on women thing, okay.  I mean, that has crushed Republicans the last few years.  It hit a wall this year and in part it was because of guys like Cory Gardner out in Colorado, who when they started running ads against him saying he was anti-women and, and would stop everything, he said, actually you know what, I&#8217;m in favor of over-the-counter contraception which actually would make it much easier for all of you women out there.  And by talking about policies that would actually help women in particular and by not being afraid to, he didn&#8217;t just say no, I&#8217;m not.  He actually gave examples of what it was that made him, his policies and his ideas work for women and, you know, I can&#8217;t remember what the final vote was but he kept the gap with Mark Udall very small in the women&#8217;s vote.  When Ken Buck ran in 2010 he lost women by 17 points.  And they did the same playbook on him in Colorado and I think Cory Gardner lost women by 3 or 4 in the end or something like that.  Tom Cotton won women by 10 points in part by talking about issues that mattered to women that went beyond uteruses.  You know, he talked about foreign policy.  You know, remember, there&#8217;s a lot of women out there that are national security moms.  They care about things like this.  So I think you have to address these head on.  You know, Ed Gillespie in Virginia, so close, but he spent most of his time, a lot of time on the campaign trail and I advised everyone to go look in Ed Gillespie&#8217;s campaign, he had all of his policies laid out.  He was a very informed candidate who went on an agenda and he spent a lot of time on the campaign trail talking about ways in which Republican policies will help the working poor.  You know, you have to address these things if you&#8217;re not going to be tarred as anti-women, anti-poor and everything else.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>Yeah, just so the Republicans don&#8217;t overreact and go ballistic and actually damage themselves, what is your recommendation for a strategy after Obama commits his lawless act next week?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel:</strong> Well, look, I think the first thing Republicans have to do is actually just point out, A) how unlawful this is, okay, and that&#8217;s a theme that&#8217;s really grown out there among people and the public and I think it resonates.  I think they also have to point out that this was done for cynical reasons.  The President is not helping Hispanic voters.  What he will put out will not be durable, it does not address a lot of the problems the Hispanic community cares about.  There are all kinds of problems with doing this by executive order because you shouldn&#8217;t do it that way.  So they should point out that there are major problems and that he didn&#8217;t do this to actually help and it&#8217;s not good policy, and then I think they should put forward a series of bills that address different issues, starting with the border security bill, but going through some of the things.  And, you know, I think that Republicans have the ability, when I think of immigration, I know that this is very controversial but immigration can also be seen as a big jobs bill.  I mean, there&#8217;s a lot to this about high tech visas, guest worker programs, things like that, and I think it&#8217;s got to be a framing issue as well as anything.  But they do I think have to respond in some way.</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>John Boehner has already rolled over on immigration and is going to give us amnesty and it makes those of us who worked hard to get Republicans elected wonder what the effort was about and why the Republicans in the House can&#8217;t seem to get a Republican as a leader.  Would you like to comment on that?</p>
<p><strong>Kimberley Strassel: </strong>Well, they just had elections.  Anyone could have challenged him and nobody did.  So I think one problem that has happened, and I would wager if you talked to members of Congress they would agree with this too, is that probably one of the failings of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell over the last few years is they haven&#8217;t actually talked to each other, and they haven&#8217;t necessarily talked to their conferences as much as they should and told them what they&#8217;re going to do and make an effort to get them onboard with it.  And you know when you&#8217;re not sending a message about what your plan is and working hard internally to get your guys onboard, you create a vacuum which allows everyone to kind of do whatever they want.  And, you know, I think that was some of the craziness you saw over the shutdown last year, it wasn&#8217;t the shutdown itself but the fact that the party didn&#8217;t seem to know where it was going, it was running in 15 different directions all at the same time.  So this isn&#8217;t directly addressing your question but I do think one of the things that I&#8217;m hearing from people is that there&#8217;s been a big push on Boehner and McConnell to be a lot more responsive to their caucuses, be a lot more informative about what they&#8217;re doing and to work with each other and have a unified strategy and we&#8217;ll see if that doesn&#8217;t help.  Thank you.</p>
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		<title>The Vanishing of White Working-Class Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/the-vanishing-of-white-working-class-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-vanishing-of-white-working-class-democrats</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/the-vanishing-of-white-working-class-democrats/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:02:36 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247019</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The left's hatred for the working class backfires. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/construction-worker-at-construction-site-with-hard-hat_123251.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247027" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/construction-worker-at-construction-site-with-hard-hat_123251-450x337.jpg" alt="construction-worker-at-construction-site-with-hard-hat_123251" width="336" height="252" /></a>In the National Journal Daily this week, liberal elections analyst Charlie Cook of the Cook Report penned a <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/off-to-the-races/democrats-paved-the-way-for-their-own-decline-20141201"><span style="color: #1255cc;">rejoinder</span></a> to his fellow Democrats accusing the party of having a race problem. In his piece, subtitled “Democrats have subordinated their traditional focus on helping the working class,” Cook notes it’s been “increasingly hard” for the party to attract <i>white</i> working class voters in particular. Because inside-the-Beltway types usually take years to notice things us regular outsiders have been seeing for decades, Cook&#8217;s commentary is refreshing stuff.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Noting the media’s mantra Republicans face about their poor polling returns among blacks, Hispanics and single women, Cook takes a swipe at his own, saying that a “parallel problem” exists among Dems, namely the whittling away of their white working class vote, once the core constituency of ‘the modern, post-New Deal Democratic Party.’</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Turning to his always good demographic analysis, Cook notes that along with urban areas and college towns, Democratic strength is increasingly concentrated in “narrow bands along the West Coast (but only the first 50-100 miles from the beaches) and the East Coast (but only from New York City northward).” By contrast he notes, “few Democrats represent small-town and rural areas”, areas which are rapidly becoming “no-fly zones for Democrats.” <a href="http://www.gallup.com/poll/179753/obama-approval-drops-among-working-class-whites.aspx"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Citing</span></a> recent polls taken among white working voters, Cook says Obama’s job approval rating is a mere 27 percent, his lowest ever. Meanwhile, in these past midterms, Democratic House candidates lost this demographic by 30 points.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">This isn’t exactly surprising, but it’s refreshing given the source. Cook is a regular at liberal speaking events around the Beltway area. In the rare time the white working class vote is discussed at such dos, whether at Brookings, the Center for American Progress or the Carnegie Endowment, the tone is usually derisive and frequently hateful.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Cook’s description of the isolated Democratic strongholds is very revealing and aligns well with Charles Murray’s 2012 ‘<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/12/books/review/charles-murray-examines-the-white-working-class-in-coming-apart.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Coming Apart</span></a>’ survey of White America. The gaping division Cook describes between the fenced-in white enclaves of the West and Northeast coasts and the great white expanse everywhere in-between should, he says, “underscore the magnitude of the Democratic Party’s problem” today.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The class division among whites is wider than ever due to our immigration policy, an area that’s been increasingly disastrous for the lower classes and which is finally making headlines in the mainstream media, not occasionally, but daily – Cook doesn’t mention immigration as a source of class tension; the topic is apparently still a verboten one for contemporary Dems, even the ones that profess to be sympathetic to the working class – The historic party of working people have become the chief importers of scab labor, all for the elite’s personal short-term gain. Being of the company exec/shareholding class, these elites siphon off the outsized corporate profits caused by suppressed labor costs and personally benefit from cheap maids, cooks and nannies all the while pushing the diffuse costs onto the general taxpaying public. While white working people in the hinterland are cleaning their <i>own</i> houses, the coastal Democrat elite are holding feel-good fundraisers and sipping champagne poured by the non-white help.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">During a 2008 fundraiser in San Francisco, an area well within one of Cook’s “narrow bands,” Obama demeaned his party’s traditional white working class base when he said they “<a href="http://michellemalkin.com/2008/04/11/snob-ama-disses-pro-gun-religious-anti-illegal-immigration-activists-in-penn/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">cling to guns or religion</span></a>” out of a sense of bitterness. But when one’s livelihood is given away, what else are they expected to cling to?</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">There’s one thing Democrats should remember about the heartlanders living between New York and LA. Although they’re some of the nicest people in the world, they have a strong sense of injustice and do not respond well to unfairness. If <a href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/obama-problem-i-m-not-emperor-united-states_701295.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Emperor Obama</span></a> and the Democratic elite want to avoid another electoral defeat, they should take Cook’s advice and revisit the Party’s traditional focus on helping, not hindering, its traditional base.</p>
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		<title>Amnesty Showdown</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-showdown/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=amnesty-showdown</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/amnesty-showdown/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 03 Dec 2014 05:54:02 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246547</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How will the GOP respond to Obama's executive power grab? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-immigration.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246550" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/obama-immigration-401x350.jpg" alt="Barack Obama" width="343" height="299" /></a>On Tuesday, Republicans <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/01/Scalise-Boosts-Yoho-Bill"><span style="color: #1255cc;">met</span></a> behind closed doors to plot their response to President Obama’s unilateral decision to grant de facto amnesty and work permits to five million illegal aliens. That response centers around the House’s control of government spending, and according to sources that contacted Breitbart news, the GOP rank-and-file will be setting the agenda. “It&#8217;s not just for show,” said Rep. Matt Salmon (R-AZ). “[Party leaders] don&#8217;t want to get something to the floor and then have some big rebellion, they really want to get it right the first time. And they&#8217;ve learned the hard way that the way to do that is to build everything from the bottom up instead of shoving it from the top down.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A number of different options are being considered, but all of them are seemingly aimed at avoiding a government shutdown. That’s because a government shutdown of any kind, regardless of who initiated it, is invariably blamed on the GOP, according to inside-the-beltway thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Columnist Charles Krauthammer <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/12/01/krauthammer-to-gop-see-a-psychiatrist-for-rage-over-exec-amnesty-dont-vote-for-govt-shutdown-video/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">illuminated</span></a> that reasoning Monday on Fox’s “Special Report” with Bret Baier. &#8220;There’s reality, and there’s the way reality is reported in the media,” he explained.</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">We know that you’re right, if there were a government shutdown under these circumstances, it would be Obama being the one shutting it down with a veto. However, we also know that as night follows day, it will be reported everywhere as a Republican shutdown and they will suffer as they suffered last October, 2013, and it was a disaster. Republicans are finally ahead of Democrats in the poll about who do you favor, and this would be the worst time to blow it.</p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">However, one cannot discount the impact the previous government shut down had on the 2014 elections &#8212; which was seemingly not very much. The GOP <a href="http://www.electionprojection.com/2014-elections/races/2014-senate-races.php"><span style="color: #1255cc;">picked</span></a> up at least 8 Senate seats to capture a majority and 11 House seats to strengthen one.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">On the other hand, there is little doubt the media would indeed blame Republicans for any shutdown. Most Republicans apparently understand this and were said to be discussing a normal “omnibus” spending bill, a hybrid “cromnibus” bill that provides a temporary funding extension for immigration, and a number of options for each. The omnibus part of the package would fund most of the government at current spending levels for ten months through September 15, while the cromnibus portion provides the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the government agency that oversees service related to immigration, funding for only a few months. House Speaker Boehner (R-OH) envisions a <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/house/225690-boehner-backs-two-step-plan"><span style="color: #1255cc;">two-step</span></a> process for passage, holding a vote on the omnibus bill this week, and the cromnibus bill next week.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One of the options being considered was introduced late last month by staunch conservative Rep. Ted Yoho (R-FL). The sophomore lawmaker <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/11/20/Republicans-Leave-Town-Without-A-Plan-To-Fight-Obama"><span style="color: #1255cc;">proposed</span></a> a bill that would rescind the discretion by the executive branch to exempt entire categories of illegal aliens from prosecution and deportation. Though the gesture is chiefly symbolic, Boehner and other GOP leaders have reportedly embraced it as a way to simultaneously assuage conservative GOPers concerns with Obama’s unconstitutional overreach, and move them away from demanding a government shutdown.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In addition, Salmon wants to add language to the omnibus bill preventing the president from issuing work visas to illegals. It is an omnibus package House Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-KY) said would include 11 appropriation bills, with the separate funding for the DHS maintained on a continuing resolution (CR) that would last until “sometime in March.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Time is of the essence. The current emergency funding keeping the government open expires on Dec. 11, giving the GOP six more days to get their strategic ducks in a row. And despite their cleverness, they still must contend with the reality that outgoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) will scuttle any effort that would accrue to the GOP’s benefit. While Reid <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/house-gop-unveils-omnibus-plan-to-keep-immigration-pressure-on-obama-20141202"><span style="color: #1255cc;">agreed</span></a> to consider a spending package that only funds DHS through March, he said he would only do so if the deal didn’t include any riders unacceptable to his party.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reid stood in stark contrast to the position taken by Rep. Nita Lowey (D-NY), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. She insisted it would be &#8220;dangerous and irresponsible to engage in stunts and gimmicks affecting funding for the agencies under the Department of Homeland Security.” She was echoed by DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson, who testified at a House hearing Tuesday morning. He claimed temporary funding would make it harder to run his department in an efficient manner. As for Obama, White House Press Secretary John Earnest said the president would prefer a bill covering all spending for the entire year. But he <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/12/02/us-usa-congress-shutdown-boehner-idUSKCN0JG1MH20141202"><span style="color: #1255cc;">refused</span></a> to say whether the president would veto a bill with short-term funding for the DHS.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Both Houses of Congress are scheduled to go on recess December 12, but Reid <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/floor-action/senate/225597-reid-senate-might-work-the-week-before-christmas"><span style="color: #1255cc;">warned</span></a> the Senate that it might be necessary to extend their time in Washington through Dec. 19. “We have a lot to do and not a lot of time to accomplish it,” Reid said.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One effort is aimed at passing a <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/lawmakers-divided-over-renewing-tax-breaks-1417481046"><span style="color: #0433ff;">short-term extension</span></a> of approximately 50 tax breaks benefiting businesses, individuals and nonprofits. The vast majority of them expired at the end of 2013. The extension would last only until the end of the year, but that would allow those breaks to be claimed during next year’s tax-preparation period. The move was precipitated by a veto threat from Obama, <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/225584-house-moves-toward-vote-on-expired-tax-breaks"><span style="color: #1255cc;">undermining</span></a> a two-year, $400 billion deal being worked out between Reid and House Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp (R-MI). It would have extended some of those tax breaks for two years and others indefinitely. “We were making really good progress until the president issued a veto threat,” Camp said Monday. “That brought a halt to everything,”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Obama objected to the deal because he considered it too favorable to business, and because it failed to extend an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit and the Child Tax Credit set to expire in 2017. The GOP contends those tax breaks have been illegally exploited by taxpayers and illegal aliens fraudulently claiming those credits, further insisting Obama’s recent action on immigration exacerbated the problem. Hence the House&#8217;s $45 billion extension, which could be voted on as early as today.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Democrats have mixed feelings regarding the proposed legislation. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden (D-OR) remained non-committal, Committee member Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WVA) was adamantly against it, and Rep. Sandy Levin (D-MI), the top Democrat on the House Ways and Means Committee, was in favor.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In other words, like everything else being proposed here, the outcome remains in limbo.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Some GOP conservatives still remained wedded to addressing Obama’s lawlessness, regardless of the consequences. Rep. Steve King (R-IA) wants even a short-term extension for the DHS to cut off funding for the president’s immigration agenda, even if the government shuts down as a result. &#8220;It isn’t us bringing about a shutdown,” he insisted. &#8220;We fund everything else, and then the president has to argue that he’s going to shutdown the government in order for him to carry out his lawless, unconstitutional act.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) wasn’t buying it. &#8220;We need to quit, you know, kind of rattling the economy with things that are perceived by the voters as disturbing,&#8221; he told a Washington conference.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Voters themselves apparently agree. A Qunnipiac <a href="http://www.quinnipiac.edu/images/polling/us/us11252014_uh2ddgk.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">poll</span></a> released Nov. 25 shows they oppose shutting down “major activities of the federal government&#8221; as a means of blocking Obama’s agenda by a 68-25 percent margin. Even Republican voters oppose the idea by a 47-44 percent margin. “Americans seem divided on immigration, but they agree on one thing: They don’t want a government shutdown over President Obama’s action on immigration,” said Tim Malloy, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Those same voters, however, mostly oppose Obama’s immigration agenda. Democrats favor it by a 74-18 percent margin, but Republicans and independent voters oppose it by margins of 75-20 percent, and 51-40 percent, respectively. In short, ambivalence prevails.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">How long it prevails is hard to say. Much of it depends on how far next year&#8217;s GOP congressional majority is willing to go to illuminate the ideological differences between the two parties, and whether they are willing to frame an agenda, or continue reacting to the one proposed by Obama and a Democrat minority.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Immigration aside, it is worth noting that on Monday, America’s national debt <a href="http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-12-01/total-us-debt-rises-over-18-trillion"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reached</span></a> $18 trillion. That number represents a 70 percent increase in the debt amassed during Obamas’s tenure. On Tuesday it was revealed Social Security will become <a href="http://www.mrctv.org/blog/chart-social-security-s-end-date-fast-approaching-far-earlier-expected"><span style="color: #1255cc;">insolvent</span></a> by 2024. That’s 34 years earlier than originally projected. In other words, we remain on an unsustainable trajectory, one driven overwhelmingly by the exponential expansion of government championed by Democrats. Spending cuts aren’t popular, but genuine statesmen propose ideas that put the good of the nation above the good of the party. Embracing such statesmanship seems like a pretty good point of departure for next year’s GOP majority. If nothing else it would stand in stark contrast to the president’s me-first agenda and a Democratic party extremely comfortable with putting its own interests above those of the nation.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Andrew Klavan: How the Media See the Midterms</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/andrew-klavan-how-the-media-see-the-midterms/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=andrew-klavan-how-the-media-see-the-midterms</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 27 Nov 2014 05:57:05 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong><span style="color: #000000;">In this special episode, our</span><span style="color: #000000;"> yes-he&#8217;s-happily-married-ladies host examines how the wise sages of main stream media covered, or didn&#8217;t cover, the recent mid-term elections. See the video and transcript below. </span></strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/FKLy-IcdH7c" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan and this is the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The political landscape has changed and now that some time has passed, let’s try to get at the deeper meaning of the midterm elections.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">In the final results, Republicans won eleventy hundred Senate seats out of a possible thirty-three, and approximately a gazillion governorships including four in the seven states that only exist in Barack Obama’s imagination.  I know many of you untrained amateur political hobbyists out there may feel this means that voters have repudiated the Obama presidency&#8230;  and then thrown it to the ground and stomped on it&#8230;  then set it on fire&#8230;  and then mocked its dying agonies&#8230;  while feeding the flames with crumpled Hope posters&#8230;  that once seemed to promise so very, very much and now are only ashes.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And yet President Obama himself says he still believes he has the love of a grateful nation. The nation is Iran but Iranians are people too, some of them.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To separate the facts from the things the president says, let’s turn to the sharp-eyed, clear-eyed, blue-eyed, google-eyed experts who populate the mainstream media.  Only their incisive analysis can help us reach the revolting truth.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">For instance, the mainstream Washington Post determined that this was a so-called Seinfeld election that was about nothing, whereas the mainstream Daily Beast allowed it was more of a Seinfeld election that was actually about nothing.  Mainstream New York magazine said this was really a Seinfeld election about nothing but mainstream columnists at CNN, Huffington Post and USA Today said this looked to them like a Seinfeld election and was about nothing.  This, of course, is as opposed to being, say, a screw-off-leftist-jackass election that was about telling leftist jackasses to screw off.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The mainstream New York Times, a former newspaper, ran an op-ed saying there shouldn’t be any mid-term elections, while mainstream ABC, CBS and NBC simply pretended there weren’t any.  According to our friends at the Media Research Center, mainstream ABC World News Tonight went seven weeks in September and October without running a single story about the midterms, while mainstream NBC and CBS ran only a tiny percentage of the number of stories they ran before the Democrat midterm victory in 2006.  Network news executives were asked why they barely covered the upcoming Republican tsunami but they couldn’t hear the question because they had their fingers in their ears and were singing lalala very loudly.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But in the wake of the crushing, excoriating, devastating, humiliating, crushing and humiliating and devastating and humiliating rejection of Obama and the Democrat agenda, mainstream news commentators were quick to explain how Republicans winning elections meant Republicans were losing elections.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Matthew Dowd from the mainstream ABC News network said the Republican election triumph left the Republican brand “still very damaged,” whereas Jim Vanderhei of the mainstream website Politico said the GOP victory will put the party in “a hell of a jam” and Mika Brzezinski at the extremely mainstream MSNBC said the Republican wave will hurt Republicans because it will “embolden their self-destructive ways.”</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">And while Republicans did crush the Democrats&#8230; and did see them driven before them while hearing the lamentations of their women, Ben Smith of the mainstream website Buzzfeed said the elections meant surprisingly little, while Chris Cillizza at the still mainstream Washington Post called the elections “boring, vapid and inconsequential.”  Chris Matthews made the following face.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So there you have it:  according to the mainstream media, the midterms were elections about nothing that shouldn’t have been allowed and didn’t really happen but if they did they didn’t matter and Republicans lost them even if they won.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now some of you may say this sort of election analysis only proves that so-called mainstream journalists are really just a bunch of ideologically corrupt leftist shills seeking to twist the facts to advance an extremist agenda that’s completely out of keeping with the founding principles of the United States.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">I’m Andrew Klavan with the Revolting Truth.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Pat Caddell: Midterm Elections a Repudiation of Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:52:22 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[One of America's foremost election experts analyzes the GOP's victory at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Pat Caddell&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112328603" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Yes, I’m basically happy.  The person I’m really happy about is that Harry Reid is no longer Majority Leader.  I say that certainly not because I’m a Republican.  I say that because I’m an American and, as I had said on television, he was the greatest danger to democracy, I said this election, that we&#8217;ve ever seen, and his damage to the institution of the Senate where no one was allowed to vote, where there were no amendments, where there were no bills considered unless he wanted to, where he killed all discussion and basically all effective work in the world’s most deliberative body, supposedly.  And what he did with the nuclear option overnight to roll back 250 years of protecting the minority, which now the Democrats are going to find out how much they like that, but all of that and I think for the sake of the democracy, his demise is the biggest and greatest news.  The fact that he stays on only shows you how my party cannot get beyond—he and Nancy Pelosi&#8211;the Democrats cannot get beyond their own myopia and thinking as they have a truly disastrous election.</p>
<p>An election, I want to point out that was not only &#8212; but has many interesting kernels to it.  And I want to say, first of all, and it has many instructions for the future and then it was also about not a lot, not a lot.  The one thing is that, first of all, yes, the Republicans won a big victory and, once again, left amazing possibilities on the table because their consultant, lobbying, whoever controls this Republican Party has the imagination of a French General staff in World War I.  They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into about a dozen states, and they did not put anything into what I thought was a pretty simple election.  First, the Republicans decided they didn’t have anything they were going to offer.  No economic plan, no message, nothing like what happened in &#8217;94 with which was the Contract for America.  Which no one knew what was in the Contract for America, but it set an image for the Republicans that year with Gingrich and the victory that year, which was that at least the Republicans had a plan, had an idea.  We’re most of all united.  Let me just say something about those kinds of things, misreading elections.  Newt Gingrich then misread that election that the country had voted for revolution.  The country had voted to stop Bill Clinton.  There is somewhat of a vast difference there.</p>
<p>This election, let me just say, the success.  I want to talk first about what was left there and then the success.  The strangest thing about the election, for those of you who don’t know, I’m on a program at 7:30 eastern time on Sunday nights live with Doug Schoen and John LeBoutillier called <i>Political Insiders</i> in which we basically try to tell the truth, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have quite a response, and sometimes I get a little carried away.  I called the President last week a raging narcissist, which is true.  The whole problem with this guy is not that he’s a radical Pres &#8212; he’s a raging narcissist, and he’s going to prove it in the next couple of weeks.  But the election hung for a long time.  Those close Senate races hung to the end.  You could not look at the national situation &#8212; the direction of America where it was more than two to one or going in the wrong direction, the President’s job rating poorly, all of his policies under attack and very negatively received, an economy that people believed was not helping them, and all of that &#8212; and you look at the historical record in the six years and you say, “My God, that’s got to be a Republican landslide.”  And then you look down at the individual race and you said, “My God, they’re all close.”  And I kept saying this tension could not hold.  And I thought, as I had said the Sunday before election, there was a good 30 percent chance or more that it would just blow open; that eventually the undecides would move in the direction they should and essentially that’s what happened.</p>
<p>But when I look at the election and say what was possible, and I don’t mean to be a sour note on what makes everyone happy, but it’s important to understand what it may tell you.  In the states that did not have big battleground Senate races, where none of the several billion dollars or $4 billion, whatever was spent, the Republicans put no effort whatsoever.  I had argued, as I had done in &#8217;12, and argued since, hey, this is a pretty simple election.  This is a referendum election.  And why the Republicans refused to take some of that money that they were wasting by piling even more.  For those of you who know economics, know the marginal gain, marginal differentials.  But when you keep pouring money into races where people are saturated beyond belief with television and where you’re watching 50 spots at one time and the whole thing, because of local buy, and the expense the stations are gouging, the people buying the media and whatever, why did the Republican National Committee, which does have the ability to do this, where the Senate can eat it up by national advertising amazes me, why didn’t they put air cover over the race?  Why didn’t they?  Very simple, first of all, remember we’ve had all of these crises.  Starting, you go to the VA, Benghazi, or anything you want to take, White House Secret Service, Bergdahl, on and on and on, a disaster after disaster this year.  And, voters, like all of us, there was one coming every week and then Ebola and ISIS and then you go, my God I forgot about the VA.  Well, in advertising there is a reason they keep reminding you.  So, what I’m wondering is why wasn’t there some kind of effort to put out a message that said to remind.  First of all, all it did was remind people.  Remember this, remember this, and ask a simple question.  Because we knew what the results were.  They were more than two to one people opposed his policies.  Once Obama handed the Republicans and shafted his party with the message that my policies are on the ballad, why didn’t they just quote that.  Put that up and say, “If you disagree with those policies and here’s an example, send him a message.  Vote Republican.”  If you weren’t going to say anything positive, that certainly was a major message.  And guess what, it would’ve been seen by everybody and cheaper and better placement, everywhere across the country.</p>
<p>And you know what would’ve happened?  Let me tell you what happens.  There were 15 House races that were undecided election night.  Most of them line outside of all of these states where the money was spent.  As of to date, nine of those 15 have ended up being won by Democrats because there was no national message.  If you look at Illinois, where the Republican Senate gubernatorial candidate won a surprising victory over one of the most corrupt&#8211;I mean really, I’m broke.  I mean what a disastrous place Illinois is&#8211;after Obama had campaigned for Pat Quinn, the incumbent.  Won by five, six points.  That’s even counting Chicago several times.  But Dick Durbin, the major force in Democrats in the Senate, Democrat Whitt got 53 percent of the vote.  Al Franken got 53 percent of the vote.  You go through some of these races and you think, my God.  Always when we have landslides, we have these surprise upsets.  Like Virginia almost was.  But we have them.  Now Gillespie had no more.  He couldn’t buy media pretty much the last month.  No one was supporting him.  Can you imagine what a little bit more push and a national message would have done or might have opened up in a couple of these Senate races?</p>
<p>Look, the Republicans have their best House position since 1946.  But if you’re going to win an election, take everything off the table you can is my theory.  But, unfortunately, the strategy I described does not enrich the political consultant, lobbyist class in the Republican party, which makes a lot more money by having only state races and does not require them to have any imagination other than storming across no man’s land in the same way they do.</p>
<p>Let me say this.  You look at the exit polls and there are some problems.  When everyone tells you how all the vote came out, let me tell you a dirty little secret for which I will probably be shot for having announced.  At the end of the process, after the votes come in, the people who run the exit poll reweight all of their actual results from the 20,000 people they interview and weight it to the results.  That’s like if you hired me to poll and I said to you, just wait election night I guarantee you I will give you the winner and the right result.  Well, they’ve got some bias problems in there.  So, take some of these divisions skeptically.  So, I went back.  I polled the numbers for the 97 percent before we had the magic of this.  And here’s part of the story of the election.  One, it is that the voters were not rewarding.  And this is important about misreading elections as I pointed out in &#8217;94.</p>
<p>This was a repudiation of the President and his policies and his party.  But it was not an endorsement of the Republican Party by any means.  This was voting for the lesser of which evil that was in front of you and the evil in front of you was the one that was in the White House and in power.  Now, that doesn’t mean the opportunities don’t exist for what you do, but to think that this was an endorsement, because mainly remember I don’t know if you can define.  I don’t know what the campaign was about other than beating Obama.  And in individual races, it worked.  But listen to this, and this goes to a message I’ll talk about at the end in a few minutes about 2016 and what’s coming and a project I’ve been working on.  But I want to tell you this.  What you had was both parties had high negative ratings.  The public was dissatisfied, to say the least, with Obama.  When asked angry or dissatisfied, it was around 60 percent.  The Republican leadership in Congress got the same number, 60 some percent, just to show you, and this is of Republicans.  I mean this is a Republican wave election.  Right?  Republicans are still getting even worse ratings relatively, if you think about how people are voting, than did the Democrats.  All of that pointed to me to the fact that one should be careful; that basically, this was a very dissatisfied election.</p>
<p>Remember, we had a drop off.  This is the lowest midterm election since 1942.  Now, in 1942 there was a reason a lot of people didn’t get to the ballot.  For those of you who are too young to know, there was a thing called World War II going on.  But the results are only slightly better than they were in the 1942 turnout because so many dissatisfied voters where both parties stayed home.  And they depended on area.  Someone has done this.  It’s quite an interesting analysis.  In the third most rural and, therefore, most Republican areas of the country, the turnout was down about 34 percent.  In the exurbs and the suburbs, it was 38 percent decline, and in the urban areas, the urban centers, it was 47 percent.  Now that does not mean that the black vote, for instance, necessarily, and this is where only when we get a genius like Mike Barone you get in the precinct and actual numbers analysis is what we know.  But we have a situation where the exit polls tell us that the black turnout, the African American turnout, was only a point less than it was in 2012.  The Hispanics really stayed home.  But as Tavis Smiley, I agree with Tavis Smiley, if you’re black or Hispanic or of any color, what the hell was your reason to turn out and vote Democratic.  What had you been given, an economy where your income had gone down, where your families are not benefited and where the very wealthy were.  Remember, this is a Fed, appointed by Barrack Obama, propping up the very richest people with this wonderful bond buying plan they had, which has stoked the stock market, but done nothing for ordinary Americans.  And the President can’t understand and the economists say, “Oh my gosh, look how good the economy’s doing.”  Well, the American people have a different perception whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Conservatives.  If they know that they are not doing as well, they know that the jobs being created, thanks in part to Obamacare, more than half of them and a vast majority of them now, are part-time.  People are not working.  They live on the edge and they are still very nervous even though things are getting better.  And that partly is reflected you could see in the exit polls.  Seventy-eight percent of the people thought that they were extremely or very worried about the economy in the next year or so, which is totally different than what we’re being told is the case.</p>
<p>And then finally, one of the points in the exit poll that was interesting was that 3/4th of the American people believe that we were going to have another terrorist attack.  That it was highly likely or more that we would have a terrorist attack.  Those numbers are actually higher than they were after 2001.  And I wonder why?  Well, because if you look to the feckless leadership of this White House.  I mean the only way I can even describe it in foreign policy is feckless.  Whether it is in Iran.  In search of a deal, you have to be panic.  Barrack Obama’s proven one thing.  In search of a deal, he will do anything.  And that’s what’s been happening with Iran.  They’re allowing Iran supposedly to stop their nuclear weapons plan to continue to enrich uranium.  Hardly a prescription.  And if they don’t get an agreement by the 24th, the Iranians have used this time and given up nothing that they said they would.  And we have the person, so you can feel certain at night and not worry, the very woman who crafted the wonderful plan with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration to keep them from having nucs and expanding is the one working with the Iranians that John Kerry has brought in to handle that.</p>
<p>And then we have the Ukraine.  Putin sees the President at this meeting in Asia for two days and immediately starts reinvading Ukraine because he was so amazed with the President’s toughness.</p>
<p>And then finally we do it in a climate deal with Chinese, which is wonderful.  They buy 20/30 somewhere in the future.  They will cut back their CO2 use, but with no plan.  And meanwhile, we’re supposed to cut even more in between.  Once again, the search free deal at all costs.  And it should frighten anybody that for two years this will happen and you have to look to the Republican Congress.</p>
<p>But the President’s lack of behavior during this ISIS, which most Americans support.  Fifty-eight, thirty-seven support.  And yet on the ISIS thing, you have a lot of the people who opposed it, Democrats and Republicans agreed equally in their support, but people who oppose this, Democrat and Republican, who oppose what’s going on with ISIS, voted Republican.  Why?  Because I suspect they think this is not working.  That this is another sham being presented.  And any plan that has five shorties a day for air cover with no one on the ground.  And now our new, in the spirit of Arvin, we are sending in deals to that crack Iraqi Army to take on ISIS, and with what will be, we promise, great results.  That whole unraveling, all of that has made the American people very, very nervous.  And yet the President seems to have learned nothing from the election.</p>
<p>And I want to talk about a couple of issues for now they are very important coming up, and they also relate to the election and what we also know.  And also the question of how the Republicans will behave because I think they’ve behaved badly on many of these issues, and I have said this before at this forum.</p>
<p>Let’s take Obamacare.  What I call the night it was passed, a crime against democracy.  To jam through something without any support, unlike Social Security or Medicare where we had massive support from both parties, jam through with lies.  And, by the way, when we really found out the lies, it was amazing but by, and basically on the basis of bribery.  And all those people this time who voted for it, except for Jeanne Sheehan, were defeated and Franken and Durbin.  But the point is is that the American people have never accepted Obamacare.  We are kept told how great it is.  And then we have this gift of Mr. Gruber.  I just can’t get over him.  All I can think is Goober peas.  Gruber, he’s out there with all his comments.  And the White House denies he had anything to do.  We were paying him $400,000.00 apparently not to do anything except write the plan.  He is a Romney hangover from Romneycare.  Which is one of the reasons I am so unenthusiastic about your last nominee, who should have won the election and lost the election that should never have been lost.  Again, and the same people who came up short in delivering what could have been this year and are running around crowing are the same people who delivered that mistake.</p>
<p>And the Supreme Court ruled Obamacare was legal.  But when John Roberts had that visitation that he wouldn’t be invited to Washington dinner parties anymore after <i>The Washington Post</i> warned him desperately.  Things in Washington, there are certain priorities in life, going to dinner parties.  Apparently, John Roberts is more important than the law.  So he changed his opinion, embarrassingly so, and then decided to call the mandated attacks.  And, as I said at the time, my God, in this terrible disaster, he’s handed one club to the Republicans that they must use, which is that they lied that it was a tax.  Right?  Now, you would have thought the Republican party would have taken that in the Senate and the election and pounded that, and they didn’t and they wouldn’t.  And, to this day, I don’t know.  I can speculate why, but they did not.  That message for the American people, because it was very simple for the Democratic opponents in some of these Senate races that year, which is were you lying.  Were you part of the lie or, if you didn’t know, will you vow to vote to repeal the mandate now that you were lied to too.  It’s only one of two choices.  Either you were fooled or you were part of the fooling of us.</p>
<p>But that kind of thinking doesn’t seem to make it into politics anymore, which I think would’ve been helpful.  I think all along the Republican establishment has been lukewarm about Obamacare.  They have gone through the motions, sometimes these useless repeals.  Why we had useless repeals after 27 of them or whatever after the Supreme Court decision, not move to specifically just repeal the mandate, which would’ve killed healthcare, I do not know.  We’re going to have more opportunities.  But the notion of let’s repeal it all or whatever the strategies are, Obamacare has been proven to be the big lie of American politics.  And the President and now Mr. Gruber has pulled the bandage off so we can all see what was the truth, and we’re hopeful that that will change.</p>
<p>The other issue is immigration.  I listen to the people saying how great things would be.  We’d all be holding hands and jumping up and down because Obama would now embrace the compromise.  So, I’m sitting with Neil Cavuto election night on his show on Fox Business about 10:00, and I’m getting this and someone’s arguing on a panel.  I’m going, wait a minute, didn’t we do this two years ago.  I sat right here while all you people were saying Obama now would have a legacy.  He’s got a second term.  He’ll now work with people.  And didn’t I tell you he just tore the country apart to win and that he hates his other opposition and he’s so arrogant.  I told you there would be no peace.  And now you people think he’s going to do anything.  He’s going to blow the country up.  And all of this we’re going to work together and whatever?  This is a President who has decided that with this immigration move, and here is a very important point if you take nothing back.  And I am going to stress it Sunday because it’s really important. I watched the Sunday shows last week and all of the commentators in the Beltway, all of the wonderful media, and I want to talk about them for one second in a minute.  But all of them talked about this in one sentence.  Well, the Republicans are going to be angry.  It’s going to be a firestorm among the Republicans.  No, the firestorm will be with the American people.</p>
<p>The attitudes on immigration have had a sea change in three months.  In September, Rasmussen had numbers that showed vast majorities of Americans both oppose the President granting amnesty, believe that he did not have the power to do so, and also believed that if they did, the Republicans should take him to court, which people had ridiculed before, and including a large majority of moderates, the most critical group in the election who were normally democratic.  They do not vote like liberals, but they generally follow that and they deserted on immigration.</p>
<p>Everything points to we had a referendum in Oregon election night.  Now, you wouldn’t know this because, even if you go to CNN or whatever, the only thing that you will find that was on the ballot in Oregon was the legalization of marijuana, which CNN and the people in the news organization mainly think that’s probably one of the more important issues.  But they didn’t cover, and they don’t even report to this day on their web site, is there was a ballot measure by the same people, liberal Oregon, which had just voted for marijuana, to allow illegal aliens to have driver’s license.  Almost 70 percent of the vote was no.  Okay?  You want to talk about canaries in the mine.  Actually, the Democrats will have to worry because they blow up the Democratic party with this.  But you know what happened in the election, and I said this weeks before.  I was talking about the sea change on immigration.  The fact that it went to the idea of the President was King, not President, and that even large numbers of Democrats were opposed, and what I didn’t understand is why wasn’t the Republican party making that a direct issue against Democratic candidates.  How are you voting on immigration?  The President’s going to sign this amnesty.  Will you reject the President or not?  Actually, make it explicit particularly in those places where you don’t have a chance.  But they didn’t and I’ll tell you why.</p>
<p>Because the unholy alliance.  And some of you won’t like this, but it’s the truth.  The unholy alliance on immigration is an alliance between unions and the left because they want more cheap votes and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, particularly, and a lot of major Republican donors who want a lot of cheap workers.  And, therefore, and that is best illustrated by <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, which takes all leave of its senses because of their support for total, open borders, along with <i>The New York Times</i>.  That’s when they stroll through the lilies together, skipping through and singing.  This is the problem.  The country doesn’t want this.  The country’s attitudes are changing.  And certainly, by the way, generically, and I love the way the institutions organize and put together the stuff on polling because they try to give a question that will give them some answer.  So, once it was clear that attitudes on immigration change, all of the major mainstream media polling outfits stopped polling on immigration.  As I pointed out, they didn’t even mention it in their election results.</p>
<p>And it goes to the other question.  The President’s right to constitutional power; that he is King.  But I have no confidence when Lindsey Graham, who got, by the way, 54 percent in South Carolina and a black man got 62 percent, tells you what might have been in South Carolina.  Some people, as opponents, are better to be lucky than to be good.  But Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who led the surrender on the appointments when the President was appointing these people on the Labor Practices Commission, laid down on that, which the court ruled unanimously was illegal.  And the Republicans were halfhearted.  It’s like the response when Harry Reid did the nuclear option.  Mitch McConnell and the Republicans could have stopped everything in the Senate.  Everything in the Senate requires unanimous consent, including the prayer in the morning.  Do you know what happens if Mitch McConnell had gotten up and said there will be no more business in this Senate until this is revoked.  You are not going to overnight have a coup de tat against the Constitution of the United States.  A stand for principle for once, the people would’ve supported.  Instead, they just said, “Oh my God, wait until we get to have it.”  It’s just those kinds of things that disillusion Americans.</p>
<p>Finally, the last point I want to really talk about other than the media.  And let me tell you something, whatever goes forward, the true enemy, and I’ve said this for years, is the media.  And it is not because of the truth they tell or the lies they tell, it is what they do not tell.  It is their decision not to report things.  For instance, the Gruber incident as of last night until yesterday morning, once, had been mentioned, only once, on any of the major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS.  Now, of course, CBS news is run by the man whose brother, Ben Rhodes, is the one who manufactured the talking points at Tom Donlan’s direction from Benghazi, and who makes sure to protect Obama.  But, they report nothing.  In the election, its stunning.  Numbers were in 2006, huge percentages.  I think it was like 150 some mentions on the evening news about President Bush being in trouble.  On the three networks this time, it was like 15 or 16.  And on ABC, it was zero.  ABC wasn’t even…and you wonder why interest was lower?  Because a lot of it wasn’t being reported.  And this has got to be taken on at a different level.  Too many Republicans in Washington and the establishment want to have nice relations with the press.  They want to be mentioned in the press.  They want to go along.  There needs to be a war on the press because it goes to the culture and it goes to whether or not we have a Constitution.</p>
<p>I was on the board at West Point.  I watched young men and women who were willing to stand on the ramparts and pledge with their very lives to protect our freedom, who thought it was an honor.  The press, which their ramparts, is a special deal on the First Amendment is that they would protect the American people from power from the Government.  And they have deserted those ramparts.  And in deserting those ramparts, they have endangered the freedom of every American, Democrat, Republican, Liberal or Conservative.  And there has to be a real war here.  And there is not.</p>
<p>You people, it’s like Bill Maher on television.  I mean HBO.  Bill Maher is not practicing free speech.  He’s practicing paid speech.  He gets paid by HBO.  He gets paid by you subscribers.  How many of you people in here subscribe to HBO?  Look.  Come on, let’s all be honest, I mean.  Yeah.  You know what you’re doing, you’re subsidizing all of that because Conservatives don’t know how to fight.  They don’t know how to take on HBO and say, hey, we’re not asking you take Bill Maher off.  How about put someone else on.  I have a friend in mind I would like to mention, but I won’t.  But, put someone on that balances that out or we will all cancel.  Do you know how fast Time-Warner would do if a million people in this country said they would cancel if they did not put a balance on HBO?  But you don’t fight.  You just give in.  It’s like the war on the culture.  This is a time to actually make definitions of these things.  The influence of the culture in Hollywood, as my friend Michael Barnes here says, every day on YouTube and everything else, they get up and then the score is at the end of the day is 845 to nothing.  Imagine if you cut that to two to one in the culture in terms of messaging and real things.</p>
<p>Finally, on 2016.  Nothing can be read from 2014.  The things I talk about is what I have discussed in my Smith Project.  The American people are united about one thing.  They hate the political class in Washington.  They hate the Democrats and Republicans, alike, with that.  They believe they are being screwed by both.  And I would like to remind the Speaker, again last night, Elizabeth Warren’s position about how the banks operate and about how they are getting off.  You know who agrees with that?  About 85 percent of the Republicans and Conservatives.  The entire country understands being screwed by crony capitalism which operates with the Chamber of Commerce and in Washington and the Democrats with all of their energy and all of their building bureaucracies for political machinery.  And they know they’re not being benefited and there is a common sense center that is gigantic, and it is coming.  It didn’t come in this election because we were squeezed between who would be in control of the Senate.</p>
<p>But I will tell you one last thing from the exit polls that has not been discussed.  There was a special sub sample of them, in which they asked people about several candidates would they be a good president.  Hillary Clinton was 42 yes, 53 no.  Then they asked about four Republicans, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Rick Perrin.  On the average, 26 percent said that each of them would make a good president.  On average, 60 to 63 percent said no, they wouldn’t.  And this is in a Republican sweep going on.  And when they asked to how the people would vote in an election, 39 to 40 percent said they would vote Republican.  Thirty-four percent for Hillary.  This is not good news for Hillary at all.  And the balance said that it all depended.  They weren’t sure.  They weren’t particularly happy.  Understand we’re going to have insurgencies in 2016.  The Republican party and for the first time in your lifetime, my lifetime, or anyone’s lifetime.  Well, I guess some people were born in 1940 when you had Wendell Willkie seize the Republican party.  It was an insurgency.  You could have one this year.</p>
<p>And let me give you one last example why.  I’ll give you an issue.  One of the things the American people most are upset about when you ask them about it.  I’ve done it, Heather Higgins has done it, on polling about the exemption for Congress and the Congressional staff in the healthcare bill that the President came down and negotiated with Harry Reid and with John Boehner.  And Boehner was then saying, oh, he was against this exemption except that Harry Reid got ticked off and leaked all the emails where they agreed, they came together, so that they protect the Congress from what the American people were doing.  When you ask that of American people, 2/3rds of Republicans believe that’s the reason to turn every single person in Washington out of office.  You have 15, 18, whatever number of candidates running for President or thinking about running or having dreams and visions of White House and oval offices.  Not a single one of them will raise this issue.  This issue, the agreement between the two parties was that it was not to be discussed in the election, and it wasn’t.  Did you know that?  They had an actual agreement they would not raise this issue.  Do you know what could’ve happened to some of the incumbents, Democrats particularly, who were vulnerable if that had been raised.  And it wasn’t.  And the reason is and that’s what I mean, there is an insurgency.</p>
<p>I will know the Republican party has life when there’s a Republican running for President willing to attack the establishment of his own party the way that Jimmy Carter and others did in the Democratic party that I was involved in in the 70s.  Then you may get somebody who represents the American people.  As long as this is controlled by the people, as I said to you for two years, in Washington whose only real ambition is to hold on to the power they have and the money they make, your prospects in 2016 are dim.</p>
<p>Anyway, thank you very much.</p>
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		<title>Midterm Election: What Just Happened?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/midterm-election-what-just-happened/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=midterm-election-what-just-happened</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:53:03 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[An all-star panel discusses what to expect in 2016 and beyond at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion &#8220;Midterm Election: What Just Happened?&#8221; which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112390545" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr:</strong> Let me start in response a little bit to what Ben said last night where he broke down the urgent versus the necessary. Obviously, election matter because the last six years I think have done real damage, and we lost very badly in 2006, both the House and the Senate. 2008 it got even worse. Also lost the presidency and terribly wide margins for the Democrats in both the House and the Senate. Made a comeback in 2010, moved back 2012, made some progress again this year, and now we have control of the Congress, but in the two years we have left with Obama in the White House, in a sense we have a blocking action. We&#8217;ll have some discussion later about what we can achieve positively and how clever we can be, but losing elections really does matter and yes, changing the culture matters too, and that&#8217;s a longer-term proposition, but we really can&#8217;t afford to lose the next presidential election and then have essentially the judiciary locked up for the next 25, 30 years under the control of the Democrats as well as the political election cycle.</p>
<p>Start with the big issue of whether the Republicans, based on what happened this year, can win a presidential election, and this comes down to what I call the demographic argument, and I want to throw out a comparison of two presidential elections, 1988 and 2012. 1988 was the last presidential election a Republican won when most of the media and the Democrats thought the Republicans had a lock on the Electoral College. George Herbert Walker Bush beat Michael Dukakis 40 states to 10, 426 electoral votes to 112, won by 8 percent in the popular vote, 54 to 46, but the interesting thing is, if you look at the breakdown between the votes of white voters and nonwhite voters in that election, Bush won by 20 percent among white voters and lost by 66 percent among non-white voters. In 2012 you have exactly, exactly the same breakdown in terms of white voters and non-white voters. Romney won by 20 percent among white voters and lost by 66 percent among non-white voters. The difference is in 1988 whites were 86 percent of those who voted in the presidential election and in 2012 they were 72 percent. When you change 14 percent and you take away a 20 percent margin among those 14 percent, a positive margin for your side, and replace it with a 66 percent margin for the other side, those 14 percent produced a 12 percent shift in margin. Instead of an 8 percent victory for Bush over Dukakis, Obama beat Romney by 4 percent. All right? Every 1, 2 percent shift has that impact at this point, assuming the numbers stay the same.</p>
<p>Now, the good news is the Republicans are improving their performance slightly among white voters. They won by 22 percent in 2014, and they did substantially better among minority voters. Instead of losing by 45 percent among Hispanics, they lost by roughly 26, 27 percent. They almost broke even among Asian voters after losing that group by 45 percent in 2012. The exit polls showed they won among Native Americans. That doesn&#8217;t make a whole lot of sense to me, but I think that may be some of the massaging that Pat Caddell talked about. The African Americans who voted 96 to 3 in 2008 for Obama and 93 to 6 in 2012 this time in the congressional elections was 89 to 10. It may not seem like a big deal, but it is a big deal. When George Bush was elected in 2004, the black vote was 88 to 11. That&#8217;s a huge difference from 96 to 3 or 93 to 6. All right? In fact, in 2004 to 2008 Bush won by 3 million votes, Obama won in 2008 by 9½ million votes. That&#8217;s a 12½ million shift in margin. Half of it, half of it was in increased turnout, substantially increased turnout among African Americans and the huge victory margin they gave of 93 percent margin as opposed to 77. Okay?</p>
<p>The Obama team knew what they were doing. They knew who would vote for them, and they got them registered, and they brought them to the polls. That&#8217;s a good thing they did for their candidate. All right? They knew who their voters were, and they got them to register, and they got them to vote, and they had the mechanics to monitor who was voting on election day and who hadn&#8217;t, and getting to the votes with early voting and so on. Okay? Republicans did better in the ground game this time, but still probably not up to where we need to be to win a presidential election.</p>
<p>So what were the demographics? I mean, if you think about it for a second, last year in the United States, actually for the last two years, 50 percent of the live births went to whites, 50 percent to non-whites. Let&#8217;s assume you look 30, 40 years out and you assume we have a country where the white vote goes for 22 percent. Remember, these are all citizens; they&#8217;re all born here. 22 percent for the Republican and the non-white vote, which is 50 percent, goes by 50, 55 percent to the Democrats. You balance those out, you average them out, what do you have? California. The nation has become California in terms of its electoral mix. What if you get the 2014 numbers, which are better. Republicans did better among whites. They won by 22 percent. They lose among minorities by say 45 to 50 percent. Then you get Oregon. Or maybe Minnesota. Okay? You got a shot in a good year, but doesn&#8217;t look very good.</p>
<p>The good news is the shift in the birth rate is not reflected in the shift in the mix of those who are voting to the same extent. Hispanics were 8 percent in 2006, they were 8 percent in 2010, they were 8 percent of the vote in 2014. Given that they are by far the fastest-growing group in America, that suggests that even with the Hispanic vote being obviously a pro-Democratic vote, if that vote grows much more slowly than is anticipated and grows to 10 percent, 12 percent, 13, and Republicans can keep their losses to 20 percent, you do not have the demographic nightmare which was forecast for the Republican Party in a book in 2002 by John Judis and Reed Teixeira, who called it the emerging demographic majority for the Democrats because of A) growing minority vote and B) growing percentage of white voters who are college educated who are more open and receptive to Democrats than non-college-educated white voters are who are the Republicans&#8217; strongest base.</p>
<p>Turns out that white college-educated voters move from election to election and can get disgusted if they think their taxes are going up and their services are going down or if they see things that they&#8217;re unhappy about, so it&#8217;s not a lost cause, but it would be silly not to recognize some of the trends that are underway in American society. This country is changing faster demographically than any country in Europe, and we&#8217;ve had books by Mark Steyn and others talking about how Europe is gone and it&#8217;s going to be 50 percent Muslim and those countries are going to disappear. The United States&#8217; demographics is changing much faster than any of those countries, and that&#8217;s with a replacement birthrate here at almost 2.1. We&#8217;re just a little bit below that. In Europe they&#8217;re much below that. They&#8217;re bringing in people. Their actual native population is declining.</p>
<p>So this is a shift and it&#8217;d be silly &#8212; Republicans have to do better with all groups. That&#8217;s the message I&#8217;d have, and do better with all groups means less pandering and more having a national American message, which is exactly I think what Pat Caddell was talking about today. I could not agree with him more. If the Republican Party simply is part of the governing majority and it&#8217;s a little bit less liberal than the other party, you sort of have the political parties in Great Britain. They are all locked in, essentially, to the same situation.</p>
<p>Now, let me talk again: Some good news this year in the elections. Republicans, the charge was, well, it&#8217;s a favorable nap in the Senate. You had all these Senate seats in red states that Romney had won big. There were 36 governors&#8217; races, and 22 of them were in states that Obama had carried. Republicans did not win red state governorships. They won in Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maine. I have a summer home in Maine. One of the biggest wins of the night for me, because there&#8217;s probably no more detested character on the left than the governor of Maine, who is an abused child, one of 18 children. You talk about a rags to riches story. Look up Paul LePage on Wikipedia and read his life story, and it will match what you heard before in the previous talks about someone making something of their life and dealing with a tough situation and overcoming it. Maine Public Radio had a suicide watch out for all of their listeners on election night. They called for grief counselors, but unfortunately the grief counselors were all their listeners. They had to bring them in from Northern New Hampshire. There were seven Republican grief counselors in Northern New Hampshire.</p>
<p>Anyway, in the House of Representatives, I disagree a little bit with Pat, but for the most part he&#8217;s correct. Republicans probably left six, seven, eight seats on the table this year, but their maximum, given essentially the current mix of the populations and how people vote, is probably not a lot higher than 260, and they will probably get to 248, 249, 250 after those last few recounts are done in Arizona and New York, California, and you have the two runoffs in Louisiana. By the way, Louisiana Senate, first poll on the runoff, Cassidy is 16 points ahead of Mary Landrieu, so say goodbye to Mary.</p>
<p>There is something to having a national message, if you&#8217;re a national political party, and the Republicans again, why I say there&#8217;s sort of a limit, 260, 265, you&#8217;re not going to do much better. The Republicans did a great job redistricting, which is why winning the governorships in 2018, winning state legislative seats in 2020 is so crucial to maintaining that for the next ten years. I mean, in Ohio, Republicans have 12 of the 16 House seats. They have 13 of the 18 House seats in Pennsylvania, 9 or 14 in Michigan, 9 of 13 in North Carolina. Those are not deep red states. I mean, essentially what&#8217;s happened is the Democrats want their minority voters concentrated, and the Republicans cooperate, so they give them seats where Democrats had enormous numbers of wasted votes. They win by 80 to 20 in their seats. Republicans win a lot of other seats by 55/45, 60/40. All right?</p>
<p>So, and I want to say this very clearly. For the purposes of what you&#8217;re going to hear over the next few days, I&#8217;m not saying the Republicans are the good guys, but they&#8217;re our side at this point, and it&#8217;s our side versus the other side, and I would prefer our side wins. Okay? And getting the right people on our side obviously matters, and getting better candidates for our side matters, but we did well this year as a party and conservatives are in better shape for the Republicans having won control of both Houses than if they had remained in a minority on the other side.</p>
<p>One last thing. You hear a lot of talk about this blue wall. Republicans can&#8217;t win the White House. They can&#8217;t win the White House because the Democrats have won enough states in the last six presidential elections to get 242 electoral votes. All right? So Republicans gotta win pretty much every toss-up to be able to get elected President. Well, Republicans were 206 this time. Add Florida, Virginia, and Ohio you get to 266. Those are three states Republicans have to win to win the presidency. If they can&#8217;t win those three states they&#8217;re not going to win the presidency. All right? But then you have a bunch of other states. There are seven or eight states from Iowa, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, which was only a 5 percent state, New Hampshire, Colorado. Republicans can put together a win nationally at the White House and for once they&#8217;ll be running against a candidate who may be older than the Republican, and the Republicans may not be nominating someone who ran before and lost, which has been six of their last seven nominees. All right? That seems to be how you get nominated for Republican. Run once and lose. So put together a younger candidate, someone with a fresh face, someone with ideas and I don&#8217;t think 2016 is a dead issue. Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>This election, the midterm election, was not a vote for conservatism or the Republican Party. It was a vote against President Barack Obama, that the whole populace and the America people were really fed up with, and look at the minuses that Obama had: the handling of the Ebola crisis, the handling of Obamacare, the lies about Obamacare, his entire foreign policy collapse where his whole approach to the Middle East has gone up in flames. Everyone can see that Obama, in virtually domestic and foreign policy, I would say he&#8217;s actually the worst president that we&#8217;ve had certainly in the 20th century on. I think history will show, if the liberals on the left stop writing history and get some conservatives in there, at least, that Obama will be in the middle or on the bottom and nowhere near the top, as the greatest president, as a good president. He&#8217;s not in the ranks of an FDR or a Lincoln or a Reagan. He will be at the bottom.</p>
<p>So this midterm election really should come as no surprise. The presidency is something very, very different, and here&#8217;s what I think the problem is. The Republicans have to have a few different things if they are going to win. First, they have to understand that they must get votes from and appeal to the white working class, young people, Hispanics, African Americans. They have to broaden their approach and realize that they have to make inroads in groups that traditionally have not voted Republican in a long, long time. They can make these inroads, but to do that the Republicans have to have the message that they are a Big 10 party. They are not going to impose an ideological uniformity where if you don&#8217;t have either the most conservative position or if you disagree on tactics with some conservatives, that you are therefore not a conservative and not a Republican. They have to realize that everyone is not going to agree on every issue within the Republican Party, and the party has to begin trying to change its message to appeal to some of the groups whose votes they need.</p>
<p>Now, here is where Rand Paul sees part of the picture. Now I&#8217;m an opponent of Rand Paul. I think he would be a disaster. I think he&#8217;s trying to hide it by calling himself a realist, but he has an isolationist or a non-interventionist position very close to that of his father. That would be a disaster for America as well as the Republican Party. But the one thing Rand Paul has understood has to be done is a broad outreach to African Americans showing that the Republican Party has something to offer the African American community. In fact, has a great deal more to offer them than the Democratic Party, whose Great Society programs have collapsed and have proved to be an utter failure. So Rand Paul understands that. Secondly, Rand Paul has been making a great outreach to young people, and young people are attracted to a lot of his libertarian message. I don&#8217;t agree, again, with all of the libertarian message or proposals of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but Paul is reaching them and getting the big turnouts on campus because he understands the need for a new kind of message and reconsideration of old views.</p>
<p>Now, let me raise as an example here, the attitude towards gay marriage. Social conservatives have, for reasons that I respect, drawn a strong case against gay marriage as being good for society. My friend Robbie George, the Princeton professor of politics and perhaps the nation&#8217;s leading social conservative, has made a compelling case against gay marriage. But as I said to them, the tipping point is over. It&#8217;s a done deal. None of your arguments, as good as you and people who agree with you make them out to be, it&#8217;s over. The fight has been lost. You can&#8217;t change the fights that have been lost. There have been polls taken of young Republicans. I think a poll I read said that about 80 percent of young Republicans who consider themselves conservatives support gay marriage. The tide has changed. If the Republican Party can&#8217;t come out for gay marriage because they have to hold the party together, at least they can unite and work in areas in which both factions of the party agree to end discrimination against gay people. That has to be an opening in that position and a shift, or the Republican Party is going to lose young Republicans and young conservatives as well. I think that&#8217;s a hard truth, and it has to be accepted.</p>
<p>Secondly, let me give you another example, and here I&#8217;m going to quote from Michael Gerson&#8217;s recent column in the Washington Post about John Kasich. Now John Kasich has done tremendous things. Here&#8217;s what Gerson writes, and I&#8217;ll ready the quote. Kasich, he writes, deserves the award for the best performance in a battleground state. Yet Kasich won a majority of union voters, three-fifths of female voters, a majority of voters under the age of 30, two-thirds of Independents, and one quarter of African American voters. That is an incredible statistic for a real conservative. Now let&#8217;s say hypothetically John Kasich or someone who has his kind of positions got to be the Republican nominee. Are conservatives going to stand against such a person merely because he moved in one direction other Republican conservative governors did not move? That is, accepting the expansion of Medicaid and accepting the government funds to do that while other conservatives who were governors voted against it and stood firm against that? Kasich believes, right or wrong, that a program exists to help the poor who deserve help for health insurance, that that was a necessary step. In other words, he dissented from traditional conservative positions on one issue. To a lot of conservatives, that makes Kasich beyond the pale. I think you can&#8217;t do that. For a party that wants to broaden its appeal, it has to agree that not everyone is going to agree with what most people think are conservative principles. On one or another specific issue a conservative can feel a different approach has to be taken, even if it goes against the sentiment or the viewpoint of other conservatives. We have to accept that kind of diversity and try to understand why someone like a John Kasich, who is a conservative, disagrees and does something else in his own state. So there&#8217;s that to consider.</p>
<p>Secondly, let me finish with this thought. I think that one also has to stop demanding all or nothing. I think some of the arguments coming from the Ted Cruz faction or from Cruz himself of the Republican Party, and you heard Ted here last year. He&#8217;s a very intelligent man, brilliant intelligence. Both Robbie George and Alan Dershowitz said he was the best student they ever had, but I think Ted Cruz is wrong in a lot of his tactics, making extreme tactics the equivalent or the mark for being a conservative. Cruz has been making some noise recently about maybe we should close down the government again and not accept certain things that Republican leadership seems to be accepting. I think that&#8217;s wrong and dangerous.</p>
<p>Now, let me quote one conservative who said this. If you read Commentary Magazine you saw it in the cover story by Peter Wehner, and I forget who coauthored it. I think it might be Yuval Levin. But they have this quote from a conservative leader, who said, &#8220;True believers on the Republican right prefer to go off the cliff with flags flying rather than take half a loaf and later come back for more.&#8221; Now you know who said that? Anybody? Yes, it was Ronald Reagan, and Reagan understood that one has to make compromises. For example, in 1964 Reagan campaigned very strongly against Medicare. In 1980 he said we have to accept the fact Medicaid is popular. It passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats. We can&#8217;t undo Medicare or spend any time attacking it. It&#8217;s here to stay. Reagan adopted to reality. There are some things we can&#8217;t change. We have to pick our fights closely, fight where we can win, and fight not only getting conservatives to vote for us, but getting centrist and disaffected Democrats. We have to create, as Reagan managed to do, a new generation of Reagan Democrats. They&#8217;re there waiting to be taken back into the fold. The midterm elections showed that. We have to remember that as we go forward to 2016. Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Saving Pat Roberts, $12 million. Rescuing Mitch McConnell in very Republican Kentucky, $50 million. The look on Harry Reid&#8217;s face sitting next to Barack Obama two days later, priceless. If you haven&#8217;t seen that picture, please print it and frame it and put it over your desk. You know, I think Pat Caddell and Richard delivered some of the buzzkill facts about what happened in the last election, but I think we should do a victory lap first, and we all know about the Senate. In some ways I think that was the least important victory, and let me just point out a couple things that happened. We&#8217;ve talked about new Republican governors. There were at least 350 new Republican seats picked up in state legislatures. Tim Scott, one of my favorite senators, is the first black American to win in the south since Reconstruction. Some of you will remember that Tim Scott was in fact the Tea Party candidate in a very crowded House Republican primary who ran on issues, who ran on something called the Contract from America against Strom Thurmond&#8217;s grandson. Someone should tell Mother Jones the story about how it is that the Tea Party is expanding what it is the Republican Party looks like in 2014, which brings up, of course, Mia Love.</p>
<p>The story in the House, I think, is more compelling. Let&#8217;s give a shout out to Mia Love. I first met Mia Love when she was still a mayor in the State of Utah, and if you&#8217;re talking about expanding the demographics of the GOP, consider this. Black, woman, conservative, Tea Partier, Mormon. That&#8217;s pretty cool, huh? Someone send a memo to Mother Jones on that one too. But you know the House got more conservative. It got more liberty minded, and yes, the House majority grew but we also picked up seats like Mia Love&#8217;s which is a Democratic pickup. Bruce Poliquin in Maine, who is another liberty-minded fiscal conservative, and also Rod Blum in Iowa. This is a seat that Republicans should not have picked up. These are candidates that ran on something other than &#8220;I&#8217;m not Barack Obama.&#8221; There may be a lesson in there.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s at least touch on the down side here. The turnout in 2014 compared to 2010 was down 8 million voters. Now imagine what we might have done with a couple million votes at the margin in some of these battleground states. In 2010 we had much higher turnout among self-identified Independents, self-identified Tea Partiers, and self-identified conservatives. All of those voters showed up less in 2014 than they did in 2010. Interestingly, registered Republicans, or at least self-identified Republicans, went up a little bit, 1 percent according to a Wall Street Journal poll. I think that sort of punches a hole in this mythology that somehow Tea Partiers and conservatives are the Republican base. I think it&#8217;s better described that there are people that vote based on issues, not party affiliation. Someone should send that memo to Reince Priebus. You&#8217;re allowed to clap. It&#8217;s cool. So that&#8217;s the good news.</p>
<p>That was good stuff, and we need to be careful about the lessons for 2016 because I think, if you go to Nebraska, one of my favorite senators that will be coming in 2015, of course, is Ben Sasse in Nebraska. Now, if you compare Ben&#8217;s performance in Nebraska to what happened in Kansas, these states are fairly comparable in terms of size, in terms of massive Republican advantage. Pat Roberts struggled until the last minute to win in a state that we shouldn&#8217;t have spent a dime in. Ben Sasse spent far less money, and he won by 34 points. Now how did that happen? Anyone who was paying attention to this race should remember that Ben Sasse not only ran against Obamacare, he actually put together a very specific plan on what he would do to dismantle and replace Obamacare with a patient-driven system. You didn&#8217;t see that much amongst Republican candidates. Ed Gillespie actually did something similar at the last minute in Virginia, and you might argue that that was where he got his last-minute surge. I don&#8217;t have data to prove that point, and I won&#8217;t necessarily be able to defend it, but it&#8217;s something to check out, but Ben Sasse comes to the U.S. Senate as a one-man think tank that actually has ideas that were proven on the campaign trail on how we are going to manage Obamacare now that it is law, now that it has destroyed the individual market, now that it has radically expanded Medicaid rolls. We need more than &#8220;I&#8217;m not Barack Obama&#8221; to solve this problem, and this goes back to the 2010 analogy.</p>
<p>In 2010 there was a crowd-source document some of you will remember. It was called the Contract from America, and it was modeled after Newt Gingrich&#8217;s 1994 contract with one important difference. It wasn&#8217;t designed in Washington, D.C. It was crowd-sourced from millions of Americans who were asked, and Freedom Works was intimately part of this process. We actually had the audacity to ask Americans what they thought Washington should do, and so you came up with a ten-policy plank platform that not only Tim Scott ran on in South Carolina, but a vast majority of the Republicans that won in 2010 on a positive, specific, bold agenda. That&#8217;s where that came from.</p>
<p>Maybe that&#8217;s a lesson for 2016. The good news, and we&#8217;ve heard all the bad news, and I agree with all of the analysis on demographics and how an off-year election is fundamentally different than a presidential election. The good news is that we can actually fix this if we look at where the ideas are coming from in the House and the Senate Republican caucuses. It&#8217;s not coming from the top. It&#8217;s not coming from leadership. It&#8217;s coming from the bottom up, and perhaps that&#8217;s appropriate given who we are and what we believe. We think the genius of America comes from our communities, not from Washington, D.C., not from the top down. We are not Democratic apparatchiks that wait for someone to tell us what to do, right? This is why herding individualists is a lot like herding cats. But in the age of the Internet there&#8217;s a lot more of us than there are of them. If you go to the very long tail of the Internet where the decentralization of information – do you guys remember when Walter Cronkite used to tell you &#8220;that&#8217;s the way it is&#8221;? You couldn&#8217;t go on Google and fact check him, could you? You couldn&#8217;t set up an RSS feed and get multiple sources of information that told you that what the three networks were spoon feeding you was just not true. That doesn&#8217;t exist anymore, and even the New York Times is scrambling for eyeballs online in a very decentralized world where good information gets to people at lower marginal costs all the time. This is the new normal. This is the opportunity for Republicans that have enough faith in their ideas that they&#8217;re actually going to talk about big bold ideas going into 2016.</p>
<p>When Pat Robertson was in trouble in Kansas, did he call John McCain to come rescue him? Who did he call? Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Where are the ideas coming from in the Republican Party? Mike Lee just became the chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, which Jim DeMint turned into the Republican Senate Think Tank a few years earlier. Mike Lee is another one-man think tank. He&#8217;s the guy that&#8217;s actually not only sober in his analysis but bold in his willingness to put good ideas on the table. We should learn a thing or two from Mike, and by the way, the GOP establishment is preparing to primary him in Utah in 2016. We should not let that happen.</p>
<p>I think Republicans mostly succeeded in 2014 by not being Barack Obama. This is not a very good long-term strategy, but if we would embrace the idea that good ideas can actually engage people that are interested in ideas, not party affiliation, and connect with Independents, connect with young people who are more liberty minded, there&#8217;s nothing but potential here, but the GOP needs to get comfortable with the fact that they&#8217;re not in charge anymore. You think about the vaunted Obama Get Out the Vote machine, for all of its decentralization it was fundamentally dependent on a cult of personality from someone at the very top of the pyramid dictating this is what we&#8217;re going to do, people waiting for their marching orders. You cannot do that with Republicans, and if you try they will take your head off. You can&#8217;t do that with libertarians. You can&#8217;t do that with Tea Partiers. They rightly believe that they&#8217;re in charge, and the moms that have Facebook pages all over American, Tea Party moms that are bigger than county GOPs, they&#8217;re in charge now.</p>
<p>So the question is what is the party going to do to tap into this massive decentralized network of people that should be constituents of Republican candidates? Don&#8217;t take them for granted. Don&#8217;t tell them what to do. Engage them on a set of values and ideas that are compelling. Now this is not necessarily completely like what you would argue Ted Cruz is doing. I think there are a lot of big bold ideas, positive ideas, Reaganesque ideas that cut across party lines. One is yes, we do need to repeal Obamacare, but we need to replace it with something, right? And if Republicans were good they would put that on the president&#8217;s desk. If they can&#8217;t do that, they should repeal the individual mandate. It is completely unjust. It is completely screwing our young people, and it has bipartisan support. There was a House vote where 30 Democrats crossed across the aisle. Another interesting subject is criminal justice reform, including asset seizure, sentencing reform. These are things that Rand Paul has worked on that again creates bipartisan majorities. They would put the president in quite a bind if he chose to veto things like that, and most importantly, embrace the chaos of a beautiful decentralized community that will show up if you stand for something and will stay home if you don&#8217;t. Thank you very much.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr: </strong>I just want to make one quick note. To follow up with what Matt said. At this point in time, the Republican Party, which is of course the old people&#8217;s white people&#8217;s party, there are more statewide elected officials which means senators or governors, minorities in the Republican Party than there are in the Democratic Party. There are five versus four. The Republicans will put up a candidate and it doesn&#8217;t matter whether they&#8217;re Hispanic or Black to run statewide or Asian, and they&#8217;ll win if the voters, and particularly in those states where a lot of Republican voters like their ideas. Tim Scott proves that. Democrats will only put up their candidates, minority candidates, in safe minority districts. They will not risk essentially what&#8217;s going on statewide, and that&#8217;s why they have so few. If they are the overwhelming choice, they should be putting up more state nominees and they don&#8217;t.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Just one more comment on what Rand Paul is doing. I was on a panel recently with Richard Viguerie and he described libertarians as the fourth leg of what has now become a Republican table. Not, no longer the traditional stool where you had social conservatives, defense conservatives and fiscal conservatives. I do think that&#8217;s true particularly with young people, and we should be careful not to disenfranchise all of these crazy liberty kids that can be unruly. They can be loud. Remind me a lot of exactly what I was like when I was their age. This is an opportunity, and I think that the party made a huge mistake at the convention in 2012 by disenfranchising Ron Paul delegations. It wasn&#8217;t like Ron Paul was going to win the nomination. They would have been smarter to embrace a very broad community that includes the liberty agenda as part of that.</p>
<p><strong>Tom Lifson: </strong>I&#8217;ll use the moderator&#8217;s prerogative to agree with Matt. I live in Berkeley, California believe or not, and when Rand Paul came to campus it was electric. Nobody has been screwed worse by Obama than the young demographic. Nobody has been screwed worse by the education establishment than the young demographic, who are graduating college with debt that can&#8217;t be discharged in bankruptcy. So there is an opportunity there for the Republicans, if we&#8217;re willing to take it. Okay. Throwing it open to questions. Over there.</p>
<p>Next Speaker</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> I&#8217;d like to challenge some of the things that I heard from Ron Radosh, I&#8217;ve heard these from others as well, that the Republican Party somehow has to become more like the Democrat Party. We have to be for amnesty. We have to be for gay marriage. We have to be for all of this left-wing social agenda and it&#8217;s because of these palecon social conservatives that we are losing elections. I can say as a Republican candidate in a blue state, Maryland, first for Congress I was the Republican nominee in 2012 against Chris Van Hollen and again this year as a lieutenant governor candidate in a primary in Maryland where we ultimately won the governor&#8217;s race in a blue state, nobody saw that coming, that social conservative issues are big winners. And we have to be true to our social roots and our conservative roots. I campaigned an awful lot in Hispanic churches. I can tell you this is a demographic we are told by the political consultants that is not supposed to vote Republican. They were overwhelming going to vote Republican, and why were they going to vote Republican? Because we were against gay marriage, we affirm that marriage was between one man and one woman, and that is the way it always has been. That is a natural fact. You cannot legislate marriage and destroy biology. It does not happen.</p>
<p>Young people understand. And even in the Hispanic community they understood the argument which I put forward boldly and frankly and openly looking people in their eyes that we exist in a nation of laws. And the reason that many Hispanics came to this country was to escape countries where there was not a rule of law, and do you want to go back to dictatorship, which is what you fled from &#8212; or do you want to live here in a country with rule of law?</p>
<p>So I think, I would challenge you that we should not be abandoning our social agenda. We can perhaps express it differently. I&#8217;ll give you that. Yes, we could express it differently. We can put a more positive spin on it, not a restricted spin on it. But a lot of social conservatives stayed home. Many of them in minority communities, and these are votes that could be big winners for us, if we stay true to our values. Thanks.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>I&#8217;m not saying you and other social conservatives should not stay true to their values. I did not say the Republican Party should endorse gay marriage. I don&#8217;t think it should. I think it should allow in its ranks those who believe that gay marriage is right, and those who believe it is wrong. To take a position on this kind of issue is going to lose a lot of young people. And they are overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage. Now you can try and educate them for your point of view, argue with them, present solid arguments as to why marriage should just be between a man and woman. That&#8217;s fine. But for the party to come out on one or another side of this would be disastrous. It&#8217;s going to put into oblivion. I think there are common issues. One other comment I wanted to make that I forgot to say, about ideas. And I agree with a lot of what Matt said. There is that group what they call the Young, the YG project, Young Guards?</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Young Guns.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>Young Guns.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>And they put out a book filled with ideas. There are great theorists. Like my two favorite ones are conservative intellectuals Yuval Levin and James Capretta. You&#8217;ve seen Capretta a lot on Fox News. They have drawn up serious arguments for how to not just say replace, get rid of Obamacare, but how to replace it with a solid program that gives real healthcare on market-based principals. They have thought about this. I think all political leaders have to look at the various arguments in their book, that is free online, and take these, a lot of their ideas into consideration, and if you&#8217;re in office as Republican in the state or national level, see if you can work with some of these people to fashion legislation to present based on some of the concrete ideas they lay out. I think that&#8217;s extremely important.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>A quick comment on the question from a libertarian perspective, I can speak to my community which is very libertarian, but also significantly socially conservative, and I don&#8217;t think that you had to abandon your personal values and the things that you learn in church on Sunday or the definition of marriage in order to understand that outsourcing really important social institutions to 535 men and women that can&#8217;t balance a budget is a really bad idea. And I think we learn that during, you can clap. That&#8217;s cool. During the Bush administration, I think there was a lesson learned when we got involved in things like face-based initiatives that really outsourced really precious community actions, voluntary community-based activities to Washington, DC, and they started fighting over who got the most earmarks. I think that&#8217;s a huge mistake. I think that social institutions that hold this country together are way too important to let Washington, DC get its hand on them.</p>
<p><strong>Tom Lifson: </strong>Thank you. One more question. The gentleman on the aisle, yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>What you guys think about first a new radical right that gets in the media&#8217;s face and pushes the agenda to them instead of accepting the agenda that they get shut out of day after day, and secondly, creating a real marketing machine for the things that we hold most dear and pushing it out to the American people who will follow the first shiny object that comes in front of them?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr: </strong>I&#8217;m going to take a quick response and really take a different attack which is I think Republicans win when they have better candidates, and the machinery makes the big difference and the spending does, but we had better candidates this year. Wendy Davis was a terrible candidate. She was their Todd Akin. Bruce Braley was a terrible candidate in Iowa state. Democratic never should have lost. We came up in the process this year, produced much better, more effective, positive messengers for our side. It wasn&#8217;t just all a negative anti-Obama message on the state level in these individual races. The people we put up were better candidates. They were more &#8212; there&#8217;s no way a Republican should ever win an open seat race in Iowa by 9 percent, and that had a lot to do, not with the amount of spending, each side had it, not with the particular messaging that the parties put in behind it, but the fact that one candidate communicated better and connected with the voters better than the other side did.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>You know I think politics is a little bit like entrepreneurship because sometimes the customer is always right and sometimes you go to market with something they didn&#8217;t know they wanted. Say an iPhone, something like that. And all of sudden everybody decides that that&#8217;s what they want. So it is good candidates. But I think the machinery matters as well, and you guys are in the right place if you want to understand a little bit about how Democratic apparatchiks function because I assume you&#8217;ve all been assigned your readings from Saul Alinsky, and we need to understand that. Pat Caddell mentioned something that can&#8217;t be overstated. The consultant industrial complex is so fixated on paid media because that&#8217;s where they can make their margins. You can&#8217;t make a lot of money going door to door, engaging grassroots communities. This is why the left beats on us the ground. I&#8217;ll go back to something I mentioned earlier: embrace decentralization, social media. Instead of running thousand point TV buys, why don&#8217;t you target young people on Facebook? We&#8217;ve tested this. It works.</p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: Selling Conservatism</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/bill-whittle-selling-conservatism/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-selling-conservatism</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:27:25 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Firewall star explains how to pitch a pro-freedom message at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong>Below are the video and transcript to Bill Whittle&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event took place Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida.</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112280256" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>Before I start things I&#8217;d like to just say one thing. This is my first time here. It&#8217;s my third time here but it&#8217;s my first time here actually working for the Freedom Center and working with David.  And being the person who&#8217;s always written his own videos and very proud of his own videos, I&#8217;ve had a chance to actually work with David on scripts and let me just explain to you briefly how that goes.  I&#8217;ll have a script idea for something I think is really profound, important and deep and I&#8217;ll send it to David and David will go, &#8220;Ah, mostly no, you really kind of missed the boat.  You should concentrate a little more over this and take some of this out and add this beat over here.&#8221;  And I say, &#8220;Well, yes sir, that&#8217;ll be great&#8221; and then I hang up the phone and go, &#8220;Oh, you&#8217;re going to get your beat over here.  You want a beat over here?  I&#8217;ll put a beat over here.  I&#8217;ll take this out of my video &#8230; tell me who&#8217;s going to write my own videos &#8230;&#8221;  And I say, &#8220;Yeah, no, no, no.  We&#8217;ll take this out, no problem.  We&#8217;ll take it out.  We&#8217;ll add this.  Sure.  Here ya go.  Take a look at it.  It&#8217;s fine.  You&#8217;re paying me here …&#8221;  It&#8217;s so much better, it&#8217;s just so much better.  It&#8217;s so much better.  Curse you Comrade Horowitz.  Curse you and your magnificent vision for how to make a message clear and on point.</p>
<p>So what are we going to talk about today? Well, two years ago I was on this very stage just a few days after we took a shellacking by the Democrats.  I was on this stage two years ago after we&#8217;d lost a big election and I was terrific.  And if there&#8217;s any correlation between those two things, this morning I am just gonna suck because we whipped those racist, anti-Semitic communists out of their boots.  We whipped them out of their boots.  Couldn&#8217;t have happen to a nicer bunch of venal criminals.  So I&#8217;m sure the question everybody&#8217;s asking is what now?  I mean, what now?</p>
<p>When Obama was elected it was the lightworker descending from heaven into the Roman columns and two years later the American people said enough of this guy.  We recaptured the House of Representatives.  That allowed him, allowed us to stop him from doing an awful lot of damage.  We had this incredible reverse in 2012 and now we have the Senate.  What does the Senate give us?  Well, this is not what I want to talk about today, but I think what we have with the House and the Senate is we have the ability to deliver legislation to the president&#8217;s desk and we should be delivering a lot of legislation to his desk and make that son of a gun veto it.  Make him own it.  Make him take personal responsibility for the first time in his life and say &#8220;Nope, nope.&#8221;  The 2015 Small Business Anti-Regulation Act.  Nope.  The 2016 IRS Restructuring Bill.  Nope.  Make him own it.  The Secure the Boarders for American Safety Act.  Nope.  Make him own his policies and failure by sending the kind of legislation the American people want to see and have him veto it.  And you put some markers down for 2016.</p>
<p>But that&#8217;s not really what I want to talk about today.  What I&#8217;d like to talk about today briefly is this.  What are we actually selling to the American people?  What&#8217;s our message?  For six years now we&#8217;ve been saying these guys are awful and their policies are awful and they&#8217;re damaging the country and here&#8217;s the evidence.  And they are.  And we keep doing this and that&#8217;s what the videos do, but we can&#8217;t just be a party or a movement that has a negative message.  Don&#8217;t do that &#8217;cause the American people have a perfect right to ask, &#8220;Well, if we don&#8217;t do that then what do we do?&#8221;  What do you think is a better idea?  That&#8217;s what I want to talk about today.  I&#8217;d like to talk about what I think the conservative message; I won&#8217;t say the Republican message, but I will say the conservative message.  What is the conservative message moving forward from this point especially starting in 2016?  And I think where we have to start from is we have to start from the progressive message &#8217;cause they had a message in 2008.  And that message was &#8220;Hope and Change.&#8221;  And that&#8217;s where we need to start.  Because hope and change appealed to a lot of people; appealed to a lot of stupid people, but it appealed to a lot of people.  Because hope and change, when you think about it, first of all, are unbelievably vague terms.  They&#8217;re extremely vague.  Hope.  Hope, hope, hope.  Hope for what?  Change.  Change to what?  Change to what?  Driving along the freeway and then going off a cliff is a change.  Well change to what?  Hope from what?  But if you think about their message, this is the point I&#8217;m trying to make today.</p>
<p>Hope and change, when you get right down to it, are extremely passive qualities.  They&#8217;re the qualities of herd animals.  They hope for change.  They hope for change.  There&#8217;s nothing, no ownership in it.  There&#8217;s no motion.  There&#8217;s no ability to control your destiny.  You hope for change.  You sit back and wait for something to happen.  You sit and wait for something to happen.  And that&#8217;s entirely their philosophy and that&#8217;s what they want.  They want a nation of people who sit and wait for them and the rest of the elitists to make something happen for them.  And the American people are getting a little tired of hoping for change.  They&#8217;re done with it.  We have to give them a better message.  So what&#8217;s better than hope and change?</p>
<p>Well, many of you may have heard of an author named Viktor Frankl.  He was a philosopher who survived the concentration camps and he did a lot of thinking about this in the camp and then in a series of years of clinical research afterwards.  And Frankl wrote a book called Man&#8217;s Search for Meaning.  And Frankl realized that it&#8217;s not money that people want.  Freud thought that mankind&#8217;s main motivation was the pursuit of pleasure.  But Frankl found out that wasn&#8217;t the case at all in the camps.  He found that the people that survived in the camps survived because they had some sense of meaning.  Something mattered to them.  It was never the same for any two people.  Some cases it might be a missing wife, maybe it&#8217;s a book that wasn&#8217;t finished, maybe it&#8217;s a desire to see Venice.  But the people that held on to some sense of meaning survived those awful conditions and Frankl wrote that in the concentration camps you could tell when a man was about to die because when he gave up his quest for meaning, he was gone in three days.  They just knew he was on his way out.  It&#8217;s meaning.  It&#8217;s not power.  It&#8217;s not money.  It&#8217;s meaning.</p>
<p>So, if we take that as granted &#8212; and I know that&#8217;s certainly true in my life and I&#8217;m sure it&#8217;s true in your life.  Successful people, you know, the left thinks that successful people &#8212; rich people, business people &#8212; go into business to make money.  That&#8217;s not why anybody starts a business.  People start a business because they have something they want to achieve.  They have a vision of something.  They&#8217;ve got a dream.  They can make a lot of money doing that but never say, &#8220;I&#8217;m going to go out and make a lot of money.&#8221;  No.  I want to start a dry-cleaning business.  I think we can do a better job with mortgages.  Whatever the case may be.  So I think Frankl&#8217;s right.  I think meaning is what people want.  And if we&#8217;re going to be a party that has a future and as a party that has a message, we need to incorporate this.  So if I was going to write the message for the conservatives going into the future, I would say no, forget hope and change.  Those are passive, weak, probably-never-gonna-happen, lottery-ticket philosophies for herd animals.</p>
<p>If I was leading the GOP I would say our message on every single program that we put out is &#8220;What is your individual plan for meaning in your life?&#8221; What&#8217;s your plan for meaning in your life?  If you raise that question, you start people thinking along the kind of lines that they should be thinking about in this country.  What&#8217;s your plan for meaning in your life?  That&#8217;s a specific question and it requires a specific kind of answer.  A very specific kind of answer.</p>
<p>What&#8217;s your plan for meaning?  Well, what&#8217;s required in the plan?  If you&#8217;re going to plan for something, what&#8217;s required in a plan?  You know, the difference between hope and plan is that a plan is hope on a timetable.  And I don&#8217;t mean to be particularly vulgar about this but the difference between hoping and planning is the difference between sitting in your parents&#8217; basement at 39 years old playing video games and watching online porn versus working your butt off with two jobs and taking out the high school homecoming queen on prom night.  That&#8217;s the difference between hoping and planning.  And I know which one I&#8217;d rather do &#8217;cause I&#8217;ve done them both.</p>
<p>So, you want to get people to be thinking along the lines of planning.  What does planning entail?  What does it take to make a plan for your individual meaning?  What do you have to do?  Well, if you&#8217;re going to plan something, you need probably five qualities.  Right?  You need ambition.  You need vision.  You need confidence, persistence and hard work.  You need those things.  And you can tell people that if you&#8217;re willing to do those things, you don&#8217;t have to hope anymore because it&#8217;s not something that may happen someday.  If you have a plan and you&#8217;re willing to execute the plan, you will get to whatever you define is the meaning in your life.  You will get there.  And then all of a sudden the American people realize what they used to realize a long time ago before these progressives came in here with their control over everything.  That their destinies are in their hands, not the government&#8217;s hands.  That their destinies are not dependent on somebody else&#8217;s welfare, nobody else&#8217;s opinion of you, not your personal influence.  It&#8217;s in your hands.  You own your own future.  It&#8217;s your future to do with what you want to.</p>
<p>Why do you think Thomas Jefferson shocked the world by saying, &#8220;Life, liberty and&#8221; &#8212; instead of property because that&#8217;s what everybody referred to, &#8220;life, liberty and property&#8221; &#8212; &#8220;the pursuit of happiness.&#8221;  What an astonishing idea that was.  What an astonishing insight into the human condition to understand that the three things that make this country work are life, the ability to be alive and to have your own soul and your own desires, liberty, the freedom to do whatever you damn well want to so long as you don&#8217;t interfere with somebody else&#8217;s liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  That&#8217;s built into a government?  That&#8217;s astonishing.  And that is the astonishing idea that we need to revive with the American people.  That you have the ability to pursue your own individual happiness and no one can stop you.  No one can stop you.  If you know what you want, you will get there if you follow these steps.  So what are the steps?</p>
<p>Well, the first step is ambition.  And the beautiful thing about ambition is ambition can be as big or as small as the individual person.  Some people may have an ambition to be a brain surgeon and that&#8217;s going to require a lot of hard work over a long period of time.  Some person&#8217;s ambition may be to go to every single home game of the Green Bay Packers.  And that person&#8217;s ambition and that person&#8217;s meaning is no more and no less meaningful than a brain surgeon because if going to every single home game of the Green Bay Packers makes that person happy and is what they care about, then they have a right to find a way to make that happen in their lives.  It&#8217;s no better and no worse.  It is an individual search for meaning.  So you have to have first of all the ambition to understand that there&#8217;s things out there that you want.</p>
<p>I think the second thing you need in order to execute a plan is you need a vision.  You need to see it.  You need to see it.  This where it comes closest to these progressives&#8217; ideas of hope.  I have a dream.  What&#8217;s your dream?  I have a dream that someday maybe I&#8217;ll own a really big boat.  Okay.  How you gonna get there?  I buy a lottery ticket once a week; I spend a dollar …  We know that&#8217;s not going to get you the boat and on some level you know it, too.  On some level that dollar is a narcotic that you&#8217;re injecting into your arm that allows you to think about having a boat, but you know you&#8217;re not going to get that boat with that lottery ticket and everybody in the American public knows it.  And that&#8217;s exactly what these people are selling the American people.  No.  That&#8217;s what these progressives are selling.  A shot in the arm with a narcotic saying don&#8217;t worry we&#8217;ll give you barely enough food, barely enough housing.  We&#8217;ll give you crappy phones, all this other stuff.  It&#8217;s a narcotic.  That hope is a narcotic in that sense.  If you go to the American people and say you want a boat?  You say, good, I can relate to that.  I&#8217;d like to have a boat, too.  How do you get to your boat?  What&#8217;s your plan?  Then you start to realize no one is in your way, but you&#8217;ve got to see it.  Everybody out here who&#8217;s run a business has had in their heads a vision of what that business could look like.  They have a vision of what their career would look like.  They have a vision of what their house lots would look like.  They may know what kind of car they want to drive.  Sometimes you&#8217;re touching these things.  Sometimes your touching them with your own hands.  That&#8217;s all it takes.  You want to drive a nice Mercedes convertible?  Rent one.  Feel it.  Touch it.  Now you know what you want.  It&#8217;s there.  It&#8217;s real.  See, you need the vision of it.</p>
<p>I think probably the most important part of this five-step plan is confidence.  You gotta believe it.  You gotta believe you can do it.  I think Henry Ford&#8217;s statement is as true a thing as I&#8217;ve ever heard: Whether you believe you&#8217;re going to succeed or believe you&#8217;re going to fail, you&#8217;re right.  Right?  It&#8217;s that simple.  Do you think you can do it?  Do you have the confidence to think that you can do it?  And of all the things that these progressives have done to this country, the thing that distressed me the most is how they have so insidiously destroyed each individual person&#8217;s sense of confidence in his own ability to lead his own life.  That is appalling.  It&#8217;s appalling.  Confidence is everything.  Confidence is everything and I&#8217;m a very confident person by and large.  But confidence isn&#8217;t a little fortress that we live in you know. There are days that I wake up and I&#8217;m just completely out of juice.  I just don&#8217;t have any confidence left; it&#8217;s gone.  I&#8217;m done. I don&#8217;t have any confidence left.  I don&#8217;t believe any of this stuff&#8217;s going to work.  I sit there.  I do awful things. I say awful things. I say things I regret. I hurt the people I like.  I&#8217;m miserable.  I&#8217;m embittered.  I&#8217;m jealous.  I&#8217;m petty.  I&#8217;m a Democrat for a couple of days.  I&#8217;m just a progressive for a couple of days wishing and hoping that things were different and angry that things didn&#8217;t turn out the way I wanted and thinking, ah, well, this person&#8217;s got the stuff that I want, and I&#8217;m a progressive for a day or two and then I slowly put the confidence back together and it takes a day or two or a week or whatever and then I&#8217;ll just kind of pick myself up and go back and try again.</p>
<p>Which leads us to our fourth point in this giant idea of a plan: persistence.  Persistence.  Are you going to do this until you fail, Bill?  No.  No, I&#8217;m not going to do this until I fail.  I have &#8212; the first time I stood on this podium I&#8217;d been failing for 40 years before I got up here.  I had been a failure for easily 35 years before anybody ever heard of me.  And I don&#8217;t mean like a one-time failure.  I mean, I&#8217;ve been a security guard, I&#8217;ve been a waiter, I&#8217;ve been a limousine driver.  I&#8217;ve done everything and I&#8217;ve probably ruined six businesses trying to get up here.  But the seventh one&#8217;s working out pretty well.  And so I&#8217;m going to continue to fail until I succeed.  And I&#8217;m not afraid of failure anymore.  Failure is my friend.  Failure teaches me lessons.  I was; the next video we&#8217;re doing for Firewall is about the crash in the Mojave.  Spaceship Two.  I got to be good friends with Burt Rutan.  We made; it looked like that spacecraft crash happened because the copilot reached out too early and pulled the knob to release the feather mechanism in the back of the spacecraft.  Why did he do that?  Well, as pilots we&#8217;re trained to touch the things that we&#8217;re supposed to see in a preflight and I think he just made a simple honest mistake that probably could be fixed by one line on a checklist.  I think it&#8217;s going to be just that simple.  One line on a checklist would have saved that mission.  Does that mean that we shouldn&#8217;t have flown the mission?  No.  We didn&#8217;t know that before.  Now we know.  We&#8217;re going to go; we&#8217;re going to make new mistakes now and we&#8217;re going to kill more people so we can find out what else we don&#8217;t know.  And we&#8217;ll keep going up there until we find out what we don&#8217;t know, and then when we find out what we don&#8217;t know, we&#8217;ll know what we know and then we&#8217;ll move on.  And then that vehicle will be safe.  And then we&#8217;ll go make some new failures and kill some more new people.  Courageous people who risk their lives to find out what we don&#8217;t know.  That&#8217;s persistence.  That&#8217;s what makes America.  It&#8217;s good to fail.  It should be easy to fail here.  I&#8217;ve failed here more times than I can count.  Failure&#8217;s your friend as long as it doesn&#8217;t get you down.  Persistence.  Persistence.  You just keep trying.  Keep trying until you get there.  And nothing in a plan should ever be single-pointed failure.  If you have a plan that depends on one individual sending money in to you or one thing happening; it&#8217;s not a plan.  That&#8217;s still hope.  It&#8217;s got to have pathways to get there.</p>
<p>And I think the final thing I&#8217;ll say after persistence of course &#8212; and this is the deal killer for the left.  Ultimately when it&#8217;s all said and done my friends, what it really comes down to for your individual plan for meaning is hard work.  And the left wants nothing to do with that.  It&#8217;s so much easier to tax a business than it is to run a business.  It&#8217;s so much easier to legislate other people&#8217;s money into your wallet than it is to go out and actually make your own.  It&#8217;s so much easier to just convince people to give you all the power than it is to go out and earn your own power. If anybody thinks that Barack Obama in the private sector could afford the smallest private jet, a Citation maybe, through the kind of brain and intellect that he has &#8230;  He condemns people to travel in private jets; he&#8217;s got the biggest private jet in the world.  He&#8217;s got a four-engine 747 and he&#8217;s got another one waiting right behind him.  Does anybody think that Barack Obama could earn that jet if he didn&#8217;t go around telling other people that they&#8217;re hopeless sheep hoping for change?  Of course not.  Joe Biden. It&#8217;s not that Joe Biden couldn&#8217;t run WalMart.  Joe Biden couldn&#8217;t run <em>a</em> Wal-Mart.  He couldn&#8217;t manage a Wal-Mart.  He travels in limousines by making people dependent on hope and change.  So it&#8217;s hard work.  It&#8217;s a lot of hard work.</p>
<p>And to close I want to tell you what that hard work means to me.  There&#8217;s two people especially in this crowd today who&#8217;ve been a big part of me doing this extra work for these Firewalls that have been so much fun and so rewarding for me.  One of them is Ben Shapiro.  You here Ben?  Here he is.  My friend Jeremy Boreing was telling me, I was trying to decide can I do this extra work &#8212; &#8217;cause I already was working pretty hard and this is going to be a lot of extra work, these Firewalls &#8212; can I do it?  Can I do it?  And Jeremy, said well Ben works like a rented mule and anytime more work comes along for Ben, he takes it.  And I thought this 12-year-old guy is making all this money?  He&#8217;s making this money because he works like an animal.  Like an animal.  He works all the time.  He writes so much and I remember thinking, well, jeez, if this cute little thing can do it &#8230; and then I figure I might be able to do a little more work myself, and if I have to get up earlier and stay up later then that&#8217;s what I&#8217;m going to do.  And the other person who had a big effect on me in the same way is Andrew Klavan.  You in here Andrew?  I know I saw him earlier.  He left when he saw me speaking.  He normally just leaves the room when I&#8217;m present because it&#8217;s too much for him to bear.  But Andrew Klavan said the same thing.  He said, &#8220;Take it, do it.  You can sleep when you&#8217;re dead, Bill.&#8221;  And Andrew was telling me he had some advice when he was going to start on his own and his psychologist or somebody  &#8211; because he&#8217;s in a massive amount of therapy needless to say if you&#8217;re Andrew Klavan.  And he basically said his therapist said to him, Klavan said I don&#8217;t work on weekends.  This guy said to him well then you&#8217;re going to fail.  Any questions?  No, I don&#8217;t want to work on the weekends.  Then you&#8217;re going to fail.  So I work on weekends and I stay up late and I get up early.  And I work really hard and I earn the things that I earn because I have a vision in my plan for meaning.</p>
<p>I don&#8217;t just have a dream.  When I was a kid I had a dream.  I wanted to walk on the moon.  I wanted to walk on the moon because that&#8217;s what people my age did.  We commanded space shuttle missions and then we commanded Mars missions and we planted the flag and we went out there a bunch of  steely-eye mission men and we broke new horizons because that&#8217;s what Americans do.  And for the middle part of my life I said well that&#8217;s not going to happen.  NASA&#8217;s a failure.  The space program&#8217;s a failure.  All they do is go around in circles.  The moon is further away now than it was in 1969.  The moon&#8217;s further away now than it was in 1959 when I was born.  Suddenly I realized it doesn&#8217;t matter, I want to walk on the moon.  I want to walk on the moon, and I have plan to walk on the moon, and I&#8217;m going to do it.  I&#8217;m going to do it.  I&#8217;m going to take a space program to the American people.  I&#8217;m going to sell them on it &#8212; $9.95 a month on their credit card.  It&#8217;s going to generate a couple of billion dollars a year, more than we can spend.  I&#8217;m going to sell it to them because I know how to do that and one of the prices of me coordinating this thing &#8212; I thought you&#8217;re all going to use a space engineer, no.  It needs a guy with vision, who can convince people that this is a good idea.  So I&#8217;m going to start a private space program two or three years from now. I&#8217;ve got it all laid out step by step.  No step is a cavern that&#8217;s a unjumpable,  It&#8217;s a routine, regular business plan and when I&#8217;m done 12 years from now, I&#8217;m walking on the moon. Or I&#8217;m going to die trying because that&#8217;s what I want to do.  I want to walk on the moon.  And I&#8217;m gonna.  I&#8217;m gonna.  Because I have a plan.  I have a plan.  And I&#8217;m going to do it &#8217;cause I&#8217;m going to do it.</p>
<p>And if you take that idea to the American people and say to them listen, it doesn&#8217;t have to be walking on the moon, it doesn&#8217;t have to be brain surgeon.  It really, truly can be &#8212; if what you want in life is a little boat to cruise the intercoastal waterway on, we can help you.  And by helping you what we really mean is we can get out of your way and show you how you can get that boat without depending on me or the lottery or any other thing that is some kind of cosmic ray that has to happen.  You want a boat?  Here&#8217;s how you get a boat.  What&#8217;s your plan for meaning in your life?  It changes people&#8217;s thinking and it gets them out of the herd mentality and takes us away from being a nation of sheep back to what we are, which is a pack of sheepdogs who protect the innocent, and when we run into villains and wolves and other creatures that go bump in the night, we tear their throats out.  We tear their throats out.</p>
<p>Thank you very much for having me.  It&#8217;s great to be here.</p>
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		<title>Washington Braces for Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/washington-braces-for-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=washington-braces-for-amnesty</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/washington-braces-for-amnesty/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 17 Nov 2014 05:58:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Republicans weigh counter-strategy options. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pic_giant_111014_SM_Barack-Obama-G.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245357" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/pic_giant_111014_SM_Barack-Obama-G-450x340.jpg" alt="pic_giant_111014_SM_Barack-Obama-G" width="377" height="285" /></a>Republicans in Congress are struggling to put together a strategy to combat President Obama&#8217;s expected unilateral immigration amnesty as the administration moves closer to pulling the amnesty trigger by year&#8217;s end.</p>
<p>Their deliberations came as Vice President Joe Biden <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/11/15/readout-vice-presidents-central-america-events-today"><span style="color: #0433ff;">met</span></a> Saturday with Guatemalan President Otto Perez Molina, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, and Salvadoran President Salvador Sanchez Ceren. One of the topics was how to facilitate even more immigration from those poor Third World countries to the United States.</p>
<p>Biden said next month the U.S. would create what the White House called &#8220;an in-country refugee/parole program in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, to allow certain parents who are lawfully present in the United States to request access to the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program for their children still in one of these three countries.&#8221;</p>
<p>Although fighting President Obama&#8217;s unprecedented threatened power grab by allowing a shutdown of the federal government is a possibility, <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/16/us-usa-immigration-congress-idUSKCN0J00U320141116"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Republican lawmakers acknowledge</span></a> they haven&#8217;t warmed to the idea.</p>
<p>&#8220;It doesn&#8217;t solve the problem,&#8221; Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), chairman of the Senate Republican Conference, said on &#8220;Fox News Sunday.&#8221;</p>
<p>&#8220;But look, we&#8217;re having those discussions&#8230; We&#8217;re going to continue to meet about this. I know the House leaders are talking about, the Senate leaders are talking about it,&#8221; he said. &#8220;Republicans are looking at different options about how best to respond to the president&#8217;s unilateral action, which many people believe is unconstitutional, unlawful action on this particular issue.&#8221;</p>
<p>On ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week&#8221; House Deputy Majority Whip Tom Cole (R-Okla.) was cool to the idea of a shutdown. &#8220;I think the president wants a fight. I think he’s actually trying to bait us into doing some of these extreme things that have been suggested. I don’t think we will.&#8221;</p>
<p>U.S. Rep. Bill Flores (R-Texas) is opposed to a shutdown. &#8220;There’s a wide diversity of thought as to how effective that would be,&#8221; he said. A shutdown &#8220;is not a good solution.&#8221;</p>
<p>One of the less appealing suggestions is to sue Obama. There is a huge problem with legal standing and is it by definition an abdication of the constitutionally-stipulated power of the purse held by Congress. Lawmakers don&#8217;t have to go to court to stop Obama.</p>
<p>Many House conservatives <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/14/us-usa-immigration-republicans-idUSKCN0IY2H320141114"><span style="color: #0433ff;">want Congress to ban</span></a> the funding needed to implement Obama&#8217;s executive amnesty. Others would attempt to keep the agencies implementing the amnesty on a short leash by appropriating funding for them on a short-term basis, theoretically allowing them to withhold immigration funds without shutting down the government.</p>
<p>&#8220;The power of the purse is what&#8217;s given to the House,&#8221; said Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.). &#8220;That’s the check that we have against the White House. To the extent that that&#8217;s the lever we have, that&#8217;s the lever we&#8217;ll use.&#8221;</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&#8217; 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.</p>
<p>On Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning at least 53 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 244 out of 435 seats. In the new year Republicans will control at least 31 state governors&#8217; mansions and at least 68 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska&#8217;s legislature has only one chamber). In at least 23 states Republicans will control the governorship and both houses of the state legislature. Democrats can make the same claim about only 7 states.</p>
<p>Republican leaders have been talking out of both sides of their mouths on the amnesty issue for months.</p>
<p>Acting unilaterally on immigration would be &#8220;a big mistake&#8221; akin to &#8220;waving a red flag in front of a bull,&#8221; McConnell said. Such action &#8220;poisons the well for an opportunity to address a very important domestic issue.&#8221;</p>
<p>But McConnell also said he&#8217;s not willing to use Congress&#8217;s spending power to stop amnesty. Right after the election he seemed adamant that he would not abide a  government shutdown.</p>
<p>House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), whose speakership is likely to be challenged by conservative lawmakers in January, also said unilateral action would &#8220;poison the well.&#8221; Boehner warned Obama, &#8220;when you play with matches, then you take the risk of burning yourself, and he&#8217;s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.</p>
<p>On the weekend Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson <a href="http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/224304-dhs-chief-obama-immigration-order-in-final-stages"><span style="color: #0433ff;">confirmed</span></a> that planning for Obama&#8217;s executive amnesty, along with other changes to the immigration system, is almost complete.</p>
<p>&#8220;We’re in the final stages of developing some executive actions,&#8221; Johnson said. &#8220;We have a broken immigration system. The more I delve into it, the more problems I see.&#8221;</p>
<p>Of course, it is a leftist lie to say that the immigration system is <i>broken</i>. When progressives say the system is broken, they mean it is functioning in a less than optimal manner, failing to capture every single prospective illegal alien welfare case available to wade across the Rio Grande or walk across the nation&#8217;s largely undefended border with Mexico. To them, immigration policy is a taxpayer-subsidized get-out-the-vote scheme for Democrats and the best reform they could imagine would be to abolish America&#8217;s borders altogether.</p>
<p>The system is doing what it was designed to do: Flood America with people who don’t share Americans’ traditional philosophical commitment to the rule of law, limited government, and markets, in order to force changes in society. The radicals’ goal today is to use immigration to subvert the American system, just as it was in the 1960s when the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) shepherded leftist reforms of that era’s immigration laws through Congress.</p>
<p>The current immigration system is congested, overwhelmed, and under attack by the sheer volume of illegal aliens that Democratic policies have been bringing to the U.S. The problem isn&#8217;t so much the legal regime governing immigration but the years of non-enforcement at the border, coupled with Obama&#8217;s brazen attempts to recruit illegals from Latin America, luring them with promises of government largesse such as food stamps.</p>
<p>Most analysts haven&#8217;t noted that if Obama acts unilaterally on immigration, he is likely to do long-term damage to the electoral prospects of the Democratic Party. The voters of Oregon, a longtime Democrat stronghold, <a href="http://apnews.myway.com/article/20141116/us-immigration-oregon-3fe495c4ab.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">delivered a stark warning</span></a> on illegal immigration to the president&#8217;s party in the election a fortnight ago.</p>
<p>Even as Oregonians easily approved Measure 91, a ballot proposition legalizing possession, cultivation, and recreational use of marijuana, and added to Democrat majorities at the state level, they overwhelmingly rejected Measure 88 which would have sustained a state law giving driver&#8217;s licenses to illegal aliens.</p>
<p>The vote to legalize pot was 55.6 percent in favor to 44.4 percent against but the vote to overturn the statute providing driver&#8217;s licenses was a lopsided 66.4 percent to repeal compared to just 33.6 percent to uphold the law. The statute was approved last year without much opposition by state lawmakers and signed into law by Gov. John Kitzhaber, a Democrat.</p>
<p>As of a month ago, the illegal alien lobby <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/10/20/Voters-61-in-Progressive-Libertarian-Oregon-Likely-to-Reject-Driver-s-Licenses-for-Illegals"><span style="color: #0433ff;">had outspent</span></a> the other side by a 10-to-1 margin.</p>
<p>&#8220;It was really the epitome of a grassroots effort,&#8221; Cynthia Kendoll, an activist for the successful &#8220;No&#8221; side told reporters. &#8220;There&#8217;s such a disconnect between what people really want and what&#8217;s happening.&#8221;</p>
<p>Mark Krikorian of the respected nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies said the thumping voters gave Measure 88 was proof that the groups supporting endless accommodations for the illegal aliens invading this country are hopelessly out of touch. &#8220;It really highlights how this issue is not a Republican-liberal issue like, say, taxes and abortion, but an up-down issue, elites versus the public.&#8221;</p>
<p>As if on cue, left-wing elitist Marshall Fitz of the Center for American Progress (CAP), dropped by to smear those who voted against Measure 88 as racist, monobrowed, dimwits.</p>
<p>&#8220;Is there an instinct toward security, hunkering down and against welcoming the other?&#8221; Fitz said. &#8220;That&#8217;s part of human nature. But that doesn&#8217;t mean instincts can&#8217;t be overcome by reason.&#8221;</p>
<p>Decent, patriotic Americans are infuriated by the kind of smugness and condescension exuded by open-borders radicals like Fitz and Obama who glibly equate opposition to illegal immigration to xenophobia and racism. They are intensely angered when they are told by the leftists of the media day in and day out that if you support enforcement of immigration laws you&#8217;re a bad person. The accusation grates because Americans are among the most tolerant and generous in the world, and beyond any doubt the most accepting of immigrants.</p>
<p>People like Fitz and his former boss CAP founder John Podesta, who is now a senior advisor in the Obama White House, seem unable to fathom just how disgusted law-abiding Americans, including legal U.S. immigrants, are by illegal immigration and the coddling and granting of special privileges to illegals.</p>
<p>The issue of illegal immigration isn&#8217;t a powder keg ready to blow both major political parties to bits. It&#8217;s more like a stage coach in an old Western movie loaded with liquid nitroglycerin. One bad bump on the road and &#8212; <i>kaboom</i>! &#8212; those guiding it across the frontier are vaporized. Obama&#8217;s hugely unpopular executive amnesty threatens to render Democrats a spent force for decades. Whether Republicans will be smart enough to stay clear of the Obama-created debacle-in-waiting remains to be seen.</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> <a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf" target="_blank"><b>Subscribe</b></a><strong style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to </strong></p>
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		<title>What Happened?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-happened</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:01:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Looking at the years ahead after the midterm elections. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245228" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1-444x350.jpg" alt="Midterm Elections-1" width="312" height="246" /></a>Just what happened last week on election day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?</p>
<p>The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of &#8220;we the people&#8221; only a distant memory and a painful mockery.</p>
<p>We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama&#8217;s term?</p>
<p>Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country&#8217;s immigration laws unilaterally.</p>
<p>Does that sound like a lame duck president?</p>
<p>On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic&#8217;s dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.</p>
<p>The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.</p>
<p>People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.</p>
<p>You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.</p>
<p>When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.</p>
<p>The president&#8217;s refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas — as was done by Britain and a number of African nations — is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans&#8217; interests for the sake of other people&#8217;s interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.</p>
<p>Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama&#8217;s citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: &#8220;We can&#8217;t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times &#8230; and then just expect that every other country&#8217;s going to say okay.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a similar vein, Obama said, &#8220;we consume more than 20 percent of the world&#8217;s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world&#8217;s oil reserves.&#8221; In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; — at least in the vision of Barack Obama.</p>
<p>That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; and consuming what we produce — while paying for our imports — is not allowed to disturb Obama&#8217;s vision.</p>
<p>Resentment of the prosperous — whether at home or on the world stage — runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don&#8217;t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.</p>
<p>The big question is whether the other branches of government — Congress and the Supreme Court — can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.</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 Dems Lost and It’s Not Their Fault</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-dems-lost-and-its-not-their-fault/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-dems-lost-and-its-not-their-fault</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:57:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The Irresponsible Party can’t take responsibility.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/0719-CPELOSI-05-PELOSI-US-POLITICS-GOVERNMENT-CONGRESS-PELOSI_full_600.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244887" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/0719-CPELOSI-05-PELOSI-US-POLITICS-GOVERNMENT-CONGRESS-PELOSI_full_600-450x344.jpg" alt="0719-CPELOSI-05-PELOSI-US-POLITICS-GOVERNMENT-CONGRESS-PELOSI_full_600" width="357" height="273" /></a>The Democrats lost and no one is resigning. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi intend to stay on even after overseeing the largest political catastrophe for their party in decades. In six years, Pelosi went from a House majority of 257 seats to a current running total in the 180s. Harry Reid took a Senate majority and turned it into a minority and all he has to show for it are a lot of donations from out-of-state law firms.</p>
<p>Not only aren’t Harry and Nancy resigning, but they aren’t even taking any responsibility. Irresponsibility is the Democratic word of the day and the decade. Harry is blaming Barry. Barry is blaming Harry. No one is even paying attention to Nancy ever since she became irrelevant four years ago.</p>
<p>The Democrats don’t just preach irresponsibility and pander to the irresponsible. They are irresponsible.</p>
<p>Democrats often point to Congress’s low approval ratings as proof that the public doesn’t support the Republicans. They neglect to mention that its present low approval rating of 14 matches its low point of 14 under Pelosi and Reid’s Democratic majority. The last time Congress had an approval rating above 40, there were Republican majorities in the House and Senate.</p>
<p>It isn’t Republican obstructionism that keeps the approval ratings low. That’s just the narrative that the real Democratic obstructionists used once they lost their majority in order to give Obama sanction for unilateral rule. Now Senate and House Democrats have paid the price for the damage that they inflicted on their party by allowing Obama’s unilateral and incoherent policymaking to define them.</p>
<p>Obama “won” by locking in an opposition Congress that leaves him as the only significant elected member of his party. He has achieved what he sought all along by reducing his entire party to him. By completely isolating himself politically, Obama has eliminated any dissent from within his own party.</p>
<p>He has become a “Party of One.”</p>
<p>It’s not much of a victory for any politician who isn’t a wannabe dictator or a hopeless narcissist.</p>
<p>Like his congressional leaders, Obama refuses to concede that the election had anything to do with him, despite claiming beforehand that it was all about his policies. During the election, his inner narcissist wanted to make the election about him, even though his own party begged him not to.</p>
<p>But now that the election is lost, he isn’t responsible and is blaming the “map” which is his way of saying that he didn’t lose the game. The game was unfair.</p>
<p>The most powerful man in the world is making the same excuse as a little boy losing at Monopoly. But he has a point. There was no way to win on his terms by maximizing the turnout of the base with ugly polarizing identity politics. The closest thing to that effort came from “Senator Uterus” and his off-putting “War on Women” rhetoric and it failed. If Obama can’t win with identity politics, then the election is unfair… and the only way to fix it is with illegal alien amnesty for demographic change.</p>
<p>Illegal alien amnesty is the adult political equivalent of overturning the board of the United States, tossing all the American voters on the floor, and remaking the country with new majorities.</p>
<p>That way identity politics will always be a winning move.</p>
<p>That’s why Obama isn’t offering any actual compromises. Instead he came out and threatened executive action on illegal alien amnesty. Then he offered the possibility that he might consider giving the Republicans some of what they want if they give him everything he wants. That’s not how he negotiates with Iran, but he obviously has warmer feelings for the Ayatollahs than he does for the Republican Party.</p>
<p>It’s not as if there are any adults in the room.</p>
<p>Joe Biden prepped for the election by getting blonde hair plugs so he can seem younger than Hillary when he runs against her. He’s polling at 21% among Dems 18 to 29, the only age group in whose support for Hillary he has managed to make a serious dent.  Biden may be four years older than Hillary, but with enough caps, implants and procedures, he can appear young enough for a mid-life crisis.</p>
<p>Biden predicted that the Dems would hold the Senate. Had he spent less time looking in the mirror and styling the new scalp that he had gotten stapled to his skull and more time looking at the polls, he might have had been able to prepare his party for the actual outcome.</p>
<p>On the party side, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz will launch a review to see what went wrong. It’s a safe bet that the thing that went wrong won’t involve her. But maybe Debbie should have paid more attention to what the voters thought of her party instead of trying to find new arguments to get it to pay for her dresses.</p>
<p>At least Biden wasn’t sending the DNC the bill for his hair plugs. Or so we hope.</p>
<p>Barry and Harry, Nancy and Debbie have one real skill between them and that’s raising money. All of them are good at parting billionaires from big checks in exchange for specified and unspecified favors. None of them are any good at actually running things or at accepting responsibility when they go wrong.</p>
<p>And then there are the Clintons, the 2016 frontrunners whose fundraising skills are unparalleled, but who couldn’t stop Arkansas or West Virginia from going GOP and whose aggressive campaign strategy fizzled. Like Harry and Nancy, Hillary isn’t about to step back. Like Obama, she isn’t accepting responsibility for the defeat; instead her backers say she’ll benefit from a Republican House and Senate.</p>
<p>It’s not bad enough that the Dems torched their own legislative majority to make it easier for Obama to blame Republicans, but now they’re celebrating losing the Senate because that makes it even easier for Hillary Clinton to blame Republicans.</p>
<p>And if Hillary loses in 2016, think how easy it will be for the Dems to finally be able to blame Republicans for everything.</p>
<p>This isn’t how serious political leaders act. This is how children behave.</p>
<p>The winning Dem strategy is to have the most power and the least responsibility. They want to rule unilaterally and blame the Republicans for everything that goes wrong. They want to nuke the filibuster, the power of the legislature and then claim that their man is acting like a dictator because of the GOP.</p>
<p>They need the Republican Party as a scapegoat for their policymaking failures, but they can’t blame it for their political failures. That’s too much like admitting defeat.</p>
<p>If the Democrats didn’t lose because the Republicans offered a compelling vision or because of their own incompetence, then why did they lose? The only remaining excuse is racism. The Democrats have taught a chunk of their base to blame their own failures on racism. Now they want to do the same.</p>
<p>Harry and Barry, Nancy and Debbie can stay in their old jobs and ride their party off the cliff. And it won’t be their fault. No one will have to be fired. No policies will have to be rethought.</p>
<p>It will be because the map was unfair. Because America is racist. Because the dog ate their homework and the Koch Brothers unfairly ran the same attack ads that they had been running and it was raining outside and some states had Voter ID and there wasn’t enough early voting and the lines were too long and their shoelaces broke and everything out of their control conspired unfairly to make them lose.</p>
<p>The only thing that can save the Dems is responsibility. But after so many years of preaching irresponsibility, the irresponsible party has poisoned itself with its own product.</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: Give Back the Senate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:54:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244889</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats, and now that they have, it&#8217;s time to give it back to its rightful owners&#8230;</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Join Bill Whittle in his latest Firewall, where he shows how destructive the Progressive Amendments have been &#8212; especially the Seventeenth Amendment. Find out why it matters! See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DUOGdBgeB14" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody, I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats. And now that they have, it’s time to give it back. Not to the Democrats. And not even to we, the people. No, now that Republicans have the Senate, it would be nice if actual conservatives lead the fight to return the Senate to its rightful owners.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">See these ancient old prudes? These are Progressives. Yes, they were ancient old prudes even back in the Progressive era, around the turn of the last century. Now modern Progressives are a little better exfoliated and botoxed, of course, but they have in common with these proto-Progressives that same fiery look in the eye — which is that genetic defect of getting all excited about telling other people what to do — for their own good, naturally.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((WINK))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Progressive Era gave us the Progressive Amendments to the Constitution — which, looked at individually, show just how envious Progressives are, how prudish they are, and how tyrannical they are.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The 16th Amendment gave us the income tax, which, when you think about it, doesn’t even penalize the rich — which was, of course their goal then as it is today. No, taking income penalizes hard work, and the harder you work, the more you get penalized. So next time you get your paycheck, take a look at the raw amount before withholdings. Thank the Progressives for what you don’t take home.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Eighteenth Amendment — Prohibition — was the first time the Constitution was changed to actually take away a freedom: the freedom to get lit so that you didn’t have to listen to these Progressive harpies whine and complain day and night. But this freedom — the God-given freedom to have beer at the end of a hard day — was a little too precious, a little too near-and-dear to give up, so the eighteenth amendment was repealed by the twenty first Amendment. And don’t forget that: freedom can come back sometimes — if you miss it enough.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the real damage was done by the Seventeenth Amendment, changing Article one, section three of the Constitution, which stated that U.S. Senators were to be elected by the legislatures of each state. The Seventeenth Amendment changed that to make US Senators electable by the people of the state.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Democracy! Now the people have a voice in Washington, not just the rich fat cats in the state legislatures! Hooray for democracy! And that is how Progressives steal freedom: they do it in the name of democracy. They’re very good at it now: they ought to be — they’ve had a lot of practice.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, first, those fat cats in the legislatures were in fact elected by the people of their state, so there’s some democracy for you right there.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the main problem is, the people already had a voice in Washington: it’s called the House of Representatives. They’re elected directly by the people, every two years, and the more people a state has, the more representatives that state has in the House.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was never intended to represent the people. The senate was supposed to represent the states: that’s why Wyoming, with roughly five hundred thousand people, has two senators, and California, with roughly seventy-six times as many people — also has two senators.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Seventeenth Amendment made the Senate utterly redundant. Now it’s kind of a retirement home for lifers; the House of Lords with six year terms that get further and further away from the people that elected them and who sit in a sort of royal court being serenaded by special interest groups in DC steakhouses.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was designed to protect the power of the states because the more power the states have, the less power the Federal government has — and vice versa. But progressives can’t leave people alone, you see? They have to take their income, and tell them whether they can drink or not, or what kind of health insurance they have to buy, or how big a soda they can have, and what kind of car to drive and all the rest. And in order to do that, they need the coercive power of central authority — which meant destruction of the power of the states. After all, you can’t force people not to gamble, drink, or whore around if they can just move to Nevada!</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To paraphrase H.L Menken, that’s the Progressive nightmare: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may escape being told what to do.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Our founders weren’t the idiots we have in Washington today. They knew what kind of people go into politics — control-freak weenies, that’s what kind — and they set up legal and structural barriers to put limits on just how much power jug-eared narcissists, sleazy used-car salesmen and dimwitted botoxed harpies can actually accumulate. We need to get that power back to the states, so that if you don’t like the way they roll in Tulsa you can move to San Francisco and visa versa.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">We repealed the Eighteenth Amendment — we can repeal the Seventeenth as well, because only the states are powerful enough to stop this Federal government from enforcing that Progressive utopia: a country where anything that is not forbidden is mandatory.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So kick back, relax, have a drink and think it over.</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>Obama&#8217;s Amnesty By Blackmail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/obamas-amnesty-by-blackmail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-amnesty-by-blackmail</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:34:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[The president embraces the "by any means necessary" strategy for his radical agenda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obamapng.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244794" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obamapng-450x337.png" alt="Obamapng" width="373" height="279" /></a>Ignoring voters&#8217; historic coast-to-coast repudiation of his disastrous policies this week, President Obama is now threatening to move forward unilaterally with a massive immigration amnesty by the end of the year.</p>
<p>At his first post-election press conference Wednesday, instead of embracing conciliation as a responsible adult might do, Obama, the petulant Chicagoland thug, pulled a switchblade. Obama tried to blackmail newly emboldened congressional Republicans, vowing to enact amnesty through executive fiat if Congress doesn&#8217;t play ball.</p>
<p>Republicans&#8217; newly won control of the Senate and enhanced majority in the House of Representatives means the Republicans who just gave Obama&#8217;s Democratic allies a savage electoral beat-down are now in a better position to give Obama the unprecedented immigration amnesty he wants. As the president said,</p>
<blockquote><p>So before the end of the year, we&#8217;re going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system &#8230; at the same time, I’ll be reaching out to both [incoming Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, [House Speaker] John Boehner, and other Republican as well as Democratic leaders to find out how it is that they want to proceed. And if they want to get a bill done &#8212; whether it’s during the [approaching] lame duck [session of Congress] or next year &#8212; I&#8217;m eager to see what they have to offer.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although McConnell and Boehner have been all over the map on immigration amnesty in recent months, since the election they have said they will not be pushed around by the president on the issue of amnesty.</p>
<p>Acting unilaterally on immigration would be &#8220;a big mistake&#8221; akin to &#8220;waving a red flag in front of a bull,&#8221; McConnell said. Such action &#8220;poisons the well for an opportunity to address a very important domestic issue.&#8221;</p>
<p>Boehner also said unilateral action would &#8220;poison the well.&#8221; The House Speaker warned Obama, &#8220;when you play with matches, then you take the risk of burning yourself, and he&#8217;s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.&#8221;</p>
<p>Contrary to what Obama said, there are virtually no lawful actions Obama can take on amnesty, but the president has always viewed laws as speed bumps on the road to social justice. The wily former part-time adjunct constitutional law lecturer promised to ignore the separation of powers prescribed by the U.S. Constitution and implement Third World-style government-by-decree. He said:</p>
<blockquote><p>But what I’m not going to do is just wait. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve shown a lot of patience and have tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible, and I’m going to keep on doing so. But in the meantime, let’s figure out what we can do lawfully through executive actions to improve the functioning of the existing system.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama, a master of rhetorical tricks, hasn&#8217;t actually been patient. He already illegally granted an amnesty benefiting certain categories of illegal aliens. A recently uncovered government procurement order suggests his administration may be planning to issue 34 million work visas and green cards without the required legal authorization from Americans&#8217; elected representatives in Congress.</p>
<p>As for reaching out to the GOP, Obama is lying as usual. He has no interest in working with congressional Republicans. He has only slightly more interest in working with congressional Democrats. He&#8217;s a megalomaniacal, authoritarian leader who is only comfortable when he&#8217;s calling the shots.</p>
<p>Reporter Jon Karl embarrassed Obama during the presser by pointing out that &#8220;Mitch McConnell has been the Republican Leader for six years, as long as you’ve been President.&#8221; Karl continued, &#8220;But his office tells me that he has only met with you one-on-one once or twice during that entire six-year period.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama didn&#8217;t acknowledge that fact and awkwardly segued into a discussion of sharing some Kentucky bourbon with Sen. McConnell even though he admitted he didn&#8217;t know if McConnell drinks bourbon.</p>
<p>Parts of Obama&#8217;s strange prepared statement were laced with practiced platitudes as the nation&#8217;s Chief Executive dismissed the election results as irrelevant:</p>
<blockquote><p>Still, as president, I have a unique responsibility to try and make this town work. So, to everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too. All of us have to give more Americans a reason to feel like the ground is stable beneath their feet, that the future is secure, that there’s a path for young people to succeed, and that folks here in Washington are concerned about them. So I plan on spending every moment of the next two-plus years doing my job the best I can to keep this country safe and to make sure that more Americans share in its prosperity.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course people who do not vote can&#8217;t actually be called &#8220;voters,&#8221; but thinking has never been the strong suit of this man who thinks &#8220;Austrian&#8221; is a language and who celebrates &#8220;Cinco de Quatro.&#8221; In Obama&#8217;s disordered mind he didn&#8217;t really lose, even though he proudly boasted mere weeks ago that the election would be seen as a referendum on his administration. “I’m not on the ballot this fall &#8230; but make no mistake, these policies [of mine] are on the ballot — every single one of them,” he said on the campaign trail.</p>
<p>Obama doesn&#8217;t seem to accept the new Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as politically legitimate, as J. Christian Adams <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/11/06/decoding-the-president-listening-to-two-thirds-who-didnt-vote/">argues</a>. This contempt for Americans who don&#8217;t toe the leftist line is part of the Left&#8217;s deep-seated hatred of the American system of governance. Adams explains:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is a favorite fable among far-left groups like the Advancement Project and Demos that more voters is always good and fewer voters is always bad. They firmly believe that the path to a progressive policy wonderland is to get everyone with a heartbeat to vote.  This is part of an even older fable that the &#8216;system&#8217; robs the underclass of power through laws, rules, racist constructs and oppressive societal structures – like having to make the effort to register to vote, for example.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s all the usual blatherskite we&#8217;ve come to expect from Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizers. If they win, they shout to the heavens that they&#8217;ve secured a thunderous mandate from We The People; if they don&#8217;t win, they try to discredit the results.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s quite a contrast from the way Obama acts when his side wins.</p>
<p>Days after Obama&#8217;s first inauguration he brazenly flaunted his new political legitimacy in a closed-door meeting with congressional leaders. Republicans would have to do his bidding because, as he baldly stated, &#8220;I won.&#8221;</p>
<p>Republicans still have to submit to the Dear Leader because he claims to have a mandate from the whole of the American people.</p>
<p>As his approval ratings continue to plummet Obama seems oblivious to the contempt that normal, patriotic Americans feel for him as they lose their jobs and their health care because of his socialist meddling. And he cannot seem to fathom the brutal, historic thrashing his party received in congressional elections on Tuesday.</p>
<p>On Tuesday the GOP flipped control of the Senate, winning at least 52 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 242 seats. Republicans captured governors&#8217; mansions in &#8211;of all places&#8211; Democrat-dominated Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland, and will control at least 66 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska&#8217;s legislature has only one chamber).</p>
<p>Meanwhile, President Obama is scheduled to meet today at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss legislative matters, including amnesty.</p>
<p>But if Obama really believes he has the power to enact an amnesty by presidential decree, why bother having such a meeting? The president&#8217;s phone and pen ought to suffice to rewrite immigration laws.</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 Election Was Fun But Don’t Get Too Happy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/the-election-was-fun-but-dont-get-too-happy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-election-was-fun-but-dont-get-too-happy</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:58:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244637</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The GOP has two years to give voters a real reason to vote for it -- before Dems regroup in 2016. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/election.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244639" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/election-450x346.png" alt="election" width="351" height="270" /></a>Eighteen years ago I met a Democratic consultant who said to me, “David, your side doesn’t give people a reason to vote for them. Republicans only win when Democrats screw up big time.” This year Democrats screwed up big time (along with many pollsters), and Republicans won big time. There’s a lot of good news here, especially the Republican gubernatorial victories in Democratic states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and battleground states like Ohio and Florida. Perhaps the most inexplicable good news of the day was the fact that Sandra Fluke got trounced by a Republican in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. No wonder Democrats are weaker now than at any time since the 1920s.</p>
<p>Looking over this Democratic wreckage, Republican doomsayers should take note. The American people are not “low information” dummies, who will believe anything Democrats tell them. Abe Lincoln had it right: “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Republicans should also note that despite all the people on food stamps and all of the voters getting free stuff – 47% by Mitt Romney’s misguided count – they were still independent and savvy enough to return Scott Walker in Wisconsin, to elect Tim Cotton in Arkansas, and to defeat Sandra Fluke in Santa Monica. Finally, Democrats’ racist appeals to minority voters don’t seem to be working as well as they used to. All these Republican whines were in fact excuses for poorly run political campaigns. Normally, you have to defeat your opponents. You can’t count on them to defeat themselves. Normally.</p>
<p>And this raises the big question, which is 2016. Democrats, when they are not over reaching and claiming against all evidence that the party of Joni Ernst and Shelley Moore Capito and Nikki Haley is conducting a war against women, are formidable political opponents. When they regroup after this defeat they will not be so easy beat in 2016. Unless…</p>
<p>Unless Obama, ideologue that he is, determines to stay the course, grants amnesty to 11 million illegals, continues to use fly swatters to combat ISIS, alternately stonewalls and heads for the golf course in the face of major crises, and vetoes Republican bills to restore the economy. There is always this possibility but don’t count on it. And in the absence of such screw-ups, Republicans will need to get their act together and give voters something to vote <i>for</i>.</p>
<p>Here’s an idea. What Republicans should offer voters is a national security program that protects them, and individual freedom. Freedom to choose their healthcare; freedom to run their businesses in an environment where government is not looking over their shoulders at every turn and stifling their incentives to create jobs; freedom to go about their lives without fear of terrorist attacks; freedom to shape their country and its culture within secure borders; freedom from electoral fraud, and IRS intrusion designed to turn their country into a one-party state.</p>
<p>These are not only policy preferences; they are moral themes – calls to action &#8211; that sum up what the Republican Party is about.</p>
<p><em>David Horowitz is the author of the recently published book </em>Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan For Defeating The Left<em> (Regnery 2014).</em></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>Ten Reasons Why I Am No Longer a Leftist</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/danusha-v-goska/ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ten-reasons-why-i-am-no-longer-a-leftist</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:06:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Danusha V. Goska]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[An account of the milestones in my journey out of the political faith.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Break-Chains.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244528" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Break-Chains-450x337.jpg" alt="Break-Chains" width="310" height="232" /></a><strong>Reprinted from <a href="www.americanthinker.com">The American Thinker</a>.</strong></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">How far left was I? So far left my beloved uncle was a card-carrying member of the Communist Party in a Communist country. When I returned to his Slovak village to buy him a mass card, the priest refused to sell me one. So far left that a self-identified terrorist proposed marriage to me. So far left I was a two-time Peace Corps volunteer and I have a degree from UC Berkeley. So far left that my Teamster mother used to tell anyone who would listen that she voted for Gus Hall, Communist Party chairman, for president. I wore a button saying &#8220;Eat the Rich.&#8221; To me it wasn&#8217;t a metaphor.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I voted Republican in the last presidential election.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Below are the top ten reasons I am no longer a leftist. This is not a rigorous comparison of theories. This list is idiosyncratic, impressionistic, and intuitive. It&#8217;s an accounting of the milestones on my herky-jerky journey.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>10) Huffiness</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In the late 1990s I was reading <em>Anatomy of the Spirit</em>, a then recent bestseller by Caroline Myss.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Myss described having lunch with a woman named Mary. A man approached Mary and asked her if she were free to do a favor for him on June 8th. No, Mary replied, I absolutely cannot do anything on June 8th because June 8th is my incest survivors&#8217; meeting and we never let each other down! They have suffered so much already! I would never betray incest survivors!</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Myss was flabbergasted. Mary could have simply said &#8220;Yes&#8221; or &#8220;No.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Reading this anecdote, I felt that I was confronting the signature essence of my social life among leftists. We rushed to cast everyone in one of three roles: victim, victimizer, or champion of the oppressed. We lived our lives in a constant state of outraged indignation. I did not want to live that way anymore. I wanted to cultivate a disposition of gratitude. I wanted to see others, not as victims or victimizers, but as potential friends, as loved creations of God. I wanted to understand the point of view of people with whom I disagreed without immediately demonizing them as enemy oppressors.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I recently attended a training session for professors on a college campus. The presenter was a new hire in a tenure-track position. He opened his talk by telling us that he had received an invitation to share a festive meal with the president of the university. I found this to be an enviable occurrence and I did not understand why he appeared dramatically aggrieved. The invitation had been addressed to &#8220;Mr. and Mrs. X.&#8221; Professor X was a bachelor. He felt slighted. Perhaps the person who had addressed his envelope had disrespected him because he is a member of a minority group.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Rolling his eyes, Prof. X went on to say that he was wary of accepting a position on this lowly commuter campus, with its working-class student body. The disconnect between leftists&#8217; announced value of championing the poor and the leftist practice of expressing snobbery for them stung me. Already vulnerable students would be taught by a professor who regarded association with them as a burden, a failure, and a stigma.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Barack Obama is president. Kim and Kanye and Brad and Angelina are members of multiracial households. One might think that professors finally have cause to teach their students to be proud of America for overcoming racism. Not so fast, Professor X warned.  His talk was on microaggression, defined as slights that prove that America is still racist, sexist, homophobic, and ableist, that is, discriminatory against handicapped people.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Professor X projected a series of photographs onto a large screen. In one, commuters in business suits, carrying briefcases, mounted a flight of stairs. This photo was an act of microaggression. After all, Professor X reminded us, handicapped people can&#8217;t climb stairs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I appreciate Professor X&#8217;s desire to champion the downtrodden, but identifying a photograph of commuters on stairs as an act of microaggression and evidence that America is still an oppressive hegemon struck me as someone going out of his way to live his life in a state of high dudgeon. On the other hand, Prof. X could have chosen to speak of his own working-class students with more respect.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Yes, there is a time and a place when it is absolutely necessary for a person to cultivate awareness of his own pain, or of others&#8217; pain. Doctors instruct patients to do this &#8212; &#8220;Locate the pain exactly; calculate where the pain falls on a scale of one to ten; assess whether the pain is sharp, dull, fleeting, or constant.&#8221; But doctors do this for a reason. They want the patient to heal, and to move beyond the pain. In the left, I found a desire to be in pain constantly, so as always to have something to protest, from one&#8217;s history of incest to the inability of handicapped people to mount flights of stairs.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>9) Selective Outrage</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I was a graduate student. Female genital mutilation came up in class. I stated, without ornamentation, that it is wrong.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A fellow graduate student, one who was fully funded and is now a comfortably tenured professor, sneered at me. &#8220;You are so intolerant. Clitoredectomy is just another culture&#8217;s rite of passage. You Catholics have confirmation.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">When Mitt Romney was the 2012 Republican presidential candidate, he mentioned that, as Massachusetts governor, he proactively sought out female candidates for top jobs. He had, he said, &#8220;binders full of women.&#8221; He meant, of course, that he stored resumes of promising female job candidates in three-ring binders.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Op-ed pieces, Jon Stewart&#8217;s &#8220;Daily Show,&#8221; Twitter, Facebook, and Amazon posts erupted in a feeding frenzy, savaging Romney and the Republican Party for their &#8220;war on women.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I was an active leftist for decades. I never witnessed significant leftist outrage over clitoredectomy, child marriage, honor killing, sharia-inspired rape laws, stoning, or acid attacks. Nothing. Zip. Crickets. I&#8217;m not saying that that outrage does not exist. I&#8217;m saying I never saw it.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left&#8217;s selective outrage convinced me that much canonical, left-wing feminism is not so much support for women, as it is a protest against Western, heterosexual men. It&#8217;s an &#8220;I hate&#8221; phenomenon, rather than an &#8220;I love&#8221; phenomenon.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-family: times new roman,times,serif;"><strong>8.) It&#8217;s the thought that counts</strong></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">My favorite bumper sticker in ultra-liberal Berkeley, California: &#8220;Think Globally; Screw up Locally.&#8221; In other words, &#8220;Love Humanity but Hate People.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It was past midnight, back in the 1980s, in Kathmandu, Nepal. A group of Peace Corps volunteers were drinking moonshine at the Momo Cave. A pretty girl with long blond hair took out her guitar and sang these lyrics, which I remember by heart from that night:</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;If you want your dream to be,</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Build it slow and surely.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Small beginnings greater ends.</span></span></p>
<p style="margin-left: 40px;"><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Heartfelt work grows purely.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I just googled these lyrics, thirty years later, and discovered that they are Donovan&#8217;s San Damiano song, inspired by the life of St. Francis.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Listening to this song that night in the Momo Cave, I thought, that&#8217;s what we leftists do wrong. That&#8217;s what we&#8217;ve got to get right.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">We focused so hard on our good intentions. Before our deployment overseas, Peace Corps vetted us for our idealism and &#8220;tolerance,&#8221; not for our competence or accomplishments. We all wanted to save the world. What depressingly little we did accomplish was often erased with the next drought, landslide, or insurrection.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Peace Corps did not focus on the &#8220;small beginnings&#8221; necessary to accomplish its grandiose goals. Schools rarely ran, girls and low caste children did not attend, and widespread corruption guaranteed that all students received passing grades. Those students who did learn had no jobs where they could apply their skills, and if they rose above their station, the hereditary big men would sabotage them. Thanks to cultural relativism, we were forbidden to object to rampant sexism or the caste system. &#8220;Only intolerant oppressors judge others&#8217; cultures.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I volunteered with the Sisters of Charity. For them, I pumped cold water from a well and washed lice out of homeless people&#8217;s clothing. The sisters did not want to save the world. Someone already had. The sisters focused on the small things, as their founder, Mother Teresa, advised, &#8220;Don&#8217;t look for big things, just do small things with great love.&#8221; Delousing homeless people&#8217;s clothing was one of my few concrete accomplishments.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Back in 1975, after Hillary Rodham had followed Bill Clinton to Arkansas, she helped create the state&#8217;s first rape crisis hotline. She had her eye on the big picture. What was Hillary like in her one-on-one encounters?</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary served as the attorney to a 41-year-old, one of two men accused of raping a 12-year-old girl. The girl, a virgin before the assault, was in a coma for five days afterward. She was injured so badly she was told she&#8217;d never have children. In 2014, she is 52 years old, and she has never had children, nor has she married. She reports that she was afraid of men after the rape.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A taped interview with Clinton has recently emerged; on it Clinton makes clear that she thought her client was guilty, and she chuckles when reporting that she was able to set him free.  In a recent interview, the victim said that Hillary Clinton &#8220;took me through Hell&#8221; and &#8220;lied like a dog.&#8221; &#8220;I think she wants to be a role model… but I don’t think she’s a role model at all,&#8221; the woman said. &#8220;If she had have been, she would have helped me at the time, being a 12-year-old girl who was raped by two guys.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary had her eye on the all-caps resume bullet point: FOUNDS RAPE HOTLINE.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Hillary&#8217;s chuckles when reminiscing about her legal victory suggest that, in her assessment, her contribution to the ruination of the life of a rape victim is of relatively negligible import.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>7) Leftists hate my people</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I&#8217;m a working-class Bohunk. A hundred years ago, leftists loved us. We worked lousy jobs, company thugs shot us when we went on strike, and leftists saw our discontent as fuel for their fire.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Karl Marx promised the workers&#8217; paradise through an inevitable revolution of the proletariat. The proletariat is an industrial working class &#8212; think blue-collar people working in mines, mills, and factories: exactly what immigrants like my parents were doing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Polish-Americans participated significantly in a great victory, Flint, Michigan&#8217;s 1937 sit-down strike. Italian-Americans produced Sacco and Vanzetti. Gus Hall was a son of Finnish immigrants.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In the end, though, we didn&#8217;t show up for the Marxist happily ever after. We believed in God and we were often devout Catholics. Leftists wanted us to slough off our ethnic identities and join in the international proletarian brotherhood &#8212; &#8220;Workers of the world, unite!&#8221; But we clung to ethnic distinctiveness. Future generations lost their ancestral ties, but they didn&#8217;t adopt the IWW flag; they flew the stars and stripes. &#8220;Property is theft&#8221; is a communist motto, but no one is more house-proud than a first generation Pole who has escaped landless peasantry and secured his suburban nest.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Leftists felt that we jilted them at the altar. Leftists turned on us. This isn&#8217;t just ancient history. In 2004, <em>What&#8217;s the Matter with Kansas?</em> spent eighteen weeks on the bestseller lists. The premise of the book: working people are too stupid to know what&#8217;s good for them, and so they vote conservative when they should be voting left. In England, the book was titled, <em>What&#8217;s the Matter with America?</em></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">We became the left&#8217;s boogeyman: Joe Six-pack, Joe Hardhat. Though we&#8217;d been in the U.S. for a few short decades when the demonization began, leftists, in the academy, in media, and in casual speech, blamed working-class ethnics for American crimes, including racism and the &#8220;imperialist&#8221; war in Vietnam. See films like <em>The Deer Hunter</em>. Watch Archie Bunker on &#8220;All in the Family.&#8221; Listen to a few of the Polack jokes that elitists pelted me with whenever I introduced myself at UC Berkeley.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Leftists freely label poor whites as &#8220;redneck,&#8221; &#8220;white trash,&#8221; &#8220;trailer trash,&#8221; and &#8220;hillbilly.&#8221; At the same time that leftists toss around these racist and classist slurs, they are so sanctimonious they forbid anyone to pronounce the N word when reading Mark Twain aloud. President Bill Clinton&#8217;s advisor James Carville succinctly summed up leftist contempt for poor whites in his memorable quote, &#8220;Drag a hundred-dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you&#8217;ll find.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left&#8217;s visceral hatred of poor whites overflowed like a broken sewer when John McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate in 2008. It would be impossible, and disturbing, to attempt to identify the single most offensive comment that leftists lobbed at Palin. One can report that attacks on Palin were so egregious that leftists themselves publicly begged that they cease; after all, they gave the left a bad name. The Reclusive Leftist blogged in 2009 that it was a &#8220;major shock&#8221; to discover &#8220;the extent to which so many self-described liberals actually despise working people.&#8221; The Reclusive Leftist focuses on <em>Vanity Fair </em>journalist Henry Rollins. Rollins recommends that leftists &#8220;hate-fuck conservative women&#8221; and denounces Palin as a &#8220;small town hickoid&#8221; who can be bought off with a coupon to a meal at a chain restaurant.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Smearing us is not enough. Liberal policies sabotage us. Affirmative action benefits recipients by color, not by income. Even this limited focus fails. In his 2004 Yale University Press study, Thomas Sowell insists that affirmative action helps only wealthier African Americans. Poor blacks do not benefit. In 2009, Princeton sociologists Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford demonstrated that poor, white Christians are underrepresented on elite college campuses. Leftists add insult to injury. A blue-collar white kid, who feels lost and friendless on the alien terrain of a university campus, a campus he has to leave immediately after class so he can get to his fulltime job at MacDonald&#8217;s, must accept that he is a recipient of &#8220;white privilege&#8221; – if he wants to get good grades in mandatory classes on racism.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">The left is still looking for its proletariat. It supports mass immigration for this reason. Harvard&#8217;s George Borjas, himself a Cuban immigrant, has been called &#8220;America’s leading immigration economist.&#8221; Borjas points out that mass immigration from Latin America has sabotaged America&#8217;s working poor.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It&#8217;s more than a little bit weird that leftists, who describe themselves as the voice of the worker, select workers as their hated other of choice, and targets of their failed social engineering.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>6) I believe in God.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Read Marx and discover a mythology that is irreconcilable with any other narrative, including the Bible. Hang out in leftist internet environments, and you will discover a toxic bath of irrational hatred for the Judeo-Christian tradition. You will discover an alternate vocabulary in which Jesus is a &#8220;dead Jew on a stick&#8221; or a &#8220;zombie&#8221; and any belief is an arbitrary sham, the equivalent of a recently invented &#8220;flying spaghetti monster.&#8221; You will discover historical revisionism that posits Nazism as a Christian denomination. You will discover a rejection of the Judeo-Christian foundation of Western Civilization and American concepts of individual rights and law. You will discover a nihilist void, the kind of vacuum of meaning that nature abhors and that, all too often, history fills with the worst totalitarian nightmares, the rough beast that slouches toward Bethlehem.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>5 &amp; 4) Straw men and &#8220;In order to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.&#8221;</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">It astounds me now to reflect on it, but never, in all my years of leftist activism, did I ever hear anyone articulate accurately the position of anyone to our right. In fact, I did not even know those positions when I was a leftist.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Truth is that which serves the party.&#8221; The capital-R revolution was such a good, it could eliminate all that was bad, that manipulating facts was not even a venial sin; it was a good. If you want to make an omelet, you have to break a few eggs. One of those eggs was objective truth.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Ron Kuby is a left-wing radio talk show host on New York&#8217;s WABC. He plays the straw man card hourly. If someone phones in to question affirmative action – shouldn&#8217;t such programs benefit recipients by income, rather than by skin color? – Kuby opens the fire hydrant. He is shrill. He is bombastic. He accuses the caller of being a member of the KKK. He paints graphic word pictures of the horrors of lynching and the death of Emmett Till and asks, &#8220;And <em>you</em> support <em>that</em>?&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Well of course THE CALLER did not support <em>that</em>, but it is easier to orchestrate a mob in a familiar rendition of righteous rage against a sensationalized straw man than it is to produce a reasoned argument against a reasonable opponent.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">On June 16, 2014, Washington <em>Post</em> columnist Dana Milbank published a column alleging that a peaceful Muslim was nearly verbally lynched by violent Islamophobes at a Heritage Foundation-hosted panel. What Milbank described was despicable. Unfortunately for Milbank and the Washington<em> Post</em>&#8216;s credibility, someone filmed the event and posted the film on YouTube. Panel discussants, including Frank Gaffney and Brigitte Gabriel, made important points in a courteous manner. Saba Ahmed, the peaceful Muslim, is a &#8220;family friend&#8221; of a bombing plotter who expressed a specific desire to murder children. It soon became clear that Milbank was, as one blogger put it, &#8220;making stuff up.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Milbank slanders anyone who might attempt analysis of jihad, a force that is currently cited in the murder of innocents &#8212; including Muslims &#8212; from Nigeria to the Philippines. The leftist strategy of slandering those who speak uncomfortable facts suppresses discourse and has a devastating impact on confrontations with truth in journalism and on college campuses.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>2 &amp; 3) It doesn&#8217;t work.  Other approaches work better</strong>.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I went to hear David Horowitz speak in 2004. My intention was to heckle him. Horowitz said something that interrupted my flow of thought. He pointed out that Camden, Paterson, and Newark had decades of Democratic leadership.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Ouch.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I grew up among &#8220;Greatest Generation&#8221; Americans who had helped build these cities. One older woman told me, &#8220;As soon as I got my weekly paycheck, I rushed to Main Ave in Paterson, and my entire paycheck ended up on my back, in a new outfit.&#8221; In the 1950s and 60s, my parents and my friends&#8217; parents fled deadly violence in Newark and Paterson.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Within a few short decades, Paterson, Camden, and Newark devolved into unlivable slums, with shooting deaths, drug deals, and garbage-strewn streets. The pain that New Jerseyans express about these failed cities is our state&#8217;s open wound.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I live in Paterson. I teach its young. My students are hogtied by ignorance. I find myself speaking to young people born in the U.S. in a truncated pidgin I would use with a train station chai wallah in Calcutta.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Many of my students lack awareness of a lot more than vocabulary. They don&#8217;t know about believing in themselves, or stick-to-itiveness. They don&#8217;t realize that the people who exercise power over them have faced and overcome obstacles. I know they don&#8217;t know these things because they tell me. One student confessed that when she realized that one of her teachers had overcome setbacks it changed her own life.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">My students do know &#8212; because they have been taught this &#8212; that America is run by all-powerful racists who will never let them win. My students know &#8212; because they have been drilled in this &#8212; that the only way they can get ahead is to locate and cultivate those few white liberals who will pity them and scatter crumbs on their supplicant, bowed heads and into their outstretched palms. My students have learned to focus on the worst thing that ever happened to them, assume that it happened because America is unjust, and to recite that story, dirge-like, to whomever is in charge, from the welfare board to college professors, and to await receipt of largesse.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">As Shelby Steele so brilliantly points out in his book <em>White Guilt</em>, the star of the sob story my students tell in exchange for favors is very much not the black aid recipient. The star of this story, still, just as before the Civil Rights Movement that was meant to change who got to take the lead in American productions, was the white man. The generous white liberal still gets top billing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In Dominque La Pierre&#8217;s 1985 novel <em>City of Joy</em>, a young American doctor, Max Loeb, confesses that serving the poor in a slum has changed his mind forever about what might actually improve their lot. &#8220;In a slum an exploiter is better than a Santa Claus… An exploiter forces you to react, whereas a Santa Claus demobilizes you.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">That one stray comment from David Horowitz, a man I regarded as the enemy, sparked the slow but steady realization that my ideals, the ideals I had lived by all my life, were poisoning my students and Paterson, my city.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">After I realized that our approaches don&#8217;t work, I started reading about other approaches. I had another Aha! moment while listening to a two minute twenty-three second YouTube video of Milton Friedman responding to Phil Donahue&#8217;s castigation of greed. The only rational response to Friedman is &#8220;My God, he&#8217;s right.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;"><strong>1) Hate.</strong></span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">If hate were the only reason, I&#8217;d stop being a leftist for this reason alone.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Almost twenty years ago, when I could not conceive of ever being anything but a leftist, I joined a left-wing online discussion forum.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Before that I&#8217;d had twenty years of face-to-face participation in leftist politics: marching, organizing, socializing.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In this online forum, suddenly my only contact with others was the words those others typed onto a screen. That limited and focused means of contact revealed something.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">If you took all the words typed into the forum every day and arranged them according to what part of speech they were, you&#8217;d quickly notice that nouns expressing the emotions of anger, aggression, and disgust, and verbs speaking of destruction, punishing, and wreaking vengeance, outnumbered any other class of words.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">One topic thread was entitled &#8220;What do you view as disgusting about modern America?&#8221; The thread was begun in 2002. Almost eight thousand posts later, the thread was still going strong in June, 2014.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Those posting messages in this left-wing forumpublicly announced that they did what they did every day, from voting to attending a rally to planning a life, because they wanted to destroy something, and because they hated someone, rather than because they wanted to build something, or because they loved someone. You went to an anti-war rally because you hated Bush, not because you loved peace. Thus, when Obama bombed, you didn&#8217;t hold any anti-war rally, because you didn&#8217;t hate Obama.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I experienced powerful cognitive dissonance when I recognized the hate. The rightest of my right-wing acquaintances &#8212; I had no right-wing friends &#8212; expressed nothing like this. My right-wing acquaintances talked about loving: God, their family, their community. I&#8217;m not saying that the right-wingers I knew were better people; I don&#8217;t know that they were. I&#8217;m speaking here, merely, about language.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In 1995 I developed a crippling illness. I couldn&#8217;t work, lost my life savings, and traveled through three states, from surgery to surgery.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A left-wing friend, Pete, sent me emails raging against Republicans like George Bush, whom he referred to as &#8220;Bushitler.&#8221; The Republicans were to blame because they opposed socialized medicine. In fact it&#8217;s not at all certain that socialized medicine would have helped; the condition I had is not common and there was no guaranteed treatment.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I visited online discussion forums for others with the same affliction. One of my fellow sufferers, who identified himself as a successful corporate executive in New Jersey, publicly announced that the symptoms were so hideous, and his helpless slide into poverty was so much not what his wife had bargained for when she married him, that he planned to take his own life. He stopped posting after that announcement, though I responded to his post and requested a reply. It is possible that he committed suicide, exactly as he said he would &#8212; car exhaust in the garage. I suddenly realized that my &#8220;eat the rich&#8221; lapel button was a sin premised on a lie.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In any case, at the time I was diagnosed, Bush wasn&#8217;t president; Clinton was. And, as I pointed out to Pete, his unceasing and vehement expressions of hatred against Republicans did nothing for me.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I had a friend, a nun, Mary Montgomery, one of the Sisters of Providence, who took me out to lunch every six months or so, and gave me twenty-dollar Target gift cards on Christmas. Her gestures to support someone, rather than expressions of hate against someone &#8212; even though these gestures were miniscule and did nothing to restore me to health &#8212; meant a great deal to me.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Recently, I was trying to explain this aspect of why I stopped being a leftist to a left-wing friend, Julie. She replied, &#8220;No, I&#8217;m not an unpleasant person. I try to be nice to everybody.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Julie,&#8221; I said, &#8220;You are an active member of the Occupy Movement. You could spend your days teaching children to read, or visiting the elderly in nursing homes, or organizing cleanup crews in a garbage-strewn slum. You don&#8217;t. You spend your time protestingand trying to destroy something &#8212; capitalism.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">&#8220;Yes, but I&#8217;m very nice about it,&#8221; she insisted. &#8220;I always protest with a smile.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Pete is now a Facebook friend and his feed overflows with the anger that I&#8217;m sure he assesses as righteous. He protests against homophobic Christians, American imperialists, and Monsanto. I don&#8217;t know if Pete ever donates to an organization he believes in, or a person suffering from a disease, or if he ever says comforting things to afflicted intimates. I know he hates.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I do have right-wing friends now and they do get angry and they do express that anger. But when I encounter unhinged, stratospheric vituperation, when I encounter detailed revenge fantasies in scatological and sadistic language, I know I&#8217;ve stumbled upon a left-wing website.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Given that the left prides itself on being the liberator of women, homosexuals, and on being &#8220;sex positive,&#8221; one of the weirder and most obvious aspects of left-wing hate is how often, and how virulently, it is expressed in terms that are misogynist, homophobic, and in the distinctive anti-sex voice of a sexually frustrated high-school misfit. Haters are aware enough of how uncool it would be to use a slur like &#8220;fag,&#8221; so they sprinkle their discourse with terms indicating anal rape like &#8220;butt hurt.&#8221; Leftists taunt right-wingers as &#8220;tea baggers.&#8221; The implication is that the target of their slur is either a woman or a gay man being orally penetrated by a man, and is, therefore, inferior, and despicable.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">Misogynist speech has a long tradition on the left. In 1964, Stokely Carmichael said that the only position for women in the Civil Rights Movement was &#8220;prone.&#8221; Carmichael&#8217;s misogyny is all the more outrageous given the very real role of women like Rosa Parks, Viola Liuzzo, and Fannie Lou Hamer.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">In 2012 atheist bloggers Jennifer McCreight and Natalie Reed exposed the degree to which misogyny dominates the New Atheist movement. McCreight quoted a prominent atheist&#8217;s reply to a woman critic. &#8220;I will make you a rape victim if you don&#8217;t fuck off&#8230; I think we should give the guy who raped you a medal. I hope you fucking drown in rape semen, you ugly, mean-spirited cow… Is that kind of like the way that rapists dick went in your pussy? Or did he use your asshole… I&#8217;m going to rape you with my fist.&#8221;</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">A high-profile example of leftist invective was delivered by MSNBC&#8217;s Martin Bashir in late 2013. Bashir said, on air and in a rehearsed performance, not as part of a moment&#8217;s loss of control, something so vile about Sarah Palin that I won&#8217;t repeat it here. Extreme as it is, Bashir&#8217;s comment is fairly representative of a good percentage of what I read on left-wing websites.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I could say as much about a truly frightening phenomenon, left-wing anti-Semitism, but I&#8217;ll leave the topic to others better qualified. I can say that when I first encountered it, at a PLO fundraising party in Marin County, I felt as if I had time-traveled to pre-war Berlin.</span></span></p>
<p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><span style="font-family: times new roman, times, serif;">I needed to leave the left, I realized, when I decided that I wanted to spend time with people building, cultivating, and establishing, something that they loved.</span></span></p>
<p><strong>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </strong><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank"><strong>Click here</strong></a><strong>.   </strong></p>
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		<title>Election Day: What&#8217;s at Stake</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/election-day-whats-at-stake/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=election-day-whats-at-stake</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2014 05:58:59 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244348</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will Americans choose freedom or the continuing dominance of statism? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244349" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260-450x288.jpg" alt="votejpeg-42b1d7963e761260" width="355" height="227" /></a>The election and reelection of Barack Obama have seemingly realized the progressive dream of transforming America from its traditional Constitutional order to one more similar to Europe’s––an activist rather than a limited federal government, one whose power and reach extend into the market economy, trump state sovereignty, and subject individuals to the ideological preferences and aims of the federal Leviathan and its managers. What is at stake today is the continuing dominance of these statist ideas.</p>
<p>Over the past six years Obama and progressives partially achieved some of these progressive goals. Through legislation, executive orders, like-minded judges, and the interpretations of law by anonymous, unelected federal functionaries, Obama’s government has intervened in the automobile, finance, health care, and housing industries; hampered the explosive growth of the energy industry by reducing development on federal lands and waging a war on carbon; encroached on the states’ sovereignty through the regulatory powers of the Environmental Protection Agency and the renegade Department Of Justice; and intruded into civil society and individual rights on issues such as contraception, traditional marriage, freedom of speech, and religious freedom.</p>
<p>Worse yet, the old progressive goal of redistributing property has accelerated over the last 6 years. Entitlement spending has exploded, increasing along the way the wider regulatory scope and intrusiveness of the federal agencies created to manage this transfer of wealth. Social welfare spending now approaches a trillion dollars a year, people claiming Social Security Disability insurance have increased from 3 million in 1980 to 11 million today, and the number of people getting food stamps has doubled to 46 million just over the last decade. These trillions in transfer payments represent a massive redistribution of property. According to the Tax Foundation, America’s highly progressive tax system in 2012 resulted in about $2 trillion being redistributed from the top 40% of taxpayers to the bottom 60%.</p>
<p>The increase in entitlement spending, however, has also required much higher budget deficits and an unprecedented peacetime increase in the national debt, which now stands at $17 trillion dollars, up from $10 trillion in 2008. From 2009-2012, Obama’s budgets averaged deficits of $1.25 trillion. This year’s deficit is projected to be around half a trillion dollars, but according to the CBO, deficits will return to the trillion-dollar mark from 2022-2024. And don’t forget, the costs of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt are projected to devour all tax revenues by 2030. This means that either taxes will have to be raised to ruinous levels, or even more money borrowed to finance the unfunded liabilities of those programs, which have been estimated at anywhere between $123 and $200 trillion. Ancient tyrants redistributed the property of just the living; the modern welfare state has managed to redistribute the property of the unborn citizens who will inherit this debt.</p>
<p>Both parties bear some responsibility for this mess, testimony to just how engrained the entitlement mentality and the acceptance of redistributing property are in today’s America. Yet the last 6 years have seen unprecedented expansions of this process, and demonization of those like Paul Ryan who propose even modest steps towards defusing this ticking fiscal bomb.</p>
<p>In foreign policy as well, Obama and the Democrats have shaped their actions according to the quasi-pacifist, “postmodern” ideology that distrusts using American power to protect Americans’ security and promote their interests. Instead, an America guilty of historical crimes, oppression, and exploitation must subordinate its power to transnational institutions like the U.N., and rely on diplomacy and multilateral coalitions that advance international interests, including those of our enemies and rivals, at the expense of America’s.</p>
<p>Thus Obama started his presidency with an apology tour, led from behind in Libya, and oversaw dangerous reductions in the military budget. He has abandoned Iraq, and left its fragile political order, purchased with the blood and money of Americans, stranded between the Iranian rock and the ISIS hard place. His feckless overthrow of Libya’s Gaddafi has left that country a petri dish of jihadist bacilli, leading to the murder of an American diplomat and 3 brave warriors, and flooding the Middle East with weapons plundered from Gaddafi’s arsenals. He has compromised and betrayed America’s allies like Egypt and Israel, and groveled before her enemies like Iran. His empty bluster on Syria and Ukraine has emboldened bloody tyrants like Assad and geopolitical rivals like Russia. All the while he and his foreign policy team have talked and talked and talked, a spectacle of gutless, futile diplomacy redolent of England’s in the 20’s and 30’s.</p>
<p>Yet all these actions and policies both domestic and foreign reflect a worn-out philosophy repeatedly repudiated by history. The progressive worldview of the Democrats is founded on the idea that increasing knowledge of the natural world, human nature and behavior, and social and political reality can drive human progress and improvement. Nature, people, and society thus can be directed towards the creation of an idealized world in which the tragic constants of human life––physical want, suffering, oppression, violence, brutality, inequality, and injustice––are eliminated. Just give power to the “technicians of the soul,” as Stalin called them, the “technocrats” who possess this knowledge, and they will rearrange society in a way that achieves utopia––once, of course, religion, custom, and traditional wisdom are swept away lest their irrational prejudices and superstitions like “sin” and “good and evil” block humanity’s march to the brave new world. All that is needed is to increase the coercive power of the state in order to institute reforms and remove any obstacles to the efforts of technical elites to achieve these utopian boons.</p>
<p>The progressives’ hostility to free-market capitalism and fondness for dirigiste economic polices, for example, illustrate these philosophical assumptions. To progressives, “income inequality” and economic winners and losers are intolerable injustices reflecting not the variations of talent, virtue, hard work, and luck among individuals, but capitalism’s rigged rules and privileging of profit over people. Use the power of the state to amend those rules and to intervene in the market through regulations, tax policy, and the redistribution of property, and you can eliminate those injustices. Thus Obama’s “You didn’t build that” and  “When you spread the wealth around, it’s good for everybody” rhetoric, recently endorsed by Hillary Clinton’s similar claim, <span style="color: #272727;">“Don’t let anybody tell you that it’s corporations and businesses that create jobs.” </span>Thus the relentless public demonization of the wealthy and corporations, and the attempt to use regulatory and taxing power to siphon off their capital and put it to achieving the progressive vision of “social justice.”</p>
<p>What is at stake this election day is whether or not Americans will reject this ideology and the policies it creates. It is about starting to restore to our politics prudence, humility, respect for traditional wisdom, and common sense. It is about recognizing that an irreducibly complex and quirky human nature and behavior are not infinitely plastic and so cannot be shaped according to the abstract visions of technical elites armed with an intrusive power that compromises our freedom. It is about accepting the tragic truth that the freedom to choose how to shape one’s life means that bad choices will create bad consequences, and so individual freedom cannot exist without individual responsibility for those bad choices. It is about accepting that suffering and failure are not unjust anomalies to be engineered from human existence, but non-negotiable givens of human life, and thus will never be eliminated, but only mitigated. And it is about remembering that every attempt to create heaven on earth has had to diminish the people’s freedom, and sometimes has demanded their lives.</p>
<p>In short, what is at stake is the return to the ideas about human nature and existence upon which the Founders built the American order and its guarantee of the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.</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>Why Republicans Don&#8217;t Get It</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/why-republicans-dont-get-it/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-republicans-dont-get-it</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 22 Oct 2014 04:47:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[The folly of sidelining the conservative base. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aaavote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243546" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/aaavote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="331" height="248" /></a>A new poll this week shows 2012 presidential nominee and 2008 primary candidate Mitt Romney leading the field of potential 2016 Republican candidates. According to ABC News/Washington Post, 21 percent of Republican voters would vote for Romney in the primaries; Jeb Bush and Mike Huckabee tie at 10 percent, followed by Rand Paul, Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. Altogether, some 44 percent of Republican primary voters want an &#8220;establishment&#8221; candidate — by which we mean a candidate for whom social issues are secondary, immigration reform is primary and economics dominates.</p>
<p>The establishment donors on the coasts see this poll and believe that a consolidated funding effort mobilized behind the Chosen One (Romney, Bush, Christie or Ryan) could avoid a messy primary and keep the powder dry for a 2016 showdown with Hillary.</p>
<p>The conservative base knows this, and they groan.</p>
<p>That&#8217;s because the conservative base understands that what motivates them is not the marginal tax rate — nobody in the country knows, offhand, his or her effective tax rate — but values. And none of the top priorities for Republican donors match the fire-in-the-belly issues that motivate the folks who knock on doors, phone bank and provide the under-$50 donations that could power a Republican to victory.</p>
<p>The divide between the establishment and the base represents a divide between the wallet and the working man, the penthouse and the pews, the Ivy Leagues and the homeschools. Which is why Republican leadership quietly assures its top donors that should Republicans win the Senate, their first legislative push will encompass corporate tax reform and immigration reform.</p>
<p>They will not push primarily for border security, or for protection of religious freedom, or for repeal of Common Core. They will not use their opportunity to govern as an opportunity to draw contrast between conservatism and leftism. Instead, they will seek &#8220;common ground&#8221; in a vain attempt to show the American people that efficiency deserves re-election.</p>
<p>And the American people will go to sleep, conservatives will vomit in their mouths, and leftists will demonize Republicans all the same.</p>
<p>Conservatives understand that politics simply reflect underlying values. That&#8217;s why they are passionate. They don&#8217;t vote their pocketbooks. They vote their guts, and their guts tell them that leftism is immoral on the most basic level.</p>
<p>Republicans, on the other hand, believe that politics are just business by other means. That means that Republicans think Americans, left and right, share the same underlying values. That&#8217;s a lie, and it&#8217;s a self-defeating lie at that.</p>
<p>Until Republicans begin to appreciate the moral conflict between right and left, they will dishearten the right and provide easy targets for the left. The nominee won&#8217;t matter; elections won&#8217;t matter. And the alienation of the American conservative will deepen and broaden, until, one day, it bursts forth with a renewed fire that consumes the Republican Party whole.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Reasons for Political Hope</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/reasons-for-political-hope-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=reasons-for-political-hope-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:52:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242261</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Four key factors working against the Left this election season. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242263" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/vote-here-450x337.jpg" alt="Americans Go To The Polls To Elect The Next U.S. President" width="308" height="231" /></a>Many Republicans are excited about the midterm elections. They see a good chance of taking over the Senate, which means they can neutralize Obama’s last few years in office. Many also are hopeful about the presidential election in 2016, though Hillary Clinton will enter that race with decided advantages. Regaining the presidency, some believe, will lead to a reprise of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, in which the country was turned from its leftward drift under Jimmy Carter.</p>
<p>Yet even if this scenario unfolds as the Republicans hope, it is doubtful the deeper structural problems of the country will be solved. The entitlement Leviathan, nourished under governments dominated by both parties, is unlikely to be reformed as significantly as it must in order to ward off looming fiscal catastrophe. Too many Republican politicians are enablers of government spending, voting to keep funding handouts like the $20 billion a year in agricultural subsidies. Others are plotting “comprehensive immigration reform,” aka amnesty, to ensure a steady supply of cheap labor.  Too many have seemingly accepted the disastrous cuts in military spending that put at risk our ability to defend our interests and security.</p>
<p>Then there are the nearly 66 million American people who reelected as president an inexperienced narcissist, serial liar, racial divider, and manifest failure. Whether they did so out of juvenile idealism, hope for racial reconciliation, or the lure of more government handouts doesn’t really matter. This lack of judgment and basic information, or sacrifice of principle to self-interest, bespeaks an electorate significant numbers of whom are unlikely to support any politician or party that seriously attempts to halt runaway entitlement spending, debt, and deficits, or to rebuild our military deterrence and reassert our will globally.</p>
<p>Yet despite these obstacles, the political order created in 1787, assaulted as it has been over the last 100 years, still possesses resources for putting us back on the right track. If we fail to take advantage of those resources and modern information technologies, we will have no one blame but our fellow citizens or ourselves for our country’s decline.</p>
<p>First and foremost, we still hold elections every 2 years, and elections have consequences. We can remain mystified that 66 million voters chose Barack Obama over Mitt Romney in 2012, but think how much worse it could have been without the 2010 midterm “shellacking,” as Obama called, that gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans. We can disagree over what the Republican House should or shouldn’t have done with their power, but they at least slowed down the slow-motion train-wreck of the Democrats’ progressive policies.</p>
<p>Regular fair and transparent elections mean that changing course is always possible. It may be that things will have to get much worse than they are now to wake up those 4 million Republicans who stayed home in 2012, or those 5 million voters who gave Obama the victory. And there’s a chance that the pain of correction will be much more severe, much more socially disruptive than anything we’ve seen in many years. But we still will have the legal right to change course when that moment comes.</p>
<p>Second, despite decades of assault on federalism, sovereign state governments still exist. They still remain what Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1932 called a “laboratory” in which citizens can “try novel social and economic experiments without risk to the rest of the country.” In recent years states have gone their own way on issues like gun control, voter identification laws, same-sex marriage, right-to-work laws, reduction of public employee unions’ political power, limits on abortion, or legalization of marijuana. Particularly important are the states’ right to set tax laws and business-friendly regulations that lure investment and people.</p>
<p>A comparison of California with Texas illustrates this phenomenon. As <i>Forbes</i> <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2013/07/03/texas-v-california-the-real-facts-behind-the-lone-star-states-miracle/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">reported</span></a> last year on the country’s two most populous states, “California’s state and local tax burden ranks as America’s 4th-highest compared to Texas at 45th.  California taxes a 42 percent larger share of state income than does Texas, California’s restrictive energy policies discourage oil extraction, even though it has the largest proven shale oil reserves in the nation; while its industrial electrical rates are 88 percent higher than in Texas.” As a result, in 2011 Texas’ per capita GDP surpassed California’s. No surprise, then, that between 2000 and 2012, Texas’ population growth rate doubled California’s, and that 183 Californians moved to Texas for every 100 Texans moving to California.</p>
<p>Increasing red-state success in growing their economies and liberating people from the intrusive Leviathan state will attract more and more people, even as the bankrupt blue-state policies of ruinous tax rates and over-regulation will drive more and more people away. We could then see a return to the Founders’ idea of federalism as “islands of intolerance in a sea of tolerance,” with people free to feet-vote for the political and social order they find congenial.</p>
<p>Third, American civil society––those 1.5 million associations and organizations separate from government––is still vigorous, though not as much as it was at its peak in 1970. People still belong to groups like the PTA and the Rotary Club, and still attend more than 350,000 churches. The pushback by churches and religious organizations against Obamacare’s requirement that they offer abortifacients and birth control in their health plans illustrates the impact civil society can have on public policy. More significant is the rise of the Tea Party, a truly grassroots movement that quickly organized in 2009, and by the summer its members were confronting politicians at “town-hall” events, a display of direct political accountability to the people more typical of early America or ancient Athens. There is no question that the Republicans’ victory in the 2010 midterm was made possible by Tea Party activists.</p>
<p>Finally, new communication technologies have broken the monopoly liberals once held over information and commentary. Before the rise of talk-radio in the 80s, political opinion was controlled by a few score network news anchors, magazine editors, and syndicated columnists. Today there are hundred of thousands of voices and opinions on cable news networks like Fox News, blogs, on-line magazines like <i>FrontPage</i>, websites, social networks like Facebook, and video sites like YouTube. It’s clear that the persistence of Fox News in reporting the Benghazi debacle and the IRS scandal have kept these administration failures alive in the public square.</p>
<p>Of course some of these sites are frequently venues for misinformation, propaganda, and transient trivia. But they also provide ordinary citizens with a democratic virtual town square in which lies are exposed, truths hidden by the establishment media revealed, and opinions aired to raucous challenge and debate. Don’t forget, the Tea Party could become a national organization nearly overnight because of a YouTube video and the Drudge Report. Still protected by the First Amendment, this virtual town square gives everyone the opportunity to exercise their right to free speech, and to mobilize resistance to the political status quo.</p>
<p>The resources, then, are there, and they more than any one election give us hope. We just have to make use of them. It is still in doubt whether the 2 terms of Barack Obama have represented a permanent change in the American political character, a shift much farther to the left than this country has ever experienced; or whether the unique circumstances of electing the first black president will be a one-off, and the nation will return to its traditional center-right character, and restore our fiscal sanity and our global leadership. Whatever the outcome, it will be the responsibility of the people to use resources of the Constitution to get our country back on track.</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>Conservatives Triumph in Border Bill Victory</title>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 04 Aug 2014 04:52:23 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Citizens blunt Obama's threat to force amnesty on the country. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/article-new_ehow_images_a06_7l_or_information-illegal-immigration-800x800.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237788" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/article-new_ehow_images_a06_7l_or_information-illegal-immigration-800x800.jpg" alt="article-new_ehow_images_a06_7l_or_information-illegal-immigration-800x800" width="265" height="199" /></a>Conservatives in Congress scored a major triumph last week as the House approved emergency legislation that strengthens border security and attempts to rein in a lawless president.</p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), a conservative champion, took a well-deserved victory lap in an </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/08/conservative-plan-could-save-border-bill/" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">interview</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">with the WND news website.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The &#8220;legislative miracle&#8221; approved by the House represents </span><span class="zw-portion">a </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">stunning turnaround</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">and </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">a huge victory for the conservatives in Congress.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span><span class="zw-portion"> Its approval is also a big win for the American people </span><span class="zw-portion">who</span><span class="zw-portion">, Bachmann said,</span><span class="zw-portion"> “</span><span class="zw-portion">saved Congress from itself</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">by </span><span class="zw-portion">jamming the congressional switchboard to state their opposition to President Obama&#8217;s planned immigration amnesty.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Bachmann noted the legislation pays states to place National Guard troops on the border, doubling funding for that program. It also responds to the president&#8217;s threat that </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">he would act alone, lawlessly, to grant work permits to 5-</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">to</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">6 million illegal foreign nationals.</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">We have taken the strongest possible action, legislatively, to stop him</span><span class="zw-portion">,&#8221; Bachmann said.</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;</span><span class="zw-portion">We</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">ve put the president on notice by saying, </span><span class="zw-portion">‘</span><span class="zw-portion">You better not issue these work permits because we</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">ve said no. You better not try it, Mr. President.</span><span class="zw-portion">’”</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The bill also provides funding to immigration agencies to house illegal alien children and also amends a 2008 law that was created to block the sex trafficking of young people but which has been used to provide asylum to illegals coming from Central American countries.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Bachmann also marveled at the fact that the bill was even tougher in her view than what anti-amnesty stalwarts Sens. Jeff Sessions (R-Alabama) and Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had thought was politically possible to achieve.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">She also rejected </span><span class="zw-portion">President Obama</span><span class="zw-portion">&#8216;s mischievous comment Friday afternoon in which he attacked conservatives for supposedly preventing the House from approving a border-fix measure.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">That </span><span class="zw-portion">comment</span><span class="zw-portion"> was</span><span class="zw-portion"> “</span><span class="zw-portion">infantile,</span><span class="zw-portion">”</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion spell-error">Bachmann</span><span class="zw-portion"> said, noting that the Democrat-controlled Senate is the chamber that has yet to approve a border bill. Republicans hope Senate Democrats take a public relations drubbing in coming weeks for failing to act.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Victory came a day after a</span><span class="zw-portion"> conservative-led uprising among House Republicans</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/conservatives-kill-amnesty-bill/" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">scuttled</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">Speaker John Boehner</span><span class="zw-portion">’</span><span class="zw-portion">s worse-than-useless border crisis and immigration legislation</span><span class="zw-portion">. </span><span class="zw-portion">“</span><span class="zw-portion">The bill as it was had more loopholes than a knitted afghan,</span><span class="zw-portion">” </span><span class="zw-portion">Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) </span><span class="zw-portion">told </span><span class="zw-portion">FrontPage </span><span class="zw-portion">on Thursday.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The showdown between rank-and-file Republicans and their leaders in the House came as Americans grow increasingly angry over the border crisis that has been </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/062514-706233-texas-border-immigration-wave-orchestrated-by-administration.htm" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">staged and carefully choreographed</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">by the far-left levelers of the Obama administration.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Conservatives worried that the GOP establishment bill did not even try to block Obama&#8217;s upcoming mass amnesty and did not do enough to crack down on the recent surge of illegals streaming across the country&#8217;s southern border.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">But on Friday conservative and moderate Republicans united during a House GOP conference meeting and approved stronger legislation to replace the GOP establishment&#8217;s weak border bill that Boehner put on the back burner the day before. A </span><span class="zw-portion">$694 million </span><span class="zw-portion">emergency measured aimed at fixing the border crisis was approved by the House later that day on </span><span class="zw-portion">a vote of 223</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">to</span><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">189</span><span class="zw-portion">, freeing House members to begin their delayed three-week summer recess that was supposed to begin Thursday.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">The legislation attempts to defang President Obama&#8217;s wildly unpopular </span><span class="zw-portion">Deferred Action for Children Arrivals, or DACA, policy </span><span class="zw-portion">that he used to provide asylum to more than 500,000 illegals who came to the U.S. as minors. Separately, the House approved a bill to reverse DACA, which encourages youngsters to make the dangerous trek north from Central America to sneak across the border, on a vote of 216 to 192. Four Democratic lawmakers voted for the measure.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Meanwhile, the Obama administration is pressing ahead with plans to illegally grant amnesty to millions of immigration law-breaking foreign nationals present in the country.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">It is </span><span class="zw-portion">just one in a long series of Reichstag fires calculated to enhance the power of the neo-Marxist despot who now occupies the Oval Office.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">O</span><span class="zw-portion">n ABC&#8217;s &#8220;This Week&#8221; yesterday </span><span class="zw-portion">Obama palace heel-clicker Dan Pfeiffer </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/03/wh-adviser-dan-pfeiffer-the-president-has-no-choice-but-to-act-on-immigration/?advD=1248,53299" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">reaffirmed</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">that a huge amnesty is coming. Obama &#8220;has no choice but to act&#8221; to grant amnesty to as many as five million illegal aliens &#8220;at the end of summer,&#8221; he said.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">After pointing out that Obama said last year that he did not believe he had authority to act unilaterally, an incredulous George Stephanopoulos asked Pfeiffer, &#8220;Doesn&#8217;t a reversal like that fuel the arguments of those who say that the president is overstepping his authority?&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Pfeiffer said that &#8220;whatever [Obama] does in this space will not be a substitute for comprehensive immigration reform. Congress will still need to act.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;But because of Congress&#8217;s failure to fix the immigration system and to pass the supplemental appropriations bill needed to deal with the specific crisis on the border, the president has no choice but to act &#8230; at the end of the summer.&#8221;</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Even the cripplingly affective leftist dead-ender Ed Schultz </span><a style="color: blue;" title="" href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/30/msnbc-host-obamas-amnesty-could-doom-democrats/?utm_referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F" target="_blank"><span class="zw-portion link">thinks</span></a><span class="zw-portion"> </span><span class="zw-portion">amnesty-bound Obama is politically suicidal.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;Hold the phone &#8212; this would be a mistake if the president were to do this,&#8221; Schultz told the phone booth that consists of his MSNBC audience last week.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;Politically, there is no way Democrats can go home and campaign on across-the-board amnesty for millions of undocumented workers &#8230; it could be an electoral death knell for the Democrats,&#8221; he said.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Recent surveys show Obama&#8217;s pro-illegal immigrant policies have the strong support of just 18 percent of the public, compared to the nearly 60 percent who strongly oppose those policies.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">&#8220;I don&#8217;t like government by executive order,&#8221; said Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.). &#8220;I just don&#8217;t, generally, so I&#8217;d have to look and see specifically what [Obama is] proposing and what he&#8217;s talking about,&#8221; said the left-winger.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Polls now suggest Pryor stands a very good chance of losing to Republican challenger Tom Cotton in November.</span></p>
<p class="zw-paragraph" style="color: #000000;"><span class="zw-portion">Perhaps the senator should have spoken out against the president&#8217;s reckless policies earlier.</span></p>
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