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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Republicans</title>
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		<title>Ben Shapiro: Republicans Secretly Want Obama&#8217;s Amnesty</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/ben-shapiro-republicans-secretly-want-obamas-amnesty/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=ben-shapiro-republicans-secretly-want-obamas-amnesty</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:50:07 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247194</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Ben Shapiro explains why establishment Republicans aren&#8217;t using the power of the purse to stop Barack Obama&#8217;s executive amnesty: They don&#8217;t want to stop it. See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/3DHJ-CbOGQA" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">There is the only one way to explain the new proposal by Speaker of the House John Boehner and other top Republicans for stopping President Obama’s executive amnesty: they don’t want to stop it at all.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Here’s the story.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Republicans have two options: the smart option and the stupid option.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The smart option would be for Republicans to pass a short-term continuing resolution to fund the government through January. That would allow Republicans to come into office and take power in the Senate. Then Republicans could do what Congresses have done for centuries: avoid passing omnibus spending bills, which tie all spending together and lead to shutdowns, and instead fund the government through separate appropriations bills, one per department. That de-links funding for the Defense Department, for example, from funding for Obama’s executive amnesty. Obama would have a tough time vetoing a standalone Defense funding bill that has nothing to do with executive amnesty.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Then there’s the stupid option.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Republicans could push forward an omnibus spending bill that would completely fund the government through next September, but fund the Department of Homeland Security – and Obama’s amnesty –through next March. That would effectively allow 60 days of funding for Obama’s program to give work permits to illegal immigrants.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Now, Obama probably won’t accept the deal, and will shut down the government over the failure to fully fund his executive amnesty. Speaker Boehner will then cave, and fund the entire program. We know this because that’s exactly what he did regarding Obamacare two years ago, during the infamous government shutdown.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But let’s say Obama signs the bill. There’s no guarantee Speaker Boehner will fight over DHS funding in March, either. In fact, certain Republican congresspeople have already indicated he won’t.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Naturally, Boehner is pursuing the stupid option. Why? Not because he’s stupid, but because he likes Obama’s executive amnesty. President Obama’s executive amnesty allows him to sign off on the establishment Republican soft-on-immigration policy while simultaneously complaining about Dictator Obama. He can win points with the base by bashing President Obama, and at the same time, greenlight Obama’s immigration policy – which Republican establishment types from the Wall Street Journal to Jeb Bush to the Chamber of Commerce have been pushing relentlessly as “comprehensive immigration reform.” Obama has given them cover. All they have to do now is whine about Obama being a Big Bad Tyrant, then fund his tyranny. They can pop the cork in the back offices secretly while hypocritically blasting Obama for seizing their power in public.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">They’re playing conservatives for suckers.</p>
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		<title>Why Are the Senate Races Close?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/why-are-the-senate-races-close/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-are-the-senate-races-close</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:55:26 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244181</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Republican battle cry that wasn't. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/race.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244185" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/race-450x300.jpg" alt="New York And NJ Residents Struggle To Recover One Week After Superstorm Sandy" width="257" height="171" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz’s &#8220;<em>Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left</em>,&#8221; <a style="color: #800000;" href="http://www.amazon.com/Take-No-Prisoners-Battle-Defeating/dp/1621572560/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406631034&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=take+no+prisoners">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p>For six years the Democratic majority in the Senate has formed a solid bloc behind a president who betrayed every American soldier who died in Iraq by deliberately losing the war and failing to secure the peace. Obama’s anti-military, anti-American zeal has brought this country to its knees internationally. His cowardice when it comes to the use of force has created a terrorist threat greater than any America has faced since the height of the Cold War. With no dissent from the Democratic majority in the Senate.</p>
<p>The Senate Democrats have supported Obama’s anti-Constitutional efforts to crush their opposition through voter fraud and the political corruption of the IRS. They have embraced his open borders mania, which has introduced tens of thousands of criminal illegals into the American heartland, along with exotic viruses and unknown numbers of terrorists who come here with the intent to kill.</p>
<p>The Senate Democrats have supported Obama’s socialist schemes depriving Americans of the right to choose their health care, destroying millions of jobs, leaving 90 million idle, and 47 million on food stamps. They have turned a blind eye when his unconstitutional executive orders restored a malicious welfare system that condemns millions of disadvantaged Americans to lives of permanent poverty and denied them a shot at the American dream.</p>
<p>Senate Democrats have embraced the lynch mob in Ferguson and used this deplorable episode in their campaigns as a symbol of Republican racism instead. This is a classic case of projection since Democrats are the party of racial categories and racial malice. The nation’s most notorious lynch mob leader and premier racist, Al Sharpton, is the president’s special adviser on race. Thanks to Obama’s policies and the support of Senate Democrats the nation is more racially divided than it has been since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964 and 1965.</p>
<p>So why are the Senate races close? They are close because Republicans are paralyzed by a political cowardice that makes them reluctant to fight fire with fire. From election to election they are afraid to hold Democrats morally accountable for what they actually stand for and have done. Where is the Republican calling out the Democrats for their support for racists like Sharpton and the lynch mob demanding blood in the case of officer Darren Wilson? Where is the Republican decrying the betrayal of the brave Americans who died to keep Iraq free? Where is the Republican standing up for the millions of poor black and Hispanic children who languish in public schools that don’t teach them and whose lives are being crushed by Democratic “welfare” systems? Where is the Republican Party’s campaign against the Democrats’ totalitarian attempts to destroy the two-party system and empower criminals? Why is their political language so tepid when it comes to the outrages that Democrats daily commit?</p>
<p>Yes there are individual Republicans who take on these issues and the Republican Party has occasionally done so as well. But consider the tone of their arguments as compared to the Democrats’ moral indictments of Republicans as racists, and woman haters, and enemies of the poor. Where is the Republican language to match these indictments and neutralize these attacks?</p>
<p>The Democrats have launched a war against individual freedom and the American constitutional arrangement that defends it. That is the meaning of their attacks on the Second Amendment, their attempts to impose speech codes on a once free nation, and their determination to make voter fraud a normal corruption of the political process. Where is the Republican battle cry in defense of individual freedom? Republican opposition to the atrocity called “Obamacare” is framed in the language of accountants. Yes Obamacare will raise health care costs for those who can pay. But like all socialist programs the foundation of Obamacare is theft. Take the earnings of those who have worked and use it to subsidize the costs of those who don’t. This is an assault on individual freedom. But where is the Republican battle cry identifying it as such?</p>
<p>Fostering terrorist concentrations of power, opening America’s borders to criminals, failing to quarantine Ebola carriers, unleashing the IRS to crush their political opposition, supporting a lynch mob seeking to coerce the judicial process, violating the Constitution and stripping the representatives of the people of their authority and power – all these have a common core. They are a war against individual freedom. Why is this not the Republican campaign theme?</p>
<p>The Republican Party is the party of small business (the political billionaires are clustered among the Democrats). But politics cannot be viewed as a business. Democrats are missionaries seeking to change the world. Like all such missionaries from Lenin to ISIS, individual freedom presents a threat to their world transforming goal. They know what’s good for you, and they are determined to prevent you from resisting it. This is what the political battle is about and unless Republicans embrace the missionary attitude, and make freedom their rallying cry, it is not just elections they are jeopardizing but the future of our country as well.</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>Independents Fear Terrorism &#8212;- Dems Prioritize Global Warming &#8216;Threat&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/independents-fear-terrorism-dems-prioritize-global-warming-threat/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=independents-fear-terrorism-dems-prioritize-global-warming-threat</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:38:32 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241646</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[New polling shows progressives' peculiar priorities. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/140625-iraq-isis-mosul-street-445a_82f23afee3a82a104ef51a50474e30c61.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241649" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/140625-iraq-isis-mosul-street-445a_82f23afee3a82a104ef51a50474e30c61-450x334.jpg" alt="140625-iraq-isis-mosul-street-445a_82f23afee3a82a104ef51a50474e30c6" width="295" height="219" /></a>A Pew Research Center/USA Today <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2014/08/28/as-new-dangers-loom-more-think-the-u-s-does-too-little-to-solve-world-problems/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">survey</span></a> conducted between Aug. 20 and 24 reveals a startling disconnect between Democrats and the rest of America.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A staggering 68 percent of Democrats consider global climate change a greater threat to the United States than either Al Qaeda at 67 percent, or ISIS at 65 percent. By contrast, 80 percent of Republicans cited Al Qaeda as the principal threat facing the nation, followed by 78 percent citing ISIS, and only 25 percent expressing concern about global climate change. Among Independents, Al Qaeda led the way at 69 percent, followed by ISIS at 63 percent, and global climate change bringing up the rear at 44 percent.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The survey addressed nine categories, including Iran’s nuclear program; China&#8217;s emergence as a nuclear power; the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; extremist groups like Al Qaeda; Islamic militant groups like ISIS; North Korea’s nuclear program; growing tension between Russia and her neighbors; the country-to-country speed of infectious diseases; and global climate change.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">For Democrats, global climate change was concern Number One. For both Republicans and Independents, it came in dead last.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Such findings should surprise no one. Global climate change has assumed a cult-like status among the American left, one that not only transcends scientific reality, but engenders an unseemly level of rage directed at skeptics, and a monumental level of hypocrisy among its adherents.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The scientific reality has been scarred by politics. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2014/08/07/global-warming-pause-puts-crisis-in-perspective/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">admits</span></a> that many of their hypotheses are based on &#8220;best guess” assumptions. Yet those best guess assumptions have consistently over-estimated the amount of warming, with predictions far exceeding that which is actually taking place. We are currently in a global warming “pause&#8221; that has <a href="http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/03/rss-shows-no-global-warming-for-17-years-10-months/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">exceeded</span></a> 17 years. Yet even if one goes back to 1979, when satellite instruments began to consistently measure temperatures in the Earth’s lower atmosphere, the overall temperature rise has been approximately one-third of one degree Celsius, or approximately one degree Celsius per century. Since 1990, IPCC computer models have predicted at least 2.4 degrees of global warming per century, almost two-and-a-half times the actual amount.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Perhaps such measurements are honest mistakes. Or perhaps not. In 2009, the Climategate scandal revealed scientists at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/18555-global-warming-hoax-unraveling-someone-tell-obama"><span style="color: #1255cc;">conspired</span></a> to suppress data that conflicted with their apparently preconceived conclusions. According to Real Science blogger  Steven Goddard, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has also been <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/10916086/The-scandal-of-fiddled-global-warming-data.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">involved</span></a> data manipulation, replacing real temperature readings with data compiled on computers. And much to Al Gore’s chagrin, the Arctic ice cap he <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2738653/Stunning-satellite-images-summer-ice-cap-thicker-covers-1-7million-square-kilometres-MORE-2-years-ago-despite-Al-Gore-s-prediction-ICE-FREE-now.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">predicted</span></a> in 2007 could be &#8220;gone in summer in as little as seven years,” has now expanded two years in a row by as much as 43 to 62 precent, depending how one measures it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">None of these inconvenient realities (and countless others) are presented to entirely dismiss the notion that global temperatures may be increasing, but rather to demonstrate that among leftists, hysteria and fear-mongering remain an integral part of the climate change debate.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is hysteria and fear-mongering that demands any skepticism whatsoever must be threatened. Thus when Swedish climatologist Dr. Lennart Bengtsson expressed his own reservations about climate change, his fellow colleagues <a href="http://humanevents.com/2014/05/16/the-new-climategate-scandal/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">turned</span></a> him into a pariah that made it impossible &#8220;to conduct my normal work and ….even start to worry about my health and safety,” he said in letter explaining his resignation from a London think tank—not because he questioned global warming, but because he challenged the rate of change demanded by the dogmatists.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">On Monday, Robert Kennedy Jr. <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/sep/23/robert-kennedy-jr-we-need-laws-punish-global-warmi/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">epitomized</span></a> the left’s determination to silence the doubters, insisting there should be a law allowing authorities to punish skeptics who are “selling out the public trust,” even as he accused the left’s favorite target, the Koch Brothers, of engaging in climate “treason.” Getting even more hysterical, Kennedy stated that the Kochs should be thrown in &#8220;the Hague with all the other war criminals.” Yet when a reporter <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2765461/Robert-F-Kennedy-Jr-loses-cool-grabs-mic-reporter-pushing-carbon-footprint.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">confronted</span></a> Kennedy about his own rather large carbon footprint, he became irate and accused her of “destroying democracy,” before stating that he does not believe quality of life should sacrificed for the environment.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The exchange highlights the glaring hypocrisy that animates Kennedy, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and a host of other celebrities and politicians more than willing to talk the talk, as they conspicuously avoid walking the walk. Even the 300,000 marchers who took part in New York’s &#8220;People&#8217;s Climate March” Monday were apparently unconcerned by the <a href="http://theweek.com/speedreads/index/268575/speedreads-climate-change-marchers-leave-behind-mounds-of-trash"><span style="color: #1255cc;">tons</span></a> of non-biodegradable garbage they left behind in their wake. Furthermore, it’s quite easy for jet-setting, yacht-squatting celebrities to pontificate about preserving one’s “lifestyle”—as long as one is willing to ignore the reality that millions of people’s <i>lives </i>depend upon the economic development that requires energy expansion.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In a <a href="http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/09/23/350911527/obama-to-lays-out-approach-to-climate-change-in-u-n-speech"><span style="color: #1255cc;">speech</span></a> yesterday at the United Nations, President Obama addressed party’s favorite issue, warning the developing nations of the world that, because of global warming, they cannot repeat the “dirty phase” of industrial development. According to a <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/23/fact-sheet-president-obama-announces-new-actions-strengthen-global-resil"><span style="color: #1255cc;">fact sheet</span></a> from the White House’s Office of the Press Secretary, the president’s initiatives include an &#8220;Executive Order on Climate-Resilient International Development, requiring agencies to factor climate-resilience considerations systematically into the U.S. government’s international development work and to promote a similar approach with multilateral entities.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That didn’t sit particularly well with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), with one insider <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2767000/Obama-s-new-climate-change-rules-create-unnecessary-hurdle-global-relief-development-work-warns-CDC-official-including-EBOLA-efforts.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">characterizing</span></a> such considerations as “an unnecessary hurdle” to leap over during emergencies that require urgency. On Monday the CDC offered up a sobering example of such urgency, predicting that as many as 1.4 million people could be affected by the Ebola outbreak by January of next year.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Furthermore, the multilateral entities to which Obama referred don’t include India and China. Both countries decided to <a href="http://www.hindustantimes.com/india-news/india-china-ignore-un-climate-change-summit/article1-1267288.aspx"><span style="color: #1255cc;">ignore</span></a> yesterday&#8217;s UN Climate Summit, despite being responsible for one-third of the total carbon emissions in 2013. Both nations have little interest in curbing their emissions until the United States and the European Union offer “substantial incentives” for doing so. Their resistance is likely exacerbated by the reality that the Green Climate Fund, established by the UN at the 2010 talks in Cancun to <a href="http://www.csmonitor.com/Environment/Energy-Voices/2014/0923/UN-Climate-Summit-China-India-leaders-are-no-shows.-Why-that-s-ok.-video"><span style="color: #1255cc;">finance</span></a> green energy projects in Third World nations, has failed to get off the ground. Absent the transfer of wealth from rich nations to developing nations this fund represents, there is little likelihood of either nation jumping on board the “green” bandwagon anytime soon.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the meantime, Democrats’ &#8220;less-urgent” national security priorities have forced the Obama administration’s hand. A bombing campaign was initiated in Syria Monday, driven in large part by the reality that a virtually unknown group of al Qaeda affiliated terrorists called the Khorasan Group &#8220;was in the final stages of plans to execute major attacks against Western targets and potentially the U.S. homeland,” <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/defense/defense-official-al-qaida-affiliated-group-was-in-final-stages-of-planning-attacks-against-the-west-20140923"><span style="color: #1255cc;">according </span></a>to Lt. Gen. William Mayville, the director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. American officials <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/world/middleeast/us-sees-other-more-direct-threats-beyond-isis-.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">contend</span></a> the group, comprised of al Qaeda operatives from the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, is even more intent on initiating domestic terror attacks than ISIS is. Moreover, they have a special affinity for terrorists plots involving concealed explosives.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">ISIS may disagree. In a 42-minute speech released Monday, ISIS spokesman Abu Muhammad Adnani <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/23/islamic-state-followers-urged-to-launch-attacks-against-australians"><span style="color: #1255cc;">called</span></a> on Western Muslims to perpetrate domestic attacks in a series of “lone wolf” operations. &#8220;Do not ask for anyone&#8217;s advice and do not seek anyone&#8217;s verdict,&#8221; Adnani said. &#8220;Kill the infidel, whether he is civilian or military for they have the same ruling. Both of them are disbelievers.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">One is left to wonder whether Democrat “true believers,” who view global climate change as a greater threat than Islamic terror, are swayed by the possibility of  “imminent” domestic terror attacks. Perhaps they need reminding that 9/11 was a “two-fer,” as in a terrorist attack that also precipitated an <a href="http://www.nyc.gov/html/doh/wtc/html/know/know.shtml"><span style="color: #1255cc;">environmental disaster</span></a> in Lower Manhattan. Nor does it take much of an imagination to envision the “environmental impact” of a “dirty” bomb, or outright nuke, detonated in an American city. It takes even less of an imagination to know how a majority of Americans would view the warped priories of Democrats if Islamic terrorists make good on any of their murderous designs. Perhaps that majority should remember those priorities in November.</p>
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		<title>Why Nice Guys Finish Last in Politics</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/why-nice-guys-finish-last-in-politics/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-nice-guys-finish-last-in-politics</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Sep 2014 04:44:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241149</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Politics is war, but some Republicans just don’t get it.]]></description>
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<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/bb.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-240392" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/bb-227x350.jpg" alt="bb" width="227" height="350" /></a><strong>To order David Horowitz&#8217;s new book, <em>Take No Prisoners</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Take-No-Prisoners-Battle-Defeating/dp/1621572560/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1406631034&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=take+no+prisoners">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/">Washington Times</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Republicans are going to dominate the midterm elections, but it would be a foolish gamble to count on them to win the 2016 presidential contest. Why is that? Democrats are now a party of the left (no more John Kennedys, no more Joe Liebermans). That means they are driven by ideology and not the pragmatic outlook that used to be the two-party norm.</p>
<p>Ideology soon disconnects you from reality, which is why Democrats will lose in November — that&#8217;s the downswing. During the upswing, though, ideological passion provides a sense of mission and hope that can win over gullible majorities.</p>
<p>In 2008, when Barack Obama promised to turn back the tides and fundamentally transform America, he took enough of the American people with him to become the 44th president of the United States. It was a baseless, deceptive, empty-headed hope that made him seem the answer to so many unfounded prayers. Mr. Obama was a lifelong anti-American radical and a world-class liar. He was not going to lead Americans into a post-racial bipartisan future as he promised. It has taken years for a majority of the American people to realize that.</p>
<p>Republicans will win the midterms because six years of radical policies have brought this country low — the worst economic recovery since the Great Depression; the worst unemployment and greatest expansion of people on the dole; an ongoing disaster to the health care system; the destruction of America&#8217;s borders; and a global power vacuum deliberately created by a leftist commander in chief, which has been filled by the greatest threat to American security since the onset of the Cold War.</p>
<p>Accordingly, in this election cycle the American people are fed up, and they&#8217;re going to turn out the party responsible. That is just this round, though, and there are two years until the next one — a lifetime, politically speaking. Mr. Obama is not an aberration, but a culmination of what has been happening to the Democratic Party during the last four decades. If Mr. Obama is prepared to lie to conceal his real agenda, so is the leadership of the Democratic Party. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, a longtime advocate for America&#8217;s retreat, has suddenly emerged as a hawk on the Islamic State, as has Hillary Clinton, who presided over America&#8217;s catastrophic retreat. While Mr. Obama struggles to make the two sides of his mouth look like one, both Ms. Warren and Mrs. Clinton rush to disassociate themselves from his cowardly retreats. You can expect the Democrats to reposition themselves on many other fronts as well.</p>
<p>Going into the 2016 election, you can count on Republicans to stay &#8220;positive,&#8221; to emphasize policy, and above all, not to hit the Democrats where it hurts. You can also count on Democrats to do just the opposite. Because they always do.</p>
<p>Mike Tyson once said, &#8220;Everyone has a game plan until you punch them in the mouth.&#8221; Democrats have a massive punch in the mouth for Republicans, and it&#8217;s always the same punch. Republicans are painted as racists, sexists, homophobes, anti-poor people, selfish and uncaring. Note that this is a moral indictment. It defames the character of Republicans like the corporate predator and dog-abuser Mitt Romney.</p>
<p>The only answer to an attack like this is to attack Democrats with an equally potent indictment of their moral character. For example, Democrats are actually the party of racists — supporters of the lynch mob in Ferguson, Mo.; controllers of America&#8217;s inner cities; enemies of poor black and Hispanic children trapped in the public schools they control; and so forth. No Republican to my knowledge has ever called Democrats racists, yet the latter send their own kids to private schools while denying children who are poor, black and Hispanic the right to do so. How racist is that? Al Sharpton is the president&#8217;s chief adviser on race. Republicans will never lay a glove on him for these obscenities.</p>
<p>I have just published a book, &#8220;Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan for Defeating the Left,&#8221; using these principles. I&#8217;m not holding my breath that any Republicans will listen, though. They are too intent on telling positive &#8220;stories,&#8221; proposing workable policies and pretending that people will give them a fair hearing despite the fact that their opposition is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to portray them as racists, women haters and enemies of the poor. How difficult is it to understand this: If you are perceived by voters as racist or even just selfish and uncaring, they are not going to have the same interest in your policy advice, as Mr. Romney found out in 2012.</p>
<p>Here is what Republicans need to understand to win: Politics is a street war, and there are no referees to maintain the rules — and the ones that infrequently pop up (such as CNN&#8217;s Candy Crowley during one of the last presidential debates) are there to bury you. Attack your opponents before they attack you. Attack them with a moral indictment; if well-executed, it will win the day.</p>
<p>And remember that even if you fail to do this to them, they will certainly do it to you. You can count on that.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p><em>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>David Horowitz</strong> discussing <a href="http://www.blackbookoftheamericanleft.com/">The Black Book of the American Left</a> in <strong>The Glazov Gang&#8217;s</strong> two-part video series below:</em><br />
<b></b></p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/QL9WUvnJ_Cs" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/eeN2K6romr8" width="460" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Take No Prisoners</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/take-no-prisoners/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=take-no-prisoners</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 26 Aug 2014 04:56:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. Christian Adams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239533</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Latest book by David Horowitz provides modern battle plan for conservatives.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/horowitz_prisoners.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239536" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/horowitz_prisoners-450x318.jpg" alt="horowitz_prisoners" width="318" height="225" /></a><strong>To purchase David Horowitz&#8217;s new book, <em>Take No Prisoners</em>, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621572560/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1621572560&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20&amp;linkId=ZLFKIO3OORHJOL6H">click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from <a href="http://pjmedia.com/">PJMedia.com</a>.</strong></p>
<p>Ten pages into David Horowitz’s new book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1621572560/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&amp;camp=1789&amp;creative=390957&amp;creativeASIN=1621572560&amp;linkCode=as2&amp;tag=pjmedia-20&amp;linkId=ZLFKIO3OORHJOL6H"><em>Take No Prisoners: The Battleplan for Defeating the Left</em></a><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Take-No-Prisoners-Battle-Defeating/dp/1621572560"> </a>(Regnery, 2014), I realize putting dog-ears on pages with important quotes for this review is hopeless. I’ve placed a dog-ear on every page. By the end, the whole book might be dog-eared.</p>
<p>If there was a single book to add to the swag-bag for the attendees at the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, <em>Take No Prisoners</em> is the book. Not only is the book helpful in understanding the modern political battlespace, as Horowitz makes clear throughout, the delegates who will be in Cleveland are sorely in need of help.</p>
<p>Many still think elections are won or lost because one side has better ideas than the other. Election losers convinced that they had better ideas harbor all sorts of excuses for their loss — the media, economic earthquakes, silly character attacks.</p>
<p>Recall in 2012 the relentless and unopposed effort to define Mitt Romney as beholden to the richest of the rich, out of touch with most Americans. Republicans delivered wet noodle complaints that the attacks were “class warfare” and “divisive.” Horowitz:</p>
<blockquote><p>These were weak and whiny responses, all too familiar from previous Republican campaigns. Common to both was failure to address the specific charges . . . The term “class warfare” is a polite way of discussing a real problem, namely leftist agendas in national politics. But politeness protects others – in this case, opponents who are busy defaming you as mean spirited and selfish. . . it fails to hold your adversaries accountable for what they have actually done and are likely to continue doing if elected.</p></blockquote>
<p>And what of the zinger that Obama was “divisive?” Horowitz:</p>
<blockquote><p>Complaining about “divisive politics” is not only futile, it is incomprehensible. Elections are by nature divisive. They are competitions between winners and losers. They are about defeating opponents. Why wouldn’t they be divisive??</p></blockquote>
<p>The strongest part of <em>Take No Prisoners</em>, is how Horowitz matches his skill as a word-smith with real campaign choices. Every Horowitz book is characterized by brilliant writing, and sharp word choices. <em>Take No Prisoners</em> is about how Republicans have dropped the ball on writing the national narrative, and how they can get it back by crafting words and tactics that counter the left’s mastery of the process.</p>
<p>Many in the GOP and conservative movement might not like the taste of Horowitz’s medicine. A party raised on the primacy of ideas and policies will feel uncomfortable with the smashmouth suggestions in <em>Take No Prisoners.</em> I’ve heard the complaints — ‘we don’t want to become them’ — a complaint more convenient when the threats to liberty were less advanced. It’s also a complaint that misses the mark as a matter of fact:</p>
<blockquote><p>Behind Republican failures at the ballot box is an attitude that reflects an administrative rather than political approach to election campaigns. Republicans focus on policy proposals rather than electoral combat and the threat posed by their opponents. Administrative politicians are more comfortable with budgets and pie-charts than with the flesh and blood victims of their opponent’s policies and ideas. When Republicans do appeal to the victims of Democrat’s policies, those victims are frequently small business owners and other job creators – people who in the eyes of most Americans are rich.</p></blockquote>
<p>At the root of this strategic mistake is the belief among many Republicans that the two parties still share the same goals, but have divergent ways to get there. News flash: Democrats like John F. Kennedy and Scoop Jackson no longer exist. The Democrats have been taken over by messianic progressives seeking to craft the world in their own image. “Republicans do not hope to change the world. They are too mindful of the human catastrophes that have been brought about by those who do,” the former Communist Horowitz writes because he knows it all too well.</p>
<blockquote><p>As a result of this attitude, conservative’s emotions are not inflamed as progressives’ are when confronting those with whom they disagree. The conservative instinct is to search for common ground and to arrive at practical measures to address public problems. That is why they take a lot of time explaining to voters how their proposals might work. But by the time they reach them, many voters are not listening.</p></blockquote>
<p>This may be the central dividing line between the establishment and the Tea Party — a division Horowitz notes is more a question of tactics than goals.</p>
<p>I regularly encounter this aversion to the fight, despite the fact I receive emails and expressions of thanks from lawyers across Holder’s Justice Department. Lawyers trapped inside DOJ are filled with gratitude that I (and a few others) aggressively shine a light on Holder’s misbehavior and radicalism. Some GOP alumni of the DOJ grumble that it hurts the institution or goes too far.  But the good people still trapped inside a radicalized Justice Department, who see the disappearance of standards which governed the place for decades, are thankful. Even leaders of the Department of Justice during the age of Reagan are on the side of sunshine, not in the camp of those giving Eric Holder quarter. Horowitz didn’t name his book <em>Take no Prisoners</em> by accident.</p>
<p>Horowitz’s prescription: 1) Put the aggressors on defense. 2) Throw their victims in their faces. 3) Start the campaign now because they already have.</p>
<p>Horowitz dissects the left’s machine — not just the electoral tactics from the 2012 election and the inadequate GOP response, but the interplay between narrative, words, tactics, and ultimately questions involving race.</p>
<p>Race has become the central organizing energy behind the progressive domination of the Democrat party, and the defeat of the GOP. Race is the word that makes Republicans scatter in terror. Some Republicans have decided that the best approach to racial issues is to give the race agitators what they want.</p>
<p>This rewards evil. Organizing Americans on racial lines is evil. Hundreds of thousands of Americans lost their lives to eradicate polices that treated people differently because of skin color. Horowitz:</p>
<blockquote><p>When all is said and done, this racial Teflon is the reason that Republicans lose elections. . . . If conservatives are unable to repel and neutralize these squalid Democratic attacks, they can’t hold Democrats accountable. They can’t hold Obama accountable, and by extension they can’t hold any progressive accountable. Because this is how they fight. . . Any form of counterstrategy to these Democratic offensives must take the form of an attack.</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz is right.</p>
<p>Here’s an example. The NAACP is a morally bankrupt organization. They held the moral high ground a half century ago and helped end racial evil. But in 2014, they thrive on scaring and tricking minorities into being afraid. They herd minorities into solid electoral blocks by telling them Republicans seek to disenfranchise them by passing voter ID. They lie to minorities to scare them the same way white southerners stirred cultural fear of black men a century ago because they posed a predatory threat to southern women. That Voter ID disenfranchises blacks in 2014, and black men in 1914 were a predatory threat to white women, are both racially motivated lies designed to stoke fear and paranoia of the opposite race.</p>
<p>It’s time that the GOP go on offense against the racial lies the Democrats use to defeat them at the ballot box.</p>
<p>But will they? I’m not so sure. There are many who think the best way to respond to a lie is to flee because the lie is effective.</p>
<p>Horowitz describes this lack of GOP unity:</p>
<blockquote><p>Internal dissention not only blunts Republican attacks, it hands Democrats convenient stick to beat them with. No one on the Right thinks this is an advantageous situation. . . . What Democrats have that Republicans lack is the power of a unifying idea. . . . That idea – the idea of changing the entire framework of the nation’s life, of ‘making a better world’ – is what unifies the Left and gives it power.</p></blockquote>
<p>Horowitz concludes that politics has become religion to progressives, and when you oppose their politics, you stand in the way of their religious crusade. Until the Republicans understand that merely talking about pie charts and policy proposals cannot defeat messianic attacks, they will continue to lose Presidential elections.</p>
<p>After a GOP primary debate in South Carolina in February 2012, I was driving back to the hotel with PJ Media’s Roger Simon. Roger was inclined to go for Romney. I was partial to Newt Gingrich. Roger wanted a victory in November, and so did I. We just got there different ways. “I fear Romney doesn’t understand the left,” I told Roger. If you don’t understand the modern progressive left, you won’t defeat them, and that’s what Take No Prisoners is designed to do: Educate those who don’t understand the modern left, and provide a way to defeat them.</p>
<p>Romney’s dog would end up proving me right in 2012.</p>
<p>The Obama campaign <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2012/05/16/simon-schuster-to-capitalize-on-romney-hates-dogs-craze-sweeping-nation/">aggressively</a> went after Romney because he once put his dog in a car carrier designed for the purpose on the exterior of his station wagon. I saw bumper stickers, usually on cars driven by women, saying “Dogs for Obama.” Republicans laughed at the attack on how Romney treated his dog, not thinking it was serious.</p>
<p>Never mind the chutzpah of the Obama campaign attacking Romney for his treatment of his dog — all from a man who <a href="http://www.newsmax.com/LowellPonte/Obama-Autobiography-dog-Romney/2012/04/20/id/436539/">used to eat them</a>. Had someone in the Romney campaign crafted a witty well worded response that alluded to Obama’s past, the whole matter would have boomeranged back on Obama. How many hundreds of thousands of voters, voters who didn’t pay attention to conservative media, would have said – “huh!? Obama ate a dog?”</p>
<p>Had someone in a 2008 campaign crafted a witty well worded response that alluded to Obama’s past other than the dog eating, we might never have been stuck with him.</p>
<p>Instead, the rational shrugged off the dog on the roof attack as silly.  We’ve been laughing at the silliness of the left for 30 years, not thinking it was serious. In the meantime, the very unserious views we laughed at are now policy.</p>
<p>Saul Alinsky’s Rule Number Five understands this: “RULE 5: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.” When your opponent is ridiculing you, you are in very dangerous territory, and there is only one effective response. Fire must be used against fire.</p>
<p>Horowitz lays out an architecture in <em>Take No Prisoners</em> for conservatives to operate in the modern political battlespace. Among the key points are “in political warfare, the aggressor usually prevails. Position is defined by fear and hope. The weapons of politics are those that evoke fear and hope. Victory lies on the side of the people.”</p>
<p>The details are in the book. And if Republicans want to reverse a string of electoral losses in 2016, let’s hope Republicans read it.</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>Lois Lerner&#8217;s Vendetta</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/lois-lerners-vendetta/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lois-lerners-vendetta</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 31 Jul 2014 04:45:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Toxic partisanship revealed in new emails. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-237489" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/medium.jpg" alt="medium" width="303" height="240" /></a>House Republicans have released a Lois Lerner <a href="http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/lerner_email_a.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">email</span></a> exchange from November 2012 that “clearly demonstrates why Ms. Lerner not only targeted conservatives, but denied such groups their rights to due process and equal protection under the law,” wrote House Ways and Means Committee Chair Dave Camp (R-MI) in a <a href="http://waysandmeans.house.gov/uploadedfiles/camp_to_holder_-_referral_supplement_7_30_2014.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">letter</span></a> to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. The emails were part of additional evidence the Committee turned over to the Justice Department (DOJ) to support a thorough investigation of the IRS’s criminal behavior. “While the Committee has not seen an evidence of a serious investigation by your Department, it is my sincere hope that in light of this new strong evidence that you immediately begin aggressively investigating this matter or appoint a special counsel. The failure to do so will only further erode public trust in not only the IRS, but the Department as well,” Camp warned.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The emails are indeed damning, and they were sent by Blackberry while Lerner was apparently traveling in Great Britain. Lerner begins an exchange with a personal associate who <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/irs-official-called-gop-crazies-email-24774313"><span style="color: #1255cc;">did not work</span></a> at the IRS, during which the former director of the Exempt Organizations Unit makes no effort to hide her contempt.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Lerner begins this part of the exchange by saying she overheard some women say America was bankrupt and &#8220;going down the tubes.” The friend replies, “You should hear the whacko wing of the GOP. The US is through; too many foreigners sucking the teat; time to hunker down buy ammo and food, and prepare for the end. The right wing radio shows are scary to listen to.” Lerner responds, “Great. Maybe we are through if there are that many assholes.” The friend replies, “And I’m talking about the hosts of the show. The callers are rabid.” Lerner responds, “So we don’t have to worry about aliens terRorists (sic). It’s our own crazies that will take us down.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Camp is using this information to make the case that Lerner’s bias is self-apparent, and that the DOJ should get more involved in reviewing her, along with the IRS. He also reiterated his contention that Holder <a href="http://thehill.com/business-a-lobbying/213792-new-emails-lerner-cursed-conservatives"><span style="color: #1255cc;">has yet</span></a> to make a determined effort to do so. “Despite the serious investigation and evidence this Committee has undertaken into the IRS’s targeting of individuals for their beliefs, there is no indication that DOJ is taking this matter seriously,” he said in a statement. “In light of this new information, I hope DOJ will aggressively pursue this case and finally appoint a special counsel, so the full truth can be revealed and justice is served.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In his letter to Holder, Camp reveals that the Committee also discovered that Lerner used her personal email account for official business “including confidential return information” and noted that the DOJ could use its resources to discover “whether there was unauthorized disclosure of taxpayer information in violation of the law.” Camp further refers to an email dated February 22, 2012, in which Lerner contacted an IT professional about a “Virus on Home PC,’” further indicating  she kept work info on her home computer, “some of which may have been lost.” Lerner speculates that her computer may have been hacked “because my password was too simple,” raising additional concerns that taxpayer information may have been leaked.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">“Leaked” may be too kind. In April, the House Oversight Committee released <a href="http://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/FN-Combined.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">IRS emails</span></a> revealing that staff members for the Committee&#8217;s Democratic Ranking Member, Elijah Cummings (D-MD), had a number of <a href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/04/09/new-emaisl-show-lois-lerner-fed-information-about-true-the-vote-to-democrat-elijah-cummings-n1822247"><span style="color: #1255cc;">exchanges</span></a> with the agency in 2012 and 2013 regarding True the Vote, a conservative entity that focuses on the prevention of vote fraud. Because the IRS and Cummings&#8217; staff asked for nearly identical information from True the Vote, there is a strong indication there was a coordinated and improper effort to share confidential information. Prior to this revelation, Cummings claimed no such communication had occurred and he labeled the IRS investigation a “witch hunt.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Lerner was directly involved in attempting to get True the Vote information to Cummings. In an email exchange with deputy Holly Paz, who has since been put on administrative leave, Lerner asked, “Did we find anything?” Paz said no, and Lerner replied, “Thanks, check tomorrow please.” The exchange occurred January 28, three days after Cummings staffers asked for info.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The latest revelations about Lerner follow an equally damning April 2013 exchange revealed earlier this month by the Committee. In that one, Lerner <a href="http://legalinsurrection.com/2014/07/lois-lerner-email-we-need-to-be-cautious-about-what-we-say-in-emails/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">expresses</span></a> the need to be “cautious about what we say in emails” because they might be part of a Congressional search. She then wonders about whether conversations contained by the OCS, the IRS’s internal messaging system, are “searchable.” &#8220;[Instant] messages are not set to automatically save as the standard; however the functionality exists within the software,&#8221; an IRS official wrote back. &#8220;My general recommendation is to treat the conversation as if it could/is being saved somewhere, as it is possible for either party of the conversation to retain the information and have it turn up as part of an electronic search.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">&#8220;Perfect,&#8221; Lerner replied.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">And of course <i>that</i> revelation, indicating that IRS officials may have routinely communicated through a system that wasn’t archived, follows the incredulous assertion last month by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen that two years&#8217; worth of Lerner’s emails were “lost” because her computer <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/irs-lost-lois-lerners-emails-in-tea-party-probe/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">crashed</span></a> in 2011—and her hard drive had been <a href="http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Articles/2014/06/20/IRS-Head-Defends-Destruction-Lois-Lerner-s-Hard-Drive"><span style="color: #1255cc;">thrown away</span></a>. It was a revelation the agency withheld from the Committee for over a year, while it <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/gop-leader-subpoenas-irs-chief-over-missing-emails/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">violates</span></a> the Federal Records Act (FRA) requiring the IRS to preserve key documents. Since then, deputy associate chief counsel<b> </b>Thomas Kane told the Committee that some of those emails might be available on backup tapes.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;"><span style="color: #1255cc;"><a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/federal-eye/wp/2014/07/21/six-questions-from-it-experts-about-the-missing-irs-emails/">Six questions</a></span> posed by Barbara Rembiesa, president and founder of the International Association of Information Technology Asset Managers (IAITAM), a group of IT experts, provided a roadmap for getting to the truth. The first one, &#8220;What happened to the IRS’s IT asset managers who appear to have disappeared at a key juncture?” is followed by a revelation that at least three of the IRS’s IT managers were indeed moved out of their positions around the time the May 2013 Inspector General’s (IG) <a href="http://www.treasury.gov/tigta/auditreports/2013reports/201310053fr.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">report</span></a> detailing the agency’s improper targeting tactics was released. Other probing questions concern the lack of documentation proving Lerner’s hard drive was destroyed, by whom, and IRS policies and procedures for document preservation and disaster-recovery.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The final question was prophetic: &#8220;Where are Lois Lerner’s Blackberry e-mails?” Rembiesa pressed that particular issue. “It is difficult to imagine that none of the emails in question were done on a mobile basis,” she said. “If so, there may be a freestanding stream of email records that would not be impacted by the Lerner hard drive loss.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Two federal judges have made it clear IRS stonewalling on the issue is no longer acceptable. On July 10, U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan gave the agency 30 days to submit a written explanation—under oath—explaining how it lost the emails. The ruling was a response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by Judicial Watch. A day later, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton <a href="http://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2014/07/11/second-federal-judge-wants-info-on-lost-irs-emails"><span style="color: #1255cc;">demanded</span></a> to know what became of Lerner’s hard drive. If it was destroyed, he wants a sworn affidavit to that effect. He also wants information about the IG&#8217;s investigation. Walton’s ruling was in response to a lawsuit filed by True the Vote, who is also asking the judge to appoint an independent expert to investigate the lost emails. True the Vote’s lawyer, Cleta Mitchell, explained why. &#8220;We don&#8217;t trust the IRS,” she told Walton.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Judicial Watch’s Jay Sekulow is calling for the appointment of a Special Prosecutor based on <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/jw-obtains-irs-documents-showing-lerner-contact-doj-potential-prosecution-tax-exempt-groups/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">emails</span></a> between Lerner and the DOJ regarding the targeting of conservative groups, as well as the reality that the DOJ investigation (such as it is) is being conducted by Barbara Bosserman. Bosserman is an attorney from the DOJ&#8217;s Civil Right division, not the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division that handles public corruption. She has also been a campaign contributor to President Obama and the Democratic Party, presenting what Sekulow, as well as <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368132/real-and-perceived-bias-irs-investigation-hans-von-spakovsky"><span style="color: #1255cc;">members</span></a> of the Committee, consider a blatant “conflict of interest.” &#8220;There could be no more clear example of the need to appoint a truly objective and independent prosecutor than in this case,” Sekulow <a href="http://aclj.org/free-speech-2/testifying-before-congress-doj-compromised-justice-demands-special-counsel"><span style="color: #1255cc;">contends</span></a>.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s not going to happen. It would be up to Eric Holder to do so, and the most transparently political Attorney General in more than forty years isn’t about to let it happen.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In the meantime, Lois Lerner remains in the eye of the storm. And what little information has been gleaned from those emails discovered so far reveals her to be every bit the partisan hack those victimized by her efforts have accused her of being.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Committee should continue its investigation, but in a very measured way: it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Lerner’s emails exist, that they contain no more incriminating information, and that IRS officials who hid the revelation about their destruction are waiting to spring a politically-calculated trap aimed at blowing the investigation out of the water. If that possibility sound conspiratorial, Americans should ask themselves if a year ago, they could have imagined an Obama administration abetting human trafficking by allowing a wholesale invasion of our Southwest border, and shipping thousands of illegal aliens around the nation—in <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/07/25/Over-200-Illegal-Immigrant-Children-Shipped-to-Indiana"><span style="color: #1255cc;">secret</span></a>. When the one rule that governs the implementation of one’s agenda is “by any means necessary,” all things are possible.</p>
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		<title>Obama and Putin’s Savage World Order</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/obama-and-putins-savage-world-order/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-and-putins-savage-world-order</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 21 Jul 2014 04:42:54 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Savages can only be beaten by throwing away the rules.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/mn.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-236744" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/mn-450x253.jpg" alt="mn" width="352" height="198" /></a>Whether it’s Obama sneering “Sue me” to critics of his abuses of power or Putin shrugging at yet another atrocity, we are no longer in the civilized urbane precincts of law and government.</p>
<p>What both men have in common is a hard left background which has taught them that the only defining principle in politics is Lenin’s “Kto-Kovo”. Kto-Kovo or Who-Whom reduced all interactions to warfare. The Bolsheviks ushered in the end of rules, decency or honor. All that mattered was who would be able to destroy whom. It didn’t matter whether you had justice on your side, but what you would do about it.</p>
<p>Obama and Putin have the same message for America. “Kto-Kovo.” “Sue me.” “So what?” “I won.”</p>
<p>Both men are mocking the impotence of their opponents who by failing to stop them have shown that they are weak and worthless. Instead they use them to divert attention from their own crimes.</p>
<p>In a Kto-Kovo world, there are no compromises and no morals. There are no laws and no limits.</p>
<p>If you can do something, you do it. If your opponents can’t stop you, then you have the right to do it. The true radical, the man of destiny, will do anything he wants because that is what makes him great. Lies are constant and utterly shameless. No lie can ever be exposed because the liar moves on to the next lie and then the one after that. Truth is as meaningless in a Kto-Kovo world as law.</p>
<p>Words and laws are just means to power. And in a Kto-Kovo world, power is all that matters.</p>
<p>A Kto-Kovo leader, whether in the 7<sup>th</sup> century or the 21<sup>st</sup> century, operates by rallying his followers through bold acts that expand their power and humiliate and destroy the morale of their enemies.</p>
<p>Whether it’s Putin invading Ukraine or Obama unilaterally running his amnesty, a Kto-Kovo leader attacks and challenges his enemies to stop him. He ignores any authority not under his control and does what he wants and by doing so he demonstrates that his power is the only authority that counts.</p>
<p>Kto-Kovo leaders are barbarians. Their actions challenge the framework of civilization. Their coming is a warning that civilization is on its last legs.</p>
<p>Civilization limits power by creating rules, whether in the realm of political power or the realm of ideas. There are means of limiting individual power and collective power and testing ideas and agendas. Kto-Kovo breaks all these limits. It says that if I want to punch you in the face, I will. If I want to force you to buy health insurance, I will. If I want to invade your country, I will. If I want to open your borders to invaders, I will. If I want to lie about everything, I will.</p>
<p>Don’t like it? So sue me.</p>
<p>In a Kto-Kovo world, the most lawless wins. Obama can beat up Republicans who still follow the rules. Putin however can smack around Obama because he follows even fewer rules.</p>
<p>Obama abuses executive power. Putin is executive power. When there are no laws, the dictator beats the abusive elected official.</p>
<p>Meanwhile in Iraq and Syria, ISIS is still winning the Kto-Kovo game because it follows no rules at all. There is nothing that its terrorists won’t do. And that puts them ahead of both Putin and Obama.</p>
<p>When Michelle Obama offered one of the hashtags that work so well against Republicans, Boko Haram laughed in her face. Social media bullying can take down the unarmed. It isn’t a threat to men who have no jobs, lots of guns and who aren’t part of your society’s extended cultural peer group.</p>
<p>Their Kto-Kovo comes down to naked force. Either you kill them or they kill you.</p>
<p>Kto-Kovo is a journey to the jungle floor of barbarism and there is always someone willing to be more of a barbarian. Obama daringly uses executive orders, starts wars and smuggles guns to terrorists. Putin skips right to shooting down planes. Boko Haram and ISIS cut to the suicide bombers and the genocide.</p>
<p>Don’t like it? So sue them.</p>
<p>Terrorism is the final Kto-Kovo. That is the bloody lesson that confronts Israel in Gaza. Fighting an opponent that will commit any crime and tell any lie is impossible except by Kto-Kovo rules. Terrorists use rules to immobilize their opponents while they themselves obey no rules.</p>
<p>Alinsky’s Rule Four, “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules”, is also the credo of Hamas, Putin and Obama. Kto-Kovo attackers have the most contempt for those who follow rules that weaken them. Their favorite tactic is accusing you of something they know to be false, “You are just like Hitler”, “You are a racist”, “You don’t care about human rights”… and then forcing you to disprove their accusations which limits your mobility and makes you predictable, neurotic and vulnerable.</p>
<p>Eventually you begin to turn on your own people at the first sign that they might embarrass you by proving the enemy’s accusation right. Meanwhile the Kto-Kovo enemy is a racist, doesn’t care about human rights and thinks that being compared to Hitler is a compliment.</p>
<p>What the Kto-Kovo enemy fears most is that his opponents will stop playing by the rules. Rules are a consensus, but the habits of civilization teach us that they are inviolable laws. That is why we insist on treating terrorists like prisoners of war even though the codes for the treatment of prisoners were part of a mutual reciprocal arrangement. We bend over backward to protect enemy civilians even when those civilians openly support terrorists whose goal is to kill as many of our civilians as possible.</p>
<p>We act as if Russia is a legitimate state that can be reasoned with when there is extensive evidence that its current leaders, just like in Soviet times, operate only under Kto-Kovo rules and don’t respond to anything else. And we still like to think that Obama’s Kto-Kovo politics can be neutered by the right Supreme Court decision or lawsuit when the only thing he responds to are direct threats to his power.</p>
<p>Obama isn’t worried about being sued. He isn’t afraid of any court. He isn’t even all that worried about losing the Senate. What he fears is another populist wave, like the one that created the Tea Party, swamping his agenda with mass protests and government disruption that even his media can’t ignore.</p>
<p>Putin isn’t afraid of another international investigation or limited sanctions. He’s terrified of losing power in a domestic uprising or of being forced to back up his threats with a shaky military.</p>
<p>Kto-Kovo fights can’t be won by playing by the rules. They can only be won by directly challenging the enemy’s power base and by going outside the rules to create your own power base.</p>
<p>It’s a power struggle that has no rules except that the side that blinks first loses.</p>
<p>In the memory of every civilization is the knowledge that barbarians can only be beaten by being as willing to throw away the rules as they are. Otherwise you end up on the wrong side of Kto-Kovo.</p>
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		<title>Can Americans Be Trusted to Oversee School Lunches Themselves?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/can-americans-be-trusted-to-oversee-school-lunches-themselves/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=can-americans-be-trusted-to-oversee-school-lunches-themselves</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 29 May 2014 04:25:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[First Lady Michelle Obama gives us the answer. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/20140528_inq_lunch28z-a.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226460 alignleft" alt="Michelle Obama" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/20140528_inq_lunch28z-a-450x309.jpg" width="315" height="216" /></a>On Tuesday, First Lady Michelle Obama took on House Republicans, criticizing their attempt to roll back the current guidelines for school lunches. “It’s unacceptable to me, not just as first lady but also as a mother,” she </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/may/27/cafeteria-politics-michelle-obama-starts-food-figh/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&amp;utm_medium=RSS">declared</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> during a White House meeting with school nutrition officials. &#8220;The last thing we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids’ health. Now is not the time to roll back everything we have worked for.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The current standards took effect in 2010, when President Obama signed the </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ncsl.org/research/human-services/healthy-hunger-free-kids-act-of-2010-summary.aspx">Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">. Its requirements included more fruits, vegetables and whole grains to be served to students, while setting limits on sugar, sodium and fat. It also set a limit of 850 calories per meal.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While many consider the initiative a laudable goal aimed at reducing childhood obesity, it has collided with daunting reality: students, as well as cafeteria workers, are rejecting the standards as too rigid. A Government Accountability Office (GAO) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.gao.gov/assets/670/660427.pdf">report</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reveals that student participation in the National School Lunch Program declined by 1.3 million students from the 2010-2011 school year through the 2012-2013 school year, “after having increased steadily for many years.” It further notes that almost all states reported that getting students to accept lunches that complied with the new standards was “challenging,” and that school food authorities (SFAs) faced many problems associated with the program. They included federally-required price increases, “plate waste” (as in food thrown away rather than eaten), overall management of food costs, and planning menus that complied with federal portion sizes and calorie requirements.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Leah Schmidt, president of the School Nutrition Association (SNA), an organization comprised of school nutrition officials and companies that sell food to schools, reinforced that reality. “The administration’s own data proves that student participation in school lunch is abruptly down in 48 states despite rising school enrollment and 30 years of steady program growth,” she explained in a statement. “SNA does not want to gut the nutrition standards — we support many of the requirements. Our request for flexibility under the new standards does not come from industry or politics. It comes from thousands of school cafeteria professionals who have shown how these overly prescriptive regulations are hindering their effort to get students to eat healthy school meals.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Enter Congress. Last week, a House subcommittee </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/news/politics-elections/2014/05/27/first-lady-set-to-respond-to-school-meal-critics-n1843678">approved</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a spending bill that would allow schools to waive the standards if a school food program incurs a net loss over a six month period. The bill was crafted by Rep. Robert Aderholt (R-AL) who said it was in response to requests from school officials. They complained about losing money because they are required to spend money on higher cost, healthier foods even as student demand continues to decline. “I am standing with our nation’s schools to provide them the flexibility they are requesting from Congress,” Aderholt explained. &#8220;The language in this bill simply provides those schools that are having difficulty complying with the regulations the ability to obtain a temporary, one-year waiver.” </span></p>
<p>That reality was reinforced National School Boards Association (NSBA) whose spokeswoman, Lucy Gettman, <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/206734-michelles-meals-turn-off-the-kids">revealed</a> that many schools are raiding their teaching budgets to pay for the aforementioned plate waste. The Department of Agriculture further noted that 500 schools dropped out of the program this year. The NSA and the NSBA both support the legislation and it is expected to be approved by the House Appropriations Committee this week.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The Senate Appropriations Committee also entered the picture, passing a 2015 funding bill for the Department of Agriculture requiring the Department to inform Congress on how it will help schools implement guidelines. In addition the bill prevents scheduled limits on sodium from going into effect, and asks the Department to determine whether schools are capable of implementing the requirement to provide 100 percent whole-grain pasta and bread scheduled to take effect next fall. The USDA </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/policy/finance/206734-michelles-meals-turn-off-the-kids">legitimized</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> complaints by schools that said they could not find whole-grain pastas that did not fall apart in the giant cauldrons used to prepare school meals.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Despite these realities, the pushback was inevitable. Democratic National Committee Vice Chairwoman Donna Brazile </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.kspr.com/news/nationworld/Brazile-GOP-Let-them-eat-whatever/21051646_26189616">attacked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Republicans for allowing such flexibility, claiming the bill &#8220;appears to be an attempt to buy time so the frozen food industry and agribusinesses can worm their foods into the schools. The provision is opposed by hundreds of nonpartisan, nonprofit nutrition organizations and supported by just a handful of powerful junk food interests.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That sentiment was echoed by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CN) who voted against the bill. “Why would Congress, already maligned for labeling pizza a vegetable — and I know something about pizza — now seek to weaken federal child nutrition programs, and through the appropriations process no less, other than to appease the industry?” she asked. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">PTA President Otha Thornton was also upset. &#8220;At a time when families are working hard to live healthy lives, school meals should be supporting families&#8217; efforts, not working against them,” she wrote in a letter to Congress. Michelle Obama who has made this issue one of her primary policy achievements was equally incensed. “This is unacceptable,” she said at the White House meeting. “It’s unacceptable to me not just as First Lady but also as a mother.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unfortunately, Michelle Obama’s heavy-handed, top-down approach to the issue is just as unacceptable to those affected most: the students themselves. They have taken to Twitter to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/barbara-boland/thanksmichelle-students-tweet-photos-skimpy-stomach-turning-school-lunches">express</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> their dissatisfaction with the changes, posting pictures of flaccid-looking healthy lunches, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://twitchy.com/2014/04/05/meanwiches-and-stinkburgers-ticked-off-kids-blame-michelle-obama-for-pitiful-school-lunches-pics/">replete</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> with “colorful” and often censorable commentary, followed by the hashtag #ThanksMichelle. Students have also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/06/nyregion/healthier-school-lunches-face-student-rejection.html?pagewanted=all&amp;_r=0">staged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> boycotts, Facebook-organized lunch strikes, and produced a parody music video called </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IB7NDUSBOo">&#8220;We Are Hungry”</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that depicts several students fainting from hunger. It has garnered nearly 1.4 million views on YouTube.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Such reactions are virtually inevitable among teenagers who don’t like being told what to do about anything, much less about what to eat. But Obama undermines her own cause with the one element that invariably attaches itself to the progressive agenda: rank hypocrisy. CNS News’s Barbara Boland decided to investigate what Michelle Obama&#8217;s daughters, Sasha and Malia, are served at Sidwell Friends, the high-end private school they attend. She discovered they eat lunches “from menus designed by chefs.” &#8220;While the Obama daughters have enjoyed dishes like chicken coconut soup, local butternut squash soup, crusted tilapia, they also get their fill of what Mrs. Obama might consider junk food,” writes Boland. &#8220;This week, for example, they&#8217;ll enjoy </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.sidwell.edu/calendars/month.aspx?pageaction=ViewPublicBlock&amp;ModuleID=375">meatball subs, BBQ wings, and ice cream</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, in addition to chicken curry, deviled egg salad and the intriguing &#8216;Chef&#8217;s Choice.&#8217;&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other entrees included on the Sidwell menu include Philly Cheese Steaks, All Natural Beef Hot Dogs, Pepperoni Flatbread Pizzas and Beef BBQ Sliders.  Meriwether-Godsey, the company the provides those meals, employs a registered dietician, an executive chef, and a team of company chefs who design a menu updated every quarter &#8220;so we continue to provide excellent nutrition in keeping with the latest tastes and trends,&#8221; </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.ilunchbox.com/articles/wonder-what-the-obama-girls-are-having-for-lunch/meriwether-godsey-chef-profiles.php">says</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Leslie Phillips, Director of Business Development. &#8220;Young people are increasingly interested in food and are developing very discerning palates at a younger age.” No doubt, especially when such main courses are accompanied by such items as Organic Baked Fries, Grilled Portobello, Spinach Ricotta, Brazilian Sweet Potato Salad, Basmati Rice, and Roasted Acorn Squash.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On the other hand, there is little doubt that combatting childhood obesity is a noble effort. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) it is a condition that has doubled in children, and quadrupled in adolescents in the past 30 years. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet while addressing what children eat is part of the equation it is not nearly enough: a lack of exercise is an equally critical component. Unfortunately, a report released in 2013 by Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, “Educating the Student Body: Taking Physical Activity and Physical Education to School,” reveals that 44 percent of schools have </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/education/many-schools-cutting-back-physical-education">cut back</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on physical education classes, and only half of America’s youth meet the U.S. Health and Human Services Department&#8217;s evidence-based guideline of at least 60 minutes of vigorous or moderate-intensity physical activity daily. It further notes the cutbacks have been engendered by schools devoting more time to reading and math since the passage of No Child Left Behind in 2001.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In other words, the federal government is working at cross purposes with itself. To her credit, Michelle Obama has also promoted an exercise initiative called Let’s Move, but it is hardly a substitute for the school-based phys. ed. requirements America&#8217;s school children need.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Which initiative is more important? Americans old enough to remember a time when school lunches were far less health-oriented than they are now, also remember that childhood obesity was the exception, not the norm. It was also a time when gym classes were an integral part of the school curriculum. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Regardless, the real turnoff here may not be the message, but the messenger. Like her husband, Michelle Obama is a firm believer in the government-knows-best, one-size-fits-all approach to implementing initiatives, even as her own children remain exempt from many of those initiatives. One suspects that she, along with many of her progressive allies, might get a better reception from the public if such arrogance, coupled with the “do as I say, not as I do” hypocrisy that invariably accompanies it, weren’t integral parts of their self-aggrandizing agenda. Absent what would amount to a Road to Damascus change of attitude, this is a &#8220;food fight&#8221; likely to continue.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>White People Be Playing the Race Card</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/larry-elder/white-people-be-playing-the-race-card/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=white-people-be-playing-the-race-card</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 26 May 2014 04:00:09 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Larry Elder]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[al sharpton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jay Rockefeller]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[steve israel]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=226229</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Meet the Left's white race hustlers. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Senator-Jay-Rockefeller-007.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-226230 alignleft" alt="Senator-Jay-Rockefeller-007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Senator-Jay-Rockefeller-007-450x270.jpg" width="315" height="189" /></a>I&#8217;m old enough to remember when only black people called black people &#8220;Uncle Tom.&#8221; Democrats, however, long expanded the category of who can play the race card and on whom. Call them equal opportunity race-card players.</p>
<p>As with black race-card hustlers — say the Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton or any given host on MSNB-Hee-Haw — white race-card players label others &#8220;racist&#8221; for the crime of disagreement. As with black race-card hustlers, white race-card hustlers need not name names when accusing someone of &#8220;racism.&#8221; And, as with black race-card hustlers, the mainscream media will not bother to ask the white race-card hustler to identify said racists.</p>
<p>Some examples:</p>
<p>Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y.: When recently asked if his Republican colleagues were racist, Israel responded, &#8220;Not all of them, no. Of course not. But to a significant extent, the Republican base does have elements that are animated by racism.&#8221; &#8220;Not all&#8221; implies one or more is &#8220;animated by racism.&#8221; He never bothered to name names, let alone what &#8220;animated&#8221; the racist(s). The host did not ask.</p>
<p>Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.: Only days ago, the soon-to-retire senator said that he can now speak out about the number of Republicans who oppose President Barack Obama because of his race: &#8220;It&#8217;s an American characteristic that you don&#8217;t do anything which displeases the voters, because you always have to get reelected here. I understand part of it. It has to do with — for some, it&#8217;s just we don&#8217;t want anything good to happen under this president, because he&#8217;s the wrong color.&#8221;</p>
<p>Former Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, now a Democrat: Crist recently said that &#8220;a big reason&#8221; he switched parties was because of the way &#8220;some&#8221; people in his former party — Republican — treated Obama: &#8220;I couldn&#8217;t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president.&#8221;</p>
<p>Feminist attorney Gloria Allred, Democrat: After the election of George W. Bush in 2000, Colin Powell and Condi Rice, formerly with the Reagan administration, were considered likely to join the new administration. Allred, who then hosted a Los Angeles radio show, referred to them (not by name) as &#8220;Uncle Tom types.&#8221;</p>
<p>Former President Jimmy Carter, Democrat: He attributed opposition to Obamamcare and other Obama policies to racism. &#8220;I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama,&#8221; said Carter, &#8220;is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he&#8217;s African-American.</p>
<p>Racism &#8230; still exists, and I think it&#8217;s bubbled up to the surface because of a belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country.&#8221;</p>
<p>CNN&#8217;s Anderson Cooper: When asked by embattled Clippers&#8217; owner Donald Sterling whether there&#8217;s much prejudice in America, CNN&#8217;s Anderson Cooper replied, &#8220;Yes. &#8230; There&#8217;s institutional prejudice&#8221; in addition to the kind &#8220;that people have in their hearts.&#8221; In fairness to Cooper, Sterling did not ask him to name any &#8220;institution&#8221; — but it would have been helpful.</p>
<p>The Republicans-hate-blacks narrative remains crucial to maintaining the monolithic 95 percent Democratic black vote, without which the Democratic Party cannot succeed. Economist Thomas Sowell writes, &#8220;If Republicans can get just a fourth or a fifth of the black vote nationwide, that can shift the balance of power decisively in their favor.&#8221; As recently as 1956, nearly 39 percent of blacks voted Republican in the presidential election.</p>
<p>The next time a Democrat or member of media speaks darkly about these anonymous Republican &#8220;racists,&#8221; ask this question: Don&#8217;t Israel and Rockefeller, currently in office, have a duty to &#8220;out&#8221; these racists? Why allow known bigots to remain in government? Doesn&#8217;t morality require Crist, running as a Democrat for his old job as governor of Florida, to identify and help remove these racist elected officials? Aren&#8217;t these Republican &#8220;racists&#8221; — whose IDs are being protected by their Democratic colleagues — detrimental to the interests of the nation and serving in violation of their oath to protect and defend the U.S. Constitution? Doesn&#8217;t this oath mean protecting and defending the rights of all constituents irrespective of race — and exposing the &#8220;racists&#8221; who refuse to do so?</p>
<p>Why protect them? Why conceal their identities? Out the SOBs!</p>
<p>But, no. Democrats would rather just brand unnamed Republicans as &#8220;racist,&#8221; no matter how absurd or outlandish the charge. Given this tepid five-year-old &#8220;recovery,&#8221; the Obama-loving/leftist media/academia/Hollywood crowd cannot, during this off-year election cycle, brag about economic growth. So look for more topic-changers like &#8220;income inequality,&#8221; climate change and the eternal struggle against the unknown &#8220;racist&#8221; obstructionists who sit across the aisle.</p>
<p>Sigh.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Republican Leaders Fight Back Against IRS Power Grab</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/republican-leaders-fight-back-against-irs-power-grab/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=republican-leaders-fight-back-against-irs-power-grab</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Feb 2014 05:55:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[GOP]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IRS]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218433</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[GOP stands up for free participation in the democratic process.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/we.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-218439" alt="we" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/we-450x243.jpg" width="315" height="170" /></a>Republicans are fighting back against proposed new IRS rules that they say would make formal the tax agency&#8217;s infamous crackdown on Tea Party groups that oppose the Obama agenda, stripping them of their free speech rights during election cycles.</p>
<p>&#8220;Every American needs to know about this abuse of power,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky) said in a recent speech on the Senate floor. “Let me be clear: What the administration is proposing poses a grave threat to the ability of ordinary Americans to freely participate in the Democratic process.”</p>
<p>The new rules, first unveiled around Thanksgiving when no one was paying attention, would prevent so-called 501c4 advocacy groups from participating in certain kinds of political activity. Such nonprofit organizations would be prevented from communicating with voters about candidates or political parties within 60 days of a general election.</p>
<p>On the House side, Speaker John Boehner (Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (Va.), Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (Calif.), Cathy McMorris Rodgers (Wash.), Dave Camp (Mich.), and Hal Rogers (Ky.) have signed a letter asking newly minted IRS chief John Koskinen to kill new proposed regulations dating from November that they say are intended to silence conservative groups.</p>
<p>On the Senate side, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), Minority Whip John Cornyn (Texas), John Thune (S.D.), Orrin Hatch (Utah), and Richard Shelby (Ala.) also signed the letter that suggests Koskinen would be perceived as a puppet of the Obama White House if he didn&#8217;t pull back from the regulations. In the Obama era IRS officials have been accused of spending <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/10/irs-white-house-officials-that-shared-confidential-taxpayer-info-had-155-white-house-meetings/">an inordinate amount of time</a> at the White House and getting far too cozy with top administration figures.</p>
<p>“It is our view that finalizing this proposed rule would make intimidation and harassment of the administration&#8217;s political opponents the official policy of the IRS and would allow the Obama administration to use your agency as a partisan tool,” the lawmakers said in <a href="http://www.speaker.gov/sites/speaker.house.gov/files/UploadedFiles/IRS%20letter_140205.PDF">the letter</a>.</p>
<p>“This would be a serious error, especially in the light of the recent track record of intimidation at the IRS. It would also cement your reputation as someone who is unable or unwilling to restore the public&#8217;s faith in this important agency.”</p>
<p>Although Koskinen, who was sworn in as IRS Commissioner on Dec. 23, said he did not participate in drafting the rules, he has refused Republican demands to block their implementation.</p>
<p>“Everyone can make comments about our draft regulations as they are now,” Koskinen said in testimony before a House Ways and Means subcommittee last week.</p>
<p>“There will be a public hearing,&#8221; he said. &#8220;There will be numerous occasions for people to bring any information that they would like, or perspectives, about those regulations forward before they are finalized. And they&#8217;re not going to be finalized in the near-term future,” he added, noting that the administration had received 21,000 comments on the regulations.</p>
<p>According to <a href="http://www.freedomworks.org/press-releases/freedomworks-activists-fight-newly-proposed-irs-ru">FreedomWorks</a>, the proposed IRS guidelines would restrict the political activities of tax-exempt 501c4 organizations, expand the already unchecked discretionary power of the IRS, and institutionalize the agency’s targeted harassment of conservative and libertarian nonprofits in the Obama era.</p>
<p>These &#8220;draconian IRS regulations &#8230; would make it virtually impossible for tea parties that want to participate in the political process to do their business,&#8221; said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks.</p>
<p>&#8220;They’re going after conservative groups, they’re going after libertarian groups, and they’re going after citizen groups that want to organize people based on the values of the constitution; based on the ideas of freedom and have an impact on the political conversation. If that sounds familiar, what they’re doing is formalizing the same persecution, the same targeting that we saw coming out of the IRS leading up to the 2012 election.&#8221;</p>
<p>What most of the news coverage of the sordid IRS saga misses is that Democrats are angry about Republican-friendly nonprofits. They are upset that nonprofits that oppose Obama are allowed to exist at all. They use specious arguments to justify the Obama administration&#8217;s increasingly naked repression of its domestic political enemies.</p>
<p>Democrats correctly view Tea Party groups, that is, right-wing populist groups, as an existential threat to the Left. These nonprofits tend to be Republican-leaning organizations and they have been successful so far in derailing, or at least slowing, parts of President Obama&#8217;s ongoing transmogrification of America.</p>
<p>Democrats don&#8217;t want any conservative nonprofits to enjoy tax-exempt status. Such nonprofits are all working against the Left, standing in the way and preventing America from becoming a leftist utopia.</p>
<p>Using the IRS to hurt right-of-center groups is fair game, according to left-wingers. President Obama can&#8217;t even bring himself to admit that what happened at the IRS was corrupt.</p>
<p>In an embarrassing television interview that aired Super Bowl Sunday, Obama lied shamelessly to save his skin in the horrendous IRS targeting scandal that could yet cost him the presidency. There was &#8220;not a smidgen of corruption&#8221; in the IRS saga, Obama told an incredulous Bill O&#8217;Reilly in the on-air mendacity marathon as he smeared Fox News Channel and blamed the network, instead of his own misdeeds, for his deepening political woes.</p>
<p>In fact we now know that officials at the highest level of the Obama administration had been conspiring for years, plotting a Chicago thug-style knee-capping of conservative opposition groups.</p>
<p>A congressional hearing <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2552413/Sparks-fly-knives-come-hearing-IRS-targeting-tea-party-groups-new-email-document-shows-agency-cover-mode.html#ixzz2sc0dedTs">revealed</a> last week that the IRS was planning to justify unfairly targeting nonprofit anti-Obama groups as early as 2012, long before a government watchdog exposed the depth of the targeting.</p>
<p>The smoking gun came in the form of an email from Treasury Department tax policy attorney Ruth Madrigal to several IRS officials including the infamous Lois Lerner who invoked the Fifth Amendment&#8217;s non-incrimination privilege to avoid coming clean during a high-profile congressional inquiry.</p>
<p>&#8220;Don’t know who in your organizations is keeping tabs on c4s,&#8221; Madrigal wrote, referring to the tax-exempt Tea Party groups recognized under section 501(c)(4) of the federal tax code, &#8220;but since we mentioned potentially addressing them (off plan) in 2013, I’ve got my radar up and this seemed interesting.&#8221;</p>
<p>Congressional tax-writing chief Rep. Dave Camp (R-Mich.) said Madrigal&#8217;s missive meant that new rules were not being developed as a &#8220;remedy to the target[ing]&#8221; that took place in 2011 and 2012. &#8220;I’m pretty sure [off-plan] means &#8216;hidden from the public,&#8217;&#8221; said Camp, who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.</p>
<p>Investigators still haven&#8217;t interviewed many conservative groups that were denied tax-exempt status while their liberal counterparts sailed through the nonprofit status-granting process.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>Republicans Go On an Immigration Reform Bender</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/republicans-go-on-an-immigration-reform-bender/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=republicans-go-on-an-immigration-reform-bender</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Feb 2014 05:40:34 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[border]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Illegal Aliens]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=218186</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[That little thing that needs to be done -- before talking about what to do with 11 million illegal aliens.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/il.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-218187" alt="il" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/il.jpg" width="268" height="188" /></a>Rather than twisting the political knife in the gaping wound that is Obamacare, House Republicans are off on a “comprehensive immigration reform” toot. The latest news has the Speaker putting off any action for now, and waiting until after the midterm elections in order not to anger the anti-amnesty base, and “to goose Latino turnout or to swing purple districts” in 2016, as political blogger <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/02/06/emerging-house-gop-consensus-on-immigration-wait-til-next-year">Allahpundit</a> put it. In other words, electoral timing rather than principle is determining what happens.</p>
<p>But principle, not to mention common sense, is what’s at stake here. Anyone proposing “comprehensive” anything after the debacle of Obamacare is delusional. Complex problems are not going to be solved with grandiose legislation that tries to politically please everybody. Nor are most sensible voters likely once again to play Charlie Brown to the Congressional Lucy jerking away the promised “enforcement triggers” and “border security” football after the de facto amnesty is already in place. We went through all that in 1986, when the same promises of employer checks of legal residency and beefed-up border security were broken, more than doubling the number of illegal immigrants from 5 million to 11 million today.</p>
<p>And please, let’s stop all the delusional dreams of Hispanic “natural conservatives” flocking to the GOP after the boon of amnesty is bestowed upon them. John McCain partnered with Teddy Kennedy in 2005 and 2007 to craft legislation to create a “path to citizenship,” and still got half as many Hispanic votes (31%) as Barack Obama did in 2008. By the way, McCain beat Mitt “self-deport” Romney by a whole 4 points with Hispanic voters. Voters vote their interests, and the interests of the majority of Hispanic voters are best served by the Democrats, as evidenced by the fact that 75% percent favor a “bigger government providing more services,” according to a <a href="http://www.pewhispanic.org/2012/04/04/v-politics-values-and-religion/">Pew</a> poll. That’s why the best a Republican candidate has done with Hispanics, George W. Bush in 2004, was still 18 points behind the Democrat John Kerry, one of the least likable and most incompetent candidates since Mike Dukakis. To think that being nice will trump those interests is nonsense. And any gain that might accrue is likely to be offset by losses among the base angered at such pandering.</p>
<p>Also ridiculous is the fear that not doing <i>something</i> will allow Democrats to tar Republicans with the racism or xenophobia brush. Here’s a newsflash: they are going to do that no matter what Republicans do. The “preemptive cringe” as Margaret Thatcher called it is the worst form of defense. The only way not to be labeled “racist,” or accused of waging a “war against women,” is to give the liberals everything they want. Rather than give in to such threats, go on offense with data detailing the enormous costs of illegal immigration in states like California. Take those hidden cameras into San Joaquin Valley emergency rooms on Saturday night, the jails and prisons, the Social Security Disability office, the stores and groceries accepting EBT cards, and the small towns stricken with hit-and-run drivers, drunk drivers, county roads turned into dumps, unregulated buildings and restaurants, and rampant theft.</p>
<p>Of course, there are numerous illegal aliens and their children who are hard-working, law-abiding, and eager to become Americans, not remain Mexican at heart while they benefit from America’s opportunity and freedom. Having lived 60 years in the San Joaquin Valley and experienced immigration legal and otherwise long before tony liberals discovered this issue, I have known many such immigrants. But in the immigration debate today, all we hear are the feel-good stories about hard-working family-values Hispanics, and nothing about the other side of the coin: the thug, the welfare leech, the thief, the law-breaker, and the gang-banger. If we are going to debate this issue honestly, then let’s talk about the whole reality rather than ignoring the side that doesn’t advance our political interest, whether this be more Democrat voters and welfare clients, or more cheap labor. Then explain how amnesty is going to change that behavior and lower those costs.</p>
<p>Moreover, let’s demand that the amnesty crowd explain exactly how they plan to sort out those two sets of illegal immigrants, the ones we should keep and the ones we need to kick out. Expel the felons? OK, then start with the tens of thousands already housed in American prisons. But why stop at felons? Anyone with a DUI should be gone, anyone determined to have illegally received welfare benefits or food stamps or Social Security Disability Insurance should be gone. Anyone in possession of a fraudulent Social Security Card should be gone. Anyone caught driving without a license or insurance should be gone. Anyone using hospital emergency rooms as a doctor’s office for minor ailments should be gone. And anyone who thinks I’m making up racist slanders needs to take a tour of the San Joaquin Valley and see the reality too many people pretend does not exist.</p>
<p>If the Republicans want to start doing something about immigration, then build a fence on the border, period. And don’t tell me it’s impossible. In the 14<sup>th</sup> Century the Ming Dynasty in China built 5,500 miles of the Great Wall using nothing but animal and human muscle power. Don’t tell me the country that between 1940 and 1944 increased military aircraft annual production from 3660 to 96,300, that in 1942 was producing 4,000 Sherman tanks a month, 70 years later can’t fence off the 1933 miles of border between Mexico and the U.S.</p>
<p>Do that first, and when the border is secure, then start talking about what to do with the 11 million illegal aliens. Meanwhile, reform our immigration policies by getting rid of family reunification programs, and making admission to this country conditional on what the immigrant has to offer Americans, not what Americans have to offer immigrants. Start enforcing labor laws and putting teeth into sanctions against violating them. And most important, start returning to the old model of immigration that made it work for most of American history: assimilation to American political principles and virtues, facility in speaking English, and a rejection of self-loathing multicultural nonsense about American guilt and the superiority of the countries immigrants risk their lives to leave.</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>Fight the Next War, Not the Last One</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/fight-the-next-war-not-the-last-one/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=fight-the-next-war-not-the-last-one</link>
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		<pubDate>Mon, 27 Jan 2014 05:55:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[address]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Clinton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[state of the union]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[Why dwell on Obama when the Hillary campaign is mounting its assault? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pict.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-217292" alt="pict" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/pict-450x337.jpg" width="270" height="202" /></a>Tuesday night President Obama will deliver another campaign speech, this one marketed as the State of the Union address. As such, we can expect to hear, through the usual white noise of “I,” “me,” and “my,” vacuous bromides like “moving America forward,” and empty promises “to grow the economy, strengthen the middle class, and empower all who hope to join it,” as White House flack Dan Pfeiffer said. So after token references to economic growth, we can expect to be served heaping helpings of “income inequality” and “economic mobility,” the redistributionist chum for his hungry progressive base.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Is anybody surprised at once again experiencing the mendacity of hope? Is there anything we don’t know about the incompetence, arrogance, and political thuggery of this administration? Obama and the Democrats represent the toxic stew of old-style Progressive government by technocratic elites, Sixties grievance politics, stealth pacifism, guilt over America’s sins, class warfare, redistribution of wealth to buy votes, crony socialism for the progressive 1% to secure campaign-contribution kickbacks, and pork for public employee unions to garner votes as well as bucks. The wages of this faux populist elitism are a sluggish recovery, anemic economic growth, a real </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t15.htm" target="_blank">unemployment rate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> of 13%, a 3% decline over the last decade in the workforce </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://data.bls.gov/timeseries/LNS11300000" target="_blank">participation rate</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the monstrosity of Obamacare, the failure to exploit this country’s petroleum and natural gas riches, the looming bankruptcy of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, and the explosion of debt and deficits to finance the whole disaster. In other words, precisely the policies guaranteed to stop economic growth and to weaken the middle class.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As for foreign policy, it would be surprising to hear a whole lot about that on Tuesday night. Five years of Obama have seen American prestige and influence damaged across the globe. Enemies and rivals have been appeased and strengthened, friends and allies scorned and compromised. Russia and China are rushing to fill the vacuum left by American retreat. The Middle East in particular is one spark away from explosion. American lives and dollars have been squandered by Obama’s abandonment of Iraq and Afghanistan. Reliable if thuggish allies in countries like Libya and Egypt have been surrendered to jihadists or civil war. Our stalwart friend Israel has been bullied and endangered. Al Qaeda and its affiliates are rampaging across the region. And Iran––our enemy for 35 years, the most vicious and lethal state sponsor of terrorism, the murderer of thousands of Americans––currently is being not just appeased into becoming a nuclear power, but bribed with sanctions relief to do so. Given the brazen shamelessness of Obama, I fully expect him to ignore all those disasters on his watch, and in full Neville “peace in our time” Chamberlain mode, tout as a “breakthrough” his agreement with Iran that does nothing to stop the mullahs from acquiring the bomb.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Equally predictable will be the reaction to the speech. The Congressional Democrat shills and touts will pop up on the carefully crafted applause lines, while Joe Biden grins maniacally. The courtiers in the media will declare Obama’s reading of the words of others to be the greatest oratory since Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, and carefully parse the banalities, clichés, tired jargon, preposterous claims, and outright lies for more signs of their messiah’s rhetorical, political, and intellectual brilliance. The far-left of the base, who differ from other Democrats only in their honesty about their statist intentions, will whine that Obama didn’t promise to raise taxes on the “1%” even more, dismantle the NSA, shut down Guantanamo, shutter every coal-fired electricity plant, go on a Keynesian spending binge, destroy our drones, and slash defense spending to the bone, as they cast longing gazes on Cherokee princess Elizabeth Warren.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But we know all that. For five years we conservatives have been like Cassandra, wandering desperately around Troy accurately predicting its destruction and being dismissed as insane. Or in our case, as racist, heartless, greedy, and downright evil. No amount of empirical evidence debunking the claims of income inequality and the lack of mobility, or explaining the adverse effects of raising the minimum wage, or detailing the ongoing collapse of Obamacare, or adding up the fiscal failures of stimulus spending, or exposing the sweetheart deals to “green energy” hustlers, or documenting Obama’s serial lies, has made much of a difference. His celebrity besotted, vulgar-rich 1% lifestyle on the taxpayer’s dime, his abuse of executive power to make or unmake laws for political advantage, his demonization of his political enemies and rivals even as he simpers piously about “civility,” his attempt to kill the Fox News messenger, his siccing of government agencies like the IRS and Department of Justice on conservatives, all have been amply publicized. And despite all that, his job </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html" target="_blank">approval numbers</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> average 43%, up over 3 points since December 2, when they should be at least 10 points lower, and heading south.</span></p>
<p>Forget the speech. Forget yet once again cataloguing Obama’s crimes and misdemeanors. When we’re not preaching to the choir, we come off like the Ancient Mariner, a gray-beard loon grabbing voters’ sleeves to make them hear yet again the tale of the political albatross hanging around the country’s neck. We need to seize the opportunity created by the dissatisfaction with Obamacare, which has penetrated the fog of self-interest, ignorance, and indifference that helped reelect Obama. The strong likelihood that Obamacare will continue to hit more and more people in the wallet means that there will be a larger, more receptive audience come November’s midterm elections.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But Republicans have to be ready for that opportunity, with savvy, competent candidates and spokesmen who can explain the issues and link voter angst to the specific policies that created them, and who have workable alternatives to offer. They have to break the usual Republican circular firing squad, whether in Congress or the primaries, and concentrate their fire on the political enemy. They have to cleverly mock those who would whine about the metaphor in the previous sentence, and abandon the “preemptive cringe,” as Margaret Thatcher called it, they sometimes indulge when the other side squeals about “racism,” “war on women,” “polarization,” “incivility,” and “extremists.” Instead, they should model their responses on Ronald Reagan’s brilliant </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" title="" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wi9y5-Vo61w" target="_blank">riposte</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to Jimmy Carter in the 1980 debate, “There you go again,” using the same tone of mild amusement at a sulky child’s tantrum.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And Republicans have to start dismantling the carefully crafted persona of Hillary Clinton––or “Planet Hillary,” as The New York Times Magazine absurdly put it in a worshipful profile––who currently is riding out Obama’s political storm in the safe haven of accolades, awards, Time magazine puff pieces, and $200,000 speeches from companies investing in the future. Republicans can’t let voters forget every gaffe, corrupt deal, and scandal from 1992 until today, or stop reminding them that she has no achievements other than buying her mediocre political career with the coin of humiliation at the hands of her philandering husband. Voters have to be reminded of her politicized opposition to the 2007 successful surge of troops in Iraq, and her public accusation that General Petraeus was lying about the evidence of that success. Most important, all Americans must never let anyone forget that on her watch 4 Americans died in Benghazi, while all she had to say was “What difference does it make!” after lying to a grieving father that an obscure moviemaker was to blame.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Whatever damage Obama can do in the next 3 years, 8 years of Hilary Clinton will make it worse. Every dysfunction inflicted on the country by 100 years of the progressive assault on limited government, self-reliance, and self-government will continue to worsen, while the debt clock ticks ever closer to the midnight of bankruptcy. Conservatives need to fight the next war, not refight the last one.</span></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>From Martin Luther King to Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/from-martin-luther-king-to-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=from-martin-luther-king-to-obama</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/from-martin-luther-king-to-obama/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Jan 2014 05:33:05 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Black]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civil rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[martin luther king]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Race]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Segregation]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216929</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left's betrayal of the civil rights movement. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ob4.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216958" alt="ob4" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ob4.jpg" width="350" height="307" /></a>On the day before Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, the <i>New Yorker</i> unveiled an extended interview with Obama in which the flailing leader blamed his poor approval ratings on racism.</p>
<p>“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama told the editor of the liberal magazine known for its cloyingly obscure cartoons and overwhelmingly white readership.</p>
<p>Obama began his first term with an approval rating of 68 percent; a figure unmatched since JFK. No Republican had enjoyed a starting approval rating above 60 percent in 60 years, indicating how much more willing Republicans were to give the other guy a fair shot than their Democratic counterparts. At 12 percent, his disapproval ratings were also much lower than those of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.</p>
<p>If his current approval rating of 40 percent pro and 51 percent con can be put down to anything, it isn’t race. When Obama began his first term in office, he had the approval of 41 percent of Republicans. By the time the year was out, that number had fallen to 16 percent.</p>
<p>At the start of his first term, he had the approval of 62 percent of independent voters. Today he has the approval of less than half that number. Only his support from his own party has remained unchanged.</p>
<p>Any honest politician would put those numbers down to his actions, but Obama always takes refuge in race, telling Remnick, “There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues.”</p>
<p>Few men knew that history better than the black Republican minister who stood on the steps of a memorial to the Republican president who ended the Democratic Party’s institution of slavery and, with a resonance that echoes across time, said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”</p>
<p>The post-equality civil rights movement of the left has long since buried that dream, exchanging it for a nightmare of calculated racial inequalities where your race is what you will be judged by when you apply for college, apply for a job or face low approval ratings after your national health care scheme explodes into a broken $600 million website and millions of angry people who have lost their health insurance and are being forced to pay more money for fewer benefits.</p>
<p>The media treated Obama’s victory as the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy when it was actually the inversion of it. King had never wanted a country where votes were cast based on race instead of character and where failed policies were excused because of the race of the politician.</p>
<p>King called for a culture of character, while Obama represents the post-equality civil rights culture of grievance. He called for an end to racial divisiveness, while Obama and his political collaborators have weaponized racial division as a political strategy.</p>
<p>At the beginning of Obama’s first term, 69 percent of blacks said that Martin Luther King Jr’s vision had been fulfilled. Two years later, only 54 percent of blacks agreed and 45 percent disagreed.  By 2013, only 32 percent of blacks would even agree that a lot of progress had been made in fulfilling the dream.</p>
<p>What these numbers truly reveal is that Obama failed blacks even more than he failed whites.</p>
<p>&#8220;The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,&#8221; King said. The island has grown lonelier and drifted further away from the material mainland under Obama.</p>
<p>The paradox that black unemployment would increase faster under a black leader, that black median income would fall under him and that the disparity of wealth between the races would double under him is an entirely expected phenomenon. It is the outcome of the same economic processes that took place in the majority of urban areas under the control of black Democrats.</p>
<p>Obama was not King’s disciple; he was the disciple of Jeremiah Wright who warned against black middle-classness. Obama is not interested in equality through freedom, but in radicalizing inequality.</p>
<p>Black economic equality, like every other form of real, as opposed to artificially subsidized, equality, is a threat to the political ruling class of the left which weaponizes inequality to consolidate its power.</p>
<p>Despite his polished rhetoric, Obama is not any different than the Chicago ward boss who tells her constituents that they are poor because of white people, that their neighborhoods are dangerous because white people don’t care about them and that all the programs that are supposed to help them get sabotaged and drained dry by the ward boss… because of white racism.</p>
<p>Martin Luther King Jr. called for a nation whose politics would not rely on racial division, but racial politics are still as much the cement of the Democratic Party as they were during Segregation. It is as impossible to imagine a Democratic Party without racial divisiveness as it would be to imagine Microsoft abandoning software and switching to making furniture or Hostess switching from cakes to jet engines.</p>
<p>The Democratic Party that now claims the legacy of a Republican civil rights leader did not do a complete turnaround, instead it decided to play the game of racial division that it had been playing from one end, from the other end instead.</p>
<p>And it did not make this decision for moral reasons, but for purely pragmatic ones.</p>
<p>The civil rights movement was reinvented to reflect not King, but Obama, not healing, but grievance, not unity, but division, and is embodied by men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton whose rhetoric is only a means of monetizing their manufactured outrage, who invoke King because they want to live like kings.</p>
<p>Civil rights ceased being an equality movement and became the long march of poverty pimps through every five-star hotel in the country, men of no faith calling themselves reverends and preaching the power of their left-wing bosses in ringing tones as if they were at the pulpit of a rural church instead of working the teleprompter at another political fundraiser.</p>
<p>Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was not fulfilled by the lecherous leeches calling themselves civil rights activists and invoking his name to pry open checkbooks and political offices, but by the American people whose decency and goodwill he had been appealing to on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It is the American people who have made King’s dream real, not through marches or protests, but by doing the right things in their daily lives, year after year, decade after decade and generation after generation.</p>
<p>Obama and the left’s gang of poverty pimps and politically correct organizers hijacked King’s dream of the equality of character over the inequality of grievance. It’s up to the American people to take it back.</p>
<p>*</p>
<p>Don&#8217;t miss <strong>Ann-Marie Murrell</strong>&#8216;s video interview with <strong>Daniel Greenfield</strong> on <em>Robert Gates’ Revelations Confirm Horowitz&#8217;s “Party of Defeat,”</em> <em>Abandoning Iraq, </em><em> How Americans Died For a War Obama Didn&#8217;t Believe In</em>, <em>The Release of Terrorist Lawyer Lynne Stewart</em>, <em></em>and much, much more:</p>
<p><strong>Part I:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/xwp_CUfwAss" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Part II:</strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/TywIVHDnwxc" height="315" width="460" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe> <b></b></p>
<p><strong>To sign up for <em>The Glazov Gang,</em> <a href="http://horowitzfreedomcenter.us1.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=caa6f67f1482e6214d83be62d&amp;id=c761755bdf">Click here</a>.</strong></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
<p><b></b></p>
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		<title>Democratic Exodus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/democratic-exodus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=democratic-exodus</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 17 Jan 2014 05:16:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[2014]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Democrats]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Election]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[retiring]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=216671</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Progressives up for re-election can read the tea leaves. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Screen-Shot-2014-01-17-at-1.31.27-AM.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-216672" alt="Screen Shot 2014-01-17 at 1.31.27 AM" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Screen-Shot-2014-01-17-at-1.31.27-AM-419x350.png" width="335" height="280" /></a>Terrified Democratic lawmakers are retiring in droves because they know it won&#8217;t be easy to survive the anti-establishment electoral tsunami expected to swamp Capitol Hill in November.</p>
<p>Democrats have every reason to feel depressed about the approaching midterm elections, <a href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/01/midterm-elections-republicans-really-could-win-2014-101802.html">according to</a> famed psephologist and prognosticator Larry Sabato.</p>
<p>This will probably be &#8220;a good election year for the GOP,&#8221; Sabato says. Rattling off the main factors that appear to be driving this election cycle, Sabato opined,</p>
<blockquote><p>The president is a Democrat and his approval is weak. The economy may be improving, based on GDP growth (4.1 percent in the third quarter), but voters still don’t believe their personal economy, at least, has picked up much. Instead, the major national issue of the moment is Obamacare, which at this point is a loser for Democrats. The structure of the election in the House and Senate also bends in the GOP direction.</p></blockquote>
<p>Even those representing traditionally safe Democratic congressional districts know the political landscape is on-track for dramatic changes after this year&#8217;s midterm elections. Republicans are optimistic about picking up plenty of U.S. Senate seats this year. At least five Democrats are not seeking reelection. They are Max Baucus (Mont.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Carl Levin, (Mich.), and Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.).</p>
<p>On Wednesday, 12-term Rep. Jim Moran (Va.) said he won&#8217;t seek reelection. The day before, Rep. Bill Owens (N.Y.) said he won&#8217;t run again. On Monday, Rep. George Miller (Calif.), a 40-year congressional veteran and ally of House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), said he&#8217;s retiring.</p>
<p>Reps. Jim Matheson (Utah) and Mike McIntyre (N.C.), are also heading for the exits, opening up seats that will almost certainly go Republican. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (N.Y.), an anti-gun rights fanatic, is also not seeking reelection.</p>
<p>Deluded as usual, House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) believes Democrats will recapture the House, an electoral result that is a virtual impossibility according to serious political handicappers. &#8220;Our Democratic retirements do not relate in any way to our prospects for winning,&#8221; said the former House Speaker.</p>
<p>&#8220;Democrats are optimistic about our prospects,&#8221; she added, &#8220;And we&#8217;ve met all of our critical imperatives for where we need to be on a path to victory.&#8221;</p>
<p>Republicans called out the latte leftist for her unfounded optimism.</p>
<p>“We know Nancy Pelosi doesn’t think we have a spending problem, but now she’s really in denial,&#8221; National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesman Daniel Scarpinato said yesterday.</p>
<p>Referring to the retirements of Matheson in Utah and McIntyre in North Carolina, Scarpinato added, &#8220;Losing two Democrat incumbents in two of the most Republican districts in the nation is the worst case scenario for Pelosi’s dreams of becoming Speaker of the House again.”</p>
<p>Probably the most colorful of the House Democrats taking a deliberate dive this year is Rep. Jim Moran, a Virginia Democrat representing a congressional district that is so far-left and safe for Democrats that some local conservatives call it &#8220;the People&#8217;s Republic of Alexandria.&#8221;</p>
<p>The violent, hard-drinking, rage-filled, emotionally volatile Moran has a long corruption rap sheet. Amazingly enough, he managed to stay out of jail after taking what appeared to be a bribe from a lobbyist. Moran <a href="http://www.congressproject.org/ethics/morancom.html">accepted</a> an unsecured $25,000 &#8220;loan,&#8221; based on a secret promissory note issued by a registered lobbyist, Terry Lierman, who received legislative assistance from the congressman.</p>
<p>Lierman represented Schering-Plough Corp., which hired him to push Congress to defend its monopoly on the popular allergy drug Claritin. On June 30, 1999, Moran co-sponsored legislation to help Schering-Plough. The next month Moran sent a letter to other Democratic lawmakers, seeking support for the measure. That summer Moran accepted $25,000 from Lierman. The promissory note had no maturity date and did not indicate when the principal had to be repaid except to stipulate that Lierman could call in the loan at any time. This means it was less a promissory note than a &#8220;get out of jail free&#8221; card ready to be made public in case of emergency.</p>
<p>Moran <a href="http://freebeacon.com/anti-israel-democrat-jim-morans-worst-moments/">suggested</a> a cabal of wealthy Jews dragged the U.S. into the war against Iraq. He criticized the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), saying it didn&#8217;t &#8220;represent the mainstream of American Jewish thinking at all.&#8221; AIPAC thrives because it is &#8220;so well organized” and its &#8220;members are extraordinarily powerful—most of them are quite wealthy—they have been able to exert power,” he said in 2007.</p>
<p>The thuggish Moran, a former boxer, <a href="http://articles.latimes.com/1995-11-22/news/mn-6126_1_d-san-diego">allegedly</a> “sucker-punched” a Republican lawmaker in 1995 during a House floor debate about sending troops to Bosnia.</p>
<p>And the apple doesn&#8217;t far fall from the tree. Moran&#8217;s son, Patrick, who had been his father&#8217;s campaign&#8217;s field director, was <a href="http://www.politico.com/blogs/on-congress/2012/10/morans-son-resigns-after-video-shows-him-discussing-147142.html">caught on video</a> in 2012 discussing how to fake documents in order to vote on behalf of 100 people.</p>
<p>Both father and son have been prosecuting the Democratic Party&#8217;s war on women for years. Moran has gotten into hot water repeatedly for allegedly using violence against females. A boozer like his father, Patrick <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/crime/guilty-plea-for-son-of-us-rep-moran-in-assault-case/2012/12/12/6c7165a6-4489-11e2-8061-253bccfc7532_story.html">pleaded guilty</a> to assaulting his girlfriend. Police say he grabbed the woman by the back of her head and slammed it into a trash can in front of a Washington, D.C. nightclub. (Nobody said community organizing was pretty.)</p>
<p>With a straight face, this week Nancy Pelosi <a href="http://www.democraticleader.gov/Pelosi_Statement_on_Retirement_of_Rep_Jim_Moran">praised</a> Israel-hating Moran as &#8220;a pillar of our Caucus and one of the finest legislators in the House.&#8221; Surely she was lying when she said the endlessly obnoxious bloody shirt-waving congressman&#8217;s &#8220;eloquence and ability commands the respect of members on both sides of the aisle.&#8221;</p>
<p>Expect Pelosi&#8217;s lying to intensify over the coming 10 months.</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>What to Expect in 2014</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/what-to-expect-in-2014/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-to-expect-in-2014</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ben-shapiro/what-to-expect-in-2014/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 Jan 2014 05:25:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ben Shapiro]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214378</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Will conservatives make this year historic? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/tedcruz.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214382" alt="US Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on 'The Impact of Sequestration on the National Defense'" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/tedcruz-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>2013 was a year of revelations, a year of possible turning points. For nearly two decades, since Ronald Reagan left office, America moved steadily in the direction of the left, both culturally and politically. When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state.</p>
<p>All battles for the soul begin with culture. And while the battle against Obama&#8217;s unprecedented growth of government started with the tea party victories of 2010, the cultural battle against the left didn&#8217;t truly take until 2013. The seeds were planted for this cultural battle in earnest in 2012, when Obama and his Democratic Party allies put race, sexual orientation and abortion at the core of his reelection campaign. Americans were told by the media that Obama&#8217;s competence mattered less than the fact that half the country was mean, nasty, racist and homophobic. Todd Akin&#8217;s absurd comments on conception via rape were the issue, Americans were told, not the imminent takeover of the health care system; Obama&#8217;s sudden support for same-sex marriage was the issue, not his devastating regulatory state; George Zimmerman and Trayvon Martin were the issue, not the destruction of entire swaths of the United States via leftist governance.</p>
<p>And it worked. Conservative Americans, bludgeoned into silence on cultural battles, decided to focus entirely on Obama&#8217;s economic buffoonery. Unsurprisingly, it didn&#8217;t work; culture, as my friend Andrew Breitbart was fond of stating, is upstream of politics.</p>
<p>2013 marked a turning point. From Chick-fil-A to &#8220;Duck Dynasty,&#8221; conservative religious Americans found their footing: Whether you are for or against same-sex marriage, it is plainly un-American to override someone&#8217;s religious beliefs in the name of your politics. Conservative Americans seemed to realize, for the first time in a long time, that the battle over same-sex marriage came wrapped in a larger battle over religious freedom. And they fought back, and won.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, conservatives began to fight back against the left&#8217;s uncorroborated assertion of right-wing racism. While MSNBC focused laser-like on one Confederate flag at an anti-Obamacare rally, those same MSNBC hosts laughed at Mitt Romney&#8217;s adopted black grandchild (Melissa Harris-Perry), suggested that someone ought to &#8220;p***&#8221; and &#8220;s***&#8221; in Sarah Palin&#8217;s mouth (Martin Bashir), used anti-gay slurs (Alec Baldwin), shook down businesses over race (Al Sharpton) and labeled words like &#8220;black hole&#8221; and &#8220;Chicago&#8221; racist (Chris Matthews). Race, the right realized, was an obsession only for the left.</p>
<p>And in the aftermath of the left&#8217;s successful 2012 &#8220;war on women&#8221; meme, the right began to fight back, too. Beginning with the left&#8217;s attempted deification of amoral Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis, who filibustered for 11 hours on behalf of the murder of 21-week-old fetuses, the right refused to be cowed. Abortion is a real moral issue with real lives at stake, and no amount of leftist badgering could back conservative Americans off their attempts to protect the unborn.</p>
<p>The cultural battles gradually made their way into the political arena, too. Freed from the burden of the beige and blundering Romney campaign, conservatives stood up against the growth of government on moral, not merely practical, grounds. Obama&#8217;s signature program began to collapse the moment Americans awakened to the deep immorality of government-controlled medical care. Sen. Ted Cruz&#8217;s government shutdown strategy, right or wrong, highlighted conservative opposition to the state as cradle-to-grave caretaker. American distrust of government, for the right reasons, soared.</p>
<p>This does not mean the battles are over for conservatives. They&#8217;re just beginning. The media have already geared up toward nominating Hillary Clinton in 2016 (The New York Times whitewash of Benghazi this week was only the beginning). The DC-run Republican Party has a disheartening way of crippling its own conservative base in order to cut deals. But 2013 could go down as the year that conservatives moved beyond standing athwart history shouting &#8220;stop,&#8221; and began shoving in the opposite direction, which could make 2014 historic.</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>2014: Year of Decision</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/2014-year-of-decision/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=2014-year-of-decision</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/2014-year-of-decision/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jan 2014 05:55:46 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214254</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The stakes have never been higher.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lk1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214260" alt="lk" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/lk1-450x300.jpg" width="315" height="210" /></a>This year we will see if America is still a center-right country, or if Obama’s two terms will mark a historic shift to the left. History and recent events give cause for optimism, subject, of course, to unforeseen events.</p>
<p>The champions of big government, wealth redistribution through taxation and entitlement transfers, and a coercive, intrusive regulatory regime have many times exaggerated the death of conservatism and the final victory of progressivism. Remember this famous pronouncement by culture critic Lionel Trilling in 1950? “In the United States at this time Liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition. For it is the plain fact that nowadays there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in general circulation . . . But the conservative impulse and the reactionary impulse do not, with some isolated and some ecclesiastical exceptions, express themselves in ideas but only in action or in irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.” Even as Trilling wrote those words, the work of Russell Kirk, F.A. Hayek, Richard Weaver, Whittaker Chambers, William F. Buckley, and many others were developing a powerful conservative philosophy that would bear fruit in the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.</p>
<p>Or those of a certain age can remember the triumphalism of the left after the disgrace of Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974, which was followed a year later by the debacle in Saigon and the seeming repudiation of the conservative view of America’s role as the defender of freedom against communist expansion. But the incompetence and naïve idealism of Jimmy Carter’s four years as president quickly made plain the deep flaws of the progressive ideology, as stagflation at home and foreign policy retreat abroad taught us once again that the utopian fever dreams of the progressives threatened our prosperity and endangered our security. The failure of the Carter presidency created the conditions favorable to conservative ideas, and galvanized a people receptive to the philosophy of prudence, self-reliance, and the Constitutional principle of limited government.</p>
<p>The last 54 months of the Obama regime and its rampant progressivism cannot obscure the epochal shift away from the big government doctrines of tax-and-spend and top-down social engineering, the sea change achieved during the Reagan years. Even Bill Clinton admitted that “the days of big government are over,” signed welfare reform into law, and tread carefully on the issue of raising taxes. The giddy progressives’ celebrations in 2010 over the passage of Obamacare, despite the obvious distaste for it among the people, deluded many into thinking the tide had turned yet again in favor of the progressives, and away from even the “third way” of Clintonian liberalism. But the rise of the Tea Party and the rambunctious town-hall meetings the following summer rudely awakened the pipe-dreaming Democrats, and reminded them that there are still millions of Americans who treasure their birthright of freedom and autonomy, and resent an overweening nanny state. The midterm election that year gave the House to the Republicans, and slowed if not stopped the fulfillment of the rest of the progressive wish-list such as amnesty for illegal aliens, punitive tax hikes, and even more Keynesian “stimulus” voodoo.</p>
<p>This history suggests that we may see in 2014 a further shift away from progressivism, for several reasons. The rank incompetence, arrogance, and juvenile narcissism of Obama more and more confirm that his election was not about progressive ideas, but about a misguided yearning for racial reconciliation, and a naïve attempt to lay to rest the ghosts of America’s racist past. We are unlikely to see a similar mistake in the future, particularly since the wages of voting for any reason other than principle and competence have been made painfully clear in the dangerous American retreat abroad, and the economic malfeasance here at home.</p>
<p>And that brings us to the next reason for optimism: the continuing disaster of Obamacare, which promises to be for conservatives the gift that keeps on giving. All the problems plaguing this ill-conceived, reckless legislation––escalating health-care costs, more people losing health care than gaining it, the narrowing of doctor and hospital choice for those who do get coverage, and the promise of exploding government spending to keep the whole contraption functioning––are likely to worsen rather than improve. Those failures and disasters will be a constant reminder of everything that is wrong with the progressive ideology, particularly its arrogant notion that a superior elite of technocrats are better able to organize social and economic life than are individuals, families, civil society, local government, state government, or the free market. They will remind Americans that self-reliance and personal freedom are written in our DNA, that most of us are like Huck Finn, apt to resent every progressive Widow Douglas and Miss Watson trying to coerce us into her idea of being “civilized.”</p>
<p>Other signs of change are in the air. The clumsy, craven, and failed response of the A&amp;E network to some comments by “Duck Dynasty” star Phil Robertson––a modern Huck Finn if ever there was one–– is a rude reminder that if you are a for-profit enterprise in America, it doesn’t do to alienate your customers just to curry favor with a minority of self-selected commissars of virtue whose intolerance and preening self-righteousness would make an old Puritan patriarch blush. This episode may be transient, but it also may be the harbinger of a growing recognition on the part of conservatives and libertarians that they are not a minority, and that their patronage should not be taken for granted. More attempts by special interest groups and businesses to stifle dissent and impose politically correct orthodoxy may be sparks that along with the failures of Obamacare kindle a nation-wide uprising against the statist status quo like the one we witnessed in the summer of 2010.</p>
<p>Finally, even the mainstream media, long a reliable lapdog for the administration, have had to confront the swelling tide of change. A new CNN (sic!) <a href="http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/12/26/cnn-poll-gop-has-edge-in-early-midterm-indicator/">poll</a> shows Republicans leading Democrats in the generic ballot 49% to 44%, a 13-point swing over the last two months. Only 22% of Democrats are extremely or very enthusiastic about voting next November, while 36% of Republicans are. And 55% of voters say they are more likely to vote for a candidate who opposes Obama, compared to 40% who would favor a candidate who supports him. And Senate Democrats in the Senate are vulnerable. According to <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/hotline-on-call/i-the-hotline-i-s-senate-race-rankings-democrats-on-defense-20131127">National Journal</a>, 13 of 15 seats likely to switch parties are held by Democrats, as are all 7 seats most likely to switch. If the Republicans take 6 of those 7, they will take back control of the Senate, and be able to stand athwart Obama’s second-term agenda yelling Stop.</p>
<p>We’ll see. Prudence is a conservative virtue, and November is far away. But if history is any guide, if Obamacare continues its slow-motion implosion, if the progressive <a href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=23374">Nurse Ratcheds</a> keep trying to make us swallow their toxic intolerance, and if conservatives stiffen their spines, they stand a good chance of slowing down the progressive agenda.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>.   </b></p>
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		<title>A New Year and Old Problems</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/a-new-year-and-old-problems/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-new-year-and-old-problems</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 01 Jan 2014 05:25:29 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=214312</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Facing our historic crossroads. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-sad-frown.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-214313" alt="obama-sad-frown" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/obama-sad-frown-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>Whenever we stand on the threshold of a new year, we are tempted to forget the hazards of prophecy, and try to see what may lie on the other side of this arbitrary division of time.</p>
<p>Sometimes we are content to try to change ourselves with New Year&#8217;s resolutions to do better in some respect. Changing ourselves is a much more reasonable undertaking than trying to change other people. It may or may not succeed, but it seldom creates the disasters that trying to change others can produce.</p>
<p>When we look beyond ourselves to the world around us, peering into the future can be a very sobering, if not depressing, experience.</p>
<p>ObamaCare looms large and menacing on our horizon. This is not just because of computer problems, or even because some people who think that they have enrolled may discover at their next visit to a doctor that they do not have any insurance coverage.</p>
<p>What ObamaCare has done, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts&#8217; Supreme Court decision, is reduce us all from free citizens to cowed subjects, whom the federal government can order around in our own personal lives, in defiance of the 10th Amendment and all the other protections of our freedom in the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>ObamaCare is more than a medical problem, though there are predictable medical problems — and even catastrophes — that will unfold in the course of 2014 and beyond. Our betters have now been empowered to run our lives, with whatever combination of arrogance and incompetence they may have, or however much they lie.</p>
<p>The challenges ahead are much clearer than what our responses will be. Perhaps the most hopeful sign is that increasing numbers of people seem to have finally — after nearly five long years — begun to see Barack Obama for what he is, rather than for what he seemed to be, when judged by his image and rhetoric.</p>
<p>What kind of man would blithely disrupt the medical care of millions of Americans, and then repeatedly lie to them with glib assurances that they could keep their doctors or health insurance if they wanted to?</p>
<p>What kind of man would set up a system in which people would be forced by law to risk their life savings, because they had to divulge their financial identification numbers to strangers who could turn out to be convicted felons?</p>
<p>With all the time that elapsed between the passage of ObamaCare and its going into effect, why were the so-called &#8220;navigators&#8221; who were to be handling other people&#8217;s financial records never investigated for criminal convictions? What explanation could there be, other than that Obama didn&#8217;t care?</p>
<p>Caring is not a matter of words.</p>
<p>&#8220;By their fruits ye shall know them&#8221; — not by their rhetoric, image or symbolism.</p>
<p>Those who have still not yet seen through Barack Obama will have many more opportunities to do so during the coming year, as the medical, financial and other painful human consequences of ObamaCare keep coming out in ways so clear that not even the mainstream media can ignore them or obscure them.</p>
<p>The question then is: What can be done about it? Nothing can be done about Obama himself. He has three more years in office and, as he pointed out to the Russians, he will no longer have to face the American voters.</p>
<p>ObamaCare, however, has no such immunity. It is always hard to repeal an elaborate program after it has gone into effect. But Prohibition was repealed, even though it was a Constitutional Amendment that required super-majorities in both houses of Congress and super-majorities of state legislatures to repeal.</p>
<p>In our two-party system, everything depends on whether the Republicans step up to the plate and act like responsible adults who understand that ObamaCare represents a historic crossroads that will determine what kind of people we are going to be, for this generation and generations yet unborn — citizens or subjects.</p>
<p>This means that Republicans have to decide whether their top priority is internal strife among the different wings of the party — another circular firing squad — or whether either wing puts the country first.</p>
<p>A prediction on how that will turn out in the new year would be far too hazardous to attempt.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Progressive Reality Is Here</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-progressive-reality-is-here/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-progressive-reality-is-here</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 18 Dec 2013 05:51:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[limited government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Progressives]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[scandals]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=213415</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How many Americans are ready to accept the sacrifices we have to make to right our fiscal ship? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/well.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-213420" alt="well" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/well-450x266.jpg" width="315" height="186" /></a>The Republicans are feeling confident these days. The slow-motion debacle of Obamacare promises to keep that albatross around the necks of the Democrats at least through next year’s midterm elections. The IRS, NSA, and Benghazi scandals are still simmering, and any day new information may emerge that puts them back on the front page. Obama’s disapproval rating is at 53.4%, according to the <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obama_job_approval-1044.html" target="_blank">RealClearPolitics</a> average of 11 polls. The Republican Party’s approval numbers are still lower than Democrats’, but they are trending up while the Dems are moving down.</p>
<p>The recent budget deal passed in the House supposedly augurs well for the Republicans as well. Many see the bipartisan agreement to fund government spending for two years as a tactical victory that takes the bad public relations of a government shutdown off the table, thus keeping the focus on the Obamacare disaster. Growing more confident, the “establishment” Republicans are marginalizing the Tea-Party “extremists” who generate so much bad press for the GOP. Or as the Huffington Post gloated, House Speaker John Boehner “was at least declaring war on the well-funded agitators” who “jumped the shark” by opposing the deal.</p>
<p>The Republicans may have achieved a tactical victory, but only time will tell if it translates into taking back the Senate and the presidency. But even if they do, it is still unlikely that they will achieve any meaningful reforms that can reign in the federal leviathan, seriously reduce metastasizing debt and deficits, or fix the looming disaster of unfunded entitlement liabilities. For the fact is, the Progressive vision now a century old has won the political debate over the power and goals of the federal government.</p>
<p>The Progressive agenda starting with the administration of Theodore Roosevelt is now political reality. The Constitutional idea of a limited federal government checked and balanced by Congress and the sovereign state governments––the obstacles to Progressive ambitions to guide the evolution of the nation toward greater “social justice” and fiscal equality––is now a distant memory. Most people assume that the job of the fed is to “solve problems” through a vast bureaucracy of technocrats. The notion that state and local governments, or the institutions of civil society perhaps should have the responsibility to “solve problems,” gains little traction among the mass of citizens, especially when it comes to mitigating the slings and arrows of human existence.</p>
<p>As a result of this assumption, the size and coercive concentrated powers of the federal government at the expense of state governments and individuals alike have grown to an extent that would have shocked the Founders. As of January 2012, the federal government employed 2.3 million workers, excluding military personnel, at a cost of $200 billion a year. Total federal spending in 2013 was $3.5 trillion, a 40 percent increase over the last decade. Equally significant is the intrusive, coercive regulatory apparatus that has followed this expansion of the federal government. In 2012, the Federal Register, which publishes proposed new rules andfinal changes to existing rules, comprised 78,961 pages. The Code of Federal Regulations, which publishes general and permanent rules and regulations, totaled 174,545, with over one million individual regulatory restrictions. Just the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act passed in 2010 is up to nearly 14,000 pages of rules––and is only 39 percent complete. The <a href="https://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#143023156b511253_http://cei.org/studies/ten-thousand-commandments-2013">Competitive Enterprise Institute</a> puts the total cost of complying with all these rules and regulations written by anonymous, unaccountable federal bureaucrats at $1.8 trillion. As Robert Nisbet writes in his invaluable <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-Present-Age-Progress-Anarchy/dp/0865974098/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1387241092&amp;sr=8-1&amp;keywords=the+present+age+nisbet" target="_blank">book</a> <i>The Present Age</i>, “There isn’t an aspect of individual life, from birth to death, that doesn’t come under some kind of federal scrutiny.”</p>
<p>This expansion, moreover, has come under Republican administrations as well as Democratic ones. The Environmental Protection Agency’s some 7000 rules cost $353 billion a year. Just six proposed new rules could cost between $36 and $111 billion, according to the EPA’s own lowball estimate. The legislation establishing the EPA was signed by Richard Nixon. Or take Social Security Disability Insurance. The number of workers receiving disability insurance has increased from 2.9 million in 1980 to 8.8 million in 2012. In 2013 SSDI will cost around $150 billion, a trend that will leave the program insolvent in 2016. This increase is mostly the result of the loosening of medical eligibility requirements to include more subjective conditions such as mood disorders and musculoskeletal problems. This change was legislated under the Social Security Disability Benefits Reform Act of 1984. That legislation was signed into law by Ronald Reagan. More recently, George W. Bush signed into law the Medicare Prescription Drug Act of 2006, which will cost $549 billion between 2006 and 2015.</p>
<p>The last three examples demonstrate that bigger government has been driven by a relentless expansion of entitlement spending both by increasing the number of recipients of existing programs, and by creating new ones. But as everyone knows, spending on entitlement programs is on a path to national bankruptcy due to 76 million Baby Boomers retiring at a rate of 10,000 a day. In 2012, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other health spending made up 45 percent of the $3.6 trillion budget, with another 19 percent going to federal employee retirement and benefits, veterans’ benefits, and anti-poverty programs such as food stamps and welfare. Add in the costs of servicing the $17 trillion in debt necessary for financing all this largesse, and by <a href="http://www.heritage.org/federalbudget/entitlement-spending-double?nomobile" target="_blank">2050</a> just health care entitlements alone will consume every dollar of federal taxes.</p>
<p>Here too Republicans, when they haven’t been creating new programs, have at best attempted to cut back <i>increases</i> in spending, rather than holding spending flat or reforming programs to decrease spending. As for questioning the existence of such programs, that is the fast track to political suicide. Indeed, just recommending modest reforms will bring down on any politicians charges of heartless indifference to the old and poor. Just ask Paul Ryan, whose 2012 budget that called for entitlement reform earned him a starring role in an attack ad in which he pushed a granny in a wheelchair over a cliff.</p>
<p>Finally, all this largesse is funded by a federal income tax that is a mechanism for the redistribution of property that troubled critics of democracy from the ancient Greeks to the American Founders. The U.S. has one of, if not the most, progressive tax rates of the world’s 24 richest countries. This progressivity of U.S. income taxes results in a redistribution of wealth from higher income to lower income citizens, even taking into account payroll and state taxes. According to the <a href="http://taxfoundation.org/article/distribution-tax-and-spending-policies-united-states." target="_blank">Tax Foundation</a>, “The typical family in the lowest 20 percent in 2012 (with market incomes between $0 and $17,104) pays an average of $6,331 in total taxes and receives $33,402 in spending from all levels of government. Thus, the average amount of redistribution to a typical family in the bottom quintile is estimated to be $27,071. The vast majority of this net benefit, a total of $21,158, comes as a result of federal policies.” The top 20 percent, on the other hand, paid $87,076 more in taxes than it received in government spending, while the top one percent paid $867,473 in taxes and received $55,078 in spending. In 2012, about $2 trillion was distributed via entitlement programs and tax credits from the top 40 percent to the bottom 60 percent of taxpayers.</p>
<p>The truth is, we all have become a “nation of takers,” as Nicholas Eberstadt documents in his important <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Nation-Takers-Americas-Entitlement-Epidemic/dp/1599474352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1387239901&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=a+nation+of+takers" target="_blank">book</a>. We all consider normal a gigantic federal government of bureaucrats and technocrats whose job is to redistribute property in order to finance a vast network of entitlement spending from which most of us benefit either directly or indirectly. Beneficiaries of these programs have powerful lobbies that monitor and punish any politician who dares challenge this status quo. Just consider how easy it has been to marginalize the Tea Party as racist extremists, the only political organization calling for the return to the limited government of the Constitution, the reigning in of unsustainable debt and deficits, and the reform of entitlement programs so that only the truly needy are served. The existence of a vast constituency for government handouts has enabled this demonization of the only people crying “Iceberg ahead!”</p>
<p>Other Republicans may believe that once they return Congress and the Presidency to the Republicans––something they say the polarizing Tea Partiers make difficult, if not impossible––then they will turn to addressing the coming debt-deficit-entitlement crisis. Perhaps they are right. I hope they are right. But history gives us little hope that they will achieve anything other than a slow-down of the disaster. Not because they are “establishment” insiders or liberal wolves in conservative sheep’s clothing, but because not enough American people are ready yet to face reality and accept the sacrifices we’re all going to have to make to right our fiscal ship. Until then, the Progressives will keep winning no matter which party is in power.</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>Michael Barone on the ObamaCare Meltdown</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-obamacare-meltdown/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-obamacare-meltdown</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/the-obamacare-meltdown/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 02 Dec 2013 05:37:39 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[failure]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meltdown]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obamacare]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Republicans]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=212000</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How does the president's signature disaster figure in the long-view of American politics? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obamacare.jpg"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-212016" alt="obamacare" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/obamacare.jpg" width="340" height="170" /></a><strong>Editor’s note: Below is the video and transcript of the keynote speech by Michael Barone given at the Freedom Center’s 2013 Restoration Weekend. The event was held November 14th-17th at The Breakers resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p style="text-align: center;"><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/80151310" height="281" width="400" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Michael Barone:</strong> How many of you have been enjoying wallowing in Obamacare?  Let&#8217;s see the hands here.</p>
<p>We’re going through kind of, I think, an extraordinary period here in American politics.  And the widespread anticipation of the Obama Democrats have really not come to pass.  I mean, it&#8217;s fascinating.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ll go back five years, to the beginning of 2009.  And Obama and the Democratic supermajorities &#8212; thanks to Arlen Specter and the vote counters in Minnesota, and so forth &#8212; came to office with this basic assumption that in times of economic distress, Americans would be more supportive of or amenable to big-government programs.  And that was the lesson that was taught, after all, by the New Deal historians who wrote these very readable and widely read books about Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal.  It&#8217;s a lesson that&#8217;s been widely believed among Democrats and so forth.</p>
<p>I tried to teach a somewhat different lesson in my historical account of American politics from 1930s to the 1980s called &#8220;Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan.&#8221;  The last time I looked on Amazon, there was a copy available for 11 cents.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>So it&#8217;s not clear that my version of this went very far.  But I basically took the view then, and take the view now, and have taken it for a long time, that Americans are basically not a big-government country.  On balance, we&#8217;re a country that tends to favor markets and initiative over big government and bureaucracy, and qualify that in various ways, and different times and places.</p>
<p>But I think that we&#8217;ve had a pretty good demonstration project of testing these different and opposed propositions in the last several years.  And I think we see with Obamacare the result there.  You basically &#8212; you know, this proposal was unpopular when it was first broached.  We were assured by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi that we would find out what was in the bill after we passed it and that we would like it then.</p>
<p>We&#8217;re still waiting.  It has become worse.  It has moved downward in the public opinion polls.</p>
<p>And I think in many ways the Democrats are paying a price for the way they passed this legislation.  They passed this legislation in the face of public opposition without any support from the other political party.  And after hearing pleas from the unlikely quarter of the voters of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, saying please do not pass this bill, they passed it anyway.</p>
<p>I have an old saying that there is nothing free in politics; there is some question about when you pay the price.  And I think that Democrats thought that they were getting Obamacare for free for a long period of time, and they&#8217;re not paying the price.</p>
<p>And we&#8217;re seeing that lawyers and community organizers can put words down on paper.  And they can say &#8212; okay, the IT guys will set this up so it&#8217;ll do that.  And it turns out that it&#8217;s not that easy, and that we have in particular a President who&#8217;s not very good on follow-through implementation and getting things done.</p>
<p>If you go back to his career as a community organizer &#8212; he never did get all the asbestos out of the Altgeld housing project in Chicago.  They&#8217;re still waiting for the asbestos to come out.  He nevertheless got one promotion after another.  He got positive reinforcement for non-fulfillment of practical objectives.  And so, we&#8217;re getting what we&#8217;re seeing now.</p>
<p>But I think it has been fascinating to watch this program fall apart.  And to watch the information technology &#8212; we have the President now basically admitting that he lied when he said you can keep your insurance policies.  We were supposed to get 500,000 people signed up for insurance and making payments.  Well, 106,000 signed up, but most of those didn&#8217;t make any payments; we don&#8217;t know how many &#8212; and the IT jokes of people waiting before the frozen screen for hours and hours, when Obama said that it would be as easy as Expedia or Travelocity to use &#8212; poses a real contrast between the public sector and the private sector.</p>
<p>And it also puts this in glaring partisan terms.  The Democrats passed Obamacare with no Republican votes.  If you want to go out and defeat the RINO Republicans who voted for Obamacare, you&#8217;re going to have to look pretty hard, because there aren&#8217;t any.  No Republicans voted for this.</p>
<p>And the polling numbers that have come in continue to get worse and worse.  We&#8217;ve got majorities now thinking that the President lied.  This is not a positive result for him.  And I think that you&#8217;ve got majorities, increasing majorities, saying this program is not working.  And I think that this is really a teachable moment.</p>
<p>I think particularly &#8212; look, the Quinnipiac Poll came out last week.  And I&#8217;m hesitant to draw too many lessons from a single poll.  But I think that it&#8217;s got some very significant numbers in it.  If these are corroborated in other surveys &#8212; and I think they probably will be &#8212; I think that they have a lot of significance, and they tell us some important things about going forward.  The Quinnipiac Poll showed that Obama&#8217;s job rating was down to 39 percent positive, 56 percent negative; a low point for him.  This has been a survey &#8212; a polling firm, by the way, that has tended to produce results that are a little more Democratic than the average poll coming out.  So I think these are significant.</p>
<p>What I look at with most interest is the results among millennials and Hispanics.  Millennials being people born &#8212; you know, under-30 voters or people born after 1980.  You&#8217;ll remember the millennials voted in 2008 66-32 for Obama.  I said that the Republicans missed their chance to win when they failed to pass a constitutional amendment raising the voting age to 35.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>Too late now.  Or say you can never vote if you were born after 1980.  And 60-37 for Obama in 2012.  Hispanics &#8212; that&#8217;s a growing segment of the electorate, whether we like it or not &#8212; they were 67-31 for Obama in 2008, and even more &#8212; 71-27 &#8212; against Mitt Romney in 2012.</p>
<p>You know, the general thought was among a lot of people &#8212; and not just Democratic analysts &#8212; that for the foreseeable future, we were going to see a basically Democratic country, because the millennials were going to be a larger part of our electorate.  And those of us who were born before 1980 were going to be a smaller part of it as time went on.  And Hispanics were going to be a larger percentage of the electorate.</p>
<p>So the Republican Party was doomed, and we were going to have Democratic majorities forever, and so forth.  This assumes that the parties would make no adjustments, that there would be no changes, and there will be no events changing some people&#8217;s minds about opinions.</p>
<p>Well, there do seem to be some events changing their mind.  The job rating &#8212; Obama&#8217;s job rating among millennials and Hispanics is now negative in this poll &#8212; 36-54, 41-47 &#8212; try to confuse you by too many numbers.  And their feelings on Obamacare are similarly negative.  These were people that the 2012 polls told us thought Obamacare would be nice.  These young people, of course, were in the process of getting snookered.</p>
<p>One of the basic features of the architecture of the bill is that young people in their 20s subsidize older people age 55 to 64.  This is by people who say that they want progressive redistribution of economic wealth from the poor to the rich, except that young people, in their 20s, have negative net worths on the average.  In fact, they shouldn&#8217;t have any wealth in their 20s; they don&#8217;t know what to do with it.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And people in the 55-to-64 age group &#8212; that&#8217;s the peak wealth accumulation year of most years of most Americans.  They just start to spend down their wealth after age 65.</p>
<p>So this law is transferring wealth, money, from people with no net worth to people with peak net worth.  And the only justification for that is this idea that &#8212; they&#8217;re trying to create the idea that nobody should pay anything for medical care; it should just come to you free.  Because government knows how to deliver it.</p>
<p>Well, the young people are starting to see through that with sticker shock.  It seems pretty clear that they are not signing up for this program.  You&#8217;ve got these &#8212; how many of you have seen that Colorado ad for Obamacare?  The guy standing upside-down on the beer keg?  I didn&#8217;t realize people actually did that.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>And this girl that&#8217;s lusting after this sort of nice, rich-looking young man, saying that Obamacare provides her with free contraceptives, so now all she has to do is get the guy between the covers.  This is the level of political advertising that I didn&#8217;t see in my earlier years.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>But basically, they&#8217;re turning against this.</p>
<p>Now, Hispanics tend to be &#8212; among them, 2012, Obamacare was real popular &#8212; hey, we&#8217;re going to get free goods.  But they&#8217;re learning a lesson that they may&#8217;ve learned in Mexico, or in the countries they came from, which is you actually can&#8217;t trust government to deliver on its promises.  It turns out that it is a weak instrumentality.  As no less than the President taught us, it doesn&#8217;t do IT good.  It&#8217;s a &#8212; in the words of the political scientist Steven Teles, it is a kludgeocracy.</p>
<p>And I think this is a teachable moment.  I think that people, particularly people tilted towards the young end of the age group &#8212; and Hispanics, new immigrants, so forth &#8212; people who have had the least experience with the American system of government and self-government are suddenly seeing what government does and what the advantages of self-government are.</p>
<p>And I think that they weren&#8217;t aware of these things as much.  They drank the Kool-Aid &#8212; we are the change we are seeking, it&#8217;s so wonderful being in this hall with all these cheering people.  And they are now beginning to learn that when people construct a system that they say is failsafe, it turns out to be sure to fail, and that there is no such thing as a free lunch.</p>
<p>And I think there&#8217;s other lessons that Republicans need to teach and to learn themselves, which is that in a vibrant economy, young people setting the course for their lives can choose their future.  They can find work and contributions that they can make to society by which they can achieve what AEI president Arthur Brooks calls earned success.  They can achieve &#8212; and that can be measured in money, it can be measured in other economic measurements, it can be measured in service to family, to community, to people abroad, whatever.  There are many ways to earn success in this society.</p>
<p>And what a vibrant economy enables young people to do is find a way to earn success that is in line with their special talents, their particular interests, their uniqueness as an individual.  This is a generation that likes to be unique and have its own music playlist and its own Facebook page, and all that stuff.</p>
<p>A sluggish economy, a kludgeocracy economy, is one in which you better take the first job that comes down the pike.  And you aren&#8217;t able to find fulfilling work, you aren&#8217;t able to find not only a good income but a sense of fulfillment, a sense of satisfaction, from having accomplished and maximized your own potential.</p>
<p>And I think that Republicans need to make the point not only that this Obamacare system is failing and is less than about what big bureaucracy teaches &#8212; produces, but that there are other alternatives available.  And this means coming forward in time with other healthcare plans, with market-oriented healthcare policy.  It means coming forward with policies that can plausibly address and strengthen the economy in various ways &#8212; and, I would add, policies that encourage or strengthen family formation.  We&#8217;ve got to have policies that give incentives to entrepreneurs.</p>
<p>We also need to think about public policies that encourage two-parent families, that encourage stability in personal life, which &#8212; you can see from the statistics that people who are raised in chaotic family situations achieve less in our society, they have greater handicaps.  We&#8217;re talking about things that happened to them as children, so they&#8217;re not responsible for these problems.  And we&#8217;ve got to think about public policies that strengthen this.</p>
<p>So looking forward, I think the political outlook for the Republicans is pretty good.  If you look at &#8212; as we know, Barack Obama won the presidency but for reasons &#8212; for demographic reasons, actually, which are reflected in my book, &#8220;Shaping Our Nation: How Surges in Migration Transformed America,&#8221; which you can get later.</p>
<p>(Laughter)</p>
<p>The Democrats have an advantage in the Electoral College, though I would not say anything like an [in-electable] advantage.  If you&#8217;ve got young voters and Hispanics who voted 60-plus percent for the Democrats now going 60 percent negative on their policies, you can turn a lot of those target states around.</p>
<p>But when you look at House of Representatives, when you look at equal population districts, Republicans have an advantage.  That&#8217;s because heavily Democratic groups &#8212; blacks, Hispanics, gentry liberals &#8212; are clustered in a few central cities; Republicans are more spread around the rest of the country.</p>
<p>So when you look at congressional districts &#8212; in 2012, Barack Obama carried 209 congressional districts.  Mitt Romney carried 226.  Most districts were Romney districts, and the Republicans won 234 of those districts, Republican candidates for Congress.</p>
<p>I think that means that &#8212; it doesn&#8217;t assure Republicans have a House majority, but it means it&#8217;s very much uphill for the Democrats if Obama&#8217;s job approval was at the 50 percent level it was in November 2012, and it ain&#8217;t there anymore.</p>
<p>Senate seats &#8212; we&#8217;ve got, as you know, a lot of &#8212; seven Senate seats held by Democrats, up in states carried by Romney &#8212; Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana, Montana, North Carolina, South Dakota, West Virginia.  I would like to echo some of what Ann Coulter said yesterday about not getting too involved in primaries and looking for the purest candidate, even though you nominate somebody that really isn&#8217;t electable.  I think it&#8217;s important to win those races.</p>
<p>I think Republicans have an outside chance as well, in Senate seats in Colorado, Iowa, Michigan and New Hampshire.  Those were all target states, or Michigan was for awhile, in the general election.  So I think those things are possible.</p>
<p>But I think it&#8217;s important.  And this is a slower process &#8212; and it doesn&#8217;t just happen in the campaign cycle &#8212; to come up with alternative public policies that can help in particular tell young Americans, tell recently arrived Americans how they can choose their future and pursue their dreams, and pursue happiness in our country.</p>
<p>So now, let me conclude with that.</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 Political Debate We Need to Have</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-political-debate-we-need-to-have/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-political-debate-we-need-to-have</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-political-debate-we-need-to-have/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 11 Nov 2013 04:29:16 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
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		<description><![CDATA[Today, we treat politics as a sport, but it’s really a conflict of ideologies between federalists and technocrats.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/reframe-final.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-210219" alt="reframe-final" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/reframe-final.jpg" width="280" height="175" /></a><strong></strong></p>
<p><strong>Reprinted from Hoover&#8217;s <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/defining-ideas/article/161046">Defining Ideas</a>.</strong></p>
<p><strong>[Illustration by Barbara Kelley]</strong></p>
<p>The media and pundits treat politics like a sport. The significance of the recent agreement to postpone the debt crisis until January, for instance, is really about which party won and which lost, which party’s tactics are liable to be more successful in the next election, and which politician is a winner and which a loser. But politics rightly understood is not about the contest of policies or politicians. It’s about the philosophical principles and ideas that create one policy rather than another—that’s what it should be about, at least.</p>
<p>From that point of view, the conflict between Democrats and Republicans concerns the size and role of the federal government, which is no surprise to anyone who even casually follows politics. But more important are the ideas that ground arguments for or against limited government. These ideas include our notions of human nature, and what motivates citizens when they make political decisions. Our political conflicts today reflect the two major ways Americans have answered these questions.</p>
<div>The framing of the Constitution itself was predicated on one answer, best expressed by Italian philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli: “It is necessary to whoever arranges to found a Republic and establish laws in it, to presuppose that all men are bad and that they will use their malignity of mind every time they have the opportunity.” Throughout the debates during the Constitutional convention, the state ratifying conventions, and the essays in the <em>Federalist</em>, the basis of the Constitution was the view that human nature is flawed.</div>
<p>As Alexander Hamilton wrote in <em>Federalist </em>6,men are “ambitious, vindictive and rapacious,” and are motivated by what James Madison called “passions and interests.” These destructive passions and selfish interests were particularly predominant among the masses, whose ignorance of political theory and history left them vulnerable to demagogues. Hence the people “are daily misled into the most baneful measures and opinions by the false reports circulated by designing men,” as Elbridge Gerry said during the Constitutional convention debates.</p>
<p>This low estimation of the people partly explains the “democracy deficit” in the original Constitution, which allowed the people to elect directly only the House of Representatives. But unlike Plato, who proposed an elite with superior wisdom to run the state justly and efficiently, early Americans believed the flaws of human nature were universal, and all men, no matter their wealth or intelligence, were corruptible. More important, they were firm believers in the tendency of concentrated power to corrupt, for power is “of an encroaching nature,” as George Washington and James Madison said, and is ever striving to increase its scope. Vanity, greed, pride, and selfishness, John Adams wrote, “are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty.”</p>
<p>Universal human depravity thus precluded any simple form of government whether democratic, monarchical, or aristocratic. The solution of the framers was the mixed government in which the democratic House of Representatives, the aristocratic Senate, (chosen by the state legislatures), and the monarchical president (chosen by the Electoral College) would along with the judiciary divide the powers and functions of government and thus check and balance the tendency of each branch to maximize its power at the expense of the people’s freedom. As James Madison explained in <em>Federalist</em> 51, the “separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government” would allow each branch “to resist the encroachment of the others,” for “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”</p>
<p>Equally important was the principle of federalism, the protection of the power of the states evident in giving state legislatures the responsibility for selecting Senators and the presidential electors. Given the variety of conflicting interests among the states, Madison wrote in <em>Federalist</em> 10, there will be a “greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties, against the event of any one party being able to outnumber and oppress the rest,” and “greater obstacles opposed to the concert and accomplishment of the secret wishes of an unjust and interested majority.” Any selfish interest or violent passion “will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other states,” and “the variety of sects dispersed over the entire face of it [the nation] must secure the national Councils against any danger from that source.” Just as the variety of interests and passions among the people will check and balance each other, so too will the variety of state interests check and balance the power of the federal government.</p>
<p>Starting in the late nineteenth century, a different view of human nature and its motivations developed. The Progressive movement rejected the Founders’ assumption of the universal depravity of human nature. Progressives believed human nature could be improved under the environmental pressures of technological, scientific, and economic changes. New “sciences” like sociology and psychology had developed that were discovering the material causes of human behavior whether social, economic, or political. From this knowledge came the technical means of alleviating the social and economic disruptions attending these changes. Masters of this new knowledge and the techniques for applying them, if given power, could apply these insights into governing and managing the state, and solving the new problems that had arisen from industrialization and technological change.</p>
<p>From the Progressive perspective, the Constitution and its structure of checks and balances were outmoded. Industrialization and technological development had created new problems that required a different form of federal government. According to Progressive president Theodore Roosevelt in his 1901 State of the Union speech, “The old laws, and the old customs which had almost the binding force of law, were once quite sufficient to regulate the accumulation and distribution of wealth. Since the industrial changes which have so enormously increased the productive power of mankind, they are no longer sufficient.”</p>
<p>Woodrow Wilson made the same argument. Politics must now be understood as a Darwinian process, and the Constitution must evolve to meet new circumstances. “All that progressives ask or desire,” Wilson wrote in 1913 in <em>The New Freedom</em>, “is permission—in an era when ‘development,’ ‘evolution,’ is the scientific word—to interpret the Constitution according to the Darwinian principle.”</p>
<p>The limited government of the Founders, then, was incapable of effective government given the developments in economic and social life that were changing human nature. The national interest could no longer be served by the state governments, the free market, or civil society A bigger and more powerful national government was necessary to control big business and corporations, and to more equitably distribute wealth and improve the general welfare. The clash of the various interests and passions of individuals and factions must be neutralized, and national unity must be created through a national government and its technocratic administration. The individual rights enshrined in the Constitution had to be redefined in terms of the larger society and its welfare.</p>
<p>The right to property, for example, so crucial for the framers, now must be “subject to the general right of the community to regulate its use to whatever degree the public welfare may require it,” as Theodore Roosevelt said in his famous “New Nationalism” speech delivered during the 1912 presidential campaign. Enforcing this concern for the “general right of the community” required a “policy of a far more active government interference with social and economic conditions.”</p>
<p>In his last State of the Union speech Roosevelt said, “The danger to American democracy lies not in the least in the concentration of administrative power in responsible and accountable hands. It lies in having the power insufficiently concentrated” to serve the unified interests of the collective people. Woodrow Wilson concurred. Imagining in <em>The New Freedom</em> the progressive utopia that would come into being once the existing politico-social order had been rebuilt by what Wilson calls political “architects” and “engineers,” he describes it as a structure “where men can live as a single community, co-operative as in a perfected, coordinated beehive.”</p>
<p>To achieve these aims, the federal government had to grow, with agencies and bureaus created to administer the laws and regulations presumably made necessary by new economic and social conditions. “There is scarcely a single duty of government which was once simple which is not now complex,” Woodrow Wilson wrote in his essay “The Study of Administration.” He went on to write: “The functions of government are every day becoming more complex and difficult, they are also vastly multiplying in number. Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings . . . Whatever holds of authority state or federal governments are to take upon corporations, there must follow cares and responsibilities which will require not a little wisdom, knowledge, and experience.”</p>
<p>This wisdom, knowledge, and experience will be the purview of those schooled in the new sciences, not the traditional wisdom and practical experience of the people pursuing their various and conflicting interests. As Progressive journalist Walter Lippmann wrote in 1914, “We can no longer treat life as something that has trickled down to us. We have to deal with it deliberately, devise its social organization, alter its tools, formulate its method, educate and control it. In endless ways we put intention where custom has reigned. We break up routines, make decisions, choose our ends, select means,” which we can do because “the great triumph of modern psychology is its growing capacity for penetrating to the desires that govern our thought.” The instrument of this process necessarily must be the federal government, now enriched by the Sixteenth Amendment, which in 1913 instituted a national income tax.</p>
<p>The Progressives, then, discarded the Founders’ vision of an eternally flawed human nature, and the Constitutional architecture that balanced and checked the tendency for people and factions to pursue their interests and maximize their power at the expense of others. Now a more powerful federal government––currently comprising over 500 agencies and offices, with 2.3 million employees costing $200 billion annually–– armed with new knowledge and backed by coercive federal power, will organize, regulate, and manage social and economic conditions to improve life and create a more just and equitable society.</p>
<p>But the Founders’ main motive in crafting the government they did was not to create utopia, but to protect the freedom of all from the dangers of concentrated power, whether this power was embodied in the majority or in a minority. As Alexander Hamilton said in <em>Federalist </em>85, “I never expect to see a perfect work from imperfect man. The result of the deliberations of all collective bodies must necessarily be a compound, as well of the errors and prejudices, as of the good sense and wisdom, of the individuals of whom they are composed.” A powerful minority of federal technocrats unaccountable to the people is no exception to the maxim that “power is of an encroaching nature,” its growth always coming at the expense of freedom.</p>
<p>These are the two visions behind the politics of debt and government spending that are necessary for financing a technocratic big government. The outcome of the budget negotiations next January and February will reflect which idea triumphs: that of government limited to protect the autonomy and freedom of flawed humans, or that of big government creating a better world for perfectible humans through entitlement spending financed by taxes and debt. That is the debate we need to be having.</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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