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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Senate</title>
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		<title>Torture and Police Brutality in a Real Police State</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/faith-j-h-mcdonnell/torture-and-police-brutality-in-a-real-police-state/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=torture-and-police-brutality-in-a-real-police-state</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 17 Dec 2014 05:46:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Faith J. H. McDonnell]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[brutality]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Communism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[North Korea]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247513</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Where is Senate and media outrage about brutalized North Koreans?]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/kj1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247515" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/kj1.jpg" alt="kj" width="279" height="157" /></a><em>The police beat them with clubs and metal brushes. Some of the teenagers were beaten so badly that their heads were covered with bald spots because the hair would no longer grow back from the trauma. </em>(“MJ” a missionary who with his wife sheltered North Korean orphans)</p>
<p>On December 10, 2014, Human Rights Day, the American media was salivating over the Senate Democrats’ report about enhanced interrogation of terrorists, raging over the U.S. government’s violation of jihadists’ human rights. At the same time, condemnation of America’s police forces continued to spread throughout the country, leading to well-orchestrated protests this past weekend. Meanwhile, a Capitol Hill <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/Events/2014-International-Human-Rights-Day.aspx">press conference</a> sought to open the eyes of the world to true torture and real police brutality.</p>
<p>The press conference, was sponsored by the <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org">North Korea Freedom Coalition</a> (NKFC), under the chairmanship of Dr. Suzanne Scholte. The NKFC was joined by U.S. Representatives <a href="http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/press-release/chairman-royce-applauds-house-passage-north-korea-sanctions-legislation">Ed Royce</a> (R-CA) and <a href="http://democrats.foreignaffairs.house.gov/press_display.asp?id=1378">Eliot Engel</a> (D-NY) to focus on the circumstances of <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/UploadedDocuments/2014_PhotoLaosNinePhotos.pdf">nine North Korean teenagers</a> who were <a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887324682204578514772761682396">forced back</a> to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in May 2013 by the Laotian and Chinese governments. Their whereabouts has been unknown since the repatriation, but recent rumors have suggested that at least some of the seven boys and two girls may have been executed as punishment for leaving Kim Jong Un’s wonderland.</p>
<p>The young people are known as the “Laos Nine” because it was from Laos that they were returned to China and repatriated to North Korea. They had been part of the <em>kkotjebbi</em> (homeless North Korean children living on the streets in China). They were taken in by <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/UploadedDocuments/2014_Testimonial_MJ.pdf">a missionary “MJ” and his wife</a>, who have saved the lives of many North Korean children, in spite of the risk to themselves.</p>
<p>Police brutality is a daily reality for the <em>kkotjebbi</em> according to MJ. In a statement for the press conference, he revealed that “most of the children were eating what they could find in trash cans and were sleeping in the sewers in freezing conditions,” all the while trying to avoid the notice of the brutal Chinese border patrol guards who beat them with clubs and metal brushes.</p>
<p>MJ said that the children “had no access to medical care and begged on the streets with frostbitten and infected feet.” And yet for North Korean escapees, even facing beatings from the Chinese police and freezing to death are preferable than being caught by the Chinese government and forcibly repatriated to the police state of North Korea.</p>
<p>The missionary couple feared to remain in China with “their children.” Although North Korean defectors are recognized internationally as refugees, China routinely violates its obligations to respect the principle of non-refoulement under international refugee and human rights law and sends North Koreans back to certain imprisonment and probable death. So in April of 2013, MJ, his wife, and the nine teens began a journey from China to North Korea. After they crossed the Chinese/Laotian border they were arrested by the Laotian authorities and instead of accommodating their safe passage to South Korea, the Laotian government collaborated with the Chinese government to send the teens back to China from which they were returned to North Korea.</p>
<p>In February 2014, a <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/ReportoftheCommissionofInquiryDPRK.aspx">report</a> issued by the <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/CoIDPRK/Pages/CommissionInquiryonHRinDPRK.aspx">Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea</a> echoed what human rights organizations have been saying for years. The COI’s report, under the authority of the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, thoroughly details the deplorable conditions for the citizens of Kim Jong Un’s regime, and the unspeakable torture that those confined to one of the prison camps in the vast network across the DPRK. In Section 60, “Arbitrary detention, torture, executions, and prison camps,” the report reveals:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>In the political prison camps of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape and the denial of reproductive rights enforced through punishment, forced abortion and infanticide. The commission estimates that hundreds of thousands of political prisoners have perished in these camps over the past five decades. The unspeakable atrocities that are being committed against inmates of the kwanliso political prison camps resemble the horrors of camps that totalitarian States established during the twentieth century.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Congressman Royce, the Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, opened the December 10 press conference on the Laos Nine. He and all of the other speakers referred to COI’s report. Royce echoed the COI’s recommendations that the UN General Assembly consider a resolution to condemn North Korea for human rights abuses and crimes against humanity, and that North Korea be referred to the International Criminal Court. The Chairman also stressed the immediate need for the Senate to take up a <a href="https://www.congress.gov/bill/113th-congress/house-bill/1771?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22H.R.+1771%22%5D%7D">piece of legislation (H.R. 1771)</a> that was passed unanimously by the House of Representatives, calling for strong sanctions against North Korea.</p>
<p>H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act, according to the NKFC, “calls for the harnessing of the Treasury Department’s regulatory oversight of the hub of the global financial system, blocking the accounts and revenue streams that sustain Kim Jong Un’s oppression and control of the North Korean people, along with his weapons programs, arms trafficking, proliferation, and money laundering.” The NKFC also says that the bill “blocks the funds of third-country entities that knowingly facilitation North Korea’s crimes against humanity, and its violations of U.N. Security Council sanctions.” If the members of the Senate Intelligence Committee responsible for the recent shameful report really care about human rights and stopping torture, they would work to pass immediately H.R. 1771, the North Korea Sanctions Enforcement Act.</p>
<p>Engel, the Ranking Member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has worked in partnership with Royce for a number of years on a variety of human rights issues. He repeated his House colleague’s call for action in both the United Nations and the U.S. Congress. Engel also noted that the decision of the Laotian government to send the nine orphans back to China and then back to North Korea <a href="http://www.brookings.edu/research/opinions/2010/09/north-korea-human-rights-cohen">violates international law</a>.</p>
<p>Thankfully, as the North Korea Freedom Coalition pointed out in a <a href="http://www.nkfreedom.org/UploadedDocuments/2014_NKFCLaos20141210.pdf">letter</a> addressed to Laotian President Lt. Gen. Choummaly Sayasone, since the incident with the Laos Nine, the Laotian government has <em>not </em>forced any other North Korean refugees – either adult or children – back to North Korea. “We urge you to continue this humanitarian policy which is consistent with international refugee law and we urge you to work with the Republic of Korea and other nations on the safe resettlement of North Korean refugees until conditions improve in that country,” the Coalition wrote.</p>
<p>Following the remarks by the members of Congress, NKFC advocates displayed photos of the nine children and told their story as told by missionary MJ. The first speaker, NKFC Vice Chairman, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, Associate Dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, declared that it was important for the children and other North Koreans longing for freedom to know that they “are not forgotten.” Cooper held the photo of the oldest of the North Korean orphans, Moon-Chul, who was 19 at the time of repatriation. According to the little bit of biographical information, this young man:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>. . . suffered frostbite on his feet. There was no place where he could receive medical care so he had to cut his own three frostbitten toes off. Despite his difficulty walking due to his injuries and all that he suffered, he always had a kind heart which led him to take care of the young kkotjebbis and give them food that was found first. Because of Moon-Chul’s kindness in caring for Ryu Kwong-Hyuk, who was much weaker, Kwong Hyuk survived.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>Another one of the NKFC advocates followed up with a photo of Ryu Kwong-Hyuk, 17 at the time of repatriation, and told of him:</p>
<blockquote><p><em>This young man was unable to beg or steal for food because he felt great shame for his condition. When Moon-Chul found him he was nearly starved to death, but Moon-Chul kept Kwong-Hyuk alive making sure he had food. Kwong-Hyuk’s dream is to get an education and one day serve the poor.</em></p></blockquote>
<p>If the mainstream media is so morally scrupulous that it is appalled by enhanced interrogation of radical jihadists, it should be doubly appalled by the deliberate starvation of human beings by their own government and the imprisonment of 100,000 men, women, and children in political prison camps under horrific conditions.</p>
<p>If the Senate Intelligence Committee could spend some $50 million to condemn the waterboarding of the mastermind of 9/11, who sawed the head of Danny Pearl…could they spare a little compassion for Noh Yea Ji, a 14 year old North Korean orphan girl who was sold as a slave in China three times, rescued along with the rest of the Laos Nine, and who has now disappeared in the torture chamber that is North Korea?</p>
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		<title>Back in Saigon: The Senate Intelligence Committee Report</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/bruce-thornton/back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=back-in-saigon-the-senate-intelligence-committee-report-2</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Dec 2014 05:40:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Bruce Thornton]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[CIA]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nixon]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[report]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Torture]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247269</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Left revives an old tradition of besmirching the CIA in a time of crisis abroad. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/o-CIA-SYRIAN-REBELS-facebook.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247270" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/o-CIA-SYRIAN-REBELS-facebook-450x322.jpg" alt="A man crosses the Central Intelligence A" width="362" height="259" /></a>The Senate’s misleadingly dubbed “torture report,” an executive summary of which was released by the Senate Intelligence Committee, is a shameless and dangerous act of political grandstanding and moral preening. The investigative report of the CIA’s long-suspended interrogation program reflects nothing more than just how firmly the progressive mind is stuck in the old Vietnam War paradigm, their master narrative of American crime and left-wing righteousness. Once more, we see how reactionary is the ideology of the left, their minds unable to accommodate historical change, new ideas, or even coherent thinking.</p>
<p style="color: #313131;"><span style="color: #000000;">Jose Rodriguez, a 31-year veteran of the CIA who ran the interrogation program, has <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-once-urged-the-agency-to-do-anything-to-fight-al-qaeda/2014/12/05/ac418da2-7bda-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">detailed</span></a> the hypocrisy and untruths of the report. He reminds us that in the aftermath of 9/11, lawmakers demanded that the intelligence agencies do everything possible to stop another attack. Indeed, Feinstein in May 2002 told the <i>New York Times </i>that “</span><span style="color: #272727;">we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves.” In her comments on the Report’s release, however, Feinstein referred to the Geneva Convention and said, </span>“No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, (including what I just read) whether a state of war or a threat or war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” Twelve years later, the political advantages of moral preening have trumped the recognition that hard choices have to be made sometimes to fulfill the federal government’s highest duty, which is to keep the citizens safe.</p>
<p>Rodriguez also explodes the report’s canard that the enhanced interrogation techniques were not legally sanctioned. They were in fact reviewed in 2002 and 2005 by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, and in 2009 were investigated by Eric Holder’s DOJ, which did not file charges. Rodriguez also debunks the claim that the CIA withheld information concerning their use from government officials. Rodriguez should know, since he was there when the CIA briefed Senator Feinstein and House Representative Nancy Pelosi on the techniques. And he exposes the lie that EITs did not yield vital information, an assessment also contradicted by ex-CIA chief Michael Hayden, who said of the charge that it “is so untrue” that it “actually defies human comprehension. We detained about 100 people, we had a Home Depot-like warehouse of information from those people.” Former CIA chiefs James Woolsey, Porter Goss, George Tenet, and, with shrewd equivocation, Leon Panetta, along with ex-Attorney General Mike Mukasey and current CIA chief John Brennan, have confirmed that EITs did provide valuable intelligence.</p>
<p>Yet the central fallacy of the report is that the EITs  “amount[ed] to torture,” as Feinstein announced on the report’s release. But government policy follows the law as written and established by Congress, not what “amounts” to the law in someone’s subjective estimation. Such sophistic language compromises the report’s description of EITs. The techniques cited––threats, sleep deprivation, “physical assault,” stripping detainees naked, putting them in “stress positions”––are all obviously frightening and painful. But they are not “torture” under U.S. law. Nor is waterboarding, Exhibit A in the left’s indictment of U.S. heinous behavior. That’s why Feinstein slyly says that EITs “amount” to torture rather than explicitly calling them torture, and why she cites international conventions on torture rather than the U.S. law.</p>
<p>Just consult the <a href="http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00002340----000-.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">statute</span></a> covering torture in the U.S. Code, which defines it as “an act committed by a person acting under the color of law specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering (other than pain or suffering incidental to lawful sanctions) upon another person within his custody or physical control,” and further clarifies “severe mental pain or suffering” as “the prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from . . . the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering.” The key words are “intended” and “severe.” As Marc Thiessen concluded in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Courting-Disaster-America-Barack-Inviting/dp/1596986034/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&amp;ie=UTF8&amp;qid=1418248906&amp;sr=1-1&amp;keywords=marc+thiessen"><span style="color: #0433ff;">analysis</span></a> of the EITs and their legality, “The fact is, <i>none</i> of the techniques used by the CIA meet the standard of torture in U.S. law. This is for two reasons: because the CIA interrogators did not <i>specifically intend</i> to inflict severe pain and suffering; second, because they did not <i>in fact</i> inflict severe pain and suffering.” And in 2009 Attorney General Eric Holder agreed, when he testified before Congress that waterboarding U.S. military personnel as part of their training was not torture: “It’s not torture in the legal sense because you’re not doing it with the intention of harming these people physically or mentally.”</p>
<p>This simple legal reality is why Feinstein in her statement depends on imprecise adjectives like “visceral,” “ugly,” “brutal,” and “harsh”––to create a cloud of emotion that hides the fact that EITs were not illegal and were not torture. Furthermore, if Feinstein and other critics think this point is a sophistic evasion and that these techniques <i>are</i> torture, then they should call on Congress to change the law rather than rewriting history to suggest that the CIA did something illegal.</p>
<p style="color: #313131;"><span style="color: #000000;">But fact and reality are not as important as politics and the leftist melodrama of America’s historical crimes. Thus Feinstein said her report reveals behavior that is “</span>a stain on our values and on our history,” and Senator John McCain said they are violations of our “ideals.” So just how is attempting to keep America safe by interrogating terrorists according to the law, with doctors and psychologists present to monitor the terrorist’s well being, a “stain”? In the real world beyond our borders, genuine torture is used daily without the sort of legal limits or oversight imposed on our interrogators. And most of the time, the torture is not used to gain life-saving information, but to punish political enemies, terrorize political opponents, or just indulge sadistic cruelty. That is a real “stain.”</p>
<p style="color: #313131;">As for our “ideals,” such a low bar for indictment as waterboarding––which killed no one, and which several journalists volunteered to undergo––means, <span style="color: #000000;">as Max Boot has suggested, </span>that the Allied strategic bombing of Germany and Japan, which killed 650,000 to a million civilians with high explosives, nuclear bombs, and incendiaries, was an even grosser and more heinous “stain” on our “ideals” than sleep deprivation and scary threats. Where was the investigation of strategic bombing after World War II, or the pontifications on the Senate floor of how we Americans were “better” than such practices? Are we now just morally superior to those Americans who accepted the “awful arithmetic” and defeated 2 racist, brutal, totalitarian regimes? Or how about Obama’s droning to death over 3600 terrorists, including nearly 500 civilians, actions not subject to the legal review the EITs were? Dead terrorists are bad sources of intelligence of the sort gleaned by using EITs. Will we see a future investigation that condemns these drone executions as a “stain on our values and history” and “ideals”? It seems that “values” and “history” are defined by which party is in control of the government and stands to benefit politically by pointing out how they’ve been defiled.</p>
<p><span style="color: #313131;">But apart from politics, this report and its rollout </span>are just another act in the progressive melodrama of America’s sin and guilt for crimes committed when morally superior liberals aren’t running the show. And exhibit number 1 for progressives of a certain age is the Vietnam War. That’s why the conflict in Iraq was shoehorned into the Vietnam paradigm as soon as ambitious Democrats like Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, and John Kerry, who had all voted for the war, began noticing the traction Howard Dean was gaining from opposing the war.</p>
<p>Thus the 1964 <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution"><span style="color: #0433ff;">Gulf of Tonkin</span></a> resolution authorizing the escalation of the war in Vietnam found its parallel in Bush’s alleged “lies” and “false intelligence” about Hussein’s WMDs (“Bush lied, millions died!”). The charge that Vietnam was benefitting the “military-industrial complex” and its lust for profits and resources was duplicated in allegations that the Halliburton Corporation and Dick Cheney were really after Iraq’s oil (“No blood for oil!”). Anti-war critics like I.F. Stone and the Berrigan brothers were reincarnated as the buffoonish Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky. The anti-war movement of the Vietnam era reappeared as International ANSWER, Code Pink, and various other outfits protesting the war in Iraq. Clichés like “escalation” and “quagmire” resurfaced in media commentary, and atrocities like My Lai were searched for in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo.</p>
<p>And don’t forget the investigative assault on the CIA by Senator Frank Church’s committee following the 1975 North Vietnamese victory in Vietnam, a report that weakened the CIA and compromised its effectiveness in ways that helped pave the way for the 9/11 attacks. Now it finds a new iteration in the Senate Intelligence Committee report and the dishonest media coverage besmirching the CIA. The immediate result has been to endanger our agents and intelligence assets abroad.  It still waits to be seen how much damage will ensue to the morale and future practice of the brave men and women who try to keep us safe.</p>
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		<title>An Ominous Omnibus</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/an-ominous-omnibus/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=an-ominous-omnibus</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 11 Dec 2014 05:49:15 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247245</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The mammoth spending bill would fund amnesty and Obamacare --- and could be voted on today.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/boehner-mcconnell.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247246" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/boehner-mcconnell-407x350.png" alt="boehner-mcconnell" width="329" height="283" /></a>A mammoth spending bill aimed at preventing a repeat of the last government shutdown is coming under heavy fire from conservative groups for green-lighting President Obama&#8217;s executive immigration amnesty and continuing to fund Obamacare.</p>
<p>Republicans in Congress are inexplicably rushing through a catch-all $1 trillion-plus spending bill to prevent the government from running out of money at midnight tonight. The measure, which would keep the government funded through the end of the federal fiscal year (Sept. 30, 2015), is being called a <i>cromnibus</i>, which is a portmanteau of <i>CR</i>, as in continuing resolution, and <i>omnibus</i>, as in omnibus legislation.</p>
<p>The measure contains hundreds of policy provisions including a new prohibition on the legalization of marijuana in the District of Columbia and new funding to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) and the Ebola virus in West Africa. It would continue funding two wildly unpopular Obama initiatives, Obamacare and President Obama&#8217;s extra-legal immigration amnesty. The Department of Homeland Security would be funded only for a few months, allowing lawmakers to delay a fight over amnesty until springtime.</p>
<p>&#8220;Importantly, the bill does nothing to block President Obama&#8217;s unilateral, unlawful actions which include granting quasi-legal status, work permits and Social Security numbers to those who are in the country illegally,&#8221; said Heritage Action for America spokesman Dan Holler.</p>
<p>&#8220;I suppose we shouldn&#8217;t be surprised that it&#8217;s taken the Republicans all of 35 days to drop that ball in spectacularly disappointing fashion,&#8221; Jenny Beth Martin, co-founder of Tea Party Patriots said in a statement. &#8220;Make no mistake, this bill DOES fund Obama&#8217;s executive amnesty, and so much more.&#8221;</p>
<p>The measure makes sure that illegal aliens benefiting from Obama&#8217;s amnesty receive Social Security benefits and spends almost $1 billion to help illegals integrate into communities across the country. It also blows apart the budgetary ceilings agreed upon by House Budget Committee Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) and Senate Budget Committee chairman Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.).</p>
<p>There is, of course, no reason for Republicans to pass in a frenzied rush an all-encompassing bill funding almost all of the federal government. They could easily draft a stopgap spending bill to carry them over to January when Republicans will control both chambers of Congress and have greater bargaining power in negotiations with President Obama.</p>
<p>But conservative critics say House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) have ulterior motives. Using the boogeyman of an impending government shutdown to keep lawmakers in line, the GOP leadership has been generating a false sense of urgency in order to get the omnibus legislation through. Boehner and McConnell, they say, have no intention of repealing Obamacare, so they are kicking the can into 2015.</p>
<p>Most elected Republicans still seem blissfully unaware that the the last shutdown in October 2013 was an unmitigated public relations success for Republicans even though it might not have felt that way at the time. Setting aside the relentless media propaganda that falsely painted the shutdown as a massive Democratic tactical victory, the episode sent the unmistakable message that GOPers were champions of freedom of choice in health care.</p>
<p>The shutdown boosted GOP public approval numbers all the way through the election this month, helped to revive the fight against Obamacare as millions of Americans were having their health insurance policies abruptly canceled, and helped to set the stage for the Republicans’ historic trouncing of the Democrats in congressional elections. The shutdown was an extended, cost-free infomercial for the GOP that reminded Americans that Republicans were on their side on an issue that mattered to them. In other words, it derailed what had seemed like an unstoppable leftist narrative that the always-unpopular Obamacare was a done deal and that resistance to it was futile.</p>
<p>Those gun-shy Republicans who oppose a government shutdown at all costs are never quite able to explain why, if the shutdown was so bad for the GOP, Republicans are now on the march. On Nov. 4 the GOP flipped control of the 100-seat U.S. Senate, winning 54 seats. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 246 out of 435 seats.</p>
<p>Opposition to the spending measure has grown steadily since the bill was unveiled Tuesday night but Republican leadership in the House says it is confident it can get the bill passed.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, 10 grassroots conservative groups have <a href="http://mobile.wnd.com/2014/12/grassroots-revolt-10-conservative-groups-call-for-boehner-mcconnell-to-resign/"><span style="color: #0433ff;">signed a letter</span></a> demanding that Boehner and McConnell be removed from their posts for collaborating with the president on amnestying 5 million illegal aliens.</p>
<p>William Gheen, president of Americans for Legal Immigration, said the pending bill betrays the values held by more than 70 percent of the people who cast ballots in the congressional elections last month.</p>
<p>“They’re mocking the public, and it’s a huge deception. We can’t allow that deception to prevail. What we need right now is, we need the phones ringing off the hook,” said Gheen. “Word in D.C. is Boehner is hell-bent on getting his plan through to help Obama with the budget, and American citizens out there now have less than 48 hours to respond and take action to change that.”</p>
<p>&#8220;Christmas has come early for the big spenders in Congress who have been experiencing long-term withdrawal from the earmark ban,&#8221; said Andy Roth, vice president of government affairs at the Club for Growth (a group that did not sign the letter). &#8220;This 1,603-page bill provides a &#8216;fix&#8217; for these jonesing politicians who carry water for their special interest buddies.&#8221;</p>
<p>A final vote on the spending legislation could come today.</p>
<p>Members of organized labor have come out against the bill. Teamsters Union president Jimmy Hoffa Jr. <a href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/12/10/BLOOD-IN-THE-WATER-TEAMSTERS-JIMMY-HOFFA-JR-TO-CONGRESS-KILL-THE-OMNIBUS-BILL"><span style="color: #0433ff;">railed</span></a> against the measure because it &#8220;will slash the pensions of thousands of retirees who worked years for a pension that they thought would provide them financial security in their retirement years. That promise is now busted.”</p>
<p>“To add insult to injury, this Omnibus bill compromises highway safety by rolling back Hours-of-Service regulations, allowing truck drivers to work more than 80 hours per week – twice the normal 40-hour work week,” Hoffa added.</p>
<p>Yesterday House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi expressed reservations about the measure. “Once more, Republicans are working to stack the deck for the special interests against everyone else,” Pelosi said. She continued:</p>
<blockquote><p>Buried in the more than 1,600 pages of the omnibus package Republicans posted in the dead of night are provisions to put hard-working taxpayers back on the hook for Wall Street’s riskiest behavior. This provision, allowing big banks to gamble with money insured by the FDIC, opens the door to another taxpayer-funded bailout of big banks – forcing middle class families to bear the burden of Wall Street’s mistakes.</p></blockquote>
<p>Even Rep. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), normally a hyper-partisan member of the Democratic leadership, now opposes the bill. He is opposed to the proposed increases in caps for individual donors in elections that was slipped into the omnibus legislation.</p>
<p>Some of the more extreme left-wing members of Congress such as Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/warren-leads-liberal-democrats-rebellion-over-provisions-in-1-trillion-spending-bill/2014/12/10/c5c915e4-80b5-11e4-9f38-95a187e4c1f7_story.html"><span style="color: #0433ff;">are opposed</span></a> to the omnibus for their own ideological reasons.</p>
<p>Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), currently the fringe-left favorite for the 2016 presidential nod, called the bill &#8220;the worst of government for the rich and powerful.&#8221;</p>
<p>The measure would ease some restrictions on derivatives trading which Warren says would help Wall Street and big banks. On the Senate floor she offered a self-serving version of history, saying the bill “would let derivatives traders on Wall Street gamble with taxpayer money and get bailed out by the government when their risky bets threaten to blow up our financial system.”</p>
<p>“These are the same banks that nearly broke the economy in 2008 and destroyed millions of jobs,” she said, ignoring the role that meddlesome regulations and left-wing public policies played in inflating the mortgage bubble that deflated around that time.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Senate CIA Report and Democratic Treachery</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/the-senate-cia-report-and-democratic-treachery/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-senate-cia-report-and-democratic-treachery</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 10 Dec 2014 05:55:30 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[CIA]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=247157</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Putting American lives on the line for a political payout.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/feinstein.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-247160" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/feinstein-432x350.png" alt="feinstein" width="315" height="255" /></a>On Tuesday, the Senate Intelligence Committee released the 500-page executive summary of the report on the CIA’s enhanced interrogation of terrorist detainees. Democrats, the media and Republican Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) are using it as an opportunity to <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/09/politics/cia-torture-report/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">hammer</span></a> the CIA and the Bush administration, while American embassies, military units and other U.S. interests are <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/us-prepares-security-risks-torture-report-080155482--politics.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">preparing</span></a> for possible reprisals. But adding further threats to Americans already in harm&#8217;s way matters not. Beleaguered congressional Democrats are desperate for a political boon and have turned to an old standby: sabotaging national security and sacrificing American lives.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Since their betrayal of the Iraq war, Democrats, particularly in the Senate, have panned the techniques used by the CIA to garner critical information in the days following 9/11 as “torture,” and have claimed that they yielded no useful intel. Though the use of these techniques was long known to Democrats — with virtual indifference toward them at the outset — many Democrats have since claimed they were unaware of what was occurring, which explains their lack of opposition to their government supposedly engaging in “torture.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Leading the way on the latter fabrication was then-House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA). Her ongoing denials regarding knowledge of the CIA&#8217;s waterboarding of terrorists were ultimately undone by Pelosi herself in 2009, when she finally <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/14/pelosi-cia-misled-congress-over-waterboarding/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">admitted</span></a> she had known about the program since 2003. Yet even as she admitted it, she continued to promote the “Bush lied, people died” lie, insisting that &#8220;the C.I.A. was misleading the Congress and at the same time the administration was misleading the Congress on weapons of mass destruction.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Those would be the same weapons of mass destruction whose existence was <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/10/14/world/middleeast/us-casualties-of-iraq-chemical-weapons.html?smid=tw-share&amp;_r=3"><span style="color: #1255cc;">acknowledged</span></a> by the <i>New York Times</i> last October.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">As for so-called torture, the report <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/10/world/senate-intelligence-committee-cia-torture-report.html?emc=edit_na_20141209&amp;nlid=23627335&amp;_r=0"><span style="color: #0433ff;">cited</span></a> sleep deprivation, threatening subjects with death, “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” described by the CIA&#8217;s chief of interrogations as a way to exert “total control over detainees,” and waterboarding, as in simulating near drowning. The report further stated that former CIA directors George J. Tenet, Porter J. Goss and Michael V. Hayden hyped the value of those techniques in secret briefings with the White House and Congress.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein admitted that she “could understand the C.I.A.&#8217;s impulse to consider the use of every possible tool to gather intelligence and remove terrorists from the battlefield, and the C.I.A. was encouraged by political leaders and the public to do whatever it could to prevent another attack,” but that “such pressure, fear and expectation of further terrorist plots do not justify, temper or excuse improper actions taken by individuals or organizations in the name of national security. The major lesson of this report is that regardless of the pressures and the need to act, the intelligence community’s actions must always reflect who we are as a nation, and adhere to our laws and standards.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The hypocrisy is breathtaking. While the Left wrings its collective hands about “torture,” they remain silent to Barack Obama’s <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/10/how-team-obama-justifies-the-killing-of-a-16-year-old-american/264028/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">drone program</span></a>. One that has not only killed terrorists, but America citizens, Samir Khan, and Anwar al-Awlaki. Both men were traitors, but they were executed without the due process the Left supposedly reveres so much in the case of terrorist detainees. So was Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, as well as innocents who were victims of collateral damage. No one was reported to have been killed by the Bush administration&#8217;s enhanced interrogation techniques, yet somehow Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney are routinely <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=Bush+Cheney+war+criminals&amp;ie=utf-8&amp;oe=utf-8"><span style="color: #1255cc;">referred</span></a> to as “war criminals” while Obama largely gets a pass.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The <i>Washington Post’s</i> Bill Gerson cuts right through the double-standard, noting intelligence personnel now being excoriated received the same “direction and protection,” consisting of presidential approval, congressional briefing, lawfulness determined by the U.S. Attorney General and target value determined by the CIA Director as those currently participating in the drone program. &#8220;Some may argue a subtle moral distinction between harshly interrogating a terrorist and blowing his limbs apart,” Gerson writes. &#8220;But international human rights groups and legal authorities generally look down on both. The main difference? One is Obama’s favorite program. A few years from now, a new president and new congressional leaders may take a different view.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">This double standard puts the lie to Democrats’ seriousness toward the claim that the Bush administration engaged in “torture,” illegality and human rights abuses in its mission to thwart terrorist attacks against the homeland. In truth, the campaign against tough interrogation is a political cudgel that Democrats have employed to bludgeon their political enemies, no matter the national security cost. It amounts to nothing less than a revisionist effort to turn those entrusted with protecting the country in the immediate aftermath of the worst domestic attack in American history into pariahs, even as the war remains ongoing. As Gerson so rightly notes, the report’s release is an act of &#8220;exceptional congressional recklessness” engineered by Feinstein, whose &#8220;legacy is a massive dump of intelligence details useful to the enemy in a time of war.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Our allies are equally appalled. ”Foreign leaders have approached the government and said, &#8216;You do this, this will cause violence and deaths,&#8221;&#8217; <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/12/08/house-intelligence-chairman-rogers-report-will-spur-attacks/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">warned</span></a> Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. &#8220;Our own intelligence community has assessed that this will cause violence and deaths.&#8221;</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest acknowledged such concerns, but insisted the administration &#8220;strongly supports the release of this declassified summary of the report.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">No doubt. The release neatly coincided with ObamaCare mega-consultant Jonathan Gruber’s Congressional <a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/12/09/politics/gruber-hearing/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">testimony</span></a> regarding his contempt for the American public, and the deception employed to get the ACA passed. Thus, the administration has once again employed a bait and switch effort to distract the public, despite the fact that distraction imperils Americans and our allies.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">CIA veteran Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., who ran the enhanced interrogation program, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/todays-cia-critics-once-urged-the-agency-to-do-anything-to-fight-al-qaeda/2014/12/05/ac418da2-7bda-11e4-84d4-7c896b90abdc_story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">destroys</span></a> the contention that Democrats were out of the loop, and that the enhanced interrogation techniques yielded no useful information. &#8220;The leaders of the Senate and House Intelligence Committees and of both parties in Congress were briefed on the program more than 40 times between 2002 and 2009,” he reveals, noting those same lawmakers &#8220;urged us to do everything possible to prevent another attack on our soil.” He was equally forthright about the intel that was garnered. &#8220;After extraordinary CIA efforts, aided by information obtained through the enhanced-interrogation program, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed architect of the 9/11 attacks, was captured in Pakistan,&#8221; he explains.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">He is especially critical of “hypocritical&#8221; Democrats. He cites Feinstein&#8217;s 2002 <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/26/weekinreview/all-fronts-getting-more-than-one-step-ahead-of-an-attack.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">assertion</span></a> that &#8220;we have to do some things that historically we have not wanted to do to protect ourselves,” as well as an <a href="http://votesmart.org/public-statement/15557/cnn-late-edition-with-wolf-blitzer#.VIdvyifFm3d"><span style="color: #1255cc;">interview</span></a> between CNN’s Wolf Blitzer and Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WVA), then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee. In response to Blitzer’s question about whether Khalid Sheik Mohammed might be turned over to friendly countries with no restrictions on torture, the Senator admitted it was possible. “I wouldn’t take anything off the table where he is concerned, because this is the man who has killed hundreds and hundreds of Americans over the last 10 years,” he replied.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Rodriguez then adds a dose of devastating perspective to the mix. &#8220;If Feinstein, Rockefeller and other politicians were saying such things in print and on national TV, imagine what they were saying to us in private….Our reward, a decade later, is to hear some of these same politicians expressing outrage for what was done and, even worse, mischaracterizing the actions taken and understating the successes achieved,” he states.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Current and former CIA leaders <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/defense/226465-spies-push-back-on-senate-report"><span style="color: #1255cc;">bitterly contested</span></a> the report. Bush-era CIA Director George Tenet labeled it &#8220;biased, inaccurate, and destructive,” adding that it &#8220;does damage to U.S. national security, to the men and women of the Central Intelligence Agency, and most of all to the truth.” CIA Director John Brennan said the agency made mistakes, but insisted &#8220;the record does not support the study’s inference that the agency systematically and intentionally misled each of these audiences on the effectiveness of the program.” A <a href="http://ciasavedlives.com/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">website</span></a> launched by a number of intelligence officials blasted the report:</p>
<blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;"><i>The recently released Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) Majority report on the CIA&#8217;s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Program is marred by errors of facts and interpretation and is completely at odds with the reality that the leaders and officers of the Central Intelligence Agency lived through. It represents the single worst example of Congressional oversight in our many years of government service.</i></p>
</blockquote>
<p style="color: #232323;">Cheney also remains <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/09/us/politics/white-house-and-gop-clash-over-torture-report.html?emc=edit_th_20141209&amp;nl=todaysheadlines&amp;nlid=62431058&amp;_r=1"><span style="color: #1255cc;">resolute</span></a> about the necessity and legality of the program. “What I keep hearing out there is they portray this as a rogue operation, and the agency was way out of bounds and then they lied about it,” he said in a telephone interview with the <i>New York Times</i>. “I think that’s all a bunch of hooey. The program was authorized. The agency did not want to proceed without authorization, and it was also reviewed legally by the Justice Department before they undertook the program.” Cheney also had nothing but praise for those who participated. “As far as I’m concerned, they ought to be decorated, not criticized,” he added.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The alternative viewpoint? &#8220;Showing respect even for ones enemies. Trying to understand and in so far as psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view,” <a href="http://www.ijreview.com/2014/12/212850-hillary-remarks-beat-enemies-may-just-killed-chances-presidency/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">said</span></a> Secretary of State and likely presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Americans have a choice to make between competing worldviews. The wrong choice will have deadly consequences.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Pat Caddell: Midterm Elections a Repudiation of Obama</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=pat-caddell-midterm-elections-a-repudiation-of-obama</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 26 Nov 2014 05:52:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Frontpagemag.com]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245909</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[One of America's foremost election experts analyzes the GOP's victory at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to Pat Caddell&#8217;s speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112328603" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p>&nbsp;</p>
<p>Yes, I’m basically happy.  The person I’m really happy about is that Harry Reid is no longer Majority Leader.  I say that certainly not because I’m a Republican.  I say that because I’m an American and, as I had said on television, he was the greatest danger to democracy, I said this election, that we&#8217;ve ever seen, and his damage to the institution of the Senate where no one was allowed to vote, where there were no amendments, where there were no bills considered unless he wanted to, where he killed all discussion and basically all effective work in the world’s most deliberative body, supposedly.  And what he did with the nuclear option overnight to roll back 250 years of protecting the minority, which now the Democrats are going to find out how much they like that, but all of that and I think for the sake of the democracy, his demise is the biggest and greatest news.  The fact that he stays on only shows you how my party cannot get beyond—he and Nancy Pelosi&#8211;the Democrats cannot get beyond their own myopia and thinking as they have a truly disastrous election.</p>
<p>An election, I want to point out that was not only &#8212; but has many interesting kernels to it.  And I want to say, first of all, and it has many instructions for the future and then it was also about not a lot, not a lot.  The one thing is that, first of all, yes, the Republicans won a big victory and, once again, left amazing possibilities on the table because their consultant, lobbying, whoever controls this Republican Party has the imagination of a French General staff in World War I.  They poured hundreds of millions of dollars into about a dozen states, and they did not put anything into what I thought was a pretty simple election.  First, the Republicans decided they didn’t have anything they were going to offer.  No economic plan, no message, nothing like what happened in &#8217;94 with which was the Contract for America.  Which no one knew what was in the Contract for America, but it set an image for the Republicans that year with Gingrich and the victory that year, which was that at least the Republicans had a plan, had an idea.  We’re most of all united.  Let me just say something about those kinds of things, misreading elections.  Newt Gingrich then misread that election that the country had voted for revolution.  The country had voted to stop Bill Clinton.  There is somewhat of a vast difference there.</p>
<p>This election, let me just say, the success.  I want to talk first about what was left there and then the success.  The strangest thing about the election, for those of you who don’t know, I’m on a program at 7:30 eastern time on Sunday nights live with Doug Schoen and John LeBoutillier called <i>Political Insiders</i> in which we basically try to tell the truth, and we’ve been fortunate enough to have quite a response, and sometimes I get a little carried away.  I called the President last week a raging narcissist, which is true.  The whole problem with this guy is not that he’s a radical Pres &#8212; he’s a raging narcissist, and he’s going to prove it in the next couple of weeks.  But the election hung for a long time.  Those close Senate races hung to the end.  You could not look at the national situation &#8212; the direction of America where it was more than two to one or going in the wrong direction, the President’s job rating poorly, all of his policies under attack and very negatively received, an economy that people believed was not helping them, and all of that &#8212; and you look at the historical record in the six years and you say, “My God, that’s got to be a Republican landslide.”  And then you look down at the individual race and you said, “My God, they’re all close.”  And I kept saying this tension could not hold.  And I thought, as I had said the Sunday before election, there was a good 30 percent chance or more that it would just blow open; that eventually the undecides would move in the direction they should and essentially that’s what happened.</p>
<p>But when I look at the election and say what was possible, and I don’t mean to be a sour note on what makes everyone happy, but it’s important to understand what it may tell you.  In the states that did not have big battleground Senate races, where none of the several billion dollars or $4 billion, whatever was spent, the Republicans put no effort whatsoever.  I had argued, as I had done in &#8217;12, and argued since, hey, this is a pretty simple election.  This is a referendum election.  And why the Republicans refused to take some of that money that they were wasting by piling even more.  For those of you who know economics, know the marginal gain, marginal differentials.  But when you keep pouring money into races where people are saturated beyond belief with television and where you’re watching 50 spots at one time and the whole thing, because of local buy, and the expense the stations are gouging, the people buying the media and whatever, why did the Republican National Committee, which does have the ability to do this, where the Senate can eat it up by national advertising amazes me, why didn’t they put air cover over the race?  Why didn’t they?  Very simple, first of all, remember we’ve had all of these crises.  Starting, you go to the VA, Benghazi, or anything you want to take, White House Secret Service, Bergdahl, on and on and on, a disaster after disaster this year.  And, voters, like all of us, there was one coming every week and then Ebola and ISIS and then you go, my God I forgot about the VA.  Well, in advertising there is a reason they keep reminding you.  So, what I’m wondering is why wasn’t there some kind of effort to put out a message that said to remind.  First of all, all it did was remind people.  Remember this, remember this, and ask a simple question.  Because we knew what the results were.  They were more than two to one people opposed his policies.  Once Obama handed the Republicans and shafted his party with the message that my policies are on the ballad, why didn’t they just quote that.  Put that up and say, “If you disagree with those policies and here’s an example, send him a message.  Vote Republican.”  If you weren’t going to say anything positive, that certainly was a major message.  And guess what, it would’ve been seen by everybody and cheaper and better placement, everywhere across the country.</p>
<p>And you know what would’ve happened?  Let me tell you what happens.  There were 15 House races that were undecided election night.  Most of them line outside of all of these states where the money was spent.  As of to date, nine of those 15 have ended up being won by Democrats because there was no national message.  If you look at Illinois, where the Republican Senate gubernatorial candidate won a surprising victory over one of the most corrupt&#8211;I mean really, I’m broke.  I mean what a disastrous place Illinois is&#8211;after Obama had campaigned for Pat Quinn, the incumbent.  Won by five, six points.  That’s even counting Chicago several times.  But Dick Durbin, the major force in Democrats in the Senate, Democrat Whitt got 53 percent of the vote.  Al Franken got 53 percent of the vote.  You go through some of these races and you think, my God.  Always when we have landslides, we have these surprise upsets.  Like Virginia almost was.  But we have them.  Now Gillespie had no more.  He couldn’t buy media pretty much the last month.  No one was supporting him.  Can you imagine what a little bit more push and a national message would have done or might have opened up in a couple of these Senate races?</p>
<p>Look, the Republicans have their best House position since 1946.  But if you’re going to win an election, take everything off the table you can is my theory.  But, unfortunately, the strategy I described does not enrich the political consultant, lobbyist class in the Republican party, which makes a lot more money by having only state races and does not require them to have any imagination other than storming across no man’s land in the same way they do.</p>
<p>Let me say this.  You look at the exit polls and there are some problems.  When everyone tells you how all the vote came out, let me tell you a dirty little secret for which I will probably be shot for having announced.  At the end of the process, after the votes come in, the people who run the exit poll reweight all of their actual results from the 20,000 people they interview and weight it to the results.  That’s like if you hired me to poll and I said to you, just wait election night I guarantee you I will give you the winner and the right result.  Well, they’ve got some bias problems in there.  So, take some of these divisions skeptically.  So, I went back.  I polled the numbers for the 97 percent before we had the magic of this.  And here’s part of the story of the election.  One, it is that the voters were not rewarding.  And this is important about misreading elections as I pointed out in &#8217;94.</p>
<p>This was a repudiation of the President and his policies and his party.  But it was not an endorsement of the Republican Party by any means.  This was voting for the lesser of which evil that was in front of you and the evil in front of you was the one that was in the White House and in power.  Now, that doesn’t mean the opportunities don’t exist for what you do, but to think that this was an endorsement, because mainly remember I don’t know if you can define.  I don’t know what the campaign was about other than beating Obama.  And in individual races, it worked.  But listen to this, and this goes to a message I’ll talk about at the end in a few minutes about 2016 and what’s coming and a project I’ve been working on.  But I want to tell you this.  What you had was both parties had high negative ratings.  The public was dissatisfied, to say the least, with Obama.  When asked angry or dissatisfied, it was around 60 percent.  The Republican leadership in Congress got the same number, 60 some percent, just to show you, and this is of Republicans.  I mean this is a Republican wave election.  Right?  Republicans are still getting even worse ratings relatively, if you think about how people are voting, than did the Democrats.  All of that pointed to me to the fact that one should be careful; that basically, this was a very dissatisfied election.</p>
<p>Remember, we had a drop off.  This is the lowest midterm election since 1942.  Now, in 1942 there was a reason a lot of people didn’t get to the ballot.  For those of you who are too young to know, there was a thing called World War II going on.  But the results are only slightly better than they were in the 1942 turnout because so many dissatisfied voters where both parties stayed home.  And they depended on area.  Someone has done this.  It’s quite an interesting analysis.  In the third most rural and, therefore, most Republican areas of the country, the turnout was down about 34 percent.  In the exurbs and the suburbs, it was 38 percent decline, and in the urban areas, the urban centers, it was 47 percent.  Now that does not mean that the black vote, for instance, necessarily, and this is where only when we get a genius like Mike Barone you get in the precinct and actual numbers analysis is what we know.  But we have a situation where the exit polls tell us that the black turnout, the African American turnout, was only a point less than it was in 2012.  The Hispanics really stayed home.  But as Tavis Smiley, I agree with Tavis Smiley, if you’re black or Hispanic or of any color, what the hell was your reason to turn out and vote Democratic.  What had you been given, an economy where your income had gone down, where your families are not benefited and where the very wealthy were.  Remember, this is a Fed, appointed by Barrack Obama, propping up the very richest people with this wonderful bond buying plan they had, which has stoked the stock market, but done nothing for ordinary Americans.  And the President can’t understand and the economists say, “Oh my gosh, look how good the economy’s doing.”  Well, the American people have a different perception whether they are Democrats, Republicans or Conservatives.  If they know that they are not doing as well, they know that the jobs being created, thanks in part to Obamacare, more than half of them and a vast majority of them now, are part-time.  People are not working.  They live on the edge and they are still very nervous even though things are getting better.  And that partly is reflected you could see in the exit polls.  Seventy-eight percent of the people thought that they were extremely or very worried about the economy in the next year or so, which is totally different than what we’re being told is the case.</p>
<p>And then finally, one of the points in the exit poll that was interesting was that 3/4th of the American people believe that we were going to have another terrorist attack.  That it was highly likely or more that we would have a terrorist attack.  Those numbers are actually higher than they were after 2001.  And I wonder why?  Well, because if you look to the feckless leadership of this White House.  I mean the only way I can even describe it in foreign policy is feckless.  Whether it is in Iran.  In search of a deal, you have to be panic.  Barrack Obama’s proven one thing.  In search of a deal, he will do anything.  And that’s what’s been happening with Iran.  They’re allowing Iran supposedly to stop their nuclear weapons plan to continue to enrich uranium.  Hardly a prescription.  And if they don’t get an agreement by the 24th, the Iranians have used this time and given up nothing that they said they would.  And we have the person, so you can feel certain at night and not worry, the very woman who crafted the wonderful plan with the North Koreans during the Clinton administration to keep them from having nucs and expanding is the one working with the Iranians that John Kerry has brought in to handle that.</p>
<p>And then we have the Ukraine.  Putin sees the President at this meeting in Asia for two days and immediately starts reinvading Ukraine because he was so amazed with the President’s toughness.</p>
<p>And then finally we do it in a climate deal with Chinese, which is wonderful.  They buy 20/30 somewhere in the future.  They will cut back their CO2 use, but with no plan.  And meanwhile, we’re supposed to cut even more in between.  Once again, the search free deal at all costs.  And it should frighten anybody that for two years this will happen and you have to look to the Republican Congress.</p>
<p>But the President’s lack of behavior during this ISIS, which most Americans support.  Fifty-eight, thirty-seven support.  And yet on the ISIS thing, you have a lot of the people who opposed it, Democrats and Republicans agreed equally in their support, but people who oppose this, Democrat and Republican, who oppose what’s going on with ISIS, voted Republican.  Why?  Because I suspect they think this is not working.  That this is another sham being presented.  And any plan that has five shorties a day for air cover with no one on the ground.  And now our new, in the spirit of Arvin, we are sending in deals to that crack Iraqi Army to take on ISIS, and with what will be, we promise, great results.  That whole unraveling, all of that has made the American people very, very nervous.  And yet the President seems to have learned nothing from the election.</p>
<p>And I want to talk about a couple of issues for now they are very important coming up, and they also relate to the election and what we also know.  And also the question of how the Republicans will behave because I think they’ve behaved badly on many of these issues, and I have said this before at this forum.</p>
<p>Let’s take Obamacare.  What I call the night it was passed, a crime against democracy.  To jam through something without any support, unlike Social Security or Medicare where we had massive support from both parties, jam through with lies.  And, by the way, when we really found out the lies, it was amazing but by, and basically on the basis of bribery.  And all those people this time who voted for it, except for Jeanne Sheehan, were defeated and Franken and Durbin.  But the point is is that the American people have never accepted Obamacare.  We are kept told how great it is.  And then we have this gift of Mr. Gruber.  I just can’t get over him.  All I can think is Goober peas.  Gruber, he’s out there with all his comments.  And the White House denies he had anything to do.  We were paying him $400,000.00 apparently not to do anything except write the plan.  He is a Romney hangover from Romneycare.  Which is one of the reasons I am so unenthusiastic about your last nominee, who should have won the election and lost the election that should never have been lost.  Again, and the same people who came up short in delivering what could have been this year and are running around crowing are the same people who delivered that mistake.</p>
<p>And the Supreme Court ruled Obamacare was legal.  But when John Roberts had that visitation that he wouldn’t be invited to Washington dinner parties anymore after <i>The Washington Post</i> warned him desperately.  Things in Washington, there are certain priorities in life, going to dinner parties.  Apparently, John Roberts is more important than the law.  So he changed his opinion, embarrassingly so, and then decided to call the mandated attacks.  And, as I said at the time, my God, in this terrible disaster, he’s handed one club to the Republicans that they must use, which is that they lied that it was a tax.  Right?  Now, you would have thought the Republican party would have taken that in the Senate and the election and pounded that, and they didn’t and they wouldn’t.  And, to this day, I don’t know.  I can speculate why, but they did not.  That message for the American people, because it was very simple for the Democratic opponents in some of these Senate races that year, which is were you lying.  Were you part of the lie or, if you didn’t know, will you vow to vote to repeal the mandate now that you were lied to too.  It’s only one of two choices.  Either you were fooled or you were part of the fooling of us.</p>
<p>But that kind of thinking doesn’t seem to make it into politics anymore, which I think would’ve been helpful.  I think all along the Republican establishment has been lukewarm about Obamacare.  They have gone through the motions, sometimes these useless repeals.  Why we had useless repeals after 27 of them or whatever after the Supreme Court decision, not move to specifically just repeal the mandate, which would’ve killed healthcare, I do not know.  We’re going to have more opportunities.  But the notion of let’s repeal it all or whatever the strategies are, Obamacare has been proven to be the big lie of American politics.  And the President and now Mr. Gruber has pulled the bandage off so we can all see what was the truth, and we’re hopeful that that will change.</p>
<p>The other issue is immigration.  I listen to the people saying how great things would be.  We’d all be holding hands and jumping up and down because Obama would now embrace the compromise.  So, I’m sitting with Neil Cavuto election night on his show on Fox Business about 10:00, and I’m getting this and someone’s arguing on a panel.  I’m going, wait a minute, didn’t we do this two years ago.  I sat right here while all you people were saying Obama now would have a legacy.  He’s got a second term.  He’ll now work with people.  And didn’t I tell you he just tore the country apart to win and that he hates his other opposition and he’s so arrogant.  I told you there would be no peace.  And now you people think he’s going to do anything.  He’s going to blow the country up.  And all of this we’re going to work together and whatever?  This is a President who has decided that with this immigration move, and here is a very important point if you take nothing back.  And I am going to stress it Sunday because it’s really important. I watched the Sunday shows last week and all of the commentators in the Beltway, all of the wonderful media, and I want to talk about them for one second in a minute.  But all of them talked about this in one sentence.  Well, the Republicans are going to be angry.  It’s going to be a firestorm among the Republicans.  No, the firestorm will be with the American people.</p>
<p>The attitudes on immigration have had a sea change in three months.  In September, Rasmussen had numbers that showed vast majorities of Americans both oppose the President granting amnesty, believe that he did not have the power to do so, and also believed that if they did, the Republicans should take him to court, which people had ridiculed before, and including a large majority of moderates, the most critical group in the election who were normally democratic.  They do not vote like liberals, but they generally follow that and they deserted on immigration.</p>
<p>Everything points to we had a referendum in Oregon election night.  Now, you wouldn’t know this because, even if you go to CNN or whatever, the only thing that you will find that was on the ballot in Oregon was the legalization of marijuana, which CNN and the people in the news organization mainly think that’s probably one of the more important issues.  But they didn’t cover, and they don’t even report to this day on their web site, is there was a ballot measure by the same people, liberal Oregon, which had just voted for marijuana, to allow illegal aliens to have driver’s license.  Almost 70 percent of the vote was no.  Okay?  You want to talk about canaries in the mine.  Actually, the Democrats will have to worry because they blow up the Democratic party with this.  But you know what happened in the election, and I said this weeks before.  I was talking about the sea change on immigration.  The fact that it went to the idea of the President was King, not President, and that even large numbers of Democrats were opposed, and what I didn’t understand is why wasn’t the Republican party making that a direct issue against Democratic candidates.  How are you voting on immigration?  The President’s going to sign this amnesty.  Will you reject the President or not?  Actually, make it explicit particularly in those places where you don’t have a chance.  But they didn’t and I’ll tell you why.</p>
<p>Because the unholy alliance.  And some of you won’t like this, but it’s the truth.  The unholy alliance on immigration is an alliance between unions and the left because they want more cheap votes and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, particularly, and a lot of major Republican donors who want a lot of cheap workers.  And, therefore, and that is best illustrated by <i>The Wall Street Journal</i>, which takes all leave of its senses because of their support for total, open borders, along with <i>The New York Times</i>.  That’s when they stroll through the lilies together, skipping through and singing.  This is the problem.  The country doesn’t want this.  The country’s attitudes are changing.  And certainly, by the way, generically, and I love the way the institutions organize and put together the stuff on polling because they try to give a question that will give them some answer.  So, once it was clear that attitudes on immigration change, all of the major mainstream media polling outfits stopped polling on immigration.  As I pointed out, they didn’t even mention it in their election results.</p>
<p>And it goes to the other question.  The President’s right to constitutional power; that he is King.  But I have no confidence when Lindsey Graham, who got, by the way, 54 percent in South Carolina and a black man got 62 percent, tells you what might have been in South Carolina.  Some people, as opponents, are better to be lucky than to be good.  But Lindsey Graham and John McCain, who led the surrender on the appointments when the President was appointing these people on the Labor Practices Commission, laid down on that, which the court ruled unanimously was illegal.  And the Republicans were halfhearted.  It’s like the response when Harry Reid did the nuclear option.  Mitch McConnell and the Republicans could have stopped everything in the Senate.  Everything in the Senate requires unanimous consent, including the prayer in the morning.  Do you know what happens if Mitch McConnell had gotten up and said there will be no more business in this Senate until this is revoked.  You are not going to overnight have a coup de tat against the Constitution of the United States.  A stand for principle for once, the people would’ve supported.  Instead, they just said, “Oh my God, wait until we get to have it.”  It’s just those kinds of things that disillusion Americans.</p>
<p>Finally, the last point I want to really talk about other than the media.  And let me tell you something, whatever goes forward, the true enemy, and I’ve said this for years, is the media.  And it is not because of the truth they tell or the lies they tell, it is what they do not tell.  It is their decision not to report things.  For instance, the Gruber incident as of last night until yesterday morning, once, had been mentioned, only once, on any of the major networks, NBC, ABC, CBS.  Now, of course, CBS news is run by the man whose brother, Ben Rhodes, is the one who manufactured the talking points at Tom Donlan’s direction from Benghazi, and who makes sure to protect Obama.  But, they report nothing.  In the election, its stunning.  Numbers were in 2006, huge percentages.  I think it was like 150 some mentions on the evening news about President Bush being in trouble.  On the three networks this time, it was like 15 or 16.  And on ABC, it was zero.  ABC wasn’t even…and you wonder why interest was lower?  Because a lot of it wasn’t being reported.  And this has got to be taken on at a different level.  Too many Republicans in Washington and the establishment want to have nice relations with the press.  They want to be mentioned in the press.  They want to go along.  There needs to be a war on the press because it goes to the culture and it goes to whether or not we have a Constitution.</p>
<p>I was on the board at West Point.  I watched young men and women who were willing to stand on the ramparts and pledge with their very lives to protect our freedom, who thought it was an honor.  The press, which their ramparts, is a special deal on the First Amendment is that they would protect the American people from power from the Government.  And they have deserted those ramparts.  And in deserting those ramparts, they have endangered the freedom of every American, Democrat, Republican, Liberal or Conservative.  And there has to be a real war here.  And there is not.</p>
<p>You people, it’s like Bill Maher on television.  I mean HBO.  Bill Maher is not practicing free speech.  He’s practicing paid speech.  He gets paid by HBO.  He gets paid by you subscribers.  How many of you people in here subscribe to HBO?  Look.  Come on, let’s all be honest, I mean.  Yeah.  You know what you’re doing, you’re subsidizing all of that because Conservatives don’t know how to fight.  They don’t know how to take on HBO and say, hey, we’re not asking you take Bill Maher off.  How about put someone else on.  I have a friend in mind I would like to mention, but I won’t.  But, put someone on that balances that out or we will all cancel.  Do you know how fast Time-Warner would do if a million people in this country said they would cancel if they did not put a balance on HBO?  But you don’t fight.  You just give in.  It’s like the war on the culture.  This is a time to actually make definitions of these things.  The influence of the culture in Hollywood, as my friend Michael Barnes here says, every day on YouTube and everything else, they get up and then the score is at the end of the day is 845 to nothing.  Imagine if you cut that to two to one in the culture in terms of messaging and real things.</p>
<p>Finally, on 2016.  Nothing can be read from 2014.  The things I talk about is what I have discussed in my Smith Project.  The American people are united about one thing.  They hate the political class in Washington.  They hate the Democrats and Republicans, alike, with that.  They believe they are being screwed by both.  And I would like to remind the Speaker, again last night, Elizabeth Warren’s position about how the banks operate and about how they are getting off.  You know who agrees with that?  About 85 percent of the Republicans and Conservatives.  The entire country understands being screwed by crony capitalism which operates with the Chamber of Commerce and in Washington and the Democrats with all of their energy and all of their building bureaucracies for political machinery.  And they know they’re not being benefited and there is a common sense center that is gigantic, and it is coming.  It didn’t come in this election because we were squeezed between who would be in control of the Senate.</p>
<p>But I will tell you one last thing from the exit polls that has not been discussed.  There was a special sub sample of them, in which they asked people about several candidates would they be a good president.  Hillary Clinton was 42 yes, 53 no.  Then they asked about four Republicans, Jeb Bush, Chris Christie, Rand Paul and Rick Perrin.  On the average, 26 percent said that each of them would make a good president.  On average, 60 to 63 percent said no, they wouldn’t.  And this is in a Republican sweep going on.  And when they asked to how the people would vote in an election, 39 to 40 percent said they would vote Republican.  Thirty-four percent for Hillary.  This is not good news for Hillary at all.  And the balance said that it all depended.  They weren’t sure.  They weren’t particularly happy.  Understand we’re going to have insurgencies in 2016.  The Republican party and for the first time in your lifetime, my lifetime, or anyone’s lifetime.  Well, I guess some people were born in 1940 when you had Wendell Willkie seize the Republican party.  It was an insurgency.  You could have one this year.</p>
<p>And let me give you one last example why.  I’ll give you an issue.  One of the things the American people most are upset about when you ask them about it.  I’ve done it, Heather Higgins has done it, on polling about the exemption for Congress and the Congressional staff in the healthcare bill that the President came down and negotiated with Harry Reid and with John Boehner.  And Boehner was then saying, oh, he was against this exemption except that Harry Reid got ticked off and leaked all the emails where they agreed, they came together, so that they protect the Congress from what the American people were doing.  When you ask that of American people, 2/3rds of Republicans believe that’s the reason to turn every single person in Washington out of office.  You have 15, 18, whatever number of candidates running for President or thinking about running or having dreams and visions of White House and oval offices.  Not a single one of them will raise this issue.  This issue, the agreement between the two parties was that it was not to be discussed in the election, and it wasn’t.  Did you know that?  They had an actual agreement they would not raise this issue.  Do you know what could’ve happened to some of the incumbents, Democrats particularly, who were vulnerable if that had been raised.  And it wasn’t.  And the reason is and that’s what I mean, there is an insurgency.</p>
<p>I will know the Republican party has life when there’s a Republican running for President willing to attack the establishment of his own party the way that Jimmy Carter and others did in the Democratic party that I was involved in in the 70s.  Then you may get somebody who represents the American people.  As long as this is controlled by the people, as I said to you for two years, in Washington whose only real ambition is to hold on to the power they have and the money they make, your prospects in 2016 are dim.</p>
<p>Anyway, thank you very much.</p>
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		<title>Midterm Election: What Just Happened?</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:53:03 +0000</pubDate>
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		<description><![CDATA[An all-star panel discusses what to expect in 2016 and beyond at Restoration Weekend. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><strong style="color: #232323;">Below are the video and transcript to the panel discussion &#8220;Midterm Election: What Just Happened?&#8221; which took place at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 20th Anniversary Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 13th-16th at the Breakers Resort in Palm Beach, Florida. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//player.vimeo.com/video/112390545" width="500" height="281" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr:</strong> Let me start in response a little bit to what Ben said last night where he broke down the urgent versus the necessary. Obviously, election matter because the last six years I think have done real damage, and we lost very badly in 2006, both the House and the Senate. 2008 it got even worse. Also lost the presidency and terribly wide margins for the Democrats in both the House and the Senate. Made a comeback in 2010, moved back 2012, made some progress again this year, and now we have control of the Congress, but in the two years we have left with Obama in the White House, in a sense we have a blocking action. We&#8217;ll have some discussion later about what we can achieve positively and how clever we can be, but losing elections really does matter and yes, changing the culture matters too, and that&#8217;s a longer-term proposition, but we really can&#8217;t afford to lose the next presidential election and then have essentially the judiciary locked up for the next 25, 30 years under the control of the Democrats as well as the political election cycle.</p>
<p>Start with the big issue of whether the Republicans, based on what happened this year, can win a presidential election, and this comes down to what I call the demographic argument, and I want to throw out a comparison of two presidential elections, 1988 and 2012. 1988 was the last presidential election a Republican won when most of the media and the Democrats thought the Republicans had a lock on the Electoral College. George Herbert Walker Bush beat Michael Dukakis 40 states to 10, 426 electoral votes to 112, won by 8 percent in the popular vote, 54 to 46, but the interesting thing is, if you look at the breakdown between the votes of white voters and nonwhite voters in that election, Bush won by 20 percent among white voters and lost by 66 percent among non-white voters. In 2012 you have exactly, exactly the same breakdown in terms of white voters and non-white voters. Romney won by 20 percent among white voters and lost by 66 percent among non-white voters. The difference is in 1988 whites were 86 percent of those who voted in the presidential election and in 2012 they were 72 percent. When you change 14 percent and you take away a 20 percent margin among those 14 percent, a positive margin for your side, and replace it with a 66 percent margin for the other side, those 14 percent produced a 12 percent shift in margin. Instead of an 8 percent victory for Bush over Dukakis, Obama beat Romney by 4 percent. All right? Every 1, 2 percent shift has that impact at this point, assuming the numbers stay the same.</p>
<p>Now, the good news is the Republicans are improving their performance slightly among white voters. They won by 22 percent in 2014, and they did substantially better among minority voters. Instead of losing by 45 percent among Hispanics, they lost by roughly 26, 27 percent. They almost broke even among Asian voters after losing that group by 45 percent in 2012. The exit polls showed they won among Native Americans. That doesn&#8217;t make a whole lot of sense to me, but I think that may be some of the massaging that Pat Caddell talked about. The African Americans who voted 96 to 3 in 2008 for Obama and 93 to 6 in 2012 this time in the congressional elections was 89 to 10. It may not seem like a big deal, but it is a big deal. When George Bush was elected in 2004, the black vote was 88 to 11. That&#8217;s a huge difference from 96 to 3 or 93 to 6. All right? In fact, in 2004 to 2008 Bush won by 3 million votes, Obama won in 2008 by 9½ million votes. That&#8217;s a 12½ million shift in margin. Half of it, half of it was in increased turnout, substantially increased turnout among African Americans and the huge victory margin they gave of 93 percent margin as opposed to 77. Okay?</p>
<p>The Obama team knew what they were doing. They knew who would vote for them, and they got them registered, and they brought them to the polls. That&#8217;s a good thing they did for their candidate. All right? They knew who their voters were, and they got them to register, and they got them to vote, and they had the mechanics to monitor who was voting on election day and who hadn&#8217;t, and getting to the votes with early voting and so on. Okay? Republicans did better in the ground game this time, but still probably not up to where we need to be to win a presidential election.</p>
<p>So what were the demographics? I mean, if you think about it for a second, last year in the United States, actually for the last two years, 50 percent of the live births went to whites, 50 percent to non-whites. Let&#8217;s assume you look 30, 40 years out and you assume we have a country where the white vote goes for 22 percent. Remember, these are all citizens; they&#8217;re all born here. 22 percent for the Republican and the non-white vote, which is 50 percent, goes by 50, 55 percent to the Democrats. You balance those out, you average them out, what do you have? California. The nation has become California in terms of its electoral mix. What if you get the 2014 numbers, which are better. Republicans did better among whites. They won by 22 percent. They lose among minorities by say 45 to 50 percent. Then you get Oregon. Or maybe Minnesota. Okay? You got a shot in a good year, but doesn&#8217;t look very good.</p>
<p>The good news is the shift in the birth rate is not reflected in the shift in the mix of those who are voting to the same extent. Hispanics were 8 percent in 2006, they were 8 percent in 2010, they were 8 percent of the vote in 2014. Given that they are by far the fastest-growing group in America, that suggests that even with the Hispanic vote being obviously a pro-Democratic vote, if that vote grows much more slowly than is anticipated and grows to 10 percent, 12 percent, 13, and Republicans can keep their losses to 20 percent, you do not have the demographic nightmare which was forecast for the Republican Party in a book in 2002 by John Judis and Reed Teixeira, who called it the emerging demographic majority for the Democrats because of A) growing minority vote and B) growing percentage of white voters who are college educated who are more open and receptive to Democrats than non-college-educated white voters are who are the Republicans&#8217; strongest base.</p>
<p>Turns out that white college-educated voters move from election to election and can get disgusted if they think their taxes are going up and their services are going down or if they see things that they&#8217;re unhappy about, so it&#8217;s not a lost cause, but it would be silly not to recognize some of the trends that are underway in American society. This country is changing faster demographically than any country in Europe, and we&#8217;ve had books by Mark Steyn and others talking about how Europe is gone and it&#8217;s going to be 50 percent Muslim and those countries are going to disappear. The United States&#8217; demographics is changing much faster than any of those countries, and that&#8217;s with a replacement birthrate here at almost 2.1. We&#8217;re just a little bit below that. In Europe they&#8217;re much below that. They&#8217;re bringing in people. Their actual native population is declining.</p>
<p>So this is a shift and it&#8217;d be silly &#8212; Republicans have to do better with all groups. That&#8217;s the message I&#8217;d have, and do better with all groups means less pandering and more having a national American message, which is exactly I think what Pat Caddell was talking about today. I could not agree with him more. If the Republican Party simply is part of the governing majority and it&#8217;s a little bit less liberal than the other party, you sort of have the political parties in Great Britain. They are all locked in, essentially, to the same situation.</p>
<p>Now, let me talk again: Some good news this year in the elections. Republicans, the charge was, well, it&#8217;s a favorable nap in the Senate. You had all these Senate seats in red states that Romney had won big. There were 36 governors&#8217; races, and 22 of them were in states that Obama had carried. Republicans did not win red state governorships. They won in Maryland, Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maine. I have a summer home in Maine. One of the biggest wins of the night for me, because there&#8217;s probably no more detested character on the left than the governor of Maine, who is an abused child, one of 18 children. You talk about a rags to riches story. Look up Paul LePage on Wikipedia and read his life story, and it will match what you heard before in the previous talks about someone making something of their life and dealing with a tough situation and overcoming it. Maine Public Radio had a suicide watch out for all of their listeners on election night. They called for grief counselors, but unfortunately the grief counselors were all their listeners. They had to bring them in from Northern New Hampshire. There were seven Republican grief counselors in Northern New Hampshire.</p>
<p>Anyway, in the House of Representatives, I disagree a little bit with Pat, but for the most part he&#8217;s correct. Republicans probably left six, seven, eight seats on the table this year, but their maximum, given essentially the current mix of the populations and how people vote, is probably not a lot higher than 260, and they will probably get to 248, 249, 250 after those last few recounts are done in Arizona and New York, California, and you have the two runoffs in Louisiana. By the way, Louisiana Senate, first poll on the runoff, Cassidy is 16 points ahead of Mary Landrieu, so say goodbye to Mary.</p>
<p>There is something to having a national message, if you&#8217;re a national political party, and the Republicans again, why I say there&#8217;s sort of a limit, 260, 265, you&#8217;re not going to do much better. The Republicans did a great job redistricting, which is why winning the governorships in 2018, winning state legislative seats in 2020 is so crucial to maintaining that for the next ten years. I mean, in Ohio, Republicans have 12 of the 16 House seats. They have 13 of the 18 House seats in Pennsylvania, 9 or 14 in Michigan, 9 of 13 in North Carolina. Those are not deep red states. I mean, essentially what&#8217;s happened is the Democrats want their minority voters concentrated, and the Republicans cooperate, so they give them seats where Democrats had enormous numbers of wasted votes. They win by 80 to 20 in their seats. Republicans win a lot of other seats by 55/45, 60/40. All right?</p>
<p>So, and I want to say this very clearly. For the purposes of what you&#8217;re going to hear over the next few days, I&#8217;m not saying the Republicans are the good guys, but they&#8217;re our side at this point, and it&#8217;s our side versus the other side, and I would prefer our side wins. Okay? And getting the right people on our side obviously matters, and getting better candidates for our side matters, but we did well this year as a party and conservatives are in better shape for the Republicans having won control of both Houses than if they had remained in a minority on the other side.</p>
<p>One last thing. You hear a lot of talk about this blue wall. Republicans can&#8217;t win the White House. They can&#8217;t win the White House because the Democrats have won enough states in the last six presidential elections to get 242 electoral votes. All right? So Republicans gotta win pretty much every toss-up to be able to get elected President. Well, Republicans were 206 this time. Add Florida, Virginia, and Ohio you get to 266. Those are three states Republicans have to win to win the presidency. If they can&#8217;t win those three states they&#8217;re not going to win the presidency. All right? But then you have a bunch of other states. There are seven or eight states from Iowa, Nevada, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, which was only a 5 percent state, New Hampshire, Colorado. Republicans can put together a win nationally at the White House and for once they&#8217;ll be running against a candidate who may be older than the Republican, and the Republicans may not be nominating someone who ran before and lost, which has been six of their last seven nominees. All right? That seems to be how you get nominated for Republican. Run once and lose. So put together a younger candidate, someone with a fresh face, someone with ideas and I don&#8217;t think 2016 is a dead issue. Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>This election, the midterm election, was not a vote for conservatism or the Republican Party. It was a vote against President Barack Obama, that the whole populace and the America people were really fed up with, and look at the minuses that Obama had: the handling of the Ebola crisis, the handling of Obamacare, the lies about Obamacare, his entire foreign policy collapse where his whole approach to the Middle East has gone up in flames. Everyone can see that Obama, in virtually domestic and foreign policy, I would say he&#8217;s actually the worst president that we&#8217;ve had certainly in the 20th century on. I think history will show, if the liberals on the left stop writing history and get some conservatives in there, at least, that Obama will be in the middle or on the bottom and nowhere near the top, as the greatest president, as a good president. He&#8217;s not in the ranks of an FDR or a Lincoln or a Reagan. He will be at the bottom.</p>
<p>So this midterm election really should come as no surprise. The presidency is something very, very different, and here&#8217;s what I think the problem is. The Republicans have to have a few different things if they are going to win. First, they have to understand that they must get votes from and appeal to the white working class, young people, Hispanics, African Americans. They have to broaden their approach and realize that they have to make inroads in groups that traditionally have not voted Republican in a long, long time. They can make these inroads, but to do that the Republicans have to have the message that they are a Big 10 party. They are not going to impose an ideological uniformity where if you don&#8217;t have either the most conservative position or if you disagree on tactics with some conservatives, that you are therefore not a conservative and not a Republican. They have to realize that everyone is not going to agree on every issue within the Republican Party, and the party has to begin trying to change its message to appeal to some of the groups whose votes they need.</p>
<p>Now, here is where Rand Paul sees part of the picture. Now I&#8217;m an opponent of Rand Paul. I think he would be a disaster. I think he&#8217;s trying to hide it by calling himself a realist, but he has an isolationist or a non-interventionist position very close to that of his father. That would be a disaster for America as well as the Republican Party. But the one thing Rand Paul has understood has to be done is a broad outreach to African Americans showing that the Republican Party has something to offer the African American community. In fact, has a great deal more to offer them than the Democratic Party, whose Great Society programs have collapsed and have proved to be an utter failure. So Rand Paul understands that. Secondly, Rand Paul has been making a great outreach to young people, and young people are attracted to a lot of his libertarian message. I don&#8217;t agree, again, with all of the libertarian message or proposals of the libertarian wing of the Republican Party, but Paul is reaching them and getting the big turnouts on campus because he understands the need for a new kind of message and reconsideration of old views.</p>
<p>Now, let me raise as an example here, the attitude towards gay marriage. Social conservatives have, for reasons that I respect, drawn a strong case against gay marriage as being good for society. My friend Robbie George, the Princeton professor of politics and perhaps the nation&#8217;s leading social conservative, has made a compelling case against gay marriage. But as I said to them, the tipping point is over. It&#8217;s a done deal. None of your arguments, as good as you and people who agree with you make them out to be, it&#8217;s over. The fight has been lost. You can&#8217;t change the fights that have been lost. There have been polls taken of young Republicans. I think a poll I read said that about 80 percent of young Republicans who consider themselves conservatives support gay marriage. The tide has changed. If the Republican Party can&#8217;t come out for gay marriage because they have to hold the party together, at least they can unite and work in areas in which both factions of the party agree to end discrimination against gay people. That has to be an opening in that position and a shift, or the Republican Party is going to lose young Republicans and young conservatives as well. I think that&#8217;s a hard truth, and it has to be accepted.</p>
<p>Secondly, let me give you another example, and here I&#8217;m going to quote from Michael Gerson&#8217;s recent column in the Washington Post about John Kasich. Now John Kasich has done tremendous things. Here&#8217;s what Gerson writes, and I&#8217;ll ready the quote. Kasich, he writes, deserves the award for the best performance in a battleground state. Yet Kasich won a majority of union voters, three-fifths of female voters, a majority of voters under the age of 30, two-thirds of Independents, and one quarter of African American voters. That is an incredible statistic for a real conservative. Now let&#8217;s say hypothetically John Kasich or someone who has his kind of positions got to be the Republican nominee. Are conservatives going to stand against such a person merely because he moved in one direction other Republican conservative governors did not move? That is, accepting the expansion of Medicaid and accepting the government funds to do that while other conservatives who were governors voted against it and stood firm against that? Kasich believes, right or wrong, that a program exists to help the poor who deserve help for health insurance, that that was a necessary step. In other words, he dissented from traditional conservative positions on one issue. To a lot of conservatives, that makes Kasich beyond the pale. I think you can&#8217;t do that. For a party that wants to broaden its appeal, it has to agree that not everyone is going to agree with what most people think are conservative principles. On one or another specific issue a conservative can feel a different approach has to be taken, even if it goes against the sentiment or the viewpoint of other conservatives. We have to accept that kind of diversity and try to understand why someone like a John Kasich, who is a conservative, disagrees and does something else in his own state. So there&#8217;s that to consider.</p>
<p>Secondly, let me finish with this thought. I think that one also has to stop demanding all or nothing. I think some of the arguments coming from the Ted Cruz faction or from Cruz himself of the Republican Party, and you heard Ted here last year. He&#8217;s a very intelligent man, brilliant intelligence. Both Robbie George and Alan Dershowitz said he was the best student they ever had, but I think Ted Cruz is wrong in a lot of his tactics, making extreme tactics the equivalent or the mark for being a conservative. Cruz has been making some noise recently about maybe we should close down the government again and not accept certain things that Republican leadership seems to be accepting. I think that&#8217;s wrong and dangerous.</p>
<p>Now, let me quote one conservative who said this. If you read Commentary Magazine you saw it in the cover story by Peter Wehner, and I forget who coauthored it. I think it might be Yuval Levin. But they have this quote from a conservative leader, who said, &#8220;True believers on the Republican right prefer to go off the cliff with flags flying rather than take half a loaf and later come back for more.&#8221; Now you know who said that? Anybody? Yes, it was Ronald Reagan, and Reagan understood that one has to make compromises. For example, in 1964 Reagan campaigned very strongly against Medicare. In 1980 he said we have to accept the fact Medicaid is popular. It passed with votes from both Republicans and Democrats. We can&#8217;t undo Medicare or spend any time attacking it. It&#8217;s here to stay. Reagan adopted to reality. There are some things we can&#8217;t change. We have to pick our fights closely, fight where we can win, and fight not only getting conservatives to vote for us, but getting centrist and disaffected Democrats. We have to create, as Reagan managed to do, a new generation of Reagan Democrats. They&#8217;re there waiting to be taken back into the fold. The midterm elections showed that. We have to remember that as we go forward to 2016. Thank you.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Saving Pat Roberts, $12 million. Rescuing Mitch McConnell in very Republican Kentucky, $50 million. The look on Harry Reid&#8217;s face sitting next to Barack Obama two days later, priceless. If you haven&#8217;t seen that picture, please print it and frame it and put it over your desk. You know, I think Pat Caddell and Richard delivered some of the buzzkill facts about what happened in the last election, but I think we should do a victory lap first, and we all know about the Senate. In some ways I think that was the least important victory, and let me just point out a couple things that happened. We&#8217;ve talked about new Republican governors. There were at least 350 new Republican seats picked up in state legislatures. Tim Scott, one of my favorite senators, is the first black American to win in the south since Reconstruction. Some of you will remember that Tim Scott was in fact the Tea Party candidate in a very crowded House Republican primary who ran on issues, who ran on something called the Contract from America against Strom Thurmond&#8217;s grandson. Someone should tell Mother Jones the story about how it is that the Tea Party is expanding what it is the Republican Party looks like in 2014, which brings up, of course, Mia Love.</p>
<p>The story in the House, I think, is more compelling. Let&#8217;s give a shout out to Mia Love. I first met Mia Love when she was still a mayor in the State of Utah, and if you&#8217;re talking about expanding the demographics of the GOP, consider this. Black, woman, conservative, Tea Partier, Mormon. That&#8217;s pretty cool, huh? Someone send a memo to Mother Jones on that one too. But you know the House got more conservative. It got more liberty minded, and yes, the House majority grew but we also picked up seats like Mia Love&#8217;s which is a Democratic pickup. Bruce Poliquin in Maine, who is another liberty-minded fiscal conservative, and also Rod Blum in Iowa. This is a seat that Republicans should not have picked up. These are candidates that ran on something other than &#8220;I&#8217;m not Barack Obama.&#8221; There may be a lesson in there.</p>
<p>Let&#8217;s at least touch on the down side here. The turnout in 2014 compared to 2010 was down 8 million voters. Now imagine what we might have done with a couple million votes at the margin in some of these battleground states. In 2010 we had much higher turnout among self-identified Independents, self-identified Tea Partiers, and self-identified conservatives. All of those voters showed up less in 2014 than they did in 2010. Interestingly, registered Republicans, or at least self-identified Republicans, went up a little bit, 1 percent according to a Wall Street Journal poll. I think that sort of punches a hole in this mythology that somehow Tea Partiers and conservatives are the Republican base. I think it&#8217;s better described that there are people that vote based on issues, not party affiliation. Someone should send that memo to Reince Priebus. You&#8217;re allowed to clap. It&#8217;s cool. So that&#8217;s the good news.</p>
<p>That was good stuff, and we need to be careful about the lessons for 2016 because I think, if you go to Nebraska, one of my favorite senators that will be coming in 2015, of course, is Ben Sasse in Nebraska. Now, if you compare Ben&#8217;s performance in Nebraska to what happened in Kansas, these states are fairly comparable in terms of size, in terms of massive Republican advantage. Pat Roberts struggled until the last minute to win in a state that we shouldn&#8217;t have spent a dime in. Ben Sasse spent far less money, and he won by 34 points. Now how did that happen? Anyone who was paying attention to this race should remember that Ben Sasse not only ran against Obamacare, he actually put together a very specific plan on what he would do to dismantle and replace Obamacare with a patient-driven system. You didn&#8217;t see that much amongst Republican candidates. Ed Gillespie actually did something similar at the last minute in Virginia, and you might argue that that was where he got his last-minute surge. I don&#8217;t have data to prove that point, and I won&#8217;t necessarily be able to defend it, but it&#8217;s something to check out, but Ben Sasse comes to the U.S. Senate as a one-man think tank that actually has ideas that were proven on the campaign trail on how we are going to manage Obamacare now that it is law, now that it has destroyed the individual market, now that it has radically expanded Medicaid rolls. We need more than &#8220;I&#8217;m not Barack Obama&#8221; to solve this problem, and this goes back to the 2010 analogy.</p>
<p>In 2010 there was a crowd-source document some of you will remember. It was called the Contract from America, and it was modeled after Newt Gingrich&#8217;s 1994 contract with one important difference. It wasn&#8217;t designed in Washington, D.C. It was crowd-sourced from millions of Americans who were asked, and Freedom Works was intimately part of this process. We actually had the audacity to ask Americans what they thought Washington should do, and so you came up with a ten-policy plank platform that not only Tim Scott ran on in South Carolina, but a vast majority of the Republicans that won in 2010 on a positive, specific, bold agenda. That&#8217;s where that came from.</p>
<p>Maybe that&#8217;s a lesson for 2016. The good news, and we&#8217;ve heard all the bad news, and I agree with all of the analysis on demographics and how an off-year election is fundamentally different than a presidential election. The good news is that we can actually fix this if we look at where the ideas are coming from in the House and the Senate Republican caucuses. It&#8217;s not coming from the top. It&#8217;s not coming from leadership. It&#8217;s coming from the bottom up, and perhaps that&#8217;s appropriate given who we are and what we believe. We think the genius of America comes from our communities, not from Washington, D.C., not from the top down. We are not Democratic apparatchiks that wait for someone to tell us what to do, right? This is why herding individualists is a lot like herding cats. But in the age of the Internet there&#8217;s a lot more of us than there are of them. If you go to the very long tail of the Internet where the decentralization of information – do you guys remember when Walter Cronkite used to tell you &#8220;that&#8217;s the way it is&#8221;? You couldn&#8217;t go on Google and fact check him, could you? You couldn&#8217;t set up an RSS feed and get multiple sources of information that told you that what the three networks were spoon feeding you was just not true. That doesn&#8217;t exist anymore, and even the New York Times is scrambling for eyeballs online in a very decentralized world where good information gets to people at lower marginal costs all the time. This is the new normal. This is the opportunity for Republicans that have enough faith in their ideas that they&#8217;re actually going to talk about big bold ideas going into 2016.</p>
<p>When Pat Robertson was in trouble in Kansas, did he call John McCain to come rescue him? Who did he call? Rand Paul and Ted Cruz. Where are the ideas coming from in the Republican Party? Mike Lee just became the chairman of the Senate Steering Committee, which Jim DeMint turned into the Republican Senate Think Tank a few years earlier. Mike Lee is another one-man think tank. He&#8217;s the guy that&#8217;s actually not only sober in his analysis but bold in his willingness to put good ideas on the table. We should learn a thing or two from Mike, and by the way, the GOP establishment is preparing to primary him in Utah in 2016. We should not let that happen.</p>
<p>I think Republicans mostly succeeded in 2014 by not being Barack Obama. This is not a very good long-term strategy, but if we would embrace the idea that good ideas can actually engage people that are interested in ideas, not party affiliation, and connect with Independents, connect with young people who are more liberty minded, there&#8217;s nothing but potential here, but the GOP needs to get comfortable with the fact that they&#8217;re not in charge anymore. You think about the vaunted Obama Get Out the Vote machine, for all of its decentralization it was fundamentally dependent on a cult of personality from someone at the very top of the pyramid dictating this is what we&#8217;re going to do, people waiting for their marching orders. You cannot do that with Republicans, and if you try they will take your head off. You can&#8217;t do that with libertarians. You can&#8217;t do that with Tea Partiers. They rightly believe that they&#8217;re in charge, and the moms that have Facebook pages all over American, Tea Party moms that are bigger than county GOPs, they&#8217;re in charge now.</p>
<p>So the question is what is the party going to do to tap into this massive decentralized network of people that should be constituents of Republican candidates? Don&#8217;t take them for granted. Don&#8217;t tell them what to do. Engage them on a set of values and ideas that are compelling. Now this is not necessarily completely like what you would argue Ted Cruz is doing. I think there are a lot of big bold ideas, positive ideas, Reaganesque ideas that cut across party lines. One is yes, we do need to repeal Obamacare, but we need to replace it with something, right? And if Republicans were good they would put that on the president&#8217;s desk. If they can&#8217;t do that, they should repeal the individual mandate. It is completely unjust. It is completely screwing our young people, and it has bipartisan support. There was a House vote where 30 Democrats crossed across the aisle. Another interesting subject is criminal justice reform, including asset seizure, sentencing reform. These are things that Rand Paul has worked on that again creates bipartisan majorities. They would put the president in quite a bind if he chose to veto things like that, and most importantly, embrace the chaos of a beautiful decentralized community that will show up if you stand for something and will stay home if you don&#8217;t. Thank you very much.</p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr: </strong>I just want to make one quick note. To follow up with what Matt said. At this point in time, the Republican Party, which is of course the old people&#8217;s white people&#8217;s party, there are more statewide elected officials which means senators or governors, minorities in the Republican Party than there are in the Democratic Party. There are five versus four. The Republicans will put up a candidate and it doesn&#8217;t matter whether they&#8217;re Hispanic or Black to run statewide or Asian, and they&#8217;ll win if the voters, and particularly in those states where a lot of Republican voters like their ideas. Tim Scott proves that. Democrats will only put up their candidates, minority candidates, in safe minority districts. They will not risk essentially what&#8217;s going on statewide, and that&#8217;s why they have so few. If they are the overwhelming choice, they should be putting up more state nominees and they don&#8217;t.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Just one more comment on what Rand Paul is doing. I was on a panel recently with Richard Viguerie and he described libertarians as the fourth leg of what has now become a Republican table. Not, no longer the traditional stool where you had social conservatives, defense conservatives and fiscal conservatives. I do think that&#8217;s true particularly with young people, and we should be careful not to disenfranchise all of these crazy liberty kids that can be unruly. They can be loud. Remind me a lot of exactly what I was like when I was their age. This is an opportunity, and I think that the party made a huge mistake at the convention in 2012 by disenfranchising Ron Paul delegations. It wasn&#8217;t like Ron Paul was going to win the nomination. They would have been smarter to embrace a very broad community that includes the liberty agenda as part of that.</p>
<p><strong>Tom Lifson: </strong>I&#8217;ll use the moderator&#8217;s prerogative to agree with Matt. I live in Berkeley, California believe or not, and when Rand Paul came to campus it was electric. Nobody has been screwed worse by Obama than the young demographic. Nobody has been screwed worse by the education establishment than the young demographic, who are graduating college with debt that can&#8217;t be discharged in bankruptcy. So there is an opportunity there for the Republicans, if we&#8217;re willing to take it. Okay. Throwing it open to questions. Over there.</p>
<p>Next Speaker</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member:</strong> I&#8217;d like to challenge some of the things that I heard from Ron Radosh, I&#8217;ve heard these from others as well, that the Republican Party somehow has to become more like the Democrat Party. We have to be for amnesty. We have to be for gay marriage. We have to be for all of this left-wing social agenda and it&#8217;s because of these palecon social conservatives that we are losing elections. I can say as a Republican candidate in a blue state, Maryland, first for Congress I was the Republican nominee in 2012 against Chris Van Hollen and again this year as a lieutenant governor candidate in a primary in Maryland where we ultimately won the governor&#8217;s race in a blue state, nobody saw that coming, that social conservative issues are big winners. And we have to be true to our social roots and our conservative roots. I campaigned an awful lot in Hispanic churches. I can tell you this is a demographic we are told by the political consultants that is not supposed to vote Republican. They were overwhelming going to vote Republican, and why were they going to vote Republican? Because we were against gay marriage, we affirm that marriage was between one man and one woman, and that is the way it always has been. That is a natural fact. You cannot legislate marriage and destroy biology. It does not happen.</p>
<p>Young people understand. And even in the Hispanic community they understood the argument which I put forward boldly and frankly and openly looking people in their eyes that we exist in a nation of laws. And the reason that many Hispanics came to this country was to escape countries where there was not a rule of law, and do you want to go back to dictatorship, which is what you fled from &#8212; or do you want to live here in a country with rule of law?</p>
<p>So I think, I would challenge you that we should not be abandoning our social agenda. We can perhaps express it differently. I&#8217;ll give you that. Yes, we could express it differently. We can put a more positive spin on it, not a restricted spin on it. But a lot of social conservatives stayed home. Many of them in minority communities, and these are votes that could be big winners for us, if we stay true to our values. Thanks.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>I&#8217;m not saying you and other social conservatives should not stay true to their values. I did not say the Republican Party should endorse gay marriage. I don&#8217;t think it should. I think it should allow in its ranks those who believe that gay marriage is right, and those who believe it is wrong. To take a position on this kind of issue is going to lose a lot of young people. And they are overwhelmingly in favor of gay marriage. Now you can try and educate them for your point of view, argue with them, present solid arguments as to why marriage should just be between a man and woman. That&#8217;s fine. But for the party to come out on one or another side of this would be disastrous. It&#8217;s going to put into oblivion. I think there are common issues. One other comment I wanted to make that I forgot to say, about ideas. And I agree with a lot of what Matt said. There is that group what they call the Young, the YG project, Young Guards?</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Young Guns.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>Young Guns.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>Yeah.</p>
<p><strong>Ron Radosh: </strong>And they put out a book filled with ideas. There are great theorists. Like my two favorite ones are conservative intellectuals Yuval Levin and James Capretta. You&#8217;ve seen Capretta a lot on Fox News. They have drawn up serious arguments for how to not just say replace, get rid of Obamacare, but how to replace it with a solid program that gives real healthcare on market-based principals. They have thought about this. I think all political leaders have to look at the various arguments in their book, that is free online, and take these, a lot of their ideas into consideration, and if you&#8217;re in office as Republican in the state or national level, see if you can work with some of these people to fashion legislation to present based on some of the concrete ideas they lay out. I think that&#8217;s extremely important.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>A quick comment on the question from a libertarian perspective, I can speak to my community which is very libertarian, but also significantly socially conservative, and I don&#8217;t think that you had to abandon your personal values and the things that you learn in church on Sunday or the definition of marriage in order to understand that outsourcing really important social institutions to 535 men and women that can&#8217;t balance a budget is a really bad idea. And I think we learn that during, you can clap. That&#8217;s cool. During the Bush administration, I think there was a lesson learned when we got involved in things like face-based initiatives that really outsourced really precious community actions, voluntary community-based activities to Washington, DC, and they started fighting over who got the most earmarks. I think that&#8217;s a huge mistake. I think that social institutions that hold this country together are way too important to let Washington, DC get its hand on them.</p>
<p><strong>Tom Lifson: </strong>Thank you. One more question. The gentleman on the aisle, yes?</p>
<p><strong>Audience Member: </strong>What you guys think about first a new radical right that gets in the media&#8217;s face and pushes the agenda to them instead of accepting the agenda that they get shut out of day after day, and secondly, creating a real marketing machine for the things that we hold most dear and pushing it out to the American people who will follow the first shiny object that comes in front of them?</p>
<p><strong>Richard Baehr: </strong>I&#8217;m going to take a quick response and really take a different attack which is I think Republicans win when they have better candidates, and the machinery makes the big difference and the spending does, but we had better candidates this year. Wendy Davis was a terrible candidate. She was their Todd Akin. Bruce Braley was a terrible candidate in Iowa state. Democratic never should have lost. We came up in the process this year, produced much better, more effective, positive messengers for our side. It wasn&#8217;t just all a negative anti-Obama message on the state level in these individual races. The people we put up were better candidates. They were more &#8212; there&#8217;s no way a Republican should ever win an open seat race in Iowa by 9 percent, and that had a lot to do, not with the amount of spending, each side had it, not with the particular messaging that the parties put in behind it, but the fact that one candidate communicated better and connected with the voters better than the other side did.</p>
<p><strong>Matt Kibbe: </strong>You know I think politics is a little bit like entrepreneurship because sometimes the customer is always right and sometimes you go to market with something they didn&#8217;t know they wanted. Say an iPhone, something like that. And all of sudden everybody decides that that&#8217;s what they want. So it is good candidates. But I think the machinery matters as well, and you guys are in the right place if you want to understand a little bit about how Democratic apparatchiks function because I assume you&#8217;ve all been assigned your readings from Saul Alinsky, and we need to understand that. Pat Caddell mentioned something that can&#8217;t be overstated. The consultant industrial complex is so fixated on paid media because that&#8217;s where they can make their margins. You can&#8217;t make a lot of money going door to door, engaging grassroots communities. This is why the left beats on us the ground. I&#8217;ll go back to something I mentioned earlier: embrace decentralization, social media. Instead of running thousand point TV buys, why don&#8217;t you target young people on Facebook? We&#8217;ve tested this. It works.</p>
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		<title>Keystone Killed</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/keystone-killed/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=keystone-killed</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 19 Nov 2014 05:30:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Keystone]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mary landrieu]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245564</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Desperate Sen. Mary Landrieu loses the vote, and likely her Senate seat as well.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/r1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245574" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/r1-450x299.jpg" alt="A TransCanada Keystone Pipeline pump station operates outside Steele City, Nebraska" width="307" height="204" /></a>The ongoing theatrics surrounding the Keystone XL pipeline <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2014/11/18/senate-backers-keystone-pipeline-scramble-for-last-vote/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">continued</span></a> in earnest Tuesday. Desperate Democrat incumbent Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA) spent the afternoon trying to secure the critical 60th vote necessary for the filibuster-proof majority that would get the legislation through the Senate and onto Obama’s desk, while her fellow Democrats weighed the pros and cons of alienating their radical environmentalist constituency. Democrats chose to stand with the radicals, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/us/politics/keystone-xl-pipeline.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">defeating</span></a> the bill by a 59-41 vote.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">By the middle of the afternoon, Landrieu’s chances of winning over one more Democrat looked increasingly slim. Every one of the Senate’s 45 Republicans were on board, but Democrat support that included those who cosponsored Landrieu’s bill, as well as those who had publicly voiced their commitment to its passage, brought the overall total to 59 votes. On Monday, two Senators Landrieu thought she might flip, Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Carl Levin (D-MI), both reaffirmed their intention to vote against the project. They were <a href="http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/18/us-usa-keystone-idUSKCN0J20EQ20141118"><span style="color: #1255cc;">joined</span></a> Tuesday by Sen. Angus King (I-ME). &#8220;Congress is not – nor should it be – in the business of legislating the approval or disapproval of a construction project,” he said in a news release.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Landrieu’s motives were politically transparent. She faces a Dec. 6 runoff against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy, and her ongoing effort to get Keystone through the Senate was aimed at demonstrating her political clout as chairwoman of the Senate Energy Committee. Yet despite a long <a href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/mary-landrieu-makes-last-ditch-pitch-for-a-vote-on-keystone-20141112"><span style="color: #1255cc;">speech</span></a> made within minutes of the lame-duck session beginning last Wednesday, during which she contended Keystone was &#8220;clearly supported by sixty or more members of this body,” her message ultimately failed to resonate with her Democrat colleagues.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Landrieu’s future is likely to mirror the Senate vote. On Election Day she was the frontrunner in a <a href="http://elections.nytimes.com/2014/louisiana-elections"><span style="color: #1255cc;">four-way race</span></a> against three Republicans, including Cassidy, Rob Maness and Thomas Clements. Yet she only secured 42 percent of the vote, necessitating the runoff against Cassidy, who finished a point behind. More tellingly, Landrieu finished well behind the overall Republican vote total of 56 percent.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Since that day, a series of inconvenient realities have further diminished Landrieu’s chances of getting reelected. When the GOP takes control of the Senate in January, Landrieu, assuming she survives, will be forced to relinquish her post as chairwoman of the Energy Committee. It was that power position that provided much of the impetus for her campaign. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pushed the knife in deeper, <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/apnewsbreak-gop-promises-cassidy-committee-seat-26851561"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promising</span></a> to put Cassidy on the Energy Committee if he wins. Cassidy also sponsored the House version of the pipeline bill that elicited <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/11/14/house-keystone-pipeline-vote/19021085/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">overwhelming</span></a> support in the GOP-controlled chamber, sailing through on a 252-161 vote.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In other words, Cassidy prevailed while Landrieu failed.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Adding to Landrieu’s woes, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) has virtually <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/11/democrats-ads-mary-landrieu-112647.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">abandoned</span></a> spending any money on her runoff election, canceling more than $1.8 million worth of broadcast buys, even as the National Republican Senatorial Committee (RNSC) remains on track to spend $2.3 million on broadcast ads to put Cassidy over the top. It shows. Of the 26 surveys <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2014/senate/louisiana_senate_race.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">cited</span></a> by Real Clear Politics, Cassidy leads in 20, Landrieu in 5, with one tie. The Senate vote will undoubtedly make those numbers worse for Landrieu. If Cassidy wins the runoff, the GOP will have gained 9 Senate seats in the 2014 mid-term election.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The number nine is also one that puts the lie to the media-promulgated notion that Republicans are the “obstructionist” party: the House’s latest vote to authorize construction of the Keystone XL pipeline <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/11/14/house-keystone-pipeline-vote/19021085/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">marks</span></a> the <i>ninth</i> time they have done so. The eight prior approvals were sent to the Senate where the nation’s foremost obstructionist, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/mary-landrieus-keystone-lifeline-1415923975"><span style="color: #1255cc;">allowed</span></a> them to languish over the course of the last four years. The <i>Wall Street Journal </i>mocks Reid’s sudden interest in a pipeline vote he has routinely thwarted. &#8220;Call it the Save Mary Landrieu Act of 2014,” the paper states.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Reid is not alone. Liberal Democrats who worship at the Church of Global Warming are also against the pipeline being built. One of them, Sen. Brian Schatz (D-HI) sent an email blast to his supporters asking them to sign a petition rejecting the project. All of them are beholden to the radical environmentalists, including protesters who <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/11/17/environmentalists-protest-outside-mary-landrieus-capitol-hill-home/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">swarmed</span></a> Landrieu’s Capitol Hill townhouse on Monday, as well as big-bucks donors like California billionaire Tom Steyer, who ended up <a href="http://pjmedia.com/instapundit/198214/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">spending</span></a> $74 million to support a “green” agenda and oppose Keystone.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Steyer’s hypocrisy is monumental. Prior to his “green conversion” he was one of the world’s <a href="http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/04/the-epic-hypocrisy-of-tom-steyer.php"><span style="color: #1255cc;">largest funders</span></a> of coal projects. He is also an unabashed rent-seeker. At one point his hedge fund, Farallon Capital Management, had $40 million <a href="http://freebeacon.com/columns/gas-attack/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">invested</span></a> in Kinder Morgan, an entity building a competitor to Keystone. That revelation elicited a promise to sell his stock shares and donate the profits to charity. Regardless, Democrats—the very same ones who rail about corrupting effect of too much money in politics &#8212; stand with him and a raft of other donors who have, as the <i>WSJ</i> <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/little-green-machine-1415319154"><span style="color: #1255cc;">puts</span></a> it, &#8220;made opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline a litmus test of their support for Democrats.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It is a litmus test wholly embraced by President Obama, who has spent six years stonewalling the project, hiding behind the excuse that he wants the State Department’s seemingly endless environmental evaluations to continue. That would be the same State Department that released a review last January <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/01/31/269529696/state-dept-delivers-unwelcome-news-for-keystone-opponents"><span style="color: #1255cc;">revealing</span></a> there would be no significant impact on greenhouse gas emissions if the pipeline were approved because the oil will be produced regardless of America’s involvement or lack thereof. Nonetheless, White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest <a href="http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2014/11/18/white-house-suggests-obama-veto-keystone-bill/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">indicated</span></a> Tuesday Obama would veto the project, irrespective of the Senate vote. “There is a process that’s underway that’s going through it’s regular course.” he said. “The State Department is the proper venue for reaching this determination.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Obama himself indicated his opposition as well during a speech in Burma on Nov. 14 when he <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/article/392913/obamas-keystone-madness-robert-zubrin"><span style="color: #1255cc;">insisted</span></a> that &#8220;we should judge this pipeline based on whether or not it accelerates climate change or whether it helps the American people with their energy costs and their gas prices,” further insisting he has to &#8220;constantly push back against this idea that somehow the Keystone pipeline is either this massive jobs bill for the United States, or is somehow lowering gas prices.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The first bit puts Obama at odds with uncomfortable reality. There’s been no global warming for <a href="http://hotair.com/archives/2014/11/17/what-the-mainstream-media-wont-tell-you-about-global-warming/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">over 18 years</span></a>, the oil will be obtained and sold even if it ends up in China, and Obama himself has <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/5/editorial-the-high-price-of-hope/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promised</span></a> to continue forging ahead with an agenda that would cause energy prices to “skyrocket.” Moreover despite the private enterprise fracking boom, (which Obama likes to take credit for, even though he had nothing to do with it) America still imports nearly <a href="http://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec3_7.pdf"><span style="color: #1255cc;">30 percent</span></a> of its oil. This leaves us vulnerable to a cadre of South American and Middle East thugs who yearn for our demise—and use oil revenues to facilitate it.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The last bit seemingly puts the president at odds with the State Department, which <a href="http://www.npr.org/2014/11/17/364727163/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-keystone-xl-oil-pipeline"><span style="color: #1255cc;">estimates</span></a> 42,000 direct and indirect jobs generating about $2 billion in earnings would be created during the construction phase of the pipeline. After the construction, only around 50 permanent jobs would remain, primarily for maintenance.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Perhaps more to the point is the president’s effort to rather casually dismiss part time jobs. Obama is the same president who was touting his administration’s job creation efforts in 2013—despite the fact that <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/08/21/part-time-job-creation_n_3788365.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">75 percent</span></a> of<i> all</i> net jobs created that year were part time.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Despite the Senate’s rejection, the American public stands firmly behind Keystone. A <i>USA Today</i> survey shows they <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/11/17/usa-today-poll-immigration-isis-keystone-pipeline/19165331/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">support</span></a> the construction of the pipeline by a whopping margin, with 60 percent in favor, versus 25 percent who oppose it. A Pew survey <a href="http://www.people-press.org/2014/11/12/little-enthusiasm-familiar-divisions-after-the-gops-big-midterm-victory/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reveals</span></a> almost identical support at 59 percent overall, but Democrat support has dropped from 54 percent to 43 percent since 2013.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Republicans have also made up their minds. While Obama is off the veto hook temporarily, there is no doubt whatsoever a Republican-controlled Congress will send a continuing stream of bills his desk approving the pipeline, forcing him to veto them over and over again. Or perhaps once a soon-to-be Democratic congressional minority gets more time to reflect on their second electoral wipeout in four years, as well as the politics involved in the 2016 races, they might conclude that defying a president who told the electorate they were running on his policies in the mid-terms is the sensible thing to do.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In other words, a veto-proof majority approving the pipeline might be a possibility.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">An Associated Press <a href="http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_WORLDS_LARGEST_SOLAR_PLANT?SITE=AP&amp;SECTION=HOME&amp;TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&amp;CTIME=2014-11-17-14-33-47"><span style="color: #1255cc;">story</span></a> on alternative energy sources demonstrates why. The highly-touted Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System, the world’s largest of it type, is producing only half the amount of energy its green cheerleaders predicted it would. Why? &#8220;The sun isn&#8217;t shining as much as expected,” the AP reports. &#8220;Factors such as clouds, jet contrails and weather have had a greater impact on the plant than the owners anticipated,” the California Energy Commission said in a statement. In other words, as far as radical environmentalists are concerned, whether or not American have enough electricity to light their homes should be based on accurate, long-term weather predictions&#8211;and fewer jets flying overhead. One suspects most Americans want a tad more reliability than that.</p>
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		<title>What Happened?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=what-happened</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/thomas-sowell/what-happened/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 13 Nov 2014 05:01:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Thomas Sowell]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245227</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Looking at the years ahead after the midterm elections. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245228" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Midterm-Elections-1-444x350.jpg" alt="Midterm Elections-1" width="312" height="246" /></a>Just what happened last week on election day? And what is going to happen in the years ahead?</p>
<p>The most important thing that happened last week was that the country dodged a bullet. Had the Democrats retained control of the Senate, President Obama could have spent his last two years in office loading the federal judiciary with judges who share his contempt for the Constitution of the United States.</p>
<p>Such judges — perhaps including Supreme Court justices — would have been confirmed by Senate Democrats, and could spend the rest of their lifetime appointments ruling in favor of expansions of federal government power that would make the freedom of &#8220;we the people&#8221; only a distant memory and a painful mockery.</p>
<p>We dodged that bullet. But what about the rest of Barack Obama&#8217;s term?</p>
<p>Pundits who depict Obama as a weak, lame duck president may be greatly misjudging him, as they have so often in the past. Despite the Republican sweep of elections across the country last week, President Obama has issued an ultimatum to Congress, to either pass the kind of immigration law he wants before the end of this year or he will issue Executive Orders changing the country&#8217;s immigration laws unilaterally.</p>
<p>Does that sound like a lame duck president?</p>
<p>On the contrary, it sounds more like some banana republic&#8217;s dictator. Nor is Obama making an idle bluff. He has already changed other laws unilaterally, including the work requirement in welfare reform laws passed during the Clinton administration.</p>
<p>The very idea of Congress rushing a bill into law in less than two months, on a subject as complex, and with such irreversible long-run consequences as immigration, is staggering. But there is already a precedent for such hasty action, without Congressional hearings to bring out facts or air different views. That is how ObamaCare was passed. And we see how that has turned out.</p>
<p>People who are increasingly questioning Barack Obama&#8217;s competence are continuing to ignore the alternative possibility that his fundamental values and imperatives are different from theirs.</p>
<p>You cannot tell whether someone is failing or succeeding without knowing what they are trying to do.</p>
<p>When Obama made a brief public statement about Americans being beheaded by terrorists, and then went on out to play golf, that was seen as a sign of political ineptness, rather than a stark revelation of what kind of man he is, underneath the smooth image and lofty rhetoric.</p>
<p>The president&#8217;s refusal to protect the American people by quarantining people coming from Ebola-infected areas — as was done by Britain and a number of African nations — is by no means a sign of incompetence. It is a sacrifice of Americans&#8217; interests for the sake of other people&#8217;s interests, as is an assisted invasion of illegal immigrants across our southern borders.</p>
<p>Such actions are perfectly consistent with Obama&#8217;s citizen of the world vision that has led to such statements of his in 2008: &#8220;We can&#8217;t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times &#8230; and then just expect that every other country&#8217;s going to say okay.&#8221;</p>
<p>In a similar vein, Obama said, &#8220;we consume more than 20 percent of the world&#8217;s oil but have less than 2 percent of the world&#8217;s oil reserves.&#8221; In short, Americans are undeservedly prosperous and selfishly consuming a disproportionate share of &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; — at least in the vision of Barack Obama.</p>
<p>That Americans are producing a disproportionate share of what is called &#8220;the world&#8217;s output&#8221; and consuming what we produce — while paying for our imports — is not allowed to disturb Obama&#8217;s vision.</p>
<p>Resentment of the prosperous — whether at home or on the world stage — runs through virtually everything Barack Obama has said and done throughout his life. You don&#8217;t need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the clues. You have to shut your eyes tightly to keep from seeing them everywhere, in every period of his life.</p>
<p>The big question is whether the other branches of government — Congress and the Supreme Court — can stop him from doing irreparable damage to America in his last two years. Seeing Obama as an incompetent and weak, lame duck president only makes that task harder.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Bill Whittle: Give Back the Senate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/truthrevolt-org/bill-whittle-give-back-the-senate/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 10 Nov 2014 05:54:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[TruthRevolt.org]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244889</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A Truth Revolt video. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats, and now that they have, it&#8217;s time to give it back to its rightful owners&#8230;</strong></p>
<p style="color: #000000;"><strong>Join Bill Whittle in his latest Firewall, where he shows how destructive the Progressive Amendments have been &#8212; especially the Seventeenth Amendment. Find out why it matters! See the video and transcript below. </strong></p>
<p><iframe src="//www.youtube.com/embed/DUOGdBgeB14" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen="allowfullscreen"></iframe></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">TRANSCRIPT:</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Hi everybody, I’m Bill Whittle and this is the Firewall.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, the Republicans have retaken the Senate from the Democrats. And now that they have, it’s time to give it back. Not to the Democrats. And not even to we, the people. No, now that Republicans have the Senate, it would be nice if actual conservatives lead the fight to return the Senate to its rightful owners.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">See these ancient old prudes? These are Progressives. Yes, they were ancient old prudes even back in the Progressive era, around the turn of the last century. Now modern Progressives are a little better exfoliated and botoxed, of course, but they have in common with these proto-Progressives that same fiery look in the eye — which is that genetic defect of getting all excited about telling other people what to do — for their own good, naturally.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">((WINK))</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Progressive Era gave us the Progressive Amendments to the Constitution — which, looked at individually, show just how envious Progressives are, how prudish they are, and how tyrannical they are.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The 16th Amendment gave us the income tax, which, when you think about it, doesn’t even penalize the rich — which was, of course their goal then as it is today. No, taking income penalizes hard work, and the harder you work, the more you get penalized. So next time you get your paycheck, take a look at the raw amount before withholdings. Thank the Progressives for what you don’t take home.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Eighteenth Amendment — Prohibition — was the first time the Constitution was changed to actually take away a freedom: the freedom to get lit so that you didn’t have to listen to these Progressive harpies whine and complain day and night. But this freedom — the God-given freedom to have beer at the end of a hard day — was a little too precious, a little too near-and-dear to give up, so the eighteenth amendment was repealed by the twenty first Amendment. And don’t forget that: freedom can come back sometimes — if you miss it enough.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the real damage was done by the Seventeenth Amendment, changing Article one, section three of the Constitution, which stated that U.S. Senators were to be elected by the legislatures of each state. The Seventeenth Amendment changed that to make US Senators electable by the people of the state.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Democracy! Now the people have a voice in Washington, not just the rich fat cats in the state legislatures! Hooray for democracy! And that is how Progressives steal freedom: they do it in the name of democracy. They’re very good at it now: they ought to be — they’ve had a lot of practice.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Well, first, those fat cats in the legislatures were in fact elected by the people of their state, so there’s some democracy for you right there.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">But the main problem is, the people already had a voice in Washington: it’s called the House of Representatives. They’re elected directly by the people, every two years, and the more people a state has, the more representatives that state has in the House.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was never intended to represent the people. The senate was supposed to represent the states: that’s why Wyoming, with roughly five hundred thousand people, has two senators, and California, with roughly seventy-six times as many people — also has two senators.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Seventeenth Amendment made the Senate utterly redundant. Now it’s kind of a retirement home for lifers; the House of Lords with six year terms that get further and further away from the people that elected them and who sit in a sort of royal court being serenaded by special interest groups in DC steakhouses.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The Senate was designed to protect the power of the states because the more power the states have, the less power the Federal government has — and vice versa. But progressives can’t leave people alone, you see? They have to take their income, and tell them whether they can drink or not, or what kind of health insurance they have to buy, or how big a soda they can have, and what kind of car to drive and all the rest. And in order to do that, they need the coercive power of central authority — which meant destruction of the power of the states. After all, you can’t force people not to gamble, drink, or whore around if they can just move to Nevada!</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">To paraphrase H.L Menken, that’s the Progressive nightmare: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may escape being told what to do.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Our founders weren’t the idiots we have in Washington today. They knew what kind of people go into politics — control-freak weenies, that’s what kind — and they set up legal and structural barriers to put limits on just how much power jug-eared narcissists, sleazy used-car salesmen and dimwitted botoxed harpies can actually accumulate. We need to get that power back to the states, so that if you don’t like the way they roll in Tulsa you can move to San Francisco and visa versa.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">We repealed the Eighteenth Amendment — we can repeal the Seventeenth as well, because only the states are powerful enough to stop this Federal government from enforcing that Progressive utopia: a country where anything that is not forbidden is mandatory.</p>
<p style="color: #000000;">So kick back, relax, have a drink and think it over.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Amnesty By Blackmail</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/obamas-amnesty-by-blackmail/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-amnesty-by-blackmail</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:34:42 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Amnesty]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244786</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The president embraces the "by any means necessary" strategy for his radical agenda. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obamapng.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244794" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/Obamapng-450x337.png" alt="Obamapng" width="373" height="279" /></a>Ignoring voters&#8217; historic coast-to-coast repudiation of his disastrous policies this week, President Obama is now threatening to move forward unilaterally with a massive immigration amnesty by the end of the year.</p>
<p>At his first post-election press conference Wednesday, instead of embracing conciliation as a responsible adult might do, Obama, the petulant Chicagoland thug, pulled a switchblade. Obama tried to blackmail newly emboldened congressional Republicans, vowing to enact amnesty through executive fiat if Congress doesn&#8217;t play ball.</p>
<p>Republicans&#8217; newly won control of the Senate and enhanced majority in the House of Representatives means the Republicans who just gave Obama&#8217;s Democratic allies a savage electoral beat-down are now in a better position to give Obama the unprecedented immigration amnesty he wants. As the president said,</p>
<blockquote><p>So before the end of the year, we&#8217;re going to take whatever lawful actions that I can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system &#8230; at the same time, I’ll be reaching out to both [incoming Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, [House Speaker] John Boehner, and other Republican as well as Democratic leaders to find out how it is that they want to proceed. And if they want to get a bill done &#8212; whether it’s during the [approaching] lame duck [session of Congress] or next year &#8212; I&#8217;m eager to see what they have to offer.</p></blockquote>
<p>Although McConnell and Boehner have been all over the map on immigration amnesty in recent months, since the election they have said they will not be pushed around by the president on the issue of amnesty.</p>
<p>Acting unilaterally on immigration would be &#8220;a big mistake&#8221; akin to &#8220;waving a red flag in front of a bull,&#8221; McConnell said. Such action &#8220;poisons the well for an opportunity to address a very important domestic issue.&#8221;</p>
<p>Boehner also said unilateral action would &#8220;poison the well.&#8221; The House Speaker warned Obama, &#8220;when you play with matches, then you take the risk of burning yourself, and he&#8217;s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.&#8221;</p>
<p>Contrary to what Obama said, there are virtually no lawful actions Obama can take on amnesty, but the president has always viewed laws as speed bumps on the road to social justice. The wily former part-time adjunct constitutional law lecturer promised to ignore the separation of powers prescribed by the U.S. Constitution and implement Third World-style government-by-decree. He said:</p>
<blockquote><p>But what I’m not going to do is just wait. I think it’s fair to say that I’ve shown a lot of patience and have tried to work on a bipartisan basis as much as possible, and I’m going to keep on doing so. But in the meantime, let’s figure out what we can do lawfully through executive actions to improve the functioning of the existing system.</p></blockquote>
<p>Obama, a master of rhetorical tricks, hasn&#8217;t actually been patient. He already illegally granted an amnesty benefiting certain categories of illegal aliens. A recently uncovered government procurement order suggests his administration may be planning to issue 34 million work visas and green cards without the required legal authorization from Americans&#8217; elected representatives in Congress.</p>
<p>As for reaching out to the GOP, Obama is lying as usual. He has no interest in working with congressional Republicans. He has only slightly more interest in working with congressional Democrats. He&#8217;s a megalomaniacal, authoritarian leader who is only comfortable when he&#8217;s calling the shots.</p>
<p>Reporter Jon Karl embarrassed Obama during the presser by pointing out that &#8220;Mitch McConnell has been the Republican Leader for six years, as long as you’ve been President.&#8221; Karl continued, &#8220;But his office tells me that he has only met with you one-on-one once or twice during that entire six-year period.&#8221;</p>
<p>Obama didn&#8217;t acknowledge that fact and awkwardly segued into a discussion of sharing some Kentucky bourbon with Sen. McConnell even though he admitted he didn&#8217;t know if McConnell drinks bourbon.</p>
<p>Parts of Obama&#8217;s strange prepared statement were laced with practiced platitudes as the nation&#8217;s Chief Executive dismissed the election results as irrelevant:</p>
<blockquote><p>Still, as president, I have a unique responsibility to try and make this town work. So, to everyone who voted, I want you to know that I hear you. To the two-thirds of voters who chose not to participate in the process yesterday, I hear you, too. All of us have to give more Americans a reason to feel like the ground is stable beneath their feet, that the future is secure, that there’s a path for young people to succeed, and that folks here in Washington are concerned about them. So I plan on spending every moment of the next two-plus years doing my job the best I can to keep this country safe and to make sure that more Americans share in its prosperity.</p></blockquote>
<p>Of course people who do not vote can&#8217;t actually be called &#8220;voters,&#8221; but thinking has never been the strong suit of this man who thinks &#8220;Austrian&#8221; is a language and who celebrates &#8220;Cinco de Quatro.&#8221; In Obama&#8217;s disordered mind he didn&#8217;t really lose, even though he proudly boasted mere weeks ago that the election would be seen as a referendum on his administration. “I’m not on the ballot this fall &#8230; but make no mistake, these policies [of mine] are on the ballot — every single one of them,” he said on the campaign trail.</p>
<p>Obama doesn&#8217;t seem to accept the new Republican majorities in both houses of Congress as politically legitimate, as J. Christian Adams <a href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/11/06/decoding-the-president-listening-to-two-thirds-who-didnt-vote/">argues</a>. This contempt for Americans who don&#8217;t toe the leftist line is part of the Left&#8217;s deep-seated hatred of the American system of governance. Adams explains:</p>
<blockquote><p>It is a favorite fable among far-left groups like the Advancement Project and Demos that more voters is always good and fewer voters is always bad. They firmly believe that the path to a progressive policy wonderland is to get everyone with a heartbeat to vote.  This is part of an even older fable that the &#8216;system&#8217; robs the underclass of power through laws, rules, racist constructs and oppressive societal structures – like having to make the effort to register to vote, for example.</p></blockquote>
<p>It&#8217;s all the usual blatherskite we&#8217;ve come to expect from Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizers. If they win, they shout to the heavens that they&#8217;ve secured a thunderous mandate from We The People; if they don&#8217;t win, they try to discredit the results.</p>
<p>And it&#8217;s quite a contrast from the way Obama acts when his side wins.</p>
<p>Days after Obama&#8217;s first inauguration he brazenly flaunted his new political legitimacy in a closed-door meeting with congressional leaders. Republicans would have to do his bidding because, as he baldly stated, &#8220;I won.&#8221;</p>
<p>Republicans still have to submit to the Dear Leader because he claims to have a mandate from the whole of the American people.</p>
<p>As his approval ratings continue to plummet Obama seems oblivious to the contempt that normal, patriotic Americans feel for him as they lose their jobs and their health care because of his socialist meddling. And he cannot seem to fathom the brutal, historic thrashing his party received in congressional elections on Tuesday.</p>
<p>On Tuesday the GOP flipped control of the Senate, winning at least 52 seats as of this writing. The House GOP increased its majority, winning at least 242 seats. Republicans captured governors&#8217; mansions in &#8211;of all places&#8211; Democrat-dominated Massachusetts, Illinois, and Maryland, and will control at least 66 of the 99 state legislative chambers across the country (Nebraska&#8217;s legislature has only one chamber).</p>
<p>Meanwhile, President Obama is scheduled to meet today at the White House with congressional leaders to discuss legislative matters, including amnesty.</p>
<p>But if Obama really believes he has the power to enact an amnesty by presidential decree, why bother having such a meeting? The president&#8217;s phone and pen ought to suffice to rewrite immigration laws.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>The Election Was Fun But Don’t Get Too Happy</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/david-horowitz/the-election-was-fun-but-dont-get-too-happy/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-election-was-fun-but-dont-get-too-happy</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 05 Nov 2014 05:58:10 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[David Horowitz]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244637</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The GOP has two years to give voters a real reason to vote for it -- before Dems regroup in 2016. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/election.png"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244639" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/election-450x346.png" alt="election" width="351" height="270" /></a>Eighteen years ago I met a Democratic consultant who said to me, “David, your side doesn’t give people a reason to vote for them. Republicans only win when Democrats screw up big time.” This year Democrats screwed up big time (along with many pollsters), and Republicans won big time. There’s a lot of good news here, especially the Republican gubernatorial victories in Democratic states like Michigan and Wisconsin, and battleground states like Ohio and Florida. Perhaps the most inexplicable good news of the day was the fact that Sandra Fluke got trounced by a Republican in the People’s Republic of Santa Monica. No wonder Democrats are weaker now than at any time since the 1920s.</p>
<p>Looking over this Democratic wreckage, Republican doomsayers should take note. The American people are not “low information” dummies, who will believe anything Democrats tell them. Abe Lincoln had it right: “You can fool some of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.” Republicans should also note that despite all the people on food stamps and all of the voters getting free stuff – 47% by Mitt Romney’s misguided count – they were still independent and savvy enough to return Scott Walker in Wisconsin, to elect Tim Cotton in Arkansas, and to defeat Sandra Fluke in Santa Monica. Finally, Democrats’ racist appeals to minority voters don’t seem to be working as well as they used to. All these Republican whines were in fact excuses for poorly run political campaigns. Normally, you have to defeat your opponents. You can’t count on them to defeat themselves. Normally.</p>
<p>And this raises the big question, which is 2016. Democrats, when they are not over reaching and claiming against all evidence that the party of Joni Ernst and Shelley Moore Capito and Nikki Haley is conducting a war against women, are formidable political opponents. When they regroup after this defeat they will not be so easy beat in 2016. Unless…</p>
<p>Unless Obama, ideologue that he is, determines to stay the course, grants amnesty to 11 million illegals, continues to use fly swatters to combat ISIS, alternately stonewalls and heads for the golf course in the face of major crises, and vetoes Republican bills to restore the economy. There is always this possibility but don’t count on it. And in the absence of such screw-ups, Republicans will need to get their act together and give voters something to vote <i>for</i>.</p>
<p>Here’s an idea. What Republicans should offer voters is a national security program that protects them, and individual freedom. Freedom to choose their healthcare; freedom to run their businesses in an environment where government is not looking over their shoulders at every turn and stifling their incentives to create jobs; freedom to go about their lives without fear of terrorist attacks; freedom to shape their country and its culture within secure borders; freedom from electoral fraud, and IRS intrusion designed to turn their country into a one-party state.</p>
<p>These are not only policy preferences; they are moral themes – calls to action &#8211; that sum up what the Republican Party is about.</p>
<p><em>David Horowitz is the author of the recently published book </em>Take No Prisoners: The Battle Plan For Defeating The Left<em> (Regnery 2014).</em></p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A President&#8217;s Global Warming Treaty Tyranny</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/a-presidents-global-warming-treaty-tyranny/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-presidents-global-warming-treaty-tyranny</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 28 Aug 2014 04:50:28 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Climate Change]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Global Warming]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Senate]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Treaty]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[United Nations]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=239679</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Submitting the U.S. to the international community's will -- without the consent of Congress. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #232323;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Politics_1114_Obama_ClimateChange_480x360.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-239682" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Politics_1114_Obama_ClimateChange_480x360-450x337.jpg" alt="Politics_1114_Obama_ClimateChange_480x360" width="312" height="234" /></a>In yet another demonstration of contempt for the Constitution, President Obama and his administration are pursuing what the <i>New York Times</i> <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/us/politics/obama-pursuing-climate-accord-in-lieu-of-treaty.html?_r=0"><span style="color: #1255cc;">characterizes</span></a> as a &#8220;sweeping international climate change agreement to compel nations to cut their planet-warming fossil fuel emissions” &#8212; absent any input from Congress.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Constitution requires a two-thirds majority approval by the Senate to ratify any legally binding treaty. The Obama administration plans to sidestep that requirement by calling the agreement a “politically binding” deal that would substitute for an actual treaty. It would consist of voluntary pledges, combined with obligations from a 1992 U.N. treaty known as the <a href="https://treaties.un.org/pages/ViewDetailsIII.aspx?&amp;src=TREATY&amp;mtdsg_no=XXVII~7&amp;chapter=27&amp;Temp=mtdsg3&amp;lang=en"><span style="color: #1255cc;">United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Control</span></a>. That 22-year-old agreement was reached at the “Earth Summit” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The U.S. Senate <a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=j57VaLBSGogC&amp;pg=PA58&amp;lpg=PA58&amp;dq=climate+change+treaty+1992,+Senate+ratification&amp;source=bl&amp;ots=I3UtYpHb3n&amp;sig=5YqN6K8eGpJTNZ_tEyG202v7vfM&amp;hl=en&amp;sa=X&amp;ei=l_r9U4DJHtTmoAS574GwBA&amp;ved=0CE4Q6AEwCA#v=onepage&amp;q=climate%20change%20treaty%201992,%20Senate%20ratification&amp;f=false"><span style="color: #1255cc;">ratified</span></a> the agreement on October 7, 1992, and President Bush Sr. signed it six days later, making it legally binding.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Obama administration contends that simply adding the additional voluntary pledges to the agreement obviates the need for another ratification process. “There’s some legal and political magic to this,” said Jake Schmidt, an expert in global climate negotiations with the <a href="http://www.nrdc.org/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">Natural Resources Defense Council</span></a>, a leftist advocacy group. “They’re trying to move this as far as possible without having to reach the 67-vote threshold.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Not magic. Just another attempt by the Obama administration to kick Congress to the curb in pursuit of an agenda that has absolutely no chance of getting majority approval in Congress, much less a two-thirds vote of approval in the Senate. In 1997, the Kyoto climate control treaty was rocketed into oblivion with a 96-0 bipartisan vote. Another effort was undertaken in Copenhagen in 2009, but once again the attempt to forge a legally binding agreement failed. Obama attended that conference, hoping to put America in alignment with the global community, but he did so with <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/13/weekinreview/13broder.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">no support</span></a> whatsoever from Republicans, along with opposition from several Democrats representing states that rely heavily on coal power for energy and jobs. Democrats made it clear they wouldn’t accept any treaty or agreement threatening that status quo. In 2010, “cap and trade” legislation <a href="http://online.wsj.com/articles/henninger-obamas-troublesome-congress-1404342045"><span style="color: #1255cc;">failed</span></a> in the Senate for the same reason.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">The Obama administration is undeterred by such inconvenient realities. In June, once again absent any input from Congress, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) <a href="http://www.climatechangedispatch.com/dem-senator-epa-will-come-for-natural-gas-next.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">proposed</span></a> regulations aimed at cutting existing greenhouse gas emissions from existing power plants 30 percent by 2030. The move has <a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-epa-lawsuit-20140805-story.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">engendered</span></a> lawsuits in the in the U.S. Court of Appeals in the District of Columbia from at least a dozen coal-reliant states. It has also engendered a <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/209186-heitkamp-to-gas-industry-when-coal-is-dead-they-will-come-for-you"><span style="color: #1255cc;">warning</span></a> from North Dakota Democrat Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, whose state relies on coal-generated electricity for a whopping 80 percent of its power needs. &#8220;When that is done, and the stake is through the heart of coal, they will come for you next,” Heitkamp told representatives from the natural gas industry. She also added a dose of reality to the mix. &#8220;In my lifetime we will not transition away from coal,” she contended.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">That remains to be seen, given the Obama administration’s penchant for “transitioning” away from the rule of law. Yet even this patchwork quilt of an agreement will suffer the same affliction that bedevils many of the administration’s efforts, as in a disconnect from geopolitical reality. The premise behind this pact is to “name and shame” countries who do not meet their reduction requirements. Thus the administration is relying on the idea that “embarrassed” nations will fall back in line, regardless of the economic consequences for doing so.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">It’s not going to happen. As the <i>Washington Times</i> correctly <a href="http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/aug/26/obama-seeks-bypass-congress-un-climate-change-deal/?utm_source=RSS_Feed&amp;utm_medium=RSS"><span style="color: #1255cc;">explains</span></a>, &#8220;China and India, each with more than a billion people and swathes of horrific poverty of a sort not seen in the West, have been particularly outspoken in their refusal to agree to any mandatory carbon-emission cuts, which would limit their development and prosperity.”</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">In addition, the poorer nations of the world are also unlikely to abide by any agreement that does not bind richer nations to a massive wealth transfer aimed at assisting their development of dams and levees to guard against coastal flooding from rising seas, or provide food aid during droughts that are invariably attributed to global warming.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Global warming itself has been subjected to a series of “readjustments” in recent years. In 2009, there was the “Climategate” scandal in which the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit was found to have <a href="http://www.thenewamerican.com/reviews/opinion/item/18555-global-warming-hoax-unraveling-someone-tell-obama"><span style="color: #1255cc;">suppressed</span></a> data contradicting their assessment of global warming. Last year, a series of leaked emails revealed that scientists working on a U.N. climate change report were <a href="http://www.foxnews.com/science/2013/09/20/warming-lull-since-18-haunts-climate-change-authors/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">struggling</span></a> to explain why global warming has decreased over the last 15 years, even as greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. That same year, a paper asserting that there was a 97-percent scientific consensus regarding human-caused global warming<b> </b>was revealed to have been <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamestaylor/2013/05/30/global-warming-alarmists-caught-doctoring-97-percent-consensus-claims/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">doctored</span></a> by warming alarmists and their media allies. In June, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) quietly <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/30/noaa-quietly-reinstates-july-1936-as-the-hottest-month-on-record/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reinstated</span></a> data showing July 1936 as the hottest month on record, after insisting in 2012 that July of that year was the &#8220;all-time warmest month on record for the nation in a period of record that dates back to 1895.” And last week in Australia, scientists with the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) were <a href="http://www.thegwpf.org/australian-met-office-accused-of-manipulating-temperature-records/"><span style="color: #1255cc;">accused</span></a> of manipulating data to create an artificial warming trend, using a process called “homogenization” that ostensibly corrects anomalies in raw temperature data. The BOM insisted that it was “very unlikely” that such homogenization affected overall outlooks.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Countering such realities requires a certain level of hysteria. The so-called paper of record was more than up to the task. &#8220;The strategy comes as scientists warn that the earth is already experiencing the first signs of human-caused global warming — more severe drought and stronger wildfires, rising sea levels and more devastating storms — and the United Nations heads toward what many say is the body’s last chance to avert more catastrophic results in the coming century,” the <i>New York Times</i> reports.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">A U.N. report to be released in early November is equally dire, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/science/earth/greenhouse-gas-emissions-are-growing-and-growing-more-dangerous-draft-of-un-report-says.html"><span style="color: #1255cc;">noting</span></a> that the world is on the cusp of “irreversible change” due to global warming.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Hence the “last chance” efforts continue. Last year, dozens of countries <a href="http://thehill.com/policy/energy-environment/191264-climate-negotiators-strike-last-minute-deal"><span style="color: #1255cc;">reached</span></a> a deal in Warsaw that allow them to make “contributions” to reducing global warming, as opposed to “commitments&#8221; for doing so. Thus countries like China and India won more lenient guidelines for reducing emissions than desired by the United States and Europe. This deal was seen as a springboard for the upcoming one, to be hammered out next year in Paris, following a December meeting in Lima, Peru to draft the agreement.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">Republicans have little use for a pact that ignores the rule of law and tramples the concept of national sovereignty in the process. “Unfortunately, this would be just another of many examples of the Obama administration’s tendency to abide by laws that it likes and to disregard laws it doesn’t like&#8211;and to ignore the elected representatives of the people when they don’t agree,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) in a statement.</p>
<p style="color: #232323;">When there’s a planet to save—and an American economy to ruin in the process—such “banal&#8221; considerations must be cast aside. Obama and his administration are determined to fulfill his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?Source=GovD&amp;v=CNSZ62xiD4M"><span style="color: #1255cc;">promise</span></a> of “skyrocketing” electricity prices, along with his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KrefKCaV8m4"><span style="color: #1255cc;">one</span></a> to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” Delivering the nation into the clutches of UN bureaucrats, while kicking Congress and the Constitution to the curb, is the latest effort to fulfill that agenda. It won’t be the last.</p>
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		<title>Supreme Court Rebukes Obama Lawlessness</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/supreme-court-rebukes-obama-lawlessness/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=supreme-court-rebukes-obama-lawlessness</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 27 Jun 2014 04:53:45 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[recess appointment]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Supreme Court]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=235090</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The unanimous decision rejecting the president's "recess" appointments. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/court-gavel.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-235092" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/court-gavel-450x337.jpg" alt="court-gavel" width="271" height="203" /></a>In a humiliating rebuke to President Obama, the Supreme Court affirmed in a labor relations case yesterday that there continue to be constitutionally prescribed limits to the powers of the nation&#8217;s Chief Executive.</p>
<p>The Court invalidated three recess appointments the president made in an attempt to unconstitutionally manipulate federal labor relations policy.</p>
<p>Justices held unanimously in <i>National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning</i> Thursday that Obama overreached on Jan. 4, 2012 when he recess-appointed three members to the NLRB without bothering to wait for the U.S. Senate to recess. Obama’s goal was to pack the under-staffed NLRB with likeminded leftists and give the board the quorum it previously lacked to conduct official business.</p>
<p>Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) lauded the Court&#8217;s clampdown on “President Obama’s unlawful abuse of the president’s recess appointments power.”</p>
<p>“This marks the 12th time since January 2012 that the Supreme Court has unanimously rejected the Obama administration’s calls for greater federal executive power,” Cruz said.</p>
<p>A delighted Michael Savage said on his radio show: &#8220;America just won a 9-to-0 victory over an emerging dictatorship.&#8221; (The full opinion is available at the Supreme Court&#8217;s <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/13pdf/12-1281_bodg.pdf">website</a>.)</p>
<p>In this post-constitutional era in which the Supreme Court gave its imprimatur to the nonsensical ruling in <i>NFIB v. Sebelius</i>, the vile pro-Obamacare decision that has been aptly compared to an infamous slavery-reinforcing ruling that helped to precipitate civil war, it remains to be seen what, if any, other limits to governmental power the Court will see fit to recognize. Ben Shapiro correctly <a href="http://www.creators.com/opinion/ben-shapiro/the-worst-ruling-since-dred-scott.html">characterized</a> the tortuously reasoned Obamacare decision as &#8220;the greatest single judicial limitation on American liberty since <i>Dred Scott v. Sandford</i> (1857), in which the Supreme Court ruled that under the Constitution, blacks were not human beings.&#8221;</p>
<p>The lawsuit disposed of yesterday was brought by Noel Canning of Washington state, the owner of a soft drink bottling and distribution company who was displeased by a ruling the board made against him after its quorum was restored by the purported recess appointments. The NLRB found that Canning&#8217;s firm engaged in unfair labor practices by declining to sign a collective bargaining agreement. Canning argued the board had no legal authority to render the decision because the president&#8217;s recess appointments, made when the U.S. Senate did not consider itself to be in recess, were improper.</p>
<p>The Recess Appointments Clause (Article II, Section 2, Clause 3) of the U.S. Constitution states, &#8220;The President shall have Power to fill up all Vacancies that may happen during the Recess of the Senate, by granting Commissions which shall expire at the End of their next Session.&#8221;</p>
<p>The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit previously sided with Canning and his company, finding that the president may make recess appointments only when the Senate is in recess between numbered sessions of Congress, and only then if the vacancy arose in that same time span. The high court concurred, finding that the president cannot arrogate to himself the power to determine when the Senate is in recess. It is for the Senate to judge when it is in recess.</p>
<p>“We hold that, for purposes of the Recess Appointments Clause, the Senate is in session when it says it is, provided that, under its own rules, it retains the capacity to transact Senate business,” Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in the majority decision for the high court.</p>
<p>During oral arguments earlier this year, nearly every member of the Supreme Court questioned the constitutionality of Obama’s NLRB appointments.</p>
<p>Chief Justice John Roberts defended the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to approve nominees as a vital check on an out-of-control executive branch. Senators “have an absolute right not to confirm nominees that the president submits,” he said.</p>
<p>Left-leaning Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee who had served as the president&#8217;s solicitor general, told government counsel, “The history is entirely on the Senate’s side, not your side.”</p>
<p>However, in rendering their decision this week the justices split over whether to preserve the president&#8217;s recess appointment powers.</p>
<p>As Daniel Greenfield <a href="http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/supreme-court-obamas-recess-appointments-violated-constitution/">noted</a>, &#8220;There was no Supreme Court disagreement as to whether Obama’s recess appointments were illegal. Instead the liberal majority protected the recess appointment, while conservatives dissented.&#8221;</p>
<p>Justice Antonin Scalia indicated he agreed with the result in the case but chided the liberal members of the Court. “The majority practically bends over backwards to ensure that recess appointments will remain a powerful weapon in the president’s arsenal,” he said.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, the new ruling calls into question every order issued by the NLRB since the date the appointments were made.</p>
<p>The AFL-CIO&#8217;s Marxist president, Richard Trumka, <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/what-does-the-supreme-courts-nlrb-ruling-mean-for-hundreds-of-labor-cases/2014/06/26/3a20a1fe-fd4f-11e3-b1f4-8e77c632c07b_story.html">downplayed</a> the significance of the decision:</p>
<blockquote><p>The impact of [Thursday’s] ruling is far less than it might have been, because there is now a full complement of Senate-confirmed members of the NLRB and a Senate-confirmed NLRB general counsel.</p></blockquote>
<p>But Thomas J. Donahue, CEO of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, hailed the court decision, calling it &#8220;a victory for the rule of law.” He added, “the president’s unprecedented recess appointments left the NLRB in legal limbo, causing major uncertainty for both employers and employees alike.”</p>
<p>Last summer the labor board got five Senate-confirmed members for the first time in years as part of a political deal between Senate Democrats and Republicans. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) pressured Republicans by threatening to enact the &#8220;nuclear option&#8221; to eliminate filibusters for most presidential nominations. The deal moved forward but Reid and his allies went ahead and changed the filibuster rule anyway.</p>
<p>Incidentally, the NLRB itself shouldn’t even exist. It is a socialist anachronism left over from the New Deal that Obama uses to create new rules and regulations without having to go the normal route and ask Congress to pass a law. Obama’s toadies at the NLRB are hellbent on making America more like bureaucratic, dysfunctional Europe where labor violence and union-caused disruptions are everyday occurrences.</p>
<p>It is worth recalling that two of the three recess-appointment labor board members were professional leftists.</p>
<p>At the time of his appointment Richard Griffin was general counsel for the International Union of Operating Engineers (IUOE). Since 1994 he had served on the board of directors for the AFL-CIO Lawyers Coordinating Committee.</p>
<p>When she was recess-appointed, Sharon Block was Deputy Assistant Secretary for Congressional Affairs at the U.S. Department of Labor. Between 2006 and 2009, Block was Senior Labor and Employment Counsel for the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee where she worked for the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.).</p>
<p>Appointee Terence F. Flynn, who had served as Chief Counsel to NLRB board member Brian Hayes, didn’t stick around long enough to influence much at the NLRB. He resigned four months into his term after an official probe was launched into allegations that he unlawfully leaked internal documents to a Republican colleague. Flynn denied any wrongdoing.</p>
<p>But the <i>Canning</i> decision wasn&#8217;t the only pro-freedom court ruling yesterday.</p>
<p>The New York State Court of Appeals <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/nyregion/city-loses-final-appeal-on-limiting-sales-of-large-sodas.html?_r=0">killed</a> former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg&#8217;s wildly unpopular law that prohibited the sale of sugar beverages in containers exceeding 16 fluid ounces.</p>
<p>Writing for the court&#8217;s majority, Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. determined that New York City&#8217;s Board of Health “exceeded the scope of its regulatory authority” in enacting the measure that residents resented because it limited their choices as consumers.</p>
<p>The city&#8217;s new far-left chief executive, Bill de Blasio, whined about the court decision, saying he was &#8220;extremely disappointed.&#8221; The mayor promised to seek out new ways to microscopically meddle in the affairs of New Yorkers.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, U.S. House Speaker John Boehner (R-N.Y.), who frequently excuses his sometimes jaw-dropping political timidity by asserting that Republican control of the House of Representatives represents control of one-half of one-third of the federal government, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2014/06/25/liberal-law-professor-jonathan-turley-thinks-congress-could-win-their-new-lawsuit-against-obama/?advD=1248,53299">filed a lawsuit</a> in which House Republicans speak for all of Congress.</p>
<p>&#8220;In my view the president has not faithfully executed the laws,&#8221; Boehner told reporters as he explained the legal action aimed at curbing Obama&#8217;s nearly daily overreaches.</p>
<p>Although some question whether House Republicans have proper legal standing to sue, leftist law professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University said the action has a decent shot at succeeding.</p>
<p>Referring to President Obama&#8217;s increasing unilateralism, Turley said “there’s no license for going it alone in our system.”</p>
<p>“I think there is a case against the president for exceeding his authority,” Turley said. “I happen to agree with the president on many of his priorities and policies, but as I testified in Congress I think he has crossed the constitutional line.”</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 Return of Earmarks?</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/the-return-of-earmarks/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=the-return-of-earmarks</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/ian-smith/the-return-of-earmarks/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Wed, 14 May 2014 04:20:52 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Ian Smith]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[bills]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[earmark]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=225432</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Ominous signals from Congress that groundbreaking reforms may soon be reversed. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/r620-921c71eafb5ae62d70f90f236fc7e7c3.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-225433" alt="r620-921c71eafb5ae62d70f90f236fc7e7c3" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/r620-921c71eafb5ae62d70f90f236fc7e7c3-450x329.jpg" width="360" height="263" /></a>Last week members of the Senate Republican Steering Committee met over lunch to discuss the potential revival of that long-gone facet of backroom politics: the congressional earmark. Given the Committee’s direct involvement in the Senate and House rule-making process and Harry Reid’s defense of earmarks on the Senate floor earlier that week, it’s perhaps time Americans were given a re-cap on the vileness that is earmarking.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">To remind, earmarking is the tailoring of certain pieces of legislation in order to reward targeted congressional members with federal spending in their districts and states. It is spending used solely to push narrow political interests, such as pet projects or awards to donors, rather than the interests of the broad American public. Because spending provisions that are earmarked are usually negotiated privately in congressional committees, where deals can be arranged to advance personal and political goals, the practice evades the usual procedures for public debate and expert review.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Because of an initiative started by President George W. Bush, which was later copied by President Obama, earmarking was banned in the House and Senate in 2010 and 2011, respectively. Since then, thanks to these moratoriums, this non-transparent and ethically questionable practice has pretty much ended and tens of billions of dollars in taxpayer funds have been saved.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The ban on earmarks was partly in response to the 2005 &#8220;Bridge to Nowhere&#8221; </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&amp;sid=aWA7joXO0bRk">debacle</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> which involved a fishing village on Alaska’s Gravina Island. Despite having a population of around 50 Tsimshian natives, inserted into that year’s transportation bill was a provision for the island to receive a 9,000-foot-long bridge, which, if then-Governor Sarah Palin hadn’t stepped in, would’ve cost taxpayers nearly a quarter of a </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">billion</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> dollars.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Your average politician’s voracious drive for re-election and desire to stay in office is what fuels these types of abusive projects. Describing his tenure as Chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, Don Young, the Representative for Alaska responsible for the &#8220;Bridge to Nowhere&#8221; earmark, said at the time of the controversy, “I’d be silly if I didn’t take advantage of my chairmanship… I think I did a good job.” Rep. Young is still in office and is no doubt supportive of an earmark revival.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is key committee chairmen like Young who benefit most from earmarked spending, as they have the most power during bill mark-ups. Since chairman-roles are usually held by the most senior incumbents, the districts and states that get the big earmarked dollars generally depends on who has the most seniority and power in Congress. Young, in fact, is the fourth most senior representative in House. In a perverse feedback loop, the practice of earmarking leads to more support from constituents, which then leads to greater entrenchment of the incumbent, which leads to more and bigger earmarks. Breaking such a system is difficult and it explains why the practice persisted for many decades before Tea Party activism in the mid-2000s finally forced Congress to act. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">That earmarks help powerful, senior incumbents is worrisome, but most troubling is that earmarks lead to bad legislation. As House Speaker </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.examiner.com/article/speaker-boehner-bemoans-lack-of-earmarks-to-grease-highway-bill">Boehner</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> has noted, “You take the earmarks away and guess what? All of a sudden people are beginning to look at the real policy behind it.” By banning earmarks, our representatives have to consider whether the </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">entire</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> bill is good for their district and the country. This is of course what the Founders intended.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Notable is the connection the mainstream media routinely makes between congressional gridlock and &#8220;Tea Party intransigence.&#8221; The refrain from liberal pundits usually goes something like, &#8220;Obama’s forced to push through initiatives like amnesty because the Republicans in the House just can’t seem to control Tea Party extremists!” The more convincing explanation for this slowdown, however, is simply the current restraint on Committee members from earmarking for on-the-fence members. Without grease on the wheels the legislative machine does begin to slow down. But in a country that has on its books 4,000 federal criminal laws and counting, there is no urgency for new bills. It’s certainly better to have higher quality bills that are good for all the American people.  </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The caveat of course is that we have a lawless and tyrannical president who, because of a &#8220;gridlocked&#8221; Congress, feels the need to push through his own initiatives, just like he did with administrative amnesty. But as long as we force our representatives to stand up to the President, we can end such abuse, just like we ended earmarks.</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>Hillary Clinton’s Problem Isn’t Age &#8212;- It’s Experience</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/hillary-clintons-problem-isnt-age-its-experience/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=hillary-clintons-problem-isnt-age-its-experience</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 30 Apr 2014 04:58:51 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[age]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[experience]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hillary Clinton]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=224257</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Hillary is a 66-year-old child.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ap_hillary_clinton_01_jef_130201_wg.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-224258" alt="ap_hillary_clinton_01_jef_130201_wg" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/ap_hillary_clinton_01_jef_130201_wg-433x350.jpg" width="303" height="245" /></a>The problem with Hillary Clinton’s candidacy isn’t that she would take office at the age of 69. An older and more mature president is not a bad thing. It’s how little she has done in that time.</span></p>
<p>After 2008, when Hillary was beaten by an even more inexperienced candidate, most people forgot just how little experience she has holding elected office.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton only won one political office and she did so in her fifties. Despite winning two elections, her Senate career only covered the period from January 2001 to January 2009.</p>
<p>It’s more time than Obama spent in the Senate, but that’s not saying much.</p>
<p>JFK was considered young and inexperienced after spending 14 years in Congress. Hillary Clinton isn’t young, but her experience in elected office at the age of 69 will be less than his was at the age of 44.</p>
<p>Hillary’s supporters will argue that she has plenty of experience in public life. Unfortunately it’s the wrong kind of experience.</p>
<p>Like Elizabeth Warren, a slightly younger and more left-wing Hillary clone, she spent a good deal of time in the corrupt intersection between leftist non-profits, corporate boards and politically connected legal positions. The bad lessons those posts taught her are evident from Whitewater and HillaryCare.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton embodies the corrupt culture of Washington D.C. whose cronyism and nepotism she has far too much experience with as the other half of a power couple notorious for personal and political corruption.</p>
<p>When they left, Bill and Hillary trailed illegal pardons and stolen property behind them.  As recently as 2008, Bob Herbert of the <i>New York Times</i> wrote, &#8220;The Clintons should be ashamed of themselves. But they long ago proved to the world that they have no shame.&#8221;</p>
<p>Back in 2001, he had suggested that the Clintons might one day be “led away in handcuffs.”</p>
<p>That’s Hillary Clinton’s real experience and it’s not policy experience or foreign policy experience. It’s the politics of political corruption. Hillary Clinton’s track record doesn’t consist of policy achievements. It’s in the people she knows and owes favors to, the legion of corrupt associates of Clintonworld and the millionaires and billionaires who fund her unscrupulous political ambitions with their dirty money.</p>
<p>If Hillary’s last name were still Rodham, no one would have even proposed her for Senate. There is absolutely nothing in her record or her ideas that recommends her for higher office.</p>
<p>Not only is she inexperienced and inept, despite her many makeovers she is a colorless figure with the speaking style and fashion sense of a college registrar, and a bureaucrat’s cagey instinct for pre-emptive cover-ups that only make her look more suspicious even when she didn’t actually do anything wrong.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton did nothing of note either as Senator or Secretary of State. The reason why her time in the Senate is remembered on the left for her Iraq War vote and her time as Secretary of State is remembered on the right for Benghazi is that there isn’t anything else to remember her for.</p>
<p>The high points of her national career are negative; terminated from Watergate after unethical behavior, a failure on government health care as First Lady, an Iraq War vote that she spent five years lying about and the abandonment of Americans in Benghazi as Secretary of State.</p>
<p>And a track record of trying to blame her decisions on everyone else.</p>
<p>Despite voting for the Iraq War, Hillary blamed Bush for a “rush to war” and for “triggering” the conflict. Few on the left have forgotten that she had even more positions on the Iraq War than John Kerry and that her positions changed completely based on what was going on in America and Iraq at the time.</p>
<p>When it came to Benghazi, other people took the fall for a horrifying failure that she claimed to be accepting responsibility for, while her own pet committee shifted the blame onto others.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton accused Obama of being unready for a 3 A.M. phone call, but does anyone believe that she would take a 3 A.M. phone call and make a quick decision in a crisis? Is there anything in her track record in the Senate or as Secretary of State that suggests that she is bold and decisive?</p>
<p>Anything at all?</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton carefully avoided a track record. In the Senate, she invariably went with the least controversial position on every issue until she began overcompensating on Iraq to win back the left.</p>
<p>In the Senate, she was for a ban on flag burning, Cap and Trade, nuclear power, for Israel, for  Palestine, for abortion, against abortion, for harsh criminal penalties, against harsh criminal penalties, for No Child Left Behind, against No Child Left Behind, for gay marriage, against gay marriage, for medical marijuana and against medical marijuana.</p>
<p>If the polls opposed gay marriage, she was against it. If the polls supported it, she was for it. The same went for everything else.</p>
<p>As Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton staked out a bold position in favor of visiting other countries and shaking hands with their leaders.</p>
<p>This is not a woman who takes 3 A.M. phone calls. Not without polling them first and issuing a non-definitive statement in the vaguest possible language that she can’t be held accountable for in any way.</p>
<p>This isn’t a record that speaks of experience. It’s the record of a woman working hard to avoid ever having an experience, a position or a conscience.</p>
<p>JFK came into the White House having seen combat and having come close to dying many times. He had spent almost a decade and a half in Congress and taken positions on important issues.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton may be almost 70 at that same point, but without a fraction of his experience, and she has tried to make up for it with childish lies like claiming to <a href="http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/clinton-misspoke-about-bosnia-trip-campaign-says/">have come under sniper fire</a> in Bosnia, claiming to <a href="http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2008/mar/10/hillary-clinton/clinton-visited-kosovo-refugees-but-/">have negotiated open borders for refugees</a> in Kosovo and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1581606/Hillary-Clinton-I-was-instrumental-in-Northern-Ireland-peace-process.html">claiming to have been instrumental</a> in the Irish peace process.</p>
<p>It’s no wonder that the chief counsel to the House Judiciary Committee in Watergate said of her, <a href="http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/02/25/hillary-fired-lies-unethical-behavior-congressional-job-former-boss">“She was a liar.</a>”</p>
<p>Hillary’s experience is as imaginary as her work bringing peace to Northern Ireland. The issue isn’t her age; it’s her lack of principles and her lack of courage. Hillary Clinton compensates for a mediocre career of political cronyism with ridiculous lies in an act of neurotic insecurity.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton isn’t too old to be president. She’s too adolescent, untried and immature. She has made too few decisions that matter, taken too few risks and even less responsibility and lives an imaginary Walter Mitty life of death-defying adventures that only exist in her mind and her press releases.</p>
<p>Hillary isn’t just incompetent, corrupt or a liar. Like too many of her peers, she’s a 66-year-old child.</p>
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		<title>Bloomberg vs. the Koch Brothers</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/bloomberg-vs-the-koch-brothers/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bloomberg-vs-the-koch-brothers</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 04:34:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Daniel Greenfield]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221748</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[According to Harry Reid, some "out-of-state billionaires" are more equal than others. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bloomberg-ap.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221785" alt="bloomberg-ap" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/bloomberg-ap-450x337.jpg" width="315" height="236" /></a>The Democratic Party wants the 2014 elections to be about anything and everything except ObamaCare. The depths of Hope and Change were plumbed in 2008, the War on Women was exhausted in 2012 and that leaves only the Koch Brothers.</p>
<p>Senator Harry Reid, facing the end of his time as Senate Majority Leader, has decided to bet the farm on the Koch Brothers. His Senate Majority PAC (formerly Commonsense Ten, really “Keep Harry Reid Majority Leader”) is trying to protect Senate Democrats who are hated in their own states for voting to drive up the price of health insurance while cutting Medicare by accusing their Republican opponents of being pawns and puppets of the Koch Brothers.</p>
<p>One ad already running in Louisiana tells voters, “Out-of-state billionaires are spending millions to rig the system and elect Bill Cassidy. Their goal? Another politician bought and paid for.”</p>
<p>And who is funding the $3 million Reid ad campaign denouncing out-of-state billionaires for spending millions to influence politics? Is it grass roots Louisiana voters or local kindergarteners pitching in their pennies to stop the rampage of the billionaires?</p>
<p>The single biggest donor to Senate Majority PAC is an out-of-state billionaire.  <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2014/01/michael-bloomberg-senate-majority-pac-101808.html">Michael Bloomberg donated $2.5 million</a> this year. Bloomberg’s priorities of banning guns, soda and salt are more at odds with the average Louisiana voter, who overwhelmingly supports the Second Amendment and eats what he likes no matter how much salt and sugar it has, than those of the “libertarian-minded” Koch Brothers.</p>
<p>Mainstream media stories about the Senate Majority PAC ad blitz don’t bother to mention that the clamor over “out-of-state billionaires spending millions” is really a case of the 16<sup>th</sup> richest man attacking the 6<sup>th</sup> richest men in order to keep the Senate exactly the way it has been for the last seven years.</p>
<p>If Bloomberg had donated $2.5 million to a Republican PAC that was using it to air ads blasting Democrats as puppets of George Soros, every news story about the ad blitz would lead with the absurd hypocrisy of one billionaire funding attacks against another billionaire for trying to influence politics.</p>
<p>The choice not to report this reveals that the biggest problem with politics isn’t the undue influence of money, but the undue influence of media.</p>
<p>Bloomberg, who has his own media outlet, has a very distinct agenda and it isn’t a libertarian-minded plot to “take over the government and leave you alone.” His $2.5 million donation to help Harry Reid cling by his fingernails to his position isn’t being done out of the goodness of his heart.</p>
<p>Bloomberg isn’t a party donor, he’s an issue donor. And his biggest issue is gun control.</p>
<p>46 percent of Louisiana residents own a gun and Proposition Two, which made it the state with the strongest backing for the Second Amendment, passed by 74 percent. Louisiana voters deserve to know that an out-of-state billionaire fanatically obsessed with outlawing guns is trying to rig their system.</p>
<p>“The mayor intends to keep his wallet open after he leaves office to influence national policy around issues like guns, education and marriage equality,“ <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/18/nyregion/bloomberg-forming-super-pac-to-influence-2012-races.html?_r=0">a Bloomberg adviser said</a>.</p>
<p>Louisiana voters oppose 2 out of 3 of those policies.</p>
<p>Other Senate Majority PAC donors include billionaire hedge fund manager James H. Simons, media mogul Fred Eychaner and sleazy Hollywood tycoon Harvey Weinstein. Simons and Weinstein live in Manhattan and Eychaner in Chicago. Weinstein, like Bloomberg, is a gun control fanatic.</p>
<p>Bloomberg isn’t just buying Senator Mary Landrieu, he’s also buying the Senate Majority Leader by helping him hang on to power. Fortunately for Bloomberg, <a href="http://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/judicial-watch-announces-list-of-washingtons-ten-most-wanted-corrupt-politicians-for-2012/#reid">Harry Reid has a history of being for sale</a>.</p>
<p>Before Harvey Whittemore was sent to prison for illegally <a href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2013/10/01/reid_supporter_whittemore_gets_2_years_in_campaign_cash_case_120171.html">funneling $130,000</a> to Reid’s re-election committee, Reid had worked to move Whittemore’s Coyote Springs project forward, intervening for him with Federal agencies in ways that raised eyebrows even among his own allies.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.today.com/id/40565987/ns/business-going_green/#.Uy-MGPlr7J8">Reid pushed to give $450 million</a> in stimulus cash to a Chinese wind farm company whose backers donated to his campaign. He <a href="http://freebeacon.com/dirty-harrys-clean-energy-cronyism/">worked to help a Chinese solar energy</a> company, which received $39 million worth of land for $4.5 million, receive Federal waivers.  And <a href="http://freebeacon.com/dirty-harrys-clean-energy-cronyism/">he even pressured the Department</a> of Homeland Security to expedite visas to shady Chinese businessmen linked to a casino project involving his son.</p>
<p>Most <a href="http://www.examiner.com/article/harry-reid-may-be-implicated-online-gaming-corruption-investigation">recently Reid’s name</a> has come up in a corruption investigation involving online gambling.</p>
<p>Considering how many favors Senator Reid has done for Chinese interests with American money, it was surreal to see him denouncing the Koch Brothers as “un-American” on the Senate floor. If anyone is un-American, it’s Reid who has proven that he’s willing to divert millions to China if his sons get a piece of the action.</p>
<p>There is a case to be made for moving money out of politics, but Reid is the worst possible politician to make it.</p>
<p>Senate Majority PAC inveighs against the influence of money on politics at the service of a man who will do anything and everything for anyone as long as they spell his name correctly on the check.</p>
<p>The Senate’s Manchurian Candidate accused the Koch brothers of corrupt foreign practices based on a debunked Bloomberg article.  Reid claimed that they bribe foreigners to get contracts. Meanwhile foreigners bribe Reid to get contracts.</p>
<p>“Is even one of you — is even one of you — willing to stand up and disavow the Koch brothers’ agenda?” Reid demanded.</p>
<p>The question is whether Senator Reid will disavow the Bloomberg agenda?</p>
<p>&#8220;I&#8217;m trying to find a Republican who will raise an objection to two brothers trying to buy America,&#8221; Reid said.</p>
<p>Is there a Democrat who will object to the attempts by Nazi collaborator and wanted financial criminal George Soros to buy America? What about Fred Eychaner and Steve Mostyn?</p>
<p>What about Imaad Zuberi, a top figure in the Syrian Sunni opposition, who bundled at least $500,000 for Obama? What about Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whose dishonest political ads are setting new lows even by the already low standards of national politics?</p>
<p>The only time that Democrats raised any objection to Bloomberg’s attempts to buy the political process outright was when he began to oppose Democrats in red states unless they buckled on gun control. <a href="http://www.politico.com/story/2013/05/bloomberg-pryor-gun-control-ads-democrats-90986.html">Then Reid’s people met with Bloomberg’s</a> people and begged the billionaire to stop targeting them.</p>
<p>The only time that Reid objects to Bloomberg buying America is when it hurts Democrats.</p>
<p>“I’m not afraid of the Koch brothers,” Reid boasted. Instead Reid is afraid of Michael Bloomberg.</p>
<p>“I believe I am on the side of the American people,” Reid said. But the American people don’t pay Reid. Billionaires like Bloomberg do.</p>
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		<title>A Silver Lining for GOP Senate Hopes</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/a-silver-lining-for-gop-senate-hopes/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-silver-lining-for-gop-senate-hopes</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Mar 2014 04:23:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221803</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Left is no longer enamored with stat guru Nate Silver. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vote-here.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-221807" alt="vote-here" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/vote-here.jpg" width="269" height="201" /></a>Statistical wunderkind Nate Silver, who analyzes baseball and elections, has bad news for Democrats. Appearing Sunday on ABC&#8217;s </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">This Week, </i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Silver </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/03/23/Nate-Silver-60-Chance-GOP-Takes-Back-Senate">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> reporter Jonathan Karl that Republicans have a 60 percent chance to win the six seats they need to regain control of the Senate in November. &#8220;What&#8217;s the projection, how many are they going pick up?&#8221; Karl asked. &#8220;Exactly six,&#8221; Silver replied. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Unsurprisingly, Democrats were not amused. Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) executive director Guy Cecil </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/03/24/dscc-pushes-back-against-nate-silver/">fired back</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in a memo released yesterday morning. &#8220;Nate Silver and the staff at FiveThirtyEight are doing groundbreaking work, but, as they have noted, they have to base their forecasts on a scarce supply of public polls,&#8221; Cecil declared. &#8220;In some cases more than half of these polls come from GOP polling outfits. This was one reason why FiveThirtyEight forecasts in North Dakota and Montana were so far off in 2012. In fact, in August of 2012 Silver forecasted a 61% likelihood that Republicans would pick up enough seats to claim the majority. Three months later Democrats went on to win 55 seats.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cecil&#8217;s memo is deliberately selective. Silver, who is editor-in-chief of </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fivethirtyeight-senate-forecast/">FiveThirtyEight</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, a website he recently </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/03/17/five-thirty-eight-espn-nate-silver_n_4980024.html?utm_hp_ref=media">relaunched</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in conjunction with ESPN, not only predicted Obama would win the 2012 election, he correctly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/07/nate-silver-obama-reelection_n_2086556.html">predicted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the electoral outcomes in 50-out-of-50 states. That followed him getting the call right in 49-out-of-50 states in 2008, missing only Indiana, where Obama won with a razor-thin margin of 0.1 percent. Silver’s triumph in 2012 was sweet retribution for the man who had endured </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://mashable.com/2012/11/02/nate-silver-twitter/">ridicule</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> from media pundits who doubted his prognostications. &#8220;I think I get a lot of grief because I frustrate narratives that are told by pundits and journalists that don&#8217;t have a lot of grounding in objective reality,&#8221; he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&amp;v=ZDPpoOaGLK4">told</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Charlie Rose shortly before the 2012 election.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Objective reality is the key. Silver is a </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://mashable.com/2012/11/07/nate-silver-wins/">registered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Democrat, but maintains strict nonpartisanship when it comes to analyzing data. That data, which includes a number of factors such as the weight and accuracy given to each poll based on its historical accuracy, is fed into a computer, where an algorithm makes the ultimate calculations.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">This year, those calculations have Democrats on edge, especially since Silver takes trending into consideration. As he </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/fivethirtyeight-senate-forecast/">noted</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> on his FiveThirtyEight political blog, his last forecast in July &#8220;concluded the race for Senate control was a toss-up.&#8221; His contention that Republican are now &#8220;slight favorites&#8221; is based on president&#8217;s sinking approval ratings, which have fallen to 42 or 43 percent from a previous average of 45 percent, and the contention that &#8220;the GOP has done a better job of recruiting credible candidates, with some exceptions.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as ABC’s Karl </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://abcnews.go.com/ThisWeek/video/week-nate-silver-2014-23024622">laid</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> out the parameters of the 2014 election, which includes races for 36 seats that are mostly non-competitive, he set the stage for Silver&#8217;s prediction that Republicans would pick up &#8220;at least 3 seats&#8221;: &#8220;West Virginia, South Dakota, Montana,&#8221; Silver explained. After naming those three, Silver talked about the other states where he expected the GOP to do well. These included Arkansas, which Silver gives the GOP a 70 percent chance of wining, followed by Louisiana at 55 percent, and &#8220;purple&#8221; North Carolina at 50 percent. Other states Silver sees as possible pickups for the GOP include Alaska at 45 percent, and the blue states of Michigan, Colorado and Iowa at 45, 35 and 30 percent, respectively. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Republican Scott Brown in New Hampshire? &#8220;We think the Republican opportunity is a little over-hyped,&#8221; Silver concludes. &#8220;Scott Brown was extremely popular in a different state four years ago,&#8221; he adds, rating Brown’s chances at only 25 percent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even as he predicted Republicans will likely gain 6 seats, Silver added a qualifier of &#8220;plus or minus 5,&#8221; meaning that they have a chance to gain &#8220;a really big win&#8221; of as many as 11 seats. He puts the odds of them getting that many victories at 30 percent.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Even before Sunday&#8217;s interview, Silver and his newfound status as an uber prognosticator was being exploited in a fear campaign conducted by Democrats. Over the last four months, Silver has been </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nationaljournal.com/daily/who-scares-democrats-more-than-the-koch-brothers-nate-silver-20140311">featured</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> in at least 11 fundraising emails, all of which contained his name in the subject line, along with words such as &#8220;fear,&#8221; &#8220;bad news&#8221; and &#8220;doomed.&#8221; &#8220;There&#8217;s a lot of testing, particularly for subject lines, to see what has the best open rates,&#8221; said Taryn Rosenkranz, a Democratic digital fundraising consultant unaffiliated with the DSCC. &#8220;Using that name over and over suggests it&#8217;s successful, and people are opening and giving.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/senate-races/201460-silver-republicans-slight-favorites-to-win-senate">echoed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that sentiment. “This is a snapshot in time,” he noted on “This Week.” “I think this is going to motivate our base.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It may take more than motivation. In his blog, Silver points to a number of factors breaking in the GOP&#8217;s favor. Despite a &#8220;rough tie&#8221; between the parties on the congressional generic ballot his organization considers the &#8220;single best measure of the national political environment,&#8221; Silver explains that superior GOP turnout in mid-term elections is the equivalent of a 6 point edge. He further notes that Democrats&#8217; other problem is based on the &#8220;constitutional mathematics&#8221; of the Senate&#8217;s six-year election cycle. The year 2008 was an &#8220;extraordinarily strong year for Democrats,&#8221; and that a neutral scenario, or even one that slightly favored Democrats this time, would still produce a &#8220;drop-off relative to that base line.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">These calculations, which Silver calls &#8220;The National Environment,&#8221; is one of five factors that comprise his methodology. The other four include &#8220;Candidate quality&#8221; and its assessment&#8217;s of an individual&#8217;s fund-raising ability and ideology, &#8220;State partisanship,&#8221; comparing an individual states&#8217; voting patterns against the national popular vote, &#8220;Incumbency,&#8221; a huge advantage in most cases, and &#8220;Head-to-head polls&#8221; that have &#8220;some predictive power if evaluated carefully.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Cold numbers aside, some leftists are aghast at Silver&#8217;s prediction. Aside from the rest of Cecil&#8217;s memo, which quickly deteriorates into a familiar screed, claiming Democrats &#8220;are fighting for the middle class and Republicans are fighting for Washington special interests like the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and their reckless and irresponsible agenda that voters despise,” Silver was also </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/03/23/tarnished-silver/?module=BlogPost-Title&amp;version=Blog%20Main&amp;contentCollection=Opinion&amp;action=Click&amp;pgtype=Blogs&amp;region=Body">excoriated</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> by </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">New York Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> columnist Paul Krugman. In a piece entitled &#8220;Tarnished Silver,&#8221; Krugman contends the prognosticator’s website &#8220;looks like something between a disappointment and a disaster.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Other leftists didn&#8217;t need to hear Silver&#8217;s latest pronouncement. He has apparently been the piñata-of-the-month for some time. Last Friday, </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Times</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> columnist Tim Egan </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/opinion/egan-creativity-vs-quants.html?src=me&amp;ref=general">took</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Silver to task for relying too much on mathematics, and not enough on the &#8220;messiness&#8221; of creativity to make his predictions. Two days earlier, Think Progress&#8217;s Kiley Kroh </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3415984/nate-silver-science-writer-ignores-data/">hammered</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Silver for hiring global warming skeptic Roger Pielke, Jr. to write for his website. On March 12, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://theguardian.com/">theguardian.com</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8216;s Emily Bell </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/12/journalism-startups-diversity-ezra-klein-nate-silver">whacked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Silver and other journalism start-ups for having too many white males in their employment. </span></p>
<p>Yet perhaps the most bizarre attack of all was penned March 19 by the New Republic&#8217;s Leon Wieseltier who ludicrously chastised Silver for his nonpartisanship. &#8220;[Silver] dignifies only facts,&#8221; Wieseltier writes. &#8220;He honors only investigative journalism, explanatory journalism, and data journalism. He does not take a side, except the side of no side….<i>He</i> is the hedgehog who knows only one big thing. And his thing may not be as big as he thinks it is.&#8221;</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Silver is the hedgehog who successfully predicted 99-of-of-100 state electoral outcomes over the course of two presidential elections. To casually, or caustically, dismiss his efforts says far more about those who do so than Silver himself. It is certainly a long way until the mid-term election, but the American left would have to be delusional to believe that ObamaCare, an economy that benefits Wall Street at Main Street&#8217;s expense, a fantastically incoherent foreign policy, and the numerous scandals that afflict the Obama administration, don&#8217;t accrue to the benefit of the GOP. Taking on Silver smacks of killing the messenger. Yet much like their similar efforts to demonize the Koch brothers, Democrats may have little else going for them.</span></p>
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		<title>Florida Loss Spells Doom for Democrats</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/matthew-vadum/florida-loss-spells-doom-for-democrats/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=florida-loss-spells-doom-for-democrats</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 14 Mar 2014 04:54:22 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Matthew Vadum]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[David Jolly]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=221047</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Obamacare supporters hit the panic button.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/florida.jpg"><img class=" wp-image-221049 alignleft" alt="florida" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/florida.jpg" width="252" height="189" /></a>The defeat of an Obamacare-loving Democrat in a closely watched special election in the Tampa area ought to give comfort to Republicans aiming to control both houses of Congress after the upcoming elections in November.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On Tuesday, Republican David W. Jolly had mainstream journalists across the nation popping Prozac as he polled 48.52 percent in the special election in Florida&#8217;s 13th congressional district, triumphing over Democrat Alex Sink who garnered 46.64 percent and over Libertarian Lucas Overby who received 4.84 percent of the votes, according to still-unofficial results.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">No matter what they say publicly, Sink&#8217;s loss is terrifying to careerist Democrats. President Obama&#8217;s party desperately wants to talk about something other than Obamacare now that it&#8217;s becoming increasingly clear that they have no chance of retaking the House and are very likely to lose control of the Senate.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The FL-13 race was the Democrats&#8217; to lose. &#8220;This wasn&#8217;t some random battle; the deck was stacked for Democrats, yet prevailing political fundamentals pushed the W into the Republican column,&#8221; notes Townhall political editor Guy Benson.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As even left-leaning </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Politico</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/guybenson/2014/03/13/reports-democrats-in-disarray-on-obamacare-n1808510">observes</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the Democratic Party is in chaos right now:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A few Democrats are advocating a drastic rhetorical shift to the left, by criticizing their own party for not going far enough when it passed the law in 2010. Other Democrats plan to sharply criticize the Affordable Care Act when running for re-election. Many plan to stick to the simple message that Obamacare is flawed and needs to be fixed —a tactic that plainly didn’t work for Sink. Taken together, the Democratic Party is heading into an already tough election year divided — instead of united — on the very issue Republicans plan to make central to their campaigns.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Going into the FL-13 vote three days ago, Democrats already had a seemingly impossible task ahead as they lost control of the narrative.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Before Election Day this week, Republicans characterized the vote as a referendum on Obamacare, a program that Democrats across America have been scrambling to distance themselves from. Jolly promised to press for repeal. Sink, who had high name recognition with voters after running for governor in 2010, defended Obamacare in principle but said parts of the program needed to be fixed.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sink also came across as callous and out-of-touch to left-wingers when she offered a one-percenter&#8217;s rationale for supporting so-called comprehensive immigration reform.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The reforms are important to America because &#8220;we have a lot of employers over on the beaches that rely upon workers and especially in this high-growth environment, where are you going to get people to work to clean our hotel rooms or do our landscaping?&#8221; she said, channeling her inner Ebenezer Scrooge. &#8220;We don&#8217;t need to put those employers in a position of hiring undocumented and illegal workers.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Pundit Stuart Rothenberg previously declared the contest to be a must-win for President Obama&#8217;s party.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Since most nonpartisan handicappers and analysts have for years expected this seat to go Democratic when it became open, a Republican victory would likely say something about the national political environment and the inclination of district voters to send a message of dissatisfaction about the president,&#8221; Rothenberg said. &#8220;And that possibility should worry the White House.”</span></p>
<p>Although a Republican replacing another Republican as a result of a special election shouldn&#8217;t necessarily be headline news, both parties &#8220;nationalized&#8221; the race and poured vast resources into it. When the GOP defined the contest as a referendum on Obamacare, the mainstream media did not object because in their cavernous echo chambers Obamacare is considered to be a great idea that is only running into trouble because of flawed implementation. Many journalists saw Sink as a shoo-in because they viewed the prospect of Obamacare repeal as an electoral non-starter.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As the often sensible Noah Rothman of Mediate </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.mediaite.com/online/florida-democrat-alex-sink-ran-against-repealing-obamacare-and-lost/">opined</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, this was &#8220;[a] real-world test case &#8230; in which a Democratic politician running in a swing district, a candidate who did not have a vote for the [Affordable Care Act] to defend, ran against her Republican opponent’s pro-repeal stance. She lost.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Sink was sunk, Rothman wrote, despite the PR shortcomings of her ultimately successful opponent. Rothman continued: </span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If there was a singular issue on which the special election in Florida’s 13th turned, it was the debate over the value of the repeal of the [Affordable Care Act]. What’s more, the pro-repeal message won in spite of the flawed nature of the messenger. Sink lost to a Republican who should have logically underperformed a generic Republican. Jolly, a 41-year-old lobbyist and Washington insider in the midst of a divorce (who is presently dating a 27-year-old former coworker of Jolly’s) represented the perfect candidate from a Democratic perspective. In theory, he should have been easily framed, polarized, and made toxic. It did not turn out that way.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Democrats apparently underestimated just how toxic Obamacare, which is causing suffering from coast to coast, was (and continues to be) to ordinary Americans.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And after the torpedoing of Sink, for whom the professional Left had such high hopes, Democratic office holders are in denial.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">White House press secretary Jay Carney </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2014/03/12/white_house_sinks_loss_not_tied_to_obamacare_121903.html">dismissed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> out of hand the suggestion that the hated Affordable Care Act doomed the Democratic standard-bearer in Florida.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Any fair assessment of the role that the debate about the Affordable Care Act played reaches the conclusion that, at best for the Republicans, it was a draw,” Carney sniffed. “And I think that&#8217;s evidenced by the fact that the Republican candidate himself didn&#8217;t even mention it in his victory speech.”</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But the day before the vote a nervous White House political director, David Simas, reportedly called journalists to feed them the don&#8217;t-you-even-think-of-blaming-Obamacare party line in advance in case Sink failed to win. The official narrative formulated on Monday declared that the health care law wasn&#8217;t a big factor in the special election.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">With Jolly&#8217;s victory, it is even more certain that Obamacare will be a huge issue in congressional elections in November. Republican candidates may even draw lessons from the race and build on the things that Jolly&#8217;s campaign did right.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Meanwhile, Democratic National Committee boss Debbie Wasserman Schultz, herself a Florida congresswoman, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2014/03/11/wasserman-schultz-says-dem-loss-in-special-election-shows-gop-weakness/">has managed to convince herself</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> that the results in FL-13 somehow constitute some kind of moral victory for the Democratic Party.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">“Republican special interest groups poured in millions to hold onto a Republican congressional district that they’ve comfortably held for nearly 60 years,&#8221; Wasserman Schultz said in a rushed reaction statement.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">&#8220;Tonight, Republicans fell short of their normal margin in this district because the agenda they are offering voters has a singular focus – that a majority of voters oppose – repealing the Affordable Care Act that would return us to the same old broken health care system.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While Wasserman Schultz&#8217;s cute little trivia point that Democrats managed to shave about 10 percentage points off Republican Young&#8217;s 2012 vote tally happens to be true, it really doesn&#8217;t matter. It is an apples-to-oranges comparison.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The special election was called to replace </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://ballotpedia.org/C._W._Bill_Young">Rep. C.W. &#8220;Bill&#8221; Young</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, the longest serving Republican in the House of Representatives, who died in October at age 82. Young was a </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">cardinal</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">, Capitol Hill slang for an especially powerful lawmaker who chairs a subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee. (Young had previously been chairman of the full committee for six years.) From his defense subcommittee perch, he was in a position to hand out favors and bring home the bacon for his Gulf Coast district with greater ease than the typical federal lawmaker, making him virtually invincible in elections. Whenever he faced the voters, he rarely dipped below 60 percent in the popular vote.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But after representing the 10th congressional district for 20 years, he was redistricted last election cycle into a less reliably Republican district. The 13th congressional district that he was elected to represent in 2012 is a swing district, one that went for President Obama in both 2008 and 2012.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So of course the GOP vote percentage was bound to go down, especially with a new Republican candidate not all that familiar to the voters. Like a magical curse, the perks and power of incumbency &#8212; media attention, voter goodwill, franking privileges &#8212; all vanish when the incumbent dies. If a Republican candidate other than the unusually </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">interesting</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> Jolly had run, there is good chance that person would have beat Sink by more than Jolly&#8217;s two percentage point margin.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But wait &#8212; there&#8217;s </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.nbcnews.com/politics/first-read/gop-may-reap-rewards-obamas-unpopularity-midterms-poll-finds-n50341">even more bad news</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> for Democrats.  According to NBC News:</span></p>
<blockquote><p>Barack Obama and his Democratic Party are facing difficult political headwinds less than eight months before November’s midterm elections, according to a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll. Obama’s job-approval rating has dropped to a low point of 41 percent, never a good position for the party controlling the White House; By a 33 percent to 24 percent margin, Americans say their vote will be to signal opposition to the president rather than to signal support, though 41 percent say their vote will have nothing to do about Obama; Forty-eight percent of voters say they’re less likely to vote for a candidate who’s a solid supporter of the Obama administration, versus 26 percent who say they’re more likely to vote for that candidate[.]</p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Obamacare is shaping up to be a decisive &#8212; if not </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">the</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> decisive issue &#8212; in the midterm elections that are now just under eight months away.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If FL-13 is a bona fide bellwether, maybe there is hope for America after all.</span></p>
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		<title>A Cop-Killer Advocate Goes Down in Flames in the Senate</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/arnold-ahlert/a-cop-killer-advocate-goes-down-in-flames-in-the-senate/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-cop-killer-advocate-goes-down-in-flames-in-the-senate</link>
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		<pubDate>Thu, 06 Mar 2014 05:56:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Arnold Ahlert]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Adegbile]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[A victory against Obama's radicalization of the Department of Justice. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/461397207.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220373" alt="Senate Judiciary Committee Holds Hearing On Judicial Nominations" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/461397207-450x347.jpg" width="315" height="243" /></a>In a major defeat for the Obama administration, the Senate voted 52 to 47 to </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://townhall.com/tipsheet/katiepavlich/2014/03/05/breaking-senate-votes-to-block-nomination-of-cop-killer-advocate-debo-adegbile-n1804566">block</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the confirmation of Debo Adegbile, President Obama&#8217;s nominee to head the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Justice Department. Every Republican Senator opposed the effort, and they were joined by eight Democrats, including Sens. Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, Chris Coons of Delaware, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and John Walsh of Montana. Nevada&#8217;s Harry Reid joined his seven colleagues, but only to preserve his ability to reconsider the nomination late if necessary. Though the vote was close, the blocking of Adegbile&#8217;s nomination strikes a significant blow to the Obama administration&#8217;s attempt to further radicalize the already out-of-control Department of Justice. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Under Adegbile&#8217;s leadership and supervision, the NAACP&#8217;s Legal Defense Fund (LDF) </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://therightscoop.com/must-watch-ted-cruz-on-exactly-why-debo-adegbiles-nomination-to-head-doj-civil-rights-div-should-be-opposed/">undertook</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> an unconscionable effort to politicize the murder of Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner. Faulkner was murdered on December 9, 1981 by Wesley Cook, a former Black Panther more familiarly known as &#8220;<a href="http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=1330">Mumia Abu-Jamal</a>.&#8221; Abu-Jamal was also a supporter of “MOVE” a racist-anarchist group that </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/will-senate-confirm-cop-killer-advocate_783732.html">encouraged</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> violence against police officers. When Faulkner </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://justice.danielfaulkner.com/history/">tried</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> to arrest Abu-Jamal’s brother during a traffic stop, Abu-Jamal ran across the street and shot Faulkner in the back. Faulker turned and fired one shot, hitting Abu-Jamal in the chest before falling to the ground. Abu-Jamal then proceeded to shoot Faulkner four more times at close range, including once directly in the face. The murderer was still at the scene when officers arrived seconds later. The murder weapon, a .38 caliber revolver that records showed Abu-Jamal had purchased months earlier, was found at the scene.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Abu-Jamal was convicted in light of a mountain of evidence. Several eyewitness were on the scene, including Abu-Jamal&#8217;s brother, who has </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://m.nationalreview.com/article/364188/dojs-radical-civil-rights-division-john-fund">never</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> testified to his innocence. Two hospital workers did testify, telling the court that Abu-Jamal told them, “I shot the motherf***er, and I hope the motherf***er dies.” </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">On July 2, 1982, a racially-mixed jury unanimously convicted Abu-Jamal. They sentenced him to death the next day after deliberating for just two hours. After hearing Abu-Jamal&#8217;s appeals, that verdict was upheld by Supreme Court of Pennsylvania on March 6, 1989.</span></p>
<p>The subsequent campaign to release Abu-Jamal, which Adegbile was a part of, was nothing less than an attempt by radical leftists to pervert and abuse the legal system to help get one of their fellow revolutionaries back on the street.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">In 2009, the NAACP&#8217;s LDF, directed by Adegbile, </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.freemumia.com/2011/07/naacp-legal-defense-and-educational-fund-files-bried-for-mumia/">began</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> advocating for Abu-Jamal. A series of rallies and protests, accompanied by a media campaign, were put together to promote the idea that Abu-Jamal was a political prisoner. In 2011, the LDF took him on as a client. An LDF press release disseminated the same year contended that &#8220;Abu-Jamal is widely viewed as a symbol of the racial injustices of the death penalty.&#8221; It further noted that &#8220;Mumia Abu-Jamal&#8217;s conviction and death sentence are relics of a time and place that was notorious for police abuse and racial discrimination.&#8221; LDF lawyers even ginned up protests and rallies in France, where, in 2006, the city of St.-Denis had </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://antimove.blogspot.com/2006/05/french-honor-cop-killer-and-cult.html">named</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> a street after the cop-killer. That move was </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=1014">condemned </a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">in the House of Representatives by a vote of 368-to-31 with 8 voting present. (All 31 dissenting votes were cast by Democrats).</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The LDF continued to press its campaign, characterizing Abu-Jamal as a victim of racism. Adegbile pursued that tack in several courts of law, where his arguments were ultimately rejected. One of the contentions Adegbile made during that time was contained in an amicus brief he and other LDF lawyers filed with the Supreme Court in 2009. It asserted that Abu-Jamal&#8217;s conviction was invalid because of racial discrimination in jury selection. Yet there were two black Americans on the jury, and Abu-Jamal himself took part in the selection process. There would have been a third black juror, but Abu-Jamal instructed his lawyer to strike him.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Former Justice Department civil rights lawyer J. Christian Adams succinctly </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/justices-civil-rights-nominee-has-resume-that-includes-sesame-street-and-voting-rights/2013/12/31/7e321eee-7236-11e3-8def-a33011492df2_story.html">summed</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> up Adegbile&#8217;s tenure of leadership at the LDF. “When he ran the unit at the Legal Defense Fund, they took positions far outside of the mainstream of the law, far outside existing jurisprudence as it relates to race, and really advanced a fringe agenda,” he explained.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Nonetheless, far too many Democrats have circled the wagon on Adegbile, defending this egregious nomination. Democrats barred </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Daniel Faulkner&#8217;s widow Maureen from speaking before the </span>committee. <span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Before the vote, however, Pennsylvania Republican Senator Pat Toomey read from a letter from Faulkner to Senate lawmakers. &#8220;Today, as my husband lies 33 years in his grave, his killer has become a wealthy celebrity,&#8221; she wrote. &#8220;Old wounds have once again been ripped open, and additional insult is brought upon our law enforcement community in this country by President Obama&#8217;s nomination of Debo Adegbile.&#8221;</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Maureen Faulkner&#8217;s pleas aside, President Obama </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">railed against rejection of Adegbile, calling the vote a &#8220;travesty.&#8221; Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) accused the GOP of racism, despite the slew of Democrats who rose to oppose the obscene nomination, which was also opposed by the National Fraternal Order of Police, the National Association of Police Organizations, and Democratic Philadelphia Prosecutor Seth Williams. </span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">The defeat was even more stinging because Adegbile only needed the support of 51 senators to advance his nomination to a final vote. That&#8217;s because Harry Reid and his fellow Democrats </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2013/11/21/harry-reid-nuclear-senate/3662445/">invoked</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> the &#8220;nuclear option&#8221; last November, reducing the threshold for a filibuster from 60 votes to 51, specifically to ease the approval of executive and judicial nominees. Vice President Joe Biden attended the session in case he was needed to break a tie, but he was rendered superfluous when seven Democrats defected. Tellingly, Adegbile&#8217;s rejection was the first one under the new rules &#8212; rules that Democrats have exploited to ram through more than 40 other nominees, including several who would have been rejected under the old threshold.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">For the moment, the American people have been spared the appointment of another radical, race-obsessed leftist to a Justice Department already poisoned by corruption and fringe ideology. Adegbile&#8217;s career of legal abuse, extremism and attacks on civil rights make him unfit for any position of authority in the department. </span><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">And despite both Reid and Obama&#8217;s contentions, his defeat would have been impossible without a handful of </span><i style="line-height: 1.5em;">Democrats</i><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"> defecting from their radicalized brethren and deciding that having a cop-killer&#8217;s advocate running the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ was a bridge too far. It was.</span></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>Senate Democrats and a Cop Killer</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/j-christian-adams/senate-democrats-and-a-cop-killer/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=senate-democrats-and-a-cop-killer</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 28 Feb 2014 05:53:50 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[J. Christian Adams]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[civil rights]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Debo Adegbile]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Justice Department]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[mumia abu jamal]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=220000</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Democrats poised to push through nomination of Mumia Abu Jamal devotee Debo Adegbile.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a00d83451d94869e201a51095c501970c.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-220001" alt="Debo Adegbile" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/6a00d83451d94869e201a51095c501970c-429x350.jpg" width="257" height="210" /></a></span>On Monday we will learn a great deal more about what sort of party the Democrats are in 2014.  Senator Harry Reid will move the nomination of the brazen race radical Debo Adegbile to the floor of the Senate for a vote. Adegbile is the President’s nominee for the Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Justice Department, one of the most powerful appointments in the executive branch.</p>
<p>We will learn if Senator Mark Pryor (D-AR) and Senator Kay Hagan (D-NC) share the values of their constituents, or the values of the radical secularists in the administration.  While at the NAACP, Adegbile authored a brief to strip members of the Hosanna Tabor Evangelical Lutheran Church of the right to practice their faith and appoint ministers of the church as they saw fit. Adegbile argued to the Supreme Court that Christian churches shouldn’t continue to enjoy the same constitutional protections of the “ministerial exception” as churches had for centuries.  He argued that the government should have a say in church theology and who could be a minister of a Christian church.</p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Adegbile didn’t want churches to enjoy the full and free exercise of religion.  The United States Supreme Court rejected Adegbile’s arguments, 9-0.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Church attendance in North Carolina and Arkansas is among the highest in the nation, and Hagan and Pryor should reject Adegbile, just as every member of the Supreme Court did.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Adegbile also has a racial history entirely hostile to the values of citizens of West Virginia, Montana, Alaska and Louisiana.  Citizens in those states believe in school discipline and not deciding who gets admitted to college based on an applicant’s skin color.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Yet, Adegbile has aggressively pushed a fringe racial agenda and would use the power of the Justice Department to do so if Senators Joe Manchin (D-WV), John Walsh (D-MT), Jon Tester (D-MT), Mark Begich (D-AK) and Mary Landrieu (D-LA) vote for him Monday afternoon.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">While at the NAACP, Adegbile fought against school discipline.  He argued that more black children were being disciplined compared to their percentage in the population, so naturally school discipline must be racially discriminatory.  At the Justice Department, if he is confirmed, expect him to litigate this nutty idea using the heavy boot of the federal government.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If Adegbile is confirmed, schools will be afraid to punish unruly children and more students who need order in their lives will experience chaos.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Adegbile has also fought to keep a woman out law school because she is white.  Abigail Fisher was denied admission to the University of Texas simply because she is white, and Debo Adegbile has worked hard at the NAACP to keep her out.  He has filed legal briefs with the Supreme Court and managed a nationwide litigation campaign to support racial discrimination in education.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">If the Senators from West Virginia, Montana, Alaska and Louisiana vote to confirm a man who has fought to judge people by the color of their skin, and not the content of their character, they will not be representing their constituents.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Last week, the Republican Senator from Pennsylvania and the African-American Democrat District Attorney penned a joint Wall Street Journal editorial – </span><a style="line-height: 1.5em;" href="http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304610404579401483616494254?mg=reno64-wsj&amp;url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702304610404579401483616494254.html" target="_blank">The Justice Nominee and the Cop Killer.</a><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">  The cop killer to whom they refer is Mumia Abu Jamal – black panther, murderer, and hero to the left.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">A stack of national police organizations also oppose Debo Adegbile’s nomination over his representation of Abu Jamal, including the Fraternal Order of Police.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Debo Adegbile voluntarily chose to help Mumia in his efforts to escape the death penalty for murdering Philadelphia police officer Danny Faulkner.  Jamal murdered Faulkner in cold blood, and then turned his America hating rhetoric into celebrity status.  Like Debo Adegbile’s NAACP, Jamal rants on public radio about structural racism in America.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Mumia, so the fable goes, was prosecuted because he is black.  Because he is black, he could not get a fair trial, he will tell you.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">It is precisely this racially paranoid rot that attracted Adegbile and his NAACP to Mumia’s cause.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">As Senator Toomey and District Attorney Seth Williams wrote:</span></p>
<blockquote><p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">But it is one thing to provide legal representation and quite another to seize on a case and turn it into a political platform from which to launch an extreme attack on the justice system. When a lawyer chooses that course, it is appropriate to ask whether he should be singled out for a high-level national position in, of all things, law enforcement.</span></p></blockquote>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Adegbile and his NAACP raised money off of the leftist murderer&#8217;s celebrity.  Adegbile and the NAACP did more than represent the murderer in court, they allied with his racial grievances.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So what will Pennsylvania’s other Senator do?  Will Democrat Bob Casey side with the man attracted to helping a cop killer, or, will he side with his constituents and vote against Debo Adegbile’s nomination?</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">We will find out this coming Monday at 5:30 when the vote on Adegbile’s nomination reaches the floor of the Senate.  Just 20 years ago, nobody with Adegbile’s radicalized race history would even be nominated.  The Clinton administration had the sense to pull the nomination of Lani Guinier, a crackpot who was nominated for the same office as Adegbile.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">Amazingly, Guinier’s primary sin was to advocate for race quotas in hiring.  She didn’t attack Christian churches and didn’t represent unrepentant black panther cop killers.  She didn’t have anywhere near the radicalized record of Debo Adegbile.</span></p>
<p><span style="line-height: 1.5em;">So Monday we will learn whether any pockets of sanity exist among Senate Democrats, or whether the values of the folks back home no longer matter in 2014.</span></p>
<p><strong>UPDATE</strong>: After this article was published, Senator Bob Casey (D-PA) announced his opposition to the Adegbile nomination.</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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