Establishment Groups on Retreat Against Tea Party Incumbents

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Photo Credit: Getty Images Big-business and establishment groups vowed they would wage war on conservatives and Tea Party candidates, particularly incumbents, in 2014, but they are backing off after realizing they may not want to throw money at losers.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce vowed to spend $50 million taking sides in GOP primaries for establishment-friendly candidates, and other GOP establishment front-groups vowed to raise and spend millions more dollars against conservative and Tea Party candidates.

“Big Business swore this would be the year it would wrestle back the soul of the Republican Party from the grip of the tea party,” Politico writes. “But with primary season looming, the big threats from Big Business appear to be just that.”

Politico notes that the big-business groups are not backing many candidates early and have not “cowed conservative groups fueling challenges to incumbent senators.”

The Republican party has shifted to the right for at least the last thirteen years, according to Gallup polls, and on issues like amnesty, grassroots have mobilized against it even without big-money being spent by amnesty opponents. For instance, after the House GOP released its so-called “immigration principles,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) slammed the document as “amnesty.” That was enough to stall whatever momentum there may have been as the grassroots galvanized against amnesty, forcing GOP leaders to declare that they would not go forward on amnesty until they can trust President Barack Obama to actually enforce any new law that may be passed.

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Immigration Change Gives Legal Status to Undocumented Relatives of US Military

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Photo Credit: Fox News Immigration reform may be stalled in Congress, but a new Obama administration policy is extending legal status and military benefits to thousands of illegal immigrants who are the spouses, parents and children of American military members.

Supporters say the policy — which applies to active-duty military, reservists and veterans — is long overdue.

“Those veterans and those men and women who serve in the National Guard certainly deserve the peace of mind that their family members will not be deported,” immigration attorney Faye Kolly said.

But critics say the policy is tantamount to backdoor amnesty.

“A whole class of aliens with no right to be in the United States are suddenly going to be allowed to live and work here on the basis of their relationship with military and veterans,” said Dan Cadman, with the Center for Immigration Studies.

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Rand Paul: GOP has ‘Real Opportunity’ to Attract Youth Voters

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Photo Credit: AP / Susan WalshSen. Rand Paul says his Republican Party is posed to attract more youth voters, a demographic the GOP has struggled to make inroads with in recent presidential elections.

The Kentucky lawmaker told “Fox News Sunday” that while President Obama won the youth vote by a 3-to-1 ratio, young Americans increasingly are disillusioned with the president.

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Snowden Claims He Raised Concerns about NSA Internally 10 Times Before Leaking Documents

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Photo Credit: AP / THE GUARDIANEx-NSA contractor Edward Snowden said he tried more than 10 times to go through official channels to alert someone about government spying programs, but nobody listened.

According to The Washington Post, Snowden claimed in European Parliament testimony that he reported policy or legal issues about the NSA to more than 10 officials, but as a contractor he had no legal avenue to pursue the matter.

“As an employee of a private company rather than a direct employee of the U.S. government, I was not protected by U.S. whistle-blower laws, and I would not have been protected from retaliation and legal sanction for revealing classified information about lawbreaking in accordance with the recommended process,” Snowden said in his testimony.

Snowden was at the CIA before becoming an NSA contractor. He was working for Booz Allen Hamilton at an NSA facility in Hawaii when he leaked information about the NSA spying programs to the press, The Washington Post reported.

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Huckabee: Time for Government, Not ‘People of Faith to Scale Back’

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Photo Credit: Gage SkidmoreFormer Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (R) didn’t disguise his presidential ambitions on Thursday, touting his socially conservative bona fides and blasting both President Obama and Hillary Clinton in his Conservative Political Action Conference speech.

“These are the things that I know. I know there is a God, and I know this nation would not exist had he not been the midwife of its birth. And I know that this nation exists by the providence of his hand, and if this nation forgets our God, then God will have every right to forget us,” Huckabee said. “I hope that we repent before we ever have to receive his fiery judgment.”

Huckabee is making strong signs he’ll make another run for the White House in 2016, positioning himself as a favorite of social conservatives.

The speech from the Baptist pastor was predictably heavy on social issues. Huckabee warned that “a society that sacrifices its own children is no better than the ancient Philistines,” and criticized the Obama administration for its policy requiring contraception coverage in insurance plans, warning they’re impeding on religious liberty.

“When the government begins to say ‘it’s okay if you have faith but you can only have this much of it because, when you have this much of it, it may somehow conflict with something government has passed, here’s what I know: It’s time for the government to scale back, not for people of faith to scale back. Religious liberty should be unimpeded in this nation.”

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Dr. Ben Carson: ‘We Can’t Be Free If We Are Not Brave’

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Photo Credit: APFew people have emerged on the conservative scene in recent years who have become as instantly beloved as Dr. Ben Carson, the renowned pediatric neurosurgeon and Professor Emeritus at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, who endeared himself to the Right by speaking on conservative values at the National Prayer Breakfast just inches away from captive audience member Barack Obama.

That was the case again on Saturday, when the good doctor visited the CPAC main stage to deliver his remarks.

Dr. Carson spoke about how America for him is the land of dreams, of his no-excuses mother, and of belief in God. Upon his recent retirement, the doctor imagined he would learn to play the organ and get in some golf, but, “The good Lord had a different plan.”

Since that time, Carson and his wife of 39 years, Lacena, whom he introduced at the top of his remarks, have traveled around the country, visiting states both red and blue. What he found, whatever their political persuasion, was a people that are beaten down. Dr. Carson referenced Saul Alinsky, author of Rules for Radicals, and how one of the so-called rules is to make people believe that there is only one correct way to think, and it is not their way.

Dr. Carson hates political correctness. He talked about it at that legendary prayer breakfast, and he talked about it at CPAC. What is PC today is what is espoused by left wing “ideologues,” but Dr. Carson found his own words catching on as he traversed the country, because people recognized “common sense” when they heard it. The practice of medicine, according to Carson, promotes out-of-the-box thinking as well as familiarity with controversy. It was missed by few that “common sense” falls under the out-of-the-box column and is controversial in a PC world.

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Atheists Want Iconic 17-Foot Steel Beam Cross Removed from 9/11 Museum

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Photo Credit: Jeff Kubina / flickr Atheists are trying to oust the “Miracle Cross” from the 9/11 museum arguing that its inclusion would violate the Constitution’s separation of church and state.

But Eric Baxster of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty told MyFoxNY that the cross is part of the story of 9/11 and that museums don’t censor history.

“They tell history as it happened,” Baxster said.

The 17-foot cross-shaped beam was discovered in the devastation at Ground Zero and became a symbol of comfort and hope after the horrific terrorist attack.

But American Atheists say the cross is a part of religious history and are challenging its inclusion in the new National Sept. 11 Memorial and Museum which opens in May.

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Top Democrat Sees Another Train Wreck Coming for Own Party

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Photo Credit: WNDA former high-ranking Clinton administration official and law partner with Hillary Clinton sees potential political disaster for Democrats in 2014 over Obama administration health-care policies.

But it’s not just Obamacare that has Webb Hubbell, former chief justice of the Arkansas Supreme Court and associate attorney general of the U.S., concerned about the political fortunes of his party. It’s what he calls “tinkering with Medicare, the tried and true social insurance program that so many older Americans rely on – which so many future older Americans will rely on, too.”

“You have to wonder why the administration would hand the Republicans such a gift,” he writes in a commentary piece in WND today.

What concerns Hubbell, who served 21 months in prison in the 1990s after pleading guilty to federal charges of overbilling clients at the Rose Law Firm where he was partnered with Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster, is a proposal from the Department of Health and Human Services to allow insurance companies to limit Medicare coverage for certain classes of drugs, including anti-rejection medications for transplant patients and medications to treat depression and schizophrenia in the elderly.

“The proposal isn’t based on a needs analysis but on an actuarial cost study that has drug companies, patient advocates and both Democrats and Republicans in Congress all up in arms,” says Hubbell. “And when Republicans and Democrats agree on anything, we all stand up and take notice.”

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NARAL President Says “Anti-Abortion Is Anti-American”

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Photo Credit: LifeNewsEverybody says something stupid and offensive at one time or another. But it takes a special kind of ideologue to turn it into a speech repeated over and over. And that ideologue is NARAL Pro-Choice America President Ilyse Hogue.

We missed it the first time she told a crowd that pro-lifers are “un-American.” That was at a Feb. 4 event in Washington, D.C. marking the pro-abortion group’s 45th anniversary (see video below). But Hogue liked it so much she said it again in San Francisco on March 4, at an event featuring Sandra Fluke, America’s most famous birth control user.

And lest anyone miss Hogue’s eloquence, NARAL tweeted it on March 6: “‘That, my friends, is not anti-abortion — what it is is anti-American.’ – @ilyseh on current anti-choice efforts in the US.#NARAL45.” Continues after video.

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Global Debt Exceeds $100 Trillion as Governments Binge

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Photo Credit: APThe amount of debt globally has soared more than 40 percent to $100 trillion since the first signs of the financial crisis as governments borrowed to pull their economies out of recession and companies took advantage of record low interest rates, according to the Bank for International Settlements.

The $30 trillion increase from $70 trillion between mid-2007 and mid-2013 compares with a $3.86 trillion decline in the value of equities to $53.8 trillion in the same period, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The jump in debt as measured by the Basel, Switzerland-based BIS in its quarterly review is almost twice the U.S.’s gross domestic product.

Borrowing has soared as central banks suppress benchmark interest rates to spur growth after the U.S. subprime mortgage market collapsed and Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc.’s bankruptcy sent the world into its worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Yields on all types of bonds, from governments to corporates and mortgages, average about 2 percent, down from more than 4.8 percent in 2007, according to the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Global Broad Market Index.

“Given the significant expansion in government spending in recent years, governments (including central, state and local governments) have been the largest debt issuers,” according to Branimir Gruic, an analyst, and Andreas Schrimpf, an economist at the BIS. The organization is owned by 60 central banks and hosts the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision, a group of regulators and central bankers that sets global capital standards.

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