The War for the GOP

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

By WND.

It’s a crazy situation: Conservative-minded Americans – people who a generation ago were part of the “Reagan Revolution,” and today might identify with the “tea party” – are caught up in not just one, but two civil wars.

The first conflict everyone knows about: America is more polarized today than at any time in the last century.

Arrayed on one side are the forces for limited government, free-market capitalism and traditional morality, people who believe less government means more freedom, and that the “American Dream” depends primarily on self-governing, moral and religious people. Members of this side self-identify predominantly as Republicans.

On the other side are those who consider the first group to be unfair, unjust, unfeeling, selfish, intolerant, racist and predatory – and maybe evil. It is this side, which looks to government to solve virtually all problems, that currently dominates American government, media, education and culture. Members of this side self-identify overwhelmingly as Democrats.

That’s War No. 1.

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Famous Republicans targeted for dumpster

By WND.

A conservative giant in Washington, D.C., has written a brand-new book that certainly won’t increase his chances of getting invited to cocktail parties inside the Beltway.

Known as the “funding father of conservatism,” Richard Viguerie’s “Takeover: The 100-Year War for the Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Finally Win It” takes sides in what he describes as a century-old war for the soul of the Republican Party.

Released nationwide today, it offers a blueprint for how liberty-loving, small government conservatives can win the battle against big-government Republicans…

Target No. 1 is Karl Rove

Viguerie writes that Karl Rove “has grown wealthy by promoting the idea that content-free campaigns, rather than conservative principles, are the path to victory for the Republican Party.”

“His record of 22 losses to 9 wins in 2012 shows the folly of the Republican establishment in following Rove’s advice.”

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Pelosi: We’re Keeping the Employer Mandate No Matter What Gibbs’ Clients Want (+video)

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Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey / Creative Commons

Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey / Creative Commons

Last week, former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs suggested that the employer mandate in ObamaCare would not survive, and he certainly has reason to think so. The White House keeps unilaterally changing the enforcement date and the parameters of the mandate, clearly hoping to escape political accountability for it when it finally takes effect. Yesterday, Candy Crowley asked Nancy Pelosi if Gibbs was right, but the House Minority Leader dismissed Gibbs’ prediction as just Gibbs speaking on behalf of his corporate clients:

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) suggested Sunday that former top Obama aide Robert Gibbs’s comment that the employer mandate portion of the Affordable Care Act won’t survive might be related to Gibbs’s business interests.

“I don’t know who his clients are or what his perspective is,” Pelosi told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “But we are celebrating the fact that we have over seven million who have signed up.” …

Asked again about Gibbs on Sunday, Pelosi expressed exasperation that his comments would be given such prominence. “I don’t know why we’re focusing on that,” she told CNN. “One person says one thing. Seven million people signed up.”

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Survey: Employers Beat Obamacare in Covering Uninsured

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Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yuri Gripas

Photo Credit: REUTERS / Yuri Gripas

Employer-sponsored coverage has accounted for the bulk of a recent drop in the uninsured population, according to a RAND Corporation study released Tuesday, not Obamacare.

When it comes to the previously uninsured, 7.2 million gained employer-sponsored coverage, 3.6 million gained Medicaid and just 1.4 million signed up through Obamacare exchanges through the survey’s conclusion on March 28.

With employer-based coverage providing most of the bump in coverage, it will be difficult to attribute the gains to the health care law, given the two-year delay of the employer mandate.

The in-depth survey’s finding was previewed by the Los Angeles Times, which reported last week that just one-third of exchange sign ups were previously uninsured. The full results of the study are now public and through mid-March, 3.9 million people were enrolled in marketplace plans. Just 1.4 million of those did not have prior health coverage.

The authors collected data through March 28 and acknowledged that the survey didn’t include the surge of so-called enrollments in the final days of the month, which brought the Obama administration’s total to 7.1 million, or the ongoing enrollment that’s available through April 15. But the bulk of the uninsured that highly anticipated purchasing subsidized health insurance on the exchanges would have been more likely to purchase coverage right away. The study did not determine how many enrollees had paid for their health plans.

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John Boehner Cries at Taco Bell Event

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Photo Credit: US News

Photo Credit: US News

On Tuesday, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, started to sob at a Taco Bell event, but it wasn’t because the salsa was too spicy.

Boehner made a brief cameo at a gathering sponsored by the Taco Bell Foundation for Teens and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, as the former gave the latter $30 million to help teens graduate from high school. (Taco Bell employs many teens, so that’s the connection.)

“Some of you know how I am about these things,” Boehner said, choking back tears while praising the work of the Boys & Girls Clubs. “We need to do a better job at educating more American kids. We live in America, for goodness’ sake.”

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House Committee: Possible Crimes by IRS Official

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

The chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee says investigators have uncovered evidence that a former Internal Revenue Service official may have committed crimes as part of the agency’s tea party controversy.

Rep. Dave Camp set a committee vote for Wednesday on whether to refer Lois Lerner, who used to head the agency’s tax-exempt division, to the Justice Department “for possible criminal prosecution.”

Camp, R-Mich., did not specify which laws Lerner may have broken.

Lerner’s lawyer, William W. Taylor III, has said she broke no laws. On Monday, Taylor emailed this response to Camp’s announcement: “One word: Ridiculous.”

Camp’s committee has been investigating the IRS for nearly a year. Unlike other House committees, Ways and Means has access to confidential taxpayer information as part of its investigation.

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5 Reasons Democrats Are Full Of It When They Say The Paycheck Fairness Act Will Help Women

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Photo Credit: IJ Review

Photo Credit: IJ Review

If you judged the Paycheck Fairness Act, a bill that is being voted on in the Senate on Tuesday, based upon its name alone, you would assume that it is a good thing. And that’s precisely why the bill’s Democrat creators named it as such – so that they can present it as a law that will help women in the workplace.

The problem is that it doesn’t actually help women at all. In many cases, it actually hurts women by placing costly regulations on businesses that may lower the number of workers they can afford to employ:

#1 – It attempts to outlaw something that is already illegal.“Gender-based wage discrimination has been illegal since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. If a woman is truly the victim of wage discrimination, she already has the ability to sue.”

#2 – It ignores the complex reasons that women earn less than men. “It would certainly be wrong to suggest that workplace discrimination is entirely extinct, but the PFA presumes the opposite – that men’s earnings outperform women’s solely because of discrimination and that more lawsuits are the fix. Reality is more complex. The attitude behind the Paycheck Fairness Act completely ignores that women and men may have different preferences and priorities when it comes to pay and jobs.”

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Sharpton Pushes Back on Report He was Mob Informant

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Photo Credit: REUTERS

Photo Credit: REUTERS

Al Sharpton on Monday dismissed a report portraying him as a one-time mob informant for the FBI, calling the claims old news and a “crazy” attempt to discredit him.

“I don’t see this as news,” Sharpton told FoxNews.com. “This has been brought up three or four times now. I don’t understand. It’s crazy.”

TheSmokingGun.com story describes in detail how Sharpton in the mid-1980s secretly recorded Mafia bosses and other underworld figures for an FBI-NYPD crime task force.

The 12,196-word story — in which he is referred to as CI-7, short for confidential informant #7 — says investigators got Sharpton to “flip” after getting him close enough to agreeing to broker a drug deal connected to boxing promoter Don King that they could threaten him with charges.

Though the task force took a “shotgun” approach in giving Sharpton a variety of snitching assignments, they ultimately wanted inroads into the corrupt New York music industry and realized he had the connections, according to the story.

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Parental Revolt Against Common Core Prompts States to Take Action

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

Eleven-year-old Leo Tuttle is a fifth-grader at an Indianapolis private school, where he struggles to keep up with the demanding curriculum.

But the school is where Leo’s mother, Erin Tuttle, wants him to be, rather than a public school or even the Catholic school he previously attended.

Erin Tuttle moved Leo to the private school when her home state of Indiana, along with 45 other states, agreed to follow the Common Core State Standards Initiative for all its public schools and those following the charter school program, such as the Catholic school. The Common Core standards are a set of guidelines for schools, initiated federally, to improve and make consistent education standards in math and English language arts.

The goal of Common Core is to “… articulate what students need to know in grades K-12 in order to be ready for college or a career after they graduate,” said Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, which supports and promotes the standards.

Many students and teachers saw the standards for the first time this year, as the program was being phased in nationwide. And now that they’ve seen it, many are not happy with it, and they’re joining an ever-increasing group of critics who are lining up against it.

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Pope Francis: ‘The Image of God is the Married Couple: The Man and the Woman’

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Photo Credit: AP / Gabriel Bouys

Photo Credit: AP / Gabriel Bouys

Although the national gay magazine The Advocate named Pope Francis its “Person of the Year” in December 2013, the Pope repeated on Apr. 2 the Catholic Church’s teaching that marriage is reserved for one man and one woman, adding that this is part of “God’s design” and that “the image of God is the married couple: the man and the woman ….”

During his General Audience speech at St. Peter’s Square on Apr. 2, before a crowd estimated at 45,000, Pope Francis first cited Genesis, saying, “God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them. … Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”

“The image of God is the married couple: the man and the woman; not only the man, not only the woman, but both of them together,” said the Pope. “God’s covenant with us is represented in that covenant between man and woman. And this is very beautiful.”

“When a man and a woman celebrate the Sacrament of Matrimony, God as it were ‘is mirrored’ in them; He impresses in them his own features and the indelible character of his love,” said Pope Francis. “Marriage is the icon of God’s love for us.”

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Team Boehner to Drudge: We Didn’t ‘Expand’ Obamacare, We Repealed It

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Photo Credit: Washington Examiner

Hours after the Drudge Report suggested on Sunday that “Republicans expand[ed] Obamacare” in the headline for the site’s lead story, an “alert” from the office of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, countered that they had actually “chip[ped] away another piece” of the law.

The recent change “eliminated a cap on deductibles for small group policies offered inside the law’s health care exchanges as well as outside,” the Associated Press explained.

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