Establishment Betrayal, Other Factors Leading Republicans to Abandon Party Label

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Photo Credit: legalinsurrectionThis week, The Frontier Lab published the results of months of research into why some Republicans are refusing to go by the label “Republican,” choosing to identify as anything but. I was the Research Director for this study, which applied a research approach called “Behavioral Event Modeling,” which essentially reverse engineers and maps all events that precede an individual’s disaffiliation…

The results were fascinating; after combining the flowcharts from individuals who share conservative or moderate views and no longer will use the label “Republican” to describe themselves, we ascertained four core patterns that they had in common:

1. Rejection of the “Lesser of Two Evils” argument;
2. Articulation of “Loss of Hope” in the GOP;
3. Affiliation with a new community, and
4. Incident of perceived betrayal by the GOP establishment.

…Disaffiliation from the Republican label is not only, or even primarily, a matter of philosophical differences. Rather, the perception of former Republican adherents that their party has personally attacked them, continued to present choices as a “lesser of two evils,” select candidates and principles unpalatable to voters to the point where they retain “no hope,” and failed to provide the sense of community that other outlets like talk radio and the Tea Party provide, reveal that ideology takes a back burner to what is essentially a hollow brand for those disaffiliating.

Read more from this story HERE.

IRS’s Lois Lerner Who Claimed She “Did Nothing Wrong,” Wants Full Immunity to Testify

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Photo Credit: APEmbattled IRS official Lois Lerner will not testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee unless she’s given immunity from prosecution, her lawyer told POLITICO Tuesday.

“They can obtain her testimony tomorrow by doing it the easy way … immunity,” William W. Taylor III said in a phone interview. “That’s the way to resolve all of this.”

The comments reflect the hard-line approach Lerner, the former head of the IRS division that scrutinized conservative groups, and her legal team are taking in defending her role in the agency’s scandal.

Taylor, a founding partner of Zuckerman Spaeder LLP, is even shrugging off the possibility that the full House might vote to hold Lerner in contempt.

“None of this matters,” he said. “I mean, nobody likes to be held in contempt of Congress, of course, but the real question is one that we’re fairly confident about, and I don’t think any district judge in the country would hold that she waived.”

Read more from this story HERE.

Arizona Schools Getting $465k Grant from Islamic Group With Muslim Brotherhood, Terror Ties

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Photo Credit: YouTubeLast week, the governing board of the Tucson Unified School District asked the school board to accept a $465,000 curriculum grant from the Qatar Foundation International, a global philanthropic organization with strong ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, the parent organization of the terrorist group Hamas.

The grant money is intended to implement “innovative curricula and teaching materials to be used in any Arabic language classroom,” reports the Arizona Daily Independent.

Two Tucson schools, Safford K-8 Magnet School and Cholla High Magnet School, will be the recipients of the infusion of the terror-infested cash, according to Tucson News Now.

About 100 students at Cholla High Magnet School are learning Arabic. At Safford K-8 Magnet School, 125 students are learning the language.

Last year’s grant for Arabic language from the Qatar Foundation was $55,000.

Read more from this story HERE.

House Republicans Launch Investigation Into Employer Mandate Delay

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Photo Credit: LifeNews

Photo Credit: LifeNews

House Republicans said Wednesday they are launching an investigation into the Obama administration’s decision to delay the “employer mandate” provision in the new health care law.

Members of the Energy and Commerce Committee argued the White House’s consultations with business leaders ahead of Tuesday’s announcement were conducted in secret and raise questions about the administration’s ability to carry out other facets of the Affordable Care Act.

“Just as the law was crafted out of sight from the American people, the administration is again taking care of some interests behind closed doors while struggling Americans are left to pay for the looming rate shock and grapple with the law’s complex mandates,” said committee Chairman Fred Upton, Michigan Republican.

The employer mandate required businesses with more than 50 workers to offer insurance to all full-time employees, or else pay a fine of $2,000 per worker. Business lobbied heavily against the mandate, and now it will not go into effect until after the 2014 mid-term elections.

Read more from this story HERE.

NSA Accused of Breaking More Rules to Spy on Citizens

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Photo Credit: WND

Photo Credit: WND

Much like some of the nation’s biggest gangsters have been taken down by the fine print – tax rules and the like – over the generations, it now appears that the National Security Agency’s massive spy-on-citizens scheme could unravel because officials reportedly failed to follow the rules.

The challenge is being raised by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which started protesting the NSA surveillance plans a few weeks ago, and promises to renew the protest every week until something happens.

It points out that the NSA’s search and copy functions regarding Americans and their telephone or other records, “also constitutes a legislative rule that ‘substantively affects the public to a degree sufficient to implicate the policy interests animating notice-and-comment rulemaking.”

What that means is that the organization believes the Administrative Procedures Act requires the NSA to open up its surveillance strategy for a public comment period – before it legally could begin those search and copy functions.

“Accordingly, the NSA’s collection of domestic communications, absent the opportunity for public comment, is unlawful,” the letter to NSA chief Keith Alexander and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel explains.

Read more from this story HERE.

Red, Divided and Blue Fly This Independence Day

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

It seems entirely revealing, if dispiriting, that the days before the July Fourth holiday showed Red America and Blue America pulling apart at an accelerating rate.

Of all of our national holidays, Independence Day is the one most intimately rooted in our common history and shared experience. Yet this year it arrives against a background of polarization, separation, and confrontation in the states and Washington alike. With municipal politics as the occasional exception, the pattern of solidifying agreement within the parties—and widening disagreement between them—is dominating our decisions at every level.

On almost all of our major policy choices, the common thread is that the election of 2012 did not “break the fever” of polarization, as President Obama once hoped it might. Last November, Obama became only the third Democrat in the party’s history to win a majority of the popular vote twice. But congressional Republicans, preponderantly representing the minority that voted against Obama, have conceded almost nothing to his majority—leaving the two sides at a stalemate. Meanwhile, beyond the Beltway, states that lean Democratic and those that lean Republican are separating at a frenetic pace.

Consider a few recent headlines. The Supreme Court decision upholding the lower-court invalidation of California’s Proposition 8 restored gay marriage in the nation’s largest state. It also capped a remarkable 2013 march for gay marriage through blue states, including Delaware, Minnesota, and Rhode Island (with Illinois and New Jersey possibly joining before long). The consensus is solidifying fast enough that 2014 could see several blue-state Republican gubernatorial candidates running on accepting gay-marriage statutes as settled law. Former California Lt. Gov Abel Maldonado, a likely 2014 GOP gubernatorial contender who this week reversed his earlier opposition to support gay marriage, may be an early straw in that breeze.

The story in red states, though, remains very different. Almost all of them have banned gay marriage.

Read more from this story HERE.

White House Violates Law with ObamaCare Delay

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Photo Credit: breitbart

Photo Credit: breitbart

By Ken Klukowski. Obama administration officials are illegally delaying enforcement of a central provision in the president’s namesake legislation in a desperate attempt to manipulate the 2014 midterm elections and swell the ranks of those who look to government for healthcare.

The White House is beginning to sense that when Americans realize the price of “free” healthcare, they’re likely to take swift vengeance on those responsible.

Section 1513 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, better known as Obamacare) requires all large employers to provide health insurance for their employees. “Large employers” are those with at least 50 full-time employees, and “full-time” is defined as averaging 30 or more hours per week…

Yet in a blatantly illegal move, the Obama administration is presuming to rewrite the ACA by choosing not to enforce provisions that are causing visible problems. The IRS—which is tasked with enforcing the Employer Mandate—will simply not enforce it until 2015. Every large employer in the country is under the mandate. If they don’t comply, then they are breaking federal law.

But the IRS not enforcing Section 1513 is like a policeman who patrols a stretch of road who says for the next year, he won’t issue any speeding tickets. He has no authority to suspend the law, but if he chooses to violate his duty by failing to enforce the law, then to all the motorists on the road it’s as if the law does not exist. Read more from this story HERE.

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Obama admin delays major requirement of health law

By Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar. In a major concession to business groups, the Obama administration Tuesday unexpectedly announced a one-year delay, until after the 2014 elections, in a central requirement of the new health care law that many companies provide coverage for their workers or face fines.

The move sacrificed timely implementation of President Barack Obama’s signature legislation but may help the administration politically by blunting an election-year line of attack Republicans were planning to use. The employer requirements are among the most complex parts of the health care law, which is designed to expand coverage for uninsured Americans.

“We have heard concerns about the complexity of the requirements and the need for more time to implement them effectively,” Treasury Assistant Secretary Mark Mazur said in a blog post. “We have listened to your feedback and we are taking action.”

Business groups were jubilant. “A pleasant surprise,” said Randy Johnson, senior vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. There was no inkling in advance of the administration’s action, he said.

“We commend the administration’s wise move,” said Neil Trautwein, a vice president of the National Retail Federation. It “will provide employers and businesses more time to update their health care coverage without threat of arbitrary punishment.” Read more from this story HERE.

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Obamacare’s employer mandate delayed to 2015

By Tom Howell Jr. Facing an outcry from businesses, the Obama administration Tuesday said it would delay a key part of the new health care law for an additional year, to 2015 — a stunning move that officials said gives them a chance to work out kinks over how to administer the so-called employer mandate.

In statements Tuesday evening, White House adviser Valerie Jarrett and Mark J. Mazur, assistant secretary for tax policy at the Treasury, said the goal was to give businesses more time to comply with the rules, though opponents said it was an acknowledgment of a looming disaster.

The delay is to the mandate requiring businesses with more than 50 workers to offer insurance to all full-time employees, or else pay a fine of $2,000 per worker. Business lobbied heavily against it, and now it will not go into effect until after the 2014 midterm elections.

“We have listened to your feedback. And we are taking action,” Mr. Mazur said.

The individual mandate, which applies to those who are self-employed or whose companies don’t offer insurance, is still in effect as of 2014, as are the state-by-state insurance markets, or “exchanges,” which are to be operating as of Oct. 1 and will allow small businesses and individuals without employer-based insurance to shop for health coverage with the help of government subsidies. Read more from this story HERE.

John Cusack: We’re Not Morons, Stop the Bait and Switch with Snowden

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Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

Photo Credit: Columbia Pictures

John Cusack wants you to stop paying attention to Edward Snowden.

The actor lashed out at reporters Tuesday for fixating on Snowden’s saga, which has taken on the flavor of an international thriller in recent weeks.

Criticizing media personalities by name who have questioned either Snowden’s or Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald’s character—such as CNN’s Jeffrey Toobin, The New York Times’s David Brooks, and NBC News’s David Gregory—Cusack in a conference call said focusing on Snowden at the expense of the information he uncovered was “the oldest bait-and-switch in the book.”

“We’re not morons,” he said. “The questions this NSA scandal raises aren’t going away. How long do we expect rational people to excuse the abuse of power?”

Read more from this story HERE.

University Tells Student to Remove Cross Necklace Because it Might Be “Offensive” to Other Students

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Photo Credit: Fox News

Photo Credit: Fox News

A Sonoma State University student was ordered to remove a cross necklace by a supervisor who thought other students might find it offensive, in a case that prompted even one campus official to speculate that “political correctness got out of hand.”

Audrey Jarvis, 19, a liberal arts major at the northern California university, said she had no choice but to seek a “religious accommodation” in order to wear the cross. Her lawyer said she deserves an apology, and the school seems ready to oblige.

“It’s amazing in this day of diversity and tolerance on university campuses that a university official would engage in this type of obvious religious discrimination,” said Hiram Sasser, an attorney with Liberty Institute, which is representing Jarvis.

Jarvis was working for the university’s Associated Students Productions at a June 27 student orientation fair for incoming freshmen when her supervisor told her to remove the two-inch-long cross necklace, according to Sasser.

Sasser said the supervisor told her that the chancellor had a policy against wearing religious items and further explained “that she could not wear her cross necklace because it might offend others, it might make incoming students feel unwelcome, or it might cause incoming students to feel that ASP was not an organization they should join.”

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State Department Bureau Spent $630,000 on Facebook ‘Likes’

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Photo Credit: Thinkstock Image

Photo Credit: Thinkstock Image

State Department officials spent $630,000 to get more Facebook “likes,” prompting employees to complain to a government watchdog that the bureau was “buying fans” in social media, the agency’s inspector general says.

The department’s Bureau of International Information Programs spent the money to increase its “likes” count between 2011 and March 2013.

“Many in the bureau criticize the advertising campaigns as ‘buying fans’ who may have once clicked on an ad or ‘liked’ a photo but have no real interest in the topic and have never engaged further,” the inspector general reported.

The spending increased the bureau’s English-language Facebook page likes from 100,000 to more than 2 million and to 450,000 on Facebook’s foreign-language pages.

Despite the surge in likes, the IG said the effort failed to reach the bureau’s target audience, which is largely older and more influential than the people liking its pages. Only about 2 percent of fans actually engage with the pages by liking, sharing or commenting.

Read more from this story HERE.