Palin Is Right: To Win, GOP Must Adopt Tea Party Populism

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Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore

The establishment Republican Party leaders and their sometime abettors in the establishment media would like to forget that the Tea Party uprising of 2009 and 2010 was as much a revolt against the entrenched GOP leadership as it was a rebellion against Barack Obama and his liberal agenda.

Tea Partiers and grassroots conservatives frustrated by the slow pace of change in the GOP or its tendency to equate change with lurching to the left were therefore delighted when former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin took to the stage at CPAC and delivered a stinging rebuke to the advocates of big government Republicanism and the abandonment of the Republican Party’s support for traditional marriage and other elements of the traditional values agenda.

Most of the media coverage of Sarah Palin’s CPAC speech centered on her humorous tweaking of Karl Rove and America’s nanny-in-chief New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, those who stop there in their analysis of Governor Palin’s remarks are missing the most important element of her CPAC speech: her celebration of the populist elements of the Tea Party agenda and a call for the Republican Party to embrace them.

In the first of two key points in the speech, Palin invoked the wisdom of Lady Margaret Thatcher to remind Republicans that the way forward after the 2012 election disaster was not to be more like the Democrats, saying, “The permanent political class is in permanent political mode so where do we go from here? One of my idols, Lady Margaret Thatcher, she offered this advice after her party lost at the polls. She told fellow conservatives not to get lost in abstract debates and green-eye-shade accounting. Mrs. Thatcher advised conservatives to focus their concerns first and foremost on the people. She said; look at every problem from the grassroots, not from the top down. She also cautioned Conservatives not to go wobbly on their beliefs…”

Governor Palin also gave a good analysis of the disaster Obamanomics has wreaked upon America’s middle class. These facts are important, and should get more media coverage whenever the White House says the economy is improving and the recession is over — but pointing them out is not unique to Sarah Palin. What is unique and important is her analysis of how they relate to the growth of government and the growing divide between Washington and “heartland country” as Palin calls it.

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History Channel: Resemblance Of Obama, Satanic Character Not Intentional

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Photo Credit: History Channel

The History Channel on Monday denied that the resemblance between President Obama and an actor playing Satan in the channel’s miniseries “The Bible” was intentional.

The statement from the cable network came after a storm of commentary on Twitter and other social media on how the hooded Satan looked like the president.

“HISTORY channel has the highest respect for President Obama,” the network said in a press release. “The series was produced with an international and diverse cast of respected actors. It’s unfortunate that anyone made this false connection. HISTORY’s ‘The Bible’ is meant to enlighten people on its rich stories and deep history.”

Executive producers Mark Burnett and Roma Downey blasted the controversy as “utter nonsense” in the same release, which noted that actor Mehdi Ouzaani had played Satan before Obama was elected.

“The actor who played Satan, Mehdi Ouzaani, is a highly acclaimed Moroccan actor. He has previously played parts in several Biblical epics — including Satanic characters long before Barack Obama was elected as our president,” the pair said.

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Conservative House Republicans Propose Balancing Budget In Four Years

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Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin

As Republicans and Democrats try to find middle ground between the budgets that each side has proposed, the most conservative members of the House are throwing another budget into the mix, one that would balance the budget in four years.

The Republican Study Committee’s “Back to Basics” budget proposes some of the same things as the budget introduced last week by House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, but it proposes to balance the budget by 2017, rather than 2023.

It does so by returning discretionary spending to $950 billion, lower than 2008 levels, cutting non-defense discretionary spending by $6 billion over 10 years and making serious cuts to entitlements.

Under the RSC budget, the retirement age at which people could receive Social Security payments would go up to 70, a change that would “slowly phase in” for people 51 and younger, and it would also adopt the chained CPI cost of living adjustment.

The budget would also raise the age at which people become Medicare eligible for individuals who are currently younger than 55. Like the Ryan budget, it would turn Medicare into a premium support system, but the RSC budget would enact this reform for persons under age 60, while Ryan’s budget changes it for people younger than 55.

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Obama Nominates Leading DOJ Opponent of Voter ID Laws As Labor Secretary

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Photo Credit: AP

New Labor Secretary nominee Thomas Perez was cited by both a federal judge and the Justice Department inspector general for giving incomplete testimony on the controversial handling of the New Black Panther voter intimidation case, but he took the lead in prosecuting federal lawsuits against state voter ID laws as head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.

Further, Perez served as a top aide to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy and was once disqualified from running for Maryland state attorney general.

President Barack Obama announced Perez for the cabinet post Monday morning in the East Room of the White House in front of an audience that included Attorney General Eric Holder, MSNBC commentator Al Sharpton and AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

Perez has been the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department since 2009 and before that served as the secretary of the Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulations from 2007 to 2009.

“As a civil rights attorney, a staffer for Sen. Ted Kennedy, a member of the Montgomery, Md., County Council, Tom fought for a level playing field where hard work and responsibility are rewarded and working families can get ahead,” Obama said in his announcement.

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Reporter Asks Carney: Will Obama Cut Back On Lavish Vacations, Golf Trips?

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Photo Credit: U.S. Embassy Jakarta, Indonesia

A reporter from Colorado asked White House spokesman Jay Carney how President Obama justifies “lavish vacations” and golf trips, and whether he plans to cut back.

Carney responded, “I can tell you that this president is focused every day on policies that create economic growth and help advance job creation.”

Here’s the full exchange:

Q. All right. I wanted to follow up on this young woman’s question about the high unemployment out in places like Colorado, all around the country, especially in the minority communities — exceptionally high unemployment. And when there is government workers who may be furloughed, millions of Americans unemployed, and family budgets that have been cut, how does the President justify lavish vacations and a golf trip to Florida at taxpayer expense? And does he plan to cut back on his travel?

A.  I can tell you that this President is focused every day on policies that create economic growth and help advance job creation.  We have presided over the past three years over an economy that’s produced over 6.3 million private sector jobs, and we have more work to do.  And this President’s number-one priority is growth and job creation.

Watch video here:

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U.S. Contractor Charged With Passing Nuclear Secrets To Chinese Woman

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Photo Credit: Official U.S. Navy Imagery

A U.S. defense contractor in Hawaii has been arrested on charges of passing national defense secrets, including classified information about nuclear weapons, to a Chinese woman with whom he was romantically involved, authorities said on Monday.

Benjamin Pierce Bishop, 59, a former U.S. Army officer who works as a civilian employee of a defense contractor at U.S. Pacific Command in Oahu was arrested on Friday and made his first appearance in federal court on Monday, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Hawaii said in a news release.

He is charged with one count of willfully communicating national defense information to a person not entitled to receive it, and one count of unlawfully retaining documents related to national defense. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei, asked about the case at a daily news briefing in Beijing, said he did “not understand the relevant situation”, and declined further comment.

China and the United States, the world’s two largest economies, have long engaged in spying against each other. Last year China arrested a Chinese state security official on suspicion of spying for the United States, sources said, a case both countries had kept quiet for several months as they strove to prevent a fresh crisis in relations.

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GOP Road Map: Immigration Reform and Fewer Debates

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Photo Credit: Chris Usher

Republican leaders spent three months studying their 2012 election defeat and on Monday announced they were beat on nearly every aspect of politicking, from money to message to manpower, and said one immediate change should be to embrace immigration reform — a lightning-rod issue that nearly tore the party apart under the George W. Bush administration.

Unveiling a 98-page election post-mortem, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus promised a kinder, gentler GOP that will not write off any voters. That begins, the party said, with Hispanic voters and immigration reform.

“By 2050, we’ll be a majority-minority country, and in both 2008 and 2012, President Obama won a combined 80 percent of the votes of all minority groups,” Mr. Priebus said Monday. “The RNC cannot and will not write off any demographic, community, or region of this country.”

The plan calls for the GOP to become a party that voters believe cares about them, beginning with a $10 million image makeover to attract minorities. The plan also includes nuts-and-bolts suggestions, such as shortening the presidential primary process and trying to take control of the debates, which are currently run by television networks.

Mr. Priebus‘ review shies away from blaming any specific people for the 2012 election, which saw GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney lose a race many in his party thought winnable.

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Liberal Media Lie Again, This Time About CPAC

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The liberal media covered the 40th Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) pretty much like they cover everything else — deceitfully, with a partisan bias that is transparent to every honest and intelligent person who actually pays attention. On any subject of potential political significance, there is a yawning chasm between (a) actual events and (b) the deliberately dishonest portrayal of those events by the hired liars whose biggest fraud is their ludicrous pretense to objectivity. If the New York Times could find a way to put a liberal spin on sports, they certainly would: “Louisville Gets Top NCAA Seed; Women, Minorities Hardest Hit.”

Take, for example, the young comedian Steven Crowder. While serving as emcee on the Potomac Ballroom stage Saturday at CPAC, Crowder made a joke about actress (and, it is rumored, future Kentucky Senate candidate) Ashley Judd: “This just in, Ashley Judd just tweeted that purchasing Apple products is akin to rape — from her iPhone.” Which is pretty doggone funny if you know that,as Alex Pappas of the Daily Caller reported, Judd has claimed that the purchasers of the iPhone and other Apple products are “financing mass rape” by using minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Judd has a penchant for throwing around “rape”in her far-left political rants. She has compared coal-mining in Kentucky to rape and, also, to genocide in Rwanda. Judd’s long history of such outrageous comments has Republicans laughing mirthfully at the prospect of the actress challenging Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in Kentucky next year. But according to liberal journalists — whose cheerleading for Democrats is now so unapologetically blatant that it is taken for granted — the real outrage is that any Republican would criticize Judd’s lunatic utterances.

This is apparently why the Huffington Post decided to lie about Crowder’s joke. “Steven Crowder, a Fox News contributor who hosted part of Saturday’s activities at the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference, made a questionable remark about actress and possible Kentucky Senate candidate Ashley Judd,”a post at the site described it, omitting both the factual context and the first part of the joke, quoting only Crowder’s follow-on comment: “What is this obsession with Ashley Judd and rape? It’s pretty unnerving.”

By tagging Crowder as a “Fox News contributor,” the writer of the HuffPo item signaled to liberal readers that the young comic is a hate-object. Evidently, the unnamed writer – the cowardlyHuffPo liar didn’t put a byline on this cheap smear-job –didn’t trust his readers to have enough sense to decide whether or not Crowder’s joke was “questionable.” And, of course, there was the clever ju-jitsu reversal: The story is not about whether Ashley Judd’s rhetoric was too over-the-top for a Senate candidate —Judd’s own remarks aren’t even quoted — but rather whether a comedian’s joke about Judd is “questionable.”

Speaking of questions: Is there any joke that anyone could make about any Democrat that the Huffington Post would not deem“questionable”? Of course not. The entire mission of Arianna Huffington’s organization, which she sold for more than $300 million to AOL a few years ago, is to help Democrats and harm Republicans. …

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RNC To Spend $10 Million To Reach Minorities

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Photo Credit: Chris Usher

Reeling from back-to-back presidential losses and struggling to cope with the country’s changing racial and ethnic makeup, the Republican National Committee plans to spend $10 million this year to send hundreds of party workers into Hispanic, black and Asian communities to promote its brand among voters who overwhelmingly supported Democrats in 2012.

Committee chairman Reince Priebus on Sunday also proposed shortening the presidential nominating calendar in 2016 and limiting the number of primary-season debates to avoid the self-inflicted damage from inside-party squabbling on the eventual nominee. Priebus’ top-to-bottom changes include picking the moderators for the debates and then crowning the nominee as early as June so he or she could begin a general election campaign as quickly as possible.

“Mitt Romney was a sitting duck for two months over the summer,” Priebus said of the 2012 GOP nominee.

To help his party ahead of the 2016 contest already in its earliest stages, Priebus said he would be hiring new staffers to build the GOP among voters in the states.

“It will include hundreds of people — paid — across the country, from coast-to-coast, in Hispanic, African American, Asian communities, talking about our party, talking about our brand, talking about what we believe in, going to community events, going to swearing-in ceremonies, being a part of the community on an ongoing basis, paid for by the Republican National Committee, to make the case for our party and our candidates,” Priebus said.

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Sen. Sessions Presses USDA For More Info On Mexican Food Stamp Use, Participation Rates

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Photo Credit: Daily Caller

After an effort to defund the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s food stamp outreach partnership with the Mexican government went down in committee Thursday, Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions continued to press the agency for more information about non-citizen participation in the food stamp program.

In a Friday letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack obtained by The Daily Caller, Sessions — who has been exchanging letters with Vilsack about USDA’s partnership with Mexico since last summer — requested additional information about the people the USDA has been enrolling in nutrition assistance programs and the agency’s program goals.

Last month, in a letter recently obtained by TheDC, Vilsack revealed that the share of overall Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), or food stamp, benefits going to legal non-citizens has accounted for between 3.5–4.0 percent of the total caseload since 2004.

The agriculture secretary further addressed the fact that those non-citizens who enroll in SNAP are not considered to be government-reliant under the current policies governing immigrant inadmissibility under the public charge statue. He additionally noted that the agency has provided guidance to this effect — pointing to a February 2010 letter from USDA Under Secretary for Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Kevin Concannon to all state commissioners.

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