With Second Term Assured, Obama Aides Eye Jobs as Lobbyists

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With President Obama’s reelection a done deal, headhunters are expecting worn-out administration aides to look for new jobs in the influence industry.

Several Obama aides started making post-election plans well before November, holding discussions with executive search firms in Washington as early as this past spring. Their stock has risen since Obama’s victory, but they face a tough job market on K Street, where belt-tightening has become the norm.

Several headhunters for law and lobby firms said one thing that won’t work against the job seekers is Obama’s executive order on ethics, which bans former officials from lobbying the administration while he is in office.

“That hasn’t come up once,” Eric Vautour of Russell Reynolds Associates said of the ethics order. “They can still direct those activities. If you’re asking someone to go run a whole department, they can go ask someone to make a call. It’s not that big a deal. Clients recognize that as well.”

While some lobbyists said the lobbying ban could diminish administration officials’ value on K Street, others said it has not been a major factor in assessing recruits from the administration.

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GOP Establishment Warned Of Coming Backlash If They Meddle in 2014 Primaries

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A growing push for more establishment involvement in Republican primaries may put the party in a bind as the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) grapples with helping the best possible candidates get elected in primaries in 2014.

It’s a catch-22 for the party: Stay out, and risk untested candidates like Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) or Richard Mourdock of Indiana prevailing in the primaries and losing winnable races; or engage early and risk the kind of grassroots backlash that divided the party in many of the 2010 Senate races.

There is a consensus among a number of state Republican Party officials and grassroots groups that backlash is all but assured if the GOP establishment gets involved to the same extent as 2010.

“There’s always going to be fundamental dislike of the national party coming in to a local or a state race and saying, ‘This is who we want to pick,’” said Keli Carender, national grassroots coordinator for the Tea Party Patriots.

Tea Party backlash to establishment engagement in a number of Senate primaries during the 2010 cycle is part of what cost the party some easy wins that cycle, critics say.

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Rasmussen: Respecting Voters Matters More Than Policy

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The Republican Party has won a majority of the popular vote just once in the last six elections. That dismal track record followed a party revival in the 1980s, when Ronald Reagan led the GOP to three straight popular vote majorities.

To understand what went wrong, it’s important to remember Reagan was an insurgent candidate who defeated the Republican establishment of his era. When Reagan left office, however, the old establishment reasserted control. They consistently nominated candidates for president who opposed Reagan in 1980 and consistently lost elections.

The difference is that Ronald Reagan believed in the American people and was skeptical of government. Today’s Republican establishment believes in government and is skeptical of the American people. That’s why most Republican voters today believe the party is out of touch with the base.

Consider Mitt Romney’s infamous comments about the 47 percent who are allegedly dependent upon government. After the election, Romney even said that President Obama won by giving “gifts” to these dependent Americans. The Republican establishment grumbles about makers versus takers.

Reagan had a different view. He asked, “How can we love our country and not love our countrymen?” When he passed a major tax reform bill, he was proud that it removed millions of low-income Americans from the income tax rolls. Reagan looked at low-income Americans and saw people who wanted an opportunity to work hard and get ahead. He saw a nation that was happy to extend a helping hand to all who were willing to work.

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Surprise! Audit Uncovers Rampant Fraud in Fed Program

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A federal audit of one part of the Medicaid system has uncovered hundreds of millions of dollars in suspected fraud, including payments to caregivers to provide home-care services to the disabled even when they are hospitalized or in nursing homes.

“It would seem inconceivable – even for today’s bloated government – if it wasn’t laid out in a report … by the offending agency’s inspector general,” noted Judicial Watch, which reported on the systemic failure.

Judicial Watch said the issue centers on personal care services provided by the federal and state-funded health insurance Medicaid, which have been provided to the disabled since the Supreme Court ruled in the 1990s that such care is a civil right.

“The idea is to allow the sick, disabled and those with chronic or temporary conditions [to] stay home and, in turn, avoid sticking Uncle Sam with a hefty hospitalization bill,” Judicial Watch said.

“Instead, Medicaid’s personal care services program is rife with corruption that was first exposed more than five years ago and continues to be documented annually by the agency’s watchdog. The budget has ballooned to more than $12 billion a year, just to send what amounts to a nanny to provide supportive ‘nonmedical services’ like meal preparation, housework, help with bathing and getting dressed, transportation and even money management.”

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Food Stamp Recipients Outnumber Populations of 24 States Combined

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An analysis by Breitbart News has found that the number of individuals on food stamps now exceeds the combined populations of 24 states and the District of Columbia.

In November, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that a record 47,102,780 individuals receive food stamps.

According to US. Census Bureau data, that figure exceeds the combined populations of: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Idaho, Iowa, Kansas, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming.

Since January 2009, the number of individuals on food stamps has skyrocketed from 31.9 million to the current record high 47.1 million. By comparison, in 1969 just 2.8 million Americans received food stamps.

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Club for Growth to GOP Establishment: Define ‘Electable’

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In response to signals that the GOP establishment is prepared to play a more aggressive role in 2014 Senate primaries, Club for Growth President Chris Chocola fires a shot across the bow in an op-ed published Wednesday.

“In the wake of some missed opportunities to pick up seats in the U.S. Senate over the past few cycles, one tactical change floated by the GOP establishment is that the party apparatus and its affiliated Super PACs should play a more influential role in primaries to make sure that more “electable” candidates are nominated.

It is hard to imagine a bigger mistake…

Everyone wants to avoid the next Todd Akin or Christine O’Donnell, neither of whom received any support from the Club for Growth PAC. But the Republican establishment has a horrendous track record of accurately identifying which candidates are truly unelectable and which are not. Too often, party insiders mistakenly substitute the word ‘unelectable’ for the word ‘conservative.'”

Chocola, a former GOP congressman from Indiana, points to a litany of top, establishment-favored candidates who lost in 2012 and also to a rogue’s gallery of so-called ‘electable’ GOP House and Senate candidates who backfired in spectacular fashion in recent years: Dede Scozzafava, Arlen Specter, and Charlie Crist.

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Study: U.S. Faces 52K Doctor Shortage by 2025; Obamacare, Immigration* Contributing Factors

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. . . Research published in the Annals of Family Medicine estimated that most of the doctor shortage will be caused by the rising U.S. population.

Aging adults and the expansion of healthcare coverage under the Affordable Care Act will contribute to a lesser extent, the study found.

Researchers predicted that the U.S. population will increase 15.2 percent by 2025, necessitating about 33,000 more physicians.

Aging adults will create the need for an additional 10,000 physicians in that period, while the Affordable Care Act will require about 8,000 more.

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*Immigration is inferred. The birth rate for the United State was 1.89 children per woman in 2011, which is well below the replacement rate of 2.1.

Al Gore Says Approving Keystone Pipeline Would Be ‘Morally Wrong’

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Former Vice President Al Gore says a window is opening to work on climate change legislation in Congress . . .

But words are one thing — action is another. Gore said the Obama administration decision on the Keystone XL project is the first test to see whether the two match up.

“I am strongly opposed to that tar-sands pipeline. I think it’s crazy. Again, you have the realpolitik/business logic, but I just think it is morally wrong for us to open a brand new source of even dirtier carbon-based energy when we are desperately trying to bend down the curves,” he said.

Many lawmakers on the left and the right expect President Obama to greenlight the pipeline’s northern leg. That portion requires administration approval because it crosses national boundaries.

The pipeline would bring Canadian oil sands to Gulf Coast refineries, and its supporters are promoting it as a jobs and energy security issue. Environmentalists have pushed back against the pipeline because it runs through environmentally sensitive regions and would increase delivery of one of the dirtiest forms of fuel.

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Tea Party Vows to Stay for Long Haul, Takes No Blame for GOP Losses

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Tea party leaders say they refuse to be the scapegoats for the drubbing Republicans took on Election Day, claiming it was the party establishment — not their insurgent movement — that cost the party seats in the House and Senate and returned President Obama to the White House.

In fact, various branches of the grass-roots movement vow to reassert themselves on the local and nation levels as Congress begins talks aimed at averting the “fiscal cliff.” They say their call for limited government is more relevant than ever before.

“As far as the tea party is concerned, we are still here,” said Amy Kremer, leader of the Tea Party Express. “We may not be out on the streets with the colorful signs like 2010, but we are here, we are engaged and we are going to continue to fight. We never thought this was a short-term process. It is going to take a long time to turn it around.”

Judson Phillips, head of Tea Party Nation, said the tea party’s first order of business is to rebut Republicans who want to blame the movement for their poor performance at the ballot box.

“They went well out of their way to ignore us, marginalize us and pretend we did not exist, and they gave us the most liberal nominee in the history of the Republican Party,” Mr. Phillips said, taking particular aim at Karl Rove, the mastermind behind former President George W. Bush’s career and founder of American Crossroads, a super PAC that spent more than $100 million in the campaign but had few successes to show for it.

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Establishment Republicans to Start New Pro-Amnesty Super PAC (+video)

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Former George W. Bush Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez is starting a super PAC that will support comprehensive immigration reform — or amnesty — and candidates that support it. Gutierrez recently said that English should not be the official language of government.

The super PAC argues that “all undocumented immigrants should be given a path towards legality.”

Gutierrez, who worked on the Romney campaign as his Hispanic Outreach Coordinator (Romney won 27% of the Hispanic vote), is starting the “Republicans For Immigration Reform” super PAC with Charlie Spies, who co-founded the biggest pro-Romney super PAC, Restore Our Future.

Gutierrez trashes conservatives and blame us for Romney’s loss:

Gutierrez talks about his plans to form a Super-PAC:

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