The authenticity of conservative women has always been under attack by radical orthodox feminists, but perhaps not as brazenly as by someone with such direct and frequent access to the corridors of the White House message machine as Hilary B. Rosen.

The D.C. career lobbyist and Democratic media strategist took to CNN’s airwaves this week to craft a left-wing “War on Women” attack on the real moms of the GOP. Ostensibly aiming at Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for his “old-fashioned” views of women, Rosen’s mouth instead shot off in the direction of wife, stay-at-home mother of five, grandmother of 16, and cancer and multiple sclerosis survivor Ann Romney. Mrs. Romney, sneered Rosen, “never worked a day in her life” outside of the home and should have no voice on women’s issues.

President Obama never met a payroll in his life, but that hasn’t stopped him from dictating what business owners across the country should and shouldn’t be doing. But I digress.

This was no accidental rhetorical drive-by. “Progressives” from Gloria Steinem to Patricia Ireland to Naomi Wolf have derided their conservative counterparts as female impersonators, fake women and men with breasts from time immemorial. It’s SOP: standard operating procedure. In 1992, Hillary Clinton mocked women who stayed at home and “baked cookies and had teas.” In 2004, blueblood Teresa Heinz Kerry, wife of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, sniffed that first lady Laura Bush (a former teacher and librarian before becoming a homemaker) never “had a real job — I mean, since she’s been grown up.”

Alas, if you’re a conservative mom, you’re damned if you do stay home and damned if you don’t. In 2008, Howard Gutman, a member of the Obama campaign’s national finance committee, attacked GOP vice presidential candidate and former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s ability to be a good parent and have a high-powered public life at the same time. “Your responsibility is to put your family first,” Gutman lectured as he singled out Palin’s Down syndrome baby and then-pregnant teenage daughter. “The proper attack is not that a woman shouldn’t run for vice president with five kids; it’s that a parent, when they have a family in need…” should get out of the public sphere and stay home.

Read More at GOPUSA. By Michelle Malkin.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons)

When Republicans abandon the free market and smaller government, the culprits are often the industry lobbyists within the GOP’s inner circles.

Former K Street lobbyist Ed Gillespie, who joined Mitt Romney’s campaign last week as adviser, shows how industry can muddle Republicans’ economic message. Specifically, Gillespie’s and Romney’s closeness with the health insurance industry has weakened the GOP’s ability to attack President Obama’s least popular policy, Obamacare’s individual mandate.

In 2007, Gillespie was the headline Republican for the bipartisan Coalition to Advance Healthcare Reform. CAHR advocated “market-based solutions,” but it also held as a core principle that “every American should be required to carry health insurance,” as stated in an op-ed written by CAHR founder Steve Burd, CEO of Safeway.

CAHR was made up of large employers, plus insurers like Aetna, Blue Cross of California, and Cigna, as well as drugmaker Eli Lilly. Of course Aetna and Blue Cross supported the idea of forcing people to buy health insurance. They were paying for CAHR, and CAHR was paying Gillespie.

Gillespie tells me he never advocated a federal individual mandate. Instead, he advocated “a requirement that able-bodied people should have health insurance,” as he put it in a phone conversation Wednesday. Anyone not carrying health insurance would lose half of his personal exemption, under Gillespie’s idea. “It was not a mandate,” Gillespie told me. “It was a way of addressing the free-rider problem” of uninsured people obtaining health care from hospitals, which are required by law to care for all comers regardless of ability to pay.

Read More at The Washington Examiner. By Timothy P. Carney.

Photo Credit: Gage Skidmore (Creative Commons)

James O’Keefe has struck again. And once more, he deserves a medal for his heroic operation. In 2009, he and an accomplice, Hannah Giles, laid bare the rampant criminal activities being perpetrated nationwide by ACORN, the subversive network of leftist activists whose seditious political work had previously remained largely under the radar. As a result of that exposure, ACORN was forced to officially disband and reorganize, though its activity is ongoing.

This time, O’Keefe spotlighted the epidemic of deliberate vote fraud that liberals have promoted throughout the country in recent years, and which portends the destruction of its foundations if not soon confronted and corrected. And though O’Keefe did not take his sting operation directly to the Department of Justice, by making his case so profoundly, he essentially put the nation’s highest law enforcement office on notice that it will be held accountable for its action, and perhaps more so for its inaction when presented with such incontrovertible evidence of rampant criminal malfeasance at the voting booth.

By now the account of O’Keefe’s stunning maneuver has been widely retold. In short, he went to the very polling place where Eric Holder (Barack Obama’s Attorney General) would vote, and proved that current voter identification and verification practices are so inadequate as to permit O’Keefe to accept a ballot and vote in Holder’s name, had he a mind to do so. This is particularly incriminating since it is Holder who has done more than any other high official to purposefully undermine the voting process in this country.

Beginning with his contemptible decision to ignore the flagrant acts of voter intimidation perpetrated by members of the “New Black Panther” organization in Philadelphia in 2009, Holder has an unbroken track record of choosing to overlook criminal behavior based not on the real substance of the law or the nature of any breaches, but on whether or not the liberal agenda will be served or harmed by a strenuous legal response.

J. Christian Adams, formerly an attorney at the Voting Rights Section of the Department of Justice, eventually left his position and wrote an expose on the racial motivations which completely poisoned the department on Holder’s watch. In his book, he grimly warned America that the end result of this violation of trust, if not appropriately addressed, would be “lawlessness.”

Read More at GOPUSA.

Photo Credit: The Aspen Institute (Creative Commons)

CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley was barely able to contain his laughter Wednesday night after playing a clip of President Obama invoking Ronald Reagan on behalf of his “Buffett Rule” tax hike quest. Nearly breaking into a laugh, a baffled Pelley wondered to CBS News political analyst John Dickerson: “So a vote for President Obama is a vote for Ronald Reagan?!” Dickerson snickered too. (Watch the video to see Pelley’s puzzled reaction.)

Pelley had set up the soundbite: “The President was in full campaign mode today and he even adopted a Republican idol as his own.”

Viewers than heard from Obama at an April 11 White House event: “What Ronald Reagan was calling for then is the same thing that we’re calling for now: a return to basic fairness and responsibility; everybody doing their part. And if it will help convince folks in Congress to make the right choice, we could call it the Reagan Rule instead of the Buffett Rule.”

Read More at Media Research Center By Brent Baker