Time for GOP to Listen to the American People

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Photo Credit: Townhall

Photo Credit: Townhall

It is clear that the House GOP leadership is preparing to take action on the immigration issue this year. According to reports, the “principles” of immigration reform will be introduced next week and it will include a “pathway” to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in our country. The bill will reportedly also mandate improved border security, provide additional visas for foreign workers and require those immigrants seeking legalization to learn English and pay certain fees.

The net effect of this legislation will be to provide “amnesty” for millions of immigrants who ignored our laws to settle in this country. It is a way of rewarding lawbreakers while insulting the Americans who dealt with the arduous process of legally becoming a citizen.

Each year, 1.2 million individuals legally become United States citizens. This legal immigration process should only be expanded if our country needs to import a larger talent pool of workers in certain types of industries, such as healthcare.

House GOP leaders claim that they need to take action on immigration since it is a supposedly pressing issue impacting the country. However, new poll numbers show that Americans are much more concerned about other issues. In fact, according to a new Gallup poll, immigration reform ranks at the bottom of the list of top priorities. The poll showed that only 3% of Americans listed immigration reform as a top priority for 2014.

Read more from this story HERE.

Why Didn’t the President Give this Speech Seven Months Ago When it Would Have Counted?

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

It is very hard to take President Obama seriously. At Friday’s big surveillance speech, after five years of Big Government–orchestrated Constitution shredding, he looked the American people in the eye and explained that, as monitoring technology has evolved over the centuries, our nation has always “benefited from both our Constitution and traditions of limited government.” While your head was still spinning, another whopper: After five years of whimsically “waiving,” ignoring, and unilaterally rewriting congressional statutes, he bleated that “our system of government is built on the premise that our liberty cannot depend on the good intentions of those in power; it depends upon the law to constrain those in power.”

Of course, from the man who repeatedly vowed that you could keep your health-insurance plan, all the while scheming to eliminate your health-insurance plan, we’ve come to expect this disconnect between rhetoric and reality. What makes President Obama so hard to take seriously is not just the lying. It is that he does not take his job seriously. Consider the great “metadata” controversy, the focal point of yesterday’s speech.

It has been seven months since Edward Snowden’s first felonious leaks — seven months of firestorm over the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of phone-record information on virtually all Americans. During that time the program has been hysterically slandered by critics on the left and right — the libels aided and abetted by legislators who’ve known for years exactly what the NSA was doing and yet feigned shock over Snowden’s “revelations.” (I use the mock quotes in a nod to Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., Upper West Side), who conceded last June that, when it came to the NSA’s data collection, Snowden revealed nothing that hadn’t been well known and hotly debated for seven years.)

It has been claimed, spuriously but relentlessly, that the NSA was massively spying on U.S. citizens, systematically tracking their phone calls, e-mails, and movements. This narrative has solidified into conventional wisdom. Americans widely believe that they are on the government’s radar, their every conversation eavesdropped on. I’ve witnessed it firsthand.

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Malkin: Kerry’s ‘Poor Jihadist’ Myth

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

The myth of the poor, oppressed jihadist never dies. U.S. secretary of state John Kerry is the latest Obama administration official to peddle this odious narrative. Cue John Lennon’s cloying “Imagine,” don your plaid pajamas, and curl up with a warm cup of deadly naïveté.

While meeting with Catholic Church officials at the Vatican in Rome on Monday, Kerry expounded on their “huge common interest in dealing with this issue of poverty, which in many cases is the root cause of terrorism or even the root cause of the disenfranchisement of millions of people on this planet.” In other words: If only every al-Qaeda and Taliban recruit had a fraction of Kerry’s $200 million fortune, they’d all be frolicking peacefully with infidels on jet skis sporting “Coexist” bumper stickers.

This wasn’t a one-off. Kerry delivered a similar Kumbaya-style discourse at the Global Counterterrorism Forum last fall: “Getting this right isn’t just about taking terrorists off the street. It’s about providing more economic opportunities for marginalized youth at risk of recruitment.” Naturally, the Foggy Bottom apple doesn’t fall far from the Pennsylvania Avenue terror-excusing tree. President Obama subscribes to the very same “midnight basketball” theory of counterterrorism. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Obama asserted that jihad “grows out of a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair.”

The chronic cluelessness of the root-cause apologists of jihad never ceases to amaze. Britain’s MI5 reported in 2011 that two-thirds of the U.K’s jihad suspects were from middle-class backgrounds, “showing there is no simplistic relationship between poverty and involvement in Islamist extremism.” Thorough reviews of the empirical evidence shows, as the RAND Corporation has reported, that “terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.”

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Doubts Over Common Core

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Photo Credit: abdulrahman.stock

Photo Credit: abdulrahman.stock

Viewed from Washington, which often is the last to learn about important developments, opposition to the Common Core State Standards Initiative still seems as small as the biblical cloud that ariseth out of the sea, no larger than a man’s hand. Soon, however, this education policy will fill a significant portion of the political sky.

The Common Core represents the ideas of several national organizations (of governors and school officials) about what and how children should learn. It is the thin end of an enormous wedge. It is designed to advance in primary and secondary education the general progressive agenda of centralization and uniformity.

Understandably, proponents of the Common Core want its nature and purpose to remain as cloudy as possible for as long as possible. Hence they say it is a “state-led,” “voluntary” initiative to merely guide education with “standards” that are neither written nor approved nor mandated by Washington, which would never, ever “prescribe” a national curriculum. Proponents talk warily when describing it because a candid characterization would reveal yet another Obama administration indifference to legality.

The 1965 Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), the original federal intrusion into this state and local responsibility, said “nothing in this act” shall authorize any federal official to “mandate, direct, or control” schools’ curriculums. The 1970 General Education Provisions Act stipulates that “no provision of any applicable program shall be construed to authorize any” federal agency or official “to exercise any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum, program of instruction” or selection of “instructional materials by any” school system. The 1979 law creating the Education Department forbids it from exercising “any direction, supervision, or control over the curriculum” or “program of instruction” of any school system. The ESEA as amended says no Education Department funds “may be used . . . to endorse, approve, or sanction any curriculum designed to be used in” grades K-12.

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Income Inequality: Obama Owes You $19,000

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Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing

Photo Credit: REUTERS/Larry Downing

Democratic leaders have signaled their intention to make income inequality the centerpiece of the midterm elections, and expanding benefit programs for the poor and unemployed are at the heart of the strategy. As the ever-gracious senior senator from New York, Chuck Schumer, put it, if the GOP opposes extension of long-term unemployment benefits, “it’s going to hurt them in the election.”

Now Democratic leaders are hard at work flogging the income inequality issue while refusing to come up with $6.4 billion to extend unemployment benefits. Clearly, they do not want the benefits extended. They would rather have a provocative issue to use against Republicans in the fall.

It’s possible, however, that income inequality could turn out to be a big mistake for them. Maybe Americans aren’t dumb enough to fall for wealth envy ruse again. Maybe they’re ready to grow up and realize that Bill Gates and Warren Buffett will always make more than most people. The real problem is the difference between what they should be earning, based on wage growth during previous recoveries, and they’re earning under Obama. Who’s responsible for that? Not Bill Gates or Warren Buffett.

In the past, as in the 2008 campaign, Obama liked to compare himself to Ronald Reagan. That was always laughable, but since the President brought it up, how does he compare with Reagan in terms of wage growth?

The Social Security Administration’s national average wage index shows that earnings of US workers rose by a cumulative 7.2% during Obama’s first term (from $41,334 to $44,321 between 2008 and the end of 2012). During Reagan’s first term, wages rose 29% (from $12,513 to $16,135), and they went on to rise to $19,334 by the end of his second term (a total of 54.5%). That difference is the source of much of today’s discontent over income inequality.

The real “inequality,” in other words, is between what workers are now getting (an average of $44,321) and what they would have been getting ($53,321) if the economy had been growing as it did under Reagan.

The contrast is magnified over time. By the end of Obama’s second term, average wages are likely to be close to $47,500. Applying the growth trajectory of Reagan’s second term, average wages would be $66,634. Personally, I would rather have the $66,634, and most Americans would as well.

By 2016 Obama’s experiment in socialism will have cost US workers over $19,000 per year in lost wages. And Obama’s party is just getting started. If succeeded by another left-wing president, presumably Hillary Clinton, the lost wages will continue to compound.

It doesn’t really matter how much less than Warren Buffett you are making if you don’t have enough to get your kids through school and save for retirement. It does matter if you’re making less than you should be as a result of government policies that restrict growth.

Not many of us will make it into the 1% so it doesn’t matter how much they make. What matters is how much we make. And Obama has seen to it that average Americans will be making $19,000 less than they should be. Income inequality is only a hot-button issue because, under Obama, incomes have become more unequal.

Stagnant wage growth is bad enough, but, remarkably, Obama is the first president in American history to have frozen job growth during his first term in office. According to the World Bank, the US labor force has grown by a statistically insignificant .005% between January 2009 and the end of 2012. Even the less prosperous nation of Chile managed job growth of 11.5% during the same period. Why was job growth in the US so far behind that of Chile? It was because Chile embraced the free market under a conservative president while America chose socialism.

Conservatives want something better for all Americans. They want the poor to dream big, along with everyone else. They celebrate stories like that of Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle Corporation, whose $41 billion puts him third on the list of America’s wealthiest citizens. Ellison began life as the adopted son of a family of modest means. He worked hard and earned every penny he made, but America gave him the chance.

That kind of opportunity, the chance to found a small company and see it grow into a major enterprise, has been wrecked by the Obama administration and Democrats in Congress. It is Republicans who want to make it possible once again.

Conservatives have a time-tested plan for attacking income inequality. They want Americans to have the chance to work and prosper, to start small businesses, and to see their wages grow by 54% and more. That message will resonate in 2014. But only if conservatives start to talk about the real “income inequality” in America—the inequality between what Americans are making today and what they would be making without Democrats in power.

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Jeffrey Folks is the author of many books on American politics and culture, including Heartland of the Imagination (2011). He can be contacted at [email protected].

Congress: More Democrat Millionaires than Republican . . . and Here’s Why

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Photo Credit: Weasel Zippers

Photo Credit: Weasel Zippers

The suckers are buying it!

In a report from AllGov.com, we learn that for the first time more than half of all members of Congress are millionaires. But what’s really interesting about the story is that it tells us there are more Democrats than Republicans in Congress who are millionaires.

That is not surprising to some of us, but it might be to a lot of people who have bought the Democrat/lamestream media narrative that Republicans are “the party of the rich.”

Let me tell you why this really is.

First, let’s understand there is nothing wrong with being a millionaire, or a billionaire for that matter. Contrary to what the rhetoric of the Democratic Party suggests, the vast majority of rich people have earned their fortunes by working hard and accomplishing things that have benefited others. That includes those who have made their money by investing, because they have put their capital at risk to help finance businesses that create jobs and produce goods and services people want and need.

Read more from this story HERE.

New Scandal, Same Old Christie

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Photo Credit: National Review

Photo Credit: National Review

After swiftly dismissing a top official in his administration, Chris Christie was characteristically caustic when pressed by the press for the lesson to be drawn from the scandal: “Don’t lie to the governor.”

But that was then — three years ago. This week, the raging bull turned sad puppy for two hours of bravura contrition after cashiering yet another top aide who, he says, lied to him. It is a different time, and this is a very different scandal. Yet, I can’t help suspecting it’s the same old Christie.

Back in 2010, it was Bret Schundler, Christie’s education chief, who was shown the door after purportedly deceiving the boss. The controversy that led to Schundler’s abrupt termination was considerably drier than the “Bridgegate” scandal currently engulfing the governor — the former was just run-of-the-mill governmental bungling, as the Bergen Record relates.

New Jersey had failed to qualify for federal “Race to the Top” education funds, falling a measly three points short of the 500-point threshold prescribed by an abstruse Washington formula. The amount of money involved was enormous, $400 million. But in a country where trillion is the new billion, that’s a few digits shy of grabbing the public’s attention. Plus, Christie — just hitting his stride, his eccentric brand of tough-guy bipartisanship not yet stale — was not then a national figure. So the fact that the Garden State lost out because its application omitted two years of budget data (a five-point penalty!) was big news in Trenton, but nowhere else.

This past September’s bumper-to-bumper snarls are quite another matter. They hit New Jerseyans where we live much of the time: on our derrieres, behind the wheel hours on end, crawling tortoise-like from place to place — especially when one of those places is the Big Apple. So the ongoing scandal is about traffic . . . but, of course, it’s juicier than that. It’s about hellacious traffic jams that were willfully manufactured — much as that may sound like a coals-to-Newcastle errand. It’s about Christie’s administration maliciously slamming already beleaguered commuters — and, worse, subjecting police, fire departments, emergency medical teams, school buses, and small-business merchants to withering gridlock — as payback against at least one recalcitrant Democratic mayor.

Read more from this story HERE.

DoJ IRS Investigation in the Very Best of Hands

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Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Suppose you’re President Obama. Who would be your ideal candidate to head up the Justice Department’s investigation into IRS targeting of conservative groups?

How about someone who gave thousands of dollars to your senate campaign as well as your presidential races?

The confidence that the president and AG Holder have in the press ignoring this IRS “investigation” must be so great that they simply don’t care who knows that it’s set up to be a whitewash.
Washington Post:

Two Republican lawmakers and a conservative legal group are questioning the Justice Department’s selection of a Democratic donor to lead the agency’s probe into the Internal Revenue Service’s targeting of certain advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles.

House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) and Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) issued a letter to U.S. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday demanding the department remove DOJ trial attorney Barbara Bosserman from the case, saying her involvement is “highly inappropriate and has compromised the administration’s investigation of the IRS.”

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Does the Constitution Force Bakers to Bake?

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Photo Credit: Getty Images

Photo Credit: Getty Images

Several recent court cases have resulted in small business owners, who create the wares and services that they sell, being ordered by a judge to sell their custom-made products (e.g., wedding cakes and floral arrangements) or services (e.g., wedding photography) to gay couples despite the small business owners’ refusal to do so based on their religious principles.

If the business in question sold standard, mass-produced items, such as rings, then denying gay couples the right to purchase such things would be clearly discriminatory in the same way that a realtor would be discriminating if they refused to show a house that was for sale to any and all interested potential buyers. The sexual orientation of the buyers should not be an issue in that sort of transaction.

However, the sensitivities of gay couples who claim to feel slighted is not the real issue. The plaintiff in a recent wedding cake related suit, one David Mullins, is reported to have said:

Being denied service by Masterpiece Cakeshop [the defendant] was offensive and dehumanizing especially in the midst of arranging what should be a joyful family celebration.

While vigorously defending the plaintiffs’ claims that they have a right not to be offended, the judge, the ACLU, and others in the LGBT community seem to be ignoring (in this particular case) the rights of the baker who chose not to fulfill the plaintiffs’ request. Most people would immediately think of the 1st Amendment’s protection of freedom of religion, but in truth that is not the most relevant part of the Constitution here. It is the 13th Amendment, Section 1, which should be the controlling part of the legal debate in this situation.

Read more from this story HERE.

Steyn: Global Warming’s Glorious Ship of Fools

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Photo Credit: Spectator.co.uk

Photo Credit: Spectator.co.uk

Yes, yes, just to get the obligatory ‘of courses’ out of the way up front: of course ‘weather’ is not the same as ‘climate’; and of course the thickest iciest ice on record could well be evidence of ‘global warming’, just as 40-and-sunny and a 35-below blizzard and 12 degrees and partly cloudy with occasional showers are all apparently manifestations of ‘climate change’; and of course the global warm-mongers are entirely sincere in their belief that the massive carbon footprint of their rescue operation can be offset by the planting of wall-to-wall trees the length and breadth of Australia, Britain, America and continental Europe.

But still: you’d have to have a heart as cold and unmovable as Commonwealth Bay ice not to be howling with laughter at the exquisite symbolic perfection of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition ‘stuck in our own experiment’, as they put it. I confess I was hoping it might all drag on a bit longer and the cultists of the ecopalypse would find themselves drawing straws as to which of their number would be first on the roasting spit. On Douglas Mawson’s original voyage, he and his surviving comrade wound up having to eat their dogs. I’m not sure there were any on this expedition, so they’d probably have to make do with the Guardian reporters. Forced to wait a year to be rescued, Sir Douglas later recalled, ‘Several of my toes commenced to blacken and fester near the tips.’ Now there’s a man who’s serious about reducing his footprint.

But alas, eating one’s shipmates and watching one’s extremities drop off one by one is not a part of today’s high-end eco-doom tourism. Instead, the ice-locked warmists uploaded chipper selfies to YouTube, as well as a self-composed New Year singalong of such hearty un-self-awareness that it enraged even such party-line climate alarmists as Andrew Revkin, the plonkingly earnest enviro-blogger of the New York Times. A mere six weeks ago, pumping out the usual boosterism, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that, had Captain Scott picked his team as carefully as Professor Chris Turney, he would have survived. Sadly, we’ll never know — although I’ll bet Captain Oates would have been doing his ‘I am going out. I may be some time’ line about eight bars into that New Year number.

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