Banality: RINOs Counter Tea Party With Empty Rhetoric

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Photo Credit: MIke Theiler I’m told we’re living in a Moderate Moment. After Mitt Romney lost the election, moderate Republicans started emerging from every corner of the country, from Northwest Washington, D.C. to Arlington, Virginia. It was time, they declared, for calm voices to prevail in the Republican Party. The Tea Party, the right-wing, the “Conservative Entertainment Complex” — all this must be cast overboard for the GOP to win again.

The latest iteration of this came in Wednesday’s Washington Post from columnist Kathleen Parker: RINO, of course, refers to Republicans In Name Only and is the pejorative term used against those who fail to march in lockstep with the so-called conservative base. I used “so-called” because, though the hard-right faction of the party tends to be viewed as The Base, this isn’t necessarily so. My guess is there are now more RINOs than those who, though evangelical in their zeal, are poison to their party’s ability to win national elections.

Parker calls for a RINO uprising, a new faction on the right to counter the Tea Party. That’s all well and good. There are genuine differences of opinion on the right, and a little inward dialectic never hurt anyone.

But how would her brand of Republicanism differ from the conservative base she derides? This is the closest thing we get to a policy prescription in her column: “Most would like the country to rock along without drama — operating within a reasonable budget, with respect for privacy and the rule of law, compassion for the disadvantaged and an abundance of concern for national security, including border control but not necessarily drone attacks on citizens.”

Yes, if only there was a political movement calling for reasonable budgets, more privacy for the individual, upholding the rule of law, and concern for national security. She must imagine hordes of earthy Tea Partiers holding the Post in their gunpowder-stained fingers while recoiling and exclaiming, “Compassion for the disadvantaged?! This paper’s gone to the dogs!”

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Will Climate Scamsters Be Jailed for Fraud?

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Photo Credit: WNDIt’s official. What I was howled down and banned for telling the recent U.N. climate conference in Doha is true. There has been no global warming for 17 years.

Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who heads the U.N.’s accident-prone climate panel, the IPCC, recently admitted this fact here in Australia.

The Hadley/CRU temperature record shows no warming for 18 or 19 years. RSS satellites show none for 23 years. Not one computer model predicted that.

Pachauri said the zero trend would have to persist for 30-40 years before it mattered. Scientists disagree. In 2008 the modelers wrote that more than 14 years without global warming would indicate a “discrepancy” between their predictions and reality. By their own criterion, they have grossly, persistently, profitably exaggerated manmade warming.

The 17-year flatline gives Australia’s $180,000-a-year, part-time climate kommissar, Tim Flannery, a problem. In January he crowed that extreme weather like Sydney’s recent heatwave had been predicted for decades.

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The Senate’s Shameful Behavior: Not One Word of Debate on Hagel’s Defense Nomination

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One reason the left is winning is that they fight to the mat for their principles (such that they are). So you have to give them a lot of credit – they have the passion and the willingness to fight to win. Republicans, on the other hand, continue to play footsies, contributing to the nation’s peril.

“The most deliberative body in the world” put up a charade for several weeks, with now nary a word of debate on the Senate floor. Don’t they even want the opportunity to grand-stand ? Apparently not.

Senator Chuck Hagel (R-Nebraska), who served two terms from 1997 to 2009, has been confirmed as Secretary of Defense, the position which represents the primary purpose of our federal government – to protect and defend our nation (and hopefully our Constitution). One group who did support Hagel’s nomination (besides the Democrats) ? Iran. God help us.

Despite grave concerns by many Republican Senators (and by some actual conservatives), Hagel was approved for a final vote by a whopping vote of 71 – 27, without a single word of debate. His anti-Jewish sentiment is legendary, yet the political nation gives a collective shrug, since it’s only the Jews we’re talking about.

Yet key Senators indicated grave concerns that makes one wonder exactly what ARE the principles that guide their decisions ? “Compromise” can be a good thing in politics (and marriage), IF both sides participate, and they both have common goals.

John McCain (R-Arizona) said just this past Sunday that “Hagel was not qualified to be Defense Secretary”. Yet he voted to allow Hagel’s name to come for a vote.

Richard Shelby (R-Alabama) gives the apparent new standard on Defense Secretaries, “He’s as good as we are going to get.” So forget about the USA being the best, we now just take whoever shows up.

The most curious vote came from Rand Paul, who’s been unafraid to stand on principle. Yet he deferred to the President, who “gets to choose political appointees.” While I’m personally a big fan of Rand Paul, this leaves me scratching my head and will cause a significant wedge among his legions of supporters.

Can you imagine the Democrats deferring to a Republican President for someone who was manifestly unqualified for the Cabinet ? There’s no doubt they would throw a stink (under MSM cover), and hand the Republicans an embarrassing defeat. (Anyone remember one of the most qualified men to ever be nominated for the Supreme Court – Robert Bork ? His defeat ended the practice of being candid in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee. )

Don’t forget the real vote was the cloture vote, where the Senate gave up the fight behind closed doors (71 – 27 in favor of allowing Hagel to come to a vote). The official tally though was a “respectable” (aka “CYA”) 58 – 41. Here’s the list of those who gave up the fight:

Alexander
Ayotte
Blunt
Burr
Chambliss
Coburn
Collins
Corker
Flake
Graham
Hatch
McCain
Murkowski
Sessions
Thune

Yet all of the above now hide behind a “No” vote on Hagel despite their vote to “move things along”, giving Obama another victory and discouraging scores of conservatives, grass-roots activists, and most importantly, those serving in the military. While we should all be passionate about national defense, I am especially attuned to this nomination since my son will be an Army officer come this May.

Time For The Oscars To Have A “Best Of” Politicians Category

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Photo Credit: Irish Central In an unprecedented move, Michelle Obama appeared on the Oscar stage via big screen. Direct from the White house, she was there to announce who won best picture.

To add even more dignity and state sponsorship to the occasion, Mrs. Obama was flanked by a US military contingent in full dress uniform.

The winner just happened to be Argo, a movie produced and directed by ardent Obama supporters, Ben Affleck and George Clooney. Was it a coincidence?

Presidential campaigns are heavily choreographed; every word for a campaign speech is carefully scripted and inserted in the teleprompter. Crowds (extras) are bussed in, the locations carefully selected and decorated for maximum impact, including the use of Greek columns…. All hallmarks of Hollywood.

Everything is tightly controlled, including press briefings. Friendly questions are thrown to the President, by eager “journalists” hoping not to offend. If a journalist gets out of line and asks an awkward or difficult question there will be repercussions. Even more so for those who won’t settle for an evasive non answer to their questions.

President Obama has proven to be remarkable in front of crowds, delivering powerful speeches that have even lead to people swooning in the audience…..and when he brings a tear to his eye during a touching moment, you can hear sobs in his audience.

Of course President Obama isn’t the only politician to use Hollywood props and tactics to help sway public opinion and give Oscar worthy performances.

President Clinton was also very closely tied in with Hollywood and a frequent visitor to the west coast during his presidency.

Mr. Clinton was known for his ability to shed a tear on command and get that raspy sound in his voice we all know so well. But he was caught turning the tears off and laughing when he thought the tape had stopped during a funeral…when he realized the camera was still rolling, he instantly transformed back to his tearful look.

It seems the best politicians are the ones who know how to play the camera. Oscar winning performances in front of millions can transcend them beyond leaders to celebrity status. Sadly, screen manipulation doesn’t transform into a good chief executive, or leader for our country.

Perhaps the best Oscar winning performances actually occur in Washington DC. Maybe in the future Hollywood can honor these performers with a special Oscar

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Dictatorship Of Hypocrites: The Media’s Crusade Against Cruz

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Photo Credit: Breitbart The liberal media have their knives out for Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) after his textbook cross-examination of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel at the latter’s confirmation hearing Jan. 31. Jane Mayer of the New Yorker seized on a speech Cruz gave three years ago in which he asserted that when he was at Harvard Law School, shortly after Barack Obama, there were twelve Marxists on the faculty and one Republican.

That, Mayer alleges, is evidence of Cruz’s innate McCarthyism–and hence, she implies, ought to discredit Cruz’s inquiries into Hagel’s beliefs and financial backing. That’s rich coming from the New Yorker’s resident Koch-obsessive, who launched a McCarthyist assault on the Tea Party in 2010, asserting it was mere Astroturf for the “billionaire Koch brothers’ war against Obama,” and demanding more scrutiny of the Kochs’ ties to it.

Her current campaign against Cruz is a pure political vendetta–a fact she does not even try to deny. In her latest offering, she defends her sudden interest in the 2010 speech as follows: “…Cruz’s hostile questioning of Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, Chuck Hagel, and insinuations about Hagel’s loyalties had provided a fresh context for looking more closely at the nature of the accusations he has leveled at political opponents.”

In terms of accusations against one’s opponents, it’s hard to top Mayer’s suggestion that millions of conservative Americans are paid stooges–or Obama’s numerous attacks on opponents using false accusations and innuendo. Remember the doctors who cut out kids’ tonsils for no reason except greed? The Republican presidential nominee who just might be a felon, and may have killed a man’s wife? Few complaints from Mayer there.

In fact, Mayer gave positive coverage to the anti-Bain Capital ads that ran against Romney in Ohio. In a post-election article on Nov. 19, 2012, “Seeing Spots,” Mayer noted that the ad about a worker’s dead wife was inaccurate. She nonetheless celebrated the company that made it for another ad in the series, “Stage,” which helped “to float the image of Romney as a coldhearted fat cat” and gave Obama a decisive advantage in the polls.

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The Case Of The Phantom Ballots: An Electoral Whodunit

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Photo Credit: Tim Chapman The first phantom absentee ballot request hit the Miami-Dade elections website at 9:11 p.m. Saturday, July 7.
The next one came at 9:14. Then 9:17. 9:22. 9:24. 9:25.

Within 2½ weeks, 2,552 online requests arrived from voters who had not applied for absentee ballots. They streamed in much too quickly for real people to be filling them out. They originated from only a handful of Internet Protocol addresses. And they were not random. It had all the appearances of a political dirty trick, a high-tech effort by an unknown hacker to sway three key Aug. 14 primary elections, a Miami Herald investigation has found.

The plot failed. The elections department’s software flagged the requests as suspicious. The ballots weren’t sent out. But who was behind it? And next time, would a more skilled hacker be able to rig an election?

Six months and a grand-jury probe later, there still are few answers about the phantom requests, which targeted Democratic voters in a congressional district and Republican voters in two Florida House districts.

The foreman of that grand jury, whose report made public the existence of the phantom requests, said jurors were eager to learn if a candidate or political consultant had succeeded in manipulating the voting system. But they didn’t get any answers. “We were like, ‘Why didn’t anyone do something about it?’ ” foreman Jeffrey Pankey said.

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George Will: The Manufactured Crisis of Sequester

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Photo Credit: Washington PostEven during this desultory economic recovery, one industry thrives — the manufacture of synthetic hysteria. It is, however, inaccurate to accuse the Hysteric in Chief of crying “Wolf!” about spending cuts under the sequester. He is actually crying “Hamster!”

As in: Batten down the hatches — the sequester will cut $85 billion from this year’s $3.6 trillion budget! Or: Head for the storm cellar — spending will be cut 2.3 percent! Or: Washington chain-saw massacre — we must scrape by on 97.7 percent of current spending! Or: Chaos is coming because the sequester will cut a sum $25 billion larger than was just shoveled out the door (supposedly, but not actually) for victims of Hurricane Sandy! Or: Heaven forfend, the sequester will cut 47 percent as much as was spent on the AIG bailout! Or: Famine, pestilence and locusts will come when the sequester causes federal spending over 10 years to plummet from $46 trillion all the way down to $44.8 trillion! Or: Grass will grow in the streets of America’s cities if the domestic agencies whose budgets have increased 17 percent under President Obama must endure a 5 percent cut!

The sequester has forced liberals to clarify their conviction that whatever the government’s size is at any moment, it is the bare minimum necessary to forestall intolerable suffering. At his unintentionally hilarious hysteria session Tuesday, Obama said: The sequester’s “meat-cleaver approach” of “severe,” “arbitrary” and “brutal” cuts will “eviscerate” education, energy and medical research spending. “And already, the threat of these cuts has forced the Navy to delay an aircraft carrier that was supposed to deploy to the Persian Gulf.”

“Forced”? The Navy did indeed cite the sequester when delaying deployment of the USS Truman. In the high-stakes pressure campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons program, U.S. policy has been to have two carriers in nearby waters. Yet the Navy is saying it cannot find cuts to programs or deployments less essential than the Truman deployment. The Navy’s participation in the political campaign to pressure Congress into unraveling the sequester is crude, obvious and shameful, and it should earn the Navy’s budget especially skeptical scrutiny by Congress.

The Defense Department’s civilian employment has grown 17 percent since 2002. In 2012, defense spending on civilian personnel was 21 percent higher than in 2002. And the Truman must stay in Norfolk? This is, strictly speaking, unbelievable.

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How to Win in 2014: Stop Obama’s Legislative Agenda, Promote the Farm Team

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Photo Credit: GARY LOCKENearly four months after the election, most everybody seems to agree that something is amiss with the GOP. This consensus has provoked a stream of free advice for how Republicans can get back on their feet. Some of it is constructive and helpful. For instance, commentators like Jim Pethokoukis of the American Enterprise Institute, Peter Wehner of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, and Michael Gerson of the Washington Post have persuasively argued in various ways about why and how the Republican party needs to update its policy offerings. But much of the “advice” amounts to a victory lap by liberal Democrats and their friends in the media, many of whom seem to think that a successful Republican party would be one that closely resembles the Democrats.

Helpful political advice should first of all be practical, taking into account what can and cannot be done. What, for instance, can the Republican party accomplish between now and the next election? To do that, we should first take a political inventory, to see where the GOP stands. On the plus side of the ledger, we have the party’s strength in the states. Republicans control 30 governorships, including in key swing states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. What’s more, the GOP holds a majority of state legislative seats, roughly 52 percent nationwide. All told, Republicans have unified control of 25 states, with 53 percent of the nation’s population. Compare that with the Democrats, who control 13 states with 30 percent of the American public.

Republicans also control the House of Representatives and retain enough seats to filibuster in the Senate. Not only that, but the 234 House Republicans still constitute a larger caucus than at any point during the Republican “revolution” of the mid-1990s. While this number is down from 2010, the last two cycles have produced the strongest GOP House majority since the Great Depression.

Finally, the Republican coalition is reasonably united. Naturally, there are fissures — notably, the divide between the so-called establishment wing of the party and the Tea Party “opposition.” Nevertheless, historical perspective is appropriate here. While the media like to play up today’s divisions, the party remains generally united around a set of policy goals — tax reform and sensible deregulation to jump-start the economy, entitlement reform to solve the debt crisis, the expansion of domestic energy production, and so on. One could not say the same of the Republicans after Franklin Roosevelt’s reelection in 1936 or Lyndon Johnson’s in 1964.

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Boy Scouts Should Not Backtrack On Values

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Photo Credit: National Library of NorwayA national uproar apparently caused the executive board of the Boy Scouts of America to postpone until May a vote on whether to allow homosexual Scouts and Scoutmasters among their ranks.

After more than 100 years as a private organization with the highest of moral standards, top scouting officials had initially floated the idea of rescinding the prohibition on homosexual members and leaders after reaffirming their policy last summer.

This reaffirmation followed just four years after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the right of the Scouts to set their own membership policy in regards to homosexuals in the 2008 case, Boy Scouts of America v. Dale.

Rather than resolving to uphold the Scout Law, which says that Scouts are to keep themselves “morally straight,” some members of the executive board began a covert campaign to change the policy. Two members of the executive board in particular were instrumental in pressuring their fellow board members to reconsider the ban.

Reportedly the strongest advocates for changing the common-sense policy were board members Randall Stephenson, CEO of AT&T, and Jim Turley, CEO of Ernst & Young. Pro-family groups have called for their resignation from scouting, as well they should.

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The Feds Want Your Retirement Accounts

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Photo Credit: American ThinkerQuietly, behind the scenes, the groundwork is being laid for federal government confiscation of tax-deferred retirement accounts such as IRAs. Slowly, the cat is being let out of the bag.

Last January 18th, in a little noticed interview of Richard Cordray, acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Bloomberg reported “[t]he U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau [CFPB] is weighing whether it should take on a role in helping Americans manage the $19.4 trillion they have put into retirement savings, a move that would be the agency’s first foray into consumer investments.” That thought generates some skepticism, as aptly expressed by the Richard Terrell cartoon published by American Thinker.

Days later On January 24th President Obama renominated Cordray as CFPB director even though his recess appointment was not due to expire until the end of 2013.

One day later, in the first significant resistance to President Obama’s concentration of presidential power, a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington DC unanimously said that Obama’s Recess Appointments to the National Labor Relations Board are unconstitutional. Similar litigation testing the Cordray appointment to the CFPB is in the pipeline.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) created by the 2,319 page Dodd-Frank legislation is a new and little known bureau with wide-ranging powers. Placed within the Federal Reserve, a corporation privately owned by member banks, the CFPB is insulated from oversight by either the President or Congress, its budget not subject to legislative control. It is not even clear that a new President can replace the CFPB director on taking office.

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