Republicans Allowed Karl Rove to Mislead Them Again

The crime: Mitt Romney’s inexplicable defeat. The suspects: everybody in the world, except the people who really deserve it.

The first obvious target, of course, is Mitt Romney himself, who managed to lose to a president with one of the worst economic records in memory. Then eyes turned to Romney’s campaign staff, which somehow could not turn a vibrant, brilliant, Cary Grant–in–the–making into the next president of the United States. Perhaps the fault lies with President Obama, who only pretended that nobody in America liked him. Or it was those tricky young people, who somehow managed to vote when everyone assumed they were too lazy to bother. Perhaps it was Nate Silver and his crazy belief in “theory” and “science.” Or the latest suspects: Martha Raddatz and Candy Crowley in the conservatory with the lead pipe.

Personally I love scapegoating as much as the next guy—was Jar Jar Binks really the only reason the Star Wars prequels were terrible?—but I can’t let them pin this one on Martha and Candy. Nor can I allow Republicans to pull an O.J.—stopping at nothing until they find the “real killers” of the 2012 campaign.

We know where they are. We know who they are. We’ve been here before. Years ago, as an escapee of the George W. Bush administration, I wrote a whole book about it. The only question is whether or not enough Republicans want to do anything to solve the problem.

This is not the first election cycle in which Republicans have been shell-shocked by reality. Six years earlier, Republicans across the country believed they would retain control of the House and Senate. That’s because Karl Rove and his acolytes in the Bush administration and the Republican Party told us so.

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What Petraeus Affair Reveals About Your Emails

photo credit: Italian embassy“Hell has no wrath like a woman scorned.” The saying took on a new meaning, with wrath being source of the “Petraeus-gate” that started when a general’s mistress believed he was cheating her.

The fact that Jill Kelley, a friend of the Petraeus family, received what she felt were threatening emails was apparently enough to bring the FBI into the case, prodded along by an agent-friend of the recipient.

The FBI started the investigation under the authority of the 1986 United States Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). The act allows for “government entities” to acquire a warrant to access email records less than 180 days old “if there is reasonable cause to believe a crime has been committed.” For email older than six months, a federal agency only needs to get a subpoena signed by a federal prosecutor, not a judge, to obtain the messages.

Because of the wording of the law, Americans have fewer privacy protections for their electronic emails than would for those same messages than if they were printed out and stuck in a drawer.

In the eyes of the law, email kept on an individual’s hard drive in their home computer has the same protection as one’s personal papers, which require a search warrant. Emails stored on a remote server “in the cloud” do not have the same protection.

Read more from this story HERE.

Is the Grand Old Party Over?

photo credit: donkeyhoteyToday is a monumentally important day that is being treated as a fait accompli by the Beltway ruling class and its partners, the legacy media. This morning, the Congress is scheduled to select its leaders for the coming session. If all goes according to plan, Republicans will double down on stupid – ignoring the conservatives who gave them control of the House and reappointing the same leadership team that turned the triumph of 2010 into the disaster of 2012.

In the historic 2010 midterm elections, conservatives gave Republicans a chance to prove that they’d repented of their huge-spending nanny-state ways. It was not that conservatives were won over by a Republican establishment that, during the Bush years, had run up an astounding $5 trillion of debt while creating new entitlements and launching an ill-conceived experiment in sharia-democracy building. Instead, it was that we needed to stop Obama’s doubly expensive gallop to the left, to a post-American rejection of our liberty culture. In the short term, Republicans were the only game in town.

Over the long haul, however, there were two alternatives: Either (a) the Republican Party would prove that it had become an effective vehicle for advocating and using its power to begin putting into effect the dramatic change necessary to reverse – not just halt, reverse – the debt abyss and the metastasis of the central government; or (b) the Republican Party would prove that it was not up to this challenge, would substitute lame excuses (“We only control one-half of one-third of the government”) for steely spines, and would therefore demonstrate that conservatives would be better off abandoning the GOP and establishing a new vehicle.

We’ve now seen enough to draw a conclusion: the Republican Party says what it believes must be said to entice conservative votes at election time, but it is not remotely serious about implementing limited government policies or dealing with the two central challenges of our age, existentially threatening deficit spending and Islamic supremacism.

Under the leadership of progressive-lite House Speaker John Boehner and his fellow professional Washington moderates in the GOP Senate leadership, congressional Republicans agreed to budgeting that internalized into its baselines Obama’s exorbitant stimulus spending. They signed off on a reckless extension of the government’s line of credit to an astounding $16.4 trillion, then cynically insulted our intelligence by attempting to obscure and deny their approval of it – and presently, they are laying the groundwork to raise this “debt ceiling” to a mind-boggling $19 trillion, the next stop on the road to $22 trillion and beyond. As Mark Steyn observes, the federal government now borrows a staggering $188 billion million per hour, adding $1 trillion to the debt every nine months. Contrary to what the GOP tells you, none of this could happen without the approval of the Republican-controlled House.

Read more from this article HERE.

The Case for Educational Pluralism: Alternatives to the State-funded Educational Monopoly

Public education means different things in different countries. In the United States, it means government-funded and government-delivered schooling—schooling that is supposedly ideologically neutral but in fact reflects a progressive tradition strongly committed to beliefs and to an educational philosophy rejected by many Americans. Not surprisingly, we now fight a great deal about public education. Other democracies fight about education, too, but less divisively, because for them, “public education” means educational pluralism: government support for diverse institutions that reflect a wide variety of beliefs and commitments.

One hundred and fifty years ago, America’s elites, faced with waves of (mostly Catholic, ethnic, and poor) immigrants, concluded that only state-enforced uniformity could effectively make one people out of many. Once bitterly contested on grounds of religious liberty, this belief in the uniform common school, and its ability to create citizens out of disparate groups, is now so embedded in our consciousness that we cannot imagine public education otherwise.

Because the secularist view has dominated American public education since the mid-twentieth century, many Americans reflexively confuse “secularity” with “neutrality.” Some religious groups have responded by creating parallel educational institutions.

Other liberal democracies took a different view. Beginning in the nineteenth century, most Western countries established centralized standards and funding that supported a variety of institutions with diverse philosophies of education, religious and cultural commitments, and student populations. Today, the Netherlands supports more than thirty types of schools on equal footing, and in England over 60 percent of Jewish children attend Jewish day school at state expense. Nearly a quarter of Italy’s schools are fully supported nonstate schools. Israel’s state schools are religious or secular, Hebrew- or Arabic-language, and the government funds from 55 to 75 percent of the costs of almost all nonstate schools. Educational diversity is increasing exponentially in places such as Australia and Sweden, and India is introducing vouchers in some of its provinces.

What binds the diverse groups and their schools together in most cases is commitment to a national (or regional) curriculum and assessments, so that children in quite different classrooms engage in a common civic and academic project. These curricula tend to prescribe general rather than specific goals (such as demonstrating knowledge of a particular genre of English literature rather than studying particular sonnets) and are often negotiated between national and local governments.

Recent American educational innovation—charter schools, vouchers, cyber-education, Teach for America—are encouraging educational diversity, but they can only go so far. Lasting, structural change requires reframing “public education” to mean publicly funded or publicly supported, not exclusively publicly delivered, education. This in turn requires a different political philosophy, a turn to a model of education based on civil society rather than state control.

It is important to note that educational pluralism is not a proxy for religious education, although it does embrace religious as well as secular, philosophical, and pedagogical variety. Nor is it tantamount to “privatizing education.” Rather, it affirms both the dignity of diverse commitments and society’s interest in the nurture of the next generation.

Educational pluralism would certainly not solve all of America’s educational troubles, and it would generate concerns of its own. However, it offers an honest acknowledgement of the myriad value judgments inherent in any education and generously accommodates a variety of beliefs and opinions in a way more congruous with the United States’ democratic political philosophy than does the current system. While some people fear that such pluralism would produce division and harm the students educationally, evidence suggests that, in fact, pluralism often yields superior civic and academic results.

Read more from this article HERE.

A Long Line of Nice Losers

photo credit: donkeyhoteyMitt Romney now joins the long list of the kinds of presidential candidates favored by the Republican establishment– nice, moderate losers, people with no coherently articulated vision, despite how many ad hoc talking points they may have.

The list of Republican presidential candidates like this goes back at least as far as 1948, when Thomas E. Dewey ran against President Harry Truman. Dewey spoke in lofty generalities while Truman spoke in hard-hitting specifics. Since then, there have been many re-runs of this same scenario, featuring losing Republican presidential candidates John McCain, Bob Dole, Gerald Ford and, when he ran for reelection, George H.W. Bush.

Bush 41 first succeeded when he ran for election as if he were another Ronald Reagan (“Read my lips, no new taxes”), but then lost when he ran for reelection as himself– “kinder and gentler,” disdainful of “the vision thing” and looking at his watch during a debate, when he should have been counter-attacking against the foolish things being said.

This year, Barack Obama had the hard-hitting specifics– such as ending “tax cuts for the rich” who should pay “their fair share,” government “investing” in “the industries of the future” and the like. He had a coherent vision, however warped.

Most of Obama’s arguments were rotten, if you bothered to put them under scrutiny. But someone once said that it is amazing how long the rotten can hold together, if you don’t handle it roughly.

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Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Abortion

photo credit: anyalogicIt’s time we conservative women speak out and speak candidly; no matter how uncomfortable it may make our constituents. I’m not pure and I’m not perfect. Possibly, women need to admit exactly how radical we have become and how easily influenced we are in our youth. From the latest fashion fads such as hair extensions to butt enhanced jeans, to push up bras and trying to appear like a photo shopped cover of a magazine, we must admit we are more easily influenced by marketing campaigns than we’d like to acknowledge.

All this pressure while obtaining advanced degrees in college at record numbers. Did a nine dollar birth control pill truly play a part in this election? It would appear the Obama campaign claimed the war against women as truth.

After seeing the numbers for Obama from women this past election, it’s time we conservative women send a message from the skeletons in our closets and explain why we stand where we do. Possibly, we can enlighten the generation of women coming up after us. It doesn’t matter whether or not they are conservative. Women are women. In both parties alike, we confront the same problems. Maybe, they can learn from our mistakes.

Roe vs. Wade changed us all, myself included, despite the fact that I became a young woman twenty some odd years after the court ruling. My body! My choice! From what I heard, men marched along side women to assure they could abort their own baby. While my opinion of the men who marched has now changed, back when I was an eighteen-year old girl, those men ruled. How enlightening! Today, I don’t feel the same. Men marched with woman against the very essence of womanhood and women embraced them.

Like many others, I did have an abortion. In fact, my so-called procedure occurred on my eighteenth birthday. I never recovered and thankfully so. As my young sons make cards and gifts for me on my birthday, I have not forgotten what I have done and I pray I never will. When I am alone, I realize I made a God-like decision to end the life of someone else. While it’s legally and socially acceptable, it went against my very essence as a woman. I was certainly was not aware of that while making my youthful decision.

Read more from this piece HERE.

Amnesty Would Only Make Republican Woes More Dire

Mitt Romney lost Latino votes Tuesday by a 44-point margin, a number that has caused some very principled conservative thinkers to panic unnecessarily.

Premiere Radio host Sean Hannity broke first, telling listeners Thursday: “We’ve gotta get rid of the immigration issue altogether. It’s simple for me to fix it. I think you control the border first, you create a pathway for those people that are here, you don’t say, ‘You gotta go home.’ And that is a position that I’ve evolved on. Because you know what — it just — it’s gotta be resolved.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer quickly followed suit, writing: “For the party in general, however, the problem is hardly structural. It requires but a single policy change: Border fence plus amnesty. Yes, amnesty. Use the word. Shock and awe — full legal normalization (just short of citizenship) in return for full border enforcement. … The other party thinks it owns the demographic future — counter that in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem.”

Hannity and Krauthammer are tremendous talents who have done much good promoting conservative values and ideas. But on immigration and amnesty they appear to have a very short memory.

In 1984, President Reagan won re-election despite losing Hispanics 2-to-1. In 1986, Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which both tightened immigration enforcement at the border and granted amnesty to 3 million illegal immigrants. In 1988, Hispanics rewarded the Republican party by voting … even more heavily Democratic. President Bush lost Hispanics by 40 points, 70 percent to 30 percent. So much for amnesty as the “single policy change” capable of “fixing the Latino problem.”

Read more from this story HERE.

The Media Manipulation of the Petraeus Resignation

Photo credit: isafmediaWatching CNN’s weekend ‘coverage’ of the recent resignation of former CIA Director Petraeus, I noticed that not a single mention was made about the potential impact his testimony, or lack thereof, might have on the upcoming hearings on the horrific terrorist attack upon our consulate in Libya. In fact, no mention was made about any upcoming hearings at all.

I wonder how many of my fellow Americans are aware that an American ambassador and three other men were killed in the recent Benghazi massacre in Libya? How many know of the heroic acts that occurred there? The Obama administration’s inaction, colossal failure of leadership, and probable dereliction of duty likely led to the deaths of these American patriots. Key officials in the Obama administration, including the President, may be found to have blood on their hands.

Former CIA Director Petraeus resigned for reasons yet to be fully clarified, but the liberal mass media has buried the real story. If Petraeus was compelled to testify in an ”Official” capacity, I believe he’d have been forced to ‘take the 5th’ on the stand regarding the massacre in Benghazi. I don’t criticize Petraeus though, if enough pressure is applied, we all could be persuaded. He knows what happened, and only as a civilian would he be able to testify truthfully. Thus, his resignation.

If subpoenaed, I believe Petraeus will be compelled to redact his testimony, not for protection of classified information, but rather for protection of his family. I believe he will testify, but only part of the story will be revealed. Hopefully, sufficient information, facts and time lines will surface and lead reasonable people to connect the dots and realize the truth. Of course the liberal media will employ their signature ‘slight of hand” and apply their ‘spin’ to the parts of the story they’d have otherwise buried.

If truth is revealed, we will find that the Obama administration was operating in Libya, Hungary and Syria to accomplish exactly what? Time will tell, but I think their inaction regarding the massacre in Benghazi was directly related to their objectives in Syria.

What is known for sure by anyone getting news from unbiased sources, is that the Obama administration and the mass liberal media supporting it, intentionally misdirected the American people by blaming the incident on a ‘reaction to a video’. Most know by now that this claim was manufactured and is false.

Given the mass media’s intentional redaction, omission and mis-direction of news coverage, it’s no surprise that we find our great Country on the fast track to mediocrity or worse. America’s allies are shaking their heads while enemies quietly applaud.

The mass media is now more powerful than the three branches of government combined. They’ve been allowed and encouraged to intentionally manipulate the electorate. Hiding facts and spinning the truth is expected in countries who’ve succeeded in controlling their citizens. I’m very concerned that we may see civil disobedience or worse resulting from the combined efforts of a mass media ‘manipulation machine’ and this current administration’s objectives. What I see is a mutual disregard for the Constitution. The liberal media and the present administration continue to manipulate the very people that the US Constitution was created to protect.

Just as this ‘transparent’ administration buried the facts of the ‘Fast and Furious’ scandal, they have and will again attempt the same regarding the terrorist attacks on our consulate in Benghazi. Family members deserve answers as to why their hero kin, former Seals Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were killed trying to save Ambassador Christopher Stevens and information officer Sean Smith in the Benghazi massacre. The same goes for the family members of Customs agent Terry who was killed in the line of duty defending America’s southern border. Truth though, is something Obama and his Chicago buddies have in short supply.

Perhaps I’m a bit naive, but I have faith in the vast majority of my fellow Americans. The problem we face is a voting block made up of increasing numbers of people who have little or no knowledge of history. Combine this with a manipulative mass media intent on hiding the truth and the problem becomes clear. Ignorance is not a reasonable excuse. It has been identified though and must be extinguished through education.

I’d not ask my family and friends to see things the way I do. I’d ask them to change the news channel often though. Spend a little time on the Internet, don’t take anything for granted, do a bit of research and compare what various news outlets are saying. Just take a little time to move around the dial for the sake of truth. I would not have written this article had I not seen the ‘lack’ of coverage that CNN had on the Petraeus story last weekend!

Time to Throw Social Conservatives Out of the GOP?

photo credit: wht_wolf9653It is time to throw the social conservatives out of the GOP. Look at what they got us — Barack Obama. It was the social conservatives who did it. They insisted the GOP support real marriage and children. To hell with that.

I’m getting this, in various forms, from lots of tea party activists. The GOP establishment in Washington is whispering it to each other. They look at Todd Aiken and Richard Mourdock and conclude that they, not Tommy Thompson, Heather Wilson, George Allen, Scott Brown, etc. are the problem.

It is time to get rid of the social conservatives.

What’s really going on here is that the people who voted Republican, but who disagree with pro-lifers and defenders of marriage, have decided it must be those issues. They can’t see how what happened actually happened unless it happened because the issues on which they disagree with the base played a role.

This is a psychological avoidance of larger issues and does not stack up to the data.

Mitt Romney won about a quarter of the hispanic vote and a tenth of the black vote.

Read more from this article HERE.

A Few Things I Never Want to Hear Again

Tired. That is my overriding sensation as I write this. How to bang one’s first impressions of hell out on a keyboard? Let us begin a new day, in a new world, with a first principle of sorts — in this case, a negative principle. Here is a short list of words or turns of phrase that I never want to hear again.

(1) “America is a center-right country.” Center and right are entirely relative terms. The “center” between Lenin and FDR, for example, is very far to the “left” of George Washington. And political self-identification is a meaningless standard of judgment, even by meaningless current standards.

Many on the “right” are fond of reminding us that only twenty percent of Americans self-identify as “liberals.” I actually heard Brit Hume trying to squeeze this bromide out during the Obama victory post-mortem. But in a nation that embraced a vast social welfare system eighty years ago, and has expanded it continually ever since; a nation that for the past fifty years has moved inexorably towards the locus classicus of socialist egalitarianism, government-controlled health care; a nation that elected and re-elected a man who has openly self-identified as a progressive and advocated wealth-redistribution; and a nation in which the popular culture is dominated by artless harlots, pimps, and gangsters, a “centrist” is a person who embraces social disintegration and authoritarianism. To be “moderately conservative” in such a milieu simply means that one finds the latest music video about teenage lesbian orgies just a little over the top.

America is not a center-right country, whatever that means. It is — notwithstanding its still-sane minority (which includes almost everyone reading this) — a socialist-leaning nation that lags behind the rest of the progressive world only due to a slight residual guilt complex regarding all that old Constitution stuff. The events of the past couple of days suggest that even that little bugaboo has now been largely overcome by the majority, for whom most inhibitions about accepting their chains — and chaining their neighbors — are now gone.

(2) “Mitt Romney was only the nominee because of a thin primary field.” Phooey. He was the nominee because the entire GOP establishment threw everything it had at all the other candidates, in order to guarantee that it would get the candidate most likely to succumb to their advice and direction. As of September 2012, Romney was the only candidate left in the primary field whom no one had ever described as a conservative, let alone a constitutionalist. That, in short, is why he was the nominee.

Read more from this story HERE.