Conservatives Ready For ‘Sneaky Treaties’

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Back in September, 36 Republicans in the Senate signed on to a letter requesting that no treaties be brought up for consideration during the precious few days of the lame duck session.

“The writers of the Constitution clearly believed that all treaties presented to the Senate should undergo the most thorough scrutiny before being agreed upon,” they wrote in a Sept. 20 letter to Senate majority and minority leaders Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).

“The American people will be electing representatives and senators in November, and new representatives carrying the election mandate should be afforded the opportunity to review and consider any international agreements that are outstanding at the time of their election.”

The signatories promised to oppose efforts to consider any treaty brought for consideration.

Fast-forward two months, and the Senate has begun consideration of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, a United Nations treaty that faces heavy opposition from conservative groups and received only one committee hearing, back in July.

Read more from this story HERE.

The GOP’s Weakest Leg

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photo credit: kazvorpal

The Republican coalition is often described as a three-legged stool made up of foreign policy, social issue and fiscal conservatives. It’s an apt metaphor because it captures the fact that all three legs need to be secure in order for the party to keep from collapsing.

For most of the last two decades, foreign policy (strong defense) and social (traditional values) conservatives have at various times been blamed for Republican defeats. But fiscal conservatism (lower and fewer taxes; less government spending) has always escaped from Republican losses unscathed.

2012 produced a different outcome. Everyone agrees that the 2012 election was about the economy, and that Republicans suffered a drubbing.

I’m a fiscal conservative who believes in lower taxes and entitlement program reform. But politically, these issues appear to be the weakest leg of the Republican coalition. The public is more than willing to raise taxes on the rich, and they don’t want cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

Despite the unpopularity of these ideas, various Republican office holders and pundits continue to blame social issues for election defeats.

Read more from this story HERE.

The Kennedy Center Awards and the Crisis of the Times

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The Obamas’ theatrical giving of the Leftover-from-the-Sixties awards at the Kennedy Center – Led Zeppelin, which today provides the nerve-wracking background noise in grocery stores and Dustin Hoffman who hasn’t had a real job since 1967 – fully manifests the crisis in Washington, D.C. South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint asked recently about something else with some honest frustration, “We need new people.” You’d think President Obama would do better as he is second generation himself and doesn’t belong to this crowd and in his campaign autobiography clearly crowned the Leftover-from-the-Sixties Democrats as his target to displace so as to awaken again a new and vital liberalism. So how’s that working out?

Markos Moulitas, with hopes of ushering in a generation of Iraq war veterans into the political process, well represented new and better thinking and suggested Virginia’s then governor Mark Warner, Virginia Senator Jim Webb, General Wesley Clark and Vermont Governor Howard Dean at a time when Obama began to rise and Hillary hovered around zero percent at Daily Kos (really).

“Will these Clinton-era Democrats ever go away?” asked Kos in a Washington Post essay in the day. The answer is not so easily will they go into the good night, and herewith lays the crisis. Young conservatives should ask today as well as once – oh, so long ago – governor of Florida Jeb Bush, who landed his helicopter near the White House last week in symbolism more course and conspicuous than any we have seen the likes of since the Soviets claimed to have invented corn flakes, “Will these Bush era Republicans ever go away?”

The answer to both questions is YES but DeMint is right to ask. Conservatives are better off with a presence and suggestion of new people: Senator Rand Paul of Tennessee, Senator Mike Lee of Utah, Joe Miller sure to rise in Alaska and the most talented and energetic Ted Cruz, the new senator from Texas, and possibly the one to establish the new paradigm in conservatism. Because today’s Republicans are not conservative: They are anti-liberal. And today’s Democrats are not liberal, they are anti-conservative. Like Sherlock Holmes and Professor Moriarty they go over the waterfall together.

There is no conservative party in America today but Ron Paul is Gray Champion to the new thinking which arose in the Tea Party and will awaken in what Grover Norquist calls Tea Party II: In six words, states’ rights, sound money, constitutional government. It forms a new matrix for new people and a new generation.

We enter this month an end game as per the Mayan Prophecy. The fall is at hand, but things don’t break because storms challenge New York or comets obliterate the earth. They break because cultures, liberal or conservative, refuse to let go. They cannot adapt to new thinking and cling instead to the old, the worn through, the irrelevant. And this year they marched David Letterman into the Kennedy Center. David Letterman? Previous awards have gone to Leontyne Price, Fred Astaire, George Balanchine, Ella Fitzgerald, Henry Fonda, Martha Graham, Tennessee Williams, Count Basie, Alvin Ailey, George Burns, Merce Cunningham, Isaac Stern, Cary Grant and Jimmy Cagney. These celestials today welcome Letterman into their sanga. Can there be any greater harbinger of the end times?

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Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for “Pundits Blog” in “The Hill” a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.

Brain-Lock Inside the Beltway: the GOP agonizes about the anti-tax pledge and Democrats do nothing.

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photo credit: gage skidmore

It’s at times like this I’m ashamed to admit I live inside the Beltway.

Well, that’s probably not specific enough, since I’m usually ashamed to admit I live inside the Beltway.

Still, the second you try to explain the stupidity of this “fiscal cliff” fiasco to a normal person, it makes William F. Buckley’s famous declaration that he’d rather be governed by the first few hundred people listed in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard seem all the more reasonable.

While there are some responsible politicians and policymakers in Washington, if you look at the whole place collectively, Uncle Sam starts to look like a junkie. The logic of addiction dictates that you make a deal that allows you to avoid all of your problems now and enjoy a quick high in exchange for a painful confrontation with reality down the road.

Almost exactly a year ago, during the famed debt-ceiling negotiations, Speaker of the House John Boehner boasted that he’d forced tough concessions from the Democrats, achieving the first real cut in government spending in ages. He claimed his “real, enforceable cut” amounted to $7 billion for fiscal year 2012. The Congressional Budget Office objected, saying the real savings were closer to $1 billion.

Read more from this article HERE.

Steyn: Kindly Note the Impending Bankruptcy

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Previously on The Perils of Pauline:

Last year, our plucky heroine, the wholesome apple-cheeked American republic, was trapped in an express elevator hurtling out of control toward the debt ceiling. Would she crash into it? Or would she make some miraculous escape?

Yes! At the very last minute of her white-knuckle thrill ride to her rendezvous with destiny, she was rescued by Congress’s decision to set up . . . a Super Committee! Those who can, do. Those who can’t, form a committee. Those who really can’t, form a Super Committee — and then put John Kerry on it for good measure. The bipartisan Super Committee of Super Friends was supposed to find $1.2 trillion dollars of deficit reduction by last Thanksgiving, or plucky little America would wind up trussed like a turkey and carved up by “automatic sequestration.”

Sequestration sounds like castration, only more so: It would chop off everything in sight. It would be so savage in its dismemberment of poor helpless America that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that over the course of a decade the sequestration cuts would reduce the federal debt by $153 billion. Sorry, I meant to put on my Dr. Evil voice for that: ONE HUNDRED AND FIFTY THREE BILLION DOLLARS!!! Which is about what the United States government currently borrows every month. No sane person could willingly countenance brutally saving a month’s worth of debt over the course of a decade.

So now we have the latest cliffhanger: the Fiscal Cliff, below which lies a bottomless abyss of sequestration, tax-cut-extension expiries, Alternative Minimum Tax adjustments, new Obamacare taxes, the expiry of the deferment of the Medicare Sustainable Growth Rate, as well as the expiry of the deferment of the implementation of the adjustment of the correction of the extension of the reduction to the proposed increase of the Alternative Minimum Growth Sustainability Reduction Rate. They don’t call it a yawning chasm for nothing.

Read more from this story HERE.

Questions the RINO Party Establishment Won’t Be Asked (and Can’t Answer)

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Somehow both the Left and the Republican Party establishment are allowed to each go through life tip-toeing through the raindrops, with each rarely compelled to defend their indefensibles.

That has again been apparent on the Ruling Class news shows following the election, as RINO after RINO and Republicrat after Republicrat strolled in front of the cameras to say that unless Republicans become more like Democrats they just can’t win elections. Of course, all of this propaganda begs several follow-up questions that almost never get asked, which is why I will ask them here.

Questions like:

• John McCain, if it’s true that Republicans need to move left on issues in order to win elections as you have (repeatedly) suggested, then why weren’t you running for re-election last month? Why did you lose in 2008?

• How come Republicans did very well in the 2010 elections and not as well in the 2012 elections? If it’s because we were too conservative, what evidence do you have that the failed campaign Republicans waged in 2012 was to the right of the successful campaign of 2010?

• If elections are all about winning over those supposedly crucial independents, then why didn’t Mitt Romney win the election? He won independents in Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado – all states McCain lost independents to Obama in 2008 – and did six points better with independents in Florida than McCain did in 2008. If you flip all those states to Romney he wins the Electoral College, yet he did what he was supposed to do with independents in those states and still lost them all. How do you explain that?

• If elections are only about the independents, should conservatives then en masse abandon their party affiliation and re-register as independents as a means of actually getting you to care about what they think for a change?

• If it’s true we’re alienating voters because of our stance in defense of marriage, then how do you explain the fact marriage out-performed Romney in every state it was on the ballot? For example, marriage performed 10 points better than Romney did in Maryland, even though it lost as well. Romney did better with evangelical turnout in Minnesota, where there was also a marriage initiative on the ballot, than McCain did four years ago. Instead of abandoning these issues, wouldn’t the smarter, more pragmatic political play be to try and link your candidates to issues more popular than your candidates? For instance, there is legitimate concern about the GOP’s status with minority voters. Yet those same minority voters are also very pro-life and very pro-marriage. If you really want to reach out to those voters, why not start with issues they already agree with you on?

• If we have to completely abandon the sanctity of life to win female voters, then how do you explain that Romney won white women by 14 points and still lost the election?

• If you’re going to abandon the sanctity of life, the defense of marriage, limited taxation, small government, out-of-control spending, and the rule of law, then what exactly makes you a Republican? Why not become a Democrat where the ideas you believe in are more popular?

• The most energized that pro-freedom and pro-liberty voters were this year was during the rally to defend Chick-fil-a prior to the Republican Convention. Did you make sure all those people were registered to vote, and ready to vote Republican for the same reasons they were standing in line for hours to get a chicken sandwich? Did you go out of your way to let that grassroots uprising of everyday Americans know which party stood with them, or did you shun them to curry favor with your ruling class friends?

• If Romney’s problems with the Republican base were just as simple as evangelicals not wanting to vote for a Mormon, then why did fewer Catholics vote in 2012 compared to 2008 despite the presence of Paul Ryan on the ticket? Furthermore, why did Romney do worse with Mormon voters than George W. Bush did in 2004?

• Why did you go scorched earth to shove Romney down our throats in the primary, only to then abandon him several times in the general election? Didn’t you tell all of us Romney was the only candidate running this time that could win?

• This week the Gallup Poll said for the first time since 2000 a majority of the American people don’t believe it’s the government’s role to provide healthcare for everybody. So then instead of funding Obamacare why aren’t you doing everything possible can to stop it?

• Do you have a plan to recover the 7 million white voters who voted in 2008 that didn’t vote in 2012? Do you know who those people are? Do you know why they didn’t vote?

Wouldn’t you love to see someone in the ruling class media ask these people these questions? Is there anyone in the “Republican media” that will ask them these questions when they get the chance?

Nah.

I mean, it’s not as if the republic is at stake or anything. Besides, it’s two-for-one martinis at the beltway’s newest trendy hangout, and Karl Rove is there laying out his latest master plan to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Gotta roll. Ta-ta.

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You can friend “Steve Deace” on Facebook, or follow him on Twitter @SteveDeaceShow.

Televise the Benghazi Hearings!

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Those too young to have been there might have caught the clip on YouTube. The final scene in the Monty Python classic, Holy Grail, where the mad peasants are being dragged away by the hair by London bobbies. They take advantage of the moment to shout at the TV cameras, “Look! The violence inherent in the system!” It was classic strategy of the trained apparatchik of the day to use the moment to politicize a greater purpose. In time things improved. Watergate maybe cleared the air and people for awhile began to talk straight again. But this is what we are seeing again with Susan Rice on Capitol Hill.

The use of violence at Benghazi was instantaneously utilized for a greater and broader political (propaganda) objective. The troubling thing here is that what they keep calling the “talking points” connecting the violent acts to the greater (propaganda) purpose were passed along by an American diplomat and United States Ambassador to the United Nations to five TV stations and to other media. As they are saying, they appear to have originated elsewhere; the state department, the CIA, perhaps the Obama administration. But troubling is maybe the wrong word: Horrifying is potentially the right word. Because the propagandized press “spinning” the violence was of course what was fully intended by the purveyors of the violence which we know now was related to Al Qaeda.

The bewilderment of northern New England’s rock solid senators, Kelly Ayotte and Susan Collins, coming forth from hearings to give America its first briefings had a haunting quality; a remembrance of things past. Those old enough might recall Watergate. We have seen that bewilderment before with the folkloric North Carolina venerable Senator Sam Ervin and his trusty Tennessee colleague Howard Baker, both honorable to a core, making the case then at Watergate that something was not quite right. Same here. And Americans need to know what. These hearings should be expanded and televised until we get to the bottom of it.

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Bernie Quigley is a prize-winning magazine writer and has worked more than 30 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and book, movie, music and art reviewer. His essays on politics and world affairs have appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and other newspapers and magazines. He has published poetry in Painted Bride Quarterly and has written dozens of magazine articles. For 20 years he has been an amateur farmer, raising Tunis sheep and organic vegetables. He has written hundreds of columns for “Pundits Blog” in “The Hill” a political journal in Washington, D.C. He lives in the White Mountains with his wife and four children.

Another Voice: Take the High Road, End Corporate Welfare Now!

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Obama has maneuvered the narrative of the fiscal cliff talks as being a war between the rich and the middle class. Obama claims to be on the side of the middle class and the GOP, the party of the “rich.”

The mainstream media of course, always on the look out for a simplistic headline to rally around, can carry this message forward to further marginalize the Republican Party.

It’s time for the party to be bold and call Obama’s bluff. Instead of going through the death of a thousand cuts, come out and put something on the table that all Americans can get behind: Call for the end of all corporate welfare. These “entitlements” are costing taxpayers an estimated 100 billion dollars per year. See the Cato Report HERE.

Entitlement programs/the welfare state is the driver behind the huge debt of America… Corporate welfare IS an entitlement.

If the Republicans can be bold enough to put this on the table, they can then demand from Obama, cuts to other entitlement programs. This will deflate the class warfare meme that has worked so well against the Republicans.

After all, why should the American middle class be paying for huge subsidies to corporations that hire thousands of lobbyists who shower politicians of both parties to vote more corporate loopholes?

At the same time all of the billions of dollars in “green subsidies” can be ended, including the subsidies for the rich who buy expensive electric cars. Why should the middle class pay for the rich when they buy their toys? Average income for an electric car buyer is $174,000. Why should a middle class taxpayer put up 7,500 per car to entice a wealthy person to buy an electric car?

Why should the middle class by paying 26.00 per gallon for “green” fuel supplied to the military when they can get that same fuel for 3.50 per gallon?

The giant retailer Wal-Mart has more workers enrolled in many state Medicaid programs—which are supposed to be reserved for poor people—than any other employer. Why should the middle class be subsidizing Wal-Mart?

Instantly the Republicans will gain credibility with Americans. They can stand toe to toe with Obama, look him straight in the eye and say: “We are willing to put Americas future first are you?”

Nothing short of boldness will work now, otherwise it will be another kick the can down the road and Americans will be more disillusioned than ever with their leaders in Washington.

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Ed Farnan is the conservative columnist at IrishCentral, where he has been writing on the need for energy independence, strong self defense, secure borders, 2nd amendment, smaller government and many other issues. His articles appear in many publications throughout the USA and world. He has been a guest on Fox News and a regular guest on radio stations in the US and Europe.

John Boehner, Please Retire

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It’s clear. There will be no stopping Obamacare. There will be no justice on Benghazi-gate. There will be no stopping Barack Obama’s unconstitutional usurpations and abuses of power as long as John Boehner holds the reins of power as the Republican Speaker of the House.

It’s time for John Boehner to retire. He should let a younger leader, with more will to fight Obama, take leadership in the US House.

The situation is so dire that without new leadership, the Republican Party could actually dissolve into rival factions. He is even considering caving into Barack Obama’s drive for a massive tax increase. We stand on the precipice of a total capitulation of the Republican agenda by Speaker Boehner.

We need real leaders to challenge Obama. As long as John Boehner remains Speaker of the House, Obamacare will remain the law of the land.

Back on July 1, 2012, just four short months ago, Boehner marched in front of the cameras on “Meet the Press” and vowed to do whatever it takes to stop Obamacare. Practically thumping his chest, he said: “It has to be ripped out by its roots.” And he added: “We will not flinch from our resolve to make sure this law is repealed in its entirety.”

Taking him at his word, 127 members of the House, led by Representatives Jim Jordan and Michele Bachmann, reminded Mr. Boehner that he had the ability to actually keep that promise and signed off on a letter asking Boehner to take the lead and allow the House of Representatives to finally wield its legitimate and constitutionally-granted power of the purse to “rescind all Obamacare implementation funds.”

Don’t be deceived by anything you hear on the nightly news; the sad and simple truth is that John Boehner and House Republicans already had – and still have – the power to stop the implementation of Obamacare.

They had that power from the very day that Republicans gained control of the House of Representatives back in January of 2011, and they have that power at this very moment.

Mr. Boehner simply needs to hold a simple up-or-down vote in the GOP-controlled House of Representatives to deny Obamacare funding, and Barack Obama and Harry Reid can’t do anything to stop it. It really is that simple.

The problem is not that Republicans can’t stop the implementation of Obamacare. The problem is that the so-called GOP Leadership won’t stop Obamacare, and that’s why we need a change in leadership.

So what’s Boehner’s excuse?

Boehner apparently has his reasons. We call them excuses. His surrogates argued that Boehner’s refusal to fund Obamacare could set the stage for Barack Obama to exact his revenge by ordering a “government shutdown” and blame it on Republicans.

We say let Mr. Obama take his best shot. At some point, the rubber has got to meet the road.

We don’t need to concede defeat. A “government shutdown” is not only not as bad as you’ve been lead to believe; it’s also the last thing Barack Obama wants. It puts a stop to Obama’s out-of-control spending.

What we need is a true leader at the helm who is not afraid to call Barack Obama’s bluff and negotiate from a position of strength, and that man is not John Boehner.

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Floyd Brown is a political innovator, writer and speaker.

Floyd’s new book, Obama’s Enemies List, was released in August of 2012.

Time magazine wrote: “Brown has a stature among devoted conservatives that almost matches his physical heft (6 ft. 6 in. and 240 lbs.)”.

Floyd is the president of the Western Center for Journalism, a nonprofit foundation dedicated to informing and equipping Americans who love freedom. The WCJ also trains “citizen journalists” to become effective online advocates for freedom.

Mitt Romney: A good man. The right fight.

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Over the years, one of the more troubling characteristics of the Democratic Party and the left in general has been a shortage of loyalty and an abundance of self-loathing. It would be a shame if we Republicans took a narrow presidential loss as a signal that those are traits we should emulate.

I appreciate that Mitt Romney was never a favorite of D.C.’s green-room crowd or, frankly, of many politicians. That’s why, a year ago, so few of those people thought that he would win the Republican nomination. But that was indicative not of any failing of Romney’s but of how out of touch so many were in Washington and in the professional political class. Nobody liked Romney except voters. What began in a small field in New Hampshire grew into a national movement. It wasn’t our campaign, it was Romney. He bested the competition in debates, and though he was behind almost every candidate in the GOP primary at one time or the other, he won the nomination and came very close to winning the presidency.

In doing so, he raised more money for the Republican Party than the party did. He trounced Barack Obama in debate. He defended the free-enterprise system and, more than any figure in recent history, drew attention to the moral case for free enterprise and conservative economics.

When much of what passes for a political intelligentsia these days predicted that the selection of Rep. Paul Ryan meant certain death on the third rail of Medicare and Social Security, Romney brought the fight to the Democrats and made the rational, persuasive case for entitlement reform that conservatives have so desperately needed. The nation listened, thought about it — and on Election Day, Romney carried seniors by a wide margin. It’s safe to say that the entitlement discussion will never be the same.

On Nov. 6, Romney carried the majority of every economic group except those with less than $50,000 a year in household income. That means he carried the majority of middle-class voters. While John McCain lost white voters younger than 30 by 10 points, Romney won those voters by seven points, a 17-point shift. Obama received 4½million fewer voters in 2012 than 2008, and Romney got more votes than McCain.

Read more from this article HERE.

Stuart Stevens was the chief strategist for the Romney presidential campaign.