Shapiro: Obama Tries to Define Away Reality, but Reality Wins

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Last Friday, President Obama gave his last press conference as commander in chief. Undeterred by his would-be successor’s devastating loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election, unswayed by Republicans’ complete domination of Congress, state legislatures and governor mansions, he maintained his cool and collected self-aggrandizement. Why not? According to Obama, Obama has been a major success.

Perhaps the most hilarious moment of delusion came when he talked about terrorism. “Over the past eight years, no foreign terrorist organization has successfully executed an attack on our homeland that was directed from overseas,” Obama stated. He then continued, saying no attack has been executed “in a rainstorm with the attacker driving a tractor with one hand, drinking a Miller High Life with the other and wearing a clown nose.”

To be fair, Obama didn’t add those final qualifiers. But he might as well have. In order to define away the problem of terrorism that has grown dramatically worldwide on his watch, he simply spoke of terrorism as a problem of organized groups within defined territories. That’s not how modern terrorism works. Terrorist groups can recruit without formal structures and can operate as independent cells within various countries.

Just three days after Obama’s statements, an alleged jihadi plowed a truck into a Christmas market in Berlin; the same day, a Turkish terrorist murdered the Russian ambassador to Turkey. These latest attacks aren’t outliers. In the past several years, we’ve seen terrorist attacks in Turkey, Germany, Belgium, Great Britain, Canada and Australia.

This sort of terrorism isn’t relegated to foreign countries, of course. Here is an incomplete complete list of radical Islam-related terror attacks and attempts on American soil under Obama: shootings of American military recruiters in Little Rock, Arkansas; the massacre at Fort Hood; the Boston Marathon bombing; an attempted bombing of the airport in Wichita, Kansas; hatchet attacks on New York City police officers; attempted shootings at the “Draw Muhammad” event in Garland, Texas; the attacks on military recruiters in Chattanooga, Tennessee; the massacre at the San Bernardino Inland Regional Center; the Orlando nightclub shooting; the New York and New Jersey bombings; and the Ohio State University car attack.

Obama still thinks he can cover his abysmal record with closely drawn definitions of terrorism. It’s the equivalent of President Bill Clinton saying he’s been faithful to his wife except for certain areas, like sex. It’s technically true so far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far.

Americans know that, and they reacted to Obama’s consistent lying-by-omission by electing Trump, a man who needs little evidence to jump to conclusions. Obama is so careful to avoid spotting fact patterns that he simply omits inconvenient data points. Trump is so eager to spot fact patterns that he simply includes convenient non-data points. But Americans would rather have Trump’s jump-to-conclusions mentality than Obama’s avoid-conclusions-at-all-cost mentality — Trump’s mentality may lead to mistakes, but those mistakes are less likely to cost Western lives.

So Obama can hawk his faux sophistication on terrorism as much as he wants. If Democrats want to ensure that Republicans continue to win elections, they ought to follow his lead. (For more from the author of “Shapiro: Obama Tries to Define Away Reality, but Reality Wins” please click HERE)

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How Sen. Lee Forced McConnell’s Hand on Repealing Obamacare

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House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wisc. (F, 51%) and Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. (F, 40%) have garnered plaudits recently for their strong stance on repealing Obamacare.

As voters await the repeal vote they’ve long been promised, it’s worth reflecting on how Republicans have finally gotten to this point.

It was Senator Lee who, in July of 2015, forced the repeal issue in the Senate — despite severe and unwarranted opposition from his own party’s leadership. And it is because he did so that Republicans are now poised to repeal this unwanted, unaffordable and unworkable law.

During a little-noticed floor fight over a transportation bill in the summer of 2015, Sen. Lee found a procedural loophole that would have allowed Senate Republicans to take a meaningful vote on Obamacare repeal. (By “meaningful,” I mean a vote requiring only a 51-vote majority to pass, not the 60-vote threshold more frequently employed in the Senate.) Lee entered the repeal vote, via an amendment to the transportation bill. And in doing so, he turned the Senate Republican conference on its head.

Despite campaigning on the pledge to repeal Obamacare “root and branch,” McConnell actually had no intention of allowing Lee to go ahead with a repeal vote.

Rather, he took a leaked email from a Lee staffer (full disclosure, that staffer was me) discussing the repeal vote, and used it as a tool to bludgeon Lee in front of his colleagues — not once, but twice — claiming that Lee was using this opportunity only to “divide the party.”

Dividing the party over repeal of Obamacare? The one campaign pledge that they all had in common?

As Ben Domenech later wrote in The Federalist, McConnell’s “bizarre and childish tantrum” over an Obamacare repeal vote raised the question — did McConnell have the yips?.

But rather than respond in kind, Sen. Lee chose to be the statesman. He withstood the unwarranted scorn of his colleagues and the scathing rebuke from McConnell, and offered to withdraw the amendment — but for something in return. Rather than repeal Obamacare then, he agreed to withdraw the amendment for a promise to repeal Obamacare via the reconciliation process later in the year — a more potent and powerful opportunity to issue a first strike at the law.

That promise, extracted by Lee from McConnell, formed the basis of the repeal effort, and is the reason McConnell and Ryan can so confidently line up the process in January.

How?

As a result of Lee’s efforts, Republicans passed a reconciliation bill last year that repealed Obamacare. Though it was subsequently vetoed by President Obama, that effort was the single step which proved that Senate Republicans can pass repeal, over all procedural and policy objections. That effort forms the baseline for what Republicans are about to tackle in January. Without Sen. Lee’s courageous stand, they’d be starting from scratch. As a direct result of his efforts, they are instead starting with the wind at their backs.

Some might say that end counts more than the means — so, since Republicans are going to repeal Obamacare in January, it doesn’t matter how they got there. To them I would reply: Until Lee forced repeal to be included in last year’s reconciliation, it was clear that Senate leadership would make no effort to offer a meaningful vote. Rather, up until that point, they continued to hide behind show votes at a 60-vote threshold — the kind where members can vote for something, confidently knowing it will never get the 60 votes to pass.

Lee’s actions forced the Senate majority to put its money where its mouth was. No more could they talk a big game while hiding behind show votes; they would actually have to cast a meaningful vote in the direction of full repeal. Without Lee, Senate Republicans would never have fulfilled the promises they made to the voters who elected them.

After spending nearly a decade as a staffer in Congress, I can confidently say there are very few politicians courageous enough to stare down Senate leadership and the ire of their colleagues without blinking. Sen. Lee did just that.

In Washington, holding yourself and others accountable to campaign promises can be a thankless task. Amid all the celebration and self-congratulation that will accompany the first repeal vote in January, Sen. Mike Lee deserves considerable gratitude as the unsung hero of the repeal effort. (For more from the author of “How Sen. Lee Forced McConnell’s Hand on Repealing Obamacare” please click HERE)

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Newsweek Editor Admits He Faked News on Fox

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Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald said Tuesday that his baseless claim that President-elect Donald Trump was once institutionalized in a mental hospital was actually part of a series of jokes and intended to be a “signal to a source” to talk to him.

Eichenwald’s explanation came Tuesday on “Good Morning America,” as host George Stephanopoulos asked him about the September tweet in which he said, without evidence, he believed “Trump was institutionalized in a mental hospital for a nervous breakdown in 1990.”

“Any regrets about that?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“There’s a long story behind it,” Eichenwald said after some brief laughter. “When you go through the full lead-up to that tweet — there was a reporting purpose for that tweet going out, which is more than you are going to want to hear about.

“I was making fun of Fox News and the rest, who were doing ‘Hillary has seizures,’ ‘Hillary has multiple sclerosis,’ ‘Hillary has Parkinson’s,’ you know, let’s go to Dr. Oz,” he continued, referring to a point in the election during which the two major-party presidential nominees’ health was under the microscope. (Read more from “Newsweek Editor Admits He Faked News on Fox” HERE)

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THE OBAMA LEGACY: Best Post-Election Graphic Yet

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Philip Bump at The Washington Post accurately captions it “The decimation of the Democratic Party, visualized.”

As Dave Blount observes, “In 2008, the Democrat Party abandoned the last vestiges of moderation and threw itself behind the very personification of moonbattery, Barack Hussein Obama.”

While Democrats have thus far blamed James Comey, Julian Assange, Russian hackers, Fake News, and (presumably) George W. Bush for their crushing losses, there’s a much simpler explanation.

They nominated a thoroughly unlikeable, villainous harridan who pushed the party even further to the left thanks to the honorary President of Venezuela, Bernie Sanders, and President “I’ve Got a Pen and a Phone” Davis.

And while Democrats point to a popular vote victory for Hillary Clinton, that notion is also bogus:

161219-democrats-decimated

Let’s stipulate that California — even ignoring its massive population of illegal aliens — accounted for Hillary’s popular vote “victory”.

But let’s subtract out a few items from her popular vote total:

• There’s evidence of systematic Democrat vote fraud all over the country.

• There are also reputable estimates that millions of illegal aliens voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016.

• And Democrat efforts to undermine voter ID requirements, extend early voting periods, and make absentee ballots easier to obtain and forge have all contributed to the scam.

Subtract all of that Democrat criminality and it’s clear that Trump won the popular vote — and the electoral college — by a veritable landslide.

The evisceration of the Democrat Party is Obama’s real legacy. And no one tell Paul Krugman. He’s suffering from a bad case of walking butthurt. (For more from the author of “THE OBAMA LEGACY: Best Post-Election Graphic Yet” please click HERE)

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Brave New World: Terrifying Pro-Life Consequences of UK’s 3-Parent Decision

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It’s official. We are living in a brave new world.

This week, the British government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority approved new reproductive procedures that will allow doctors to “create babies” by combining the DNA of three “parents.” HFEA Chair Sally Cheshire called it a “life-changing” decision that could prevent a small group of at-risk children from inheriting life-threatening mitochondrial diseases (like muscular dystrophy and major organ failure) from their mothers.

Proponents of the methods have assured that the decision will not activate a new age of genetically modified babies, as the procedures will be implemented on a case-by-case basis. British pro-lifers responded with a collective, “Yeah, we’ll see about that.”

Each of the new techniques involves manipulating a mother’s egg, a father’s sperm, and a donor egg to ensure that the mother’s mitochondrial DNA is not passed on. The DNA from the donor amounts to an estimated one percent of the child’s genes (hence the three “parents” claim).

“The fact that there are now calls in Newcastle for egg donors — in practice, to produce healthy embryos solely for spare parts — tells us much about attitudes to women used to produce embryos this way, and harms and endangers us all,” bioethicist Anthony McCarthy, education director at Britain’s Society for the Protection of Unborn Children, told the Catholic Herald.

Per Dr. McCarthy, only one of the two approved procedures, pronuclear transfer, destroys two viable human embryos in order to create what doctors hope will be a healthy, disease-free child. And while the alternative procedure, maternal spindle transfer, doesn’t require that an embryo be destroyed, Dr. McCarthy noted that “the new life has come to be through a production process which fragments maternity and will in practice be subject to quality-control.”

The doctors and scientists who advocated for the approval of these procedures undoubtedly believe, in their quest to give all children healthy bodies free of any deformity, that the procedures are humane. But in order to achieve their desired end, these individuals are willing to discard countless lives. If that sounds like eugenics, it’s because it is. These procedures approved by the British government aim to rid society of “undesirables.” Not very humane when you put it that way, right?

Even when the embryos are spared, as in the case of maternal spindle transfer, these procedures raise concerns regarding the purpose of procreation and parenting.

If mitochondrial DNA manipulation is permissible, why couldn’t this lead to other forms of selective DNA manipulation? For example, what if the donor has a higher IQ than the mother? Better hair? A nicer voice?

Is it fair to subject a child, who has rights of his own, to such a procedure? Shouldn’t he at least be given the choice of having a full 50 percent of his DNA come from his mother, and his mother alone?

Pro-life advocate and chairman of Oxford’s Conservative Policy Forum, Mark Bhagwandin, called the new procedures “very uncertain and potentially dangerous.”

“Whilst we are deeply sympathetic to the plight of people with mitochondrial related diseases, the ends [do] not always justify the means,” Bhagwandin told Catholic Herald. “We would encourage and support greater investigation and research into ethical remedies which do not seek to genetically modify human beings.”

At the core of the pro-life movement is the belief that children who are physically, mentally, and economically “disadvantaged” are still better off alive, with two (not three) parents who love and care for them. The pro-life community is rightfully troubled by progressive efforts that attempt to defy this belief. (For more from the author of “Brave New World: Terrifying Pro-Life Consequences of UK’s 3-Parent Decision” please click HERE)

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An Inconvenient Right: Ninth Circuit Fails to Protect 2nd Amendment

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There are all sorts of rights the federal courts have invented. There is a right to an abortion with no restrictions on the clinics; there is a right to force states to recognize any relationship as a marriage; there is a right for Planned Parenthood to get state funding; there is a right to 20 days of early voting and ballot harvesting.

Yet, when it comes to the unambiguous, natural right of self-defense, enshrined into the Second Amendment, the courts tell the states that they are free to regulate the unalienable right all they want.

The latest example is the notorious Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upholding California’s law requiring a 10-day waiting period to take possession of a gun after a purchase. Writing for a three judge panel, which overturned a district judge’s opinion in favor of the Second Amendment, Judge Mary Schroeder wrote that “[A] 10-day cooling-off period would serve to discourage such conduct and would impose no serious burden on the core Second Amendment right of defense of the home.”
Let’s be clear here: There is only one enumerated right in the Bill of Rights for which the unequivocal language of “shall not be infringed” is used. That language is not used for abortion or forced recognition of alternative lifestyles as marriage against the will of the states. (In fact, it doesn’t talk about those things at all in the Constitution. Yet, the courts are saying states can’t even implement common sense health regulations on abortion clinics.) The one right that is mentioned explicitly in unmistakable language, on the other hand, seems to be open to all sorts of political arguments by the courts.

Putting aside the fact that criminals don’t submit themselves to background checks and have plenty of avenues to purchase a gun immediately, these are not constitutional arguments. Placing a 10-day waiting period is a substantial burden, especially for first-time purchasers who often make the decision out of an imminent sense of fear or need for self-defense.

Such a restriction is manifestly unconstitutional for those who are approved quickly by the federal background check system, especially in the eyes of judges who think everything not in adherence to the DNC platform is unconstitutional.

The same courts that nullify every legitimate state power — from marriage and abortion regulation to election maps and even adhering to natural law — are suddenly deferential to state laws that are incontrovertibly against the plain language of the Constitution.

Whereas they apply strict scrutiny to any regulation of a clear state power against the ACLU’s assertion of a fundamental right, they only applied intermediate scrutiny to this gun regulation against a natural right that pre-dated our Constitution.

There are a couple of other observations in order here:

1. The lower courts are killing the Second Amendment. SCOTUS remains silent.

This gun ruling is part of a growing trend where lower courts are severely limiting the scope of the Heller ruling (not that we need the court to affirm a natural right). In Heller, the Supreme Court made it clear that governmental interest cannot be factored in to mitigate an individual right to own or bear firearms because the Second Amendment “is the very product of an interest-balancing by the people,” and “[t]he very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government … the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”

Yet every single circuit that has heard cases on gun restrictions — the Second, Third, Fourth, Ninth, and 10th Circuit Courts — has ruled there is no right to self-defense outside the home in contravention of the plain language of the Heller decision and the undeniable text of the Second Amendment. They have also upheld state “assault weapons” and high-capacity magazine bans in the Second, Fourth, and Seventh, and Ninth Circuits.

Thus far, we can’t even affirm a foundational right to self-defense with a single circuit, and the Supreme Court has therefore declined to grant cert (accept an appeal from the lower courts) to gun rights activists in an effort to overturn these lower court decisions on appeal.

Even when SCOTUS has broached the topic of guns since the Heller ruling, all but the few conservatives have clearly gone along with limiting Heller. The conservatives on the court have called them out for surreptitiously allowing the Second Amendment to be killed in the lower courts.

2. The courts are a one-way dead-end for conservatives

Ever since the federal judiciary has erroneously been given the distinction of the sole and final arbiter of constitutional interpretation, conservatives have been on the losing side of judicial supremacy well over 90 percent of the time. Heller was one of the few cases where we benefited from judicial supremacis

But notice the difference between liberal victories in the courts (even when built upon unconstitutional jurisprudence) and the few conservative victories (even when the jurisprudence is rooted in the plain text of the Constitution).

Immediately after Obergefell where the courts redefined the building block of all civilization, every red state pretty much immediately threw in the towel. Conversely, when conservatives won in Heller, the blue states immediately got to work to chip away at the scope of the victory by continuing to enforce anti-carry laws, assault weapons bans, and sundry restrictions. The dividends of liberals’ “Never surrender” mentality have paid off as the lower courts are upholding their shenanigans.

Thus once again, I must say, the federal judiciary is a dead-end for us to enforce true constitutionalism in blue states and will only serve as an anti-constitutional juggernaut for our policies in red states. Which is why we need judicial reform — badly.

Yesterday was the 225th anniversary of the ratification of the Bill of Rights. Years after the courts have been crowned king over our Constitution, everything under the sun has been retroactively enshrined into those critical amendments, except for the principles that were actually adopted in plain English. (For more from the author of “An Inconvenient Right: Ninth Circuit Fails to Protect 2nd Amendment” please click HERE)

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It’s Not Islamophobia to Recognize That Sharia Is Incompatible with the Constitution

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The Washington Post is trying to pathologize as “Islamophobia” normal, human responses to the worldwide explosion of Islamic supremacism and jihad violence, including recent savage terrorist attacks in America by Muslims our government foolishly welcomed. In a recent column, William McCants tries to cast Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, Newt Gingrich, Frank Gaffney, and anyone who agrees with them about the danger of Islamist radicalism as tinfoil-hat-wearing hatemongers or fools. That would have to include the scholars of the Claremont Institute, who issued this erudite warning of the grave threat posed to America by Islamist ideology and organizations — such as the many-tentacled Muslim Brotherhood.

No one knows the rules better than the Post: If you want to crush someone in America, link him somehow to racism, if only by some lame analogy. If you want to silence debate about your reasons for crushing him, suggest that he is frothing with hatred, to the point that his condition is a kind of moral disease. If anyone defends him, accuse that defender of that same disease and suggest that if he won’t throw his friend under the bus he could share his fate. Find out where he works, and look into getting him fired.

That’s how opinion is policed in America, where thanks to our Constitution elites don’t have the option of simply throwing dissenters in jail — as the Dutch establishment has jailed patriotic politician Geert Wilders, simply for opposing further Muslim immigration. That’s right, Wilders was sentenced to prison for making a policy argument. Fear not: Opinion polls suggest that he might be elected Prime Minister, at which point even EU minions would probably feel the need to let him out.

Or maybe not. The scorn which European elitists feel for mere citizens is so overpowering, that the Dutch might just leave Wilders to rot and annul the election — as EU satraps in Britain are trying to overturn the Brexit vote, and some Democrats are attempting to nullify the election of Donald Trump with wild charges of Russian “hacking.”

We can scent here the sniffy contempt that Clinton felt for “Deplorables,” which is shared by the Washington press corps. What’s funny is that this sense of superiority is absolutely groundless, built on wishful thinking and ignorance — in this case about what Islam really teaches and what it demands.

Communism was “pseudo-Islam.” The real thing is worse.

The brilliant economist and social philosopher Wilhelm Röpke — the very first professor fired by the Nazis for his ideas — once summed up Communism as a “pseudo-Islam.” A powerful insight: They are both creeds of conquest and domination. For a few generations, people were willing to lay down their lives for the sake of a future “socialist paradise,” but their fervor quickly faded. If you don’t believe in an afterlife, martyrdom is a pretty hard sell.

Islam, by contrast, from the very beginning offered rewards both in this life and the next one. Muhammad recruited warriors by promising them the three things which young men most crave: plunder, power, and pleasure. Those who followed him and his heirs would have Allah’s blessing in stealing loot from the unbeliever, subjugating him, and taking his wife or daughters as sex slaves. Here’s just one of the relevant verses from the Quran:

Quran (33:50) – “O Prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers; and those (slaves) whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee”

As The Religion of Peace explains: “This is one of several personal-sounding verses ‘from Allah’ narrated by Muhammad — in this case allowing a virtually unlimited supply of sex partners. Other Muslims are restricted to four wives, but they may also have sex with any number of slaves, following the example of their prophet.” And of course if jihad warriors died in battle against the unbeliever, they would go straight to paradise and enjoy a harem in heaven.

Sharia is an ideology, aimed at world domination.

Islamic sharia law is intrinsically political, oriented toward imposing Islam by force if necessary upon every nation on earth, keeping non-Muslims in a servile state, and defending masculine “honor” by savagely policing women’s sexual behavior. In every Muslim-dominated country, sharia does just these things. And every orthodox Muslim must accept sharia — including all its provisions about warring against unbelievers, with the goal of converting, killing, or enslaving every last non-Muslim on earth.

Imagine if rules for burning witches or torturing heretics were mandated in the New Testament, and put into practice in virtually every Christian country on earth, to this very day. Picture evangelicals hounding and killing witches in Alabama, and Pope Francis burning a hundred heretics or so each year in the Vatican. Don’t you think that non-Christian countries would be cautious about admitting Christian immigrants? Not just Christians with actual ties to witch-hunters and inquisitors, but any Christian who wouldn’t clearly renounce such violent practices?

In the center of Sunni Islam, Saudi Arabia, which seeds lands around the world with shiny new mosques and handpicked radical imams, all the most violent practices of primitive Islam are still in effect—from polygamy to blasphemy flogging, from cutting off hands of thieves to executing ex-Muslims for “apostasy.” The Islamic pressure groups funded by Saudi money, such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations, have close links to sponsors of terrorist groups like Hamas, as a U.S. federal judge concluded in 2009.

Time to Change Our Immigration Laws

Given these facts, it is folly to pretend that sharia is compatible with the American experiment. It is not. We need a change to our immigration laws requiring that every potential immigrant renounce the use of force to compel or restrain religious freedom — with provisions for deporting any newcomer who later expresses support for sharia or anything like it. We can model such a law on the perfectly constitutional, decades-long ban on immigration for members of Communist parties.

None of the recent jihadi attackers, in Florida, California, or Ohio, had any provable connection with terrorist groups. The Boston Marathon bombers grew up here since early childhood. What did each of these terrorists have in common? They were simply orthodox Muslims, steeped in sharia — thus primed by their creed and culture to turn against their non-Muslim neighbors. All it took was some piece of bad news, a personal setback, or the right imam spouting on the right message board, to light the spark. It is not Islamophobic to recognize this fact, and to take measures to protect ourselves and our loved ones from it. It is Islamo-realism. (For more from the author of “It’s Not Islamophobia to Recognize That Sharia Is Incompatible with the Constitution” please click HERE)

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The Most Important Cabinet Member You’re Not Paying Attention To

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President-elect Trump is nearly finished filling out his Cabinet. One of the remaining spots — and in my opinion, the most important — remains undecided. The position in question? The director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB).

The individuals who serve in Trump’s Cabinet will get the opportunity to oversee the agency or department within their specialized domains, like, for example, the Department of Defense, or the Environmental Protection Agency. But unlike those positions, the director of OMB gets the opportunity to keep tabs on each individual government agency.

That’s because OMB is specifically tasked with allocating the federal budget to the various agencies, as well as monitoring agency performance and providing financial management. OMB is also required to, “coordinate and review all significant Federal regulations by executive agencies,” — no easy task for a government that loves to spend money and promulgate never-ending regulations.

Since OMB is also responsible for drafting and formatting the President’s budget, this also allows this office to be intimately involved in all the policy and spending priorities for the entire federal government.

Although the director of OMB is not treated with the same eminence as those who run the State Department or the Department of Defense, few Cabinet positions are as important as the individual in charge of the budget office for these very reasons.

Some of the individuals chosen to join Trump’s Cabinet are controversial. For example, Trump’s choice for the deputy secretary of state postition, John Bolton, has been met with consternation by many in the liberty movement, such as Senator Rand Paul, R-Ky. (A, 92%) for his stance on issues like bombing Iran and supporting the Iraq war.

Still, conservatives and small-government Republicans should be optimistic about the names currently being floated for director of OMB. The first name floated was former Senator Tom Coburn. Coburn was an astute study of the budget during his days in the Senate, and was referred to by CNN as “a former US Senator from Oklahoma, who turned his Senate career into a crusade against government spending.”

He was also the champion of eliminating government waste, even in programs considered sacrosanct, like the military; he was a long-time advocate of fixing the Pentagon’s broken budget by demanding an audit. But Coburn also made that his mission government-wide, and was well known for publishing detailed reports on government waste.

Another promising name, and small government warrior, that has been mentioned is Congressman Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C. (A, 94%). One of the more conservative members of Congress, he is a member of the Freedom Caucus.

This often means that Mulvaney stands on principle against his own party. For example, when Republican leaders proposed the Bipartisan Budget Act — a bill to hamstring spending restraints by $63 billion — it was Mulvaney that spearheaded opposition to the deal.

In addition, Mulvaney has long advocated for a balanced budget, lower taxes, and eliminating corporate cronyism, like the Export-Import bank.

Among some of the other promising names that have been mentioned is David Malpass, a strong conservative economist by training, and a former high-ranking Reagan and George H.W. Bush official. Malpass also shares the list of names with Eric Ueland, a long-time budget staffer on the Senate Budget Committee.

The current list of conservative individuals under consideration for this position deserves more attention than perhaps any time since President Truman took office. That’s because this OMB director will have a daunting challenge in controlling government spending and debt, more than ever before. Consider the article by the Committee for a Responsible Federal budget, titled, “Trump Will Face Highest Debt-to-GDP Ratio of Any New President Since Truman.”

By our estimates, the national debt will total about 77 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) when Trump takes office, compared to 103 percent when Truman took office at the end of World War II, 58 percent when Eisenhower took office, and 46 percent when Clinton took office.

And yet, it’s not even fair to compare the debt under Truman with that of Obama. The debt that materialized under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman was almost solely related to the one-time expenses of fighting World War II. As you can see in the graph, once the war was over, the debts were quickly whittled away. That’s not the case today. Instead, our debts are becoming increasingly structural; the result of promised entitlement spending like Social Security and Medicare.

So really, the task that confronts today’s budget head will be far more daunting than anything that faced Truman. Consider this; by 2021, Social Security and Medicare alone will consume half of every dollar the government brings in. Whereas Truman could allocate surplus dollars to paying down the debt instead of buying tanks, post WWII, the budget director under Trump must decide between taking on more debt and tackling the acrimonious challenge of entitlement reform.

Still, conservatives deserved a good list of names to run what may become the most important office in the White House, and Trump has made a wise selection so far. This is what conservatives fought for. This is where we can make the government small again, and scale back Obama’s absurd regulations. (For more from the author of “The Most Important Cabinet Member You’re Not Paying Attention To” please click HERE)

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Busted: Deceitful Media Lied About Trump’s Speech in 3 Racially Charged Headlines

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With all the recent consternation from the mainstream media over the prevalence of “fake news,” and the constant grumblings about the dangers that low-information voters present, you’d think the media would take care extra care in their reporting these days.

Wrong.

The Chicago Tribune published a piece covering President-elect Donald Trump’s Thursday rally in Hershey, Pa. And, as it turns out, the story’s headline is a complete lie. The Tribune’s headline:

“Trump calls on Pennsylvania crowd to cheer African-Americans who ‘didn’t come out to vote.’”

Again — a complete falsehood. It says to the reader that Trump encouraged the crowd to cheer for black people who stayed home on Election Day — an overtly racially-charged act. But Trump did not say what the Tribune claims.

Watch for yourself (The comment in question is at the 6:48 mark. Trump begins his discussion of the black vote at the 6:20 mark):

“They didn’t come out to vote for Hillary,” Trump said.

Trump was not asking people to applaud the non-participation of black citizens; he was commending those who did not vote for his opponent — a corrupt, lying, nasty woman.

But the media has a narrative to sell to the people who don’t read past headlines. And so the New York Daily News writes:

“SEE IT: Donald Trump on ‘Thank You’ tour thanks ‘smart’ African-Americans for not voting in 2016 election.”

And Raw Story says:

“Trump tells Pennsylvania fans they can thank African-Americans for not voting in November election.”

And “journalists” push that narrative.

In their hatred of Donald Trump, the mainstream media are perfectly willing to fabricate news (or blatantly mislead, at the very least) if it makes the president-elect look like the evil, racist, monster that they insist he is. And the media does this despite the ease with which relevant facts disprove their narratives.

What is most confounding of all, though, is that the gaffe-prone Donald Trump says enough stupid things that they shouldn’t have to make up “news.” For instance, Trump recently said that African-American voters not showing up to the polls was “almost as good” as those who showed up to vote for him.

“The African American community was great to us,” Trump told a crowd in Grand Rapids, Mich., last week. “They came through, big league. Big league. And frankly if they had any doubt, they didn’t vote. And that was almost as good because a lot of people didn’t show up. Because they felt good about me.”

See, there in Grand Rapids was when Trump said something similar to what the media are implying Trump said this week. They didn’t have to lie about Trump’s comments in Pennsylvania to make their point. But they did lie in their headlines. In their efforts to spread misinformation, The Chicago Tribune and company have embarrassed themselves at the height of this fake-news hysteria.

I don’t consider myself a journalist; I’m a commentator. And so I’ll offer this comment: The point of journalism, it seems to me, is to simply report the facts and truth. It is to inform people of “the real story” when others attempt to spread lies or hide the truth.

The reason people are falling for “fake news” is because the self-proclaimed truth-tellers in MSM are willfully spreading lies. If you are a member of the mainstream media and you want people to believe in you again, stop twisting the facts. Stop pushing narratives.

Start telling the truth. (For more from the author of “Busted: Deceitful Media Lied About Trump’s Speech in 3 Racially Charged Headlines” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Sheriff Joe Arpaio Offers Evidence He Says Proves Obama’s Birth Certificate Is Not Real

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The office of Maricopa County, Ariz., Sheriff Joe Arpaio presented what it characterized as proof that the birth certificate the White House offered as evidence of President Obama’s American birth is not real.

Arpaio began the press conference Thursday in Phoenix by assuring reporters the office had “followed the evidence” and would have been just as satisfied if it had determined the certificate was authentic.

In the hour-long presentation, Arpaio’s lead investigator, Mike Zullo, made the case that the certificate was created from a “source” document: the birth certificate of Hawaiian Johanna Ah Nee, who was born within weeks of Obama in August 1961.

The Ah Nee document was originally obtained from investigative journalist Jerome Corsi, the author of several books and a contributor to the website World Net Daily.

According to Zullo, two separate forensic expert sources from two continents — Reed Hayes from Hawaii and the For Lab team in Italy — reviewed the Obama certificate and concluded it was not authentic.

Zullo told reporters Hayes has 45 years in the field and originally did not want to take the case because he is an Obama supporter and voted for him twice.

After reviewing the Obama certificate, the court expert stated, “I can’t clear this. There is something wrong with it.”

Zullo showed a video to reporters that purported to demonstrate how the date stamp in two different boxes on Obama’s certificate had the exact angle and placement, matching one of the date stamps on the Ah Nee original.

(For more from the author of “Sheriff Joe Arpaio Offers Evidence He Says Proves Obama’s Birth Certificate Is Not Real” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.