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President Obama’s Sequester Strategy: Divide And Conquer

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Photo Credit: APPresident Barack Obama broke Republicans once on taxes — and his risky strategy for winning the sequester fight assumes he’ll do it again.

He will divide, isolate and defeat Republicans using all the powers of his office and all his skills as a political campaigner. As Americans grow frustrated with the cuts, Republicans will reject their party’s no-tax mantra and demand that Congress end the standoff, even if it means raising some new revenue – just the way Obama is demanding.

Obama’s trying to speed this result, by releasing state by state details of the pain and suffering the sequester will cause, all meant to get Republicans to cave. And he’s got the biggest megaphone, hammering this message over and over in a way the divided Republican party cannot.

Except that message could cut both ways. What if the public agrees that yes, there is a lot of pain and suffering – and turns to Obama wondering, why didn’t you do more to prevent it? That’s what makes some Democrats nervous about the White House’s supreme level of confidence.

Democratic lawmakers, who are unclear about the end game, could succumb to the same public offensive that Obama has been ginning up against Republicans and start demanding that the White House cut its losses and move on to other important second-term initiatives. A GOP proposal to give flexibility to the agency heads on deciding how to administer the cuts could start looking attractive to Democrats as a way out.

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Busted: NRA Uses Justice Department Memo to Expose Obama on Guns

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Photo Credit: dok1 The National Rifle Association is using a Justice Department memo it obtained to argue in ads that the Obama administration believes its gun control plans won’t work unless the government seizes firearms and requires national gun registration — ideas the White House has not proposed and [purportedly] does not support.

The NRA’s assertion and its obtaining of the memo in the first place underscore the no-holds-barred battle under way as Washington’s fight over gun restrictions heats up.

The memo, under the name of one of the Justice Department’s leading crime researchers, critiques the effectiveness of gun control proposals, including some of President Barack Obama’s. A Justice Department official called the memo an unfinished review of gun violence research and said it does not represent administration policy.

The memo says requiring background checks for more gun purchases could help, but also could lead to more illicit weapons sales. It says banning assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines produced in the future but exempting those already owned by the public, as Obama has proposed, would have limited impact because people now own so many of those items. It also says that even total elimination of assault weapons would have little overall effect on gun killings because assault weapons account for a limited proportion of those crimes.

The nine-page document says the success of universal background checks would depend in part on “requiring gun registration,” and says gun buybacks would not be effective “unless massive and coupled with a ban.”

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Obama Fails To Register ‘Organizingforaction.net’; Site Points To NRA Home Page

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Photo Credit: Breitbart At the beginning of the year, President Barack Obama’s new 501(c)4 political nonprofit, Organizing For Action, was launched with all the usual bells and whistles. But the tech wizards at OFA forgot one important rule in today’s Internet world: Register all the iterations of your website address before someone else does.

Now Obama’s team is filing complaints against the folks smart enough to get the addresses before he did. As Obama’s OFA made its debut, no one in his purportedly Internet-savvy campaign had obtained the corresponding .com, .net, .org or .us sites, nor did OFA register other names that are close to its official one, as is the sensible practice. In the case of the .net address, a fellow named Derek Bovard had already registered the .net address by the time Obama’s team took notice.

Bovard has routed his new site to the homepage of the National Rifle Association. So, whenever anyone goes to www.organizingforaction.net they end up seeing the homepage of the NRA.

Naturally, Obama and his fellow community organizers were furious. So furious, in fact, that they have replied by filing complaints against Bovard–and, apparently, a variety of other people who had registered domain names that OFA now wants.

Obama’s group filed the complaints with the authority that governs website domain addresses, the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). The complaints were filed under Uniform Domain Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) rules. Obama’s case number is 1483257 and was filed on Feb 6. UDRP cases are usually decided within one to two months after first filing.

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Video: Biden- Americans ‘No Longer Worried’ About Economy

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Photo Credit: marcn In remarks today at the White House, Vice President Joe Biden said that Americans don’t have the same economic worries they did when President Barack Obama came into office:

“The are no longer traumatized by what was a traumatizing event, the great collapse of 2008,” said Biden.

“They are no longer worried, I think, about our economy being overwhelmed either by Europe writ large, the EU, or China somehow swallowing up every bit of innovation that exists in the world.”

See video:

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Personal Assets Crash 22% Under Obama, Recession

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Photo Credit: Washington Examiner The struggling economy, President Obama’s inability to fix unemployment and the sour housing market have cut the value of assets held by adult Americans by 22 percent since 2007, according to Pew Research.

In a new analysis of American household fiscal healthiness, Pew also found that those 35 and older have a higher and out-of-whack debt-to-income ratio of 1.22, the highest in three decades.

The crash in household assets and rise in debt comes as Americans are paying more in payroll taxes and at the gas pump, an unhealthy concoction that is sapping support for Obama.

A new Economist/YouGov poll provided to Secrets found Americans split on Obama, with 47 percent approving of his job performance, 46 percent not. And younger voters are especially distressed, with Obama receiving just 43 percent approval from those 18-29 who went overwhelmingly for him in the 2012 election. It’s not better at Rasmussen Reports, which found that just 15 percent of adults view the economy as good to excellent and, in a related poll, that just 40 percent give Obama good marks for job creation.

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Dictatorship Of Hypocrites: The Media’s Crusade Against Cruz

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

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

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

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

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

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Robert Gibbs: I Was Ordered Not To Acknowledge Existence Of Drone Program

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Photo Credit: Alex WongOn Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s “Up With Chris Hayes,” former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs said that he was not allowed to acknowledge the existence of the drone program while discussing transparency in the Obama administration.

“On this issue, particularly on national security issues, I feel like there really has been a transparency problem. I want to just show a little bit of montage of the White House responding to questions about, say, the drone program over the years,” Hayes said before playing a clip of an exchange between Gibbs and Major Garrett.

In that clip, Gibbs told Garrett that he would not “get into internal discussions” about the program.

“Do you think that you’ve been sufficiently forthcoming and the White House has been sufficiently forthcoming on this stuff?” Hayes asked.

“I certainly think there are aspects of that program that are and will remain highly sensitive and very secret, but let me give you an example here, Chris,” Gibbs said. “When I went through the process of becoming press secretary, one of the first things they told me was you’re not even to acknowledge the drone program. You’re not even to discuss that it exists,” he admitted.

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Scary Ted Cruz Labeled the New McCarthy in Leftist Freakout

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Photo Credit: New YorkerLast week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz’s prosecutorial style of questioning Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for Defense Secretary, came so close to innuendo that it raised eyebrows in Congress, even among his Republican colleagues. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, called Cruz’s inquiry into Hagel’s past associations “out of bounds, quite frankly.” The Times reported that Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, rebuked Cruz for insinuating, without evidence, that Hagel may have collected speaking fees from North Korea. Some Democrats went so far as to liken Cruz, who is a newcomer to the Senate, to a darkly divisive predecessor, Senator Joseph R. McCarthy, whose anti-Communist crusades devolved into infamous witch hunts. Senator Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, stopped short of invoking McCarthy’s name, but there was no mistaking her allusion when she talked about being reminded of “a different time and place, when you said, ‘I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such-and-such a date,’ and of course there was nothing in the pocket.”

Boxer’s analogy may have been more apt than she realized. Two and a half years ago, Cruz gave a stem-winder of a speech at a Fourth of July weekend political rally in Austin, Texas, in which he accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there. Cruz attended Harvard Law School from 1992 until 1995. His spokeswoman didn’t respond to a request to discuss the speech.

Cruz made the accusation while speaking to a rapt ballroom audience during a luncheon at a conference called “Defending the American Dream,” sponsored by Americans for Prosperity, a non-profit political organization founded and funded in part by the billionaire industrialist brothers Charles and David Koch. Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)

He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

“We are puzzled by the Senator’s assertions, as we are unaware of any basis for them,” Robb London, a spokesman for Harvard Law School, told me. London noted that Cruz had contributed “warm reminiscences“ of the school by video for a reunion of Latino alumni. “We applaud the fact that he has pursued public service, as so many of our graduates have done. We are also proud of our longstanding tradition of freedom of speech and the robust range of views and debates on our campus.”

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Have You Read Evan Todd’s Letter To Obama Yet?

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Photo Credit: RLEVANSEvan Todd is a Columbine survivor. And he wasn’t just AT Columbine on the fateful day where students lost their lives. He was shot and was wounded himself. And he’s got something to say to Obama. BEHOLD:

Mr. President, As a student who was shot and wounded during the Columbine massacre, I have a few thoughts on the current gun debate. In regards to your gun control initiatives:

Universal Background Checks

First, a universal background check will have many devastating effects. It will arguably have the opposite impact of what you propose. If adopted, criminals will know that they can not pass a background check legally, so they will resort to other avenues. With the conditions being set by this initiative, it will create a large black market for weapons and will support more criminal activity and funnel additional money into the hands of thugs, criminals, and people who will do harm to American citizens.

Second, universal background checks will create a huge bureaucracy that will cost an enormous amount of tax payers dollars and will straddle us with more debt. We cannot afford it now, let alone create another function of government that will have a huge monthly bill attached to it.

Third, is a universal background check system possible without universal gun registration? If so, please define it for us. Universal registration can easily be used for universal confiscation. I am not at all implying that you, sir, would try such a measure, but we do need to think about our actions through the lens of time.

It is not impossible to think that a tyrant, to the likes of Mao, Castro, Che, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and others, could possibly rise to power in America. It could be five, ten, twenty, or one hundred years from now — but future generations have the natural right to protect themselves from tyrannical government just as much as we currently do. It is safe to assume that this liberty that our forefathers secured has been a thorn in the side of would-be tyrants ever since the Second Amendment was adopted.

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

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

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

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

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

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