Jer's Place

Unconstitutional ? No kidding

2013-05-19T17:19:00.003-04:00

As bad as it is, it is probably worse.

2013-05-19T14:04:00.003-04:00

Most people on the right side of the political spectrum view the recent revelations of the IRS targeting Tea Party and other conservative organizations for "special" treatment as proof that Barack Obama is everything that we have been saying about him for the past six years. The truth is probably far worse.

Oh it is more than probable that the Obama Administration knew of the shenanigans going on at the IRS for some time, perhaps even from the beginning, but the real problem, the reality that should send shivers up every American's spine is that probably nobody in the Obama Administration directed the IRS to do it.

If someone in the Administration and it would have to be a powerful member to do so, did pull the strings to get the IRS to harass conservative groups, well then we just have corrupt politician doing what corrupt politicians do. But the far more likely scenario is that the IRS took the opportunity of a sympathetic administration being in power to go after its, the IRS's, enemies. In other words the IRS, as an institution, sees the Tea Party and other like minded conservative organizations as a threat to their power

Since its formation the Tea Party has been portrayed as a bunch of greedy white people hell bent on protecting themselves from higher taxes. But the Tea Party movement has always made it clear that taxes are just a symptom of a far deeper threat. The primary motivation of the Tea party movement is the belief that the federal government is far too big and is trampling on American's individual and constitutional protected freedoms.

The Tea Party has always understood one important historical truth, government = control.

This is why the Tea Party so identifies with our Founders, they too understood this simple truth and devised a system of government that, if maintained, would limit the power of government thus insuring a greater degree of individual freedom than had ever existed before the founding of our nation, Of course that system of government has not been maintained and thus we have deteriorated to the point where the IRS is harassing citizens whose only crime is that they want to become more involved in the political process of their nation.

Nothing has validated the Tea Party's concerns of an out of control federal government as has the IRS targeting of those who most openly challenge big government. The IRS, like a cornered animal lashed out at its protagonist because its very existence, its institutional survival were threatened. The institutional instincts of one of the United States most powerful and feared agencies in order to protect itself has shown it not only can but will destroy American's constitutional liberties in order to maintain its power, the power which legally belongs to the very citizens it attacks. .

It is one thing for a partisan politician and his administration to use the power of governing to punish their political enemies, happens all the time. It is quite another thing for the Leviathan of a massive Federal bureaucracy to target ordinary citizens. We know this to be true regardless of the circumstances of who specifically directed these actions. With such widespread abuse of power, nobody stepped forward to blow the whistle. No IRS employee less alone manager stepped forward and declared "this is wrong". Neither publicly or with the protection of whistle blower status, did any bureaucrat think it important to protect fellow citizens from the abuse of power by a tyrannical government agency. The IRS as an agency was more important to these people than the constitutional protections of average Americans.

I sincerely wish that Obama and his petty tyrants had forced the IRS to "punish" his enemies, the solution to that is relatively simple. But the IRS and other such federal agencies are not on the ballot every four years and you do not impeach the Federal bureaucracy.

Our federal government is a amalgamation self sustaining and self defending organisms not really subject to political control, by either party. Constitutional restraints even in their current state of political demise are absolutely meaningless to soulless institutions whose only purpose are its own perpetuation. The federal government is now so big that all of its institutions are entities unto themselves divorced from and little concerned with the citizens of the rest of the nation they ostensibly exist to serve.. They exist in order to exist, there truly is no higher goal.

If Obama ordered the IRS to attack the Tea Party that would, in one sense, be good news. It would show that the IRS was subject to "civilian" control, even if misguided, corrupt and un-American control. But I fear it is far worse than that, I fear the IRS just does what it wants in order to maintain control, its control of us, to protect itself.

A Liberal/Progressive Epiphany

2013-05-18T07:57:00.005-04:00

Via-American Thinker

By Jeffrey T. Brown

Now that the low-information/low-knowledge segment of the country is waking up to what conservatives have been pointing out since Barack Obama was first sanctified by the left, we are being treated to the spectacle of a liberal epiphany. How, they ask themselves, could this have happened? How could they have been suckered so completely? After all, liberals/progressives tell us all the time, they are a superior manifestation of the species. They are always right, and their political opponents are always bad people, motivated by ignorance and stupidity at best, and impure designs at least.

Our progressive masters proclaim that they are not nearly so ignorant, and that those to whom the liberal legions pledge their fealty have "evolved" into more modern, nobler beings. That they have done so in direct proportion to the demands of political correctness presents a hitherto unknown form of evolution, but science somehow always favors liberals, doesn't it? And if it is necessary to ignore truth now and then to enhance the evolution, or cook the science, so be it. Progress demands blindness to all prior lessons, especially those involving human nature and human failings. Progressives evolve in the opposite direction of history, experience, and evidence.

And yet, at least some of these self-appointed wizards are finally asking themselves how it's possible that those troglodytes, those conservatives, might have been right all along about the pathological dishonesty of the lords of progressivism while they, the ever-evolving, were duped.

Perhaps the answer lies in the modern practice of progressivism. Progressivism as played out in the last fifty years in America is the belief system of deeply unserious people. It exists to indulge a complete and utter lack of maturity and responsibility in large enough numbers that it is assured of getting its way. It celebrates vices. It must be imposed coercively. Overt fraud and deceit are admired skills. Its practitioners wallow in behaviors and beliefs that prior generations recognized as embarrassing character flaws. It is the belief system of spoiled, antisocial children and misguided enablers, rather than responsible grownups.

Mature adults disapprove of outright deception. It is a violation of the social code. Progressives, however, need it like air.

Indeed, no vice is quite so highly prized and honored in progressivism as lying. Every achievement attributed to progressivism is a product of pure dishonesty. Welfare, illegal immigration, gun control, socialized medicine, energy policy, our present concepts of diplomacy and foreign policy -- all are based on lies, as to both the original object and the ultimate progressive claims of success. They spring from modern liberal concepts of charity, fairness, safety, respect, and cooperation, but those concepts have themselves been redefined to conceal the progressive's immoral interpretation of them from the casual observer.

Progressives have thus brought us Socialism, economic paralysis, rampant unemployment, social division, officially endorsed discrimination, rejection of God and traditional morality, the hyper-sexualization of children, devaluation of all human life, and absolutely no hope of improvement. Despite their successes in this effort, and do not doubt that they consider these outcomes successes, they lie to Herculean heights to conceal them. They lie even about their victories lest we see them clearly in time to reverse them.

When one sets about to fundamentally transform a moral country -- that is, one which has adopted a legal code and social structure founded upon traditional morality -- one simply cannot do so transparently. We have seen that when liars profess their transparency, they are lying. When liars blame their enemies for events that either did not happen or which the liars themselves brought about, they are lying. When liars tout their own actions or intentions, they are lying. One does not create an unjust social structure and replace justice with injustice by telling the truth about what is afoot.

We have never had a more dishonest president than we do at this time in our history. He is the embodiment of progressivism. He lies effortlessly. It is not merely second nature to such a man. It is his essence. Every public statement he makes is the perfect opposite of truth.

Thus, however implausibly, we are assured he knows nothing of his own actions. He has never done anything, approved anything, or been informed of anything that can be held against him. He is not merely Teflon -- he is invisible. Those working for the most powerful man in the world also know nothing. Those in his Cabinet know nothing. They do nothing. They see nothing. They sign nothing. They produce nothing. They are responsible for nothing. And yet, somehow, enormous things keep happening that required someone to do something, and know something, and produce something.

Everything is the fault of someone else. When the progressive errs, others are to blame. Those bad straw people made the progressive do what he did. It's not his fault. It is never his fault. Thus, the unserious child, the one who is never to blame and who is always a victim, emerges to offer his excuses. His enablers do the same, possessed of the same lack of seriousness and integrity, at least for as long as they can do so without worrying that they are becoming obviously foolish. That some of them seem to know where that line is speaks volumes about the lies they tell before seeing that it is in their best interests to stop.

One of the problems with this system, however, is that to eventually overwhelm its precursor, the deceptions must be carried out constantly and on a very grand scale, and some of us who have read books know that while there are still serious people contributing to the country, something will eventually give. It appears that we may finally have reached such a tipping point.

Those who have shielded and coddled the liars from scrutiny and criticism have themselves been bitten by the spoiled brats. They have seen briefly what it is to be the target, both of lies and of bad behavior, and they don't like it. In brief moments of lucidity, despite having such clarity forced upon them, even the enablers begin to grasp that everyone is expendable for the cause. The question is, are there enough serious people left in this country to see progressivism clearly, as it is being laid bare before them, and punish the liars who have already done so much damage?

What the Obama Scandals Reveal About Progressive Ideology

2013-05-17T08:00:00.003-04:00

Via-Front Page Magazine

By Bruce Thornton

The three scandals dominating the news this week all reveal the moral and intellectual corruption at the heart of progressive ideology. Whether are not these revelations gain enough traction to halt the country’s downward spiral is the more important question.

Benghazi

The moment it came into office the Obama administration bought into the delusional narrative that Islamic jihadist terror is a response to Western historical crimes against Muslims, rather than an expression of Islamic theology. The Israeli “occupation” of Palestine, the depredations of colonialism and imperialism, the resulting dysfunctional economies and oppressive governments in Muslim countries, the arrogant xenophobia and intolerance of American culture, the invasions of Muslim countries after 9/11––all were identified as the “root causes” of terrorism.

Obama’s foreign policy, based on the assumptions of American guilt and the malign consequences of George Bush’s arrogant, unilateralist foreign policy, thus was an attempt to correct the bad policies and behaviors that instigated terror. Thus Obama apologized in his Cairo speech, eagerly extended a diplomatic “hand” to the genocidal mullahs in Iraq, rushed for the exits in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported the dubious “Arab Spring” uprisings and their Islamist prime movers like the Muslim Brothers, and distanced America from Israel.

The intervention in Libya seemed to be an easy way to validate these beliefs, at the same time avoiding the charge of retreat and withdrawal from America’s global responsibilities to advance human rights and protect the victims of tyranny. The overthrow of Gaddafi was sanctioned by the U.N. and engineered by NATO, thus confirming the progressive belief that unilaterally pursuing national interests was, like nationalism itself, immoral, and that only transnational collective action sanctioned by international institutions was legitimate.

For a while the optics were good. A creepy psychopath was eliminated, no casualties were suffered, and a seemingly secular democracy was aborning. The idealism of democracy promotion, one bungled by the unilateral, trigger-happy George Bush, was indulged at little political cost, while the “legitimate” war, against al Qaeda, was being pursued just as cheaply with out-of-sight, out-of-mind drone killings, proving that Obama was no crypto-pacifist squish. Hence the foreign policy narrative peddled during the presidential campaign that al Qaeda was on the ropes and democracy was on the march.

The attack on Benghazi on the anniversary of 9/11, eight weeks before the election, exploded that narrative. Al Qaeda and its affiliates were not on the ropes, but were growing and expanding, and could swiftly organize the sack of an embassy office and the murder of four Americans, including an ambassador, humiliating the infidel superpower. Libya was not a democracy-in-the-making, but a Darwinian tribal and sectarian jungle dominated by jihadists armed with the weapons we put in their hands when we destroyed the Gaddafi regime. The refusal to beef up security in Benghazi, which would have been an admission that things weren’t so rosy in the fledgling democracy, now looked like a political calculation that cost American lives. Worse yet, once more the idea that terrorism is a response to our bad behavior was exploded, as many of those Libyans we had liberated turned against us, just as thousands of Afghans and Iraqis have.

So of course the attack had to be spun into something closer to Obama’s foreign policy narrative: the attack was caused by a “spontaneous” protest against an Internet video insulting Mohammed. The administration knew this was a lie the day of the attack, but could not admit this repudiation of Obama’s foreign policy claims so close to the election, and so kept repeating the lie for two weeks, trusting the media spaniels to spin the attack and collude in the still on-going cover-up.

IRS Political Harassment

The IRS’s targeting of groups associated with conservative organizations applying for tax-exempt status is a predictable consequence of the progressive narrative that conservatism is a form of neurosis, the lashing out of ignorant, violent “bitter clingers” against a changing world that challenges their racial privilege, economic power, and religious superstitions. The fondness of groups like the Tea Party for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution reflects this psychopathology, the desire to “turn back the clock” and restore their once exalted social and political position. As such, they are dangerous––and armed to boot––and so require monitoring by all right-thinking people who are progressing towards the utopia of “social justice.”

So it’s no surprise that IRS functionaries would create investigative rubrics like “Tea Party” or “patriot” that reflect these assumptions in order to guide them in their scrutiny of groups seeking tax-exempt status. These bureaucrats have absorbed the narrative from the mainstream media and popular culture, both of which are steeped in the two-bit pop psychologizing that passes for wisdom among those who fancy themselves the enlightened “anointed,” as Thomas Sowell calls them. Nor are they troubled at using the coercive power of the state to pursue these political agendas, for one of the most important progressive principles is that righteous ends can justify a whole range of brutal means.

Whether or not someone in the Obama administration directly ordered the IRS to pursue this partisan harassment is irrelevant. Like the Corleone family, the administration has a lot of “buffers.” No one had to be told, just as the progressives don’t have to tell anyone in Hollywood to make yet another movie or television show denigrating and demonizing corporations, conservatives, Christians, or the CIA. That is what’s so insidious about this ideology: it has permeated the minds of people to the point that unsavory actions advancing the cause are never questioned or doubted. In the progressive mind, dogma rules, not principle. Hence the righteous act to advance ideologically sanctioned political ends without bothering about coherent or consistent principle.

The AP Wiretaps

The Department of Justice’s trolling through 2 months’ worth of phone conversations of Associated Press reporters and editors in order to discover the source of a leak reveals another moral dysfunction of progressives: their noisy evocation of principles they routinely ignore when the other side is the victim. At the same time the AP and the ACLU have been loudly invoking the First Amendment and overusing the “chilling effect” cliché, the Departments of Justice and Education sent out a letter mandating that every college and university on the Federal dole have to institute speech codes that blatantly violate the Constitution. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, “The letter states that ‘sexual harassment should be more broadly defined as “any unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature”‘ including ‘verbal conduct’ (that is, speech). It then explicitly states that allegedly harassing expression need not even be offensive to an ‘objectively reasonable person of the same gender in the same situation’—if the listener takes offense to sexually related speech for any reason, no matter how irrationally or unreasonably, the speaker may be punished.” As FIRE president Greg Lukianoff says, “The federal government has put colleges and universities in an impossible position with this mandate. With this unwise and unconstitutional decision, the DOJ and DOE have doomed American campuses to years of confusion and expensive lawsuits, while students’ fundamental rights twist in the wind.”

So two powerful federal bureaucracies wantonly jeopardize the free-speech rights and academic freedom of students and faculty in higher education –– sending an Arctic blast through the presumed bastion of the “free play of the mind on all subjects,” as Matthew Arnold put it –– and the media yawn. But let the Feds access some news-agency’s phone records to track down a leak that they claimed put our national security at risk, and the howling is deafening. No matter how specious the DOJ’s pretext or ham-handed its actions, they are certainly more respectable and defensible than the cooked-up crisis of sexual harassment in higher education, and the assault on those institutions’ core principle of academic free speech.

But that’s the modus operandi of the progressives. Democracy, human rights, free speech, individualism are all great when they serve the progressive agenda of growing the Leviathan state in order to coerce citizens into paying obeisance to the goals of “social justice.” If they don’t serve those goals, then the freedoms and rights of conservatives, Christians, capitalists, gun-owners, and other enemies of the state can be abused. But when it’s the progressives’ political ox that’s gored, then we hear the bellowing paeans to the First Amendment.

As these three scandals show, progressivism is a totalitarian ideology that seeks more and more power in order to institutionalize its dangerous ideas about human nature, the good life, and justice, and that considers any end advancing those ideas to be justified. Which brings us to the important questions––Will the voters see that these scandals are the signs of those failed ideas, and reverse our descent into big government’s “soft despotism”? Or will they just shrug them off as politics as usual?

Notable Quotes

2013-05-15T23:31:00.001-04:00

If oppressing your enemies and silencing your critics doesn’t constitute tyranny, I don’t know what does.

Matt K Lewis

Proliferating scandals expose truth about Obama

2013-05-15T07:42:00.002-04:00

Via-Chicago Tribune

President is Chicago politician, not Narnia faun

John Kass

Dogged by scandal, and with his press secretary presumably now curled up in the fetal position and breathing into a brown paper bag, it's obvious President Barack Obama is in need.

Our president must find his happy place again, away from irritating controversies.

Like Benghazi, where four Americans died and he stood before the United Nations and made a phony reference to a ridiculous video in order to save his politics at the expense of the truth.

And now it's known that his Internal Revenue Service was used to threaten conservative and tea party groups and quash political dissent. The IRS also leaked damaging information from secret files against his political enemies to the media, prompting some to call him President Barack Milhous Obama.

Another scandal, involving the Justice Department seizing reporters' phone records hoping to find administration leaks, is a chilling assault on the First Amendment that would have made Nixon or J. Edgar Hoover smile.

What Obama requires is another relaxing vacation. This time, the man needs a visit to Happy Land.

So please take my hand, Mr. President, and we'll fly there, over those political storm clouds in Washington, to where things were just about perfect:

Back home to Chicago. Grant Park. November 2008.

Can you remember the looks of genuine adoration in their eyes?

Some were so overcome they couldn't help but weep for joy. Others barely stopped their lips from twitching. Still others were wiggly with excitement, like puppies unable to keep still, and we know what puppies do when they're excited.

Many hugged and offered high-fives, or loudly clapped, or clinked glasses and gave each other profound smiles of satisfaction and joy.

And that was just the journalists.

The rest of Obama's voters were ecstatic too. But as historians will no doubt tell us, American journalists were especially thrilled.

Not all. A few grumpy types complained that messianic politics is never healthy for the Republic. But who could listen with all that joy in their ears?

The Republican establishment — the War Party — had been vanquished, and deservedly so, for talking out of both sides of its mouth about the need for a smaller government while feeding from that monstrous defense industry trough. They're in the wilderness still, and should remain there for a while.

And Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton had already had her wings clipped. Remember? She and Bill had dared suggest that Obama had played the old Chicago race card on her in the Democratic presidential primary — that primary of the 3 a.m. phone call. The media response was to crush her.

There was no memo, but the messengers gathered with common purpose, as if compelled by journalistic pheromones to do what must be done. And it was done. To Hillary. For her apostasy, she was almost cast out.

Because Obama wasn't just another politician. Reporters flocked to him as if he was the gentle forest faun, Mr. Tumnus straight out of the Narnia tales.

And American journalism was like that little girl in the C.S. Lewis stories, Lucy Pevensie, graciously accepting his tea and cakes, nodding off to the music of his woodland pipes, sleeping on his couch, smiling.

It was odd and somewhat frightening to watch so-called journalistic iconoclasts cleaving desperately to the myth of Obama as savior. His mouthpieces came up with excellent lines that were repeated endlessly, my favorite being that the guy from Chicago would transcend "the broken politics of the past."

Obama doesn't bother me. I disagree with his politics, but that's not what's galling. What's appalling was the pack mentality of journalists — and I don't need polls to tell me that most are liberals — who were so eager to wag their tails at his approach.

Benghazi is trouble enough for Obama, so troubling that a liberal soccer friend (yes, I do appreciate diversity of opinion) greeted me by sarcastically chanting, "Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi! Benghazi!" as if that dusty, bloody town in Libya doesn't mean a thing.

But it means something to Obama's credibility, which is now in tatters. And it means something to the four dead Americans, including U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens. It means something to the whistle-blowers who say they were pressured not to talk.

And Benghazi means something to the presidential prospects of Hillary Clinton. The former secretary of state's snarky comment "What difference, at this point, does it make?" will hang from her neck like the dead albatross in the poem. By 2016 it should be exceedingly ripe.

These days, Benghazi is no longer being viewed as some isolated artifact in a glass jar. The other scandals have joined it, and combine in organic fashion to produce a president on the defensive. The Obama administration insists its fingerprints aren't on this IRS business, and the president himself condemns it as an outrage.

But it is worse than an outrage. And the president was the beneficiary. If he were truly angry, he'd have fired people immediately. The push by the White House for an "independent" investigation is also an outrage.

It is the Congress' job to investigate. Let them ask the IRS why it provided information damaging to tea party members and conservatives to investigative reporters at ProPublica.

Using the IRS to smother dissent and grabbing the phone records of The Associated Press isn't something a gentle Mr. Tumnus would do.

But it is something done by politicians from Chicago, where government is the muscle that shuts the mouth.

Says it All

2013-05-14T23:24:00.001-04:00

Lies About Libya

2013-05-14T08:15:00.003-04:00

Via-The American Spectator

by Thomas Sowell

There can be honest differences of opinion on many subjects. But there can also be dishonest differences. Last week’s testimony under oath about events in Benghazi on September 11, 2012 makes painfully clear that what the Obama administration told the American people about those events were lies out of whole cloth.

What we were told repeatedly last year by the President of the United States, the Secretary of State, and the American ambassador to the U.N., was that there was a protest demonstration in Benghazi against an anti-Islamic video produced by an American, and that this protest demonstration simply escalated out of control.

This “spontaneous protest” story did not originate in Libya but in Washington. Neither the Americans on duty in Libya during the attack on the consulate in Benghazi, nor officials of the Libyan government, said anything about a protest demonstration.

The highest American diplomat on the scene in Libya spoke directly with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton by phone, and told her that it was a terrorist attack. The president of Libya announced that it was a terrorist attack. The C.I.A. told the Obama administration that it was a terrorist attack.

With lies, as with potato chips, it is hard to stop with just one. After the “spontaneous protest” story was discredited, the next claim was that this was the best information available at the time from intelligence sources.

But that claim cannot survive scrutiny, now that the 12 drafts of the Obama administration’s talking points about Benghazi have belatedly come to light. As draft after draft of the talking points were made, e-mails from the State Department pressured the intelligence services to omit from these drafts their clear and unequivocal statement from the outset that this was a terrorist attack.

Attempts to make it seem that Ambassador Susan Rice’s false story about a “spontaneous protest” was the result of her not having accurate information from the intelligence services have now been exposed as a second lie to excuse the first lie.

Despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s loudly proclaimed question “What difference, at this point, does it make?” the difference is between an honest mistake and a calculated lie to deceive the American people, in order to win an election.

Barack Obama’s election campaign oratory had proclaimed the death of Osama bin Laden as an accomplishment of his administration, as part of a general defeat of Al-Qaeda and other terrorists. To admit that these terrorists were still in action, and strong enough to kill an American ambassador and three other Americans in a well-coordinated military style attack, would be a politically devastating admission during the election campaign.

Far better, politically, to come up with a story about a protest demonstration that just got out of hand. This could be presented as an isolated, one-time event, rather than part of a continuing pattern of terrorism by groups that were still active, despite President Obama’s spin suggesting that they were not.

The problem with telling a lie, or even a succession of lies, is that a very small dose of the truth can sometimes make the whole thing collapse like a house of cards. The State Department’s own foreign service officer Gregory Hicks was in Libya during the attack, so he knew the truth. When threats were not enough to silence him, it was then necessary to try to discredit him.

After years of getting glowing job evaluations, and awards of honors from the State Department for his work in various parts of the world, Mr. Hicks suddenly began to get bad job evaluations and was demoted to a desk job in Washington after he spoke with a Congressman about what he knew. The truth is dangerous to liars.

The Obama administration’s excuse for not trying to get help to the Americans in Benghazi while they were under attack — namely, that it would take too long — is as shaky as its other statements. A small fighting unit in Tripoli was ready to get on a plane to Benghazi when they were ordered to “stand down.” Other fighting units located outside of Libya are designed precisely for fast deployment — and nobody knew how many hours the attack would last.

But it will take more investigations to determine who gave the order to “stand down,” and why. How many new lies that will generate is another question.

Notable Quotes

2013-05-14T00:28:00.001-04:00

"It is precisely because police powers are essential to the public good that abusing them is so offensive."

Michael Gerson

The IRS and Big Government

2013-05-13T09:30:00.000-04:00

Via-NRO

Obamanomics has spurred increasing distrust of government — and that was before the tax scandal.

By James Pethokoukis

The expanding Internal Revenue Service scandal could hardly be any more Drudgeriffic. Well, maybe if in addition to singling out groups with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names, the agency had purchased a few billions rounds of hollow-point ammo. Maybe then. But even as is, the scandal is looking pretty bad and getting worse. The Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the IRS also “scrutinized conservative groups for raising political concerns over government spending, debt and taxes or even for advocating making America a better place to live.”

We’ll see where this eventually goes. Maybe the whole story really is just about a few bad apples in the IRS Cincinnati office — or maybe as more details emerge, the mainstream media will start tagging it “IRS-gate.” Either way, it probably represents the last shovelful of dirt on the central mission of Barack Obama’s presidency: rehabilitating Big Government’s reputation as a necessary first step toward a new Progressive Era. In his first inaugural address, Obama tried to reframe in technocratic terms the issue of government’s proper size and scope: “The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works, whether it helps families find jobs at a decent wage, care they can afford, a retirement that is dignified.”

In essence, Obama was reopening an issue many hoped had closed after President Bill Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over” in his 1996 State of the Union address. Then, at his second inaugural, Obama answered the question posed back in his first, saying that although “we have never relinquished our skepticism of central authority, . . . we have always understood that when times change, so must we; that fidelity to our founding principles requires that preserving our individual freedoms ultimately requires collective action.” Big Government was back, baby.
But those bold words were out of sync with the results of the Obama agenda. Indeed, they were barely out the president’s mouth when Pew Research put out a damning survey with this conclusion: “As Barack Obama begins his second term in office, trust in federal government remains mired near a historic low, while frustration with government remains high.”

And why wouldn’t it? Little about Obamanomics has built confidence that government led by the Left’s best and brightest can actually solve problems — or at least solve them without creating even worse, unintended consequences. Take Obama’s three major policy achievements: the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and the Dodd–Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.

The $800 billion stimulus was supposed to kick-start the economic recovery. Instead of the unemployment rate’s dropping back to 5 percent, as Team Obama predicted for 2013, the collapse in labor-force participation, notes a new Goldman Sachs report, means the real jobless rate is more like 9 percent.

A recent survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that only 35 percent of Americans viewed Obamacare “very” or “somewhat” favorably, statistically tied with the lowest level of support since it passed in March 2010. And that was before a landmark study cast into doubt whether the heart of Obamacare, the vast Medicaid expansion, will do much of anything to improve health-care outcomes.

And last week, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke reiterated that Dodd-Frank has yet to end “too big to fail.” Instead, the megabanks have become only bigger and the financial sector even more concentrated.

If you are keeping score at home, Obama is zero for three. And now Americans have been reminded that not only is big and intrusive government inefficient, it is also often corrupt. The Obama administration and its all-star cast were supposed to be progressivism’s 21st-century proof of concept. Instead, they may have set progressivism back for another generation.

Notable Quotes

2013-05-13T07:33:00.003-04:00

"At various points over the past two years, Internal Revenue Service officials targeted nonprofit groups that criticized the government and sought to educate Americans about the U.S. Constitution."

Washington Post

Reality Bytes

2013-05-12T09:57:00.004-04:00

"Unfortunately, you've grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that's at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They'll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices."

President Barack Obama commencement address to the graduating class of The Ohio State University on May 5, 2013 in Columbus, Ohio.

"A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends.

So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a full investigation."

Washington Post Editorial May 10, 2013

Experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms [of government] those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny.

-Thomas Jefferson

What Did Obama Know and When Did He Know It?

2013-05-10T08:22:00.002-04:00

Via-Front Page Magazine

By Matthew Vadum

Congressional testimony this week showed the appalling lengths to which the Obama administration went to cover-up its mishandling of last fall’s terrorist attack at the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, but President Obama’s precise role in the cynical operation remains hidden.

Americans still don’t know what President Obama knew and when he knew it. We don’t know what exactly he did when he learned on Sept. 11, 2012 that U.S. officials in Benghazi were under attack. Obama may have gone to bed while the attack was in progress, leaving others in the administration to develop a politically expedient cover story calculated to get the Obama administration past the finish line last Election Day.

Obama’s advisers, with the president’s consent or not, opted to tell lies to get their man reelected, and to deal with the consequences of those untruths later. They knew they could count on the mainstream media to snooze on the job and dismiss the investigation to come as a partisan witch-hunt.

The manufactured storyline emphasized Obama’s increasingly hollow claim that “al-Qaeda is on the path to defeat and Osama bin Laden is dead.” It allowed the president to escape much need scrutiny about his lame approach to national security and the threat that Islamism poses to the United States.

Although three State Department whistleblowers testified Wednesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, the testimony of one witness in particular was especially unfavorable to the Obama administration.

During the hearing, star witness Gregory N. Hicks, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Libya during the attacks, explained to Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) that U.S. military personnel were not allowed to come to the aid of U.S. officials in Benghazi, a mere 400 nautical miles away.

“They remained in Tripoli with us,” Hicks said. “The medic went with the nurse to the hospital and his skills to the treatment of and care of our wounded.”

Chaffetz asked how the personnel reacted to being ordered to stand down.

“They were furious,” Hicks answered. “I can only say, well, I will quote [Army] Lieutenant Colonel [Steve] Gibson — he said ‘this is the first time in my career that a diplomat has more balls than somebody in the military.’”

Hicks testified that in his opinion U.S. military forces could have responded in time to the attacks in Benghazi had they been permitted to do so.

The U.S. defense attaché indicated around 10:45 p.m. on the night of the extended firefight between doomed consular officials and Islamic terrorists that U.S. soldiers could have been on site in Benghazi within a maximum of three hours, Hicks said.

The attaché said that U.S. African Command and the Joint Chiefs of Staff made it known that they had military assets in the area capable of responding, Hicks said.

Former U.S. Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods lost their lives at about 2 a.m. when the consulate was subjected to mortar fire.

Because Hicks’s assertion that there was a stand-down order contradicted Senate Armed Services Committee testimony Feb. 7 by U.S. Army General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) publicly demanded yesterday that the nation’s top uniformed military commander come back to Capitol Hill to offer new testimony about the Benghazi saga.

“I asked [Dempsey] directly,” Graham told Fox News.

“Were there any military assets in motion, to help folks in Benghazi, [that were] told to stand down? And what did Greg Hicks say? That Lieutenant Colonel Gibson — a DOD employee, a member of the Army — was in Tripoli, ready and willing to go to Benghazi, preparing to go to Benghazi, and was told to stand down.”

“Clearly,” Graham said, “our chairman of the Joint Chiefs’ rendition that no one was told to stand down is now in question.”

Fox News asked Pentagon spokesman Major Rob Firman to comment. “They weren’t told to stand down. They were simply told not to go to Benghazi. They were told to go to the airport in Tripoli to provide security there,” he said.

Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Seiber, a spokesman for the Joint Staff, said in a separate interview that if Dempsey were to testify again, his remarks “will not change.”

Graham also said he wanted Cheryl Mills, who was then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s legal counsel and chief of staff, to testify about Benghazi, and wanted Clinton recalled as a witness for further testimony. (Joel Pollak helpfully notes that while Clinton may have misled Congress in her previous testimony, she did not do so under oath.)

At the Wednesday hearing Hicks also testified that he never believed the attacks were prompted by a hilariously low-quality anti-Islam video on YouTube. It remains unclear who authored the now-infamous talking point but some evidence points in the direction of Obama speechwriter Ben Rhodes.

Hicks said no one from the consulate reported that the assault on the consulate was related to protests over an anti-Islam video, the Obama administration’s invented explanation for what led to the attack.

Hicks said he spoke to U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens by telephone not long after the mission was besieged. Stevens’s last words to him were, “Greg, we’re under attacks,” Hicks testified.

When Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice helped spread the phony cover story on Sunday TV talks shows five days later, saying that the video sparked the assault, Hicks testified that he was “stunned. My jaw dropped. And I was embarrassed.”

Hicks said he had asked Acting Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones why Rice had blamed the attacks on the video. “She said, ‘I don’t know,’” Hicks said in his testimony.

Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) asked, “But was it like you shouldn’t be asking that question, you should be quiet, we don’t want to talk about that? Was that the sense you got?”

“The sense I got was I needed to stop the line of questioning,” Hicks responded.

Hicks recounted that Clinton’s then-chief of staff chewed him out over an unauthorized meeting he had with Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

Hicks gave Chaffetz a classified briefing without a lawyer from the State Department being present, contrary to Clinton’s orders. Mills, whom evidence established told witnesses not to cooperate with congressional investigators, was “upset,” Hicks said.

An emotional Hicks expressed dissatisfaction with the Obama administration’s approach to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2012, and what followed them.

“I am a career public servant,” Hicks said. “Until the aftermath of Benghazi I loved every day of my job.”

At this point it appears that only partisan leftists, useful idiots, the naive, and the ill-informed profess the belief that run-of-the-mill governmental incompetence explains the administration’s disgraceful behavior on the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that brought down the World Trade Center.

Chances are Republicans in Congress will not drop this critical issue and that this week’s testimony from State Department officials who were bullied and intimidated by the Obama White House is only the beginning.

Says It All

2013-05-08T17:14:00.000-04:00

Via-MEDIAite

Obama's Benghazi cover-up begins unraveling today

2013-05-08T09:51:00.003-04:00

Via-Washington Examiner Editorial

Ever since Sept. 11, 2012, when Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in a terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, the Obama administration has done its best to confuse and conceal what actually happened. On Wednesday, when three career State Department officials testify before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Americans may finally start to get the real story.

In the aftermath of the attack, the Obama administration tried to focus attention on a silly YouTube amateur video mocking Muhammad, which President Obama repeatedly mentioned during a speech to the United Nations. U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Susan Rice went even further, telling ABC News, "Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous -- not a premeditated -- response to what had transpired in Cairo." She continued, "In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated."

Subsequently, the administration grudgingly admitted that it was a premeditated terrorist attack rather than a spontaneous demonstration protesting an obscure video. Reporting by The Weekly Standard's Stephen Hayes earlier this week made clear that multiple senior White House and State Department officials knew the video explanation was a fabrication.

Gregory Hicks, one of the witnesses scheduled to testify tomorrow, is expected to drive home the point. Hicks, a 22-year Foreign Service veteran who was the deputy chief-of-mission at the U.S. Embassy, didn't mince words when interviewed by House investigators, according to a transcript obtained by CBS News. "I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning," he said.

According to CBS, Hicks also told investigators that "a team of Special Forces prepared to fly from Tripoli to Benghazi during the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks was forbidden from doing so by U.S. Special Operations Command Africa.SDRq This, CBS noted, was "in stark contrast to assertions from the Obama administration, which insisted that nobody was ever told to stand down and that all available resources were utilized." The committee will also hear testimony from Mark Thompson, acting deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism at the State Department, and Eric Nordstom, a diplomatic security officer and former regional security officer in Libya for the Department of State.

The hearing comes on the heels of a report by House Republicans last month that contained evidence that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have misrepresented events and her role in them while testifying under oath to Congress concerning requests for additional security in Benghazi. "I didn't see those requests. They didn't come to me. I didn't approve them. I didn't deny them," Clinton told Congress. But according to the congressional report, "On April 19, 2012, the response cable from the Department of State to Embassy Tripoli, bearing Secretary Clinton's signature, acknowledges Ambassador (Gene) Cretz's request for additional security but instead articulates a plan to scale back security assets for the U.S. Mission in Libya, including the Benghazi Mission."

Americans have endured eight months of purposeful opacity from Obama administration officials on Benghazi. Tomorrow's hearing will likely bring some credible answers.

Toon

2013-05-07T10:23:00.003-04:00

Words That Replace Thought

2013-05-07T08:16:00.001-04:00

Via-The American Spectator

By Thomas Sowell

In doing so, they turn smart people into morons.

If there is ever a contest for words that substitute for thought, “diversity” should be recognized as the undisputed world champion.

You don’t need a speck of evidence, or a single step of logic, when you rhapsodize about the supposed benefits of diversity. The very idea of testing this wonderful, magical word against something as ugly as reality seems almost sordid.

To ask whether institutions that promote diversity 24/7 end up with better or worse relations between the races than institutions that pay no attention to it is only to get yourself regarded as a bad person. To cite hard evidence that places obsessed with diversity have worse race relations is to risk getting yourself labeled an incorrigible racist.

Free thinking is not free.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ruled that the government has a “compelling interest” in promoting diversity — apparently more compelling than the 14th Amendment’s requirement of “equal protection” of the law for everybody.

How does a racially homogeneous country like Japan manage to have high quality education, without the essential ingredient of diversity, for which there is supposedly a “compelling” need?

Conversely, why does India, one of the most diverse nations on Earth, have a record of intergroup intolerance and lethal violence today that is worse than that in the days of our Jim Crow South?

Even to ask such questions is to provoke charges of unworthy tactics, and motives too low to be dignified with an answer. Not that the true believers in diversity could answer anyway.

Among the candidates for runner-up to “diversity” as the top word for making thought obsolete is “fair.”

Apparently everyone is entitled to a “fair share” of a society’s prosperity, whether they worked 16-hour days to help create that prosperity or did nothing more than live off the taxpayers or depend on begging or crime to bring in a few bucks.

Apparently we owe them something just for gracing us with their presence, even if we feel that we could do without them quite well.

At the other end of the income scale, the rich are supposed to pay their “fair share” of taxes. But at neither end of the income scale is a “fair share” defined as a particular number or proportion, or in any other concrete way. It is just a political synonym for “more,” dressed up in moralistic-sounding rhetoric. What “fair” really means is more arbitrary power for government.

Another word that shuts down thought is “access.” People who fail to meet the standards for anything from college admission to a mortgage loan are often said to have been denied “access” or opportunity.

But equal access or equal opportunity is not the same as equal probability of success. Republicans are not denied an equal opportunity to vote in California, even though the chances of a Republican candidate actually getting elected in California are far less than the chances of a Democrat getting elected.

By the same token, if everyone is allowed to apply for college admission, or for a mortgage loan, and their applications are all judged by the same standards, then they have equal opportunity, even if the village idiot has a lower probability of getting into the Ivy League, and someone with a bad credit history is less likely to be lent money.

“Affordable” is another popular word that serves as a substitute for thought. To say that everyone is entitled to “affordable housing” is very different from saying that everyone should decide what kind of housing he or she can afford.

Government programs to promote “affordable housing” are programs to allow some people to decide what housing they want and force other people— taxpayers, landlords or whatever — to absorb a share of the cost of a decision that they had no voice in making.

More generally, making various things “affordable” in no way increases the amount of wealth in a society above what it would be when prices are “prohibitively expensive.” On the contrary, price controls reduce incentives to produce.

None of this is rocket science. But if you don’t stop and think, it doesn’t matter whether you are a genius or a moron. Words that stop people from thinking reduce even smart people to the same level as morons.

Notable Quotes

2013-05-06T08:20:00.000-04:00

"We live in a country where if a six-months-pregnant woman started downing shots of vodka in a bar or lit up a cigarette, people might want her arrested. But that same woman could walk into an abortion clinic, no questions asked, and be injected with a drug that would stop her baby’s heart."

Kristen Powers

Gosnell's enablers: The abortion industry

2013-05-05T13:00:00.000-04:00

Via-NH Union Leader

EDITORIAL

The trial of Kermit Gosnell, the Philadelphia abortionist accused of killing a woman and four babies, has exposed a truth about the abortion industry. It is that abortion is, in fact, an industry, not a rare medical procedure that happens to be passively available, with instruments collecting dust in long-unopened drawers, until some desperate woman rushes in under life-threatening emergency circumstances.

It is an industry that exists to make money, lots of money, by aborting as many babies as possible as often as possible. Roughly 1.2 million American babies are aborted every year, more than half of them to women in their 20s, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which maintains statistics on the practice.

It is an industry that promotes and protects its practitioners, including ones as wicked as Kermit Gosnell.

The president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania told the Philadelphia Inquirer last month that women often came to her organization after experiencing the horrors of Gosnell's clinic. "We would always encourage them to report it to the Department of Health," she told the newspaper. After that interview, she gave a speech to her organization in which she called Gosnell's practices "criminal." Planned Parenthood knew about Gosnell's criminal behavior, but never reported it. Why?

Others knew about Gosnell, too, and used him to perform procedures they were unwilling to risk being caught performing.

Desiree Hawkins was 16 when she had an abortion at Gosnell's clinic. She has said she was referred there by Hagerstown (Md.) Reproductive Health Services after that organization informed her that she was 19 weeks pregnant. She had her abortion two weeks later.

Preparing to testify at Gosnell's trial, she obtained her medical records and found to her her horror that she had been 23 weeks pregnant, not 21 weeks, when her baby was aborted. "If I had known I was 23 weeks, I would have (chosen) adoption," she told USA Today columnist Kirsten Powers.

Her pain was compounded when the DEA told her that one of the severed feet found in a jar in Gosnell's clinic was her baby's.

Why do abortion providers such as Planned Parenthood and the politicians they bankroll fight so hard to kill laws that would do nothing more than ensure that women who enter abortion mills are informed about all of their options, including adoption? Why do they oppose laws requiring parental notification for abortions given to minors? It is because those laws might discourage women and girls from choosing an abortion. And these organizations don't make a dime from a woman who chooses adoption. They are in the abortion business, and as far as they are concerned, ignorance is good for business.

When Will America Burst D.C.'s Bubble?

2013-05-05T10:13:00.001-04:00

Via-RCP

By Salena Zito

WASHINGTON--Eighteen Starbucks shops can be found in the three-mile walk from DuPont Circle to the U.S. Capitol. Not one of them had a line less than seven people deep on a recent Wednesday afternoon.

Twenty-one construction sites filled with workers on girders and cranes towering over whole city blocks can be found on the same walk.

Commerce bursts from every angle of this city: small businesses packed with shoppers, hair salons charging more than the monthly mortgage payment on my first house for a cut-and-blow-dry, and main as well as side streets clogged with traffic.

America's capital seems bubble-wrapped in its own vibrant economic boom, while great chunks of the nation struggle with uncertainty about how to keep the engine going.

In fact, six of the 10 wealthiest American counties are Washington suburbs.

Washington once was the manifest of power. Now you can add “center of wealth” to its portfolio, crystallizing the elite institutional disconnect between it and the rest of the country.

Nearly six months have passed since the last presidential campaign promises were preached. Six months of waiting outside of the bubble for the Obama administration to fulfill passionate vows inserted into soaring speeches that pledged to create a million new manufacturing jobs in this term, to help big factories and small businesses double their exports, and to invest in advanced manufacturing.

All were promises made by the president, over and over again, in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Virginia, Wisconsin and Michigan.

The outcome has not matched the promises, not even closely.

Manufacturing has stalled in the last three months, with only pockets of growth in certain sectors. A report last week by the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index showed contraction, with manufacturing job-growth hitting its plateau before Election Day last year.

And what about all of those job promises?

A Labor Department report on Friday showed marginally improved job growth but manufacturing jobs remain sluggish.

So, while Washington basks in its roaring economy, debating such issues as gay marriage, guns and how to provide a path to citizenship for 11 million illegal aliens, the rest of the country asks, “Hi, remember us? Where are the jobs? Can we focus on the jobs?”

The lack of attention given to the economy affects Main Streeters' very existence in a way that Washington does not understand. John Smith may have a job, but what about the impact in his community when his neighbors are out of work, or struggling to piece two lower-paying jobs together to make ends meet?

Such uncertainty affects spending habits as well. Consumers are behaving as though they are living paycheck to paycheck, because they don't know what is coming down the pike. That lack of spending means that tourism, travel and entertainment suffer; small shops, restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, service stations all eventually feel the pinch. Just ask anyone who owns a business in destination points across the country, and they'll tell you business is down.

Our economic recovery since 2009 has been sluggish, with few bright spots. Yet, when Americans went into the voting booths last year (if they did), they believed President Obama's rhetoric on class warfare and that he had their best interests at heart.

That has not played out six months later. A recovery is going on in this country, but most of the beneficiaries seem to be living right inside the Beltway.

And the polls back that up: Last month's Associated Press survey showed that only one in four Americans think their own financial situation will improve in the next year, and 52 percent of us disapprove of Obama's handling of the economy.

The centralized power and wealth in our nation's capital are becoming so disconnected from the rest of this country that it is palpable to everyone except those who live in Washington.

In most people's lives, the driving issue is economic security. Washington's obsession is with social and cultural issues that drive bigger wedges between Us and Them.

It's only a matter of time before the rest of America's complaints will burst Washington's bubble.

//

Winning Hispanic vote would not be enough for GOP

2013-05-03T08:46:00.001-04:00

Via-Washington Examiner

Byron York

After six months of mulling over November's election results, many Republicans remain convinced that the party's only path to future victory is to improve the GOP's appeal to Hispanic voters. But how many Hispanic voters do Republicans need to attract before the party can again win the White House?

A lot. Start with the 2012 exit polls. The New York Times' Nate Silver has created an interactive tool in which one can look at the presidential election results and calculate what would have happened if the racial and ethnic mix of voters had been different. The tool also allows one to project future results based on any number of scenarios in which the country's demographic profile and voting patterns change.

In 2012, President Obama famously won 71 percent of the Hispanic vote to Mitt Romney's 27 percent. If all other factors remained the same, how large a percentage of the Hispanic vote would Romney have had to win to capture the White House?

What if Romney had won 44 percent of the Hispanic vote, the high-water mark for Republicans achieved by George W. Bush in 2004? As it turns out, if Romney had hit that Bush mark, he still would have lost, with 240 electoral votes to 298 for Obama.

But what if Romney had been able to make history and attract 50 percent of Hispanic voters? What then? He still would have been beaten, 283 electoral votes to 255.

What if Romney had been able to do something absolutely astonishing for a Republican and win 60 percent of the Hispanic vote? He would have lost by the same margin, 283 electoral votes to 255.

But what if Romney had been able to reach a mind-blowing 70 percent of the Hispanic vote? Surely that would have meant victory, right? No, it wouldn't. Romney still would have lost, although by the narrowest of electoral margins, 270 to 268. (Under that scenario, Romney would have won the popular vote but lost in the Electoral College; he could have racked up huge numbers of Hispanic votes in California, New York and Texas, for example, and not changed the results in those states.)

According to the Times' calculator, Romney would have had to win 73 percent of the Hispanic vote to prevail in 2012. Which suggests that Romney, and Republicans, had bigger problems than Hispanic voters.

The most serious of those problems was that Romney was not able to connect with white voters who were so turned off by the campaign that they abandoned the GOP and in many cases stayed away from the polls altogether. Recent reports suggest as many as 5 million white voters simply stayed home on Election Day. If they had voted at the same rate they did in 2004, even with the demographic changes since then, Romney would have won.

Likewise, the white vote is so large that an improvement of 4 points -- going from 60 percent to 64 percent of those whites who did vote -- would have won the race for Romney.

So which would have been a more realistic goal for Romney -- matching the white turnout from just a few years earlier, or winning 73 percent of Hispanic voters?

Everyone knows the Hispanic vote will grow in the future. But if 2012 voting patterns remain the same -- whites voting in lower numbers but about 60 percent for Republicans, blacks and Asians turning out in large numbers and voting 90-plus percent and 70-plus percent, respectively, for Democrats -- Republicans will have to win an astonishingly high percentage of the Hispanic vote to capture the White House.

It is simply not reasonable to believe there is something the GOP can do -- pass immigration reform, juice up voter-outreach efforts -- that will create that result.

That doesn't mean future Republican presidential candidates should not work to increase their share of the Hispanic vote. They could, for example, actually campaign in areas with large numbers of Hispanic voters.

But here is the real solution. Romney lost because he did not appeal to the millions of Americans who have seen their standard of living decline over the past decades. They're nervous about the future. When Romney did not address their concerns, they either voted for Obama or didn't vote at all. If the next Republican candidate can address their concerns effectively, he will win. And, amazingly enough, he'll win a lot more Hispanic votes in the process. A lot from other groups, too.

It would do more than any immigration bill or outreach program ever could.

Federal Bureau of Incompetence

2013-05-02T09:03:00.000-04:00

Since I have been off of the blogosphere for over a week I know what I am about to post is somewhat dated, but it is the one item I most wanted to comment on, so here it goes.

I find any praise of the FBI for their handling of the Boston massacre, before during or after not only unwarranted but counterproductive. Since this is now becoming old news I'll just point out some relevant points.

Before

It is obvious that the deadly duo were on the FBI's radar. They, after all, interviewed the older brother and evidently did not find him to be a serious threat. This despite the fact that he posted extreme jihadist videos on his You Tube page. In other words they either did not even monitor his social network sites or simply ignored what was there. Either way they failed to identify a real threat and failed to monitor his activities.

During

This in itself could be written off as someone just "falling through the cracks" which can and does happen in a large organization. However and this is a big however, once the Boston bombing occurred and the FBI took charge of the case, within a couple of days they, the FBI, had pictures of suspects which they were distributing to law enforcement even before they released it to the public. One would assume they would release these photos to their own agents, and one would assume that the agent(s) who interviewed the older brother less than two years before should have recognized the older brother as someone they interviewed about possible terrorist "sympathies", right? You would think that but obviously, for whatever reason nothing happened.

I want to re-empathize this. One of the largest man hunts in American history is underway, the FBI is in charge. They have a picture of a suspect whom their own agent(s) from the same field office in the locality where the crime occurred interviewed the suspect for terrorist related suspicions two years prior and he was not only not picked up for questioning he was obviously not identified. How can that be possible?

Then there is the question of why they waited so long to distribute the pictures to the public. For whatever reason law enforcement could not identify the suspects, suspects who we know were planning further attacks which at the very least the FBI would have to assume was possible. When, after a quick check through their available resources, they could not identify the men whom they had photo/video of, why did they not immediately put out the images asking for the public's help? It was rumored that law enforcement had picture(s) of suspect(s) at least twenty four hours prior to them releasing them, yet they did not put these images out for millions of potential witnesses to look at? Why? If they were wrong, the persons of interest would immediately come forward and proclaim their innocence, thus taking this lead off of the table. But instead, for at least twenty four hours the FBI held onto the image(s) of the terrorist. Why?

After

The most irritating aspect of all this is the praise the FBI is getting for their "quick" actions after they released the photos/videos of the suspects. Really? What did they do? Actually they did nothing. If the guy who was car jacked by the brothers had not escaped and sounded the alarm. If they had killed him or kept him while they made their escape, then the brothers would have gone to New York and potentially set off bombs in Time Square. The FBI did not capture them in some "manhunt", they and we just got lucky that their captive escaped and sounded the alarm.

Now we have three other morons who are being charged with helping the bombers post event. Well that is nice. Fifteen days after the explosion, twelve days after "suspect 2" sent text messages to one of his buddies "jokingly" admitting his part in the bombing, they arrest these guys for destroying evidence. Now that is quick police work there.

I find it utterly humiliating as a US citizen that a nineteen year old kid can "lock down" an entire metropolitan area for a day and we somehow think that this is some great accomplishment by our premier law enforcement agency. To me it is the height of incompetence at every juncture of this sad event.

2013-04-20T11:21:00.002-04:00

Editors Note
I will be out of town until May 1, so posting here will be spotty at best. Will resume regular posting when I return

Jer

Suspect #2

2013-04-19T22:14:00.002-04:00

As Seen On Twitter

2013-04-19T09:10:00.000-04:00

@boston_police I will kill you all as you killed my brother Tamerlan Tsarnaev #watertown one killed i think one injured;;;; gooooo hell
— Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev (@Dzhokhar_A) April 19, 2013