Elections Archives - Page 805 of 833

Hillary Clinton: For Richer or Richer

May 28, 2015/in Culture War, Elections, Featured, News, Politics/by Dan Bongino

For an answer to this question, we need to check in with four experts. The first is ‘Rich Hillary Clinton.’ Rich Hillary Clinton, who has been paid more for an hour-long speech than the average median ANNUAL earnings of four American families combined, has stated about her massive wealth, “We pay ordinary income tax, unlike a lot of people who are truly well off, not to name names; and we’ve done it through a dint of hard work.”

Clearly, Rich Hillary Clinton understands that hard work can lead to a prosperous future for those willing to put in the sweat equity, despite the fact that the Clintons consider speaking engagements “hard work” (full disclosure, I have been paid to speak at events and do not consider it “hard work”). Rich Hillary Clinton also believes that she pays her “fair share” of taxes “unlike a lot of other people who are truly well off.”

Rich Hillary Clinton says this despite the fact that, according to Bloomberg News:

Bill and Hillary Clinton have long supported an estate tax to prevent the U.S. from being dominated by inherited wealth. That doesn’t mean they want to pay it. To reduce the tax pinch, the Clintons are using financial planning strategies befitting the top 1 percent of U.S. households in wealth. These moves, common among multimillionaires, will help shield some of their estate from the tax that now tops out at 40 percent of assets upon death.

Countering the assertion that Rich Hillary Clinton is in fact rich is another expert on this topic: Poor Hillary Clinton. Poor Hillary Clinton has stated this about her financial status:

We came out of the White House not only dead broke but in debt.” Poor Hillary Clinton also stated, “We had no money when we got there and we struggled to, you know, piece together the resources for mortgages for houses, for Chelsea’s education, you know, it was not easy.

America should cry for Poor Hillary Clinton. After all, how can we be expected to ignore the desperate pleas for help from a family worth a measly hundred million dollars? I’m wondering if conservatives should band together to create a foundation called the Clinton Foundation to donate to the plight of this struggling American family.

For those still confused about who is in fact considered wealthy and who is not after the Rich Hillary Clinton versus Poor Hillary Clinton debate, our second series of experts on American wealth should be consulted. Rich Alcee Hastings from Florida’s 20th Congressional District earns more in one year than the median income of three average American families combined. Rich Alcee Hastings is so confident about his wealth, and his congressional salary which places him near the top 10% of income earners in the United States, that he feels anyone earning this outrageous sum should pay even more than they do now. In an April 2014 press release, Rich Alcee Hastings stated:

We could end special tax breaks and close tax loopholes available only to the wealthiest Americans. This alone could get us $1 trillion over the next ten years. We could also stop the wealthiest among us from using overseas tax havens to avoid paying their fair share. Along these same lines, let us rid our tax code of ridiculous loopholes like deductions for yachts and the loophole for corporate jets.

Rich Alcee Hastings may not be aware that the top 10% of income earners already pay close to 70% of income taxes, but we’ll forgive him for that because rich people such as him rarely know how much money is missing from their bank accounts.

Painting a starkly different picture is Poor Alcee Hastings. Poor Alcee Hastings was recently quoted complaining about how little money he makes as a hard-working U.S. congressman. Poor Alcee Hastings said Congress is not “being paid properly” and that “Members [of Congress] deserve to be paid, staff deserves to be paid, and the cost of living here is causing serious problems for people who are not wealthy to serve in this institution.” Poor Alcee Hastings has a point here, which Rich Alcee Hastings should consider when deciding who is wealthy and who is not: cost of living and business expenses matter to many Americans who appear wealthy on paper.

Conservatives fight for lower tax rates because, although we understand the importance of taxes to fund the constitutional role of government, we don’t want to pay any more than necessary.

Ok, enough with the satire.

I wrote this piece because sometimes humor is the only way to effectively combat the far Left and its stunning hypocrisy. The hard Left debates themselves with contradictory statements about important issues such as the value of work, fair-share tax rates, income inequality, wealth, the cost of living, and more – all while lecturing us like schoolchildren.

There’s no hypocrisy in basic conservative principles, and that’s why in a world occupied by fallible human beings the default position should be the one that doesn’t contradict itself. Conservatives fight for lower tax rates because, although we understand the importance of taxes to fund the constitutional role of government, we don’t want to pay any more than necessary. Conservatives fight for personal control of healthcare choices because that’s what we want for ourselves. And, we fight for educational choices because that’s what we want for our children. This upcoming presidential election is too important to forfeit because we’re afraid of a good fight. Now is the time to boldly defend conservative principles and shed light on the fact that the hard Left’s “principles” are really nothing more than talking points.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image is by Elise Amendola | AP Photo. Reprinted with permission.

The New Republic: The Dumb Libertarian Era Is Here by Max Borders

May 27, 2015/in Culture War, Elections, Featured, News, Politics/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

As civilized human beings, we are the inheritors, neither of an inquiry about ourselves and the world, nor of an accumulating body of information, but of a conversation, begun in the primeval forests and extended and made more articulate in the course of centuries. It is a conversation which goes on both in public and within each of ourselves. – Michael Oakeshott

What do academics see when they stare down upon the rest of America? Columbia’s Mark Lilla, at least, thinks he sees a “libertarian age.”

Writing in the New Republic, Lilla wraps his punchline in a shroud of obscurity, concluding,

The libertarian age is an illegible age. It has given birth to a new kind of hubris unlike that of the old master thinkers.

Our hubris is to think that we no longer have to think hard or pay attention or look for connections, that all we have to do is stick to our “democratic values” and economic models and faith in the individual and all will be well.

Having witnessed unpleasant scenes of intellectual drunkenness, we have become self-satisfied abstainers removed from history and unprepared for the challenges it is already bringing.

Lilla suggests the old master thinkers knew better how to understand the great arc of history because they had an ideology. But we don’t.

“Our libertarianism operates differently,” writes Lilla, “it is supremely dogmatic, and like every dogma it sanctions ignorance about the world, and therefore blinds adherents to its effects in that world. It begins with basic liberal principles — the sanctity of the individual, the priority of freedom, distrust of public authority, tolerance — and advances no further.”

Now that’s strange. The normal line is that libertarians are too ideological. Of course it’s true that a form of libertarianism that advances no further than a few platitudes or axioms would be an anemic sort of libertarianism.

But the point of libertarianism is not to fill our lives with specific virtues and values; rather, it is to provide a superstructure for various moral communities to coexist peacefully.

A Libertarian Age?

Even if one agrees a libertarian age is upon us, the cock has only just crowed. According to Lilla, though, because this age is not rooted in an ideology, it is marked by an errant attitude that somehow washed over us after the fall of communism in place of all ideology. If that’s the case, why call it “libertarian”?

To describe this age as Lilla does is to fundamentally misunderstand the wordlibertarian, or at least to use it haphazardly as a convenient, if denigrating label. To misunderstand the word is also a failure to appreciate a living tradition that is only now beginning to flower in the digital era.

When I think about that rich, expanding tradition, I think of economic historian Deirdre McCloskey. She offers the kinds of connections Lilla might like to see, especially in her excellent The Bourgeois Virtues. I doubt, however, those connections are the ones Lilla would like us to draw.

Here’s McCloskey choosing not to abstain:

The master narrative of High Liberalism [modern, left-liberalism] is mistaken factually.

Externalities do not imply that a government can do better. Publicity does better than inspectors in restraining the alleged desire of businesspeople to poison their customers. Efficiency is not the chief merit of a market economy: innovation is. Rules arose in merchant courts and Quakers fixed prices long before governments started enforcing them.

I know such replies will be met with indignation. But think it possible you may be mistaken, and that merely because an historical or economic premise is embedded in front page stories in the New York Times [or The New Republic] does not make them sound as social science.

It seems to me that a political philosophy based on fairy tales about what happened in history or what humans are like is going to be less than useless. It is going to be mischievous.

It’s true. There is no ideology here, just the sum of facts.

A Narrative, an Ideology

But Lilla thinks he has a different and better narrative about history — one that is not so devoid of ideology. It’s difficult to say what that narrative is, because Lilla is so vague in his critique — so much so that one wonders if he’s simply dissatisfied with the want of ideology and hopes to put a sticker on it. He reaches for a sticker. “Libertarian” will do.

The closest we get to any proposed counternarrative comes in who Lilla would award for attempting to fix the Middle East: “The next Nobel Peace Prize should not go to a human rights activist or an NGO founder. It should go to the thinker or leader who develops a model of constitutional theocracy giving Muslim countries a coherent way of recognizing yet limiting the authority of religious law and making it compatible with good governance.”

Notice he did not say a working model, nor a successfully implemented model. Just a model. Despite the nod to a people’s history and culture, he wants to see more intellectuals with models.

Political philosopher Michael Oakeshott once said, “Like Midas, the Rationalist is always in the unfortunate position of not being able to touch anything, without transforming it into an abstraction; he can never get a square meal of experience.”

But that’s just the problem with models and planning, says Deirdre McCloskey:

How do I know that my narrative is better than yours? The experiments of the 20th century told me so. It would have been hard to know the wisdom of Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman or Matt Ridley or Deirdre McCloskey in August of 1914, before the experiments in large government were well begun.

But anyone who after the 20th century still thinks that thoroughgoing socialism, nationalism, imperialism, mobilization, central planning, regulation, zoning, price controls, tax policy, labor unions, business cartels, government spending, intrusive policing, adventurism in foreign policy, faith in entangling religion and politics, or most of the other thoroughgoing 19th-century proposals for governmental action are still neat, harmless ideas for improving our lives is not paying attention.

Or perhaps they’re failing to “look for connections.”

No Good Reason

But there’s more. Lilla writes:

Libertarianism’s dogmatic simplicity explains why people who otherwise share little can subscribe to it: small-government fundamentalists on the American right, anarchists on the European and Latin American left, democratization prophets, civil liberties absolutists, human rights crusaders, neoliberal growth evangelists, rogue hackers, gun fanatics, porn manufacturers, and Chicago School economists the world over.

The dogma that unites them is implicit and does not require explication; it is a mentality, a mood, a presumption — what used to be called, non-pejoratively, a prejudice.

Got that? A mood. A dogma. A prejudice.

Let’s assume that we all agree about what the words dogma and prejudice mean. A dogma is not an ideology because it offers no reasons for anyone’s commitments. A prejudice is simply a disposition to believe something, perhaps also for no good reason at all.

That means libertarians have no good reason to be suspicious of power (such as police power excesses in Baltimore or Ferguson), no good reason to commit to smaller government (like bank bailouts or military adventurism), no reason to believe that open trade helps the world develop (despite all the evidence), no reason to protect expression, no reason to acknowledge the social benefits of emergent order, and no reason to create a digital currency (Argentine inflation is fine).

Voluntary cooperation or the free flow of ideas, people, capital, and goods? These are all just byproducts of our dumb post-ideological age. Why? Because, according to Lilla, libertarianism is just a dogma.

To understand history through the lens of people with power screwing things up more than helping is not an abstention, and it is not illegible. The relationship between people with coercive power and the rest is our historical-ideological filter, and that’s just for starters.

Rational Irrationality

Lilla’s mischief does not just extend to history. That failure to understand libertarianism hangs about his thesis, too.

For example, a libertarian does not admire “democratic values,” as Lilla suggests. These are the values of those who would trade in the one-headed master with the many-headed one. Libertarians don’t find much value in masters at all.

Majoritarian elections don’t harness the wisdom of crowds, as Bryan Caplan reminds us in The Myth of the Rational Voter. Such wisdom can only be gained by people who are more directly accountable for their actions, who have more skin in the game, or who feel the invisible threads of community animating them in common missions. That’s not electoral politics, though.

Voters, as such, are hopelessly biased, because they don’t pay directly for what they pray for in the voting booth. So yeah, democracy is overrated. It’s certainly not something most libertarians wish to export or impose on people with twelfth-century cultures and mores. Nor is it is a twenty-first century social operating system for a free people.

Libertarians prefer organizations, markets, and community groups that compete for mindshare and marketshare. But organizations, markets, and community groups only emerge in the fertile soil of free institutions. That’s why libertarians like voluntary systems with rule of law, porous borders, and rights of exit.

Individuals coordinate either in support of organizational goals, or they participate in an order no individual could have planned. Both forms of order are beautiful — at least to the libertarian. But we certainly don’t expect to find such orders everywhere.

The Problem of Power

What about acquiescence to “public authority”? Yes, we are skeptical. And it’s true we are more interested in shedding authority, because power interferes with people’s life projects and communities. We don’t have this skepticism due to habit or breeding. We have it because we want to live the kind of happy and fulfilled lives that comes in a decentralized discovery process, which doesn’t figure into any planner’s plans. Yet planners are constantly trying to plan despite those life projects. You might say we’re not living in a “libertarian age,” but in a regulated age.

But Lilla insists our libertarian age is one marked by people failing to “think hard, or pay attention, or look for connections.” This is the sort of thing that might make progressives in the New York salon nod in vigorous assent, but it’s the nodding of those who have no idea what they’re talking about, the affectations and social signals of the salon.

The libertarian worldview is not based on technocratic dreams, government largess, or “communitarian” fancies in which elites concoct statutory schemes to blanket the land with unitary control. If this were really in a libertarian age, we would not be arguing over whether or not we are “self-satisfied abstainers.”

We would have a lot more opt-in systems — not everywhere, but in enough places, including the U.S. We would be a nation of joiners again. We could, as Paul Emile de Puydt suggested, “move from republic to monarchy, from representative government to autocracy, from oligarchy to democracy, or even to Mr. Proudhon’s anarchy — without even the necessity of removing [our] dressing gown or slippers.”

But this is not the age we live in.

The Coming Libertarian Age

The coming libertarian age will be marked not by a failure to think about the meaning of history. It will be marked by people participating in the creation of new communities, governance structures, businesses, and networks — building them up like coral reefs.

“Everyday forms of resistance make no headlines,” says James C. Scott in Two Cheers for Anarchism.

Just as millions of anthozoan polyps create, willy-nilly, a coral reef, so do thousands upon thousands of individual acts of insubordination and evasion create a political or economic barrier reef of their own. There is rarely any dramatic confrontation, any moment that is particularly newsworthy.

And whenever, to pursue the simile, the ship of state runs aground on such a reef, attention is typically directed to the shipwreck itself and not to the vast aggregation of petty acts which made it possible

If there is anything to terrify Lilla and the New Republic, it is that libertarian age. Technocracy runs aground on the coral reefs of genuine connection and decentralized market participation.

So in order to critique this “new kind of hubris,” Lilla should really tell us more about the hubris of the old master thinkers. I recall the organized-perfection society of Plato, whose order would be planned based on some, well, Platonic ideal about the virtuous person who would rule. Perhaps Lilla is referring to master thinkers like Bentham, who reduced humanity to an aggregate of hedonic calculation machines, which has given rise to an entire field of mathematical macroeconomics that lobotomizes the individual and ignores real people. Then there is of course Karl Marx, whose ideology left scores of millions destitute or dead.

Lilla cautions us not to ignore Marx’s concerns, even though the Marxists themselves left scorched earth. We still need ideology, he thinks:

The end of the cold war destroyed whatever confidence in ideology still remained in the West. But it also seems to have destroyed our will to understand. We have abdicated. The libertarian dogma of our time is turning our polities, economies, and cultures upside down—and blinding us to this by making us even more self-absorbed and incurious than we naturally are. The world we are making with our hands is as remote from our minds as the farthest black hole. Once we had a nostalgia for the future. Today we have an amnesia for the present.

Destroyed our will to understand? Libertarian dogma means “turning our polities upside down”? Making us self-absorbed? What in the world is he talking about?

Is he referring to those self-absorbed and benighted souls who brought down the Berlin Wall? Or is he simply disturbed that all they could find to do after communism’s fall was start shops and buy heavy metal albums? Maybe it’s their children — the millennials with their texting and their selfies.

He doesn’t really say. He only seems to suggest we need more Isaiah Berlins. Fair enough. At least give us something we can sink our teeth into. In conflating democracy with libertarianism, perhaps Lilla thinks voters are in fact too dumb to rule and that a wise, though considerably less hubristic, elite could show us the way if we weren’t so distracted by modern amusements.

But apart from evoking the bugbear of “neoliberalism” and praying for a theocratic modeler for the Middle East he’s scant on details. Instead, all he can offer is that we have “amnesia for the present.”

Sounds deep: chicken soup for the progressive soul. To show that we’re in a vapid libertarian age, Mr. Lilla needs to cite evidence and name names. Otherwise, it’s just the same innuendo and intimation we’ve come to expect from those prepared to spin out caricatures or just-so stories to slap the L-word on them.

In the Mood

So, Dear Reader, take with you your dogmas and your prejudices and make this world freer one act of defiance at a time. Why not? Because it’s fun — just a mood — and we have the excuse of living in that insipid age.

Your dream community, your world-changing innovation, or your preferred causes have no relevance there in the Department of History at Columbia University. Participate then in the creation of your self-absorbed fantasies with a thousand acts of permissionless kindness, a thousand dollars of investment in a small business, or a thousand lines of code.

What will flow from your dogmas and your prejudices is a great coral reef — one that is created by you and others locking arms in solidarity around a thousand different causes. And may the ship of state run aground on it.

Max Borders

Max Borders is the editor of the Freeman and director of content for FEE. He is also cofounder of the event experience Voice & Exit and author of Superwealth: Why we should stop worrying about the gap between rich and poor.

Avoiding Hillary Misery

May 19, 2015/in Commentary, Elections, News, Politics/by Alan Caruba

While we endure the daily lies of President Obama, do we really want to have another four to eight years more of Hillary Clinton’s? It’s not like we don’t have ample evidence of her indifference to the truth and that is not what America wants in a President, now or ever.

The office has already been degraded to a point where neither our allies nor our enemies trusts anything Obama says. Do we really want to continue a process that could utterly destroy our nation?

Hillary Clinton’s announcement that she intends to run for President is predicated not on any achievements in her life beyond having married Bill Clinton. Instead, her message is that America needs a woman as President. Having already elected an abject failure because he was black, one can only hope and pray that enough voters will conclude that America needs to avoid race or gender to be the determining factor.

In 1974 the 27-year old Hillary was fired from a committee related to the Watergate investigation. Jerry Zeifman, a lifelong Democrat, supervised her and when the investigation was over, he fired her and refused to give her a letter of recommendation. When asked why, he said, “Because she was a liar. She was an unethical, dishonest lawyer. She conspired to violate the Constitution, the rules of the House, the rules of the committee, and the rules of confidentiality.”

She has not changed. Writing about her emails, Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law, said her admitted destruction of more than 30,000 emails “sure looks like an obstruction of justice—a serious violation of the criminal law. The law says that no one has to us email, but it is a crime (18 U.S.C. section 1519) to destroy even one message to prevent it from being subpoenaed.” The law, said Rotunda, punishes this with up to 20 years imprisonment.

Instead, Hillary is asking voters to give her at least four years in the highest office in the land.

Even pundits like The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd, writing in mid-March responded to Hillary saying “None of what you said made any sense. Keeping a single account mingling business and personal with your own server wasn’t about ‘convenience.’ It was about expedience. You became judge and jury on what’s relevant because you didn’t want to leave digital fingerprints for others to retrace.”

“You assume that if it’s good for the Clintons, it’s good for the world, you’re always tangling up government policy with your own needs, desires, deceptions, marital bargains, and gremlins.”

Around the same time as Dowd’s rebuke, I wrote that I thought that the revelations about the emails and the millions the Clinton foundation received from nations with whom she was dealing as Secretary of State would be sufficient for those in charge of the Democratic Party to convince her not to run. I was wrong. I was wrong because I profoundly underestimated Hillary’s deep well of ambition and indifference to the laws everyone else must obey. I was wrong because the Democratic Party is totally corrupt.

It is not as if anyone paying any attention would not know that she is politically to the far Left, a politician who does not believe that the powers of our government are derived from “the consent of the governed.” Throughout her life she has let us know that with quotes such as:

“We’re going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good.”

“(We) can’t just let business as usual go on, and that means something has to be taken away from some people.”

“I certainly think the free-market has failed.” These quotes are the personification of Communism.

In March, the political pundit, Peggy Noonan, writing in The Wall Street Journal, said “We are defining political deviancy down.” Referring to the email scandal, she asked “Is it too much to imagine that Mrs. Clinton wanted to conceal the record of her communications as America’s top diplomat…?” That was the reason she ignored the government’s rules regarding such communications. Rarely mentioned is the very strong likelihood that her email account had been hacked by our nation’s enemies and thus everything she was doing, officially and privately, was known to them.

“The story,” said Noonan “is that this is what she does and always has. The rules apply to others, not her.” That is, simply said, a criminal mentality. “Why doesn’t the legacy press swarm her on this?” asked Noonan. “Because she is political royalty.”

We fought a Revolution to free America from the British royalty. This was so ingrained in the thinking of the Founding Fathers that section 9 of Article One of the Constitution says “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States. And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of Congress, accept any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever from any King, Prince, or foreign State.” That’s what the foundation did.

Noonan had earlier written a book about Hillary. “As I researched I remembered why, four years into the Clinton administration, the New York Times columnist William Safire called Hillary ‘a congenital liar…compelled to mislead, and to ensnare her subordinates and friends in a web of deceit.’”

“Do we have to go through all that again?” asked Noonan. “A generation or two ago, a person so encrusted in a reputation for scandal would not be considered a possible presidential contender. She would be ineligible. Now she is inevitable.”

Well, maybe not inevitable. We have a long time to go until the primaries arrive and then the election. We have enough time to ask ourselves if we live in a republic where merit, integrity, and honesty are still the standards by which we select our President.

Republicans and Election Reform

May 19, 2015/in Courts & Law, Elections, Featured, News, Policy, Politics, Regulation, Waste, Fraud and Abuse/by Paul R. Hollrah

Now that Republicans have working majorities in both houses of Congress, the American people can once again enjoy the benefits of the constitutional republic that the Founders designed for us. Right? Well, not so fast. To expect the current crop of congressional Republicans to do what is necessary to restore constitutional government and repair the damage done by Barack Obama… let alone know what must be done… is entirely problematic.

As a case in point, the recent battle over construction of the Keystone XL Pipeline demonstrates the complete fecklessness of congressional Republicans. From the instant the last ballot was counted in November, it was clear that one of the first bills to pass in the 114th Congress would be a bill to approve construction of the pipeline… a bill that Barack Obama promised to veto if and when it reached his desk. Does Obama care about the environment or the leftists who politicize it? Of course not. What he does care about are the many millions of dollars that pour into Democrat Party coffers from a handful of radical environmentalists.

What congressional Republicans apparently failed to recognize was the immense political gains to be made if the issue was properly handled. By developing best estimates of the number of engineers, contractors, welders, heavy equipment operators, truck drivers, and laborers required to complete the project, along with the generous salaries, wages, and benefits that those workers would command, Republicans could have armed themselves with the most potent political weapon they’d ever been blessed to have. By seeing to it that every Republican in Congress had that information at his/her fingertips, with instructions to repeated it in every radio, TV, and print media interview, and in every public appearance, Republicans could have driven a very large wedge either between the Democrat Party and radical environmentalist, or between Democrats and organized labor.

By signing the pipeline bill Obama would reap the anger of the radical environmentalists and win the approval of organized labor. Conversely, by vetoing the bill he would win high praise from environmentalists, but organized labor would be angered enough to split the Democrat vote in many national and state elections. For Republicans, it was a win-win proposition. However, instead of using that opportunity to their advantage, making a veto override a real possibility, congressional Republicans treated that opportunity as if it were a sexually-transmitted disease.

While Democrats can be counted upon to always play hardball, Republicans seem intent upon playing political softball. So, if congressional Republicans aren’t smart enough to recognize a political advantage when one falls into their laps, how can we expect them to recognize the political damage to be done if Obama is successful in giving Social Security numbers, drivers licenses, and voter registration cards to millions of illegals, none of whom are eligible to vote?

Even though they are seriously victimized by fraud, violence, and intimidation in every election, congressional Republicans appear to be blithely unaware of the problem as Democrats continue to liberalize the electoral process. In fact, it is unlikely that election reform is even on their wish list. Although election law is generally a matter of state law, a comprehensive election reform law targeting federal elections would supersede state law. A comprehensive election reform bill… one that would put Obama and congressional Democrats in a tight box… would contain the following elements of reform:

Voter registration must be done only in person. Fraud-friendly motor-voter, postcard, Internet, and same-day registration schemes must be either repealed or superseded.

In same-day registration states, Democrats have recruited teams of college students to travel from precinct to precinct, registering to vote and voting numerous times in the same day. In a heavily-Democratic county in Minnesota, an undercover investigator visited a county election board to ask whether or not it was necessary for new voters to register in person, saying that he had two friends, Tom Brady and Tim Tebow, who were unable to appear in person. The investigator was given twenty registration forms and was told that he could register twenty voters with the forms.

Registrations must be done only by full-time registrars, employees of counties and/or township government, and only in the state, county, and/or township in which the registrant maintains his/her primary residence. Third party registrars, paid and unpaid, must be prohibited.

In 2012, a voter registration study showed that, in North Carolina alone, some 35,570 voters shared the same first names, last names, and dates of birth with individuals registered to vote in other states. Another 765 North Carolinians had the same first names, last names, birthdays, and final four digits of a Social Security number as those who voted in other states. As a requisite for voter registration, each voter should be required to show proof of citizenship (birth certificate or passport) and proof of residence (drivers license, residential deed, apartment lease, utility bills, etc.).

Before voting, each voter must show an official government-issued photo ID (drivers license, passport, etc.), or an official state-issued voter registration card complete with telephone number, home address, Social Security number, and precinct number. As an alternative, and as a means of preventing voters from voting more than once in a single day, states may require voters to dip a finger into a vial of indelible ink after voting.
Court administrators must be required to furnish local election boards with name, address, date of birth, and Social Security number of every individual convicted of a felony. Election boards must be required to purge voter registrations rolls of all felons at least ten days prior to any election. County Coroners must be required to furnish election boards with copies of all death certificates. All deceased persons must be removed from the voter rolls no later than ten days prior to any election.
Registered voters who move from one state to another, from one county or township to another, or from one precinct to another, must be required to obtain voter registration transfer documents from their local election board. This document must be presented, in person, to voter registrars of the voter’s new place of residence.
Absentee ballots must be received no later than ten days prior to an election. Absentee ballots, other than those of overseas military personnel, must be tallied no later than the day and hour that polls close in any election. Absentee ballots completed by residents of hospitals, nursing homes, elder care, and mental health facilities must be completed only in the presence of representatives of both major political parties.
Other than absentee ballots, voting must be done in person, only on the day of the election, and only in the precinct in which the voter maintains his/her primary place of residence. Electronic voting and vote-by-mail schemes must be repealed or superseded. Provisional ballots must be limited only to the most serious instances of clerical error by election board officials.
The Voting Rights Act must be amended to provide fines and mandatory jail sentences for any individual who would, in any election in which the name of a candidate for federal office appears on the ballot, do any of the following:

Vote in the name of another person.
Vote or attempt to vote more than once in any election.
Vote in the name of a deceased or fictitious person.
Vote in more than one state or political subdivision.
Vote without benefit of U.S. citizenship.
Intimidate, interfere with, or cause injury to the person or property of any other person peaceably engaged in the political process, or cause any other person to do any of the foregoing.

In an April 10, 2014, speech before Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, Barack Obama attempted to rally his base by charging, falsely, that Republicans were attempting to suppress the black vote in the 2014 elections. Demonstrating once again that he is either totally dishonest or ignorant of the facts, he said, “The principle of one person-one vote is the single greatest tool we have to redress an unjust status quo. You would think there would not be an argument about this anymore. But the stark, simple truth is this: The right to vote is threatened today in a way that it has not been since the Voting Rights Act became law nearly five decades ago.”

In truth, what Obama would like to see is a system in which only Democrats and illegal aliens get to vote twice. If Republicans had any courage at all they would insist on tightening the noose around vote fraud and stop ignoring Democrat efforts to create more fraud-friendly processes. They might use comprehensive voting reform as yet another issue that would require Democrats to identify themselves for who and what they are.

As Obama has said, one would think that there would no longer be a question about holding open and honest elections in the United States, but that’s not the way things are. Decent, honest, men and women will endorse the reforms outlined above. Democrats, on the other hand, are certain to oppose them.

American Voters Now The Greatest Threat To America?

May 19, 2015/in Courts & Law, Elections, Must Read, Politics/by J.B. Williams

Through illegal immigration and so-called refugee resettlement programs, both importing a new breed of American “citizen” and a new crop of voters, the U.S. elections are now heavily influenced by foreign anti-American interests. The voter demographics of our country are being intentionally and purposefully altered. But that may not be the greatest threat to American sovereignty, security and freedom.

Our nation’s Founders did their level best to create a system of self-governance of, by and for the legitimate citizens of the United States, establishing three co-equal branches of the Federal Government, each with their own set of limited duties and authorities necessary to execute those duties. In this extraordinary effort, they installed countless checks and balances to make possible the ongoing protection of all Natural Rights established for the people in our Charters of Freedom.

One of those measures was a set of few, but strict conditions for high political office, an effort to make certain that only True Americans with no foreign entanglements or allegiances would hold the reins of political power in America. A different set of requirements were created for each branch, two chambers of the legislature, the judiciary and the executive branch.

The most powerful political office in our land and maybe in the entire world is the Oval Office, the office of Commander-in-Chief of the entire United States military and national security apparatus. This office has a very specific eligibility requirement unique to this office alone, that of no other but a natural born Citizen.

In a recent online survey, the following question was asked on more than a dozen known “conservative” Facebook (FB) groups….

“Do YOU believe that 14th Amendment “anchor babies” and “undocumented citizens” are “natural born Citizens” eligible for the Oval Office?”

Over 166 members in those FB groups shared the post and approximately 100 members voted in the survey within hours of the post. 100% of the survey respondents answered the question correctly, NO… no one answered YES or I DON’T KNOW… They may not know what natural born Citizen is, but they seem to know what it is not.

This is good news… this means that these people all know that the March 2015 Harvard Law Review essay clearing both Barack Obama and Sen. Ted Cruz for the Oval Office, is total nonsense, based upon 14th Amendment naturalization codes qualifying anchor babies and undocumented citizens for high office on the basis of misused naturalization statutes and cases.

The FB survey did not mention any candidate names. When respondents were simply answering a non-partisan question pertaining to who is not a natural born Citizen, they were able to get the answer correct with 100% accuracy.

However, some of those same respondents are supporting either an “anchor baby” or an “undocumented citizen” for the 2016 GOP nomination, without connecting the dots between the survey they had just answered and the candidates they support.

An anchor baby is a child born in the United States to foreign parents. Misuses of our immigration and naturalization statutes allow that child to be a U.S. “citizen at birth” under the 14th Amendment – then becoming an anchor under which the parents and other family members can take a shortcut to U.S. citizenship by attaching to the anchor baby. These are “naturalized citizens” and their citizenship is based solely upon 14th Amendment naturalization statutes….

This is the condition of 2016 GOP candidate Marco Rubio, who was born in Florida to two Cuban citizen parents who did not become naturalized citizens of the United States until years after Marco’s birth. Marco Rubio was born Cuban, an anchor baby citizen of the USA only under 14th Amendment naturalization codes. He is not a natural born Citizen of the United States.

Senator Ted Cruz was born in Canada and registered at that time as a native born citizen of Canada at birth. This fact is evidenced by the release of his Canadian birth record and his May 14, 2014 renouncing of his Canadian citizenship. These two very public events prove that Ted Cruz was a Canadian citizen at birth and remained a legal citizen of Canada until renouncing that citizenship on May 14, 2014.

The claim has been made that Ted Cruz is a natural born Citizen of the United States, eligible for the Oval Office, despite these known facts. These claims are again, being made on the basis of misused 14th Amendment naturalization statutes which may allow his mother to confer naturalized U.S. citizenship to Ted, under certain conditions for doing so.

The record shows that Ted’s mother did not register him as a “U.S. Citizen born abroad” in Calgary, but rather as only a native born citizen of Canada at birth. The record also shows that Ted Cruz remained a legal citizen of Canada until May 14, 2014, when he renounced that citizenship.

To date, no records of Ted Cruz ever being registered in the United States as a citizen of any kind have been released or found. A “citizen” without any authenticated documentation is by definition, an “undocumented citizen.” The legal term for undocumented citizen is “illegal alien” or “resident alien,” one who resides in the United States with no known authenticated documentation of their true citizenship status.

In fact, the term “undocumented citizen” is an oxymoron…. According to our immigration and naturalization laws, if one is not documented, they are not a citizen. They are a “resident alien.” In their efforts to collect taxes from anywhere they can, the I.R.S. created numerous new “classes of citizens” in order to collect taxes from people in our country illegally and without any other documentation.

As of this writing, Ted Cruz is a “resident alien” of the United States, not a natural born Citizen of the United States. That’s what our laws and Ted’s personal documentation prove.

When the FB survey asked “conservatives” if anchor babies or undocumented citizens are natural born Citizens eligible for the Oval Office, they answered NO with 100% accuracy. But when you point out that Marco Rubio is nothing more than an anchor baby or that Ted Cruz is anundocumented resident alien, their opinions begin to shift, sometimes violently.

Once the political agenda of the respondent enters the discussion, the simple truth they once knew is replaced by micro debate arguments that allow them to avoid reality by splitting hairs and relying on “legal expert opinions” that serve their agenda, regardless of fundamentally knowing it is all smoke and mirrors…

Despite knowing that a 14th Amendment citizen is a naturalized citizen ineligible for office, they still use 14th Amendment arguments to qualify their candidate of choice.

Americans are accustomed to people with unbridled political ambitions saying anything they have to in pursuit of that power. What’s new here is the willingness of American voters to go along with it.

Over the past couple of weeks, I have received numerous fund-raising emails that I thought came from the Ted Cruz 2016 campaign. In the last day or two, I have received the same fund-raising emails for Marco Rubio – also assuming those emails were sent by his campaign.

But in fact, both of those fund-raising efforts for Cruz and Rubio came from the same source, the National Tea Party. An operation originally established to fight for restoration of Constitutional Government now finds itself squarely in the middle of undermining the Rule of Constitutional Law, and millions of unsuspecting Americans are following their lead.

This is what makes Americans the greatest threat to America… it comes down to just two factors…

The human tendency to follow that which we want to be true, despite knowing what is true.
The tendency to ignore reality in favor of a political fantasy.

Neither Ted Cruz nor Marco Rubio is a natural born Citizen of the United States. A letter to Ted Cruz dated December 2013 literally begged Ted not to force his fraudulent condition into the daylight by running for President. He never answered that letter… His political ambitions proved to be much more powerful than his desire to simply do right.

Still, the real problem remains the average American voter… who despite knowing the truth, side with the lie believing the political end will justify the unconstitutional means.

If natural born Citizen no longer matters to the average voter, then nothing else in the Charters of Freedom matters, because you cannot protect the Constitutional Republic without preventing foreign entities from holding the most powerful office in our land.

Two of the people who should have stopped Obama from the U.S. Senate are instead, trying to ride his coattails of fraud to the Oval Office themselves…. Both are highly trained lawyers, so there is no claiming ignorance of the law. And these two have the backing of the National Tea Party…. Global governance only works in America once anyone from anywhere in the world can be Commander-in-Chief….

The same group will soon announce that Ben Carson is entering the race and they are raising money for all of these candidates…. Only a fool would give them a penny for any of them…. Only to wait to see how the Tea Party uses their money to drive the final nail in the coffin of the United States.

These groups are not just watching the end of the American presidency, they are participating in it… they are leading it.

What Today’s American Politics Tells Us

May 18, 2015/in Elections, Must Read, News, Politics/by Alan Caruba

There is something very disquieting occurring in American politics today. Most dramatically, the Democratic Party is offering a candidate who is a moral cesspool filled with lies and a history of behavior that would render anyone unthinkable for the highest office in the land. Something is very wrong when Hillary Clinton is, at this point, the only candidate for President the Democrats will be able to vote for and, worse, an estimated 47% of them will vote for her.

What we are witnessing is a Democratic Party that has been debauched by decades of socialism, an economic and political system that has failed everywhere it was implemented.

By contrast, what is being largely overlooked is the wealth of political talent—Rubio, Walker, Paul, et al—that the Republican Party has to offer as an alternative. Instead of obsessing over the different aspects of its candidates, we should be celebrating the fact that voters will be able to choose someone of real merit for whom to vote.

While the brain-dead media talks about the Republican candidates, seizing on every small element of the policies they are individually offering for consideration, the contrast with Hillary Clinton widens into a gap as large as the Grand Canyon. Her campaign thus far has been an exhibition of media manipulation. She talks of “income inequality” as if it has not existed from the dawn of time and is based on the socialist utopia of everyone being equally poverty-stricken. Who wants to live in a nation where you cannot become wealthy if you’re willing to take the risks and work hard to achieve it?

It is this gap between those concerned with the very real threats to our nation’s security and welfare that lies at the heart of the months ahead in the long political campaigns. We can, at the very least, give thanks that President Obama cannot run again. We must, however anticipate that he will do everything in his power to initiate or expand policies that do not bode well for the nation.

Why anyone would vote for a party that foisted ObamaCare on us, driving up the costs of healthcare though numerous taxes and impacting the healthcare industry in ways that have already caused many physicians to seek retirement or be forced to process their patients as rapidly as possible to pay their bills? The fact that the Republican candidate Sen. Ted Cruz is calling for the repeal of ObamaCare is reason enough to give him serious consideration.

Similarly, conservatives resist amnesty programs that would load the voting rolls with those who entered illegally and now, because they’ve been here for several years, we are supposed to consider them comparable to those who did so legally. Republican candidates who resist this understand that a nation with no real citizenship standards and borders that do not close off easy access rapidly ceases to be a nation. At the same time, these illegals are competing for jobs with those who are legal by birth and naturalization.

It’s a wonder to me that this nation is $18 trillion in debt, has over ninety million unemployed, and the nation continues to “redistribute” money from those who are working to those who are not. These programs are a huge magnet for the illegals, but it is the states that must struggle to fund their educational systems and Medicaid. Meanwhile our infrastructure goes old and in need of repair.

Beyond our shores, thanks to the foreign policies of the President, the United States is no longer the leader of the free world. As the Middle East slips into anarchy Obama wants nothing more than to give Iran the right to have its own nuclear weapons with which to pursue its hegemony of the region. Lift sanctions? Why would we want Iran to have more money to fund the terrorism that it uses to expand its influence? Closer to home, White House efforts to accept Cuba ignores its dictatorship, its record of providing weapons to our enemies, and years of hostility.

This represents a deliberate effort to undermine and weaken the moral principles on which our nation has been founded and risen to leadership in the past. Who is more widely criticized in our society than the evangelicals who have high moral standards and the Tea Party movement that is seeking to slow the obscene growth of the federal government?

We need to worry about a nation where marijuana is legalized and thus able to affects the mental capabilities of those who have used it since its heyday in the 1960s? Where is the need to reexamine the moral issues involved in the murder of babies in the womb? From 1973 through 2011, there were nearly 53 million legal abortions nationwide. In 2011, approximately 1.06 million abortions took place.

In March I noted that “More than a quarter of births to women of childbearing age—defined here as 15 to 44 years old—in the past five years were cohabiting couples, the highest on record and nearly double the rate from a decade earlier, according to new data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2011 to 2013.”

“And here’s a statistic that really caught my attention: “Cohabiting parents now account for a clear majority—59%–of all births outside marriage, according to estimates by Sally Curtin, a CDC demographer. In all, 40% of the 3.93 million births in 2013 were to unmarried women.” Moreover, “It is mostly white and Hispanic couples who are driving the trend, not black couples, experts say.”

This speaks to the breakdown of the institution that is most essential for a healthy, successful society, the dissolution or downgrading of marriage and the births that occur outside of it.

American politics—always a national debate on where we are and where we’re going, is critical to the future. Right now America is at risk of becoming a place where our founding morals, values, and traditions are being cast aside.

Your vote was never more important.

EDITORS NOTE: The featured image is courtesy of Wise Geek.

Hillary Clinton: THE WORST OF THE WORST OPPORTUNIST

May 18, 2015/in Commentary, Elections, News, Politics/by Rod Eccles

The United States of America has always been a land of opportunity. Unfortunately, that has meant both good and bad opportunity. We all know about the good opportunity because it is what the American Dream is based upon. The American Dream brings out the best in all of us. It leads us to success and it drives us through our families. It’s about being better today than we were yesterday. That is all a part of the good opportunity and right now, America has a huge opportunity and unfortunately it is the bad kind.

We are seeing the ramping up of the campaign season for the next election in 2016 and there is bad opportunity all around. We see candidate after candidate not living up to what we believe is still the American Dream. We see candidate after candidate from all levels of government telling us about their ideas to help the American people as a whole and individually. The reason this is a bad opportunity is because history has shown and taught us that big government can never help us on an individual level. I cannot even begin to fathom how someone, anyone, would argue that fact since we have overwhelming evidence which includes data and history that over shadows any small successes there might have been in this area.

What is worse is that bad opportunity always attracts bad characters. It attracts the worst our nation has to offer. These bad characters come to us in shiny cloths, shiny cars, they live in shiny homes, and work in shiny offices. But underneath it all, they are dirty, filthy, disgusting human beings. Shall I name a few? How about one? Clinton.

The facts and history are there and those facts and that history is not good. It’s not shiny. It’s not even dim. It is just filthy and disgusting. How can someone even think about running for public office and represent many, many people with a record as filthy as Hillary Clinton’s? It’s that bad opportunity calling. She cannot help herself. You see, bad opportunists are arrogant and self-important. They believe they are the best of the best when in fact they are the worst of the worst.

What difference does it make you ask? It makes all the difference in the world. If someone cannot be trusted with the little things, then how can they be trusted with the big things? Indeed, how could they ever be trusted with the HUGE things? Mrs. Clinton has a filthy history of lies, deceit, neglect, bad judgment, possible criminal activity and the list goes on and on and on. How is it that someone who is so filthy can get away with appearing so shiny? How is it that Americans allow themselves to be insulted to such a level by a bad opportunist?

Is it the promises that she and others make? These same promises they never seem to deliver upon Oh sure, they always have an excuse but then a bad opportunist always has an excuse. But that excuse never includes their own failures. Mrs. Clinton had a bad history while she was the First Lady of the State of Georgia. Then she graduated and delivered more bad history as First Lady of the United States of America and it did not stop there. She decided to shop for a senate seat and landed in a state she was known to have disparaged. It would be safe to say that Hillary Clinton hated New York State before she loved it. And she only loved it because she was able to get the citizens of that state to see only the shiny. Then she gets elected and proceeds to deliver even more bad history. Oh but she does not stop there. The one thing about a bad opportunist is that they are never satisfied with being stuck on a level that is below the level they believe in their own little minds they should be. She set her sights on the White House and being the first female President of the United States but she didn’t quite make it because an even greater bad opportunist beat her this time. But she landed on her feet as most bad opportunists often do.

The greater bad opportunist, President Obama, decided to make the lesser bad opportunist, Hillary Clinton, Senator from the Great State of New York, the Secretary of State for the United States of America and we all know what happened there. Yes more bad history was delivered. Very bad history. History so bad that even many of her supporters cannot successfully hide any of it. This history is so bad that it includes the death of four dedicated Americans under her watch and she didn’t even care.

Yet she claims she wants to be the “champion” for the American people. How can she be a champion when she has not even graduated from the Bantam leagues? Oh I know how. Because she is a bad opportunist. You and I can stop a bad opportunist. It’s really not too hard. We just have to vote for a good opportunist candidate. We have to make sure our neighbors, our family, and our co-workers fully understand how bad she is. And then make sure they see and understand there is a good opportunist who may actually deserve our vote. A good opportunist doesn’t try to make themselves all shiny. Instead, they understand they are but one light in a sea of lights that together makes a good and shiny light for all the world to see and admire.

The United States cannot be shiny if we have a dirty, filthy, bad opportunist leading. We have already seen what a dirty opportunist can do to a nation. Do we really want another dim, dirty, filthy darkness over shadowing the good light?

I sincerely hope not.

2016 GOP Hopefuls Set To Speak At Salem Media Group’s RedState Gathering In August

May 18, 2015/in Elections, Featured, News, Politics/by Dr. Rich Swier

CAMARILLO, Calif./PRNewswire/ — Erick Erickson, Editor-in-Chief of Salem Media Group’s (NASDAQ: SALM) RedState.com, announced on Tuesday the first speaker lineup for the 2015 RedState Gathering. Governor Scott Walker, Governor Jeb Bush, Governor Rick Perry, Governor Bobby Jindal, Carly Fiorina and Senator Marco Rubio have all confirmed they will speak at the event.

In a slight change of tradition, this year’s RedState Gathering will be themed “Vision 2020.”

“Though I am loathe to ever suggest a topic for speakers, I have asked each of the 2016 candidates to focus on one thing: I’d like them to present their 2020 vision for what the nation should look like after their first four years,” Erickson said. “We need to know what they see as the areas that need fixing and how their fixes will reshape the country.

Jonathan Garthwaite, Salem Vice President and General Manager of Townhall Media (under which RedState operates) said, “RedState Gathering attendees are some of the hardest working conservative activists online and door-to-door who have pushed hundreds of conservative candidates to the top. There is no better place than the Gathering for the presidential candidates to come to and give their vision for America.”

The RedState Gathering will take place at the Intercontinental Buckhead Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia, August 6-9, 2015. In addition to a majority of the GOP presidential field, invitations have also been extended to members of Congress and other local and state elected officials. The weekend will kick-off on Thursday with a discussion between Erick Ericksonr and MSNBC host Joe Scarborough and wind down with a new event on Saturday evening called the RedState Tailgate, featuring a surprise guest speaker.

Registrations to attend the RedState Gathering are currently open. To register or for additional information, please visit RedStateGathering.com. The early bird registration fee of $249 expires May 23rd.

ABOUT SALEM MEDIA GROUP:

Salem Media Group is America’s leading Christian and conservative multi-media corporation, with media properties comprising radio, digital media and book, magazine and newsletter publishing. Each day Salem serves a loyal and dedicated audience of listeners and readers numbering in the millions nationally. With its unique programming focus, Salem provides compelling content, fresh commentary and relevant information from some of the most respected figures across the media landscape.

The company, through its Salem Radio Group, is the largest commercial U.S. radio broadcasting company providing Christian and conservative programming. Salem owns and operates 110 local radio stations, with 65 stations in the top 25 media markets. Salem Radio Network (“SRN”) is a full-service national radio network, with nationally syndicated programs comprising Christian teaching and talk, conservative talk, news, and music. SRN is home to many industry-leading hosts including: Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Hugh Hewitt, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager and Eric Metaxas.

Salem New Media is a powerful source of Christian and conservative themed news, analysis, and commentary. Salem’s Christian sites include: Christianity.com®, BibleStudyTools.com, GodTube.com, GodVine.com,WorshipHouseMedia.com and OnePlace.com. Considered by many to be a consolidation of the conservative news and opinion sector’s most influential brands, Salem’s conservative sites include Red State.com, Townhall.com®, HotAir.com, Twitchy.com, BearingArms.com and Human Events.com .

Salem’s Regnery Publishing unit, with a 65-year history, remains the nation’s leading publisher of conservative books. Having published many of the seminal works of the early conservative movement, Regnery today continues as the dominant publisher in the conservative space, with leading authors including: Ann Coulter, Dinesh D’Souza, Newt Gingrich, David Limbaugh, Ed Klein and Mark Steyn. Salem’s book publishing business also includes Xulon Press™, a leading provider of self-publishing services for Christian and conservative authors.

Salem Publishing™ publishes Christian and conservative magazines including Homecoming®, YouthWorker Journal™, The Singing News, and Preaching.

Salem Media Group also owns Eagle Financial Publications and Eagle Wellness. Eagle Financial Publications provide market analysis and specific investment advice for individual investors from financial commentators Mark Skousen, Nicholas Vardy, Chris Versace, Bryan Perry and Doug Fabian. Eagle Wellness provides practical health advice and is a trusted source for nutritional supplements from one of the country’s leading complementary health physicians.

RELATED VIDEO: A new poll in New Hampshire puts Rand Paul and Scott Walker in first place among GOP candidates in the Granite State. Hillary Clinton still leads among Democrats, but she is showing some weakness. Hear why.

Anti-Semitism and Jewish Dissonance on the 2016 Campaign Trail

May 17, 2015/in Commentary, Culture War, Elections, National Security, News, Politics, Religion/by Matthew Hausman, J.D.

The left has to do some soul-searching and reflect why it describes anti-Semitism as political expression, but criticism of Muslims as hate speech. Liberal Jews have to do the same about Obama.

The 2016 presidential cycle is beginning to gear up, with Hillary Clinton assuming the mantle of presumptive Democratic nominee and Republican hopefuls preparing to compete with each other during the primary season. And Jewish Democrats are already lining up to shill for Clinton and attack the Republicans.

If the litmus test for Jewish voter loyalty is Israel, however, Democrats long ago abdicated any authority to determine “who’s good for the Jews” by their continuing support for Barack Obama – despite his relationships with Israel-bashers, his appeasement of Islamist regimes, his disrespectful treatment of Binyamin Netanyahu, and his pursuit of a deal with Iran that rewards aggression, enables its nuclear ambitions and threatens the existence of the Jewish State.

Jewish Democrats attacked Republican Senator Marco Rubio for allegedly creating a political wedge issue when he spoke in support of Israel from the Senate floor in response to the White House’s personal attacks against Netanyahu before his address to Congress in March. They criticized Rubio even as Obama refused to meet with Netanyahu and Democratic operatives were meddling in Israel’s election in an unsuccessful attempt to push a left-wing coalition to victory. It seems that party hacks were more interested in belittling Rubio’s unwavering support for Israel than in condemning the negative message sent by the fifty-eight Congressional Democrats (some of them Jews) who boycotted Bibi’s speech, and by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s churlish conduct in turning her back to the Prime Minister as he spoke.

Similarly, the National Jewish Democratic Council was quick to criticize Kentucky Senator Rand Paul for his position on aid to Israel and to insinuate that he would be detrimental to the Jewish State. This criticism is actually valid in light of Paul’s past statements about reducing aid to Israel and his isolationist rhetoric – as well as the dubious positions of his father, Rep. Ron Paul, regarding Israel. But it is hypocritical for Jewish Democrats to sound the alarm regarding Paul’s candidacy considering how they portrayed Obama as a friend to Israel and champion of Jewish values while ignoring his associations with anti-Semites, his uncritical acceptance of the revisionist Palestinian narrative, and his hostility toward the Jewish State – particularly during last year’s war in Gaza.

There is clearly a strategy to push a distorted narrative that taints all conservatives with the presumption of anti-Semitism, though hatred of Jews is far more prevalent on the political left these days. While there is a history of anti-Semitism on the right to be sure, there is just as long and pernicious a tradition of Jew-hatred on the left, where it has been a potent political force since the rise of socialism, communism and European liberalism. It permeated the ideological fabric of these movements because it was part of the societies in which they grew. Progressives today often project hostility for Jews and Israel onto conservatives while pretending that liberal and Muslim anti-Semitism does not exist.

Studies show that anti-Semitism today is much more pervasive on the left than the right. As reported in the “Annual Report: Anti-Semitism in 2013, Trends and Events” by Israel’s Ministry for Jerusalem and Diaspora Affairs, for example, “[t]he anti-Zionism prevalent mainly on the left, which has already become an integral part of the permanent worldview of individuals and groups of the left, can today be defined as a cultural code replacing anti-Semitism and enabling its disseminators to deny all connection to anti-Semitism.”

And a 2014 German study analyzing anti-Semitic trends reflected by hate mail showed that most bigoted communications during the survey period came from the political mainstream, including university professors and the well-educated (i.e., segments of the population that tend to identify as liberal). In contrast, only three percent of the offensive communications came from right-wing nationalists. The study, conducted by Professor Monika Schwarz-Friesel, professor of linguistics at the Technical University of Berlin, and published in a book entitled, “The Language of Hostility toward Jews in the 21st Century,” indicated that hatred of Jews was often presented as criticism of Israel using traditional anti-Semitic canards and imagery.

Though progressive anti-Zionists glibly attempt to distinguish hatred of Israel from hatred of Jews, it is a distinction without a difference. The left-wing movements in Europe traditionally considered religion and nationality societal evils and, accordingly, disparaged the Jews because they represented the most enduring elements of both. The anti-Zionism espoused by so many progressives today makes use of the same stereotypes and conspiracy theories that have been ascribed to Jews for generations and, consequently, is no different from old-fashioned Jew-hatred.

The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (“BDS”) and Israel Apartheid Week (“IAW”) movements are purely creations of the progressive left in partnership with Islamist interests. The left is obsessed with demonizing Israel and advancing anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, with progressive academics routinely defending campus anti-Semitism as political speech while simultaneously censoring any criticism of Muslims as “Islamophobic.”

Conversely, the European right today is generally more supportive of Israel, Jews and free speech. American conservatives likewise exhibit greater affinity for Israel than do their liberal counterparts, and Congressional Republicans support pro-Israel legislation and resolutions far more frequently than do their Democratic colleagues. These trends were reflected in a recent Gallup poll showing that 83% of Republicans sympathize with Israel compared to only 48% of Democrats. Indeed, pejorative Congressional letters mischaracterizing Israeli policies as belligerent and reproaching Israel for defending herself are written almost exclusively by Democrats.

The left maintains a sympathetic attitude towards Islamist rejectionism as reflected by its support for BDS, IAW and the revisionist Palestinian narrative, and this cannot be obscured by the hurling of scandalous accusations of Jew-hatred against conservatives who, unlike liberals, have taken meaningful and effective steps to combat it. Nearly a quarter century ago, the late William F. Buckley rid the National Review of those whose denunciations of Israel he believed were motivated by anti-Semitism. He then wrote “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” which represented a watershed in political self-analysis and moral accountability.

The left has yet to engage in similar soul searching. Instead, it excuses anti-Semitism as political expression, even as it stifles criticism of Muslims as hate-speech. Unfortunately, warped views often attributed to the “hard left” have infected the liberal mainstream, as evidenced by the failure of its establishment to wholeheartedly condemn bigotry against Jews and Israel the way Buckley did in 1992, or to ostracize progressive extremists whose venom clearly sounds in classical anti-Semitism.

When it comes to party politics, Jewish Democrats have been deluding themselves since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when they substituted New Deal priorities for authentic Jewish values and regarded FDR as a savior. Despite their blind devotion, FDR was accepting only of those who were assimilated and aligned with him politically. He seemed indifferent to Jewish suffering in Europe, as reflected by the views of his special Mideast envoy, Harold Hoskins, who recommended censoring “Zionist propaganda” that consisted largely of publicizing the Nazi genocide and lobbying for rescue efforts. Roosevelt’s Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, advised the maintenance of tight immigration restrictions that effectively condemned many to the death camps, and such recommendations guided FDR’s policy for much of the Second World War.

When reports of the genocide began to spread early in the war, the administration prevailed upon its progressive Jewish allies to downplay the news and discredit those reporting it. Many Jewish New Dealers acquiesced in an effort to prevent distractions to the war effort and embarrassment to a president they idolized. Some of FDR’s Jewish acolytes waged a shameful campaign to malign those who were publicizing the Holocaust, including Peter Bergson (Hillel Kook), going so far as to demand that Bergson and his compatriots be investigated for tax crimes and jailed or deported, though no improprieties were ever found.

Some Jewish Democrats even attempted to undermine the 1943 “Rabbis’ March on Washington” conceived by Bergson in conjunction with the Aggudat HaRabonim. The event involved four-hundred Orthodox rabbinical scholars, including Rabbis Eliezer Silver, Avraham Kalmanowitz and Moshe Feinstein, many of whom were immigrants and none of whom looked or dressed like FDR’s secular political cronies. Encouraged by some of his Jewish confidantes, Roosevelt left the White House to avoid meeting the rabbis.

Many assimilated New Dealers sacrificed Jewish interests and pledged themselves to an administration that devoted military resources to saving works of European art, but which refused to bomb the concentration camps or the railway lines leading to them in order to stop the carnage. When US policy finally changed to make saving Jewish lives a priority, it proved too little, too late. Nevertheless, the lionization of Roosevelt provided the blueprint for a political cognitive dissonance that continues today.

The endorsement of President Obama is a case in point. He sat in the pews of Jeremiah Wright’s church for more than twenty years and associated with radical academics and anti-Israel ideologues. As a senator he had no record of support for Israel, and since becoming president he has conspicuously refused to acknowledge the Jews’ historical rights in their homeland. He has treated Israel more like an enemy than an ally and has appeased Islamist regimes dedicated to destroying her and exterminating her people. Nevertheless, he has been portrayed as philo-Semitic by the liberal Jewish elite.

The real story should be apparent from his words and actions, however, including his public spats with Netanyahu and lecturing to Israelis who reject his worldview – which to the attuned ear might sound similar in tone to common progressive excoriation of Israel.

It would be more honest for his Jewish supporters to admit they no longer regard Israel and traditional values as political priorities. However, given their support for a man who has been deemed more hostile to the Jewish State than any other president, it is disingenuous for them to use faux concern for Israel as a pretext for discouraging other Jews from voting Republican.

Since the days of FDR, politically progressive Jews have sacrificed religious and ethnic loyalty for political acceptance. That was why Roosevelt knew he could count on Jewish support in downplaying reports of the Holocaust when he so requested. And this is why Obama recently met with American Jewish leaders in an attempt to silence criticism of an Iran policy that threatens the future of the Jewish homeland.

The partisan delusion continues with groups such as “Jewish Americans for Hillary,” whose website proclaims that “[t]hroughout her career, Hillary Clinton has fought for the issues that matter most to Jewish Americans.” Given her complicity in Obama’s efforts to “put daylight” between the U.S. and Israel, one has to wonder what issues they believe are important to American Jews. Her position during the Ramat Shlomo crisis in 2010 should indicate where she really stands. When Obama referred to Ramat Shlomo – an established Jewish neighborhood in Jerusalem – as a “settlement” and demanded that Israel cease all building activities there, Clinton chided Netanyahu publicly and characterized neighborhood construction as “an insult to the United States.”

During her tenure under Obama, Clinton did not disagree when he demanded that Israel pull back to the 1949 armistice lines and divide Jerusalem; and she devalued Israeli sovereignty by lambasting construction on ancestral Jewish land while ignoring illegal Arab building. She promoted Mahmoud Abbas as moderate, whitewashed the PA’s support for terrorism, and presided over renewed American participation in the anti-Semitic UN Human Rights Council.

As Mrs. Clinton attempts to rewrite her history at the State Department and posture herself as a stalwart ally within the Obama administration, Jewish voters should instead consider the decline in American national prestige and the shameful treatment of Israel that characterized her tenure as America’s top diplomat.

If Jews who supported President Obama now truly care about Israel’s future, they should acknowledge how he has compromised her national integrity, empowered her enemies and exacerbated the existential threat to her survival. They must also recognize that he has not acted alone, and that his ill-conceived policies have been enabled by fellow Democrats – including Hillary Clinton, whose actual record on Israel is spotty and opportunistic at best.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Israel National News.

Dr. Carson Meets the Press

May 14, 2015/in Elections, Must Read, News, Politics/by Paul R. Hollrah

Now that a new Fox News poll shows Dr. Ben Carson tied for first place with former Florida governor Jeb Bush among all potential 2016 Republican presidential nominees, it’s time that he prepared himself for a full scale assault by the mainstream media and by the same establishment Republicans who nominated George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney.

Dr. Carson’s interview with Chris Cuomo of CNN is a perfect example of the inquisition he will face, only because he is a black conservative. In that interview he was asked, “Do you think being gay is a choice?” In response, Dr. Carson used the prison experience to support his point of view. He said, “… a lot of people who go into prison straight – and when they come out, they’re gay. So, did something happen while they were in there? Ask yourself that question.”

That response was not sufficient to satisfy the mainstream media or gay activists. Instead, if he had been adequately prepped he might have said, “There is some clinical research which tends to show that most homosexuals are apparently born with that sexual orientation. However, we must also recognize that many men and women enter the prison population as heterosexuals, but then adopt a homosexual lifestyle while incarcerated… suggesting that, at some point, they chose to engage in homosexual behavior. What this tells us is that there is much we still don’t understand about the homosexual phenomenon.”

As a non-politician, Dr. Carson can expect to be probed even more intensely than his Republican counterparts, even though several competitors are first-term members of the U.S. Senate. Allow me to suggest some of the questions that will likely be put to Dr. Carson, along with some recommended responses:

Interviewer: “Dr. Carson, you are an internationally renowned neurosurgeon. Until recently you served as Chief of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Medical Center. Serving as president of the United States is another matter entirely. With your background, what makes you think that you should be considered as a viable candidate for president of the United States?

Dr. Carson: “Well, I’m told that there are those who say that, given the mess that Barack Obama has made of things, he has essentially ruined things for any future black man who might have presidential ambitions, and that the American people may not elect another black president for generations to come. I would remind them that, after Jimmy Carter earned a reputation as the worst president in U.S. history, I don’t recall anyone suggesting that he’d ruined everything for all future white candidates. Instead, four years later, the people elected a conservative Republican, Ronald Reagan, who not only ended the Cold War but implemented tax policies that gave us a period of economic growth that actually produced revenue surpluses by the mid-90s.”

Interviewer: “In an April NPR interview, President Obama suggested that one of your rivals, Governor Scott Walker, should ‘bone up on foreign policy.’ What do you say to those who suggest that you would have even less experience in foreign affairs than Governor Walker?”

Dr. Carson: “I would suggest that Barack Obama is the last person who should be questioning someone else’s foreign policy credentials. For example, he spent most of his formative years, up to age ten, as a citizen of Indonesia; he has admitted that he visited Pakistan as a 20-year-old student and that he visited relatives in Kenya when he was in his mid-to-late twenties. Visiting relatives and seeing the sights in foreign lands as a child and as a young man has nothing to do with assessing political and economic conditions. In fact, if he’d learned anything at all from his travels he would have a far more positive view of American exceptionalism than he has today.”

Interviewer: “In the history of our country, only twelve of our forty-four presidents had no military service. You would be the first Republican since Herbert Hoover with no military service. That being the case, how would you propose to win the respect of those in the military services as their commander in chief?”

Dr. Carson: “The men and women of our armed forces are the finest that America has to offer. And I can assure you that, regardless of whatever military experience a president may or may not have, the people in our armed services are more than capable of understanding when their commander in chief has their back and whether or not he commands their respect. If I am given the opportunity to serve as their commander in chief, they will know that I will move Heaven and Earth to give them all the tools they need and that I will not send them on fools errands. They can also be assured that, when I do what is necessary to retrieve a man who has been charged with desertion, the release of five of the worst of the worst Islamic terrorists will not be among my bargaining chips.”

Interviewer: “Two of the early entrants into the 2016 Republican presidential primary are first term senators. As a physician, you have even less political experience than they. Don’t you think that the country needs and deserves a leader with far more experience?”

Dr. Carson: “I would point out to you that Barack Obama was a first-term senator when he ran for president and his failures may cause some to think twice about electing another first-term senator, or a pediatric neurosurgeon. However, it is important to realize that Obama’s failures are not a product of his inexperience. He has failed because his ideas and his policies are wrong for this country. In my thirty-six year career as a neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins, I have been required to make more life-or-death decisions in a week or a month than a president might be called upon to make in two terms in the White House. And,unlike Barack Obama, I have always been available when the really tough decisions had to be made.”

Interviewer: “Dr. Carson, if you are the nominee of the Republican Party, your likely Democrat opponent will be former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. How do you respond to charges that she is highly experienced in foreign affairs while you have little or no experience in that realm?”

Dr. Carson: “Let’s look at the facts. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama engaged in a very bitter campaign for the 2008 Democratic nomination, a campaign in which the Clintons charged that the Obama people played the “race card” on them in South Carolina. In the interest of party unity, Obama agreed to appoint Mrs. Clinton as Secretary of State. He gave her a large staff and the use of an airplane and told her to just travel… which she did… while foreign policy was made at the White House by Obama, Valerie Jarrett, and Susan Rice. It’s impressive to hear Mrs. Clinton cite the number of miles she’s traveled and the number of countries she’s visited. However, when asked to name one accomplishment she can point to as Secretary of State, Democrats are strangely silent. As my colleague, Carly Fiorina, has correctly pointed out, Mrs. Clinton should understand that traveling is an ‘activity,’ not an ‘accomplishment.’ ”

Interviewer: “It is quite clear to everyone by now that Barack Obama and the Democrats are doing everything in their power to wrap up Hispanics as yet another captive voting constituency. In fact, they are talking about giving illegals Social Security cards, voter registration cards, free health care, free education, food stamps, and housing assistance. Since Republicans can’t be expected to enter into a bidding war for the hearts and minds of Hispanics, if you are elected president, how would you propose to counter that effort by the Democrats?”

Dr. Carson: “Your question presupposes that Hispanics would vote as a bloc for no better reason than that their votes are being bought. If I were a Hispanic I would be highly insulted by that suggestion. I believe that the members of our Hispanic population are among the hardest working people in America and I refuse to believe that they come to our country looking for a handout, rather than a hand up. As a case in point, I would refer you to the personal story of Senator Cruz’s father, Raphael, who came to this country from Cuba with only $100 sewed into his clothing. He took a job as a dishwasher and worked his way through college. Now he has a son who is a Harvard Law School graduate and a candidate for president of the United States. That is the American Dream that Hispanics seek and I will never be convinced otherwise.”

Interviewer: “You have been quoted as saying that you would not go to war with Russia over Ukraine, but that military action should not be taken off the table. Armed conflict with Russia could conceivably pose the threat of a nuclear exchange. If you believe that to be true, under what circumstances would you consider going to war with Russia?”

Dr. Carson: “Look. I don’t know of a single person in possession of his faculties who believes that the United States would ever launch a preemptive nuclear attack against another country. But every country with nuclear weapons must know that, if they were ever foolish enough to launch a preemptive strike against the United States, retribution would be swift and certain. In the United States, nuclear weapons are seen as a deterrent, not as tactical weapons.”

Now that Dr. Carson is officially a viable candidate for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination, he should always be aware that every response to reporters’ questions must contain three elements: 1) a brief clarification of the issue at hand, 2) a clear and concise statement of his position on the issue, and 3) a solid shot across the opposition’s bow. If the mainstream media insist on using Barack Obama as the standard by which Dr. Carson is to be judged, then the bar has been set very low. He should take full advantage of that weakness at every opportunity.

What Would the Country Look Like If the Far Left Won?

May 14, 2015/in Commentary, Elections, News, Policy, Politics/by Dan Bongino

I read this piece by Dr. Tim Daughtry titled “Calling for a true conservative strategy” from Feb 4. 2013 today, and thought: What would our country look like if we simply capitulated to the far-left and let them win?

Daughtry has a line in the piece which is tragically accurate:

“The strategy (of the far-left) was one of immersion more than conversion. It was not necessary to convert students or consumers of news to leftist thinking; it was only necessary to surround them with liberalism as if there were no other respectable way of thinking. While conservatives were focused on winning the next election, the left focused on winning the next generation. And they are succeeding.”

Their “immersion” strategy has been a tremendous success. It has changed the debate landscape by altering the playing field from one where two different ideological belief systems competed against one another (individual liberty and limited government vs. heavy-handed rule by government elites), to one where heavy-handed government intervention in our lives is accepted as “the norm,” and arguing against big government makes you an “extremist” or something far worse in the eyes of the cultural “elites.”

Consider for a moment what the country would look like if we completely gave up and let the far-left win, here’s what you would be looking at:

Taxes

You would be living a country with no limit on your tax bills. The far-left consistently argues for higher taxes but, did you notice that that never give you a tax rate number and only talk loosely about your “fair share?” They will never give you that actual number because they do not want to limit their access to your wallet. If the far-left won, and conservatives stopped fighting, the assault on your wallet would only end when they claimed all of the money in your wallet and the wallet too.

Healthcare

You would be living in a country where access to doctors and hospitals is tightly controlled by government bureaucrats. Never forget this; there are only two ways to allocate scarce resources in this world we have been given and a doctor’s time, and a hospital bed, are scarce resources. We can either ration those resources, and let the bureaucrats pick and choose who gets to see the doctor and who gets the hospital bed, or we can price them and let a free-people make decisions about which doctor they want to see and which hospital they want to use. If the far-left won, and Conservatives stopped fighting, your health would no longer belong to you. Your health would belong to a government bureaucrat and his permission slip.

The legions of children in school choice programs who finally have a future to look forward to would be yanked out of these programs and their better tomorrow would be heartlessly stolen away.

Education

You would be living a country where your children can only attend government schools and where the curriculum is tightly controlled by bureaucrats. The far-left fights against school choice, despite the fact that your tax dollars entirely fund the public education system because, when given the choice, parents choose schools that actually educate their kids and this severely limits the power of the bureaucracy/special interests. If the far-left won and conservatives stopped fighting, the legions of children in school choice programs who finally have a future to look forward to would be yanked out of these programs and their better tomorrow would be heartlessly stolen away.

Liberty

You would be living in a country where your speech and religious expression were tightly controlled by laws and regulations which bureaucrats deem “acceptable.” The far-left only believes in “free speech” when that speech strictly aligns with leftist thinking. Any other speech or religious expression which conflicts with leftist thinking is to be declared “non-inclusive” or “hate speech”, and the person speaking must immediately be labeled as an “extremist.” If the far-left won and conservatives stopped fighting, it would only be a matter of time before this “war on language” encompassed anyone and everyone who opposed the DC power players and the cultural elites.

It is precisely for this reason that we need a Republican nominee for President and a new generation of candidates who are not beholden to this failed strategy of yesterday. A failed strategy which apologizes for fighting for effective, conservative principles first, then meekly tries to lay out a “managed-decline” plan next. We cannot and will not be any part of any “managed-decline” of the most prosperous country on earth. We must support candidates who disavow this and proudly speak about liberty, free-market prosperity, limited-government and the boundless potential of tomorrow where the American people are unrestrained by government. A better tomorrow is right around the corner and it’s up to us to stop watching the boxing match, put on the gloves and get in the ring. The future of the country is not a spectator sport.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the Conservative Review. The featured image is by OLIVIER DOULIERY | AP Photo.

United Kingdom Election 2015: And Now For the Hard Part

May 8, 2015/in Commentary, Elections, National Security, Politics/by Henry Jackson Society

Last night was an extraordinary night in British politics. Of the three main parties, two have now lost their leaders – Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Among the minority parties, UKIP has also lost its leader. Other major figures have lost their seats in Parliament, including Jim Murphy, Ed Balls and four fifths of the Parliamentary Liberal Democrat party. The Scottish Nationalists won a sweep across Scotland. And at the most disreputable end of modern politics, the great apologist for most dictators, George Galloway, has lost his seat to his old party. But it may be easy in the picking over of all this debris to miss the two huge questions which now confront British politics.

The first is the issue of Britain’s relationship with the EU. The Conservative party’s leader has promised an In/Out referendum on the EU in 2017. The party has now achieved victory which means they will have to put this promise into action. This means that for at least the next two years this crucial lingering question of British politics will not just remain, but grow. The next two years are going to have to involve a serious debate ready to confront this issue.

The second major issue of course is the United Kingdom itself. The Scottish Nationalists lost their referendum last year – and by a good enough margin to mean that another vote (a ‘neverendum’) would have been hard to argue for for some years. But they immediately rebuilt themselves, channelled the disappointments of the campaign and last night built themselves an undeniable power-base.

Their victory in Scotland changes British politics. It means that the majority representation in the UK Parliament for the first time comes from a party which wants to separate from the UK. This is going to have huge and unsettling results for the next five years and beyond.

These two questions – Britain’s role in Europe and Britain’s make-up and integrity as a country – are vast – vaster by far than any of the issues which came up in this campaign. Britain has decided what government it wants. Now it must begin to address its role in the world.

FROM THE DIRECTOR’S DESK

And so, the nation has spoken. And how. After weeks of speculation, and seemingly in the face of all odds, the Conservative Party has been restored to government without even needing the figleaf of shared rule in a coalition. This is quite a stunning achievement in anyone’s book, particularly when you consider it is the first time since 1983 a ruling party has increased its seat tally.

No less extraordinary is the Scottish situation, where the Scottish National Party sits completely dominant over the entire landscape. Labour heartland after Labour heartland has been put to the sword in a development unparalleled in British constitutional history since the rise of the Irish nationalists when that country was part of the Union.

So what does all this mean for The Henry Jackson Society? As a cross-party organisation, we make no comment about the result other than noting its exceptionalism. We have friends in all parties, and we will continue to do so, even if some of our old ones have now left the House of Commons, to be replaced by others. There will be no change in our commitment to our values or our focus in seeing them applied in UK political decision-making.

However, it is probably the first election when a think tank featured prominently in two electoral situations in the country. George Galloway – now resoundingly defeated in his seat of Bradford West – frequently took to the airwaves attacking our organisation. And Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy was hounded by far leftist twitter trolls questioning his support for us.

As ever, we wear our critics’ admonitions as a badge of pride given who they are. We will work with all those in the new Parliament who seek to advance the causes of liberty, democracy and real human rights, as well as continuing our vigilant watch on the security challenges facing the Western world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

P.S. For those interested in my own result, although I did not win, I did nearly double the Conservative vote in Brent Central and achieved the 5th largest percentage increase in share of the vote of any Conservative candidate in the country (out of 650).

Dr. Alan Mendoza is Executive Director of The Henry Jackson Society

Follow Alan on Twitter: @AlanMendoza.

UK Elections: Conservatives Win, Israel-hating MP George Galloway Defeated

May 8, 2015/in Elections, Featured, News, Politics/by Jerry Gordon

The results of the Westminster Parliament elections in the UK appear to be a victory, Prime Minister, David Cameron and his Conservative Party trouncing Labor’s Ed Milliband. Milliband may have been done in by the resurgent Scottish National Party copping all but one of the 59 seats in the Westminster Parliament, previously a Labor bastion in the north. But no less important was the defeat by the Labor Candidate Naz Shah of George Galloway, the notorious Israel hating Respect Party MP in the predominately South Asian Muslim Bradford West riding, parliamentary district.

Former MP George Galloway

The Bradford West riding is emblematic of rising presence of the largely clan dominated South Asian Muslim Pakistani émigré community in the UK. Galloway was defeated by Naz Shah , a Muslim woman and Labor candidate by a resounding plurality of 11, 420 votes. Galloway had won a surprise election in 2012 and believed his contest might have been an easy romp. Festooned with a black fedora riding around his riding during campaigning in an double decker bus with Pakistani and Palestinian flags flying, one would have thought it was a proverbial shoo in, as we say here in the U.S. Not. He ran a divisive campaign and mean spirited campaign. The Guardian reported one example of Galloway’s campaign against Shah:

He repeatedly insinuated that Shah was pro-Israel, despite her insistence that she had attended marches for Gaza and Palestine. At one point he tweeted a picture of Jews waving Israeli flags with the caption: “Thank you for electing Naz Shah”, juxtaposed with flag-waving Palestinians and the caption: “Thank you for electing George Galloway.”

The Independent noted Shah’s victory remarks :

I thank all my opponents, with the exception of one, who all convicted themselves really deeply to, and fought to be elected on, issues and in the spirit of friendly rivalry. To Mr. Galloway I say that your campaign demeaned our democracy but personal attacks on me have not worked. The people of Bradford West have seen through this and you have been sent on your way.

During the campaign someone had deposited a dead crow on Ms. Khan’s doorstep stuffed with grass.

The Jerusalem Post reported an angry Galloway’s concession speech:

Galloway emphasized that this is not the end of his political career, adding that “The venal and the vile, the racists and the Zionists will all be celebrating.”

“The hyena can dance on the lion’s grave, but it can never be a lion. In any case, I’m not in my grave. As a matter of fact, I’m going off now to plan my next campaign,” he said.

Galloway may have been done in by his incessant trolling for dollars for Hamas in Mosques across the UK and this country for his personal charity Viva Palestina. The United West video team led by Tom Trento here in Florida had compiled a video record of Galloway’s violations of US fund raising that gave rise to Congressional calls for investigations. We had written about Galloway’s frequent trips to the U.S. to raise funds for Hamas in a September 2010 NER, expose, Coming to a Mosque Near You, Pimping for Terrorists.

Apparently, the leopard hadn’t changed his spots as evidenced by a parliamentary office aide, spilling the beans about his abuse of public office and misappropriation of public funds to run the Viva Palestina ‘charity’ fund raising. The UK charity authority has apparently impounded funds in Viva Palestina Galloway’s private charity. The Jerusalem Post reported:

His former parliamentary assistant Aisha Ali-Khan lodged a legal complaint against Galloway, filed on her behalf by Asserson Law Offices, over allegations that she was paid during her work hours to organize Viva Palestina’s fundraising events, organize its media coverage, organize and promote a “Women’s Convoy” to Gaza, recruited Viva Palestina volunteers and prepare promotional material.

“During her employment, Ms Ali-Khan was instructed to carry out a number of activities which were clearly not parliamentary and some of which were expressly prohibited…except when on leave,” according to the legal statement. Ali-Khan also alleged in the statement that she was charged with helping to plan Galloway’s wedding and assisting his soon-to-be bride.

In the six months that she worked as Galloway’s assistant, she claims that 75 percent of her work time was spent on non-Parliamentary matters. British law puts the onus on parliament members for making sure that funds, such as salaries for assistants, are used only in relation to governmental matters.

Last year, standing in front of a Palestinian flag Galloway declared the northern city of Bradford, an “Israel-free zone.” “We have declared Bradford an Israel-free zone. We don’t want any Israeli goods. We don’t want any Israeli services. We don’t want any Israeli academics coming to the university or college. We don’t even want any Israeli tourists to come to Bradford, even if any of them had thought of doing so. We reject this illegal, barbarous, savage state that calls itself Israel,” he said.

In August of 2014, when asked about alleged chemical weapons attacks in Syria, Galloway said that if it was true, Israel was the one supplying al-Qaida with the sarin gas used. “If there has been use of chemical weapons, it was al-Qaida,” he said. “Who gave al-Qaida chemical weapons? Here’s my theory. Israel gave them the chemical weapons.”

How anti-Semitic and anti-Israel is Galloway and the Respect Party South Asian organization was vividly documented in a Politico UK chronicle by the author Ben Judah who had the chutzpah to go into the lion’s den during the waning stages of Galloway’s campaign, “A Jew in Bradford”. Note what occurred:

A few months ago I had reported from the city for a Jewish online publication, and had been critical of Galloway’s anti-Zionist rhetoric. I reported that he has inflamed a hissing conspiracy theory where Jews were blamed for 9/11, for all wars all over the world, and were seen as the new Nazis

The woman from Respect does not approve.

I inform her that Respect’s Bradford HQ has given me the address and told me I can come. She then disappears, makes calls, and talks to several of the Asian men at the doorway. She returns saying I have to leave.

The press officer — whose name I miss — says she has called Bradford HQ and they now “know who I am”: I must leave immediately.

I walk out and onto the sidewalk, and take a picture of the Respect activists and the seven Asian men milling about outside the Church. They have come to see Galloway: The event is described on social media as a rally for supporters.

A burly Asian man in a black suit and sunglasses rushes up and grabs me round the neck, pinning me to a low perimeter wall. “Get out, you fucking Jew,” he shouts. I am being throttled as around ten Asian men surround me. My teeth chatter as a man in a tracksuit punches me in the head.

“Delete, delete,” they shout at me, “delete the photos.”

An older man in a shiny crooner’s suit is shouting. “Let’s call the police. Let’s get him arrested.”

Galloway is like the proverbial cat with nine lives. We can only hope that the abuse of public office and misappropriation of funds charges against Galloway for raising money for Hamas out of his riding office can be brought to trial and result in his conviction. Perhaps he might spend a term in a British prison commiserating with a Muslim cell mate about how those damnable Jews have done him in. Small hopes.

EDITORS NOTE: This column originally appeared in the New English Review.

Holding the Voters in Contempt

May 8, 2015/in Commentary, Elections, Politics/by Alan Caruba

The May 5th, 2015 lead story in The Wall Street Journal is about the result of its latest poll regarding Hillary Clinton. It says a lot about why she and the leaders of the Democratic Party must surely hold its core members in contempt. “Support for her among Democrats remains strong and unshaken.”

In the seven weeks since she announced her candidacy to be the next President of the United States and then virtually vanished from view, the news about her destroying private emails that should have been public records and the shenanigans of hers and Bill’s foundation have taken their toll.

The share of people with a negative view of Hillary says the Journal “jumped to 42% from 36%” and “only a quarter of registered voters said they view her as honest and straightforward, down from 38% last summer.” Only a quarter? You mean that many people still think she’s honest?

As Peter Wehner opined in Commentary “the depths of the Clinton’s corruption and avarice is stunning” noting that “The Clintons have known for years that Hillary would run for president—and yet they still undertook this transparently unethical and potentially politically catastrophic action” referring to their foundation’s actions and the “deletion of 30,000 emails, another breathtaking inappropriate, and possibly illegal act.”

The track record of the Democratic Party at this early point in the 2016 campaigns makes one ask why anyone would still support it, its lone candidate, and its representatives. The economy has been in the tank for the whole of the Obama administration, the same one that a Democrat-controlled Congress foisted ObamaCare on the nation without ever having read the bill.

The President’s primary obsessions these days are making sure Iran gets to have a nuclear arsenal, extending diplomatic recognition to Cuba, the leading Communist nation in our hemisphere, and making sure that our southern border remains so porous that thousands of illegal aliens can gain access.

I would be happy to tell you what Hillary’s objectives and policies are, but other than repeating the same old, failed liberal crap of the past, there’s nothing specific to identify. Does she want to “help the poor”, “protect the middle class”, et cetera? Well, sure she does. As to anything else, her opinion today is often in direct opposition to her opinion of yesterday. She’s not saying much and with reason; as often as not she makes a fool of herself in the process.

If you were a leader in the Democratic Party would you take a dim view of those who vote to keep your candidates in office? Would you, however, even once ask why the Party is unable to produce more than one candidate for President (forget Bernie Sanders—he’s a Socialist who votes with the Democratic caucus) at this point?

And who is that candidate? It is a former First Lady who has spent her entire life in politics riding the coattails of her husband, a charming rascal who has cheated on her for decades. Together they have been in more scandals than can be listed here.

They may have been “dead broke” when they left the White House, but they now own two houses and are worth millions, not the least because as Obama’s Secretary of State the foundation took in millions in donations and Bill took in millions to give speeches, often from the same donors. Was the U.S. foreign policy purchased over her four years? Was the security of the emails she was sending breached? Definitely. Can you name a single treaty or major foreign policy achievement of Hillary Clinton’s service as Secretary of State? Neither can she.

Pause now and compare that the dynamism of the Republican Party. As Gov. Mike Huckabee announces today, its slate of presidential candidates is as lively a group as one can imagine. The Party has asserted control in Congress to the point where the White House knows it no longer has free reign to destroy the nation in every imaginable way.

That’s why voters will in 2016 likely rebuke the Democratic Party in an electoral bloodbath. It’s why the voices within and beyond the Party should be calling for Hillary to step aside. It won’t happen, but it should.

Take the Politics out of Money

May 5, 2015/in Commentary, Elections, News, Politics/by Foundation for Economic Education (FEE)

You have to admire the moxie of a man that flies a gyrocopter on the Capitol lawn and risks being shot Capitol Police to protest corruption and demand campaign finance reform.

Laudable though his intentions may have been, campaign finance laws are less about reform and more about protecting incumbents from challengers. If we truly wish to reform government, we should be less concerned with getting the money out of politics and more concerned with getting the politics out of money.

The government spends gigantic amounts of money and regulates large swaths of economic activity. These actions create powerful incentives for affected interests to lobby politicians for privileges. As long as the political process has the power to create and destroy fortunes, people will compete to manipulate the system. This incentive problem is inherent to politics and cannot be eliminated by campaign finance reform.

Such “reforms” mean little else than incumbent politicians writing the rules today for the elections they will run in tomorrow. No one should be surprised when they write rules that subtly shift the odds in their favor. One example is the rules limiting individual contributions.

These rules force candidates to draw small amounts of money from a large pool of donors. Incumbents have the advantage of name recognition and established fundraising networks. The longer they have been in office, the more developed this network will become.

These rules benefit incumbents by putting challengers and unknowns at an immediate and even greater fundraising disadvantage, making it hard for them to get the traction to even have a shot at the election.

If someone wants to run outside the current two party duopoly, they put themselves at a huge fundraising disadvantage because third parties lack an established fundraising network. The clichéd version of politics is a smoke filled room where billionaires quaff brandy, but the reality is that the support of the existing party structure is much more important than any one donor. No outsider can appeal to the Elon Musks or Mark Zuckerbergs of the world to fund their campaigns against such entrenched networks. By keeping individuals’ money out of politics, we are ensuring politics as usual.

Campaign finance rules strengthen the role of political parties in choosing candidates. Political parties are not obligated to support everyone that runs under their name. If the goal is reform, one must recognize that political parties benefit from the status quo because they were instrumental in creating it.

What this means is that anyone that strays too far from the party line risks losing indispensable party support. (Former Sen. Jim Bunning’s career was cut short in this way when his own party leadership deliberately torpedoed his fundraising.) Campaign finance rules can have the impact of forcing candidates to work with political parties, thereby strengthening the power and influence of the party system.

Under the guise of creating a level playing field, the current system instead rewards those that find (or create) loopholes and push the envelope on what is legally permissible. Unexpected campaign contributions are the performance enhancing drugs of modern politics. Lobbyists gain power when they find creative ways to circumvent the law and funnel large amounts of money to candidates in need, gaining the perfectly legal influence and access to affect policy.

This is also why those who can bundle contributions are so valuable and why their downfall can create such a ruckus. While small increases in spending have a negligible effect on outcomes, someone that can exploit a loophole or bend the law can raise substantially more funds than an ethically constrained competitor.

Lastly, we must remember that even if a rule is ideal in theory, humans must enforce it. As the newly elected Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker made many political enemies. In retaliation, a prosecutor convinced a judge to authorize home invasions and police raids of prominent Walker supporters.

Such incidents should serve as a reminder that the law is a cudgel that those with power will use to bludgeon those without, given the opportunity. Lois Lerner and the IRS targeted the tea party because complex rules allow for such discretionary abuse. Grassroots organizations now need lawyers just to get off the ground. Incumbents use these rules to their advantage, strangling opposition in the cradle.

As long as politicians remain free to reward their friends and punish their enemies, they will never want for a gourmet meal or a drinking buddy. The problem of corruption is a symptom of the disease of big government.

Politicians control so much of the economy, either outright or indirectly, that those with the most to gain will always find a way to persuade politicians that what’s in their interests is the same as to what’s in the public interest. Campaign finance laws are just the insult to injury: extra power introduced to a system that is supposed by “reformed” by its exercise.

The solution to politicians being bought is to ensure that they have less power to put on auction.

Stewart Dompe

Stewart Dompe is an instructor of economics at Johnson & Wales University. He has published articles in Econ Journal Watch and is a contributor to the forthcoming Homer Economicus: Using The Simpsons to Teach Economics.