Harry Reid: Another great moment in Democrat hypocrisy

Just when you think liberal progressives cannot surprise you anymore, they exceed expectations. Consider this week’s appalling statement emanating from the mouth or some other orifice of Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. ✧ Reid stood before the camera on the Senate floor, looked the American people in the eye and declared that the Obamacare horror stories are all untrue.

Read more at Allen B. West Read More......

US Chamber of Commerce Pres: Pass Amnesty Now Before it Gets Tougher

Saying the political landscape will not be more conducive to amnesty legislation in two or four years, U.S. Chamber of Commerce President Tom Donohue wrote on Monday that immigration reform must happen now. ✧ Donohue has previously said that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce would "pull out all the stops" to get immigration reform this year. The group reportedly plans to spend $50 million to blunt the influence of the Tea Party, largely because it opposes amnesty, and millions more to push for immigration reform legislation that the Congressional Budget Office has said would lower the wages of American workers.

Read more at Breitbart Read More......

House OKs rewrite of driver’s license ballot title

SALEM (AP) — The Oregon House voted Thursday to rewrite the ballot title for a referendum to restore driving privileges for people who can’t prove they’re legally in the United States, taking the rare step of throwing out language written by the attorney general. Ballot titles are intended to provide a brief, neutral description of a measure. They’re regarded as crucial information for swing voters or those who haven’t done homework on an issue.

• The attorney general’s ballot title says the measure “provides Oregon resident ‘driver card’ without requiring proof of legal presence in the United States.”
• The Legislature’s ballot title say the measure “establishes limited purpose, duration driver card for individuals who prove Oregon residency, meet driving requirements.”

Read more at Hearald And News
Oregon Legislators hoodwinking the low information voter! --bc

UPDATE:  Good job people! This rewrite was so bad-- and the people put up such a fuss-- that the Senate did not pass the House's misleading title change! Read More......

Russian spy ship visits Havana

Cuban port call comes amid Ukraine tensions and Putin's plan to expand global military presence.
(Photo: Adalberto Roque, AFP/Getty Images)

Raising the ghost of the Cold War, a Russian spy ship has docked in Cuba amid Moscow's deepening conflict with Ukraine and President Vladimir Putin's plans to extend his country's global military footprint.

The Viktor Leonov CCB-175, an armed intelligence-gathering vessel built for the Soviet navy in the late 1980s, quietly arrived Wednesday, according to news reports. Cuban media have so far not mentioned the visit, unlike previous arrivals of warships from its former close ally.

The Viktor Leonov, which also visited Havana in September 2012, was docked Thursday at a cruise ship terminal and is slated to leave Friday, a Russian embassy official told Reuters. He described the visit as "friendly." The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Read more at USA Today Read More......

Restaurant Chain Charges Customers Obamacare Surcharge

A Florida group that that manages several restaurants is already banking money for when the Obamacare employer mandate takes effect in 2015, and is charging customers a 1 percent surcharge on food and drinks. ✧ Currently only management employees of the eight Gator’s Dockside restaurants receive health insurance, but starting in December, in order to comply with the employer mandate, about 250 full-time employees will also receive health insurance, according to CNN Money. ✧ Sandra Clark, director of operations for the Gator Group that manages the restaurants, “is not sure how much the company is spending on compliance, but estimates that it will cost $500,000 a year to extend insurance to its full-time hourly restaurant workers,” CNN Money reported. “The surcharge may bring in about $160,000 a year, she hopes.”

Read more at Heritage's Foundry Read More......

Arizona governor vetoes controversial bill allowing religious beliefs as defense for denying service

During Gov. Jan Brewer's announcement that she had vetoed SB 1062, she said the bill was "broadly worded and could result in unintended and negative consequences." The legislation caused a national uproar, with the business community, the state's Super Bowl Committee, Major League Baseball, the National Football League and both Republican U.S. senators calling for a veto. Former GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney also weighed in and urged Brewer to veto the bill, which had been passed by social conservatives in the Arizona Legislature. Proponents complained that the bill had been misrepresented.

Read more at Fox News Read More......

Marco Rubio Destroys Apologists for Cuban and Venezuelan Oppression

A new low in the disgrace of the American political class was reached when Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) took the floor this week to extol the virtues of Cuban communism. A new high immediately followed, as Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) rose to annihilate Harkin, and all the other miserable apologists for left-wing tyranny.

Read more and watch video at Human Events
(Hat tip: Stella) Read More......

IBD: Farmers' Almanac More Reliable Than Warming Climate Models

Bad Science: It turns out that a 200-year-old publication for farmers beats climate-change scientists in predicting this year's harsh winter as the lowly caterpillar beats supercomputers that can't even predict the past. ✧ Last fall, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center (CPC) predicted above-normal temperatures from November through January across much of the continental U.S. The Farmers' Almanac, first published in 1818, predicted a bitterly cold, snowy winter. ✧ The Maine-based Farmers' Almanac's still-secret methodology includes variables such as planetary positions, sunspots, lunar cycles and tidal action. It claims an 80% accuracy rate, surely better than those who obsess over fossil fuels and CO2.

Read more at Investors Business Daily (Investors.com) Read More......

Breitbart: 7 Amazing Reagan quotes that capture America's current condition

Ronald Reagan’s prescient words hold striking resonance to the dangers and maladies afflicting America today. Using social-media-style graphics, Wynton Hall covers topics from the importance of limited government to freedom's future with the beautiful clarity for which President Reagan is -- and will always be -- known.

Read more at Breitbart Read More......

Oregon House OK's Hatfield statue in U.S. Capitol, bill goes to the Senate

KTVZ.COM, SALEM, Ore. (AP) — The Oregon House has again voted to pull a statue of Oregon pioneer Jason Lee from a prominent place in the U.S. Capitol and replace it with one of Mark Hatfield. ✧ Lee, a 19th century missionary and founder of the school that became Willamette University, is one of Oregon's two statues in the halls of Congress. ✧ Hatfield supporters say it's time to showcase a new era of Oregon history represented by the Oregon governor and Republican U.S. senator who died in 2011. ✧ They revived the measure after a similar bill passed the House last year, but died in a Senate committee. ✧ The House voted Friday to require the Oregon Historical Society to raise money for a Hatfield statue. Lee's statue would return to Salem. ✧ The measure goes to the Senate.

House Bill 4071 passed 39-18. See the vote:
Bailey Aye
Barnhart Aye
Barker Aye
Barton Nay
Bentz Aye
Berger Aye
Boone Aye
Buckley Nay
Cameron Aye
Clem Aye
Conger Nay
Davis Excused
Doherty Aye
Esquivel Excused
Fagan Aye
Frederick Aye
Freeman Aye
Gallegos Aye
Gelser Aye
Gilliam Aye
Gomberg Aye
Gorsek Aye
Greenlick Aye
Hanna Aye
Harker Aye
Hicks Aye
Holvey Nay
Hoyle Aye
Huffman Nay
Jenson Aye
Johnson Aye
Kennemer Nay
Keny-Guyer Aye
Komp Aye
Krieger Aue
Lininger Aye
Lively Aye
McLane Nay
Matthews Aye
McKeown Aye
Nathanson Aye
Olson Nay
Parrish Aye
Read Aye
Reardon Aye
Richardson Excused for Business
Smith Nay
Smith Warner Aye
Sprenger Nay
Thatcher Nay
Thompson Nay
Tomei Nay
Unger Nay
Vega Pederson Aye
Weidner Nay
Whisnant Nay
Whitsett Nay
Williamson Aye
Witt Nay
Speaker Kotek Aye Read More......

House Democrats kill GOP Cover Oregon reform bid

(Sorry! I'm a little late with this) - SALEM, OR: On a party-line vote Wednesday, [February 12th], Oregon House Democrats on the Health Care Committee killed a series of amendments that Republicans said would reform Cover Oregon and improve oversight. Read more at KTVZ.com Read More......

The FCC Wades Into the Newsroom [NEWSROOM MONITORS… REALLY?]

Why is the agency studying 'perceived station bias' and asking about coverage choices? - Op-Ed BY AJIT PAI, Federal Communications Commissioner, Feb. 10 - News organizations often disagree about what Americans need to know. MSNBC, for example, apparently believes that traffic in Fort Lee, N.J., is the crisis of our time. Fox News, on the other hand, chooses to cover the September 2012 attacks on the U.S. diplomatic compound in Benghazi more heavily than other networks. The American people, for their part, disagree about what they want to watch. ✧ But everyone should agree on this: The government has no place pressuring media organizations into covering certain stories. Read more at WSJ Online… Read More......

State to same-sex domestic partners: You’re about to be married

On June 30, the state of Washington will convert to marriage the domestic partnerships of thousands of gay and lesbian couples who have not gotten married on their own or not gotten a legal dissolution.   Thousands of gay and lesbian domestic partners who have not married or legally dissolved their unions by the end of June will have their relationships automatically converted to marriage — courtesy of the state.

Read more at The Seattle Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

The Best Argument for Marriage I’ve Ever Heard

Testifying before the Indiana House Judiciary Committee on Jan. 13, Ryan T. Anderson, the William E. Simon Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, argued to a room full of policymakers:  “If the biggest social problem we face right now in the United States is absentee dads,” he paused, “How will we insist that dads are essential when the law redefines marriage to make fathers optional?”

Read more at Encourage & Teach
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Chattanooga Volkswagen workers reject the UAW

NEW ARTICLE: More details surface [added 2/17/14]... - Examiner Editorial: Auto workers in Chattanooga choose freedom over unionization

By Michael Barone - It's official: The United Auto Workers lost the representation vote at the Volkswagen Chattanooga plant. The cleverly named nooga.com has the story. The vote was close: 89 percent of workers voted, and they rejected the union by a 712-626 vote. Read more at Washington Examiner Read More......

DAVID LIMBAUGH: Americans, where have you gone?

Recently, I saw a photoshopped depiction of Charles Manson next to an unborn baby, and the caption suggested that liberals are more interested in protecting Manson than they are the baby. It got me to thinking. ✧ Yes, it got me to thinking about the absurd positions modern liberals hold, which wouldn’t be nearly so disturbing but for the fact that I’m not talking about fringe liberals. I’m talking about mainstream liberals, who control the Democratic Party, the old media, the executive branch of the federal government, the U.S. Senate, the U.S. Supreme Court half the time, the mammoth federal bureaucracy, many state governments, our universities, our national educational establishment and other cultural institutions. ✧ It still may be true that significantly more Americans self-identify as conservatives than as liberals, but liberals are calculating visionaries by nature, and with decades of planning and activism, they’ve exercised influence wholly disproportional to their numbers. Their Orwellian mindset oozes intolerance for opposing viewpoints and, with their cultural bullying, they’ve effectively scared many conservatives and other non-liberals into silence.

Read more (including a short sampling of the Obama/Democratic/liberal agenda and record) at Rare Read More......

Appeasement Doesn’t Work: Wyden O&C Bill Analysis, Pt 2

In Part 1, The “Ecological Forestry” Mandate, we reviewed the scope and purpose of the O&C lands, and assessed how the Wyden bill would impact timber production and local economies.

Reduction in Forest Roads on All O&C Lands

Another provision in Wyden’s bill that affects the Forestry emphasis areas is the mandate to reduce the total quantity of road miles “to the maximum extent practicable.” This mandate specifically applies both to the Forestry emphasis areas and the Conservation emphasis areas. It is to be achieved by decommissioning existing roads and mandating that any new roads built for a specific project are removed when the project is complete.

Read more at the Oregon Catalyst
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

“Ecological Forestry” Mandate: Wyden O&C Bill Analysis, Pt 1

When talking about the O&C lands, it’s important to understand three things. The first is that the O&C lands represent a very small fraction of the federal forest lands in Oregon. Oregon has about 30 million acres of forest lands, approximately 20 million acres of which are managed by the federal government. The O&C lands comprise only 2.1 million acres, about 10% of the federal forest lands in Oregon.

Read more at the Oregon Catalyst
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Obama: CA Central Valley drought due to climate change

Snip…
Actually, the problem for Central Valley farmers is that their water got taken from them by a federal judge, who put a baitfish ahead of human beings. Central Valley’s water-management system was designed to deal with droughts that last as long as five years, but the reservoirs that held its lifeblood got emptied into the ocean to rescue the Delta smelt. It began five years ago, and as Investors Business Daily reports, the locals remember it better than Obama does:

Read more at Hot Air Read More......

It turns out the 'Evil' Koch Bros are only the 59th biggest donors in American politics. Can you guess who is number one?

WASHINGTON EXAMINER - Charles and David Koch are the two most evil people in American politics, right? We know that because Jane Mayer proved it with her landmark "Covert Operations" tour de liberal force in 2010. ✧ Well, it turns out that Mayer's aim was off just a little, by like 58 slots on the all-time biggest donors in American politics list, as compiled by OpenSecrets.org. ✧ OpenSecrets.org tallied the top donors in federal elections between 1989 and 2014. Koch Industries -- privately owned by the Evil Koch Bros -- is on the list, to be sure, but doesn't appear until the 59th slot, with $18 million in donations, 90 percent of which went to Republicans.
So who occupies the 58 spots ahead of the Evil Koch Bros? Six of the top 10 are … wait for it … Read More......

An End to Fair Elections

The Obama administration and New York's senior senator , Democrat Chuck Schumer, are conspiring to muzzle critics of the Democratic Party before this fall's midterm elections. Literally to outlaw free speech. They are rushing through a change in IRS regulations that would prevent Tea Party organizations and other not-for-profits called 501c4s from engaging in customary pre-election activities such as get-out-the vote drives, debates and forums, and brochures rating the candidates. The regulation would even prohibit these groups from criticizing incumbent office-holders within 60 days of a general election.

Read more at Townhall.com
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Survey: U.S. press freedom plunges under Obama to 46th in world, after Romania

The Obama administration’s handling of whistleblower Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency leaks and the investigation of a string of leaks produced a plunge in the country’s rating on press freedoms and government openness, according to a global survey released Tuesday.

Read more at the Washington Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Charles Murray: The New Upper Class and the Real Reason We Dislike Them

The Pew Foundation discovered in a recent poll that tensions over inequality in wealth now outrank tensions over race and immigration. But income inequality isn’t really the problem. A new upper class is the problem. And their wealth isn’t what sets them apart or creates so much animosity toward them. ✧ Let’s take a guy — call him Hank — who built a successful auto-repair business and expanded it to 30 locations, and now his stake in the business is worth $100 million. He is not just in the 1%; he’s in the top fraction of the 1% — but he’s not part of the new upper class…

Read more at TIME.com Read More......

The Pentagon's Bow to Islamic Extremism

“Caving to pressure from Muslim groups, the Pentagon has relaxed uniform rules to allow Islamic beards, turbans, and hijabs. It’s a major win for political correctness and a big loss for military unit cohesion,” said a recent report. This new relaxation of rules for Muslims comes at a time when the FBI is tracking more than 100 suspected jihadi-infiltrators of the U.S. military. Just last month, Craig Benedict Baxam, a former Army soldier and convert to Islam, was sentenced to seven years in prison due to his al-Qaeda/jihadi activities. Also last month, Mozaffar Khazaee, an Iranian-American working for the Defense Department, was arrested for sending secret documents to America’s enemy, Iran.

Read more at Human Events
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Mississippi Passes New Gun Laws – Prevents Government Confiscation of Firearms

(Zinnfigur)

Under the Tsar, Russia was one of the most heavily armed societies on earth. That all changed when Stalin and the communists took control. Stalin was able to control, starve, punish and imprison a defenseless people… after he took their guns.  ✧ This week the Mississippi House passed a trio of gun laws yesterday preventing the government from seizing firearms during a state emergency, The Clarion Ledger reported.

Read more at Gateway Pundit Read More......

BREAKING: 100% of 501(c)(4) Groups Audited by IRS Were Conservative

Today Rep. Dave Camp (R-MI), the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, confirmed that 100% of the established 501(c)(4) groups the IRS selected for audit were conservative. But Obama says their was not a smidgen of corruption in the IRS. The Wall Street Journal reported:   A Republican House committee chairman said the Internal Revenue Service targeted tax-exempt conservative groups for audits, widening the scope of GOP ire over the agency’s oversight of political activities.

Read more at The Gateway Pundit
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Thought Police: Firms must swear ObamaCare not a factor in firings

How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so.

Read more at Fox News
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Heading Right in Nevada

Ron Paul is not the president. He was never going to be the president. He was never even going to be the Republican party’s 2008 nominee for president. This is not disputed. But it’s also true that his perennial and perennially ill-fated presidential bids changed America’s political topography in ways that East Coast political observers may not yet fully understand.

Read more at National Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Obamacare's unworkable employer mandate gets delayed again

A provision in President Obama's health care law that required larger employers to offer acceptable health insurance or face a penalty has been delayed again for most businesses. ✧ The administrative delay, which directly contradicts the text of the law, is another sign that the provision, known as the employer mandate, is unworkable.
Snip:

If Obama believes the employer mandate is a bad idea that needs to be repealed or severely changed, he should propose permanent changes rather than erratic piecemeal fixes. But for Obama, it isn't acceptable for opponents of the health care law to seek changes through the constitutional legislative process. That's sabotage. The only way to make changes to Obamacare is for him to do so unilaterally, no matter what the text of the law actually says.

Read more at Washington Examiner Read More......

Education: Too Late to Save English Departments?

By Mary Grabar
Thankfully, much is being made of Heather Mac Donald’s recent piece, “The Humanities and Us,” [HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING] in the City Journal. She illustrates the decline of college English departments, where “gender, sexuality, race, and class” have taken over Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. The radicals of the 60s and 70s are firmly in charge; their diktats have attacked the hallmarks of literary study; and Mac Donald rightly calls for a return to standards at colleges. But standards won’t do any good if incoming freshmen are incapable of reading, thinking independently, and using logic. That has already begun to be the case, and it is going to get worse thanks to new “standards” known as Common Core.

Read more at The Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Read More......

Hillary Clinton's Univision Ties Met With Near-Silence in Media; 'Pay-to-Play' Claim From GOP

High in the polls with a dream candidate’s resume, Hillary Clinton's advantages in the 2016 presidential race are the stuff of near-constant media chatter these days.  Except for one topic: Univision.  The Spanish-language network, which broadcasts from Doral, has remarkably close ties with Clinton — from the way the media giant covers immigration to the financial backing of its top leader to a new initiative between the network and the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation.Barely a peep from the press, though.

Read more at the Miami Herald
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

After CBO Report: The new cultural meme in America. Are we ready for this?

By Angela Graham-West (Wife of Allen West)
The latest economic report from the Congressional Budget Office, released Tuesday, says the health care law will cause Americans to work fewer hours — enough to be the equivalent of 2 million fewer jobs in 2017. The latest number is nearly three times as high as the budget office’s previous prediction. ✧ This was then followed by a nervous rush by the Left to justify the need for “less work”, For “hanging about,” for “discovering our passions,” for smoking a big fat (now legal) joint, and for relying on the sweat of YOUR NEIGHBOR’S BROW and not your own to finance these “internal endeavors.”

Read more at Allen B. West Read More......

16 Teens Rescued From Sex Trafficking in Super Bowl Sting

It’s the ugly side of the Super Bowl – the reality that America’s most popular sporting event is also likely America’s biggest day for sexual slavery. The day that sells the most tickets and the most coveted ad spaces is also the day that results in the most sales of little girls and women, at prices inflated to match the expense of the event. In a cruel outplay of the economic reality of “supply and demand,” it is not only local pimps who make a big profit – women and girls from all over the country are often brought in to the destination city to ensure that travelers for the big game have enough “side entertainment” available. ✧ As awareness of this evil phenomenon has grown, law enforcement officials and private organizations have been stepping up efforts to bring the activity to a halt. Read more at LifeNews.com Read More......

Is Walmart rebuilding America?

Former “Dirty Jobs” host Mike Rowe narrates a new Walmart commercial released Thursday and it contains one powerful message: “Work is a beautiful thing.” The commercial ends with a text overlay saying, “Over the next ten years, we’re putting $250 billion to work to help create new manufacturing jobs in America.” Read more at The BLAZE...

Watch Walmart’s other ads and see how the company is committed to American manufacturing jobs.
And then, there's the other side of the Walmart story.

Read More......

The Obama effect: NRA’s ‘American Rifleman’ surges to top 25 magazines in America

President Obama’s second-term effort to get Americans to hate guns has backfired. Not only did firearm sales in 2013 blow out all records, interest in learning more about Second Amendment issues has risen dramatically. This is evidenced by the news that circulation for the magazine “American Rifleman” has broken into the top 25 magazines in the country, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

Read more at the Washington Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

The Obama effect: NRA’s ‘American Rifleman’ surges to top 25 magazines in America

President Obama’s second-term effort to get Americans to hate guns has backfired. Not only did firearm sales in 2013 blow out all records, interest in learning more about Second Amendment issues has risen dramatically. This is evidenced by the news that circulation for the magazine “American Rifleman” has broken into the top 25 magazines in the country, according to the Alliance for Audited Media.

Read more at the Washington Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

What can a mere rifle do?

Long, long ago US Special Operations Forces (SOF) extensively studied what you can do with a sniper rifle, beyond just killing people. And they discovered that some items are highly vulnerable to what’s called in the trade a “standoff attack”. ✧ Someone, in the United States, has gone beyond studying targets and has attacked at least one of them in this way; the FBI and other agencies are investigating, and playing their investigation very close to the chest. Hold that thought while we can consider what a mere rifle can do, and in a while we’ll tell you what a rifle or rifles did last April.

Read more at Weaponsman.com
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Administration eases restrictions on asylum seekers with loose terror ties

The Obama administration has unilaterally eased restrictions on asylum seekers with loose or incidental ties to terror and insurgent groups, in a move one senator called "deeply alarming."

 

The change, approved by Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson and Secretary of State John Kerry, was announced Wednesday in the Federal Register. It would allow some individuals who provided "limited material support" to terror groups to be considered for entry into the U.S.

Read more at Fox News
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Prozanski’s Gun Registration Bill Heard

Today’s hearing on SB 1551, Senator Prozanski’s gun registration expansion, was enlightening to say the least.While gun owners are often referred to as a “vocal minority,” the sign-up sheets for testimony show only 19 people in support of the bill, with 28 opposed.First to testify was Trish Whitfield from the Oregon State Police ID unit.

While she did provide numbers for the total number of background checks done and the total number of denials, she did not provide any numbers for how many of those denials were for no cause.

Read more at the Oregon Firearms Federation
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

IMPRIMIS: The Tea Party, Conservatism, and the Constitution

By Charles R. Kesler
Editor, Claremont Review of Books
January 2014
Reprinted by permission from Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College.

The Tea Party movement is named, of course, for the famous event in late 1773 when cases of tea were dumped unceremoniously into the Boston harbor. The Boston Tea Party—a carefully orchestrated strike against a commodity that was being taxed and sold by a monopoly provider—was intended as a one-time thing, though it ended up being an important link in the chain of events that led to the American Revolution. Today’s Tea Party, on the other hand, has ambitions to become an ongoing force—maybe even the major force—in American conservatism. And it strives for a revolution of its own, a return to a more limited, more constitutional form of government. If I had to judge its performance so far, I would say that it has been courageous and right in its diagnosis of the problems facing American politics, but somewhat off in its prescriptions.

When I say the Tea Party is correct in its diagnosis, I mean it is correct in its very clear sense that Obamacare is not just another costly, bureaucratic, top-down, regulatory scheme, of which we have, alas, so many. There is something genuinely tyrannical (despite the good intentions of many of its supporters) about Obamacare. It threatens not only to ruin our medical care system, but indirectly and directly—and sooner as well as later—to subvert our form of government and our way of life, fundamentally changing the relation between citizens and government.

Hubris and Nemesis

In a way, you can see how dangerous Obamacare is by noticing how it has brought out the worst in liberals—which is evident in how they have responded to the Tea Party. Liberal impatience with partisanship—that is, with people who oppose their plans—arises from the fact that in contemporary liberalism, there is no publicly acknowledged right of revolution. That may seem like a strange thing to say, but if one looks at some of the political theorists who were most important to modern or statist liberalism—Kant and Hegel in Germany, say, or Woodrow Wilson here in the United States—they are usually quite explicit in rejecting a right of revolution. In their view, a people always has in the long run the government it deserves. So there’s no right of the people to “abolish,” as the Declaration of Independence proclaims, the prevailing form of government and substitute a better one. In particular, there is no conceivable right to overturn contemporary liberalism itself; as liberals today are so fond of saying, there is no turning back the clock. To liberals the Tea Party appears, well, bonkers, precisely because it recalls the American Revolution, and in doing so implies that it might not be such a bad thing to have another revolution—or at least a second installment of the original—in order to roll back the bad government that is damaging both the safety and happiness of the American people.

This is the position, for instance, of Sam Tanenhaus, former editor of the New York Times Book Review and author of The Death of Conservatism. For Tanenhaus, conservatism is good insofar as it consolidates and preserves the liberal order. If conservatism turns revolutionary, i.e., attempts to roll back the liberal order, then it exceeds its commission—it goes off the reservation, so to speak—because liberalism stands for progress and progress is final. President Obama himself made this point a few years ago regarding national health care: “I am not the first president to take up this cause,” he said, “but I am determined to be the last.” But in fact, Obamacare’s strained and narrow victory in 2010 looked not so much inevitable as desperate. It passed by a party line vote, with rampant side deals to buy out the relevant interest groups, and against bitter resistance that has not gone away. Then came its disastrous rollout and its failure to meet any of its own targets for success. All of which suggests overextension and hubris on the part of liberalism, and in the wake of this hubris the Tea Party has confirmed itself as Obama’s, and Obamacare’s, devoted nemesis.

What the Tea Party needs now is a strategy—something it has so far conspicuously lacked—to allow it to achieve its worthy ends. Thinking through a strategy will help clarify those ends: What is it, exactly, that the Tea Party means by limited government? Limited to what? And limited by what? Clearly the Tea Party’s form of conservatism points back to the Constitution as the basis for restoring American government. But how practically to move in that direction?

The Tea Party rightly concluded from the battles over Obamacare that what we are seeing in our politics these days is not two clashing interpretations of the same Constitution, but increasingly two different Constitutions in conflict: the old Constitution of 1787 and a “living” Constitution that is not just a different approach to the original, but an alternative to it. The extraordinary fight the Tea Party was willing to put up arose from this fact—that Obamacare amounted to a colossal battle between two different ways of government. And it was the Tea Party and President Obama who shared a clear understanding of the stakes; mainstream Republican leaders understood them with much less clarity and intensity.

Matching Means to Ends

The failure of the Supreme Court to strike down Obamacare and the individual mandate played into the Tea Party’s suspicions. The Court, after all, had come close to striking down the act. There were five votes to rule it unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause before Chief Justice Roberts changed the subject to the taxing power. When the Court punted on the main question and allowed Obamacare to become law, it suggested to Tea Party leaders in and out of government that the old constitutional mechanisms of judicial review and separation of powers did not seem capable of defending the Constitution against this fundamental challenge, and that the only recourse would be a direct appeal to the American people—to the ultimate source of authority for any constitution. To them, John Roberts’s about-face revealed the failure, maybe even the treachery, of the governing establishment—including the establishment Republicans who had nominated and backed Roberts as chief justice. That judgment might be unfair—at the very least it is not completely true—but in any case, the Tea Party concluded that it was now urgently necessary to raise the consciousness of the American people to this new threat.

At this point we should note the paradoxical character of the Tea Party: It is a populist movement to defend the Constitution, but the Constitution is meant, among other things, to limit populism in our politics—to channel, moderate, and refine popular passion through constitutional forms, such as elections, officeholding, and the rule of law. The point was to ensure, as The Federalist put it, that the reason, not the passion, of the public would control and regulate the government. So it was incumbent on the Tea Party to try to keep its populist means in line with its constitutional ends. And it is in this respect that the Tea Party has sometimes fallen short.

Last fall, the Tea Party seized upon the latest Continuing Resolution to try to bring down Obamacare. Granted, Continuing Resolutions, the multi-thousand page omnibus spending bills that pass for appropriations bills these days, are abdications of Congress’s own budget process and derelictions of its constitutional duty to protect the public purse. Yet bad things can sometimes be used for good purposes. But mainstream Republican leaders warned that the Tea Party senators never had a realistic plan to obtain the votes to defund Obamacare in the Senate, or beyond that to overcome Obama’s veto pen. President Obama needed to fund the government, but he felt, rightly it turned out, that he could hold out longer than the GOP could. The architects of the government shutdown could never answer the question of how victory might be achieved.

Apparently their hope was that an outraged American public—fresh from voting in 2012 to re-elect Obama and to increase the Democratic majority in the Senate by two seats—would rise up and put such pressure on recalcitrant Democrats that they would defund the program that their party had been longing for since Franklin Roosevelt. In relying on such an unlikely outcome, the Tea Party showed its own populist brand of impatience with the separation of powers, bicameralism, and the legislative process that the Constitution prescribes. In imagining that the American public could be persuaded to reconsider the results of an election hardly a year old, the Tea Party surrendered to its own version of the “leadership theory” that liberals have long preferred to legislative-executive politics of the constitutional sort. The implicit argument was that by going over the heads of party leaders and constitutional officeholders to appeal directly to the people, the Tea Party could generate its own mandate to trump the mandate just awarded in the election.

Appealing to the people, of course, is a time-honored tactic: Ronald Reagan was famous for saying that if you can’t make politicians see the light, you can at least make them feel the heat! But Reagan appealed directly to the people from the bully pulpit of the presidency, not from the Senate floor, and he made sure to explain the issue in pellucid and persuasive terms. We learned from Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich in the 1990s that it really is impossible to run American government from Congress. So as the Tea Party’s unreasonable hopes faded, it had to settle for less and less: delaying the individual mandate rather than defunding it; verifying the subsidies of policyholders in the insurance exchanges; abolishing the medical devices tax; delaying the medical devices tax; and so on. The Tea Party leaders were pushed back and back and were forced to ask for less and less, until they ended up with virtually nothing.

The Need for Political Thinking

To summarize, the Tea Party has been right about the threat posed to the fabric of constitutional government by Obamacare and by other brazen assaults on the Constitution, such as President Obama’s asserted prerogatives to choose which laws to enforce and to make recess appointments when there was no recess. But the establishment Republicans were right about the outcome of the effort to defund Obamacare by tying it to the Continuing Resolution. One might conclude then that these two groups need each other—not only in the sense that they need each other to get to a majority in the House of Representatives, but also, at least for the time being, in the sense that each supplies the other’s defects. In that light it is neither wise nor moderate for members of either group to lambaste members of the other as political enemies—something of which both sides have been guilty.

The Tea Party could do itself and the country a great service by working out what a return to constitutional government might really mean, and thus the strategy and tactics appropriate to that. What is needed is less populism and more political thinking on its part, or on the part of its trusted advisors. Political thinking and constitutional thinking are not opposed, of course, any more than putting together a political majority and defending the Constitution are opposed. Indeed, these two great duties, properly understood, are implicit in each other. It’s doubtful that the Republican party can succeed without doing both.

After a century of Progressive mining and sapping of the Constitution, the great document we count on to defend us now needs our defense, and the form of government issuing from the Constitution is itself in need of restoration and renewal. Let me end by giving a few examples of how to bring the spirit of the Constitution and the spirit of conservatism closer together.

Tea Party leaders are eloquent on the point that the Constitution does not make the Supreme Court its final arbiter. Let them apply that insight to Obamacare. The problem with Obamacare is not merely that it will ruin health care, but that it undermines the whole notion of rights—natural rights—that come not from government but from our own nature and from God. Yes, it is unfair, unworkable, and unaffordable. But to leave the argument at that leaves the Constitution out of the picture. So when denouncing Obamacare, let’s hear more about its unconstitutional aspects.

The fattest target is the Independent Payments Advisory Board (IPAB), which is unconstitutional on its face. IPAB consists of 15 members who are not elected by the people but appointed by the president. Their job is to make recommendations to limit Medicare’s budget by reducing reimbursements to doctors. Unless both houses of Congress overrule IPAB by passing their own equal or greater cuts to Medicare, IPAB’s proposals automatically become law. What’s worse, Obamacare conspires to make IPAB permanent by mandating that no resolution to repeal it can be introduced before January 1, 2017, or after February 1, 2017. In other words, the Constitution would be operational for one month only—and even then the repeal must pass by August 15, 2017, in order to be valid, and it could not take effect until 2020!

Congress could presumably unravel these restrictions and undo IPAB anytime it wanted. Nonetheless, the spirit and the letter of this kind of regulation suggest just how averse (and adverse) to the Constitution Obamacare really is. To think that Congress couldn’t repeal it, except for one month, and that even then repeal wouldn’t take effect for three years afterwards, is astounding. Why don’t Tea Party leaders talk more about that in condemning Obamacare? I think the American people would be indignant over this attack on their liberty to govern themselves. But they won’t be angry if conservatives don’t inform them about this travesty.

Conservatives should be calling for other kinds of reforms as well, in order to apply the consent of the governed to regulations which form so much of the substance of modern government. Let’s call for a vote by Congress on all regulations costing $100,000,000 or more. That’s one idea already in circulation. Or why not require the Appropriations Committee, or some combination of committees and committee chairmen in Congress, to approve all regulations, approved by any agency, so that there has to be some democratic say-so before any regulations become law? That does not require changing the Constitution, only a change in the law. We should also require Congress to follow its own budget rules. This doesn’t require an amendment either, only vigorous partisanship on the part of Republicans of every variety. We should insist on 13 appropriations bills for the 13 departments, which would give both parties a chance to fight it out, make what cuts we can make, and decide what is more essential and what is less essential. These kinds of reforms, well short of constitutional amendments, would help to reinvigorate congressional accountability and constitutional government.

If conservative officeholders don’t start to correct these structural deformations in our government, and if the Tea Party doesn’t turn its formidable patriotism and energy to enlightening the American people about how we are losing control of our own destiny, then no matter how many good policies we enact, or how low we set tax rates, the body politic will continue to sicken, and self-government will slip through our fingers.

---

The above is adapted from a speech delivered on October 21, 2013, at Hillsdale College’s Allan P. Kirby, Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship in Washington, D.C., sponsored by the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.

HARLES R. KESLER is the Dengler-Dykema Distinguished Professor of Government at Claremont McKenna College and editor of the Claremont Review of Books. He received his A.B., his A.M., and his Ph.D. in government from Harvard University. He is editor of the Signet Classic edition of The Federalist Papers; editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding; co-editor, with William F. Buckley, Jr., of Keeping the Tablets: Modern American Conservative Thought; and author of I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Future of Liberalism. Read More......

Rand Paul: Democrats should ‘disown’ Bill Clinton for being a ‘sexual predator’

Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul says Democrats need to “disown” Bill Clinton because of his history as a “sexual predator.”  “I think he’s not particularly the greatest role model for the women’s rights movement,” Paul said in an interview posted Wednesday on NewsmaxTV. “And so I think if they want to be credible in saying that they defend women’s rights in the work place, they really need to disown and really return any contributions that Bill Clinton’s either raising for people or giving to people.”  “I think for the movement to proceed on and have any consistency they need to dissociate themselves from him,” Paul said.

Read more at the Daily Caller
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Email: IRS's Lerner, Treasury Department secretly drafted new rules to restrict nonprofits

The Obama administration’s Treasury Department and former IRS official Lois Lerner conspired to draft new 501(c)(4) regulations to restrict the activity of conservative groups in a way that would not be disclosed publicly, according to the House Committee on Ways and Means.  The Treasury Department and Lerner started devising the new rules “off-plan,” meaning that their plans would not be published on the public schedule. They planned the new rules in 2012, while the IRS targeting of conservative groups was in full swing, and not after the scandal broke in order to clarify regulations as the administration has suggested.

Read more at The Daily Caller
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Obama launches 'climate hubs' to help farmers, communities

The Obama administration will announce the establishment of regional hubs focused on mitigating climate change on Wednesday.  The hubs are the first-ever regional centers that will focus solely on risk adaptation and climate change solutions at seven locations across the country.

Read more at The Hill
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

New Cover Oregon allegations: 'If it's true, someone's going to prison'

You already know the process that led to the failed rollout of the Cover Oregon website was bad. ✧ But was it criminally bad?

Read more at KATU News
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

CBO: O-Care slowing growth

The new healthcare law will slow economic growth over the next decade, costing the nation about 2.3 million jobs and contributing to a $1 trillion increase in projected deficits, the Congressional Budget Office said in a report released Tuesday.  The non-partisan group’s report found that the healthcare law’s negative effects on the economy will be “substantially larger” than what it had previously anticipated.

Read more at The Hill
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

D'Souza was Right about Obama

Dinesh D'Souza, the political commentator, author and movie-maker came under fire four years ago when he wrote a column for Forbes Magazine, "How Obama Thinks" that speculated President Obama saw the world as split in two: those nations who colonized and oppressed and the victim nations and people who were colonized and were the oppressed.

Read more at the American Thinker
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

DOT plans to mandate ‘talking’ cars

The Obama administration announced Monday that it intends to require new cars to include technology enabling them to communicate with each other, a step that transportation planners have said could significantly reduce crashes. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx told reporters that he hopes to finish the mandate before President Barack Obama leaves office. That would allow time for DOT and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to work out issues including security and privacy.

Read more at Politico
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Doctor’s ‘I will not comply’ Obamacare break-up letter getting incredible praise from her peers

A Texas ophthalmologist and co-founder of AmericanDoctors4Truth tore down the curtain on Obamacare last week, describing President Obama’s “signature” legislative achievement for the con game of forced labor that it really is. When she wrote to the Aetna insurance company canceling her participation in its offerings, Dr. Kristin Held of San Antonio was informed she is contractually bound to care for the company’s patients for another year — as though Obamacare not only re-configured the American health care system, it repealed the 13th Amendment at the same time.

Read more at Biz Pac Review
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Justice bars lawyer from testifying before House panel in IRS probe

The Justice Department said Thursday it is refusing to let a key lawyer testify to the House oversight committee on the criminal investigation into the IRS, saying that to let her brief Congress could potentially skew its probe. ✧ But oversight committee Republicans said blocking lawyer Barbara Bosserman from testifying only makes the Justice’s investigation look more partisan.

Read more at the Washington Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......

Justice bars lawyer from testifying before House panel in IRS probe

The Justice Department said Thursday it is refusing to let a key lawyer testify to the House oversight committee on the criminal investigation into the IRS, saying that to let her brief Congress could potentially skew its probe. ✧ But oversight committee Republicans said blocking lawyer Barbara Bosserman from testifying only makes the Justice’s investigation look more partisan.

Read more at the Washington Times
(Hat tip: KimR) Read More......