Bill Pascoe, Executive Vice President of Citizens for the Republic and a longtime political and communications advisor, discusses President Reagan’s political legacy and why he gives “Three Cheers” for Judge Vinson’s ruling declaring unconstitutional the individual mandate that is the heart of ObamaCare.
Listen to the interview here.
Though skeptical of a Donald Trump presidential administration, show me in the Yes column for a spirited campaign by the billionaire. For rhetorical firepower and the brashness to speak truth without consequences, there may be no more entertaining presidential hopeful than The Donald. Consider this description of his speech today at CPAC:
“The United States has become a whipping post for the rest of the world,” Trump said. “The world is treating us without respect. They are not treating us properly. America today is missing quality leadership, and foreign countries are quickly realizing this.”
Trump laced his speech with heavy criticisms of President Obama and declared himself to be pro-life, against gun control and an opponent of the health care reform law. He said that Obama “came out of nowhere” and seemed to question the president’s documented personal history, claiming that people who went to school with Obama “never saw him. They don’t even know who he is.”
On foreign policy, Trump sounded particularly skeptical of the intentions of China and the OPEC nations and said that if he had “an admiral and a couple good ships” to deal with Somali pirates, he would “blast them out of the water so fast.”
The best result of a Trump presidency? Seeing him turn around during his inaugural speech, look President Barack Obama in the eye and say, “You’re fired.”
H/T: Scott Conroy of Real Clear Politics
Leave it to liberals like Arianna Huffington to treat the little people she champions exactly like a corporate stooge. Debra Saunders highlights the hypocrisy fueling this week’s announced merger of AOL News with The Huffington Post:
Remember HuffPo’s big scoop during the 2008 presidential election? Writer Mayhill Fowler recorded then-presidential candidate Barack Obama as he told swells at a San Francisco fundraiser that blue-collar voters “get bitter” and “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.”
Last year, Fowler quit writing for HuffPo because the website refused to pay her. “Citizen journalist,” Mayhill Fowler discovered, has a very specific meaning: Free.
The savings Arianna realizes from not paying many of her contributors undoubtedly helps make her website more profitable. It also lets her hide her lust for money behind the guise of anti-corporate rhetoric. Saunders continues:
Fowler keeps waiting for the moment when high-profile Democrats realize “that they cannot say one thing and do another: to talk sympathy for working people and yet blog at a site that treats its writers badly.” Fowler should not hold her breath.
Huffington is an entrepreneurial genius at self-promotion. She fiercely surfed the left’s discontent with mainstream – read: corporate – journalism by promising to keep mainstream – read: paid – news media “honest.”
So, on the one hand Huffington lets ‘citizen journalists’ like Fowler do the heavy lifting of reporting breaking news while leveraging the resulting readership into a $315 million payday. Not a bad day’s work for the divorced wife of a multi-millionaire. Maybe now folks like Fowler will remember that liberals like Arianna are just as eager to make a buck as anyone else – they just aren’t as up front about it as the rest.
H/T: San Francisco Chronicle
Earlier this week, InsideHealthPolicy.com reported:
Republican aides on Capitol Hill are circulating sections of an independent audit that found significant shortcomings in HHS’ financial management — including noncompliance with federal laws and a $3 billion difference between the department’s own balance sheet and records maintained by the Treasury Department. HHS acknowledged “material weaknesses” in its financial management systems and said some of those issues will be worked out as the department implements a new reporting system this year.
Below are some of the specifics, care of Senator Tom Coburn:
- HHS Is Not In Compliance With Federal Financial Management Law. According to the HHS Inspector General’s review of Ernst & Young’s financial audit of HHS, “HHS’s financial management systems are not compliant with the Federal Financial Management Improvement Act of 1996.”
- Nearly $2 Billion Taxpayer Dollars Are Stuck in Limbo. “As of September 30, 2010, the audit identified approximately 102,500 transactions totaling an approximate $1.8 billion that were more than 2 year s old without activity.”
- Nearly $800 Million Dollars “Could Not Be Explained” Differing Between HHS’ Records and Treasury Department Records. “Based on our review and discussions with management, we noted differences of $794 million that could not be explained.”
- Some Processes and Procedural Manuals Have Not Been Updated Since the 1980s. “HHS’s formalized policies and procedures are out of date and may be inconsistent with actual processes taking place….For example, we noted that certain policies and procedures, including certain accrual processes, had not been updated since the mid-1980s.”
- Current HHS Personnel Need Training To “Complete Their Day-to-Day Responsibilities.” “Further, we noted additional training on the financial systems was needed to enable HHS personnel in their ability to access needed information from the system to complete their day-to-day responsibilities – including the preparation of reconciliations, research of differences noted, and the ability to identify and clear older “stale” transactions dating back several years.”
America, meet the federal department charged with implementing and managing the most significant provisions of the monstrosity known as ObamaCare.
In a November commentary, I warned that Ben Bernanke’s expansionary monetary policy threatened to erode the value of the dollar and weaken the American economy. Now the leading mind of the House GOP caucus is saying the same thing to the Fed Chairman’s face. With Bernanke appearing before the House Budget Committee earlier today, newly minted Chairman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin laid the consequences of “quantitative easing” on the line:
“There is nothing more insidious that a country can do to its citizens than debase its currency,” Ryan told Bernanke. “Chairman Bernanke: We know you know this. We know that you’re focused and concerned about this. The Fed’s exit strategy and future policy – it will determine how this ends.”
Ryan said he believed a “course correction here in Washington is sorely needed.”
“Endless borrowing is not a strategy,” he said. “My concern is that the costs of the Fed’s current monetary policy – the money creation and massive balance sheet expansion – will come to outweigh the perceived short-term benefits.”
“It is hard to overstate the consequences of getting this wrong. The dollar is the world’s reserve currency and this has given us tremendous benefits in the global economy,” Ryan said.
As usual, Paul Ryan is right. Unfortunately, there’s little that can be done from the outside. The Fed operates free of traditional rules of transparency (one of the reasons the push to audit its books has gained so much traction) and it works on the basis of a delusional proposition that it can be an engine of economic stimulus at the same time that it maintains the dollar as a stable store of value (a proposition that Ryan has rightly called into question). There’s still a lot of work to be done to rationalize American monetary policy. But it’s at least heartening to know that we’ve literally got our best man on it.
Political Wire has the astounding sums failed gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman (R-CA) paid to campaign consultants last year.
Key staffers: Campaign manager Jill Hasner ($948,000); senior adviser Jeff Randle ($550,000); finance director Sara Myers ($439,438); deputy campaign managers W. Todd Cranney ($389,000) and Tucker Bounds ($324,572.)
Overall, the campaign cost Whitman $178 of her $1 billion+ fortune. All that to lose by 13%; how much to lose by 20%?
Florida Republican Governor Rick Scott unveiled his much-anticipated budget proposal on Monday in front of a crowd teeming with Tea Party activists. Slashing $4.6 billion from last year’s budget, Scott takes aim at many sacred cows. AOL News lists the five most controversial:
(1) 10% cut in education spending
(2) Eliminating 1,690 jobs from the Department of Corrections
(3) An 8,700 overall reduction in the state government workforce
(4) Tax cuts worth $4 billion
(5) A $4 billion Medicaid reform
None of these changes, however, may be as consequential as Scott’s proposal to require state public employees to start contributing 5% of their paychecks to their pensions. If state retirement funds are ever to become solvent the employees who benefit from them will have to put some money in the kitty. Scott also wants to put new state hires into a 401(k)-type retirement system, a shift that would move the state toward a pension system of defined contributions instead of defined benefits.
If Scott is successful in Florida other states might follow suit. For the sake of taxpayers in the Sunshine State and beyond, let’s hope he prevails.
Recently, Senator Mark Udall (D-CO) signed on as a co-sponsor to Senator Richard Shelby’s (R-AL) balanced budget amendment bill, marking the first time a Democratic senator has supported such a measure since Zell Miller (D-GA) did eight years ago.
While Shelby’s version differs in some ways from the framework promoted by CFIF’s “One More Vote” initiative, Udall’s surprise support is welcome news. Getting bipartisan consensus on the need to rein in federal spending is the sine qua non of real budget reform.
My hat is off to Udall for putting himself on the record in favor of spending restraint. Now, it’s time to convert his Democratic brethren.
H/T: U.S. News & World Report
If you need any proof that the new generation of Republicans in Congress are breaking from the spendthrift ways of their forebears, look no further than this terrific idea, as reported by our friends at the Daily Caller:
With the 112th Congress in full swing, some members of the House’s conservative Republican Study Committee are making a renewed effort to establish a committee whose only purpose is to find programs to cut from the federal budget.
…
The idea is a throwback to the now-defunct “Joint Committee on Reduction of Non-essential Federal Expenditures,” started by former Virginia Sen. Harry Byrd in 1941. The bi-cameral committee slashed an (inflation-adjusted) $38 billion from the federal budget in its first four years. The committee cut and eliminated programs enacted under President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” but was dismantled in 1974.
This proposal has two salutary effects. First, it has the potential to move conservatives from the abstract to the specific when it comes to spending cuts. Second, it puts skin in the game for Democrats — if they oppose the proposal it will give the lie to all of the vague pieties about deficit reduction that they’ve harnessed over the last year. This is a fight the conservatives in Congress should relish.
This year’s Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) is set to be the biggest ever, and CFIF Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs Timothy Lee is honored to be selected as one of its speakers.
His panel, entitled “The Left’s Campaign to Reshape the Judiciary,” is scheduled for 9:30 a.m. this Friday, February 11 in the Marshall Ballroom. Kelly Shackelford of the Liberty Institute will moderate the panel, which also includes Ken Klukowski of the American Civil Rights Union and Dan Pero of the American Justice Partnership. Our judicial system is a primary tool by which the political left seeks to remake America to fit its distorted image, and we must remain vigilant against that scheme. Especially with the 2012 presidential kicking off, this CPAC isn’t one to miss.
Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.
Join CFIF Corporate Counsel and Senior Vice President Renee Giachino today from 4:00 p.m. CST to 6:00 p.m. CST (that’s 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. EST) on Northwest Florida’s 1330 AM WEBY, as she hosts her show “Your Turn.” Today’s star guest lineup includes:
4:00 p.m. CST/5:00 p.m. EST: Pete Sepp, Executive Vice President, National Taxpayers Union;
4:30 p.m. CST/5:30 p.m. EST: Mike Carey, President of American Council for Affordable Energy, Impact of Egypt Crisis on America;
5:00 p.m. CST/6:00 p.m. EST: Bill Bascoe, Executive Vice President, Citizens for the Republic, ObamaCare Ruling;
5:30 p.m. CST/6:30 p.m. EST: Timothy Lee, Vice President of Legal and Public Affairs, Center for Individual Freedom, Reshaping the Judiciary and Reagan at 100.
Please share your comments, thoughts and questions at (850) 623-1330, or listen via the Internet by clicking here. You won’t want to miss it today!
Below is one of the latest cartoons from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Ramirez.
View more of Michael Ramirez’s cartoons on CFIF’s website here.
In a bold speech at Saturday’s Munich Security Conference, British Prime Minister David Cameron lashed the rise in Islamist extremism to the permissive multicultural attitude of state bureaucracy. Announcing a dramatic shift in policy, Cameron called for “making sure that immigrants speak the language of their new home and ensuring that people are educated in the elements of a common culture and curriculum.”
Kudos to the British Prime Minister for delivering a stirring alternative to the bureaucratic-enabled formula of claiming a grievance against the government, getting public funding, and still working to violently attack the hands that coddle. Care to wager how long it will be to get a similar statement of national principle from the American President?
Since a majority of the smart people in Washington, D.C., agree that the nation’s astronomically high $14.3 trillion debt ceiling, chattering class consensus says all the “sane” members of Congress will stand together and once again extend America’s line of credit. With that in mind, GOP budget cutters are proposing to get deep spending cuts in return for raising the debt ceiling.
Not so fast, says Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke. Playing his faux apolitical persona to the hilt yesterday, Bernanke said House Republicans should “not play around” with the debt ceiling vote to extract any spending concessions. That would make a fiscal issue too political. Instead, they should treat spending and tax issues separately; exactly the unconditional debt raising approach espoused by the Obama Administration.
But the logic of the Republicans’ negotiating tactic is clear: get spending cuts now so that the debt limit becomes a true ceiling once more instead of a temporary marker. Having a limit on one’s credit card does not require the user to treat it as a goal. It’s an emergency option, not a default. Because fiscally conservative House and Senate members are the only public officials actually trying to get control of the budget, demanding concessions from the debt ceiling vote may be the only way to make progress in a fractured government.
If Bernanke is too partisan to see that, he should at least recognize that politics isn’t just an exercise in means; it’s the attainment of principled ends as well.
In its monthly report this morning, the Labor Department announced that unemployment has now remained at or above 9% for a post-World War II record 21st consecutive month. Additionally, it reported just 36,000 new jobs, well short of the expected 140,000 number.
On the eve of the 100th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, these numbers contrast the results of a big government agenda versus a free market agenda. In the 23 months since Obama’s massive $1 trillion “stimulus” passage, unemployment has increased from 8.2% to 9%. One would expect better results in exchange for deficits of $1.4 trillion in 2009, $1.3 trillion in 2010 and an expected record $1.5 trillion this year. Keep in mind that Obama projected that if we followed his big government agenda, unemployment would be down between 6% – 7% by now. In contrast, the 23 months following the effective date of Reagan’s tax cuts in January 1983 saw unemployment plummet from 10.4% to 7.2%.
The facts speak for themselves. Inexplicably, Obama nevertheless called for even more federal “stimulus” in his State of the Union address. As we celebrate the Gipper’s 100th birthday, we should remember the timeless lesson taught by his freedom agenda’s success.
If the dire predictions about Egypt’s impending descent into Islamic government turn out to be true, it would behoove Americans to read up on the group most likely to run the show. The Muslim Brotherhood can claim quite a few firsts in its 60+ year history. Among the lowlights:
The Muslim Brotherhood is for the kind of radicals who want to end Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and institute Sharia law as the measure of justice. For a full account of the Brotherhood’s history and actions, click here.
H/T: Discover the Networks
Earlier this week, I wrote that the uprising taking place against the Mubarak government in Cairo raised troubling questions about the regime that would succeed the departing president. Now, writing in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick makes a disquieting prediction — and she’s got the data points to back it up:
According to a Pew opinion survey of Egyptians from June 2010, 59 percent said they back Islamists. Only 27% said they back modernizers. Half of Egyptians support Hamas. Thirty percent support Hizbullah and 20% support al Qaida. Moreover, 95% of them would welcome Islamic influence over their politics. When this preference is translated into actual government policy, it is clear that the Islam they support is the al Qaida Salafist version.
Eighty two percent of Egyptians support executing adulterers by stoning, 77% support whipping and cutting the hands off thieves. 84% support executing any Muslim who changes his religion.
When given the opportunity, the crowds on the street are not shy about showing what motivates them. They attack Mubarak and his new Vice President Omar Suleiman as American puppets and Zionist agents. The US, protesters told CNN’s Nick Robertson, is controlled by Israel. They hate and want to destroy Israel. That is why they hate Mubarak and Suleiman.
WHAT ALL of this makes clear is that if the regime falls, the successor regime will not be a liberal democracy. Mubarak’s military authoritarianism will be replaced by Islamic totalitarianism. The US’s greatest Arab ally will become its greatest enemy. Israel’s peace partner will again become its gravest foe.
Food for thought. We shouldn’t be thinking of Cairo as Philadelphia in 1776 until it proves that it’s not Paris in 1793.
Gossip Cop has learned exclusively that President Obama has invited Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony to watch the Super Bowl with him at the White House.
Lopez’s rep confirms to Gossip Cop that the invitation was extended, and now Lopez and Anthony are arranging a trip to Washington to watch the Pittsburgh Steelers take on the Green Bay Packers with the Commander-in-Chief.
Let’s review. This Sunday, the President of the United States will welcome two of the biggest Latin pop stars of the last decade to watch a Super Bowl featuring a team owned by his Ambassador to Ireland, preceded by an exclusive interview that he’s giving to a Fox News host. We’ve gone through the rabbit hole, people.
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