The only poll that matters …
By Ed Morrissey....The final lesson comes from John Fund, who argues that this primary should teach incumbents a very valuable lesson about taking their constituencies for granted:
Many constituents of Eric Cantor felt he had ignored them for years, rarely returning home and often ignoring them on key issues ranging from expanding Medicare prescription-drug benefits to TARP bank bailouts. The frustration boiled over at a May party meeting in his district, where Cantor was booed and his ally was ousted from his post as local party chair by a tea-party insurgent. “He did one thing in Washington and then tried to confuse us as to what he did when he came back to his district,” one Republican primary voter told me. …
Primaries are often criticized for low voter turnout. But they are also expressions of the grassroots sentiments of political parties. The lesson tonight is that establishment candidates ignore their most ardent voters at their peril. As political analyst Stuart Rothenberg put it tonight: “The GOP establishment’s problem isn’t with the Tea Party. It’s with Republican voters.”
Why Eric Cantor Lost
By Erick Erickson....But Cantor really did not lose because of immigration alone. Immigration was the surface reason that galvanized the opposition to Cantor, but the opposition could not have been galvanized with this issue had Cantor been a better congressman these past few years.
He and his staff have repeatedly antagonized conservatives. One conservative recently told me that Cantor’s staff were the “biggest bunch of a**holes on the Hill.” An establishment consultant who backed Cantor actually agreed with this assessment. That attitude moved with Cantor staffers to K Street, the NRSC, and elsewhere generating ill will toward them and Cantor. Many of them were perceived to still be assisting Cantor in other capacities. After Cantor’s loss tonight, I got a high volume of emails from excited conservatives, but also more than a handful of emails from those with establishment Republican leanings all expressing variations on “good riddance.”
Cantor’s constituent services moved more toward focusing on running the Republican House majority than his congressional district. K Street, the den of Washington lobbyists, became his chief constituency. In Virginia a couple of months ago, several residents of Cantor’s district groused that they were going to support Brat because they did not think Cantor was doing his job as a Virginia congressman. Others no longer trusted him.
Cantor and his staff both lost the trust of conservatives and constituents. They broke promises, made bad deals, and left many feeling very, very betrayed. Much of it was because of Cantor’s hubris and the arrogance of his top staffers. He could not be touched and he could not be defeated. He knew it and they knew it. He kept his attention off his district, constituents, and conservatives while he and his staff plotted to get the Speaker’s chair.
Cantor lost his race because he was running for Speaker of the House of Representatives while his constituents wanted a congressman. The tea party and conservatives capitalized on that with built up distrust over Cantor’s other promises and made a convincing case Cantor could not be trusted on immigration either. By trying to be both a Virginia congressman and a worthy successor to the Speaker in K-Street’s eyes, Cantor made it easy for conservatives to mount an under the radar case against him.
The Top 8 Consequences of Cantor's Defeat
By Ben Shapiro...So Cantor is out.
And the landscape has radically shifted, both for the Republican Party, and for the 2014 election. Here are the biggest ramifications of Cantor’s defeat.
Boehner Is Likely Done. The writing has been on the wall for Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) ever since a failed House insurgency in the aftermath of a coup attempt against his speakership in January 2013. Boehner had been under fire ever since his sequestration deal with President Obama in 2011; his “fiscal cliff” deal with President Obama at the end of 2012 only drove further pressure. Boehner’s repeated attempts to covertly push amnesty legislation have lost him his base. And the departure of many of his top allies in Congress leaves him vulnerable this year. Cantor’s ties to Boehner may signal that a successful insurgency is on the way. Aides are telling the National Journal, “We’re absolutely stunned. Honestly, we really can’t believe it.”
The “Young Guns” Are Firing Blanks. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and Cantor were considered the so-called “young guns” in the House, preparing to take over leadership from Boehner and company whenever he stepped down. Ryan and Cantor have been vocal about their desire for immigration reform legislation this year. Cantor is now gone. And Ryan’s position as a leader is in serious jeopardy.
The Death of the Tea Party Was Greatly Exaggerated. After the 2012 election cycle, pundits and the chattering class deemed the Tea Party dead. After the last round of primaries, in which Tea Party groups backed incumbents in many races and lost against incumbents in others – ignoring the victory of Ben Sasse in Nebraska, which the media did – the Tea Party had been relegated to the dustbin of media history. Not so much.
The Conservative Media Has Firepower. Without the power of Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Breitbart News, and others in the new media, the consistent and steady push for amnesty in the House would have gone largely unremarked upon. Instead, it has become a national issue, firing up the base. Ousting a powerful figure like Cantor is not easy. It takes a major movement to do so. That major movement came as a result of scrutiny from conservatives in the media.
The Corporatists -- Including the US Chamber of Commerce -- Took a Major Hit. The major business interests within the Republican Party, including the Chamber of Commerce, have been heavy backers of amnesty in Congress. They just got outclassed by an on-the-ground grassroots force. The split between those two groups paves the way for an all-out brawl between the corporatist Republican establishment and the Tea Party capitalists come 2016.
Establishment Candidates Are In For a Rough 2016 Ride. In 2012, Texas Governor Rick Perry saw his candidacy end on the question of immigration. In 2016, Perry will be in the mix again, as will Jeb Bush. Both are perceived as soft on immigration by the base. The establishment Republican Party is significantly warmer to such candidates than the grassroots are. It’ll be cash vs. activism in 2016. In Cantor’s district, activism just won a stunning victory.
Democrats Will Shift the 2014 Narrative to Immigration. With the conservative base fired up about immigration, President Obama and the Democrats will seize on Cantor’s defeat to once again swerve to the “Tea Party as anti-immigrant extremist” narrative. The goal: to avoid talking about Obamacare and split the Republican Party. It won’t work. The Cantor defeat is the death knell for the immigration reform caucus in the GOP, at least for this cycle, and that means that the party will be more, not less unified.
Barack Obama Will Use This As An Excuse for Executive Action -- After The Election. Obama has been threatening executive action for years on immigration. And he has the power to blanket amnesty millions, as I’ve written before in this space. But now Obama believes he may have a ray of hope in campaigning on immigration. That will delay any executive action beyond the election. He’d rather campaign on the basis that he needs a compliant Congress on immigration than act unilaterally prior to the election and have to answer questions about abuse of power.
The Great Upsets: Brat 2014 and Bell 1978
By William Kristol
In the New York Times, Jonathan
Martin calls David Brat's defeat of House majority leader Eric Cantor
in a Republican primary "one of the most stunning primary election
upsets in congressional history."
By Thomas Lifson
So
it is—perhaps the most stunning upset since in congressional history
since an underfunded and little known challenger, Jeff Bell, defeated a
24-year incumbent, Clifford Case, in the 1978 New Jersey GOP Senate
primary. Like Brat, Bell focused on one issue to oust the incumbent. In
Bell's case, it was supply-side tax cuts. In Brat's case, the issue was
immigration. But like Brat, Bell used his main issue as a kind of
example and pivot point for the need for a broader change in orientation
by the Republican party.
In both cases, the challengers made a broad
populist case for a Republican party focused on Main Street and Middle
America, not on Wall Street and corporate interests. The reigning
Republican orthodoxy in 1978 was that if tax cuts were needed, they
should be business-friendly ones, not cuts in personal marginal income
tax rates. Similarly, Brat used his critique of "amnesty" to launch a
broad assault on GOP elites who put the interests of American
corporations over American workers, of D.C. lobbyists over American
families. Also, in both cases most national conservative leaders and
groups stayed out of the race, thinking the challenge was hopeless or
that the challengers' issues was too eccentric. Both Bell and Brat won
authentic grassroots victories.
There are of course differences. For one thing,
Bell lost in November 1978 to Bill Bradley; Brat will probably win this
November. (Of course Bell could win that same seat this November against
Cory Booker!) But in a broader sense, Bell won. His issue, supply-side
economics, and his overall populist perspective were picked up by Ronald
Reagan in 1979 and 1980, who rode them to the GOP presidential
nomination and the presidency.
It's not clear who the Reagan in today's scenario
is—though of course it wasn't clear back in 1978 that Reagan would
become the Reagan of 1980. It's also not clear whether Brat's message
can become as forward-looking as Bell's, and Reagan's. Supply-side
economics was growth economics. Anti-immigration economics can seem to
be entirely defensive economics.
It needn't be, though. The challenge for Brat and those who are well
disposed to him is to build on his victory to develop a bigger,
forward-looking agenda to advance the prospects of Main Street American
workers and families. Senators like Mike Lee, Marco Rubio, and Jeff
Sessions have started suggesting elements of such an agenda, just as
Jack Kemp was advancing Bell's agenda in Congress in the late 1970s. In
the House where Jack Kemp served, congressmen like Paul Ryan and Tom
Price (in a speech at the Heritage Foundation later today, he'll call
for a bold and reformist of "conservative incrementalism") are playing
an increasingly important and potentially Kemp-like role. The question
now is: Will there be a presidential candidate who, like Reagan,
transforms a cry of populist protest into a presidential-level governing
populist agenda?
Oops! Hillary lets the cat out of the bag on Benghazi paper trail
The
interviews promoting Hillary Clinton’s new book are serving as a test
drive for a presidential run, and she has just encountered a serious
bump in the road. Despite obvious effort put into crafting careful
rationalizations of her miserable record as secretary of state, she
managed to blurt out a key fact in an interview with NBC’s Cynthia
McFadden. Mrs. Clinton admitted that she kept detailed notes of the
Benghazi crisis, a paper trail that could be subject to subpoena. Here
is the transcript (via Fox News, which understands the import of the admission):
...Should her notes be subpoenaed and she insist that only her carefully-crafted final product (which she admits was written by a “book team”) be subject to scrutiny, Mrs. Clinton will look like someone with something to hide. As a candidate for president, attempting to cover-up her own notes of her actions as secretary of state in a crisis will not look good at all.
I suspect that she was relatively relaxed with an interview from NBC News, which has a reputation as pro-Democrat. And the question asked by McFadden appealed to her vanity – asking her how she could write in such detail about the events of September 1, 2012. In that context, she must have felt relatively safe in bragging about the notes she kept. And her response after being asked if she would make the notes available went directly to her talking points: that investigating the matter further demeans the memory of those killed.
That line won’t stand up very well if and when she seeks the presidency.
There’s a little-known division of the Department of Justice that has been bilking the taxpayers of millions of dollars each year and redistributing it to its political and legal allies, creating costly and wide-reaching regulations without any congressional oversight or public comment and seeking to expropriate private land without compensation.
The name of this division? The Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD).
These revelations come from a new book out today titled “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” authored by the National Review’s John Fund and former presidential appointee to the FEC, counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department and current Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Hans Von Spakovsky.
The ENRD is the division of the DOJ that was responsible for the Gibson Guitar Corporation raid, which as some may recall nominally dealt with the legality of materials imported from Madagascar used in the fingerboards of the company’s guitars, in what appeared to be a politically motivated case. Part of the settlement that Gibson Guitar reached with the DOJ in order to continue as a going concern was to pay out $50,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The authors write:
Here’s how it works: Special interest advocacy groups sue the EPA. The EPA, represented by the lawyers of the ENRD, chooses not to defend itself against such lawsuits. The EPA and the environmentalist groups who sued them agree to a settlement “on terms favorable to those groups.”
From 2009 to 2012 alone, at least sixty such cases resulted in “more than 100 new federal rules, many of which are major rules with estimated compliance costs of more than $100 million annually.”
MCFADDEN: You write in great detail in the book about what was happening in Benghazi as it evolved. Did you keep a diary during your time?
CLINTON: I kept a lot of notes.
MCFADDEN: If the committee wants your notes, would you turn those over?
CLINTON: They can read it in the book. Let’s see whether this is on the level or not because that really matters to me. I don’t want to be part of something which, in any way, politicizes or demeans the sacrifice that we saw happen there.
...Should her notes be subpoenaed and she insist that only her carefully-crafted final product (which she admits was written by a “book team”) be subject to scrutiny, Mrs. Clinton will look like someone with something to hide. As a candidate for president, attempting to cover-up her own notes of her actions as secretary of state in a crisis will not look good at all.
I suspect that she was relatively relaxed with an interview from NBC News, which has a reputation as pro-Democrat. And the question asked by McFadden appealed to her vanity – asking her how she could write in such detail about the events of September 1, 2012. In that context, she must have felt relatively safe in bragging about the notes she kept. And her response after being asked if she would make the notes available went directly to her talking points: that investigating the matter further demeans the memory of those killed.
That line won’t stand up very well if and when she seeks the presidency.
The most dangerous division of Eric Holder’s DOJ that you’ve never heard of
By Benjamin WeingartenThere’s a little-known division of the Department of Justice that has been bilking the taxpayers of millions of dollars each year and redistributing it to its political and legal allies, creating costly and wide-reaching regulations without any congressional oversight or public comment and seeking to expropriate private land without compensation.
The name of this division? The Environment and Natural Resources Division (ENRD).
These revelations come from a new book out today titled “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department,” authored by the National Review’s John Fund and former presidential appointee to the FEC, counsel to the assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Justice Department and current Senior Fellow at the Heritage Foundation, Hans Von Spakovsky.
The ENRD is the division of the DOJ that was responsible for the Gibson Guitar Corporation raid, which as some may recall nominally dealt with the legality of materials imported from Madagascar used in the fingerboards of the company’s guitars, in what appeared to be a politically motivated case. Part of the settlement that Gibson Guitar reached with the DOJ in order to continue as a going concern was to pay out $50,000 to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The authors write:
“instead of making a payment to the U.S. Treasury Department for the American taxpayer, Justice in essence extorted money from Gibson Guitar to help fund the NFWF, a congressionally created private charity that hands out funds “to some of the nation’s largest environmental organizations, as well as some of the smallest,” according to its own website....But perhaps even more outrageous is a process called “sue and settle.”
So basically, the Justice Department used its authority to engineer a settlement of government claims requiring the defendant to provide benefits to a private group that was not involved in the lawsuit and was not injured by the defendants’ actions.”
Here’s how it works: Special interest advocacy groups sue the EPA. The EPA, represented by the lawyers of the ENRD, chooses not to defend itself against such lawsuits. The EPA and the environmentalist groups who sued them agree to a settlement “on terms favorable to those groups.”
From 2009 to 2012 alone, at least sixty such cases resulted in “more than 100 new federal rules, many of which are major rules with estimated compliance costs of more than $100 million annually.”
Obama opens third military base to deal with flood of illegal child immigrants as officials insist they are being cared for despite abuse allegations
By Ted Thornhill
The Obama
administration announced it is designating a third U.S. military base
for emergency housing of children immigrating illegally into the United
States without parents or relatives.
The news came as officials insist that the children are in good hands, despite allegations of abuse by US authorities.
Senior
administration officials, who asked not to be identified, told
reporters that an Army base at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, will initially hold
600 ‘unaccompanied minors’ and eventually will be able to accommodate up
to 1,200.
The moves
come amid a tidal wave of children trying to slip into the United
States, largely from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, often to join a
parent already here.
Reuters
previously reported that the administration was seeking about $2billion
for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to handle the
influx in fiscal 2015, which begins on October 1, more than double the
$868million appropriated this year.
HHS takes custody of the children shortly after they are detained at the border by federal law enforcement agents.
Spending part of $1 billion in contracts disbursed by administration for ‘professional services’
By Mary Lou Byrd
An analysis of more than $1 billion dollars in spending by the
Department of Veterans Affairs on “professional services” finds several
instances of questionable spending, including millions for a national ad
campaign and energy programs to make VA facilities more sustainable.The spending comes in light of the ongoing allegations of misconduct and an audit that revealed potentially fraudulent practices at 90 VA centers.
An analysis of records on the government’s official spending website shows the VA spent $1.3 billion in the past five years for “support” and “professional services.” These contracts included millions of dollars for a campaign to put the VA in a positive light, lodging and training of employees, and energy programs to make VA facilities more sustainable.
A total of 10,171 contracts were awarded under the “professional service” code as the number of VA Medical Centers under investigation for unprofessional services and misconduct has continued to rise in recent weeks.
Report: SSA judges approve twice-denied claims at alarmingly high rate
The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released a report on Tuesday examining administrative law judges (ALJs) who approve disability claims more than 75 percent of the time. The so-called “red-flag” judges approved benefits for 1.3 million people between 2005 and 2013, amounting to $394 billion in lifetime disability payments.
The report takes a closer look at three judges who have approval rates over 90 percent, and accounted for the distribution of $10 billion in benefits alone: Charles Bridges, David Daugherty, and Harry Taylor.
“These ALJs awarded benefits in nearly every decision they made, issued an extremely large number of allowances without holding a hearing, and were subject to numerous complaints from employees within their offices,” the report said.
An ALJ for more than 25 years, Taylor approves almost 94 percent of the disability claims that reach his courtroom, and has been accused of sleeping during hearings he has presided over.
Taylor approved roughly $2.5 billion in benefits between 2005 and 2013 to 8,227 individuals. Sixty-eight percent of those decisions were held without a hearing.
“In addition to multiple allegations of personal misconduct, ALJ Taylor slept at work and during hearings many times,” the report said. “Four years after the first documented allegation that ALJ Taylor was sleeping at work, he was finally disciplined with a 14-day suspension. However, ALJ Taylor continued to violate agency policies, and was recommended for another suspension in April 2013.”
“More than a year later, the recommendation for his suspension is still pending and ALJ Taylor continues to decide a full load of cases,” the report said.
The SSA oversees two disability programs, Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) and Supplemental Security Income (SSI), which have grown “unsustainably” in recent decades, and now enroll 19.4 million people. The disability trust fund will be depleted by 2016, unless the programs are reformed, according to the Social Security Board of Trustees.
Individuals applying for disability benefits must be denied twice before their case reaches an ALJ.
Director Richard Corday denies broad array of personal data will be collected
Senators on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs committee criticized the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau for collecting vast quantities of data on people with mortgages during a hearing Tuesday.
CFPB director Richard Corday was on the defensive during his back-and-forth with committee members regarding the National Mortgage Database.
The database is jointly run by the CFPB and the Federal Housing Finance Agency. It stores information about first-lien single-family mortgages dating back to January 1998.
The criticism follows the FHFA’s April announcement of a vast expansion of the type of information collected for the database. Ranking member Sen. Mike Crapo (R., Idaho) said the collection of personal information encroaches on Americans’ privacy.
The FHFA said in its announcement that it would keep track of “name, address, zip code, telephone numbers, date of birth, race/ethnicity, gender, language, religion, social security number, education records, military status/records, employment status/records.” It also said account numbers, financial events, and other payment information would be collected.
Crapo expressed concern at the broad nature of the data collection.
“I have the concern that the government collecting this phenomenal amount of data about private citizens could be used in an evasive way,” Crapo said.
Poor Mrs. Clinton
By James Taranto
...An example:
[Mrs.] Clinton wrote that she rejected a request from the Obama campaign to attack Sarah Palin, who was then running for vice president.
"That very first day, the Obama campaign said, 'Well, we want you to go out there and criticize her,' and I said 'For what? For being a woman? No, let's wait until we know where she stands, I don't know anything about her. Do you know anything about her?' "
The
timing here is a bit of a head-scratcher. Sarah Palin became the
Republican vice-presidential nominee in late August, almost three months
after Mrs. Clinton conceded the Democratic presidential nomination to
Obama. Does that mean the Obama campaign backslid into "sexism" after
her warning--or did the air-clearing meeting take place later, perhaps
after the election when Obama was considering nominating her for
secretary of state?
Hillary told secret service agent who refused to carry her bag to 'get the f*** away from me,' and treated her detail like hired help but Bill was a softie . . . says former agent in bombshell book
....Hillary
has been known to hurl a book at the back of the head of one agent
driving her in the Presidential limo accusing him of eavesdropping,
forget her p's and q's by never thanking her protectors and lob
profanity-laced orders when she just wanted the agents to carry her bags
- a job not on agents' 'to do' list.
'Stay
the f**k away from me! Just f*****g do as I say!!!' she is quoted as
saying to an agent who refused to carry her luggage in the book
Unlimited Access by FBI agent Gary Aldridge.
Compared to Hillary's salty language,
Bill Clinton was a gentleman, according to now-retired Secret Service
agent, Dan Emmett, who began covering President Clinton on his first day
in office in 1993 and writes about guarding the President in a new
version of his book Within Arm's Length, published by St. Martin's
Press.
By Rick Moran
A
California judge has delivered a haymaker to the teachers unions by
finding that laws governing tenure and other job security laws are
unconstitutional.
Perhaps more than the finding, it was the language used by the judge in his deicsion that was shocking.
Politico:
Perhaps more than the finding, it was the language used by the judge in his deicsion that was shocking.
Politico:
He ruled that such a system violates the state constitution’s guarantee that all children receive “basic equality of educational opportunity.” In a blunt, unsparing 16-page opinion, Treu compared his ruling to the seminal federal desegregation case Brown v. Board of Education, decided 60 years ago last month. “The evidence is compelling. Indeed, it shocks the conscience,” Treu wrote.The key takeaway is that Judge Treu justified the ruling on the basis that minority childrend were harmed the most by bad teachers who were hard to fire. So-called, "disparate impact" justifications have been common for decades,
In adopting the language and legal framework of the civil rights movement, Treu gave a major boost to school reformers from both parties who have long argued that the current system dooms poor and minority students to inferior educations.
The teachers' unions were befuddled but determined to fight back:The plaintiffs went after five laws that require administrators to decide whether a rookie teacher deserves tenure after just 16 months in the classroom; require a lengthy and often costly process before a teacher can be fired; and protect veteran teachers from layoffs, even if they are less effective than their younger colleagues. They put on evidence that firing a teacher can take so long and cost so much, some districts decide instead to shuffle the worst or least experienced educators to low-income schools, in what’s known as “the dance of the lemons.”“Have we not had enough in this country’s history of short-shafting poor people and minorities?” attorney Marcellus A. McRae asked in his closing statement. “This is an abomination. This is unconstitutional. This has to stop.”
...“Let’s be clear,” said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association. “This lawsuit was never about helping students, but is yet another attempt by millionaires and corporate special interests to undermine the teaching profession and push their own ideological agenda on public schools and students while working to privatize public education.”
....It
remains to be seen whether this ruling holds. Teachers unions across
the country are powerful and well entrenched, and havfe most state
legislatures in their pockets. But the winds of change are beginning to
blow when even Democrats support some of these reforms
By Michael Bastasch A new study
by researchers at the University of Texas, Austin found that the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet is collapsing due to geothermal heat, not man-made
global warming.
Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.
....Scientists and environmentalists have been pointing to Antarctica’s collapsing western ice sheet as further evidence the planet is warming. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot recently found that the western ice sheet collapse is “unstoppable” and could dramatically raise sea levels.
Researchers from the UTA’s Institute for Geophysics found that the Thwaites Glacier in western Antarctica is being eroded by the ocean as well as geothermal heat from magma and subaerial volcanoes. Thwaites is considered a key glacier for understanding future sea level rise.
....Scientists and environmentalists have been pointing to Antarctica’s collapsing western ice sheet as further evidence the planet is warming. NASA glaciologist Eric Rignot recently found that the western ice sheet collapse is “unstoppable” and could dramatically raise sea levels.
No comments:
Post a Comment