Archives for April 2013

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see President Obama’s approval numbers falling on the key issues of guns, immigration and deficits.  They also groan as reports suggest the immigration reform bill will be some 1500 pages and the Gang of Eight may not accept amendments to the plan.  And they unload on MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry for saying we shouldn’t see children belonging to their parents or their families but to the collective and the whole community.

Margaret Thatcher, the longest-serving British prime minister in the twentieth century and surely one of the most consequential in history, died Monday from a stroke at the age of 87.

Thatcher is best known for a badly needed economic revitalization of the British economy throughout the 1980s and for her steadfast partnership with President Ronald Reagan in the battle to defeat the Soviet empire and foster the spread of freedom around the globe.

Frank Gaffney served as an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan years.  He is now president of the Center for Security Policy.

In this interview, Gaffney discusses Reagan and Thatcher as political soul mates, the importance of Thatcher in bringing down the Iron Curtain, and how history, if honest, will remember her.

More than 700 special operations veterans are demanding that the House of Representatives convene a special committee to uncover the answers to lingering questions about the Benghazi terrorist attacks almost seven months after the violence killed a U.S. ambassador and three others, including two Navy SEALs.

Special Operations Speaks sent a letter to House leaders after previous inquiries revealed virtually no new information.

“I don’t anything significant has been learned except that what is to be learned is of sufficient importance that the administration is pulling out all the stops to hide it,” said retired U.S. Navy Captain and SEAL Larry Bailey, who is also the co-founder of Special Operations Speaks.

As a result, Special Operations Speaks is now demanding that House leaders convene a special select committee to answer critical questions once and for all.  The letter includes 16 key questions that the veterans believe need better answers, ranging from what resources were available in the region to why they weren’t used to the minute-by-minute actions taken by top officials here in Washington.

Bailey says administration’s mishandling of the crisis suggests plenty of culpability and possibly even some criminal guilt on the part of some officials.

“The greatest indicator of culpability is the fact that the Commander-in-Chief, after having seen his troops under fire from a drone-mounted camera, after 30 minutes of being in the White House Situation Room, he excused himself and was never heard from since.  He went to bed that night and got up the next morning and flew to Las Vegas for a fundraiser and never once – and this is according to (former Defense Secretary Leon) Panetta and Hillary Clinton – never once called back to check and see how things were going,” said Bailey.

“The guilt issue comes when the culpability is covered up and that’s where we’re coming from.  We know the culpability is there, but we have not begun to get our claws into the guilt issue, but we will,” he said.

Bailey says the deaths of two SEALs put this issue front and center for his group.

“It was so easy to get people to sign the petition (for a special committee).  We got 700 names right away, all the way from four-star generals down to guys who were privates in the Army and didn’t do a career in the Army, but they were special operations and they’re part of our brotherhood,” said Bailey.  “It just breaks your heart to hear about those two guys living for seven hours and fighting for seven hours and knowing they could have been rescued at any time during that time.  Knowing that there were aircraft somewhere in the area, and knowing that there were ships not too far away and knowing that there were rescue teams within a reasonable distance, they could have been rescued.”

“They went to the sound of the guns.  They were saving people but they couldn’t be saved themselves because of the ineptitude or the political chicanery of an administration that doesn’t even care about the military,” he said.

Bailey has not received a response from House leaders at this point and he suspects there could be some resistance.  In fact, he sees House Speaker John Boehner as part of the problem.

“Boehner is part of the cover-up.  John Boehner, you know he goes with the flow.  He goes along to get along sometimes.  He’s actually said that he thinks the investigations that have already been conducted are enough.  But they’re not enough.  The investigation that is enough is going to result in somebody goping to jail or kicked out of office,” said Bailey.

He does not have a complete list of members he would like to see on a special Benghazi committee, but Bailey does hope Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert, California’s Duncan Hunter and Virginia’s Frank Wolf would be on the panel.

Another area of tremendous frustration for Bailey and other critics of the Benghazi investigations is the lack of access to the survivors of the attack.  According to Bailey, all of them have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements and at least one of the wounded is believed to be in a military hospital under an assumed name.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review offer high praise to the late British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher for her tireless advocating of freedom from tyranny around the world and economic freedom at home.  They also shake their heads as the Obama administration delays a scheduled missile test in the Pacific out of fears it could incite the North Koreans.  And they slam President Obama for wanting to cap retirement accounts so he can tax more of our income.

The March jobs report came in well below expectations and the top House Republican responsible for poring over the numbers each month says this is all to be expected thanks to the encroachment of Obamacare and the Obama administration’s relentless push for new taxes.

On Friday, the Labor Department reported the overall unemployment rate dropped from 7.7 percent to 7.6 percent.  However, just 88,000 jobs were added in March, well short of the 190,000 expected by economic experts.  The drop in the jobless rate is a result of 663,000 people leaving the labor force last month.

Most political chatter on the left suggests reductions in government spending through sequestration are to blame.  Many on the right say the tax increases passed through January’s fiscal cliff legislation is choking our growth, the top House Republican on the Joint Economic Committee in Congress says the explanation is the same as it’s been four more than four years.

“I’d have to say we’re in a lousy economic recovery,” said Texas Rep. Kevin Brady.  “You’re always rooting for good jobs numbers but this was not one of them.  In fact, the jobs that were created were so small it’s actually dismaying.  Plus, with more than a half a million people who have simply given up looking for jobs and they just don’t think there’s one out there, that’s a huge red flag.

“We’re at the lowest level in 34 years.  We’re actually at Jimmy Carter-era workforce rates which is a bad sign for the economic recovery of the country,” said Brady.

Several factors are grinding job growth and the overall economy to a halt, and Brady says none of the reasons are all that new.

“It’s what’s been holding the recovery back for three-and-a-half years.  It is the talk of higher taxes.  It is the president’s new health care laws.  You’ve got a lot of businesses very reluctant to add new jobs, in fact many of them are cutting hours in anticipation of it.  Of course, all the new regulation coming out of Washington.  That’s got a real dampening effect on the economy,” said Brady.  ” So the question is, ‘Do we stay this same course and continue the worst economic recovery in modern times or do we change course and give businesses the certainty to start hiring again.’  For the millions of people who have no breadwinner in their family or who have just given up looking for work, I think the answer’s obvious.  We need to change course.”

Brady elaborated on what he sees as the negative impacts of the Obama health care law and his push for additional tax increases.  He says outside of repeal, a substantial delay in the implementation of Obamacare would be a good step.  Brady admits that it would be tough to find the votes to do that but he says the economic impact would be significant.

“It will be hard but it will be wise to do it.  One, because they’re not ready to put this massive new law in place.  They’re missing, literally, every deadline they’ve set for themselves.  Because of that, businesses and patients are more uncertain about the future and what to do,” said Brady.

“For example, I toured a wood palette plant in Conroe, Texas, a month or so ago.  The increased costs from the president’s new law, to them, is the same as opening two new plants and hiring 100 new workers.  That much extra cost is what they’re going to have to incur just to keep the plants they have,” said Brady, who estimates that between seven and 65 million workers will find themselves dropped from their employer-based health plans and forced to go on the exchanges.

The Obama budget is yet to be completed but on Friday reports indicate that the president will call for reduced spending on Medicare and Social Security, but he wants hundreds of billions more in new taxes as well.  Brady says that’s not going to solve anything.

“Why doesn’t the president believe saving Social Security for the sake of saving social security?  Isn’t that enough?  And why is he pursuing higher taxes, not to make Social Security better and not to make the economy better, but just to pay for added spending in other areas?  It seems to me he’s holding seniors hostage to be able to spend more in other places.  That’s the wrong approach,” said Brady.

So what are the Republican plans for revitalizing our economy?

“We’re going to push for pro-growth tax reform because we think the tax code is so complex today, it’s really a drag on the economy.  We believe if you show the rest of the world we’re serious about getting our financial house in order, especially dealing with Social Security and Medicare that would avoid another downgrade in the credit rating.  That would be hugely helpful.  And finally, calling a timeout on the talk of higher taxes, on new regulations and even a significant delay in the president’s health care law,” said Brady.

Democrats are overwhelmingly winning minority voters and a prominent black conservative says they will keep winning until conservatives learn how to win the propaganda war and champion the story of slave-turned-abolitionist Frederick Douglass as an outreach to black voters and every voter.

K. Carl Smith is a rising star among black conservatives.  He recently addressed the 2013 Conservative Political Action Conference and is author of “Frederick Douglass Republicans: The Movement to Re-Ignite America’s Passion for Liberty.”  He says conservatives have the right message but their approach to voters is deeply lacking.

“The Republican Party has done a horrendous job of talking about a message that unites people.  They don’t talk about liberty enough and that’s the all-encompassing message that you want to put out there and that’s not happening.  It’s not being done in a very effective way,” said Smith.

“We’re so badly losing the propaganda battle, so whenever we try to express our conservative values we have already been discredited so our message falls on deaf ears.  I contend that the number one problem facing the GOP and the conservative movement is not the problem of messaging per se but this whole idea about winning a propaganda battle so your message will connect with people and resonate with people.  So when you talk about conservatism, the don’t see you as a sellout.  They don’t see you as a racist or that you don’t care about the poor.  We’ve got to start winning that propaganda battle first, and that’s what we’re not doing a very good job of,” said Smith.

Smith says the Democrats are very effective in the propaganda battles, largely because their message to black voters and other solidly Democratic voting blocs is built on a glaring lie.

“They have massively co-opted the history of the Republican Party.  If you go to the Democratic Party’s website right now, go to the ‘About Us’.  Go to the link that says ‘Our History’.  On that page, the first sentence says, ‘For the past 200 years, the Democrat Party’s been the leader of civil rights.  That’s not true!,” exclaimed Smith.

“Two hundred years, that’s what, 1813?  The slave masters were Democrats.  The Democrat Party started the KKK to suppress black votes.  So they’re co-opting the history of the Republican Party and have gotten away with it,” he said.  “The way we have to counter this is we have to speak the truth.  We have to get in the trenches.  We’ve got to let people know in a very non-condescending and non-confrontational manner, the true history of both parties and let them know that we need people in both political parties with a Frederick Douglass perspective,” said Smith.

So why does Smith hold up the brilliant 19th century orator and writer Frederick Douglass as the key to rekindling Americans’ passion for liberty among all races?

The best way to understand what conservatism is and how it improves your quality of life, you’ve got to bring Frederick Douglass into the equation,” he said.  “Nobody can out-victimize Frederick Douglass.  You’ve just got to elevate his life.  He was a man who was born below poverty and rose to be very prosperous.  he had $300,000 in the bank, which is the equivalent of $25 million today.   So when you think about it, being on the plantation as a slave and depending on the master to take care of him, Douglass was a 47-percenter.  But discovering his God-given gifts and talents and becoming an entrepreneur he became a one-percenter.”

Smith says clothing the conservative message in the success of Frederick Douglass will take the steam our of accusations that conservatives look down on people of other races or the poor.

“With Frederick Douglass, that’s off the table,” he said.  “You can’t call a Frederick Douglass Republican or a Frederick Douglass Republican a sellout.  What we’re saying is we believe and we are in lock-step with the values of Frederick Douglass, who respected the Constitution and respected the Founding Fathers.”

Smith says he grew up in a Democratic household and only later discovered that his core beliefs actually lined up with the conservative movement.  He says conservatives must patiently reach out to those who have been convinced Republicans are responsible for the ills they suffer.

“I could care less about a person’s political affiliation.  What I’ve learned matters most is not the party that you’re in but the way in which you vote.  The way in which you vote doesn’t show your love and your faithfulness to the God that you say you serve.  Once you make it a values thing and not a party affiliation thing and you can express that in a non-confrontational way, when people realize that they have been lied to and betrayed, that when they change how they vote,” said Smith, who detailed the pain of discovering how he had been politically deceived.

“When I grew up in Alabama, I thought George Wallace was a Republican.  I thought Bull Connor was a Republican.  I believed the people that bombed the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, were part of the Republican Party.  All that was not true.  When I realized this was not true I went through a period of depression because all of the things I believed to be true I found it was a lie,” said Smith.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Daniel Foster of National Review Online cheer Virginia for refusing to pay for abortions in the forthcoming health care exchange.  They’re also aghast at the horrible March jobs report.  And they discuss North Korea ordering all foreign embassy staffers out of the country by next week.

Illegal border crossings are dramatically on the rise since the latest Congressional push began towards comprehensive immigration reform.

In reporting first published by Townhall.com’s Katie Pavlich, border patrol agents in the Tucson/Nogales sector claim illegals are coming here in much higher numbers in just the past few months.

“We’ve seen the number of illegal aliens double, maybe even triple since amnesty talk started happening,” an unnamed border agent said to Townhall.  The data from Customs and Border Protection cited in the report shows 504 illegals were detected crossing in that sector between February 5 and March 1.  Only 189 were caught on camera and just 174 of the 504 were apprehended.  Of those spotted on camera, 32 were carrying huge packs believed to contain drugs and several were heavily armed.

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert is a member of the House Judiciary Committee and a former Texas judge.  He says none of this surprises him.

“This is no surprise at all.  It’s consistent with what we anticipated would happen and it’s very consistent with the reports we’ve been hearing anecdotally along the border,” said Gohmert.  “It is a huge problem and what we keep trying to get across to the administration and Senate Democratic leaders is until you secure the border even talking about amnesty becomes a magnet.”

Gohmert says this is a repeat of what happened along our southern border following the amnesty granted to illegals in 1986.

“That’s exactly what happened in 1986.  It is exactly what is happening now, just from talking about amnesty.  One of the border patrolmen said that when they’ve apprehended some, they’ve said, ‘Where do we go to get our amnesty?” said Gohmert.  “They’ve heard about it.  It’s drawing them in here and we’ve even got to quit talking about it until this administration can do better than getting one-third of those who are crossing illegally.  That’s not a secure border.”

The congressman also agreed with Michigan Rep. Candice Miller, who told us earlier in the week that the Department of Homeland Security has no current method of measuring the effectiveness of border security efforts.  But Gohmert says that shouldn’t be that hard.

“It is possible to know who’s crossing.  In Israel, they can detect people trying to dig under.  They detect people trying to come across.  This president can send drones to Yemen, for heaven’s sake, to blow up American citizens.  You can certainly have drones flying for next to nothing along our border and then send people to apprehend those who come across.  It’s not rocket science,” said Gohmert.

“For the cost of what they’ve given a couple of Solyndras we could have had the whole southern border secure and be monitoring the northern border for incursions as well.  It can be done.  They’re just not choosing to do it,” said Gohmert.

Gohmert lauds Florida Sen. Marco Rubio for insisting upon regular order in the Senate, which would require open committee hearings and votes as well as a robust amendment process.  He also says the greatest victims of amnesty would be legal immigrants who have been waiting up to a decade or more for a chance at citizenship.

He believes the immigration legislation currently being discussed will only exacerbate the problem, but Gohmert contends that securing the border would make the rest of immigration reform very easy.

“I would say that what they’re talking about is not a reform.  It is a magnet to more illegality unless the border is secured first.  If we can just get the border secured, so of 504 people trying to get across illegally we get 502 and only allow those coming in legally, once that’s done you will be amazed how quickly we get a deal done.  But they’re wanting to put the cart in front of the horse and that never works,” Gohmert said.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleasantly stunned to see the ACLU slamming the Senate gun control bill over privacy concerns.  They also wonder whether North Korea is more serious about its nuclear threats this time and why we don’t take the threat more seriously.  And they react to President Obama’s decision to forego five percent of his salary to identify with government workers about to be furloughed.

The push for comprehensive immigration reform is gathering steam on Capitol Hill and both parties say that ensuring secure borders is an integral part of reform.  However, the Obama administration is now admitting that it has no system for measuring the effectiveness of border security.

Shortly after taking office, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that the old “operational control” method of evaluating border security was “archaic” and that DHS was developing a much more accurate system known as the Border Condition Index (BCI).

The House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security recently held hearings to learn about the BCI, but was stunned by the testimony of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official Mark Borkowski.

“We sort of anticipated that we would be hearing how the BCI was about to be implemented and the construct of it and the components, etc.  Instead of that, we were told that they weren’t going to be able to tell us much about that because they didn’t think that would be very effective either so they weren’t going to be able to use that.  As you might imagine, both Republicans and Democrats were almost stunned by his testimony,” said Michigan Rep. Candice Miller, chairwoman of the Border and Maritime Security Subcommittee, who is very troubled by the inability of the DHS to handle this critical issue.

“There isn’t anybody else to ask.  I’m sorry it’s difficult but that’s their job.  It’s not like we can go to another agency and say, ‘What do you guys think?’  The Department of Homeland Security is missioned and tasked with this,” she said.

“We have to be able to measure, to have some degree of accountability, a measurement matrix of some type to be able to really understand the percentage of operational control at our borders, all the different components that the Department of Homeland Security uses that have a nexus with the border and whether we’re having success or failure or whether we’re making progress or not quite frankly,” said Miller.

According to Miller, the most recent estimate of operational control came in a 2010 report that suggested has operational control of 44 percent of our border with Mexico and just four percent on our northern border with Canada.

She admits the border can never be totally secure but she says recent testimony from Customs and Border Protection Director Mike Fisher suggests 90 percent of operational control is achievable.

“I have to say if you could get to 90 percent, I think the American people would feel a high degree of comfort and confidence that we have our borders pretty well secured,” said Miller.

President Obama and other supporters of comprehensive immigration reform contend that border security concerns have been addressed through more manpower, virtual and actual fencing, the use of drones and more money for security purposes.  Miller says all of that is welcome and apprehension numbers are up along the border but that doesn’t convince her that the problem is being solved.

“There has to be some accountability for how we are doing there.  Part of that strategy for all of this has to be a measurement system that makes sense and not just the ad hoc application of resources,” said Miller.  “Right now we’re fixated on throwing more resources at the problem.  I think the conversation will now rotate a bit to focusing on outcome.  Really, how effective are we at keeping bad things and bad people out of the country?”

In addition to not having a handle on the state of our borders, Miller says DHS dropping the ball on this issue could end up derailing immigration reform.

“If they’re not able to have something that is really representative of security progress along the border, they could be the big stumbling block for this comprehensive immigration reform, and that would be too bad I believe, because I do think the country is ready to engage in this debate and the Congress certainly is,” said Miller.

Miller says the momentum for reform may lead to passage of reform with these border security metric being addressed, but she says there are other members of Congress who are deeply troubled by this.

“I do think that the scene has been laid out there that you can actually have something pass the House and the Senate and signed into law by the president this year perhaps.  Sometimes in politics, something happens and the stars line up and people are ready to move on a particular issue,” she said.

“But in my mind, and I believe many others, there will be huge consternation for those kinds of proposals if we just have a complete void of having any type of way of measuring the security progress along the border,” said Miller.  “Whether they want to use the BCI or not use it or operational control or what have you, how do you measure border security?”