Archives for January 2014

A House Republican leader embraced legalization of illegals this week, while other GOP heavyweights outlined legislation that critics call nothing more than amnesty and empty promises towards border enforcement.

House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) announced this week that he would support language to legalize millions in this country illegally.  In addition, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan told Texas business leaders that the party wants to promote legalization that does not include a path to citizenship and adopting the DREAM Act that legalizes children brought here illegally and would allow them to become citizens.

Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian says the Republican leadership is courting disaster.

“It’s actually not surprising because it’s clear that Speaker Boehner is dead set on amnestying all the illegal aliens and so it makes sense that one of his lieutenants is going to say the same thing,” said Krikorian, who laughs at the notion the GOP is being firm by not allowing a path to citizenship.

“The supposed middle ground is that they’re calling for an amnesty that won’t give illegal immigrants regular immigrant status, green cards that could lead to citizenship.  Instead they give them a work visa amnesty, where they get to stay and they get Social Security numbers and they get everything else.  It’s just that they wouldn’t end up getting citizenship.  It’s a distinction without a difference.  It still amnesties everybody,” said Krikorian.

“The Democrats are guaranteed to attack the Republicans for second-class citizenship or something like that.  The Republicans will cave and give in after a couple years, so it’s a phony compromise, this idea of having a non-citizenship amnesty but somehow they think that’s an important difference,” he said.  “The bottom line is they want the same thing as Obama and (New York Sen.) Chuck Schumer, which is to give legal status to all the illegal aliens.”

GOP leaders are publicly wary of passing any such legislation while Obama is president because his handling of the new health care laws suggest he cannot be trusted to fully enforce all provisions of the law.  Their solution is to include language that would forbid the president from picking and choosing which provisions he would enforce, but Krikorian shakes his head at that notion as well.

“What is the Republican leadership thinking?  It seems that they are going to trust President Obama to enforce new immigration laws even though he’s not enforcing the old ones,” said Krikorian.

Krikorian is also furious at the notion of millions more guest workers coming into the country, noting that businesses are eager to bring in people to compete with jobless Americans in every sector of the economy.  He says this is not just happening in agriculture, but immigrants will be making the job search harder for single moms, teenagers, minorities and other Americans in every area from retail to manufacturing.

Despite his frustration with Republicans in both the House and Senate, Krikorian is still upbeat that comprehensive immigration reform will never happen this year.

“I still don’t think it’s going to happen because John Boehner has made clear that he’s not going to go forward with this unless he has a majority of his own Republican caucus behind it.  That’s going to be a difficult thing to arrange because even if the leadership wants it, a lot of the rank and file members don’t because they understand this is something voters aren’t enthusiastic about,” said Krikorian.

Krikorian also believes the effort will fail because the U.S. Senate will want nothing to do with the House GOP’s piece-by-piece approach.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is not starting his second term as he expected.  Rather than riding high on a landslide re-election, Christie is bogged down with incessant coverage of a decision two staffers made to close lanes from the George Washington Bridge into Ft. Lee, allegedly due to that town’s mayor refusing to endorse Christie’s re-election bid.  Naturally, the Capitol Steps are turning this all into musical comedy in “London Bridge”.  Our guest is Capitol Steps star Elaina Newport.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are encouraged that Charlie Crist’s effort to become Florida governor as a Democrat seem to be pretty weak.  They also react to Mike Huckabee’s comments about Democrats and women’s libidos.  And they discuss the news that Bob McDonnell rejected a government plea bargain that would have him pleading guilty to one felony but leaving his wife in the clear.

Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring announced Thursday that he will no longer defend his state’s constitutional amendment defining marriage solely as the union of one man and one woman, but a leading traditional marriage advocate says Herring is casting aside the duties of his office to pursue a partisan agenda.

As a member of the state senate, Herring voted for the 2006 state constitutional amendment that defines marriage in the commonwealth as solely between a man and a woman.  Now, less than two weeks after taking office as attorney general, he says the government is not only abandoning the defense of the law but actively joining a lawsuit filed against it by two same-sex couples.

“After thorough legal review, I have now concluded that Virginia’s ban on marriage between same sex couples violates the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution on two grounds: marriage is a fundamental right being denied to some Virginians, and the ban unlawfully discriminates on the basis of both sexual orientation and gender,” Herring said.

Herring won the Virginia attorney general’s race by less than 1,000 votes and actually trailed heading into the recount against Republican Mark Obenshain.  It was by far the closest statewide race in Virginia, which also included Democrat Terry McAuliffe’s win over the GOP’s Ken Cuccinelli in the contest for governor.

Liberty Counsel Chairman Mathew Staver is outraged at Herring’s decision and says Virginia’s attorney general doesn’t seem to approach law enforcement much differently than President Obama and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.

“This is unfortunately the consequence of elections and you’ve got someone who is lawless.  You really trace that back to President Obama and Eric Holder, when they decided to pick and choose, through the Department of Justice, which laws they wanted to defend and which ones they wanted to not just step aside but actually intentionally undermine.  They did that with the federal Defense of Marriage Act and now we see on the state level with this new attorney general, he does the same thing,” said Staver.

“He is not upholding the law.  He is actually undermining the very law that was passed by the people.  This was a constitutional marriage amendment that was passed by 57 percent of the Virginian voters.  As attorney general, his obligation is to defend the laws, whether passed by the legislature or passed by the people.  His obligation is not to simply act as a king or a potentate, where he just wants to pick and choose which laws he’s going to defend and which laws he’s going to intentionally undermine,” said Staver, who says this sort of action sets a precedent that could greatly damage the separation of powers.

“What would happen is if you had, for example, a Republican-led legislature and they passed laws that the Democratic governor or attorney general don’t like, they would just simply refuse to defend them, or even worse, work to actively undermine them.  That just makes no sense.  That creates a system of lawlessness.  It does not respect the rule of law and it certainly does not respect the process of the people in protecting their right for representation and the right to vote,” said Staver.

Herring is hardly the first official to declare he would not defend traditional marriage laws.  In addition to Obama and Holder at the federal level, attorneys general in Pennsylvania and Illinois and the governor of Hawaii all unilaterally declared they would not defend state laws defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

The Washington Post reports Republican attorneys general have refused to defend other laws recently.  Indiana’s Greg Zoeller refused to enforce part of his state’s immigration laws after the Supreme Court struck down similar provisions in Arizona’s SB 1070.  In Virginia, Herrings’s predecessor, Ken Cuccinelli, declared one of former Gov. Bob McDonnell’s education reforms to be unconstitutional and announced he would not defend it.

Staver says there are different levels of refusing to defend existing laws but believes the practice is never a good idea.

“There is precedent through history where attorneys general won’t vigorously enforce a law, but that’s a whole different ballgame, where you decide not to give as vigorous a defense or not to offer a defense than when you go into court and actually file a brief that undermines a case,” said Staver.

“What you ultimately have happen here, whether it’s done by a Republican or a Democrat when a law is challenged and it’s not vigorously defended, you ultimately have a system of lawlessness.” he said.

Staver is also quick to assert that refusing to defend the institution of marriage is far more significant than it is with respect to other laws.

“We’re talking about marriage.  We’re talking about a fundamental, observable relationship that has transcended governments.  It wasn’t created by a governor or a legislature.  It predates the Commonwealth of Virginia.  It predates the United States of America.  It is an institution and a relationship that is from the very beginning of time to the present.  It transcends cultures.  It predates governments,” said Staver.

“It is something that is part of the created, observable universe in which we live and it has been transmitted through history and times and cultures.  To undermine that is not to be put into the same category…as Ken Cuccinelli deciding not to defend a portion of an education law,” he said.

Apart from the legal arguments surrounding the issue, Staver says there are obvious reasons why marriage should be set aside for the union of one man and one woman, from procreation to child rearing, and he contends even the most vigorous activism of same-sex marriage supporters cannot change those facts.

“Marriage as the union of a man and a woman is part of God’s natural created order.  You may not like it.  You may disagree with it.  You may not like gravity.  You may disagree with it, but it doesn’t matter what your opinion is on it.  The fact of the matter is, it is what it is.  It exists and it exists for a reason,” said Staver.

“Marriage is between a man and a woman.  Ontologically, man and women are made for one another in a way that two men and two women simply are not.  It is through the union of a man and a woman that we procreate the next generation.  That’s why we have placed laws and policies around marriage to protect that very survival of our society,” he said.

“Also, it’s through the union of a man and a woman, husband and wife, male and female, that children have the best optimal environment in which to be raised.  Moms and dads, male and female, bring different characteristics and components to the family relation and dynamic that two men and two women simply does not do,” said Staver.

“In fact, it is contrary to what two men and two women would do.  When you eliminate one gender from the family, which is what same-sex marriage would do…and skew the view of the missing gender, have some antipathy or opposition towards the missing gender, you ultimately harm children.  When you harm children, you ultimately effect society,” he said.

Liberty Counsel will likely get involved in the case, but Staver says it’s not clear how or when the new defense team for the state law will be chosen.  He suspects the case will end up in front of the Supreme Court within the next year or two but is not optimistic the justices will rule in the way he believes they should.

“On this issue and other moral issues like abortion, I have absolutely no trust in the United States Supreme Court.  These issues of life and marriage should not be up for a popular vote by justices of the United States Supreme Court,” said Staver.

“We’ve lived under the tragedy of abortion for 41 years.  Fifty-six million people have died because seven people on the United States Supreme Court in 1973 and five people on the same court in 1992, ultimately voted, even though it has nothing to do with the Constitution,” he said.  “Frankly, I have no confidence in this court or any set of justices on the Supreme Court unless they’re going to follow and adhere to the Constitutional principles and the rule of law.”

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are encouraged that 62 percent of Americans disapprove of President Obama’s policies as a whole.  They also cringe as Iran once again points out it gives up nothing in the recent nuclear agreement with the U.S.  And they debate whether the antics of Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman were those of a triumphant athlete or someone who can’t control their rage.

Despite frigid conditions along the National Mall, hundreds of thousands of pro-life activists carried out a spirited March for Life on Wednesday, buoyed by a major infusion of young supporters and disgusted with President Obama’s relentless defense of what they consider to be the murder of unborn Americans.

Wednesday marks 41 years since the landmark Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton Supreme Court decisions that legalized abortion across the nation.  The March for Life started informally the next year and began attracting massive crowds soon thereafter.

March organizers say one of the most encouraging signs over the past few years is the tremendous growth in young activists, including high school and college students as well as young professionals.

Eric Teetsel is executive director of the Manhattan Declaration, a group founded by the late Chuck Colson that describes itself as a national movement of Christians for life, marriage and religious freedom.  A young leader himself, Teetsel says he is greatly encouraged by the infusion of teens and twenty-somethings braving the elements and getting active in the pro-life cause.

“It’s really startling.  There are so many high school and college students who bus in from all over the country.  We saw signs from Kansas and Nebraska, Florida, Ohio.  I talked to a young priest from New Orleans who had never been to D.C. before,” said Teetsel.  “Year after year, you see more of them.  I think it’s really true to say that this is the most pro-life generation.”

Teetsel says there are multiple reasons for young Americans flocking to the pro-life side in droves, ranging from the knowledge they could have been legally aborted to advances in technology that show developing babies in vivid detail.  However, Teetsel says the trend seems to boil down to one conclusion.

“In general, I think young people just simply believe that an unborn child is a life, and as a life I think it’s worthy of protection.  I think it’s as simple as that,” said Teetsel, who adds that the Supreme Court was dead wrong when the justices in the majority thought their decisions in 1973 would settle the national debate.

“Forty-one years ago when this case came down, the members of the Supreme Court believed that they were putting the final nail in a movement that had been moving right along and that this was the apex and it would never change.  They had no way of knowing that within just a couple of generations the country would have shifted directions so drastically,” said Teetsel.

“Now it looks like it’s only a matter of time before we are a nation that no longer commits this great injustice,” he said.

Teetsel’s thoughts echo comments made by several speakers at the March for Life, who vowed that the young people at the rally would live to see the end of abortion in the U.S.  Teetsel admits the fight will be fierce, given the determination of the pro-choice forces and medical advances that could someday allow women to have an abortion by taking a bill and not even needing to visit an abortion facility.  Still, he believes the momentum for outlawing abortion is very strong.

“There’s a long road ahead, but politics is downstream from culture and as my generation and other generations  come into power and the polling shows that Americans no longer want to live in a nation that (harms) unborn children, I think our laws will follow,” said Teetsel.

Several pro-choice political figures celebrated the anniversary of Roe v. Wade today, with some even wishing the court decision a “Happy Birthday”.

President Obama released a statement lauding the ruling that read: Today, as we reflect on the 41st anniversary of the Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade, we recommit ourselves to the decision’s guiding principle: that every woman should be able to make her own choices about her body and her health.  We reaffirm our steadfast commitment to protecting a woman’s access to safe, affordable health care and her constitutional right to privacy, including the right to reproductive freedom.  And we resolve to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies, support maternal and child health, and continue to build safe and healthy communities for all our children.  Because this is a country where everyone deserves the same freedom and opportunities to fulfill their dreams.

Teetsel is not swayed.

“There are so many inconsistencies inherent in that statement right there. This is the most pro-abortion, anti-family president that we’ve ever had and yet he’s willing to go so far to talk about his desire to help women and children.  It’s ironic.  I have to believe that this is a man who understands how inconsistent his logic is but has to say these things for political necessity.  His party is one that is founded first and foremost on abortion rights and you can’t deviate from that principle and get anywhere in the Democratic Party,” said Teetsel.

“He claims to be a man of faith and claims to be a family man.  I hope that one day his espoused values and his political commitments come into line and be consistent.  But today is obviously not that day,” he said.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review cheer the March for Life participants for their message and for braving the elements.  They react with disgust to Bob McDonnell’s behavior that’s now earned him and his wife a federal indictment and also discuss the latest blame shifting and poor messaging from pro-choice hero Wendy Davis in the Texas governor’s race.  And they have fun with the news Warren Buffett will pay a billion dollars to anyone who picks all games correctly in this year’s NCAA basketball tournament.

As the largest snowfall of the winter hits the eastern U.S., politicians and interest groups will claim the latest weather is proof of their position in the climate debate, but a prominent climatologist says this is nothing more than the latest development in a cooling cycle that started over a decade ago.

Climate change activists reegularly assert that volatile weather events are due to human activity that impacts our climate while skeptics point to the snow and expected cold snap that follows as further proof the earth is not running a fever.

Dr. Tim Ball taught climatology for many years at the University of Winnipeg and is the author of the newly-released book, “The Deliberate Corruption of Climate Science.”  He says it’s foolhardy to draw conclusions on overall climate trends based on one weather system or even one winter, but he believed the harsher winter is part of a cooling cycle.

“What happens as the cooling begins, the jet stream moves from west to east in very large waves but the amplitude, that is the north-south orientation of those waves, increase.  It’s called a meridional pattern of weather and that’s why you see the record colds that you had in the U.S. recently, but also record warms,” said Ball.

“When you look at eastern Australia as an example, or Siberia earlier in the winter.  So if you imagine these waves where you’ve got cold air pushing towards the equator in one area, you’ve also got warmer air pushing further towards the poles in other areas.  That’s why you’ve got this increasing variability of the weather,” said Ball, who says history tells us exactly what these conditions mean.

“If you look at the historic record, and I mean going over 10,000 years, this pattern occurs as the earth starts its cooling down process.  And that’s what’s going to happen.  We’re going to be in this cooling until at least 2040,” he said.

The cooling started ten years earlier near the South Pole, according to Ball, who says the growth in Antarctic ice is why we witnessed the research vessel and its rescue ship trapped in ice in the middle of summer in the southern hemisphere.

Ball says the cooling for us will not only continue for nearly thirty more years, but the depths of the cooling cycle could mean we experience some historic chills.

“There’s a debate about how much cooling will occur, but it’s related to the changes in the sun, the sunspot cycles.  That’s the predominant control of long-term temperature patterns,” said Ball.  “The scientists that I’ve been working with a lot, we think, as I said, that’s it’s going to continue cooling until 2040, certainly getting to cooler temperatures than we experienced around 1800 or 1820 and possibly get as cold as it was back in what’s called the ‘Little Ice Age’ when you had three feet of ice on the Thames in England in 1683.”

Looking at that historic record is critical to understanding how climate naturally changes over time, says Ball, and he contends trying to define climate or even policy on recent weather events is disingenuous.

“The difference is the difference between weather and climate.  Weather is what you experience if go and stand outside right now.  It’s the combination of thousands of variables, everything from cosmic radiation in deep space to geothermal heat off the bottom of the oceans,” said Ball.

“Climate is the average weather in a region or the change in the average weather over time.  That’s what I’ve been studying all my career is climate change and how it changes over time.  You cannot say any one particular event is due to climate change.  The only way you can do that is step back and look at the trend,” said Ball, who says many scientists today are simply misusing historic climate data to suit their political ends.

“It depends what starting point you pick on the temperature record or the precipitation record and then the ending point.  You can prove anything you want from the record by selecting the time period that you want to look at,” said Ball.

“For example, since 1900, the world warmed up to 1940.  It cooled down to 1980.  It warmed up to 1998 and now it’s cooling down again.  You could pick any one of those periods and say, ‘Oh look, it’s warming or it’s cooling’ and then say it’s going to keep on going and it’s the end of the world, which of course is what they’ve done with the recent warming from 1980 up to 2000,” he said.

After years of contending there was an unrelenting rise in global temperature, climate change activists now contend that extreme heat, extreme cold or active hurricane and tornado seasons all mean human activity is making our climate more volatile.  Ball says good science flatly proves those claims false.

“Actually, the number of tornadoes is dramatically down.  The number of hurricanes, particularly the ones coming ashore in the U.S., is significantly down.  So, their arguments are completely wrong,” said Ball.

“The supposed increase in storminess is scientifically wrong because the storms occur along the boundary between the cold polar air and the warmer tropical air, which is essentially across the central U.S., between 30-50 degrees of latitude.  If you decrease that temperature difference across that boundary, which is called the polar front, then you get fewer storms not more,” he said.

“The official argument is that the polar regions are going to warm up more than the tropical regions, which actually would reduce the number of storms but they’re claiming it will increase it.  It’s just another example of climate science being used for a political agenda,” said Ball.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Betsy Woodruff of National Review are glad to see plenty of heat aimed at New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo for suggesting some conservatives “have no place” in his state.  They also discuss how the threat of terrorist attacks is greatly overshadowing the Olympics themselves.  And they have fun with the news that a Maryland health exchange help line actually connects users to a Seattle pottery store.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. emerged as the pre-eminent leader of the civil rights movement because of his Christ-like approach to the struggle and would likely have focused more time on preaching the gospel than remaining politically active had he lived a full life, according to Council Nedd II, bishop of the Episcopal Missionary Church and founding member of the Project 21 black leadership network.

Bishop Nedd also believes King would have remained more conservatives than many of his contemporaries turned out to be and would be both amazed at the racial progress in America and distressed at how the issue is exploited for political advantage.

King rose to prominence during the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott that followed the arrest of Rosa Parks for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white passenger.  Nedd says King’s biblical approach to segregation and discrimination set him apart from other possible leaders.

“His approach was so radically different than what everybody else in the black community was talking about at that time and it was the message on non-violence.  He’s a Christian pastor, a follower of Jesus Christ, and he believed in turning the other cheek and he believed that you could meet this resistance by not resisting at all.  It had a profound impact on American society,” said Nedd.  “They’re being met with violence.  There’s water hoses, dogs and all sorts of beatings and lynchings and everything, and he’s saying, ‘Let’s just keep marching for what we want to march for and we’re going to do it in a nonviolent manner.  It got America’s attention and it got the world’s attention.”

While racial issues persist today, Nedd is confident King would be very pleased with the racial progress made in the years since his death.

“I think he would say that a major victory had been accomplished.  If you think about it, the world that he lived in and the world he knew was a very segregated America.  At the end of his life, there were riots in the street.  They were turning water hoses and dogs on children in parts of this country and because of the advent of television, people were able to see it and were rightly appalled by what they saw,” said Nedd.

“So, it’s a very different world than the one he lived in.  There’s equality in the eyes of the law.  Segregation is legally banished from the land, and black Americans have opportunities that have never been seen at any other point in U.S. history,” said Nedd.

Bishop Nedd believes that if King had lived many more years, he would have been pretty conservative and would have spent more time in the pulpit than marching for causes.

“He comes from the same era as my father so I think he would probably be a fairly conservative individual.  I think that he would still be involved in pastoral ministry or probably retired from it by this point.  He was first and foremost a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ.  I don’t think he was necessarily interested in the political pandering that you see people like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton do.  He was on a mission and the mission was to march for civil rights.  but he never gave up his calling as a minister of the gospel and his ministry was evident in his approach that he took to try to achieve civil rights for all Americans,” said Nedd.

When asked why King would be somewhat conservative when other figures from that era, like Jackson, Rev. Joseph Lowery and John Lewis charted a more liberal course, Nedd said he wasn’t sure why other leaders went in that direction, but he says people should distinguish among those figures, especially Lewis and Jackson.

“I’d put John Lewis is a slightly different category because he is a committed individual to what he’s doing.  I don’t know how much political pandering he necessarily does, but in my opinion he’s given a certain amount of grace because of what he physically endured on the same marches with Dr. King,” said Nedd.

“Jesse Jackson has always been a political figure.  He’s always sought out the media and whatever gets him to that goal, seemingly, he’s willing to do, whether it’s smearing blood on himself or whatever it is.,” he said.

In the past several years, homosexual activists have contended that their efforts to pursue gay rights and even same-sex marriage are simply an extension of the civil rights movement.  Nedd is having nine of that.

“Gay is not the new black.  There are lots of people who lived and died and suffered merely because of race.  Any individual who happens to be homosexual, they’re already covered under the law because of their color, because of their sexuality, because of various other things.  It’s not a separate classification and personally I’m offended by it.  I’m offended by the politicians who caved on the issue and I’m offended by pastors who sold out on the issue and decided, ‘You know what, I don’t really care what the Bible says .  The black president wants me to support this so I’m going to support this.  It’s absurd,” said Nedd, who also suggested King would be disappointed in Obama’s approach to the presidency.

“That’s one of the real tragedies.  Here we are in America.  We’ve got the first black president and everybody was sort of talking about the end of racism etc. and essentially what Obama has done is put on the Jesse Jackson cloak and he’s just pandering on issues of race.  He’s not showing true leadership,” said Nedd.

“He’s implemented or tried to implement a number of failed policies and when it didn’t work out, he pulls the race card.  I just that’s inappropriate and I think it’s just tacky,” he said.