Archives for June 2015

President Obama reacted to Wednesday’s murders in Charleston by saying “there’s something we can do about” mass killings in America, and a leading gun rights leader says the president is just angling for more gun control measures.

On Thursday, Obama mourned the nine people murdered at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston.  Twenty-one-year-old Dylann Roof is in custody for the killings.  He has admitted committing the murders and sources say he does not regret his actions.

However, in addition to expressing sympathies to the families and communities impacted by the murders, Obama also returned to the debate over guns.

“We don’t have all the facts, but we do know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” said Obama.

“And at some point it’s going to be important for the American people to come to grips with it, and for us to be able to shift how we think about the issue of gun violence collectively,” he said.

In the midst of that statement, Obama seemed to acknowledge the political realities in Washington are not in his favor on this issue.

“I say that recognizing the politics in this town foreclose a lot of those avenues right now,” he said.

In 2013, Obama pushed hard for the U.S. Senate (then controlled by Democrats) to approve new measures, including expanded background checks, but the bipartisan bill failed to advance.

Republicans now control both the House and Senate, so does this mean Obama knows he can’t advance the issue over the remainder of his term?  Gun Owners of America Executive Director Larry Pratt says that may not stop Obama from applying the full-court press.

“I’d bet a small amount of money on the president continuing to push, because he is so incredibly ideologically driven.  Even as he’s recognizing the difficulty of the task, I don’t think that is going to inhibit him.  I hope it will but I don’t think so,” said Pratt.

Pratt sees the limited time remaining in the Obama administration as a major motivating factor in a possible gun control push.

“This man is hard hard left.  He believes the government should control everything.  Now, he’s got less than two years to really snap the socialist vise on the country.  I don’t see him backing off,” he said.

Pratt and other critics assert that Obama’s proposed gun laws would not have made a difference in Charleston, since the victims were killed with a pistol rather than a so-called assault rifle.  High-capacity magazines of ammunition were also not involved.

Pratt says South Carolina’s laws put the members of Emanuel AME Church at a disadvantage.

“The law in South Carolina, which was actively supported by [Pastor and State Senator Clementa Pinckney] is that you cannot have a gun at a church unless the pastor or the governance of the church says it’s OK,” said Pratt.

He says the horror in Charleston follows an unmistakable pattern by recent mass murderers.

“The biggest problem occurs in gun-free zones.  That’s where all but one of our mass murders has occurred.  So you get a dirtbag in a gun-free zone intent on committing mass murder and it takes awhile before a good guy with a gun can get there,” said Pratt.

Another major reason that killers strike where they do, according to Pratt, is the ability of law-abiding citizens to obtain a gun.  He says the statistics in this area are overwhelming.

“It’s easier to protect yourself in a lot of parts of the country.  In those parts of the country where access to guns is not impeded by the kind of laws that the state senator wanted and the president wants, the murder rate and violent crime rate is lower where gun control is not as onerous,” said Pratt.

He says the areas with the most restrictive gun laws see a much different story.

“The problem we have in our country with violent crime and people using guns to commit heinous acts, occurs in our urban centers, where the gun control laws tend to be the most severe.  So the president really doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on,” said Pratt.

According to Pratt, the only people inconvenienced by cracking down on guns are the people who would act responsibly.

“I think the answer is to stop kidding ourselves.  Criminals are not going to obey the law, so let’s not make it difficult for the good guys to have guns,” he said.

 

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review cheer the many political and community leaders who called for prayer, support and unity in the wake of the Charleston murders.  We also groan as President Obama erroneously contends his gun control agenda would have prevented these killings. And we shake our heads as a highly-decorated teacher in Los Angeles is suspended indefinitely for reading an excerpt from “The Adventures  of Huckleberry Finn” to his class.

The National Organization for Marriage is asking 2016 presidential candidates to sign its pledge to champion traditional marriage, including support for a constitutional amendment on the issue and rolling back Obama administration directives within the federal government.

The group issued first issued the pledge in 2012 and the majority of Republican hopefuls signed it.  NOM President Brian Brown says it’s designed to see which candidates plan to walk the walk on a critical cultural issue.

“It makes clear that the candidates won’t just give lip service to protecting marriage, but will actually take concrete steps to protect marriage.  So it’s important that the candidates are on the record and that voters know which candidates will actually do something,” said Brown.

With so many Republicans in the race, several are likely to sign the pledge.  Brown says those candidates will we rewarded during the campaign.

“Our goal is to have champions stand up for marriage.  Whether we get three people to sign or 14, it doesn’t matter,” said Brown.  “Whoever signs, we’re going to promote.”

The pledge asks candidates to make five commitments, the first of which is to back a constitutional amendment defining marriage in the United States as the union of one man and one woman.

Even polls were lopsided in favor of traditional marriage a decade ago, the amendment failed to advance in Congress.  Brown says this is going to be a long fight but the Supreme Court could soon make an amendment more necessary than ever.

“In past years, we haven’t had the specter of the Supreme Court potentially forcing the redefinition of marriage on the whole country.  That is not the way our Constitution was written.  That will be an illegitimate decision.  The clear process we have to stop this form of judicial supremacy is a constitutional amendment,” said Brown.

The pledge also asks candidates to champion marriage through their judicial nominations and key administration appointments, such as attorney general.  It also demands allowing Americans to be free to exercise their conscience in their daily affairs and to not punish citizens for publicly advocating traditional marriage.

Those are clear references to recent religious liberty battles involving business owners uncomfortable with servicing a same-sex wedding and to the the IRS harassment of the National Organization of Marriage.  The IRS not only harassed NOM but shared it’s sensitive donor information with organizations on the opposite side of the debate.

The pledge also asks the next president to roll back President Obama’s directives within the federal government that NOM says erodes marriage and promotes the LGBT agenda.  Brown says this White House activism extends from office rules to official diplomatic policy.

“Even at the State Department, we’re seeing de facto threatening of countries with the removal of aid unless they get on board with a new definition of marriage.  That is fundamentally wrong,” said Brown.

Republicans are divided on the best campaign strategy moving into 2016.  Many consultants and elected officials say that while the party should defend traditional marriage, candidates should speak about it very sparingly so as not to turn off voters who otherwise like the GOP agenda.

Brown says Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign proved that’s a bad idea.

“A billion dollars were spent on a grand experiment to do just that and it failed,” said Brown.  “The people of this country still understand what marriage is.  They’re looking for a leader who will stand up with conviction for the truth of marriage and not be silenced or intimidated by a media culture that largely believes this fight is over.”

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of Radio America are glad to see Brian Williams will not return as anchor of NBC Nightly News after a pattern of dishonest reporting.  They also shudder at the horrific murders of nine people at a church in Charleston, South Carolina.  And they roll their eyes as the Treasury Department announces a woman will appear on the ten dollar bill within five years.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Ian Tuttle of National Review are encouraged by new polls showing Americans don’t believe Hillary Clinton cares about them and that Bernie Sanders is very competitive against Clinton in New Hampshire.  They also unpack the absurdity of the Donald Trump presidential announcement.  And they discuss the latest nonsense coming from former NAACP official Rachel Dolezal.

Thousands of emails connected to a key figure in the alleged IRS harassment of conservative organizations have been found but the IRS refuses to release them, and now a target of those IRS tactics is firing back.

Last year, the IRS reported that many thousands of emails connected to former director of exempt organizations, Lois Lerner, were lost due to hard drive failures.  The Treasury Department’s inspector general found some 6,400 Lerner emails.  However, the IRS says it will not release them now and it may be months before lawmakers or lawyers for conservative activists can see them.

“It is outrageous.  It needs to be brought to an end immediately.  Emails in whatever form that they have need to be released.  The word games need to stop,” said True the Vote President Catherine Englebrecht.  “I think the fact that we pay our taxes to this agency and they are in charge of health care should keep us awake at night.”

Despite the frustration, Englebrecht says this latest example of stalling comes as no surprise.

“It should come as no great shock at this point that the bobbing and weaving continues,” said Englebrecht.  “For them to tell the American people that, yet again, they must stall for something that has no basis suggests that, left to their own devices, they would just as soon never give up those emails.”

The IRS says the emails might be available by September.  The hold up is the assertion that employees must physically sift through the emails page by page.

“I am amazed yet again though at the attempt of the IRS to use complete nonsense in their attempt to validate the reason that they won’t release these emails,” she said.

“What they’ve said is that they’re willing to release them but first they must get rid of all of the duplicate emails and they’re doing this manually.” said Englebrecht, who points out there are plenty of computer programs that can sift out duplicate emails in short order.

She says the litany of excuses and delays makes her wonder if we’ll ever get to the bottom of the scandal.

“It’s more of the same and there’s no end in sight,” she said.

Englebrecht isn’t making any promises about what the 6,400 emails might contain, but she says the investigation should be much broader.

“It’s been troubling to me from the outset that we’ve put so much focus and attention on Lois Lerner.  There are many other people, many other assistants of key people who are in play in all this.  Our (Freedom of Information requests) have always sought to include much more than Lois Lerner and company, but rather a host of people who were in that circle at the time,” said Englebrecht.

She says one of the biggest problems is that IRS leaders feel no pressure to come clean to the American people.

“They seem to have no fear of the repercussions that Congress may exact upon them.  They have sort of positioned themselves as being untouchable.  That’s got to change,” said Englebrecht.

Congress has a major role to play in crushing that sense of invincibility.  Englebrecht admits she doesn’t know exactly where the power of lawmakers ends in this matter.  She appreciates the hearings devoted to the scandal thus far, but she says there is a long way to go.

“We are at a point now where we need prosecutions.  We need perp walks an we need people to go to jail,” she said.

True the Vote was founded to ensure fair and accurate elections nationwide.  Englebrecht’s group strongly advocates for photo identification at the polls and cleaning up voter rolls to remove people who are dead or who have moved, among other steps.

She says Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Texas to scold Republicans over the issue of voting rights shows this will be a major issue in 2016.

“I think we are in for a voters’ rights roller coaster in this election,” said Englebrecht, noting Mrs. Clinton’s lawyers are already challenging voter ID laws in states like Ohio and Wisconsin.  She says President Obama’s call for mandatory voting suggests an even more aggressive agenda could be afoot.

As for the IRS fight, Englebrecht says she is never going away.

“We will fight it with our last breath,” she said.  “This is an absolute attack on the essence of free speech.”

The Food and Drug Administration is ordering food companies to eliminate trans fats from their products within three years, a move being hailed by the medical community but excoriated by free market advocates who believe this is the just the beginning of the government taking nutritional decision out of the hands of consumers.

Tuesday’s FDA decision targets partially hydrogenated oils, or PHOs, which are commonly called trans fats.  Companies can petition the FDA for an exemption but will not be able to include trans fats without federal permission starting in 2018.

Cardiologists are hailing the decision, saying trans fats are linked to obesity, high cholesterol and heart disease.  But defenders of the free market say this is a solution in search of a problem.

“Trans fats have been phased out of our diets over the past decade and we’ve reduced consumption as a result of the market demand, more than 80 percent over the last decade,” said Jeff Stier, director of the Risk Analysis Division at the National Center for Public Policy Research.

While Stier admits that market demand is due in large part of mandatory labels on foods containing trans fats, he says the doctors are getting this one wrong.

“The argument that these cardiologists are trying to make is that we have to remove every last vestige, every little bit of trans fat that’s left in the diet.  There is no evidence to support that,” said Stier.

Even more maddening to Stier is that trans fats only came about because of previous demands by liberal interest groups.

“The reason we have trans fats in the diet and they were so widely in use 15 years ago  is because groups like the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the food police that was behind the the ban of trans fats, a generation ago was scaring us about saturated fates,” said Stier.

“They pressured us and threatened regulation to remove saturated fat from the diet whenever possible.  The industry responded and introduced and increased the use of trans fats because of this concern over saturated fat,” he said.

Stier says the shift to eradicating trans fats follows a long time of contradictory demands from the left.

“I think this ought to be a lesson in humility for the activist groups, who have been telling us, ‘Eat eggs.  Don’t eat eggs.  Eat butter.  Don’t eat butter.  Eat margarine instead.  Don’t eat margarine instead.’  We ought to be a little more careful about this advice and the consequences of it,” said Stier.

Don’t expect the order on trans fats to be the last dietary directive from the Obama administration.  Stier says Obama has hired many of the same people former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg employed to crack down on trans fats, salt, big sodas and other targets in the Big Apple.  Centers for Disease and Control Director Dr. Thomas Frieden, who gained notoriety during the Ebola scare, served as Bloomberg’s top adviser on health policy.

The Obama administration is already seeking to impose other dietary changes.

“The Obama administration scientific committee called for less consumption of meat and more plant-based diets, not only because they’re healthier but because they allege that eating meat causes global warming.  Therefore we ought to change how we eat because of its impact on global warming,” said Stier, who says his organization is challenging the administration’s agenda every step of the way and is urging Congress to assert its rightful authority on these issues.

“It’ll be interesting to see whether the Obama administration stays with that left-wing point of view or the law is instituted as Congress called for and that nutritional advice given out by the USDA and the FDA are actually based on nutrition rather than things like global warming,” said Stier.

In the meantime, do trace amounts of trans fats damage out health?  Stier is skeptical, given that many of them are found in occasionally-eaten foods like dessert toppings.

“Who’s worried about sprinkles?  There are very low levels of consumption.  It plays a very important role in baking cakes, especially in the icing.  You shouldn’t eat lots of icing on cake anyway, but these very, very small levels serve an important role,” said Stier, who says the alternatives to trans fats are maddeningly ironic.

“If you take them out of the food supply, they’re going to have to be replaced by other things, like butter, like palm oil, which activists don’t like because of their claim that it’s affecting rain forests in Malaysia,” he said.

Ultimately, Stier believes politics trumped science in the FDA’s decision, and there will be negative consequences, including diminished shelf life.

“We’ll have more food waste because foods won’t be as stable.  They’ll go rancid quicker with other oils.  So I don’t think the FDA has done an appropriate job of weighing these benefits and making a clear case of what the benefits are (very small) versus lots of unintended consequences.  That’s where they usually get into trouble, by ignoring the unintended consequences,” said Stier.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review discuss the good, bad and crazy aspects of a Donald Trump presidential bid.  We discuss his business success, his ability to attract too much of the media attention of the campaign.  And we cringe at the thought of the personal insults Trump will lob at any candidate who dares to criticize him.

A former CIA director says the Obama administration has not done nearly enough to protect the nation from attacks to our information and critical infrastructure systems.

“The president has to put this first on his list because we are very vulnerable and we will stay vulnerable until some key things get fixed.  So far I have not seen anywhere near enough commitment from the White House or anyplace else in getting this done,” said R. James Woolsey, who served as director of Central Intelligence in the Clinton administration.  He is now chairman of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

The concern is rising again after reports last week that as many as 14 million current and former federal employees had their personal data compromised.  That news follows numerous reports of alleged Chinese and Russian infiltration into various government networks.

“I think we’ve seen the beginning, but there will be more,” said Woolsey.  “We have not done a halfway decent job as a government or a society in protecting our infrastructure that’s part of the internet.”

Woolsey sees multiple reasons for why security has not been a higher priority.

“There’s a certain kind of flower children, ‘Hey, what could possibly go wrong.  We’re all going to talk to one another and won’t that be great,'” said Woolsey.

“The government has not taken nearly enough care with security.  They always put it at the bottom of the list and say, ‘We’ve got to have a check mark beside security.  Somebody go hire a firewall.’  The ablest, best, smartest and shrewdest people have not been paying attention to security for the grid and we’re starting to pay the price,” said Woolsey.

While the most recent reports of private data being hacked is very troublesome, Woolsey says it’s the tip of the iceberg.

“It’s also the case that they can hack into the control systems, the so-called SCADA systems or Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition.  SCADA systems of our infrastructure, whether it’s dams, railroad trains turn things off and turn things to the reverse of what they’re supposed to do.” he said.

Woolsey says compromising one system could lead to a domino effect in many others.

“We’re an internet of things now as people say and they seem to think that’s a great idea, but one reason that it’s not a great idea is that all the things: computers, railroad, signals, etc. talk to one another.  If you can get one going wrong and you can do it smartly. you can foul up everything it’s connected to.  That could be a massive disaster, particularly with something like the electric grid,” said Woolsey.

Woolsey says protecting the power grid in the U.S. is of the utmost importance.  He says we have eighteen “critical infrastructures” in the U.S. but the other seventeen are reliant on electricity.  If the power grid goes down, Woolsey says everything from food delivery to water purification to banking to prescription drugs is at risk.

He reiterates that the Obama administration must get serious about this now.

“The president needs to say this is the country’s number one priority.  It’s not just cyber.  An electromagnetic pulse could take down the grid and take down a lot of other systems.  This needs to be a mobilization of the very best and brightest.  We need to be able to break rules and move fast,” said Woolsey.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review appreciate Hillary Clinton admitting she is not about unifying the nation but about rewarding her friends at the expense of Americans she doesn’t like.  They also cringe as the information of 14 million current and former federal workers is hacked, most likely by the Chinese.  And they have fun with Jeb Bush’s new exclamation point in his campaign logo.