Archives for May 2016

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are tentatively encouraged to see that down ballot races may not be as bad as thought.  They also slam Facebook for manipulating the trending stories to hide news good for conservatives and promote liberal news and causes that aren’t getting much traffic.  And they rip Ben Rhodes and the Obama administration for feeding bogus information to a clueless press corps about the Iran deal and setting up “experts” to validate their talking points to those reporters.

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton says he is now backing Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race and warns voters that electing Hillary Clinton will just mean another four years of President Obama’s foreign policy.

After briefly considering a White House bid of his own, Bolton refused to endorse while the GOP nomination was still in doubt but said he would back the eventual nominee.  Recent campaign suspensions by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, and Gov. John Kasich, R-Ohio, leave Trump as the only active Republican candidate on well on his way to clinching a majority of pledged delegates.

Bolton is urging party unity because he believes the U.S. national security cannot afford Clinton as president.

“Hillary is extremely happy with the Obama foreign policy.  It’s almost an urban legend now that somehow she would be tougher, more hawkish (than Obama).  I really don’t see that,” said Bolton, who says Clinton admits as much in her most recent book, “Hard Choices.”

“It’s very hard, if not impossible, to find any real differences between what Hillary Clinton writes and what the Obama policy was,” said Bolton.  “The idea somehow that Hillary would be preferable because she would be an improvement on the Obama foreign policy is badly misguided.”

Bolton said Trump’s foreign policy speech in Washington just prior to becoming the presumptive nominee was a “good start” in laying out his vision that America’s national security interests must take top priority in the next administration.  But Trump may still have a steep learning curve on national security, evidenced most publicly by his December debate performance in wich he appeared to have no familiarity with the nuclear triad.

Bolton admits Trump still has to prove he is ready for the job.

“It’s also important to demonstrate that Trump can can fulfill the most important job of the presidency, which is keeping the country safe.  Obviously, the economy’s important.  There’s a lot of important issues,  but if the country’s not safe, everything else is secondary,” said Bolton.

Both Trump and Clinton plan to make economic issues central to their campaigns, but Bolton believes Trump’s business track record will lead Hillary to look for an advantage on international affairs and point to her time as secretary of state to show she has a much better handle on America’s national security challenges.

Bolton says Trump has to be ready to use Clinton’s record against her.

“Trump needs to demonstrate that her record at State, which is the same as the first four years under Obama, was a series of failures.  To do that is going to require talking more about the subject,” said Bolton.

Still, Bolton has no doubt Trump would be better than Clinton and urges conservatives and Republicans to stop seeking further alternatives to Trump.

“I believe this is a binary choice.  The next president will either be Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, unless Hillary gets indicted.  Talk about a third party candidate I think is badly misplaced.  The idea of not voting at all is no better because functionally that’s a vote for Hillary.  And it may have a really harmful effect on Senate and House races where Republicans are going to be fighting hard to maintain control,” said Bolton.

Another major concern for Bolton is that the world will be far less stable by January 2017 because he expects our adversaries to take aggressive steps in the coming months because they don’t expect President Obama to resist them.

“The continuing deterioration of the Middle East and all across North Africa as well is going to accelerate and I think we’re going to see Iran challenge us on a variety of points.  I think they’re going to press the outer limits of the Vienna deal on their nuclear weapons program.  Recently, the head to the Revolutionary Guards Corps threatened yet again to close the Straits of Hormuz.  I think threatening moves against friendly Arab states are all in the offing,” said Bolton.

Iraq is another hornet’s nest, with U.S. forces engaging in direct combat with ISIS in recent days and protests in and around Baghdad and even parliament leading to questions about whether the Iraqi government can survive.  Bolton says the next president will deal with an irreparable Iraq.

“The violence in parliament is really a demonstration that what’s left of the government in Iraq really is on the verge of collapse.  Iraq has functionally disappeared as a state.  The Kurds are functionally independent.  ISIS has carved out primarily the Sunni areas.  The Shia areas of Iraq are dominated by the ayatollahs in Tehran,” said Bolton.

He says the top goal in the midst of that mess is rooting out ISIS and he believes the promise of a homeland for anti-ISIS Sunnis is much better incentive than a return to the status quo of living under the retribution of the Shia majority.

“We have to give the Sunni Arabs of western Iraq and eastern Syria an incentive to leave ISIS and join us.  I think creating a new state out of what used to be Syria and Iraq makes sense.  they’re not going to fight ISIS so they can come back under the domination of the ayatollahs in Iraq or the Assad regime in eastern Syria,” said Bolton.

He says Iraq is a good example of how the next president needs to approach the world’s challenges as they exist now how they wish things were.

“In foreign policy, if you’re not dealing with reality, you’re going to fail,” said Bolton.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review give House Speaker Paul Ryan credit for resisting the GOP rush to back Trump but believe Ryan will eventually do it.  They also shake their heads as Rick Perry, who called Trump toxic and a cancer to conservatism, endorses Trump and even says he’s consider being Trump’s running mate.  And they sigh as Trump not only won’t back away from accusing Rafael Cruz from being linked to Lee Harvey Oswald but defends the National Enquirer as a legitimate news source.

The Food and Drug Administration is enacting “historic” regulations aimed at e-cigarettes aimed at further reducing youth nicotine consumption but a top regulatory expert says the government is needlessly meddling and actually making Americans less healthy.

On Thursday, Health and Human Services Secretary Sylvia Burwell announced that e-cigarette makers would be subject to the same standards as traditional tobacco firms, including marketing bans, warning labels on packages and requiring purchasers to be 18 years or older.

But perhaps the most significant part of the rule is that any product brought to market since February 15, 2007, will be subject to rigorous clearance procedures by the government just to stay in business.  Hand-rolled cigars, hookahs and pipe tobacco are also under the same rule, which stems from the Tobacco Control Act of 2009.

“It’s actually a lot worse than they make it sound,” said Jeff Stier, director of the Risk Analysis Division at the National Center for Public Policy Research.  “They’re actually holding them to a dramatically higher standard.”

“What the FDA did is so troubling because it will have the effect of taking almost all of the products, e-cigarettes, off the market because it’s holding these products to a pre-marketing approval requirement that even the FDA acknowledges may cost up to a million dollars each and will hold it to a standard that is so far very hard to prove,” said Stier.

Stier finds that especially frustrating because he says research shows e-cigarettes are demonstrably healthier for smokers than standard cigarettes.

“The Royal College of Physicians just a week-and-a-half ago released its own historic report and recommended in England that doctors recommend that patients who smoke switch to e-cigarettes because they are so much less harmful.  They call it nicotine without the smoke.  It’s the smoke that’s dangerous,” said Stier.

So why the FDA dropping the hammer in e-cigarettes?

“Because it’s the government.  Seriously, this is an opportunity that the FDA has to regulate a new product and they are basically drooling over it.” said Stier, who points out tobacco firms aren’t facing standards anywhere near as high as e-cigarette makers.

Stier says the Tobacco Control Act requires any product in this area to be proven safer than traditional tobacco products and also be safer for the general public.  But he also says Congress can take an important step in making this new FDA rules less burdensome.  There is an amendment to an upcoming appropriations bill that would essentially grandfather e-cigarettes into the marketplace by moving the deadline from 2007 to the present day.

“The clock is ticking and Congress needs to pass amendment through the entire appropriations bill now because otherwise cigarette smokers’ lives are at risk because the FDA will be taking awaya much less harmful alternative to smoking,” said Stier.

If you’re wondering why e-cigarettes are being regulated under the Tobacco Control Act when they contain no tobacco, Stier says it’s part of the Obama FDA’s legacy of redefining what words mean – from tobacco products to using 300 words to define what a menu is so calorie counts have to be published on every thing from ads to coupons.

“In the Obama administration regulatory world, the legacy is that reality is irrelevant and the rules that we make up will govern your lives.  Unfortunately, they’re making our food more expensive and they’re making it harder for smokers to quit.  That’s bad for public health,” said Stier.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review applaud Ben Sasse for refusing to accept two terrible candidates for president.  They also shudder as the hacker known as Guccifer tells Fox News he easily hacked into Hillary Clinton’s private server and many others did too.  And they throw up their hands at the push for “meternity” and “pawternity” leave – as advocates contend getting getting some me time or a new pet is equivalent to having a baby.

Donald Trump is now the presumptive presidential nominee for the Republican Party, and a longtime conservative leader says whether Trump can unify the party or win in November is almost entirely up to him.

Richard Viguerie has been a  prominent figure in the conservative movement for almost 60 years.  He is chairman of ConservativeHQ.com and the author most recently of “Takeover: The 100-year Fight for the Soul of the GOP and How Conservatives Can Win It.”

Viguerie was an active Ted Cruz supporter but says Trump won the Republican field by acknowledging and responding to the deep frustration Americans have towards Washington.

“How he did it was to ride the anger that a high percent of Americans feel towards the political establishment, Republicans and Democrats,” said Viguerie.

He says that anger burned especially hot among Republican primary voters.  There is white hot anger among conservatives at the grassroots level towards Republican leaders who have lied to them and betrayed them for too many years.  This campaign was an opportunity to send them a message,” said Viguerie.

But now that Trump has a clear path to a first-ballot nomination, Viguerie says the first and most important priority is to unite the party, which he says has not truly happened since 1988.  Fifty-one percent of Indiana primary voters who did not back Trump told exit pollsters they would never vote for him.  Polls in other states have shown similar numbers, and the #NeverTrump movement vows to oppose the presumptive nominee throughout the campaign.

Can the GOP come together?

“The most important moves coming up here in the period between now and the Republican convention is pretty much up to Trump,” said Viguerie.  “If Trump takes the moves to unite the Republican Party, and it’s pretty much up to him to do that, I think he stands a strong chance of being elected president.  We have to see if he’s serious about being the leader of a united party.”

Those unknowns, says Viguerie could be the difference between a landslide win or a crushing loss.

“I can believe that Trump could get 40 percent of the vote and I believe he could get 60 percent of the vote.  It largely depends on him.  If he runs a good campaign and campaigns on issues that conservatives and Middle America is concerned about and he has articulated very well in this campaign, he could have a blowout election,” said Viguerie.

For those insistent that Trump is unacceptable on ideological or personal grounds, regardless of whether he wins, Viguerie says the impact of a President Trump on the future of conservatism is also a blank slate.

“If he governs as a principled conservative, he has the ability to set the left back 50 or 100 years here.  He really has the ability to do serious damage to the progressives,” said Viguerie.  “But he could also do serious damage to the conservative cause.  It’s very, very much up in the air right now.”

Viguerie says the first and most important step towards bringing the GOP together is the selection of a running mate.

“It’s less important what certain conservative leaders say or do.  The real test is how the grassroots respond to it.  We saw in this election that the grassroots had a mind of their own,” said Viguerie.

That being said, Viguerie does have a name at the top of his running mate wish list.

“On that short list should be Newt Gingrich.  I think Newt Gingrich is an intriguing idea.  There are others who should be on that list, including Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, but I’m particularly intrigued with the idea of Newt Gingrich,” said Viguerie.

But he warns Trump that the wrong pick could be devastating.

“If he goes to the Republican establishment, a Paul Ryan type or Kasich, I think it’s going to be very, very difficult to have a united party and without a united party they lose,” said Viguerie.

In addition to the selection of a running mate, Viguerie says Trump needs to prove to conservatives that he will pick the right kind of judges for all levels of the federal judiciary.  He says the people Trump chooses to flesh out policy will also be telling.

“Personnel is policy and that’s the ballgame as far as conservatives are concerned.  Any candidate can promise the sun, the moon, the stars and believe it, but if they bring in big government establishment types, moderate types, we’ve lost,” said Viguerie.

While Viguerie believes unity is indispensable to winning, he says another quality is needed that he believes Trump has in abundance.

“He must be a fighter and he must have a vice president who is also a fighter.  If you bring the fight to the Democrats, this election is eminently winnable,” said Viguerie, who believes Hillary Clinton is a ripe target given her current strategy.

“Hillary is running as the third term of Barack Obama and I don’t think he’s going to be very popular by November of this year after the Republicans load up on him,” said Viguerie.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty discuss Republican primary voters determining that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.  They also weigh in on the future of #NeverTrump conservatives and discuss the stream of political figures who strongly denounced Trump immediately backing him Tuesday night.  And they consider the future of the conservative movement with a non-conservative at the top of the GOP ticket.

Escalating protests in Baghdad threaten the Iraqi government as Shia Muslim factions battle for control for the country and retired U.S. Air Force Lt. General Tom McInerney says Iran could soon wield all the power in Iraq unless the U.S. changes course in significant ways.

He is also reacting to ISIS killing a U.S. Navy SEAL, who was assisting the Kurdish Peshmerga against ISIS.

In recent days, demonstrators have stormed government buildings, protesting Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi’s decision to replace members of his cabinet.  Al-Abadi said the move was to root out corruption and bring in reformers.  The protesters believe it was designed to lessen the influence of different ethnic and sectarian factions.

And an old U.S. nemesis is right in the middle of it.

“What you’re seeing right now is that (radical Shia cleric) Moqtada al-Sadr is responsible for creating a greater wedge when the current Iraq prime minister wanted to make Iraq more independent from Iran,” said McInerney.

“You have a combination of Iranian Shia and Iraqi Shia competing as to who controls the government and who controls Iraq.  That’s the bottom line of what’s going on over there right now,” he added.

Al-Sadr is loyal to Iran.  he and is forces are responsible for the deaths of many American troops during the sectarian uprising in Iraq in 2005 and 2006.  Al-Sadr then fled to Iran when U.S. forces gained a decisive edge.

McInerney says all of this upheaval can be traced to the Obama administration’s decision to wash its hands of Iraq.

“When we pulled out, this administration fundamentally gave Iraq to Iran,” said McInerney.

Now the Iraqi government is feeling much greater heat from Shia factions more loyal to Tehran than to Baghdad in addition to the threat posed by ISIS in the north.  ISIS still controls Mosul and other swaths of territory in Iraq and is still within striking distance of the capital.

“Unless we have strong allied and U.S. leadership over there, then we are in danger of clearly losing Iraq completely to Iran,” said McInerney.

McInerney is not in favor of bringing huge contingents of ground forces back to Iraq, but he says the U.S. could end the ISIS threat very quickly if it would just use it’s overwhelming and largely unchallenged air power.

“I would have a very aggressive air campaign.  Not eight (sorties) a day.  I’d have hundreds a day.  I would take out ISIS right away.  I would absolutely destroy them and everything around them, and I would accept the collateral damage that goes with it because it would be a very short and intensive air campaign.  That would show our strength,” said McInerney.

His air campaign would include decimating ISIS headquarters and other critical infrastructure in Syria as well as spotting and eliminating weapons and fighters in the desert.  He says crushing ISIS would end the dream of the caliphate and stop the flow of radical ideologues to the area.

“Only then can we start reasserting our strength and position in the region,” said McInerney.

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced the death of a U.S. service member as a “combat death” in Iraq.  Later identified as a Navy SEAL, the American was officially “assisting” Kurdish forces.

According to Fox News, ISIS was breaking through the Kurdish line when about 20 SEALs swooped in to “heroically” beat back the ISIS forces.

McInerney is not at all surprised that American “advisers” are engaging in direct combat with the enemy.

“Although the administration does not want to admit it, I think it’s obvious when you’re putting those kinds of numbers and those kinds of forces in there as advisers, particularly at the battalion level, that you’re going to have these kinds of incidents, particularly if you get a breakthrough,” said McInerney.

But he says it never should have come to that sort of ground action.

“Where was the air power to stop that effort.  Why didn’t we know what was going on down there.  That’s my concern.  We should have planes airborne 24/7 that could immediately respond to these kinds of attacks,” said McInerney.

Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review enjoy watching Hillary Clinton squirm as a coal industry worker calls her out on her previous promise to put coal companies out of business.  They also unload on Donald Trump for trying to link Ted Cruz’s father to the Kennedy assassination.  And they react to a Huffington Post writer claiming that defending yourself with a gun ought to be unconstitutional because you’re depriving your attacker of a fair trial if they die.

A leading conservative media watchdog is blasting President Obama and the White House press corps for collaborating on a liberal agenda while Obama tells reporters he admires their commitment to facts and objectivity.

Media Research Center Vice President of Business and Culture Dan Gainor also reacted to reports that CNN is suddenly beating Fox News in prime time among a key demographic.

But the issue that really has Gainor fired up is Obama’s speech to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday.  After several minutes of cracking jokes at the expense of the press and political figures, Obama concluded by thanking the media for helping him make our country better.

“I’m very proud of what you’ve done.  It has been an honor and a privilege to work side by side with you to strengthen our democracy,” said Obama.

Just prior to that statement, Obama lauded the mainstream press for shedding ideology and only reporting where the facts and the truth lead.

“The only way we can build consensus, the only way we can move forward as a country, the only way we can help the world mend itself is by agreeing on a baseline of facts when it comes to the challenges that confront us all,” said Obama.

Those words left Gainor shaking his head.

“The president was standing in the middle of perhaps the metaphor for Washington corruption.  You’ve got the intersection of entertainment media, news media, politics and money, at an event where they have a red carpet where professional journalists are walking into an event on a red carpet,” said Gainor.

“And he’s talking about journalists taking a stand for what is true does not require you shedding your objectivity.  They have no objectivity,” Gainor added.  “For him to come out there and say he’s working side by side, what it means is they were working for him.  Absolutely, this is a telling quote.”

Gainor says journalists are even twisting basic facts into a political advantage for their allies.

“The media have all these fact-check things now.  ‘Oh, we’re going to check the facts.’  Then they turn it into propaganda,” said Gainor.

He says Sunday’s ‘Meet the Press’ provided another example.

“To really show that they’re being objective is to not do what Chuck Todd did with Ted Cruz at ‘Meet the Press,’ said Gainor.  “Getting offended that Ted Cruz is calling out the leaders of NBC as being partisan.  Of course they’re partisan.  Who is Washington journalism is not partisan?”

Also odd to Gainor is how much the media follow Obama’s lead while the president restricts access to the press more than any other president in decades.  He says it started even before Obama was elected.

“If you remember going all the way back to when a couple of newspapers endorsed John McCain, their political reporters were kicked off the campaign planes,” said Gainor.

He says the Obama White House and the press corps both have a vested interest in stifling transparency and pursuit of the truth.

“They don’t want to change it.  They don’t want to be transparent because to be transparent, they actually have to tell people what’s really going on,” said Gainor.  “The media also don’t want it either because then they would really have to after the Obama administration.  They don’t want that.”

So what would be signs that reporters are interested in fair play?  Gainor says this campaign season would be a good place to start.

“A telling sign that they were committed to truth would be doing the same due diligence that they seem intent on doing to Cruz or Trump or anybody who is running against Hillary Clinton, to Hillary Clinton,” he said.

He says journalists could also correct a glaring double standard that was on display again this weekend.

“There were people attacked at a Donald Trump rally over the weekend.  Do you see journalists running out and asking every major Democrat in the country to disavow those kinds of riots and those kinds of thuggish behaviors?  No.  But when something happens at a conservative event, they immediately demand that Republicans or conservatives disavow that,” said Gainor.

On the cable news front, CNN is now happily reporting that it beat Fox News in prime time among adults aged 25-54 in five of the past eight months.  It’s the first such stretch since late 2001, which came just before Fox started dominating the ratings.

So why the sudden shift?  Gainor chalks it up to the campaign and the raw emotions that are coming to the surface.

“I think this is the most emotionally volatile election year that I ever remember, even going back into 1968,” said Gainor.  “Voters are very concerned we’re not at the point we need to be.  Whether you look left or right, both parties are sharply divided right now.”

Gainor says there are more “talking head” shos on Fox and with so many strong opinions, some viewers are turning away from those they don’t like.  But he says CNN’s return to competitiveness, won’t last long.

“Going by the history of how CNN tends to treat conservatives, I don’t think they’ll be staying for very long,” said Gainor.