Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad to see the Supreme Court uphold the constitutionality of prayers before public meetings, even if they overwhelmingly trend toward one faith. They also shake their heads at the Obama administration’s new “climate disruption” agenda. And they contrast Obama’s ‘Year of Action’ with his actual actions.
Radical Muslims Vow to Sell Abducted Christian Girls
The leader of a radical Muslim movement in Nigeria is admitting his group abducted over 300 Nigerian girls and now says he’s ready to sell them because he’s got plenty of buyers.
Three Martini Lunch 5/5/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see a new Pew survey showing Americans severely soured on the economy, Obamacare and Democrats in general. They also react to Democrats trying to label the select committee on Benghazi as nothing more than the politicizing of a tragedy. And they weigh in on President Obama’s biting humor at the White House Correspondents Dinner.
Three Martini Lunch 5/2/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleasantly surprised to see many mainstream media reporters grilling the White House over Benghazi and being skeptical of the administration’s answers. They also groan over news that more than 800,000 Americans left the job market in April. And we have fun with the “dude” comments of former National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor.
WH Benghazi Defense ‘Laughable’
For the second straight day, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney denied a recently released email was proof of the administration’s attempt to spin the deadly Benghazi terrorist attacks as the result of a spontaneous protest, an explanation that a key member of the House committee investigating the attacks dismissed as “laughable”.
The email from White House official Ben Rhodes came to light as part of a Freedom of Information request from the watchdog group Judicial Watch. In it, Rhodes urges then-Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice to attribute the attack to spontaneous street protests in many Arab cities over an internet video that was critical of Islam and Mohammed. Ambassador Chris Stevens and diplomat Sean Smith were killed in the attack at the consulate. Ex-Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods died hours later at the CIA Annex in Benghazi.
Carney rejects the notion that the email is evidence of any sort of cover-up for the administration’s failure to protect the consulate in Benghazi or take action to assist Americans under fire during the seven-hour assault.
“This document was not about Benghazi,” said Carney, who asserts the references to the protests in the email were about major demonstrations Egypt, Yemen and Tunisia the same day that the protesters said were in response to the video.
“(Rice) relied for her answers on Benghazi on the document prepared by the CIA, as did members of Congress,” said Carney.
Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar is a member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee and its national security subcommittee. He isn’t buying Carney’s explanation.
“That’s laughable, actually laughable, and it’s sad. We constantly look back at the emails then between Cairo and Libya and they pointed out there was a document that showed people hardly even knew about the video,” said Gosar. “This is laughable if it wouldn’t be so tragic, that the White House and Jay Carney actually hold to this narrative. It’s deplorable.”
Gosar says the significance of the Rhodes email takes on further credence in light of the administration’s actions in the wake of the attacks in September 2012.
“I think it’s very significant. It gets even worse. You see the perpetration almost two weeks after Benghazi with the president’s speech at the United Nations, in which he addresses this very video,” said Gosar. “This actually tries to establish the president with a better narrative going into the election.”
If in fact the administration’s emphasis on the video was fabricated, Gosar says it’s certainly not a unique occurrence.
“This shows an intentional pattern. We see the lies in Obamacare. We see the lies in Benghazi. We see the lies in regards to the IRS. There’s got to be accountability in this administration. Somebody’s got to take a fall,” said Gosar.
Despite the current White House efforts to minimize the significance of the email, Gosar believes this reignites the commitment of Republicans to get to the truth and puts pressure on the White House to be more forthcoming.
“This puts the onus back onto the White House to come clean and get the documents out here. It also puts the onus on the attorney general of the United States to do his due diligence to make sure that the people who were involved in this have the ability to speak clearly to the oversight committee and the committees of reference. That is absolutely part of the problem,” he said.
“In my district and throughout the state of Arizona, this constantly comes up because it’s one of the few times that we watched men die and did nothing,” said Gosar.
While the White House might be on its heels at the moment, Gosar admits there are two factors working against the committee’s efforts to get more answers. He says first major hurdle is a Democratic Party completely disinterested in the truth.
“They’re toeing the party line. I think what they need to do it put their justice hats on, blindfold themselves and listen to the facts. The facts ring loud and clear. The biggest thing we’re entitled to is to let the facts come forward and let them fall where they may,” said Gosar.
The other great frustration for Gosar and other Republicans is what they characterize as the slow drip of paperwork being provided by the administration, which they say is evidenced by the Rhodes email coming forth in a legal request by a private organization and not made available to the committee in the first place. The congressman there’s plenty of information yet to be gathered.
“There’s a lot more. When you look at the tons of paperwork that is required by the federal government’s own admission, there’s a lot more out there and we need to get that. Once again, we’ve got to get back to the rule of law and make sure that we have the documents that we, in our Constitution, are entitled to have for oversight of the executive branch,” said Gosar, who adds it is the job of the attorney general to make sure the committee has all of the documents it has requested.
But while the effort to discover all the facts on Benghazi has been challenging, Gosar says the pursuit of the truth will not stop.
“It’s now taken us 20 months to get information. Senator (Ted) Cruz made the comment we know less now than we knew before because we lack the due diligence of this administration to give us the information as it occurred. We need to get to the bottom of these answers,” said Gosar.
Three Martini Lunch 5/1/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are pleased to see Wisconsin Democrats concluding that making the 2014 governor’s race about the 2011 union battles is a losing fight. They also react to reports that Syria is still holding onto chemical weapons components despite its vow to give them up. And we critique MSNBC’s revisionist take on ‘Animal Farm’.
DeMint’s Olive Branch
Heritage Foundation President Jim DeMint says the conservative battle against the establishment mentality of both parties still rages, but he says engaging in the battle of idea instead of rhetorical bomb-throwing is the smart way to get America on the path to recovery as soon as possible.
The former South Carolina senator also offered passionate comments about recent comments from prominent GOP figures on issues ranging from health care to immigration to marriage.
DeMint and Heritage Action were among the most vocal conservatives calling for government funding to be contingent upon the defunding of Obamacare last year. That pressure triggered several House votes calling for defunding or repealing or delaying certain aspects of the law. When those efforts died in the Senate, many Democrats, media outlets and voters blamed the GOP for the partial government shutdown.
Buoyed by the ensuing public relations nightmare of the Obamacare rollout, Republicans quickly maneuvered to craft a a continuing resolution that rolled some of the spending restraints imposed by sequestration while promising deficit reduction.
Heritage Action and other conservative groups urged Republicans to vote against the bill, causing House Speaker John Boehner to denounce their tactics.
“They’re using our members and they’re using the American people for their own goals. This is ridiculous. Listen, if you’re for more deficit reduction, you’re for this agreement,” said Boehner in December.
DeMint stands by the Heritage opposition to the bill, which passed easily, saying recent history shows those projected cuts may never happen.
“The bill that supposedly reduced the deficit actually boosts spending up in the next two years with the promise of sometime in the future reducing spending again. Of course that’s what the sequester did. It supposedly was going to reduce spending, but they didn’t want to reduce spending now. They keep promising it in the future,” said DeMint.
“If I hadn’t been seeing the same thing happen for 15 years while I was in the House and Senate, then I would say let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. But there is no doubt in my mind. They’re not going to stop spending unless the people of this country force them to. This debt is going to hurt us, it’s going to hurt future generations. Unfortunately, the people who are voting for the political figures who support this debt are the ones paying for it and that’s the young millennials, who are probably the most ripped off generation in history,” said DeMint, who says he’s not looking to pick any political fights but to promote policies rooted in freedom and limited government.
“We’re not Republican or Democrat at Heritage. We’re just focusing on the right ideas and we’re trying to get the country to move toward ideas such as decentralization and more competition between the states. If we can start the parade in that direction, I think the politics will follow. So we’re not going to spend so much time criticizing or beating Republicans over the head. I think if they see the country moving in the right direction, hopefully both parties might follow,” said DeMint.
Like any election year, Republicans of all stripes are hoping for unity heading into the fall campaign season. One major pillar of that unity was assumed to be lockstep opposition to Obamacare and a renewed promise to repeal it.
However, in just the past week, House Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul both indicated that the recent open enrollment of many Americans on the federal and state exchanges means full repeal is probably not doable. Both Rodgers and Paul reiterated their intense opposition to most of the law and vowed to work for massive reforms within its existing structure.
DeMint says that’s not good enough and believes the party can unite around a strategy that still includes repeal.
“We cannot have socialized medicine in this country. It hurts too many people. It’s already hurting people. It’s going to hurt our whole health care system,” he said. “You’re never going to throw people off a plan they’re on like this president is doing, but it would be relatively easy at this point to pass repeal, to give states flexibility, to allow the subsidies on the plans people are already on to phase out over a period of years or be replaced with something at the state level. There a lot of things we can to do to repeal and replace this with something that actually improves our health care system rather than destroys it.”
McMorris is not only taking heat from the right over her Obamacare comments but for also predicting an immigration reform bill would reach the House floor by August. It’s an issue that bitterly divides the right and DeMint cannot understand why this push is happening now.
“Why would a party that believes in limited government be looking at amnesty as a priority at a time when we need to fix our tax code. We need to figure out how to reduce spending. We need to fix Social Security and Medicare so they’re there for future generations,” said DeMint.
“Those are the big issues, yet the president is talking about how to manage what businesses pay their employees, fabricating wars on women and other things. Yet, we’ve got Republicans who are caving to corporate pressure on things like the (Export-Import) Bank, a big corporate welfare boondoggle. The whole amnesty bill is something doing corporate America’s bidding,” he said.
“That’s what frustrates us about politics and I don’t think America is interested in that any longer. I think you’re going to see a sea change in this election. We want to be a part of helping people understand what the right policies are right now where our country is. It’s certainly not what they’re talking about in either set of leadership in Washington right now,” said DeMint.
Another major point of debate inside the Republican Party is over the proper stance on the definition of marriage. The national party platform still defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman and a majority of Americans who identify as Republicans agree. But with national polls trending towards acceptance of same-sex marriage, millennials overwhelmingly supporting that position, at least one state party changing its platform and a string of court decisions overturning traditional marriage laws, many in the party believe it’s time to change course.
DeMint says it’s important for conservatives and all Americans to understand the unique role traditional marriage plays in a stable society, but adds that he doesn’t want Washington mandating anything on the issue.
“The best environment to raise children is when there’s a mom and dad in the home and all the statistics show that. So this is not about people’s rights or marriage equality. This is about the best environment to raise children. The federal government has never regulated marriage before or defined it. It’s something that’s come from civil society, our churches and states have regulated marriage in order to protect it. And that’s where we need to leave it,” said DeMint.
“I would hope every state would recognize the importance of traditional marriage. But if not, let the states decide and let states that want to protect the millennia-old definition of marriage (do that). No one in Washington should be deciding that for everybody in the country,” said DeMint.
Three Martini Lunch 4/30/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad new emails reveal more evidence that the White House spun the Benghazi terrorist attack as reaction to an internet video even though it knew the truth. They also groan as the economy proved to be stagnant during the first quarter of 2014. And they discuss a scheme that defrauded taxpayers of more than $1.3 million in ink cartridges.
Is America Past the Tipping Point?
With the national debt continuing to soar, bloated government getting further entrenched and the nuclear American family in decline, America’s brightest days might seem to be behind her. But Heritage Foundation President and CEO Jim DeMint says our nation can rise stronger than ever simply by following the proven course that triggered greatness in the first place.
DeMint served in both the U.S. House and Senate before resigning in 2013 and taking the helm at Heritage. In his new book, “Falling in Love with America Again,” DeMint says he decided to apply his efforts to the private sector because making real change happen within the government proved to be very difficult.
With a national debt well north of $17 trillion, federal government gathering more power and families seemingly facing more challenges than ever, DeMint says it’s a fair question as to whether America can right the ship.
“An intellectual analysis of where we are would say we probably passed the tipping point. Technically, it’s going to be very difficult to turn around. That’s my head analysis. My heart analysis is that I know the spirit of freedom still runs deep within the hearts of millions and millions of Americans. I also know that this country has been blessed by God, it’s in His hands and that spiritual revival is still very possible in our country,” said DeMint.
“We’ve got a better chance of turning our country around than our founders did, winning a war of independence against Britain. The odds have been against us before. We can turn it around but only if people understand what’s wrong,” he said.
“If they continue to think, ‘Well, the Democrats aren’t doing it right in Washington, now lets try the Republicans’ version of national education or national health care,’ it doesn’t matter who’s in charge. The country is too big to manage and it was never intended to manage all the things it’s doing in Washington,” said DeMint.
In his book, DeMint highlights limited government approaches to issues ranging from health care to education to energy. The common thread among his proposals is the value of approaching issues as “small platoons” rather than in top-down ways through a growing federal government.
“Whether you’re looking at businesses, organizations or the government itself, the real innovations and solutions tend to come from the ground up. America was built that way. We were built from the ground up. We were a very decentralized country from the very beginning. The whole point of the Constitution was to keep us that way, with a very limited federal government and a vibrant, competitive system between the states,” said DeMint.
DeMint contends that as America moves away from those principle, we lose a big part of our identity. He says engaging in small platoons, as families, churches or other community groups is a proven path to success and is still the key to making America what we want it to be.
“As we become more like centrally-planned European countries, America is losing its uniqueness and we are losing a lot of the things that made us great and prosperous in the first place,” said DeMint.
“But most of the book is about little platoons still at work all over the country, creating better schools, developing our energy on private lands, even figuring out how to insure themselves without insurance companies for health care. These examples of success are all around us. The federal government continues to try to replace them, to punish them and to create incentives to do things the wrong way, in spite of all the evidence that what’s working in America is still coming from the ground up,” said DeMint.
Another critical component to a stable, growing and thriving society in DeMint’s eyes is strong families. He says big government programs have been a disaster for the American family.
“Unfortunately, the government, in its attempt to help the poor, have actually created more poverty and broken up families. By doing that, they create inter-generational poverty and many other social pathologies of drug use, high school dropouts and incarceration. A lot of that comes straight from broken families,” said DeMint.
DeMint knows first-hand that single-parent homes are not always avoidable, but he says the federal government is actively undermining the traditional family structure.
“I grew up in a home with a single mom, but we don’t need to arrange our charitable welfare programs in a way that means a mother can get help if she doesn’t have a husband in the home. So (government programs) discourage marriage and family formation. We seem to be doing everything we can at the federal level to discredit the traditional family, which all the statistics show you if a child grows up in a home with a mom and dad, they have the best chance of succeeding and very little chance of ever living in poverty despite where they started,” said Demint.
The 2014 midterm elections could be pivotal towards steering America in the right direction, according to DeMint. However, he says many states with conservative leaders are already proving that good policies at the state level are making life better for all citizens, especially the less fortunate.
“Look at what (Gov. Bobby) Jindal’s doing in Louisiana (on education). Look at what they’ve done in Florida with more choices. And look at the fact the children who benefit the most are often poor minority children, the ones they said that choice would hurt,” he said.
DeMint says when liberal policies run unchallenged we get crises like Detroit, but limited government approaches lead to well-run governments and economic success, such as in North Dakota’s energy production and the effort of Texas leaders to keep regulations few and taxes low.
“The answers are all around us and we don’t have to win all the battles in Washington. We just have to move the battles out of Washington and let the states compete. Once we do that, I think you’re going to see America return very quickly,” said DeMint.
Three Martini Lunch 4/29/14
Greg Corombos of Radio America and Jim Geraghty of National Review are glad to see the mainstream media ever so slightly begin to drop their instinct to protect President Obama at all times. They also groan as Secretary of State John Kerry warms Israel could be an apartheid state if it doesn’t come back to Middle East peace negotiations. And they slam House GOP leaders for vowing not to repeal Obamacare and to predict immigration reform passage this year.