A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN IMMIGRATION

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday on President Obama’s plan to selectively revoke the nation’s immigration laws by executive decree. (As the Journal notes, the administration is trying to craft orders that are “legally defensible.”) This latest news drew another blast of righteous indignation from Senator Jeff Sessions, who is Horatius at the bridge when it comes to defending the rights and interests of American workers:

The Wall Street Journal confirmed today that the President is planning to issue a massive unilateral executive amnesty after the election.

In its report, the WSJ certifies that this executive amnesty would provide work permits for illegal immigrants—taking jobs directly from struggling Americans.

Based on the USCIS contract bid and statements from USCIS employees, we know this executive immigration order is likely to be broader in scope than anyone has imagined.

Earlier this week, President Obama’s former head of Homeland Security revealed that she overrode resistance from administration lawyers and law enforcement agents in implementing the President’s earlier unlawful amnesty and work authorization program for illegal immigrants 30 and under. This was an open admission by one of the most senior people in government of violating one’s oath of office in order to accomplish a nakedly political aim.

The President is assuming for himself the sole and absolute power to decide who can enter, work, live, and claim benefits in the United States. He has exempted virtually every group in the world from America’s immigration laws: people who enter before a certain age, people related to people who enter before a certain age, adults traveling with minors, minors traveling with adults, illegal immigrants who are not convicted of serious crimes, illegal immigrants who are convicted of serious crimes but not enough serious crimes, almost anyone who shows up the border and demands asylum, the millions who overstay their visas, and, as was recently exposed, illegal immigrants with serious criminal histories. On and on it goes.

A nation creates borders and laws to protect its own citizens. What about their needs?

The President is systemically stripping away the immigration protections to which every single American worker and their family is entitled. He doesn’t care how this impacts Americans’ jobs, wages, schools, tax bills, hospitals, police departments, or communities.

But it gets worse still. The WSJ reports that the President is “expected to benefit businesses that use large numbers of legal immigrants, such as technology companies.” Those changes include measures to massively expand the number of foreign workers for IT companies—measures aggressively lobbied for by IT giants like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Yet we have more than 11 million Americans with STEM degrees who don’t have jobs in these fields. Rutgers professor Hal Salzman documented that two-thirds of all new IT jobs are being filled by foreign workers. From 2000 through today, a period of record legal immigration, all net gains in employment among the working-age have gone entirely to immigrant workers.

And now, in order to help open borders billionaires, President Obama is going to deny millions of Americans their shot at entering the middle class and a better life.

The world has turned upside down. Instead of serving the interests of the American people, the policies of President Obama and every Senate Democrat serve the needs of special interests and global CEOs who fail to understand the duty a nation owes to its own people. But the citizens of this country still hold the power, and through their voice, they can turn the country right-side again.

And they will do so, I predict, in every competitive race where the Republican candidate has made immigration and defense of American workers centerpieces of his or her campaign.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/10/a-world-turned-upside-down.php

War against Isis: US air strategy in tatters as militants march on

War against Isis: US air strategy in tatters as militants march on
by PATRICK COCKBURN

World View: American-led air attacks are failing. Jihadis are close to taking Kobani, in Syria – and in Iraq western Baghdad is now under serious threat

America's plans to fight Islamic State are in ruins as the militant group's fighters come close to capturing Kobani and have inflicted a heavy defeat on the Iraqi army west of Baghdad.
The US-led air attacks launched against Islamic State (also known as Isis) on 8 August in Iraq and 23 September in Syria have not worked. President Obama's plan to "degrade and destroy" Islamic State has not even begun to achieve success. In both Syria and Iraq, Isis is expanding its control rather than contracting.

Isis reinforcements have been rushing towards Kobani in the past few days to ensure that they win a decisive victory over the Syrian Kurdish town's remaining defenders. The group is willing to take heavy casualties in street fighting and from air attacks in order to add to the string of victories it has won in the four months since its forces captured Mosul, the second-largest city in Iraq, on 10 June. Part of the strength of the fundamentalist movement is a sense that there is something inevitable and divinely inspired about its victories, whether it is against superior numbers in Mosul or US airpower at Kobani.

In the face of a likely Isis victory at Kobani, senior US officials have been trying to explain away the failure to save the Syrian Kurds in the town, probably Isis's toughest opponents in Syria. "Our focus in Syria is in degrading the capacity of [Isis] at its core to project power, to command itself, to sustain itself, to resource itself," said US Deputy National Security Adviser Tony Blinken, in a typical piece of waffle designed to mask defeat. "The tragic reality is that in the course of doing that there are going to be places like Kobani where we may or may not be able to fight effectively."

Unfortunately for the US, Kobani isn't the only place air strikes are failing to stop Isis. In an offensive in Iraq launched on 2 October but little reported in the outside world, Isis has captured almost all the cities and towns it did not already hold in Anbar province, a vast area in western Iraq that makes up a quarter of the country. It has captured Hit, Kubaisa and Ramadi, the provincial capital, which it had long fought for. Other cities, towns and bases on or close to the Euphrates River west of Baghdad fell in a few days, often after little resistance by the Iraqi Army which showed itself to be as dysfunctional as in the past, even when backed by US air strikes.

Today, only the city of Haditha and two bases, Al-Assad military base near Hit, and Camp Mazrah outside Fallujah, are still in Iraqi government hands. Joel Wing, in his study –"Iraq's Security Forces Collapse as The Islamic State Takes Control of Most of Anbar Province" – concludes: "This was a huge victory as it gives the insurgents virtual control over Anbar and poses a serious threat to western Baghdad".

The battle for Anbar, which was at the heart of the Sunni rebellion against the US occupation after 2003, is almost over and has ended with a decisive victory for Isis. It took large parts of Anbar in January and government counter-attacks failed dismally with some 5,000 casualties in the first six months of the year. About half the province's 1.5 million population has fled and become refugees. The next Isis target may be the Sunni enclaves in western Baghdad, starting with Abu Ghraib on the outskirts but leading right to the centre of the capital.

The Iraqi government and its foreign allies are drawing comfort, there having been some advances against Isis in the centre and north of the country. But north and north-east of Baghdad the successes have not been won by the Iraqi army but by highly sectarian Shia militias which do not distinguish between Isis and the rest of the Sunni population. They speak openly of getting rid of Sunni in mixed provinces such as Diyala where they have advanced. The result is that Sunni in Iraq have no alternative but to stick with Isis or flee, if they want to survive. The same is true north-west of Mosul on the border with Syria, where Iraqi Kurdish forces, aided by US air attacks, have retaken the important border crossing of Rabia, but only one Sunni Arab remained in the town. Ethnic and sectarian cleansing has become the norm in the war in both Iraq and Syria. The US's failure to save Kobani, if it falls, will be a political as well as military disaster. Indeed, the circumstances surrounding the loss of the beleaguered town are even more significant than the inability so far of air strikes to stop Isis taking 40 per cent of it. At the start of the bombing in Syria, President Obama boasted of putting together a coalition of Sunni powers such as Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Jordan, United Arab Emirates and Bahrain to oppose Isis, but these all have different agendas to the US in which destroying IS is not the first priority. The Sunni Arab monarchies may not like Isis, which threatens the political status quo, but, as one Iraqi observer put it, "they like the fact that Isis creates more problems for the Shia than it does for them".

Of the countries supposedly uniting against Isis, by the far most important is Turkey because it shares a 510-mile border with Syria across which rebels of all sorts, including Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, have previously passed with ease. This year the Turks have tightened border security, but since its successes in the summer Isis no longer needs sanctuary, supplies and volunteers from outside to the degree it once did.

In the course of the past week it has become clear that Turkey considers the Syrian Kurd political and military organisations, the PYD and YPG, as posing a greater threat to it than the Islamic fundamentalists. Moreover, the PYD is the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), which has been fighting for Kurdish self-rule in Turkey since 1984.

Ever since Syrian government forces withdrew from the Syrian Kurdish enclaves or cantons on the border with Turkey in July 2012, Ankara has feared the impact of self-governing Syrian Kurds on its own 15 million-strong Kurdish population.

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would prefer Isis to control Kobani, not the PYD. When five PYD members, who had been fighting Isis at Kobani, were picked up by the Turkish army as they crossed the border last week they were denounced as "separatist terrorists".

Turkey is demanding a high price from the US for its co-operation in attacking Isis, such as a Turkish-controlled buffer zone inside Syria where Syrian refugees are to live and anti-Assad rebels are to be trained. Mr Erdogan would like a no-fly zone which will also be directed against the government in Damascus since Isis has no air force. If implemented the plan would mean Turkey, backed by the US, would enter the Syrian civil war on the side of the rebels, though the anti-Assad forces are dominated by Isis and Jabhat al-Nusra, the al-Qaeda affiliate.

It is worth keeping in mind that Turkey's actions in Syria since 2011 have been a self-defeating blend of hubris and miscalculation. At the start of the uprising, it could have held the balance between the government and its opponents. Instead, it supported the militarisation of the crisis, backed the jihadis and assumed Assad would soon be defeated. This did not happen and what had been a popular uprising became dominated by sectarian warlords who flourished in conditions created by Turkey. Mr Erdogan is assuming he can disregard the rage of the Turkish Kurds at what they see as his complicity with Isis against the Syrian Kurds. This fury is already deep, with 33 dead, and is likely to get a great deal worse if Kobani falls.

Why doesn't Ankara worry more about the collapse of the peace process with the PKK that has maintained a ceasefire since 2013? It may believe that the PKK is too heavily involved in fighting Isis in Syria that it cannot go back to war with the government in Turkey. On the other hand, if Turkey does join the civil war in Syria against Assad, a crucial ally of Iran, then Iranian leaders have said that "Turkey will pay a price". This probably means that Iran will covertly support an armed Kurdish insurgency in Turkey. Saddam Hussein made a somewhat similar mistake to Mr Erdogan when he invaded Iran in 1980, thus leading Iran to reignite the Kurdish rebellion that Baghdad had crushed through an agreement with the Shah in 1975. Turkish military intervention in Syria might not end the war there, but it may well spread the fighting to Turkey.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/war-against-isis-us-strategy-in-tatters-as-militants-march-on-9789230.html

If It Damages America, It’s Good for Democrats

If It Damages America, It’s Good for Democrats

In almost every area of American life, the better things are, the worse it is for the Democratic Party. And vice versa.

Marriage.

Even today, after decades of feminism, most Americans agree that it is better for women (and for men) — and better for society — when women (and men) marry. Yet, when women marry, it is bad for the Democratic Party; and when women do not marry, even after — or shall we say,especially after — having children, it is quite wonderful for the Democratic Party.

Married women vote Republican. Unmarried women lopsidedly vote Democrat.

It is both silly and dishonest to deny that it is in the Democrats’ interest that women not marry.

Blacks.

Blacks who are not angry at America, especially white America, are more likely than those who harbor such anger to vote Republican. On the other hand, the more a black American considers America a racist society, the more he or she is a guaranteed Democratic voter.

Therefore, it is in the Democratic Party’s interest to ensure that as many blacks as possible regard America negatively. If Democrats feel it will benefit their party, they will play with fire — the fire of violence. Take Ferguson, Missouri. No Democrat or Republican knows what happened in Ferguson just before a black teenager was shot by a white policeman. The only thing almost any American has known about Ferguson is that a white police officer shot and killed a black teenager. Yet, while blacks in Ferguson demonstrated, some violently, the reaction of Democrats — both politicians and the mainstream left-wing media — has been to side with the demonstrators.

There does not appear to be any level of black anger at white America that is too much for Democrats, who would rather see riots — no matter how unwarranted — than potentially lose black votes.

Latinos.

The more a Latino assimilates into American society, the more likely he or she is to vote Republican. On the other hand, the more Latinos continue to identify with the country they or their parents fled, the more likely they are to vote Democrat.

Thus, Democrats and the rest of the Left have engaged in two massive undertakings for decades: One has been to label Republicans “nativist,” “anti-Hispanic,” “xenophobic” and “anti-immigrant.” The other has been to promote “multiculturalism,” the anti-assimilation doctrine that cultivates ethnic identity over American identity.

Democrats repeatedly assert that America is “a nation of immigrants.” This is undeniable. But there is a big difference today. In the past, nearly all immigrants sought to become American and to shed their previous national or ethnic identity. Today, many, perhaps a majority of, immigrants from Latin America do not have that goal. They come primarily or exclusively for economic benefits (and no one should blame them for doing so). Meanwhile, under cover of “multiculturalism,” Democrats and the rest of the Left cultivate these immigrants’ Latin American identities, knowing that the more American an immigrant feels, the less likely he or she is to vote Democrat.

Victim identity.

Americans who do not see themselves as victims — of an “unfair” or “racist” or “misogynist” society — are more likely to vote Republican. On the other hand, Americans who see themselves as victims of American society are likely to vote Democrat.

Therefore, the Democratic Party and its supportive media cultivate victimhood among almost all Americans who are not white and male.

Dependency.

The more Americans depend on themselves or on their family or community, the more likely they are to vote Republican. On the other hand, the more Americans depend on the government — whether for a job or for economic assistance — the more likely they are to vote Democrat. Therefore, it is in the Democrats’ interest to have more and more Americans depend on the state.

In other words, in almost every area of life, the better things are, the worse it is for the Democratic Party. Democrats have placed themselves in the role of benefiting from social and moral dysfunction.

And they have embraced this role. The Democratic Party cultivates singlehood, black anger at America, Latino separatism, victimhood, group grievance and dependency on government. Nor is this the only way in which Democrats do terrible damage to America. They are also tearing America apart, setting women against men (with such falsehoods as “the war on women,” “the rape culture” at American colleges, and the nonsense that “women are paid less for the same work”), blacks against whites, and Latinos against other Americans. They do this because the less women see men as an enemy, the less blacks regard whites as an enemy, and the more Latinos see themselves as Americans, the worse it is for Democrats.

The Democratic Party has been become a wholly destructive force in this country. Even though you may not intend to, if you vote for any Democrat, you contribute to that damage.

http://www.dennisprager.com/damages-america-good-democrats/

Spending: Our Grave Disease

Spending: Our Grave Disease 
Representative Rick Crawford proposes a cure. 

By Ben Carson

• 

 

Ben Carson 

I have had a fulfilling career as a pediatric neurosurgeon, which unfortunately included numerous instances in which worst-case scenarios played out in the operating room. Good surgeons plan ahead for these possible events so that bad outcomes are minimized. But of course, few treatment plans will succeed if the doctor continually fails to make a proper diagnosis before surgery begins.

When I look at our nation’s massive federal debt, it is clear that Washington has chronically misdiagnosed the situation, which has resulted in a seemingly never-ending cycle of borrowing and spending. The situation is much like a life-threatening disease: If the underlying cause is left unaddressed, patient recovery seldom occurs.

Bold leaders in both parties have warned for years that entitlement spending is the major driver of unsustainable deficits, and they have further advised that Washington implement policies to address this problem. While it is distressing to see continued inaction, what troubles me more is that virtually no one has addressed the underlying cause. In other words, why were programs created in such a manner that they would eventually become so financially upside-down that our entire economy would be in jeopardy? Furthermore, can and should we do something to ensure that future entitlement programs are created carefully and responsibly?

Let’s look at recent history. In the past ten years, projected deficits for entitlements created long ago, such as Social Security and Medicare, have grown dramatically. In fact, existing entitlement programs consume about 60 percent of all federal spending. During this time, much political effort has been expended — unsuccessfully — trying to reform these programs. I’m not saying this wasn’t an important effort. But if these programs are not reformed soon, they will consume 100 percent of projected federal revenue within the next three decades. Imagine that: Our children and grandchildren either will be faced with a federal government that has no money for defense, roads, and education, or the tax burden will double on citizens.

Sadly, while Congress was busy failing to fix these existing problems, it passed two new entitlement programs, both of which will only worsen our budgetary shortfalls. These programs create permanent commitments by the federal government to provide expensive services to people indefinitely, regardless of whether the nation can afford to do so. So, not only have we failed to stop the bleeding, but we also have managed to cause significantly more.

Setting aside the political debate about these two programs — one passed by Democrats, the other by Republicans — are any of us comfortable with the notion that permanent spending programs that grow on autopilot forever can be created as easily as Congress names a post office — by a simple one-vote majority? I understand allowing Congress to pass bills with simple majorities that benefit current constituents, but shouldn’t a bill that is going to affect generations to come require a greater threshold than a short-term partisan majority of as small as a single vote? Shouldn’t such grant programs require greater debate, more bipartisanship, some level of consensus and, of course, fiscal responsibility? Absolutely.

Fortunately, there are some in Congress with real solutions. Representative Rick Crawford, an Arkansas Republican, in conjunction with PreserveOurFuture.org, has properly diagnosed this problem and started crafting a superb treatment plan. Their “Super Program Amendment” would impose two new requirements: 1) a two-thirds-majority vote to pass any new permanent entitlement program and 2) no additional deficit spending for new entitlements created in the future. Imagine if such an amendment had been passed by Congress (and ratified by the states) as part of the budget reforms of the 1990s. Instead of seeing our unfunded obligations grow by tens of trillions of dollars, we would actually be in better financial health to deal with the unsustainable growth of entitlements today.

As a physician, I believe in prevention — namely, taking those prudent steps now that can dramatically improve health down the road. The Super Program Amendment would ensure that short-term partisan majorities cannot do more harm to the fiscal health of our nation, giving us the time we need to find consensus on fixing the nation’s other serious problems. Those problems affect everyone regardless of political affiliation, and we must all act as patriotic Americans to resolve them. 

— Ben Carson is professor emeritus of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins University and author of the new book One Nation: What We Can All Do to Save America’s Future. © 2014 The Washington Times. Distributed by Creators.com

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391449/spending-our-grave-disease-ben-carson

Our Make-It-Up World

Our Make-It-Up World 
Facts now pale in comparison with the higher truths of progressivism. 

By Victor Davis Hanson

WIth a wave of his hand... (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Victor Davis Hanson 

Do bothersome facts matter anymore?

Not really. This is an age when Americans were assured that the Affordable Care Act lowered our premiums. It cut deductibles. Obamacare allowed us to keep our doctors and health plans, and lowered the deficit. Those fantasies were both demonstrably untrue and did not matter, given the supposedly noble aims of health care reform.

The Islamic State is at times dubbed jayvee, a manageable problem, and a dangerous enemy — or anything the administration wishes it to be, depending on the political climate of any given week.

Some days Americans are told there is no reason to restrict connecting flights from Ebola-ravaged countries. Then, suddenly, entry from those countries is curtailed to five designated U.S. airports. Quarantines are both necessary and not so critical, as the administration weighs public concern versus politically correct worries over isolating a Third World African country.

Ebola is so hard to catch that there is no reason to worry about causal exposures to those without clear symptoms. But then why do health authorities still try to hunt down anyone who had even a brief encounter with supposedly asymptomatic carriers?

The deaths of four Americans in Benghazi were caused by a video that sparked a riot, and then apparently not. Various narratives about corruption and incompetence at the VA, IRS, NSA, GSA and Secret Service are raised and then dropped. The larger truth is that these scandals must be quarantined from infecting the president’s progressive agenda.

Laws used to be real, not abstract. Again, not anymore. The administration sort of enacts some elements of Obamacare but ignores others. Enforcement of federal immigration law is negotiable, likewise depending on the campaign cycle.

The Tawana Brawley case, the Duke men’s lacrosse team accusations, and the O. J. Simpson verdict were constructed fantasies. No one cared much about the inconvenient facts or the lies that destroyed people’s lives — given that myths were deemed useful facts for achieving larger racial justice.

It no longer really matters much what the grand jury will find in the Michael Brown fatal-shooting case. Whether he had just robbed a store, was high on drugs, was walking down the middle of the road and prompted a violent confrontation with a police officer, or whether the officer was the aggressor in the confrontation, these have become mere competing narratives. The facts pale in comparison with the higher truth that Brown was black and unarmed, while Officer Darren Wilson white and armed. The latter scenario is all that matters.

Language is useful for inventing new realities. “Illegal alien” is a time-tested noun denoting foreign citizens who crossed a national border contrary to law. “Undocumented immigrant” is now used to diminish the bothersome fact that millions have broken and continue to break the law.

To play down the dangers of radical Islam, an entire array of circumlocutions — “workplace violence” (in the case of the Fort Hood shooting) “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters” — were the euphemisms evoked by members of the Obama administration to construct an alternate reality in which radical jihadists are no more dangerous than disgruntled office workers or gale-force winds.

Many of the current campus poster icons are abject myths. Che Guevara, for all his hipster appearance, was no revolutionary hero, but a murderer who enjoyed personally executing his political opponents. Communist leader Angela Davis was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the totalitarian Soviet Union.

Plagiarism and making stuff up are no longer considered serious offenses against the truth. Lots of notable columnists or historians have had to confess to lifting the work of others and passing it off as their own — Maureen Dowd, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Fareed Zakaria, and the late Stephen Ambrose, to name a few. Most faced slaps on the wrist.

Even Vice President Joe Biden once had to drop a presidential bid due to accusations that he had plagiarized in law school and later had copied a speech from a British Labor politician. Barack Obama has had to acknowledge that in his autobiographical memoir, he used “composite characters” in some cases rather than actual people from his life. Sympathetic biographer David Remnick characterized Obama’s life story as “a mixture of verifiable fact, recollection, re-creation, invention, and artful shaping.”

Such disregard for truth and facts is no accident, but the fruit of postmodernism. So-called “after modern” thought was a trendy late-20th-century way to reduce facts to stories.

Progressives believed that because traditional protocols, language, and standards were usually created by stuffy old establishment types, the rules no longer necessarily should apply. Instead, particular narratives and euphemisms that promoted perceived social justice became truthful. Bothersome facts were discarded.

So far, political mythmaking has become confined to popular culture and politics, and has not affected the ironclad facts and non-negotiable rules of jetliner maintenance, heart surgery, or nuclear-plant operation. Yet the Ebola scare has taught us that even the erroneous news releases and fluid policies of the CDC can be as likely based on politics as hard science.

If that is a vision of more relativist things to come, then we are doomed.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a classicist and historian at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and the author, most recently, of The Savior Generals. You can reach him by e-mailing author@victorhanson.com. © 2014 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391404/our-make-it-world-victor-davis-hanson

Obama’s Empathy Problem

Obama’s Empathy Problem 
On issue after issue, the president telegraphs indifference to Americans’ well-being. 

By Mona Charen

• 

(White House via Flickr)

 

Mona Charen 

Can you walk out on the messiah? Appearing at a campaign rally for gubernatorial candidate Anthony Brown in Maryland on Sunday, President Obama sought to capture the magic that had electrified audiences in 2008 and, to some considerable degree, even in 2012. Obama isn’t doing much stumping this year. He limits his campaigning mostly to fundraisers. This is the year, after all, when Democratic candidates are announcing how important it is in our system of government to have honest disagreements with the president. They’re hastening to say that they would be tougher than he is on the Islamic State. They are declaring that a travel ban from West Africa is only common sense. It’s the year when some have discovered a sacred Constitutional right to keep silent about whom they voted for in 2008 and 2012.

Maryland is an exception. It’s about as safe a Democratic state as you can find, and the president was welcomed. The audience at the rally was largely African-American. And yet, according to Reuters, “a steady stream of people walked out of the auditorium while he spoke . . . and a heckler interrupted his remarks.”
Could it be that even loyal Democrats — even those who want to see Obama in the flesh — feel that they’ve heard it all before? Their actions send a clear signal: We think you’re a historical figure worth laying eyes on, but your words no longer interest us.

In 2012, reluctant to encourage a referendum on the first four years of his leadership, President Obama successfully turned attention away from his record and towards Mitt Romney and the Republicans. The race became (with the unwitting cooperation of several cloddish Republican candidates), not about the economy or jobs or debt or America’s global retreat, but about saving American women from medieval inquisitors and shielding Hispanics from mass deportation.

Democratic candidates in 2014 are, if anything, even more eager to turn attention away from the president’s performance in the past two years. The economy has not improved. Obamacare’s debut was a debacle. Foreign policy is a shambles, government agencies from the IRS to the Secret Service are loose canons, and Ebola threatens.

Democrats are attempting to reprise some of the themes that worked in 2012, notably the “war on women.” But not even that fright mask seems to be working anymore. Senator Mark Udall’s campaign in Colorado was wall-to-wall gynecology — to the point where he was ridiculed as “Mark Uterus.” The Denver Post was so disgusted that it endorsed his opponent, Representative Cory Gardner. Like other “war on women” attacks, Udall’s accusations were false. He asserted that Gardner had run an “eight-year campaign to outlaw birth control.” Gardner swatted the lie away with ads touting his support for selling contraceptive pills over the counter (a technique originated by Bobby Jindal).

Democrats are struggling not just because the economy is stagnant and the world is in chaos. They are paying the price for something else: President Obama has squandered the greatest asset he had — the perception among Americans that he cared about their problems.

President Obama telegraphs indifference to Americans’ well-being. When the Benghazi compound was overrun and our ambassador killed, he first dissembled (blaming a video) and then thundered about retribution and justice, but what happened? With the exception of one arrest, Benghazi has been dumped. No one has paid a price for that attack on the U.S.

The president permitted the Islamic State menace to metastasize and dismissed the terrorist army as “jayvee,” even as his national-security advisers were testifying before Congress that the group was a profound worry. When stories surfaced later that the president attended only 40 percent of his intelligence briefings in person, it fed the impression that President Obama doesn’t take the time to evaluate threats to the country. He now blames the intelligence community, but a man who goes golfing after an American is beheaded is signaling a certain coldness.

The response to Ebola underlines all of these tendencies in thick, black ink. His instinct has been to tamp down fears rather than address threats with alacrity. He is willing to send U.S. troops to Africa to fight Ebola but not to Iraq to fight the Islamic State. The administration’s resistance to a travel ban makes no sense if the top priority is the safety of Americans.

In 2012, most people still believed that Obama cared. How many do today?

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. © 2014 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390744/obamas-empathy-problem-mona-charen

An Election About Everything

BY STEPHEN F. HAYES

At long last, the conventional wisdom about the 2014 midterms is here: It’s an election about nothing.

OBAMA VOTES EARLY IN CHICAGO, OCTOBER 20, 2014.

NEWSCOM

The Washington Post may have been first in declaring the coming midterms “kind of—and apologies toSeinfeld here—an election about nothing.” But the Daily Beast chimed in: “America seems resigned to a Seinfeldelection in 2014—a campaign about nothing.” And New York magazine noted (and embraced) the cliché: The midterm election “has managed to earn a nickname from the political press: the ‘Seinfeld Election,’ an election about nothing.”

Soon enough this description was popping up everywhere—the New Republic, the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor, Bloomberg,Politico, and many others. The 2014 Midterms, the Seinfeld Election.

Others posited something even worse. “The 2014 campaign has been the most boring and uncreative campaign I can remember,” wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks. That wasn’t harsh enough for Chris Cillizza at the Washington Post, who went further. The election isn’t just “boring,” he wrote, “it’s vapid and inconsequential.”

The big television networks seem to agree. The signature newscasts of ABC, NBC, and CBS have barely found the upcoming elections worthy of notice. According to the Media Research Center, ABC’sWorld News Tonight didn’t run a single story about the midterms between September 1 and October 20. Over that same seven-week period, NBC and CBS evening newscasts ran just 11 and 14 stories, respectively. (It probably goes without saying that the networks found the prospective Democratic triumph in the 2006 midterms much more compelling. Over the same time period that year, NBC ran 65 stories about the midterms, CBS ran 58, and ABC ran 36.)

We have a different view.

Not only is this election not about nothing, it is being fought over exactly the kinds of things that ought to determine our elections.

It’s about the size and scope of government. It’s about the rule of law. It’s about the security of the citizenry. It’s about competence. It’s about integrity. It’s about honor.

It’s about a government that makes promises to those who have defended the country and then fails those veterans, again and again and again. It’s about a president who offers soothing reassurances on his sweeping health care reforms and shrugs his shoulders when consumers learn those assurances were fraudulent. It’s about government websites that cost billions but don’t function and about “smart power” that isn’t very smart. It’s about an administration that cares more about ending wars than winning them, and that claims to have decimated an enemy one day only to find that that enemy is still prosecuting its war against us the next. It’s about shifting red lines and failed resets. It’s about a president who ignores restrictions on his power when they don’t suit him and who unilaterally rewrites laws that inconvenience him. It’s about a powerful federal agency that targets citizens because of their political beliefs and a White House that claims ignorance of what its agents are up to because government is too “vast.” In sum, this is an election about a president who promised to restore faith in government and by every measure has done the opposite.

As even Barack Obama acknowledges, the upcoming election is about his policies and those elected officials who have supported them. It’s about an electorate determined to hold someone responsible for the policy failures that have defined this administration and the scandals that have consumed it—even if many in the fourth estate will not.

And it’s about time.

Our politics is healthier when candidates in both major parties win election because they’ve campaigned on a policy agenda. We hope that the Republicans who run for president in 2016 will engage in a detailed and thorough-going debate on substance and ideas.

But much of the political debate this year has unavoidably focused on Barack Obama and his performance as president. Most voters think he’s done a lousy job and disagree with his policies and priorities. Democrats have supported him. Republicans have opposed him. That’s what will matter on November 4.

And that’s not nothing.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/election-about-everything_817063.html?utm_source=newsletters&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=JVL+10_29_14#

The Voter-ID Myth Crashes

The Voter-ID Myth Crashes 
Enough non-citizens vote to decide close elections, a new study shows. Guess which party they favor? 

By Mona Charen

Mona Charen 

Democrats want everyone to vote: old, young, white, black, Hispanic, Asian, citizen, non-citizen. Wait, what was that last one again? We’ll get to that.

Voter-ID laws, passed by thirty states so far, are efforts by legislatures to ensure the integrity of votes. Being asked to show a photo ID can diminish several kinds of fraud, including impersonation, duplicate registrations in different jurisdictions, and voting by ineligible people including felons and non-citizens.

The Democrats have made a number of arguments against voter-ID laws. They argue a) that the problem of voter impersonation or in-person voter fraud is nonexistent; b) that black and poor voters are more likely than others to lack a valid ID; and c) that Republicans are attempting to “suppress” the votes of Democratic constituencies in a bid to revive Jim Crow. 

To believe a), you must assume that Americans, who engage in widespread tax evasion (an estimated $2 trillion in income goes unreported), insurance fraud (an estimated $80 billion dollar’s worth in 2006), identity theft (15 million victims annually), and thousands of other deceptions and crimes large and small are perfect angels when they step into the voting booth. Vote fraud simply “doesn’t exist,” pronounced Attorney General Eric Holder.

It’s extremely difficult to track vote fraud. Most states put only half-hearted efforts into purging their voter-registration rolls of the dead or those who’ve moved out of state. Prosecutions for vote fraud are rare. But prosecutions for perjury are rare, too — and not because it “doesn’t exist.” Earlier this year, the Virginia Voters Alliance found that more than 44,000 people were simultaneously registered to vote in Maryland and Virginia. Catherine Englebrecht’s True the Vote found some 6.9 million overlapping voter registrations in the 28 states they examined. For those unburdened by conscience who live close to the border, it’s more than possible to vote early and often.

Being registered in more than one jurisdiction doesn’t prove that you committed fraud, only that you’ve arranged things to permit it or that you’ve overlooked, perhaps by absent-mindedness, this detail of good citizenship. But persuasive evidence that vote fraud is both real and consequential has appeared. A new academic paper published in the journal Electoral Studies provides evidence of voting by non-citizens that directly contradicts the Democrats’ “nothing to see here” mantra. Under the neutral headline “Do Non-Citizens Vote in U.S. Elections?” three professors from Virginia universities answer in the affirmative. Using an enormous database of voters nationwide (32,800 from 2008, and 55,400 in 2012), the authors find that about one-quarter of the non-citizens who participated in the survey were registered to vote.

Studying survey responses, the authors judge that non-citizen voters tend to favor Democratic candidates by large margins.

In many states, their participation wouldn’t be large enough to make a difference, but in North Carolina in 2008, the authors calculate, non-citizens may well have tipped the state into Obama’s column. “So what?” you may say. Even if John McCain had won that state, it wouldn’t have changed the outcome of the national election. True, but remember the presidential race in 2000? Remember “hanging chad” Florida?

Several House seats, and one very significant Senate seat, were probably won by Democrats on the strength of illegal votes. In 2008, the authors note, Senator Al Franken won by just 312 votes in Minnesota. That seat was the sixtieth vote to give Democrats a filibuster-proof supermajority to pass major legislation such as Obamacare. “[Voting] participation by just 0.65 percent of non-citizens in Minnesota is sufficient to account for the entirety of Franken’s margin,” the authors write. “Our best guess is that nearly ten times as many voted.”

Voter-ID laws will not prevent non-citizens from voting. Green-card holders and even illegal aliens get driver’s licenses. But that’s not an argument against voter ID. It’s an argument for issuing driver’s licenses that specify non-citizenship.

As for blacks being “targeted” by voter-ID laws, a study by Reuters found almost no difference (2 versus 3 percent) in the number of white and black voters who lacked ID.

Voting is a semi-sacred act of civic religion. Trust that only those eligible are determining our future as a nation is the foundation of civic peace. Voter-ID laws should be just one part of ensuring voter integrity. When Democrats resist those measures, it only feeds suspicion that they’re trying to steal elections.

— Mona Charen is a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. © 2014 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391262/voter-id-myth-crashes-mona-charen

Up in Flames

Up in Flames 
The spectacular self-immolation of the Wendy R. Davis gubernatorial campaign. 

By Michelle Malkin

• 

 

Michelle Malkin 

Wendy Russell Davis is on fire. And I don’t mean that in a good way.

I mean it in a five-alarm, set-her-own-skirt-aflame, billowing-human-torch kind of way. To say that Davis is smokin’ hot is not a compliment. It’s a campaign incineration status update.

The Democratic darling of the Hollywood Left and glamour gal of abortion thought her path to the Texas governor’s mansion would be a pink-sneakered walk in the park. Instead, her single-issue campaign has combusted.

The high point of Davis’s career came last year when she flamboyantly opposed state restrictions on late-term abortions in the wake of Philadelphia death-doc abortionist Kermit Gosnell’s baby-killing spree. Gosnell’s conviction provoked national revulsion at abortion gone wild. But Davis’s radical supporters at the Texas Capitol donned tampon earrings and waved uterus flags in solidarity with abortion rights at any cost. Planned Parenthood ghouls and celebrity femmes latched on to La Davis.

Militant gender-identity politics, however, can only get you so far.

Davis’s gubernatorial bid the past month has been a series of unfortunate, cringe-inducing events exposing her empty soul. Last week, she insanely accused her opponent, Republican state attorney general Greg Abbott, of wanting to ban “interracial marriage.” Abbott’s wife, Cecilia, is the Hispanic granddaughter of Mexican immigrants.

The week before, Davis ridiculed Abbott’s physical disability with a vulgar TV ad featuring an empty wheelchair. Abbott was paralyzed in 1984 when a tree fell on top of him while he was jogging. In response to a bipartisan backlash against her crass campaign insensitivity, Davis doubled down by attacking Abbott for lacking “empathy” — while she cynically surrounded herself at a damage-control press event with disabled human shields (one of whom had to be dragged away from the podium by a Davis staffer while the crowd waited in awkward silence for the next speaker).

To bolster her Girl Power bona fides, the Davis campaign disseminated a photo of young female “friends” posing on Twitter last week after voting for the Democratic candidate. The tweet carried the hashtag “#GenWendy.” Like, you know, “Generation Wendy.” The photo, however, turned out to be a pilfered image of young Virginia College Republicans getting out the vote for GOP gubernatorial candidate Ed Gillespie. “All out of support, Wendy?” a Virginia CR spokeswoman jibed. The “imaginary friends” of Wendy became a social-media mockfest.

Desperate for positive press, Wendy welcomed New York City liberal Jon Stewart to Austin, Texas, for a last-ditch appeal on his comedy show Wednesday night. Quel appropriate: a professional clown propping up a miserable joke of a candidacy. Trailing in all the major polls, bleeding cash, and abandoned by women voters by double digits, Davis turned to Stewart to get out the vote and pump up anemic sales of her book, Forgetting to Be Afraid.

Stewart forgot to mention the trail of discredited autobiographical details Davis exploited to gain a national platform. The Dallas Morning News reported earlier this year that she “blurred” several “key facts” of her rags-to-riches story. As feminists hailed the single mother for putting herself through Harvard University while caring for two young daughters, it emerged that a second husband had taken custody of Wendy’s girls, cashed in his 401(k), and secured a loan to support her higher ambitions.

Which-Way Wendy tried to pivot from her biography botch by becoming a born-again Second Amendment–rights advocate (after working to ban gun shows while serving on the Fort Worth city council).

Me-Too Wendy attempted to burnish her border-control credentials by supporting Republican calls for an Ebola travel ban from West African countries (after earlier attacking Abbott over his “‘stop the invasion’ rhetoric” and accusing him of disliking “people who don’t look like him.”

And in the ghastliest turnaround since Linda Blair’s head spin in The Exorcist, No-Shame Wendy claimed she would support legislation banning abortions after 20 weeks — after vaulting into the national spotlight with her 13-hour back-brace-and-comfy-shoes-aided filibuster on the Texas Senate floor last year against the very bill that would have outlawed late-term abortions and cracked down on filthy, dangerous abortion clinics like the one serial baby-killer Gosnell operated for 15 years thanks to shoddy government oversight and abortion-rights apathy.

Callous evil is as callous evil does.

The lady-parts-obsessed liberal bet all her feminist marbles on her chromosomes. After Election Day, all Wendy Davis will have to show for it are well-coifed selfies and the ashes of her Vogue magazine fashion photo spread.

— Michelle Malkin is the author of Culture of Corruption: Obama and His Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks and Cronies (Regnery, 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com. © 2014 Creators.com

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/391371/flames-michelle-malkin