THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION TAKES A DIVE TO MAKE SURE NON-CITIZENS CAN VOTE

BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN LAW, OBAMA-LYNCH JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, VOTER FRAUD

Several left-wing organizations are fighting against efforts by states to make sure non-citizens can’t vote in the upcoming presidential elections. The leftists came up short when the federal election agency charged with resolving such matters ruled against them.

But the leftist groups challenged this ruling in federal court, and the Obama-Loretta Lynch Justice Department has decided to take a dive. It is not opposing the lawsuit to enjoin the election agency’s decision in favor of the sates.

Hans von Spakovsky provides the background. In essence, it is as follows:

The Constitution (Article I, Secion 2 and the Seventeenth Amendment) confers upon states the power to set the “Qualification requisite for electors.” The left, however, would prefer to see this power exercised by federal bureaucrats in Washington, D.C.

Their vehicle for the exercise of such power is the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (EAC) — an independent federal agency, or so it is supposed to be. Under federal law, the EAC is responsible for designing the federal voter-registration form required by the National Voter Registration Act, known as Motor Voter. While states must register voters who use the federal form, they can ask the EAC to include instructions with the federal form about additional state registration requirements.

Some states now require satisfactory proof of citizenship to ensure that only citizens register to vote. When Arizona sought to do so, the usual suspects — the League of Women Voters, People for the American Way, Common Cause, Project Vote, and Chicanos for La Causa — brought a lawsuit claiming that the EAC hadn’t approved such requirements.

In 2013, a divided Supreme Court said that Arizona could not implement such a requirement unless and until the EAC agrees to change the instructions for use of the federal form to include the Arizona requirements. However, the majority opinion, written by Justice Scalia, stipulated that if the EAC refuses Arizona’s request to accommodate the proof-of-citizenship requirement, the state can sue the EAC and establish in court that “a mere oath will not suffice to effectuate its citizenship requirement and that the EAC is therefore under a nondiscretionary duty to include Arizona’s concrete evidence requirement on the Federal Form.”

Arizona duly asked the EAC to approve its requirement that voters prove their citizenship. The EAC, via a single bureaucrat who was not even a commissioner, but only the acting executive director, denied the request.

According to von Spakovsky, sources in the Justice Department say that this EAC bureaucrat did not make the decision. Instead, partisan, left-wing lawyers in the Voting Section of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department actually drafted the denial letter.

If so, this seems like a fundamental violation of the EAC’s charter. It is supposed to be an independent federal agency, free from the influence of the executive — an inherently partisan player.

Having lawyers from the highly partisan DOJ Voting Section write agency policy obliterates all semblance of independence and bipartisan balance. It would be outrageous (albeit par for the course) if the Eric Holder Justice Department participated in a decision not to allow a state to verify that only citizens are registering to vote.

In any case, once the EAC regained a quorum of commissioners and hired a new executive director, the agency reversed the previously announced policy and permitted Arizona (as well as Kansas) to include citizenship-verification requirements with the federal voter-registration form.

In response, the leftist groups mentioned above filed a lawsuit in D.C. federal court seeking to reverse the EAC’s decision. They want non-citizens to vote in order to help elect a Democratic president.

The state of Kansas has moved to intervene in order to defend the EAC’s decision. The Justice Department should be the principle defender, however. An important part of its job is to defend federal agencies like the EAC when they are sued.

However, Loretta Lynch and company have decided to tank the case. In a pleading filed today, the Justice Department “consents to plaintiffs’ request for entry of a preliminary injunction” against the EAC. They are trying to make sure that the left-wing plaintiffs win by default.

The matter is being heard today before Judge Richard Leon. It seems clear that Kansas should be allowed to intervene in the case, particularly given the dive that the Lynch Justice Department is taking.

In addition, Judge Leon should explore the potential conflict of interest that may plague the Justice Department in this case. Kansas cites the alleged participation of DOJ lawyers (described above) in the original EAC denial of permission to require proof of citizenship. If the DOJ wrote the original denial for the EAC and is now charged with defending its subsequent approval, that seems problematic — all the more so, since it has chosen not to defend it.

Is DOJ refusing to defend the EAC due to a good faith belief that the agency’s ruling cannot be defended? Or is it doing so because its lawyers participated (improperly) in the original ruling and now are invested in the seeing the original ruling restored? That, it seems to me, is a fair question raised by allegations of DOJ involvement at the EAC level.

Legalisms aside, I believe that DOJ is refusing to defend the EAC due to raw partisanship and ideology. DOJ wants non-citizens to vote because they are likely to vote Democratic. It’s as basic, and disgraceful, as that.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/the-obama-administration-takes-a-dive-to-make-sure-non-citizens-vote.php

When There Is No Excuse

When There Is No Excuse

by John Schroedert

This Monty Python sketch is funny precisely because those being interrogated can never tell the truth.   We never learn if they did anything actually wrong, but they just make stupid excuse after stupid excuse.

One is tempted to laugh similarly at the EPA of the Gold King Mine Spill in Colorado, save that the consequences are so dire.  Congressman Rob Bishop (R – Utah) took to the Washington Times yesterday to demonstrate that the EPA is, if not engaged in active cover-up, so poorly managed that straightforward explanations are impossible to find.  It is pretty technical stuff, but in the words of Otter….

I am trying to tell this tale with laughs because of how ultimately pathetic it really is.

The guys in that Monty Python sketch did not try and divert the attention of their accusers, but that seems to be part of the plan at EPA.  Yesterday we learned that they have granted $15K to university students to put together a program to help the poor insulate their homes with garbage.  (Look MA!  In order for you to not be so angry that I killed the cat, I have hung the dog up by its tail.)  No, nothing could go wrong with that plan.  (You know, when I was in college I did some analytical work on shredded newspaper used as insulation to determine if fire retardants were actually present in the insulation or whether the insulation had exacerbated a fire that resulted in a death.)

Forget climate change being more about politics than science, similar things are happening on much smaller scales, as “environmental justice” becomes a thing.  “Environmental Justice” is the idea that poorer communities suffer from pollution more than wealthier communities.  Under this guise environmental infractions that might previously have resulted in a “fixit ticket” when done in designated neighborhoods are now major crimes.

The EPA, and many similar agencies on local and state levels, are out-of-control.  For many of the local and state agencies they have no choice.  They operate under grants of authority from the EPA, and are forced to toe the line even if they see plainly the silliness, if not danger (think Colorado again), associated with the EPA’s approach.  Rather than deal with real pollution and its dire consequences, the EPA is using all the force at its disposal as a tool for social engineering.  (But then what do you think people had in mind for Obamacare?)

This is truly frightening stuff.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/when-there-is-no-excuse/#more-30334

The Republican Establishment Needs to Stop Worrying and Love the Donald

The Republican Establishment Needs to Stop Worrying and Love the Donald byROGER L SIMON 

Now that Donald Trump has wiped the floor yet again with the other Republican candidates in the Nevada caucuses, it's time for the GOP to face reality -- barring force majeure, they have a presidential candidate, like it or not.

The so-called establishment has a choice: Get on the Trump bandwagon or try some desperate maneuver to stop him. But what would that be? A Rubio-Cruz ticket, assuming they would do it?  At the time of this writing, the two men added together don't equal the Trump vote in Nevada -- and that's even assuming their voters would hold, which is a risky assumption, given the current momentum. I mean -- Donald won 46% of the Hispanics!  Enough already.

A lot of my Republican friends are depressed about this situation. They worry that Trump is not a real conservative.  They cringe at his vulgarity. They are concerned he's a bully, even totalitarian.

I'm not.  And  I am not depressed, even though I admire many of the other candidates in the race.  Given the gravity of the situation, what Obama has done to this nation and the candidates being offered by the Democrats, a world class liar and a Eugene V. Debs retread, a personality as large as Donald may be necessary to revive our country. In fact, I think I'll take the "may" out of that.

This is what I think the electorate senses and what the Republican establishment fears. Rather than being afraid that Donald will lose, many establishment folks, I suspect, are afraid he will win.  It will not be business as usual and most human beings seek business as usual, especially successful ones. What, for example, is more conventional and unchanging than the Democratic Party?  They have patented stasis under meaningless junk terms like "liberal" and "progressive." Nothing ever changes.  Republicans are at risk of doing the same thing with the word "conservative." If I hear another candidate claim to be the most "conservative," I think I'll bang my head against the table.  I can't be the only one who feels that way.

So if I were a member of the Establishment, whatever that is, I would quit bellyaching, embrace Donald and make him my friend.  He's ready and willing.  If you bother to check that ultimate news source the Daily Mail, you'd see that already he is hobnobbing with such Republican stalwarts as Rudy Giuliani, Arthur Laffer and Steve Moore.  Unless I missed it, I didn't notice the article mentioning  David Axelrod or James Carville.

And listen to what Trump is actually saying.  He's for lower taxes and a strong defense and he's not really against free trade.  He just wants a better deal.  Who wouldn't and who wouldn't assume he'd  get a better one than the Obama crowd?  Or the Bush crowd for that matter, on just about anything. He's also pro-life, despite soreheads like Erick Erickson screaming that Trump supports Planned Parenthood when he has said explicitly he does not support what they do on abortion, only on other women's health issues.  Does Erickson oppose pap smears for cervical cancer?  (Frankly, I don't want to know.)

People like Erickson and pundits far more sophisticated suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome. Because he's not part of "Their Crowd" they can't really grasp what he's saying.  Time to end that.  Don't fight Donald.  Be smart, co-opt him.  Or, as we used to say, be there or be square.  Next November depends on it.

https://pjmedia.com/diaryofamadvoter/2016/02/23/the-republican-establishment-needs-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-donald/?singlepage=true

Stories and Soundbites

Stories and Soundbites

 by John Schroeder

That was an interesting week. As I write, South Carolina and Nevada results are not in, and they are the cap on the story of the week that has been, but it has been fascinating regardless. It made me reflect on the differences in how we tell news stories and how we tell fantasy/adventure stories.
Our media is full of fantasy/adventure stories – comics, TV, movies – we are drowning in them. It has been amazing to watch them change in my lifetime. Let’s face it the action movies of the ’80’s are the superhero movies of this decade with huge differences in special effects technology and a major shift in what people are really interested in. In the 80’s it was one man, strong and outstanding, against and army or a monster – beat the bad guy and carry the day. Nowadays, no hero operates alone, he has to build a “family” of some sort around him, and all heroes are deeply, often fatally, flawed. The most popular heroes right now are dark, operating on the edge and just a sneeze away from being a bad guy. The stories are intricate – and even in movies often plotted over multiple episodes – drawing the consumer in deeply and permanently.
News stories, and especially political stories, are told in an entirely different fashion. The characters are presented as a pastiche of the real person involved, quickly identified as “good” or bad,” and the conflict is reduced to a story that can be told in minutes – even seconds. It is not unlike the early days of superheroes when a comic book story was told in 10 pages or less – good conquered evil – next story.
We dwell in our fantasy and give our reality only passing interest.
That has some pretty severe consequences. I ran into a lot of anti-Catholic bigotry this past week. Such is only possible when one sees only a pastiche of the Roman Catholic Church and tries to reduce its story to a point where it can be labeled either purely good or purely bad. I am not now, nor have I ever been, a Roman Catholic. The point of this post is not to mount an apologia for Roman Catholicism. I simply wish to point out people’s tendency to reduce the most lasting and dominant institution in the world since the time of Christ (regardless of how you “feel” about Catholicism that is an objectively true statement) to labels and soundbites.
I cannot deny the ugliness that has been perpetrated by the Roman Catholic Church throughout history. But, I can find similar ugliness in most other churches. As an example, my own Presbyterian church, in its formative days, engaged in bomb plots against royalty in Scotland. If we engage with the church, in all its manifestations, as we engage with our fantasies we see the intricacies of its plots and story lines and we just might come to love it as we love our dark and flawed heroes.
And yet we choose, still, to dwell in our fantasies. I think the difference is that we know our flawed and dark heroes are pretend. Our flawed and dark reality is just hurtful and frightening.
The Apostle Paul closes his letter to the church in Philippi with several instructions. Among them is this one:

Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.

Maybe we need to quit dwelling in the flawed and dark altogether – either fantasy or reality – and begin to dwell in the good and light. There really is plenty of it out there. Reality needs us.

http://www.hughhewitt.com/stories-and-soundbites/#more-30309

HOW NOT TO MEASURE TEMPERATURE

HOW NOT TO MEASURE TEMPERATURE

BY JOHN HINDERAKER IN CLIMATE

Global warming alarmists purport to compute the average annual temperature over the entire surface of the Earth (most of which, of course, is ocean) to within one one-hundredth of a degree. That is, on its face, an unbelievable claim, but it becomes even more preposterous when you look at how temperatures are actually measured. A case in point comes from Anthony Watts.

Watts got a communication from Dr. Mark Albright, of the University of Washington:

Here is a great example of how NOT to measure the climate! On our way back to Tucson from Phoenix on Monday we stopped by to see the Picacho 8 SE coop site at Picacho Peak State Park. Note the white MMTS temperature monitor 1/3 of the way in from the left. The building is surrounded by the natural terrain of the Sonoran Desert, but instead the worst possible site adjacent to the paved road and SW facing brick wall was chosen in 2009 as the location to monitor temperature.

The wall and the road both radiate heat, artificially raising the temperature as recorded. That’s not all: air conditioning heat exchangers are located just a few feet away, constantly pumping out hot air:

I’m not saying the people who site temperature monitors locate them badly on purpose, but if you wanted to inflate temperatures artificially, this is one way you would do it. Nor is this station much of an anomaly: a majority of U.S. stations are poorly sited, which is just one of a number of issues with accurate and consistent temperature measurement. See, e.g., this study.

The more one learns about the surface temperature record, the more one concludes that satellite measurements are the only reliable, uncorrupted data set that we possess. Unfortunately, they go back only to 1979.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/how-not-to-measure-temperature.php

Sanders and Trump Have Risen from the Wreckage of a Broken Culture

Sanders and Trump Have Risen from the Wreckage of a Broken Culture

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431498/donald-trump-bernie-sanders-radicals-hijacking-mainstream

By David French 

Pop culture can normalize radicalism with astonishing speed. Conservatives have long known and lamented the truth of Scottish politician Andrew Fletcher’s famous declaration: “Let me write the songs of a nation — I don’t care who writes its laws.” Artists and the media shape our cultural environment so profoundly that their progressivism has become the default, the air we breathe. Wherever the progressive current flows, the people will drift.

Since its birth, the modern conservative movement has fought bravely to create its own counterculture, in hopes that at least some people could drift the right way, and eventually the current would be reversed.

But it’s impossible in one generation to either replace or match liberal-dominated institutions that have existed, in some instances, since before the founding of the nation. One doesn’t simply create a conservative Harvard out of thin air. Hollywood is the product of generations of artistic effort. TheNew York Times, the Washington Post, and the major broadcast media are collectively immense institutions, governed by a set of shared assumptions and located in geographic regions where dissent is rarely heard.

The Right, by contrast, hasn’t truly had time to build institutions, so it has built celebrities. It’s easier to make one man famous than it is to make Harvard, so conservative culture is dominated mainly by a series of personalities, and those personalities are often defined and exalted not so much by the quality of their distinct ideas but by personal charisma, with particular emphasis on anger and “fearlessness.”

And that brings us to the political radicalism of Bernie Sanders and the personal radicalism of Donald Trump. In their own way, they each represent the triumph of culture over politics. They are both men of their cultural moment.

Sanders came along at just the time when the Left’s triumph over the academy and pop culture was so complete that there no longer exists a meaningful moderating force. Radicalism reigns. Ta-Nehisi Coates declares that the police who died on 9/11 were “not human” to him but rather “menaces of nature” and wins the National Book Award for nonfiction. Beyonce dresses her dancers as Black Panthers and her fan base on the pop-culture left only grows. On college campuses, even far-left administrators are losing their jobs if they refuse to push their institutions even closer to the radical abyss.

And so Sanders has met his moment. Hillary Clinton is scrambling to get to his left, and her only real hope to stop him is to claim that her radical politics of race are more potent than his radical politics of class. Sanders proposes the largest tax increase and biggest expansion of government power in the history of the United States, and Clinton’s main critique is that it is too impractical to make it through Congress. Revolutionaries care not about such mundane details.

On the right, the angry man has met his angry moment. Many — but certainly not all — celebrity conservatives have been trying to build something besides a personal empire. Their famous political incorrectness is deployed in the service of a larger purpose: the creation of institutions where dissent can flourish. But those institutions are weak in their infancy compared with the GOP, the Right’s biggest organizing apparatus, and also its least trusted. So the conservative culture we do have is still a celebrity culture, and Donald Trump has taken it by storm.

The secret of his continued dominance is that he does anger bigger and better than anyone else, and his fans are willing to forgive or even cheer any transgression against conservative principle or simple good taste as a result. All manner of cruelty and lies can be justified by fury at the Left, by rage at the “GOPe,” or by the cry of “the other side does it.” Conservative leaders who were used to being the angriest and least politically correct people in the room now find themselves in the uncomfortable position of saying “no” — of saying that some things shouldn’t be said and some ideas are genuinely offensive. Yet in a movement with few institutions but many personalities, they, too, find themselves swept aside by the largest personality of them all.

At a time when our nation so desperately needs a steady hand to write its laws, the radicals have been writing its songs. Sanders and Trump are merely sailing the cultural currents the radicals created, perfecting the message that they’ve prepared the nation to receive. As William Butler Yeats wrote at another time of existential crisis, “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” We’re left with a world where “the best lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

When a culture breaks, so does a nation.

— David French is an attorney, and a staff writer at National Review.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/431498/donald-trump-bernie-sanders-radicals-hijacking-mainstream

Trump’s Iraq Chicanery

Trump’s Iraq Chicanery

By Andrew C. McCarthy 

I’m surprised that there hasn’t been more discussion about the fact that Donald Trump has been lying since the start of the campaign about his position on the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Specifically, Trump has claimed, again and again and again, that he was against the Iraq war. Just as significant, he has represented that his rationale was the belief that the military invasion and ouster of Saddam Hussein would “destabilize the region,” shifting the balance of power to Iran. The intimation (no, the outright claim – subtle intimation is not The Donald’s style) is that he, uniquely among candidates for the GOP presidential nomination and in contrast to Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side, understood the dynamics of Middle Eastern geopolitics; thus, the Trump argument goes, he is best suited to be commander-in-chief.

It has long been apparent that this is all Trumpian bunk: Despite scouring the record, no one has found a paper or audio trail of Trump expressing opposition to the war. Trump has countered that this was because he was not a politician at the time. But that’s silly: He was a celebrity who notoriously commented on public questions – abortion, socialized medicine, eminent domain, the merits of confiscatory taxation to address runaway debt, etc. It does not take more than ten seconds of exposure to the Trump ego to know that, had he vigorously opposed the invasion of Iraq, he would not only have been widely quoted on it; he would have been unable to resist ever louder “I told you so” snarks as Iraq descended deeper into sectarian strife after 2003.

And now, finally, we have undeniable audio of Trump not opposing the Iraq war – indeed, of Trump supporting it, although somewhat tepidly. On the first anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, as Buzz Feed reports, Howard Stern asked Trump if he was in favor of invading Iraq. Trump replied, “Yeah I guess so.”

Not enough attention has been paid to Trump’s succinct but telling elaboration on this answer: “I wish the first time it was done correctly.”Obviously, this is a reference to the first Gulf War in 1991. Trump’s position was that not only should we invade Iraq in 2002, but also that we should have invaded Iraq eleven years earlier.

Back then, remember, our troops had ejected Saddam’s forces from Kuwait and had them in full retreat and surrender mode. Many argued that we should “finish the job” – i.e., proceed to invade Iraq and depose the regime. But the Bush 41 administration concluded that this would destabilize the region, to the benefit of Iran. President George H.W. Bush elected not to do it.

Trump has spent the entire campaign pretending to have been prescient about the disastrous fallout of an Iraq invasion. The reality is that he was not only on board with the risk of destabilizing the region in 2002; he asserted that the big mistake was actually the failure to invade and risk destabilizing the region in 1991.

In this, as in so much else, he is a fraud.

(Disclosure: I support Ted Cruz.)

http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/431628/trumps-iraq-chicanery

A BAD DAY FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN FEDERAL COURT

A BAD DAY FOR HILLARY CLINTON IN FEDERAL COURT

 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN CLINTON EMAILS, HILLARY CLINTON, LAW

A federal district court judge today granted a motion by Judicial Watch for discovery into whether the State Department and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton deliberately thwarted the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Judge Emmet Sullivan, a Bill Clinton appointee, issued the ruling in a FOIA case seeking records about the controversial employment status of Huma Abedin, former Deputy Chief of Staff to Clinton.

In granting the motion, Judge Sullivan explained that months of piecemeal revelations about Clinton and the State Department’s handling of the email controversy created “at least a ‘reasonable suspicion’” that public access to official government records under the federal Freedom of Information Act was undermined. He cited the State Department’s inspector general’s finding last month that the State Department repeatedly allowed “inaccurate and incomplete” FOIA responses, including a May 2013 reply that found “no records” concerning email accounts Clinton used, even though dozens of senior officials had corresponded with her private account. We discussed that finding here.

Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, had this to say about the ruling:

Judge Sullivan’s ruling granting Judicial Watch’s request for discovery is a major victory for the public’s right to know the truth about Hillary Clinton’s email system. The court-ordered discovery will help determine why the State Department and Mrs. Clinton, even despite receiving numerous FOIA requests, kept the record system secret for years.

Our proposed discovery, which will require court approval, will include testimony of current and former officials of the State Department. While Mrs. Clinton’s testimony may not be required initially, it may happen that her testimony is necessary for the Court to resolve the legal issues about her unprecedented email practices.

So, while the FBI continues to investigate whether the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee committed felonies, discovery will proceed in federal court as to whether she deliberately thwarted federal law pertaining to document production.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/a-bad-day-for-hillary-clinton-in-federal-court.php

Idiocy AND Ideology? What Really Drives Obama?

Idiocy AND Ideology? What Really Drives Obama?

 

BY MICHAEL LEDEEN FEBRUARY 11, 2016

CHAT 126 COMMENTS

In his unfortunate “robot” debate in New Hampshire, Marco Rubio raised the great mystery about the Obama presidency: are the many catastrophes of the past seven years the results of incompetence, or, as Rubio insisted, does the president know “exactly what he’s doing”?

Right now, there is a solid consensus that Obama is out of his depth, a consensus you can easily see in the stock market, in the big votes for “socialism” a la Bernie Sanders, from European allies (notably France), and from enemies like Iran, where the regime reenacted the capture of American sailors, quite literally a dramatic demonstration of Iran’s contempt for the United States.

So is it idiocy or, as Rubio claims, the systematic, perhaps even brilliant, implementation of a well-elaborated world view?

I don’t think we will know the answer for sure until the Obama archives become public. That is, IF they become public. Remember we still do not have his college transcript!

Still, we’ve got the speeches and we’ve got the actions or inactions. We know that Obama has a very negative view of America’s past international actions, and there can be little doubt that he determined to do two basic things: limit American power, and prevent America from meddling in the outside world. That’s ideological, isn’t it? Indeed, Obama was, and is, bound and determined to reverse America’s alliances, dumping or diminishing traditional allies and embracing longstanding enemies. The biggest examples of the former are Israel and Egypt (with a bit of rancor for the Saudis on the side); the big embraces are Cuba and Iran.

So I think Rubio is right to call Obama’s foreign policy “ideological.” Ditto for various domestic campaigns, the funding of “green” businesses, the IRS persecution of conservative foundations and donors, the demonization of police, and his abrupt about-face on gay marriage. Standard-issue leftist causes, the stock and trade of our current educational system. Ideology again.

But that does not save the president from legitimate criticisms of incompetence and even idiocy. The Iran policy is the magnum opus. If Obama was so determined to forge an alliance with the Islamic Republic of Iran, the worst way to do it was the one he chose: running after the Iranians like a lovelorn teenager, offering no end of presents, never saying no to Iranian demands, and not even insisting that the deal be formalized. To this day, neither we nor the Iranians have signed any agreement, which has the effect of maintaining pressure on Obama to keep Khamenei happy, lest the supreme leader walk away from the deal.

Behaving in this way inverted both the logical and strategic balance of power between the two countries. Iran was desperate for money, which we control. Ergo, it should have been fairly easy for us to say to the Iranian negotiators “well, if you don’t agree, we’ll just keep the sanctions on.” Instead we begged them to take the money and catered to all their whims. Indeed, there is very little evidence that we are at all interested in Iranian adherence to the terms of the deal. We just learned, for example, that we do not know where Iran has delivered its enriched uranium. And if we do not know where it is, we do not know if they have disposed of it, do we?

It therefore seems to me that Rubio presented a false alternative in the debate in New Hampshire. As the president has demonstrated, it is quite possible to be both ideological and incompetent at the same time.

All of which brings us back to what I have long considered the great mystery of the Obama presidency. Why is he so passionate about embracing Iran? Cuba, I understand. That is a long-standing dream of the American left (although even here he negotiated badly, and shows no sign of seriousness regarding enforcement).

But Iran?

Iran is a truly hateful regime that slaughters Americans, Syrians, Iraqis, and of course Iranians in big numbers and with palpable delight. Somehow, it does not seem sufficient to me to reject past American policies to warrant an embrace of such a regime. And yet, Obama has been running after the Iranians since the presidential election campaign of 2008, and he is still running after them. I think this must be ideological, above and beyond the criticism of our past policies.

What sort of ideology could account for it? Yes, as some have said, it might be some sort of Islamic conviction, but I don’t think that’s it. I do think he has romantic feelings about Islam, as he has indicated from time to time, and perhaps that is the deeper motivation for his policy.

Time will tell, provided that we do someday get to read the memos, emails, and other records of internal debates. Both in Washington and Tehran.

https://pjmedia.com/michaelledeen/2016/02/11/idiocy-and-ideology/?singlepage=true

IN 2002, TRUMP SAID HE FAVORED INVADING IRAQ

IN 2002, TRUMP SAID HE FAVORED INVADING IRAQ

 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN DONALD TRUMP, IRAQ

Donald Trump has made his alleged opposition to the war in Iraq a central theme of his presidential campaign. He claims that it differentiates him from his opponents and speaks to his sagacity when it comes to foreign and military policy.

Early on, we noted that there was no evidence Trump opposed the invasion before it occurred. He began to criticize the war only after it appeared to be going badly. That’s known as Monday morning quarterbacking.

More recently, we pointed to a book Trump wrote in 2000 where he spoke favorably about the possibility of an invasion. In that interview, however, Trump stopped short of saying we should invade.

Now, Andrew Kaczynski of BuzzFeed has unearthed a 2002 statement by Trump in which he said the U.S. should invade Iraq. He made the statement in an interview with Howard Stern:

“Are you for invading Iraq?” Mr. Stern asked in the interview, audio of which was discovered by the website BuzzFeed.

“Yeah, I guess so,” Mr. Trump replied, adding, “I wish the first time it was done correctly,” in reference to the initial Persian Gulf invasion by the first President George Bush.

To be sure, Trump’s support for the invasion is muted. But his claim that he said before the war “we shouldn’t be doing it” is false. In fact, he said we should invade.

Moreover, to the extent that Trump had any reservation about going to war with Iraq it resided in his view that the first Persian Gulf invasion was done incorrectly. By this, he clearly meant that the U.S. should have removed Saddam Hussein at that time. Given the overwhelming success of the first invasion, that’s the only possible complaint one might lodge against how it was carried out.

Yet Trump now claims (in the February 6 New Hampshire debate, for example) that he foresaw the problems — instability and worse — that would result from toppling the Iraqi government. Obviously he did not; otherwise he would not have carped to Howard Stern about the shortcomings of the first invasion, which stopped short of toppling Saddam (an invasion he now praises for not having landed us in a quagmire).

Trump’s claims about Iraq confirm two things about him: (1) he’s dishonest and (2) far from having any insight into world affairs, he’s a slave to conventional wisdom.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2016/02/in-2002-trump-said-he-favored-invading-iraq.php

A Fight Over Scalia's Seat Is Just What the Fractured GOP Needs

A Fight Over Scalia's

 Seat Is Just What the Fractured GOP Needs

REUTERS/Darren Ornitz

By Liz Peek 

 

The tussle over who should replace Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court could prove a blessing in disguise for Republicans. After years of infighting, the GOP has an opportunity to unite in opposition to the appointment of a new justice by President Obama. In so doing, the Republican leadership could rebuild their credibility with voters, derailing some of the hostility ginned up by “anti-establishment” candidates like Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.  

Republicans say they will not confirm an Obama pick to the Supreme Court. Democrats are crying foul, but really -- who cares what the Democrats think? It is this president’s legacy and that of the Harry Reid-led Democrats in Congress that the appointment of a new justice is such a momentous undertaking. President Obama’s unlawful executive actions and willful refusal to uphold laws on the books, piled onto divisive lawmaking, have led us to this point.  That is the message that Republicans need to deliver: that they are reining in the extra-legal behavior of a renegade president.

Related: Supreme Court Battle Tests These Vulnerable GOP Senators' Reelection Chances

During Barack Obama’s presidency, Democrats have used every tool imaginable to push through favored legislation. They passed Obamacare, a policy that affects every American and that is unpopular to this day, without a single Republican vote. No such sweeping legislation had ever been adopted along such partisan lines.  It was done with a combination of rule-making trickery and outright bribery -- shameful, but effective.

Democrats’ high-handed law making drove voters to elect a Republican House in 2010. The GOP won by a landslide, the biggest upheaval in Congress since 1948. Though Obama acknowledged the “shellacking” as he called it, the rebuke did not slow him down. He had after all vowed to “transform” America. Obama proceeded to make “recess” appointments to the National Labor Relations Board that turned out to be unconstitutional, unilaterally eliminated the work requirement of the welfare reform act, and implemented a contentious mini Dream Act, protecting young people from deportation.

Consequently, the angry country turned the Senate over to Republicans in 2014 and voted in the largest GOP majority in the House since World War II. President Obama memorably said during the campaign, “I am not on the ballot this fall… But make no mistake: These policies are on the ballot. Every single one of them.” He was correct – and the voters turned out in 2014 in droves to tell Obama just what they thought of his policies. 

One observer noted that the 2014 “wave” lacked a theme and a leader, unlike the Contract for America election in 1994 or the “War on Terror” theme in 2002. He was missing the point; there was indeed a theme – and it was that Americans were sick and tired of Democrats’ imperious lawmaking.

Related: Republicans Gear Up for a Bitter Fight Over Scalia’s Supreme Court Seat

However, President Obama proved immune to the country’s criticism. Not once during this presidency has Obama acceded to the will of the people by softening a position or changing course. For years, voters cited job creation as their number one concern; the president put economic growth last place in his agenda. Instead, he focused on climate change, gun control and other priorities that ranked way down the list of voters’ interests.

In recent years, President Obama turned to executive orders and to regulations to accomplish what he could no longer achieve through the normal, constitutionally mandated process of working with Congress. In the 2014 State of the Union address he vowed as much saying, “So wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do."  

The reliance on executive actions and regulation has had two outcomes. One is that it created a serious rift among Republicans. Frustrated voters could not understand why, given control of Congress, GOP leaders could not overturn unpopular laws like Obamacare or prevent more “amnesty” mischief. Opportunists like Ted Cruz seized on this anger and created an “anti-establishment” campaign, railing against the GOP leadership who, in fairness, could do little in the face of a presidential veto.  

The second outcome is that much of Obama’s activism has stimulated lawsuits and is now at the mercy of the Supreme Court. Among the numerous policies now under review by the court are Obama’s drive to protect millions of undocumented people from deportation and his regulations aimed at shutting down our coal industry. The first resulted from an executive order and the latter from amped-up EPA regulations.

Related: Senate Republicans Grow Uneasy Over Supreme Court Delay Strategy

Both circumvented Congress and both are considered by many to constitute an abuse of executive power. The Court’s involvement in these cases speaks to the essential balance of powers established by the Constitution. If the executive branch exceeds its authority, the Court must play referee.

Hence, the angst in Democrat circles over the appointment of a justice to fill the spot vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia. We now face a prolonged, ugly battle over Obama’s right to nominate a justice and the Senate’s duty to confirm the nominee. The liberal media will attempt to portray GOP resistance as typical chronic obstructionism. They will warn senators like Kelly Ayotte and Rob Portman, who face serious reelection challenges that their chances will dim. Let them.

Republicans need to counter that narrative with this: President Obama has acted unlawfully for years, with only the Supreme Court as a brake on his push towards unpopular programs. If the American people want to dismantle our energy industries, or open our borders indiscriminately, they can vote in Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders. The people will have a chance to choose. Heaven help us if they don’t choose wisely.

Liz Peek

After more than two decades on Wall Street as a top-ranked research analyst, Liz Peek became a columnist and political analyst. Aside from The Fiscal Times, she writes for FoxNews.com, The New York Sun and Women on the Web.

http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Columns/2016/02/17/Fight-Over-Scalias-Seat-Just-What-Fractured-GOP-Needs