All five are among the Taliban’s top commanders in U.S. custody and are still revered in jihadist circles.Two of the five have been wanted by the UN for war crimes. And because of their prowess, Joint Task Force-Guantanamo (JTF-GTMO) deemed all five of them “high” risks to the U.S. and its allies.
On Thursday’s CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone challenged Richard Engel, NBC’s chief foreign correspondent, to name a country where U.S. relations have improved since Barack Obama took office more than 5 years ago. After hemming and hawing, Engel admitted that he was unable to do so.Video at link.
I don’t wade into foreign policy much, but I do travel around the world a lot. I regularly interact with foreign leaders, business people and media. In my travels overseas, everyone who voices an opinion believes America is in decline and that Obama is weak. Obviously, they are not partisans, and they usually don’t talk about America’s decline with delight. Most are reacting with anguish and worry. The rest of the world relies on America more than this president seems to realize.No one thinks America is stronger today than it was five years ago. Period.
The survey found that 43% of Americans believe the Affordable Care Act has had a mostly negative impact on the country, and 21% say it hasn't made much of an impact at all. Only 28% say the ACA has had a mostly positive impact.
"These findings indicate that more than seven in ten Americans don't feel like Obamacare has been worth it," said Bankrate.com insurance analyst Doug Whiteman.
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For years, the official intelligence community estimate was that a little more than
100 al Qaeda fighters remained in Kunar Province, a foreboding territory of imposing mountains and a local population in the mountains at least that largely agrees with al Qaeda’s ascetic Salafist philosophy.But recent estimates from the military and the U.S. intelligence community have determined that al Qaeda’s presence has expanded to nearby Nuristan and that the group coordinates its operations and activities with allies like the Pakistan-based Taliban and Haqqani Network.On Tuesday, in response to President Obama’s announcement that he would be leaving 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan past his original end of 2014 deadline for withdrawal, Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also warned about northeast Afghanistan.100 al Qaeda fighters remained in Kunar Province, a foreboding territory of imposing mountains and a local population in the mountains at least that largely agrees with al Qaeda’s ascetic Salafist philosophy.But recent estimates from the military and the U.S. intelligence community have determined that al Qaeda’s presence has expanded to nearby Nuristan and that the group coordinates its operations and activities with allies like the Pakistan-based Taliban and Haqqani Network.On Tuesday, in response to President Obama’s announcement that he would be leaving 9,800 U.S. troops in Afghanistan past his original end of 2014 deadline for withdrawal, Rep. Mike Rogers, the Republican chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, also warned about northeast Afghanistan.
Stephanie Sanok Kostro, the acting director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told The Daily Beast, “By reducing troop levels to under 10,000 [in Afghanistan], it will certainly create more space for al Qaeda in the north. The north has not seen a lot of attention given ISAF’s focus on the south and southeast of the country. So this has left the north vulnerable to al Qaeda influences and this is only going to get worse.”
Congrats to grads today. Remember: Don't let individualism trump community; move from a selfie culture to an culture.
Dog vomit where his soul should be.During his foreign policy speech at West Point Barack Obama dropped this stunning line.NPR says it was directed at his critics:In a direct challenge to his critics, Obama declared: “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it’s our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”So when has the US flouted international norms and the rule of law, Mr. President?
Americans and all freedom-loving people around the globe should be proud of Egypt as they have taken the next significant step along their democratic roadmap, demonstrating to the world that they aspire to be a democratic country. But unfortunately they do it without the support of the United States.In less than one year, Egypt has passed a Constitution, held presidential elections, and at the same time is fighting a war on terrorism in the Sinai and is winning.I spoke with various Egyptians about why they went out to vote. Faten Saad said she came this morning because she was very optimistic for June 30th. She said she came “in order to do duty for her country and to ensure Egypt has no religion influence… In particular, to prove that this is a revolution and not a coup.” She said the choice of the Egyptian nation will be to vote for Sisi.Dr. Enas stated that she came out to “vote for my country… All people are very happy.” She believes the future is very good for Egypt and will be "for freedom and democracy."What happened in Egypt is nothing less than a true miracle. If the Egyptian people and their armed forces hadn’t stood strong and united, matters could have been very different today. With an intransigent theocractic Muslim Brotherhood in power the nation could have descended into a civil war. Instead, today the Egyptians are casting their vote for an Egypt free of fundamentalist control. Egypt is changing. The “New Egypt” is being born.
Now we learn that some laborers are preparing to strike, if they are forced to absorb the higher health-insurance costs that the Affordable Care Act requires.“When we first supported the calls for health-care reform, we thought it was going to bring costs down,” a lawyer for the Laborers International Union of North America, or LIUNA, told Kris Maher and Melanie Trottman of the Wall Street Journal. But that’s not what’s happening. Maher and Trottman today discuss several cases where unionized workers and their employers are being forced to absorb higher costs as a result of the law.
She then goes on to discuss the VA scandal and accurately identifies its core cause as huge government.From Fast and Furious at the ATF to the Pigford fraud at the Department of Agriculture, the IRS’ political targeting to the State Department’s Benghazi mess, the healthcare.gov debacle at HHS to spying at the NSA and the DOJ, President Obama is running out of agencies and departments to defend in his two years left in office.
This, I think, in political terms is damaging to the administration because it feeds into the question of whether the administration can in fact administer. We had first the fiasco with the rollout of the health care program. Now we've got the troubles at the VA. now this blunder by the White House press office.
Think about this, this is an administration that is fond of telling us -- that the president is fond of telling us that he finds out about these things in the press. In this case, this was something that his press office put out and the mistake wasn't noted until somebody in the press told him about it. So they found about this from the press all right, after they put it out. That's a high level of bungling, I think it's fair to say.
It's going to feed into this whole question about whether the administration can run anything.
"This is unacceptable," she said during a roundtable discussion of the issue. “It's unacceptable to me not just as First Lady but also as a mother."The strict rules, passed in 2010, limit the amount of fat, calories, sugar, and sodium served in school meals.House Republicans are supporting a measure that would allow some school districts to opt out of the standards — if they can prove that it is affecting their school budgets.The First Lady pointed out that since the regulations, kids in the United States were eating more fruits and vegetables."The last thing we can afford to do right now is play politics with our kids' health,” she added. “Now is not the time to roll back everything we have worked for."
The University of South Carolina is dumping its Gender Studies center which became notorious for holding an event titled “How to Be a Lesbian in 10 Days or Less” and is going to teach the US Constitution instead.The Center for Women’s and Gender Studies (CWGS) at the University of South Carolina Upstate (USCU) will close on July 1 and the funding, previously allocated for CWGS, will be used to teach the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Federalist Papers.The South Carolina House of Representatives wanted further cuts at both USCU and the College of Charleston, which had already seen budget cuts over mandated gay literature for freshmen students. However, the Senate was hesitant to cut funds for fear of academic censorship.
The chambers compromised by allotting the discussed funds toward teaching the provisions and principles of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, and Federalist Papers, as well as “the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals.
The move puts South Carolina colleges back in compliance with a 90-year-old state law which requires colleges to teach students a year’s worth of courses on the nation’s founding documents.
The left is outraged and revolting. As usual.
The Morning News, owned by Warren Buffett, editorialized that this was “A chilling act of retribution” and “Required reading programs serve several purposes. Most importantly, though, the programs are intended to prepare students for the expectations of college-level discourse and open them up for the diversity they’ll find both on campus and in the real world. We’re not sure reciting the Bill of Rights, no doubt important to know, qualifies in that regard.”
Just so you understand, the Morning News’ official editorial is insisting that knowing the Bill of Rights is irrelevant to “college level discourse” and the real world. Unlike, “How to be a Lesbian in Ten Days.”
Pamela Jennings BELLVUE, COBecause many people will no longer feel as welcome or accepted at USC Upstate if the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies is not reinstated.
Alexandra Chua EL CERRITO, CABecause the dominant culture is essentially an unsolicited study of white, male cis-gendered heterosexuals
Kenne Mwikya NAIROBI, KENYAThe fight against sexism, homophobia and racism means that we have to keep vigilant against the political elite who are always out to destroy everything that is not to their selfish interests. Closing down the CWGS will be a crippling blow to people who, without it, never belonged to the larger USC community!
When you feed people's temptations to narcissistic grievances and a sense that their ethnicity automatically bestows virtue on them, so that they are mired in endless squabbles about what they are owed by "society," they are distracted from your real agenda - the imposition of totalitarianism.Some bad ideas are hard to kill. An example is the proposal to treat Native Hawaiians like an Indian tribe. Former Sen. Daniel Akaka (D-Hawaii) advanced legislation to do that for years, but it did not pass even when Democrats had supermajorities in Congress.But, as Barack Obama has said, he is not going to be stymied by the old superstition that only Congress can pass a law. The Interior Department has announced it “is considering whether to propose an administrative rule that would facilitate the re-establishment of a government-to-government relationship with the Native Hawaiian community, to more effectively implement the special political and trust relationship that Congress has established between that community and the United States.”Actually, Congress has declined to establish such a relationship, and the only “government-to-government” relationship with Native Hawaiians, the state of Hawaii's Office of Hawaiian Affairs, which was ruled unconstitutional as racially discriminatory by the Supreme Court in the 2000 case of Rice v. Cayetano.The apparent analogy here, one invoked by Akaka, is to Indian tribes. But as four members of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission pointed out in a September 2013 letter to President Obama, the analogy is faulty. Federally recognized Indian tribes “are defined by political structure and the maintenance of a separate society.” Native Hawaiians have not been a separate society for nearly 200 years. The kingdom of Hawaii in fact encouraged immigration from abroad and, far from frowning on intermarriage, tended to encourage it. Hawaii had a population of 1,360,301 in the 2010 Census, but only 80,337 people reported themselves as being solely of Native Hawaiian ancestry and another 209,633 reported mixed ancestry including Native Hawaiian.
France's Front National likewise rocked that nation's elections for EP seats.Support for Ukip has surged by more than 12 per cent, outstripping a more modest boost in votes for Labour, while the Lib Dems faced near-wipeout, slipping into fifth place behind the Greens.Mr Farage said he was 'proud' of the campaign which has seen him humiliate the Westminster parties, pushing Labour and the Tories into second and third.On a dramatic political night:
- The Lib Dems clung on to just one MEP - in the South East - as it faced wipeout elsewhere
- Labour only narrowly beat the Tories after failing to make progress in key areas where they must win at the general election
- The BNP lost its place in Brussels, as leader Nick Griffin conceded defeat
- David Cameron rejected local electoral deals with Ukip at next year’s general election, as he dismissed Mr Farage's image as a 'normal bloke down the pub'
- Mr Farage hailed the first election triumph for a minor party in more than 100 years
Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, all but said on Sunday that negotiations over the country’s illicit nuclear program are over and that the Islamic Republic’s ideals include destroying America.“Those (Iranians) who want to promote negotiation and surrender to the oppressors and blame the Islamic Republic as a warmonger in reality commit treason,” Khamenei told a meeting of members of parliament, according to the regime’s Fars News Agency.Khamenei emphasized that without a combative mindset, the regime cannot reach its higher Islamic role against the “oppressors’ front.”“The reason for continuation of this battle is not the warmongering of the Islamic Republic. Logic and reason command that for Iran, in order to pass through a region full of pirates, needs to arm itself and must have the capability to defend itself,” he said.“Today’s world is full of thieves and plunderers of human honor, dignity and morality who are equipped with knowledge, wealth and power, and under the pretence of humanity easily commit crimes and betray human ideals and start wars in different parts of the world.”In response to a question by a parliamentarian on how long this battle will continue, Khamenei said,“Battle and jihad are endless because evil and its front continue to exist. … This battle will only end when the society can get rid of the oppressors’ front with America at the head of it, which has expanded its claws on human mind, body and thought. … This requires a difficult and lengthy struggle and need for great strides.”Khamenei cited the scientific advancement of the country. “The accelerated scientific advancement of the last 12 years cannot stop under any circumstances,” he said, referring to the strides the regime has made toward becoming a nuclear power.
"Forget for a moment that Republican outrage," said King on his CNN show this morning. "More and more Democrats in key 2014 races are calling for the president to get a spine, they say, and fire his Veterans Affairs secretary. And what more and more Democrats are saying privately is scathing, calling the president and his team detached, flat footed, even incompetent."Maggie Haberman," said King turning to a panelist, "that's what strikes me, what democrats are saying privately in the wakes of the healthcare.gov problems, they see a president who doesn't want to take command, doesn't want to act fast. Raising the competence question. Some Democrats, who believe in government, [are saying] this White House doesn't appear to have its hand on the lever."Haberman of Politico agreed, cited more examples, and added: "All of this adds up to somebody who just doesn't seem at all involved."
While President Obama was lauding hashtag campaigns to free kidnap victims in Nigeria and opining on the fate of an NBA franchise owner, Russia was busy concluding a historic deal that instantly replaces the European Union--its number one market, its number one strategic commodity--with China. It thereby eliminated what remained of Europe’s already-diminishing leverage against Russian aggression, not just in Ukraine, but in Eastern Europe in general. While the two sides have been unwilling to make public many of the terms of the long-sought arrangement, the outlines alone appear sufficiently ominous to Western analysts.Russian President Vladmir Putin’s promise to strengthen his country’s geostrategic balance by reducing its dependence on Western markets and capital through deepening Russia’s ties to China and other rapidly developing economies of the East have come to fruition more quickly and comprehensively than even he might have imagined.Russia does not only instantly obtain a privileged position as the primary supplier--initially of natural gas, but perhaps soon of oil also--to the world’s largest and fastest growing country. It also ensures dramatic expansion of Russia’s energy sector with the infusion of at least $75 billion in capital required to build and maintain the infrastructure necessary to provide its natural gas to China and the tens of thousands of high paying, high skilled jobs that will come with it.
While Obama refuses to exercise U.S. resources to advance U.S. interests, the EU is being cravenly seduced with offers of cheap gas by medieval theocrats ruling the Islamic Republic of Iran. Currently on the negotiating table from Iran is an offer to supply the EU with 50 million cubic meters of Iranian natural gas provided through recently installed and easily upgradable pipelines through Turkey to meet growing EU demand.
The price of this offer is one Europeans seem only too happy to pay: dropping sanctions and all other tangible opposition to Iran’s nuclear weapons program to enable Iran to access the Western funding needed to develop the infrastructure. Rather than providing a ferocious and matched objection to any possible EU capitulation to Iranian energy offers with offers of its own, the U.S. says and does nothing.
Mr. Coates’s beautifully written monograph is intelligent and sometimes moving, and the moral and political case he makes is not to be discounted lightly, but it is not a persuasive case for converting the liberal Anglo-American tradition of justice into a system of racial apportionment. Mr. Coates and those who share his views would no doubt observe that the Anglo-American practice, despite its liberal rhetoric, was a system of racial apportionment, and a brutal one at that, for centuries, with real-world consequences that continue to be large facts of American life to this day — and they would be correct. But the remedy Mr. Coates proposes would not satisfy the criterion of justice, nor is it likely that it would reduce or even substantially eliminate the very large socioeconomic differences that distinguish the black experience of American life from the white experience of it.The most valuable aspect of Mr. Coates’s essay is as a corrective to the tendency to treat the systematic political and economic repression of black Americans as though it were a matter of distant history and a question that had been for the most part settled at Gettysburg, with a few necessary legislative reforms in the following century. The process of extirpating effective racism did not end in 1868 or in 1964; even assuming a zero racial handicap on a forward-going basis, we would expect it to take decades before the average economic differences between blacks and whites were to disappear. (If, indeed, we should expect them to disappear at all.) And the economic disadvantages imposed on African Americans did not end with slavery.Mr. Coates recounts, among other abuses, how black workers leaving the South for such communities as Chicago’s North Lawndale were systematically excluded from the formal banking system, in no small part by federal housing policy that denied FHA mortgage insurance to neighborhoods into which blacks had moved or were moving, leaving black would-be homeowners with few options other than the “on contract” purchase, essentially a rent-to-own scheme that was rife with abuse and dishonesty.
Contrary to the convenient myth related by our contemporary liberals, there was no substantial conflict between Democratic liberals and Democratic segregationists on most of the progressive agenda — the progressives and the segregationists were, in the main, the same people, and the so-called conservative Democrats in the South were very enthusiastic about federal regulation of businesses, the minimum wage, social insurance, and welfare programs, so long as they could be structured in a way that would not benefit blacks very much. But Mr. Coates does not give much consideration to the possibility that a similar dynamic still is at work among our 21st-century progressives — not in the sense that white progressives see their own interests being in direct competition with those of black Americans, but in the sense that programs run for the theoretical benefit of the poor, who are disproportionately black, are in fact run for the benefit of the largely white upper-middle-class bureaucrats who are employed by them. The teachers’ unions’ steadfast and occasionally hysterical opposition to school-reform programs intended to help the overwhelmingly black population of Washington, D.C., is a dramatic example of that, the full import of which does not seem to have settled upon the mind of Mr. Coates, who is himself a product of the backward Baltimore public-school system.
Even if we accept the facts of aggregate advantage and disadvantage with their roots in historical injustice, the aggregate cannot be converted into the collective inasmuch as neither advantage nor disadvantage is universal on either side nor linked to a straightforward chain of causality. Some blacks are born into college-educated, well-off households, and some whites are born to heroin-addicted single mothers, and even the totality of racial crimes throughout American history does not mean that one of these things matters and one does not.
Once that fact is acknowledged, then the case for reparations is only moral primitivism: My interests are inextricably linked to my own kin group and directly rivalrous with yours, i.e., the very racism that this program is in theory intended to redress. Mr. Coates also, I think, miscalculates what the real-world effects of converting our liberal conception of justice into a system of racial appropriation might mean. There are still, after all, an awful lot of white people, and though many of them might be inclined to make amends under some sort of racial truce following the process Mr. Coates imagines, many of them might simply be inclined to prevail. The fact is that the situation of African Americans in the United States has improved precisely to the extent that whites have begun to forgo tribalism and to genuinely commit themselves to the principles of liberalism, the long march toward a more perfect Union. The alternative — a system of exclusive interests in which black and white operate effectively in opposition — is not only morally repugnant, but likely to undermine the genuine political and economic interests of African Americans . . . The economic interests of African Americans, like those of other Americans, are best served by a dynamic and growing economy, preferably one in which the labor force is liberated from the dysfunctional, antique Prussian model of education that contributes so much to black poverty. The people to whom reparations were owed are long dead; our duty is to the living, and to generations yet to come, and their interests are best served by liberty and prosperity, not by moral theater.
. . . two reporters for the Financial Times, Chris Giles and Ferdinando Giugliano, took the trouble of checking Piketta’s numbers against the source data that he relies on. It turns out–to put it bluntly–that Piketty is a fraud. Giles writes:[W]hen writing an article on the distribution of wealth in the UK, I noticed a serious discrepancy between the contemporary concentration of wealth described in Capital in the 21st Century and that reported in the official UK statistics. Professor Piketty cited a figure showing the top 10 per cent of British people held 71 per cent of total national wealth. The Office for National Statistics latest Wealth and Assets Survey put the figure at only 44 per cent.This is a material difference and it prompted me to go back through Piketty’s sources. I discovered that his estimates of wealth inequality – the centrepiece of Capital in the 21st Century – are undercut by a series of problems and errors. Some issues concern sourcing and definitional problems. Some numbers appear simply to be constructed out of thin air.When I have tried to correct for these apparent errors, a rather different picture of wealth inequality appeared.Two of Capital in the 21st Century’s central findings – that wealth inequality has begun to rise over the past 30 years and that the US obviously has a more unequal distribution of wealth than Europe – no longer seem to hold.Without these results, it would be impossible to claim, as Piketty does in his conclusion, that “the central contradiction of capitalism” is the tendency for wealth to become more concentrated in the hands of the already rich….
Giles describes several categories of issues that he found with Piketty’s data:
a) Fat fingersProf. Piketty helpfully provides sources for the data he uses in his work. Frequently, however, the source material is not the same as the numbers he publishes. …b) TweaksOn a number of occasions, Prof. Piketty modifies the figures in his sources. This might not be a problem if these changes were explained in the technical appendix. But, with a few exceptions, they are not, raising questions about the validity of these tweaks. …c) AveragingProf. Piketty constructs time-series of wealth inequality relative for three European countries: France, Sweden and the UK. He then combines them to obtain a single European estimate. To do so, he uses a simple average. This decision (shown in the screen grab below) is questionable, as it gives every Swedish person roughly seven times the weight of every French or British person. …d) Constructed data
Because the sources are sketchy, Prof. Piketty often constructs his own data. One example is the data for the top 10 per cent wealth share in the US between 1910 and 1950. None of the sources Prof. Piketty uses contain these numbers, hence he assumes the top 10 per cent wealth share is his estimate for the top 1 per cent share plus 36 percentage points. However, there is no explanation for this number, nor why it should stay constant over time.
WARSAW, Poland (AP) — Poland's former president and Nobel Peace laureate, Lech Walesa, said Friday he plans to urge President Barack Obama to take a more active world leadership role when he visits Poland in June.Speaking to The Associated Press, Walesa said "the world is disorganized and the superpower is not taking the lead. I am displeased."The former Solidarity leader said that when he meets Obama in Warsaw, he wants to tell him that the U.S. should inspire and encourage the world into positive action."The point is not in having the States fix problems for us or fight somewhere, no," Walesa said. "The States should organize us, encourage us and offer programs, while we, the world, should do the rest. This kind of leadership is needed.""I will say: Either you want to be a superpower and guide us, or you should give the superpower to Poland and we will know what to do with it. Amen," said Walesa, who is known for sometimes abrasive comments.
The Freedom-Haters' goal of a weak post-America appears to be right on track.The CNBC interviewer asked Putin: "You have said 'we are a room full of adults,' so let's have an adult conversation. President Obama has accused you of untruths, as you know, when it comes to supporting some of the separatist groups in the Ukraine..."Putin responded through an interpreter:"Who is he to judge? Who is he to judge, seriously?" The crowd began to laugh and clap. "If he wants to judge people, why doesn't he get a job in court somewhere?"
He merely demonstrated that these zealots were willing to make common cause with what they considered the devil, so intense is their desire for American decline.This afternoon O’Keefe released this response on to the news on Twitter:
“Bring it, fascists!”
This week at the Council on Foreign Relations, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said Russia and China's recent aggression are directly related to President Barack Obama's failure to follow through with his threat that a "red line" would be crossed if Syria used chemical weapons.
Gates said, "Russia and China see that void" in world leadership and are taking advantage of it. He added he always tells presidents, "If you cock the pistol be ready to fire it"...
Not surprisingly, Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, sees it quite differently: Commenting for The American Spectator, Kibbe explains, “When the establishment runs on our issues to win political battles, we are winning the war. There is larger cultural shift happening here. Americans are sick of an arrogant and unchecked federal government. Because of grassroots challenges in the primaries, incumbents like Mitch McConnell had to go on the record and renew their commitment to constitutionally limited government. We have stronger Republican candidates in the general as a result. ”Kibbe is right, which explains why Democratic political operatives have such a different message compared to the missing-the-forest-for-the-trees reporters and semi-expert pundits. Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie “Stop me before Iselfie again” Wasserman Schultz argued on MSNBC that “The civil war that’s been raging in the Republican Party is really over. The tea party has won it.” She repeated the theme at a Wednesday morning press event.Radical socialist, 9/11 “truther” and former Obama “Green Jobs Czar” Van Jones says, “It looks like the Tea Party might lose some of these battles, but they’ve already won the war.” He went on to parrot the Democratic talking point that “establishment Republicans now have been pulled so far to the right.” (Aren’t you just dying to know what the rest would have been, had he understood that that wasn’t a complete sentence?)Kibbe and leftists agree: The Tea Party is influencing the GOP, causing Republican politicians to adhere more closely to conservative, pro-liberty, and free-market principles. The difference is that Kibbe thinks this impact is beneficial on both a political and a policy basis, while Democrats work to create a bogeyman of “extreme” Republicans — a caricature which has been effective in recent elections when terrible candidates like Todd Akin all but proved the point and Mitt Romney seemed incapable of relating to the ordinary American.
While some conservative voters are willing to take a leap of faith with familiar names who profess enlightenment, the Tea Party purists remain skeptical, and they are not to be blamed. The Kentuckians who voted for Bevin had simply had it up to their eyeballs with a status quo featuring Republicans unwilling to stand up to Obama-era expansionism. They consider fresh faces the only option, and that is not unreasonable.
But the lesson is: not every Tea Party candidate brings the brilliance, skill and message discipline of Ted Cruz. Please remember that America’s strongest Tea Party icon did not take out an entrenched incumbent to reach the Senate. He captured an open seat, and thus the hearts of conservatives tired of decades of Republican meekness. If the Tea Party phenomenon is at such an ebb, why is its biggest star the most powerful force in Washington?
When Tea Party candidates lose, sometimes it’s due to flaws other than ideology. Some are not the crispest campaigners. Some do not have the sharpest staffs. Sometimes they say wacky things and hang themselves.
None of those events constitute a narrative of a Tea Party in decline.
Drew Griffin, a CNN reporter who has followed and broken several stories regarding the Department of Veterans Affairs scandal, was in disbelief over President Obama’s inaction following his private meeting with Secretary Eric Shinseki. The president indicated that the administration would continue to look into the situation before doing anything.“I was a little caught off-guard by what apparently is a disconnect by what’s happening out here in the country and what the president is talking about,” Griffin said after the president’s briefing. “I hate to be curt, but these GAO reports, these Office of Inspector General, these memos dating back to 2010 to 2008 — this problem is real, it exists, it really doesn’t have to be studied as to what’s going on.”“The government has done its job studying these issues,” he continued. “To say that you are going to now wait for yet again for more studies to come back and more fact-finding to come back, I would think that the vets I’ve been talking to wanted much more direct action of what actually is going to happen going forward instead of, ‘Wait and see, and then we’ll decide what’s going to happen going forward.’”
His Todd Aikin moment.Garcia made the comment during a Google hangout he convened last week to talk about comprehensive immigration reform with supporters. The Democrat attempted to point out how, for all their talk about limited government, many Republicans are fine spending loads of government money on border security.“Let me give you an example, the kind of money we’ve poured in,” he said. “So the most dangerous — sorry, the safest city in America is El Paso, Texas. It happens to be across the border from the most dangerous city in the Americas, which is Juarez. Right?”“And two of the safest cities in America, two of them are on the border with Mexico,” Garcia continued. “And of course, the reason is we’ve proved that Communism works. If you give everybody a good government job, there’s no crime.”“But that isn’t what we should be doing on the border,” he continued. “The kind of money we’ve poured into it, and we’re having diminishing returns.”The video was uploaded to YouTube by the America Rising PAC, a Republican PAC founded in 2013 and dedicated to opposition research. It’s also the same group that originally uploaded Garcia’s earwax snafu.
The Obama administration has quietly adjusted key provisions of its signature healthcare law to potentially make billions of additional taxpayer dollars available to the insurance industry if companies providing coverage through the Affordable Care Act lose money.The move was buried in hundreds of pages of new regulations issued late last week. It comes as part of an intensive administration effort to hold down premium increases for next year, a top priority for the White House as the rates will be announced ahead of this fall's congressional elections.Administration officials for months have denied charges by opponents that they plan a "bailout" for insurance companies providing coverage under the healthcare law.They continue to argue that most insurers shouldn't need to substantially increase premiums because safeguards in the healthcare law will protect them over the next several years.But the change in regulations essentially provides insurers with another backup: If they keep rate increases modest over the next couple of years but lose money, the administration will tap federal funds as needed to cover shortfalls.
Consider the current employment culture. Sit down with an employment officer at the company where you hope to work, and something feels strange. After a while, you realize what it is: The party on the other side of the desk is not a company executive, it is Jacqueline Berrien, the head of the EEOC. The process moves in similarly creepy fashion when you are the one offering the job: Sure, your future hire is there in the flesh, but you might as well be talking to Thomas Perez. That is, the rules the United States secretary of labor enforces determine the course of your conversation more than anything you, or the new hire, might feel like saying.It was not always thus. In the 19th century and well into the 20th, many employers and employees believed that their relationship, the two-party one, was key. Outsiders — regulators, unions, lawmakers — were intruders. That privacy of employer and employee often yielded negative results. The employer might exploit the employee. But the two-party dynamic often succeeded. Because the employee-employer pair set their terms together, they trusted each other. From time to time, they also helped each other.
In 1905, the Supreme Court supported this old view when it held that New York State might not regulate the hours worked at a bakery because doing so interfered with the sanctity of the contract between worker and employer. The case, Lochner, has long been ridiculed by progressives and conservatives alike as an example of absurd federal interventionism: After all, the issue was a state law, not a law passed in Washington, D.C. Several decades later, in the 1923 case Adkins v. Children’s Hospital, the Supreme Court explicitly rejected the minimum wage, with Justice Sutherland explaining of the minimum wage: “It exacts from the employer an arbitrary payment for a purpose and upon a basis having no causal connection with his business, or the contract or the work the employee engages to do.” It was only another decade-plus later, in West Coast Hotel, that the enervated justices finally succumbed and opened the door to a third party, the labor regulator. Well into the second term of a progressive administration, justices do tend to get intimidated, and the Supreme Court certainly demonstrated that in West Coast Hotel.
The relationship between employer and worker does matter. The employer who cannot set his business’s wages, or who must, whether or not he can afford it, increase wages, is an employer who is less likely to invest in his relationship with his employees. He is also less likely to hire and more likely to use a temp agency, to “nickel and dime” in the way that progressive cartoons mock. States and towns rarely supply institutions as wonderful as the Andrew Carnegie libraries. When rules intrude, the loss to personal ambition, workplace satisfaction, and civic culture is great. So great that perhaps someone will eventually figure out a way to quantify that.
