The new Crossroads GPS ad “Basketball” could prove to be the most effective ad of the 2012 presidential campaign.

The ad is not red meat for right wingers. It does not go after President Obama for his associations with radicals such as Van Jones, Bill Ayers or the Reverend Wright. I doesn’t go after Obama’s Socialism — his desire to redistribute all our wealth. It doesn’t even go after Obama’s extremists efforts to radically transform America.

No, the new “Basketball” ad subtly goes after those who were swayed by presidential candidate Obama’s eloquent offer of hope for change and the disappointment they are now experiencing. As the New York Times puts it, the ad is not a “searing denunciation” of Obama. It is more a soft-pedaled, deeply researched, delicately worded story of a struggling family let down by Obama’s failure to make things better.

The ad opens with a woman watching her young children playing basketball, talking about her family’s financial hard times, with her voice full of disappointment

“I always loved watching the kids play basketball, I still do, even though things have changed.”

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Michael Hernon of Franciscan University, to discuss the Catholic lawsuit over the HHS mandate that religious institutions provide coverage of birth control and why Franciscian became the first Catholic institution to drop health insurance for students over the HHS mandate.

We’re brought to you as always by Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

Notre Dame, Catholic Dioceses Sue Obama Over Contraception Mandate
Franciscan University Becomes First to Drop Coverage Under HHS Mandate
Franciscan University: In Defense of Religious Liberty

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So, Cybersecurity. I’ve spent so much time talking about why the Lieberman-Collins Cybersecurity bill in the Senate is terrible, and anti-PROTECT IP champion Ron Wyden has taken up the opposition as well, but there is need for some enhanced ability of government to coordinate against and to attack Internet security threats.

Here’s a Reddit post that should scare people about the kinds of ongoing criminal enterprises that are out there, online, worldwide. Here’s the kind of research that demonstrates the need of the good guys to be open and to collaborate. Think about what happens when (not if) the technology that goes into these cash cow botnets (some run by Anonymous) instead goes into spying (some done by Wikileaks) and into terrorism (some done by Anonymous).

Cybersecurity is, on some level, easy to understand as an issue. We know there are people online who break into computers. Retransmission Consent is a tricker issue, as it’s regulatory inside baseball between local broadcasters and local cable providers. Two heavily regulated industries battle it out over a fine point of policy. It’s hard for a conservative to grapple with it, sometimes.

But I’m going to disagree with with this post by Gordon Smith and call television broadcasters the new manufacturers of buggy whips. Right now they’re still important for some people, to be sure, in the same way that some people will use a land line phone instead of wireless Internet to stay connected.

But younger people are moving away from it. “Broadcast-only” is a misleading term. I’m in that category, but not because I watch broadcast television. I watch pay TV. It’s just called Hulu, not cable.

Further, I doubt that broadcasters really are the best source of information anymore most of the time. People are using the Internet more and more without having a cord in the home to bring it in. iPhones, Android phones, and yes even Windows phones, are collectively taking over the phone market. In so doing they also take over the information market at home.

This is why it’s wrong to maintain the current retransmission consent rules, and why it’s wrong to try to block spectrum incentive auctions to encourage the shifting of spectrum from broadcasters to wireless Internet providers. Even if we thought it was legitimate for government to try to prop up broadcasters instead of opening the market, it’s pointless to have government stand athwart what the people actually want to spend their money on, yelling stop. We’ll just get run over, and hinder innovation in the progress.

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One Florida political blog calls this “Maybe the worst political web video ever produced in Florida” and comments that “You watch this video and all of the losses — Jim Davis, Alex Sink, Kendrick Meek, etc. — begin to make sense.” David Freddoso quips that “After watching this, I’m convinced Obama is toast in FL this year.” And it’s not even targeting any of the actual Republican candidates in 2012, but instead going after the popular Marco Rubio. How bad is this web ad produced by the Florida Democratic Party? Watch for yourself.

Today is the calm before the storm of next week when conservatives will be involved in the marque fight of the cycle; Ted Cruz vs. David Dewhurst in Texas.  Nonetheless, there are primary elections in Arkansas and Kentucky today that will provide us with a couple pickup opportunities.

Arkansas-4 

Blue Dog Mike Ross is headed back to the Democrat kennel, creating a prime pickup opportunity for us in November.  However, it is vital that we pick the best candidate in the primary to secure at least one conservative seat in this rapidly conservative-trending state.  At present, the Republican delegation stinks:

We need to build a conservative bench in this state if we ever hope to win a conservative majority.  Tom Cotton is the man.  He was the first candidate endorsed by Red State. He is also supported by the Club for Growth and the Madison Project.  Cotton is committed to fighting the liberals in both parties.  His opponent, Beth Anne Rankin, who is supported by Mike Huckabee, will represent more of the same in this mediocre populist delegation.

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Promoted from diaries.

No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President…

–Article II, Section 1 of the United States Constitution

This is a passage that has weighed heavily upon us in recent years. There are those among us, known commonly as “Birthers” who dispute the eligibility of various politicians to be President or Vice-President of the United States. The most popular target of the Birthers is Barack Obama, of course, but of late, Birthers have been training their sights on the cases of Marco Rubio, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Ted Cruz, and probably others.

Leaving aside the birth certificate issue, which is unique to Obama’s case (and for the record, I do believe he was born in Hawaii), the main sticking point for the Birthers is that all four of the politicians have at least one parent who was not born in America (indeed, Obama is the only one who had a parent who was an American citizen at the time of his birth, his mother). They are fond of quoting the line from Book I, Chapter XIX of Emmerich de Vattel’s The Law of Nations: “The natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.”

While they are not wrong in that the Founders were fond of the book, there’s one problem with trying to apply this interpretation to our Constitution: the United States’ legal history.

I am planning this to be a mutli-part series. Part II will deal with the interpretation of this clause in the latter half of the 19th century, with particular emphasis placed on the 14th Amendment and later court cases. Part III, meanwhile, will deal with how the clause has been dealt with in the 20th century and in our day. So, let’s jump right in.

Hit the jump for more.

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Over the course of the last two years, Barack Obama’s union appointees at the National Labor Relations Board have been waging a war against America’s union-free workplace. While the NLRB’s prosecution of the Boeing Company for the alleged “crime” of opening a non-union pant in South Carolina captured much media attention, when taken in their totality, the less-reported decisions and rule-making that Obama’s appointees have issued is, to America’s union-free workplace, akin to a death by a thousand cuts.

Although the NLRB’s so-called ambush election rule was recently (and temporarily) struck down by a federal court, as long as unions control the NLRB, its return is only a matter of time.

One decision, though, that the NLRB issued last year that has been discussed with little understanding by the general public (including many small businesses) is the ability for unions to now unionize “micro unions (or units).”

Simply put, the NLRB now allows small, distinct groups of employees to unionize within a workplace, even if the vast majority of employees working around the small group don’t want to unionize. Further, under the NLRB’s new, micro-union concept, it is very easy for multiple unions to now unionize multiple small distinct groups of employees.

Now, under a recent decision under the NLRB’s Region 2 in New York City, the NLRB has ruled that the shoe salespeople within a large department store are eligible to vote to unionize, despite the fact that the entire store is populated by salespeople.

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Tonight, I’m going to spend some time talking about movies, what a waste 3D is, and of course talk about the new James Bond movie.

Oh, and I’ll get into the Cory Booker backtrack too.

You can listen live tonight on the WSB live stream and call in at 1-800-WSB-TALK.

The show is live from 6pm to 9pm ET.

Consider this an open thread.

We have reached an endpoint of sorts in the decade-long Afghanistan War. President Obama will not keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and force them to accept terms of any kind. Have we lost the war? Should we have left years ago, or never gone in? That depends on your view of what we were fighting for and about in the first place.

I. Lowering The Bar

The New York Times summarizes the lowered expectations Obama is pushing to be able to declare a successful withdrawal:

Gone is the much greater expectation that NATO will leave behind a cohesive central government with real influence beyond Kabul and a handful of other population centers. Gone is the assumption that Helmand Province, Kandahar and the rest of the heavily contested south – where the bulk of the 2010 influx of troops was sent – will remain entirely in the control of the central government once that area is transferred to Afghanistan’s fledgling national security forces.

…President Obama’s national security adviser, Thomas E. Donilon, described a hoped-for outcome in Afghanistan that was far less ambitious than what American officials once envisioned.

“The goal is to have an Afghanistan again that has a degree of stability such that forces like Al Qaeda and associated groups cannot have safe haven unimpeded, which could threaten the region and threaten U.S. and other interests in the world,” Mr. Donilon said.

Nowhere on this list is the defeat of the Taliban, which – seeing this coming – gave up on peace talks months ago:

While Kandahar and other population centers in the south have seen a decrease in Taliban attacks since the surge forces arrived, insurgent attacks have increased in less populated southern areas, military officials report. The heads of the Senate and House intelligence committees, appearing on CNN’s “State of the Union” program two weeks ago, and reporting on a recent trip to Afghanistan, said the Taliban were gaining ground, something that is bound to accelerate once the NATO troops give way to Afghan-led forces.

“I think we’d both say that what we found is that the Taliban is stronger,” Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said, seated next to Representative Mike Rogers, Republican of Michigan.

As Dan Spencer noted yesterday, this is a distinct change of tune from 2008, when then-candidate Obama described Afghanistan as “a war that we have to win” and 2009, when President Obama declared:

This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaida would plot to kill more Americans.

So this is not only a war worth fighting; this is a – this is fundamental to the defense of our people.

But despite the President’s bold words, the Administration never did set a clear definition of victory in Afghanistan. Specifically, while the State Department designated the Pakistani Taliban a terrorist group, it resisted requests by even Democratic Senators to designate the Afghan Taliban as a terrorist group, apparently – at the time – due to an unwillingness to foreclose a negotiated resolution that would bring the Taliban back into the political process. This was not a new problem (the State Department had likewise refused to designate the Taliban as a terrorist group during the Bush Administration even in 2001) but at a time when the nation was ramping up its military commitment to the war in Afghanistan, the broader refusal to define an enemy to be defeated (the essential element of any military action) left the war effort directionless and increasingly difficult to justify to a war-weary public. And now, by withdrawing unilaterally without using the leverage of our arms to force a negotiated resolution on favorable terms, we are essentially washing our hands of the fight against the Taliban.

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Today is May 21st. On this date in 1602, Martha’s Vineyard was first sighted by English explorer Bartholomew Gosnold. At the time, the island was peopled entirely by the indigenous tribe known as the Kennedys. When he made landfall, Gosnold was offered brandy and snuff, then asked to leave because his ship was “blocking the view, dahling, and has dreadful decor.” Also on this date, in 1980, The Empire Strikes Back was first released in theaters. That movie always makes me nostalgic. I remember when my dad cut my hand off and I fell out of a floating city. Ah, memories. On this date in 1892, the opera Pagliacci premiered in Milan, Italy. It was an instant and enduring success, and gave us the ever popular (and personal favorite) aria “Recitar! … Vesti la giubba“. It also taught the world that clowns are to be feared and avoided. And finally, today is “National Memo Day”. You can celebrate by starting every sentence with “note to self.” Note to self, this is an Open Thread.

Cory Booker’s Conscience Held Hostage, Day One | Jim Geraghty
“On Morning Joe, Newark Mayor Cory Booker’s subsequent video explaining that he has no real quarrel with the tactics and methods of the Obama campaign is compared to a ‘hostage tape.’”

Harold Ford Jr. On Booker: “I Would Not Have Backed Off The Comments” | RCP
“‘I would not have backed off the comments if I were Mayor Booker,’ former U.S. Congressman Harold Ford Jr. said on ‘Morning Joe’ today.”

Networks Target Romney’s Wealth 13 Times More Than Richer Sen. Kerry | Newsbusters
“But the major networks gave Kerry’s great wealth nowhere near the attention that they have given to Gov. Mitt Romney’s millions in 2012.”

Actor Will Smith Gets High Taxes Reality Check | MichelleMalkin.com
“Actor Will Smith supports President Obama’s call for America’s top earners to pay more taxes. But where would he draw the line? Let’s just say Smith won’t be moving to France any time soon.”

Politico Continues Attacks On Private Citizens Supporting Romney | Big Journalism
“The backgrounds of private citizens supporting Governor Romney, however, elicits all kinds of time, attention, manpower, and publicity from Politico’s wretched left-wingers.”

Kathleen Sebelius’s Orwellian Assault On the First Amendment from kevinaw2.

boniface (BAH-nuh-fuss): noun the proprietor of a hotel, nightclub, or restaurant.
(Via Merriam-Webster.)

For free.  Here’s Mitt Romney‘s latest strike-while-the-iron-is-hot attack ad “Big Bain Backfire:”

Nice to see that they’re keeping up with events, huh?

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