Current tax law, or what passes for “law”, requires tyranny in its enforcement. The Internal Revenue Service has always been uniquely above the law with their unique right to preemptive seizure of a target’s property and a reverse burden of proof that requires accused taxpayers  to prove their innocence. Broad bureaucratic discretion  weakens the rule of law at the IRS just as it does with EPA, Dodd-Frank and Obamacare. Much as at Attorney General Eric Holder’s Department of Justice where their rule of law was interpreted to acquit New Black Panthers that  intimidated white voters with billy clubs at Philadelphia polling places. Campaign finance laws in clear violation of the Constitution’s insistence that Congress “make no law” abridging the freedom of political speech and having  such partisan liberal activist Democrats wield the vast government power of the IRS merely increases the inherent tyranny of tax law exponentially.

Meanwhile, as President Barack Hussein Obama and his Secretary of Homeland Security bend over backwards not to offend jihadists who perpetrate “work-place incidents” (aka murder) at Fort Hood, the IRS protects us from…wait for it:

The IRS came after Billy Graham, too, his son charged Tuesday in a letter to President Barack Obama.

Franklin Graham, the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the family’s international humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse, said that the IRS notified the organizations in September that it was conducting a “review” of their activities for tax year 2010.

With the IRS admitting it gave extra scrutiny to conservative political organizations, Graham says he now believes that the review was part of an Obama administration effort of “targeting and attempting to intimidate us.”

The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association urging of voters to back “candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel” during last year’s presidential race was the reason why IRS agents visited the North Carolina offices of both Graham groups, the letter accuses.

“While these audits not only wasted taxpayer money, they wasted money contributed by donors for ministry purposes as we had to spend precious resources servicing the IRS agents in our offices,” Graham wrote in the letter, which was shared with POLITICO. “I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us. This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it ‘un-American.”

Graham said that “in light” of the IRS admission that it targeted tea party groups for added scrutiny, “I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence – or justifiable.”

The Philosopher Kings prefer “laws” like Obamacare that grant the discretion for the secretary to decide “The Law” in an arbitrary way. They know best what We the People need in every circumstance and needn’t be saddled with bright lines of right and wrong. Hence their aversion to an imaginary line on a map, commonly called a border, that might separate them from future voters to continue them in power, but I digress.

The Founders understood that free people imbued with Judeo-Christian values and an economy allowing free enterprise filled the vacuum liberals assume must be filled by what experts wielding by government decree. Hopefully voters that re-elected such a failed president will realize the role they play (in conjunction with a compliant press, mass  media and academia) in imbuing liberal Democrats with their notion of un-accountability and the resulting hubris we see at the IRS, EPA and DOJ.

Those within the Obama administration that broke the law must be punished for crimes committed; but the confluence of the Benghazi, IRS and DOJ-AP subpoena scandals is a teachable moment that could bode well for future elections even if no one political officeholder is impeached. It would have been hard for even a competent and vast right-wing conspiracy to concoct a better real world narrative exhibiting the inherent dangers of big liberal government on our individual liberty, economic prosperity and national security.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

To hear liberals in the media express shock, however belatedly, at how “gruesome” and “grisly” were the murders of newborns by “Doctor” Kermit Gosnell following botched, third-trimester abortions, one would think that your average run of the mill abortion more resembled the merciful deaths of convicted murderers by lethal injection, if not a manicure. But then, Gosnell was also acquitted on one murder charge:

An abortion doctor was convicted Monday of first-degree murder and could face execution in the deaths of three babies who were delivered alive and then killed with scissors at his grimy, “house of horrors” clinic.

In a case that became a grisly flashpoint in the nation’s abortion debate, Dr. Kermit Gosnell, 72, was also found guilty of involuntary manslaughter in the overdose death of an abortion patient. He was cleared in the death of a fourth baby, who prosecutors say let out a whimper before the doctor cut the spinal cord.

Do we think that what happened before the “whimper” (death rattle?) by Baby No. 4 and the cutting of its (his or hers?) spinal cord, was not grisly and gruesome? Three other murder charges were thrown out by the trial judge before trial. More detail:

The gruesome details came out more than two years ago during an investigation of prescription drug trafficking at Gosnell’s clinic. Investigators said it was a foul-smelling “house of horrors” with bags and bottles of fetuses, including jars of severed feet, along with bloodstained furniture, dirty medical instruments, and cats roaming the premises.

Many of the fetuses in bags and bottles were the result of  choices made legal by the Supreme Court in 1973. Is choice “gruesome” and “grisly”? Apparently, but there’s nothing to see here after Roe v Wade, but in future would our un-regulated protectors of women’s health please get rid of the legal remains of choices before they are photographed for intolerant pro-lifers to run in ads. But no, this same liberal media regularly denounces the showing of fetal bodies being torn apart via suction at week 23.

Funny, when I read Winston Churchill’s accounts of the drawing and quartering of certain King’s enemies in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples, descriptions such as grisly and gruesome came to mind, but I guess that’s not the case if the other ends of ropes tied to horses traveling north, south, east and west, respectively, pass thru a vaginal canal before being tied to small arms and legs?

“Progressives”, can we talk?

Just got through finally watching the first few minutes of the Academy Award-nominated film “Lincoln” for which Daniel Day-Lewis became the first man to win three Best Actor Oscars. But Mike, what has that to do with abortion and Gosnell? Glad you asked.

Why did Director Stephen Spielberg feel the need to re-write history to make a historic figure as revered as the man called “The Great Emancipator” seem even more “emancipating” than he was:

In the film Lincoln is dedicated to the great task of getting the House to ratify the Thirteenth Amendment. But the film fails to note that Lincoln did not support the Thirteenth Amendment when it was proposed in 1864—by the Women’s National Loyal League, led by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Lincoln’s view at that point, as Foner shows, was that slavery should be abolished on a state-by-state basis, since slavery had been created by state law. He changed his mind in response to political pressure from Radical Republicans.

According to the film, Lincoln in 1865 was in “a race against time” (this synopsis comes from the semi-official Internet Movie Data Base), because “peace may come at any time, and if it comes before the amendment is passed, the returning southern states will stop the amendment abolishing slavery before it can become law.” That is simply not true. The movie focuses on the lame duck Congress that met in January 1865. If it had failed to ratify the amendment, Lincoln had announced that he would call a special session of the new Congress in March, where the Republicans would have a two-thirds majority. It would have passed the amendment easily—slightly more than one month later than the lame-duck Congress featured in the film.

The film makes another false argument, that once the Southern states were back in the union, they would have the power to block the amendment’s ratification, which required the vote of three-quarters of the states. Lincoln and the rest of the Republicans were not going to allow the Confederate state governments to remain in power after surrender—that was what “Reconstruction” was all about. Louisiana, Tennessee and Virginia had already formed new governments that abolished slavery. There was no “race against time”—and thus the central drama of the film is bogus.

The abolition of slavery by Western Europeans and Americans is one of the greatest chapters of 5000 years of human history dominated by human suffering under tyranny. But progressives, modern-day liberals, Democrats (but I repeat myself), are never content to compare America with other actual civilizations in that history, for to do so in this context would show that only the Judeo-Christian West abolished slavery on moral grounds. Lincoln, the first Republican, made his anti-slavery bona fides clear in his famous debates with Stephen Douglas, but as a politician and President had to deal with the real world in which the institution had existed since time immemorial.

Therefore, the Real Abraham Lincoln is not good enough for the Utopians. Yet, these same ideological soul mates (read atheists, agnostics and some liberal Christians) have made liberal politics their religion,  with “choice” aka abortion, as its most cherished sacrament. But a funny thing happened on the way to their “holy of holies” where only the Most Reverend Doctors aka abortionists are allowed behind the veil.

Some body parts fell out and spoiled the party, so please pay for Georgetown Law Student’s birth control pills. Technology is progressive. Human nature is not.

Seven lawyers in robes opened Pandora’s Box and Americans succumbed. After all, BMW payments are more easily made absent bills for Pampers at Sam’s Club. Will Spielberg’s next flick re-write Gosnell as heroic or merely misunderstood? That if only five lawyers in robes would tweak Casey v Planned Parenthood…

Meanwhile, the march of millions of legal grisly and gruesome deaths inside wombs “progresses”, while liberal Democrats cry crocodile tears over the “pain” inflicted on mass murderers by electric chairs, hangmen’s nooses and even the pin-prick of needles. And we think the national debt is this country’s  biggest problem?

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

It wasn’t “just about sex” nor “Nixon’s War”.

In the wake of the documented cover up of Benghazi security lapses and admissions of politically targeted IRS inquiries by the Obama Administration, would it be too much to ask that the moral lapses of Democrats Lyndon, Bill, Hillary, and Barack finally be placed in an accurate historical context? We had been searching for a way to express our outrage at the current president of the United State’s seeming alienation from the people he is sworn to protect and defend, without seeming too driven by partisanship in our critique when we learn that:

The Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups went beyond those with “tea party” or “patriot” in their names—as the agency admitted Friday—to also include ones worried about government spending, debt or taxes, and even ones that lobbied to “make America a better place to live,” according to new details of a government probe.

Even Hillary Clinton, famous for defining patriotism as disagreeing with President Bush on the Iraq War, would have to deem such actions by the Obama Administration’s IRS as, ipso facto, “not patriotic.” These Clinton-Obama Democrats are hard to parody, much less overstate the venality of.

We argued soon after the September 11, 2012 attack on our consulate in Benghazi, Libya and well before even then-Secretary of State Clinton’s offensive “What difference does it make?”-congressional testimony in January, that the admitted facts (little security in a war zone that had been abandoned by all Western nations and obvious mischaracterization of the attack as resulting from a spontaneous demonstration) alone indicted President Obama and Hillary for dereliction of duty. After all, the offices of Chief Executive of the United States and the highest cabinet position in the chain of command are not mere platforms from which to make speeches advocating the virtues of modern-day liberal progressivism and the Democratic Party. No, these offices are entered into only after the swearing of oaths to defend the United States and its Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic.

But then again, this gamecock has is personally aware of the problematic circumstance of foxes guarding hen houses, but I digress.

Having an embassy or consulate open for business at all in Libya was negligent, per se. Having less security in Benghazi, especially after two previous attacks there by al Qaeda affiliates, than we have at the U.S. embassy in Paris was reckless, bordering on criminal. Blaming the attack on an anti-Mohammed video and jailing its American producer in order to win an election based partly on the claim that one’s foreign policy has removed the threat of al Qaeda is, well, not patriotic.

Before any testimony was given by whistleblowers before Congress last week, there was no exculpatory explanation for the actions and inaction of the Obama Administration before, during and after the Benghazi attack. But if a Republican partisan were to imagine what a little digging would reveal, they couldn’t have planted evidence more damning:

• Requests for extra security were made known to Hillary;
• Hillary did receive a 2am call the night of the attack advising here that it was carried out by Ansar al-Sharia, Islamist terrorists in Libya  affiliated with al Qaeda;
• Less than five days later Hillary stood before the families of the fallen in Delaware and blamed the deaths on the producer of the video; and
• Hillary’s top aide threatened the job security of State Department whistleblowers should they speak to Congress or the press.

Yes, by all means let’s have more hearings even if no impeachments or criminal charges are forthcoming. The truth and deterrence against future such lapses will out. But could fellow Republicans in the media at least have the candor of Dennis Kucinich and state the obvious import of the facts  we already have by expressing moral outrage against Obama and Hillary? It is not necessary for Democrats to admit to Perry Mason that they are guilty of murdering the truth, for Republicans to so conclude and so state to the American people when the cameras are rolling.

Moreover, it is allowed for Republicans to note the venal Democratic Party pattern of LBJ tapes admitting he fought the Vietnam War he stated he couldn’t win (It could, but that argument is for another day) with both hands tied behind his back in order to protect the reputation of his manhood and that President Bill Clinton’s use of the IRS as a political tool makes Richard Nixon’s seem like a less than third-rate burglary:

This Clinton scandal [Filegate] involve[d] the discovery of over 900 Republican FBI files in the White House.  Files of former Secretary of State James Baker, former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, and Newt Gingrich’s spokesman Tony Blankley were found to be on this list.   Upon the discovery of these files, the White House issued an excuse claiming that the files were mistakenly requested by a White House employee working with an outdated list.  They were called a simple “snafu.”  Investigations into Filegate revealed that not a common White House worker but the President’s friend and close advisor, Anthony Marceca, had requested the files.

Of course, then-GOP Senate Majority Leader of the Impeachment-Removal from Office Trial, Trent Lott locked up all but some Monica Lewinsky evidence lest the press be leaked evidence damning him, protestations of then-Democrat Lieberman notwithstanding; thus leaving Nixon as the only President owning a -gate, water or otherwise, that the “mainstream” media recognizes.

The GOP is to be commended for their hard work in un-covering the details of Benghazi. Let’s just hope that they don’t set the bar for public shaming too high, even if all they have is Fox News Channel. Yes, there are some more questions to be answered, but the main questions concerning the character of Obama and Hillary and their minions have already been answered. They are vile and we shouldn’t be shy about repeating that fact in public, ad nauseam.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

If you thought that the Boston Marathon bombings would preclude a repeat of presidential apology tours on foreign soil, like President Obama’s 2009 pilgrimage to Cairo to beg the sharia (that treats women like slaves) law-loving Muslim Brotherhood’s forgiveness of American presidents not named Obama for backing Egyptian leaders who wouldn’t arm suicide bombers bound for pizza parlors in Tel Aviv, you would be wrong:

Once again blaming his own country for Mexico’s gun violence without mentioning Fast and Furious, the gun runner in chief pledges to find and jail gun smugglers. Perhaps he should start with his own administration.

‘We recognize that most of the guns used to commit violence here in Mexico come from the United States. … We’ll keep increasing the pressure on the gun traffickers who bring illegal guns into Mexico, and we’ll keep putting these criminals where they belong — behind bars,” President Obama told students assembled at the Anthropology Museum in Mexico City on Friday, repeating a big lie he’s said before.

Obama did not mention Fast and Furious, the administration’s gunrunning operation into Mexico, which started in the fall of 2009 and ended in December 2010 only after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry was murdered in Arizona with one of the weapons we provided to the Mexican drug cartels. Immigration Customs Enforcement Agent Jaime Zapata was also killed by Fast and Furious weapons, as have been hundreds of Mexican nationals.

Not to be outdone on non-golf vacation homeland turf, at a rare White House news conference last week, the president was asked about the hunger strike by illegal Islamist terrorist combatants detained at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:

Bill Plante (CBS): Mr. President, as you’re probably aware, there’s a growing hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay, among prisoners there. Is it any surprise, really, that they would prefer death rather than have no end in sight to their confinement?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it is not a surprise to me that we’ve got problems in Guantanamo, which is why, when I was campaigning in 2007 and 2008 and when I was elected in 2008, I said we need to close Guantanamo.

I continue to believe that we’ve got to close Guantanamo. I think — well, you know, I think it is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep America safe. It is expensive. It is inefficient. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It lessens cooperation with our allies on counter-terrorism efforts. It is a recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.

Now Congress determined that they would not let us close it and despite the fact that there are a number of the folks who are currently in Guantanamo who the courts have said could be returned to their country of origin or potentially a third country.

This conservative Republican wouldn’t have a problem with yet another Barack Hussein Obama Apology Tour if only it consisted of a belated fast and furious mea culpa accepting blame for his own failings as President, rather than presuming to apologize for blameless Americans.  We would be reassured to see our President shed crocodile tears for the victims of Gitmo and other Islamist terrorists, especially if it coincided with a Nixonian resignation admitting his dereliction of Commander-in-Chief duties in Benghazi (The private sector, and work on his third autobiography, awaits, but I digress).

And what American wouldn’t rejoice if their Chief Executive took  his first focused-on-creating-private-sector-jobs tour in Texas or any other state, if only upon his return home he would tour Capitol Hill to sign legislation repealing Obamacare and other Democratic Party-enacted job-killing legislation he signed over the last four years. But what seems more likely, is that President Obama will claim credit for the Lone Star state  economy despite his responsibility for assaults Texans have ameliorated  against the EPA and his deep water oil drilling moratoriums for which he was held in contempt of court.

There are few states that can boast of good economy over the past four years, and even those that can could be doing much better had Obama and the Democrats not held all levers of power in D.C. for two years and prevented any job-creating, pro-business legislation from seeing the light of day with shared power over the last two years.

Until 2016 too many of us cry crocodile tears daily for the poor denied an opportunity to work, the middle class the opportunity to stay there and our armed forces led by the likes of Obama, Hillary come Kerry, that are indifferent to their plight.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

Never a fan of the flaky former anti-pork crusader when he last represented Charleston and environs, nor while Governor of the Palmetto State from 2003-2011 when he literally soiled the State House floor with piglet feces when the non-diapered porcine co-stars (named “Pork” and “Barrel”) of an anti-pork barrel-spending  stunt let nature take its course with the slop they had eaten for breakfast; Sanford, like most any Republican, is vastly superior to Elizabeth Colbert Busch, and most any Democrat. What should worry conservatives is that such a historically conservative district, that twice sent Tim Scott to Washington before he was appointed to fill the U.S. Senate seat vacated by (the retiring-to-head-the-Heritage Foundation) Jim DeMint, couldn’t produce a tea partier conservative Republican challenger capable of defeating the disgraced professional politician in the GOP primary.

Not sure if Colbert Busch is married, much less whether she has ever committed adultery in South America or been alleged to have violated court orders in North America; but for the purpose of electing a glorified yea/nay voter on relatively easy issue choices, I don’t much care. Much like while I would prefer that my barber engage in interesting patter while manipulating sharp objects above my neck, what matters is the quality of the haircut.

What matters about members of Congress is how they vote on proposed bills that affect my life, Liberty and happiness pursuits. While not defending himself against his ex-wife in family court or beating paths to bungalows in Buenos Aires, Sanford can be counted on to support the pro-growth economic policies he always has and which are desperately needed now by Charleston, South Carolina and 49 other states.

Which brings us to drawl and that’s all, the myth of the conservative Southern Democrat, the “D” after Colbert Busch’s name on the ballot and Boeing. Again, not sure if the Democrat nominee has a drawl, and given the dispositive wealth of information communicated by her choice to run as a Democrat, I admit I haven’t felt the need to closely follow the campaign; but if I were a betting man I would wager that she has pretended to be a conservative of sorts while trying to hide her past record of liberal activism anathema to the views of a majority of South Carolinians.

Today’s Democratic Party is bought and paid for by the Gosnell-defending Planned Parenthood abortion, anti-business environmentalist, race-baiting, thuggish labor union lobby; and candidates that choose to run with the “D” next to their name do so, not because they are yellow dogs like their grandfathers, but rather because they are true-believing  liberals like their failed hero in the White House whose illegally-packed-with-improper-recess-appointments National Labor Relations Board delayed the creation of 3800 well-paying North Charleston Boeing plant jobs for more than two years.

If elected, Busch (tired of typing her un-hyphenated “last” names) would cast her first vote in the House to re-install the Obamacare-passing Nancy Pelosi as Speaker and could be counted on to tow the liberal Democratic Party line like Sixth District Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC) does. Want higher  taxes? Vote for Busch. Want to finish off the coal industry? Busch is your gal. Like higher energy prices? Elizabeth’s party delivers. Want to make sure full-time job killing Obamcare remains the law of the land? Vote “D”!

Charleston rebuilt after Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s 1865 post-March to the Sea visit and the mid-1990s closing of its Naval Base and Shipyard; but for S.C.’s Holy City and most other cities across the Fruited Plain to rebuild after Obama’s leveling of the non-J.P. Morgan, American economy, Republican votes to reverse laws enacted by Democrat majorities will be required. Whether they are flaky, adulterous, lying trespassers or not.

Our Stone Mountain-of-Georgia-roost-view of the South Carolina race is hazy and our alter ego Cockstradamus retired from political prognostications after We the People re-hired a failed Obama last November. But if our beloved home state, and especially the First Congressional District, even faintly resembles the state we left for Hotlanta in the Summer of 2001, we would be shocked if Charleston sent a “D” to D.C. on Tuesday.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

But Mike, over 100,000 jobs were “created” last month and Jason Collins of the Washington Wizards “came out.”

If only the same number of jobs existing before the new jobs were created, still existed.

But alas, as we sit here in Month 52 of the Age of Obama, the total number of Americans employed is still less than the number employed on the last day of Month 96 of the Age of Bush43, i.e. the day before President Barack Obama’s First Inaugural. Remember that guy? You know, the Celebrity-in-Chief that was re-elected last year when a majority of voters decided that ex-President George W. Bush was still responsible for all problems economic or otherwise.

Still can’t quite place this Obama cat? OK, he’s the guy that cut off questioning of the surviving Boston Bomber to congratulate a former NBA player for having the “courage” to call Sports Illustrated and admit that back during his playing days he was oriented to have sex with men. Remind you of recitations of the acts of valor by those awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor? Me neither.

Not sure yet if free agent (Collins ‘came out’ the day AFTER his contract with the Wizards expired. Jason is ‘active’ in the NBA like I am, and I’ve never played professional basketball apart from wagers on pick-up games at the YMCA, but I digress…) Collins will be nominated for a CMOH or if former ACORN attorney Obama will serve as the 36-year old’s agent to try and find an NBA team to sign up a guy that averaged less than three points and rebounds combined, per game, last year. Hopefully Collins won’t also “come out” against background checks for gun sales between gay non-gun dealer partners at gun shows, lest we risk another Sandy Hook.

But then again, the gun used by the Connecticut mass murderer was registered with his mom. So, think a gay man will come out for the Democratic Party’s dream of a federal law allowing the police to enter homes at will after Marathon Bombings or merely to enforce new laws requiring gun owners to properly store their weapons so that their children don’t have access? Only random checks of the homes of registered gun owners by Big Brother could possibly work. But then what of the Supreme Court’s ruling striking down state sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas when an exigent search of a home happened upon a Collins-like act of courage between two other men that were also not then active players in the NBA?

Enough already Mike! The Obama Administration won’t come clean on its Benghazi lies, Islamist terrorism threat denials, the national debt crisis or the anemic economy.

So you mean that blaming the Ambassador and other American deaths in Benghazi on a video that Hillary says doesn’t make any difference at this point, Mirandizing Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, changing the cost-of-living formula for Social Security beneficiaries and reminding us of J.P. Morgan’s record profits, isn’t “coming clean”?

Guess not, but who knows, maybe tomorrow we will learn that President Obama and the First Lady held a conference call with three offensive linemen on NFL rosters who are courageous partners in a bigamous gay marriage whose ex-wives aborted fetuses with the help of Planned Parenthood. God bless America…

…unless you desire Life, Liberty and pursuits of same -sex, economically prosperous (able to afford Le Sueur instead of just store brand/generic peas), secure-in-the-homeland-and/or-foreign-embassy-or-consulate happiness.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

It’s easy to forget the fear that gripped America in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil. It’s even easier to take for granted the homeland peace that followed until the Islamist-inspired  Tsarnaev Brothers & Co. bombings in Boston on the Ides of April, 2013. And it’s even easier than that to not remember what made the peace possible, especially if your political party opposed nearly every aspect of the national security policies that kept Fort Hood (Nov. 2009), Christmas Day Detroit Underwear (Dec. 2009), Times Square (May 2010) and Boston Marathon bombers at bay; and that led to the May 2, 2011 raid that took out Osama bin Laden and the drone that took out Anwar al-Awlaki on September 30, 2011.

Is it just a coincidence that the further away we get from the national security and defense apparatus put in place by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the more we hear of terrorist near misses and the more dead American terrorist victims we bury as a result of Islamist successes? Last week’s dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center (library)  in this tenth anniversary year of the invasion of Iraq seems a good time to evaluate the post-9/11 legacy of the re-elected Republican Bush43 and the post-apology tour national security record of his re-elected Democrat successor to the Oval Office.

We are continually reminded of the plethora of hawkish Bush policies retained by President Barack Obama despite his record of opposition to so many after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate through his 2008 presidential campaign.  Yes, its true that rendition, indefinite detention of illegal enemy combatants, and drone attacks continue unabated, if not enhanced. The Patriot Act remains in effect and yes; despite his Attorney General Eric Holder’s best efforts, the U.S. Military Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba remains open, if only for non-droned, Bush-captured detainees.

But it appears to this observer that would-be terrorists aren’t fooled by what Bush policies Obama continued, whether after sober reflection on how best to discharge his duty to defend innocent American lives (and/or prevent re-election distractions) or after even Democrats in Congress rejected their abandonment (see Gitmo and Holder’s proposed anti-Bush, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed show trial in NYC).

The same terrorists-in-waiting that read faux hawk Democrats not named Joe Lieberman and hopeful “neo-con” Republicans praise President Obama for aspects of the Bush-Cheney defense regime continued under his administration; hear drones in their sleep and saw Zero Dark Thirty on Netflix, also know that:

• President Bush killed tens of thousands of trained-for-attacks-on-the-American-homeland jihadists in the Iraq War by going on offense in their Islamic homeland;
• President Obama was too disinterested  in preserving the gains of The Surge in Iraq to even bother with securing a Status of Forces Agreement there so as to retain an American presence large enough to prevent the establishment of the kind of safe havens for terrorists that Saddam had provided to Abu Nidal and others;
• Then-Senator Obama (and then-Senator Hillary Clinton) voted twice to de-fund American troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan;
• President Obama surrendered in Iraq and has set a date-certain for withdrawal from Taliban-resurgent Afghanistan after settling for less than half the troops requested by military leaders for a surge there;
• President Bush warned of an Iraq-Iran-North Korea “Axis of Evil”, not to tread on me (and this country) in January of 2002 and insisted upon funding SDI throughout his two terms as Commander in Chief;
• Then-Senator Obama opposed the funding of ‘Star Wars’ (SDI) that now remains the best protection America has nuclear missiles launched against Communist Kooks named Kim or Apocalyptic Twelfth Imam-seeking Islamist Iranian Mullahs; and
• President Obama silently observed Axis of Evil-directed slaughter in Teheran streets, while still begging for an audience with the ruling Mullahs’,  Mahmoud MembersOnlyJacket-ejad (sp?) puppet Iranian president.

President Obama twice refused to authorize a raid of OBL’s Pakistani compound for months before finally agreeing to use intel gleaned from KSM and other non-droned, captured members of al Qaeda after Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-approved nose-swabbings (water-boarding enhanced interrogation) that he and many Democrats (including Hillary but not Bill Clinton) opposed as “torture”, to take out the man who declared jihad war on America in 1996, felled our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 killing over 200 and wounding over 4000; and who, along with KSM and Ayman al-Zawahiri plotted, planned and executed the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Yet, despite all that, when President Obama was asked by Bob Woodward, for his 2010 Obama’s Wars book, what national security issue kept him up at night, the Commander in Chief answered not preventing terrorist attacks across the Fruited Plain, but rather that we respond rapidly to victims after attacks.

Last week’s knee-jerk Mirandizing of surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev reveals that in the Age of Obama’s War on Amorphous Extremism, if a captured terrorist isn’t droned; instead of  facing Zero Dark Thirty-style  enhanced interrogations, they are reminded of the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and given the telephone number to Eric Holder’s former Sixth Amendment pro-bono-for-terrorists law firm that stands ready to secure an anti-American show trial if Attorney General Holder can sneak you into Lower Manhattan while Congress is in recess:

Prosecutors unsealed an indictment against a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden on Thursday that charged him with conspiracy to kill Americans, after government sources said he was arrested overseas and brought to New York. Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a militant who appeared in videos representing al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks in 2001, had initially been picked up in Turkey and was brought to the United States in an operation led by Jordanian authorities and the FBI, the sources said.

The Turkish government deported him to Jordan, the sources said, where local authorities and the FBI took custody of him. He was brought to the United States in the last few days, a law enforcement source said. U.S. officials including Attorney General Eric Holder announced the indictment on Thursday, saying he would be arraigned on Friday at U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, only blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the September 11 attacks.

Abu Ghaith becomes one of the highest-ranking al Qaeda figures to be brought to the United States for civilian trial. When Holder previously announced plans to try defendants in the September 11 attacks in the same courthouse, he was forced to back down by public opposition, and the trials were moved to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The first act of Eric Holder as Attorney General was to threaten CIA interrorgators and the Justice Depratment lawyers advising them with prosecution for torture and other war crimes. Think this fact doesn’t resonate with our terrorist enemies? Of course they understand the current regime them face in the U.S. is one seeking appeasement, not victory in the war on terror, …er ah “extremism.” Moreover, his appeals as a private attorney (and other “Gitmo Bar” attorneys) before becoming attorney general and delaying actions since have been responsible for the delays in Military Tribunal prosecutions of captured terrorists for war crimes, which he now cites as a reason for seeking justice in domestic criminal justice trials.

For those that don’t remember, or in denial about, the aftermath of 9/11 including Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling (including First Gulf War ceasefire terms that hundreds of American armed forces died to achieve such as daily  firing on American planes enforcing the No-Fly Zone),  hide-and-seek WDM games with United Nations inspectors, and live TV appearances with the Palestinian parents of Israeli-pizzeria suicide bombers; its probably too much to ask that we re-visit the decade before 9/11. But given the Democrat Obama Administration’s return to the failed Bill Clinton-Janet Reno-Jamie Gorelick, Democratic Party treatment of Islamist terrorism as mere “crime”, we must.

We learned this week that neither the FBI, CIA or DHS shared troubling terror connection intel they each had concerning both Tsarnaev brothers and their mother; including inspiration from the late drone-killed  al-Awlaki, who also inspired and/or supported the workplace incident protagonist Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. It appears that the Gorelick Wall protecting terrorists has been re-erected while non-terrorist ladies, old and young alike are groped by TSA at airports, despite the sequester no less.

Terrorists are not stupid. They know the thousands of dead terror allies that Commander in Chief Bush killed with shock, awe and years of patience while Barack, Hillary, Biden, Kerry & Co. (Democrats) initiated the BushLied Era when Iraq failed to become Meso-Connecticut-potamia within 72 hours of our 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Terrorists now know what OBL didn’t know when he still considered America the weak horse and paper tiger in the Middle East after Bush43 succeeded Clinton42:

Republicans are strong and Democrats are weak.

Funny they missed that truism from Cold War history and nature on par with the laws of gravity, death and taxes. Again, repeat after me,  Democrats are aggression-inviting weak appeasers of evil; and Reagan/Bush Republicans declare empires and terrorist harborers evil and proceed to defeat them as long as Americans keep Democrat hands away from the power to surrender. Democrats can’t wait to use drone kills as an excuse to cut and run even before dead Ambassadors and embassy personnel in Benghazi are buried.

A confession. I always used to cringe when President Bush would justify our troops-on-the-ground war on terror in the Iraq and Afghanistan with his: We have to fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them over here. Why? Because, it is probably impossible to stop every attempted attack on a free nation with de facto open borders like ours. The better construction for Bush speeches would have ended with “…so we won’t have to fight them as much over here.” Moreover, we did break up terror cells after 9/11 and probably thwarted follow-up attacks on the homeland that we never heard about, many of which were not thwarted by intel gathered over there.

But it is hard to ignore the increasing return of terror to U.S. soil coincident with the replacement of an American president feared by the Islamist enemy with a Commander in Chief that refuses to utter a discouraging word about Islam’s obvious connection to our enemies. It is impossible to imagine that our terrorist enemies lack the common sense to discern the difference between the force they face in Obama and the Democrats versus the force they faced from Republican Bush Cowboys.

Cowboys and all out war vs Drones? Cowboys win.

Cowboys came in handy after 9/11 didn’t they? It is clear that they would have come in handy after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. But much as Winston Churchill, who warned of the NAZI threat prior to their Bleitzkreig Battle on Britain, was famously discarded by the British people after he and his American ally (see also American-armed and equipped Stalin on the eastern front) won WWII, thus saving Britain; so did the American people seek another illusory peace dividend by playing nice with people they supposed were only upset with Bushes and neocons. Hence, the installation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the labeling of Syria’s Assad a “reformer” before the slaughter as a reformer, and leading from behind in Libya.

Yes, our present Chief Executive finally killed bin Laden and plays Drone-Battleship for lunch in between mothballing navy aircraft carriers, gutting the Marine “Corpse” and recruiting teen daughters for combat; but Islamist terrorists aren’t fooled. Even as the so-called “mainstream” aka cover-for-the-Democratic Party press in this country focused on the WMD  shell game lost by Bush (but somehow not Bill Clinton, France, Democrats in Congress and the UN), terrorist enemies focused on lives and safe nation-state harbors lost.

After the 1998 African Embassy bombings, OBL and the Taliban were sure that President Bill Clinton would authorize and execute an invasion of their lairs in Afghanistan. They hid. No American invasion followed. When all we did was talk tough and lob a few missiles at compound night watchmen, they were emboldened to bomb the USS Cole and hijack planes for the 9/11 attacks.

President Bush eliminated the safe terrorist havens in the Middle East, including Iraq; forced Muammar Gadaffy’s WMD surrender; and decapitated the leadership of al Qaeda. He greatly de-populated the cabal of terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, Saddam had terror training centers for over a decade and tried to have President George H.W. Bush (41) assassinated, which pretext (along with Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with the U.N. WMD inspectors) was among those used by President Clinton when he ordered the Operation Desert Fox bombing of Iraq in December of 1998.

Funny the nuclear/chemical/biological WMD obsession of Democrats when none of the terror attacks before 9/11 or since (save for Saddam’s in Kurdistan) have used WMD to kill thousands of Americans, but I digress.

Bush=Safety. Obama, not so much.

President Bush kept us safe after 9/11. And btw, prevented a recession with his tax cuts after Clinton’s tech bubble burst and 9/11. Unemployment averaged 5.2% under eight years of Bush43, as opposed to 9.4% so far under Obama44 but again, I digress.

President Obama has not kept the homeland safe; and launching more drones and reminding us that OBL was buried at sea won’t gather the intel required to get us safe.

The Axis of Evil, thanks to President Bush, no longer includes Iraq, but soon could given his seemingly intentional surrender of the Bush Surge gains there. We can only hope that the purple-finger revolution, despite our mistakes after Shock & Awe and the capture and execution of Saddam, survives well-enough intact so that they remain the best example of a lamb-like Arab Spring in the Muslim World. North Korea remains an Axis threat, but at least faces a Hawaii and West Coast defended by Reagan-GOP-Bush-built SDI missiles. Iran can only feel more empowered as the Evil leader said Axis given Obama’s appeasement of their own Mullahs, hood brothers in Egypt and Miranda rights if caught.

But what may be almost as troubling as Iran’s nuclear advances, are the new Evil members emboldened to join the Axis since President Obama was first Inaugurated. Libya was in a box. No longer. Egypt was an ally of Israel. No longer. Northern Africa and Syria are in flames. And no new inmates have been seen at Gitmo since before Obama started lowering the world’s oceans and raising energy prices on the American poor.

How many more liberal Democrat “why do they hate us” experiments and the slaughter that results, (not to mention their poverty-increasing Keynesian economic policies at home) must we endure before we as a country eliminate Democrats as an acceptable choice to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic? Hopefully at least by 2016.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

It’s easy to forget the fear that gripped America in the aftermath of al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. soil. It’s even easier to take for granted the homeland peace that followed until the Islamist-inspired  Tsarnaev Brothers & Co. bombings in Boston on the Ides of April, 2013. And it’s even easier than that to not remember what made the peace possible, especially if your political party opposed nearly every aspect of the national security policies that kept Fort Hood (Nov. 2009), Christmas Day Detroit Underwear (Dec. 2009), Times Square (May 2010) and Boston Marathon bombers at bay; and that led to the raid that took out Osama bin Laden and the drone that took out Anwar al-Awlaki.

Is it just a coincidence that the further away we get from the national security and defense apparatus put in place by President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, the more we hear of terrorist near misses and the more dead American terrorist victims we bury as a result of Islamist successes? Last week’s dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Center (library)  in this tenth anniversary year of the invasion of Iraq seems a good time to evaluate the post-9/11 legacy of the re-elected Republican Bush43 and the post-apology tour national security record of his re-elected Democrat successor to the Oval Office.

We are continually reminded of the plethora of hawkish Bush policies retained by President Barack Obama despite his record of opposition to so many after his 2004 election to the U.S. Senate through his 2008 presidential campaign.  Yes, its true that rendition, indefinite detention of illegal enemy combatants, and drone attacks continue unabated, if not enhanced. The Patriot Act remains in effect and yes; despite his Attorney General Eric Holder’s best efforts, Gitmo remains open, if only for non-droned, Bush-captured detainees.

But it appears to this observer that would-be terrorists aren’t fooled by what Bush policies Obama continued, whether after sober reflection on how best to discharge his duty to defend innocent American lives (and/or prevent re-election distractions) or after even Democrats in Congress rejected their abandonment (see Gitmo and Holder’s proposed anti-Bush, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed show trial in NYC).

The same terrorists-in-waiting that read faux hawk Democrats not named Joe Lieberman and hopeful “neo-con” Republicans praise President Obama for aspects of the Bush-Cheney defense regime continued under his administration; hear drones in their sleep and saw Zero Dark Thirty on Netflix, also know that:

• President Bush killed tens of thousands of trained-for-attacks-on-the-American-homeland jihadists in Iraq by going on offense in their Islamic homeland;
• President Obama was too disinterested  in preserving the gains of the surge in Iraq to even bother with securing a Status of Forces Agreement there so as to retain an American presence large enough to prevent the establishment of the kind of safe havens for terrorists that Saddam had provided to Abu Nidal and others;
• Then-Senator Obama (and then-Senator Hillary Clinton) voted twice to de-fund American troops in the field in Iraq and Afghanistan;
• President Obama surrendered in Iraq and has set a date-certain for withdrawal from Taliban-resurgent Afghanistan;
• President Bush warned of an Iraq-Iran-North Korea “Axis of Evil”, not to tread on me (and this country) in January of 2002 and insisted upon funding SDI throughout his two terms as Commander in Chief;
• Then-Senator Obama opposed the funding of ‘Star Wars’ (SDI) that now remains the best protection America has nuclear missiles launched against Communist Kooks named Kim or Apocalyptic Twelfth Imam-seeking Islamist Iranian Mullahs; and
• President Obama silently observed Axis of Evil-directed slaughter in Teheran streets, while still begging for an audience with the ruling Mullahs’,  Mahmoud MembersOnlyJacket-ejad (sp?) puppet Iranian president.

President Obama twice refused to authorize a raid of OBL’s Pakistani compound for months before finally agreeing to use intel gleaned from KSM and other non-droned captured members of al Qaeda after Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-approved nose-swabbings (water-boarding enhanced interrogation) he and many Democrats (including Hillary but not Bill Clinton) opposed as “torture”, to take out the man who declared jihad war on America in 1996, felled our embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998 killing over 200 and wounding over 4000; and who, along with KSM and Ayman al-Zawahiri plotted, planned and executed the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.

Last week’s knee-jerk Mirandizing of surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev reveals that in the Age of Obama’s War on Amorphous Extremism, if a captured terrorist isn’t droned; instead of  facing Zero Dark Thirty-style  enhanced interrogations, they are reminded of the Fifth Amendment right to remain silent and given the telephone number to Eric Holder’s former Sixth Amendment pro-bono-for-terrorists law firm that stands ready to secure an anti-American show trial if Attorney General Holder can sneak you into Lower Manhattan while Congress is in recess:

Prosecutors unsealed an indictment against a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden on Thursday that charged him with conspiracy to kill Americans, after government sources said he was arrested overseas and brought to New York. Suleiman Abu Ghaith, a militant who appeared in videos representing al Qaeda after the September 11 attacks in 2001, had initially been picked up in Turkey and was brought to the United States in an operation led by Jordanian authorities and the FBI, the sources said.

The Turkish government deported him to Jordan, the sources said, where local authorities and the FBI took custody of him. He was brought to the United States in the last few days, a law enforcement source said. U.S. officials including Attorney General Eric Holder announced the indictment on Thursday, saying he would be arraigned on Friday at U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, only blocks from the site of the World Trade Center, which was destroyed in the September 11 attacks.

Abu Ghaith becomes one of the highest-ranking al Qaeda figures to be brought to the United States for civilian trial. When Holder previously announced plans to try defendants in the September 11 attacks in the same courthouse, he was forced to back down by public opposition, and the trials were moved to the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

For those that don’t remember, or in denial about, the aftermath of 9/11 including Saddam Hussein’s saber-rattling (including First Gulf War ceasefire terms that hundreds of American armed forces died to achieve such as daily  firing on American planes enforcing the No-Fly Zone),  hide-and-seek WDM games with United Nations inspectors, and live TV appearances with the Palestinian parents of Israeli-pizzeria suicide bombers; its probably too much to ask that we re-visit the decade before 9/11. But given the Democrat Obama Administration’s return to the failed Clinton-Reno-Gorelick, Democratic Party treatment of Islamist terrorism as mere “crime”, we must.

We learned this week that neither the FBI, CIA or DHS shared troubling terror connection intel they each had concerning both Tsarnaev brothers and their mother; including inspiration from the late drone-killed  al-Awlaki, who also inspired and/or supported the workplace incident protagonist Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, Underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad. It appears that the Gorelick Wall protecting terrorists has been re-erected while non-terrorist ladies, old and young alike are groped by TSA at airports, despite the sequester no less.

Terrorists are not stupid. They know the thousands of dead terror allies that Commander in Chief Bush killed with shock, awe and years of patience while Barack, Hillary, Biden, Kerry & Co. (Democrats) initiated the BushLied Era when Iraq failed to become Meso-Connecticut-potamia within 72 hours of our 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Terrorists now know what OBL didn’t know when he still considered America the weak horse and paper tiger in the Middle East after Bush43 succeeded Clinton42:

Republicans are strong and Democrats are weak.

Funny they missed that truism from Cold War history and nature on par with the laws of gravity, death and taxes. Again, repeat after me,  Democrats are aggression-inviting weak appeasers of evil; and Reagan/Bush Republicans declare empires and terrorist harborers evil and proceed to defeat them as long as Americans keep Democrat hands away from the power to surrender. Democrats can’t wait to use drone kills as an excuse to cut and run even before dead Ambassadors and embassy personnel in Benghazi are buried.

A confession. I always used to cringe when President Bush would justify our troops-on-the-ground war on terror in the Iraq and Afghanistan with his: We have to fight them over there, so we won’t have to fight them over here. Why? Because, it is probably impossible to stop every attempted attack on a free nation with de facto open borders like ours. The better construction for Bush speeches would have ended with “…so we won’t have to fight them as much over here.” Moreover, we did break up terror cells after 9/11 and probably thwarted follow-up attacks on the homeland that we never heard about, many of which were not thwarted by intel gathered over there.

But it is hard to ignore the increasing return of terror to U.S. soil coincident with the replacement of an American president feared by the Islamist enemy with a Commander in Chief that refuses to utter a discouraging word about Islam’s obvious connection to our enemies. It is impossible to imagine that our terrorist enemies lack the common sense to discern the difference between the force they face in Obama and the Democrats versus the force they faced from Republican Bush Cowboys.

Cowboys and all out war vs Drones? Cowboys win.

Cowboys came in handy after 9/11 didn’t they? It is clear that they would have come in handy after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. But much as Winston Churchill, who warned of the NAZI threat prior to their Bleitzkreig Battle on Britain, was famously discarded by the British people after he and his American ally (see also American-armed and equipped Stalin on the eastern front) won WWII; so did the American people seek another illusory peace dividend by playing nice with people they supposed were only upset with Bushes and neocons. Hence, the installation of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, the labeling of Syria’s Assad before the slaughter as a reformer, and leading from behind in Libya.

Yes, our present Chief Executive finally killed bin Laden and plays Drone-Battleship for lunch in between mothballing navy aircraft carriers, gutting the Marine “Corpse” and recruiting teen daughters for combat; but Islamist terrorists aren’t fooled. Even as the so-called “mainstream” aka cover-for-the-Democratic Party press in this country focused on the WMD  shell game lost by Bush (but somehow not Bill Clinton, France, Democrats in Congress and the UN), terrorist enemies focused on lives and safe nation-state harbors lost.

After the 1998 African Embassy bombings, OBL and the Taliban were sure that President Bill Clinton would authorize and execute an invasion of their lairs in Afghanistan. They hid. No American invasion followed. When all we did was talk tough and lob a few missiles at compound night watchmen, they were emboldened to bomb the USS Cole and hijack planes for the 9/11 attacks.

President Bush eliminated the safe terrorist havens in the Middle East, including Iraq; forced Muammar Gadaffy’s WMD surrender; and decapitated the leadership of al Qaeda. He greatly de-populated the cabal of terrorists trained in Afghanistan and Iraq. Yes, Saddam had terror training centers for over a decade and tried to have President George H.W. Bush (41) assassinated, which pretext (along with Hussein’s refusal to cooperate with the U.N. WMD inspectors) was among those used by President Clinton when he ordered the Operation Desert Fox bombing of Iraq in December of 1998.

Funny the nuclear/chemical/biological WMD obsession of Democrats when none of the terror attacks before 9/11 or since (save for Saddam’s in Kurdistan) have used WMD to kill thousands of Americans, but I digress.

Bush=Safety. Obama, not so much.

President Bush kept us safe after 9/11. And btw, prevented a recession with his tax cuts after Clinton’s tech bubble burst and 9/11. Unemployment averaged 5.2% under eight years of Bush43, as opposed to 9.4% so far under Obama44 but again, I digress.

President Obama has not kept the homeland safe; and launching more drones and reminding us that OBL was buried at sea won’t gather the intel required to get us safe.

The Axis of Evil, thanks to President Bush, no longer includes Iraq, but soon could given his seemingly intentional surrender of the Bush Surge gains there. We can only hope that the purple-finger revolution, despite our mistakes after Shock & Awe and the capture and execution of Saddam, survives well-enough intact so that they remain the best example of a lamb-like Arab Spring in the Muslim World. North Korea remains an Axis threat, but at least faces a Hawaii and West Coast defended by Reagan-GOP-Bush-built SDI missiles. Iran can only feel more empowered as the Evil leader said Axis given Obama’s appeasement of their own Mullahs, hood brothers in Egypt and Miranda rights if caught.

But what may be almost as troubling as Iran’s nuclear advances, are the new Evil members emboldened to join the Axis since President Obama was first Inaugurated. Libya was in a box. No longer. Egypt was an ally of Israel. No longer. Northern Africa and Syria are in flames. And no new inmates have been seen at Gitmo since before Obama started lowering the world’s oceans and raising energy prices on the American poor.

How many more liberal Democrat “why do they hate us” experiments and the slaughter that results, (not to mention their poverty-increasing Keynesian economic policies at home) must we endure before we as a country eliminate Democrats as an acceptable choice to defend us against enemies foreign and domestic? Hopefully at least by 2016.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

RUSH (Limbaugh): …I must tell you: I just don’t understand this, Senator (Rubio).  I don’t understand why we’re doing something that the Democrats are salivating over. I’ve never agreed with Senator Schumer about anything and I’m being told that I should on this.  I’m just having a tough time.  I look at what happened in California after the last amnesty. We lost that state to the Democrats.  I’m having trouble seeing how this benefits Republicans.

(Sen. Marco) RUBIO (R-FL):  Well, a couple things.  First of all, as far as Senator Schumer and others who are on the bill are concerned, I think the way to understand it is they’ve agreed to things that we believe in because they want our support…

One aspect of the as yet unwritten “bill” being pushed by the latest bi-partisan Gang of Eight actually does, in our opinion, override all other negative aspects of the proposal to make it a huge net benefit to Republicans as opposed to the status quo:

It locks all illegals out of a quick path to citizenship and its automatic conference of voting rights for at least 15 years and possibly much longer.

Since the Perry-Romney GOP presidential primary debates over in-state tuition for the children of Texas illegals, we changed our position on coupling border security improvement (a fence, etc) and our policy towards long-term illegals, primarily on moral grounds. We consider there to have been a de facto open border rule of law policy since the early 1990s through at least as late as 9/11/2001 and, therefore, do not consider treating them as illegals for non-voting purposes after so many years as members of our communities to be either just or wise from many national security, domestic law enforcement and other aspects of our national life.

That said, we continue to respect those conservatives still concerned about “amnesty” issues, new laws that would “encourage” future illegal immigration and, of course, border security. We just think that the level of unjust treatment of long-term residents overrides the other issues so much that we would not insist upon a comprehensive bill that “solves” all immigration problems.

So why should Rush Limbaugh and other conservatives, skeptical of Rubio’s approach, support his efforts? Primarily because the Gang of Eight proposal would lock in all current illegals from even applying for a green card for ten years, and from possibly becoming a citizen for at least 15 years given all the fine, work, non-welfare dependency and other requirements. Rush has often expressed his willingness to test the Democrats by agreeing to amnesty after 25 years. Well, this conservative would support a lifetime ban on full citizenship if we could get it in exchange for legalizing the 11+ million for non-voting purposes. But Rubio’s minimum 10-15+ year “path”, especially given the ban on receiving federal benefits, is too good to pass up in our considered opinion, given the likely alternatives including the de facto status quo amnesty.

President George W. Bush had to be dragged kicking and screaming to start building a border fence. One of President Obama’s first official acts as Chief Executive was to halt the construction. Only a fence can be trusted to deter and prevent illegal immigration, and even if we had e-verify, comprehensive reform and zero amnesty, the U.S. will always remain a magnet for our poorer southern neighbors. The black market will always exist. Measures necessary to kill the cash under the table market would require a totalitarian state. And the day America ceases to be a magnet for immigrants is the day America won’t be the exceptional, prosperous America we remember. The marginal “magnet” effect of another “amnesty” is quite puny as compared to the main magnet effect of our greatness and Mexican proximity.

To hold the lives of millions hostage that we essentially let in with a wink and a nod only to decide they were “criminals” on par with murderers and thieves after 9/11 is not just, not worthy of America. Maintaining the status quo is not advancing the cause of the Rule of Law given that the actual written rules were ignored for decades with no public clamor for correction. Why? Because we were all fat and happy to have Mexicans make the babies we aborted or otherwise chose not to have so we could better make the BMW payments and not have to budget in Pampers.

So we let in the construction, landscape, babysitting and cleaning services. Allowed them to form churches and become our neighbors. To hold their lives hostage based upon a fictional history of the rule of laws that were not enforced, is not just.

But even if one disagrees with that analysis, as George Will stated last week, “the first rule of conservatism is to admit reality.” The 11 million are here to stay. To allow them to go home and re-apply in ten years is also amnesty. The Rubio plan would be another form of amnesty, but people, amnesty is not always a dirty word. In the real world we face choices, and for 20 years before 9/11 we chose to have a de facto open border. Now we have choices made necessary by our prior choices.

There is a possibility, however sleight, that we could lock out 11 million likely Democrat voters from voting or getting federal welfare benefits for 15+ years. Before the Ted Kennedy immigration as socialism law passed in 1965, a major requirement for immigrants was that they not be a charge upon the state. What’s not to like, fellow conservatives? Rubio restores that standard, in his “amnesty.”

Furthermore, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) is pushing for passage of the legal immigration reform contained in Rubio’s plan that would allow the U.S. to again return to a pre-1960s regime that allows thousands of science and engineering immigrants in , even if they happen to be, egad!, white Europeans! China’s push for global dominance won’t wait for us to build a fence and get Democrats to reform their liberal minds.

If we can lock out 11 million undocumented Democrats from automatic voting-rights citizenship for nearly two decades and/or open up legal immigration for the skills we need to remain the most powerful nation on Earth, we should do it. Whether we can mandate the building of a border fence or not. And whether the solution can be characterized as some form of amnesty or not.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

What prompts a young man to come to this country and still feel alienated from it, to go back to Russia and do whatever he did? And I don’t think we’ve examined that enough. I mean, there was 24/7 coverage on television, a lot of newspaper print and so on, but we’ve got to look at the roots of all of this because it exists across the whole subcontinent, and the – and the Islamic world, around the world.

And I think we also have to examine the use of drones that the United States is involved in and – and there are a lot of civilians who are innocently killed in a drone attack in Pakistan, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq. And I can tell you having spent a lot of time over there, young people will come up to me on the streets and say, “We love America. But if you harm one hair on the – on the head of my sister, I will fight you forever.” And there is this enormous rage against what they see in that part of the world as a presumptuousness of the United States.

What prompted young men and women born in this country, like Bill Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn and Kathy Boudin, to feel so alienated from it they became Weather Underground bombers? What prompted native-born legislators, judges and juries to fail to lock them up for life? What prompted American universities to affirm their attacks on the institutions of this country by making them professors at the American universities of Illinois-Chicago, Northwestern and Columbia, respectively?

What prompted Ivy League student Bill Clinton to protest America in Moscow during the Cold War? Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to provide cover for al Qaeda in Benghazi? And Barack Obama to circle the globe apologizing for America during his first year in office?

To be alienated from America is required orthodoxy for membership in America’s cultural elite from D.C. to NYC to Boston to Chicago to LA and all points educational and journalistic in between.

What prompted Walter Cronkite to claim U.S. armed forces lost Tet? What prompted the Left to dismiss the Communist threat despite the massive slaughter for decades? What prompted them to leave the South Vietnamese and the Hmong to the tender mercies of Ho Chi Min? Senator Ted Kennedy to secretly write Gorbachev to undermine his president’s opposition to the unilateral surrender of a “nuclear freeze?” John Kerry to aid and abet enemies of the USA from North Vietnam to Nicaragua to Syria?

The Bible and prayer were banned from K-12. The mention of God’s name is treated like the uttering of gutter profanity and the only moral values taught to teens and pre-teens at government schools are “tolerance” and “diversity” for anything but Judeo-Christian values and America as an exceptional nation.

It’s a miracle there are enough young Americans left to man the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines, after 40+ years of liberal brainwashing.

Re-examine drone policy? But wait, Tom, we surrendered Iran (Carter), Iraq (Obama), Egypt (Obama) and Libya (Obama). We (yes, one of those same Democrats) begged Iran’s mullahs to sit down for tea while they exerted the will of Allah, unfettered by American-backed Shahs. Yet, they still hate us.

Yes, I quite understand why a young “expert” interview on the Arab street would impress Brokaw with vows of revenge for hairs mussed by American bombs. Too bad they didn’t take out their revenge on their own leaders that mussed their hair and ours. See 9/11 when they mussed our hair in Manhattan, Arlington County (VA), and a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania. American hair was also mussed by Muslims in Teheran in 1979, the first WTC bombing in 1993, and African embassies in 1998.

The root cause of Islamist violence against us does not lie in our drone policy. Rather, it lies in envy and a religion defined by an un-Holy book that preaches conversion by the sword and so is un-fit for a Christian-like “Reformation”, lest they trash the word of God from The Prophet.

The problem also lies with two concepts that are anathema to the Brokaw-Liberal-Democrat Left in this country: Original Sin and Natural Law. The Left refuses to accept the obvious lessons of the history of a fallen world and sinful human nature that can only thrive via the force to defend against evil by a moral and religious people who restrain themselves so that a tyrannical government isn’t necessary for acceptable order.

The Left does its best to alienate all who enter their avenues of influence in schools, movie theaters, television screens , print media, and the internet. Most who so enter are natural-born American citizens that could one day run for president, even if they launch campaigns from the living room of a terrorist. Most could become First Lady even if the first time they were proud of the nation that defeated Jim Crow, Nazi Germany and the Evil Soviet Empire, was when their husband got Iowans to vote for him in caucuses. But, sadly, since the government does not yet hold fee simple title to American children, our youth continue to be influenced by their parents and the values they hold. Hence, the Republican Party.

The fact is that probably a higher percentage of immigrants, many of whom fled oppressive socialist governments, than native-born Americans are less alienated. One wonders if their ties are as grounded in liberty and hard work happiness pursuits or welfare, but at least many of them have been educated in the school of hard knocks that is non-capitalist dictatorial regimes abroad.

Sadly, the lessons taught across the Fruited Plain in the late 1970s and during Obama’s first term by failed liberal Democrat governance weren’t learned thanks to the Brokaws of the world who can’t abide that their liberal religion ever be discredited. If only we could alienate them from their religious love of Big Government tax takings and control of the lives of others via regulation, America might have a chance.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

Think all this is absurd? After Benghazi and the post-9/11 BushLied Era (defined by the Democrats’ rhetoric and actions as when Iraq failed to blossom into Connecticut within 72 hours after Saddam was captured after relying on the same WMD-intel that Bill Clinton relied upon), you shouldn’t. And let me be the first Republican to ask, much as so many Democrats did so soon after 9/11/2001:

Why do they still hate us after four years of Hillary and Barack?

Think it’s too soon after Boston to exercise Hillary-inspired patriotic debate? I don’t. This is a teachable moment on how, despite the killing of Osama bin Laden on this re-elected Democratic president’s watch, historically weak is his party on national security, even if the first successful terrorist bombings since Oklahoma City in 1995  and the World Trade Center in 1993 cannot be directly tied to that weakness.

The fact is that the Homeland was kept safe from terror under the post-9/11 regime constructed by Republican President George W. Bush. The fact is that only after the Democratic Party President and Secretary of State (who de-funded troops in the field while senators and who opposed the nose-swabbings of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that led to the intel that made President Barack Obama’s greatest and only foreign policy triumph possible) took office, did the Times Square and Underwear bombers’ near misses, Fort Hood slaughter and Boston bombings occur.

Does it deter homegrown terrorists for Democrats to nominate for president a man whose political coming out party was in the home of Weather Underground bombers Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, celebrated academics in his Chicago academic community? Or that Columbia University gladly weathered the storm of their recent hiring of Underground alum, Kathy Boudin?

I know, what storm? The “mainstream media” protects its radicals, whether they teach at Ivy League schools, kill babies still partially in the womb or only recently exited wombs in Philly, or are Puerto Rican terroists pardoned by a president whose First lady needed the PR terror vote in her run to become the junior carpet-bagging senator from the Empire State.

Have the “diversity and tolerance” (for all but Christians, conservatives, Southerners  and white males) messages of the Democrats over the past 40+ years sent a message of strength to would-be Islamist terrorists? Were the Tsarnaev brothers made more or less likely to commit acts of terror with an attorney general in office who did pro bono work for their ilk  after 9/11; sought to close Gitmo and have KSM star in an anti-Bush and Cheney show trial in Manhattan; and promised to read OBL his Miranda rights if he had been captured? Yet, we learn that the FBI (rightfully, thank God) delayed begging Dzhokar Tsarnaev to lawyer- and clam-up soon after his arrest. Funny how the immediate threat of more bombings can occasionally, even with radical leftists like Eric Holder, concentrate the “responsibility for my watch” mind.

I’m reminded of a strange statement President Obama made to Bob Woodward three years ago when asked what kept him up at night as his greatest worry. The President didn’t suffer insomnia fretting over how best to prevent terrorist acts. No, he resorted to counting sheep over how best to respond quickly to terror AFTER it occurs. Of course, we need to be vigilant in first response preparations, but when the nation is governed by such Democratic sheep, it’s no wonder that young punks can more easily think of themselves as lions capable of slaughter on our streets.

When the ideological brothers of the Boston Marathon Bombing brothers were slaughtering Iranians in the streets, President Obama begged an audience with the Mullahs doing the slaughter. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry argued to restore diplomatic relations with the so-called “reformer” Assad in Syria before his slaughter. Hillary’s closest aide is the proud daughter of Muslim Sister and Brotherhoodies, many of whose sympathizers work in the Obama Administration that handed over Egypt to those progenitors of al Qaeda.

Osama bin Laden famously miscalculated in 2001 that there was no significant difference between a Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George W. Bush. After all, after the African Embassy and US Cole bombings, OBL went  into hiding, so sure was he that the US would invade his Afghanistan safe haven. When he saw that we were the “weak horse” and a “paper tiger”, he failed to gather intel on the difference between Democrats and Republicans on national security since Bill Clinton campaigned for George McGovern.

All terrorist have to fear from the Obamas of the world are the surrenders of wars won by Republicans (see Iraq) and yes, some occasional drones. But their noses will never we swabbed, those that slander the Prophet of Islam will not own the future, and one day they could teach Howard Zinn’s anti-American history at Harvard.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

Liberal Democrats must hate science and technology; and must be protected from it, and not just as relates to the hoax of man-made global warming to cover their anti-capitalism, i.e. anti-individual liberty, agenda.

What if Johnny Carson’s tree falls in the forest or a murder trial is held in Philadelphia and NBC cameras fail to capture their respective sights and sounds? For all but the abortion “doctor’s” murder victims; and squirrels and avian occupants of and creepy crawly things upon which said tree falls, did either event take place:

In Philadelphia, a doctor is on trial for the gruesome murders of eight people inside his low-rent office. A former assistant testified that she personally witnessed the physician commit at least 30 murders. Most of the patients were “beheaded,” another assistant said, adding that there was “blood all over the place.” If you have not heard of this doctor’s trial for committing a terrifying, decades-long string of serial killings, there is a reason. He is an abortionist.

His name is Kermit Gosnell. He was arrested after a 2010 FBI raid at his offices, which were described this way in the grand jury report: “There was blood on the floor. A stench of urine filled the air. A flea-infested cat was wandering through the facility, and there were cat feces on the stairs.”

The sensational nature of this case alone justifies massive media coverage. The doctor ran a filthy, uninspected clinic for decades as state regulators looked the other way. He infected women with diseases by using unsterile equipment. Two of the women who came to him for abortions died. But Kermit Gosnell is not a household name for one reason: His crimes raise uncomfortable questions for supporters of unlimited abortion on demand.

Remember the mental gymnastics of the post-Roe v Wade (1973) 70s and 80s when Ivy Leaguers and their ilk, taking their cue from Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s three-trimester-state-interest vs. a woman’s-right-to-abortion-privacy test, regularly declared the tautology of life beginning at fertilization as false and speculated about what exactly was that formless glob (with no right to life for at least 24 months after said fertilization and concomitant uniquely-resulting DNA) growing ever larger inside the bodies of female right-to-choosers?

Remember the post-Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992) end of the tenuous third-trimester safety for babies, lest the “health of the mother” as she contemplates the difficulty of making the Pampers, in addition to the BMW, payments; and the re-introduction of back alley-abortion (the horror that legalized abortion was supposed to save us from) scissors into the skulls of 8 month-old fetuses whose legs and parts of their torso have already felt the atmosphere of planet Earth?

Remember when technology advanced to produce photos of animals (see above) and human babies inside the womb and the post-Roe Generation X-ers, thankful to have survived their own mothers’ right to choose, vexed pollsters that assumed gay marriage and snuffing out the unseen were equally popular?

Remember when the public finally found out what was partial birth abortion and yet watched President Bill Clinton veto legislation outlawing same?

Remember when the Democratic Party nominated for (and the American people twice elected as) President of the United States a man who, as a state senator in the Land of Lincoln, opposed legislation requiring the Dr. Gosnells of the world to refrain from killing babies that escape the womb despite their best efforts to kill them legally while at least one hair remained plastered by placenta within the vaginal wall.

Liberals, most of whom have been firmly ensconced in the Democratic Party for at least the past 30-40 years, generally reject the Judeo-Christian concept of original sin and its moral absolutes; and, instead believe in the inevitable “progress” of mankind despite 5000 years of written evidence to the contrary. They deem abortion to be “progress”, and yet even many of them either react in horror or cower in silence when the “stuff” of the Pandora’s Box they successfully urged seven lawyers in black robes to open in 1973, manages to be seen in the full truth light of day.

My friends, bones crunch inside the womb as well outside the womb.

American women, many of whom were aided and abetted by American men, have engaged in 50 million such inside-the-womb bone-crushings since 1973, that are just as horrific as those perpetrated by abortionist “Doctor” Gosnell in the City of Brotherly Love. When a majority of Americans begin to understand that fact and demands that Presidents appoint and that the U.S. Senate advise and consent only to those Supreme Court justices that will reverse Roe and Casey; or that super majorities of the House, Senate and state legislatures amend the constitution to protect all life based upon the biological fact of its existence, then and only then will America have  a chance to once again be a Shining City on a Hill.

So long as a majority are only horrified when the sound of a tiny severed limb striking the floor, as a result of a  late-term abortion, is within earshot, we remain no more “progressive” than the virgin-sacrificing pagans the Hebrews confronted in Canaan or the Romans that fed Christians to lions in the Coliseum.

If, like me, you have been a party to an abortion in your past, you will need to muster the courage to repent of your sin and forgive those committed by others. Join me, and lets not indulge in self-delusion via selective horror.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

But at least Augusta National now has two female members and, as with the catch-all “The Secretary shall decide”, if Obamcare law is otherwise inconvenient to Big Government regulators; CBS can always cite the calling in of a fan to allege rule violations to justify not disqualifying ratings-driver Tiger Woods for rules violations that otherwise require disqualification:

The Masters rules committee cited a relatively new rule (brought in to deal with cases where viewers call in after the fact to report violations seen on TV) that allows the tournament to waive a penalty of disqualification in exceptional circumstances. They then released a statement that in essence placed the onus on the rules committee for not alerting Woods of his violation before he signed his scorecard.

The statement says: “After meeting with the player, it was determined that he had violated Rules 26, and he was assessed a two stroke penalty. The penalty of disqualification was waived by the Committee under Rule 33 as the Committee had previously reviewed the information and made its initial determination prior to the finish of the player’s round.

Nick Faldo, a three time Masters champion and the lead analyst on CBS coverage of the event, said that Woods ought to consider withdrawing from the event…

After all March Madness is over and CBS has to make up for profits they and all the other networks, save for Fox News Channel, gave up long ago due to their religious devotion to trashing America’s history, culture and values. Never thought we would see the day that broadcast network pressure would so taint the memory of Atlanta’s Bobby Jones and Augusta, Georgia’s Masters tournament, but we digress.

And speaking of “mainstream” media trashing of our culture and values, whatever happened to the bugging of the Watergate Hotel and Woodward & Bernstein’s investigative journalism that brought down a president as the example to which all journalists aspire? It appears that environmental liberal Democrat wacko magazine Mother Jones or some liberal Democrat mother (or the sons and daughters of such liberal Democrat mothers) may have illegally taped the Senate Minority Leader discussing research into liberal Democrat actress Ashley Judd.

But instead of the “story” being the possible emergence of a 21st Century Gordon Liddy, the news is supposedly how venal is opposition research when it is not directed at Romneys and Bain Capital. i.e. Republicans.

Outside the beltway, crickets fill the void of the First Amendment-empowered Fourth Estate when it comes to trials of the pro-choice murder of babies not yet taken home from Democrats’ favorite hospitals, aka abortion mills,  in the City of Brotherly Love:

The evangelicals in my twitter and Facebook feed are asking, justifiably, why these crimes seem to be nowhere in the media.  You’d think that a lurid crime touching an issue of major national importance would be covered everywhere.  And yet, there’s been very little.

Who knew that 50 years after Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique and The Pill gave women another “choice”, that “The Choice” so many women would make would be the Pandora’s Box of abortion on demand opened up by seven male lawyers in black robes on the U.S. Supreme Court in 1973′s Roe v. Wade. Infants may be safest in their mother’s arms, defended by their Second Amendment-armed natural father in marital bliss; but before that safety is achieved the child must first escape the womb, no matter the effect of their escape on their mom’s ability to make the BMW payments. And even then, MSNBC may air liberal Democrats claiming it best that Uncle Sam be the baby daddy so Americans will beg to be taxed more to pay union wages to three government school “administrators” for every tenured “teacher” of all things wonderful about Big Government.

One would think that such a liberal Democrat academia and press would want the government’s youth to visit the 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Big Government pinnacle where Baby Daddy Barack resides, but nary a discouraging word is heard from CBS, NBC, ABC and CNN when “sequester” blacks out the White House tour market in favor of Hip Hop celebrity tours of the Executive Mansion.

Think the culture is bad now? It is, and can it ever get anything but worse when the Associated Press becomes George Orwell’s “1984” 29 years later by refusing to refer to immigrants that illegally cross American borders as illegal immigrants and it takes Jay Leno to point them out as the undocumented (future voting liberal) Democrats that they are.

But no worries, Tiger is still on the prowl on Sunday at Augusta as Condi Rice looks on…

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

Every time this former labor union lawyer and son/grandson of former Brotherhood of Railway (Southern/Norfolk Southern) Carmen union members expresses any negative opinion of the union movement or even any particular union local, I endure the wrath of pro-union Democrats, family and friends. That wrath usually takes one of two broad forms.

One, since I was “raised on union wages”, I have no right to now oppose unions. This personal legacy, non-substantive, and near religious argument is rather easily dismissed, especially since my own father expressed a loathing of his own union as it evolved to prevent the firing of incompetent employees and trump up skin surface scratches as serious workplace injuries requiring substantial compensation. This argument also reminds of the similar “logic” used against Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas that he must favor affirmative action in perpetuity since he “benefited from it.” Again, such thinking would forever mire select communities in policies that harm the whole, based solely upon parochial interests.

Two, but Mike, “labor unions built the American middle class.” Even if that were true (it’s not, and more on that later), it is not a substantive argument for supporting every existing labor union today, no matter their actions.

But the death of the free market and cold warrior giant, Margaret Thatcher, requires that I take my criticism of labor unions and the laws that favor them to their logical conclusion if I am to keep faith with my heartfelt Judeo-Christian and economic beliefs and principles, especially since my Summer of 2001 conservative epiphany.

In that regard, let me first refer to a portion of Mona Charen’s timely obituary memorializing the Iron Lady:

The magnitude of Thatcher’s accomplishments as prime minister cannot be understood without reference to the depths into which Britain had fallen by 1979. Successive Labour (and spineless Tory) governments had delivered an economy close to collapse. During the “winter of discontent” in 1978–79, strikes by public employees had crippled public services. Pickets blocked the entrances to hospitals, and only those suffering emergencies were permitted entry. Railway workers and truck drivers disrupted transportation. Trash accumulated on the streets as sanitation workers walked off the job. Bodies accumulated in morgues as gravediggers joined the strikes, prompting officials to discuss burial at sea for the mounting piles of corpses.

Thatcher’s victory ushered in a period of difficult but necessary free-market reforms. As in the U.S. under Reagan, Britain endured a tough recession as Thatcher wrestled inflation down. But the economy then rebounded and grew dramatically. She privatized state-owned industries, cut taxes on investments, radically reduced the power of trade unions, and reduced government spending. “The trouble with socialism,” she said, “is that eventually you run out of other people’s money.”

The Eighth Commandment, The Golden Rule and the Right to Strike

Thankfully, despite the unfairness of FDR’s National Labor Relations (Wagner) Act, President Reagan’s task in righting the economy of the United States (while formidable given the necessity of taming inflation and cutting taxes and job-killing regulations) did not require dismantling privatized industries and other advanced socialist policies that Britain’s prime minister had to confront. The free market, at least in right-to-work states made possible by the Republican Party’s post-WWII Taft-Hartley revision of President Franklin Roosevelt’s prime labor law “achievement”, had already much reduced private sector union employment, so that it remained only for The Gipper to meet the PATCO government union’s unlawful strike with the legally-called-for firing of those without the “right.” Even FDR opposed such public sector strikes and even the formation of such unions.

But FDR was also bitten by his own Wagner Act-defined “right to strike” monument of the New Deal when workers building the arsenal of democracy got selfish after the Day of Infamy. He, like Thatcher, found that it could also be immoral for private sector workers to strike.

And about this right to strike and other labor laws for which we are invited to give the labor union movement full credit for enacting into law. Did some labor unions lobby for laws against child labor, safety requirements, the minimum wage and the 40-hour work week? Yes, but laws are passed by legislatures, and we don’t owe any lobbyist perpetual carte blanche to abuse their employers just because they helped get laws favored by the majority passed, much less permanently tilt the labor market playing field in their favor.

I speak, of course, of the post-New Deal right to “strike” versus the right to quit one’s job, individually or en masse, and free speech to criticize one’s employer on public property that had existed since the ratification of the United States Constitution. The “modern-day” version of the right to strike means the right of union workers that have quit their jobs to intimidate other Americans willing to work for their former employer  and, as in the 1937 Flint (MI) General Motors plant strike, to occupy the private property of another, thus preventing the owners of the use of their property for private enterprise, i.e. to earn money for food and shelter.

How did it ever occur to non-Communists that they secure some shared ownership right in another’s property simply because they accepted a job with the owner? Such was a violation of the sin of stealing before and after the Wagner Act.

Moreover, contrary to the Democratic Party’s re-write of American history, the existence of a middle class the prosperity of which the world had never seen existed in the colonies before the Revolution, had only grown more prosperous before and after the Civil War, and was the reason that huddled masses from increasingly Marxist Europe populated the Fruited Plain, long before there was a National Labor Relations Board.

The reason we had and have a middle class was and is due to private property rights and the efficient technology and processes it produced. No amount of collective bargaining aided by the power of government laws on the side of employees can build a business able to pay middle class wages. All it can do is carve up the wealth already produced by a company that was created because a free man with an idea was willing to risk his time and money because of the American promise, informed by Christ’s Golden Rule, that he would get to keep the fruits of his labor and thus be treated by others as they would prefer to be treated.

Thank you American Founding Fathers that ratified that Golden Rule in our Constitution and those that have sought to restore and preserve it here, as well as those like Margaret Thatcher that saved  Britain from freedom’s socialist enemies for a time.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free

Observing the blanket press coverage of the recent week of oral arguments concerning California’s Proposition 8 and the federal Defense of Marriage Act before the nation’s highest court, one could be forgiven for thinking that one-third of America’s government only concerns itself with less than 2% of its citizens’ concerns. But, beyond the din of “mainstream” media’s declaration of the end of traditional marriage’s 5000 year run (despite the recent re-affirmation of same by more than 80% of the states) one could faintly hear an actual post-oral argument, 5-4 eclectic decision in Florida v Jardines that affirms the security of one’s person (gay or straight) and papers from unreasonable searches and seizures while presiding as king or queen (no matter the gender) of one’s castle:

Drug-sniffing police dogs have their place, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled. And it’s not on a suspect’s front porch.

The court today said officers typically need a warrant before taking an animal to the door of a house in the hope of detecting narcotics. The justices ruled on Feb. 19 that police officers can search someone’s car after a trained dog outside the vehicle alerts them to the presence of drugs.

Together, the decisions amount to a vote of respect for the abilities of police dogs — and wariness about their potential misuse. While the court has previously said officers can walk onto a suspect’s property to knock on the door, the 5-4 majority today said the use of trained dogs is different.

“When it comes to the Fourth Amendment, the home is first among equals,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote. “This right would be of little practical value if the state’s agents could stand in a home’s porch or side garden and trawl for evidence with impunity.”

The justices were considering a bid by Florida officials to revive the prosecution of a man arrested after police raided a Miami house and found marijuana plants.

The Florida Supreme Court said prosecutors couldn’t use evidence obtained in the house because officers violated the U.S. Constitution’s ban on unreasonable searches.

Scalia was joined in the majority by Justices Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Stephen Breyer dissented.

In the latest in a series of “drug-sniffing police dog” cases, the dissenters essentially equated the use of a canine’s senses with that of homo-sapiens; but the majority requires the detection of drugs by the former only via a pre-sniff trip to the house search warrant supported by non-canine probable cause. The eclectic mix of justices from the left and right on opposite sides of each other also reflects some common ground upon which both small government tea partiers and ACLU civil libertarians can stand.

Spartanburg, South Carolina trial lawyer Andrew Johnson reacted to the increasingly rare ruling restricting the powers of the government thusly:

I was quite relieved the court did not allow probable cause for the search warrant of a home to be based upon a supposed alert by a dog. I’ve seen so much abuse of this procedure in the vehicle arena. A handler can make a dog alert (or claim it did) whenever he wants to. Allowing this practice would have essentially eliminated the Constitutional requirement for probable cause of a person’s home as it already has for vehicles.

This former liberal Democratic Party official and trial lawyer turned tea partier conservative Republican corporate counsel between immigration cases heartily agrees, and in our effort to bring you comprehensive coverage of the law in these United States between our own court proceedings, would return to the issue of gay marriage only to suggest that we doubt five of the above-referenced justices will impose same-sex marriage across the entire Fruited Plain by rejecting the will of a usually liberal Golden State electorate that wishes to keep “I do’s” exclusively between one man and one woman.

The only question unanswered by pro-gay marriage liberal Democrats obsessed with barren heterosexual couples’ that seek an equivalence with straights and libertarians pining for a day they can’t point to when government concerned itself not with marriage (civil marriage arose, partially, by the way, to accommodate the non-religiously betrothed); is how a Lesbian couple can ever consummate their union so that the Sword of annulment Damocles isn’t forever suspended above their necks?

What we do know is that any search warrant to discover such consummation evidence may not be based upon the sniff of a dog accompanying the police on a warrant-less stroll around the couple’s gay abode.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free Press

The real question Bob Johnson, founder and CEO of BET Network and owner of the NBA’s Charlotte Bobcats, should ask is why Blacks tolerate the failed Democratic Party to the tune of regularly giving them over 90% of their votes. Instead, he issued the following, late last week:

This country would never tolerate white unemployment at 14 and 15 percent. No one would ever stay in office at 14 or 15 percent unemployment in this nation, but we’ve had that double unemployment for over 50 years,” Johnson said while speaking at the National Press Club about the gap between whites and blacks in America.

“The national average is 7.7 percent, and African-American unemployment is 13.8 percent. To be honest, it’s probably greater than that when you count the number of African-Americans who have simply given up on finding employment,” said Johnson, who is also founder and chairman of The RLJ Companies.

In 1972, the unemployment rate for African-Americans was 11.2 percent in January of that year and as low as 9.4 percent in December of that same year. It dipped as low as seven percent in April 2000. The unemployment rate for blacks in February 2013 was 13.8 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Johnson said the challenge was to figure out why the unemployment rate for blacks has been so high, “and if that doesn’t change, somebody’s going to have to pay— 34 million African-Americans are not going to leave this country, millions of African-Americans who don’t have jobs.”

“Somebody’s going to have to pay for them. Somebody’s going to have to take care of them, and if somebody’s going to have to take care of them, that money’s got to come from somebody. And whoever’s paying for it is going to be upset about it, and they’re going to start looking for somebody to blame,” Johnson said.

We appreciate Johnson’s frustration with the failed economic policies of the Obama Administration, as this was not the first time that he has lashed out at the Democrats. And we certainly agree with his warning concerning how society will have to “pay” (whether in welfare and other costs) for failed citizens.

But Bob, sadly, Americans of all hues tolerated above 14% unemployment for Whites via FDR’s Democrats from 1933-1940; and a similar under-employment (unemployed and part-time that doesn’t include the discouraged) rate (15.9% and higher) for the last four years from President Barack Obama’s Democrats. And yes, the exponentially higher such rates that Democrats tolerate are a moral abomination, as are the welfare policies of Food Stamp Nation.

Increasing numbers of Americans are economically illiterate. How else did the nation re-hire such an epically failed Chief executive last November? It doesn’t help that nearly all Republicans, advocating the supply-side policies that lifted the fortunes of Blacks to historically high levels from the mid-1980s through the mid-2000s, face an African-American electorate blindly loyal to the class warriors that Bob Johnson famously loathed back in 2011:

“Well, I think the president has to recalibrate his message. You don’t get people to like you by attacking them or demeaning their success. You know, I grew up in a family of 10 kids, first one to go to college, and I’ve earned my success. I’ve earned my right to fly private if I choose to do so.

“And by attacking me it is not going to convince me that I should take a bigger hit because I happen to be wealthy. You know, it is the old — I think Ted and Fred and I we both sort of take the old Ethel Merman approach to life. I’ve tried poor and I tried rich and I like rich better. It doesn’t mean that I am a bad guy.

“I didn’t go in to business to create a public policy success for either party, Republican or Democrat. I went in business to create jobs and opportunity, create opportunity, create value for myself and my investors. And that’s what the president should be praising, not demagoguing us simply because Warren Buffet says he pays more than his secretary. He should pay the secretary more and she will pay more.”

Bravo Bob. Let’s educate the nation writ large not to tolerate high unemployment for any group except the lazy and corrupt. Obama’s continued failed policies are hopefully helping in the instruction.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free Press

The U.S. Constitution makes clear that:

“The judicial power of the United States shall extend to all Cases…arising under this Constitution, the Laws of the United States, and…-to Controversies to which the United States shall be a party…” – Article III, Section 2.

This “cases and controversies” clause makes clear that courts do not exist to serve as philosopher kings available to issue advisory opinions imposing liberal orthodoxy when We the People’s representatives dare evade the supposed progressive bent of history dependent upon a so-called “living constitution.”

We the (conservative) People of the United States dared, thanks primarily to Speaker Newt Gingrich and the first Republican House in 40 years after the mid-term Election of 1994, to pass the Defense of Marriage Act less than two months before the Election of 1996 to make clear that states would not have to recognize same-sex marriages legally entered into in other states and that American taxpayers would not have to subsidize such marriages under federal law. Liberal Democrat Bill Clinton recently expressed his evolved opinion that the law is unconstitutional and that he favors gay marriage; but the then-recently-chastised-at-the-polls-President Bill Clinton signed DOMA into law as a re-born defender of traditional values so that he would have a chance to slip by with Ross Perot’s help again for a second term in the White House.

There are conservative arguments based upon Tenth Amendment federalism and the Full Faith & Credit Clause that could undermine the constitutionality of a federal definition of marriage contrary to that of states that actually authorize and conduct marriages; but that Attorney General Eric Holder and his boss could somehow unilaterally leave the law un-defended and thus have it overturned on the issue of a lack of “standing”, would turn the Rule of Law into an unjust game  of chance unworthy of any court of justice, much less our nation’s highest.

Same goes for Governor Jerry Brown’s decision to refuse to further defend Proposition 8, the second such popular referendum in California in eight years that rejected marriages by other than traditional ones between one man and one woman, after his government’s lawyers conveniently lost the case in lower federal courts.

The main purpose of “standing” requirements to bring lawsuits is make sure that only persons or entities harmed by another, including the government, may access the judicial power; thus protecting the guardians of law and justice serving and being funded by the people from arbitrary and whimsical employment. The issue of standing is most seriously required of plaintiffs who summon defendants to court. Clearly a person sued for money damages has standing to defend themselves.

Do Jerry Brown, Eric Holder and Barack Obama own The Government?

But what of the government as defendant against persons complaining of a law passed by the government? Much of the discussion concerning oral arguments in the Prop 8 and DOMA cases before the United States Supreme Court this week seemed to miss the fact that these laws defending traditional marriage are not the property of Jerry Brown, Eric Holder of President Barack Obama. DOMA was passed by THE government of the United States, not Bill Clinton’s or even Newt Gingrich’s. Prop 8 was a referendum insisted upon by the people of California precisely because their courts and elected representatives had twice rejected their clear voice.

Both cases invoke the Fourteenth Amendment and other provisions of the Constitution of the United States and thus, as required by Section 2 of the judicial article, “arise under” said constitution. The people are entitled to have their over 200-year-old Constitution, and laws passed there-under, defended no matter the duplicity of the Eric Holders of the world to try and trick America into becoming Sodom or Gomorrah before its democratic processes choose to challenge God to find at least 10 good men residing therein.

For decades, the only way liberals were able to impose their will upon a center-right country was through five un-elected lawyers in black robes that circumvented the amendment process prescribed in the Constitution by using the terms “due process” or “equal protection” to mean anything but for babies in the womb or any other object of their “progressive” evolving wrath.

Standing on the promises of God and the U.S. Constitution

Now, just as liberals muster actual electoral majorities in selected states and in re-electing a fairly overt radical and failed liberal to the presidency, one would hope that Chief Justice John Roberts  and  Justice Anthony Kennedy will resist what Robert Bork called “the tempting” and let We the People govern ourselves. Can’t they look their Georgetown cocktail party hosts in the eye trust the liberal agenda to an increasingly liberal electorate? Or must they wield absolute power even among the like-minded?

Once again, the subjects of nine American oligarchs, 237 years removed from declaring independence from King George III, await the fate of marriage from on high. What were those shots heard ’round the world fired for again?

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free Press

Oral arguments were heard today in the case of Hollingsworth v. Perry by the nine justices of the nation’s highest court, with the fate of same-sex marriage and the constitutional rule of law hanging in the balance. Twice in the past 14 years, majorities of California voters have voted to reject allowing two persons of the same-sex to marry. Each direct popular ballot initiative (Proposition 22 in 2000 and Proposition 8 in 2008) was taken by the people of the nation’s largest state to overrule decisions by the California Supreme Court that deemed the denial of same-sex marriage as a violation of their state constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.

Proponents of gay marriage are asking the nation’s highest court to rule that Proposition 8, which amended California’s state constitution to restrict marriage in the Golden State to unions between one man and one woman, violates such federal equal protection guarantees embodied in the 14th Amendment  of the U.S. Constitution.

Lost in much of the commentary leading up to today’s oral arguments in today’s Hollingsworth case that was initiated in a California federal district court on behalf of two same-sex couples (one female couple and one male couple), is the significance of the ruling by the California Supreme Court in the 2009 case of Strauss v Horton that upheld the constitutionality of Prop 8 under its state constitution, after having previously struck down Proposition 22.

Why the two different rulings and why are they so significant? Because while Prop 22 enacted a mere statute, Prop 8 followed the California State Constitution’s  requirements for direct amendment of the state constitution, thus restricting the issue in Strauss to whether the proper constitutional procedure for amendment was followed. It was, thus denying a few lawyers in  black robes from once again imposing their made up will and essentially re-amending the state constitution by judicial fiat.

Had the California Supreme Court so imposed its will and ruled same-sex marriage required under other clauses of the state constitution, there would be nothing the U.S. Supreme Court could do to uphold the will of the people to define marriage as they deem appropriate.

Today’s oral arguments focused much on the issue of “standing” mainly because the lawyers for the state of California refused to appeal previous federal court rulings they “lost” (but wanted to lose) while defending the law, as was their initial duty. As is allowed under state and federal law, “interested” parties may “intervene” and prosecute and/or defend under certain circumstances. Such law on standing is rather arcane and quite dependent on the particular circumstances of each specific case, which could produce varying results including allowing only the two marriages of the particular couples to stand, dismissal that upholds Prop 8 or strikes it down thus making gay marriage legal only in states (AL, AZ, CA, HI, ID, MT, NV, OR, and WA) over which the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has federal jurisdiction or requiring that the whole case be remanded to a lower court for further proceedings.

A ruling that denies standing to a litigant in the Hollingsworth case would prevent any ruling on the substantive merits of the claim that the U.S. Constitution demands that all states must allow same-sex couples to marry. Only by admitting standing, and then inventing a meaning of the “equal protection” not intended by the framers and ratifiers of the post-Civil War, 14th Amendment (via the kind of emasculation of the rule of law that we saw when the court invented abortion rights or the right of city governments to take the private property of one person and give it to another private person) could the court unilaterally amend the U.S. Constitution and so impose its wishes on the whole of the United States.

Once again, We the People hold our breath in hopes that Chief Justice Roberts (as in the Obamacare ruling) and Justice Anthony Kennedy (as in the abortion and war powers cases, among others) do not usurp the right to self-government we thought was won for us when General George Washington’s Continental Army defeated the tyranny of kings and distant, unaccountable parliaments; so that they will be more liked at cocktail parties in Georgetown.

Contrary to the musings of too many conservatives, the flaws of Roe v Wade and Casey v Planned Parenthood, that first invented and imposed abortion on the entire U.S., was not that they “short-circuited” an “evolutionary process” already ongoing in the individual states. Such an analysis concedes the liberal activivist proposition of a “living constitution”, thus implicitly legitimizing rulings that invent rights that have allegedly “evolved” based upon Gallup polls.

No, the reason that a ruling imposing gay marriage on states with laws against it would be improper is because it would further erode the Rule of Law by We the People in favor of rule by oligarchical elites, thus overturning the self government revolution that make us the Shining City on a Hill. Conservatives and Christians are prepared to lose on the issue of gay marriage under the Rule of Law, just as we seek to overturn the murderous abortions of nine-month old babies via the rule of law.

We used to be able to accurately say that the Left can’t get majorities to enact their Utopian vision and so had to do it via five lawyers in black robes. Sadly that is no longer the case on many issues. But the Left is happy to get its way via any means necessary even if by doing so, they shred the document embodying the supreme law of the land that protects us all from arbitrary rule by tyrants.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free Press

None here.

But, Europe ain’t America:

Cyprus reached a last-ditch deal with international lenders on a 10 billion euro ($13 billion) rescue plan to avoid economic meltdown, agreeing to close down its second-largest bank and inflict heavy losses on big depositors.

The agreement came hours before a deadline to avert a collapse of the banking system in fraught negotiations between President Nicos Anastasiades and heads of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

 Without a deal, Cyprus’s banking system would have collapsed and the country could have become the first to crash out of the European single currency.

Backed by euro zone finance ministers, the plan will spare the Mediterranean island a financial catastrophe by winding down the largely state-owned Popular Bank of Cyprus, also known as Laiki, and shifting deposits below 100,000 euros to the Bank of Cyprus to create a “good bank”.

Deposits above 100,000 euros in both banks, which are not guaranteed under EU law, will be frozen and used to resolve Laiki’s debts and recapitalize Bank of Cyprus, the island’s biggest, through a deposit/equity conversion.

It was unclear if banks would reopen for business on Tuesday, but an announcement, if any, was anticipated to be accompanied by restrictions on capital movements to prevent a run on banks.

Cyprus government spokesman Christos Stylianides said: “We averted a disorderly bankruptcy which would have led to an exit of Cyprus from the euro zone with unforeseeable consequences.”

Asked about the level of losses on uninsured depositors in Bank of Cyprus, he told state radio: “The assessment is that it will be under or around 30 percent.”

But is America becoming Europe?

As Shakespeare famously said, “there is a tide in the affairs of American men.” Sometimes, one man with courage can make a majority, but after a lobster enters a pot of lukewarm water and bathes awhile it doesn’t notice incremental increases in temperature and the inevitable boiling point before served up with butter.

This is why our Founding Fathers began the American Revolution to protect the fruits of their labor after Sugar and Stamp Acts, but before absolute confiscation of their private property.

In Cyprus, shrugs. No tea on ships being thrown overboard into the Mediterranean there.

Yet, while our federal government hasn’t yet resorted to brazen takings of savings accounts at your local bank, they did (Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and their respective Congresses) use TARP to bail out their Big Bank pals lest our financial system collapse (or so we were told).  President Obama won re-election claiming that he “saved us from the abyss” with actions worse than anything King George III did to the colonists, even if FDIC remained intact.

Yes, we now have taxation (and regulation) WITH representation now. Yes, even faceless bureaucrats that kill the coal industry, affordable health care and insurance, and restrict oil drilling, are appointed and overseen by those presidents and  representatives we elect.

But theft is still theft, even if Chief Executives and Legislators, with the approval of five lawyers in black robes, refuse to call it theft under the contract made with We the People, i.e. the U.S. Constitution.

Yes, we had a tea partier-inspired GOP mid-term election landslide in 2010. But unlike the aftermath of the Boston Tea Party in the 18th Century, the aftermath of our 20th Century version seems only to be that the elected thieves were issued smaller, but just as effective weapons with which to rob us.

Don’t scoff at Cyprus, Speaker Boehner, unless you are ready to use the power you have in one-half of one-third of the federal government (as you so describe) to, at least, defund Obamacare with risk of a government shutdown.

Our Founding Fathers risked being hanged for treason. Couldn’t elected Republicans at least risk losing the political power they refuse to use and be sentenced to life in Ohio and other points not D.C.? One would hope.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free Press

If there is one lesson this tea partier conservative learned from the re-election of President Barack Obama that we never expected to see, it is that Republicans can not count on a majority of voters to hold Democrats responsible for the failed results of their economic policies. Despite the dearth of any GOP votes in Congress to inflict Obamacare upon the American people and the 2010 landslide that restored Republican control of the House; Florida, Colorado and Ohio electorate memories faded when bombarded with Bain-ful attacks targeting the top of the 2012 GOP ticket.

Enter the junior senator from the Lone Star state and let the re-branding begin:

When the U.S. Senate…takes up the continuing resolution to fund the federal government for the remainder of fiscal year 2013, Sen. Ted Cruz (R.-Texas) will offer an amendment that will prohibit funding for the implementation of Obamacare during that period.

“I believe we will have a vote on this amendment and I have said I am willing to employ any procedural means necessary to ensure that we do get a vote on the amendment,” Cruz told reporters…

Cruz, who favors total repeal of Obamacare and has introduced legislation to do that, said in a conference call on Monday that at a minimum Obamacare should not be implemented until Gross Domestic Product has started growing at its average post-World War II level or better.

“The historic levels of growth have been 3.3 percent and, in my view, at a minimum, we should see a return to those historic levels of growth before Congress is willing to contemplate putting through another massive burden on the economy that hurts productivity and kills jobs,” said Cruz.

The Republican-controlled House [already] passed its version of the CR… But the Republican leaders of that chamber did not put language in their bill to defund Obamacare or any part of it…

To add insult to self-inflicted Republican brand injuries, Speaker John Boehner this week agreed with President Obama that the national debt is not yet an “immediate” crisis. Never mind the ongoing anemic recovery unworthy of the name and a work force still smaller than the one Obama inherited from his predecessor, but did the Speaker miss the news about America’s first in its history credit rating downgrade?

But of course, if Boehner were to agree that a crisis exists now, he would be required to take bold (and inherently risky) action now. So instead of mustering the courage to address actual crises that have been and continue to cause economic suffering on a scale not seen across the Fruited Plain since Okies were force-fed grapes of wrath, we continue to let Democrats and their Media Branch to concoct faux crises that prevent elementary school children from touring the White House. Does Boehner not see the electoral risks of cowardly inaction since he remained Speaker after the Election of 2012? And yet, he still refuses to exercise what power can be wielded from that office.

We do not advocate games of government-shutdown chicken lightly (especially with such a crisis-welcoming executive like Obama serving as chief) and we would not demonize fellow Republicans that define responsible governance as authorizing the funding (albeit via Bernanke’s funny money) of laws passed by Congress (even if done contrary to then-existing Senate rules); but the 5-year and counting PRESENT economic crisis calls for at least one man with courage to make a majority for reversing course before the Democrats next tax hike resembles a Cypriot reverse bank robbery.

It would be folly to shut down the government over Paul Ryan’s plan to balance the budget in ten years, so economically illiterate are swing voters in northern Virginia (not to mention how large a 2023 Ryan federal government would remain). But surely it is worth the risk, especially given the prospect of four more years of Democratic budgetary irresponsibility, for the GOP to try and brand itself as the party seeking to save Americans from 23 new Obamacare taxes, higher health insurance premiums, demotions of employees from full-time to part-time to avoid employer coverage mandates and all the other evils of the Orwellian-titled  Affordable Care Act that polls show is very unpopular.

March (to the Final Four in Atlanta) Madness has lost some of its allure this year not only because of the ongoing one-and-out-t0-the-NBA trend and the nearly irrelevant NCAA men’s basketball regular season, but also because of the January-December madness we have witnessed in Washington, D.C. for the last four years.

But with the Rand Paul drone-filibuster and the Ted Cruz Obamacare-repeal challenge leading to today’s Vernal Equinox and the official beginning of Spring, hope springs eternal that conservatives could once again, act like conservatives.

Mike DeVine

“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson

Editor of Hillbilly Politics

Atlanta Law & Politics columnist at Examiner.com

Front page columnist for Liberty Unyielding and Western Free Press