Secretary Sebelius has been shaking down the industry she controls, raising funds for Enroll America, an alliance of community organizers and health sector businesses. This is not the first time Sebelius has run afoul of ethics laws, as she illegally campaigned for Democrats in 2012.

In her position, Sebelius has enormous power. She may have the authority over the futures of the companies involved, if President Obama doesn’t appoint member to the Independent Payment Advisory Board, or even if the IPAB doesn’t submit certain plans to lower health care costs.

Whether the IPAB submits the proposals or Sebelius does, they have the force of law unless Congress votes with a supermajority against them.

According to a letter sent by two House committee chairmen,

The secretary’s actions show an apparent disregard for constitutional principles and may violate the Antideficiency Act, the prohibition against augmenting congressional appropriations, and executive branch ethics laws.

Five members of Congress signed the letter, including Ways and Means Committee Chairman Dave Camp, Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Fred Upton, Rep Jack Kingston, and Senators Alexander and Hatch of the Senate committees having oversight over how HHS spends money.

ThinkProgress stated that Alexander did the same thing in 1991 under President George H.W. Bush. Alexander cites differences, but the activity is wrong in either case. Pointing out that someone else did it, too, doesn’t make it right to do now.

The members asked Secretary Sebelius for details, including

1. A list of outside entities for which her department solicits funds
2. A description of the coordination between HHS and EnrollAmerica and other groups
3. Who in the government is soliciting
4. Any government resources used
5. A list of those contacted
6. The specific requests made
7. Any promises or offers made in return
8. Any feedback or success reports from EnrollAmerica to HHS
9. Who cleared this for ethics
10. Any other fundraising done under the Public Health Services Act
11. A list of funds transferred since March 23, 2010 for PPACA implementation, including from HHS, other federal departments, or outside entities like EnrollAmerica.

The last item there relates to a slush fund Sebelius has been using to fund Obamacare implementation, since it’s far more expensive to destroy the American economy and health system than Obamacare thought. As Phil Kerpen put it,

And while Sebelius is dialing-for-dollars, she is also reallocating money from a slush fund created by the law toward public relations and political activity instead of using it to help people with preexisting conditions.  About 40,000 people with preexisting conditions will go without any coverage this year because Sebelius chose to end enrollment in the federal Preexisting Condition Insurance Plan in order to instead fund TV advertising and grants to lobbying groups.  So HHS is abusing taxpayer dollars as well as shaking down private citizens for coerced donations, all to maximize spending on their political push to build support for the unpopular law, instead of actually helping sick people.

The members also want a few answers from EnrollAmerica, including

1. A list of staff or EnrollAmerica officials, HHS staff, and health sector companies who talked about fundraising
2. The emails about it
3. The process by which EnrollAmerica obtained tax-exempt status from the IRS

The Board of Directors for EnrollAmerica includes:

• Ron Pollack Executive Director, Families USA, thought to be funded by public sector unions, especially the SEIU, which mainstains a seat on the group’s board.
• Vinny DeMarco President, Maryland Citizens’ Health Initiative, a group whose main purpose appears to be harassing the poor with “sin” taxes on tobacco and alcohol.
• Roger Schwartz Executive Branch Liaison, National Association of Community Health Centers. Community health centers received $11 billion for the first five years of Obamacare.
• Debra Barrett Vice President of Government Affairs, Teva Pharmaceuticals USA. Pharmaceutical companies are among the biggest winners under Obamacare.
• Tom Epstein Vice President, Public Affairs, Blue Shield of California.The nationwide BCBS Association may be not-for-profit, but they will reap billions in new non-profits under Obamacare.
• Anthony Barrueta Senior Vice President, Government Relations, Kaiser Permanente, an insurance company that stands to profit from Obamacare
• Sister Carol Keehan President and CEO, Catholic Health Association of the United States, which insisted during negotiations over PPACA that “Medicaid and Medicare Disproportionate Share Hospital (DSH) payment reductions should only be triggered if anticipated reductions in the number of uninsured are achieved.” In other words, it’s about the money.
• Richard Umbdenstock President and CEO, American Hospital Association, the biggest beneficiary of Obamacare, which includes the effective ban on physician-owned hospitals, a competitor to the AHA.

This episode shows that government is just too big, and with too much power, to be wielded by anyone. No matter how ethical or capable a person is, the control of vast resources and the pressure to accomplish political goals is too great a temptation to resist. The most effective way to reduce the size of the federal government is immediate full repeal of Obamacare.

Follow @lheal on Twitter.

Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks

Keynesianism is still not working.

The central idea of the dominant economic philosophy in Washington, DC, is that when the private economy fails to produce enough demand, the government can and should step in to take up the economic slack. It should have been long since discredited. But like other bad ideas, people keep bringing it back.

No sane person would say we have not tried government spending to stimulate the economy. We’ve tried it over and over, and it does not work.

But still, some will beat a straw man until he cries for submission. Henry Blodgett, writing at Yahoo, noted that an important error had been uncovered in an influential economics finding.

Once the error was corrected, the “90% debt-to-GDP threshold” instantly disappeared. Higher government debt levels still correlated with slower economic growth, but the relationship was not nearly as pronounced. And there was no dangerous point-of-no-return that countries had to avoid exceeding at all costs.

The discovery of this simple math error eliminated one of the key “facts” upon which the austerity movement was based.

It also, in my opinion, settled the “stimulus vs. austerity” argument once and for all.

The argument is over. Paul Krugman has won. The only question now is whether the folks who have been arguing that we have no choice but to cut government spending while the economy is still weak will be big enough to admit that.

The straw man is twofold. First, debt is not just bad because it slows down the economy, which it does a little. Debt is bad because it eventually piles up and the interest crushes the economic life out of a nation.

Secondly, the 90% figure is important to those who identified the problem as the deficit (and taxes being too low), rather than as too much government that spends too much. Deficit and debt are symptoms of tring to spend our way out of a slow economy. As governments try to cushion the people from the effects of bad decisions or to spend their way to prosperity, they tend to develop high levels of debt. 

Spending is the problem, not the solution. And should some “unexpected” set of conditions force a rise in interest rates, the huge debt will leave us without good options.

Europe has tried “austerity” since 2008, but the United States has not. The meaning of austerity is different over there: higher taxes on the people, with only a little more spending. 

While dancing on the grave of austerity, the Keynesians sing a song of higher spending. Excess debt is fine, they chime, so high spending is nothing to worry about.

Contrary to Blodgett, all we have done since the 2010 elections is to keep the increases in government spending at bay. We are still spending an outrageous amount, and not getting anything for it.

Stimulus spending will continue to fail, because government spending, in and of itself, does not promote economic growth. There is no point going ever further into debt when doing so will not help.

If you say “A results in B,” and B doesn’t happen, then either A never happened or A does not, in fact, result in B.  In this case, if you say “Government spending results in economic growth,” and the economic growth doesn’t happen, either government spending never happened or government spending does not, in fact, result in economic growth. 

Why doesn’t government spending work? There are at least four reasons: taxation, regulation, bad aim, and dependency.

When government spends, it gets the money from somewhere: borrowing, printing, or taxation. In the end, all of these harm economic growth over the long term.

Borrowed money must be repaid with interest, resulting in taxes — and the anticipation of future taxes — that are higher than they would have been otherwise.  Printing money reduces its value, a tax on the buying power of the money people already have.

Government spending comes with regulations. This may be the worst aspect of spending, because it lasts long after the spending is done. Sometimes government gives away money apparently without strings, but show me someone who is unemployed, and I will show you a law or regulation keeping them that way.

Government seldom spends on the right things, in terms of trying to stimulate the economy.  If something were a good investment, the private sector would already be making it.  Free markets fill voids.

For instance, the federal government continues to spend money to keep home prices inflated, in order to keep people happy with their economic situation. The thought is that people who believe their homes are worth a lot will continue to pay on their mortgages and be better consumers in other areas. But that also means that some people who want to buy homes are priced out of the market. This is also why you have seen so many company layoffs when stimulus money runs out.  The market didn’t create the need for that job, easy credit and government money did.  When the money dries up, so do the jobs created. 

The government also malinvests when trying to encourage immature technology in the marketplace. Rather than waiting for market conditions to coalesce around ethanol, solar power, or electric cars, the government tries to encourage people to take them up before they make economic sense, or worse, to force their acceptance by fiat.

That’s not to say that all government spending is bad. It’s just that neither bureaucrats nor elected officials can pick the right things to spend money on to improve the economy. Even spending on infrastructure doesn’t, by itself, help the economy as a whole. The infrastructure that gets built may help the economy, or it may be a bridge to nowhere.

Finally, government spending produces dependency.  When government spends, people and companies sit around contemplating how to get the next handout. Instead of looking for a job, people tend to look in the mailbox. Rather than putting their time to productive use finding what people want to buy and selling it to them, companies focus on government grants and cost cutting. 

Even if governments print money to give away without any strings to everyone (so the right people are sure to get it), the result is dependency. Don’t take my word for it. Look around.

We have not tried cutting spending, slashing the bureaucracy, allowing markets to define technology and prices, or encouraging people and companies to make it on their own.  Until we do, the economic morass will continue.

Follow @lheal on Twitter.

Copyright FreedomWorks, 2013

Contrary to various claims, this bill neither cripples Obamacare implementation nor fixes Obamacare. It merely forces the Obamacare train wreck to get by on its own, without spending taxpayer (or deficit) money to push administration policies.

The bill’s purpose is to move funding from one area of Obamacare to another, from a slush fund called the “Prevention and Public Health Fund” to the “Preexisting Condition Insurance Program” (PCIP). That may sound iffy — why aren’t conservatives pushing for full repeal?

The PCIP serves only a small number of very sick people who would otherwise have to join the Welfare and Medicaid entitlement rolls to get the specialized care they need.

Were it not for the tsunami of distortions caused by health insurance tax incentives, Medicare, Medicaid, and now Obamacare, the people with these preexisting conditions would not face the kind of health care and health insurance costs they do. But because we have these other giant programs distorting the market, continuing the funding for a HRP is hardly a concession that government can do health insurance better.

The slush fund will be used for ad campaigns similar to the Andy Griffith Obamacare ads from the 2010 election cycle, and other annoying activities with questionable legal footing.

As Ken Hoagland said of the Helping Sick Americans Now Act:

Our grassroots supporters like it. They understand there are problems with our healthcare system but that ObamaCare is the wrong medicine. Pre-existing conditions are a problem and recognizing this plain truth is positive. Better? The difference between caring for people who are out in the cold and using the monies to accelerate the set up of what will be seriously delayed and dysfunctional exchanges, funding Hatch Act violations and bike paths.

The United States needs real immigration reform, and Republicans need to show they’re on the side of immigrants. Something has to be done.

Not this.

Some Republican interest in immigration reform is driven by electoral considerations. Realizing that Democrats — Democrats — have successfully painted us — us — as racists, some in the party are looking for a way to show that we’re not. By writing “Immigration Reform” on a piece of paper and voting for it, supporters hope to show Latinos and other special demographic groups that we’re not such bad people.

Writing at the Huffington Post, Jon Ward give a decent analysis of the Republican politics of the deal. Republicans on Capitol Hill will take any deal, Ward says, and Marco Rubio just wants to be president. President Obama won’t enforce border security with a new law any more than he has in the past. Chuck Schumer is using Rubio to gain the Democratic Party millions of new voters.

While I don’t disagree with Ward’s analysis, I’m perhaps not typical of conservatives on this issue. My priorities are:

• National Security: We should know who is entering the country. We ask people at ports of entry to show their passports, and ask Americans to take off their belts and shoes and submit to sexual assault to fly between American cities. It seems more reasonable to me to ascertain the identity and intent of those, especially foreign nationals, desiring to cross into our country.
• Open immigration: I don’t want quotas of any kind, whether national, ethnic, religious, or skill-based. The Senate plan continues the worldwide blockade on people who want to come to America.

But what does the bill (pdf) say?:

Not earlier than the date upon which the Secretary has submitted to Congress the Notice of Commencement of implementation of the Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy and the Southern Border Fencing Strategy under section 5 of this Act, the Secretary may commence processing applications for registered provisional immigrant status pursuant to section 245B of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as added by section 2101 of this Act.

As National Review’s Rich Lowry wrote:

Under the bill, no additional enforcement has to take place before undocumented immigrants get legalized. The secretary of the Department of Homeland Security merely has to come up with a strategy for enforcement and notify Congress that it has commenced. It doesn’t matter if it is a good, bad, or indifferent plan, so long as it is a plan. Then, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants get legal status.

[...]

If the Gang of Eight bill becomes law, a natural political dynamic will take over. Denying any undocumented immigrant newly legal status will seem arbitrary and unfair, and so the notionally tough requirements for legal status will be only loosely applied.

To which Jonathan Tobin replied at Commentary:

Lowry and other conservatives who worry about whether this will be a repeat of the 1986 immigration bill, which promised better enforcement that was not delivered, have a point. But the idea that the measures about border security in the bill are nothing but airy promises is unfair. One can always argue that the government will treat the provisions in the bill as meaningless and that Congress will be too weak to insist on enforcement. But the stakes in this coalition are so high that a repeat of past failures in this manner seems less likely. Even the Democrats understand that the price of Republican support means real border security and this bill provides a template for that.

The entire point is that after Republican support has been achieved and the bill is signed into law, Democrats will no longer have any reason to continue the charade. There is a supernatural level of credulity required to believe that the Obama administration will follow through on enforcement.

Current enforcement

Under the Schumer plan, current illegal immigrants do in fact go to the head of the line, being able to apply for legal residency immediately after the Secretary supplies a Southern Border Security and a Southern Border Fencing Strategy. What does that mean?

The term ‘‘Comprehensive Southern Border Security Strategy’’ means the strategy established by the Secretary pursuant to section 5(a) to achieve and maintain an effectiveness rate of 90 percent or higher in all high risk border sectors.
[...]
The term ‘‘effective control’’ means the ability to achieve and maintain, in a Border Patrol sector (A) persistent surveillance; and (B) an effectiveness rate of 90 percent or higher.

Two things should jump out of that: 1) They’re only talking about 90 percent effectiveness and 2) that is only in certain areas designated as “high risk”.

The ‘‘effectiveness rate’’, in the case of a border sector, is the percentage calculated by dividing the number of apprehensions and turn backs in the sector during a fiscal year by the total number of illegal entries in the sector during such fiscal year.

But wait a second. How do they know how many are entering illegally? That implies perfect knowledge of the extent of illegal border crossings. The bill implicitly envisions a state of border security in which the challenges of detection have been met, but leaves it in the Secretary’s interest not to meet them.

The lower the detection rate, the fewer the number of high-risk sectors and the greater the likelihood of meeting the 90 percent goal.

The term ‘‘high risk border sector’’ means a border sector in which more than 30,000 individuals were apprehended during the most recent fiscal year.

Any area reporting fewer than 30,000 crossings will not be designated a “high risk border sector” and will simply not count toward the national assessment of border security.

Homeland Security will have limited organizational incentive to enforce border security in any other area.

The term ‘‘Southern Border Fencing Strategy’’ means the strategy established by the Secretary pursuant to section 5(b) that identifies where fencing, including double-layer fencing, should be deployed along the Southern border.

The Department’s border security goal is to achieve and maintain effective control in high risk border sectors along the Southern border.

Finally, why is it only the Southern Border? Why not the Northern border and our seacoasts, as well?

The bill continues and deepens Congressional involvement in setting standards for who comes here, micromanaging the labor market in the way hard-line socialist countries do.

The idea that the Senate immigration plan improves our border security is ridiculous. It continues the policy Congress managing who immigrates to America, on the theory that Congressional wisdom is greater than that of those wanting to come here. That anyone — Republican or Democrat — are falling for it shows them to be driven by politics and not by the needs of the nation.

So it is unsurprising that most people think his ideas are stupid. Twitter users pilloried Sirota mercilessly for saying without a trace of irony, “Let’s Hope the Boston Marathon Bomber is a White American.”

Salon photo

The reflexive use of racism has achieved such a level of bemused contempt for everyone to the right of Think Progress that Sirota’s silliness even rated a Drudge link this morning.

Sirota doesn’t rate a full fisking, but a few truly awful statements deserve note.

Because of these undeniable and pervasive double standards, the specific identity of the Boston Marathon bomber (or bombers) is not some minor detail — it will almost certainly dictate what kind of governmental, political and societal response we see in the coming weeks.

The reason we don’t see links between “acts of terror” by random white people is that, contrary to Sirota’s clear unstated premise, skin color doesn’t by itself create a link between people. If a domestic terrorist in Cleveland wishes to communicate with one in New York, they have to use some other means besides believing in their hearts the importance of their own skin tone.

If two people share a religion, sects of which have a known doctrine of evangelism through violence, that’s an actual linkage. If they adhere to the same political ideology, that’s another kind of link. In the case of Islam, there is both a political and a religious linkage.

That means regardless of your particular party affiliation, if you care about everything from stopping war to reducing the defense budget to protecting civil liberties to passing immigration reform, you should hope the bomber was a white domestic terrorist. Why? Because only in that case will privilege work to prevent the Boston attack from potentially undermining progress on those other issues.

To know that’s true is to simply consider how America reacts to different kinds of terrorism.

Sirota tries to dance around his own party affiliation, listing instead the full gamut of political causes from leftist to far leftist. The phrasing is awkward. From one writer to another, David, simply omit the clause about party affiliation altogether.

More substantively, Sirota doesn’t explain why privilege will prevent progress on his favorite policy fronts. Let me try.

Rep Steve King (R-IA) linked the Boston Massacre to immigration reform, noting, perhaps implicitly, that the bombing had all the hallmarks of having been executed by foreign terror organizations. Whether a foreign terrorist tries to come to the US posing as a business traveler or simply walks across one of our unguarded borders, it would be nice to stop them, and our immigration laws should reflect that.

But if the Boston bomber is not a “White American,” but a foreigner of whatever color, it is not a lack of privilege that would cause us to realize that our border security is lacking, but the fact that a foreign national blew up two bombs at a major American cultural event. And if a “White American” is found to be the bomber, it will not be privilege that separates his crime from our immigration laws but people like Sirota insisting that a domestic terror attack should have nothing to do with border security.

The cries to separate border security from domestic terrorism will be all the stronger from Sirota if an American of color is the bomber, whatever the motive for the attack.

Privilege, even assuming for the sake of argument that it exists, has nothing to do with the matter.

Though FBI data show fewer terrorist plots involving Muslims than terrorist plots involving non-Muslims, that’s a very low bar to get over.

Of the  228,182.000 American adults in 2008, about 173,402,000 or 76% called themselves Christian and 1,349,000 or  0.6% of the American adult population (pdf) identifies itself as Muslim. . So we would expect, as a matter of simple statistics, to see something like two orders of magnitude more acts of terrorism to be committed by Christians than by Muslims. That is, for every act of terror committed by an American Muslim, we would expect to see about 100 committed by Christians.

That it is even a matter of comparison is absurd. Establishing that the 99.4% of Americans who are not Muslims commit more terror than the 0.6% who are ought not be so difficult.

Sirota appears to rely heavily on a report from a shadowy group called the Muslim Public Affairs Council, MPAC. The report, the group’s “Post-9/11 Database,” contends that there are more non-Muslim incidents of terrorism than ones committed by Muslims.

While that fact is not really in dispute, the way the group gets there is by counting every casual threat and act of stupidity by some weird douchebag as an act of terrorism.   Jared Lee Loughner, for instance, helps pad the group’s numbers on terrorist acts committed by “anti-government” terrorists.  Loughner, you’ll recall, was a leftist who killed six people and very nearly killed Rep Gabby Giffords in an attempt to stop the tyranny of grammar. He was a nutcase, that is, whose stalking target happened to be in Congress.

These terror plots are counted the same whether they resulted in the deaths of innocents or were discovered by FBI sting operations that may have instigated the plots in the first place. The database specifically excludes eco-terrorism, perhaps the largest single segment of terrorism, even bigger than the jihadist category. And most importantly, the database doesn’t track material support for terrorism, probably because that would mean reporting on groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations, an ally of MPAC named as an unindicted conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial.

America has mobilized a full-on war effort exclusively against the prospect of Islamic terrorism. Indeed, the moniker “War on Terrorism” has come to specifically mean “War on Islamic Terrorism,” involving everything from new laws like the Patriot Act, to a new torture regime, to new federal agencies like the Transportation Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to mass surveillance of Muslim communities.

The statistics Sirota relies on begin history on 9/12/2001, looking at terror attacks after that date. But if one looks at a longer period of time, say beginning on February 26, 1993, or perhaps  October 23, 2000, or an even more thunderously obvious date like September 10, 2001, the reason we have tended to link Islam to terrorism might become clear even to someone looking through a lens designed only to show stuff that isn’t there.

Arkansas has a Democrat governor and Republican legislature.

Arkansas DHS spokesperson Amy Weber told me Friday, “It really lies in the hands of our legislature. Both our state House and state Senate have passed the enabling legislation for what’s being called the “private option” here in Arkansas, which is to take the expansion population and putting them in the private insurance exchange.

“But in Arkansas.” continued Weber, “there is a second vote that’s needed, which is actually the Medicaid appropriation that needs approval so that we have the spending authority to pursue the private option.”

“The enabling legislation required 51% of the vote, but the appropriation requires 75%.“ In the state Senate, which passed the enabling legislation 24 to 9, that means getting to 27 votes, and 75 in the House. Monday’s vote got only 69 House votes, 6 shy.

It’s unclear whether another vote will take place.

“Politically, it may be tough to reach,” Webb said, “but we’re hopeful. Arkansas really kind of found a unique way to make it something that both Democrats and Republicans feel like is a really good approach and the best thing for Arkansas.”

The Supreme Court said states could not be forced to choose between expanding Medicaid (bad insurance for the poor) and losing the Medicaid program subsidies entirely. Medicaid covers people who make up to the Federal Poverty Line (FPL). Obamacare envisions states expanding that to 138% of FPL, a creeping expansion of the entitlement state.

So Arkansas Governor Mike Beebe in February suggested that Arkansas instead be allowed to cover the expansion population (100 to 138% of FPL) on the state’s Obamacare exchange, using the Medicaid expansion money to pay private insurance premiums for the not-quite-poor.

As an April 11 release from the Arkansas state Senate put it:

“When the 2013 legislative began, the governor initially proposed to expand the Arkansas Medicaid program through the same formula many other states have followed – by adding more people to the list of government Medicaid rolls.

In this case, they would be working adults whose yearly incomes are less than 138 percent of the federal poverty level. The governor’s proposal would have set Arkansas against the trend of other Southern states, many of which have indicated they will reject Medicaid expansion. However, the Arkansas Senate chose a different approach. Rather than simply expand the Medicaid program, the Arkansas Senate voted to use federal funds to pay for private health insurance for low-income families.

With this method, the Arkansas Medicaid program will shrink because SB 1020 will transfer low-income families and others covered by government Medicaid to a private insurance carrier. This proposal was developed by Arkansas senators who insisted on an option that would cost the state less than it would have if they had just let the federal Affordable Care Act take effect without legislative action.

The Senate version, SB2010, amends Arkansas Code Title 20, Chapter 77 to create subchapter 21. That reads in part:

(d)(1) The Department of Human Services is specifically authorized to pay premiums and supplemental cost-sharing subsidies directly to the Qualified Health Plans for enrolled eligible individuals. (2) The intent of the payments under subdivision (d)(1) of this section is to increase participation and competition in the health insurance market, intensify price pressures, and reduce costs for both publicly and privately funded health care.

But doctors are going out of business paying malpractice insurance while paying staff to wade through the massive bureaucracy and the regulations of the expanding federal Obamacare leviathan. The pressure on their bottom line just to survive will not allow them to lower prices.

In addition, Arkansas has a shortage of doctors and is actively working to raise physician pay.

Hospitals are usually not price-sensitive, being local monopolies. If there is a way to make them less price-sensitive, it’s to provide people with free insurance, since those people will no longer be at all concerned, if they were before, what the services of the hospital cost. 

You don’t lower prices in a market with a massive new government subsidy.

Like all other expansions of Medicaid, this one will be funded by federal deficit spending. Arkansas legislators will have to own the vote to spend their grandchildren’s money. 

—-

Portions Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks

In the recent mania to redefine marriage, several straw men have come up. Opponents of redefining marriage have erroneously compared state recognition of homosexual marriage to recognizing the bonds of matrimony between adults who marry children, between close relatives, or even cross-species marriage.

Or is it so erroneous? After all, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, and Maryland allow pregnant teens or teens who have already had a child to get married without parental consent. With parental consent, many states will recognize marriages by those younger than 18.

It’s a question of where to draw the line. Marriage allows people to be more self-sufficient, requiring less government assistance. In this era of unsustainable government entitlement spending, fiscal conservatives and marriage advocates may find themselves arguing for fewer and fewer restrictions on who marries whom.

And there are certain religious traditions in which the underage are encouraged, with parental consent, to participate.

While not even vegans say animals should be allowed the right to enter into contracts, we are currently seeing how quickly opinions can evolve.  Today’s tongue-in-cheek “Animals are people, too!” could become tomorrow’s “Animals are equal.“ I really don’t see that happening, and people raising it ignore the fact that we can’t communicate with animals, to determine consent. 

My Two Mommies

States and the federal government already enforce child support payments. Suppose a man has children with Wife 1, but divorces Wife 1 and marries Wife 2. The state still enforces his duties to his children by now ex-Wife 1, usually recommending that the parents maintain a positive relationship — for the children, of course.

What if the relationships are so positive that, to share expenses, the man and Wife 2 decide to provide for ex-Wife 1 and their children directly, say by sharing a duplex?

What power of the state says that the man may not have an affair with ex-Wife 1 while married to Wife 2? As long as neither Wife complains about it, will the state intervene? Almost certainly not, except to make sure he doesn’t abuse his children, and continues his child support payments.

You can continue that exercise in whatever direction you want to take it. Polygamy is available de facto to any group of adults who want to take it up.

Polygamy seems like a perfect hell on Earth to me, since I can’t keep track of what one woman tells me. Having shared child-rearing duties with a wife and ex-wife, I believe the difficulty of balancing those relationships would be beyond my capacity. But it’s not unheard of. People do it.

Not only do they do it, but they face an historical and ongoing religious persecution because of it. And despite Ted Olson’s arguments to the  Supreme Court, state recognition of polygamy would strengthen the position of women in polygamous relationships.

Having given up the fight on marriage redefinition, Republicans will be in no position to argue against state recognition of polygamy, nor even simple bigamy. Two wives in a duplex don’t share the same address. What does it matter how closely together they live?

These are not slippery-slope arguments, but more like approaching-cliff ones.

Proponents of redefining marriage point to miscegenation laws, and I understand they sincerely believe in that argument.  I don’t, however, since I don’t believe sexual preference is inborn and unchangeable.  Applying civil rights laws to personal choices is wrong, and a never-ending well of societal trouble awaits us if we do.

Along with pursuit of civil rights, traditional marriage has been a part of Republican Party platform since 1854. It is a mistake to abandon that plank, and the base of the Party, in an effort to reach new people. It’s far better to continue making the case that the intertwined leftist experiments in social engineering and government expansion are harmful, and to draw people in on our own terms.

In what appears to be a coordinated attack,

• Mediaite: Sarah Palin Bizarrely, Wrongly Takes Credit for Marco Rubio
• Political Gates:  SarahPAC – Effective PAC or Sarah Palin’s Personal Slush Fund?
  This one is kind of incoherent.
• Daily Beast:  Palin’s SarahPAC Embarrassment: Consultants Are Cashing In

Self-described conservative AJ Delgado highlights 14 frames (by my count), less than a second, of Rubio’s family in a 2 minute, 18 second ad, drawing from that something “bizarre”.

The Shark Tank reminds us all of how it went down.

In April of 2010, Rubio was gaining considerable name recognition, but it wasn’t until a video that the Shark Tank recorded of Sarah Palin at the 2010 Southern Republican Leadership Convention in New Orleans, did Rubio’s national name ID  really blow up.

In the video, Palin stated,” I love Marco Rubio.” She later added,” Marco, keep up the good work-call me, can I help?”

John “No Labels” Avlon  attacked SarahPAC over its expenditures, humorously faulting Palin for spending (marginally) more than she took in — as if 2012 were just like any other year. The main point of the attack was to label Palin a hypocrite for SarahPAC’s use of consultants.

The video riffed off her speech at CPAC, in which Palin railed against “the big consultants, the big money men, and the big bad media.” But there’s an irony alert ahead: the current stated purpose of SarahPAC is to raise money ahead of the 2014 election—most of which will be spent on conservative consultants.

But as Ali Akbar points out, a “campaign consultant” is essentially anyone who works on a campaign. Here’s a taste; read the whole thing.

What Palin is going after is specific elite category of the consultant class: Those who reap millions of dollars for controlling votes, for building candidates, for brokering bad deals, for finding awful consensus instead of fighting for victory.

A culture has been brewing in DC since the 1980s. The establishment has always existed, but the systematic and structural powers of “The Establishment” have increased within the upper tiers of Republican mega-consultants. Well, that was until the Tea Party and Sarah Palin. Palin’s war is with the consultant class, not all consultants. It’s the difference between a de facto institution and a description. Between a noun and an adjective. This is all pretty basic stuff, unless you’re pushing straw men arguments for a living.

From OpenSecrets.org, below is a list of expenditures for the PAC last year.  This is not the Michael Steele RNC. A group living the high life from donor money would spend more than $4000 for meals in a year. It looks like SarahPAC uses a lot of direct mail, using a well-known conservative vendor.  Note that the only category that resembles labor in the list are the entries for consultants.

Media consultants are often given a fee that includes their subcontracting cost of the various media buys. It’s more efficient, and hides the details of ad buys, for instance, in local markets.

Top Vendors/Recipients

President Obama won by defining his opponent in a negative way, and marrying modern technology with old-fashioned boots on the ground. Republicans can do those things even better than he did, but doing so will require radically reforming the party.

My response to the report is in three parts:

• Messaging
• Demography and Mechanics (this post)
• Friends, Allies, Primaries, and Campaign Finance

The most important sentence in the whole report is this one about the Obama campaign:

Marrying grassroots politics with technology and analytics, they successfully contacted, persuaded and turned out their margin of victory. (p. 24)

That’s the key realization: Obama won by a strong Get Out The Vote effort, not on policy. But it looks like the RNC is taking the wrong lesson from 2012, and attempting to mimic superficially the features of the Obama campaign, and also to change the Party’s policy platform.

Michael Patrick Leahy, writing at Breitbart.com, notes that in-person GOTV gets only four mentions in the entire document.

To win future elections — and indeed to remain relevant as a political party — Republicans must do as the report hints, and turn the party inside out. The RNC is correct that it needs a radical reformation, but fails to describe one.

Localism, Not Demographics

The report fails to provide a vision because it focuses on “Demographic Partners” where it should see only Republicans. No special methods are needed to reach out to people based on their skin color or accent. Rather, reaching out to anyone requires an acceptable messenger.

The report is right to say, as on page 8, that Hispanics, for instance, will not listen to the Republican message if they believe Republicans don’t want them here. More generally, the Obama campaign successfully painted Republicans as not on the voter’s team. Once the team identification was made, nothing Mitt Romney said made a difference.

One of the best ways to appeal to people is with other people who look, dress, speak, act, and think the way they do, and who listen.  That applies to all people, no matter what their skin color, whether rich or poor, native speaker or new immigrant.

The “Demographic Partners” section of the report is not integrated into the GOTV mechanism. The report envisions holding events in majority-minority areas, but doesn’t describe how those can have any lasting impact.

The RNC should establish a grassroots program to help grow the Republican share of the minority vote and begin by targeting it in red states with significant minority populations.The plan would outline anticipated demographic changes, recent electoral history, whom we should target and some suggestions on how that could be done. This would be a reasonably inexpensive program and only require one staffer at a state party to coordinate the effort. It is also a good candidate program for matching funds from out-of-state donors. (p. 14)

That last two sentences of that actually says they really aren’t going to fund the effort. As hinted on page 46 in a different context, grassroots outreach and organizing should command the lion’s share of the Party’s budget.

A local precinct worker (“precinct committeeman”, ”precinct chair” or “captain” — from now on: PC) walking his own streets and knocking on the doors there knows the culture of the community in which he lives. He or she has automatic acceptance that an outsider on the phone, or even standing on those doorsteps, will never have.

Rather than reaching out to people based on their membership in some minority group or class of people, the RNC should use every event, every message, and every spare dollar it has to recruit PCs in every precinct it can. We would expect that the PC would look and act like most of the people in that precinct. In any case, being local they would have a greater acceptance level in the community.

The same method of outreach is needed in every community, tailored to its unique setting by the only people who know how to tailor it. Local people can develop ongoing relationships with the voters that just aren’t possible with phone banks or advertising, no matter how well targeted the communication is.

Even social media, while helpful, doesn’t cover the territory. People don’t organize themselves geographically on social media, but by their interests. Since we elect people based on where they live, we have to go there to elect them. The way to do it is to use the people who are already there.

Continuous Improvement

With regard to the techniques of organizing campaigns and getting people to the polls, the committee says wisely,

We cannot leave anything to intuition, gut instincts or “traditional” ways of doing things.

The need to introduce a process of continuous improvement is clear.  As someone who only got involved in the nuts and bolts of politics in 2009, it has been maddening to hear campaign consultants and “experts” explain the way things are done, but not be able to give more than anecdotal evidence for why they are done that way.

After their 2004 loss, the Democrats — and in fact the entire leftist establishment — developed a model of improvement based on the scientific method. Conservatives will likely be more comfortable with a business-oriented metaphor. The effect will be the same: compare methods and messages against one another and use what actually works, given the resources available.

The goal for the last couple of decades has been to develop ever-better methods of microtargeting voters: classifying as well as possible every voter and delivering only the messages to which that voter will likely respond, based on their characteristics on file.

Team Obama — and Karl Rove — prefer an approach targeting individuals by identifying them from lots and lots of data, with probabilities gleaned from people who have similar traits.

Rove described microtargeting in the Wall Street Journal, noting that

Republicans historically did this better, but they microtarget once in the late spring or early summer, hoping this snapshot will remain stable through election day. Team Obama integrated polling data into their voter file and frequently did large surveys with short questionnaires. This steady flow of attitudinal information gave them a dynamic view of the electorate’s constantly changing opinions, and allowed them to constantly update and refine their microtargeting.

Team Obama used their own GOTV calling to track how voter sentiment was changing, in effect replacing traditional polling with their own. Rove implies that given enough money he can do the same thing for his side.

As Aaron Goldenberg wrote in an excellent post at FreedomWorks,

Rove’s contention is the following: By hiring an “army” of mathematicians and data analysts as Obama did in 2012, the RNC or the 2016 Republican Presidential nominee can sift through voter files in order to rank and track likely voters. This is what marketers attempt to do when they sell soap. Unfortunately, politicians are not soap and no ad in Field and Stream of Mitt Romney and his lovely wife wrapped in white bath towels hopping out of the shower holding bars of Dove will make voters more likely to vote. The reason is simple. Voters HATE politicians. We hate them. We do not trust them. When people knock on our door or call us on the phone asking for our vote, we lie just to get rid of you.

Here I disagree strongly with Goldenberg, from both personal experience and from the literature on the subject. It’s not that he’s wrong about some people not liking personal contact, but that he paints it with far too broad a brush. People dislike telephone calls and visits from strangers at the wrong time of day, but they like text messages, telephone calls, and visits from people they know.

Michael Patrick Leahy, writing at Breitbart.com, said:

Yet most post game electoral analyses, especially the ”Inside the Cave“ report published by well respected new media firm Engage DC, made clear that the 2012 Obama campaign established that the critical initial contact in establishing an understanding of voter behavior takes place in the person-to-person communication that takes place on the front doorstep of the voter.

There is something almost mystical about standing on someone’s doorstep and asking for their vote. There, they are the authority, and the activist is merely a guest.

No mysticism is required to show the effectiveness of having an ongoing, permanent representative in every neighborhood.

The RNC and the state parties are best to organize the ground game, but there is a complementary role for friends and allies to play organizationally.

The best role for Republican friends and allied groups to play is to encourage their members to become active members of the party in their home precinct. Whether they become PCs, block captains, poll watchers, or election judges, the outside group will be able to influence the direction of the party of the members’ choice without changing its mission in the slightest or engaging in coordination. Having members who are on the ground working with their neighbors will also benefit the outside groups, as there is no better political education for the members.

While more information to microtarget individual voters is generally better, the RNC should first master arming local Party representatives with the basic information and let their local boots carry it to the voter’s doorstep, where a far richer sort of information is available. It would be good to continuously return corrections and voter preferences to the global data store, but the most important user of information gained from the voter is the PC himself.

That presumes that there is a local PC available. In many areas of the country, particularly urban liberal strongholds, there are no local precinct workers. Republicans have ceded much of that territory to the left, abandoning completely any area in which they weren’t competitive. There should not have been any precincts in 2012 with zero Republican votes, but there were many.

That fact is key for the Republican’s minority and youth outreach. The most effective contacts are built on a preexisting trust. That means using someone from the neighborhood, not someone who shows up on the first Monday in November.

Obama won by defining Mitt Romney in a negative way, and marrying modern technology with old-fashioned boots on the ground. Republicans can do those things even better by having permanent, ongoing representatives in every precinct and arming them with data and the tools needed for effective outreach.

Whether the neighborhood is an inner city block,  expensive homes surrounding a golf course, or a rural town that has seen better days, the messenger must look, talk, and act like the people he’s trying to reach.  Find the local ambassador — the precinct committeeman — first. Let him use his superior knowledge of his community to recruit and vet candidates and get out the vote for a platform.

Follow @lheal on Twitter

Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks

The RNC report categorized its recommendations in seven areas:

1. Messaging
2. Demographic Partners
3. Campaign Mechanics
4. Friends and Allies (Third Party Groups)
5. Fundraising
6. Campaign Finance
7. Primary Process

I have chosen to break my response into three parts:

• Messaging
• Demography, Mechanics
• Friends, Allies, Primaries, and Campaign Finance

The committee spoke to more than 2,600 people, conducted a poll among 2,000 Republican Hispanic voters, surveyed political hacks and pollsters, and conducted an online survey of 36,000 people interested enough to take the survey. The regurgitation of contact numbers sounds eerily like the Illinois GOP touting how many people it has contacted while losing election after election.

Regardless of the number of inputs, the quality of the advice the committee chose to accept is what matters. Did anyone persuade the committee of anything? What comes through most in the document are points on which the committee could use the voices of others to buttress its own positions.

Messaging

There are some positive items in the report. Following the example of Senator Ted Cruz, for instance, the report suggests Republicans present their ideas through the lens of the people at the bottom. But other suggestions in the report don’t make much sense at all, or don’t address the messaging problems the party has been having.

Here, then, is my summary. Republicans, if they want to win, will:

• Present a clear contrast to the Democrats. The RNC report seems to suggest mimicking their opponents, or softening language to mask any differences.
• Avoid making overtly antagonistic comments that will arouse the other side’s base. This may be impossible, as the other side seeks out such “bulletin board” material. All candidates should test messages internally and practice the language and phrasing needed to avoid verbal land mines.
• Use the language of the target audience without hiding and especially without changing principles.
• Adopt the perspective of the bottom rung of the ladder or someone who sees themselves as part of an oppressed group, and explain how a world view that includes individual freedom, opportunity, and placing limits on government helps them.
• Avoid criticizing other Republicans who make errors. If you can’t support someone, be silent. If asked, change the subject. If pressed, insist that questions be about your campaign, not someone else’s. If pressed further, attack the other side, not your own.

Voters, especially the undecided, are filled with cognitive dissonance. For instance, they believe in the image of America as the land of opportunity, but they also believe in a safety net for those who can’t take care of themselves.

The successful Republican candidate appeals to the central place of the individual, faith, and family, the dreams of people for success, and America’s unique place in world history. The successful Democrat appeals to group labels, the fear of failure, and exaggerated societal imperfections.  The idea is to get the voters thinking in your terms, not those of the other party. 

Undecided voters are attracted to confidence above all else. You need look no further than the current occupant of the Oval Office for a great example of someone who espouses the silliest policies imaginable, but who does so with such confidence that people accept his statements without challenge. Polls show consistently that people don’t like his ideas, but do like him. It’s because of the confidence with which he presents his awful positions.

The trap Republicans have fallen into most often in the last several election cycles is attacking their own, believing their party would benefit by distancing itself from gaffe-prone, scandal-marred, or otherwise imperfect candidates. Those friendly-fire attacks have only made matters worse, focusing attention where Republicans didn’t want it.

The following bit of class warfare from the report is shocking in its off-hand delivery. While I dislike corporate welfare as much as the next tea partier, I’d like to know what the committee means by “corporate malfeasance,” — and who, exactly, is not blowing the whistle on it? That isn’t the troubling part, however:

We have to blow the whistle at corporate malfeasance and attack corporate welfare. We should speak out when a company liquidates itself and its executives receive bonuses but rank-and-file workers are left unemployed. We should speak out when CEOs receive tens of millions of dollars in retirement packages but middle-class workers have not had a meaningful raise in years.  (p. 6)

I would not want to belong to a party that as a matter of policy nit-picked private sector compensation on grounds of fairness. These are decisions to be left to the free market. Rather than adopting such Marxist rhetoric, Republicans should stay true to our founders’ vision of economic freedom for all. People who acquire wealth honestly should be praised and imititated, not treated as thieves.

Today’s Democratic Party has devolved into a party of Marx. America doesn’t need another one.

Republicans should stop saying that the 47% of people who don’t pay federal income tax are never going to vote for them. There are several things wrong with saying so.

First, it isn’t true. Many of the people in my rural area, for instance, are solidly Republican retirees who don’t pay income tax. Veterans just released from service and retraining, small business owners struggling to make money, and conservative and libertarian students, many of which vote Republican, but also typically don’t pay income tax.  A lot of people know that while they are not able to work in the private economy, a strong one is essential for national survival.

Not paying income tax and living off of government programs are not the same thing.  Even those who do depend on government programs do not all want to depend on them. In fact, most do not.  Using government programs doesn’t mean you won’t vote to limit government.

Speaking in terms of “makers and takers” inadvertently validates the Marxist narrative of class struggle.

Never attack the voters.  Attack special interests, bad ideas, your opponent, and even the opposing party, but do not attack the voters themselves. 

FreedomWorks’ Jeff Scully says the way forward for Republicans is not cynically reaching out to groups to achieve diversity for its own sake:

If the RNC wants to reach out to women, minorities, and the youth, they need to make it less about being a Republican or part of the RNC, and more about ideas.

It is not necessary, and in fact would be unhelpful, for the RNC to dictate to state parties or individual candidates which planks of the party platform they will stress.

Frightened by media furor over mistakes made by individual candidates, the RNC is about to embark on a fool’s errand: effectively changing its platform to avoid the topics on which those mistakes were made. Not only is avoiding media furor not possible, but avoiding those topics leaves the field open to Republican opponents — both Democrats, and whatever other parties arise who are not afraid to stand on their own principles.

Follow @lheal on twitter.

Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks

Background

In Illinois the State Central Committee chooses the Chairman, but in practice follows the wishes of the gubernatorial nominee and congressional incumbents. The committee is made up of one member per congressional district, elected by the county chairmen in that district.

Pat Brady was hand-picked by 2010 Illinois GOP gubernatorial nominee Bill Brady (no relation) during that failed campaign. The two were high school friends. Pat Brady retained his chairmanship after the loss.

Chairman Brady claimed credit for the 2010 tea party victories in the statehouse and congressional races, touting the number of telephone calls made in the Victory program. Losing the governorship by less than 1% after polling well ahead going into the final weekend, he privately blamed that loss on the candidate’s pro-life stance.

More precisely, then Executive Director Rodney Davis (now in Congress representing IL-13) told me privately, out of Pat Brady’s hearing but implying the Chairman’s agreement, that it was the Bill Brady campaign’s inability to answer pro-choice GOTV ads in Chicago the weekend of the election that led to the loss — throwing campaign manager Jerry Clarke under the bus.

When Brian Milleville (Redstate’s anacreon) and I asked Chairman Brady to help us recruit new precinct committeemen, he responded that he was just a part-time volunteer.

In the 2012 election cycle, Pat Brady intervened in a primary race for a county board seat, even chairing the campaign of one of the candidates. His candidate was soundly defeated.

At the 2012 state party convention, Brady was at the forefront of a move for a closed convention. The rules adopted in committee did not allow floor motions, and all votes were to be voice votes, with the opinion of the chair being final. The quietly stated motivation was to keep Ron Paul supporters from hijacking the convention, while the real intent may have been to stop a movement to restore direct election of Central Committee members. The final effect was to leave state convention delegates with no actual function other than to be stage props for the Central Committee.

The Central Committee is a self-perpetuating club, choosing its own nominees and manipulating county chairmen into approving the committee’s choices for its own membership.   The committee is responsive to incumbents in Congress, however, who greatly influence the choice of committee member for their district.

In downstate Illinois, traditional family, abortion, national defense, and the right to keep and bear arms are the only real hot-button issues for Republicans.  Politicians are careful to stay aligned with the base in those areas.

The state’s Republican US Senator, Mark Kirk, and State Treasurer, Dan Rutherford (R-Pontiac), are both supporters of gay marriage. Rutherford is running for Governor. If he wins the nomination, Rutherford would have his pick for Party Chairman.

So it was surprising to me that a group of Central Committee members called for the Chairman’s removal after he also came out in favor of gay marriage. I suspected there was more to the story, and that gay marriage was just a proxy issue.

Why Brady Must Go

On Saturday, March 16, a spokesman for Illinois State Central Committeeman Bob Winchester said the issues leading to the attempted, but delayed ouster of Brady were:

1. Inserting himself in a contested primary 
2. Failure to raise money
3. Inability to manage the money he did raise
4. Ignoring the Party’s platform

On the morning of March 9, 11 of the 18 Central Committee members (61.1%) supported the ouster, which would have met the 60% majority needed to remove the Chairman. After intense lobbying from former moderate former Governor Jim Thompson, former Governor Jim Edgar, Rep Aaron Schock, and Senator Kirk, committee member Carol Donovan of the 7th district flipped, according to Winchester spokesman Tom Donnell. The motion was tabled.

It should be pointed out that the primary argument for keeping Brady was that to remove him would provide Democrats with a talking point. It’s better to wait, to make clear that Chairman Brady’s removal is for arrogance and overall poor performance, and not just for being, as much of the Republican Party’s leadership in Illinois is on so many other issues, out of step with the rank and file on this one.

Donnell spoke at the Cumberland County Lincoln Day dinner in place of Winchester, who was gravely ill.

“You may have heard,” said Donnell, “that members of the State Central Committee have tried to remove Pat Brady as Chairman of the Illinois Republican Party due to his support for so-called gay marriage. This is not entirely true. There were many reasons for his removal.

“First, Chairman Brady interfered in contested Republican primaries, primaries between two Republicans. The state Party chief does not do this. Secondly, he cannot raise money. Thirdly, he cannot manage the money he did raise. Fourthly, we have a platform in the Illinois Republican Party, put together by the entire Party. He ignored the platform, one point of it.

“Last Saturday, he was to be relieved of his job. We have 18 State Central Committeemen. Eleven of them banded together to form a search committee to come up with four or five candidates to make a new party chief.

“Then, the lobbying started. Men that I respect, even love, lobbied people, ‘You don’t want to vote to make a change. Make it wait. Make it later.’  Finally one wonderful lady from Chicago, she’s a great lady, told the rest of them, ‘I’ve had too much pressure. I cannot vote for the change.’

“So Pat Brady is still your State Party chief, for a certain period of time, but a change will be made. And it is important that you find out who voted in favor of a change. Bob Winchester voted in favor of a change. He and Jerry Clarke were two of the leaders in favor of a change.”

I spoke to Jerry Clarke, and sent him the foregoing asking for correction or comment. He gave no answer before time of publication.

————-

Update 2103-03-18 15:45:

According to Illinois Review, Central Committee member Deb Detmers (IL-12) said:

1. The bylaws of the the state party allow for meetings of the committee to be called by either the State Party Chairman of a signed letter of 5 members of the committee. The meeting for last weekend was called by 5 members of the committee. As it was a duly scheduled meeting, I did indeed plan to drive to Tinley Park and back on Saturday until I received a call at 10:00 p.m. the night before the meeting was canceled.  It is my understanding a group of the State Central Committeemen had a conference call where they decided to cancel the meeting. I was neither invited nor informed on this conference call.

That makes sense, as only the 11 pro-removal committee members would have been on the call.

End update

————-

Follow @lheal on twitter.

We lost.

This post is addressed to those who say Obama cheated to win. Maybe there was fraud around the edges, or maybe it was massive, blatant, and made the difference. Whatever the case, there is one way to prevent it from happening again, and that is for you personally to take care of business on the local level.

Grassroots activists on the right were properly alarmed by reports of voter fraud in the wake of the 2008 elections. Candidate Obama had used his experience registering new voters in Chicago to tap into a nationwide network of street activists, paid by how many new voters they registered. As a result, many registered phony names.

A subsidiary of the group was paid $800,000 by Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign to register voters for the 2008 primaries, and ACORN’s political wing endorsed Obama back in February. But Obama’s campaign told CNN that it “is committed to protecting the integrity of the voting process,” and said it has not worked with ACORN during the general election. Brian Mellor, an ACORN attorney in Boston, said the group has its own quality-control process and has fired workers in the past — including workers in Gary. But he said allegations that his organization committed fraud is a government attempt to keep people disenfranchised.”We believe their purpose is to attack ACORN and suppress votes,” Mellor said. “We believe that by attacking ACORN, they are going to discourage people that have registered to vote with ACORN from voting.”

The people of TrueTheVote.org did great work in documenting and exposing fraudulent and sloppy voting practices.

The left then relied on the narrative of “vote suppression” to rally key voting segments and increase donations. Leftist pundits are still pushing it.

Further investigations of ACORN revealed shoddy accounting and corruption, forcing the sham of an end to government funding and the group’s nominal breakup. But though ACORN no longer exists, the group continues to work under different names, using the same resources and the same people to do the same things.

As I’m sure the activists at TrueTheVote would agree, If you want to stop voter fraud, and that’s your big concern, here is one way to do it: become a precinct committeeman in the political party of your choice.

The precinct committeeman recruits election judges to work on election day, and also can find and train designated poll watchers, whose ability to gather and relay information varies from state to state. Usually every candidate is allowed one poll watcher in each precinct.

So even if you’re not going to become the go-to political person in your precinct, you can at least volunteer to be a presence at the polling place.

We must drop the idea that the Obama reelection campaign relied on cheating to win. Pointing at cheating excuses our failure in messaging and persuading people toward our values.  We will never take stock of our own weakness if we don’t admit that we lost.

There were not millions of fraudulent votes. That’s too big a conspiracy to hide. If we are manning the polling places as we should be, our opponent would not be able to cheat at all. If your polling place is adequately staffed, you will know who voted. If that result differs from the returns, wave a red flag.

As I was enlightened by a Twitter friend, blaming the election loss on fraud also “makes us no better than the gross ‘Bush stole Florida’ hanging chad crowd.” Thorough studies have revealed that the President Bush clearly won Florida in 2000.

Vote fraud is a non-issue when a polling place is attended by poll watchers, our election judges, and … most importantly … lots and lots of our voters.

Electronic voting machines, and the programs that run them, are a big worry for some people. Here again, if we had adequate staffing of polling places and were monitoring how many of “our” people voted, we would be able to point out any systematic fraud.

Get out of denial. We lost. Get involved and influence the people in your neighborhood to see that those on the right are likeable and have at heart the best interests of America and the people who are its citizens.

Change hearts. Fight fraud. Encourage integrity in the system. It all has to be done locally.

Follow @lheal on twitter.

Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks.

Woodward has been a leading voice in liberal journalism for four decades. He is to journalism what Michael Jordan is to basketball: a star so big he changed the game, setting the standard for generations of journalists.

Woodward revealed in his book “The Price of Politics” that the sequester idea originated at the White House:

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

As an indicator of truth, we like to find facts stated with falsifiable detail. We like to find them reported contemporaneously, because no one can know what the future holds and what facts will be convenient to have written.  We like them to be internally and externally consistent.

Woodward shows the lie not only of the sequester’s origin, but its effects as well.

The sequester narrative Obama is trying to push is that it will ruin the economy, starve little children, and set fire to Lake Erie. It must be cast as a Republican idea for that narrative to hold.

Remember, the Woodward story is about Mr. Obama lying to say that Congress came up with the plan for the sequester. 

Conservatives, Tea Partiers and those who just do math have been calling for spending cuts for years. The left has to push the fear of the cuts as damaging to the economy, and also as hurting crucial voting blocs like firefighters, teachers and troops.

If sequestration is not seen as damaging to the economy and to Republicans by the general public, other spending “cuts” will not be, either. That is a perception the left cannot allow. If the Woodward narrative is allowed, then spending cuts (which were Mr. Obama’s idea) will be implemented and life will go on.  The evil Republicans will have won this round of chicken, and the White House cannot allow that to happen. 

Not being able to attack the facts, the left follows Alinsky’s Rule 11 and attacks the messenger.

Is this why a “very senior person“, whom we now know was White House economic adviser Gene Sperling,  emailed Woodward to say he would “regret” challenging the Obama narrative on the sequester? The actual email from Sperling reads as an attempt to concern troll the reporter:

But I do truly believe you should rethink your comment about saying that Potus asking for revenues is moving the goal post. I know you may not believe this, but as a friend, I think you will regret staking out that claim.

Now, why would Woodward not believe what he’s being told? Perhaps because he had just been browbeaten for a half an hour on the phone over the issue. But more importantly, the Sperling relation of events doesn’t fully match reality. As Sperling continues:

The idea that the sequester was to force both sides to go back to try at a big or grand barain with a mix of entitlements and revenues (even if there were serious disagreements on composition) was part of the DNA of the thing from the start. It was an accepted part of the understanding — from the start. Really. It was assumed by the Rs on the Supercommittee that came right after: it was assumed in the November-December 2012 negotiations.

But that’s only part of the picture. While at the time the Budget Control Act of 2011 was signed the White House said sequestration was a trigger,  President Obama has all along taken credit for the sequester reductions in plans for future increases, which he has dishonestly called “cuts”. The President is in fact moving the goal posts after claiming victory.

So when White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe said Woodward is too old to play in the big leagues, he was using Woodward’s reaction to the concern trolling as a proxy for revealing the Obama duplicity on who came up with sequestration:

Watching Woodward last 2 days is like imagining my idol Mike Schmidt facing live pitching again. Perfection gained once is rarely repeated.

— David Plouffe (@davidplouffe) February 28, 2013

… he was merely joining in with his allies in the liberal online media attacking Woodward. As J Christian Adams says:

You, of all people, threatened by a Democrat White House.  So where are your defenders?  Where are the new hipster reporters of the left to defend you? Where have all the flowers gone, they used to ask.

And attack him they are. As Breitbart News noted, 

The messaging was universal from the leftist Obama-supporting media: Woodward hadn’t been threatened, and was an amateur or a crazy old coot to think he was being threatened. Matt Yglesias of Slate summed up the general Palace Guard Media take: “Woodward’s managed to make me suspect Nixon got a raw deal.” 

The media will regret ganging up on Woodward, like prisoners of war enforcing the effects of Stockholm Syndrome on their own to perpetuate the status quo.  In a situation like that, it only takes one incident in which two people stand up against the bullying. Bob Woodward showed he is willing to do so. Others seem capable of it. 

Or, perhaps I’m wrong, and the practice of living in the hive mind is too ingrained in them. If that is so, I regret that none of them will ever be Bob Woodward.

Follow @lheal on Twitter.

Copyright 2013, Freedomworks

In addition, the sequester is the law of the land. That means something, we were told. At any rate, failing to implement the sequester or equivalent cuts is now a spending increase. Those demonizing the sequester with scare tactics will attempt to blame it and fiscal conservatives for any negative economic news in the future. But they always do that. When you will be blamed either way, the right thing to do is to do the right thing.

The Deficit

Our budget deficit this year is projected by the Congressional Budget Office to be $850B. We need to run a surplus of $500B per year for 33 years to pay off our debt. Along with that, we will have to pay the interest on what we’ve already borrowed, which will go up dramatically as interest rates increase.

To start paying down the debt, we need to cut $1.3 trillion in spending this year. The sequester doesn’t really cut anything, but merely doesn’t increase spending by as much. 

On the other hand it’s risky business attaching actual numbers to the sequester, because everyone seems to have their own. Part of the trouble is that we haven’t had an actual budget in nearly four years. 

 The Senate, which has been under Democrat control since 2006, hasn’t produced a budget since April 4, 2009.

• That was before the first Tax Day Tea Parties
• That was before there was any such thing as Obamacare
• That was before most children in Head Start were born
  
• 31 Senators have never voted on a budget

How are they planning federal spending for the next ten years when they haven’t even had a budget for the last four?

The $22 billion of reductions in planned increases to this year’s spending will be swallowed up by some emergency this or contingency that. There will be some crisis used to justify increased outlays.

Despite having bragged since August, 2011 about the very cuts in the sequester and having used them to justify his fiscal cliff plans, the President fights tooth and nail to increase the budget by $1.3 trillion over ten years. Instead, we should be cutting it by that amount this year, as we would need to do to begin paying down our debt.

In demagoguing sequestration, the President argues that it would have disastrous economic effects. If a small decrease in the rate of increase in government spending will wreck the economy, then something is terribly wrong.

Jobs

During the Obama Depression, while America has suffered, DC has been a boom town. The bureaucrats and hangers on in DC have had their party. Now it’s time for them to pay the band.

The sequester is a joke, and the whining over letting it go through shows the unserious nature of our elected officials, especially President Obama.

The Purpose of Government

Our government exists to defend the liberty of the people, not to provide jobs for DC bureaucrats. Do you want to justify government spending? Show how it defends freedom, or liberty, or the rights of the people.

We have too many people on Welfare, food stamps, and too many companies dependent on government spending. It’s going to end sometime and not well. The sequester doesn’t address that problem, but it should serve as a wakeup call for those who think the gravy train will keep rolling.

The question for our government is not when the spending spree will stop, but whether we stop it or it stops us.

Follow @lheal on Twitter.

Copyright 2013, Freedomworks

Making it harder to screen out potential bad employees and making it more expensive to hire people is practically a mandate against hiring.

The EEOC’s ruling came out last April, and they tried to spin it as a simple consolidation of past rules. “The Guidance builds on longstanding court decisions and existing guidance documents that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (Commission or EEOC) issued over twenty years ago.”

“An employer’s use of an individual’s criminal history in making employment decisions may, in some instances, violate the prohibition against employment discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as amended.”

The EEOC’s recommended Best Practice? Wait until you get to know an applicant before obtaining his criminal record.

Some states require employers to wait until late in the selection process to ask about convictions.¹⁰⁸ The policy rationale is that an employer is more likely to objectively assess the relevance of an applicant’s conviction if it becomes known when the employer is already knowledgeable about the applicant’s qualifications and experience.¹⁰⁹ As a best practice, and consistent with applicable laws,¹¹⁰ the Commission recommends that employers not ask about convictions on job applications and that, if and when they make such inquiries, the inquiries be limited to convictions for which exclusion would be job related for the position in question and consistent with business necessity.

While the EEOC is busy trying to strong-arm businesses into hiring ex-cons and presuming all business owners are racist, the White House pivots to jobs by making them harder to get.

Talking Points Memo cites House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) saying:

“[W]hen you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it,” Boehner told reporters Wednesday morning during a Capitol Hill press conference with the House GOP leadership. “And what happens when you take away the first couple of rungs on the economic ladder? You make it harder for people to get on the ladder. Our goal is to get people on the ladder and help them climb that ladder so they can live the American dream.”

While holding his hands to his ears hollering “LA-LA-LA-LA,” Paul Krugman writes in the New York Times that “there just isn’t any evidence that raising the minimum wage near current levels would reduce employment.”

Notice the phrasing, “would reduced employment.” Krugman might find it more difficult to claim that raising the minimum wage would have no impact on future employment.

TPM quotes an unnamed Journolist member White House official:

The official said Boehner’s hypothesis is based on the theory that when the cost of employment goes up, business want to hire fewer people. But that’s only part of what happens, the official said, arguing that studies find that it is offset by reduced turnover, more motivated workers and a more productive workforce. The official said studies find that the second effect tends to be about the same as the first effect when it comes to employment.

Reduced turnover may not be helpful, depending on how it’s achieved. Employers don’t like hiring new people or training them, but that is how the unemployed get a chance. For current employees, turnover represents a chance to move up the ladder.  Lowering turnover with a minimum wage increase, to the extent that it does anything, will keep people unemployed because the cost is too high, and keep those who are hired from advancing.

The only way a minimum wage increase lowers turnover is by keeping people from striving to better themselves.

People are not more motivated because of an increase in the minimum wage, but just the opposite. A minimum wage increase makes it harder to get a raise, which lowers motivation. Rewarding their productive work motivates people. Giving them things doesn’t.

In France they have low turnover, because it takes a lot of work to fire someone.

In France it is not possible to hire employees ” at will ” in other words, once you have taken on an employee you may only dismiss him or her for a specific reason.

The reason or ground must be one which is recognised by French Statute (i.e. the codified law to be found in the Code du Travail) or by French Case Law.

The dismissal procedure on disciplinary grounds is very formalised and failure to follow the procedural steps, even where the dismissal is manifestly justified on the merits, may result in the Courts overturning the dismissal and ordering the reinstatement of the employee.

Virtually all disciplinary measures are required to be in writing and generally need to be brought to the employee’s attention by a registered letter sent to his or her home address, pursuant to a formal meeting between employer and employee.

As a result of those measures and the mindset they embody, unemployment in France has stayed well above 8% for most of the last 30 years.

Make it illegal to screen for criminals, and employers will be less likely to hire anyone.

Make it hard to let someone go, and employers won’t hire them in the first place.

Make it more expensive to hire, and you keep people unemployed.

The minimum wage actually works as a maximum wage for millions of low skill, or no skill workers.

A few years ago, I ran into some financial difficulty. A sudden drop in income and a lifestyle I suddenly couldn’t support forced me to take a part-time job. With the economy and job opportunities scarce, I ended up delivering pizza.

Food service workers are typically hired at low wages. Once new hires show their ability to learn and excel in their jobs, opportunities for increased pay and responsibility are supposed to follow. Because of the minimum wage, new hires already earn the amount the market will bear, resulting in static pay. It’s a glass ceiling for wages at the bottom end, accentuating a culture of discouragement and apathy. People learn from that distorted experience that the only way to advance is to vote themselves an increase in pay. The minimum wage teaches exactly the wrong lessons.

Companies who hire at minimum wage often have a large workforce and low profit margins. Therefor, increasing wages, even slightly is a burden on the employer as it is multiplied by the shear size of their employee roster.

Maryland bartender Sarah Smith said raising the minimum wage just means fewer jobs. “In the service industry turnover is commonplace, exponentially more than any other industry.” A higher minimum wage would stifle the mobility of service workers, making it difficult to find work — forcing people to stay in jobs they don’t want.

There is a culture among young, minimum wage employees of trying out jobs and establishments to find a place they like and people with whom they are comfortable. The same goes for the managers: they get to know the local labor pool, often being part of it, and want to be able to give someone new a chance. The higher the minimum wage, the more difficult it is to give someone new that chance.

Smith noted that proponents of increasing the minimum are using those in service industry jobs as an example of whom it will benefit. She doesn’t think it will help at all. “Upward earning potential is based on performance, not how much you make when you are hired.”

Keith Hennesy made what many see as the obvious and complete rebuttal to the President’s call to raise the minimum to $9/hour, by asking, “Why not $90/hour?” Hennessy says any increase suffers from the same problems:

The same logic holds, just to a much lesser degree, for a minimum wage increase of any size, including the increase to $9 proposed tonight by the President. A minimum wage increase precludes employers from hiring, or from continuing to employ, those workers whose productive value to the firm is worth less than the new minimum wage. Like any price ceiling or price floor a minimum wage restricts supply, and an increase in the minimum wage restricts supply more. Raise the minimum wage and you will eliminate jobs for the lowest-skilled workers in America.

Yesterday, on TheBlaze there was a good discussion on minimum wage jobs, and how they provide on the job training. How the minimum wage is a cruel insult to young people, especially in poor neighborhoods without a lot of other opportunities.

See the great discussion here.

“I think it is inflationary,” said Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) to CNN. “I think it actually is counterproductive in many ways. You end up costing jobs from people who are at the bottom rung of the economic ladder.”

Most people working at the minimum are like I was, part-timers. All together, according the the Bureau of Labor Statistics only about 5% of people paid by the hour make the minimum or less.

Like many liberal policies, raising the minimum wage will only harm those it ‘intends’ to help. The minimum wage is a cruel idea whose time has past, and in fact, never was.

Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks

In the power struggle between the DC Establishment and grassroots, labeling of the two sides often conceals the battle lines.  Language frames the debate, and I am still not completely comfortable with the labels “establishment” and “grassroots”.  I’m even more uncomfortable with the labels “true conservative” and “RINO”, as they don’t describe at all what the fuss is about.

I am a conservative. Well, I’m really a libertarian. Actually, I’m just interested in pursuing American ideals. I like to do what works. I know people have to get elected to implement their policies.

Did that paragraph make any sense? Each of the sentences was true, on some level, but none of them fully describes me, and I suspect none of them describes you completely either.

We are each amalgams, mixtures of ideologies. We each have a different makeup, a different reading list of foundational literature, a different story to tell. Each of us values adherence to our own ideology — whatever it is — with a different weight. We are each willing compromise on some policies, but not on others.

There are many ways political beliefs can be categorized. The poles we generally use in the US — whether we say left vs right or we say statist vs libertarian — are themselves complex, made up of the summation of myriad policy preferences. Your beliefs, your priorities, and your willingness to compromise on what you do and don’t care about are unique to you, and can change even for you over time.

There is seldom a binary, yes-or-no answer to any of these questions. It’s almost always a matter of degree.

We have to expect, therefor, that conservatives are going to differ with others who call themselves “conservative”.  Extending the label with “true conservative” just doubles down on the fact that you’re willing to take on the undefinable label. You may even stray into the No True Scotsman Fallacy, so tempting is it to believe that everyone thinks the way we do.

The label “true conservative” began to be applied when grassroots activists noted that politicians of both parties were campaigning as conservatives, especially in Republican primary elections, but weren’t actually all that conservative when they got into office. Politicians love to campaign as social conservatives in rural areas, for instance, using the power of projection to allow voters to believe they are also fiscal conservatives.

By contrast, the name “RINO” is an acronym for “Republican In Name Only”, and came about describing politicians such as longtime US Senator from Pennsylvania Arlen Specter, who actually changed his party affiliation twice. But quickly the term began to be applied to anyone who strayed from the Republican party line on any issue, and then for any moderate Republican. Ironically,  while still connoting moderate views, it became shorthand for any politician whose positions were based on party loyalty rather than conservative ideology.

Beware when someone uses the Fallacy of Ambiguity to say that there are two establishments, or to ask what it is that a conservative wants to conserve. Words are just labels for concepts, and such trickery is designed to conceal rather than to enlighten.

House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH)  is a conservative:

Boehner attributed the suspicions to the younger members in the Republican ranks who are not familiar with his voting record in the years before he took the Speaker’s gavel.

“Some of our members don’t realize that while I may be a nice enough guy, and I get along with people, when I was voting I had the 8th most conservative voting record in the House,” he said. “But a lot of our newer members – they don’t know that. And so, you know, they think I’m some squish, that I’m ready to sell them out in a heartbeat, when obviously, most of you in this room know that…”

The Speaker does in fact have a 88% lifetime rating with FreedomWorks and a 90% rating from the American Conservative Union.

The trouble for the Mr. Boehner has come since his election as Speaker in 2011. Before then, his votes — except for a tendency to favor earmarks and his votes for TARP  – were exempliary. Since then, he has led a path of sacrificing principle on the altar of the retention of power.

The vast majority of those in the Republican establishment, like Mr. Boehner, are conservative or libertarian by ideology. None of them is a screaming Marxist. The question is whether they vote their ideology and construct bills around that ideology, or whether they maneuver and connive to give the appearance of favoring their ideology while their true intent is acquiring and retaining political power for themselves.

We’ve all heard, “You have to win to implement your policies.” The trouble is that you’ve never fully won. There’s always the next election, the next poll, the next press conference.

Do you want to gain power to further your ideology, or do you use your ideology to gain power? Again, it’s a matter of degree.

The distinguishing question between establishment and idealists is whether someone thinks it’s more important to get elected or to represent his ideals. Almost everyone has a set of policy positions they would not change or back away from to get elected. People with a larger number of strongly held such positions are idealists, and people with a smaller number of more weakly held beliefs are establishmentarians.

The battle is not between “RINOs” and “conservatives”. The battle is over the question of retaining power versus clinging to ideals at all costs. If you argue that you must avoid the conflict to live to fight another day, you are arguing that your own power and position are more valuable than using them to defend what you believe.

Follow @lheal on twitter.

Copyright 2013, FreedomWorks. All rights reserved.

It’s time to abandon the “Tea Party” label, and redouble our effort to defeat the statists.

I said on twitter the other day:

It’s time to ditch the #TeaParty label. Disband your local Tea Party group and reform as “Community Action Forum” or something.

— Loren Heal (@lheal) January 27, 2013

Some misunderstood me to be proposing a new name, but that’s not it at all. Note the “or something” part.  We need to be a swarm of groups, each taking care of our own town or city, in cooperation with those nearby.

Nor do I oppose those who want to push through the negative and rally around the brand. That has value, especially for those who want to keep the threat of forming a distinct political party alive. It’s just not the way I think we should go.

Public support of the Tea Party brand has fallen sharply. Rasmussen polling finds that “only 30% of Likely U.S. Voters now have a favorable opinion of the Tea Party. Half (49%) of voters have an unfavorable view of the movement. ”  Yet 62% favor smaller government.

That means it’s the label that is the problem, not the ideas behind it. We are not loyal to a label, but to a movement, and not to a movement, but to the ideas it represents.

The Tea Party label has become a burden. It’s an unnecessary one. Like the British Redcoats, using the Tea Party brand alerts our opponents to our presence. Instead, we need to disappear into the trees, organizing the people while the enemy thinks we’re gone.

Here at Redstate, LaborUnionReport wrote that we can unite or perish:

However, when the 2006 mid-terms rolled around the union bosses and their troops united and took over Congress. The union bosses knew they must work together to defeat the GOP. They pooled their resources and their assets in the states to work–telling them to work together. And they did.

Meanwhile, on the right, at least two of the “leaders” will not even speak to one another.

On the ground, petty bickering over e-mail (donor) lists and past grievances is the cause for division and hatred. It’s pathetic.

As a result, the grassroots of the Right are floundering, demoralized, under attack, leaderless and clamoring for what should be done.

Now, more than ever, Americans who value the Constitution and the Founders’ vision must set aside their differences and unite upon common ground or we all can continue to watch American freedom perish.

It is time to regroup, re-engage, and organize and, most importantly: Unite or perish.

I urge you to read and study the PowerPoint presentation that goes along with that post.

When the ACORN scandal broke, the group first defended itself, but then went in a different direction: it disappeared, with its supporters even allowing Congress to defund it. ACORN no longer exists.

Instead there are a hundred other groups doing the same things with same people at the same addresses and the same funding. Only the signs above the doors have changed.

The tea parties of 2009 were a great time in the history of the republic. Ordinary people rose up and demanded that their government live within its means.

But even the leaders of those groups owe nothing to the Tea Party, for there has never been such a thing. It has always been a movement, an amorphous collection of like-minded, interlocking groups with common goals and concerns.

And should the “Tea Party” label be dropped, the movement would continue to be an amorphous collection of like-minded, interlocking groups with common goals and concerns.

Instead, reform your group under a different name and start issuing press releases. But more importantly, do the real work:

• Enter your local political party as a Precinct Committeeman or woman
• Contact your like-minded friends, family, church members, softball team and recruit a team of activists
• Involve your members in local events to spread the word to surrounding precincts
• Knock on doors and use personal contact to turn out the vote in your precinct
• Move up the ranks in your political party, having more and more influence on the candidates it chooses

Some have said the tactic of dropping the Tea Party label is allowing the left to define us and set the terms of the debate. Just the opposite is true. They are already defining us. Instead, we can define ourselves. We can do that by accepting that the Tea Party brand has outlived its purpose and adapt our tactics accordingly.

Follow @lheal on Twitter.

Some of the proposals we will hear in the coming days and weeks will be made in good faith. Others will be made to gain political advantage. None will be designed to make people more free.

Both Conn Carroll and Michelle Malkin conclude that the bipartisan Senate plan is fundamentally the same as the failed 2007 Bush-McCain-Kennedy plan.

U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) issued this statement:

I appreciate the good work that senators in both parties have put into trying to fix our broken immigration system. There are some good elements in this proposal, especially increasing the resources and manpower to secure our border and also improving and streamlining legal immigration. However, I have deep concerns with the proposed path to citizenship. To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally.

The elements of the bipartisan Senate plan are:

1. Create a tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required;

The way to think of immigration reform is not as amnesty, but as an admission that our laws and policies have failed. When a law isn’t working, you don’t keep it in place just because it’s in place, you change it. When no one drove 55 MPH on the highway, we changed the law. When Obamacare fails, we will change that law, too.

“But they broke the law!” people will say. Yes, they did. So are you, right now. We have so many laws that it’s impossible not to break them. When they come for your gun, are you going to give it up, or claim it’s been lost or stolen? You’ll be breaking several laws if you do.

Accompanying the admission of failure must be enough change in the law to keep the failure from recurring. In this case, we don’t have that.

Missing is any mention of a border fence or objectively verifiable border security.  The plan creates a commission of governors and others to report on border security. But border security is a federal responsibility, and must serve national purposes. Governors — and especially, the others, may be politically served by sacrificing border security for the flow of people through their state, or for some other local priority.

The addition of resources to border security sounds nice, but it’s really just an expansion of the DHS bureaucracy. Doubtless the missing fence will be replaced with drones, presumably armed, flying over US soil. Those resources can be cut back in any budget year or the first time some drone operator gets careless and does something dreadful.

In any event, President Obama is said to oppose tying the timetable for citizenship border security, believing it should just happen.  He will bully Republicans into accepting a blanket amnesty without even the phony promise of increased border security.  They will probably give in, rather than be seen as anti-immigrant.

2. Reform our legal immigration system to better recognize the importance of characteristics that will help build the American economy and strengthen American families;

This is the worst part of the proposal, from my perspective. I would like the federal government to check the criminal status and background of those entering the country, and if they are found not to be terrorists or criminals, they should be allowed to enter and get on a path to citizenship. The government should not try to decide what will help the economy, because that is something the government is unable to know.

3. Create an effective employment verification system that will prevent identity theft and end the hiring of future unauthorized workers; and,

Civil libertarians are sounding the alarm over the plan’s reliance on E-verify, calling it a thinly-disguised nationald ID. A major problem with a national ID is, briefly, that the source documents used to establish the ID are less secure than the ID.

4. Establish an improved process for admitting future workers to serve our nation’s workforce needs, while simultaneously protecting all workers.

This is further Soviet-style economic central planning, ordering up “workers” as one orders bulk raw material. It is a despicable “guest worker program”, which formalizes the same underclass of non-citizen that immigration reform is designed to eliminate.

The plan would “Allow employers to hire immigrants if it can be demonstrated that they were unsuccessful in recruiting an American to fill an open position and the hiring of an immigrant will not displace American workers;”.

My Solution, for what it’s worth:

1. Build a series of connected fences, walls, ditches, causeways, or other physical barriers along our borders. Equip each with every type of sensor needed: video, sound, seismic, etc.  Make sure no one enters the country who intends us harm.
2. Let everyone else in, and let anyone apply for citizenship without any impediment or quota for race, creed, or even marketable skill. Deny them benefits until they are citizens.  Ideally, I’d rather drastically cut back on our entitlement state to care only for the truly helpless, regardless of citizenship.
3. Delay citizenship applications for those here already until the backlog of foreign applicants is cleared.

Opening immigration to anyone who wants in and is willing to try to support themselves is good policy, it’s good politics, and it’s good tactics. President Obama will be forced to oppose it by his union cronies. If nothing else, it’s leverage.

Unfortunately, the people writing our laws believe it is their job to tinker with the economy and control the makeup of our population.  This reform opportunity, should they be successful, will extend the scope and reach of our government and deny people freedom, in the name of a false equality and partisan political advantage.

Is Christmas about Christ, or is it about reindeer?

Why, yes.

Christmas is when Christians celebrate of the virgin birth of Jesus the Christ, Y’shua the Messiah, in a manger in Bethlehem. It’s a tale of wise men (who weren’t there) and shepherds (who were).

But the celebration on December 25 is a matter of convenience:

December 25 was the birthday of Mithra, the pagan God of light. In 325 AD, Roman emperor Constantine re-assigned the meaning to the birthday of Jesus, the true God of light.

Christmas is also a celebration of the dead of Winter, a memory of joy shared even in the coldest days of the Little Ice Age in Europe — and perhaps some dim memory of even colder days past in a real Ice Age. The last warmth of Summer is gone by the time of the solstice, and we have time to gather together in our little hovels and share the fruits of our year’s labor with those we love.

In coopting and eventually supplanting the Roman solstice festivals, Christians and those enjoying the favors of cultural Christianity learned to follow the example of one of the most generous men in history, Nicholas of Myra. 

During the Little Ice Age, the entire globe was much cooler than it is now. Colder, longer winters chilled northern Europe and the U.S. The Little Ice Age generally is said to have begun in the 15th century and to have ended in the mid 1800′s. Greenhouse gases were not responsible for cooling the planet during that time, and were obviously not responsible for the warming trend that continues to this day.

Many of our Christmas traditions, from White Christmas to sleighs and reindeer, stem from the Little Ice Age period. 

So while you might consider the holiday’s origins or the use of evergreen trees pagan, it’s ours now. Merry Christmas!

Paranoia over imagined theocracy has brought a war on Christmas, which is really only a skirmish in the religious liberty front of the culture war, in which the leftists attempt to define liberty as tyranny and right as wrong. What, dear atheists and secular purists, is so harmful about an exchange of gifts? What state religion is established by this admixture of seasonal and cultural icons?

And to those Christians who find a dichotomy in the dualism, who see a conflict between magical reindeer and frankincense, I say: quit being humbugs. Sing about Rudolph, enjoy your stocking stuffers, blow your wad at Wal-Mart, and give shelter to needy travelers.

Because Christmas is Christmas, and there’s no need to pin it down more than that.