Columnist.
Attorney General Eric Holder's people have no shame. After months of stonewalling, misinformation and petulant disregard for the victims of the Fast and Furious gunwalking scandal, President Obama's Justice Department is hiding behind the most despicable race-card demagogues on the planet. "Post-racial" America never looked so bitter, clingy and cowardly. At a Tuesday press conference in Washington, D.C., human shield Al Sharpton condemned the upcoming House vote on a contempt motion against Holder as "reckless" and "morally reprehensible." Yes, the infamous hate-crimes hoaxer, cop-basher and riot incitement specialist is now the self-appointed sheriff of Capitol Hill morality. A Huffington Post report hyping Sharpton's protection racket decried the contempt citation as an "assault on minority rights." In typical race-baiting style, Sharpton told the leftwing website: "I'm not saying that this is because Holder is black, and I'm not calling (Republicans) racists. I'm saying what they're doing has a racial effect."
There aren't Greek columns tall or wide enough to camouflage Barack Obama's impending North Carolina catastrophe. In September, the campaigner-in-chief will travel to Charlotte for his party's presidential nominating convention. For once, the incurable jetsetter may wish he had stayed home. Obama's stage managers envision a triumphant, unifying coronation reminiscent of their 2008 DNC production in Denver. But the southern swing state is turning into a Democratic disaster zone. Start with the North Carolina Democratic Party. At the state party convention last week, Obama for America was AWOL. The glaring absence of high-level national Obama surrogates was noted "as odd," according to the Charlotte News and Observer. There's good reason to steer clear. The party is embroiled in a sordid sex scandal that won't go away. Earlier this year, former party communications staffer Adriadn Ortega, 26, accused former NCDP executive director Jay Parmley of repeated sexual harassment and physical groping. Documents leaked to the conservative Daily Caller news site revealed a hush-hush financial settlement involving the two men. Ortega was fired; Parmley resigned; state Democrats went into panic mode.
COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. -- The smell of singed air here is inescapable. Less than 50 miles west of my neighborhood, the latest wildfire has spread across 1,100 acres. It's the fifth active blaze to erupt in our state over the past month. But ashes aren't the only things smoldering. The Obama administration's neglect of the federal government's aerial tanker fleet raises acrid questions about its core public safety priorities. Bipartisan complaints goaded the White House into signing a Band-Aid fix last week. But it smacks more of election-year gesture politics: Too little, too late, too fake. Ten years ago, the feds had a fleet of 44 firefighting planes. Today, the number is down to nine for the entire country. Last summer, Obama's National Forest Service canceled a key federal contract with Sacramento-based Aero Union just as last season's wildfires were raging. Aero Union had supplied eight vital air tankers to Washington's dwindling aerial firefighting fleet. Two weeks later, the company closed down, and 60 employees lost their jobs. Aero Union had been a leader in the business for a half-century.
While calls for U.S. Attorney General Eric "Stonewall" Holder's resignation grow and the House GOP gears up for a contempt vote next week, it's worth remembering how we got into this mess. In two words: feckless bipartisanship. "I like Barack Obama and want to help him if I can." That was Utah GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch in January 2009, just weeks before the Senate voted on President Obama's attorney general nominee, Eric Holder. Right out of the gate, upon Obama's election in November 2008, Hatch signaled that he would greenlight the administration's top law enforcer. "I start with the premise that the president deserves the benefit of the doubt," the six-term incumbent Hatch told The Hill newspaper. "I don't think politics should be played with the attorney general." Utah voters, mark those words. Bending to bipartisanship for bipartisanship's sake -- and ignoring the obvious consequences -- is playing politics.
During the summer of 2009, conservative activists turned up the heat on Democratic politicians to protest the innovation-destroying, liberty-usurping Obamacare mandate. In the summer of 2012, it's squishy Republican politicians who deserve the grassroots flames. In case you hadn't heard, even if the Supreme Court overturns the progressives' federal health care juggernaut, prominent GOP leaders vow to preserve its most "popular" provisions. These big-government Republicans show appalling indifference to the dire market disruptions and culture of dependency that Obamacare schemes have wrought. GOP Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, vice chair of the Senate GOP Conference, told a St. Louis radio station two weeks ago that he supports keeping at least three Obamacare regulatory pillars: federally imposed coverage of "children" up to age 26 on their parents' health insurance policies (the infamous, unfunded "slacker mandate"), federally mandated coverage regardless of pre-existing conditions ("guaranteed issue," which leads to an adverse-selection death spiral) and closure of the coverage gap in the massive Bush-backed Medicare drug entitlement (the "donut hole fix" that will obliterate the program's cost-controls).
Free speech is under fire. Online thugs are targeting bloggers (mostly conservative, but not all) who have dared to expose a convicted bomber and perjuring vexatious litigant who is now enjoying a comfy life as a liberally subsidized social justice operative. Where do your elected representatives stand on this threat to our founding principles? On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, bravely stepped forward to press this vital issue. In a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Chambliss decried the "harassing and frightening actions" of Internet menaces who recently have gone after several conservative new media citizen journalists and activists. GOP Rep. Kenny Marchant of Texas added his voice, telling Holder in a statement that he is "very afraid of the potential chilling effects that these reported actions may have in silencing individuals who would otherwise be inclined to exercise their Constitutional right to free speech." And the American Center for Law and Justice, a leading conservative free speech public interest law firm, announced it was providing legal representation to the National Bloggers Club -- a new media association that has provided support and raised funds for targets of this coordinated harassment. (Full disclosure: I volunteer on the National Bloggers Club board of directors.)
They really outdid themselves. In Wisconsin and across the nation, public school employee unions spared no kiddie human shields in their battle against GOP Gov. Scott Walker's budget and pension reforms. Students were the first and last casualties of the ruthless Big Labor war against fiscal discipline. To kick off the yearlong protest festivities, the Wisconsin Education Association Council led a massive "sickout" of educators and other government school personnel. The coordinated truancy action -- tantamount to an illegal strike -- cost taxpayers an estimated $6 million. Left-wing doctors assisted the campaign by supplying fake medical excuse notes to teachers who ditched their public school classrooms to protest Walker's modest package of belt-tightening measures.
Six-term entrenched incumbent Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, is attacking his conservative challenger, Dan Liljenquist, over his alleged support for tax hikes in Washington. My sides ache. Liljenquist has never voted for federal tax hikes or massive entitlement spending or multibillion-dollar bailouts or serial debt-limit increases in Washington because he has never served in Washington. Never. Hatch, by contrast, has spent the last 36 years racking up a Big Government record that cannot be whitewashed away.
What's green and blue and grabby all over? President Obama's new pressure campaign for Congress to ratify the Law of the Sea Treaty (LOST). The fight over LOST goes back three decades, when it was first rejected by President Ronald Reagan. He warned that "no national interest of the United States could justify handing sovereign control of two-thirds of the Earth's surface over to the Third World." According to top Reagan officials William Clark and Ed Meese, their boss believed the "central, and abiding, defect" was "its effort to promote global government at the expense of sovereign nation states -- and most especially the United States."
The embattled chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission resigned this week. It's a victory for Republican oversight on Capitol Hill, women and sound science. But it's also a lesson in the futility of Bush-era bipartisanship. When you cut deals with bullies, it's a timeless and bitter recipe for more bullying. Gregory Jaczko served as appropriations director and science policy adviser to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., before joining the NRC in 2005. The anti-nuclear advocate was sworn in by his brass-knuckled boss and protector, Reid, who pressured the Bush administration to appoint him as a condition for moving through any other NRC nominations.
Boxing champion Manny Pacquiao is guilty -- of being true to his Catholic faith. The gay-marriage mob is guilty -- of the very ugly bigotry it claims to abhor. And left-wing media outlets are guilty -- of stoking false narratives that shamelessly demonize religion in the name of compassion.
The stench of Chicago cronyism over the White House just got fouler. Inhale this:
While the White House and its media water-carriers try to distract the American public with gay-marriage talk and half-century-old tales of Mitt Romney's prep school pranks, the inconvenient truth remains: President Obama is responsible for perpetrating jaw-dropping, job-killing scientific fraud. And his minions are still trying to cover it up. New internal e-mails disclosed by the House Natural Resources Committee this week show that a supposedly exculpatory report on the administration's doctored drilling moratorium analysis -- issued by the Department of Interior's Inspector General's office -- was itself incomplete, misleading and unsubstantiated. Even more damning, the documents reveal that the White House actively blocked investigators and refuses to comply with subpoenas.
With six months until Election Day, conspiracy theories are percolating on the Internet like bubbling mud pots at Yellowstone: Left-wing billionaire George Soros is going to rig the election for Barack Obama. Foreigners will oversee the nation's entire vote-counting system. The fix is in, and all is lost. Before conservatives go all Michael Moore-moonbatty, let's calm down and separate voter fraud facts from fiction. There's no time to waste worrying about manufactured scares. And there are plenty of legitimate threats to electoral integrity without having to inflate or concoct them.
Quick, hide under the covers. The nation's storyteller, Barack Obama, unveiled a frightening new fable on the Internet intended to scare women away from supporting fiscal conservatives in November. But as is increasingly common with Obama's social media propaganda initiatives, "The Life of Julia" immediately flopped. Why? Because 1) self-sufficient women voters aren't as sheeple-ish as Democratic strategists make them out to be, 2) conservative activists are overtaking Obama's zombie army online, 3) non-delusional Americans don't want cradle-to-grave utopians turning their country into the next Greece or Spain, and 4) responsible grownups are getting sick and tired of radical Saul Alinsky-style tall tales from the progressive Pied Piper.
Elizabeth Warren is the Harvard law professor running for Senate in Massachusetts as a Democratic populist-progressive champion. But don't call her "Elizabeth Warren." Call her "Pinocchio-hontas," "Chief Full-of-Lies," "Running Joke" or "Sacaja-whiner." Warren has claimed questionable Native American minority status for years to reap career "diversity" benefits. Now, Cherokee leaders, campaign rival GOP Sen. Scott Brown and an army of Twitter detractors have called her out for gaming the racial-preference system. Live by identity politics, die by identity politics.
One of President Obama's radical eco-bureaucrats has apologized for confirming an indelible truth: This White House treats politically incorrect private industries as public enemies who deserve regulatory death sentences. Environmental Protection Agency administrator Al Armendariz, an avowed greenie on leave from Southern Methodist University, gave a little-noticed speech in 2010 outlining his sadistic philosophy. "I was in a meeting once, and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement, and I think it was probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate for the meeting, but I'll go ahead and tell you what I said," he began. In a video obtained and released by Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., Armendariz then shared his bloody analogy:
Who is Rashad Robinson? And why has his fringe, race-baiting organization been able to pressure several major corporations into abandoning a pro-limited-government legislative association -- all for a few cheap social-justice brownie points? Conservative consumers need to get informed, get active and stand their ground against free speech-squelching progressive activists who have demonized the American Legislative Exchange Council. This isn't just a battle over ALEC. It's a war against the left's shakedown artists taking aim at our freedoms of speech and association.
There is a reflexive desire among a certain species of moderate Republicans to be perceived as "civil" by liberal opponents who believe that the mere existence of free-market, limited-government conservatism is an indecent affront to humankind. All aboard the U.S.S. Lost Cause. This disastrous, bend-over bipartisanship is a hard habit to break. In 2008, Arizona Sen. John McCain rode the "Barack Obama is a nice guy, but vote for me" wave to crashing defeat. In 2012, McCain's endorsee, Mitt Romney, has made "Barack Obama is a nice guy but in over his head" a standard stump-speech talking point.
