December 22, 2012

NEWSMAX
Gingrich to Newsmax: GOP Gave Obama Upper Hand
by Todd Beoman
December 21, 2012

Former GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich told Newsmax late on Thursday that he was perplexed by House Speaker John Boehner’s move to postpone the vote on his highly controversial plan that would prevent tax hikes for everyone except those making more than $1 million a year.

“I don’t understand what the strategy is of the House Republicans, so it’s hard to judge what they’re doing,” the former GOP House Speaker told Newsmax in an exclusive interview. “I don’t know what they’re trying to do.

“I’ve talked with several House members here today — and I don’t think many of them have any idea of what they’re doing. Literally have no idea,” Gingrich added. “Several members have no idea.”

Editor's Note: 5 Signs Stock Market Will Collapse in 2013

“I’m not worried about this week or next week. I’m worried about four years from now — and I don’t see the strategy in place that is going to catch up with Obama,” he said.

Gingrich was among several Capitol Hill observers asked by Newsmax to respond to Boehner’s late-evening decision. The move to call off the vote came after the Ohio Republican called a short meeting of the House Republican Conference to determine whether he had enough vote to pass the bill.

“The House did not take up the tax measure today because it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass,” Boehner said in a statement. “Now it is up to the president to work with Senator Reid on legislation to avert the fiscal cliff.

“The House has already passed legislation to stop all of the Jan. 1 tax-rate increases and replace the sequester with responsible spending cuts that will begin to address our nation's crippling debt. The Senate must now act.”

Boehner’s postponement topped a chaotic day of intense arm-twisting of members of the GOP rank and file. Several Senate Republicans, including Rob Portman of Ohio, were called on to press their House colleagues to support the Boehner plan.

Gingrich told Newsmax, however, that the negotiating process has given President Barack Obama the upper hand. “They have spent the entire time since the election negotiating — and that puts the president in the strongest position.”

He likened Obama to being the fictional Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s classic “Gulliver’s Travels” and the GOP to being the Lilliputians. “You needed all of the Lilliputians to tie Gulliver down.

Editor's Note: 5 Signs Stock Market Will Collapse in 2013

“If every House committee and House subcommittee had hearings every day on the waste in government — if every week there was something new about government wastefulness, there would be a very different tone to these negotiations,” Gingrich said. “It would be very difficult to demand more money from the American people.”

The House move also brought praise from several conservative groups, including the Club for Growth, which earlier this week attacked the concessions Boehner made in the plan.

“We are pleased that the House Republicans did not vote to raise taxes,” spokesman Barney Keller told Newsmax late Thursday. “An anti-growth tax increase would not have solved our fiscal problems — and it would have killed jobs.

“The House needs to focus on a pro-growth, tax-reform, entitlement-reform agenda, which enjoys broad support among Americans,” he said.

Americans for Prosperity told Newsmax that it was among many organizations that emailed House members asking them not to support Plan B, said spokesman Levi Russell.

“We have been opposing and continually opposing the plan,” he said. “We just think it’s a bad plan. It does not address the fiscal cliff. It does not address our fiscal issues. It does nothing to control out-of-control spending.

“The tax increases are always real and always immediate — but the spending cuts are predicted to take place in some future Congress.

“The Senate should take the bill that the House has already passed, pass it — and the president should sign it,” Russell recommended. “And, then next year, Congress needs to begin real, substantive entitlement reform and tax reform to put this country back on the road to prosperity.”

Read more: http://goo.gl/aNuq3

TOWNHALL
10 Facts for Liberals: Why Gun Control Can't Stop Another Newtown Massacre
by John Hawkins
December 22, 2012

There are now calls from the Left for gun control legislation in response to Adam Lanza's unconscionable mass killing of innocent children at Sandy Hook Elementary. However, very few people seem to be asking the most basic question of all before getting started: What gun control legislation could have stopped Adam Lanza?

The answer is "none."

Let's consider a few alternatives:

1) The school was already a "gun free zone;" so obviously that wasn't effective. Of course, the sort of people who would respect a "gun free zone" in the first place are the very ones you wouldn't have to worry about carrying a gun; so it's an almost useless designation.

2) What about closing the supposed "gun show loophole?" Well, since Lanza killed his own mother and used her legally acquired guns for his rampage, making it harder for googly-eyed loners to acquire weapons wouldn't have changed a thing.

3) Some people are calling for a ban on automatic weapons. Setting aside the fact that the regulation of fully automatic weapons is already tighter than Spandex, Adam Lanza didn't use a fully automatic weapon.

4) Then there are calls for the "Assault Weapons Ban" to be reinstated. One problem: the semiautomatic Bushmaster .223 rifle that Lanza used wasn't covered by the bill. So, his mother could have bought that exact same gun with a sheriff looking over her shoulder while the ban was in place.

5) We could, of course, pass a newly updated "Assault Weapons Ban" that covers the semiautomatic Bushmaster .223 rifle. Then, gun manufacturers would try to create weapons that can get around the ban. They would probably be successful. Even if they weren't, it's not as if Lanza was battling Marines. When you're a coward who's attacking unarmed children, any gun will work.

6) We could also ban high-capacity ammunition magazines, but given the 3-5 second reload time, that would have been a minor inconvenience to Adam Lanza at worst. After all, it's not as if a group of small children were going to be able to scamper away or gang up on him during a four second window.

So, what now? Well, let's step into the realm of fantasy and assume that there's no such thing as a 2nd Amendment that provides the public with a Constitutional right to "keep and bear arms." that is every bit as important as the right to free speech and freedom of religion. Let's also pretend that the American public would go along with the following laws and attempts to implement them wouldn't lead to wide scale violence and unrest.

7) Congress could ban the manufacture and sale of bullets and magazines. Given the massive number of bullets and magazines already owned by the public and readily available instructions for making them, this wouldn't stop any determined killer like Adam Lanza. On the other hand, it would lead to a massive black market with tens of millions of previously law abiding Americans buying bullets by the bucketful from back rooms across the country.

8) Congress could also ban the manufacture and sale of guns. Again, that would lead to the creation of a massive black market, but it would also leave roughly 300 million guns in the hands of the American people. In other words, if Adam Lanza had decided to wait until AFTER that law was passed to go on his killing spree, it would have been the same sad story.

9) Then, there's the most extreme step of all: Congress could ban the ownership of guns. One problem: In the vast majority of cases, the government has no record of who owns guns and who doesn't. In most places, those records are kept at the gun store level and are not updated. If the gun is lost, stolen, given away or sold by the individual, there is no record of it. This is a feature, not a bug, and it's designed to prevent exactly the sort of confiscation we're discussing here. So, even if all guns were made illegal, it would be very difficult to enforce, most people wouldn't turn their weapons in and there would probably be two hundred million guns left in the hands of the American public. Would a man like Adam Lanza still be able to acquire a weapon in that situation? Come on, he KILLED HIS OWN MOTHER for a gun; so you can be sure he'd have gotten one elsewhere.

10) Let's go Steven Spielberg on this problem and assume space aliens show up and use some bizarre technology to get rid of all guns. Well, even so, fire and explosives would still exist and as Brian Palmer has noted in Slate, those can be even more effective killers than guns.

Guns aren't even the most lethal mass murder weapon. According to data compiled by Grant Duwe of the Minnesota Department of Corrections, guns killed an average of 4.92 victims per mass murder in the United States during the 20th century, just edging out knives, blunt objects, and bare hands, which killed 4.52 people per incident. Fire killed 6.82 people per mass murder, while explosives far outpaced the other options at 20.82. Of the 25 deadliest mass murders in the 20th century, only 52 percent involved guns.

If gun control advocates like Barack Obama, Michael Bloomberg and Michael Moore, all of whom have armed guards protecting their safety, succeed in making guns less available for law abiding citizens, it wouldn't stop another Newtown massacre, but ironically it would make it easier for rapists, gangs or even the next Adam Lanza to hurt innocent people.

Read more: http://goo.gl/tnm8s

THE WEEKLY STANDARD
The Greatest Conservative Generation
by William Kristol
ADVANCE EDITORIAL from the December 31, 2012 - January 7, 2013 issue.

“There were giants in the earth in those days.” The death on December 19 of Robert Bork—superb legal scholar, preeminent constitutional thinker, principled public servant—calls to mind the other giants of American conservatism who have left us in the last decade: Bill Buckley and Irving Kristol, Milton Friedman and James Q. Wilson, Richard John Neuhaus and Jeane Kirkpatrick, Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp. They were the greatest conservative generation. They rode into the valley of liberal orthodoxies and emerged sometimes triumphant, always unbowed. When can their glory fade? They left our nation stronger and better for their efforts.

Those who knew them do their best to carry on the fight. Inspired by their example and effort, by their boldness and wisdom, remembering the uphill struggles of the early years, they do their best to keep the banner aloft and moving forward. But what of the next generation?

It’s been almost 60 years since Bill Buckley and his colleagues founded National Review, standing “athwart history, yelling Stop, at a time when no one is inclined to do so, or to have much patience with those who so urge it.” Those of us concerned with the perpetuation and success of American conservatism might consider what Abraham Lincoln said a little more than 60 years after the American Revolution, on January 27, 1838, at the Young Men’s Lyceum in Springfield, Illinois.

The whole speech is, needless to say, worth reading—and worth rereading. But for our purposes, consider one aspect of the 28-year-old Lincoln’s treatment of the question of “the perpetuation of our political institutions.” Why, he asked, “suppose danger to our political institutions? Have we not preserved them for more than fifty years? And why may we not for fifty times as long?”


One reason, Lincoln explains, is that “the scenes of the revolution .  .  . must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time. In history, we hope, they will be read of, and recounted, so long as the Bible shall be read;—but even granting that they will, their influence cannot be what it heretofore has been. Even then, they cannot be so universally known, nor so vividly felt, as they were by the generation just gone to rest.”

Lincoln suggests that, even for the generation after the Founders, these scenes were a kind of “living history.” But for Lincoln’s generation, “those histories are gone.” And “unless we, their descendants, supply their places with other pillars, hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason,” we will lack “the materials for our future support and defense.”

The materials for the future support and defense of conservatism will have to be forged by a generation that remembers not the Founders. In a way, this can be an advantage. Young men and women today, interested in the perpetuation of our political and civic liberty, will understand they can’t coast on the Founders’ efforts. They’ll also be less intimidated by the Founders’ example. They will be open to fresh thinking “hewn from the solid quarry of sober reason.” Such fresh thinking has never been more necessary.

But as they think anew, they’ll also look back to Bob Bork and his compatriots. Their work is the point of departure, a source of invaluable lessons, both substantive and strategic. Yet the generation that now ascends to center stage shouldn’t be intimidated by their daunting example.

The best revenge for Edward Kennedy’s slander about “Robert Bork’s America” would be to help advance the cause of what is truly Bob Bork’s America—a nation of constitutional liberty and self-government. Bob Bork would have enjoyed the well-deserved encomiums he is receiving. He’d be even more pleased by the young men and women coming forth to say how inspired they have been by his example.

Read more: http://goo.gl/Rd9R3

December 21, 2012

NATIONAL REVIEW
Inside the Meltdown
by Robert Costa
December 21, 2012

At a quarter to 8 p.m. on Thursday night, House Republicans gathered in the Capitol basement for an urgent, closed-door conference meeting. The scene was hushed and confused. Instead of huddling in a windowless room, members thought they’d spend the evening on the House floor, voting on “Plan B,” Speaker John Boehner’s fiscal-cliff proposal. But as they took their seats and looked at Boehner’s face, the reason for the gathering became clear: The speaker didn’t have the votes. The whipping was over. “Plan B” was dead.

Boehner’s speech to the group was short and curt: He said his plan didn’t have enough support, and that the House would adjourn until after Christmas, perhaps even later. But it was Boehner’s tone and body language that caught most Republicans off guard. The speaker looked defeated, unhappy, and exhausted after hours of wrangling. He didn’t want to fight. There was no name-calling. As a devout Roman Catholic, Boehner wanted to pray. “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,” he told the crowd, according to attendees.

There were audible gasps of surprise, especially from freshman lawmakers who didn’t see the meltdown coming. Boehner’s friends were shocked, and voiced their disappointment so the speaker’s foes could hear. “My buddies and I said the same thing to each other,” a Boehner ally told me later. “We looked at each other, rolled our eyes, and just groaned. This is a disaster.”

Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania, a burly former car dealer, stood up and urged the conference to get behind the speaker. “How the hell can you do this?” Kelly asked, according to several people inside the room. A few of Boehner’s critics told Kelly to stop lecturing, but most were silent. They had been battling against “Plan B” all week, and quite suddenly, they had crippled the leadership. Boehner sensed the tension, requested calm, and then exited the room.

Since the meeting lasted only a few minutes, several members, such as Representative Tim Huelskamp of Kansas, missed the session. As Huelskamp, a leading “Plan B” adversary, rushed to get there, he saw a stream of his colleagues exiting. They were on their phones with aides and family members, sharing the news. They’d be coming home for the holidays since the House was in a state of chaos. Some of them, however, seemed bewildered by the turn of events. They walked slowly down the basement hallway, whispering with other members. One freshman asked a senior member, “Are we really not coming back?” The senior member simply nodded. Almost everyone avoided the press. Feelings were raw. Representative Steve King of Iowa, a frequent Boehner critic, looked at me, shook his head, and said, “I have nothing to say.”

Boehner and his leadership team soon departed. Kevin McCarthy, the GOP whip, who hours earlier was meeting with on-the-fence members over Chick-fil-A sandwiches in his office, left the Capitol looking distressed. So did Eric Cantor, the majority leader, who had spent the past two days wooing backbenchers. Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, the Budget Committee chairman and recent Republican vice-presidential candidate, strolled out of the Capitol with Representative Tom Price of Georgia, a popular conservative who has expressed his unhappiness with Boehner’s cliff strategy. The pair declined to discuss the drama, but they both looked tired and frustrated.

Read more: http://goo.gl/xwElu

THE CATO INSTITUTE
Behind the Smears
by Walter Olson
December 20, 2012

Here’s something you may not know about the 1987 battle that kept Robert Bork off the Supreme Court: Opponents pursued a whispering campaign against him on the grounds that he wasn’t enough of a religious believer.

Back then, many Democrats still held seats in the rural South, and the religion angle gave them an easier way to explain their stance to constituents than, We’ve been asked to oppose him as a party-line matter.

Thus Rep. John Bryant (D-Texas) warned that Bork was “an agnostic who is not a member of any church.”

And Sen. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), while disclaiming any “religious test for judges,” advised “fundamental religious people” back home to “look, in addition to what he has written, at [Bork’s] statements on morals or lack thereof — and I don’t mean to suggest he is immoral — but his lack of occupation with morals and with religion.”

“Never in memory had a judicial nomination

been fought in such language. Why?”

Sen. Howell Heflin (D-Ala.) told constituents he was “disturbed by [Bork’s] refusal to discuss his belief in God — or the lack thereof.” Heflin also alluded darkly to the nominee’s beard and “strange lifestyle” as a Yale law professor.

Judge Robert Bork died yesterday at 85, and as one of the smartest persons ever nominated to the high court — George Will called him ‘the most intellectually distinguished nominee since Felix Frankfurter’ — he was well situated to appreciate the many historical ironies.

One was that opponents like Heflin could exploit prejudice against him as a former Yale law professor and presumed Northeastern elitist. In fact his views were so far from his former colleagues’ that in later years he was to joke of seeing a bumper sticker that read, Save America. Close Yale Law School.

The religious angle adds another irony. Particularly after his defeat and retirement from the bench, Bork’s views drifted steadily rightward; in the wake of his best-selling 1997 book Slouching Toward Gomorrah, he became a favorite of “secularism is destroying America” culture warriors.

Of course the confirmation critique that makes it into every Bork obituary isn’t Heflin’s or Johnston’s. It’s Ted Kennedy’s blowhard caricature, intended for northern liberal consumption, of “Robert Bork’s America” as “a land in which women would be forced into back alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, school children could not be taught about evolution,” and so on.

Never in memory had a judicial nomination been fought in such language. Why?

As a constitutional law scholar, Bork had distinguished himself even among conservatives for his scathing critique of the Warren Court, which he accused essentially of having made up constitutional law as it went along.

To organized liberal groups, on whose behalf Kennedy was acting, this was the next thing to a declaration of war. Yet they couldn’t exactly come out and defend making up constitutional law as you went along as their own vision for the high court.

Instead, they served up a steady diet of vitriol and wild oversimplification, especially in TV ads and other messages delivered outside the confirmation hearings.

The Washington Post itself opposed Bork’s confirmation, yet nonetheless editorialized against the “intellectual vulgarization and personal savagery” to which some of his opponents had descended, “profoundly distorting the record and the nature of the man.”

Once “Borking” had been coined as a word and as a practice, it didn’t take long for nominees of both sides to pay the price. Some didn’t care to put themselves or their families through months of mudslinging.

Within a few years, presidents of both parties were taking care to pick nominees with schmoozy as opposed to prickly personalities — and willing to submit to coaching on how to give off that oh-so-important empathetic vibe without actually committing to anything.

Read more: http://goo.gl/zIGfR

AMERICAN THINKER
How to Downsize the Federal Government
by Bill Weckesser
December 21, 2012

Maybe Republicans need go back to the Gipper's playbook on the deficit. Reagan once said, "I'm not worried the deficit. It's big enough to take care of itself." He certainly had a point. Reagan was charged with massively increasing spending and borrowing on defense so that liberals would be sort of handcuffed from any big new spending programs for a while. And, arguably, for a while it may have worked.

Now the New York Times laments-in an article I found at CNBC-that instead of defense, entitlements are swallowing all the money.

Consider the president's budget, which by law must include projections of taxing and spending over the next decade. Loath to raise taxes on the middle class yet unwilling to cut deeply into the budgets for Social Security or Medicare, the president and his advisers proposed cutting the discretionary part of the budget devoted to everything except defense and other security agencies to 1.7 percent of economic output by 2022, down from 3.1 percent last year. 

This is not irrelevant spending. It accounts for every government expenditure except entitlements, security and interest. It pays subsidies for higher education and housing assistance for the poor. It finances the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration. It pays for the Federal Emergency Management Agency and training programs for unemployed workers. Without such spending, the government becomes little more than a heavily armed pension plan with a health insurer on the side.
House Republicans are equally if not more frugal. The House budget resolution, the Republicans' last detailed proposal about taxes and spending, refers to discretionary spending except national defense, a broader category than that considered in the president's budget. They too cut it to the bone: to about 2.1 percent of economic output in 2022, from 4.3 percent last year. 

To put it in perspective, this would cut the government's civilian discretionary budget to the smallest it has been as a share of the economy at least since the Eisenhower administration -- when a quarter of the population lived under the poverty line, thousands of children still contracted polio each year and fewer than one in 12 Americans older than 25 had a college degree. According to estimates by the Congressional Budget Office, even going over the so-called fiscal cliff would not cut it as deeply.

Hey, the Eisenhower years weren't so bad. This could be a road back.

Conservatives need to turn the table on the debate. Instead of arguing that entitlements will soon swallow everything else, so let's cut them, let's work on cutting all the rest. House republicans should consider making every cut a tradeoff versus cutting Social Security/Medicare. For instance, either downsize the EPA...or cut Social Security/Medicare. Reduce the Energy department...or reduce Social Security/Medicare. Scale back the Department of Education...or trim Social Security/Medicare. The list is endless. A lot of Americans have more affection for Social Security/Medicare than any government agency. This could be a stealth way to pursue some healthy de-regulation. Would this meaningfully reduce the deficit? Of course not.

But, to paraphrase Reagan, "entitlements are a big enough problem to take care of themselves." In the meantime, maybe conservatives can win some other battles

Read more: http://goo.gl/USzE5