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---Another Golf Joke:Jim decided to tie the knot with his longtime girlfriend.One evening, after the honeymoon, he was cleaning his golf shoes.His wife was standing there watching him.After a long period of silence she finally said: "Honey, I've been thinking, now that we are married it's time you quit golfing. Maybe you should sell your golf clubs."Jim gets this horrified look on his face.She says, "Darling, what's wrong?"”There for a minute you were sounding like my ex-wife.”"Ex-wife!" she screams, "I didn't know you were married before!"Jim says ”I wasn't!“
The black population I grew up with in Birmingham were conservative and very close to their church. As WW 2 progressed, many blacks from the south moved north where better and more jobs were available. Most never returned after the War, and, post desegregation, black culture changed and their conservative orientation became diluted. The Republican Party, which had every philosophical right to retain their vote, lost it because of inattention, stupidity and lack of effort.
The article below suggests, post Obama, the black vote could again become more fluid. Whether Republicans will grasp that fact and do anything about it remains to be seen. Jack Kingston has a deserved following among his black constituents because he addresses their issues, appears before them and his staff provides excellent service.
It does not take rocket science to break down barriers. Some southern Republicans, as the article suggests, have been effective but most believe penetration is hopeless and do not even make the effort. Black voters hold deep seated grievances, some rational some not, but ignoring them simply reinforces their blind embrace of The Democrats whose policies have been destructive and counterproductive whether blacks realize this or not or are even capable of or willing to admit it.
As I have said so often, Obama has been an unmitigated disaster for his own people but they cannot see beyond his color. He plays them like a violin while violating their dignity. His policies have made them more dependent and increased their unemployment and that is a recipe for generational disaster.(See 2 below.)
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My friend, John Podhoretz, has misgivings regarding Kerry's peace initiatives. (See 3 below.)
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Can Hillary put a winning strategy together?
It would be nice to believe voters would demand such but she may not need to do so. Why? Because the press and media will spin for her, women will gush for her and Republicans might find the odds beyond daunting regardless of whomever they select.
Anatomical voting may win the day once again over rational thinking. (See 4 below.)
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Out of town for next week!
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Dick
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1) Issa Accuses White House, IRS of Stonewalling on Targeting Probe
By Todd Beamon
Rep. Darrell Issa accused the Obama administration and its new IRS chief on Tuesday of obstructing his panel's investigation into the agency's targeting of tea party, conservative and religious groups.
If "the IRS continues to hinder the committee's investigation in any manner, the committee will be forced to consider use of compulsory process," the California Republican, chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, wrote in a letter to Internal Revenue Service Acting Commissioner Daniel Werfel.
The letter, which was reported by The Washington Times and CNN, was also signed by Rep. Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican who also sits on the committee.
The letter, however, did not elaborate on exactly what steps Issa's panel might take, though he noted that impeding congressional investigators could result in prison terms of up to five years.
"Obstructing a congressional investigation is a crime," Issa and Jordan stressed in the letter.
"Despite your promise to cooperate fully with congressional investigations, the actions of the IRS under your leadership have made clear to the committee that the agency has no intention of complying completely or promptly with the committee's oversight efforts," the letter said.
"The systematic manner in which the IRS has attempted to delay, frustrate, impede, and obstruct the committee's investigation raises serious concerns about your commitment to full and unfettered congressional oversight," the document said.
The Issa-Jordan letter came on the same day when another House panel, the Ways and Means Committee, released an analysis showing that conservative groups faced more probing questions than did liberal groups seeking the same tax-exempt status.
Ways and Means Chairman Dave Camp told the Times that conservative groups were asked three times as many questions, and were less than half as likely to get approval from the IRS.
Like the oversight committee, Camp said his investigators were also waiting on the IRS to turn over more information.
"This is just the tip of the iceberg," he told the Times. "We have received less than three percent of the documents responsive to the investigation."
Meanwhile, an IRS spokeswoman, Michelle Eldridge, told both the Times and CNN that the agency was "aggressively responding to the numerous data requests we've received from Congress.
"We are doing everything we can to fully cooperate with the committees, and we strongly disagree with any suggestions to the contrary," Eldridge said.
The letter claimed, for instance, that the IRS has handed over only 12,000 of the more than 64 million pages of documents initially identified as potentially relevant to the investigation into the alleged unfair targeting of conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
"This incredibly slow pace of production has been an unnecessary attempt to frustrate the committee's oversight efforts," Issa and Jordan said in the letter.
Eldridge contended, however, that "while the volume of raw data collected ... is quite high, it is a misleading figure to use in order to determine the volume of material the IRS will ultimately produce."
"The vast majority of it is completely unrelated to the congressional investigations," she said.
"Once the data is limited to the time period in question, and the issue in question, we expect the final tally of produced documents will be far lower — in the neighborhood of 460,000 documents or fewer."
Eldridge said that 70 of 1,500 or so attorneys in the IRS chief counsel's office were currently working full time to respond to congressional inquiries into the matter.
It is a "time- and labor-intensive review process," she said.
In addition, the Issa-Jordan letter also complained that documents produced by the IRS "contain excessive redactions that go well beyond those necessary to protect confidential taxpayer information."
The letter also asserted that a senior IRS official — Cindy Thomas — had been "affirmatively prevented" from providing congressional investigators with relevant documents in her possession.
Additionally, Issa blasted the agency for allegedly trying to "carefully orchestrate the public release" of information contained in a 30-day review of the matter back in June — before providing the information to the committee.
Capitol Hill Republicans have long insisted that after President Barack Obama was first elected, the IRS started unfairly targeting conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status.
Democrats, however, argue the IRS improperly scrutinized groups on both the left and right as part of a clumsy attempt to administer vague election-related tax laws.
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2)In post-Obama America, small inroads with blacks would be big for GOP
By James Rosen and Kevin Thibodeaux
Down in Monroe, La., hard by Black Bayou Lake, U.S. Rep. Rodney Alexander wonders why Republican leaders in Washington haven't sought his advice on their initiative to improve the party's anemic standing among African-American voters.
Compared with his Republican peers in the House of Representatives, Alexander is unusually adept at drawing black votes.
"It's something they should have been doing to begin with," Alexander said of his party's new outreach to black voters.
Alexander's congressional district is one-third black, the largest share among the 234 House districts held by Republicans — none of whom is African-American.
Nationwide, nine in 10 black voters chose Democrats over Republicans in congressional races in November, and 93 percent of African-Americans supported President Barack Obama over GOP nominee Mitt Romney, exit polls showed.
Alexander drew 43 percent of his African-American constituents' votes, four times more than the typical Republican lawmaker gets, on his way to winning easy re-election in November, according to a McClatchy analysis of the outcome in 93 virtually all-black precincts in his district.
"You would think (the GOP) leadership would recognize that someone who gets 78 percent of the vote in a 33 percent black district might ask me how I do that, but you're the first person who's asked," Alexander told McClatchy.
Eleven of the 234 Republican House seats are in districts where at least one-quarter of eligible voters are African-Americans, according to U.S. Census Bureau figures. Those districts are all in the South, spread among Georgia, South Carolina, Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Virginia.
McClatchy was able to obtain November 2012 precinct-level election results, broken down by race, for six of the 11 districts. McClatchy analyzed 193 precincts with an average of 94 percent African-American voters in those six districts.
Support for the white Republican lawmakers among black voters in the 11 districts varies widely, from Alexander's 43 percent and the 30 percent standing enjoyed by fellow Louisianan Rep. John Fleming, to virtually no support — in the 1 percent range — for Reps. Tom Rice of South Carolina and Martha Roby of Alabama, according to the McClatchy analysis of 187 African-American precincts in their districts.
Alexander and the other lawmakers who represent those districts have some ideas for their GOP colleagues about how to court black voters: Go into their communities, avoid inflammatory language, don't come across like a big shot and answer all questions forthrightly no matter how tough.
"I don't think you'll find anybody at my town hall meetings who thought that I used harsh rhetoric," said Rep. Mick Mulvaney of South Carolina.
While Republicans' outreach to Hispanics has received broad attention of late, the Republican National Committee, led by chairman Reince Priebus, has launched a less-heralded bid to break Democrats' electoral stranglehold on African-American votes.
Under Priebus' new motto "Open for Repairs," the initiatives are part of Republicans' broader rebranding effort following Obama's decisive defeat of Romney with strong support from women, youth, blacks, Hispanics and Asians.
"Young voters are increasingly rolling their eyes at what the party represents, and many minorities wrongly think that Republicans do not like them or want them in the country," a task force of GOP leaders concluded in a March report.
As they begin to look toward the post-Obama era, even modest improvements among African-American voters could bring Republicans big electoral gains.
President George W. Bush got 16 percent of the Ohio black vote in 2004, helping him carry the decisive state in his narrow re-election win. Only 3 percent of African-Americans in Ohio voted for Romney in November, by contrast, and the former Massachusetts governor had drop-offs among blacks in Florida, Virginia and other swing states that he lost.
Republicans, though, face formidable challenges in their quest to increase support among African-Americans:
—Their intense criticism of Obama is viewed by many blacks as personal and hostile, likely offsetting any steps they take to build goodwill with African-Americans.
"Today it's racial because you have a black man in the White House and they are determined to make him a failure," said James Bradford, a black constituent of Alexander in Jonesboro, La. "They are attacking every program that affects black folks. That may not be their intention, but that's what they're doing."
—The GOP-controlled House of Representatives has voted 37 times to repeal what Republicans deride as Obamacare, even though the Senate Democratic majority makes those votes purely symbolic. Voting dozens of times to repudiate Obama's signature legislative achievement strikes blacks as political overkill.
—Most congressional Republicans' desire to slash government spending has led them to target safety net programs that disproportionately impact African-Americans because a larger proportion of blacks than whites are poor.
David Bositis, who has tracked black voting for two decades while doing extensive polling and focus groups among African-Americans, said Republican officeholders in the South are setting their party back among blacks for years by blocking the enactment of the 2010 landmark health insurance law.
"Black support for Medicaid expansion is 90 percent, and yet these state legislatures and governors are not going to expand Medicaid," said Bositis, an analyst with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "There will be dead black people because of them."
The Republican National Committee task force recommended developing "best practices of Republicans who were successfully elected in districts with a high population of African-American voters."
That description fits Alexander, a sixth-term congressman who suggests one good practice: Stop using rhetoric that offends many blacks.
As Exhibit A, Alexander offered Romney's "47 percent" campaign claim that most Obama supporters view themselves as victims who are on the government dole because they don't take responsibility for their lives.
"I supported Romney, but I was very disappointed he said that," Alexander said. "It hurt all of us (Republicans). That's one reason the Republican Party gets in trouble sometimes — assuming that if you are in need of help, you are asking for something you don't deserve."
Republicans don't expect a mass political conversion of African-Americans anytime soon. But especially once Obama leaves office, they see an opening for the party of Lincoln. It must start, party leaders say, with baby steps: Republican candidates going into black communities, explaining their positions and asking for African-Americans' votes.
In South Carolina, Mulvaney didn't fare nearly as well as Alexander among the blacks who make up one-quarter of his constituents, the ninth-biggest share among all Republican House members. Mulvaney drew just 4 percent of their votes in November, according to a McClatchy analysis of 19 heavily African-American precincts in his district.
Yet Mulvaney has attended town hall meetings hosted by the local branch of the NAACP, most recently in February, when he spent two hours answering questions from a mostly black audience of about 60 people. "I'm not doing this to try and get votes," Mulvaney told McClatchy afterward. "I'm doing this because these are people I represent."
Melvin Poole, a tax-preparation firm owner and head of the Rock Hill, S.C., branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said Mulvaney gained some respect and may have picked up a few votes.
People were impressed that the second-term lawmaker walked into Freedom Temple Ministries church in Rock Hill without aides or notes, carrying only a bottle of water, and then spent so much time there.
"He got some real tough questions — about the Affordable Care Act, about the budget cuts, about jobs," Poole recalled. "He didn't cut us off and run out of the building. He stayed until every question that anybody had was asked and answered. He was really down to earth. It was like standing next to a guy in the park and just talking."
Mulvaney was surprised in January when he attended Obama's second inauguration at the U.S. Capitol and a reporter asked him why he was there, given that most of his fellow Republican lawmakers were absent.
"That's absurd," Mulvaney responded. "Forty-five percent of the people I represent voted for this gentleman, so I'm going to come and represent them at this very important proceeding."
In Mississippi, Rep. Gregg Harper was the only one of three white Republican House members who attended an emotional memorial service last month at Arlington National Cemetery for Medgar Evers on the 50th anniversary of the civil rights leader's murder.
"What happened in that murder was a great tragedy," Harper told McClatchy. "It's part of our history — not one that we're proud of, but to see where we've come is pretty remarkable. And I just wanted to be there to pay my respects."
Echoing Mulvaney, Harper added: "I didn't do that hoping I might pick up minority voters. I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do."
Some Southern states' responses to the Supreme Court's June 25 decision weakening the 1965 Voting Rights Act also might hinder Republicans' progress with African-Americans.
Republican leaders in several Southern states covered by the high court ruling, including Texas and North Carolina, have indicated they will move forward with voter ID laws that the Justice Department or federal courts had blocked or restricted. Leading civil rights groups argue that such laws depress the black vote by requiring driver's licenses or other forms of identification that relatively fewer African-Americans possess.
"It is hardly reaching out to blacks to push these harmful laws forward, particularly since there is no voter fraud that needs to be addressed with drastic legislation that disenfranchises African-Americans," said Garrard Beeney, a New York lawyer who represented the NAACP and other groups in the South Carolina voter ID case.
In Washington, the GOP rebranding task force recommended that the Republican National Committee hire black communications and political operatives to head the African-American outreach, which it has done. The GOP leaders made a slew of other proposals:
- Establish ties with the NAACP and other civil rights groups.
- Recruit party members at historically black colleges.
- Develop a training program for African-American Republican candidates.
- Create a database of black leaders.
- Promote black staffers "who should be visible and involved in senior political and budget decisions."
- Assemble a "surrogate list" of African-Americans to appear in black news media.
For Sen. Rand Paul, a Kentucky Republican and possible 2016 presidential candidate, these steps are all well and good, but he's focused on more concrete measures.
Paul and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., are pushing a bill to authorize judges to disregard mandatory minimum sentences for an array of federal crimes, many of them drug-related. Such sentences, which give judges no leeway in setting punishment even for relatively minor crimes, have helped swell the country's inmate population, with a disproportionate impact on young black men.
Paul is developing separate legislation to prevent federal grants to police and sheriff departments from being tied to arrest rates, which he says leads officers to detain a disproportionate number of African-Americans.
"We think it's at the very least implicitly racist, and we're going to put a stop to it," Paul told McClatchy. Mulvaney, the South Carolina Republican, has learned to vet his language closely when speaking with African-American and Hispanic constituents — and to free it from Republican ideological baggage.
"In those ethnic groups, the word 'community' has a very powerful cultural meaning," he said. "To many white Republicans, we respond to that word as a synonym for the government. We sit here, and we extol the role of the individual over the role of the community, because many of us equate community with government. And I think by doing that, we alienate some folks to our message."
Mulvaney, though, thinks it will take a "transformational figure" to draw significant numbers of blacks to the Republican Party.
Mulvaney believes that such a figure will have to be an African-American. He names Sen. Tim Scott, a fellow South Carolinian who is the only black Republican in Congress, and J.C. Watts, the former college football star and lawmaker from Oklahoma.
Scott dislikes focusing on the color of his skin, much like Obama. He does, though, believe that his personal story of having risen from an impoverished childhood to a prominent place in American politics could gain him an audience that other Republicans don't have.
"It's really taking the time to share my personal journey, which has a lot of roadblocks, a lot of hurdles and a lot of failure, and connecting that to the American dream and how it is available to all of us," Scott said in an interview.
"And perhaps if pain and failure lead forward, I have an opportunity to share that with others," Scott said. "I hope to be part of bringing that message to (South Carolina) and maybe one day to the nation."
While Watts remains a loyal Republican, he's skeptical that his party's new push for African-American loyalists will have much staying power.
"The key is to put teeth into it and to be real about it," Watts said last month while attending the North Carolina Republican Convention in Charlotte. "I'll believe it when I see it."
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Kerry’s pathetic peace talks
Back in the 1960s, dorm rooms across America featured a cutesy wall poster that read, “What if they gave a war and nobody came?” The similar question to be asked in light of the big-nothing event this week in Washington is: “What if they gave peace talks and nobody cared?”
You may not even know that so-called “peace negotiations” began yesterday between Israel and the Palestinians under the stage management of Secretary of State John Kerry.
There was a time when you would have known — oh, would you have known. The fact of the talks would’ve screamed at you from the front pages, would’ve begun every nightly newscast, would’ve been the subject of every editorial, every op-ed, every talking-head panel.
Now? Bupkis. That’s the Yiddish word for “nothing,” and it’s the mot juste for what’s going on here.
The urgent need to negotiate a peace between the two parties has always been based on a widely held theory that has been utterly discredited by recent history. The theory held that instability and tension in the Middle East was driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so solving it was the key to moving forward in the region.
Who on earth thinks that now? The Arab world has been on fire for 2 1/2 years now as a result of events and circumstances having absolutely nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. For more than two years, Islamists and would-be democrats and military-junta types in Egypt have been enmeshed in a titanic roundelay in which Israel does not figure.
Syrians are locked in a horrifyingly bloody civil war in which all the violent dysfunctions of the Arab world are now in play.
For once, no one is blaming the Jews, or acting as though the way to calm the storm is to create a Palestinian state.
(Many of those who preached this false gospel actually don’t want the storm calmed: They want Assad to fall in Syria, and they want the streets of Cairo to remain under siege so that neither the Army nor the Muslim Brotherhood feels it has the right to dominate Egypt.)
Meanwhile, back over where the peace talks are going to be happening, the Palestinian Authority is saddled with an increasingly dysfunctional government. The president, Mahmoud Abbas, can’t find himself a prime minister to run the place. The man in the job, the respected economist Salam Fayyad, quit earlier this year; his replacement lasted all of two weeks. The post is unfilled at what we are told may be a hinge moment in world history.
So, yeah.
Abbas has been governing illegally since 2009, after he canceled an election he feared he would lose. And this is the man — politically compromised at best with no one credible to back him up — who is going to make a highly complex deal with the Israelis? Please.
The Palestinian political system is cleaved in two, just as the land controlled by the Palestinians is divided. The Palestinian Authority rules over the West Bank; Hamas rules over the Gaza Strip. They hate each other.
Hamas has no interest in a deal with Israel; its stated purpose is the destruction of the Jewish state. And the Palestinian Authority has made it clear for the greater part of two decades that it can only accept a deal with Israel in theory, not in practice.
So here we are: Civil war in Syria, Egypt on fire and John Kerry trying to broker a deal with Palestinians who can’t deal and an Israeli prime minister who seems willing to go along with the charade (including releasing more than 100 terrorists from prison, a move the Israeli public hates) to make nice with the new man at Foggy Bottom.
This summer spectacular is already a bigger bomb than “The Lone Ranger.”
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4)The challenges that face Hillary Clinton
By Douglas Shoen
Young people are the core constituency that elected Obama twice — and in America, those under 30 simply do not have a chance at achieving the same success as their parents. Even if you look just at student loans, a small piece of the challenge affecting younger people, total outstanding loans topped $1 trillion for the first time in 2011. That’s a tremendous amount to pay back, especially with so few available jobs. Unless Clinton develops an agenda that speaks directly to young people’s needs and concerns, she will fall short.
More generally, she needs to develop a unifying agenda that seeks to reduce economic inequality, which has reached all-time highs, through growth-oriented policies. This cannot be done through redistributive policies of the type Obama repeatedly articulates.
Rather, it can be accomplished only with an agenda focusing on economic growth, tax reform and energy independence through the continued development of a multifaceted domestic energy industry — the kind of agenda that can attract a critical mass of support in both parties. She needs to move off fairness and redistribution to emphasize growth and tax policies that encourage investment.
Such an agenda would offer a stark, and arguably welcome, contrast with the administration’s incoherent populist program dedicated to more stimulus, higher taxes and, ultimately, redistribution of wealth.
Rather than dividing and polarizing America, as both parties have done, Clinton needs to take a different approach. She must emphasize the essential unity and singularity of the American experience in promoting a new and attainable American dream. To be sure, this will have different specific policy components for various groups: enterprise zones for impoverished communities, immigration reform and a renewed commitment to vocational training and community colleges to give everyone a fair shot at succeeding. She also will have to emphasize training and retraining for workers who have been marginalized by the current economy.
This approach would stand in sharp contrast to the president’s, with his recent emphasis on redistribution above all else and very little talk of tax reform and economic growth. While Obama has been hiding behind terms like “broken Washington” and “ineffective government,” Clinton has the opportunity to offer specificity and a clear, long-term vision for America.
Beyond America’s borders, Clinton needs to go back to the approach she took on foreign policy before her presidential campaign, when she spoke clearly and directly about coercive diplomacy. The United States has increasingly found itself in a weakened position, whether in Middle East hot spots like Egypt and Syria or toward rogue states like North Korea and Iran. NSA leaker Edward Snowden’s quest for asylum only accentuates the impression of an administration playing catch up on the international stage.
Politicians typically fight the last war. In the next campaign, Clinton will most likely be sadly mistaken if she thinks that trying to reprise the Obama 2012 campaign will maximize her chances of victory. Obama, after all, got only 51 percent of the vote running against a particularly inept candidate whose résumé and rhetoric directly played into the president’s class-based campaign. It may well help her in the primaries to have a super PAC run by two aging veterans of the Democratic left, Harold Ickes and James Carville, and staffed by two young veterans of the Obama campaign, Jeremy Bird and Mitch Stewart, but it provides little confidence that Clinton is planning to develop the type of inclusive, growth-oriented, optimistic message she will need in 2016.
Put simply, Clinton must provide clear evidence that she understands more than just the suffering the American people have faced in these past few difficult years. She must transcend Washington’s deepening partisan divisions and speak fundamentally about the need to unify and revitalize America with a set of policies that put her not on the left or the right but above the current political divide. That’s how she can win.
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