Sen. Rubio slams our JV president for his actions. (See 1a below.)
My own sentiments, Jeb Bush is slammed because of Baker's history and Krauthammer tells it like it is!. (See 1b, 1c and 1d below.)
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Obama to America - I demand you vote! (See 2 below)
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Will Hillary serve it up? (See 3 below.)
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I visited the Sav. Classical Academy this week and those who join me on April 17, are in for a pleasant surprise. Ben, the headmaster, took us around, introduced us to many of the kids, always by name, and the experience took me back to my own grade school days where discipline and a great learning environment ruled.
The Academy is fulfilling the dream of exposing kids, from Chatham County, to a rigorous education, teaching them personal skills that will last them a life time and giving them opportunities that will make them better, happier and more productive citizens and eventual parents.
SAC can be replicated once politicians move out of the way and let solid educators do what they are trained to do.
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Dick
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1) The Crisis Has Exploded
Today, the president of the United States told the prime minister of Israel he was reassessing America’s “options” with regard to Israel in light of remarks Benjamin Netanyahu made about potential Palestinian statehood and an election-day Facebook post urging Israeli right-wingers to go to the polls on Monday to counter a surge in Israeli Arab voters.
The crisis in the relationship we discuss in our new editorial statement has entered a new and potentially unprecedented phase.
It may well be that the president is going to present American Jews with a choice over the coming months no American president should ask us to make—to become parties to and participants in his effort to create what, in 2009, he called “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel.
First, to the two-state issue. There’s simply no question Netanyahu was willfully and purposefully misunderstood late last week when hostile reporters announced he had withdrawn his support for a two-state solution. That was not true. What he said was this: “I think that anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state today and evacuate lands is giving attack grounds to radical Islam against the state of Israel.” The key word is “ today.” Today. He did not say never. He said such a state was impossible today, and that is simply a statement of fact. So when, in a television interview this afternoon, he told Andrea Mitchell that yes, he believed in the two-state solution, he was saying nothing new. Any minimally fair interpretation of Netanyahu’s remarks makes that clear. We are told Netanyahu reiterated the point in the phone call with the president, and that he was told Obama didn’t believe him.
[UPDATE: In response to this piece, some have claimed I distorted Netanyahu’s view because he replied “indeed” when an interviewer asked whether he was saying there would be no Palestinian state during his premiership. But that “indeed” is entirely of a piece with the “today” comment—one can support the two-state solution as the only theoretical answer to the problem and still be pretty sure no such solution is in the cards for another four years. It was the Palestinians who walked away from the table in 2013, not Israel; and Gaza’s ruling Hamas party wasn’t even involved in the talks. Netanyahu’s own stated principles for a Palestinian state—that it renounce terror, recognize the Jewish state as a Jewish, forego the so-called “right of return”—would have been the basis for any negotiation, even by the Center-Left coalition, and the Palestinians are so far away from any such acknowledgments the issue of statehood was barely raised during the Israeli election campaign.]
The fact that the president is using the twisting of Netanyahu’s words as one basis for a reassessment of the relationship is the purest evidence yet of his hanging-judge cast of mind when it comes to Israel and its prime minister. He is looking for any excuse to come down hard on the foreign politician Obama loathes the most—and to create that “daylight” for which he is so eager.
Now to the question of Arab voters. Let me stipulate for the purposes of this discussion that the Facebook post was a terrible mistake, since it has had deleterious consequences and was entirely unnecessary. It came only a few hours before the polls closed and, as we now know, the size of Likud’s victory on Monday was so decisive nothing Bibi said so late could have done much to boost Likud’s enormous 200,000 margin over the second-place Zionist Union coalition. Let me stipulate as well that concerned American Jews have every right to feel what Likud did was wrong, although I think it is important to note no effort was made to suppress a single Arab vote but rather to frighten potential Likud voters with the prospect of a strong showing by the state’s non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Arab parties—to get them not to waste a vote on a smaller right-wing party but to go with Bibi instead.
But fine. If you want to hate what Netanyahu said, hate it. Here’s the thing: How the prime minister of Israel talks about Israeli citizens who possess equal rights under the law and have their own means of redress under the law if they are mistreated should have no basis whatever in the “assessment” of the bilateral relationship between the United States and Israel. The president has spent years making very nice patter with Turkey’s Erdogan and other foreign leaders whose treatment of minorities do not deserve mention alongside Israel’s and whose suffering small sub-populations have no means of achieving redress.
So even those who are furious with Netanyahu should really take a breath and a close look and consider this point carefully: The Arab-vote business is a pretext. American presidents, this one especially, typically do not revisit special strategic relationships based on election-day maneuvers in a democracy, however unpleasant they might find them. In my view, Obama is hoping once again to use liberal Jewish disaffection in the United States with Netanyahu as a wedge to give him space to make a major policy pivot from the special relationship—one for which he has hungered since he came into office.
Hovering over and above and behind all this is, of course, the negotiation with Iran—and Netanyahu’s standing to criticize it as the most influential foreign leader outside the United States with a view of it. Pummelling Bibi now and compelling him to take whatever steps he can to mollify the president before Obama announces he will accede to moves against Israel in various international fora has the added advantage to the president of raising the stakes on further Netanyahu criticism of an Iran deal to a level Bibi may not be willing to risk.
We may be hard upon a great moment of testing for American Jews. Are they going to fall for this? Are they going to allow themselves to be used as a wedge against Israel in hostile territory like the United Nations? Are they going to provide more ammunition to the president and his effort to still his critics only weeks before the United States might be announcing its acquiescence to the gravest existential threat the Jewish people have faced since the Holocaust?
1a)
Watch: Senator Rubio Rips Obama's 'Historic Mistake' on Israel
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/192932#.VQwlLwsPOsg.gmail
Rubio gives impassioned speech revealing Obama's 'outrageous' hypocrisy and enmity concerning Israel with elections fallout.
By Ari Yashar, Gil Ronen
Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Thursday night delivered a powerful speech against US President Barack Obama's increasing hostility towards Israel after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's elections victory, as the White House threatened to pull support for Israel at the UN.
Rubio began by noting "Israel is everything we want that region of the world to be," pointing out the Jewish state's democracy, free enterprise economy, and status as a strong American ally.
Speaking about Israel's "unique purpose" as "the homeland for the Jewish people in the aftermath of the Second World War and of the Holocaust," he noted his pride that America has "stood behind the Jewish state for all of these years."
However, that support is in danger he charged, pointing that as of the time of his speech Obama had yet to call Netanyahu to congratulate him on his victory - the call came later on Thursday night, a full two days after elections.
Rubio revealed the hypocrisy of the delay, given that in 2012 Obama was among the first to call and congratulate Russia's Vladimir Putin, President Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as well as Chinese Communist leaders, and in 2013 he likewise rushed to call Iranian president Hassan Rouhani.
The senator provided an overview of Obama's noted slant in bashing Israel back from his campaigning days in 2008.
At eight minutes and 25 seconds into the video, Rubio turns up the heat, focusing on the post-election fallout.
Obama accused Netanyahu of "divisive language" in the elections, noted Rubio, saying the criticism was hypocritical given that Obama "was elected at least once, probably twice, on extremely divisive language."
Making the hypocrisy of the criticism more apparent according to Rubio is that after Iran's "fraudulent election" of 2009, a local Green Revolution started and was violently put down - in that case, Obama refused to "interfere in the sovereignty of Iran."
Obama has also harped on Netanyahu for saying the conditions for a two-state solution do not exist, threatening to reconsider the US's position in the UN and possibly allow a resolution recognizing the Palestinian Authority (PA) as a state.
"Obama is making an historic mistake"
Rubio argued the conditions are not right for a peace deal. He pointed to how Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza turned them into rocket launching grounds, how the PA turned down every peace offer, how 6% of the PA budget goes to jailed terrorists and their families including with foreign donor money, and gave multiple illustrations of PA incitement.
"These are the people that this president wants to put pressure on them (Israel) to cut a peace deal with," emphasized Rubio. "I think Netanyahu is right that the conditions do not exist for a peace deal with people who teach their children that killing Jews is a glorious thing...that there's no such thing as a Jewish people, that any methods of destroying them is valid, that pay them salaries and benefits."
Rubio asserted "this president is making an historic mistake. Allies have differences, but allies like Israel, when you have a difference with them and you make it public, it emboldens their enemies...to launch more terrorist attacks, to go to more international forums and delegitimize Israel's right to exist."
Denouncing Obama's anti-Israel rhetoric, Rubio said "this is outrageous, it is irresponsible, it is dangerous, and it betrays the commitment this nation has made to the right of a Jewish state to exist in peace."
"They deserve to be treated with more respect, not less, than this president is giving the supreme leader of Iran," he added, noting Obama is wary of upsetting Iran to as not to harm the nuclear deal being formed.
"If America doesn't stand with Israel, who would we stand with?" posed Rubio. "If they are not worthy of our unconditional support, then what ally of ours around the world can feel safe in their alliance with us?"
1b) Where Do You Stand? What ill You Do?
I opposed candidate Obama from the git go, not because he was a Democrat, but because I considered him unqualified. I saw him as the political equivalent of the star in Meredith Wilson's "The Music Man."
Subsequent events have reconfirmed my view and apparently, polling data, suggests many others have come to a similar conclusion, albeit late.
Now our JV president is pursuing policies that, in my humble opinion, are unfavorable not only to America but also to Israel, one of our nation's strongest allies and supporters! In doing so, Obama is placing Jews in an historic and unprecedented position of validating his threat of pulling away from America's relationship with and support of Israel. I find this both disturbing and bordering on anti-Semitism.
Because Netanyahu has been unwilling to succumb to Abbas' demands, when there has been no Palestinian quid pro quo, a refusal to recognize Israel's right to exist and be accepted as the established Jewish state, he has been treated by this president as a pariah.
Furthermore, were Europe not dependent on Russian and Middle East oil, I daresay they would not be supportive of the contrived Palestinian cause. Whereas Israel has absorbed millions of refugees, Jews and non-Jews, the U.N has continued to support Palestinian refugees who serve as pawns in order to justify the fraudulent claim the problems of the world are directly attributable to Israeli intransigence and settlements. This myth is due to the fact that 57 Arab and Muslim nations have been allowed to hijack the U.N. and much of the rest of the world is led by feckless hypocrites who are also anti-Semitic.
I suspect the pressures against Israel will mount as Obama pursues an agreement allowing Iran to gain nuclear status, if they have not already, regardless of whether they change their behaviour and demonstrate they no longer wish to be the world's biggest terrorist state and a threat to world stability.
Obama appears prepared to throw the gauntlet down with respect to his opposition to Congress' having a say and America's long standing relationship with Israel out of petulance because his misguided proposal, regarding Iran, has been challenged.
I am sure there are Jews who fear supporting Israel at this time out of concern over breaking with Obama. There are many Jews who believe Israel should never have become a nation in the first place. That is their right though I disagree with their position.
A strong Israel, in my opinion,has allowed Jews, worldwide, to stand taller and to be proud of Israel's unbelievable accomplishments in all facets of life and under the most difficult of circumstances.
The time has come for every Jew to ask themselves where they stand and what they will do?
1c) Jeb Bush Condemned Over Speech at Anti-Israel Conference
Jeb adviser James Baker to keynote J Street conference
Leading talk show host and best-selling author Mark Levin assailed Jeb Bush last night over the revelation that one of his top foreign policy advisers, James Baker, will keynote an anti-Israel conference this weekend.
The annual conference of the activist group J Street features an array of anti-Israel speakers, including proponents of the Boycott, Sanctions, and Divest (BDS) movement, which seeks Israel’s destruction, and advocates for the terrorist group Hamas.
Jeb Bush’s selection of Baker as a foreign policy adviser has sparked concern among conservatives and in the Jewish and pro-Israel communities. Baker is infamous for his hostility to Israel, having said during his tenure as secretary of state in the George H.W. Bush administration, “F—k the Jews, they don’t vote for us anyway.” Baker is also a supporter of President Obama’s Iran negotiations.
“Jim Baker, much like Barack Obama, has always had a hate on for Israel,” Levin said. “This antipathy toward Israel is well documented. Baker wanted the U.S. to punish Israel for destroying Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor [in a 1981 airstrike]. He hated Netanyahu as early as 1990, barring him from entering the State Department’s building. And last but not least, Baker co-wrote the Iraq Study Group’s 2006 paper that recommended among other things that the United States tilt its foreign policy away from Israel and toward Syria and Iran—advice that Obama seems to have taken to heart.”
“This is the guy, the leading advisor to Jeb Bush on foreign policy, who Jeb Bush asked to be his leading adviser, and now he’s the keynote speaker to this left-wing hate group J Street,” Levin said.
Update: Bush spokesman Tim Miller sent the following statement: “Governor Bush consults with a broad group of advisors, reflecting different views. The Governor’s own record on Israel is one of strong and unwavering support. When it comes to J Street, in particular, he firmly opposes lobbying groups whose actions undermine Israel’s efforts to defend itself.”
1d) No Peace Any Time Soon, but Not Because of Bibi Palestinian
By Charles Krauthammer
Palestinians have demonstrated neither the will nor the leadership to sign a deal with Israel.
Of all the idiocies uttered in reaction to Benjamin Netanyahu’s stunning election victory, none is more ubiquitous than the idea that peace prospects are now dead because Netanyahu has declared that there will be no Palestinian state while he is Israel’s prime minister.
I have news for the lowing herds: There would be no peace and no Palestinian state if Isaac Herzog were prime minister either. Or Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert for that matter. The latter two were (non-Likud) prime ministers who offered the Palestinians their own state — with its capital in Jerusalem and every Israeli settlement in the new Palestine uprooted — only to be rudely rejected.
This is not ancient history. This is 2000, 2001, and 2008 — three astonishingly concessionary peace offers within the last 15 years. Every one rejected.
The fundamental reality remains: This generation of Palestinian leadership — from Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas — has never and will never sign its name to a final peace settlement dividing the land with a Jewish state. And without that, no Israeli government of any kind will agree to a Palestinian state.
Today, however, there is a second reason a peace agreement is impossible: the supreme instability of the entire Middle East. For half a century, it was run by dictators no one liked but with whom you could do business. For example, the 1974 Israel–Syria disengagement agreement yielded more than four decades of near-total quiet on the border because the Assad dictatorships so decreed.
That authoritarian order is gone. Syria is wracked by a multi-sided civil war that has killed 200,000 people and that has al-Qaeda allies, Hezbollah fighters, government troops, and even the occasional Iranian general prowling the Israeli border. Who inherits? No one knows. In the last four years, Egypt has had two revolutions and three radically different regimes. Yemen went from pro-American to Iranian client so quickly the U.S. had to evacuate its embassy in a panic. Libya has gone from Moammar Qaddafi’s crazy authoritarianism to jihadi-dominated civil war. On Wednesday, Tunisia, the one relative success of the Arab Spring, suffered a major terror attack that the prime minister said “targets the stability of the country.”
From Mali to Iraq, everything is in flux. Amid this mayhem, by what magic would the West Bank, riven by a bitter Fatah–Hamas rivalry, be an island of stability? What would give any Israeli–Palestinian peace agreement even a modicum of durability?
There was a time when Arafat commanded the Palestinian movement the way Qaddafi commanded Libya. Abbas commands no one. Why do you think he is in the eleventh year of a four-year term, having refused to hold elections for the last five years? Because he’s afraid he would lose to Hamas.
With or without elections, the West Bank could fall to Hamas overnight. At which point fire rains down on Tel Aviv, Ben Gurion Airport, and the entire Israeli urban heartland — just as it rains down on southern Israel from Gaza when it suits Hamas.
Any Arab–Israeli peace settlement would require Israel to make dangerous and inherently irreversible territorial concessions on the West Bank in return for promises and guarantees. Under current conditions, these would be written on sand.
Israel is ringed by jihadi terrorists in Sinai, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Islamic State and Iranian proxies in Syria, and a friendly but highly fragile Jordan. Israelis have no idea who ends up running any of these places.
Well, say the critics. Israel could be given outside guarantees. Guarantees? Like the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which the U.S., Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s “territorial integrity”? Like the red line in Syria? Like the unanimous U.N. resolutions declaring illegal any Iranian enrichment of uranium — now effectively rendered null?
Peace awaits three things. Eventual Palestinian acceptance of a Jewish state. A Palestinian leader willing to sign a deal based on that premise. A modicum of regional stability that allows Israel to risk the potentially fatal withdrawals such a deal would entail.
I believe such a day will come. But there is zero chance it comes now or even soon. That’s essentially what Netanyahu said in explaining — and softening — on Thursday his no-Palestinian-state statement.
In the interim, I understand the crushing disappointment of the Obama administration and its media poodles at the spectacular success of the foreign leader they loathe more than any other on the planet. The consequent seething and sputtering are understandable, if unseemly. Blaming Netanyahu for banishing peace, however, is mindless.
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2) Obama Urges Soviet-Style Voting Laws
Posted By Matthew Vadum, In FrontPage
Forcing Americans to vote under threat of legal penalty would help to fundamentally transform America, President Obama told a town hall-style meeting in Cleveland yesterday.
It is the latest radical leveling scheme that flows from the president’s totalitarian impulses. It is also consistent with his support for “Net Neutrality,” which is a form of censorship and his opposition to the landmark Citizens United decision that affirmed a conservative activist group’s constitutionally guaranteed right to make a movie critical of Hillary Clinton. It is an assault on American democracy itself because one of the ways that people express themselves politically is to stay home on Election Day. Compelled speech is not free speech.
“It would be transformative if everybody voted,” Obama said just months after his party was crushed in off-year congressional elections that gave Republicans control of both houses of Congress., rammed thru in Clinton's first
“That would counteract [campaign] money more than anything,” the president said during a discussion about reducing the role of money in elections. “If everybody voted, then it would completely change the political map in this country.”
Australia and a handful of other countries have mandatory voting laws, he noted. Pushing for such laws in the U.S. “may end up being a better strategy in the short term” than attacking Americans’ right to make campaign donations.
It would be “fun” for the U.S. to look at a constitutional amendment taking aim at campaign money, he said, but “realistically, given the requirements of that process, that would be a long-term proposition.” (Such a proposed constitutional amendment is currently pending in Congress.)
Obama whined that Democrats often don’t get around to voting in midterm elections. “The people who tend not to vote are young, they’re lower income, they’re skewed more heavily towards immigrant groups and minority groups,” he said.
But Obama only wants the right people to vote. That didn’t happen in the fall so he wants to force lazy Democrats off their couches and into voting booths. As theWashington Times reports, “in House races nationwide last November, about 5 million more Republican voters cast ballots than Democratic voters.”
What Obama didn’t say was that forced voting would benefit the Left. Making everyone including ultra low-information voters cast ballots would promote the redistribution of wealth and provide Democrats a permanent electoral advantage.
Honest leftists admit this while they clothe their rhetoric in moral garments and hoary civic cliches about the joys of full political participation.
Leftist academics, for example, favor mandatory voting because it leads to Marxist mobocracy.
The pursuit of the holy grail of so-called social justice serves as the justification for a never-ending war that the Left helps the nonproductive elements of society wage against the productive. Left-wingers suffer from a pathological hatred of material inequality and they abhor the freedoms guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution. It bothers them to no end that some Americans have more stuff than others.
Academics “Down Under,” where failing to vote is against the law, apparently share the same pathologies as their American counterparts.
According to Lisa Hill, a politics professor at the University of Adelaide in Australia, “America has a serious voter turnout problem,” and as a result “American democracy is dying.” Of course this foreign doomsayer presents no credible evidence that this is a problem in American society. Her chief concern is that there are some Americans who have more money than other Americans.
Forcing Americans to vote would boost the redistributionist efforts of government, transferring wealth from those who earned it to those who did not, she openly admits:
“The most decisive means for arresting turnout decline and closing the socioeconomic voting gap is mandatory voting: in fact, it is the only mechanism that can push turnout anywhere near 95 percent. Places with mandatory voting also have less wealth inequality, lower levels of political corruption and higher levels of satisfaction with the way democracy is working than voluntary systems.”
Boiled down to its essence, Professor Hill’s phony, self-serving, good-government claptrap, promotes the growth of government and involuntary transfers of wealth.
Besides, close to 100 percent voter turnout isn’t necessarily a sign that democratic culture is thriving in a country, contrary to Hill’s implication. History suggests the opposite. Sky-high voter participation is associated with despotic regimes that punish citizens for not voting. (The Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, or International IDEA, offers an interesting primer on compulsory voting at its website.)
“In undemocratic regimes it is often the case that political and social pressure, intimidation or other means drive people to the polls,” according to the Centre for European Policy Studies. “This was the case in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe and still occurs in Central Asia and North Korea.”
But left-wingers are broken records, always complaining about supposedly inadequate voter participation rates, something that is only a problem in the eyes of control freaks. They want to expand the electorate by any means possible. They want, as the fraudsters of ACORN demonstrated for four decades, the dead, cartoon characters, and fictional figures to be registered to vote and to actually cast ballots. The want felons, an important constituency in the Democratic Party, to vote.
Boosting voter turnout was President Bill Clinton’s first legislative priority even though he “had just won an election in which the country had seen the largest increase in voter turnout in a generation,” according to journalist John Fund. “Nonetheless, President Clinton declared a ‘crisis’ in civic participation and proceeded to ram the proposed law through Congress.”
Trotskyist academics Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven lobbied vigorously for the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, commonly known as the Motor-Voter law.
Flooding the electoral system with massive numbers of know-nothing voters would promote radical upheaval in American society, Cloward and Piven argued.
“Enlisting millions of new and politicized voters is the way to create an electoral environment hospitable to fundamental change in American society,” they explained in a 1983 article titled “Toward a Class-Based Realignment of American Politics: A Movement Strategy,” as I
wrote in my book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers.
“An enlarged and politicized electorate will sustain and encourage the movements in American society that are already working for the rights of women and minorities, for the protection of the social programs, and for transformation of foreign policy. Equally important, an enlarged and politicized electorate will foster and protect future mass movements from the bottom that the ongoing economic crisis is likely to generate, thus opening American politics to solutions to the economic crisis that express the interests of the lower strata of the population … The objective is to accelerate the dealigning forces already at work in American politics, and to promote party realignment along class lines.”
Artificially enlarging the electorate beyond those who bother to keep abreast of public affairs can only help progressives. Obama knows this. This is why he spends so much time trying to be cool, reaching out to the uneducated and the ignorant, reading comical Top 10 lists on late night TV shows, and referencing trivial things in interviews. He knows he can lie to his audience with impunity because its members have little to no idea what he actually stands for. They vote for him because they like him and feel that he cares about them. They are unable to connect him to his disastrous policies that are destroying America. In other words, they are ideal voters, as far as the Left is concerned. And it is no coincidence that Obama and other left-wingers also support open borders and immigration amnesties for illegal aliens because they know the new voters will be grateful to Democrats and support them for life. After all, who doesn’t like Santa Claus?
Obama, the Red diaper baby, embraced Cloward and Piven’s class warfare-based electoral strategy in 1992 when he worked for ACORN’s Project Vote affiliate. “All our people must know that politics and voting affects their lives directly,” he said. “If we’re registering people in public housing, for an example, we talk about aid cuts and who’s responsible.”
Out of appreciation for their hard work on the Motor-Voter legislation, President Clinton hosted Cloward and Piven at the signing ceremony for the bill and thanked them by name.
That law turned welfare offices into voter registration centers and encouraged nonprofit groups to conduct registration drives. It also opened the door to massive voter fraud. The law invites voter fraud by forcing states to register on the spot anyone seeking a government benefit such as a renewal of a driver’s license or welfare.
The statute also forbids officials from demanding proof of U.S. citizenship or identification. States were also forced to allow mail-in voter registration, which made it easy for troublemaking activists to place false names on the rolls without any human contact with a government official. Mail-in voting, of course, is the opposite of the secret ballot because a bureaucrat has to examine the mailed-in ballot. States were also under orders not to purge the dead, criminals, or people who moved from the voter rolls for a minimum of eight years.
Now that the Left has partially rigged the electoral system, they want to force everybody to vote.
An Obama alumnus brought up mandatory balloting almost three years ago. During the 2012 election cycle when ever so briefly it seemed that Mitt Romney might actually have a shot at ousting Obama, Peter Orszag, former head of the Office of Management and Budget, floated the idea of coerced voting.
Orszag moaned that even though the U.S. “prides itself as the beacon of democracy … it’s very likely no U.S. president has ever been elected by a majority of American adults. It’s our own fault — because voter participation rates are running below 60 percent, a candidate would have to win 85 percent or more of the vote to be elected by a majority.”
The former top Obama bureaucrat then revealed that his real motivation was to launch an assault on Americans’ constitutionally protected free speech rights.
“Beyond simply raising participation, compulsory voting could alter the role of money in elections. Turn-out-the-vote efforts, often bankrolled by big-money groups, would become largely irrelevant. Negative advertising could be less effective, because a central aim of such ads is to discourage participation in the opponent’s camp.”
Obama and his lackeys only support democracy when they are on the winning side. When they lose and their candidate is in the White House, they become staunch advocates of overbearing executive actions. They rejoice at Obama’s ugly boast that he wields “a pen and a phone.”
They want to make it more difficult for Americans to express themselves during election season. They want to make it easier for people who don’t give a farthing’s cuss about the governance of the country to find their way into voting booths. They support protracted early voting periods because that makes it much more expensive to get messages out to voters. They want people who are easily manipulated and susceptible to demagoguery to cast ballots.
Left-wingers support all these things because they know that in a fair contest they could never beat patriotic Americans who aren’t hellbent on fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
Their salvation lies in ridiculous schemes like compulsory voting and lying to the public.
And they will demonize anyone who gets in their way.
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3) Gowdy Asks Clinton to Turn Over Email Server
The chairman of a House committee investigating the deadly 2012 attacks in Benghazi on Friday formally requested that Hillary Rodham Clinton turn over her email server for an independent review.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., sent a letter asking the former secretary of state to turn over to the State Department inspector general or other third party the server she used for official State Department business. The aim would be to have a third party determine what records should be made public.
"Though Secretary Clinton alone is responsible for causing this issue, she alone does not get to determine its outcome," Gowdy said in a statement. His request to turn over the server is "in the interest of transparency for the American people," Gowdy said of the former secretary of state, who is a likely a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination next year.
Clinton has pledged that all her work-related email would be made public, but acknowledged deleting thousands of messages related to personal matters. Clinton has said the server "will remain private.
House Speaker John Boehner has not ruled out a vote in the full House to force Clinton to turn over the server if she declines to make it available.
Meanwhile, the Justice Department said that it shouldn't be required under the Freedom of Information Act to provide emails from Clinton that were sent from or received by her private account. Government lawyers said in a filing to a federal appeals court late Thursday that the FOIA law "creates no obligation for an agency to search for and produce records that it does not possess and control."
The Justice Department acted on the State Department's behalf in a lawsuit by Freedom Watch, a conservative group led by Larry Klayman, who has filed dozens of lawsuits against the Clintons in the past. Klayman asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to hold Hillary Clinton and top aide Cheryl Mills in criminal contempt in relation to its request for documents.
Klayman says the court also should issue a subpoena for the seizure and production of the computer file server that was used to store and process Clinton's emails. The Justice Department said the requests should be denied.
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