Insult Laws

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

An important part of the ONE Campaign’s effort to involve young men and women in Africa in helping to determine the next round of Millennium Development Goals for 2015 is a project called “You Choose.”

You Choose involves utilizing mobile phone numbers by large corporations asking users (at no cost) to text a certain message to a certain number if they want to become involved. Then they get to go through a decision-tree and pick out the issues they think should be highlighted.

This, as you might imagine, has taken the time and talents of some of the best young organizers in southern Africa and we’ve had the opportunity to catch up with some of them both in South Africa and in Malawi. Continue reading →

It’s the Sun Flares, Stupid

BY WILLIAM F. GAVIN

I awoke this morning to learn from the TV news that there are gigantic sun flares on the sun, among the largest ever recorded.

Then I turned to the Washington Post editorial page.  The lead editorial was a scathing condemnation of the IRS for its treatment of conservative political groups. But it was the op-ed page that really surprised me.

The left-hand column, written by Charles Lane, criticized an energy scheme by Rep. Ed Markey, Massachusetts arch-liberal (or do I repeat myself?). In the middle of the page were two columns, one by George Will, the other by Michael Gerson. Each, in its own way, condemned the administration for the IRS scandal and President Obama for his recent (and all too typical) speech at Ohio State University  in which he  sneered at conservatives who “warn that [government] tyranny is just around the corner”. Continue reading →

Right Wing on a Roll

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

It has been a good couple of weeks for conservative activists. They have been able to take issues that they care deeply about and get the MSM (or main-stream media) to pay attention.

First, it was the trial of abortion doctor Kermit Gosnell that caught fire.

I noticed on my Facebook page some of my “friends” kept talking about this Philadelphia doctor who killed babies after they were born. They were complaining bitterly how the trial was not being covered by anybody outside of Philly.

And as it turned out, they were right. The MSM didn’t cover the story for weeks, especially in Washington. But late last month, a switch seemed to turn, and the GR888, even Morning Joe would talk about it on their roundtable discussions. Continue reading →

The New York Times: Living in the Dark Ages?

BY WILLIAM F. GAVIN

Reading the New York Times on Sunday always reminds me what a technical and professional wonder that newspaper is. For breadth and depth of coverage, good writing, and cultural news, it has few if any real challengers. But it is so afflicted with obvious left/liberal bias in its news coverage (or, often, lack of coverage), and especially in its doctrinaire editorials, it has become a tragic case of  ideological rigidity.

It is as if someone created an automobile that was a miracle of design, performance, and style, with one fatal flaw–it could only turn left.

But how can this be? How can highly educated, articulate, bright, professionally competent, ambitious people who run and staff the Times not realize the blatant prejudice that so often distorts news coverage in what they print and what they fail to print? These are people who worship at the shrine of reason and science, proclaim their own fairness, and believe, as most left/liberals do, that they are simply smarter than everyone else, especially conservatives. Continue reading →

Independent Investigation of the IRS

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

At midnight on June 30, 1999, the statute that authorized the Independent Counsel Act expired.

That act had allowed Ken Star to investigate President Clinton. It had also allowed several independent counsels to investigate Reagan appointees like Ed Meese, Ray Donavan and Samuel Pierce.

Lawrence Walsh investigated George H.W. Bush’s role in Iran-Contra and found the most advantageous time to release his report to maximize the advantage for the Democrats.

In other words, both Republicans and Democrats grew to hate the Office of Independent Counsel, and they both let it die a natural death.

The fact that it died in 1999 didn’t necessarily mean that the investigations ended. In fact, Robert Ray continued his investigation of the Clinton Administration until 2001. Continue reading →

Out of Touch

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

People who travel overseas with any regularity know how difficult it is to keep up with news from the states. CNN International runs Anderson Cooper and other domestic programs, but the news inserts are for, as the name suggests, an international audience – not for traveling Americans.

One of the issues about getting domestic news outside the U.S. is the issue of internet connectivity. I am on the shores of Lake Malawi in Monkey Bay about which Wikipedia says glowingly, “there is a supermarket and a market in Monkey Bay.” There is a new ATM nearby but the internet connection is approximately dial-up speed.

Some stories came through anyway.

The increasingly dangerous civil war in Syria moved into a new phase over the weekend when two car bombs killed 46 people in Turkey in a town along the Syrian border. Continue reading →

Big Momentum on Immigration Reform

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Comprehensive immigration reform will get 75 votes in the Senate, making it harder for conservatives to kill it in the House.

The Senate Judiciary Committee easily brushed aside efforts from Republicans and Democrats to amend the base bill with potential poison pills, a sure sign that it has real momentum. While the markup is scheduled to go on for three more weeks, the Committee should agree to just bring the whole bill, un-amended, to the Senate floor and dispense with the needless drama.

The meltdown at the Heritage Foundation has made it easier for main-stream conservatives to vote for the bill in the Upper Body. A report by the conservative think-tank that put the cost of the Gang of Eight bill at 6.3 trillion dollars was condemned Continue reading →

A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

Neighborhood. Community. Internet. Smartphone. Texting.

What do those things have in common? Well, the first two are starting to fade. The last three are contributing to the fade.

Community used to have a different feeling when I was growing up. It could mean the people who lived next door (I knew them all when I was growing up on Herkimer Street in Waterbury, Conn). Today, I live in Washington, D.C. I know the neighbor we share a wall with. But I have no idea who lives two doors down.

In Cleveland, fortunately, Charles Ramsay didn’t run the other way when he heard a scream for help. He felt a sense of community. Of neighborhood. Someone who lived next door – a young woman he never knew even existed next door – Continue reading →

Obama, Benghazi, and Mark Sanford

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

There’s an axiom in Washington that goes like this: ‘The more words it takes to explain something, the more likely it is that you are lying’.

Think about it. It is always easier just to tell the truth and take your lumps and get over it somehow.

Lying takes a lot of work. Here’s some aphorisms about telling the truth versus lying that somehow seems to get forgotten by people when elected to higher public office:

‘It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place’.  ~H. L.Mencken Continue reading →

Benghazi

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

I haven’t been paying too much attention to the Benghazi thing. Fox News is fixated on it, but Fox gets fixated on a lot of things that don’t particularly interest me.

So I was pretty surprised when the Benghazi attacks resurfaced throughout the media yesterday and today, even on MSNBC. I didn’t watch the hearing live (I have a day job, and I was busy doing that day job), but I saw the news reports later.

A couple of things interested me.

Bill Clinton’s impeachment lawyer was central to the Benghazi investigation. Isn’t it amazing how the same people just keep showing up in the middle of all kinds of scandals. Continue reading →

Benghazi-Gate

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Politics or policy? Policy or politics?

Those were the questions posed to me by MSNBC’s Chris Jansing Wednesday morning an hour before the curtain was due to go up on the hearings before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee chaired by Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA).

I said that it is always a combination of both.

Are Republicans in the U.S. House looking for an edge in the on-going battle with the Democrat-controlled Senate across the Capitol Building and the Democratic Administration down Pennsylvania Avenue? Continue reading →

The Castro Boys

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

Yesterday morning, Barbara Harrison was on the radio, promoting a story for the local NBC newscast, about a baby who was found in the garbage, barely breathing, who grew up to be a 23-year old college graduate who is doing great today, thanks to the person who found her in the plastic bag and the family that helped to raise her.

Later that day, came the revelations of three women who escaped from three brothers named Castro. The women were held as sex slaves, repeatedly raped and beaten for more than a decade.

That was bad enough. It turned out the three women would be beaten even more when they became pregnant, and that five of those pregnancies were ended, either before or after the kids were born.

I was pro-life before yesterday.

I am more pro-life today. Continue reading →

FactCheck.Org for Media – Please!

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Did you know that 11 states now have more people on welfare than they have employed?

Really? Yeah, swear to God. It was on the Internet.

Well, that piece of gossip is just not true. It was concocted from statistics contained in a magazine article.

I know that because I read FactCheck.org. In fact, when I get stuff like that forwarded to me, I send it to my good friend Brooks Jackson to find out what is true, half-true, or untrue. He would always send me a link to an article on the FactCheck.org site which had, what else? The facts. Continue reading →

Men Behaving Badly

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Mark Sanford is the worst example of what passes for a political professional in the United States.

He will, in the next few days, be sworn in as the Member of Congress from the First District of South Carolina having won a special election against a woman whose only reason for running is that she is the sister of comedian Stephen Colbert.

What a choice. Continue reading →

Top 3 Options for Syria

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

I am not an expert on Mideast politics, and I have only been casually observing the growing conflagration in Syria.

There is a full-blown civil war engulfing that country, as Islamic extremists on one end and pro-democracy forces on the other try to topple Bashar Al-Assad’s Ba-ath Party in Damascus.

Assad is a member of the Alawite minority in Syria, so he is not necessarily an ally of either the Shia or Sunnis that make up most of the Arab world. He has been an ally of the Persians in Iran, and his country is a safe haven for terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. Continue reading →

Enemies Foreign and Domestic

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

Every Member of Congress and commissioned officer (civilian and military) in federal service as well as every enlisted service member takes an oath that requires they promise to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

This oath is required by statute. The Presidential oath, the only oath in the Constitution, does not contain that language: “I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Continue reading →

The Hatfields and McCoys

BY JOHN FEEHERY
Reprinted from TheFeeheryTheory.com

“These guys are like the Hatfields and McCoys. That’s why they can’t get anything done in Congress.”

My cab driver pretty much nailed it on the head. Relations between the Democrats and the Republicans in Congress have taken on all of the characteristics of that famous family feud.

The Hatfield-McCoy feud started out when a McCoy came home from the Civil War as a Union soldier, angering a group of Hatfields, who had formed a pro-Confederacy vigilante group called the “Logan wildcats.” They promptly murdered him. Continue reading →

Precise Language Matters

BY B. JAY COOPER
Reprinted from BJayCooper.com

Language not only matters (cliché though that is) but begets itself, which can be a problem, too.

Take the last week or so. President Obama told the Syrian government, through the media, that proof of their use of chemical weapons against their own people would cross a “red line.” In fact, it would even be a  “game-changer.” According to news reports, the White House went through a weekend of meetings to discuss the President’s posturing (important in diplomacy) regarding Syria and how he should phrase it. The language he wound up using at a press conference was not what they agreed to and apparently was more direct than they intended. Continue reading →

$248 Million Medicaid ‘Mistake’

BY FRANK HILL
Reprinted from TelemachusLeaps.com

The Governor of North Carolina, Pat McCrory, announced another ‘mistake’ in the Medicaid projections made by the Administration of former Governor Bev Perdue last fall before the elections. Wonder if these underestimations were deliberate in the hopes of helping the Democrat candidate in the gubernatorial race?

Nah, that never happens. Right? ‘Nothing to see here, ladies and gentlemen. Move right along’.

This time, the ‘underestimation’ accounted for $135 million in the state’s largest health care program, Medicaid, for the indigent and infirm. That was on top of another $113 million or so announced earlier this year. Continue reading →

Less Is More

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

In spite of a lot of talk and promises, President Obama is one pick away from filling out his Cabinet-level team for his second term. The scorecard? According to the Washington Post’s Emily Heil and Al Kamen: The number of white men in Cabinet-level jobs increased from eight in the first round to likely 10 in this term and one fewer woman than there were in his first.

Moreover, according to the two writers, the President didn’t do very well in “maintaining diversity, and for those who expected more minorities – especially Latinos – not good at all.”

Assuming Charlotte Mayor Anthony Foxx is confirmed as Transportation Secretary, it “would bring the number of blacks to only three, down from four in the first term.” Continue reading →