Obama Withdraws Radical Judicial Activist Nominee

My article from the March 27, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Obama Withdraws Radical Judicial Activist Nominee

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama suffered a major political defeat last week when he was forced to withdraw the nomination of a radical New York lawyer to an important federal appeals court. More than a mere political win for Republicans, the withdrawal is an important victory against the Left’s gun control agenda and has prevented an anti-Second Amendment jurist from getting closer to the Supreme Court.

With the chattering classes now opining nonstop about two same sex marriage-related cases pending in the U.S. Supreme Court, you may not have heard that the president nixed the nomination of Caitlin J. Halligan to the critical District of Columbia Circuit of the U.S. Court of Appeals. The circuit court hears many cases dealing with the reach of the federal government and is viewed by some as a stepping-stone to an appointment to the Supreme Court.

Conservatives viewed the twice-filibustered Halligan as radical largely because of her open hostility to gun rights.

Halligan bragged about her opposition to the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCAA), which was enacted to stop Second Amendment opponents’ efforts to deliberately bankrupt gun manufacturers through baseless litigation. In 2003 she admitted playing a role in state lawsuits that sought to take the extraordinary step of holding gun makers liable for criminal acts committed using handguns.

“These lawsuits specifically targeted gun manufacturers for liability similarly ludicrous to holding a manufacturer of scissors liable for the foolish, careless, or malicious actions of people who injured others (or themselves) with a pair of scissors,” according to Judicial Action Group.

John Podhoretz is a blithering idiot

The talentless beneficiary of nepotism pontificates once again in Commentary that it is a bad idea to talk about President Obama’s exhaustively documented left-wing

radicalism.

The notion that Obama is a dangerous extremist helps him, because it makes him seem reasonable and his critics foolish. It also helps those who peddle it, because it makes them notorious and helps them sell their wares. But it has done perhaps irreparable harm to the central conservative cause of the present moment—making the case that Obama’s social-democratic statism is setting the United States on a course for disaster and that his anti-exceptionalist foreign policy is setting the world on a course for nihilistic chaos. Those are serious arguments, befitting a serious antagonist. They may not sell gold coins as quickly and as well as excessive alarmism, but they have the inestimable advantage of being true.

Obama is certainly a socialist and probably a Marxist. He is the most ideologically radical president the United States has ever had. Saying so does not harm the conservative movement, no matter what this Manhattan mediocrity says.

The truth is the truth.

Podhoretz is calling everyone who has written about Obama’s extremism a liar and a fool. This includes Stanley Kurtz, George Will, Aaron Klein, Brenda J. Elliott, Rush and David Limbaugh, Mark Levin, David Harsanyi, Trevor Loudon, the late Andrew Breitbart and so many others.

Why does anyone listen to this halfwit?

Tom Perez: Obama’s Radical Labor Secretary Nominee

My article from the March 15, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Tom Perez: Obama’s Radical Labor Secretary Nominee

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama intends to nominate in-your-face radical lawyer Thomas Perez as his next Secretary of Labor, according to media reports.

Now an assistant attorney general at the U.S. Department of Justice, Perez is a former top aide to the late Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and possibly a perjurer, which makes him a perfect fit for the ethically-challenged Obama cabinet.

If confirmed, Perez would replace Hilda Solis, a former Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles who resigned in January.

Solis treated the Labor Department as an arm of the labor movement and business as an enemy, not a partner in creating jobs. She also discarded Bush era transparency rules that fought union corruption.

What would Perez be like as labor secretary?

He told AFL-CIO leaders that if Martin Luther King were alive today, “He would join with you … in calling for passage of the Employee Free Choice Act” — legislation that would drastically tilt workplace elections in favor of labor. He said the “civil rights movement and the labor movement are … essentially the same.”

At DOJ, Perez led the Obama administration’s assault on voter ID laws last year.  As John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky report in Who’s Counting, as a member of the Montgomery County, MD Council in 2003 he also tried to force governments to accept fraud-prone matricula consular ID cards issued by Mexican consular offices.

Perez was also president of Casa de Maryland, a notorious advocacy group for illegal aliens funded by George Soros and the soon-to-be laminated Hugo Chavez. (Big donors to Casa de Maryland include Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society –$270,000 since 2010– National Council of La Raza –$70,000 since 2004– and two government-supported entities, Neighborhood Reinvestment Corp. –$40,000 since 2011– and Maryland Legal Services Corp. –$630,203 since 2005.)

Perez apparently favors Saudi-style anti-blasphemy laws. In Saudi Arabia and other Islamic countries offenders are condemned to death merely for insulting Islam.

Rachel Maddow Smears ‘Racist’ Scalia

My article from the March 8, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Rachel Maddow Smears ‘Racist’ Scalia

By Matthew Vadum

Some left-wingers can’t handle it when a Supreme Court justice takes on one of their sacred cows, the blatantly racist Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Affective leftist Rachel Maddow flew into a rage of ignorant indignation, blasting Justice Antonin Scalia as a “troll” on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” for criticizing a racist law that she supports precisely because it is racist in means and effect.

The revered federal law uses racist means not only to protect black Americans’ right to vote, but also to guarantee election results. Section 2 of the Act allows congressional district boundaries to be redrawn to protect “majority-minority” districts and to prevent what a congressional research report calls “the submergence of minority voters into the majority, which can deny minority voters the opportunity to elect a candidate of their choice.” Though they may believe such policies are needed, honest people call such measures racist because they single out Americans for special treatment because of their race.

MSNBC-TV host Maddow, who has a long history of getting basic facts wrong, accused Scalia of racism, claiming he said that “voting is a racial entitlement, something that you are entitled to on the basis of your race.”

“Wait a second. Do you know how that sounds? But I think he does know how that sounds, and that’s the neat thing about being there in person because you can see oh, actually, he’s a troll. He’s saying this for effect.”

Except Scalia didn’t say that. Justice Sonia Sotomayor did — albeit in the form of a question, not an assertion.

The Chavez Nightmare Comes To An End

My article from the March 6, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

The Chavez Nightmare Comes To An End

By Matthew Vadum

After a long battle with cancer, Barack Obama’s less media-savvy comrade Hugo Chavez is finally dead.

Venezuela’s Vice President, Nicolas Maduro, announced that the communist tyrant died yesterday after seeking medical treatment from the quacks and bunglers laughingly referred to as the Cuban health care system. Hidden away from the public for months, Chavez, whose election in 1999 sparked a leftist revival throughout Latin America, may have actually died some time ago.

Chavez will be remembered not only for his fanaticism and brutality but also for his effective use of the same Saul Alinsky-inspired community organizing techniques now relied on by President Barack Obama.

Both men hate capitalism. Chavez called capitalism “savagery,” while the smoother Obama tries to be more upbeat, speaking of the need to spread wealth. Both men are champions of gun control, social engineering, and unlimited governmental power.

Both hate America (to varying degrees) and both utilize mobs to harass and intimidate their enemies.

Obama has used union goons, ACORN members, and his personal tax-exempt Alinskyite army, Organizing for Action (formerly Organizing for America), against his adversaries.

Chavez, who habitually used the rhetoric of class warfare, funded a network of violent, government-armed “Bolivarian Circles,” similar to Cuba’s Committees for the Defense of the Revolution. In order to identify citizens worthy of governmental persecution, the neighborhood-based militias reported on Venezuelans deemed to lack the requisite enthusiasm for Marxism. Like Hitler’s Sturmabteilung (SA), these groups broke up opposition meetings by force.

Chavez intimidated the private media by openly threatening and harassing independent media outlets. He also introduced a requirement that journalists be licensed. Obama doesn’t need to keep the media in line because they already worship him.

While Obama has been busy installing senior government officials such as Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel who lack the ability to understand the Islamofascist threat, Chavez allowed America’s terrorist enemies to set up shop in his country.

A big supporter of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Chavez permitted Iran-funded Hezbollah and the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas to open offices in Venezuela’s capital, Caracas.

Chavez also ran what political scientists call a “public diplomacy” campaign in the U.S. to help bolster American support for his regime. The propaganda effort consisted of using CITGO to funnel discounted home heating oil to the nonprofit group Citizens Energy Corp., which is run by former Congressman Joe Kennedy II (D-Mass.). CITGO operates a chain of gas stations in the U.S. and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA). PDVSA is owned by the government of Venezuela and has been described as a “black box” because it also funded Chavez’s overseas political ambitions.

Kennedy’s nonprofit distributed Venezuelan oil to poor people, and the former lawmaker went on TV to berate then-President George W. Bush, whom he said “cut fuel assistance.” Kennedy boosted Chavez, boasting about how Venezuela’s socialism had helped to ease suffering in America. In a commercial he said that “CITGO, owned by the Venezuelan people,” had helped poor Americans while their own government stood idly by doing nothing. (Chavez may even have funded ACORN, a possibility I raised in my 2011 book, Subversion Inc.)

As a statement made by Venezuela’s Maduro illustrates, Chavez, unlike Obama, had a tenuous grip on reality. Echoing Chavez, Maduro said the regime suspects the late dictator’s enemies somehow gave him cancer.

Such craziness was par for the course for Chavez.

Matthew Vadum's work cited in 50 books (so far)

I've been keeping a running tab of the books that reference my work and/or quote me.

Authors on the right, such as John Fund, Phyllis Schafly, Michael Reagan, David Horowitz, and Michelle Malkin rely on my research and commentary.

Authors on the left, such as Arianna Huffington, Thomas Frank, and Center for American Progress visiting fellow Shirley Sagawa, have also given my work a vote of confidence by relying on it.

Here is the list as of March 19, 2013:

* asterisk indicates New York Times bestseller

In reverse chronological order (sorted by year):

50) Change Agents: Alinskyian Organizing Among Religious Bodies, Volume 1, by Stephanie Block, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013, page citations unknown.

49) The Maclean's Book of Lists, Rogers Publishing, 2012, page citation unknown.

48) Judge Me By The People Who Surround Me: The Obama Challenge, by Barbara Bluefield, Outskirts Press, 2012, page citations unknown 

47) Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right, by Thomas Frank, Macmillan, 2012, page citations unknown 

46) Who's Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk, by John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky, Encounter Books, 2012, page citations unknown

*45) Shadowbosses: Government Unions Control America and Rob Taxpayers Blind, by Mallory Factor and Elizabeth Factor, Center Street, 2012, page citations unknown

44) No Higher Power: Obama's War on Religious Freedom, by Phyllis Schafly and George Neumayr, Regnery Publishing, 2012, page citations unknown

The Racism of Gun Control

My piece from the March 4, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

The Racism of Gun Control

By Matthew Vadum

Black conservative leaders warn that new gun control proposals threaten Americans’ most fundamental civil rights.

Star Parker, founder and president of the Center for Urban Renewal and Education (CURE), recalled the racist pedigree of gun control laws and the grave dangers they create, not just for blacks, but for all Americans.

“I believe that it is our duty to stand together and challenge the proposals currently on the table in the Senate, which invoke painful memories of Jim Crow laws and black codes,” said Parker.

“Black history is rife with government demands for background checks in order to qualify for constitutional rights,” she said at a Washington, D.C. press conference. “All Americans should be concerned.”

The effort to stem further gun control measures comes as left-wing legislators lead a crackdown on the Second Amendment.