Putin’s Showdown With Terror

My article in today's FrontPage Magazine:

Putin’s Showdown With Terror

By Matthew Vadum

Russian President Vladimir Putin is augmenting security for the upcoming Winter Olympics in southern Russia in the hope of preventing possible Islamic terrorist attacks at the international sporting event.

Putin tried to reassure Russian media that visitors will be safe at the Olympics that will take place from Feb. 6 through Feb. 23 in Sochi in the Caucusus mountains in the region of Krasnodar Krai on the Black Sea, not too far from Russia’s land border with Georgia. Islamists have already threatened to attack the games and authorities are searching for potential suicide bomber Ruzanna Ibragimova, the 22-year-old widow of a jihadist killed by Russian security forces who may have traveled from Dagestan to Sochi. Last week three security officers and four militants who may have been planning attacks on the Olympics were killed in a gunfight.

Parts of Russia are reportedly turning into armed camps as authorities crack down on protests and perceived anti-government activities in the sprawling nation with a significant Muslim minority.

About 40,000 members of Russia’s police and security forces will patrol the events, he said, and elite Spetsnaz fighters will be guarding against violent Muslim separatists.

“We will try to make certain that the security measures are not intrusive or too conspicuous, so they are not too noticeable for the athletes, the Olympics’ guests or journalists,” Putin said. “But at the same time, we will do our utmost to ensure that they are effective.”

Russian authorities have created a large security zone around Sochi, deployed thousands of extra police and troops, and are spending billions of dollars to keep the games safe. Submarines are patrolling the Black Sea coast while drones keep an eye on the host city from above. S-400 anti-aircraft missile systems are in place, capable of blowing hijacked aircraft out of the sky.

Sochi may as well have a giant bulls-eye painted over it. It stretches more than 60 miles and the Olympic Stadium, media complex, and ice hockey, speed skating, and figure skating facilities are located on the coast. A 44-mile express train route runs from the shore through the mountains to one of the two Olympic Villages, ski runs, and luxury hotels, generating headaches for security experts.

Critics are worried that Putin can’t guarantee security for athletes and tourists in the wake of last month’s Islamist bomb attacks in Volgograd that left more than 30 dead. The U.S. Department of State warns that Americans planning to visit Sochi should be vigilant about security because of potential terrorist threats, crime, and unreliable medical care.

Democratic Exodus

My article from the Jan. 17, 2014 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Democratic Exodus

By Matthew Vadum

Terrified Democratic lawmakers are retiring in droves because they know it won’t be easy to survive the anti-establishment electoral tsunami expected to swamp Capitol Hill in November.

Democrats have every reason to feel depressed about the approaching midterm elections, according to famed psephologist and prognosticator Larry Sabato.

This will probably be “a good election year for the GOP,” Sabato says. Rattling off the main factors that appear to be driving this election cycle, Sabato opined,

The president is a Democrat and his approval is weak. The economy may be improving, based on GDP growth (4.1 percent in the third quarter), but voters still don’t believe their personal economy, at least, has picked up much. Instead, the major national issue of the moment is Obamacare, which at this point is a loser for Democrats. The structure of the election in the House and Senate also bends in the GOP direction.

Even those representing traditionally safe Democratic congressional districts know the political landscape is on-track for dramatic changes after this year’s midterm elections. Republicans are optimistic about picking up plenty of U.S. Senate seats this year. At least five Democrats are not seeking reelection. They are Max Baucus (Mont.), Tom Harkin (Iowa), Tim Johnson (S.D.), Carl Levin, (Mich.), and Jay Rockefeller (W.Va.).

Will SCOTUS Reverse Obama’s Recess Appointment Power Grab?

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Will SCOTUS Reverse Obama’s Recess Appointment Power Grab?

By Matthew Vadum

Speculation is running rampant in the nation’s capital that the Supreme Court is poised to strike down three purported recess appointments that President Obama used to unconstitutionally manipulate federal labor relations policy.

During oral arguments in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning on Monday, the justices seemed uncomfortable with Obama’s Jan. 4, 2012 overreach in which he recess-appointed three members to the NLRB without bothering to wait for the U.S. Senate to recess. Obama’s goal was to pack the under-staffed federal body with likeminded leftists and give the NLRB the quorum it previously lacked to conduct official business. A defeat for Obama in this closely watched case could call into question every order issued by the NLRB since the date the appointments were made.

Incidentally, the NLRB itself shouldn’t even exist. It is a socialist anachronism left over from the New Deal that Obama uses to create new rules and regulations without having to go the normal route and ask Congress to pass a law. Obama’s toadies at the NLRB are hellbent on making America more like bureaucratic, dysfunctional Europe where labor disruptions and union violence are everyday occurrences.

During oral arguments this week nearly every member of the high court questioned the constitutionality of Obama’s NLRB appointments that were apparently carried out contrary to Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution.

Chief Justice John Roberts defended the Senate’s constitutional prerogative to approve nominees as a vital check on an out-of-control executive branch. Senators “have an absolute right not to confirm nominees that the president submits,” he said.

Left-leaning Justice Elena Kagan, an Obama appointee, told government counsel, ”The history is entirely on the Senate’s side, not your side.”

The War on Poverty's Biggest Casualties

My article from the Jan. 10, 2014 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

The War on Poverty's Biggest Casualties

By Matthew Vadum

Fifty years after liberals launched their sacrosanct “War on Poverty,” Americans, and black Americans in particular, aren’t better off.

But neo-Marxist ideologue that he is, President Obama is determined to double-down on leftist failure, widening the so-called war by calling for the biggest welfare spending increases in American history— amounting to more than $10 trillion over a decade, according to the Heritage Foundation’s Robert Rector.

This War on Poverty that Obama wants to escalate came on the heels of the death of President John F. Kennedy.

As the country was reeling in shock just seven weeks after Kennedy was assassinated, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, urged Congress to embark on a new metaphorical war effort against poverty. In that State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, Johnson said, “Let this session of Congress be known … as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States.”

This “unconditional war on poverty in America … will not be a short or easy struggle, no single weapon or strategy will suffice, but we shall not rest until that war is won,” Johnson said. ”The richest nation on earth can afford to win it. We cannot afford to lose it.”

The War on Poverty also gave taxpayers’ money to so-called community groups like ACORN and Saul Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation in order to encourage them to agitate against the status quo. This, in turn, stimulated demand for more government spending as taxpayer dollars became a kind of ever-increasing subsidy for pro-Big Government activism. The federal government still hands out huge grants to left-wing groups to subsidize their efforts to take away our economic freedoms.

A half a century later, federal and state welfare spending, adjusted for inflation, is now 16 times greater. The country has spent $20.7 trillion in 2011 dollars over the past 50 years on welfare programs, far exceeding what the U.S. has spent on every war it has fought.

Already the federal government administers 80 different means-tested welfare programs. Government blew $916 billion on these programs in 2012 alone, and about 100 million Americans accepted aid from at least one of the programs, costing $9,000 per recipient on average, a figure, Heritage’s Rector notes, that doesn’t include Social Security or Medicare benefits.

Yet “victory” in the War on Poverty is nowhere in sight. In 2012, 15 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line, roughly the same percentage as in the mid-1960s. Currently, around 50 million Americans live below the poverty line, which the government defines as a four-member family earning $23,550 a year. And 47 million Americans receive food stamp benefits, 13 million more than when President Obama was first sworn in.

A Killing Frost for Green Bosses

My article from the January 8, 2014 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

A Killing Frost for Green Bosses

By Matthew Vadum

Does a record-setting cold wave have anything to do with massive upheaval among the fear-mongering elite of professional left-wing environmentalism?

As the endlessly referenced Polar Vortex of Doom keeps the fruited plain in a deep freeze, it turns out several major environmentalist lobbies are shedding their current leadership.

This is happening despite the media’s nonstop, years-long, global warming propaganda assault, the presence of a radical, lawless left-winger in the White House and a Democratic stranglehold over the Senate. The voters can’t be bothered to care about this silly global warming issue.

In an amazing non-coincidence, Maggie Fox, CEO for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, is leaving her organization in the spring. Formerly known as the Alliance for Climate Protection, the group changed its name after a hard-fought push to enact cap-and-trade legislation fizzled.

National Wildlife Federation CEO Larry Schweiger, Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) President Frances Beinecke, Center for Climate and Energy Solutions (C2ES) President Eileen Claussen, and Greenpeace USA’s youthful Executive Director Phil Radford are also decamping from their respective posts this year. (The Pew Center on Climate Change was relaunched as the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions in 2011.)

Could it be that the career eco-extremists, con artists, and meteorological Machiavellians selling global warming doom and gloom are finally beginning to realize that their current approach isn’t working?

58: That's how many books cite my work

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 January 7, 2014:

* asterisk indicates New York Times bestseller

In reverse chronological order (sorted by year):

58) Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, by Ian Haney Lopez, Oxford University Press, 2014, page 160 

57) The Enemies Within: Communists, Socialists, and Progressives in the U.S. Congress, by Trevor Loudon, Pacific Freedom Foundation, 2013, p. 532n17

56) Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office, by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott, WND Books, 2013, p. 300n13

55) Infiltrated: How to Stop the Insiders and Activists Who Are Exploiting the Financial Crisis to Control Our Lives and Our Fortunes, by Jay W. Richards, McGraw Hill, 2013, pp. 100, 260, 261

54) The Battle of the Three Wills: as it relates to good & evil, by H. Edward Schrier, Author House, 2013, page citation unknown

*53) Breakthrough: Our Guerrilla War to Expose Fraud and Save Democracy, by James O'Keefe, Threshold Editions, 2013, page 39, 71, 322n39, 323n71

52) Handbook of Research on Sport and Business, edited by S. Söderman, H. Dolles, Edward Elgar Publishing Inc., 2013, page 458

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

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Lawyer to Obama’s Justice Department

My article from today's FrontPage Magazine:

Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Lawyer to Obama’s Justice Department

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama’s nominee to be the nation’s top civil rights enforcer is a race-obsessed lawyer who tried to permanently free unrepentant cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.

This radical so-called civil rights lawyer, Debo Adegbile, was until fairly recently head of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Like Attorney General Eric Holder, Adegbile is a staunch affirmative action supporter and doesn’t appear to believe that white Americans are entitled to civil rights protection. Currently he serves as senior counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, which is chaired by Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.).

It’s yet another nomination to high federal office in which Obama isn’t even trying to conceal his anti-American radicalism. “Obama’s nominee process involves finding the worst person on earth for that job or any job,” as Daniel Greenfield observes. “It’s a process that never fails.”

Interestingly, Adegbile has a personal story that’s similar to Obama’s. The DoJ nominee was raised by a single mother in the absence of her son’s Nigerian father, reports the Washington Post.

Under Adegbile’s leadership, NAACP LDF acted in several legal proceedings for the black leftist folk hero who has parlayed his 1981 murder of white Philadelphia police officer Daniel Faulkner into a career behind bars. Born Wesley Cook, the former Black Panther often referred to affectionately in radical circles as simply “Mumia,” enjoys celebrity status on the Left and is a frequent guest speaker at college commencement ceremonies.

“The question of Abu-Jamal’s guilt is not a close call,” according to John Fund. “Two hospital workers testified that Abu-Jamal confessed to them: ‘I shot the motherf***er, and I hope the motherf***er dies.’ His brother, William, has never testified to his brother’s innocence even though he was at the scene of the crime. Abu-Jamal himself chose not to testify in his own defense.”

As Faulkner tried to arrest Abu-Jamal’s brother during a traffic stop, Abu-Jamal shot the policeman once in the back and then stood over him and shot him four more times at close range, once directly in the face. Multiple eyewitnesses were present during the crime.

Adegbile’s “nomination is an in-the-face appointment,” according to J. Christian Adams, a Justice Department whistle-blower who chronicled the vicious racial politics of the DoJ’s Civil Rights Division in his bestselling book,Injustice: Exposing the Racial Agenda of the Obama Justice Department.

Comrade De Blasio Takes Over

My article from the Jan. 2, 2014 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

Comrade De Blasio Takes Over

By Matthew Vadum

Communist-sympathizing radical Bill de Blasio has laid out an ambitious, far-left agenda as he begins what is destined to be a disastrous reign as New York’s 109th mayor.

Leveling left-wingers, with their perverse obsession with income equality, are looking eagerly to the city in the hope that the new mayor will “morph New York City’s municipal machinery into a closely watched laboratory for populist theories of government that have never before been enacted on such a large scale,” according to a fawning New York Times profile.

In a pie-in-the-sky inaugural address, de Blasio promised class-based hatred and civil unrest in pursuit of so-called social justice.

“We recognize a city government’s first duties: to keep our neighborhoods safe; to keep our streets clean; to ensure that those who live here – and those who visit – can get where they need to go in all five boroughs. But we know that our mission reaches deeper. We are called to put an end to economic and social inequalities that threaten to unravel the city we love. And so today, we commit to a new progressive direction in New York. And that same progressive impulse has written our city’s history. It’s in our DNA.”

De Blasio’s ascendancy could also help Democrats at the national level two years from now.

The New York Times’ Benghazi Revisionism

My article from the Dec. 30, 2013 issue of FrontPage Magazine:

The New York Times’ Benghazi Revisionism

By Matthew Vadum

To help put Hillary Clinton in the White House, the once-great New York Times has published a dubious report swallowing the Obama administration’s lies about the Sept. 11, 2012 Islamist attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.

In an act of journalistic malfeasance, the agenda-setting newspaper of record concluded over the weekend that the once-obscure “Innocence of Muslims” YouTube video sparked the armed assault that left four Americans dead at the height of last year’s presidential election cycle. The newspaper also concluded that al-Qaeda wasn’t involved, ignoring the mountain of evidence suggesting al-Qaeda was involved.

Months of investigation by The New York Times, centered on extensive interviews with Libyans in Benghazi who had direct knowledge of the attack there and its context, turned up no evidence that Al Qaeda or other international terrorist groups had any role in the assault. The attack was led, instead, by fighters who had benefited directly from NATO’s extensive air power and logistics support during the uprising against Colonel Qaddafi. And contrary to claims by some members of Congress, it was fueled in large part by anger at an American-made video denigrating Islam.

Evidently the Old Gray Lady didn’t look too hard for the truth.

From the outset the Obama administration said that what happened in Benghazi was a spontaneous riot identical to what had taken place in Cairo, Egypt, a short time before.

The administration claimed that the Benghazi violence was a spontaneous protest that somehow got out of hand. The official line was that a demonstration outside the U.S. mission in Benghazi grew increasingly violent and that protesters unconnected to terrorist groups eventually stormed the facility.

Not long after the attack National Security Adviser Susan Rice told Fox’s Chris Wallace that,

the best information and the best assessment we have today is that in fact this was not a preplanned, premeditated attack. That what happened initially was that it was a spontaneous reaction to what had just transpired in Cairo as a consequence of the video. People gathered outside the embassy and then it grew very violent and those with extremist ties joined the fray and came with heavy weapons, which unfortunately are quite common in post-revolutionary Libya and that then spun out of control.

Weeks later the Obama administration changed its tune, admitting as more and more evidence accumulated that terrorist groups were involved in planning and carrying out the attack.

2014: A Bad Year for the Left?

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

2014: A Bad Year for the Left?

By Matthew Vadum

Most political indicators point to a terrible 2014 for American leftism amidst an auspicious resurgence of conservatism throughout the nation.

As Americans continue to suffer in the weak Obama-era economy and as their anxiety over President Obama’s hated health care program grows, an electoral tsunami appears to be in the offing.

Americans have never bought into President Obama’s contention that income inequality was what he called “the defining challenge of our time.” The AP-Times Square New Year’s Eve Poll conducted by GfK shows under 1 percent considered that issue the most important news story of 2013. Topping the list of issues was the implementation of Obamacare which was deemed the number one issue in 2013 by 26 percent of respondents. The next-highest ranked issues were identified as the “death of Nelson Mandela” and the “federal government’s budget troubles: sequestration, the fiscal cliff and the government shutdown,” both weighing in at a mere 8 percent each.

Obama’s approval ratings continue to drop and Americans now consider big, overweening government to be the biggest threat to the nation. An astounding 72 percent of Gallup respondents now believe that big government poses a greater threat to the U.S. than big business or big labor, a record high since Gallup started asking the question almost a half century ago. “(The findings) may be partly a reaction to an administration that favors the use of government to solve problems,” the Gallup organization said in a quaint understatement.

Democratic strategists who say that the public is warming up to Obama and Obamacare  are in denial.