No, Gov. Brownback, Cruz didn't violate Reagan's 11th commandment

My article in today's American Thinker:

No, Gov. Brownback, Cruz didn't violate Reagan's 11th commandment

By Matthew Vadum

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is the latest Republican to twist Ronald Reagan's "Eleventh Commandment" to suit his purposes by falsely accusing Sen. Ted Cruz of violating it.

According to Brownback, the junior senator from Texas is a big meanie for pointing out the objective fact that Bob Dole's namby-pamby 1996 bid for the presidency was disastrous.  The congenitally outraged Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) agrees with Brownback and is demanding that Cruz apologize.

But what did Cruz actually say to ignite such passions?

“You want to lose elections?  Stand for nothing,” Cruz said last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the Washington, D.C. suburbs. 

Look at the last four congressional elections – '06, '08, '10, '12. In three of the four, we followed that strategy: '06, '08, and '12.  We put our head down, we stood for nothing, and we got walloped.  The one election that was a tremendous election was 2010, when Republicans drew a line in the sand.  We said, unequivocally, we stand against ObamaCare, against bankrupting the country, and we won in an historic tidal wave of an election.

But what Cruz said next angered Brownback, himself a former U.S. senator.

And then, of course, all of us remember President Dole and President McCain and President Romney.  Now look: those are good men.  They’re decent men, but when you don’t stand and draw a clear distinction, when you don’t stand for principle, Democrats celebrate.

“I don’t appreciate it,” Brownback told Fox News.  “I understand why people do that, but Bob Dole is a great American.  You can disagree with him on policy, but he’s the iconic figure of the World War II generation.  He’s a wonderful man.  He led the Senate for a good period of time.”

In fact, Cruz expressly disagreed with Dole on policy alone and praised him, calling him a "decent" man.  Cruz didn't get personal.  A media-savvy politician, he deliberately sugar-coated his criticism of Dole.

Cruz failed to make the point that no one has ever accused Dole of being principled.

Of course, Republican relics like Dole and the rest of the RINO chorus are a big part of the problem, because they haven't even tried to take on big government.  They share at least some of the blame with Barack Obama and leftist Democrats for America's ongoing decline.

But Cruz didn't say any of this.  He took the high road, unlike his many detractors in the Republican Party.

Lois Lerner’s Lies and Cover-Up Revealed

My article from today's FrontPage magazine:

Lois Lerner’s Lies and Cover-Up Revealed

By Matthew Vadum

Former IRS mandarin Lois Lerner orchestrated an unprecedented crackdown on Tea Party and conservative groups and then attempted to scapegoat those nonprofits, blaming them for the harsh treatment they received at her instigation, according to a damning report released yesterday by congressional investigators.

The report came out six days after Lerner appeared before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee under subpoena and for a second time refused to testify about IRS targeting of right-of-center 501c4 nonprofit advocacy groups during the 2010 and 2012 election cycles. (The full report is available in PDF form at the committee’s website.) At the March 5 hearing, which was a continuation of a hearing started last year, Lerner again opted to invoke her Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination.

President Obama has claimed that there was not even “a smidgen of corruption” in the IRS affair but anyone with eyes knows the Obama administration has been stonewalling and intimidating witnesses who know the ugly truth about these Third World banana republic-style tax abuses.

Democrats correctly view Tea Party groups, that is, right-wing populist groups, as an existential threat to the Left. These nonprofits tend to be Republican-leaning organizations and they have been successful so far in derailing, or at least slowing, parts of President Obama’s ongoing transformation of America. Many left-wingers don’t believe such groups are legitimate and don’t want them granted official recognition and tax-exempt status by the IRS.

The report also comes as lawmakers consider whether to cite Lerner for contempt of Congress.

“Many questions remain, including the identities of others at the IRS and elsewhere who may have known about key events and decisions she undertook. Americans, and particularly those Americans who faced mistreatment at the hands of the IRS, deserve the full documented truth that both Lois Lerner and the IRS have withheld from them,” the new report states. 

But “[e]ven without her full testimony, and despite the fact that the IRS has still not turned over many of her e-mails, a political agenda to crack down on tax-exempt organizations comes into focus,” the report continues. ”Lerner believed the political participation of tax-exempt organizations harmed Democratic candidates, she believed something needed to be done, and she directed action from her unit at the IRS.”

Association of Counties Pushes Obamacare for Prisoners

My inaugural news article for Newsmax ran March 5, 2014.

Here it is:

Association of Counties Pushes Obamacare for Prisoners

By Matthew Vadum

At least six states and several local governments are signing up prison inmates on Obamacare exchanges after the National Association of Counties (NACo) began encouraging counties to shift some prisoner healthcare expenses onto federal taxpayers.

Convicted prisoners under sentence may not be covered under the Obamacare law, but inmates awaiting trial can be signed up on the healthcare exchanges under a provision in the Affordable Care Act that expanded eligibility for Medicaid on Jan. 1. 

Giving prisoners Obamacare coverage inflates enrollment numbers for the program and allows states and counties to avoid paying for expensive hospital stays.


To take advantage of the looser Medicaid signup rules, NACo put together a "how to" guide two years ago that encourages counties to apply for Obamacare for prisoners who are in pretrial detention.


Enrolling county jail inmates under the Affordable Care Act will be better for the prisoners and will benefit society as a whole, NACo states in its briefing booklet titled, "County Jails and the Affordable Care Act: Enrolling Eligible Individuals in Health Coverage."


The document states that the expanded coverage offered by Obamacare will "better connect individuals involved in the criminal justice system to appropriate medical and behavioral healthcare services, which in turn has the potential to reduce recidivism rates as well as county jail healthcare costs."


But David Hogberg, a healthcare policy expert at the National Center for Public Policy Research, said putting prisoners into the Obamacare exchanges will drive up insurance premiums and hurt taxpayers.

Will Lois Lerner Be Held in Contempt?

My article in the March 7, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Will Lois Lerner Be Held in Contempt?

By Matthew Vadum

As the Obama administration’s coverup of former IRS official Lois Lerner’s wrongdoings moves into high gear, Democrats are doing everything they can to direct public attention away from the scandal and tamp down growing calls for the president’s impeachment.

Lerner may soon be compelled to testify or be cited for contempt of Congress. After a hearing concluded Wednesday at which Lerner refused to answer questions, Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) indicated that Republicans are growing tired of the former IRS executive’s shenanigans. “At some point, I believe that she has to testify, or she should be held in contempt,” he told reporters.

Democrats are also desperate to use theatrics and sideshows to change the subject from the slow-motion 100-car pile up that is Obamacare. To make matters worse for Democrats, President Obama’s already low public approval ratings are cratering in a new Fox News poll whose results have been echoed in recent media-conducted polls.

Obama’s overall approval/disapproval numbers hit an all-time low of 38 percent to 54 percent. A mere 28 percent of Independents, 39 percent of women, and 38 percent of young voters gave the president a thumbs-up for his performance in office. When respondents were asked, “Do you think the country is better off than it was five years ago, or not?” just 34 percent answered yes, compared to 60 percent responding no.

At a Wednesday hearing of the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), who has been dining out for a half century on his civil rights activism in the Sixties, pulled a well-publicized publicity stunt calculated to make committee chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) look mean-spirited.

The days when Cummings courageously stood up to oppressive government measures are long gone. Now he leads the charge on behalf of Big Brother and our increasingly out-of-control federal government.

Glenn Greenwald: Raving Leftist

My article from the March 6, 2014 issue of FrontPage magazine:

Photo: courtesy of USASurvival.org

Glenn Greenwald: Raving Leftist

By Matthew Vadum

Adding to a long tradition of misleading the public with dubious information, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz recently unleashed a scathing attack on Edward Snowden promoter Glenn Greenwald in a 7,600-word essay published by The New Republic. Although Wilentz never comes out and says it directly, the reader is left with the distinct impression that he believes neo-communist Greenwald shouldn’t be considered a member-in-good-standing of the Left. In fact, Wilentz seems to insinuate that Greenwald is an extreme right-winger at heart, a proposition that cannot survive serious scrutiny.

An unabashed partisan Democrat, Wilentz is known for his televised histrionics on the eve of President Clinton’s impeachment. He warned House members that if they voted to impeach Clinton, “history will track you down and condemn you for your cravenness.” TheNew York Times ridiculed him for his outburst, editorializing that his “gratuitously patronizing presentation … marred the Democratic experts’ argument that Mr. Clinton’s misconduct did not meet the constitutional tests for impeachment.”

In the article on Greenwald, whom Rachel Maddow calls “the American left’s most fearless political commentator,” Wilentz artfully suggests that Greenwald might be a right-wing crypto-critic of the president and the Left because he is a zealot on so-called privacy issues and has ferociously attacked the Obama administration for its NSA spying abuses. Instead of making a clear accusation of ideological infidelity against Greenwald, Wilentz cherry-picks statements from Greenwald’s past to put him in the same ideological camp as Ron Paul “paleoconservatives,” who support income tax abolition, isolationism, among other things.

As evidence, Wilentz cites Greenwald’s dalliances with members of the Right in the past. Despite being a crusader for gay rights, in Greenwald’s “online travels, he gravitated to right-wing sites such as Townhall, where he could engage in cyber-brawls with social conservatives,” Wilentz writes. ”Over time, he met some of his antagonists in the flesh and, to his surprise, liked them.”

Greenwald’s work has certainly endeared him to libertarians, with whom the lawyer-turned-journalist has had associations over the years, but the simpler explanation for his outreach is that politics makes strange bedfellows. Just because Greenwald elevates the surveillance issue over all others doesn’t mean he stopped being a dogmatic leftist.

And there is no doubt Greenwald is a committed radical leftist.

It’s doubtful that America could ever move far enough to the left to satisfy Greenwald — the recipient of an award named in honor of Soviet agent and left-wing journalist, I.F. Stone. Greenwald doesn’t want to change a few policies here and there; He wants to overthrow the system and his life’s work is clearly dedicated to precisely that.

Medea Benjamin Booted Out of Egypt

My article in today's FrontPage magazine about anti-American trust fund commie Medea Benjamin:

Medea Benjamin Booted Out of Egypt

By Matthew Vadum

Code Pink co-founder Medea Benjamin, a frequent teller of tall tales, claims she was detained and physically abused Monday by Egyptian authorities when she flew into Cairo’s airport –on her way to an anti-Israel rally in Gaza.

Benjamin, who has close ties to the Obama White House, was traveling to Egypt for a meeting with international delegates before a scheduled trip to Gaza for what Amy Goodman of “Democracy Now” described innocuously as a “women’s conference.”

Hours later after being deported to Turkey, Benjamin said she had been held at the Cairo airport without explanation and violently handcuffed by Egyptian officials. While in Egyptian custody she took to Twitter to ask for help. She said officials in Cairo dislocated her shoulder and broke her arm before putting her on an airplane bound for somewhere in Turkey.

“I was brutally assaulted by Egyptian police, who never said what I was being accused of,” Benjamin said in a statement, according to CBS News. “When the authorities came into the cell to deport me, two men threw me to the ground, stomped on my back, pulled my shoulder out of its socket and handcuffed me so that my injured arm was twisted around and my wrists began to bleed. I was then forced to sit between the two men who attacked me on the plane ride from Cairo to Istanbul, and I was (and still am) in terrible pain the whole time.”

There appears to be no independent confirmation that Benjamin suffered bodily injury in Egypt.

If the Left knew Christians were coming they'd've baked a cake

My article in yesterday's American Thinker:


If the Left knew Christians were coming they'd've baked a cake

By Matthew Vadum

The religious freedom legislation that gelatin-spined Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoed wasn't controversial until the Left started lying about it.

The state-level civil rights bill that Brewer mothballed Feb. 26 was killed by a media-led propaganda campaign that falsely characterized it as "anti-gay."  To no one's surprise, both of the GOP's last two RINO losers, Mitt Romney and John McCain, urged a veto.

As Ed Whelan blogs at National Review,

There has been a blizzard of hysterical misinformation about Arizona’s SB 1062.  As anyone who takes the trouble to consult the text of the legislation will readily discover, SB 1062 does not mention, much less single out, gays or same-sex ceremonies.
As Douglas Laycock (who supports redefining marriage to include same-sex couples) and other leading religious-liberty scholars explain in a letter to Arizona governor Jan Brewer, SB 1062 “has been egregiously misrepresented by many of its critics.”

SB 1062 would not have given Arizona residents the right to discriminate.  Although freedom of association has been under attack by the Left for decades, Arizona law already acknowledged that residents retain the right to discriminate in at least a few aspects of their private lives. 

Obama's Minimum Wage Ruse

My article in today's American Thinker:

Obama's Minimum Wage Ruse

By Matthew Vadum

President Obama's newfound enthusiasm for the minimum wage is the political equivalent of a ruse of war.

With an eye on the approaching midterm elections, the Demagogue-in-Chief hopes to lure his Republican enemies into a discussion on his ideological home turf so he can pound away at them mercilessly and distract from his own political problems.

As his approval rating slides, Obama has heartily embraced the red herring as the cornerstone of his public relations strategy.  Bearing his by now familiar deer-in-the-headlights look, he officially knows next to nothing about what his administration is doing and is constantly on the lookout for scapegoats and other distractions.

Democrats, as well as those leftists not disillusioned with Obama, desperately want to recapture the House and hang onto the Senate in the hope of imposing even more destructive progressive policies on the populace before a new president takes over in January 2017.  The November congressional elections give these left-wingers their last kick at the legislative can during the Obama presidency.  It is Obama's final opportunity to drop-kick America over the cliff and into the bottomless socialist abyss.

Obama promises that 2014 will be "a year of action."  The president plans to keep the chattering classes busy blathering on endlessly about stuff that doesn't matter to normal people.  He knows dragging voters to the polls in an off-year election is hard, so he wants to excite his base.

Obama is pushing a minimum wage increase, an otherwise marginal issue voters place well down on the list of national priorities, because he needs to get left-wing voters emotional.  Even though under 3 percent of all workers in the nation (and an even lower percentage of full-time workers) earn the minimum wage, Obama knows that whipping up indignation over the issue gets voters to the polls.

Obama's former employer and legal client ACORN, the huge community organizing network that went bankrupt in 2010, viewed raising the minimum wage as an electoral crowd pleaser.

ACORN put minimum wage propositions on the ballot in order to drive up turn out among poor voters and the progressive faithful.  "We would like it to become a fact of political life where every year the other side has to contend with a minimum wage law in some state," said Jen Kern, director of ACORN's Living Wage Resource Center.

"This is what moves people to the polls now.  This is our gay marriage," she said some years ago before big chunks of the conservative movement went wobbly on same-sex marriage.

To further motivate supporters and distract from the weapon of mass socioeconomic destruction that is Obamacare, the president and his cabinet members are now lecturing Americans daily about things like "income inequality," "green jobs," and the alleged phenomenon of anthropogenic global warming.  Obama even made income inequality the centerpiece of his most recent State of the Union Address.

Like the minimum wage, each of these issues is a ruse de guerre that Rules for Radicals author Saul Alinsky would applaud.  Each issue can be used to recruit voters and fill the pockets of labor leaders who demand their cut of the action. 

Obama can't acknowledge what he is doing out loud so he plays the compassion card.

Obama's News Police

My article in today's FrontPage magazine:

Obama's News Police

By Matthew Vadum

The Obama administration is planning to send what critics characterize as government spies into the newsrooms of the nation’s media outlets.

This unprecedented assault on Americans’ First Amendment freedoms is part of the Community Organizer-in-Chief’s political war against the few pockets of media resistance he has encountered at Fox News and in the world of talk radio. Sending federal bureaucrats to meddle in newsroom affairs by conducting an alleged “study” will chill news coverage and make government-licensed broadcast media think twice about airing stories that place the Obama administration in a bad light.

To this end the Federal Communications Commission is moving forward with its “Multi-Market Study of Critical Information Needs,” or CIN. Although the FCC is a regulatory body, not a research organization, it plans to send researchers to question reporters, editors, and station owners about how they decide which stories to run. In the spring a field test is set for Columbia, S.C.

The FCC intends to discover “the process by which stories are selected,” how often stations cover “critical information needs,” the media outlets’ “perceived station bias,” and “perceived responsiveness to underserved populations.” The phrase “underserved populations” is politically correct neo-Marxist jargon and a screaming red flag that some kind of quota system may be on its way.

Republican members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee attacked the study idea, saying it was a step towards a “Fairness Doctrine 2.0.”

“Given the widespread calls for the Commission to respect the First Amendment and stay out of the editorial decisions of reporters and broadcasters, we were shocked to see that the FCC is putting itself back in the business of attempting to control the political speech of journalists,” all Republicans on the committee wrote in a letter to new FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler. 

“It is wrong, it is unconstitutional, and we urge you to put a stop to this most recent attempt to engage the FCC as the ‘news police.’”

In an interview with Fox’s Megyn Kelly, Townhall.com news editor Katie Pavlich eviscerated the proposed study:

I don’t understand why the Obama administration hasn’t understood this idea that when the Department of Justice monitored the phone lines of journalists, and their parents by the way, that wasn’t enough to them. Now they want to send investigators into newsrooms all over the country whether it’s broadcast or print. They have no business sending those people into our newsrooms. How we gather news is none of the government’s business. And this isn’t about the FCC getting people the information that they, quote, need, as they claim. This is about controlling what people say and this is about intimidating the news through these –whatever you want to call them– navigators.

You Subsidize Leftist Anarchy

My column in today's American Thinker:

You Subsidize Leftist Anarchy

By Matthew Vadum

You have been subsidizing the efforts of radical left-wing community organizers for years, and you probably didn't even know it.

Fifty years ago as Barack Hussein Obama inhaled the values of his communist parents, grandparents, and mentors, their comrades were drafting plans to destroy American civil society.

Armed with your parents' and grandparents' tax dollars, America-hating extremists Richard Cloward, Frances Fox Piven, and Saul Alinsky were hard at work in the 1960s laying the foundation to wreak havoc on America and its people in an effort to force revolutionary change. 

Progressive agitators' quest to obliterate economic freedom was aided by the "War on Poverty," a metaphorical military undertaking against an ineradicable foe.  Given its chance of success, it may as well have been the War on Rainbows.

This doomed adventure got underway while Americans were still woozy and shaken, in need of reassurance just seven weeks after an avowed communist named Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy.

In his first State of the Union address on Jan. 8, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson ushered in a half-century of government-incentivized sloth, indolence, dependency, and social decay.  He urged Congress to embark on a new belligerency against the condition of not having enough stuff, as arbitrarily determined by vote-grubbing politicians.  "Let this session of Congress be known," Johnson proclaimed, "as the session which declared all-out war on human poverty and unemployment in these United States."