Election Integrity Activists: Obamacare 'Biggest Voter Registration Fraud Scheme in History'

by Matthew Boyle 30 Oct 2013
 

 

 Conservatives point to the Obamacare website exploiting a strange loophole in the National Voting Rights Act to question whether the President's signature healthcare law had a political motive, as well. Several election integrity activists have alleged that the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA), or Obamacare, does not appear to have been an effort to conduct healthcare reform to fix what was described in 2009 and 2010 as a broken healthcare system.

The law passed Congress with just Democratic Party support. Instead of being an honest attempt to fix America’s healthcare woes, “I think [it] is the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world,” said Gregg Phillips, the founder of the election integrity group Voters Trust, in an interview with Breitbart News Wednesday morning.

Phillips and Catherine Engelbrecht of True The Vote, another election integrity group, cite as proof what left-wing organizations are saying about how they plan to use Obamacare. Demos, a left-wing organization funded by liberal billionaire George Soros, published a report earlier this year titled: “Building a Healthy Democracy: Registering 68 Million People to Vote Through Health Benefit Exchanges.”

On page six of the report, author Lisa Danetz argues that Obamacare “will enroll 68 million individuals.”
“The ACA [Affordable Care Act] requires subsidized health insurance to be made available to low-income Americans, through a single application process, administered and operated in each state by an entity called a ‘Health Benefit Exchange,’” Danetz writes. “Governments must establish this application process by October 2013.”

Danetz is describing healthcare.gov, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) website that has thus far faced enormous problems, forcing HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to testify before Congress on Wednesday about the program’s ongoing failings.
Engelbrecht and Phillips believe that all of those promises about healthcare were never meant to be true.

They believe the underlying intent is to collect personal data and voter registration information and share it with the federal government, which would in turn share it with left-wing groups—in Obamacare they are called “Navigators”—to conduct what is essentially a taxpayer-funded Get-Out-The-Vote operation for the Democratic Party.

“Approximately 68 million individuals, most of them low-income, will eventually enroll in subsidized health care under the law,” Demos’ Danetz writes in the report.

The Congressional Budget Office estimates that approximately 16 million people will apply for health insurance through various subsidized programs in 2014, an additional seven million will apply in 2015 and an additional ten million will apply in 2016. By 2022, Medicaid and CHIP enrollment is expected to reach 43 million individuals, a number that includes those enrolled before the ACA plus those that become eligible as a result of the ACA. Affordable Insurance Exchanges will are expected to enroll an additional 25 million individuals.

On page seven of the Demos report, Danetz ties Obamacare back to the 1993 passage of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), colloquially known as “Motor Voter” because it is the law that allowed voter registration at places like the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV). “In each state, a Health Benefit Exchange will handle the majority of Covered Transactions for Insurance Affordability Programs,” she writes. “The ACA requires a single streamlined application process for all programs, administered in each state by the Health Benefit Exchange. The Health Benefit Exchange will also handle renewals and changes of address for a certain subset of individuals who obtain health insurance through programs under the ACA.”

Danetz lays out how 17 states and Washington, D.C., have elected to run their own exchanges, seven states have opted for so-called “partnership exchanges,” and 26 states have decided to become a part of the federal exchange. “Under the NVRA, Health Benefit Exchanges are entities that administer public assistance, and, as such, are required to incorporate voter registration services into operation of Insurance Affordability Programs,” she writes. Throughout the rest of the report, Danetz lays out the nuts and bolts of how the left plans to use Obamacare as a voter registration tool.

Phillips, the founder of election integrity group Voters Trust and an expert in analyzing big data, told Breitbart News in an in-person interview Wednesday that the left also attempted this in the early years of the Clinton administration.

“All of the pieces and parts for this story have been in place for years until the exchanges were created,” Phillips said. “The exchange is sort of the catalyst... We didn’t know this until the feds started showing up on the states’ doors with tens of thousands of cases. In Texas, they have 25,000. You’ve got every state all over the country seeing these cases.” By “cases,” Phillips is talking about Medicaid enrollment numbers increasing.

Phillips said Obamacare has nothing to do with reforming people’s healthcare coverage. “When HealthCare.gov was set up, everyone was led to believe that this was about the exchange and the insurance exchange and getting coverage and what your premium is going to be, and what your deductible is going to be and all that,” he said. “It’s one piece [of what the website really is]. To get there, however, the website makes a suggestion based on your income. If you say you make zero income, you’re not going to the exchange because you’re not qualified for it. You’re going to the Medicaid side of it.”

Income verification is not required for these submissions, so that is where much of the fear of fraud comes from. Phillips noted that Obamacare has technically undone many of the fraud protections at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) that came as part of the 2002 Improper Payments Act.
Engelbrecht, the head of election integrity group True The Vote, told Breitbart News in a phone interview on Wednesday that this voter information is collected via the Motor Voter law. Motor Voter, Engelbrecht noted, “was Bill Clinton’s first bill that he offered.”

“This was never about the exchanges, there’s no question about that,” Engelbrecht said of Obamacare.

That’s why this was so ill-conceived. They put their time and energy and effort into developing pipes into 50 states so that they could funnel in the Medicaid expansion to get more Medicaid enrollees. That’s what this is about. That’s the game. As part of that strategy, there’s bountiful numbers of new voters but there’s also weight that is forced upon the states by the virtue of new Medicaid patients that the federal government is not checking qualifications for.

After the states get the Medicaid applications forwarded to them from healthcare.gov, they will have to sort through hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of applications that are automatically generated by a computer system. Since the states likely cannot handle the high number of applications expected to come in, most of those applications will likely be hastily approved.

After an application with a voter registration form attached to it is approved, an actual voter registration card is mailed out automatically. No human being ever sees the card between the time someone logs onto healthcare.gov to type any information, true or untrue, into the system and when a card is mailed out. At that point, when the card shows up in the mail, whoever receives it just needs to sign it and mail it back to the authorities, and they will have registered to vote without ever being in front of any official person.

To pull this off, technically, Phillips notes, President Obama’s administration is interpreting a visit to healthcare.gov as a visit to a physical government office. “The law is clear,” Phillips said of Motor Voter. “It states that all of this [voter registration] has to happen in an office, face-to-face with an individual. The very idea that I get to open up my website and call that my office, does that mean al Qaeda on their 5,000 websites, that those are their offices? Of course not. It’s ridiculous.” Nonetheless, the administration has been able to pull that off thus far.
 “What the portal does, is it forces you to get out,” Phillips said of the Obamacare website.

It forces you to say, "I do not want to register to vote." If you don’t do that, it forces you through to registration. When it gets to the states, like Texas, it’s going to send you the voter registration no matter what you put in the exchange. It’s going to mail it to your house and no human ever touches it and no government official or even any person ever eyeballed you to verify you are a real person or what.

Unlike at the DMV or other government agencies, Engelbrecht said with Obamacare signups it is assumed people will say yes when asked if they want to register to vote—and they have to specify they would like to opt-out of voter registration if they choose not to do so. Because of this change in philosophy from how, say, the DMV registers people to vote, Engelbrecht said it allows left-wing organizations to search and target voters using the federal government collected in a way that has never been seen before.

With Obamacare, Engelbrecht said, people “need to be very intent and specific in their intent not to register to vote” if they do not want to register. “In this system, you are required to opt out,” she said. “That’s the psychology: ‘You’re suggesting to me that I should register, giving me free stuff,  so why would I risk upsetting the apple cart by opting out? I’ll just do what you want me to do. I’m fine with doing that, sure.’”

Also, since technically the Motor Voter law requires that anyone who is registering to vote can receive help if they want it from those government officials at the agency they are registering to vote with, the federal government has been able to create a task force called “Navigators” who will help people register to vote and sign up for Obamacare by visiting people’s homes. The data that has been collected thus far through healthcare.gov, and data that will be collected moving forward, will likely be shared with the Navigators groups.

The Navigators groups consist of organizations like former ACORN organizers, Organizing For America (OFA)—President Obama’s old campaign spinoff—and other groups that have built themselves on winning elections for Democrats.

Engelbrecht said people should listen carefully to what the left is saying, because they have publicly discussed this aspect of the Obamacare website. Danetz’s Demos report earlier this year, Engelbrecht notes, is hardly the only place the left has talked openly about this. Liberals have made similar suggestions on the pages of Mother Jones magazine and on the liberal Daily Kos website, both in late-September pieces. Talking Points Memo, another left-wing media outlet, has covered it as well.

A coalition of left-wing organizations—Demos, HealthCare for America NOW, Project Vote, Fair Elections Legal Network, and the League of Women Voters—have discussed elements of this plan specifically in open, publicly-available comments made to HHS about the implementation of the Navigators program.
Rush Limbaugh hinted at the breaking of this story on his program on Wednesday, calling it a “slam dunk” theory of what is “really going on” with Obamacare. “Remember when we first learned who was getting money to set up exchanges in California?” Limbaugh asked listeners. “The SEIU covered California; it was a bunch of left-wing activists. And the NAACP. And from that universe of people, the navigators are hired.

What do you think is really going on? Voter registration. In addition to you going to get your healthcare, there is obviously massive Democrat voter registration going on at these exchanges.”

Limbaugh even cited Danetz’s report for Demos, asking listeners: “What if the end result here, in addition to everything else, is 68 million new registered Democrat voters?”

Big Government

Issa on Grenade-Walking Scandal: WH 'Let Bad Things Happen' to Push Assault Weapons Ban

by AWR Hawkins 26 Oct 2013
 

 

 Responding to news that explosives from a DOJ grenade-walking scandal were detected at an attack that killed three Mexican policemen, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) suggested "the administration really did want to let bad things happen in the hopes that they would get an 'assault weapons' ban." On October 23, Breitbart News reported that explosives used in a recent attack on Mexican police were traced to U.S. bomb maker Jean Baptiste Kingery. He is accused of walking grenade components into Mexico and also of converting semi-automatic firearms into fully automatic weapons.

Kingery was apprehended in 2009, but the U.S. Attorney in Arizona, Dennis Burke, did not prosecute him. The DOJ chose instead to secretly watch Kingery and try to track grenade components once they were in Mexico, in hopes that they would lead to cartel members.

This endeavor failed, and now three Mexican policemen are dead.

Rep. Issa commented on the DOJ grenade-walking scandal:

When you have the attorney general's own offices being informed about a very dangerous person exporting hand grenades and converting AK-47s into machine guns and they let him continue as part of not, Fast and Furious, but a completely separate failure, I think what you see is an administration that I'm beginning to think really did want to let bad things happen in hopes they would get [an] assault weapons ban. The dots are being connected more and more to these kinds of actions.

Follow AWR Hawkins on Twitter @AWRHawkins.

Big Government

We Told You So: Obamacare Is a Disaster

By David Bossie 
26 Oct 2013

 President Obama promised that his health insurance exchanges would make all of our lives better. In exchange for forcing us to buy insurance, Obama promised that his new government-run markets would be simple, one-stop-shops for quality, affordable coverage.  He was wrong.

Instead, Americans are stuck with websites that don’t work and health plans they can’t possibly afford.

Those who do have insurance are getting cancellation notices, and those that don’t can’t find affordable coverage.

On Monday, President Obama said, “No one is madder than me” about the website’s countless failures. The tough questions continued on Tuesday for White House Spokesman Jay Carney and became so difficult that he abruptly left the press conference. The White House is blaming HHS and denying responsibility. The American people are witnessing in real time what happens when big government takes over healthcare.

Here are some Obamacare blunders so far:

• CBS News reports a huge spike in people enrolling in Medicaid rather than buying private health insurance. Not only does this add to the unsustainable costs of that entitlement program, it shrinks the pool of healthy people the insurance exchanges require.
• During Congressional testimony, the contractors who helped build healthcare.gov admitted they could not create their own accounts on the site. As reported in the Associated Press, contractors were not comfortable with the site going live as it was not tested and ready to handle confidential information. They didn't even remove dummy JavaScript files from the live site, which included character names from Star Wars and Transformers.
• According to the Washington Post, even state bureaucrats are confounded by Obamacare’s endless technical glitches. While HHS is trying to claim the website is improving, insurance commissioners responsible for overseeing insurance industries in states relying on the federal government to run health-care exchanges still cannot get answers to their desperate phone calls to Washington.
• CBS News reported that a “shop and browse” feature that was added to the Obamacare website in order to offer customers the ability to see premium price estimates prior to creating an account is wildly inaccurate and misleading. It often underestimates actual premiums by over 50%.
• According to Kaiser Health News, 300,000 Floridians received insurance coverage cancellation letters from Florida Blue. That is 80% of their individual policy holders in the state.
• Consumer Reports magazine, which has supported Obamacare since 2009, suggested to readers that due to privacy concerns, everyone should “[S]tay away from Healthcare.gov for at least another month if you can.” Their software tester opined, “Hopefully, that will be long enough for its software vendors to clean up the mess they’ve made.”
• On Sean Hannity’s radio show, Sean called the Obamacare hotline on air and asked the representative on the phone about call volume along with other questions. Just days later, the operator was fired for being honest about the glitches in the program.
• According to Politico, because the White House knew the Federal exchange website disaster would be investigated by House Republicans, the Administration had a “bunker mentality” and only sought advice from partisan “trusted campaign tech experts.”
• The New York Times reported contractors and specialists have said fixing the site’s problems soon is “unrealistic,” as “more than 5 five million lines of software code may need to be rewritten before the web site runs properly.”
• The Washington Examiner discovered that CGI Federal, the Canadian firm which designed the Obamacare health insurance exchange website, was given a no bid contract for the work.
• According to Millward Brown Digital research firm, the Obamacare exchange website had an estimated 9.47 million unique visitors during the first week. Of those visitors, 3.72 million started the registration process, but only 1 million completed registration. Only 36,000 completed enrollment. CNBC’s initial report showed 99% of Obamacare applicants “hit a wall.”
• Chad Henderson of Georgia, who became the media’s poster boy as one of the few to actually sign up for Obamacare, lied about his success, according to a Reason Magazine investigation. On LinkedIn, Henderson lists himself as a volunteer for Organizing for Action.
• On Bloomberg TV, Office of Management and Budget Director Sylvia Burwell has refused to guarantee that the Obamacare website will be fixed by December 15, even though the individual mandate goes into effect that same month.
• Even prominent Democrats admit the website is a disaster. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi told ABC News that the Obamacare website glitches are “unacceptable.” On MSNBC, former White House Spokesman Robert Gibbs said he believes people should be fired.
• Reporters at CNN and MSNBC have tried and failed to sign up for Obamacare while on the air.
• The Hill reports that states are already facing a serious threat of identity theft, as fake insurance exchange websites are being launched by cyber criminals trying to steal private information. This issue of fraud with Obamacare has also taken place over the phone, with scammers calling up individuals claiming to be government representatives and requesting personal information. The lack of uniformity in state exchange websites only adds to the endless confusion.
• Finally, Secretary Kathleen Sebelius dug in her heels amid calls to resign, telling reporters that she doesn’t work for the people who are upset about Obamacare’s failures.

This is exactly what conservatives warned would happen. Government just simply isn’t competent enough to run America’s health care system, and it never will be. Our constitution established a government that is supposed to carry out a few basic functions and no more. The government has no business running a health insurance marketplace or any other function that was supposed to be left to the private sector. It’s a shame that Americans have to learn this lesson in such a painful way.

Big Government

Palin: Schweizer Book a 'Slap Upside the Head' to Media's Blindness to D.C. Corruption

By Sarah Palin 22 Oct 2013

  Governor Palin posted this to her Facebook page on Tuesday night with a link to the review she wrote for Breitbart News about Peter Schweizer's new book, Extortion. We are reposting what she wrote in its entirety because we feel she makes an excellent point drawn from her personal experience. Look, I’ll keep this brief because I want to spend quality time getting kids to bed tonight. Doubt I’ll get much sleep though because the recent proof of government corruption makes me nauseated. If it doesn’t you, and you can blindly ignore the status quo embraced by our politicians and low information voters, then I unapologetically call out your disloyalty to the ethical foundation of the greatest nation on earth.

When you have a moment, please read my review of a jaw dropping, searing new book that provides the proof that Washington, D.C. has strayed so far from the planks in both major political parties' platforms that we are fools for trusting any who have refused to fight against cronyism and extortion. This is the stuff Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin and a few others have railed against so boldly. It's the stuff “tea party” patriots of all stripes rallied against to grow the grassroots movement that is the only political solution to defend our republic! “60 Minutes” covered some of this on Sunday, Sean Hannity had an outstanding interview with the book’s author tonight, and other mediums are doing right by not ignoring these revelations.

Here’s the deal: all politics is local. And personal. Let me personalize this. It is UNBELIEVABLE that the press would investigate every nook and cranny of my life; send gullible reporters to my little town to kick over every rock any family member ever tread underfoot; scour every email I’ve written; research every Palin campaign disclosure like junkyard dogs; sic 12 AP reporters to fact check my book; breathlessly report about my wardrobe and an old used tanning bed I bought to get some sun during Alaskan winters as if these were vital national news stories; hound friends, personal doctors, strangers, and just downright strange people, etc., etc., etc., to know everything we do (and they still get the story wrong!). They blew and still blow all those resources “investigating” the irrelevant hockey mom from Wasilla. Meanwhile our government goes to hell in a hand basket right before the “elite media’s” closed eyes, and it took my friend Peter Schweizer to slap you upside the head to see any of this corruption? Good God. Be ashamed, media, be very ashamed.

Now, I think I’ll go read “Green Eggs and Ham” to my little boy, then we’ll all say a prayer for our country as I join you in readying for tomorrow’s battle for America.

Here’s my review of Peter Schweizer’s new book “Extortion: How Politicians Extract Your Money, Buy Votes, and Line Their Own Pockets”: http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/10/21/Extortion
Photo credit: Shealah Craighead

Big Government

D.C.'s 'Corrupt Bastards Club'

The Corrupt Bastards Club. They said it. I didn’t.

 

 

In Alaska we had a group of politicos who chuckled as they dubbed themselves the “CBC,” which stands for “Corrupt Bastards Club.” But it was no laughing matter. I, and many others, took them on. We won.

When I served as chairman of our state’s Oil and Gas Commission, I reported on the cronyism of the chair of my own Party, who had been appointed by our governor to that same energy regulating commission. (Click here to see a reporter’s reaction to a short Newt Gingrich interview on the matter.) The whistle blowing resulted in him receiving the largest ethics fine in the state’s history. But that was just the tip of the oily iceberg. The FBI investigated Alaskan lawmakers for taking bribes from the oil industry in exchange for votes favorable to that industry, and politicos ended up in jail.* The lawmakers actually called themselves the Corrupt Bastards Club and even emblazoned the CBC initials on baseball caps they gifted each other – that’s how untouchable they believed they were. But average, concerned citizens said, “enough is enough,” and shook things up. Though some of the CBC members ended up in horizontal pinstripes, much of the compromised party apparatus stayed in power.

I’ll never forget standing at the podium during our state GOP convention and asking delegates to stand up with me and oust the status quo because the political environment had to change for Alaska to progress toward her manifest destiny as a more productive—and ethical—state to help secure our union. Only about half stood up. The rest looked around gauging the political winds and sat on their thumbs. Our federal delegation was incensed at me. Their influence resulted in much of the party machine staying put, but I’ll never be sorry I fought it.

Today, doesn't it seem like we have a Corrupt Bastards Club in D.C.? On steroids? It might not be as oily and obvious as its Alaska counterpart, but it’s just as compromised because its members, too, are indifferent to what their actions mean for We the People.

I’m prepared to be attacked for suggesting this comparison of the D.C. political establishment with the CBC. But I call it like I see it. And lived it. The fight over defunding socialized healthcare, aka Obamacare, should have opened everyone’s eyes to call it the same.

From the very start, we knew that any health care reform could move us in one of two directions: closer to a genuine free market and patient-centered system to allow choices, affordability, and continued economic freedom, or closer to full socialized healthcare in the form of a single-payer system. President Obama and many Democrats have always openly admitted they want socialized medicine in the form of a single-payer system.

It can be argued that Obamacare isn’t full socialized medicine… yet. Right now it is a sort of corporatism, which is the collusion of big government with big business. With Obamacare, the government has taken over an industry that comprises a sixth of our economy, radically changed the way it operates, and is mandating that we purchase the services of that industry. This is unprecedented. It’s radical.

For those Obama voters who are now flummoxed by the rise in their health care premiums, let me explain why they went up. Obamacare has changed the very nature of insurance, which is a hedge against a future possibility. A 27-year-old marathon runner is much less likely to suffer a major illness than a 57-year-old obese chain smoker with a pickled liver. But Obamacare has ruled that there be no adjusted costs for pre-existing conditions, which means we threw out the actuarial data and everyone is now required to pay more to cover those who are more likely to be sick. But now average Americans – especially those healthy 20somethings who probably don’t even want to buy insurance – can’t afford to pay for Obamacare.
Obamacare in its current corporatist form isn’t meant to last. It’s meant to push us towards full socialized medicine with a single-payer system. How do I know this? Simple. Let’s compare Obamacare with the Canadian single-payer system.

With Obamacare we have crappier health care (fewer choices, fewer doctors, and an IPAB rationing panel of faceless bureaucrats, aka the ol' “death panel” that has been admitted to existing in Obamacare), but it is very expensive for the individual American. For instance, you’ll find that the so-called Bronze Plans are just as expensive as the Platinum Plans when you factor in the $5,000-$10,000 deductible in addition to the monthly payments you’ll shell out. And those Americans who aren’t being pushed onto the Obamacare exchanges are still seeing their insurance premiums skyrocket as the industry shifts onto consumers the cost of not factoring in various conditions.

Now let’s look at what Canadians have. I dare say our good neighbor to your north, and my east, has even worse health care coverage, but at least it’s “free” for the individual.
Americans, if you’re faced with a 300% increase (or even a 65% increase like my family) in your health care premiums for crappier coverage, doesn’t “free” socialized medicine all of a sudden sound appealing?

And that’s how Americans will be led down the primrose path to a single-payer system. People will be frustrated, worn out, and broke under this new government burden. Many will end up concluding they’ll settle for – then demand – full socialized medicine because they’ll see how the unworkable Obamacare will break our health care system (where, presently, no one is turned away from emergency rooms and we have many public and private safety nets for people in need), along with busting our personal bank accounts. The cry will go out, “Can’t you just put us all in a sort of Medicaid-like system? It’ll be much less confusing than these awful exchange websites and a lot less expensive!” As things stand, many who are getting slammed by Obamacare will inevitably settle for less out of necessity. And that’s the left’s declared plan: a single-payer system. They said it. I didn't.

Of course, the Canadian system isn’t really “free." It comes with high taxes and even more rationing, which is precisely why the Obama-friendly economist Paul Krugman makes a point of reminding us that we’ll only bring health care costs “under control” by employing “death panels and sales taxes.” And, of course, our already broke country will go bankrupt even faster under the unsustainable strain of this expanding welfare state, and our economy will suffer under the stagnation of permanently higher taxes.

When Harry Reid laughs and says, “Yes, yes! Absolutely, yes!” when asked if his goal was to move Obamacare to a single-payer system of full socialized medicine, he’s spilling the truth. The evidence is right before our eyes. Please open yours, GOP establishment.

The broken websites and botched Obamacare rollout help push things to that inevitable conclusion by causing frustration and confusion that only the government can “fix.” In fact, these unusable Obamacare websites make a reasonable person wonder how this administration could have made such a colossal bungle of the rollout when they are, after all, the same savvy experts who had the most sophisticated and precise campaign websites ever built. They could pinpoint voters down to a city block, but they messed up a website that cost the government over $200 million more than it cost Apple to develop the first iPhone. Purposeful?

The full implementation of Obamacare puts us firmly on the path to the left’s desire of a single-payer system of socialized medicine. That was the end game for Obama and the Democrats all along. The end is now in sight for them, and the media doesn’t even ask about it.

So what was the GOP establishment’s game plan to fight this march towards socialism? They’ve been busy denouncing Sens. Ted Cruz and Mike Lee and their supporters, along with the good House Members who fought for our one chance to defund Obamacare. But what were the wayward Republicans’ alternative plans? They thought we could ignore the implementation of Obamacare and simply focus on some future electoral victories in the hope that some day the stars will align and we’ll have super majorities in the House and Senate along with a Republican president who would hopefully repeal this disastrous soon-to-be set in stone new “entitlement.”

There’s a big problem with that scenario. It overlooks the everyday reality before our eyes. As Obamacare is being implemented, Americans can’t afford to pay for it. We can’t even sign up for it on the impossibly cumbersome websites, but the IRS will fine us for not doing so anyway! Obama gave his pals, and Congress gave themselves, tickets off this train wreck via waivers. Cruz and Lee fought for us to get the same relief the big guys got. The media and disloyal politicians turned on them and, divided, we lost. Now we little guys are stuck on this train, which will soon collide with hardship and real-world economics that don’t pencil out.

Friends, by the time the electoral stars align for this hoped-for GOP hat trick the country will be out billions, if not trillions, more of our tax dollars and will have already begged D.C. to relieve us of this corporatist nightmare even if it means a socialized single-payer system. And once there, do you think we’ll ever go back and strip this “entitlement”? Unarguable history proves otherwise.

The only credible plan of action was to do everything in our power to delay the implementation of Obamacare – defund it, postpone it, whatever – while at the same time work to elect a majority to repeal it.

That is what Cruz and Lee and those Tea Party aligned House Members were doing. There was no other credible alternative plan to seize the constitutionally appropriate opportunity to legislatively close the purse strings to stop the juggernaut of full socialized medicine.

You have to wonder whether the permanent political class in D.C. really wants to get rid of Obamacare at all. We’re finding out it’s good business for them.

The same lobbyists who wrote Obamacare are now busy selling their wares to anyone with enough dough who wants to get around the law. Meanwhile politicians are busy collecting campaign donations and other favors while carving out the lobbyists’ requested exemptions for various cronies. Then every election cycle they get to capitalize on fundraising off Obamacare shenanigans while telling voters back home about how hard they’re fighting to stop it. Don’t be fooled. Too many of them merely took meaningless symbolic votes that could never have repealed this, and they sat on their thumbs without standing united in the fight for us.
GOP politicians claim they’re against Obamacare and promise to repeal it. But when it came time to stand up and use the Constitutional tools they have – the power of the purse strings – to finally halt the implementation, they balked, waved the white flag, and joined the lapdog media in trashing the good guys who fought for us.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, these same politicians are covertly pushing through amnesty despite evidence that the 33 million newly legalized voters will overwhelmingly lean Democrat! Obviously this makes the likelihood of a GOP hat trick electoral victory, and hence the repeal of socialized healthcare, even more improbable.

The media wants you to believe that the partial government shutdown “fractured” the Republican machine from grassroots commonsense conservatives who go by the acronym TEA Party (that stands for “Taxed Enough Already”). No, Tea Party patriots rose up because the Republican machine “fractured” itself years ago by marginalizing its conservative base. The recent “slimdown” didn’t cause the fracture. It happened because of the fracture – because wayward Republicans have refused for years to stand up and fight for economic freedom and limited government, despite campaigning on those principles every election cycle.

That’s how we got into this debt-ridden mess in the first place. They campaigned one way, but governed another.

It’s the establishment’s choice whether this fracture remains unfixed because the conservative grassroots will never give up the fight for freedom. Never. Never. Generations of our sons and daughters sent off to war to protect our freedom have paid too high a price for us to ever give up the fight.

The conservative grassroots is rising up just like some did all those years ago at the GOP convention in Alaska. We’re rising up and calling on the rest of the Party to stand up with us against corruption and indifference – the twin causes of failure. Stand up, America! A great awakening is needed now more than ever. And it can happen in this most exceptional nation. By the grace of God it will happen!

President Reagan warned about socialized medicine, and ironically I quoted his warning in my closing remarks during the 2008 Vice Presidential debate: “If you don’t do this and if I don’t do it, one of these days you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.”

You deserve the best, America. And the best is God-given freedom.

*I encourage readers to see Stephen K. Bannon’s documentary “The Undefeated” for a full explanation of the Corrupt Bastards Club and how we took them on in Alaska.

Headline image: Shealah Craighead

Big Government

Why Obama wants to delay Obamacare, but can’t

October 18 2013
By: Doug Brady

 
I’m not going to argue with the preponderance of the recent polling data which clearly indicates the GOP brand took it on the chin (with the predictable assist from the media) for Obama’s decision to shut down the government over Obamacare. But will this really do damage to the Republicans and revive Obamacare the long run?  I think not. Though perhaps unintentional, the much-maligned GOP tactics of the past three weeks will not only hasten the end of the Democrat’s cherished health care debacle, but discredit the concept of government-run health care in general.

Suppose conservatives in Congress hadn’t decided to go to the mattresses over Obamacare. Suppose they hadn’t made any noise over it at all.  This was in fact the strategy suggested by many in the Republican Establishment. Ignore Obamacare and let it fail on its own. This was probably the safe route as Obamacare is an unmitigated catastrophe and will undoubtedly collapse sans any help from the GOP. But the magnitude of the disaster for the Democrat Party would have been muted to some extent had Republicans taken this path.

Given all the recent information that has come trickling out since the October 1st launch, it’s easy to envision Obama delaying the individual mandate on his own. Without any constitutional or statutory authority, he’s essentially rewritten the law to suit his political interests already. His decisions to unilaterally delay the employer mandate and waive the requirement that applicants verify their eligibility for subsidies are just two examples. If he thought the exchanges were anywhere close to being ready, he wouldn’t have taken either of these actions. And if the GOP had ignored Obamacare, he would have been free to delay the individual mandate with little or no political repercussions. Who would have argued with him?

Why is it in Obama’s interest to delay the individual mandate? Given the colossal magnitude of the problems at healthcare.gov, the only way Obamacare has even a remote chance at long term survival is to scrap the entire architecture of the website and start over. To be clear, for reasons that go way beyond the technical "glitches" at the aforementioned website, Obamacare will collapse anyway as I’ve explained many times in the past four years on these pages. But let’s play along and assume that Obama, Pelosi, Reid, et. al., have a clue how insurance markets work and that Obamacare is a well-conceived plan that just needs a few minor technical tweaks here and there.

In a recent article at Bloomberg Megan McArdle, nobody’s idea of a conservative, described why it’s imperative for the success of Obamacare that its implementation be delayed if the government exchanges aren’t working — and working well — right now:

If the exchanges don’t get fixed soon, they could destroy Obamacare — and possibly, the rest of the private insurance market. The reason that the exchanges were so important was that they were needed to attract young, healthy people into the insurance system. The worry was that if insurance is hard to buy — if you have to do your own comparison shopping and then call the insurance company, and fax in some paperwork and two years of tax returns — that the young and the healthy simply won’t do it. Sick people and old people who were getting huge subsidies — and maybe the ability to buy insurance on the private market for the first time in a long while — would overcome any obstacles, because if you’re spending $15,000 a year on health care, it’s worth a lot of your time to make sure that you have insurance. But if your biggest annual health-care expense is contact lens solution, you may just decide to skip it and pay the fine.

The administration estimates that it needs 2.7 million young healthy people on the exchange, out of the 7 million total expected to apply in the first year. If the pool is too skewed — if it’s mostly old and sick people on the exchanges — then insurers will lose money, and next year, they’ll sharply increase premiums. The healthiest people will drop out, because insurance is no longer such a good deal for them. Rinse and repeat and you have effectively destroyed the market for individual insurance policies. It’s called the “death spiral,” and the exchanges, like the mandate, were designed to keep it from happening…

Once the death spiral happens, it’s very difficult to recover from. That’s why if the exchanges don’t work soon, we need to hit the reset button and try again next year.

And nobody outside of the Obama White House bubble believes there’s any chance the exchanges will work properly any time soon, regardless of how you define the word "soon". 4-6 months is one guess, and that’s just to test the existing system. If, as is more likely, they have to uproot it and start over, it will take significantly longer than that. The National Review’s Yuval Levin expands on McArdle’s point about the insurance death spiral and how the onerous exchanges make it inevitable:

One key worry is based on the fact that what they’re facing is not a situation where it is impossible to buy coverage but one where it is possible but very difficult to buy coverage. That’s much worse from their point of view, because it means that only highly motivated consumers are getting coverage. People who are highly motivated to get coverage in a community-rated insurance system are very likely to be in bad health. The healthy young man who sees an ad for his state exchange during a baseball game and loads up the site to get coverage—the dream consumer so essential to the design of the exchange system—will not keep trying 25 times over a week if the site is not working. The person with high health costs and no insurance will.

And even if the "healthy young man" to whom Levin refers does persevere and is eventually lucky enough to make it through the byzantine healthcare.gov maze. He’ll have the privilege of enrolling for a government approved health insurance plan costing him several hundred dollars per month in premiums with an annual deductible in the neighborhood of $4,000. Why would he willingly sign up for this? I’m not sure how, precisely, you define "young", but my guess is that the type of individual Obama needs to sign up for this boondoggle has annual medical expenses equal to less than the cost of one month’s Obamacare premium, if that. In an average year, this individual may have an annual wellness visit, a flu shot and, if he’s particularly unlucky, a trip to the local urgicare center for stitches from cutting his finger while trying to clean leaves out of his gutter. Wouldn’t it make more economic sense to pay the $95 fine and self-insure? And if some catastrophic disease or accident does befall him, Obamacare’s nonsensical requirement that insurers cover pre-existing conditions eliminates the rationale for him (and everyone else) to purchase insurance in the first place. My point: The aforementioned insurance death spiral will happen anyway, it’ll simply happen a lot sooner if the unusable Obamacare exchanges aren’t delayed and fixed.

I suspect Obama knows this. But now, given the events of the past three weeks, it’s politically impossible for him to delay Obamacare despite the gathering and overwhelming evidence that he must. If he does, whatever short-term political victory he thinks he’s achieved with his shut-down theatrics will evaporate overnight. And with Obama, politics trumps all else. Even with the media’s loyal assistance, I don’t see how he manages to get away with delaying Obamacare after claiming to have saved America from those evil, hostage-taking Republicans for … wanting to delay Obamacare. He’s not Bill Clinton.

Some are already speculating that Obama will sooner or later be forced to announce a delay, but I don’t see how he can do it politically. If past is prologue, he’ll merely dig in his heels and insist all is well. That’s what he does.

There are plenty of people to whom I’ve spoken who believe Obama had intended Obamacare to collapse all along, that it was part of his master plan to nationalize the entire health care industry. That’s not implausible, but I’m skeptical. I simply don’t believe Obama’s that bright. But that’s irrelevant. As I noted at the beginning of this post, the Obamacare debacle will inflict incalculable harm on the notion that government can or should be put in charge of our health care system or anything else. Pre-Obamacare, roughly 85% of Americans were insured, the overwhelming majority of which were satisfied with their coverage. Obamacare was ostensibly designed to deal with the 15% who weren’t. Obama promised no pain to the 85%. Not only would we be able to keep our current plan, but we could look forward to a $2500 cut in our annual premiums as well. None of this turned out to be true. Quite the opposite.

Thus Obama wreaked havoc on the 85% in order to cover the remaining 15%. But even that won’t happen. As the WaPo notes, even if Obamacare goes according to plan, an estimated 31 million Americans will still be without coverage in 2023.  How is such ineptitude and dishonesty by the government an argument for an even greater role for government? In light of the immense incompetence they’ve demonstrated in implementing their partial takeover of the health care system, why would anyone outside of the Daily Kos or MSNBC entrust them with the whole thing?  The question answers itself. Even Kos has their doubts about Obamacare. So, no, I’m not worried that Obamacare’s inevitable collapse will necessarily lead to nationalization of 18% of our economy.

Obamacare is an epic example of government overreach and incompetence. Obama, even with his breathtakingly misplaced arrogance, must be aware of the fact that his signature "achievement" is a clusterfark and that its only chance for survival is to delay and attempt to fix it so there’s at least a small chance that those elusive young people will mitigate the death spiral. But now he can’t delay it:  He just shut down the government because the Republicans wanted to delay it. Irony.

Had conservatives followed the advice of establishment Republicans and not made Obamacare an issue in the debt-ceiling and budget negotiations, Obama would probably delayed it on his own by now. Indeed it’s conceivable, likely even, that he would have delayed it until January 2015, thus depriving the GOP of a red-hot issue in the 2014 mid-terms … not unlike the establishment’s choice of Mitt Romney deprived Republicans of the issue in 2012. But thanks to conservatives, that didn’t happen and Obamacare will be front and center in 2014. That can’t possibly be good for Democrats.

Update: No worries, Obamacare fans. HHS claims the system is working great and Nancy Pelosi sees no reason for delay. (I wonder if she’s read it yet.)

Conservatives 4 Palin

WW II Memorial Rally in Washington

 October 14, 2013
By Doug Mainwaring

Several thousand U.S. Veterans and their admiring supporters descended on Washington D.C.'s WWII Memorial to protest the punitive treatment of Veterans by the Obama Administration during the ongoing government shutdown.

 

People drove through the night or flew in the day before from as far away as Florida, Louisiana, and California. One active-duty soldier flew in from Germany just to participate in the two-hour rally, and rushed off to fly back so he wouldn't be AWOL on Monday. 

 

Vets and active military have been the focus of the administration's contempt, suffering one indignity after another.

 

Many elderly attendees desperately searched in vain for men's and women's rooms nearby, but all the lavatories within walking distance of the War Memorials had been locked days earlier by the U.S. Park Service.

 

Vets who arrived early took down the barricades blocking access to the WWII Memorial, some saying "Mr. Obama, tear down this wall."

 

 The crowd roared for Sarah Palin, who was briefly trapped in the crush of an adoring crowd as she approached the WWII Memorial to speak.

 

 Republican Senators Mike Lee and Ted Cruz were also met with thunderous applause and cheers.

While this was billed as a Veterans rally, Vets weren't the only ones who showed up.

 

When a convoy of truckers came rumbling down 17th Street (which runs between the WWII Memorial and Washington Monument grounds), ralliers ran out into the street to greet them.

 

Between the blaring of the truckers' horns and the thunderous revving of the Harley Davidsons on 17th Street, as well as the frequent roars of the large crowd, one vet quipped, "I hope the Obamas weren't planning on sleeping in this morning."

 

This sign captured the spirit of the rally.

The rally then moved west to the Lincoln Memorial, where vets again tore down barricades. 

They then carried the barricades several blocks north and piled them up in front of the White House. First, mounted police showed up.

 Then U.S. Police to break up the crowd. 

 Then police in riot gear arrived. 

And, in case the unruly mob of wheelchair-bound octagenarians and their supporters got completely out of hand and stormed the White House, a sniper appeared atop the roof. 

During the "Occupy Washington" protests two years ago, never was there such a show of force against a relatively small number of protestors. Evidently our wonderful military vets are more dangerous than "Occupy" anarchists. 

 

While the White House may want to forget about our four brave patriots murdered in Benghazi, the veterans have not and will not.

 

George Washington, shedding a tear, as he likely would if he were alive to witness the Washington 
Aristocracy's tyrannical treatment of the country class, and in particular, to our veterans and active-duty military.

Doug Mainwaring is a cofounder of National Capital Tea Party Patriots.

American Thinker

Sen. Ted Cruz's Remarks at the Values Voter Summit

Watch Ted Cruz's inspiring speech as well as watch him handle half a dozen hecklers with astute diplomacy. 

Governor Palin: ‘What Average Americans Think of Members of Congress’

October 10 2013

Governor Palin posted the following via Facebook recently:

Kudos to Sean Hannity for his hard hitting interview with Anthony Weiner. See video of it below.

Really, liberals, to think you supported this fine gent in Congress all those years with minions in the media propping him up? Hmmmmmm. I hope Weiner continues to be a spokesman for the liberal cause because his position pretty much says it all.

Just as interesting juxtaposition to show what average Americans think of members of Congress like Anthony Weiner and the permanent political class in D.C., I’m pasting below a letter that was posted online in various forums. It was apparently sent by a gentlemen in Washington state to his senators. I don’t know this gentleman and can’t verify the authenticity of the letter, but its words ring true with the sound wisdom of We the People.

Here’s the letter:

April 3, 2013
Senator Patty Murray
Senator Maria Cantwell
Washington, DC, 20510

Dear Senator:

 I have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a Command Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses shortly after his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those virtues he felt important – honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the laws of God and of our various governments. I have served my country, paid my taxes, worked hard, volunteered and donated my fair share of money, time and artifacts.

Today, as I approach my 79th birthday, I am heart-broken when I look at my country and my government. I shall only point out a very few things abysmally wrong which you can multiply by a thousand fold. I have calculated that all the money I have paid in income taxes my entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop open for one year! Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know what the Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your haircuts and meals on us.

Last year, the president spent an estimated $1.4 billion on himself and his family. The vice president spends $ millions on hotels. They have had 8 vacations so far this year! And our House of Representatives and Senate have become America’s answer to the Saudi royal family. You have become the "perfumed princes and princesses" of our country.

In the middle of the night, you voted in the Affordable Health Care Act, a.k.a. "Obama Care," a bill which no more than a handful of senators or representatives read more than several paragraphs, crammed it down our throats, and then promptly exempted yourselves from it, substituting your own taxpayer-subsidized golden health care insurance.

You live exceedingly well, eat and drink as well as the "one percenters," consistently vote yourselves perks and pay raises while making 3.5 times the average U.S. individual income, and give up nothing while you (as well as the president and veep) ask us to sacrifice due to sequestration (for which, of course, you plan to blame the Republicans, anyway).

You understand very well the only two rules you need to know – (1) How to get elected, and (2) How to get re-elected. And you do this with the aid of an eagerly willing and partisan press, speeches permeated with a certain economy of truth, and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and under-educated citizens (and non-citizens, too, many of whom do vote) who are looking for a handout rather than a job. Your so-called "safety net" has become a hammock for the lazy. And, what is it now, about 49 or 50 million on food stamps – pretty much all Democratic voters – and the program is absolutely rife with fraud with absolutely no congressional oversight?

I would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What changed you is the seductive environment of power in which you have immersed yourselves. It is the nature of both houses of Congress which requires you to subordinate your virtue in order to get anything done until you have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase President Reagan, it appears that the second oldest profession (politics), bears a remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.

As the hirsute first Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton (1834 – 1902), English historian and moralist, so aptly and accurately stated, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Great men are almost always bad men." I’m only guessing that this applies to the female sex as well. Tell me, is there a more corrupt entity in this country than Congress?

While we middle class people continue to struggle, our government becomes less and less transparent, more and more bureaucratic, and ever so much more dictatorial, using Czars and Secretaries to tell us (just to mention a very few) what kind of light bulbs we must purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we can eat, what cars we can drive, gasoline to use and what health care we must buy. Countless thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses costing the consumer more and more every day.

As I face my final year, or so, with cancer, my president and my government tell me "You’ll just have to take a pill," while you, Senator, your colleagues, the president, and other exulted government officials and their families will get the best possible health care on our tax dollars until you are called home by your Creator, while also enjoying a retirement beyond my wildest dreams, which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay for.

The chances of you reading this letter are practically zero as your staff will not pass it on, but with a little luck, a form letter response might be generated by them with an auto signature applied, hoping we will believe that you, our senator or representative, has heard us and actually cares. This letter will, however, go online where many others will have the chance to read one person’s opinion, rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its senators and representatives.

I only hope that occasionally you might quietly thank the taxpayer for all the generous entitlements which you have voted yourselves, for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of course, it just goes on the $17 trillion national debt for which your children and ours, and your grandchildren and ours, ad infinitum, must eventually try to pick up the tab.

My final thoughts are that it must take a person who has either lost his or her soul, or conscience, or both, to seek re-election and continue to destroy this country I deeply love and put it so far in debt that we will never pay it off, while your lot improves by the minute, because of your power. For you, Senator, will never stand up to the rascals in your House who constantly deceive the American people. And that, my dear Senator, is how power has corrupted you and the entire Congress. The only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits. This, of course, will kill the goose that lays your golden eggs. And woe be to him (or her) who would dare to bring it up.

Sincerely,

Bill Schoonover

Here’s the video of Hannity’s interview with Anthony Weiner:



Conservatives 4 Palin

David Horowitz: "Fight Fire With Fire"

by Jeffrey 

Below is the transcript of a speech David Horowitz recently delivered at the Americans for Prosperity Defending the American Dream Summit in Orlando, Florida.

 I’m pleased to be here. I want to thank Tim Phillips for inviting me to this gathering, and the Koch brothers for organizing it. Most of you probably know that I grew up in a Communist family and had a misspent youth as a Marxist leader of the New Left in the 1960s. In later years, when I reflected on the damage our “revolution” had inflicted on our country, I would ask myself, “Where was the ruling class? Why didn’t they defend the System from these modern day Luddites and America haters? Why didn’t they expel us from the schools we tried to shut down? Why did they give us platforms to advance our agendas? What were they thinking?”

As the years progressed, and the radicals first infiltrated and then took over the Democratic Party, I found myself asking, “Where is the ruling class? Why don’t they see the threat this radicalized party is posing to their interests and the country’s? Why isn’t the ruling class mobilizing its resources to oppose an assault that is threatening the free market system and the very foundations of our democracy?”

And then, last year, I was invited to this event, and here you are. Except that I no longer believe there is a ruling class or that you are one. America is — as it has always been — a pluralistic society with competing centers of power. Moreover, as Jacob Laksin and I have shown in our book The New Leviathan the preponderance of political wealth is on the left, and has been put in the service of parties and causes that are anti-capitalist. As Jacob and I showed, progressive foundations engaged in political activities are more than 10 times wealthier than their conservative counterparts, and are able to deploy resources for political ends that are greater by far than even that.

Historically the movers of radical transformations have always been drawn from the ranks of the upper classes. The French Revolution was initiated by French aristocrats; Karl Marx was funded and promoted by a capitalist factory owner. And the Obama socialists who today threaten our way of life are swimming in wealth up to their eyeballs. The purpose of these observations is first to underscore how important you as creators of wealth are to the battle facing us; and second, how much catching up you have to do in order for us to prevail.

If the last five unhappy years have taught us anything, it is these two things: First, elections have consequences. The left’s last two electoral triumphs have already had a devastating impact on our nation and its future. America is now a great power in steep decline, a by-stander in world events, where once it shaped them. Our president is set on a course that actively encourages our enemies, weakens our friends and diminishes our military strength. At home his policies have impelled us towards national bankruptcy and constitutional disorder. And worse. Until the IRS and NSA scandals and Obamacare revealed the power that the Obama radicals are acquiring, I myself did not realize how close we were to the prospect of losing our democracy and actually becoming a totalitarian state. If you control all that information about individual lives and you have all that power over their finances and health, you can destroy any opposition and you do not need a secret police to enforce your will.

The second thing we have learned is something that everyone knows but no one wants to admit: well-designed character attacks can have a crucial impact on electoral outcomes; well-designed character attacks overpower well-crafted messages.

In the last election, Romney had a good message and an obvious one: Obama’s economic recovery has been a sorry failure; 23 million people still are jobless; many more are underemployed; if you want jobs and economic opportunities, support the job creators and innovators and deregulators.

But a critical majority of the voting public never heard Romney’s message. The reason? A $200 million smear campaign successfully portrayed him as a heartless job destroyer, a mouthpiece for the selfish rich, someone whose words you can’t trust.

What was the answer of Obama’s opponents to this killer attack? They didn’t have one. There was no $200 million campaign dedicated to destroying Obama’s credibility and undermining his message. Obama’s opponents didn’t have a message discrediting his character and neutralizing his attacks.

Would it have been difficult to do this? Obama is arguably the most brazen and compulsive liar ever to occupy the White House. He is an absentee executive — invisible at the budget negotiations in Washington and the withdrawal negotiations in Iraq, missing in crisis after crisis. While Egypt and Syria burn, he golfs. His endless dithering and misguided interventions in support of the Muslim Brotherhood have set the entire region aflame. Meanwhile, he and his wife carry on like French royalty, lavishing tens of millions of taxpayer funds on their family and dog while tens of millions of Americans suffer historic levels of deprivation because of the policies Obama put in place.

How is it possible that his opponents have not buried him under his own disasters? How did two successive presidential candidates, McCain and Romney, characterize this selfish, malicious leader — selling hope while delivering misery — as a “good man,” and someone who only lacked experience for the job? How about a moral conscience?

The answer is obvious to everyone but no one will say it out loud.

No one will confront Obama the way he deserves to be confronted because he is black. Actually he is half black, raised by whites and one Indonesian but no matter, since racist liberals have made the color of one’s skin decisive. It is because Obama is a minority that no one will hold him to a common standard; or confront him with what he has actually done. Any political consultant will tell you that you can’t. This is how race conscious and race-prejudiced our country has become.

This is why Republicans lose elections. Because what is true of Obama is true of the Democratic Party and the socialists generally. They present themselves as the party of minorities, whom they use as human shields whenever they are attacked, portraying their critics as indecent and racist. If we can’t hold Obama accountable, how can we hold any Democrat, any liberal or any socialist accountable? Because this is how they fight, and will do so until a counter-strategy is put in place.

My purpose in coming here today is to outline such a strategy, one that will take down the socialists at election time, and between election times, and defend the market-based democracy we all hold dear. Defend it when we are attacked as racist, insensitive and unfair. Which is how they will always attack us.

Their campaign narrative goes like this: We are the defenders of the underdog, and the champions of equality and fairness. If you attack us you attack minorities, women, children, and the poor. If you oppose us you are racists; you are the people who supported segregation and lynching. Kathleen Sebelius, Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, has actually said this about opponents of Obamacare, glossing over the fact that segregation, like slavery, was a Democratic Party platform.

To begin to devise a counter-strategy, to expose their hypocrisy and impugn their character and neutralize their attacks, you have to ask yourself this question: How is it that Democrats liberals and socialists can pose as defenders of the poor?

Obama has created more poor people than all the presidents since World War II put together. Today, forty-seven million Americans are on food stamps and 100 million on government handouts. In Democrat monopolies like Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Washington DC and a dozen other major urban blight areas, liberal socialists have damaged and destroyed the lives of more African Americans than all the Republicans since the creation of the Republic. Yet every four years – and in between – they are able to persuade voters that they are defenders of minorities and the poor.

How do they do it? Not by actually helping minorities and the poor, but by attacking the rich. They portray rich people as the enemies of minorities and the poor who refuse to pay their fare share. They demonize wealth. That is what allows them to pretend they are friends of the poor.

Conservatives often fail to appreciate the cynical basis of the attacks on them. Conservatives are earnest – too earnest. They aim their messages at the head instead of the heart. They appeal to reason instead of the emotions. That’s why they lose. Democrat socialists don’t actually hate rich people or believe they are oppressors of the poor. In fact Democrat socialists want to be rich. In fact they are rich. Just ask George Soros, Jon Corzine, Nancy Pelosi, Rahm Emanuel, Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton and the White House couple. They want to be filthy rich. As far as socialists are concerned rich people are OK — if they support the socialist agendas. It’s cynicism on steroids. It’s all about power. It’s a strategy to win. Attack the rich to show you are friends of the poor. And politically it works.

How can we who believe in individual rights and free markets fight this? How can we neutralize the slanders and show that we are the real defenders of minorities, the poor, the little guy, working Americans, the middle class? How can we turn the tables on them?

It’s not rocket science. You can counter their attacks by turning their guns around. You can neutralize them by fighting fire with fire.

In the real world, Democrat socialists have made the lives of poor Americans worse, much worse. You need to shove this fact in their faces every time you speak. Here is the reality: In every inner city of size in America, the selfish exploiters of the poor are liberals – what I am calling Democrat socialists;they are the ones who fatten themselves off the votes of minorities and the poor while blocking their opportunities for a better life, and throwing them crumbs in return.

Detroit is a city Democrat socialists have run as a political monopoly for 52 years.  For twenty of those Detroit’s Democrat mayor, Coleman Young, was also a member of the Communist Party.

In 1961 before their rule, Detroit had the highest per capita income in the United States; Today, it is
the poorest large city in all fifty states.

In 1960 Detroit was the fourth largest city in America with nearly 2 million inhabitants. Today two-thirds of Detroit’s population is gone. This human flight was the direct result of the government’s attacks on wealth and private companies, and on white people. It was a direct result of the rampant corruption among its political rulers and their draconian restrictions on what private individuals and entrepreneurs could do.

The city currently owes $14 billion in long-term debt, primarily driven by unfunded government union pension and retirement healthcare obligations.

Today Detroit’s median household income is $28,000 – slightly more than half the median income of the state of Michigan or the United States.

Nearly half of Detroit’s population is either unemployed or no longer looking for work. Its poverty level is 36 percent or more than twice that of the state level.  Over a third of its inhabitants are on food stamps. Three out of every four of its children are born out of wedlock. A third of its school children don’t graduate and nearly half of those who do are functionally illiterate.

In one generation the Democrat socialists reduced America’s number one industrial city to the level of a third world nation.

Did I mention that eighty-two percent of Detroit’s population is African American?

This is a social atrocity committed by liberals and Democrat socialists against African Americans. If we spoke like they do, we would have no compunction about calling this the most appalling racist atrocity against African Americans since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts.

Now consider this: This historic assault on Detroit’s African American population was absent from all the speeches and all the political ads of all the actors supporting free market solutions in the 2012 elections. The word “Detroit” wasn’t mentioned.

This atrocity is not just being committed in Detroit. The government of every major inner city in America has been 100% controlled by Democrat socialists for the last fifty years. Everything that is wrong with America’s inner cities that policy can affect, liberals, Democrats and socialists are responsible for. They have their boot heels on the necks of poor black and Hispanic families. But we are all too polite to mention it.

Some Republicans have complained that Democrats win because they hand out goodies to minorities and the poor. Yes, they do. But the goodies they hand out are chump change compared to what they’ve destroyed for all Americans and especially for the poor. Would you rather live on food stamps and handouts or be able to pay for what you need and want? I don’t think there are many Americans who would have trouble making that choice.

So here’s the strategy, remembering that the best defense is a good offense:Attack the Democrat socialists for their wars against minorities and the poor. Expose their empty promises and question their character and undermine their message by portraying them as hypocrites who cannot be trusted. In attacking them as enemies of minorities and the poor we show that we care what happens to minorities and the poor. We put them on the defensive, and we neutralize their malicious and unfair attacks.

There is one more lesson to be learned from the last election: By well-placed attacks, we can change the story line of the national debate to our advantage.

Republicans planned to make the 2012 election about Obamacare, because there was a Republican landslide in 2010 around that issue. But two things happened on the way to the election that changed the subject. First, Romney picked Paul Ryan as his running mate so the details of Ryan’s plan to fix everything – including Medicare – became targets that were used to neutralize and divert the Republican attack.

Second, and far more importantly, a movement called Occupy Wall Street went on a rampage in American cities attacking the so-called 1% and the allegedly unfair distribution of wealth. Occupy Wall Street was a criminal mob supported by Obama and Pelosi, orchestrated and financed by the socialist government unions. Overnight, this changed the national debate from Obamacare to “fairness.” It cast anyone opposing more taxes as a selfish defender of the rich, and put Republicans on the defensive.

We don’t have the presidency, and we don’t have the union network or the national media to shift the debate to subjects that will give us that advantage. But we do have independent expenditure campaigns, and we do have the Tea Party grassroots to promote the message. And this is what the message should be:

They say we’re anti-woman because we don’t want to finance contraceptives for upper middle class academic women. Our answer to this attack should not be to argue about contraceptives, which will lose us a lot of single women votes. Our answer should be: After 5 years of Obama rule there are 16 million women on food stamps. Two out of every five single mothers are on food stamps. Under Obamacare family health care costs are about to skyrocket. This is Obama’s war on women.

They say we’re anti-Hispanic. After 5 years of Obama rule, there 8 million Hispanics on food stamps, and 20 million Hispanics who are unemployed or no longer looking for work. This is Obama’s war on minorities.

They say we don’t care about blacks. Look at America’s inner cities. They are run by Democrats and socialists and have been for fifty years. This is their war on African Americans and the poor.

And so on. As I said, it’s not rocket science. It’s about turning the guns around. It’s about having the moral fiber to do so.

 Finally, I don’t want to leave you with the idea that campaigns are won on negatives alone. The negatives I have proposed are designed to blunt the opposition attacks and put them on the defensive. But people need hope, and are looking for change. These are basic elements of any campaign message. In crafting the message the positive elements should be designed so that they also dramatize the negative: how the opposition hurts minorities, working Americans and the poor. In opposing parties that oppress these underdog classes we demonstrate that we care about what happens to them. It’s a simple equation. But our side doesn’t get it yet.

Here’s one example of how it could be done:
Let’s take the education dollar that taxpayers now give to the bureaucrats who don’t care about their children, and give it back to the taxpayers. Let’s voucherize all the school systems in the country from kindergarten to college. Conservatives are always talking about abolishing the Department of Education. This is not the way to go about it. Voters will be told that conservatives are against education.

Instead of calling for the abolition of the Department of Education call for a fundamental change in its mission. Take its $50 billion or so budget and require that the money be spent on a voucher program for all Americans – from kindergarten through college. Let’s put the education dollars in the hands of every poor and middle class person in America. And let’s launch this effort with a $100 million TV ad campaign to tell Americans how the liberal socialists in every major urban school system have destroyed the lives of poor, mainly black and Hispanic children, who can’t afford the private schools that liberal legislators send their own kids to.

Let’s put hope in the hands of people who can’t afford to send their kids to schools that will teach them.
Let’s change the way the educational economy works, so that individuals are empowered – not government – so that competition is restored and standards are raised. Let’s take the second biggest part of the government economy and return it to the people. Let’s create a model of the kind of society we want — a free market society, a society based on individual achievement, not government defined collectives.

This is just one possible campaign. Even if this particular campaign doesn’t win the first or second time around it will eventually change the perceptions of everyone in politics. We will no longer be seen as the defenders of the rich; we will be seen as the defenders of minorities and the poor; and our opponents will be seen as their oppressors. If campaigns like this are conducted in the right way they will change not only the way conservatives frame their message; they will change the political landscape of the country and the prospects for our nation’s future.

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David Horowitz Freedom Center