Fiery Dana Loesch at Racine Tea Party Saturday Before Recall Election

Walkin' Tall: Walker Inspires an Army

June 8, 2012
Lloyd Marcus

A friend informed me that Gov. Scott Walker defeated the recall on the same day President Ronald Reagan passed away, June 5.  She added that Walker reminds her of Reagan.

As chairman of The Campaign to Defeat Barack Obama, I have visited several cities in Wisconsin.  In my chats with patriots across the state, they sang the praises of Gov. Walker's reforms and his remarkable courage.  Despite intense and relentless pressure, Walker stayed true to championing conservative principles.

While we all knew that the Democrats' attack on the Wisconsin governor had national ramifications, the result of Walker's courage is more powerful than anyone could have imagined.  My goodness, this man has inspired a nation.  Wow!

Gov. Walker stepped up, drew his sword of honor, and defeated the multi-headed dragon of liberalism, just when our Tea Party movement desperately needed a hero.  Since the beginning of the Democrats' absurd recall attack on Walker for simply keeping his campaign promises, Walker and his family have endured horrendous persecution and death threats.  Even now, after Walker won the recall, the internet is littered with new threats on Walker's life.  Liberals are tweeting that someone should kill Gov. Walker.  Don't you just love the liberal anti-war, let's-be-tolerant-of-everything crowd?  Disagree with them and they demand that you be silenced, destroyed or killed.

Countless patriots have shared their research, which confirms that our government is racing down various wrong roads, all leading to destruction.  These patriots feel hopeless, unable to hit the brakes to turn America around.  But Scott Walker has shown us that one brave, committed man can make a difference.

 Democrat mayor of San Jose, CA Chuck Reed is battling the unions to restore his city to fiscal sanity.  Mayor Reed said some city employees are making more money in retirement than they did when they were working.  His city's system is corrupt and insane.

San Diego, CA mayor Jerry Sanders is fighting to implement reforms which he says will save several billions over the next ten years.  On average, from 60% to the upper seventies, voters are supporting this new wave of courageous mayors and governors in their quest for fiscal morality and sanity.

Now that Scott Walker has led the way, I predict a tsunami of mayors and governors suddenly finding a backbone to say no to workers receiving immoral, unsustainable benefits.
Ann Coulter called Walker's victory "the recall heard around the world."  That is pretty powerful -- one man!

I do not know about you, but I feel empowered -- what I do does matter.  Your book matters.  Your video matters.  Your song matters.  Your running for office matters.

Brothers and sisters, imagine the power of an army of Scott Walkers -- all fully committed to restoring the God-inspired conservative principles which have made us a great and prosperous unique experiment -- America.  My name is Lloyd Marcus, and I am Scott Walker!

American Thinker

Citizens United Becomes the Left's All-Purpose Excuse

June 8, 2012
By Richard A. Baehr

Tuesday night, watching the election returns from Wisconsin was an object lesson in a few areas.  On both CNN and MSNBC, the pundits and hosts proved they cannot divide.  Flashed on their screens were comparisons of total spending on the governor's race that showed $45 million in total for Scott Walker, and but $9 million for the poor beleaguered forces of Tom Barrett, the candidate of  "the people" (the unions).  

Of course, the unions' direct or in-kind spending throughout the recall effort, variously estimated at $20 million on the governor's race alone, was excluded from the comparison.  In any case, the geniuses of the left, Rachel Maddow, Lawrence O'Donnell, and Ed Schultz among them, all bemoaned this 7-to-1 or 8-to-1 spending disparity, all a result of the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision.  One would think that 45 divided by 9 is not a tough calculation.

But the bigger confusion concerned Citizens United.  It turns out, of course, that not a dollar that made its way into the Walker or Barrett campaign would have been kept out had Citizens United gone the other way at the Supreme Court.  Citizens United related not to contributions to candidates' campaigns, but to contributions by corporations and unions to organizations that made independent expenditures.  In Wisconsin, Walker outraised Barrett by $30 million to $4 million.  This occurred in part because Walker raised money for months before he knew who his opponent would be.  Also, Wisconsin law, both before Citizens United and after, allows a governor to raise unlimited contributions for such a recall effort.  
Barrett had to raise money for the Democratic primary fight and then raise more in the short period before the recall vote, with lower limits on the maximum size of his contributions, also as set by Wisconsin law.  

Were a Republican effort made to recall a Democratic governor in Wisconsin, the exact same limits for both the governor and the recall opponent would have been in place, favoring the Democratic incumbent.  The outside party expenditures favored Walker by $15 to $5 million without counting the union money, and favored the recall effort by $25 million to $15 million, with the union money included.

In other words, the outside expenditures favored Barrett and the recall, after including the union contributions.  The unions spent a lot of money before the Democratic candidate was known, to gather the roughly one million signatures that were sufficient to generate the recall election and then to help their preferred candidate in the Democratic primary (who lost).  It is entirely artificial to include only union money in the one month after Barrett was nominated.

Greg Sargent, a left-wing columnist for the Washington Post, admitted that the Walker/Barrett funding disparity had its roots in state  law:

Walker, meanwhile, has benefitted from the state's election finance rules that allowed his campaign to raise unlimited contributions from individuals after recall petitions were filed in November 2011. His challengers could take no more than $10,000 from individuals.

Note of course, the word "individuals," not "corporations" or "unions."  The big-money donors to Walker, in a few cases, were the same individuals who gave to the Republican Governors Association, which provided over $4 million to support Walker.  But again, the money came from individuals.  The Democratic Governors Association could have raised big gifts from George Soros or Jeffrey Katzenberg to back Barrett.  There was nothing in the law before or after Citizens United that prevented the left's big donors from backing Barrett, other than Barack Obama trying to suck up all the available cash.

Blaming Citizens United for the decisive Walker victory is nothing more than a smokescreen to cover up the fact that most Wisconsin voters were tired of 15 separate, very divisive, and angry recall campaigns, all mounted because of unhappiness among some voters with some of Walker's policies since he took office.  

Most people think you get your next shot at an elected official when the candidate runs for re-election.  Recalls of governors are more like impeachments -- something that is done to address corruption, or other criminal behavior (applicable to most recent governors of neighboring Illinois, for instance).

So too, the left is unwilling to consider that its side might have lost on the merits -- that Walker has done a good job, addressing the state's deficits, and eliminating some of the imbalances between public- and private-sector benefit packages for workers.  The changes to public employee collective bargaining rights have had their most dramatic result in the number of union members who have chosen to continue with their union dues (and membership) now that said dues are not automatically deducted and then paid by the state to the unions.  It looks as if more than half of AFSCME members opted out.  Some of them may have decided that the extra money they will have from not paying union dues might help pay for the extra health care or pension costs they now have to account for (still pretty modest by comparison with private-sector workers).  Some of them may even realize that the additional contributions they are making are a major reason why some of them still have jobs, since the alternative to the higher contribution levels was layoffs of public-sector workers.

Ed Schultz does not understand it, but it is not that difficult to understand why some union household members (38% according to the not very reliable exit polls) voted for Walker.  This number includes private-sector union workers, who prefer private-sector job growth, as opposed to higher state spending to provide more salary and benefits to public-sector employees.

On Thursday came a new campaign finance horror story for the left, and again it had nothing to do with Citizens United.  Mitt Romney and the Republican National Committee outraised Barack Obama and the Democratic National Committee, $76 million to $60 million, in May.  These were not contributions that were in any way a result of the Citizens United decision.  Rather, the circumstances seem to reflect the fact that there is much greater enthusiasm this time around on the Republican side than there was in 2008, another conclusion the left is unwilling to accept, since they want to believe that it is just the plutocrat conservative billionaires, such as the Koch brothers, who are destroying the country with their big contributions.  

Romney's amazing haul in May came in under the radar.  There were no flashy events with Bill Clinton or Hollywood celebrities.  There were no auctions to contribute $3 and have a one-in-5 million chance to meet George Clooney or Sarah Jessica Parker in his or her home.  However, the Romney campaign might consider whether it can raise a lot of $3 contributions from people who do not want to meet Anna Wintour.

One final point on the money disparity in Wisconsin.  People on the left seemed to think it unfair that they were outspent.  That has just not been part of the natural order of things over the last half-decade.  The left conveniently forget that in the 2008 presidential campaign, their candidate Barack Obama was the first major party candidate to opt out of public financing of the general election campaign.  The good government pro-public finance crowd smiled all through September and October of 2008, when Obama outspent McCain for the presidency, not some governor's race, by 5-to-1.  Do you think, just maybe, all that money may have contributed to Obama's victory or to the margin of victory, not even to mention the contribution value of all the free love provided to Obama by the network news programs, morning shows, and soft media, such as Oprah?

The left is unwilling to accept that a majority of American voters might not be with them, and that ordinary Americans (not just the ultra-rich) might contribute to Republicans.  The start of the general election cycle is providing evidence that 2012 will not be a replay of 2008.

Richard Baehr is co-founder and chief political correspondent of American Thinker.

American Thinker

Ben Smith Concedes Obama's New Party Involvement; Will He Pursue or Play Down?

by Joel B. Pollak 

Buzzfeed's Ben Smith now concedes that Barack Obama sought the socialist New Party's endorsement in 1996--but continues to give Obama, and the New Party, the benefit of the doubt on whether Obama was in fact a member. While admitting the Obama campaign misled the press and the public about the New Party, Smith continues to let the campaign get away without comment--when, in fact, David Axelrod responded yesterday.


Granted, Axelrod's response was to claim that he had "no idea" about the New Party--but that is almost certainly a lie, given that he controls Obama's image tightly, and given that the campaign targeted the New Party allegation as a "smear" in 2008. It is widely known that Axelrod micromanages his candidates' speeches and biographies, and there is almost no chance he has "no idea" about Obama's New Party ties.


To his credit, Smith allows that "if the Obama campaign falsely denied that detail of his liberal past in Chicago, it wouldn't be the only fishy statement they made in 2008 about that period." But he disagrees with Kurtz that Obama's ties to the New Party "would have been the straw to break the camel's back."

It might not have been--because the mainstream media deflected each new fact about Obama as it emerged. (John Nolte has covered Smith's own role in that deflection, calling it "BenSmithing.") When the media could no longer write "nothing to see here" pieces about Obama's past, as in the case of Jeremiah Wright, it eagerly accepted and celebrated Obama's supposedly historic (but in fact fraudulent) explanations and excuses.

Smith places the burden of proof on Kurtz, as always. Why? How many lies from the Obama campaign are necessary before the mainstream media holds it accountable? Has Smith pressed the campaign for an apology to Kurtz, whom it smeared as a "crackpot"? When will "no idea" no longer be an acceptable answer?

Big Journalism

Afterburner with Bill Whittle: Hope… and Change

Europe is descending into a horrible debt nightmare. Will unions throw America into a similar debt spiral, or will voters stand up to organized labor as they did in Wisconsin? Find out as Bill Whittle tells you about the dangers of socialism, and the true impact of Governor Scott Walker’s recall win in Wisconsin.

The “People United” Go Down In Flames

Walter Russell Mead 

The American left as we have come to know it suffered a devastating blow in Wisconsin last night. The organized heart of the left gave everything it had to the fight against Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker: heart, shoe leather, wallet and soul. The left picked this fight, on the issue and in the place of its choice; it chose to recall Walker because it believed it could win a showcase victory. That judgement was fatally flawed; it is part of a larger failure to grasp the nature of American politics and the times in which we live.

The left gave this fight everything it had. It called all the troops it could find; it raised all the money it could; it summoned the passion of its grassroots supporters, all the moral weight and momentum remaining to the American labor movement and every ounce of its strength and its will.

And it failed.

The tribes of the left danced and rallied in the streets of Madison. They knocked on doors. They staffed phone banks. They passed fliers. They organized on social media. They picketed. They sang. They brought in the celebrities and the stars; they marched seven times around the city blowing the trumpets and beating the drums. They hurled invective; they booed; they cheered.

And they failed.

For labor, this was a key test of strength and clout. Scott Walker attacked the American labor movement where it lives: the public sector unions are the only bright spot in the dismal world of modern American unions. They have the growth, they have the money, they have — or they had — the hope.

The Walker reforms hurt AFSCME in Wisconsin almost as badly as Ronald Reagan hurt PATCO, the air traffic controller union he famously crushed in 1981. Public sector workers have deserted their unions in droves since the state clipped union bargaining rights and stopped automatic collection of dues. After a string of bitter, humiliating and expensvie defeats, labor in Wisconsin will now be a shadow of its former self, lacking the troops, the money and the morale.

The public sector unions are critical to what remains of the American left. The power of the public service unions in Democratic politics pulls the entire party to the left and gives ideas that are important to the left an access to power that they would otherwise lack. But more important than that, they provide a kind of center to a movement that otherwise threatens to fragment into antagonistic cliques.

The New Left of the 1960s and 1970s rapidly devolved into different factions. There are environmentalists, civil rights and Black activists, poverty activists, feminists, intellectuals in the academy and the arts, gay rights advocates and many other groups whose agendas often don’t overlap and sometimes conflict.

Two big things unite them: a general sense of being on the same side in opposition to the economic and social right, and the belief in a strong, well-funded state. Some want the state to enforce mandates and empower them to reshape and uplift the bitter clingers. Others want the state to fund their universities, create jobs for their communities or otherwise provide concrete benefits. But for all of them the progressive, bureaucratic government machinery of the 21st century is both the prize for whose control they struggle and the agent they hope will make their dreams real.

This is exactly what public sector unions believe in and want: more government mandates and more government jobs — with more security, higher wages and better benefits all the time.

A Democratic Party dominated by its public sector unions is a party married to government and to bureaucracy. To the degree that the public unions shape its agenda, the Democrats become a lobby for the servants of the state. For the unions who represent its employees, the bureaucratic, civil service state is a solution permanently in search of new problems to solve and new worlds to conquer. The power of the public unions within the party pulls Democrats much farther to the left than they would otherwise go.

This is one reason the Wisconsin reforms stimulated such a powerful and united emotional wave of push back from virtually every section of the left. The threat to the public unions isn’t just a threat to a powerful source of funding for left-liberal candidates and to strong organizations with political experience and muscle; it’s a threat to the heart of the left coalition and to the structures that give the left much of its power in Democratic and therefore in national politics.

But the dominance of the public unions in the left had consequences for the left itself — bad ones. In contemporary America, the public sector unions are essentially a conservative constituency. That is, their core goal is to get more resources in order to fight all but superficial change in the structures their members inhabit. They want ever growing subsidies to the postal service, the public school system, the colleges and universities, even to health care — but they do not want the kind of reforms that could make these institutions more efficient, more productive, more serviceable.

To the extent that these unions shape the Democratic agenda, Democrats aren’t just the party of government; they are the party of inefficient, expensive, unresponsive, bureaucratic government. They are the party of government workers first and foremost, and if there is a clash between the interests of the providers of government services and their consumers (between, for example, unqualified, unmotivated life-tenured public school teachers and kids), the unions come at these issues from the standpoint of protecting workers first, others second.

In terms of the blue social model, they are the party of the bitter clingers: the power of public sector unions among Democrats is a power that inhibits Democrats from putting forward innovative, future-facing ideas (about schools, health care, and so on) and keeps them focused firmly on the defense of the past.

The left’s analysis of its loss in Wisconsin resorts to some classic tropes: it is despair masked as defiance in order to avoid deep introspection. The rhetoric of resistance is employed to describe the substance of collapse in an effort to insulate conventional pieties and beloved assumptions from withering critiques. Thus from Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor and publisher of The Nation and a deeply engaged and thoughtful person of the left, came an op-ed published in the Washington Post. Contemplating the imminent defeat in Wisconsin, she titled her article “Wisconsin gives progressives something to build on.” She is clear about the nature of the threat:

By attacking labor unions, flooding Wisconsin with outside cash and trying to cleanse the electorate of people who don’t look, earn or think like him, Walker has taken aim at more than a single campaign cycle or a series of policies; his real targets are the pillars of American progressivism itself.

But contemplating the likelihood of defeat, she calls on her allies to take the long view. The very long view. They must contemplate history with the eyes of faith.

Elections are over in a matter of hours, but movements are made of weeks, months and years. The Declaration of Sentiments was issued at Seneca Falls in 1848, yet women did not gain the right to vote until seven decades later. The Civil War ended with a Union victory in 1865, yet the Voting Rights Act was not passed until a century later. Auto workers held the historic Flint sit-down strike in 1936-37, yet the fight for a fair, unionized workforce persists 75 years later.

Victory is inevitable, though perhaps not for another two generations. Build the movement; fight the fight. The message at once consoles the faithful and acknowledges the scale of a historic defeat. When she tries to sound positive about what the long, expensive, draining, bitter, losing fight in Wisconsin accomplished, she waxes eloquent but not, I think, convincing:

Just as the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt motivated people around the world, including in Wisconsin, the occupation of the Madison statehouse helped inspire the occupation of Wall Street a few months later.

This seems at once grandiose and hollow — like Donald Trump, though without the vulgarity. And the fight in Wisconsin gives us an example, she enthuses:

…in the last 15 months, Wisconsin’s progressives have shown us that the battle against bankrolled austerity can be bravely waged by an army of dedicated people committed to protecting working families. They’ve reminded us that good organizing is our only chance to withstand the blitzkrieg of corporate funded advertising — and better yet, leave a lasting mark. Their movement, with thousands of new Wisconsin activists mobilized, energized and educated, can be permanent — and it can keep growing.

Yes, they can do all that, and they can lose. Big time. They can fail to get their favorite candidate nominated by the Democratic voters, they can fail to move public opinion on the core question of the Walker labor reforms, and they can fail to move the state or the country towards their point of view.
Vanden Heuvel’s analysis of why the left lost in Wisconsin is simple, and if it is true, the left looks doomed.

The answer is money, she says, reflecting a very widespread line of analysis. Thanks to the Supreme Court, the right is able to outspend the left ten to one, ensuring that the left can never win.

If the argument is correct, then this really is a “Seneca Falls” movement — and the left is doomed to generations of marginalization or, as The Nation would more optimistically put it, “struggle.” If the right can “flood the zone” with dough, the left will never be able to win enough presidential and senatorial contests to reverse the Supreme Court’s trajectory. If the American people are really so stupid and clueless that they docilely follow the big bucks and the deceptive campaign ads of their clever class enemies on the right, then the right is pretty much set for a long spell of power.

The reality is more complicated. For one thing, the left had more money on its side in Wisconsin than many reports acknowledge; $20 million from labor groups, according to this estimate. More importantly, money does matter in politics, but money alone is rarely enough, especially on an issue which voters care deeply about. When the left — or the right — can summon popular passion and energy to its side, it can not only put up a noble fight. It can win. This actually happens quite a lot in American politics: poorly funded campaigns with charismatic candidates tap into some deep reservoir of popular sentiment and they deal out bitter defeats to the pallid, colorless but well-moneyed Establishment candidates. This has been happening relatively frequently in Republican politics of late. There have been times in American history when it happened also on the left. Milwaukee, Wisconsin has had Socialist mayors.

The left’s problem in Wisconsin wasn’t that the right had too much money. The left’s problem is that the left’s agenda didn’t have enough support from the public. Poll after poll after poll showed that the public didn’t share the left’s estimation of the Walker reforms. Many thought they were a pretty good idea; many others didn’t much like the reforms but didn’t think they were bad enough or important enough to justify a year of turmoil and a recall election.

The left lost this election because it failed to persuade the people that its analysis was correct. The people weren’t a herd of sheep dazzled by big money campaign ads on TV; the Wisconsin electorate chewed over the issues at leisure, debated them extensively, considered both points of view — and then handed the left a humiliating, stinging and strategic defeat.
 


What happened in Wisconsin last night wasn’t, as a distraught young voter told CNN in the video above, the death of democracy in America. But it was an important stage in the death of an old vision of what America is about. What was once a common vision of the future — the “liberal” utopia of the last fifty years — is behind us now. We need a new future because the old one has turned into the past.

Governor Walker and Mayor Barret both gave good speeches last night, and both called for an end to the bitter divisiveness that has polarized Wisconsin for the last 18 months. Both, in a characteristically American way, spoke of the need to put the past behind us and work to build a better tomorrow.

There has never been a greater need for the American faith that leads us to embrace change. The old certainties don’t work anymore, the old institutions are too expensive and too slow, and the old economy isn’t coming back. In Wisconsin, the left embraced the visions and the hopes of the past, but the voters were ready to move on.

Voters in Wisconsin didn’t reject a role for the state in regulating the economy and easing the harshness of life in a market economy. But they turned decisively against the argument that well-paid armies of life-tenured bureaucrats can produce enough good government to justify the cost. And the lesson of the election isn’t that the right has too much money; the lesson is that while the left still has plenty of passion and fire, it has, thanks in part to the power of public sector unions, largely run out of compelling ideas.

American Interest

Holder: Email with Words 'Fast & Furious' Not Referencing Fast & Furious

by Mary Chastain 1 hour ago 7 post a comment

 Another day of testimony from Attorney General Eric Holder, another day of stonewalling Congress. Thursday afternoon, the embattled Holder answered questions from members of the House Judiciary Committee. Starting out, Chairman Lamar Smith asked him directly who in the Department of Justice knew about the gun walking used in Operation Fast and Furious. “Mr. Attorney General, who is the highest ranking official in this administration that knew that these tactics were being used?” asked Chairman Smith. Mr. Holder never directly answered. Instead, he asserted that the operation started in Arizona and the US Attorney and ATF office there knew. After trying a few more times, Chairman Smith moved on.

Later on, Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa began an explosive exchange with Mr. Holder. Issa asked Holder if the DOJ produced documents internally about Fast & Furious, and, of course, Mr. Holder dodged the question. Chairman Issa responded with visible irritation.





“No, Mr. Attorney General, you are not a good witness. A good witness answers the question asked. So let’s go back again. Have you and your attorneys produced internally the materials responsive?” said Chairman Issa.

While the Chairman tried to get a coherent answer from Mr. Holder, Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee decided to turn his time into a circus. She interrupted him to ask Chairman Smith to allow Mr. Holder to answer the question. Chairman Smith said he would be allowed and added Mr. Holder would have more time to do that if there weren’t any interruptions. After that was settled and Chairman Issa asked for his time back, Rep. Watt decided to butt in with a request about time being allowed or given back.

Chairman Issa also revealed he was given the wiretap applications by whistleblowers because they are tired or Mr. Holder’s stonewalling. While trying to ask Mr. Holder a question, Rep. Watt kept trying to interrupt Chairman Issa. Every time Issa opened his mouth he was interrupted. All he wanted to know was if the senior officials who signed the wiretaps, like Deputy Assistant Attorney General Jason Weinstein, were responsible for the wiretap applications. When Mr. Holder was able to answer, he deflected and didn’t give a yes or no response.

The Democrats gave Rep. Jason Chaffetz the same treatment. Rep Chaffetz asked Mr. Holder if he would meet with him and other members of Congress privately to discuss the wiretaps & other evidence and why they came to different conclusions. He explained that five minutes during these hearings is not enough time. Mr. Holder said no.





In order to persuade Mr. Holder, Rep. Chaffetz read an email from Mr. Weinstein that is about Fast & Furious. Mr. Holder deflected, insisting the email was about Operation Wide Receiver, despite the text of the message specifically referencing Fast & Furious. Despite this proof of reaching different conclusions, Mr. Holder still did not agree to meet personally with any of the congressmen.

Big Government