Tag Archives: Topic: Politics

AP: Republican lawmakers have a message for those who want the party to soften its emphasis on social conservatism in hopes of reaching a wider national audience: Not so fast.

The Hill: Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) has endorsed the Ready for Hillary super-PAC, becoming the first lawmaker to back an effort aimed to push Hillary Clinton to run for president in 2016.

One News Now: The president announced in recent days he is appointing five open homosexuals to ambassador positions around the globe, including an HBO executive and a hedge fund manager. There are already three open homosexuals serving as ambassadors in the Obama administration. – See more at:

Politico: Conservative leaders say it would be wrong to read too much into the speeches Thursday. There’s no question, they say, that in the event of a sweeping Supreme Court ruling in favor of gay unions, the Republican Party’s leadership and its field of 2016 candidates would take the side of social conservatives.

Boston Herald (AP): Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny says anti-abortion activists in his predominantly Roman Catholic country are inundating his office with threatening packages and letters condemning him as a baby-killer, some written in blood. “I am now being branded … around the country as a murderer, that I’m going to have on my soul the death of 20 million babies,” Kenny said Wednesday as he described a mass campaign to flood his post box and telephone switchboard with anti-abortion messages.

The College Fix: Robert Anderson, an associate professor at Pepperdine University School of Law, has uncovered that among the 47 attorneys at the U.S. Department of Education who donated money to a candidate in last year’s presidential election, 47 of them donated to Barack Obama – or all of them, basically.

Christian Concern: A Tory MP wants David Cameron ousted as party leader because he “marched us on to the guns” over gay marriage. Andrew Bridgen, MP for North West Leicestershire, says the issue has driven voters into the arms of UKIP.

LifeSiteNews: In 2008, a private tech company was quietly formed in Washington. Its purpose was simple: collect and store data on U.S. voters from across the issue spectrum and from all walks of life, and sort it into easy-to-use files that any left-leaning candidate or issue group could use to reach individuals with a message specifically tailored to their interests and lifestyle. The company was called Catalist, and it has proven to be the most powerful and effective weapon the Left has ever wielded in the battle to win the ultimate prize in the American political cycle: Getting out the vote.

WorldNetDaily: WND has received an unclassified NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) that warns airmen not to look at news stories related to the data-mining scandal.

Rachel Alexander at Townhall: Sociologist George Yancy asked professors if they would be more or less likely to hire someone if they were a Republican, evangelical or fundamentalist. Three-quarters said political affiliation would not affect their hiring decision. But the one-quarter that did say it would influence their decision virtually all said they would favor a Democrat over a Republican. Almost half of the sociology professors surveyed said they would look unfavorably upon evangelicals and fundamentalists trying to get a job in their department!

BuzzFeed: With a record number of out LGBT lawmakers, the caucus is aiming to change the Hill — and the country.

Townhall carries the YouTube video.

Rasmussen: A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that just 16% of Likely U.S. Voters believe most members of Congress care what their constituents think. Sixty-four percent (64%) feel they don’t care what their voters think

Times Union: Kelly Cummings, the top spokesperson for Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, issued a statement accusing Gov. Andrew Cuomo of playing to “extremists who want to expand late-term abortion” with the last provision in his just-introduced Women’s Equality Act.

The Wall Street Journal video is here.

Townhall covers and carries video of the exchange during Congressional hearings.

National Journal: The New Jersey governor’s decision to hold the Senate race in October 2013 means it will be difficult for the GOP to contest the seat.

NRO: “This is what really rankles conservatives,” Armey said on CNN this afternoon. “I put it down as debilitating stupidity because the first rule of politics is ‘don’t lose the friends you already have for the friends you’re never going to get.’”

NewsMax: Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus says a new study by college GOP members marks a “great” step forward in boosting the party’s appeal to young voters even though the report warned the party’s brand was damaged among that demographic.

The Advocate: College Republicans to GOP: Drop Marriage Opposition If You Want Our Vote
Congressional Republicans must give up their slavish devotion to opposing marriage equality if they hope to once again attract younger voters, the nation’s leading group for conservative college students said today in a scathing report. | More reports here.

Erik Stanley on the Janet Mefferd Show | MP3 audio 13:20 mins | Related articles by Erik Stanley. | www.PulpitFreedom.org

The Hill: House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) slammed White House spokesman Jay Carney as a “paid liar” Sunday over the administration’s handling of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) scandal.

The Hill: The IRS tried to impose a gift tax on donors to a conservative group formed to support former President George W. Bush’s 2007 troop surge in Iraq, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

Christian Institute: In a letter signed by 15 MPs, including former children’s minister Tim Loughton and former defence minister Sir Gerald Howarth, Peers were told of the “varying degrees of coercion” when it came to the “free vote” in the House of Commons.

How Appealing link to a report and the ruling.

ABA Journal: But in the aftermath of Citizens United, lower courts are dealing with the question of whether those rights extend beyond political speech. Do corporations—including secular, for-profit corporations—possess religious liberty rights too?

National Journal: They also didn’t seem to know, or care, that Jackson had a long history of antigay rhetoric, the most incendiary of which includes saying that gay men and women are “very sick people psychologically, mentally, and emotionally,” calling them “perverted,” and comparing homosexuality to pedophilia. That’s what drew Fleischer’s ire. “Jackson’s antigay slurs are indefensible,” he tweeted.

The Hill: Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) on Sunday defended his decision to single out a key GOP group in a 2010 letter to the IRS.

Christian Institute: “But I think it is right for Britain, like other countries, to take on this issue and to determine the right approach and that’s exactly what I’ve done and I’m proud of the fact that this legislation has now passed the House of Commons.”

Gay Politics: White House officials including Valerie Jarrett, a top adviser to President Obama, today spoke at an event honoring “Harvey Milk Champions of Change,” a group of 10 openly LGBT elected and appointed officials who were nominated for the honor by the American public.

Boston Globe: A leading antiabortion group plans to use Virginia’s 2013 statewide races as a strategic proving ground ahead of next year’s midterm elections, raising the stakes in a gubernatorial contest marked by heated debate over social issues. The Susan B. Anthony List . . .

Fox News: Under her direction, the FEC undertook the largest enforcement action in its history — suing the Christian Coalition for violating campaign laws. The Christian Coalition won, but in one deposition, FEC lawyers asked a defendant if televangelist Pat Robertson prayed for him. James Bopp, the Christian Coalition’s lawyer, said he was “shocked and appalled” by that. . . . “She was in effect being promoted for what she had done at the Federal Election Commission and now was going to be expected … to replicate that at the IRS and now we know that’s exactly what happened,” he said.

Washington Post: If we give the president the benefit of the doubt and assume he knows the truth is going to come out, the question remains: Does the administration appoint the special prosecutor sooner or later? The calculus inside the White House is how to best protect the president’s political interests. They have two options.

The Hill: Carney said that Mark Childress, the White House deputy chief of staff, twice spoke with Lois Lerner, the IRS official who oversaw the agency’s tax-exempt organization, about the strategy for revealing conservative targeting.

AP: Members of the Cincinnati tea party will gather at noon Tuesday at the city’s Fountain Square, then march to the nearby federal building to continue the rally.

The Hill: “He thought the opposition to it would lessen after the [2010] election. I said, ‘It’s just the beginning.’ I said, ‘It’s going to grow because I can tell you it’s not going to go away and it’s going to get worse,’” Snowe said in a radio interview moderated by Julie Mason, host of SiriusXM’s Press Pool.

Washington Times: But by Monday, Mr. Jackson, the first black candidate Republicans have chosen to run statewide since 1988, was being slammed by critics for statements he’s made in the past likening Planned Parenthood to the Ku Klux Klan and that gays and lesbians are “very sick people psychologically, mentally, and emotionally and they see everything through the lens of homosexuality.”

The Hill: White House press secretary Jay Carney said Monday that Chief of Staff Dennis McDonough and other senior officials knew of the general nature of the report but decided to keep the president in the dark about the report’s finding that the IRS had targeted conservative groups for extra tax scrutiny.

NY Times: At the first Congressional hearing into the I.R.S. scandal, J. Russell George, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, told members of the House Ways and Means Committee that he informed the Treasury’s general counsel of his audit on June 4, and Deputy Treasury Secretary Neal Wolin “shortly thereafter.”

Weekly Standard: “[I]f this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different.”

Washington Examiner: Sarah Hall Ingram, the IRS executive in charge of the tax exempt division in 2010 when it began targeting conservative Tea Party, evangelical and pro-Israel groups for harassment, got more than $100,000 in bonuses between 2009 and 2012.

Weekly Standard (includes video): California congressman Devin Nunes made the claim yesterday that the Justice Department wiretapped telephones in the House of Representative’s Cloak Room, an exclusive part of the Capitol where members are able to privately interact with one another. Nunes made the claim on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show.

NewsMax: A pro-marriage organization claims the IRS leaked confidential financial documents to a rival group which were then used against GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney during the 2012 election.

Jen Kuznicki at CNSNews: Byron York of the Washington Examiner wrote yesterday that the IRS scandal could lead to fears about the agency’s role in enforcing Obamacare: The IRS will also decide who is, and who is not, eligible for Obamacare’s subsidies. The law authorizes the IRS to share confidential taxpayer information with the Department of Health and Human Services for the purpose of determining those subsidies.”

Michael W. Hannon at Public Discourse: Our arguments for limited government should recognize political community as an intrinsic good, not mistake it for a merely instrumental one.

Broadening IRS Victims Include Pro-Life Advocates, As Congress Investigates Thomas More Society Cases Demonstrate Conservative Bias Only “Tip of Iceberg”   (May 15, 2013 – Chicago)  The Thomas More Society is speaking out about blatant bias by the supposedly apolitical …

Rasmussen Reports: Voters are now evenly divided when asked if elections in the United States are fair today, and a solid majority continues to believe that the U.S. government does not have the consent of the governed. But the Political Class strongly disagrees.

James Bovard at Wall Street Journal: As David Burnham noted in “A Law Unto Itself: The IRS and the Abuse of Power” (1990), “In almost every administration since the IRS’s inception the information and power of the tax agency have been mobilized for explicitly political purposes.”

Politico: Larry Conners, a veteran local news anchor at KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis, says that the Internal Revenue Service has been targeting him since an April 2012 interview he conducted with President Obama — a fact that he dismissed as coincidence until the recent reports about the IRS targeting conservative groups.

AP: Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker call the allegations “Big Brother come to life.”

Politico: “We are looking at it pretty seriously,” said Dan Backer, a lawyer who represents a half dozen conservative groups targeted by the IRS, including Combat Veterans Training Group and TheTeaParty.net. “Given the sheer scope of maleficence at the IRS, there may be a legal recourse.”

Erik Stanley at Speak Up Movement: But what should be reported is that the targeting by the IRS goes even deeper than what is just reported. Because the IRS has been targeting churches since the passage of the Johnson Amendment in 1954. There is no difference between what the IRS has been caught doing with conservative groups and what the IRS has done to churches for the last 59 years. Both are intimidation.

Washington Post: Earlier this spring, Sen. Rand Paul and his wife, Kelley, invited a crew from the Christian Broadcasting Network into their Kentucky home for what turned into two full days of reality TV.

FoxNews: An IRS campaign to apply additional scrutiny to conservative groups went beyond targeting “Tea Party” and “patriot” groups to include those focused on government spending, the Constitution and several other broad areas.

Christian Institute: The Government thinks supporters of traditional marriage are just “dinosaurs” who should be “frogmarched” towards a new concept of wedlock, Lord Carey says.

Newsok.com: An Internal Revenue Service spokeswoman told reporters on a hastily-arranged conference call Friday that employees targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny during the 2012 election weren’t acting out of political bias, but she couldn’t name any groups with less conservative-sounding names.

James Taranto at WSJ: n September 1989 the New York Times magazine published an excerpt of “The IRS: A Law Unto Itself,” a book by former Times reporter David Burnham. Burnham detailed how the Internal Revenue Service had misused its power in an attempt to stifle political dissent . . .

Kristan Hawkins at Townhall: The bottom-line is this: Kermit Gosnell is not unique. He is a product of the culture of death that Planned Parenthood’s hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars cultivates and encourages, beginning with our youth. While Students for Life’s Planned Parenthood Project will soon expose Planned Parenthood’s corrupt, dirty, and deadly practices on campuses nationwide, it’s time for Washington, starting with Republican House Leadership, to investigate and defund the abortion Goliath once and for all.

AP:The Internal Revenue Service inappropriately flagged conservative political groups for additional reviews during the 2012 election to see if they were violating their tax-exempt status, a top IRS official said Friday.

Lyle Denniston at Constitution Daily: If the Constitution takes at least part of its meaning from the way elected officials react to a high-profile public policy issue, the supporters of same-sex marriage have reason to be optimistic right now. In the space of less than a week, Rhode Island and then Delaware became the 10th and 11th states to allow gay marriage (along with Washington, D.C.). But is that a trend that the Supreme Court is ready to advance—or will choose to leave alone to see how it goes?

Jordan Bloom at the American Conservative: In honor of F.A. Hayek’s birthday, let’s consider for a moment how he misread himself. In his essay “Why I Am Not A Conservative,” the economist and philosopher argued for a radical anti-state program, …

Samuel Gregg at Public Discourse: Conservatives need to stop shying away from principled, as opposed to merely utilitarian, defenses of economic freedom and its associated institutions.

Former Sens. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Sam Nunn (D-Ga.) at The Hill: After trying private negotiations, bipartisan commissions, informal “gangs” and a supercommittee, the search for a long-term federal fiscal plan has come full circle back to where it started — regular order under the budget process in Congress. Or has it?

The Hill: The Republican National Committee urged the Supreme Court on Tuesday to strike down certain limits on campaign contributions, saying they’re a violation of the First Amendment. The RNC filed its opening brief in a case challenging limits on the total amount one person can donate in a single election cycle.

The Hill: Sanford owes party leaders nothing, as they refused to spend money on his campaign in the closing weeks and held him at arm’s length for much of the race. He’s also a vocal — and stubborn — fiscal conservative . . .

AP: In a story of political redemption, Mark Sanford is headed back to Congress after his career was derailed by scandal four years ago.

KARE11.com: “You have to have proof that he’s not representing. Well, the proof was in the last election when you have 62.5 percent of the voters (in the district) that voted for traditional marriage,” he told KARE 11. Radinovich recently announced he supports same sex marriage legislation.

Illinois Review reports.

Opposing Views: The Illinois Family Institute protested against State Rep. Ron Sandack over the weekend, while gay marriage activists staged a counter protest, outside the Republican’s Downers Grove office (video below).

Chicago Tribune: Pat Brady, the chairman of the Illinois Republican Party, announced his resignation Tuesday amid a simmering controversy over his support for gay marriage legislation.

LifeNews: With a national controversy swirling surrounding abortion as the Kermit Gosnell murder trial unfolds, several Senate Republicans are seeking hearings on the abortion practitioner and abortion in general.

These aggregate limits restrict how much an individual may spend on political contributions over a two-year election cycle, even though the contributions are at levels otherwise legal.

Christian Institute: Yesterday, over 300 local voters protested outside David Cameron’s constituency office in Witney, Oxfordshire, against his plans to redefine marriage.

Christian Institute: The Conservative Party faces losing hundreds of seats at the local elections tomorrow because of the Prime Minister’s plans to redefine marriage, according to a new poll. The survey also shows that many voters are turning to UKIP over the issue.

Elahe Izadi at National J. via Yahoo: Polling on gay marriage among blacks has been mixed. A March 2013 Pew Center study – which compiled results from four surveys conducted over more than a year — found 40 percent of African-Americans support gay marriage, with 48 percent opposing. The same study found 49 percent of whites and 61 percent of Democrats support gay marriage.