human events: 8.13.12

POLI T ICS

Newt Gingrich Cites Three ‘Must Haves’For GOP Platform p. 16

DEFENSE

Defense Cuts Put Virginia Center Stage In November p. 10

ELECT ION 201 2

Is Romney Wrong To Offer Two Years Of Tax Returns? p. 19

The former candidate says platform should address radical Islamists, religious liberty and innovation.

Layo� s and sequestration concerns could swing Virginia voters toward Mitt Romney, some observers believe.

Turns out, a review of who has released what, when shows no singular practice. Even Ted Kennedy refused.

P O W E R F U L C O N S E R V A T I V E V O I C E S

®

T H E NAT I O NA L C O N S E RVAT I V E W E E K LY | E S TA B L I S H E D 1 9 4 4 • WA S H I N G T O N, D . C . | W E E K O F AU G U S T 1 3 , 2 0 1 2

Dependency Nation

President Obama may have just handed Mitt Romney the issue he needs to win the middle class. But will he use it? p. 14

Cybersecurity Act, Round Two p. 12Look for President Barack Obama to attempt to do through executive order what he could not push through Congress. The Cybersecurity Act failed to pass earlier this month.

KEY TOPIC

3WEEK OF AUGUST 13, 2012 | HumanEvents.com

PAGE THREE

▲ Former steel worker Joe Soptic in a 2011 file photo. AP IMAGES

n Report: U.S. negotiating for Afghanistan POW BergdahlBy Hope Hodge

The U.S. government may be back at the bargaining table with the Taliban for the freedom of U.S. prisoner of war Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured in Afghanistan in June 2009 and has been held by the Haqqani Network insur-gent group ever since.

Human Events reported in May on Bergdahl’s plight, seemingly a low-priority con-cern for his government and in limbo after a recent negotia-tion e�ort went o�ine. Now, CNN and Reuters report that negotiations for Bergdahl may be in motion once more, with a new twist on a proposal that would transfer �ve detainees from Guantanamo Bay in ex-change for the captive POW.

“The new proposal involves sending all �ve Taliban prison-ers to Qatar �rst, before the Taliban releases Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl, the sources said. The original o�er proposed trans-ferring the Taliban prisoners into two groups, with Bergdahl being released in between,” reports CNN.

“The o�cials stress that the exchange, should it take place, would be implemented in ac-cordance with U.S. law, which requires consultations with Congress before any detainees are transferred from Guanta-namo.”

That requirement could be a sticking point: while veterans’ rights groups and a number of members of Congress have expressed sympathy for Berg-dahl’s plight, others have made it clear that they will not sup-port any negotiations with the Taliban to recover the captive soldier.

Sta� for House Armed Services Committee member Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) told Human Events earlier this year that Hunter would oppose such negotiations.

Senate Armed Services Committee ranking member John McCain (R-Ariz.), while saying he endorsed talks with the Taliban, has criticized the detainee-release deal for Berg-dahl as “highly questionable.”

Hope Hodge is a reporter covering Defense & National Security for Human Events.

Twisted Timelines and Possible Collusion on PAC Ad Shake Obama Campaign

By Audrey Hudson

The centerpiece of a $20 million operation by a super PAC backing President Barack Obama is being criti-cized for inconsistent timelines behind a new ad fea-

turing steelworker Joe Soptic that may also have broken campaign finance laws.

The PAC commercial set to blanket swing state television sets this week showcases the story of Soptic, a 62-year-old Missouri man, and suggests that Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney is responsible for his wife’s death.

Such ads by PACs are called independent political expen-ditures, and it is a violation of federal election laws for a cam-paign to coordinate with the production or placement of such commercials.

However, a similar ad featuring Soptic wearing the same shirt was produced by the Obama campaign in May, along with a conference call in which Soptic read a transcript retell-ing his wife’s tragic story.

Romney blasted the PAC ad Thursday and accused the Obama campaign of focusing exclusively on personal attacks.

“In the past when people pointed out that something was inaccurate, why, campaigns pulled the ad,” Romney told for-mer Education Secretary Bill Bennett on his radio show. “They were embarrassed. Today, they just blast ahead.

The Priorities USA ad was produced by the PAC’s founder, Bill Burton, who also served as Obama’s White House deputy secretary and worked on Obama’s first presidential campaign.

“The point of this ad is that—you know, it’s to tell the story of one guy, Joe Soptic, and the impact on his life that hap-pened for years, and to this day, as a result of decisions that Mitt Romney made,” Burton told CNN.

After Politico broke the story Wednesday on the campaign and PAC’s use of the same individual relating the same story, top Obama o�cials denied any knowledge of the duplication.

“We have nothing - no involvement with any ads that are

done by Priorities USA,” CNN quoted campaign spokes-woman Jen Psaki as stating on Wednesday. “We don’t have any knowledge of the story of the family. As you know, cam-paign finance rules in that regard are in place for a reason.”

By Thursday, the campaign was changing its story: “No one is denying he was in one of our campaign ads. He was on a conference call telling his story,” Psaki told reporters on Air Force One.

Interestingly, Stephanie Cutter, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, participated in the campaign’s May conference call featuring Soptic, identified herself on the recording, and thanked Soptic for sharing his experiences.

In the campaign call and the PAC ad, Soptic blames Rom-ney for closing the steel plant and costing the family their health insurance. Years later, Soptic’s wife died of lung cancer.

“I had to put her in a county hospital because she didn’t have healthcare, and when the cancer took her away, all I got was an enormous bill,” Soptic says. “That put a lot of stress on me: I thought I’d be paying it o� until I died myself. That probably wouldn’t have happened if Bain kept its promise and I was allowed to keep our health insurance.”

Bain owned GST Steel of Kansas for eight years before it shut down in 2001, however Romney left the company in 1999.

In the commercial, Soptic says his family lost their health-care insurance as a result of the closure and “a short time after that, my wife became ill.”

Soptic’s wife was not diagnosed until 2006 with the late-stage cancer and died three weeks later.

Soptic says he found work six months after the plant shut down as a school custodian making $25,000 a year, but did not add his wife to the insurance plan because of the monthly costs.

His wife remained on insurance provided by her employer until 2003, when she left her job due to an unrelated injury.

Audrey Hudson is a senior reporter for Human Events.

The ad featuring Joe Soptic is chock full of falsehoods and exaggerations, but charges of collusion could prove more disastrous for the desperate campaign.

4 HumanEvents.com | WEEK OF AUGUST 13, 2012

CAPITAL BRIEFS

ment managing education in my back yard and we don’t need an Energy Department that employees 16,000 people and 100,000 subcontractors.”

ELECTION 2012NEW VOTERS MILD ABOUT OBAMAAs wild as first-time voters were about Barack Obama’s presidential cam-paign in 2008, a new poll shows that first-time voters are not as engaged in the current presidential campaign. In fact, they are less likely to vote in November than other Obama back-ers from 2008, a poll conducted by Louisiana State University Public Policy Research Lab shows. Asked if the president deserves reelection, nearly 83 percent of the new voters

primaries in ’08 and this year.” Paul “absolutely” should address the con-vention in Tampa (Fla.) and his views should be carried in the platform, said Goldwater, “because he has aroused thousands with his more libertarian approach.”

When asked if Paul’s position of closing bases abroad and bringing troops home differ from the strong pro-defense views in his father’s clas-sic books “Why Not Victory? and “Conscience of a Conservative”, Gold-water shot back: “It’s a lot different in the world today. We’re not fighting Communism or a common enemy, and we shouldn’t go looking for battles.”

Goldwater also believes that Paul’s opinions of closing down the Depart-ments of Energy and Education should definitely be in the platform because “we don’t need a cabinet-level depart-

Goode remains popular in the Old Dominion’s 5th District. With a re-cent Quinnipiac poll showing Barack Obama and Mitt Romney each getting 44 percent of the vote in the state, GOP leaders fear Goode could tip its 14 elec-toral votes to Obama in a close race.

ELECTION 2012GOLDWATER, JR. IN FOR RON PAULRon Paul’s rally during the Republican National Convention in August will be warmed up by a very familiar name: Barry Goldwater, Jr., son of the 1964 Republican presidential nominee who is considered a father of the postwar conservative movement.

The younger Goldwater, himself a former Republican congressman from California (1969-82), told Human Events last week, “I’ve always been for Ron. We served in the House togeth-er, and I campaigned for him in the

ACROSS AMERICAARE GOODE’S VIRGINIA SIGNATURES NO GOOD?

With days to go before Virginia’s Au-gust 24 filing deadline for third par-ties, Constitution Party presidential nominee and former Virginia Rep. Virgil Goode came under scrutiny in his effort to secure a ballot position in November.

The state board of elections an-nounced last week it is seeking an in-vestigation into ballot signatures in-volving Goode’s campaign. The board voted unanimously to request the Commonwealth’s Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli to investigate “suspect-ed petition fraud” on forms submitted by the Constitution Party, which is al-ready on the ballot in 17 other states.

A former six-term congressman,

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▲ Fmr. Rep. Virgil Goode AP IMAGES

▲ Rep. Ron Paul AP IMAGES


NEWS, VIEWS, OPINIONS FROM WASHINGTON

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8

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OPINIONLiberals tell whopping lies, and too many conservatives don’t read enough to refute them.by Ann Coulter

HOT OR NOTClint Eastwood tops the list after he endorsed Mitt Romney, making up for his “halftime in America” comment earlier in the year.

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENTNew group headed by former Interior chief Gale Norton will “link tighter the economy and environment.”by Audrey Hudson

THE DEBUNKERDo more guns cause more murders? Our data diver goes deep to study correlations between murders by gun and gun sales.

OPINIONThe case against President Obama’s re-election: You can run against his record or his ideas.by Charles Krauthammer

DEFENSEThe Pentagon is backtracking after the president contradicted the department’s base closure plans.by Hope Hodge

This Week’s Must ReadsWELCOME to Human Events. Political momentum, with Con-gress out, now swings toward the upcoming Republican and Democratic conventions. The speaker line-up, the agenda and platform ideas are taking shape. This week, Newt Gingrich gets our platform 2012 discussion rolling with his recommenda-tions on page 16. Look for more on the GOP platform in Human Events next week.

—Cathy Taylor

PAGE

ciety, this one has grown exponential-ly.” Noting that 15 percent of the U.S. population is now on food stamps and “we are in the midst of a dependency crisis.”

Reversing that dependency is “dif-ficult if not impossible when the food stamp program is carried under the banner of a farm bill,” Stutzman and Needham wrote, so “it is time to have a farm-only bill farm bill and move other policies separately.”

CONGRESSBACHMANN RIGHT TO QUESTION CLINTON AIDE’S BACKGROUNDRep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) and four other members of Congress came under fire earlier this summer for asking agency inspectors general to conduct an investigation into appar-

HOUSESTUTZMAN SAYS SPLIT FOOD STAMPS FROM FARM BILLAlthough it will probably have to wait until the next Congress, fresh-man Rep. Marlin Stutzman (R-Ind.) has started a movement likely to catch on with conservatives: separating the food stamp legislation from the Farm Bill.

Writing in the Wall Street Journal last week, Stutzman and Michael Needham of the Heritage Foundation pointed out that “[f ]rom its name, you’d never know that 80 percent of the Federal Agriculture Reform and Risk Management Act goes toward the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), commonly referred to as food stamps.

But it does—and, like most programs rooted in the New Deal and Great So-

who backed Mr. Obama last time said yes, compared to about 91 percent of other Obama voters. Nearly 52 percent of the new voters who cast ballots for the president strongly agreed with the statement, “Obama cares about people like me.” By contrast, nearly 64 per-cent of other Obama voters strongly agreed with that statement.

ACROSS AMERICAREPUBLICANS, DEMOCRATS FEUD OVER EARLY VOTING IN OHIOWith the Republican-controlled state legislature voting to eliminate early voting on the Saturday, Sunday, and Monday before the November election with the exception of military person-nel, the Obama campaign last week joined forces with the Democratic Na-tional Committee and state Democrats to challenge the measure in court.

The Democrats argument is that all Ohioans deserve the right to vote, and if active duty military service members can vote, then that privi-lege should be extended to all eligible Buckeye State voters under the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Not so, say 15 military groups that filed a motion on the side of Ohio’s secre-tary of state asking that the lawsuit be dismissed.

“The Obama campaign’s and Demo-cratic National Committee’s argument that it is arbitrary and unconstitution-al to afford special consideration, flex-ibility, and accommodations to mili-tary voters to make it easier for them to vote in person is not only offensive, but flatly wrong as a matter of law,” declared the groups, which included the National Guard Association of the United States, the AMVETS, and the Marine Corps League.

ent links between top Obama admin-istration officials–including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s aide, Huma Abedin–and leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood terrorist organization.

Some rushed to Bachmann’s aid, like Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) to press the matter; others distanced them-selves.

McCain took to the Senate floor to denounce the accusation, calling Abe-din a “fine and decent American.”

Now, a former U.S. attorney who made a name for himself as the pros-ecutor of the terrorist perpetrators of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, is saying we should take Bachmann’s concerns seriously.

Andrew C. McCarthy, who now contributes to National Review and the Foundation for the Defense of De-mocracies, said in a conference at the National Press Club Wednesday that Abedin’s connections are too serious to ignore.

“I’ve been, I must say, baffled by this whole situation,” McCarthy said, not-ing that a candidate for a high position in a government agency should expect to be subjected to an intensive back-ground investigation.

In Abedin’s case, McCarthy said Abedin’s personal and professional af-filiations, as well as her family’s links to Muslim Brotherhood organizations, should be enough to give investigators pause.

Prior to taking her current position, Abedin worked as an assistant editor for the journal of the Institute of Mi-nority Muslim Affairs, an organization formerly chaired by Abdullah Omar Naseef. Naseef founded the Al-Quae-da-linked charity Rabita Trust.

Three other members of Abedin’s family are alleged to have connec-tions to suspect Islamist groups, but McCarthy said her personal links alone would be grounds for an in-vestigation.

▲ Rep. Marlin Stutzman AP IMAGES


DEFENSE & NATIONAL SECURITY

EVENTS, HEARINGS, MEETINGSDATEBOOK

WASHINGTON

CONGRESS IS OUT OF SESSION UNTIL SEPTEMBER FOR ITS AUGUST RECESS; HERITAGE FOUNDATION HOSTS A PANEL DISCUSSION ON HOMELAND SECURITY ISSUES.

TUESDAY: “When the Next Catastrophe Strikes: Disaster Response and Defense Support to Civil Authorities”—part of the Heritage Foundation Homeland Security 2020 Series, with Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense and Americas’ Security Affairs Paul Stockton. 10 a.m.

THURSDAY: “Student Promotion and Retention: What’s Best for Kids?” Brookings Institution Center on Children and Families event, examining reading and retention policy and practice. Program includes the release of a policy brief summarizing research on the topic. 9 a.m.

SATURDAY: American Council of Trustees and Alumni unveils 2012 “What Will They Learn?” college rankings at the National Press Club.

CAMPAIGN TRAIL

IMPORTANT HOUSE AND SENATE PRIMARIES HELD IN FOUR STATES; MITT ROMNEY CONCLUDES HIS SWING STATE BUS TOUR.

TUESDAY: Connecticut, Florida, Minnesota, and Wisconsin hold Republican and Democratic House and Senate primary elections.

TUESDAY: Mitt Romney’s bus tour of 2012 election battleground states travels Ohio, stopping at Ross County Courthouse, Chillicothe.

WEDNESDAY: Former President Bill Clinton expected to attend Priorities USA Action—a pro-Obama super PAC—briefing in New York, featuring presentations from his former aides Sean Sweeney and Harold Ickes.

OF INTEREST

WEDNESDAY, A DEFERRED ACTION PROTOCOL FOR CHILDREN OF IMMIGRANTS—PART OF PRESIDENT OBAMA’S EXECUTIVE ORDER ON IMMIGRATION REFORM—WHO WERE BROUGHT TO THE U.S. ILLEGALLY GOES INTO EFFECT.

MONDAY: Philadelphia abortion doctor, Kermit Gosnell, goes on trial after being charged with killing seven born-alive babies and the 2009 death of a 41-year-old refugee, Karnamaya Mongar, after an allegedly botched abortion at his West Philadelphia Clinic.

WEDNESDAY: New deferred action for childhood arrivals process implemented, meaning certain young people who were brought to the U.S. as young children, do not present a risk to national security or public safety, and meet several key criteria will be considered for relief from removal from the country.

THURSDAY-FRIDAY: Annual Border Security Conference, hosted by The University of Texas at El Paso in conjunction with the Office of Rep. Silvestre Reyes. Brings together leaders from the public and private sectors to explore the best methods of safeguarding a common border.

Pentagon Forced to Talk Fast After Obama Contradicts Position on Closing of BasesBy Hope Hodge

Since the release of the White House FY 2013 Defense budget proposal in January, Pentagon

o�cials have been openly discussing the possibility of adding a round of Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC), an unpopular but routine and effective way to trim costs and increase effi-ciency. But in a recent interview with a local Virginia radio station, President Barack Obama appeared to camouflage the truth about BRAC plans in an apparent attempt to salvage popularity points in military-heavy regions.

The last round of BRAC was exe-cuted between 2005 and 2011, closing 13 military installations and combining or realigning a dozen more. Another closure cycle was not due to begin until 2015, but military officials have said spending cuts under the 2011 Budget Control Act could prompt the closing of more bases in 2013.

In an exclusive July interview with WAVY, a radio station covering the military-dense region of Hampton Roads, Va., Obama appeared to forget all about that plan.

“Do you support another BRAC clos-ing bases, possibly hurting Hampton Roads?” WAVY reporter Andy Fox asked the president, according to a

transcript.“You know, I don’t think now is the

time for BRAC, we just went through some base closings and the strategy we have does not call for that,” Obama replied.

Among those who noticed the sud-den change in message was Republican Congressman Randy Forbes (Va.), who penned a letter to Obama in July asking for clarification regarding the new mes-sage.

“Your statement is inconsistent with

those from Secretary Panetta, other members of your administration and budget documentation that all requested another two rounds of Base Realignment and Closure,” Forbes wrote. “We would appreciate if you could confirm that the Administration at this time is no longer seeking to close additional military installations.”

Forbes’ communications director, Wes Battle, said the Congressman won-dered if Obama had flipped on the issue, or had just committed a messaging ga¦e in an e¦ort not to lose the support of military communities.

“It wouldn’t seem like the venue. If you were going to take BRAC out of the budget, you wouldn’t do it in a local Virginia-affiliated interview,” Battle said, meaning Obama would be more likely to pick a national venue to announce a decision with such broad implications.

Whatever the case, Obama’s revela-tion appeared to force Defense Secre-tary Leon Panetta out of a silence on the issue he has maintained fairly con-sistently in order to back the president up.

“It’s now clear, obviously, that there will not be a round of BRAC authorized in 2013. And that’s no surprise,” Panetta announced on Monday at an Associa-tion of Defense Communities event in

Monterey, Calif. “…I mean, we have to put it forward, we’ve got to make it clear that we’ve got to have the argument, but I understand how tough it would be.”

The prospect of additional BRAC rounds has been wildly unpopular among conservative lawmakers and most members of Congress in either party with a military base in their dis-trict: the closing and realignment of military installations typically spells lost jobs and a negative economic trickle-down in the communities sur-rounding the bases.

In February, 42 members of Congress from both sides of the aisle wrote a let-ter to Obama urging him to hold o¦ on his base closure plans.

“With threats around the globe and during a time when every defense dol-lar is scarce, what is the justification for spending on additional base closures?” they wrote. “How does this approach make our country safer?”

A Republican amendment to the 2013 Defense spending bill that would expressly prohibit the use of federal funds for a FY 13 BRAC round passed the House and now awaits consider-ation by the Senate.

Hope Hodge is a reporter covering Defense & National Security for Human Events. She can be reached at [email protected].

President Obama appeared to camou�age the truth about base closure plans in a recent Virginia radio interview.

▲ Leon Panetta. AP IMAGES


On June 15th, the Department of Homeland Security announced that it intends to circumvent Congress and administratively implement the DREAM Act. The announcement came through an official policy memo, signed by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and a Homeland Security press release. In the announcement, Secretary Napolitano states that, effective immediately, the Obama Administration will move to stop deporting illegal aliens who qualify for the DREAM Act by granting these illegal aliens “deferred action.”

Deferred action status is what DHS grants when it decides, in its own discretion, not to remove an illegal alien. Those who receive deferred action usually also receive work authorization and DHS has confirmed that illegal aliens granted deferred action pursuant to the new policy memo will be eligible for it. There is no statutory basis for deferred action status, as it is merely referred to in the federal regulations (See, e.g. USCIS Ombudsman memo, Apr. 6, 2007 (citing 8 C.F.R. 274a.12(c)(14))). Even more troubling, deferred action is not subject to judicial review. (Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Comm., 525 U.S. 471, 484, 492 (1999))

Under the new policy, in order to be eligible for deferred action, an illegal alien must:

1. Have come to the United States under the age of sixteen;

2. Have continuously resided in the United States for at least five years preceding the date of this memorandum and are present in the United States on the date of this memorandum;

3. Currently be in school, have graduated from high school, have obtained a general education development certificate, or are honorably discharged veterans of the Coast Guard or Armed Forces of the United States;

4. Have not been convicted of a felony offense, a significant misdemeanor offense, multiple misdemeanor offenses, or otherwise pose a threat to national security or public safety;

5. Not be above the age of thirty.

In addition, the illegal aliens must also complete a background check and, for those individuals who make a request to USCIS and are not subject to a final order of removal, must be 15 years old or older. While this new policy is effective immediately, Secretary Napolitano has directed U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to create an application process that will be fully operational within 60 days. DHS estimates that nearly 1 million illegal aliens will be given a reprieve through its new policy.

In a completely contradictory explanation, Secretary Napolitano insists that the decision to grant deferred action to illegal aliens will be done on a “case-by-case” basis, yet simultaneously outlines broad categories that determine eligibility. Moreover, to estimate at the outset that 1 million illegal aliens will benefit from this new policy is a clear indication that the Obama Administration intends to grant blanket relief to illegal aliens on its own initiative, completely circumventing Congress which has repeatedly rejected the DREAM Act over the past ten years. Perhaps even more appalling, Napolitano makes no excuse for this wholesale rejection of the rule of law and usurpation of Congressional authority. Instead, she states that our immigration laws are not to be “blindly enforced” and that “discretion is especially justified in these cases.”

A D V E R T O R I A L

DHS Grants Reprieve to Illegal Aliens

F E D E R AT I O N F O R A M E R I C A N I M M I G R AT I O N R E F O R M • F I G H T I N G T H E FA I R F I G H T F O R I M M I G R AT I O N R E F O R M

Go to www.fairus.org for more updated information concerning the Administration’s latest move.

HumanEvents.com | WEEK OF AUGUST 13, 20128

▲ Former Interior Secretary Gale Norton testifies about the role of the department in the Deepwater Horizon disaster, July 20, 2010. AP IMAGES

ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Conservatives Set to Explore Innovative Environmental Ideas

“We would like to link tighter the economy and environment. We want to see thriving industry so people can have jobs at the same time we protect the environment,” former Interior Secretary Gale Norton told Human Events.By Audrey Hudson

Ranchers and farmers along the Blackfoot River in Montana have their own method for

dealing with the drought that does not involve the federal government or bureaucratic regulations that often favor the environment over humans.

Using more e�cient equipment to water their crops and voluntarily cut-ting back on their usage of irrigation systems are just some of the responses that frees up enough water to remain in streams and maintain a healthy fish population.

“It doesn’t have to be either farmers or fish, you can have both flourish,” says Gale Norton, who served as Interior secretary during the George W. Bush administration.

Called the Blackfoot Challenge, the water conservation methods were cre-ated in 1993 by local residents to con-serve and enhance the natural resources. It is also one of many models being examined by the newly formed Conservation Leadership Project, of which Norton is a member.

“These are all voluntary—not regula-tory—these are all approaches people have worked out themselves through a local cooperation,” Norton told Human Events in a recent interview.

Norton served as Interior secretary

from 2001-2006 and was the first woman to hold that cabinet position, but not without some controversy. Her Senate confirmation was protested by environmentalists who opposed her multiple-use approach to public lands and support for natural resources development.

Practical solutionsThe purpose of the Conservation Lead-ership Partnership is to provide a cata-lyst to create practical solutions to envi-ronmental issues using a conservative and libertarian focus. The organization is made up of former government o�-cials, public policy experts, agricultural leaders, business visionaries and envi-ronmentalists.

“A consistent theme is a bottoms-up solution as opposed to those mandated from Washington. It allows people to find solutions that really work for their communities—not one size fits every-one in the country,” Norton said.

“Some conservatives are unhappy with the current state of environmental regulation, and that tends to make people think that conservatives don’t care about the environment,” Norton said.

“In reality, you can separate wanting to protect the environment from heavy-handed regulation. What we are doing is exploring the avenues for protecting

our environment while also encourag-ing free enterprise and innovation and recognition of private property rights,” Norton said.

The partnership will bring together people from vastly di�erent ecological perspectives—hunting, fishing, farmers, ranchers, oil and gas industry, and envi-ronmental groups—to explore what can be done cooperatively to enhance the environment and meet the needs of those who live o� the land as well, Nor-ton said.

“We would like to link tighter the economy and environment. We want to see thriving industry so people can have jobs at the same time we protect the environment,” Norton said.

The group began holding meetings earlier this year and will continue with hearings throughout the west on water issues, energy security, and habitat con-servation issues.

Norton said they will hear from peo-ple involved in these and other issues “to make sure we have good practical solutions” then the leadership project will release a series of white papers for public consumption.

“Hopefully, those who are involved with policy development will take them seriously,” Norton said.

Audrey Hudson is a senior reporter for Human Events covering Energy & Environment. Her email address is [email protected].

n EPA mandate threatens to spike grocery pricesBy Audrey Hudson

Key Republican senators are pushing the Environmen-tal Protection Agency (EPA) to temporarily suspend its mandate to blend massive amounts of corn with gasoline production citing extreme drought conditions that are pushing costs sky-high.

The lawmakers say the mandate will lead to higher food prices, as well as higher energy costs, and that Ameri-cans need some protections against a spike in grocery bills in this bleak economy.

The EPA requires that fuel marketers blend 13 billion gal-lons of corn ethanol into the nation’s gasoline supplies this year, said the letter signed by Sens. James Inhofe of Okla-homa, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, David Vitter of Louisi-ana, Pat Toomey of Pennsylva-nia, Olympia Snowe of Maine, John Barrasso of Wyoming and John Cornyn of Texas.

“To meet this requirement, a substantial volume of our corn crop will have to be diverted into our fuel supplies, se-verely impacting food and feed prices,” the lawmakers said.

One-quarter of the na-tion’s corn crop was diverted to produce ethanol in 2007; today nearly 40 percent is redirected.

“This sharp increase in the use of corn for fuel production has contributed to food costs outpacing the rate of in�a-tion,” the lawmakers said.

Congress gave the EPA the authority to waive the man-date if there is an inadequate domestic supply of corn, or if the requirement would severely harm the economy or environment.

According to Reuters news service, corn prices have steadily increased over the last six weeks, and with one-third of the supply going towards animal feed, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association warns that prices will increase for livestock pro-ducers causing some to go out of business or cut jobs.Audrey Hudson is a senior reporter for Human Events.

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DEFENSE & NATIONAL SECURITY

▲ Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney stands between Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, left, and Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, as he campaigns in Sterling, Va., June 27. AP IMAGES

Defense Cuts Will Define Va. in November

Presidential candidates are �ghting �ercely for Virginia’s votes. Here’s why defense cuts and pending layo�s are putting the Old Dominion state at center stage in the race for the presidency, and why Virginia may go Republican.By Hope Hodge

With 13 electoral votes and a tendency to bend Republi-can, the commonwealth of

Virginia rarely draws the attention of presidential candidates the way peren-nial swing states such as Ohio, Florida and Iowa do. But Virginia’s 52-46 per-cent swing in 2008 favoring Demo-cratic candidate Barack Obama and today’s heated narrative about defense spending cuts and a coming economic crisis have changed all of that.

Candidate foot tra�c is one indicator of the growing importance of winning Virginia. Republican challenger Mitt Romney, who has made six days’ worth of campaign appearances in the state since the beginning of the year, begins a swing state tour in Virginia on August 11, joining forces with its Republican governor, Bob McDonnell, for maxi-mum impact. Obama, whose previous e�orts in the state had also been per-functory, launched an intensive tour through the state July 13 and 14, and returned again July 27.

A new National Journal study shows

Virginia ranking third in cumulative ad spending among all eight swing states for both Obama and Romney, just behind Florida and Ohio. A Washington Post breakdown of the spending by region and week shows that the mili-tary-heavy port city of Norfolk has received the most attention, particularly with the summer upswing in ad pur-chases nationwide. Campaign airtime buys have topped $300,000 in the Nor-folk region every week since mid-May.

Some political observers believe the apparent uptick in interest can be tied to growing concern about more than $500 billion of defense cuts set to take e�ect next year under the Budget Con-trol Act. Projections from George Mason University show Virginia, with its many defense contractors and mil-itary installations, faring worst of all under the cuts, with $9.8 billion and more than 122,000 private-sector jobs on the line. According to estimates by the National Association of Manufac-turers, 115,000 of those jobs could be lost by 2014.

Romney has seized on the sequestra-tion narrative, attacking Obama for sign-

ing the law that mandated the cuts and for threatening to veto any attempt to override them without also raising taxes.

“This is not the time for the presi-dent’s radical cuts in the military,” Rom-ney told an audience at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention in Reno, Nev., last month.

At the same convention, Obama tried to hold ground on the issue. “Those big, across-the-board cuts, including defense, that Congress said would occur next year if they couldn’t reach a deal to reduce the deficit? Let’s understand, first of all, there’s no rea-son that should happen, because people in Congress ought to be able to come together and agree on a plan, a balanced approach that reduces the deficit and keeps our military strong,” Obama said.

The narrative of calamity under sequestration is gaining traction, said Wes Battle, communications director for Rep. Randy Forbes (R-Va.), who launched a “defending our defenders” road tour of Virginia in May to discuss sequestration.

“I think (Forbes) had enormous feedback that obviously the sequester

is not something that anyone wants, that it will be catastrophic to national security in the state of Virginia,” Wes Battle told Human Events. “I think when you see the presidential candi-dates talking about it and you see the senators talking about it, it’s certainly gaining some traction.”

Republican consultant Ron Bonjean told Human Events that McDonnell’s 2010 election may be an indicator that Virginia is ready to swing Republican once more.

“In rebuke to Obama’s far-left agenda, the state voted a Republican governor into o�ce,” he said. “What you have now is a very volatile state; it’s now in the toss-up category. What could put it over in the Romney camp is the issue of jobs and the economy and the defense industry in the state.”

Fight heats upBonjean said he believed the message about the dangers of sequestration and Obama’s link to the coming disaster had yet to take a solid hold in advertising, but in some ways that fight was just begin-ning to heat up. “After Congress returns, the fiscal cli� is going to be looming,” he said. “The trend is in Romney’s direc-tion, but he’ll have to seal the deal.”

A political analyst at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, Geo� Skelley, said the fight for Virginia was quickly becoming more than just a matchup over a swing state. Republican Senate candidate George Allen has also begun to discuss sequestration on the campaign trail as he faces o� against Democratic opponent Tim Kaine for a key seat in Congress.

“If Romney wins Virginia, Allen will win,” Skelley said.

In the Center’s “Crystal Ball” cam-paign model, curated by director Larry Sabato, Virginia is listed as the third most important state to win in Novem-ber, Skelley said. But having been car-ried by Obama by a relatively significant six-percent margin in 2008, it could also be the bellwether of a Republican turnaround, he said.

“For Romney, winning Virginia means he’s also going to win Ohio and Florida,” Skelley said. “It seems like Virginia really could be the state that decides things.”

Hope Hodge is a reporter covering Defense & National Security for Human Events. Her email address is [email protected].

...appear to be true battleground states in the presidential election, and are states where political advertising has been extremely high in recent weeks (delegate count in parentheses):

8 states...Nevada

(6) Colorado (9)

Iowa (6)

Ohio(18)

N.H. (4)

Virginia (13)

North Carolina (15)

Fla. (29)


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▲ Sen. Joseph Lieberman (I-Conn.) takes a question during a news conference on the Cybersecurity Act, July 24. AP IMAGES

TECHNOLOGY & FREEDOM

Executive Orders to Address What Congress Did Not on Cybersecurity Bill

Privacy advocates were worried about large-scale information sharing between private �rms and the government, as well as the burden of complex new regulations to be imposed upon companies. The issue will likely come back next year.

By John Hayward

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 may have failed in the Senate earlier this month, but look for

President Barack Obama to revive key portions that he favors—and circum-vent Congress—by invoking executive orders.

“In the wake of Congressional inac-tion and Republican stall tactics, unfor-tunately, we will continue to be ham-strung by outdated and inadequate statutory authorities that the legisla-tion would have fixed,” White House Press Secretary Jay Carney asserted after the Cybersecurity Act failed. “Moving forward, the President is determined to do absolutely everything we can to better protect our nation against today’s cyber threats and we will do that.”

In the meantime, business leaders have said that defenses against poten-tial cyberattacks can be best handled by those businesses themselves, which have a high interest in protecting their data and do not want government step-ping in with new regulations.

The Cybersecurity Act of 2012, spon-sored by Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), was defeated in the Senate on August 2, on a proce-dural vote that failed to achieve the two-thirds majority required. The bill

was widely viewed as a somewhat “watered-down” version of the House’s defeated cybersecurity bill, in which many of the programs designed to include private-sector firms would be voluntary.

Proponents of the cybersecurity bill are portraying its demise as an exercise of pointless partisan vandalism, but there were significant objections raised to certain provisions in the bill, and the amendments it accumulated. Privacy advocates worried about large-scale information sharing between private firms and the government. The burden of complex new regulations upon pri-vate enterprises was a source of con-cern, and the effectiveness of those policies was questioned.

The Act tried to do too muchThe cybersecurity bill fell victim to the same flaw that a�ects most sweeping legislation: it tried to do too much. It asked representatives to ignore seri-ous reservations from their constitu-ents, in order to swallow ‘poison pills’ along with less controversial measures that might have been able to win broader support. Some of the Senate bill’s provisions concerned increasing the efficiency of the government’s internal electronic security measures, and fostering more robust inter-agency communication. Those provi-

sions would have a much better chance of passing, if presented in a smaller, cleaner bill.

Instead, the Senate ended up with the usual over-reaching hot mess, which at one point picked up an amend-ment for gun control, sponsored by Democrats Chuck Schumer of New York and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey, among others.

Senator Lieberman was very upset by the demise of the bill, declaring “This is one of those days when I fear for our country, and I’m not proud of the United States Senate. We’ve got a crisis, and it’s one that we all acknowl-edge. It’s not just that there’s a theo-retical or speculative threat of cyberat-tack against our country—it’s real.”

It’s interesting to note that very few American media sources concerned themselves with actually quoting opponents of the Cyberscurity Act, instead summarizing their arguments in a dismissive sentence or two, before extensively quoting anguished sup-porters—who portrayed defeat of the act as either blind partisanship, or cavalier ignorance of a looming elec-tronic menace.

Foreign media proved a better source for quotes from opponents, such as business consultant and corporate security expert Thomas Whelan, who sounded neither partisan nor unrea-

sonable when he told the Canada Free Press: “Many corporate security direc-tors believe their own businesses are better able to protect themselves from cyber attacks. If the government wishes to assist, the Obama adminis-tration can offer grant money to upgrade cybersecurity programs. Once the government is involved, there’s nothing to stop its o�cials from creat-ing numerous and costly mandates in the name of national security. It could very possibly create a whole new bureaucracy filled with government workers who have little in the way of security management knowledge and experience.”

Cybersecurity has been lobbed between the House and Senate like a tennis ball that ends up stuck in the net. Observers generally believe the next session of Congress will take up the issue again. But we might not have to wait that long for the government to impose cybersecurity regulations, because the White House has signaled that President Obama—the ultimate “unitary executive,” to borrow a term the Left abruptly stopped using in Jan-uary 2009—is considering the use of executive orders to circumvent Con-gress once again.

If these executive orders are limited to rearranging the government’s secu-rity infrastructure—such as adopting the Cybersecurity Act’s proposal to coordinate federal online security resources through the Department of Homeland Security—the result would not be objectionable. But the people of the U.S., through their representatives in both the House and Senate, have voted against the imposition of oner-ous new security regulations on the private sector, or the creation of gov-ernment-business security partner-ships that might threaten individual privacy. The White House should not be able to override this Constitutional process just because it doesn’t like the outcome.

A new Congress will be coming soon, and the private sector hardly sits idle on matters of Internet security in the meantime. More cybersecurity legislation will be proposed and debated, in due time. The American people need an opportunity to con-sider the trade-o�s between privacy and security they are being asked to make. Much of the public still has not come to terms with how much of their personal information has seeped onto the Internet, or how powerful data mining tools have become. Online threats are cause for concern, but not panic.

John Hayward is a reporter for Human Events covering Technology & Freedom. His email address is [email protected].


Senators, pass the bipartisan Wyden-Snowe ‘Wireless Tax Fairness Act’ (S. 543). It’s a grand slam for wireless consumers, who already pay on average more than 16% of their monthly bill in taxes and fees, compared to 7% on other taxable goods and services. S. 543 is the perfect pitch to fix that. It would put a five-year freeze on new and discriminatory state and local wireless taxes and fees. The House has already put a man in scoring position by passing H.R. 1002. Now’s the time for the Senate to drive home the winning run for wireless consumers.

Pass the ‘Wireless Tax Fairness Act,’ S. 543.

Consumers should be “safe” from unfair wireless taxes and fees.

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WIRELESS CONSUMERS!

HumanEvents.com | WEEK OF AUGUST 13, 201214 Cover Story: Economy & Budget

By David Harsanyi

Dependency is growing, exploding actually, and it’s no accident.

Most readers will remember that one of President Barack

Obama’s first reelection campaign o�erings, “The Life of Julia,” an ode to an imaginary woman who lived her entire life benefitting from government dependency and other people’s money rather than individual initiative and hard work.

Americans, the administration’s case goes, should be able to enjoy housing aid, student loan forgiveness, food stamps, free birth control, government retirement plans, universal internet service, medical insurance, and that’s just for starters. If all of that doesn’t cut it, there is always welfare for those who need it—and often for those who do not. The percentage of Americans paying the tab for this utopian state of a�airs is shrinking and the growing number of people supposedly “benefiting” threaten to change the dynamics of politics and government.

Last week, the Romney campaign finally took the Obama administration to task for weakening requirements in the popular bipartisan 1996 welfare reform, which allows states to waive work requirement as a condition of receiving welfare. In July, using a request by a number of governors seek-ing more flexibility in welfare manage-ment, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius issued a memorandum in July allowing the work requirements to be stripped.

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, even today, 83 percent of Americans surveyed support such requirements.

Realizing the political potency of the issue, the presumptive Republican nominee went on to accuse the presi-dent of fostering a “culture of depen-dency.” Some Democrats retorted that

Romney was peddling the politics of “resentment” and others claimed that the criticism was implicitly racist. Or, in other words, Obama doesn’t have an e�ective answer to the charge. This is probably so because it’s true.

Government, most Americans surely agree, has a duty to provide a safety net for those temporarily struggling or per-manently unable to support them-selves. But when government disincen-tivizes self-reliance and treats dependency as a right, we’re going to have a problem.

Ballooning programsAccording to data from the U.S. Cen-sus’s Survey of Income and Program Participation, almost 110 million Amer-icans received some welfare benefit in 2011. As the Heritage Foundation points out, in 1962, 28.3 percent of fed-eral spending was spent on dependence programs, while in 2010 that number had reached over 70 percent. Robert Rector, an expert on welfare policy at the conservative think tank, writes that a third of Americans partake in some sort of welfare program. Washington “currently runs more than 80 means-tested welfare programs. Roughly a third of the population receives bene-fits from one or more of these pro-grams. (These figures do not include Social Security or Medicare.) Total welfare spending in 2011 came to $927 billion.”

Welfare cases peaked in 1995 and then declined dramatically once time limits on benefits and work-for-welfare requirements were enacted by the reform bill. The percentage of the population receiving welfare per-cap-ita fell nearly one-third by 2007. Tin-kering with that kind of success (though, it is arguable that Obama views it as success considering he opposed reform in the 1990s) provides a fortuitous opening for Republicans on a number of levels. Romney has an opportunity to open up a favorable

front in the coming weeks, especially in states like Ohio, where working class voters tend to pay their own way. Thus Republicans have a persuasive case to make that dependency is on the verge of growing into something dangerous. No, the Obama Administration wasn’t alone in creating the environment for the boom, but it has excelled at foster-ing it.

Department of WelfareTake the most obvious dependency program: food stamps. The farm bill changed the name of food stamps to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. One in seven Amer-icans use them. And even that isn’t enough for the U.S. Department of Agri-culture, which recently spent around $3 million on a series of ads imploring people to find out if they too were eli-gible—rather than spending taxpayer money educating people about the many ways in which they can wean themselves o� handouts.

The fungibility of food stamps—everyone buys food, after all, so the money saved can be spent on any-thing—makes it tantamount to sending out cash. A lot of cash. Enrollment has risen from 17.3 million in 2001 to 46.2 million in October 2011. Spending on food stamps alone is projected to reach nearly $800 billion over the next decade. It seems unlikely that all these folks would be starving without SNAP.

The Department of Agriculture is, in essence, a welfare department of its own. Food stamps eat up around 80 percent of the “farm bill.” (Another chunk of the bill is allocated to a gov-ernment-sponsored welfare program called farm subsidies—but that’s a story for another day.)

In fact, The Department of Agricul-ture o�ers a perfect example of how Washington thinks it is mommy and daddy for all Americans. Drought con-ditions have hurt crops across the country this summer. It’s a serious

problem in many areas, no doubt. The Ag Department has now designated half of all counties in the United States—1,584 in 32 states—as primary disaster areas this growing season.

Obviously, Romney can not run on a “don’t help the farmers” platform, but he can point to an array of examples of how dependency is celebrated by the administration.

There is, of course, the massive expan-sion of Medicaid enacted through Obam-acare, the student loans forgiveness, the

Dependency NationPresident Obama may have

just handed Mitt Romney the issue he needs to win over the middle class.

But will he use it?

▲ Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney campaigns in Elk Grove Village, Ill., August 7. AP IMAGES

Cover Story: Economy & Budget 15WEEK OF AUGUST 13, 2012 | HumanEvents.com

administration’s plan to push the Federal Housing Finance Agency into enacting a mortgage principal reduction program which would put taxpayers on the hook for the hundreds of thousands of mort-gages they did not buy.

An advantage for RomneyLast week, Sandra Fluke, the George-town University law student who became a national figure after demand-ing government mandate companies provide birth control for her, intro-

duced President Obama at a campaign stop in Denver. Fluke, treated as a hero at the event, had argued in front of a congressional committee that birth control could cost her $3,000 or more during her time at law school. Repub-licans have an opportunity to juxtapose the Sandra Flukes of the world with women who achieve without begging for state-sponsored condoms.

Because dependency not only costs dollars, it changes the political dynamic in an unhealthy way. In 1962, the first

year measured in the Index of Depen-dence on Government, the percentage of people who did not pay federal income taxes--and were not claimed as a dependent by someone else who did pay federal income taxes--was around 24 percent. In 1969, it was 12 percent. In 2000, 34 percent. In 2009, nearly 50 percent.

No, this doesn’t mean that all citizens who don’t pay federal income tax are dependents on the state. Some are at the end of their careers, others are starting

out their lives, some are temporarily struggling and others have been thrust into hardships beyond their control. Yet, as fewer people have a vested interest in the cost of government, as the base of taxpayers shrinks and the number of welfare recipients explodes, a day will come when a majority of Americans may value reliance on government over free-dom from it.

David Harsanyi is a senior reporter at Human Events, covering Economy & Budget. He can be reached at [email protected].

Dependency Nation

▲ Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney campaigns in Elk Grove Village, Ill., August 7. AP IMAGES

▲ Newt Gingrich greets supporters after speaking at Delmarva Christian High School in Georgetown, Del., April 18. AP IMAGES

Three Challenges for the 2012 Republican Platform

By Newt Gingrich

Party platforms have both an immediate and a long term role.

For the immediate future they should help win the election and com-municate the core values and proposals that rally activists and voters to the party and its candidate for president.

There are a number of obvious planks that have been in our recent platforms including Right to Life, defending the Second Amendment, balancing the budget, etc.

However, for the long run a party platform can also play a very useful role in educating the country and setting the stage for a big discussion about big ideas.

As we prepare for the 2012 platform it is worth looking back to the first Republican platform in 1856 for an idea of how influential these documents can be. In the 1856 platform, the party made

a series of commitments that quite lit-erally changed American history. Most obvious was the platform’s commit-ment to opposing the extension of slav-ery in the territories—a stand that helped lead to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery.

Pivotal platformsThe 1856 platform previewed Lincoln’s moral arguments for the abolition of slavery, harkening “our Republican fathers, [who held] it to be a self-evi-dent truth, that all men are endowed with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and that the primary object and ulterior design of our Federal Government were to secure these rights to all persons under its exclusive jurisdiction.”

The platform made another commit-ment that was soon to become a major policy initiative: the development of a transcontinental railroad.

This commitment was a defining characteristic of the emerging Repub-lican Party. In 1859 candidate Abraham Lincoln stood on the banks of the Mis-souri River at Council Blu�s, Iowa and pledged his support for a transconti-nental railroad.

This commitment to railroads as a key part of a better future was not something new for Lincoln. As early as his very first campaign for state legisla-tor in 1832, at the age of 23 (he lost), Lincoln had a railroad construction plank in his campaign literature. The amazing thing was that Lincoln had never seen a train. The railroad engine was only invented in Great Britain in 1829 (Stephenson’s “the Rocket”) and the first engine arrived in the United States in 1829. Yet Lincoln read about it in a newspaper and intuitively under-stood how important railroads would be to cross the vast prairies of the American West.

Lincoln, the first Republican presi-dent, was fascinated by technology. He made a good living as a railroad attor-ney, winning a key case that enabled railroads to become the dominant method of transportation. He is the only president to hold a patent for a techno-logical development. And as president he displayed great interest in new tech-nologies for winning the Civil War.

The 2012 Republican Platform Com-mittee should consider deeply this sense of historic technologies, long-term developments and writing to set the framework for the future as well as to win the immediate election.

There are three particular areas in which Republicans need to take a long view and write an historic section of the platform: 1. Radical Islamists, 2. Religious Liberty, and, 3. Innovation as the central engine of both economic growth and government reform.

Continued on next page.

In a Human Events exclusive, Newt Gingrich says Republicans need to take a long view and write an historic section of this year’s Republican platform that reinforces the core values that rally activists and voters.


POLITICS

Continued from previous page.Let me expand on each of these and

explain why we need them as a key part of the dialogue about America’s future.

1. Radical Islamists

Radical Islamists are the greatest immediate threat to American safety and security.

We are currently engaged in a vari-ety of countries (Afghanistan, Paki-stan, Iraq, Somalia, Yemen, etc). We have enemies actively plotting to try to kill us both at home and abroad. From a terrorist attack at Fort Hood, Texas, which killed 13 Americans, to a failed car bomb in Times Square, New York, which would have killed hun-dreds if it had worked, we are threat-ened in our own country. We have one nation led by radical Islamists (Iran) trying to get nuclear weapons despite a concerted effort by much of the world to isolate and sanction them into stopping. We have another semi-ally, semi-opponent (Pakistan) which already possesses well over 100 nuclear weapons and which is deeply penetrated by radical Islamist factions. There is violence and instability in Egypt, Syria, and Libya. There have been recent acts of violence in the Sinai desert on the Israeli border for the first time in a generation.

Yet we have no clear national defini-tion of the threat. In fact when the National Security Five (five members of the House) dared to ask about Mus-lim Brotherhood influence in the administration, they were attacked for daring to ask the obvious. The bias in our elites against having an honest con-versation about radical Islamists is enormous.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned that we are facing enemies who seek supremacy not equality. He has also warned that the Western elites are “asleep” (his term).

The Republican Platform Committee has a great opportunity to help educate America and the world by including a clear and decisive section on the threat from radical Islamists and the need for a national strategy that deals realisti-cally and e�ectively with a worldwide movement seeking to establish Islamist supremacy.

2. Religious liberty

Religious liberty is under assault from the secular left and Obama’s adminis-tration in an unprecedented manner. The left is attacking Christians in a variety of settings. In many ways Chris-tianity is incompatible with some of the most cherished beliefs of the modern left. The result has been decisions that make it impossible for religious institu-tions to survive and for religious people to openly express their beliefs.

The Obama administration’s war on the Catholic Church is only the most visible and focused of the various assaults. There are serious efforts

underway to turn parts of the Bible into “hate crimes” (something which already exists in a number of countries in Europe, for example).

The Republican Platform Committee has a unique opportunity to highlight the basic principles of American Excep-tionalism. The 2012 platform should emphasize that no government can come between man and God. The plat-form should emphasize the degree to which our rights come from our Cre-ator as our Declaration of Indepen-dence asserts.

3. Innovation in government, private sector

Innovation is the engine of economic growth and government reform.

History tells us that innovation is the primary driver of economic growth, so in this time of high unemployment and a struggling economy, the Republican party should make a point of supporting genuinely pro-innovation policies. By that I don’t mean the folly and corrup-tion of the left—picking winners and losers and rewarding cronies with gov-ernment funds—but rather, policies that make it easiest for innovators to innovate.

There has been a disheartening ten-dency to reduce political debate to more or less of the same kind of bureau-cratic spending. But opponents of big government are perhaps more likely to succeed if they o�er a smarter, more e�cient, more pro-innovation alterna-tive.

We do need cheaper government, but we also need smarter government.

American industry has learned to innovate decisively and constantly. Daily improvement is a key mantra of successful manufacturers. This is anti-thetical to the bureaucratic model. By imposing the modern management techniques of the private sector on the bureaucracy, we could have genuine government reform that gives us more innovation and saves up to $500 billion a year in waste.

Similarly, the right kind of advances

in health outcomes could save trillions of dollars. Brain research could lead to breakthroughs in autism, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, mental health, post-trau-matic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries, which would save more money than any current spending cuts can conceive of. The application of brain research to better learning sys-tems could lead to a revolution in our ability to educate people.

Innovative approaches to defense procurement could save hundreds of billions of dollars while actually getting newer, better equipment to our troops faster and in greater quantities.

The use of credit card anti-fraud expert systems from American Express, Visa and MasterCard could save well over $100 billion a year in government mismanagement of healthcare and other payments.

Prizes and other innovative systems could reduce the cost of getting back to the moon by 90 percent from the $150 billion originally proposed in a govern-ment monopoly program run by the NASA bureaucracy to less than $15 bil-lion in private sector entrepreneurial e�orts.

Innovation is the heart of the Amer-ican experience. From Benjamin Franklin inventing the lightening rod, bifocal glasses and the Franklin stove to the founders writing a patent o�ce into the Constitution, America has always been an innovative country.

The Republican Party should recom-mit to that spirit of innovation and pledge to find a better, more prosper-ous, healthier and safer future with limited government, balanced budgets, and better lives through a sustained commitment to innovation.

These three areas will help create an historic document that will be studied for years to come. It is the kind of plat-form the American people deserve.

Newt Gingrich served as the 58th Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. He has founded and chaired several public policy think tanks and has authored or co-authored 18 books, including “A Nation Like No Other: Why American Exceptional-ism Matters” (Regnery, 2011).


POLITICS

▲ Romney will be the head of a party with many factions, vying for platform planks. AP IMAGES

n First group of convention speakers announcedBy Monique Hamm

As the Republican National Convention nears, names of speakers and platform committee members are being announced.

The speakers, so far, include a few familiar faces in Repub-lican circles, such as former Secretary of State Condo-leezza Rice, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and GOP primary candidate Rick Santorum. Additionally, the list boasts a number of governors, includ-ing Susana Martinez (New Mexico), John Kasich (Ohio), Rick Scott (Fla.), Mary Fallin (Okla.), and Nikki Haley (South Carolina).

Newt Gingrich has been tapped to teach a series of workshops nicknamed Newt University, the New York Times reported.

Some are speculating that the choice of speakers is intended to attract a more diverse voting pool. At least three Hispanic speakers have been chosen, including Marti-nez, congressional candidate Ted Cruz (Tex.), and Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuño. The Washington Post’s Sean Sul-livan argued that the choices also signify a Republican e�ort to reach out to women. “[Fallin’s] selection further underscores Republicans’ desire to make inroads with women, especially at a time when Democrats are charging Republicans with waging a ‘war on women.’”

The Republican platform committee is headed by Vir-ginia Gov. Bob McDonnell and co-chaired by Sen. John Ho-even of North Dakota and Rep. Marsha Blackburn of Tennes-see. Possible discussion points for the platform include a Federal Reserve Audit; Romney spoke favorably about the idea on August 3.

Also, the Log Cabin Repub-licans, who represent gay and lesbian GOP members, have said they are aiding the platform committee with edit-ing their stance on traditional marriage to make the lan-guage “more inclusive.”Monique Hamm is an editorial assistant for Human Events. Her email address is [email protected].


ACROSS AMERICA JOHN GIZZI ON POLITICS

Less than two weeks after Rep. Steve LaTourette (R-Ohio) announced his sudden decision to end his bid for a tenth term, observers from Cleveland to Washington are still wondering why the moderate lawmaker (lifetime American Conservative Union rating: 68.46 percent) and close friend of House Speaker John Boehner chose this strange time to call it quits.

Renominated in a primary and coast-ing to re-election in the 14th District, the 58-year-old LaTourette said on July 30 he would not run. But, he did delay his o� cial announcement until Aug. 8, thus permitting the choice of a new Republican nominee by local party leaders rather than triggering a fresh primary.

As to why this strange turn of events, one Buckeye State GOP operative who knows the congressman well and requested anonymity, told Human Events: “Steve never got over being passed to head the House Transporta-tion (and Infrastructure) Committee (next year) in favor of Rep. Bill Shuster

(R-Pa.), who is younger and has served in Congress half as long. And Steve and his second wife have young children, so he feels this is the time to be spend-ing with them.”

Why leave now?But why, we asked, would LaTourette leave when friend and fellow Ohioan Boehner is at the peak of his power in the House?

The same source said: “That’s just it. Boehner is speaker now, but won’t be forever. Steve figures that if he’s going to have any success as a lobbyist or consultant, it is now, while Boehner is at the top of his game.”

Under Ohio election law, the August timing of LaTourette’s exit puts the choice of a Republican nominee in the hands of 14 people— the chairman and secretary of the Republican committees from the parts of seven counties that are in the 14th District.

More than a few feel that this is LaTourette’s way of sticking his tongue out at the GOP right one more time.

Were a primary held, few doubt that veteran State Rep. Ron Young of Lake County, a conservative in the mold of the late Ohio hero Rep. John Ashbrook,

would win easily. Young has strong backing from the area tea party move-ment and the national Right to Work Committee.

With the party leaders picking the nominee, odds are strong that they will turn to a more moderate, LaTourette-style nominee.

The most-oft mentioned name is that of former State Rep. Matt Dolan, nephew of Cablevision founder Charles Dolan and son of Cleveland Indians owner Larry Dolan. Two years ago, Dolan lost a bid for the just-cre-ated o� ce of Cuyahoga County (Cleve-land) Executive.

A third Republican mentioned is Cuyahoga County Prosecutor David Joyce, considered more conservative than LaTourette.

In stating his reasons for leaving Congress so suddenly, LaTourette said that you have to “hand over your wallet and voting card to extremes.” But, as is almost always the case politics, there is almost more to the story than meets the eye.

Most of the national press eyes last week were concentrated on the Republican U.S. Senate

primaries in Michigan and Missouri, in which former Rep. (1992-2010) Pete Hoekstra and current Rep. Todd Akin respectively were nominated to oppose liberal Democratic Sens. Debbie Stabe-now and Claire McCaskill

But there were other contests of interests in the two states. Among them:

Ann Wagner’s second chance Last year, former Missouri State GOP Chairman Ann Wagner lost the race for Republican National Chairman to Reince Priebus. Last week, Wagner, who was a past RNC co-chair, came back to handily win the Republican nomination in the open 2nd District (Greater St. Louis), which six-term Rep. Todd Akin left to run successfully for the Republican Senate nomination. A strong conservative, Wagner is consid-ered a shoo-in in November.

Upton’s up Once distrusted by conservatives and challenged in primaries, Rep. Fred Upton (R-Mich.) has clearly won his stripes on the right as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Commit-tee. Myron Ebell, director of Freedom Action and a longtime foe of environ-mental extremism, hailed 13-termer Upton (lifetime ACU rating: 72.42 per-

cent) as a “crucial point man against Obamacare and the EPA’s power grabs.” Last week, voters in Michigan’s 6th Dis-trict agreed with Ebell that “good behavior should be rewarded” and renominated Upton by a margin of 2-to-1 over 2010 opponent Jack Hoogendyk.

Santa Claus is coming to town That’s what supporters of Kerry Ben-tivolo were saying last week after their

man won the Republican nomination in Michigan’s 11th District (Wayne-Oakland counties). With the surprising retirement of six-term GOP Rep. Thad McCotter, Bentivolio—who raises rein-deer and plays Santa Claus at Christ-mas parties—was the lone candidate on the ballot in the heavily Republican district. Bentivolio is also a leader in Ron Paul’s campaign and ran on a plat-form of abolishing the income tax and Department of Education and getting

the U.S. out of the United Nations and the International Monetary Fund. Obviously alarmed at the thought of a Paul man being their nominee, local GOP leaders rallied behind former State Sen. Nancy Cassis as a write-in candidate. But Bentivolio prevailed—in part with the support of fellow Paul supporter and Texas millionaire John Ramsey, whose Liberty for All under-wrote TV spots and mailings on behalf of Bentivolio.

Behind Rep. LaTourette’s Surprise Exit

Wagner Wins in Missouri, Paul Supporter Wins GOP Nod to Replace McCotter

▲Rep. Steve LaTourette AP IMAGES

▲Kerry Bentivolio FACEBOOK▲ Rep. Fred Upton AP IMAGES▲ Ann Wagner FACEBOOK


By Scott Kaufman

Is Mitt Romney out of step with recent campaign practice in saying he will only provide a full two years

of tax returns?Turns out, it’s not as far out of the

ordinary as some reports would have people believe, according to a Human Events review of who revealed what about their taxes, as reported by Fact-check.org, Wstp.com, Citizens for Eth-ics and CNN.

Mitt Romney’s tax returns reemerged as a subject of controversy this month when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Romney “didn’t pay any taxes for 10 years” and, subse-quently, Congressional Democrats refused to distance themselves from the comments.

George Romney set precedentThe precedent for presidential candi-dates to release their tax returns is often, ironically, attributed to Mitt Romney’s father, George Romney, who ran for president in 1968. Candidate Romney and the then-Governor of Michigan released 12 years of tax returns, noting “One year could be a fl uke, perhaps done for show.”

However, the release of tax returns predates George Romney and has its roots in Richard Nixon’s famous “Checker’s Speech” during the presi-dential election of 1952. The speech, in response to questions about Nixon’s fi nances, led Nixon to call for all candi-dates to instill the American people with “confidence.” The Democratic nominee, Adlai Stevenson, and his vice- presidential running mate, John Spark-man, released several years of tax returns, but Nixon didn’t release his returns until after Dwight Eisenhower had won the presidency.

Similarly, in 1968, Nixon released no tax returns, but neither did his Demo-cratic opponent Herbert Humphrey.

In fact, it wasn’t until the 1976 pres-idential election that candidates began again releasing their tax returns. Ger-ald Ford released 10 years worth, albeit only summaries, and Jimmy Carter released one year. Jimmy Carter, how-ever, began the tradition of releasing tax returns throughout his presidency.

When Ronald Reagan challenged Carter in 1980, Reagan only released a tax return for the past year and only did so begrudgingly, following intense scrutiny.

Walter Mondale in his run against Reagan in 1984 released 11 years of tax returns. By doing so, Mondale set the ‘modern’ precedent for releasing sev-eral years of tax returns that the media now seems to be holding Romney to.

But, Mondale didn’t make a rule, more like a guideline that has been in fl ux since.

For example, the next election cycle, Democratic candidate Michael Duka-kis in 1988 only released fi ve years of returns, but George H.W. Bush released 14 years’ worth.

Mitt Romney ignited the debate about his own returns in April when he said on CNBC with Larry Kudlow, “John Kerry released two years of taxes. I’ve released one already, put the esti-mate out for the next year. We’ll have two years of taxes.”

The media was quick to point out

that John Kerry had released some 20 years of taxes and while on the surface true, isn’t the whole truth. John Kerry the presidential candidate actually released four years of tax returns dur-ing the course of the 2004 campaign.

The rest of those 20 years of tax returns had been released over the course of Kerry’s three previous Sena-torial elections.

George W. Bush released fi ve years of returns during the 2000 presidential election and three previously in the run-up to his two-time governorship in Texas.

Bill Clinton, who said earlier this month on NBC’s Today that, “you know, it’s typical we all release 10, 11 years,” only released two, 1990 and 1991, during the presidential campaign. He previ-ously had released 10 in 1990 while still governor of Arkansas.

Notably, Mitt Romney has faced the tax return release question once before in a quest for national o¤ ce—in 1994 when he ran against Democratic heavy-weight Ted Kennedy for a Senate seat.

In that race, the Ted Kennedy pretty much made the decision for both of them—Kennedy refused to release his tax returns, citing privacy reasons.

Scott Kaufman is an editorial assistant with Human Events.

Not every presidential candidate has released years and years of tax returns, a review of post-WWII races shows. Even Ted Kennedy invoked a privacy argument during his 1994 Senate race against Romney.

The Furor Over Romney’s Tax Returns: Are 2 Enough for Voters, 12 Too Many?

ELECTION 2012

▲ Sen. Ted Kennedy debates Republican challenger Mitt Romney In the 1994 Massachusetts Senate race. AP IMAGES

▲ George Romney, 1967. AP IMAGES

Go onlineTo read John Gizzi’s interview with Sen. John Thune, please visit HumanEvents.com.


▲ The objective is clear for Mitt Romney: Paint Barack Obama as an awful steward of this country, with terrible and harmful ideas. AP IMAGES

OPINION

The Case Against Re-Election

There are two ways to run against Barack Obama: stewardship or ideology.By Charles Krauthammer

WASHINGTON—There are two ways to run against Barack Obama:

stewardship or ideology. You can run against his record or you can run against his ideas.

The stewardship case is pretty straightforward: the worst recovery in U.S. history, 42 consecutive months of 8-plus percent unemployment, declining economic growth—all achieved at a price of another $5 trillion of accumulated debt.

The ideological case is also simple. Just play in toto (and therefore in context) Obama’s Roanoke riff telling small business owners: “You didn’t build that.” Real credit for your success belongs not to you—you think you did well because of your smarts and sweat? he asked mockingly—but to the government that built the infrastructure without which you would have nothing.

Play it. Then ask: Is that the governing philosophy you want for this nation?

Mitt Romney’s preferred argument, however, is stewardship. Are you better off today than you were $5 trillion ago? Look at the wreckage around you: this presidency is a failure. I’m a successful businessman. I know how

to fix things. Elect me, etc. etc.Easy peasy, but highly risky. If you

run against Obama’s performance in contrast to your own competence, you stake your case on persona. Is that how you want to compete against an opponent who is not just more likable and immeasurably cooler, but spending millions to paint you as an unfeeling, out-of-touch, job-killing, private-equity plutocrat?

The ideological case, on the other hand, is not just appealing to a center-right country with twice as many conservatives as liberals, it is also explanatory. It underpins the stewardship argument. Obama’s ideology—and the program that followed—explains the failure of these four years.

What program? Obama laid it out boldly early in his presidency. The roots of the nation’s crisis, he declared, were systemic. Fundamental change was required. He had come to deliver it. Hence his signature legislation:

First, the $831 billion stimulus that was going to “reinvest” in America and bring unemployment below 6 percent. We know about the unemployment. And the investment? Obama loves to cite great federal projects such as the Hoover Dam and the interstate highway system. Fine. Name one thing of any note created by Obama’s Niagara of borrowed money. A modernized electric grid?

Ports dredged to receive the larger ships soon to traverse a widened Panama Canal? Nothing of the sort. Solyndra, anyone?

Second, radical reform of healthcare that would reduce its ruinously accelerating cost: “Put simply,” he said, “our healthcare problem is our deficit problem”—a financial hemorrhage drowning us in debt.

Except that the CBO reports that Obamacare will cost $1.68 trillion of new spending in its first decade. To say nothing of the price of the uncertainty introduced by an impossibly complex remaking of one-sixth of the economy—discouraging hiring and expansion as trillions of investable private-sector dollars remain sidelined.

The third part of Obama’s promised transformation was energy. His cap-and-trade federal takeover was rejected by his own Democratic Senate. So the war on fossil fuels has been conducted unilaterally by bureaucratic fiat. Regulations that will kill coal. A no-brainer pipeline (Keystone) rejected lest Canadian oil sands be burned. (China will burn them instead.) A drilling moratorium in the Gulf that a federal judge severely criticized as illegal.

That was the program—now so unpopular that Obama barely mentions it. Obamacare got exactly

two lines in this year’s State of the Union address. Seen any ads touting the stimulus? The drilling moratorium? Keystone?

Ideas matter. The 2010 election, the most ideological since 1980, saw the voters resoundingly reject a Democratic Party that was relentlessly expanding the power, spending, scope and reach of government.

It’s worse now. Those who have struggled to create a family business, a corner restaurant, a medical practice won’t take kindly to being told that their success is a result of government-built roads and bridges.

In 1988, Michael Dukakis famously said, “This election is not about ideology; it’s about competence.” He lost. If Republicans want to win, Obama’s deeply revealing, teleprompter-free you-didn’t-build-that confession of faith needs to be hung around his neck until Election Day. The third consecutive summer-of-recovery-that-never-came is attributable not just to Obama being in over his head but to what’s in his head: a government-centered vision of the economy and society, and the policies that flow from it.

Four years of that and this is what you get.

Make the case and you win the White House.

Charles Krauthammer is a nationally syndicated columnist and a Fox News Channel analyst.


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Liberals’ Secret Weapon: Conservatives Who Don’t Read

Liberals tell whopping lies, and most conservatives can’t be bothered to learn history.By Ann Coulter

Fifty years from now, everyone will agree that Karl Rove committed treason by revealing the identity of CIA “spy”

Valerie Plame, tea partiers shouted the N-word at a black congressman and Duke lacrosse players gang-raped a stripper.

Liberals tell whopping lies, and most conservatives can’t be bothered to learn history.

In the last few days, we’ve heard both George Will and Charles Krauthammer, otherwise intelligent people, repeating bogus Democratic talking points about how Joe McCarthy allegedly smeared innocents with false allegations.

These two, and many lesser lights, have invoked the standard liberal calumnies against McCarthy in order to ridicule Sen. Harry Reid for making a Birther-like accusation against Mitt Romney, saying that the “word is out” that Romney didn’t pay taxes for a decade.

This, it is claimed, is comparable to Sen. Joe McCarthy’s “famous speech” in 1950, in which he allegedly said he had a list of 205 communists at the State Department—but then he never produced that list!

No, the idea that McCarthy threw out unsubstantiated charges and switched numbers, from 57 to 205, were the wild-eyed allegations of McCarthy haters, which, on closer examination, turned out to be completely false, just like the

accusations against Rove, the tea partiers and the Duke lacrosse players.

It was proved false at the time—not just decades later, when McCarthy was vindicated with a whoop when Soviet archives and cables were revealed to the world.

I was hoping to write about my smash best-seller “Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America”—out in paperback this week!—but now I guess I’ll have to recap parts of my smash best-seller “Treason: Liberal Treachery From the Cold War to the War on Terrorism.”

Democrats turn a blind eyeMcCarthy said he had the names of 57 communists or communist sympathizers working in the State Department who needed to be investigated. Separately, he cited a 1946 letter from former Secretary of State James Byrnes to Congress stating that there were 205 known security risks still working there.

His point, misconstrued by Democrats at the time and since, was not to accuse specific individuals, but rather to indict the Democrats for turning a blind eye to ridiculous security risks in important government jobs, even after Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and Alger Hiss. (Sorry, Nation magazine, they’re still guilty.)

McCarthy gave his Wheeling, W.Va., speech two weeks after Secretary of State Dean Acheson had defended celebrity communist spy Hiss on Jan. 25, 1950—the day of Hiss’ criminal conviction for denying under oath

that he was a Soviet spy.Even after Whittaker Chambers

had produced documents proving that Hiss was working for the Soviet Union while advising President Roosevelt, the Democrats were still defending a traitor. Chambers said of Acheson’s disgusting defense of Hiss, “You will look in vain in history for anything comparable to it.”

As Democrats always do when they are caught red-handed harming the country, they obsessed on some small, technical error of a Republican.

They claimed that McCarthy had said in his Wheeling speech that he had the names of 205 card-carrying members of the Communist Party—not 57. (Having only 57 communists in the State Department was apparently considered a great success for a Democratic administration.)

In fact, McCarthy had mentioned the 205 number only in citing Byrne’s letter to Congress a few years earlier saying that was the number of known security risks still employed at the State Department.

As Soviet spies were honeycombed throughout the government, influencing U.S. policy to the benefit of the Soviet Union, the Democratic-controlled Senate convened panels to determine exactly what Joe McCarthy had said to a meeting of Republican women in West Virginia. To wit: Had he said he had the names of 57 specific security risks at the State Department, or 205?

After dedicating months of investigation to this crucial question—with Senate investigators actually

flying to West Virginia to interview everyone who attended the speech—it turned out McCarthy was right.

The Senate committee that was determined to censure McCarthy ended up having to drop the matter of McCarthy’s Wheeling speech entirely. A fact-filled memo detailing the committee’s findings concluded that McCarthy had said he had the names of 57 security risks, not 205.

The truth about McCarthy’s Wheeling speech, including the committee’s memo finding that McCarthy was telling the truth, and a newspaper article reprinting the speech before it became a object of obsession by Democrats, is given in M. Stanton Evans’ monumental book, “Blacklisted by History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America’s Enemies.”

Moreover, contrary to the nonsense about McCarthy not being able to name the 57 specific individuals, the very day he got back to Washington, he gave a six-hour speech on the Senate floor, providing details about the problematic State Department employees, chapter and verse. He did not “name names” because that was not his point.

As McCarthy said, some State Department employees with communist associations might be innocent. His point was: The Democrats were still refusing to take Soviet espionage seriously by investigating these preposterous risks on the government payroll.

Far from recklessly smearing people, McCarthy described each employee as a “case” and cited such evidence as their being identified as Soviet spies in FBI reports, by fellow spies and by the State Department itself. He reported their connections to known agents, attendance at “Youth International” meetings in Russia and repeated contacts with known Soviet espionage groups.

These were not baseless charges. And as we now know, they were absolutely true.

Sensible people knew it at the time, but the disgorging of Soviet archives as well as Soviet cables decrypted by the top-secret Venona project proved beyond a doubt that McCarthy was right about the individuals he named. None of them should have been allowed anywhere near a government office.

The claims of Will and Krauthammer are as true as liberal slanders about Karl Rove outing a CIA agent, tea partiers calling a black congressman the N-word and Duke lacrosse players raping a stripper. Even at the time, liberals had to back down from their lies about McCarthy saying he had a list of “205” communists. But liberals write the history and conservatives don’t read.

Ann Coulter is legal affairs correspondent for Human Events. She can be reached at [email protected]

2ND OPINION

▲ Sen. Joseph McCarthy at a March 9, 1950 hearing on McCarthy’s charges of Communist infiltration in the State Department. AP IMAGES


84% of Democratic, 83% of Republican and 81% of Independent voters regularly read newspapers in print or online. Impressive online response! 51% of voters rate newspaper websites as reliable, accurate and in-depth for local political/civic issues. That’s more than all other websites. Now, as mobile usage emerges, 58% of voters who use mobile devices for political information use newspaper sources for that news. Seniority counts! The most reliable voting bloc, seniors, are frequent and regular newspaper readers - a whopping 84%. Surprise! 79% of young voters, 18-34, read a newspaper in print or online at least once a week. Even on mobile devices, young voters turn to newspaper sources first for campaign and election news. When it comes to reliable, accurate and in-depth information about local politics, newspapers - print and online - rank #1.

If you’re looking to connect with voters...

Source: Moore Information (January 2012), American Voter Media Use

ReadersVoteVotersRead

... no other medium outperforms newspaper media.

Newspaper Association of America 4401 Wilson Blvd., Suite 900, Arlington, VA 22203 571.366.1000

www.naa.org/political


CONSERVATIVE SPOTLIGHT

24 QUIZ ANSWERS

Political Quiz of the Week1. Former Rep. Steve Stockman of Texas recently won the Republican primary for a new seat in Texas sixteen years after he was defeated for re-election. Who is the only U.S. representative since the 20th and 21st centuries who has had a longer gap between terms in o�ce?2. Stockman is actually tied with which other U.S. representative for the second-longest gap between stints in the House?3. Playwright Gore Vidal, who died recently at age 86, was the losing Democratic candidate for Congress from New York in 1960. Who defeated Vidal for Congress?4. As a California resident in 1982, Vidal unsuccessfully sought the Democratic nomination for U.S. senator. Who defeated him for that nomination?5. Vidal had the unique distinction of appearing on the cover of Time Magazine, just as his father and his grandfather once did. Who were Vidal’s father and grandfather?

1. Rep. Jeanette Rankin (D-Montana), who was elected in 1916 and defeated in 1918 after voting against U.S. entry in World War II, and then returned to the House 22 years later (1940) and then being defeated in ’42, after voting against U.S. entry in World War II. 2. Rep. Donald “Buz” Lukens (R-Ohio), who served in the House from 1966-70 and then returned to the House in 1986 and served until 1990. 3. Republican Rep. J. Ernest Wharton. 4. Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown, who went on to lose in the fall election to Republican Pete Wilson. 5. His father Eugene Vidal was the �rst chairman of the Federal Aviation Administration, and his grandfather was Sen. Thomas P. Gore (D-Okla.), who served from 1906-20 and then from 1930-36.

THIS WEEK IN HISTORYAugust 19, 1909

First race is held at the Indianapolis Motor SpeedwayOn this day in 1909, the �rst race is held at the Indianap-olis Motor Speedway, now the home of the world’s most famous motor racing competition, the Indianapolis 500.

Built on 328 acres of farmland �ve miles northwest of Indianapolis, Indiana, the speedway was started by local businessmen as a testing facility for Indiana’s growing automobile industry.

Susan B. Anthony ListBy Sarah Jean Seman

The Susan B. Anthony List was formed 20 years ago to support and promote pro-life government leaders and legislation.

Through education and mobilization of the pro-life movement, the SBA List has bundled checks for and garnered awareness and support for more than 75 winning members of Congress.

“I really believed that to end abortion we had to elect leaders who would end abortion with laws that would appoint Supreme Court justices that would uphold those laws and that some of the best advocates for those laws are women,” said Marjorie Dannenfelser, president of SBA List. The legislative focus of the non-profit organization makes it unique from many other pro-life groups. The SBA List is similar to Emily’s List, a pro-choice political action committee, only they are fighting for the opposite outcome.

One of the SBA List’s primary missions is to elect to Congress men and women who will oppose abortion. In 2010, the SBA List helped to elect more than 100 candidates, spread out in the House, Senate and statewide offices.

“Anybody that’s worked on the Hill, including myself , understands that you can’t just have a drizzle you have to have a waterfall, or a fire hose, of grassroots activity to affect a member

of congress’ vote,” Dannenfelser said.Through their Legislative Action

Center, Americans can read pending bills and send directly letters to their member of Congress to discuss the legislation. With over 170,000 members, the organization trains individuals to become activists in their communities and to advocate pro-life legislation with citizen lobbying. Their voices can hardly go unnoticed with over 1 million letters reaching the White House and Capitol Hill in 2009, according to the SBA List website. Also helping to inform voters is the Legislative Accountability Project, which highlights the voting record of members of Congress.

Mobilizing for RomneyAt present, the grassroots efforts in battleground states are focusing on monopolizing the money, as they push states to vote for pro-life candidates in tight Senate races and for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the presidential election, according to Dannenfelser.

The SBA List promotes the view that abortion is exploitation of women, and wants to debunk popular myth which they say includes, such phrases as, ‘All women are pro-choice,’ ‘abortion is safe, legal and rare’ and ‘partial birth abortion is medically necessary’ according to the website.

The suffrage movements saw abortion as exploiting women by using them as commodities

Dannenfelser said. The organization’s namesake co-founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, according to the Susan B. Anthony Museum and House website.

“Susan B. Anthony called [abortion] ‘child murder’ in her own newspaper, in her own editorial,” Dannenfelser said. Anthony would not allow abortionists to advertise in her magazine, The Revolution, the masthead of which read “Men their rights, and nothing more; women, their rights, and nothing less,” and the aim of establishing “justice for all.”

“We know the devastating effects through mental health professionals and through all sorts of miseries that women who have had abortions have gone through that has been well-documented: predilection of suicide, self-cutting, eating disorders, all sorts

of mental illnesses that come from a self-loathing or a lack of the ability to forgive oneself for something, which was dehumanizing,” Dannenfelser said.

Women leading the pro-life movement, who have undergone an abortion, are idyllic examples of courage and public self-forgiveness, according to Dannenfelser. They are “crying out to other women to join with Susan B. Anthony List, and other organizations, to end the practice and to really welcome both woman and child without cutting those bonds.”

Visit www.sba-list.org or call 202-223-8073 for information on internships positions or questions on how to become involved with the SBA List.

Sarah Jean Seman is an editorial assistant for Human Events.


HUMAN EVENTS TOP 10/CLOAKROOM

13

WHO’S HOT, WHO’S NOT

HOT: CLINT EASTWOODHollywood may be a bastion of liberalism, but Republicans have received a valuable endorsement from Clint Eastwood. Last week at a joint Republican National Committee and Mitt Romney fundraiser, Eastwood helped raise $2 million. The actor also voiced his hopes that Romney was “going to restore, hopefully, a decent tax system that we need badly...so that there’s a fairness and people are not pitted against one another as to who’s paying taxes and who isn’t.”

NOT: ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGERFormer California governor and action hero Arnold Schwarzenegger is starting up a think tank at the University of Southern California—the USC Schwarzenegger Institute for State and Global Policy—where he will be a professor of State and Global Policy. Schwarzenegger’s wide-ranging knowledge of how to destroy the fiscal viability of the most populous state in the Union will, no doubt, be invaluable for future actor-turned-politicians, in accessing what not to do.

NOT: HARRY REID (D-NEV.)A Mormon melee (of words) broke out between Mitt Romney and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. In light of the Republican candidate’s refusal to release his older tax returns, the senator vocally insinuated that Romney may have not paid his taxes in the last ten years. Reuters reported that the White House is coordinating attacks with Reid on Romney’s returns. Both Democrats and Republicans have spoken out against Reid’s remarks.

HOT: GENERAL PETRAEUSThe days of Moveon.org’s “Petraeus Betray Us” campaign are long gone. This became evident after the media frenzy over the Drudge Report’s erroneous claim that the general was under consideration as a VP pick for Mitt Romney. In the Drudge poll, readers supported the idea of Petraeus as a VP with 45 percent in favor and 36 percent opposed. Unfortunately for them, Petraeus shot down the idea saying he “will not seek elected office.”

54

76

1098To the left, it is not just the capitalistic system that is to blame for the world’s problems, it is the greedy bankers, hedge fund managers and insurance companies that put profits before people. When he is not cutting deals with them or raising money from them, Obama has demonized entire sectors of the economy as causing the nation’s problems.

Leading Democrats felt right at home lending their moral support to the Occupy Wall Street crowd and its indictment of the capitalistic system. Obama leads the way, with his “spread-the wealth-around,” “you-didn’t-build-that” mentality, and his attacks on Bain Capital reinforce his antipathy to capitalism.

After the Bush v. Gore in 2000, liberals went apoplectic saying that the Supreme Court subverted democracy. They ramped up their rage another notch in 2010 after the Citizens United case, which gave corporations and unions the right to make independent political expenditures. Of course, they suddenly moderated their tone following the Obamacare decision.

Racism must be the reason that the left’s beloved president is not cruising to re-election, according to the world of progressive thought where the prism of race is the lens through which all is filtered. Electing the first black president wasn’t enough to quell the charges that America is a racist nation. Now we all must go along with everything he does or be slandered as hate-mongers.

Even when he had complete control of Congress, Obama had a tough time enacting parts of his agenda. But since the 2010 GOP takeover of the House, the president has found a new scapegoat, blaming a do-nothing Congress for obstructing his plans. That strategy didn’t set well with the Senate Democrats who controlled the Senate and haven’t passed a budget in three years.

When patriotic Americans began to rally in towns across the country out of concern that their nation was heading towards insolvency, the reaction of the left was to smear and slur the decent, hard-working citizens. Tea partiers have been called terrorists and likened to the Taliban. Now when they don’t get their way, the left blames the tea party for being obstructionist.

Nothing irritates the left more than their belief that corporations are buying elections, although they don’t seem to mind it when George Soros is writing the checks. Since they lost the Citizens United case, they have turned their aim on the Koch brothers, who have the audacity to donate to conservative causes. A sign that the Kochs are becoming ingrained within leftwing group-think is the new HBO series “Newsroom” slipping references to the brothers into the show’s predictably sanctimonious dialogue.

Yes, it’s a tough world out there and things happen beyond the control of the president. Obama seems to think that events outside the nation’s borders are the reason he hasn’t been able to fix things yet, citing the Arab Spring, Japanese tsunami, and European debt crisis. It is not as if other presidents haven’t had to deal with crisis from overseas; think Pearl Harbor, the Cold War, and September 11.

Whenever there is a high profile shooting in America it is the fault of conservatives, according to the current liberal punditry. When a lunatic shot Rep. Gabrielle Gi�ords, left-wingers blamed Sarah Palin for inciting hatred. In the moment after the Aurora, Colo. rampage, ABC News speculated it was the act of a tea party maniac. And any gun death, anywhere, must be the fault of the NRA—not taking into consideration that if one person in the theater was armed, the death toll may have been one.

You only can blame your predecessor for so long, Mr. President. Obama loves to remind us of the mess he inherited from George W. Bush, but that doesn’t excuse his wrong-headed policies that made matters worse. Remember the last two years in o�ce he had Speaker Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid to contend with.

Oil, Bankers & Businessmen

CapitalismSupreme Court

RacismDo-nothing Congress

Tea partyKoch Brothers

Foreign EventsViolence2

George W. Bush

Top 10 Liberal Media Blame GamesWhether it’s castigating George W. Bush, the tea party or Wall Street bankers, the left loves to play the blame game. Since their world view and political solutions can’t be called into question, there must be nefarious forces causing things to go wrong. And here is the list, which had to be sharply narrowed down to �t into ten.

JOSEPH AUGUST/SHUTTERSTOCK.COM


THE DEBUNKER

By Mark LaRochelle

In the last Debunker, we examined the relationship between gun ownership and the murder rate. We found that the most recent statistics from

the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed that annual gun purchases increased by more than 60 percent over the past decade, while the murder rate declined by more than 14 percent. We concluded that either “(1) there is no correlation between gun ownership and the murder rate, or (2) gun ownership is negatively correlated with the murder rate (in other words, more guns means fewer murders).”

Some comments online have argued that we did not prove the point: after all, not all murders are committed with firearms. What if murders by guns increased, they ask, while murders committed with weapons other than guns decreased by larger

amount, producing the decline in overall murders.

It’s an interesting question. If the dramatic rise in gun purchases coincided with a large enough drop in murders committed by knives, blunt objects, etc. (perhaps deterred by the increased probability that a would-be victim or bystander might have a gun), overall murders might have dropped, while murders by gun remained stable, or even increased (perhaps due to shoot-outs).

There’s nothing a statistics nerd like the Debunker likes better than an interesting question. After looking into this one, however, we must pronounce it:

BUNKThe FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting statistics table building tool doesn’t break down murder rates by type of weapon used. However, the FBI’s Crime in the United States appendix, “Supplementary Homicide Data,”

includes Expanded Homicide Data tables for Murder Victims by Weapon (including “Total Firearms”) for 2001-2005 and 2006-2010. Combining this data with the U.S. Census Bureau’s population estimates for 2000-2009 and 2010, we can derive the murder rate (per 100,000 population) for murders by gun alone:

Now we can compare annual gun purchases (as measured by the FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System with this murder rate by gun:

The result is that, while gun purchases increased more than 60 percent, the murder rate by guns declined even more than the overall murder rate: The overall murder rate declined some 14 percent, but the murder rate by gun declined more than 20 percent.

A simple linear regression analysis of these figures reveals a coefficient of correlation of about 0.97.

Of course, correlation is not

causation, but a coefficient of 0.8 is considered “strong”; a coefficient of 1.0 is perfect correlation; this coefficient—0.97—is incredibly strong. Moreover, the coefficient of determination here is 0.94—meaning that 94 percent of the decline in the murder rate by gun is explained by the increase in gun purchases; only 6 percent is due to other causes.

Conclusion: The argument that increased gun ownership causes increased murders by guns is unfounded. The evidence very strongly shows that increased gun ownership causes murders by gun to fall. In the absence of countervailing evidence, the presumption must be in favor of increasing gun ownership: Restricting the Second Amendment rights of the citizenry means that innocent people will die. The burden of proof is on the proponents of gun control to show otherwise.

Mark LaRochelle was an editor at Consumers’ Research and is a contributor to Human Events.

MORE GUNS = MORE MURDERS? PART II

Some of our readers wanted more details from the Debunker after Part I; so, this week, he delves deeper into the notion that increased gun ownership causes increased gun murders.

ANNUAL NICS BACKGROUND CHECKS AND MURDER RATES

GUN MURDER RATE AS A FUNCTION OF NICS BACKGROUND CHECKS (2001-2010)

FIGURE 1 FIGURE 2

Murder Victims (Total Firearms) U.S. Population Murder Rate by Gun*

2001 8890 281,424,602 3.162002 9528 284,359,005 3.352003 9659 287,094,280 3.362004 9385 292,344,890 3.212005 10100 295,023,274 3.422006 10225 297,869,107 3.432007 10129 300,829,936 3.372008 9528 303,684,948 3.142009 9199 306,360,603 3.002010 8775 308,977,944 2.84

Background Checks Murder Rate by Gun*

2001 8,910,191 3.562002 8,454,322 3.762003 8,481,588 3.812004 8,687,671 3.642005 8,952,945 3.842006 10,036,933 3.422007 11,177,335 3.362008 12,709,023 3.132009 14,033,824 3.002010 14,409,616 2.83

% change 61.72% -20.31%*Per 100,000Sources: U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports. Supple-mentary Homicide Data. Expanded Homicide Data. Murder Victims by Weapon. 2005: 2001-2005; 2010: 2006-2010; U.S. Census Bureau. Annual Population Estimates, 2000-2009; Press Release: U.S. Census Bureau Announces 2010 Census Population Counts.

Sources: U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Criminal Justice Information Services Division. National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) Operations 2010. Chart: Transactions Created in the NICS, p. 9; U.S. Department of Justice. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Uniform Crime Reports.

ANNUAL NICS BACKGROUND CHECKS

3.9

3.7

3.5

3.3

3.1

2.9

2.7

2.58,000,000 9,000,000 10,000,000 11,000,000 12,000,000 13,000,000 14,000,000 15,000,000

YEARLY MURDER RATE BY GUN

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100%. CAN IT GET ANY CRAZIER?NO, THIS IS NOT A PARANOID FANTASY. IT’S REAL.

The Oakland Bay Bridge, an iconic American landmark in the San Francisco Bay, is being built with millions of dollars of Chinese-made steel.

We could have made it here. We didn’t. And it’s just one of many ways China holds us in an economic stranglehold:

We’ve handed them our future, buying and borrowing like mad. So when unfair trade practices have cost 2.8 million Americans their jobs, Congress does nothing. When our

The U.S. - China deficit grew from $84 billion in 2001, when China entered the WTO, to $295 billion in 2011

This deficit has eliminated or displaced nearly 2.8 million U.S. jobs since 2001, representing about 2 percent of total U.S. employment

Of the nearly 2.8 million jobs lost or displaced, 1.9 million were in manufacturing—nearly half of all U.S. manufacturing jobs lost between 2001 and 2010

In a national poll, 96% of Republican voters say they support keeping America’s trade laws strong and strictly enforced to provide a level playing field for our workers and businesses

China owns 9 percent of our public debt

Speaker Boehner, listen to us:

Will Washington have the courage to act?

Take a stand on China’s currency manipulation

Stop China’s illegal and unfair trade practices

Pass H.R. 639/S. 328—NOW!

www.americanmanufacturing.org

Tell Congress to hold China accountable:www.americanmanufacturing.org/chinacheats

trade defi cit with China hits a new record, we fail to curb our insatiable desire for their artifi cially subsidized exports.

This is more than economic suicide. It’s a national security threat that requires urgent action by Congress.

human events: 8.13.12

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