http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/its-not-your-fathers-republican-party-anymore I went out into the rain on Tuesday to vote in the special primary election for the candidates who will oppose one another in November to be New Jersey’s next U.S. Senator. The election was occasioned by the death of Sen. Frank Lautenberg, surely one of the most liberal senators to have ever represented […]
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323639704579014880441301124.html?mod=WSJ_Opinion_MIDDLETopOpinion
The New York Times gave us an amusing juxtaposition earlier this week. Editorialist David Firestone sang the praises of Hillary Clinton’s deceptive and pandering speech in which she denounced measures against voter fraud, and he called on Mrs. Clinton to mount another favorite Times hobbyhorse:
Campaign finance issues deserve a speech just as impassioned as the one on voting rights, and it will be interesting to see if Ms. Clinton devotes more time to the subject than President Obama has.
Building a campaign around these kinds of issues particularly non-partisan redistricting and easy registration–has always been seen as too narrow and too wonky for a major candidate. But Ms. Clinton’s political future, not to mention the health of her party and her country, depend on someone taking them on and not letting go. And should Ms. Clinton succeed Mr. Obama, she will encounter precisely the same kind of blanket opposition in the House unless she starts trying to change it now.
Firestone is confusing his categories here: Redistricting and voter registration are not “campaign finance issues,” and while the federal government has broad authority to regulate registration, redistricting is almost entirely a state prerogative. The Voting Rights Act does give the feds some involvement in redistricting, but it cuts in the opposite direction of “nonpartisan redistricting”: Washington presses states to create “majority minority” districts. Given current voting patterns, that leads to a concentration of Democratic voters, making surrounding districts easier for Republicans to carry.
But what intrigues us is the way in which laws restricting political speech–in the areas of both campaign finance and taxation–are vital to, as Firestone puts it, “Ms. Clinton’s political future.”
We noted Tuesday that Mrs. Clinton is using her sinecure at the Clinton Foundation–a charity that is fully tax-exempt under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code–as a “formal apparatus” to prepare for a prospective campaign for president in 2016. Yesterday’s Times features a lengthy investigative report on the foundation:
Soon after the 10th anniversary of the foundation bearing his name, Bill Clinton met with a small group of aides and two lawyers from Simpson Thacher & Bartlett. Two weeks of interviews with Clinton Foundation executives and former employees had led the lawyers to some unsettling conclusions.
The review echoed criticism of Mr. Clinton’s early years in the White House: For all of its successes, the Clinton Foundation had become a sprawling concern, supervised by a rotating board of old Clinton hands, vulnerable to distraction and threatened by conflicts of interest. It ran multimillion-dollar deficits for several years, despite vast amounts of money flowing in. . . .
Worried that the foundation’s operating revenues depend too heavily on Mr. Clinton’s nonstop fund-raising, the three Clintons are embarking on a drive to raise an endowment of as much as $250 million, with events already scheduled in the Hamptons and London. . . .
And efforts to insulate the foundation from potential conflicts have highlighted just how difficult it can be to disentangle the Clintons’ charity work from Mr. Clinton’s moneymaking ventures and Mrs. Clinton’s political future, according to interviews with more than two dozen former and current foundation employees, donors and advisers to the family. Nearly all of them declined to speak for attribution, citing their unwillingness to alienate the Clinton family.
Difficult it no doubt is. It would be insurmountable if the Clintons (Bill in particular) lacked the star power that makes raising a $250 million endowment a feasible goal. That kind of money will enable the Clintons to buy the legal expertise to make sure everything they do complies with the letter of the law–no matter how shady it may seem to use a 501(c)(3) charity as a political vehicle.
http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2013/08/rebuilding-jerusalem/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=d05ffd0081-Mosaic_2013_8_16&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-d05ffd0081-41165129 “The idea of Judaism is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish people, and the idea of the Jewish people is inseparable from the idea of the Jewish land” THE Zionist movement dates from A.D. 70, the year of the destruction of the Temple and the Jewish State. The Zionist Organization dates from 1897, […]
Another Tack: Hobson’s choice – the Obama variation Was it really meaningless coincidence that just as an alarmed American administration closed down some 20 embassies throughout the Mideast – including the one in hardly unfriendly Tel Aviv – Ft. Hood shooter Nidal Hasan delivered his opening court-martial statement? Although superficially unconnected, these events are inextricably linked. […]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-obamas-unconstitutional-steps-worse-than-nixons/2013/08/14/e0bd6cb2-044a-11e3-9259-e2aafe5a5f84_story.html
President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. Desperation fuels arrogance as, barely 200 days into the 1,462 days of his second term, his pantry of excuses for failure is bare, his domestic agenda is nonexistent and his foreign policy of empty rhetorical deadlines and red lines is floundering. And at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality.
Explaining his decision to unilaterally rewrite the Affordable Care Act (ACA), he said: “I didn’t simply choose to” ignore the statutory requirement for beginning in 2014 the employer mandate to provide employees with health care. No, “this was in consultation with businesses.”
He continued: “In a normal political environment, it would have been easier for me to simply call up the speaker and say, you know what, this is a tweak that doesn’t go to the essence of the law. . . . It looks like there may be some better ways to do this, let’s make a technical change to the law. That would be the normal thing that I would prefer to do. But we’re not in a normal atmosphere around here when it comes to Obamacare. We did have the executive authority to do so, and we did so.”
http://pjmedia.com/spengler/2013/08/15/americas-problems-in-the-middle-east-are-just-beginning/?print=1 It’s 2015, and there is a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. The Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood (Hamas), financed by Iran, wins an election on a platform demanding the expulsion of the Jews from Israel. Iran, meanwhile, smuggles shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to terrorist cells in Palestine that can take down […]
http://bit.ly/14CZmYb 1. IBM acquired Trusteer for $700MN, its 13th Israeli acquisition (Globes Business Daily, August 16, 2013). 2. Warren Buffett defined Israel as “the leading, largest and most promising investment hub outside the United States.” Bill Gates stated that “innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business.” Israeli firms […]
http://www.investigativeproject.org/4125/qatar-risky-overreach Haifa, Israel – With seemingly limitless wealth and a penchant for often supporting both sides of the argument, the State of Qatar has become a highly significant player in Middle East power-politics. Recent events in Egypt and Syria, however, have put the brakes on Qatar’s ambitions. In this second part of his analysis […]
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/add-brussels-to-the-list-of-where-jews-need-to-hide-again/2013/08/16/ Atheneum Maimonides, a Jewish school in central Brussels. Note the video cameras, unmarked entrance, absence of windows on lower levels. For years there have been reports of Jews being warned not to wear items that identify them as Jewish in places where there are large or numbers are particularly aggressive anti-Semites. People are told […]
Zurich unveils sex drive-in The Swiss city of Zurich on Thursday unveiled a sex drive-in which local authorities say will enable them to keep closer tabs on prostitution, a year after voters backed the plan. Due to be opened officially in a ceremony on Aug 26, the nine so-called “sex boxes” are located in a […]
