In an annual tradition that began in 1976 by former player, businessman and part-time actor Paul Salata, the very last person picked in the NFL draft each year, sometimes 450 selections after the draft commences, hosts a week long golf tournament, regatta, roast, and presents Mr. Irrelevant with the Lowsman Trophy, which is of course the opposite of the Heisman Trophy. The trophy itself strikes the same pose as the Heisman, except with the player fumbling the ball.

Until yesterday, Mr. Irrelevant lived only in the hearts of minds of only the most loyal followers of the draft. Thanks to his stunning performance on the Sunday show circuit yesterday, Mr. Irrelevant should now forever be linked to Obama special assistant Dan Pfeiffer, who saw the law, the Benghazi talking points, and where Obama was the night of the attack last September 11th on our consulate, all as being irrelevant.

Now if only we could undo the damange of Obamacare and make the rest of the administration just as irrelevant. The country would be far better off.

But with the testimony Friday of Steven Miller to the House Ways And Means Committee, we see now that what you pray about is a legitimate tax question. And on the Hugh Hewitt Show just a big ago, Texas Congressman Kevin Brady let this slip, when it comes to what happens when pro-life groups meet up with the Internal Revenue Service.

HH: Guy Benson, you have a question for Congressman Brady?

GB: Well, yeah, Congressman, I thought that your formulation, asking the question are we still in America, it was so apropos, especially when we heard that exchange between Mr. Miller and Representative Schock of Illinois, who talked about the pro-life organization…

KB: Yes.

GB: …that was asked by the IRS in writing what type of prayers they did.

KB: Yes.

GB: I mean, that, to me, is like a whoa, holy cow type of moment. Were you blown away by that as well?

KB: Yes, and we had obviously been reading through all the material throughout the week as this thing was coming out. And not only did they ask what were the contents of you prayers, but they were asking pro-life groups to have their board of directors commit that they will not protest in front of Planned Parenthood clinics, which again, never heard of in my life. And it ought to frighten people that the IRS, that the government, is that intrusive on behalf of a political agenda.

JC: Kevin, this is John Campbell. I haven’t heard this. They made them commit that they wouldn’t protest, or else they threatened they couldn’t get a tax exempt status?

KB: Absolutely. Abosutely.

GB: Yes.

KB: That was one of the intrusive questions they asked. And this is a simple C4 application. This has never been a cross-examination of your political or religious beliefs. But this is far beyond just conservative tea party type groups. This goes to the pro-life movement as well.

Yes, if you want to get tax exempt status, you have to have your board of directors remove the ability of your group to protest at Planned Parenthood clinics.

In any normal universe, regardless of the political ideology coming down here, the ACLU should go apoplectic over any group being leaned on by the federal government to waive their right of freedom of assembly.

Sadly, this doesn’t appear to be any normal universe.

HH: Your colleague, Devin Nunes, was on the program yesterday, and brought to my attention what I had not realized, which is the extent of this snooping on AP reached the House of Representatives.

PR: Yeah.

HH: And he used the wrong term. He said wiretapping. He meant snooping, because they just swept up the phone records. Does that shock you that the DOJ without a court order and on their own initiative, swept up the phone records of the House of Representatives?

PR: Well, it’s the Cloak Room, excuse me, it’s not the Cloak room where members of Congress used the phones. They call it the Press Gallery, which is not far from the Cloak Room. It’s in the same House floor, it’s off the House floor. But my understanding is they took the records of the House Press Gallery AP. Members of Congress use the phones in what we call the Cloak Room. I don’t think they took those records. So I don’t think you could say they swept up the records of members of Congress’ phone calls. They took the records of AP reporters in the House Gallery who were doing, were reporting on Congress.

HH: But if they can do that, if they can go into the House, can’t…

PR: Yeah, look, I’m not making an excuse. I’m just trying to make sure that we’re accurate here.

HH: Does it trouble you?

PR: Of course it troubles me. Are you kidding me? Look, this is why, again, the point I’m trying to make here is let’s not think of this as just, oh gosh, some bad people at the IRS did those dumb things, and then oh, some overzealous prosecutor at the Justice Department did that, and oh, gosh, you know, some low level person at the State Department did this. We should not be thinking like that. We should be thinking this is what you get with big government in practice. This is what you get when you have a government that just has gone beyond its moorings, that has gone beyond its scope, and this is the kind of government you get with progressive politics. And that’s just not in keeping with our Constitution. That’s not what we deserve. We want equality under the law, and that’s not what we’re getting, whether we’re a reporter, a taxpayer, or a citizen.

.

HH: The idea that this might be a Geithner-Axelrod plan, and by that, the sort of intimation, Henry II style, will no one rid me of this turbulent priest, will no one rid me of these turbulent Tea Parties, that might have just been a hint, a shift of an eyebrow, a change in the tone of voice. That’s going to take a long time to get to. I don’t trust the Department of Justice on this. Do you, Congressman Nunes?

DN: No, I absolutely do not, especially after this wiretapping incident, essentially, of the House of Representative. I don’t think people are focusing on the right thing when they talk about going after the AP reporters. The big problem that I see is that they actually tapped right where I’m sitting right now, the Cloak Room.

HH: Wait a minute, this is news to me.

DN: The Cloak Room in the House of Representatives.

HH: I have no idea what you’re talking about.

DN: So when they went after the AP reporters, right? Went after all of their phone records, they went after the phone records, including right up here in the House Gallery, right up from where I’m sitting right now. So you have a real separation of powers issue that did this really rise to the level that you would have to get phone records that would, that would most likely include members of Congress, because as you know…

HH: Wow.

DN: …members of Congress talk to the press all the time.

HH: I did not know that, and that is a stunner.

DN: Now that is a separation of powers issue here, Hugh.

HH: Sure.

DN: And it’s a freedom of press issue. And now you’ve got the IRS going after people. So these things are starting to cascade one upon the other, and you have the White House pretending like they’re in the clouds like it’s not their issue somehow.

Exit question: I’m sure mainstream media, and the other two branches of government, see no problem whatsoever in secret records searches between the two branches, right? No separation of powers issue here. Heh. Can’t wait to see if this gets picked up tomorrow.

Update (Ed): Headline changed for accuracy.  Also edited final paragraph for same reason.

Sorry, it’s not about the IRS deciding who gets audited depending upon their political persuasions or their religious beliefs.
What is going on inside of MSNBC is the news that Barack Obama’s Justice Department, for some inexplicable reason, decided in 2012 that not only was the President’s campaign staff concerned about what the media was reporting, but that they opted to secretly wiretap the offices of the Associated Press. Sources close to MSNBC came out of their planning session for how the little-watched network would cover the story.

Erika of course has the full story on the front page, but this leads to a bigger question.

Hugh Hewitt has long called for a select committee on Benghazi, because of the inter-jurisdictional problems of five committees involved that might step on each other. You’d have to think that’s almost a certainty now, wouldn’t you? With Benghazi, the IRS scandal, and WiretAP now busting out all over, there’s nobody in Washington busier than Darrell Issa in the House Governmental Affairs and Oversight Committee. His plate is certainly going to be full. Benghazi deserves its own investigatory committee.

We’ll soon see if the other scandals rise to that level.

Exit question: When Barack Obama has lost Joe Klein, the New Yorker, Maureen Dowd, when CBS News’ Scott Pelley gives speeches in horror that mainstream media is getting the big stories wrong over and over again, when arch-liberal Ruth Bader Ginsberg is saying maybe the Court overreached on Roe V. Wade, you have to wonder if maybe, just maybe, the tide is finally beginning to turn in this country for the better. Or am I just being too optimistic?

I’ll go read Allahpundit for a while. That should even me out.

Not helpful.

12 minutes later, former California Congresswoman Jane Harman said, while video streamed of the two different blasts, seconds apart, a block apart, we don’t know as of yet whether this was terrorism.

Also not helpful.

CNN, purportedly being a news agency, is supposed to be able to report the news. There is conclusive and persuasive evidence showing that this was a terrorist attack. Two explosions that closely timed at a public event isn’t a boo-boo. It wasn’t an accident. Some al-Qaeda type isn’t going to issue a communique later and say, “My bad, didn’t mean for that to go off there, we’re sorry.” It was a terrorist attack, and CNN is going out of its way to make sure they don’t jump to that conclusion.

But, if it were a terrorist attack, apparently CNN’s threshold for speculation is a lot lower, where they can immediately point fingers that it could be those crazy right wing white extremists.

It’s too bad the network’s systemic ideological disease is getting in the way of reporting the human drama unfolding before them in a responsible way. We grieve for the victims of the bombing, and for all the relatives of those involved. We are all from Boston today, and I say that as a lifelong Southern California sports fan. And believe me, that’s not easy to say. We should all grieve for the first day or two. But we should also rage that we were again attacked. We need to find out who did this, and once we do, may hell rain down upon their heads. In the meantime, CNN, how about doing your job? Report what we do know, and don’t report what we don’t know. Doesn’t seem too hard to ask, does it?

Republicans cannot do anything about the President’s endless parade of photo ops, grandstanding behind first responders on the sequester, or in front of a bunch of kids on guns. And they cannot do anything about the Chris Matthews of the world comparing them to Hamas. But they do have math, facts, logic and clarity on their side, if only they will use their entire Congressional caucus more effectively in the messaging department. This was a good start.

Well, I think we need to have this kind of debate. And like we’ve done in the past, and I feel like we’re on a broken record here, but we need to show the country how we would do things differently if we don’t like the direction that we’re headed. We don’t like the idea of consigning our children and grandchildren to a mountain of debt that they can’t survive, where they have a lower standard of living. We don’t like the idea of courting a recession, which is what a debt crisis would bring us.

We want opportunity. We want people to get on with their lives by having opportunities, by having economic growth. We want to have a strong national defense. We want to have entitlement programs that people retire on and keep the benefits that were promised to them, like Medicare and Social Security. We want a health care system that’s vibrant, that works for patients who are in charge of their health care. We want to have the American dream in reach for every single person in this country.

This is what you…you need a budget in order to do that. You need to show the country your policies and how they all add up in order to achieve these goals that we have. We can’t simply stand up and give lofty speeches. We have to show specifically what reforms and policies that we’re calling for to get these goals accomplished.

And unfortunately, far more people are falling behind. We have the highest poverty rates in a generation. We have people who are about to enter retirement who may very well have the promises that were made to them reneged upon, just like what’s happening in Europe. We have young people who can’t get good jobs coming out of college. We’ve got opportunities denied left and right in this country in this stagnant economy.

And the primary reason why is because of our government, and because of its lack of foresight in tackling the problems we have before us. And we want to have this debate. We want to show the country that if you get ahead of these problems and tackle them before they tackle us, we’ll all be better off, that if you reform programs like Medicare, you can guarantee its promise for the people who are in and near retirement, and there for my generation and my kids’ generation when we retire. It’s smarter to do it that way, because in a debt crisis, everyone gets hurt, especially people who need government the most. They’re the ones who get hurt the first and the worst in a debt crisis, which is where we are headed if we stick with the status quo.

And unfortunately, because of the President’s lack of leadership, because of the political games he’s playing, because of the Senate’s refusal to even try to govern by budgeting, that’s where we’re headed. We need to go in a different direction, and we’re not going to stop showing the country a better way to go. That’s what budgeting is all about. That’s what we’re going to do in March, and that’s the kind of debate this country so richly deserves.

One of their reporters was on a cell phone while the shooting began, and after a few F bombs hurled his way, the reporter got the hint that law enforcement was requesting in the strongest possible way that for his own safety, perhaps he could relocate with all haste to a vantage point that might not get him killed in the crossfire. As a media person myself, I noticed that ten seconds of running the feed through a delay was not going to deprive the viewing public of learning what was going on in the story, and there really is no good reason not to use the delay.

But after that call, about 30 minutes later, the mistake was compounded by whoever isn’t directing the ongoing news story, when the anchor broke into the phone call of the same reporter on site to bring you this important piece of information:

02-12KCAL-Dumbass.mp3

For those of you who wonder why radio shows screen phone calls, or at least try to, this would be why. KCAL, next time, hit the delay and count to ten, and then tell us what you want to tell us. No one’s going to care who was first by how many seconds when the story is over, and you won’t look anywhere as foolish. And you won’t owe the feds quite so much in fines.

HH: Let me bring up one piece of information that Ben Shapiro at Breitbart put out today, which is one of the foreign funders behind Senator Hagel that he has not yet disclosed formally is something called Friends Of Hamas. If that is in fact true, Senator, would that lead you to vote against Mr. Hagel?

RP: You know, I saw that information today, also, and that is more and more concerning. With each day, there are new things coming out. So part of me wonders if the nomination continues to go on, and we’ll see how that goes. There are also either some organizations or corporations he’s been involved with that people, Ted Cruz in particular, has been asking are there any foreign contributors. And I think that is important. If you’re going to be in that high level a position in our government, we need to know if you have foreign sponsors, or have had foreign contributors. And I think that is pretty important, because people, that’s something that needs to be known.

HH: Well, let’s stay focused on Friends Of Hamas. Obviously, that would be a support group for a terrorist organization. Can you imagine voting or not filibustering anyone who’d received support from supporters of a terrorist organization?

RP: Like I say, it’s very troubling. And I’ve just seen the press report, so I’m going to have to look at what the response is, what the group is, and that kind of thing. But it is very concerning.

HH: Hamas – what is your opinion of Hamas?

RP: Well you know, I think that Hamas has shown itself not capable of sort of living in peace with Israel. They seem to foment a military reaction, and don’t seem to be able to live in peace with Israel. I do know that Israel did negotiate with them on one occasion for release of the solider, an Israeli soldier who’d been held there, and some say there are discussions between Hamas and Israel. I think that for there to be process for peace, there needs to be a more moderate type of Palestinian government in Gaza, I think, for the peace process to move forward.

HH: I believe Hamas is on our country’s list of terrorist organizations. Do you agree with that assessment?

RP: Yes.

HH: And so given that, I come back around to answering again, asking again, Senator Paul, I don’t know how Senator Hagel’s name can’t be withdrawn if he has received support from an organization, that’s a big if, but just assume that it is for a second, Shapiro a pretty good reporter, he’s got to pull his name. You can’t take money from a terrorist-supporting organization and come before the United States Senate and ask for a vote, can you?

RP: Yeah, I’m very troubled by it, and I think that’s what’s going to, we’re going to find out, is he’s going to have to respond to this. And you know, I think we’ll find out something in the next day or two.

- – - -

HH: Let me conclude by going one more time back to Secretary Hagel. Is it fair for me to conclude, tell the audience after you’re gone, that Chuck Hagel, in Rand Paul’s view, has to answer the question about whether or not he took money from Friends Of Hamas?

RP: Yes, that he has to, and I am going to wait and see what his answer is to that, and I’ve tried to keep an open mind on this. But I become more and more troubled with each day.

The nomination of Chuck Hagel, at this stage of the game, appears, it not Monty Python ex-parrot dead, at least Princess Bride mostly dead. There are clearly financial ties the former Nebraska Senator does not want to become public, because once disclosed, his nomination could no go forward. But Republicans are showing no signs of allowing the nomination to move forward until said financial disclosures, and any following questions that arise from them are answered.

And the collegiality principle that normally allows swift approval of appointees who are or were senators goes out the window in this case, because Hagel really wasn’t a likable guy on either side of the aisle.

Republicans so far haven’t let up on this, and they shouldn’t. We owe it to the republic to not passively approve someone so clearly demonstrating incompetence at best, and hostility at worst, towards the department he is nominated to run.

Finally.

In short, those who are silent on the gun issue now are no different than those who were silent in the South during the civil rights debate of the 60′s. In other words, if you’re not vocal about calling for banning guns, you’re racist or something.

Let’s set aside the irony that there were Democrats, including Al Gore, Sr. of Tennessee, who voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But then again, you wouldn’t expect lefties like Matthews and Brokaw to actually look at the race problems in their own party before calling conservatives racist.

But their argument is essentially that if you are silent about the gun issue, meaning not openly carrying the water for the President in his latest campaign to ban weapons, you’re just as reprehensible as those who remained silent in the South while the black community was fighting for civil rights in the 60s. This is such intellectual laziness, it’s almost silly to try and counter it. But here’s a way to do it.

According to statistics from MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), about 10,000 Americans are killed each year due to accidents caused by drunk drivers. It was as high as 15,000 per year ten years ago. So just in the last decade, nearly 120,000 Americans needlessly lost their lives because of cars. When compared to guns, cars are much more lethal. The numbers don’t lie. With this knowledge reported every year around the holidays, especially when the likelihood of drunk driving is at its peak, there is no way newsmen like Matthews and Brokaw can deny the fact that cars kill people in vastly higher numbers than guns. And yet, they’re silent on the issue. And those who are silent on the need to ban cars in America are just as bad as those who were silent during the civil rights debate in the 60′s. Therefore, Chris Matthews and Tom Brokaw are, well, you know the rest. Using the logic of the left, you can take any sentence, or sometimes any word that is said, and find a way of accusing the right of being racist. It’s disgusting and reprehensible.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf eventually had a problem with the wolf because he overplayed his hand in the rhetoric department, and people quit paying attention to his cries. When will Americans do the same thing to the left in this country who so cheaply and inappropriately throw around the racism charge?

I seem to remember an old saying about the definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. Know what we need? Double secret probation gun laws.

So thorough was Morgan beaten on argument during these two segments, what came afterwards was pitiful – Morgan bringing on the victim of gun violence after Shapiro had left to attack him as instransigent. That’s what bullies do. They can’t win when they’re stared down, so instead, they resume the fight when they aren’t directly confronted.

Here’s just a bit of what Senator Toomey said:

HH: So looking at that, are you willing to go through, as Senator Paul said on the program last week, before Senator McConnell came on, Senator Paul was on. He said look, I’ll go through the debt ceiling. In fact, he won’t vote for a debt ceiling without a balanced budget amendment. I don’t think many people will agree with that position, but are you willing to see it go through in order to get real reform?

PT: Well, I was on Morning Joe a couple of days ago, Hugh, and I made the point very clearly, if we go past the deadline on debt ceiling, it means some bills don’t get paid for a while? That is disruptive, that is not optimal, I certainly hope we can avoid it. But I would rather pay that price, if that’s the price we have to pay to start to get us on a sustainable fiscal path, I’d rather pay that price now than the kind of fiscal and financial and monetary collapse that awaits us if we continue with this Obama spending policy. So the answer is I’m not voting for a debt ceiling increase unless we get some meaningful reforms that start to put us on a sustainable path.

HH: Will you use the parliamentary tactics available to you to force that as well?

PT: If the reforms are not adequate, I will.

Message to Congressional Republicans. The more members take a public hard line on the debt ceiling debate, drawing a very clearly line in the sand that they are willing to take us over the edge barring significant reforms to entitlements, the better. And the sooner, the better.

The national defense apparatus, facing a trillion dollars of cuts over the next decade as part of the sequestration, is still facing it. Instead of it taking place now, it’s now in a two month governmentally-induced coma awaiting its fate in March.

Entitlement reform? A wink and a promise, one that no rational person in America expects to be kept.

Other federal spending reform? Same wink, same promise. Nancy Pelosi says all the cuts have been made already, and that there’s nothing left to cut.

Barring another can kicking session in two months when the next cliff arrives, we will conservatively (is that still a word that has any definition?) spend $4 trillion dollars more than we take in over the next decade. That’s not including what actually costs are realized when the full width and breadth of Obamacare is implemented, and the rest of the administration’s EPA regulations kick in.

And just because we’ve done nothing to reform the tens of trillions of dollars that’s going to hit the economy like a ticking time bomb when all of the Boomers hit retirement age, it doesn’t mean the math and actuarial tables aren’t right.

By the time Barack Obama retires to Hawaii permanently in 2017, this country is on track to be in debt by a sum that’s greater than most countries on Earth are worth.

Here’s Texas Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee’s prescription for what ails America’s schools.

Wouldn’t the construction of moats stocked with alligators around each school be cheaper and more effective? Exit question: If steel walls keep the bad people out, can’t we put up a steel wall across 2,000 miles of our Southern border?

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I realize to those of us with an I.Q. higher than that of a plant, this incoherence from Ed Schultz is hardly worth anything more than an eye roll. But since we live in an age where Republicans don’t seem to want to do any sort of national messaging at all, or at a minimum, counter the inanity from the left, allow me to explore this comparison.

1. The attack in Benghazi was warned about three days in advance by the Libyan government. The Connecticut Governor did not make a similar warning that the federal government ignored.

2. Ambassador Stevens asked repeatedly for more security, because he worried for his safety, and the safety of his consulate staff. Those requests were apparently denied by the State Department. The principal of Sandy Hook didn’t make any such request to the Department of Education or Homeland Security. Had she made requests, and they would have been denied, then there’s a case for oversight outrage. It is interesting that in both events, though, more security might have spared innocent life.

3. The White House, through its press secretary, its U.N. ambassador and the President himself, told a fiction about the cause of Benghazi attack, blaming it on a YouTube video. No such misdirection was perpetrated by the administration about Newtown.

4. The attack in Benghazi took place over the course of seven hours, with the White House being informed, and watching from an overhead drone picture, for at least six of those seven hours with no military response given. The attack in Newtown was over in minutes.

5. Former Special Forces assets from the CIA were on the ground in Benghazi, painting a target on perpetrators of the attack, and did not receive the assistance of our military, specifically on someone’s orders. No such plea for help was refused in Connecticut.

6. If John McCain is somehow neutralized on the gun issue because his vice presidential nominee once said the word “reload” publicly, then Barack Obama is somehow neutralized on every inappropriate statement by Joe Biden, as long as we’re into moral equivalence here?

Senators McCain, Graham and Ayotte are conducting their Constitutional role of oversight because of the apparent lack of judgment and response by the Obama administration after Americans were under attack by terrorists on U.S. soil, even if present in a different country. There is no similar appearance of misconduct by school staff, first responders, or city, state or federal agencies involved at Sandy Hook.

But other than all that, Ed, the hypocrisy analogy is pathetic, sad and shows the nasty, insensitive nature of the left that is willing to seize upon any crisis to further their political agenda. There is a difference between the two sets of victims between Newtown and Benghazi. The four lives lost in Benghazi were tragic, because indications are that it didn’t have to happen. But all four were grown adults who chose to serve the country in a profession that is often times more hazardous than other careers here in the states. The innocents lost last Friday were mostly little kids.

Honestly, lefties, is there no limit to the depravity of your rhetoric?

That said, there are few things about which I’m pretty confident. It’s a smaller list, but there are some things of which I am very certain. But there is one thing I know for a fact, and that is that Frank Pastore is in a much better place, and Heaven’s collection of power hitters are overjoyed at Frank’s arrival, because batting practice fastballs are now traveling across eternity.

Prayers to Gina, his wonderful wife and their family, that God’s grace will get them through the difficulty of this at this time of year. And I hope they do appreciate the impact Frank had on people not just around Los Angeles on radio, but all over the world. 

If you want to get a glimpse of the kind of character Frank was, I encourage you to pick up his autobiography, Shattered.

Rest in peace, Meat.

Underreported in all the bad news the last two presidential cycles is the fact that Repulicans have been gradually and methodically increasing their numbers in state houses, including full control of Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. Reid Wilson in the National Journal today explains how Republicans are contemplating using those new majorities to more level the Electoral College playing field by changing their system from winner-take-all to awarding them by Congressional districts.

Any such movement would bring about conflict like we just saw in Lansing, Michigan, except tenfold. But after being labeled by the left as racist, sexist, homophobic, misogynist, lying, greedy, murderous and crooked, I’m not sure being called a cheater for changing the system concerns me much.

The best example I can give why to support the plan?

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As I understand it, the reason her nomination was doomed, notwithstanding personal financial ties with the Keystone Pipeline and other potential conflicts of interest, was because it has been reported that in her role as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, and as part of President Obama’s national security team, she had access for up to five days to the classified daily intelligence briefings that told her there was no “spontaneous protest” that turned violent at our consulate in Benghazi. There was no outrage to the YouTube video that caused this. Yet Dr. Rice chose to follow the carefully excised unclassified documents, and attempted to hide behind the blissful ignorance defense. Williams could have cleared this up once and for all. One question is all it would have taken. Dr. Rice, did you have access to, and did you read the classified intelligence that gave a different version to the events in Benghazi than what you told Americans?

If she says yes, her nomination should have been toast. She would never say yes on camera, and would dodge the question, which would still be a yes.

If she says no, then someone else from the intelligence community lied to Congress about who knew what and when. Either way, Williams makes news.

Instead, he throws softballs, and leaves the implicit imagery with viewers that those two awful angry white guy Senators, McCain and Graham, are to blame for making her the scapegoat. Nowhere in Williams’ report was the fact that New Hampshire Senator Kelly Ayotte was the leading critic of Dr. Rice’s non-nomination, and is the one who announced were there to be a Rice nomination, she’d put a hold on it. So there’s not a men versus woman aspect to the story at all.  But then again, journalism and reporting stories isn’t what Brian Williams, Rock Center and NBC are about.

The bottom line is four Americans are still dead, and the rest of the country doesn’t know who screwed up and why. That investigation needs to continue in Congressional hearings. But one of two scenarios about Dr. Rice’s testimony still have to remain true. Either She had intelligence to the contrary and she intentionally misled the nation about the terrorist attack on 9/11/12, or she didn’t read or believe the classified intelligence she had access to was more accurate than the unclassified version. That doesn’t speak well for her competence.

Maybe my memory is still a little fuzzy, but I remember President Kennedy being for a lot of things. Dividing the country in half over a desire to raise income taxes just because he wants to redistribute wealth wasn’t in any of my history books.

Look, I’m open-minded on the approach, except that my preference is we have to deal with it comprehensively. I just question the wisdom of doing it in one massive piece of legislation, the reason being that every time that Washington has tried to tackle an issue like this comprehensively, you end up trading one good policy in exchange for five very bad policies or four very bad policies. I also think it’s difficult to put together the kind of support for a big piece of legislation. Some people think that that means well, let’s just do the easy stuff and not touch the hard stuff. I don’t think that’s true at all. I think we have to do all of it. That’s why I believe we have to deal with it comprehensively. And maybe I’m wrong about doing it in one big bill. I’m just wary of it, because I think it’s failed in the past, because you end up having to do three or four really bad things in order to get one good thing done. Look, this is a serious issue. We have to solve it. It’s important for our country to solve this issue. But it has to be done, and it has to be done in a way that’s humane and compassionate. But it also has to be done in a way that’s responsible. We do want to be compassionate to the people, like the young people that were brought here when they were children. We do want to take into account the fact that when you talk about 11 million undocumented people, you’re talking about 11 million human beings with real families and real stories. And on the other hand, we want to make sure that we’re being fair to the people who have done it right, and we want to make sure we don’t do anything that encourages people to do this in the future, because if we do it the wrong way, in ten years, we’ll have another 11 million people. So we don’t want that to happen, either. So this is going to take a little time, but I think it’s important to do it right. It’s a very important thing for our country. America cannot be what it is destined to be in the 21st Century if we don’t figure this out, and I hope to play an important role in that.

The rest of the interview transcript, and the audio of it, will be available a little later here.

Now I could have missed it, but I don’t seem to remember Matthews badgering David Brock or Eric Boehlert of Media Matter for America who pays their salary repeatedly. For some reason, George Soros’ involvement doesn’t rise to the level of journalistic integrity to Matthews.

I’m shocked, shocked.

The police were out with riot gear as protests got angry and violent. You saw earlier in Allah’s post about what they did to an otherwise occupied tent. But here’s the rationale of your typical, average union worker.


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Yes, they’re coming for you. And do you know why they’re coming for you? Because the President of the United States fomented that mentality ever since he came onto the national political scene. Class warfare has been stock and trade with the Democrats for decades, but Barack Obama has used Alinskyite tactics to parlay it into two terms as president. Here’s what he had to say just yesterday while on a Detroit stop on his latest Soak-The-Rich-In-Taxes tour.

What I learned in a Macro Economics class in community college 26 years ago, Barack Obama still hasn’t yet been able to master. 80% of something is better than 100% of nothing. If there are more jobs, even if they don’t pay as much as some other existing union jobs, more people will be employed and contributing to the system, and have money to spend. Obama seems to think he can create a closed-world system where business will flock to the highest paid union workers, because of the skill set and demeanor of the guy above, and overpay in labor costs so that that overpaid labor will have more money to spend and buy things made by other union labor. Unfortunately, the world has other ideas.

Obama’s inconsistency on American exceptionalism, we’re the problem and need to apologize for our actions while on the world stage, but our union labor is the envy of business internationally, is just another example in an increasingly long list of examples of why campaign tactics do not always translate well to actual leadership.

Lincoln literally fought a war to keep the Union together. Obama seems perfectly content to foment discord in order to keep unions together.

A new report by the intelligence community projects that the United States will no longer be the world’s only superpower by 2030.

“In terms of the indices of overall power – GDP, population size, military spending and technological investment – Asia will surpass North America and Europe combined,” the report concludes.

Looks like this administration will have eight years to now only preside over the continual dumbing down of education, but dumbing down smart power, too. Taking a trillion dollars out of Defense over the next decade should keep our waning global influence pretty much on schedule.

Now while Senator Trotter cools his heels in the pokey awaiting charges on a class four felony, it would normally be inappropriate to pile onto his current legal troubles. And by piling on, I of course mean look at the Democrat’s record on the gun control issue. But it’s the holiday season, and conservatives need something to bring good cheer. So from the Chicago Tribune today:

Trotter has been a longtime gun-control advocate who opposed concealed carry legislation in the state. In an unsuccessful Democratic primary bid in 2000 against U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush, Trotter chided another candidate in the contest for being absent from a special legislative session during a crucial gun-control vote.

“It’s important for our constituents to be here to act upon this one way or another,” Trotter said of then-state Sen. Barack Obama.

I only have one question. What would Bob Costas do?

Exit thought: Does the arrest of Donne Trotter make the TSA racist, too?

DK: It’s ugly. It is really ugly. Tonight, we have seen for the first time since the beginning of the revolution, and I think perhaps for the first time since the revolution that brought Nasser to power in the early 1950s, open factional fighting, political factions fighting in the streets of the capitol around the presidential palace. Islamists armed with clubs and rocks and their fists, Molotov cocktails battling secular protestors similarly armed. I’ve never seen anything like it. I just emerged from the fighting right now, and I’m frankly sort of awestruck and depressed.

HH: Did you see anyone being seriously injured in the course of those conflicts, David Kirkpatrick? Or is it sort of the faux violence that we associate with some Western protests?

DK: No, no. I saw many people wounded, some with birdshot, some with rocks to the head, a steady stream of ambulances leaving. The Ministry of Health says more than 211 have been injured. Each side, the secular protest leaders and the Islamists say that one of theirs has been killed, but the Health Ministry hasn’t confirmed that, yet. So that’s speculative. And I’m almost, it would almost be irresponsible to report it, except that everyone here believes it. And so it’s become, this notion of martyrdom on either side, has become a part of the fight now.

Now this raises a few questions. Where in the world are the RPG’s? No mortar fire? Certainly, it cannot be argued that the response to a half-baked movie promo on You Tube is going to spark a more violent and murderous mob riot than the reaction to the hijacking of the democratic process and attempting to create an Iranian-style phraoahship on the Nile. Can it?

Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell put the lie to the rhetoric in 3 minutes today on the floor of the United States Senate. Working on a piece of legislation dealing with Russia, McConnell used his leader privilege to offer a straight up or down vote on Geithner’s proposal. He’s so confident that there is not only no support from the Republican side of the aisle, there’s no support from the Democratic side, either. If Barack Obama’s plan, as proposed by his Treasury Secretary, were to be voted on by a Democratically-controlled Senate, even after the American people have spoken and the mandate has been claimed, there would not be 51 votes. There might not even be 30.

So what does Majority leader Harry Reid say, who has been one of the chief bomb throwers in the rhetoric department, when McConnell asks for unanimous consent to present the Geithner plan as an amendment to the Russia bill, or offer it as its own stand-alone bill?

He objected.

So out of one side of Reid’s mouth this week, he’s planning on blowing up the filibuster rules so that he takes one weapon away from the minority to stop bad legislation by removing the 60 vote threshold to move to debate on a motion or bill. Right now, to force that 60 vote opening filibuster, all one has to do is object to unanimous consent, just like Harry Reid did today. Out of the other, he’s using the standard rules to keep his side from being embarrassing their own President on an issue no one on the Hill believes to be serious.

Not satisfied with resting on their laurels, however, the CFTU has decided to branch out. As California goes, so goes the nation. Marxism isn’t coming, friends, it’s here. And it’s animated. It’s even narrated by Ed Asner, who uses his grandpa voice so that even the kiddies will wonder why rich people hate us so.

I got a very interesting reaction when I played this for our Hughniverse audience last night. Most people begged me to turn it off, because it was too hard to watch. I say you have to watch it. We’ve ceded too much ground already, and aren’t just losing the battle, we’re not even willing to see what the other side is up to anymore. We ignore this at our peril.

By the way, according to the caption at Breitbart, where I originally found this video, this bit was written and produced by Fred Glass, who is a CFTU staffer. Allegedly, he pulled down a salary of $139,800 in 2011. I’m sure he’ll get a nice pension when he retires after a long and prosperous career of brainwashing. Think one school would have turned down an additional $140,000 if it would have been offered to them rather than being ciphoned, either by the legislature or through union dues, or both, to a untion thug?

This morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough and Jon Meacham, presidential biographer and former editor-in-chief of Newsweek, had a discussion of just how poor of a leader Barack Obama is. Joe’s co-host, Mika Brzezinski, wanted to defend the President just out of partisan duty, but really had no answer to what even the liberals in the media know – this President really isn’t a very good one. He’s just their guy, and now they have the unenviable task to carry the water for him for another term.

So a policy decision over the impact of tax rates cannot be dissented against in this country anymore, because it’s morally equivalent to owning slaves. The American left has thrown around the racism charge so freely that the boy hasn’t just cried wolf, he’s run full page ads, recorded infomercials, embedded blogads, and personally visited the residence of every American in the republic to make sure everyone knows there’s a wolf, that the wolf is a Republican, and that he’s racist.

Never mind the fact that the tax rate increases the left, elected Democrats and MSM, want will only raise around eight days of revenue out of a projected trillion and a half dollar deficit, and it will have a smothering effect on the private sector going into the new year. Forget about the fact that the President’s proposal last Thursday actually takes our deficit and makes it worse by increasing federal spending by an additional quarter of a trillion dollars. Having concerns about the executive branch having unilateral control over when and how much money this country can borrow, with no Congressional ability to check it? You’re dreaming. And you might as well submit yourself to thought police reprogramming if you hold the opinion that it’s a moral evil to take from those who have earned it in order to give it away to those who have not.

To this “very smart” unnamed White House aide, however, none of these reasons for opposition to the President’s plan are to be taken into account. A normal, rational person cannot look at the President’s plan and say anything but pass it unanimously. The only explantion for dissent has to be because of the color of the President’s skin or something.

Language continues to be the biggest victim of the culture war being waged in America 2012. If a Republican is in the White House, dissent is defined as patriotic. If a Democratic president is in office, and he happens to have a different skin color than all of his predecessors, dissent is redefined to mean racist. If a woman becomes president at some point in the future, and she is a Democrat, dissent will morph yet again into meaning sexist or misogynistic. Let’s hope that some day soon, we can go back to dissent being defined as patriotic again. That will mean that the country finally figured out there’s no wolf.

McConnell came, he saw, and then he laughed. He couldn’t help it. It was the same kind of involuntary reaction one has when they’re told the Cleveland Browns are going to win the Super Bowl this year.  McConnell later joined Hugh Hewitt  and had this to say:

MM: Well, it’s certainly true that they could get what they have claimed for years they wanted to do by doing nothing. They could get a big Defense cut, and they could get a massive tax increase. But of course, they don’t want to get a tax increase on everybody, only on the top two rates. Also, do they really think it would be good for the economy for all of this to kick in? I tell you, I think the fundamental observation I would make about all of this right now, whether it’s this totally unserious proposal from the Secretary of the Treasury or the attempt by the majority leader to break the rules to change the rules of the Senate, they’re strutting their stuff after the election. They’re still celebrating, and they’re having a hard time noticing that they don’t have a super majority stranglehold on the Senate, and they don’t control the House.

HH: Senator, there are at least nine, maybe ten or more Democrat seats up in 2014. You named some of them – Senator Landrieu, Senator Begich, but also Senator Rockefeller’s seat is up, Senator Hagan, you’ve got Senator Baucus himself, Tim Johnson, Mark Udall, Mark Pryor. Are these Democrats who are…

MM: Alaska, very red state, Democrat in Alaska up…

HH: Are they not concerned that their constituents are watching, and they’re going to remember this brinksmanship?

MM: Oh, I can’t imagine that they would vote for what the Secretary of the Treasury showed the Speaker and myself today. I can’t imagine it. And so that underscores what a totally unserious…this proposal, you know, Hugh, it wouldn’t have passed the House with Nancy Pelosi as speaker. This is, you know, absurd.

HH: So if you have to do something, I mean, are you expecting them to send up something else? Or are they just trying to make it look as though you folks are refusing to respond to an offer?

MM: Yeah, I think it’s all game playing. They want to make us look unreasonable. And you have to ask the question, to what end? There’s not an election for two years. The election is over. This is time to be governing. The posturing, the endless campaign, the never-ceasing finger pointing and blaming, you know, I know he’s upset about it, but he’s got a Republican House to deal with, and he’s got a non-inconsequential Republican minority in the Senate. He doesn’t own this Congress like he did the Congress in 2009 and 2010. He can’t get anything he wants. Those days are over.

I am pleased to see that not all Republicans in elected office are willing to cower to a President as though he has a mandate when in fact, no mandate exists. A coalition of unserious people can vote in an unserious leader so that unserious economic proposals are presented, but that certainly does not mean that serious people should abandon, well, seriousness.

I am also pleased that McConnell’s press office issued a press release earlier today, then made sure they pointed to a great column by our friend and colleague, Fred Barnes of the Weekly Standard. But when we responded and asked on short notice for the Senator to come on and talk about it, he did. Lesson to Republican Congressional leaders: Do this more.

But yet, the President is still acting like he wants to move in the direction of Dr. Rice anyway. Holding his first Cabinet meeting since the election, with Dr. Rice in attendance, he said this:

Just a bit ago on Hugh Hewitt’s show, Senator Ayotte minced no words when explaining what troubles her about the nomination.

No, absolutely. So yesterday, I met with Ambassador Rice, and here’s where we are. A couple of concerns – number one, we know that the representations of connecting the Benghazi attacks to the video or protest, that was false. And the issue was she, you know, when she came into the meeting, she admitted that that was wrong. Well, I guess the first question is if you knew it was wrong and then the acting CIA director said we knew firmly by September 22nd that that was wrong, in terms of the intelligence, but no one, she had appeared on every single major news network, and had said, obviously made those representations. She never corrected them. That’s number one. But secondly, here’s what I learned that really bothered me. It wasn’t just, I think we were left an impression that somehow she was just relying on these unclassified talking points that were changed. That’s deeply troubling in and of itself, and let’s just understand the change. The change was that as reported, the classified talking points said that individuals with ties to al Qaeda were involved in the attack on the consulate, and that was removed, the al Qaeda references removed from the unclassified talking points. But in her position as ambassador to the U.N., she didn’t just review the unclassified talking points. She received daily intelligence briefings, and she did in fact review the classified talking points. So in other words, when she went on the Sunday shows, regardless of the reasons for it or the reasons for the unclassified version not containing al Qaeda, which I think are dubious, she went on and made representations, obviously, that would have led you to believe that this wasn’t a terrorist attack.

She also keyed in on Senator Collins’ concerns, which are that Dr. Rice previously served as the assistant secretary of state for African affairs in 1998, the very time our two Embassies were blown up by what later became al Qaeda. Providing security to those compounds would have fallen under her purview. Dr. Rice had no answers to Collins’ concerns, and yet she’s trying to remain a viable potential nominee. It makes you ask a question about Obama’s real intent here.

The President is not adept at leading, being president, or campaigning, really. If there hadn’t been a 24/7 media campaign in the mainstream media to do the heavy lifting for him, he would not have won this most recent election. MSM gave him at least three points’ worth of a tailwind. What the President excels at is sowing division in the country by throwing up red herrings in order to keep people’s eye off whatever ball with which he’s trying to score.

Either Obama believes he won, and he’s just that arrogant to believe that he gets who he wants, regardless of the veracity, or lack thereof, of the proposed nominee, or he wants the circus atmosphere to continue, allowing the left to continue to attach racial undertones to a potential nomination where there are no racial elements to discuss.

Dr. Rice clearly had access to classified breifings that undercut both what she said on the five Sunday shows, as well as the White House defense that she was just reporting on what she was briefed. So why the theatrics of continuing to defend her? Could it be that he’s keeping the specter of the Rice nomination alive as a distraction so that while too many of us, me included, focus on this, he’s gaining speed for the tax hikes he so desperately wants?

I’m all for continuing to pull threads on Benghazi wherever there are threads to pull, because the truth is owed to the familiies of those who lost their lives there. And the American people should know the truth about what their government does and doesn’t do. But that said, I’m becoming concerned that this is becoming a rope-a-dope scenario.

No unanswered questions regarding Dr. Rice’s involvement? Really?

1. Who at the White House decided it should be Susan Rice to appear on the five Sunday shows?
2. Who at the White House decided to pull the relevant information out of her briefing that would show Benghazi was a planned, premeditated terrorist attack, and replace it with a phony cover story about a non-existent spontaneous protest to a You Tube video?
3. Why did Ambassador Rice not have the intellectual curiosity to ask what were the other possible scenarios besides the briefing, and ascertain the probabilities of whether alternative narratives could be true?
4. Why did Ambassador Rice not have the intellectual curiosity to question why Ambassador Stevens left the heavily fortified fortress that is our U.S. Embassy in Tripoli and go to Benghazi without proper security on September 11th when Stevens himself feared for his safety and the Libyan government warned an attack was imminent several days prior?
5a. If Susan Rice is not a player in all of this, why was she made the voice of the Obama administration on Benghazi?
5b. And if she was a non-player and knew it, why did she volunteer to take the lead on this blindly without asking any questions?
6. If Dr. Rice is so easily duped by faulty intelligence, and doesn’t possess the capacity to question it, why would that make her a suitable candidate for the top diplomatic post in the world?
7. Dr. Rice on at least one of her Sunday show appearances claimed not only that the attack in Benghazi was spontaneous, but that there was no evidence to conclude it was preplanned. How could Dr. Rice be so out of the loop to not see evidence when Defense Secretary Leon Panetta two days prior to her five show extravaganza was on the Hill briefing Democratic Senators that indeed it was a preplanned terrorist attack, very al Qaeda-esque in nature, and that the video had nothing to do with it?

Just a refresher:

Dr. Rice can’t say there’s no evidence to the contrary when the contrary evidence was not only being used in Congressional oversight meetings by the Secretary of Defense, but the Senators, including Carl Levin, spoke publicly on the matter reciting what they learned from Panetta, all before she took to the airwaves on Sunday the 16th.

There is no credibility here – either from Dr. Rice or from Jay Carney, who is trying to do the Baghdad Bob by saying there are no unanswered questions.

The administration, and their allies in mainstream media, may want to believe that ‘you’re a racist and a sexist if you dare question the motives of Dr. Rice or criticize her role in the handling of the attack’ is an all-emcompassing answer. But it’s a dodge.

And dodges aren’t just cars built by Fiat with your taxpayer bailout money. They’re non-answers to unanswered questions.

Update (Ed): Jake Tapper e-mailed me to clarify that he wasn’t the reporter who asked the question today.

Whether we want to believe it or not, Barack Obama will be president for four more years, and will not sign any repeal that makes it through the House and Senate. And believing that any repeal bill would even get brought up for a vote in a Senate is a bigger fantasy than believing the Arab Spring will turn out just fine. So how do we continue to fight this battle, knowing as we do that Obamacare is bad law, bad policy, bad health care, and bad, bad, bad for the U.S. economy? Two fronts.

First, the House Ways And Means Committee will have to take a large role in the next few years overseeing the implementation process. HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has already balked at providing information and documentation to the committee, and hearings are going to have to ramp up. In a Politico article this morning, Speaker Boehner is quoted as saying in a letter to fellow Republicans earlier this month, “I’ve long maintained there are three possible routes to repeal of ObamaCare: the courts, the presidential election, and our constitutional responsibility for oversight,” Boehner wrote in a letter to House Republicans earlier this month. “With two of them having come up short, the third and final of these becomes more important than ever.”

He’s right. Stunt votes of repeal, knowing it will go nowhere in the Senate, will not do this time. The bill is 2,000 pages of fraud and bureaucracy, and Congress has to do the best they can to pick away at it, and the Caucus has to continue making the case to the American people that the program will eventually collapse under its own weight, and we’ve said all along there’s a better way, and this is what that way forward should be. Unless, of course, the Supreme Court takes another bite at the Obamacare apple and strikes it down.

As Ed wrote earlier on Hot Air, just because the election is over, the legal challenges to Obamacare have not gone away at all, and with a piece of legislation this massive, that is this overarching, it can’t help but raise significant Constitutional challenges the deeper you get into the implementation process. It’s a rotten onion, and it stinks more with every layer you peel back. Alliance Defending Freedom has at least one challenge pending that has a pathway to the Supreme Court regarding the HHS regulations, and Fox News talked to Jordan Sekulow about another similar challenge coming, this time from Hobby Lobby.

The road to repeal has gotten considerably longer and narrower. But this is another battle on which conservatives, despite the odds, should stand their ground and fight. Either we believe in our core principles of adherence to the 1st Amendment, and limited government, and individual choice, or we don’t. And if we don’t, we’re not a serious political movement any longer.