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Why Pope Francis is Wrong about Capitalism

Last week, Pope Francis gave his first major speech on economics. In it, he demanded more government control over the economy, decried the gap between the rich and poor, and called on the world’s leaders to end “the tyranny of money.”

We should all be concerned about the plight of the poor. Unfortunately, the pope’s comments miss the mark in several key ways.

1. Nothing in human history has done as much to alleviate human poverty as free-market capitalism. This shouldn’t even be a controversial statement. Before the Industrial Revolution, the entire world lived in far worse poverty than the pope’s slum-dwelling parishioners in (socialist) Argentina did when he was the archbishop of Buenos Aires. Moreover, humans had lived in that level of extreme poverty since at least Noah’s flood.

Were there redistribution schemes in ancient Rome, ancient Egypt, and ancient China? Of course, and they are well documented. Did they lift anyone out of primitivism? No, they did not.

To give just one example of how capitalism reduces suffering: Capitalism has eliminated famine from most of the world. The steps by which it did this were not obvious, and were entirely profit-driven. Someone invented a steam engine. Someone figured out how to attach steam engines to boats and trains. Some other people put up their hard-earned capital to invest in building boats and trains. Someone else thought of using new technology to can food. Someone built warehouses. None of this was done for charity. But one day there was a famine, and so someone shipped trainloads of canned goods to the starving people. It took the genius of the market to conquer want.

We can tell similar stories about everything from polio to tooth brushes. But the bottom line is, well, the bottom line. The poorest in capitalist countries live better — in all the ways that count most — than kings did just a century or two ago. Though rare even in the early 20th century, indoor plumbing is now almost universal in much of the world, and there are more cell phones than toilets. African children living in huts take courses on iPhones. The poorest illegal alien can walk into any emergency room in America — before Obamacare — and be treated with state-of-the-art equipment no one could have paid for just five years ago, for free.

Socialism produced none of this. Indeed, socialism feeds off the wealth and ingenuity of others. The pope should not rail against what free markets haven’t yet done without first thanking God for what they have done.

2. Capitalism is the societal fulfillment of the Golden Rule. For those who missed Sunday school, Jesus taught people to “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” No economic system realizes this principle as thoroughly as capitalism.

What do I mean? It’s simple. In a capitalist economy, for me to make a single penny, I must first think about my potential customer. What does she need? What does she want? What problems does she have, and how can I solve them? How can I make her life better?

Only then, after thinking through all this, can I offer her a product. And then she has an opportunity to purchase my product — or not purchase it. I can invest my entire life savings in addressing her needs and still be paid absolutely nothing for my efforts.

This is the Golden Rule. Even when people aren’t consciously seeking to do good, capitalism forces them to put others before themselves. And while every other economic system relies on coercion, capitalism leaves people truly free.

3. The Bible precludes every other economic system. As Pope Francis should know better than most, the Bible is no friend of socialism. The Ten Commandments — especially the commandment against stealing and the commandment against coveting — directly conflict with socialism. In fact, several biblical passages contradict socialist principles. When King Ahab nationalizes Naboth’s vineyard, the Lord roundly condemns him. Jesus commends the entrepreneur who multiplies his money, while condemning the employee who buries his stake, giving the money entrusted to that “wicked servant” to the more successful investor and casting the failure “into outer darkness.”

Does this make the Bible harshly Darwinian? No, this makes the Bible consistent. There is no virtue in taking someone else’s money to do “your” good works. Capitalism permits the massive multiplication of wealth for all members of society.

Pope Francis is absolutely right to call on the wealthy to be more generous with what they have. But he is dangerously wrong to ignore how capitalism serves humanity.

Sadly, this sort of confused teaching hobbles Christianity. It demonizes exactly the sort of wealth creation Jesus demanded, and thus all the good works that could be done as a result. And those works are not limited to charity. As Ronald Reagan used to say, “The best jobs program is a job.”

Pope Francis — and the world — would do well to learn this.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reprinted the full text of NFRA President Rod D. Martin’s op-ed for the Daily Caller, “Why Pope Francis is Wrong About Capitalism.” We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
May 24th, 2013

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IRS’ Lerner Had History of Harassment, Inappropriate Religious Inquiries at FEC

Perhaps no other IRS official is more intimately associated with the tax agency’s growing scandal than Lois Lerner, director of the IRS’s Exempt Organizations Division. Since admitting the IRS harassed hundreds of conservative and Tea Party groups for over two years, Lerner has been criticized for a number of untruths—including the revelation that she apparently lied about planting a question at an American Bar Association conference where she first publicly acknowledged IRS misconduct.

Logo of the Internal Revenue Service

Still, Lerner has her defenders in the government and the media. Shortly after the scandal broke, The Daily Beast  published an article headlined “IRS Scandal’s Central Figure, Lois Lerner, Described as ‘Apolitical.’” Insisting Lerner, and the IRS more broadly, were not not politically motivated has been a central contention of those trying to minimize the impact of the scandal.

The trouble with this defense is that, prior to joining the IRS, Lerner’s tenure as head of the Enforcement Office at the Federal Election Commission (FEC) was marked by what appears to be politically motivated harassment of conservative groups.

Lerner was appointed head of the FEC’s enforcement division in 1986 and stayed in that position until 2001. In the late 1990s, the FEC launched an onerous investigation of the Christian Coalition, ultimately costing the organization hundreds of thousands of dollars and countless hours in lost work. The investigation was notable because the FEC alleged that the Christian Coalition was coordinating issue advocacy expenditures with a number of candidates for office. Aside from lacking proof this was happening, it was an open question whether the FEC had the authority to bring these charges.

James Bopp Jr., who was lead counsel for the Christian Coalition at the time, tells The Weekly Standard the Christian Coalition investigation was egregious and uncalled for. “We felt we were being singled out, because when you handle a case with 81 depositions you have a pretty good argument you’re getting special treatment. Eighty-one depositions! Eighty-one! From Ralph Reed’s former part-time secretary to George H.W. Bush. It was mind blowing,” he said.

All told the FEC deposed 48 different people—and that doesn’t begin to account for all the FEC’s requests for information. Bopp further detailed the extent of the inquiry in testimony delivered before the congressional Committee on House Administration in 2003:

The FEC conducted a large amount of paper discovery during the administrative investigation and then served four massive discovery requests during the litigation stage that included 127 document requests, 32 interrogatories, and 1,813 requests for admission. Three of the interrogatories required the Coalition to explain each request for admission that it did not admit in full, for a total of 481 additional written answers that had to be provided. The Coalition was required to produce tens of thousands of pages of documents, many of them containing sensitive and proprietary information about finances and donor information. Each of the 49 state affiliates were asked to provide documents and many states were individually subpoenaed. In all, the Coalition searched both its offices and warehouse, where millions of pages of documents are stored, in order to produce over 100,000 pages of documents.

Furthermore, nearly every aspect of the Coalition’s activities has been examined by FEC attorneys from seeking information regarding its donors to information about its legislative lobbying. The Commission, in its never-ending quest to find the non-existent “smoking gun,” even served subpoenas upon the Coalition’s accountants, its fundraising and direct mail vendors, and The Christian Broadcasting Network.

One of the most shocking things about the current IRS scandal is the revelation that the agency asked one religious pro-life group to detail the content of their prayers and asked clearly inappropriate questions about private religious activity. But under Lerner’s watch, inappropriate religious inquiries were a hallmark of the FEC’s interrogation of the Christian Coalition. According to Bopp’s testimony:

FEC attorneys continued their intrusion into religious activities by prying into what occurs at Coalition staff prayer meetings, and even who attends the prayer meetings held at the Coalition. This line of questioning was pursued several times. Deponents were also asked to explain what the positions of “intercessory prayer” and “prayer warrior” entailed, what churches specific people belonged, and the church and its location at which a deponent met Dr. Reed.

One of the most shocking and startling examples of this irrelevant and intrusive questioning by FEC attorneys into private political associations of citizens occurred during the administrative depositions of three pastors from South Carolina. Each pastor, only one of whom had only the slightest connection with the Coalition, was asked not only about their federal, state and local political activities, including party affiliations, but about political activities that, as one FEC attorney described as “personal,” and outside of the jurisdiction of the FECA [Federal Election Campaign Act]. They were also continually asked about the associations and activities of the members of their congregations, and even other pastors.

If that all sounds like it could simply be Bopp’s jaundiced characterization of the FEC’s inquiries, Bopp’s testimony includes this transcript of the FEC’s deposition of Lt. Col. Oliver North. An attorney for the FEC asks North about prayers between him and the Christian Coalition’s Pat Robertson. Bopp and other attorneys are present for the questions, which leads to this testy exchange. The letter Q denotes the FEC’s lawyer, the letter A denotes North’s responses, and the letter O is used to represent attorneys representing North and the Christian Coalition:

Q: (reading from a letter from Oliver North to Pat Robertson) “‘Betsy and I thank you for your kind regards and prayers.’ The next paragraph is, ‘Please give our love to Dede and I hope to see you in the near future.’ Who is Dede?”

A: “That is Mrs. Robertson.”

Q: “What did you mean in paragraph 2, about thanking -you and your wife thanking Pat Robertson for kind regards?”

A: “Last time I checked in America, prayers were still legal. I am sure that Pat had said he was praying for my family and me in some correspondence or phone call.”

Q: “Would that be something that Pat Robertson was doing for you?”

A: “I hope a lot of people were praying for me, Holly.”

Q: “But you knew that Pat Robertson was?”

A: “Well, apparently at that time I was reflecting something that Pat had either, as I said, had told me or conveyed to me in some fashion, and it is my habit to thank people for things like that.”

Q: “During the time that you knew Pat Robertson, was it your impression that he had – he was praying for you?”

O: “I object. There is no allegation that praying creates a violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act and there is no such allegation in the complaint. This is completely irrelevant and intrusive on the religious beliefs of this witness.”

O: “It is a very strange line of questioning. You have got to be kidding, really. What are you thinking of, to ask questions like that? I mean, really. I have been to some strange depositions, but I don’t think I have ever had anybody inquire into somebody’s prayers. I think that is really just outrageous. And if you want to ask some questions regarding political activities, please do and then we can get over this very quickly. But if you want to ask abou somebody’s religious activities, that is outrageous.”

Q: “I am allowed to make-’’

O: “We are allowed not to answer and if you think the Commission is going to permit you to go forward with a question about somebody’s prayers, I just don’t believe that. I just don’t for a moment believe that. I find that the most outrageous line of questioning. I am going to instruct my witness not to answer.”

Q: “On what grounds?”

O: “We are not going to let you inquire about people’s religious beliefs or activities, period. If you want to ask about someone’s prayers-Jeez, I don’t know what we are thinking of. But the answer is, no, people are not going to respond to questions about people’s prayers, no.”

Q: “Will you take that, at the first break, take it up- we will do whatever we have to do.”

O: “You do whatever you think you have to do to get them to answer questions about what people are praying about.”

Q: “I did not ask Mr. North what people were praying about I am allowed to inquire about the relationship between-’’

O: “Absolutely, but you have asked the question repeatedly. If you move on to a question other than about prayer, be my guest.”

Q: “I have been asking you a series of questions about your relationship with Pat Robertson, the Christian Coalition. . . . It is relevant to this inquiry what relationship you had with Pat Robertson andI have asked you whether Pat Robertson had indicated to you that he was praying for you.”

O: “If that is a question, I will further object. It is an intrusion upon the religious beliefs and activities of Dr. Robertson. And how that could – how the Federal Government can be asking about an individual’s personal religious practices in the context of an alleged investigation under the Federal Election Campaign Act, I am just at a complete loss to see the
relevance or potential relevance, and I consider that to be also intrusive.”

Q: “Was Pat Robertson praying for you in 1991?”

O: “Same objection.”

A: “I hope so. I hope he still is.”

Asked what he remembers about this exchange, Bopp tells The Weekly Standard he was “white hot,” and notes that the transcription isn’t entirely accurate becuase it actually excludes many of his objections.

The Christian Coalition was ultimately absolved of any FEC wrongdoing in 1999, and Lerner was promoted to acting General Counsel at the FEC in 2001 before eventually moving on to the IRS.  Bopp, who’s all too familiar with the aggressive and inappropriate tenor she set leading the FEC’s Enforcement Division, says he became concerned about what would happen as soon as Lerner joined the IRS. “When she left the FEC, I thought, ‘Wow, this means the not for profit division is gearing up politically,’” he said. “It didn’t bode well, because of the way [the FEC] approached cases.”


Editor’s Note: We have reprinted the full text of “IRS’ Lerner Had History of Harassment, Inappropriate Religious Inquiries at FEC” by Mark Hemingway from the Weekly Standard. We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
May 23rd, 2013

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Hawaii Republican Assembly Official Statement Concerning the Hawaii Republican Convention

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Official Statement Concerning Hawaii Republican Convention 2013

HONOLULU, HAWAII, May 18, 2013: The Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA) is pleased that the Hawaii Republican Party (HRP) completed their annual State Convention without major mishap. HRP elected the same officers; the same team that has been trying to erase the party debt since 2010, elected less legislators than in 2010, and deals with a House Caucus that partnered with the Democrat Progressive Wing.

HIRA President Tito Montes stated “We are all members of the Republican Party. We hope HRP changes their policies to become inclusive, transparent and honest. Where HRP refuses to speak for its party members, HIRA will fill the void with conservative solutions. HIRA’s intent is to assist the election of conservatives to public office in Hawaii.”

That candidates for party office who were not on the ‘approved party slate’ fared as well as they did reflects the disenchantment with current Republican Party policy and politics. Each of three challengers had little opportunity to campaign and yet scored decent numbers from the small crowd.

With only 174 of a possible 2,000 delegates or alternates attending this year’s half-day convention, the HRP message conveyed by convention speakers seemed to be more about the HRP’s intolerance to differing opinions within the party, calling for unity, and less on how we are going to defeat Democrats. However, HIRA was pleased to assist party members in changing their position and allow members to hear resolutions during Convention.

HIRA intends to boost conservative and liberty movement participation in the Republican effort to gain relevancy. HIRA believes that bold conservative solutions are the keys to helping Hawaii and to improving Republican success at the polls.

The potential of our islands will only be realized when conservative solutions are embraced by our state and county and federal governments. These conservative values are shared by the vast majority of Republicans in Hawaii and elsewhere, according to Montes.

The Hawaii Republican Assembly (HIRA), an affiliated chapter of
the National Federation of Republican Assemblies
is the conservative standard-bearer of the Republican Party of Hawaii
and the leading advocate for conservative solutions in the islands.

 We are not an official arm of the Republican Party of Hawaii (RPH).
We are the conservative base of the Republican Party.

# # #

Contact

Tito Montes
President –
president@hawaiirepublicanassembly.com

Hawaii Republican Assembly
P.O. Box 2805
Honolulu, HI 96803
alerts@hawaiirepublicanassembly.com
www.HawaiiRepublicanAssembly.com

 

Posted
May 20th, 2013

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The Homestead Act of 1862, Signed into Law by President Lincoln

pioneer, west

CHAP. LXXV. —An Act to secure Homesteads to actual Settlers on the Public Domain.

Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States, or who shall have filed his declaration of intention to become such, as required by the naturalization laws of the United States, and who has never borne arms against the United States Government or given aid and comfort to its enemies, shall, from and after the first January, eighteen hundred and sixty-three, be entitled to enter one quarter section or a less quantity of unappropriated public lands, upon which said person may have filed a preemption claim, or which may, at the time the application is made, be subject to preemption at one dollar and twenty-five cents, or less, per acre; or eighty acres or less of such unappropriated lands, at two dollars and fifty cents per acre, to be located in a body, in conformity to the legal subdivisions of the public lands, and after the same shall have been surveyed: Provided, That any person owning and residing on land may, under the provisions of this act, enter other land lying contiguous to his or her said land, which shall not, with the land so already owned and occupied, exceed in the aggregate one hundred and sixty acres.

SEC. 2. And be it further enacted, That the person applying for the benefit of this act shall, upon application to the register of the land office in which he or she is about to make such entry, make affidavit before the said register or receiver that he or she is the head of a family, or is twenty-one years or more of age, or shall have performed service in the army or navy of the United States, and that he has never borne arms against the Government of the United States or given aid and comfort to its enemies, and that such application is made for his or her exclusive use and benefit, and that said entry is made for the purpose of actual settlement and cultivation, and not either directly or indirectly for the use or benefit of any other person or persons whomsoever; and upon filing the said affidavit with the register or receiver, and on payment of ten dollars, he or she shall thereupon be permitted to enter the quantity of land specified: Provided, however, That no certificate shall be given or patent issued therefor until the expiration of five years from the date of such entry ; and if, at the expiration of such time, or at any time within two years thereafter, the person making such entry; or, if he be dead, his widow; or in case of her death, his heirs or devisee; or in case of a widow making such entry, her heirs or devisee, in case of her death; shall prove by two credible witnesses that he, she, or they have resided upon or cultivated the same for the term of five years immediately succeeding the time of filing the affidavit aforesaid, and shall make affidavit that no part of said land has been alienated, and that he has borne rue allegiance to the Government of the United States; then, in such case, he, she, or they, if at that time a citizen of the United States, shall be entitled to a patent, as in other cases provided for by law: And provided, further, That in case of the death of both father and mother, leaving an Infant child, or children, under twenty-one years of age, the right and fee shall ensure to the benefit of said infant child or children; and the executor, administrator, or guardian may, at any time within two years after the death of the surviving parent, and in accordance with the laws of the State in which such children for the time being have their domicil, sell said land for the benefit of said infants, but for no other purpose; and the purchaser shall acquire the absolute title by the purchase, and be en- titled to a patent from the United States, on payment of the office fees and sum of money herein specified.

Pioneer family, black American

SEC. 3. And be it further enacted, That the register of the land office shall note all such applications on the tract books and plats of, his office, and keep a register of all such entries, and make return thereof to the General Land Office, together with the proof upon which they have been founded.

SEC. 4. And be it further enacted, That no lands acquired under the provisions of this act shall in any event become liable to the satisfaction of any debt or debts contracted prior to the issuing of the patent therefor.

SEC. 5. And be it further enacted, That if, at any time after the filing of the affidavit, as required in the second section of this act, and before the expiration of the five years aforesaid, it shall be proven, after due notice to the settler, to the satisfaction of the register of the land office, that the person having filed such affidavit shall have actually changed his or her residence, or abandoned the said land for more than six months at any time, then and in that event the land so entered shall revert to the government.

SEC. 6. And be it further enacted, That no individual shall be permit- ted to acquire title to more than one quarter section under the provisions of this act; and that the Commissioner of the General Land Office is hereby required to prepare and issue such rules and regulations, consistent with this act, as shall be necessary and proper to carry its provisions into effect; and that the registers and receivers of the several land offices shall be entitled to receive the same compensation for any lands entered under the provisions of this act that they are now entitled to receive when the same quantity of land is entered with money, one half to be paid by the person making the application at the time of so doing, and the other half on the issue of the certificate by the person to whom it may be issued; but this shall not be construed to enlarge the maximum of compensation now prescribed by law for any register or receiver: Provided, That nothing contained in this act shall be so construed as to impair or interfere in any manner whatever with existing preemption rights : And provided, further, That all persons who may have filed their applications for a preemption right prior to the passage of this act, shall be entitled to all privileges of this act: Provided, further, That no person who has served, or may hereafter serve, for a period of not less than fourteen days in the army or navy of the United States, either regular or volunteer, under the laws thereof, during the existence of an actual war, domestic or foreign, shall be deprived of the benefits of this act on account of not having attained the age of twenty-one years.

SEC. 7. And be it further enacted, That the fifth section of the act en- titled” An act in addition to an act more effectually to provide for the punishment of certain crimes against the United States, and for other purposes,” approved the third of March, in the year eighteen hundred and fifty-seven, shall extend to all oaths, affirmations, and affidavits, required or authorized by this act.

SEC. 8. And be it further enacted, That nothing in this act shall be 80 construed as to prevent any person who has availed him or herself of the benefits of the fir8t section of this act, from paying the minimum price, or the price to which the same may have graduated, for the quantity of land so entered at any time before the expiration of the five years, and obtain- ing a patent therefor from the government, as in other cases provided by law, on making proof of settlement and cultivation as provided by exist- ing laws granting preemption rights.

APPROVED, May 20, 1862.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reproduced the full transcript of the 1862 Homestead Act from OurDocuments.gov. We encourage you to visit the original. 

Posted
May 18th, 2013

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Washington: Where Nobody Gets Fired and Everyone Gets Lunch

So, what does somebody have to do to get fired around here?

Unprepared, you are somehow surprised when your office in Benghazi gets torched and overrun by terrorists on the anniversary of 9/11.

They kill your ambassador and three others. Yet, you are so clueless that you actually think it is a spontaneous protest of a YouTube video that nobody has seen. Or, at least, that is what you tell people.

Talking points are drawn up. They are vetted by various agencies and departments with special intelligence and expertise. And days later after everyone says it was a coordinated terror attack, one of your most trusted and influential advisors goes out and insists it was just a political demonstration that got out of hand. (This, by the way, is also known as a “lie,” or, during campaign season, a “political coverup.”)

All this ignorance and deceit, despite the fact that you have 50,000 employees stationed around the world to project America’s image abroad and keep tabs on basic on-the-ground intelligence.

Yet nobody gets fired. The closest thing to trouble comes down on a handful of dedicated and loyal service officers on the ground who were horrified over the ineptitude and deceit that followed the avoidable murders of their close friends and colleagues. They get bullied, threatened and — reportedly — demoted for speaking honestly about what happened.

Operations back home are no better.

The agency charged with the most sensitive, serious and invasive responsibilities of our government — collecting taxes from us and punishing those who cheat the system — has been turned into a political machine carrying out vendettas against opponents and those who simply disagree with the current administration.

Gee, why would those crazy, right-wing tea party nutjobs be distrustful of the federal government? Why would they hold animus toward the agency charged with collecting taxes from their hard-fought earnings?

Why would they be worried about Big Sis stockpiling so much ammunition that common hunting ammo has to be rationed at their local sporting goods store?

Now the White House admits they had heard reports that the IRS was targeting conservatives and political opponents. But, who cares? They’re conservatives and they deserve it. In addition, it turns out that the IRS was also leaking private info about conservatives to liberals in the media.

Administration officials are trying to say this was isolated to a handful of lower-level employees in the IRS. But it is a reflection of the agency and administration at the highest levels. The most prominent heads should roll. (I know, I know, here comes an audit by the IRS.)

And then, just when you think it cannot get any worse, we learn that the Department of Justice has been spying on reporters from the Associated Press.

Somewhere, Richard Nixon is blushing and fanning himself.

Yet, nobody gets fired. If anything a fraction as serious as this happened on the watch of the director of the shoe department at Macy’s, he would be immediately fired — frogmarched out of the shoe department under armed escort and told to never return to the store.

But this is the federal government run by an administration utterly devoted to the blind and deaf leviathan.

It reminds me of something a friend who worked at the White House once told me about how in Washington no one is ever fired for incompetence or malfeasance. They merely get recycled from one scandal to the next.

“You will always eat lunch in this town again,” he said, over lunch in a popular D.C. restaurant.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reprinted the full text of “Washington — the Town Where Nobody Gets Fired and Everyone Eats Lunch” by Charles Hurt from The Washington Times. We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
May 17th, 2013

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IRS Gives Progressive Group Confidential Documents on Conservatives

Logo of the Internal Revenue Service

The progressive-leaning investigative journalism group ProPublica says the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) office that targeted and harassed conservative tax-exempt groups during the 2012 election cycle gave the progressive group nine confidential applications of conservative groups whose tax-exempt status was pending.

The commendable admission lends further evidence to the lengths the IRS went during an election cycle to silence tea party and limited government voices.

ProPublica says the documents the IRS gave them were “not supposed to be made public”:

The same IRS office that deliberately targeted conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status in the run-up to the 2012 election released nine pending confidential applications of conservative groups to ProPublica late last year… In response to a request for the applications for 67 different nonprofits last November, the Cincinnati office of the IRS sent ProPublica applications or documentation for 31 groups. Nine of those applications had not yet been approved—meaning they were not supposed to be made public. (We made six of those public, after redacting their financial information, deeming that they were newsworthy.)

The group says that “no unapproved applications from liberal groups were sent to ProPublica.”

According to Media Research Center Vice President for Business and Culture Dan Gainor, ProPublica’s financial backers include top progressive donors:

ProPublica, which recently won its second Pulitzer Prize, initially was given millions of dollars from the Sandler Foundation to “strengthen the progressive infrastructure”–“progressive” being the code word for very liberal. In 2010, it also received a two-year contribution of $125,000 each year from the Open Society Foundations. In case you wonder where that money comes from, the OSF website is www.soros.org. It is a network of more than 30 international foundations, mostly funded by Soros, who has contributed more than $8 billion to those efforts.

On Friday, the House Ways and Means Committee is scheduled to hold a formal hearing on the IRS conservative targeting scandal. IRS Commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration J. Russell George are slated to testify.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reprinted the full text of “Progressive Group: IRS Gave Us Conservative Groups’ Confidential Docs” by Wynton Hall from Breitbart.com. We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
May 15th, 2013

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Ted Cruz: What We Know & What We Don’t Know About Benghazi

On September 11, 2012, terrorists attacked our consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and murdered four Americans, including our ambassador. Eight months later, we have learned some of what happened, but many questions remain.

This week the House of Representatives will hold a hearing on Benghazi, because we still don’t know all the facts about how we responded during the seven and a half hours of attacks, why we could do nothing to save the lives of Ambassador Chris Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods, and what, if anything, we have done to deter future attacks against Americans by holding the responsible parties accountable.

What we do know leads to the inescapable impression that before, during, and after the Benghazi attacks, there was confusion and paralysis at the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the White House.

Congress has learned that both Ambassador Stevens and his predecessor made repeated requests for additional security during the spring and summer of 2012. Most notably, Ambassador Stevens sent a cable to the State Department on August 15, 2012, expressly requesting additional security because the Benghazi consulate could not withstand a coordinated attack. The requests were denied, but Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, observed in congressional testimony that Defense could have provided all the needed security if State had requested it.

Strikingly, Chairman Dempsey admitted he “would call myself surprised” that former secretary of state Hillary Clinton testified that she did not know about that cable at the time of the attacks.

We also know that the State Department made no request for additional security from the Defense Department in Benghazi in the weeks leading up to September 11, 2012, despite knowing that the Red Cross and the United Kingdom had both withdrawn from the city because of the deteriorating security situation — not to mention the obvious significance of the anniversary of September 11, 2001. Worse, we have been told that no military assets were in a position to respond during the seven-plus hours of the attacks. But, as Chairman Dempsey testified, had additional support been requested before the attack, Defense would have provided it, and it could have saved lives.

The attack began at 3:42 p.m. EDT. We know that President Obama received a single 10- to 15- minute briefing on the Benghazi attack from Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Chairman Dempsey at 5:00 p.m., during his regularly scheduled briefing. But we also know that the president had no subsequent discussions with either the secretary or the chairman for the duration of the attack.

Seven and a half hours after the attack commenced, at 11:15 pm EDT, sustained mortar fire killed Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods. Neither the secretary nor the chairman had any discussions with the president at that time, or throughout the remainder of the night. Moreover, the president had no contact with any member of the government of Libya for the duration of the attacks.

We know that during the duration of the attacks, neither Secretary Panetta nor Chairman Dempsey slept; both remained at the Pentagon throughout the night. But neither the secretary nor the chairman knows if the president slept while our people were under attack.

While the president was missing in action, there was confusion among the relevant cabinet officers as to who was in charge of coordinating the response from Washington. But we know that from the beginning to the end of the attacks, neither Secretary Panetta nor Chairman Dempsey had any conversation whatsoever with Secretary Clinton.

We also know that in the aftermath of the attacks, the Benghazi compound remained unsecured — and media reporters were able to access confidential documents — for 23 days because the State Department did not request Defense’s assistance in securing the site.

We know from their congressional testimony that according to the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the director of national intelligence, because the attack on the annex employed rocket-propelled grenades and sustained mortar shelling, there was “no question” at the time that the events in Benghazi were terrorist attacks.

We know that on September 14 and 15, 2012, the State Department altered the administration’s talking points on Benghazi to eliminate references to “Islamic extremists” and “al Qa’ida,” and instead substituted language about how the incident was a “spontaneously inspired . . . violent protest.”

We know that at Dover Air Force Base on September 14, 2012, when the coffins of the four dead Americans came home, Secretary Clinton attributed the attack to “an awful videotape we had nothing to do with.”

And, in the aftermath of the attacks, we know of no effort to mount a counterattack that would deter similar acts of terrorism in the future. In the intervening months, we have seen additional attacks on our personnel abroad, including the attempted suicide bombing of our embassy in Ankara, Turkey, and the brutal attack on the natural-gas facility in Algeria in which two Texans, Victor Lovelady and Frederick Buttaccio, lost their lives.

What we know today has come only as a result of sustained inquiry by Congress. Officials have been exceedingly reluctant to share information and have insisted that all relevant questions were asked and answered in the State Department Accountability Review Board (ARB) report completed in December 2012.

“What difference at this point does it make?” Secretary Clinton responded in January to questions about the nature of the Benghazi attack. “Let’s put this behind us,” Secretary of State John Kerry complained last month. Last week, White House spokesman Jay Carney dismissed press inquiries about the attack by saying, “Benghazi was a long time ago.”

But many more questions remain. Here are a dozen:

• Why was the State Department unwilling to provide the requested level of security to Benghazi?

• Were there really no military assets available to provide relief during the seven hours of the attacks? If so, why not? During the attacks, were any military assets ordered to stand down?

• If the secretary of defense thought there was “no question” this was a coordinated terrorist attack, why did Ambassador Susan Rice, Secretary Clinton, and President Obama all tell the American people that the cause was a “spontaneous demonstration” about an Internet video?
• Why did the State Department edit the intelligence talking points to delete the references to “Islamic extremists” and “al Qa’ida”?

• Why did the FBI release pictures of militants taken the day of the attack only eight months after the fact? Why not immediately, as proved so effective in the Boston bombing?

• Why have none of the survivors testified to Congress?

• Why is the administration apparently unaware of the whistle-blowers who have been attempting to tell their stories? Is it true that these career civil servants have been threatened with retaliation?

• Did President Obama sleep the night of September 11, 2012? Did Secretary Clinton?

• When was President Obama told about the murder of our ambassador? About the murder of all four Americans? What did he do in response?

• What role, if any, did the State Department’s own counterterrorism office play during the attacks and in their immediate aftermath?

• Why was Secretary Clinton not interviewed for the ARB report?

• And why, if all relevant questions were answered in the ARB report, has the State Department’s own inspector-general office opened a probe into the methods of that very report?

It is time for some answers. Let us hope that the House hearing this week will finally shed some light, and that the inquiry continues until the facts are fully understood.

Ambassador Stevens, Sean Smith, Glen Doherty, and Tyrone Woods deserve justice, and our brave men and women who continue to put their lives on the line every day in similar, dangerous situations deserve to know we are doing everything possible not only to protect them in the event of a terrorist attack, but also to deter these attacks from happening again. Better late than never.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reprinted the full text of “Benghazi Eight Months Later: What We Know and What We Still Don’t Know” by Senator Ted Cruz from the National Review Online. We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
May 10th, 2013

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Benghazi: the Scandal that Won’t Go Away

The Benghazi scandal won’t bring down the Obama administration. And it’s too early to decide whether it will sink Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid in 2016. There are plenty of other things quietly waiting to do that.

But that scandal — persistent, patient, and always just around the corner from the White House — just won’t go away.

In just the past few days, we’ve learned a lot. For starters, from Stephen Hayes’s reporting in the Weekly Standard, we learned that the State Department is guilty — and that’s the proper word — of making “heavy substantive revisions” to the CIA talking points that State was supposedly relying on to tell the truth about the September 11, 2012 attack on the American consulate outpost in Benghazi. Hayes says that those changes were part of a “frantic” process that took place in the 24 hours preceding UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s now-infamous appearances on the Sunday talk shows in which she spun the administration’s line that the attack was in reaction to an anti-Islam video that no one had seen.

He also reports that about two hours into the eight-hour-long attack, it was obvious that al Qaeda terrorists were taking part in it. Shortly after that, the State Department was already working to remove those references including those to Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-connected group that had already claimed credit for the attack.

Just yesterday we learned (from a House committee leak) that Greg Hicks, one of the Benghazi whistleblowers, will say in a hearing Wednesday that “I think everybody in the mission thought it was a terrorist attack from the beginning.” That, according to a CBS News report. Hicks is described as a 22-year Foreign Service diplomat who was the highest-ranking U.S. official in Libya after the attack.

Also yesterday, Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said that the Obama administration had literally threatened one or more of the Benghazi whistleblowers and that hospital records had been tampered with to conceal the identity of at least one of the survivors of the attack.

So what is the Obama administration trying to hide? Pretty much everything.

Last week, we learned that the State Department’s Inspector General is investigating the Pickering-Mullen “Accountability Review Board” for, among other things, its failure to investigate and get statements from the Benghazi survivors. Before there were whistleblowers there were survivors, yet the comprehensively misnamed “Accountability Review Board” didn’t question them.

Which isn’t a surprise. The ARB did what it was paid to do: limit the damage and blame people under Hillary Clinton for the failures of leadership and management. It was, simply, a whitewash. We’ll probably wait a long time for the IG to report the facts — 2017 sounds like the right time frame.

In the press conference announcing the report, Adm. Mullen said something that’s been bothering me ever since. He said that no military assets could have been deployed in time. In time to do what?

If that means, in Clintonian terms, that they wouldn’t have been in time to save Ambassador Chris Stevens, that doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t have been in time to save the SEALs.

If you parse Mullen’s words — as we learned we must when Hillary’s hubby was president — he almost certainly meant that the ambassador was killed in the early moments of the attack. Mullen, the good Obama man that he is, didn’t say that there were no military assets that could have been deployed in time to save the two former Navy SEALs who tried to rescue the ambassador.

And that is where Mullen is being dishonest, joining then-Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and several other Obama ranking officials. (Panetta, we must remember, said that we can’t just send forces in without knowing what they’ll be facing.) None of the Obama team was willing to even ask the Libyans for permission to cross their borders. Not that we should have asked, or cared about the answer.

My sources tell me that there were a host of assets that could have been brought to bear. First up could have been a squadron (or more) of F-15s based at Sigonella, Italy. Flying at only about 0.8 Mach, they could have been there in about forty minutes. You don’t leave F-15s on the runway without fuel or armaments. And a few 20mm cannon shells can ruin your day. The fact is that the F-15s possibly could have saved the two SEALs, and they certainly could have filled the consulate’s courtyard with piles of dead terrorists.

The other asset we had at Sigonella, according to my sources, was about one hundred Force Recon Marines. Could they have reached Benghazi in time to rescue the SEALs? It’d take an hour or two to roust them from their bunks and get them on a C-130, ready to parachute in. We’ll never know. But there’s more than enough information to conclude that the F-15s could have.

At the risk of stating the obvious, there should be nothing more that we needed to know other than Americans were under fire. The Obama administration — Hillary herself, Panetta and the president — knew that was so. They did nothing.

Which brings us back to what Greg Hicks and the other whistleblowers will say on Wednesday. Mark Thompson is a deputy coordinator for the State Department’s counterterrorism bureau. Eric Nordstrom is a diplomatic security officer who had cognizance of Libya in the months leading up to the attack.

They may say a lot more than that everyone in the Benghazi mission believed the attack was made by terrorists. And then again, they may not say anything else. They may have been sufficiently intimidated by the State Department to remain silent, or they may not know anything else. Which leaves Republicans right where they were at the end of Romney’s second debate with Candy Crowley (and Obama).

Was it a terrorist attack? Of course it was. Was al Qaeda involved? Ditto.

The Republicans need to answer the “where’s the beef?” question. If they’re going to produce something that the Obama administration will find indigestible, it’s not going to be in the fact that the State Department disapproved requests for more security in Benghazi. And it’s not in the fact that the hospital records were altered.

The facts that are important — and the only ones that the Republicans should focus on — are in the State Department’s massive, misleading revisions to the CIA talking points and in the utter failure of the Obama administration to attempt to rescue Americans under fire.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reprinted the full text of “Benghazi Bullchips” by Jed Babbin from the American Spectator. We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
May 7th, 2013

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Love Your Neighbor, Change Your World

Rod Martin

We need to remember — and some of us just need to learn — how sensitive some people still are about race: not in the “chip on shoulder” sense many imagine (and sometimes encounter), but in the downtrodden, fear of rejection sense that wearies the soul and brings lifelong hurt. You’ll see what I mean.

I spoke yesterday to over 500 members of the Tennessee Republican Assembly at their state convention. It was a lot of fun, and thankfully, I was very well received (I had to follow Rand Paul: no easy thing!).

Afterward, a very large crowd came up to speak to me, and I received people for quite a long time. One of them, was a beautiful young lady. I don’t know anything about her except what I’m about to tell you.

Now mind you, this was a relatively integrated crowd. There were actually quite a few people present from a variety of minorities, which was a real blessing: it’s good to see more and more people coming together behind the things we believe without regard to race.

I had just spoken on reaching out to your neighbor, building bridges by making friends. She came up to me and said, “Thank you so much for that. Before, I felt really uncomfortable coming here. Now I’m really glad I came”

I had no idea what she was talking about. So I asked, “What made you feel that way?”

Her eyes dropped, and with her right forefinger she swept down the bare skin of her left arm: “you know”.

No, I didn’t know. Until then I’d taken her for white with a tan, and not even much of that.

But she felt it intensely, despite there being many people of more than one race with darker skin than hers just feet away. What was almost imperceptible to me was as big as the whole world to her.

Which requires us to ask: why?

It’s worth remembering, first, that everyone is self-conscious to a degree, and thus everyone needs some kindness and understanding, usually more than you realize. The nature of a fallen world is that we are all broken, all disconnected. And speaking as the father of daughters, women frequently feel this even more strongly than men, and assume everyone sees in them some “flaw” which no one else perceives. I have seen truly striking women believe themselves ugly, usually because some man close to them had torn them down, or at least failed to affirm them. It’s very sad to see.

But there’s certainly nothing wrong with having slightly darker skin than a Scandinavian, and generations of white women have baked themselves on beaches and in tanning booths to achieve far more.

No, fifty years after King’s “Dream” this young lady still feared that a room full of white people would look down on her, possibly even act hurtfully. And that’s just tragic.

I grew up in an integrated world. There were occasional unkindnesses to be sure, but racism was universally thought wrong, at least among our generation: it just isn’t 1963 anymore. Blacks and whites openly dated in my rural Southern high school, though parents still disapproved; other races carried no history and thus no discomfort or awkwardness at all.

Even so, there remained that tendency to self-segregate: blacks to one side of the dining hall, whites and other races to another. It wasn’t ugly — people came and went freely between the two groups — and it generally seemed from our (white) perspective that it represented just one more of junior high and high school’s cliques.

Did it feel so innocent to them? Does it now?

What I said in my speech stands: all these needless barriers, all these misunderstandings — frequently unknown to at least some of the parties — could go forever away if we would just act like Christians are already required to do. Love your neighbor, we are taught, which certainly must mean at least meeting him. Why can’t we cross the street, knock on a door, ask a new friend to dinner? Watch the game together? How hard is it really?

Republicans now fret openly about losing the Latino vote, losing single women, losing Asians, having long since lost most blacks. Why not quit worrying about that sort of thing and start just making friends?

How hard can it be?

Sounds overly simplistic, doesn’t it? But there are many more white Christians in America than all blacks or all Hispanics. What if all of us just set out to befriend — to love — one or two? We could change the fruit of centuries in the blink of an eye.

Something changed for the young lady I met yesterday. I got to be part of that. Where will her new affirmation, her new courage, lead her? I have no idea. But it feels — and is — a lot better to be part of the solution than to be part of the problem.

 

Editor’s Note: We have reprinted here in full “We Need to Remember” by NFRA President Rod Martin from RodMartin.org. We encourage you to visit the original.

Posted
April 26th, 2013

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