ConservativeHome's The Republican

The GOP needs a clear message on Iran, Russia, China and other threats

John Rossomando  
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The last decade of war and the sour economy has left many Americans unwilling to engage in foreign-policy much as it was during the 1930s when isolationism took over.

This was partly evident in last week’s foreign policy debate when domestic issues such as Obamacare and the national debt took center stage.

Now is not the time to withdraw from the world. Russia and China remain significant threats to our national security through their proxies in Iran, Venezuela and North Korea. And they are more than eager to fill the void left by the appearance of America’s decline.

As Jeffrey Bosco reported in The Weekly Standard, China has used American distractions in the Middle East to build up its power in East Asia:

Washington policymakers managed to convince themselves that on counter-terrorism, as well as on counter-proliferation and the growing North Korea nuclear threat, China was a committed, reliable, and essential partner—a “responsible stakeholder.” What China was doing to prepare for war against Taiwan, and against the United States should it come to Taiwan’s aid, largely became a back-burner issue. The same was true of China’s complicity in proliferating dangerous weapons and materials to the world’s most dangerous states, including North Korea and Iran.

And the Obama administration’s coddling of the Muslim Brotherhood in Libya, Egypt and Syria should be a cause for alarm where the GOP presidential candidates should be building an alternative message and strategy for confronting this thorny problem.

Former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton told me last September that:

My feeling is that we ought to be pursuing a very active policy of regime change in both Iran and Syria going back to my time during the Bush administration. These are regimes that are not going to change as long as they are in power.

It was foolish of the Obama administration to ever believe that Bashar al-Assad was ever a reformer as they kept saying over and over, and over again.

We can see now how far from the truth that is. We can’t live in a world of illusion, and that is as much as we hoped for the best as a result of the Arab spring, we can’t make policy according to our hopes and aspirations for how it’s going to turn out.

We have to make our policies in a very realistic fashion and base our policies on what’s actually happening, not on what we wish would happen. 

Last week, former NATO Supreme Commander Gen. Wesley Clark defended the Obama administration’s inaction during the 2009 Persian Spring on the grounds that the president was trying to “reset” our relations with Iran.

How has Iran repaid Obama’s kindness?

In the past few days we’ve seen a near repeat of Iran’s 1979 takeover of the U.S. embassy by Iranian “students”. Sunday’s AP report said:

“Iranian students stormed the British Embassy in Tehran Tuesday, breaking down the door, throwing around papers and replacing the British flag with an Iranian one. Iran's state-run Press TV reported that police had the incident under control, but Britain's Foreign Office called the situation ‘fluid’ and said ‘details are still emerging.’”

If Jimmy Carter had been re-elected in 1980, we’d still be confronting the Soviet Union today.

So far, only Newt Gingrich has enunciated a coherent strategy for confronting Iran, which has been the nexus of global terrorism and regional instability since the late 1970s.

Gingrich was correct to advocate cutting off Iran’s ability to refine gasoline, which would crush the Iran’s economy. A blockade of Iran would be seen as an act of war by the Iranians, but it’s a necessary evil because the Islamic Republic has been in a state of war with the United States since 1979.

If we do nothing to help Iran’s dissidents to stand up against the mullahs, we will have a nuclear Iran to deal with that likely would act with impunity because it views the United States as a paper tiger.

The GOP presidential candidates cannot afford to put Iran, China, or Russia on the back burner because they pose a mortal threat to our nation.

Obama’s Carteresque policies have only destabilized the world with live in and have done nothing to help us to regain our national prestige.

Whomever becomes the eventual GOP nominee must be ready to confront Iran and our other adversaries on Day 1. We can't have someone who has to learn on the job.

Occupy Wall Street links up with Muslim radicals

By Steve Emerson

Anti-Israel and Muslim-American advocacy groups in the United States are capitalizing on the Occupy Wall Street Movement (OWS) to promote their own agendas.

The Occupy movement started in New York's Zuccotti Park Sept. 17, and spread to more than 100 cities,according to the movement's "unofficial" website. "The movement is inspired by popular uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, and aims to expose how the richest 1 percent of people are writing the rules of an unfair global economy that is foreclosing on our future."

There has been an ongoing debate about the depth of anti-Semitism within the OWS movement, with some finding it rampant and others casting it as a fringe element. Those concerns were heightened Nov. 5 when more than 20 people from the Occupy Boston camp marched into the lobby of that city's Israeli consulate for a sit-in. The group engaged in a series of anti-Israel chants including "Viva Palestina," and "Hey hey, ho ho, Israeli apartheid has got to go!"

What is clear is that groups like the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) have insinuated themselves on the movement to tackle issues other than economic policies.

The latest example came Nov. 18, when CAIR's New York chapter held a rally, prayers and a march from Occupy Wall Street to make demands including:

· "An immediate end to all racial, ethnic and religious profiling;"

· "The dismantlement and disclosure of all surveillance operations;"

· An "independent commission to investigate all NYPD and CIA operations against the Muslim community." The event was sponsored and endorsed by dozens of organizations, including the New York chapters of the Muslim American Society, the Islamic Council of North AmericaAl-Awda and the Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York.

The demonstration attracted hundreds of Muslims and approximately 50 OWS protesters, carrying signs reading, "NYPD Watches Us. Who Watches NYPD?"

"Many many other people at Occupy Wall Street stand in solidarity with Muslim communities, and all targets of NYPD, CIA, FBI and government repression," Jen Waller, a representative of the OWS movement and a member of the New York Committee to Stop FBI Repression, said during the rally. She added that we are watching "more and more innocent Muslim men and women [that] are targeted and attract into government orchestrated terrorism schemes."

Previously, Islamist groups joined OWS events. CAIR-NY and the Islamic Leadership Council held a prayer service in Zuccotti Park on Oct. 21 following outreach to the group by the Wall Street protesters.

The crowd of approximately 60 chanted in response to a speaker: "American Muslims have to stand with Occupy Wall Street. For a long time, American Muslims have been scared into silence. Those days are over. We are here in numbers. We are here to pray. We are here to protest. And most of all we are here to raise our voice."

Imam Ayub Abdul Baki of the Islamic Leadership Council of New York delivered a speech saying, "We are also suffering, suffering racism and discrimination. Islamic bashing is on the increase." Baki held up a plaque with the "last sermon of the Prophet Mohammed," calling it "the eternal message of Islam to the world." Baki then discussed the sermon saying "all Muslims as well as non-Muslims should be familiar with this."

Baki's Leadership Council (Majlis Ash-Shura of Metropolitan New York) is an umbrella organization of mosques and Islamic organizations that claims to serve 850,000 Muslim New Yorkers and is "dedicated to bring Muslims on one platform." Among its members are the Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA)-NY and the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center.

MAS was founded as the American chapter of the Muslim Brotherhood, while ICNA has a track record of radicalism and teaching its members violence and the evils of Jews and America. ICNA issued a press release earlier this month expressing support and sympathy for the OWS protestors.

The youth branch of the Muslim American Society (MAS) held an OWS gathering in Zuccotti Park in late October. "We, the members of Muslim American Society New York and Muslim New Yorkers stand in solidarity with the protesters of Occupy Wall Street on grounds of free speech, right to assemble and justice for all," the advertisement for the event said.

Hatem Bazian, the chairman of the anti-Israel organization American Muslims for Palestine, led a prayer service and delivered a speech late last month as part of Occupy Oakland. Bazian spoke about the amount of money the United States spends on the military, calling the United States "a deaf economy," and stating "We are the number one producers of weapons of mass destruction."

"Allah and his messenger are at war with those who exploit people through usury," CAIR-Michigan Executive Director Dawud Walid said Oct. 21 during a "Sermon about Occupy Wall St Movement & the death of Qadhafi" at a Michigan mosque. "And the world is hungry for this message. The financial and the housing crisis would not be what it is in America I believe, and even some non-Muslim economist wrote if the American financial system was working according to the Islamic banking system. This is a fact," he added.

Walid drew help from the Occupy Detroit movement to hold "Crusades Against Hate" on Nov. 11, which was intended to counter a prayer event being held that same day by an organization that CAIR regards as anti-Muslim.

Other groups have capitalized on the OWS movement to promote anti-Israel messages.

In addition to the Boston sit-in, protesters in Chicago repeated anti-Israel statements made on a megaphone by an Occupy Chicago leader: "The city of Chicago is guilty of supporting the Israelis." The speaker also announced two upcoming demonstrations to protest the "Israeli occupation of the Palestinian land."

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), an anti-Israel organization on college campuses across the country, joined an OWS protest last month during its 2011 conference, "Students Confronting Apartheid," at Columbia University.

Approximately 30 SJP students participating in the conference joined protesters at Wall Street, chanting "Occupy Wall Street, Palestine Must Be Free," while carrying Palestinian flags.

Since its inception, SJP chapters have campaigned for divestment from companies that work with Israel, which SJP categorizes as an apartheid state, and accuses of ethnic cleansing.

This month, activists from Adalah-NY, a radical group that organizes protests against Israeli artists andproducts, went to Zuccotti Park to read a statement advocating boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

"Our aspirations overlap; our struggles converge," the statement said. "Our oppressors, whether greedy corporations or military occupations, are united in profiting from wars, pillage, environmental destruction, repression and impoverishment … Palestinians, too, are part of the 99% around the world that suffer at the hands of the 1% whose greed and ruthless quest for hegemony have led to unspeakable suffering and endless war."

OWS protests also have served as a platform for individuals to make anti-Semitic statements.

"I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government... they need to be run out of this country," an OWS protester in Los Angeles said.

The Emergency Committee for Israel released a video featuring anti-Semitic speech and signs at OWS protests. Signs include statements such as "Hitler's Bankers – Wall St.," and "Google: 1) Wall St. Jews 2) Jewish Billionaires 3) Jews & Fed Rsrv Bank." The video also calls on viewers to contact elected officials to take action against the hate speech.

The anti-Israel agenda associated with the OWS movement led "many Jewish supporters of OWS who do not identify as anti-Zionist" to believe "that they could no longer be associated with the movement," Daniel Sieradski, a Jewish OWS supporter said in an interview earlier this month. "Worse yet, there have been attempts to push Zionists out of the movement by claiming their support for Israel's mere existence is fundamentally racist and as such, they should not be part of any serious social justice movement."

One OWS protest organized by Existence is Resistance worsened the movement's "external impression of being pro-terror," Sieradski said. Existence is Resistance (E.I.R.) is a grassroots organization that promotes"non-violent resistance through cultural arts." E.I.R. hosted a "Kuffeya Day" at New York's Liberty Plaza late last month "in support of Palestinian prisoners, most significantly Majd Ziada." The photo featured alongside the event announcement is a picture of Leila Khaled, a member of the U.S. designated terrorist group thePopular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. During the event a man claiming to be from Afghanistan gave an anti-Semitic tirade, saying that "Yehudi" means "hateful thing." (Yehudi means "Jew" in Arabic).

It's a "Jewish idea to kill Muslims," he added, and that America and Israel are trying to kill Muslims.

Demonstrations like the above have nothing to do with OWS's frustrations with U.S. economic policies. But they show how Islamist groups are using the economic-driven movement to engender hostility toward Israel, and in some cases, toward Jews in general.

http://www.investigativeproject.org/3312/is-the-occupy-wall-street-movement-occupied

 

Next year's election is the GOP's to lose

By Dr. Terry Madonna

As the 2012 presidential election looms ever closer, two hard facts confront American politics. The first is that Barack Obama—despite enormous obstacles—could still win next year’s presidential election. The second is that he probably won’t. Both of these propositions deserve close scrutiny.
 
Arguing that Obama could still win flies in the face of considerable evidence to the contrary. Both the president’s approval rating and his critical “re-elect” numbers are in the low- to mid-40% range. No president in modern times has ever won re-election with such low public approval. Furthermore, there’s little reason to think his numbers will dramatically improve between now and next November. Equally ominous, Obama’s low popularity reflects America’s still struggling economy and stubbornly high unemployment. No president since Franklin Roosevelt in 1936 has been re-elected against the backdrop of such dismal economic conditions. And even in Roosevelt’s troubled times, unemployment had actually dropped during his first term, not risen, as has been the case during Obama’s first term. Given these indisputable facts, it would seem that Obama’s re-election chances are dubious at best.
 
But they are not, largely because American presidential elections are much more than a simple popularity contest between opposing candidates and competing philosophies. Indeed, history suggests and most political scientists agree that presidential elections are properly understood as a two-step national referendum on the incumbent and his challenger. In the first phase, the electorate decides thumbs up or thumbs down whether it will give the incumbent another term. If the electorate renders thumbs down, the second phase of the referendum is triggered. In it the electorate seeks a challenger who is an acceptable alternative to the rejected incumbent.
 
This vital contingency, the search for an acceptable alternative to the incumbent, explains why we now have a tight national election when by historical standards Republicans should be on their way to a landslide victory.  
 
The electorate has already decided, largely on the basis of poor economic growth and jobs, that Obama should not have a second term. But the second critical referendum step remains unresolved. If in the end the GOP does not nominate an acceptable alternative, the American electorate next November will hold its collective nose and vote Obama a second term. Thus, which candidate the Republicans finally nominate along with the condition of the economy are the factors likely to determine the election’s outcome.
 
This inevitably sets up four possible scenarios, one favorable to Obama, one favorable to Republicans, and two more with uncertain effects on the race: (1) a declining or stagnant economy and Republicans nominate an acceptable alternative; (2) a declining or stagnant economy and Republicans nominate an unacceptable alternative; (3) an improving economy and Republicans nominate an acceptable alternative; or (4) an improving economy and Republicans nominate an unacceptable alternative.
 
Scenario one (bad economy, acceptable challenger) all but guarantees a GOP victory. Scenario four (improving economy, unacceptable challenger) does the same for Obama. But scenario two (bad economy, unacceptable challenger) and scenario three (improving economy, acceptable challenger) may favor either party.
 
What if anything may either campaign do at this point to influence events, given these fundamental forces now in play?
 
For Obama there seems little to do beyond squeezing as much improvement out of the economy as he can while making the case that his opponent has no plan to make things better. To win he must be lucky in the GOP candidate he ultimately faces. Republicans, on the other hand, do control their own fate. They have to nominate a candidate that will appeal to sufficient moderates and independents in the critical battleground states to win the magical 270 electoral votes.
 
Do Republicans have such a candidate running for the nomination? The question allows no unqualified answer. However, on the basis of numerous head-to-head trial run polls measuring Obama versus various GOP aspirants, there seems at least one Republican, Mitt Romney, who is an acceptable alternative to most voters. There may be others, but clearly voters consider at least Romney to be a viable candidate.
 
Also auspicious for Republicans is their historical tendency to forge consensus from chaos and unity from disunity after deeply divisive nomination contests. The turmoil now raging within the GOP may be a distant memory when they gather for their nominating convention in Tampa next August.
 
That said, however, it must be acknowledged that the GOP contest underway is far from over. During 2011, five separate candidates have at least briefly led in trial heat polls. At one point there was a statistical tie between four different candidates (Paul, Cain, Gingrich, and Romney), and the active field now still numbers eight candidates approaching the early caucuses and primaries.
 
From the perspective of late 2011, the outcome of next year’s presidential contest is still in doubt. While Obama no longer controls his fate, Republicans still must act to control their own. At this point, it is still not certain they will.

http://fandm.us2.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=1bda540ee10a82d94d6e2bcfc&id=6353bd2508&e=7926903475

Occupy Ignorance: Occupy Wall Street flunks basic economics

John Rossomando  
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Occupy Wall Street’s basic refrain “Tax the Rich”, a slogan that has been bandied around by communists and others on the far-left for generations, belies the movement’s basic economic ignorance.

For starters, even if you were to confiscate all of the wealth of every member of the hated top 1 percent, it would not come anywhere near closing the nation’s $1.2 trillion deficit.

George Mason University economist Walter Williams observed in a column last April:

“This year, Congress will spend $3.7 trillion dollars. That turns out to be about $10 billion per day. Can we prey upon the rich to cough up the money? According to IRS statistics, roughly 2 percent of U.S. households have an income of $250,000 and above. By the way, $250,000 per year hardly qualifies one as being rich. It's not even yacht and Learjet money. All told, households earning $250,000 and above account for 25 percent, or $1.97 trillion, of the nearly $8 trillion of total household income. If Congress imposed a 100 percent tax, taking all earnings above $250,000 per year, it would yield the princely sum of $1.4 trillion. That would keep the government running for 141 days, but there's a problem because there are 224 more days left in the year.”

Barack Obama has already proven that overregulation deters the capital investment that creates jobs. Government interventions deter job creations and potentially encourage further job losses.

Oklahoma Sen. James Inhofe observes that these regulations are already having severe negative impacts:

According to Inhofe, the administration’s proposed CO2/greenhouse gas-emission regulations—due out in November—could chop $300 billion to $400 billion alone off the nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) each year.  Estimates from the Senate Energy and Public Works Committee's Republican staff estimates this regulation could cost in excess of the 2 million jobs that would have been lost as a result of Waxman-Markey Climate Change Bill.

 Other estimates suggest that the EPA’s Utility MACT and Transport Rule could cost $184 billion and 1.4 million jobs.  Statistics Inhofe provided suggest the rule could shutter hundreds of coal-fired power plants around the country—equaling as much as 20% of the nation’s total energy output.

 This rule would require 23 states to reduce sulfur dioxide and nitrous oxide emissions from their power plants to reduce their effects on neighboring states.

 The National Associations of Manufacturers estimates the Utility MACT and cross-state air pollution rules will cost its members $18 billion annually, and drive its members’ electricity costs up by 11.5%.  It also shares Inhofe’s analysis that these regulations could cost 1.4 million jobs annually.

Coal ash regulations would touch countless industries, such as concrete, road construction, plastics and petrochemicals, among others.  The Partnership for Affordable Clean Energy estimated in a  June 2011 study that the EPA’s coal ash regulations could cost 316,000 jobs and cost the economy around $110 billion.

The protesters should study economics before attacking capitalism. What would they replace it with – moribund central planning. Even the Soviets and Eastern Europeans found they couldn’t escape the laws of supply and demand.

Socialism only benefits the well-connected and those in political power while squeezing out everyone else. History shows that revolutions only replace one groups of corrupt elites with another even more corrupt group.

Tony Blankley to ConHomeUSA: Gingrich would deliver the biggest conservative agenda since Reagan

John Rossomando  
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Former Gingrich press secretary Tony Blankley tells ConservativeHome USA that the popular desire to elect someone with ideas and substance has fueled the former House speaker’s rise to the top of the polls.

“While most of the people who are running for president are pretty well informed and pretty bright people, most just end up in talking points,” Blankley says. “There’s not a lot of depth to their discussion, and I think that Newt’s standing out in the debates as somebody who’s actually thought deeply on these issues, cares about them and who discusses them both conceptually and in detail.

“And I think that’s why he’s moved up from single digits to anywhere from around 22 to 24 percent after a couple of months of debates.”

Blankley observes that a candidate like Gingrich has appeal because he stands for ideas and results at a time when both parties can’t seem to get the job done. The Supercommittee’s Super failure stands as the latest and most searing example of Washington’s inability to place the country’s needs before political considerations.

“I think not just a lot of conservatives, but also a lot of independents and moderates want to hear somebody who has some idea of how we can improve things,” Blankley says. “That’s Newt’s strength, and now is his moment, I think.”

Gingrich’s former press secretary jokes that you would need a “really large vehicle, maybe an ocean liner” to affix a bumper sticker that would fit all of Newt’s ideas in one place.

But on a more serious note, Blankley suggests that a Gingrich presidency would be the most ambitious of any in recent memory.  Blankley saw Gingrich up close on an almost daily basis throughout the Contract With America and the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.

 “I was with him about 12 hours a day, particularly before he became speaker where it was just the two of us and a secretary in the room,” Blankley says. “I know him very well.”

According to Blankley, Gingrich was just about the only person in the room in the run up to the 1994 midterms who thought the GOP could win early on and made it happen with his dogged determination.

He predicts that the first eight months of a Newt presidency would be not unlike FDR’s in the event he would win along with sizeable GOP majorities in the House and the Senate.

“It would be like 1933, but we’d be going back in the other direction toward markets and traditional values,” Blankley says. “It would be a really thrilling thing to watch.

“We had a bit of that during the first eight months of the Reagan term in ’81 had some of that; it was a pretty invigorating period where the ideas of the new president won support in Congress and the country.”

Gingrich’s record from the 1980s shows he consistently ran to the right of the Reagan administration, particularly in his insistence on a spending freeze in 1983, which put him at loggerheads with people like James Baker and then OMB Director David Stockman, as Evans and Novak reported in January of that year.

Blankley predicts Gingrich would likely have sizeable majorities in both the House and the Senate, but exact number in the latter chamber being more open to question.

 “I think you would see a remarkable period of legislation on deregulating, on attracting health care into a more market-oriented system and on reforming taxes,” Blankley says. “But I can’t imagine anyone who would bring the intellectual vigor or policy agenda to the table as Newt would.”

He characterizes Romney as someone who would be more like “a manager” who would manage the nation’s policy problems incrementally rather than in large jumps unlike Gingrich.

“I think we need to do it in larger jumps,” Blankley says. “So I think comparing a Romney to a Gingrich presidency, I think would see a far more dramatic effort under [Newt] more like he did when he was speaker.

“I think the motivation for him to deliver once he’s committed on something is really powerful.”

To date, Gingrich is the only American politician who committed to balancing the federal budget and succeeded.

Blankley predicts based on his knowledge of Gingrich’s character that the former speaker would only choose people in his cabinet who would get the job done and be most effective. He notes that Gingrich bucked House tradition when he tapped people like now Ohio-Gov. John Kasich to chair the House Budget Committee and Henry Hyde to chair the House Judiciary Committee.

Gingrich is man who isn’t restrained by Washington convention, but who instead has consistently bucked custom to get things done.

“Newt believed you picked people who would deliver people who would deliver the results you committed to,” Blankley says. “And I think you’d see that kind of selection in top appointments, and [his] people wouldn’t be there because some faction of the party wanted them to be there, but [rather] because of the policy commitments he made during the campaign.”

When asked about what he would advise Gingrich to do in response to questions about his personal and business dealings, Blankley suggested that his old friend be direct and truthful with the American public.

Blankley says old accusations such those insinuating that he brought “disrepute on the House” for how he funded a college course he taught while he was speaker will be trotted out. But the facts are in this particular case were that the Clinton IRS found him innocent of the charges against him after he left Congress.

And the same goes with the mistakes he made in his first two marriages.

“I think we’ll have a better opportunity this time to get the truth out than the mischaracterization of it, and I think we’ll have to see how the public balances out the pluses and minuses,” Blankley says.

For more, click the link below and listen:

Blankley

Congressman Phil Roe: Giving back and giving thanks

Congressman Phil Roe, M.D. represents Tennessee’s First District. 

As we celebrate Thanksgiving on Thursday with our family and friends, let’s remember its important history and all that the holiday stands for. While there were many celebrations before, in 1789, George Washington signed an official proclamation entitled “General Thanksgiving” which called for a “day of public thanksgiving and prayer.”

Since then, our nation has observed this day as a time to give thanks for the harvest and express gratitude for the blessings in your life. It’s about spending time with your family and loved ones. It’s about giving back and giving thanks.

We must also repurpose ourselves to do all we can to restore our economy and put us on a path to economic growth. This includes creating jobs and putting us on a path toward a balanced budget. I am disappointed the House was not able to pass a balanced budget amendment because our national debt has reached an all time high of $15 trillion—more than $48,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. It is time to get serious about enacting spending cuts, and I can promise you this defeat is just the start of a long journey to end wasteful Washington spending.

The herd thins as the debate shows it is a two-man race between Gingrich and Romney

John Rossomando  
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WASHINGTON - The top thing that struck me last night as I was sitting at D.C.'s Constitution Hall watching the blows of the CNN/AEI/Heritage Foundation GOP national security debate was that the race really is now between former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

The other candidates with the exception of former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman seemed to either have bumper-sticker answers that lacked depth. 

Huntsman summarized the debate with one sentence: “Today we have a president who can't lead. We have a Congress that can't even figure out how to balance our budget. They need term limits, by the way. We've gotta get our house in order… We've gotta get our house in order if we're gonna expect to get anything done overseas because when our light shines we can influence the rest of the world.”

And what was true four years ago when Hillary Clinton chided Barack Obama about being ready for that 3 a.m. phone call is still true today.

The presidency isn’t just a matter of domestic issues, but it means being able to defend the nation and promote its economic interests abroad.

So it comes down to the question, "Who has the breadth of experience, understanding, and depth to pull the nation away from the brink of disaster?"

Gingrich seemed to have a decisive command of the issues, such as when former U.S. Attorney General Ed Meese, now an important figure at the Heritage Foundation, asked him what he thought of the Patriot Act.

“I think it's desperately important that we preserve your right to be innocent until proven guilty, if it's a matter of criminal law. But if you're trying to find somebody who may have a nuclear weapon that they are trying to bring into an American city, I think you want to use every tool that you can possibly use to gather the intelligence,” Gingrich said.  “The Patriot Act has clearly been a key part of that. And I think looking at it carefully and extending it and building an honest understanding that all of us will be in danger for the rest of our lives.

“This is not going to end in the short run. And we need to be prepared to protect ourselves from those who, if they could, would not just kill us individually, but would take out entire cities.”

The best defense Ron Paul could mount was quibbling over the legal definition of what a war is. But the founding fathers, for example, never once wrote that states or localities needed a congressional declaration of war to fight off Indian raids, which would be probably the closest 18^th century equivalent of al-Qaida terrorism.

War isn’t what it once was when the enemy was a nation-state like the Soviet Union and you had millions of troops on the other side of the Iron Curtain wearing uniforms.

Cain’s responses to the questions during the debate only served to further discredit his candidacy.

Comments like: “No, Blitz. That's oversimplifying it. I happen to believe that if -- if you allow our intelligence agencies to do their job they can come up with an approach - I'm sorry, Blitz, I meant Wolf, OK?” make it seem Cain doesn’t understand the seriousness of the office he is running for.

This along with other answers that made it seem he doesn’t have a deep understanding of the issues at hand made the hitherto Romney, Cain, Gingrich matchup seem more like Romney and Gingrich are the only candidates with a chance.

Romney hit particularly hard against suggestions that the United States cut and run in Afghanistan.

“We spent about $450 billion so far, 1,700 or so service men and women have lost their lives there, and many tens of thousands have been wounded. Our effort there is to keep Afghanistan from becoming a launching point for terror against the United States. We can't just write off a major part of the world,” Romney said. “This is not time for America to cut and run. We have been in for 10 years. We are winding down. The Afghan troops are picking up the capacity to secure their country. And the mission is pretty straightforward, and that is to allow the Afghan people to have a sovereign nation not taken over by the Taliban.”

Clearly at this late stage in the pre-primary season, it appears only Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney have the depth and understanding to compete with President Obama next fall. The others are good people, but they are just not ready to be President of the United States of America, and Obama would destroy them.

So will it be the visionary leader or the manager who GOP voters choose as their nominee? That is the question that should be on voters' minds.

Paul Ryan showed courage by voting NO on the Balanced Budget Amendment

John Rossomando  
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The major press outlets looked with dismay Friday as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan cast one of four Republicans to cast a vote against the Balanced Budget Amendment proposed by Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

And the press accounts almost ignored the concerns that Ryan and other conservatives had with the amendment’s failure to cap spending as a percentage of GDP. The proposed amendment could have created a situation where the courts, not Congress and the president, could have intervened to hike taxes.

Boehner and the GOP placed political expediency over principle. It is refreshing to see Mr. Ryan placing his principles first

Ryan released the following statement after the vote:

“I’m concerned that this version will lead to a much bigger government fueled by more taxes.  Spending is the problem, yet this version of the Balanced Budget Amendment makes it more likely taxes will be raised, government will grow, and economic freedom will be diminished. Without a limit on government spending, I cannot support this Amendment.”

The budget chairman is to be commended for putting principle over politics, especially for someone of his stature.

Conservative groups such as Americans for Tax Reform and Let Freedom Ring had been pushing hard to keep the weak balanced-budget amendment from coming to the floor.

ATR put out the following statement  before the vote:

Washington must learn to live within its means. A Balanced Budget Amendment should keep the focus on Washington’s overspending problem. Passing a BBA that allows a tax hike by a simple majority, however, will allow lawmakers to balance their budgets on the backs of taxpayers, rather than forcing Congress to rein in spending.

 Washington has an overspending problem, not an under-taxing problem. Historically, outlays have averaged about 21 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) while revenues have amounted to about 18 percent of GDP. Due to the Obama Administration and Congressional Democrats’ spending binge, outlays now average almost 25 percent of GDP, and are projected to stay around 23 percent in perpetuity.

 Unless tax hikes are taken off the table, reckless lawmakers will increase taxes to pay for these new bloated spending levels, instead of bringing spending in line with revenues.

Any lawmaker concerned about restoring American solvency cannot seriously vote for a BBA that does not include a super-majority requirement for tax increases. To pass a BBA that allows a tax hike by simple majority is to distract from the real problem of government spending, and leave taxpayers to bear the burden of foolhardy federal budgeting.

After the vote, I received comments from a conservative Hill office explaining the problems with the amendment with the following warning:

"For the last 60 years, our country has taken 20 cents out of every single dollar made in America to pay for the federal government. When Liza’s my age, we will be scheduled to take about 42 cents out of every single dollar made in America just to pay for the current government at that time.

I asked the Congressional Budget Office what will the tax rates be on my children’s generation, you know when I’ve got grandkids running around. They ran all their numbers through their computers and gave me their answer. The lowest tax bracket, the 10 percent bracket, goes to 25 percent, middle income taxpayers get a tax rate of 63 percent, and the top tax rate, which is what 80 percent of all those businesses, those subchapter S corporations, those partnerships, that goes to 88 percent. Then the CBO said, this could have some negative effects on the economy at that time. So, even these bean counters in government have got this figured out.

We all know where we’re going. We all know that the growth of our government is on an incredible upward trajectory, which is driven almost totally because of entitlement programs, programs that are going bankrupt and in urgent need of reforming. ...

We’re going from 40 million retirees in America to 80 million retirees. These are what we call pay as you go programs. Current workers pay their taxes for current beneficiaries. We’ve got a 100 percent increase in our retirement population, but only a 17 percent increase in the working population following them. 10,000 people are retiring every single day today in America, and so we know that our government is on this enormous trajectory of growth. If we allow that growth to continue unchecked, if we don’t reform the spending programs that are driving that growth, and we have just a balanced budget then we will crank taxes up in this country to the likes we’ve never seen before, and we will not have that economic liberty, that kind of freedom and prosperity we’ve had that defined this country, which have made our country the most prosperous nation in the world.

 So a balanced budget amendment that simply says: have expenditures equal revenues. At worst we’ll split the difference, and we’ll go from taking 20 cents out of every dollar made in America, 20 percent of GDP, to 30 percent instead of 40 percent. Either way you go, you’re looking at European levels of size of government. We don’t want to get down that path.

 To me, the root cause of this problem is spending. It is not a revenue problem that we have in Washington; it’s a spending problem that we have."

Supercommittee's failure was in the cards from the start

John Rossomando  
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As I’ve been saying here for the past few months, the Supercommittee’s failure was a foredawn conclusion the second John Boehner and Barack Obama announced its creation.

Republicans and Democrats have never been as ideologically polarized as they are today. In the past, both parties had ranks of centrists who would cross and vote with the other side. If Ronald Reagan had faced a Congress with the ideological balance of the 112^th Congress in 1981, his landmark tax cuts would never have passed.

Although Ronald Reagan controlled the Senate in reverse of today’s situation, he found he could rely on conservative Democrats like then-Rep. Phil Gramm of Texas to get his plans through.

But the last several election cycles have winnowed the liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats as both parties have become increasingly ideological and less regional.

The Democrats’ ideological pull toward the far-left has been exemplified in its embrace of Occupy Wall Street, which has been openly organized by hard-left communists. Consequently, the formerly liberal, now radical, Democrats are ideologically hardened in their support for government welfare programs regardless of the consequences.

The two parties’ reaction to the national debt passing $15 trillion for the first time in history brought this stark reality home. The days when Democrats worked for balanced-budgets and reforming government are over.

The Supercommittee’s inevitable failure will be blamable on the left’s religious addiction to bureaucracy and welfare programs that pay the bureaucrats far better than the recipients.

The GOP deserves its share of the blame too because irresponsible spending during the Bush years undermined the party’s effectiveness in resisting the “tax-and-spend” liberals.

The truth is both sides are too ideologically polarized to work together now that the hard-leftists have replaced the softer leftists like Bill Clinton who occasionally was able to work with conservatives to make a deal.

This polarization is evident in Sen. Pat Toomey’s comments to Politico:

“There are fundamentally and deeply held views across the American political spectrum and here in Congress,” Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.), a member of the supercommittee, told POLITICO on Thursday. “If this were easy, this would have been done a long time ago.”

Congress enters silly season as the national debt passes $15T

John Rossomando    
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Fifteen years ago, House Minority Leader Steny Hoyer pontificated about how the nation’s then $5 trillion debt threatened his daughter’s well-being and that of his grandkids at a Jan. 1995 press conference defending the balanced-budget amendment.

But now as the national debt passes a then-unimaginable $15 trillion, Hoyer and the Democrats have entered into silly season by opposing any sort of balanced-budget amendment. Instead of taking the situation seriously, they continue to advocate for uncontrolled reckless spending.

And the GOP isn’t far behind them because House leaders like Speaker John Boehner have caved going back to their pledge to cut $100 billion from the federal budget. But CBO found they only ended up cutting out a meager $353 million in last spring’s budget deal.

House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan has stood alone among the Republican leadership as a voice crying in the wilderness about the need to take this debt explosion seriously.

Mr. Ryan stated the following last night in a press release:

“Instead of advancing credible solutions, the president remains committed to more borrowing, more spending, and more taxes. When it comes to making the tough decisions necessary to deal with our debt, the President is deferring to one commission after another, only to ignore the recommendations of these commissions. And his party’s leaders in the United States Senate? Well, it has been over 930 days since they passed a budget.

I think the reason is pretty simple: the president and his party’s leaders remain unwilling to publicly commit to the kinds of tax increases that their spending appetite requires.

“You deserve a lot better than that. You deserve a credible plan. You deserve leaders willing to tackle this problem, willing to advance solutions that would lift this crushing burden of debt and make possible a growing, prosperous economy.

That is exactly what we here in the House of Representatives have done, and we will continue to advance serious solutions that match the magnitude of our greatest challenges.”

Sure things are hard when the GOP controls 1/3 of the 1/3 of the federal government, but the party has done a terrible job in the public-relations war let alone in holding the line with Obama.

And instead of Republicans forcing the Democrats to compromise, The Hill greeted readers with the headline: “Hensarling says GOP willing to consider Dem tax proposals.”

The Republican co-chairman of the deficit-reduction Supercommittee on Wednesday indicated he and his party were willing to listen to proposals from Democrats to consider higher taxes to reduce the deficit.

Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Texas) walked back a statement he made Tuesday on television, when he said Republicans “have gone as far as we feel we can go” by offering to raise $250 billion in new tax revenues.

The GOP won the House last year on the promise that it would end business as usual, but Republicans have failed to deliver during the negotiation process.

The Democrats need to stop for a second and see the results of their failed fiscal policies as RSC Chairman Jim Jordan observes:

“The national debt is nearly equal in size to our entire economy and growing larger every single day. Unless we make the fundamental changes needed to stop the out-of-control spending, you can look at Greece and Italy to see where this road ends.”

And presidential candidate Herman Cain's campaign chimed in with comments to ConservativeHome USA saying:

"Our national debt has exceeded $15 trillion – including a $4 trillion spending-binge during the Obama presidency. Obama’s failed leadership and flawed Keynesian economic philosophy has driven the American economy not into the proverbial ditch but off the cliff.  In order to renew America’s economic prospects we need bold solutions and a leader with a proven record of turning around dysfunctional business enterprises.

 “President Obama’s disastrous economic policies are not only an economic travesty, they are immoral.  We cannot leave our children and grandchildren with this enormous burden. We must take responsibility for our actions."