Congress can stop Obamacare by refusing to fund its mandates

Should Republicans regain control of Congress, they could theoretically use their new power of the purse to deny Obama the funding needed to administer his signature accomplishment. This prospect is already gaining steam among opponents of the law. The new group DeFundit.org has gotten more than 90 candidates and current members of Congress to sign a pledge supporting stripping ObamaCare of money.

There are a lot of scenarios for how a defunding push could play out, especially based on whether Republicans gain control of one or both chambers of Congress. But in the end, such a strategy could result in a replay of late 1995, when a budgetary standoff led to a government shutdown.

Newt Gingrich, who as House Speaker was a central figure in the standoff leading to that shutdown, has been one of the most vocal proponents of the defunding strategy, and he presented the idea during an April breakfast hosted by TAS.

"A simple majority can refuse to fund," Gingrich said. "So if [John] Boehner is Speaker and Mitch McConnell is majority leader, all you have to do is write it into the appropriations bills. If the president vetoes the appropriations bills, you repass them. The president has got to go to the country and convince the country...to spend money on a program that has a 20 percent margin of disapproval."

He continued, "So the president has to somehow make it into a positive political issue to veto the appropriations bills. The only person who can close the government is the president. If you're determined to pass the appropriations bills, he has to decide to veto a bill you have passed."

The idea would be to gut ObamaCare by denying the money needed to implement its sweeping provisions. "There are 159 new offices, agencies, and commissions in this new bill," Gingrich explained. "All you say is, we're not gonna fund them. And you have in effect, stopped the project."

Stealth jihad - from the Ground Zero mosque to Newt's lips

Newt Gingrich has become the first major politician to acknowledge that the problem America faces today from Islamic jihadists is not simply one of terrorism, but of a larger attempt to insinuate elements of Islamic law (sharia) into American society, and to assert the principle that where sharia and American law conflict, it is American law that must give way.

The stated goal of Islamic jihadists around the world is consistent: to weaken non-sharia governments through terrorism as well as other means, so as ultimately to topple those governments and install Islamic law in their place. The non-violent means by which they work to achieve this goal were the focus of my 2008 book Stealth Jihad, in which I decried the universal tendency among both Republicans and Democrats to speak solely of the threat of “terrorism,” and to ignore completely the stealthy ways in which the terrorists’ agenda was advancing under our noses.

In a series of discrete initiatives generally advanced as “civil rights” or “religious freedom” issues, Muslim groups linked to the Muslim Brotherhood, an international organization whose stated goal is “eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within,” have pressed successfully in recent years for numerous special privileges for Muslims in American society. Footbaths for ablutions before Islamic prayers have been constructed in airports and universities; Muslim employees have been given special break times at factories, breaks that non-Muslims are not offered, so that they can pray at the prescribed times; and initiatives have been undertaken in the media and courts to stigmatize and marginalize anyone who speaks honestly about the nature and magnitude of the jihad threat.

None of these initiatives may seem to amount to much at first glance; however, they should cause concern for two reasons: because in every case they further the principle that American law and custom should give way to Islamic imperatives, rather than that Muslims in America should adapt their behavior to American principles; and because of the connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of Hamas and al Qaeda.

And now Gingrich has become the first national politician to take notice of this threat. Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute on Thursday, he said: “This is not a war on terrorism. Terrorism is an activity. This is a struggle with radical Islamists in both their militant and their stealth form.”

Newt: No (Ground Zero) mosque. No self-deception. No surrender. The time to take a stand is now, at this site...

(Ground Zero)There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.

The proposed "Cordoba House" overlooking the World Trade Center site – where a group of jihadists killed over 3000 Americans and destroyed one of our most famous landmarks - is a test of the timidity, passivity and historic ignorance of American elites. For example, most of them don’t understand that “Cordoba House” is a deliberately insulting term. It refers to Cordoba, Spain – the capital of Muslim conquerors who symbolized their victory over the Christian Spaniards by transforming a church there into the world’s third-largest mosque complex.

Today, some of the Mosque’s backers insist this term is being used to "symbolize interfaith cooperation" when, in fact, every Islamist in the world recognizes Cordoba as a symbol of Islamic conquest. It is a sign of their contempt for Americans and their confidence in our historic ignorance that they would deliberately insult us this way.

Those Islamists and their apologists who argue for "religious toleration" are arrogantly dishonest. They ignore the fact that more than 100 mosques already exist in New York City. Meanwhile, there are no churches or synagogues in all of Saudi Arabia. In fact no Christian or Jew can even enter Mecca.

And they lecture us about tolerance.

If the people behind the Cordoba House were serious about religious toleration, they would be imploring the Saudis, as fellow Muslims, to immediately open up Mecca to all and immediately announce their intention to allow non-Muslim houses of worship in the Kingdom. They should be asked by the news media if they would be willing to lead such a campaign.

We have not been able to rebuild the World Trade Center in nine years. Now we are being told a 13 story, $100 million megamosque will be built within a year overlooking the site of the most devastating surprise attack in American history.

Finally where is the money coming from? The people behind the Cordoba House refuse to reveal all their funding sources.

America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization. Sadly, too many of our elites are the willing apologists for those who would destroy them if they could.

No mosque.

No self deception.

No surrender.

The time to take a stand is now - at this site on this issue.

Romney leads in early race for campaign contributions

Mitt Romney’s political action committee blew away his potential rivals’, according to reports, in money raised during the latest fundraising period. Meanwhile, Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s political groups combined raised nearly twice as much as Romney, though most was raised through a 527 group that doesn’t have the fundraising limits that the other PACs do.

Romney’s Free and Strong America PAC brought in $1.8 million during the April to June reporting period and has about $2.2 million cash on hand.

Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s SarahPAC raised $865,815.42, and has just more than a million cash on hand, according to reports.

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty’s Freedom First PAC raised $724,000, with $940,000 cash on hand.

Former Alaska Gov. Mike Huckabee’s HuckPAC reportedly raised $258,000.

And Gingrich raised $3.5 million, the majority of which came from American Solutions, a 527 which by law cannot advocate the election or defeat of any candidate.

In the guise of stimulating recovery, Obama is building "secular socialist machine" patterned after Roosevelt's New Deal

Students of history will recognize the method to President Obama's madness. The parallels in both policy and politics to the Roosevelt Administration are too striking not to be deliberate. President Obama is consciously modeling his Administration on the Roosevelt Administration. But just as the liberals of the 1930s graduated to the New Left of the 1960s, President Obama's policies and politics transcend the liberalism of the 1930s. He is building what Newt Gingrich rightly calls a secular socialist machine in his new book To Save America.

Roosevelt's Keynesian economics was left for dead in the 1980s with President Reagan's supply-side revolution miraculously ending the stagflation of the 1970s with a 25-year economic boom. But President Obama came into office talking as if that never happened, casting it down the memory hole. While Reagan's early 1981 budget cuts slashed the federal budget by about 5%, Obama rammed through an almost $1 trillion stimulus package of nearly all Keynesian economics from the 1930s, laughing at his astounded critics with the question, "What do you think a stimulus is?"

Economically, it didn't work, just as it didn't in the 1930s or the 1970s. Now 29 months after the recession officially started in December, 2007, unemployment is 10% and rising, and the stock market is again stumbling, with the Dow still 4000 points off its last highs. The recovery was overdue a year ago, and even now economic growth is not half what it should be.

But note how the stimulus spending was structured so that more is spent this year than last. Was the goal to reduce unemployment as quickly as possible, or to use the guise of Keynesian stimulus spending for a political slush fund to buy as many votes as possible in this political year? Note also that about half of the direct "stimulus" spending went to state and local governments to prop up the employment of public employees, the most reliable supporters of liberal Democrat candidates. The only thing President Obama's stimulus is stimulating is a left-wing Democrat political machine.

Romney and Huckabee have crossover appeal, but Palin and Gingrich are better liked by Republicans

Our monthly look ahead to the 2012 Presidential race finds Barack Obama more or less tied with all four of the leading candidates for the Republican nomination. He trails Mike Huckabee 47-45 and Mitt Romney 45-44, ties Newt Gingrich at 45-45, and leads Sarah Palin 47-45. This is the weakest performance Obama's posted in these 13 monthly surveys and a pretty clear indication that passing health care has not done anything to enhance his political standing, at least in the short term.

It's not that any of the Republican candidates are particularly popular, or even that Obama's approval numbers have declined. But whereas in previous months a good number of the voters disapproving of his job performance weren't ready to commit to voting Republican in 2012 yet, now 85-89% of them do in each of these hypothetical contests. That suggests that even if Obama's overall unpopularity has not increased, the intensity of it has. For instance among voters who disapprove of Obama but also have an unfavorable opinion of Sarah Palin, she leads him by 22 points in a head to head contest. That wasn't necessarily the case in previous months.

Palin and Gingrich are the most popular among Republican voters...and the least popular overall. 71% of GOP folks have a favorable opinion of Palin but thanks to putrid numbers with Democrats and independents her overall favorability is 38% with 52% of voters having a negative opinion of her. For Gingrich 62% of Republicans see him positively but with similarly bad standing among voters outside the party his total favorability is 34% with 47% of voters expressing negative sentiments toward him.

Romney and Huckabee are less popular within their own parties than Palin and Gingrich but have better overall favorability numbers because they're less toxic to Democrats and independents. There is a real potential in the GOP race if all these folks run to put voters in a situation where they have to decide between who they like best and who they think has the best chance to defeat President Obama.

Palin, Romney strong in Newsmax-Zogby poll

A recent Newsmax Media-Zogby poll showed former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin leading the Republican field as the party’s preferred candidate for president in 2012.

And a breakdown of demographic and other data from the survey offers some interesting insights on current Republican thinking about GOP candidates in the next presidential election:

Sarah Palin, who grabbed 22.2 percent of the vote in the poll, is more popular in the East than anywhere else in the country. Interestingly, she has been described as a Western and Southern candidate, but our Zogby poll found that 25 percent of Easterners supported her. The West, in fact, gave her the lowest figure — 20 percent.

Palin is not as strong with 65-plus voters — her percentage there dropped to 19.7 percent. She seems to be popular with younger voters, with 23 percent of those between ages 18 and 29 supporting her.

Newt Gingrich came in at 12.4 percent, but he seems to skew with stronger support among males, 14 percent, while female Republican voters gave him 11 percent.

Palin skews favorably with women, with 23.3 percent of Republican women supporting her compared to 21 percent of Republican men. She also does very well in the 55-to-69 demographic group, where 24 percent of Republicans back her. That number drops dramatically to just 14 percent in the 70-plus group.

Mike Huckabee seems to be a favorite of black Republicans, garnering 24.2 percent of the vote, more than any other candidate in the field.

Palin draws exceedingly well with born-again and Evangelical Christians, pulling a strong 28.4 percent of their vote. She also gets strong support from less educated voters — 28.6 percent of those who said they did not have a college degree voted for her, while those with a college degree gave her just 18.5 percent.

Mitt Romney had consistently strong poll numbers across all demographic groups. Interestingly, although he is a Mormon, he led the pack among Catholic voters, even beating out Palin, 23.6 percent to 21.1 percent.

Romney also seems to be very favorably viewed by Jewish Republicans, gaining a remarkable 32 percent of their support.

Does California vote signal antigovernment tide?

"Americans should look carefully at the anti-politician, anti-government mood exhibited in California this week. Just as Proposition 13 and the anti-tax movement of 1978 were the forerunners of the Reagan presidential victory, so the results of Tuesday's vote are a harbinger of things to come.

The repudiation of the California establishment in the series of initiative defeats could hardly have been more decisive. Five taxing and spending measures were rejected by 62.6 to 66.4 percent of the voters. That is a consistent majority of enormous potential. An even larger majority, 73.9 percent, approved the proposition limiting elected officials' salaries when there is a deficit.

This vote is the second great signal that the American people are getting fed up with corrupt politicians, arrogant bureaucrats, greedy interests and incompetent, destructive government."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/
article/2009/05/21/AR2009052103724.html