GOP

New at Live Action: Christie Lied About Backing Sotomayor at GOP Debate

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

There was no significant discussion of abortion at Thursday night’s Republican presidential debate, except for a brief mention by Ted Cruz of New York being a relatively pro-abortion place (a crazy idea he must have gotten from Americans United for Life’s ranking of New York among the ten most pro-abortion states, or NY Governor Andrew Cuomo outright saying pro-lifers “have no place in the state of New York”), and Marco Rubio criticizing funding of Planned Parenthood.

In a brief segment, Rubio criticized Obama for making Planned Parenthood funding a priority instead of the military. In another, he accusing Chris Christie of having donated to Planned Parenthood and of having supported pro-abortion Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor.

The ensuing argument between Cruz and Donald Trump on New York didn’t touch on abortion again, but sparks flew on the latter incident…

RUBIO: Unfortunately, Governor Christie has endorsed many of the ideas that Barack Obama supports, whether it is Common Core or gun control or the appointment of Sonia Sotomayor or the donation he made to Planned Parenthood. Our next president, and our Republican nominee can not be someone who supports those positions.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Abortion Neglected at CNBC GOP Debate. Let’s do something about it.

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , ,

If you were expecting to hear the Republican presidential candidates say anything new about how they would protect the preborn from abortion or getting Planned Parenthood’s hand out of America’s wallets, then last night’s CNBC primary debates were a huge letdown.

Not one question addressed abortion or Planned Parenthood in any way. The excuse would be that the debate was billed as strictly focusing on economic issues – making pro-life issues off-topic – but that went out the window the moment questions were asked about marijuana legalization and gay rights. Those detoured the conversation away from the nation’s finances and into individual freedom, morality, and society’s values — abortion would have been out of place how? (Not to mention the clear economic issue of taxpayer dollars funding Planned Parenthood.)

Moderators with a major political axe to grind clearly weren’t interested in giving the preborn or Planned Parenthood’s crimes any attention, but even so, the candidates could have done more to proactively work abortion into their answers, like Lindsey Graham did with his main issue, foreign policy.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

New at Live Action: Pro-Abortion HuffPo Attack on Ben Carson Completely Fails

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Following Dr. Ben Carson’s strong stand for life over the weekend on Meet the Press, the Huffington Post is attacking the presidential candidate with an open letter to Carson by playwright, political science professor, and self-professed “ordained minister and a person of faith” Monica Bauer.

After some lip service to how Carson “seem[s] like a sincere person who wants to do the right thing,” she proceeds to challenge him on “a couple of things that just maybe no one in your circle has ever discussed with you.”

As we will soon see, this condescension is mostly projection:

First of all, if it is as simple as all that, and all abortions were about killing a baby, how do you explain the Supreme Court ruling in Roe v. Wade? This was a 7-2 decision. It was not simply liberals versus conservatives.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

How Awful Would Paul Ryan Be as House Speaker?

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Let us count the ways:

  1. His Heritage Action and Conservative Review scorecards are 55% and 58%, respectively. That’s far worse than “imperfect”—Ryan’s record of standing with conservatives doesn’t even rise to the level of “below average.” It’s in F territory. I know liberals believe in rewarding failing grades, but are conservatives ready to join them?
  2. Ryan is an open-borders fanatic of the worst order, from sabotaging efforts to control immigration early in his career to championing the most recent amnesty bill, without regard for how utterly its border and enforcement provisions were proven to be fraudulent. Indeed, his immigration zealotry overrides his other supposed conservative principles so fully that he openly supports “guest workers” for the express purpose of relieving employers of the burden of having to offer Americans higher wages.
  3. Pro-lifers and marriage defenders can’t count on Ryan to have our back when it counts. He has repeatedly voted for budget resolutions that include funding for Planned Parenthood, supports unprincipled and unworkable “truces” on social issues, and voted for the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, which threatened religious employers’ right to require adherence to a faith’s principles even when relevant to the position.
  4. The sole rationale for Ryan’s stature on the Right is his supposed fiscal seriousness, his reputation as the smartest adult in the room when it comes to getting spending under control. Thing is, even that is wildly overblown. For all the hysterics it inspired at the time, his 2012 budget plan would have actually increased spending by trillions over the next decade, left countless wasteful and destructive programs and agencies untouched, and wouldn’t have balanced the budget until 2040. Worse, a year later he joined forces with Democrat Patty Murray to sabotage one of Hill Republicans’ only substantive accomplishments in recent memory, the sequester budget caps.
  5. Apart from his budgets’ substantive deficiencies, Ryan has never been any good at selling his ideas to the public. The pattern is pretty simple: Ryan churns out a plan, does little to no work helping his fellow Republicans prepare a real campaign to make the case for it, leftists inevitably scream that it means the elderly dying and poor people thrown on the streets, and Ryan responds with wonkish technobabble that impresses political junkies who already know better but means nothing to the voters he needs to reassure. Shouldn’t the fact that he couldn’t even put away Joe Biden have been a red flag here?
  6. Ryan favors other terrible fiscal policies: TARP and the internet sales tax scheme known as the Marketplace Fairness Act.
  7. Here’s Ryan in 2013 saying “if we had a Clinton presidency […] I think we would have fixed this fiscal mess by now,” and here he is in 2014 saying Barack Obama’s repeated violations of federal law, separation of powers, and the Constitution “do not rise to the high crime and misdemeanor level”…just in case any part of you was still expecting Speaker Ryan to give the Left a real fight.

Straw-Manning: An Amnesty Shill’s Best Friend

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , ,

Oh look: Pew got Republican voters to look more liberal than they really are with intentionally-vague terminology — “certain requirements” — that induces respondents to project wildly different notions of what those requirements should be into a single category.

The poll does not say a majority of Republicans are content with the real bone of contention: sham bills that provide amnesty with citizenship but lie about security and enforcement. (It also shows that majorities of Republicans want to end birthright citizenship and build a border wall, and that only 37% favor citizenship for illegals.)

Contrary to the lying cheap-labor toadies who slander conservatives as “xenophobes” for not agreeing with them, very few of us opposed to the GOP’s amnesty-mania insist that every single illegal has to be gone no matter what.

Again, for the unprincipled simpletons who parrot whatever Republican leadership and the Wall Street Journal tell them to, it’s really not that complicated:

  1. Complete a manned and monitored border wall.
  2. Crack down on visa overstays.
  3. Fully implement e-Verify.
  4. Take legal action against sanctuary cities.
  5. Reverse President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty.
  6. Crack down on illegals’ use of public aid.
  7. After Congress has actually done it, rather than given us the umpteenth insincere promise to do it in the indeterminate future, and after the people have seen for themselves that we really have stopped the mass influx of new illegals and meaningfully reduced the number of current illegals, then we can look at how many are left and decide on some sort of regularization (provided it does not allow any possibility of citizenship without first leaving and re-entering legally).

New at Live Action: Don’t Let Iowa Gov. Branstad Chicken Out on Defunding Planned Parenthood

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In July, Iowa Republican Governor Terry Branstad responded to the news of Planned Parenthood’s organ harvesting side business by ordering a comprehensive review of state women’s health and family planning funding to ensure none of it was helping Planned Parenthood perform abortions. Alas, now he says he can’t defund Planned Parenthood after all:

“It appears to me, and the advice that we have received from the attorney general’s office, is that we cannot defund Planned Parenthood,” Branstad said last week, according to The Des Moines Register. “The attorney general’s office has notified us that we don’t have reasons; [Planned Parenthood hasn’t] violated their responsibilities under the grants that they have received from the state.”

The Iowa social conservative group The Family Leader is not impressed, and has been doing a lot of work to refute Branstad’s claims and pressure him into doing the right thing.

Read the rest at Live Action News.

Abysmal Kasich-Rubio ’16 Case Illustrates Why GOP Keeps Losing Elections

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

The following article was originally written in August. Given the lack of responses at the time and that the subject of conservative publications giving platforms to disastrously unconservative political advice remains newsworthy, I am publishing it here.

In most fields, past failures to produce results tend to diminish one’s standing as an authority on future successes. So while it’s natural that alumni of John McCain’s presidential campaign would favor a 2016 nominee as centrist as John Kasich and a running mate as amnesty-minded as Marco Rubio, it’s also alarming to see their prescriptions disseminated in a leading conservative publication.

None of Myra Adams’s five points for Kasich-Rubio ’16 are persuasive. In fact, her August 14 National Review column making the case reads more like a catalogue of the Beltway myths, shallow assumptions, and unconservative priorities that have created countless Republican defeats. Continue reading →

When Will We Get Serious about Judicial Tyranny?

Calvin Freiburger Uncategorized , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

A Republican presidential field with over a dozen candidates splitting conservative voters may be a recipe for political disaster, but one of the silver linings is that with so many dueling personalities, some are bound to voice overlooked ideas to a wider audience than they’re used to.

So far, that’s been one of the only good things to come out of Mike Huckabee joining the fray. He’s made directly attacking the judiciary’s assumed constitutional monopoly a recurring theme over the past several months, from his January suggestion that we defy the Supreme Court if they impose same-sex marriage nationwide to his May campaign announcement blasting politicians for “surrender[ing] to the false god of judicial supremacy.”

His comments got a little debate among the commentariat and more than a little hysteria from the press, but nowhere near the conversation they should have sparked. Maybe it was the messenger—while Huck’s nanny-state, pro-amnesty, soft-on-crime, snake-oil record should absolutely keep him far, far away from the White House, conservatives can’t afford to let our rightful distaste for the Huckster distract us when he stumbles upon something important. Continue reading →