Does Obama Want Credit for Keystone?

So many questions as to why on earth President Barack Obama would veto a no-brainer, job creator like the Keystone pipeline bill.

The presumption is that Obama is simply an ideologue. Or he's simply beholden to Tom Steyer and the environmental lobby. Or he is so hopelessly partisan, he just wants to veto everything the Republican Congress sends him.

President Barack Obamma (WhiteHouse.gov)

Or, he wants to take credit for all the productivity that comes from the Keystone XL pipeline.

From the Washington Examiner:

President Obama Monday predicted that the State Department would conclude its review of the Keystone XL pipeline within "weeks or months," meaning the White House likely would make the final call on the project this year.

"I think it will happen before the end of my administration," Obama told Reuters on Monday, referring to the Keystone XL project, which the State Department has been reviewing for more than six years.

When pressed further, Obama suggested the evaluation would be completed within "weeks or months."

The president recently vetoed legislation authorizing construction of the 1,700-mile pipeline, just the third time he has exercised such powers.

So sure. Veto and totally get Congress out of it. Then in weeks or months, when he needs a boost and Republicans are distracted on other issues, boom, the State Department completes it's ongoing process. After the process is done, it's the Obama administration -- having done its due diligence -- that approved the Keystone pipeline. If it creates as many jobs as advertised, it's part of the president's legacy. If not, well, it was his State Department that did it.

La Raza's Reach Into the White House

After the Obama immigration actions, I looked at the National Council of La Raza's extensive reach inside the White House, as I point out in my feature on the organization in Organizations Trends.

Cecilia Muñoz (WhiteHouse.gov)

No matter who the next president is, it’s unlikely the organization will enjoy the same clout with the White House as it has under the Obama administration. The reason is what the government watchdog group Judicial Watch calls the “Muñoz factor.”

Muñoz refers to Cecilia Muñoz, a former vice president of La Raza who is now Obama’s White House domestic policy director. (Her official title is “Assistant to the President and Director of the Domestic Policy Council.”) The New York Times referred to her as a “fiery immigration rights lobbyist” who in 1997 was furious when Clinton White House staff twice asked her if she was an American citizen. ...

As an activist, she said there should be another amnesty just four years after the 1987 amnesty in a report she wrote for La Raza. Her report also called for ending all workplace enforcement aimed at illegal immigrants.
While serving in the Obama White House, she minimized the seriousness of illegal immigration. “If you were running the police department of any urban area in this country, you would spend more resources going after serious criminals than after jaywalkers. DHS (the Department of Homeland Security) is doing the immigration equivalent of the same thing,” Muñoz told the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute conference in September 2011.

When the Obama White House asked her to come on board, she turned them down, feeling she was an activist not a policymaker. But then Obama made a personal call.
“He said that he wasn’t taking no for an answer, that he intended to make this as family-friendly a place as it could be, and that he wanted me to help change the country,” Muñoz said. After the 2012 election, Muñoz said she is glad she joined the White House staff because “the Latino community has gone from being invisible in this town to being not only visible but clear agents of change driving the country forward.” Muñoz added, “People feel empowered”.

Click here to read the full article.

Politicizing the Super Bowl: Why a Lefty Mag Believes the Seattle Seahawks are the Progressive Cause

Ahead of the Super Bowl, the far, far left magazine, The Nation, tells America why it must root for the Seattle Seahawks over the New England Patriots. This intriguing piece I flagged courtesy of the Daily Caller.

“If only” star athletes used their hyper-exalted-brought-to-you-by Nike platform to actually say something about the world instead of just trying to sell us more crap. If only they stood up to tired sports media that for decades had treated outspoken athletes with a sneering and, in the case of black players, transparently racist contempt… This is reason enough, if you aren’t from the Maine-to-Connecticut-corridor, to pull for the Seattle Seahawks. This is a team that has had players speak out for the Black Lives Matter movement and a team that has felt no compunction against calling out a commissioner in Roger Goodell who cares more about public relations than the players and the families of players that the league employs.

I wrote about the shameless legacy of The Nation magazine that is about this publication that will mark its 150th anniversary this year in my piece in Organization Trends.

Oscar Garrison Villard took over the magazine, producing it again as a stand-alone publication and moving it to the far left. It hasn’t returned to sanity since. Under its new leaders, The Nation enthusiastically backed the Russian Revolution in 1917 and was the first American magazine to print the Soviet Constitution. Vladimir Lenin wasn’t the only tyrant to make its editors’ hearts skip a beat. Over the decades, The Nation would apologize and make excuses for Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, and Ho Chi Minh. All this time, it issued various hysterical warnings that portrayed the United States as one step away from fascism, theocracy, or corporate oligarchy. 

Stalin supporter Freda Kirchwey replaced Villard as editor in 1932, a time when the United States was believed to be at the doorstep of its progressive utopia as Franklin Delano Roosevelt was running for president. Kirchwey was an early secular progressive culture warrior who used the magazine to advocate for such fashionable causes as sexual freedom and birth control (Freda Kirchwey: A Woman of ‘The Nation,’ Harvard University Press). The Nation managed to end up on the side of the United States in World War II—at least once Stalin had broken with his treaty partner Adolph Hitler and needed America’s help. The Nation and Kirchwey did tick off progressives in 1948 by refusing to break rank with Democrats and support Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace. 

Carey McWilliams, a lawyer, left-wing journalist, and labor organizer, took the helm of the magazine in 1955, as the magazine persistently sympathized with the Soviets on Cold War policies. Among the writers to start at the magazine during McWilliams’ time were radical activist/presidential candidate Ralph Nader, Marxist historian Howard Zinn, and gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson ... 

Ironically, in 1989 the magazine founded by an abolitionist published a slapstick, twinkle-in-your-eye piece about child sex slaves from Haiti by Herbert Gold, who wrote, “For a writer going through personal distractions, an escape into the indulgence of melodrama can provide what the maker of an analgesic calls temporary fast relief. Slave Trade was intended to offer a lively passing of time” (Dec. 18, 1989) ... 

In 2004, the Anti-Defamation League asked why The Nation would allow advertising from a group of Holocaust deniers called the Institute for Historical Review. The ad was titled, “Unmasking Israel’s Most Dangerous Myths” and called the Holocaust a “historical myth cited to justify Zionist aggression and repression.” 

“Doesn’t The Nation have advertising acceptability standards that identify and reject offensive content?” asked ADL national director Abraham H. Foxman in an April 21, 2004 letter to the editor. “If it does, it somehow missed the obvious here. Unfortunately, giving space to a group that sponsors Holocaust denial only lends them credibility and perpetuates a lie.”

The New Republic's Sorry Fall

The mass revolt from The New Republic has reportedly sent a number of writers to new outlets. Still the magazine is having a difficult time recovering. More recently (in what may or may not be an attempt to deliver an audacious cover story in the midst of its free fall) the magazine is doing a self examination on its legacy on race. 

Never a moneymaker, the magazine has a storied history, but has been taken down the tubes by its new management, as I write in Organization Trends.

Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank, known for his snarkiness, wrote mournfully in his Dec. 8, 2014 column about his former employer: “The New Republic is dead; Chris Hughes killed it.” In 2012 Hughes, the wealthy tech liberal, bought the magazine founded by Walter Lippmann, Herbert Crowley, and Willard Straight. “But Hughes is no Lippmann; he’s a callow man who accidentally became rich—to the tune of some $700 million—because he had the luck of being Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard,” Milbank wrote. 

Just last year it celebrated its 100th anniversary. Hughes decided it was going to be a technology company and fired Franklin Foer as editor, replacing him with an editor who had been fired from the low-rent gossip website Gawker. This move prompted staffers to flee and most contributing editors to demand that their names be removed from the masthead. The bloodbath caused at least 58 of 87 names on the masthead to disappear. 

The magazine’s apparent death comes after years of being to the right of most other lefty publications. The magazine supported the Global War on Terror and tried to invoke the party of FDR and JFK over the party of MoveOn.org and Daily Kos. It supported Joe Lieberman’s hopeless bid for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. 

It had some dark years, including a period of editorship under Henry Wallace, FDR’s former vice president and an apologist for Stalin (years later, Wallace recanted). After Wallace left as editor to run for president on the Progressive ticket, the editor in the late 1940s into the 1950s was Michael Whitney Straight, later revealed to be a Soviet spy in Anthony Blunt’s ring at Cambridge University (the two were briefly lovers).

Click here to read the full story.

Will Eric Holder's Push for Drug Amnesty Continue Under Next Attorney General?

In a parting shot at outgoing Attorney General Eric Holder, published in Organization Trends, I focus on an aspect of Holder's tenure that gotten less attention, the drug amnesty movement. The issue is something for senators to consider in the confirmation hearing for Loretta Lynch. Please read full article here.

Here's an excerpt:

In a video message earlier this year, Holder talked about the Clemency Project, which is the Obama administration’s initiative aimed at freeing as many as 20,000 drug offenders. “In 2010, President Obama signed the Fair Sentencing Act reducing unfair disparities in sentences imposed on people for offenses involving different forms of cocaine,” Holder said. “But there’s still too many people in federal prison who were sentenced under the old regime and who, as a result, will have to spend far more time in prison than they would if sentenced today for exactly the same crime,” he said. “This is simply not right."

The Fair Sentencing Act changed the quantity of crack cocaine and powder cocaine needed to trigger mandatory minimum sentencing laws. The statute eliminated five-year sentences for crack cocaine and reversed many of the provisions of the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act.

The Obama administration was going to use executive action to make a 2010 law passed by Congress retroactively cover sentences handed down by courts prior to the change in the law. For an administration that’s had jolly fun circumventing the legislative branch, this new initiative gave Obama and Holder a means of doing an extra-constitutional end-run around the federal judiciary.
The administration is receiving help from private groups, both large and small, that are united in a push for the relaxation of narcotics laws. Leading the way in recruiting prisoners to seek early clemency through the president’s mass pardon program are the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU Foundation Inc., 2013 assets $341.1 million; ACLU Inc., 2013 assets $34.7 million), National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (2012 assets $6.8 million), American Bar Association (2013 assets $298.1 million), and Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM Foundation, 2012 assets $1.2 million).

No one who follows the activist Left should be surprised to learn that radical philanthropist George Soros funds some of these advocacy organizations. Soros’s Foundation to Promote Open Society has provided grants to ACLU Foundation ($3,192,000 since 2009) and FAMM Foundation ($1.2 million since 2009). His Open Society Institute (recently renamed Open Society Foundations) has given grants to ACLU Foundation ($24,912,175 since 1999) and FAMM Foundation ($1,771,000 since 1999). The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers has received $20,800 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation.

Pelosi's War on Women Against a Solider Tough Enough to Take It

Get a load of this. Rep. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat, is an American hero whether you like her politics or not.

CBS News and National Journal should get credit for covering this story, and it should shame Nancy Pelosi, or Rosa DeLauro from ever claiming to be advocates for women again.

From CBS:

House Democrats decided Thursday to deny Rep. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, a proxy vote in the Democratic leadership elections, which she requested because she can't be in Washington, D.C. for the vote.  ... the very pregnant 46-year-old Iraq War veteran who lost both of her legs in a 2004 helicopter crash, was told by doctor that it was unsafe for her to fly at this stage in her pregnancy.

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, opposed the request, a day after she chastised reporters over what she suggested was a gender-based double standard: "You never ask Mitch McConnell, 'Aren't you getting a little old Mitch? Shouldn't you step aside?'"

And Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Connecticut, who has been a fierce advocate for issues that resonate with women, is one of the members who denied the request.  

... Duckworth said in a statement, "The Caucus chose not to allow me to vote via proxy. I respect the process and very much appreciated my colleagues who made sure my request was considered."
 
Duckworth deserves credit for being classy about this. But really? Whatever inside politics or axes to grind that led to this denial should provoke some national outrage.

To their credit, Reps. Jan Schakowsky, D-Illinois  and Gwen Moore, D-Wisconsin were both strong advocated for the proxy vote.  

It's all part of the absurdity of the war on women. Read about the history of the intellectually and morally bankrupt political line here.

Obamacare: The Sequel Isn't Looking Much Better

Who knows? Maybe they'll pull it off this time. It's only the first day. But that's what Obama administration officials said last year when the the first day of Healthcare.gov was a disaster. Look at what's happening in a few states.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Insurers involved in HealthCare.gov’s testing said fixes were still continuing as of Friday. In a handful of states that run their own enrollment marketplaces, officials have poured millions of dollars into upgrades and have yet to fix technology flaws that could foil consumer sign-ups.

Minnesota took its exchange offline this week for testing after making some fixes, and planned to direct certain consumers with major life changes to a call center, because a piece of the site isn’t complete. Maryland won’t launch statewide online enrollment until Nov. 19 and is limiting Saturday sign-ups to a single onsite event. In Vermont, some consumers who want to renew coverage won’t be able to do so online because the technology isn’t ready.

And this from the Associated Press, via ABC News on Washington State:

Washington's health care exchange shut down after the first few hours of open enrollment Saturday as state officials and software engineers tried to resolve a problem with tax credit calculations.

Officials at the exchange said Washington Healthplanfinder, which opened at 8 a.m., appeared to be working fine at first. When the exchange's quality control system reported the problem, they decided to shut the whole system down at about 10:30 a.m. to fix it. ... On Saturday afternoon, officials estimated the site wouldn't reopen until Sunday morning, but the actual timing will depend on how soon a software fix can be tested for potential side-effects.