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Looks like the GOP will have some good results next week. With an example of Colorado, John Fund reminds us we have to have a win large enough to cover the margin of Dem voting fraud.
Many liberals are adamant there is no threat of voter fraud that justifies efforts to improve the integrity of elections. “There is no real concrete evidence of voter fraud,” tweeted Donna Brazile, former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, this week. “It’s a big ass lie.”
James O’Keefe, the guerilla filmmaker who brought down the ACORN voter-registration fraudsters in 2010 and forced the resignation of NPR executives, politely disagrees. Today, he is releasing some new undercover footage that raises disturbing questions about ballot integrity in Colorado, the site of fiercely contested races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the governorship. When he raised the issue of filling out some of the unused ballots that are mailed to every household in the state this month, he was told by Meredith Hicks, the director of Work for Progress, a liberal group funded by Democratic Super PACS.: “That is not even like lying or something, if someone throws out a ballot, like if you want to fill it out you should do it.” She then brazenly offered O’Keefe, disguised as a middle-aged college instructor, a job with her group.
The video of O’Keefe’s encounters with other operatives is equally disturbing. He has a conversation with Greenpeace employee Christina Topping, and suggests he might have access to unused ballots from people who have recently moved out of college fraternity houses. “I mean it is putting the votes to good use,” she responds. “So really, truly, like yeah, that is awesome.”
Colorado secretary of state Scott Gessler, along with several county election clerks, have raised warning flags that a new state law that automatically mails a ballot to everyone is an engraved invitation to commit fraud. “Sending ballots to people who did not even ask for them or have moved out of state is asking for trouble” he told me. …
Andrew McCarthy covers Ron Klain’s first job for the administration – the Solyndra bust. The denouement (bankruptcy) was coming just days before the elections and the fixers managed to put it off until the day after the election. Here’s the end of McCarthy’s piece.
… This is where the Energy Protection Act’s only sensible aspect is supposed to kick in. The law stipulates that, in the event a company in which the government has invested the public’s money goes bust, taxpayers must be prioritized over company stakeholders when any remaining assets of the bankrupt business are sold. That should have happened with Solyndra. But remember, this is the lobbyist-laden, crony-socialist Obama administration we’re talking about.
OMB officials fully understood that there was no economic sense in the Solyndra restructuring proposal. The government loan put the public first in line for proceeds on the sale of Solyndra assets. With the company hurtling toward inevitable bankruptcy, an immediate liquidation under the original loan terms would net taxpayers a much better deal — about $170 million better. As congressional investigators later learned, so compelling was the argument against restructuring (i.e., the argument for faithfully executing the law) that OMB feared “questions will be asked” if the Department of Energy proceeded with it.
Yet the Obama DOE permitted the Solyndra backers to renegotiate the terms anyway. Preposterously, DOE rationalized that the restructuring was necessary “to create a situation whereby investors felt there was a value in their investment.” Of course, when commerce is not rigged by the government, the value in an investment is the value created by the business in which the investment is made. Here, Solyndra’s business operations produced only losses. New investment in the failing company could be enticed only by an invalid restructuring that prioritized investors over taxpayers — the kind of scheme from which faithful enforcement of the Energy Policy Act is supposed to protect the public.
In February 2011, in exchange for lending some of their own money, Solyndra stakeholders were given priority over taxpayers with respect to the first $75 million in the event the company filed for bankruptcy. A few months later, Solyndra did precisely that.
Negotiations over the restructuring deal had begun in 2010. The time they bought helped delay Solyndra’s implosion beyond the midterm elections. Yet with collapse looming, the company still decided that autumn to lay off nearly 20 percent of its work force. On October 25, 2010, just a week before the midterms, Solyndra CEO Brian Harris alerted the Obama DOE that in three days, the company would shut down its original factory and begin shedding employees and contractors.
The day before that scheduled October 28 announcement, panicked White House energy adviser Heather Zichal e-mailed the redoubtable Ron Klain — as well as Valerie Jarrett and Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer — explaining: “Here’s the deal: Solyndra is going to announce they are laying off 200 of their 1,200 workers. No es bueno.”
Republicans on a House committee investigating Solyndra subsequently learned that DOE pressured the company to delay the announcement. It was finally made on November 3 . . . the day after the midterm elections.
Well, well, well. Here we are just two weeks before the 2014 midterms and Ron Klain is back to manage another crisis — an infectious-disease outbreak. Sure he’s a political fixer, not an epidemiologist, but rest assured that Klain will keep us promptly apprised of all Ebola developments without ever glancing at a calendar or a poll.
Dan Henninger thinks Klain may be the last fixer.
In “Pulp Fiction,” a movie about crime, there is a character named The Wolf. The Wolf is known as a “cleaner.” His line of work is cleaning up the mess made by incompetent criminals. As played by Harvey Keitel, the cleaner is a man of focus, competence and authority. I thought of the cleaner when President Obama called in Ron Klain.
Mr. Obama said Mr. Klain would be the Ebola czar. But the rest of the Beltway political community said he was something else. Some said Mr. Klain was a famous political operative. Josh Earnest, the White House press secretary, called him an “implementation expert.” Those who have been around politics too long said Mr. Klain was a fixer.
Political fixer is not an entirely dishonorable profession. Presidents, governors, mayors—nearly all at some point need someone who can hose down the blood, do the laundry and get the boys back to doing business as usual.
Or used to.
Ron Klain may be the last fixer. …
Hillary was campaigning for Martha Coakley in MA and decided to see if she could sound dumber than Fauxchahontas – Elizabeth Warren. We’ll look at this from a few directions. Jonathan Tobin is first.
It didn’t take long for Hillary Clinton’s handlers to start walking back the putative 2016 Democratic presidential nominee’s latest whopper. While campaigning alongside Senator Elizabeth Warren — the Democrat most members of her party’s base really like — Clinton tried to play can you top this with the popular left-winger by telling her audience, “Don’t let anybody tell you that corporations and businesses create jobs.” It’s hard to imagine a more mind-boggling confession of her ignorance of basic economics. But even after her staff tried to explain it as merely opposition to certain tax breaks or “trickle down economics,” it’s hard to explain what she was thinking. …
… This is, of course, the same Hillary who likes to pretend to be the adult in the room on economic as well as foreign policy issues. But as she proved during her time as secretary of state, Clinton is a political chameleon with no core beliefs other than her own personal ambition. Just as she gladly went along with President Obama’s decision to cut and run from Iraq and ultimately from Afghanistan and stay out of Syria even though she supposedly disagreed with much of this, when placed in Warren’s orbit in front of an audience of rabid liberals, Clinton is ready to stake out a position that seems to assert that only government is responsible for job creation.
Rather than a misstatement or a gaffe or even a late life avowal of neo-socialist claptrap her nonsense about corporations not creating jobs is testimony to her inauthentic nature. …
More from Jennifer Rubin.
… This latest gaffe confirms that when Clinton’s lips move she is telling us what she thinks her base wants to hear, not sharing any original or sincerely felt position of her own. Moreover, her utter lack of spontaneity has now become a primary characteristic. As one Capitol Hill Republican put it, “She overcompensates when she’s in uncomfortable territory.” Like trying to be a populist. Or trying to attack the corporations whose trough she has fed on for millions of dollars in speaking fees. Or trying to appear nonchalant about a challenger from her left, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who actually believes anti-business rhetoric.
How is it that Clinton is, well, such a bad politician? Remember in 2008 she wasn’t all that scintillating, appearing stiff and remote and running on experience in a “change” election. For decades Bill Clinton had been the politician and she, the operator behind the scenes. Electoral politics most obviously had not been her own life’s calling. As we age, old habits of mind become more ingrained. Whatever tendencies one has magnify and whatever limitations one suffers from become more impervious. Then, consider that for nearly six years as secretary of state and former secretary of state she has perfected the art of saying not very much at all. No wonder her public performances are so painful to watch. …
And Ed Morrissey with his case backed by some numbers.
… The miminum-wage bill for which Hillary Clinton voted passed in 2007 and took effect in stages, beginning that summer. The Household Survey of the BLS showed that the US economy had 146.063 million jobs in June 2007, just before the increase took place. Last month’s data showed that the US economy had 146.6 million jobs — an increase of less than 500,000 in over 7 years, not “millions of jobs” as Hillary claims here. In fact, the 146.6 million is the highest it’s ever gotten since the passage of that law. In the same period, the civilian workforce participation rate has gone from 66% to 62.7%. On a population basis, there are a lot fewer people working after the last minimum wage hike, not more, and wages are actually down, not up.
Compare this to the “trickle-down” era of the Reagan presidency. When Reagan took office in January 1981, the US economy had 99.995 million jobs and the participation rate was 63.9%. By the end of his presidency in January 1989, the US economy had grown more than 16 million jobs (116.708 million total) and the participation rate had leaped to 66.5%. That covers nearly the same length of time since the last minimum wage hike (96 months vs 89 months), but both include about five years of technical economic recovery.
Obviously there were other factors in play here, so lets focus on something more directly affected by minimum-wage hikes — teen unemployment, which is where minimum-wage hikes have the most impact. When Reagan took office, teen unemployment was 19.1%, but it dropped to 16.4% by the end of his presidency. In June 2007, it was at a similar level, 16.3%. Today it’s 20%, and has been bouncing in 2014 between 19% and 21%. Don’t forget that these figures are more than five years into a supposed recovery. …