The Front Page Cover
~ Featuring ~
Cracked Foundation
by John McCormack
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liar-nObamaCare's Failure Is Trump's Fault?
In an interview with Fox News' Chris Wallace on Sunday, Jonathan Gruber, one of the primary architects of liar-nObamaCare, was questioned as to who was at fault for the law's failure. Gruber responded, "Before President Trump was elected there were no counties in America that did not have an insurer. ... Then you have a president who comes in, undercuts open enrollment, doesn't honor the obligations this law makes to insurers and as a result premiums are going up and insurers are exiting." In other words, liar-nObamaCare is failing because of Donald Trump. What a conveniently deceitful excuse. The reality is that insurance companies have been swallowing losses for years, prompting many to leave the government exchanges well before Trump even became a candidate for president. And while Trump has talked about cutting funding to liar-nObamaCare, to date none of those threats have been enacted. Once again, Gruber is simply peddling a lie.
Meanwhile, Barack liar-nObama was given the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award over the weekend. In his speech he touted his and Democrat brave efforts in forcing liar-nObamaCare onto the American public, all the while ignoring the skyrocketing costs and general wreckage to Americans' freedom his law created. He declared, "These [Democrat] men and women did the right thing. They did the hard thing ... and most of them did lose their seats." Yes, many Democrats did lose their seats, but Republicans are proving that their "sacrifice" was worth it by their own unwillingness to potentially suffer a similar fate in repealing the disastrous law for the good of the country.
Finally, while Trump is not to blame for liar-nObamaCare's imminent collapse, he has hampered Republicans' efforts at repealing and replacing the law. The fact of the matter is that Trump likes too many things about liar-nObamaCare. His demand that the replacement law retain some of the more costly elements of the "Affordable" Care Act has only proven to deepen divisions within the Republican Party, weakening their ability to comprehensively repeal and replace. We're discovering he and many moderates simply don't want true repeal. Just this past weekend Trump tweeted, "Of course the Australians have better healthcare than we do — everybody does. liar-nObamaCare is Dead! But our healthcare will soon be great." It's strange to offer praise of a single-payer system, which is what Republicans are trying to avoid.
So, while Democrats continue to spin the fiction of the "successes" of liar-nObamaCare, Trump and Republicans are saddled with a disunified effort to fix the mess they were given. ~The Patriot Post
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Does Anyone In Washington Even Care
That We Are 20 Trillion Dollars In Debt?
by Michael Snyder
{thesleuthjournal.com} ~ There has been a tremendous amount of talk about the spending deal that was just reached in Congress. Most of the focus has been on who “won” and who “lost” politically... and if you have been keeping up with my articles you definitely know my opinion on the matter. But what nobody is really talking about is that this deal actually increases spending at a time when our debt has been absolutely exploding. We added more than a trillion dollars a year to the U.S. national debt during liar-nObama’s eight years in the White House, and our debt binge actually accelerated toward the end of his second term. In fact, the national debt increased by more than 1.4 trillion dollars during fiscal 2016…http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/debt-insanity-20-trillion-dollars/
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A Slap in the Face to Democracy:
Canada's "Anti-Islamophobia" Motion
Canada's top Muslim cleric, Iqbal Al-Nadvi,has openly quoted the Islamic
Prophet Muhammed asserting, "Jihad will continue till the Day of Judgment."
by Ruthie Blum
{gatestoneinstitute.org} ~ Growing concern in Canada over liberal policies benefitting Muslim extremists sheds light on why an "anti-Islamophobia" bill -- proposed in the wake of the deadly January 17 Quebec City mosque attack and approved by parliament... on March 23 -- spurred such heated controversy there. Motion 103, tabled by Liberal Party MP Iqra Khalid, a Muslim representing Mississauga-Erin Mills, calls on the Canadian government to "develop a whole-of-government approach to reducing or eliminating systemic racism and religious discrimination including Islamophobia."...https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10313/canada-anti-islamophobia-motion
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Happy About French Election Outcome,
But Worried About Rise Of Populism
by Charles Campbell
{westernjournalism.com} ~ Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice thinks it’s a net positive that Emmanuel Macron won France’s presidential race on Sunday... However, the former secretary of state expressed concern about the rise of populism in Europe and its impact on politics. “I really do believe that these populists are changing the character of the politics just by being there, so even mainstream candidates are having to respond to their agenda,” Rice said in an interview with Capital Download... http://www.westernjournalism.com/condoleezza-rice-happy-french-election-outcome-worried-rise-populism/?utm_source=Email&utm_medium=patriotupdate&utm_campaign=dailyam&utm_content=libertyalliance
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North Korea Wants To Reduce
White House “to Ashes”
by jon Lockett
{thesun.co.uk} ~ In the latest bizarre threat to the United States to come from Kim Jong Un’s regime, an editorial by North Korea’s state news agency warned that the White House would be “reduced to ashes.”... According to the U.K. Sunday Express, the 2,000-word editorial condemned the Trump administration for its deployment of naval vessels to the region and promised forced reunification with South Korea. “This is a stern warning to the U.S. imperialists and their stooges running amuck for aggression and war moves,” the editorial read. “The world will clearly witness how the crime-woven history of the U.S. imperialists will be over, how the despicable remaining days of the South Korean puppet forces will come to an end and how national reunification, the cherished desire of the Korean nation, will be achieved.”... https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/3501422/now-north-korea-threatens-to-nuke-the-white-house-as-it-brands-american-troops-murderous-ogres/
.California Dems Vote for Communists in Government Jobs
by Daniel Greenfield
{frontpagemag.com} ~ It seems a little late now that all the elected branches of government are dominated by them, but might as well make it nice and legal... Being a communist would no longer be a fireable offense for California government employees under a bill passed Monday by the state Assembly. But voting for Trump still is. It would eliminate part of the law that allows public employees to be fired for being a member of the Communist Party. Employees could still be fired for being members of organizations they know advocate for overthrowing the government by force or violence. Except the two are one and the same. But the left has different standards for groups advocating the overthrow of the government... that they agree with... http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/266656/california-dems-vote-communists-%C2%A0government-jobs-daniel-greenfield.
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by John McCormack
{weeklystandard.com} ~ When news broke that Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and president of the Heritage Foundation, was being removed from his role at the prominent conservative think tank, activists and political insiders wondered: Had the Founding Father of the Tea Party finally been defeated by his longtime foes in the GOP establishment? "If Heritage pushes Jim DeMint out, it was because a few board members, who are close to the Republican establishment, never wanted him to be president and have been working to push him out ever since," one operative who had worked with Heritage told Politico, which broke the news of DeMint's imminent departure on April 28.
The speculation made a certain amount of sense: This was Jim DeMint, after all, the man who had clashed with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and bucked the GOP establishment in order to help elect conservatives Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ben Sasse to the Senate.
But in the following days, both DeMint's allies and critics close to Heritage painted a different picture. Both sides agreed that the departure had little to do with ideological disputes. But they sharply disagreed about why DeMint was axed.
In reports in the Atlantic, Politico, and the Washington Examiner, DeMint's allies said he had simply lost an internal power struggle with Michael Needham, the 35-year-old CEO of Heritage Action, the think tank's legally distinct activist and lobbying wing. Needham also has a reputation for having an antagonistic relationship with the Republican establishment. DeMint supporters accused Needham of using any argument he could—pro-Trump or anti-Trump—to turn board members against DeMint, with the ultimate goal of becoming the foundation's president.
That characterization was disputed by DeMint's critics, including Bill Walton, a member of the Heritage Foundation's board of trustees, which unanimously requested and received DeMint's resignation on May 2. "This is not a Needham-versus-DeMint power struggle, and it was not about having different views about conservative policy," Walton told me. Walton expects Heritage will find a new president in a matter of months and it won't be Needham. "Mike's brilliant," Walton said, but the Heritage president needs to be "somebody with a track record of running a significant institution, and that's not his background as of yet."
"When the board of trustees announced DeMint's departure on May 2, a statement from chairman Thomas Saunders accused DeMint of "significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation." DeMint responded with a statement listing a number of achievements—including Heritage's key role in the Trump transition—and pointing out that the University of Pennsylvania had named Heritage one of the best-managed think tanks in the country.
The board didn't name any specific problems with DeMint's management style, but Bill Walton came up with a few in his interview with TWS. The top layer of management beneath DeMint, known as group vice presidents, was filled by his former Senate staffers, and "they set up a system where you couldn't get anything out of research until the group vice presidents read it. And they were busy doing their own jobs," Walton said. "So we had some instances where people would write things, and we couldn't get them out in a timely fashion." Walton also said that some sound research was rejected on ideological grounds, but he declined to provide specific examples.
Paul Winfree, a former Heritage analyst who now works at the White House, took to social media to defend the research department. "I worked in two different research departments at Heritage under the helm of both Feulner & DeMint," Winfree wrote on Twitter. "The research shops were always protected by management from politicization" DeMint's defenders said this criticism of the research department was simply an attack on Heritage's longstanding policy to speak with one voice. "Literally the entire story of Heritage from its founding is that it's not an ivory tower think tank," said one DeMint ally. "Heritage is a do-tank that works to be relevant to the conversation, to lead the conservative movement, speak with one voice. You can't speak with one voice if you have multiple researchers who write on their own without any review, without any conversation, without any collaboration." Such vetting, the DeMint ally said, is what made Heritage different from think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings, and without it, that's how Heritage ended up with "an individual mandate to buy health insurance, and supporting the bailout, and Romneycare"—all policies different Heritage scholars had endorsed before DeMint's arrival.
But the board's criticism of DeMint's management style wasn't limited to the research department. Another instance of DeMint's poor management, Walton said, was when "we had somebody who was invited to the White House and wanted to bring along one of our health care experts and had to get approval from the management committee, and that was slow in coming, so we missed the opportunity to take our own health care expert to join in the debate on the health care plan. It was things like that."
Walton declined to discuss the White House meeting in greater detail, but according to sources familiar with the situation, this dispute underscores the fact that DeMint's ouster was at least in part a power struggle with Heritage Action. Needham had been invited to discuss the GOP's liar-nObamacare repeal-and-replace efforts with Vice President Mike Pence at the White House on April 3. The topic of discussion was an amendment that would provide waivers for liar-nObamacare's regulations to states under certain conditions, and Needham had requested the day before that a foundation scholar join him.
The foundation's leadership rejected this request, according to a source, not because they were angling for a specific legislative outcome on the American Health Care Act, but to give their scholars the opportunity to analyze a proposal that hadn't yet been put into legislative text. With the congressional recess fast approaching, there was intense pressure to hold a vote, and Heritage Foundation leadership didn't want to get boxed in at a White House meeting, coaxed into supporting a plan that hadn't been vetted.
It's easy to see how this incident could be interpreted or spun in different ways: Was DeMint's team ruling with a heavy hand, or was Needham making a power play against DeMint? Was the foundation protecting its scholars from political pressure or protecting its turf? Whatever the truth, that story—and others like it—made their way back to Heritage's governing board and played a prime role in the ouster of one of America's most prominent conservative figures from one of the country's most powerful conservative institutions.
Cracked Foundation
{weeklystandard.com} ~ When news broke that Jim DeMint, the former South Carolina senator and president of the Heritage Foundation, was being removed from his role at the prominent conservative think tank, activists and political insiders wondered: Had the Founding Father of the Tea Party finally been defeated by his longtime foes in the GOP establishment? "If Heritage pushes Jim DeMint out, it was because a few board members, who are close to the Republican establishment, never wanted him to be president and have been working to push him out ever since," one operative who had worked with Heritage told Politico, which broke the news of DeMint's imminent departure on April 28.
The speculation made a certain amount of sense: This was Jim DeMint, after all, the man who had clashed with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell and bucked the GOP establishment in order to help elect conservatives Marco Rubio, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Ben Sasse to the Senate.
But in the following days, both DeMint's allies and critics close to Heritage painted a different picture. Both sides agreed that the departure had little to do with ideological disputes. But they sharply disagreed about why DeMint was axed.
In reports in the Atlantic, Politico, and the Washington Examiner, DeMint's allies said he had simply lost an internal power struggle with Michael Needham, the 35-year-old CEO of Heritage Action, the think tank's legally distinct activist and lobbying wing. Needham also has a reputation for having an antagonistic relationship with the Republican establishment. DeMint supporters accused Needham of using any argument he could—pro-Trump or anti-Trump—to turn board members against DeMint, with the ultimate goal of becoming the foundation's president.
That characterization was disputed by DeMint's critics, including Bill Walton, a member of the Heritage Foundation's board of trustees, which unanimously requested and received DeMint's resignation on May 2. "This is not a Needham-versus-DeMint power struggle, and it was not about having different views about conservative policy," Walton told me. Walton expects Heritage will find a new president in a matter of months and it won't be Needham. "Mike's brilliant," Walton said, but the Heritage president needs to be "somebody with a track record of running a significant institution, and that's not his background as of yet."
"When the board of trustees announced DeMint's departure on May 2, a statement from chairman Thomas Saunders accused DeMint of "significant and worsening management issues that led to a breakdown of internal communications and cooperation." DeMint responded with a statement listing a number of achievements—including Heritage's key role in the Trump transition—and pointing out that the University of Pennsylvania had named Heritage one of the best-managed think tanks in the country.
The board didn't name any specific problems with DeMint's management style, but Bill Walton came up with a few in his interview with TWS. The top layer of management beneath DeMint, known as group vice presidents, was filled by his former Senate staffers, and "they set up a system where you couldn't get anything out of research until the group vice presidents read it. And they were busy doing their own jobs," Walton said. "So we had some instances where people would write things, and we couldn't get them out in a timely fashion." Walton also said that some sound research was rejected on ideological grounds, but he declined to provide specific examples.
Paul Winfree, a former Heritage analyst who now works at the White House, took to social media to defend the research department. "I worked in two different research departments at Heritage under the helm of both Feulner & DeMint," Winfree wrote on Twitter. "The research shops were always protected by management from politicization" DeMint's defenders said this criticism of the research department was simply an attack on Heritage's longstanding policy to speak with one voice. "Literally the entire story of Heritage from its founding is that it's not an ivory tower think tank," said one DeMint ally. "Heritage is a do-tank that works to be relevant to the conversation, to lead the conservative movement, speak with one voice. You can't speak with one voice if you have multiple researchers who write on their own without any review, without any conversation, without any collaboration." Such vetting, the DeMint ally said, is what made Heritage different from think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and Brookings, and without it, that's how Heritage ended up with "an individual mandate to buy health insurance, and supporting the bailout, and Romneycare"—all policies different Heritage scholars had endorsed before DeMint's arrival.
But the board's criticism of DeMint's management style wasn't limited to the research department. Another instance of DeMint's poor management, Walton said, was when "we had somebody who was invited to the White House and wanted to bring along one of our health care experts and had to get approval from the management committee, and that was slow in coming, so we missed the opportunity to take our own health care expert to join in the debate on the health care plan. It was things like that."
Walton declined to discuss the White House meeting in greater detail, but according to sources familiar with the situation, this dispute underscores the fact that DeMint's ouster was at least in part a power struggle with Heritage Action. Needham had been invited to discuss the GOP's liar-nObamacare repeal-and-replace efforts with Vice President Mike Pence at the White House on April 3. The topic of discussion was an amendment that would provide waivers for liar-nObamacare's regulations to states under certain conditions, and Needham had requested the day before that a foundation scholar join him.
The foundation's leadership rejected this request, according to a source, not because they were angling for a specific legislative outcome on the American Health Care Act, but to give their scholars the opportunity to analyze a proposal that hadn't yet been put into legislative text. With the congressional recess fast approaching, there was intense pressure to hold a vote, and Heritage Foundation leadership didn't want to get boxed in at a White House meeting, coaxed into supporting a plan that hadn't been vetted.
It's easy to see how this incident could be interpreted or spun in different ways: Was DeMint's team ruling with a heavy hand, or was Needham making a power play against DeMint? Was the foundation protecting its scholars from political pressure or protecting its turf? Whatever the truth, that story—and others like it—made their way back to Heritage's governing board and played a prime role in the ouster of one of America's most prominent conservative figures from one of the country's most powerful conservative institutions.
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