HALF-FULL REPORT 08/01/14

If a documentary were made about John Kerry’s performance as Secretary of State, it ought to be entitled: "The Putz." In an administration in which the most common characteristics of senior officials are arrogance and incompetence, Kerry sticks out.

The Secretary of State was in the news this week for proposing a cease fire plan that blatantly favors Hamas, and for getting his (very prominent) nose out of joint when it was summarily rejected, and not just by the Israelis. He’s so out of touch with reality he doesn’t even realize he’s a failure, Jennifer Rubin says.

 An Israeli television station said the transcript it obtained of the 35 minute telephone conversation between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last Sunday indicates Zero demanded Netanyahu accept the one-sided terms.Zero Hedge has a transcript, and some interesting commentary.

"It’s bad enough to have a president with little foreign policy sense or credibility, but such a president, when coupled with a discredited secretary of state, brings U.S. foreign policy to a grinding halt," Ms. Rubin said.

In this instance, we can be grateful our president and his secretary of state are international laughingstocks.

Ordinarily, this would be a bad thing. But in this instance, we can be grateful our president and his secretary of state are international laughingstocks. Netanyahu can have no doubt about which side they’re on, but has little to fear from resisting their demands.

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla, explains here when Israel should agree to a cease fire:

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Some suspect Kerry was made secretary of state in order to make Hillary Clinton’s performance seem better. Here, here and here are reminders it wasn’t.

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It’s a Mad Mad Mad World when Egypt is a more valuable ally of Israel than is the United States.

Egyptian President (former general) Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has been behaving shrewdly on the world stage, and has treated our secretary of state with the contempt he deserves.

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In other foreign policy/national security news this week:

Islamists claim they’ve taken over Benghazi.

The Pentagon has no idea where more than 40 percent of the weapons it’s given the Afghans are.

Zero’s downsizing of the military leaves America too weak to counter rising global threats, said an independent panel appointed by DoD and Congress. We should be very alarmed, Bill Kristol says.

Sen. Mark Udall, D-CO, has called for the resignation of CIA Director John Brennan in the wake of his admission yesterday (7/30) the CIA had indeed spied on Congress.

Foreign policy is no longer a strong point for President Obama, the Associated Press said in this news analysis today. Well, duh.

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This isn’t about politics, but it’s very big, very worrisome. If you weren’t sweating about the Ebola virus before, you will be after reading this.

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Democrats were gleeful last night after House Republicans failed to pass a bill to address the border crisis. Their joy was short-lived, because the GOP leadership and rebellious conservatives worked out a deal today.

Hardliners such as Mickey Kaus, who fears Senate Dems will use any bill to revive "amnesty," don’t want the House to pass anything. That’s terrible advice.

To solve the crisis, there must be new legislation to:

*streamline deportations (fewer lawyers, more bus tickets);

*forbid ICE from releasing before their deportation hearings illegals who have committed violent crimes (2,000 were released last year);

*require the president to disclose where he is sending the illegals, and how much is being spent on their care;

*establish a system for tracking those who overstay their visas (roughly 40 percent of illegals entered the country lawfully);

*give the Border Patrol new tools such as "Blue Servo," and build a border fence in high traffic areas, and

*to cut off foreign aid to the countries facilitating the immigrant flood.

Americans now think illegal immigration is our most serious problem. The vast majority want Congress to pass reforms this year. It would be politically catastrophic for Republicans to let themselves be seen as the obstacle to reform.

Since as long as Democrats control it, there’s no way the Senate will approve any bill the House passes, political considerations are paramount. It’s all about appearances.

The usual suspects decried the bill the leadership’s task force produced as a "Trojan horse," a "sellout" by the "Establishment." The relative ease with which a compromise was worked out is evidence the charge is mostly BS. Ross Kaminsky details here the good things in the bill. But the conservative rebellion, led mostly by Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala, has made the bill better.

The sticking point was the bill by Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Tex, introduced in the House by Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-TN, to deny the president funds to legalize the status of illegal immigrant minors. Since there is absolutely no way the Senate will approve the DACA limitation, this, too, is all about postering.

It’s unfortunate rebellious conservatives chose this issue on which to posture. A provision forbidding ICE from releasing violent criminals, or cutting off foreign aid to facilitators of the illegal immigrant flood would have been very popular. Democrats would have had a hard time explaining why they voted against it. The rebels chose to make their stand instead on an issue that is popular with only a minority of Republicans. There are a lot of words that can be said about this, but "smart" isn’t one of them.

The Senate failed to pass its version of the border crisis supplemental, but no one in the media is beating up the Democrat leadership there for inaction. The overwhelming bias of the news media makes it all the more critical that Republicans not shoot themselves in the feet.

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In other Border Crisis news this week:

ICE has remodeled – at a cost it won’t disclose – a 29 acre facility in Karnes City, Texas (about 100 miles south of Austin) which will provide "suites"with flat screen tvs and telephones; a computer lab, internet access, recreational facilities, a cafeteria which will serve three all you can eat meals a day, and free medical and dental care to the 532 illegals they plan to house there. They’ll also be provided with immigration lawyers, pro bono. The estimated cost is $140 per person per day.

Illegal immigrant children have exposed federal agents to lice, scabies, tuberculosis and chicken pox, according to a report Thursday by the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security.

Gov. Mike Pence learned illegal immigrants would be housed in his state from news reports

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Democrats are using the (bogus) threat of impeachment to raise funds from their gullible base, and to motivate more of it to go to the polls this November. Even liberals Ron Fournier and  Joe Klein find this bizarre, and disturbing.

Zero is using the threat of issuing additional executive orders gutting enforcement of immigration laws to goad more Republicans into talking impeachment. If he does issue those orders, it would be an impeachable offense, but it would be political suicide for Republicans to pursue it, said Charles Krauthammer.

Democrats never tried to impeach President Bush, said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Tex, who in 2008 cosponsored a bill to impeach President Bush. Ms. Jackson Lee has been described – charitably — as "not the sharpest knife in the drawer." If she were a knife, she couldn’t cut through a stick of butter warmed in the oven.

Alison Lundergan Grimes, who is running against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky, thinks Israel’s ballistic missile defense system works in tunnels; want supporters to put her bumper stickers in their yards.

But in the not the sharpest knife in the drawer sweepstakes, it’s hard to top Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, head of the Democratic National Committee. Here’s Debbie Dimwit on MSNBC yesterday, criticizing Republicans for suing President Obama for doing his job when, in fact, he’s doing his job "actually less often, and at a rate that is lower than any President since Grover Cleveland."

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The House passed Wednesday (7/30) a bill to sue President Obama for failing to uphold the laws. Many conservatives snipe at Speaker John Boehner, R-OH, for pursuing this. The lawyers from whom he got the idea make the case for it here. Forget impeachment, the Wall Street Journal said in an editorial. This lawsuit is the real threat to Zero.

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House and Senate negotiators have agreed on a VA "reform" bill that does a little to relieve the plight of veterans; more to reward the bureaucrats who’ve neglected and abused them. Details here, here, here and here.

Rep. Jeff Miller, R-Fla, chair of the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, knows it’s a bad bill, but agreed to it because of the urgent need to provide vets with some relief. Without the massive bribe for VA bureaucrats, Sen. Bernard Sanders, I-VT, chairman of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee – 17 of whose 20 largest contributors are unions -would have blocked any reform at all.

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New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo could be in really big trouble. With the law, not the voters. Watergate type trouble, thinks the very left wing Nation magazine.

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The administration’s argument Congress intended for those who sign up for Obamacare on the federal exchange should get subsidies too has been torpedoed by a video of remarks made in January of 2012 by one of Obamacare’s leading architects.

What’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credit," said MIT economist John Gruber. "I hope that that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges."

That was just a "speak-o," the verbal equivalent of a typo, Gruber said in the wake of rulings last week in which one appeals court threw out subsidies for those who purchased Obamacare policies on federal exchanges, another upheld them. But Gruber had said the exact same thing on other occasions.  So had Sen. Max Baucus.

As of noon EDT today, recordings have been found of 7 Gruber "speak-os." Liberal WaPo blogger and Journolist founder Greg Sargent thought he’d found "bombshell" evidence supporting the administration when he discovered an earlier version of the "Affordable Care Act" would have provided subsidies to purchasers on the federal exchange, too. Poor Greg didn’t realize courts consider removal of such language in subsequent iterations of the bill conclusive proof it was not "intended" to be in the final version.

"This was all going to come up in court eventually, so Sargent won’t go down in history as the ObamaCare apologist who accidentally killed it, but the panic level on the Left went up a few notches after they noticed where his ‘bombshell’ ended up detonating," said John Hayward of Human Events.

This doesn’t matter to most liberals, who care only that they get what they want. But liberal judges require at least a fig leaf of ambiguity to justify their blatantly political rulings. Gruber, Baucus and Sargent have stripped it away. That’ll be a big problem for Obamacare supporters when the Supreme Court settles the conflicting appeals court rulings sometime next year.The Competitive Enterprise Institute, one of the plaintiffs in the suit the 4^th Circuit ruled against, petitioned the Supreme Court yesterday to review the ruling.

In this instance, the "Supreme Court" means Chief Justice John Roberts, the surprise swing vote in the 5-4 decision in 2012 which held the personal mandate in Obamacare is constitutional because it is a tax.

I didn’t join in the calumny of Roberts by outraged conservatives because I agree with him it is no more the business of the courts to correct mistakes voters make at the polls than it is to fix "drafting errors" in the laws Congress passes.

Whether Roberts intended to or not, he did conservatives a favor, argued Bill Dunne in the American Thinker in January, because what has made Obamacare wildly unpopular has been its implementation. To paraphrase Nancy Pelosi, we had to find out what was in the law to really, really hate it. Which, according to this poll, more of us do now than ever.

If Roberts had voted to strangle Obamacare in the cradle, "Howls of outrage would have erupted from every Democrat/leftist stronghold," wrote Dunne. Many who see Zero now as a dufus and a flagrant liar would have viewed him as a martyr. The Dems likely would have retaken the House.

Dunne (and I) think Roberts knew what he was doing. He got the 4 libs to agree Obamacare is constitutional only if it is a tax. And by defining it as a tax, the chief justice supercharged this lawsuit.

"All Bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives," it says in Article I, Section 7. The Obamacare law originated in the Senate. Attorneys general in 20 states have filed briefs in support of the suit, so it, too, is likely to wend its merry way to the Supremes. (Oklahoma AG Scott Pruitt brought Gruber’s remarks to the attention of the judge Tuesday.)

 "I am beginning to think John Roberts plays a mean game of chess," said Dr. John at Flopping Aces.

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In other Obamacare news this week, a Government Accountability Office report details how HHS wasted $840 million of our money on a web site that (still) doesn’t work; health insurance premiums in California have risen between 22 and 88 percent this year; Aetna’s CEO says Obamacare numbers are "worse than we expected;" emails indicate a cozy crony capitalist relationship between the Obama administration and big insurance companies; the Obamacare web site still isn’t ready for prime time; another GAO investigation indicates Obamacare is a fraudster’s dream come true.

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Primaries next week in Kansas on Tuesday and Tennessee on Thursday will close out this year’s electoral battles between conservative insurgents and "Establishment" Republicans.

In Kansas, Dr. Milton Wolf (Barack Obama’s cousin) is taking on Pat Roberts, 78, who’s been in the Senate since 1997. Roberts has led by at least 20 percentage points in every independent poll taken.

In Tennessee, State. Sen. Joe Carr faces off against Lamar Alexander, 74, who’s been in the Senate since 2003. His lifetime voting record is 76, but was only 60 last year. The big issue has been Alexander’s vote for the "Gang of 8" bill. The surge of illegals has put it front and center.

After attending an Alexander rally this week, Tennessee political reporter Bill Hobbs said he sees an upset brewing.

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The "carbon footprints" of environmentalists are substantially larger than those of most other people. I chose to end the HFR this week with this bit of old news (it’s from May) so I can refer to Instapundit’s remark that he won’t start worrying about "Climate Change" until the alarmists start acting as if they really do.

The news this week – and for every week to come for the forseeable future – should be viewed in the context of a race: Will the Obamunists destroy the country before we can stop them?

We’ll lose the race if Republicans don’t win big in the midterms. The odds favor a GOP takeover of the Senate, say the New York Times and the Washington Post. The GOP could win 12 to 14 seats, says the chairman of the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee. You’d expect him to say that, but Josh Krausharr of the National Journal also sees signs of a Republican wave building.

But if a lot of us don’t up our game, we may blow it. We haven’t been acting as if we really believe the things we say about the danger Obama poses to America. If we did…

We would concentrate our fire on the Obamunists. To win, Republicans must convince voters they’re capable of governing. When we snipe constantly at each other, we undermine that perception.

We would focus on the effects of Obama’s policies. When we speculate about the motives behind them, we risk turning off voters unhappy with the way things are, but unwilling to attribute Obama’s failures to anything more sinister than incompetence. If Americans believe Democrats are ruining the country, they don’t need to be persuaded they’re doing it deliberately to vote against them.

We would muse less about what Americans ought to think, pay more attention to what they actually do think. If we offer credible solutions to what most Americans say are our biggest problems, we’ll win. If we keep beating the drums for our favorite hobby horses, we may not.

We would watch our tone. Liberals constantly accuse us of being "extremists." When we’re strident, we make it easier for people to believe them. The best way to seem moderate is to sound moderate.

I’m appalled at how many conservatives go out of their way to sound heartless and cruel, as when they criticized Glenn Beck for planning to bring water, food, clothing and childrens’ toys to the immigrant camps where conditions are squalid. (I doubt he’ll be delivering soccer balls to the suites at Karnes City. I’m trying to figure out how to get in there.)

Jack Kemp had a saying to which more of us should pay heed: "People don’t care what you think if they don’t think you care."

Things will get worse for America as long as Zero is president. There’s not much we can about that. But if we do a better job of explaining to Americans why things are so bad and how they can be made better, if we fight our enemies instead of our allies, if we try to find common ground with those Zero has alienated and betrayed, we can win in November a victory big enough not only to stop the Obamunists dead in their tracks, but to kick start an American renaissance.

Whether we’ll do what’s necessary to win this victory — or just continue to bitch — will determine whether the glass is filling up, or emptying out.

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