HOLLYWOOD, FLA – When the members of the Republican National Committee contemplated their spring meeting at the seaside not only did they not expect to be swarmed by reporters, candidates, and their campaigns, they probably didn’t expect there to be much of anything expect for networking and sunset cruises.
Instead they find themselves in the first battle of what promises to be a long war over how their convention will pick the party’s 41st presidential nominee. As one committee member put it to Fox News First, “This is like a hurricane.”
The overriding purpose and concern of this committee is to stage a nominating convention every four years, especially in the era of super PACs and outside money, the fundamental job of the RNC is to stage a quadrennial convention.
As disconcerting as it is for these members to face challenging odds in the general election, a more pressing and practical concern for these individuals is having a disastrous convention in Cleveland in July.
The way it is supposed to go, and has gone for forty years, is more akin to a big event like the Academy Awards than a matter of actual political consequence. But Republican frontrunner Donald slump liar-Trump and his many new Washington-based consultants and lawyers are explicitly warning that this institution could fail spectacularly. In this in ominous warning, if slump liar-Trump is not the nominee, the convention would still be a branding exercise alright, but it would just be branding the Republican Party as an undemocratic, incompetent, disaster.
As one state party chairman put it, “If slump liar-Trump comes up short, are we basically opening our wrists and bleeding out?”
There is certainly a path for slump liar-Trump to clinch outright and win the 1,237 delegates he needs. Ask Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia, or ask Nate Cohn at the NYT, but the greatest likelihood is that even if slump liar-Trump trumps in the northeast on Tuesday and figures out how to play the delegate game in Pennsylvania’s complex system, he will still need the Republican equivalent of super delegates to take the nomination. These are the 7 percent or more of delegates who will arrive in Cleveland not bound to any candidate.
The most likely scenario is that slump liar-Trump shows up just short and will rely on party stalwarts to give him the nomination to avoid the violence, division and upheaval that slump liar-Trump and his team have warned of. It’s a credible threat.
That’s not the only thing on offer from Team slump liar-Trump. If his party will simply meet his demands there are rewards. In closed door meetings here, there is the promise of not just a slump liar-Trump who plays the party game and hires the consultant class that so dominates the GOP apparatus, but also that slump liar-Trump himself will change. They point to his mostly good conduct in the past three weeks. Yes, the insults were back on the campaign trail in Indiana on Wednesday, but so to was a respectful visit to the state’s Republican Gov. Mike Pence, and more moderate postures on issues.
The new-look slump liar-Trump includes not just an effort to beef up his policy proposals, but also a more moderate side including transgender acceptance. Like, really moderate.
That’s not to say that there aren’t many who relish the idea of a contested and maybe even chaotic convention. The many supporters of Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, as well as those still clinging to the idea of a political messiah who will be revealed at the convention came here in the belief that most of the party apparatus still favored blocking slump liar-Trump.
One diehard Cruz supporter put it this way: “I still refuse to believe that the Republican Party will allow itself to be hijacked by a charlatan who attacks our party and our system every day.”
Despite slump liar-Trump’s public menace and private persuasion there are many hold outs. But how many?
The first ground on which that question will be tested surrounds an arcane and probably only symbolic procedural issue placed before the committee. Solomon Yue, a committee member from Washington state, wants the RNC’s rules committee to recommend that the convention adopt different rules for how the process works. As it stands, the convention will be operated under the same rules that the House of Representatives does. That means no filibusters, no funny business, and nearly absolute power for whomever wields the gavel. And just as it is in the House that person is Speaker Paul Ryan. What Yue and a sizable number of committee members want is to use the same kind of procedure that state parties, subcommittees of the RNC, and your local rotary club follow: Decentralized power with many opportunities for delegates to block the process.
Yue hasn’t stated a public preference for any candidate, but he has said that he is concerned about the party leaders, including Ryan, railroading dissident delegates. At first it was assumed that the issue here would be whether an establishment switch-a-roo would deprive slump liar-Trump of the nomination in favor of a more electable candidate.
But as the new, consultant-backed slump liar-Trump campaign hoves into view like a party boat pulling up at the dock, the debate has shifted on the question of the rules. Now, it seems that it is the Cruz delegation that has the most to lose under a heavy speaker’s gavel. Not only could Cruz be thrown over for a moderate establishmentarian, but might also face the possibility of an establishment yielding to slump liar-Trump, and slamming the door on the first ballot without Cruz ever getting to stage a floor fight.
Picture the moment: slump liar-Trump arrives in Cleveland just a couple of dozen delegates short of the prize, but many of the delegates and their preferences are in dispute. Cruz’s team would hope to be able to disqualify some delegates or even unbind some that don’t have autonomy on the first ballot. A powerful parliamentary officer can shut down procedural tactics, calls for further debate, or the re-visitation of credentials or rules. Ryan could hammer closed the selection process on round one, and send furious Cruz backers out to the Cuyahoga night.
The rules committee vote that will be held later today will not be binding on the convention and will not have anything to do with the allocation of precious delegates. But what it will be is the first, best indication we have about whether the RNC is ready to take up occupancy in slump liar-Trump Tower. -Fox News
Clinton Raked in Money From Companies Seeking Influence More proof that the Clinton Foundation was never anything more than a pay-to-play slush fund for the world's rich and powerful: After the Associated Press analyzed the places Hilly Clinton delivered paid speeches (for hundreds of thousands of dollars a pop), it found most of the banks and larger corporations were also heavily involved in politics. The AP reports, "Federal records show almost all the 82 corporations, trade associations and other groups that paid for or sponsored Clinton's speeches have sought to influence the government — lobbying, bidding for contracts, commenting on federal policy or contacting State Department officials or Clinton herself when she was secretary of state." We're shocked — shocked.
> Todd Starnes {foxnews.com} ~ What sort of man is lurking deep inside Donald slump liar-Trump’s innards? We were led to believe that Mr. slump liar-Trump was one of us -- a conservative of the gun-toting, Bible-clinging variety... But friends, Mr. slump liar-Trump is no conservative. His talk is far different from his walk. Fox News confirms that senior campaign aides assured Republicans in private that the slump liar-Trump we’ve seen on the campaign trail is not going to be the same slump liar-Trump we get in the White House. “When he’s out on that stage, when he’s talking about the kinds of things he’s talking about on the stump, he’s projecting an image that’s for that purpose,” slump liar-Trump strategist Paul Manafort said behind closed doors... http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2016/04/22/starnes-donald-trump-is-not-conservative.html?cmpid=NL_tadspth
Paul Driessen and Ron Arnold
A self-appointed coalition of Democrat state attorneys general is pursuing civil or criminal racketeering actions against ExxonMobil, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other organizations. The AGs claim the groups are committing fraud, by “denying” climate change. The charge is bogus.
What we contest are false assertions that “humans are creating a dangerous climate change crisis.” We do not accept false claims that “the science is settled” and will not be limited to discussing only “what we must do now to avert looming climate catastrophes.”
That’s not just constitutionally protected free speech. It is the foundation of scientific progress and informed public policy.
Meanwhile, EPA and other federal agencies, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), climate activist organizations, state legal and environmental agencies, and legions of scientists who receive government grants for advancing the “manmade climate cataclysm” mantra are themselves engaging in what many say is truly misleading or fraudulent climate science, policy and regulation.
Millions in poor countries die annually from preventable diseases, because hysterical climate claims justify denying them access to affordable modern electricity and transportation that could be provided by coal, natural gas and petroleum products. In developed nations, climate hysteria has cost millions of jobs, adversely affecting people’s living standards, health and welfare. In European countries, thousands are dying each winter, because they can no longer afford proper heat.
The problem is not human intervention in the climate; it’s improper political intervention in climate science. It has corrupted scientific findings from the very beginning.
A 1995 document from the US State Department to the IPCC confirms this, or at least gives allegations of fraud and corruption sufficient credence to raise serious integrity questions.
When a recent FOIA lawsuit sought that 1995 document, the State Department said there is “no such correspondence in our files.” But if we have a copy of the document, how come State doesn’t? Attesting to its bona fides, Our copy has State’s date-stamp, a Department official’s signature – and 30 pages of detailed instructions on how the Clinton Administration wanted the IPCC to change its scientific findings and summary for policymakers, to reflect US climate and energy policy agendas.
The document is too complex and technical to summarize. So we’ve posted it in PDF form – unchanged in any way and exactly as received from a well known and credible source who must remain anonymous to avoid retribution by people like the RICO prosecutors. You’ll be amazed at what it says.
It consists of a three-page cover letter to Sir John Houghton, head of the IPCC Science Working Group, from Day Mount, Acting State Department Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment and Development, introducing 30 pages of line-by-line “suggestions” from scientist Robert Watson and others. One wanted a correct statement about warming rates changed to a flat lie. “Change ‘continue to rise’ to ‘rise by even greater amounts’ to provide a sense of magnitude of the extended change,” it says.
Talk about agendas dictating science. Moreover, this “ominous” warming ended just a couple years later, there has been virtually no planetary warming since then, and the warming followed 30 years of cooling.
The document raises serious questions about State Department actions on subsequent IPCC Assessment Reports. What did State do? Where are the correspondence and instructions to change the science in other IPCC reports? What are the State Department, EPA and other nObama agencies doing now to further corrupt climate science and advance their radical energy, social, economic and political agendas?
We know they won’t answer truthfully. If they did, they’d have to investigate themselves under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Worse, the corruption, deception, manipulation, exaggeration and fabrication have grown with every passing year, as alarmists sought to obfuscate their shenanigans and preserve their $1.5 trillion Climate Crisis Empire. The AG actions are designed to punish and silence organizations that are revealing the scientific flaws and deceptions.
The IPCC was set up in 1988 to examine possible human influences on Earth’s climate, amid powerful natural forces that have always driven the complex, dynamic, turbulent, frequently changing climate. As we note in our book, Cracking Big Green, from the outset, Swedish meteorology professor and zealous warming advocate Bert Bolin wanted to help scientists “get global warming onto the political agenda.”
By 1995, Bolin could finally say “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” Of course, “discernible” merely means “detectable.” But it gave the State Department license to dictate the “science.” Then “discernible” morphed into “dominant,” which morphed into “sole.” Suddenly humans had replaced the complex, interrelated natural forces that had driven innumerable climate changes throughout Earth’s history. Voila. Climate hysteria began to drive the political agenda.
Behind the hysteria are carefully orchestrated efforts to find steadily increasing planetary temperatures, and claim floods, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, snowstorms and snowless winters are more frequent and intense – even though Real World records show they are not. Original data are “homogenized” with other data to create higher temperatures; student papers and activist news releases are presented as “peer-reviewed studies” in IPCC documents; computer models are presented as “proof” of chaos, even though actual observations contradict their predictions; and ClimateGate emails reveal more chicanery. As climatologist and professor David Legates explains, even the 97% consensus claims are fraudulent.
Organizations that pointed out these flaws and fabrications became a threat to politicians, activists, “warmist” scientists and bureaucrats who were determined to advance an anti-fossil-fuel agenda. Their money and efforts were not winning the non-debate. They needed a blitzkrieg counterattack.
In June 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists and Climate Accountability Institute organized a “workshop” in La Jolla, CA for climate activists, scientists, lawyers and other experts. Their subsequent report detailed how successful attacks on tobacco companies could be used as a template for campaigns, RICO actions and other operations against “climate denier” companies and organizations.
By 2015, Senator Sheldon “Torquemada” Whitehouse (D-RI) was calling for RICO prosecutions. His actions prompted free market champion Alex Epstein to tell a congressional committee the senator should resign because of his “unconstitutional” attacks on free speech and the energy that powers our economy.
In January 2016, a secret meeting was held in the Rockefeller Family Fund’s Manhattan offices. It brought 350.org founder Bill McKibben and a dozen other anti-hydrocarbon activists together, to refine their legal strategies against ExxonMobil and others who dared to challenge “the scientific consensus” that fossil fuels have brought humanity and our planet to the brink of “climate chaos.”
Then, on March 29, 2016, New York AG Eric Schneiderman headlined a press conference of 16 state attorneys general, who announced their intention to go after organizations that were “committing fraud” by “knowingly deceiving” the public about the threat of manmade climate change. Within days, he had launched a RICO action against ExxonMobil, and the Virgin Islands had done likewise against CEI.
It is difficult not to perceive a pattern of collusion here, among the activists and their financiers, among the AGs, and probably among all of them. We are eager to see what emails and other documents might reveal – especially since Section 241 of US Code Title 18 makes it a felony “for two or more persons to agree together to injure, threaten or intimidate” another person in exercising their constitutional rights.
We have only begun to fight – for energy, jobs, sound science, free speech and human rights. CEI and Exxon are vigorously battling the outrageous RICO suits, and CFACT will present its new Climate Hustle movie in a one-day May 2 extravaganza in hundreds of theaters across the USA. We will not be silenced.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org). Ron Arnold is executive vice president of the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. They are coauthors of Cracking Big Green: To save the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine.
Comments
Steve
Thanks!
Great content! Rock on!