Meet the GOP's Unconventional New Star

As the nation’s first female combat pilot, Rep. Martha McSally has always been one to cast aside convention.

Now that she’s a member of Congress, the Arizona Republican is showing no signs of changing.

After winning a recount against Democratic incumbent Rep. Ron Barber by just 167 votes, McSally didn’t get in line and keep quiet like other freshman. She began aggressively lobbying Homeland Security Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-Texas) and won herself a subcommittee gavel and a platform to hold hearings.

The Republican hired former Democratic Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s top spokesman as her district director — part of a broader push to reach out to Democratic, independent and minority voters she’ll need to win reelection in her southern Arizona district, one of the most competitive in the country.

The retired Air Force colonel and squadron commander also isn’t afraid to admonish fellow House Republicans. In a 30-minute interview with The Hill last week, she warned against GOP messaging bills that fire up the base but won’t pass the Senate.

Via: The Hill

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Hillary Responds to 'Clinton Cash' Accusations About How She 'Got Rich,' Says Republicans Are 'Talking Only About Me'

Read more at http://www.inquisitr.com/2028945/hillary-clinton-responds-to-accusations-about-how-she-got-rich-notes-republicans-are-talking-only-about-me/#sQLIBF32pi2xuF4F.99The Inquisitr -  Now that Hillary Clinton has announced her candidacy for the 2016 presidential election, she is already fiercely under attack from her political opponents. Clinton has reassured her supporters that she understands the way election season works and that she’s prepared for all kinds of attacks and “distractions” from the Republican opposition.

According to ABC News, Hillary Clinton has already had to fend off several accusations about her conduct during her time as Secretary of State for the Obama Administration. A previous report from the Inquisitr covered the soon-to-be-released book Clinton Cash:The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich. Republicans are citing the book as proof that Hillary Clinton accepted donations from foreign governments for her charity, the Clinton Foundation, and then proceeding to give special treatment to the governments that gave her money.

Hillary Clinton has responded to the accusations by claiming it’s all part of election season, and that the book is nothing more than a distraction.

“Well, we’re back into the political season and therefore we will be subjected to all kinds of distractions and attacks and I’m ready for that,” said Hillary Clinton. “I know that that comes unfortunately with the territory.”

Via: The Inquisitr

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Liberal Media In A Frenzy Over Walker’s Pro-Worker Immigration Stance

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker said Monday immigration policy should be American-worker centered, apparently striking a nerve with the liberal media, who called it extreme and used tweets from a disgruntled former employee to criticize the move.

The Washington Post, MSNBC, and Huffington Post said the stance is a dumb move politically, because only a small number of right-wing extremists question the economic value of legal immigration.

“It’s not clear whether he understands that immigration is one way to boosteconomic growth,” Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote condescendingly. “(There is replete evidence that immigration boosts revenue, growth and does not take jobs away from native-born workers.)”

“We have remarked that the temptation in the GOP primary is to play to the loudest voices and the staunchest segment of the party, even though they do not represent a majority of voters in the party, let alone in the general electorate,” Rubin added.

Via: Daily Caller

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Jumping the (Real Estate) Gun? Clinton Confidante Buys Condo In DC

Is someone optimistic that Hillary Clinton is going to be spending a lot more time in Washington, D.C., in the years ahead? Donna Shalala, the longtime Clinton family confidante who was announced as the head of the New York-based Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation in March, closed that same month on a Georgetown condo in an upscale building with waterfront views. According to real estate records, Shalala purchased for $862,500 the one-bedroom, one-bathroom unit on Water Street NW under a trust account in her name; at just 924 square feet, that’s quite the pricey pied a terre.

Sources say Shalala will likely spend most of her time in New York for her foundation job, which would make the Georgetown property a secondary home—the type of place you’d use frequently if your boss, for instance, was the First Husband and your other boss was the President. Shalala has gotten used to cushy digs. As president of the University of Miami, where she has been since leaving the Clinton administration as secretary of health and human services in 2001, she lived at the school’s massive Coral Gables presidential house until it was sold for $9 million in 2012. Since then she’s been bunking at a new, 9,000-square-foot, two-story home, complete with an elevator, dubbed “Ibis House,” in Pinecrest, an expensive gated community. Shalala is slated to depart University of Miami in early May, at the end of the academic year.

Via: Politico

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Critics: NLRB May Gut ‘Right to Work’ Laws

The federal government’s top labor arbiter may use its regulatory power to force non-union employees in right to work states pay union dues.

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) put out a call for legal briefs on Wednesday asking labor law scholars to weigh in on whether unions should have the ability to extract dues payments from non-members. The announcement drew immediate criticism from right to work activists.

“It is unfortunately not surprising that the Obama NLRB is now actively working to undermine the 25 state Right to Work laws. Its ‘call for briefs’ signals this NLRB’s intention to reverse over 60 years of Board precedent to give union bosses an unprecedented tool to eviscerate employees’ Right to Work protections,” Mark Mix, president of the National Right to Work Committee, said in a release.

“Right to work” laws ban coercive dues systems in which employees must join a union and pay dues as a condition of employment. The laws have passed in 25 states and are spreading in traditional union strongholds: Wisconsin, the birthplace of public sector unions, passed such a law in March, just two years after similar regimes were implemented in Indiana and Michigan.

Unions have fought the law in courts in nearly every state that has adopted the measure, arguing that since labor groups negotiate wages and benefits on behalf of all workers, non-members are “free-riding.” In most cases, those challenges have not prevailed in state or federal courts. Unions in Indiana, for example, filed a flurry of lawsuits intended to block the implementation of the state right to work law. Federal Judge Phillip Simon tossed them out of court in 2013.

Via: Washington Free Beacon

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What Today’s American Politics Tells Us

There is something very disquieting occurring in American politics today. Most dramatically, the Democratic Party is offering a candidate who is a moral cesspool filled with lies and a history of behavior that would render anyone unthinkable for the highest office in the land. Something is very wrong when Hillary Clinton is, at this point, the only candidate for President the Democrats will be able to vote for and, worse, an estimated 47% of them will vote for her.

What we are witnessing is a Democratic Party that has been debauched by decades of socialism, an economic and political system that has failed everywhere it was implemented.

By contrast, what is being largely overlooked is the wealth of political talent—Rubio, Walker, Paul, et al—-that the Republican Party has to offer as an alternative. Instead of obsessing over the different aspects of its candidates, we should be celebrating the fact that voters will be able to choose someone of real merit for whom to vote.

While the brain-dead media talks about the Republican candidates, seizing on every small element of the policies they are individually offering for consideration, the contrast with Hillary Clinton widens into a gap as large as the Grand Canyon. Her campaign thus far has been an exhibition of media manipulation. She talks of “income inequality” as if it has not existed from the dawn of time and is based on the socialist utopia of everyone being equally poverty-stricken. Who wants to live in a nation where you cannot become wealthy if you’re willing to take the risks and work hard to achieve it?

Via: Canada Free Press

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The Loretta Lynch Race Game

Saturday’s Washington Post front page carries on its recent tradition of fanning racialist flames without substantial regard to fact or context. 

The header reads: “Race creeps into debate over stalled nomination for attorney general” and the first graph notes that “African American and other civil rights leaders” are infuriated that Loretta Lynch’s confirmation as attorney general has been held up because of -- you guessed it -- racism. Responding to the president’s dog whistle, National Action network and multimillionaire tax scofflaw Al Sharpton says he’s going on a three-day hunger strike to force consideration of her nomination. Be our guest, Al. (Although after the stomach stapling, there’s not much more to be lost.)

Again the formerly respectable civil rights movement is shilling for the Democrats in general, and Obama in particular, and the Post fails to present the issue fairly. Once again the “civil rights groups” prove themselves as blindly partisan as the no nukes crowd who protest the building of nuclear power plants here and say nothing of the Iranian nuclear arms buildup and the human shields who never tie themselves to the doors of Israeli nurseries. How easily they all ceded any moral authority.

The record shows that the holdup is not racist and not unprecedented. The charge, moreover, is pure projection -- the left attributing to its opponents its own bad behavior.

Via: American Thinker

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Who actually pays their “fair share” of taxes?

In recent years, claims that “the rich” don’t pay their “fair share” of taxes have been repeated countless times. But that excuse to tax them more to line others’ pockets is blown away whenever the highly disproportionate income tax burdens borne by higher earners are reported. As the Wall Street Journal titled a recent article,“Top 20% of Earners Pay 84% of Income Tax.” In fact, the top 1 percent of American earners earn about one-sixth of total income, but pay nearly as much in income taxes as everyone else combined.

Rather than abandon the electorally valuable false premise that such disproportionate burdens are justified, however, the political Left rallies to its cause. They try to rescue it by asserting that other taxes are regressive, so that taxes aren’t “really” so clearly unjustifiable as income tax burdens reveal. The featured players in that drama are state and local sales and excise taxes and Social Security taxes. Unfortunately, those taxes are also misrepresented to defend “fair share” misrepresentations.

Columnist Michael Hiltzik illustrated the state and local gambit in a tax-day column echoing charges that their sales and excise taxes “disproportionately hammer lower-income taxpayers,” with that alleged regressivity offsetting income tax unfairness.

That claim arises because those with lower current measured incomes spend a larger proportion of them on those taxes. However, as Edgar Browning has noted, “relative to lifetime income, there is very little difference in the percentage of income consumed among income classes.” As a result, apparent regressivity using current incomes is shown instead as “roughly proportional” to income in the more-appropriate lifetime context. Low current-income families also consume a multiple of their income, largely financed with government transfer payments excluded from income measures. That further exaggerates the share of their incomes going to such taxes.

Via: California Political Review

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