Present at the Creation: Adam Hasner, with Marco Rubio Against the Florida GOP Establishment

“A day in politics is like an eternity. A lot of recent events have altered the political landscape,” Adam Hasner told me by phone. Until last week was running for the U.S. Senate, but he is now running for the congressional seat vacated by Allen West.

Though Hasner hesitates to compare himself to West, the two have a lot in common. They are both principled, “minorities of minorities” who have to make  the case to groups not necessarily receptive to the conservative message. “When you are a black Republican or a Jewish Republican, you have to be even more firm in your beliefs and more principled,” Hasner explains.

The past year Hasner, the former majority leader of the Florida House of Representatives, has been running in a crowded primary to unseat Bill Nelson, the senior U.S. Senator from the Sunshine State.

Though Hasner was endorsed by talk show host, Mark Levin, the Family Research Council, and won the Florida straw poll, Hasner struggled to get the attention he needed. He blames the presidential race for “sucking all of the attention out of the room.” There were 350 articles about the Rubio-Crist race in 2010, but less than fifty about the 2012 contest. Hasner had been leading in the polls against George LeMieux, who Governor Charlie Crist appointed before deciding to run in the Senate contest only to lose to Marco Rubio, but Hasner’s lead collapsed when Rep. Connie Mack joined the race in late October and was endorsed by Mitt Romney.

Now Hasner’s hoping to be Allen West’s reinforcement, not replacement, in Congress. Hasner, who raised $1.3 million in his bid for U.S. Senate still has $666,000 cash on hand and has West’s support. West, in turns, plans to run in a friendlier Palm Beach County-based congressional seat after redistricting made his swing district much more Democratic. All within forty-eight hours, Rep. Tom Rooney moved to a new district in the west; West moved to Rooney’s old district up north.

The son of two New York teacher union members and liberal Democrats, Hasner came of age during the Age of Reagan. ”I didn’t inherit conservatism in the bloodstream,” he says, but he paid attention, becoming a lifelong Republican at age 18. “I grew up during the Morning in America. That’s where my politics were shaped.”

Hasner’s bona fides among Jewish conservatives are the genuine article. He likes to joke that he is married into the Jewish conservative movement. His wife, Jillian, worked for the Palm Beach chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition.

Though the district has gotten more Democratic in redistricting, Hasner is confident that he can win in November. “Every election that I won, I over performed,” says Hasner, the first Jewish majority leader of the Florida house of Representatives. “When John Kerry got 51% I got 58%. I got 60% of the vote, Obama got 52%.”  He adds: “The district I represented [in the Florida House of Representatives] is compromised in the new district. I know this people, people know me, where I lived my whole life.” Hasner, running in one of the most Jewish congressional districts in the country, might be buttressed by a new poll by the Pew Forum on Religion and Life showing that Jewish-Americans are turning from the Democratic Party. Jewish identification with the Democrats slipped from 72 to 65% between 2008 to 2011.

Hasner’s likely opponent is Lois Frankel, the former mayor of West Palm Beach. She is, for all intents and purposes, a morph of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the leader of the Democratic National Committee. Wasserman Schultz was Frankel’s protégé.

Hasner understands his role clearly.  ”This is going to be a battleground seat in the sense,” he promises. “Whoever is running for president, whoever is running for U.S. Senate, well, the way you a state election is just don’t get too badly beaten in Palm Beach and Breyer County,” he promises.

Hasner made a name for himself in Tallahassee, Florida. “You are constantly outnumbered and being challeneged by the status quo and what everybody expects you to believe. I’ve proven that that’s the type of individual I am. I’ve called out the Republicans as many times as I’ve called out the Democrats.” He took on Charlie Crist. Hasner pushed to eliminate property taxes; Crist opposed it. Crist wanted to take stimulus money; Hasner opposed it. Crist supported Cap and Trade; Hasner opposed it with Marco Rubio, then Speaker of the Florida State House.

Hasner promises to take on the Republicans in Washington, too. He rattles off the issues where the GOP establishment has been disappointing, among them  ”our debt and the payroll tax cut.” ”What people are looking for are candidates and representatives that are going to work hard, tell it like it is. I’m unafraid to do things when it doesn’t poll well.”

You can get a sense of Hasner’s leadership from this video, taken on April 16, 2011.

“We want our leaders to tell it like it is. And if you’re not going to get the job done, we are going to find somebody else who will.  We need to tell them: cut the spending, stop the borrowing, balance the budget, and attack the debt. And we sent that message in 2010, but it was only the beginning. In 2012, we need to send principled, conservative reinforcements to Washington D.C. to get the job done.”

It’s up to the voters of Palm Beach to decide what seems evidence: Adam Hasner is Marco Rubio’s and Allen West’s conservative reinforcement.

That was November 14, 2011.

Now, with news that the Office of Congressional Ethics has launched an insider trading investigation of Rep. Bachus, among possible others, I once again call on the Alabama Republican to do the right thing and leave Congress for good.

At the historic moment when the American people were looking to their elected leaders to protect them and their families’ portfolios, Rep. Bachus was busy using nonpublic information to enrich his own portfolio. In the summer and fall of 2008, Spencer Bachus’s position as the ranking Republican on the House Financial Services Committee gave him access to high-level private meetings and conversations with the then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other senior officials. The meetings Bachus was privy to were so secretive that those in attendance were not even allowed to bring cell phones into the meetings so as to prevent sensitive information that could threaten our nation’s financial system from leaking out.

And what did Congressman Bachus do with such trust and responsibility?

From July to November 2008, Bachus executed at least 40 well-timed, highly risky options trades throughout the turbulent period that netted him as much as $50,000 in capital gains. As Americans were losing their life savings, Bachus was padding his.

What Congressman Spencer Bachus did was wrong, vile, and an affront to the decency of the American people and the principles of honesty and fairness upon which our system rests.

I have received criticism from some Republican quarters who think I should never have spoken out against such an influential Republican member of Congress. But the conservative movement has a long tradition of ousting forces that stand to threaten the principles we fight for, regardless of party. We must do so again now—especially now.

I seldom call for resignations. Even at the height of the Anthony Weiner scandal, I remained silent on whether Rep. Weiner should leave office. But what Spencer Bachus did was egregious and fundamentally unethical.

On November 17, 2011, the Tea Party’s commitment to principle, not party, compelled them to organize a protest at Rep. Bachus’s Alabama office and call for his ouster. They were right then, and they are right now.

Our Founding Fathers believed political leadership was a call to stewardship, not self-enrichment. We must protect the principles that made America great. And that starts with throwing out those who smirk at fair play and shrug at the laws of our land.

Spencer Bachus: it’s time for you to go.

Police are warning everyone–including conservative bloggers credentialed for the event–to stay away from the confrontations as they struggle to contain the clashes, which Stranahan has described as “forceful.”

In a letter sent to Eric Richardson, the Occupy activist who recently told Lee Stranahan about racism within the movement, Kenneth Louis, Deputy City Clerk of Newark, informed protestors that they “will be required to remove all individuals and equipment from Military Park as of 9:00 P.M. [EST] beginning on Thursday, February 9, 2012.”

As the letter indicates, the Occupy Newark protestors have been granted two extensions already, and the city council has had enough.

Mayor Booker had earned the praise of the left for visiting the activists of Occupy Newark, and addressing them. Now, however, the romance appears to be over, as Occupy implodes in violence and disorder across the nation.

]]> http://biggovernment.com/publius/2012/02/08/exclusive-cory-booker-newark-to-occupy-so-long/feed/ 36 http://biggovernment.com/smotley/2012/02/06/the-internet-bureau-of-over-regulation-and-crony-socialism/ http://biggovernment.com/smotley/2012/02/06/the-internet-bureau-of-over-regulation-and-crony-socialism/#comments Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:13:22 +0000 Seton Motley http://biggovernment.com/?p=423564 We have just passed through the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) brouhaha.

A bill intended to stop theft – an important goal, and a necessary function of government.  But SOPA was overly broad, and deserved in its most recent iteration to go away – which it did.

Because of a bipartisan oppositional uprising – but the two sides arose for very different reasons.

The Theft-Left is vociferously opposed to private property rights.  SOPA is aimed at protecting private property.  So the Left said No.

The Right is loathe to grow government control of anything – including the Web.  And having just witnessed the recent Big Government Network Neutrality Internet power grab, their antennae were highly sensitized – and they said No.

Now, Washington is talking cyber security.  Where there is, again, a legitimate role for government – but we have, again, a bill that defines said role much too broadly.

Before we get to SOPA-level heights of righteous (Right) and faux-righteous (Left) indignation, let us reflect – and reset.

—–

The cyber security legislative overreach in question is California Republican Dan Lungren’s HR 3647 – the PrECISE Act.  A similar Senate bill will be proffered on February 17 – by the very awful Senate Democrat Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Lungren’s bill makes the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the decision-making hub for all things cyber security.  For the government – AND the private sector.

The government would take the lead role in developing, implementing, and conducting on-going tests of cyber incident response plans.

And we all know how well the government does when taking the lead on things.

Lungren’s bill creates a whole new level of bureaucracy – in a nonprofit entity called the National Information Sharing Organization (NISO).  And it sounds an awful lot like some of the criss-cross-government personnel monstrosities created by ObamaCare (and others).  And is a Crony Socialist and Media Marxist nightmare mess waiting to happen.

NISO’s Board of Directors consists of:

• One representative from the Department of Homeland Security and four representatives from three different Federal agencies with significant responsibility for cyber security.

Criss.  Cross.

• Ten private sector representatives, including at least one member representing a small business interest.  These must represent each of the following sectors and sub-sectors:
  • Banking and finance
  • Communications
  • Defense industrial base
  • Energy, electricity sub sector
  • Energy, oil, and natural gas sub sector
  • Heath care and public health
  • Information technology

Behold the Crony Socialist Bureau.  You can just imagine the size of the campaign contributions necessary to land here.  But it’ll be worth it.  You’ll get to then write regulations that benefit you and hamstring your competitors.  And receive exclusive shots at myriad government contracts.  And….

• Two representatives from the privacy and civil liberties community.

Behold the Media Marxist contingent.  Think a free market-oriented technology group like Americans for Prosperity, or Americans for Tax Reform or our Less Government will EVER be chosen for this?

Ummm, no.

It will undoubtedly look like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)’s Advisory Committee on Diversity for Communications in the Digital Age.  On which not a single conservative organization sits – but more than a dozen Leftist groups do.

A little ironic for a “diversity” panel, is it not?

And last but not least:

• The Chair of the National Council of Information Sharing and Analysis Center

NISO is a bureaucratic, sclerotic crony-fest at best.  It is a totalitarian Cyber Bureau at worst.

Thanks, but no thanks.

There are better, less government-centric cyber security views out there.  There’s the House Republican Cyber Security Task Force report.  And a quartet of Republican Senators recently penned an op-ed that lays out a much-better-than-Reid-and-Lungren outlook.

Let’s go the less government route, shall we?

—–

These piecemeal attempts at Internet legislation are indicators of a broader problem.

The last time Congress wrote telecommunications law was…1996.  Not to overstate it – but things have changed a little.

(Un)intentional government overreaches like SOPA and the Reid-Lungren cyber security bills keep happening because the Internet (and Internet-connected smart phones) exist in an outdated legal no-mans-land.

Dramatic, intentional power grabs like Net Neutrality are the result of government thuggery – but with some grey-area obfuscation cover provided by this lack of legislative clarity.

Remember, Ladies and Gentlemen, we conservatives believe in less government – not none.  Laws can be written to constrain We the People – or to constrain the government.  They in fact must be written to control the latter.

When the lines aren’t clearly drawn so as to confine the Leviathan – it inexorably expands its reach.  We have long since passed this point with the World Wide Web.

Which has rapidly become a free speech, free market Xanadu.  But in so doing has created some new, unique problems – that do in fact require some legislation.

It is time for a government-confining refresh of the now hopelessly antiquated 1996 Telecommunications Act.

Which will go a long way towards helping put a stop to the Big Government Internet atrocities and absurdities that have recently been foisted upon us.

Claremont McKenna College, a private liberal arts college in Los Angeles, has earned international infamy for fraudulently misreporting its SAT scores to game the U.S. News & World Report rankings. Richard Vos, dean of admissions since 1987, resigned in disgrace Monday, starting a nationwide debate about the role of SATs in higher education and the integrity of Claremont’s admission process. But absent from any analysis is this: Vos began falsifying SAT scores in 2005, right around the time Claremont began to institutionalize racial preferences. An investigation of the data since released suggests that Claremont manipulated the school’s scores to cover up admittance of under-qualified minority students.

Every spring, Claremont reports SAT scores from the preceding fall entering class to U.S. News & World Report. For the class admitted in 2004, its scores and data are sent in March 2005 and published in the fall issue.

The timing is relevant here because, in 2004, Claremont began admitting its first of four classes from the Posse Foundation, a full-scholarship program for inner-city students from Los Angeles. Ten students were admitted per year into a class of about 250 students, for a total of 40 students over four years. The students were personally interviewed by Vos and Gann, according to a press release from the college’s website in late December 2003, but in his 2005 report to U.S. News–the first year Posse students were admitted–Vos began falsifying SAT scores. The actual and manipulated mean SAT verbal and math scores are below; the median are accessible here.

In 2007, Claremont began admitting students from QuestBridge, another scholarship program for students from poor and largely minority backgrounds. Posse has partnered with such schools as Bowdoin, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Colby, DePauw, Grinnell, Middlebury, and Vanderbilt; QuestBridge has partnered with some thirty-one other colleges, including most of the Ivy League, M.I.T., Pomona, Oberlin, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Williams.

Although we do not know the statistics for the Posse students, we do have reason to doubt their academic qualifications as a group. At least one student flunked out and several took leaves of absence for academic reasons. A 1998 evaluation of the Posse program at Vanderbilt University found that athletes entered with an average of 1042 SAT score and maintained an average GPA of 3.13, while Posse students came in with a 900 average SAT and finished with a 2.93 average GPA. Due to the low grades of Posse students in their engineering programs, Rice and Lehigh canceled their involvement with Posse, according to the L.A. Times in 2004.

At Claremont, the class of 2011, admitted in 2007, is the only class admitted in its history to have members of both QuestBridge and Posse in its ranks. It was also the class that saw its mean math scores inflated the most – by 28 points.

The next worse year was the class of 2015–admitted in 2011–which had mean critical reading scores increased 23 points. Interestingly, this class has the highest percentage of international students of any previous classes. This is not surprising. International students typically pay full tuition, unlike QuestBridge and Posse students, who received full scholarships. As might be expected, the enrollment of international students and QuestBridge/Posse students track the performance of the college’s endowment. When Claremont is richer, it enrolls more full-scholarship Posse and QuestBridge students; when it’s poorer, it has more full-paying international students. In 2008, Claremont canceled its involvement with Posse for unstated reasons; in 2009 it canceled its involvement with QuestBridge for “financial considerations,” Vos told me via email on December 31, 2008.

The charts indicate that the scores for Claremont’s verbal and math SAT scores rose after 2009–the first year no Questbridge/Posse students were admitted.

Gann wrote to the community on Monday that Claremont only increased SAT scores “were generally inflated by an average of 10-20 points each,” but it appears Vos engaged in systematic fraud. Though it’s unclear whether or not he acted alone, he manipulated the numbers to conceal year-to-year declines in SAT scores. He held average math scores constant at 700, rather than honestly reflecting their drop to 680 in 2006 and 2007. Sources close to the emergency faculty meeting that took place today confirm the fraud is more widespread than has been officially acknowledged and that in some years, Claremont admitted students who took no standardized tests at all.

****

Ever since Gann came to Claremont from Duke Law in 1999, she has stressed diversity. In 2004, she defended Kerri Dunn, a visiting psychology professor who faked a hate crime against herself and her car (Dunn was imprisoned for insurance fraud).

That incident got national attention. Gann pledged an independent investigation, though none took place. After Dunn’s hoax and the racial animus it stirred up, she bemoaned the low numbers of black undergraduates (then 4% of 1,052 students) and minority tenure-track professors to the St. Petersburg Times in 2004 and promised to fix the numbers.

There have always been grounds to challenge the college’s affirmative action policy. The Claremont Independent, the college’s conservative newspaper that I once edited, first reported that the college had been discriminating on racial lines in November 2006. “Statistics provided by the admissions office show that it admitted roughly 45% of both black and Hispanic applicants, vs. 22% of the white applicants and 17% of Asian applicants,” we wrote. Vos denied that such a racial agenda exists, but in 1999, Vos criticized the anti-racial preference Proposition 209 ballot measured passed by California voters. “Why would we change our policies?” he rhetorically asked when questioned whether Claremont would also be racially neutral. “We’ve always had a commitment to affirmative action, and now because some students perceive that the University of California system is perhaps not as welcoming as it was a few years ago, more students are now thinking of going to the private [colleges]. The UC’s loss is our gain.” In fact, prior to Gann, Claremont argued that “there is no clear linkage between educational quality and diversity,” according to a Nov. 1993 letter to an accrediting agency. (Page 115, The Ups and Downs of Affirmative Action Preferences by M. Ali Raza, A. Janell Anderson, and Harry Glynn Custred.

****

Since Vos’s resignation, Claremont has scrubbed all mention of him from its website, in a manner similar to its communication director’s handling of Bassam Frangieh, a pro-terrorist professor, which Joel Pollak, Breitbart’s editor-in-chief, documented in March 2011.

****

The scandal continues. Only twenty-four hours after the scandal broke, over 1,000 newspapers, magazines, and websites have picked it up, though many students are downplaying it, arguing that perhaps Claremont ought to exit the rankings altogether, which is akin to arguing that one shouldn’t have taken a class after being caught cheating.

Gann has made the college rankings front and center of her tenure at Claremont, explicitly encouraging donations to game the rankings. Her Fall 2003 fundraising letter explains that alumni giving “demonstrate[s] overall alumni satisfaction…[and] plays an important role in advancing the reputation of CMC, including the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.” The college has set a “new goal” to increase alumni donations from 50% to 55% over the next five years. “This goal not only will place us within the range of Williams, Swarthmore, and Amherst colleges—the top three liberal arts institutions as ranked by U.S. News—but will also secure a position that is superior to every national university in the country except Princeton,” she wrote.

But Vos’s cheating and prompt resignation–and Gann’s failure to monitor him–have many alumni wondering how deep the fraud goes and whether Gann should go, too. Claremont’s motto is “civilization prospers with commerce,” but commerce demands honesty and integrity, not games and fraud.

Hannah Burak CMC ‘13 contributed to this report. The author is CMC ‘11.

Morris Beschloss, a longtime resident of Southern California’s Coachella Valley, is a conservative economic and political expert who at 82 writes a regular column for the Desert Sun newspaper, blogs on the paper’s website, and hosts his own television show, The World Report, on the Time Warner network.

In 1939, at the age of 9, Beschloss, a German Jew, escaped Nazi Germany with his mother and older brother. His grandmother refused to leave, and several years later she became one of the six million Jews murdered at the hands of Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Morrie, as friends call him, spoke to me about his only son, Michael Beschloss. He is the Harvard educated, NBC News Presidential Historian. As the Presidential Historian, the younger Beschloss holds himself out as an unbiased, apolitical analyst of all things Presidential. Long ago, a political wedge was driven between the two, with Michael Beschloss strongly objecting to his father’s conservative politics.

The older Beschloss talked about his son’s accomplishments, which he admires. When it comes to his son’s work with NBC, however, Beschloss didn’t mince words:

“Once you’re in bed with the devil, you begin to spout the devil’s bullshit,” he explained, when referring to what he calls NBC’s overtly liberal bias. He cited Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin as another example of media driven political taint. “She is nothing but a lackey for the left,” said Beschloss.

Beschloss, who calls the cable division of his son’s employer, MSNBC, “nothing more than the propaganda wing of the Obama White House,” spoke with disdain about the network and many of its on-air personalities. Al Sharpton, who incited the 1991 Crown Heights riots, “is a known anti-Semite,” said Beschloss. He also decried the fact that the network employed, as an anchor, the daughter of alleged “arch-anti-Semite Zbigniew Brzezinski” (Mika Brzezinski).

Afsaneh and Michael Beschloss

We then began to talk about the self-designated, progressive “media watchdog group” Media Matters for America. Michael Beschloss (the son) is married to Iranian born Afsaneh Mashayekhi Beschloss. She has well-documented, strong ties to Democrats and George Soros-backed groups, including Media Matters. Mrs. Beschloss is currently President and CEO of Rock Creek Group, a hedge fund based in Washington, D.C. One of Rock Creek Group’s senior advisors is Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, a former Lt. Governor of Maryland, who is also leading American Bridge–a Democrat fundraising project co-founded with Media Matters for America’s David Brock.

George Soros announced in 2010 that he was donating $1 million to MMFA specifically to go after Fox News Channel, whose hosts, he claimed, were “inciting violence.”

“George Soros is the most dangerous man in America,” said Morrie. Beschloss believes that major conservative media such as Fox News and BigGovernment.com are targets of MMFA and Soros not only because they present opposing points of view, but because they have “huge audiences” that far outnumber those of liberal media outlets.

Beschloss adds that despite Soros’ Jewish heritage, Soros “sides with the enemies of Israel on a regular basis.” In 2010, Soros gave $750,000 to J Street–an organization that poses as pro-Israel but in reality is a radical left-wing group actively campaigning against Israel’s right to defend itself.

Beschloss went on to say that in his view, the only media that matters is News Corp., the parent company of Fox News Channel; and the Wall Street Journal, which he says are the “only objective major media left in America.”

Notwithstanding his son’s affiliation with NBC and his daughter-in-law’s ties to MMFA, Beschloss says MMFA’s simple mission is “to destroy any organization with views that contradict theirs.”