Tag: 2016

Mark Levin For President! (or, top speechwriter in 2016)

By Steve Parkhurst

As you know from this website, I have read The Liberty Amendments: Restoring the American Republic and I have been advocating the ideas presented within the book. While we must continue to work within the system that exists today, we must begin educating and running candidates that will understand, embrace and advocate for the idea that Levin has presented and even the idea put forth by THE Coolidge Project.

With that in mind, and realizing that 2016 will be here as scheduled, along with a Presidential campaign and election, these final words in The Liberty Amendments…these words should be the closing words for the nominee as he or she accepts the nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2016:

In the end, the people, upon reflection, will decide their own fate once their attention is drawn. As President Reagan stated, “You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope for man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children’s children say of us that we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done.”

Let us do all that can be done. Let us be inspired by the example of our forefathers and their courage, strength, and wisdom. Let us be inspired by the genius of the Constitution and its preservation of the individual and the civil society. Let us unleash an American renaissance in which liberty is celebrated and self-government is cherished. Let us, together – we, the people – restore the splendor of the American Republic.

Time is of the essence. Let us get started today!                                                         – p. 208

Yes, I realize Levin does not want to run for President, or be President. But, the conclusion of his book is a tremendous clarion call for action worthy of each and every conservative Presidential candidate in 2016. At the very least, Mark Levin should be consulted by the person writing that nominees speech.

As a final note, Jack Kemp was a huge believer in what he hoped would be an “American renaissance” leading up to and following the Reagan Revolution. I like and appreciate Levin’s reference to “an American renaissance.” We got the Reagan Revolution, but we did not achieve the needed renaissance in the following years, one could even argue we went backward.

This needs to be the mission now. Let us get started today.

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Governor Scott Is On The Rise

By Joe Gruters

Not even relentlessly negative media coverage is stopping Floridians from seeing the tangible value of having Rick Scott for governor.

A recent Quinnipiac University poll found that Scott’s approval rating continuing to grow by hitting an all-time high of 43%, up steadily from the low of 29% in 2011. His approval and disapproval ratings are essentially even now.

While his opponents paint his re-election as a steep uphill battle, his approval ratings are flowing against that narrative. It was his unpopularity driving those speculations. But he is popularity keeps rising, and probably will continue to.

It’s not surprising. Scott was elected to grow the economy and keep state government living within its means. He kept both promises with tough and unpopular spending cuts in the first year, coupled with tax cuts that he then used to go out and pitch the state.

He has worked tirelessly, personally calling CEOs around the country to pitch Florida’s economic and quality of life benefits while going abroad on trade missions to our best trade partners in South America and Europe.

The result?

Jobs up, taxes down, state debt down and Floridians better off. It’s that simple.

Moody Investor Services rated Florida Aa1 with a stable outlook even though it “was one of hardest hit states in the recent recession, with unemployment spiking to 11.4%.” Unemployment is now down to 7.1%, a half of a percentage point below the national average, which was lower than Florida’s when Scott came into office.

The report gives Florida high marks for its fiscal discipline.

According to Moody’s Analytics, Florida’s 2013 employment growth is expected to increase 1.9% — again, far surpassing the national rate of 1.3%.

In the past two years, Scott has paid down $2 billion of Florida’s debt, nearly half of what former Gov. Charlie Crist ran up as governor. This is the first time in nearly 30 years that Florida has reduced its debt in back to back years and no one doubts that he will reduce it again this year. That lightens the burden on all hard-working Floridians, who now have the fourth lowest debt per person in the nation.

So the burden of government on average Floridians is reduced. More jobs are available and the expectation for far more jobs coming is offered by objective outsiders such as Moody’s.

These things don’t happen accidentally or all on their own. The are the result of strong, principled, conservative leadership.

It is no wonder that with 17 months before election day, Democrats have no serious opponents lined up yet to run against Scott. There will be no easy pickings here.

However, the Democrats will eventually coalesce around someone and it will become a huge fight. Because not only is the governor’s mansion up for grabs, but Florida is a bellwether state for the nation.

We cannot let anyone make the case that Florida is a blue state. It must remain red and then vote conservative for president in 2016. That starts with the 2014 governor’s race.

We must continue to make the case for conservatism and a conservative governor, for the good of our state and for the good of the country.

Thanks for being informed and engaged.

Country getting desperate for conservative change

By Joe Gruters

The news out of Washington — even at the subdued, unenthusiastic rate of the mainstream media — makes it more painfully clear every day that we have got to get more conservative Republicans in office.

The first goal is to win the U.S. Senate in 2014. Florida does not have a direct dog in that fight, but really everybody does. Here’s why.

Senate President Harry Reid is planning to eliminate some portions of the problematic Gang of Eight bill and insert a substitute amendment that includes the Corker-Hoeven amendment and the rest of the Gang of Eight’s bill. It becomes a 1,200-page bill no ones has read, just like Obamacare.

Then Reid is planning to refuse to allow any other amendments and move straight to final passage of the bill in the Senate. Debate is being cut off Wednesday in time for a final vote, just two days after debate started on the new bill — on 1,200 pages no one is sure of — and final passage is probably before the July 4 break.

Democrats are planning to try to ram another fiasco for the country through. Even if it is stopped in the House, the Democrats will simply use it as a campaign issue. A few Senate victories in 2012 and none of this would be happening.

On the executive branch, the mischief just gets more nefarious.

Fox News reported over the weekend that the Obama administration is suing Dollar General and a BMW facility in South Carolina for the alleged unfair use of criminal background checks for job applicants. The lawsuit comes just a few months after the feds warned companies about how such screenings can discriminate against African Americans.

Yup, under Obama, if you check an applicants’ criminal background you’re racist.

Last year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission issued new guidelines that cautioned against rejecting minority applicants who have committed a crime and recommended businesses eliminate policies that “exclude people from employment based on a criminal record.”

Wow. That is awful on so many levels. In addition to defying common sense (by people who clearly have never run a company) it is another freedom-squelching intrusion by the federal government into our everyday lives.

The Chicago Tribune, of all places, published an editorial Sunday explaining why the rollout of Obamacare will be a mess. “The rollout of Obamacare later this year is likely to bring a rate shock for many Americans who will buy health insurance from state marketplaces known as exchanges. How much will premiums jump? Officials at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services won’t say. It could be that HHS is keeping a lid on rates because it wants to avoid a California-like debacle.”

The editorial went on to quote one unnamed top Democrat as saying the rollout will be a “train wreck.”

Republicans can’t give up on fighting Obamacare at every turn. Want more evidence?

The Conservative News Services reported that the Internal Revenue Service sent 23,994 tax refunds worth a combined $46.4 million to “unauthorized” alien workers who all used the same address in Atlanta, according to the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (TIGTA).

According to CNS: “That was not the only Atlanta address theoretically used by thousands of ‘unauthorized’ alien workers receiving millions in federal tax refunds in 2011. In fact, according to a Treasury Inspector General audit report published last year, four of the top ten addresses to which the IRS sent thousands of tax refunds to ‘unauthorized’ aliens were in Atlanta.”

Remember, and this is critical, the IRS is in charge of enforcing Obamacare. Not only has the organization proved itself corrupt and partisan, it is also apparently grossly incompetent — and in charge of one-seventh of the U.S. economy. What a disaster.

Republicans have to fight and fight and fight against Obamacare at every step. We can’t give up. And we can’t give up on border security and the rule of law. Everything remains at stake. So we need the U.S. Senate back first and get stronger in the House in 2014. That’s only next year, 17 months. Then we can think about 2016.

Thanks for being informed and engaged.

SAP: Big Data And The 2016 US Presidential Election

By Steve Parkhurst

I was recently interviewed for this piece by business and IT writer Debra Donston-Miller about Big Data and 2016. I’ll have more to say about the subject soon enough, but for now, enjoy this article.

 

SAP Forbes logo GPH Consulting

Big Data And The 2016 US Presidential Election

By Debra Donston-Miller, May 7, 2013

If big data was something of a secret weapon during the presidential election of 2012, it promises to loom large as we run up to 2016.

There’s no doubt that big data is playing an increasingly big role in business, politics, healthcare, education, retail and numerous other industries. With the right tools and expertise, organizations can slice and dice data to reveal trends and other information that will inform decisions about future strategy and direction.

“[Big data] is the idea that we are finally able to do with a huge body of data things that were impossible to achieve when working with smaller amounts, to uncover to new insight and create new forms of economic value,” said Kenneth Cukier, co-author with Viktor Mayer-Schönberger of “Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think,” and data editor of The Economist. “So, for example, the reason we have self-driving cars or very good computer translation is not because of improvements in processors or algorithms, though they are useful, but because we have vastly more data from which the computer can calculate the probability that a traffic light is red and not green, or which a word in one language is a suitable substitute for a word in another.”

During the 2012 election, big data was used to great advantage—namely, by Barack Obama, in his re-election campaign.

A November 2012 article in Time magazine, “Inside the Secret World of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win, reported, “Data-driven decision making played a huge role in creating a second term for the 44th President and will be one of the more closely studied elements of the 2012 cycle. … In politics, the era of big data has arrived.”

Cukier said campaigns have always been run on information, but in 2012 big data helped optimize that information and activities around it.

“Obama’s data scientists made pioneering innovations on applying big data to politics,” said Cukier. ”They learned through testing what the optimal sum was when requesting a donation. Every piece of promotional literature online and offline is tested before it goes live at scale. They micro target down to subgroups of the population that were otherwise not picked up by campaigns in the past because it was hard to get granular information on those groups and what moved them to vote a certain way. As a result, campaigns try to tailor their activities down the seemingly ‘individual’ level — not  broad, lumpy categories like the ‘soccer moms’ used in Clinton’s campaigns in the 1990s.”

The role of big data will only increase in the 2016 presidential election, with practitioners using technology to hone in on data much more granularly than ever before. In addition, say experts, the use of big data will overlap with social media and other platforms.

“For the 2016 presidential election, we can expect big data to play a much more central role than ever before,” said Cukier. “[We’ll see] micro-targeting of individuals and narrow subgroups of the population, tailored messages over social media platforms, instant feedback loops to the campaign about what works and what doesn’t to move voters, and data collected from the private sector to build predictive models of what works best for fundraising, activating the base of supporters and the get-out-the-vote activities.”

Pay attention to some of the hotly contested issues and the preparation for 2014 Senate elections, and you will see big data at work and a preview of what’s to come in 2016.

“There will be data testing in the run-up to 2014,” said Steve Parkhurst, political consultant, GPH Consulting. “There have already been debates this year on issues like the sequester, the Second Amendment and immigration, for example, and I’m sure the big data databases are filling up with usable data. The data drill-down is no doubt tracking where voters are looking and what those voters are saying, especially online.”

All of this is not to say that the process will be easy. Analysis of big data is a highly complex task, and at this point in time it requires a very specialized—and often expensive–skill set.

“Not just everyone can set up a big data shop,” said Parkhurst. “The people who are really good at it are going to charge a premium price.”

Luckily, technology providers are heeding the call for products and services that can tame the big data beast. Indeed, said Cukier, two of the biggest barriers to big data are narrow thinking and a dearth of leadership.

“The only real obstacle is one of mindset,” said Cukier. “We need to think creatively about what we can do with the data and how important it is. It takes both ingenuity and leadership.”

Leftwing Media Assault On Marco Rubio Well Underway

San Antonio Express News MYSA.com

I saw something interesting today in the San Antonio Express-News. You can see for yourself below, the “letter to the editor” section features a picture of US Senator Marco Rubio. That picture refers to the letter “Unbalanced” by Frank H. Wians Jr., which begins at the bottom left in the picture.

Express News Marco Rubio GPH Consulting

There are several items in play here. First, sympathizer Bruce Davidson had an op-ed (Castro faces local challenges along with stardom) published on February 17 on the front page of the San Antonio Express-News’ Opinion page. On page 3 in the same issue, Leftist Maria Anglin, also a sympathizer, wrote an op-ed (The peril of the pedestal) knocking Senator Rubio for “the ascent of the earnest young senator from Florida”. And, because she focused her attack on Senator Rubio, I am going to focus today on Maria and her column.

The delusion of Maria Anglin really becomes more evident here:

Time magazine called him “The Republican Savior.” Karl Rove has called him “the best communicator since Ronald Reagan.” And when Rubio was picked to deliver the State of the Union rebuttal, House Speaker John Boehner said he carries the GOP banner of freedom, opportunity and prosperity in a way few others can.

Wow.

Apparently Maria knows nothing about Rubio or his family story. I’m really not sure why she is confused by any of this. Actually, I do understand. It has to do with the R after his name. Senator Rubio is not one of the fellow travelers like Maria, and therefore, he is to be vilified, destroyed and left on the ash heap. And this is ok since Rubio does have that R after his name. If he had a D after his name, we would be able to call Maria a racist and other clever code words approved by the Left.

Maria continues:

Rubio did say that there is only one savior, and that he isn’t it. But, so far, there’s no word about how close he thinks he can come to Dutch or Superman.

That my friends, that may be one of the dumbest sentences ever put on paper. Fortunately, Rubio is not trying to be Dutch or Superman, he is trying to be Senator Marco Rubio, Republican Senator from Florida.

Maria then had to get in some shots on Sarah Palin, for some reason (actually, that reason is simply to bash all Republicans, that’s why Maria writes and why she is published):

Remember Sarah Palin? Once she was the pistol from Alaska, a no-nonsense moose-skinning hockey mom who finally seemed to understand the lives of the average American Republican.

She wasn’t a political monster, but she had enough exposure to run alongside a presidential candidate with an iffy ticker. Today, she’s little more than a fringe figure who can be counted on to deliver regrettable tweets.

Finally, to really get to the point, besides the fact that Marco Rubio is indeed of Cuban descent, and a Republican, Maria tries to point our side in another direction:

Still, if it’s ever going to happen, it needs to get started. So why not Rubio? Then again, why not Louisiana’s Bobby Jindal? He, too, seems to have the same fire, although he reads a little more, well, angry.

Now I’m really starting to think that Marco Rubio might just be the right guy, at the right time. When our candidates start to get shredded, and then more “viable” or alternative candidates are offered up from the Left, you know they are just trying to throw us off. I am inclined not to be interested in advice from the Left.

We all know that if Thursday at 9pm came around and Governor Jindal was the Republican nominee, by 9:20pm Maria and the fellow Left leaning “journalists” would have their stories ready to print about Jindal’s being “too angry” and his lack of experience (Louisiana is a little state, right?). This is a game to these sociopaths. A game I don’t intend to play, and hopefully the lessons of 2008 and 2012 have helped teach our side to stop playing the game on the Left’s turf, and by their rules. For example, look no further than our sides willingness to allow Leftists from ABC, CNN, CNBC, Politico or MSNBC to ask questions of our candidates during Presidential primary debates. That has to stop.

We obviously have a long way to go to get to 2016 and that nominating process. I am not interested in the opinions of those on the Left as to who we should nominate. They will not be fair, they will not be balanced, we know this going in. These articles point to that disparity in fairness and accuracy. Rarely will one shill newspaper show its hand all in one issue, but it happened on February 17; praise the one, denigrate the other.

– – –

I’m not going to delve into Bruce Davidson’s attempts to sympathize with, and begin to make excuses for, Julian Castro. There will be plenty more on that, later. But as Mr. Wians points out in his letter above, the Express-News is one newspaper not hiding its Leftwing tilt very well.

Rubio Delivers Republican Response, Twice

Marco Rubio, United States Senator from Florida, pulled off quite a feat tonight. He offered the Republican rebuttal to President Obama’s State Of The Union address. That seems ordinary enough, but Senator Rubio went a step further and delivered the speech, once in English and once in Spanish. Videos of both speeches are posted below.

English:

Spanish:

If you watched either video, you likely noticed the moment where Senator Rubio reached for a drink of water. It was a very human moment, and Senator Rubio made the most of it after he spoke, take a look at this tweet and picture:

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