Thursday, January 2, 2014

World's climate warming faster than feared, scientists say - Telegraph

World's climate warming faster than feared, scientists say - Telegraph

[Are you kidding me? These "scientists" still tout warming after 17 years of no warming and one of the coldest winters ever.]

World's climate warming faster than feared, scientists say

Scientists say the world’s climate is warming faster than feared because previous predictions were too “optimistic” and overestimated the cooling impact of clouds

A satellite image of planet Earth Photo: Alamy

By Jonathan Pearlman, Sydney

7:14PM GMT 01 Jan 2014

5432 Comments

As the planet marked its fourth hottest year on record, a study published in the journal Nature found increasing levels of carbon dioxide will lead to thinner ocean clouds and reduce their cooling impact, causing temperature rises of at least 5.6F (3C) over the course of the century.

The team of scientists said the findings show some climate models have been too “optimistic” and previous estimates of a minimum temperature rise of only 2.7F (1.5C) could now be discounted. The optimistic models did not properly assess the impact of water evaporation, which sometimes rises only a short distance into the atmosphere and causes updraughts that reduce cloud cover, the study found.

”These models have been predicting a lower climate sensitivity but we believe they’re incorrect,” Professor Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales, told The Sydney Morning Herald.

”The net effect of [climate change] is you have less cloud cover.”

The study comes amid a controversy in Australia over claims by Maurice Newman, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s top business adviser, who said the world had been taken “hostage to climate change madness”.

Mr Newman said the climate change establishment, led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, remained “intent on exploiting the masses and extracting more money”.
“The scientific delusion, the religion behind the climate crusade, is crumbling,” he wrote in The Australian. “Global temperatures have gone nowhere for 17 years... If the IPCC were your financial adviser, you would have sacked it long ago.”
Mr Newman, a former chairman of the Australian Stock Exchange, was criticised by the opposition and pilloried by scientists, who said he was expressing “flat earth” views and should be sacked.
“His piece is a mix of common climate change myths, misinformation and ideology,” said Professor David Karoly, from the University of Melbourne, in an article in The Sydney Morning Herald.
“I would not choose a person who believes that the Earth is flat to advise Australian shipping or airline businesses on how to plan routes to travel around the world. It is clearly not sensible to have a person who believes that climate change science is a delusion as leader of the prime minister’s Business Advisory Council.”
Mr Abbott, who is something of a climate change sceptic, once claimed that “climate change is “absolute crap”, though he later said he accepts it is “real”.
Since winning a federal election last September, he has moved to scrap Labor’s tax on carbon emissions and instead proposes to address climate change by paying polluters to reduce emissions, though critics say the plan is underfunded and will not achieve its reduction targets.
The debate comes as Australia in 2013 marked its hottest year since reliable recordings began in 1910. The world’s driest continent also recorded its hottest day, hottest month, hottest winter’s day and hottest summer.
The run of warmer weather began late in 2012 and was so great that Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology last year changed its official weather forecasting map to include new colours - deep purple and pink - for areas with temperatures above 50C (122F).
Globally, according to figures released in December by the United States National Climatic Data Center, 2013 was set to be the fourth hottest year in 134 years of records behind 2010, 2005 and 1998.
Meteorologists said it was the hottest year on record for a non-El Niño year.

Obama’s Half-Brother Reveals What the President Did the First Time They Met in Kenya and Talked About ‘Heroes of Western Culture’ | TheBlaze.com

Obama’s Half-Brother Reveals What the President Did the First Time They Met in Kenya and Talked About ‘Heroes of Western Culture’

Jan. 2, 2014 7:54am Sharona Schwartz

President Obama’s half-brother tells an Israeli newspaper that when he first met Barack, he was struck by his sibling’s rejection of western culture.

“I remember that my impression at the first meeting was that Barack thought that I was too white, and I thought that he was too black,” Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo told Maariv. “He was an American citizen on a journey in search of his African roots, while I was a resident of Kenya seeking to find his white roots.”

“I remember that when I spoke with him about the heroes of Western culture he rolled his eyes impatiently. My feeling was that, here is an American who in many ways is trying to be a local Kenyan youth. This is something I tried to flee my entire life,” Ndesandjo said of the brothers’ first meeting in Kenya that Obama described in his 1995 best selling memoir “Dreams from My Father.”

Obama’s Half Brother Tells an Israeli Newspaper about What He Believes the President’s Views Are on His Race and American Culture

President Barack Obama with Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo (R) and his wife (Image: Mark Obama Ndesanjo Foundation Ltd.)

In his memoir, Obama also described the first meeting with his brother. “I don’t feel much of an attachment [to Kenya]. Just another poor African country,” Obama quoted Ndesandjo saying. He went on to say, “You think that somehow I’m cut off from my roots … Well, you’re right.”

As was reported on TheBlaze last month, Ndesandjo has said he wants to “set the record straight” about some of the details presented in Obama’s memoir.

The siblings have met since that first meeting in Kenya, including in 2007 before then-candidate Obama’s debate with Hillary Clinton.

“I came to visit him in Texas, and it was one of the happiest moments of my life. He entered the room where I was waiting for him, looked at me and said, ‘Mark, what happened to your afro?’ And I asked: ‘What happened to your afro?’ He said: ‘I cut my hair.’ It was a real moment, very natural, as if for a moment we returned to being two brothers,” Ndesandjo recounted.

Ndesandjo described his relationship with the president as “loaded” and “passionate.”

“There were very good conversations or very loaded,” he said in the interview that was published on Thursday.

The siblings share the same Kenyan father, Barack Obama Sr., but different white American mothers.

“A few months ago I asked him to contact his relatives in Kenya. I told him that even one phone call would propel them to the sky with such happiness, but he didn’t like what I asked, and that moment broke off the connection with me,” Ndesandjo said.

Note that in Hebrew – the language in which the interview was published – the same word is used for “connection” and “relationship” so it’s unclear if Ndesandjo meant that his brother Barack cut off the telephone conversation or their relationship.

“He can be sensitive, aggressive or very stoical. That’s a side of his personality that many people do not know,” Ndesandjo said of Barack Obama.

“Barack and I have a lot in common. Both of us have advantages and disadvantages, and some of them come from our father,” Ndesandjo told Maariv.

The president’s half-brother described their relationship with their parents and with each other.

He called their father “a boundary-breaking man and to a large extent rebellious. He was a man of great passion and intellect, who attracted many people.”

Asked what he has in common genetically with Barack, Ndesandjo said, “I think that the common link between us comes not from [our] shared father, rather more from our mothers. Both of us had strong mothers, women who took great risks to raise their children and to protect them. Barack and I love our mothers to no end, because they defended us and protected us.”

“I thought it was amazing how much he resembles me,” Ndesandjo said of their first meeting. “And yet, we were like two Siamese twins who looked in the direction of the other, and we were unable to see each other.”

Ndesandjo is today a businessman and musician who lives in China. He published an autobiographical novel several years ago which described an abusive Kenyan father.

He also runs the Mark Obama Ndesanjo Foundation which promotes cultural exchanges between Asia, Africa and the U.S. and provides instruments and music teachers to needy children in China.

When his parents divorced, Ndesandjo moved to the U.S. where he studied physics at Brown University and Stanford and earned an MBA from Emory University.

Ndesandjo’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, Obama Sr.’s third wife, was born in the U.S. to Lithuanian Jewish immigrants.

Ndesandjo told Maariv he considers himself a member of the Jewish people. “I am a Jew not only because I have a Jewish mother but first and foremost because there exists in me great pride to be a part of the Jewish people. I feel great belonging to Jewish heritage, to Jewish culture, and to the Jewish philosophers,” he said.

Obama’s 2014 Big Lie: Income Inequality | Somewhat Reasonable

Obama’s 2014 Big Lie: Income Inequality

by Alan Caruba
January 1, 2014

As the liberal disaster called Obamacare unfolds, President Barack Obama is already embarked on his next Big Lie: income inequality.
It’s useful to visit some of the planks of Karl Marx’s 1848 Communist Manifesto. They included abolition of private property — the keystone of capitalism — and the application of all rents of land to a public purpose. Marx advocated a heavy progressive or graduated income tax whereas a fair tax that treats all Americans fairly by taxing what you spend instead of what you earn. The current tax code is more than 73,000 pages! Marx wanted to eliminate all rights of inheritance and centralize credit by means of a national bank.
What Obama is talking about is socialism/communism when he claims that income inequality must be altered by more government intrusion into our lives and his claims are false. He said that “a dangerous and growing inequality and lack of upward mobility” is “the defining challenge of our time.”
His objective is to further divide Americans by promising what government cannot and should not deliver. This is now the Democratic Party theme leading up to the midterm elections in November. He is right about one thing, only economic growth can provide the opportunity for Americans to increase their personal incomes, provide a choice of investments, and save more for the future. In his first five years in office, economic growth has been historically slow.
In a Wall Street Journal opinion commentary by Robert A. Grady he cites a 2011 study by Lee Ohanian and Kip Hagopian, “The Mismeasure of Inequality”, that concluded that “inequality actually declined 1.8% during the 16-year period between 1993 and 2009.” According to studies by the U.S. Treasury, the capitalist system in America, providing mobility (up or down), found that “considerable income mobility” in the decades 1987-1996 and 1996-2005, found that approximately half of those in the bottom income quintile in 1996 had moved to a higher quintile by 2005. They were decades, the 1980s and 1990s, in which the vast majority of Americans gained higher incomes.
In the past four and a half years since the recession officially ended, poor people and the middle class were hurt the most and opportunity slowed. Under Obama millions of Americans are out of work and dependent on government programs such as food stamps and unemployment compensation. The later ended for many on December 31. The inequality that Obama cites is the direct result of the failure of his economic programs as well as a dramatic surge in federal regulations that harm economic growth.
The Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — is discouraging full-time employment. According to Gallup’s payroll-to-population ratio, the proportion of the American population working full-time, has dropped almost two percentage points in the last year to 43.8%. Wall Street Journal columnist noted that Obama spent 2013 fund-raising for the Democratic Party “making 30 separate visits to wealthy donors” at “more than twice the rate of the president’s two-term predecessors. On the day following the September 11, 2012 attack that killed an American ambassador and three others in Benghazi, Obama flew to Las Vegas on a fund-raising trip.
In the year ahead you will hear him cite figures based on 1979 income rates to justify his call for more opportunity, but in 1979 the mean (average) household income of the bottom 20% of wage earners was $4,000. By 2012, it was $11.499, an increase of 186%. For the middle class, the increase was 211%. Despite the 2008 financial crisis, it still rose.
Did the rich get richer? Yes. But the rich earn their money from inheritance, from business development (jobs) and investment. Under communism there is no inheritance; the state gets it all. And the state owns the factories and instruments of production, as well as collectivizing agriculture. It maintains a “progressive” or graduated income tax.
Does the political theme of income inequality work? Bill de Blasio, New York’s new mayor, ran on an income inequality platform and will be sworn in by former President Bill Clinton who will be accompanied by his wife, Hillary.
Income inequality will be the theme of Obama’s forthcoming State of the Union speech, but like everything else he says it will be a Big Lie.

Obama To Americans: You Don't Deserve To Be Free

President Obama’s Kansas speech is a remarkable document. In calling for more government controls, more taxation, more collectivism, he has two paragraphs that give the show away. Take a look at them.

there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The market will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just cut more regulations and cut more taxes–especially for the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the winners do really well, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle down to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle down, well, that’s the price of liberty.
Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our rugged individualism and our healthy skepticism of too much government. That’s in America’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the decade before the Great Depression. It’s not what led to the incredible postwar booms of the ’50s and ’60s. And it didn’t work when we tried it during the last decade. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this theory.

Though not in Washington, I’m in that “certain crowd” that has been saying for decades that the market will take care of everything. It’s not really a crowd, it’s a tiny group of radicals–radicals for capitalism, in Ayn Rand’s well-turned phrase.
The only thing that the market doesn’t take care of is anti-market acts: acts that initiate physical force. That’s why we need government: to wield retaliatory force to defend individual rights.
Radicals for capitalism would, as the Declaration of Independence says, use government only “to secure these rights”–the rights to life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. (Yes, I added “property” in there–property rights are inseparable from the other three.)
That’s the political philosophy on which Obama is trying to hang the blame for the recent financial crisis and every other social ill. But ask yourself, are we few radical capitalists in charge? Have radical capitalists been in charge at any time in the last, oh, say 100 years?
I pick 100 years deliberately, because it was exactly 100 years ago that a gigantic anti-capitalist measure was put into effect: the Federal Reserve System. For 100 years, government, not the free market, has controlled money and banking. How’s that worked out? How’s the value of the dollar held up since 1913? Is it worth one-fiftieth of its value then or only one-one-hundredth? You be the judge. How did the dollar hold up over the 100 years before this government take-over of money and banking? It actually gained slightly in value.
Laissez-faire hasn’t existed since the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. That was the first of a plethora of government crimes against the free market.
Radical capitalists are just beginning to have a slight effect on the Right wing. The overwhelming majority on the Right are eclectic. Which is a nice way of saying inconsistent.
The typical Republican would never, ever say “the market will take care of everything.” He’d say, “the market will take care of most things, and for the other things, we need the regulatory-welfare state.”
They are for individualism–except when they are against it. They are against free markets and individualism not only when they agree with the Left that we must have antitrust laws and the Federal Reserve, but also when they demand immigration controls, government schools, regulatory agencies, Medicare, laws prohibiting abortion, Social Security, “public works” projects, the “social safety net,” laws against insider trading, banking regulation, and the whole system of fiat money.
Obama blames economic woes, some real some invented (“inequality”) on a philosophy and policy that was abandoned a century ago. What doesn’t exist is what he says didn’t work.
Obama absurdly suggests that timid, half-hearted, compromisers, like George W. Bush, installed laissez-faire capitalism–on the grounds that they tinkered with one or two regulations (Glass-Steagall) and marginal tax rates–while blanking out the fact that under the Bush administration, government spending ballooned, growing much faster than under Clinton, and 50,000 new regulations were added to the Federal Register.
The philosophy of individualism and the politics of laissez-faire would mean government spending of about one-tenth its present level. It would also mean an end to all regulatory agencies: no SEC, FDA, NLRB, FAA, OSHA, EPA, FTC, ATF, CFTC, FHA, FCC–to name just some of the better known of the 430 agencies listed in the federal register.
Even you, dear reader, are probably wondering how on earth anyone could challenge things like Social Security, government schools, and the FDA. But that’s not the point. The point is: these statist, anti-capitalist programs exist and have existed for about a century. The point is: Obama is pretending that the Progressive PGR +0.41% Era, the New Deal, and the Great Society were repealed, so that he can blame the financial crisis on capitalism. He’s pretending that George Bush was George Washington.

We radical capitalists say that it was the regulatory-welfare state that imploded in 2008. You may disagree, but let’s argue that out, rather than engaging in the Big Lie that what failed was laissez-faire and individualism.
The question is: in the messy mixture of government controls and remnants of capitalism, which element caused the Great Depression and the recent financial crisis?
By raising that question, we uncover the fundamental: the meaning of capitalism and the meaning of government controls. Capitalism means freedom. Government means force.
Suddenly, the whole issue comes into focus: Obama is saying that freedom leads to poverty and force leads to wealth. He’s saying: “Look, we tried leaving you free to live your own life, and that didn’t work. You have to be forced, you have to have your earnings seized by the state, you have to work under our directions–under penalty of fines or imprisonment. You don’t deserve to be free.”
As a bit of ugly irony, this is precisely what former white slave-owners said after the Civil War: “The black man can’t handle freedom; we have to force him for his own good.” The innovation of the Left is to extend that viewpoint to all races.
Putting the issue as force vs. freedom shows how the shoe is on the other foot regarding what Obama said. Let me re-write it:

there is a certain crowd in Washington who, for the last few decades, have said, let’s respond to this economic challenge with the same old tune. “The government will take care of everything,” they tell us. If we just pile on even more regulations and raise taxes–especially on the wealthy–our economy will grow stronger. Sure, they say, there will be winners and losers. But if the losers are protected by more social programs and a higher minimum wage, if there is more Quantitative Easing by the Fed, then jobs and prosperity will eventually trickle up to everybody else. And, they argue, even if prosperity doesn’t trickle up, well, that’s the price of the social safety net.
Now, it’s a simple theory. And we have to admit, it’s one that speaks to our intellectuals’ collectivism and Paul Krugman’s skepticism about freedom. That’s in Harvard’s DNA. And that theory fits well on a bumper sticker. (Laughter.) But here’s the problem: It doesn’t work. It has never worked. (Applause.) It didn’t work when it was tried in the Soviet Union. It’s not what led to the incredible booms in India and China. And it didn’t work when Europe tried it during over the last decades. (Applause.) I mean, understand, it’s not as if we haven’t tried this statist theory.

How does that sound? That’s blaming an actual, existing condition–government controls and wealth-expropriation–not a condition that ended in the late 19th century.
So which is the path to prosperity and happiness–freedom or force? Remember that force is aimed at preventing you from acting on your rational judgment.
Obama’s real antagonist is Ayn Rand, who made the case that reason is man’s basic means of survival and coercion is anti-reason. Force initiated against free, innocent men is directed at stopping them from acting on their own thinking. It makes them, under threat of fines and imprisonment, act as the government demands rather than as they think their self-interest requires. That’s the whole point of threatening force: to make people act against their own judgment.
The radical, uncompromised, laissez-faire capitalism that Obama pretends was in place in 2008 is exactly what morality demands. Because, as Ayn Rand wrote in 1961: “No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others. . . . To claim the right to initiate the use of physical force against another man–the right to compel his agreement by the threat of physical destruction–is to evict oneself automatically from the realm of rights, of morality and of the intellect.”
Obama and his fellow statists have indeed evicted themselves from that realm.

It's official: Obamacare debuts with more canceled plans than enrollments | The Daily Caller

It’s official: Obamacare debuts with more canceled plans than enrollments

12:10 AM 01/01/2014

Sarah Hurtubise

Obamacare may have promised health insurance for the masses. But on its first day, it’s left more Americans without coverage than before the law was passed.
More than 4.7 million Americans had their health insurance canceled as a result of any of the thousand-plus-page law’s new rules, the Associated Press reports, but the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) confirmed Tuesday that between federal and state exchanges, just 2 million Americans have signed up for Obamacare coverage. (RELATED: Obama administration announces net loss of at least 3 million insurance plans)
The Obama

administration has yet to announce the final tally of full enrollments, which are only confirmed once customers have made their first payment, but Cato Institute health policy expert Michael Cannon warns that not all those who signed up will complete their purchases, potentially leaving the White House with an even lower bottom line.
Even without the full number of enrollments, Obamacare’s current net effect is clearly in favor of cancellations. Millions are already seeing Obamacare’s adverse effects — largely due to more mandates for more services.
The health-care law requires that all insurance plans cover 10 “essential benefits,” eliminating millions of plans that don’t fit the bill and boosting costs for consumers that have to purchase coverage for services they may not want or need.
All plans must include maternity coverage, for example — including plans for men and post-menopausal women. Even customers without children must purchase plans that cover pediatric services. Other newly established essential benefits include hospitalization, mental-health services and preventive and wellness services.
While a grandfather clause allowed plans purchased before Obamacare passed in 2010 to continue, HHS estimated that 40-67 percent of plans would eventually lose their status and cost millions of Americans their insurance plans.
The Obama administration eventually admitted Obamacare’s role in crushing many Americans’ coverage and has scrambled to belatedly make up for it. President Barack Obama

first attempted to reinstate the canceled coverage for just one more year, but many insurers chose not to restart already-canceled plans.
The latest stopgap, announced just before the deadline to purchase exchange coverage, is to allow those with canceled plans a one-year “hardship exemption” from the individual mandate to have medical coverage, but insurance companies didn’t see this as an adequate solution either.
“This type of last-minute change will cause tremendous instability in the marketplace and lead to further confusion and disruption for consumers,” Robert Zirkelbach, a spokesman for the trade group America’s Health Insurance Plans, told reporters.

Wednesday, January 1, 2014

'Completely false': Sources on ground in Benghazi challenge NYT report | Fox News

'Completely false': Sources on ground in Benghazi challenge NYT report

By Adam Housley

Published December 30, 2013

FoxNews.com

Fifteen months after the Sept. 11 attack in Benghazi which killed Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, the narrative of the attack continues to be shaped, and reshaped, by politicians and the press.
But a New York Times report published over the weekend has angered sources who were on the ground that night. Those sources, who continue to face threats of losing their jobs, sharply challenged the Times’ findings that there was no involvement from Al Qaeda or any other international terror group and that an anti-Islam film played a role in inciting the initial wave of attacks.
“It was a coordinated attack. It is completely false to say anything else. … It is completely a lie,” one witness to the attack told Fox News.
Sean Smith, a foreign service officer, and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were also killed in the 2012 assault.
The controversial Times report has stirred a community that normally remains out of sight and wrestles with how to reveal the truth, without revealing classified information.
Fox News has learned that the attack on the consulate started with fighters assembling to conduct an assault.
"Guys were coming into the compound, moving left, moving right…and using IMT (individual movement techniques). … That’s not a spontaneous attack,” one special operator said.
"One guy was shooting, one guy was running. There are guys watching the gates. … The bosses on the ground were pointing, commanding and coordinating -- that is a direct action planned attack."
The community of operators in Libya that night and since includes the CIA, FBI, U.S. military, U.S. State Department and contractors working for the United States in a number of capacities. According to multiple sources on the ground that night, all the intelligence personnel in Benghazi before the attack and there now understand Al Qaeda is a significant threat in Libya.
Recent reports also suggest that Libyan militia leader Ahmad Abu Khattallah is the mastermind of the attack and had no real connections to Al Qaeda or terrorist organizations.
Multiple sources, though, challenged that claim. They insist that while Khattallah was found responsible for the actions at the actual consulate and was essentially the ground force commander that night, he is also clearly tied to Ansar al-Sharia and to the broader terrorist network.
“There is direct evidence linking him before the attack and after the attack to terrorist groups. An opportunity came, and Khattallah conducted an assault on the consulate. To say that it wasn’t tied to Al Qaeda is completely false. There is literal evidence in many forms and shapes, directly linking him,” one source said.
Khattallah is also a member of the militia group the Libyan Shield, which was formed to protect Benghazi and is operating separate from Tripoli.
Other militias are not inclined to turn Khattallah in, because they are also tied to Ansar al-Sharia. Commanders from some of these militias thought to be friendly to the United States and who have worked with American special forces, the CIA and State Department personnel have flipped sides and affiliated with Ansar al-Sharia. Sources say the terrorist group is saturating the whole region of eastern Libya with money, training and personnel. "They are now the biggest organization in town,” one said.
Sources also tell Fox News that while Khattallah is responsible for the ground actions that night, he also reports to other commanders in Ansar al-Sharia. He is seen as a relatively small piece of the terror puzzle in the region, which includes Al Qaeda ambassadors. Some in the intelligence community call these terrorist ambassadors “Amirs,” and there has been one stationed in Libya for some time, as they are the liaison for intelligence and direction for operations. Libyan Shield, which has different offshoots in different locations, also has members directly affiliated with terrorist organizations and Al Qaeda. Bomb-making materials have been found with some of these groups as well.
Fox News has also learned there was a week of briefings by the head of counterintelligence in the entire region that identified Al Qaeda as the largest and most significant element infiltrating Libya, with the final briefing on Sept. 10.
Adam Housley joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 2001 and currently serves as a Los Angeles-based correspondent.

Guess Who's Funding the Republican Civil War - NationalJournal.com

Guess Who's Funding the Republican Civil War

Labor unions. And they're doing it through a pro-business Republican PAC.

Members of the Laborers' International Union of North America rally in Washington.(Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

By Scott Bland

The Republican Main Street Partnership has emerged as an outspoken, deep-pocketed player in pro-business GOP plans to beat back tea-party challengers next year. But the group's new super PAC has an unexpected source for its seed money: labor unions.
The super PAC, called Defending Main Street, has not yet submitted a major donor disclosure to the Federal Election Commission. But documents filed by other groups show that two labor organizations, the International Union of Operating Engineers and the Laborers' International Union of North America, directed a combined $400,000 to the Republican group in September and October.
Main Street says it has raised roughly $2 million total between its super PAC and an affiliated nonprofit group so far—and that means labor has supplied at least 20 percent of those funds.
For the unions, this is not a surprising move. While both labor groups direct most of their millions to Democrats, they have consistently given smaller amounts to friendly Republicans.

But the scale of these six-figure donations—$250,000 from the Operating Engineers and $150,000 from LIUNA—makes this effort distinct. Plus, the money is coming as the Main Street group has been publicly declaring its intent to crush tea-party challengers in Republican primaries, going head to head with conservative bankrollers such as the anti-tax Club for Growth.
"Hopefully, we'll go into eight to 10 races and beat the snot out of them," Main Street President Steven LaTourette told National Journal in October.
That puts these labor groups on the front line of the GOP's intra-party ideological conflict, a battle where the affiliation to unions won't be considered advantageous, to say the least.
Take Idaho, for example, where LaTourette and Main Street have vowed to help Republican Rep. Mike Simpson win his primary against club-backed challenger Bryan Smith.
The Club for Growth has already criticized Simpson for earning union endorsements in past elections, and it has turned other groups' support back around on Simpson, too. When the U.S. Chamber of Commerce released a TV ad backing Simpson on Thursday, Club for Growth president Chris Chocola said in a statement, "I guess pro-bailout, pro-Obama stimulus spending, pro-debt birds of a feather flock together."
LaTourette has pledged that Main Street will seek to match the Club's spending in that contest.
"We don't care about where Main Street gets its funding from," said Club for Growth spokesman Barney Keller. "But it's not surprising that Mike Simpson, who is anti-school choice and was backed by the Idaho teachers' union six elections in a row, would get backing from groups that are supported by labor unions."
Certainly, labor is not alone in funding Main Street. The group's money is "coming from business folks, from private donors," said spokesman Chris Barron. "It has a wide range of folks who are interested in supporting the governing wing of the Republican Party."
Barron rejected critiques of Main Street's funding and positioning. "If the money came from Mother Teresa, the Club for Growth would attack where it came from," Barron said.
Both the Operating Engineers and the Laborers' Union have given millions of dollars to Democratic candidates and millions more to the party's quasi-official House and Senate super PACs over the last few years. Only one other PAC gave more to Democratic candidates than the Operating Engineers' in 2012, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
But both unions have also consistently invested in the campaigns of friendly Republicans, including LaTourette's (when he was in Congress). Earlier this year, LIUNA endorsed New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie for reelection, and its PAC gave $300,000 to the Republican Governors Association, which ran pro-Christie advertising in the Garden State.
The Operating Engineers' PAC has given 23 percent of its donations to federal candidates to Republicans this year, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and it supported a super PAC called "Lunch Pail Republicans" last year. At the AFL-CIO's national convention in September, the Operating Engineers and another group offered a successful resolution urging "that the AFL-CIO take practical steps ... to cultivate and nurture relationships with members of all parties" and "encourage moderate candidates" in Republican-leaning congressional districts as part of a "pragmatic, bipartisan approach" to its political giving and advocacy.
"Especially with this crazy political atmosphere, this is a place where we need to be lending support to middle-of-the-road Democrats and Republicans both, and this is part of that effort," Jeffrey Soth, the Operating Engineers' political director, said.
Defending Main Street will file its next financial disclosure with the FEC in January.

Confessions of a Colorado Conservative

Thursday, January 2, 2014