BOOM: David Brooks, Charles Murray, and the Reign of Mammon

by LaVonne Neff 02-15-2012
8:56am



Der Mammon und sein Sklave. Holzstich, 1896 via Wiki Commons, http://bit.ly/zom5Df

Tuesday's New York Times carried a thought-provoking op-ed by David Brooks called "The Materialist Fallacy." I recommend that you read it: it's only 764 words long. Brooks argues that "in the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated." This is not just because of job loss (the liberal explanation) or government intrusiveness (the libertarian explanation) or "the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms" (the neo-conservative explanation).

It has more to do with declining social context and social capital, says Brooks, who never met a financial capitalist he didn't like. He really likes Charles Murray's new book, however: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010. (If you're not up for the 416-page book, you might want to read Brooks's January 30 column in praise of it.) Both authors worry about nefarious social forces that are driving a wedge between rich and poor, productive and non-productive, law-abiding and outlaws.

Brooks is partly right, and so are his critics. Yes, there's a rip in our social fabric. Yes, it is caused or made worse by job loss, ill-advised government programs, and shifting (or abandoned) values. Yes, it diminishes social capital and impoverishes social context. But also, Mr Brooks, and perhaps fundamentally, our decaying social fabric is the direct result of our enthusiastic worship of Mammon--the love of money that is the root of all evil (1 Timothy 6:10).


I don't need to remind anybody about rapacious financiers, bloated CEOs, unscrupulous lobbyists, and corrupt politicians. But there were plenty of those in the 1890s and the 1920s, and, as Brooks points out, the social fabric still stayed more or less intact back then. Even two World Wars and a Great Depression didn't unravel it. People still finished school, still got jobs, and still got married before having children, if not always before getting pregnant. Why did things start to break down in the 60s?

It's all the Boomers' fault, right? I mean, the first Boomers were getting their driver's licenses in 1962, the very year Brooks chooses as the beginning of the end. And once we had wheels, and cars with back seats, and, hey, the Pill!--it was all downhill from there.

Nope. Brooks doesn't think it's that simple. But I don't see him fretting about the sea change in the cult of Mammon that took place in the 1950s when we older Boomers were children. For the first time, kids — millions of us — became a market segment. With a brand-new television set planted in nearly every living room in America, we were sitting ducks for anyone who had a product to sell and money to buy air time. We were as plankton to whales, as baby seals to sharks.

The marketers told us we were fantastic, and we believed them. They told us we deserved whatever we wanted, and we agreed. They warned us, sometimes not so subtly ("often a bridesmaid, never a bride"), that if we didn't buy their product, we might face some diminution of our social capital, and we trembled. And they encouraged us to buy their product right now, whether or not we had cash on hand.

Believing them, we stopped thinking about tomorrow. Sha la la-la-la-la, live for today — never mind that what we did today might get us in debt, or destroy our brains, or produce babies. We were the "Now" generation, and proud of it.

But what do you get when people start wanting everything now, so much so that they stop making and carrying out long-range plans, that they defer commitment indefinitely, that they heedlessly risk future solvency in favor of present satisfaction? Well, at the front end, you get a great economy based on thriving businesses with ever-expanding sales volumes. Then, when the rush subsides, you get fatherless children, inadequate education, declining health, a hazardous environment, crumbling roads, and joblessness. You get a social fabric shot full of holes.

So whom shall we blame for the present sad state of so many Americans? Government? Big business? Mysterious social forces? Our own lack of moral fiber? Sure, why not. We've all sold out to Mammon. Our society's organizing principle is the love of money.

Alas, until we as individuals and as a nation stop worshiping at Mammon's altar, all attempts to fix the social fabric--be they Republican, Democratic, socialist, anarchist, moralist, religious, or academic--will be about as effective as sewing "a piece of new cloth on an old garment" (Mark 16:21). Still, a patched garment, if no new fabric exists, is better than no garment at all.

LaVonne Neff is an amateur theologian and cook; lover of language and travel; wife, mother, grandmother, godmother, dogmother; perpetual student, constant reader, and Christian contrarian. She blogs at Lively Dust and at The Neff Review.

The Materialist Fallacy

February 13, 2012

By DAVID BROOKS

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class.

In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.

As early as the 1970s, three large theories had emerged to explain the weakening of the social fabric. Liberals congregated around an economically determinist theory. The loss of good working-class jobs undermined communities and led to the social deterioration.

Libertarians congregated around a government-centric theory. Great Society programs enabled people to avoid work and gave young women an incentive to have children without marrying.

Neo-conservatives had a more culturally deterministic theory. Many of them had been poor during the Depression. Economic stress had not undermined the family then. Moreover, social breakdown began in the 1960s, a time of unprecedented prosperity. They argued that the abandonment of traditional bourgeois norms led to social disruption, especially for those in fragile circumstances.

Over the past 25 years, though, a new body of research has emerged, which should lead to new theories. This research tends to support a few common themes. First, no matter how social disorganization got started, once it starts, it takes on a momentum of its own. People who grow up in disrupted communities are more likely to lead disrupted lives as adults, magnifying disorder from one generation to the next.

Second, it’s not true that people in disorganized neighborhoods have bad values. Their goals are not different from everybody else’s. It’s that they lack the social capital to enact those values.

Third, while individuals are to be held responsible for their behavior, social context is more powerful than we thought. If any of us grew up in a neighborhood where a third of the men dropped out of school, we’d be much worse off, too.

The recent research details how disruption breeds disruption. This research includes the thousands of studies on attachment theory, which show that children who can’t form secure attachments by 18 months face a much worse set of chances for the rest of their lives because they find it harder to build stable relationships.

It includes the diverse work on self-control by Walter Mischel, Angela Duckworth, Roy Baumeister and others, which shows, among other things, that people raised in disrupted circumstances find it harder to control their impulses throughout their lives.

It includes the work of Annette Lareau, whose classic book, “Unequal Childhoods,” was just updated last year. She shows that different social classes have radically different child-rearing techniques, producing different outcomes.

Over the past two weeks, Charles Murray’s book, “Coming Apart,” has restarted the social disruption debate. But, judging by the firestorm, you would have no idea that the sociological and psychological research of the past 25 years even existed.

Murray neglects this research in his book. Meanwhile, his left-wing critics in the blogosphere have reverted to crude 1970s economic determinism: It’s all the fault of lost jobs. People who talk about behavior are blaming the victim. Anybody who talks about social norms is really saying that the poor are lazy.

Liberal economists haven’t silenced conservatives, but they have completely eclipsed liberal sociologists and liberal psychologists. Even noneconomist commentators reduce the rich texture of how disadvantage is actually lived to a crude materialism that has little to do with reality.

I don’t care how many factory jobs have been lost, it still doesn’t make sense to drop out of high school. The influences that lead so many to do so are much deeper and more complicated than anything that can be grasped in an economic model or populist slogan.

This economic determinism would be bad enough if it was just making public debate dumber. But the amputation of sociologic, psychological and cognitive considerations makes good policy impossible.

The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them. It’s not enough just to have economic growth policies. The country also needs to rebuild orderly communities.

This requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.

Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.

Is Glenn Beck A Hypocrite?

I found this and decided to post this article.  Cenk (The young turks) had Andrew on his show tonight and they were politely discussing this and his venture at CPAC this past weekend. 
Here is the video.....

Andrew Breitbart: It’s OK to smear Occupy, because tea party has been unfairly portrayed


“I tand by precisely what I said,” Breitbart says.
Cenk talks to Andrew Breitbart about a video that captures him yelling, “Stop raping people!” at Occupy protesters outside the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC).
what I’m trying to understand is if you’re doing it on purpose, like, you know you’re being unfair, or do you think you’re being eminently fair?” Cenk asks.
Do you really think you can smear the whole movement?” Breitbart answers, “I’m being too fair. Fair is playing by the same rules that you and NBC and The Huffington Post played against smearing the tea party.”

Written by Steven Rosenblum in politics, TV, VIP on 26 May 2011

  It is important that I start by saying I don’t personally know Andrew Breitbart or Glenn Beck. I met Breitbart once, for about 60 seconds, at CPAC 2010. I also interviewed him by phone on May 21^st, with my co-host Daria DiGiovanni, on Conservative Republican Forum. I have never met or spoken to Glenn Beck. I admire what both of these men have accomplished.

 

Glenn Beck versus Andrew Breitbart

*Updated (see below).

On the evening of May 24^th I became aware of a feud between Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck, two conservative media heavyweights, that apparently has been brewing for the better part of a year. The dispute goes back to the story of Shirley Sherrod, the USDA employee, who was forced to resign in July of 2009 after a video of her speaking at a local NAACP chapter meeting was shown on Breitbart’s BigGovernment website.
In the video Mrs. Sherrod- who is black- talks about an experience she had with a white farmer who came to her for help saving his farm. She tells the audience among other things that, “I was struggling with the fact that so many black people have lost their farmland and here I was faced with having to help a white person save their land — so I didn’t give him the full force of what I could do. I did enough.”


This video became public at a time when the NAACP and much of the liberal media were attempting to portray the Tea Party movement as racist. Not surprisingly conservative media outlets: including FoxNews and others ran with the story. This led to Mrs. Sherrod, the USDA’s Georgia Director of Rural Development, being forced to resign by Secretary Tom Vilsack to avoid embarrassing the Department and the Obama Administration.
Unfortunately the video on BigGoverment’s website was not the full video of the event. It was however “the entirety of the speech [Breitbart] had in his possession”, according to blogger Ed Morrissey at HotAir.com. Mrs. Sherrod goes on to explain the error of her initial impression, this fact was later confirmed by the farmer himself and his wife. In fact the wife calls Sherrod a “friend” who “helped us save our farm”.
Andrew Breitbart has said that the point of the video was not Mrs. Sherrod’s statement, but rather the way that the audience laughed and seemed to approve of her not giving the white farmer “the full force of what” she could do. Again, the NAACP was accusing the Tea Party of racism and Breitbart had a tape of people at a NAACP chapter meeting embracing her story of black on white racism.
The dispute between Beck and Breitbart stems from some of the claims Beck made about how he covered the story, including: “We didn’t rush to condemn her”, “We defended her and said her side of the story demanded to be heard- because– context matters.”


It is true that on his Fox News Channel show Beck did not condemn Shirley Sherrod. But what was not revealed to his TV audience, and was largely ignored in the media, was that earlier that morning on his nationally syndicated radio program (before all the exculpatory information became known and put her comments in context) Beck did attack Sherrod in 3 segments, totaling about 9 minutes.
Click below to hear the segments from 7/20/2010:
Glenn Beck Radio Audio Segment 4
Glenn Beck Radio Audio Segment 11
Glenn Beck Radio Audio Segment 12
If Beck had simply said he didn’t have all the facts when his radio show aired and had framed his future coverage of the story that way, there would have been no problem. But instead he told this cable audience, “I have a story I want to share with you that I haven’t shared yet. Do you know why I didn’t do the Shirley Sherrod story? Did anyone think that story was uncommon for the people that we have in the White House? That there might be some prejudice that is happening? No. I stood in my office with my entire team, and I said, “Something’s wrong, don’t do this story.” That’s what saved me: the Sword of the Spirit.”
Clearly, this is not the case. He attacked Mrs. Sherrod on his radio show based on the information he had in his possession at that time. He also ignored the context of the article that accompanied the audio he was using to attack her. Then when the full story became clear Mr. Beck didn’t simply admit it, he made himself the victim and started to blame others.
Click below to see Glenn later the same day on his Fox News show:
Beck- Context Matters Part 1
Beck- Context Matters Part 2
Beck- Context Matters Part 3
Beck- Context Matters Part 4
On his Twitter feed Breitbart says he’s “been trying since July 2010 to get him [Beck] to set [the] record straight”. He says he “sucked it up for most of a year & went to Beck’s office last month. Talked to [a] top exec. Expected results. Got none”.
Breitbart goes on to ask “Beck fans” 5 questions:

1. “Is it cool your guru goes behind my back to hire away my editors, take bloggers/contributors & while bad mouthing me?”
2. “Why’d he take so much Big content w/out attribution during even our high times? Is partial attribution the ‘truth’ standard?”
3. “When he was throwing me under [the] Sherrod bus, why’d he double down & lie to O’Reilly’s face that he didn’t do [the] story?”
4. “Why has he avoided a year of me trying to settle this privately through Kerry, LibertyChick & others?”
5. “Why’d you go after O’Keefe & me (though I had nothing to do w/NPR)? @mmfa [Media Matters for America] sure liked that d*ck move!”

I have been to GlennBeck.com and TheBlaze.com to see if Mr. Beck has addressed Mr. Breitbart’s charges. I could find no evidence that he has. On his cable show Beck tells his viewers a few things that have always made me respect him: “Don’t take my word for anything I say on this show”, “do your own research”, “truth has no agenda” and “QUESTION WITH BOLDNESS”.
I don’t have a dog in this hunt. Both Andrew Breitbart and Glenn Beck are titans of conservative media that have inspired many of us to write, broadcast, investigate and question. If I had never heard of the two of them I might not be writing for this publication and likely would not be hosting my own radio show.
Andrew Breitbart vs. Glenn Beck, to me, is the equivalent of the old Japanese monster movie ‘King Kong vs. Godzilla’ (I’m not sure who is who). It is a colossal battle and just as the result of those two monsters fighting led to the destruction of Tokyo, a battle between Breitbart and Beck could lead to damage to the conservative movement and media. The only winners in this dispute are left-wing media organizations like Media Matters for America, the DailyKos, MSNBC and the New York Times.
And yet it seems the difficult question that must be asked, because “the truth has no agenda”, is: “Is Glenn Beck a hypocrite?” Has he failed to live by the standards he espouses to his audience? His listeners, viewers and all the people that buy his books and have traveled vast distances to attend his rallies, not to mention all the people that follow his 9 principles and 12 values (912) deserve to know the truth of what really happened.
Andrew Breitbart has made his side of the story extraordinarily clear and very public. He has brought the issue of Glenn Beck’s ethics and integrity to the court of public opinion, because he says Beck refused to deal with it privately for almost a year. To put it simply Beck’s principles and values have been challenged, this time by a conservative peer not some left-winger. Shouldn’t Glenn address this? His silence is deafening.
Updated 12:30pm 5/26/11:
It appears that Glenn Beck’s  producers did go on to defend Mrs. Sherrod in the 4th hour of the show which is available only to SUBSCRIBERS OF HIS INSIDER EXTREME service. They play audio of a CNN interview with Mrs. Sherrod, where she defends herself and tries to explain why she did not fight when the USDA and White House demanded her resignation. You can judge for yourself the veracity of her claims and how much the Beck producers actually defend Sherrod.

Senator McConnell Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

Feb. 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference


Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell talked about Republican Party strategy against President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. He talked about the economy, the deficit, and the the Obama administration ruling on a provision of the 2010 health care law that requires church-affiliated employers to cover contraceptives and other preventive services in their health insurance plans.

Must-Read Transcript Breitbart at CPAC:This Is Not Your Mother's Democratic Party

This is not word for word, but pretty close.  He knows exactly how to incite the audience.


Doug Ross @ Journal: -- 
Saturday, February 11, 2012, 3:55:00 PM

Transcript by Biff Spackle, Junior Cub Reporter:

Right now, my Twitter feed is already calling me a big fat homosexual. Hello, children at home. No, your Dad's not gay. That's how the Left rolls.

Everybody asks me: why do you retweet? Why do you do that? ...In fact, there's probably no one in the world I respect more than Professor Hugh Hewitt and the other day he took me aside. He said, "I don't think you should do that, Andrew." Well, Professor Hewitt, on this issue I disagree.

Because they've held over our heads -- with contempt -- the false narrative of their innate tolerance. The least tolerant people you'll ever meet in your entire lives -- I know it, I live it every day. And I retweet it to remind them that I know exactly who they are.

...This is my war cry for 2012. You need to join me in my war against the institutional left.

This is not your mother's Democratic Party... duh! John Podesta and George Soros? This is not your mother's Democratic Party You know whose party it is? ...I have a thesis about who we're fighting against on the hard left... [In college] I had no idea these [left-wing academics] people were actually serious about the malarkey they were teaching. The post-structuralist, politically correct garbage.

Unfortunately in 2004, the radical Left [executed] a coup d'etat of the Democratic Party. And basically kicked a person -- that four years was called 'the standard-bearer of decency in the Democratic Party'. And that person was Joe Lieberman.

That was the end of the Democratic Party. And in 2010, the DLC went under.

There's no such thing as a moderate Democrat. And so what do we get now, in Barack Obama?

In this election we're going to vet him

I've got videos, by the way, and in this election we're going to vet him. I've got videos. This election we're going to vet him. From his college days, to show you why racial division and class warfare are central to what 'hope and change' was sold in 2008.

The videos are going to come out. The narrative is going to come out: that Barack Obama met a bunch of silver pony-tails [left wing academics] back in the 1980s, like Bill [Ayers] and Bernadine Dohrn who said "one day, we're going to have the presidency.'

And the rest of us slept while they plotted and they plotted and they plotted. And they oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in the Annenberg Challenge, from real capitalists, who gave it to their children and their children's children [who] then became communists. We've got to work on that...

Barack Obama is a radical and we should not be afraid to say it. And Barack Obama was launched from Bill and Bernadine's salon... it became self-evident to me that [Obama enjoyed] many a meal there... And don't tell me, ABC, CBS and NBC that I can't posit that theory, because it is a self-evident truth. Just like it was a self-evident truth that he was with Jeremiah Wright. And just as it was a self-evident truth that when he was at Harvard, he was advocating for the worst of the worst to join the faculty. Radicals. Radicals at "Beirut on the Charles".

And that who's in the White House. And that's who's outside right now [the Occupy movement] telling you that you don't have a right to be here. They would squelch your free speech just as easily as they do at Harvard, Vassar, Yale, Wesleyan - they're a bunch of totalitarian freaks.

The media can no longer be called objective journalists

And they pal around with our friends in the mainstream media. I always thought the media leaned to the left... but when they act like a Provost at a politically correct university and tell people to shut up, [then] no longer can they be called objective journalists. They're playing for the other side.

They've been part of demonizing good and decent people. They tried to defeat the Tea Party and when they failed, just like when they tried to create a [leftist] Rush Limbaugh and they failed with Air America, they want what they can't have. They wanted what they could not have and what did they create?

They created the "Occupy Movement". What is the Occupy Movement, you may ask? It's a natural, organic group of people -- you've never seen before in your life. Wait a sec-- these exact people protested against you at the GOP Welcoming Committee in 2008-- and two of them were arrested for planting Molotov cocktails. [These] are radicals against the police, radicals against you, exactly like Occupy, the same exact people, the same people who organized "Camp Casey" in Crawford, these are the same exact people who went down the highway at the end of the summer when Katrina happened, created Occupy New Orleans.

It's the same radicals, they've been in your life since 'Senator Obama' became part of your vocabulary. They are at war with you. They attack you. They throw eggs at you. And -- guess what? -- the media looks the other way. You're domestic terrorists, you know. Janet Napolitano warned me about that.

Yet when this group emerged, what happened? ...This is my thesis: the anti-war movement was never about anti-war. It was a Saul Alinsky community-organizing tool to get Barack Obama and the Left elected. It went away immediately.

The Occupy Movement is the Definition of Un-American

And the mainstream media created a narrative... Time Magazine's "Person of the Year... this is the anti-war movement! How do I know this? Because if I told this to ABC, CBS and NBC, they'd tell me it's a conspiracy theory -- that it's just a bunch of organic people. There's no organization going on, even though we have the emails to prove it. Or the undercover videos of Natasha Leonard of The New York Times organizing with the radicals. No, that didn't mean anything!

Bernadine Dohrn pointed out to me when I was snarkily asking 'What ever happened to the anti-war movement?', she let loose an affirmation of everything I know to be true. She said, "Well, that's not true... it's more or less what Occupy Wall Street is." And the mainstream media refuses to tell you that these are the same shock troops that have been ... instigating [against] us, instigating riots against the police, these people are the definition of un-American.

I don't care who our candidate is

You want a unity speech? I'll give you a unity speech. I don't care who our candidate is.

I haven't since the beginning of this... ask not what the candidate can do for you, ask what you can do for the candidate!

And that's what the Tea Party is.

We are there to confront [the radical left] on behalf of our candidate!

I will march behind who ever our candidate is. Because if we don't, we lose.

There are two paths! There are two paths! One is America, the other is Occupy! One is America, the other is Occupy! And I don't care, and along the way... I've realized over the last three years that the Republican Party and the conservative movement is not what ABC, CBS and NBC put on the screen.

They try to portray you in the worst possible light... and when I travel around the United States meeting people in the Tea Party who care -- black, white, gay, straight -- anyone that's willing to stand next to me to fight the progressive left, I will be in that bunker, and if you're not in that bunker 'cause you're not satisfied with this candidate, more than shame on you. You're on the other side.

Erick Erickson -- you listening?

Breitbart: Support Republican Nominee, Whomever It Is, in “War Against the Institutional Left.”

Andrew Breitbart’s Video Of CPAC Speech


Breitbart tells CPAC: I have videos of Obama in college and they’ll come out during the election


posted at 7:53 pm on February 10, 2012 by AllahpunditVia Mediaite, the key bit comes at 5:15 but don’t skip. Watch the whole thing, as this is easily the most entertaining speech you’ll see at CPAC. Naturally he’s coy about what he’s got, but it sounds like it has to do with O as a student radical. I wonder if big media, having heard this, will scramble to try to uncover the footage and put it out ASAP so that it’s old news by the time of the general election. Can’t wait to hear their explanations for why they couldn’t be bothered to do that last cycle.


Note well what he says at 10:30 about Bernadine Dohrn’s take on the anti-war movement. It’s a comfort to know that some of its leaders are now willing to admit what a fraud it was.


Posted on February 11, 2012

This is a speech about unity, mind you. I thought he was never gonna make it, but man was I wrong! This speech I bet changed a lot of minds about the back-and-forth of our candidates and the threats of sitting it out if it’s not who they picked for President.


Posted on February 10, 2012 by Bill Hobbs

Long-time Tea Party supporter Andrew Breitbart, the conservative new-media star and publisher of Breitbart.com and Breitbart.tv, gave a colorful last speech of the day at CPAC today in which he bashed the liberal media and the Occupy movement, calling the radical Left “a bunch of totalitarian freaks.”

“I’m looking for you Occupy Freaks, bring on the glitter bomb,” Brietbart said at the start of his talk, as he paced the CPAC stage, peering into the crowd.

According to Brietbart, the Occupy movement houses the same radicals from the anti-war movement – but the media chooses to ignore their violent acts and instead paint them as “peaceful protesters.”

Brietbart said the Occupy protesters are “the definition of un-American,” and urges attendees to act and react to these “shock troops” by supporting the Republican presidential nominee – whomever it is.

Ask not what candidate can do for you, but what you can do for the candidate,” Brietbart said, drawing applause, and called on the crowd to “join me in the war against the institutional left.”

Senator Rand Paul Remarks to Conservative Political Action Conference

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference



Senator Rand Paul criticized President Obama's call for a minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires. Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, Senator Paul warned of a looming national debt crisis, saying even his party was late to address the issue.

Herman Cain Remarks at Conservative Political Action Conference

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference




Herman Cain used his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference(CPAC) to endorse Joe "the Plumber" Wurzelbacher for Senate in Ohio. Speaking in Washington, Mr. Cain also said he dropped out of the presidential race because of "gutter politics and for family."

Conservative Issues

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference




Republican Representatives Steve King (IA), Michele Bachmann (MN), and Jim Jordan (OH) spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Among the Issues they addressed were federal regulations, President Obama's foreign policy agenda, and the state of the conservative movement.

Conservative Political Action Conference Panel Discussion

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference



Conservative commentators talked about the state of the conservative movement, the 2012 presidential election campaign, the economy, and Republican views of social issues.

Speaker Boehner Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference



House Speaker John Boehner spoke about the House under his leadership. He also talked about Republican efforts to ban earmarks and the Obama administration ruling on a provision of the 2010 health care law that requires church-affiliated employers to cover contraceptives and other preventive services in their health insurance plans.

Rick Perry Remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference

Feb 9, 2012
Conservative Political Action Conference


Texas Governor Rick Perry talked about the relationship between Wall Street and the federal government