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2016

Upheaval To Reinvent U.S. Politics :David Malpass

“THE SYSTEM IS RIGGED.” That’s the angry outcry from many Americans as we rush headlong toward the November election. Milton Friedman defined a worthy goal for a society seeking equal opportunity: There should be no arbitrary obstacles blocking people from realizing their ambitions. The angry public sees government overreach as precisely that—an arbitrary obstacle that thwarts their ambitions.

This column has advocated a sweeping government upheaval that would rewrite federal rules in order to limit Washington’s power and redirect it toward growth, security and higher middle-class incomes. Every government department needs to be reinvented and, in most cases, downsized through strong cabinet leadership and oversight. Interactions with Congress need to be transformed. Hundreds of “independent agencies” need to be disbanded or reacquainted with the practice of checks and balances.

Washington hates the idea of an upheaval. The current system is entrenched because it works well for those on the inside, the people who control the outcomes while achieving wealth and status for themselves. Many politicians and former government officials make large fortunes, which is reflected in the capital region’s having the highest per capita income in the nation. This is wrong.

MISGUIDED POWER

The reasons for this bonanza are clear and demand an upheaval. Washington will soon be spending $4 trillion per year, heading toward $5 trillion, yet it doesn’t have a working budget process or limits on spending and taxation. Instead, power is arbitrary and nearly absolute, a recipe for corruption, mistakes and inequality.

For example, the combined wisdom of the Pentagon, Congress and the White House has spent $1 trillion on an F-35 fighter jet that doesn’t meet defense needs, while lobbyists pay richly for the access needed to guide the procurement process. On the international front too much power has been vested in multilateral organizations that work against American values and interests. The IMF regularly imposes austerity on poor people, lowering incomes while increasing government power. The UN is divisive and incompetent, whether in dealing with human rights, women’s safety or North Korean missiles terrorizing the Pacific.

The recently disclosed Panama Papers show the extent of government corruption worldwide—often taking place under the noses of U.S.-funded watchdogs. Washington’s political establishment seems unable to cut a single program. In 2015 crony capitalism mysteriously resurrected the Export-Import Bank after it had been shuttered for cause as an unnecessary apparatus of corporate subsidies and government power contributing to inequality.

MY SAY: ON PASSOVER

Tomorrow evening Jews will gather with friends and family to celebrate Passover. We will recount the hardships of slavery in Egypt and the harsh oppression by the Pharaoh. We will rejoice in the rescue by Moses who demanded freedom for our people. We will recite the ten plagues that were unleashed on the Egyptians when the Pharaohs refused to free the Jews .The Pharaoh finally relented but when the Jews were leaving he sent an army to capture them and return them to enslavement. We will cheer when we retell how the waters of the Red Sea miraculously parted giving the Jews an escape, and the waters returned drowning the pursuing army.

Then, we will have a moment of silent prayer in memory of the martyrs of the Warsaw Ghetto who courageously rebelled on Passover in April of 1943 and held off the well-armed Nazis for over a month.

Finally, we will recount another miracle- the return of the Jews to Israel in 1948 when the seas again parted- this time for the steel hulls of vessels bringing besieged and beleaguered and traumatized survivors of the Genocide of World War 2 to safety and succor in the Jewish state of Israel.

Then we will eat, drink and be merry.

But, the story of Passover continues with great consequences:

The book of Exodus says that after crossing the Red Sea, Moses led the Jews into the Sinai, where they spent 40 years wandering in the wilderness. After travelling through the desert for nearly three months, they camped before Mount Sinai and it was there that God made a covenant with Moses and revealed the Ten Commandments on two stone tablets that codified the mandate to create a just and humane society and govern the lives of Jews and all decent people and nations. There are actually 613 commandments which cover every aspect of life-even hygiene and diet, but the Decalogue- the Ten Commandments are the most famous.

Think about that. At a time and place of local mores that sanctioned and celebrated murder and pillage and tyranny, these laws set forth principles of morality which have lasted for millennia.

Until 2005 The Ten Commandments were prominently displayed in courts, schools, churches and public grounds. In 2005 rulings on the presentation of religious symbols and sacred text on Texas public property, the US Supreme Court justified displays like the Ten Commandments but with the caveat that such displays must be clearly secular and not cross the line into proselytizing.

However, in a ruling on the display of the Ten Commandments in Kentucky courthouses, the justices ruled 5 to 4 that public officials were not motivated by a secular purpose in ordering the courthouse display but sought to advance religion in violation of the separation of church and state.

The debate continues with the ACLU pitted against all public displays of the Ten Commandments and determined citizens of all religions who fight to uphold their rights to display them. There are prominent jurists and scholars who continue to argue on that subject. In spite of these controversies, The Ten Commandments continue to inspire all the world’s religions and all decent societies- religious as well as secular.

Here, in this great nation we live in freedom from intimidation, oppression and harassment because those founding fathers who sought to “form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity” were religious Christians who were informed and guided by the Bible and the Ten Commandments which were revealed more than 3,000 years ago to Moses and the Jewish people on their way to their homeland in Israel.

Hiroshima and ‘Unwarrantable Self-Abasement’ The moral incoherence of the U.S. expressing regret for swiftly ending a war it didn’t start. Bruce Thornton

Next month, Obama will be in Japan for the G-7 Summit. There are rumors that he will visit Hiroshima and formally apologize for the U.S. dropping atomic bombs on that city and Nagasaki in August 1945. Maybe that’s why John Kerry didn’t apologize during a recent visit to the Hiroshima memorial, but merely set the stage for Obama by lamenting the suffering and calling for a “world free from nuclear weapons.”

The debate over whether or not Truman should have authorized dropping the bombs is an old one. And any objective evaluation of the decision shows that it was correct, for it shortened the war and saved millions of Japanese and American lives. More interesting than rehashing what should be a settled debate is the ideological prejudices and moral incoherence of those who continue to want the U.S. to express regret for swiftly ending a war it didn’t start and paid for with nearly 112,000 lives.

First is the idea, serially displayed by Obama since the beginning of his presidency, that the U.S. has been a bad international actor and so must atone for its sins. As the leftist tale goes, America’s corporate greed, imperialist depredations, and racist nationalism sowed the seeds of all the world’s disorder and ills. Whether poverty in Africa, violence in the Middle East, or global warming, the default response is “When all else fails, blame the Americans.”

Just watch Oliver Stone’s 10-part “documentary” on the Cold War, “The Untold History of the United States,” or read Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States. This is the “Yankees done us wrong” school of factually challenged historiography that has spread into popular culture, high school curricula, and whole departments in most universities. With Obama it has now reached the presidency, where its malign effects have been obvious in his foreign policy disasters caused by feckless “disengagement” and “leading from behind” predicated on reversing America’s malign interventionism.

President Hillary Clinton Only Republicans can make President Hillary Clinton a reality. Daniel Greenfield

On January, 20, 2017, President Hillary Clinton might just become a reality. With her face set in the tight unpleasant grimace that is the closest she can come to smiling, she will take the oath of office on a bible, her Alinsky thesis or an Eleanor Roosevelt Ouija board vowing to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

If the bible doesn’t burst into flames on the spot, she will take office with one more lie on her stained conscience after a long career of them.

And the United States will enter the longest period of uninterrupted Democrat rule since FDR. It will be the single greatest opportunity for the left to transform America since the days of the New Deal.

Think of America before the New Deal. And then think of how much America changed after it.

It might behoove Republicans to stop accusing each other of having short fingers or 600 mistresses and start making the case against Hillary Clinton if they want to win anything worth winning. In the midst of all the exciting debates about establishment conspiracies and shoving video forensics, too many have forgotten what is really at stake here and what they ought to really be talking about.

The national debt will go up. So will your taxes. Hillary Clinton is promising a trillion dollar tax hike. And that’s during her campaign. Imagine how much she will really raise taxes once she’s actually in office.

Two Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Anthony Kennedy will likely leave office on her watch. That’s in addition to Scalia’s empty seat which she will fill resulting in an ideological switch for the court. Additionally, Kennedy, for all his flaws, was a swing vote. Hillary’s appointee won’t be swinging anywhere. The Supreme Court will once again become a reliable left-wing bastion.

Even if the Democrats never manage to retake Congress, they will control two out of three branches of government. And with an activist Supreme Court and the White House, the left will have near absolute power to redefine every aspect of society on their own terms without facing any real challenges.

And they will use it. Your life changed fundamentally under Obama. The process will only accelerate.

You will have less free speech. You will pay more for everything. Your children and grandchildren will be taught to hate you twice as hard. Local democracy will continue being eroded. Your community, your school, your town, your city and your state will be run out of D.C. You will live under the shadow of being arrested for violating some regulation that you never even heard of before.

SENATOR BEN SASSE (R-NEBRASKA): THE CRISIS OF THE AMERICAN IDEA…..SEE NOTE PLEASE

Ben Sasse is a United States Senator representing Nebraska. Before his election to the Senate in 2014, he served as president of Midland University, where he turned around a failing institution and made it one of the fastest-growing colleges in America. Senator Sasse holds a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, a master’s degree from St. John’s College in Annapolis, and a PhD from Yale. He and Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas are stars of the GOP….RSK http://www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2016/04/the-american-idea-a-crisis.html

“We face great challenges at this moment in history. We face cyber threats. We face a resurgent Russia under Vladimir Putin. We face a jihadi threat. We face the growing threat of nonstate actors, who now can carry out massive attacks and are as able to play on the global stage as state actors. We face the exploding costs of our entitlement programs.

All these challenges are acute, but another dangerous trend is attracting less notice: The crisis of confidence in, and the growing unawareness of, the American idea.

What is the American idea? The American Founding made the bold claim that most peoples and most governments in the history of the world had been wrong about the nature of power and the nature of freedom. Sure, there were moments in history when certain city-states advanced some conception of liberty, but most people in human history said that might makes right: If you have a monopoly on power, you can do what you want. Everyone else in those societies was not a citizen but a dependent subject. If you lived in such a society, you needed the king to give you rights. The passive assumption was prohibition. The passive assumption was that if I want to start a business, I need a charter because it is illegal to run that business unless the king has sanctioned it. Therefore, I go and supplicate before the king in his court, and he decides whether to give me the right to start that business.

Today we would say that is bizarre. The voluntary transaction between two people is the very nature of freedom. The American Founders saw that denying people their freedom is fundamentally wrong because it does not comport with the dignity of people who are created in the image of God. People have been endowed with certain inalienable rights. God gives us those rights; government does not.

Government is merely a tool. It provides a framework for ordered liberty so that free people can live fully flowering lives.

This is why Ronald Reagan said that the American Founders “brought about the only true revolution that has ever taken place in man’s history.” Previous revolutions “simply exchanged one set of rulers for another set of rulers,” Reagan said. But America’s Founders did something different: They developed and fought for “the idea that you and I have within ourselves the God-given right and the ability to determine our own destiny.”

Founding FathersThink about how the framers of the Constitution wrestled with whether to enumerate any rights. What’s the danger in enumerating rights? Your list will never be long enough. The Constitution does not define any rights because the Constitution is the way that we give the government limited authority. All the powers that we do not give to the government are rights that we still retain. Even when the framers came up with the first ten amendments to the Constitution as a Bill of Rights, they could not decide on any one individual right to list first. They had to list five things in the First Amendment: religious liberty, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, and the right to redress grievances. Those five freedoms are all listed as first freedoms because there is no way you can get the list complete.

The FDA Is Turning Away from Science The ‘precautionary principle’ is anti-scientific and blocks the use of helpful and important products. By Sandy Szwarc

On April 8, the FDA announced it was launching legal action to remove Carbadox from the marketplace. Carbadox is an antibiotic that has been safely used by veterinarians and pig producers for more than 40 years and is very effective for controlling bacterial diseases, including salmonella and swine dysentery. By helping pigs stay healthier, Carbadox also helps improve feed efficiency and weight gain. In fact, according to a 2012 USDA Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service report, this antibiotic is used by more than 40 percent of pig nurseries in the United States. It is one of the few antibiotics considered by swine veterinarians to be critically essential for the health and welfare of growing pigs.

Sadly, the FDA’s move is another example of a growing stream of executive actions by federal agencies succumbing to political and ideological agendas, including animal-rights activism, and turning against the longstanding tradition of sound, evidence-based science. Scientific and agricultural professionals are left to speak out and give the public factual information they can trust.

The FDA’s action is not about safety or protecting the health of people or pigs, and these growing attacks on the agricultural industry and food producers will have devastating costs to people and to our food supply.

The FDA press release revealed that the agency has been harassing the maker of Carbadox to prove that there is no potential risk to people who eat pork from pigs that have been given its antibiotic. The FDA says it is taking this latest action in response to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations/World Health Organization and its Codex Alimentarius Commission, which recently determined that “there is no safe level of residues of Carbadox in food that represents an acceptable risk to consumers.”

Those who understand science will immediately identify the fallacy at work here. The instant we hear that “there is no safe level of exposure” to something, it’s a baloney alert that we’re being given junk science. Virtually everything can cause tumors in laboratory rats when administered in toxic doses. In fact, everything in life — from salt to sunlight — can be harmful in excessive amounts. But, that doesn’t mean we cannot safely enjoy them; they might even be essential for our survival. There is no such thing as “no safe level of exposure.” Remember, the dose makes the poison. Even water is deadly in excessive amounts. Medicine and poisons are just opposite ends of the spectrum of the science of toxicology (the Greek word pharmakon means both “remedy” and “poison”).

The Horrors of Hiroshima in Context By Victor Davis Hanson

The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 remains the only wartime use of nuclear weapons in history.

No one knows exactly how many Japanese citizens were killed by the two American bombs. A macabre guess is around 140,000. The atomic attacks finally shocked Emperor Hirohito and the Japanese militarists into surrendering.

John Kerry recently visited Hiroshima. He became the first secretary of state to do so — purportedly as a precursor to a planned visit next month by President Obama, who is rumored to be considering an apology to Japan for America’s dropping of the bombs 71 years ago.

The horrific bombings are inexplicable without examining the context in which they occurred.

In 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on the unconditional surrender of Axis aggressors. The bomb was originally envisioned as a way to force the Axis leader, Nazi Germany, to cease fighting. But the Third Reich had already collapsed by July 1945 when the bomb was ready for use, leaving Imperial Japan as the sole surviving Axis target.

Japan had just demonstrated with its nihilistic defense of Okinawa — where more than 12,000 Americans died and more than 50,000 were wounded, along with perhaps 200,000 Japanese military and civilian casualties — that it could make the Americans pay so high a price for victory that they might negotiate an armistice rather than demand surrender.

Tens of thousands of Americans had already died in taking the Pacific islands as a way to get close enough to bomb Japan. On March 9-10, 1945, B-29 bombers dropped an estimated 1,665 tons of napalm on Tokyo, causing at least as many deaths as later at Hiroshima.

Our Savonarolas On the ethos of “Burn it down!” By Kevin D. Williamson

Odd news that maybe isn’t so odd: A presidential straw poll conducted by a libertarian student group found that the most popular candidate among its members was Donald Trump. Second place: Bernie Sanders.

Young libertarians for elderly socialists: Not as strange as it sounds, or unprecedented.

Fifty years ago, the libertarian (he’d have said “anarcho-capitalist”) economist and political analyst Murray Rothbard dreamt of a grand coalition between far Left and far Right, whose members and interests, he believed, might be unified momentarily and perhaps more than momentarily by opposition to the Vietnam War. This was an error and led him to some ghastly places (thrilling to the stirrings of David Duke and culpable indulgence of Holocaust deniers) and into associations from which the liberty movement has never recovered.

What might drive a young libertarian into the “revolution” that Sanders proclaims? One thing is the ongoing Rothbardian bent in libertarian foreign-policy thinking, and Sanders is the only candidate in the race who isn’t entirely hostile to non-interventionism on the Ron Paul model. On lifestyle-libertarian issues — marijuana, stance toward religious traditionalists and their institutions — Sanders is the libertarians’ man, in practice. Sanders is energetically anti-libertarian on questions of trade and immigration, but a nontrivial number of self-professed libertarians have abandoned those issues or reversed themselves on them, “libertarian” now being used with unfortunate looseness to mean “right-wing populist who does not wish to be identified with Mitch McConnell’s party.”

We also are seeing the poison dividend of the bank bailouts.

Free-marketeers and free-traders must of course be realists about big business and its interests to the extent that we live in the real world, but for a generation, the working assumption was that the party of capitalism and the party of capitalists were if not the same party then largely on the same side, give or take an ethanol subsidy or in-house fight about intellectual property. The bailouts changed that.

The sort of libertarians who might have followed Rothbard into the sweaty precincts of David Duke’s political thinking have always had some uneasiness about the (Jewish) international bankers who terrified Henry Ford, and you’ll generally find them in possession of a copy of The Creature from Jekyll Island, the ur-text of Federal Reserve conspiracy theory. The spectacle of a small number of financial institutions throwing the world into an economic crisis through their fecklessness and rapacity and then demanding sweetheart loans amounting to trillions of dollars to see them through — a drama in which the banks were both the hostages and the hostage-takers — brought new life to the dry bones of 1930s conspiracy theories.

Chinese Naval Base in Djibouti Poses Problem for U.S. Ryan Healy

On Monday April 18, 2016, China officially broke ground on its first naval base in Djibouti, Africa, a country which has also been the home of the United States (U.S.) African intelligence-gathering base for the past 15 years. The Chinese base will be encroaching upon a major U.S. military installation with 4,000 troops and has the largest drone installation base outside of Afghanistan.

Djibouti may be a proving ground for China’s foreign policy as the nation looks to further expand its influence in Africa. China has participated in anti-piracy missions off the coast of Somalia since 2008 and increased those missions in 2010. Chinese President Jinping donated $100 million to the African Union (AU) and said it was to help build a standby force as well as an emergency response and quick response force.

American Ambassador to Djibouti Tom Kelly warns that Djibouti is the forefront of U.S. national security policy in Africa and raised concerns of Chinese military efforts to intercept American intelligence.

The U.S. also has to deal with Djibouti president Ismali Omar Guelleh, viewed by many locals as a dictator, who curtails free speech and human rights, makes arbitrary arrests, and uses torture on opposition. Guelleh may be increasing his ties to China following the Chinese purchase of the Port de Djibouti for $185 million. Chinese investment has also establish a $4 billion dollar railway project from Djibouti to Ethiopia; and is expected to Djibouti $20 million per year for the Djibouti naval base over the next decade.

Iran’s Nuclear Missiles in Our Future by Peter Huessy

Iran has not only failed to sign the agreement, it passed a parliamentary resolution reiterating Iran’s right to do the nuclear activities the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA) forbids.

Iran’s purpose seems obvious. By blocking transparency for its nuclear activities and evading enforcement of the terms of the JCPOA, Iran gets to move forward with its nuclear weapons development even as it pretends not to.

Most of the media have ignored satellites photos showing that Iran has hidden its Parchin military atomic complex by completely bulldozing the area and then building an underground nuclear facility off limits to any inspections.

A missile can be launched from the sea — as Iran has done at least twice — by a freighter, which leaves no return address. Even the threat of missile launch can have significant coercive political effect particularly if one does not know from where it will be fired.

As for accuracy, if a missile in the mode of an electro-magnetic pulse exploded anywhere in the atmosphere between Atlanta and Boston, it would knock out most of America’s electric grid.

In 2017, the next administration will face the choice of keeping the US-Iran 2015 nuclear deal – still unsigned by Iran — or of creating a new approach to eliminate Iran as an emerging nuclear power.

Supporters of the current deal, the Joint Comprehensive Program of Action (JCPOA), will continue to argue that Iran has implemented the important provisions of the deal; that current violations and uncertainties are not critical to fulfilling the agreement, and that troublesome activities by Iran’s leadership are just designed to appease some hardliners opposed to any concessions to the United States, “The Great Satan.”