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2016

Refusing to Kiss King Corn’s Ring in Iowa By John Fund —

For more than 30 years, Iowa’s obsession with its ethanol fuel industry has played an outsize role in its presidential caucuses. The winner of every caucus in both parties during that period has strongly backed federal subsidies or mandates for the corn-grown fuel. That winning streak could end this year if Senator Ted Cruz takes Iowa. Polls currently show him with a narrow lead.

In 2008, Fred Thompson told me he didn’t see merit in subsidizing one fuel over another, but in Iowa’s GOP caucus that year “opposing ethanol was like pushing against a mountain.” Hillary Clinton voted against ethanol a total of 17 times in the U.S. Senate, saying she found it “impossible to understand why any pro-consumer, pro-health, pro-environment, anti-government member” could vote for ethanol mandates. In 2007, as she announced for president, she took a sharp turn on the Road to Des Moines and embraced ethanol. This year, she calls ethanol “a success for Iowa and much of rural America.”

But on the Republican side, two candidates have broken ranks. Senator Rand Paul, true to his libertarian principles, supports an immediate phase-out of subsidies. And Cruz addressed the Iowa Agriculture Summit, run by ethanol and wind-subsidy interests, in March 2015. His message: The federal mandate on ethanol, which has cost consumers at least $10 billion since 2007, had to end. In front of a crowd of pro-ethanol farmers and moneymen, Cruz said:

I don’t think Washington should be picking winners and losers. I have every bit of faith that businesses can continue to compete, can continue to do well without having to go on bended knee to Washington asking for subsidies, asking for special favors. I think that’s how we got in this problem to begin with.

The Tea-Party Warriors Who Are Now ‘Establishment Republicans’ By Mark Antonio Wright

A specter is haunting the conservative movement. From the dark underbelly of corrupt Washington, D.C., an unyielding “Republican establishment” has come out to feast upon the mutilated corpses of Reagan, Goldwater, and Buckley. The smarmy hucksters who make up its rank are masters of disguise: During the day, they insist that they represent the great silent majority of conservative Americans; at night, they prove that they’re in it only for the money, the power, and the Georgetown social scene. The monsters have names — such as Marco Rubio, Paul Ryan, Nikki Haley, Trey Gowdy, Mike Lee, and . . . wait, what?

To turn on talk radio or to sift through the murkier regions of the Internet is, invariably, to be told that the leaders of today’s reform conservative movement are RINOs — Republicans in Name Only — through and through. According to many who inhabit the Right, even those men and women who rose in the 2010 tea-party wave have fallen now to the dark side. Once, they led the fightback against Barack Obama; now, just a few short years later, they have allied themselves with official Washington in a dastardly scheme to maintain the status quo.

Is this claim true? No, it is not. Indeed, by simply taking a look back at the last five years of conservative commentary on three well-known reform conservatives, we can see that the storyline of “tea-party champion becomes establishment stooge” doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

DAVID PRYCE JONES- A PEOPLE DIVIDED- A REVIEW OF EDWARD ALEXANDER’S “JEWS AGAINST THEMSELVES

To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say,Is a keen observer of life,The word intellectual suggests right away A man who’s untrue to his wife.

W. H. Auden could well have carried his lampoon further by pointing out that any intellectual these days is most likely to be untrue to his country, his compatriots, and their culture. It seems to come naturally to some characters to condemn what they are expected to praise, and praise what they are expected to condemn. Accordingly, the assumption takes root that Western societies are unjust at many a level, and that they do things much better somewhere else.

One approved model used to be the Soviet Union, then it was Maoist China or Castro’s Cuba, and there are even socialists now who look to the Venezuela of Hugo Chávez. A small but
vociferous number of academics and littérateurs repeatedly put across some inner vision that possesses them, falsifying reality in the manner ofartists.

The primary explanation of this phenomenon is snobbery. The works of a Gore Vidal, a Norman Mailer, a Harold Pinter, an Edward Said, and alltheir kind are exercises in superiority. To hold opinions about national politics and purposes contrary to those of everyone else seems like flattering evidence of being cleverer than the masses who can’t think
things out for themselves and don’t know they are being hoodwinked. In this mindset, doing harm is progressive and unpopularity is proof of courage.

A particular subsection of intellectuals comprises Jews who are engaged in a very old battle to define their identity. Scattered in many countries and living among Christians or Muslims, they were nonetheless always a nation, with a faith and languages and customs of their own. The obvious strategies for survival were to avoid drawing attention to themselves, to stay apart, to do whatever was asked by the powers that be, and finally to flee if persecution was threatening martyrdom.

Your Burger Is Killing the Planet, Say the Climatarians By Jeff Stier

Move over, vegetarian; the “climatarian” is now taking the smug seat at the dinner table.

This new term is a convergence of two political crusades: climate change and the food movement. It landed on the New York Times list of the top new food words for 2015. Here’s how the Grey Lady defined the term:

climatarian (n.) A diet whose primary goal is to reverse climate change. This includes eating locally produced food (to reduce energy spent in transportation), choosing pork and poultry instead of beef and lamb (to limit gas emissions), and using every part of ingredients (apple cores, cheese rinds, etc.) to limit food waste.

Climate activists are ratcheting up their attempt to blame global warming on food production and consumption, targeting the meat industry in particular. As the public tunes out stale climate-change rhetoric, climatarians hope to turn attention away from your SUV and onto your dinner plate.

They have plenty of help to make their case. A dire report released last November by Chatham House at the Royal Institute of International Affairs claims that the livestock sector is responsible for emitting about 15 percent of greenhouse gases, which “is equivalent to tailpipe emissions from all the world’s vehicles.” The United Nations pegs the figure even higher, at about 25 percent. They want us to think that if we cut out meat, we’d dramatically reduce emissions.

A specious report from the cancer agency of the World Health Organization last year warned that processed and red meat are carcinogenic. The group’s goal is to foment public fear about America’s favorite protein, despite a dearth of scientific evidence to back it up

Confident of Iowa Victory, Cruz Goes after Trump in New Hampshire By Eliana Johnson —

Conway, N.H. – Ted Cruz says the Republican presidential primary has reached a “new phase.” He’s acting like it, too.

Less than a month ago, the Texas senator was predicting the contest would narrow, as it typically has, to a two-man race between a conservative and an establishment favorite. But it turns out 2016 may have surprises in store even for Ted Cruz.

On Monday afternoon, as his campaign bus barrels down the highway here, Cruz appears to be surveying an altogether different landscape from the one he’d anticipated: Instead of a potential showdown with Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush, he finds himself staring at Donald Trump, perhaps the one candidate with an even bigger claim to the outsider mantle.

“There’s no doubt the contours of the race have changed,” Cruz says, leaning back in the leather seat of his luxury bus, surrounded by campaign aides on all sides.

Cruz now sees Trump as the only man standing in his way. The collapse of their détente has scrambled the Republican race, forcing Cruz to make political calculations he’d planned on avoiding. But he delights in playing political strategist, and he is doing so now, analyzing the field anew, searching for Trump’s hidden weaknesses, and, for the first time here in New Hampshire, going after them aggressively.

Cruz has long scoffed at the traditional notion that there are “three legs” of the Republican stool — that is, that a candidate must satisfy economic conservatives, social conservatives, and foreign-policy hawks. Instead, he has talked about the “four lanes” of Republican voters — Evangelicals, libertarians, tea-party activists, and moderates — and argued that he can win over enough voters in the first three lanes to capture the nomination.

Cruz admits that Trump has eaten into his base. “The voters supporting Trump are coming from multiple lanes,” he says. “He’s got a significant numbers of moderates and liberals that are supporting him. He’s also drawing votes right now from some evangelicals, from some tea-party activists, and from some Reagan Democrats. From three of those four categories — evangelicals, tea-party activists, and Reagan Democrats — we have very, very strong appeal and strong support, and so we are battling him for support in each of those lanes.”

Here in New Hampshire, where Trump leads in the polls, the contours of a Cruz offensive are coming into view. The senator tells me we’re entering the phase of the campaign “when the voters begin seriously examining the records of the candidates.”

Obama’s Paper-Thin Presidency By John Thune —

— John Thune is a United States senator representing South Dakota and chairman of the Senate Republican Conference.

Last week, President Obama delivered his final State of the Union address. In the lead-up to the speech, there was a lot of discussion about the nature of the president’s legacy. Less discussed, however, was that most of the president’s so-called legacy may not outlast his presidency, since most of his supposed achievements have never been enacted into law.

Early on in his presidency, it became clear that the president didn’t have much interest in working with Congress in a bipartisan manner, and after losing large majorities in the House and Senate, he made it clear that he did not want to listen to the American people, who had overwhelmingly rejected his far-left agenda. His determination to circumvent Congress and ignore the American people has not only been an affront to the democratic process and an attack on the balance of power our Founding Fathers envisioned, it has also failed as a strategy for securing long-lasting achievements.

As a result of his contempt for Congress and his unwillingness to engage with the legislative process, the vast majority of the items that make up the president’s “legacy” — including the national energy tax, executive amnesty, and the flawed Iran deal — are not actual laws. Instead, the president’s legacy is largely made up of regulations, executive actions, and executive agreements, most of which can be easily overturned by the next administration.

After Congress and the American people rejected Obama’s cap-and-trade proposal, he turned to the EPA to impose his will through heavy-handed regulations, including the national energy tax that will increase energy costs for those who can afford it the least. But because these regulations have been imposed through the administration’s rulemaking process instead of through congressional action, a new president could start the process of repealing these rules as soon as he or she takes office. In fact, at least two of these rules could be eliminated even sooner, since they are currently being challenged in the courts.

Chelsea Clinton Bad-Mouths Bernie Sanders’s Health-Care Proposals on Behalf of Hillary By Rich Lowry —

The children of political candidates are useful adornments in campaign literature and ads, and when they are older, as character witnesses on the campaign trail.

Rarely are they used as attack dogs, let alone armed with shameless talking points to try to dampen the rise of an inspirational political rival. But nothing is beneath Bill and Hillary Clinton. So they trotted out their daughter, Chelsea, to warn about the dastardly designs that Bernie Sanders has for ending Medicare as we know it.

It’s part of a hammer-and-tongs assault that should feel familiar to Republicans. It turns out that becoming the target of Medicare demagoguery isn’t just for Newt Gingrich or Paul Ryan anymore. No one has released an ad of Bernie Sanders pushing a senior citizen over a cliff yet, but if the Vermont senator continues his rise, just give it a couple of more weeks.

Chelsea Clinton charged that Sanders “wants to dismantle Obamacare, dismantle the [Children’s Health Insurance Program], dismantle Medicare, dismantle private insurance.” For those keeping score at home, that’s a lot of dismantling. Chelsea said she worried — the chain of reasoning was left fuzzy — that Sanders would somehow give Republicans “permission” to go back to the pre-Obamacare era and “strip millions and millions and millions of people of their health insurance.”

Frightened yet? What Sanders is proposing is so-called Medicare for all, a universal, single-payer health-care program that has been the goal of progressives for decades. For this, he is being savaged by a Hillary Clinton who in the early 1990s famously immolated herself in a doomed fight for her version of universal coverage.

The gravamen of her case against Sanders is that he is a socialist — and an enemy of the welfare state. He is advocating a further step in the Democratic crusade to expand the social safety net — and is a dangerous radical because of it. He is a threat to all that has been achieved by the Left — because he wants to achieve more.

NYPD ordered to purge info on Islamic terror By Carol Brown

A U.S. District Court has ordered the NYPD to purge extensive documentation that outlines the rise of Islamic terror in the West and threats to the United States. The report, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, focused on providing law enforcement and policy-makers with vital intelligence on domestic terror operations. A key component of the document outlined how jihadists get into the country and carry out terror attacks. Many experts have described the report as “critical” to our national security. The court order is a huge victory for the ACLU (who spearheaded the effort two-and-one-half years ago) and Islamic supremacists.

The Free Beacon reports on key areas reached in the settlement, including the following mandates:

The NYPD must purge the report on the department’s understanding of “radical Islam” along with how best to police the threat.

The NYPD must “remove the publication from its database and vow not to rely on it in the future” and that they will not open or extend investigations based on it.

The NYPD must implement measures to “mitigate the impact of future terror investigations on certain religious and political groups,” such as those in the Muslim-American community.

Needless to say, many legal experts have pointed out that this action “could hamper future terrorism investigations.”

The court ties law enforcement’s hands behind their back, blindfolds them, and performs a lobotomy.

Leftist McCarthyism in Israel Funded by Soros and Other US Leftists By Steven Plaut

In its latest act of illicit intervention in Israeli public life, the foreign (mainly U.S.)-funded “New Israel Fund” (where their ‘New Israel” means Palestine) has filled the Israeli press and the country’s billboards with a McCarthyist anti-democratic vilification poster that essentially endorses all who seek to deny freedom of speech in Israel to non-leftists.

It is the NIF’s response to the campaign by the student Zionist movement Im Tirtzu against ‘Shtulim’ (plants) in Israel, meaning foreign-funded anti-Israel subversives. In the NIF ad, it shows Yitzhak Rabin with the slogan “THEY already took care of that plant,” meaning “THEY” collectively murdered Rabin. By THEY the NIF does not mean Yigal Amir and his brother. It means all Israeli critics of the left.

For decades, the mantra of Israel’s anti-democratic left has been that Rabin’s death was caused by the exercise of freedom of speech by non-leftists in Israel, especially when they criticized Rabin and called him names. Their conclusion is that criticism of the left by non-leftists is a clear and present danger that produces murder and so must be suppressed. Just how they know that assassin Yigal Amir’s behavior was not caused by his attending law school has never been explained. In any case, the catechism of the left, which includes most journalists, is that the Rabin murder was caused by “incitement.” Curiously, they are not reminding people what Rabin really thought of leftist NGO B’tselem!

13 Hours: A different take By Arnold Cusmariu

Various and sundry nail-biters losing sleep over Michael Bay’s just released 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, worried sick that it might pose a threat to the coronation (um, election) of Hillary Clinton as president of the United States, can relax. The movie actually does a good job of covering up the criminal incompetence of the Obama administration and its then secretary of state, the aforementioned H. Clinton.

Back in the day when movies weren’t just glorified video games, it was made clear early on who the good guys were and who the bad. Westerns and crime stories pretty much followed this formula, even if the good guys weren’t always perfectly good, nor the bad guys perfectly evil. Audiences rooted for the good guys and went home happy when they won and the bad guys died of lead poisoning.

So who are the good guys and who are the bad guys in 13 Hours?

The good guys are obvious. Who are the bad guys?

The first one to put in an appearance is Libya’s former strongman, Col. Moammar Gaddafi, in power from 1969 to 2011. A grainy clip shows him being dragged away and summarily shot. Jubilation followed the tyrant’s demise, U.N.-supervised free and fair elections were held immediately, and a pro-American government was installed dedicated to keeping a lid on terrorism throughout North Africa and beyond. Another fabulous Obama administration foreign policy success! Woo-hoo!