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December 2017

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Frontpage Magazine’s Man of the Year: President Trump “Are you better off than you were last year?” Daniel Greenfield

By on December 29th, 2017

It’s that time of the year when media outlets write up the people and trends who defined the year while ignoring the man who redefined it.

2017 was the year that the United States of America got up off its knees. It was the year that we stopped following the world and started leading it. It was the year that our booming economy accomplished the impossible. It was the year that we became a great nation again.

And one man is responsible for that.

President Trump promised to make America great again. And every day, it’s happening. Factory workers and small businessmen, farmers and ranchers, soldiers and police officers are waking up to a renewed America. Time chose a social justice hashtag as its ‘Thing of the Year’. We’re choosing the man who turned the country around as our “Man of the Year”.

When President Trump promised 4% economic growth, the media herded together economists to prove it couldn’t happen. CNN surveyed 11 economists and Bloomberg asked 80 economists. They agreed it was impossible. 2% growth was the best that we could hope for. And we would have to get used to that.

And then the GDP growth estimate for the fourth quarter of 2017 approached 4%.

Americans are realizing that maybe we don’t have to just get used to dividing up the last torn shreds of a failing economy between leftist crony billionaires and their officially entitled victim groups.

Maybe we can do better.

The S&P 500 Index has gone up 20% this year and the Dow is up 25%. Holiday shopping season sales are up almost 5% over last year. Consumer confidence is at a 17-year high. The unemployment rate is at a 17-year low. The manufacturing industry just had its best month of job gains for the year.

All of this isn’t just a matter of dollars and cents. It’s the knowledge that things are getting better. You can’t fake it. The media spent eight years promising a recovery that no one believed in. Obama announced that the recovery had happened more times than he ended the Iraq War. And just like the end of the war, it never happened. It’s happening now because people are living a better future.

Call it… making America great again. Not for government officials, but for ordinary Americans.

Obama made life great for government bureaucrats. In the era of hope and steal, the bedroom communities of Washington D.C. became the wealthiest counties in the country. Americans lost their jobs, veterans lost their lives and the government bureaucracy grew fat on their misery.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

A Tale of Two Presidents and One Newspaper By Michael Walsh

By on December 29th, 2017

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before:https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/28/a-tale-of-two-presidents-and-one-newspaper/

The stench of failure hangs over Mr. X’s White House. The people know it, judging by the opinion polls. Corporate titans know it and whisper disenchantment with a fellow conservative. Washington knows it when an Administration official calls the budgeting process ”an unmitigated outrage” and when Mr. X’s closest friend in the Senate pronounces the President ”as very close to set in concrete.”

Mr. X’s loss of authority only halfway through his term should alarm all Americans. The economic nostrums he brought to office have not had the predicted effect. Only by recognizing his errors will he find better ideas. To rationalize the failure so far, or to blame his predecessors, the media and Congress, is to condemn the nation to two more years of destructive confusion.

By his own reckoning, Mr. X became President for one basic reason: to restore the morale and power of America. By his own analysis, that meant above all ”the rejuvenation of our economy” so that America could regain industrial strength, put all its people to work and defend its interests around the world.

Sound familiar? It should—it’s the opening three paragraphs of a New York Times editorial about Ronald Reagan’s first administration, published on January 9, 1983. So if you think the Times is repeating itself, you’re right. For the past half-century, the Times and other Democratic Party house organs have adopted a single unwavering posture toward Republican and conservative presidents: they’re against them, no matter what.

Hence their reliance on boilerplate editorials such as the one quoted above; presidents may come and go, editorial writers may pass through the pages of the Good Gray Lady, and times may change, but the rhetoric remains the same. If you think this is accidental, however, you must have been born yesterday.

The point of the cultural Marxist project, for which the Times is, and long has been, the chief spokesman, is to keep hammering home the same points about its enemies, until they are simply accepted as fact and no longer even contended or questioned. Do you honestly think, at this point, that there is a single soul on the staff of the New York Times who would today disagree with the sentiments expressed in 1983—or not endorse them if the editorial board substituted the name of Trump for Reagan?

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The Islamic Brew of Racism, Apartheid, and Slavery By Eileen F. Toplansky

By on December 29th, 2017

While the world is in a dither about America recognizing Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, it is, predictably, totally unconcerned about the constant and ongoing practice of “legally or culturally enforced discrimination and/or persecution based on a person’s race or national identity” – to wit, apartheid – in the Muslim world. Consider that:

Arab League states discriminate against and exclude Palestinians because of their national identity.
Palestinian refugees have been denied citizenship for two generations or more in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.
Palestinians have been expelled from many Middle Eastern countries – e.g., Kuwait, Jordan, Libya, and Iraq.
In Lebanon, Palestinians must live in designated areas, cannot own homes, and are barred from 70 occupations.

And yet, every year, universities across America host Israel Apartheid Week despite the fact that “Israel actually is the only apartheid-free state in the Middle East – a state whose Arab population enjoys full equality before the law and more prerogatives than most ethnic minorities in the free world, from the designation of Arabic as an official language to the recognition of non-Jewish religious holidays as legal days of rest.”

Contrast this with the fact that Muslim religiously based apartheid continues, since “Muslims historically view themselves as superior to all others and consider non-Muslims or kuffars as dhimmis.” Thus, Christians, Jews, and Bahá’í remain second-class citizens throughout the Muslim world. Racism is rampant in the Arab world, and “Africans of sub-Saharan descent are held in deep contempt, a vestige of the region’s historical role as epicenter of the international slave trade.”

And while Palestinian refugees are championed by the Arab world, they are treated like outcasts. Khaled Abu Toameh writes, “[I]t was revealed that the Iraqi government has approved a new law that effectively abolishes the rights given to Palestinians living there. The new law changes the status of Palestinians from nationals to foreigners.” In sum, “[t]he hypocrisy of the Arab countries is in full swing. While they pretend to show solidarity with their Palestinian brothers, Arab governments work tirelessly to ethnically cleanse them. Palestinian leaders, meanwhile[,] care nothing about the plight of their own people in Arab countries. They are much too busy inciting Palestinians against Israel and Trump[.]”

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A Big, Beautiful Trump 2018 Issue Civil-service reform could get bipartisan support, even in a rough election year.By Kimberley A. Strassel

By on December 29th, 2017

President Trump is on the hunt for a 2018 issue—a strong follow-up to his tax-cut victory that will motivate voters and gain bipartisan support. Democrats are pushing for an infrastructure bill, inviting the president to spend with them. House GOP leaders are mulling entitlement reform—a noble goal, if unlikely in a midterm cycle.

Fortunately for the president, there’s a better idea out there that’s already a Trump theme. It’s also a sure winner with the public, so Republicans ought to be able to pressure Democrats to join.

Let 2018 be the year of civil-service reform—a root-and-branch overhaul of the government itself. Call it Operation Drain the Swamp.

When Candidate Trump first referred to “the swamp,” he was talking about the bog of Beltway lobbyists and “establishment” politicians. But President Trump’s first year in office has revealed that the real swamp is the unchecked power of those who actually run Washington: the two million members of the federal bureaucracy. That civil-servant corps was turbocharged by the Obama administration’s rule-making binge, and it now has more power—and more media enablers—than ever. We live in an administrative state, run by a left-leaning, self-interested governing class that is actively hostile to any president with a deregulatory or reform agenda.

It’s Lois Lerner, the IRS official who used her powers to silence conservative nonprofits. It’s the “anonymous” officials who leak national-security secrets daily. It’s the General Services Administration officials who turned over Trump transition emails to Special Counsel Robert Mueller in the absence of a warrant. It’s the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Leandra English, who tried to stage an agency coup. It’s the EPA’s “Scientific Integrity Official” who has taken it upon herself to investigate whether Scott Pruitt is fit to serve in the office to which he was duly appointed. It’s the thousands of staffers across the federal government who continue to pump out reports on global warming and banking regulations that undermine administration policy.

More broadly, it is a federal workforce whose pay and benefits are completely out of whack with the private sector. A 2011 American Enterprise Institute study found federal employees receive wages 14% higher than what similar workers in the private sector earn. Factor in benefits and the compensation premium leaps to 61%. Nice, huh?

These huge payouts are the result of automatic increases, bonuses, seniority rules and gold-plated pensions that are all but extinct in the private sector. The federal workforce is also shielded by rules that make it practically impossible to fire or discipline bad employees, to relocate talent, or to reassign duties. These protections embolden bureaucrats to violate rules. Why was Ms. Lerner allowed to retire with full benefits? Because denying them would have cost far more—and required years of effort. CONTINUE AT SITE

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Birds of Regulatory Prey Interior reverses an Obama rule punishing accidental bird killings.

By on December 29th, 2017

Animal spirits revived this year after the Trump Administration halted its predecessor’s regulatory predations. Consider the Interior Department’s legal memo last week that rescinds an Obama Administration policy of criminalizing citizens who accidentally kill migratory birds.

The Migratory Bird Treaty Act of 1918 makes it a federal crime to “pursue, hunt, take, capture or kill” migratory birds. Offenders can be punished with up to six months in prison and fined $15,000 per violation. The law was originally intended to protect birds migrating between Canada, Mexico, Japan, Russia and the U.S. from poachers who sold their feathers for a profit.

Over the last 100 years, the list of protected birds has grown to more than a thousand species including crows, ducks and finches. President Obama added nearly 200 bird species to the list while calling open season on energy companies whose activities “incidentally” harm birds. In 2011 federal prosectors charged seven oil companies in North Dakota after more than two dozen birds flew into their tar pits.

An equal opportunity business harasser, the Obama Administration targeted wind farms operated by Duke Energy and PacifiCorp Energy that were found to have maimed hundreds of birds. Individuals also wound up in the government’s crosshairs—for instance, a tree-trimmer in Oakland was investigated by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2014 after accidentally injuring five black-crowned night herons.

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Intelligentsia Elegy American intellectuals are at odds with the workings of democracy. E. M. Oblomov February 3, 2017

By on December 29th, 2017

The Russian language boasts a formidable literary tradition. A handful of Russian words have made their way into English agitprop, apparatchik, commissar, gulag, Kalashnikov, nomenklatura, pogrom, samizdat, vodka, and now kompromat. But while the Russian language is expressive, it is mostly a borrower, not a lender, of words. The word intelligentsia made its first English appearance in 1918, shortly after the Russian Revolution. It exploded in usage thereafter. What was missing from the West’s conceptual inventory in 1918 that we had to import a foreign word from Revolutionary Russia?

Intelligentsia, a very Russian concept, is difficult to pin down with precision. Russia has always been a caste society and the intelligentsia was a particular caste, consisting of educated people who did not fit into one of the traditional categories—clergy, nobility, peasants, merchants, or the urban middle class. But the line of demarcation for membership was never clear. When I was a child in the Soviet Union, I thought it meant nice Jewish people who read books, wore spectacles, tucked in their shirts, and didn’t slurp their soup. In my parents’ circle, these were mostly engineers and scientists, with a smattering of musicians and doctors. None had any sort of formal connection to academic social science or the humanities, since in the U.S.S.R. these fields were political minefields, difficult for decent people to negotiate. But most seemed to dabble in poetry or playwriting, and all could recite large chunks of Evgenii Onegin from memory.

The concept of the intelligentsia was easier to define negatively. Anyone connected with the organs of state power—government functionaries, law enforcement, the military—fell way outside the pale. Party membership was disqualifying. A more-than-casual interest in sports, while not in itself disqualifying, was deeply suspect. Ultimately, membership came down to a self-designation, a certain recognizable set of manners, turns of phrase, and habits of mind. It was an aesthetic and an outward pose. “Intelligentnost’”—the quality of belonging to the intelligentsia—stood for whatever was perceived to be the opposite of the backwardness, stupidity, alcoholism, profanity, ignorance, and mud of provincial Russian life. Taken too far, it could become a kind of cult: a pious, atheistic godliness.

As a metaphysical ideal of intelligentnost’, imagine a professor of philology at the University of Vienna around the turn of the last century settling down in his library with a brandy, his pince-nez, and a volume of Proust, after an evening at the Philharmonic, where he watched Gustav Mahler conducting Beethoven. This fantasy of antique Central European gentility stood in contrast with a shabby and stunted Soviet reality. Decades of exposure to constant propaganda inevitably left its mark on all but the strongest of intellects. Cut off from contact with the outside world and normal cultural, intellectual, and artistic influences, the Soviet intelligentsia’s tastes were frozen sometime around 1937. Its members found escape in their book collections, which were always nearly identical, consisting of the same multi-volume editions of the nineteenth-century Russian and European classics, certain twentieth-century modernists and social realists, as well as volumes of foreign exotics like Lion Feuchtwanger, Mark Twain, John Dos Passos, Jack London, O. Henry, Ernest Hemingway, and a few other officially approved Westerners. Anton Chekhov was especially well-loved. A physician by temperament and training (the most intelligent of professions), his plays and short stories had no discernible politics and were characterized more than anything else by their fellow-feeling and concern with human decency.

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Don’t Take the Wrong Lessons from NYC’s Murder Drop Proactive policing still matters. By Heather Mac Donald

By on December 29th, 2017

Cop critics who assiduously ignored the 20 percent increase in the national homicide rate over the previous two years have suddenly become enthusiastic purveyors of crime statistics. Fueling their newfound interest in crime data is the announcement that the New York City homicide rate is at a near-60-year low. That homicide drop shows that proactive policing is irrelevant to crime levels, say these policing skeptics. The New York Police Department’s reported-stop activity plummeted earlier in this decade as a result of a groundless trilogy of racial-profiling lawsuits against the department. Yet crime in New York ultimately continued its downward trajectory. Therefore, proactive policing like pedestrian stops is unnecessary, these cop critics say.

Their arguments are specious.

New York City’s formerly high-crime neighborhoods have experienced a stunning degree of gentrification over the last 15 years, thanks to the proactive-policing-induced conquest of crime. It is that gentrification which is now helping fuel the ongoing crime drop. Urban hipsters are flocking to areas that once were the purview of drug dealers and pimps, trailing in their wake legitimate commerce and street life, which further attracts law-abiding activity and residents in a virtuous cycle of increasing public safety. The degree of demographic change is startling. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, for example, the number of white residents rose 1,235 percent from 2000 to 2015, while the black population decreased by 17 percent, reports City Lab. In Bushwick, Brooklyn, the number of whites rose 610 percent over that same decade and a half; the black population was down 22 percent. Central Harlem’s white population rose 846 percent; the black share dropped 10 percent. In 2000, whites were about three-quarters of the black population in Brownsville-Ocean Hill; by 2015, there were twice as many whites as blacks. In 2000, whites were one-third of the black population in Crown Heights North and Prospect Heights; now they exceed the black population by 20,000. The Brooklyn Navy Yards has now been declared the next cool place to be by the tech industry. Business owners are moving their residences as well as their enterprises to the area.

This demographic transformation has enormous implications for crime. A black New Yorker is 50 times more likely to commit a shooting than a white New Yorker, according to perpetrator identifications provided to the police by witnesses to, and victims of, those shootings. Those victims are overwhelmingly minority themselves. When the racial balance of a neighborhood changes radically, given those crime disparities, its violent-crime rate will as well. (This racial crime disparity reflects the breakdown of the black family and the high percentage of black males — upwards of 80 percent in some neighborhoods — being raised by single mothers.)

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Leftist Socialism: The Toothfish of Modern Politics by Linda Goudsmit

By on December 29th, 2017

Patagonian Toothfish, the rejected ugly, oily, bottom dwelling toothy fish was rebranded Chilean Sea Bass and became an expensive delicacy for gullible millennials.

So it is with Socialism, a rejected, ugly, oily, bottom dwelling ideology that enriched the elite and enslaved the masses was rebranded Social Democracy and became a rallying cry for naive 21st century millennials.

It is often useful to look backward to move forward so let’s review. Karl Marx, author of The Communist Manifesto, stated unequivocally, “Democracy is the road to socialism.” Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party, affirmed, “The goal of socialism is communism.” Social democracy began in the late 19th early 20th century as a political ideology advocating an evolutionary and peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism using established political processes to effect the transition rather than the revolutionary processes of Marxism.

The Socialist Party of America had been unable to field a successful presidential candidate for decades so in 1972 the Socialist Party of America officially rebranded itself and changed its name to Social Democrats, USA. “The name ‘Socialist’ was replaced by ‘Social Democrats’ because many Americans associated the word ‘socialism’ with Soviet Communism.” Anyone familiar with Marx and Lenin correctly associated the two which is why rebranding was necessary to eliminate its negative image and conceal its identity.

The thing about rebranding is that it does not change the product itself – only the name changes and its psychological associations.

Rebranding Toothfish as Chilean Sea Bass was a successful marketing strategy designed to sell a rejected fish in the food industry. Similarly, rebranding the Socialist Party of America as Social Democrats was a successful marketing strategy designed to sell a rejected ideology in the political sphere. Both were highly successful.

The democratic socialism currently embraced by the left-wing radicals that dominate the Democrat Party in America has embraced identity politics to increase its membership with inclusive promises of “social justice and income equality.” These slogan promises disguise the reality of socialism because, like the Patagonian Toothfish, changing its name does not change what socialism is.

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MOVIES AND TELEVISION Comments turned off

Civilization’s ‘Darkest Hour’ Hits the Silver Screen A masterful new film shows how Churchill saved the world from Nazi Germany in May of 1940. By Victor Davis Hanson

By on December 28th, 2017

The new film Darkest Hour offers the diplomatic side to the recent action movie Dunkirk.

The story unfolds with the drama of British prime minister Winston Churchill’s assuming power during the Nazi invasion of France in May 1940. Churchill’s predecessor, the sickly Neville Chamberlain, had lost the confidence of the English people and the British government. His appeasement of Adolf Hitler and the disastrous first nine months of World War II seemed to have all but lost Britain the war.

Churchill was asked to become prime minister on the very day that Hitler invaded France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. The armies of all three democracies — together larger than Germany’s invading forces — collapsed within days or a few weeks.

About a third of a million British soldiers stranded in a doomed France were miraculously saved by Churchill’s bold decision to risk evacuating them by sea from Dunkirk, France, where most of what was left of the British Expeditionary Force had retreated.

Churchill’s greatest problem was not just saving the British army but confronting the reality that, with the German conquest of Europe, the British Empire now had no allies.

The Soviet Union had all but joined Hitler’s Germany under their infamous non-aggression pact of August 1939.

The United States was determined at all costs to remain neutral. Just how neutral is emphasized in Darkest Hour by Churchill’s sad phone call with U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt. FDR cleverly assures Churchill that in theory he wants to help while in fact he can do nothing.

Within days of Churchill’s taking office, all of what is now the European Union either would be in Hitler’s hands or could be considered pro-Nazi “neutral.”

Darkest Hour gets its title from the understandable depression that had spread throughout the British government. Members of Churchill’s new war cabinet wanted to sue for peace. Chamberlain and senior conservative politician Edward Wood both considered Churchill unhinged for believing Britain could survive.

Both appeasers dreamed that thuggish Italian dictator Benito Mussolini might be persuaded to beg Hitler to call off his planned invasion of Great Britain. They dreamed Mussolini could save a shred of English dignity through an arranged British surrender.

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Mapping The Swamp, A Study of the Administrative State (FY2016) reveals the size, scope, and power of the federal government.

By on December 28th, 2017

Here are some ‘Key Findings’:

1.97 million civil service employees at a total cash cost of $136 billion. Every minute, the federal government pays its disclosed workforce $1 million. Every eight-hour workday costs more than $500 million.

Over the last six-years, the number of federal employees making $200,000+ increased by 165 percent.

More than 400,000 federal bureaucrats made $100,000+ incomes. Furthermore, nearly 30,000 rank-and-file employees out-earned all 50 state governors receiving more than $190,823.

After just 3-years of employment, federal bureaucrats receive 43 paid days off – that’s 8 1/2 weeks! We estimate this perk costs taxpayers $22.6 billion annually.

A new ‘minimum wage’ for federal employees: at 78 agencies, the average employee made more than $100,000!

Presidio Trust – a small federal agency in San Francisco – paid out three of the four largest bonuses at the federal government, including the largest in FY2016. The biggest bonus ($141,525) went to an HR Manager in charge of payroll!

Download a PDF copy of our report, click here.

We literally ‘Mapped The Swamp’:

Search our interactive map of the 2 million federal bureaucrats by ZIP code, click here. Just click a pin and scroll down to see the results rendered in the chart beneath the map.

See a small piece of the federal bureaucracy in your ZIP code or any ZIP code across America.

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