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January 2019

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

I’m A Senior Trump Official, And I Hope A Long Shutdown Smokes Out The Resistance

By on January 17th, 2019

https://dailycaller.com/2019/01/14/smoke-out-resistance

The Daily Caller is taking the rare step of publishing this anonymous op-ed at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose career would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

As one of the senior officials working without a paycheck, a few words of advice for the president’s next move at shuttered government agencies: lock the doors, sell the furniture, and cut them down.

Federal employees are starting to feel the strain of the shutdown. I am one of them. But for the sake of our nation, I hope it lasts a very long time, till the government is changed and can never return to its previous form.

The lapse in appropriations is more than a battle over a wall. It is an opportunity to strip wasteful government agencies for good.

On an average day, roughly 15 percent of the employees around me are exceptional patriots serving their country. I wish I could give competitive salaries to them and no one else. But 80 percent feel no pressure to produce results. If they don’t feel like doing what they are told, they don’t.

Why would they? We can’t fire them. They avoid attention, plan their weekend, schedule vacation, their second job, their next position — some do this in the same position for more than a decade.

They do nothing that warrants punishment and nothing of external value. That is their workday: errands for the sake of errands — administering, refining, following and collaborating on process. “Process is your friend” is what delusional civil servants tell themselves. Even senior officials must gain approval from every rank across their department, other agencies and work units for basic administrative chores.

Process is what we serve, process keeps us safe, process is our core value. It takes a lot of people to maintain the process. Process provides jobs. In fact, there are process experts and certified process managers who protect the process. Then there are the 5 percent with moxie (career managers). At any given time they can change, clarify or add to the process — even to distort or block policy counsel for the president.

Saboteurs peddling opinion as research, tasking their staff on pet projects or pitching wasteful grants to their friends. Most of my career colleagues actively work against the president’s agenda. This means I typically spend about 15 percent of my time on the president’s agenda and 85 percent of my time trying to stop sabotage, and we have no power to get rid of them. Until the shutdown.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

There is only one Brexit by Sinclair Davidson

By on January 17th, 2019

http://catallaxyfiles.com/2019/01/17/there-is-

I’m sure everyone is fixated with the circus that is UK politics at the moment. The problem as I see it is the desire to “have a deal”. The stark reality is that there are no deals to be had – certainly no better deals.

Talking to a UK based friend last year about why she voted remain there were three points:

She favoured close economic ties with Europe – that is a bigger market argument,
She perceived many of the Leave arguments to be racist – yes, there was an element of racism in some of the Leave arguments,
She hoped the EU would get a wake up call and negotiate a better deal for the UK after the referendum.

Point 3 is worth discussing. The fact is that the UK already has a preferential deal, many deals, with the EU. They can legitimately ask the question, “More? You want more?”. Then David Cameron went to Brussels a few weeks before the vote and tried to get a better deal and the Europeans said no. So there was no better deal on the table if the UK had voted to remain.

But we know the UK voted to leave. The Remainers put up a whole bunch of legal challenges but in big pictures terms lost the fight. The UK parliament passed legislation that takes the UK out of the EU at the end of March. That part of the process is on automatic pilot and will occur unless the legislation is amended.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

David Bidstrup: If one problem is too hard to solve try another one

By on January 17th, 2019

http://catallaxyfiles.com/2019/01/16/david-bidstrup-if-one-problem

Back in the 1970’s the big climate scare was the “impending ice age”. Temperatures had fallen since the 1930’s and Arctic sea ice was in abundance. All the “scientists” and the “scientific bodies” agreed that we would freeze. There was “concensus”.

The main problem with global cooling was it could not be attributed to anything “anthropogenic”. Carbon dioxide was supposed to heat us up and the Milankovitch cycles and sunspot activity were outside mans “control”. There was nothing we could do except to prepare to become extinct as agriculture failed and mass starvation culled us from the earth.

Fortunately temperatures began to rise and by 1988 the climate problem became how to stop us all from frying. This was a better problem because the fanciful notion that carbon dioxide, with its magical property of “trapping heat” and “radiating it back towards us”. The magical “greenhouse effect”,( that is nothing like a real greenhouse), became the culprit and that gave them a means of “control”. They could “stop climate change” if only we gave up having cheap reliable electricity and glass in the windows. I wonder when they will work out how to control volcano’s – that’s a hard one so they will probably let it go through to the keeper.

There was also a moral dimension to the story. All of the “advanced counties” who had benefited from the dreaded CO2 and advanced their standard of living had done so by “causing climate change” that would affect outer bong-bong land. We were guilty of eco-terrorism and had to atone.

For some reason that is beyond rationality, the task of co-ordinating the “science” and sorting out the method to make reparations for our sins was given to the United Nations, one of the most ineffectual organisations in the world. In the best bureaucratic tradition the IPCC became the 300 kg Gorilla that sat wherever it wanted to. Meetings were held in exotic places and attended by thousands of “dignitaries”, “scientists” and hangers on. Our recently departed Premier attended one of them with a film crew in tow so that his virtue was captured for posterity. While all this happened the state electricity supply was trashed and the state debt increased.

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MEDIA Comments turned off

A Casualty of an Age of Character Assassination Kevin Myers ****

By on January 17th, 2019

We live in an age in which irreversible character assassination is a public entertainment, the slanderers being for the most part well-bred, well-paid, intelligent and enjoying the tacit backing of social-media giants Facebook and Twitter. They raise lynch mobs in 140 characters and have established a worldwide Reich wholly antithetical to the freedoms of speech, thought and association.

There is no such thing as bad publicity, the showman Phineas T. Barnum used to declare about his invention, the “publicity stunt”. His logic was simple: the adhesiveness of the person’s name would cling to the public’s memory-cells long after the event that originally lodged it there had vanished. That, however, was before the conjuncture of social media and the internet had rendered the concept of forgetfulness as extinct as the toeless sloth. Together, the venom of Twitter/Facebook and the utter eternity of the web can today destroy a person’s good name as long as Halley’s Comet circles the Milky Way. Anyone caught in the jaws of social media’s 3 a.m. drunken abuse and the perpetual ubiquity of the internet is henceforth forever vulnerable, beyond the protections of memory loss, statutes of limitations or libel laws.

There are a couple of other ingredients to this mix that increase its lethality. The first is that the victim should be a foe of the liberal-left nexus of doctrinaire feminism, pseudo-egalitarianism and liberal-leftism. The second is that it helps if the proposed victim inadvertently steps a little out of line.

Believe me, I know.

Just over a year ago, my editors of the Irish edition of the Sunday Times of London asked me to write a piece about the pay differential between men and women in the BBC. Doing a background check, I noted that the two best-paid women in the BBC were Jewish. I was (and remain) one of the most fervent supporters of Israel in the Irish media, and I have long been both an admirer of the Jewish people and an amateur student of their many achievements. (These, by the way, include the first tank, Dassault aircraft, independent suspension, penicillin, streptomycin, the anti-polio jab, oh yes, and the Old Testament.) I admit that I clumsily strayed into what others might regard as anti-Semitic territory when I genuinely congratulated these two women:

Good for them. Jews are not generally noted for their insistence on selling their talent for the lowest possible price, which is the most useful measure there is of inveterate, lost-with-all-hands stupidity. I wonder: who are their agents? If they’re the same ones that negotiated the pay for the women on the lower scales, then maybe the latter have found their true value in the market place.

The only query that my column elicited from the Sunday Times was whether I was certain they were Jewish. I replied I was.

Shortly after midnight, just minutes after my column appeared, someone in London began to tweet about my “anti-Semitic rant” through the sewer that is social media, and this gathered pace exponentially. While I slept, my career was effectively ended, and shortly after I woke I was publicly sacked by the Sunday Times editor without him even speaking to me. Over the next twenty-four hours, my reputation as perhaps the most stalwart friend of Israel in the Irish media and a repeated attester to the full horrors of the Final Solution was completely turned on its head.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

John Snooke:Carbonphobia, It Goes Against the Grain

By on January 17th, 2019

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet/2019/01/carbonphobia-it-goes-against-the-grain/

The Paris agreement obliges Australia to reduce emissions across the board, with cheap electricity the first casualty of the Gaia worshippers’ maniacal irrationality. Soon it will be the turn of the agriculture sector. If you think electricity prices are insane, just wait until you see what happens to the price of food.

As the term ‘climate change’ has now all but replaced ‘global warming’ in catastrophism’s argot and our nation’s political vernacular, let me report in sorrow rather anger that some farmers, who should know better, have made themselves dupes of those bent on wrecking the economy, the nation’s future and their own livelihoods.

For years, government-funded climate scientists have plied a generation of gullible followers with questionable science. The models used to display the planet’s imminent doom all and always emphasis the alleged ability of carbon dioxide to massively change global temperatures, even though it represents just 0.04% of atmospheric gases. Their models have been proven wrong in theory and practice time and again; meanwhile, the climate changes as it has always done in response to entirely natural factors and influences.

For farmers, the trap is that any climatic event not suitable for the optimum production of their particular commodity is now deemed not be the consequence of living and working on a land of “drought and flooding rain” but of anthropogenic climate change. Disingenuously, this dismisses the 200-plus years of records — unhomogenised records, that is — and ignores the Australian farmer’s demonstrated ability to cope with and adapt to climatic adversity. Whilst climate change has supposedly been ruinous over the past 20 years, farmers have been using innovation, developed mostly on-farm, to substantially increase our agricultural output. Simply put, the increased agricultural production in this age of supposed ruinous climate change is not reconcilable — and especially not with the fearmongering that continues apace even as global temperatures obstinately refuse to rise above the flat-line they have followed for what is now 20 years.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Rep. Ilhan Omar on Past Anti-Semitic Tweet: ‘Those Were The Only Words I Could Think About’ By Jack Crowe

By on January 17th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/rep-ilhan-omar-on-past-anti-semitic-tweet-those-were-the-only-words-i-could-think-about/

Representative Ilhan Omar (D., Minn.), asked during a Wednesday evening CNN interview about her claim that “Israel hypnotized the world,” explained that she resorted to the “unfortunate” language upon being overcome with emotion after seeing images of Israeli bombs falling on the Gaza strip.

“I remember when that was happening, watching tv and really feeling as if no other life was being impacted in this war and… those unfortunate words were the only words I could think about expressing at the moment,” Omar told CNN’s Christine Amanpour, referencing Israel’s 2012 airstrike offensive in Gaza.

“And what’s really important to me is that there is a difference between criticizing a military action by a government that has exercised really oppressive policies and being offensive…to particular people of faith,” she added.
Imam Mohamad Tawhidi ✔ @Imamofpeace
Rep. @Ilhan Omar says her anti-semitic tweets were the only words she could think of when Israel attacked Gaza. Can she please show us her tweets against terrorist Hamas when they recently launched rockets onto a Jewish kindergarten?

They don’t exist.

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FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Trump’s Middle East Strategy and the Kurds By Myron Magnet

By on January 17th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/donald-trumps-middle-east-strategy-and-the-kurds/

There’s a problem with getting too close to Turkey.

President Trump is right to dismiss the “freedom agenda” in the Middle East. Long experience has disproved that idea that, under the umbrella of U.S. military might and with American encouragement, tribal Muslim societies with medieval and theocratic cultures and institutions will transform themselves into free democratic republics. Instead of an Arab Spring, we got years of jihadi civil war, culminating in the ISIS scourge of violence and terror.

With the ISIS fanatics largely (though not entirely) brought to heel in Syria, and all other reasons for having U.S. troops in the Middle East exhausted, Trump aims to bring the troops home. As Hudson scholar Michael Doran argued in a recent, widely read Mosaic article — with Walter Russell Mead concurring in the Wall Street Journal — this doesn’t mean Trump has no Middle East strategy. Doran notes that Trump is trying to forge a Sunni–Turkish–Israeli coalition as a realpolitik counterbalance to Iranian power in the region, rather than leaving a vacuum for jihadists to fill, and argues that this is the right strategy.

But there’s a problem with getting too close with Turkey, one that the strategy’s advocates acknowledge but have done too little to address: the country’s treatment of our allies the Kurds. It is a matter of national honor not to abandon our allies to slaughter, as we abandoned the Montagnards after Vietnam and our translators and spies in Iraq. It is disgraceful that, as Henry Kissinger has said, while it is dangerous to be an enemy of the United States, to be its friend is fatal.

Certainly we ought to do something to try to protect them from Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Doran writes, but he doesn’t specify what this is. Both National Security Advisor John Bolton and Trump himself, meanwhile, have issued categorical demands to Erdogan for specific protections for the Kurds.

You can see from Erdogan’s ferocious outrage over these demands — he wouldn’t even see Bolton when he came to Turkey recently — the fatal flaw in the Doran-Mead argument: Turkey is not our friend. Erdogan, as Mead quotes Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu as charging, is an anti-Semitic dictator. In fact, to my mind, the speed and determination with which he has dismantled Ataturk’s secular state and turned it into a Muslim sharia regime shows that admitting Turkey into NATO was as foolish a miscalculation of the striped-pants liberal globalists as letting China into the World Trade Organization. Admitting power-hungry dictators into the global club does not transform them into rule-abiding, contract-respecting, peace-and-freedom-loving liberals. It just opens the door to subversion of the West.

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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Leaked Bruce Ohr testimony may be the key to unraveling the biggest political scandal in American history By Thomas Lifson

By on January 17th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/leaked_bruce_ohr_testimony_may_be_the_key_to_unraveling_the_biggest_political_scandal_in_american_history.html

The mobilization of law enforcement and intelligence assets by the Obama administration in 2016 to spy on the presidential campaign of rival party candidate Donald Trump is the biggest political scandal in our history. The Mueller probe of Trump is a cover-up, as are leaks to friendly media by anonymous former officials. Yet the pieces are falling into place to burn through the dust clouds and see the underlying crimes.

John Solomon of The Hill is one of our leading sources for the real story obscured by the guilty parties and their media allies. Fully uncovering it will require prosecution of related crimes, and the testimony of cooperating witnesses in the interest of mitigating their legal consequences, up to and including prison time.

Testimony given by former FBI top lawyer Bruce Ohr that has been leaked to Solomon provides, in Solomon’s words:

… the most damning evidence to date that FBI and DOJ officials may have misled federal judges in October 2016 in their zeal to obtain the warrant targeting Trump adviser Carter Page just weeks before Election Day.

Misleading a federal judge is a big crime.

Ohr has testified that the officials who submitted the FIA warrant applications knowingly lied, because he warned them that the Fusion-GPS dossier was opposition research from the Hillary Campaign:

The then-No. 4 Department of Justice (DOJ) official briefed both senior FBI and DOJ officials in summer 2016 about Christopher Steele’s Russia dossier, explicitly cautioning that the British intelligence operative’s work was opposition research connected to Hillary Clinton’s campaign and might be biased.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Beto bombs bigly in long interview with the Washington Post By Thomas Lifson

By on January 17th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/01/beto_bombs_bigly_in_long_interview_with_the_washington_post.html

When a CNN anchor warns that “it’s a fine line to walk between being a blank canvas and an empty vessel,” a pretty-boy, Kennedyesque empty-suit progressive candidate, already recognizable by his first name alone, is in trouble.

Beto looks like a beta, if we are to judge by the Washington Post’s account of his “lengthy” interview with Post writer Jenna Johnson. The title gives away the verdict: “Beto O’Rourke’s immigration plan: No wall but no specifics.” The lead paragraphs are no kinder. Jenna Johnson wrote:

In a digital ad that recently went viral, Beto O’Rourke tore into President Trump’s desired border wall with soaring footage of the Rio Grande Valley and an explanation of what the wall would do: cut off access to the river, shrink the size of the United States and force the seizure of privately-held land.

It noted that most undocumented immigrants [sic] who arrived in the United States in the past decade came not over the border but on visas that then expired.

So what should be done to address visa overstays?

“I don’t know,” O’Rourke said, pausing in a lengthy interview.

The vacuity was so obvious that even CNN anchor Brianna Keilar felt compelled to raise the alarm. The segment is embedded below, but Tommy Christopher of Mediaite cuts to the chase:

Keilar brought up O’Rourke’s recent interview with The Washington Post’s Jenna Johnson, during which O’Rourke seemed to have trouble answering several questions.

“He was asked how he would handle immigrants who overstay their Visas, and he said ‘I don’t know’,” Keilar said. “On withdrawing troops from Syria, he said there may be a good reason, but he doesn’t necessarily understand. He seemed to be passing on a lot of stuff, the Constitution, he questioned whether a 230 year-old document can be used as a guide for today’s issues, especially international issues.

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ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Fact-Free Politics: From Climate Change to Trickle Down Thomas Sowell

By on January 17th, 2019

https://spectator.org/fact-free-politics-from-climate-change-to-trickle-down/
Empty catchwords reveal a mind that’s unwilling to analyze and debate.

In this era when there has been more information available to more people than at any time in the past, it is also true that there has been more misinformation from more different sources than ever. We are not talking about differences of opinion or inadequate verification, but about statements and catchwords in utter defiance of facts.

Among the most popular current catchwords are “climate change deniers.” Stop and think. Have you ever — even once in your entire life — seen, heard or read even one human being who denied that climates change?

It is hard even to imagine how any minimally knowledgeable person could deny that climates change, when there are fossils of marine creatures in the Sahara Desert. Obviously there has been quite a climate change there.

The next time someone talks about “climate change deniers,” ask them to name one — and tell you just where specifically you can find their words, declaring that climates do not change. You can bet the rent money that they cannot tell you.

Why all this talk about these mythical creatures called “climate change deniers”? Because there are some meteorologists and other scientists who refuse to join the stampede toward drastic economic changes to prevent what others say will be catastrophic levels of “global warming.”

There are scientists on both sides of that issue. Presumably the issue could be debated on the basis of evidence and analysis. But this has become a political crusade, and political issues tend to be settled by political means, of which demonizing the opposition with catchwords is one.

It is much the same story on economic issues. Any proposal to reduce income tax rates is sure to bring out claims that these are “tax cuts for the rich,” based on the “trickle-down theory” that reducing the taxes collected from the rich will cause some of their wealth to “trickle down” to people with lower incomes.

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