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NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION

50 STATES AND DC, CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT

Roger Franklin: Pryor Convictions and Trumped-Up Tears

Fairfax alumna Lisa Pryor has taken to the pages of the New York Times to insist that Australians, like the editors who chose to run her piece, are scared and sobbing that Hillary Clinton will never be president. Pity about what she got wrong and left out.
Long ago, when the bloom of youth was yet upon my cheeks and adventure in my heart, I carried aboard a jet bound for San Francisco a letter from Mum to be opened once the flight was airborne. It was all good advice … don’t drink too much … behave yourself … don’t drink too much … be polite to police officers … don’t drink too much. Sound counsel in every respect, the note concluded with an admonition that today seems both quaintly dated and sadly so, ‘Be a good ambassador for your country.’ Alas that former SMH opinion-page editrix Lisa Pryor (left) was not similarly encouraged to avoid bringing Australia into disrepute. It might have stayed her hand from tapping out the embarrassing missive that appears in the New York Times international edition.

Doctor Pryor’s topic (for a genuine, pill-prescribing doctor she has made of herself since leaving Fairfax) is Donald Trump’s presidential victory or, to be more accurate, the utter catastrophe of Hillary Clinton’s defeat. Times readers are alerted early to the newly minted medico’s fragile emotional condition, which has seen her dissolve in tears “many times, in the shower, in the car.” It would be presumptuous for one other than a physician to recommend an increased dose of the psyche-smoothing medications that she elsewhere notes have done her a world of good, but all that bawling really does suggest a suitable case for stepped-up treatment. Likewise a visit with her optometrist, as it seems she has quite some difficulty reading the charted results of survey questions. But more on that in a tick. First, the paragraph that says so much, not about how Americans “let us down” by rejecting a corruptocrat hypocrite in favour of a vulgarian tycoon, but about the author and the US publication whose front page is moist with its contributor’s latest weepings.

The election of Mr. Trump feels like a sudden plunge after a gradual decline. Already he is goading China, befriending President Vladimir V. Putin, disregarding climate change and refusing daily intelligence briefings because he’s “a smart person.” None of this, we fear, will end well for any of us.

What you mean “we”, white girl? Moving in the circles she does and re-tweeting with approval the asininities of Crikey!’s Bernard Keane and others, it might well be that she has never met anyone other than the sort of people who still regard the SMH as a serious publication, a very small congregation indeed. Were she to get out more it would come as a surprise to learn that some of her compatriots are actually quite pleased to see a bull at the door of the Washington china shop, as the American enterprise has been running in the red for far too long and could do with a top-to-bottom renovation and re-staffing. The paragraph above, representing as it does the cognitive dissonance of the New Establishment, makes the case.

“…a sudden plunge after a gradual decline”

So Obama’s eight years of profligate spending, of fecklessness and impotence, haven’t lifted anyone’s boat, yet US voters must be held to account for electing the man who noted as much and tapped his nation’s dyspepsia.

“…he is goading China…”

Much as Churchill goaded Germany, perhaps, by noting that it was intimidating its neighbours and laying claim to their territories?

Time to Get Rid of the EPA? Scott Pruitt May Be Just the Guy to Do It Trump’s nominee for the EPA Administrator could — and should — abolish the agency. By Henry I. Miller

Several commentators have characterized the selection of Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt to become the next EPA Administrator as a sharp stick in the eye to the agency and its employees. They’re right — and seldom has any herd of federal bureaucrats been more deserving of it. For decades, in administrations Democratic and Republican alike, the EPA has been relentlessly ideological, politicized, corrupt, and incompetent.

When I joined the Food and Drug Administration in 1979, I was essentially apolitical and knew next to nothing about federal regulation. I was a science nerd who had spent the previous 16 years in college, graduate school, medical school, and postdoctoral training. It didn’t take long until I learned about the jungle of government bureaucracies, and one of the harshest lessons concerned the perfidy and incompetence of one of the FDA’s siblings, the EPA.

I found the EPA to be relentlessly anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-industry. The only thing it seemed to be for was the Europeans’ innovation-busting “precautionary principle,” the view that until a product or activity has been definitively proven safe, it should be banned or at least smothered with regulation. In fact, during international discussions and negotiations over the harmonization of biotechnology regulations in which I participated, the EPA often seemed allied with the European Union and committed to working against U.S. interests.

To my astonishment, I found that there were entire groups within the EPA whose function it was to lie to the Office of Management and Budget and to Congress about the rationale for and impacts of their proposed regulations. And over the years, I discovered that there is a kind of underground railway by which the most incompetent, disaffected, and anti-industry employees from other regulatory agencies find their way to the EPA, creating a miasma of dysfunctional governance.

During the two decades since I left government service, I’ve continued to watch the EPA’s shenanigans with a mixture of awe and vexation. Policy by policy and decision by decision, the EPA has decimated the nation’s competitiveness, ability to innovate, and capacity to create wealth. Its policies and decisions have single-handedly killed off entire once-promising sectors of biotechnology, including bioremediation (the use of microorganisms to clean up toxic wastes, including oil spills) and microorganisms that when sprayed on plants could prevent frost damage.

The EPA’s expansive and ever-expanding regulations impose huge costs on American businesses and, ultimately, on consumers. An analysis by the Competitive Enterprise Institute estimated that the annual cost of compliance with EPA regulations alone is more than a third of a trillion dollars. Ideology is one thing, but corruption and abuse are quite another. A scheme was exposed some years ago that would have diverted EPA “research” funds to pay outside public-relations consultants. This payola scheme is similar to the agency’s longstanding practice of buying influence by doling out hundreds of millions of dollars each year to certain favored nonprofit organizations — money that, according to the inspector general and Government Accountability Office, is dispersed with no public notice, competition, or accountability. The GAO investigators documented systematic malfeasance by regulators, including: 1) making grants to grantees who were unable to fulfill the terms of the grants; 2) favoring an exclusive clique of grantees without opening the grants to competition; 3) funding “environmental” grants for activities that lack any apparent environmental benefit; and 4) failing to ensure that grantees performed the objectives identified in the grants.

The Animal Cunning and Instinct of Donald Trump He grasped that what voters cared about were the very issues politicos were disdainfully ignoring. By Victor Davis Hanson

The American middle classes, the Chinese, and Vladimir Putin have never been convinced that Ivy League degrees, vast Washington experience, and cultural sophistication necessarily translate into national wisdom. Trump instead relies more on instinct and operates from cunning — and we will soon see whether we should redefine “wisdom.”

But for now, for example, we have never heard a presidential candidate say such a thing as “We love our miners” — not “we like” miners, but “we love” them. And not just any miners, but “our” miners, as if, like “our vets,” the working people of our moribund economic regions were unique and exceptional people, neither clingers nor irredeemables. In Trump’s gut formulation, miners certainly did not deserve “to be put out of business” by Hillary Clinton, as if they were little more than the necessary casualties of the war against global warming. For Trump, miners were not the human equivalent of the 4,200 bald eagles that the Obama administration recently assured the wind turbine industry can be shredded for the greater good of alternate energy and green profiteering.

In other words, Trump instinctively saw the miners of West Virginia — and by extension the working-class populations of states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio — as emblematic of the forgotten man, in a way few of his Republican rivals, much less Hilary Clinton, grasped.

No other candidate talked as constantly about jobs, “fair” trade, illegal immigration, and political correctness — dead issues to most other pollsters and politicos. Rivals, Democratic and Republican alike, had bought into the electoral matrix of Barack Obama: slicing the electorate into identity-politics groups and arousing them to register and vote in record numbers against “them” — a fossilized, supposedly crude, illiberal, and soon-to-be-displaced white working class.

For Democrats that meant transferring intact Obama’s record numbers of minority voters to a 68-year-old multimillionaire white woman; for Republicans, it meant pandering with a kinder, softer but still divisive identity-politics message. Trump instinctively saw a different demographic. And even among minority groups, he detected a rising distaste for being patronized, especially by white, nasal-droning, elite pajama-boy nerds whose loud progressivism did not disguise their grating condescension.

Broward Deputy Sheriff Leads Banquets Featuring Terror Associates CAIR’s Nezar Hamze shares stage with man convicted of support for Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Joe Kaufman

We expect members of law enforcement to protect us from harm, not have involvement with those who look to do us harm. We cannot expect that from Nezar Hamze, because, while he is a Deputy at the Broward County Sheriff’s Office, he is also the head of the Florida chapter of CAIR, a group with extensive ties to terrorism. This past month, Hamze led two banquets where groups in the hallway and people on the stage and in the audience also had well documented associations with terror.

CAIR or the Council on American-Islamic Relations was created in June 1994 as part of an umbrella group led by then-global head of Hamas, Mousa Abu Marzook. CAIR has been named by the US government a co-conspirator for two federal trials dealing with the financing of millions of dollars to Hamas. In November 2014, CAIR, itself, was designated a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government. Many CAIR representatives have served prison time and/or have been deported from the US for terrorist-related activity.

CAIR-Florida reflects the same violent extremism of its parent organization. In July 2014, CAIR-Florida co-sponsored a pro-Hamas rally in Downtown Miami, where rally goers shouted, “We are Hamas,” “Let’s go Hamas,” and “Hamas kicked your ass.” Following the rally, the event organizer, Sofian Abdelaziz Zakkout, wrote in Arabic, “Thank God, every day we conquer the American Jews like our conquests over the Jews of Israel!”

CAIR-Florida Executive Director Hassan Shibly has referred to Hezbollah as “basically a resistance movement” and “absolutely not a terrorist organization” and, in August 2014, tweeted, “Israel and its supporters are enemies of God…” In December 2010, CAIR-Florida CEO and Statewide Regional Operations Director Nezar Hamze repeatedly refused to denounce Hamas, when given numerous chances to do so, stating “I’m not denouncing anybody. I’m not getting involved in the politics.”

Today, apart from his full-time roles with CAIR, Hamze is a full-time Deputy at the Broward Sheriff’s Office (BSO). He was referred for the job by Scott Israel, the current Sheriff, who calls Hamze his “friend.” Israel hired Hamze against the advice of all three BSO Majors who had evaluated Hamze during the hiring process. In May 2013, they unanimously signed a form stating, “At this time, I do not recommend Officer Hamze for employment…” Hamze was found to be lying on his polygraph exam about “use of illegal drugs” and about “buying illegal drugs.”

Those facts pale in contrast to the security issues involved. What should have stopped Sheriff Israel from hiring Hamze, before anything, was Hamze’s ongoing involvement in a designated terrorist group. However, Sheriff Israel has demonstrated that he cares little about Hamze’s terror-related background, as he has allowed Hamze the ability to exploit his position in the Sheriff’s Office to provide gun training to various radical mosques. The Sheriff, himself, has used Hamze to personally introduce him at these dangerous venues.

In July 2015, the Hamze/Israel Show made an appearance at the Darul Uloom mosque, located in Pembroke Pines, Florida. Each gave impassioned speeches, as they donned their full BSO uniforms, with guns and badges on display.

Many al-Qaeda terrorists have passed through Darul Uloom. “Dirty Bomber” Jose Padilla was a student of the mosque’s founder and present imam, Maulana Shafayat Mohamed. Now-dead al-Qaeda Global Operations Chief, Adnan el-Shukrijumah, was a prayer leader at Darul Uloom. And Darul Uloom Arabic teacher Imran Mandhai, along with mosque goers Hakki Aksoy and Shueyb Mossa Jokhan, hatched a plot at the mosque to blow up different South Florida structures, including area power stations, Jewish businesses, and a National Guard armory.

National Geographic Puts a 9-Year-Old Transgender Girl on the Cover By Tyler O’Neil (huh????!!!!)

National Geographic magazine announced last week that it will feature its first transgender model on the cover in January, a 9-year-old “girl.”

“She has lived as an openly transgender girl since age 5, and she captured the complexity of the conversation around gender,” wrote National Geographic editor Susan Goldberg in a letter announcing the issue. “Today, we’re not only talking about gender roles for boys and girls — we’re talking about our evolving understanding of people on the gender spectrum.”

Avery Jackson, the 9-year-old transgender from Kansas City, Kansas, will appear on the cover wearing hot pink cheetah-print pants. Confident, laid back, and poised with pink-dyed stripes through shoulder-length hair, she does indeed look like a girl, but is 9 — or 5! for that matter — an old enough age to determine one’s own gender? Especially if it is opposite her biological sex?

The magazine’s issue focuses on the “Gender Revolution,” pointing out 80 different 9-year-olds in eight different countries. It hits shelves on December 27, and is guaranteed to stir up controversy.
Sponsored

Indeed, shortly after the announcement, a Twitter user named Mark Romano declared, “I used to love National Geographic. Unfortunately, it has become nothing but a cesspool of Left-wing insanity.”

Beneath Avery Jackson’s picture stands the single quote, “The best thing about being a girl is, now I don’t have to pretend to be a boy.”

Leftists Ally with Jihadis in Our Public Schools By Karin McQuillan

After being subjected to jihadi propaganda by a Palestinian on an illegal visa in their third grade public school class, 8-9 year old American kids were led by their teacher to attack Israel. Watch the video.

It’s like a Maoist Red Guard indoctrination session. The children’s African-American teacher, Brooke Barnett, tells the children that Israel is hiding what’s really going from the world, but that the video they are about to see “is true, we can see what’s happening.”

After the program the third-graders were encouraged to share their reactions. The first child says, “Israel is wrong to think that Palestine could be theirs, because they already have a lot of land and they shouldn’t just take more thinking they own the world.”

“They (Israelis) should be peaceful but they’re not…they should not kill other people.”

“It’s not fair that people (jailed jihadis) will not see get to see their families.”

One child says, “When I grow up I’m going to go to Palestine and protest.’ “Welcome, welcome,” replies the speaker, “We need you to come to make struggle.” Another voice is heard saying, “Thank you.”

In the video, Code Pink leftist Ariel Gold, invited by the school to put on the program, reminds the children, “You guys are studying the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Child, from the United Nations…so the United Nations makes laws around what people can do, what countries can do, and many times Israel violates those laws, and that is what we are working for, for international law.”

Did you know that United Nations law is taught in our elementary schools? Yes, so-called Human Rights, not the U.S. Bill of Rights, is a standard topic in third grade social studies.

Student: “If somebody is attacking…you say Inshallah, so God can help us stop it.” “That’s beautiful,” breathes their teacher. Inshallah, beautiful, God Bless America, forbidden.

Burnett helps the next child, who mumbles something about not being able to protect yourself, “She’s saying it’s not fair they (Israelis) are more powerful. They (the Arabs) should be able to defend themselves but they (the Israelis) are more powerful because they have guns.”

In an unplanned moment of humor, an Arabic-speaking child is confused into thinking that Israeli terrorists are attacking Palestinians, and suggests the Palestinians on the West Bank build their own wall to protect themselves. “If they attack you …build your own wall…use their resources (bricks) against them, if you’re scared, how is that going to help.” A wall is not the answer out leftist teacher Brooke Burnett wants to hear; she asks Bassem Tamimi to comment. He tells the class, “Our children is our resources…our children who will fight….”

Another adult voice, “And the TRUTH, the TRUTH is the resource…if everybody was building walls, then we’d all be separated by walls, that’s not how human beings want to live, we want to be together, like in this classroom.” “Then how are you going to stop Israel,” asks the Arabic-speaking boy. Tamimi: “We would like to protect ourselves with your solidarity…you are all to defend us…to be freedom fighters for Palestine.”

The principal of the elementary school, Susan Eschbach, defended the event (full text here). She falsely claimed:

There were many adults present in the class and at no time was there an anti-Israel, anti-Palestine, anti-Jewish, or anti-Muslim stance. The children took away from this experience several messages. …“ You can make friends across borders and that is a good thing.” “Love will make peace, not hate.”

Ithaca (NY) third grade event shows how anti-Israel indoctrination has moved into elementary schools.

The School District, under pressure from irate parents, later wrote that the program was politically skewed and inflammatory, and apologized.

The Superintendent of schools falsely claimed Tamimi was not an invited guest, and that the lesson was on universal human rights, but admitted to The Blaze:

The suffering of Jewish children was not discussed with the third grade children; nor was the issue of Tamimi’s relative Ahlam Tamimi (Sbarro Pizza suicide bomber) raised. …Nor were the children told that Israel’s security barrier (which Palestinian activists usually call a “wall”) was erected in order to keep suicide bombers out of Israel and that since then suicide attacks have virtually ended, saving scores of children’s lives.

Asked if any pro-Israel voices were invited to the classroom, Brown said, “No other speakers have been into this classroom to talk about human rights at this time.”

The Superintendent has done nothing to drain the swamp. The children have not been debriefed and told they were subjected to jihadi propaganda. The teacher who instigated and presided over this radical hate teaching suffered no consequences and is still in her classroom. The school principal, who enlisted openly anti-Israeli groups to design her school’s curriculum on human rights (and boasts that she wants a designation from them as a “Human Rights School” whatever leftist claptrap that is), is still in place.

William Jacobson, a Cornell law professor and blogger at legalinsurrection.com appeared on Mark Levin’s show to discuss breaking this story and posting the video. It took Jacobsen a year of litigation under the NY Freedom of Information Law to get a partial video of the event.

There were other teachers there, there were staff there, nobody said a word about it, and they tried to cover it up. This is really a microcosm of what’s happening to our educational system. We are allowing these activists … into high schools and elementary schools, and you rarely get video of it, because most people can’t just walk into an elementary school and just start shooting video….

Who was it that the leftist school teacher invited to brainwash her students? Bassem Tamimi is a Palestinian jihadi who uses his own son and daughter attack Israeli soldiers in order to film them to incite jihadi violence. The Alegmeiner:

As the website Legal Insurrection reported in October, Tamimi used his Facebook page to promote an antisemitic blood libel that Israel arrests Palestinian children “To STEAL THEIR ORGANS.” The claim Tamimi reposted included a picture of a person’s torso with a long wound stitched up along the side.

Tamimi uses children as tools to instigate confrontations with Israelis, including having his daughter, dubbed “Shirley Temper,” scream at soldiers in hopes of provoking images that portray them as cruel or brutal.

Tamimi lied about his arrest record in order to get a U.S. visa from the Obama administration and embark on a speaking tour across America in favor of the anti-Semitic BDS movement. He boasted of his broader aim – to create an intifada in America, starting with our children.

“When we are able to get a video like this, we can use it to great effect,” he said. “When enough people here see these videos and hear our stories, it can start a kind of intifada [popular Palestinian uprising] against Israel in the United States.”

Jacobsen explains:

Tamimi’s son, Mohammad, was the subject of a recent media frenzy after he threw rocks at Israeli soldiers and when they moved to arrest him, a soldier was set upon by local women and children, all as the video rolled. Rock throwing has become a serious problem, with numerous motorists killed and injured as a result, yet it is an activity Tamimi encourages (for which he has been arrested).

Yet while Tammi showed videos in Ithaca and led the American children in an anti-Israeli, pro-jihadi discussion in the Ithaca classroom, the teachers and staff in the room noticed nothing wrong.

Hamilton’s Electors Vote Trump The pressure campaign fails, but Clinton has more faithless electors.

The 538 members of the Electoral College met Monday in 50 state capitals, and nearly all followed the public will in the 29 states carried by Donald J. Trump by voting to make the Republican the 45th U.S. President. There will be no Electoral College coup.

On Election Day Mr. Trump won states (including Maine’s second congressional district) worth 306 electoral votes, comfortably more than the 270 needed for victory. While Monday’s final tally wasn’t known when we went to press, the count was headed toward 304 for Mr. Trump, with two dissenting GOP electors from Texas.

It is nonetheless worth noting the extraordinary lengths that Democrats and the progressive media have gone to attempt to lobby electors to vote for Hillary Clinton or a Republican alternative. “Electors under siege,” said a headline in Politico, reporting that many “have been inundated by harassing phone calls and hate mail,” even “death threats.”

So much for the calm deliberation that progressives claim to want as they lobbied electors under the rubric of Hamilton’s Electors. The spectacle of the last month has been an exercise in political intimidation, precisely the kind of pressure politics that Alexander Hamilton wanted an Electoral College to protect the country from. There’s a case for independent judgment by electors, but only in extraordinary circumstances—such as learning something new and disqualifying about a candidate.

The pressure tactics included a gambit by 10 electors, backed by Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta, for a special intelligence briefing on Russian hacking before they voted. The lobbying was also notable for the number of progressive pundits who urged the electors to deny the results on Election Day in favor of defaulting to 538 electors.

Their supposedly killer argument is that Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote by some 2.86 million votes, at last count. But everyone, including the Clinton campaign, knew that the victor would be determined by electoral votes. No one ordered Mrs. Clinton not to campaign in Wisconsin, which she lost by something like 22,000 votes.

Voters Not Fooled by Democrats’ Dangerous Immigration Agenda There’s a new sheriff in town. Michael Cutler

One of the most treasured hallmarks of America’s democratic electoral process is that following every election the transference of political power is done peacefully. It is also expected that the candidate that loses an election will concede the results of the election and congratulate his/her opponent and wish that person success.

However, members of the Democratic Party and others, such as Presidential candidate Jill Stein, were so upset with the outcome of the election that they have made a series of false, outrageous accusations.

In so doing they not only attacked Donald Trump but our most prized democratic traditions.

The inflammatory and vitriolic statements made by various Democratic politicians, on all levels of government, were followed by violent demonstrations around the United States and on college campuses spurred on by the false accusations.

FBI Director Comey was blamed for causing Hillary to lose the election because he had made public statements about Hillary’s missing e-mails and illegal use of a private e-mail server to receive and transmit highly classified national security information.

Stein sought a recount of the votes in three key states. This costly effort failed to disclose any voting irregularities committed on behalf of Trump.

Now the most recent claim of the Democrats is that Russia hacked the U.S. electoral process to insure that Trump would win the election.

It is impossible to discuss computer security and not raise the issue of Hillary and her outrageous national security transgressions, through the use of her private and non-secure server as well as her non-secure digital devices, that created huge national security vulnerabilities for the United States.

Our government may not ever fully discover the extent of the damage this may have done to America’s intelligence gathering operations and may well continue to hobble those efforts for years to come.

Why Building the Wall Should Not Be Trump’s No. 1 Immigration Priority Mandating E-Verify and ending visa overstays will do more good, more quickly. By Mark Krikorian

EDITOR’S NOTE: The following article first appeared in the December 19, 2016, issue of National Review.

Ironically, Donald Trump’s marquee immigration proposal — a border wall, which Mexico will pay for — is the part of his immigration platform least likely to make much difference. This is not to say it’s infeasible or even ill advised. Only about one-third of the border with Mexico has any kind of fencing, and half of that consists merely of low-rise vehicle barriers intended to stop truck traffic; anyone can easily climb over or under them (as I myself have done on many occasions). And the president doesn’t need further authorization from Congress to build a physical barrier, although he would eventually need additional funding.

As to Mexico providing that funding, the campaign said this could happen through higher visa fees or a tax on remittances. The latter is long overdue regardless and already in place in Oklahoma, which taxes all personal out-of-state wire transfers but refunds 100 percent of the tax to those who file their annual tax returns, thus levying the tax only on illegal aliens. A national version of this fully refundable payment would be a fitting way of making illegal aliens help pay for immigration enforcement.

All that said, the problem at the border isn’t so much physical as political. While incremental improvements are needed in infrastructure, technology, and personnel, the Obama administration has rendered the long buildup at the border through the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations moot by simply waving illegal aliens across and letting them stay. This is no exaggeration; Brandon Judd, head of the Border Patrol agents’ union, testified before Congress last year that 80 percent of apprehended illegal aliens are being released into the United States. Ending this catch-and-release approach to border enforcement (item No. 2 on Trump’s ten-point list) is probably more important than the wall, and quicker to implement.

The other immigration initiative on the incoming administration’s to-do list that has drawn a lot of attention is Trump’s pledge to deport 2 to 3 million criminal aliens. This represented a move toward realism, away from his comments early in the campaign that all illegal aliens would have to be deported; Trump realized that, as Andrew C. McCarthy has written regarding immigration violations: “Our goal is never to extirpate crime problems. . . . Crime problems are managed, not eradicated.”

But deporting criminal aliens neglected under President Obama’s laxity is an essential part of such management. And the figure of 3 million is probably an undercount: Immigration and Customs Enforcement itself estimated several years ago that there were 1.9 million deportable aliens with criminal convictions. Add to that close to a million people who were ordered deported but absconded, plus other alien criminals who weren’t convicted only because they jumped bail or were released by sanctuary cities, and there will be plenty to do with the enforcement resources now underutilized because of the huge decline in interior deportations under Obama.

There are two parts of any effective immigration-enforcement plan that are more important than either the Mexican border or criminal-alien removals: turning off the jobs magnet and ensuring that lawful foreign visitors actually go home when their authorized time is up. Both are included in the president-elect’s enforcement outline, but they need more attention — and administrative focus — than they have received.

Making legal status a labor standard, through rules such as those that provide overtime pay and prohibit employing child labor, is the most important single thing that can be done to reduce the incentive to immigrate illegally. Practically, that means requiring use of the free online system E-Verify for all new hires. E-Verify enables employers to check whether the ID information provided by their new hire is authentic. It is now voluntary; about half of last year’s new hires were screened through E-Verify. Making it mandatory will require an act of Congress. E-Verify is not a silver bullet — despite continuous improvements, some illegals still slip through, and a significant share (though a minority) of illegals work off the books. But any immigration-enforcement overhaul must include mandatory nationwide use of E-Verify if it is to have any chance of success.

The second enforcement initiative, policing visas and the visitors who use them, isn’t the arcane issue some may think. The old rule of thumb used to be that 60 percent of the illegal population snuck across the border and 40 percent overstayed visas, making visa-tracking important but secondary. New research from the Center for Migration Studies (no relation to my Center for Immigration Studies) found the reverse — now close to 60 percent of the 1,000 new illegal aliens settling in the U.S. each day are believed to be visa overstayers.

This needs to be addressed at both the front end and the back end. That is to say, the State Department needs to reduce its issuing of “nonimmigrant” (i.e., temporary) visas to people who are likely to stay here illegally in the first place, and the Department of Homeland Security needs to implement a check-out system for foreign visitors so we can know in real time who didn’t leave when he was supposed to.

Our nation’s visa officers abroad are America’s other Border Patrol, but State Department leadership views them more as travel agents. As with the actual Border Patrol, this is a problem mainly of management and policy, not resources. The relevant law clearly says that every applicant for a temporary visa is to be assumed to be an intended illegal alien until he proves otherwise. In practice, the burden of proof is often reversed. Since 9/11, security screening has been taken more seriously, but preventing non-terrorist or non-national-security-related visa overstays is simply not a priority. In fact, an earlier version of the Foreign Affairs Manual, the body of regulations that govern the State Department, included this quote from a Truman-era immigration commission:

How the Navy’s Zumwalt-Class Destroyers Ran Aground Billed as the Navy’s stealth wonder-ship of the future, the USS Zumwalt destroyer has turned into a procurement boondoggle. By Mike Fredenburg

On November 22, while the world watched, the U.S. Navy’s newest, most complex warship ground to a stop in middle of the Panama Canal, both propellers seized, leaving the ship dead in the water. The warship, the USS Zumwalt, DDG-1000, had to be towed out of the canal. While not as embarrassing as watching our sailors being taken hostage by Iran and then publicly humiliated, nonetheless it was pretty embarrassing. Yes, all new classes of ships have teething problems, but this is at least the third major “engineering casualty” that the USS Zumwalt has experienced over the last few months, and it is emblematic of a defense-procurement system that is rapidly losing its ability to meet our national-security needs.

The Zumwalt was going to be the United States’ 21st-century, cruiser-sized, super destroyer that would allow us to dominate the world’s oceans and littorals for the next 50 years. The Navy made big promises: The two overarching goals for the program were that the ship would be very stealthy and that it would set new standards in reducing crew size. Another major element of its raison d’être, was that it would be able supply the Naval Surface Fire Support (NSFS) capability the Navy has been promising the Marines since it retired the last of the modernized Iowa-class battleships in 1992.

This really big warship was going to anchor the Navy’s ability to project power into the littorals. Its 15,000 to 16,000 tons of displacement would be crammed full of new and revolutionary technologies such as the Integrated Power System, the Linux-powered Total Ship Computing Environment Infrastructure (TSCEI), and, of course, the Advanced Gun System. Its massive generating capacity would allow it to power the energy-hungry lasers and railguns of the future. Its defining glory, its stealth, would allow the Zumwalt to undertake missions that other less stealthy ships could not.

Skyrocketing Costs, No Accountability

The Zumwalt destroyer program grew out of the 1994 SC-21 program, the goal of which was to develop the Navy’s surface-combatant warships of the 21st century. This destroyer program, PMS 500, went through several name changes, the DD-21, the DD(X), before finally, in 2006, the program was renamed to DDG-1000, the Zumwalt class.

Based on the Navy’s 1999 assurances that each ship would cost just $1.34 billion and that the whole 32-ship program would come in at $46 billion, Congress committed to fund the program. But by 2001, cost growth prompted the Navy to lower the projected class size to only 16 ships. And by 2005, with the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimating costs of well over $3 billion per ship, the Navy decided to drop the number of ships to be built to just seven. Flash-forward to today and the Navy has capped production at just three ships, with each costing over $4.2 billion in construction costs alone. Toss in over $10 billion for development costs, and you end up at more than $7 billion per ship. Amazingly, this is actually more than the $6.2 billion we paid for our last Nimitz-class aircraft carrier.

To make matters worse, this cost is still rising — the Navy actually took delivery of, and commissioned, a ship that is far from complete and years away from being ready for combat. To obfuscate this fact, many future “modernization costs,” new threat upgrades, and the like will appear, all funded under new programs with the goal of pumping more money into to Zumwalt to get it to where it should have been when it was commissioned. Unsurprisingly, as of May of 2016, the GAO reports that only three of eleven critical technologies the Zumwalt relies upon were considered mature.

Adding insult to injury, absolutely no one has been held accountable for this budget-busting debacle. In fact, every one of the Navy’s four original project managers were almost immediately promoted from captain to admiral upon completing their stint in charge. And the lead contractors for the Zumwalt program — Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, and General Dynamics — have received additional hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of defense contracts — even as costs soared, schedules slipped, and capabilities declined.

Unsurprisingly, the chief of naval operations, the Navy’s senior uniformed naval officer, who played a major role in getting initial support and funding for new destroyer program, went on to become CEO and chairman of General Dynamics, which during his tenure secured billions of dollars directly related to the Zumwalt program. Of course, none of the congressional representatives who carried water for these same defense contractors have paid any price whatsoever for continuing to support funding the Zumwalt — despite overwhelming evidence the project was a loser.