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A Great Week for the President and a NeverTrump Crack-up By Julie Kelly

Posted By on December 23rd, 2017

This week has been a vindication for much-maligned Trump supporters. Not only did the president have the best week of his administration, an internecine feud erupted within the “NeverTrump” tribe.

First, the great week. The president fulfilled a key campaign promise with his signing this morning of the tax reform bill that also eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate and opened up the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge to drilling. He reprioritized our national security interests with his National Security Statement issued Monday And finally, who can’t be proud of the the announcement that the United States would finally be “taking names” of our foes at the United Nations? There is palpable satisfaction among Trump voters and even reluctant supporters.

Though ultimately less important, on one level, the “NeverTrump” infighting may be even more delicious than the solid week of accomplishments. Before the primary elections, an influential and vocal group of conservatives loosely banded together to oppose Trump’s candidacy; this included the editors of National Review and The Weekly Standard, conservative columnists for the Washington Post and New York Times, authors such as Tom Nichols, and the presidential ticket of independents Evan McMullin and Mindy Finn. But since Trump won (and subsequently amassed a record any legitimate conservative would have hailed had it come from a different Republican) a growing rift has developed between the various factions in NeverTrumpland. On one side are influencers who gradually, if begrudgingly, acknowledge Trump is governing in a way far more palatable to their “principled conservatism” than they expected. While they still bemoan his temperament and approach, they commend his achievements.

On the other side are opportunists who have become traitors to the “conservative” cause they once championed as they shrewdly trade their integrity for air time on MSNBC or CNN to rant about the president. (I have written about them here and here.) They have publicly speculated—or hoped, to put it more accurately—that Trump would not survive the first year of his presidency, and encouraged his staff and Congressional Republicans to abandon the Trump Titanic before the Mueller iceberg took it down. Their message has become inchoate and unhinged, and decidedly not conservative.

The widening rift between the two camps turned into a chasm this week. On Monday, National Review Online published a column by its editor, Charles C. W. Cooke, denouncing the hyperbole and hypocrisy of Jennifer Rubin, the Washington Post’s allegedly conservative blogger. Cooke, not exactly a fan of President Trump, compared Rubin to Trump’s most “unprincipled acolytes” who demand blind loyalty to the MAGA cause: “Rubin has become precisely what she dislikes in others: a monomaniac and a bore, whose visceral dislike of her opponents has prompted her to drop the keys to her conscience into a well.”

Cooke identifies several issues on which Rubin has flip-flopped since Trump was elected, including the Paris Climate Accord, Obama’s Iran deal, the U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem, and gun control. To illustrate her reversals, Cooke cited Rubin’s own words and columns. (Cooke also linked to my recent article about Rubin.) Cooke calls her byline “tragically misleading,” noting “she is not in fact writing from a ‘conservative perspective,’ but as just one more voice among a host of Trump-obsessed zealots who add nothing to our discourse. In so doing, she does conservatism a sincere disservice.”

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

California’s Political Fires The state’s wildfires are overwhelming its anticarbon pieties.

Posted By on December 23rd, 2017

Wildfires continue to ravage California, and the bravery of firefighters trying to prevent damage to homes and property has been inspiring. But this being 2017 in America, the state’s progressive politicians are blaming the fires on humanity’s sins of carbon emission. To the contrary, the conflagrations should be a wake-up call to regulators and politicians who have emphasized acts of climate piety over fire prevention.

This year’s wildfires have consumed about 1.2 million acres in the Golden State—more than the state of Rhode Island—and caused tens of billions of dollars in damage. Some four dozen people were killed amid the blazes through Northern California in October. Large sections of coastal Ventura and Santa Barbara counties have been charred this month while a Los Angeles brushfire threatened the Getty Center and the University of California, Los Angeles.

“The fires are burning in California. They’ll be burning in France, burning all around the world,” fire-and-brimstone Governor Jerry Brown proclaimed recently in Paris. The world is “on the road to hell.”

Yet this fire season appears to be a black swan. One of the wettest winters on record followed a five-year drought and a bark-beetle forest infestation. The result has been a buildup of deadwood and dry brush. The U.S. Forest Service this month said it had found 129 million dead trees in California. Santa Ana and Diablo winds have been particularly persistent, strong and erratic this year, making the fires spread faster and harder to contain.

Loath to let a natural disaster go to political waste, the California Air Resources Board used the fires to promote a new climate-change “scoping plan” aimed at doubling the rate at which it cuts carbon emissions. The irony is that the emissions from wildfires could negate all of the state’s anticarbon policies.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Next Year in Jerusalem The U.N. reveals the depth of its anti-U.S., anti-Israel politics.

Posted By on December 23rd, 2017

When Donald Trump made good this month on his campaign promise to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, it changed almost nothing on the ground: The reality is that Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for decades.

Likewise for the United Nations’ vote Thursday to condemn the U.S. for the move. It changes nothing, because the U.N. doesn’t get to decide which capitals America recognizes and where it puts its embassies. But the resolution is a reminder of how deep anti-American and anti-Israel sentiment runs at Turtle Bay.

Only seven countries—Guatemala, Honduras, Togo, Nauru, Palau, Micronesia and the Marshall Islands—were willing to stand with Uncle Sam and Israel and vote against the resolution. Thirty-five nations abstained, including Canada and the Czech Republic, which is at least better than outright condemnation. But 128 countries voted yes, with Britain, France, Japan and Germany joining Iran, Russia, China and North Korea to condemn the U.S.

The question is what comes next. Before the measure passed, Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., delivered a speech reminiscent of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s rebuttal in 1975 when he was the American Ambassador and the U.N. passed a resolution declaring Zionism a form of racism.

“We will remember [this vote],” Ms. Haley said, “when we are called upon to once again make the world’s largest contribution to the United Nations. And we will remember it when so many countries come calling on us, as they so often do, to pay even more and to use our influence for their benefit.” President Trump said something similar at his cabinet meeting, that “we’ll save a lot” by cutting aid to countries that went against us.

These are welcome reminders to an assembly that has long been an embarrassment to its founding principles. Ms. Haley was joined in her reaction to this insult by some members of Congress. Sen. Marco Rubio (R., Fla.) also said the U.S. ought to reconsider the money the U.S. pays to keep the U.N. going.

The feeling is understandable, and we hope the Trump Administration finds ways to make clear its displeasure to the friends who abandoned the U.S. A complete pullout from the U.N. is unlikely, if only because the U.S. is a member to serve America’s interests, not the U.N.’s. Without the U.S. as a check, the United Nations would allow the Palestinians and others to write their own terms for the Middle East, and denunciations of America would be as common as denunciations of Israel. This is the reason Israel remains in the body, notwithstanding the routine insults from countries with obscene human-rights violations.

The best way for America to show the hollowness of this U.N. stunt is by proceeding with its plans to build an Embassy in Jerusalem—and demonstrate to the U.N. that America is one nation that stands by its friends.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

The Karaoke State of Palestine by Nidra Poller

Posted By on December 23rd, 2017

Palestine

The very word is so tasty. Just saying it-the State of Palestine-is enough to bring into being this imaginary state with neat little houses on tree-lined streets, municipal buildings, bus stations, a brand new airport, and the capital in “East” Jerusalem, the imaginary holy land, the Jerusalem of Palestine, a cut-and-paste of Their Jerusalem. But without Them.

The simple recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel-officially declared by Congress in 1995, confirmed by geographic and geopolitical realities, and now consummated by President Trump-unleashes a torrent of disapproval and threats. The disciples of international law chant promises of violence, stamped with the moral authority of Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran’s Rouhani.

Unilateral declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of the State of Israel? It’s blasphemy! Shameful disrespect for international law. It’s reckless! Putting the cart before the horse, tossing a match into the powder keg, and pouring oil on the fire! Is Trump out of his mind? He’s destabilizing the delicate balance of the shaky Middle East. What’s become of the table where the promised talks should be held? The peace process was almost nearly ready to resume, and now it’s doomed! And so it goes: the revisionists are busy reconstructing the past with shopworn lies, and the multilateralists have decreed the irreversible isolation of the United States, guilty as charged.

One thing is certain: all hell will break lose. In fact, the shababs, by tens and by twenties, went back to their old game, complete with keffieh-face masks, sling shots and rocks, flaming tires, stereotyped theatrics. They go round in circles, scatter in the jet stream of water cannons, cry in clouds of tear gas, do their act, and run back home.

Reality

Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Jerusalem is a reality. The two-state-solution with “East” Jerusalem as capital of Palestine is a fake proposal. But there is a real proposal facing off with the Jewish Jerusalem. It’s an Islamic Jerusalem.

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Banish the bureacrats: Driving federal workers out of DC By Betsy McCaughey

Posted By on December 23rd, 2017

Flanked by a towering 185,000 pages representing the federal regulatory code and a short pile of 20,000 pages (the code’s length a half-century ago), President Trump pledged to return us to the days of less red tape. Pointing to the colossal pile, which would take three years to even read, the president reiterated that “every unnecessary page” means “projects never get off the ground.”

Trump claims he’s already eliminated 22 rules for every new one imposed this past year. His critics dispute how many he’s actually scrapped, but no one denies he’s brought the steady stream of new rules nearly to a halt. This pause is buoying business optimism and the stock market.

What’s next? Rolling back rules on mining, manufacturing, oil exploration, banking — you name it. Even better, both the Trump administration and some Democrats in Congress want to relocate federal agencies from inside the DC Beltway to the nation’s heartland. Getting Washington out of Washington.

Imagine regulators having to rub elbows with the people being regulated.

There’s a lot of wisdom outside that DC bubble. Why should so much federal management be concentrated far from the industries and people affected?

Earlier this year, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee voted to “Divest DC” and identify agencies easiest to move. The idea has bipartisan support. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-Ohio) sees it as a way to repopulate economically depressed cities that offer cheaper office space and housing, less traffic and lower cost of living for federal workers. Think Cleveland, Buffalo, Syracuse or Detroit, to name a few.

These struggling cities have universities, airports and other amenities of urban living without the astronomical cost of Washington, DC. Bringing federal agencies to these cities could revitalize their failing economies — as office supply stores, restaurants and home-builders spring up to meet the demands of federal workers and their families.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Christmas Is Here, Everyone! EPA Officials Are ‘Leaving in Droves’Christmas Is Here, Everyone! EPA Officials Are ‘Leaving in Droves’ James Delingpole

Posted By on December 23rd, 2017

Environmental Protection Agency officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times.

More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration.

What marvellous news to ease us all into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?

Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”

Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it. It wants us to believe that this is an attack on both science and the environment.

Within the agency, science in particular is taking a hard hit. More than 27 percent of those who left this year were scientists, including 34 biologists and microbiologists; 19 chemists; 81 environmental engineers and environmental scientists; and more than a dozen toxicologists, life scientists and geologists. Employees say the exodus has left the agency depleted of decades of knowledge about protecting the nation’s air and water. Many also said they saw the departures as part of a more worrisome trend of muting government scientists, cutting research budgets and making it more difficult for academic scientists to serve on advisory boards.

Actually, though, what it really is is #winning.

ANTI-SEMITISM Comments turned off

MY SAY: A GREAT JEWISH-AMERICAN TRADITION MOVIES AND DIM-SUM

Posted By on December 22nd, 2017

This year as in decades past, I will spend Christmas holidays the way many Jews do. There will be movies, some at home on Netflix and Chinese food. The Chinese food is far removed from the choices from columns 1 and 2 which always followed a double feature at a movie on Southern Boulevard that my brother and I frequented every Christmas after we came to America.

Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan famously said at her confirmation hearings “Like all Jews I was probably at a Chinese restaurant on Christmas…..” Senator Chuck Schumer added :“If I might, no other restaurants are open.”

There is actually a documentary about the Jewish/Chinese food axis “The Search for General Tso” (http://www.thesearchforgeneraltso.com/).

Latkes, chicken soup, kreplach, and gefilte fish became compatible with chow mein-pronounced “show mein” by the Bronx epicures.

Happy holidays!

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

“Court Jihad”: How the French Justice System Assists Islamists by Yves Mamou

Posted By on December 22nd, 2017

“Yves Mamou, author and journalist, based in France, worked for two decades as a journalist for Le Monde. He is finishing a book about “Collaborators and Useful Idiots of Islamism in France,” to be published in 2018.”

In France, all the circumlocutions for the word “terrorist” appear to have the same goal: to deny that Islamist terrorism is a coordinated movement and that Islamist warriors are mainly French citizens engaged in a war against their own country.

If you deny that terrorism is a war, you also logically have to deny that terrorists are supported, sheltered, transported and financed by a grey zone of supposedly peaceful French citizens.

In France today, the result of the denial of war is the “anti-racism” movement. Anyone who dares to question Islam or Islamism in its relation to violence and terrorism risks being hauled into court and tried as a “racist.”

When members of a small French far-right nationalist group, Génération Identitaire, occupied a mosque under construction in Poitiers in 2012 and said they were celebrating the anniversary of the battle of Poitiers (732 AD), in which Charles Martel defeated the army of the Ummayad Caliphate, thereby routing the Arab invasion of France, the prosecutor of the Republic of France launched an immediate investigation for “incitement to racial hatred.” Five of the activists were arrested, indicted, and this month, sentenced to one-year suspended prison sentences. The court sentenced four of them to deprivation of their civic rights (such as the right to vote in elections) for the next five years. In addition, the Génération Identitaire organization had to pay a fine of 10,000 euros, and the four activists had to pay a fine of 24,000 euros to the organization “Muslims of France” (“Musulmans de France”), which is the owner of the mosque and the legal representative in France of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood movement. If the fine is not paid, the activists will go to jail.

The lawyer for Génération Identitaire, Frederic Pichon, said he was “flabbergasted by the severity of the sentence” and that the decision was “political”. “I cannot help comparing it with the incredible impunity that… Femen received when it burst into the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris,” he said.

Pichon was referring to a 2013 incident, in which members of the feminist group Femen had burst topless into Notre Dame Cathedral, were accused of damaging a bell, and in 2015, were acquitted by the Paris court of appeals. Two of the security officers who drove the perpetrators received fines.

The heavy sentence against far-right activists of the Génération Identitaire, however, should not have come as a surprise. The French judicial system is simply applying a policy which claims that the new enemy of the society is not Islamism, but the traditional fascism of the extreme right. This policy, elaborated by the Ministry of Justice and applied by prosecutors, is based on two assumptions. The first is that — despite the fact that since 2012 more than 250 people have been murdered in France by Islamic terrorism — there is supposedly no Islamist war against France or any other non-Muslim country. Islamists killers are presumably only “lone wolves” or “mentally ill”. The second assumption is that if there is no Islamist war against non-Muslims, all critics of Islam and Islamism are not exercising freedom of speech but expressing racism.

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With Dignity, Trump Crosses the Delaware By Michael Walsh

Posted By on December 22nd, 2017

The tax-cut bill is the beginning of the end of the Cult of Victimization. With its passage, the Republican majority in Congress, however tenuous, has scored its first (and only) major legislative victory, handing president Trump and the American people an early Christmas present. That it was passed without a single opposition-party vote in either house should tell you all you need to know about the socialist ethos that has seized control of the criminal organization masquerading as a political party known as the Democrats.https://amgreatness.com/2017/12/21/with-dignity-trump-crosses-the-delaware/

As it happens, this gift—to all Americans, not just the “rich” and “corporations,” as the socialists would have you believe—nearly coincides with Washington’s famous surprise attack on the sleeping Hessian mercenaries in 1776. While the Democrats were not caught off-guard to quite the same extent as the frozen German soldiers, they were just as thoroughly routed, as you can tell from the bitter denunciations coming from such veteran party apparatchiks as House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), along with their party mouthpieces, such as the New York Times.

Quoth Schumer: “There are only two places where America is popping champagne—the White House and the corporate board rooms, including Trump Tower.”

If not quite as sweeping and simplifying as Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981 or the reforms of 1986, the bill rectifies some of our tax code’s worst distortions, with remedies such as reducing the corporate tax rate to more internationally competitive levels and eliminating Obamacare’s individual “mandate,” which financed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (passed with zero Republican votes) at IRS gunpoint.

That these two selling points were immediately decried as “tax cuts for the wealthy” and “destroying poor people’s health care” tells you all you need to know about the poverty of the Democrats’ ideological pro forma response. But then to these people, everything is the End of the World As We Know It, including rolling back Obama’s “net neutrality,” restoring state lands in Utah, and letting you keep some more of your own money. Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut’s reaction was typical:

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Trump Links Immigration Law Enforcement To National Security America’s borders are its first and last line of defense. Michael Cutler

Posted By on December 22nd, 2017

On December 18, 2017 two important documents were published that illustrate that President Trump is determined to keep his campaign promises and protect America and Americans.

First of all, on that day the official White House website posted a document that laid out President Trump’s national security strategy to “advance America’s interests.” His national security strategy includes border security and meaningful enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws from within the interior of the United States. Here is the excerpt from that document:

PROTECT THE HOMELAND: President Trump’s fundamental responsibility is to protect the American people, the homeland, and the American way of life.

We will strengthen control of our borders and reform our immigration system to protect the homeland and restore our sovereignty.

The greatest transnational threats to the homeland are:

Jihadist terrorists, using barbaric cruelty to commit murder, repression, and slavery, and virtual networks to exploit vulnerable populations and inspire and direct plots.

Transnational criminal organizations, tearing apart our communities with drugs and violence and weakening our allies and partners by corrupting democratic institutions.

America will target threats at their source: we will confront threats before they ever reach our borders or cause harm to our people.

The second document to consider is the Government Executive Magazine report, “Trump Administration Seeks Outside Help to Hire 26,000 New Immigration Enforcement Personnel.”

According to the article, the administration is seeking to hire 10,000 more ICE personnel and 5,000 additional employees for the Border Patrol and continue to hire even more personnel over time. Clearly the administration is determined to not just talk about the need to secure our nation’s borders and enforce our immigration laws but to actually achieve these critical goals.

However, it is imperative that if the administration is able to overcome Congressional resistance to hiring enforcement personnel that ICE not distract them from the immigration law enforcement mission. Indeed there are many ways that this workforce can and must be deployed to achieve maximum results.

Obviously more agents could and should seek to locate and apprehend aliens who either entered the United States without inspection or subsequent to having been admitted into the United States, violated their terms of admission. However, there are many more missions that must be effectively addressed by ICE.