RUTHFULLY YOURS

As policymakers in Washington consider infrastructure legislation, regulatory reform that encourages sustained investment and innovation to help rebuild critical public networks should be the first item on the agenda. Targeted infrastructure deregulation like that which has enabled the country’s freight-rail system to thrive should be the model for future policy.

The shameful state of America’s infrastructure is well-documented. Earlier this year, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) gave the nation’s infrastructure a D+ grade overall. But ASCE did identify one bright spot: Our 40,000-mile freight-rail network, which earned a “B,” the highest of 16 graded categories. This is where federal policymakers can learn the lessons of smart reforms that encourage the sustained investment necessary to create safe and modern infrastructure.

America’s freight-rail system is one of the world’s best examples of privately owned and privately funded infrastructure, but this was not always the case. During the 1970s, our freight-rail industry struggled under the weight of onerous regulations that limited the ability of railroads to effectively manage their own operations. At the time, 21 percent of the freight-rail system was operated by bankrupt rail companies.

In 1980, a law known as the Staggers Act jumpstarted the industry by removing much of the red tape that had been stifling it. Most crucially, it relaxed rate regulations, which allowed railroads to better compete with other transportation modes.

“The history of the U.S. railroad industry during the 30 years since the Staggers Act was signed is a story of enormous success,” say researchers at the Cato Institute. “Productivity growth in the U.S. railroad sector has far outpaced the gains in the U.S. private domestic sector. The factors underlying this performance include pricing flexibility, economies of density achieved through line abandonments, industry consolidation, and the growth of long-haul coal and intermodal traffic.”

More importantly, it helped unlock the ability of railroads to invest in their infrastructure, which led to the creation of one of the world’s safest and most efficient transportation networks. Since 1980, railroads have privately spent more than $630 billion to maintain and modernize infrastructure while investing in safety innovations that have made freight rail the safest way to move goods across the country. In fact, 2016 was the safest year on record for the rail industry.

Still reeling from a series of embarrassing disclosures and meltdowns that have blackened her image, Linda Sarsour, the self-promoting anti-Semitic provocateur has found herself once again embroiled in controversy. Sarsour, who has proven to be adept and promoting herself on social media, bit off more than she could chew when she provoked the ire of CNN’s Jake Tapper.

Sarsour had expressed support for Assata Shakur, a fugitive cop killer who murdered a New Jersey state trooper in 1973. Shakur was convicted of first degree murder in 1977 but managed to escape from prison less than two years later and resurfaced in communist Cuba. She is currently on the FBI’s Most Wanted Terrorists list. Sarsour has a long, sordid history of expressing support for murderers including Rasmea Odeh, the PFLP terrorist who murdered two Israeli university students, and is slated to be deported from the United States for committing immigration fraud.

Tapper called out Sarsour on her “ugly sentiments” and asked, somewhat rhetorically, if there were “any progressives out there condemning this?” Sarsour, sensitive to the fact that a prominent journalist from the mainstream dared to criticize her, lashed out with a series of bizarre tweets. She ridiculously accused Tapper of “join[ing] the ranks of the alt-right” in an effort to “target” her. Sarsour has a habit of spewing such paranoid absurdities. Last week she claimed to be the victim of an orchestrated “Zionist media” conspiracy after irregularities were discovered in an online crowd-funding campaign she started.

Sarsour then challenged Tapper to cite examples of her ugly sentiments. Tapper proceeded to cut the rabble-rouser down to size in short order by noting Sarsour’s public wish to remove Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s vagina. Ayaan is a victim of the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation, a widespread, sadistic and life-altering ritual still practiced by many Muslims, even in the United States. Sarsour’s frantic effort to delete the infamous vagina removal tweet in an attempt to hide her odious past proved unsuccessful, and continues to hound her as she tries to rebrand her image and infiltrate into the Democratic Party.

Sarsour’s supporters in the twitterverse proved equally unsuccessful in silencing Tapper. Black Lives Matter co-founder Alicia Garza called Tapper’s tweets “intentionally inflammatory.” Tapper responded with a biting riposte; “How about being part of a gang that kills a NJ State Trooper? Is that considered inflammatory?” Score 2 for Tapper, zero for the fascist left.

With a few notable exceptions, most of the criticism leveled against Sarsour and her rabid antisemitism has emanated from the center-right. The center-left has been shamefully silent in condemning Sarsour’s abhorrent views, while the hard-left has embraced her fully.

Tapper’s criticism of Sarsour stands in marked contrast to cowardly and pernicious elements on the left who pretend to be progressives but in fact, encourage and support fascism. A good example of this is provided by liberal activist Sally Kohn who tweeted, “#IStandWithLinda today & always…I know @lsarsour to be a defender of justice FOR ALL!” She then absurdly tweeted “both sides have a problem with hateful crazies. The difference is the left denounces theirs. The right elects theirs president.”

The glaring irony strains credulity. Sarsour is on record advocating violence against Israelis and voicing support for terrorists and cop killers. She is a supporter of the anti-Semitic BDS movement, asserted that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” alleged that supporters of Israel cannot be feminists, and has expressed a desire to remove the vaginas of women with whom she disagrees. She is a supporter of Sharia law of the brand practiced in Saudi Arabia, a country infamous for oppressing women, and which recently arrested a woman who had the temerity to wear “indecent clothing” to wit, a miniskirt. And yet Kohn and others leftists of similar ilk, while claiming to reject extremism within their ranks, still admire and stand with Sarsour.

Antisemitism is a feature ensconced within the hard-left. The hard-left’s embrace of Sarsour is hardly surprising and is in fact, to be expected. The center-left, which seeks to broaden the party’s appeal to more radical elements, is too craven to challenge Sarsour’s outrageous comments and her support for cop killers, convicted terrorists and assorted anti-Semites. But Tapper’s pointed criticism of Sarsour represents a notable crack in the façade. Whether it leads to further action by the center-left to repudiate known anti-Semites like Sarsour, and tackle rampant antisemitism within its ranks is still too early to say. I’m not holding my breath.

What difference does it make?

Bad ideas work their way back to worse premises. The ‘worse premise’ of the bad idea of NeverTrump was that it didn’t really matter if Hillary won. It was an echo of Hillary’s infamous Benghazi testimony.

What difference does it make anyway if the woman behind the Arab Spring were running our foreign policy and if the Clinton Foundation’s gallery of rogue donors were running everything else?

It sure as hell didn’t make a difference to NeverTrumpers who were too busy grading Trump on table manners and finding implausible reasons to believe that President Hillary Clinton wouldn’t be so bad. NeverNeverTrumpland became its own echo chamber with no one to call out its crazy delusions.

Trump won, Hillary lost and NeverTrumpers clings to its “What difference does it make” premise.

At the New York Post, John Podhoretz insists that, “Hillary’s White House would be no different from Trump’s.”

Bad idea meet worse premise.

“The astonishing answer, if you really think it through, is: not all that different when it comes to policy,” he claims.

Only in NeverNeverTrumpland could anyone come up with an “astonishing answer” like that.

It’s an astonishingly astonishing answer since Hillary’s platform called for ending deportations of illegal aliens and allowing them access to ObamaCare. That’s slightly different from building a wall, a 33% increase in illegal alien arrests and a 67% decline in illegal immigration under President Trump.

But a lot of NeverTrumpers seem closer to Hillary’s position there anyway.

Hillary’s platform also called for expanding ObamaCare, killing coal and fracking, automatic voter registration at 18, undermining the Second Amendment, a job-killing minimum wage hike and free college. That’s a long way from repealing ObamaCare, a coal and fracking boom, the restoration of law and order, fixing college abuses and conducting voter fraud investigations.

But what difference does it make in NeverNeverTrumpland where policy doesn’t matter anyway?

On foreign policy, the President of the United States has an even freer hand. And the free hand would have belonged to the woman who handed entire countries over to the Muslim Brotherhood, Al Qaeda and ISIS.

Podhoretz claims that a Republican congress would have blocked Hillary from getting anything done. The Obama years suggest that putting our faith in the obstructive powers of a GOP Congress ought to come with a free limited edition of the Brooklyn Bridge. And Hillary had made a point of asserting that many of her policy proposals would bypass Congress.

“Trump has gotten very little done. The same would have been true if Hillary had won,” he writes.

Hillary Clinton had promised to bypass Congress on gun control, energy restrictions and immigration. Both Trump and Clinton pledged to roll out a big batch of executive orders. Hers would have been very different than his.

If Congress won’t act, became a theme of hers during the campaign. Would she have done it?

On Thursday, the Trump administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) will release its semi-annual “Unified Agenda,” a master plan for all significant federal regulation which agencies intend to issue in the coming months. According to one conservative leader, this agenda will provide a blueprint for how the administration will cut down on all kinds of regulation — not just official rules, but also “regulatory dark matter.”

“If you go outside and look at the stars tonight, you’re not seeing much of the universe. The bulk of it is dark matter,” explained Clyde Wayne Crews, vice president for policy at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI), on a call with reporters. Similarly, while Congress passes a few laws and administrative agencies issue a few official regulations, “there are thousands and thousands of other notices,” bulletins, letters, and so on, issued by agencies every year.

This “regulatory dark matter” is hard to track, because it isn’t even collected or examined. Rather, an agency will set forth specific dictates and companies, organizations, or individuals will follow them, without the intermediate step of an official law or regulation.

The best example of this came last May, when the Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) sent a letter to North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory insisting that House Bill 2, the state’s law restricting public, multiple-stall restrooms on the basis of biological sex, violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by institutionalizing sex discrimination.

In one sweeping move, the DOJ had redefined the Civil Rights Act of 1964, extending its protection against discrimination on the basis of sex to transgender people, something foreign to the law itself and with which the law’s authors clearly would have disagreed.

This letter was not an official law passed by Congress and signed by the president. Nor was it an official regulation, submitted in the Federal Register. No, it was an administrative fiat which threatened hefty penalties — the revocation of North Carolina’s $4.5 billion in federal funding for the 2016-2017 school year.

But this infamous transgender mandate — reversed by a Trump administration directive this past February — is just the tip of the iceberg, Crews said.

“It’s long been the case that there are more regulations than laws, and if we’re missing regulations, we’re missing government’s biggest effect on the economy,” the CEI vice president argued. He expanded the astral metaphor adding, “Lately, Washington has gone supernova.” CONTINUE AT SITE