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Ethics for the D.C. Ethicists Walter Shaub’s exit is the grandstanding of a pious political operator: Kimberley Strassel

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

We interrupt this week’s Don Jr. loop to tell a tale of a real ethics scandal. It’s one perpetrated not by the Trump administration, but by the man atop Washington’s ethics-industrial complex: Walter Shaub.

If you’ve never heard of Mr. Shaub, you soon will. He is resigning as director of the Office of Government Ethics—effective next week—so that he can continue more publicly the war he’s been waging against the administration internally since last fall. Unquestioning media outlets are providing him a big podium for his accusations, so it’s worth noting some facts.

Mr. Shaub was already playing the indignant watchdog on Sunday, as he explained his resignation on ABC’s “This Week.” He complained that the White House was consistently “challenging OGE’s authority to carry out its routine and most basic functions.” Understanding those “functions” is critical to realizing the Shaub drama is so much grandstanding.

The OGE isn’t a watchdog or an inspector general’s office. As its own website makes clear, it doesn’t adjudicate complaints, investigate ethics violations, or prosecute misconduct. Rather, it was set up in 1978 to help the White House. Its job is to “advise” and to “assist” the executive branch in navigating complex ethical questions, a job undoubtedly more frustrating and messy under President Trump. Nonetheless, Mr. Shaub’s attempt to act as ethics czar, to ride herd on the Trump operation, is outside his office’s mission. It’s the act of a pious political operator who doesn’t like this president.

Only weeks after the election, as speculation swirled about how Mr. Trump would handle the ethical complexity of his business dealings while president, Mr. Shaub was already trolling, posting a series of sarcastic tweets about divestiture to the Office of Government Ethics’ official account. When Mr. Trump released his plan for his assets, Mr. Shaub blasted it at a public event with press in attendance. So much for the “help” part.

The best insight into Mr. Shaub’s methods can be seen in the long fallout from Kellyanne Conway’s bone-headed February attempt to defend Ivanka Trump by calling on Americans to buy her clothing line. Deputy White House counsel Stefan Passantino, who leads the internal ethics team, reached out within minutes to reassure Mr. Shaub the situation would be reviewed. Mr. Shaub nonetheless waited only four days before dropping a public letter essentially demanding action against Ms. Conway.

In a Feb. 28 response to Mr. Shaub, Mr. Passantino noted that some of the OGE’s ethics regulations do not apply to White House staff. He nonetheless immediately reassured Mr. Shaub that a separate regulation did hold them to some of the same standards and that he had reschooled Ms. Conway in them. CONTINUE AT SITE

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China’s Empty Nobel Chair Liu Xiaobo dies in Beijing’s custody, an example to the world.

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel laureate, died on Thursday, only weeks after he was moved to hospital from a prison cell. The Chinese government bears responsibility for failing to competently diagnose and treat his liver cancer. To Beijing’s shame, the only other Peace Prize winner to die in custody was Carl von Ossietzky, a prisoner of Nazi Germany who won in 1935 and died in 1938.

Liu played a pivotal role in the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square, helping to negotiate the peaceful departure of the last students to occupy the square. He kept the spirit of that movement alive in 2008 when he helped to write Charter 08, a democracy manifesto. Shortly thereafter he was sentenced to 11 years in prison for “subversion.”

Main Street Columnist Bill McGurn on the life and death of the Nobel Laureate, and what it portends for China’s future. Photo Credit: Getty Images.

China’s rulers have worked hard to make sure their citizens learned little about Liu’s ideas. That fear of one man’s courage testifies to the illegitimacy of their power. Liu could have played an important role in China’s transition to democracy, but his example will serve as an inspiration to future generations.

Beijing has used the fruits of economic reforms started by Deng Xiaoping in 1979 to prolong authoritarian rule far longer than most thought possible. But its obsession with social control is hampering further moves toward a free-market economy. The resulting tensions are building and increase the risk of instability.

At the Nobel prize ceremony in 2010, Liu was represented by an empty chair. His death is a reminder of the world’s obligation to keep attention on China’s rights abuses. Without political reform, China will continue to use its growing economic and military clout to spread its authoritarian model. Pressuring Beijing to free the imprisoned human-rights lawyers who have taken up Liu’s freedom fight would serve the interest of China’s people, as well as the rules-based international order that its undemocratic government seeks to subvert.

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Introducing MAGAnomics The Trump agenda for achieving 3% economic growth.By Mick Mulvaney, director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

If the Trump administration has one overarching goal, it’s to Make America Great Again. But what does this mean? It means we are promoting MAGAnomics—and that means sustained 3% economic growth.

For most of our nation’s modern history, a healthy American economy meant one that grew at roughly 3.5%. That was the average growth rate between the late 1940s and 2007. Since then, it has hardly topped 2%.

The difference between those two growth rates is staggering. If the American economy had grown at only 2% between the end of World War II and 2000, average household income would have been roughly $26,000 instead of $50,000.
Over the next 10 years, 3% growth instead of 2% will yield a nominal gross domestic product that is $16 trillion larger, federal government revenues $2.9 trillion greater, and wages and salaries of American workers $7 trillion higher.

For merely suggesting that we can get back to that level, the administration has been criticized as unrealistic. That’s fine with us. We heard the same pessimism 40 years ago, when the country was mired in “stagflation” and “malaise.” But Ronald Reagan dared to challenge that thinking and steered us to a boom that many people thought unachievable. In the 7½ years following the end of the recession in 1982, real GDP grew at an annual rate of 4.4%. That is what a recovery looks like, and what the American economy is still capable of achieving.

The focus of MAGAnomics is simple: Grow the economy and with it the wealth of, and opportunity for, all Americans. It does that by focusing on fundamental principles that made the U.S. economy the greatest engine of prosperity in the history of the planet:

• Tax reform. We need to boost productivity. Fundamental to that is encouraging capital investment. We’ve seen for decades that growth in private-sector jobs correlates to growth in private business investment. When businesses invest in new plants and equipment, they tend to hire more people, who produce more. Lower tax rates and faster cost recovery are two levers that will reduce the cost of capital and thereby help ignite economic growth. And since 70% of business income goes to wages, the benefits flow to workers as well.

• Curbing unnecessary regulation. Much like commonsense tax reform, rolling back unnecessarily burdensome regulations will reduce the cost of doing business. When regulations increase costs, they decrease returns, leaving less capital to invest. If they are too burdensome, they discourage any investment at all, as businesses choose to forgo opportunities. This is important to all business, but especially to capital-intensive sectors like manufacturing. Overly zealous environmental regulations have played a role in pushing many U.S. businesses overseas. Requiring realistic and fact-based cost-benefit analyses of regulations will help protect both the environment and American jobs.

• Welfare reform. Growth also depends on the size of the workforce. Although the labor pool is aging, we are also seeing people who could be working but are staying home. We badly need them to go back to work. We believe that most want to do this but simply lack the opportunity. Our welfare system often creates disincentives for people to seek work. We intend to change that. We need to reform welfare to ensure it helps those truly in need of it, but does not encourage people to stay home.

• Smart energy strategy. The president’s “all of the above” energy strategy expands the economy’s growth potential. Yes, it puts coal miners back to work. But cheaper, cleaner, more abundant energy will also increase investment and employment across dozens of industries, from chemicals to automobiles. By ensuring reliable supplies and stable prices, the president’s energy plan will reduce uncertainty, especially in the manufacturing sector, thereby reducing the risks associated with building new plants and hiring more American workers.

• Rebuilding America’s infrastructure. The president’s plan to rebuild America’s infrastructure will create immediate job opportunities. More important, it will boost the long-term productivity of American industry. Rebuilding roads, bridges, airports and ports will pay dividends both now and in the future.

• Fair trade for America. The president is right in that the U.S. is frequently abused when it comes to international trade. Ensuring that other nations do not undermine our economy by unduly taxing our products, by dumping products here, or by stealing our intellectual property is essential to our economic future.

• Government spending restraint. When government spends a lot, it takes money away from private investment. And private investment is always a more efficient allocator of capital than government. We will continue to fund critical government functions, including a social safety net that gives people the comfort of knowing they will not be overlooked while encouraging them to be more willing to take chances. But we will watch every dollar to minimize waste. We will, in short, seek to take from you only what government actually needs to function.

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The Donald Trump Jr. emails definitely show collusion. But collusion in what?By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Andrew C. McCarthy is a former federal prosecutor and a contributing editor at National Review.

“Collusion” is a hopelessly vague term. Alas, the word has driven the coverage and the debate about possible coordination between the Trump campaign and Vladi­mir Putin’s regime. But it is a term nigh useless to investigators, who must think in terms of conspiracy. Collusion can involve any kind of concerted activity, innocent or otherwise. Conspiracy is an agreement to commit a concrete violation of law.

Thus has the collusion question always been two questions: First, was there any? Second, if so, collusion in what?

The first question, to my mind, is no longer open to credible dispute. There plainly was collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. This is firmly established by emails exchanged in June 2016 between Donald Trump Jr. and an intermediary acting on behalf of Russian real estate magnate Aras Agalarov. A Putin crony, Agalarov is also a business partner of President Trump.

The emails report that Agalarov had met with Russia’s chief government prosecutor and that the latter offered to provide “official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary [Clinton] and her dealings with Russia.” The intermediary, Rob Goldstone (a publicist for Agalarov’s pop-star son, Emin), told Trump Jr. that the information “would be very useful to your father” and — more significant — that it was “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.”

In a subsequent email, Goldstone told Trump Jr. that Emin Agalarov wanted Trump Jr. to meet with a “Russian government attorney” who would be flying in from Moscow. Trump Jr. agreed to the meeting and elaborated that it would include then-campaign manager Paul Manafort as well as Jared Kushner, Trump Jr.’s brother-in-law.

The meeting took place at Trump Tower. The Russian attorney, whom Goldstone accompanied, was Natalia Veselnitskaya. She is a former regime prosecutor who now represents Putin cronies and lobbies the U.S. government to repeal the Magnitsky Act, a human rights provision enacted to punish Russia for torturing and killing a whistleblower. The act’s undoing is known to be a Putin priority.

Consequently, we now have solid documentary evidence that the Trump campaign, fully aware that Putin’s regime wanted to help Trump and damage Clinton, expressed enthusiasm and granted a meeting to a lawyer sensibly understood to be an emissary of the regime. Top Trump campaign officials attended the meeting with the expectation that they would receive information that could be exploited against Clinton.

That is collusion — concerted activity toward a common purpose. We can argue about whether the collusion amounted to anything, in this intriguing instance or over time. That is under investigation, and deservedly so. To my mind, though, it is no longer credible to claim there is no evidence of a collusive relationship. It is there in black and white.

Now we are on to the real question: Collusion in what? There are two aspects to this question: legal and political.

As a matter of law, mere collusion is not a crime. As noted above, it must rise to a purposeful agreement to carry out a substantive violation of law. It is not a crime to collude with a foreign government, even a hostile one, if the point is to accept information in the nature of opposition research. The suggestion that it might violate campaign law to accept information — as a “thing of value” — would raise significant constitutional questions while trivializing the conduct, which is egregious because of the nature of the relationship, not the money value of the information. To rise to the level of conspiracy, there would need to be proof, for example, that (a) violations of U.S. law were orchestrated by the Russian regime, and ( b) Trump campaign officials knew about them and were complicit in their commission.
At the moment, there is no such evidence. We will have to see what the investigation yields.

That, however, is not the end of the matter. The framers included impeachment in the Constitution in order to address violations not just of law but also of the public trust — transgressions in the nature of abuse of power or that otherwise demonstrate unfitness for office. Among the most profound concerns of our Constitution’s authors was the specter of a president who aligned with a foreign power covertly and against U.S. interests.

Of course, a political remedy is subject to political considerations. On the matter of unsavory relations with Russia (and other regimes, for that matter), we have gotten in the habit of tolerating much that ought not be tolerated, from politicians of both parties. Trump’s relationship with Putin’s regime should not be examined in a vacuum. But that said, it must be examined.

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Poisoning the Minds of America’s Schoolchildren Teaching kids to hate their country’s traditions and institutions.

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

For the past 30 years, a Philadelphia-based organization called Need in Deed (NID) has been training elementary and middle-school teachers “to use the classroom to prepare young people for civic responsibility and service to others.” And how, exactly, does NID do this? By training its teachers to engage students in long-term “service projects” whose objective is to: (a) inculcate youngsters with the notion that America is an oppressive wasteland where nonwhite minorities, women, homosexuals, the poor, and even the natural environment are routinely exploited and abused; and (b) turn children into budding political activists and community organizers who seek to fundamentally transform that deeply flawed society.

For example, in one NID project at Grover Washington Jr. Middle School in Philadelphia, eighth-grade students explored “some of the discriminatory housing forces – practices like redlining, steering, predatory lending and ethnic intimidation – that have influenced the[ir] city’s racial and economic segregation” over the years. As part of their instruction, these students watched an ABC Nightline segment titled “Race in America,” which examined the case of a black family that had fearfully fled their new home in a mostly white section of Philadelphia after neighbors harassed them with racial epithets and threatening letters. After watching the video, the students were asked to express, in writing, their outrage over how the black family had been mistreated.

As part of that same NID project, Princeton sociologist Doug Massey, author of American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of an Underclass – a book claiming that black urban poverty is largely a result of massive discrimination in U.S. cities – addressed the students personally. In a subsequent lesson, the youngsters watched a documentary titled Race: The Power of an Illusion, which, in the words of its producer, “reveals how our social institutions ‘make’ race by disproportionately channeling resources, power, status and wealth to white people.”

Another NID project – designed to introduce young people to purportedly heroic women who have battled the forces of “racism, homophobia, [and] sexism” – required the pupils to read the Kate Schatz book Rad American Women A-Z. The women who are profiled and lionized in Schatz’s book are almost all leftists, and in some cases Marxists or political revolutionaries. Among them:

Angela Davis, a lifelong America-hating Communist, and a former member of the murderous Black Panther Party;
Rachel Carson, a staunch anti-capitalist and the founder of the modern radical environmental movement;
Sonia Sotomayor, a Supreme Court Justice whose worldview is thoroughly steeped in identity politics;
Wangari Maathai, a pro-socialist environmental activist who once charged that “some sadistic [white] scientists” created the AIDS virus “to punish blacks” and, ultimately, “to wipe out the black race”;
Qiu Jin, a Chinese feminist and revolutionary who believed that the traditional family structure was oppressive to women;
Dolores Huerta, a longtime socialist, labor leader, and advocate of mass immigration; and
Ella Baker, an influential civil-rights leader and avowed socialist who had ties to the Communist Party USA, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee, and the Weather Underground.

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The Argument For Privatization Can prosperity and “equality” coexist? Herbert London and Alexander G. Markovsky

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

This is in response of criticism to our article “Economy of Mass Prosperity,” published by the Washington Times in June, which advocates privatization of the nation’s infrastructure.

It is almost a cliché to suggest America is a divided nation. There is a split among many blacks and whites; rich and poor. But the fundamental difference is between those who have learned from history, convinced that socialism is too extreme for the American psyche, and the other that clandestinely believes that socialism, in fact, has already arrived and is making sure that America can no longer live without it.

he socialists declared three primary points:

a. Capitalism is not capable of mass prosperity.

b. Privatizing infrastructure will make every road/bridge/rail crossing in America a never-ending toll booth.

c. Privatization will further contribute to economic inequality.

The argument that capitalism is not capable of mass prosperity is so ludicrous that even the arch-foe of capitalism, Karl Marx, disagreed. And Marx did not just disagree, he wrote in The Communist Manifesto:

“The bourgeoisie [capitalists] has been the first to show what man’s activity can bring about. It has accomplished wonders far surpassing Egyptian pyramids, Roman aqueducts, or Gothic cathedrals. The bourgeoisie draws all nations into civilization. It has created enormous cities and thus rescued a considerable part of the population from the idiocy of rural life. The bourgeoisie, during its rule of scarcely one hundred years, has created more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.”

Since those words were written 150 years ago, free-market capitalism proved to be an endeavor with no end. It has undergone the Second Industrial Revolution and is in the process of a third, the Digital Revolution, which, with the introduction of advanced technologies, computers and the Internet, continues opening up entirely new vistas creating wealth and prosperity for all.

The concern that privatization will make every road/bridge/rail crossing in America a never-ending toll booth ignores the reality. The never-ending toll booth is already here. The infrastructure owners, the state and local governments, have been treating infrastructure as a revenue stream. Being a monopoly, they are in a position to manipulate supply and demand to justify the imperative of constantly raising taxes (property, gasoline and other general local taxes), user fees and tolls, ostensibly for building and maintaining highways while neglecting the assets’ maintenance and repair. The nation’s decaying infrastructure is a direct consequence of the product being sold regardless of quality and costs.

Anyone traveling the New Jersey-Manhattan corridor has experienced the effects of the state monopoly, spending endless hours in traffic and paying exorbitant tolls every few miles.

And there is no greater symbol of government monopolistic power than the Washington Bridge, built in the 1930s with taxpayer money. Its owner, the New York and New Jersey Port Authority, charges $15 for each trip, collecting $1.5 billion annually. In any other circumstance, with this revenue it would be easy to warrant constructing another bridge to relieve transportation congestion.

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Trump FBI Pick Poised For Confirmation Christopher Wray impresses even Democratic senators. Joseph Klein

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

Christopher Wray, President Trump’s nominee to replace James Comey as FBI director, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. He performed so well that key Democratic members of the committee such as Senator Dianne Feinstein said they were impressed and were inclined to vote for his confirmation. Senator Al Franken, a chronic skeptic of anything coming from the Trump administration, said to the nominee, “I think you had a good hearing today, and I wish you luck.”

Christopher Wray is eminently qualified for the position of FBI director, based both on his experience as well as his temperament. He served previously as a deputy attorney general in charge of the criminal division during President George W. Bush’s administration. Prior to that, his public service included a stint as assistant U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, prosecuting individuals who committed a variety of crimes including bank robbery, gun trafficking, kidnapping and arson. Right after graduating from Yale Law School, he clerked for United States Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, who described Mr. Wray as “balanced, thoughtful, deliberative” and “unflappable.”

Mr. Wray has a reputation for a calm demeanor. He avoids the limelight whenever possible. “Chris is a very gentle soul,” says Monique Roth, who served as his senior counsel at the Justice Department. “He’s not one of those grandstanders or ego-driven people. He’s very self-effacing and thoughtful.”

Indeed, Mr. Wray could be considered in one respect the antidote to Comey, who craved the spotlight. However, like Comey, he demonstrated his independence from political pressure while serving in the Bush Department of Justice. He joined Comey and Robert Mueller, who was then the FBI director and currently the special counsel overseeing the Russian investigation, in preparing to resign over a controversy involving a proposed domestic surveillance program.

Mr. Wray was asked repeatedly during his confirmation hearing whether, as FBI director, he would remain independent of the White House and partisan pressures. He assured the senators on several occasions that his loyalty would be only to the Constitution and the rule of law. He said that he was never asked to pledge his loyalty to the president and that he would not do so in any case. Mr. Wray said he would resign if asked by the president to do something he considered to be “illegal, unconstitutional or even morally repugnant” and could not talk the president out of taking that course of action.

“Nobody should mistake my low key demeanor for lack of resolve,” Mr. Wray declared. “Anybody who thinks that I would be pulling punches as the FBI director sure doesn’t know me very well.”

Mr. Wray offered his understanding of the FBI’s role, which is to do fact finding and accumulate evidence on which to base a recommendation whether to prosecute or not. Prosecutors, not the FBI, are responsible for the decision whether to prosecute. When asked whether former FBI Director Comey had acted responsibly in holding the press conference in which he held forth on his views of the Hillary Clinton e-mail imbroglio, Mr. Wray indicated what he would not do as FBI director. He said he would not hold a press conference disclosing derogatory investigatory information regarding an uncharged individual.

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The Next Right-Wing Populist Will Rise to Prominence by Attacking American Higher Education The academy is primed to be a punching bag for the GOP’s 2020 standard-bearer, just as the media were in 2016. By Elliot Kaufman

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

I want to make a prediction: The next successful Republican politician will rally the Right by making America’s universities his punching bag — and said universities will prove even more vulnerable to that politician’s attacks than the media were to Donald Trump’s.

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that Republican opinion of the nation’s higher-education system has deteriorated remarkably in a very short time. In 2015, 58 percent of Republicans thought that colleges and universities had a positive effect on the country; an only slightly larger share of Democrats, 65 percent, agreed. Just two years later, the numbers are dramatically different: Only 36 percent of Republicans view colleges positively, compared to 72 percent of Democrats. A whopping 58 percent of Republicans think that colleges and universities have a negative effect on the country.

Now imagine what could happen to that number if a Republican presidential nominee tweeted every day and gave speeches around the country attacking our colleges. Imagine how many more Republicans would come to view the nation’s academic enclaves negatively if their party’s standard-bearer complained daily about the indoctrination of our children, the ceaseless rise in tuition costs that bleeds regular folks dry, the decline in pedagogical rigor, the political bias, the lies. Imagine what would happen if such a politician branded universities as the “enemy of the American people.”

Post-Trump, the Republican party will likely be disunited. Voters and politicians will wonder what the party stands for anymore. Is it pro– or anti–military intervention? Pro– or anti–free markets? Culturally conservative or vulgar? The GOP will need a message around which to coalesce. More precisely, it will need an enemy. Republican voters may disagree on policy and principle, but they can agree on whom they don’t like:

Radical professors, race-obsessed provocateurs, gender-studies grifters, anti-Israel fanatics, weak-kneed administrators, disgusting libertines, angry feminists, and illiberal student protesters.

Conservatives can get on board with this critique. They have long railed against the liberal bias of colleges and their effect on America’s young. They might get uncomfortable when the critique gets extreme, of course, but the extreme version of the message is not meant for them. It will hammer the same themes as before but excite populists with different terms. “Radical professors” will become “anti-American” or “Communist.” “Racial provocateurs” will become “anti-white racists.”

In short, everyone will hear what he or she needs to, and respond accordingly. The alt-right will cheer. Conservative intellectuals will write treatises on the pernicious influence of radical intellectuals and call for a new type of American university. Policy wonks will cite studies demonstrating the decline in intellectual diversity on American campuses, drawing up plans to lower tuition or expand technical education while noting responsibly that universities are not for everyone. Each story about silly student protesters and each intimation of a speech code will spark a thousand “hot takes,” a Fox News interview, and comment from public officials. Populists will decry the “end of free speech.”

These blows will land for three reasons: 1) They’re partially true; 2) universities and the Left are in denial about their truth; and 3) Republican voters have been primed to believe them.

The American college system is incredibly screwed up. Only its most servile apologists will deny that. For one, it’s a bubble. Tuition prices never stop rising, far outpacing inflation, even as the services rendered seem to have deteriorated. Exorbitant tuition imposes immense strain on parents, who often must reshape their lives around paying college bills, and on students, many of whom struggle under the burden of student debt for years after graduation.

Moreover, to what does all that tuition really entitle a student, anyway? The elimination of core curricula in the ’80s and ’90s has destroyed the foundation of American liberal-arts education. The “studies” majors have themselves drawn students in without being able to offer a promise of real erudition or substantial job prospects. Many disciplines have shifted dramatically toward the study of race, gender, and class.

The bias is undeniable: Left-wing professors and students predominate, while conservative thought is often ignored, sometimes marginalized, and occasionally forbidden by oppressive speech codes or threatening mobs. Political correctness and identity politics rule many campus student groups. And college life reliably promises socialization into progressive ideas and sexual mores, as well as a confrontation with the most relaxed attitudes toward drinking and drugs.

Nor do universities themselves recognize the validity and potency of their critics’ charges. In covering the Pew survey, InsideHigherEd laid blame for the shift in Republican attitudes at the feet of “perceived liberal orthodoxy and political correctness in higher education.” This is typical of how these discussions go. There are only “perceived” problems. The evidence of how fields have drastically changed and how the professoriate has drifted radically leftward since the 1990s is ignored.

Does this sort of denialism sound familiar? If so, it is likely because the media made the same arguments for years when they were accused of liberal bias. Conservatives were always either “making it up” or they weren’t, but bias was just unavoidable. “Reality has a well-known liberal bias,” joked Stephen Colbert. “On the liberal bias of facts,” read the headline on one Paul Krugman column in the New York Times.

By refusing to own up to their own bias and weaknesses, the media didn’t make their critics disappear; they only angered and empowered them, making themselves more vulnerable to attack. Trump took advantage of that vulnerability by proving he could strike at the media harder than anyone else ever had. A lifelong Democrat and buffoon, he proved his bona fides to Republican voters by waging war on mainstream journalists.

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West Can Neither Live with nor Take Out North Korean Nukes It’s time for the U.S. and its allies to prepare for a tough, messy confrontation. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

North Korea recently test-launched a long-range missile capable of reaching Alaska.

When North Korea eventually builds a missile capable of reaching the U.S. mainland, it will double down on its well-known shakedown of feigning indifference to American deterrence while promising to take out Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Seattle unless massive aid is delivered to Pyongyang.

Kim Jong-un rightly assumes that wealthy Western nations would prefer to pay bribe money than suffer the loss of a city — and that they have plenty of cash for such concessions. He is right that the medicine of taking out Kim’s missiles is considered by Western strategists to be even worse than the disease of living with a lunatic regime that has nukes.

No wonder that the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations had few answers to North Korea’s serial lying and deceit about its nuclear intentions.

Sanctions were eventually dropped or watered down, either on reports of the mass starvation of innocent North Korean civilians or on false promises of better North Korean behavior.

China publicly promised to help rein in its unhinged client while privately doing nothing. Apparently, Beijing found a rabid North Korean government useful in bothering rivals such as the Japanese and South Koreans while keeping the U.S. off balance in Asia and the Pacific. The dynamic economies and pacifism of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were taken for granted by China as easy targets for coercion and blackmail.

Russia is never any help. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russian foreign policy is reductive: Whatever causes the United States and its allies a major headache is by definition welcomed.

There seems to be zero chance of a North Korean coup or a Chinese intervention to remove Kim. The brainwashed North Korean population is cut off from global news and knows nothing other than three generations of Kim family dictators. The military junta that surrounds Kim is likely as aggressive as its leader. These functionaries see his survival as the only guarantee of their own privilege and influence.

A preemptory strike might not get all of North Korea’s nuclear missiles and could prompt a conventional response that would wreck nearby Seoul — a scenario about which North Korea openly brags.

Pyongyang believes that only the Israelis are wild enough to preempt and bomb neighboring nuclear facilities, as they did in 1981 against Iraq and again in 2007 against Syria. And yet Israel attacked only because neither Iraq nor Syria had created deterrence by possession of a single deliverable nuclear weapon.

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The global warming fraud explained in one simple chart By Thomas Lifson

Posted By on July 13th, 2017

The global warming fraud is based entirely on the practice of “adjusting” data. Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick graph was “adjusted” to “hide the decline,” most notably. But every prediction of catastrophe, every “hottest year ever” story, depends on adjusting the actual data of surface temperatures.

A recent scientific study of global average surface temperature reports and the CO2 endangerment finding has produced a remarkable graph that says it all, very clearly.

James Delingpole of Breitbart spotted it and explains:

The peer-reviewed study by two scientists and a veteran statistician looked at the global average temperature datasets (GAST) which are used by climate alarmists to argue that recent years have been “the hottest evah” and that the warming of the last 120 years has been dramatic and unprecedented.

What they found is that these readings are “totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data.”

That is, the adjusted data used by alarmist organizations like NASA, NOAA, and the UK Met Office differs so markedly from the original raw data that it cannot be trusted.

This chart gives you a good idea of the direction of the adjustments.

The blue bars show where the raw temperature data has been adjusted downwards to make it cooler; the red bars show where the raw temperature data has been adjusted upwards to make it warmer.

Note how most of the downward adjustments take place in the early twentieth century and most of the upward take place in the late twentieth century.

It’s awfully incriminating.