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Donald Trump and the art of the bipartisan deal Why 2019 will be a year of consolidation Roger Kimball

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://spectator.us/trump-government-shutdown-bipartisan/

Sometime back in the Pleistocene Era — that is to say, round about 2015 — a frequent criticism of Donald Trump was that he wasn’t ‘really’ a conservative. He was an ‘opportunist,’ you see, someone who blithely changed his position on exigent issues — abortion, government run health care, etc. — and even his political party to suit the prevailing winds of the zeitgeist.

There is something to that charge, but the more interesting question is whether it counts as a criticism or a commendation.

The poet William Blake was not exactly a political sage. But his observation that an honest man may change his opinions but not his principles is relevant here.

It was not until he became President, I believe, that Donald Trump began speaking about ‘principled realism.’

Whenever the President has laid out that idea, the punditocracy has been quick to criticize him. Following his UN speech this autumn, for example, Quartz dismissed the idea as an ‘oxymoron’ that was ‘baffling’ the foreign policy establishment.

Baffling it may be to the residents of Turtle Bay, Foggy Bottom, and their stable of K-Street plotters and scribes. But in fact, the President was admirably lucid in explaining what he meant by ‘principled realism.’ At the center of the idea is the resolute determination that ‘we will not be held hostage to old dogmas, discredited ideologies, and so-called experts who have been proven wrong over the years, time and time again.’ I’ve laid out what I think that means in the column linked above and in commentary on the President’s articulation of his national security policy a year ago.

The lodestar is pragmatism energized by tactical nimbleness. We want prosperity, national security, and the rule of law. What are the most likely routes to those goals?

It does not take a political genius to understand that weaponizing entities like the EPA, the IRS, and the whole lumbering apparatus of the administrative state is unlikely to attain those goals.

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A Federal Judge Finally Exposes The Lies At The Heart Of Obamacare Obamacare was sold to the American people under false pretenses and upheld by a dishonest Supreme Court ruling. Now it’s coming apart, and it’s about time.By John Daniel Davidson

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

http://thefederalist.com/2018/12/17/federal-judge-finally-exposes-lies-heart-obamacare/

A federal judge in Texas has brought long-overdue clarity to our interminable debate over health care reform. On Friday, District Judge Reed O’Connor struck down Obamacare in its entirety, arguing that the individual mandate—the part of the law that forces American to buy insurance or pay a penalty—is unconstitutional. Because O’Connor ruled that the mandate can’t be separated from the rest of the health care law, he invalidated the whole thing.

It’s about time. No serious person has ever doubted that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, because no possible reading of the Commerce Clause could support such an outlandish scheme. As the late Justice Antonin Scalia noted during oral arguments before the Supreme Court in 2012, if the government can force you to buy health insurance under the Commerce Clause, it can also force you to buy broccoli, or a car, or pretty much anything. Allowing the individual mandate under the Commerce Clause powers would give Congress unlimited authority to regulate almost every aspect of our lives.

In his majority opinion for that case, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts declared rather straightforwardly that, “The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance.” But then Roberts did something not straightforward at all. He construed the penalty—the Orwellian-sounding “shared responsibility payment”—as merely a tax, and therefore permissible under the federal government’s taxing power. By this rather crude rhetorical legerdemain, Obamacare survived.

Of course, the individual mandate penalty was never a tax, and everyone knows it. When Congress passed last year’s tax bill, it set the penalty to zero, beginning next year. That one move exposed the cynical heart of Obamacare for what it is. If there is no penalty, and no revenue being brought in for the federal government, then the penalty isn’t a tax. And because the individual mandate violates Congress’ authority under the Commerce Clause, the mandate must be struck down, along with the rest of the law.
Obamacare Failed Because Young People Didn’t Want To Pay For It

All of this underscores the blunt reality that Obamacare was always at heart a bad-faith proposition. The basic operation of the law, never stated or acknowledged by its authors, was to force younger, healthier people to subsidize health insurance for older, sicker people. It was a redistribution scheme, plain and simple.

Perhaps that’s a sound policy, maybe even a morally upright one. But that was never what Obamacare defenders claimed the law to be. They said it was a “market-based” reform, that it would foster competition and lower prices, that you could keep your plan and your doctor, that the average family would save $2,500 a year.

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The Globalist Mindset: They Hate You By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/16/the-globalist-mindset-

Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?

The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?

The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?

The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.

In a word, the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward state-managed social justice if you will—to end up as a sort of global Menlo Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the fated, but sometimes stalled, process along.

Like Aristocrats of Old
Voters in consensual societies are often assumed too ignorant of the world beyond their borders, too encumbered with traditional racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and nationalist prejudices, and too ill-informed to know what is good for them. No wonder that sometimes hoi polloi must either vote repeatedly until they get it right, or follow executive and judicial fiats issued from their betters on high. In the globalist mindset, Brexit passed not because it was felt to be good by a majority or even advantageous for the United Kingdom, but because racists, xenophobes, nativists, protectionists, and chauvinists deluded the clueless public into thinking a pre-EU, and more racist and sexist Britain was somehow superior.

A postelection depressed Hillary Clinton had to travel all the way to Mumbai, India to find a more enlightened audience that would appreciate her insight that the ogre Trump had beat her because:

If you look at the map of the United States, there is all that red in the middle, places where Trump won. What that map doesn’t show you is that I won the places that own two-thirds of America’s Gross Domestic Product. I won the places that are optimistic, diverse, dynamic, moving forward. And his whole campaign, Make America Great Again, was looking backwards. You don’t like black people getting rights, you don’t like women getting jobs, you don’t want to see that Indian American succeeding more than you are, whatever that problem is, I am going to solve it.

The globalist elite is certainly transnational and is sickened by localism, traditionalism, and autonomy. Monsieur Macron shares much more in common with Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, or Justin Trudeau than he does with rural Frenchmen. It is almost as if in 2019 our elites are emulating the interlocking aristocratic families of late 19th-century Europe, but instead of being common descendants of Queen Victoria they are the godchildren of Menlo Park, Brussels, Strasburg, Davos, and Wall Street.

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Fix the First Step Act and Keep Violent Criminals behind Bars By Tom Cotton

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/first-step-act-amendments-keep-violent-offenders-behind-bars/

Republicans can and should pass some common-sense amendments.

This week, the Senate will vote on the latest version of the First Step Act, a criminal-justice bill that would release thousands of dangerous criminals from federal prison earlier than under current law. This effort is misguided and dangerous, as I have written before. Thankfully, there is still time to limit the damage.

Along with Senator John Kennedy, I have introduced an amendment to categorically exclude violent felons and sex offenders from the bill’s time-credit program, which can be used for early release. We also have amendments to notify victims before a prisoner is released early, and to monitor whether prisoners who are released early commit more crimes. If advocates of First Step want to protect public safety, they will support all three amendments.

Advocates of this bill already have taken a first step to improve the bill, thanks to criticism from major law-enforcement groups, victims of crime, and conservatives such as myself. After calling my concerns “100 percent fake news” and trying to force their bill through the lame-duck Congress without vetting, these advocates have finally acknowledged some of the problems I have identified and taken steps to fix them. For example, the “warden loophole” has been tightened (though not entirely closed), several crimes have been added to the ineligible-prisoners list, and fentanyl traffickers are no longer eligible to earn time credits (though unfortunately, these traffickers would still benefit from reduced sentences on the front end). The bill’s “safety valve” provision was curtailed, so that judges will have less discretion to allow traffickers with serious criminal records to avoid mandatory minimum sentences required by law.

These modest changes have satisfied some of my conservative colleagues, who have signed on in support of the bill. Even this publication has offered a tentative, lukewarm endorsement. Both have said the bill should pass if it excludes violent offenders from early release.

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How Identity Politics Imperils the Liberal Tradition by David Furse-Roberts

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2018/12/how-identity-politics-imperils-the-liberal-tradition/

As a vehicle to satisfy the human thirst for recognition and belonging, identity politics has proven an empty vessel. While promising to elevate the status of various minorities it has eroded human dignity, and while claiming to offer solidarity it has sown division and discord.

In the midst of the 1949 election campaign, Robert Menzies told a Melbourne audience, “We denounce all attempts to create hostilities against any migrant or group of migrants, whether Jew or Gentile, on the grounds of race or religion.” The aspiring prime minister went on to declare, “Once received into our community, a new citizen is entitled to be treated in every way as a fellow Australian”, and that “the strength and history of our race have been founded upon this vital principle”.

To be sure, Menzies in 1949 accepted “White Australia” as a pillar of the “Australian Settlement” and desired “as many immigrants as we can get of British stock”. Nonetheless, the Liberal Party founder attempted to strike a new tone that marked a clean break from the bitter religious and racial sectionalism of Australia’s past. Committed above all to reviving the tradition of Australian liberalism, Menzies envisioned an Australia where citizens would be judged less by their background than by their moral character and contribution to society. As the historian and Liberal Party elder David Kemp observed, Menzies created a party and subsequently led a government that would go beyond the collectives of class, race and gender to promote greater opportunities for all Australians.

The liberal philosophy Menzies embodied stands out as not only a repudiation of the old class warfare and sectionalism but also as a rebuke to the contemporary fad of “identity politics”, the phenomenon of “group identities” defining and driving political discourse in Australia and much of the Western world.

Subject to a variety of constructions and meanings, “identity politics” embodies two main related ideas. First, that individuals are defined primarily by their “identity”, the three main classifications being race, class and gender; and second, that politics, history and sociology can be primarily understood through the role played by those identities and the conflict those identities generate. As a 2017 report by the Institute of Public Affairs noted, “the underlying philosophical premise of identity politics is that individuals are distinguished by their differences, rather than by their similarities”.

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Turkey’s Fake Outrage over the Murder of Khashoggi by Uzay Bulut

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13415/turkey-outrage-khashoggi

There are at least 170 journalists and media workers currently in Turkish jails and prisons, according to the Platform for Independent Journalism.

Hrant Dink, as editor-in-chief of the bilingual Turkish-Armenian newspaper, Agos, wrote about the Armenian Genocide. For this he was prosecuted under Article 301 of the Turkish Penal Code, which makes it illegal to insult Turkey or Turkish government institutions or to “denigrate Turkishness.” Dink was shot dead outside his newspaper’s office in Istanbul on January 19, 2007. Eleven years after the murder, the trial is still in progress.

The Turkish government still has not officially recognized, apologized for, or made reparations on behalf any of these and other such crimes at any time in its history; impunity for past injustices continues to lead to present injustices.

It is high time for members of the Western media to stop relying on Turkish officials as sources of reliable information in their reports on Khashoggi, and start highlighting Turkey’s ongoing deadly persecution of its own journalists.

Since the October 2 murder of Saudi Muslim Brotherhood political activist and Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been condemning the perpetrators of the “ferocious murder,” vowing that his government would “uncover what has happened” and portraying himself as a champion of human rights.

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Palestinians: Shooting a Pregnant Woman and Lying by Bassam Tawil

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/13431/palestinians-shooting-pregnant-woman

According to the logic of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Ministry of Information, Israeli soldiers searching for terrorists is an “act of terrorism,” but not the shooting of a pregnant woman and six other Israeli civilians standing at a bus stop.
The message that Abbas is sending to the world is: How dare these Israelis take security measures to stop terrorist attacks against their soldiers and civilians!
Finally, we might mention an important detail about which Abbas and his representatives are keeping their mouths shut tight: the Israeli crackdown on Hamas in the West Bank actually serves the interests of the Palestinian Authority. Without this ongoing crackdown, Hamas would have long ago overthrown Abbas’s regime and seized control of the West Bank.

Three Israelis have been killed in the latest wave of Palestinian terrorism in the West Bank in the past week. The victims are two soldiers and a four-day-old baby who was prematurely born after his mother was shot and wounded in a drive-by shooting attack carried out by Palestinian terrorists.

The terrorist attacks took place near the West Bank city of Ramallah, the de facto capital of the Palestinian Authority (PA), where President Mahmoud Abbas and most of his senior officials live and work. The car used in the drive-by shooting, which took place outside Ofra settlement, was later discovered by the Israeli army in the Ain Musbah neighbourhood of Ramallah, a few hundred meters from the private residence and headquarters of Abbas.

No one is suggesting that Abbas knew in advance of the terrorist attacks. However, the response of Abbas and his top officials to the attacks raises serious doubts about their purported commitment to peace with Israel.

Hours before the Ofra attack, Abbas said in a speech before leaders of his Fatah faction that he remains committed to “peaceful popular resistance” and diplomacy. “We don’t believe in weapons, and we don’t believe in rockets,” Abbas said in a reference to the rockets launched by Hamas and other terrorist groups from the Gaza Strip toward Israel.

The same Abbas who says he is opposed to the use of weapons and rockets has nonetheless failed to condemn the terrorist attacks in which these three Israelis were killed. Instead, his officials and he have been condemning Israel on a daily basis for cracking down on the terrorists.

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Gilets Jaunes: Lost in the Funhouse by Nidra Poller ****

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://isgap.org/flashpoint/gilets-jaunes-lost-in-the-funhouse/

8-11 PM December 11 Strasbourg: Terrorist attack at the Christmas market. The shooter, wounded and on the run, has been identified as 29–year-old Cherif C. a multi-recidivist criminal who has been flagged as a security risk since 2016. The current tally is two dead, a third victim brain-dead, thirteen wounded, six of them critically.

Since November 17, I have been gathering available information on the Gilets Jaunes (GJs), or “Yellow Vest Movement”, observing, analyzing, and testing my insights against accepted opinion. With rare exceptions, the GJs have been received with exceptional indulgence. The violence they spawn is both condoned and denied…attributed to the GJs and lifted from them by hair-splitting distinctions, as if, in a raging crowd of thousands, one could separate the real GJs from the opportunistic thugs, all dressed in yellow vests, all surging in the same direction. Murderous hatred and unprecedented destruction are dismissed with a Gallic shrug as an epiphenomenon that can’t discredit the voice of the people crying for justice.

What about jihad (the so-called terrorist attacks) on these same streets and boulevards such a short time ago and one after the other? Some commentators and officials did mention the danger of creating opportunities for terrorist attacks in the midst of a Gilet Jaune “demonstration.” But, I told myself, these GJ actions are in themselves terrorism, and these common ordinary Frenchmen are behaving as if they were inspired by Islamic mobs in Kabul, Peshawar, or… Gaza.

How blind, deaf, and dumb to create chaos in an already beleaguered democracy. And now the inevitable has happened. A jihad attack between one Yellow Saturday and the next. The baseless speculation that President Macron would declare a state of emergency to put an end to those pointless actions is becoming a reasonable option.

I still feel as though I have to apologize for my harsh judgment of giletjaunisme. But I will trust my intuition.

Lost in the funhouse

How can the Gilets Jaunes “movement” be evaluated on the basis of a bowdlerized version of their grievances, propositions, and actions, packaged in comparisons with the French Revolution and mai 68 to make a palatable story adapted to a variety of tastes? That narrative cannot encompass the scope, the concrete realities, and the glaring contradictions of an incendiary outburst of negative energy in the heart of a European democracy.

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GEERT WILDERS:A freedom fighter’s call for vigilance and courage.

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of remarks given by Geert Wilders at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2018 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 15th-18th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272252/geert-wilders-restoration-weekend-frontpagemagcom

Robert Spencer: It is my great honor and great pleasure to introduce to all of you tonight the great visionary who is going to be the one who turn things around for Europe and brought about its salvation as a continent upon which free people could still live, and the one man who has stood firm all these years against absolutely extraordinary and crushing pressure to give in, the great, the heroic, Geert Wilders.

Geert Wilders: Thank you. Robert, thank you so much for the most kind words. So, hello America, how are you tonight? It’s an honor for me to be at Restoration Weekend again, and it’s a pleasure to be amongst friends. I see so many here, great people with strong convictions and love for freedom, people who supported me for so many years, like the great David Horowitz himself. Thank you David.

But also Dr. Bob Shillman, Nina Rosenwald, Daniel Pipes, all people that I will have to say thank you so much for all you did, but also please allow me to say a word of respect to a colleague of mine in your own U.S. Congress, a hero, somebody that I respect a lot and was re-elected at the mid‑terms, the congressman from Texas, Louis Gohmert, Louis rise.

Thank you. And of course, I’m not involved in your own domestic politics, but for me one of the best news was, not only that our friend Louis Gohmert, but also that our friend Steve King from Iowa was elected. Congratulations both. And of course, it’s always a pleasure for me to be in the United States, the land of the free and the home of the brave. America is a country that is not afraid to let its own national interests prevail as it should; to do what is best for its own people–the American people–where most of the leaders in my part of the world, Western Europe, cannot even spell the word national, let alone the combination national interest, your country is led by one of the strongest and bravest leaders of the free world, and I honor him from that, Donald J. Trump.

Europe desperately needs more strong leaders like Mr. Trump for we are fighting for our existence, and I’m not exaggerating. Our freedom, our way of life, our culture, our identity, our national security, are at stake and heavily under attack, and the reason for that indeed still is mass immigration and Islamization combined with the total failure, and even betrayal by weak European politicians who are unwilling to fight back.

They, those weak leaders, do not protect us but they facilitate our destruction and when political leaders become pieces of evil, the people must speak, and so we have to do that. And that is why we do speak out and fight back. But, that comes with a price. If you dare to fight back, if you dare to speak the truth about Islam, the authorities and the Islamists will do anything to silence you. You will be taken to court. I have myself been taken to court or threatened to be taken to court in my own country, the Netherlands, in Austria, in Pakistan, in Jordan, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, in Saudi Arabia.

The biggest Muslim country in the world Indonesia declared me persona non grata for life.

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Operation Northern Shield Deprives Hezbollah of Major Strategic Asset Israel’s anti-tunneling initiative wreaks havoc on Hezbollah’s subterranean infrastructure. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on December 17th, 2018

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/272237/operation-northern-shield-deprives-hezbollah-major-ari-lieberman

On November 14, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu left many scratching their heads in bewilderment when he unexpectedly agreed to a ceasefire with the Gazan-based terror group, Hamas. In a two-day spate of cross-border violence, sparked by an intelligence operation in Gaza, the terrorist group fired an unprecedented 460 rockets and mortars into Israel, the highest ever for the terror group in such a brief period.

Of course, the fact that no Israelis were killed during the bombardment (a Palestinian living in Israel was killed) made Netanyahu’s announcement more palatable to the Israeli public but there was another more pressing matter that was dogging the prime minister. At an event hosted in honor of Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, He made a cryptic reference to other “considerations that must be hidden from the enemy,” which “the public can’t always be privy to.”

Two weeks later, on November 29, Israel struck multiple enemy positions near Damascus and southern Syria. The target bank included pro-Iran militias as well as weapons bound for Hezbollah. It was the first reported Israeli strike in Syria since the September 18 downing of a Russian IL-20 “Coot” surveillance aircraft by inept Syrian anti-aircraft crews.

At the time, some speculated that Netanyahu was referring to this operation since it carried with it the potential of conflict with the Russians. Within days however, it became clear that Netanyahu was referencing a more sinister development on the Israel-Lebanon border. On December 4, Netanyahu announced that Israel had undertaken Operation Northern Shield, an undertaking aimed at uncovering and destroying Hezbollah tunnels penetrating Israel from Lebanon.