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It’s Still a Mad, Mad California Coastal elites set rules for others, exempt themselves, and tolerate rampant lawlessness from illegal aliens. By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

One reason for the emergence of outsider Donald Trump is the old outrage that elites seldom experience the consequences of their own ideologically driven agendas.

Hypocrisy, when coupled with sanctimoniousness, grates people like few other human transgressions: Barack Obama opposing charter schools for the inner city as he puts his own children in Washington’s toniest prep schools, or Bay Area greens suing to stop contracted irrigation water from Sierra reservoirs, even as they count on the Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy project to deliver crystal-clear mountain water to their San Francisco taps.

The American progressive elite relies on its influence, education, money, and cultural privilege to exempt itself from the bad schools, unassimilated immigrant communities, dangerous neighborhoods, crime waves, and general impoverishment that are so often the logical consequences of its own policies — consequences for others, that is. Abstract idealism on behalf of the distant is a powerful psychological narcotic that allows caring progressives to dull the guilt they feel about their own privilege and riches.

Nowhere is this paradox truer than in California, a dysfunctional natural paradise in which a group of coastal and governing magnificoes virtue-signal from the world’s most exclusive and beautiful enclaves. The state is currently experiencing another perfect storm of increased crime, decreased incarceration, still ongoing illegal immigration, and record poverty. All that is energized by a strapped middle class that is still fleeing the overregulated and overtaxed state, while the arriving poor take their places in hopes of generous entitlements, jobs servicing the elite, and government employment.

Pebble Beach or La Jolla is as far from Madera or Mendota as Mars is from Earth. The elite coastal strip appreciates California’s bifurcated two-class reality, at least in the way that the lords of the Middle Ages treasured their era’s fossilized divisions. Manoralism ensured that peasants remained obedient, dependent, and useful serfs; meanwhile, the masters praised their supposedly enlightened feudal system even as they sought exemptions for their sins from the medieval Church. And without a middle class, the masters had no fear that uncouth others would want their own scaled-down versions of castles and moats.

Go to a U-Haul trailer franchise in the state. The rental-trailer-return rates of going into California are a fraction of those going out. Surely never in civilization’s history have so many been so willing to leave a natural paradise.

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Empty Heads of State In this time of crisis, some European leaders are braver than others. Bruce Bawer

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

It’s been hard to keep track of all the acts of jihadist terror that have struck Western Europe in 2016, let alone the sundry smaller-scale atrocities – from gang rapes of children to stabbings of defenseless old women – that have been committed by Muslim men and boys. And then, of course, there’s the rise in dhimmitude that has accompanied all these developments – the public events scaled back or canceled, the churches that have removed crosses, and the other efforts on every imaginable front to appease the Prophet’s followers by gradually erasing Europe’s cultural traditions. From Bradford to Brussels, from Malmö to Marseilles, fear and anger have soared; in the face of a pusillanimous political establishment, more and more voters in a range of countries have been looking elsewhere for true leadership.

As 2016 ended, then, Western Europe’s current leaders had a lot to answer for. And because most of their countries have a tradition of broadcasting a brief year’s-end address by the head of state or government – which a remarkable number of Western Europeans are in the habit of watching – those leaders also had a golden opportunity to speak directly to their people about the events of the past year and about hopes and concerns for the year to come. So what did they have to say for themselves?

Speaking on New Year’s Eve, Angela Merkel got right down to business, stating at the outset that at present Germany’s #1 challenge is “undoubtedly Islamic terrorism.” Of all the leaders whose year-end speeches I read or watched, I’m pretty sure she was the only one who actually used the words “Islamic terrorism.” Full points for that. Alas, Angela was quick to proclaim that the way to oppose the terrorists’ hate was by turning the other cheek – and keeping the borders open. Echoing Hillary Clinton, she affirmed: “We’re stronger together.” François Hollande followed much the same formula, lamenting the year’s “terrible attacks” in Nice and elsewhere but saying that while the terrorists “wanted to divide” France, the French people had refused to engage in “stigmatization” and shown that they were (guess what?) “stronger together.” Hollande closed with a warning: if Marine Le Pen’s National Front wins this year’s election, France will “no longer be French.” Hey, look around you, M. Hollande: thanks to you and your crowd, France is becoming less and less French every day.

Then there were the European royals, whose speeches were likely written (or at least vetted) by their respective governments but who do have some personal leeway in deciding what to say. These are people whose job it is to serve as living symbols of their respective nations and of those nations’ histories, cultures, and values. And what did they have to say in this time of deepening anxiety?

Most admirable, perhaps, was Queen Elizabeth, who, speaking on Christmas Day, actually mentioned Jesus Christ and described herself unashamedly as a follower of Christ “because Christ’s example helps me see the value of doing small things with great love.” Of course the Queen is famously tight-lipped – and, in any case, no Prime Minister would ever let her openly express apprehension about the Religion of Peace – but she managed to communicate something important, I think, simply by referencing her personal religious belief and reminding viewers of her role as Head of the Church.

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Gov. Cuomo Commutes Sentence of Radical Leftist Terrorist Judith Clark Cuomo forgives her role in a triple murder — for which she has never shown genuine remorse. Joseph Klein see note please

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

from 2012 http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2012/01/15/the-sad-story-of-judith-clark-ron-radosh-oh-puleez-see-note/

THE SAD STORY OF JUDITH CLARK: RON RADOSH…..OH PULEEZ!….SEE NOTE | RUTHFULLY YOURS

THIS “DAMNEDSEL” IN DISTRESS IS NO ONE TO CAPTURE MY COMPASSION. SHE GOT GOOD TRAINING FROM THE PLO IN LEBANON….

READ:http://www.iwp.edu/news_publications/detail/impediments-to-effective-counterintelligence-and-counterterrorism

“The clearest example of this is the Brink’s robbery on October 20, 1981, in which three people were murdered. Remnants of 1970s terrorist groups, the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Republic of New Africa, banded together as the May 19th Communist Organization and attempted to rob a Brink’s truck in order to finance an expansion of their activities. In early 1979, more than two years before the murders, this terrorist group issued a document called Principles of Unity of the May 19th Communist Organization. The document pledged support to terrorists in the United States, South Africa, and Puerto Rico, as well as to terrorists in the Middle East.This was not enough to alert the FBI. Nor was the fact that Judy Clark, a member of the group, had attended an international conference organized by the PLO in Lebanon in September 1981, shortly before the abortive terrorist “expropriation.” Five hundred supporters of the PLO and other international terrorist groups were in attendance. Clark remained in Lebanon with the PLO for a time after the conference.”

New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has decided to commute the sentence of a domestic terrorist, Judith Alice Clark, who willingly participated in a bloody robbery that led to the deaths of a security guard and two police officers. Clark, who pleaded not guilty, but was convicted of felony murder, had been sentenced to such a long prison term that she had no real hope for parole during her lifetime – until now. Cuomo’s decision to commute Clark’s sentence will not immediately result in her release, but the steep reduction in her sentence will make her eligible for parole early this year. The loved ones of the three men killed during the robbery and getaway in which Clark took an active part will have to continue to experience their hellish losses for as long as they live. Unless all the family members of the slain are ready to forgive what the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” and “freedom fighter” did, and they do not object to Clark’s release on parole, she should continue to experience her own hell in jail for as long as she lives.

On October 20, 1981, Clark joined members of the violent radical group known as the Weather Underground, who robbed a Brink’s armored truck in Nanuet, New York. Clark, who did not pull the trigger herself, was the driver of one of the getaway cars. Her partners in crime killed a Brinks guard, Peter Paige, in the course of the robbery. They also killed the two police officers, Waverly Brown and Edward O’Grady, who had attempted to stop the getaway vehicles on the highway. Clark was captured after she crashed one of the getaway vehicles. Just before her arrest, according to the 2008 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit denying Clark’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus, “police saw Clark reach for a nine-millimeter pistol on the floor of the car.”

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The PLO’s zero-sum game The time has come for the Israeli government to make some bold moves. Caroline Glick

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

Since its inception in the late 1970s, the Israeli peace movement has been based on one thing: hope.

Members of the peace movement hoped the PLO’s war with Israel could be resolved through compromise. Proponents of peace with the PLO hoped that Yasser Arafat and his terrorist minions weren’t truly committed to Israel’s destruction.
The two-state formula was based on the hope that Israel could reach an accommodation with the PLO. To wit, in exchange for parts of Judea and Samaria and Gaza (no one was talking about Jerusalem), Israeli peaceniks, who over time came to encompass all factions of the Left in Israel, hoped the PLO would bury the hatchet, build a state, or federate with Jordan, and that would be that.

In 1992, the peace camp took over the government. Under the leadership of then prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and then foreign minister Shimon Peres, hope became the basis for Israel’s national security strategy. That strategy was followed by every Israeli government since. The basic idea was clear enough. In exchange for land and guns and legitimacy, Arafat and his goons would be domesticated.

The peace camp’s hope was never based on evidence. Indeed, it flew in the face of the PLO’s track record. By the time the Israeli peaceniks began negotiating with Arafat and his deputies in the late 1980s, the PLO had already controlled two autonomous areas. In both Jordan and Lebanon, Arafat and his terrorists transformed peaceful areas into bases for global terrorism and launching points for massacres of Israelis and of victims from Africa to Europe to the Americas.

The secret of the PLO’s success was that it didn’t simply kill people. It combined murder with political warfare. The PLO’s political war had two goals. First, it aimed to make killing Jews politically acceptable a mere generation after the Holocaust.

Second, the PLO devoted great resources to wooing the Israeli and Western Left. It sought to convince a sufficient core of leftists that the PLO wasn’t really committed to its goal of eradicating Israel. It actually was a peace movement in terrorist disguise.

Arafat and his deputies whispered in the ears of their gullible Israeli “partners” that they weren’t an implacable foe. They were partners for peace just waiting to be convinced that they could make a deal.

The success of both political warfare strategies has been on prominent display of late. On December 23, the ambassadors of state members of the UN Security Council broke out in spontaneous applause after they unanimously passed Resolution 2334, which declares Israel an outlaw state populated by criminals and bereft of all rights to its capital and its historic heartland.

A week later, the PLO’s largest terrorist faction Fatah celebrated its founding day. The largest celebration this year reportedly took place in Bethlehem.

Fatah was actually founded in 1958. But Arafat chose December 31, 1964 as its founding day because that was the day his terrorists carried out their first terrorist attack against Israel.

In Bethlehem Saturday, thousands of Palestinian youths – starting at the age of four or five – marked the day with a march through town.

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UN Human Rights Council Welcomes Saudi Arabia to Its Ranks By Michael van der Galien

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

You’ll never believe which states joined the United Nations Human Rights Council. Or, well, if you know anything about the UN, perhaps you will believe it:

That reads like a who’s who of human rights abusers. Nowadays, however, these regimes — which routinely oppress women, and jail, torture, and even kill critics — are somehow deemed to be the protectors of our universal human rights. I’d laugh if it wasn’t so incredibly sad.

But wait, the UNHCR says, don’t criticize Saudi Arabia! According to Sharia they have “fair gender equality”!

Satire, right? Nope, the UNHCR is dead serious.

BOOKS Comments turned off

Is Islamic Cash Keeping Daniel Silva’s Books Out of Hollywood? By David Solway

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

Daniel Silva is among the finest and most compelling writers in the suspense/intrigue/espionage/thriller genre in modern fiction, which has its share of brilliant or engaging practitioners—Ian Fleming (of course), John LeCarré, David Baldacci, Jo Nesbo, James Rollins, Kathy Reichs, Steve Berry, Donna Leon, Tom Clancy, Jonathan Kellerman, Mons Kallentoft, Louise Penny, P.D. James, Michael Gruber, John Burdett, Trevor Ferguson (aka John Farrow) and, yes, Dan Brown, to name a few of the most prominent. Silva is a charter member of this elect fraternity, one of the genre’s best-selling authors, whose area of expertise is the Middle East, the Palestinian terror machine, Iran’s nuclear ambitions, the Russian involvement in the region, the ambitions of Islamic jihad around the globe, and, of course, the efforts of Israel’s intelligence agency, the Mossad, to counter these manifold threats.

Indeed, Silva’s knowledge of the Middle East imbroglio is second to none and his plots are invariably timely, impinging on the cultural, political, and military realities of the present day. His most recent offering, The Black Widow, may well be his most topical and profoundly analytical work. All the salient elements of the international arena, real and imagined, are there: ISIS and the caliphate; drone warfare; the dissolving border between Iraq and Syria; the disintegration of Lebanon; the collusion of Turkey; a succession of catastrophic attacks in Paris, Amsterdam, and Washington, the latter on the scale of 9/11; a feckless and narcissistic American president plainly inadequate to the burden of high office; the dysfunctional character of American and European national security; and the comparative effectiveness of the Mossad. The book and the world intersect at every point.

It is interesting to note that Silva’s novels are tailor-made for the Hollywood film industry, yet not one has appeared in the theaters. It is not difficult to see why. As in real life, his terrorists are Muslims, members of a socially protected species. When it comes to the entertainment industry, a toxic amalgam of abject pusillanimity and leftist sympathies, along with dark infusions of Arab cash, has had its predictable effect on filmic integrity and patriotic sentiment. One recalls that the movie version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears transforms the novel’s villains, a sect of actual Palestinian terrorists known as the PFLP, into a collection of Austrian fascists—safe, acceptable bad guys. Given their inseparable interweavings with geopolitical reality, Silva’s plots are thankfully immune to such deceptive meddling. Timorous and morally compromised, Hollywood will not violate the shibboleths of the day or offend its twin masters: progressivist culture and Islamic money. As usual, the iron grip of political correctness is, well, iron.

The same wariness is true of our literary critics who are often careful to hedge their bets. Robert Fulford, for example, a belvedere eminence for the National Post, penned a laudatory review of The Black Widow, but could not help pressing the right virtue-signaling buttons. Silva’s fascinating hero, Israeli operative and future head of the Mossad Gabriel Allon, may be “the James Bond of Israel.” Nevertheless, though sympathetic with Allon’s fight “for his country’s future existence,” Fulford considers it necessary to comment in passing that we “see everything from the standpoint of the Israelis,” as if we didn’t see everything from the standpoint of the British in the Bond novels, or from the perspective of the Americans in Berry’s works, or of the Thai in Burdett’s Sonchai Jitpleecheep series, and so on. He plainly would not have felt obliged to qualify his approval had there been any other national polity in play.

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Jarrett: The 8 years Obama was president were ‘scandal free’ By Rick Moran

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

A major figure in the “most transparent administration in history” just told the biggiest lie of the last decade.

Valerie Jarrett said in an interview on CNN that President Obama “hasn’t had a scandal and he hasn’t done something to embarrass himself” during his 8 years in the White House.

New York Post:

The aide, also a close friend of Obama and his wife, Michelle, credited the first couple with being good people and getting good results.

“That’s because that’s who he is — that’s who they are — and I think that’s what really resonates with the American people,” Jarrett said.

Critics of the Obama administration said Jarrett was trying to rewrite history.

“This is delusional,” said Tom Fitton, president of the government watchdog group Judicial Watch, which has filed numerous lawsuits to illuminate many of the Obama administration’s shortcomings.

“The Obama administration has a scandal rap sheet longer than my arm. Between just the IRS abuses, Benghazi, and the Hillary Clinton scandals, this administration was even more corrupt than Nixon’s,” Fitton concluded.

A partial list of some of the more notable scandals should serve to make a liar out of Jarrett:

Operation Fast and Furious. …
Benghazi. …
The IRS targeted conservative organizations. …
The DOJ seized Associated Press phone records as well as phone and email records from Fox News reporter James Rosen. …
The NSA conducted mass surveillance against American citizens without a warrant.
Ransom paid to Iran for our navy hostages
Clinton’s email scandal
The EPA’s poisoning of several rivers in Colorado as a result of a toxic waste accident
The scandal involving out of control partying by Secret Service agents

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Violence in the Halls, Disorder in the Malls The holiday hooliganism traces back to the Obama administration’s destructive efforts to undermine school discipline. Heather Mac Donald

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

Judging by video evidence, the participants in the violent mall brawls over the Christmas weekend were overwhelmingly black teens, though white teens were also involved. The media have assiduously ignored this fact, of course, as they have for previous violent flash mob episodes. That disproportion has significance for the next administration’s school-discipline policies, however. If Donald Trump wants to make schools safe again, he must rescind the Obama administration’s diktats regarding classroom discipline, which are based on a fantasy version of reality that is having serious real-world consequences.

The Obama Justice and Education Departments have strong-armed schools across the country to all but eliminate the suspension and expulsion of insubordinate students. The reason? Because black students are disciplined at higher rates than whites. According to Washington bureaucrats, such disproportionate suspensions can mean only one thing: teachers and administrators are racist. The Obama administration rejects the proposition that black students are more likely to assault teachers or fight with other students in class. The so-called “school to prison” pipeline is a function of bias, not of behavior, they say.

This week’s mall violence, which injured several police and security officers, is just the latest piece of evidence for how counterfactual that credo is. A routine complaint in police-community meetings in minority areas is that large groups of teens are fighting on corners. Residents of the South Bronx’s 41st Precinct complained repeatedly to the precinct commander in a June 2015 meeting about such street disorder. “There’s too much fighting,” one woman said. “There was more than 100 kids the other day; they beat on a girl about 14 years old.” In April 2016, a 17-year-old girl in Coney Island, Brooklyn, Ta’Jae Warner, tried to protect her brother from a group of girls gathered outside her apartment building who were threatening to kill him; one of the group knocked her unconscious. She died four days later. At a meeting in the 23rd Precinct in East Harlem in 2015, residents asked why the police hadn’t stopped a recent stampede of youth down Third Avenue. In April 2012, a group of teens stomped a gang rival to death in a Bronx housing project.

The idea that such street behavior does not have a classroom counterpart is ludicrous. Black males between the ages of 14 and 17 commit homicide at ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males of the same age. The lack of socialization that produces such a vast disparity in murder rates, as well as less lethal street violence, inevitably will show up in classroom behavior. Teens who react to a perceived insult on social media by trying to shoot the offender are not likely to restrain themselves in the classroom if they feel “disrespected” by a teacher or fellow students. Interviews with teachers confirm the proposition that children from communities with high rates of family breakdown bring vast amounts of disruptive anger to school, especially girls. It is no surprise that several of the Christmas riots began with fights between girls. School officials in urban areas across the country set up security corridors manned by police officers at school dismissal times to avoid gang shootings. And yet, the Obama administration would have us believe that in the classroom, black students are no more likely to disrupt order than white students. Equally preposterous is the claim that teachers and administrators are bigots. There is no more liberal a profession than teaching; education schools are one long indoctrination in white-privilege theory. And yet when these social-justice warriors get in the classroom, according to the Obama civil rights lawyers, they start wielding invidious double standards in discipline.

ISRAEL, WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Israel Lawmakers Plan Bill to Annex West Bank Settlement Members of governing coalition say they will put forward the measure after Donald Trump takes office By Rory Jones

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

TEL AVIV—Members of Israel’s governing coalition said they would propose legislation after Donald Trump’s inauguration to annex a West Bank Jewish settlement for the first time, defying the United Nations and the international community.

If approved, such a law would mark a stark departure from decades of Israeli policy tolerating and even promoting settlements but not considering them part of the country proper.

Naftali Bennett, leader of the pro-settlement Jewish Home party, said Monday that after the new U.S. president takes office on Jan. 20, he would put to an initial vote in parliament a bill to make the settlement Ma’ale Adumim part of Israel. Mr. Trump has indicated he will ease U.S. pressure on Israel to curtail settlements when he is in the White House.

“The conclusion is to stop the march of folly toward a Palestinian state and to implement Israeli law in Ma’ale Adumim,” Mr. Bennett said in a statement issued from the settlement. Jewish settlers in the West Bank are subject to military law, but if the territory they occupy is annexed they come under civilian Israeli law.

Mr. Bennett has advocated for Israel to abandon its longstanding commitment to establishing a Palestinian state as part of a future peace deal—a position that in part spurred the U.S. decision last month to allow the U.N. to pass a rare censure of Israel that deemed settlements illegal.

His plan to push for annexation of a settlement appeared to be in response to that U.N. resolution and a subsequent speech by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry that also criticized Israel over settlements.

Jewish Home holds enough seats in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s fragile ruling coalition to force a collapse of the government if it wants to. In recent months, Mr. Netanyahu has acquiesced to many of the party’s demands to expand or maintain settlements on land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.

To become law, the bill would need the support of the vast majority of governing coalition members, who account for 67 out of 120 seats in the Knesset. It already has the support of some of the 30 lawmakers from Mr. Netanyahu’s Likud party and all of Jewish Home’s eight seats.

Members of the Likud party and Mr. Bennett’s Jewish Home initially drafted a bill last year to annex Ma’ale Adumim—one of the largest Jewish settlements in the West Bank with 37,000 residents, and located just 5 miles east of Jerusalem—but ultimately decided not to push it while the Obama administration was still in office.

Lawmakers from all but one of the parties in Mr. Netanyahu’s coalition signed off on support for the bill last year. Those from the ultraorthodox United Torah Judaism party, which has six seats, haven’t formally offered their support.

It would have to pass a number of votes in the parliament before becoming law, a process likely to take months.

“Right now, the prime minister asked us not to do anything active in the short term as he is going to consider the move with the President-elect Trump and will work to get support,” said Yoav Kish, a member of the Likud party who led the drafting of the bill. “From my side, I’m going to push it forward once we pass President Obama.” CONTINUE AT SITE

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Shooting Down North Korea’s Missiles Kim wants the ability to make U.S. cities his nuclear hostages. See note please

Posted By on January 3rd, 2017

Little Kim scion of an evil dynasty is the product and legacy of an unfinished war…..Instead of total surrender and reunification Eisenhower ended the war in 1953 . Please read:

The Legacy of an Unfinished War by Ruth King 2008 http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/exclusive-the-legacy-of-an-unfinished-war
Kim Jong Un announced Sunday that North Korea is about to test an intercontinental ballistic missile that can reach the U.S. mainland. If he proceeds with the test, the U.S. should shoot it down.

The test itself is not a shock. Four previous tests of the Taepodong-2 missile were disguised as satellite launches, and two of them succeeded in putting objects into orbit over the U.S. The news here is that the young dictator is so confident of becoming a full nuclear power that he has dispensed with the fig leaf of a space program.

This is one more sign that Kim is racing to the finish line of full nuclear-weapons capability. Thae Yong Ho, the No. 2 in the North Korean Embassy in London until he defected, warned last week that Kim wants to deploy nuclear-armed missiles by the end of 2017.

The North already has the technology to launch a nuclear weapon against South Korea and Japan. But hurdles remain to deploying an ICBM with a nuclear warhead. Chief among them is a re-entry vehicle capable of withstanding extremes of temperature and vibration. A successful test could provide the North with valuable data to work the problem.

The U.S. has ship-based missile defenses in the region, and intercepting the test would have the dual purpose of slowing Kim’s nuclear progress and demonstrating an effective deterrent. Kim may figure the U.S. won’t take such action as it prepares to inaugurate a new President and South Korea is riven by an impeachment trial of President Park Geun-hye. But the U.S. right to self defense provides ample justification, and U.N. Security Council resolutions ban the North from pursuing its missile program.

Even the defensive use of force carries risks that Kim would retaliate, but the larger risk is letting a man as reckless as Kim gain the means to hold American cities hostage. Kim evidently believes that once the North has a credible ability to destroy Seattle or Chicago, the U.S. will have no choice other than to accept it as a normal nuclear state. The Obama Administration, in consultation with President-elect Donald Trump, can demonstrate its bipartisan resolve to thwart that plan.