at issue this week climate talks phyllis schlafly an american apologizes in...

At Issue this week... Climate Talks by Phyllis Schlafly

An American apologizes in ParisIt was only “Issue Three” on the

weekly episode of the McLaugh-lin Group, but if President Obama

has his way, the 140-nation conference on global warming — excuse me, climate change — will be the most consequential event of his presidency. If Obama’s plans to reduce America’s energy use are allowed to go forward, it would go a long way toward fulfilling Obama’s 2008 promise of “funda-mentally transforming the United States of America.”

THE MEETING of the United Na-tions Framework Convention on Climate Change was held near Paris at a secure con-ference center overlooking Le Bourget air-port. That’s where the great American hero, Charles Lindbergh, landed his “Spirit of St. Louis” on May 21, 1927.

Lindbergh was greeted by over 100,000 cheering Frenchmen who carried him off the field on their shoulders and delivered him to the President of France, where he was awarded the prestigious Legion of Honor. Obama’s tedious keynote speech at Le Bourget was somewhat less warmly received, as he kept droning on for many minutes beyond his allotted time, ignoring the chimes that repeatedly signaled his time was up.

It was another stop on his apology tour: “I’ve come here personally, as the leader of the world’s largest economy and the sec-ond-largest emitter, to say that the United States of America not only recognizes our role in creating this problem, we embrace our responsibility to do something about it.”

Obama flattered the delegates that “this is the moment we finally determined we would save our planet.” He claimed that “our nations share a sense of urgency about this challenge and a growing realization that it is within our power to do something about it.”

That silly statement was reminiscent of his 2008 campaign boast: “I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that ... this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”

Obama also bragged about his three-day tour of Alaska in Sept., where he personally inspected one of the melting glaciers that entertain tourists on cruise ships. Of course, those glaciers have been melting in the

summertime ever since we bought Alaska from Russia in 1867.

Although glaciers may be melting in Alaska and the Arctic, ice has been ex-panding at the other end of the planet, in Antarctica. In any case, UNFCCC execu-tive secretary Christiana Figueres recently admitted that climate change “is not about the temperature.That is just a proxy. The discussion is about the decarbonization of the economy.”

At a previous UNFCCC meeting three years ago at Doha, Qatar, Figueres let the cat out of the bag when she revealed that the goal of the whole process is a “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Earlier this year she said “this is probably the most difficult task we have given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development mod-el, for the first time in human history.”

THAT KIND of dictatorial attitude is why climate change fanatics are called watermelons — green on the outside, red (for Marxism) on the inside. The climate change movement is where many commu-

nists found a new home after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Obama knows that Congress will never approve any of the specific proposals that come out of the Paris conference, so he plans to double down on executive action by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Energy. EPA Admin-istrator Gina McCarthy and Energy Secre-tary Ernest Moniz both attended the Paris meeting with a large contingent of aides and officials.

The EPA’s Clean Power Plan, which would basically eliminate coal-fired elec-tric utilities and cause all Americans to pay much higher electricity bills, is currently pending before the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. That court was stacked with four new Obama judges in the last two years after then-Majority Leader Harry Reid invoked the “nuclear option” to change Sen-ate rules by a simple majority vote.

CONGRESS STILL has the power of the purse and should use that power to block, delay, or defund Obama’s assault on the production of energy that powers the American way of life. It should refuse to provide the $100 billion a year that Obama has promised to the Green Climate Fund starting in 2020.

December 8, 2015

PhyllisSchlafly

(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate

December 16, 2015 2016 Election Charen (26) Will (8)CAIR Malkin (3) Chicago Elder (11) Christmas Cushman (18) Hollis (20)Climate Talks Harsanyi (13) Schlafly(1)Dear Mark Levy (19)Democrats Barone (15) Erickson (10)Economy Kudlow (12)Energy Development Moore (29) Family Greenberg (22) Freedom of Religion Jeffrey (21) Gun Control Saunders (4, 13)Higher Education McCaughey (24) Williams (24)Islamist Terrorism Buchanan (16) Charen (17) Chavez (17) Thomas (18)Israel Prager (27) Thomas (27)Leslie’s Trivia Bits Elman (14) Media Bias Bozell (6, 21) Buchanan (6) Coulter (7)National Security Bay (30) Malkin (31) Shapiro (4)Obamacare Saunders (10)Obama Presidency Farah (30) Lambro (28) Limbaugh (2) Massie (25) Murchison (23) Sowell (3) Plans Greenberg (23)Progressive Taxation Will (14)Public Safety Lambro (5) Putin, Vladimir Tyrrell (29)Republicans Barone (9) Lowry (9) World Olasky (22)

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Once again, President Obama emerged from his perma-nent sabbatical on the war

on terror to inform us, in a bizarre ad-dress from the Oval Office, that he has things firmly under control and there’s no need for us Americans to be con-cerned. Excuse me if I’m not comfort-ed.

Obama has made quite clear that he is blind to the threat that radical Islam represents to America and the rest of the civilized world. He obviously be-lieves that Islam produces no more or worse terrorists than any other religion or cult and that it is wrong to focus on the radical strain of Islam because it leads to discrimination against other Muslims — discrimination he seems to see under every rock.

WE’VE REPEATED to the point of cliché that to effectively wage war, one must identify his enemy, and no one can rationally dispute this. But Obama can’t bring himself to identify radical Islam, Islamism or Islamic ter-rorism as our enemy. His blindness may be from his sentimental child-hood attachment to Islam. It may be that his leftist ideology compels him to see conservatives, Republicans and Christians as America’s true enemies. But whatever it is, he is crippling the United States in this war and is making us increasingly vulnerable.

You could tell from Obama’s body language and his hurried tones that his heart was not in his speech. He didn’t want to be there. I suspect his advis-ers pressured him to make this speech because he had to do something to deceive the American people into be-lieving that he is actually engaged and that we can trust him to lead us in this war. But he convinced no one with that lack-luster address, in which he gave empty assurances that we are following a strategy that we all know to be nonexistent.

It’s easy to recognize when Obama is passionate about something, such as when he talks about alleged Christian atrocities against Muslims hundreds of years ago during the Crusades, gun control, health care, income redistribu-tion or global warming. But with the exception of gun control, those issues were not part of his speech, so he was noticeably indifferent and disengaged.

It took him four days to respond formally to the greatest terror attack on our soil since 9/11, and he acted as though he was just now devising a strategy to deal with Islamic terrorism, except that he actually didn’t. He still didn’t identify Islamic terrorism as the enemy. Instead, he was careful to nar-rowly define our enemy as ISIL, his an-

noying acronym for the Islamic State group, which most Americans refer to as ISIS.

Obama is so adamant about protect-ing the image of Islam that he bends over backward to remind us that there is no conclusive evidence that the mur-d e r o u s Islamic couple were

acting on behalf of the Islamic State. It is amazing that he thinks that de-nying this link is somehow reas-

suring to us. To the contrary, we have more reason to be concerned about threats to our homeland if these two ji-hadis were radicalized and acting sole-ly on their own, though that appears to be unlikely.

It’s hard not to believe that there is something in the actual religion of Is-lam that motivates a disturbing number of its adherents to wage war against others inside or outside the religion of Islam who will not submit to their view of it. Obama can talk until he’s blue in the face about how peaceful the religion is, but clearly, many Muslims worldwide don’t subscribe to his view, and this has been the case since the in-ception of the religion.

This doesn’t mean we should in any way discriminate against Muslims, most of whom, of course, don’t sub-scribe to the radical version. But it does

Obama’s umpteenth tired, dishonest speech on terrorismOBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 8, 2015

mean that we can’t turn a blind eye to the radicalized elements of their reli-gion, which are not limited to al Qaeda or the Islamic State. Try Boko Haram, for starters. It also does not mean that every time there’s an Islamic act of ter-ror, our putative commander in chief should rush to the lectern to assure Muslims that we are not at war with them and lecture the rest of us not to mistreat Muslims — which we are not doing. Obama is obviously far more in-terested in creating this straw man to knock down than in defining and de-stroying our enemy.

Obama keeps telling us not to give in to fear, but it’s not so much fear of terrorism that is haunting us as it is the realization that our commander in chief is doing nothing to combat the threat. His entire tenure in office has been a saga of a president usurping and abus-ing authority, yet the one clear consti-tutional duty he has — to keep America safe and secure — he abdicates with striking disgrace. So no, President Obama, we are not afraid that we are incapable of defeating the enemy; we are mortified that we have a leader who won’t lead and who has created a vacuum in the world and in the United States where our enemy can flourish.

PRESIDENT OBAMA, you un-derestimate the American people just as egregiously as you ignore the real-ity of our enemy. Please don’t insult us anymore with your lies that you have a strategy to defeat an enemy you won’t even acknowledge. No one with half a brain believes you anymore.

DavidLimbaugh


3December 16, 2015

When the President of the United States asks the tele-vision networks to set aside

time for him to broadcast a speech from the Oval Office, we can usually expect that he has something new to say. But President Obama’s speech Sunday night was just a rehash of what he has been saying all along, trying to justify poli-cies that have repeatedly turned out di-sastrously for America and our allies.

This was not a speech about how the Obama administration is going to do anything differently in the future. It was a speech about how Obama’s policies were right all along. Obama is one of those people who are often wrong but never in doubt.

THE PRESIDENT struck a famil-iar chord when he emphasized that we shouldn’t blame all Muslims for the ac-tions of a few. How many people have you heard blaming all Muslims?

Even if 90 percent of all Muslims are fine people, and we admit 10,000 refu-gees from the Middle East, does that mean that we need not be concerned about adding a thousand potential ter-rorists — even after we have seen in San Bernardino what just two terrorists can do?

The first responsibility of any gov-ernment is to protect the people already in the country. Even in this age of an en-titlement mentality, no one in a foreign country is entitled to be in America if the American people don’t want them here.

Obama’s talk about how we should not make religious distinctions might make sense if we were talking about

handing out entitlements. But we are talking about distinguishing between different populations posing different levels of danger to the American people.

When it comes to matters of life and death, that is no time for the kind of glib, politically correct rhetoric that Barack Obama specializes in.

Obama may think of himself as a citizen of the world, but he was elected President of the United States, not head of a world government, and that does not authorize him to gamble the lives of Americans for the benefit of people in other countries.

The illusion that you can take in large numbers of people from a fundamental-ly different culture, without jeopardiz-ing your own culture — and everything that depends on it — should have been dispelled by many counterproductive social consequences in Europe, even aside from the fatal dangers of terror-ists.

MOST REFUGEES in the Middle East can be helped in the Middle East, and many Americans would undoubt-edly be willing to financially help Mus-lim countries like Jordan or Egypt to care for these refugees in societies more compatible with their beliefs and val-ues.

The history of millions of European immigrants who came here in centuries past was fundamentally different from

what is happening in our own times.First of all, those immigrants were

stopped at Ellis Island to be checked medically and otherwise, and were al-lowed to get off that island to go ashore only after they had met whatever legal standards there were. Otherwise, they were sent back where they came from.

More fundamentally, people came here to assimilate into the American so-ciety they found, not to become isolated enclaves of aggrieved foreigners, de-manding that Americans adjust to their languages, their values and their ways of life.

Like so much that President Obama says, his talk of “stronger screening” of people coming into the United States is sheer fantasy, when even his own intel-ligence officials and law enforcement officials say that we have no adequate data on which to base a meaningful screening of Syrian refugees.

When Obama spoke of the danger of our being “drawn once more into a long and costly ground war in Iraq or Syria,” that was yet another fantasy, that wars are optional.

When terrorists are at war with us, we cannot simply declare that war to be over, whenever it is politically conve-nient, as Obama did when he withdrew American troops from Iraq, against the advice of his own generals. That is what led to the rise of ISIS.

OUR ONLY real choice is between destroying ISIS over there or waiting for them to come over here and start killing Americans. As in other cases, Obama has made a choice that reflects politics and rhetoric, rather than reality.

President Obama’s speechOBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 8, 2015

Thomas Sowell(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate

As news of the San Bernardino jihadist shootings blared on airport TVs, I spotted a TSA

monitor flashing the now ubiquitous mes-sage:

“If you SEE something, SAY some-thing.”

The warning should be followed with a big “LOL” and a winky-blinky, just-kidding emoji. It’s one of the emptiest slo-gans in modern American life.

WHILE THE White House pays lip service to homeland security vigilance, it consorts with Islamic terror sympathizers who attack vigilant citizens and law en-forcement officers at every turn.

Yes, I’m looking at you, Council on American-Islamic Relations.

After seeing CAIR’s bizarre press con-ference with the San Bernardino jihadists’ family members, here’s what I’d like to

say to them: You are not to be trusted. You put

damage control above border control and jihad control. You are enemies of our national security and sovereignty.

Reminder: The feds designated CAIR an unindict-ed terror co-con-spirator in 2007 in the prosecution of the Holy Land Foundation and others for providing support to Hamas jihadists. Over the al-leged objections of Dallas-area federal prosecutors, the Obama Justice Depart-ment’s senior political appointees de-clined to press terror-financing charges against CAIR co-founder Omar Ahmad.

Instead, the administration has rolled out the red carpet for CAIR officials “hundreds” of times since 2009 on a

“range of issues.”This is the same group of

“Islamophobia!”-shrieking grievance grifters that cooked up the Ahmed “ C l o c k Boy” Mohamed

brouhaha in Tex-as, where the city of Irving and Ir-ving Independent School District are now being sued for $15 mil-

lion after raising alarms over the teen’s low-tech media stunt. Obama hailed Mohamed before the boy jetted off to Qatar to cash in on a Muslim Brother-hood-linked educational scholarship.

THIS IS the same group of litigious radicals who unsuccessfully sued a Florida gun shop owner this summer for declaring that he would refuse to

The CAIR effect: See something, do nothingCAIR: December 4, 2015

sell weapons to “[a]nyone who is either directly or indirectly associated with terrorism in any way.” A judge ruled this week that “[t]here are simply no facts grounding the assertion that Plain-tiff (CAIR) and/or one of its constitu-ents will be harmed.” CAIR is appeal-ing, of course.

This is the same group of treach-erous thugs that squelched critics of Somalia-based jihad group al-Shabab in Minnesota. CAIR smeared whistle-blowing Muslims who participated in an educational Minneapolis forum on al-Shabab terrorism and youth gangs as “anti-Muslim.” In 2013, the uncle of a missing young Muslim radical testified before Congress about CAIR’s efforts to pressure families to impede FBI in-vestigations.

“CAIR held meetings for some members of the community and told them not to talk to the FBI,” Abdirizak Bihi told lawmakers, “which was a slap in the face for the Somali American Muslim mothers who were knocking on doors day and night with pictures of their missing children and asking for the community to talk to law enforce-ment about what they know of the miss-ing kids.”

This is the same group of free speech-trampling zealots that bombard-ed private citizen, Zaba Davis, with ha-rassing subpoenas over her opposition to a planned construction project by the Muslim Community Association and Michigan Islamic Academy. A federal judge called CAIR’s anti-free speech witch hunt “chilling” and ordered the outfit to pay $9,000 in legal fees.

This is the same manipulative group of controversy-manufacturing instiga-tors who tried to sue “John Does” -- in-nocent American citizens who alerted the authorities about their security con-cerns -- in 2007 after a group of imams falsely claimed they were discriminated against on a Minneapolis flight.

And this is the same dangerous group of jihad enablers that filed an obstructionist lawsuit to block vigilant Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from quizzing Muslim border-crossers about their ties to jihadist martyrs and radical mosques. The anti-”racial profiling” lawsuit has dragged on for three years.

Little wonder, then, that in this po-litically correct climate of intimidation, a neighbor of the San Bernardino jihad-ists told local media this week that he had “noticed a half-dozen Middle East-ern men in the area in recent weeks, but decided not to report anything since he did not wish to racially profile those people.”

THAT’S THE CAIR effect: See something, do nothing. Silence is com-plicity.

MichelleMalkin



There are two kinds of Ameri-cans. One sees a mass shoot-ing — such as the recent kill-

ings in San Bernardino, California, and Colorado Springs, Colorado — and a u t o m a t i c a l l y thinks other peo-ple should not be able to buy or own guns or own some kinds of guns. The other learns of a mass shooting and takes comfort in the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms.

I FALL INTO the second group while being surrounded by people in the first group. When a mass shoot-ing occurs, the typical Bay Area voter reacts by calling for gun control mea-sures to disarm white male gun nuts. It’s a very human reflex. People who are passionate about policy like to think that if their political views pre-vailed, then the world would be a safer place.

Some observers, however, went too far in their eagerness to blame gun nuts. During a story on the San Ber-nardino shootings, which left 14 dead, the BBC’s James Cook proclaimed, “Just another day in the United States of America, another day of gunfire, panic and fear.” Can you imagine an American reporter introducing a story on the Paris shootings that left 130 dead with the same attitude?

As the story unfolded Wednesday, President Barack Obama acknowl-edged that authorities did not know details but said, “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world.” The president has, in the past, made similar claims, which PolitiFact has rated “mostly false.” The United States falls behind Norway, Finland and Switzerland in mass shootings per capita.

Obama went on to say, “And for those who are concerned about terror-ism, some may be aware of the fact that we have a no-fly list where people can’t get on planes, but those same people who we don’t allow to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm, and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them. That’s a law that needs to be changed.” It was a dry, political response.

Sen. Barbara Boxer called on Con-gress to pass gun control laws like those in her state of California, which she acknowledged did not prevent the shooters from obtaining two assault-style rifles. “In California, we have tough gun laws. I don’t know how these weapons got where they were,” quoth Boxer. “We’ll find out.”

Boxer told her colleagues she does not understand “why anyone else would need to have this type of weap-o n . ” It’s true; Boxer does

not understand that there are a lot of people in this country who pre-fer to take charge of their own pro-

tection rather than cede their security to laws that don’t work.

SAN BERNARDINO police Chief Jarrod Burguan told Politico that all four of the weapons used by shooters Syed Farook, 28, and his wife, Tash-feen Malik, 27, were purchased legal-ly. In California, that entails a back-ground check. Farook purchased two of the guns. Police found 1,600 rounds of ammunition in the couple’s rented SUV when deputies killed them during a shootout. Later, police found 4,500 rounds of ammo, a dozen pipe bombs and hundreds of tools that could have been used to make more bombs in their

home. Burguan believes that the two had the capability to wage another at-tack when they were stopped.

Every piece of new information — the arsenal, the black tactical gear, reports that Malik pledged allegiance to the Islamic State on Facebook dur-ing the attack — suggests that this was not a case of angry-man gun violence or workplace-related violence but a planned terrorist attack. By choos-ing Farook’s colleagues — who had thrown him a baby shower — as tar-gets, the couple served the goal of radi-cal Islamists: to drive a wedge between Muslims and non-Muslims. This is pure evil.

Gun violence erupts in a state of gun controlGUN CONTROL: December 6, 2015

I DON’T believe that a federal as-sault weapons ban could stop a Colo-rado Springs-style shooting. I cer-tainly don’t think “gun safety” laws could stop terrorists. If Congress were to pass such a ban, then lawmakers would have to grandfather existing as-sault weapons. Manufacturers would find legal ways around Washington restrictions. The kind of Americans who want to take charge of their own defense would buy them. The public would not be safer. The new gun law would be about as effective as the war on drugs.

Debra J.Saunders


Months ago, a concerned American at a school in Texas spotted a 14-year-

old Muslim boy toting around a con-traption that looked very much like a bomb. That Texan called the police, who came and detained the boy; after learning that the boy’s device was ac-tually a disassembled clock, they re-leased him.

WEEKS AGO, a concerned Ameri-can in San Bernardino spotted a “half-dozen Middle Eastern men” in the area of an apartment housing Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik. He didn’t know what they were doing there, but they seemed suspicious. He didn’t call the cops.

In San Bernardino, of course, that political correctness ended in the death of 14 Americans and the wound-ing of 21 more. In Texas, that failure to bow to political correctness ended in the attorney general of the United States vowing to track down and in-vestigate the local police department.

Welcome to politically correct America, where you are damned if you do, and damned if you don’t.

Political correctness costs lives. It doesn’t merely require us to abide by the strictures of an arbitrary linguistic code. It isn’t just an irritation. It means that we’re all supposed to frontally lo-botomize ourselves to basic realities.

We’re supposed to pretend that there’s nothing more suspicious about a half-dozen Middle Eastern males coming and going at odd hours from an apart-ment with a small child than there would be if a half-dozen white males did the same thing. We’re supposed to cave to the fantasy that a religious Muslim reaching out to terrorists over the internet poses no more threat than a Christian visiting a pro-life website. We’re supposed to blind ourselves in order to avoid the obvious.

That costs lives.

NOW, THIS doesn’t mean that we ought to discriminate against indi-vidual Muslims, of course. But it does mean that law enforcement ought to look at indicators of possible terrorist connections, and that one preliminary indicator is religious practice of Islam. That indicator isn’t sufficient to deter-mine connection to terrorism — far from it. No single indicator generally is. But behavioral profiling involves investigating a variety of factors. As Daniel Wagner, CEO of Risk Solu-tions, writes about Israel’s profiling

techniques, “Departing passengers [at Ben Gurion Airport] are questioned by highly trained security agents before they reach the check-in counter. These interviews could last as little as one minute or as long as an hour, based on such factors as age, race, religion and destination.”

Ignoring any of these factors repre-sents incompetence.

But the president wants to use the force of law to enshrine incompetence. He suggests that to assess risk differ-ently based on religious observance is somehow a violation of basic Ameri-can principles, rather than a time-test-ed technique of all human relations. We obviously must remain on guard for baseless bias and persecution with-out evidence. But we can’t ignore the realities of risk assessment in the name of cultural sensitivity, either.

THAT’S HOW we end up with the utter stupidity of an MSNBC host suggesting that media stop showing pictures of the San Bernardino female shooter so as not to link her hijab-clad visage with Islam. That’s how we end up with Obama suggesting that our own Islamophobia causes terrorism, rather than radical Islam. Most impor-tantly, that’s how we end up with more dead Americans.

Should we religiously profile?NATIONAL SECURITY: December 9, 2015

BenShapiro


5December 16, 2015

Once again Americans have been gunned down in cold blood in a mass shooting,

only this time by assailants dressed and armed like terrorists.

It turns out that law enforcement of-ficials discovered that two of the shooters, a hus-band and Pakistani wife, are from the Middle East and are terrorists.

The attackers killed at least 14 peo-ple and wounded 21 at a Christmas par-ty on Wednesday at the Inland Regional Center facility that serves people with developmental disabilities in San Ber-nardino, California.

IT WAS THE deadliest mass shoot-ing since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School three years ago, where a deranged youth killed 26 chil-dren and school personnel.

But it is shocking to learn the num-ber of mass shootings has been rapidly escalating this year.

On June 17, nine were killed at a his-toric black church in Charleston, South Carolina; five at a military recruiting center on July 16 in Chattanooga, Ten-nessee.; 10 killed at Umpqua Commu-nity College on Oct. 1 in Roseburg, Oregon; then last week’s attack at a Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood facility; and most recently, the 14 killed Wednesday.

It was the 355th such attack this year, according to an Internet site that keeps track of mass shootings.

In Wednesday’s episode, two of the at-tackers were killed by police, and a third suspect was taken into custody. Others were believed to be still at large.

T h e y were reportedly wearing masks, dressed in black, and

armed with assault rifles and handguns, and according to

reports Wednes-day, tossed objects from their black

van as they fled — which turned out to be pipe bombs.

“We heard something like explosives — big sounds first, then a few seconds later ... we heard the gunshots,” said an employee of the public health depart-ment.

Police told reporters that they came to the facility “well prepared” as if they were on “a mission.” Was this a domestic terrorist attack? An investigation Thurs-day showed that it was.

“One of the big questions that will come up repeatedly is: ‘Is this terror-ism?’” says David Bowdich, the assis-tant director in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. “It is a possibility. We are making some adjustments to our investi-gation.”

A law enforcement official said one of the suspects was identified as Syed Fa-rook, a health inspector at the San Ber-nardino County Department of Public Health, which hosted Wednesday’s holi-day party. Police said they found a huge cache of weapons in Farook’s home.

Recent mass murders have been car-ried out by a lone, mentally deranged killer. According to the Washington Post,

“Multiple-shooter events are extremely rare ... (In) a recent FBI report on 160 ‘active shooter incidents’ between 2000 and 2013, all but two involved a single shooter.”

“The one thing we do know is we have a pattern now of mass shootings in the country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world,” President Obama said in a television interview.

ONCE AGAIN, he called for stricter gun laws and pointed out one of the most egregious loopholes: People on the no-fly list can legally buy a gun.

“Those same people who we don’t al-low to fly could go into a store right now in the United States and buy a firearm, and there’s nothing that we can do to stop them,” he said.

The grim reality behind the fast-in-creasing rate of mass shootings has a lot to do with long-ignored mental health is-sues — and with households whose par-ents legally own guns, often lots of them, that are easily available to their children.

The mass killer at Sandy Hook El-ementary School was a deeply disturbed youth whose mother knew of his men-tal illness and had a large collection of

Easy access to public spaces should be severely curtailedPUBLIC SAFETY: December 3, 2015

handguns and rifles in her home. He used them to kill her before he went on his rampage of death.

One of the most preventable mass shootings occurred on Sept. 16, 2013, at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., not far from the nation’s Capitol.

Aaron Alexis was a 34-year-old ci-vilian contractor in the Navy who had a long, well-documented history of severe mental sickness, but no one reported the red flags up the line of authority.

He underwent numerous examina-tions by doctors and had run-ins with the law, yet he still retained his security cre-dentials to gain access to the naval base anytime he wanted.

One day he snapped, walked into the Navy Yard with his security pass, killing a dozen people before he was shot and killed.

I don’t have all the answers to the rash of mass killings that are occurring in our country with increasing frequency, but here’s a few.

We certainly need to step up security at all of our public buildings and trans-portation facilities, with IDs, bag and package searches, and X-ray scans. Just as we do at airports.

The days of easy access to public schools and colleges has to be a thing of the past. We need security officials at ev-ery door, checking everyone who passes through them — the same security that members of Congress installed in the Capitol.

In an age of home security devices and alarm systems — not to mention terrorism — we’re going to have to get much more serious about this in our day-to-day lives.

We have to be much more vigilant with mental health issues, watching for signs of illnesses that need to be reported, with plenty of follow-up procedures.

I don’t see any chance of Congress banning the sale of guns. Americans have a constitutional right to protect their fam-ily and themselves. But psychotic people shouldn’t be allowed to own guns.

Parents with easy access to firearms at home need to be held fully accountable if their children use those guns to harm others.

BUT WHAT I want to know is who let these rifle-carrying killers into the In-land Regional Center building in the first place?

DonaldLambro

(c) 2015, United Media Services

Should we religiously profile?


In the feudal era there were the “three estates” — the clergy, the nobility and the commons. The

first and second were eradicated in Robe-spierre’s Revolution.

But in the 18th and 19th century, Ed-mund Burke and Thomas Carlyle identi-fied what the latter called a “stupendous Fourth Estate.”

Wrote William Thackeray: “Of the Corporation of the Goosequill — of the Press ... of the fourth estate. ... There she is — the great engine — she never sleeps. She has her ambassadors in every quarter of the world — her courtiers upon ev-ery road. Her officers march along with armies, and her envoys walk into states-men’s cabinets.”

THE FOURTH estate, the press, the disciples of Voltaire, had replaced the clergy it had dethroned as the new arbi-ters of morality and rectitude.

Today the press decides what words are permissible and what thoughts are ac-ceptable. The press conducts the inquisi-tions where heretics are blacklisted and excommunicated from the company of decent men, while others are forgiven if they recant their heresies.

With the rise of network television and its vast audience, the fourth estate reached apogee in the 1960s and 1970s, playing lead roles in elevating JFK and breaking Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.

Yet before he went down, Nixon in-flicted deep and enduring wounds upon the fourth estate.

When the national press and its aux-iliaries sought to break his Vietnam War policy in 1969, Nixon called on the “great silent majority” to stand by him and dis-patched Vice President Spiro Agnew to launch a counter-strike on network preju-dice and power.

A huge majority rallied to Nixon and Agnew, exposing how far out of touch with America our Lords Spiritual and Lords Temporal had become.

Nixon, the man most hated by the elites in the postwar era, save Joe Mc-Carthy, who also detested and battled the press, then ran up a 49-state landslide against the candidate of the media and counter-culture, George McGovern. Me-dia bitterness knew no bounds.

And with Watergate, the press extract-ed its pound of flesh. By August 1974, it had reached a new apex of national pres-tige.

In The Making of the President 1972, Teddy White described the power the “adversary press” had acquired over America’s public life.

“THE POWER of the press in Amer-ica is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion, and this sweep-ing political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about — an authority that

in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.”

Nixon and Agnew were attacked for not understanding the First Amendment freedom of the press. But all they were doing was using their First Amendment freedom of speech to raise doubts about the objectivity, reliability and truthful-ness of the adver-sary press.

Since those days, conserva-tives have attacked the mainstream media attacking them. And four decades of this endless warfare has stripped the press of its pious pretense to neutrality.

Millions now regard the media as ideo-logues who are masquerading as journal-ists and use press privileges and power to pursue agendas not dissimilar to those of the candidates and parties they oppose.

Even before Nixon and Agnew, con-servatives believed this.

At the Goldwater convention at the Cow Palace in 1964 when ex-President Eisenhower mentioned “sensation-seek-

ing columnists and commentators,” to his amazement, the hall exploded.

Enter The Donald.His popularity is traceable to the fact

that he rejects the moral authority of the media, breaks their commandments, and mocks their condemnations. His con-t e m p t for the norms of Po-

litical Correctness is daily on display.

And that large slice of America that detests a me-dia whose public

approval now rivals that of Congress, relishes this defiance. The last thing these folks want Trump to do is to apologize to the press.

And the media have played right into Trump’s hand.

They constantly denounce him as grossly insensitive for what he has said about women, Mexicans, Muslims, Mc-Cain and a reporter with a disability. Such crimes against decency, says the press, disqualify Trump as a candidate for presi-dent.

Why the liberal media hate Donald TrumpMEDIA BIAS: December 4, 2015

Yet, when they demand he apologize, Trump doubles down. And when they de-mand that Republicans repudiate him, the GOP base replies:

“Who are you to tell us whom we may nominate? You are not friends. You are not going to vote for us. And the names you call Trump — bigot, racist, xeno-phobe, sexist — are the names you call us, nothing but cuss words that a corrupt establishment uses on those it most de-tests.”

What the Trump campaign reveals is that, to populists and Republicans, the political establishment and its media arm are looked upon the way the commons and peasantry of 1789 looked upon the ancien regime and the king’s courtiers at Versailles.

YET, NOW that the fourth estate is as discredited as the clergy in 1789, the larger problem is that there is no arbiter of truth, morality and decency left whom we all respect. Like 4th-century Romans, we barely agree on what those terms mean anymore.

PatBuchanan


The first wave of analysis after the mass shooting in San Ber-nardino suggested that this

could be a right-wing militia or anti-gov-ernment conspiracy. This is the default position of the anti-conservative press: unless shown otherwise, it was one of those right-wingers.

Then they named the suspects, Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik. Remote controls were surely tossed across America when CNN legal analyst Casey Jordan guessed that the Muslim shooter was “going into this conference room where there was a holi-day party, which may have been offen-sive to him.”

Ah, religion.

THE MEDIA have harbored anti-religious bigotry for years. But now it’s turned vicious. This tragedy drew out liberal animus against those offensive “prayer people” who won’t back gun control. Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten angrily announced on Twit-ter: “Dear ‘thoughts and prayers’ people: Please shut up and slink away. You are the problem, and everyone knows it.”

Agile critics on Twitter soon sent back a flock of official White House tweets from President Obama himself expressing “thoughts and prayers” after the terrorist attacks and during the Ebola epidemic. On the morning after the San Bernardino attack, he again offered his “thoughts and prayers” to the victims,

proving one can be prayerful and agitate for gun control simultaneously.

The New York Daily News really turned the volume up, with this ranting tabloid headline: “GOD ISN’T FIXING THIS.” The subheadline below said “As latest batch of innocent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind meaningless platitudes.”

FOR A MAJOR city newspaper to use their front page to mock people who are praying after what happened in San Bernardino is unconscionable and unbe-fitting a publication that purports to be a serious media outlet. This newspaper should have apologized for comparing prayer to “meaningless platitudes” — both to Republican leaders and to people of faith — and then fired the person re-sponsible for approving such a vile front page and cover story.

The Lichter-Rothman “Media Elite” surveys back in 1981 revealed that 50 percent of the news media did not be-lieve in God and 86 percent seldom or never went to church or synagogue. You can only surmise that it’s worsened since then. If you don’t want to believe in God, it’s sad but acceptable. But what

the Daily News lunged far further, ridi-culing people of faith for offering simple prayers after a massacre.

No one in the liberal media seemed to think this might offend the audience at home, who were sending their prayers for the victims. CNN, the same people who air legal analysts who wonder about murder being caused by offensive “holi-day parties,” couldn’t see why that nasty front page might be revolting, and pro-moted it every hour on the hour. Anchor-man Don Lemon read most of the front page on the air, and asked a spokesman for the liberal Brady Campaign for a re-sponse. On cue, Dan Gross said, “Reli-gion doesn’t need to be part of this con-versation.”

NBC’s Andrea Mitchell suggested it was a natural rebuke: “All the talk of prayer prompted an angry tabloid head-line in today’s New York Daily News.” On CBS, morning anchor Gayle King offered praise for this junk: “I thought that headline was very powerful.” Later, co-anchor Charlie Rose added to the offense: “As the New York Daily News said, God is not going to fix it. We have to fix it.”

Our largely secular press forget that radical Muslims see America as the Great Satan, as godless. Their promotion of this bigoted rant against God only deep-ens the terrorists’ hatred for our country.

WE OFFER our prayers. It’s what civilized people do.

The ‘God isn’t fixing this’ liberal mediaMEDIA BIAS: December 4, 2015

Bozell(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate

Brent

7December 16, 2015

The San Bernardino shooting has just happened and the shooters are unknown, but in

response to Robert Dear Jr.’s murder of three people at a Colorado Springs shopping mall last week, the New York Times exulted:

“Even as politi-cians and those in Congress pump up public fears at the supposed threat of refugees fleeing Syria, every day in America people — mostly white men — are walking into movie theaters, restaurants, churches, grade schools and health care centers armed to the teeth, determined to take as many people out as they can.”

MOSTLY WHITE men???I know it didn’t happen here, but

is the Times really going to ignore the murder of 130 people in Paris two weeks ago?

Here at home, an Oregon Commu-nity College was shot up in October — by a mixed-race, half-black immigrant, Chris Harper-Mercer. Nine people were killed. It’s hard to remember every sen-sational crime, but that was just two months ago.

Last year, another mixed-race immi-grant, Elliot Rodger, committed mass murder at a sunny college campus in Santa Barbara, killing twice as many people as Robert Dear did — in half the time! That seemed like a pretty big story to me, but the media passed over it pret-ty quickly. The Times has airbrushed it from history.

In 2013, two Chechen immigrants — also allegedly fleeing persecution — blew up the Boston Marathon.

In 2012, Haitian immigrant Kesler Dufrene murdered as many people in Miami as Robert Dear did in Colo-r a d o Springs. One of Du-

frene’s victims was a 15-year-old girl. Du-frene had already been convicted of a felony in the United States, so

he should have been deported, but our “Deporter in Chief” Obama had blocked his return to Haiti. As the murdered girl’s mother said, “Because of immigration, my daughter is not alive.”

Have you ever heard of Dufrene? I don’t think his murders got as much press as the “Planned Parenthood” shooting.

I’m sure you’ve heard of Jared Lough-ner. But have you ever heard of Eduardo Sencion?

In 2011, nine months after Lough-ner’s shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, Sencion, a Mexican immigrant, shot up a Carson City, Nevada, IHOP, killing four Americans, including three National Guardsmen and a 67-year old woman.

Eduardo was a Mexican immigrant. The Times ran two stories on his mass murder — on Pages 17 and 18. By con-trast, Loughner’s shooting got dozens of write-ups in the Times, including at least three front-page articles, three editorials and 10 op-eds.

The media are tickled pink whenever they have a white perpetrator because it happens so rarely in a country that is ma-jority white.

IN 2009 — the same year that model second-generation immigrant Nidal Ma-lik Hasan murdered 13 soldiers at Fort Hood — model first-generation Viet-namese immigrant Jiverly Wong shot and killed 13 people in Binghamton, New York, because he was upset that people disrespected his English skills.

Who holds the record for the deadli-est shooting by a single gunman in U.S. history, you ask? That would be Korean immigrant, Seung-Hui Cho, with 32 murders in a matter of hours at Virginia Tech in 2007.

The Times cheered anti-gun advo-cate Carolyn McCarthy’s election to Congress, but today, the paper seems to have forgotten the event that propelled her there: the 1993 Long Island Railroad massacre that left six passengers dead, including McCarthy’s husband.

Media claims and some past mass shootersMEDIA BIAS: December 2, 2015

That mass shooting was committed by a Jamaican immigrant, Colin Ferguson.

It hasn’t even been a week, and the Times has already run more than a dozen articles on the shooting at a Colorado Springs shopping mall. Hey — every-body remember the wall-to-wall cover-age of the mass shooting at a Salt Lake City shopping mall in 2007? Five people were killed.

Here’s a clue: Two days after the at-tack, the Times ran an article titled, “An-ti-Bosnian Backlash Is Feared in Utah.” (The killer: Bosnian immigrant Sulejman Talovic.)

After Mexican immigrant Salvador Tapia slaughtered six employees at the Windy City Core Supply warehouse in Chicago in 2003, the Times plastered the story all over — one article on Page 14 of the late edition. The Washington Post also ran one.

The media use their own lack of cov-erage as proof that mass murder by non-whites almost never happens. It’s exactly what they’re doing to Donald Trump over his claim that a lot of Muslims cel-ebrated the 9/11 attack.

At the time, normal people were en-raged that the media refused to cover the Muslim reaction to 9/11, all while lavish-ing endless column inches on a non-exis-tent “backlash” against Muslims.

But now these journalist-referees turn around and insist that the only acceptable proof that Muslims cheered the 9/11 at-tack is the existence of the very media coverage that they obstinately refused to provide.

There’s a reason most people trust their own recollections over media re-ports.

AFTER 20 years of nearly non-stop mass murder by non-white immigrants in a country that is still majority white, our media have the audacity to claim that tens of thousands of Syrian Muslims are less dangerous than the most pacific hu-man beings in world history: 21st-centu-ry white American men.

AnnCoulter

(c) 2015, Ann Coulter

The ‘God isn’t fixing this’ liberal media


Sen. Tim Scott, who evidently has not received the memo explaining that politics is a

grim and bitter business, laughs eas-ily and often, as when, during lunch in this city’s humming downtown, he ex-plains that South Carolina’s Low-country is ben-efiting from what are called “half-backs.” These are migrants who moved from Northern states to Florida in search of warmth but, finding high prices and congestion, then moved halfway back, settling in South Carolina. Doing so, they have lo-cated in the state where, Scott believes and history suggests, the 2016 Republi-can presidential nomination will begin to come to closure.

SINCE PICKING Ronald Reagan over John Connally and George H.W. Bush in 1980, South Carolina’s Repub-lican primary electorate has sided with the eventual nominee every four years, with the exception of 2012, when Newt Gingrich from neighboring Georgia was rewarded for denouncing as “de-spicable” a journalist’s question during a debate here. This year, South Carolina votes just 10 days before the selection of convention delegates accelerates with the March 1 “SEC primary,” so-named because five of the 12 primaries that day are in Southern states represented in that football conference.

The Human Snarl, aka Donald Trump, is leading polls here, where South Carolinians share the national consensus that, in Scott’s mild words, “however it is today is not the way it should be.” But it remains to

be seen whether Re-publicans will vote for Trump while so warmly embracing

the senator who is his stylistic an-

tithesis. Scott is “an unbridled optimist” (his description) who thinks Republi-can chances in 2016 depend on whether their nominee is an “aspirational lead-er” or someone “selling fear.” Scott’s un-Trumpian demeanor is both a cause and an effect of his popularity: He was elected with 61 percent of the vote in 2014 to complete the term of a sena-tor who resigned. Which is why 13 of the Republican presidential candidates have eagerly accepted his invitations to hold town meetings with him. He took Ohio Gov. John Kasich to Hilton Head because it has so many Ohioans, some of them halfbacks. All the candi-dates covet Scott’s endorsement, which will happen only if, as the Feb. 20 vote draws near, polls show a close race, per-haps a four-point difference between the leaders.

THIS COULD be a choice between two of Scott’s Senate colleagues, Flori-da’s Marco Rubio and Texas’ Ted Cruz. If, he says, South Carolinians choose

well — “not sending independents flee-ing in the opposite direction” — Amer-ica will be en route to a Republican presidency.

Scott, 50, became a congressman by defeating in a Republican primary the son of Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat presidential candidate in 1948 and then eight-term U.S. senator. In 2013, Scott became the second African-American Republican senator since Reconstruc-tion (Ed Brooke of Massachusetts was the first), and today he and New Jersey Democrat Cory Booker are the Senate’s only African-Americans.

The predictive power of South Carolina2016 ELECTION: December 3, 2015

Henry Olsen of the Ethics and Pub-lic Policy Center in Washington, whose specialty is conservative politics, says that among the four states that vote in February (the others are Iowa, N.H. and Nev.), South Carolina’s electorate “best mirrors the nation’s.”

Writing for National Review Online, Olsen says the state’s primary elector-ate closely reflects the national bal-ance among the GOP’s four factions — “moderates and liberals” (32 percent), “somewhat conservatives” (32 percent), “very conservative evangelicals” (28 percent) and “very conservative secu-lars” (6 percent). Iowa, says Olsen, fa-vors candidates who are very religious and conservative, New Hampshire fa-vors moderates, Nevada favors conser-vative seculars. Here, however, a domi-nant cohort is that which Olsen calls the national party’s “ballast” — the “some-what conservatives.”

South Carolina’s primary 11 weeks from now will be as distant from the state’s 1980 primary that chose Reagan as Reagan’s first presidential victory later that year was from Franklin Roo-sevelt’s last victory in 1944. And when South Carolina voted in 1980, the huge and still growing Boeing plant in North Charleston, the Mercedes plant in North Charleston and the BMW plant in Spar-tanburg were still in its future. As were the halfbacks who are another reason South Carolina no longer has stereotypi-cal Deep South demographics.

AND WHY whichever Republican wins here will have done so in the first 2016 contest that approximates the elec-torates of the swing states that will deter-mine the 45th president. This fact must be deeply satisfying to Nikki Haley, 43, South Carolina’s Indian-American gov-ernor, and to Scott, who was born 44 days after enactment of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that made all of this possible.

GeorgeWill

(c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group

9December 16, 2015

A funny thing is happening on the way to the GOP meltdown.

According to the latest Quinnipiac poll, the two most popular and broadly acceptable candidates in the field are perhaps the most talented and most reli-ably conservative. Oh, and by the way, they are Hispanics in their 40s.

Donald Trump is still leading the polls and has demonstrated a staying power that has confounded his crit-ics, but Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz are now beginning to stand out in the rest of the field, clustering with Ben Carson in effectively a three-way tie for second place nationally.

ACCORDING TO the latest Quin-nipiac poll, Rubio is at 66 percent to eight percent favorable/unfavorable, while Cruz is at 65 percent to nine per-cent, for the highest net favorable rat-ings in the race, 58 percent and 56 per-cent, respectively. Only five percent of Republicans say they wouldn’t consider voting for Rubio, and six percent say that of Cruz, the lowest numbers in the field (Trump and Jeb Bush are unac-ceptable to the most Republicans, at 26 percent and 21 percent, respectively).

Unlike with Trump or Carson, ex-plaining the emergence of Rubio and Cruz doesn’t require figuring out why the laws of political gravity have been suspended or psychoanalyzing GOP voters. They are advancing in a com-pletely typical track.

They both have thought about run-ning for president for a very long time. They both paid their dues — Cruz in the George W. Bush campaign and admin-

istration; Rubio in the Florida House. They both serve in a body, the U.S. Sen-ate, that practically exists as a stepping-stone to the White House. They both look, talk and act like politicians — because they are politicians, and good ones.

If the race eventually has Rubio and Cruz among the finalists, or winnows down to a Rubio-Cruz fight, it will feature supremely skilled campaigners who are eloquent and sure-footed and represent the best next-generation poli-ticians the party has to offer.

A CRUZ-RUBIO race would play as the grassroots vs. the establishment, although Rubio in the establishment slot would be an enormous victory for the tea party.

In this scenario, the so-called estab-lishment candidate would be the guy who ran for Senate in Florida in 2010 against a sitting Republican governor and the firm backing of the National Republican Senatorial Committee. As far as RINO-hunting goes, by stopping Charlie Crist and chasing him out of the party, Rubio still has the best and most consequential hide.

And in a Cruz-Rubio scenario, the grassroots candidate would be the guy who emulated the establishment candi-date’s upstart campaign two years later in Texas.

The tea party has over the years backed some flagrantly unsuitable can-didates in Senate primaries — remem-ber Christine O’Donnell? Chris Mc-Daniel? — but it invested very wisely in Cruz and Rubio.

There is no doubt that the two are now positioned differently. From the beginning of his Senate career, Cruz has focused on bonding with the grassroots of the party, while Rubio sponsored a misbegotten immigration bill that hasn’t been forgotten or forgiven by conserva-tives. Cruz is working from the right of the party out (he’s strongest among self-identified very conservative voters), and Rubio is working from the center of the party out (he’s strongest among self-identified somewhat conservatives).

There are doubts about both of them. Is Cruz electable? Can Rubio be trust-ed on immigration? Does Cruz lack a winning personal touch? Is Rubio too youthful-looking? And Donald Trump can’t be wished away.

If Trump wins Iowa, it will indeed be like the First Bull Run of the Republi-can civil war. Regardless, the race is still highly unpredictable. Chris Christie, in a testament to his resiliency, is showing signs of life. Jeb Bush will get another look at some point. The last couple of weeks before Iowa and New Hampshire always bring surprises.

BUT REPUBLICANS hyperven-tilating over Trump should pause long enough to appreciate the steady rise of two conservative 40-somethings who represent the party’s future.

Cruz vs. Rubio — a better GOP raceREPUBLICANS: December 3, 2015

RichLowry

(c) 2015, King Features Syndicate

There are just eight-and-a-half weeks to go until the Iowa caucuses, with two of those

weeks devoted to holidays during which polling is ordinarily not con-ducted, and the race for the Republican presidential nomination seems to be taking perceptible shape. And it con-tinues to defy conventional wisdom.

Since mid-July Donald Trump has been leading in the national polls, ex-cept for a moment early last month when he was effectively tied with Ben Carson. His numbers have moved up and down a bit but have stayed be-tween 22 and 30 percent since early August.

HE LED IN polls in Iowa from August to late October, when he was overtaken by Carson, and by late No-vember, despite calling Iowa voters stupid, he was leading there again.

He has led in New Hampshire polls since late July, and by about 15 points since early August. He has led in South Carolina polls since early August, and by 15 points or more until Carson nar-rowed the gap in November.

T h r o u g h o u t all these months, most political pro-fessionals have pooh-poohed his chances of actu-ally winning the nomination — and for plausible reasons. His trademark promise of deporting all 11 million il-legal immigrants is surely a logistical impossibility. His promise to engage in deal-making with Russia’s Vladimir Pu-tin seems astonishingly naive. His trash-talking of opponents and members of the press seems shockingly un-presidential.

But as veteran reporter Thomas Ed-sall writes in his New York Times blog,

“his apparent vulnerabilities — his hu-bris, his narcissism, his bullying, his boisterousness — have been strengths in a primary campaign premised on de-fiance of political correctness, left a n d right.” Perhaps not

coincidentally, many Republican voters see hubris, narcis-

sism and bullying as characteristics of Barack Obama.

Trump’s support comes dispropor-tionately from non-college graduates and from those with modest incomes — not the support base for Republican nominees in the recent past.

Interestingly, as FiveThirtyEight ana-lyst Harry Enten points out, Trump has consistently run better in polls conduct-ed by automated phone calls and over the Internet (29 percent) than in live-interview polls (23 percent).

The state of play in the Republican raceREPUBLICANS: December 4, 2015

TRADITIONALLY, live-interview polling has been the standard technique and its results more trusted. Respondents to Internet polls tend to be self-selected volunteers, not random samples, and it has been assumed that respondents are more likely to spoof machines than ac-tual human beings.

But polling techniques developed for a nation with universal landline tele-phones and a population that answers the phone may not be producing reliable results in a nation where, according to Politico’s Steven Shepard, 47 percent of adults now live in cellphone-only house-holds.

Trump’s better-than-average show-ings in Internet and automated polls suggest that his poll numbers are being boosted by non-voters. But the vastly increased viewership for Republican debates this cycle suggests that he may be drawing previous non-voters into the electorate.

One thing polls of any kind don’t do well is project turnout. We’ll be able to see whether Trump’s poll numbers hold up in the next two months of polling. But we won’t see whether he attracts new voters to the polls until the results from Iowa and New Hampshire come in. Re-publican primary turnout wasn’t robust in 2008 or 2012. There’s room for it to balloon this time.

Other candidates’ standings are eas-ier to assess. Ben Carson, with dispro-portionate support from religious con-servatives, seems to be falling out of contention even in religious-conserva-tive-heavy Iowa.

Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who won their Senate seats as upstarts against party establishments in 2010 and 2012, have moved into double digits nationally and in early states.

Jeb Bush, leading in national and New Hampshire polls until July, now seems mired in single digits, despite heavy super-PAC advertising. Evidently, few Republican voters are eager to run a dy-nastic nominee against Hillary Clinton.

It’s theoretically possible that Chris Christie (endorsed by the New Hamp-shire Union Leader) or John Kasich could jump into contention by winning or placing in New Hampshire. It seems unlikely that in this crowded field any-one else could vault into the top tier as Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum did in Iowa in 2008 and 2012.

THE DREAM scenario for Repub-licans skeptical about Trump is that he brings new people to the polls who ul-timately rally to another nominee. A nightmare scenario is if Trump is nomi-nated and runs worse than others, as he does in current polling, against Hillary Clinton. An even worse nightmare: if a disgruntled Trump runs as an indepen-dent candidate.

MichaelBarone



America’s largest health insur-er, UnitedHealth Group Inc., is losing so much money on

the Affordable Care Act exchange poli-cies it sells in 34 states that CEO Ste-phen Hemsley apologized to investors in New York on Tuesday. “It was for us a bad decision,” Hemsley said, accord-ing to Bloomberg News. UnitedHealth stayed out of the Obamacare market in its first year. “In retrospect, we should have stayed out longer,” Hemsley add-ed. UnitedHealth may get out of the in-dividual market in 2017.

UnitedHealth spokesman Tyler Ma-son wanted to be clear that Hemsley was not trashing Obamacare; he simply was describing one provider’s experi-ence.

HOUSE MINORITY Leader Nancy Pelosi likes to say that Obamacare is un-der assault from Republicans who want to destroy the health care program, but it looks as though the program itself — written by Democrats and passed with-out a single Republican floor vote — is sinking under its own weight.

This is where I would expect some readers to shake their heads and mut-ter about conservatives not wanting the Affordable Care Act to work. Actually, conservatives understood from the get-

go that what President Obama promised would not work. You can’t lower the typical family’s premiums by $2,500 annually, as Obama promised in 2007, and let people keep their old health plans and let consumers keep the doc-tors they like, too. As it turns out, none of those three promises was kept.

The really big lie was Obama’s as-sertion that he could fund near-univer-sal health care by reducing emergency room visits. “What happens is, you don’t have health insurance, you go to the emergency room. You weren’t get-ting a checkup; something that might have been curable with some antibiotics isn’t caught, but by the time you get to the hospital, it’s much more expensive,” he said in 2010.

IT TURNS OUT that emergency room visits are up, not down, since the requirement to have health coverage took effect, according to a recent poll by the American College of Emergency Physicians.

As I write, I can see some readers concluding that a single-payer plan could work better as it would focus on serving patients, not increasing insur-ance company profits. Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin, a Democrat, was ready to implement single-payer — and then had to admit his plan “might hurt our economy.” Twelve out of the original 23 nonprofit co-ops largely funded by Obamacare will no longer offer policies after this year. With about a third of the co-ops having closed, some half a mil-lion Americans have had to scramble for new health care plans. The co-ops claimed they didn’t receive the prom-ised federal support.

In other boardrooms, the news is grim. “All the other big insurers are sig-naling the same problems,” Ana Gupte, an analyst with Leerink Partners, told the Wall Street Journal.

I’VE NEVER understood how so many smart people could believe the claim that the government could pro-vide more health care to more people — for less money — as Pelosi claimed in 2012 when she told Meet the Press, “Everybody will have lower rates, bet-ter quality care and better access.” It was magical thinking, and the results are anything but magical.

Who’s sorry now? A health giant CEOOBAMACARE: December 3, 2015

Debra J.Saunders


Two weeks ago, a man began firing shots in a parking lot in Colorado Springs. He moved

into a Planned Parenthood facility. Even-tually captured, it turns out the man is a lunatic. He lived in a trailer with no running water or electricity. He had a history of violent behavior and crazy theories about the world. But according to the American political left, the man was clearly a Christian pro-life activist.

A FEW DAYS ago in California, Is-lamic radicals shot up a Christmas party. Armed with long barrel rifles — not handguns — and an assortment of other instruments of death, they killed more than a dozen people. The American po-litical left, before the facts became clear, immediately started blaming Repub-licans, the National Rifle Association and Christians. Once it was clear that Muslims were involved, the political left looked the other way.

When Bryce Williams killed two re-porter colleagues live on air in Virginia, the American left immediately blamed Republicans and the National Rifle As-sociation, and demanded new laws for background checks. When it was point-ed out that Williams had a background check before buying his gun and that he was gay, the story disappeared.

The party that booed the addition of God to the Democrats’ political platform in 2012 last week began attacking any-one on social media who dared offer up prayers for the victims of the California shooting. In fact, at the very time victims and families were gathered together pray-ing, the left engaged in “prayer shaming” on social media, mocking and ridiculing anyone who offered up prayers.

The reaction is rather stunning. When bad things happen in this country, the American political right’s default is a madman or Islamic radical. The Ameri-can political left’s default is always to presume their political opponents are at fault. This trend seems only to be in-creasing. A writer for the U.K. Guard-ian openly suggested that perhaps NRA board members should be assassinat-ed. A leftwing political commentator viewed the destruction in last week’s California shooting and declared it the work of a Republican.

We are seeing both a rise in these sorts of shootings and also a rise in political blame from the left directed at their op-ponents. But things were not always this way. Yes, there have been mass shoot-ings in the past. Bill Clinton, even after signing the assault weapons ban into law, saw Columbine. George W. Bush saw the Virginia Tech shooting. Though gun violence continues to decline in this

country, these sorts of events seem to be happening more and more often.

In fact, the pace does seem to have quickened in Barack Obama’s America. The man who tells his fellow

Americans that in-cendiary rhetoric can cause violence once told his sup-porters to take guns to knife fights. He

told supporters to get in the faces of their neighbors. He told Hispanic voters to punish Republicans who, Obama said, were their enemies.

Barack Obama’s White House set up a website in which citizens could re-port other citizens for daring to speak critically of Obamacare. Just last week, President Obama’s Organizing for Ac-tion group put up a website encouraging Americans to root out “climate deniers” and “call them out.”

IF IT SEEMS like we are in a more violent age, we just might be. The vio-lent rhetoric of America’s own president suggests it. He lectures Christians on the crusades and thinks we need to under-stand why Islamic radicals want to kill us. When a lunatic kills three people out-

side a Planned Parenthood facility, the President and his political allies blame pro-life Christians. When an Islamic rad-ical kills soldiers at Fort Hood, the Presi-dent considers it workplace violence.

The political left in this country has decided, in the name of constantly ad-vancing their agenda, to politicize every-thing. You are either with them or against them. The left gives a pass to our actual

It was not always so: The left’s defaultDEMOCRATS: December 4, 2015

enemies, and treats their neighbor as the enemy because their neighbor can cast a vote, but ISIS cannot.

IT USED TO not be so. But then Barack Obama stood up and literally told people to start taking guns to knife fights. Now we are dealing with the con-sequences.

Erick Erickson


11December 16, 2015

Who’s sorry now? A health giant CEO

In October 2014, 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot and killed by Chicago Police Officer

Jason Van Dyke.The dash-cam video of the shooting

was not released until a few days ago, when ordered by a judge. Right before the video’s release, the county prosecu-tor announced the intention to charge Van Dyke with first-degree mur-der. The exces-sive charge and the timing were done, presumably, to mollify potential protesters because the prosecutor called the investigation “ongoing.”

FOLLOWING THE release of the video, which showed McDonald being shot 16 times, protesters marched on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue (aka the “Magnificent Mile”) on Black Friday, inconveniencing shoppers — even bar-ring them from entering and leaving some prominent stores — and causing retailers to lose money on the year’s most important shopping day.

Four weeks ago, the Chicago Tribune reported that three gang members lured a nine-year-old from a park and into an alley, then executed him, allegedly as an act of revenge against the boy’s father, for his ties to a rival gang. “After his brother and his mother were shot,” re-ported the Tribune, “Corey Morgan, 27, and two other Terror Dome (gang) mem-bers had driven around on a daily basis

looking for revenge, prosecutors have alleged. Morgan vowed to kill ‘grand-mas, mamas, kids and all,’ they said.

“The three found their target on a warm Nov. 2 as 83-pound Tyshawn (Lee) played in Dawes Park near his grandmother’s Auburn Gresham home, prosecutors said. One of the three chat-ted up Tyshawn, walked with

him to the alley and then shot him five times as Morgan

and the third in-dividual looked on from a black

SUV, prosecutors charged. Police found Tyshawn’s beloved basketball near his body. Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the boy was targeted because of his father’s gang involvement.”

If anybody marched on the Magnifi-cent Mile to protest yet another Chicago killing — this time the cold-blooded murder of nine-year-old Tyshawn — the media failed to notice.

As for police shootings, in 2014, Chi-cago cops killed 17 people. This year, with one month to go, Chicago cops have killed seven.

On the other hand, Chicago — so far — has seen almost 450 homicides, mostly black on black, and mostly in-volving young blacks. Incredibly, only 25 percent or so are solved.

True, in 2014, of the people fatally shot or wounded by Chicago cops, 78 percent were black. But it is equally true that of all Chicago homicides in 2014, 78 percent of victims were also black.

And for young black men, homicide — usually committed by other young black men — is the No. 1 preventable cause of death. For young white men, it’s auto-mobile accidents.

AS FOR 17-year-old McDonald, the Associated Press describes a kid raised without a father, shuttled around by the child services system: “A black teenager shot 16 times by a white Chicago police officer was a ward of the state when he died, having spent years being shuttled between different relatives’ homes and foster care from the time he was three. ...

“McDonald, (who) grew up without his father involved in his life ... spent

Chicagoland — a tale of two tragediesCHICAGO: December 3, 2015

most of his 17 years as a ward of the state. According to Illinois Department of Children and Family Services’ re-cords, he was taken from his mother at age three in 2000 because the agency had deemed that his mother didn’t pro-vide him with proper supervision. He was placed in a foster home.

“He later moved to his great-grand-mother’s, and returned to his mother in 2002. But citing physical abuse by the mother’s then-boyfriend, the state again took McDonald away. From around age six to 16, he lived with his great-grandmother and then stayed in the same house with an uncle after his great-grandmother died in 2014.”

That McDonald died at the hands of an officer is rare. Sadly, the way Mc-Donald was raised — without a father and without appropriate parenting — is all too common.

Meanwhile, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel has fired Police Superinten-dent Garry McCarthy. And, yes, this is the same McCarthy who, along with Mayor Emanuel and a principal of an urban high school, was portrayed as a hero in a 2014 CNN reality TV series called Chicagoland.

When Ferguson’s Michael Brown and Baltimore’s Freddie Gray were killed by police, Department of Justice probes began within days. Chicago’s Laquan McDonald was killed in Octo-ber 2014, but the DOJ probe didn’t start until April 2015. Mayor Rahm Eman-uel, of course, is Obama’s ex-chief of staff.

A KILLING by a cop causes “ac-tivists” to hit the streets. But a black nine-year-old targeted and killed by three black gang members — no march. What about agitating against a welfare state that encourages women to marry the government — and men to abandon their financial and moral responsibili-ties?

LarryElder



A 211,000 jobs increase for November will finally push the Fed over the line and into

a quarter-of-a-point rate hike later this month. The question is, how much and how fast will the central bank raise its target rates?

My advice to Janet Yellen is to move at the pace of an injured snail. But Yellen is determined to start “normalizing” policy. She’s bet the rhetorical ranch on a December move. It’s sort of like defending the Fed’s manhood, or in this case, wom-anhood.

I DON’T THINK this is the kind of rules-based monetary policy that for-mer Fed head Paul Volcker or Stanford economist John Taylor have been call-ing for. But Yellen doesn’t like rules. The closest she gets is a two percent inflation target. But you know what? Over a normal lifetime, two percent inflation will quintuple the price level, doing enormous damage to consumers, savers, businesses and the economy.

Stock markets cheered the Novem-ber rise in jobs, with the Dow jumping 370 points. I suspect two reasons for this. The economy is rising, although at a tepid pace. And the Fed is expect-ed to move rates higher at a slow and gradual pace.

I sure hope the stock market reading is correct. Because if you look deeper, inflation-sensitive, forward-looking

market prices are showing much more deflation than inflation.

Gold is down. The dollar is up. Com-modity indexes are falling along with bond-market inflation expectations. And a c t u a l inflation is near zero.

If these were nor-mal times, a price-rule approach to monetary policy would suggest easier, not tighter,

actions. But after seven years of zero-interest-rate policy and an explosion in the Fed’s balance sheet, these are not normal times.

Incidentally, there are glitches in the latest jobs report. The private work-week and aggregate hours worked fell. Manufacturing hours worked have been slumping for months. And the ISM man-ufacturing index has dropped below 50 (a contractionary signal).

Year-over-year wage growth has slowed. And while the unemployment rate remains at five percent, the broader U-6 labor-impairment rate increased a tick to 9.9 percent. That points to a lot of discouraged workers, far too many part-time workers, and a key reason why 65 percent of Americans think the country is moving in the wrong direction.

What’s more, business-investment indicators are falling significantly. Busi-ness investment is the key source of de-cent-paying, middle-class-wage-earning jobs. Because business investment has slumped (it never really recovered), vari-ous measures of middle-class take-home pay remain below peak levels.

AND THE business-investment pic-ture may worsen as the broadest mea-sures of corporate profits, which have been flat for two years, are now drop-ping.

Profits are the mother’s milk of stocks and the lifeblood of the economy. But productivity (output per hour) is stag-nant, even as compensation has slightly increased. Therefore unit labor costs that businesses pay are growing faster than the prices businesses receive. So profit margins are turning negative.

Even this tepid, two percent, so-called recovery may be running out of steam.

The long-term slump in business in-vestment is one of the key factors behind the slowdown in productivity, which is

Will Janet Yellen sabotage Hillary Clinton?ECONOMY: December 5, 2015

so important to growth, jobs, and wag-es. And Congress still has not moved to slash the prohibitively high corporate tax rate, which is holding back all manner of activity and forcing cash and firms to move offshore.

That, plus overregulation and a steady flow of anti-business rhetoric from the White House, is blocking the creation of new capital, which is so vital to produc-tivity.

If you penalize businesses, forget about good jobs and rising incomes.

So Democrats are coming out against rate hikes because they fear Janet Yel-len’s Fed-womanhood argument will damage the economy and sabotage Hillary Clinton’s presidential standing. Yellen believes more people working and earning causes inflation. But that’s wrong. Excess money and a cheap dol-lar cause inflation. And Democrats think taxing success and printing money will lead to a better economy. Wrong again. Higher taxes stem investment and sink the economy, and when combined with easy money they generate higher infla-tion.

That’s a bad 2016 scenario for Hill-ary.

But Republicans are missing the point. Rather than rooting for higher interest rates, the GOP Congress should slash the corporate tax rate from 40 to 15 percent, permit full tax expensing for new investment, make repatriation of $2.5 trillion parked overseas as easy as possible, and then seek a price rule based on a sound and stable dollar. All that will spark a new era of growth, and, yes, real interest rates will rise and the Fed can lift its target rates. That’s a po-litical winner.

UNTIL WE GET the right growth model, one that leads to prosperity and price stability, the economic outlook won’t get any better. And the election is still up for grabs.

Larry Kudlow


13December 16, 2015

There is something I forgot to mention in my Sunday col-umn about California’s gun

laws and their failure to stop the San Bernardino terrorist attack last week: I supported California’s 1989 assault weapon ban. The bill passed after a vicious elementary schoolyard shoot-ing in Stockton left five children dead. The shooter had an AK-47. Sacramen-to passed an assault weapon ban that I believed would save lives because it would limit the speed with which a de-ranged thug could kill.

FACT IS, I knew next to nothing about guns. I wrongly equated semi-automatic weapons with automatic weapons. I wrongly thought the guns banned in the 1989 law were faster than other semi-automatic long guns. I felt virtuous because at least I was supporting something.

In 1994, Washington adopted a na-tional assault weapon ban. As the law was about to sunset in 2004, a Depart-ment of Justice evaluation determined that if the ban were renewed, then its effects on gun violence would be “small at best and perhaps too small for reliable measurement.” That’s in part because the banned firearms were used in about two percent of crimes before the law was enacted, according to most studies.

In his Sunday night speech on the

San Bernardino attack, President Barack Obama told America that to fight terrorism, Washington has to make it “harder for people to buy pow-erful assault weapons like the ones that were used in San Bernardino.” Me-thinks he wants some partisan cage-rattling to distract from the frightening prospect of terror in the homeland. On Saturday, a New York Times front-page editorial opined

likewise. The editorial noted that Eu-ropean bans have not stopped terrorist attacks, “but at least those countries are trying.”

THAT’S THE spirit of the assault weapon ban community; it is a good thing to enact laws that don’t work, because it shows you really care. Pat yourself on the back quickly because you’ve just chased other Americans — people who fear that this is an early step in a march against their Second Amendment rights — to their local gun dealer to buy what they think you want to ban.

For the record, I don’t think it’s a good thing if more people own guns. Irresponsible owners leave loaded

weapons where children can find them. Also, more than 20,000 Americans kill themselves with guns annually.

But this is important: There has been “a remarkable decrease in vio-lent crime and gun crime in the U.S. since the early 1990s, even though the number of firearms has increased by about 10 million every year,” Center for Research in Crime and Justice Di-rector James Jacobs told Time maga-zine. “There’s no simple correspon-dence between the number of firearms in private hands and the amount of gun crime, and I often find it somewhat strange that there seems to be a per-ception that things are worse than ever when, in reality, things are really better than they’ve been for decades.”

SO WHAT’S my plan? A few read-ers have asked me. To start, I don’t be-lieve in enacting laws that do not work. I know what did work — the heroic San Bernardino Police Department. Officers arrived at the scene in four minutes. A surveillance team found the terrorists’ rented van; the shootout that followed very likely prevented anoth-er deadly attack. The officers’ training saved lives. The key is to know your enemy. The enemy is Islamic extrem-ism, not American gun owners.

The gun debate, continuedGUN CONTROL: December 8, 2015

Debra J.Saunders


What do you call it when elites fly their private jets to an international climate

change conference to forge a deal with despots that caps American prosperity without our consent? You call it pro-gressivism.

It’s estimated that 50,000 carbon-spewing humans participated in the Paris climate conference. But while President Barack Obama was taking his working dinner at the three-Mi-chelin-star L’Ambroisie, public pro-testers were banned from protesting in the aftermath of the Islamic terror at-tacks. Liberte? Not so much.

IT TOOK a handful of gunmen only one night to impede free expres-sion in Paris. Yet according to the president, the 0.1 to 0.2 C of warming we might see over the next decade — the worst-case scenario predicted by global warming alarmists — is the big-gest crisis facing mankind, worthy of a massive and expensive curbing effort.

That doesn’t mean Obama won’t use the issue of terrorism to refocus

our attention where it belongs. Mil-lions of people might live in fear and suffer under the genuine, deadly threat of radical Islam, but the president con-tends that the Paris conference itself is “a powerful rebuke to the terrorists” and an “act of defiance” in the face of extremism.

Why not? True believers are rarely dissuaded by re-ality. Socialist Francois Hol-lande, president of a country that not only was re-cently a target of Islamic terror but also witnessed the bloodiest conflict of the 20th century, claimed: “Never have the stakes been so high at an international conference. It’s about the future of the planet, the future of life.” Never?

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, a man whose divided nation still suffers unconscionable destitution and tyranny, told leaders that human-kind has “never faced such a test” as climate change. Never?

THESE ARE preposterous exag-gerations that have as much to do with history and science as the book of Revelation. But that’s nothing new, is it? On Wednesday, Obama alleged that without a climate change agreement, there could be “submerged countries, abandoned cities, fields that no longer grow” — assertions that are no

more than fearmon-gering, ratcheted up over the decades by

frustrated envi-ronmentalists and now confidently thrown around by

presidents. These prophecies are teth-ered to reality in the same way Donald Trump’s whoppers are, although the media treat the former with undeserv-ing respect.

Transforming ideology into a “sci-ence” is not a new development on the left. But the most useful indicators tell us that humanity’s prospects are on the upswing. Poverty is declining; crops are producing higher yields; and hu-mans are living longer and healthier

Climate talks reveal progressivism’s true hypocrisyCLIMATE TALKS: December 4, 2015

lives despite the mild warming we’ve experienced. And in spite of these advancements (or maybe because of them), Western leaders are prepared, conveniently enough, to cap growth, spread wealth and centralize power in the way progressives have always wanted to cap growth, spread wealth and centralize power.

The world looks ready for a deal. Developing nations will receive repa-rations for the capitalist sins of ad-vanced nations — about $100 billion each year. Corporations will be subsi-dized so they can create more unpro-ductive industries to meet arbitrary caps. And the worst carbon offenders in the world will have to do nothing. What’s not to like?

If a deal can be reached, Obama will have to trust that Communist China — the world’s most prodigious carbon emitter — will voluntarily implement economic restraints about 30 years from now, by which time the U.S. will have to reach a 26 to 28 percent re-duction in greenhouse gas emissions. Obama will implement regulations to get that done unilaterally. So China will have more of a say in what hap-pens to our environmental policy than Congress. But Obama will also nego-tiate with a number of other unsavory despots, such as the homicidal Robert Mugabe, who represents the African position at the Paris negotiations. He will not, however, bring the deal to Congress, which represents the major-ity of the American people.

The Paris agreement might be the biggest, most crucial international deal the world has ever known, but it is not important enough to be subjected to the traditional checks and balances of American governance. Global warm-ing “does not pause for partisan grid-lock,” the president explained this summer. In other words, the president does not have to “pause” for Congress if he feels like using the regulatory state to implement his preferred parti-san policy.

THIS KIND of circumvention will be cheered by those who once feigned indignation when prior presidents abused executive power. This is really important, as you know. Obama hopes “to make climate change policy the signature environmental achievement of his, and perhaps any, presidency,” said an approving New York Times edi-tor. Progressives are perfectly content to surrender freedoms to fight global warming — perfectly content to give the executive branch unprecedented power to “act.” And when the private jets come back and the pretend off-sets are cashed in and the moralizing begins, you will know they did it for your own good.

DavidHarsanyi



Because grazing land is inac-cessible, sheep that live on North Ronaldsay, northern-

most of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, dine almost exclusively on dabberlocks (Alaria esculenta) and dulse (Palmaria palmata). That’s seaweed to you and me. Small, dark and rugged, North Ronaldsay sheep are known to produce superb wool, although some people claim their mutton has a fishy taste.

The first Russian language edition of Boris Pasternak’s novel Doctor Zhiva-go was published by an American pub-lishing company funded by the CIA. Soviet publishers in the mid-1950s refused the book because it was criti-cal of communism. The CIA figured anything the Soviets objected to so strongly was bound to be in the interest of democracy, so it arranged for copies to be printed in Russian and smuggled into the Soviet Union.

THE STORY of Hanukkah centers on a rebellion led by Judah the Macca-bee in 166 B.C. to overthrow the Greek ruler Antiochus Epiphanes and reclaim the Temple for the Jewish people. It’s one of history’s earliest examples of guerilla warfare. In November 2015, archaeologists unearthed a fortress in Jerusalem where they believe some of the fighting occurred.

Choosing the perfect gift for the president of the United States has re-sulted in some well-meant, but weird selections. Theodore Roosevelt re-ceived a Grevy’s zebra and a caseload of baboons from King Menelik of Ab-yssinia. (They were given to the Na-

tional Zoo.) Richard Nixon received a tapestry portrait of himself from the Shah of Iran. Warren G. Harding re-ceived no fewer than 150 cornets. (He blew a mean horn, apparently.) And a thoughtful wigmaker gave John Quin-cy Adams a toupee.

In 2013, the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant in Sweden was shut down when a swarm of jellyfish — or, more properly, a “bloom” of jellyfish — clogged its cooling water intake sys-tem. Similar jellyfish infiltrations have occurred at power plants in Scotland, Japan, Israel and the United States in recent years. As jellyfish populations increase (thanks to environmental change) expect to see more of them clogging the works at power plants around the world.

When Frank Sinatra died, he was buried with a flask of Jack Daniel’s Ten-nessee Whiskey. Jackie Gleason reput-edly introduced Frank to the drink, but Sinatra made it his signature, famously sipping it onstage between numbers. In 2014, Jack Daniel’s introduced a lim-ited edition 90-proof whiskey named for Sinatra, and in 2015 it offered an even smaller batch select whiskey in honor of what would have been Sina-tra’s 100th birthday, Dec. 12, 2015.

TRIVIA1. The 2004 film Beyond the Sea is a

biopic about which singing sensation?A) Bobby DarinB) Bobby RydellC) Bobby ShermanD) Bobby Vinton2. Whose experiments in “classical

conditioning” and the “physiology of

digestion” earned him the Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology in 1904?

A) Anton ChekhovB) Mikhail LomonosovC) Ivan PavlovD) Igor Sikorsky3. Hanukkah, the Festival of Lights,

is celebrated for how many nights?A) 3B) 8C) 12D) 304. When Harry Truman received

a gift of two chickens from a French farmer, what did he do with them?

A) Cooked themB) Gave them to an American farmerC) Kept them as petsD) Returned them5. A near-fatal sting by a box jelly-

fish stopped what distance swimmer’s third attempt at swimming from Flor-ida to Cuba?

A) Janet EvansB) Missy FranklinC) Diana NyadD) Dara Torres6. Sinatra’s first Academy Award

was for a 1946 short film called “The House I Live In,” made to oppose what?

A) Anti-SemitismB) Child abuseC) Nuclear weaponsD) Slavery(answers on page 19)

Leslie Elman is the author of Weird But True: 200 Astounding, Outrageous and Totally Off the Wall Facts. Contact her at [email protected].

Leslie’s Trivia BitsLESLIE TRIVIA BITS: December 7, 2015

Progressives are increasingly preoccupied with income in-equality, and their current hero,

Sen. Bernie Sanders, favors increasing the tax system’s progressivity. So, in this 103rd year of the income tax, it is timely to note that there still is no intellectually sturdy case for progressive taxation.

Arguments for it are invariably argu-ments for increased equality of social outcomes. Because individuals have dif-ferent vocational desires and different aptitudes for adding value to the econ-omy, inequality is inevitable. Because individuals have different social sensi-bilities, opinions will differ about what degrees of inequality are intolerably un-lovely (more about this aesthetic metric in a moment). But inequality, even when unlovely to some, is unjust only when it arises from unjust social arrangements. So, the degree to which inequality is morally troubling depends on the degree to which the process that allocates wealth does so according to merit and self-reli-ance rather than political influence and rent-seeking.

SOCIETY SHOULD prevent ex-treme privation, no matter how far the top earners are from those near the bot-tom. But who is to decide, and how are they to decide, the ideal spread between the top and the bottom of income distri-bution? The argument for progressive taxation must demonstrate this: such tax-ation does not do more harm by slowing economic growth than faster economic growth would do good by its distributive effects.

Although the argument for progressive taxation usually begins with a moral judg-ment about social conditions, it usually becomes a moral assertion about equi-table sacrifices. It asserts that money has declining marginal utility — that $1,000 subtracted from a wealthy person’s in-come diminishes that person’s happiness, or society’s sum of happiness, less than would $1,000 subtracted from the income of a person with a modest income.

But this ostensibly scientific, mean-ing empirical, generalization about how people value money often conceals moral judgments about how people ought to value money, or — again, an essentially aesthetic judgment — about the “social value” of expenditures by the wealthy and the non-wealthy. When these moral judgments are codified in tax policy, they conflict with this idea: “It is one of the virtues of a free society that, within the widest limits, men are free to maximize their satisfactions according to their own hierarchy of preferences.”

So wrote two University of Chicago law professors, Walter J. Blum and Harry Kalven Jr., in a famous 1952 essay, “The Uneasy Case for Progressive Taxation.” Their understanding of a free society is shared by many conservatives, including

many Republican presidential aspirants, who favor a “flat” or proportionate in-come tax: If taxpayer A earns 20 times more than taxpayer B earns, taxpayer A pays 20 times more dollars.

Proportionate taxation always is what progressive taxation never is: simple. What justifies progressive taxation, and characterizes progressivism, is confidence that at any moment in society’s endless evolution, what is equitable can be known and society can be fine-tuned to achieve it. Which is how we got our baroque tax code.

AS BLUM and Kalven noted, “It is the very nature of majority rule that the majority can vote distinctive burdens for the minority.” It is, however, the nature of reality that burdens imposed on the

wealthy minority can injure the major-ity by impairing economic incentives, thereby suppressing growth. Progressive taxation reduces the rewards of invest-ments, and the real rate of return on sav-ings, thereby encouraging consumption over saving and hence over capital f o r m a - tion. When progres-

sive taxation slows economic growth, it makes inequalities of wealth more du-rable by retarding the accumulation

of new fortunes. And by encouraging constant tinkering with the tax code to perfect equity, progressive taxation gives a patina of altruism to rent-seeking by economic factions, whereby government enriches those sophisticated at manipu-lating it.

Because other arguments produce only an “uneasy” case for progressive taxa-

The empty case for progressive taxationPROGRESSIVE TAXATION: December 6, 2015

tion, this is the argument of last resort: All striving occurs in, and all success is conditioned by, a social context. Each individual’s achievement, like each in-dividual, is derivative of society, which is entitled to socialize — conscript — whatever portion of each individual’s acquisition that society calculates is its rightful share. Because collective choic-es (provision of education, infrastruc-ture and other public goods) facilitate individuals’ strivings, the collectivity, represented by government, can take as much of created wealth as it decides it made possible. Being judge and jury in its own case, government will gener-ously estimate its contributions and en-titlements.

THE ARGUMENTS for progres-sive taxation range from the feeble to the sinister. The case for it is not uneasy, it is nonexistent.

GeorgeWill

(c) 2015, Washington Post Writers Group

15December 16, 2015

Leslie’s Trivia Bits

The Republican Party certainly has its problems: a chaotic presidential race; a despised

congressional party; unpopularity among the rapidly growing number of non-whites.

But the Democratic Party has its problems as well. One of them is the fact that the two signature policies of Barack Obama — the Affordable Care Act and the nuclear agreement with Iran — are unpopular with most voters.

YOU HEARD little from the presi-dent about Obamacare or his approach to Iran during his 2012 re-election cam-paign. You’ve heard little about them from Democratic candidates for Con-gress in 2010, 2012 and 2014 or those running for next year.

It’s also not clear that these policies would have been pursued in the same form if Hillary Clinton had been elected president in 2008. Would she have taken a mono-partisan approach to health care and hewn to it after the election of a Republican as senator from Massachu-setts? Would she have banked so heav-ily on the notion that concessions could make Iran a friendlier power in the Mid-dle East?

Maybe, maybe not. But as the certain Democratic nominee and as Obama’s former secretary of state, she is saddled with them.

Richard Nixon in 1960, George H. W. Bush in 1988 and Al Gore in 2000

sought third presidential terms for their parties when their incumbent presidents had job approval well above 50 percent. Bush, after turbulent primaries, won a solid victory. Nixon and Gore, nominat-ed with only brief opposition, lost by a hair.

Barack Obama’s job approval is cur-rently 44 percent,

and Clinton, like Nixon and Gore, seems unlikely to

undergo serious testing in the primaries and caucuses.

There is a larger problem here, not just for Clinton but also for her party. Since the 1930s it has been dedicated to the proposition that expanding govern-ment will help ordinary citizens make their way through the perils of (then) an industrial-age and (now) an informa-tion-age society.

The problem is that these seven years of the Obama administration, quite con-trary to the president’s intention, have discredited government as an instru-ment to improve people’s lives.

The most glaring failure has been Obamacare, from the implosion of the healthcare.gov website to the recent announcement of the nation’s largest health insurer that it would no longer of-fer policies on Obamacare’s exchanges.

Designing government policies that can produce positive results without negative unanticipated consequences is a tricky business. Social Security re-quired government to collect taxes and send out checks on time — something a

competent bureaucracy can do. Obam-acare requires government to do many more things, some of which government is not very good at. Voters have noticed.

THEY HAVE noticed, as well, that government is no longer very good at doing things almost everyone thinks it should do, such as providing health care for military veterans. Democrats can argue that the Department of Veter-ans Affairs hospital system’s problems antedate 2008. But government is their baby, and they’ve been in charge for seven years.

Last week’s mass murders in San Bernardino have underlined govern-

Dems’ problem: Americans have little faith in governmentDEMOCRATS: December 8, 2015

ment’s limits. Obama and Clinton have called for more gun control measures. But California already has the laws they want Congress to pass. Overall trends in Pew Research Center polling data in the last 20 years show an increase in the percent of Americans who support gun rights and a decrease in the percent of Americans who support gun control.

A third problem for Democrats is ap-parent in the fact that near the end of multiple Democratic presidential terms, sizable forces in the party turn left. A few examples are: Henry Wallace’s Pro-gressives in 1948; the anti-Vietnam war movement in 1968; Edward Kennedy’s challenge of Jimmy Carter in 1980; and Ralph Nader’s third-party candidacy in 2000.

Similar things are happening today — in the Bernie Sanders candidacy, the Black Lives Matter movement and re-bellions on college campuses. When the public has soured on Democratic poli-cies, party rebels double down and de-mand more.

Republicans have faced similar dis-content on the right, from Barry Gold-water in 1960, Ronald Reagan in 1976, Pat Buchanan in the 1990s and the tea party movement in the wake of George W. Bush’s presidency.

But the problem is more acute for the Democratic Party, which has always been a coalition of disparate groups: the top and bottom of the income and edu-cation scales, ghetto blacks and gentry liberals, left-wing academics and labor unions.

HOLDING THAT coalition togeth-er is easier when faith in government is strong. It’s harder today, when, as Pew reports, only 19 percent of Americans say they can trust the government all or most of the time. For Democrats, that’s a big problem.

MichaelBarone


16 December 16, 2015

In Sunday’s first-round of regional elections in France, the clear and stunning winner was the National

Front of Marine Le Pen. Her party rolled up 30 percent of the

vote, and came in first in six of 13 re-gions. Marine herself won 40 percent of her northeast district.

Despite tremen-dous and positive publicity from his presidential role in the Charlie Hebdo and Paris massacres and the climate summit, Francois Hollande’s Socialist Party ran third.

WHAT DROVE the victory of the National Front?

According to the Wall Street Journal’s William Horobin, “Ms. Le Pen, who has combined the party’s anti-immigration stance with calls for hard-line security measures and tighter control of France’s borders, has only bolstered her support in the three weeks since the Paris attacks.”

The rightward shift in French poli-tics is being replicated across Europe, as nations tighten borders and erect new checkpoints against the tsunami of mi-grants and refugees from Africa and the Middle East.

Angela Merkel and open borders are yesterday in Europe; Marine Le Pen is tomorrow.

And the rightward shift is occurring here as well, propelled by the terrorist atrocity in San Bernardino. On immigra-tion, terrorism, borders, crime and secu-rity, Americans are moving to the right.

Donald Trump has taken the toughest stance. He will send illegal immigrants

back and make Mexico pay for his wall. He is the least restrained in what he would do to the Islamic State. And his lead nationally has now reached an un-precedented 20 points.

I n Iowa, Sen. Ted Cruz is surging. Cruz would “carpet bomb [ISIS] into oblivion,” and try to make the sand around Raqqa

“glow in the dark.” He charges Marco Rubio with collaborating with Sen. Chuck Schumer in backing amnesty for illegal immigrants.

In return, Rubio tears into Cruz daily, charging him with being soft on nation-al security for having backed the USA Freedom Act that denies the NSA instant access to all phone and computer records of American citizens.

Like most Republicans, Cruz support-ed keeping NSA’s hands off the metadata of electronic communications of U.S. citizens. But that position seems more suited to the libertarian moment that has passed, not the national security moment we live in today.

Chris Christie says San Bernardino proves his point about keeping refugee wives and even three-year-old orphans out of New Jersey. As we now know, that female terrorist may have been the radi-calizer.

The Clintons have long been reliable weather vanes of national politics. And Hillary Clinton, too, has begun moving to the right. Sunday, she said she was ready to take “military action” if Iran fails to comply with the slightest provision of President Obama’s nuclear agreement.

SHE WANTS tech companies to start policing and shutting down Islamist websites that preach hate and may have radicalized the couple that carried out San Bernardino. Clinton added dismissively, “You are going to hear all the familiar complaints: ‘freedom of speech.’”

Monday’s Washington Post reported on how Bernie Sanders, yesterday’s Socialist sensation, received a tepid re-sponse when he spoke to a crowd about income equality, but failed to address the Islamist terrorist atrocity and what he would do about it.

Last week, the New York Times ran its first front-page editorial in 95 years, de-manding new federal gun laws. Ameri-ca’s response — a stampede to gun stores to buy firearms for self-defense.

Outlawing AK-47s and AR-15s may

United States of America and France turn right

seem like common sense to the Times. But Americans do not believe such laws would keep terrorists from getting these weapons. And many realize those cops used semi-automatic rifles to turn the terrorists’ SUV into a pile of junk in a single minute — and them into Bonnie and Clyde.

Even the president is signaling a shift to the right.

Sunday, in only his third Oval Office address, Obama said he will intensify bombing in Iraq and Syria. He wants tougher screening of those coming to America. And he concedes that “an ex-tremist ideology has spread among some Muslim communities” and is a “real problem Muslims must confront.”

Tougher on crime, tougher on terror-ists, tougher on securing the border — that is the demand of the moment, and probably of 2016.

Americans are coming to realize we cannot prevent all such slaughters as Ford Hood and Virginia Tech, Colum-bine and Aurora, Tucson and the Navy Yard, Newtown and Umpqua College, and Charleston.

Nor can we prevent all Islamist ter-rorism if Muslims raised here or living here become radicalized in mosques or by the Internet, and seek revenge and paradise as warriors of ISIS by slaugh-tering Americans.

Al Qaeda and ISIS now realize the worldwide publicity gains of Paris and San Bernardino in terrorizing the West. And they will surely seek to replicate those massacres.

And every new atrocity, whether of the work place or Islamist variety, will make cops more popular and guns seem more essential.

NEW HORRORS are likely ahead — that will continue America’s turn to the right.

December 8, 2015

PatBuchanan


This Week’s Conservative Focus 17 Islamist Terrorism

Everything we know so far about the slaughter of 14 people in San Bernardino,

California, points to Islamist terrorism. Yet President Obama’s comments on Wednesday suggest he thinks the best response is to stiffen gun control laws. “The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel any-where else in the world. And there are some steps we could take not to elimi-nate every one of these mass shootings, but to improve the odds that they don’t happen as frequently: common-sense gun safety laws, stronger background checks.”

PRESIDENT OBAMA is eager to have a debate over gun violence but he seems loath to discuss terror-ism on American soil. Whether it was in response to the killings in Califor-nia or the massacre of soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, or the Boston mara-thon bombings, the president gets cold feet when it comes to con-demning Islamist terrorism.

After Nidal Hasan murdered 13 of his fellow soldiers on Nov. 5, 2009, President Obama took to a podium for a previously scheduled press event and

gave “shout outs” to participants for several minutes before turning to the deadly events of the day, which he de-scribed only as “a horrific outburst of v i o l e n c e . ” Even after investigators learned that Hasan had been

communica t ing with Islamist ter-rorist Anwar al-Awlaki prior to his

attack, the gov-ernment contin-

ued to classify the massacre as “work-place violence.”

IN THE AFTERMATH of the 2013 Boston bombings, the president

Call it Islamist terrorism, Mr. Presidentexhibited the same dispassionate de-meanor — Obama Cool — that has characterized most of his pronounce-ments on terrorism. “We will find out who did this; we’ll find out why they did this. Any responsible individuals, any responsible groups will feel the full weight of justice,” he said. He fi-nally described the bombings as “an act of terrorism,” but only after con-siderable public criticism of his fail-ure to do so earlier. And even then, he qualified his remarks by noting, “Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terror.”

Contrast President Obama’s reac-tions in these incidents to French Pres-ident Francois Hollande’s response to the terrorist attacks in Paris last month. Hollande immediately called for war; Obama called for justice.

In the American and French terrorist incidents, the main perpetrators were either born or grew up in the societ-ies they attacked. They were domestic terrorists motivated by a radical, reli-gious-based ideology.

Islam is not synonymous with Is-lamism. The overwhelming majority of Muslims do not adhere to the Is-lamist ideology that drives terrorists like Nidal Hasan, the Tsarnaev broth-ers or the seven men who murdered 130 Parisians. Islamism is defined by its bloody call to jihad against unbe-lievers and imposition of a caliphate over Muslims. Terrorism is the method Islamists employ, but it is their fanati-cal religious beliefs that drive them.

When our leaders cannot even bear to name the problem, it is hard to imagine they can solve it. President Obama isn’t alone in refusing to utter the phrase Islamist terrorism. Repeat-edly pressed on the issue at the second Democratic presidential debate, Hill-ary Clinton refused to say the words “Islamic terrorism” when referring to what happened in Paris.

YES, WE HAVE too many mass shootings in the United States — and we need to find ways of preventing them. But what took place in San Ber-nardino this week wasn’t only a mass shooting. The husband and wife who donned combat gear and armed them-selves with semi-automatic weapons, hundreds of rounds of ammunition and bombs were likely on a mission to kill unbelievers in a grotesque perversion of religion. If we are to prevent further such attacks, we need to focus as much on the ideology that drives them as we do on the weapons they use. But we can only do so if we are willing to call these acts what they are: Islamist ter-rorism.

December 4, 2015

Linda Chavez


In the aftermath of Paris and be-fore San Bernardino, Hillary Clinton articulated the forced

catechism of the left: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.”

What happens when a major politi-cal party becomes so wedded to politi-cal correctness that it feels constrained to deny reality? Clinton could hardly have chosen a less opportune moment to squeeze her eyes shut about the threat of Islamic extremism, a threat that is glaringly, blazingly obvious.

THE FIRST part of what Clinton said was true. Islam is not our adver-sary. There are an estimated 1.6 bil-lion Muslims in the world, and if all of them were violent extremists, we’d have a planet drowning in blood. Most Muslims are peaceful. Beyond that, they practice charity, care for the sick and encourage good works.

But there is a fever sweeping the Muslim world that has infected a sig-nificant minority of Muslims — and because Muslims are so numerous, that minority amounts to hundreds of millions. It began in the 1920s with the Muslim Brotherhood. Its Shia incarna-tion has captured the government of Iran. Saudi oil money has facilitated its spread to places such as Pakistan and Afghanistan. President Obama, de-luded from the get-go that our enemy was not Islamic extremism but merely “al Qaeda,” stood by while the Islamic extremists in Iraq and Syria morphed into a new entity called ISIS. Obama never saw it coming because he was determined to believe, with Clinton and other Democrats, that terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.

Isn’t it odd, then, that in Nigeria (70

percent Muslim) and Lebanon (54 per-cent Muslim) large majorities say they are “very worried” about Islamic ex-tremism in their countries? The pres-ence of Boko Haram in Nigeria and Hezbollah in Lebanon has a way of concentrating the mind. People around the world are worried about Islamic radicalism, too. Perhaps they are mind-ful of 9/11, the Fort Hood shooting (2009), the Boston Marathon bomb-ing (2013), the bombings of

trains in Madrid (2004), the three-day siege of hotels and a Jewish center in Mumbai (2008), the bombings of a bus and trains in London (2005), the attack on a Jewish school in Toulouse (2012), the slaughter of students at a Kenya university (2015), the attack on high schoolers in Peshawar, Pakistan (2014), the shootings at a Mali hotel (2015), the stabbings in Israel (2015), the Bali bombings (2002), the Jakar-ta bombing (2009) and so very many more, to say nothing of the treatment of religious minorities, homosexuals, and women in many Muslim societies.

AS FOR WHETHER Muslims are tolerant, there’s no doubt that some are, but as a 2013 Pew survey of global attitudes found, 88 percent of Egyptian and 62 percent of Pakistani Muslims favor the death penalty for apostates. “This is also the majority view among Muslims in Malaysia, Jordan and the Palestinian territories,” reported the Washington Post after reviewing the data.

We Americans congratulate our-selves for our comparatively superior

ability to assimilate Muslim immi-grants into our society, and perhaps we deserve the pat on the back. Then again, we have nothing like the num-bers of Muslim immigrants Europe does, and the percentages matter. Even among American Muslims, seven per-cent told Pew in 2011 that “suicide bombing or other violence against civilians is justified to defend Islam against its enemies sometimes.” One percent said “often” and five percent said “rarely.” Eighty-one percent said “never.” Those responses were not very different from the views of Turk-ish and Indonesian Muslims.

Islam is in the throes of a religious war. The primary victims are other Muslims, but thousands of Chris-tians, Jews, Hindus and others have been bloodied by it as well. Obama told Christians not to get on “our high horse,” referring to the Crusades. Yes, when Christianity was about the age that Islam is now, it too was engulfed in righteous violence (Protestants ver-sus Catholics). The West is long past it. They’re not. If another civilization had been able to exert influence over Europe in the 1500s and 1600s to quell the violence and encourage the “better angels” of the society, it would have been no bad thing.

AS FOR TODAY, we owe it to our-selves to be alert to the obvious threat that radical Islam poses to the people of the Middle East (primarily) and to the rest of us. Radicalism has had the wind at its back in the Muslim world for nearly a century. It shows no sign of abating just because Clinton and company bury their heads in the sand.

December 4, 2015

‘Nothing to do with Islam’

MonaCharen



December is often the time of too many events, too many parties, too many ob-

ligations, too many gifts and too much family. There are quite a few Decem-bers in my recent memory where I did too much, slept too little and was worn out or sick by Christmas. The season can be — if left unchecked — exhaust-ing rather than exhilarating.

LAST SUNDAY marked the begin-ning of Advent. It is the season that marks the expectation, the waiting and the preparation for Christmas, the cel-ebration of Christ’s birth. It also marks the beginning of the church year, when the readings and the rituals observed throughout the year start anew. How-ever, what I like most about this season is the repetition of things past.

It’s the repetition of family tradi-tions, small and large, that provides the comfort, reminder and framework to enjoy the season. Spending time with those we love, celebrating the birth of Christ, who provided hope and life to a dark-filled world.

Today we, too, have many reasons to feel dark, to feel overwhelmed, to worry about tomorrow: terrorism, do-mestic shootings, a stagnant economy and rapidly changing international relations. We do not live in a stable world.

It is in these fluid times that follow-ing traditions, routines and rituals can provide the most comfort. They al-low us to remain centered and focused while the outside world is churning. They allow us to breathe, relax and ap-preciate those we love.

These past few years have been flu-id, and featured events both joyful and sorrowful for our family. My husband’s father passed away this year, joining my mother in heaven. We miss him, my mother and the infamous “Granny” (my husband’s maternal grandfather) who passed away four years ago this summer. Our children have gained two cousins, who infect our lives with laughter and energy. Our children have grown in years and maturity, constant-ly and consistently amazing us.

These events have led to changes, but our family has gained strength.

I WORRY less (well, I attempt to worry less) about the future, knowing that it is out of my control, and I try to slow down and appreciate the mo-ments that I have, while I have them. While it’s made me more aware of how little power I have, it has also made me more aware of the power and grace of God. It has made me more apprecia-tive of God’s grace and presence in the small daily events, finding a parking place near the front of a store, an ap-pointment opening up when needed, a

friend calling in my time of need. Lit-tle events that speak to my heart.

God’s grace appears not so much in large events, but more in the small, powerful moments of my day. Last night, we hung the Christmas orna-ments on the tree, displayed the manger scene and pulled the Christmas mugs out of the attic. As we worked, we listened to Christmas music.

Our 14-year-old, Robert, is now large enough to carry the boxes up and down from the attic, and our 16-year-old, Maggie, decorated the majority of the tree by herself. It was much different from the days when their plastic ornaments only hung on the bottom third of the tree.

When I came across a small ceramic angel that had broken in half Maggie said, “Don’t worry. We will find its pieces and fix it.” And we did. Robert fixed the light-up “Merry Christmas” doormat, while my husband Jimmy c h a n g e d lights.

Stepping back after the last orna-ment was hung, Maggie declared it a “perfect tree.” Noting that she likes the way we

have various types of ornaments hung on the tree, she said, “I can remember almost all of them.”

This small moment in a busy day was a picture of God’s grace. Her smile and happy memories of Christmases past, her mention of loved ones missed and

Let your presence be your present this seasonCHRISTMAS: December 3, 2015

her leadership in decorating the tree, as well as her brother’s amazing hauling skills, made me realize that life does continually change but what is impor-tant is being with those we love.

While it’s always tempting to do more, to be involved more, especially this time of year, this is exactly the time we need to slow down, to do less, to be present more with those whom we love.

THIS ADVENT, remember that the season is not just about the event, but about the expectation, the waiting, the preparation, the everyday events where you can see God’s grace shine. Slow down, and let your presence be your present this season.

JackieGingrich

Cushman(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate

Wisdom can often be found in unexpected places. During debate in the

House of Commons on whether Brit-ain should join the U.S. and Russia in bombing ISIS targets in Syria, Hilary Benn, the shadow foreign secretary of the liberal Labour Party, delivered a speech that approached Winston Churchill in its vision:

“AND WE ARE here faced by fascists. Not just their calculated bru-tality, but their belief that they are superior to every single one of us in this chamber tonight, and all of the people that we represent. They hold us in contempt. They hold our values in contempt. They hold our belief in tol-erance and decency in contempt. They hold our democracy, the means by which we will make our decision to-night, in contempt. And what we know about fascists is that they need to be de-feated. And it is why, as we have heard tonight, socialists and trade unionists and others joined the International Bri-gade in the 1930s to fight against Fran-co. It’s why this entire House stood up against Hitler and Mussolini. It is why our party has always stood up against the denial of human rights and for jus-tice. And my view, Mr. Speaker, is that we must now confront this evil. It is now time for us to do our bit in Syria. And that is why I ask my colleagues to vote for the motion tonight.”

Members of both parties cheered and the motion passed.

In the U.S., we get moronic state-ments claiming that climate change is “directly related” to terrorism (Sand-ers), endure calls for more gun laws

when current gun laws are disobeyed, and stand bewildered as our president, in the face of attacks by radical Is-lamists, says, “We cannot turn against one another by letting this fight be de-fined as a war between America and Islam,” while Attorney General Lo-retta Lynch targets people who use anti-Islamic language for fear it “will be accompanied by acts of violence.” Meanwhile, Islamic extremists move about the U.S. with ap-

parent impunity. MSNBC and other networks, meanwhile, give airtime to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a so-called advo-cacy group with ties to the Holy Land Foundation and Hamas, to spout pro-paganda that the San Bernardino mur-ders had nothing to do with Islam. And let’s not forget those “Christian” kill-ers who shoot up abortion clinics, as if these are immorally equivalent.

THE BBC also refuses to label ISIS killers as terrorists, preferring to call them “militants.”

In his brief address Sunday, Presi-dent Obama offered no new strategy for defeating Islamic terrorism. He disingenuously claimed his policies are working. If this is success, what does failure look like?

The UK and U.S. have invited this madness by admitting thousands into our countries, many of whom come from regions that do not embrace

Western values, foolishly hoping these people will assimilate.

The FBI says it is investigating ISIS suspects in every U.S. state. Why, then, are we allowing more refugees in before these investigations are con-cluded and action taken?

Former House Speaker Newt Gin-grich described the Islamist movement as a “virus.” A virus must be isolated and eradicated. Bombing a foreign country is not enough. Just as a virus requires leadership from the medi-cal community and cooperation from those at risk of infection, the ISIS vi-rus requires political leadership, which President Obama has failed to provide.

What will our leaders say if these murderers succeed in acquiring weap-ons of mass destruction? What hap-pens if one of these weapons wipes out London, New York or Washington? Should we take decisive action now, or wring our hands later?

On Nov. 16, 1934, Winston Churchill, who stood virtually alone in his early warnings about the growing rearmament of Germany and the threat it posed to a world that preferred the false comfort denial brings, told his fellow parliamentarians: “As we go to and fro in this peaceful country with its decent, orderly people going about their business under free institutions and with so much tolerance and fair play in their laws and customs, it is startling and fearful to realize that we are no longer safe in our island home.”

EIGHTY-ONE YEARS later, we are again unsafe.

A Churchill-like momentISLAMIST TERRORISM: December 7, 2015

CalThomas(c) 2015, Tribune Media Services

19December 16, 2015

CONTACT INFORMATION

ANSWERS1) Beyond the Sea was based on

the life of Bobby Darin.2) Remember Pavlov’s dogs? Ivan

Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for his work in classical conditioning.

3) Hanukkah is celebrated for eight nights.

4) Sorry animal lovers, Harry Tru-man had those two chickens fried, American style.

5) Jellyfish thwarted Diana Nyad’s third and fourth attemptst o swim be-tween Florida and Cuba. She com-pleted her goal on the fifth try, in 2013.

6) Frank Sinatra starred in “The House I Live In,” a film that con-demned anti-Semitism.

TRIVIA ANSWERSAnswers from page 14

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Need to make a correction on your

mailing label? Contact us at 800-888-3039 or [email protected]

Individual Contact InformationGreenberg - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected] Lowry - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected] - [email protected]

Contact through Creators Syndicate Michael Barone, Austin Bay, Brent Bozell, Pat Buchanan, Mona Charen, Linda Chavez, Jackie Gingrich Cushman, Larry Elder, Erick Erickson, Joseph Farah, David Harsanyi, Laura Hollis, Terry Jeffrey, Larry Kudlow, David Limbaugh, Dick Morris, Wil-liam Murchison, Paul Paquet, Dennis Prager, Ben Shapiro, Thomas Sowell, Matt Towery Contact - [email protected]

Contact through Universal PressAnn CoulterContact by mail :c/o Universal Press Syndicate1130 Walnut StreetKansas City, MO 64106

Poor liberals, they just can’t catch a break. Liberal pundits and politicians were living high on

the hog after the shooting at the Colorado Springs abortion clinic known as Planned Parenthood. They thought they had dis-covered the Holy Grail of political oppor-tunities after the tragedy; the elusive op-portunity to go after guns while painting Planned Parenthood as a warm and fuzzy victim of domestic terrorism by Chris-tian, pro-life, conservatives. Some liberal pundits even tried to equate Christians and the attack on Planned Parenthood with Islamic terrorism.

BUT THEN came the massacre in San Bernardino by true terrorists to steal all of the headlines and rain on the liberal parade. Liberals sensing half a loaf is bet-ter than no loaf immediately went after guns before any details were even known about the mass killing at the social ser-vices facility. As Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel once famously said while work-ing for Barack Obama “You never let a serious crisis go to waste.” Wait doesn’t his city have a few gun problems of its own?

Well anyway Hillary tweeted: “I re-fuse to accept this as normal. We must take action to stop gun violence now.”

Bernie Sanders tweeted: “Mass shoot-ings are becoming an almost every day occurrence in this country. This sickening and senseless gun violence must stop.”

Martin O’Malley that other Democrat running for president, not to be outdone also tweeted: “Horrifying news out of #San Bernardino. Enough is enough: It’s time to stand up to the NRA and enact meaningful gun safety laws.”

Another mass killing and another mass knee jerk reaction from the left concern-ing stricter gun control laws. All politi-cized reactions before it was even deter-mined that the culprits were radicalized American Muslims. Don’t any of these people have advisors telling them how foolish this will make them sound? But wait, the most egregious political oppor-tunism from the left came from that last bastion of non-partisan thought — print journalism. (Tongue firmly in cheek)

“God Isn’t Fixing This” screamed the headline in large bold letters on the cover of the New York Daily News. The cover continued, “As the latest batch of inno-cent Americans are left lying in pools of blood, cowards who could truly end gun scourge continue to hide behind mean-ingless platitudes.”

FIRST OF all don’t challenge God. Secondly this headline was in response to GOP presidential candidates and other conservatives who had humbly offered up their thoughts and prayers to the vic-tims and families of this heinous act.

Of course President Obama got into the knee jerk one upsmanship. During the daily White House press briefing, Presi-dent Obama’s spokesperson Josh Earnest was asked: “President Obama yesterday jumped to say that this mass shooting means it’s time for commonsense gun laws. Does the President really think that

common sense gun laws would deter ter-rorists now that he has admitted that these two may have been terrorists?” Earnest replied: “Yes. The president believes that passing common sense gun laws that makes it harder for people with bad in-tentions to get guns, makes the country safer.”

Are liberals so “anti-gun” that they are blinded by the reality of the evil na-ture of Radical Islam? It has been shown that terrorist groups like ISIS don’t want to simply disrupt western society; they want to take over the world and convert each person to Islam or kill the infidel. Terrorists will gladly sit through a wait-ing period to purchase their guns. In fact that gives them more time to make pipe bombs and other improvised explosive devices.

By all accounts these people legally purchased their firearms. So exactly which new gun law would have prevent-ed this tragedy? In this wacky world of political correctness a liberal politician surely wouldn’t ask an individual buying a gun if they were Muslim or had recent-ly travelled to the Middle East. In fact according to liberals, asking about a per-son’s nationality is bigoted and hateful.

IT’S TIME to get serious about ter-rorism but since President Obama insists that climate change is the number one threat in the world, maybe we should arm each American with a can of hair-spray so that next time there’s an attack, we’ll be ready to hit them with some ozone destroying V05.

E-mail your questions to [email protected]. Follow Mark on Twitter @MarkPLevy

Liberal idiocy concerning guns and terrorismDEAR MARK: December 4, 2015

MarkLevy

(c) 2015, Mark Levy

A Churchill-like moment


With Thanksgiving having come and gone, we are now solidly into the Christmas

season. Two stories that reveal Holly-wood’s attitude about Christmas in pain-ful detail recently caught my attention.

The first was an article in the L.A. Times about the 50th anniver-sary of “A Charlie Brown Christmas.” It is now a classic; one of the most beloved of all broadcast television Christmas specials. Yet those in charge of its production at the time thought it was going to be a dismal fail-ure.

Why? Because cartoonist and author Charles M. Schulz refused to include a laugh track, and — most significantly — because he insisted upon Linus’ recital of the account of the birth of Christ from the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke.

TOO SERIOUS. Too religious.As we know now, the executives were

wrong. “A Charlie Brown Christmas” was an instant hit. But even today, some still don’t understand why. Several peo-ple were interviewed for the L.A. Times piece and asked about the show’s endur-ing popularity. The reasons they offered? Feelings of “Familiarity and tradition,” appreciation “Passed from generation to generation,” and “Comfort in a difficult world.”

That might explain the show’s popu-larity now; it doesn’t explain the show’s success in 1965.

But if Hollywood was merely igno-

rant in 1965, they are actively hostile in 2015. What “Christmas” show is every-one talking about this year? The winter finale of ABC’s hit show, Scandal. In this now infamous episode, lead char-acter Olivia Pope, played by Kerry

Washington, has an abortion, which the doctor performs to the strains of the Christmas hymn, “Silent Night.”

Seriously? Not “Frosty the Snowman,” “Silver Bells” or “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus,” but “Silent Night?”

In case you don’t know (or don’t re-member), here are the lyrics to the first verse of that hymn:

Silent Night, Holy Night / All is calm, all is bright / Round yon virgin mother and child / Holy infant so tender and mild / Sleep in heavenly peace / Sleep in heavenly peace

It gets worse. The audience hears the words of Pope’s father in voiceover dur-ing the procedure, saying, “Family is a burden ... a pressure point, soft tissue, an illness, an antidote to greatness. You think you’re better off with people who rely on you, depend on you, but you’re wrong, because you will inevitably end up needing them, which makes you weak, pliable. Family doesn’t complete you. It destroys you.”

As if this is not bad enough, the epi-sode ends with Olivia Pope at home, drinking wine (is this some kind of new abortion meme?), smiling at her Christ-mas tree and listening to another sacred hymn, “Ave Maria,” the Catholic “Hail

Mary” prayer set to music. Some of the lyrics (translated from the Latin in which the hymn is sung) include the words, “blessed is the fruit of thy womb.”

WHAT IS Christmas? It is one of the two most sacred holidays in Chris-tianity. It celebrates the birth of a child who comes to save all OF mankind. It is represented by depictions of the Holy Family: Mary, Joseph, and the newborn baby, Jesus, God Incarnate. In the hymn, the night is “silent” in awe of God’s love and that of Christ’s earthly parents. Ol-ivia Pope’s night is “silent,” by contrast, because she has destroyed the life within her. A child is not the manifestation of love, or even an opportunity to give love, but the target of death.

Right on cue, here came the hardline pro-choicers celebrating the “honesty”

From Charlie Brown to Scandal: Hollywood and ChristmasCHRISTMAS: December 3, 2015

and “bravery” of Shonda Rhimes, the show’s creator. Cecile Richards, CEO of Planned Parenthood, was grateful for the very expensive commercial, issuing a statement in which she said she “ap-plauded Shonda Rhimes.” Jessica Sama-kow of the Huffington Post praised the storyline because it showed abortion to be “just one of the things [Pope] did that day.”

Sorry. Not buying it. All of these cel-ebratory accolades smack of desperation and excuse.

It’s hard to overstate the depravity in this. It is beyond “edgy,” beyond taste-less, beyond insulting, even beyond blas-phemous. An abortion set to Christmas hymns is evil masquerading as entertain-ment. And while we’re on the subject, let’s address the “bravery” nonsense and call out everyone associated with this episode for the craven cowards that they are. One need only contemplate for an instant what the outcry would be had ABC decided to take a similar approach to the holiest of holidays or most revered religious figure in the Islamic tradition. Christians are safe targets, and everyone in Hollywood knows it.

What have we learned in the 50 years since the first broadcast of “A Charlie Brown Christmas?” That Hollywood’s discomfort with the Christ in Christmas has become outright hostility. And what Hollywood got wrong about “A Charlie Brown Christmas” is what Hollywood gets wrong about most Americans’ atti-tudes about life in general: Good is bet-ter. Bad is not more fun. God resonates. Christ matters.

We have also learned that there is ap-parently is no “bottom” to the slippery slope in pursuit of the shocking and — yes — scandalous.

ABC DESERVES all the public op-probrium that it receives as a result of this appalling breach of basic decency. Unfortunately, I don’t think that will change things much.

Merry Christmas, Charlie Brown.

LauraHollis


21December 16, 2015

Barack Obama wanted 15 minutes of airtime on Sun-day night, the most heavily

watched night of the week, to speak to the nation about the San Bernardi-no shooting. It was appropriate for the president to request it, and for the net-works to grant it, but everyone knew he would say nothing new of substance. On the matter of Islamic terrorism, he never does.

AND HE DIDN’T. And in so not do-ing, he wowed the press again.

The stenographers underlined his good intentions. On ABC, Clinton-donating George Stephanopoulos sum-marized: “A stern and direct President Obama, laying out what he called a strong and smart strategy to deal with the terrorist threat that has evolved here in the United States.” On PBS, anchor Judy Woodruff said, “I was struck when the president said we will destroy the Is-lamic State. He said we will prevail by being strong and smart.”

No one in these slavish studios would dare to suggest that events from Paris to San Bernardino had exposed Obama as hapless and weak. Or that more speeches weren’t going to fix it, especially when he offers no new initia-tive to change a failed policy.

Go back about eight years, when President Bush asked for a primetime address on Sept. 13, 2007 to address

the status of the surge of troops in Iraq. Here’s what NBC morning host Mere-dith Vieira asked future Obama defense secretary Chuck Hagel, then a Republi-can of sorts: “Senator, good morning to you. Let me ask you right out of the bat — when the president speaks about Iraq tonight, do you believe that he will have any credibility?”

That was mild for its time. MSNBC’s top “talent” Keith Olbermann at that point was suggesting Bush was either a “pathological presidential liar” or an “idiot-in-chief.”

AFTER BUSH’S 2007 address, there came a five-minute Democrat re-sponse from Sen. Jack Reed of Rhode Island. Did anyone at the networks line up a Republican response to Obama for Sunday night? No one even considered it, apparently — despite the fact that Obama predictably went political and blamed the GOP majority in Congress for failing to pass enough gun control.

President Obama is also losing on his proposal to admit 10,000 Syrian refugees into the United States. In his speech, he declared “it is the responsi-bility of all Americans — of every faith

— to reject discrimination. It is our re-sponsibility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country.”

Couldn’t anyone in the press find the irony here? Under President Obama, the State Department reports that out of 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted into the U.S. since the Syrian civil war erupted in 2011, only 53 (2.4 percent) have been Christians while 2,098 (or 96 percent) have been Muslims. Since the Paris ter-ror attacks on Nov. 13, the State Depart-ment has admitted 237 Syrian refugees — 236 Sunni Muslims and one Chris-tian (0.4 percent).

The latest Investor’s Business Daily/TIPP poll showed that 60 percent of the country believes allowing Syrian refu-gees into America is a threat to our na-tional security. By 56 to 39 percent, they oppose admitting 10,000 Syrian refu-gees, and 56 percent are not confident in the U.S. government’s vetting process. (See the “vetting” of San Bernardino killer Tashfeen Malik.)

THE OBAMA administration is dreadfully incompetent and this presi-dent is seriously out of touch. The net-works have some propaganda to make, so they’re airing stories of sympathetic Syrian refugees now living in America, and proclaiming how much they love it — take that, you racist, Islamophobic Republicans who would dare to put the flow of these patriotic refugees on hold!

Obama: Seriously, out of touchMEDIA BIAS: December 9, 2015

Bozell(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate

Brent

When President Barack Obama addressed the na-tion Sunday night about the

terrorist attack in San Bernardino, he was careful to build a wall of separation be-tween the terrorists who had murdered 14 Americans and the religion they claimed to embrace.

“But it is clear that the two of them had gone down the dark path of radical-ization, embracing a perverted interpre-tation of Islam that calls for war against America and the West,” Obama said.

WERE THE president to exhibit this same zeal in defending the integrity of Christianity, he would drop his adminis-tration’s legal pursuit of the Little Sisters of the Poor.

He would also let all Americans de-cide for themselves whether it is in keeping with their moral principles to buy, provide or take actions intended to facilitate the provision of insurance that covers sterilizations, contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs and devices.

Yet the Obama administration has pursued a case into the Supreme Court

that, if the administration prevails, would prohibit Catholic nuns from freely exer-cising their Catholic faith.

It could also move the United States toward accepting the fallacious argument that federal judges ought to have the au-thority to interpret what are and are not legitimate religious views.

The Little Sis-ters are bravely re-sisting.

In practical terms, the gov-ernment wants to force this order of nuns to take one of two actions. It can sign a document in-structing the third-party administrator of its self-insured employee health plan that the administrator is obligated to provide coverage for sterilizations, contracep-tives and abortion-inducing drugs and devices. Or it can give the Department of Health and Human Services the informa-tion it would need to tell the third-party administrator it is obligated to do so.

Either way, the government wants to force the nuns to take an action whose purpose is to facilitate distribution of

sterilizations, contraceptives and abor-tion-inducing drugs and devices.

“Our beliefs forbid us from partici-pating, in any way, in the government’s program to promote and facilitate ac-cess to sterilization, contraceptives, and abortion- inducing drugs and

devices,” the Little Sisters have said.

As this column noted in July, the sis-

ters’ lawyers ex-plained their moral objection in a brief

submitted to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit, which heard their case.

“THIS IS necessary not only to pre-vent complicity in grave sin, but also to avoid even appearing to condone wrong-doing, which would violate the Little Sisters’ public witness to the sanctity of human life and could mislead other Catholics and the public,” said the brief. “Such scandal would itself be sinful and would undermine the Little Sisters’ abil-ity to carry out their ministry.”

Hijacking the Little Sisters’ religionFREEDOM OF RELIGION: December 9, 2015

The majority of a three-judge panel ruled against the sisters, and, in Septem-ber, the full appeals court voted not to take up their case.

The appeals court refused to accept the proposition that forcing an order of Catholic nuns to take an action that is ex-pressly intended to convert their health care plan into a conduit for delivering abortion-inducing drugs places a “sub-stantial burden” on the sisters’ exercise of their faith. They argued that this is especially true because the Christian Brothers, who currently act as the third-party administrator for the sisters’ plan, are themselves exempted from the man-date to provide sterilizations, contracep-tives and abortifacients.

Therefore, the judges argued, the ac-tion the government wants to force the nuns to take will not result in the gov-ernment’s intended purpose: the provi-sion of sterilizations, contraceptives and abortifacients.

When the full appeals court voted not to take up the case, Judge Harris Hartz, joined by four other judges, dissented.

He argued that the court was taking a step toward empowering federal judges to rewrite the moral rules of a religion.

“All the plaintiffs in this case sin-cerely believe that they will be violating God’s law if they execute the documents required by the government,” said Judge Hartz. “And the penalty for refusal to ex-ecute the documents may be in the mil-lions of dollars. How can it be any clearer that the law substantially burdens the plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion?

“Yet the panel majority holds other-wise,” he wrote. “Where did it go wrong? It does not doubt the sincerity of the plaintiffs’ religious belief. But it does not accept their statements of what that belief is. It refuses to acknowledge that their religious belief is that execution of the documents is sinful. Rather, it reframes their belief.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit hijacked the Catholicism of the Little Sisters of the Poor. It made it-self the interpreter of what that faith truly demands.

In its own brief to the appeals court, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops had warned of this.

“Indeed, the test repeatedly champi-oned by the government would transform the Religious Freedom Restoration Act’s substantial burden analysis into an exer-cise in amateur theology,” said the US-CCB brief. “The Constitution, however, does not permit federal courts or govern-ment officials to be arbiters of matters of faith.”

IT IS TIME for the Obama adminis-tration to entirely drop its sterilization-contraceptive-abortifacient mandate and declare that federal judges have no right to rewrite the Catholic faith.

TerryJeffrey(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate


We are sitting here wait-ing for the Boston branch of the family to arrive

Thanksgiving Day — like so many other American families waiting for the kids and grandkids to appear. The paper is full of Heartwarming Stories about this day set aside to be thankful. Like that of the eighth-grader in Opelousas, La., who collected more than 2,000 pounds of food to be distributed to poor families over the holiday season.

Abraham Lincoln had the right idea as he looked around at the ruin of a Union he had sworn to preserve and those out to destroy it: Defy them! Giv-ing thanks is a sure way to do that, and that’s just what he did: by giving thanks for the bountiful harvest that war-torn year.

WE ALSO hear other kinds of sto-ries on Thanksgiving, for the heavy air is full of them: stories of brutal hus-bands who lock the wife and kids out of the house on this day of all days. Stories of couples planning to divorce — with their parents’ blessings, or at least grudging consent. There is the usual news of crime and its rampages. Satan never seems to take a day off but still walks to and fro in the land, see-ing what trouble he can stir. Then there are the stories we hear of sickness and deaths since last Thanksgiving. Time hangs heavy.

It isn’t even Christmas, yet the Scrooges already begin to come out, the sad sacks who have nothing better to say on this holiday or any other except “Bah, Humbug!” My wife, Brooke, has swept and cleaned and scrubbed and polished every surface to a shine in anticipation of my pious family’s ar-rival after their long day’s journey from Boston, shlepping enough kosher food along to sustain themselves during their visit here. And so we wait. And wait for them to appear. Like the Prodigal Son after many a misadventure, or maybe just for Godot.

MY PHYSICAL therapist tells me I need to keep moving, and so I do, complete with my ever faithful walker, which doubles as a seat if I need one. I set out into another beautiful Arkansas evening that turns out to be my favor-ite kind: overcast with a hint of rain. Promise is everywhere. I think of my big sister, chipper as ever in her 90s. And envy her disposition, so much like my all-American father’s. He may have gone broke time and again, but never thought of himself as poor. Something good was always going to come up, and sure enough it did.

The camellia bush in the front yard, oblivious to the season, is blooming like crazy again. As if He were saying, My will be done, not your fearful mood reflected in My creation. Soon my anxi-eties are shuffled off. I even get to ex-change a few words with a neighbor in mamaloshen, mother tongue and moth-er wit Yiddish, before turning around and heading back home. To wait. And wait.

How empty and echoing the house seems. How solitary. And then ... they’re here! They’ve called from the airport just off the plane. Danged air-lines, you can’t count on them. Sure enough, this flight was right on time. And we are transported from darkness unto light.

THEN THEY are upon us. The whole house creaks with a joyful noise as they unload and move in. It grows dark outside, but inside all is light. My, how the kids have grown. Soon their cousins will be over to add to the wel-come tumult. My grandson and his fa-ther talk about the rules for letting ko-sher food thaw. My granddaughter tells me about her pre-bas mitzvah classes in Boston. As usual the women are providing the food and drink, the life and love and leveling sense. Their long day’s journey — and ours — is over at last.

Long day’s journey into nightFAMILY: December 7, 2015

PaulGreenberg

(c) 2015, Tribune Media Services

“Hear this, all peoples! Give ear, all inhabitants of the world, both low and high, rich and poor together!”

That first verse of Psalm 49 could start off every issue of WORLD, be-cause that’s our goal: We’re delighted to have 80,000 members, most of whom are evan-gelicals, but we’d like more people in churches to read us, and the unchurched as well. We know how to get more readers — rent more email lists, have booths at more conferences — but we primarily use our financial resources to serve our existing mem-bers by continuing to improve our magazine, website, podcast, and jour-nalism courses.

THAT’S A constant challenge, and as editor in chief I have to confess my tendency to covet at times the re-sources of Time. Members send us tips on stories worth investigating, but of-ten we have to pass them by because a full-scale investigation would take more staff time than we can afford: Our magazine has only nine full-time editors and reporters, and our website and podcast together have only that many as well.

Still, Time used to be fat with articles and ads, but now it’s thin, and its circu-lation has fallen enormously. Time still has more readers than WORLD, but our readership increased slightly this year, which is great news these days in journalism. And what Psalm 49 says about individuals is true about media empires too: “Be not afraid when a man becomes rich, when the glory of his house increases. For when he dies he will carry nothing away.”

As other news organizations slump, we’re adding new elements. We now review children’s books in every is-sue, because that’s valuable to the parents and grandparents among our members. Our daily half-hour podcast, “The World and Everything in It,” in-cludes features on everything from the changing ideas of courtship to the Su-preme Court’s ever-changing view of the Constitution. We’ve also expanded our coverage of China, and we’re in-tensifying our presidential campaign coverage. (Psalm 49 describes well the debates: Some “trust in their wealth and boast of the abundance of their riches,” while others “have foolish confidence; yet after them people ap-prove of their boasts.”)

SOME THINGS haven’t changed. We still want to be tough-minded yet warmhearted, factually accurate and biblically objective, salt rather than sugar. We still want to present sensa-

tional facts with understated prose, to be dependent on God and indepen-dent of any political faction or interest group, to pound the pavement for sto-ries and not sit in offices sucking our t h u m b s . Instead of scream-

ing, “The sky is falling,” we still remember that God holds up the sky.

Over the past 17 years our

World Journalism Institute has coun-tered the overwhelming secular liber-alism of college journalism programs, and also scouted Christian talent. All six of our full-time magazine reporters and editors under age 40 have come to us through WJI training, as have 11 of our 16 part-time magazine correspon-dents and two-thirds of our website’s part-time contributors. Last summer we taught the editors in chief of seven leading Christian college newspapers, as well as journalism majors from leading secular schools, and offered six internships.

Our WJI courses have also trained dozens of others now working for secular newspapers and magazines ranging from the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin”in California to the Washing-ton Post. We’re able to attract talented college students and mid-career pro-fessionals to our WJI courses partly because of the reputation of WORLD and our professors, and partly — let’s be frank — because we don’t charge tuition and do offer paid internships.

SO JOEL BELZ last month and I this month ask for your help. Almost every year we ask a few more folks to step forward with a commitment of

Be not afraid: Pressing forward and aiming higherWORLD: December 7, 2015

$5,000 annually for three years. More than 50 World Movers have done so in the past: We are praying for 100. But we’ll be thankful for anything you give. If you’re concerned about the next generation and our current bat-tles, please make a fully tax-deductible gift to WORLD. To give quickly and securely online, visit wng.org/world-movers.

Reprinted with permission of WORLD. To read more news and views from a Christian perspective, call 800-951-6397 or visit WNG.org.

MarvinOlasky

(c) 2015, God’s World Publications

23December 16, 2015

What was the reason for the bland, gluten-free flavor of the president’s Oval

Office address on terrorism? Barack Obama, on this theoretically important occasion, was out of his element. There were no “folks” (aka people) to attack for questioning his motives or mission, apart from “some who reject any gun-safety measures.” We were almost back to business there: enacting a domestic agenda that features gun control along with tighter regulation of business and resistance to ideas put forth by Repub-licans.

BUT HE HAD to move along. This thing, the Oval Office speech, was about terror, foreign and especially do-mestic. But the leader of the free world had little to say of any real substance on those matters. “The threat from terror-ism is real.” Yes, we suspected as much in the aftermath of the Paris and San Bernardino massacres. “But we will overcome it.” We will? How? “By being strong and smart, resilient and relent-less. And by drawing upon every aspect of American power.”

So is it time for a change? Well, may-be not. It seems the “more sustainable victory” the president is planning on is to be won through “the strategy that we are using now -- airstrikes, Special Forces and working with local forces.” But he specified that Americans cannot “occupy foreign lands” -- as if Repub-licans were demanding we take over Syria, and maybe Libya to boot.

Still, said the President, we’ll keep supporting our ISIS-fighting Syrian

and Iraqi proxies. “Go get ‘em, guys!” is Obama-led America’s exhortation to those we consider allies in the cause of freedom.

The standout characteristics of this Dec. 6 address were bloodlessness and an absence of patriotic outrage that in-nocent countrymen of ours, and inno-cent Parisians, should find themselves subject to the ravages of homicidal maniacs. Why did he bother? Because the occasion gave him the

chance to contextualize his perennial assault on the Republicans for thwart-ing Common Sense Gun Control?

THE TERRORISM address, it seems worth noting, took place the night before the nation’s annual com-memoration of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Compare and contrast. “Yesterday,” President Roosevelt told Congress, “December 7, 1941 -- a date which will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and de-liberately attacked by the naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.” There was fury in FDR’S steady voice.

Nobody claiming intellectual cred-ibility would call the San Bernardino massacre a Pearl Harbor replay in its level of provocation or historical sig-nificance. Yet in some way the terrorism address could be called the low point to

date of Obama’s presidency: a chance, forever lost, to rise above and do some-thing other than issue pallid assurances

Did not Obama, halfway through the address, affirm the belief that “we are at war” with the murderers? He might have conceded that parties at war with each other commonly use guns, making gun control a chimerical exercise for now. Not our president. It will be hard to dislodge him from his purpose of sav-ing America the Obama way, i.e., keep-ing our eyes on domestic do-gooding, discrediting the foreign policy courses and expedients of his predecessor in the Oval Office.

I do not believe Barack Obama is ei-ther a Muslim or an alien. I think he is a symbol of American anxieties, disqui-etudes and palpitations in a century fac-ing challenges new to our robust nation-al experience. There is nothing robust or mettlesome about Barack Obama, save his desire to guilt us for the unsavory ways of our past: the fighting, the ex-ploiting, the John Wayne stuff. Witness Sunday night. Our president’s grand at-tempt to reassure probably had the ef-fect of leaving Americans less assured than ever before.

ONE UNDERSTANDS the Trump phenomenon better and better. DT’s a boor and a patent medicine hawker. But he’s also the antithesis of Obama, and he’s benefiting from a real and rising sense that the man currently charged with leading his country isn’t up to the job. He’s perhaps not up to any job re-quiring mettle and candor over self-righteousness and evasion.

Why this, president? Why now?OBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 8, 2015

WilliamMurchison


You may think moving six lanes of heavy highway traf-fic through old, already con-

gested and only newly revived neigh-borhoods is an awful idea. And you’d be right. And not only because those old, established neighborhoods would be torn apart. Just as city after American city from Chicago to Dallas was divided into largely racial zones years ago. The costs then weren’t just economic but human, the effect inhumane. Talk about madness. ...

But a little over a decade ago (2003), one study proposed not just six ad-ditional lanes of traffic through Little Rock but a minimum of 10 new lanes. Call it madness multiplied.

WHAT WE have here may be one more example of how far removed city planners and traffic engineers are from the madding crowd, ensconced as they

are in their nice, clean offices with may-be a fern or two on their desks and the usual certificates on the wall. As if all these real live human beings they were moving about were just stick figures in their drawings.

Scott Bennett, who is Arkansas’ top highway official, sounds deaf as ever to these simple but basic human con-siderations. “I don’t know if anything has changed since then,” he says, re-ferring to 2003. When, of course, the whole world has. But he talks as if all he can think a b o u t is cars, cars, cars — not the people in them and slicing through their neigh-borhoods, livelihoods, plans, hopes and memories.

There may be only one word to say to technocrats like Mr. Bennett who keep

coming up with these purely abstract schemes year after year, decade after decade:

Stop!

IT MIGHT help if our Great Plan-ners reviewed the tragic history of some Great Plans That Failed — even if those who dreamed them up had the best of intentions, and the

best of reputations for designing and executing great plans.

What could be a more impres-

sive accomplishment than conceiving and then carrying out the Normandy Invasion during the Second World War? Dwight D. Eisenhower would do both, earning the respect and gratitude of not only his countrymen but all those strug-gling to be free of Nazi tyranny.

Nightmare Avenue: Great plans, great failuresPLANS: December 2, 2015

As a popular president and com-mander-in-chief after the war, he came up with a defense measure that would have sped military convoys across the country in no time without interfering with civilian highways. It sounded like a good idea — a great idea — at the time. Indeed, it was the beginning of this country’s system of interstate highways, inspired by the German Autobahn, that would make America a leader in high-way planning and the envy of the world. So was the plan. But then Ike made the mistake of going to see how his plan was working out on the ground.

It took the president only one look to realize his folly. Instead of connecting the country’s great cities and speeding traffic through them, his plan divided those cities, and some haven’t become whole yet. Because his Great Plan tore apart old established neighborhoods. Ike was appalled at the sight. As soon as his interstate surrounded a city like Chicago, for example, development fol-lowed it. And sealed it off. North Sid-ers were divided from South Siders, the east from west sides of town. Old rival-ries were aggravated, but this time there were steel and concrete lines of demar-cation between them, as if not a high-way but a great gulf had been opened between them — a gulf not unlike the split that the Wilbur Mills Freeway had opened in Little Rock years ago. The di-visions were not only ethnic but racial as Polish and Chinese neighborhoods, say, were split and racial ghettos sealed.

Yes, it was as fashionable then as it is now for great cities to grow in all direc-tions, and metropolises like Dallas were supposed to be the model to imitate. But ask anyone who’s ever been lost on the Dallas freeway, doomed to go on forever circling his destination without ever get-ting there, if he really envies this coun-try’s big cities and wishes Little Rock were more like them. Yet every cham-ber of commerce and regional planning agency in the country seems bent on im-itating their hellish growth and its less than livable result.

Perhaps it’s just my own small-town background that prejudices me against Great Plans, or a naturally conservative streak that warns me it is better to love what you have and seek to improve it than turn our backs on it and aim to be a little Dallas or Atlanta. No thank, you.

You can have that kind of “progress,” which is little more than a kind of el-ephantiasis that swallows up everything in its path rather than carefully choosing what is worth saving and then conserv-ing and enhancing it.

PLANS ARE just fine, and ambition a noble quality, but beware: Great plans can prove great failures, even if some of our planners are oblivious to the great failures they are courting.

PaulGreenberg

(c) 2015, Tribune Media Services

Long day’s journey into night


On Dec. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a constitu-tional challenge to racial pref-

erences in college admissions. These preferences obviously hurt whites and Asians turned down to make room for less qualified minorities. Ironically the preferences also harm many Hispanics and African-Americans —- the very stu-dents that are supposed to be helped. No wonder campuses are roiled with racial tension. It’s high time the court put a stop to racial preferences entirely.

Abigail Fisher, a white woman who sued the University of Texas for reject-ing her in 2008, claims the university’s admissions process unconstitutionally favored minority applicants, violating her right to equality under the law. Like affirmative action programs everywhere, UT claims it judges each applicant “ho-listically.” Don’t buy it.

FOR UT applicants, simply being born black or Hispanic gets you points for “achievement,” even if your parents are wealthy bankers. Being born white or Asian gets you zip. It’s similar at Har-vard, which is being sued in another case. In defense, Harvard says “when choos-ing among academically qualified appli-cants,” colleges need “freedom and flex-ibility to consider each person’s unique background.” That’s doubletalk. Many minorities admitted to elite schools based on race are not “academically qualified.”

A survey of selective colleges by UCLA professor Richard Sander docu-mented that students who get in based on race tend to earn lower grades and are less likely to graduate. At less demand-ing colleges, they’d have a better chance

to succeed. They’re in over their heads, confirmed Gail Heriot, member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Not in California, which outlawed racial preferences in 1996. Minority stu-dents now are more apt to attend lower ranked public colleges but twice as likely to graduate.

Heriot reports “mounting empirical evidence” that admitting students based on race is “doing more harm than good.”

THAT POIGNANT lesson seems lost on administrators at elite universities who boast about large minority enroll-ments.

Racial preferences in law school ad-missions put many minorities on the fail-ure track. At selective law schools, 51 percent of African-American first-year students admitted with racial preferences had grades in the bottom 10 percent of their class, compared with only five per-cent of white students performing that badly.

It is bad enough to be at the bottom of the class. “It is quite another for an African-American student to find him-self toward the bottom of the class and to find half of his African-American friends and acquaintances there, too,” explains Heriot. It stokes bitterness, and feelings of injustice.

Minority students struggling aca-demically tend to segregate themselves

from other students. And turn to nonaca-demic pursuits — like campus protests.

This fall’s protesters at the Univer-sity of Missouri, Princeton, Harvard and Yale are demanding “safe spaces” for black students.

In previous decades, students pro-tested the Vietnam War or economic inequality. Today they lack a cause big-ger than themselves. They whine about perceived racial slights. Imagine being admitted to an Ivy League college and then complaining about the names on the buildings — John Calhoun at Yale or Woodrow Wilson at Princeton (as if anyone who lived more than a century ago would pass muster by today’s val-ues.)

Justice Clarence Thomas warned from personal experience about harm to minority students: “I watched the opera-tion of such affirmative action policies when I was in college, and I watched de-struction of many kids as a result.”

Of course, the Justices hearing the Texas case will focus on the harm done to students excluded because they are not favored minorities. Whites like Abi-gail Fisher, but also Asians. Like Har-vard and many universities, UT limits Asian students, even though they have the highest test scores. Asian-American groups label that “racist” and remind the Court that “it demeans the dignity and worth of a person to be judged by ances-try instead of his or her own merit and essential qualities.”

IT’S ALSO unconstitutional. Now’s the time for the Justices to say so unam-biguously, and put a stop to it.

Affirmative action: Race to the bottomHIGHER EDUCATION: December 9, 2015

BetsyMcCaughey


Most college students do not belong in college. I am not by myself in this as-

sessment. Washington Post columnist Robert Samuelson said, “It’s time to drop the college-for-all crusade,” add-ing that “the college-for-all crusade has outlived its usefulness.” Richard Vedder, professor emeritus of econom-ics at Ohio University, reports that “the U.S. Labor Department says the major-ity of new American jobs over the next decade do not need a college degree. We have a six-digit number of college-educated janitors in the U.S.” Vedder adds that there are “one-third of a mil-lion waiters and waitresses with col-lege degrees.” More than one-third of currently working college graduates are in jobs that do not require a degree, such as flight attendants, taxi drivers and salesmen. College was not a wise use of these students’, their parents’ and taxpayer resources.

WHAT GOES on at many colleges adds to the argument that college for many is a waste of resources. Some Framingham State University students were upset by an image of a Confed-erate flag sticker on another student’s laptop. They were offered counseling services by the university’s chief di-versity and inclusion officer.

Campus Reform reports that be-cause of controversial newspaper op-eds, five Brown University students are claiming that freedom of speech does not confer the right to express opinions they find distasteful.

A Harvard University student or-ganization representing women’s in-terests now routinely advises students that they should not feel pressured to attend or participate in class sessions that focus on the law of sexual vio-lence and that might therefore be trau-matic. Such students will be useless to rape victims and don’t belong in law school.

And some college professors are not fit for college, as suggested by the courses they teach. Here’s a short list, and you decide: “Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dress-ing,” Swarthmore College; “GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity,” University of Virginia; “Oh, Look, a Chicken!” Belmont University; “Get-ting Dressed,” Princeton University; “Philosophy and Star Trek,” George-town University; “What if Harry Potter Is Real?” Appalachian State Universi-ty; and “God, Sex, Chocolate: Desire and the Spiritual Path,” University of California, San Diego. The fact that such courses are part of the curricula also says something about administra-tors who allow such nonsense.

Then there is professorial “wis-dom.” Professor Mary Margaret Pen-

rose, of the Texas A&M University School of Law, asked, during a panel discussion on gun control, “Why do we keep such an allegiance to a Con-stitution that was driven by 18th-cen-tury concerns?”

PERHAPS THE newest “intellec-tual” fad is white privilege. Portland State University professor Rachel Sanders’ “White Privilege” course says “whiteness” must be disman-tled if racial jus-tice is ever to be achieved. Campus Reform reports on other whiteness issues (http://tinyurl.com/oof9wu3). Harvard’s classes on critical race theory combine “progres-sive political struggles for racial jus-tice with critiques of the conventional

legal and scholarly norms which are themselves viewed as part of the il-legitimate hierarchies that need to be changed.”

Back to those college administra-tors. Dartmouth College’s vice provost for student affairs, Inge-Lise Ameer, said, “There’s a whole conservative world out there that’s not being very n i c e . ” She did, however,

issue “an unequiv-ocal apology” for stoking ten-sions with such a disparaging comment about

conservatives to Black Lives Matter protesters.

After a standoff with other Black Lives Matter protesters, Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber acceded to demands that

Squandered resources on college educationHIGHER EDUCATION: December 9, 2015

former Princeton President Woodrow Wilson’s name be removed from the campus because of his behavior as U.S. president. President Wilson was a progressive and an avowed racist who racially segregated the civil ser-vice and delighted in showing D.W. Griffith’s racist The Birth of a Nation to his White House guests. Professor Thomas DiLorenzo’s recent column suggests that a worthier target for Black Lives Matter protesters would be Abraham Lincoln, who he says was “the most publicly outspoken racist and white supremacist of all Ameri-can presidents” (http://tinyurl.com/jza7ntf).

THE BOTTOM line is that George Orwell was absolutely right when he said, “There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them.”

WalterWilliams


25December 16, 2015

Affirmative action: Race to the bottom

Does anyone remember hearing about radical Japanese or rad-ical Germans during World

War II? Does anyone recall talk about radical Communists during the Cuban Missile crisis or the Cold War?

On December 8, 1941, President Roo-sevelt addressed a joint Congress in the aftermath of the at-tack on Pearl Har-bor. Roosevelt did not say “radical” Japanese nor did he remotely sug-gest they were nice people but a few of them had highjacked what it meant to be Japanese. His speech was just over sev-en minutes in duration and he used the words “Japan” and “Japanese” a total of 15 times during that speech.

GRANTED OBAMA can reference himself that many times in 15 seconds, but then we’re not comparing President Roosevelt to the poisonous lover of those who want us dead are we? Presi-dent Roosevelt didn’t say that a Japanese “call to worship” was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard either.

In his speech President Roosevelt de-monstrably made reference to the other countries Japan had violated; and it is important to note that he did not treat Ja-pan as anything less than what it was at that time — a hostile nation bent on con-quest. Nor did President Roosevelt issue an edict through his attorney general at a dinner for Japanese sympathizers in the aftermath of Japan’s unprovoked attack on the United States and promise to pros-

ecute anyone who spoke ill of them. And it did not take President Roosevelt two full days to have his FBI declare the at-tack on Pearl Harbor exactly what it was — an act of war.

Conversely, it took Obama’s FBI two full days to declare the Muslim terror-ist attack in San Bernardi-

no, CA, a terrorist at-tack. That was after Obama tried to float

the idea that it was an act of work-place violence.

President Roosevelt didn’t try to make the Japanese feel good or feel special — quite the opposite. He detailed that it was Americans who were the victims and that the American government had, through diplomatic channels, attempted to work with Japan.

Obama, however, mocked the Ameri-can people on foreign soil just days be-fore the Muslim terrorist attack in Cali-fornia, saying we were afraid of “women and three-year olds” because of our ob-jections to Muslim refugees.

President Roosevelt didn’t spin the narrative. He did not try to call that which was evil and demonic, pastoral and safe. Obama has used and continues to use every avenue available to him to ensure Muslims are permitted to entrench them-selves in a way that allows for them to commit ongoing acts of terrorism on American soil.

DOES ANYONE think President Roosevelt and/or the American people would have tolerated a contemptible in-dividual hiding behind our laws to blame

the massive deaths and destruction of Pearl Harbor on the American people?

Huusam Ayloush, spokesman for the domestic hate group the Council on American Islamic Relations (C.A.I.R.) sitting approximately 30 minutes from one of the most horrific terrorist attacks on American soil — claimed that the at-tack was America’s fault. Appearing on Chris Cuomo’s CNN show, New Day, he had the shameless audacity to blame the terrorist attack in Paris and California on America.

LIBERALS AND appeasers who re-fuse to realize what we were up against argue it was unfair to hold Japanese citi-zens in internment camps during World War II. Without hesitation I say the same

FDR — a man: Obama — enemy of AmericaOBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 4, 2015

should be done to Muslims in prepara-tion to ship them back to their places of origin.

Obama used the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Ex-plosives in an attempt to control the nar-rative in the aftermath of San Bernardi-no. Why?

Why would Obama and his Justice Department think it necessary to protect those out to murder us? In the blink of an eye the public knew all there was to know about the transgendered gunman/gun-gal or whatever that there was to know. In the case of the Muslim terrorist attack in California the White House did all they could to delay the public know-ing the perpetrators were Muslims.

President Roosevelt didn’t make ex-cuses for the hellacious actions of the Japanese but the Obama White House tried to spin the narrative on San Ber-nardino as workplace violence and a good employee who was somehow in-sulted during a Christmas party.

President Roosevelt didn’t go before Congress and the American people and say government needed to control air-planes because of what had happened. He boldly went before America and as-sured the people that America would not surrender nor abide such a horrific act.

Obama’s first action was to demand gun control even though his own spokes-man acknowledged that the gun control measures Obama wants in no way can prevent the Muslim terrorism.

OBAMA ASSURED America his ad-ministration would be the most transpar-ent one in history. Specific to that point in the aftermath of another act of Muslim terrorism, there are three things glaringly transparent: 1) Obama favors Muslims terrorists over Americans; 2) Obama is not inclined to hide his affections for ter-rorists over Americans; and 3) for all of President Roosevelt’s negatives, thank God Obama wasn’t in office when Pearl Harbor was attacked.

MychalMassie(c) 2015, Mychal Massie


The dictionary defines “bogey-man” as “an imaginary evil spirit, referred to typically

to frighten children.” Hello, Donald Trump. It’s not clear whether he set out intentionally to elect Hillary Clinton, but there is little question that he could not be fulfilling the role of Republi-can bogeyman to greater effect.

As Commen-tary’s Jonathan Tobin noted, dur-ing a week in which the disastrous fecklessness of President Obama and his party in the face of terrorism ought to have been Topic A, we are all talking about Trump instead. Brilliant. Tobin’s point actually applies to the entire presi-dential contest. By rights, it should be about the Democrats’ unraveling. From Obamacare to terrorism, from the economy to climate change, and from guns to free speech, progressive poli-cies have proven deeply disappointing when not downright obtuse and dan-gerous. Clinton promises more of the same while trailing an oil slick of cor-ruption in her wake. And yet swinging into the frame, week in and week out, the orange-maned billionaire bogey-man dominates the discussion.

HECK YES, Republicans are anti-Hispanic bigots, Trump (a lifelong Democrat) is supposed to confirm. Just look at the way he talked about Mexi-

can “rapists” and vowed to build a wall that Mexico will fund.

Heck yes, Republicans want to fight a war on women. Did you hear what Trump said about Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina?

Heck yes, Republicans are anti-im-migrant, anti-handicapped,

anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim. Line ‘em up and Trump

will offend. Not cleverly, mind you, but crudely.

Donald Trump is fond of saying that our political leaders are stupid, constantly outmaneuvered at the bargaining table by shrewder Chinese, Mexicans, and Japanese. No one can accuse him of stu-pidity: provided his goal is to elect Hill-ary Clinton.

This week, while we were still bury-ing our dead from San Bernardino, ev-ery Republican — rather than explain-ing why President Obama’s refusal to fight the war on terror has led to this mo-ment — instead had to condemn Don-ald Trump’s mindless proposal to keep every single Muslim out of the United States until further notice. Again, he’s the perfect bogeyman.

It’s not just that what he says de-mands condemnation. It’s that it seems to give credence to the Democrats’ nar-rative.

One of the false notes in President Obama’s Sunday evening speech was his resort to one of his favorite libels

about the American people he purports to lead. He scolded the country for its Islamophobia. “It is the responsibility of all Americans — of every faith — to reject discrimination. It is our responsi-bility to reject religious tests on who we admit into this country. It’s our respon-sibility to reject proposals that Muslim Americans should somehow be treated differently.”

THAT’S NOT the trouble here. America is an incredibly welcoming na-tion and has opened its arms to Muslims

Democrats’ best weapon: Donald Trump2016 ELECTION: December 8, 2015

along with people from every part of the globe. Far from targeting American Muslims for discrimination, the U.S. has been a haven. Though liberals like to conjure it to slander the U.S., anti-Muslim discrimination and violence have been minimal in the U.S., even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. (The most common targets of religious big-otry in America? Jews.)

On the other hand, it’s only common sense to proceed with caution about ad-mitting thousands of refugees and im-migrants from the part of the world that is currently aflame with Islamic extrem-ism. That caution, not to be confused with discrimination (there is no consti-tutional right to come to America), was endorsed just three weeks ago by a large majority in Congress (including 47 Democrats). It isn’t anti-Muslim to seek to exclude Muslim extremists.

Leave it to Trump to lob a stink bomb that putrefies everything.

Above all, the great favor that Trump does for Obama and for Hillary Clinton is to focus on personalities instead of philosophy. Trump, of course, has noth-ing to offer except personality (even if its charm eludes me). But his emphasis on “getting the best people” is exactly wrong. That’s the progressive idea — that the best people know better how to run your life than you do. That’s what we’ve had under President Obama. Obama is a failure not because he’s stu-pid, or stubborn, or inexperienced. He’s a failure because he believes in failed ideas.

HILLARY CLINTON believes in all the same myths and shibboleths. After two terms of decline and decay, voters are ready for a different approach, unless someone crashes the Republican Par-ty. Can it be pure accident that Donald Trump is playing the role to perfection?

MonaCharen


27December 16, 2015

More than a decade after my 19th trip to Israel and the Middle East, this 20th

visit shows how some things have changed, but the important ones re-main the same.

What one notices first is the large amount of new construction, which suggests a certain Israeli permanency against religious opposition, hatred and threats of annihilation perhaps no other country has had to endure. Second are the many prosperous Arab neighborhoods, which defies much of the propaganda broadcast to the world about how Israelis mistreat Arabs and Muslims, locking them in poverty.

ABOUT HALF an hour’s drive from Jerusalem, I visit a plant that makes air-conditioning parts. Moshe Lev-Ran, the international manager, who bears a slight resemblance to ac-tor Lorne Greene of the old Bonanza TV series, employs Jews and Muslims who he says work together without any problems. Lev-Ran, who says he believes in equal pay for all, thinks prosperity is the key to peace in the region. He admits to a “left hand” (lib-eral) worldview and given the periodic outbursts of violence by some who are better off than they were before the “occupation,” he is likely engaging in wishful thinking that money is the key to peace.

It seems that everyone in Israel has either a solution to the conflict, or a suggestion for better communicating Israel’s position to the world. Martin

Sherman, executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, thinks the government spends too little -- a fraction of one percent on public diplomacy -- allowing Israel’s detrac-tors to dominate in the propaganda war.

Sherman would offer generous eco-nomic incentives to Palestinian Arabs to emigrate and seek a better life else-where, preserving the Jewishness of the Jewish state. Under his proposal, those who refuse to leave would see their services reduced, including elec-tricity and water, which he sees as morally justifiable, since Israel should have no obligation to sustain its en-emies.

HE OPPOSES the creation of a Palestinian state and thinks the rest of the world should, too. “Why would the world accept another state that is misogynist and homophobic?” he asks, adding, “Jews must realize that between the (Jordan) River and the (Mediterranean) Sea there will be ei-ther Jewish or Muslim sovereignty.

To create a Palestinian state next to Israel, says Sherman, would lead to the Lebanonization or balkanization of Is-rael. “There is no way Muslim Arabs will accept a Jewish state.” Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has said as much.

Geography and demography are the central concerns of most Israelis. A trip to a mountaintop near the Israeli settlement of Barkan in the West Bank provides a dramatic view of “the three seas,” the Mediterranean, Sea of Gali-lee and Dead Sea. This vantage point, within view of Ben Gurion Airport, illustrates just how vulnerable Israel would be to terrorist rockets. Think Gaza times two. As the saying goes, “Israel is a small country,” a truth that shocks many first-time visitors.

THE OBAMA administration has asked both Israelis and Palestinians to “tone down” the rhetoric that feeds the violence in Israel. It is unlikely that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Ne-tanyahu or Palestinian President Mah-moud Abbas will comply. Palestinian hatred of Jews permeates every facet of society and it starts early. According to Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli research institute studying Palestin-ian society, Palestinian textbooks, for example, “make no attempt to educate for peace or coexistence with Israel. Instead Israel’s right to exist is ada-mantly denied and the Palestinian war against Israel is presented as an eternal religious battle for Islam.”

Western governments must remove their blinders and support Israel’s at-tempt to curtail and conquer this vi-rus, not only for Israel’s sake, but out of self-interest, because a strain of it is already spreading to Europe and America.

In Israel, the more things change ...ISRAEL: December 3, 2015

CalThomas(c) 2015, Tribune Media Services

According to the father of the San Bernardino terrorist, Syed Rizwan Farook, his son

was “obsessed with Israel.”In an interview in the Italian news-

paper La Stampa, the senior Syed Fa-rook said, “My son said that he shared [Islamic State leader] Al Baghdadi’s ideology and supported the creation of the Islamic State. He was also obsessed with Israel.”

Likewise, the Los Angeles Times reported that “As the investigation un-folded, friends and family of the shoot-ers came forward to offer snapshots that may point to what motivated Wednes-day’s attack, including Farook’s appar-ent fixation on Israel and Malik’s devo-tion to a fundamentalist strain of Islam.”

THERE IS no greater predictor of violence than Jew-hatred. It predicts violence as accurately as does animal torture.

But while it is universally acknowl-edged that childhood torture of ani-mals predicts violence, relatively few people understand that the same holds true of Jew-hatred.

Given that I have found no excep-tion to this rule, one would think that non-Jews would learn from it and immediately op-pose Jew-haters. But, incredibly, that is not the case. Most non-Jews have regarded Jew-hatred as the Jews’ problem or, as in the case of Israel-hatred, the Jews’ fault.

In the 1930s, when Western democ-racies had a chance to crush the Nazis, they did nothing despite the fact that Hitler and Nazism were as obsessed with the Jews as Syed Farook was with the Jewish state. The West regarded Hitler’s anti-Semitism as essentially

the Jews’ problem. Eventually, about 50 million people were killed, 44 mil-lion of them non-Jews.

So, too, when Israelis were being murdered by Palestinian Muslim sui-cide bombers in the so-called Intifada, the murders were

largely ignored, or worse, “ex-plained” by West-ern liberals as the understandable Palestinian reac-

tion to Israeli occupation.Then came 9/11, and America and

the world began to appreciate — though the left still doesn’t — that Pal-estinian terror was about the ultimate aim of annihilating Israel, not about “asymmetrical warfare,” or use of the “poor man’s atom bomb” or “a reac-tion to occupation.”

Of course, some will object that it is neither fair nor accurate to lump

Obsessed with Israel: What else do we need to know?ISRAEL: December 8, 2015

Israel-hatred with Jew-hatred. So, let me briefly explain why Israel-hatred is just another form of Jew-hatred, or anti-Semitism.

FIRST, WE ARE talking about Israel-hatred, not Israel-criticism. No prominent defender of Israel — not one — has ever equated criticism of Israel with Israel-hatred or with anti-Semitism. It is a common charge made by anti-Zionists that defenders of Isra-el equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, but it has no truth.

What is equatable with anti-Semi-tism is anti-Zionism, the belief that the Jewish state has no right to exist.

Why is that the same anti-Semitism?Because when one argues that the

only country of the world’s more than 200 countries that has no right to exist is the one Jewish country, there is no other possible explanation. There are 22 Arab countries, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Persian Gulf, and they all have a perfect right to exist. But somehow there is no room for one Jewish country the size of New Jersey.

When the Presbyterian Church (USA) or the American Anthropology Association votes to boycott one coun-try on earth, and that country is the only Jewish country on earth, it strains credulity to argue that Israel’s being Jewish is irrelevant.

Israel is probably the oldest country in the world with an indigenous lan-guage and culture going back 3,000 years. Yet, much of the world denies these roots and favors the claim to the land made by Palestinians, a group which had no distinct identity before the mid-20th century.

The Jewish state plays the same role among the world’s nations as indi-vidual Jews played within the world’s nations: a superbly accurate way to assess a group’s moral compass. As George Gilder calls it, it is the Israel Test.

Those obsessed with the Jews in a negative way have a moral compass whose pointer points South. That’s why Syed Farook mass murdered in-nocent Americans.

Farook and all the Islamist terror-ists are ultimately Yasser Arafat’s and the Palestinians’ legacy to mankind — and especially to fellow Muslims, the greatest victims of the suicide terror.

Or, to put it in a positive way, show me Muslims who accept the right of the Jewish state to exist, and I will guarantee you that they will never sup-port ISIS or engage in terror.

WHEN WILL the world learn this simple lesson?

DennisPrager(c) 2015, Creators Syndicate


America is in a prolonged war against global Islamic terror-ists, but also in a fierce politi-

cal battle here at home over how to fight it and win.

President Obama is losing both wars, according to the negative reaction to his nationally televised address to the nation Sunday night from friends and foes alike.

GOP Sen. Mar-co Rubio of Flor-ida said Obama’s speech conveyed a “growing sense we have a president who is completely overwhelmed.”

“It was tiresome. There’s a real case to be made that Obama’s minimalist strat-egy isn’t working,” wrote the Washington Post’s liberal columnist Dana Milbank, one of the president’s earliest supporters.

ON TUESDAY, Milbank ticked off a few of the other responses from Capitol Hill: “Repackaged half measures ... tone deaf ... sales pitch for the status quo ... Obama is riding the bench at T-ball to-day.”

Donald Trump, the clear leader for the 2016 Republican presidential nomi-nation, called for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.”

That drew criticism from other presi-dential candidates in both parties and from American Muslims.

“One has to wonder what Donald Trump will say next as he ramps up his anti-Muslim bigotry,” said Ibrahim

Hooper, national communications direc-tor at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Where is there left for him to go? Are we talking internment camps? Are we talking the final solution? I feel like I’m back in the 1930s.”

Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewan- dowski, told the As-

sociated Press the ban would include “ev-erybody,” but did not elaborate.

More than 80,000 Muslims immigrate to the

United States each year, according to a Pew Research Center report in 2011.

In his address Sunday, Obama went through a laundry list of actions he has taken to combat terrorism and others that he wanted Congress to approve.

One of them was a new war authoriza-tion by Congress “to demonstrate that the American people are united and commit-ted” in the war against the Islamic State’s armies.

But Congress isn’t united on another authorization vote, and leaders in both parties say he was given that authority (known as AUMFs) after the 9/11 attacks.

“They have the tools right now,” said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California. “He has the authority to go out and destroy ISIS with the current AUMF he has.”

Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid told reporters last month that “I don’t be-lieve in AUMFs.”

What does that say about the Demo-crats? That they are largely divided on the president’s request, and are resisting

another authorization vote in the war on terrorism. There is no unity.

Instead, Reid is calling for the creation of an “ISIS czar” in the administration and tightening gun control laws. That no doubt will leave radical Muslims shaking in their boots and fleeing for their lives. Good grief.

REID DID endorse Obama’s gun con-trol proposals, which would block gun buyers who are on terrorism watch lists, an idea Republican leaders ridiculed.

“There cannot be any presumption of guilt just because the government in-cludes your name on a list, particularly when it comes to denying your core con-stitutional rights,” said Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas.

It wasn’t just the Republicans who were criticizing the president’s response to the latest terrorist attack on our home-land. The liberal national news media have begun to criticize him more sharply, too.

Milbank wasn’t the only journalist to give Obama failing grades on the terror-ists’ widening war. Listen to what the Post’s chief political analyst Dan Balz has to say.

Obama has no realistic plan to defeat ISISOBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 8, 2015

“The president’s speech Sunday night ... was likely to change few minds. His public remarks ever since the terrorist at-tacks in Paris last month have been off-key and lacking in persuasion,” he wrote in a stinging column.

“From his news conference in Turkey a few days after those attacks, when he was thrown on the defensive by a series of questions about the administration’s strategy, to his White House remarks the day before Thanksgiving (and less than a week before the massacre in San Ber-nardino), when he said there was no cred-ible threat against the homeland, Obama has been fighting a rear-guard action in the battle for public opinion.”

Shortly before the shocking San Ber-nardino attacks, the president was tell-ing the world that Islamic State terrorists were “contained.” Sure.

That reminded many Americans of his preposterous and utterly false claim throughout his re-election campaign that al Qaeida terrorists were “decimated” and “on the run.”

On the day of Obama’s Sunday speech, Hillary Clinton said on ABC’s This Week that the U.S. wasn’t winning the war against ISIS, but said she expect-ed Obama to lay out “an intensification of the existing strategy” that night.

In a tweet written shortly after Obama’s remarks, Richard Haass, president of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations, said “two things missing from (Obama’s) address: intensification of military strat-egy; preparing Americans for additional domestic acts of terrorism.”

A large majority of Americans people aren’t buying Obama’s flimflam excuses and exaggerated security claims any-more, according to every poll.

The terrorists aren’t “on the run” or even near to being “decimated.” They have vastly grown in numbers and in their capacity to inflict death and destruc-tion anywhere in the world, including the U.S.

President Obama has underestimated ISIS from the beginning, and despite what he says, he has no realistic plan to defeat them.

THE WAR ON terror will continue until an experienced and effective leader emerges from the presidential election to free the world from this evil, bloodthirsty scourge. Think very carefully when you vote.

DonaldLambro

(c) 2015, United Media Services

29December 16, 2015

Truth be told, I once rather admired Vladimir Putin, as George W. Bush rather ad-

mired him. I cannot say, as Bush can, that I looked into his eyes and “was able to get a sense of his soul.” But his na-tion has suffered through a long century, when the Western world had achieved so much. True, the Russian despots put the Western world through dreadful tra-vail, but in terms of wealth and happi-ness, we did OK. The 20th century has been the best, by far, for the West — at least in material terms. Meanwhile, the Russian despots were veritable jailers to their countrymen and they cost them dearly. At the end of the Cold War, Rus-sia was an emerging nation.

HOWEVER, HERE was Putin — a man who might bring the Russians into the modern world. In fact, when he came to presidency in Russia he was doing just that; arriving in the modern world with freedom, a semblance of the rule of law and a rich countryside on which the liberated Russians could apply their variegated talents. It seemed to me that Putin might just be the man to lead the gifted Russian people to suc-cess in the world community. Besides, he was in the prime of middle age and, with regularity, retired to the gym at the end of a busy day. How could I not have admiration for a man who challenged the vicissitudes of aging?

Alas, Putin has turned out to be, as Holman H. Jenkins Jr. said in the Wall

Street Journal last week, a “gambler” whose gambits in the Middle East now testify to “the unhealthiness of his do-mestic political situation.” Through his reckless roll of the dice, he has cost 224 Russian lives returning home from a holiday in Egypt. Now he has cost the lives of two of his airmen, and lost a fighter plane and helicopter on a rescue mission. What does he have to show for his recklessness? His economy is, as I predicted a year or so ago, in the tank. It has mainly been

based on the price of oil. More vigor-ous economies, such as South Korea and the Czech Republic, rely on manu-facturing for at least 20 percent of their economic growth. In Putin’s Russia, the figure was 15 percent in 2014 — pos-sibly lower. According to the Interna-tional Monetary Fund, if you left out oil and gas, Russia’s non-oil revenues were descending to an 11 percent deficit of GDP. Still, Putin continued his military buildup.

THE BUILDUP was premised on oil that cost $100 a barrel. That price has now been split in half. Recently Russia’s Deputy Defense Minister Yuriy Borisov reported, “For the first half of the year, Russia’s arms industries only

fulfilled 38 percent of their contracts.” Such is the state of the Russian econo-my: Its military spending, which ranked the third highest in the world last year, now ranks seventh or eighth. And the economic picture is worsening. Military shipments are missing their targets and their quality is dubious.

However, Putin’s commitments in Crimea and the Middle East have actu-ally grown. He is even shaking his fist at Turkey and NATO. He is regularly pictured with the same dour expression on his face, even when he was photo-graphed shirtless and seated on a horse. In his trademark pose, he has raised a perpetual pout to the level of fierce de-fiance. But whom is he defying? Our president? The guy who is famous for changing American strategy, at least for now, and leading from behind?

PRESIDENT PUTIN is engaged in propping up Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad. He is also promising to bring down ISIS. France, after suffering a cruel ISIS attack, is trying to summon the Western powers and Russia against ISIS. Russia has its own bloody history with homegrown Islamists. Now would be a good time to disengage from Assad and join the French in finishing off ISIS and bringing stability to the Middle East. Putin could defy our president to his heart’s content and join the rest of the civilized world by leading from the middle. He would not have to miss a night at the gym.

Russia’s Vladimir Putin poutsVLADIMIR PUTIN: December 3, 2015

R. EmmettTyrrell


President Obama has been mocked, and appropriately so, for his ludicrous comment that

the upcoming climate change summit in Paris will be a “powerful rebuke” to the terrorists. No. This summit is a powerful rebuke to common sense.

It says a lot about the lack of clarity and commitment to the growing threat of the Islamic State that the world lead-ers are gathering in the city where the murderous attacks just happened, with the blood barely dry, and the prime topic of discussion will be how to stop the rise of the oceans.

Amazingly, the White House then wonders why so few voters have any trust in his handling of the terrorism cri-sis.

THE CONCERN isn’t just that cli-mate change derangement syndrome has such an obsessive grip over this presi-dent and other world leaders that they choose to take their eyes off the ball. It’s worse than that: The entire global-

warming agenda is an impediment to the war against terror.

One of our most effective economic swords to use against ISIS — and Iran, Putin’s Russia and OPEC — is Amer-ica’s vast shale oil and gas reserves as well as our 280 years’ worth of domes-tic coal resources. This point should be self-evident: Every barrel of oil we pro-duce here at home is one less barrel we have to purchase from abroad.

We know from intelligence reports that the Islamic State receives as much as half a billion dollars a year in petro-dollars. ISIS’ access to Middle Eastern oil finances a growing army of terrorists that are well armed, trained, and coor-dinated to wreak havoc on the Western world.

Why then do we continue to buy oil from those who are trying to kill us? That’s especially crazy given that we now have the capacity to achieve real energy independence within five years by pursuing a pro-America energy de-velopment strategy.

Our own Energy Information Admin-istration reports that we have access to more recoverable fossil fuel resources than any nation in the world thanks to the new and ever-improving smart drill-ing technologies. We have hundreds of billions of barrels of oil underneath us, and by 2020 we can and should be-come the energy-dominant nation in the world. This could be an economic and geo-political game-changer, yet Presi-dent Obama recently nonsensically de-clared in a speech on climate change that we should keep these resources in the ground.

NO MATTER how severe one be-lieves the threat of global warming, the inescapable reality is that for at least the next decade and even with a rapid conversion to renewable energy, the U.S. and the rest of the world will continue to rely heavily on oil, natural gas and coal for about two-thirds of our transportation fuel and electricity. If we don’t produce our vast domestic fos-

American energy will help defeat terrorismENERGY DEVELOPMENT: December 1, 2015

sil fuel energy, the world will buy oil and natural gas from somewhere else — and the terrorist networks will grow richer and more militant.

This may be an inconvenient truth, but it’s an economic reality. Another re-ality is that regardless of what the U.S. does to force-feed expensive and unre-liable green energy into our economy, the rest of the world is building hun-dreds of new coal plants every year and drilling for oil wherever they can find it.

President Obama could and should announce several emergency steps ei-ther with the stroke of a pen or with congressional approval to make Amer-ica less reliant on terrorist oil and the blood money that too often goes with it.

First immediately repeal the 1970s law that prohibits the exporting of American gas and oil. Doing so could increase US production by as much as $50 to $100 billion annually.

Next build the Keystone XL Pipe-line and many other pipelines awaiting government approval so we can safely and swiftly transport North American oil to the markets where it is needed. This could create thousands of high-paying union jobs as well.

We should also allow drilling on federal lands that aren’t environmen-tally sensitive. More than 90 percent of the drilling boom has been on private lands. Use the royalties to retire some of our debt and for an anti-terrorism fund.

Finally, suspend some of the more strident EPA rules that are shutting down our coal producers across the na-tion even as Asia is building 500 new coal plants this year alone.

Until two weeks ago, Barack Obama and many European leaders were in-sisting that their highest priority was combating climate change. Now they’ve been reminded — and, hope-fully, we all have — that free nations face a much more dangerous and im-minent threat to our ways of life.

OF COURSE, domestic drilling won’t by itself thwart ISIS’ opera-tions. But it is a small, vital step in diminishing this snake’s global reach and influence. President Obama keeps saying that he is taking every possible step to prevent more terrorist attacks. Alas, this isn’t true. Instead of going to Paris to talk about the weather, Obama should be devising an urgent strategy to defund the terrorists and help rebuild the U.S. economy by making America the energy-dominant nation on the planet.

This guest column is by Stephen Moore, a distinguished visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation, economics contributor to FreedomWorks and au-thor of Who’s the Fairest of Them All?


The old proverb speaks to the difficulty of finding the rare and concealed amid the nor-

mal and visibly numerous: Within the haystack, the needle hides.

The terrorist couple who murdered 14 people in San Bernardino, Cali-fornia, were radical religious murder-ers hiding among loyal, law-abiding Americans. Forget the needle. Tash-feen Malik and her husband, Syed Riz-wan Farook, were daggers. They didn’t cut hay; they assassinated loyal, law-abiding Americans among whom they lived and worked.

ACCORDING TO investigators, Malik had pledged her fealty to the Islamic State group. Her pledge to the group makes her a traitor. The religion she espoused has explicit political ob-jectives, to include the overthrow of the U.S. government and destruction of the U.S. Constitution in favor of a foreign power.

Treason also involves duplicity. Ma-lik entered the U.S. under false pre-tenses. She abused America’s liberal immigration regimen. Farook, born in the U.S., turned on his native country. They abused America’s liberal immi-gration regimen and had a child in an American hospital. They pretended to mix in San Bernardino’s melting pot. And yes, America is still a melting pot of humanity — socially, ethnically, culturally and spiritually. The diverse origins and faiths of the people Malik and Farook murdered confirm it.

In the lingo of security agencies, ter-rorism is a type of distributed offensive threat. Malik and Farook are a hideous illustrative case. The couple planned to ambush unarmed civilians; they were an offensive threat. “Distributed” is the difficult word. A terrorist can select from a range of targets “distributed” throughout an area. In this case, they chose a regional human services cen-ter in San Bernardino. They could have bombed a bus going to Disneyland. The defense cannot protect everything. Police are “distributed” throughout an area. So are surveillance cameras. But terrorists can evade them.

Terrorism’s “distributed” threat is one reason the National Security Agen-cy looked for clues in cellphone meta-data, but that resource is now heav-ily restricted. Advocates of concealed handgun carry permits point out that armed citizens are a “distributed de-fense” to counter crime and terror. This is a very compelling argument but is one zealous gun controllers tune out. They shouldn’t.

Six years ago, a retired FBI agent told me that some of the best sources for stopping a domestic terror attack are tips from citizens. American Mus-lims provide good tips on potential

Islamist-inspired terrorists. They know their community. Counterterrorism isn’t cops on the beat, but there are similarities.

THAT MADE sense to me. In 2003, I had a cup of coffee with an Arab Muslim friend of mine. I asked him for an update on The Quest — his long pur-suit of a permanent resident green card. He sighed and then said, softly, “There are 25,000 Arab Muslim men in my group (green card applicants), (and) 24,991 of them are like me, Austin. We know what it is like — to live in fear of terrorists, criminals, dictators. We left

to come here ... to get away from them. But the other nine? They are very dan-gerous people.” He paused and then added, with unmistakable resignation, “ I guess that’s just my lot

in life.”I heard the resig-

nation and told him I could vouch for him.

No need. His at-torney told him to continue to work

hard and wait.I asked him where he got the num-

ber “nine.” I knew he meant potential terrorists and spies. He thought for a moment and then replied: “Well ... it seems about right. There are not many (violent Islamist extremists). ... They’re crazy, you know.” We explored his gut

Finding the assassin dagger in the haystackNATIONAL SECURITY: December 9, 2015

estimate. If nine out of 25,000 is right, then we’ve got 90 in 250,000. Ninety heavily armed fanatics can seize a city. Yes, “very dangerous people.”

He eventually secured his green card. Then he went to Iraq as a transla-tor. He is very proud of that service. A few weeks ago, he wrote me an email and said he expects to become a citizen at some time next year.

WE NEED to do a better job vetting immigrants. That isn’t bigotry; that’s sanity. However, loyal, responsible im-migrants strengthen America. Ameri-cans who happen to be Muslims are — like my friend — a key line of defense in stopping Islamic State-influenced terror attacks.

AustinBay


There’s no easy way to say this.If you’ve had your head in the sand

in recent years, what I am about to re-late may sound over the top, provoca-tive, incendiary, disturbing, demagog-ic.

But the time has come to sound the alarm.

Americans, your government is at war with you, with the country’s own founding principles, with the nation’s own security and self-interest.

LOOK AT Washington’s response to the massacre of dozens at a San Ber-nardino, California, Christmas party by a radical Muslim couple.

Barack Obama and other leaders of his party predictably, before the victim’s bodies were even cold, were asserting that stricter gun control was needed to prevent future attacks of this kind.

Democratic members of Congress responded by joining Friday prayers in mosques with strong jihadist connec-tions.

Democratic officials condemned the offering of Christian prayers for the victims of the attack by several Repub-lican presidential candidates.

Just a day after the bloody attack, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, speaking at a dinner held by Muslim Advocates, a legal group that regu-larly defends Muslim Brotherhood organizations, threatened prosecution of “anti-Muslim rhetoric” and told Muslim parents to contact the Depart-ment of Justice and the Department of Education — not local school officials — about any “bullying” their children report. Other Western nations have al-ready imposed laws curbing free ex-

pression when it comes to criticizing Islam — which is more than a religion. It is a worldview, an ideology, a po-litical system. It was once the force behind the largest and longest-lasting empire in history.

Republican and Democratic offi-cials fought efforts to derail Obama’s United Nations plan to flood the U.S. with tens of thousands, perhaps hun-dreds of thousands, of Sunni Muslim refugees. Screening to prevent more ji-hadis from entering the country under the program represents a mere after-thought at best and a hopeless smoke-screen at worst.

While the lawyers for the perpe-trators of the California massacre are peddling a conspiracy tale, officials of the Council on American-Islamic Re-lations, a Muslim Brotherhood front group, is blaming American foreign policy for the attack. One should ask: Whose foreign policy? Obama’s? The president they adore? The president who has pledged to stand with Mus-lims come what may? The president who, like them, insists Islamic terror-ism is an oxymoron?

IT’S CLEAR the federal govern-ment has no plans to offer protection to American citizens against future at-tacks by jihadis. Just the opposite. The government is facilitating, enabling and empowering them. That’s the pol-icy.

It’s becoming apparent the plan rep-resents nothing less than to terrorize the American public into total submis-sion to government. The very word “Is-lam,” by the way, means “submission.” How convenient. How coincidental.

More than a few Americans have noticed the trend. They are arming themselves in record numbers. And this is a smart thing to do.

But it’s hardly a substitute for rein-ing in the power of Washington, which has become the No. 1 enemy of the citizenry.

If you never quite understood what Obama meant when he threatened to begin “the fundamental transformation of America,” now maybe you get it.

It’s the most divisive, subversive, treasonous policy of any president in American history. Sadly, the entire Democratic Party establishment sup-ports it. And, even more tragically, the entire Republican Party establishment does nothing to stop it.

Think about it.It’s the Washington establishment

vs. America. America is awakening, but the political system is badly bro-ken.

The Obama administration is now in incitement mode.

It would like nothing better than for Americans who recognize the danger to turn to ugliness, revenge, violence, hatred. Sadly, no one may be able to stop such incidents — and Obama surely knows that.

DIVIDE AND conquer is the strat-egy. Obama is tearing the nation apart. What else do you suppose is the end-game?

Your government is at war with youOBAMA PRESIDENCY: December 8, 2015

JosephFarah


31December 16, 2015

Calm down and think, America.While everyone’s undies are in a

bunch over Donald Trump’s proposal for a Muslim immigration morato-rium, it is undeniable in a time of “heightened alert” — when violent ji-hadists have no problem targeting their enemies here and around the world — that national se-curity profiling is imperative to our survival.

Yes, that means taking politically incorrect crite-ria such as ethnicity, nationality and religion into account when battling radical Islamist throat-slitters, suicide bombers and hijackers who incinerate children on airplanes traveling to Dis-neyland, plant bombs in their shoes, underwear, soda bottles and belts, and shoot up concert halls, restaurants, malls, Army bases and social services centers.

YES, THAT MEANS unapologetic government tracking of Arab and Mus-lim foreign students, high-risk Muslim refugees, Muslim chaplains serving in the military and in prisons, and Arab and Muslim pilots and flight students.

Yes, that means taking immigration status into account to apply increased, common-sense scrutiny of temporary visa holders from jihadist breeding grounds.

All temporary visa-holders — for-eign students, tourists, businesspeople and guest workers — are here by privi-lege, not by right. Their visas can and should be revoked whenever necessary to protect national security.

It is not “un-American” to bar any new religious visas for dangerous Muslim clerics or to freeze visas is-sued to travelers from official state sponsors of terrorism.

It is not contrary to our “values” to prioritize the immediate removal of all illegal visa overstayers and

deportation fugi-tives from terror-sponsoring and terror-supporting nations.

Should we have a special reg-

istration system for visa holders from jihadist strongholds? Heck, yes. After 9/11, the feds put in place a National Security Entry-Exit Registration Sys-tem that required higher scrutiny and common-sense registration require-ments for individuals from jihad-friendly countries including Afghani-stan, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Soma-lia, Syria and Yemen, as well as other at-risk countries.

The basic components included a more rigorous application process in light of the shoddy visa questionnaires and undetected overstays of the 9/11 hijackers; 30 extra minutes of inter-viewing at ports of entry; a digital fin-gerprint check and in-person registra-tion after they arrived in the interior of the country; and verification of depar-ture once they exited.

The targeted registration of certain foreign nationals already in the coun-try (temporary visa holders including students, tourists and businesspeople) resulted in the detection and appre-hension of at least 330 known foreign

criminals and three known terrorists who had attempted to come into the country at official ports of entry — in-cluding suspected al Qaeda operatives who were caught trying to enter the U.S. after their fingerprints matched ones lifted by our military officials from papers found in Afghanistan caves.

BUT AS I’VE reported previously, grievance-mongering identity groups, the American Civil Liberties Union, the late Ted Kennedy, and open-bor-ders Republicans could not stand the idea of an effective national security profiling database. The Obama ad-ministration, which now disingenu-ously calls on Americans to be “vigi-lant,” suspended the narrowly targeted NSEERS program in 2011 to appease the “Islamophobia!” shriekers.

Anti-profiling radicals want it both ways. They damn federal homeland security officials when they gather in-telligence based on threat factors and behavioral factors — and damn them in hindsight if they don’t. FBI agents are condemned as bigots when they attempt the most modest of surveil-lance measures, and they are damned as bumblers when they fail to act on information gathered through those means.

Perhaps you’ve forgotten how Mus-lim groups balked after 9/11 when federal investigators went to mosques to ask about knowledge of terrorist at-tacks. What were they supposed to do — go to Catholic nunneries and Bud-dhist temples instead?

Face it: Religious profiling is an essential tool in combating Muslim extremists carrying out an eternal reli-gious crusade to kill nonbelievers and establish a global caliphate. If Catho-lic, Protestant, Jewish or Hindus were financing and training a worldwide network of bloodthirsty jihadi opera-

National security profiling is a no-brainerNATIONAL SECURITY: December 9, 2015

tives, America would be thoroughly justified — obligated — to gather basic intelligence data on relevant churches, congregations or temples.

Those who moan about any form of ethnic, religious and nationality pro-filing now will be the first to attack federal officials for not enough when another terrorist attack occurs. I’ll never forget hypocrite Maureen Dowd, the New York Times’ resident chaise lounge general, after the FBI admitted that it had resisted Phoenix FBI agent Kenneth Williams’ recommendation to profile Arab/Muslim flight students in the summer of 2001:

“Now we know the truth,” she whined. “The 9/11 terrorists could have been stopped if ... the law en-forcement agencies had not been so inept, obstructionist, arrogant, anti-quated, bloated and turf-conscious, and timid about racial profiling.”

Gee, Mo, what do you think caused that timidity? Hmm?

And let’s remember amid this lat-est outbreak of anti-profiling hysteria that the same grievance groups who object to taking ethnicity, religion and national origin into account during wartime zealously defend discrimina-tory racial and ethnic classifications to ensure “diversity” on college campus-es, guarantee government contracts for minorities, and achieve manufactured “parity” in police and fire departments.

IN SUICIDAL America, there’s always a “compelling government in-terest” for using discriminatory clas-sifications — unless that compelling interest happens to be the nation’s very survival.

Michelle Malkin is author of the new book Who Built That: Awe-Inspiring Stories of American Tinkerpreneurs. Her email address is [email protected].

MichelleMalkin


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