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May 2016

Remember Farsi Island Budget cuts and an irresolute president have left the Navy weaker. By Rep. J. Randy Forbes(R-Va. District 4) see note please

Just for the record….Randy Forbes is a strong supporter of Israel and ranked -6 by the American Arab Institute….rsk
The images from earlier this year are still appalling: ten American sailors, on their knees with their hands behind their head, held at gunpoint aboard a broken-down patrol boat by paramilitary forces of the Islamic Republic of Iran.

The capture and detainment of those ten U.S. Navy sailors on January 12, 2016, came at the start of a year in which America’s foreign policy has been at a crossroads. In the State of the Union address he delivered the very next day, President Obama spoke of living in a time of extraordinary change, with the international system led by the United States under growing strain. In his speech, the president conceded that we are living in increasingly dangerous times but dismissed “all the rhetoric about . . . our enemies getting stronger and America getting weaker” as “political hot air.” With humiliating footage of our captured sailors still playing on the news, however, it was hard to deny that our nation faces a number of worrisome problems.

Around the world, we see a number of threatening actors — nation-states and other groups alike — with growing capabilities and diminished regard for international laws and norms. Iran’s illegal detainment of ten U.S. sailors was only the latest malicious action by a rogue regime that continues to brazenly support terrorism, develop and test ballistic missiles, and threaten oil exports from the Gulf. ISIS remains uncontained, and from remote villages in Pakistan to the cultural capitals of Europe, extremists have been successfully plotting and executing horrific terrorist attacks. Putin has annexed Ukraine, buzzed our ships and airplanes, threatened our NATO allies, and elevated Russian submarine activity and nuclear saber-rattling to Cold War levels. In Asia, China is amassing military power and slowly but steadily securing de facto control of the nearby seas, while North Korea has acquired nuclear weapons and delivery systems that can reach the United States.

Climate Hustle: An Impressive, though Flawed, Exposé of Global-Warming Alarmism By Rachelle Peterson

Last year Sony Pictures Classics released Merchants of Doubt, a documentary alleging that paid hucksters peddle climate denialism. Marc Morano, who founded and runs the website Climate Depot, was featured prominently as huckster-in-chief. This week Morano struck back with Climate Hustle, a 90-minute film released by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and CDR Communications. Climate Hustle exposes the industry of climate alarmism through an impressive sequence of interviews and news clips revealing the politicized narrative pushed onto the public. It’s a film with an important message. Unfortunately, its reach will be limited by its low budget and a few missteps in narrative development. But anyone interested in the politicization of contemporary science must see it. It showed in theaters only on May 2 but is set for release on DVD later this spring.

Climate Hustle unveils seven “hustles” perpetrated by climate con artists. These include the sleight of hand (patching together data sets into misleading temperature records) and the “ol’ switcheroo” (the pivot from global cooling to global warming and then again to “climate change” and “extreme weather”). Damning sequences show original clips of news anchors and scientists changing their tune as doom-predicting climate models fail to match the facts.

More often — and this is the key point of Climate Hustle – the hustlers stick to their talking points long after the facts have left them behind. We see climate scientists fumbling to explain the 18-year pause in global warming. We also see the precarious positions of celebrity global-warming apologists stuck on repeat, unsure which island of pseudo-scientific messaging to leap onto next. The most hilarious of these (filed under “The limited time offer,” one of the seven hustles) is Prince Charles, who in five nicely timed clips declares that nations will be under water in ten years (that was in 1999); then in 100 months (2008), seven years (2009), 86 months (2010). Finally, in 2014, he enunciates the worn-out warning that we are once again “running out of time.”

Netanyahu Prepares for War at Home and Abroad By Tom Rogan

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has at least four different problems.

First, an upcoming State Comptroller report seems set to accuse Mr. Netanyahu of keeping critical information from his cabinet in the buildup to Israel’s summer 2014 military action in Gaza, and of failing to adequately respond to tunnels Hamas used in launching attacks on Israeli soil.

Second, Mr. Netanyahu is under increasing pressure from coalition partners in his cabinet. As I noted last November, the Israeli government is defined by significant internal tensions. Leading the charge for tougher action against the Palestinians is Education Minister Naftali Bennett. A young, charismatic hawk and proponent of expanded West Bank settlement construction, Mr. Bennett wants to bend Mr. Netanyahu to his hard-line agenda.

Third, the likelihood of renewed conflict with Hamas is growing by the day. Recent weeks have seen Hamas escalate the pace of rocket, mortar, knife, and bomb attacks on Israelis. In response, the Israeli military is launching operations against Hamas facilitation nodes.

Fourth and finally, tensions are growing with Iranian proxies in the Golan region on Israel’s border.

Let’s take the third and fourth issues first. Israel’s strategic goal in dealing with Hamas is to constrain the group’s military capabilities. Partly motivated by the aforementioned domestic controversy over Hamas’s infiltration tunnels in 2014, Netanyahu also wants to ensure that they cannot launch a surprise attack on Israeli civilians. Such an attack would cost innocent lives, and, more important, it would embolden Israeli adversaries at a time of growing regional instability.

And that leads us to Iran. With President Bashar al-Assad of Syria now buoyed by Russia, Lebanese Hezbollah (LH) and Iran sense an opportunity to re-commit their energies toward Israel’s northern border. The Syrian Civil War has imposed a heavy military and political toll on Iran and LH, but their existential fetish for Jewish blood is unrelenting. As the Middle East sinks into unrestrained violence, the Obama administration has sat idly by, dancing to Vladimir Putin’s tune at every turn. And without any confidence that Obama would come to its aid in a time of need, Israel is now aligning with the Sunni-Arab monarchies against Iran. Netanyahu’s recent assurance of Israel’s continued claim to the Golan Heights was a physical metaphor for Israel’s evolving security strategy: Israel wants Iran to know that it will not replicate America’s strategy of acquiescence and will role the military dice to preserve its deterrent posture if it must.

After Trump, Conservatives Must Continue to Explore Their Options By Andrew C. McCarthy —

It’s been my great good fortune to know many patriotic Americans, a goodly number but by no means all of them conservatives, who are now supporters of Donald Trump. Similarly, many of my friends and allies in the conservative movement are immovably #NeverTrump. There is significant infighting between these camps. How can it be that people for whom the national interest remains paramount find themselves at loggerheads, after fighting shoulder to shoulder for decades against anti-Americanism and cultural decline?

The occasion for posing this question is my close encounter with the intensity of the rupture. Yesterday, I published on the Corner a post in support of exploring an independent candidacy for the presidency, a bid that could provide a credible alternative to both Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, and Hillary Clinton, who is certain to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer. What was most baffling about the negative reaction I got from some friends, colleagues, and readers — ranging from disappointment to white-hot anger — is that we are in basic agreement about priorities. It’s not like we’re not playing for the same team anymore. The bitter disagreement is about how to achieve the main objective.

And what is the objective? At this point, it is to prevent Hillary Clinton from becoming president of the United States. For most of us — those who reluctantly realize we must confront the strong possibility of defeat — there is also a corollary: to minimize the amount of damage Mrs. Clinton could do if she wins.

Interestingly, few of my pro-Trump correspondents see the objective as electing Trump for the good that he would do for the country. The case for Trump is that elections, as the estimable John Bolton put it in a recent interview, present a “binary choice.” The main attraction of Trump, for those who are attracted, is the belief that he stands the best chance of defeating Clinton.

While Trump has his fans, he troubles most conservatives — to put it mildly. That is because records matter more than late-life conversions, proclaimed with varying amounts of conviction and coherence. On his record, Donald Trump is a left-wing Democrat, whose newfangled conservatism is suspect. He is a deal-maker, whose positions, regardless of the fervor with which they are announced, are best understood as the start of a negotiation — endlessly elastic.

That said, the two principal objections of my correspondents are: (a) Clinton’s election would be assured by an independent bid — which many refer to as a “third party” candidacy, even though what I’ve endorsed is a run by an independent Republican (the distinction is significant for reasons I’ll get to); and (b) an independent bid is just a scheme to sneak a GOP-establishment operative into the White House against the will of the voters, who overwhelmingly rejected the establishment in the primaries.

These are the two objections I anticipated in my post. All I can do is elaborate on what I’ve said.

First, I would support only an independent bid that has a decent chance to succeed — either in getting the 270 electoral votes needed to win or, more likely, denying that Electoral College majority to any candidate, which would throw the election into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. There, Clinton would stand the least chance of winning. If an independent bid lacked the capacity to compete realistically with the major parties, or lacked a candidate who could attract a competitive coalition, I would throw up my hands and vote for Trump. I am not trying to spare myself or anyone else the stark choice of Trump v. Clinton if that’s what we are realistically down to. I do not need a third option as a symbolic gesture so I can con myself into believing I haven’t helped elect Hillary. (In fact, I live in New Jersey, which will vote for the Democrat regardless of whom I vote for, or whether I vote at all.)

RELATED: What Chance Would a Third-Party Candidate Have?

Trump names the enemy By James Lewis

Chances are that Donald Trump and his foreign policy crowd have not been reading The American Thinker. I would rather believe that Trump & Co. are just endowed with common sense and a genuine concern for the American interest. This also happens to be in the best interest of most people in the world — except for the jihad war crowd.

American Thinker and like-minded people have been yelling into the storm for almost eight years now, but we can’t take credit for Trump’s common sense in foreign affairs. Good sense guided American policy long before the Rise of the One.

The great exception to ordinary common sense has been Obama himself.

Donald Trump has been attacked as a populist lowbrow, but he has just given a foreign policy speech that makes more sense than any blowhard fantasy coming from the left. The Don didn’t promise to roll back the rising oceans, like King Canute, but instead he presented sensible policy goals to get us out of the swamp.

Trump is promising to be pro-American, in contrast to Obama’s fantasy policies that ended up killing hundreds of thousands of people abroad for no discernible reason at all. Obama bombed Libya for no stated reason except the obvious lie that we were going to stop genocide. Instead, things got much worse, and today Libya is still entangled in an avoidable civil war.

But the biggest, most desperately needed step has already been taken by Trump, even before the election.

Donald Trump has named the enemy in the Jihad War. He calls it “radical Islam.” That’s good enough, because it labels the war theology of jihad as the real enemy. We do not hate Muslims. We hate their indoctrination into a pre-medieval desert theology that makes war on infidels a first duty for every believer.

#DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY AND BEYONCE AT WEST POINT?

Raised-Fist Photo by Black Women at West Point Spurs Inquiry By Dave Philipps
” “These ladies weren’t raising their fist to say Black Panthers. They were raising it to say Beyoncé,” said Mary Tobin, a 2003 graduate of West Point and an Iraq veteran who is a mentor to some of the seniors and has talked with them about the photograph.” (huh?!!!!)
Young black women set to graduate from West Point ignited debate last week when they raised their fists in this group photo.

A group of young black women poised to graduate from the United States Military Academy gathered on the steps of West Point’s oldest barracks last week in traditional gray dress uniforms, complete with sabers, for a group photo. Known as an “Old Corps” photograph because it mimics historical portraits, it was nearly identical to thousands that cadets have posed for over the decades, with one key difference: The 16 women raised their clenched fists.

The gesture, posted on Facebook and Twitter last week, touched off a barrage of criticism in and out of the armed forces as some commenters accused the women of allying themselves with the Black Lives Matter movement and sowing racial divisions in a military that relies on assimilation.

West Point opened an investigation on April 28 into whether the women violated Army rules that prohibit political activities while in uniform. Now, as the women wait to hear if they will be punished, they are gaining supporters who say they were simply making a gesture of solidarity and strength.

The elite public military academy, which trains many of the Army’s future leaders, is overwhelmingly male and 70 percent white. The 16 cadets in the photo represented all but one of the black women in a graduating class of about 1,000, a meager 1.7 percent. But the Army has long tried to play down race and gender to create a force where “everyone is green.”

When it comes to protest, West Point could not be more different from a civilian campus, where demonstrations, sit-ins and leaflets are commonplace.
At the military academy, in contrast, public displays of politics by students and staff members are prohibited in an effort to build a unified force that remains clear of partisanship.

The group photo has revealed an underlying tension at West Point.

The academy, while seeking to foster a diverse student body that reflects the nation, also aims to educate future officers in the regimented ways of the military, in which the only differences that matter are the ranks displayed on soldiers’ shoulders.

The Arabs’ Real Grievance against the Jews by Fred Maroun

The Arab world still does not today accept the concept of a Jewish state of any size or any shape. Even Egypt and Jordan, who signed peace agreements with Israel, do not accept that Israel is a Jewish state, and they continue to promote anti-Semitic hatred against Israel.

During Israel’s War of Independence, Jews were ethnically cleansed from Gaza, the West Bank, and East Jerusalem, and in the years that followed, they were ethnically cleansed from the rest of the Arab world.

Jews demand the right to exist, and to exist as equals, on the land where they have existed and belonged continuously for more than three thousand years.

We would rather claim that the conflict is about “occupation” and “settlements.” The Jews see what radical Islamists are now doing to Christians and other minorities, who were also in the Middle East for thousands of years before the Muslim Prophet Mohammed was even born.

The real Arab grievance against the Jews is that they exist.

As Arabs, we are very adept at demanding that our human rights be respected, at least when we live in liberal democracies such as in North America, Europe, and Israel. But what about when it comes to our respecting the human rights of others, particularly Jews?

When we examine our attitude towards Jews, both historically and at present, we realize that it is centered on denying Jews the most fundamental human right, the right without which no other human right is relevant: the right to exist.
The right to exist in the Middle East before 1948

Anti-Zionists often repeat the claim that before modern Israel, Jews were able to live in peace in the Middle East, and that it is the establishment of the State of Israel that created Arab hostility towards Jews. That is a lie.

So Many Rules, So Few Opportunities A wave of regulation coincides with weak hiring and growth.

Friday’s jobs report from the Labor Department brought the latest reminder that the U.S. economy isn’t creating opportunities like it used to. A separate report released this week goes a long way toward explaining why.

On Wednesday Wayne Crews of the Competitive Enterprise Institute rolled out his annual report card on federal regulation, “Ten Thousand Commandments.” Beltway rules are now imposing $1.9 trillion of annual costs on the U.S. economy. That’s the same level as last year, but when combined with on-the-books federal spending, which is $3.9 trillion, the feds are taking a record-setting bite out of private commerce and wealth.

The regulatory burden is staggering for the economy and for all who live and work within it. The annual tab for complying with directives from Washington is now larger than the entire economy of Russia. The cost of federal red tape amounts to nearly $15,000 per U.S. household each year.

And the bureaucratic onslaught will continue, even as we enter the final months of the last year of President Obama’s second term. Mr. Crews reports that regulators spanning 60 federal departments, agencies and commissions have nearly 3,300 regulations still in the pipeline and waiting to be imposed on an unsuspecting public.

Is it any wonder that the government reported modest job growth in April and a shrinking labor force? Or that the U.S. economy wheezed its way to 0.5% growth in the first quarter?

Mr. Crews’s data also show that the regulatory burden falls particularly hard on small firms, which suffer higher compliance costs per employee than larger competitors. This may explain why readings of small-business hiring look even worse than for the economy as a whole.

The Obama Administration was the first in American history to generate more than 80,000 pages of new and proposed rules in the Federal Register in a single year. CONTINUE AT SITE

Israel’s Prophetic War A forgotten war in Lebanon anticipated America’s battles in Iraq and Afghanistan.By Bret Stephens

From 1985 to 2000, the Israeli military occupied an 11-mile-deep “security zone” in southern Lebanon, in an effort to prevent the area from becoming a staging ground for attacks by Hezbollah into Israel itself. Some 250 Israeli soldiers were killed fighting in the zone and another 840 were injured—numbers that, for a country of Israel’s size, proportionately exceed America’s casualties in Iraq. Yet the campaign was never given a proper name, and the soldiers who fought in it never received a ribbon for wartime service.

This was the Jewish state’s forgotten war. Yet as Matti Friedman notes in “Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story,” the fighting anticipated the kind of conflicts the U.S. would soon find itself waging in the Middle East—conflicts in which a modern army, technologically sophisticated but weakly supported by public opinion at home, gets bogged down in a failed state trying to hold the line against primitive but cunning adversaries motivated by religious zeal and determined to sustain the fight for decades, even generations. It’s the kind of war the West has yet to figure out a way of winning.
Pumpkinflowers

By Matti Friedman

Algonquin, 256 pages, $25.95

Mr. Friedman, a Canadian-born Israeli writer, served in Lebanon in the late 1990s at an exposed Israeli outpost called “the Pumpkin.” (His title comes from Israeli military jargon, where “flowers” mean wounded soldiers and “oleander” means a dead one.) This superb book is partly a history of the war, partly a personal memoir, and partly a work of political analysis. But mainly it is an effort to tell the story of the young men who fought to defend something “the size of a basketball court”—not all of whom survived.

“At the outpost were several dozen young men isolated to a degree exceptional in the modern world,” Mr. Friedman recalls. “Mail arrived in the same way the soldiers did, on convoys rendered unpredictable by the threat of bombs. There were no women. There was nothing feminine, nothing unnecessary to the purposes of allowing you to kill, preventing you from being killed, and keeping you from losing your mind in the meantime. Nothing was soft or smelled sweet.” CONTINUE AT SITE

Trump Voters: Not So Irrational The political scientist who applies the ‘rational choice’ theory of economics to voters says there was a method to the GOP’s primary madness.By Allysia Finley

Shortly before the May 3 Indiana primary, a video of a Donald Trump supporter accosting Ted Cruz went viral. Surrounded by a throng of Trump fans shouting “career politicians have killed America,” the Texas senator tried to engage the man in a mock debate—without much success. Mr. Cruz made several attempts to discuss Mr. Trump’s record, then finally gave up and told the man that Mr. Trump “is playing you for a chump,” adding: “Ask yourself . . . why the mainstream media wants Donald Trump so desperately to be the Republican nominee?” The Trump supporter—whose favored candidate reportedly has enjoyed $2 billion in free media coverage—replied: “They’ve backed you every chance they get.”

Episodes like that, combined with Mr. Trump’s romp through the Republican presidential primary season, have shaken many people’s faith in the American electorate. But what if Trump voters, however uninformed, are still making a rational decision by backing him?
That is the contrarian argument advanced by political scientist Samuel L. Popkin of the University of California, San Diego, who has studied public opinion and elections for half a century. A native of Superior, Wis., the 73-year-old Mr. Popkin has also served as a consultant for the presidential campaigns of George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore. Mr. Popkin is perhaps best known for applying the rational-choice theory of economics to voting.

His seminal 1991 book “The Reasoning Voter” argues that voters are public investors who “expend effort voting in the expectation of gaining future satisfaction.” They “combine, in an economical way, learning and information from past experiences, daily life, the media, and political campaigns” to make reasoned judgments about politicians.

One of Mr. Popkin’s favorite examples of how “low-information voters” use “cues” to form logical conclusions is Gerald Ford’s eating an unshucked tamale, which signaled to many Latino voters that the president didn’t understand their culture. History repeated as farce this week when Mr. Trump on Cinco de Mayo tweeted a photo of himself eating a taco bowl: “The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”

Mr. Popkin, who was in New York City visiting family, sat down to talk on Wednesday afternoon, interpreting the often bizarre-seeming Republican primary season by using his political theory of low-information rational voting. CONTINUE AT SITE