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November 2016

A Party of Teeth-Gnashers The broken record of racism/sexism/homophobia plays on and on and on. By Victor Davis Hanson

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/442535/print

After the Democratic equality-of-opportunity agenda was largely realized (Social Security, Medicare, overtime, a 40-hour work week, disability insurance, civil rights, etc.), the next-generation equality-of-result effort has largely failed.

What is left of Democratic ideology is identity politics and assorted dead-end green movements as conservation has become radical environmentalism and fairness under the law is now unapologetic redistributionism. The 2016 campaign and the frenzied reaction to the result are reminders that the Left is no longer serious about formulating and advancing a practical agenda. In sum, for now it is reduced to a party of gatecrashers.

The Podesta archive, when coupled with the pay-for-play Clinton Foundation, summed up the liberal ideology: progressive platitudes as cover for an elite’s pursuit of power and influence. Examine a coastal Democratic establishmentarian, and there is little discernable difference in his lifestyle, income, or material tastes from those conservatives (usually poorer) whom he accuses of all sorts of politically incorrect behaviors. Self-righteous outrage is a Democratic selling point and a wise career move for journalists, academics, bureaucrats, and politicians.

Without an ideology that even remotely matched the life she led, Hillary Clinton could only run a campaign without consistent positions. She flipped on the Keystone pipeline and trade agreements. She refuted the entire 1990s Clinton economic and social agenda. Indeed, her positions of 2008 — anti–gay marriage, border enforcement, and rural populism — were the very positions that she smeared others for embracing in 2016. In 2008, Clinton damned Obama for his “clingers” speech; in 2016, she trumped him with her deplorables and irredeemables.

She both derided Wall Street and was enriched by it. Her 2008 brief flirtation with the white working classes as a modern Annie Oakley came full circle in 2016, with exultant promises to put coal miners out of work. In the end, Hillary had no ideology other than getting even richer by leveraging the office of secretary of state and pandering to identity politics in hopes that record numbers of women and minorities would vote for a 68-year-old white multimillionaire, much as they had voted for Barack Obama. The more she talked of the LGBT or Latino communities, apparently the more we were to think that the Clintons had subverted their offices and reputations to grift a $150 million personal fortune for the underprivileged.

One of the reasons Trump won without commensurate money, organization, ground game, big-name endorsements, establishment unity, conservative media encouragement, and despite a campaign of gaffes and opposition-planted IEDS, was that half the country felt it would not have survived four more years of the cynicism of left-wing politics. In other words, voters got tired of being accused of thought crimes from a party led by wealthy people who made them poorer while adding insult to injury.

Report: Trump Picks Rep. Tom Price as HHS Secretary By Debra Heine

Dr. Price, a fierce ObamaCare opponent, has his own plan to replace it ….
According to the Washington Post, President-elect Donald Trump has chosen Georgia Rep. Tom Price, a former orthopedic surgeon and staunch ObamaCare opponent to serve as the secretary of health and human services in his administration.

An insider from within the transition team told the Post that the public announcement of Trump’s selection of Price, could come as early as Tuesday.

As HHS secretary, Price would become the Trump administration’s point person on dismantling and replacing the Affordable Care Act, one of Trump’s major campaign promises.

Price, 62, who represents a suburban Atlanta district, has played a leading role in the Republican opposition to the law known as Obamacare and has helped draft several comprehensive bills to replace it.

During the campaign, Trump railed against the Affordable Care Act and vowed to repeal and replace it. But after meeting with Obama in the Oval Office shortly following the election, he was convinced to perhaps keep some of the more popular elements of the law intact and amend the law rather than repeal it.

Trump has said he would favor keeping the provision preventing insurers from refusing coverage for preexisting conditions as well as the one permitting children to stay on their parents’ health plans until age 26.

Price is a six-term congressman who chairs the House Budget Committee and is said to be close to House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.).

Fidel Castro’s Mass Murder by the Numbers By David P. Goldman

Fidel Castro shed blood on a scale unimaginable in American terms. His butchers executed perhaps 15,000 prisoners, according to academic estimates cited by Wikipedia:

British historian Hugh Thomas, in his study Cuba or the pursuit of freedom[22] stated that “perhaps” 5,000 executions had taken place by 1970,[21] while The World Handbook of Political and Social Indicators ascertained that there had been 2,113 political executions between the years of 1958–67.

Professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, Rudolph J. Rummel estimated the number of political executions at between 4,000 and 33,000 from 1958–87, with a mid range of 15,000.

That was in a country of 7 million. In per capita terms, that’s the equivalent of about 680,000 executions in the United States of America with our population of 318 million. What’s 680,000? The entire population of Denver or Seattle. Imagine taking every man, woman, and child of a major American city and murdering them. That’s the scale of Fidel Castro’s crimes.

680,000 is a bit less than the standard estimate for total military deaths in the American Civil War. Imagine standing 680,000 soldiers against a wall — all the dead of Antietam, Gettysburg, Cold Harbor Chickamauga and every other battle of the Civil War — and shooting them dead in cold blood. That’s the equivalent of Fidel Castro’s mass murder.

Stalin, Hitler, Mao and Pol Pot killed more people in relative terms. After that, it’s hard to find a tyrant with a bigger body count than Fidel. To speak of him with anything but a curse is an insult to the memory of his victims.

FRANK GAFFNEY: THE BIG LIE IS BACK

In 2011, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to use “some old fashioned techniques of peer pressure and shaming” against those whose exercise of free speech “we abhor.”

At the time, she had in mind specifically perpetrators of what the OIC, the Muslim Brotherhood, other Islamic supremacists and their enablers on the Left call “defamation of Islam.” But the same playbook – in the tradition of Mrs. Clinton’s mentor, Saul Alinsky – is now being followed with a vengeance against what is abhorred by the cabal best described as the Red-Green Axis.

Much in evidence among such “old-fashioned techniques” now being employed is what’s known as “the Big Lie.” It entails the endless repetition of outrageous falsehoods to defame, and ultimately silence, one’s political opponents.

Three good men Donald Trump has selected for key strategic and national security positions are currently getting the Big Lie treatment: his White House Counsel Steve Bannon, Attorney General-designate Senator Jeff Sessions, and incoming National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Michael Flynn. They are being relentlessly vilified as “racists,” “bigots” and “haters.”

I feel these able public servants’ pain. Indeed, I know what it’s like to be subjected to the Big Lie. For years, the Islamists and their allies on the hard Left – notably, the discredited (for example, here and here) Southern Poverty Law Center – have used character assassination and vitriol against me (for example, here, here and here) to protect what they otherwise cannot defend: the totalitarian program its adherents call Sharia. The false assertion last week that I had been asked to serve on the Trump transition team sent these rogues into fresh paroxysms of hateful denunciation, repeated like a mantra by their media echo chamber (for example, here, here, here and here).

I am hardly alone in being diagnosed by such charlatans with the made-up condition of “Islamophobia.” Indeed, I am proud to be included in the company of men and women being pilloried for what Islamic supremacists and their enablers would have us believe is “defamation of Islam.” In fact, it is simply informed, astute and courageous truth-telling about the global jihad movement and threat it poses. Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions and Mike Flynn are under assault for doing the same in this and other contexts.

It seems that critics are particularly unhinged by the clarity of these three men and the president they will serve about the fact that Islamic supremacism is not simply a menace overseas. The Red-Green types are determined to prevent Donald Trump from operationalizing the plan of action he described in a major address on the topic on August 15, 2016. Among its highlights are the following:

Our new approach, which must be shared by both parties in America, by our allies overseas, and by our friends in the Middle East, must be to halt the spread of Radical Islam. All actions should be oriented around this goal….Just as we won the Cold War, in part, by exposing the evils of communism and the virtues of free markets, so too must we take on the ideology of Radical Islam….

Flunking Higher Education By Glenn Fairman *****

Peace Studies, Black Studies, Womens’ Studies, Ethnic Studies, even Marijuana Studies. These “Sensitivity Degrees,” from 40K plus a year universities, are coming home to roost — as our youth begin taking their surly bite out of the “reality sandwich.” Having initially lusted after those glossy course catalogs, what a cold slap in the face it was to learn that an engineering degree actually required spending nights burning the midnight oil, rather than the bong. How comforting it was to switch majors after the freshman term and saunter into the lukewarm waters of sub-mediocrity. How natural it felt to re-enter the progressive womb and be “Born Again” as a smart-phone toting infant — where the ability to emote (and bullshit) was valued over the cruel, patriarchal, intolerant, and narrow world of science and its unforgiving mistress: mathematics.

And even if one still wished to cultivate the traditional loosey-goosey creative life, these days the disciplines of: Philosophy, English, and Political Science are more representative of Progressive indoctrination than that once blessed golden path of diving deep into the human condition. Now, the liberal arts or social sciences are indispensable to a cultured society, but only in the last few generations has our moribund culture succumbed to the delusion that such knowledge was sufficient, in and of itself, for obtaining gainful employment. Little did they know that “The Technical City” has little need of such pleasantries, and this cruel revelation hit working class parents perhaps the hardest. Indeed, how many scrimping couples mortgaged their golden years so that little Heather and charming Max could swig and cavort to the dulcet tones of Higher Education — that velvet-lined Hamster box of learning? Having handed over their treasures to the longhairs, Mom and Pop were handed back sniveling toddlers. And if we have learned anything from this vast transfer of wealth, it is that an expensive dumbed down liberal arts education only increases the difficulty of dynamiting the entitled little bastards out of the basement before we qualify for Medicare.

Listen. America has surpassed its solubility limit for the number of parasites it can absorb and coddle. A knowledge of Foucault or Betty Friedan may impress in the decadent salons of Manhattan, but not so much in cleaning storm drains or in inquiring whether a patron would prefer a refill of his beverage of choice at that petit’ bourgeois establishment — Le’ Burger King.

What have we learned, class? You’re taking too damn long to grow up here in America! And while the philosopher contemplates his indigence and the psych major has her head examined, the principle on that student loan ain’t budged a lick. How’s that for some fundamental transformation?

THE FOREST JIHAD IS HERE: ARIEL KOCH

This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on November 25, 2016, rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission.http://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/2016/11/the-forest-jihad-is-here/

In contrast to talk about a “new form of terror,” the weapon of arson has served radical Islam for years around the world, with the aim of causing damage and “sowing fear into the hearts of infidels.”

A wave of fires is raging throughout Israel, causing great damage and leading to furious debates and rumor mills regarding their cause. Is this deliberate, negligence, or just a matter of the weather? The answer, so it seems, is a combination of the three. Some of the fires may indeed be the result of negligence, but such a large number of them in so many places suggests deliberate intent, helped by changes in the weather.

Indeed, police officials spoke this week of a “wave of arson,” and even arrested some suspects. At a press conference convened in burning Haifa by Prime Minister Netanyahu and Interior Minister Gilad Erdan, the fires were described as “terror,” and Minister Erdan even defined the “arson terror” as a new phenomenon which Israel is now coping with. But in fact, this isn’t the first time terrorists have made use of the arson weapon, and the idea has been widespread on the internet for years. The main party spreading it is al-Qaeda.

While Osama bin Laden and the al-Qaeda leadership hid in the Afghan-Pakistani hills, Abu Mus’ab al-Suri, the organization’s ideologue and strategist, published a two-volume book entitled A Call for Global Islamic Resistance. In his book, al-Suri calls on supporters of global jihad to hurt the West via urban combat and terror, individually and in groups. He provided inspiration for the terrorists who bombed Madrid in March 2004 and London in July 2005. Marc Sageman, a former psychiatrist working for American intelligence called this approach “leaderless jihad.” After the attack by terrorist Mohammad Merah on the Jewish Otzar Hatorah school in Toulouse, the head of Europol called it “the new jihad.”

The War That Dare Not Speak Its Name For all his promises to get America out, Obama’s legacy is a renewed war in Iraq.By William McGurn

When David Petraeus appeared Monday at Trump Tower for a meeting with the president-elect, the headlines naturally fixated on whether the retired Army general and former CIA chief would serve as secretary of state for the incoming administration.

Certainly Mr. Trump’s choice here will be one of his most consequential cabinet picks. But the appearance of Mr. Petraeus carries an even more striking implication. Because his presence is a reminder of a painful truth that Mr. Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton all found easier to ignore throughout the 2016 election campaign.

The truth is this: America is still at war in Iraq.

All throughout the campaign, Mr. Trump rightly thumped both President Obama and Mrs. Clinton for their refusal to use the I-word—Islamist—when speaking of the terror threat against the American people. But when it came to the W-word—war—Mr. Trump was not much better.

In three presidential debates, neither Mr. Trump nor Mrs. Clinton used the word war to describe the fighting in Iraq in which our troops are now engaged. When they did use the word, the context was almost always frozen in 2002.

There are political reasons for this. Mrs. Clinton, for example, is well aware that the Bernie Sanders wing of her party regards her as a latter-day Dr. Strangelove. So when she did talk about war and Iraq, it was mostly to declare that her Senate vote to authorize it was a mistake she deeply regrets.

Mr. Trump mostly fixated on the past as well. On almost every occasion the Iraq war came up, Mr. Trump used the opportunity to insist he’d opposed it from the start.

A NOTABLE QUOTE ABOUT TRUMP AND MUSLIMS

http://www.wsj.com/articles/notable-quotable-trump-and-muslims-1480378571

Abdulrahman al-Rashed, writing in a Nov. 10 op-ed titled “Don’t Fear Trump,” which appeared on the website of the Al Arabiya News Channel and in the London-based Arab daily Asharq al-Awsat:

When Barack Obama won the presidential elections eight years ago, it was met by a torrent of cheerful statements and writings. Back then, I wrote saying do not be over-optimistic. And now, it’s only been one day since Donald Trump won the elections and many rushed into making pessimistic judgments. To those I say, do not be over-pessimistic. . . .

Those who have been persuaded by what’s written and said during the electoral campaigns, and who concluded that Trump is against Muslims must take two important points into consideration: Trump’s personal history and the system of the American state, its constitution and judicial institutions. The president-elect has a long personal record of dealing with Muslim people and there isn’t any racial stance documented against him. He’s never been engaged in political or media campaigns against Muslims, whether American Muslims or Muslims outside the U.S., even following the phobia which spread after the September 11 terrorist attacks although Trump is a resident of the traumatized city of New York.

Meanwhile, the stance against Muslims who are affiliated with terrorism and extremism must not be viewed as a racial stance. As Muslims, this is our position too. Those who want to confuse enmity towards extremism with enmity against Islam are ideological groups that sponsor terrorist ideology and they aim to lobby to serve their political purposes.

Arab governments have plenty to do to communicate with the new administration in Washington after it’s formed. . . . At the same time, we must not blame Washington and fail to see that most of our problems and issues are the product of our decisions and acts and that most solutions to them are in our hands.

Donald Trump Chooses Tom Price as Health Secretary Price has led efforts to craft a GOP alternative to the Affordable Care Act By Louise Radnofsky and Peter Nicholas See note please

Just for the record: Rep. Tom Price is a staunch supporter of Israel and ranked a minus 4 from the Arab American institute. As Tevye said ” it doesn’t make much difference but it’s nice to know.” rsk
WASHINGTON—President-elect Donald Trump has chosen House Budget Committee Chairman Tom Price (R., Ga.) as his nominee for secretary of the Health and Human Services Department, according to a transition team adviser, putting the six-term congressman in charge of the sprawling agency that will likely dismantle Democrats’ 2010 health-care overhaul.

Mr. Price, a 62-year-old former orthopedic surgeon, is one of several GOP physicians who sought to carve out a leading role in shaping the party’s health policy and, in particular, the party’s alternative vision to Democrats’ Affordable Care Act. Much of his criticism of the law has centered on the authority it gives to the federal government, and to the agency that he may now head.
“We think it’s important that Washington not be in charge of health care,” he said in an interview this summer. “The problem that I have with Obamacare is that its premise is that Washington knows best.”

He has championed his own legislation, the Empowering Patients First Act, since 2009, taking a position on a number of hot-button issues for conservative health policy thinkers. In its latest iteration, the proposal includes refundable, age-adjusted tax credits for people to buy insurance if they don’t have access to coverage through an employer or government program. People in a government program, such as Medicare, Medicaid or Tricare, would also be allowed to opt out of it and get tax credits toward the cost of private coverage instead.

Mr. Price had previously included tax deductions in his plans, a tool typically favored by harder-line conservative health policy thinkers, but said he had “moved towards credits because we felt it was cleaner.”

France’s Politician Dhimmis by Yves Mamou

“Moreover, it is puzzling and disturbing that France adopts a double standard in relation to Israel, while ignoring 200 territorial conflicts currently taking place around the world, including those taking place right on its doorstep.” — Response of Israel’s Foreign Ministry to France’s new labeling regulations.

In the Ukraine, a few sanctions were imposed by France and EU, but there was never any labeling of food or cosmetic products.

Ironically, and sadly, the people most negatively affected by the French and EU regulations will be the 25,000 Palestinians employed by Israelis in the West Bank.

In just one year, 2016, France and its socialist president have made multiple hostile gestures towards Israel, which reveal more about raw anti-Semitism posing as anti-Israelism in France than about its unjustly solitary target.

The Muslim vote is now an important factor in French politicians’ decisions. In 2012, socialist President François Hollande was elected with 93% of the Muslim vote. That is how diplomacy is made conducted in France, and in Europe generally. It is a diplomacy solidly rooted in domestic policy. It is a domestic policy made by dhimmi politicians.

In France, retail chains and importers now have the legal obligation to label products originating in Judea, Samaria, eastern Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

On November 24, the Official Gazette of the French Republic (JORF) published Regulation No 1169/2011, ordering “economic operators” to inform consumers about “the origin of goods from the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967.”

This French regulation is an application of the interpretive notice issued by the Official Journal of the European Union (OJ), on November 12, 2015. The notice states that the EU “does not recognise Israel’s sovereignty over the territories occupied by Israel since June 1967, namely the Golan Heights, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and does not consider them to be part of Israel’s territory” and claims it is responding to “a demand for clarity from consumers, economic operators and national authorities”.

The European Commission allowed member states to arrange their own national implementation of this European regulation, with financial penalties.

The French adoption of this EU policy insists on labeling Israeli products with the greatest precision possible.